Exploring Contexts

26 THE AUTHOR’S WORK AS CONTEXT:

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

When we read, we inevitably compare. We compare the writer’s style to the styles
of other writers; we compare characters within a story or play to one another and
to people we know; we compare our life experiences to the many imaginary expe-
riences that unfold before us as we read. Our interpretations of literature are fueled
by such comparisons.
Reading several works by a single author is one of the most rewarding and
enlightening types of comparison we can employ as active readers of literature.
Such comparisons serve a variety of purposes: they help us develop a sense of the
overall shape of the writer’s work (that is, the writer’s oeuvre, or canon); they
reveal the kinds of characters, plots, and dramatic situations the author likes to
create; they offer a glimpse into the author’s particular way of looking at the world.
At the same time, such comparisons can enrich our understanding of any one
work by drawing our attention to features we might not have thought much about
otherwise.
This chapter offers you the opportunity to compare two plays by one of his-
tory’s most vital and versatile playwrights: William Shakespeare. Shakespeare is a
particularly enticing subject for this kind of comparative study in part because we
know so little about him. While we can
facilitate and enhance our reading of
many writers by studying the letters,
essays, diaries, and other documents in
which the writers comment directly on
their lives and works, Shakespeare left
behind no such record. The only rec-
ords that exist are official ones—mar-
riage licenses, property deeds, and wills.
Those records tell a brief story.
Shakespeare’s origins were humble: his
grandfather, Richard, rented the land
he farmed, near Stratford-upon-Avon, a
market town in the English midlands.
Richard’s son, John, married the daugh-
ter of one of Richard’s former landlords
and moved to town. There he became a
tradesman prosperous and respected
enough to buy quite a bit of property
and to hold several civic offices, includ- William Shakespeare

1265
 1266 CH. 26 / THE AUTHOR’S WORK AS CONTEXT

Shakespeare’s birthplace

ing that of mayor. The family’s star was on the rise by the time William was born
(sometime in April 1564). Though most likely neither of Shakespeare’s parents
could read or write (certainly they had no formal schooling), his father’s involve-
ment in city government brought with it the privilege of enrolling William in the
local free grammar school. Here Shakespeare learned how to read and write, not
only in English but also in Latin and perhaps Greek. His schoolmasters also prob-
ably required him to read such standard classical works as Ovid’s Metamorphoses
and the plays of Plautus and Terence (which greatly influenced the plays he would
later write). In 1582, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a local
farmer; in the next three years, the couple had three children, including a set of
twins.
From the time of the twins’ birth in 1585 until 1592,
Life’s but a walking shadow, Shakespeare’s life becomes—for us—a blank: all we
a poor player
know is that by the latter date he was a successful actor
That struts and frets his
and playwright spending most of his time in London.
hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no (We know this, in part, because Shakespeare was prom-
more. . . . inent enough to be called an “upstart crow” in a book
—SHAKESPEARE
published by a rival playwright in 1592; apparently,
this London-born, university-educated author felt a bit
threatened by the undereducated provincial.) Though, in 1594, the “upstart crow”
achieved a measure of renown as a poet by publishing two lengthy narrative poems
(Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece), his career from this time until his death
centered mainly on his work with the Lord Chamberlain’s (later King’s) Men—one
of the two most prominent acting companies of his day. Shakespeare’s work with
the company was multifaceted: an actor with the troupe and its chief dramatist,
he was also a shareholder who helped manage the troupe’s affairs (including the
building of the Globe Theater, on the South Bank of the Thames River, in 1599).
 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 1267

Being a shareholder ensured that he

prospered along with the company
(especially after they secured the
patronage of the king in 1603). As a
result, Shakespeare enjoyed a level of
economic prosperity and a kind of
status that wouldn’t have been possible
to a mere actor, playwright, or poet. The
Crown granted Shakespeare’s father
(and thus the playwright) the title of
“gentleman” in the late 1590s. And at
his death in 1616, Shakespeare left his
family substantial property in both
London and Stratford (where the family
had continued to live).
Such facts remind us that Shake-
speare was, after all, a real and in some
ways rather ordinary person—who ulti-
mately convinced audiences and rivals The Globe Theater
alike that he was more than an “upstart
crow,” but who did not, as a recent biographer reminds us, “in his own day inspire
the mysterious veneration that afterwards came to surround him.” These mundane
facts tell us almost nothing, however, about the man’s or the artist’s inner life—
his personal opinions, his motives, his loves, his dislikes, his politics, his “philos-
ophy.” These we can only infer, guess at, or imagine by reading and comparing
his plays and poems. Luckily, Shakespeare left us a lot of these, including 154
sonnets (some of which are included in the poetry section of this book) and at
least thirty-eight plays. (Scholars believe Shakespeare co-wrote at least one more
play, and others may yet be discovered and authenticated.)
Given that the plays include thirteen comedies, ten tragedies, ten English his-
tories, and five romances, variety is a distinctive feature of Shakespeare’s work as
a playwright. It is fitting, then, that the two plays included in this chapter—A
Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet—seem, at first glance, so different. A Midsum-
mer Night’s Dream, written in about 1595, is generally considered one of the last of
Shakespeare’s “apprentice” plays—the work of a young writer just beginning to
find his own voice and dramatic style, but still quite dependent on classical models.
Though written only a few years later (ca. 1599–1601), Hamlet is nonetheless
regarded as one of the greatest works of a seasoned writer. Differences proliferate:
Dream, a comedy, culminates in marriage (several marriages, in fact); Hamlet, a
tragedy, concludes with the death and destruction of an entire royal family. Dream
is among Shakespeare’s shortest plays; Hamlet, among his longest. Hamlet focuses
squarely—almost relentlessly—on its title character, whom we leave the play feeling
that we know inside and out. Dream, in contrast, flits among many characters.
Though we may fall in love with some of them, we probably will not feel that we
truly know them. (Indeed, part of the play’s humor comes from our having as hard
a time as the characters themselves do remembering who is who and who loves
whom.)
But while the plays have important and revealing differences, they have equally
significant similarities, and by attending to these similarities we may come to
1268 CH. 26 / THE AUTHOR’S WORK AS CONTEXT

understand and appreciate Shakespeare’s particular way of looking at the world.

To begin with, we may approach such similarities (within these or any plays) by
concentrating on their basic elements, looking for patterns in character, setting,
structure, tone, and theme (remembering, of course, that these elements ultimately
combine to shape our experience of any one play).
In thinking about character, for example, notice that both the protagonists and
the antagonists of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet are persons of high birth
and position. These characters’ choices and behavior deeply affect the communi-
ties that they lead. In fact, both plays repeatedly remind us of the general effects
and communal significance of such characters’ actions, as when, for example, we
are told in A Midsummer Night’s Dream of the “progeny of evils” that come of the
“debate” and “dissension” between Titania and Oberon (2.1.115–16). Like all
Shakespeare’s plays, this comedy and tragedy both take for granted the idea that
“on [a leader’s] choice depends / The safety and health of th[e] whole state” (Hamlet
1.3.20–21), and both trace the effects of the particular, often bad, choices made by
kings, princes, and dukes.
Shakespeare and his contemporaries often compared the relationship between
a king and his subjects to that between a father and his children or between a
husband and his wife. For example, an early Shakespeare comedy, The Taming of
the Shrew, concludes with a speech in which the tamed shrew declares, “Thy hus-
band is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, / Thy head, thy sovereign.” Building on this
idea, she argues both that a woman’s duty to her husband is the same “as the
subject owes the prince” and that a woman who refuses to obey her husband is
exactly like “a foul contending rebel / And graceless traitor.” We can see similar
analogies at work in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet: one begins with a
duke and a father provoking a group of young Athenians to rebel against them;
the other shows us a son who is also a prince struggling to choose the right
response to the murder of a father who was also a king.
We pay attention to the effects of these high-born characters on their environ-
ments in part because Shakespeare’s plays also include characters who occupy
positions much lower on the social scale than the main characters do. In addition
to Titania, Oberon, Theseus, and Hippolyta (rulers of the divine and human
realms), A Midsummer Night’s Dream introduces us to the Athenian craftsmen (or
“mechanicals”) led by the fittingly named Bottom. And while Hamlet focuses pre-
dominantly on members of the Danish royal court, one of the most memorable
scenes in the play features a lowly gravedigger and the skeletal remains of a court
jester named Yorick. As a result, the two plays demonstrate Shakespeare’s tendency
to people his plays with a socially diverse cast of characters and to thereby create
a socially inclusive dramatic world.
As inclusive as Shakespeare’s dramatic world is, it is far from democratic (as the
speech from The Taming of the Shrew suggests). As you read more plays by Shake-
speare, you will probably become more attuned to the different ways in which they
depict “high” and “low” characters. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is typical, for exam-
ple, in the way it associates socially low characters with low or physical comedy
(as opposed to high or verbal comedy). Bottom, after all, wears an ass’s head for
much of the play. Yet Bottom is also typical of Shakespeare’s socially humble
characters because he possesses a kind of wisdom lacking in his social betters.
Certainly, he has more imagination and a much greater appreciation of art’s power
than Duke Theseus, who refuses to believe in “fables,” thinks lovers and poets are
 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 1269

no better than madmen (5.1.3–6), and

rather heartlessly ridicules the mechan-
icals’ creative efforts.
Despite the tendency to distinguish
high from low, then, Shakespearean
drama draws our attention to funda-
mental human experiences that cut
across social lines. A Midsummer Night’s
Dream reminds us that a fairy queen is
no more immune to love’s magic or
foolishness than the lowliest of mor-
tals; Hamlet, that a king’s life lasts no
longer than a court jester’s. The joys of
love, the pain of death—these experi-
ences link us and remind us of our com-
mon humanity.
Shakespeare suggests such links, in
part, by structuring each play so that
the main plot is complemented by par-
allel, yet often contrasting, secondary
plots. A Midsummer Night’s Dream offers
at least four plots, each featuring a pair Bottom, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream
of lovers whose happiness is, or has
been, threatened by their own failures
to understand each other or by others’ opposition to their relationship. Hamlet
revolves around three intersecting, but distinct, plots featuring Hamlet, Laertes,
and Fortinbras—three very different young men who must each figure out how
to respond to, and perhaps avenge, his father’s murder. In these, as in other
Shakespeare plays, the secondary plots can be divided into underplots, which
are romantic or parodic versions of the main plot, and overplots, which fore-
ground its political dimensions. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bottom becomes
the protagonist of the underplot, Theseus and Hippolyta (and, perhaps, Titania
and Oberon) of the overplot(s). In Hamlet, the underplot focuses on Laertes; the
overplot, on Fortinbras. However, all the secondary plots encourage us (and
sometimes, as in Hamlet, the characters themselves) to compare the way different
people handle similar situations and thus to evaluate various choices, various
responses. The parallel plots serve simultaneously as a structural device, a
potent means of characterization, and a way of drawing our attention to general
issues and themes.
Reading Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream
side by side may also help us appreciate the tonal com- Shakespeare’s plays are not
plexity of Shakespeare’s plays—their incorporation of
in the rigorous critical sense
either tragedies or comedies,
both comic and tragic elements. While A Midsummer
but compositions of a distinct
Night’s Dream plunges us into a nighttime world dom-
kind; exhibiting the real
inated by the intertwining forces of magic, love, and state of sublunary nature,
humor, it also continually reminds us of the danger- which partakes of good and
ous aspects of the night, of the struggles that human evil, joy and sorrow.
beings endure in their pursuit of love and happiness, —SAMUEL JOHNSON
of the brevity and fragility of human joy and human
 1270 CH. 26 / THE AUTHOR’S WORK AS CONTEXT

life, of what Hamlet calls the “thousand

natural shocks / That flesh is heir to”
(3.1.62–63). The specter of death hovers
in the background of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream as surely as it occupies the
foreground of Hamlet. And while Ham-
let, like most tragedies, focuses primar-
ily on mortality, violence, and time’s
destructive force, it also shows us the
comic side of the human condition. In
fact, one of the things that makes Ham-
let such a sympathetic character is his
sense of humor; he proves so adept at
wordplay that we wish he could stick to
that instead of resorting to swordplay.
Turning from tone to theme, we find
that both Hamlet and A Midsummer
Night’s Dream say something about the
Sir Laurence Olivier as Hamlet order of things and the rhythm of life.
Although Hamlet ends with a body-
strewn stage, the play encourages us to
see those deaths as the necessary prelude to a restoration of order and health to
a kingdom diseased and disordered as a result of a sovereign’s choices. For Clau-
dius’s crimes ultimately infect and poison everything and everyone, even innocent
bystanders like Ophelia. Both to us and to Hamlet, Claudius’s reign represents the
triumph of humanity’s worst impulses. By embracing his role as heaven’s “scourge
and minister” even at the risk of his own life (3.4.179–81), however, Hamlet reaf-
firms our faith in humanity’s noblest qualities as he strives to set right all that is
“rotten in Denmark” (1.4.90). In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we again see the
actions of a sovereign turn the world upside down: the young rebel against the
old, women chase men, old friends turn on each other, an ass consorts with a
queen. Clearly, the kinds of dissension and disorder at work in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream make us laugh, while those in Hamlet make us cringe or cry. Yet the rhythm
of both plays turns out to be surprisingly similar, tracing the movement from
disorder to order, from dissension to harmony. In the process, both plays ask us
to think about the nature and causes of social, political, and moral disorder, of
dissension within states and families.
As you read Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
[W]hen you are really read- you will discover many more parallels of theme, char-
ing Hamlet, the action and acter, setting, and structure whose significance you will
the characters are not some-
want to ponder and investigate. But you may also want
thing which you conceive
to think about another, perhaps more elusive element:
apart from the words; you
apprehend them . . . in the language. Shakespeare is justly celebrated for his use
words, and the words are of language, and we pay homage to it, unwittingly or
expressions of them. not, every time we use any one of the many idiomatic
—A. C. BRADLEY
expressions that originated in the plays. (If, for exam-
ple, you conclude that Shakespeare is “Greek to me,”
you have proven otherwise by quoting directly from his play Julius Caesar.) In
Shakespearean drama, language is never an end in itself but instead establishes
 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 1271

character and tone, structures the play, shapes our emotional response to it, and
enunciates theme. Hamlet, for example, characterizes both Polonius and Hamlet
in part through their penchant for wordplay. But as Polonius suggests, Hamlet’s
wordplay is “pregnant” with significance in a way that his own is not (2.2.201).
While Polonius’s use of language arguably demonstrates both his facile nature
and his fondness for sham and trickery, Hamlet’s displays his preoccupation with
probing beneath the surface of language and much else.
In both Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream the musical and visual qualities
of Shakespeare’s language are integral to its meaning. Though written mainly in
verse, Shakespeare’s plays include prose passages; and though most of the poetry
is blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), Shakespeare also uses rhyme and
rhythmic variation to great effect. As you read the plays, then, you will want to
pay attention to the texture and rhythm of the language—to the effect of sound on
sense. You will also want to attend to the way Shakespeare uses language to appeal
to your eye, as well as your ear. For visual imagery, like sound, consistently serves
both structural and thematic ends, linking various moments and ideas, actions
and themes. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, characters frequently refer
to their eyes. Such references begin in the very first scene: when Hermia wishes
that her father “look’d but with my eyes,” Theseus responds that “your eyes must
with his judgment look” (lines 56–57). These lines prepare us for a drama in which
eyes will play a major part, in which love and vision tend to go hand in hand, in
which both love and vision often conflict with “judgment.” Oberon’s love potion,
after all, works through the eyes, while Puck initially misapplies the potion largely
because his eyes have deceived him. The characters’ talk of eyes thus connects
directly to the plot; through both, the play asks us to think about the tremendous
power of vision and the dangers of relying on it.
Reading many plays by a single playwright will help you better recognize sty-
listic as well as structural and thematic patterns within each play: each addi-
tional Shakespeare play you read will bring you closer to an understanding and
appreciation of his unique way of looking at the world and of the way his views
and his technique changed over time. You will gain a sense of Shakespeare’s
development as a dramatist even as, ideally, you develop your own skills as a
reader of drama.