Expanding Eyes: A Visionary Education

Prospero’s melancholy speech about life as a vanishing illusion seems to subvert the paradisal vision of the wedding masque. But the illusions of art provide the model of a greater reality and the power to work towards it by changing people. In three hours, true love has transpired, people have been rehabilitated and changed for the better, and the dead have come back to life. Life is “strange,” life is a “wonder.”

Prospero summons up a masque, a spectacle in honor of the newly betrothed Ferdinand and Miranda. Using characters from Classical mythology, it dramatizes the four levels of the Chain of Being, especially the paradisal imagery of the Golden Age. Then, suddenly, Prospero dismisses the vision, and gives his famous speech. All things pass away leaving “not a rack behind.” How to reconcile this with the ideal vision?

In the central act, Prospero puts three sets of characters through ordeals that are at once punitive, when appropriate, and transformative. Ferdinand humbles himself to draw logs to win Miranda—and does. Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban’s attempt at a Jan.6-style insurrection is turned into farce by Ariel. The Court Party is offered an illusory banquet, which vanishes and a harpy accuses all but Gonzalo.

Gonzalo indicates that he does not mean literally his speech about ruling the island to excel the Golden Age. But in what sense, then, does he mean it? While the Court Party sleeps, Antonio and Sebastian plot murder. Caliban meets the two lower-class, satiric characters: Trinculo, the jester, and Stephano, a “drunken butler,” and begins to worship them as gods.

Ferdinand and Miranda see each other and fall in love. Prospero pretends to be the irate senex or possessive father of New Comedy. The Court Party: Alonso is in deep depression; Gonzalo tries to get him to change his negative, hopeless attitude, but is countered by the nihilistic cynicism of Antonio and Sebastian.

The long but necessary back story of Propero and Miranda’s exile. Prospero’s servants, the elemental spirits Ariel and Caliban. Shakespeare’s prophetic foreshadowing of later imperialism and colonialism in the treatment of the native Caliban. Shakespeare’s most famous song. Ferdinand and Miranda meet.

Prospero, in Act 1, Scene 2, gives a long speech to his daughter Miranda telling how, 12 years ago, he was deposed as Duke of Milan to this island by his evil brother Antonio. Prospero and the theme of the wielding of power, in four roles: as ruler, as magician, as artist (creator of theatrical illusions), and as educator.

The four romances at the end of Shakespeare’s career, belonging to an age-old genre, the tale of wonders and marvels, from the Wanderings of the Odyssey to fantasy and science fiction in our time. Act 1, scene one. Why try to stage a storm at sea? A touchstone: how various people face imminent death.

The Duke returns and passes judgment. Mariana pleads for Angelo, wanting him despite his faults. Remarkably, Isabella pleads for Angelo. Four possible weddings: Angelo and Mariana, Isabella and the Duke, Claudio and Julietta, Lucio and the prostitute he got pregnant. A happy ending? The double meaning of “measure for measure,” according to justice or to mercy.

The Duke’s plan to fool Angelo by substituting the head of Barnardine won’t work because Barnardine humorously refuses to be hanged. So they substitute the head of an already dead criminal for Claudio’s. The Duke “returns” in Act 5. Isabella and Mariana accuse Angelo but are arrested for slander. Lucio unhoods the Friar—to reveal the Duke.

In the middle of Act 3, at a dark moment, the plot turns. The Duke speaks of Mariana, abandoned by Angelo, now in the “moated grange.” Tennyson’s famous monologue “Mariana.” Pompey and Mistress Overdone are arrested. Lucio has gotten a prostitute pregnant and refuses marriage and child support.

When Isabella informs Claudio of Angelo’s offer, that his life may be saved if she has sex with Angelo, in terror of death he begs her to do it. Her cold, angry response, lacking all compassion, is absolutely unChristian, and we have to probe her deeper psychology, her need to be sheltered from life and its imperfections.

Angelo is reluctant to come right out and say it, but finally tells Isabella that she must give herself up to him sexually in order to save her brother’s life. The Duke, as Friar, counsels Claudio that he should be detached about death because life is not worth living. This is a possible religious attitude, though not one that Shakespeare’s comedies ever endorse.

Elbow, the Constable, has arrested Pompey because something insulting was said to his wife when she entered the whorehouse to ask for stewed prunes. Elbow is so confused that we never learn more. Isabella pleads for her brother’s life, and Angelo, after she leaves, discovers he is sexually obsessed with her.

The Duke of Vienna puts young Angelo in charge in his absence, but disguises himself as a Friar and intends to observe what goes on in his absence. Angelo has Claudio arrested because his fiancée Julietta is pregnant, though they are engaged in a binding, though secret contract. Lucio goes to the convent to fetch Claudio’s sister Isabella to plead to Angelo for Claudio’s life.

The common pattern of all three plots in Twelfth Night: a deadlocked conflict of opposites into which a third factor enters to transform the situation. In all three plots, this involves a character with two identities and gender ambiguity. Introduction to Measure for Measure: the meaning of the designation “problem play.”

Feste as Sir Topas the cleric accuses Malvolio, desperate and shut up in darkness, of being mad. Act 5 is a single scene of multiple recognitions, climaxing when Viola/Cesario is standing on stage and her identical twin brother Sebastian walks on: “A natural perspective, that is and is not.” The couples are sorted out, Viola and Orsino, Olivia and Sebastian. Malvolio stomps out, vowing revenge.

Sir Toby’s crowd play a joke on both “Cesario” and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, pushing two terrified characters into a duel. Antonio intervenes, thinking “Cesario” is Sebastian. Malvolio acts so bizarrely that Olivia fears he has gone mad, though he is following the instructions of the fake letter, designed to humiliate him.

A false letter, faked by Maria, makes Malvolio think Olivia secretly loves him, and gives him advice which will humiliate him when he follows it. Another practical joke: “Cesario” is supposedly challenged to a duel by Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Antonio dares to stick by Sebastian, though he is subject to arrest if apprehended by the Duke’s officers.

Viola’s brother Sebastian, disguised as Roderigo, and his good friend Antonio. Orsino is increasingly drawn to Cesario, the disguised Viola. But Olivia is as well. The reveling crew of Sir Toby Belch hatch a plot against Malvolio. Songs of carpe diem and of death.

Viola, dressed as a young man named Cesario, is sent to woo Olivia on his behalf. Olivia is shut up, wearing a veil, vowing to mourn her brother for 7 years. In comes Cesario, and Olivia promptly is infatuated with her, not realizing that “Cesario” is another woman. The antagonism between the steward Malvolio and the rowdy crew of Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Maria. The contrast between Feste the Clown and Malvolio, the “refuser of festivities.”

Shakespeare transforms the New Comedy or comedy of manners pattern by having the action move through some realm of mysterious transformation. In Twelfth Night, Viola, the heroine, comes of out the sea, surviving shipwreck, disguises herself as a male, and enters the court of Duke Orsino, which eventually leads to the transformation of the whole society of Illyria, an imaginary country, the intersection of “delirium” and “illusion.”

The mystery of how the English won, suffering small losses, though hugely outnumbered. Slapstick scenes with Fluellen, the true honorable soldier who publicly humiliates the fraudulent braggart soldier Pistol. Act 5 ends the play like a comedy, with a betrothal. The comic wooing of the princess Catharine by Henry, though neither speaks the other’s language very well.

The conflicts in Shakespeare’s tetralogy are one phase in the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, followed by the Wars of the Roses, a civil war that ended the Plantagenet dynasty. The astonishing victory at Agincourt on October 25, 1415, against seemingly impossible odds. The question of whether Henry followed the honorable rules of war.

The central theme of the play: what is justified in Henry V’s career? The death of Falstaff, and his replacement by the comic Welshman Fluellen. The comic pattern of alazon vs. eiron, boaster vs. self-deprecator. The siege of Harfleur. Another theme: the power of language. Henry’s speeches.

The portrait of Henry in this play as an idealized model or “mirror” of a “Christian king, not a realistic characterization. The mirror contrast with Richard II, who uses his imagination as escape into narcissistic fantasy. Henry inspires the imagination of others. A long disquisition over Henry’s legal right to rule France. In Act 2, the return of the lower-class characters, the quarreling Nym and Pistol, who note in passing that Falstaff is ill.

Henry IV dies offstage between Acts 4 and 5. Hal, now Henry V, embraces his brothers and vindicates the Lord Chief Justice, who had had him arrested, notwithstanding he was the future king of England. The play ends as he rejects his false father figure, Falstaff, in a devastating speech. Henry V opens with a famous Prologue that is in fact about the power of imagination, working through language, necessary to swell the bare “O” of the stage into two nations and the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.

Prince John defeats the rebels without battle by breaking his word to them with cold calculation. Falstaff carouses with Shallow and Silence, and remembers the “chimes at midnight” from the days of their youth. On the good news of the rebels’ defeat, Henry IV collapses. Hal enters his chamber, sees him unconscious, assumes him dead, and puts on the crown. Henry wakes and accuses Hal of being eager to assume the crown.

Northumberland is persuaded by his wife and Hotspur’s widow to betray the rebel cause a second time and flee to Scotland. An extraordinary reality-TV-style scene in the tavern. The prostitute and “drama queen” Doll Tearsheet loves to pick fights with men just as entertainment. She picks a fight with Falstaff, then with Pistol, the braggart soldier, and gets the two men to fight each other. Act 3 opens with the soliloquy of Henry IV: “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown” in despair of England and of life.

Part 2 mirrors Part 1 but has a harsh, almost naturalistic realism that is quite different and modern-seeming. It takes place immediately after the first part, and a personified Rumour spreads fake news about the outcome of the Battle of Shrewsbury. Northumberland throws away his crutches and decides he isn’t sick anymore, now that the battle is over. Falstaff encounters the incorruptible Lord Chief Justice but succeeds yet again in exploiting Mistress Quickly, who loves him maternally and will do anything for him.

The king offers clemency, but Worster and Vernon lie to Hotspur and Douglas and say the king showed “no mercy.” Walter Blunt is killed by Douglas. Falstaff’s famous soliloquy about honor. Hal saves his father’s life, then fights and kills Hotspur. He thinks Falstaff is dead, but Falstaff is “counterfeiting” death and “rises” once Hal leaves. The rebels lose and are captured.

The intense and moving confrontation of father and son, Henry IV and Hal, in which the king says that Hal is not only a failure but, for all he knows, possibly a betrayer. But Hal placates him. In Act 4, Falstaff has allowed the good men to buy their way out and instead conscripted troop of pathetic failures. On the eve of the decisive battle, one by one all the rebels send word that they are backing out, finally leaving only Hotspur and Douglas. Most shockingly, Northumberland abandons his own son.

The double tetralogy of history plays as the “Henriad,” a quasi-epic. Yet the surprising amount of humor in the play, subverting epic high seriousness. Hotspur and the Welsh Owen Glendower argue while trying to carve up a map of England. Hotspur deflates Glendower’s pretensions as a mighty magician. Hotspur and Kate: an attractive marriage, full of bantering, poignant because we know that Hotspur will die.

Plays relevant to our time, because they explore the social chaos that ensures when the rule of law is overthrown by various kinds of people with interests of their own. Henry’s allies have turned against him, the lower-class characters in the tavern are out of control. There is nothing to constrain aristocracy who do not like to be constrained, or who are psychologically disconnected from reality. There is nothing to constrain lower-class characters from anarchistic behavior.

Within a year, Henry’s allies turn into his enemies. We see those who put him on the throne in Richard II now begin to plot against him in 1.3. Hotspur, who fancies himself a man of restless action but who is really driven by his own fevered imagination. In contrast, Falstaff, weighed down by his enormous body. Hotspur and Falstaff: mind and body. Poins and Hal disguise themselves and rob Falstaff and the rest of the gang after they have robbed the king’s men—Hal is helping to rob his own father. A glorious joke.

It has been a year since the end of Richard II. Henry IV is king, but faces Scottish and Welsh rebels. Hotspur, son of Northumberland, refuses to ransom prisoners until Mortimer, his brother-in-law but also heir presumptive to the throne, is ransomed in return. Where is Hotspur’s counterpart, Prince Hal? In a tavern with Falstaff and his gang, planning robberies. Hal’s soliloquy that he is only pretending to be a ne’er-do-well. Falstaff: one of Shakespeare’s greatest comic creations, but introduced in a history play. He is not historical: why is he here?

The Queen sent into exile in France: the imagery of a “divorce.” York discovers that his son Aumerle is plotting again Henry and goes to Henry to denounce him as a traitor. His wife helplessly tries to intervene. A scene that degenerates from seriousness into farce, a pattern in the play. Richard’s lyrical soliloquy of himself as a microcosm, but one divided. His unexpectedly heroic death. In the final scene, Henry learns that his former allies are now rising up against him. In a key line, repeated verbatim, the word is set against the word.

Richard is deposed in a public trial, which Bolingbroke and Northumberland hope to turn into a Soviet-style mockery in which Richard confesses all his wrongs. Instead, he steals the show, and makes them look like bullies and himself like a martyr—like Christ as the Man of Sorrows. The scene was not printed until after the death of Elizabeth, who is reputed to have said, “Know ye not I am Richard II?”

Richard, having made enormous, though eloquent, speeches of self-pity instead of bolstering the morale of what followers remain to him, holes up in Flint Castle. But when confronted by Bolingbroke and his fellow rebels, descends, slowly and ritualistically, from the walls, surrendering without the slightest resistance into the hands of his enemies. In the next scene, the Queen, speaking to a Gardener, speaks of her husband’s fate as a second fall of Man.

The exiled Bolingbroke lands in England and gathers an army, claiming he has returned only to claim his legal rights as the heir of John of Gaunt. Old York, the last of the 7 sons of Edward III, helpless and feeble, switches his allegiance to Bolingbroke, the symbolic turning point of the play. Richard returns from Ireland and makes a bizarre, theatrical speech about how the earth itself will rise up and angels descend to aid him because he is God’s anointed king.

John of Gaunt is inspired on his deathbed with a famous speech about the glorious land of England—now fallen on hard times due to the corrupt Richard II. Richard comes in, and Gaunt tells Richard what a fool he is being, angering Richard. Gaunt dies offstage, and Richard immediately moves to take his estates, which should go to Gaunt’s son Bolingbroke, in order to fund wars in Ireland. This not only gives Bolingbroke yet more reason for rebellion but creates sympathy for his cause. Richard puts old, feeble York, the last of the fabled 7 sons, in charge of England while he is in Ireland.

In a ritualized, formal scene, Bolingbroke opens the play by accusing Thomas Mowbray of having murdered Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester. Mowbray denies it, and a date for a trial by combat is set. Mowbray hints what is widely believed, that he was acting on the orders of Richard II himself. Gloucester’s widow seeks justice from John of Gaunt, but Gaunt says nothing can be done because the king, who is clearly guilty, is nonetheless “God’s anointed.”

The place of the history play among the four genres that Shakespeare wrote in. Its origins as a native form of drama, unlike tragedy and comedy, derived from Classical literature. The historical background of the plot of Richard II, the first of Shakespeare’s double tetralogy dramatizing English history for well over a century before his time.

After the crisis of Act 4, with two sets of lovers estranged and good friends quarreling, a happy ending brought about by Hero’s symbolic death and rebirth. A ritual at her supposed tomb is followed by a wedding of Claudio to a masked woman, who turns out to be Hero. Much Ado is a play about the instability of the human condition, the revolution of opposites: merry and melancholy, love and hate, friendship and enmity, youth and age. peace and war. The hope is that such instability can be good as well: it means we can change, that we can undergo “conversion.”

Claudio, out of revenge, publicly shames Hero by accusing her of infidelity at her own wedding ceremony. All the men behave badly in reaction—except Benedick. Benedick and Beatrice finally confess their love for each other in a short but touching scene.

Their friends contrive through staged conversations intended to be overheard to bring Benedick and Beatrice together. Meanwhile, Don John and his henchmen also stage a false drama, attempting to make Hero seem unfaithful. Dogberry and the Watch, the lower class characters, overhear the plotting and actually arrest Don John’s henchmen, but they are not “noted” by their social superiors.

Don John the melancholic. “Merry” and “melancholy” as two of the play’s many opposites. His attempt to cause mischief by telling Claudio that, in the masked ball in the first part of Act 2, Don Pedro woos Hero for himself rather than for the sake of Claudio. Meanwhile, Beatrice wounds the disguised Benedick by telling him that no one respects Benedick because he is too “merry,” always joking and frivolous. Much ado about “noting,” i.e., about taking note of: a comedy of gossip, rumor, deliberate lies spread both innocently and malevolently, a play with a new relevance in the age of social media.

A comedy of manners, a great deal of it in prose, about “noting,” i.e., taking note of. “Nothing” would have been pronounced “noting” in Shakespeare’s time. Rumors and misinformation spreading like wildfire and wreaking havoc with social life: Much Ado takes on new meaning in the age of social media. Two romances with two women: the lively, independent Beatrice and the patriarchally controlled Hero.

The mystery of Hamlet’s seeming “conversion” in Act 5. Most of the cast wiped out in the final scene. Can the complexities of Hamlet be drawn together into a unified pattern? Three types of tragedy: (1) of social order; (2) of isolated, alienated consciousness; (3) of love and gender. Hamlet as an attempt to encompass all three.

The mixed mood of the famous graveyard scene, mixing seriousness and humor in violation of the neo-Classical unities. Hamlet and the gravedigger speaking of death as leveler of social distinctions. The skull of Yorick the jester, whom Hamlet knew as a child. The funeral of Ophelia. Hamlet and Laertes struggle in her grave. Hamlet’s new sense that “There’s a divinity shapes our ends.”