We wander in illusions.

Self-knowledge in Shakespeare's characters.

The Shakespeare club meets on Sunday to discuss The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. If you want to join, you need to be a paid subscriber.

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In Shakespeare’s end was his beginning. The Tempest, one of his latest plays, frequently echoes The Comedy of Errors, one of his earliest. Both plays have at their beginning long speeches full of exposition about past miseries: Prospero tells Miranda how they had to flee from Milan; Aegeon tells the story of how his family was separated in a storm, a theme that Shakespeare has used in Twelfth Night and Pericles as well as these two plays. “But here must end the story of my life” Aegeon says, setting up the comic situation of The Comedy of Errors. At the close of The Tempest, Alonso says to Prospero,

I long
To hear the story of your life, which must
Take the ear strangely.

Telling the story of their lives preoccupies Shakespeare’s characters. From Antipholus to Juliet to Falstaff to Hamlet to Viola to Rosalind to Helena to Macbeth to Othello to Prospero they re-narrate themselves, re-tell the story of who they have been, who they might become.¹

They are inventing themselves. To invent means not just to create but to discover. (Johnson: “To discover; to find out; to excogitate; to produce something not made before.”) Invent comes from the Latin inventus, past participle of invenire “to come upon; devise, discover.” It is in their excogitations that Shakespeare’s characters stumble upon themselves. Excogitate is literally out-think, and they think-out in their speech. So frequently they twist from one meaning to another, caught up in the tangle of their own self-realising speeches.

As he slowly talks himself into madness at the start of The Winter’s Tale, Leontes says to himself

may’t be?—
Affection! thy intention stabs the centre:
Thou dost make possible things not so held,
Communicatest with dreams;—how can this be?—
With what’s unreal thou coactive art,
And fellow’st nothing: then ‘tis very credent
Thou mayst co-join with something; and thou dost,
And that beyond commission, and I find it,
And that to the infection of my brains
And hardening of my brows.

Affection means something more like affectation. Leontes is asking himself if he might not be inventing all of his suspicions, just as Hamlet asks himself—what if the ghost claiming to be my father is a demon, and I am deceived? Leontes’ speech comes close to self-recognition—that he is communicating with dreams, “coactive” with what’s unreal, credent (credulous) with what infects his brains. His tragedy is that he choose to ignore himself.

So it is with Romeo, who says, at the crucial moment after Mercutio’s death,

O sweet Juliet,
Thy beauty hath made me effeminate
And in my temper soften’d valour’s steel!

And so he makes his choice,

Away to heaven, respective lenity,
And fire-eyed fury be my conduct now!

Madness overtakes him, as it over takes so many Shakespearean men, with the force of a storm, as he says,

The time and my intents are savage-wild,
More fierce and more inexorable far
Than empty tigers or the roaring sea.

It is natural for Shakespeare to be drawn to images of the sea: men’s thoughts are a tide of passions, buffeted by the winds of the world, the storms of fate, and so much of our lives is as but the frothing foam upon the cresting wave—we long to preserve it but must enjoy it while we have the time. Our lives are like a dream, as soon as glimpsed as lost, holding but a minute in perfection, and gone. It is through the inventive re-narration of ourselves that we can preserve anything at all.

And so even minor characters, fated to die for the plot, will tell us the story of their lives, which we, like Alonso, long to hear, knowing it will take the ear strangely: strangeness makes art, and keeps a record of our time.

In Richard III, Brakenbury goes to fetch Clarence out of his cell (unknowingly, before poor Clarence is murdered). Clarence tells him he passed a dreadful night,

So full of ugly sights, of ghastly dreams,
That, as I am a Christian faithful man,
I would not spend another such a night

“What was your dream?” Brakenbury replies, “I long to hear you tell it.”

Methoughts that I had broken from the Tower,
And was embark’d to cross to Burgundy;
And, in my company, my brother Gloucester;
Who from my cabin tempted me to walk
Upon the hatches: thence we looked toward England,
And cited up a thousand fearful times,
During the wars of York and Lancaster
That had befall’n us. As we paced along
Upon the giddy footing of the hatches,
Methought that Gloucester stumbled; and, in falling,
Struck me, that thought to stay him, overboard,
Into the tumbling billows of the main.
Lord, Lord! methought, what pain it was to drown!
What dreadful noise of waters in mine ears!
What ugly sights of death within mine eyes!
Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks;
Ten thousand men that fishes gnaw’d upon;
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,
All scatter’d in the bottom of the sea:
Some lay in dead men’s skulls; and, in those holes
Where eyes did once inhabit, there were crept,
As ‘twere in scorn of eyes, reflecting gems,
Which woo’d the slimy bottom of the deep,
And mock’d the dead bones that lay scatter’d by.

There are images here that resurface in The Tempest (those are the pearls that were his eyes!). The dream is not a mere poetic set-piece, though it surely is anthology writing of the sort we know Shakespeare produced to meet the demands of his audience. But like the opening sequence of The Faerie Queene, this dream is showing us Clarence’s passage to the underworld. In Spenser, the passage is to Morpheus, God of Sleep, but Clarence is dreaming of his passage to Hell. Brakenbury asks how he could stay alive to see all these things. In the dream, Clarence tells him, he was unable to “yield the ghost.” Horrified, Brakenbury asks, “Awaked you not with this sore agony?”

O, no, my dream was lengthen’d after life;
O, then began the tempest to my soul,
Who pass’d, methought, the melancholy flood,
With that grim ferryman which poets write of,
Unto the kingdom of perpetual night.

Clarence is about to be confronted with his earthly crimes.

…then came wandering by
A shadow like an angel, with bright hair
Dabbled in blood; and he squeak’d out aloud,
”Clarence is come; false, fleeting, perjured Clarence,
That stabb’d me in the field by Tewksbury;
Seize on him, Furies, take him to your torments!”
With that, methoughts, a legion of foul fiends
Environ’d me about, and howled in mine ears
Such hideous cries, that with the very noise
I trembling waked, and for a season after
Could not believe but that I was in hell,
Such terrible impression made the dream.

Brakenbury wishes he hadn’t asked,

No marvel, my lord, though it affrighted you;
I promise, I am afraid to hear you tell it.

This is no mere dream, of course, no poetic fancy. Clarence has been guilty of these things, and now he is possessed of a deep, dark fear of holy judgement.

O Brakenbury, I have done those things,
Which now bear evidence against my soul,
For Edward’s sake; and see how he requites me!
O God! if my deep prayers cannot appease thee,
But thou wilt be avenged on my misdeeds,
Yet execute thy wrath in me alone,
O, spare my guiltless wife and my poor children!
I pray thee, gentle keeper, stay by me;
My soul is heavy, and I fain would sleep.

In the telling of his dream that Clarence has become perhaps more horrified than he was to begin with. Those tempests of the soul, re-narrated, leave him un-soothed. How terrible the line—“O, spare my guiltless wife and my poor children!” (This recurs in one of Shakespeare’s darkest scenes, in Macbeth when Macduff hears news of his slaughtered family: “What, all my pretty chickens and their dam/ At one fell swoop?”) Clarence is frenzied: he might almost have preferred the terrors of sleep to his waking self-realisations.

As Clarence sleeps, Brakenbury reflects,

Princes have but their titles for their glories,
An outward honour for an inward toil;
And, for unfelt imagination,
They often feel a world of restless cares:
So that, betwixt their titles and low names,
There’s nothing differs but the outward fame.

“Unfelt imaginations” means things not actually experienced. All that outward honour is real only in the mind. Such noble lives as these, Brakenbury says, are merely waking dreams—stories these men tell themselves, all for the sake of outward fame which brings them inward toil. What Clarence has realised in his self-narration is that he did “those things,/ Which now bear evidence against my soul” for no good reason—, for loyalty to a king who now abandons him to Hell. It is in the re-telling of his own tale that Clarence realises this most strongly.

The poetic justice of Richard III is that Richard, the one who framed Clarence, has his own terrible dream at the end. He is visited by the ghosts of those he killed. One of them is Clarence, who says,

Let me sit heavy on thy soul to-morrow!
I, that was wash’d to death with fulsome wine,
Poor Clarence, by thy guile betrayed to death!

Waking, Richard self-narrates, and comes to realise who he truly is,

What do I fear? myself? there’s none else by:
Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am:
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why:
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack. I love myself. Wherefore? for any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O, no! alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself!

So often, Shakespeare’s men tell themselves the truth and then ignore it, tell themselves the truth too late, only see who they are when they have set their own fate through self-ignorance. The noble characters, the one we truly love, are like Helena in All’s Well that End Well—they hear themselves, they act with dignity, and they do not submit to either the fate the world imposes upon them or to the fact they risk imposing upon themselves. As Mariana says in that play, “No legacy is so rich as honesty.”

The idea that we can find redemption through narrative is false. It doesn’t save Othello or Hamlet. It doesn’t save poor Clarence. What matters is action. Not merely the telling of a tale but the living of it. Self-narrative is too a way of self-deceit. As Antipholus says, “we wander in illusions.” To break the illusion we must change the story of our lives, not just how we tell the story.

1. There’s a little anticipation of The Winter’s Tale as well, when Dromio says,

As from a bear a man would run for life,
So fly I from her that would be my wife.

And the scene when Antipholus of Syracuse woos Luciana is very “brave new world”.