Romeo and Juliet

In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare creates a world of violence and generational conflict in which two young people fall in love and die because of that love. The story is rather extraordinary in that the normal problems faced by young lovers are here so very large. It is not simply that the families of Romeo and Juliet disapprove of the lovers’ affection for each other; rather, the Montagues and the Capulets are on opposite sides in a blood feud and are trying to kill each other on the streets of Verona.

Every time a member of one of the two families dies in the fight, his relatives demand the blood of his killer. Because of the feud, if Romeo is discovered with Juliet by her family, he will be killed. Once Romeo is banished, the only way that Juliet can avoid being married to someone else is to take a potion that apparently kills her, so that she is buried with the bodies of her slain relatives. In this violent, death-filled world, the movement of the story from love at first sight to the union of the lovers in death seems almost inevitable.

What is so striking about this play is that, despite its extraordinary setting (one perhaps reflecting Elizabethan attitudes about hot-blooded Italians), it has become the quintessential story of young love. Because most young lovers feel that they have to overcome giant obstacles in order to be together, because they feel that they would rather die than be kept apart, and especially because the language that Shakespeare gives his young lovers is so exquisite, allowing them to say to each other just what we would all say to a lover if we only knew how, it is easy to respond to this play as if it were about all young lovers rather than about a particular couple in a very unusual world. When the play was rewritten in the seventeenth century as The History and Fall of Caius Marius, the violent setting became that of a particularly discordant period in classical Rome; when Leonard Bernstein rewrote the play as West Side Story, he chose the violent world of New York street gangs.

Scholars generally date the writing of Romeo and Juliet to 1595–96, near in time to the composition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare based the plot on several sources, including Arthur Brooke’s Tragicall Hystory of Romeus and Juliet. Romeo and Juliet was published as a quarto in 1597. A fuller text of the play, which has served as the basis of all subsequent editions, appeared in quarto in 1599.

The Taming of the Shrew

Love and marriage are the concerns of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. The play offers us some strikingly different models of the process of attracting and choosing a mate and then coming to terms with the mate one has chosen. Some of these models may still seem attractive to us, some not.

Lucentio’s courtship of and marriage to Bianca are prompted by his idealized love of an apparently ideal woman. When she first appears, Bianca is silent and perfectly obedient to her father. Lucentio then speaks of her as if she were a goddess come to earth. Because her father denies all men the opportunity openly to court Bianca, Lucentio spontaneously throws off his social status as a gentleman in order to disguise himself as a lowly tutor, the only kind of man that Bianca’s father, Baptista, will let near her. All that matters to Lucentio is winning Bianca’s heart. To marry her—even in secret and in shared defiance of her father—is surely, he believes, to be happy.

An alternative style of wooing adopted by Petruchio in quest of Katherine is notably free of idealism. Petruchio is concerned with money. He takes money from all Bianca’s suitors for wooing her older sister, Katherine, who, Baptista has dictated, must be married before Bianca. When Petruchio comes to see Katherine, he first arranges with her father the dowry to be acquired by marrying her. Assured of the money, Petruchio is ready to marry Katherine even against her will. Katherine is the shrew named in the play’s title; and, according to all the men but Petruchio, her bad temper denies her the status of “ideal woman” accorded Bianca by Lucentio. Yet by the end of the play, Katherine, whether she has been tamed or not, certainly acts much changed. Petruchio then claims to have the more successful marriage. But is the marriage of Petruchio and Katherine a superior match—have they truly learned to love each other?—or is it based on terror and deception?

This question about Katherine and Petruchio is only one of the questions this play raises for us. How are we to respond to Kate’s speech at the end of the play, with its celebration of the wife’s subordinate position? What does it mean that Bianca, the “ideal” woman, at the end seems unpleasant and bad-tempered, now that she is married? How should we respond to the process by which Petruchio “tames” Kate? As with so many of Shakespeare’s plays, how one answers these questions has a lot to do with one’s own basic beliefs—here, one’s beliefs about men and women, about love and marriage.

The dating of The Taming of the Shrew is complicated by the play's ambiguous relationship to a play entitled The Taming of a Shrew, printed and performed in 1594, which may have been an early version, or a reported version, of The Shrew , which was printed in the 1623 First Folio. Shakespeare’s sources for the plot include other contemporary works on the same theme.

The Tempest

In The Tempest Shakespeare puts romance onstage. He gives us a magician, a monster, a grief-stricken king, a wise old councillor, and no fewer than two beautiful princesses (one of whom we only hear about) and two treacherous brothers.

The magician is Prospero, former duke of the Italian city-state of Milan, whose intense attraction to the study of magic caused him to lose sight of the political necessity of maintaining power, which he then lost to his treacherous brother, Antonio. When we first meet Prospero, he has already suffered twelve years of exile on a desert island, where his only companions have been his daughter, Miranda, now a beautiful princess, the spirit Ariel, and the monster Caliban, whom Prospero has used his magic to enslave.

Now, sailing by the island and caught in a terrible storm are Prospero’s enemies (and one of his friends), who are returning from North Africa after having attended the wedding of another beautiful princess, Claribel of Naples, and the king of Tunis. On the ship are Antonio, who usurped Prospero’s dukedom and put him out to sea; King Alonso of Naples, who conspired with Antonio against Prospero; Sebastian, Alonso’s brother, who is about to conspire with Antonio against Alonso; Prince Ferdinand, Alonso’s son, destined to discover and fall into the power of the beautiful Miranda; and finally, Gonzalo, the wise old councillor who, twelve years before, provided Prospero with the books and other necessities that have made it possible for Prospero not only to survive his exile, but also to grow ever more powerful as a magician.

Prospero will now turn his awesome power upon his enemies through the agency of Ariel (and the many other spirits whom Ariel directs) in producing terror in Prospero’s victims and pleasure in those whom Prospero favors.

Yet The Tempest is more than romance, for its characters exceed the roles of villains and heroes, some of them becoming both villains and heroes. Prospero seems heroic in enduring his long exile, in protecting his daughter from Caliban, and in mastering a spirit world that he can use to control the elements and much else. Yet he also seems villainous in his enslavement of others, notably Caliban, and his enormous appetite for revenge on his enemies. Caliban seems to deserve the name of monster for his attack upon Miranda, but he also seems heroic in his resistance to Prospero, who wrests the island from him and attempts to tyrannize over him. Thus The Tempest belongs not only to the world of romance, but also to the period of colonialism, written as it was in the early stages of the European exploration and conquest of the New World.

The doubleness that we see in the play’s embodiment of seemingly timeless romance and a temporally specific historical moment is characteristic of this complex play, which seems simple and lyrical but which contains wonderfully complex narratives and emotions.

The Tempest was among the last of Shakespeare’s plays; he is thought to have written it in 1610–11, and it was performed at court November 1, 1611. It was printed in the 1623 First Folio. Among Shakespeare’s sources were an account of Sir Thomas Gates’s shipwreck, works on the New World such as Silvester Jourdain’s A Discovery of the Barmudas and theTrue Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia, and other sources he frequently used for his plays, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Virgil's Aeneid, and the essays of Montaigne.

Timon of Athens

The real Timon of Athens lived in that city in the fifth century BCE, making him a contemporary of Socrates, Pericles, and Alcibiades. Shakespeare presents him as a figure who suffers such profound disillusionment that he becomes a misanthrope, or man-hater, preferring the wilderness to any human community. He is thus a more interesting and more complex figure than the harshly condemned caricature that Timon had become to Shakespeare's contemporaries.

Timon was so well known in Shakespeare's day that the word “Timonist” was a slang term for an unsociable man, and Shakespeare’s contemporaries saw his misanthropy as the outward manifestation of the mortal sin of envy. George Whetstone, for example, in the mid-sixteenth-century The English Myrror, introduces Timon as an example of a man who “without envy cannot endure to behold the glory of the other. For which cause Timon of Athens was called dogged, because he grinned at the felicity of man: yea, if we well considered their effects, the actions of the envious may well be termed devilish in that they repine at the glory of God, and bend all their forces to suppress virtue and her followers.”

In contrast to such writers as Whetstone, Shakespeare provides us with a far more compassionate representation of Timon. Shakespeare’s play includes not just the disillusioned misanthrope that Timon ultimately becomes but also a wealthy, magnificent, and extravagantly generous figure of Timon before his transformation into misanthropy. When Timon first takes the stage, he is thronged by petitioners, artists, and merchants, as well as by those he calls his friends. He lays out great sums to free a friend from debtors’ prison, to provide for the marriage of a servant, and to patronize the arts, as well as to buy a jewel. While not exclusively altruistic in his pursuits, Timon nonetheless is presented as unique among the play’s characters in furthering the good of others. His most extravagant generosity is to his friends, to whom he tirelessly offers gifts. Timon so idealizes friendship that he believes that it can replace the financial arrangements of credit and debt as the basis for the distribution of wealth in Athens.

Through his bounty, Timon makes his wealth and property the property of his friends. His giving sometimes seems rivalrous insofar as he strives to give his friends greater gifts than they give him. Yet his understanding of friendship is ultimately cooperative, rather than competitive; he expects that, having received as gifts all that he owned, his friends will be equally generous to him.

Once Timon’s creditors begin to clamor for repayment, Timon has the opportunity to discover if his friends share his understanding of friendship. Then he finds that his idealization of friendship has been an illusion. All his social relations proving to be baseless, Timon invites his friends once more to his formerly great house so that he can repudiate them bitterly and then abandon Athens and retreat to the woods. There in soliloquy and in interviews with his former fellow citizens, he expounds the misanthropy for which he was to remain notorious for thousands of years and eventually earn the severe judgment of so many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries.

Shakespeare’s Timon, however, can never be altogether reduced to the stereotypically envious and devilish misanthrope, because he has been shown to have had the capacity for marvelously inclusive, if indiscriminate, friendship. His misanthropy, according to Shakespeare, arises from the destruction of an admirable illusion, from which his subsequent hatred can never be entirely disentangled.

Many scholars believe that Timon of Athens is an unfinished play—one that Shakespeare never polished into final form—and that it was not performed during Shakespeare’s lifetime. He is thought to have written the play in 1605–08, and it was published in the First Folio in 1623. Among Shakespeare’s sources was Plutarch’s Lives

 

Titus Andronicus

Titus Andronicus is the earliest tragedy and the earliest Roman play attributed to Shakespeare. Its tragic hero Titus acts in many ways as the model Roman, even though he makes a series of tragic errors. As the play begins, his loyalty to the Roman state is absolute, and he has given evidence of this civic virtue in his triumphs on the battlefield and in his willingness to spend his own blood in the service of extending and preserving the empire. He has led twenty-one of his twenty-five sons to death in Rome's wars. In having done so, Titus may seem to lack a feature of Roman manhood that was also highly valued, namely, patriarchal devotion to his family. This impression appears confirmed when early in the play Titus stabs to death one of his few surviving sons, who, in Titus's judgment, is showing disloyalty to Rome by resisting the desire of its newly crowned emperor.

Yet before the play is half over, Titus has come to appreciate that under the sway of the new emperor Saturninus and his bride Tamora, Rome has become "a wilderness of tigers" and that "tigers must prey, and Rome affords no prey / But me and mine." He is brought to this recognition by the death sentence imposed on two of his three remaining sons, a sentence that teaches him that the Roman tribunes are "more hard than stones." Almost immediately he is faced with the terrible rape and mutilation suffered by his only daughter. With his realization that justice has fled from Rome and that his and his family’s sacrifices are now as nothing, Titus turns his fierce loyalty away from the state and toward his family alone. Many scenes in the latter half of the play show him in the company of his brother, daughter, and grandson, a foursome totally devoted to each other and joined in mutual compassion for the family's horrible suffering.

The transference of Titus's emotions from state to family is oddly mirrored in the transformation of another of the play's chief characters, Aaron the Moor. Beginning the play as its magnificent villain and the secret lover of the new empress of Rome, Tamora, Aaron seems almost to embody the near-comic figure of the Vice from drama before Shakespeare. Like the Vice, who was closely modeled on the devil of Christian theology, Aaron is nearly superhumanly inventive and resourceful in devising plots to destroy others, and, like the Vice, he takes huge delight in the destruction. Yet once the Empress, to her horror, bears him a child who is the image of himself, he turns his boundless energy and resourcefulness to the preservation of the baby, for whose sake he is ready to endure any suffering. Aaron does not lose his thirst for perpetrating evil, but he strangely combines his consummate villainy with great tenderness to his own little family—a tenderness that also comes to characterize Titus before the play reaches its terrifying conclusion.

Titus Andronicus was first published in a quarto of 1594; this printing survives in a single copy which is housed in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s archives. Some scholars date the writing of the play to 1591–92; others argue for 1593–94. The play draws heavily on the story of Philomel in Ovid’sMetamorphoses and on Senecan tragedy, but if it had a direct source that source is no longer extant.

Troilus and Cressida

For the dramatic speech and action of Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare turned to two of the most prominent authors in his culture.

The first was Homer, who had inspired much of Greek and Latin literature as author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the epic poems treating the Trojan War and its aftermath.

The second was Geoffrey Chaucer, who, as author of The Canterbury Tales and the great romance of the Trojan WarTroilus and Criseyde, was the only English writer granted status comparable to the titans of classical literature.

Homer’s heroes, especially Achilles and Hector, are so magnificent that they attract the interest and intervention of the gods of the classical world. These gods contend with each other over the fates of their favorites, and sometimes even join in the fight with them on the battlefield between the walls of Troy and the ships of the Greek invaders. The Greeks and the Trojans battle over Helen, the queen of Sparta and wife of Menelaus; she was taken from him by Paris, a son of Priam, king of Troy, and now is held within the city’s impenetrable gates and walls. Helen, every bit as magnificent as her male counterparts, is, in Homer, innocent of inconstancy because she is the victim of a divine spell.

Chaucer’s young Trojan prince Troilus and the widow Criseyde, with whom he falls in love, are fitting company for the Homeric heroes among whom Chaucer places them. However immature Troilus is at the beginning of the romance, his love for Criseyde matures him and ennobles his character, so that by the time they consummate their love, she can imagine him providing her the protection of a wall of steel. During their long affair, he loves her with great constancy. And he continues to love her after she is sent away by the Trojan council to the Greeks, to whom her father has already fled, and even after her betrayal of him when the Greek Diomedes prevails on her to accept him as her lover.

While Criseyde turns out finally to be false, Chaucer and the rather clumsy and inexperienced narrator he creates both seem highly sympathetic to her in her vulnerable state. Up to the moment of her inconstancy, the poem is lavish in providing readers with details of her domestic situation and of her states of mind and feeling in a way the draws us close to her. Only Chaucer’s Pandarus and Diomedes seem to anticipate their Shakespearean counterparts, both men ruthless in exploiting Criseyde’s fears.

None of Shakespeare’s characters are the exemplars of heroism, constancy, or greatness found in Homer’s and Chaucer’s creations. In part, their diminishment in Shakespeare’s play may result from his transformation of them from epic and romance to drama. By convention in epic, the characters associate with the gods and thereby share the glory of these divinities; by convention in drama, the gods do not appear, and the characters therefore cannot exceed the limits of their humanity.

By convention too in both romance and epic, the characters are presented to us by admiring narrators; by convention in drama, the characters must speak for themselves. But the shift in genre from epic and romance to drama cannot in itself account for the shrinking of the Homeric and Chaucerian characters to their Shakespearean size.

Instead, Shakespeare shapes the action of his play and the speeches of his characters so as to diminish the characters. The leaders of the Greek army, General Agamemmnon and his councilors Nestor and Ulysses, talk endlessly as they scheme to get their chief warrior Achilles again to fight. Their schemes involve deception and cheap theatricality, and Greek officers and warriors alike are presented as fitting subjects for the cynical Thersites to lash mercilessly with his tongue.

On the Trojan side, when the leaders meet to discuss whether to keep Helen, Hector provides powerfully reasonable arguments for delivering her up to the Greeks and then, on a seeming whim, sides with the others in continuing the war to keep her. In Shakespeare’s version, all the Greeks and Trojans, Paris excepted, doubt that Helen is worth the lives lost in their war for her.

Just as Paris dotes on Helen, so Troilus on Cressida. Yet in contrast to Chaucer’s Troilus, Shakespeare’s fails to mature in response to his love and remains in adolescent self-absorption, almost indifferent to Cressida’s plight when she is forced out of Troy and made to go to her father in the Greek camp. For her part, Shakespeare’s Cressida shows nothing of the thoughtful reflection of her Chaucerian predecessor; it is replaced in her by calculation and manipulation of her suitors.

Apparently, Shakespeare chose to part ways with Homer and Chaucer by throwing onto their characters a relentlessly satirical light, one that makes his play a savage attack on the ideals that serve as cover for greed, violence, and lust.

Scholars believe that Shakespeare wrote Troilus and Cressida in 1603, the year that it appears in an official list, or a year or two earlier. The play was published in 1609 as a quarto, a small, inexpensive, single-play volume.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Even though the word “gentlemen” in its title would suggest that this play’s heroes are adults, the play is much more intelligible if we think of them as boys—boys who, as the play opens, are about to leave home on their own for the first time. Their longtime friendship has been dealt a double blow: one of the boys has developed a crush on a girl, though he hasn’t yet told her that he likes her; the other is being sent off by his father to the equivalent of a boys’ finishing school. In the course of the play’s action, both boys make the journey away from home, and both behave in ways that get them in terrible trouble.

Sent to “the Emperor’s court” in order to learn to be “perfect gentlemen”—to practice in “tilts and tournaments,” to learn how to make proper (male) conversation—Valentine and then Proteus are in turn derailed by overwhelming attraction to Sylvia, the ruler’s daughter. Valentine’s characteristic gullibility and mental denseness do not deter Sylvia from returning his love, but these weaknesses do render him incapable of eloping with her without getting caught—and banished. Proteus’ weaknesses—self-centeredness and the capacity for cold treachery—are triggered by his sudden love-at-first-sight desire for Valentine’s girlfriend, a desire which wipes out his former love for Julia and leads him into committing a series of despicable acts that win from Sylvia nothing but scorn and that wound (but do not drive away) Julia, who has pursued him disguised as a boy.

When Sylvia follows Valentine into banishment (and into the forest), and Proteus follows Sylvia, and Julia follows Proteus, the stage is set for one of the more disturbing play-endings ever devised by Shakespeare. But the stage is also set for the play’s “gentlemen” to begin to take small steps toward mature manhood.

Lest we not recognize the inner weaknesses that bedevil Valentine and Proteus, Shakespeare provides each with a servant who, either explicitly or by example, points out their failings. Speed is as bright as Valentine is dim, and when Valentine is fortunate enough to have Speed present to explain things to him, he functions not too badly. And Lance is as loving and compassionate as Proteus is callous. Lance’s account of his farewell scene with his family—played out for the audience with the family roles represented by Lance’s left and right shoes, his walking staff, and his dog Crab—is among the funniest scenes in Shakespeare; and Lance’s later account of taking on himself the whippings earned by Crab (almost as funny as the “farewell” scene) comments pointedly, if indirectly and parodically, on Proteus’ failures of loyalty.

It is often hard to know how a modern reader or spectator should respond to this play. The scenes with the outlaws in the forest seem to parody any number of things, though it is hard to say how the scenes would have been perceived by an audience in the 1590s. The disturbing actions in the play’s final scene are hard to reconcile to today’s views of “natural” sexual and social relationships. But it helps to view Valentine and Proteus as boys struggling to keep their balance in the face of new and unexpected desires—making terrible errors but, with the help of staunchly loyal girlfriends, coming through to a livable future.

Shakespeare wrote The Two Gentlemen of Verona early in his career; suggested dates are between 1590 and 1595. It was published in the First Folio in 1623. Among Shakespeare’s sources was Jorge de Montemayor's pastoralDiana Enamorada.