Macbeth

In 1603, at about the middle of Shakespeare’s career as a playwright, a new monarch ascended the throne of England. He was James VI of Scotland, who then also became James I of England.

Immediately, Shakespeare’s London was alive with an interest in things Scottish. Many Scots followed their king to London and attended the theaters there. Shakespeare’s company, which became the King’s Men under James’s patronage, now sometimes staged their plays for the new monarch’s entertainment, just as they had for Queen Elizabeth before him. It was probably within this context that Shakespeare turned to Raphael Holinshed’s history of Scotland for material for a tragedy.

In Scottish history of the eleventh century, Shakespeare found a spectacle of violence—the slaughter of whole armies and of innocent families, the assassination of kings, the ambush of nobles by murderers, the brutal execution of rebels. He also came upon stories of witches and wizards providing advice to traitors. Such accounts could feed the new Scottish King James’s belief in a connection between treason and witchcraft. James had already himself executed women as witches. Shakespeare’s Macbeth supplied its audience with a sensational view of witches and supernatural apparitions and equally sensational accounts of bloody battles in which, for example, a rebel was “unseamed . . . from the nave [navel] to th’ chops [jaws].”

It is possible, then, that in writing Macbeth Shakespeare was mainly intent upon appealing to the new interests in London brought about by James’s kingship. What he created, though, is a play that has fascinated generations of readers and audiences that care little about Scottish history.

In its depiction of a man who murders his king and kinsman in order to gain the crown, only to lose all that humans seem to need in order to be happy—sleep, nourishment, friends, love—Macbeth teases us with huge questions. Why do people do evil knowing that it is evil? Does Macbeth represent someone who murders because fate tempts him? Because his wife pushes him into it? Because he is overly ambitious? Having killed Duncan, why does Macbeth fall apart, unable to sleep, seeing ghosts, putting spies in everyone’s home, killing his friends and innocent women and children? Why does the success of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth—prophesied by the witches, promising the couple power and riches and “peace to all their nights and days to come”—turn so quickly to ashes, destroying the Macbeths’ relationship, their world, and, finally, both of them?

In earlier centuries, Macbeth’s story was seen as a powerful study of a heroic individual who commits an evil act and pays an enormous price as his conscience—and the natural forces for good in the universe—destroy him. More recently, his story has been applied to nations that overreach themselves, his speeches of despair quoted to show that Shakespeare shared late-twentieth-century feelings of alienation. Today, the line between Macbeth’s evil and the supposed good of those who oppose him is being blurred, new attitudes about witches and witchcraft are being expressed, new questions raised about the ways that maleness and femaleness are portrayed in the play. As with so many of Shakespeare’s plays, Macbeth speaks to each generation with a new voice.

Shakespeare wrote Macbeth in about 1606 or 1607. It was published in the First Folio in 1623.

Measure for Measure

Measure for Measure is a play rooted deeply in early seventeenth-century culture; at the same time, it retains a powerful hold on the imaginations of modern readers. In an attempt to suggest why Measure for Measure continues to be among the most passionately discussed of Shakespeare's plays, we might think about the ways that the seventeenth-century issues it dramatizes relate to present-day concerns.

The play features a duke who is so anxious about the decline in the moral quality of his subjects' lives that he temporarily removes himself from the government of his city-state and deputizes a member of his administration, Angelo, to enforce existing laws more rigorously. Angelo, who has never before had the opportunity to exercise such power over others and who thus has never had to withstand the temptation to misuse it, experiences no qualms of conscience as he holds all in the city to the same idealized standard of moral behavior that he thinks he himself exemplifies. The man he chooses as his first victim is Claudio, who has impregnated Juliet before they have solemnized their marriage. For this crime, Angelo condemns Claudio to death.

At Claudio's request, Isabella, Claudio's sister, approaches Angelo to plead for her brother's life. Every bit as idealistic as Angelo, Isabella is in the process of entering the convent of the Order of Poor Clares, where she will vow lifelong obedience, poverty, and chastity. Her eloquence in addressing Angelo arouses in him the desire to possess her, a desire so strange to him that he immediately gives in to it and, renouncing integrity and morality, attempts to extort sex from her in return for her brother's life.

Isabella, denied any opportunity to expose Angelo's corruption, is nonetheless resolute in her spiritual commitment to preserve her chastity, no matter the consequences. Meanwhile, the duke has disguised himself as a friar so as to discover the true nature of his subjects. After eavesdropping on Isabella's revelation to her brother about Angelo's attempted extortion, the duke (in his friar's disguise) offers to ally himself with Isabella against Angelo.

In view of the overriding importance of religion and the spiritual life in early seventeenth-century England, and in view of the control exerted over both religion and morality by the State in this era when Parliament actually debated the death penalty for premarital sex, it is easy to see how Measure for Measure might capture its audience's interest. In today's culture, however, in which religion exerts an influence on the lives of only a part of the population, it would seem unlikely that Measure for Measure could engage audiences in anything like the same way it once did. Yet there are now other issues that have attached themselves to the play.

One such issue is the division of opinion about the role of government in shaping the morality of citizens. For those who regard such governmental action as intrusive, the duke may seem intolerably meddlesome in his interference in the lives of his people; for those who want government to act in the defense of conventional morality, the duke may be understood as properly exerting himself to impose standards of moral behavior on his people. Another issue that has become attached to the play is sexual harassment of women by men, with Angelo and Isabella's encounter presenting itself as a powerfully dramatic representation of this ongoing problem. Yet another current issue, the right of a woman to control her own body, has arisen for modern readers from the scenes in which Isabella is forced to choose between her virginity and her brother's life. Modern responses to Measure for Measure indicate how a play that is formed in a past culture can be transformed in its reception by present culture into a spectacle of continuing fascination.

Shakespeare is believed to have written Measure for Measurein 1604; it was performed at court that December. The play was first published in the First Folio in 1623. His principal source for Measure for Measure was another play, George Whetstone’s two-part Promos and Cassandra.

The Merchant of Venice

The Merchant of Venice, like most of Shakespeare's comedies, is about love and marriage. But the path to marriage in this play is unusually hazardous. The characters compare it to the epic voyage undertaken by Jason and the Argonauts to win the Golden Fleece. In this play, Portia, the fabulously wealthy heiress of Belmont, is herself the Golden Fleece, according to her would-be husband, Bassanio. To win her hand in marriage, he must put his future at risk in an attempt to choose correctly among three caskets or chests of gold, silver, and lead. If he chooses rightly, he wins, in marriage, the beautiful, intelligent, and supremely resourceful Portia and her great wealth. If he chooses wrongly, he must forever abandon Portia and may never propose marriage to any other woman. He would therefore die without legal heirs.

The test of the caskets, prescribed in the will of Portia's dead father, is not the only obstacle to Bassanio and Portia's happiness. There also stands against them a magnificent villain, the moneylender Shylock. In creating this character, Shakespeare seems to have shared in a widespread and, from our point of view, despicable prejudice against Jews. In Shakespeare's England there had been no Jews for a long time, except an occasional visitor, and so there was no direct experience to counteract the prejudice. Shylock would have been regarded as a villain simply because he was a Jew.

Yet Shakespeare was led by his art of language to put onstage a character who gave such powerful expression to the alienation he felt because of the hatred around him that, in many productions of the play and in the opinions of many famous actors, Shylock emerges the hero of The Merchant of Venice. In fashioning in Shylock a character whose function is to frustrate the satisfaction that we are invited to desire for the play's lovers, Shakespeare has, for many people, brought forth a character who rivals the lovers in the power he exerts over us.

Over the centuries Portia too has also deeply engaged audiences. In her role as the daughter bound by her father's will, one who sees herself as helpless in the face of the casket test and whose anxieties and joys we are encouraged to share, Portia is, for readers and playgoers alike, one of Shakespeare's most appealing heroines. But it is in her role as Balthazar the young lawyer that Portia is most remembered. The speech in which she urges Shylock to show the kind of mercy that "droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven," that "is enthronèd in the hearts of kings" and "is an attribute to God Himself," is one of Shakespeare's most famous and most loved passages. For readers and audiences today, the pleasure that should accompany her saving of Antonio is clouded by what seems to us her cruel treatment of Shylock—but the role of Portia remains one that every Shakespearean actress yearns to play.

Partly because of a probable reference within the play to the capture of a real Spanish ship, Shakespeare is believed to have written The Merchant of Venice in 1596–97. It was published in 1600 as a quarto. Shakespeare drew on several contemporary works as sources for the play, but chiefly on a story from Ser Giovanni Fiorentino's Il Pecorone (The Dunce).

The Merry Wives of Windsor

Shakespeare's “merry wives” are Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, both married to well-to-do citizens of Windsor, a town near London best known for its royal castle and its parks. ("Mistress," in their case, means what "Mrs." later came to mean.) The two are fast friends who cooperate with and completely trust each other, and who join together to play elaborate practical jokes on Mistress Ford's jealous husband and on the knight Sir John Falstaff, a visitor staying at Windsor’s Garter Inn.

As a collection of characters in a play, merry wives, jealous husbands, and predatory knights would have been familiar to Shakespeare's audience. This is a group found over and over again in a particular kind of popular play of Shakespeare's time called "citizen comedy" or "city comedy." The staple of such comedy, found throughout the seventeenth century, is a kind of class warfare in which courtiers, gentlemen, or knights prey on married citizens by using social superiority to seduce the wives, thereby gaining access to the married couples' money and turning the citizen-husbands into figures of scorn called cuckolds (a name for men whose wives are unfaithful). In these plays, proper wives stand out against such seducers and maintain a posture of silence, chastity, and obedience, but merry wives—those who enjoy and are animated by feasting and entertainment—often give in to the pleasures offered by their male social superiors.

Shakespeare's merry wives, though, do not follow the usual pattern. Instead, Falstaff's offer of himself as lover to both Mistress Page and Mistress Ford becomes the occasion of their extended torment of him. No matter how much they enjoy having fun, these wives are individually and collectively offended by his offer. They immediately turn their attention to taking revenge for his presuming to approach them. And when one of the husbands, Ford, is overcome by jealousy and seeks to expose what he believes is his wife's infidelity, he too becomes the target of the wives' merry schemes.

But the combination of Mistress Page and Mistress Ford is not the only comic engine in this play. While Falstaff is the butt of their jokes, he nonetheless responds to his plight with comic speeches filled with the same linguistic facility that Shakespeare gives this character in the history plays in which he also appears. There is a long, if quite groundless, tradition that Queen Elizabeth so enjoyed Falstaff in Shakespeare'sHenry IV, Part 1 and Part 2 that she commanded the dramatist to write a play about Falstaff in love, a command that Shakespeare purportedly fulfilled in just two weeks. While the tradition has nothing factual to support it, it reflects the fact that Falstaff through the centuries has been regarded by audiences as the “hero” of the play.

Scholars think Shakespeare wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor between 1597 and 1601. It was published as a quarto in 1602. A much fuller and more readable text appeared in the Folio of 1623. Shakespeare’s sources for the play remain uncertain, but likely included a story from Ser Giovanni Fiorentino's Il Pecorone (The Dunce) and Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie .

A Midsummer Night's Dream

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, one of Shakespeare's most popular plays, Shakespeare stages the workings of love in ways that have fascinated generations of playgoers and readers. The play confronts us with mysterious images of romantic desire. There are Theseus and Hippolyta, about to be married; both are strange and wonderful figures from classical mythology. Theseus is a great warrior, a kinsman of Hercules; she is an Amazon, a warrior-woman, defeated in battle by Theseus. His longing for the wedding day opens the play, and the play closes with their exit to their marriage bed.

Within Theseus's world of Athens, two young men and two young women sort themselves out into marriageable couples, but only after one triangle, with Hermia at the apex and Helena excluded, is temporarily replaced by another, this time with Helena at the apex and Hermia excluded. At each point the fickle young men think they are behaving rationally and responsibly as infatuation (sometimes caused by a magic flower, sometimes not) leads them into fierce claims and counterclaims, and the audience is shown the power of desire to take over one's vision and one's actions. By presenting the young lovers as almost interchangeable, Shakespeare displays and probes the mystery of how lovers find differences—compelling, life-shaping differences—where there seem to be only likenesses.

In the woods outside of Athens, where the lovers suffer their strange love experiences, we find yet other images of desire, these involving the king and queen of Fairyland and an Athenian weaver transformed into an ass-headed monster. King Oberon and Queen Titania are engaged in a near-epic battle over custody of an orphan boy; the king uses magic to make the queen fall in love with the monster. The monster—a simple weaver named Bottom who came into the woods with his companions to rehearse a play for Theseus and Hippolyta's wedding—is himself the victim of magic. He has been turned into a monster by Oberon's helper, a hobgoblin or "puck" named Robin Goodfellow. The love-experience of Titania and Bottom is a playing out of the familiar "beauty and the beast" story, and, like the stories of the young lovers, it makes us wonder at the power of infatuation to transform the image of the beloved in the lover's eyes.

Finally, there is the tragic love story of "Pyramus and Thisbe," ineptly written and staged by Bottom and his workingmen companions. In this story romantic love leads to a double suicide—provoking only mirth in the onstage audience but reminding us once again of the extraordinary power of desire.

It is thought that Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream in the mid-1590s, perhaps for an important wedding. The play was published as a quarto in 1600. The main plot has no obvious sources, but sources for the Pyramus and Thisbe play-within-a-play include Ovid’s Metamorphoses.Shakespeare may also have drawn on Geoffrey Chaucer’sCanterbury Tales and Sir Thomas North’s English translation of Plutarch’s Lives, among other works.

Hartlepool – a brief history

As Roman power declined in the fifth century, Anglo-Saxons from the north of Europe began raiding the coast of Northern England. They soon became settlers and established a small Anglian kingdom known as Hartness (the promontory of Hart), which eventually became Northumbria.

The promontory or headland was distinguished from Hart by the addition of the word `pool', perhaps a reference to the protected bay close by the headland. The name Hartlepool is probably derived from words "heopru' – the place where harts (deer) drink. Heorot is Saxon for hart.

The monastery at Hartlepool was founded by St. Aidan in 640 on the original headland site. The monastery prospered and Aidan installed a nun, Hilda – to be Abbess and oversee the monks and nuns. Hilda became an outstanding principal and King Oswy of Northumbria entrusted his young daughter's education to her in 655.

The site of the old monastery is marked today by the beautiful abbey church bearing the abbess' name – St. Hilda. A twelfth century building, the church was begun at about the time a fleet of ships bound for the Crusades was being assembled in the harbour, and completed around 1240. It became the burial place of the De Brus family – Norman landowners who had acquired Hartlepool at the time of the Conquest in 1066.

The Brus' hold on Hartlepool began after the building of Durham Castle by William the Conqueror. They brought stable times for the town with Robert de Brus being the biggest landowner in the north east, becoming Lord of Hartness. It was during these times that the villages of the area were first mentioned in official records, having been omitted from the Domesday Book of 1086.

The town's first charter was received before 1185. Hartlepool's fortunes blossomed and the town gained a mayor, an annual two-week fair and a weekly market. After two hundred years the Brus connection with Hartlepool was severed when "Robert the Bruce' of national historical fame, and last Lord of Hartness, was crowned King of Scotland in 1306. Angered by this King Edward I confiscated his title to Hartlepool.

Savage Scots!

A particularly savage Scots sea-borne assault took place in 1315 when the townspeople took to the sea with their goods and possessions until the marauders left. After this attack the port began to build fortifications with defensive walls constructed around the Headland. The impressive Sandwell Gate, which can still be seen has walls over eight feet thick.

Three hundred years later the Scots returned to the town. During the English Civil War, Scottish troops in alliance with the Parliamentarians, having captured Newcastle, attacked Hartlepool. The town surrendered and the Scots garrison occupied and repaired the crumbling defences, including the walls, to repel the Royalists.

Apart from defending the town against pirates, the occupying forces drained resources and the end of the war saw Hartlepool's fortunes at a low ebb. The local coastal fleet was reduced to just two vessels and by the beginning of the eighteenth century further decay had set in. The pier and walls were again crumbling, as was St. Hilda's church.
Hartlepool established gun emplacements and defences in 1795 to repel a possible French invasion. Later the Crimean War revived the idea of protection from seaborne attack and two batteries were built close together, the lighthouse battery in 1855 and the Heugh battery in 1859.

The Poems

William Shakespeare is best known today for his plays, but in his time poetry was far more important to any writer’s literary reputation. Tradition has it that Shakespeare wrote his two long poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece,during a period of forced unemployment in 1592–94, when an outbreak of the plague closed London’s theaters. The poems were published, respectively, in 1593 and 1594.

Shakespeare’s famous sonnets and two other fairly lengthy poems, The Phoenix and the Turtle and A Lover’s Complaint,are also thought to date from early in his career. They were published some years later, perhaps without his permission. Still more of Shakespeare’s poems and songs can be found within the plays themselves.

Like his plays, Shakespeare’s poems are full of passages that remain embedded in our popular culture. Sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”) is a fixture of wedding ceremonies, and Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”), Sonnet 29 (“When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”), and Sonnet 73 (“That time of year thou mayst in me behold”)—to name only a few—are known and quoted in the same way that famous lines and passages are quoted from Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet or Macbeth.

The Winter's Tale

The Winter's Tale, one of Shakespeare's very late plays, puts onstage a story so filled with improbabilities that the play occasionally seems amused at its own audacity. Near the story's end, for example, as incredible details accumulate, one character says "This news which is called true is so like an old tale that the verity [i.e., the truth] of it is in strong suspicion"; he has just exclaimed "Such a deal of wonder is broken out within this hour that ballad makers [the tabloid writers of Shakespeare's day] cannot be able to express it." As the "old tale" spins to its remarkable conclusion, another character tells us that what we are about to see, "Were it but told you, should be hooted at / Like an old tale."

The sense of the incredible and the wonderful seems built into the design of the play, as the play's title indicates. And the play's dialogue forces upon us an awareness of the title's significance. "Pray you sit by us / And tell 's a tale," Queen Hermione says early in the play to her young son Mamillius, who replies, "A sad tale's best for winter. I have one / Of sprites and goblins." The tale that the play tells, like that promised by Mamillius, is indeed of "sprites and goblins"—of ferocious and murderous passions, of man-eating bears, of princes and princesses in disguise, of death by drowning and by grief, of Greek oracles, of betrayal, and of unexpected joy. And the play draws much of its power from its heavy dependence on Greek myths of loss and of transformation.

Yet the story the play tells is at the same time solidly grounded in the everyday, while the play itself is closely tied to Shakespeare's earlier, more straightforward, tragedies and comedies. The monstrous jealousy that descends upon Leontes, for example, is mythlike in its resemblance to the madness sent by the gods to punish Hercules in classical drama, but it seems not unfamiliar as an emotional state that can threaten anyone who loves someone else and who is thus vulnerable to loss and betrayal. Leontes' actions are so extreme that one at first discounts them as rather un-Shakespearean, yet his story is recognizably a retelling of Othello's (with the Iago-figure here incorporated into the hero's own psyche), as well as being a retelling of the Claudio-Hero plot in Much Ado About Nothing.

A "winter's tale" is a story to be told or read in front of a fire on a long winter's night. Paradoxically, this Winter's Tale is ideally seen rather than read. Its sudden shift from tragedy to comedy, its playing with disguise, its startling exits and transformations seem addressed to theater audiences, not readers. But the imagination can do much to transform words into living characters and stage directions into vivid action, and thus to turn this play that is quintessentially for the stage back into a tale of wonder, a tale "of sprites and goblins."

Shakespeare is thought to have written The Winter’s Tale in 1609–11; it was performed at the Globe in May 1611 and at court in November of the same year. Its first known publication is in the 1623 First Folio. His chief source for the play was Robert Greene’s Pandosto, or the Triumph of Time.

Much Ado About Nothing

Much Ado About Nothing is one of Shakespeare’s more popular comedies, with a long history of success on the stage. Much of its appeal lies in its two stories of romantic love with their quite different journeys to comedy's happy ending. Hero and Claudio fall in love almost at first sight; their union has the blessing of the older generation (in the persons of Hero's father, Leonato, and Claudio’s prince, Don Pedro). All should be well. But from the outside comes the virulent force of Don John, who acts with the kind of malice that strikes out at whatever promises to make someone else happy. For Hero and Claudio to find happiness, they must go beyond Don John’s treachery, Claudio's own weak jealousy, Don Pedro's touchy sense of his own honor, and Leonato’'s too credulous paternal fury. It takes a second (unlikely) outside force in the guise of the bumbling, officious Dogberry to offer any hope of bringing Hero's truth to light.

The story of Beatrice and Benedick is quite other. They are kept apart not by a vicious outsider but by their pride in their own brilliance and by their mutual antagonism and distrust. Both express aversion to marriage; each finds particular pleasure in attacking the other. To outsiders, they seem an ideal pair. So the outsiders decide to play Cupid.

Over the centuries the Beatrice-Benedick plot has most captivated audiences and readers. King Charles I, in his copy of Shakespeare's plays, crossed out the play's title and renamed it “Beatrice and Benedick," and a prefatory poem in a 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets says, "Let butBeatrice / And Benedick be seene, lo, in a trice / The Cockpit, Galleries, Boxes all are full." And Berlioz's opera version ofMuch Ado is named Béatrice et Bénédict. It is generally agreed that Beatrice and Benedick are the model for the witty lovers in comic drama of later centuries; and it can be argued that they led as well to Jane Austen’s Elizabeth and Darcy inPride and Prejudice and to Scarlett and Rhett in Gone with the Wind.

It is, however, the conjunction of the Beatrice and Benedick story with the story of Hero and Claudio that makes Much Adoso rich and rewarding a play. Beatrice and Benedick, faced with humiliating descriptions of what they had considered their most prized character traits, learn to “suffer love” and to "eat their meat without grudging." Simultaneously, Claudio and Hero are forced into an experience that acquaints them first with life’s darkness (with treachery, betrayal, vicious jealousy, public shaming, and abandonment) and then with quite unexpected joy (with the recovery of the irrevocably lost, with discovery at the unlikely hands of the play's “shallow fools"). It can be argued that, while the play calls itself "Much Ado about Nothing,” its stories are actually much ado about life at its most important.

Much Ado About Nothing was printed as a quarto in 1600, and was probably written in 1598–99. In writing the play, Shakespeare relied upon many sources, including Ariosto'sOrlando Furioso and Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene.

Othello

In Othello, Shakespeare creates a powerful drama of a marriage that begins with fascination (between the exotic Moor Othello and the Venetian lady Desdemona), with elopement, and with intense mutual devotion and that ends precipitately with jealous rage and violent deaths. He sets this story in the romantic world of the Mediterranean, moving the action from Venice to the island of Cyprus and giving it an even more exotic coloring with stories of Othello's African past.

Shakespeare builds so many differences into his hero and heroine—differences of race, of age, of cultural background—that one should not, perhaps, be surprised that the marriage ends disastrously. But most people who see or read the play feel that the love that the play presents between Othello and Desdemona is so strong that it would have overcome all these differences were it not for the words and actions of Othello's standard-bearer, Iago, who hates Othello and sets out to destroy him by destroying his love for Desdemona.

As Othello succumbs to Iago's insinuations that Desdemona is unfaithful, fascination—which dominates the early acts of the play—turns to horror, especially for the audience. We are confronted by spectacles of a generous and trusting Othello in the grip of Iago's schemes; of an innocent Desdemona, who has given herself up entirely to her love for Othello only to be subjected to his horrifying verbal and physical assaults, the outcome of Othello's mistaken convictions about her faithlessness.

At this point in our civilization the play's fascination and its horror may be greater than ever before because we have been made so very sensitive to the issues of race, class, and gender that are woven into the texture of Othello. Desdemona is white, Othello black. Their inter-racial marriage is a source of a stream of slurs from Iago that runs throughout the play. Class is emphasized when Iago is presented as someone bitterly resentful of his social inferiority (surely a factor in his initial failure to be named Othello's second-in-command) and so knowledgeable about the workings of prejudice and self-doubt that he can easily twist others' feelings and actions to serve his own mysterious ends. The issue of gender is especially noticeable in the final scenes of the play—with the attacks on Bianca, Emilia, and Desdemona—which are vivid reminders of how terrible the power traditionally exerted by men over women can be.

Othello was performed at court in 1604 and scholars believe Shakespeare wrote it that year or the year before. The first known publication of the play was as a quarto in 1622, several years after Shakespeare’s death. A somewhat fuller text was included in the Folio of 1623. Shakespeare drew on various works in writing Othello, chief among them Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi.

Pericles

Pericles tells the story of a prince who, as a young man in search of a wife, finds a gorgeous princess; he risks his life to win her, but discovers that she is in an incestuous relationship with her father; the discovery not only disgusts him but also puts him in mortal danger from her father, and he flees. This is only the beginning of Pericles’ travails. After many adventures, including a near-fatal shipwreck, he meets another princess with whom he falls in love; this time the love leads to marriage. He and his pregnant wife set out for his kingdom, but in a tempest at sea his wife dies in giving birth to their daughter. The series of adventures continues, following the narrative pattern of “and then…and then…and then…” through one disaster after another until the daughter, now grown up, pulls her grief-stricken father out of the depths of his despair and the play moves toward its gloriously happy ending.

This play, patterned as a sequence of adventures and misadventures, is clearly not typical of Shakespearean drama, and the opening lines of the play prepare us for its strangeness. A speaker, using archaic language, introduces himself as the medieval poet John Gower come back from the grave to tell us a story from long ago, one recited over the centuries and read by many a lord and lady. And, indeed, this reincarnated Gower does proceed to tell us much of the tale, taking our imaginations from one spot to another in the eastern Mediterranean, introducing scenes of dialogue and action, pronouncing judgment on characters good and bad, and sometimes filling in extensive gaps in the story.

Woven into and around Gower’s narration are dumb shows (scenes of action without speech) and spectacular dramatized scenes—scenes of starving kings and citizens, of shipwrecks and storms at sea, of courtly banquets and martial dancing, of brothel life and supernatural visions—but it is Gower who holds the story together and guides us through time and space. The play’s structure, then, is like a narrative which periodically breaks into dramatic life.

Such an unusual way of shaping a drama is not only fascinating but also fitting, since Pericles tells the kind of romance tale that one associates more with “once-upon-a-time” storytelling than with theater. The play’s story is a version of one of several ancient popular tales about a hero who, after great trials and long journeys, successfully establishes a family, only to lose both wife and children; time then passes, his fortunes finally change, and, in a near-miraculous fashion, he recovers both the children and the wife.

That Shakespeare had been interested in this kind of tale from the very beginning of his career is shown in the frame story of family separation and reunion that surrounds the one-day action of the very early The Comedy of Errors, and we find versions of this same romance plot in Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale, and Cymbeline as well. What sets Periclesapart from these other romance-based plays is its openly narrative structure and the deliberately archaic verse in which Gower-as-Chorus speaks.

Because Pericles is so unusual in its structure, because it was not printed in the Folio of 1623, and because much of the text in which it survives is so problematic, this play remains on the periphery of Shakespeare’s work, with some scholars in the past arguing that it is not by Shakespeare, and scholars today insisting that another playwright wrote much of it.

Yet Pericles shares multiple features with many of Shakespeare’s plays, it tells the kind of story that Shakespeare turned to often in his career, and it presents the story in a highly experimental manner, a characteristic of the plays that, like Pericles, Shakespeare wrote late in his career. Whatever the scholarly doubts about the authorship of the play, a good production shows that it has the power and the strong emotional effect that one associates most of all with Shakespeare.