Riassunto The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare., Sintesi del corso di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Riassunto The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. The traces of Shakespeare’s life (pp. 1-13) During his lifetime, eighteen of the plays now attributed to Shakespeare were printed in the small-format editions called quartos. Many such editions of plays in this period were issued without the name of the author – there was no equivalent to our copyright system, and publishers were under no legal obligation to specify on their title pages who wrote the texts they printed. By the second decade of the seventeenth century, it had become routine to include the author’s name. By 1597 seven of Shakespeare’s plays had been printed, their title pages providing details of plot and of performance but not the identity of the author. After 1598 Shakespeare’s name began to appear on the title page of quartos, and indeed several plays almost certainly not authored by him were printed with his name. Shakespeare’s name figured prominently in the editions of his non-dramatic: Venus and Adonis (1593), The Rape of Lucrece (1594) and the Sonnets (1609). Confirmation of Shakespeare’s contemporary reputation as a love poet comes from many early sources. The greatest tribute to Shakespeare’s genius came seven years after his death, when John Heminges and Henry Condell brought out the collected edition of his plays now known as the First Folio (1623). This edition contains the text of eighteen plays that had not been published before and might well have otherwise disappeared. It included an engraved portrait of Shakespeare that is probably closer to an accurate image of the author. It featured four dedicatory poems. The poem by Ben Jonson is particularly noteworthy since Jonson likens his deceased friend and theatrical rival to some of the greatest English writers and also to the greatest playwrights of antiquity. Jonson thought that his tribute would bear witness to the justness of his judgment. The First Folio, for all the obvious care with which it was edited and presented, gives us almost nothing of what we crave. There is a single detail that Heminges and Condell bother to provide: their great friend's "mind and hand went together", they write; "and what he thought, he uttered with the easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers". If the claim is true, it helps to explain how Shakespeare managed to accomplish so much in a relatively short lifespan. Recent studies of the various states of Shakespeare's texts suggest that he heavily re- worked at least several of his plays. Heminges and Condell are silent about Shakespeare's life, and they do not arrange the plays in the order of their composition, so that readers could follow the evolution of the playwright's skill and vision. Though there are still disputes over the precise years in which certain plays were first written and performed, a rough chronology of the plays is now generally accepted. Some biographers, particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, attempted to assign this chronology to a presumed psychological evolution that underlay it: from the mingled realism and festive laughter of the histories and comedies to the despair and bitterness of the tragedies, to the renewed if sober hopefulness of the romances. But the story itself has proved difficult to coordinate coherently with the surviving biographical details of Shakespeare's life. The Folio editors though they include the author's picture, they do not bother to include his birth and death dates, his marital status, his surviving children, his intellectual and social affiliations. As Shakespeare was dead when the edition was produced, it is unlikely to have been his own wishes that dictated the omissions. The editors evidently assumed that the potential buyers of the book would not be interested in what we would now regard as essential biographical details. Such indifference is probably a reflection of Shakespeare's modest origins. He flew below the radar of ordinary Elizabethan and Jacobean social curiosity. The fact that there are no police reports, privy council orders, indictments or post-mortem inquests about Shakespeare tell us something significant about Shakespeare's life - he possessed a gift for staying out of trouble - but it is not the kind of detail on which biographers thrive. William Shakespeare was baptized in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon on 26 April 1564. He was the first son of John and Mary Shakespeare. One of his sisters, Joan, married a hatter and survived both her husband and her celebrated brother; she is mentioned in Shakespeare's will. The place into which William was born was a prosperous, peasant market town, situated on the river Avon. The origins of William's father, John, were in the countryside; his grandfather, Richard, was a tenant farmer in the nearby village of Snitterfield. In the mid-sixteenth century John Shakespeare moved to Stratford, where he became a glover and dresser of soft leather. He purchased a house and other property in Stratford and soon after married Mary Arden. Continuing to prosper, John steadily rose in the town's administrative hierarchy. He held a series of trusted roles culminating in 1568 in a year's term as bailiff, the equivalent of mayor. From the late 1560s onwards the course of his life became distinctly less smooth. Speculation that Shakespeare's father was secretly a Catholic was furthered by the discovery, in the eighteenth century, of a document that purposed to be John Shakespeare's spiritual last will and testament. The original document, conspicuously Catholic in its formulations, has been lost, however, and its authenticity has been challenged. John Shakespeare never returned to public office in Stratford, though he seems to have weathered his financial difficulties. Part at least of William Shakespeare's childhood and adolescence may well have been shadowed by family difficulties but there is no firm evidence to prove it. He presumably learned his ABCs at a petty school and then presumably went on to the King's New School, a fine, free grammar school where he would have received a serious education centred on the Latin classics, but the records that might have confirmed his attendance are lost. There is no record of what he did in the years immediately after he left school. The next time that William Shakespeare leaves a documentary trace of himself is in the marriage licence bond recorded on 28 November 1582 to enable him to marry Anne Hathaway. In May she gave birth to a daughter, christened Susanna. Before two years had passed, she gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl, whom the parents named Hamnet and Judith. These three children, all of whom survived infancy, died before she did, and Shakespeare's only grand-daughter, Elizabeth, died childless in 1670. We have no direct evidence of Shakespeare's life for seven years, a period that has been dubbed by frustrated biographers the "Lost Years". Then in 1592 a playwright, Robert Greene, published a nasty attack on an "Upstart Crow". Greene's attack takes the form of a warning to fellow university-educated playwrights who had been writing for the London stage. Lacking their elite educational background, the "Upstart Crow" started off as a mere actor but has now set up to be a writer as well. Greene does not exactly name the rival, but he identifies him by alluding to a line from one of Shakespeare's earliest plays, Henry VI, and informing that its author regards himself as "the onely Shake-scene in a country". By 1592 Shakespeare had made his way from Stratford to London, he had become an actor and he had established himself sufficiently as a playwright. Indeed, Greene seems to assume that Shakespeare was well- enough known to be identified merely by a quotation and an allusion. By 1592 Shakespeare seems to have had important friends and protectors. The precise route by which Shakespeare entered the professional theatre has remained obscure. Theatre scholars have reconstructed with confidence his trajectory that led him to be an actor, playwright and shareholder in the company known first as the Lord Chamberlain's Men and then, after Queen Elizabeth's death in 1603, as the King's Men. These were the two most successful and celebrated companies o the age. For the better part of two decades, he wrote approximately two plays a year. At the same time, he was somehow memorizing parts, rehearsing and performing in plays, his own and those of others. And he was helping to manage his company's finances and his own. In a profession where almost everyone else eked out a marginal existence, Shakespeare amassed a small fortune. Combining the archives, scholars have found various documentary traces of Shakespeare's business dealings. For example, he was twice cited for not paying his taxes on his London residence. None of these dealings constitutes anything out of the ordinary for a person of means in this period, but taken together, they represent a lifelong attention to his financial resources. One of the anecdotes that the writer John Aubrey collected and recorded in 1681 seems true: Shakespeare was not "a company keeper". He "wouldn't be debauched", Aubrey's informant reported, and if invited out, he would excuse himself, writing that "he was in pain". Shakespeare must have husbanded his time extremely well: it is noteworthy that his two great narrative poems seem to have been written during a period in which the theatres were all shut down, by government order, in response to an epidemic of plague. When this torrent of London-based activity was going on, the playwright did not live with his family. How frequently Shakespeare saw his wife and children is not known but he had not abandoned them: his wife and children remained in Stratford, living with his parents in the family house and then, from 1597 onwards, in New Place, the second-largest house in the town. Shakespeare's purchase of New Place is striking evidence of his prosperity. After the construction of the Globe theatre in 1599 Shakespeare had another source of regular income: he was part-owner of the playhouse in which his company performed. After 1606 his company also took the lease on the Blackfriars theatre and thereby acquired another significant London venue. In addition, he was rumoured to have been given very substantial gifts by the Earl of Southampton to whom he dedicated Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece and who is often mentioned as one of the prime candidates for the unnamed fair young man of the Sonnets. The Sonnets are written in the first person, with exceptional intensity and reveal a passionate relationship, mingling adoration, desire and bitter reproach, with both n aristocratic young man and a dark lady. There is pain when a rival poet threatens to displace the speaker in the young man's affections, and still greater pain when the dark lady seduces the young man. In several of the sonnets the poet seems to refer specifically to his profession in the public theatre. Alas, ‘tis true, I have gone here and there / and made myself a motley to the view, / gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear. (110: 1-3). In addressing the dark lady the poet repeatedly refers to himself by name Make but my name thy love, and love that still, / And then thou lov’st me for my name is Will. (136: 13-14). the Masters of the Revels (the official in charge of entertainments at court). In this respect, the so-called Melbourne Manuscript - a folded sheet of an autograph play attributed to James Shirley, discovered in 1985 among the Coke family papers at Melbourne Hall in Derbyshire - provides ambiguous evidence. The writing on the sheet begins in what is clearly the middle of a scene, and it is not entirely certain that the scene ends with the fourth and final page. As the scribe reached the last page he wanted to get as much material in as possible, with the result that the page looks distinctly crowded: presumably the scribe did not want to start a new sheet. The Melbourne Manuscript suggests that the sheet as a unit played some part in the play's evolution. Whether working alone or collaborating, at some stage the playwright had to put pen to paper. It is possible that the company or the entrepreneur supplied the playwrights with paper in loose sheets. Authors might fold the sheets to produce inner and outer margins for their writing: mistakes often found in the form and position of speech prefixes and some stage directions may have occurred because dramatists tended to add them outside the folded margins after the main dialogue had been written. The common handwriting of the period was the secretary hand which had its own distinctive forms, abbreviations and easily confused letters. Stage directions, speech prefixes and names of people and of places were generally written in an italic hand which would usually have required a pen cut differently from the one used for secretary hand. In addition to their source books, dramatists may well have written with note- or table- or commonplace books beside them. The initial process of composition might be relatively slow or quite rapid, needing much, heavy revision or very little. "His mind and hand went together", Heminges and Condell wrote of Shakespeare in the First Folio, "And what he thought, he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers". Heminges and Condell might not have realized that the manuscripts from which they worked were not Shakespeare's first drafts, but his fair copies of them. Yet there is evidence from the quartos of some of his plays that Shakespeare wrote and rewrote passages, sometimes neglecting to signal clearly which version was to be cancelled. Authorial drafts were called foul papers copy to distinguish them from the recopied fair version. Surviving manuscripts showing an author at work on a literary composition are rare, and the existence of examples of theatrical foul papers as opposed to fair copies revised has been disputed. Theatrical foul papers might contain deletions and revisions, changes in the forms of speech prefixes and stage directions. These irregularities were ironed out when the papers were copied for the production of the prompt book, the company's official record of the play. In this model, Shakespeare's foul papers were generally sent to be printed in the early quartos, while the prompt book was kept by the company and was used in the production of the texts for the First Folio. If foul papers were too foul, too chaotic, and difficult to read, they would scarcely supply adequate evidence for a company or an entrepreneur that a play in fact existed in an actable form. They would also prove a hindrance for licensing by the Master of the Revels. Similarly, the foulest of foul papers might prove too illegible to be copied for the prompt book. Yet if foul papers were reasonably tidy in themselves, there seems to have been no reason to suppose that they could not have served as the prompt book. Shakespeare's theatre recognized the role of a prompter played in a play's performance, and it would seem sensible that the prompter would have a copy of the text from which he could follow its action. If the prompt book represents a set of instructions for the recreation of a performance of a play, its often-great length, and the presence of extraneous elements, such as non-authorial comic material, remains puzzling. The prompt book was a valuable property and was apparently prepared with some care from material that derived from the author's foul papers. In turning the foul papers into the prompt book, theatrical companies might have used an in-house professional. All or some of the actors would have been supplied with their part or their roles in a roll. The plot of the play was written on a sheet of paper mounted on pasteboard and apparently hung up on a peg: its scene-by-scene account of the play's dramatic action was copied in two columns and included actors' names as well as their roles. It was not until 1624 and the scandal of Middleton's A Game at Chess that private transcripts of public plays began to be produced. Yet the professional copying of literary works in manuscript was well established by the 1590s, and, even if plays might not have qualified as "literary works", it is reasonable to assume that private individuals sought out copies of plays they had seen acted; so, too, theatre companies or their individual members saw that supplying manuscript copies provided a way of supplementing their income. The career of the poet and professional scribe or scrivener Ralph Crane, who was involved in the preparation of private transcripts for sale on behalf of authors and on commission for himself, supplies some evidence for the form this sort of activity might have taken. Crane had been working for authors in the theatre from as early as 1618. If theatrical manuscripts had a commercial value, it is possible that they would proliferate by hand in the same way that poems, letters, tracts, and other documents did. As London audiences demanded new plays supplemented by frequent revivals - a well-organized system of copying and storing manuscripts would have been essential. Furthermore, when companies went on tour outside London or in Europe, they might well have needed to take with them copies of the plays they were to perform. All this argues against a simple two- manuscripts model for theatrical production. In the same way, authors almost certainly kept manuscripts copies of their own plays, usable for the purposes of revision. No subject attracted more attention in the last twenty years than the question of the authorial revision of plays of this period. If Shakespeare did revise some of his plays and poems, it undermines his image as a spontaneous genius. If revision shows authorial rethinking, then it usually does so in the light of theatrical experience. A theory of revision chimes with the ideas about textual instability and indeterminacy. If, for example, quarto and Folio King Lear definitely are different plays, it becomes impossible to say which is the "real" one, indeed which is to be read first. In this uncertain textual world, readers can play a significant part in the selection and even creation of the work(s). There is then an interest in revision that relates to a desire to understand more about Shakespeare's creative process. In the past, Shakespeare was thought to have been indifferent to the publishing of his plays. He was believed to have intended his plays exclusively for the theatre, where they were subject to continual change. But the revision theory allows for the possibility that these changes might represent Shakespeare's second or even third thoughts. Shakespeare's plays were published by being performed, but around half of them were also published during his lifetime in print - the other half appearing in the First Folio after his death. The editions of his plays and of his poems that he might have seen were produced mainly in quarto, with a few in octavo: in a quarto book, the sheet of paper on which the text is printed is folded twice to produce a square-shaped book, in an octavo it is folded four times to produce a smaller, pocket-sized volume. Although there seems little doubt that the texts of the narrative poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) were published on Shakespeare's behalf and with his approval, the status of his other poems, notably the Sonnets (1609) and of the plays is disputed. In the case of the Sonnets, the argument revolves around whether their publication was authorized by Shakespeare or whether the volume was in effect pirated by Thomas Thorpe, who is usually identified with the "T.T." of the book's enigmatic dedication. There are strong arguments for and against Shakespeare's hand in the book's publications, arguments that have also involved doubts about his authorship of the poem A Lover's Complaint that accompanied the Sonnets. The status of the play quartos and octavos is equally still a matter of dispute. During the course of the last century, scholarly opinion moved from thinking that all quartos were stolen to defining a particular group as being "bad quartos": they were short, mangled parts of the text, sometimes included material from other literary works or just obvious comic banter and rarely seemed performable. How these bad quartos came into being remains uncertain. Most scholars tend to accept that they were in fact memorial reconstructions by one or more members of the theatre company that put them on. The badness of the bad quartos has been challenged, so that they are often now known as abbreviated or suspect texts. Although their dialogue and speeches are generally thought to be unreliable witnesses to what Shakespeare wrote, some scholars have argued that their stage directions reveal something about contemporary performance practices. A dozen of those good texts are, by most modern standards, too long to be acted within the performance times. Yet the contemporary appetite for lengthy sermons might suggest that some audiences had a highly developed ability to concentrate for long stretches of time. One answer that has been put forward to the problem of the differing length of plays in different versions is that several of the good quartos and of the plays in the Folio represent some sort of reading texts for those who enjoyed the shorter versions actually put on the stage. The alternative view holds that the quartos were published as part of a coherent marketing strategy in relatively expensive formats and that their typography often shows a real concern to present the text in as careful and attractive a form as possible. Shakespeare's may not have been the most popular plays of the period in print, but his full name was attached to work of others. After his death, in 1619 William Jaggard and Thomas Pavier put together a collection of quartos featuring plays by or associated with Shakespeare. The challenge for future scholars will be to understand the relationship between the printed versions of the plays, versions which their author must have seen and perhaps owned, and his own dramatic productions. The theatre of Shakespeare’s London (pp. 45- 59) "Cries" or troupes were set up by "sharers" who contributed to them two separates but equally important qualities: acting talent and money. Shakespeare himself was a full "sharer" in a company known first as the Lord Chamberlain's Men and later as the King's Men. Shakespeare was bound to be performance focused. Theatrical income was specifically linked to performance. Then if plague closed the theatre, or fire destroyed it, Shakespeare would make no money, and nor would anyone else. So, there was seldom any "spare" money in the theatre - which explains why no performers were provided who did not act, no conceptualizers were acquired who did not organize performances and few theatrical activities took place for which there was no financial return. Sharers sometimes kept and trained apprentices: young boy players to whom they taught the art of acting. As "playing" was not a formalized profession, an actor who wanted apprentices had to acquire and maintain membership of a professional guild; he would then technically take on apprentices in his trade, though he would in fact teach them to act. So, John Heminges took on a number of apprentice “grocers” during his acting career. These apprentices performed not just the roles of boys like Mote in Love's Labour's Lost and Arthur in King John, but also those of women, a fact that leads to a certain amount of metatheatrical jesting on Shakespeare’s part. Though "hirelings" - players paid by the week - were sometimes acquired, scenes were, when possible, simply swollen with non-speaking characters performed by people already working for the troupe: gatherers, who collected entrance money from the audience, and tiremen, who helped dress the actors backstage. As Shakespeare wrote largely for a group of actors whom he knew well, he shaped his characterizations to the skills of his colleagues. For this reason, he repeats character types. The fool with a beautiful singing voice, for instance, is to be found in several of his plays. One play gains resonance from its gesture towards another: Lear and Twelfth Night share a moment of tragic vision with each other and with the knowing spectators in ways that confound distinctions between comedy and tragedy. Other roles that he wrote are also shaped to the skills of a single actor, and the connections between such roles erode the separation between one play and another. The repeated characters written for a regular group of performers with individually identifiable skills suggests the way Shakespeare conceived of a theatrical company. When Shakespeare created roles, it was with a limited number of character types in mind, representative of the acting skills of his company. His texts in the form in which they were first printed often alternate, in speech prefixes and stage directions, between using a generic name and a character name, suggesting that Shakespeare probably wrote for "types" found in his troupe and individualized them only later. Different plays were put on every day in the early modern theatre. As a result, actors needed to have a method for putting on up to forty plays in a season, with minimal preparation. Sharers in a company would hear a reading of a new play given by its author, partly to decide whether or not to accept the text, and partly to learn the tale it told; so, they did know the story in which they were to feature and the staging issues it raised. No actor received a full copy of the play because paper and scribes were expensive. These parts of plays would then be learnt by heart, a process known as study or sometimes, when a helper was involved, instruction. This is fictionalized by Shakespeare: in A Midsummer Night's Dream actors are given their parts but are issued with strict instructions; after this they have only one brief and unfinished collective rehearsal before they put on the performance itself. In study and instruction alike, actors would read their parts looking to identity their passions and to isolate the particular transitional moment when one passion yielded to another. Once isolated, the passions also needed to be manifested in themselves, as did other more technical features of the writing. For all of this, actors needed to decide which words in their text to choose and emphasize and which telling gestures to use to accompany them. Generally, under the auspices of the prompter - who was in charge of the practical side of performance - there is no indication that sharers were concerned with the narrative arc of a play. A potentially tragic character might not be conscious of the fact - and so would not play the fact - that the story around him is a comedy, allowing for a broader range of interpretation within a single play. This also goes some way towards explaining Shakespeare's ability to create individual characters with their own habits of rhetoric. For Shakespeare, separate parts would have constituted a vital way of conceiving of a text in the first place: he was an actor who wrote in the knowledge that his plays, like all plays, would be disseminated in part- form; he constructed his texts accordingly. Only in 1567 in London was a fixed theatre, the Red Lion, constructed and it did not last long. But everything changed in 1576 when an enormous round theatre, called "the Theatre", was built in Shoreditch by the ex- actor and entrepreneur James Burbage. The Theatre, with its shape and name gesturing towards a classicism that the wood and thatch of the structure scarcely merited, was to stand for over twenty years. One of several reasons for the popularity of the Theatre was James Burbage's talented family. Shakespeare, who started writing for the Theatre in about 1594, originally penned many of his star roles for the "delightful Proteus" Richard Burbage, who was famous for his spectacular acting range. Much of London was in the hands of puritans, so all playhouses, the Theatre included, were constructed in areas known as "the Liberties" which were outside the jurisdiction of the lord mayor and not bound by London laws. The Theatre had been built on a rented field; so, when the owner of the field decided not to let his property any longer, the company found themselves without legal access to the site of their stage. The company's solution, as legal records attest, was forcibly to enter the field they no longer owned and to pull down their theatre: they conveyed it over the Thames for re-use on the other side. During the next year, the Globe playhouse was built from the Theatre's remains. While waiting for the Globe to be completed, the Lord Chamberlain's Men moved to another round theatre, the Curtain, which had been constructed some years earlier in the Theatre’s environs. The attraction of Southwark, attested to by the fact that other public theatres, the Rose, and the Swan, had already been built there, was that the area had a well-established reputation for light-hearted entertainment. simultaneously mocks and fulfils the wishes of its audience. The poem represents two people (and two genders) who inhabit contiguous but autonomous imaginary realms. That is, Venus and Adonis occupy almost the same space, but what each of them sees and feels is quite different from what the other sees and feels. This concentration on what these two characters see or do not see is reinforced by the extraordinary density of the vocabulary of looking within the poem: similes are introduced by 'Look how'; repeatedly we are urged to "see'. But the poem's interest in perception goes well beyond a concern with the visual and the illusionistic. The poem explores the boundaries between different people's perceptions and the ways in which even the most sumptuous rhetoric cannot overcome the irreducible distinctness of different viewpoints. Venus and Adonis marks the beginning of Shakespeare’s career as a perspectival artist, for whom what each person sees may differ from what everyone else sees. After the extreme success of Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare turned to the labour which he had promised to the Earl of Southampton in its dedicatory epistle. The result was the publication in 1594 of Lucrece, or The Rape of Lucrece. Lucrece was dedicated to the Earl of Southampton in warmer terms than its predecessor and may indicate a growing relationship of patronage between the Earl and the poet. Its ambience is profoundly different from that of Venus and Adonis. It describes a historical event. The rape of the chaste Roman wife Lucretia by Sextus Tarquinius, son of one of the early rulers of Rome, was believed to have precipitated the banishment of kings and the introduction of republican government to Rome. The poem creates a milieu – internal, tense, enclosed - which is notably different from the unpopulated outdoor summerscape of Venus and Adonis. Lucrece's sources lie in Roman history, in Ovid's calendrical poem called the Fasti and in Virgil's epic Aeneid. Lucrece is different from Venus and Adonis but is designed as a companion-piece for it. Its interior landscape, its focus on sexual desire and even its political themes seem to grow from the final sequence of the earlier poem. Venus' eyes flee from the sight of the dead Adonis in the 'deep dark cabins of her head', which anticipate the dark interiors and dark psychological spaces of Lucrece. Like the earlier poem, Lucrece repeatedly conjoins rapidly sketched actions with speeches which seem unstoppable. But perhaps the greatest difference between the two poems is that in Lucrece gender roles are almost oppressively conventional: a feminine eloquence that cannot move a male will is pitted against an appetite that simply sees and seeks to take what it wants. Lucrece's copious style, despite its sententious learning, is unable to prevent Tarquin's rape. Lucrece is full of paradoxes and does not simply succumb to orthodoxy in its representations of gender relationships: Tarquin becomes a 'captive victor that hath lost in gain' as a result of the rape and is rendered passive by his enslavement to passion. Meanwhile, although Lucrece's eloquence has no practical effect, she acquires a curious form of agency through passivity, since the display of her body in Rome leads to a political transformation in the city. Lucrece went through four editions within a decade of its publication. Tarquin is not satisfied by his rape and Lucrece's rhetoric does not directly cause the constitutional transformation of Rome that results from her violation. The power of the poem lies in its capacity to take its readers outside time, into an unchanging landscape of trauma, in which temporal flow hastens to allow the rapid fulfilment of desire, and then slows to take full and anguished account of pain. The poem pushes the eloquence of Venus and Adonis one step further, to explore a rhetoric of despair. Being a printed poet of longer poems in the late Elizabethan period brought with it constraints. The literary marketplace, which encompassed the tastes of patrons and readers of printed books as well as the desires of booksellers to have marketable commodities to sell, also exerted pressures on those who wrote for it. These forces encouraged writers to develop a style and a persona which would mark works that carried their name as a particular kind of commodity. Some of the features of Lucrece which are less attractive than Venus and Adonis may be the consequences of these pressures. Sometimes it almost seems as though Shakespeare's public stylistic identity is forcing him to produce more and yet more lengthy displays of copious complaint. It is often suggested that Shakespeare returned to writing plays after the end of the serious plague which had closed the London playhouses from the summer of 1592 to the middle of 1594, and that the 'narrative' poems were composed only to earn a crust during a particularly dark period. Shakespeare is known to have published only one work apart from plays for fifteen years after Lucrece, and the single work with which he broke his silence, 'Let the bird of loudest lay' is so short and enigmatic that is difficult to relate to any larger poetic project. We do not know the exact chronology of Shakespeare's poetic activity after the early 1590s, but it is almost certain that he began to comp sonnets in and after that period. Sonnets, and short lyric poems, were sometimes printed in long sequences, but sometimes they were circulated in manuscript in smaller groups. Some were copied into notebooks and commonplace books for private enjoyment. Shakespeare frequently embeds songs in his plays and was particularly prone to do so after 1599 when his company recruited the professional fool Robert Armin (who had a fine voice). But he also wrote short poems which were not designed to be set to music from at least the middle of the 1590s. Love's Labour's Lost (c. 1594) explores the pleasures and pressures which could arise from composing shorter lyric pieces and circulating them in manuscript rather than in print. In that play the king and his courtiers set about wooing their mistresses by composing lyrics, despite the fact that they have all sworn to give up the company of women. Once such poems entered the public domain, other readers might connect them to their authors and notice awkward relationships between what the poems say and the public identity of the author. Love's Labour's Lost was the first printed play to which Shakespeare's name was attached. It is therefore ironic that three of the four lyrics by the courtiers in Love's Labour's Lost were printed under Shakespeare's name in 1599 as part of the miscellany called The Passionate Pilgrim. The printer of this volume, William Jaggard, wanted Shakespeare the brand name. The courtiers' poems become in Jaggard's collection Shakespeare's poems. We don't know with absolute certainty when Shakespeare circulated his sonnets 'among his private friends' or when he wrote them. But the complete collection of 154 Sonnets, followed by their enigmatic end-piece A Lover's Complaint, were not printed until 1609 when the bookseller Thomas Thorpe published them under the title Shakespeares Sonnets. It used to be believed that this was a 'pirated' publication, and that Thorpe had got hold of a manuscript without Shakespeare's consent. More recent scholars tend to believe that Shakespeare authorized the publication. Whatever its origins, the 1609 volume looks unauthorized. Most authorized sonnet collections of the 1590s included dedications by the author, and most also printed whole sonnets on a single page. Thorne's 1609 volume instead opens with an address by the printer to the 'only begetter of these ensuing sonnets' and it spreads poems messily across pages. Sonnets belong in a peculiar social and intellectual space in early modern England. They might be addresses to particular individuals, and they might be caught up in narratives about fidelity and authorship. They might raise questions about the author and his or her gender and identity, and about the occasions on which they were written, and about whether their mode of address is directly epistolary, meditative, private or public. But they are not confessional narratives. It is the questions the Sonnets raise, rather than the answers to those questions, which make them important works. The important thing in reading the Sonnets is not to let our inability to determine their precise origins or their earliest rhetorical purposes become imaginatively stifling. These poems leave their readers trying to reconstruct a possible story and a possible set of sexual adventures around the poems, and they challenge their readers to see what riches the plurality of their language will throw up in response to that story. This makes the Sonnets a sort of para-narrative, a lyric form which seems to derive from a story which they themselves seem simultaneously to be creating and concealing. In ordinary conversation we know what words are attempting to do because we can read a variety of social and gestural signs which anchor an utterance within a pragmatic framework. With Shakespeare's Sonnets we are left to imagine that framework. And that makes those poems dramas of language and imagination. The Sonnets give us a form of erotic desire embodied in language that refuses to limit itself to particular objects and individuals. One of the more self-contained mysteries about the 1609 volume is the presence at its end of a 300-line poem called A Lover's Complaint, which describes the experiences and adopts the voice of a woman who has been abandoned by a lovely young man. During the period in which it was believed that Thorne had pirated Shakespeare's Sonnets it was often assumed thar A Lover's Complaint was not by Shakespeare and that the bookseller had simply tacked a poem by another hand onto the end of the volume. There was then a period in which A Lover's Complaint was welcomed into the canon as a contribution to the tradition of female complaint. In many ways the Sonnets are the extreme endpoint of the project which began with Venus and Adonis. The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint lack the copious sweetness of the earlier narrative poems, and they deliberately eschew their freshness and quotability in favour of a style that is tangled even when it seems epigrammatic. But they are obsessively concerned with the relationship between how people feel and how they see the world around them. They are also about the ways in which speeches of persuasion and praise may (or may not) relate to their objects and occasions. The Sonnets resonate with a wide range of tonalities from the plays in ways which may reflect their extended genesis. But the really deep relationship between Shakespeare's careers as playwright and poet goes far beyond either verbal parallels or connections of theme and mood: in the Sonnets it seems as though Shakespeare wanted to go beyond his own dramatic practice, to turn away from directly represented scene and relationship into imagined scene and relationship. They are the capstone of Shakespeare's career as a poet. His early narrative poems explored how voices and emotions might extend far beyond the lightly sketched occasions which gave rise to them. His sonnets are dramatic monologues which require their readers continually to invent and reinvent their dramatic occasions. They are words which simultaneously construct and dissolve their occasions, where a whole world of relationships could depend on the interpretation of a single word. Shakespeare and race (pp. 201-215) Trying to understand race in Shakespeare's writing is an exercise fraught with difficulty. Even outside Shakespeare's work, the word race is a slippery one. When used to denote racial identity, the term's meaning can be still harder to pin down. To some, race suggests biological differences based in physiognomy and skin colour. Race is thus not a transparent concept but a bundle of contradictions. It is at one and the same time visible and invisible, a component of biological identity and a trope of cultural or religious difference. It is, in other words, a cluster of problems. This is just as much the case in Shakespeare's writing. The meaning of the word race, in Shakespeare's works, deviates from the associations with skin colour or religion that we now tend to assign it. Race derives from the Latin radix, meaning "root". Roots imply ancestry, and Shakespeare most often uses the term race to designate a notion of lineage that confers a specific social rank. So, race demonstrates what one critic calls the 'genealogical idiom' of much pre-modern European thought. The term's early modern European cognates designated any group of plants, animals or humans that share traits through a common lineage. Edward Topsell's Historie of Four-Footed Beastes and Snakes (1607) speaks of 'mares appointed for race', that is, for breeding. Shakespeare often uses the term in this equine sense. In The Merchant of Venice Lorenzo refers to 'a wild and wanton herd / Or race of youthful and unhandled colts' (5.1.71-2). Shakespeare's usages of race do not imply skin colour. He never employs the term in relation to 'black' characters. He characterizes the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra's beauty as belonging to a 'race of heaven' but the phrase suggests celestial lineage rather than dark skin. The one possible exception is when Miranda refers in The Tempest to the native islander Caliban's 'vile race'. Caliban, the son of the Algerian witch Sycorax and the devil, is characterized by Prospero as a 'thing of darkness'. Yet Miranda's and Prospero's epithets refer less to Caliban's skin colour than to his breeding. Still, Miranda's rejection of Caliban pushes in the direction of modern racism inasmuch as it enforces the divide between human and 'savage', between noble and base kinds. For Miranda, Caliban's 'vile race' manifests itself in his desire to produce offspring by raping her, a desire that raises the spectre of sexual violence and of mixture and adulteration. This spectre haunts another of Shakespeare's usages of race. When Antony denounces Cleopatra for preventing him from 'getting of a lawful race' with his Roman wife, Octavia, he implies, like Miranda, that illegitimate sexual union produces adulterated offspring. Shakespeare's spectres of adulterated 'race' in The Tempest and Antony and Cleopatra, speak to important developments that transformed Europe over the course of the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. This period witnessed the rise of Western European imperialism, global trade and colonialism processes that both exposed Europeans to foreign cultures and prompted a hardening of their conceptions of racial difference. In 1492, the same year that Columbus 'discovered' America and its 'Indian' inhabitants, Christian Spain drove the last Moorish king out of the Iberian Peninsula and expelled all Jews; subsequently, Christians of Moorish and Jewish 'race' or ancestry attracted the suspicious attention of the Spanish Inquisition. During the sixteenth century, Portugal established the transatlantic African slave trade and eastern trading colonies. England, having already begun its own colonial experiment in Ireland, fantasized about following the Portuguese example in both the West and East Indies. Shakespeare participates in such fantasies. A Midsummer Night's Dream simply imagines merchant ships sailing through the 'spiced Indian air' (2.1.124). But his later plays fantasize a twinned mercantile and sexual conquest of the Indies. The irony is that, for Shakespeare, the English were themselves less a pure race than the product of mixture. In Henry V, he says that the English have emerged from the grafting of noble Frenchman and 'savage' British after the Norman Conquest of 1066. Here Shakespeare applies to the English a horticultural understanding of race that appears more explicitly in The Winter's Tale, where he represents grafting as the hybridization of the 'bark of baser kind / By bud of nobler race' - a mixture that, in this case, 'does mend nature'. Such a view is clearly in conflict with what we see in The Tempest and Antony and Cleopatra, where racial mixing does not so much 'mend' as deviate from nature. To underscore the unnatural deviance of mixing, those of 'vile race' are sometimes represented in Shakespeare's plays as a separate species. Coupling with those of 'vile race' could thus be refigured as interspecies sex. This strategy is most apparent in Othello, when Iago tells Desdemona's father, Brabanzio, that if she marries the black Othello, “you'll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse, you'll have your nephews neigh to you, you'll have coursers for cousins and jennets for germans” (1.1.I12-15). Othello shows that even if Shakespeare did not use the term race as a marker of skin colour, he was possessed of a strong colour consciousness. Throughout his work, he juxtaposes characters of 'fair' and 'black' complexion. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the fair Helena (who is compared to a white 'dove') contrasts with the dark Hermia (who is compared to a black 'raven' (2.2.120)). The juxtaposition of 'fair' and 'black' can even occur in one character. Rosaline in Love's Labour's Lost is presented as 'black as ebony' (4.3.244), but, like the dark lady, her refusal of cosmetics makes her beautiful: 'therefore she is born to make black fair' (4.3.257). It is clear that Shakespeare's use of black-and-white symbolism often depends on conceptions of colour that are racially inflected. Neither Hermia nor Rosaline is presented as African. But Hermia's lover, Lysander, denounces her in racial terms when she no longer pleases his eye. Whereas Ethiope serves here as racial shorthand for physical ugliness, Shakespeare resorts to an additional generic term applied to black specifically pre-Christian and even pre-societal. lineage. Critics often note how, in his last speech, Othello is split between the roles of Christian defender of Venice and Turkish traitor. But he is also split in time, between Christian present and Indian or Judaean past. These splits distil the many contradictions of Shakespeare's treatment of race. Shakespeare, sexuality and gender (pp. 217-231) At the conclusion of Twelfth Night, as part of the reconciliation scene, comes a revelation that modern audiences would find disconcerting if they paid attention to it. Sebastian gives their age at the death of their father as 13. They cannot be much older than this during the course of the play: they are prepubescent; Sebastian’s voice has not yet changed, and his facial hair has not begun to grow. If they are still 13, it means that, though Sebastian and Olivia have by this time married, the husband has not yet even reached the age of consent, which at this period in Shakespeare’s England was 14 for men, 12 for women. Sebastian’s combative energy and erotic readiness suggest advanced adolescence, and would have suggested it to Shakespeare’s audience as well. The idea of a 13-year-old husband was a fantasy, though doubtless a culturally significant one. Olivia’s propensity for falling in love with prepubescent youths was not uncommon. Shakespeare’s beloved young man in Sonnet 20 has all the attractions of a woman without her drawbacks (lato negativo). In this society, Olivia is not alone. The twins in Shakespeare’s source, Barnabe Rich’s Apollonius and Silla, on whom Sebastian and Viola are based, are considerably older: at the tale’s opening Silvio, the character who became Sebastian, is already away at the wars. Their precocious sexuality brings their characters into coincidence with the actors impersonating them: beneath their costumes Viola and Olivia are prepubescent boys, and to make Viola’s male twin the same age made theatrical and logical sense. Shakespeare similarly revised the age of Juliet, which appears to be about 16 in Arthur Brook’s Romeus and Juliet, downward to 13. This again is specified: Juliet’s nurse says that Juliet is not yet 14, and even specifies her birthday (31 July). Juliet’s mother says that she herself gave birth to Juliet when she too was 14. It is an index to a powerful sexual fantasy that in both its negative and positive versions pervades the plays. The corollary to this fantasy is one in which young people in love evade the patriarchal imperatives by escaping to a world without parents, where they can arrange their own marriages. The normative ending of comedy is marriage, but Shakespeare characteristically works a significant variation on the norm. Shakespeare’s comedies typically end just before the marriage, sometimes with an entirely unexpected delay or postponement. The play that begins where comedy ends, with the father defeated and the lovers married, is Othello. The lovemaking of Othello and Desdemona is interrupted on the only two nights they spend together before he murders her on their wedding sheets. Even in those few marriages in Shakespeare that are depicted as sexually happy – in Hamlet and The Winter’s Tale – the sexuality of women is represented as unsettling. Early modern gynaecology offered widely varying accounts of the aetiology of gender, but the most persistent, descending from Galen, cited apparent homologies in the genital structure of the sexes to show that male and female were versions of the same unitary species. The female genitals, it was argued, were simply the male genitals inverted and carried internally rather than externally. Sexual experience was conceived to be the same in both. Both male and female seeds are present in every foetus. A foetus becomes male rather than female if the male seed is dominant and generates enough heat to press the genital organs outwards – that is, if the foetus is stronger, strength being conceived as heat. In this version of anatomical history, we all begin as female, and masculinity is a development out of and away from femininity; the female is an incomplete male. At the same time, the alternative theory maintaining that the anatomical differences between male and female are definitive and that women are not incomplete men but have their own kind of perfection is also found. From a cultural point of view, the critical element in the argument is less the fluidity of gender than the assumption than its movement works in only one direction, from female to male, which is conceived to be upwards, towards completion; in this construction, the masculine is what the human strives to be. The most frightening part of this teleology was the fantasy of its reversal, the fear that men can turn into women. The fear of effeminization pervades the moral literature of the age: boys must be trained to be men, and to remain manly re quired constant vigilance. Associating with women, falling in love, was inherently dangerous to the masculine self. The classic Shakespearian example is Mark Antony, transformed by love from “the triple pillar of the world” into “a strumpet’s fool”; and Cleopatra, playing her own entirely conventional role, completes his effeminization. The age is full of warnings implying that masculinity is not something to be taken for granted. The greatest danger to manhood was women. Renaissance ideology had a vested interest in defining women in terms of men – the point was to establish the parameters of maleness, and those of womanhood only in relation to men. There is nothing egalitarian about the notion that women and men are versions of each other, that women are almost men and can even become men. Most of the scientific opinion codified by Ian Maclean in his essential study The Renaissance Notion of Women assumes the correctness of the homological thesis, but stresses the differences between men and women, not their similarities, and these differences are invariably prejudicial. Women are more passionate, less intelligent, less in control of their affections and so forth. The difference in degree of perfection becomes a significant difference in kind, and such arguments are used to justify the whole range of male domination over women. The disguises of Shakespearian drama look less like theatrical convention. One can imagine a romance in which the plot does not ultimately undo itself in the removal or penetration of the disguise, where disguise becomes the reality, the true expression of the self – where the impersonation becomes the person. There are gestures towards this sort of essentialization of costume in Shakespeare. In As you like it, when Rosalind disguises herself as the youth Ganymede to accompany Celia in their flight into the forest of Arden, it is for practical reasons: women on the road are always in danger, and the presence of a man is a sufficient deterrent to predators. The disguise subsequently becomes a cover for her meetings with Orlando. Disguise here is the essence of romance, and when the disguise is discarded the romance has ended – here in marriage, though if we think about what happens afterwards, for example in Othello and Romeo and Juliet, it is not clear that abandoning the disguise necessarily constitutes a happy ending. In Twelfth Night Viola initially regards her transvestite disguise as correspondent to her inner state. By the middle of the play, she has changed her mind: she is now trapped in a costume that misrepresents the form of her intent, that makes it impossible for her to express her feelings. But she too maintains the disguise long after its utility in the plot has been exhausted. The eventual unmasking does nothing to change the terms on which the play has operated throughout: appearances remain of the essence. Olivia has fallen in love with the cross-dressed Viola, and when Sebastian appears, identically costumed, she instantly transfers her feelings to him – the twins are, for Olivia, interchangeable. There are very few plays that suggest gender may be more than the costume – that that part of the self which is defined by sexuality is real and knowable. Viola, challenged by Sir Andrew, laments that “a little thing would make me tell them how much I lack of a man”, invoking in that lack a very old anatomical fantasy that women are men with something missing. This is obviously a male fantasy, not a female one, though in this case Viola’s failure of nerve is not merely a function of the missing genital organs: in the duel, Sir Andrew turns out to be no more of a man than Viola. Even in the real world, common sense is not always the bottom line, and the boundaries of mimesis are far more extensive than they are in the theatre. There are a number of famous cases of people who successfully lived cross-gendered for years, for example the jazz pianist Billy Tipton as a man. Tipton’s sex was discovered only after his death: Tipton passed as a man because in the 1930s for a woman to perform in jazz clubs as anything, but a vocalist was impossible. Billy Tipton’s sexual anatomy would have been the ultimate reality only for the purposes of one particular type of sexual intercourse. For other forms of interaction, gender is not a matter of anatomy but of self- presentation. The performative elements of gender took on an additional complexity in the Elizabethan theatre, where the women’s roles were played by men. For a woman to display herself on stage was to violate all the canons of female modesty and chastity. Such assumptions about women were universal in the Renaissance, but the English were the only culture in Europe to attempt to solve the problem by maintaining a transvestite public theatre. At the same time, moralizing attacks on the Elizabethan theatre tend to focus particularly on the transvestism of the stage, and consider it an enticement to and cover for sexual, and particularly homosexual, activity. Three-quarters of Shakespeare’s Sonnets are love-poems to a young man, a fact that was unproblematic in Shakespeare’s time, but one that criticism has only recently been willing to acknowledge. To begin with the legal situation, sodomy was a capital crime. Anti-theatrical tracts assumed that the boys who played the women’s roles on stage played them in life as well; anti-Catholic invective declared ecclesiastical celibacy to be a cover for institutionalized buggery; judicial indictments for political or religious crimes often included additional charges of sodomy. Sodomy tended to serve as a gloss on whatever the culture considered worst or most threatening. According to the Lord Chief Justice, the sex had to be non-consensual, a rape. The law as elucidated by the Lord Chief Justice said nothing about sex between consenting male partners, about sex between men other than anal sex, about homosexual activity of any sort performed in private: none of these legally constituted sodomy. In the popular mind the term covered a multitude of horrendous sins, not all of them by any means involving homosexuality. A Bruce Smith’s study reveals a total of only six sodomy trials in the entire reign of Elizabeth: all but one involved the rape of a minor, and five of the six resulted in acquittals. Heterosexual fornication and even sex with animals were prosecuted much more energetically. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, with their open declarations of the poet’s love for the beautiful young man, are part of this cultural scene. Sodomy was not equivalent to homoeroticism, and English Renaissance culture did not display a fear of homoeroticism as such. On the contrary, the love of men for other men was both a fact of life and an essential element in the operation of the patronage system. The rhetoric of male friendship in the period is precisely that of passionate love. Though female homoeroticism was in less danger of being construed in sexual terms, by the 1590s a term for lesbianism – tribadry – had entered the language. The association of the stage’s transvestite boys with homosexual prostitution is found in puritan polemicists and in the playwrights themselves. For the readers of Shakespeare’s age, the locus classicus for the idealization of homosexual feeling was Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. One of the most striking aspects of the poem is its overt sexuality. Marlowe describes both Hero and Leander as infinitely desirable; but the praise of Leander is much more frankly sexual than that of Hero, and specifically homosexual. Gods and men pine away for Hero, but the measure of Leander’s beauty is not that women desire him, but that men do. Marlowe is certainly daring, though less so in a Renaissance context than he seems now – for adult men to be attracted to good-looking youths was quite conventional. The closest analogue to Shakespeare’s Sonnets to the young man is Richard Barnfield’s overtly homoerotic series of sonnets to a beloved youth. Love poetry in the 1590s included celebrations of the love of men for men. A letter written by King James to his favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, gives a good sense of how much the homoerotic was part of the currency of social relationships in Shakespeare’s age. the metamorphic quality of the king’s sexuality in this rhetoric is notable: he proposes marriage to Buckingham and then imagines himself in succession as widow, father and husband, and Buckingham as his child and wife. The king proposes an image of an endlessly mutating family. The language of love in the age implies everything but tells nothing.