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Whatever you want to ask or discuss, you can drop in the comments here.

Did you love the play or hate it? What ideas do you want to talk about? Did anything shock you? What do you want to discuss? Did you see a good (or bad) production? Tell us!

MEETING LINK — https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89049733164?pwd=0VXSomyCN8aizr5K4ahmebmLllqbtX.1

Full Shakespeare schedule here.

**Remember, this is now open to everyone. You no longer need to pay to attend. Please cancel your subscription unless you want archive access.**

Whatever you want to ask or discuss, you can drop in the comments here.

Did you love the play or hate it? What ideas do you want to talk about? Did anything shock you? What do you want to discuss? Did you see a good (or bad) production? Tell us!

MEETING LINK — https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87151379439?pwd=yggk9m2uwlSwMptDN0BW43ukXJeW8b.1

Full Shakespeare schedule here.

**Remember, this is now open to everyone. You no longer need to pay to attend. Please cancel your subscription unless you want archive access.**

Whatever you want to ask or discuss, you can drop in the comments here.

Did you love the play or hate it? What ideas do you want to talk about? Did anything shock you? What do you want to discuss? Did you see a good (or bad) production? Tell us!

MEETING LINK — https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82530350175?pwd=ZTn9CdvrKyAxCCeSC3iGKZuO0ZKMg8.1

Full Shakespeare schedule here.

Shakespeare’s England was almost obsessively concerned with time—the commercial pressure of time, the mutability of life. His characters are often alarmed at the sudden passing of time (“the clock upbraids me”, “I wasted time and now doth time waste me”, “the time is out of joint”, “Golden lads and girls all must,/ As chimney-sweepers, come to dust”) or they feel the compulsion to battle time (“let myself and fortune/ Tug for the time to come”), or they are philosophical about the forces of time (“one man in his time plays many parts”, “Time travels in divers paces with divers persons”, “O gentlemen, the time of life is short”, “The end crowns all,/ And that old common arbitrator, Time,/ Will one day end it”).

Macbeth is the Shakespeare play most concerned with time. It is a short, dark, bloody play, that is so compressed because it is time that makes everything so dark. (It is said this is the shortest Shakespeare play, which is not right. Comedy of Errors and The Tempest are shorter. But it is the most compressed, the most rapid.) To begin quoting the play on this topic would involve starting with the opening line — “When shall we three meet again” — and would only stop at the end of the play, when Malcolm says,

what needful else
That calls upon us, by the grace of Grace,
We will perform in measure, time and place

Like Hamlet, Macbeth is about the disordering of time, the unravelling of the expected course of events. “To beguile the time,” Lady Macbeth tells her husband, “Look like the time.”

To beguile the time means to their deeds are done in the dark. The weird sisters, at the opening, agree to meet “ere the set of sun.” The sun is tracked, setting just as Banquo is killed. The doomed Banquo had said, after meeting the weird sisters, “The instruments of darkness tell us truths.” Milton surely was inspired by this line when he wrote of the elements in the “wild Abyss,/ The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave” that the elements

must ever fight,
Unless th’ Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more worlds—

It is Satan looking out over that aspect in Paradise Lost, and there is something demonic about Macbeth’s affinity to the weird sister’s predictions, as if he is the real witch at the heart of the play, unaware of what his embrace of their predictions will turn him into, what dark materials he has within.

If only they had known how dark their times would become, would the Macbeths have continued with their plan? Macbeth famously says,

if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We’d jump the life to come.

An admission of the sort that murderers often make. We know that “Brave Macbeth” was “Disdaining fortune” on the battlefield to put down the rebellion against Duncan. So, with that arrogance, he thought that he could put himself above the flow of time. We are told after we see him hear the prophecy that he was “Disdaining fortune”, but Shakespeare is careful in that early scene to show us that Macbeth is already absorbed by his dark ambitions. When they see the sisters, Banquo speaks eight lines describing them, and Macbeth tells them to speak. It is after they begin their prophecy that Macbeth becomes so self-absorbed, Banquo is alarmed.

Good sir, why do you start; and seem to fear
Things that do sound so fair? I’ the name of truth,
Are ye fantastical, or that indeed
Which outwardly ye show? My noble partner
You greet with present grace and great prediction
Of noble having and of royal hope,
That he seems rapt withal

The word “rapt” comes back. Macbeth is constantly slipping into this distracted state, putting himself outside time. At one point, he begins soliloquising and then breaks off, realising there are men standing there, waiting to be dismissed. Banquo calls him “rapt” again, and Macbeth, still talking to himself, mutters: “Come what come may,/ Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.” This is a contortion of the Gospel phrase, “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

Macbeth’s tragedy is not just that he refuses to be Duncan’s subject, but that he thinks he can disdain fortune, ignore the implications of the prophecy—he thinks he does not have to be Time’s subject either.

The play has a slippery handling of time. We are told of Macbeth disdaining fortune out of sequence, and there are other moments when time goes awry, such as when Macbeth is told Macduff has fled for England—even though he was told that news a few scenes earlier. Macbeth’s experience of time is distorted, and we are often experiencing this play with something like his interior distortions. Soliloquies and asides are Shakespeare’s method of drawing us into Macbeth’s rapt experience. This is a high and sophisticated development of the conspiratorial methods he began using in Richard III.

Slowly, as he removes himself from the flow of time, as he tries to “jump the life to come” Macbeth goes mad. Madness is a total lack of any sense of time, a loss of the continuous nature of life and experience. It is the phenomenology of timelessness, the unravelling, as Lady Macbeth has it, of the ebb and flow of the day.

Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep’, the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast,—

This is why, as Bradley says, when we recall any scene from Macbeth, we recall it happening at night. Night was a time of spirits and dangers, crimes and hauntings, a time when the good and the Christian needed to be abed, or guided by a protecting light. Macbeth’s world slowly darkens, until the madness takes hold and he never sees the light again.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Remember, too, the darkness of Lady Macbeth’s madness: “she has light by her continually; ‘tis her command.” Macbeth’s hubris about his dominion over time creates a sharp pivot at the beginning of Act III. Up to now, Macbeth has seemed an ambitious, unstable man who killed for power. Now we realise he has lost his grip, and we realise he doesn’t know he has lost his grip. After sending Banquo on his ride, pre-meditating the coming murder, he tells the rest of the lords,

Let every man be master of his time
Till seven at night: to make society
The sweeter welcome, we will keep ourself
Till supper-time alone: while then, God be with you!

It seems like a simple instruction, merely to allow everyone free time till supper. But obviously it means more than that. Macbeth believes he has that sort of free will to be “master of his time”, in the biggest sense as a tyrant and as one who can disdain fortune. Alas, the very next thing he says summons the men who will kill Banquo. From there on the play runs swiftly. As soon as Macbeth proclaims that men must be master of their times, he gives the orders that unleashes time against him.

This is the centre of his tragedy. It is never made clear whether the weird sisters cause the events of the play, or merely predict them. They are the dance of time, not the creators of events. Macbeth’s fault is not within his times, but within himself. He reacts to their prophecy with ambition . He arrives having already coveted what they tell him will happen. He “starts” (both in the sense of jumping with alarm, and of beginning his murderous plan: he starts his time) because he is alarmed that they know what he really desires. He never realises, until it is too late, that “Time, thou anticipatest my dread exploits.” In this confession of his problem, we hear the echo of poor mad Lady Macbeth—, “What’s done cannot be undone.—To bed, to bed, to bed!”

Shakespeare’s mothers are often nasty. Lady Capulet ignores, then disowns, poor Juliet. Lady Macbeth would kill her child to gain a throne. Though they grieve (Constance in King John) it is vicious grief (Queen Margaret in Richard III). Sometimes they are terrifying: Volumnia raised Coriolanus to be a tyrant; Tamora encourages her son to commit rape in Titus Andronicus. Often, there are no mothers. O! Cordelia, Katherine, Miranda, Jessica — think how they need their mother’s love! Many are minor. Aemilia in A Comedy of Errors appears at the end, a resolution. The blameless Lady Macduff appears only to be hauntingly killed, a brief symbol of innocence in a darkening world. There is a wicked step-mother (Cymbeline), a jealous step-mother (Pericles), a weak-willed mother (Hamlet). It is almost incidental that Mistress Page (The Merry Wives of Windsor) is a mother; Cleopatra, too. Only Hermione’s strong innocence in A Winter’s Tale makes her rightfully beloved.

Hermione has a splendid precursor, the Countess of Rousillion, from All’s Well That Ends Well. This play is unjustly unloved, and the Countess gets less attention than she deserves. She is among Shakespeare’s most fascinating characters, and is his most wonderful mother.

All’s Well That Ends Well is an inverted romance in which the woman pursues the man. It is also about inverted families. It is often said that we cannot choose our parents: Shakespeare is interested in the fact that we cannot choose our children. Just as Helena inverts the expectations of a romantic heroine, so the Countess inverts the expectations of a mother, and picks her child.

My argument, in a nutshell:

Helena is one of Shakespeare’s great experiments. She inverts the expectations of her sex without losing her virtuous character nor destroying the basic plot of a romantic comedy, but with some of the most daring challenges to the form in the whole Shakespeare canon. She is matched in this by her adoptive mother.

I have a great love of this play and these characters, and am really delighted to have written this short appreciation. Some of the piece is available above the Liberties paywall. Or you can read the it in print, alongside Cass Sunstein, Ryan Ruby, and many others.

**Remember, this is now open to everyone. You no longer need to pay to attend. Please cancel your subscription unless you want archive access.**

Whatever you want to ask or discuss, you can drop in the comments here.

Did you love the play or hate it? What ideas do you want to talk about? Did anything shock you? What do you want to discuss? Did you see a good (or bad) production? Tell us!

I will schedule soon an “Introduction to Shakespeare” session for anyone who wants to attend.

MEETING LINK — https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83867169931?pwd=zMMx1QQ7KV4C6b2orW3MCrMvbYzodQ.1

Full Shakespeare schedule here.

In my first year of college, I took a class called Greek Civilization, a comprehensive introduction to Ancient Greece from the Bronze Age through the fall of Athens conducted via the literary record in all the prominent genres: epic and lyric poetry, tragic and comic drama, history and philosophy. One day we were discussing Antigone when a student ventured to the brisk older professor a speculation about the eponymous heroine’s motive, one relying on elements of her background and personal psychology nowhere detailed in the play. It was something vaguely Freudian, as I recall, about her relationship to her father and brother. “That would make sense,” the professor replied with contemptuous sarcasm, “if Antigone were a real person!”

The professor was right: Sophocles, in composing some kind of religious ritual we probably understand less well than we think we do, construed his characters as mythic archetypes with fated destinies, not neighbors about whose troubled family history we might gossip. With allowances for complex cultural history that intervenes in the two millennia between 5th-century B.C. Athens and 16th-century A.D. London, a history that includes the development of Christianity with its emphasis on the examination of conscience, we might say that Sophocles’s successor playwright Shakespeare is the first writer of imaginative literature to invite us to construe his characters as real people, three-dimensional persons with particular private histories and motivations scarcely known even to themselves.

We see this Shakespearean innovation especially when we compare the playwright’s versions of the stories he adapts to their portrayal in his sources. In Holinshed’s Chronicles, Macbeth has a political case against Duncan, who has illegitimately passed him over for the throne; in the earlier History of King Leir, the aged monarch devises the love-test to manipulate Cordelia into marrying the man of his choice; in Plutarch’s Lives, Marc Antony had been a dissolute bon vivant long before he ever set eyes on Cleopatra. But in Shakespeare’s rendition of each tale, the tragic heroes’ rational motives go missing. We are left to speculate why one kills his king, another alienates his best-loved daughter, and the third gives first his empire and then his life up for his mistress. The heroes themselves seem baffled at their own self-thwarting actions, with Macbeth, for example, asking himself,

[W]hy do I yield to that suggestion

Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair

And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,

Against the use of nature?

Goneril’s remark about her father, “He hath ever but slenderly known himself,” might suit all these tragic heroes–not to mention the notoriously befuddling Hamlet, whose self-inquiry in four soliloquies has launched thousands of essays into the source of his delay. Hamlet’s delay even inspired Freud to devise the Oedipus Complex to explain it–imposing again on Sophocles, just like my old classmate, a reading better suited to Shakespeare.

Before Freud, however, came Hegel. As a philosopher of history rather than a psychologist, he showed a keener awareness of cultural change over time. In his Aesthetics, he argued for Greek tragedy–Antigone, not Oedipus the King, was his paradigm case–as the direct expression of ethical conflict. Greek tragedy stages a war between two legitimate ethical forces (family obligation and loyalty to the state in Antigone, for example) that had each grown one-sided and had to destroy each other, the better to demonstrate the need for a higher synthesis. In some tragedies, this synthesis even emerges, as at the conclusion, for instance, of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, where the forces of blood vendetta are allotted a religious place in society, even as the state with its mechanisms of legal redress and due process usurps their function of avenging crime.

No such synthesis tends to happen in Shakespeare, however. Hegel thought Shakespeare the first of the Romantics, the first of the moderns. What Greek civilization held in perfect balance–a balance too perfect, one that didn’t allow for revolutionary change–Shakespeare tears apart. For Hegel, Shakespeare demonstrates the “self-sufficiency of character” so that his characters are “free artists of themselves” rather than standing for ethical agencies beyond themselves. In this way, Shakespeare can do what Sophocles could not: write a convincing tragedy about a mere criminal, a regicide, in the figure of Macbeth. Macbeth wins our sympathy with courage and heroism even in a bad cause as he beckons us to investigate the deep source of his mysterious motive, as Hegel argues:

Macbeth is forced by his character…into the fetters of his ambitious passion. At first he hesitates, then he stretches his hand to seize the crown; he commits a murder in order to secure it, and in order to maintain it storms on through the tale of horror. This regardless tenacity, this identity of the man with himself, and the object which his own personality brings to birth is the source to him of an abiding interest. Nothing makes him budge, neither the respect for the sacredness of kingship, nor the madness of his wife, nor the rout of his vassals, nor destruction as it rushes upon him, neither divine nor human claims—he withdraws from them all into himself and persists.

In English criticism, Hegel’s successor and evangelist was A. C. Bradley. Bradley was born in 1851 to a father who led the progressive Evangelical Clapham Sect, reformers renowned for their abolitionist advocacy earlier in the 19th century. Bradley arguably secularized this Evangelical reformism when he studied the progressive historical philosophy of Hegel at Balliol College, Oxford, and then when he affiliated with Fabian socialism later in life. His main legacy, however, is not political but literary: the Oxford lectures published in 1904 as Shakespearean Tragedy. There Bradley considers Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth primarily in the light of Hegel’s insight that Shakespeare invests his characters with autonomy. In the first chapter, Bradley writes:

The ‘story’ or ‘action’ of a Shakespearean tragedy does not consist, of course, solely of human actions or deeds; but the deeds are the predominant factor. And these deeds are, for the most part, actions in the full sense of the word; not things done ‘’tween asleep and wake’, but acts or omissions thoroughly expressive of the doer–characteristic deeds. The centre of the tragedy, therefore, may be said with equal truth to lie in action issuing from character, or in character issuing from action.

This emphasis on the centrality of character leads Bradely to speculate on the pasts of Shakespeare’s heroes, to focus his interpretive energy on what must have led up to the tragedy before the play begins. He introduces his interpretation of Hamlet, for example, with this:

Let us first ask ourselves what we can gather from the play, immediately or by inference, concerning Hamlet as he was just before his father’s death.

In an update on Romantic readings of Hamlet by Coleridge and Goethe, Bradley offers us a public-spirited prince possessed of poetic and philosophic idealism derailed into morbidity by his father’s death and its exposure of un-ideal reality. Much as this interpretation differs from Freud’s sexual emphasis, Bradley shares Freud’s method of pragmatically treating the character like a real person with an inner life susceptible to analysis, a method ultimately inspired by Romanticism’s obsession with the inner life, thus the references to Goethe, Hegel, and Coleridge.

The professionalization of literary studies in the academy eventually left Bradley’s approach looking naive, really a type of unprofessional gossip, next to the formalism the New Critics would adopt in the middle of the 20th century and the poststructuralist and historicist studies that would disaggregate “the text” (no longer the work) into its component ideologemes as the century wore on. “Social energy” wrote the plays of Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt would proclaim in the introduction to his Shakespearean Negotiations in 1990, in which case we have no warrant for wondering about secret sources of Hamlet’s despair or Macbeth’s ambition rather than about how early modern society conceptualized the themes of which the text was woven.

It was in this atmosphere that Harold Bloom published Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human in 1998. Bloom began his academic career in the 1950s reviving individualist Romantic poetics against the Christian formalism of New Critics inspired by T. S. Eliot, but he ended it defending this same individualism against what he notoriously called “the School of Resentment,” with its social and political focus (Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, New Historicism, etc.):

Essentially, I seek to extend a tradition of interpretation that includes Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, A. C. Bradley, and Harold Goddard, a tradition that is now mostly out of fashion. Shakespeare's characters are roles for actors, and also they are considerably more than that: their influence upon life has been very nearly as enormous as their effect upon post-Shakespearean literature.

Bloom self-consciously takes this tradition to its extreme, producing less an exegesis of Shakespeare’s plays than a rhapsody on the strongest characters, above all the bottomless Hamlet, Cleopatra, and Bloom’s favorite and double Falstaff. This is at times, as critics have complained, a rhetorical performance in place of an analysis, almost at times amounting to a kind of sometimes Bradly-inspired Shakespeare fan fiction–

Sometimes I amuse myself by surmising the effect, if Shakespeare had confronted Falstaff with Prince Hamlet rather than Prince Hal. But as I have cited earlier, Harold Goddard charmingly says Hamlet is his own Falstaff, and trying to imagine Falstaff as Horatio is dumbfounding.

[...]

Othello is a great soul hopelessly outclassed in intellect and drive by Iago. Hamlet, as A. C. Bradley once observed, would have disposed of lago very readily. In a speech or two, Hamlet would discern Iago for what he was, and then would drive Iago to suicide by lightning parody and mockery. Falstaff and Rosalind would do much the same, Falstaff boisterously and Rosalind gently.

–but it remains valuable for its ability to convey enthusiasm and emotional intensity, especially for younger readers just beginning their relationship to the plays.

A more experienced reader, however, may want a critical guide more capable of taking the plays as a whole, as integral works of art, rather than as sometimes flat backdrops against which character can shine more brightly. The most influential Shakespeare critic of the generation following Bradley, G. Wilson Knight, rejected his precursor’s psychologized method and its Romantic legacy. Knight opted instead for a modernist search for mythic patterns in the human imagination of the same sort that led Joyce to based Ulysses on The Odyssey and Eliot to base The Waste Land on the Grail legend. And whereas Bradley was a socialist interested in political reform, his designs on this world, Knight was a practicing spiritualist–the Vice President of the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain, in fact–seeking a plane far above the merely material.

In his Wheel of Fire of 1930, Knight argues that the Victorian character-centered approach to Shakespearean tragedy as typified by Bradley will tend to vindicate Tolstoy’s complaint about the plays’ unreality and lack of consistent motive. The very gaps in motivation Shakespeare introduces into his sources, which inspired the science of psychoanalysis, cannot satisfy modern audiences habituated to the legible characterization of the realist novel. For Knight, we must recognize Shakespeare’s mature plays as a body of symbolic dramatic-poetic myth:

[W]e should regard each play as a visionary whole, close-knit in personification, atmospheric suggestion, and direct poetic symbolism: three modes of transmission, equal in their importance. Too often the first of these alone receives attention…

Knight conceived of the mature plays as forming a mythic cycle about the recovery of the soul from a disgust toward life–

The plays from Julius Caesar (about 1599) to The Tempest (about 1611) when properly understood fall into a significant sequence. This I have called ‘the Shakespeare Progress’. Therefore in detailed analysis of any one play it may sometimes be helpful to have regard to its place in the sequence, provided always that the thought of this sequence be used to illuminate, and in no sense be allowed to distort, the view of the play under analysis. Particular notice should be given to what I have called the ‘hate-theme’, which is turbulent throughout most of these plays: an especial modern of cynicism toward love, disgust at the physical body and dismay at the thought of death; a revulsion from human life caused by a clear sight of its limitations–more especially limitations imposed by time.

–an interpretation reflected in the book’s most famous essay, “The Embassy of Death: An Essay on Hamlet.” Here Knight inverts Bradley’s Romantic reading of the prince by contrasting his soul-sickness with the essential health of the Danish court: Claudius is a thoughtful king, committed to resolving international conflict through diplomacy rather than war; Polonius and Laertes are sensible to warn Ophelia away from the unstable Prince; Ophelia and Gertrude are innocent victims of Hamlet’s cruelty. Knight allows Hamlet’s greater accuracy of perception, since only the tragic protagonist’s initial revulsion can set him on the path to a cure the late romances will effect, but Knight’s reading requires a sense of the dramatic whole, not just the central character’s personality, to be persuasive. It even persuaded T. S. Eliot himself. In the book’s foreword, he conceded of Knight’s essays that they made him see Shakespeare as a poet more like Dante than he had imagined, one backed by a coherent metaphysic.

Knight, like Bradley, found a successor at the end of the 20th century. In 1992, the poet Ted Hughes published his controversial Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, a massive reading of almost the same dramatic cycle as Knight’s–though Hughes starts with As You Like It rather than Julius Caesar–with an eye toward Shakespeare’s use of tragedy and romance as ritual dramas like those of Ancient Greece to heal an England riven by religious wars and and an emergent Puritan-Enlightenment nexus that alienate the people from the worship of the Mother Goddess enshrined by medieval Catholicism (and, behind her, the likes of Venus and Isis).

To be dense with realistic understanding of secular man, as Shakespeare’s tragedies are, isn’t enough to earn them a place beside the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, where one does instinctively set them. Presumably they qualify for that fraternity because they operate, as I have said, on the mythic plane, and embody a vision of sacred man, or of falling and fallen man in a sacred universe. Or of rational man confronting and challenging a sacred universe. In both the Greek world and Shakespeare’s, the archaic reign of the Great Goddess was being put down, finally and decisively, by a pragmatic, sceptical, moralizing, desacralizing spirit: in Greece by the spirit of Socrates, and in England by the spirit of the ascendant, Puritan God of individual conscience, the Age of Reason cloaked in the Reformation. [...] Maybe this is how the Complete Works come be (whatever else they may be) modern England’s creation story, our sacred book, closer to us than the Bible.

As with Bloom’s book of the same period, Hughes’s work may be too idiosyncratic to count as responsible literary criticism; like Bloom’s book, however, it communicates an infectious urgency and enthusiasm in the reading of Shakespeare generally unmatched in more orthodox scholarship.

Whether one most appreciates the character-centered approach of Bradley and Bloom or the reading oriented toward mythic form in Knight and Hughes, whether one thinks it’s the height of foolishness or the height of wisdom to treat dramatic characters as real people or to treat theatrical myth as religious scripture, Shakespeare’s “infinite variety” can sustain it all. One feature shared in common among Bradley, Knight, Hughes, and Bloom is an intuitive, emotional, and even personal apprehension of the text, without which perhaps no scholarly knowledge can ever amount to wisdom. As Camille Paglia put it in the essay on Shakespeare in her own controversial end-of-the-millennium critical compendium, Sexual Personae, “ Rationalists have their place, but their limited assumptions and methods must be kept out of the arts. Interpretation of poem, dream, or person requires intuition and divination, not science.”

It’s hardly the most entertaining or significant of the histories. It used to be popular because stars loved to play the major roles. Mrs Siddons could always fill a house with King John. But it is not very popular simply on its own terms. It is not a great play.

But it is an experimental play. Shakespeare is always experimenting. He puts rhetorical techniques to a multiplicity of uses. He re-works similar stories and characters and ideas and dynamics again and again. Reading his works in order shows you how elements of Hamlet evolve from Romeo, how there is something of the Ariel-Prospero relationship present in the scene in King John.

After the great fire of London, Christopher Wren rebuilt dozens of churches. Each one was constrained in some way. The plot was an odd shape. There were some old stones left over. Parishioners had their demands. Wren was developing the new classical style within those constraints. Each church is thus an experiment. Go to one and you see how the dome and pillars of St. Paul’s were developed, to another how he worked out how to fill a church with so much light it becomes a lantern.

Shakespeare is like this. Each play has new constraints, from the source, from audience demand, and from the implicit censorship of the times. Market competition is constantly forcing him to be inventive, too. So he is always experimenting.

In “Between Tetralogies: King John as Transition”1 Virginia Mason Vaughan argues that King John acts as a hinge between the two history tetralogies. Eight of the history plays run in chronological order from Richard II to Richard III, covering a century and more of English history. But they are not aesthetically coherent. There is a great gulf between the first four plays he wrote (the three parts of Henry VI and RIII) and the second four (RII, two parts of Henry IV, and HV).

What happened between the two tetralogies to make them so different?

King John begins in medias res. It presents an isolated series of episodes that are linked to the reign of one king. And these episodes are important, not for their interconnectedness with other events, nor for their consequences to Britain's future, but for their own sake. In King John we miss a sense of history as continuing process. What we gain, however, is an intense focus on the political present—the here and now of decision-making.

Mason Vaughan quotes various critics to argue that Shakespeare begins to disregard Elizabethan ideas in King John. Order and degree give way to a complex network of personal relationships. This is the experimental break-through of the play.

King John shows the dramatist newly aware that political questions are seldom as easy to answer as the traditional hierarchical model suggests. In this sense, King John represents an important transition between the two tetralogies. In particular—and here is the focus of the present essay—King John demonstrates Shakespeare's experimentation with more sophisticated dramaturgical techniques to convey political complexities…

What are those dramaturgical techniques?

To see what King John accomplished, we need to see what happened in the earlier plays first.

The Henry VI plays are mostly “episodic”, “presentational”, and “simplistic.” There is very little engagement with the characters. The “abstract political message” predominates. They are “as much homiletic as dramatic.”

Throughout the Henry VI plays Shakespeare interrupts the action with choral figures who declaim on civil war.

Various characters simply tell us what to think. The moral is so clear it becomes dull. Emblematic scenes like the Temple garden with the red and white roses become almost allegorical. Many speeches are “pure exposition”.

In the most emblematic scene of 2 Henry VI, Jack Cade is killed. His foe, Alexander Iden, represents the pastoral ideal of life away from court factions. Yet this brief glimpse of what English life should be is followed immediately by Clifford's Senecan declamations and York's Marlovian determination to pursue the crown. These passages do not end the play, however. Though the final scene does celebrate the Yorkist victory at St. Albans, it looks ahead to the next episode in Shakespeare's saga, the Parliament that begins 3 Henry VI. Thus, while Shakespeare might have ended on a rhetorical climax, he chose instead an open ending, a continuation of the episodic structure.

Even Richard III, a generally much better play, is like this. It is full of prophecies and curses that come to pass. Richard is almost a real person, but he is an archetype too. It’s all still a bit Hollywood.

The ghosts' psychomachia in Act V is another emblematic scene, reducing the conflict at Bosworth to a simplistic clash between good and evil. Richmond is a deus ex machina who ends England's civil carnage and proudly proclaims the concluding moral.

Mason Vaughan says the plays are still sophisticated accomplishments, but that they are not political per se: “they do not analyze political behavior.”

King John and political behaviour

King John is different. In clashes between “John and Arthur, the Bastard and his brother, Constance and Elinor, Pandulph and John, Lewis and John, the barons and John, and finally, Pandulph and Lewis, each side has some legitimacy.”

As Mason Vaughan says, “The scenes are arranged so as to give the audience divided loyalties: politics becomes embedded in personal relationships rather than abstract ideas.”

Before the closing lines, which do moralise, the play “probes rather than pronounces.” The play is a debate, not a homily. “In King John patriotic fervor is continually muted by doubt and skepticism… The audience is forced to see the action from several perspectives at once, not simply from within the framework of Tudor myth and English patriotism. In other words, the tensions so often noted in the Henriad begin to appear in King John.”

Look at that last sentence again. “In other words, the tensions so often noted in the Henriad begin to appear in King John.”

In her discussion of how King John relates to another play about the same story The Troublesome Reign, Mason Vaughan discusses how Shakespeare defies the expectations of his time. I have bolded key sentences.

While Shakespeare's audience may have delighted in the Bastard much as we do, it was probably surprised by the rest of the play. Shakespeare's John is not the John of sixteenth-century propaganda. He is not the warlike Christian who temporarily defied Rome in John Bale's King Johan, Foxe's Booke of Martyrs, the Homilie Against Disobedience, and The Troublesome Raigne. Shakespeare makes very little of John's excommunication or his death. John does briefly declare himself "supreme head" and insist that "No Italian priest / Shall tithe or toll in our dominions" (III.i. 153-55). But that is as far as he goes. His failure in this play stems not from defiance of the Pope but from his role in planning an innocent child's murder. Arthur's death alienates the nobles, which in turn assures Lewis' success. The religious issue is muted throughout. Shakespeare was more interested in the concept of legitimacy, which he further explored in the Henriad. King John's plot may be from The Troublesome Raigne, but Shakespeare condensed his material to emphasize repeated reversals of expectations.

We immediately think of Macbeth, an achievement Shakespeare could not have made without the experiments of King John.

One key dramatic method of King John is “frequent turns of events”, which means both characters and audience are constantly surprised. We alternate between claims to authority and actions that undermine those claims. This “allows him to juxtapose characters who think they are in control of "the times" with events which drastically undercut their assurance.”

Think of the marvellous juxtapositions of the court and country scenes in the two parts of Henry IV, especially the Gloucestershire scene in 2 Henry IV, which are almost never played well, but which are, on the page, some of Shakespeare’s finest work. (It is the actors’ fault they do not play well, to be clear.)

In King John, this technique reaches its heights in the battle of Angiers scene.

Although Shakespeare was limited by his chronicle sources, he manipulated those sources for the best effect. In this scene he crams a series of political events into an extended episode. And despite the heavy stylized speeches, Shakespeare forces “the audience to experience the complex life of the dramatized world and its inhabitants.” His treatment is not as sophisticated as it will be in the Henriad, but the audience is caught in a web of personal relationships that embody politics’ divided loyalties.

Conclusion

I do not love King John. I cannot bring myself to admire it in my memory. But Mason Vaughan shows me that Shakespeare’s genius for showing how the simple abstraction of ideas transmogrifies into the convolutions of human behaviour owes a great deal to his experiments in King John.

Read more about King John

Iannaccone showed pages to Sorti and his wife, Rita Monaldi, who have written extensively about Dante and Shakespeare, helped by their daughter, the historian Teodora Sorti. They noticed Florio also highlighted entire lines and scenes in the Divine Comedy that appear in Shakespeare’s plays, suggesting Florio fed ideas to the Bard.

In one highlighted section, Dante compares fleeting fame to “worldly rumour”, writing: “Worldly rumour is nothing but a gust of wind, first blowing from one quarter, then another, changing name with every new direction.”

Sorti pointed to the character called Rumour in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, who boasts: “Which of you will stop the vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks? I, from the orient to the drooping west, making the wind my post-horse, still unfold the acts commenced on this ball of earth.”

Sorti said: “The fact that Florio marked this long passage, of which there is no trace in his dictionaries, is a clear indication that it was selected for Shakespeare’s text.”

There is another example in the Times article and more promised in a book. This was discovered in a book in the British Library. (Link below.)

This is why we need universities. Real scholarship makes these discoveries and they slowly add up to a fuller understanding of a period of a writer. Too much humanities output hasn’t been this sort of thing of course, but true literary scholarship is not something we want to lose. Nor as and would say can it be replicated here on Substack.

Link — https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/unearthed-book-shakespeare-dante-pgk232pmh

Some of what is discussed in the video is not mentioned in these notes, and vice-versa. A piece will follow next week writing up some of the comments in the video about King John as an important transition play for Shakesepare.

1. After Shakespeare’s death the performance record for King John is quiet, but starting in 1737 it becomes a popular play again, with performances in 58 seasons during the following 120 years. In 1760/61, 1766/67, and 1817/18 it was performed at more than one theatre.

2. King John is an actor’s play, full of speeches that give an opportunity for intense performance.

3. However, it is not easy to fit King John into revivals of the history plays and so it has lagged behind the Henriad. In 1944 it was said to be unknown on the stage, having fallen out of popularity.

4. Some say the play is popular when made dramatic and unpopular when made ideological, which causes a loss of the passion that attracted actors like Garrick and Kemble to the play in earlier generations.

5. John is hardly apolitical. It has been used as a feverishly anti-Papist play in the eighteenth century and a strongly anti-war play in 1980s Germany, when it was performed seemingly in response to the USA’s decision to deploy Pershing missiles in West Germany.

6. However, as L.A. Beaurline says in the introduction to the Cambridge edition, John’s political relevance has been a “spasmodic phenomenon” and unlikely to account for changes in popularity.

7. Changes in acting styles are more likely to account for the play’s reputation. John rewards passionate acting, not the muted realism that emerged as the canonical taste in the twentieth century. So it is no surprise to find that Baliol Holloway performed in the play.

8. Beaurline, writing in 1990, identified two sorts of “dramatic values” in their time. First, convincing acting that allows the audience to believe in the drama. Second, the play as an abstraction of “portable meaning”. John can satisfy both but it is hard to achieve.

9. In 1823, Charles Kemble staged a production in historically informed costume, for the first time. John’s costume had the lions from his great seal; Eleanor’s costume was based on her effigy. Taste was tending to the medieval in Britain more broadly at this time. It is reported that when the curtain rose and revealed knights in mail, courtiers in long tunics, John dressed as his effigy in Worcester Cathedral, and the correct helmets and shields everywhere, the audience gave “a roar of approbation” and four rounds of applause.

10. In 1841, Macready staged a Gothic production which supposedly included three hundred extras to create a sense of realism.

11. Macready took pains on all details, rather than prioritising the leading parts, so that everything was to make a whole convincing picture: backdrops, costumes, the way actors wore their mail and costumes in different settings, exactly where everyone stood, and so on.

12. Later productions followed suit, until it became impossible to make money staging such elaborate plays, and Kean’s tour of America failed in 1852.

13. Beerbohm Tree was so eager to please the eye and amuse the audience: he seems to have stifled all the drama. Thus the picturesque tradition hardened into an intricate image which shattered.

14. Tree’s production was full of little touches: stairs, an organ, a jester who beats the Bastard with a bladder, real daisies to be cut down by John’s sword, a glade of trees, and so on. The result, though splendid, was, Beaurline says, a production that was “busy without significance.”

15. Beerbohm Tree’s production is also the first time Shakespeare was filmed.

16. John exemplifies the declamatory style. Beaurline says that this contrasts to the relative subtlety and flexibility of the dramatic poetry makes the declamatory stuff seem artificial.

17. The Bastard sometimes has a believable plain style, such as I.i.271-6. We can see the plain style as honest and the declamatory style as concealing a lie.

18. In many Shakespeare plays, it is futile to pursue moral absolutism in politics. John is an early instance of this theme which is pursued most rigorously and successfully in Coriolanus.

19. John is a play of earthly power. Providence is diminished and the state demythologised. Divine authority becomes realpolitik. Beaurline: “the impression is that this is a fallen world, from which God is removed and alien.”

20. Like Richard II, John falls because he claims too much power for himself.

21. We do not know what year John was written. It has to be after 1587, when Holinshed was published, and by 1598 it was praised by Francis Meres. The consensus, according to the Arden editor, is that the 1591 play The Troublesome Reign was one of Shakespeare’s sources. Stylistic analysis suggests 1595-6.

22. In keeping with the other history plays, commoners are not a large presence in John, and they appear solo, not as part of the collective. As the Arden editors say, “these characters, plain, pragmatic and decent, come into focus only to the degree that they resist absorption by their social group.”

Whatever you want to ask or discuss, you can drop in the comments here.

Did you love the play or hate it? What ideas do you want to talk about? Did anything shock you? What do you want to discuss? Did you see a good (or bad) production? Tell us!

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1. Richard II was written in 1595. The Chamberlain’s Men had been formed in 1594, and Shakespeare would have been contracted to write one tragedy and one comedy a year. He followed it with the two parts of Henry IV and Henry V, as well as Julius Caesar, in the following years.

2. In December 1595, a letter to Sir Robert Cecil asked if he will want to watch a play about “K. Richard”. This is thought to refer to Richard II, which was a popular play.

3. In 1597, the first Quarto was published. Two more Quartos were published in 1598. This was the first play popular enough to have three printings in two years. There were five Quartos before the Folio in 1623.

4. The second Quarto (i.e. the first one printed in 1598) was the first time Shakespeare’s name appeared on a printing of one of his plays.

5. In 1600, six passages were anthologised in England’s Parnassus.

   Read more about Shakespeare and anthologies here

6. According to an account of Elizabeth I speaking to the Keeper of the Tower of London, Good Queen Bess called herself Richard II, in reference to this play, which she said had been performed “40tie times in open streets and houses.”

7. The Earl of Essex commissioned a performance of Richard II shortly before his failed rebellion attempt in 1601.

8. Before 1594, there was much uncertainty in the market. Plague kept theatres closed. Now Shakespeare seems to be starting on a sequence of plays, something to bring reliable audiences. The poems he printed during the plague closures foretell the highly lyrical style of Richard II, and other plays written at this time.

   Read more about this phase of Shakespeare’s career

9. Shakespeare kept ownership of the plays he had written before 1594. Most playwrights did not do this. They may have been the capital he used to join The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, who now performed his Henry VI trilogy.

10. Pilgrimage to Jerusalem is a motif that runs from the start of Richard II to the end of Henry V.

11. Although Shakespeare is, as always, heavily indebted to his sources, including Holinshed and Samuel Daniel, he made much more of this motif than anyone else. His account is centred on an expansion of the old prophecy that Henry IV would die in Jerusalem.

12. The plays are also about power: who controls an over-mighty king? There are three kings in English history who were usurped—John, Henry VI, and Richard II. Shakespeare dramatised all three. (If you enjoy history trivia, you can also think about the three years in English history in which two kings ascended the throne.)

13. Both pilgrimage and crusade are established as motifs. Gaunt talks of crusading ancestors and Richard I. Richard II is told to behave more like a palmer, i.e. someone on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Mowbray and Bolingbroke make a pilgrimage to death. Henry ends the play wishing to go on pilgrimage to atone for Richard’s death.

14. Richard II was more politically troublesome than the other history plays. It is about an heirless monarch who has bad advisors, a subject a little too close to home for the ageing Elizabeth.

15. Essex was descended from one of Edward III’s sons, like all the participants in the Wars of the Roses. Richard II and Henry IV were both descended from sons of Edward III. Various other plays in the 1590s were dedicated to Essex and made more of his ancestor’s role in history.

16. One Parliamentarian had been imprisoned for writing a pamphlet suggesting James VI of Scotland was Elizabeth’s legitimate heir. A book about Henry IV, dedicated to Essex and boosting his ancestor, was censored. The book was used as evidence against Essex later on, and the author was put in the Tower. Although the Chamberlain’s Men are thought to have performed Richard II for Essex and his men, they were not punished.

17. The deposition scene in IV.i was removed from printed editions in Elizabeth’s lifetime. When we talk about Richard II having contemporary political resonance, we must remember that the play itself makes no comparison to Essex and is hardly “on the side of” Bolingbroke. The deposition scene was first published in the fourth Quarto of 1608. We don’t know if it was performed earlier than that.

18. Other sources include a play called Woodstock and a translation of Froissart. He may have used other histories of the Wars of the Roses too, and perhaps A Mirror for Magistrates. There are multiple verbal parallels between Samuel Daniel’s book The Civil Wars and speeches in Richard II by Carlisle and Richard. The garden and mirror scenes have no known source. He makes more of the issue of divine right than any of his sources.

19. The current Cambridge editor, Claire McEachern, sees the choices Shakespeare made as to do with play structure, not political outlook. Shakespeare had a “precise idea of structure” and choices are more to do with “the principle of balance” than ideology.

20. Some of you may have heard me talk about Shakespeare as a pragmatist. The garden scene at III.iv is a crucial scene for this idea. Right in the middle of this play which is about two competing ideals of kingship—the divine right and the material right—is a pragmatic speech about the need for a king to do a good job. McEachern writes that the scene is “poised between the political realism of the confrontation at Flint Castle and the attempted legalisms of the Parliament scene. It expresses “the realistic political need for the man to fit the office. There is no divine right… only good husbandry.” A good king, in other words, does a good job.

21. Bolingbroke makes a series of legal challenges to Richard, about the distribution of property and the investigation of murder. Gaunt accuses Richard of side-stepping the law. But Gaunt also sees it is for God to judge the duel. He advocates patience. In III.iii Richard asserts this view and is opposed by Northumberland.

22. Shakespeare endorses neither. This is a play of personality. Woodstock, one of the source plays, blames Richard’s flatterers. Richard II makes Richard the author of his own fall. McEachern says, “he words himself into abdication.”

23. Richard II is written entirely in verse. It is full of speeches and rhetorical devices. Much of the verse is formal, i.e. not trying to sound like ordinary speech. Confrontation scenes (Mowbray and Bolingbroke, Gaunt and the Duchess) contain many rhyming couplets, which express controlled anger, frustration, “imposing a ceremonious formality on a tense confrontation”.

24. Gaunt speaks more couplets than anyone else. They suit his sense of certainty and his conventional wisdom.

25. Richard II would have been performed at The Theatre. (The company moved to the Globe around 1600.) It was built in Shoreditch in 1576. In 1596-7, the lease expired, and they performed at the Swan while the Theatre was re-built as the Globe.

26. It requires very little staging. This is a talking play, not a moving play. It took two hours to perform, probably at two in the afternoon, when the daylight was best.

27. Richard II remained popular and controversial. It was performed to a packed theatre in 1631. It was censored before being banned in 1680, even though Nahum Tate had removed all the misdeeds of the king. It was unpopular in the eighteenth century, perhaps because it portrayed a “bad king”. Johnson thought it was dull!

28. Edmund Kean saw Richard’s potential as a tragic hero and revived the play in 1815, removing the conspiracy at the end. His version stayed on stage for years and went to New York in the 1820s.

29. In the 1850s, Charles Kean staged a pared down, highly gothic version, with dozens of people on stage, some of whom climbed lamp-posts while church bells rang. Pater loved the production and praised the play for its musical language and structure. Richard became less of a “bad king” and more a sympathetic figure.

30. Pater compared Richard to a poet or actor, overwhelmed by his love of words. Politics no longer mattered to the play so it became a tragedy. In 1903, Beerbohm Tree staged the duel with real horses. Politics has never really taken over from Richard’s character again in modern production.

31. Starting in the 1980s with Stephen Greenblatt, many scholars have tried to make connections between Richard II and Elizabethan politics. This is largely speculation and always begins and ends with ideas that fit modern politics perhaps too neatly. If you want the theatre to be a subversive place, you do not need much evidence to spin such a tale. More recent work has suggested that Essex may not have planned a full rebellion, merely a replacement of the Queen’s advisors. Watching Richard II was not, then, a subversive act, but more of “dinner and a show” before a difficult challenge was made to the Queen about her court.

Whatever you want to ask or discuss, you can drop in the comments here.

Did you love the play or hate it? What ideas do you want to talk about? Did anything shock you? What do you want to discuss? Did you see a good (or bad) production? Tell us!

**I will record most of the session so that people who cannot join can watch it later.**

MEETING LINK — https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87591101308?pwd=5W3XpZXSJ2etTa7YOOEPS5znkPGwt6.1

Find your local number: https://us06web.zoom.us/u/kcB1RV3M4K

Full Shakespeare schedule here.

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For more about this stage in Shakespeare’s career, read this piece.

1. A Midsummer Night’s Dream marks the arrival of magic in Shakespeare’s work. The fairies presage witches, ghosts, spirits, monsters, vasty deeps, and all manner of the weird. Few things have become so fixedly part of the cultural unconscious than Shakespeare’s vision of fairies who combine inexplicably the joy of innocence and the dangers of evil.

2. This is also the beginning of another truly Shakespearean place: the forest. From here on, pastoral retreat is reshaped from Arden to the island of The Tempest. Deep England, Northrop Frye’s “green world”, animates the Shakespearean imagination very deeply, from the Gloucestershire scenes in Henry IV (so sharp a rendering they are nigh unperformable) to the walking woods of Macbeth.

3. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is also one of Shakespeare’s most musical plays. There are songs in the play itself, two of which were lost, gone, as Johnson said, after many other things of great value. Music is essential to Shakespeare, not only as a part of the performance, but in the lyricism of his language, both poetry and prose.

4. When giving a lecture about Othello, W.H. Auden once shuffled on the stage in his slippers, put on a recording of Verdi’s Otello, and sat and listened to it. One could do the same with this play and Mendelssohn.

5. But many great musicians have been compelled by this play: Duke Ellington named an album after one of its line; progressive rocker Steve Hackett made a Dream suite; Dream has been a musical comedy (Swinging the Dream, 1939), as well as some thirty-nine operas, including one by Britten (1960); there are also several ballets.

6. Scenes of the Dream have been painted by Reynolds, Fuseli, Blake, and Landseer, among many others. Lewis Carroll counted one-hundred-and-sixty-five fairies in Joseph Paton’s The Quarrel (1849).

   

7. What all of this shows is that Dream has become perhaps Shakespeare’s most loved play because it is his most exuberant.

8. Exuberance is the power of the dream: innocence, revelry, festivity, gaiety. Sir Toby in Twelfth Night scorns Malvolio: “dost thou think that because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?” In the Dream, the scorn becomes manic action. There is no greater power against authority than merry laughter.

9. This is why Dream has been popular in totalitarian countries: a Nazi prison, Hungary, Lebanon. The Arden editor (whose introduction is splendid throughout), says of Peter Brook’s production in Hungary: “It was a moment’s draught of liberty, smuggled in under the aesthetic cover of theatre.”

10. C.L. Barber has a strong conclusion about the nature of dream and reality.

    Theseus, moreover, does not quite have the last word, even in this play: his position is only one stage in a dialectic. Hippolyta will not be reasoned out of her wonder, and answers her new Lord with

    But all the story of the night told over,

    And all their minds transfigur’d so together,

    More witnesseth than fancy’s images

    And grows to something of great constancy;

    But howsoever, strange and admirable.

    (V.i.23-27)

    Did it happen, or didn’t it happen? The doubt is justified by what Shakespeare has shown us. We are not asked to think that fairies exist. But imagination, by presenting these figments, has reached to something, a creative tendency and process. What is this process? Where is it? What shall we call it? It is what happens in the play. It is what happens in marriage. To name it requires many words, words in motion—the words of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

11. That last phrase is apt. Dream is a play of constant motion, not only the back-and-forth emotionality of the lover, but literally, on stage, someone should always be moving. Lovers chasing each other or fighting each other; Fairies darting, hiding, sneaking, pranking.

12. Dream is more than two-thirds verse, about half-and-half rhymed and blank. Ordinary speech, which voices plain statements and simple plot points, rises to some of the loveliest sounding poetry. Lysander, protesting his right against Demetrius is given mellifluous lines. Read these out loud.

    I am, my lord, as well derived as he,
    As well possess'd; my love is more than his;
    My fortunes every way as fairly rank'd,
    If not with vantage, as Demetrius';
    And, which is more than all these boasts can be,
    I am beloved of beauteous Hermia:
    Why should not I then prosecute my right?
    Demetrius, I'll avouch it to his head,
    Made love to Nedar's daughter, Helena,
    And won her soul; and she, sweet lady, dotes,
    Devoutly dotes, dotes in idolatry,
    Upon this spotted and inconstant man.

    See how the rhetorical tropes are used: the anaphora of “as well… as well” gives way to “my love… my fortunes”. The first line, “I am, my lord” is echoed in the sixth: “I am beloved of beauteous Hermia.” There’s a beautiful simplicity in the alliteration of beloved and beauteous. The short vowel sounds of beloved (eh, uh), become the long sounds of beauteous (ooh, ee). The phrase “beauteous Hermia” is a double dactyl (so it is pronounced beau-te-ous Her-mi-a, dum-dee-dee, dum-dee-dee), a lovely lilting sound. The earlier part of the line is iambic (“I am be-loved) which we expect to carry on (the previous lines are all iambic). So the double dactyl catches the ear with a lover’s swoon. Beautiful irregularity builds to a great crescendo in the closing lines, which can be marked, thus,

    Demetrius, I'll avouch it to his head,
    Made love to Nedar's daughter, Helena,
    And won her soul; and she, sweet lady, dotes,
    Devoutly dotes, dotes in idolatry,
    Upon this spotted and inconstant man.

    See the scornful spondee, “his head”, the prosecutorial firmness of the sudden iambs of “and won her soul”, and the way the plangent alliteration of “dotes,
    Devoutly dotes” stops shy of overkill by picking up the “d” sound within “idolatry”. This phrase shows, too, the musicality of the Dream; there is something of sonata formation in the vowels that go from “O”, develop through “eh”, “owe”, “ee”, and back to “O”, “O”. The marvellous caesura of “Devoutly dotes, dotes in idolatry” maintains the buoyancy of these plangent lines, which is brought to a pitch as the vowel sequence of “owe”, “O”, “O”, leads to the “oh” of idolatry.

    And then in the final line the word “Upon” echoes in “spot” and “inconstant” and “man”. Lysander has double-unstressed syllables, too, in “Hel-en-a” and “i-dol-at-ry”, which he uses to good effect at the ends of his lines to give a dropping, hollow, sense of sadness. He is an effective public speaker, like Othello.

13. But even the prose is poetic. There is a glory to Bottom’s cadences. We begin to see hints of Falstaff in his Mainwaring-esque pomposity.

    I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was--there is no man can tell what. Methought I was,--and methought I had,--but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottom's Dream, because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the duke: peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.

14. Here is Samuel Johnson’s note to the lines:

    Flute. Nay, faith, let me not play a woman; I have a beard coming.

    Quince. That's all one, you shall play it in a masque; and you may speak as small as you will.

    This passage shews how the want of women on the old stage was supplied. If they had not a young man who could perform the part with a face that might pass for feminine, the character was acted in a mask, which was at that time part of a lady's dress so much in use that it did not give any unusual appearance to the scene: and he that could modulate his voice in a female tone might play the women very successfully. It is observed in Downes's Memoirs of the Playhouse, that one of these counterfeit heroines moved the passions more strongly than the women that have since been brought upon the stage. Some of the catastrophes of the old comedies, which make lovers marry the wrong women, are, by recollection of the common use of masks, brought nearer to probability.

15. Dream is about a play within a play, and that play is about another Shakespeare play: Romeo and Juliet. Pyramus and Thisbe is clearly an echo of Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Dream were both written at a similar time, probably 1595. The mechanicals are a mockery of a troupe of actors trying to perform a tragedy very like Romeo and Juliet. What goes wrong in Romeo goes right in Dream. Both are about daughters defying fathers, the weak hand of stern authority, and the temporary madness of young love. Mercutio is obsessed with fairies. A.D. Nuttall says these lines of Lysander are a good summary of Romeo,

    Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
    That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
    And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!'
    The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
    So quick bright things come to confusion.

    They explicitly echo Juliet:

    I have no joy of this contract to-night:
    It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;
    Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be
    Ere one can say 'It lightens.'

    For more about Romeo and Juliet, read this.

16. Although we love it, and it has been hugely popular for many years now, Dream seems to have been little performed after the Restoration. And when it was performed, it was as a comic opera, with very little of Shakespeare’s words.

17. It started to be performed with more of the original words in 1840. But later productions still cut many lines.

18. It was common in the nineteenth century for women to play Oberon and Puck.

19. It was in Liverpool in 1880 that the popular practice of children playing fairies began, although it seems quite possible that this happened in the original productions. The fairies’ lines are so simple, so fool-proof, they seemed designed for children.

20. In 1900, the luscious tradition had a moment of glory in the Beerbohm-Tree production, which put a splendid forest on the stage with mechanical song-birds and live rabbits.

21. Peter Brook’s production in 1970 is now famous and inescapable. Its innovation was the set, a large white box. The production was full of gymnastics and circus tricks. Brooks knew that Dream is about theatre, and so his production enabled everything the theatre could do to flourish. He was surely more right than his dismal successors that this is not a play about submerged violence, but theatrical unity. Shakespeare establishes another great theme in this early masterpiece: redemption.

Whatever you want to ask or discuss, you can drop in the comments here.

Did you love the play or hate it? What ideas do you want to talk about? Did anything shock you? What do you want to discuss? Did you see a good (or bad) production? Tell us!

**I will record part of the session so that people who cannot join can watch it later.**

MEETING LINK — https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83716852480?pwd=05b8bSmujKv06ZaPLY6zzVhxMH9KHM.1

Find your local number: https://us06web.zoom.us/u/kcG0xNwuOp

Full Shakespeare schedule here.

Plague

In 1592, the plague arrived in London. This was the last great plague of the century, but it hit hard. London lost 8% of its population, with some twenty thousand dead. Shakespeare was a young playwright and actor at this time. Now the theatres were closed for two years.

When they opened again in 1594, Shakespeare began an extraordinary period of creativity. Between 1594 and 1597, he wrote Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King John, Richard II. This is the second phase of his career. It is a highly lyrical phase, full of intricate rhetoric and vivid poetry. The Comedy of Errors is a lovely play, but Richard II is a jewel in the Shakespearean crown. In this brief period, Shakespeare wrote several of his most sparkling, most loved plays. He wrote in three years thousands of lines that are still performed, memorised, and anthologised.

This is the first tipping point of his career. Several times, Shakespeare’s innovations come flaring out, as he competes with other writers and adjusts to the tastes of the times.

Before the plague, in his early apprentice phase, Shakespeare developed his history plays in Henry VI and Richard III and wrote the early comedies Taming of the Shrew and Two Gentlemen of Verona. After the plague, he was writing masterpieces that show huge development in dramaturgy and lyricism.

Two developments contributed to this leap forward: a new theatre company and the poetic culture of the 1590s.

Lord Chamberlain

In May 1594, Henry Carey, first Baron Hunsdon and lord chamberlain of the queen's household set up the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. His job was to provide the Queen with the best entertainment during Christmas. The idea was that plays would be written and performed in the theatres in the suburbs of the City, and the best would be performed for Good Queen Bess. The City of London was usually hostile to players, believing they practised and encouraged immorality, which is why they required special licensing. Shakespeare joined this new group. It was, from the start, a new way of working. Andrew Gurr writes, in The Oxford Dictionary of Biography.

The new acting companies of the 1590s at first provided a notable exception to the prevailing rule among Elizabethan organizations, which were normally decidedly autocratic in character, being ruled either by a citizen paterfamilias or by a lord with inherited authority. By contrast, each company worked as a team, sharing the members' assets, income, and costs.

Being part of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men meant Shakespeare had permanent colleagues. Actors like Burbage (tragic hero) and Armin (clown) worked with him on every play, and allowed him to develop and experiment his parts in accordance with their specific talents.

Poetic culture

In the two year period of theatre closures, as well as touring the provinces, Shakespeare had written poetry. Venus and Adonis is, as Peter Holland says in the ODNB, a mixture of the comic and erotic, a combination that became a hallmark of Shakespeare’s writing. It was one of his most popular works, running to fifteen editions by 1636. That is more than any of his other printed works.

The 1590s was a great decade for poetry. Elizabethan England had a flourishing of verse. Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Sidney’s Arcadia and Astrophel and Stella were published. Writers like Thomas Campion, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, and Walter Raleigh were all publishing. Anthologies like The Phoenix Nest and translations like Chapman’s Homer came out. There were sonnets, epics, epithalamions, ottava rima, pastorals, allegories, satires, lyrics…

This was a rich tradition for several reasons. English was in a state of immense growth. Thousands of words were being added as the language grew to accommodate all the new ideas being translated from the Latin. There was a strong poetic tradition from earlier in the century (Wyatt, Surrey, Howard). And many splendid lyrics were written for, or influenced by, lute songs and madrigals. Campion is the great poet of the sung lyric and his words read beautifully today.

So Shakespeare is the pinnacle of a teeming culture. The theatres flourished in a culture that was expanding in all sorts of ways. London was full of the effects of trade, travel, and translation. The population was growing. The beneficial effects of selling the monasteries into private hands a generation earlier were an economic boon (it enabled the building of the theatres for one thing). And there was a glut of grammar-school educated young men, who wanted their entertainment to be both bawdy and witty, a combination at which Shakespeare excelled.

The effects are obvious everywhere: mellifluous lines of verse, sonnets embedded into plays, a merry excess of puns and rhetorical tropes. Shakespeare was taking so much that existed in the poetic and dramatic culture of his time and condensing into half a dozen plays, mocking it, replicating it, bettering it. After the dullness of the Henry VI plays, and the unevenness of Richard III, we suddenly get the startling feeling of his immense productivity.

With the new comedies, and Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s genius has met the conditions of his time and a new brilliance emerged.

Relevant reading

You can find more details about Shakespeare responding to his contemporaries in my notes about Love’s Labour’s Lost.

Here are my notes about Romeo and Juliet, which has some basic information about the original Theatre, and a little more about contemporary influence. (I also wrote about Romeo and Juliet.)

And here are last month’s notes about Comedy of Errors.

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1. Errors has been one of the least admired plays, among the least performed and discussed. It is the shortest play.

2. In 1709, Rowe said Errors had “doggerel rhymes” and that Shakespeare lacked Latin. In 1728, Pope said only a few of the scenes could possibly be by Shakespeare. Hazlitt called it “not the most pleasing.”

3. Charles Armitage Brown said: Error’s “action is serious” and its “mistakes… are ludicrous.” Of an 1838 performance, he wrote, “the audience in their laughter rolled about like waves.”

4. The source is Plautus’s Menaechmi, from which Shakespeare derived the Antipholus twin plot. He added the second set of Dromio twins from another Plautus play Amphitryon. Plautus was a set text at grammar schools.

5. Errors was written in the late 1580s, perhaps 1590. Shakespeare became the father of twins (Judith and Hamnet) in 1585.

6. Menaechmi has seventeen errors. Shakespeare has more like fifty.

7. Ros King in the Cambridge editions points to the many contradictions of religion and spiritualism, identity and confusion, morality and excess. It is a joke and it is serious. Knockabout humour is achieved through precise control of language. Errors is about domesticity, social morality, middle-class values, family separation, political conflict,—but the story is romance and fairy tale.

8. Plautus’s prologue to the Amphitryon defends tragi-comedy, the only known classical usage of that term. The non-Aristotelian mode of Shakespeare’s drama has one origin here.

9. Errors has a lot of poetry, as much as Richard III or Love’s Labour’s Lost, and is as experimental as Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is 87% verse, of which, 25% is rhyming.

10. Errors opens in iambic pentameter, and goes on to include: blank verse, heroic couplets, quatrains, hexameter, stichomythia, short lines, and tumbling verse (which has a regular number of stressed, but irregular number of unstressed syllables). Tumbling verse is lower class, and spoken by servants; blank verse and heroic couplets are spoken by higher class characters.1

11. Ros King: “this variation invariably has dramaturgical function. It creates a sense of characters really talking and listening to each other, repeating each other’s rhythms… or capping each other’s rhymes.” She quotes Brennan O’Donnell, who says the tri-syllabic rhyme in these lines, is “the verbal equivalent of a slammed door”,

    Are you there wife? You might have come before.
    Your wife, sir knave? Get you from the door.

12. Epheseus, the town where the action takes place, is a metaphor for the theatre: a place of unstable identity.

13. Error was a Renaissance preoccupation. In The Faerie Queene, The Redcrosse Knight has to battle the monster Error, who strews errors around her, representing Catholic doctrine.

14. Error means: wandering; mistakes of ignorance; wrong belief. Errors has what Spenser called an “endless train” of all these sorts of errors.

15. Errors is full of merchants. The background of the plot is a trade war. The action hinges on a luxury commodity. It is a trader’s need to call in a debt that tips the plot into frenzy. (Debt can also have religious and emotional connotations.)

16. Words like “juggler”, “sorcerer”, and “mist” were often used as insults towards Catholic practices just as exorcism, veneration of the Host, and intercessory prayer for souls in Purgatory. When Antipholus of Syracuse says “Nimble jugglers” the audience would know this was an abuse against Catholic priests.

17. Unlike other Shakespearean comedies, there is no town/county divide, no Forest of Arden, in Errors. Both realms exist in one: it is an uncanny play: the ordinary and the magical are interfused.

18. In De fabula, an essay printed in editions of Terence’s comedies, it is said that comedy has a three-part structure: protasis, epistasis, catastrophe. In the epistasis, occurs, “the increase and progression of the turbulations and the whole, as I might say, knot of error.” The rope near the end is, according to the Arden editor, almost an allegory of that idea.

19. In 1996, the RSC did a production that emphasised the serious side of the play. Benedict Nightingale wrote abut Antipholus’ “inner need verging on compulsion” to find his twin and said audiences would “find the magic and may even be moved” by the final reconciliation.

20. Syracuse and Epheseus were significant cities to Elizabethans. Damnation and salvation were central problems of the Reformation. The New Testament refers several times to the difficulty of converting the Epheseans (see Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians). In the sixteenth century, it was a significant Christian site under Turkish rule. It was also significant to the ancients, and had a Temple of Diana; it was famous for witchcraft. Diana was goddess of both chastity and childbirth. Aemilia, at the end, is both nun and mother. It is a place of duality, suitable to Reformation transitions.

21. In IV.iv, the Ephesians believe Antiphous and Dromio are possessed, and bring in an exorcist. (They are confronted with the Syracusean doubles, who already think the island is a den of witchery). This has a basis in the Acts of the Apostles, 19: 13-18, Geneva Bible version.

    Then certain of the vagabond Jews, exorcists took in hand to name over them which had evil spirits, the name of the Lord Jesus, saying, We adjure you by Jesus, whom Paul preacheth.(And there were certain sons of Sceva a Jew, the Priest, about seven which did this.) And the evil spirit answered, and said, Jesus I acknowledge, and Paul I know: but who are ye? And the man in whom the evil spirit was, ran on them, and overcame them, and prevailed against them, so that they fled out of that house, naked and wounded. And this was known to all the Jews and Grecians also which dwelt at Ephesus, and fear came on them all, and the Name of the Lord Jesus was magnified, And many that believed, came and confessed, and showed their works.

22. Whether Errors “takes sides” in the Reformation is hard to say. A.D. Nuttall points out that the marrying of a nun at the end might be a mockery of Luther (who attracted controversy for marrying a nun), but Aemilia was already married. The phrase “locked out” in the scene outside the house has been seen as a commentary of the Act of Uniformity—but that statute compelled people to attend church. It could, in fact, be a critique of the Catholic practice of excommunication. The taking of communion, in the Catholic church, is the literal taking of the body and blood of Christ, from which the possessed are locked out.

23. The dispute between Adriana and Luciana in Act II echoes the contemporary argument about “companionate marriage”, the idea that marriage is not a sacrament, but a worldly office, to be enjoyed, and that although it still involves a hierarchy, it should be an affectionate partnership. It was common to summarise Paul’s injunctions in the Epistle to the Ephesians to the phrase: wives be obedient, husbands be kind.2

24. Ros King says Doctor Pinch echoes all different churches, and seems to be a commentary not on any one of them, but on the impossibility for any church to avoid falling into error. The solution to error, in this play, is not doctrinal, but family reconciliation.

25. (I would add that this becomes the overwhelming theme of Shakespeare’s work, with Aemilia’s reveal echoed in plays like Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale, and noting that his tragedies are often about the ways families refuse or are prevented from reconciliation.)

26. In a 1991 programme note, the eminent Shakespeare scholar Anne Barton wrote:

    The anguish of the dead man is real, even if the verse he speaks delicately suggests to a theatre audience that his loss will not prove irredeemable… there is something consciously absurd about this reunion which happens not only beyond hope but beyond any expectation explicitly generated by the play. Almost always, the theatre audience laughs when Aemilia identifies (Egeon), but the laughter is not the laughter of farce.

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Moral money

Shakespeare was a very good amateur economist, for which he gets very little credit. He had to be, to bring his stories to light, to be a true observer of human nature, since human nature is inextricably tied up with the economy. From business dealings in Venice to fights over land in Britain, Shakespeare looks at themes like wealth, poverty, trade, debt, and the moral issues around money.

Even marriages and friendships are intertwined with financial dealings. In The Merchant of Venice, the bond between Antonio and Bassanio is not just friendship but also involves monetary loans. Bassanio seeks to marry Portia not only for love but also for her wealth, to resolve his debts.

He wrote in Elizabethan England, a time rife with changing financial concerns, social hierarchies changing as there’s the rise of the middle class, the rise of mercantilism and trade, and changes in land rights. Shakespeare sets his stories in Venice, Rome, Britain, and beyond, but his abiding preoccupation is the universal pull of money and how it shapes life’s romances and tragedies.

All times seem tumultuous when you look at them closely enough, but with Shakespeare you can see the impacts of the changes being made manifest in the stories he tells.

Debt

The Merchant of Venice is famously about Antonio, a Christian merchant, and Shylock, a Jewish moneylender. It centers around the conflict between trade and lending money at interest—a big issue in Shakespeare’s England, where charging interest was often frowned upon.

In the late 1500s the usury laws were strict! There was a parliamentary act against usury in 1571 which legalised interest rates of up to 10%, but even this found strong moral and religious opposition. Christianity traditionally condemned the practice of profiting from lending money.

Shylock is an outsider because of his religion and his job. He lends money, which makes people dislike him, but it's how he makes a living in a society that doesn't accept him. When he makes a deal with Antonio, asking for a pound of flesh if Antonio can't pay back, it shows how serious debt can be.

In Act I, Scene III, Shylock says:

You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog,
And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,
...
Well then, it now appears you need my help.

The play criticizes the hypocrisy of people who hate moneylenders but still need them. As David Graeber wrote, societies decry moneylenders but exploit them anyway. And we’ve had the same conversations after the 2008 crisis!

Trade

Let’s look beyond. In The Merchant of Venice, Antonio’s ventures represent the business spirit of the time, with international trade growing but full of risks. His success depends on luck and nature, showing the full breadth of early capitalism.

It’s part of the Elizabethan era, both in the rise of mercantilism and international trade. East India Company was chartered in 1600!

Or we can see how Antonio’s wealth comes from trading by sea, a dangerous venture. He has invested in many ships, hoping to spread the risk out. He invests in multiple ships bound for different destinations, spreading his risk, as portfolio diversification.

And then when his ships are lost, it shows how risky global trade can be. Also not a facet of life that’s untrue today.

Iago’s manipulation of Othello plays on insecurities about race, trust, and social status. The play subtly comments on how economic factors mix with personal relationships and societal biases.

Wealth

We can go broader, look at the very root of the problem. At wealth. In Timon of Athens, Shakespeare tells a warning story. Timon was a nobleman who gives generously but ends up broke. His gifts and parties make people praise him, but when he runs out of money, those friends leave him.

In Act II, Scene II, Timon’s steward, Flavius, says:

What shall be done? He will not hear till feel:
I must be round with him, now he comes from hunting.
Fie, fie, fie, fie!

Flavius is worried because Timon is spending without care and not managing his money well, when someone ignores financial realities to gain social approval.

After losing everything, Timon becomes bitter and moves to the wilderness, where he finds gold. And instead of using it to rebuild his life, he funds a war against his city, showing how disillusioned he is with society's values.

Shakespeare also talks about property and inheritance. King Lear looks at how wealth, power, and family ties interact. Lear decides to split his kingdom among his daughters based on how much they say they love him, leading to a tragic tale. Montaigne’s essays, particularly “Of the Affection of Fathers to Their Children”, discuss themes like the folly of relinquishing control and the nature of authority, which may have influenced King Lear.

Act I, Scene I, has Lear saying:

Give me the map there. Know that we have divided
In three our kingdom; and 'tis our fast intent
To shake all cares and business from our age,
Conferring them on younger strengths...

By giving up his authority and dividing his wealth, Lear upsets the normal order. His daughters Goneril and Regan’s endless desire for power and wealth shows how economic ambition can corrupt.

Economic Mobility

Shakespeare often shows the complexities of social hierarchy and the chances for moving up economically. In Romeo and Juliet, the feuding Montagues and Capulets are both wealthy families, and their wealth gives them power in Verona, full of lavish parties and extravagance.

Characters like labourers and artisans in plays like Julius Caesar and A Midsummer Night’s Dream offer a look into the lives of the working class. In Henry IV, Part I Prince Hal spends time with commoners at the Boar’s Head Tavern. His interactions with Falstaff and other lower-class characters show the fluidity of social boundaries and his ability to move between different social levels. This duality comments on leadership and the importance of understanding people from all economic backgrounds.

Falstaff himself struggles to survive economically. His schemes are driven by a need for financial security, often crossing moral lines. To be part of the upper class is to have the financial wherewithal to act like it.

In Julius Caesar, the opening scene shows common people celebrating Caesar’s return, only to be scolded by officials:

You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!
O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome...

This shows the contempt the elite have for the masses and power of public opinion.

Coriolanus too describes tensions between the ruling class and the common people. The food shortages and the plebeians’ demand for fair prices, and the value of labor. The character Menenius uses the “fable of the belly” to argue that different social classes are like parts of a body, each with its role.

Shakespeare anticipates themes of class struggle and the labor theory of value, which would later be central to economic thought.

As Henry Oliver explained so well:

Indeed, the play focuses on the idea that Coriolanus has brought far more wealth to Rome through battle than the people have through labour. Indeed, one interesting question is why Shakespeare shows so little sympathy to the people in Coriolanus when their complaint is that the state has hoarded grain from them.

One answer is that Shakespeare was a grain hoarder himself. He was prosecuted for grain hoarding in 1598. Crops were unreliable in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, and riots were thought to be a major risk in the early seventeenth century.

Monetary Policy

And it’s not just about characters having concerns regarding money or trade, it’s the whole economy itself. Go broader. In The Second Part of King Henry VI, there’s a scene where Jack Cade leads a rebellion that includes the goal to eliminate money:

All the realm shall be in common, and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass.

I don’t know if this is crypto-utopian or anarcho-socialist, but Cade’s utopian vision hints at abolishing private property and currency.

Cade’s rebellion is portrayed as misguided. As many of you reading would also agree. Shakespeare here talks about the complexities of economic systems and the challenges of managing a currency without causing social upheaval, a particularly modern idea that wouldn’t go out of place at Santa Fe complexity conferences.

He also is possibly making a note against Thomas More’s Utopia, noting that wanting something deeply enough, no matter how utopian, doesn’t get manifested. The same theme he discusses in the “island economy” in The Tempest. Economics is a science of tradeoffs.

Coin and conscience

Shakespeare weaves economic themes into his plays, showing a deep understanding of how money influences human behaviour and society. His exploration of wealth, poverty and trade gives us a complex view of economic relationships. He shows how economics affects personal identities, social hierarchies, and moral choices.

The most interesting part is that the central role these theses play in his plays are not diminished at all by their introduction. In contrast with the current predicament that one can’t easily find a book that depicts economics better, or the modern economy better. Shakespeare wrote about the full society, not just a sliver of it.

It’s not just money but a broader thesis that he often explores. Iago’s deceit can be viewed as a form of information asymmetry, where he manipulates Othello by controlling the flow of information. That’s a wonderful exposition of a foundational piece of economic insight.

As You Like It includes the loss of communal resources and the effects of changing land rights. As in the feud between the Montagues and Capulets, it’s a struggle over social capital and influence, scarce resources still in an age of plenty, one apt for our coming future.

Many of the economic concerns of Shakespeare’s England—like the ethics of lending money at interest, the risks of trade, and rigid social classes—are still relevant today. Beneath the poetry lurks a mind uncannily alert to the costs and benefits of every human transaction, whether on the Rialto, the battlefield, or the throne. In that sense, Shakespeare was a dramatist of economics, a bard who knew that coin and conscience often diverge—and that the resulting conflict is timeless fuel for tragedy and farce alike.