Shakespeare's First Tetralogy

It's simply not disputed that the second tetralogy (considered in terms of composition, not historical chronology) is stronger than the first, but the first -- Parts 1, 2, and 3 of Henry VI and Richard III -- is not without great merit.  The three parts of Henry VI -- of which Part 1 may actually have been composed last -- are sloppy, sprawling, and glorious.  They are, to my mind, among the most purely entertaining of Shakespeare's plays.  The winner at the end of Part 3 -- only a temporary winner, as the play makes quite clear -- is King Edward of the Yorkist faction, and upon his triumph he sums up the long list of the defeated quite well:

          What valiant foemen, like to autumn's corn
          Have we mown down in tops of all their pride!
          Three dukes of Somerset, threefold renowned
          ... Two Cliffords, as the father and the son;
          And two Northumberlands; two braver men
          Ne'er spurred their coursers at the trumpet's sound.  (5.7.3-9)

This is just a partial list, of course, of defeated Lancastrians -- just the names that have come in multiples.  There's also murdered King Henry and his murdered son, Prince Edward, who is not to be confused with Edward of York (now king), and who may or may not be King Henry's son, anyway, given good Queen Margaret's long-term love for the Duke of Suffolk (who is also dead now).  We have seen multiple Gloucesters, who stand out in sharpest contrast.  Take good but ill-fated Humphrey, brother of the late Henry V and one of the very few characters in this series who can simply, unequivocally be called good.  Then take, by contrast, that other Gloucester: crookback Dickie, who slashes his way to the throne in the last title in the tetralogy, the one that bears his name.

Richard III is often cited as Shakespeare's first great creation, and it is true that he bears a certain charisma.  More and more, he comes to dominate 3 Henry VI, making him inevitably the focus of its sequel.  Is Richard the first likeable slasher in the history of literature?  We know he's evil, but he's got such a charm about him in knowing who he is.  In an odd way, he is honest in his dishonesty, in the sense that he is true to himself.  And he is true to us, to his audience, speaking to us so frankly in his soliloquies, delightfully sharing with us his plans to murder anyone who comes between him and the crown, be they the bearers of his own family's blood or no.  We've seen killers, murderers, rapists, raving warriors before, but Richard might be our first true psychopath in all of literature.  He has no remorse, little feeling, nothing that resembles what we call conscience, until it comes to him in a dream near the very end.  He seems eerily, frighteningly real, nonetheless, frighteningly human.  He's not the bogeyman; rather, his humanity, as limited as it is, is on full display.  Richard is the medieval vice character, but with a depth that makes him more than just a prop or a walking idea.  In that respect, the invention of his character is utterly brilliant.  If Richard II was the poet-king, elegist for a vanquished sense of national unity, Richard III is the actor-king, one who can play any part that it takes to get to the top: the victim, the lover, the loving brother and uncle, the wounded soul, but above all the killer.  His seduction of Lady Anne is masterful, an achievement that would be worthy of even Iago's admiration, and I wonder if perhaps Richard isn't the slicker and more subtle of the two.  Richard's post-nightmare soliloquy in Act 5 is another achievement on Shakespeare's part.  Is Shakespeare telling us that there is not a man alive, no matter how vile, who cannot feel the stab of remorse?  Here we have Richard talking to himself, a fragmented conscience.  This final soliloquy is not directed at us, but rather at himself.  It's a remarkable innovation, with language that is blurred and elliptical to match his state of consciousness.  Richard is never more alive than in this penultimate moment.

In the final analysis, however, Richard is unequivocally evil, but other characters tend to fall into a grayer moral domain -- or at least they weave in and out between the audience's moral censure and the audience's sympathy.  We side first with one character, then with another.  Richard of York (father of Edward, his eldest son who becomes king, and of crookback Richard, younger son but nonetheless the father's namesake) is despicable at times, such as when he contributes to the plot against Humphrey of Gloucester in Part 2, but admirable at other times, and never more so than when he falls victim first to Queen Margaret's scorn in Part 2, and then to her blade.  As 'tis said multiple times in the series, the manner of his dying, the tears he sheds at the news of his youngest son Rutland's death, the wicked way that Queen Margaret and Lord Clifford rub -- literally -- Rutland's blood into him, all of that is enough to bring his own enemies, such as that Northumberland who is present, to tears. 

That is, it will bring any enemies who have human hearts to tears -- Clifford seems to have lost his own heart in revenging his father's death, and Margaret's heart may well be less than fully human.  Queen Margaret is one of Shakespeare's boldest, most audacious women, and famously the cause of the writer's first notoriety -- earning him a mention in Greene's Groats-worth of Wit (1592).  York, in his final moments of defiance before he is slain, effectively sums up her character: "tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" (1.4.140).  As a character who appears in four separate plays, Margaret is distinctive in the Shakespearean canon.  It's hard to find much sympathy for Margaret -- she borders on psychopathic herself -- but for the general fact that this life as queen was not one she chose for herself.  Had her husband made a stronger king, she might not have to go to such lengths she goes to in order to secure his throne and to secure a royal future for her son.  Unlike Queen Elizabeth, who made a battlefield appearance at Tilbury as a motivational gesture, Queen Margaret actually leads her army into battle, wielding a true sword.  One cannot help but be fascinated by her character, whether you can find any cause to admire her or no -- rather, it's simply the idea of it, that a woman could be so remorselessly bad -- and so bold.  In battle, she's more a man than her husband, whose effeminate nature brands him incompetent to rule, and who sits by haplessly, disinclined to join the fray. 

How could that paragon of virtue, King Henry V, have borne such a son, so unfit to govern that he loses the English territories in France, sees the nation divided to its very core, and ultimately loses his own kingship (multiple times)?  Hapless and hopeless, Henry himself makes clear to us throughout the plays that bear his name that he would make a better tender of sheep -- that is, real, live, bleating, wool-bearing sheep -- than he makes tender of the imperial flock.  His weakness is in no small part the cause of the whole bloody debacle here.  Yet he bears a meekness, a mildness, a gentleness of character that sometimes wins us over.  He is too good to be king, perhaps, but he would have made a right honest clergyman.  His death is positively Christ-like.  And he is, after all, the king, for those who still believe in that sort of thing.

The quality of writing throughout this tetralogy varies widely, and most scholars agree that Shakespeare was not likely to have been the sole author of 1 Henry VI, which is particularly inconsistent.  Whether Shakespeare revised someone else's work or collaborated, we cannot know.  I myself am not past the idea that Shakespeare, a newly minted writer at this point, simply had not mastered the art of consistency yet.  I have no doubt that Shakespeare could have written the weakly developed Act Five of 1 Henry VI.  Maybe his boss just said to him, "Hey, kid, I like the material, but this Joan of Arc chick, she's gotta be bad in the end.  Real bad, I mean.  For Chrissakes, you gotta give us a reason to burn her at the stake."  And sure enough, Shakespeare does just that.  We have a conjuration of demons and Joan's own damning self-indictments to assure audiences that she is a witch and no maid by far.  (She tells the English that they cannot burn her at the stake because she is pregnant, though with whose child she cannot offer an answer with any certainty.  They burn her anyway.  They are English, after all.)  What had been a compelling and complex character study deflates in seconds flat. 

Nevertheless, it's all quite entertaining, even Joan's conjuration of demons.  It could give The Tudors a run for its money.  Imagine -- a historical soap opera with the requisite HBO-ready "boobs and blood" that go along with the genre -- but with good dialogue.  I'd pay to see it.

Richard III is sometimes considered Shakespeare's first great work of literature.  True, it's ultimately the best of these plays, but it's also so clearly a continuation of them, almost a Part 4 to the Henry VI plays, which are not without their charms, primarily the fact that they are so brisk and entertaining, but also the sense that they convey a world that rings true politically and characters who generally possess a realistic depth.  Together, these plays constitute a dramatically thrilling but politically demoralizing chapter in British history, a time when the political system had failed and English identity itself was at stake.  True, in the end you can't remember the difference between the first Somerset and the second one, but the sense of movement still sweeps you along.  This is exciting stuff to read.  Whether he wrote it all or not, it's still Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's Tetralogies

Of course, Shakespeare never intended for anyone to read the two tetralogies straight through in chronological order -- he may never have intended anyone to read them at all.  But that doesn't mean it's not a worthwhile exercise to try them out in historical order, from Richard II straight through to Richard III.  The effect of doing so is rather curious, and it presents a compelling insight into what Shakespeare might have meant by his notion of history. 

History, at the time, was a literary art that had little concern for factual detail, and drama had in the eras preceding Shakespeare always been the stuff of moral pageantry.  Combining the two together as Shakespeare did was a new invention being pioneered in his time.  Indeed, Shakespeare has been said to have invented the history play himself, though to argue so might be to slight some of the efforts of his contemporaries.  Certainly, though, the history play was a new thing, and Shakespeare proved himself adept at unlocking its potential.  The result is that the moral certitude that provided the backbone of the medieval morality play was vanquished.  Even that walking vice, Richard of Gloucester, is a curious character, one with dimension, and not the flat emblem at work in plays of past eras.  Enter a world of moral complexity, of something altogether more real and more recognizably human.

As for the notion of history, the insight that Shakespeare seems to offer here is that it moves.  I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln's famous statement, in his Second Inaugural, about the coming of the US Civil War.  After a brief but far-reaching account of the circumstances leading up the war, Lincoln simply states, "And the war came."  Ultimately, the mechanisms and motives of history are lost somewhere in the details, and we are left with a series of moving images attached to a result.  From the perspective of the present, the events of the past always seem inevitable -- because we have no other past to take its place.  Eventually, the names of individuals characters blur and become indistinct, and we are left merely with a sense of the inexorable sweep of it all.

Reading the two tetralogies from start to finish, I realized that the chronological approach captures the sweep of history, but it doesn't make for the dramatic arc that formed as Shakespeare wrote the plays.  To end with the first tetralogy is to see England at its worst -- that is, history at it its worst, because Shakespeare's England is a stand-in for the bigger world and its history.  In the first tetralogy, we see a nation taken to the brink of failure.  That it is redeemed by the first triumph of the Tudor dynasty in the final pages of text does little to dispel the sense of collapse that dominates the series, which shakes the foundations of the notion of kingship and threatens to call the whole thing out as a fiction.  We wonder how the puissant seed of glorious Henry V could produce such a milksop as Henry VI.  If that's the case, then all indeed is vanity. 

To build up, then, to Henry V, to end his long run of history plays on that note of rousing national unity, may seem a little cheap, but it works.  This sequence re-establishes the myth of kingship, restores the political enterprise of the nation, gives the people what they want: a glimmering, shining moment of common purpose and shared glory.  Of course, it was all probably an accident of his career (possibly a result of the fact that there was, purportedly, already a play about Henry V written in the early 1590s), but by disposing of Henry VI early on, Shakespeare freed himself up to end the story on a flourish of triumph.  Revisionist history, as history generally is.

The Other Richard

Richard II is Shakespeare's elegy for an England that once was whole.  It's easy to see why it's not one of the bard's more popular plays: it's mostly talk and little action.  So many gauntlets get thrown down and picked up again with hardly a drop of blood spilled till the end.  As political theatre, though, it's pretty intriguing.  Forget The West Wing and House of Cards; Richard II started all of that.  Perhaps it's time for a revival.

The most interesting thing about King Richard's character is his complete ignorance of what an off-putting and charmless blighter he really is.  Richard is a character without much character, and he never does much to deserve our sympathy.  He doesn't seem to have a sense of identity separate from his title, and when that is taken away from him his only sense of substance comes from bemoaning the loss of what once was his.  He has no substance until he realizes that he is nothing.  In a way, Richard is Shakespeare's ultimate king because he has no other qualities to interfere in the definition of his character -- he is the pure essence of kingship.

Even within the realm of the play, it's hard to tell what's true about Richard and what's not.  Is he really a lecherous debauchee?  In his interactions with his queen, he doesn't come off as one.  He does, however, bear a callous disregard for the interests of anyone lower than he is -- and that includes everyone, of course.  Reckless and profligate he is, a financially imprudent manager of the kingdom, and weak in earning the respect of anyone who has cause to question the wisdom of his decisions.  Richard rules without regard to his subjects, and in the medieval worldview he inhabits, this is simply his prerogative.  Those in the play who do respect him seem to do so because of his office, and this notion they cling to with a fierceness and determination that goes no little distance in helping a modern audience to understand what the notion of kingship meant at a certain point in history.  As Marjorie Garber notes, "the older generation is shown to be impotent and powerless, placing its faith in God and in an old world order" (Shakespeare After All 244).  That old world order is about to vanish.  Henry Bolingbroke -- later King Henry IV -- is shrewder than Richard in this new world order, and yet, ultimately, almost equally hapless, as the same political machinations by which he topples Richard immediately threaten him, too.  Richard II bears witness to nothing less than the invention of politics as we know it, when power ceased to be a right and became instead something that a ruler had to manage, manipulate, and defend from internal threats as well as external threats.  The play reveals kingship itself as a communally agreed-upon fiction, a social construction.  The title is awarded to the one who does the best job of convincing others that he should be king.  When Richard dies, it marks the end of an era in which the privilege of kingship could be taken as a given. 

A paradise England was then, but perhaps only a paradise in retrospect.  Between the lines, the play questions if it really could have been that perfect if it held within it the mechanism of its own downfall and decline by placing such a hollow man on the throne.  Once the illusion of kingly virtue is shattered, it's gone for good, though, and England is left in a precarious place.  Two hundred years later, this was the still precarious England in which Shakespeare found himself.  The language of the play, though, is continuously retrospective, the language of a paradise lost, and the action is completely downward, or perhaps chiastic -- with Richard falling as Bolingbroke rises.  The first elegy of the play is spoken in prophetic form by the dying John of Gaunt, who in the midst of a longer speech declares

          This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle,
          This earth of majesty, ...
          This other Eden, demi-paradise,
          This fortress built by nature for herself
          Against infection and the hand of war,
          ... Is now leased out ....

          That England that was wont to conquer others
          Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
          (2.1.45-72)

Fittingly, given the Eden theme here, much of the casual conversation throughout the play is devoted to gardening, to tending plants and making them bear fruit.  Richard is no Adam, though; whatever fruit he eats imparts little knowledge, and instead of a line of descent he engenders only a downward descent of fortune.  Many of Richard's speeches, increasingly lengthy and increasingly elegiac, would not be out of place coming from exiled Lear's mouth, but Richard, unlike Lear, fails to excite much sympathy. 

What Richard does do right and do well is to elegize.  He elegizes not only his downward descent from kingship but also the wholeness of the England that was, when the office of the king was enough to unite the kingdom.  "Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs," Richard says when he first realizes that all is lost,

          Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
          Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
          Let's choose executors and talk of wills.
          And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
          Save our deposed bodies to the ground?

          For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
          And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
          (3.2.150-155, 160-161)

Richard's elegies are inevitably part harangue, as well.  He's incredulous, outraged, offended; he's histrionic and petulant.  Unlike Lear, who finds himself in a situation that is in some ways analogous, Richard never demonstrates remorse, never demonstrates a glimmer of understanding why he has fallen, only that he has: "for I must nothing be" (4.1.210).  His most dramatic gesture is to smash a mirror in which he sees a reflection of himself, to prove "How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face" (4.1.302).  The action produces a cool and measured rebuke from pragmatic Bolingbroke: "The shadow of your sorrow" -- meaning the sorrow that Richard's imprudent actions have produced -- "hath destroyed / The shadow of your face" (4.1.303-304).  The unresolved irony of Richard's character is that he never once seems to acknowledge that his own weaknesses, his own poor decisions as a ruler, are the cause of his own downfall.  Still, there are glimmers of an active consciousness, most especially in an exceptionally long and powerful speech at the end, which includes these lines:

          Thus play I in one person many people.,
          And none contented.  Sometimes am I king.
          Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar.
          And so I am: then crushing penury
          Persuades me I was better when a king.
          Then am I kinged again, and by and by
          Think that I am unkinged by Bolingbroke
          And straight am nothing.  But whate'er I be,
          Nor I nor any man that but man is
          With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased
          With being nothing.
          (5.5.31-41)

The idea of the self as nothing would be revisited by that other doomed king, the aged Lear, many years later.  The meta-dramatic theme of the king playing a part will also be revisited in Macbeth's most famous soliloquy.  The insights here are powerful and poetic.  They do Richard little good, though, for by the end of the scene he is dead -- not, it is worth noting, without slaying two of his would-be murderers. 

Is this play a history or a tragedy?  The distinction here, as with Richard III, would seem only to place limits on a play that can appeal to traditions in both genres.  The major structural irony of the play is that Richard himself in slain by the same means that set into motion the chain of events leading to his downfall.  Rumor killed Gloucester -- the rumor that Richard wanted him dead, which is the kind of rumor that inspires ambitious men to action -- and the same kind of rumor kills Richard himself.  The irony is not lost on the newly crowned Henry IV, who seems to realize that his own rule will be plagued by dissent and strife.  The difference is that Henry will not deal so weakly with threats to his safety.  One can believe that Henry has the capacity to be a better king, but will the office of kingship allow it in this new political world?  This becomes the matter for the next installment in what scholars call the Henriad, chronologically the first of Shakespeare's two tetralogies in English history, thought the second in composition.

Lion-hearted Richard I may not have boasted a Shakespeare play to his name, but he has plenty else in legend.  Richard III, of course, lives in ignominy -- rightly or wrongly, all parking lot discoveries aside.  Richard II has languished in obscurity for lo these many years.  He's a curious character, after all, though, and worth a second look -- despite the fact that the harder you look, the less there is to see.

Macbeth and the Problem of Evil (Or, Why Does the Pot Call the Cauldron Black?)

In Macbeth, Shakespeare grapples with the problem of evil in a way that is more subtle and careful  -- and also more enigmatic -- than the way other writers approach this theme.  Unlike, say, Paradise Lost, Macbeth makes no attempt to answer our questions about the nature and cause of evil.  That Paradise Lost succeeds as a poem is not a testament to the strength of Milton's theodicy -- in fact, it succeeds despite Milton's theodicy, which is primarily a curiosity to a modern reader, and which has been misinterpreted (perhaps deliberately) by our predecessors, most notably the Romantic poets.  Blake, of course, claimed Milton to be a closet Satanist, "of the devil's party."  This is the kind of pitfall Shakespeare wisely avoided by making his plays character-driven and not idea-driven.  Shakespeare is one of our greatest thinkers, yet he eschewed philosophy of this sort.  He seemed not to like answers, only questions.  Macbeth, then, offers a perfect support for Keats's famous observation about "negative capability" in Shakespeare: "... when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."

If there is an idea or set of ideas behind Shakespeare's explication of evil in Macbeth, it is more like an anticipation of Hannah Arendt's ideas about the banality of evil.  Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are hardly banal in any way.  But the evil that they do emerges from their character, from their human weaknesses.  In Shakespeare, evil is not a character in a morality play, nor a philosopher's caricature of one.  It does not derive from a transcendentally signified source and assert its authority.  The view of evil as a preternatural force, a view that predominated past eras (and is still present in modern times) and which is present in superficial readings of Macbeth, is not valid ultimately in this play, the Weird Sisters notwithstanding.

Why cannot supernatural forces be the cause of evil here?  After all, as one of the witches says, Macbeth is "wicked" -- meaning bewitched.  But if Macbeth is bewitched, it is clearly because he has allowed evil forces to enter into his heart, just as Lady Macbeth does with her "Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts" speech.  The witches merely hold up to Macbeth a mirror of his own secret thoughts.  As A. D. Nuttall observes in Shakespeare the Thinker, Macbeth's start at the witches' prophecy is "the most economical feat of dramaturgy ever ....  Macbeth's start means, 'How do they know that I have already thought about this happening?'" (284).  The supernatural power of the Weird Sisters is in knowing Macbeth, not in controlling him.  In Shakespeare After All, Marjorie Garber notes that

The witches never directly suggest a course of action, nor do they tell Macbeth to murder Duncan.  It is his own “horrible imaginings” and his wife’s prompting that move him in the direction of action. (707)

The witches never say how it is that Macbeth will become king, only that it will happen.  If they have some metaphysical control of him, Shakespeare never says so.  Banquo does nothing to secure the witches' prophecy to him, yet he does eventually "get kings" -- the witches play no role in this but expressing foreknowledge of the fact.  In fact, the witches' only practiced power, despite their talk of curses, seems to be that of prophecy, of knowledge and foresight.  Macbeth is certainly played with by supernatural forces, but his actions are fated only in the classical sense: they are a natural extension of the qualities of character that he possesses and therefore an expression of his own being.  As Heraclitus wrote, "A man's character is his fate."

All this external wrangling aside, let us take it as a given that Macbeth's and Lady Macbeth's actions are evil.  What causes these two to commit themselves to evil actions?  Iago's evil was described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as "motiveless malignity."  The reasons Iago himself gives for his actions are not ultimately very convincing; they are all out of proportion to the evil he inflicts.  Richard III was, perhaps, simply evil by nature, a crookback owned by the devil with only the tiniest gleaming of conscience.  Iago and Richard are fascinating psychological studies, but neither one provokes much sympathy.  But Macbeth and Lady Macbeth do, or at least they should.   In his characteristic fashion (that is, offering a bold claim that has the ring of truth to it, but providing little in the way of evidence), Harold Bloom writes, in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human:

Macbeth suffers intensely from knowing that he does evil, and that he must go on doing ever worse.  Shakespeare rather dreadfully sees to it that we are Macbeth; our identity with him is involuntary but inescapable.  … Macbeth terrifies us partly because that aspect of our own imagination is so frightening …. (517)

Macbeth is an embodiment of our own guilty feelings, amplified.  Never mind that we're not killers nor usurpers.  Because we recognize Macbeth's feelings as legitimately human -- as how we would feel if we had done such deeds -- we cannot fully condemn him.  To do evil is one thing.  To simply be evil, however, is an oversimplification.  Shakespeare, the colossus of the early modern era, lived with one foot in a world that believed in demons and witches and another foot in a world that would create science as we know it, realism, and psychology.  He gives us a Macbeth -- and eventually a Lady Macbeth -- who suffer, who feel guilt, who feel, and the sensitive reader or playgoer can never be fully against such characters.  The Macbeths are tormented, and they are psychologically real.  "Full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife": has anyone on earth ever suffered so much guilt for his own willful wrongdoings?  When the Porter claims to be porter of hell-gate, perhaps this is what his speech unwittingly suggests -- that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth will straightaway begin the torment that they will suffer for their sins. 

The question then remains: what motive does Macbeth have to pursue evil? 

What does not seem to explain Macbeth's actions is a lust for power.  Unlike Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Macbeth spends very little time expressing his desire for "The sweet fruition of an earthly crown" -- and in fact he is keenly aware that he is the possessor of a "fruitless crown."  Macbeth is a perfect antithesis -- parallel but opposite -- to Tamburlaine.  Both are usurpers, yet one, like Ozymandias, lives to bear an imperious frown with which to cow the world and to sneer his cold command, while the other seems not to know what it is at all that he wants from the bargain.  The only thing he seems to wish for is to make his wife happy.

Love itself, then, is one explanation, perhaps the most compelling, for Macbeth's actions.  Bloom notes (again without providing any evidence) that the Macbeths are "profoundly in love with each other" (518).  As evidence, I would offer up Act Three, Scene Two, with its pervasive use of terms of endearment, and with the Macbeths trying their best to gently reassure one another, to soothe each other.  We know that "dearest chuck" is the kind of thing that's humiliating to say in public but fair game in the bedroom.  That love could lead to evil is certainly not unheard of in Shakespeare.  Consider Othello's claim to be "one that loved not wisely but too well."  Could the same be said of the Macbeths?  Macbeth loves his wife well enough to kill for her.  Before killing Duncan, Macbeth resolves to be quit of the matter until Lady Macbeth insults his manliness and prods him into action.  Is this compelled subservience or love?  (Is there a difference, the ghost of Friedrich Nietzsche somewhere asks.)  The news of his wife's death causes Macbeth to launch into the most powerful statement of nihilism in the text, a profound meditation on futility and the nature of time.  In this context, Macbeth's only motive seems to be his love for his wife -- once she is gone, the whole enterprise is utterly bootless. 

Macbeth's overpowering prolepsis may also to some extent serve as cause to his evil deeds.  Macbeth bears perhaps the most powerful imagination in all of Shakespeare, so powerful that it is out of his control.  Macbeth suffers an inability to distinguish between present and future; he has been disjointed from time.  Even in his great soliloquy, upon hearing of the present news of his wife's death, the only terms he has for expressing his reaction are grounded in seemingly irrelevant future modalities: "should" and "would."  His wife is dead, and confronted with a situation that epitomizes the pastness of the past, all Macbeth can think about is the future and time in the abstract.  Like an Abraham Lincoln speech that is almost completely devoid of first-person singular pronouns, Macbeth's reaction here is curiously both personal and impersonal.  Macbeth's "horrible imaginings" mean that he walks about in a kind of fever dream, unable to sleep.  His mind, once again, is full of scorpions.  The hallucinatory power of the play comes even before the murder.  When he sees the bloody dagger, Macbeth surmises, "Mine eyes are made the fools o' th' other senses / Or else worth all the rest."  He seems implicitly to side with the latter judgment.  In writing about another play (Antony and Cleopatra), A. D. Nuttall notes that "Your sturdy empiricist is usually clear that mental images are unreal." Macbeth is clearly not a sturdy empiricist.  Nuttall continues: "... Hume, the arch empiricist, was to discover that the only way he could distinguish percepts from images was by the greater 'vivacity' of the percepts."  In Macbeth's case, the percepts pale to the vivid haunts of his imagination.  The sense connected to the mind's eye is indeed worth all of the others.  Lady Macbeth's description of her husband ("My lord is often thus") when he envisions Banquo's ghost is perhaps a convenient excuse, or perhaps an indication of what we would consider today to be an ongoing psychotic or even schizophrenic condition.  Of course, Shakespeare would never have recognized the condition as such, but as Bloom states, "humankind will never stop catching up to him" -- it's not unimaginable that Shakespeare would be sensitive to such mental states before the rest of us were able to define them. 

Along similar lines, one might wonder if Macbeth is suffering from a clinical condition that has only in recent decades been acknowledged as a serious source of distress for many combat veterans.  Does Macbeth suffer from a pre-modern version of what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder?  In the first image we get of Macbeth (through the Captain's spectacularly vivid speech), we learn that he has "unseamed" his foe "from the nave to th' chops."  The shedding of blood is what Macbeth does best.  We are well aware today of the potentially dissociative effects that combat experience can have on the individual.  To imagine that this is a modern disorder and not one that could afflict someone in  Shakespeare's time (or Macbeth's, or Homer's, for that matter) is to sell humanity short. 

As impossible as it seems, Lady Macbeth's motives are altogether more complicated, more difficult to sound. 

In assaying her motives, though, we should first note that Lady Macbeth is a woman in a man's world.  For comparison, Lady Kaede, the Lady Macbeth-inspired character in Akira Kursosawa's Ran, presents an excellent illustration of a woman at odds in a male-dominated feudal culture.  In Kurosawa's garish technicolor phantasmagoria, Lady Kaede essentially masterminds the downfall of entire clans.  Her motive is revenge.  Shakespeare doesn't give us any such clear motive for Lady Macbeth, but the point can be justly applied.  In order to advance herself in this world, Lady Macbeth takes on the sensibility of a man -- or she tries to, but the "compunctious visitings of nature" come to her eventually despite her best efforts.  To gain power in such a world as the one she lives in, she might use only nefarious means.  She must be unsexed in mind and deed to wield power.  This fact alone fails to generate much sympathy for Lady Macbeth, though, just as Lady Kaede in Ran fails to excite any sympathy -- just fascination.  Ultimately, there must be more to Lady Macbeth's character.

Lady Macbeth's background is poorly defined in the play, but it gives us much potential for speculation.  Holinshed's Lady Macbeth is a widow.  What happened to her husband?  What happened to her children?  Lady Macbeth makes it clear that she has been a mother -- "I have given suck" -- but the only children in the play are Macduff's murdered babes -- a gruesome reminder of Macbeth's own childlessness.  (As Bloom wryly but chillingly notes, "Unable to beget children, Macbeth slaughters them.")  Given the bloody climate of the play's Scotland, we can guess upon the nature of the demise of Lady Macbeth's previous family.  The kind of grief Lady Macbeth might have felt -- from a husband lost, from children lost, from both, perhaps -- might have deranged her.  Shakespeare never mentions a former husband, though, and he deviates from Holinshed in numerous ways.  But the child, whether Macbeth's or another man's, is referred to, and in the most hideous of fashions, when Lady Macbeth claims to her husband,

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 plucked my nipple from his boneless gums
            And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you
            Have done to this.

This most shocking inversion of the stereotypical maternal ethic is Lady Macbeth's boldest speech in the entire play, maybe the boldest speech in all of Shakespeare.  Its intensity is such, I would say, that it could hardly be rhetorical.  If we attempt to understand Lady Macbeth as a fully human figure and not simply a caricature of evil, the question then is what deep psychic wound, what distress or trauma, could provoke such a speech?  Perhaps the answer is right here in the text.  Lady Macbeth has nursed a child, and that child is gone now.  Is the anti-maternal ethic a psychological protection from the anguish that the maternal ethic once provoked in her?  There might be more than gall here; there might be tears as well.  This speech might be Shakespeare's way of offering a brief but compelling insight into Lady Macbeth's character.

Thanks to the poetry of Sylvia Plath and the DSM, we now know that women can and often do suffer serious psychological disorders accompanying motherhood.  Once again, Shakespeare was not a modern clinical psychologist, but he was observant of human nature.  We shouldn't assume that just because there wasn't a label for these conditions the symptoms didn't exist.  As with Macbeth's potential case of schizophrenia or PTSD, Shakespeare might have understood something about this aspect of human experience long before the rest of us caught on.

One of the qualities that makes Shakespeare so great is his understanding that the mind is a complicated terrain and that motive is often mysterious and opaque even to oneself.  He understood the fragmented nature of consciousness.  He understood the nature of long suppressed desires.  Lady Macbeth's character is not so well developed as is her husband's, and so we must necessarily speculate here, but what we do know is that Lady Macbeth, too, eventually suffers for her evil deeds, and this is what humanizes her.  Lady Macbeth's waiting gentlewoman and the doctor both know what she has done, and they pity her even as they are horrified by her.  Perhaps we, too, might view her with the same mixture of pity and fear, the hallmark qualities that tragedy evokes according to Aristotle's famous definition.

In thinking about the Macbeths, I am reminded of the epigraph to Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. It's a quatrain from Francis Villon's "The Ballad of the Hanged Men":

          Brothers, men who live after us,
          Let not your hearts be hardened against us,
          Because, if you have pity for us poor men,
          God will have more mercy toward you.

(Translation by Craig E. Bertelot, from the UC Davis website; Capote notoriously includes only the original French in his epigraph.)

Villon, a criminal himself, offers us the voices of those about to be hanged for their misdeeds.  Evil, depicted rightly, always has a human face, and the perpetrators of evil deeds may indeed be worthy of our sympathy.  The problem of evil, though, in the broader sense, will have to remain unsolved.

Romantic Tragedies for Young and Old

Romeo and Juliet is, of course, Shakespeare's testament to youth and beauty.  The vision of love that it presents is idealistic and pure, doomed to fail because the world is too, too harsh for such purity.  Antony and Cleopatra, by contrast, is a testament to mature love -- or what oft passes for love among grown-ups.  The vision of love that it presents is cynical and desperate, doomed to fail because the individuals who practice it are, through and through, corrupt.  Romeo and Juliet are innocents who live in a fallen world.  Antony and Cleopatra are themselves fallen.  Give me Antony and Cleopatra any day.

The curious and distinctive feature of both plays is the two-fold focus of each, as indicated by the titles.  Othello doesn't share the billing with Desdemona, nor does Macbeth with his Lady Macbeth -- though I suspect that if Lady Macbeth asked him, he would do it.  Hamlet, of course, would be incapable of sharing the spotlight with Ophelia for even an instant.  Romeo isn't Romeo, though, without Juliet, and Antony without Cleopatra is an altogether different sort of fellow -- witness Julius Caesar, whose Antony is fascinating and complex, a great manipulator and (like his later counterpart) something of a cipher, but no fool for love, certainly, and no bacchanal neither.  The Antony of Julius Caesar is unquestionably Roman: rational, pragmatic, masculine, with a compelling sense of duty.  The Antony of Antony and Cleopatra is only partly so -- and only when he is outside of Egypt or outside of the influence of Egypt.  He has had an encounter with the non-Roman world, with the luxurious East, and with femininity.  He has been converted, to some extent at least.  In Egypt, instead of restrained Roman stoicism and self-control, he encounters, in almost mystical fashion, license and passion.  He seems to have been unprepared for this experience.  He goes native, almost a prefiguration of Kurtz but in the romantic sphere. 

Antony and Cleopatra is a notoriously messy play, a long one, to boot, with entanglements, reversals, changes of heart.  What does love mean in such a context?  The goal, I believe, in most of Shakespeare's plays is to express depth of feeling, but in the first three acts (and part of the fourth) here, that goal is distant and seems of little interest to the playwright.  The romance here is hardly romanticized.  The modern corollary of Antony and Cleopatra is the punk rock spectacle of Sid and Nancy or the junkie dependency of Drugstore Cowboy.  Antony and his famous lover are strung out on each other, drained by each other, narcotized.  Of course, Sid and Nancy take it deeper down into the gutter, but like them Antony and Cleopatra are outrageous, out of bounds, creatures of the night who patrol the streets for entertainment.  They don't create their own rules -- rather, they defy rules of any sort.  A. D. Nuttall called this relationship "all splendor, all style."  There's no substance here, which is precisely the point.  Clean-cut Antony goes to Egypt and gets his hair spiked.  Someone should tell Sofia Coppola to direct. 

Love between Antony and Cleopatra is inconstant and inconsistent, proceeding in fits and starts, entangled in politics and practicalities.  For Antony, there is always the pull of Rome.  Romeo would have allowed no compromise to enter into his love.  Antony, by comparison, practices a kind of romantic realpolitik, and his cynicism is most apparent in his choice of marriage partners: Fulvia and then Octavia, but never Cleopatra.  To the marriage of true minds, however, he admits no impediments, so long as that marriage remains of the mind -- and of the body -- but nothing on paper.  In The Tempest, Prospero gives us marriage as a means to an end, but at least he had the decency to see to it that his daughter fell in love with the man he would have her marry.  Antony and Cleopatra seems altogether to condemn marriage as a sham.  Comedy itself is indicted, then, and tragedy reigns.  Shakespeare has never been more cynical on the subject of marriage.

And to compare Juliet and Cleopatra -- those two at opposite ends of the virgin-whore dynamic.  The sweetness of Juliet's virginity proves the intimacy of her connection to Romeo, her only lover for all eternity.  Cleopatra has been around the block a few times, of course, most notably with Antony's former boss, the mighty Julius, but she is no less the goddess, and the widespread awe and admiration her beauty and majesty inspire is a wonder to all:

         Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
         Her infinite variety.  Other women cloy
         The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
         Where most she satisfies.  For vilest things
         Become themselves in her, that the holy priests
         Bless her where she is riggish.  (2.2.276-281)

So says Enobarbus.  He speaks for Antony, since Antony himself characteristically has few words to speak his own state.  As for Cleopatra, lips serve consistently as a metonym for all aspects of her self: her words, her body, her kisses -- and therefore her sexuality, her femininity.  "Eternity was in our lips and eyes," she says of her relationship with Antony in Act 1, Scene 3, beginning her elegy almost from the very start.  What Cleopatra comes to represent is mystical and non-Western cult of femininity.  She represents perhaps Shakespeare's most daring venture into the non-Western world.  Antony is unmanned by her, but it is also true that her suicide is (asps aside) in the grand and dignified Roman style.  She has learned as well as she has taught.

The goal in the earlier acts of the play seems to be something different from the Shakespearean standard, which I have characterized as depth of feeling.  Instead, we have a character study and an examination of realism in human behavior.  Along these lines, Antony and Cleopatra is uniquely successful in the Shakespearean canon.  It is precisely when the affair is nearly over that it turns from a fractured event into the stuff of myth.  Initially, it's a self-mythologized tale, with Cleopatra herself elegizing both Antony and her love for him, and it matters little that the words that she uses only partly match up to the reality of what we saw happening in earlier scenes.  It's a convincing job she does of telling what it all means, and even Caesar falls for it, and most audiences will, too, I suspect.  No one could argue that Antony and Cleopatra is Shakespeare's best play, but it is a stand-out in some ways, not least of which is the audacity with which Cleopatra steals the show in Act 5.

Of course, Shakespeare can give us other visions of love among the grown-ups.  There are Egeon and Emilia from The Comedy of Errors, at the beginning of the bard's career, and Leontes and Hermione from The Winter's Tale, at the other end.  But those are the loves of comedy and romance.  The latter relationship is certainly fraught with the heavy weight of Leontes' unwarranted mistrust and jealousy, but it is true in the end and achieves a kind of renewed purity through the couple's rediscovery of each other.  The Winter's Tale is a fantasy, Shakespeare at his most optimistic, less concerned with a convincing vision of reality than with a fanciful vision of how things ought to be.

Akira Kurosawa's Ran

The title promises chaos.  It does not fail to deliver.

Ran cobbles together elements of King Lear and Macbeth to spectacular effect, proving the universality of Shakespeare's vision.  At the same time, Ran is wholly original, the work of an auteur whose vision had grown and changed as he entered the final phases of his career.  Unlike the aging Lord Hidetora, however, Kurosawa does not lose his finely wrought command of the situation.  We have, I suspect, inspiration from traditional Noh theatre in the sometimes elaborate formality of the the acting.  This formality is offset, though, by scenes that unfold more naturally, scenes in which human actions take place with a kind of inevitability as far beyond our ken or control as the clouds that brood dramatically but affectlessly over the battlefields and heaths of the film.  The director himself, after decades of staying true to black and white, takes on the primary color palette in its most fundamental form, catching up on technicolor with a vengeance.  Besides the red, yellow, and blue of the flags of the Ichimonji clan, we have blood that washes over the whole film in streams, rivulets, flood beds that usually run dry but not now.  Blood doesn't just flow here; it spurts, jets, sprays across the frame.  The stylized unreality of it is pointed, deliberate.  Thus there is another element, that of horror.  The pale, ghastly flesh of Lord Hidetora as he confronts the reality of his sons' mistreatment of him reflects the nightmarish quality of his experience.  The film is heavily stylized but also bears elements of realism.  We are watching something foreign but at the same time Shakespearean in its universality.  The experience is, I imagine, not so different from that of sitting in the Elizabethan theatre.

Unlike King Lear, though, we have no Edgar to emerge victorious and restore a new order even as the protagonist, the exemplar of the old order, dies.  Ran is much more nihilistic than Shakespeare's bleakest.  In keeping with its Elizabethan antecedent, Ran does at the end briefly give us a sense that family bonds can be meaningful, after all, but then snatches that sentiment away from us.  There is no justice in the universe, says King Lear, unless we impose it upon the world ourselves through our wills.  Edgar will do so in Lear.  Ran instead leaves us with a parting image of the gods' blindness and impotence.  The only order that ever was in this world was written in blood, and this is the inevitable result of it. 

I had the great fortune of viewing this film once on the big screen at AFI's Silver Theatre in Maryland. The colors were vivid, terrifying, magnificent.  There is a powerful but brutal beauty to this film, the kind that only a master at his peak can produce.

Hamlet and Modernity

Harold Bloom called Hamlet the most modern of Shakespeare's plays.  It is, but it is distinctive also for its hero's ultimate disavowal of modernity.

Hamlet is a modern prince, not a medieval one, a university scholar and a skeptic, one who dares to question religious authority in his private thoughts, in which he questions what happens to us after death instead of taking it as a given that either heaven or hell is at stake.  Hamlet looks back to Stoicism, but to do so is in context an Early Modern gesture.  To espouse classical ideas in a classical era is not modern; to embrace them in the Renaissance is.  Hamlet is charged with the task of the medieval warrior -- to enact vengeance on his father's murderer -- and it is no surprise that the sweet prince balks at the command.

Hamlet's father, by contrast, is a medieval warrior, right out of Icelandic saga, as Bloom puts it.  He's Beowulf, more or less, too busy making war to make love or any other nicety.  (No wonder then that slick-talker Claudius moves in on the Queen.)  The play itself spans historical eras.  At the beginning we have the Ghost, banished to Purgatory and thus a Catholic presence prefiguring the Reformation.  As the Ghost generally recedes we proceed through the Protestant era and by the end find ourselves in a post-Christian landscape, one in which the Prince, forced to choose between a Stoicism that condones suicide in certain conditions and a Christianity that forbids it as mortal sin, embraces parts of each philosophy but neither one entirely.  Hamlet makes a separate peace with fate, on his own terms. 

Shakespeare is perhaps the Colossus of the Early Modern era.  He has one foot solidly in the old world of antiquity, one in the modern era.  It is a curious choice then that, by finally enacting revenge against Claudius, Hamlet ultimately chooses the warrior code of his father and lands himself firmly on the side of traditions that were perhaps already in the process of becoming obsolete.  Modern he may have been, but Shakespeare, likewise, ultimately found his truest values in the classical tradition.

The Marriage of True Minds

Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 offers its truest vision of love if it is read as a poem not of the consummation of love, but rather of a love that could never be consummated -- at least not in any officially sanctioned way.  The poem is typically interpreted as a celebratory one -- a celebration of marriage and true love -- and I once heard a distinguished professor refer to it as just so much romantic fluff, unconvincing stuff that Shakespeare didn't really have his heart invested in -- something to keep himself busy in a plague year, I suppose.  In fact, it was this comment (overheard at tea in the Folger Shakespeare Library in the summer of 2006) that set me to thinking about the poem.

The meaning of Sonnet 116, as I see it, hinges on the allusion to the Book of Common Prayer that is framed in the opening lines:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments ....

Here's the text from the Solemnization of Matrimony, the version from 1559 that Shakespeare would have known, that would have been read (and addressed to him) at his own wedding in 1582:

[Priest:] I require and charge you (as you will answer at the dreadful day of judgment, when all the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed) that if either of you do know any impediment why ye may not be lawfully joined together in matrimony, that ye confess it. For be ye well assured, that so many as be coupled together otherwise than God's word doth allow, are not joined together by God, neither is their matrimony lawful.

The language remains pretty similar even in the 1928 version of the Book of Common Prayer.  The Alternate Service Book (1980), however, offers this much milder version:

If any of you know cause or just impediment why these two persons should not be joined together in Holy Matrimony, you are to declare it.

There is the faint ring of tradition here in "impediment," though "just" is a curious choice that pretends to nod in the direction of justice, but in fact works in the opposite direction by saying let's not quibble with frivolous or irrelevant claims here.  In contemporary civil services, however, this still friendlier version is more common:

If any one can show just cause why they may not be lawfully joined together, let them speak now or forever hold their peace.

The contemporary versions offer us a mere formality, or an excellent occasion for bringing on the climax of a romantic comedy.  The purpose seems to be rhetorical, to give heft to the service lest it become too light a matter.  There is little in it to bring a dissembling bigamist to his knees out of fear, which seems to me to be a likely purpose of the original -- a valid purpose at a time when, for instance, you might have a successful young playwright abiding in the town of London while his lawful wife lives far away in a small country town and a second marriage might be one of many temptations to occur to him.  Even the Alternative Service Book version of the impediment warning is only mildly insistent on any notion of religiosity through its inclusion of the easy-to-overlook "Holy."  My point is that we don't take marriage as seriously as we used to, and we might not be as attuned to the dire seriousness of purpose invested in the 16th-century solemnization of the event.

Of course, the newer versions of the "impediment" text also present a sharp contrast to the original in that they address the congregation gathered here today and not the bride and groom themselves.  What was an intense charge levelled on man and woman is now a mild injunction to the crowd without any specified consequence.  And the consequence, in Shakespeare's time, was indeed severe: a thumbs-down on Judgment Day, at what Shakespeare calls in line 12 of the poem "the edge of doom."  We've seen the images painted onto the wall of the chancel arch in the Chapel of the Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon.  We know what that involves.

So, the poet is saying here that his love will last till Judgment Day.  But what kind of love is it?  How exactly does the poem riff on the original text? 

In the interpretation of the poem that I am proposing, the key phrase is "of true minds."  Implicit with these words is the sense that, in this case, a marriage of any other sort between the two relevant individuals does indeed involve impediments.  The only marriage without impediment here is of the mind -- that is, a figurative marriage and not one of the sort that can physically be consummated.  The speaker's words become all the more bold -- and more sensible -- if we see the presence of these implied impediments to an official marriage sanctioned by both church and state.  Here we have matter for the "alteration" and "remove" of lines 3 and 4, respectively; the poet will not yield to the fact that he will always be separated from the person addressed in the poem.  Thus the poem carries a broader and more purposeful range of emotion, and what has seemed to so many a straightforward love poem finds proper grounding in the tradition of courtly love, with its goal being the expression of a love that can never be reciprocated, the love of the unattainable object of desire.  The generic conventions of the sonnet supports this reading. 

So, the speaker's love is as sturdy as the North Star, immune to the ravages of time.  Comedy ends in marriage, tragedy begins with it, but the perfect love is held forever in stasis, and it endures despite the fact that it expects nothing in return.  (Keats seems to have understood this, as he demonstrates when depicting his lovers on the Grecian urn.)

Biographical readings of poetry oft prove distracting, especially when the poet is Shakespeare, but this poem seems to invite such speculation. What if Shakespeare loved a lady not his wife? He could never marry her. What if Shakespeare were gay? That situation would perhaps present the very pinnacle of unrequited love in his time. These speculations are impossible to support in any convincing fashion, and it's entirely possible that the poem was written merely as an exercise -- something to do during a plague year -- but these conjectures do illustrate some of the possible meanings of the poem. Then again, it's entirely possible that I am wrong here, and the man did simply write the poem for his wife, who was indeed at some significant remove. But still, I can't get past "true minds" and the sonnet's tradition of speaking to unrequited love.  In the end, with the sonnet, , every instance of which is an implicit allusion to every other of its type, genre prevails.

Further Thoughts on Hamlet

I.  The Noble Mind.

     Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
     The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune .... (3.1.57)

     Take these again, for to the noble mind
     Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. (3.1.100-101)

The italics are mine, of course.  The first quotation is from Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy, the second from Ophelia's discussion with Hamlet immediately following the soliloquy.  The repetition of phrasing is startling, and coincidence seems unlikely, given that we are dealing with the one writer who boasts the broadest vocabulary in the English-language tradition, a writer who seems to have taken great pains to craft most carefully every expression his characters utter, even if the texts we read from offer only a corrupt rendition of those expressions. 

Ophelia's speech would bear scanning, in its context.  Hamlet's words to Ophelia immediately preceding this speech are cold, cynical even ("No, not I, / I never gave you aught" -- 3.1.95-96).  His words to her immediately after it, however, are stinging, vitriolic, fraught unmistakeably with violent intent.  Is it possible that this speech -- this phrase, noble mind -- is a trigger to Hamlet, a sign that he has been betrayed? 

Who hears Hamlet's soliloquy, besides the prince himself and the audience?  Do the King and Claudius, onstage but withdrawn, hear him, as some productions would have it?  (One imagines them lurking up on the balcony of The Globe.)  Does Ophelia, who is supposed to be standing by with her nose in a book?  Imagine, if you will, a Hamlet who draws aside an arras at the end of his soliloquy, only to find the fair Ophelia there, and her nervous reply afterward.  A possibility, perhaps. 

Or is it that when Hamlet hears these words that so closely echo his own just-recently uttered sentiments, he knows then that she was there, and why she was there, thus provoking him to question her honesty.  The question -- "Ha, ha!  Are you honest?" (3.1.103) -- not only doubts Ophelia's chastity but also her loyalty, her trustfulness, and it echoes Hamlet's mocking, method-in-madness comments to Polonius in 2.2.174-186, which suggest a suspicion that Polonius will use his daughter as a tool in his campaign of espionage.  To Hamlet's mind, both Polonius and Ophelia are part of the apparatus that is against him.  Hamlet knows that Ophelia has, from his perspective, betrayed him. Perhaps, we reason, Ophelia is merely playing the obedient daughter here, but it matters not to Hamlet.  Perhaps father and daughter both are just following orders -- the councilor his king, the daughter her father -- but Hamlet judges guilt by people's actions and not by their intent (cf. the hapless Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the seemingly harsh sentence Hamlet imposes upon them).

Ophelia's post-mortem on the encounter -- "O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!" (3.1.150) -- aptly ties it all together thematically, but it misses the mark in judging the quality of Hamlet's mind,  Perhaps his mind is one that works all too well.

II.  The Process of Encountering Death.

(As foregrounding for this idea, it is worth considering Harold Bloom's claim, in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, that Yorick served as the young Prince Hamlet's surrogate father and was, perhaps, the inspiration for Hamlet's wit.)

Hamlet begins with one father figure and ends with another. There is at the beginning The Ghost, and at the end Yorick. We start with Hamlet's namesake, end with his father's fool. That Hamlet himself throughout the play resembles the latter rather than the former is the true source of the play's tension. It is only when Hamlet encounters Yorick's remains, though, that he is able to get past the anxiety of Yorick's influence and become his true father's son.

Each figure is a revenant, and each figure is an emblem of one facet of death: Old Hamlet being the afterlife of the soul, Yorick being a truer, more tangible presence: the aftermath of the body. One cannot be touched, the other can be caressed or tossed, kissed, smelt, and eventually put back down into the dirt.

This encounter with Yorick's mortal remains is a significant further step in a process that begins perhaps with Polonius' death and Hamlet's subsequent meditation upon the dead man's corpse, as though by studying the product of death -- a body devoid of its animating principle -- he could come closer to knowing its meaning and thereby settle his lingering questions about the nature of death and spur himself on to further action.  Setting aside the encounter with Prince Fortinbras, certainly an inspiration for Hamlet's eventually springing into action mode in Act V, this event is a turning point for Hamlet.  His leaping into Ophelia's grave is the culmination of the process, the last such event before we see a changed Hamlet in the final acts of the play, one who is ready to "let be" and face what he seems preternaturally to know will be his own imminent death.

Technically, when he handles Yorick's skull Hamlet is expressing disgust at the skull as a kind of metonym for all human remains – he is disgusted at the material dimensions of death and the decay of the human body.  What what can we make of the fact that we see the whole in terms of the Ghost – armed for battle, head to toe – while we see only a part with Yorick – his bare skull? Which provides the more accurate portrayal of death? The Ghost presents the spirit, while the skull presents the material reality of death.  Perhaps, then, the vision of death presented by Act I (that the soul lives on) is overruled by the the vision of death presented in Act V (that death is a kind of material fragmentation.  Parts of you enter the guts of a worm and so forth, while other parts linger in the dirt and are subsequently mistreated by the sexton some years later -- but the soul is nowhere to be found here.  Death cannot be comprehended in its entirely, with all life's armor still intact, but only in bits and pieces, missing a jawbone.  Just like the monsters in Beowulf can only be depicted through synecdoche, the reality of death in Hamlet can only be understood through its parts.

Earlier, Hamlet presents death as the “undiscovered country.”  Has he been there, now?  Has he explored that country now that he has held Yorick’s skull in his hands and leapt into his lover's grave? Do these experiences make death real to him?  The graveyard here is the very landscape of death itself, and it is worthy to note that 5.1 is one of only two scenes that take place outside the walls of Elsinore.

III. The Symmetrical Structure of the Play

In Acts I and V, Hamlet encounters his father figures, both as revenants.  It is ironic, then, that his encounter with the war-like Ghost inspires Hamlet to play the fool -- the man of wit and words -- and that the encounter with the fool inspires Hamlet to put foolish things away and to become the war-like man of action who will not only best his opponent, Laertes, in swordsmanship but also finally gain his revenge against his father's murderer.  It is also appropriate that, in keeping with the medieval tradition of castrating fools so that they are harmless around the women of the house and so that their jibes do not sting so much, Hamlet in fool mode is figuratively a castrato, impotent in his ability to maintain a healthy relationship with his lover and impotent as well in his ability to stir himself to action.  It is also worth noting that we can extrapolate backward from the beginning of Act I to King Hamlet's funeral, and that we can extrapolate forward from the end of Act V to Prince Hamlet's.

In Acts II and IV, Hamlet encounters his foils.  The first is the Player, a man of words and of gestures that typically bear no consequences in real life.  The second is Fortinbras, the consummate man of action of his generation -- as Hamlet's father was to his own.

Act III, then is the emotional core of the play: the famous "to be or not to be" soliloquy and the play-within-the-play.

Shakespeare's Coriolanus

In ways, Coriolanus is an underrated tragedy.  It's easy to see, however, why it's not so famous as some of the others in the Shakespearean canon.

What Coriolanus lacks, as critics have noted, is the interiority of Shakespeare's most famous works.  In the later years of his career, Shakespeare made at least a partial movement away from the innovations that he pioneered in his earlier plays, which culminated in the intense interiority of Hamlet.  Late plays such as The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline shy away from a developed sense of interiority, but others such as The Tempest at least partly embrace it in a way more in keeping with the old (new) fashion.  After reading Coriolanus, what really strikes me about Shakespeare is that he must have been interested in exploring different ways of revolutioning our understanding of depth of character; he offers us unprecedented insights into the internal lives of his characters not only through soliloquies and other revealing speech acts but through other experimental methods as well.  He looked at character from every angle, and indeed some plays, including both Hamlet and Coriolanus, can almost seem like exercises in methods of character development.  In Coriolanus, Shakespeare develops his hero's character by examination of act and externally-directed gesture.  Coriolanus gives us another way of demonstrating character, the opposite of the method Hamlet uses.  Coriolanus' character is developed precisely by his not speaking.

For this to work, Shakespeare has to make it clear that he is giving us another kind of character completely.  The title character simply does not possess an internal life that is not represented clearly and accurately by his words and deeds.  Coriolanus' most defining trait, outside of his absolute superiority as soldier and general, is his absolute forthrightness in word and attitude.  He may be capable of irony -- particularly sarcasm, directed to the plebeians and their tribunes -- but he is incapable of dishonesty, of dissembling.  What good would a soliloquy do for such a man?  Nothing he could say in private to himself would tell us any more about him than what he says in public does.  There's nothing he feels that he doesn't say before all.  If Coriolanus were a novel, it would have to be in a very detached third person. 

Coriolanus stands out among Shakespeare's Romans -- he's no Brutus, with his deep internal agonies, and not a Mark Antony, either, with his many brooding contradictions or slippery sense of character.  It's not until the very end that Coriolanus ever feels a conflicted sense of duty.  Before that, when exiled from Rome by the tribunes and their followers, he simply joins the side of Rome's enemies.  It's less a matter of revenge and more a sensible career move: he's a soldier, and he needs to find work.  Today, we think little of the ousted C.E.O. who moves on to head another company, or of the professional athlete who moves from one city's team to another's.  Coriolanus doesn't agonize over the decision or the act.  He just does what it is in his nature to do.  If he can't fight for the Romans, he will simply have to fight for their enemies.

Coriolanus also stands out among Shakespeare's warriors -- he's no Macbeth or Othello, either, with their respective internal agonies.  Unlike Macbeth, Coriolanus is incorruptible; his strict and militaristic sense of duty prevails without question.  Unlike Othello, Coriolanus does not allow himself emotional luxuries like love.  The one emotion he feels is anger, but even then his anger seems a very distant second to his stoical observeance of his sense of duty.  When he does allow something else to enter in -- his feelings of pity for his mother, who to this point proves as warlike in her attitude as her son is in his deed -- it enters in swiftly, like a dagger.  What affects Coriolanus is at least in part the fact that his mother bowing before him (instead of his bowing to her) violates his sense of order, his sense of right as it is supposed to be practiced.  "The gods look down, at this unnatural scene / They laugh at."  Before his mother kneels to Coriolanus, not even the thought of his wife and child's destruction can move him.  To see his warlike mother cowed, however, unmans the warrior.

Coriolanus does possess a fascinating sense of character, one that we associate archetypally with the soldier.  Coriolanus is the most ancient of Shakespeare's Romans, but his portrait also seems eerily like that of the soldier of today.

Shakespeare and Kyd

It's inevitable that anyone who studies Hamlet will eventually encounter the scholarly discussion associating Shakespeare's play with that of one of his predecessors, Thomas Kyd, whose The Spanish Tragedy presents many themes that would work their way into Hamlet. Although I doubt that I am going to shine any new light on the points of comparison between the two plays here, I nonetheless wanted to put down in writing my observations after having read The Spanish Tragedy.

First of all, it's quite certain that Shakespeare would have been very familiar with The Spanish Tragedy. Written in the mid-1580s, the play was one of the most popular of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods. Though many of the thematic elements of the play were popular ones at the time, the precise combination of themes from The Spanish Tragedy that are repeated in Hamlet makes it highly unlikely that mere coincidence is at work here.

Beyond the fact that both plays are revenge tragedies that feature a ghost and a play-within-a-play, the most pronounced point of similarity between the two plays is the suicidal impulses experienced by the tragic avengers of both plays.  These suicidal tendencies are the distillation of a deep-seated melancholy that springs from grief. This melancholy disposition represents a transformation of character both for Hieronimo in TST and for Hamlet.  Each bore a different persona, a different personality before murder intruded on the father-son relationship.  Does this thematic element -- the suicidal urge in response to profound grief -- have its origins somehow in Senecan tragedy? I am not familiar enough with Seneca to be able to say, but it would be worth an investigation.  Regardless, both plays treat the suicidal impulse as a natural response to the death of one who is loved so dearly, and both plays present this kind of deep melancholy as an impediment to action -- ironically, an impediment to vengeance.

Hieronimo first presents his death wish in a speech immediately after his son's murder, in Act 2, Scene 5. After a dramatic expression of his desire to cease living, Hieronimo concludes his speech, which is in Latin, by saying:

Let me die with thee; thus would I go into the shadows. But nonetheless I will avoid yielding too quickly to death lest then no vengeance should follow thy death.
(Translation courtesy of the 1951 Croft Classics edition of the play.)

Hamlet inhabits a similar mental state, of course, when we first encounter him.  (It's also worth noting the parallels here to Romeo and Juliet and to the Pyramus and Thisbe parody in A Midsummer Night's Dream.)  Hamlet's first soliloquy -- "O that this too, too sullied flesh would melt" -- expresses his attitude, which might seem, to a modern audience, to display an unusual and extreme form of grief.  Considered as a response to Kyd's play, however, Hamlet's  suicidal despair makes more sense. 

It is tempting, then, in terms of this theme, to see Hamlet as a case of the anxiety of influence, that influence being limited not to Kyd but perhaps to other revenge tragedies of the time, which employed similar plot points and character features.  If we choose to see the play this way, we have to consider that as Shakespeare composed the play he consciously or subconsciously strived to one-up Kyd and other revenge tragedy writers at every step.  Shakespeare knew, as he drafted this play, that the story would remind audiences of Hieronimo. Dazed by grief, beset by confusion regarding the nature of his son's murder, Hieronimo delays in his pursuit of revenge.  Hamlet's delay, then, must be more pronounced in order to trump Hieronimo's.  Hamlet's morbid nature, his suicidal disposition, his antic behavior, all must seem more intense than Hieronimo's for the play to work.  Shakespeare could take it for granted that play-going audiences would be familiar with the generic conventions of revenge tragedy.  The masterstroke of the revenge tragedy genre is the delay, the period of feigned madness that comes perilously close to the real thing -- and in Hamlet seems to become quite actually the real thing.

In TST, however, Kyd ultimately gives us the perfect avenger in Hieronimo.  Hamlet, by contrast, is a reluctant avenger who, it seems, would rather return to his studies in Germany.  Vengeance is Hieronimo's only motive, the only thing that holds him upright after his son's death, the only thing that animates his flesh.  His delay is initially a practical matter -- he does not know who has killed his son.  Next, he suspects but does not know for sure; he is worried he is being tricked.  Hieronimo doubts the letter that Bel-Imperia sends to him -- written grotesquely with her own blood -- suspecting it may be entrapment.  He seeks to verify the information contained in it just as Hamlet will seek to verify the Ghost's word as genuine.  When Hieronimo finally knows with certainty, he has to face the task of seeking vengeance upon some very important members of the royal court, people above his station, just as Hamlet has to venge himself upon his King and uncle.  Hieronimo devises his plan; then he follows it out to the very letter.  To be sure, Hamlet, by contrast, stumbles somewhat into vengeance in his own Act 5.  He is perhaps merely fulfilling the fate that is ordained to him, but there is no pronounced plan at work when Hamlet finally swashbuckles his way to Claudius' death -- and Hamlet's own.  Does Hamlet know that the fate of the revenger also entails the avenger's own destruction?  (He certainly seems to: "The readiness is all," he claims, and we suspect that he knows he is facing more than mere sport in what awaits.)  If so, perhaps it is because he, too, an avid theatregoer, is aware of what happens to Hieronimo.

Hamlet's delay, in the context of Hieronimo's delay, and in the context of the ruination that is the result of Hieronimo's finally revenging the murder, is both more understandable and more curious.  Hamlet has to delay because Hieronimo delays, and he has to delay more profoundly.  But why else should Hamlet delay?  Hamlet doubts the nature of the task, doubts himself, doubts the nature of all that he perceives, and, as I said, would rather resume his studies at the university, where he is learning to be a modern skeptic rather than the medieval prince who would be his father's son.  A mere precautionary measure and a matter of mere strategy to Hieronimo become to Hamlet representations of the qualities of his character.  He endlessly questions just about everything.  Through Shakespeare's pen, this quality in Hamlet gives his character depth, and it generates a sense of ambiguity.  It gives us time to see the reluctance in Hamlet's character.  (Hamlet's eventual springing into action mode in Act 5, then, makes him, in a Kantian way, all the more the hero because he has, against his nature, summoned up the courage to act.)  Hamlet presents to us a very different kind of avenger than the one we have with Hieronimo, whose delay occupies only about a third of TST, while Hamlet's occupies nearly the entirety of the play that bears his name.  It may well be that Hamlet's delay is primarily plot-driven: Shakespeare needed a five-act play, and vengeance automatic is not going to supply acts two to four.  But still, the result is the same: we are left to make sense of acts two through four.  If Shakespeare's strategy here is merely to fill up the acts, he succeeds beyond the measure of his ambition, and the material he creates is so convincing and compelling that we have to treat it as though there were more to it.  The relationship between structure and theme is so tight here that it may be impossible to separate the two.

Hieronimo does in fact possess a depth of character, as well, even if it is not so deeply pronounced as Hamlet's.  Part of TST's emotional resonance comes from the fact that its hero cannot speak of what he believes to be true, especially not to Lorenzo, the chief villain of the play.  Hieronimo says, "My grief no heart, my thoughts no tongue can tell" (Act 3, Scene 2).  Hamlet says nearly the same: "But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue" (Act 1, Scene 2).  The suffering that each hero bears, audible only to the audience, is a clear point of comparison between the two plays.  Furthermore, both characters take on a madness that is partly feigned and partly real.  Compare Hieronimo's clever disguise -- "my simplicity may make them think / That ignorantly I will let all slip" (Act 4, Scene 6) -- with Hamlet's -- "As I perchance hereafter shall think meet / To put an antic disposition on" (Act 1, Scene 5).  Both heroes must not be themselves in order ultimately to be themselves.

Finally, in comparing these two, we have the fact that both protagonists are playwrights.  Hieronimo is a playwright by circumstance.  The plan to perform a drama is a mechanism by which he will exact vengeance on his son's killers.  Hamlet, by contrast, is a playwright and dramaturge by nature.  It just so happens that the play he directs presents the opportunity to catch his father's killer through the study of physiognomy. 

In both plays, the suicidal impulse must also extend beyond the tragic heroes.  In TST, it reaches Isabella, Hieronimo's wife, who succumbs to her suicidal yearnings late in the play but before revenge is acted out.  In Hamlet, it destroys Ophelia, whose "self-slaughter," to borrow, out of context, a term from Hamlet, seems to be both an accident and an event with very clear antecedents.  And of course, in both plays the body counts only mount from the points of these deaths onward.

Some further differences that must be noted include the inversion of father-son relationships (in terms of who is to be avenged and who is to seek the vengeance) and the frankly pagan attitude of the Kyd play, which boldly and unequivocally takes place in a universe in which the geography of classical mythology is valid, thus providing a pronounced contrast to the obsession with Christian religious themes that we see in Hamlet.  Christian values are frequently cited as reasons for what not to do in Hamlet (reason not to commit suicide, reason not to kill a murderer who is, theoretically, praying, but, oddly enough, not reason to follow the Bible's advice ["Vengeance is mine ... saith the Lord"] and forebear seeking revenge), but we rarely see actions performed on the basis of the core Christian principals of faith, hope, and charity, or any other Christian value, for that matter.  Still, the play inhabits a universe in which Christian beliefs provide context.

Would it be fair to say that if there were no Spanish Tragedy there would be no Hamlet?  In such cases, it is always impossible to claim much of anything with certainty, but at the very least Hamlet would doubtless have been a very different thing if not for Kyd's play.  The Spanish Tragedy does have a certain flair to it -- though melodramatic at times and a bit pedestrian in its language, it is a highly readable play, one that is almost flawlessly strucutred and designed, one that features well-drawn and compelling characters.  Shakespeare's play, by contrast, is at times a glorious mess, which is no doubt partly due to the fact that the text was likely never prepared for publication by its author, but also perhaps due to something else at work in Shakespeare -- in all of his works, not just the one in question here.  So many things are going at so many different levels.  Shakespeare's language is dynamic and, when he wants it to be, sophisticated; with every word and phrase he grasps for something distinctive.  But he also creates some scattershot imagery at times, as in the "To be or not to be" soliloquy with that business of "slings and arrows" and other military-style references mixing it up with a "sea of troubles."  This kind of mixed metaphor is not an isolated incident in Shakespeare.  Yet, all told, the speech is movingly profound, and the play digs more deeply into our consciousness -- and into that of the play's protagonist -- than The Spanish Tragedy ever does.  I say this not to diminish the significance of Kyd's work, but to say that all the patter about Shakespeare over the centuries is a legitimately warranted phenomenon.  It is hard to pin down exactly what it is about Shakespeare that makes him superior to a Kyd or a Marlowe, but superior he is.  Perhaps it is exactly this quality -- that it is hard to get a handle on things in Shakespeare -- that makes him so great.  We know that the words are powerful, but we have a hard time figuring out what exactly it is that they mean.

Claudius Reconsidered

Taking a cue from Harold Bloom, I'd always thought of Claudius as a weak villain. It's true that Claudius is certainly no Iago, but it's not Iago that this play needs.* Claudius' gift as a villain is his wit and, as Hamlet points out in 1.5, his charm: "one may smile, and smile, and be a villain." Hamlet, of course, can see through the false charm, the false mourning of Claudius' opening speech in 1.2, but the rest of Denmark does not -- and Hamlet's mother does not. As such, Claudius is a perfectly fitting villain to oppose Hamlet. Claudius boasts the power to manipulate language, to make falseness seem genuine, while Hamlet himself has "that within which passeth show." False words, false personas: these are antithetical to Hamlet.

My turn-around in assessing Claudius is inspired by Marjorie Garber, who, in her Hamlet chapter in Shakespeare After All, says of Claudius that "he is in control of language, making it jump through hoops, cease to mean what it should," citing his initial speech in 1.2 as evidence. Garber makes Claudius' use of language analogous to his use of poison: "the dangerous poison of words, words, words." The serial poisoner uses guile, secrecy, charm, and wit to work his vile purposes, and it is fitting that in the end he is done in, in part at least, by poison.

Hamlet may see right through Claudius, but that does not mean that Hamlet can easily and handily dispatch the villain without consequences. It is true, ultimately, that Hamlet is far more clever and more skilled than Claudius is, but to kill a king, even a false one, is no simple task, and Claudius' particular strength, his underhanded control of appearances, is to Hamlet what Kryptonite is to Superman. And certainly Hamlet does have his own issues to work out before he can rid the world of his foe.
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* One might wonder what a Hamlet v. Iago showdown might look like. I'd lay my money on Hamlet, who seems unlikely to fall prey to the kind of schemes that laid Othello low. Hamlet, for instance, knows how to discern a true friend (Horatio) from false ones (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern).

More on Macbeth

Having seen the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival's production of Macbeth the other night, I have a few points to hash out, or perhaps rehash, as the case may be.

*For a production of Macbeth to work, the audience must have sufficient points of access to Macbeth's character -- and to Lady Macbeth's. That is, first of all, we must develop an understanding of Macbeth's prowess as a warrior, his courage, and his seeming-steadfast loyalty (which quickly dissipates in the wake of the witches' prophecies). All of this is established in Act I, through the Captain's report ("doubtful it stood ...") and then through the explicit contrast (primarily in Duncan's speech) between Macbeth and the traitor Macdonwald. Macbeth, like Othello, is the story of a fall from grace, of a good man gone bad because of the weaknesses in his character, whereby his strengths become perverted. The tragic arc of the story is rendered insensible if we do not at the start see Macbeth as the valiant, noble, and, indeed, loyal thane.

For the rest of the play, beyond Act I, to work, we need to see a suffering Macbeth, not merely a merciless tyrant (though he is, certainly, that, too--or he becomes it by the middle of Act IV). We need to see a Macbeth who is devoted to his wife, who does what he does in no small measure out of love for her. We need to see a falling hero who is tormented by phantasmagorical images, who recoils with horror at his own deeds, who feels powerless to stop the procession of bloody deeds that he himself enacts, until he becomes largely numb to them, or even embraces them, until Macbeth concludes that he has supped so much on horror that it frights him no longer. (Of course, he realizes that he is wrong, and therein we find the most complete, the most powerful expression of humanity in the play -- that no matter how bloody, how awful the tyrant, he is still capable of grief, depths of sadness.) When Macbeth envisions the bloody dagger, we have to understand the horrific charge of this hallucination: the dagger is covered in blood--not the blood of his own impending fate (could he meet any other fate, given the processional of bloody deeds that begins the play?), but the blood of the innocents he will murder. As penalty, Macbeth will "sleep no more," and his wife will achieve only a sleep without rest, one tormented by somnambulatory recreations of her guilt. Once Macbeth's sense of humanity has been utterly drained, as it is after he expends his last heartfelt sentiments at the news of his wife's demise, it is time for him to enter fully the identity of the heartless villain, and thus it is time for him to pay for his crimes with his very life.

In the meantime, the Macbeths suffer greatly, are racked (in the Early Modern sense of "rack") by guilt, and the effect on us as audience is that we feel their guilt, their suffering, their horror, the fruitlessness of their ambitions, their powerlessness to stop the procession of bloody deeds once they begin. The guilt that they feel is the stuff of our own nightmares, our worst twinges of conscience, only amplified. You walk away thinking that there is something, just a hint, perhaps, of yourself in Macbeth or in Lady Macbeth, and thus the play offers one of the most powerful experiences of catharsis of any Shakespearean play.

*Regarding the theme of sleep, Macbeth provides a nightmarish Jacobean counterpoint to the far gentler Elizabethan sleep-comedy of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Sleep and dreams -- "to sleep, perchance to dream" -- are clearly significant thematic elements in Shakespeare.

*The issue of agency is perhaps the most perplexing issue in Macbeth, presenting a problem without an answer: to what extent is Macbeth himself responsible for his own deeds? Is he a victim of "supernatural soliciting" via the witches and the shadowy master with whom they communicate via their cauldron? Or do the witches' words merely unloose the "vaulting ambition" that is latent in Macbeth? Beyond these questions, is the outcome of the play merely a function of the innate character Macbeth possesses, or does he create this character through words and deeds that are deliberative?

This is the great ambiguity of the play that makes it another poignant iteration of what is perhaps he greatest theme of the Shakespearean canon: the nature of character and identity. Character is destiny in Shakespeare, but how much of character is our own?

Faced with a set of conditions -- an opportunity for advancement, a murder to be avenged, slings and arrows, etc. -- what do you do? Shakespeare's characters are at once classical and modern, with one foot in the past, the other in a present that is hurtling toward the future. Macbeth himself is either a testament to the enduring mystery of fate or he is one who forges his own fate in the existential void of the untethered self. Hamlet is, of course, the greatest monument to self in Shakespeare, but others -- Othello, Prospero, Brutus, and, Harold Bloom would say, Falstaff -- bear the same burden of character.

*I was impressed the other night with a sense of the great importance of Macduff in the play, partly as a contrast to Macbeth but also as a warrior with great similarity to Macbeth. Both are formidable practitioners of the art of war, but -- partly through chance and circumstance -- Macduff is the vehicle of good and the achiever of a Pyrrhic victory, and Macbeth ultimately the defeated villain.

The emotional anchor of Act IV is Macduff's response to the news that Macbeth has slain his family. The situation prompts all manner of questions. Why did Macduff leave his family unprotected? Was it a matter of loyalty to the state versus loyalty to family -- protecting the common interest versus protecting one's own? Or was it simply a failure on Macduff's part to thoughtfully anticipate the outcome of his actions, which his wife subsequently interprets as an act of desertion? Macduff is none too great a thinker, it seems, and he operates at his best when fueled by raw emotion. And the emotion of Macduff's response is precisely the issue: he must "dispute it like a man." I have a lot more to say about this scene, which does a lot with gender themes and the nature of true manhood, but that is perhaps a matter for another time.

Macduff's wife brands him a traitor, and though Macbeth is certainly the greater traitor of the two by far, it invites comparison and contrast between the two warriors. When Macbeth battles Macduff, he is, essentially, battling his own best self of his former life. The two are in many ways more alike than they are different.

*Macbeth is, in all, I think, the most efficient play Shakespeare wrote, word for word. It's an impressive achievement, prompted by a desire to please a patron, no doubt -- King James, whose reputed short attention span explains in part the efficiency of the play -- but there's hardly a wasted line in the entirety of its five acts. This is not to say that Macbeth is necessarily Shakespeare's "best" play, but it is one that never fails to yield rich new meanings with each experience of it, and that, I believe, is what keeps us coming back to Shakespeare again and again.