By Hook or By Crook: Part Four

Romeo and Juliet

The story goes like this: two families, the Montagues and Capulets, are engaged in a longstanding feud. After a street brawl, the city magistrate demands peace.

Romeo, a young Montague, is moping around after being rejected by Rosaline, the love of his life. His cousin, Benvolino, along with his friend Mercutio, take him along to crash a Capulet party in an attempt to cheer him up. There, Romeo meets Juliet, the new love of his life. The two employ a friendly friar to marry them in secret; immediately after, Romeo kills one of Juliet’s cousins and is banished, and Juliet is forced to marry another man. The friendly friar organizes a ruse in which Juliet fakes her own death via a magic potion, but his message informing Romeo of the plan miscarries; Romeo rushes back to find Juliet “dead,” and, well, the rest is history.

I think the play does a good job of playing with our sympathies for Romeo and Juliet. Their scenes together are honestly beautiful, particularly the famous balcony scene — “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” — in which Shakespeare employs the type of romantic imagery he has mastered in his sonnets to great effect. I love Romeo wishing to be various inanimate objects, only because they exist slightly closer to Juliet than himself. That’s great!

But of course, outside of his scenes with Juliet, it’s clear that Romeo is a bit of a lovelorn bumbler, who in the morning is lamenting his loss of Rosaline, and by evening time is willing to put his life on the line for Juliet. I like that when he goes to see the Friar the morning after the party, the Friar assumes that he’s spent the night with Rosaline; not only is this funny, but it also puts into perspective just how quickly this whole thing is moving from the perspective of an outside observer. It reminds me of my tumultuous first relationship, where my mom would have to come to my room and ask, “Wait, you guys are back together again?” to which I would reply, “Well, yeah… that happened like twelve hours ago.” The Friar is an interesting character, as he understands that this whole thing is a youthful fancy, but chooses to go through with it anyway in the hope of resolving the Montague-Capulet feud.

Mercutio (the smart fool) is entertaining, Juliet’s nurse (the stupid fool) is tolerable, and the “wit” is mostly kept to a minimum, which is always appreciated. The fatal ruse is a little ridiculous, but seems to suit the rashness of our heroes, and sometimes you really do need a magic potion to bring a play together.

The play subtly incorporates a theme that was more tediously presented in Love’s Labour’s Lost: namely, how a gift for romantic poems is more often the result of a love of poetry than a love of a particular lover. Romeo can charm with beautiful words, but we of course have to question the extent to which he loves Juliet specifically, rather than just loving the act of losing his mind over someone.

Overall, I enjoyed this one a great deal. It’s clever, it’s beautiful, it’s well-paced and it’s cleanly plotted. It deals with themes that I like (ill-fated love) and takes them fairly seriously, even while undercutting them in critical ways. These two layers to the story provide a complexity that makes the play feel like it has some depth to it.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Samuel Pepys described this play as “the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life,” which only shows that he was largely unfamiliar with the rest of Shakespeare’s comedic ouevre. The next critic mentioned on the Wikipedia page is John Dryden, who was “preoccupied with the question of whether fairies should be depicted in theatrical plays, since they did not exist.” I stand at the end (or at least, the latest mid-point) of this long line of Shakespeare skeptics, and I strive to, in large, provide more thrilling and engaging commentary than these two early examples; however, when it comes to Midsummer, I find that I simply cannot gather the requisite enthusiasm. I’ve read this play a few times, and each time it simply slips right out of my mind, leaving barely a residue.

The story contains three elements: 1) Theseus and Hippolyta, two legendary Greek figures, are getting married; 2) Helena, Hermia, Lysander, and Demetrius, all Athenian youths, are engaged in a love quadrangle that, for reasons I don’t care to get into, leads them all to wander around at night in a forest temporarily inhabited by Titania & Oberon, the Queen & King of the Fairies respectively, as well as their sprite Robin “Puck” Goodfellow, who are in Athens for reasons related to 1); 3) Six clownish buffoons, craftsmen aspiring to thespianism, decide to put on a play for the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta, holding a dress rehearsal in the middle of the night in the same forest as 2), thus becoming entangled in the quadrangle and transforming it into some amorphous and perhaps non-Euclidean shape. Shrewd readers will be able to predict the type of hijinks that ensue when Puck starts playing around with a love-potion, causing all sorts of comical misunderstandings.

I think the main appeal of the play is the mystical setting, a dream-like forest where fairies bound and play little tricks with our emotions. The specific elements of the play, however, fail to cohere into anything more significant than the same kind of dull romantic buffoonery that we've already seen several times before. I will admit that the play-within-a-play did make me chuckle a few times, but are we really here for chuckles? Is that why we esteem Shakespeare as the paragon of English literature? I really don’t think so.

King John

This play holds the impressive distinction of being the only Shakespeare play that I have never not even once heard any mention of — not even a passing reference to the title. And it will perhaps be of no surprise to my readers that I would place it among his best.

The play is difficult to summarize, as there is quite a lot going on, but never does the plot feel convoluted or confused. The pace is near perfect, with each scene pushing the events forward while still leaving ample time for impressive speeches and conversations. Each member of the reasonably large cast gets their opportunity to share their views and motivations, even as these twist and turn with the events of the war; and the speeches are rife with imagery and wonderful language.

We find ourselves in the somewhat familiar territory of a war between France and England, although this takes place several hundred years before the events of the Henry VI quadrology. This time, the Pope gets involved, sometimes inciting and sometimes reconciling the two parties; in fact, the war stops and starts two or three times over the course of the play. The central conflict is contained within the relationship between King John and his young nephew Arthur, who is in a certain respect the “rightful” heir to his throne. However, neither Arthur and John can be called the play’s central characters, necessarily; similar to Henry VI, they find themselves without any agency, merely being thrown about by the waves of a large political ocean.

In fact, the plot is such that there is no central character, with different men and women bursting forth at various times to assert their will. This is what gives the play such a twisting, turning sort of motion, where each character is merely reacting to the decisions of everyone else. While several fit into familiar archetypes, the play never feels like a collection of tropes but instead a chaos of wills; while you can’t say any of them contain depth (which is, I suspect, perhaps beyond the scope of a historical five-act play) they all have a certain emotional and dramatic force.

From Constance, Arthur’s mother, whose immediate undoing — as in, she is done for by Act II — is presented with such earnestness, emotion, and poetic wonder that we would be remiss not to place her in the upper pantheon of Shakespeare’s woe-begotten unfortunates; to a man mostly denoted by the moniker “The Bastard,” whose bizarre and comedic (although never goofy) lust for violence energizes every scene he is in; to all the minor characters who leave their subtle mark on the action, I never found myself in a position of wishing someone would just leave the stage already — usually, I wanted them to come back.

Perhaps I am being so effusive with my praise due to my bewilderment at the total obscurity this play has fallen into (the Wikipedia page doesn’t even contain a “Criticism and analysis” section.) I really think this belongs in the same conversations as Richard III. It feels to me like the historical play is Shakespeare’s true comfort zone, letting his talents flow naturally without recourse to bawdy humour or overwrought tragedy.

That being said, it would be hard to argue that King John is categorically different from the rest of the Histories we’ve read so far — as a genre, they play it fairly safe, with much of the same themes, plots, and archetypes appearing again and again. They are masterfully done, to be sure, but it doesn’t seem that Shakespeare is striving for greatness in these plays — they feel more like a craftsman operating in his “neutral” mode, more effective than Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois but still leaving me with this feeling that not a ton has been truly said, despite how many enjoyable words were spoken.

The Merchant of Venice

The story is this: a merchant named Antonio is moping around for reasons unknown, when his buddy Bassanio shows up to ask him for the latest of what seem to be endless requests for a loan. Since Antonio has no cash on hand, all his money being put into boats sailing around the world, he tells Bassanio to borrow the money using his name. Bassanio, for whatever reason, decides that the most appropriate lender would be a Jewish guy named Shylock, Antonio’s greatest enemy, whose hatred for Antonio is mostly based off the fact that Antonio lends money without interest and condemns usury. Instead of charging interest, Shylock will only lend the money on the condition that non-payment will be punished by Shylock carving a pound of flesh from Antonio’s body. The reason for this is that Shylock is evil, and the reason he is evil is because he is Jewish.

For once, Harold Bloom and I are in agreement: he wrote, "one would have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to recognize that Shakespeare's grand, equivocal comedy The Merchant of Venice is nevertheless a profoundly anti-semitic work." It is pretty clear that Shakespeare’s plays are full of racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic themes and characters, and they carry off these racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic themes in such a boring, of-the-times sort of fashion that it mostly fails to warrant any comment at all. The argument of non-anti-semitism seems to be based mostly on a speech Shylock gives near the middle of the play in which he claims that Jews are, in fact, people too, which I would argue is not a particularly radical position (especially placed in the mouth of a Jewish character…) and is somewhat undercut by Shylock’s obsessive avarice which sees him wish his own daughter’s death in order to retrieve the money she took from him. (More on this later…)

Anyway, the reason Bassanio needed the money from Antonio is to go woo a faraway lady. This lady, Portia, is being courted by men across the world (including the Prince of Morocco, whose first lines, in true Shakespearean fashion, are about how black he is) but remains unmarried because of her late father’s bizarre wish that she only be married to whichever man can correctly solve a riddle which involves picking the correct one of three chests. In the first act, we see a few suitors deny the challenge, and then two fail, which leads up to Bassanio somewhat anticlimactically picking the correct chest and winning his bride.

At the same time, Shylock’s daughter is sick of being the daughter of a Jew so decides to run from home and marry a Christian named Lorenzo. These two, despite not doing a whole lot of anything in particular, are probably the best couple in the play, for their few scenes together mostly contain them having fun and joking around in a way that feels genuine and loving.

Lo and behold, all of Antonio’s ships wreck, leaving him unable to pay back Shylock’s loan, and it is agreed by everyone that, according to the laws of the land, Shylock can now carve a pound of flesh from his chest. Bassiano returns to Venice to offer Shylock double the amount of the loan (using money he borrowed from Portia), but Shylock insists on taking the flesh. The Duke of Venice, bewildered by the situation but seemingly unable to find any legal fault in the proceedings, calls upon a foreign lawyer to hopefully offer some clarity. Because we’re in Act IV and no one has put on a disguise yet, Portia assumes the identity of this lawyer and wins the day by declaring that carving a pound of flesh from a person is, in fact, illegal, thereby making Shylock guilty of attempted murder. His punishment is forfeiting all his money and being forcibly turned Christian.

The fifth act sees the resolution of a throwaway gag involving wedding rings, the revelation of Portia’s disguise, and the further revelation that actually Antonio’s ships did not all wreck and actually everything’s okay, and also Lorenzo and Jessica are going to get all of Shylock’s money, leaving everybody happy and content and having learned something about something.

Strangely enough, I actually enjoyed this play. The main reason is that most of the absurdity is contained within the plot itself, and not in buffoonish characters. As with all the comedies, the whole thing is goofy and very stupid, but it “makes sense” from a plot standpoint, and the two plots actually overlap and cohere to tell an almost touching story of unconditional friendship. The play reminds me a lot of Taming of the Shrew, in which the misogynistic themes are so overwrought as to become absurd; this play basically has the same feeling but with antisemitism.

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS

Fourteen plays in, not quite halfway through this project, we must dare to ask the question: do I like Shakespeare yet?

The answer is complicated. Here’s my great difficulty with Shakespeare: I just can’t take his work seriously. I find it difficult to get emotionally invested in the stories he’s telling, and therefore I struggle to convince myself that it’s worth exploring the themes being presented. The best I can do is recognize his competency when it becomes apparent: in the pacing of his plots, and the consistency of his poetry. The former is not a quality that excites me; we have to remember that two of my favourite authors are Melville and Proust, whose novels have absolutely no sense of pacing. The latter is interesting but the context of the poetry often takes away from its meaning. For example, when Portia delivers a little poem about mercy in Act IV of A Merchant of Venice, we must remember that she is dressed as a fake lawyer and delivering this speech to an absurd Jewish stereotype. Divorced from this context, it’s a nice little monologue, but when it happens in the play, it leaves me fairly nonplussed. The only exception, where I feel the poetry and the story fit perfectly, albeit in a slightly ironic way, has been Romeo and Juliet.

I can’t take the work seriously because the plays themselves do not feel serious. And I’m not just talking about the comedies but the other plays too. There’s such an overwhelming sense of goofiness and “entertainment” that I just can’t read these as serious works of literature. This is not to say that I don’t like jokes — obviously I like jokes. And it’s not just that Shakespeare’s jokes are old, because I even like old jokes. The trouble is that Shakespeare is not funny. Making funny jokes is, strangely enough, a deeply serious act. The humour of authors like Melville and Soseki is a facet of their seriousness. Making unfunny jokes, on the other hand, is profoundly unserious. And the difference, often, between a funny joke and an unfunny joke is that funny jokes come from the heart, from deep inside your being; and unfunny jokes come from copying or rehashing previously funny (or unfunny) jokes in an attempt to appease an audience. I don’t get the impression that Shakespeare believes in his own jokes. I even wonder whether he thought they were funny at all.

But that is just idle speculation: what is important is the impression made on me, the person writing this series. When I read analysis and criticism of Shakespeare’s plays, I simply can not understand what possessed people to think so deeply about works that, to me, feel so trivial.

I will soldier on, though, because I still have hope that Shakespeare will impress me yet. We must keep in mind that, up to this point, we have read six comedies, five histories, two of the worst tragedies I’ve seen in my life, and one “real” tragedy. Before us lie many of the “great works” of Shakespeare: Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello. I’ve read all these before, and some I have pre-existing problems with, but it was so long ago and so divorced from any context that maybe, just maybe, I missed something in them. It would be foolhardy to stop now; then again, some may argue that it was foolhardy to start at all…

Next: Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 & 2, Henry V