The Sir John Falstaff we see here is not the same one we first met in Henry IV Part One. There he was humorous, rambunctious and profoundly wise. Here he is actually unlikeable and (even though one feels a little sorry for him at times) he gets what he deserves.

The story is this: Falstaff needs money and likes the company of ladies. Foolishly, he writes the same love letter to Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, proposing a tryst. These two resourceful ladies, upon discovering this silly double-booking, decide to teach him a lesson by pretending to agree to receive him. In a complicated farce of go-betweens, disguises, and subplots, during which Master Ford becomes insanely jealous, Falstaff is first stuffed unceremoniously into a laundry basket and carted off to be thrown into the filthy Thames, and then beaten and chased from the premises disguised as an undignified old woman. Not satisfied with this, the two ladies, together with their now informed husbands and the other townspeople, stage a midnight revel involving children, fairies, legends, dancing and, ultimately, the public embarrassment of poor Sir John.

One of the several subplots also culminates in the midnight revelries. Mistress Anne, daughter of the Pages, is being wooed by the dull young Slender (favored by her father as the best match), by the flighty French Dr. Caius (favored by her mother), and the impoverished nobleman Fenton (favored by Anne herself). Both parents connive to have their chosen son-in-law steal Mistress Anne away to clandestine weddings during the pageantry but Anne and Fenton fool them both by eloping and returning to the festivities as husband and wife. The parents bow gracefully to their daughter’s choice, Falstaff recovers quickly from his public embarrassment, and they all head to the Page residence for a celebratory and reconciliatory dinner.

The only Shakespearean comedy to be set in England, The Merry Wives of Windsor is one of Shakespeare’s more popular but at the same time obscure and least analyzed plays in spite of the rich potential for analysis of class, gender, language and more. A less than scientific but revealing investigation shows over 60 million Google hits in a search for Hamlet, 27 million for Romeo and Juliet and a mere 912 000 for The Merry Wives of Windsor. Interestingly, “Falstaff” gives over five million hits all by itself: admittedly, many of these are for the Verdi opera, the Henry plays and the various pubs and whatnot bearing the fat knight’s name; but Sir John nevertheless remains one of Shakespeare’s most appreciated characters, in spite of his misfortunes in this play.

Contributed by Ruby Jand

SEBASTIAN. I remember
You did supplant your brother Prospero.

ANTONIO. True.
And look how well my garments sit upon me;
Much feater than before; my brother’s servants
Were then my fellows; now they are my men.

SEBASTIAN. But, for your conscience,–

ANTONIO. Ay, sir; where lies that? If ’twere a kibe,
‘Twould put me to my slipper: but I feel not
This deity in my bosom: twenty consciences
That stand ‘twixt me and Milan, candied be they
And melt ere they molest!

Kibes here, although used metaphorically to illustrate the absent pangs of Antonio’s conscience, obviously suggest something uncomfortable or painful to do with feet, making walking best performed in slippers. The OED confirms this with the meaning of “a chapped or ulcerated chilblain, especially on the heel”, and its entry suggests also that this may be something of a vulgar word, given that it can also be used for damage to the hooves of sheep and horses.

Two occurrances of the word remain in Shakespeare’s opus. Pistol shows absolutely no sympathy for Falstaff’s being “almost out at heels” but rather tells him “Why, then, let kibes ensue”. Similarly, Hamlet picks up on the vulgarity of “kibes” when he remarks to Horatio that “these three years I have taken note of it, the age is grown so picked that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier he galls his kibe”, where to “gall a kibe” means something like to tread on someone’s toes (or rather, ‘ulcerated chilblains’), and thus the larger metaphor describes the Prince’s distaste for either social climbers or – more probably – the debased Danish nobility.

To conclude this foray into Shakespeare’s boots, I’d like to point out that there is a great and longstanding relation between tragedy and feet. It begins with Oedipus, of course, and pops up again with Philoctetes. Perhaps the Bard knew this, and so, by having characters high and low complain about their kibes, further inscribed himself in the Greek classical tradition. After all, what could be a more bathetic hamartia than a blister?

The date of an author’s death is always more important than that of his birth. This is not to say that we shouldn’t be celebrating Shakespeare’s entry into the world, but rather that we must not lose sight of the importance of his exit, itself taking place (perhaps) fifty-two years to the day after the Bard’s birth. Given that it is possible that Shakespeare, like Cassius in his Julius Caesar, died on his birthday, I will therefore take this occasion to wish him, simultaneously, Happy Birthday and, I suppose, Happy…errr…Anniversary. I have my reasons for this.

You see, I’m interested in copyright. The death of the author is more important than his birth because it is, in many jurisdictions, from this moment that we now measure the time before the author’s works enter into the public domain. Of course, Shakespeare was born, wrote and died at a time when copyright law was rather different, but this certainly doesn’t mean that he has escaped the web of regulations that have governed texts over the years.

Walker's defence of his actions (click for a larger image)

Even though Shakespeare died three hundred and ninety-six years ago, many of his plays are still in copyright. This is not because Shakespeare has become legally immortal, but rather because we have no unquestionably authoritative texts for any of his plays. Instead, every editor decides whether Hamlet wants his “solid”, “sullied” or “sallied” flesh to melt, copyrights his choice and its explanation, and charges all and sundry for the use of his text. A set quantity of years after that editor’s departure from this world, his text becomes free to use. As a result, full access to the latest, most academically-rigorous texts of Shakespeare is always the length of a copyright term away from the those who do not or cannot pay for the privilege.

This is important. Take the visualisations on the RSC’s My Shakespeare website, as an example. The emotional colouring of King Lear may well look a bit different if we follow either a quarto-based or a folio-based edition of the play. Similarly, the quotes used in Branagan’s ‘Shakespeare by Chance’ are obviously dependant on the latest critical readings of a textual crux. Visualisations based on up-to-date texts are thus still a long way off, since Shakespeare is always evolving, each editor and publisher giving his words new life, and thus – to look at it a different way – a new birthday, a new future death, and, following that event, a new distant entry into the public domain.

This is, however, changing. On 23rd April 2012, fittingly enough, PlayShakespeare.com released a modern, critically-rigorous and machine-readable, edition of Shakespeare’s works, choosing to remove all copyright restrictions from the start. Of course, their text will one day be superseded by new literary discoveries, but it certainly brings the public, analysable, free Shakespeare forward by no “small time”. More scrupulous visualisations are of course now possible, but, beyond this, one hopes for larger things. PlayShakespeare.com’s text has the potential to change Shakespeare’s online presence, currently dominated by the out-of-copyright 1898 Moby edition, digitised in 1993.

Even more importantly, it might make us think before we cut and paste what purports to be the Bard on the internet: whose Shakespeare is this? and, ultimately, whose Shakespeare are we wishing Happy Birthday to?

I’ve worked in either e-learning or education now for over five years – and one of the main things I have often noticed is the time and effort required to make new resources. People often dream of having a magical button that will make e-learning materials for you, but this, surprisingly perhaps, still remains very much a pipe dream. Often though, as a developer (I am more developer than scholar, or even teacher), you find something in a form which can be converted in order to create e-learning resources. If we ignore the idea that all elearning has to be drag and drop activities or quizzes, then there is a lot of material on the internet from which teaching materials can be made.

So where did the Shakespeare idea come from? Well, I found the text at http://shakespeare.mit.edu/, and noticed that the web pages had a structure to them: you could see in the underlying HTML who was a speaker, the act, the scene and what the line number was. Hence I didn’t have to do anything with the HTML, bar write a little bit of code to read it and turn it into a database. Effectively, this code was looking for repeating patterns in the HTML, and then converting them into entries to store in a database.

Now that I had the text in a database, I could write queries on the database to extract and present the data in a variety of ways. All of the data and code was written by me, and some of it is now online on the OKF’s Datahub and GitHub. I’d also be interested in hearing if people would like the data served in any other way. As I said at the start of this blog, people seem to like magic buttons which do all the hard work, and so perhaps making the data available isn’t that helpful for a general audience? Further, I’d like to think that maybe there is some scope in building services around the text, but again, as someone who isn’t a Shakespeare scholar or teacher I think I’d struggle to come up with useful ones in advance.

One thing that many of the images do, for example, is to flatten Shakespeare: the ‘Shakespeare Connections’ sequence shows us who speaks to whom over the course of the play but not at what times; similarly, the ‘Shakespeare Fingerprints’ sequence shows us when someone speaks, but not to whom. When a human reads a play, these two dimensions, the moment and the direction of a speech, cannot easily be filtered out, and I’m yet to find the human reader capable of mapping in his notebook such images as the ‘Science of Shakespeare’ pages provide. In this respect the computer’s view is unique, because non-human.

Let us concentrate now on ‘Shakespeare Connections’. As I mentioned, many of these computer-generated windows on the play confirm things that we already know. In The Winter’s Tale picture, it is unsurprising that Leontes, the jealous and suspicious king of Sicilia who banishes his baby daughter and comes close to killing his wife, is the character who interacts with the largest number of people.

Similarly, it is no surprise that Caius Martius, aka. Coriolanus, is at the heart of Coriolanus.

However, some plays surprise us with their diagrams. It is Falstaff, and not Prince Hal, who is at the centre of the web of King Henry IV part I, and Portia, not the merchant Antonio or Shylock the Jew, who sits at what might also be called the emotional centre of The Merchant of Venice.

One final point. These images show us neither the character who speaks most, nor the most important character in the story. The former is a job for a different program, and the latter one for a human. The ‘Shakespeare Connections’ simply show the character who speaks with whom, and who, out of all these characters, has the largest number of interlocutors. This focus makes the pictures well-suited to showing us the complexity of Shakespeare’s history plays, plays often criticised for their complex plots and excessive numbers of events.

I would like to conclude therefore with a triptych, composed of those images that represent the Henry VI trilogy. Here, the lines in red show us what a tangled web Shakespeare weaves, and how the trilogy descends from the high martial nobility of Talbot, to the bitter struggle led by York and his sons for control of the English throne, until we reach the last convulsions of the war, where Warwick (and the Lancastrian army) is betrayed and killed at the battle of Barnet.

FALSTAFF Though I could ‘scape shot-free at London, I fear the shot here; here’s no scoring but upon the pate.–Soft! who are you? Sir Walter Blunt: there’s honour for you! here’s no vanity! I am as hot as molten lead, and as heavy too: God keep lead out of me! I need no more weight than mine own bowels. I have led my ragamuffins where they are peppered: there’s not three of my hundred and fifty left alive; and they are for the town’s end, to beg during life. But who comes here?

This is the only time that Shakespeare uses the word “ragamuffins”, describing the rag-tag band of conscripts and volunteers that Falstaff has led to their deaths before the enemy bullets, the “lead” and “shot” mentioned here, the latter also meaning a reckoning or shopkeeper’s bill.

As for ‘ragamuffin’, the word first appears as the name of a demon in Langland’s Piers Plowman (1387), and then is attested frequently from 1586 on as a term for a “person [...] of a ragged, dirty and (frequently) disreputable appearance.” (OED). The origin of the term is obscure: the ‘raga-’ prefix is clearly descended from ‘ragged’ and ‘raggy’, both of which were used for the devil as well as for disorderly appearance; the ‘muffin’, however, is a bit trickier. One authority holds that it comes from a Middle French word for devil, another from an Anglo-Norman term for a demon (the ‘mal-felon’, which gives ‘maffelon’ and then ‘muffin’…

A final possibility, especially given Falstaff’s habitual references to food and inns earlier in the passage, is that ragamuffin is itself meant with a punning etymology here: these ragged, dead soldiers have after all been thoroughly seasoned with bullets, just as one would “pepper” an Elizabethan loaf or ‘muffin’. Such an idea, the combination of death and eating, is found elsewhere in Shakespeare, Hamlet himself telling King Claudius that the murdered Polonius is “at supper”, just “Not where he eats, but where he is eaten”…

Jumping forward to Shakespeare’s time, and the playwright’s twenty ‘cankers’ cover almost all the various meanings of the word, save that of ‘crab’. First, and most simply, a ‘canker’ is a tumour, of the kind that a misanthropic Timon wishes would “gnaw” the heart of Alcibiades. Second, a ‘canker’ is another word for the damage caused by oxidation, as is clear from the way Venus concludes a speech designed to entice Adonis into her arms: “Foul-cankering rust the hidden treasure frets, / But gold that’s put to use more gold begets.”

By far the most frequent use of canker in Shakespeare’s works, however, is in relation to its botanical meaning. A ‘canker’ is either a type of wild rose (for Hotspur, Bolingbroke is a “canker” next to the “lovely rose” that was Richard II; and Much Ado’s Don John would “rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in [the] grace” of his brother, Prince of Arragon) or a ‘cankerworm’. This ‘cankerworm’ is a type of insect that attacks the fragile buds and flowers of plants: Blake reuses the motif in his ‘The Sick Rose’ (1794), and Shakespeare has no less than six clear references to this worm. Titania orders her fairies to hunt “cankers in the musk-rose buds” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Proteus and Valentine bandy talk of “cankers” in “the sweetest bud” between them at the start of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and the famous rose-picking scene of Henry VI part I would not be complete without the future Richard III asking Somerset if his white rose “Hast not […] a canker”.

Beyond all these specific uses of the word, each more or less metaphorical or allegorical, Shakespeare makes ‘canker’ his own in two other distinctive ways, both rich with insight into the thoughts of his characters. It becomes, for example, part of a compound adjective, as in Edgar’s pithy and bitter summary of his ordeals at the end of King Lear: “Know my name is lost; / By treason’s tooth bare-gnawn and canker-bit.” In this transformation, we leave the original cankerworm far behind. Similarly, Prospero concentrates all his disdain for Caliban into the word ‘canker’, turning it into a verb in the process, to describe “A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains, / Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost; / And as with age his uglier body grows, / So his mind cankers.”

The story is deceptively simple. Two sets of identical twins are separated as small children. One set, both named Antipholus, are sons of a wealthy merchant, the other their servants, both named Dromio. They grow up in separate cities and the fun begins when one Antipholus and Dromio arrive in Syracuse where the other Antipholus and Dromio have lived since childhood. Antipholus of Syracuse is married to Adriana and is an established and well-respected citizen. What is comical, often side-splittingly so, is how these two sets of twins, Adriana, her sister Luciana, and the townspeople of Syracuse all keep running into each other, but never the twins together, so that all manner of confusions arise. “Who are you?” is answered by “you’ve known me all my life”; “I just gave you a bag of money” is answered by “I’ve never seen you before in all my life”; “I love you” is answered by “But you’re married to my sister”, which is answered by “I’m not married”, then by “Oh you cad”…

Things all work out in the end of course, with the twins astounded to confront their exact lookalikes. What isn’t so funny, though, is the anguish the characters go through as their sense of identity is warped out of all recognition. In the process marriages and lives are threatened, power is used and abused, servants protest against cuffs and kicks, and women struggle against oppression by husbands and the church. In other words, though the characters are as individually quirky yet universal as Shakespeare’s characters always are, the depth in the play is based on what Stephen Greenblatt calls, in the introduction to the Norton edition, “the hidden strangeness of ordinary existence” and the “alienation and existential anxiety” found in all of Shakespeare’s plays.

The Comedy of Errors is not one of the most widely performed of the Shakespeare collection, nor have many movies been made based on it. It did, however, rate a musical, The Boys from Syracuse (1940), and several productions of the play have been televised, most notably one directed by Trevor Nunn, with Judi Dench in the 70′s, and the BBC Complete Works of Shakespeare version in the 80′s with Michael Kitchen and Roger Daltry playing the two sets of twins. In 2003 a Japanese film version, directed by and starring Mansai Nomura, was released. It’s time for a new English language version. With the rich potential of interpreting the class and gender conflicts within the power struggle between the church and state and the basic hilarity of the play, Kenneth Branagh or Julie Taymore could create another masterpiece to bring Shakespeare alive once again to young (and old) audiences.

Contributed by Ruby Jand

If there were a prize for ‘varletry’, however, it would have to go to Troilus and Cressida. Thersites calls Achilles’ beloved friend Patroclus a “male varlet”, Troilus asks for his “varlet” to help him unarm, and Thersites, again, this time surveying all the Greek and Trojan heroes, sums the lot up as a “bunch of incontinent varlets”. This great variety allows us to see the various senses of the word a little more clearly, and, hence, resolve the Shallow conundrum that I began this article with. When Troilus asks for his “varlet”, he is simply asking for a servant, in the same way one might ask for a ‘valet’. If this is Shallow’s sense, then he is being pretty positive about his “very good” servant.

Unfortunately, the sense of ‘servant’ is not too far removed from some less positive meanings, such as ‘social inferior’ (that used by Lear and Kent to insult the courtier Oswald), or even ‘sex slave’ (Patroclus as “Achilles’ male varlet”). All this eventually brings us to a more general meaning of ‘scoundrel’, employed by Elbow to describe Pompey and Thersites to describe everyone around him. Not employed, however, by Shallow, whom I take as an incompetent but far from malign presence in Henry IV part II, and thus not likely to cast aspersions on his servant as he enjoys some wine with his old friend Falstaff.

• https://github.com/okfn/shakespeare
• https://github.com/okfn/shakespeare-material

This “store of power”, as Helena puts it at the end of All’s Well that Ends Well, has been around for a while, but the addition of the data puts the entirety of the project in one place. As well as the plays and poems, you will also find the Droeshout engraving of the bard, material from the Encyclopedia Britannica, and some useful scripts (capable, amongst other things, of using XSL to produce high quality PDFs via Latex).

If you have any questions about using the repository, check out the readme or get in touch with us on our mailing list. Making this stuff freely available is a key part of our belief in openness, and it would be truly wonderful to see other projects grow out of our own.

HORTENSIO Would all the world but he had quite forsworn!
For me, that I may surely keep mine oath,
I will be married to a wealtlly widow
Ere three days pass, which hath as long lov’d me
As I have lov’d this proud disdainful haggard.

Here Hortensio abandons his attempts to woo Kate (the eponymous ‘shrew’ of the play), taking leave of a woman he finds “proud, disdaindul”, and a “haggard”: that is to say, not ‘run-down’, but rather “wild”, or, better yet, “untamed”. “Haggard”, although it evolved to mean ‘wild-looking’, actually originates in falconry, where it means “a wild (female) hawk caught when in her adult plumage” (OED). Thus Petruchio, following what was once a common, euphuistic, metaphor, describes his plans for Kate, his shrewish future wife:

PETRUCHIO [...] Another way I have to man my haggard,
To make her come, and know her keeper’s call,
That is, to watch her, as we watch these kites
That bate and beat, and will not be obedient.

Peculiarly, this way of describing people in Shakespeare is only ever applied to women, and often carries overtones of male domination. Petruchio’s is ultimately comic, but Othello’s talk of haggards certainly is not. Enthralled by Iago, he promises that “If I do prove her haggard, / Though that her jesses were my dear heartstrings, / I’d whistle her off, and let her down the wind / To prey at fortune.” Removing the metaphor, one could paraphrase as folllows, ‘If I find out that she’s disobedient, then – no matter what the cost – I’d cut all ties (jesses) between us.’

Last but not least in this swift flight over Shakespeare’s falconry, we have a woman using the word “haggard”. However, this woman is Twelfth Night’s Viola and she uses the word when disguised as a man. Continuing the gender-bending, she even portrays a man, and not a woman, “haggard”. That man is Feste, whom she likens to the touchy “haggard” who “check[s] at every feather / That comes before his eye”. The Fool of the play, unconstrained by decorum, reminds us of the wildness and hence the particular dramatic potential within this word in Shakespeare’s falconing time.

KENT My life I never held but as a pawn
To wage against thy enemies; nor fear to lose it,
Thy safety being the motive.

The state or condition of being given or held as a pledge, or as security for the repayment of a loan; chiefly in at pawn, in pawn, †to pawn, etc. Also fig.

This is quite clearly what the Hostess of King Henry IV part II is talking about when she complains that Falstaff has been running up a tab of such proportions that she will have to “pawn both my plate and the tapestry of my dining-chambers”, even though she eventually softens up and serves him, regardless of the fact that she might have to “pawn [her] gown” to pay for it.

Returning to questions of honour, and loftier characters than the Hostess, the word “pawn” as noun or verb is everywhere: Tarquin is described “Pawning his honour to obtain his lust” in The Rape of Lucrece; the history plays are full of challenges in which the throwing of the guantlet is accompanied by the words “There is my honour’s pawn”; an Old Athenian begs for Timon’s approbation with the words “Pawn me to this your honour”; and Imogen, agreeing to keep a chest of jewels in her bedchamber (with – unbeknownst to her Iachimo – hidden inside), says, with some dramatic irony, that she will “pawn my honour for their safety”.

All this and more suggests that the correct reading of those lines from King Lear has nothing to do with chess. Rather,

KENT My life I never held but as a pawn
To wage against thy enemies; nor fear to lose it,
Thy safety being the motive.

Means: ‘I considered my life as something to be pawned, to be pledged on my honour, in order to secure thy safety’. The word “wage”, which might mislead here by evoking the language of combat too strongly, nevertheless means also, to quote the OED once more, “To deposit or give as a pledge or security”. Kent’s life is no chess piece, but rather something with a clear value in terms of both his own sense of honour and his service to Lear.

Brimstone is another word for sulphur, since sulphur is highly inflammable. The term used to be very common, and, tellingly, made it into the first English translation of the Bible. At one end of the good book, Genesis 19:24 talks about “brimstone and fire” that God rained on Sodom and Gomorrah; and, at the other end, Revelations 19:20 describes how idolators and those with the mark of the beast “were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone”.

Given these Biblical overtones, it is unsurprising to find two out of the three uses of “brimstone” in Shakespeare’s works involve oaths. Sir Toby, never one to speak with much refinement, bursts out with “Fire and brimstone!” when he overhears Malvolio’s daydreams about his employer and Toby’s sister, Olivia, for the first time. Elsewhere, Othello shouts, “Fire and brimstone!” when Desdemona unwittingly mentions how fond she is of Cassio. Given that Othello normally speaks with great polish, his slip into the same language as Sir Toby gives us a sense of how strikingly vulgar his emotional explosion must appear.

One last instance, again from Twelfth Night but this time from Sir Toby’s companion, Fabian, explaining to Sir Andrew Aguecheek that Olivia’s behaviour towards the disguised Viola/Cesario was obviously only intended to “ put fire in your heart and brimstone in your liver”. Although, as soon becomes clear, Aguecheek’s wrath is far from possessing divine proportions…

The first production destroyed the original Globe Theatre on 29 June 1613, through over-elaborate staging: at Wolsey’s banquet (1.2.49): canons fired blanks with wadding which set fire to the thatched roofing. The production could have transferred to the King’s Men’s indoor theatre at Blackfriars, location of the historical divorce trial in the play, which uses the Queen’s original words. This realistic production offended Sir Henry Wotton (who described the fire): “The King’s Players had a new play called All is True, representing some principal pieces of the Reign of Henry 8, which was set forth with many extraordinary Circumstances of Pomp and Majesty, even to the matting of the Stage; the Knights of the Order, with their Georges and Garter, the Guards with their embroidered Coats, and the like: sufficient in truth within a while to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous.” Supposedly, after playing Henry VIII, John Lowin passed on Shakespeare’s directions to his godson, Sir William Davenant, for a Restoration revival. This tradition, preserved by Kean, Irving, and Tree, favoured Holbein’s images of King Henry’s court; but stage dominance passed from Henry (Betterton) to Queen Katherine (Siddons) to Wolsey (Irving, Tree). Siddons intensely identified with her role, like Ashcroft (Nun, R.S.C., 1969) .

Samuel Johnson rated the dying Katherine’s scene (4.2) “above any other part of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and perhaps above any scene in any other poet, tender and pathetic, without gods, or furies, or poisons, or precipices, without the help of romantic circumstances, without improbable sallies of poetical lamentations, and without any throes of tumultuous miseries.” Though often produced for British coronations, the play suffered discrediting censure after James Spedding questioned its authorship (1850). Since then, on stylistic, not historical grounds, many scenes have been attributed to John Fletcher, Shakespeare’s successor as the King’s Men’s dramatist. Such views discouraged the play’s appreciation and production until Tyrone Guthrie’s (R.S.C.,1949). However, scholars judged Henry VIII as the best play in the BBC Shakespeare series (with Claire Bloom as Katherine; 1979).

Contributed by Hugh Macrae Richmond

York, in Henry VI part III describes how “oft Edward came to my side / With purple falchion painted to the hilt”; Anne tells Richard (currently Duke of Gloucester but future Richard III) that “Queen Margaret saw / Thy murderous falchion smoking in [her husband’s, the same Edward York is talking about] blood”; and a dying King Lear recalls that “I have seen the day, with my good biting falchion, I would have made them skip”. Elsewhere, The Rape of Lucrece accounts for half of all Shakespeare’s uses of the word, fittingly enough as ‘falchion’ is noted by the OED as often being a poetic synonym for the monosyllabic “sword”. Shakespeare’s concentration on Tarquin’s “falchion” in his long poem, however, hints at another meaning:

His falchion on a flint he softly smiteth,
That from the cold stone sparks of fire do fly;
Whereat a waxen torch forthwith he lighteth,
Which must be lode-star to his lustful eye;
And to the flame thus speaks advisedly:
‘As from this cold flint I enforced this fire,
So Lucrece must I force to my desire.’

The coordintation of Tarquin’s falchion, the sparks of its sharpening, and the fires of lust in this stanza underline a link between the Roman man’s weapon and his libido. Indeed, what is obvious here can be glimpsed in King Lear’s regret that he was no longer sufficiently strong and manly to wield a falchion in defence of Cordelia. Taking this connection between falchions and the phallus in a different direction brings us to Shakespeare’s last use of the word, and the only one from a comedy. Boyet, joining in the group mocking of Holofernes at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost, tells the poor man that his face resembles “The pommel of Caesar’s falchion”, by far the least impressive part of this weapon.

You normally find the word ‘nonce’ in phrases with ‘for’, and Shakespeare gives us two of these. The most famous by far occurs at the end of Hamlet, when Claudius reveals one of the measures he will take to ensure Laertes victory in the upcoming duel between him and Claudius’ son-in-law.

CLAUDIUS When in your motion you are hot and dry,–
As make your bouts more violent to that end,–
And that he calls for drink, I’ll have prepar’d him
A chalice for the nonce; whereon but sipping,
If he by chance escape your venom’d stuck,
Our purpose may hold there.

Here, “for the nonce” means ‘for the particular purpose’ or, more likely, ‘for the particular occasion’. Both phrases depending on the original Old English sense of nonce as ‘one’ and thus also translatable as ‘for that one purpose’ or ‘for that one occasion’. The second of Shakespeare’s uses of the word ‘nonce’ – in – illustrates this clearly, as Pointz explains how he will camouflage his and Prince Hal’s clothes, for the express purpose of surprising Falstaff and the others on Gad’s Hill even more effectively: “sirrah, I have cases of buckram for the nonce, to immask our noted outward garments.”

One final nonce, that occurring in Henry VI part I. An Auvergnat Countess has taken the British captain Talbot prisoner, and is more than a little puzzled by the way in which her captive laughs and jokes about his being only Talbot’s “shadow”, since the captain is without his soldiers.

COUNTESS This is a riddling merchant for the nonce;
He will be here, and yet he is not here:
How can these contrarieties agree?

The ‘nonce’ here is probably best glossed as the third sense of the phrase ‘for the nonce’: quite simply, ‘verily, indeed’.

As Octavius’ comments make clear, “wassail” is often not too highly regarded. Originally, the practice of wassailing involved a trip from door to door singing carols; however, this pleasant activity could easily become less cheery when the carollers requested alms and drink or, after having received their drink, then became rowdy. This is the sense of wassail most often found in Shakespeare (is Shakespeare a grinch? Again, the question seems relevant). Take this famous passage from Hamlet as an example, where “wassail” is synonymous with unruly behaviour:

HAMLET The King doth wake to-night and takes his rouse,
Keeps wassail, and the swaggering up-spring reels;
And, as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,
The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out
The triumph of his pledge.

Similarly, it is with drink and “wassail” that Lady Macbeth plans to befuddle the guards around King Duncan, thus allowing her husband a chance at regicide.

Not to finish on a dismal note, I leave you with the last two occurrences of Shakespeare’s five mentions of “wassail”. Falstaff, being rather fat, compares himself to a “wassail candle” since he, like such objects, is made of “tallow”. In Love’s Labour’s Lost Berowne, last seen talking about Christmas, also gives us a reference to wassail, describing Boyet as “wit’s pedlar, and retails his wares / At wakes, and wassails, meetings, markets, fairs [...]”.

Indeed, one may suspect that the turkey was a rare sight in London, since Shakespeare is often careful to make clear that he is talking about the bird, especially when comparison to this particular avian is used as an insult. When the welshmen, Gower and Fluellen, see Pistol in Henry V, they describe him “swelling like a turkey-cock”. When Fabian wants to capture the hoodwinked Malvolio’s state of mind, he too reaches for the Christmas bird, saying that “Contemplation makes a rare turkey-cock” out of Olivia’s steward. These two examples suggest a link between the turkey and pride, perhaps based on the ostentation of serving this delicacy at one’s table. Certainly, Gremio, reflecting on what makes him an eligible batchelor is very proud of another import, this time actually coming from the Middle East (whereas turkeys came from the New World), namely his “Turkey cushions”.

The final reference to a turkey in Shakespeare is the most banal, two salesmen in Henry IV part I, in a scene often excised, complain about their wares, and especially their far-from-festive turkeys…

2. CAR. I have a gammon of bacon and two razes of ginger, to be delivered as far as Charing-cross.
1. CAR. ‘Odsbody! the turkeys in my pannier are quite starved.

BEROWNE Why should I joy in any abortive birth?
At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled shows;
But like of each thing that in season grows;
So you, to study now it is too late,
Climb o’er the house to unlock the little gate.

Of course, though, Christmas is about more than weather, and, as Berowne’s ‘everything in its time’ argument suggests, there were a host of traditional things to do. Eat turkey (as Henry VIII was one of the first to do), munch pies and make merry until Epiphany (or Twelfth Night) marked the climax of festivities. As regards specific entertainment, Berowne, speaking of his failed plan to impress the ladies two-thirds of the way through the play, mentions one such activity:

BEROWNE I see the trick on’t: here was a consent,
Knowing aforehand of our merriment,
To dash it like a Christmas comedy.

”A Christmas comedy” refers to the many plays put on to entertain revellers in the Christmas season, and may even refer to a specific performance of The Comedy of Errors at Gray’s Inn on 28th December 1598, which, ending in uproar, did not go well at all.

My final reference to Christmas comes from another of Shakespeare’s comedies, The Taming of the Shrew, and this time reveals a rather low opinion of the festive period. A troop of actors arrive at Christopher Sly’s house in an attempt to cheer him up; surprised, he questions his servants about their intent.

SLY. Marry, I will; let them play it. Is not a commonty a Christmas gambold or a tumbling-trick?
PAGE. No, my good lord; it is more pleasing stuff.

GLOSTER. To fight on Edward’s party for the crown;
And for his meed, poor lord, he is mew’d up.
I would to God my heart were flint, like Edward’s,
Or Edward’s soft and pitiful, like mine:
I am too childish-foolish for this world.

QUEEN MARGARET.Hie thee to hell for shame and leave this world,
Thou cacodemon! there thy kingdom is.

The fact that Richard and those others on stage not only ignore this reference but go on to talk openly of how the one of Shakespeare’s most famous villains would be followed “if [he] should be our king” turn what might have been a biting interjection from the former queen into a proof of her waning power and Richard’s waxing strength. Just what, though, is a cacodemon?

Well, the word means ‘evil spirit’ and so might be adequately translated by lopping off its prefix and just using ‘demon’ (as the ‘No Fear Shakespeare’ does). ‘Demon’, in our AD society is always negative so the prefix caco-, meaning bad and found, for example, in cacophony (bad sound) and cacogastric (bad digestion), would seem to be redundant.

I’m not so sure, though. Shakespeare could have written ‘Thou art a demon’ and preserved his meter, but chose instead the pagan form, dating from the time when a demon or daimon could be good (eudaimon or agathodaimon) or bad (our cacodaimon). I think he did this to capture something superlative about Richard: as his actions in the play will prove, this character is not just diabolic, but superlatively so, evil even amongst other evils, and thus truly, as the ignored Margaret puts it, a caco-demon.

As its length would indicate, this is not intended as a scholarly study of the cultural significance of First-Folio ownership; rather, it is, as Rasmussen himself notes in his acknowledgements, a “trade book”. In this respect, there is a great deal here for the Shakespeare enthusiast if not for the Shakespeare expert, and all presented in small, bite-size chunks. Sometimes even an enthusiast might wish for a little more detail, however. My favourite chapter, that detailing Charles I’s First Folio and his annotations of the work, is remarkable for using the historical object as a window into Charles’ imprisonment and mental state, but such an approach is all too brief and lasts only for a mere two pages in a largish font. The next chapter takes us to the bar in which Quentin Tarantino filmed Kill Bill, and an excited description of how one researcher found a hair trapped in the ink of a First Folio. It is of itself a fascinating idea, but, again, lasts for only a few pages before a chapter on a botched attempt to steal a copy of this book takes its place. Despite this endless variety, Rasmussen is able to provide us with little facts at every turn, and it is a testament to his knowledge of the subject, that he is able to wear it all so lightly indeed.

I must confess that as I continued with this book, I had the guilty desire that Rasmussen would depart from what actually happened to the First Folios and begin a fictitious account. Although much of what The Shakespeare Thefts reveals confirms the old adage that truth is stranger than fiction, one can’t help but think that fiction is still often much neater and more readable than truth. So many different things have happened to so many different copies of the First Folio that it would have been impossible to impose a single narrative on them all, and the problems of this constantly moving text are to a certain extent the problems of its topic. The title of the work makes for a particularly good example: it tries to impose some order with the word “Thefts”, but many of the anecdotes told within have little to do with larceny at all. The title, perhaps revealingly, also makes me think of J.L. Carrell’s successful The Shakespeare Secret (2008), a book which does use fiction to create a riveting, coherent narrative out of the multitudinous facts of manuscript transmission.

I enjoyed this book, and after having eagerly turned all its pages, finished it in possession of several new tidbits of information that I did not possess before, such as the fact that a clause in a Japanese will has hidden a Folio from the world for thirteen years, and that the bullet lodged in one Folio stopped at Titus Andronicus. For this, I would recommend the book as a stocking-filler for a Shakespeare buff, although, even then, be prepared to find the aforesaid buff perhaps wanting a little more when he has consumed this book.

One final comment, as one of those in charge of a website devoted to making information about Shakespeare as widely accessible, as open, as possible. At several points, Rasmussen correctly emphasises the importance of the detailed descriptions that he and his team have made of each Folio, since these descriptions make those volumes “The World’s Worst Stolen Treasures”, capable of being recognised by anyone with the information he has codified. Unfortunately, the fruits of Rasmussen’s research are only available in the weighty tome that is The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue, and would, I believe, be of greater service to the scholarly community as an online database. I do not know if his publishers have such plans, but given the evident wealth of information available, it really does seem a logical step.

Further, if this database one day became open access, then everyone, their appetite whetted by Rasmussen’s little book, would be able to marvel at the strange and true accounts all jostling for space in The Shakespeare Thefts.

AUTOLYCUS Here’s one to a very doleful tune. How a usurer’s wife was brought to bed of twenty money-bags at a burden, and how she long’d to eat adders’ heads and toads carbonadoed.

Everywhere else in Shakespeare’s works, the ‘extended use’ is almost always an insulting one. Used as a verb, ‘carbonado’ means “to cut, slash or hack”, and sometimes to grill, as though one were making a Italian fish dish out of one’s adversaries. Thus Kent’s threat to Oswald in King Lear is particularly graphic about the courtier’s skinny legs:

KENT Draw, you rascal: you come with letters against the king; and take vanity the puppet’s part against the royalty of her father: draw, you rogue, or I’ll so carbonado your shanks: – draw, you rascal; come your ways!

Whilst the Clown of All’s Well that Ends Well suspects that such harsh treatment has already been given to Lafeu’s visage, which he calls a “carbonadoed face”. Given that ‘carbon’ (coal) is visible in ‘carbonadoed’ and ‘fire’ (‘feu’ in French) visible in Lafeu, the Clown is also playing on the lordling’s name here. No such subtlety for Falstaff who is simply terrified of meeting a gristly end as he blusters away on the battlefield of Henry IV part I.

FAL Well, if Percy be alive, I’ll pierce him. If he do come in my way, so; if he do not, if I come in his willingly, let him make a carbonado of me. I like not such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath: give me life; which if I can save, so; if not, honour comes unlooked for, and there’s an end.

Two final observations on this word. First, it only ever appears in prose, hinting at both the word’s tongue-twisting qualities and its potentially lower register. Second, as a verb and as a noun, it bears the shameful ‘obs.’ in the OED. Please, therefore, kind reader, bring it out of obsolescence, and threaten to carbonado either your fishes or your foes.

On the 11th July, the Open Literature (now Open Humanities) mailing list got an email about a competition being run by the University of Bologna called ‘Inventare il Futuro’ or ‘Inventing the Future’. On the 28th October, Hvaing submitted an application on behalf of the OKF, we got an email saying that our idea had won us €3 500 of funding. Here’s how.

The Idea: Open Reading

The competition was looking for “innovative ideas involving new technologies which could contribute to improving the quality of civil and social life, helping to overcome problems linked to people’s lives.” Our proposal, entered into the ‘Cultural and Artistic Heritage’ category, proposed joining the OKF’s Public Domain Calculators and Annotator together, creating a site that allowed users more interaction with public domain texts, and those texts a greater status online. To quote from our finished application:

Combined, the annotator and the public domain calculators will power a website on which users will be able to find any public domain literary text in their jurisdiction, and either download it in a variety of formats or read it in the environment of the website. If they chose the latter option, readers will have the opportunity of searching, annotating and anthologising each text, creating their own personal response to their cultural literary heritage, which they can then share with others, both through the website and as an exportable text document.

As you can see, with thirty thousand Euros for the overall winner, we decided to think very big. The full text, including a roadmap is available online. Many thanks to Jason Kitkat and Thomas Kandler who gave up their time to proofread and suggest improvements.

The Winnings: Funding Improvements to OKF Services

The first step towards Open Reading was always to improve the two services it proposed marrying: the Annotator and the Public Domain Calculators. With this in mind we intend to use our winnings to help achieve the following goals, although more ideas are always welcome:

• Offer bounties for flow charts regarding the public domain in as yet unexamined jurisdictions.
• Contribute, perhaps, to the bounties already available for implementing flowcharts into code.
• Offer mini-rewards for the identification and assessment of new metadata databases.
• Modify the annotator store back-end to allow collections.
• Make the importation and exportation of annotations easier.

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if any of this is of interest. An Open Humanities Skype meeting will be held on 20th November 2011 at 3pm GMT.

MARIA Dumaine was at my service, and his sword:
‘No point’ quoth I; my servant straight was mute.

KATHARINE Lord Longaville said, I came o’er his heart;
And trow you what he call’d me?

PRINCESS Qualm, perhaps.

However, Katharine’s reference to Longaville’s heart hints at a rather more sinister origin to the word, a sense still active at Shakespeare’s time and which here makes the Princess’ quip considerably more cutting. In Henry VI part II, for example, Glocester seems to be affected by rather more than a feeling of compunction, as he finds himself unable to continue reading the harsh details of the proposed peace settlement with France:

GLOSTER Pardon me, gracious lord;
Some sudden qualm hath struck me at the heart
And dimm’d mine eyes, that I can read no further.

Glocester, who will die later in the trilogy from his weak heart, here suffers the first signs of illness. This is the original, sinister, meaning of qualm: in Old English it means death, plague and calamity; and by Shakespeare’s era, it meant a sudden fit of faintness or sickness (as well as the modern sense). Other, related, and long-gone meanings for qualm include the cry of a raven (a bird long associated with mortality), and the act of boiling (the result of confusion between warm/walm/qualm).

One final example completes the picture: Beatrice, having unwittingly revealed her affection for Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing is simultaneously teased and comforted by Margaret.

BEATRICE It is not seen enough, you should wear it in your cap. By my troth, I am sick.

MARGARET Get you some of this distilled Carduus Benedictus, and lay it to your heart: it is the only thing for a qualm.

Margaret’s joke only works here when you understand that “qualm” was both a misgiving and a legitimate medical syptom, and thus doubly apt for treatment by exposure to “Carduus Benedictus”, latin for ‘Blessed Thistle’ but innuendo for something much more romantic.

FORD Well met, Mistress Page. Whither go you?
MISTRESS PAGE Truly, sir, to see your wife. Is she at home?
FORD Ay; and as idle as she may hang together, for want of company. I think, if your husbands were dead, you two would marry.
MISTRESS PAGE Be sure of that,–two other husbands.
FORD Where had you this pretty weather-cock?
MISTRESS PAGE I cannot tell what the dickens his name is my husband had him of. What do you call your knight’s name, sirrah?
ROBIN Sir John Falstaff.
FORD Sir John Falstaff!
MISTRESS PAGE He, he; I can never hit on’s name. There is such a league between my good man and he! Is your wife at home indeed?
FORD Indeed she is.
MISTRESS PAGE By your leave, sir: I am sick till I see her.

The exchange is worth quoting, not just for its sly reference to lesbianism, but to give a taste of the relaxed style of this dialogue: Mistress Page is on her way to something far more interesting, but takes the time to chat with Robin and Ford. This laid-back context is worth noting, particularly when we recall that the word ‘dickens’ means, according to the OED, ‘devil’.

No-one is quite sure of the etymology of ‘dickens’, but its presence as a modest and far from violent oath, in tune with Shakespeare’s comedy, is only attested from 1599 and Thomas Haywood’s King Edward IV. The exclamation is thus predated by the surname Dickens, which goes back much earlier, as all those places named after members of the Dickens family in the States would suggest. Quite what the Dickens’ family would have made of their family name becoming a mild oath is anyone’s guess, as they could have hardly seen the most probable evolution (from ‘devil’ to ‘devil-kins’ to ‘dickens’) coming.

One final note on the word ‘dickens’, or, more specifically, on the phrase ‘what the dickens’, which has remained a part of our everyday language long after we stopped saying ‘where the dickens have you been?’ and so forth. Bernard Levin famously places it amongst those expressions we use nowadays and owe to Shakespeare, even though Shakespeare was neither its originator nor first recorder. This is an important and oft-overlooked distinction: Shakespeare may be the source of many an English colloquialism, but he is rarely its inventor. Rather, his dramatist’s ear has placed all the curious turns of English in one particularly rich and varied oeuvre, and so facilitated their continuation.

Macbeth also provides us with an example of what is now the most recognisable modern sense of the word, a forerunner or, figuratively, an omen. Moments before battle is joined at Dunsinane, he orders his soldiers to “Make all our trumpets speak; give them all breath, / Those clamorous harbingers of blood and death.” Detectable in these words, although used metaphorically, is the remains of the pomp and circumstance that joins harbingers to greatness: thus the “blood and death” he foresees will be of great magnitude, since it is important enough to send harbingers in advance of itself.

To conclude, therefore, we find two senses of this word in Shakespeare, one who searches lodging and one who announces the arrival of another; in both, the presence of harbingers is a sign of greatness, whether the situation be literal or figurative. In this way Hamlet emphasises the country-wide menace of events in Denmark by calling them “harbingers preceding still the fates”; Puck captures the stunning magic of the dawn when he notices that “yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger”; and a misled Luciana underlines the bitterness of her counsel to “Apparel vice like virtue’s harbinger”.

The name Philomela, although Ovid thought that it came from the Greek for ‘lover of song’, actually seems to mean lover of fruit, lover of apples (one thinks of Paris’s choice) and lover of sheep. These bucolic references recur in Shakespeare’s sweetest evocation of the Philomel story, the songs chanted by Titania’s fairy attendants in the woods of A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Philomel, with melody,
Sing in our sweet lullaby:
Lulla, lulla, lullaby; lulla, lulla, lullaby:
Never harm, nor spell, nor charm,
Come our lovely lady nigh;
So good-night, with lullaby.

Of course, no mention of Philomel could ever be completely without menace, and, despite the fairies’ wishes, Oberon soon appears to charm his lady into humiliating infatuation with an ass. Chaucer, in Troilus and Criseyde has a roughly similar scene, when Criseyde, not long before she and Troilus consummate their love in the night, whiles away nightfall listening to the nightingale, the bird into which tradition holds Philomela was transformed, as it sings “ayein the mone shene, / […] a lay / Of love, that made hir fresh and gay”. Of course, Criseyde’s misfortunate is both further off and much more grave than the recumbant Titania’s, yet still both scenes portray the two halves of the Philomela story: the evil dealt to a woman at the hands of a man, and the beauty of the bird’s song that charms and testifies to the tragedy.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, himself hellenophile and here rephrasing a common Ancient Greek sentiment, wrote that “Most wretched men / Are cradled into poetry by wrong, / They learn in suffering what they teach in song.” The words come from his Julian and Maddalo, a poem heavy with the poet’s own introspection, yet they also play out the shape of the Philomela story: great suffering and beautiful song. Shakespeare’s sonnet 102 draws a parallel between the sonneteer and the songbird (here called ‘Philomel’), since “like her, I sometime hold my tongue: / Because I would not dull you with my song.” Being Shakespeare, this is something of a new twist: the silence of the nightingale is the interest of the amorous sonneteer; the lack of music both the promise of future, better, sounds, and the repudiation of a link between song and suffering. This contrasts with Raleigh’s poem (written in response to one by Christopher Marlowe), where the silence of the nightingale is, if anything, more terrifying than her song, being a sign of “cares to come”.

Yet Shakespeare does not shy away from this menace either: his Lucrece, herself a victim of rape, sings “her nightly sorrow” like the nightingale in The Rape of Lucrece, and then, not soon after, curses the joyful morning chorus and instead invites Philomel’s avian to warble an accompaniment to her grief. Elsewhere, Iachimo, the villain of Cymbeline, notes with glee that Imogen, the woman whose love for Posthumus he will misrepresent, read before sleeping “The tale of Tereus” and “that the leaf’s turn’d down / Where Philomel gave up”. Whether evil man or female victim, the Greek myth serves to sharpen the emotion of the scene. The danger, of course, is that things may seem too pat, the identification between Greek heroine and Shakespearean character too neat, and the art thus fatally blunting the articulation of sorrow felt or sorrows still to fall.

This point brings us to Titus Andonicus, where an early-career Shakespeare is, even more than elsewhere, interested in the limits and techniques of his writing. Specifically, the playwright seems to be measuring himself against the Latin poet Ovid, whom he would have studied at length in school and whose version of the Philomela story he would consequently know. It is to this chapter of Ovid’s Metamorphoses that a tongueless Lavinia turns to tell her family about what the young Goths have done to her; yet, as her father Titus himself remarks, Lavinia is in a state “worst than Philomel”. Titus’ brother Marcus is even clearer, bursting into an uncomfortably long speech before the mangled woman to say that her agressor “hath cut those pretty fingers off / That could have better sew’d than Philomel”, Ovid’s heroine communicating her plight in a tapestry sent to her sister Procne.

If we add all this emphasis on Lavinia suffering more than Philomela to poets’ connections between suffering and song embodied in the nightingale trope, a few observations can be made. What pushes Shakespeare’s Lavinia beyond the Ovidian pale is a particularly obvious wound: Philomela’s rape and the cutting of her tongue are not immediately visible injuries, whereas the loss of Lavinia’s hands is. In this respect Shakespeare surpasses Ovid in a dimension offered to him as a playwright and not to Ovid or other writers of poems: the actor’s physical body on the stage. Even the rudimentary stagecraft of an Elizabethan stage could bind and bloody hands, and Lavinia’s appearance on a stage without these appendages makes for a theatrical spectacle as much as a poetical one. In a very specific, dark sense of the term, Lavinia is Shakespeare’s transformation of Philomela, her metamorphosis marked right before the spectator’s eyes.

The internet and its multitudinous voices regularly remind me of that legendary property, that ethereal, mythic status held by Shakespeare and his works. In the online community, stories are borrowed from every orifice, from every nook and cranny on the information superhighway. Borrowed, acquired, improved, weakened and every other operation under the sun. There is now, at our fingertips, a vast, unprecedented repository of information, of both fact and fiction, that we draw upon for inspiration, and, more specifically, make metatheatrical comment on in contemporary performance (see the work of Rimini Protokoll for an example). The universal archive of the internet is enriched with such mammoth investment from all the peoples of the world that what I call freedom of narrative could not help but be born out of it. This freedom is rooted in the online ability to interpret, to adapt, and to debate every story, every picture and every single syllable of a sound bite; it is the internet’s most wondrous feature. No longer are we so tightly bound to a corporate or state perspective on events, should they have chosen to report them at all. Naturally bias and prejudice are is still rife, but there are, however, simply so many reputable bloggers, so many mobile phone recordings of live events and so many grassroots reporters that stories can no longer be easily quashed.

This free narrative that we discover on the internet pervades the best of contemporary performance on offer today, as evidenced by the latest rise of verbatim theatre, its renaissance due to the ease with which broad sample data can now be obtained. My troupe,The Propaganda Company decided that we should examine this multiple perspective phenomenon for our next show, by utilising one of the most popular texts in the theatrical canon. Enter Lear.

A scholarly chap once said of our King Lear script that we had “barbarized” the text. I can understand his view: our text comprises only a third of the original’s lines, is encompassed in a one act structure of thirteen scenes and has no Edgar, no Cordelia and even fewer attendants. Our play is, of course, far from being the unique recipient of such accusations, and many other contemporary reworkings of the Bard’s portfolio suffer opprobrium for choosing to highlight a small moment or issue and then magnify it through the phenomenon of multiple perspectives. To be honest, I would have to say that I’ve witnessed some dreadful productions that aim to do just that, providing ample evidence for those thinking it better to leave well enough alone when dealing with a Shakespeare work.

Nevertheless, a blanket disapproval of modernisation, contemporising or whatever you’d like to call it simply misses both the importance of contemporary, internet-inspired, polyphonous retellings and, I’d argue also, the joyful breadth of the Bard’s original works. The latter, after all, themselves commented with varied levels of success and audacity on the issues that permeated Shakespeare’s own society and continued, with the aid of adaptation, to comment on other cultures from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. This was one of the reasons for us selecting King Lear: the play was infamously altered in 1681 by Nahum Tate to create a happier, pacified ending; Tate’s version then ran for over 200 years and appeared in Johnson’s Shakespeare folio. This Restoration adaptation’s durability suggests that successful and bold adaptations of narrative can and have been found; in the technology-heavy culture of the twentieth-first century, it seems to me that there is now more adaptation activity than ever before, under the influence of what I previously identified as the freedom of narrative.

It is my profound belief that modern audiences crave shorter, more focused and hard-hitting performances that smack of originality. One has only to tour the works of Bond, Pinter and Kane for many a vivid example. Originality, though, and especially with regard to Shakespeare, has to mean an original use of free narrative, an original commentary or retelling of something. Much to my surprise, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s recent and glorious Merchant of Venice (or should I say Merchant of Vegas?) was my most recent experience of the spirit of free narrative.

Turning further back in time, I watched, last October, the Polish company Song of the Goat do a version of Macbeth. Condensed into 75 minutes of explosive physical action and ritualistic stick-bashing, the show was a master class in polyphonic performance with an astounding intensity. Such bold reinterpretation, characteristic of free narrative, goes back, of course, to the 1960s, when the internet was but a glint in a military milkman’s eye. Today, however, in adaptations such as this polish Macbeth, we witness the huge emphasis placed on transformative perspectives, what contemporary theory calls the “neo-new take”. This approach applies (with varying degrees of credibility and success) new, personal and often subversive approaches that, rather than drag a play into our century, coax it forward, organically drawing out what matters to us: it is partly the product of ensemble creation processes, but I also attribute it strongly to what we see our far-flung fellows doing in online communities, commenting, arguing, tweeting.

Take our Lear as an example, presenting power as a muddy business where the daughters are reasonable and brutal, where Lear is a sage but callous hedonist and the Fool is his compassionate spin doctor. The greatest homage we pay to the online spirit of powerful independent thought is in Poor Tom who features frequently as a physically disturbed servant, subjected to wrath and love, but ultimately dictating the fate of his oppressors. Timely stuff we hope. It discourages some audience members from ever straying from traditional Shakespeare again but I don’t doubt that others warm to it, thus ensuring a future audience for the Bard’s works on the contemporary edge of things.

One final comment: Shylock would no doubt have vomited at the thought of thousands of global performances – traditional or much less so – of Shakespeare annually, all free from copyright and royalties. In a way, it’s the ultimate practice and example of shedding the shackles of fiscal oppression … at least creatively. At a time when many are drawing lines in the silicon of the internet in an attempt to protect and commercialise every byte of data, note of music, second of film and pixel of image available, the Bard, by virtue of his age, represents a delightful pocket of resistance, an alternative to this all-enclosing juggernaut of a system. Shakespeare is freely accessible online, not least on Open Shakespeare, and this hopefully leads to a proliferation of work amongst the modern groundlings that the internet makes of all of us, ensuring that the bard remains universally affective, and the source of further free narrative.

The life of a Shakespeare professor can be a lonely one: hours spent holed up in a library researching obscure theories about Hamlet’s sweat, or in a sunless office writing up lecture notes. That’s why we decided to start writing our blog, Everyday Shakespeare. We wanted to get some fresh air and have a little more fun with our favorite Renaissance man.

Before we got started, we had some decisions to make: Would we ‘out’ ourselves by using our own names (something most academic bloggers avoid for fear of looking un-professorial)? Would we talk about our kids? How often would we post? We’re both working moms, so we knew we were taking on a big challenge. We decided to give each day of the week its own gimmick so that we wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel every day. We were hoping that what was stifling in our everyday lives (Monday=soccer practice; Tuesday=PTA), might be freeing when it came to our everyday blogging lives (Tuesday=Magic Shake-Ball; Friday=Homebaked Shakespeare). With our schedule in place, and a blog workshop under our belts, we were ready to go.

We let down our hair, took a deep breath, and climbed out of the Ivory Tower. What we found was an undiscovered country populated with actors, teachers, obsessed Bardolators, and people on the fringe of the Shakespearean fringe. We found out that people wanted to talk about performances they’d seen, quotes they loved, characters they related to, what Shakespeare had to say about chickens — you name it. They joined the debate when we had Margaret of Anjou weigh in on the Tiger Mom controversy and Richard III review “Game of Thrones”. It was exhilarating and unpredictable. We couldn’t believe we’d been missing out on all this fun. We were hooked.

For us, blogging also confirmed what we’d both felt over the years as we poured over his characters and stories: Shakespeare was a guy who gets us, who understands our sleep-deprived, stressed out, carpooling existences even though we’re living in suburban Boston and he’s, well, dead. Shakespeare’s humor and wisdom about some of the most painful issues in our lives had always been a reassurance and a comfort — and a lot cheaper than therapy. Now we had an international support group! We got fabulous feedback when we talked about how Shakespeare nailed depictions of teenage bullies, marital sex, and parental guilt. People cyber-laughed at our McSweeney’s pieces, “Letters to Santa from Shakespeare’s Characters” and “willslist”, our craigslist parody where we imagined Lady Macbeth trying to hawk a bloody mattress and Hamlet looking to sell his shower caddy and Ikea dresser before jumping off the Wittenberg University bell-tower.

We like to think that Shakespeare would have approved of what we’re doing. After all, for someone like him who was determined to win over wealthy folks and groundlings alike, the far-reaching democracy of the blogosphere would have been a dream come true. Not to mention the international possibilities. Shakespeare fantasized about foreign lands, and the people he might have met there; with the internet, he could have Friended all of them.

We don’t know what Shakespeare would have tweeted, but we do know he’d have had millions of followers.

He had us at “Good morrow”.

LAERTES To his good friends thus wide I’ll ope my arms;
And, like the kind life-rendering pelican,
Repast them with my blood.

With these words, the hot-blooded lord promises cooperation with the friends of his murdered father (such as Claudius), even as he plots brutal revenge on his father’s murderer, Hamlet. The idea of the pelican wounding itself to feed and sustain its young, perhaps the result of the peculiar way in which the bird will hold its beak-pouch when regurgitating food for its infants, makes for an image of self-sacrifice that dates back to medieval texts. The self-sacrificing pelican, supposedly giving up its blood, imitates Jesus giving up his life, having offered his blood and body in the form of bread and wine to his believers at the Last Supper.

We find the Christian-avian overlap elsewhere in Shakespeare’s works: King Lear reverses the trope when he points to a noticeable lack of Christian charity in his “pelican daughters”, trying to drain him dry; elsewhere, John of Gaunt (near to death at the start of Richard II) accuses the King with another bitter reference to the “life-rendering pelican”:

GAUNT O! spare me not, my brother Edward’s son,
For that I was his father Edward’s son.
That blood already, like the pelican,
Hast thou tapp’d out, and drunkenly carous’d

Here one may draw out similarities between Richard’s improper treatment of Gaunt and the improper use made of the blood (or wine) of the pelican (or Christ). Given the strength of the association between pelicans and divinity in the medieval period, as evinced by Corpus Christi College’s heraldry, and given the fact that the historical John of Gaunt (brother to the Earl of Cambridge) died in February 1399, one may even say that this pelican, so odd to modern, secular ears, even adds a bit of period colour to this Elizabethan play

Last year, I found myself at an impasse: MA finished, PhD applications in process, an office job unrelated to my field but a pressing need to stay abreast of all matters Shakespeare for the sake of my personal and professional peace of mind. So I found myself making a choice: do I wile away the year playing time-wasting computer games, or do I push forward? Realizing for certain that Shakespeare was a topic that I was going to spend the rest of my life pursuing, I decided to jump into the fast-moving stream that is the Shakespearean discourse taking place over the internet.

I find it mind-boggling that after two short years, I have become an ‘established blogger.’ The process began when I started Why I love Shakespeare, and then decided that I did not want to restrict my musings on bibliophilia (the love of books) to Shakespeare, and started A Bibliophile’s H(e)aven. Seeking Shakespeare-loving collaborators, I have now joined the ranks of The Shakespeare Standard and Open Shakespeare, for whom I write and assist editorially.

So why the blogging addiction? Because I am a big fan of choice.

My online lifestyle began with the choice: what, in particular, will I write about? When I started with Why I Love Shakespeare, I wanted to reach out to any errant Google-er who, in the years or decades after studying Shakespeare in high school, could not understand what the ‘big deal’ was. To me, the wisdom I found between the pages of Shakespeare’s plays was a huge deal, and I wanted to share this enthusiasm with my readers by giving them pint-sized doses of what I think makes his writing so thought-provoking and relevant today.

The choice to blog about Shakespeare was a great way to work on my writing skills and keep up with the newest trends in Shakespeare criticism, but it also allowed me certain luxuries. For once, the only deadlines and business hours I operated under were my own. When I blog, I am my own boss, accountable to my readers and myself. That’s not to say I do not feel guilty when a month goes by (as it inevitably does) without a post, but it is equally important to realize that it is far too easy to type letters onto a keyboard and press ‘Post’. Within an instant, my writing is readily available for billions of people over the Internet to see – so I better only publish material that I am proud of.

While enjoying the choice to blog when I want, the blogosphere also allows me the choice to blog any way I want. For me, this means that I do not have to construct a linear narrative: if I want to talk about sonnets today and a Shakespeare film tomorrow, I can do so. With the option of labeling my posts, I have the freedom of writing about whatever inspires me at that moment. This way, my readers get a taste of the variety of ways that Shakespeare touches our lives, and if they really want, they can focus on one aspect of my blog: Reviews, Rants, Current Events, or my favorite, Arresting Images, in which I close-read small portions of Shakespeare’s texts.

What expands my readers’ choices exponentially is technology’s gift to humankind: hypertext. Hypertext allows me to accommodate a variety of different readers. Some of my readers are fellow Shakespeare scholars, and do not need further explanation when I name-drop or casually use theatre jargon. Nonetheless, many others welcome a degree of clarification, and hypertext allows these readers the choice of clicking on these concepts. With each hyperlinked word, my readers have the option of broadening their understanding of the field without being burdened by lengthy digressions or the shame of feeling patronized by a lowest-common-denominator explanation. Hypertext offers my readers a world of information at their fingertips, yet allows me to speak with the brevity that, Polonius reminds us, is the soul of wit. Even before the age of Apps and Twitter, the beauty of the Internet has always been the democracy it engenders in allowing anyone connected to hop on their own private soapbox and speak their mind. Ultimately, your decision to read my blog, or how to read my blog, is your choice, but the beauty of writing a blog is that it is always my choice to continue doing so. No grades, no deadlines, no acceptance or rejection letters, although possibly the occasional heckler. I choose to continue producing the best writing I possibly can, and the Internet itself has no choice but to listen to me. For that, I am most grateful.

Gives not the hawthorn bush a sweeter shade
To shepherds looking on their silly sheep
Than doth a rich embroider’d canopy
To kings that fear their subjects’ treachery?

Indeed, shepherds are not the only commoners to make use of the common hawthorn: the mechanicals of A Midsummer Night’s Dream turn a hawthorn bush into their “tiring house”, that part of their makeshift rehearsal space where they will go and change their clothes (‘attire’). There is something of a joke here, since the hawthorn plant forms very dense bushes indeed, and so makes for a tiring house that would be rather difficult to enter into. Orlando, in As You Like It, would certainly be aware of this density, having – according to Rosalind at least – hung “odes upon hawthorns” in her honour, despite the obvious difficulty of attaching anything to plants so tangled and boxy that Edgar, in King Lear describes the power of a winter wind as something capable of blowing through “sharp hawthorn”.

As well as all this movement through, under, onto and into hawthorn bushes, there are one or two references to their buds. The branches of this plant, when in flower, used to be carried during May Day celebrations each year, until the shift to the Gregorian calendar in 1752 meant that the hawthorn started flowering in the middle and not the start of the month. However, the link between hawthorns, May, and all that May stands for in terms of young love, was alive and well in Shakespeare’s time, when Helena, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream can bemoan such beauty in Hermia that it is more charming than all that goes on when “hawthorn buds appear”.

Last, but not least, we have the berries, and Falstaff’s contribution to this article. Declaring his love for Mrs Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor, he points out that she is not one of those “lisping hawthorn-buds that come like women in men’s apparel”, although quite what this might mean is beyond me. I shall content myself by guessing that such “hawthorn buds” stand for pathetic, weak lovers (Mercutio denounces the “lisp” of Tybalt and other “fantasticoes” in Romeo and Juliet), something that Falstaff and Mrs Ford are most certainly not.

From an early age, I’ve always loved books. In my pre-adolescent years, I loved devouring series novels and waiting for the next one to come out so I could get the next piece of the story. Now, as an adult, I love the sight of them on my shelf, I love the smell of the old book glue in the antique books I collect; I love reading them and not only learning things about myself, but so many things about the world around me.

Lately, though, as anyone would notice, the world around me is changing; no longer are books things one must lug about, or wet one’s fingers to turn the pages. Books are available everywhere in our new virtual world, via the world wide web or various e-readers. With the increased availability of books, that means there is an increased availability of knowledge; never before has a society been able to be so autodidactic. Not only can one read all forms of literature online, but also summaries, analyses, and criticism of that literature. This increased access to knowledge has created a proverbial vortex in which our lives have become mixed with the literature we love to read.

One of my literary loves is Jane Austen. I love her wit, use of irony, intrusion into her characters’ thoughts, and just the absolute faithfulness with which she presented the society in which she lived. Now, I don’t have just her novels lining my shelves; I have a hyper-concordance wherein, should I be absent from my shelf or just simply not want to flip through the book, I can search for one name or word in any one of her novels. Not only that, but there is also the Republic of Pemberley, a site that provides exhaustive information about Jane, her life and times, and her works – all at the stroke of a key. What ever did we do before the advent of this cornucopia of potential knowledge?

And then there’s Shakespeare. Oh, Will. I’ve loved him ever since I discovered in high school that I could just understand his writing without help. Unlike so many of my classmates, I got it. That doesn’t mean, though, that I’ve ever settled for my own perspective on his works. After my high school introduction, I took one class at university that lumped him in with Milton and Chaucer, another specifically focused on his tragedies. Then, after earning my degree, I went on to take a continuing education course at a different university that focused on other plays. My point is that varied perspectives enhance our understanding of all literary works. Again, we cue the world wide web with all its latent intellectual bounty. Sites like Open Shakespeare not only present his works in their entirety, but also offer critical introductions, and a Will-ophile like myself can find virtually anything necessary to learn more about Shakespeare – or to use when presenting his works to my ever virtually-evolving students.

So, what’s the point? Well, first, there is no reason not to take advantage of the virtual yet very real wealth of information at our fingertips. Second, if one is, as Lin Yutang said, to be wise and “read both books and life itself,” then we – bibliophiles and literary types, as a microcosm of a greater society – must be prepared for a paradigm shift. No longer are we wetting fingers or staining fingers with ink in order to push through to that paper or submission deadline; we are callousing fingertips and crouching over a screen that leads us all, students and teachers, to a “brave new world, / That has such people in’t!”

HAMLET [...] Sense sure you have,
Else could you not have motion; but sure that sense
Is apoplex’d; for madness would not err,
Nor sense to ecstacy was ne’er so thrall’d
But it reserv’d some quantity of choice
To serve in such a difference.

Note here that apoplexy occurs only as part of a metaphor: for Hamlet, Gertrude’s senses must have all but shut down, since such a wedding could not have occurred otherwise, in spite of all (and here comes another Greek word) the “ecstasy” she may have felt. The language of the Prince of Denmark on this topic of remarriage is full of words with classical roots and references to classical myths: one thinks of his paralleling Old Hamlet and Claudius, the former being to the latter as “Hyperion to a satyr”.

Hamlet’s description of “apoplex’d” senses may well be a sign of his hiding behind the words he learnt at university in Wittenberg; another example of the word, this time in *Coriolanus*, is far more blunt , with the word employed to describe what the play’s eponymous hero considers the dullness of peacetime.

CORIOLANUS [...] Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it’s spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men.

Coriolanus’ assessment of peace could not be further from that of Henry IV, the only character in Shakespeare’s works to die of apoplexy, and a man obsessed with maintaining the fragile equilibrium of peace installed after his rebellion and dethroning of Richard II. As Falstaff puts it, “This apoplexy [...] is a kind of lethargy, [...] a kind of sleeping in the blood, a tingling. [...] It hath it original from much grief, from study, and perturbation of the brain”. All his information, we soon learn, comes from “Galen”, quite possibly one of those books in Greek on the shelf of the young Prince of Denmark back in Wittenberg, and almost certainly present in the library of that other famous Wittenberg graduate: Dr Faustus.

It’s tempting to think that whatever you want to find out about nowadays, it’s only a click away. But with any Google search throwing up hundreds of thousands of hits, is it really that simple? I recently heard a radio discussion where it was suggested we are all “disempowered by the overload of information”, and in the academic world, it’s the same. Historian Daniel J. Cohen has said: “It is now quite clear that historians will have to grapple with abundance, not scarcity. Several million books have been digitized … and … we are confronted with a new digital …resource of almost unimaginable size”.

Cohen’s concern is over the digitization of books and manuscripts until recently only available by examining the original item, but this isn’t the only kind of project in the digital revolution. One great resource to be launched online later this year is the Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700, which offers high quality descriptions, but no images. The book holdings of major libraries worldwide are now searchable online via COPAC, but it would be a mistake to think that job’s done. Although the scope is widening, only a fraction of the world’s libraries are on COPAC, and most libraries and archives contain uncatalogued materials, and have too few staff to catalogue.

Many resources for Shakespeare study are easy to find. Among texts, Folios and Quartos have been scanned, and the Internet Shakespeare Editions is producing fully-edited modern editions for the internet. Books of Shakespeare criticism have been digitized as part of mass digitization projects of texts, manuscripts and illustrations like the Google Books project or the Internet Archive. Among institutional websites the prize goes to the Folger Shakespeare Library which includes not only the Library’s catalogues but an image database, videos, and pages of outstanding articles. Modern stage production images for the Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare’s Globe are posted on their sites. It’s not a dedicated Shakespeare resource, but the ubiquitous Google search can pick up content from almost anywhere so effectively that a recent survey named Google search engines as 4 of the top 20 websites worldwide. While undeniably useful, this ease can encourage a “smash and grab” mentality which effectively decontextualises the images, video or written content.

My own experience with digital projects relates largely to the development of an online database of information about RSC productions, linking the data to catalogue records in the RSC’s Archives. This launched in 2004 as the RSC Performance Database. I was simultaneously involved in two image projects, Royal Holloway College’s Designing Shakespeare and the RSC’s Pictures and Exhibitions. The potential benefits of linking these projects together were obvious, but with each planned and funded in isolation there was no opportunity for cooperative working.

I’m going to focus on a single but very dynamic area of digital initiatives, Shakespeare on video. If you’re a student or teacher studying Shakespeare, YouTube is an obvious place to start. A search for “Shakespeare” here results in thousands of hits all by itself, without even considering the material on other video websites.

Faced with this kind of result, sites have sprung up to help filter these resources. MIT’s Global Shakespeares project “provides global, regional, and national portals to Shakespeare productions within a federated structure”, a real treasure trove containing great content. Bardfilm is a personal blog selecting and commenting on Shakespeare-related films, a fascinating collection put together by someone with a passion for the subject, though not always easy to search. Bardbox is Luke McKernan’s project, and as you’d expect from the British Library’s Moving Image curator, the site addresses issues of selection and cataloguing while also being a personal choice. Only original videos are chosen, from sites like YouTube and Vimeo. None of these sites aim to be comprehensive, and the BUFVC’s International Database of Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio is a fantastic resource which aims to fill that gap by being an “authoritative online database of Shakespeare-related content in film, television, radio and video recordings,… international in scope and hold[ing] over 7,000 records dating from the 1890s to the present day.”

While all the above offer access to information and videos themselves, there are still problems. Items are not scanned or made searchable in a consistent way, and the mass of resources that aren’t digitised are ignored. This presents a real issue with currency. The RSC’s Pictures and Exhibitions and the Victoria and Albert Museum’s PeoplePlay UK were both projects containing thousands of images, but operating on defunct platforms they have been taken down. The RSC website currently contains valuable video interviews and production clips, but will these go the same way?

What is the future for Shakespeare in the digial world? Content is certain to grow. The question “How do I find it?” can probably be solved, but only if further cataloguing is done. The other question “How do I sort out the good stuff from the rest?” is also complicated, and too large for any small group of people to answer.

One option might be to look at the sort of solutions offered by organisations like WordPress, where help is provided by the wiki-based WordPress Codex community forum. Only twenty administrators work for WordPress, but there are 115,000 self-selected members of the forum, many of whom provide content. Is a Shakespeare crowdsourcing project like this the way forward? If so, who’s going to get it started?

I take my first example from *Richard II*, not least because the word return occurs a great deal in the so-called history plays, where messengers are forever being sent to various English and French courts only to be returned again with a polite reply or, in one memorable case after a delivery of tennis balls, a declaration of war. The lines below, however, do not deal with messengers but with two quarreling Dukes, Bolingbroke and Mowbray; Richard orders them to stand down in a rare display of royal authority, even as this point marks the slow erosion of his sovereignty until he eventually resigns the crown to the returning Bolingbroke.

KING RICHARD Let them lay by their helmets and their spears,
And both return back to their chairs again:
Withdraw with us; and let the trumpets sound
While we return these dukes what we decree.

King Richard is not the only king in Shakespeare to talk of returning: Lear, who also shares Richard’s downward trajectory, has a very well-known speech about his desire not to return to his daughters’ houses. With the dethroned Lear wandering the countryside, he would resemble those messengers at the other end of the normal hierarchy, forever being sent hither and thither in the history plays, were it not for his stubborn refusal to reject all houses.

LEAR Return to her, and fifty men dismiss’d?
No, rather I abjure all roofs, and choose
To wage against the enmity o’ the air;
To be a comrade with the wolf and owl,-
Necessity’s sharp pinch!–Return with her?
Why, the hot-blooded France, that dowerless took
Our youngest born, I could as well be brought
To knee his throne, and, squire-like, pension beg
To keep base life afoot.-Return with her?
Persuade me rather to be slave and sumpter
To this detested groom.
[Pointing to Oswald.]

My last example, before I leave off for this week and prepare my own return to action at a slightly slower rate than Ariel, returning to Prospero “ere your pulse twice beat”, is taken from the *Sonnets*. These poems, charting the speaker’s emotional engagements are full of references to separation and return: my favourite, by virtue of its wonderful conclusion, is number 56.

Sweet love, renew thy force; be it not said
Thy edge should blunter be than appetite,
Which but to-day by feeding is allay’d,
To-morrow sharpened in his former might:
So, love, be thou, although to-day thou fill
Thy hungry eyes, even till they wink with fullness,
To-morrow see again, and do not kill
The spirit of love, with a perpetual dullness.
Let this sad interim like the ocean be
Which parts the shore, where two contracted new
Come daily to the banks, that when they see
Return of love, more blest may be the view;
Or call it winter, which being full of care,
Makes summer’s welcome, thrice more wished, more rare.

From Monday 12th September to Monday 10th October, Open Shakespeare will host a series of articles on the topic of ‘Shakespeare and the Internet’. When we invited contributions, the theme was deliberately kept as broad as possible in order to facilitate a wide and diverse range of responses from each of those who have written a post for us. Our contributors range from teachers and students of Shakespeare to an experimental theatre company.

Having already read the majority of the contributions, I can say now that the series fulfils its goal of offering what the Bard would call a “multitudinous” range of approaches to the topic of Shakespeare and the Internet; subjects range from why Polonius would appreciate hypertext to the problems and opportunities of online abundance. Please feel free to make use of the comments section at the bottom of each article, and to carry on in this space the points for debate that each article raises. The contributions will appear in the following order:

• Monday 12th September: Sylvia Morris, Finding Needles in Haystacks: Shakespeare and the Internet
• Monday 19th September: Heather Nolen, “The wise man reads both books and life itself”
• Monday 26th September: Erin Weinberg, Why do I blog about Shakespeare? It’s a Choice
• Monday 3rd October: Caroline Bicks and Michelle Ephraim, Good Night, Tweet Prince
• Monday 10th October: The Propaganda Company, Freedom of Narrative

Every article in this series is published under a Creative Commons 3.0 SA BY licence, meaning that it is free to redistribute and reuse, providing that you attribute it to its author (BY) and that you share-alike. As with all the other material on Open Shakespeare, we hope that publication under such a licence will encourage the diffusion and development of our contributors’ ideas.

My thanks to all those who have contributed their time and thoughts to this project, particularly Erin Weinberg, whose proof-reading skills have been extremely useful in the preparation of these pieces for publication. Depending on the success of this series, we intend to publish similar, themed posts under an open licence in the future: if you would like to participate as either a writer or an editor, please get in touch through the usual channels.

Now, to conclude, I leave you, I hope, in approximately the same state of anticipation as Leonato leaves an impatient Claudio in Much Ado about Nothing:

till Monday [...] which is hence a just seven-night; and a time too brief too, to have all things answer my mind.

MACBETH I conjure you, by that which you profess,–
Howe’er you come to know it,–answer me:
Though you untie the winds, and let them fight
Against the churches; though the yesty waves
Confound and swallow navigation up;
Though bladed corn be lodg’d, and trees blown down;
Though castles topple on their warders’ heads;
Though palaces and pyramids do slope
Their heads to their foundations; though the treasure
Of nature’s germins tumble all together,
Even till destruction sicken,–answer me
To what I ask you.

The image of buildings falling to their foundation recurs in Venus and Adonis, Coriolanus and The Winter’s Tale. Each time the power of the description turns on the fact that ‘foundation’ stands for both origin and fundamental level, making such destruction doubly total. Yet there is a more hopeful rendering of the idea to be found too. After all, foundations should also be where things begin, as Lord Bardolph is keen to impress on the rebels of Henry IV pt II:

LORD BARDOLPH. [...] in this great work,
Which is almost to pluck a kingdom down
And set another up, should we survey
The plot of situation and the model,
Consent upon a sure foundation,
Question surveyors, know our own estate,
How able such a work to undergo,
To weigh against his opposite; or else
We fortify in paper and in figures,
Using the names of men instead of men;
Like one that draws the model of a house
Beyond his power to build it; who, half through,
Gives o’er and leaves his part-created cost
A naked subject to the weeping clouds
And waste for churlish winter’s tyranny.

As many will know, the rebellion of this sequel, like that of Henry IV part I, is crushed. That said, I can still find one – albeit sentimental – example of something springing from a foundation and succeeding: Open Shakespeare itself. Given previous reflections on openness and knowledge, perhaps my thought here on the OKF should be the observation that the concept of ‘foundation’, of laying out the start of something (call it what you will: trailblazing, pathfinding, innovating…), underpins everything that this project and the OKF does. Is this in tension, though, with the hopes of creating stable, flourishing open communities? Or rather, as I personally believe, the rhetoric necessary to the establishment and motivation of such groups. The only thing certain is that when talk is no longer of founding, then the project and the OKF will have changed utterly. For now, there is much work to do: “God save the foundation”, indeed.

The term knowledge is taken to include:
– Content such as music, films, books
– Data be it scientific, historical, geographic or otherwise
– Government and other administrative information

Shakespeare might have been able to grasp this (apart from the word data), although this kind of knowledge is, admittedly and unsurprisingly, far removed from his sense of the word, which already had (and still has) a complicated history, with its roots in both the concept of knowing something through experience (savoir) and that of knowing through the senses (connaitre). For a neat marriage of the two, take the disguised Duke’s rebuke to Lucio’s profession of love for the Duke himself towards the end of Measure for Measure:

DUKE Love talks with better knowledge, and knowledge with dearer love.

Here, knowledge covers both Lucio’s blindness to the facts of the situation (i.e. that the Duke he professes to love is in fact standing, disguised as a friar, in front of him – savoir) and Lucio’s complete lack of tact (if he really did experience “love” for the Duke, he would not be shouting it in such a context – connaitre). In this respect, knowledge resembles something rather more abstract than its definition as content/data/information by the OKF would have it. Of course, such concrete, intellectual (knowledge as savoir) terms are necessary for articulating the aims and work of the foundation; when it comes to the world of Shakespeare’s plays, however, more subtle, personal flavours of knowledge emerge, blends of savoir and connaitre. The phrase “my knowledge” gets, for example, eleven airings in various plays, whilst one of the greatest speeches on ‘knowledge’ in all Shakespeare must surely be that in which Leontes, in the opening half of The Winter’s Tale, announces that he believes his wife disloyal:

LEONTES How bles’d am I
In my just censure, in my true opinion!–
Alack, for lesser knowledge!–How accurs’d
In being so blest!–There may be in the cup
A spider steep’d, and one may drink, depart,
And yet partake no venom; for his knowledge
Is not infected; but if one present
The abhorr’d ingredient to his eye, make known
How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides,
With violent hefts;–I have drunk, and seen the spider.
Camillo was his help in this, his pander:–
There is a plot against my life, my crown;
All’s true that is mistrusted:–that false villain
Whom I employ’d, was pre-employ’d by him:
He has discover’d my design, and I
Remain a pinch’d thing; yea, a very trick
For them to play at will.

Leontes’ suspicions ultimately prove groundless, and he spends the rest of the play regretting the outcome of his jealous rage, until finally offered redemption from daughter and wife in the final act. What this speech shows above all else in the personal nature of knowledge: Leontes’ “knowledge” is so personal that it is in fact delusion, and he lives in his own terrifying world of spiders and “pinch’d” things, a stark example of the terrible consequences of isolation and suspicion. The lesson of Leontes and of other uses of the word “knowledge” in the Shakespeare corpus is clear: again and again, the bard shows us how knowledge becomes personal, how we become attached to the things and people that we know, and how sharing this attachment is important. This is also, I suppose, ultimately what lies behind both the fear of exposure and the benefits of community that are inherent in openness as the OKF understands it: those that resist the opening of data fear the release of knowledge that has become personal to them, and those that support such openness seek the chance to build communities on a personal level.

A piece of content or data is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share-alike.

Unfortunately for me, Shakespeare would have understood about half of the words in the above sentence in the same way that we do. He never uses the word “data” (despite its possession of those Latin roots so attractive to the poet elsewhere) and the concept of wider reuse and redistribution of any work is far from thinkable in a cultural era dominated by the Stationer’s Company. Instead, “open” for Shakespeare often has a rather more concrete meaning:

STEPHANO. Come on your ways: open your mouth; here is that which will give language to you, cat. Open your mouth: this will shake your shaking, I can tell you, and that soundly [gives CALIBAN a drink]: you cannot tell who’s your friend: open your chaps again.

This scene, from the inebriation of Caliban in The Tempest, is just one of many involving the verb in its sense of “moving from a closed position”, be it mouths (“chaps”), doors, or anything else on stage.

Perhaps more curious than this banal example is the use of open as an adjective, where it is sometimes associated with vulnerability. This is often also a criticism of our modern, technological sense of the word ‘open’: if everything was such, would not plagiarism and artistic penury run rampant? Of course, the devotee of openness replies that it promotes community, and that ‘open’ is hardly a synonym for unprofitable. This very website is living proof of this fact, harvesting annotations and promoting the study of Shakespeare worldwide. In our modern, internet era, the publisher, the software designer, or the artist that decides to go open finds themselves in an international community and support network, and thus in a far better position than these few hapless usages of the adjective ‘open’ in Shakespeare’s works:

1) Salisbury, contemplating the moral and political landscape in King John

Murder, as hating what himself hath done,
Doth lay it open to urge on revenge.

2) Two gentlemen concerned that walls might have ears when it comes to discussing the fate of Katherine of Aragon in King Henry VIII

We are too open here to argue this;
Let’s think in private more.

3) Anne, hoping something nasty will happen to the future king, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, in Richard III

Either, heaven, with lightning strike the murderer dead;
Or, earth, gape open wide and eat him quick,
As thou dost swallow up this good king’s blood,
Which his hell-govern’d arm hath butchered!

Peculiarly, one might add that all these Shakespearean associations of openness and vulnerability listed here involve politics and government. For more on the topic of open government in our own time, I strongly suggest a visit or at least a following of the OKF’s own Open Government Data Camp, due to take place in Poland on 21st October. I guarantee a more positive outlook on the idea than Shakespeare’s images of the “hell-govern’d arm”.

CLARENCE [...] Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks;
Ten thousand men that fishes gnaw’d upon;
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,
All scatter’d in the bottom of the sea:
Some lay in dead men’s skulls; and, in those holes
Where eyes did once inhabit, there were crept,
As ’twere in scorn of eyes, reflecting gems,
Which woo’d the slimy bottom of the deep,
And mock’d the dead bones that lay scatter’d by.

The image of the skull in this speech, articulated in the voices of Boris Karloff, George Clooney, Tom Brokaw and Harvey Keitel by Mr Meskimen, serves in part as a memento mori (something that recalls mortality, as seen in this ), and aptly so, given Clarence’s imminent end. The seventeen other skulls in Shakespeare are often caught up in the same memento mori tradition: Hamlet and the gravedigger is the most famous example, but Surrey offers an insulting reference to the trope in Richard II when he tells Fitzwater to think on “thy father’s skull”, and Romeo and Juliet contains multiple macabre references to the cranium.

One other use of skulls, not too far removed from reminding us of our mortality, is as part of some particularly gruesome image. My favourite of them all comes in The Tempest, when Prospero describes how both the condition and cure that he imposes on Antonio, Alonso, Gonzalo, and the rest.

PROSPERO A solemnt air, and the best comforter
To an unsettled fancy, sure thy brains,
Now useless, boil’d within thy skull!

KING HENRY Woe above woe! grief more than common grief!
O that my death would stay these ruthful deeds!–
O pity, pity! gentle heaven, pity!–
The red rose and the white are on his face,
The fatal colours of our striving houses;
The one his purple blood right well resembles,
The other his pale cheeks, methinks, presenteth.
Wither one rose, and let the other flourish!
If you contend, a thousand lives must wither

For King Henry, mourning the death of a unnamed father’s son on the battlefield near Towton, “purple” is the colour of blood, and blood is the colour of one of the English roses, the ‘Red Rose of York’. In this respect, when we read the word “purple” in Shakespeare’s plays, one should think of a redder hue than what we now call purple. A rose, as they say, by any other name would smell as sweet, but, to the mind’s eye, it may well look pretty different.

In some places the meaning of the word ‘purple’ is clearer than elsewhere: blood, for example, is frequently described as ‘purple’ where we would now say ‘red’, in Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, Henry VI part II (“purple tears”), King John, Richard III, Richard II (“the purple testament of bleeding war”), Romeo and Juliet, and the Sonnets. Elsewhere, the exact colour meant by Shakespeare’s word “purple” is open to investigation. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a particularly good test case: Bottom the Weaver and wannabe actor has a “purple-in-grain beard” and is fed “purple grapes” at Titania’s behest; Oberon places a purple dye into the love potion that infatuates the lovers and Titania, and describes its source in a flower struck by “Cupid’s fiery shaft”; as for the audience member, the exact colour of any of this is obscure.

One bastion of security remains, however, in Shakespeare’s reference to the original ‘imperial purple’ (Greek porphyra), carefully manufactured from a mucus secreted by the spiny dye-murex snail, and thus a rare and status-granting tint. The sails of Cleopatra’s barge are an example of this colour’s role in ostentatious displays of power:

ENOBARBUS [...] The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
Burn’d on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them [...]

The colour of this purple can be precisely established, since the process by which it was created is still known to us. Yet for all these other mentions of the colour, some degree of ambiguity must always be present. Is this not true of other colours though? When we hear of “ivory globes circled with blue” do we all imagine the same shades on Lucrece’s chest? And how is this blue different from the “two blue windows” that the dawn opens in the sky at the start of the same play? Of course, the question of a word’s precise meaning is not limited to colour either, other descriptive terms (such as those for expression or posture) suffer from the same problem when we read the plays. It is only when we see the plays that some of this ambiguity is removed, and we learn the exact colour of Malvolio’s stockings, for example; even then, this leaves some mysteries unresolved and thus each spectator as each reader, imagining their own personal Shakespearean reds and purples in their head.

The sour taste of the crabapple reappears in King Lear, where the Fool compares Goneril’s nature to the bitter fruit, saying that “She’ll taste as like this [i.e. Reagan] as a crab does to a crab”. Petruchio, being called “a crab” by Katherine the Shrew, presumably because of his resemblance to the notoriously gnarly produce of the tree, turns the insult on its head by retorting, “Why here’s no crab, and therefore look not sour.”

The lack of aesthetic appeal to the crab-apple powers what Nathaniel – with his tongue firmly in cheek – describes as the “sweetly varied” language of Holofernes, the schoolmaster who compares the fall of a shot deer to “a crab on the face of terra, the soil, the land, the earth” in Love’s Labour’s Lost Whilst Holofernes speaks bastard Latin, it is a rather different question of heredity that the crab-apple points up in Henry VI pt II, when Suffolk accuses Warwick’s mother of infidelity:

SUFFOLK Blunt-witted lord, ignoble in demeanour!
If ever lady wrong’d her lord so much,
Thy mother took into her blameful bed
Some stern untutor’d churl, and noble stock
Was graft with crab-tree slip, whose fruit thou art,
And never of the Nevils’ noble race.

With all this talk of crab-apple trees and their relation to sour dispositions, ugliness, disease and marital infidelity, it comes of something of a surprise to learn that when Hamlet talks of crabs, he is in fact the only character in all Shakespeare’s works to have the crustacean in mind. That said, he famously has a rather strange idea of the creature, madly telling Polonius that he could only resemble Hamlet “if, like a crab, he could go backward”.

Details

• Where? Brettenham House, 9 Savoy Street, WC2E 7EG, London. – Meet outside ‘The Savoy Tup’ Pub, Savoy Street, at 10am to be guided to the venue.
• When? Saturday 13th August, 10am – 6pm
• What?A gathering for all those interested in the relation between technology and literature, with a specal focus on the creation of open knowledge.
• More details: http://wiki.openliterature.net/Text_Camp_2011
• Order (free) tickets: http://textcamp2011.eventbrite.com/
• Twitter: #tcamp11

Hope you can make it!

Needlework is not always a way of dismissing a woman, though: Othello praises Desdemona for being “so delicate with her needle” that it defeats all his violent thoughts, and Imogen, the heroine of Cymbeline, reconfigures needlework as a kind of female empowerment when she imagines how she would, if possible, stand “by with a needle, that [she] might prick / The goer back” in an imaginary duel between the Queen’s son and the exiles of the play.

Of course, as soon as the needle might represent female power, it becomes a topic of male banter amongst some of Shakspeare’s viler characters. Thersites insults Ajax in Troilus and Cressida by saying that he has “not so much wit [...] as will stop the eye of Helen’s needle”, and there is definitely some lewd reference here to phallic needles, eyes/holes and Helen’s supposed promiscuity. A similar configuration of tropes occurs when Tarquin stalks towards the sleeping Lucrece:

And being lighted, by the light he spies
Lucretia’s glove, wherein her needle sticks;
He takes it from the rushes where it lies,
And griping it, the neeld his finger pricks:
As who should say this glove to wanton tricks
Is not inur’d: return again in haste;
Thou see’st our mistress’ ornaments are chaste.

This time, the needle epitomises the weakness of the woman’s power to resist the Roman warrior, and grimly foretells Lucrece’s later suicide with a dagger. To conclude, one might set this tragic piece of needlework against Gower’s description of Marina in one of the choruses of Pericles: here, in this late play, suffering remains paramount but its potential as a source of strength is also evoked, all with the image of a woman wielding a needle:

when she would with sharp needle wound,
The cambric, which she made more sound
By hurting it […]

Stoop then, and wash. How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted o’er
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!

These four lines fall almost precisely at the centre of Julius Caesar, and mark a particularly vertiginous moment for the play’s audience. A great part of the dizzying effect depends on the use of two words beginning with ‘un-’. In this case the use of the prefix (as opposed to writing “not born”, for example), captures the special sense of Cassio’s speech: future states and accents have not yet come in to being, but they will. The word ‘unborn’, like all words beginning with such a prefix, unites two states: being born and not being born. Thus there is an added element of tragedy to the grief of Richard II’s childless wife, when she tells the courtier Bushy:

Some unborn sorrow, ripe in fortune’s womb,
Is coming towards me, and my inward soul
With nothing trembles; at some thing it grieves
More than with parting from my lord the king.

Many commentators take this line to refer to a stillborn heir; if so, then “unborn”, capturing both the possibility of birth and its tragic denial, is the apt and awful word for the occasion.

There are over 700 different words beginning with “un-” in Shakespeare’s works, all (excluding those with the under- prefix) of them preserving the balance of possibility and denial already seen with “unborn”. Particular examples include: Octavius arguing that one should “let determined things to destiny / Hold unbewail’d their way” in Antony and Cleopatra; both Lear and, metaphorically, Othello appearing “unbonneted”; the young prince Humphry describing “unfather’d heirs” at the end of Henry IV part II; Cymbeline fearing to appear “unkinglike”; Henry V apologising to the future Queen Katherine for his provoking or “untempering” visage; and, strangest of all, Isabella talking about “unwedgeable oak”. This last example is part of an exchange between the heroine of Measure for Measure and its villain, Angelo, where Isabella’s emotion appears in such dense and passionate speech on the topic of abused authority that it merits quotation:

[...] Could great men thunder
As Jove himself does, Jove would ne’er be quiet,
For every pelting, petty officer
Would use his heaven for thunder;
Nothing but thunder! Merciful Heaven,
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
Split’st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak
Than the soft myrtle: but man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.

BASTARD Bell, book, and candle shall not drive me back,
When gold and silver becks me to come on. [...]

The three objects mentioned are those used in the rites of exorcism, the flamboyant villain of King John comparing himself to the devil. Strikingly similar phrasing is found in an exchange between Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus and Mephistopheles:

MEPHIST. Nay, I know not: we shall be cursed with bell, book, and candle.
FAUSTUS. How! bell, book, and candle,—candle, book, and bell,—
Forward and backward, to curse Faustus to hell!

Faustus and his demon are here, in a piece of anti-Catholic foolery, mocking the Pope’s efforts to rid them from the Vatican, as the candle, book and bell of exorcism fail utterly. Moving away from religious uses, but keeping the element of mockery, we find many mixes of candles and insults in Shakespeare’s works. Falstaff’s girth often leads to jokes about how many candles could be made by turning his fat to “tallow” in Henry IV part I and II; Demetrius criticises the presence of a “candle [...] already in snuff” to represent the mechanicals’ moonshine as the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and Leonato rails against those who stay up all night drinking by calling them “candle-wasters” in Much Ado About Nothing.

Rather more innocently, Romeo imagines himself as nothing more than a lovesick “candle-holder” at the Capulet ball, the early modern expression for what we would now call third who makes a crowd, which also survives in the French expression for the same phenomenon: “porter la chandelle”. Candles too appear with reference to love in The Merchant of Venice, which mentions the object more than any other play: Jessica fears having to “hold a candle to my shame” of running away for love, and Portia, returning to Belmont after saving Antonio, spots from afar the wax-based lights of her household:

PORTIA. That light we see is burning in my hall.
How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

These lines on good deeds contrast nicely to what must be the most famous use of candles in Shakespeare’s work, the comparison between the burning of a candle and the duration of a human life. It is hardly unique to Shakespeare but is nevertheless used twice in his works, both times in the mouths of warriors. It occurs first when Clifford dies on the battlefield of Henry VI part III, and ,superlatively, when Macbeth learns of his wife’s death.

MACBETH. She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.-
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

From the seventy-two appearances of bells in Shakespeare’s texts, five different uses appear, with much blurring between them. Amongst the most frequent is the bell as the death knell: the priest promises that Ophelia will have “bell and burial” despite her apparent suicide in Hamlet; news of Hotspur’s death at the start of Henry IV part II is compared to the sound of “a sullen bell”, a phrase also used by the Sonnet-writer for his own passing (LXXI); and the song that plays as Bassanio chooses his casket in The Merchant of Venice tolls the beginning and the end of infatuation:

It is engend’red in the eyes,
With gazing fed; and fancy dies
In the cradle where it lies.
Let us all ring fancy’s knell:
I’ll begin it.–Ding, dong, bell.

There are many more examples that I leave out here. Macbeth, for example, is full of knells, or, rather, of bells that Macbeth hears as knells: the bells that ring after Duncan’s murder are, for example, “a knell / That summons thee to heaven or to hell”. Other bells in the play include the “alarum bell”, which also makes its appearance in Othello (when a drunken Cassio kills Roderigo), and in Henry VI part I (when the French prepare their attack), to name but a few examples.

Far from the battlefield or the funeral, bells also serve to mark the time. They ring the hour on the battlements of Elsinore at the start of Hamlet, and mark dinnertime in The Comedy of Errors. In one of Shakespeare’s most touching scenes, an imprisoned and deposed Richard II compares himself to a broken clock, right down to its carillon:

[...] For now hath time made me his numbering clock:
My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto my finger, like a dial’s point,
Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.
Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is
Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart,
Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans
Show minutes, times, and hours [...]

My last few examples concern other bells: the head of a flower can be called a bell (as Ariel’s bower in “a cowslip’s bell” attests), and the ram that leads a flock a “bell-wether”, after the bell he carries on his neck (thus Touchstone calls a shepherd “a bawd to a bell-wether” in As You Like It, for example).

Having run from burning theatres to animal husbandry, I conclude with one last quote involving bells, this time from King John, which I shall explain in my next piece.

BASTARD Bell, book, and candle shall not drive me back,
When gold and silver becks me to come on. [...]

Although Shylock is the villain of this play, Shakespeare departs from the Elizabethan caricature of the cruel, hated Jew, as exemplified by Marlowe’s Barabas in The Jew of Malta (1589-90). His creation is more complex, fusing humanity with unrelenting cruelty and a strict adherence to the letter of the law. In this way, the Jew-figure becomes something impossible to define, performable as the clownish, evil, red-haired Elizabethan devil (a precursor to Dickens’ Fagin), or as the sympathetic Jew of our modern, post-holocaust view. Whether his ultimately cruel punishment is his redemption or his humiliation just does not matter when a broken Shylock murmurs his last line: “I am not well.”

Despite being on a more comic trajectory, Portia, like Shylock, is also bound by strict adherence to the law. First, she faithfully submits to the terms of her father’s will, which force her to select her future husband according to their choice of gold, silver or leaden casket (a passage famously discussed by Freud in 1913). Second, once Bassanio has chosen the correct box, she displays a brilliant understanding of the law to free Antonio from Shylock on a technicality. Yet for all her brilliance in the courtroom, Portia must dress as a man there, and, again like Shylock, this rich heiress’ actions demonstrate the prejudices and limitations of Venetian society.

Set in Venice and Portia’s home in Belmont, the play moves from a fraught mix of cosmopolitan bustle and casual antisemitism to a fairytale land of riddles, music and poetry. At the play’s conclusion, all the main characters (save Shylock) enter the idyllic world of Belmont in a happy ending, which is nevertheless tainted by memories of Portia’s rejected suitors and Shylock’s earlier exit. Such ambiguity was brought out notably in a 2010 performance at New York’s Shakespeare in the Park, just one of many performances of this popular Shakespeare play, perhaps now best known through the Al Pacino film of 2004.

Originally contributed by Richard Rose Adapted for publication by James Harriman-Smith

DECIUS [...] unicorns may be betray’d with trees,
And bears with glasses, elephants with holes,
Lions with toils, and men with flatterers:
But when I tell him he hates flatterers,
He says he does, being then most flattered.
Let me work;
For I can give his humor the true bent,
And I will bring him to the Capitol.

The idea that unicorns, like other creatures, have their weaknesses, is also something brought up by Timon of Athens during a rambling debate on the topic of the humane and the bestial with the philospher Apemantus. The misanthrope counters Apemantus’ wish to be a best as follows, taking the unicorn as a climax in his argument:

If thou wert the lion, the fox would beguile thee; if thou wert the lamb, the fox would eat thee; if thou wert the fox, the lion would suspect thee, when peradventure, thou wert accused by the ass; if thou wert the ass, thy dulness would torment thee, and still thou livedst but as a breakfast to the wolf; if thou wert the wolf, thy greediness would afflict thee, and oft thou shouldst hazard thy life for thy dinner; wert thou the unicorn, pride and wrath would confound thee and make thine own self the conquest of thy fury; [...] What beast couldst thou be that were not subject to a beast?

The combination of rarity and special power that the above passages find in the unicorn is complemented by another idea in The Rape of Lucrece. As many know already, unicorns were famous for being wild and free, and only susceptible to taming by a virgin. This sexual element lurks in the background of a long speech on the wonders of time given by Shakespeare’s heroine, where it is – conspicuously – time and not virginity that triumph over the unicorns power, “To slay the tiger that doth live by slaughter, / To tame the unicorn and lion wild”. If there were any doubt over the sinister application of this example in the mouth of a vulnerable woman, one need only look elsewhere in the same passages to see that the tragedy of the unicorn (special, proud, vulnerable and desired) is the same as Lucrece’s, for Lucrece invokes time with the terrible feeling that its power will not aid her, even though it should “eat up errors by opinion bred, / Not spend the dowry of a lawful bed”.

Having explored the battlefields and courts where ‘quailing’ occurs, let us turn to a rather puzzling use of the noun in Antony and Cleopatra. Antony, having just received bad auguries from the soothsayer, contemplates the upcoming battle between his forces and those of Octavius Caesar in terms of previous, less serious, confrontations between them.

ANTONY [...] in our sports my better cunning faints
Under his chance: if we draw lots, he speeds;
His cocks do win the battle still of mine,
When it is all to nought; and his quails ever
Beat mine, inhoop’d at odds.

It seems that “quails [...] inhoop’d” is a reference to the now extinct sport of quail-fighting, which according to Johnson took place in “a broad hoop” to prevent the combatants from “quitting each other”.

My last use of quails takes us from one oft-prohibited activity, betting on duels between birds, to another: prostitution. Possibly with reference to the Anglo-Norman ‘caille’, the word quail could also mean, according to the OED, ‘prostitute’. Thus, Thersites, neer one to shy away from descriptions of disgusting bodily functions in Troilus and Cressida manages to simultaneously describe the gastronomic and sexual inclinations of Agamemnon with reference to the little birds in his vile encomium of the Grecian leader.

[...] Here’s Agamemnon, an honest fellow enough, and one that loves quails, but he has not so much brain as ear-wax [...]

If this be magic, let it be an art
Lawful as eating.

The lawfulness of magic is evoked elsewhere in Shakespeare. Othello picks up the negative connotations of the word when he, ironically, tells the Venetian senate of the “magic” that, according to them, he must have used in order to woo Desdemona. Such ironic reference to magic comes back later in the play, when the moor imagines the magical creation of the handkerchief he gave to Desdemona, whose presence in Camillo’s chamber forces Othello over the edge.

OTHELLO Tis ture: there’s magic in the web of it:
A sibyl, that had number’d in the world
The sun to course two hundred compasses,
In her prophetic fury sew’d the work;
The worms were hallow’d that did breed the silk;
And it was dy’d in mummy which the skillful
Conserv’d of maiden’s hearts.

The magic of the handkerchief is ultimately manifested in the way in which it inflames Othello’s jealousy. Something similar occurs in Hamlet, where the “magic” poison of the play-within-a-play (again overlapping theatre and sorcery) provokes the very real anger of Claudius whom it directly accuses.

In that accusation, Claudius is himself made out as the user of the “magic” poison that kills Old Hamlet, and this is but one of several examples of evil or so-called ‘black’ magic in Shakespeare’s work. Exeter, at the funeral of Henry V with which Henry VI part I opens, imagines the black magic of the French which could have “contriv’d” the end of the king; whilst in Macbeth, the evil coven of witches represents perhaps the most prominent black magic users of Shakespeare’s canon. It is after all, Hecate, the queen of the witches, who in an oft-cut speech promises:

HECATE [...] There hangs a vaporous drop profound;
I’ll catch it ere it come to ground:
And that, distill’d by magic sleights,
Shall raise such artificial sprites,
As, by strength of their illusion,
Shall draw [Macbeth] to his confusion:
He shall spurn fate, scorn death, and bear
His hopes ‘bove wisdom, grace, and fear:
And you all know, security
Is mortals’ chiefest enemy.

The order, and not the inn, is behind several other uses of the word, particularly in the histories. Talbot, the great warrior of Henry VI part I critically recalls how members of the order “of the garter were of noble birth, / Valiant and virtuous, full of haughty courage”; Richard III, on the other hand, swears “by my George, my garter, and my crown”, only to have Queen Elizabeth throw his words straight back at him:

QUEEN ELIZABETH By nothing; for this is no oath:
Thy George, profan’d, hath lost his lordly honour;
Thy garter, blemish’d, pawn’d his knightly virtue;
Thy crown, usurp’d, disgrac’d his kingly glory.
If something thou wouldst swear to be believ’d,
Swear then by something that thou has not wrong’d.

Queen Elizabeth’s distate for Richard and his unscrupulous use of what Talbot held so sacred are likely to have been shared by a character in Henry VIII, who, remarkably, is actually called “Garter” (presumably after his knighthood), and who gives a long eulogy on the newly-born “high and mighty Princess of England, Elizabeth” towards the end of the play.

As well as the knightly order, whether comically or reverentially evoked, one finds another, more sartorial use of garters. Iago demands one as a tourniquet as a way of covering his own murder of Roderigo in Othello; and Malvolio, famously humiliating himself by appearing “cross-gartered” before his mistress Olivia in Twelfth Night, is forced to admit that his costume causes some “obstruction in the blood”. By falling into the trap of the servants and Olivia’s extended family, Malvolio the butler in fact comes close to doing metaphorically what Theseus imagines the mechanicals’ scriptwriter might literally do in a Midsummer Night’s Dream, namely “hang’d himself in [a] garter”. Likewise, a disgruntled Falstaff tells Prince Hal to “hang thyself in thine own heir-apparent garters”.

A source of insults and humiliation, as well as more innocent foolery, this “narrow band of fabric fastened about the leg” is truly, as the Fool of King Lear puts it, “cruel garters” indeed.

Where’s Antonio, then?
I could not find him at the Elephant [...]

Quite why Illyria should name an inn after an exotic animal is anyone’s guess, although one should note that this occurs elsewhere in Shakespeare’s works: the inn at the centre of The Comedy of Errors is called, for example, ‘The Tiger’. Efforts to find a modern day equivalent of the elephant inn, in Montenegro, Albania or Croatia, reveal only that there exists only one mix of hospitality and African beast in the region Shakespeare called “Illyria”: the Electric Elephant Festival, in Croatia.

Leaving the comedies behind, our word hunt brings us to a set of plays placed that all take place in the classical period. Elephants were, of course, most famously used at this time by Hannibal in his attack on Rome during the Second Punic War between Carthage and Rome, but Decius (one of the conspirators against Caesar) points out that even these creatures could be beaten with “holes” in the ground. The comment comes in a speech comparing elephants to the proud and powerful Roman leader, a patter nof thought also found in Troilus and Cressida, where the Greek heroes, Achilles and Ajax, are likened to the beast: Achilles to the creature that “hath joints but none for courtesy” and Ajax to an animal that is “slow” and powerful.

One might conclude then, that all Shakespeare’s references to the elephant have little overlap with modern conceptions of the beast, influenced by tales of Indian exoticism, like Rudyard Kipling’s, or by such sympathetic portrayals as Disney’s Dumbo. Instead of this later view, elephants are taken as representative of great power, but inflexible and stupid. With this in mind, perhaps one should note the potential for a diplomatic gaff when Suleiman the elephant was presented to Archduke Maximilian II (later the Holy Roman Emperor) by King John III of Portugal in 1542. That, though, is a story for another time.

When? 13th August 2011, 10am – 6pm
Where? To be Confirmed Website: http://wiki.openliterature.net/TextCamp2011
Register: http://textcamp2011.eventbrite.com

During the day, we hope to create, discuss and maybe even publish ‘open literature’, which is to say that we will work on both texts that are in (and about) the public domain, and on the open-source tools for the analysis and appreciation of these works.

Planned activities include:

• Discussion and/or hacking of 2 231 texts recently released from Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) with the help of the Text Creation Partnership
• Coming up with ideas for and perhaps composing a web based narrative.
• Writing a guide to creative commons and related licenses as regards literary productions.
• Working out how to build an online community around a work of literature, with advice on the process of receiving edits to one’s own online work.
• And, of course, much much more…

Why not suggest your own ideas? or take a look at the wiki for the event?

Berowne, never short of witticisms, is one user of the word zany. It occurs in a speech following the failure of his and his friends’ attempts to woo the princesses, the result of all said princesses having had the chance to mischievously disguises themselves as each other. The frustrated prince, imagines the kind of person who could have ruined their fun.

BEROWNE [...] I see the trick on’t: here was a consent,
Knowing aforehand of our merriment,
To dash it like a Christmas comedy.
Some carry-tale, some please-man, some slight zany,
Some mumble-news, some trencher-knight, some Dick,
That smiles his cheek in years, and know the trick
To make my lady laugh when she’s dispos’d,
Told our intents before; which once disclos’d
The ladies did change favours, and then we,
Following the signs, woo’d but the sign of she.

Berowne’s “zany” turns out to be the Princesses’ elderly counsellor Boyet, but one can’t help but suspect that the true zanies, in the sense of ridiculous incompetents, are Berowne and his friends, who blindly “woo’d but the sign” of their beloved’s and not the ladies themselves.

A similar reversal occurs in the other use of the word, Malvolio’s attack on Feste, Sir Toby and Sir Andrew in front of his mistress Olivia near the beginning of Twelfth Night.

MALVOLIO I protest I take these wise men that crow so at these set kind of fools, no better than the fools’ zanies.

In a way, the head butler is right to spot how the activities of Sir Toby and Sir Andrew degrade them, but the audience’s sympathies are very much against poor Malvolio. Soon, the man is to become the object of ridicule himself, and so those he has called “zanies” take their revenge by tricking him into the absurd “cross-garter’d” dress of a clownish man.

Moving away from this talk of bullocks, and in the direction suggested by Don Pedro’s comparison between conjug*al bonds and the farmer’s yoke, brings us to a whole host of uses of the word that turn on the idea of joining things together. Wolsey prays that Henry VIII will “yoke together […] my doing well / With my well saying”; Sicinius advises Coriolanus not to “yoke with” Brutus in his campaign for the consulship; and Henry V observes, on the capture of the conspirators, Lord Cambridge and Lord Scroop, how “Treason and murder ever kept toegether, / As two yoke-devils sworn to either’s purpose”.

From jointure, we come to the other element of yokes: dominance. Again, we can find applications to marriage: Hermia, one of the central characters of A Midsummer Night’s Dream vows to Theseus that she would, for example rather never marry than have Demetrius “whose unwished yoke / My soul consents not to give sovereignty”. Alternatively, political dominance is often expressed in terms of oxen-management: Titus Andronicus is littered with references to “the yoke of Rome”, and Northumberland in Richard II speaks revolution when he declares that “we shall shake off our slavish yoke”.

Going through all the examples of this word, a single instance really leaps out at me. It is another example of a theme that has been discussed here before, in reference to drawers and dawns, that of the burden of authority. Richard, moments before pasing from the position of Duke of Gloster to king of England, uses the phrase “the golden yoke of sovereignty” to describe kingship. The metaphor allows the Duke of Gloster both to appear humble before his interlocutors by emphasising the burden of monarchy, yet nevertheless contains the other sense of being able to impose one’s yoke upon others. Having come from the farmyard to the the palace, I shall end this article here.

PETRUCHIO. Signior Hortensio, ‘twixt such friends as we
Few words suffice; and therefore, if thou know
One rich enough to be Petruchio’s wife,
As wealth is burden of my wooing dance,
Be she as foul as was Florentius’ love,
As old as Sibyl, and as curst and shrewd
As Socrates’ Xanthippe or a worse,
She moves me not, or not removes, at least,
Affection’s edge in me, were she as rough
As are the swelling Adriatic seas:
I come to wive it wealthily in Padua;
If wealthily, then happily in Padua.

As is clear here, Xantippe represents the archetypal awful wife. She is, for Petruchio, on a par with the ugly witch that Florentius promises to marry for the answer to the riddle “what does every woman want?” in Gower’s Confession Amantis, and with the Sibyl, the immortal and deranged seer of the Aeneid who also makes an appearance in the epigraph of Eliot’s The Wasteland.

Who, though, was Xantippe? The facts are rather thin on the ground, and were probably even thinner in Shakespeare’s day, but what we do know now reveals some irony in Petruchio’s use of her name to describe his hypothetical wife, a position ultimately filled by Kate, the shrew of this play’s title. Xantippe, like Kate, was noble: the reference to horses (Greek ‘hippos’ – thus ‘Xant-hippos’) in her name indicates aristocratic blood, and her eldest son by Socrates took the name of her father, Lamprocles, and not that of Socrates’ less illustrious parent. Testimony from Plato and Xenophon suggest that Xantippe was a good wife to Socrates, albeit headstrong. It is this latter attribute that was accentuated by Plutarch (whom Shakespeare read), Aelian, and Antisthenes, ultimately leading to the stereotype of the domineering wife that Shakespeare uses here.

Returning to Plato and Xenophon’s accounts of Xantippe, we learn that Socrates chose his wife because he valued her strength of will.

I wish to deal with human beings, to associate with man in general; hence my choice of wife. I know full well, if I can tolerate her spirit, I can with ease attach myself to every human being else.

Just like Petruchio, who comes to apprecaite Kate’s strength of character over the blandness of other women, Socrates too, nearly two thousand years before, discovered the joys of marrying a supposed ‘shrew’. This is the irony behind Shakespeare’s speech.

Shakespeare’s vizards occur in a variety of circumstances. The word is used literally only once, however, when Ford goes to buy children “vizards” in The Merry Wives of Windsor. At other points, the sense is metaphorical, expressing deception, be it of oneself or of others. Macbeth advises his wife to “make our faces vizards to our hearts, / Disguising what they are” in one of his many uses of ‘covering’ metaphors, such as the wish to “scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day” a few lines later. Something like Macbeth’s deceptiveness is found by York in Queen Margaret, when he, defeated, defies and curses her near the start of Henry VI pt III.

YORK She-wolf of France, but worse than wolves of France,
Whose tongue more poisons than the adder’s tooth,
How ill-beseeming is it in thy sex
To triumph, lke an Amazonian trull,
Upon their woes whom fortune captivates!
But that thy face is, vizard-like, unchanging,
Made impudent with use of evil deeds,
I would assay proud queen, to make thee blush.

The insult here is that Queen Margaret has committed so many “evil deeds” that, a little like an Elizabethan Dorian Gray, her face has become a mask, imperviously covering her humanity.

There can be no empathy between York and Margaret, and the mask/vizard represents this by serving as a type for blocked communication. That masks should block communication and not, as one might expect, deliver a clear and uniform message, is somewhat strange, although very much the case in much of Shakespeare’s uses of the word. Take, for instance, my last example, from Troilus and Cressida, which takes the blocking, obscuring qualities of masks as part of a long metaphor on the subject of what occurs when all the marks of hierarchy (“degree”) is no longer visible (“vizarded”).

ULYSSES.
Troy, yet upon his basis, had been down,
And the great Hector’s sword had lack’d a master,
But for these instances:
The specialty of rule hath been neglected;
And look how many Grecian tents do stand
Hollow upon this plain, so many hollow factions.
When that the general is not like the hive,
To whom the foragers shall all repair,
What honey is expected? Degree being vizarded,
Th’ unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask.

My first example is drawn from Macbeth, and the drunken Porter’s discussion about drunkeness with Macduff.

MACDUFF What three things does drink especially provoke? PORTER Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes and unprovokes; it provokes the desire but takes away the performance.

Not much to be said here, except to note a small overlap between drink, urine and lechery. This too is active in my second example, this time spoken by Lucio in Measure for Measure. He is telling the disguised Duke about his new deputy, Angelo.

LUCIO Some report a sea-maid spawned him; some, that he was begot between two stock-fishes. – But it is certain that when he makes water, his urine is congealed ice; that I know to be true. And he is a motion ungenerative, that’s infallible.

Urine is, unsurprisingly, a topic of low conversation, for Lucio to be speaking thus to the ruler of Vienna (like the Porter to Macduff) is as ridiculous as it is a subversive reminder of how much respect and authority depend upon appearance. Lucio’s description of Angelo is funny, but it also represents how untenable Angelo’s public persona is, so unhuman as to be vulnerable to easy mockery along the same lines of sex and lechery that are found in the Porter’s blabbering.

Whilst Angelo’s urine marks out his unhumanity, the making of water is, for Shylock, an example of what brings all humankind together, regardless of religious orientation. In a long speech about how all people can be overcome with “affection”, he cites the analogous involuntary response that some may have to bagpipes to support his case.

[...] others, when the bagpipe sings i’the nose,
Cannot contain their urine [...]

Unfortunately for Shylock, such an argument eventually fails to hold any water.

The sense that “quondam” is a rather formal way of saying “erstwhile” or “formerly” can be traced in every one of Shakespeare’s uses of the word. However, the three other passages to be treated here also all link “quondam” with sex. Pistol promises that “I have, and will hold the quondam Quickly” in a rather physical riff on the marriage vows in Henry V; Hector, in Troilus and Cressida, bates Menelaus by telling him that Helen, his “quondam wife swears still by Venus’ glove / She’s well, but bade me not commend her to you”; and Benedick describes former ladies’ men as “quondam carpet-mongers” in Much Ado About Nothing.

This relation between “quondam” and sexual mores has been explored elsewhere. Some, for example, point to the obvious sexual reference when Chaucer’s Wife of Bath describes how men have always loved her “quoniam” to elaborate a theory about “qu-” words and their relation bawdiness (cf. the Elizabethan “quean”, for a prostitute). Elsewhere, and perhaps most interestingly, research suggests that “quondam” may lie behind the modern word ‘condom’: eighteenth-century Scots routinely replaced a “C-” at the start of English words formerly beginning with “Qu-” (thus ‘corter’ for ‘quarter’), and so could be found giving advice about birth control through the use of a “quondam”. Quite whether this can be extended back to Shakespeare’s time is still a matter of debate, although Hector’s comments about “Venus’ glove” do make for tempting evidence…

In the Merchant of Venice, a Neapolitan prince is amongst Portia’s unsuccessful suitors, not least because he “doth nothing but talk of his horse”, leading Portia to quip that she is “much afeard my lady his mother play’d false with a smith”. Neapolitan ancestry comes up in much more serious terms in Henry VI part II, when York, captured by Margaret and her Lancastrian forces, curses her in defiance as the “Outcast of Naples, England’s bloody scourge”.

Portia’s wit about sexual infidelity, and York’s violent outburst come together in Thersites description of the “Neapolitan bone-ache” that he finds on the battlefield of Troy in Troilus and Cressida. The “bone-ache” is syphilis, and marks yet another less than flattering reference to Naples in Shakespeare’s works. When Lucentio suggests that he disguise himself as “Some Neapolitan” in The Taming of the Shrew in order to deceive his beloved’s father, Biondello, he must surely have got a laugh, given that such a choice of disguise inadvertantly implies sexual decadence and disease as much as Neapolitan wealth.

Despite all these ignominious Neapolitans, there is one character in Shakespeare’s works who goes some way to redeeming the city. That character is Gonzalo, the elderly councillor mocked by the other court members in The Tempest, but revealed to have been a friend to Propsero in exile, and thus, in the magician’s words, “A noble Neapolitan”, valued all the more for his contradiction of a stereotype:

PROSPERO By Providence divine.
Some food we had and some fresh water that
A noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo,
Out of his charity, – who being then appointed
Master of this design, / did give us, with
Rich garments, linens ,stuffs, and necessaries,
Which since have steaded much: so, of his gentleness.
Knowing I lov’d my books, he furnish’d me,
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.

The simplest [definition] is that a city is a human settlement in which strangers are likely to meet. For this definition to hold true, the settlement has to have a large heterogeneous population; the population has to be packed together rather closely; market exchanges among the population must make this dense, diverse mass interact. In this milieu of strangers whose lives touch there is a problem of audience akin to the problem of audience an actor faces in the theatre.[Sennet (1974), 331-2]

The “problem of audience” is that, in a milieu of strangers, witnesses, and audiences do not know a person’s history. This means that a person or character’s identity is often dependent on their immediate interaction with their audience. Such a situation was probably even true of Shakespeare’s History and Roman plays, the vast majority of his audience having only the sketchiest idea of who their protagonists were. Many city comedies exploit this situation: the aptly named Lethe, in Middleton’s Michaelmas Term, is described as one “’Mongst strange eyes/That no more knew him than he knows himself” (1.i.148-9); much of the humour of A Trick to Catch the Old One is based on how Walkadine Hoard knows nothing of the ‘widow’; and, in The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare’s Antipholus of Syracuse must struggle in an ingenious variation on this position.

ANTIPHOLUS (of Syracuse) I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.
So I, to find a mother and a brother,
In quest of them unhappy, lose myself.
(The Comedy of Errors 1.i.35-40)

Even the briefest description of the plot of this play will reveal the intricate web of interdependency that Shakespeare weaves in Ephesus. This short soliloquy from Antipholus of Syracus neatly reiterates the starting, and already complex, position of the play. The “drop of water” and “the ocean” recall Egeon’s description of the shipwreck that sundered the family, and the possibility that Antipholus may “lose himself” is given pressing relevance by the resemblance it bears to his father Egeon’s plight who will soon be executed for being a Syracusan in Ephesus unless he can find a son to lend him a thousand marks. Furthermore, Antipholus’ brief moment of soliloquy, his sense of being “unseen” and “inquisitive” – an ideal pursued by the Duke of Measure for Measure as well – is soon shattered by the appearance of Dromio of Ephesus who, mistaking him for his master, Antipholus’ long-lost twin, informs him “The meat is cold because you come not home”(1.i.48). From here things only get more complicated, as dependencies are layered upon dependencies: at one point, a merchant requires payment from the goldsmith who requires payment from Antipholus, who, mistaken for his twin, must be found by Egeon to avoid execution. As Sennett points out, the city is more than the likelihood of meetings: these meeting are the result of economic, market forces. In The Comedy of Errors it is the multiplication of these forces, of these dependencies, that create the humour and comedy of the meetings. Furthermore, this network, unlike the vertical “degree” Ulysses propounds in Troilus and Cressida, is horizontal, levelling. In a certain sense, these dependencies give a framework in which to understand the city; the humour of The Comedy of Errors is the result of a situation wherein, because all the characters save the Duke, Egeon, and the Abbess, are operating without full knowledge of their history, the very framework that should confirm and render the city logical only serves to confuse them even more. The comic contrast is found in how Ephesus becomes, to the audience, more and more normal, more and more full of interrelations and chance encounters, even as it appears to become increasingly paranormal for the hapless protagonists. Shakespeare has evoked the everyday city and made its normality comical.

For Douglas Bruster, these interdependencies are grounded upon the objects of the play.[Bruster (1992), 64] He suggests that as theatre mimetically glossed the contemporary, urban and courtly preoccupation with commodity and materiality, objects became a focus of interest in their own right, and gained a “locative signification”. It is certainly true that the elaborate relation between Angelo the goldsmith, both Antipholuses and Dromios, Balthasar the merchant, Adriana, and the Courtesan revolves around the golden chain and its current location. Antipholus of Syracuse, for example, is defined as an oath-breaker whilst the chain is neither in his or his wife’s possession. Bruster describes this phenomenon, similar to the way that the handkerchief becomes the lynchpin of Othello’s identity as husband or cuckold, as an “uncanny facility of transference between subjective and objective”.[Bruster (1992), 67] Indeed, the cuckold and the merchant are never far apart in city drama: A Trick to Catch the Old One manages to combine them both as Walkadine Hoard is conned into both paying Witgood’s debts and marriage with Jane, the courtesan. Bruster suggests this is because cuckoldry and cozening are similarly based on the way that the possession of an object constitutes the base of the possessor’s identity. Such plays “prove that only that which can be lost (or stolen) can be possessed”.[Bruster (1992), 69] However, there is at least one episode in The Comedy of Errors that complicates this perception.

BALTHASAR […] Depart in patience,
And let us to the Tiger all to dinner,
And about evening come yourself alone
To know the reason of this strange restraint.
If by strong hand you offer to break in
Now in the stirring passage of the day,
A vulgar comment will be made of it,
And that supposed by the common rout
Against your yet ungalled estimation
That may with foul intrusion enter in
And dwell upon your grave when you are dead.
For slander lives upon succession,
For ever housed where it gets possession.
(3.i.94-106)

This is Balthasar’s counsel to Antipholus of Ephesus, who, returning from trade with his Dromio, discovers the doors of his house locked against him since his wife has admitted Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse already, believing them to be her husband and his servant. A material, economic discourse can be traced here, especially in the idea that “slander gets possession”, but the decision “that chain I will bestow – / Be it nothing but to spite my wife – / Upon my hostess there” (3.i.117-119) only follows what is first and foremost a psychological trauma. It is not the location of the chain, but the location of Antipholus of Syracuse that is important, because, here, Antipholus’ psyche and the action he takes are not shaped by material things but by a sense of being watched, of displaying oneself. Balthasar warns him that “a vulgar comment” would be made upon his forcing entrance to his house, but Antipholus then takes such a possibility and uses it to his advantage when he decides “in spite of mirth…to be merry” (3.i.108) and to “spite my wife”: just as his wife now appears unfaithful to him, so does he contemplate a display of unfaithfulness to Adriana. The balance of motives is neatly expressed by the scene’s penultimate couplet: “Since mine own doors refuse to entertain me, / I’ll knock elsewhere to see if they’ll disdain me.” (3.i.120-121) Several critics [Bruster (1992), 75] have pointed out the sexual implications that run through this dialogue, sharply focused by Antipholus’ choice to go and meet a courtesan: the barred gate a motif of refusal, and thus emasculation of Antipholus. However, there is another desire thwarted by the barring of Antipholus’ gate against him: the desire for shelter. Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space argues that, as the Milosz line “Je dis ma mere. Et c’est à toi que je pense, ô maison!” indicates, a house can function as a shelter, and that, like many human virtues, such a capacity is best seen in response to a threat.[Bachelard (1994), 45-6] Antipholus of Ephesus is certainly under threat: this, his first and surprisingly late appearance in the play, already insinuates that his importance in aesthetic terms has been appropriated by his twin; and the opening exchange with Dromio of Ephesus immediately exposes him to the paranormal world of the double. His decision to go to a place called ‘The Tiger’ for shelter from what Titus calls a “wilderness of tigers” (Titus Andronicus 3.i.54) is a neat touch. The Ephesian is not trying to hide, but countering display with display. This play makes very clear that in a city of market forces, commodities, and crowds, it is not, as Bruster suggests the possession of the material object alone that defines identity, but the displaying of that possession, being seen by the crowd to have it. Display is everything, and The Comedy of Errors concludes only when Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse are displayed alongside Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus; and Egeon is displayed and recognised by his long-lost wife, now the Abbess.

DROMIO (of Ephesus) Methinks you are my glass, and not my brother.
I see by you I am a sweet-faced youth.
Will you walk in to see their gossiping?
DROMIO (of Syracuse) Not I, sir. You are my elder.
DROMIO (of Ephesus) That’s a question. How shall we try it?
DROMIO (of Syracuse) We’ll draw cuts for the senior. Till then, lead thou first.
DROMIO (of Ephesus) Nay then, thus:
We came into the world like brother and brother,
And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before another.
(5.i.417-425)

The repetition of “brother” is significant here: this moment is an early version of the reestablishment of family bonds that concludes such late plays as Pericles, and The Tempest. Such reestablishment offers a traditionalist framework to the city’s interrelations, based on the traditional unit of the family and not on the vagaries of the economy. However, this is still a moment of display, of theatre, and it is the act of display, Lysimachus introducing Pericles to long-lost Marina, that leads to the reunited family. My emphasis on display would appear to contradict Andrew Gurr’s opinion that the early modern theatre was filled with an audience, and not lots of individual spectators. How then does an audience hear ‘display’? These, the concluding lines of The Comedy of Errors, provide a possible way of doing so, because they contain several moments of verbal displaying, of blazoning. The last couplet is very clear: “hand in hand” is a plain instruction for the final tableau and the way in which such a pair of nouns recalls the similar construction of “brother and brother” gives a clear meaning, the fraternal iteration of the play’s many interdependencies. The other phrase of note, “Methinks you are my glass, and not my brother” describes, and so displays, Dromio’s appearance to the audience. Rather like the conclusion of Twelfth Night, when Viola and Sebastian (another pair of sundered siblings) meet, such a verbal trick is necessary because, for those lucky enough to see the stage, it would be as highly unlikely that the actor playing one Dromio resembled the other as the boy playing Viola reflected Sebastian. The aural, verbal effect is out of step with the visual, and, although this considerably complicates the conclusion of Twelfth Night, splitting the characters into those enjoying comic fictional bliss and those, like Malvolio and Sir Toby, left out,[Barton (1994), 91-113] The Comedy of Errors has been working on such a disjunction almost from the very start. Ben Jonson, operating on a surprising misconception regarding the use of such ‘stage-twins’, abandoned his own play of mistaken identity because he “could never find two so like others that he could persuade spectators they were one,” [Dorsch (2004), 20] with a telling use of the word ‘spectators’. The continual disjunction between aural and visual in the play is either, then, Shakespeare exploiting the presence of an audience and not spectators, or a metatheatrical level added to the farce of the play, or, as neither of these are mutually exclusive, both.

The sequence of ‘triumphs’ examined earlier all relate to a similar aural display. The heavy focus on “eye him” and “see him” in Brutus’ words from Coriolanus, Cleopatra’s fears that the crowd will “uplift us to their view”, and the order of Henry V’s chorus to “Behold” that which he is describing are all part of an aesthetic synaesthesia. It would be an oversimplification, though, to completely discount the visual aspects of early modern urban life. Almost every street would bear signs emblazoned with a symbol for easy recognition, even “theatres, like taverns and shops, were well illustrated to catch the attention of the citizens.”[Ackroyd (2000), 170] The Accession day festivities employed far more craftsmen than they did poets, although an emphasis on conspicuous display of wealth, and a continual redefinition of contemporary fashion was one of the principal effects of the court. Indeed, with each change of fashion, the playhouses themselves would acquire new costumes. According to Jones and Stallybrass, the theatres provided a useful second-hand market for expensive clothes whose circulation was limited not only by changes in fashion but in the sumptuary laws of the period as well.[Jones and Stallybrass (2000), 187] In spite of the second-hand nature of the clothes, the costumes of the actors would still have created a powerful spectacle, and, along with the dress of the wealthier members of the audience, the theatre also had the capacity to influence contemporary fashion – to be a place, as Jonson put it, “To see and be seene” (Dedication to The New Inn). Records still survive of the clothes worn by the actors, but they have been written in a most curious way: they are not described in terms of the player who owned them, but as part of the part whose costume they composed; thus we find a bill for the washing of “God’s robes”[Jones and Stallybrass (2000), 179] in amongst the theatre records. Such a note further complicates the aural-visual complication of the urban theatre of Shakespeare: these robes were undoubtedly spectacular so as to suggest the Almighty, but at the same time it is the words of the play in which the costume is used that give to the costume its significance and identity. Either way, such details, along with the fact that the purchase and maintenance of clothes constituted the largest part of a company’s spending,[Ibid. 178] gives at least an idea of to what extent Shakespeare’s drama was embedded in the city of fashion and market at its time; how the theatre was another act of display in a city already filled with them.

Gail Kern Paster, in her book on The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare, makes this point, suggesting that display and performance are means of containing the essential doubleness of the city. She locates the archetypes of such contradiction in the Bible, and in secular myths about the founding of cities. The Old Testament describes how Cain, after killing Abel, “knew his wife, and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch.” (AV Genesis 4:17). This passage sets the death of Cain against the new life of Enoch, both of which are present at the construction of the first city; the pronoun of “he builded a city” appears at first sight to relate to Enoch, a further identification of the two acts. In secular mythology, Cain’s murder of Abel and construction of the city is repeated by Romulus’ murder of Remus and the founding of Rome. The New Testament also presents a contradictory view of the city: on one hand there is the whore and city of Babylon “The woman which thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth” (Revelation 17:18), on the other New Jerusalem “And the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day: for there is no night there.” (Revelation 21:25). Paster’s point is fair enough, and relates in addition to what I said earlier on how epilogues could shape and cast their audience, and drama the environment in which it was performed. What Paster neglects to mention is the role played by display in respect to the city presented in the Bible itself. It is found in the story of Ruth.

So they two went until they came to Bethlehem. And it came to pass, when they were come to Bethlehem, that all the city was moved about them, and they said, Is this Naomi?
And she said unto them, Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.
I went out full and the LORD hath brought me home again empty: why then call ye me Naomi, seeing the LORD hath testified against me, and the Almighty hath afflicted me?
So Naomi returned, and Ruth the Moabitess, her daughter in law, with her, which returned out of the country of Moab: and they came to Bethlehem in the beginning of barley harvest.
(Ruth 1:19-22)

“Is this Naomi?” This is a biblical version of what Sennett called the “problem of audience”. Because of her time in Moab, Naomi, especially as she is now returning with the “Moabitess” Ruth, must reveal her history. She does, but even as she recounts it, she prefaces it with a change of identity so that the story that displays her recreates her as “Mara”. As before, it is the act of display that constitutes an identity in a city. Later in the Book of Ruth, display carries a slightly different significance.

And when Boaz had eaten and drunk, and his heart was merry, he went to lie down at the end of the heap of corn: and she came softly, and uncovered his feet, and laid her down.
And it came to pass at midnight, that the man was afraid, and turned himself: and, behold, a woman lay at his feet.
And he said, Who art thou? And she answered, I am Ruth thine handmaid: spread therefore thy skirt over thine handmaid; for thou art a near kinsman. And he said, Blessed be thou of the LORD, my daughter: for thou hast shewed more kindness in the latter end than at the beginning, inasmuch as thou followedst not young men, whether poor or rich.
And now, my daughter, fear not; I will do to thee all that thou requirest: for all the city of my people doth know that thou art a virtuous woman.
And now it is true that I am thy near kinsman: howbeit there is a kinsman nearer than I.
Tarry this night, and it shall be in the morning, that if he will perform unto thee the part of a kinsman, well; let him do the kinsman’s part: but if he will not do the part of a kinsman to thee, then will I do the part of a kinsman to thee, as the LORD liveth: lie down until the morning.
And she lay at his feet until the morning: and she rose up before one could know another. And he said, Let it not be known that a woman came into the floor.
Also he said, Bring the vail that thou hast upon thee, and hold it. And when she held it, he measured six measures of barley, and laid it on her: and she went into the city.
(Ruth 3:7-15)

Display is part of the construction of reputation; Balthasar warns Antipholus of Ephesus that he will stain his as yet “ungalled estimation” if he continues to make his apparent rejection so public; in this passage, Boaz is aware of this, and so says “Let it not be known that a woman came into the floor”. This is despite the fact that “all the city of my people doth know that thou art a virtuous woman”, but this should not be surprising: even a small, rural, biblical city contains strangers, and it is from these strangers that Boaz seeks to protect Ruth. This story can be glossed in Douglas Bruster’s terms: the “six measures of barley” are both the reason Ruth first comes to Boaz and an alibi for her visit (and as such a way of preserving her virtue). But the distinction is still clear: the object and the market bring Ruth to Boaz, but the unavoidable display of urban life and especially display to strangers, govern action and identity. These two unite in Boaz’s care so that Ruth is not shamed.

The Accession Day procession, when the theatre spread over the city, is an example of willing display, of panoply. To find its opposite – unwilling display – that is to say, shame, one need look no further than an anecdote of the man who famously Morris-danced from London to Norwich, the clown of the King’s Company, Will Kemp:

I rembred one of them to be a noted Cut-purse, such a one as we tye to a poast on our stage, for all people to wander at, when they are taken pilfring.[Cited by Gurr, 258]

Considering the Globe had some three thousand audience members in it, this was quite some punishment. Not to mention that recognition as a thief would severely limit one’s ability to continue with such a career. But if this was the punishment, one can only wonder at those who stood up and faced the crowd every afternoon to earn a living, sometimes even playing those punished with shame themselves, such as Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, in King Henry VI Part Two. According to Barry Russell, actors in the, comparatively modest-sized, Swan Theatre when it was first built at Stratford-upon-Avon showed signs of nervousness when performing in such an intimate and exposing space.[Bruster (1992),24] It does not seem unreasonable to suggest that the references of characters like Cleopatra to “thick breaths,/Rank of gross diet” reflect in part the actor’s own anxiety at displaying themselves in front of so many people, and, most importantly, having to control and manage them.

The playing conditions, shame and display in the city: all these notes and comments have some bearing upon one of the few other plays classed by critics, along with The Comedy of Errors, as a city play by Shakespeare: Measure for Measure. It is a commonplace [Paster (1985), 219] to associate Vincentio’s scheme with theatrical endeavour: the play’s conclusion is managed like a play within a play, and the Duke follows a Machiavellian crowd-pleasing politics that “kept the minds of his subjects in suspense and admiration, and occupied with their outcome.” [Machiavelli (1985), 88] He sets out his position moments after appointing Angelo his deputy:

DUKE […] I love the people,
But do not like to stage me to their eyes:
Though it do well I do not relish well
Their loud applause and aves vehement,
Nor do I think the man of safe discretion
That does affect it.
(Measure for Measure 1.i.67-72)

The “loud applause and aves vehement” bears some resemblance to the positive response of a theatre crowd, and the slightly contorted use of “stage me” only supports this. His disavowal of public show also echoes James I’s own dislike of appearing in public.[Gibbons (2004), 22] As with much the Duke says in this play, the insight provided by this speech is more complex than it would first appear. Given that the Duke’s actions once disguised as Friar Lodowick can all be seen as an enormous theatrical performance, his apparent separation of playhouse and polis here looks to be a rather hypocritical statement. However, the phrasing of this speech, the constructedness and ceremony of the quasi-anthimeria [OED 3.b.] of “stage”; the fact that the public display is “loud and vehement”; and the passage’s references to the bodily functions of sight, taste and hearing – all directly contrasts to the role the Duke performs over the next few scenes. For Machiavellian or benevolent reasons, he attempts to become part of the city: his performance is both an attempt to efface his identity and to influence the city around him; to control the crowd by embedding himself in it. The choice of disguise, a clergyman, should also be commented upon since clergy, players, and politicians were often compared. The speeches over Caesar’s corpse in Julius Caesar happen at an un-roman “pulpit” (3.i.236), and the large open space near St Paul’s held regular congregations. Vincentio, though, does not become a theatrical Christian preacher but a lowly friar. Although his exchange with Claudio, persuading him to “Be absolute for death” (3.i.5) is not free from the rhetoric of the sermon, especially with its repeated use of “thou”, the stage is very bare, the space intimate and the Duke’s “thou” is part of an individual purpose. When Isabella knocks, the Provost’s startled “Who’s there?” sounds blunt in spite of Isabella’s elegant “grace and good company” because the Provost, like the rest of the audience, has felt the intimate and theatrical moment of this city Duke shatter.

The reason the Duke gives Angelo and Escalus for his dislike of being staged to public eyes deserves further examination. Simply put, the Duke does not trust the judgment of one that “affects” (that is to say ‘loves’ and ‘shows an affectation’) the “loud applause and aves vehement”; whether this caused a titter of metatheatrical laughter or not depends on the performance but it should be noted that the possibility at least is there. Either way, this seems to be an honest statement of Vincentio’s feelings, when he next appears and delivers his pseudo-soliloquy (“You will demand of me why I do this” 1.iii.18) to the Friar, he admits that he has “ever loved the life removed / And held in idle price to haunt assemblies / Where youth and cost witless bravery keeps.” (9-11). Even with the Duke’s habitually contorted syntax the distaste is evident: “idle price” evokes both a sense of ‘little worth’ and of ‘costly slothfulness’ that is developed in “witless bravery”. The next thing the Friar is told is that all power has been “delivered to Lord Angelo” (12) and the contrast between Angelo and such gallants is clear. Yet by the conclusion of this one-way dialogue it becomes evident that Angelo and the gallants share one trait at least: their conspicuousness. The scene’s concluding, and oft quoted couplet, “Hence shall we see, / If power change purpose, what our seemers be” (54-5) looks back to those gallants of the Duke’s earlier discourse as well as to the test of the deputy by using the neologistic “seemers” as opposed to Angelo’s actual name; this ambiguity here is also a self-mandate for Duke to observe elsewhere in Vienna. Finally, the musicality of this couplet has a special significance: “we”, “see”, seemers”, and “be” are all linked by their use of the long ‘e’ sound. This confirms my earlier point on the Duke’s peculiar, self-effacing performance: “we”, used in Vincentio’s opening speech as the royal ‘we’ (for example, “we have with special soul / Elected him” 1.i.17) now carries with it a sense of shared spectatorship and so, in its ambivalence, reflects the Duke’s own position. Shared spectatorship (“we see”) is then behind the sequence that alters “seemer” to the bare existence of to “be”. Overall, the couplet whets the audience’s appetite for what is to come. Unfortunately this is too neat an analysis, and, at the “moated grange” of “dejected Mariana” (3.i.247-248), the only time the scene is set outside the city, we hear why.

DUKE Oh place and greatness, millions of false eyes
Are stuck upon thee; volumes of report
Run with these false and most contrarious quest
Upon thy doings; thousands escapes of wit
Make thee the father of their idle dream
And rack thee in their fancies.
(4.ii.56-61)

Note first the return of “eyes”, always a popular image in Shakespeare and here, as in Brutus and Cleopatra’s speeches quoted above, once again capable of taking on a metatheatrical resonance as the six thousand or so eyeballs belonging to the groundlings and the galleries of the amphitheatre playhouse swivelled onto the actor. In addition, these are “false eyes”: the Duke can no longer easily identify himself as a watcher as he is beginning to realise the danger such a relationship entails. William Warburton, in 1747, thought this speech should be placed elsewhere, whereas A.P. Rossiter thought that this speech should be augmented by the Duke’s tetrametric couplets on “He who the sword of heaven will bear / Must be as holy, as severe” (3.ii.223-44). But this speech works fine as it is: its brevity recalls the form of the earlier moment of self-realisation that follows the Duke’s exposure to Lucio, and even perpetuates the earlier insight that “back-wounding calumny / The whitest virtue strikes” (3.ii.159-60). These two short speeches problematise the Duke’s position as a watcher, as a member of the crowd. Not only are the eyes “false” but they “are stuck” upon “place and greatness”: the construction of “are stuck” gives no clear sense of agency, and instead only a generalised present tense, it suggests both that the “false eyes” have stuck themselves to “place and greatness” and that they have been stuck to it. Again, this follows the shape of the Duke’s paradoxical position: the attraction of authority is seen as something both constructed by authority and, as it were, an instinctive lure. Dominating both senses is the other meaning of “stuck”: the eyes are not only fixed upon “place and greatness” but trapped there. This irrevocable nature is important to the Duke’s hendiadys of “place and greatness”: although it sounds proverbial, the trope also suggests a detailed distinction, an equality of emphasis derived from personal knowledge; thus the rhetorical phrase works as a comment in general and as one on both Angelo and Vincentio. Rather like the disguised Henry V giving “a little touch of Harry in the night” (4 Chorus 47), the Duke is stuck with the fact that he is the Duke. Although he attempts to be part of the crowd, such a performance only reveals the performance necessary to being a leader; by acting the spectator he observes his own acting and the forces that control such display. To do so requires a theatrical city, and Vienna certainly is.

Vienna shares several similarities with Ephesus. The characters of Vienna are also interdependent: they are not bound by trade or blood, but instead linked through sexual appetite. There is a hint of this in The Comedy of Errors, the role of the courtesan to Antipholus’ household as well as Dromio’s steadfast avoidance of the kitchen maid’s “Netherlands”, but Measure for Measure goes much further. Sexual relations link every character in the play, be it the comradely question of “which of thy hips has the most profound sciatica?”[30] (1.ii.47-8) or the Provost taking care of “the groaning Juliet” (2.ii.16). This interdependency is accentuated by the fact that Vienna, like Ephesus, is a distorted city: in the same way that being from Syracuse merits death or ransom in Ephesus and so the ultimate emphasis is placed upon questions of identity from the play’s beginning, so does Angelo’s reinstatement of the death penalty for fornication give Measure for Measure one central, ramifying concern. This, with the aid of some critical theory, provides a valuable insight into Shakespeare and the city. In the early twentieth century, a movement loosely known as Russian Formalism began with the central idea that art worked by making the familiar strange so as to break the blinkered, habitual way of considering the world and show it anew. Art was made strange, or ‘defamiliarised’ (a translation of the Russian ostrenie), by the devices employed by the artist. The relevance to Shakespeare should be clear: Vienna and Ephesus are both defamiliarised urban environments, made strange by peculiarly draconian laws that serve as a means of building interdependencies between the characters of the play. One of the criticisms of Russian Formalism, voiced by Roman Jakobson, was that the process of defamiliarisation requires some kind of limitation as well since without it one would be unable to perceive the original for the applied strangeness, the city for the death penalties. Vienna and Ephesus provide this limitation through their contemporaneous qualities: the aforementioned description of Dromio’s Nell plays upon conventional Elizabethan national stereotypes.

ANTIPHOLUS (of Syracuse) Where France?
DROMIO (of Syracuse) In her forehead armed and reverted, making war against her heir.
ANTIPHOLUS (of Syracuse) Where England?
DROMIO (of Syracuse) I looked for her chalky cliffs, but I could find no whiteness in them. But I guess it stood in her chin, by the salt rheum that ran between France and it.
(Comedy of Errors 3.ii.109-15)

Here, The War of the Three Henries may be behind Dromio’s description of France “making war against her heir”,[Dorsch (2004), 38] and the “salt rheum”, as well as representing the English Channel, makes a typical joke on the various venereal diseases associated with the French, salt baths being an early modern treatment for such diseases. They are mentioned in terms of the similarity such tubs bore to the powdering and preservation of beef in Measure for Measure as well: Mistress Overdone, in Pompey’s words “hath eaten up all her beef, and she is herself in the tub” (3.ii.50-51). Angelo’s other edict, that “All houses [i.e. Brothels] in the suburbs of Vienna must be knocked down” (1.ii.80), resembles a proclamation of James I on 16th September 1603 that called for the pulling down of houses in the suburbs as a protection against the spread of plague.[Gibbons (2004), 88] Finally, the Duke’s ‘return’ to Vienna has been said to resemble the Accession Day of James I, taking place in early 1604. [Ibid. 21]

The final scene of Measure for Measure, the public performance of the Duke’s return to Vienna would seem to contradict my argument that Vincentio, by performing the spectator in a theatrical city, seeks to achieve an insight into the dynamics of authority. As I noted at the beginning of this discussion, this event unfolds like a play within a play, before the eyes of not only the Jacobean audience but the majority of the characters in the play as well. I would maintain, though, that the Duke does not deviate from his position as a spectator for the majority of it, and when he does do so it is because he is then able to assume authority. The real performer, staged to the city’s eyes, is Angelo. And, just as Boaz acted to protect Ruth from the shame that display in a city can inflict, so is the deputy exposed in what, to the once reclusive Duke’s way of thinking, must be the most tortuous of punishments. One way of considering Measure for Measure is, in Freudian terms, as a kind of mass repression. Pompey’s dialogue with Escalus makes this very clear by contrasting natural libido and imposed, legal restriction.

ESCALUS How would you live, Pompey? By being a bawd? What do you think of the trade, Pompey? Is it a lawful trade?
POMPEY If the law would allow it, sir.
ESCALUS But the law will not allow it, Pompey; nor it shall not be allowed in Vienna.
POMPEY Does your worship mean to geld and splay all the youth in the city?
(2.i.192-9)

By the final stages of the play the success of this repression is very ambiguous. On one hand, neither Pompey Mistress Overdone nor the two Gentlemen are present at the denouement; on the other, the prison has become a concentrated den of iniquity filled with “Mistress Overdone’s…old customers”, and Angelo confesses to fornication. What can be said, though, is that repression has been brought out into the open in a series of sudden, dramatic, and shaming coups de théâtre. It is easy to forget, but, up until this point, Angelo has never appeared in so very public circumstances: unable to bear Pompey’s stalling any more, he abruptly leaves the relatively small-scale proceedings of Froth and Elbow; and although the Provost does report that, as regards Claudio’s hope of reprieve, “upon the very siege of justice / Lord Angelo hath to the public ear / Professed the contrary.” (4.ii.85-7), this too implies none of the ceremony of the play’s conclusion, focusing on the bureaucratic “public ear” and not the “false eyes” of public spectacle. Even on the level of the play’s imagery, Angelo has also been distinguished as rather inward, as containing things within him. In his tortured soliloquy following Isabella’s first petition, he figures his current predicament as a crisis of urban redevelopment.

ANGELO …Can it be that modesty may more betray our sense
Than woman’s lightness? Having waste ground enough
Shall we desire to raise the sanctuary
And pitch our evils there? Of fie, fie, fie, fie,
What dost thou or what art thou Angelo?
(2.ii.174-177)

The relentless use of the rhetorical question (erotema) forcibly conveys the dividedness of Angelo as much as it establishes the extent of his self-containment. Containment is also the most striking aspect of Isabella’s description of the garden where Angelo expects to have sex with her. “Cicummured with brick”, “with a vineyard backed”, having “a planched gate” that requires “a bigger key”, and further secured with “a little door / Which from the vineyard to garden leads” (4.i.25-30): a symbolic interpretation of the garden as Angelo’s repressed libido is very tempting, and to some degree supported by traditional associations of gardens and sexuality. Thus Angelo, entering the city with the Duke, is on the verge of being physically and psychologically exposed.

DUKE Oh, your desert speaks loud, and I should wrong it
To lock it in the wards of covert bosom
When it deserves with characters of brass
A forted residence ’gainst the tooth of time
And razure of oblivion. Give me your hand
And let the subject see, to make them know
That outward courtesies would fain proclaim
Favours that keep within.
(5.i.9-16)

Like many of the Duke’s speeches in this scene, these words have a certain bendiness to them since the audience are as aware as Vincentio that forms of public display are also forms of public exposure. “Favours” is a particularly charged word, serving as a nexus between the accoutrements of rank and patronage, and sexual liaison. It should also be noted that the Duke, although prominent, is already staging Angelo, here in an emblematic hand-holding with himself and Escalus, and then far more explicitly when he replies to Isabella’s petition by telling her that “Here is Lord Angelo shall give you justice” and, with the usual irony, to “Reveal yourself to him.” (5.i.27-28) The ramifications of Angelo’s exposure should be considered in terms of the Duke’s own distaste and distrust of those who relish loud applause and aves vehement. The Duke and Angelo are very close in this scene: as Angelo’s own neuroticism, hypocrisy and asceticism are brought to trial, so too does the Duke work through his own psychological difficulties, shielded in part by the very public position in which he has placed Angelo. The conclusion of this process is Lucio’s discovery of Vincentio since, just as the twins of The Comedy of Errors were displayed alongside one another to restore order to the play, now the Duke’s deception is revealed to the characters and his exploitation of “the problem of audience” at an end. He is no longer a spectator, but is in total control because he is still sharply aware of the dynamics of audience.

DUKE [To Isabella] If he be like your brother, for his sake
Is he pardoned, and for your lovely sake
Give me your hand, and say you will be mine,
He is my brother too. But fitter time for that.
By this Lord Angelo perceives he’s safe;
Methinks I see a quickening in his eye.
Well, Angelo, your evil quits you well.
Look that you love your wife: her worth, worth yours.
I find an apt remission in myself; […] (5.i.483-91)

The Provost, cued by the Duke, has presented the hooded Claudio as though he were a different prisoner, one “Who should have died when Claudio lost his head, / As like almost to Claudio as himself” (481-2). This turn of phrase not only keeps Isabella in suspense right up until her brother is ‘unmufffled’, it also suggests that Claudio may be slightly changed, perhaps even reformed. The discovery of Claudio is also a clear repetition of Lucio pulling off the Duke’s disguise, with the effect that the phrase “If he be like your brother”, as well as describing the reformed Claudio, could also describe the similarly hoodless Vincentio. The suggestion is very subtle, but it is the first step of an identification that continues in “He is my brother too” and culminates in the proposal of marriage. Not only is the Duke in control, but he is subtly part of his audience as well. Isabella’s silence is not surprising: forgiving Angelo, and finding Claudio to be alive have left her stunned, and the Duke knows this, not withdrawing his proposal but giving her “fitter time for that”. Even when focused on Isabella, the Duke is now so profoundly part and power of the scene: he has spotted “a quickening” in Lord Angelo‘s eye. The timing of Angelo’s reaction suggests that the Deputy is himself aware of how closely his fate is linked to the Duke; the “this” of “By this Lord Angelo perceives he’s safe” can be both Vincentio’s proposal and the survival of Claudio: both are indicative of the Duke’s power and mercy that bodes well for the chastised official. To a certain extent, Angelo is correct, since the Duke, after this final piece of early modern ‘aural display’ demanded by the dramaturgy, does pardon Angelo. The “apt remission in myself” is both the Duke publicly admitting how he, by playing the spectator and manipulator, is complicit, as well as the moment at which mercy is distinguished from leniency. By finding an “apt remission” in himself Vincentio metes out judgment having been informed by experience and by an understanding of the dynamics of audience in the city; his kindness is not the kindness of an unthinking, reclusive leniency any more.

DUKE [...] Dear Isabel
I have a motion much imports your good,
Whereto, if you’ll a willing ear incline,
What’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine.
So bring us to our palace, where we’ll show
What’s yet behind that’s meet you all should know.
(5.i.530-1)

Here is another moment of oft-remarked silence from Isabella, but she need not speak. Although the Duke is offering marriage, he does it almost hypothetically, and does not yet expect an immediate reply: it is up to her to choose “if you’ll a willing ear incline” (emphasis mine). This delay and the concluding couplet’s promise of further revelations withheld from the audience are the final iteration of the Duke’s new, extremely powerful position. Vincentio is now the cynosure he once dreaded, but he strikes a remarkable balance: he displays his intention of marriage, and of making further revelations, but then denies these events from both the audience of the theatre and the urban characters of the play (Pompey is working in the prison, Lucio to be married by force, and Mistress Overdone mysteriously absent). This anticipation leaves all the audiences in his power, and the Duke with a measure of control over the forces of display that have been so active throughout the play. With no wit to leap forward, Volpone-like, and offer an alternative view of the play, there is no better representation of the Duke’s new power, no longer isolated ruler nor half a member of the crowd, than his walking away from that great crowd, the three thousand pairs of eyes, the breaths that smelt “brown bread and garlic” (3.ii.156) of the theatre audience.

Both The Comedy of Errors and Measure for Measure present two distinct yet related ways in which Shakespeare explores the city, and, on top of this, explores the ways in which the city can be given meaning, and partly defined. Distortion, defamiliarisation, and display are part of these explorations; but so is an engagement with both an economic, market-orientated discourse and with a psychological awareness of the pressures of urban life. Both psychological and economic representation rely upon a strong level of interdependency between characters, in part provided by the plot, in part provided by the type of city that Shakespeare has built. Vienna and Ephesus are built from London, and they are built in London upon the stage of its theatre or its court; they offer a view on the city around them, even as they draw power from the playing conditions of the time. In his relationship to the city Shakespeare powerfully exploits what Bacon eloquently called “a great secret in nature” in The proficiencie and advancement of learning, divine and humane.

The action of the theatre, though modern states esteem it merely ludicrous unless it be satirical and biting, was carefully watched by the ancients, so that it might improve mankind in virtue; and indeed many wise men and great philosophers have thought it to the mind as the bow to the fiddle; and certain it is, though a great secret in nature, that the minds of men in company are more open to affections and impressions than when alone. [Bacon (1605, cited by Gurr (2004), v]

LUCENTIO Mistress, what’s your opinion of your sister?
BIANCA That, being mad herself, she’s madly mated.
GREMIO I wattant him, Petruchio is Kated.

This exchange occurs at the end of Act III, when Petruchio, declaring that Kate is “my good, my chattels … / My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything” takes off with his wife from their own marriage celebration, leaving Bianca and the others in some consternation behind them. Brian Morris, who edited the play in 1981, hears an echo of Much Ado About Nothing in the sentiment that “Petruchio is Kated”, imagining “Kate” to be taken as some kind of disease in the same way that Beatrice fears that Claudio has “caught the Benedick”. Another possibility, entirely of my own invention, is the similarity between ‘Kate’ and ‘cates’, the latter referring to a choice food or delicacy, with the punning sense here that Petruchio does not want a marriage feast, but would rather enjoy his Kate/cates elsewhere.

Either way, this single word is rich with meaning, and is perhaps best understood as a sly joke on the similarities between Kate and Petruchio, which ultimately lead to one of the warmest relationships in Shakespeare’s oeuvre. With this in mind, perhaps “kated” should, like some of the playwright’s better-known neologisms, take up its place in our everyday speech, describing the moment when someone meets their match in matrimony. Now is an apt time for such an undertaking: after all, an obvious example in 2011 would be “Prince William is Kated”.

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Rather less common nowadays than the sense of a jump over, away, or to something, is the meaning of “jumping” as “coinciding”. Shakespeare uses it frequently. In The Taming of the Shrew, the devious Trantio tells his fellow marriage-conspirator, Lucentio, that “Both our inventions meet and jump in one”; Viola, in Twelfth Night, recognises her brother because the elements of his story, “place, time, fortune, do cohere and jump / That I am Viola”; and the Prince of Arragon, suitor to Portio in Merchant of Venice, proves his egoism by choosing the golden cask and declaring that “I will not jump with common spirits”.

This sense of coincidence and similarity in “jump” is also found in its adjectival/adverbial usage, meaning “coinciding, exactly agreeing; even; exact, precise”. On the battlements of Elsinore, Marcellus tells Horatio that the Ghost has appeared “twice before, and jump at this dead hour”; and Iago plots to bring Othello “jump when he may Casio find / Soliciting his wife”.

Other uses of the word include: the sense of ‘chance’, as Caesar, facing down Antony’s Egyptian army, declares that “our fortune lies / Upon this jump”; and to surprise-attack, or set upon, as Coriolanus calls upon those in his public audience “That love the fundamental part of state / More than you doubt the change on’t; that prefer / A noble life before a long, and wish / To jump a body with dangerous physic / That’s sure of death without it.” However, perhaps the most memorable use of the word jump comes in what now passes as one of the bawdiest speeches in Shakespeare’s oeuvre: a rustic servant describing the not-so-innocent wares of Autolycus the courtier-peddlar in The Winter’s Tale, with a rhyme between “jump” and “thump”:

SERVANT He hath songs for man or woman of al sizes; no milliner can so fit his customers with gloves: he has the prettiest love-songs for maids; so without bawdry, which is strange; with such delicate burdens of ‘dildos’ and ‘fadings’, ‘jump her and thump her’ [...]

It is the blackness of ebony that most interests Shakespeare. In Twelfth Night Feste the clown (disguised as Sir Topas the priest) tortures the imprisoned Malvolio with a nonsensical description of the steward’s surroundings.

FESTE Say’st thou that the house is dark?
MALVOLIO As hell, Sir Topas.
FESTE Why it hath bay windows transparent as barricadoes, and the clerestories toward the north are as lustrous as ebony; and yet complain’st thou of obstruction?

The joke of course is that Feste accurately describes the “barricadoes” and ebon darkness of the prison, only to draw the conclusion that the “barricadoes” are “transparent” and the ebon “clerestories” (church windows) are “lustrous”. In reply to this, Malvolio can only insist that “I am not mad, Sir Topas. I say to you this house is dark.”

The uncomfortable comedy of Feste torturing Malvolio is far removed from the use made of “ebony” in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Here the word is used by the King of Navarre to describe Berowne’s beloved Rosaline.

KING By heaven, thy love is black as ebony!
BEROWNE Is ebony like her? O word divine!
A wife of such wood were felicity.
O, who can give an oath? Where is a book?
That I may swear beauty doth beauty lack
If that she learn not of her eye to look.
No face is fair that is not so full of black.

Whereas Feste was busy contorting his language to befuddle Malvolio, Berowne’s ornamental punning is aiming straight for courtly wit. To understand him, it is necessary to recall both the value of ebony and the fact that blackness might also be shameful (cf. Malvolio’s “[black] As hell” above, or Gertrude’s “black and grained spots” of guilt in Hamlet). Consequently, the King’s “black as ebony” pulls two ways: beautiful as ebony yet ugly as blackness. Berowne takes this doubleness as improvises upon it, emphasising the beauty of darkness, and particular of Rosaline’s dark eyes. Elsewhere in Shakespeare’s works similar reconstruction of blackness takes place: the dark lady of the Sonnets is praised, for example, with the comment that “now is black beauty’s successive heir”. Shakespeare’s near contemporary, Philip Sidney, also praised dark beauties, focussing like Berowne on the beloved’s eyes. Stella in Astrophil and Stella (1592) is thus possessed of eyes “in beamy black”.

Overall then, blackness is the dominate feature of ebony when it appears in Shakespeare’s works, with the added complexity occuring when Berowne uses its beautiful, ornamental properties to challenge (like Sidney) other preconceptions about blackness in the period. I should probably mention Othello at this point, but would rather avoid a lengthy article.

CHORUS…But now behold,
In the quick forge and working-house of thought,
How London doth pour out her citizens.
The mayor and all his brethren in best sort,
Like to the senators of th’antique Rome
With the plebeians swarming at their heels,
Go forth and fetch their conquering Caesar in;
As, by a lower but as loving likelihood,
Were now the General of our gracious Empress,
Bringing rebellion broached on his sword,
How many would the peaceful city quit
To welcome him! Much more, and much more cause,
Did they this Harry. Now in London place him.
(King Henry V, 5 Chorus 22-35)
[Note: a variety of critical editions have been used for the plays cited in this essay. Please refer to bibliography.]

Before its obvious contemporary political resonance is discussed, it is necessary to examine the language of this passage in detail. Despite the urgency and excitement of “now behold”, the Chorus delays the mention of “London” with a metaphorical description of the imaginative process. Like many of the Chorus’ speeches that beg the audience to “piece out our imperfections with your thoughts” (Prologue 23), the language of “quick forge and working-house of thought” suggests the constructedness of theatrical endeavour and, perhaps, of kingship itself. However, the metaphor “quick forge and working-house of thought” also takes for its vehicle the workshops and industries of Elizabethan London. Incidentally, so does “piece out” by calling up the work of a tailor.[cf. OED “piece out”: ‘To enlarge or complete by the addition of a piece; to eke out or extend with extra pieces’; and “piece”: 1. trans. a. ‘To mend, make whole, or complete by adding a piece or pieces; to patch.’] As in the labour spent constructing the triumphal arches, and fake scenery of the Accession Day pageant, so is this constructedness an urban effort. From this position things grow more complex: the first simile equates Elizabethan London with Rome, Henry V with Caesar. Such an equation is not uncommon: as the title of Roy Strong’s painting made clear, the Accession Day procession used the Roman military triumph as a model; London and Rome (and Troy) were habitually linked as part of the translatio imperii;[That is to say, the belief that imperial power moved westward through the ages.] and, furthermore, Henry V was written in the same year as Julius Caesar and it is not unreasonable to expect some cross pollination. The second simile is a rarity in Shakespeare’s opus: it is not only a contemporary reference, but a reference to a contemporary hope: that the Earl of Essex would return triumphant from his attempts to quash the Irish rebellions. The passage goes out of its way to avoid any hints of treason: Essex is “the General of our gracious Empress”, no Caesar nor Henry V; and the royal welcome of “this Harry” is with “much more cause”. Nevertheless, such blunt denial, as close to the edge of dramatic illusion as only a choric figure can be, suggests that such equation contained a risky contemporary political resonance that had to be avoided. But this chorus’ purpose is not to make a political statement anyway: the last sentence is as clear as it can be when it tells the audience to “Now in London place him”, and what is truly remarkable about this passage is the way in which a city is evoked as a constant across time. Or, more precisely, the relationship of a large group of people to a single figure, to a single piece of display, is considered as something unchanging in this presentation of the city.

“Now in London place him” is not the last sentence of the Chorus’ speech, though; by the end of the description Henry V is “back return again to France”, and the plot moves on from that position. The fact that the Chorus continues smoothly from such a resonant description of contemporary London helps to counteract the way in which a metatheatrical reference to the current urban milieu normally occurs at the conclusion of a play, and thus limits the ‘episodic’ feel of a play already sharply demarcated into acts. Much can be discerned about the relationship between drama and the city, which provided space for its theatre and the money of its audience, by examining a few of those moments at the end of the play when the theatre opens up to the city around it and the city folk watching it, where the world of the play and of the theatre appear to come into alignment. Perhaps the best example is the conclusion of Jonson’s Volpone:

1st AVVOCATO […] Away with them!
Let all that see these vices thus rewarded
Take heart, and love to study ’em. Mischiefs feed
Like beasts till they be fat, and then they bleed.

[Exeunt all. Volpone re-enters]

VOLPONE The seasoning of a play is the applause.
Now, though the fox be punished by the laws,
He yet doth hope there is no suffering due
For any fact which he hath done ’gainst you;
If there be, censure him – here he doubtful stands.
If not, fare jovially, and clap your hands.
(Volpone, 5xii148-57)

The stage direction is editorial, but, regardless of who is on stage, the effect is very clear indeed. The couplet of the 1st Avvocato, with its clear masculine endings, sounds like the conclusion to the play, and the applause may even have started when Volpone comes forward to speak. If so, this would add an extra level of irony to “The seasoning of the play is the applause” since this line already plays upon the animal imagery of the 1st Avvocato: once the lawyer has (metaphorically) slaughtered the “beast”, Volpone steps forward to ask the audience to “season” it. In a play infused with the influence of animal fables (Volpone himself owes no small debt to the French Reynard the Fox), a culinary conclusion is very apt. This may amuse the audience but the real force of the epilogue is the way in which Volpone makes an alternate tribunal out of the audience. The city of the play has condemned the wily Fox, but the character’s final trick is, as the Chorus of Henry V does, to walk the line between the place represented on stage and the place of the theatre to achieve a different kind of pardon. Volpone’s words tell his audience the meaning of their applause, and, perhaps, briefly offer a window into the dynamics of the city itself that, at tribunal, or at play, seeks and is validated by an audience. Of course, Jonson’s play is far from unique in this: the declaration of Face that he “puts myself / On you” (5.v.163-4) at the conclusion of the highly metatheatrical Alchemist has much the same effect. So too is the ending of Eastward Ho! a useful example: because the play parodies ‘city comedy’, its inclusion of such an ending helps to link an urban awareness and concluding metatheatre even more strongly; furthermore, the occasion it characters make reference to is none other than the Accession Day pageantry.

QUICKSILVER …See if the streets and the fronts of the houses be not stuck with people, and the windows filled with ladies, as on the solemn day of the pageant.
(Eastward Ho! Epilogue 5-6)

Shakespeare too, at the end of both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest also takes the opportunity an epilogue offers to collapse illusion to have characters beg “indulgence” or to “be friends”. But the best example of them all has to be the conclusion of King Henry VIII. Now known as a collaborative effort between Shakespeare and Fletcher, its last few scenes represent a sustained evocation of the city and its people that concludes with Cranmer’s famous ‘prophecy’ of both Elizabeth I, and he “Who from the sacred ashes of her honour/Shall star-like rise as great in fame as she was, /And so stand fixed” (5.iv.45-7), James I. The sequence of scenes is important: the action before Cranmer’s prophecy is focused on the Porter and his Man, and is filled with a sense of the city’s closeness. The Porter’s first line, “You’ll leave your noise anon, ye rascals. Do you take the court for Parish Garden? Ye rude slaves, leave your gaping” (5.iii.1-3) not only acts as an implicit stage direction for some off-stage noise to represent crowds outside the court, but actually makes reference to some other, more literally ‘off stage’ noises. A glance at a map of seventeenth century London shows the proximity of the Globe and Paris(h) Garden, both situated on the Bankside, and the latter’s bull- and bear-baiting drew crowds and noise easily audible at the Globe. Later references to “Paul’s” (14), “Moorfields” (31), “youths that thunder at a playhouse” (57), and the Porter’s order for “You i’th’chamblet, get up o’th’rail,” (86-7)["Chamblet" or 'camlet': expensive material made from silk and hair, worn by wealthier playgoers; “rail”: probably a low railing that went round the stage. – McMullan, 426] perpetuate the city’s presence and bring it even closer. Every time the city is articulated it is shaped: rhetorical magic creates the fiction on stage, but also reminds the audience of where they are. When Cranmer delivers the prophecy, he does so from this position so that he speaks both fictional, climactic revelation, and contemporary commentary and praise. This play, even more than the other conclusions open to the audience, offers a direct comment on contemporary theatre and society. The play’s own epilogue, probably Fletcher’s, that follows seems weak in comparison to this larger concluding movement.

So far, we have seen a few of those moments where the interface between Shakespeare and others’ plays and the city is at its clearest. At such points, the drama attempts to gloss the society, the city, or at least the audience of city folk, around it. This is only a small sample of Shakespeare’s approaches to the city; Anne Barton has written that the plays “are filled with evasions of the urban”, but, as should already be apparent, this is not quite right. The epilogues of The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and others would all be directly addressed to an audience of city-dwellers, be they groundlings or gallants (as well as to a court audience, and, if touring, a provincial one); the noise of the “Parish Garden” could be heard in a theatre built into the city; and even Henry V, which admittedly has a very limited portrayal of actual urban events, still approaches the city in its choruses and the reminiscing of the troops before Agincourt. What would be more accurate is to say that Shakespeare approaches the urban by a roundabout route, and thus does not ‘evade’ it. To return to my earlier references to the triumphal tradition behind the Accession Day parades or the penultimate chorus of Henry V, this roundabout route to the urban is present in several other similar descriptions, all to be found in Shakespeare’s Roman Plays.

Julius Caesar is known for its anachronistic mentioning of clocks and tunics, and there is the same mix of Elizabethan “chimney-tops” and Roman generals in Murellus’ chastising description of the citizens’ previous festivities:

MURELLUS …Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft
Have you climbed up to walls and battlements,
To towers and windows, yea, to chimney tops,
Your infants in your arms, and there have sat
The livelong day, with patient expectation,
To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome.
(Julius Caesar 1.i.36-41)

Although this is quite a clear description, it should be noted that Murellus is describing something that happened in the past. Here the Rome of Pompey’s triumph is used to gloss the Rome of Caesar’s return; but, at the same time, the Rome of Caesar is seen through an Elizabethan overlay of “chimney tops”. This may result, as references to “cobblers”, and “base mechanicals” in this scene certainly do, from North’s Elizabethan translation of Plutarch. What is important, though, is the way in which Murellus’ strange, composite Rome is inextricably part of his argument, and of the play’s development. A similar use of the city occurs in Anthony and Cleopatra:

CLEOPATRA Now, Iras, what think’st thou?
Thou an Egyptian puppet shall be shown
In Rome as well as I. Mechanic slaves
With greasy aprons, rules and hammers shall
Uplift us to the view. In their thick breaths,
Rank of gross diet, shall we be enclouded
And forced to drink their vapour.
(Antony and Cleopatra 5.ii.206-12)

Once more, the city is presented hypothetically, and as part of an argument. It is also distinctly Elizabethan in flavour: Cleopatra goes on to say how “scald rhymers [will]/Ballad us out o’tune” and “quick comedians”, including “Some squeaking Cleopatra boy” (214-9), will portray her and Antony. Of course, this is exactly what the Elizabethan theatre has been doing for the last two hours. Rather like the peculiarly self-aware characters of Troilus and Cressida, Cleopatra sees her future and it is in a city: she can escape Rome, but London and the pervasive Elizabethan milieu can never be completely evaded. The (literal) distaste and contempt that inflects Cleopatra’s imagery of “gross diet” and being “forced to drink their vapour”, resembles Brutus’ withering description of Coriolanus’ triumphal return from Corioles:

BRUTUS […] Your prattling nurse
Into a rapture lets her baby cry
While she chats him. The kitchen malkin pins
Her richest lockram ’bout her reechy neck,
Clambering the walls to eye him. Stalls, bulks, windows
Are smothered up, leads filled, and ridges horsed
With variable complexions, all agreeing
In earnestness to see him.
(Coriolanus 2.i.179-87)

The triplet of “chats him”, “eye him”, “see him”, contributes as much as “reechy” and “smothered” to a sense of commonness that Brutus (rather ironically, given his being one of the people’s tribunes) seeks to attribute to Coriolanus. As in the other two examples, the “leads”, “lockram”, and “malkin” (a shortened version of Matilda, printed as a proper name, ‘Malkin’ in the First Folio) all create the same bifocal effect of Rome in Elizabethan terms. Or, rather, Jacobean, since passages of Brutus’ description echo two accounts of James I’s accession day parade: Dekker’s The Magnificent Entertainment and Jonson’s Ben Jonson His Part of King James his Royall and Magnificent Entertainement through his Honorable Cittie of London.[David George, Notes &Queries, 241 (June 1966): 164] The Tribune’s words also manage to find a middle ground between Cleopatra’s hypothetical experience and Murellus’ evocation of past triumph: for although Brutus is ostensibly describing something that just happened, the triumph that the audience has seen on stage consists only of Cominius, Lartius, Coriolanus, Captains, Soldiers, and a Herald (2.i.134SD). This is not to say Brutus is lying: he is simply telling Sicinius and the audience what has been going on offstage, elsewhere in Rome; alternatively, as with the Porter of Henry VIII, he could also be describing a rather different offstage. The “reechy” crowds so eager to see Coriolanus could have been present earlier in the play: they could have been the groundlings themselves.

It is hard to conceive the difference between the early modern theatres, especially amphitheatres like the Globe, and the modern stage. Andrew Gurr has pointed out several differences. The first of them is his distinction between “early audiences” and “modern spectators” [Gurr (2004), 1]; that is to say a collective mass of listeners, and a group of individual spectators. One reason for this difference is that, what with many gallants wearing elaborate headgear or smoking vast quantities of tobacco, the early modern theatregoer would not have been able to see very well at all. This was not for lack of trying: ‘auditors’ all but surrounded the stage so that, if you did manage to see past the plumes and puffs, the view would be both of actor and of the audience members behind him, along with itinerant tradesmen, prostitutes and thieves. An obvious result of this is that what Coleridge called the “willing suspension of disbelief” was exceptionally difficult in such a theatre. Not just sight, but touch, smell, hearing, and (should you have bought an apple as refreshment) taste constantly and intrusively reminded the auditor of where they were. There were also no on-site toilets. In such an environment, then, there was only one illusion that could be produced with ease, and that was the illusion of the city itself. Shakespeare’s plays do not evade the urban, instead their illusions must respond to and profit from the presence of city. The city is intrusive, and not just in the Roman plays, which, as has been noted, partake of a clear intellectual and traditional link between Rome and London, England and the world of Homer, Ovid, and Virgil. Anne Barton notes that even As You Like It has Duke Senior call deer the “native burghers of this desert city” (2.i.23), and Jaques (according to the First Lord) call cows “you fat and greasy citizens” (2.i.55) [Barton (1994), 331]. These intrusions are part of the chaos of the city, its novelty and uncertainty; and it can be said that the Accession Day pageant did not complicate the city by making it into a stage, but simplified it instead. The Chorus’, Brutus’, Cleopatra’s, and Marcellus’ conceptions of the city are all so clear as to be part of a wider expression, whether of the fear of shame, the sense of greatness, or otherwise. The city of the pageant and other special occasions was uncomplicated, but this is not to say that Shakespeare was unaware of the complexity and strangeness of the normal, everyday city in which he lived. It is to that city and Shakespeare’s relation to it that I will now turn.

About halfway through the day I noticed that little had been said about social media: I mentioned twitter in my presentation about Open Shakespeare, but Facebook (even in a discussion devoted to ‘social media and user-generated content’) was largely absent. Thinking about why this might be, I imagine several reasons: first, a lack of understanding about quite how important facebook now is in internet usage; second, the absence of experience in managing a successful facebook-based fan network; and, in relation to this, third, the peculiar language of ‘likes’ and so on specific to Facebook, and the difficulty of communicating what may be an original artistic project in the standardised vocabulary of such a platform. For a more developed reflection about this point, do have a look at Patrick Hussey’s thoughts on ‘community managers’.

Although people weren’t talking about social media, they were talking about the annotator used on Open Shakespeare. Everyone was agreed that it would almost certainly grow very big, yet also that, before it did, a few things needed to be put in place, namely:

• Versioning: i.e. a freely annotatable text, from which annotations gradually moved to a more established version.
• Login: crucial to filtering annotations
• Tagging: for filtering; already in place, but needs to be simplified

If we want to extend the annotator beyond Shakespeare, and really increase its use, one delegate pointed out how well adapted science fiction would be to the tool. First, science fiction readers tend to be more tech savvy; second, science fiction (like fantasy) often teaches its readers about its world as they read, thus providing information for retrospective annotation without too much additional research (as opposed to Shakespeare, who often demands a grip of sixteenth/seventeenth century England); finally, perhaps one of the most famous science fiction writers of all time, H P Lovecraft, is almost completely in the public domain…

Last but not least in this rag-tag post, a point about some of the other things I heard during the day. Andrew Nairne, Director of the Arts at the Arts Council, spoke about how £20m had been allocated for digital/artistic collaborations, for which the NESTA scheme serves as a pilot. He spoke of “digital” as an “operating context” (so both a context in which to operate, and one, I presume, that operates upon the content delivered through it), yet also underlined the ability of technology to serve the arts, “accelerating and enhancing”. Last but not least, he and several others, pointed to the utility of adopting a “gaming” model for online art, partly, I feel, in an effort to overcome one of the many instinctive fears of arts organisations, whose presence resounded through the beautifully modern NESTA suite from time to time throughout the day.

It is the blackness of ebony that most interests Shakespeare. In Twelfth Night Feste the clown (disguised as Sir Topas the priest) tortures the imprisoned Malvolio with a nonsensical description of the steward’s surroundings.

FESTE Say’st thou that the house is dark?
MALVOLIO As hell, Sir Topas.
FESTE Why it hath bay windows transparent as barricadoes, and the clerestories toward the north are as lustrous as ebony; and yet complain’st thou of obstruction?

The joke of course is that Feste accurately describes the “barricadoes” and ebon darkness of the prison, only to draw the conclusion that the “barricadoes” are “transparent” and the ebon “clerestories” (church windows) are “lustrous”. In reply to this, Malvolio can only insist that “I am not mad, Sir Topas. I say to you this house is dark.”

The uncomfortable comedy of Feste torturing Malvolio is far removed from the use made of “ebony” in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Here the word is used by the King of Navarre to describe Berowne’s beloved Rosaline.

KING By heaven, thy love is black as ebony!
BEROWNE Is ebony like her? O word divine!
A wife of such wood were felicity.
O, who can give an oath? Where is a book?
That I may swear beauty doth beauty lack
If that she learn not of her eye to look.
No face is fair that is not so full of black.

Whereas Feste was busy contorting his language to befuddle Malvolio, Berowne’s ornamental punning is aiming straight for courtly wit. To understand him, it is necessary to recall both the value of ebony and the fact that blackness might also be shameful (cf. Malvolio’s “[black] As hell” above, or Gertrude’s “black and grained spots” of guilt in Hamlet). Consequently, the King’s “black as ebony” pulls two ways: beautiful as ebony yet ugly as blackness. Berowne takes this doubleness and improvises upon it, emphasising the beauty of darkness, and particular of Rosaline’s dark eyes. Elsewhere in Shakespeare’s works similar reconstruction of blackness takes place: the dark lady of the Sonnets is praised, for example, with the comment that “now is black beauty’s successive heir”. Shakespeare’s near contemporary, Philip Sidney, also praised dark beauties, focussing like Berowne on the beloved’s eyes. Stella in Astrophil and Stella (1592) is thus possessed of eyes “in beamy black”.

Overall then, blackness is the dominate feature of ebony when it appears in Shakespeare’s works, with the added complexity occuring when Berowne uses its beautiful, ornamental properties to challenge (like Sidney) other preconceptions about blackness in the period. I should probably mention Othello at this point, but would rather avoid a lengthy article.

What could he see but mightily he noted?
What did he note but strongly he desir’d?
What he beheld, on that he firmly doted,
And in his will his wilful eye he tir’d.
With more than admiration he admir’d
Her azure veins, her alabaster skin,
Her coral lips, her snow-white dimpled chin.

In contrast to Venus and Adonis, this portrayal of Lucrece is rather disturbing, made through the eyes of Tarquin, her future rapist. The reference to alabaster in the final line, along with coral and azure (originally another name for lapis lazuli), all contribute to render Lucrece an object and an ornament in Tarquin’s view, something to be possessed. Calcite alabaster has two specific properties that may also be relevant here: it resists water, but can be marked with a knife (Lucrece, of course, after many tears eventally commits suicide with just such an implement); and it was once used for windows. The translucent properties of alabaster are perhaps active here since a central theme of the poem is Lucrece’s sense of her own vulnerability, her feeling that her violation is plain for all those who “[pry] through my window” to see.

Sinking deeper into the menacing possibilities of alabaster, we come to Othello, who vows that “I’ll not shed [Desdemona’s] blood; / Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow, / And smooth as monumental alabaster”. He keeps his promise, but still suffocates his beloved at the play’s conclusion. The “monumental alabaster” differs from other uses of the mineral in relation to ornament, and is typical of Othello’s tendancy to aggrandise (see Wilson-Knight on “the Othello music” for a long description of this). Alabaster was used on monuments as well as ornaments, namely tombs and effigies, because of the ease with which it might be carved. When Othello speaks of “monumental alabaster”, a macabre note is sounded.

There is a darker appearance of the word, than even Othello’s, however: it comes in Richard III and Tyrrel’s soliloquy describing how the two young princes were murdered at the king’s orders. “Thus…girdling one another / Within their alabaster innoent arms / …We smothered / The most replenished sweer work of nature.” These lines unite the ornamental littleness of alabaster (the children’s fragility), its whiteness and translucency (their innocence), and its macabre usages (their murder).

To conclude, I turn to the fifth, final and cheeriest usage of alabaster in the canon. Gratiano’s speech to his friend Antonio about his passionate nature, and his subsequent rejection of alabaster and all that it represents in The Merchant of Venice. His lines set him apart in the play, distinct from Antonio’s anxieties and Shylock’s macabre plots, themselves the true analogues of alabaster. After all, Antonio’s ships may well have been carrying the precious mineral.

GRATIANO Let me play the fool;
With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come;
And let my liver rather heat with wine
Than my heart cool with mortifying groans.
Why should a man whose blood is warm within
Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster,
Sleep when he wakes, and creep into the jaundice
By being peevish?

…there is an upstart Crow, beautiful with our feathers, that his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke vierse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceite the onely Shake-scene in a countrey..”

There is much to be discussed here, but – noting only that “Johannes fac totum” means something like ‘Jack-of-all-trades’ (‘Johnny-do-it-all’) – I shall concentrate specifically on the now famous description of Shakespeare as an “upstart Crow”. In particular, I shall reveal how Shakespeare himself uses the word, both to illuminate Greene’s insult and, as ever, to explore the myriad-mindedness of our playwright.

There are fifty uses of the word “crow” in the plays and poems, but not all of them refer to the bird. For example, neither Friar Lawrence nor Antipholus of Ephesus make use of avian assistance to break down, respectively, the door of the Capulet monument or that of their own house, but rather demand what we now call a ‘crow-bar’, so named for its resemblance either to the bird’s beak or talons.

When the crow does appear in Shakespeare’s writing, it is not to its beak nor its talons but, as with Greene, to its feathers that reference is often made. Punning, for example, on the senses of crow as bird and bar, Dromio asks his master if he wants “A crow without feather” to break down the door of his house in Ephesus. Elsewhere, the blackness of the crows’ plumage is made to carry a whole range of meaning: its “sable” places it amongst the “mourners” of the Phoenix and the Turtle, and Autolycus sells “Cypreis black as e’er was crow” to the rustics of The Winter’s Tale. “Our feathers” that Greene accuses Shakespeare of stealing, are thus to be taken as something that covers a colouring strongly associated with not just death and mourning, but more nastily, both ugliness (for Romeo, Juliet is a beautiful dove amongst crows) and corruption (the rapist Tarquin is compared to a “crow” in Lucrece).

Corruption and blackness is not just limited to moral depravity, but also disease: the crow’s colour fits its larcenous activities, and Shakespeare repeatedly portrays the crow as a battlefield scavenger. York boasts that he has made Clifford “prey for carrion kites and crows” in Henry VI part II, Grandpré describes the birds hovering over the English forces at Agincourt in Henry V, and Pandarus invokes them on the battlefield of Troy in Troilus and Cressida. Although such a portrayal of the crow as scavenger fits Greene’s purposes in calling Shakespeare an “upstart Crow”, aligning him with both the repulsive and the unromantic elements of martial society, the fact that Greene claims that Shakespeare has stolen his and others’ feathers also portrays Greene as one of the crows’ habitual targets, namely carrion. Of course, this is not to Greene’s purpose, but the extension of the metaphor seems a neat defence of the bard if not the bird.

It is in The Merchant of Venice that Shakespeare uses the bird for more moral ends, illustrating this time Portia’s support for a judgment that takes into account all mitigating circumstances. Such a use of the crow, although dependent on less flattering representations for the power of its reversal, is nevertheless proof of Shakespeare’s inventiveness. These lines take the symbolism of the crow, evident elsewhere in the plays and poems, and viciously employed by Greene, and then add to it in a new and unexpected way: the point that the crow is only criticised when heard (“attended”) is, one is tempted to say, a response to Greene, whose angry slur is also praise of Shakespeare, since it proves his rise through the cultural echelons of his day.

PORTIA The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark
When neither is attended; and I think
The nightingale, if she should sing by day,
When every goose is cackling, would be thought
No better a musician than the wren.
How many things by season season’d are
To their right praise and true perfection!

Rufus Pollock provided the opening address, pointing out how the convergence of the two phenomena of greater data availability and advanced computing power had created the perfect conditions for openness to flourish. He announced one such flourishing in the form of datacatalogs.org, which came online at the start of the conference. His next point was to argue that the focus of activities in the community was moving from making data accessible to providing tools for and building communities around that data. Of course, the quantity problem is only half solved (a later speaker pointed out the small quantities of open government data in Asia, for example), but was still at a point where data cycles (ecosystems of community, tools and data) could be founded. This last point fits neatly with Open Shakespeare, since the project is slowly forming just such a cycle: early editions of Shakespeare’s plays are open data, and a small community is either building tools (like the annotator) or using them to create more content about Shakespeare’s works, which in turn offers new programming challenges and so completes the circle.

Glyn Moody’s keynote talk, immediately following Rufus’, approached the topic of Open Knowledge from a different angle, by analysing the current situation in terms of a new abundance which placed pressure on systems, such as the UK’s copyright law, designed for eighteenth-century conditions of scarcity. Although Moody did not mention it, Shakespeare himself was something of a forerunner in this domain: the “fourteen years plus fourteen more” model of copyright established in 1710 was the result of bookseller lobbying, not least that of Jacob Tonson, eager to protect his monopoly on the works of Shakespeare and others (notably Milton, and Dryden’s translations of Virgil). Having sketched out his model of abundance and scarcity, Moody concluded with the provocative question of how open projects would function without copyright, pointing out that many in fact depend upon restrictive legislation as their raison d’être. The only answer that I can give is that open projects would perhaps continue as the first models of communities where exchange and collaboration are well established (as in Open Shakespeare), that is to say, continuing as, in other words, those “data cycles” and “ecosystems” that Pollock had described as the successors to the victories of open data availability.

Later on in the conference, in the second track of talks, a panel on ‘Data Journalism: What Next?’ provided considerable food for thought on the topic of communities, much of it served up by the Guardian’s Simon Rogers. It was he, for example, that questioned the merits of crowd-sourcing, arguing that it did not provide objective data, since its contributors could be extremely biased, an MP participating, for instance, in the crowd-sourced analysis of his own expenses. This point was backed up by Stefan Candea, with both he and Simon Rogers emphasising the important labour that remained for the journalist when it came to looking over crowd-sourced responses and shaping them into a story. A neat example of this was the Guardian’s exploration of Sarah Palin’s emails, where users were directed to a random email and then asked to signal anything of interest. Although not flawless (one imagines a Palin aide slaving away to hide significant correspondence), its randomness nevertheless provided an even coverage of the files. This randomness might be an important tool for Open Shakespeare’s own crowd-sourcing of annotations, as a way of directing users to annotate less-appreciated works. As regards the verifiability of these annotations, Open Shakespeare has the problematic luxury of considering subjective opinion on the Bard’s art as valid as objective facts about it, since these opinions map the contours of contemporary attitudes to Shakespeare. Further, the intense subjectivity of responses to art means that such subjective annotations do not suffer from the problem of verifiability, because no such critical response has ever been verifiable (for those interested, this line of argument is behind Kant’s description of “universal subjective validity” in his Critique of the Power of Judgment).

It is on this idea of subjective annotation, the generation of subjective data, that I would like to bring this summary to a close. The conference was on Open Knowledge, but it is significant that I found the adjective to have been discussed far more often than the noun. Open Shakespeare’s annotation system, the tool that generates its data cycle, provides both verifiable information (“mirth in funeral” is an example of “synoeciosis” in Hamlet) and subjective opinion (“Words, words, words” is, for one user, “one of the most human lines in the play”). Is the second still data? I would argue that it is, but it is of a kind rarely discussed in Berlin. After all, what are we to do with it in order to integrate it back into the system of open data? Such opinion does not atomise easily, just as Shakespeare’s own words resist, with their context and their double meanings, computerised analysis. We can count the instances of the word “prune”, but it takes an article on the subject to bring out the humour from the information generated by the open-source tool. That article itself is data and can be itself the launch pad for new responses, but it moves the axis of the cycle away from developers’ tools and their data and towards the perspective of the user and, more broadly, that of the community. Rufus Pollock was right to argue for the existence of ecosystems of open data, but the case of Open Shakespeare shows that they can only be fully functional if all three elements are given their full weight: tools, data, and users together.

If one word could sum up the work of May and June, it would be ‘users’. These two months have seen our online presence, especially on twitter, grow: over four hundred and twenty annotations have now been written, and we have been followed by, amongst others, a Tory MP and the artistic director of the Boston Actors’ Shakespeare Project. In order to provide a regular stream of new content for our followers, weekly articles on Shakespeare’s words have been posted over the last eight weeks, those on “dawn” and “drawer” attracting the most interest.

There is no single word with which to encompass our plans for the future. A study of how people use the website, and especially the annotator, is currently underway, the conclusions of which will soon be presented at OKCON 2011, and – if all goes well – in journal format also. One recommendation will be to establish ready-made categories for annotations, in order to make organisation of the comments much easier. Whilst studying the data, it also occurred to me that the website could be extended with the incorporation of famous past annotations, such as those comments made by Johnson and Pope when they each edited Shakespeare’s works in the eighteenth century.

Of course, we need not only incorporate the annotations of Johnson and Pope into Open Shakespeare: we could also expand Open Shakespeare to Open Literature and include their creative work too. Indeed, just such an expansion is likely to take place over the summer, and we would love to hear about any ideas people have for Open Literature: whether, for example, there is a particular (out of copyright) author you would like to see uploaded soon or whether you simply have some thoughts about the layout of it all. As ever, you can get in touch through the website, post to the open literature mailing list, or best of all, add to the new Open Literature Wiki.

Before we discuss these passages, I would like my reader to imagine a prune. In Elizabethan times, this subspecies of plum was served dried as a delicacy. Small, round, and wrinkly, it seems to have been considered reminiscent of a testicle. Pompey, describing the quite possibly fictitious visit of constable Elbow’s wife to a house of ill repute, says that “she came in great with child; and longing – saving your honour’s reverence – for stew’d prunes”. The prunes in question, on which Pompey dwells so fulsomely as to drive a frustrated Angelo from the court, are a transparent reference to male sexual favours, underlined by the use of “stew’d”, a culinary term synonymous with low-life and immorality.

The simple shepherd, although in conversation with the far from pure Autolycus (famous now as an early purveyor of the “dildo”) is not quite so lewd as Pompey when it comes to fruit. Whereas Pompey details how Mrs Elbow supposedly sat “cracking the stones of the foresaid prunes”, the shepherd innocently thinks about the feast’s need for “four pound of prunes, and as many raisins o’the sun”. Note that these are fresh prunes (in contrast to the sun-dried grapes), and thus, one imagines, less prone to insalubrious insinuations.

My last reference to prunes is given to us by Falstaff, a frequent figure in these articles, not least because of his great appetite for food and drink. Participating in the ‘Pompey’ tradition, the old knight tells the Hostess that “There’s no more faith in thee than in a stew’d prune”, where “stew’d prune” is the fruity synonym of ‘prostitute’. In Henry IV part II, the same equivalence lies behind Doll’s tyrade against Pistol, when she, in the presence of Falstaff and others, accuses the hot-blooded captain of living “upon moldy stewed prunes and dried cakes”. Of course, only one of these nouns actually refers to a foodstuff, and so Doll’s phrase provides a final example of how objects answering one bodily need may represent the satiation of another, and thus a whole network of moral judgments founded on the humble “prunus domestica”.

MERCUTIO Thou art like one of these fellows that, when he enters the confines of a tavern, claps me his sword upon the table, and says ‘God send me no need of thee!’ and by the operation of the second cup draws him on the drawer, when indeed there is no need.

The ‘drawer’, of course, refers to the barman, the ‘tapster’, who – as the OED puts it – “draws liquor for customers”. Mercutio’s banter with Benvolio puns on the differing situations of drawing a sword and drawing a pint: strangely, his is the only use of the word that does not occur in a scene with Falstaff, another character very able to distinguish between swords and beverages. That said, it is not Falstaff who speaks about drawers in these scenes, but rather his royal companion, Prince Hal.

PRINCE. I have sounded the very base-string of humility. Sirrah, I am sworn brother to a leash of drawers; and can call them all by their Christian names, as, Tom, Dick, and Francis. They take it already upon their salvation, that though I be but Prince of Wales, yet I am the king of courtesy; and tell me flatly I am no proud Jack, like Falstaff, but a corinthian, a lad of mettle, a good boy,–by the Lord, so they call me;–and, when I am King of England, I shall command all the good lads in Eastcheap.

For Hal, the drawer is more than an unremarkable figure useful for a pun but nor more like he is for Mercutio. Instead, the drawer represents another world, that the young prince enters into with both a wry smile and an eye on his future role as king. This speech occurs early in Henry IV Part I, and is paralleled by another episode in Part II where Hal and Poins disguise themselves as Drawers to trick Falstaff. This comic venture then becomes more serious when Hal becomes King Henry and, on the eve of Agincourt, once more alters his dress and blends in with the common people, culminating with his dawn meditation on “ceremony”. That great speech has its roots here in the tavern, where the prince’s fascination with the many echelons of society, the trappings of a profession and the “Tom, Dick and Francis” beneath them, begins with “a leash of drawers”.

The little episode between Kent and Oswald functions by betraying the hope and freshness that a new morning represents. Their brawl is yet another sign of the erosion of Lear’s power. In contrast to this, the disguised Duke Vincentio – another leader who delegates his power, albeit more successfully than Lear – reassures the Provost, with a statesman’s eye for symbolism, that “As near the dawning .. as it is, / You shall hear more ere morning”. This intimation is part of a sequence of night-time scenes in Measure for Measure, during which the disguised Duke unravels the orders of his corrupt deputy, Angelo, and so saves Claudio from execution for adultery, even as he prepares his own reappearance in Vienna. Frequent references to the fact that “it is almost clear dawn” rush the audience through a sequence of scenes that culminate with the final Duke’s dispensation of justice “like power divine”.

From dawn, to sun, to God, the same sequence of thoughts runs through another leader who disguises himself: Henry V. Wrapped in a common soldier’s garb, he reprises a theme of his sleepless father’s in Henry IV pt II, musing on “Ceremony” before the battle of Agincourt. Just as his father contrasted the poor “ship-boy’s” capacity to sleep in a storm when “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown”, Henry V imagines the slave

…Who with a body fill’d and vacant mind
Gets him to rest, cramm’d with distressful bread,
Never sees horrid night, the child of hell,
But, like a lackey, from the rise to set
Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night
Sleeps in Elysium; next day after dawn,
Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse,
And follows so the ever-running year,
With profitable labour, to his grave…

Hyperion was one of the Greek titans, ultimately associated with the sun in Greek mythology, and here by Shakespeare. This personification of the sun as Hyperion also makes both sun and titan similar to King Henry, who will simself soon be helped “to his horse” by a servant. Hyperion, as a titan, was cast down by the younger Gods (the Olympians, led by Zeus against Chronos), and one cannot help but wonder whether the King’s comparison between himself and the sun-titan does not also carry a hint of night-time anxiety. After all, his father was “uneasy” under a crown that he took from a weak Richard II.

There are other dawns in Shakespeare’s works, but I will not analyse them in such detail as these three mornings. Many of these other examples are sinister: Titus Andronicus, in words that become very ironic indeed, praises the morning of the hunt which will finish with his daughter raped and mutilated; Marcellus, trying to work out why the Ghost disappeared at the start of Hamlet, describes the cockerel’s role at “dawning”; and, finally, Iachimo, having stolen Imogen’s bracelet, crawls back into the trunk to await the dawn and the fulfilment of his plot in Cymbeline.

Sinister or not, all these examples are part of one of the most complex stage illusions of Shakespeare’s works: the compression of time. Criticised for this by later neoclassicists like Rymer, his use of little words like dawn or night, or phrases like “The clock hath stricken three” (a very anachronistic moment in Julius Caesar), alert us to shifts of time as much as other phrases alert us to shifts of place. With these words, though, comes more than additional detail, but an atmosphere. After all, Iachimo’s nascent plot is all the more powerful for proceeding just before dawn, and Henry V’s battleside worries soon dissipate with the coming light. Later, facing down a French messenger, the young King delivers a celestial threat, which operates not on the pale light of morning, but the stifling warmth of midday.

A many of our bodies shall no doubt
Find native graves; upon the which, I trust,
Shall witness live in brass of this day’s work:
And those that leave their valiant bones in France,
Dying like men, though buried in your dunghills,
They shall be famed; for there the sun shall greet them,
And draw their honours reeking up to heaven;
Leaving their earthly parts to choke your clime,
The smell whereof shall breed a plague in France.

A rather less innocent mix of garlics and osculation is made in Measure for Measure by the “fantastic” of the play, Lucio. When speaking to a friar who, unbeknownst to him, is actually the disguised Duke Vincentio, Lucio offers a lewd, unsubstantiated account of Vincentio’s doings:

The duke, I say to thee again, would eat mutton on Fridays. He’s not past it; yet, and, I say to thee, he would mouth with a beggar though she smelt brown bread and garlic. Say that I said so.–Farewell.

Quite why brown bread and garlic should be associated is a mystery to me, and perhaps material for another article. Of equal interest here, though, is the link between garlic and the poor. One finds the same association in Coriolanus, whose eponymous hero doesn’t quite have to ask beggars for their votes, but he does have to meet many a plebian and is afterwards flattered by Menenius for his ability to stand “The breath of garlic-eaters”.

Last but not least, we have a mystified Hotspur, who, having spent some time with Glendower and his fantastic stories of “dreamer Merlin” and “skimble-skamble stuff” declares that,

… I had rather live
With cheese and garlic in a windmill, far,
Than feed on cates and have hi talk to me
In any summer-house in Christendom.

“Cates” was an Elizabethan word for delicacies (delicates), and the fact the proud and noble Hotspur would prefer the peasant’s garlic over Glendower and sweets is strong language indeed. In fact, he would not only take garlic, but also cheese into the bargain as well, and become positively French to avoid the Welsh lord’s ramblings.

On which note, I end my own ramblings, with the disclaimer that all attribution of garlic and cheese to the French is entirely of my own whimsical fabrication, and has no roots whatsoever in the language of Shakespeare.

Onion appears five times in Shakespeare’s works, and all but one reference deals with their capacity to make the chef’s eyes water. Lafeu’s, “Mine eyes smell onions; I shall weep anon” is perhaps the simplest of all such uses of the bulb (I would have typed vegetable, but such a categorisation is apparently quite contentious). Other characters, when speaking about onions’ lacrimose properties, display a peculiar tendency to associate them with women. After all, as Lear puts it “women’s weapons” are “water drops”. The eunuch in Antony and Cleopatra talks of the tear-inducing alium twice. Here, as Antony discusses the forthcoming war against Octavius, he declares:

ENOBARBUS. What mean you, sir,
To give them this discomfort? Look, they weep;
And I, an ass, am onion-ey’d: for shame,
Transform us not to women.

Similarly, a Lord in The Taming of the Shrew advises on how to acquire the woman’s gift of crying with the aid of an onion:

LORD … And if the boy have not a woman’s gift
To rain a shower of commanded tears,
An onion will do well for such a shift,
Which, in a napkin being close convey’d,
Shall in despite enforce a watery eye.
See this dispatch’d with all the haste thou canst;
Anon I’ll give thee more instructions.

Peculiarly, all the references to onions in Shakespeare’s works, whether they deal with crying or women or neither of these, are made by men. My last example is no exception, and is taken from Bottom’s advice to his fellow Rude Mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is thankfully free from the misogyny of lord and eunuch, and instead displays a touching regard for the lord and ladies’ sense of smell.

BOTTOM … In any case, let Thisbe have clean linen; and let not him that plays the lion pare his nails, for they shall hang out for the lion’s claws. And, most dear actors, eat no onions nor garlick, for we are to utter sweet breath; and I do not doubt but to hear them say it is a sweet comedy. No more words: away! go; away!

Thanks to these lines, when it comes to the performance of Pyramus and Thisbe at the play’s conclusion, one thing of which we can now be sure is that the eyes of the assembled gentry are weeping tears of laughter, and not, as Lafeu puts it ‘smelling Onions’.

FALSTAFF … ‘Sblood, I am as melancholy as a gib cat or a lugged bear.
PRINCE HENRY Or an old lion, or a lover’s lute.
FALSTAFF Yea, or the drone of a Lincolnshire bagpipe.

For the curious, a Lincolnshire bagpipe – no pictures of which exist in the public domain – consists of only a single “drone” (or pipe) along with the usual mouthpiece and bag. It has a rather mixed reputation: Samuel Pepys wrote in 1667 that Lincolnshire bagpipes made “barbarous music”, whilst a linguist noted in 1875 that “Licolnshire bagpipes” was a colloquialism for the croaking of frogs. The instrument may indeed have been associated with melancholia, but such a range of other opinions suggests that Falstaff’s line, rather like Falstaff himself, has a few playful ambiguities to it.

The music of bagpipes does not fare too well in my second example either. Autolycus’s music is described by a servant as so delightful that after having heard it “the bagpipe could not move you”. Again, here, the emotional properties of bagpipes are alluded to, but immediately dismissed from the pastoral world of Bohemia, a land which, unlike Perdita’s homeland, does not know such grim emotion.

I will conclude with perhaps the most curious mention of bagpipes of them all. Shylock is better known for his melancholic and brooding speeches than for his humour; yet it is he who turns the equally melancholy bagpipe to surreal comic effect. The intent of his speech – to demonstrate at Antonio’s trial that his lethal demand for a pound of flesh is based upon a fixed and inalterable humour – is deadly serious, yet one cannot help but awkwardly smile at his choice of illustration.

SHYLOCK … Some men there are love not a gaping pig;
Some that are mad if they behold a cat;
And others, when the bagpipe sings i’ the nose,
Cannot contain their urine; for affection,
Mistress of passion, sways it to the mood
Of what it likes or loathes. Now, for your answer:
As there is no firm reason to be render’d,
Why he cannot abide a gaping pig;
Why he, a harmless necessary cat;
Why he, a wauling bagpipe; but of force
Must yield to such inevitable shame
As to offend, himself being offended;
So can I give no reason, nor I will not,
More than a lodg’d hate and a certain loathing
I bear Antonio, that I follow thus
A losing suit against him. Are you answered?

Adamson, Silvia, Hunter, Lynette, Magnusson, Lynn, Thompson, Ann, and Wales, Katie, ed. Reading Shakespeare’s Dramatic Language: A Guide. The Arden Shakespeare: London, 2001.
Blake, N. F. Shakespeare’s Language: An Introduction. London: Macmillan, 1983.
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead Books: New York, 1998.
___________, ed. Macbeth. Chelsea House Publishers: New York, 1991.
___________, ed. William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Chelsea House Publishers: New York, 1987.
Boyce, Charles. Shakespeare A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Plays, His Poems, His Life and Times, and More. New York: Facts on File, 1990.
Bradley. A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. London: Macmillan, 1904.
Brown, John Russell, ed. Focus on Macbeth. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.
Coursen, H. R. Macbeth: A Guide to the Play. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997.
Goddard, Harold. The Meaning of Shakespeare. Phoenix Books: Chicago, 1951.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2004.
Halliday, F.E. Shakespeare and His Critics. Schocken Books: New York, 1963.
Hawkes, Terence, ed. Coleridge’s Writings on Shakespeare. Capricorn Books: New York, 1959.
___________, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Macbeth. Prentice-Hall, Inc.: Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1977.
Kermode, Frank. The Age of Shakespeare. The Modern Library: New York, 2003.
——–. Shakespeare’s Language. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2000.
Kirsch, Arthur. W.H. Auden: Lectures on Shakespeare. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Kott, Jan. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Anchor Books: Garden City, New York, 1966.
Knight, G. Wilson. The Imperial Theme. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1931.
Leggatt, Alexander, ed. William Shakespeare’s Macbeth: A Sourcebook. Routledge: London, 2006.
Muir, Kenneth, ed. The Arden Shakespeare: Macbeth. Watson-on-Thames, Surrey:Thomas Nelson, 1984.
Onions, C. T. A Shakespeare Glossary. Oxford University Press: London, 1911.
Rosenberg, Marvin, Masks of Macbeth. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
Schoenbaun, Samuel. Macbeth: Critical Essays. Garland Publishing, Inc. New York:1991.
Spurgeon, Caroline. Shakespeare’s Imagery. London: Cambridge University Press, 1939.
Traversi, D.A. An Approach to Shakespeare. London: Sads, 1957.
Wain, John. The Living World of Shakespeare. Macmillan: London, 1964.
___________, ed. Shakespeare: Macbeth. Aurora Publishers Inc: Nashville, 1969.

Film and Video Productions

Casson, Philip, dir. Macbeth. With Ian McKellan and Judi Dench. HBO Home Video, 1978.
Chailly, Richard and d’Anna Claude, dir. Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth. With Leo Nucci and Shirley Verrett. Deutsche Grammophon, 1987.
Hughes, Ken, dir. Joe Macbeth. With Paul Douglas and Ruth Roman. Columbia Pictures, 1955.
Kurosawa, Akira. Throne of Blood. With Toshiro Mifune and Isuzo Yamada. Toho Company, 1957.
Kusej, Martin, dir. Dimitri Shostakovitch’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsenks. With Chrisopher Ventris and Eva Maria Westbroek. BBC, 2006.
Billy Morrissette, dir. Scotland PA. With James LeGros and Moura Tierney. Abandon Pictures, 2001.
Polanski, Roman, dir. Macbeth. With Jon Finch and Francesca Annis. Sony Pictures, 1971.
Prouty, C. J., dir. Never Say Macbeth. With Gregory G. Giles and Alexander Enberg. Vanguard Cinema, 2007.
Serybryakof, Nikolai, dir. Macbeth, with Alec McCowen and Brian Cox. Sony Pictures, 1995.
Welles, Orson, dir. Macbeth. With Orson Welles and Jeanette Nolan. Mercury Productions, 1948.
Wright, Geoffrey, dir. Macbeth. With Gary Sweet and Steve Bastoni. Starz, 2006.

Macbeth has been filmed many times, including several silent movie versions. Orson Welles directed a version in 1948, with himself as Macbeth and Jeanette Nolan as Lady Macbeth very much in love at the beginning of the play, obviously sexually attracted to each other, embracing so it looks like they mean it. And Roman Polanski in 1971 tried to make the play contemporary by bringing nudity and much blood. (Interestingly, Macbeth was the first movie Polanski did after his wife, Sharon Tae, was brutally murdered by the Manson family.) And in 2006 Geoffrey Wright directed an updated and controversial Macbeth, set in the gangworld of Melbourne Australia, with most of the original text included, but with the actor’s speaking with contemporary Australian accents.

Macbeth has such a powerful hold on people’s imaginations, that there have also been notable “spin offs’ of it. In opera both Verdi and Shostakovitch adapted the play, in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth of Mittsenk, respectively. There have been cinematic and dramatic adaptations as well. The 1955 Ken Hughes film Joe Macbeth sets its scene in the Chicago gangworld, with Joe Macbeth murdering his way to power. Barbara Garson’s 1966 anti-war play Macbird! saw Lyndon Johnson as Macbeth. Akiru Kurosawa set the play in 16th century Japan, during a time of civil wars, in Throne of Blood. And Billy Morrissette’s Scotland PA shows Macbeth and his lady as partners in bed, in crime, and in business. They kill their Duncan in order to steal his idea for a fast food hamburger chain, what turn out to be a wildly successful chain of “Macbeths” burgers and fries. And in 2007 C. J. Prouty directed Never Say Macbeth, an amusing movie about a young actor who faces unexpected consequences when he defies theatrical tradition and says “Macbeth” inside the theater. Clearly the play is as relevant today as when it was first performed for King James I.

That annotation on Elizabethan law is just one example out of – currently – over four hundred annotations submitted to the website, around three hundred of which are on Hamlet, chosen by vote as our flagship annotation project, and the rest on a diverse selection of Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, tragedies and romances. We hope to gather many more such contributions over the months to come, and continue to improve the annotator, which now sports a useful ‘tagging’ feature, soon allowing users to sort through annotations.

As well as gathering annotations, we have almost reached the conclusion of our efforts to publish a short introduction for every one of Shakespeare’s works. Thirty-one specially-written short pieces are already online, composed by volunteers ranging from an emeritus professor at Berkeley to a film actor from Cambridge. Along with these shorter pieces, we are beginning to accumulate longer critical essays: one on ‘Shakespeare and the City’, and another on Macbeth, kindly provided by John Boe at UC Davis.

As Open Shakespeare has grown, we have attracted some media attention. TCS (The Cambridge Student newspaper) published an article on our work in February, and a local radio station reported on our first annotation sprint. We were also invited to give a talk at the British Library as part of a series of staff talks on textual analysis at the end of February, an event which proved to be a great chance to receive new suggestions for the future direction of the project.

In the months to come, we look forward to expanding from Open Shakespeare to Open Literature, allowing users to apply our tools, and especially to annotate a wider range of authors. As annotations accumulate on Shakespeare, we also hope to publish a hardback Open Shakespeare edition of Shakespeare’s plays, on the model of the prototype, annotation-less edition prepared for OKCON 2010.

If any of this is of interest to you, please do join our ‘open literature’ mailing list, follow us on twitter, or get in touch through the website.

JHS, RP

To do:

• Publish a ‘state of the project post’ on OKFN blog
• Publicise site through contact with other projects: www.delightedbeauty.org, www.shakespeareinsmalldoses.com
• Publicise site: unis (NFP, fun for summer), Call For Papers
• Investigate kickstarter
• Organise May Week event, publicise with invitation for help over summer
• Institute regular emails on openlit: monthly recap of volunteering/contributions, weekly drip feed of news and suggestion for contributions (one thing done, one thing needed – wotd, intro)
• Sign up to open humanities mails: updates for okfn, advertise for openlit…
• Prepare an Open Shakespeare presentation at OKCON Berlin

I dare not ask for mercy.
It is too late, hell drags me down. I sink,
I sink—Oh!—my soul is lost forever!

This view of the play tends to see it more like a medieval morality play, with good triumphing over evil, than a modern psychological drama.

Influenced by the Romantic movement and perhaps by the rise of the novel, 19th century critics tended to make character more of the issue. Thus while they still acknowledge the moral themes of the play, the romantic critic’s focus less on the lesson of Macbeth and more on his character. Thus DeQuincy talks about how in Macbeth “the retiring of the human heart, and the entrance of the fiendish heart was to be expressed and made sensible. Another world has stept in; and the murderers are taken out of the region of human things, human purposes, human desires. They are transfigured: Lady Macbeth is ‘unsexed;’ Macbeth has forgot that he was born of woman; both are conformed to the image of devils; and the world of devils is suddenly revealed.” And thus Coleridge explains Macbeth’s vulnerability to the witches’ prophesies by talking about the beliefs of actual soldiers: “Superstition, of one sort or another, is natural to victorious generals; the instances are too notorious to need mentioning.”

This focus on character reaches its culmination in the early 20th century with the contributions of A.C. Bradley and Sigmund Freud. The influence of Bradley on Shakespeare criticism in the early 20th century cannot be overestimated. (The critic Alexander Leggatt refers to a comic poem where “Shakespeare’s ghost failed an exam on his own plays because he had not read Bradley.”) While still acknowledging the good versus evil theme of the play (made dramatic by a dark/light opposition), Bradley saw Macbeth’s destiny as coming from his character, his tragic flaw. Thus he analyzed Macbeth as if Macbeth were a real person, and saw the poetry of his speeches more as evidence of Macbeth’s poetic genius than Shakespeare’s. Similarly Sigmund Freud analyzed the Macbeths as if they were patients on his psychoanalytic couch, seeing their psychological difficulties and tragic ends coming from the trauma of their being childless.

Refuting Bradley and Freud, L.C. Knights published a famous essay in 1933, “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” Here Knights made fun of the kinds of questions represented by his title, pointing out that indeed Macbeth is a dramatic poem, that the Macbeths are not real people and that although in the play Lady Macbeth talks of having nursed at least one baby, we can never know how many children she had. Caroline Spurgeon goes further (and more usefully) in this emphasis on the poetic surface of Shakespeare’s plays with her groundbreaking work Shakespeare’s Imagery (1935). Much like a botanist classifying flora, Spurgeon described the predominant imagery in each Shakespeare play. Macbeth’s “ill-fitting garments,” ”the reverberation of sound echoing over vast regions,” light as life/virtue as opposed to dark as evil/death, and (an image that according to Spurgeon is found in much of Shakespeare’s work) sin as a disease. Spurgeon convincingly demonstrates, with many examples, that these images indeed are the poetic touchstones of Macbeth, that “an appreciable part of the emotions we feel throughout of pity, fear, and horror is due to the subtle but repeated action of this imagery upon our minds, of which in our preoccupation with the main theme, we remain often largely unconscious.” So here instead of analyzing the minds of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, we are analyzing the minds of the readers or hearers of the play.

But in the 20th century, discussion of the characters has gone on side by side with discussion of the poetry. Thus many critics have asked who the three witches are, whether they are supernatural, natural, or something in between. While Bradley wrote, for example, “There is not a syllable in Macbeth to imply that they are anything but women.” But Harold Goddard argued that the witches have a supernatural effect on us, “giving the impression of mighty and inscrutable forces behind human life.” “Devils and angels”—and witches—, he argues, “are out of fashion,” but for Goddard they represent something real, not necessarily in some metaphysical realm, but in human psychology, in the unconscious mind. And so Goddard begins his essay on Macbeth with an epigraph from Thoreau: “Men are probably nearer to the essential truth in their superstitions than in their science.”

From the 18th century on, critics have talked about Macbeth as “Shakespeare’s descent into Hell,” but, Goddard points out, “it is also his spring myth.” He alludes to Northen mythology, pointing out how Malcolm and his soldiers carrying the branches from Birnam wood in front of them evokes the myth of coming spring, the vanquishing of winter and war by spring and peace.

Many critics have resisted such psychological and mythic approaches, and prefer to see Macbeth as an explicitly Christian play. Thus W.A. Murray argues, “It [Macbeth], if ever poem was so, a traditional Catholic Christian poem, the moral vitality of which is rooted in an uncompromising medieval faith, and in a pre-scientific view of the nature of reality.” This is the 18th century point of view updated, as is Willard Farnham’s argument that Macbeth is “a morality play, written in terms of Jacobean tragedy. Its hero is worked upon by forces of evil, yields to temptation in spite of all that his conscience can do to stop him. . .and is brought to retribution by his death.”

The polish critic Jan Kott turned such traditional interpretations on their head, arguing that Macbeth shows the absurdity of the world and that history is nightmare. Macbeth has only one theme, Kott says, “murder.” Thus after his first murder, Macbeth declares that the world is changed, that “from this instant/ There’s nothing serious in mortality;/ All is but toys. . .” (II.iii.90-92). And so before he dies all Macbeth can do is “to drag with him into nothingness as many living beings as possible.” “This is the last consequence of the world’s absurdity,” Kott writes, ignoring any Christian affirmative morals in the play. “Macbeth is still unable to blow the world up. But he can go on murdering till the end.”

While Harold Bloom acknowledge that Macbeth is “overtly medieval Catholic,” it seems not set in Scotland but in “the cosmological emptiness as described by the ancient Gnostic heretics.” Here he comes known more on Kott’s side than Samuel Johnson’s, seeing “Christianity as irrelevant to Macbeth.” He stresses that Macbeth is Shakespeare’s most imaginative hero, and that the enigma of the play is “its protagonist’s hold upon our terrified sympathy.” Bloom argues that we respond to the play with terror, but problematically we discover Macbeth “more vividly within us the more deeply we delve.” Shakespeare makes us identify and sympathize with a murderer: this is the problematic experience of reading or seeing Macbeth.

In recent years, gender critics have taken on Macbeth. Marilyn French sees the play as showing the victory of the masculine over the feminine, with there being at the plays’ end “a totally masculine world,” Lady Macbeth dead and the witches gone. Janet Adelman, in a feminist psychoanalytic reading, similarly argues that Macbeth begins “by unleashing the terrible threat of destructive maternal power and demonstrates the helplessness of its central male figure before that power. . . .” Like French she sees the end of the play as a consolidation of male power, a solving of the male’s problems through elimination of the feminine.

In 2000 Frank Kermode wrote Shakespeare’s Language, with a non-professional audience in mine. He describes a use of language that is unique to Macbeth, “an idiosyncratic rhythm,” built on oppositions and alternatives (fair and foul, grow and not grow, is and is not), and shows that while equivocation is a theme of the play it is also a habit of the play’s language. Finally, in the tradition of Spurgeon, he points to certain words and themes that are “the matrices of the language in Macbeth”: time, man, done, blood, darkness. The reader of the play can focus on these words in reading and gain a deeper understanding of how the play works.

Our second annotation sprint, taking place at the end of Cambridge University term attracted contributions from all over the internet, particularly from the States. In Cambridge itself, our volunteers continued working on Hamlet, bringing the total number of annotations on this text to nearly 300.

Since this sprint, we have overhauled the aesthetics of the annotator, and added the ability to tag annotations. Work has also begun on other plays by Shakespeare, including: Henry IV pt 1, Much Ado about Nothing, Troilus and Cressida, and more.

Outreach

The project continues to appear at various events in and around Cambridge. Upcoming appearances include:

• ‘Humanities Research: the future might be digital’, 11am – 4pm 10th May 2011, CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities).
• ‘Food for Thought’, 2pm – 5pm 27 June 2011, English Faculty Library, Cambridge.

We have also began collaboration with local schools in Cambridge in order to test the utility of the annotator tool for Key Stage 3 students of Macbeth.

[From Shakespeare 1765, Johnson discusses the belief in witches and how Lady Macbeth influences her husband.]

I. i. Enter three Witches.
In order to make a true estimate of the abilities and merit of a writer, it is always necessary to examine the genius of his age, and the opinions of his contemporaries. A poet who should now make the whole action of his tragedy depend upon enchantment, and produce the chief events by the assistance of supernatural agents, would be censured as transgressing the bounds of probability, he would be banished from the theatre to the nursery, and condemned to write fairy tales instead of tragedies; but a survey of the notions that prevailed at the time when this play was written, will prove that Shakespeare was in no danger of such censures, since he only turned the system that was then universally admitted to his advantage, and was far from overburthening the credulity of his audience.

The reality of witchcraft or enchantment, which, though not strictly the same, are confounded in this play, has in all ages and countries been credited by the common people, and in most by the learned themselves. These phantoms have indeed appeared more frequently, in proportion as the darkness of ignorance has been more gross; but it cannot be shown, that the brightest gleams of knowledge have at any time been sufficient to drive them out of the world. . . .

The Reformation did not immediately arrive at its meridian, and tho’ day was gradually encreasing upon us, the goblins of witchcraft still continued to hover in the twilight. In the time of Queen Elizabeth was the remarkable Trial of the Witches of Warbois, whose conviction is still commemorated in an annual sermon at Huntingdon. But in the reign of King James, in which this tragedy was written, many circumstances concurred to propagate and confirm this opinion. The King, who was much celebrated for his knowledge, had, before his arrival in England, not only examined in person a woman accused of witchcraft, but had given a very formal account of the practices and illusions of evil spirits, the compacts of witches, the ceremonies used by them, the manner of detecting them, and the justice of punishing them, in his dialogues of Daemonologie, written in the Scottish dialect, and published at Edinburgh. This book was, soon after his accession, reprinted at London, and as the ready way to gain K. James’s favour was to flatter his speculations, the system of Daemonologie was immediately adopted by all who desired either to gain preferment or not to lose it. Thus the doctrine of witchcraft was very powerfully inculcated, and as the greatest part of mankind have no other reason for their opinions than that they are in fashion, it cannot be doubted but this persuasion made a rapid progress, since vanity and credulity co-operated in its favour, and it had a tendency to free cowardice from reproach. . . . Thus, in the time of Shakespeare, was the doctrine of witchcraft at once established by law and by the fashion, and it became not only unpolite, but criminal, to doubt it, and as prodigies are always seen in proportion as they are expected, witches were every day discovered, and multiplied so fast in some places, that Bishop Hall mentions a village in Lancashire, where their number was greater than that of the houses. The Jesuits and sectaries took advantage of this universal error, and endeavoured to promote the interest of their parties by pretended cures of persons afflicted by evil spirits, but they were detected and exposed by the clergy of the established Church.

Upon this general infatuation Shakespeare might be easily allowed to found a play, especially since he has followed with great exactness such histories as were then thought true; nor can it be doubted that the scenes of enchantment, however they may now be ridiculed, were both by himself and his audience thought awful and affecting.

Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859).

["On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth," 1823, contains De Quincey’s thoughts on why the knocking at the gate in the porter scene can so affect an audience.]

From my boyish days I had always felt a great perplexity on one point in Macbeth. It was this: the knocking at the gate, which succeeds to the murder of Duncan, produced to my feelings an effect for which I never could account. The effect was, that it reflected back upon the murderer a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity; yet, however obstinately I endeavoured with my understanding to comprehend this, for many years I never could see why it should produce such an effect.

. . . .Murder, in ordinary cases, where the sympathy is wholly directed to the case of the murdered person, is an incident of coarse and vulgar horror; and for this reason, that it flings the interest exclusively upon the natural but ignoble instinct by which we cleave to life; an instinct which, as being indispensable to the primal law of self-preservation, is the same in kind (though different in degree) amongst all living creatures: this instinct, therefore, because it annihilates all distinctions, and degrades the greatest of men to the level of ‘the poor beetle that we tread on’, exhibits human nature in its most abject and humiliating attitude. Such an attitude would little suit the purposes of the poet. What then must he do? He must throw the interest on the murderer. Our sympathy must be with him (of course I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into his feelings, and are made to understand them,— not a sympathy of pity or approbation). In the murdered person, all strife of thought, all flux and reflux of passion and of purpose, are crushed by one overwhelming panic; the fear of instant death smites him ‘with its petrific mace’. But in the murderer, such a murderer as a poet will condescend to, there must be raging some great storm of passion—jealousy, ambition, vengeance, hatred—which will create a hell within him; and into this hell we are to look.

In Macbeth, for the sake of gratifying his own enormous and teeming faculty of creation, Shakspere has introduced two murderers: and, as usual in his hands, they are remarkably discriminated: but, though in Macbeth the strife of mind is greater than in his wife, the tiger spirit not so awake, and his feelings caught chiefly by contagion from her,—yet, as both were finally involved in the guilt of murder, the murderous mind of necessity is finally to be presumed in both. This was to be expressed; and on its own account, as well as to make it a more proportionable antagonist to the unoffending nature of their victim, ‘the gracious Duncan,’ and adequately to expound ‘the deep damnation of his taking off’, this was to be expressed with peculiar energy. We were to be made to feel that the human nature, i.e. the divine nature of love and mercy, spread through the hearts of all creatures, and seldom utterly withdrawn from man—was gone, vanished, extinct, and that the fiendish nature had taken its place. And, as this effect is marvellously accomplished in the dialogues and soliloquies themselves, so it is finally consummated by the expedient under consideration; and it is to this that I now solicit the reader’s attention. If the reader has ever witnessed a wife, daughter, or sister in a fainting fit, he may chance to have observed that the most affecting moment in such a spectacle is that in which a sigh and a stirring announce the recommencement of suspended life. Or, if the reader has ever been present in a vast metropolis, on the day when some great national idol was carried in funeral pomp to his grave, and chancing to walk near the course through which it passed, has felt powerfully in the silence and desertion of the streets, and in the stagnation of ordinary business, the deep interest which at that moment was possessing the heart of man—if all at once he should hear the death-like stillness broken up by the sound of wheels rattling away from the scene, and making known that the transitory vision was dissolved, he will be aware that at no moment was his sense of the complete suspension and pause in ordinary human concerns so full and affecting, as at that moment when the suspension ceases, and the goings-on of human life are suddenly resumed. All action in any direction is best expounded, measured, and made apprehensible, by reaction. Now apply this to the case in Macbeth. Here, as I have said, the retiring of the human heart, and the entrance of the fiendish heart was to be expressed and made sensible. Another world has stept in; and the murderers are taken out of the region of human things, human purposes, human desires. They are transfigured: Lady Macbeth is ‘unsexed;’ Macbeth has forgot that he was born of woman; both are conformed to the image of devils; and the world of devils is suddenly revealed. But how shall this be conveyed and made palpable? In order that a new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear. The murderers, and the murder must be insulated—cut off by an immeasurable gulf from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs- locked up and sequestered in some deep recess; we must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested—laid asleep—tranced—racked into a dread armistice; time must be annihilated; relation to things without abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion. Hence it is, that when the deed is done, when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard; and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced; the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1772-1835.

[The following is from the notes for Coleridge’s influential Shakespeare lectures.]

Macbeth stands in contrast throughout with Hamlet; in the manner of opening more especially. In the latter, there is a gradual ascent from the simplest forms of conversation to the language of impassioned intellect,—yet the intellect still remaining the seat of passion: in the former, the invocation is at once made to the imagination and the emotions connected therewith. Hence the movement throughout is the most rapid of all Shakspeare’s plays; and hence also, with the exception of the disgusting passage of the Porter (Act ii. sc. 3), which I dare pledge myself to demonstrate to be an interpolation of the actors, there is not, to the best of my remembrance, a single pun or play on words in the whole drama. I have previously given an answer to the thousand times repeated charge against Shakspeare upon the subject of his punning, and I here merely mention the fact of the absence of any puns in Macbeth, as justifying a candid doubt at least, whether even in these figures of speech and fanciful modifications of language, Shakspeare may not have followed rules and principles that merit and would stand the test of philosophic examination. And hence, also, there is an entire absence of comedy, nay, even of irony and philosophic contemplation in Macbeth,—the play being wholly and purely tragic. For the same cause, there are no reasonings of equivocal morality, which would have required a more leisurely state and a consequently greater activity of mind;—no sophistry of self-delusion,—except only that previously to the dreadful act, Macbeth mistranslates the recoilings and ominous whispers of conscience into prudential and selfish reasonings, and, after the deed done the terrors of remorse into fear from external dangers,— like delirious men who run away from the phantoms of I their own brains, or, raised by terror to rage, stab the real object that is within their reach:—whilst Lady Macbeth merely endeavours to reconcile his and her own sinkings of heart by anticipations of the worst, and an. affected bravado in confronting them. In all the rest, Macbeth’s language is the grave utterance of the very heart, conscience-sick, even to the last faintings of moral death. It is the same in all the other characters. The variety arises from rage, caused ever and anon by disruption of anxious thought, and the quick transition of fear into it.

In Hamlet and Macbeth the scene opens with superstition; but, in each it is not merely different, but opposite. In the first it is connected with the best and holiest feelings; in the second with the shadowy, turbulent, and unsanctified cravings of the individual will. Nor is the purpose the same; in the one the object is to excite, whilst in the other it is to mark a mind already excited. Superstition, of one sort or another, is natural to victorious generals; the instances are too notorious to need mentioning. There is so much of chance in warfare, and such vast events are connected with the acts of a single individual,—the representative, in truth, of the efforts of myriads, and yet to the public and, doubtless, to his own feelings, the aggregate of all,—that the proper temperament for generating or receiving superstitious impressions is naturally produced. Hope, the master element of a commanding genius, meeting with an active and combining intellect, and an imagination of just that degree of vividness which disquiets and impels the soul to try to realize its images, greatly increases the creative power of the mind; and hence the images become a satisfying world of themselves, as is the case in every poet and original philosopher:—but hope fully gratified, and yet, the elementary basis of the passion remaining, becomes fear; and, indeed, the general, who must often feel, even though he may hide it from his own consciousness, bow large a share chance had in his successes, may very naturally be irresolute in a new scene, where he knows that all will depend on his own act and election.

The Weird Sisters are as true a creation of Shakspeare’s, as his Ariel and Caliban,—fates, furies, and materializing witches being the elements. They are wholly different from any representation of witches in the contemporary writers, and yet presented a sufficient external resemblance to the creatures of vulgar prejudice to act immediately on the audience. Their character consists in the imaginative disconnected from the good; they are the shadowy obscure and fearfully anomalous of physical nature, the lawless of human nature,—elemental avengers without sex or kin:

Fair is foul, and foul is fair; Hover thro’ the fog and filthy air.

A. C. Bradley (1851-1935).

[From Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), the most influential of character-based Shakespeare criticism in the 20th century.]

Macbeth, it is probable, was the last-written of the four great tragedies, and immediately preceded Antony and Cleopatra.1 In that play Shakespeare’s final style appears for the first time completely formed, and the transition to this style is much more decidedly visible in Macbeth than in King Lear. Yet in certain respects Macbeth recalls Hamlet rather than Othello or King Lear. In the heroes of both plays the passage from thought to a critical resolution and action is difficult, and excites the keenest interest. In neither play, as in Othello and King Lear, is painful pathos one of the main effects. Evil, again, though it shows in Macbeth a prodigious energy, is not the icy or stony inhumanity of Iago or Goneril; and, as in Hamlet, it is pursued by remorse. Finally, Shakespeare no longer restricts the action to purely human agencies, as in the two preceding tragedies; portents once more fill the heavens, ghosts rise from their graves, an unearthly light flickers about the head of the doomed man. The special popularity of Hamlet and Macbeth is due in part to some of these common characteristics, notably to the fascination of the supernatural, the absence of the spectacle of extreme undeserved suffering, the absence of characters which horrify and repel and yet are destitute of grandeur. The reader who looks unwillingly at Iago gazes at Lady Macbeth in awe, because though she is dreadful she is also sublime. The whole tragedy is sublime.

In this, however, and in other respects, Macbeth makes an impression quite different from that of Hamlet. The dimensions of the principal characters, the rate of movement in the action, the supernatural effect, the style, the versification, are all changed; and they are all changed in much the same manner. In many parts of Macbeth there is in the language a peculiar compression, pregnancy, energy, even violence; the harmonious grace and even Aow, often conspicuous in Hamlet, have almost disappeared. The chief characters, built on a scale at least as large as that of Othello, seem to attain at times an almost superhuman stature. The diction has in places a huge and rugged grandeur, which degenerates here and there into tumidity. The solemn majesty of the royal Ghost in Hamlet, appearing in armour and standing silent in the moonlight, is exchanged for shapes of horror, dimly seen in the murky air or revealed by the glare of the caldron fire in a dark cavern, or for the ghastly face of Banquo badged with blood and staring with blank eyes. The other three tragedies all open with conversations which lead into the action: here the action bursts into wild life amidst the sounds of a thunderstorm and the echoes of a distant battle. It hurries through seven very brief scenes of mounting suspense to a terrible crisis, which is reached, in the murder of Duncan, at the beginning of the Second Act. Pausing a moment and changing its shape, it hastes again with scarcely diminished speed to fresh horrors. And even when the speed of the outward action is slackened, the same effect is continued in another form: we are shown a soul tortured by an agony which admits not a moment’s repose, and rushing in frenzy towards its doom. Macbeth is very much shorter than the other three tragedies, but our experience in traversing it is so crowded and intense that it leaves an impression not of brevity but of speed. It is the most vehement, the most concentrated, perhaps we may say the most tremendous, of the tragedies.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939).

[In this excerpt from Some Character-types Met with in Psycho-analytical Work, 1916, Freud discusses the implications of the Macbeths’ childlessness.]

We may take as an example of a person who collapses on reaching success, after striving for it with single-minded energy, the figure of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth. Beforehand there is no hesitation, no sign of any internal conflict in her, no endeavour but that of overcoming the scruples of her ambitious and yet tender-minded husband. She is ready to sacrifice even her womanliness to her murderous intention, without reflecting on the decisive part which this womanliness must play when the question afterwards arises of preserving the aim of her ambition, which has been attained through a crime.

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thought, unsex me here
… Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers! (I. v. 41)

… I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe below that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this. (I. vii. 54)

One solitary faint stirring of reluctance comes over her before the deed:

… Had he not resembled
My father as he slept, I had done it … (II. Ii. 14)

Then, when she has become Queen through the murder of Duncan, she betrays for a moment something like disappointment, something like disillusionment. We cannot tell why.

.. Nought’s had, all’s spent,
Where our desire is got without content:
‘Tis safer to be that which we destroy,
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy. (III ii 4)

Nevertheless, she holds out. In the banqueting scene which follows on these words, she alone keeps her head, cloaks her husband’s state of confusion and finds a pretext for dismissing the guests. And then she disappears from view. We next see her in the sleep-walking scene in the last Act, fixated to the impressions of the night of the murder. Once again, as then, she seeks to put heart into her husband:

Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account? (V. i. 40)

She hears the knocking at the door, which terrified her husband after the deed. But at the same time she strives to “undo the deed which cannot be undone”. She washes her hands, which are blood-stained and smell of blood, and is conscious of the futility of the attempt. She who had seemed so remorseless seems to have been borne down by remorse. When she dies, Macbeth, who meanwhile has become as inexorable as she had been in the beginning, can only find a brief epitaph for her:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word. (V. v. 17)

And now we ask ourselves what it was that broke this character which had seemed forged from the toughest metal? Is it only disillusionment—the different aspect shown by the accomplished deed— and are we to infer that even in Lady Macbeth an originally gentle and womanly nature had been worked up to a concentration and high tension which could not endure for long, or ought we to seek for signs of a deeper motivation which will make this collapse more humanly intelligible to us?

It seems to me impossible to come to any decision. Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a piéce d’occasion, written for the accession of James, who had hitherto been King of Scotland. The plot was ready-made, and had been handled by other contemporary writers, whose work Shakespeare probably made use of in his customary manner. It offered remarkable analogies to the actual situation. The “virginal” Elizabeth, of whom it was rumoured that she had never been capable of child-bearing and who had once described herself as “a barren stock” in an anguished outcry at the news of James’s birth, was obliged by this very childlessness of hers to make the Scottish king her successor. And he was the son of the Mary Stuart whose execution she, even though reluctantly, had ordered, and who, in spite of the clouding of their relations by political concerns, was nevertheless of her blood and might be called her guest.

The accession of James I was like a demonstration of the curse of unfruitfulness and the blessings of continuous generation. And the action of Shakespeare’s Macbeth is based on this same contrast. The Weird Sisters assured Macbeth that he himself should be king, but to Banquo they promised that his children should succeed to the crown. Macbeth is incensed by this decree of destiny. He is not content with the satisfaction of his own ambition. He wants to found a dynasty— not to have murdered for the benefit of strangers. This point is overlooked if Shakespeare’s play is regarded only as a tragedy of ambition. It is clear that Macbeth cannot live for ever, and thus there is but one way for him to invalidate the part of the prophecy which opposes him— namely, to have children himself who can succeed him. And he seems to expect them from his indomitable wife:

Bring forth men-children only!
For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males … (.I vii. 72)

And equally it is clear that if he is deceived in this expectation he must submit to destiny; otherwise his actions lose all purpose and are transformed into the blind fury of one doomed to destruction, who is resolved to destroy beforehand all that he can reach. We watch Macbeth pass through this development, and at the height of the tragedy we hear Macduff’s shattering cry, which has so often been recognized to be ambiguous and which may perhaps contain the key to the change in Macbeth:

He has no children! (IV iii 216)

There is no doubt that this means: “Only because he is himself childless could he murder my children.” But more may be implied in it, and above all it may lay bare the deepest motive which not only forces Macbeth to go far beyond his own nature, but also touches the hard character of his wife at its only weak point. If one surveys the whole play from the summit marked by these words of Macduff’s, one sees that it is sown with references to the father-children relation. The murder of the kindly Duncan is little else than parricide; in Banquo’s case, Macbeth kills the father while the son escapes him; and in Macduff’s, he kills the children because the father has fled from him. A bloody child, and then a crowned one, are shown him by the witches in the apparition scene; the armed head which is seen earlier is no doubt Macbeth himself. But in the background rises the sinister form of the avenger, Macduff, who is himself an exception to the laws of generation, since he was not born of his mother but ripp’d from her womb.

It would be a perfect example of poetic justice in the manner of talion if the childlessness of Macbeth and the barrenness of his Lady were the punishment for their crimes against the sanctity of generation— if Macbeth could not become a father because he had robbed children of their father and a father of his children, and if Lady Macbeth suffered the unsexing she had demanded of the spirits of murder. I believe Lady Macbeth’s illness, the transformation of her callousness into penitence, could be explained directly as a reaction to her childlessness, by which she is convinced of her impotence against the decrees of nature, and at the same time reminded that it is through her own fault if her crime has been robbed of the better part of its fruits.

Macbeth. If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly: if th’ assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all — here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We’d jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague th’inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends th’ingredience of our poison’d chalice
To our own lips. He’s here in double trust:
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off;
And Pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven’s Cherubins, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind. —I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself
And falls on the other —

Duncan has arrived at the castle, and Macbeth thinks out loud about the proposed murder of the king. This speech, that begins with sibilant s and harsh t sounds, captures the inner qualities of Macbeth’s thinking. Some of the language is difficult, but these difficulty can seem to come from the fact that we are overhearing Macbeth’s inner thoughts rather than a communication meant to be understood by another person. The speech starts with three repetitions of “done,” an important word in the play (along with “do,” “deed,” and other such variations).

Macbeth is here not so sure about what Lady Macbeth asserts so easily a little later, that “what’s done is done.” He would do the murder quickly (without hesitation), if only he were sure that would be the end of it, that the situation was done once the murder was. If only, Macbeth thinks, the assassination (what a whispered, sibilant word!) could trammel (that is catch as in a net), the consequences of the assassination, and thus catch (as a trammel net does) with Duncan’s end (his surcease) Macbeth’s final success (being secure as the new king). The phrase “with his surcease success” is almost intentionally obscure, with what one critic called a sickly rhythm (fitting the “doubleness” theme of the play), but the feeling (again brought out be the whispered “s” sounds) is clear: surcease, success; Duncan’s death, Macbeth’s triumph. This success, Macbeth knows, is in doubt, contingent upon the crucial conditional at the beginning of the speech: “If.”

In a now common phrase Shakespeare seems to have invented, he futilely wishes that the murder might be the “be-all and end-all.” If only it could be, then, Macbeth says, “upon this bank and shoal of time/ We’d jump the life to come.” This too is a problematic passage. First of all, in the only text of Macbeth (the first Folio), “bank and school” of time is written. While some have ingeniously tried to argue this as correct, most scholars accept the 18th century scholar Theobald’s brilliant emendation of “school” to “shoal.” Thus we get a river of time image, for a shoal is a place where a river is shallow, and we see Macbeth upon the bank of the river of time (at a shallow spot), hoping to jump over. Now while “jump the life to come” can suggest skipping over the future consequences of doing the murder, more likely the life to come refers to the after life, which Macbeth is willing to risk, jumping over or ignoring that final life to come in heaven or hell.

Then the speech gets clearer, as Macbeth moves from thinking about final judgment to thinking about “judgment here.” And here clearly justice would suggest that the murderer will be punished with murder. Macbeth recalls his traditional obligations as the King’s subject, relative, and as a host to care for (not kill) his guest. Then Macbeth for the first time explicitly talks about Duncan’s great virtue, which leads him back to theological language, for he sees Duncan’s virtues as like angels with trumpets (a familiar image, from the book of Revelations as well as from much Renaissance painting). And these angelic trumpets will announce the damnation of those who have killed good King Duncan. Then “Pity like a new born babe’ and a high order of angels (cherubim), flying in the wind, will blow (carrying forward the trumpet image) the deed in all eyes, like the wind blows specks of dust into people’s eyes, causing them to cry.

Macbeth’s “Pity as a Babe” image is echoed by Lady Macbeth’s shocking claim later in the scene:

I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn
As you have done to this. (I.vii.54-9)

Here Lady Macbeth shows the ultimate lack of pity, an unwillingness even to spare a baby.

And then Macbeth ends with an image that echoes the jumping the life to come (across a river) that he started with. Now he is a horseman, whose horse is ambition, which he pricks (with his spurs in its side) just as he is trying to stir himself into action—but his ambition jumps too far, and falls on the other…. Lady Macbeth enters and Macbeth doesn’t finish his thought. Probably he was going to say other “side,” echoing the jump the river image from the start. The speech as a whole shows how he sensitively can analyze the negative consequences to come, but is going to leap and fall nonetheless.

Act IV, Scene 1, Lines 44-63

2 Witch. By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes. —[Knocking.
Open, locks,
Whoever knocks!
Enter Macbeth.
Macbeth. How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags!
What is’t you do?
All. A deed without a name.
Macbeth. I conjure you, by that which you profess,
Howe’er you come to know it, answer me:
Though you untie the winds and let them fight
Against the churches; though the yesty waves
Confound and swallow navigation up;
Though bladed corn be lodged and trees blown down;
Though castles topple on their warders’ heads;
Though palaces and pyramids do slope
Their heads to their foundations; though the treasure
Of Nature’s germens tumble all together,
Even till destruction sicken, answer me
To what I ask you.
1 Witch. Speak.
2 Witch. Demand.
3 Witch. We’ll answer.
1 Witch. Say, if thou’dst rather hear it from our mouths,
Or from our masters?
Macbeth. Call ‘em; let me see ‘em.

There are two difficulties here. First of all there is Macbeth’s conjuring, where he professes his willingness to have churches, ships, corn, trees, castles, palaces, and pyramids destroyed. The ultimate sign of how far Macbeth has turned to evil comes in his willingness to let “Nature’s germens” be destroyed. The word “germen” relates to our word germ, not as its primary meaning of “microbe,” but rather as a seed (as in the phrase, “germ of an idea”). Germens are the invisible seeds of all things, the essences of all. Macbeth is thus willing to have the entire universe be destroyed, so long as the witches answer his questions. King Lear in his madness makes a similar pronouncement: “Crack Nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once” (III.ii.8).) Macbeth’s willingness to let everything, even the germens (the building blocks of the world) be destroyed is a shocking indication of his evil.

The other difficulty is that the witches speak of their “masters,” whom Macbeth asks to see. And their masters turn out to be “apparitions,” images that foretell the future: an armed head signifying Macduff (who will kill Macbeth), a bloody child (signifying that Macbeth cannot be killed by any “born” of woman), a crowned child carrying a tree (signifying Birnam wood coming to Dunsinane), and finally a procession of eight Kings (ending with Shakepeare’s current King, James). The witches do not control the future, then; instead the images of the future control them, are their masters. It’s as if the future is there already (behind?) waiting to be summoned into the present by those (like the witches) who know how to summon.

Thunder and lightning. Enter three WITCHES.

1 Witch. When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
2 Witch. When the hurly burly’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won.
3 Witch. That will be ere the set of sun.
1 Witch. Where the place?
2 Witch. Upon the heath.
3 Witch. There to meet with Macbeth.
1 Witch. I come, Graymalkin!
2 Witch. Paddock calls.
3 Witch. Anon.
All. Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air.

This brief but famous first scene, with its ominous mood sets the tone of the play. The witches are obviously familiar with each other, planning when next to meet. We have caught them in media res, in the midst of their current action. What they were doing before the play starts we have no way of knowing. They tell us of a tumultuous battle with the onomatopoetic phrase, “hurly burly.” And clearly they are seeking out Macbeth. The first two witches prepare to exit by announcing they hear call, respectively, a cat (Graymalkin) and a toad (Paddock). These two are traditional witches’ “familiars” (animals that help a witch with her magic).

That the weird women hear their familiars call is then a clue that they are indeed witches, as the text and character list labels them. But the astrologer Simon Forman saw the play in London shortly after it was written (in 1611) and he, without benefit of reading the text, wrote in a notebook that they were “3 women feiries or Nimphes.” (The perspicacity of this particular astrologer might be suggested by the fact that he successfully predicted his own death, but this, as has been pointed out, is not hard to do when you kill yourself.) In any case, Forman didn’t consider that they might be real women, the kind of real women who were sometimes tried and executed for witchcraft. He thought them spiritual beings.

One clue as to their perhaps inhuman quality is revealed in their next appearance, when Banquo and Macbeth meets them, and Banquo points out that they “should be women/And yet your beards forbid me to interpret/That you are so” (I.3). As women with beards, they are unnatural and uncanny.

They conclude this little scene by chanting in unison, and because it is in unison the chant has an especially magical, incantatory quality. They introduce the theme of doubleness to the play (“Fair is foul, and foul is fair”), and suggest thereby that good and evil may be hard to tell apart. And they interestingly refer to hovering through the air, suggesting perhaps that, like traditional folkloric witches, they can fly. This little scene is attention grabbing, with its formulaic taking of turns (1,2,3) and the short strange rhythms of the verse, all suggesting a witches’ ritual, what was often called a Witches’ Sabbath.

Act II, Scene 1, Lines 31-64

Macbeth. Go, bid thy mistress, when my drink is ready,
She strike upon the bell. Get thee to bed.—
Exit servant
Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o’ the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still,
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. There’s no such thing:
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes. Now o’er the one half-world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain’d sleep; witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecat’s off’rings; and wither’d Murder,
Alarum’d by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,
Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives:
Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.
A bell rings.
I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

Here we see the difference between Macbeth’s outer persona, speaking in an everyday tone to his servant, and his inner thoughts, which he shares with the audience is soliloquy as soon as the servant leaves. He is waiting for his wife’s signal that it is time for him to commit the murder, but in the stillness of waiting his imagination takes over, and he has the vision (or hallucination) of a dagger in the air. He takes out his real dagger but says the dagger of his vision looks just as real to him. While he knows this imaginary dagger is from his mind, for Macbeth what is in his mind seems as real as what is in reality. And, amazingly, the vision changes even as Macbeth looks at it. First it starts moving, leading Macbeth to the place where he will commit the murder, then suddenly showing drops (gouts) of blood, which were not there before. Even as he sees this imaginary dagger, he tries to reassure himself, “There’s no such thing.”

Then he reminds himself that this is nighttime (when all seems dead), and sleep is bothered by “wicked dreams.” It is almost as if Macbeth is himself dreaming a wicked dream while still awake. This is the time of night “witchcraft celebrates/Pale Hecat’s off’rings,” he says, bringing to his mind (and the audiences) the role the witches have played in leading him towards this murder. (Hecate, who will appear later in the play as the Goddess of the witches, is pale because she is the moon goddess, Goddess of night and darkness, where the moon is the strongest pale presence).

Then almost allegorically Macbeth imagines “Murder,” set on by his watchkeeper the wolf (often associated with the moon and darkness and also with death because wolves are scavengers or carrion-eaters), moving stealthily (as criminals must). Interestingly Macbeth imagines also Murder moving with “Tarquin’s ravishing strides,” Tarquin being the mythological rapist of Lucrece, who Shakespeare wrote about in his poem “THE Rape of Lucrece,” and who he alludes to in several plays (including Cymberline and Titus Andronicus). Murder moves like a ghost, Macbeth says (and indeed murder makes for ghosts), which leads him to ask that his own strides be unheard even by the earth, for if his footsteps are heard, someone might notice where he is (and prevent the murder). Further, if his footsteps are heard, the time will not be as filled with horror. Silence can make things more frightening (as makers of scary movies know). Finally he ends with a Hamlet-like suggestion that he should stop talking and start acting, that deeds are what count.) At least in the beginning of the play, Macbeth is a lot like Hamlet, a man who likes to think and talk a lot about what he is going to do, but who finally must learn how to do.) Macbeth, as has been suggested before, is full of uses of “do,” “done,” “deed,” etc., but it does take Macbeth a while to talk himself into doing his deed. He has to soliloquize about the murder before he can actually do it. Like an introvert, he has to think first, then act.

Finally the bell rings in the silent night, and Macbeth, wishing Duncan not here this sound that is calling him to his death, leaves the stage in silence.

Act II, Scene 2, Lines 26-56

Macbeth. One cried ‘God bless us!’ and ‘Amen,’ the other,
As they had seen me with these hangman’s hands.
List’ning their fear, I could not say “Amen,”
When they did say ‘God bless us!’
Lady Macbeth. Consider it not so deeply.
Macbeth. But wherefore could not I pronounce ‘Amen’?
I had most need of blessing, and ‘Amen’
Stuck in my throat.
Lady Macbeth. These deeds must not be thought
After these ways: so, it will make us mad.
Macbeth. Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep,’ the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast;—
Lady Macbeth. What do you mean?
Macbeth. Still it cried ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house:
‘Glamis hath murder’d sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more!’
Lady Macbeth. Who was it that thus cried? Why, worthy Thane,
You do unbend your noble strength, to think
So brainsickly of things. Go get some water,
And wash this filthy witness from your hand.—
Why did you bring these daggers from the place?
They must lie there: go, carry them, and smear
The sleepy grooms with blood.
Macbeth. I’ll go no more:
I am afraid to think what I have done;
Look on’t again I dare not.
Lady Macbeth. Infirm of purpose!
Give me the daggers: the sleeping, and the dead,
Are but as pictures; ’tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil. If he do bleed,
I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal,
For it must seem their guilt.

The murder has been done, and Macbeth is disturbed, dwelling on the fact that he could not say “Amen,” when he heard the King’s sons praying, saying “God bless us.” Lady Macbeth suggests simple repression: don’t think about it, or else you’ll go crazy. (The irony of this speech appears later in the play, when it is indeed Lady Macbeth who has gone crazy.)

But Macbeth, as would seem normal, cannot help but think about what he has just done. And just as he had seen an air-borne dagger before the deed, after the deed he heard a voice saying to him, “Sleep no more.” (This voice we must suppose is yet another hallucination, but perhaps this voice and the airborne dagger were not actually created by the witches or the devil and not just by Macbeth’s own troubled mind?)

Macbeth, who will not sleep from now on (nor will his sleepwalking wife), sums up what he is losing, in one of the greatest poetic descriptions of sleep ever written. First Macbeth calls to mind the innocence of sleep—as opposed to the guilt of his own waking mind. Then he uses five short but brilliant metaphors to show that Macbeth knows what he will be missing. Sleep is seen as a knitter putting back together the unraveled sleeve of care; sleep is the death that each day’s life demands as a part of the nature of things; sleep is a bath after hard physical labor; sleep is the second course in nature’s banquet, the first being waking; and in this feast, it is sleep, not waking that provides the chief nourishment.

Lady Macbeth just tells him not to be so “brainsickly,” to just go wash the blood off his hands, and to return the daggers to the scene of the crime, which Macbeth has mistakenly (perhaps in a daze) carried with him. Macbeth, unable to look on what he has “done,” refuses. Lady Macbeth claiming that there is no more reason to fear the dead than the sleeping, says she will do it. Earlier in the scene, she showed a similar naiveté, when she recounted how she left the daggers for Macbeth and considered killing the king herself. She didn’t, she told Macbeth, because the king “resembled/My father as he slept.” Clearly this supposed resemblance suggests something meaningful to the more psychologically sensitive—for example that the King as King is indeed a kind of father to her. She naively thinks she can cover the sleeping attendants with Duncan’s blood and suffer no psychological consequences. Perhaps it is because Macbeth has early on thought about the murder’s psychological consequence (future lack of sleep, for example) that he doesn’t go mad. Lady Macbeth, who thinks that her soul or psyche will not be affected by a murder, who even is foolish enough to claim she could kill a nursing baby, will be the one who goes mad.

Act III, Scene 4, Lines 135-143

Macbeth. I am in blood
Stepp’d in so far, that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er.
Strange things I have in head, that will to hand;
Which must be acted ere they may be scann’d.
Lady Macbeth. You lack the season of all natures, sleep.
Macbeth. Come, we’ll to sleep. My strange and self-abuse
Is the initiate fear that wants hard use:
We are yet but young in deed.

This is the last conversation between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. It is just past the middle of the play, right after the banquet that Macbeth disrupted upon seeing Banquo’s ghost. Macbeth now exhibits a for him surprising calmness and brevity. He employs a powerful metaphor, that of wading in a river of blood. The wading metaphor is apt, for in fact when you are wading a river, once you pass the half-way point, there is no turning back. Macbeth, like the play itself, is past the halfway part and so must go on his bloody way. (This river of blood metaphor also echoes the “bank and shoal of time” and “jump the life to come” images of his Macbeth’s earlier speech, and also brings to mind the traditional image of time as a river.) Lady Macbeth now acknowledges the psychological damage that has been done, pointing out that Macbeth is suffering from his lack of sleep. “Come, we’ll to sleep,” he responds, but there is no suggestion in the play that they are actually able to sleep.

Macbeth concludes, in his last speaking to his wife with words that don’t really seem directed at her. He says that his self-delusion (so most editors translate “self-abuse’), what makes him unable to sleep, is just the fear of a newcomer (to the game of murder), a fear that can be overcome by more such deeds, by more murders. Macbeth has here left his wife behind as she descends into madness and he becomes hardened, no longer plagued by guilt or self-doubt.

Act IV, Scene 1, Lines 1-38

Thunder. Enter the three Witches.

1 Witch. Thrice the brinded cat hath mew’d.
2 Witch. Thrice and once the hedge-pig whined.
3 Witch. Harpier cries “‘Tis time, ’tis time.”
1 Witch. Round about the cauldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw.—
Toad, that under cold stone
Days and nights has thirty-one
Swelter’d venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.
All. Double, double toil and trouble:
Fire burn; and, cauldron, bubble.
2 Witch. Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
All. Double, double toil and trouble:
Fire, burn; and, cauldron, bubble.
3 Witch. Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf;
Witches’ mummy; maw and gulf
Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark;
Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse;
Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips;
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,
For the ingredients of our cauldron.
All. Double, double toil and trouble:
Fire burn; and, cauldron bubble.
2 Witch. Cool it with a baboon’s blood:
Then the charm is firm and good.

This scene contains Shakespeare’s most famous lines, after, perhaps Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”: Double, double toil and trouble/ Fire burn; and, cauldron bubble.” We are treated here to an almost voyeuristic glimpse into the witches’ most secret activity: their magical ceremony. Shakespeare here follows a traditional magical practice in explicitly invoking the magical power found in number. “Three” is the magical number first invoked in the ritual—in western magical tradition, three is the most powerful number, rather than for example “four” as with most Native American tribes. “Thrice” the cat mews and the pig whines, and then the ritual can begin.

And as ancient “black” magical traditions have it (as detailed, for example, in Apuleius’s The Golden Ass), animal parts have magical properties, especially parts taken from animals only recently deceased. The superstitious idea is that such parts still somewhat carry the life energy they used to and so can be used in making a magical potion. As animal parts (lizard’s leg, tooth of wolf, tongue of dog, etc.) have magic, so much more do human parts. Thus into the cauldron they throw a Jew’s liver, a Turk’s nose, a Tartar’s lips, and a baby’s finger. Three of these parts come from explicitly non-Christians (the Jew and presumably two Moslems), which perhaps carry more magic than the presumably “saved” Christian recently dead. And the source of the fourth part (a finger from baby), suggests at the relation between the witches and the Macbeths, for early in the play Macbeth invoked pity as a new born babe, and then Lady Macbeth suggested her wiliness to murder a baby. The pure evil of taking a finger form a baby is perhaps the source of the hoped-for power from the finger in the ritual.

Act V, Scene 5, Lines 16-28

Seyton. The queen, my lord, is dead.
Macbeth. She should have died hereafter:
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

What comes just before Macbeth’s famous “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech is a bit confusing. Why does Macbeth first respond to the news of his wife’s death with, “She should have died hereafter”? Some editors suggest that he means, “She would have died later in any case,” the implication being that all humans die. Or, as other editors suggest, he could be saying that it would have been better for her to die some later time, not just then. This last interpretation fits well with the general theme of “time” in the play. In any case, the line is unusually short for pentameter, only eight instead of ten syllables, which might suggest to the actor takes time for a noticeable pause after “hereafter.” The “word” in Macbeth’s next line is surely Seyton’s use of the word “died.” Macbeth, about to fight a battle doesn’t have time to mourn, and the first two lines of the speech have a cold and not a mournful tone, are not what one would expect of a husband who just learned of his wife’s death.

Then the great speech begins in earnest, with the three tomorrows in a long line (eleven syllables), and a rhythmic repetition suggesting at how time moves. And if you scan this lines for iambs (du DUH), you’ll find that stresses go on the “and,” where some actors do put them, suggesting at an almost boring quality of the inevitable succession of tomorrows that make up time: Tomorrow AND tomorrow AND tomorrow. Fitting with the long slowness of this line, the next line starts with a trochee (DUH duh), stressing “Creeps.” And Macbeth’s words suggest this creeping with the alliterations, “petty pace” and “day to day,” images again echoing the original invocation of an endless string of tomorrows that makes up time, a string that Macbeth sees as petty rather than meaningful. Perhaps the death of his wife has caused him to see the meaninglessness of his life, or his inevitable death. And Macbeth’s opening thought ends by using a sound metaphor (also frequent in Macbeth), suggesting that the petty creep of time goes on to the last “syllable” of recorded time. Perhaps time is measured in syllables, because it is a human construct, something we record (in a way animals don’t). And certainly time envisioned, as ending on a final syllable does not suggest that time is grand, large, or important; if you break a sentence into just its syllables, the sentence can lose some of it meaning. So again, Macbeth suggests at the meaninglessness of time, of human time on earth, of human life.

The next thought moves from “tomorrows” to “yesterdays,” which light fools (humans) the way to death (dusty in reference to the earth/dust where humans are buried, which humans become after decomposition). Then, Macbeth associates with having a light to find the way to death (what he sees life’s journey as), with a traditional and perhaps worldwide metaphor, the association of life with a flame, using the imperative to ask for “the brief candle,” life, to be put out. We can see how he is talking in response to the news about Lady Macbeth about death, and seeing her time, and his, and ours, as just a brief candle. And the candle image of course puts us in mind of Lady Macbeth’s last appearance in the play, where she walked with candle in hand and the doctor said she always had it with her.

From the candle comes the associated idea of a shadow: if life is a candle, it is also a walking shadow (as Lady Macbeth walking with a candle could have produced a shadow.) And shadows are of course insubstantial and impermanent. And then Macbeth uses one of Shakespeare’s favorite metaphors to describe life: it is play, and we are all actors (poor players) who only have our brief time on stage (strutting and fretting) till our play ends, and we die, and are heard no more. (Shakespeare’s audience talked in terms of hearing plays, not seeing them, so the end of the play is not, as it might be to a modern audience, suggested at by the actors being seen no more, but rather by their being heard no more.)

Then again associating from the previous image/idea, Macbeth sees life not as a play, but as a related thing, a tale. But here his pessimism becomes even more explicit. Where some might see the teller of the tale of life to be God, who promises and eventual happy ending (for some) in heaven, here the tale of life is shockingly told be an idiot. Just as humans “strut and fret” in their time on the stage of life, so too do they fill their tales with “sound and fury.” But the meaning of this activity, the meaning of life, is finally “nothing.” Macbeth in a profoundly beautiful soliloquy has put forth a profoundly dark, even nihilistic idea. And this idea fits his time of life, with his wife now dead, he himself about to fight his enemies and possible die, with no religious consolation, Macbeth, despite the power of his language, is left with nothing.

Macbeth is the second shortest of all Shakespeare plays, and the shortest of all the tragedies. It was first published in the First Folio of 1623, after Shakespeare’s death. Many have argued that the play as we know it is a cut version of Shakespeare’s original —perhaps cut by Ben Johnson who was not known to like complicated language such as Macbeth is full of (such as, “multitudinous seas incarnadine,” and “with his surcease, success”). And Simon Forman, who left a diary describing the play as he saw it in 1611, points to a different beginning than we have in our text. There is no way of knowing if the play was originally longer, but the historic success of the play in production does suggest that it works as a drama in the extant short and fast version.

Macbeth’s guilt for being led into murder by the witches.

The text doesn’t make it clear that the witches led Macbeth into murder. They do not say he has to kill Duncan in order to be king, they simply tell him he will be king. But their prediction does force readers to wonder whether Macbeth is simply following what is fated, or whether he has free will. This is an issue philosophers have not settled, nor can a reader of Macbeth. But we see Macbeth and Lady Macbeth deciding on their own to do the murder, so surely we feel they are to blame. And Macbeth has a peculiar psychic bond with the witches, as if they were a part of his own psyche. This bond is made explicit b y Macbeth’s first words in the play, “So foul and fair a day I have not seen,” words that clearly echo the witches’ first chant, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”

Lady Macbeth’s faint

After the discovery of the murder of Duncan, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth sham grief. Then surprisingly, Lady Macbeth faints. The text doesn’t tell us whether she is just pretending to faint or not (and actress would have to decide for herself about this). But if the faint is real, then Lady Macbeth is not as strong as she thinks she is or has pretended to be (which weakness fits someone who eventually goes mad with guilt).

The third murderer

In Act III, Scene 1, Macbeth hires two murderers to kill Banquo and Fleance, but in the murder scene (III.3), a third murderer surprises the other two. He says he has been sent by Macbeth, he shows familiarity with Banquo’s walking habits, he is the first to recognize Banquo, and he is the first to notice (and care) that Banquo’s son Fleance has escaped. Many readers have felt that this murderer is Macbeth himself, coming along in disguise to try to make sure the job is done right. But when the first murderer returns to the castle, Macbeth is there waiting for him, and Macbeth does seem shocked and dismayed to find that while Banquo has been murdered, Fleance has escaped. So clearly the theory that the third murderer is Macbeth is “fantastic,” as one editor puts it. But many readers still have their suspicions, which suspicions fit the “uncanny” quality of the play Macbeth. And some directors have gone so far as to have Macbeth himself act as the third murderer.

Macduff abandonment of his family

Many readers blame Macduff for fleeing to England and thus leaving his wife and children undefended from Macbeth. In his defense, one can only point out that there was no reason (political, practical, or otherwise) for Macbeth to have murdered Macduff’s family, so Macduff doubtless presumed they were safe. Macduff hadn’t yet realized the pure evil in Macbeth, and so can be blamed perhaps only for naiveté.

The authorship of the Hecate scenes

In Act III, Scene 5, the three witches meet with Hecate (Greek Goddess of the underworld), At the end of the scene, Hecate and some spirits sing a long song, presumably with dancing , “Come away, come away.” Hecate joins the three witches again in Act IV, bringing with her three other witches, and this time they sing the song “Black spirits.” The problem here is that both these songs appear in a play by Thomas Middleton, The Witch, and both these songs were probably written by Middleton (not Shakespeare) and added to Macbeth (perhaps to lengthen the play). On this basis, some argue that all of Hecate’s part is a non-Shakespearean interpolation. But she does speak language that works with the play, for example calling Macbeth “a wayward son,” and pointing out to the witches that he “Loves for his own ends, not for you,” that is that Macbeth doesn’t love evil itself, but rather uses evil to get the power he loves. And Hecate also meaningfully points out, “And you all know, security/ Is mortals’ chiefest enemy” (III.v.32-3). These lines sum up Macbeth’s downfall: he couldn’t just wait for the witches’ prophecy to be fulfilled, he had to make himself secure about his future (by killing the King, then Banquo). People sometimes object to singing and dancing in the middle of a tragedy, but there is singing and dancing in many of Shakespeare’s tragedies. And indeed at the end of each play at the Globe theatre, the actors would do a jig, an elaborate dance. This practice is adhered to at the New Globe in London, and while it may seem ridiculous, it is remarkably effective. The audience (and the actors) leave the stage happy, after seeing (as in a recent production of Macbeth at the New Globe) Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, the witches, the whole cast in a merry dance.

The fate of the witches at the end of the play

Shakespeare not infrequently doesn’t tie up all the threads of his story, doesn’t say what has happened to all the characters (most famously with the fool in King Lear). But the reader or audience should notice and wonder about these characters. While Macbeth is killed, the witches (and Hecate) are not. Presumably they still exist after the play, which suggests that Evil can never finally be defeated, although certain evil people can be.

Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as a Couple: The Character of their Marriage

In his marriage with Lady Macbeth, Macbeth shows himself to be a traditional modern man. He is like the 1950’s businessman who moves ahead up the corporate ladder, aided by his loving wife, his partner behind the scenes. At the beginning of the play, actors often play the Macbeths as very much in love, as very sexually attracted to each other. One critic even said that the Macbeths are Shakespeare’s happiest married couple (the only competition are Kate and Petruccio in The Taming of the Shrew).

Some years ago, perhaps it was on April Fool’s day, The Wall Street Journal, published a little article headlined, “Macbeth Lands Top Job in Scotland,” with the subheading, “Wife Said to be Motivating Factor.” The marriage partnership as an institution that works to further the career ambitions of the husband is a feature of the early modern and modern eras, though somewhat less so in what people call our postmodern era. (A charming recent film based on Macbeth, Scotland PA, similarly shows Macbeth and his lady as partners in bed, in crime, and in business. They kill their Duncan in order to steal his idea for a fast food hamburger chain, what turn out to be a wildly successful chain of “Macbeths” burgers and fries.)

Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth does push her husband to move quickly into his future. She tells Macbeth that his letters letting her know of the witches’ prophesy “have transported me beyond/This ignorant present, and I feel now/ The future in an instant.” And this future depends upon murdering the rightful king.

Lady Macbeth knows her husband. Yes, he is a warrior, a military hero who just before the play begins had personally killed the chief rebel against the king by cutting him from the navel all the way up to the jaw (“from the naves to the chops”). He is capable of great violence, but also of great sensitivity. (This combination of seeming opposites makes for an interesting literary character. Tony Soprano is just such a Macbeth-like sensitive tough guy, haunted by dreams, even seeing a psychiatrist—and Macbeth also seeks a kind of psychiatric help for his mad wife, in vain asking a doctor, “Cant thou not minister to a mind diseased?” (V.iii.40)

After reading Macbeth’s letter about the witches’ prophecy, Lady Macbeth talks to her imagined husband in soliloquy, “Yet I do fear thy nature./ It is too full o th’ milk of human kindness/To catch the nearest way” ( I.v.16-18), Lady Macbeth wants them to be the young couple who get ahead in a hurry, who find the nearest way to success. Macbeth is sensitive psychically in that he sees witches and even a ghost (of dead Banquo, which only he sees): he is a kind of spiritual person, for he does see spirits! The hallucinated dagger he sees (“Is this a dagger that I see before me”), and his long and thoughtful soliloquies, show how easily he is drawn into the introverted world of his own thoughts. In some ways he is like Hamlet, so comfortable with thought that he could easily fail to act.

Lady Macbeth knows Macbeth’s sensitive introversion and suggests it indicates an unwelcome feminine side, too much “milk” of human kindness—milk of course being associated with females. Lady Macbeth knows that Macbeth, with his feminine side, is especially vulnerable to suggestions that he is less than a real man. After a long soliloquy Macbeth convinces himself to give up the plan of murdering the king, “That but this blow/Might be the be-all and the end-all” he says to himself, “here/But here, upon this bank and shoal of time/We’d jump the life to come.” (I.vii.4-7). But Macbeth knows the murder will not be the be-all and end all (a phrase apparently coined by Shakespeare), that the deed will have inevitable consequences. So he tells his wife, “We will proceed no further in the business.” (I.vii.31) But Lady Macbeth knows how to work her husband. First she uses language that suggests sexual impotence: “Art thou afeard/To be the same in thine own act and valour,/ As thou art in desire?” (I.vii.39-41) (She is subtly suggesting that if you desire something (be it sexual satisfaction or the kingship) and are unable to act, then you are less than a real man. Then she calls him a “coward,” “letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon’ I would’/ Like the poor cat in the adage” (I.vii.44-45). She is referring to an adage that would have been known to Shakespeare’s audience (who lived in a world full of proverbs): “The cat would eat fish and would not wet her feet.” She attacks his manhood, comparing him to a scared female cat (even today men have their manhood disparaged by being called a “pussy.”)

Macbeth protests, “peace/I dare do all that may become a man/ Who dares do more, is none” (I.vii.45-7). But Lady Macbeth knows how to play this game, and even more explicitly attacks his masculinity. (This not altogether admirable motivational device is occasionally used by women still today.) “When you durst do it,” she says, “Then you were a man/And to be so much more than what you were, you would/Be so much more the man” (I.vii.49-51). She finally she convinces him “to screw [his] courage to the sticking place” (I.vii.61) —a metaphor derived either from tuning a violin or shooting a cross bow.

After killing the king, Macbeth tells his wife “I have done the deed,” and the words “do” “done” and “deed” echo through the play. These words often have a sexual context in Shakespeare’s comedies (as in the phrase “do the deed of darkness”), but for the Macbeths the deed of darkness becomes murder, not sex. And so the play is a tragedy, not a comedy.

Lady Macbeth tries to console Macbeth later on with a powerful truism: “what’s done is done” (III.ii.12). And later, in her madness, she tells herself the same thing: “what’s done cannot be undone” (V.i.64). While what she says is true, in both situations it offers little consolation. At first Lady Macbeth claims, “A little water clears us of the deed” (II.ii.64), but Macbeth suspects differently, saying, “To know my deed were best not know myself.” (II.ii.72). But Macbeth hardens, and after Macbeth’s the commissioned killing of Banquo, he tells his lady, “We are yet but young in deed” (III.iv.143).

For the Macbeths time itself is gradually destroyed, most obviously though their inability to sleep, for sleep is the natural way of defining time, of separating days into days and nights. Thus shortly after the murder of the King, Macbeth heard a voice, his inner voice, cry, “Sleep no more, Macbeth does murder sleep.” (II.ii.34-5). When Macbeth is told his wife is dead, he responds with detachment, “She should have died hereafter/ There would have been time for such a word” (V.v.17-19), which leads him to his great depressed soliloquy, “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.” Once he and his wife were truly a couple. But finally, he cannot even mourn his once beloved wife. She is dead, and his life is just a meaningless succession of tomorrows, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.

Macbeth

Macbeth is, first of all a war hero, the courageous hero of a battle that takes place just before the play begins. A modern psychologist might even speculate that the experience of this violence and death contributes to his subsequent aberrant behavior, that his encounters with the witches and subsequent homicidal actions come about through a kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome. In any event, as a war hero (unlike King Duncan or the King’s sons Malcolm and Donalbain), he epitomizes masculine strength. Macbeth is also a man propelled by ambition. Once the possibility of being king is mentioned, the possibility of he being the man who leads all other men, he (and his wife) can almost think of nothing else.

But Macbeth is also sensitive and unusually imaginative. He is clearly an introvert. While he can act in battle, his natural turn of mind is towards himself, and thus his soliloquies reveal the poetic depths of his imagination. He speaks about a third of the lines in the play, much of them in soliloquy, and so we see how inward his vision is. Once Lady Macbeth is dead, Macbeth is really the only fully developed character on stage, as Shakespeare does not try to individualize or give personalities to Malcolm, Macduff, Banquo, or any of the other characters in the play.

At the beginning of the play, in a human way, Macbeth tries to draw back from murdering the king, and then he even expresses remorse for the deed. He knows his own nature and says that if he has to face what he has done, it is best he not know himself. And so he, over time, tries to repress the sensitive side of his nature. So he hardens, first in killing his friend Banquo because the witches prophesied that Banquo and not Macbeth would have descendents who were kings. But even then his guilt shows in that he is haunted by Banquo’s ghost. But he loses all humanity, becoming a twisted parody of a “real man” when he decides to kill Macduff’s wife and children just because Macduff has joined Duncan’s son Malcolm in England. Before commissioning these murders, he announces his change of heart, saying, “from this moment/ The very firstlings of my heart/ Shall be the firstlings of my hand” (IV.i.47-9). There’s to be no more introspective thought and feeling, no indecision, no guilt for killing Lady Macduff and her babies. Now he is a pure man of action, and so he is unable at the end even to express real grief for the death of his wife.

Macbeth’s character does change during the play. At first he is in conflict and full of self-doubt. Before murdering the king he hallucinates a dagger in the air, such is the power of his imagination. And after the murder, he can no longer sleep. Not being able to sleep is a traditional sign of guilt, so we can’t quite dismiss Macbeth as a psychopath, because a psychopath would not feel guilt for his evil deeds. Similarly, only Macbeth (and the audience) sees Banquo’s ghost. That he sees and is tormented by this ghost shows the power of Macbeth’s imagination and the fact that he cannot escape feelings of guilt. These feelings of guilt are one thing that make us able to sympathize with him, even as we condemn him. So at the beginning of the play Macbeth is not fully evil, as are Iago in Othello, Richard III, or Edmund in King Lear. Macbeth is a character who is gradually drawn into evil, who gradually loses his soul.

And so Macbeth finally embraces evil without self-doubt and, apart from lack of sleep, becomes more sure of himself, no longer full of guilt. This transformation is complete in the final scenes, when Macbeth returns to the battlefield to fight Duncan’s forces (including Macduff). Now Macbeth is full of energy, comfortable to be on the battlefield as he was before the beginning of the play, not thinking and feeling but just fighting, trying to kill and not be killed. He has returned to the one place he is comfortable: the battlefield.

Lady Macbeth

Lady Macbeth is the only other developed character in the play. She primarily is defined in terms of her marriage, and her principle gift is her ability to influence her husband. Perhaps she controls her husband through her beauty and sexual attractiveness, and they do seem very happy to see each other in their first scene together. But Lady Macbeth certainly also controls through her language, making fun of his manhood and emphasizing her own “masculine” strength.

At the beginning she seems more ambitious for Macbeth than he is for himself (acting out the old fashioned role of the woman behind the man). She wants Macbeth to be King so she can be his “dearest partner of greatness” (I.v.11). In the early part of the play, Lady Macbeth does seem to be or at least think herself to be stronger than Macbeth. Thus Macbeth tells her “undaunted mettle should compose/ Nothing but males” (I.vii.74-5). Perhaps the inappropriateness Lady Macbeth seeming more masculine than her husband is shown most vividly by her statement that she would dash the brains out of a baby nursing at her breast rather than break an oath such as Macbeth has made to kill the king. (Her troublesome “masculine” character is perhaps also paralleled by the fact that the three female witches have beards.)

Lady Macbeth is not as introverted or psychologically sophisticated as Macbeth. After she drugs the guards so Macbeth can murder the King, she suggests she could easily have committed the murders herself, saying, “Had he not resembled/ My father as he slept, I had done’t” (II.ii.12-13). The King is symbolically her father, but she takes no time to examine her own imagination (as Macbeth does constantly). After the murder, she counsels Macbeth not to think about it, as if such a repression could easily be accomplished. And when she sees that Macbeth has brought the bloody daggers with him rather than leave them as evidence to implicate the King’s guards as the murderers, she tells him to carry them back. He cannot, so grief stricken is he. But Lady Macbeth takes the daggers, claiming with easy words, “The sleeping, and the dead,/Are but as pictures” (II.ii.52-3. )She returns shortly with bloody hands and almost childlike in her naiveté, says, “A little water clears us of this deed: How easy is it then” (II.ii.66-7).

Her psychological progress over the course of the play is opposite of Macbeth’s and more dramatic. While he succeeds somewhat in repressing his guilt, Lady Macbeth (never conscious of it at the beginning) is overtaken by it and driven mad. A little water does not wash away the blood, and she exhibits the obsessive-compulsive symptom of constantly seeming to wash her hands. Macbeth had been a war hero, and so was somewhat hardened by the sight of blood; also, he dealt with his feelings of guilt early and explicitly, rather than just ignoring or repressing them. Lady Macbeth instead falls apart as a character, descends into memorable madness (her mad scene is one of the great actress moments in Shakespeare), and takes her life. And she takes her life offstage. While the Macbeths once acted the archetype of the power couple, by the time she dies, they have gone their separate ways.

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thy own eye?

Or in other words, do not make fun of another’s imperfections when you are blind to your own. Modern Bibles give: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your eye?” This then allows us to see a certain irony in Demetrius’ comments on the mechanicals’ play at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

DEMETRIUS A mote will turn the balance, which Pyramus, which Thisbe, is the better.

Demetrius is, of course, criticising a poor performance, but his choice of ‘mote’ to describe the actors’ merits suggests that he may have his own problems when it comes to observation. After all, earlier in the play, he has received the “love-juice” in the play, something rather more than a “mote”.

Some similar irony occurs in a famous scene in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Here, almost all the male characters manage to overhear each other’s love-sick wailings, except for Berowne who manages to pour out his heart in solitude and then, taking refuge in a tree, to listen in on everyone else’s. His hypocritical position becomes very clear when he starts talking about motes…

BEROWNE But are you not asham’d? nay, are you not,
All three of you, to be thus much o’ershot?
You found his mote; the king your mote did see;
But I a beam do find in each of three.

This scene in Love’s Labour’s Lost with the association of infatuation and the mote / beam of weakness, leads to a rather more sober use of the word in Shakespeare’s long, tragic poem, The Rape of Lucrece:

Their smoothness, like a goodly champaign plain,
Lays open all the little worms that creep;
In men, as in a rough-grown grove, remain
Cave-keeping evils that obscurely sleep:
Through crystal walls each little mote will peep:
Though men can cover crimes with bold stern looks,
Poor women’s faces are their own faults’ books.

Here, Lucrece describes the position of women as being fatally open, as beings whose every weakness is exposed to men, whilst those men, using violence and “bold stern looks” can – hypocritically – disguise their own, most likely larger, flaws (the wooden beams that the motes of dust imply). This being Shakespeare, the biblical language is combined with traditional allegory of “grove” and “cave” to describe error and danger, as well as intense self-referentence to this literary Lucrece being like a “book”.

My final example is simple, but useful as a conclusion. It comes from Pericles, and is used not describe any kind of hypocritical position, but rather the smallness of the dramatic characters themselves, as small as motes of dust.

GOWER Like motes and shadows see them move awhile;
Your ears unto your eyes I’ll reconcile.

Of course, as my earlier example showed, motes are never far from beams, and the tiny object one sees in another may suggest that one is missing something much larger. When Gower speaks these lines then, as the chorus in Pericles, and uses them to describe dramatic art, are the audience meant to wonder about their own position, the possibility that they too might be actors? All the world’s a scene…

Malcolm— The eldest son of King Duncan, he flees to England after the King’s mysterious murder in Macbeth’s castle. In England he shows his cleverness and fitness for rule by testing Macduff to make sure he is not a Macbeth spy and by suggesting the soldiers disguise their attack by all holding branches cut from Birnam Wood in front of them. He becomes King at the end of the play.

Donalbain— The youngest son of King Duncan, he flees Macbeth castle after his father’s assassination, going to Ireland.

Macbeth— Thane of Cawdor, then Thane of Glamis, then King of Scotland. A war hero and a loving husband who succumbs to temptation and becomes a murderous tyrant in order to be King. He shares his sensitive and introverted thoughts through soliloquy even as he represses his sensitivity so as to become a cold-blooded murderer.

Banquo—A general of the King’s army, Banquo is Macbeth’s partner in battle and shares the experience of the witches. prophecy with him. Banquo, who unlike Macbeth, maintains his morality and loyalty to the King, ends up murdered by Macbeth, returning as a ghost.

Macduff— The Thane of Fife, a Scottish nobleman, he flees Scotland to join Malcolm in England. Macbeth then kills Macduff’s wife and children at their castle in Fife, causing Macduff to promise revenge, which he gets by vanquishing Macbeth.

Lennox—A Scottish nobleman, he becomes more and more sarcastic about Macbeth’s virtue and more and more fearful for Scotland’s fate.

Ross— A Scottish nobleman and cousin of Macduff’s who primarily acts as a messenger in the play.

Menteith— A Scottish nobleman who joins Malcolm and Macduff in fighting against Macbeth.

Angus— A Scottish nobleman, he follows King Duncan at the beginning of the play and fights with Malcolm and Macduff at the end of the play.

Cathness— A Scottish nobleman, he joins Malcolm and Macduff to fight Macbeth. He doesn’t speak.

Fleance—Banquo’s son, he escapes the murderers who kill his father and although his whereabouts are unknown at the end of the play, his survival suggests that his descendants will eventually be Kings.

Siward—Earl of Northumberland and leader of the 10,000 man English forces that fight with Malcolm, he loses his son in the battle.

Young Siward—Siward’s son, he is killed in battle by Macbeth.

Seyton—An attendant to Macbeth, he brings Macbeth his armor and informs him of the death of his wife.

Boy—Macduff’s son, he shows precocious wit and charm in conversation with his mother, then is killed by Macbeth’s hired murderers.

An English Doctor—The doctor brags about how King Edward the Confessor of England can miraculously cure diseases.

A Scottish Doctor—He attends Lady Macbeth and reports on her sleepwalking.

A Soldier (A Captain)—He describes to King Duncan Macbeth’s battle heroism despite bleeding from his own wounds.

A Porter—The doorkeeper at Macbeth’s castle, he has a long perhaps drunken and perhaps funny soliloquy before opening the gates to Macduff and Lenox on the morning of King Duncan’s murder.

An Old Man—With Rosse, he discusses the evil omens associated with the murder of King Duncan.

Lady Macbeth—Macbeth’s wife. She encourages Macbeth to be active in fulfilling the witches’ prophecy by killing Duncan. After the deed, she gradually descends into hallucinatory madness, constantly washing her hands.

Lady Macduff—Wife of Lord Macduff, killed by Macbeth’s hired murderers.

Gentlewoman—Attendants on Lady Macbeth.

Hecate—Classical Goddess of the underworld, she appears as the three witches’ superior.

Three Witches—Either supernatural or in touch with the supernatural, they lead Macbeth to his destruction by showing him the future. They are female, bearded, and evil.

Apparitions—Supernatural visions brought to Macbeth by the witches: an armed head, a bloody child, a child crowned with a tree in hand.

Lords—Members of Macbeth’s court.

Soldiers—They represent Macbeth’s and Malcolm’s armies.

Murderers— Two murderers are hired at Macbeth’s castle, but a third joins them for the murder of Banquo.

Attendants— The retinue following Kings Duncan and Macbeth.

Messengers— Macbeth’s servants.

Our modus operandi is the same as ever: all the instructions are here.

Following on from the first annotation sprint, we will be annotating Hamlet

On Saturday 19th March we’re holding the second Open Shakespeare Annotation Sprint — participate and help change criticism forever! We’ll be getting together online and in-person to collaborate on critically annotating a complete Shakespeare play with all our work being open.

All of Shakespeare’s texts are, of course, in the public domain, and therefore already open. However, most editions of Shakespeare that people actually use (and purchase) are ‘critical’ editions, that is texts together with notes and annotations that explain or analyze the text, and, for these critical editions no open version yet exists. On the 19th March we will continue to change all that!

Using the annotator tool we now have a way to work collaboratively online to add and develop these ‘critical’ additions and the aim of the sprint is to fully annotate one complete play. Anyone can get involved, from lay-Shakespeare-lover to English professor, all you’ll need is a web-browser and an interest in the Bard!

• When: Saturday Mar 19th 2011, 11am-7pm GMT
  • May extend either side depending on location of participants
• Where: online and in-person
  • In-person meet-up details coming soon!
• Planning etherpad: http://literature.okfnpad.org/annotation-sprint
  • Please add your name here if you plan to participate so we can coordinate
  • Facebook event
• Event page: http://www.openshakespeare.org/2011/02/26/announcing-annotation-sprint-ii
• Requirements: a standards-compliant web browser (Firefox or Chrome recommended — not IE)

Using specially-designed annotation software we intend to print an edition of Shakespeare unlike any other, incorporating glosses, textual notes and other information written by anyone able to connect to the website.

Work begins with a full-day annotation sprint on Saturday 19th March, which will take online as well as at in-person meetups. Anyone can organize a meetup and we’re organizing one in Cambridge, England – more details forthcoming (if you’d like to hold your own please just add it to the etherpad linked above).

Annotation Sprint

Overall, a success, but could certainly benefit from an extended period of build-up and publicity.
A radio report on the event can be found here: http://www.camfm.co.uk/player/player.php?epid=754
TCS (The Cambridge Student Newspaper) published an article on us too, available as a pdf here: http://www.tcs.cam.ac.uk/download/TCSVolume12Lent_Issue5.pdf

Software

A new programmer will be working on the annotation tool, aiming to implement tagging.
Other useful features could include: line reference, filtering…

Website

New word of the day logo!

British Library

RP and JHS will be speaking at the British Library on Thursday 24th February. Do get in touch with anything you’d like us to speak about.

Until 11:30am you can: Vote for the play to be annotated

Any feedback, or thoughts? Use the etherpad to leave your thoughts about the event.

How to Participate

Step 0: Check your browser

To participate in the annotation sprint, you will need a recent version of Firefox or Chrome or Safari.

Step One: Login to Open Shakespeare [optional]

[optional]: you don’t need to login — but if you don’t your contributions will be anonymous.

To login you’ll need to obtain an OpenID if you don’t have one. Here’s how:

1. Visit https://www.myopenid.com/

2. Click on the button ‘Sign up for an OpenID’

3. Follow their instructions to create an OpenID by which you will be known when annotating

Now you’ve got an OpenID you can login:

1. Go to our login page

2. Click on the ‘OpenID’ button

3. Copy and paste, or type out your OpenID, which looks like a web address

Step Two: Start Annotating!

1. Go to our works page and click on ‘annotate’ beneath the chosen play

2. All the instructions are written on the side of the page in the ‘Annotation: Howto’ column

The play opens with thunder and lightening, then the entrance of three witches. With incantatory verses, they allude to a recent battle and plan to meet later in the day. One witch claims to hear the call of a cat (“Graymalkin,” presumably her familiar), another the call of a toad (“Paddock,” presumably her familiar), which calls lead all three to depart. Their final words in unison set the scene as foggy and announce a central theme of the play: “Fair is foul and foul is fair.”

Act I, Scene 2

King Duncan of Scotland, together with his two sons, Malcolm and Donalbain, and attendants, hears from a bleeding captain the details of a recent battle against Norwegian forces. The captain tells of Macbeth’s heroism in battle (and also Banquo’s). The captain leaves to have his wounds tended to, and noblemen Ross and Angus enter. Ross tells the King of the Thane of Cawdor’s treasonous support of Norway and of Macbeth’s defeat of Cawdor and the Scottish victory in battle. The King sentences the Thane of Cawdor to death and gives Cawdor’s title to Macbeth.

Act I, Scene 3

The three witches enter to thunder, discussing various of their evil deeds. They describe themselves as “the weird sisters,” and claim their “charm” (the magical verse we have heard) is now ready to have its effect, at which point Macbeth and Banquo enter. The witches greet Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, and King hereafter. Banquo asks them to tell his fortune as well, and is told that while he will not be King his descendents will be. Macbeth, troubled by the prophecies, tells Banquo that they should talk more later.

Act I, Scene 4

Malcolm tells his father King Duncan of the execution of the traitorous Thane of Cawdor. Macbeth and Banquo enter and Duncan thanks them for their battlefield heroism. Duncan announces he is making Malcolm Prince of Cumberland. Macbeth is troubled by this development but says nothing about it.

Act I, Scene 5

At Macbeth’s castle in Inverness, Lady Macbeth reads a letter from her husband telling about the witches’ prophecy. She worries that her husband, though ambitious, is ‘too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness” to do what he needs to do to make himself king. A messenger arrives to tell her the King will be spending the night at the Macbeths’ castle, after which Lady Macbeth wishes to lose her femaleness and replace it with cruelty. Macbeth arrives and Lady Macbeth tells him that the King will not live to leave the castle and that she will take charge of things.

Act I, Scene 6

Lady Macbeth courteously greets the king’s party as it arrives at the castle.

Act I, Scene 7

Macbeth in soliloquy rehearses the various reasons why he should not assassinate his guest the King. Lady Macbeth enters, and Macbeth tells her they will not proceed with the assassination. Lady Macbeth upbraids him for his lack of masculinity, then tells him of her plan to get the King’s guards drunk, then after the King is killed to plant the bloody knives on these same guards, who will then be blamed for the murder. Macbeth is convinced.

Act II, Scene 1

At a court within the castle, sometime after midnight, Banquo and his son Fleance are approached by Macbeth and a servant with a torch. Banquo says that he has dreamt of the weird sisters, but in response Macbeth denies even thinking of them. Banquo, Fleance, and the servant leave, and Macbeth in soliloquy says that he thinks he sees a dagger before him, and soon in his vision he even sees blood stains on this dagger. As he decides to sop talking and start acting he hears a bell, which he takes to be a knell marking King Duncan’s immanent death.

Act II, Scene 2

Lady Macbeth in soliloquy tells how she has drugged the drinks of the king’s now sleeping guards and left their daggers for Macbeth to use. Macbeth enters saying that he has done the deed. Macbeth is upset that one of the grooms in his sleep cried “God bless us,” and the other said “Amen,” but Macbeth found himself unable to say “Amen” as well. Lady Macbeth tells Macbeth not to think so much about these things, but Macbeth goes on to lament that he heard a voice saying that he would no more be able to sleep. Lady Macbeth tells him to go wash his hands while she puts the guards’ daggers (which Macbeth has mistakenly carried with him) back at the murder scene and smears the guards with blood. Lady Macbeth leaves, Macbeth wonders if his hands will ever be clean, then Lady Macbeth reenters, now with bloody hands too. They hear a knocking and leave to wash and put on their nightclothes.

Act II, Scene 3

A porter enters in order to open the gates to those knocking. He pretends to be porter of Hell Gate, admitting various sinners into hell, then he opens to door to Scottish nobles Macduff and Lenox. After some trivial joking, Macbeth enters, and MacDuff leaves to get the King, while Lenox tells Macbeth of the strangeness of the night (with portents such as screams of death). Macduff reenters, excitedly announcing the king’s murder. Macbeth and Lenox run off, Lady Macbeth enters, is told of the murder, and laments that it has happened in her house. Lenox and Macbeth reenter, and Macbeth says he regrets that in his rage he killed the king’s guards/grooms, since the evidence plainly showed they had killed the king. Lady Macbeth faints and is carried out. All except the king’s sons, Malcolm and Donalbain, leave to put on day clothes and arms. The king’s sons, fearing for their own safety, resolve to flee, one to Ireland, one to England.

Act II, Scene 4

Outside the castle an old man and Scottish nobleman Rosse talk about how even though it is by the clock now daytime, nonetheless it is still dark, and how the previous night things were so strange that an owl killed a falcon and Duncan’s horses ate each other. Then Macduff enters to tell them about the king’s murder, how the king’s sons have fled (presumably because they were guilty of the murder) and how Macbeth is to become the new king.

Act III, Scene 1

In the palace, Banquo voices his suspicion of Macbeth. Then Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, and their attendants enter and Macbeth announces a feast in honor of Banquo that evening. Banquo announces that he and his son Fleance are going riding that afternoon but will be back for the feast. All leave, except for Macbeth and a servant, who is sent to bring Macbeth certain men. In soliloquy, Macbeth talks about his fear of Banquo, whose descendents according to the witches will be kings. Two men enter, and Macbeth reminds them of the various harms Banquo has done to them. They agree to kill Banquo and Fleance while they are out riding. Macbeth explains that because he and Banquo have mutual friends he as king cannot be officially involved.

Act III, Scene 2

Lady Macbeth tells Macbeth to stop worrying and looking so worried. Macbeth agrees and hints that he will take care of Banquo and Fleance but not share the details with his wife.

Act III, Scene 3

The two murderers hired by Macbeth are surprised to find a third murder has joined them. They insist Macbeth could have trusted them. Banquo and Fleance enter, with Banquo killed and Fleance escaping (urged by his dying father to seek revenge).

Act III, Scene 4

Back at the palace, a banquet has been prepared. The Macbeths greet their guests, then Macbeth goes to the door to talk to one of the murderers, who informs him that Banquo is indeed dead but that Fleance has escaped. Soon after Macbeth returns to the table, Banquo’s ghost (visible only to Macbeth and the audience) enters and sits in Macbeth’s seat. Macbeth’s guest cannot understand the frenzy Macbeth is suddenly in, but Lady Macbeth makes an excuse, claiming that Macbeth frequently has such spells. In an aside she tells Macbeth to act more like a man, but Macbeth continues to be freaked out by the ghost. The ghost leaves and Macbeth calms himself, excusing his strange sickness to his guests. But then the ghost reenters, and Macbeth freaks out again, telling the ghost that he would not fear it in any other shape at all. Everyone is befuddled, and Lady Macbeth asks them all to leave. Then Macbeth tells Lady Macbeth that the ghost demanded blood. Macbeth comments on how Macduff has not come to Macbeth as he was commanded and then says he will take care of this problem soon, that there are many more bloody actions to come.

Act III, Scene 5

To thunder, the three witches meet Hecate, who criticizes them for aiding Macbeth when Macbeth doesn’t love them for themselves (evil) but for what they promise him. But she assures the witches that she shall entrap Macbeth because of the weakness he has in common with all people: too much desire for security.

Act III, Scene 6

Lenox tells a Lord about the recent events, ironically talking as if Macbeth were innocent. The Lord tells Lennox that the Kings’ son Malcolm and Macduff have fled to the English court, and they both agree that they pray for Scotland’s rescue to come from England.

Act IV, Scene 1

To thunder, over a boiling cauldron, the witches chant an incantation (“Double Double, toil and trouble”) while throwing in magical offerings (newt’s eye, dog’s tongue, etc.). Macbeth enters and demands they answer his questions. The first, an apparition of an armed head, tells Macbeth to beware of Macduff, the Thane of Fife. The second, a bloody child, assures Macbeth that none of woman born can harm him. The third, a crowned child carrying a tree, assures Macbeth he will never be defeated until Birnam Wood comes to Macbeth’s castle at Dunsinane. Macbeth then asks if Banquo’s descendents will ever rule in this kingdom. There appears a succession of eight kings, the last with a mirror in his hand, and Banquo following. The vision vanishes, and Macbeth is not pleased. Lenox enters to tell Macbeth that Macduff has fled to England. Macbeth vows that from now on he will act immediately upon his feelings and thus decides to go attack Macduff’s castle, killing his wife and children.

Act IV, Scene 2

At Macduff’s castle, with Lady Macduff, her son, and the nobleman Ross, Lady Macduff complains about Macduff having left them, but Ross defends Macduff, then leaves. Lady Macduff and her son have an extended charming conversation, in which the son makes several precociously cute remarks. A messenger enters telling Lady Macduff to fly, but she replies that she has nowhere to go. Murderers enter, kill the son and chase Lady Macduff offstage.

Act IV, Scene 3

At the English court, Malcolm asks Macduff why he abandoned his wife and children, and Macduff, insulted, offers to leave if Malcolm really thinks him a villain. Malcolm then proceeds to tell Macduff in detail how he, Malcolm, is actually more evil than Macbeth. Macduff, shocked and dressed to hear Malcolm’s litany of vices, abandons all hope and says good-bye to Malcolm. At this Malcolm knows Macduff is not one of Macbeth’s many spies and insists he himself is indeed a paragon of virtues. A doctor enters and tells how the English King cures “the Evil” (a name for scrofula, a kind of tuberculosis) with his touch. Then Ross enters and after some hesitation tells Macduff that Macbeth has killed Macduff’s wife and children. After showing his grief, Macduff promises revenge.

Act V, Scene 1

A doctor and a gentleman talk about Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking, then Lady Macbeth enters candle in hand, sleepwalking, and continually acting as if she is washing her hands. Her seemingly irrational utterances suggest at the source of her disturbance: “Out, Damned spot!” “The Thane of Fife had a Wife.” The doctor suggests that her problems are more religious than medical.

Act V, Scene 2

Menteith, Cathness, Angus, Lenox, and soldiers are near Dunsinane on their way to Birnam Wood to meet Malcolm, Macduff, Siward, and the allied English forces. They discuss Macbeth evil rule and pledge to cure their country of the disease that Macbeth’s rule represents.

Act V, Scene 3

Macbeth asserts that he is unafraid since Birnam wood could never some to Dunsinane. A servant reports the approach of 10,000 English soldiers, and Macbeth tells him to leave. Macbeth calls for his attendant Seyton to bring him his arms, and then asks a doctor about his patient, Lady Macbeth. Being told that a doctor cannot cure mental problems, Macbeth rejects medicine, wishing only that the doctor might prescribe something to purge the British from the land. Macbeth announces again that he is not afraid, and the doctor wishes he were away from the castle.

Act V, Scene 4

In front of Birnam wood, Malcolm orders his soldiers to cut branches to hold before them in order to camouflage their movements.

Act V, Scene 5

Macbeth is ready for battle when he hears women crying and Seyton enters to tell him that his wife is dead. Macbeth meditates on the meaninglessness of life (“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”), then a messenger enters claiming to have seen Birnam wood moving. Macbeth starts to despair at this bad sign, but resolves to do battle anyway.

Act V, Scene 6

Malcolm gives orders for the soldiers to throw down their ”leafy screens,” and he Macduff, and Siward resolve to do battle.

Act V, Scene 7

In battle, Macbeth kills young Siward, gloats how none born of woman can harm him, and exits. Macduff enters looking for Macbeth. Malcolm and Siward resolve to enter Macbeth’s castle.

Act V, Scene 8

Macbeth rejects the alternative of suicide, then Macduff enters and they fight. Macbeth taunts Macduff, telling him that none born of woman can harm him. Macduff responds by saying he came into the world via the Caesarian section surgical procedure and thus (technically) was not “born.” Macbeth laments the ambiguous way his fortune was told and says he refuses to fight. Macduff then demands Macbeth yield, but Macbeth instead resolves to fight and is killed.

Act V, Scene 9

Malcom, Rosse, old Siward, and others enter discussing the battle; Old Siward expresses thanks that his son has died as a soldier. Macduff enters carrying Macbeth’s head, and they all hail Malcolm as King of Scotland. He makes what were formerly called Thanes into Earls, says that Lady Macbeth actually seems to have killed herself, then invites all to see him crowned King of Scotland at Scone.

The votes are in! We are annotating Hamlet

This weekend we’re holding the first Open Shakespeare Annotation Sprint — participate and help change criticism forever! We’ll be getting together online and in-person to collaborate on critically annotating a complete Shakespeare play with all our work being open.

All of Shakespeare’s texts are, of course, in the public domain, and therefore already open. However, most editions of Shakespeare people actually use (and purchase) are ‘critical’ editions, that is texts together with notes and annotations that explain or analyze the text, and, for these critical editions no open version yet exists. This weekend we’re aiming to change that!

Using the annotator tool we now have a way to work collaboratively online to add and develop these ‘critical’ additions and the aim of the sprint is to fully annotate one complete play. Anyone can get involved, from lay-Shakespeare-lover to English professor, all you’ll need is a web-browser and an interest in Bard, and even if you can’t make it, you can [vote right now on which play we should work on][vote]!

• When: Saturday Feb 5th 2011, 11am-6pm GMT
  • May extend either side depending on location of participants
  • May do a second day on Sunday (depending on coffee and enthusiasm)!
• Where: online and in-person
  • E.g. in-person meetup at University of Cambridge English Faculty
• Planning etherpad: http://literature.okfnpad.org/annotation-sprint
  • Please add your name here if you plan to participate so we can coordinate
  • Facebook event
• Event page: http://openshakespeare.org/2011/02/01/announcing-annotation-sprint
• Requirements: a standards-compliant web browser (Firefox or Chrome recommended — not IE)
  * [Vote for text to annotate (doodle)][vote]

[vote]: http://www.doodle.com/6rghbkbyb5tcin3r
Using specially-designed annotation software we intend to print an edition of Shakespeare unlike any other, incorporating glosses, textual notes and other information written by anyone able to connect to the website.

Work begins with a full-day annotation sprint on Saturday 5th February, which will take online as well as at in-person meetups. Anyone can organize a meetup and we’re organizing one at University of Cambridge English Faculty (if you’d like to hold your own please just add it to the etherpad linked above).

DUCHESS.
O ill-dispersing wind of misery!–
O my accursed womb, the bed of death!
A cockatrice hast thou hatch’d to the world.
(Richard III IV.i.54)

But in fact Gloucester got to the analogy first; ruminating on the living obstacles between himself and the crown in Henry VI, Part III, the would-be King prophesies:

I’ll slay more gazers than the basilisk.
(III.ii.187)

Another Shakespearian villain associated with the mythological serpent – again, somewhat prophetically – is Tarquin in The Rape of Lucrece: the mortal consequences of the rape are anticipated when his lustful gaze is compared to ‘a cockatrice’ dead-killing eye’ (l. 540). But it is especially fitting that Gloucester should bear the comparison twice. ‘Basilisk’ derives from the ancient Greek for ‘king’, the serpent being named, according to Pliny, for the spot on its head resembling a crown (cf. ‘basilisk’, OED 1). Medieval tradition bestowed a more explicitly crown-like comb or crest on the legendary serpent’s head, so that the basilisk really was a giant lizard wearing a crown – Richard III indeed.

‘Basilisk’ was also a type of very large cannon used from the Middle Ages until the sixteenth century (OED 3), so called because, like the legendary serpent, it had a habit of wiping out everything in view (one particularly famous basilisk, now housed at Dover Castle and weighing over two tonnes, is nicknamed ‘Queen Elizabeth’s pocket pistol’). There is mention of a military basilisk in Henry IV, Part I (II.iii.53), but of greater interest, perhaps, is the moment in Henry V when we see the two meanings of the word conflated:

QUEEN ISABEL.
So happy be the issue, brother England,
Of this good day and of this gracious meeting
As we are now glad to behold your eyes;
Your eyes, which hitherto have borne in them
Against the French that met them in their bent
The fatal balls of murdering basilisks.
The venom of such looks, we fairly hope,
Have lost their quality; and that this day
Shall change all griefs and quarrels into love.
(V.ii.12-20)

Lastly, it may be worth noting that Shakespeare resisted any bawdy puns on cockatrice, and made nothing of the association between basilisks, pocket pistols, cannon shot, and monarchical power…

Contributed by Victoria Coldham-Fussell