Shakespeare's experiments.

compositions of a distinct kind

Why make a pair of Troilus and Cressida and Antony and Cleopatra, as the Shakespeare book club did recently? They are perhaps two of the best plays for seeing Shakespeare’s experimentation at work.

In the miracle year, he wrote Hamlet and Twelfth Night. What could he possibly do next? After the Poets’ War, Shakespeare had outcompeted three rivals: Sidney, Marlowe, and now Jonson. He had adapted away from the splendid comedies of his youth, through the problematic histories of the Henriad, to write Hamlet, a play which took the equivalent of a B-movie and turned it into, well, into Hamlet, the centre of the canon.

Hamlet is not a traditional tragedy. Unlike Oedipus or Antigone there’s no Aristotelian pattern. We cannot say that this is a play of delay, but it’s not a classically structured tragedy either. It is horribly dark, but also remarkably funny. Just as the comedies often have some element of despair, so the tragedies are never uniformly grim. Even Macbeth has the porter. As Johnson said,

Shakespeare’s plays are not in the rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolick of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design.

Claude, by the way, understands this quite well. When I asked it to proof read this piece, one of the comments it gave me was this,

I love Johnson's quote about Shakespeare transcending simple genre classifications. The idea that his plays reflect "the real state of sublunary nature" with its endless mixing of joy and sorrow feels remarkably modern - it's almost like Shakespeare was writing complex "dramedies" centuries before that became a recognized form.¹

We saw that Henry IV was the moment when Shakespeare really developed the art of blending the dark and the light. That play was written at the same time as The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing, two plays that resist classification. Troilus is sometimes classed as a “problem play”, along with Measure for Measure and All’s Well that Ends Well, but “problem plays” are, in one sense, all that Shakespeare ever wrote.