Hi! Thanks for visiting my blog!

My blog is called ‘Infinite Ocean’ because–apart from my dialectical monist philosophy, which I hope can help people heal from alienation, C-PTSD and the other effects of narcissistic and emotional abuse–I have a (potentially) infinite number of subjects to write about. I have eclectic interests, so I write on a variety of subjects. Here is a brief explanation of all that I do.

Now, Dear Reader, beware: while I write a lot about such topics as narcissistic abuse, I want to emphasize that I am no expert. I have no formal training in psychiatry or psychology whatsoever; I merely dabble in psychoanalysis, and even that comes only from reading a lot–I’ve never been trained in that field. I say this to prevent any misunderstandings about the efficacy of what I have to say in an attempt to help people heal from psychological trauma; indeed, I myself am healing, and so my writing is just my personal journey, my attempt to heal myself. So feel free to accept or reject whatever I write about here in terms of its worth as advice.

One of the annoyances of doing research is how difficult it is to find appropriate source material from a Google search. Sometimes, the sources I give links to that back up my arguments are passages that are, unfortunately, hard to find within a sea of text. What can I say? I try my best with what little I have; so please, if you choose to read what I write, take it with a generous dose of salt, and if you have serious issues of psychological trauma, seek a qualified expert. My scribblings are no substitute: they’re just me pouring out my feelings, and if they–for what they’re worth–can give you validation or inspiration of some kind, then they’ve done what I meant for them to do, no more.

In addition to the above, I write about anarchism, socialism, libertarian-leaning Marxism, and psychoanalysis, as well as writing literary and film analyses (again, with the same lacunae of authority as there are in my writings on narcissistic abuse). I also write fiction–horror and erotic horror, mostly. Here are links to some of my short stories, as well as to works-in-progress. Here are some poems I’ve written.

Then, there are a few novels I’ve written and self-published on Amazon. (If you’re a sufferer of complex trauma and find horror triggering, I’ll more than understand if you want to skip past the next few paragraphs.)

My Kindle e-book, Sweet, is about a woman who has a disturbing habit: she likes to have men get her pregnant, then a few months after the baby is born, she kills it, cooks it, and eats it. Her latest lover wants to be involved with their baby’s life–how will he stop the mother from ending its life?

…and here are links to my other two Kindle e-books, Vamps, and Wolfgang.

Vamps is a vampire erotic horror novel, about three groups of vampiress strippers/prostitutes who lure lustful men in, then suck…their blood. Vampire hunters, however, are out to get them, and have been exposing them to the lethal sunlight. Someone is helping the hunters find the vamps…is it one of the vamps?

Wolfgang is about a German billionaire who happens to be a werewolf. Racked with guilt over his killings (particularly those of his own parents), he has a young prostitute whip and beat him, in sort of an S & M style, in an attempt to assuage his guilt. She has her own agenda (a lycanthrope fetish!), though, as does his butler (to use the billionaire’s money in ways the butler deems fit). A love triangle develops between the three: who will get control of the money, which two will remain lovers, and who will be the next werewolf?

My next erotic horror novel, Creeps, is a work-in-progress as of the writing of this update. It’s about a prostitution ring that uses small tech put inside worm-like ‘creeps’ that slither into the body, so the tech can take control of the bodies of the people forced into “consenting” prostitution. Two people, a young man and his older sister, discover that a woman friend of theirs is trapped in one of the legalized brothels, and they have to figure out a way to get her out of there. If the mafia ring (protected by a corrupt government) catches the woman’s two friends, though, creeps may be used on them to keep them quiet…permanently.

Anyway, I hope you have fun looking around at all of the different topics I’ve been writing about, and I hope you find some that interest you enough to make you want to follow me. Cheers!

Analysis of ‘Othello’

Othello, the Moor of Venice, is a tragedy Shakespeare is believed to have written in about 1603. It is based on the Cinthio short story Un Capitano Moro (‘A Moorish Captain’), and it is one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, dealing with such themes as jealousy, envy, undeserved reputations, gossip, and the issue of racial prejudice.

On this last issue, it is necessary to examine the unclear racial background of Othello the Moor. He is referred to as, and calls himself, “black” several times in the play. What is meant by black is open to interpretation. Is he meant to be a sub-Saharan African, or a swarthy, dark-complexioned north African? Both interpretations are possible, based on the vague way the people of Renaissance England used the word black to describe people. One possible piece of evidence to suggest black, and not merely swarthy, is Roderigo’s pejorative description of Othello (in Act One, Scene i) as “the thick-lips,” but this is far from conclusive.

However Shakespeare meant the Moor to be, he was historically portrayed by white actors in blackface. Some notable exceptions to this include the first black actor to play Othello, Ira Aldridge, in 1833; later, there was Paul Robeson’s Othello, with Uta Hagen as Desdemona in the hit Broadway run in 1943. This use of blackface on white actors for the Othello role was finally starting to be faded out by the 1970s and 1980s: one of the last of these notable conservative productions being the BBC TV one with Anthony Hopkins in the title role. Ever since then, black actors have usually been used; one noteworthy exception to this, however, was an inverted 1997 production with Patrick Stewart as Othello without blackface, and with a black cast playing everyone else.

Here are some famous quotes:

1. I am not what I am. –Iago, Act One, scene i, line 66

2. Even now, now, very now, an old black ram /Is tupping your white ewe. –Iago, Act One, scene i, lines 89-90

3. Your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs. –Iago, I, i, 117-118

4. Most potent, grave, and reverend signiors,
My very noble and approved good masters,
That I have ta’en away this old man’s daughter,
It is most true; true, I have married her:
The very head and front of my offending
Hath this extent, no more. Rude am I in my speech,
And little bless’d with the soft phrase of peace:
For since these arms of mine had seven years’ pith,
Till now some nine moons wasted, they have used
Their dearest action in the tented field,
And little of this great world can I speak,
More than pertains to feats of broil and battle,
And therefore little shall I grace my cause
In speaking for myself. Yet, by your gracious patience,
I will a round unvarnish’d tale deliver
Of my whole course of love; what drugs, what charms,
What conjuration and what mighty magic,
For such proceeding I am charged withal,
I won his daughter. –Othello, I, iii, 76-94

5. Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see:
She has deceived her father, and may thee. –Brabantio, I, iii, 292-293

6. Thus do I ever make my fool my purse:/For I mine own gain’d knowledge should profane,/If I would time expend with such a snipe./But for my sport and profit. I hate the Moor:/And it is thought abroad, that ‘twixt my sheets/He has done my office: I know not if’t be true;/But I, for mere suspicion in that kind,/Will do as if for surety. He holds me well;/The better shall my purpose work on him./Cassio’s a proper man: let me see now:/To get his place and to plume up my will/In double knavery–How, how? Let’s see:–/After some time, to abuse Othello’s ear/That he is too familiar with his wife./He hath a person and a smooth dispose/To be suspected, framed to make women false./The Moor is of a free and open nature,/That thinks men honest that but seem to be so,/And will as tenderly be led by the nose/As asses are./I have’t. It is engender’d. Hell and night/Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light. –Iago, I, iii, 377-398

7. And what’s he then that says I play the villain?/When this advice is free I give and honest,/Probal to thinking and indeed the course/To win the Moor again? For ’tis most easy/The inclining Desdemona to subdue/In any honest suit: she’s framed as fruitful/As the free elements. And then for her/To win the Moor–were’t to renounce his baptism,/All seals and symbols of redeemed sin,/His soul is so enfetter’d to her love,/That she may make, unmake, do what she list,/Even as her appetite shall play the god/With his weak function. How am I then a villain/To counsel Cassio to this parallel course,/Directly to his good? Divinity of hell!/When devils will the blackest sins put on,/They do suggest at first with heavenly shows,/As I do now: for whiles this honest fool/Plies Desdemona to repair his fortunes/And she for him pleads strongly to the Moor,/I’ll pour this pestilence into his ear,/That she repeals him for her body’s lust;/And by how much she strives to do him good,/She shall undo her credit with the Moor./So will I turn her virtue into pitch,/And out of her own goodness make the net/That shall enmesh them all. –Iago, II, iii, 325-351

8. Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul,/But I do love thee! and when I love thee not,/Chaos is come again. –Othello, III, iii, 91-93

9. O! Beware, my lord, of jealousy;/It is the green-ey’d monster which doth mock/The meat it feeds on. –Iago, III, iii, 169-171

10. It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,–/Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!–/It is the cause. Yet I’ll not shed her blood;/Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,/And smooth as monumental alabaster./Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men./Put out the light, and then put out the light:/If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,/I can again thy former light restore,/Should I repent me: but once put out thy light,/Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature,/I know not where is that Promethean heat/That can thy light relume. When I have pluck’d the rose,/I cannot give it vital growth again./It must needs wither: I’ll smell it on the tree. –Othello, V, ii, 1-15

11. Soft you; a word or two before you go./ I have done the state some service, and they know’t./No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,/When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,/Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,/Nor set down aught in malice: then must you speak/Of one that loved not wisely but too well;/Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought/Perplex’d in the extreme; of one whose hand,/Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away/Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,/Albeit unused to the melting mood,/Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees/Their medicinal gum. Set you down this;/And say besides, that in Aleppo once,/Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk/Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,/I took by the throat the circumcised dog,/And smote him, thus. –Othello, V, ii, 341-359

12. I kissed thee ere I killed thee, no way but this,/Killing myself, to die upon a kiss. –Othello, V, ii, 361-362

Particularly obvious themes in Othello are those of jealousy and envy, but it is useful to distinguish between these two similar words. Jealousy is usually used to describe someone who is afraid of losing a lover to a rival, whereas envy involves unhappiness or resentment over already not having what another has, and wanting to destroy the envied person. Envy comes from the Latin invidia, which refers to looking at people with an evil eye, in other words, with a feeling of malice and hatred towards the envied one. Iago, of course, perfectly personifies envy in Othello.

Iago envies Michael Cassio for getting the promotion to lieutenant that Iago feels he deserved. Instead, Iago, a much more experienced soldier than Cassio, must remain merely Othello’s ensign (or ‘ancient,’ as he is called in the play). Because Othello judged Cassio the better man for the promotion, the Moor must suffer; since Cassio got the promotion Iago should have been given, Cassio must suffer.

Though Othello suffers racial prejudice as a dark-complexioned Moor in Venice and Cyprus, both places dominated by whites, he is valiant, noble, and well-spoken; he only becomes violent when manipulated by Iago, the real beast of the story. And for all of Iago’s reputation for being honest and good, he gives all the indications of his own bestial nature, right from his first appearance in the play. Indeed, his first word is a blasphemy: “‘Sblood,” he says to Roderigo. Soon afterwards in the same scene, he says, “Zounds”, and he speaks crudely of Othello’s seduction of Desdemona (Quotes #2 and 3 above). Also, he constantly uses the imagery of beasts in his choice of words: ram, ewe, Barbary horse, baboon, cats, puppies, snipe, asses, “the green-ey’d monster,” etc. All these word choices of his set the tone of his evil character: wild, and immoral.

Othello’s jealousy over Desdemona’s supposed affair with Cassio isn’t the only instance of jealousy in the play. Roderigo is jealous of Othello’s marriage to her, hoping foolishly that she will get bored with the Moor (according to the lie Iago tells Roderigo), and then the buffoonish suitor will supposedly get his chance to have her.

Iago also grapples with jealousy when he has heard a rumour that Othello has slept with his wife, Emilia (see Quote #6). This, given during a soliloquy, seems to be the greater reason for Iago to want revenge. “And nothing can or shall content my soul/Till I am evened with him, wife for wife.” (II, i, 223-224)

Apart from these jealousies, there is also Bianca’s jealousy when she finds Desdemona’s handkerchief, “spotted with strawberries” (as Iago has earlier described it) among Cassio’s things, and assumes her lover has been seeing another woman. Significantly, Othello has been secretly watching this altercation, and is himself even more inflamed with jealousy, assuming Cassio’s rumoured affair with his wife has been incontrovertibly proven.

Many reputations in this play are unjustly acquired. Iago, a most heinous liar throughout the play, is honoured as “honest Iago” right up to Emilia’s accusation of him lying to Othello. Iago feels Cassio doesn’t deserve the good name associated with being lieutenant, and easily engineers proof that, with a few cups of wine, Cassio can demonstrate his unworthiness of the rank. Othello has a reputation for being unshakeable in the face of war and death, yet the mere suggestion that his wife could be having an affair makes him fall so to pieces that he strikes her in public, in front of Lodovico, her cousin!

Ultimately, the most undeserved of reputations is that of Desdemona as “whore”. So guiltless is she that not only can’t she even say the word “whore” without difficulty, but she can’t even imagine any other married woman being unfaithful to her husband, as she says to Emilia on the night she is to be murdered. Indeed, she keeps a perfectly Christian attitude right to the end, expressing her love and loyalty to the Moor by saying, “Commend me to my kind lord: O, farewell!” Then she dies, after having been smothered by a pillow held in Othello’s hands.

It is her very sweetness that makes her unjust murder so especially horrific.

Analysis of ‘The Merchant of Venice’

The Merchant of Venice is a tragi-comedy probably written between 1596 and 1598. It is one of the ‘problem plays’, as it’s difficult to classify this play in either the tragedy or comedy category. A controversial play, it deals with religious intolerance towards the Jewish faith, and thus, by extension, with antisemitism. It is an open question whether the play openly promotes bigotry against Jews, or merely comments on such bigotry. Both positions will be discussed below.

Here are some famous quotes:

1. “The devil can cite scripture for his purpose.” –Antonio, Act I, scene ii, line 93

2. “I am glad ’tis night, you do not look on me,/For I am much asham’d of my exchange;/But love is blind, and lovers cannot see/The pretty follies that themselves commit,/For, if they could, Cupid himself would blush/To see me thus transformed to a boy.” –Jessica, Act II, scene vi, lines 34-39

3. “All that glisters is not gold.” –Prince of Morocco, Act II, scene vii, line 65

4. “To bait fish withal. If it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgrac’d me and hind’red me half a million; laugh’d at my losses, mock’d at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies. And what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions, fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute; and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.” –Shylock, Act III, scene i, lines 45-62

5. “The quality of mercy is not strain’d;/It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:/It blesseth him that gives and him that takes./’Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes/The throned monarch better than his crown;/His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,/The attribute to awe and majesty,/Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;/But mercy is above this sceptred sway,/It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,/It is an attribute to God himself;/And earthly power doth then show likest God’s/When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,/Though justice be thy plea, consider this–/That in the course of justice none of us/Should see salvation; we do pray for mercy,/And that same prayer doth teach us all to render/The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much/To mitigate the justice of thy plea,/Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice/Must needs give sentence ‘gainst the merchant there.” –Portia (as Balthazar), Act IV, scene 1, lines 179-200

6. “This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood;/The words expressly are ‘a pound of flesh’./Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh;/But, in the cutting it, if thou dost shed/One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods/Are, by the laws of Venice, confiscate/Unto the state of Venice.” –Portia (as Balthazar), Act IV, scene i, lines 301-307

7. “How far that little candle throws his beams!/So shines a good deed in a naughty world.” –Portia, Act V, scene i, lines 90-91

One important theme in The Merchant of Venice is outer appearance versus inner reality. This is best and most easily seen in the matter of the three caskets. The gold and silver caskets may be pleasing to the eye, but what’s inside them is utter ruin for the suitors who are superficial enough to choose them. Bassanio, however, can see past the dull-looking lead casket, whose message threatens rather than promises; accordingly, he finds Portia’s picture in it, and may marry her.

Another example of this theme is how Lorenzo, in his love for Jessica, can see past her Jewish upbringing, so hateful to Christian bigots, to see the lovely girl she is inside. Similarly, when she’s disguised as a boy during her eloping with Lorenzo, she feels foolish, “But love is blind,…” (See Quote 2)

Furthermore, in Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech (see Quote 4), he shows us how, underneath the surface differences between Christian and Jew, members of both traditions are equally human, reacting the same way to stimuli of pleasure or pain, with the Christian just as capable of vindictiveness as the Jew.

Indeed, the ‘mercy’ shown Shylock by the Christians is hardly mercy at all: he’s allowed to live, but he’s financially and spiritually ruined, giving up his money and property to the state and to Antonio, with Antonio’s half reserved for Shylock’s hated Christian son-in-law and disloyal daughter after Shylock dies. To top his humiliation off, he’s forced to convert to Christianity. Gratiano cruelly gloats as Shylock leaves the courtroom in near despair.

During that same courtroom scene, the Duke of Venice is advised to see beyond the physical youth of ‘Balthazar’ and see the age of ‘his’ wisdom. Of course, neither he nor the husbands of Portia and Nerissa can see beyond the ladies’ disguises to realize who the ‘lawyer’ and ‘his clerk’ really are.

Materialism is a constant preoccupation in this play. Bassanio spends money as fast as he borrows it, and needs it of Antonio to marry the wealthy Portia (Is this the real reason he loves her?). Antonio, the merchant of the play’s title, waits for his ships to return from such distant places as Mexico to get his money, and he’s delighted that they’ve safely returned at the play’s end.

Usurer Shylock hates Antonio not only because he’s a Christian bigot against Jews, but because he lends money without interest, hurting Shylock’s business by lessening his profits. Worse, his daughter Jessica steals from him when she elopes with Lorenzo.

The princes of Morocco and Aragon show their materialism when they choose the gold and silver caskets, only then to lose all hope of having Portia on not choosing the right casket. The Moroccan prince thus bitterly learns, “All that glisters [i.e., glistens, glitters] is not gold.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Shylock is one of the least materialistic characters in the play, going against the Jewish stereotype at a time when one would assume playwrights were free to exploit prejudicial attitudes without fear of politically correct censure. Shylock is angry with Antonio for lending out money gratis because this generosity hurts his very livelihood, not merely his ability to get rich. (We must remember how pre-Enlightenment Jews in Europe were hardly allowed any livelihood other than that of usurer, a hated occupation.)

Jessica’s marriage to Christian Lorenzo upsets Shylock more than her stealing of his ducats; and a turquoise ring of his wife’s, also stolen by Jessica, has more sentimental than monetary value for Shylock.

Indeed, when offered, in the courtroom, twice the amount Antonio owes him, Shylock doesn’t accept it, preferring revenge to money. The useless, valueless pound of flesh he wants is a possession wanted from malice, not materialism. This malice is something he returns to the Christians for persecuting him with the same spite.

This brings us to the next theme: religious bigotry. Shylock’s dislike of Christians is as apparent as their intolerance of Jews, which is not to say that Christians have actually suffered as much from Jewish bigotry as vice versa, but just that Shakespeare has thoroughly explored this theme from both points of view.

Before the story has begun, Antonio spat on Shylock; when he confronts Antonio with this abusiveness, Antonio proudly says he’d do it again. When Shylock says he’ll take a pound of Antonio’s flesh instead of interest if he defaults on the loan, Antonio–assuming confidently that he’ll easily pay Shylock back in time–calls him a “gentle Jew”, then imagines “This Hebrew will turn Christian: he grows kind.” Apparently, Jews can’t be kind–only Christians can.

Jessica can tolerate neither her own Jewishness, nor her father’s; thus, she eagerly wishes to leave him, marry Lorenzo, and convert to Christianity. Often in the play, Christians use the word Jew as if it were synonymous with devil. In fact, the explicit comparison of Shylock, or Jews in general, to devils is frequently made (see Quote 1 above, referring to Shylock’s ‘devilish’ interpretation of the Genesis story of Jacob’s dealing with Laban over sheep).

Two more examples of such antisemitism come from the mouth of Solanio in Act III, scene i: “Let me say amen betimes, lest the devil cross my prayer, for here he comes in the likeness of a Jew.” (lines 18-19); then, shortly after Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech, when Shylock’s friend Tubal (another Jew) appears, Solanio says, “Here comes another of the tribe; a third cannot be match’d, unless the devil himself turn Jew.” (lines 66-67)

Because Shylock has suffered so much from Christian hate, he understandably returns their bigotry to them. He says, of Antonio and Bassanio, “I am not bid for love; they flatter me;/But yet I’ll go in hate, to feed upon/The prodigal Christian.” (Act II, scene v, lines 13-15)

Later in the same scene, he says to Jessica, “Lock up my doors, and when you hear the drum,/And the vile squealing of the wry-neck’d fife,/Clamber not you up to the casements then,/Nor thrust your head into the public street/To gaze on Christian fools with varnish’d faces;/But stop my house’s ears–I mean my casements;/Let not the sound of shallow fopp’ry enter/My sober house. By Jacob’s staff, I swear/I have no mind of feasting forth to-night:/But I will go.” (lines 28-37)

In the courtroom scene, when Bassanio and Gratiano show the limits of their love for their wives, in their willingness to sacrifice them to save Antonio, Shylock bitterly notes, “These be the Christian husbands! I have a daughter–/Would any of the stock of Barrabas/Had been her husband, rather than a Christian!” (Act IV, scene i, lines 290-292)

Another theme in The Merchant of Venice is the breaking and keeping of oaths. Portia has sworn an oath to obey her late father’s wish to abide by the conditions he’s stipulated in her suitors’ choosing of the three caskets. If a suitor chooses silver or gold, she cannot marry him even if she wishes to. If a man chooses lead, she must marry him, even if she doesn’t love him. She keeps her oath, and is lucky to get Bassanio for a husband.

Similarly, the suitors swear an oath: if they choose of the wrong caskets, they are forbidden to marry Portia or any other woman, and mustn’t reveal what’s in the casket they’ve chosen.

The document giving Shylock legal permission to a pound of Antonio’s flesh, if he defaults, is essentially a legal oath. Shylock says, “An oath, an oath! I have an oath in heaven./Shall I lay perjury upon my soul?/No, not for Venice.” (Act IV, scene i, lines 223-225) Thus, Antonio is legally bound to give Shylock that pound of flesh.

When Bassanio and Gratiano marry Portia and Nerissa, the women give the men rings, making them swear never to give the gifts away to anyone, under any circumstances. After Antonio’s trial, Bassanio and Gratiano feel indebted to ‘the lawyer Balthazar’ (Portia in disguise) and ‘his clerk’ (Nerissa in disguise); the disguised women morally bind the men to give them the rings as proof of their gratitude. This breaking of the original oath gives the women an excuse to be cross with the men–their revenge for Bassanio’s and Gratiano’s willingness to give their wives up to save Antonio.

With the breaking of oaths comes the choice to show mercy, or strictly and stone-heartedly adhere to law. Here we come to certain stereotypical assumptions made about the difference between Judaism and Christianity.

Christian traditionalists tend to assume, as do the Christians in The Merchant of Venice, that the Mosaic law is stern, rigid, and unforgiving to those who transgress it. Actually, Pharisaic law shows much leniency and mercy to those who study thoroughly all its nuances; but the average Elizabethan Christian would only have known the Jewish law as it’s more bluntly given in the Torah. Hence the misunderstanding.

In light of this, we can see how Shylock is portrayed as an unbending advocate of the law, while Antonio and all the Christians urge forgiveness of the default on the loan. Shylock asks ‘Balthazar’, “On what compulsion must I? Tell me that.” (Act IV, scene i, line 178) Then the ‘lawyer’ answers with the famous speech on the “quality of mercy”, assumed to be an exclusively Christian virtue, given through the blood of Christ on the Cross.

When Shylock has sharpened his knife and is ready to cut out his pound of flesh from Antonio’s vital organs, however, ‘Bathazar’ uses the rigidity of legal wording to stop the Jew. Shylock is not permitted one drop of blood, for this is never given in the legal document he and Antonio have signed. Nor does the document allow Shylock any more, or any less, than an exact pound of flesh.

Now that Shylock is finally cornered, the Christians use more of the Venetian law against him; for the punishment for a foreigner’s seeking of a Venetian man’s life is to forfeit the victimizer’s property, giving half to the victim, and half to the state. The victimizer’s life is now at the mercy of the Duke of Venice.

The Duke, in an act of seeming generosity, grants Shylock mercy before it is even begged for; but what mercy is it to be allowed to live when one has had everything taken away? Knowing this, Shylock himself would prefer death.

Christian ‘mercy’ is extended by allowing Shylock to keep the state’s half, and when Shylock dies, Antonio’s half would be given to Lorenzo and Jessica. This of course humiliates the father of an already disloyal, thieving daughter. The most humiliating condition of this ‘mercy’, however, is Shylock’s forced conversion to Christianity, all to the gleeful Schadenfreude of his enemies in the courtroom.

Knowing all that we do about this Christian ‘mercy’ versus the ‘Jewish’ nature of Shylock’s cruelty, we must now address a difficult question: is the play antisemitic, or is it merely an exploration of anti-Jewish hate? The answer perhaps depends on the attitude of the viewers of the play, as well as its producers.

In productions up to the early 19th century, Shylock was portrayed as a grotesque, even comical villain, the actor wearing a red wig and a hook nose. One can easily visualize the Christian audience booing him whenever he entered the stage. These obviously would have been antisemitic productions.

Sympathetic portrayals of Shylock, however, began with Edmund Kean in the early 19th century, and most famous portrayals of Shylock since then were sympathetic. (Some of the major exceptions to this sensitivity, of course, were the productions staged in Nazi Germany.)

Next, we must examine audience opinions of the play. Conservative Christians would have little sympathy for Shylock and all the bigotry he’s endured; they would regard his “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech as him justifying his blood-lust. They would also disregard his humiliation and losses and the end of the play as a just punishment for his violent attempt on Antonio’s life, and his forced conversion to Christianity would be seen as a joyous occasion, the winning of a Jew’s soul to Christ.

This conservative audience would also consider every antisemitic slur against Shylock as a statement of simple fact, whereas a sympathetic audience would consider the source of the bigoted remarks. Sympathizers with Shylock will regard the slurs as a defect of their speakers, not as an attitude Shakespeare was necessarily trying to promote.

Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech would thus be understood as a legitimate expression of his grievances against his Christian persecutors; and while his thirst for revenge is assuredly going too far, it is seen as the understandable act of a man tragically pushed over the edge, not just an example of his ‘wicked Jewishness’.

In today’s more tolerant world, that the sympathetic interpretation is preferred to the antisemitic one is so obvious as not to need elaboration; there is, however, an artistic as well as humane reason for preferring the former.

The antisemitic reading results in one-dimensional characterizations that are not borne out in Shakespeare’s text–Christians thus would be stupidly good and the Jews dully evil. The clean-cut happy ending of such an interpretation, with Jews converted to Christ, is also blandly simplistic.

The sympathetic reading, on the other hand, allows for a more complex, nuanced characterization that is evident in the text, with a subtler mix of good and evil in both Jew and Christian; this also accords with Shakespeare’s usual colourful development of his characters. Furthermore, the resulting tragicomic ending, where Antonio is saved, but Shylock is pitifully ruined, agrees with our more morally ambiguous sense of reality, and is thus more artistically satisfying.

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Analysis of ‘Hamlet’

Hamlet is a tragedy Shakespeare wrote between 1599 and 1602. A revenge play, it is his longest, lasting about four hours if performed uncut. It is also his most experimental, since its hero is a self-doubting thinker given to long-winded speeches, not a doer. In spite of how long it takes him finally to avenge his murdered father and kill his uncle, Hamlet has always been one of Shakespeare’s best-loved plays.

The play is profoundly philosophical, touching on such issues as existentialism; and the reason for Prince Hamlet’s inability to kill his uncle, the usurping King Claudius, is one of the great mysteries of literature, for which many theories have been proposed. Some of these, as well as one of my own, will be examined below.

Hamlet is a goldmine of famous quotes. Here are but a few:

1. “A little more than kin, and less than kind.” –Hamlet, Act I, Scene ii, line 65

2. “Frailty, thy name is woman!” –Hamlet, Act I, Scene ii, line 146

3. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” –Polonius, Act I, Scene iii, line 75

4. “This above all–to thine own self be true.” –Polonius, Act I, Scene iii, line 78

5. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” –Marcellus, Act I, Scene iv, line 90

6. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” –Hamlet, Act I, Scene v, lines 166-167

7. “The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,/That ever I was born to set it right!” –Hamlet, Act I, Scene v, lines 189-190

8. “…brevity is the soul of wit,…” –Polonius, Act II, Scene ii, line 90

9. “Words, words, words.” –Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii, line 191

10. “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.” –Polonius, Act II, Scene ii, lines 203-204

11. “…there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” –Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii, lines 249-250

12. “I have of late–but wherefore I know not–lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercises, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory. This most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, how moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither, though, by your smiling, you seem to say so.” –Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii, about lines 295-309

13. “O! what a rogue and peasant slave am I!/Is it not monstrous that this player here,/But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,/Could force his soul so to his own conceit/That from her working all his visage wann’d;/Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,/A broken voice, and his whole function suiting/With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!/For Hecuba!/What’s Hecuba to him or him to Hecuba,/That he should weep for her? What would he do,/Had he the motive and the cue for passion/That I have? He would drown the stage with tears,/And cleave the general ear with horrid speech;/Make mad the guilty, and appal the free,/Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed/The very faculties of eyes and ears./Yet I,/A dull and muddy-mettl’d rascal, peak,/Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,/And can say nothing; no, not for a king/Upon whose property and most dear life/A damn’d defeat was made. Am I a coward?/Who calls me villain, breaks my pate across,/Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face,/Tweaks me by the nose, gives me the lie i’ th’ throat/As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?/Ha!/’Swounds, I should take it; for it cannot be/But I am pigeon-liver’d and lack gall/To make oppression bitter, or ere this/I should ‘a fatted all the region kites/With this slave’s offal. Bloody, bawdy villain!/Remoreseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!/O, vengeance!/Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,/That I, the son of a dear father murder’d,/Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,/Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,/And fall a-cursing like a very drab,/A scullion! Fie upon’t! foh!/About, my brains. Hum–I have heard/That guilty creatures, sitting at a play,/Have by the very cunning of the scene/Been struck so to the soul that presently/They have proclaim’d their malefactions;/For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak/With most miraculous organ. I’ll have these players/Play something like the murder of my father/Before mine uncle. I’ll observe his looks;/I’ll tent him to the quick. I ‘a do blench,/I know my course. The spirit that I have seen/May be a devil; and the devil hath power/T’ assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps/Out of my weakness and my melancholy,/As he is very potent with such spirits,/Abuses me to damn me. I’ll have grounds/More relative than this. The play’s the thing/Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” –Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii, lines 543-601

14. “To be or not to be, that is the question:/Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer/The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,/Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,/And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep–/No more; and by a sleep to say we end/The heartache and the thousand natural shocks/That flesh is heir to. ‘Tis a consummation/Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;/To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub;/For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,/When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,/Must give us pause. There’s the respect/That makes calamity of so long life;/For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,/Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,/The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay,/The insolence of office, and the spurns/That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,/When he himself might his quietus make/With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear,/To grunt and sweat under a weary life,/But that the dread of something after death–/The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn/No traveller returns–puzzles the will,/And makes us rather bear those ills we have/Than fly to others that we know not of?/Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;/And thus the native hue of resolution/Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,/And enterprises of great pitch and moment,/With this regard, their currents turn awry/And lose the name of action.–Soft you now!/The fair Ophelia.–Nymph, in thy orisons/Be all my sins rememb’red.” –Hamlet, Act III, Scene i, lines 56-90

15. “Get thee to a nunnery.” –Hamlet, Act III, Scene i, 121

16. “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc’d it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise. I would have such a fellow whipp’d for o’erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod. Pray you avoid it.” –Hamlet, Act III, Scene ii, lines 1-14

17. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” –Gertrude, Act III, Scene ii, line 225

18. “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below./Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” –Claudius, Act III, Scene iii, lines 97-98

19. “Let it work./For ’tis the sport to have the engineer/Hoist with his own petard; and’t shall go hard/But I will delve one yard below their mines/And blow them at the moon.” –Hamlet, Act III, Scene iv, lines 205-209

20. “When sorrows come, they come not single spies,/But in battalions!” –Claudius, Act IV, Scene v, lines 75-76

21. “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio.” –Hamlet, Act V, Scene i, about lines 179-180

22. “Let Hercules himself do what he may./The cat will mew, and dog will have his day.” –Hamlet, Act V, Scene i, lines 285-286

23. “Not a whit, we defy augury: there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come–the readiness is all.” –Hamlet, Act V, Scene ii, about lines 211-216

24. “The rest is silence.” –Hamlet, Act V, Scene ii, line 350

25. “Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince,/And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” –Horatio, Act V, Scene ii, 351-352

There are so many themes in this great play as almost to overwhelm the analyst, so we will start by listing those that will be looked at here. They are the following: sons avenging fathers; death–in the forms of murder (including regicide) and suicide; madness (real and feigned); action vs. inaction; and the uselessness of words vs. the need for action.

Hamlet isn’t the only son avenging his father’s murder. So is Laertes, who zealously wishes to avenge the murder of his father, Polonius, at Hamlet’s rash hand. Elsewhere, young prince Fortinbras wishes to avenge his father by taking back for Norway all the territory that Old Hamlet took from Old Fortinbras (Old Hamlet also killed Old Fortinbras). Then there is Pyrrhus who, as recounted by the First Player in his “passionate speech”, avenged the murder of his father, Achilles, by killing King Priam during the sacking of Troy.

Death is an extensively explored theme in this play. One poignant example is when Hamlet holds Yorick’s skull and, with Horatio in the graveyard scene (see Quote 21), meditates on the dead jester’s life. It saddens Hamlet to contemplate how this jester, so dear and beloved to Hamlet when he was a child, is now reduced to nothing by death…and Hamlet is now actually holding Yorick’s skull in his hand!

Similarly, great men of history, like Alexander the Great, are now each reduced to a skull and bones, no better than a beggar. Also, it astonishes Hamlet that the First Clown (the gravedigger) can so coolly, and disrespectfully, pat with a spade the skulls of men who once may have been lawyers or other respectable men of society. Death makes us all equal.

Moving over to more particular forms of death, there is much murder, especially regicide, in Hamlet. Old Hamlet was the king of Denmark until his murder, before the play begins. Prince Hamlet must avenge him by killing Claudius, the prince’s uncle and usurping king. And by killing his uncle, Hamlet will be as guilty of regicide as Claudius is.

These aren’t the only regicides, though. Old Fortinbras was killed by Old Hamlet. Then there’s the First Player’s recounting of Pyrrhus’ killing of King Priam. Also, Polonius mentions portraying, when he was young, Julius Caesar in a play, killed by Brutus; now, though Caesar was a dictator rather than a king, his assassination is close enough to be at least a variation on regicide. It’s certainly no less a murder.

Other murders, accidental or deliberate, are those of Polonius, Gertrude, Laertes, and Hamlet himself.

From murder we move on to suicide, whether successfully (if accidentally) committed or merely contemplated. Ophelia drowns herself in a brook: at the very least, she, in her madness, fails to pull her head above water; at most, she deliberately drowns herself in her despair over losing Hamlet’s love (or so it seems to her), losing her father Polonius, and losing her sanity. The clownish gravediggers later debate, in a parody of legal language, whether or not she’s committed suicide, and therefore deserves a Christian burial.

Contemplations of suicide are done by Hamlet (“O that this too too solid flesh would melt,/Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!/Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d/His cannon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!”; see also Quote 14), and by Horatio at the end of the play, when he wishes to drink from the poisoned cup as he watches Hamlet dying.

From death we must move to the theme of madness. We’ve already briefly looked at Ophelia’s madness, she who sings bawdy songs and acts wildly after enduring (as she sees it) Hamlet’s madness, his ill-treatment of her, and his murdering of Polonius.

Then we have Hamlet’s madness. Presumably, he’s only faking it to distract everyone from his plotting to kill Claudius. Certainly he insists he’s only “mad in craft,” and, interesting first word here, “essentially…not in madness.”

Could he, however, really be mad? Hamlet himself wonders about that possibility from time to time (Raving abusively at poor Ophelia during his ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ rant in Act III, Scene i, he shouts, “Go to, I’ll no more on’t; it hath made me mad.”). He has, after all, seen a ghost, and in the pre-modern world of this play, when people were ignorant of modern psychiatry, seeing a ghost is pretty much tantamount to being possessed by an evil spirit, and therefore to going mad. To be sure, Horatio and Marcellus warn Hamlet not to go alone with the ghost of Old Hamlet, for fear of the prince going mad (Horatio warns Hamlet in Act I, Scene iv, “What if it [the ghost] tempt you toward the flood, my lord, […]/And there assume some…horrible form,/Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason/And draw you into madness? Think of it…”).

Next, we must examine the theme of action versus inaction. We all know of Hamlet’s inability to act, except at the end of the play, when he knows he’s dying from the scratch of a poisoned rapier. (We will leave discussion of this famous mystery until the end of the analysis.) Other examples of this theme, from one extreme to the other, and with several intermediate points along the continuum, are worth exploring first.

Fortinbras represents the extreme of action; his name literally means, ‘strong arm’. The only thing that keeps him from achieving his goal, reached at the very end of the play, is geography: the Norwegian prince must travel a great distance with his army to reconquer the Polish lands, then conquer Denmark and become its new king. He is, nonetheless, firmly resolute in going after what he wants.

Perhaps only slightly less resolute is Pyrrhus, who briefly hesitates before striking down King Priam with his sword. (So recounts the First Player: “So, as a painted tyrant, Pyrrhus stood/And, like a neutral to his will and matter,/Did nothing./[…] so, after Pyrrhus’ pause,/A roused vengeance sets him new a-work;/And never did the Cyclops’ hammers fall/On Mars’s armour, forg’d for proof eterne,/With less remorse than Pyrrhus’ bleeding sword/Now falls on Priam.”)

Next, we have Laertes, who, though wildly resolute in avenging his father, even to the point of traitorously threatening Claudius, nonetheless cools off somewhat as he and Claudius plot the killing of Hamlet in a duel. Certainly Claudius wonders about Laertes’ commitment to revenge. (In Act IV, Scene vii, the king says, “Not that I think you did not love your father;/But that I know love is begun by time,/And that I see, in passages of proof,/Time qualifies the spark and fire of it./There lives within the very flame of love/A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it;/And nothing is at a like goodness still;/For goodness, growing to a pleurisy,/Dies in his own too much. That we would do,/We should do when we would; for this ‘would’ changes,/And hath abatements and delays as many/As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents;/And then this ‘should’ is like a spendthrift’s sigh/That hurts by easing.”)

Perhaps the crowning theme of this play is the uselessness of words versus the need for action. Hamlet isn’t Shakespeare’s longest play for nothing. Indeed, it is overloaded with words and very slow-moving action (see Quote 9), not that this apparent lop-sidedness detracts from the play’s worth, of course; for the whole message of the play can be summed up in the old cliché, ‘action speaks louder than words’.

Reference is constantly made to any character’s effusive or bombastic use of language. For example, when Polonius tells Claudius and Gertrude what he believes to be the “very cause of Hamlet’s lunacy,” all he needs to say is that Hamlet has gone mad from Ophelia’s rejection of his love; instead, Polonius speaks in the most absurdly prolix manner, even hypocritically saying that being laconic is preferable to being loquacious (see Quote 8). Gertrude feels compelled to tell the chatterbox to use “More matter with less art.”

Earlier, he is similarly hypocritical with Laertes in advising his son to “Give everyone thy ear, but few thy voice.” Then there’s his disparaging of the First Player’s passionate speeches about Priam and Hecuba, his own interrupting words angering Hamlet (Polonius: “This is too long.” Hamlet snaps, “It shall to the barber’s, with your beard.”).

Another example of needlessly pompous language is towards the end of the play, when Osric tells Hamlet of Laertes’ challenge to a sword duel. (The foppish courtier says, “Sir, here is newly come to court Laertes; believe me, an absolute gentleman, full of most excellent differences, of very soft society and great showing. Indeed, to speak feelingly of him, he is the card or calendar of gentry, for you shall find in him the continent of what part a gentleman would see.”) Indeed, Hamlet and Horatio comment on what a pretentious fool Osric is, right to his face.

During the same scene, Hamlet tells Horatio of when he was on the boat to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He forged letters replacing the original order to kill him with one to kill Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; and he, for a change, made practical use of the grandiloquent writing style, overloaded with similes and metaphors, that is the convention used in such letters. (“I sat me down/Devis’d a new commission; wrote it fair./I once did hold it, as our statists do,/a baseness to write fair, and labour’d much/How to forget that learning; but, sir, now,/It did me yeoman’s service.” Hamlet goes on to describe the letter, quoting what he wrote thus: “An earnest conjuration from the King,/As England was his faithful tributary,/As love between them like the palm might flourish,/As peace should be her wheaten garland wear,/And stand a comma ‘tween their amities,/And many such like as-es of great charge.”)

Hamlet feels no prickings of conscience from sending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths, for, when Claudius–fearful of his royal person–tells the prince’s two false friends to take Hamlet to England, even though they perhaps don’t know they are to be taking Hamlet to be executed there, they are clearly on the corrupt king’s side. Indeed, they saturate Claudius with boot-licking words of how dependant all of Denmark is on the king’s safety. (Rosencrantz says, ” The single and peculiar life is bound/With all the strength and armour of the mind/To keep itself from noyance; but much more/That spirit upon whose weal depends and rests/The lives of many. The cease of majesty/Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw/What’s near it with it. It is a massy wheel,/Fix’d on the summit of the highest mount,/To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things/Are mortis’d and adjoin’d; which when it falls,/Each small annexment, petty consequence,/Attends the boist’rous ruin.”)

Now we must go to an exploration of how none of this useless garrulousness can replace much-needed action. When Hamlet is angry over his mother’s incestuous marriage to his uncle, he says, “break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.” Indeed, he must not speak: he must act, and we all know he can’t do that. He can’t even act on his contemplated suicide in the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy.

Hamlet isn’t the only one who cannot act, though: neither can Claudius, racked with guilt over having murdered his brother, and incapable of real repentance. For if he repents, he must give up everything–his crown, his queen, and his life. After being executed for murder and treason, he’d have his memory stained also as an incestuous adulterer. All he can do is insincerely pray for forgiveness: more useless words! (See quote 18.)

And what of Ophelia? Did she really actively commit suicide in falling into the brook, or did she merely passively allow herself to be submerged while she, in her madness, distractedly sang the words of her songs? The gravediggers debate whether or not she acted in her drowning, as we discussed above.

And finally, we must come to Hamlet’s own inaction…till the end of the play. He finally does act, but why wait till after so many deaths? He’s not afraid to kill: after all, he reverses the king’s order for his own execution in England so Rosencrantz and Guildenstern will be killed instead; he also, quite impulsively and thus contrary to his normal sense of caution, kills Polonius.

Indeed, where did this wanton killing of Polonius come from? He claims he thinks it’s the king behind the arras, but why would Claudius hide there, so soon after praying in his own room? Surely Hamlet knew it was probably someone other than the king. Most likely, conflicted Hamlet just lashed out and killed someone, out of a wish to have at least acted in some general sense.

Many theories have been proposed for Hamlet’s delayed revenge, and I will look at some of these, while showing their faults, before proposing my own explanation.

The first is a simple, practical explanation: delaying Hamlet’s revenge is a plot device, intended to lengthen the play to a duration sufficient for the Elizabethan equivalent of a feature film. The prince would have had easy access to Claudius. All he’d need to do is ask for a private moment with the king, then when the two were all alone, Hamlet would pull out his rapier and kill Claudius. Had the prince no inhibitions about getting his revenge, the play would have been over in about a half hour.

Such an explanation shows Shakespeare’s reasons for having Hamlet delay, but it doesn’t provide Hamlet’s reasons for waiting so long. Indeed, Hamlet himself doesn’t know. (Before getting on the boat for England, he says, “Now, whether it be/Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple/Of thinking too precisely on th’ event–/A thought which, quarter’d, hath but one part wisdom/And ever three parts coward–I do not know/Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do’,/Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means,/To do’t.”)

Some have suggested that Hamlet, knowing he was no better, felt sorry for Claudius: I don’t see how the prince, spewing such contempt on his uncle, would ever sympathize with him. Consider when he rants at his mother in her bedroom: “Here is your husband, like a mildew’d ear/Blasting his wholesome brother. Have you eyes?/Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed,/And batten on this moor?”

It is true that Hamlet, in killing Claudius, would be as usurping and regicidal as his uncle was in killing Old Hamlet, and therefore would be no better than Claudius. Such moral hypocrisy would send Hamlet to Hell. This proposed idea would explain Hamlet’s delay, but not his final killing of Claudius.

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche wrote that Hamlet knew that his revenge would make no difference in the larger sphere of things. We all live, and we all die: the universe rolls merrily along, as it were, regardless of what petty decisions we make in our all too brief, all too insignificant lives. Hamlet thus sees getting revenge as pointless. Again, Hamlet’s delaying is explained, but his final getting of revenge is left unanswered.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud gives a fascinating theory–the Oedipus Complex. Claudius, in murdering Hamlet’s father and marrying his mother, has acted out an unconscious fantasy of the prince’s. Though Hamlet doesn’t know it, deep down, he wishes he’d killed his father and climbed into bed with Gertrude! (20th century productions so often show Hamlet having a thing for his mother.)

He can’t bring himself to kill Claudius, because he’s always wanted to do what his uncle has done. Again, Hamlet fears moral hypocrisy sending him to Hell. And again, this theory explains the delay, but not the final act of vengeance.

Now I will propose my theory.

I believe that part of what makes Hamlet, like Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, one of the greatest tragedies ever written, is its treatment of the subject of regicide, a crime that dates back to prehistoric, pagan times, when the aging king was killed by his younger replacement in a rite of human sacrifice (see such books as Frazer’s Golden Bough for a plethora of examples). Though a horrible thing to do, killing the sacred king was considered necessary for the survival of the community.

These killings were distorted in the ancient memory of oral tradition and transformed into myths of, for example, dying and resurrecting gods (see Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths for many examples). Hamlet, I believe, can also be considered such an adaptation of a crime committed throughout history and lodged in our unconscious minds, ever eager to be given new expression in a myth or play.

Killing a king is considered one of the worst crimes to commit, for it combines murder with treason. Furthermore, Claudius commits fratricide as well as regicide, and Hamlet must also kill a family member, making the crime all the more hideous and unnatural. Yet to leave his father’s murder unavenged would be utterly unfilial. Hamlet must kill Claudius.

Hamlet must examine his true motives for revenge, already an act that’s paralyzingly paradoxical in its extremes of good and evil. Is he killing Claudius for his father, or for himself, so he can be the next king of Denmark?

As long as Hamlet is alive and well, he cannot go through with the revenge and physically do it: he can only plot, talk about it in long-winded speeches (Quote 13), and kill other people, those far from his conscience. It’s often said that he can’t make up his mind, but he has made it up: he just can’t act.

He is psychologically paralyzed by the extreme good of his necessary revenge (revenge for the love of his father, and the morally needed killing of an incestuous regicide) and the extreme evil of his vengeance (Hamlet’s own guilt in committing regicide).

It is only when he knows he’s dying from “the point envenom’d” that he kills Claudius, and when he finally acts, he acts quickly and decisively, totally unlike his hitherto hesitant attitude. Presumably, when he finally acts, he can feel the poison’s beginning effect on his body, and thus knows there’s no doubt he’s really dying.

Because he’s dying, he knows his revenge can’t at all be from selfish motives: he won’t replace Claudius as king; as he hears Fortinbras approaching with his army, he predicts the Norwegian prince will be king instead. Now Hamlet’s revenge is only for his father, so he can do it guiltlessly. The real tragedy of the play, however, is that not only he, but so many others must die alongside Claudius.

Analysis of ‘King Lear’

King Lear is a tragedy Shakespeare wrote between 1603 and 1606. It is based on the legendary King Leir of Britain, an ancient pagan king who foolishly gives his power to his two evil daughters, Goneril and Regan, while banishing his good daughter Cordelia for not flattering him as her sisters have. After Leir has lost everything due to the wickedness of her sisters, Cordelia–having married the King of France–raises the French army, invades England, and restores the throne to Leir.

Shakespeare replaced the legend’s happy ending with a heartbreakingly tragic one, shocking his audience, who were used to the original story. Because his version was too sorrowful for most people at the time to bear, a happy ending was created by Nahum Tate later in the 17th century, after the Restoration; this version–in which Lear’s throne is restored (a fitting reference to Charles II’s own restoration), the Fool is omitted completely, and Cordelia lives and even marries Edgar–was used until the 19th century, when Shakespeare’s ending was reconsidered and restored.

Now, the tragic ending is not only preferred, but is considered, along with the rest of the play, a supreme artistic achievement, on a level with Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, or Michelangelo’s Pieta. King Lear is a profound analysis of human suffering in all its forms, therefore justifying the tragic ending.

Here are some famous quotes:

1. “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” –Lear, Act I, scene i, line 50

2. “Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.” –Lear, Act I, scene i, line 89

3. “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks; rage, blow./You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout/Till you have drench’d out steeples, drown’d the cocks./You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,/Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunder-bolts,/Singe my white head. And thou, all-shaking thunder,/Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world;/Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once,/That makes ingrateful man.” –Lear, Act III, scene ii, lines 1-9

4. “I am a man/More sinn’d against than sinning!” –Lear, Act III, scene ii, lines 59-60

5. “The prince of darkness is a gentleman.” –Edgar, as ‘poor Tom’, Act III, scene iv, line 139

6. “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods–/They kill us for their sport.” –Gloucester, Act IV, scene i, lines 37-38

7. “Ay, every inch a king.” –Lear, Act IV, scene vi, line 107

8. “If not, I’ll ne’er trust medicine.” –Goneril, on having poisoned Regan, Act V, scene iii, line 97

9. “Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones!/Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so/That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone for ever./I know when one is dead and when one lives;/She’s dead as earth. Lend me a looking-glass;/If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,/Why, then she lives.” –Lear, Act V, scene iii, lines 257-263

As was mentioned above, this play is a profound exploration of human suffering in many forms. One form in particular is loss. Lear loses everything in this play: by first giving up his kingdom to his two wicked daughters, foolishly thinking they love him, he loses the one hundred knights he reserved for himself. Then he loses all his power and authority as king. When he’s locked out of Gloucester’s castle during a stormy night, he’s lost the protection of shelter. Reduced to the status of a homeless beggar, and realizing his foolishness in trusting evil Goneril and Regan, but not good Cordelia, Lear loses his sanity.

After he’s taken to Dover and restored to health by a doctor Cordelia’s provided, Lear temporarily regains his mental health, as well as gets her back, of course. But after her army loses the war against that of Goneril and Regan, and she is hanged, Lear loses that so fragilely regained wellness of mind; and finally in his heartbreak over losing her forever, the old man loses his life with a heart attack.

He does gain one thing, though: self-knowledge. Underneath the royal pomp, he’s just an old man…and a foolish one, at that. His lack of self-understanding at the beginning of the play is noted by Goneril and Regan, who say he’s only “slenderly known himself.” Later, Lear himself says, “Who am I, sir?” to impudent Oswald, and then to Goneril et al, “Does any here know me? This is not Lear./Does Lear walk thus? Speak thus? Where are his eyes?/Either his notion weakens, or his discernings/Are lethargic.–Ha! waking? ‘Tis not so.–/Who is it that can tell me who I am?”

He isn’t the only one to suffer loss, though. In a subplot that parallels the Lear story, the Earl of Gloucester is deceived by his evil, bastard son Edmund into believing that his good, legitimate son, Edgar, is plotting to kill him to gain his land.

Later, when Edmund betrays Gloucester for trying to help Lear against the machinations of Goneril, Regan and her husband, the Duke of Cornwall, they accuse him of treason, and Cornwall puts Gloucester’s eyes out. Only then does he brokenheartedly realize which son is the good one, and which the bad.

Edgar, taking care of his blind father after he’s been thrown outside as Lear was, manages to dissuade Gloucester from committing suicide; but when Edgar reveals himself, Gloucester also has a heart attack, and loses his life.

With all of the loss and suffering, we come to another important theme in the play: nihilism. As we have seen, Lear and Gloucester are reduced to nothing. Other characters to die are, as we have seen, Cordelia, Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, Oswald, and Edmund, though we may not mourn the loss of those last five so much. The kingdom of England all but falls to pieces by the end of the play, its fragile state to be restored by Edgar and the Duke of Albany. The Earl of Kent will kill himself, since he senses the ghost of Lear requiring his continued services in the afterlife. Words of negation, like ‘nothing’ and ‘never’, are stated many times throughout the play. Then there is mad Lear’s shout, “kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!”

Sometimes when we compare levels of suffering, one can find comfort for oneself in pitying the greater suffering of another, as Edgar does in a soliloquy in a shelter Gloucester has provided for homeless Lear et al. Edgar’s witnessing of Lear’s real madness in the storm, as opposed to Edgar’s feigned insanity in his role as ‘poor Tom’, makes him realize his persecution by his father isn’t so bad a situation to be in. But the next day, when he sees his eyeless father driven to despair, the heaviness of Edgar’s sorrow returns.

One particularly striking feature of this tragedy is how it inhabits an upside-down world. In this world, as in Macbeth, what is normally bad is good, and what is normally good is bad. Those who speak bluntly or rudely (Cordelia, Kent, and the Fool) are good, and they are censured, punished, and even banished by the wicked Cornwall or foolish king. Those who speak politely, who flatter, are evil, as Goneril, Regan, and Cornwall are (see also Quote 5). To be a traitor against England, as Gloucester is against the rule of Goneril and Regan, is good; to be loyal to their rule is evil, as Oswald is. To invade England, as Cordelia’s French army does, is good.

Good sons and daughters are confused with evil ones, as we have seen. Sons and daughters switch roles with parents, since Goneril and Regan are supposed to give shelter to retired Lear in their castles, while Cordelia actually takes care of him in Dover, and Edgar protects his blind father. The Fool even notes the switch of parent/daughter roles, mentioning the foolish notion to Lear: “…e’er since thou mad’st thy daughters thy mothers; for when you gav’st them the rod, and put’st down thine own breeches…” (Act I, scene iv, lines 170-173)

To disobey an edict of banishment is good, as Kent does in disguising himself as Caius and continuing to serve Lear, and Cordelia does in coming back to England with the French army.

A king is reduced to a beggar: in his homelessness in the rainstorm, he contemplates his meagre charity to other wretches in the same plight. He says, “Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,/That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,/How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,/Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you/From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en /Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp:/Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,/That thou mayst shake the super flux to them,/And show the heavens more just.”

The feigned madness of ‘poor Tom’ seems like philosophy to deranged Lear. Indeed, as Edgar is maniacally ranting, Lear wishes to continue listening to “this philosopher”, “this same learned Theban”, “Noble philosopher”, and “good Athenian”.

When Lear has his sanity, he foolishly and vainly believes Goneril’s and Regan’s empty words of flattery are truth; in his madness, he finally knows the wicked daughters’ true nature. A sane Lear banishes Kent and disowns Cordelia: fatally foolish mistakes. In his mania, he realizes they are his true friends, as is the blunt Fool, who, no real fool, speaks only witty wisdom throughout the play, telling Lear of his folly.

When Gloucester has his eyes, he is blind to Edmund’s slanders about Edgar; in his blindness, eyeless Gloucester knows which son is truly good, and which truly evil.

When Cordelia refuses to flatter her father, she is truly loving, for she won’t speak loving words just to gain land and power; Goneril and Regan gush with speeches of love, but think only of gaining his land. Kent is similarly rude to his king, but loves him and cares for him so much, he’ll kill himself to serve his master’s ghost.

Illegitimate Edmund will gain his father’s land, but legitimate Edgar, forced to flee his home, is hounded by his father’s servants.

All of these examples of an upside-down world indicate its chaos, symbolized by the storm that occurs appropriately right in the middle of the play, when the king is made into a beggar. Small wonder Akira Kurosawa called his Japanese movie version of King Lear by the name of Ran, meaning ‘chaos’, ‘disorder’.

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Analysis of ‘Julius Caesar’

Julius Caesar is a tragedy Shakespeare is believed to have written in 1599; the play is based on the assassination in 44 BC of the ancient Roman dictator and its aftermath in the Battle of Philippi. While Dante, in his Inferno, portrayed both leading conspirators, Brutus and Cassius, as traitors whose treachery is comparable to that of Judas Iscariot, Shakespeare portrays Brutus as being the only conspirator who acted selflessly, for the good of Rome.

Here are some famous quotes:

1. “Beware the ides of March.” –Soothsayer, Act I, Scene ii, line 18

2. “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world/Like a Colossus, and we petty men/Walk under his huge legs, and peep about/To find ourselves dishonourable graves./Men at some time are masters of their fates:/The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” –Cassius, Act I, Scene ii, lines 135-141

3. “…but for mine own part, it was Greek to me.” –Casca, Act I, Scene ii, around line 282

4. “Cowards die many times before their deaths;/The valiant never taste of death but once./Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,/It seems to me most strange that men should fear;/Seeing that death, a necessary end,/Will come when it will come.” –Caesar, Act II, Scene ii, lines 32-37

5. “Et tu, Brute? –Then fall, Caesar!” –Caesar, Act III, Scene i, line 77

6. “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.” –Mark Antony, Act III, scene i, line 274

7. “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;/I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him./The evil that men do lives after them;/The good is oft interred with their bones;/So let it be with Caesar.” –Mark Antony, Act III, Scene ii. lines 73-77

8. “But Brutus says he was ambitious,/And Brutus is an honourable man.” –Mark Antony, Act III, Scene ii, lines 86-87

9. “There is a tide in the affairs of men/Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;/Omitted, all the voyage of their life/Is bound in shallows and in miseries./On such a full sea are we now afloat;/And we must take the current when it serves,/Or lose our ventures.” –Brutus, Act IV, Scene iii, lines 216-222

10. “Caesar, now be still:/I kill’d not thee with half so good a will.” –Brutus, Act V, Scene v, lines 50-51

The main theme of this play is constancy versus inconstancy, everyone in the play manifesting varying combinations of these two opposites.

First, we’ll look at examples of constancy. At the end of the play, Mark Antony honours Brutus for being the one conspirator who acted not out of envy, but for the good of Rome. Indeed, his constant loyalty to Rome even outweighs his loyalty to his friend, Caesar. In all of Brutus’ speeches, be they public or private, he always puts Rome first. In his home at night, before the other conspirators arrive, he speaks of how those who gain power often ignore the base degrees from which they’ve climbed.

“Th’abuse of greatness is, when it disjoins/Remorse from power; and to speak truth of Caesar,/I have not known when his affections sway’d/More than his reason. But ’tis a common proof/That lowliness is young ambition’s ladder,/Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;/But when he once attains the upmost round,/He then unto the ladder turns his back,/Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees/By which he did ascend. So Caesar may.” (Brutus, Act II, Scene i, lines 18-27)

During the plotting with the conspirators that night, Brutus rejects Cassius’ recommendation to kill Mark Antony, too, feeling their “course will seem too bloody”. Only Caesar has to die. After killing Caesar, Brutus tells the other conspirators to dip their hands in Caesar’s blood, and to plead their cause to the people: killing Caesar was for the good of Rome, not for the conspirators’ private profit, and they are to reveal themselves proudly as liberators from Caesar’s growing tyranny (Act III, Scene i).

Later in that scene, Brutus’ constancy is so full that he would allow Mark Antony to honour Caesar in his funeral for the good he did in his life; this generosity, of course, is a risk Brutus is taking, and one that ultimately leads to his death, but it also shows how constant he is.

When Brutus learns of officers in Cassius’ army taking bribes, he shows his opposition so openly that he wounds Cassius’ pride, resulting in a quarrel (Act IV, Scene iii). Brutus’ duty to Rome outweighs his kindness to his friends; such noble constancy is rare.

Finally, when all is lost in the wars between Brutus’ army and those of Mark Antony and Octavius (later Augustus), Brutus runs into his sword, accepting the continuing power of Caesar even after his death (see quote 10).

Portia, Brutus’ wife, is offended that he won’t tell her what’s troubling him and keeping him awake at night (Act II, scene i); she feels he doubts her constancy, which she proves by cutting a wound in her leg. Later, when she fears for him and his shaky fortunes in the wars after killing Caesar, we learn she’s killed herself by swallowing burning coals, or fire, as it says in the text (Act IV, scene iii).

Julius Caesar’s constancy seems the greatest of all. Though fearing suspicious types like Cassius, he insists “always I am Caesar” (Act I, scene ii). He says “I am constant as the northern star” when he is asked for pardon for the banished brother of Metellus Cimber, one of the conspirators (Act III, scene i). The conspirators, of course, almost immediately after, in the same scene, show their inconstancy to Caesar by stabbing him to death.

His power lives on after his death, though, for Mark Antony and Octavius act as his avenging agents. His ghost appears to Brutus (Act IV, scene iii), showing us how Caesar still exists, even if no longer in physical form. Brutus acknowledges the constancy of Caesar’s power when his avengers defeat Brutus and Cassius in the battles toward the end of the play, causing Cassius and his loyal friend, Titinius, to kill themselves. “O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet!/Thy spirit walks abroad and turns our swords/In our own proper entrails.” (Brutus, Act V, scene iii, lines 93-95)

Now we’ll examine inconstancy, of which there’s plenty in this play. Cassius’ inconstancy is particularly blatant. He fears the growing power of Caesar, but is inconstant with the truth when he forges letters of complaint about Caesar’s tyranny, and has them tossed in the windows of Brutus’ home to trick him into joining the conspirators. “I will this night,/In several hands, in at his windows throw,/As if they came from several citizens,/Writings, all tending to the great opinion/That Rome holds of his name; wherein obscurely/Caesar’s ambition shall be glanced at.” (Cassius, Act I, scene ii)

Cassius is opposed to Caesar’s corruption, but is lenient over the bribery his soldiers are guilty of; hence Brutus’ accusation that Cassius has an “itching palm” (Act IV, scene iii, line 10).

Cassius is constant, though, towards his friend, Titinius, when he, believing his friend has been taken by the enemy, kills himself. “O, coward that I am to live so long/To see my best friend ta’en before my face!” (Cassius, Act V, scene iii, lines 34-35) When Titinius, having not been taken, returns and sees Cassius lying dead on the ground, he kills himself, too. “Brutus, come apace,/And see how I regarded Caius Cassius./By your leave, gods. This is a roman’s part./Come, Cassius’ sword, and find Titinius’ heart.” (Titinius, Act V, scene iii, lines 87-90)

Conflicted Brutus is constant in his loyalty to Rome, but inconstant is his loyalty to his friend Caesar; hence, after his reluctant stab at Caesar, the betrayed, dying dictator gasps out his last words, “Et tu, Brute?” (Act III, scene i, line 76)

When Brutus, Cassius, Titinius, and Messala discuss the battle plans against the army of Mark Antony and Octavius, there is disagreement over where to meet the enemy: should they wait for them to arrive, tired from long marching, while their own armies are well-rested and ready, or should they march on and face the enemy farther ahead? Cassius argues for the former, while Brutus argues the latter, based on the principle of inconstancy.

“The people ‘twixt Philippi and this ground/Do stand but in a forc’d affection;/For they have grudg’d us contribution./The enemy, marching along by them,/By them shall make a fuller number up,/Come on refresh’d, new-added, and encourag’d;/From which advantage shall we cut him off,/If at Philippi we do face him there,/These people at our back/…You must note beside/That we have tried the utmost of our friends,/Our legions are brim full, our cause is ripe./The enemy increaseth every day:/We, at the height, are ready to decline” (Brutus, Act IV, scene iii, lines 202-210, 210-215; then see Quote 9 above)

Brutus wants to fight Mark Antony and Octavius while his and Cassius’ armies still have the men “‘twixt Philippi and this ground” on their side, for, being “but in a forc’d affection”, those men may switch to the enemy’s side if Mark Antony and Octavius meet them before the battle. If Brutus’ and Cassius’ armies cut the enemy off before they can meet those men in between, inconstancy won’t have an opportunity to give those men over to the enemy.

Elsewhere, Mark Antony seems constant in his loyalty to Caesar and to Rome in his “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech, in which he passionately demonstrates Caesar’s love of the Roman people while sarcastically parroting Brutus’ “honourable” intentions. Once he has the ever-malleable crowd following him, however, he seems happier to use this support for his own political ascendancy than for Caesar’s revenge.

“Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot,/Take thou what course thou wilt,” Antony says as he watches the people of Rome riot, loot, and search for revenge for Caesar’s death (Act III, scene ii, lines 261-262).

Caesar himself is mostly constant, though he fears “lean and hungry” Cassius, and wants fat men about him; almost in the same breath, however, he says, “always I am Caesar”. Also, he thrice refuses a kingly crown, though, as Casca reports, he refuses it less and less. (Act I, scene ii, lines 220-240, etc.)

On the day of his murder, he allows the entreaties of his wife, Calpurnia, to make him stay at home (Act II, scene ii) when she tells him of a dream she’s had, seeming to portend his bloody death; yet when Decius Brutus gives a misleadingly positive interpretation of the dream, Caesar quickly changes his mind and leaves home with the conspirators.

The most blatant example of inconstancy, however, is that of the crowd of common Romans outside the Capitol after Caesar’s murder. At first, they’re shocked and horrified that their beloved leader has been assassinated in a conspiracy (Act III, scene ii); Brutus quickly sways their opinion in his favour in a brief speech:

“If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of Caesar’s, to him I say that Brutus’ love to Caesar was no less than his. If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: Not that I lov’d Caesar less, but that I lov’d Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living, and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men?”

Then Mark Antony sways the people’s opinion back against the conspirators in his repeated ironic reference to Brutus, Cassius, et al as “honourable”, during his “Friends, Romans, countrymen,” speech. All of this swaying of public opinion happens in the same scene, within a period of about a half hour. How quickly a mob can be manipulated. As passionate as they may be, they are rarely constant.

Analysis of ‘The Taming of the Shrew’

The Taming of the Shrew is an early Shakespeare comedy, believed to have been written between 1590 and 1592. Though this farce has always been a popular one, it isn’t without controversy. The traditionalist attitude towards women that is depicted, especially in Katherina’s closing speech–about a wife’s required obedience to her husband, was problematical even back in Elizabethan times. For this reason, modern productions try to soften the perceived sexism in various ways: for example, at the end of the Franco Zeffirelli film version, Katherina (played by Elizabeth Taylor) walks out on Petruchio (Richard Burton) without his permission; and in the 1929 film version with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (Petruchio), Katherina (played by Mary Pickford) gives Bianca an ironic wink during the closing speech. There is always an indication that Katherina’s feisty spirit hasn’t been, and never will be, broken by any man.

I will argue, however, that there is absolutely no need to alter the ending for feminism’s sake. What must be remembered is that the Petruchio and Katherina story is just the play-within-the-play, a farce staged for Christopher Sly, the main character of the Induction. Though all too often cut out of productions, this Induction is, in spite of its brevity, the real story of the play.

Here are some quotes:

“I am as peremptory as she proud-minded,/And where two raging fires meet together,/They do consume the thing that feeds their fury.” –Petruchio, Act II, scene i, lines 130-132

“Thus have I politicly begun my reign,/And ’tis my hope to end successfully./My falcon now is sharp and passing empty,/And till she stoop she must not be full-gorg’d,/For then she never looks upon her lure.” –Petruchio, Act IV, scene i, lines 172-176

“What, did he marry me to famish me?” –Katherina, Act IV, scene iii, line 3

“FIe, fie! unknit that threatening unkind brow,/And dart not scornful glances from those eyes/To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor./It blots thy beauty as frosts do bite the meads,/Confounds thy fame as whirlwinds shake fair buds./And in no sense is meet or amiable./A woman mov’d is like a fountain troubled–/Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty;/And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty/Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it./Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,/Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,/And for thy maintenance commits his body/To painful labour both by sea and land,/To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,/Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;/And craves no other tribute at thy hands/But love, fair looks, and true obedience–/Too little payment for so great a debt./Such duty as the subject owes the prince,/Even such a woman oweth to her husband;/And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,/And not obedient to his honest will,/What is she but a foul contending rebel/And graceless traitor to her loving lord?/I am asham’d that women are so simple/To offer war where they should kneel for peace;/Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway,/When they are bound to serve, love, and obey./Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,/Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,/But that our soft conditions and our hearts/Should well agree with our external parts?/Come, come, you froward and unable worms!/My mind hath been as big as one of yours,/My heart as great, my reason haply more,/To bandy word for word and frown for frown;/But now I see our lances are but straws,/Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,/That seeming to be most which we indeed least are./Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,/And place your hands below your husband’s foot;/In token of which duty, if he please,/My hand is ready, may it do him ease.” –Katherina, Act V, scene 2, lines 136-179

“Why, there’s a wench! Come on, and kiss me, Kate.” –Petruchio, Act V, scene 2, line 180

The Induction is the key to understanding this play, for it is the real story, not the Petruchio and Katherina one. The Induction’s brevity should not distract us from its centrality. The play staged before Christopher Sly should be regarded as no more important than the plays-within-plays in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Hamlet. The length of the Petruchio and Katherina farce, admittedly covering the vast majority of The Taming of the Shrew, nonetheless shouldn’t deflect us from the conclusion that it’s of secondary importance to the Christopher Sly story.

It is unfortunate that the Induction is so often trivialized as a mere appendage, or framing device, that can easily be discarded from productions as superfluous. It is key to understanding the play’s themes of deception, illusion, and denial of reality.

The shrew of the Petruchio story may be Katherina, but Christopher Sly is the shrew of the Induction. We must remember that, in Shakespeare’s day, a shrew could be a nasty person of either sex, not just a woman, as ‘shrew’ is understood today. Sly, a drunken oaf who refuses to pay for the ale he’s drunk at an alehouse in England, is just the kind of charmless fellow in need of a good taming. In fact, he will be so well tamed that he’ll nod off during the performance of the play.

A lord and his men come to the alehouse after a hunt, and they see the drunken slob sleeping at a table. As contemptuous of Sly as the annoyed hostess is, the lord decides to play a trick on him. Sly is carried to a bedchamber in the lord’s house, carefully so as not to wake him. When he wakes in bed, he’s been changed into the clothes of a lord, and a boy is dressed like a woman, pretending to be the lord’s obedient wife (!). This tricking of Sly, that he’s a lord, should clearly indicate what we are to think of the ‘lord’ of any house, and of his ‘obedient’ wife: it’s all an act.

Sly is told that all of the life he remembers, that of a tinker, is a mere dream he’s had while being in a coma for fifteen years. His life as a lord, into which he has woken, and surprisingly so, is his ‘real’ life. His real life has been an illusion, apparently.

Next, he is to watch ‘a pleasant comedy’, since his would-be doctors say such entertainment would be conducive to the restoration of his health. The play, that of the Petruchio and Katherina story, is so long that we, the audience, forget about the main story, the Induction, and are deceived into thinking that this mere play-within-a-play is the real story. This switching of real and illusory events (i.e., Induction and play-within-a-play) parallels the trick played on Sly, whose sense of reality and illusion are also reversed (i.e., his comatose dream-life as a tinker versus his supposedly actual life as a lord).

We must always remember how sensitive the Bard was to the illusory nature of theatre, a notion he exploited for artistic effect in several of his plays. The Taming of the Shrew is no exception to this: the play-within-a-play is to be understood as mere theatrical illusion, while the Christopher Sly story is the real one.

Another thing about Shakespeare: with his deep, penetrating insight into human nature, one of the main reasons his plays have endured for so many years, it is inconceivable that he could have had so simple-minded a view of humanity as to think that men are the natural rulers of women, however dominant such a bigoted view may have been in Elizabethan times. The Taming of the Shrew, far from being a sexist play, very subtly satirizes male chauvinism, particularly in the Induction.

The play staged before Sly, being mere theatrical illusion, needn’t–and mustn’t–be taken seriously. It’s just a farce, and its attitude towards women is accordingly absurd. The themes of deception and denial of reality within the Petruchio and Katherina story only reinforce the absurd illogic of sexist thinking.

When Lucentio sees and falls in love with Katherina’s pretty younger sister Bianca, he cannot woo her, for their father Baptista insists on finding a husband for shrewish Katherina first. Lucentio thus disguises himself as a teacher of Latin (‘Cambio’), while his servant Tranio pretends to be Lucentio. Lucentio and Tranio even exchange clothes in the street, this seeming role reversal astonishing Biondello, Lucentio’s other servant. Servant is master: this can be seen as a subtle indication of the true husband and wife relationship.

Similar to Lucentio’s deception, another suitor to Bianca, Hortensio, disguises himself as a music teacher, ‘Licio’. When Baptista agrees to have ‘Lucentio’ marry Bianca (after Petruchio agrees to marry her nasty sister), a pedant from Mantua, deceived by ‘Lucentio’ into believing Mantuans’ presence in Padua is illegal (on pain of death), agrees to pretend to be Vincentio, Lucentio’s father, and pretend to agree to pay the dowry for Bianca’s marriage. All acting and pretending, just like the chest-thumping, ‘dominant’ husband of traditional marriage.

Speaking of dominant husbands, Petruchio quickly shows himself to be as much of a shrew as Katherina (see quote one). He beats his servants, shouts at them abusively, and behaves like a madman. He denies reality throughout the story, pretending that his bride’s real name is Kate, that she’s sweet and gentle, and that she wants to marry him as much as he does her (she of course doesn’t want to marry him at all).

More denial of reality comes after their marriage. When Kate is in his house in Verona, he raves wildly at his servants that his dinner is badly cooked (it’s fine) and her bed is unfit for her to sleep on (it’s also fine). Later, he rejects a beautiful, perfectly good dress Kate would have worn to Bianca’s wedding, claiming the tailor got the measurements wrong (the tailor hadn’t, and insisted he had the correct measurements from Petruchio, while Petruchio’s servant Grumio denies it, knowing full well that no mistake was made).

Petruchio pretends the time is seven o’clock, when it is actually about two; he insists that she agree with his deliberate inaccuracy (Act IV, scene iii). On the way to Padua to attend Bianca’s wedding (Act IV, scene v), Petruchio pretends the sun shining in the sky is actually the moon, and that an old man (the real Vincentio) is a pretty young woman, again demanding that Kate go along with his bizarre distortion of reality.

All of these caricatures of reality symbolize the phoniness of male dominance of women, a phoniness that is most clearly shown in the final scene, when Bianca and a widow prove themselves to be even more shrewish towards Lucentio and Hortensio than Kate has ever been. When Kate gives the final speech about obedience to husbands, we should clearly see that this is the ultimate denial of reality: wives are, always have been, and always will be, thoroughly indomitable. Shakespeare knew–he just pretended he didn’t.

Analysis of ‘Macbeth’

Macbeth is a tragedy Shakespeare is believed to have written between 1603 and 1607. The play’s Scottish war hero turned tyrannical king is based on, but bears little actual resemblance to, King Macbeth of Scotland (reigning from 1040 until his death in 1057); the historical king is believed to have actually been a good and able king.

The play includes many magical incantations thought to have been taken from real witches without their permission, angering them and causing them to curse the play in revenge. For this reason, the play is considered unlucky. Accordingly, when actors are rehearsing the play, referring to it or the title character by name is taboo. Instead, one calls it ‘the Scottish play’, ‘MacBee’, etc. If one accidentally says ‘Macbeth’ in a theatre, there are cleansing rituals that can be done to avert disaster, one example being spinning around three times as fast as possible, spitting over one’s shoulder, and uttering an obscenity. Disastrous performances from the play’s history have contributed to the superstition. The BBC comedy ‘Blackadder the Third’ did a hilarious sendup of this superstition in the episode, ‘Sense and Senility’. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h–HR7PWfp0

Macbeth is the shortest Shakespeare tragedy, with a quick-moving first act and, apart from the title character himself, minimal character development, causing some scholars to believe we don’t have a complete copy of the play. Banquo’s son Fleance is supposed to have begot a line of kings leading up to James I, the (as of the writing of the play) new king of both Scotland and England, after the death of Queen Elizabeth I: this long lineal connection to Fleance is thought to be a politically-motivated praising of the new king.

Here are some famous quotes:

‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair;/Hover through the fog and filthy air.’ –3 Witches, I, i, lines 10-11

‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen.’ –Macbeth, I, iii, line 38

‘Two truths are told/As happy prologues to the swelling act/Of the imperial theme.’ –Macbeth, I, iii, lines 127-129

‘I have no spur/To prick the sides of my intent, but only/Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself/And falls on the other.’ –Macbeth, I, vii, lines 25-28

‘Is this a dagger which I see before me,/The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.’ –Macbeth, II, i, lines 33-34

‘Methought I heard a voice cry, Sleep no more!/ Macbeth does murder sleep.‘ –Macbeth, II, ii, lines 35-36

‘Double, double, toil and trouble;/Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.’ –3 Witches, IV, i, lines 10-11

‘Out, damn’d spot! out, I say!’ –Lady Macbeth, V, i, about line 34

‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow/Creeps in this petty pace from day to day/To the last syllable of recorded time;/And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!/Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/And then is heard no more. It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing.’ –Macbeth, V, v, lines 19-28

Three prophecies for Macbeth’s fate:

I) Beware Macduff, beware the Thane of Fife.

II) None of woman born shall harm Macbeth.

III) Macbeth shall never fall till great Birnham wood come to high Dunsinane hill.

One important theme in Macbeth is that of fertility versus infertility, or of life versus death. Banquo’s fertility allows him to begin a line of kings that continues right up to the reign of King James, almost six centuries later, and during Shakespeare’s time. Macduff, the one eventually to kill Macbeth, has several children, ‘all [his] pretty chickens’, whom Macbeth has had killed. Macduff observes that Macbeth, however, ‘has no children’.

Macbeth is defeated when Birnham wood comes to Dunsinane; all those tree branches, symbols of life and fertility, coming to Macbeth, symbol of death and infertility, to end his reign of terror.

The most important theme of Macbeth, however, is that of equivocation, perfectly embodied in the quote, ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair.’ These opposites appear several times throughout the play, as in the second quote above.

Other examples include when Banquo asks why, upon hearing the witches prophesy of Macbeth being Thane of Cawdor and the future king of Scotland, Macbeth starts in fear on hearing of things ‘so fair’. Later, when Macbeth has been crowned king (having murdered Duncan, the previous king, to get the throne), Banquo correctly suspects that Macbeth ‘play’dst most foully for’t.’

The beginning of the play is ‘So foul and fair a day’, for it is foul with the smell of the blood of war, and yet fair with Scotland’s victory over Norway and Ireland, thanks to Macbeth’s valour.

Macbeth says the witches’ prophecies ‘Cannot be ill; cannot be good’; for if bad, how do they result in good for him, making him Thane of Cawdor? If good, why do the prophecies frighten him with the firing up of his murderous ambition? Macbeth shudders over the ‘fair’ prophecies of his being Thane of Cawdor and the future king, for these spur his ‘Vaulting ambition’, his tragic flaw, which will change him from the fair war hero at the play’s beginning to the foul tyrant who must be killed at the play’s end. Indeed, even though the play ends happily with Macbeth killed and Scotland restored, it is still a tragedy in how a good man is turned into a bad man, who ultimately must be destroyed.

Banquo’s prophecies are also foul and fair. He is, according to the witches, ‘Lesser than Macbeth, and greater’; ‘Not so happy, yet much happier’. For though Banquo won’t be a king himself, his descendants will be, right up to King James, and as Macbeth imagines, possibly ‘to th’ crack of doom’.

Macbeth and Lady Macbeth switch the roles of foul and fair midway into the play, when he is crowned king. Before that, he is still somewhat good in his feelings of guilt and fear over the plotting of King Duncan’s murder; Lady Macbeth, meanwhile, relishes in her wickedness, even calling on evil spirits to keep her constant in her ambition. After he’s crowned, however, it is Lady Macbeth who is fearful and remorseful, while he is grinning in his machinations. He frowns only from his fears of losing his power; he never repents. Though Banquo’s ghost frightens him, the witches’ prophecy–that ‘none of woman born’ will kill him–gives him a false ‘fair is foul’ kind of confidence. (More on that later.)

Lady Macbeth, after disposing of the bloody daggers her husband has used on King Duncan, says ‘How easy is it’ to wash the blood off; later, during the sleepwalking scene, the imaginary blood she has on her hands is impossible to remove, as is the erasing of her guilt. The fair of easy becomes the foul of impossible.

Even the porter speaks of equivocation in bawdy humour. Wine’s effect on a man ‘provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance…makes him stand to, and not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep,…’ etc.

Finally, the second two prophecies of Macbeth’s ultimate fate are equivocal in his destiny being both foul and fair at the same time. That he will never lose his power till the forest of Birnham moves to his castle sounds as though he’ll be king forever…fair. How can the trees be uprooted and made to move up to Dunsinane hill? Macbeth doesn’t consider, however, that the English army, led by Duncan’s son Malcolm, will cut off branches from the Birnham trees and carry them to Dunsinane, to hide their numbers. Within the time frame of this play, these branch-carrying usurpers of Macbeth seem to come very soon, too…foul. When Macbeth learns the truth of this, he begins ‘To doubt th’ equivocation of the fiend/That lies like truth.’

Furthermore, the cocky self-confidence Macbeth gains from the prophecy ‘none of woman born’ will kill him (that is, none born by going through his mother’s birth canal) makes him forget all too easily the first prophecy, ‘Beware Macduff’, who wasn’t born of woman, but ‘was from his mother’s womb/ Untimely ripp’d’, that is, born by Caesarian section. Again, what makes Macbeth feel invincible–fair–should actually make him feel most vulnerable–foul.

Analysis of ‘As You Like It’

A pastoral comedy Shakespeare is believed to have written about 1599, As You Like It has been met with a varied critical response, though I am one of the play’s staunch supporters. The story is about Rosalind, who is banished from the oppressive court of Duke Frederick, usurping brother of her father, Duke Senior. Duke Frederick is the father of Rosalind’s cousin, Celia, who flees with her. The two young women, in disguise and accompanied by Touchstone, the witty court jester, enter the Edenic forest of Arden, where they’re eventually reunited with Duke Senior and all his courtiers, who have also been banished by Frederick, before the play starts.

Others to leave the court and enter the forest are Orlando and the aged Adam, soon to be chased by Orlando’s wicked older brother, Oliver. The two brothers are soon reconciled, and both have fallen in love with the women; Touchstone is matched with a country girl, Audrey. The couples are all married at the end of the play with another country couple, Silvius and Phoebe. While on the way into the forest with an army to do war on his brother, Duke Frederick surprisingly gives up the dukedom on meeting a religious man.

The two settings of the play are sharply contrasted: the corrupt court, where there is much scheming and little happiness; and the idyllic forest of Arden, a relative paradise on earth where the worst sorrows are mere complaints of unrequited love. (The name of the forest could be a portmanteau of ‘Arcadia’ and ‘Eden’; or it could simply be an anglicizing of Ardennes, since the story is set in France.)

Here are some famous quotes:

“Sweet are the uses of adversity/Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,/Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;/And this our life, exempt from public haunt,/Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,/Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.”

–Duke Senior, Act II, scene i, lines 12-17

“All the world’s a stage,/And all the men and women merely players/They have their exits and their entrances,/And one man in his time plays many parts,/His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant:/Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms,/And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel,/And shining morning face, creeping like snail/Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,/Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad/Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,/Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,/Jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel,/Seeking the bubble reputation/Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,/In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,/With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,/Full of wise saws and modern instances;/And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts/Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,/With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,/His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide/For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,/Turning again toward childish treble, pipes/And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,/That ends this strange eventful history,/Is second childishness, and mere oblivion,/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

–Jacques, Act II, scene vii, lines 139-166

“O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful! and yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all whooping.” –Celia, Act III, scene ii, lines 178-180

“”Why then, can one desire too much of a good thing?” –Rosalind, Act IV, scene i, lines 108-109

“No, no, Orlando: men are April when they woo, December when they wed: maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.”

–Rosalind, Act IV, scene i, lines 131-134

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”

–Touchstone, Act V, scene i, lines 19-31

As You Like It is Shakespeare’s most self-consciously theatrical play. As a playwright and actor, he was always sensitive to the illusory nature of theatre, to a degree far greater than most of us, and he enjoyed playing little games with that artificiality in the plays-within-plays of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, and others. The bad acting in the ‘Pyramis and Thisbe’ play (interrupted by constant laughter in the audience in MND), Hamlet’s outbursts during the performance of ‘The Murder of Gonzago’, and the brief interruption of the Petruchio and Katharine play to wake nodding Christopher Sly in TOS, are all pre-Brechtian forms of ‘alienation effect’, meant to take away the illusion of the story and remind the audience that they’re really just watching actors on a stage.

In As You Like It, the Bard uses no plays-within-plays to demonstrate theatrical artificiality, but he emphasizes that dramatic phoniness in other ways.

Duke Frederick, not the rightful duke, usurps the dukedom of his elder brother, Duke Senior, and plays the role, as it were, of duke. Banished Rosalind and her faithful cousin Celia, ladies of the court, leave for the forest of Arden dressed as poor people; Rosalind even goes so far as to disguise herself and act like a boy!

Orlando–as much an heir to the fortune of his father, Sir Rowland de Boys, as his wicked elder brother, Oliver–plays the role of lowly farmer at the beginning of the play. Then, Orlando plays the role of wrestler in a match against the far bigger and stronger Charles. Entering Arden, he plays the roles of bandit and love poet, both foolishly.

Jacques, of course, gives his lengthy speech on how we all play seven roles our whole lives: “All the world’s a stage…” First, we play the role of baby, then those of the schoolboy, lover, soldier, respectable man of society, aging man who watches his body slowly deteriorate, and finally the senile old man who suffers from dementia and dies a baby all over again.

Another insightful moment from Jacques comes when he sings the ‘Ducdame’ verse, “a Greek invocation, to draw fools into a circle.” Aren’t crowd-pleasing comedies the same thing, that is, just theatrical invocations drawing audiences into circles, so they can watch meaningless frivolity? Who knows what ‘Ducdame’ is supposed to mean? It quite possibly means nothing, yet people continue to speculate in their circles nonetheless.

Not everyone thinks As You Like It is on the same artistic level as, for example, Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, or the great tragedies. It’s assumed by some that As You Like It is a mere crowd-pleaser (as even the play’s title suggests). I disagree. I say it’s both a crowd-pleaser and a satire of the crowd-pleaser. Just as much as Touchstone speaks derisively of the performance of the two boy singers in Act V, scene iii, Shakespeare was deriding, however indirectly, the hack playwrights of his day.

I see Shakespeare as the Frank Zappa of Elizabethan theatre. Like Zappa, the Bard wrought his art in a genre that, during their lifetimes, was given slight regard by contemporary art snobs; fortunately and deservedly, their work has been posthumously viewed, however, with much more respect. Also, like Zappa, Shakespeare took his art form, experimented with it radically, subverted it, and used it to critique society. Not only was his audience laughing at his comedies, he was laughing at the audience, too, for quite often not seeing the deeper meaning, however subtly shown, in the writing.

Though AYLI is supposed to be a gleeful comedy, the wisest characters are the fool Touchstone and Jacques, who significantly is always melancholy. Jacques won’t even join the others in their–to him–empty celebrations at the play’s end. He’d rather find spiritual enlightenment from the religious man who’s converted Duke Frederick so suddenly…and in so contrived a fashion.

Jacques’s speech, “All the world’s a stage…”, is the most famous part of the play, put right in the middle of it, and as mentioned above, it’s all about the sad and phoney roles we all play throughout our lives…an odd, subversive thing to put in an ostensibly cheerful, mindlessly crowd-pleasing pastoral comedy.

The play is all about artificiality, pretence, theatricality, deceit, and role-playing. Rosalind, disguised as the boy Ganymede (a name whose homoerotic overtones should be obvious to anyone well-versed in Greek myth), represents what for Shakespeare must have been an amusing dramatic joke: female characters were always played by boys in his day. Furthermore, ‘Ganymede’ tells lovesick Orlando ‘he’ will play the role of Rosalind in an attempt to cure Orlando of his yearning for her (actually, she’s testing his love for her).

So, we have, in theatrical terms, a boy playing a girl playing a boy playing a girl. In terms of the story, we have Rosalind, who’s playing Ganymede, who’s playing Rosalind. Seem reasonable to you?

On top of that, Orlando’s in on this farce, pretending that an effeminate ‘boy’ (appropriately named Ganymede, as we observed above) is his lover. Celia plays the role of priest in a mock marriage of the would-be (and will-be) lovers in Act IV, scene one.

But in the end, Orlando cannot continue pretending, so ‘Ganymede’, pretending to know magic, says ‘he’ can make Rosalind appear. When she does come out of the bushes with Celia, both women now in beautiful dresses, Shakespeare deliberately makes things even more contrived by presenting, out of nowhere, Hymen, the god of marriage!

The deus ex machina (or ‘god out of the machine’) was a contrived device used in ancient Greek tragedy to give a quick and easy resolution to an almost unsolvable problem. A god would appear, coming down from heaven, lowered onto the stage by a crane, and he would fix whatever the problem was in the tragedy.

Shakespeare seems to be subverting this idea, for no god is needed to marry Rosalind and Orlando, Oliver and Celia, Sylvius and Phoebe, and Touchstone and Audrey. All Rosalind has to do is change back into women’s clothes, and Orlando will have her; then the four couples can find, for example, the religious man who’s converted Duke Frederick so miraculously, and they can all be married.

Which brings us to the second contrived element at the end of the play. Another Jacques, younger brother of Oliver and older brother of Orlando, appears at an all-too-well-timed moment to announce that Duke Frederick raised an army to help him make war on all who’d left the increasingly unpopular dukedom to live in Arden; yet Frederick’s had a conversation with a religious man in the forest, and repenting all of a sudden, he’s given up the dukedom to live a monastic life!

This absurdly improbable resolution of Duke Senior’s usurpation outdoes the bizarre appearance of Hymen by far; and what must be stressed here is that its phoniness is too blatant and painfully obvious to have been an oversight on Shakespeare’s part. How could a writer of his genius have allowed himself to settle for such an uninspired ending? Obviously, he intended this double deus ex machina ending as a further development of the play’s themes of theatricality and artificiality. What’s more, he perverts the deus ex machina ending by having no god resolve the problem of Duke Frederick’s intended attack, but instead puts a god in a place where one simply isn’t needed.

Finally, this deus ex machina ending, in a perverse distortion of its original function, makes fun of other, less talented contemporary playwrights, who may well have often used it. Here we see Shakespeare in true Zappa-esque form. By writing a play with an obviously phoney ending, the Bard is mocking less capable writers: don’t ever believe he was being a bad writer himself.

Analysis of ‘Romeo and Juliet’

Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s first great tragedy (his very first being Titus Andronicus), was probably written around the early to mid-1590s. Its plot was based on an Italian tale, translated into verse as The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke in 1562. Shakespeare expanded the plot by developing supporting characters, particularly Mercutio and Paris.

The archetypal young lovers have the bad luck of being born into two powerful families, the Montagues and the Capulets, who have hated and fought with each other for as long as can be remembered. Romeo’s and Juliet’s love for each other is as passionate as their families’ hatred for each other is virulent. Fate seems to conspire against the lovers. Romeo is banished from Verona for killing Juliet’s cousin Tybalt, who’s killed Romeo’s friend, Mercutio. (The latter victim is kinsman to Paris and the Prince of Verona, who’s tried unsuccessfully to stop all the fighting.) The lovers’ misfortune continues with Juliet’s seeming suicide–misinterpreted as actual by Romeo, who poisons himself in her tomb–and her actual suicide on seeing his body. With the lovers’ deaths at the end of the play, Old Montague and Old Capulet finally end their hatred. The tragedy seems to be heaven’s only way of stopping the feud.

The play is set mostly in Verona, Italy, and briefly in Mantua. Here are some famous quotes:

Two households, both alike in dignity,/In fair Verona where we lay our scene,/From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,/Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean./From forth the fatal loins of these two foes,/A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;/Whose misadventur’d piteous overthrows/Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife./The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,/And the continuance of their parents’ rage,/Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove,/Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;… (Chorus, Prologue, lines 1-12)

Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate!/O any thing, of nothing first create!/O heavy lightness! Serious vanity!/Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms! (Romeo, I, i, lines 174-177)

My only love sprung from my only hate!/Too early seen unknown, and known too late! (Juliet, I, v, 136-137)

But soft! what light through yonder window breaks?/It is the east, and Juliet is the sun! (Romeo, II, ii, lines 2-3)

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? (Juliet, II, ii, line 33)

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose,/By any other name would smell as sweet. (Juliet, II, ii, lines 43-44)

Good-night, good-night! Parting is such sweet sorrow/That I shall say good-night till it be morrow. (Juliet, II, ii, lines 185-186)

A plague o’ both your houses! (Mercutio, III, i, line 103)

All are punish’d! (Prince, V, iii, line 294)

Apart from the theme of fate, the most important themes of this play are those of dualism and duality. The words in boldface in the above quotes give some of the many references to dualism, or opposites that either complement or do battle with each other, or duality, groups of two.

Significantly, the very first word of the play is ‘Two’, and the Chorus’ opening sonnet in the Prologue to Act One is riddled with references to ‘two, ‘both’, ‘pair’, and juxtaposed opposites, as well the doubled ‘civil’ in line four. This emphatic reference to duality and dualism clearly establishes these central themes, right at the beginning of the play. (Incidentally, there are two narrative sonnets that the Chorus recites; the second one, in the Prologue beginning Act Two, is usually omitted in productions of the play.)

Other examples of duality are, of course, the boy and girl who are in love, but from two families that hate. Indeed, this is as much a hate story as it is a love story, the hate giving paradoxical intensity to the love.

Two other opposites, given shortly after the Chorus’ first narrative sonnet, are Benvolio (literally, ‘good will’), who is Romeo’s well-meaning, peace-loving cousin and friend; and Tybalt (the ‘prince’ or ‘king of cats’: I wonder, is his name, its spelling at least, a pun on ‘tyrant’?), Juliet’s fierce, belligerent cousin. The cousins’ opposition is again highlighted in the opening fight scene, further establishing the dualism theme at the beginning of the play.

Other opposites are Friar Laurence, Romeo’s ‘surrogate father’, as it were, and the Nurse, Juliet’s ‘surrogate mother’, since their actual parents seem to show little interest in their lives. The friar would have Romeo and Juliet married, for he sees in their union an end to the families’ fighting; whereas the nurse is reluctant to match the lovers throughout the play, fearing the ill consequences of their most unlikely match-making.

Of especial importance to the play’s symbolism is the opposition of night and day, of light and dark. Interestingly, most of the wooing and love-making is at night, and most of the fighting in the day; this suggests a yin and yang-like intermingling of opposites. The perfect mingling of opposites is in all of the many references to stars throughout the play, for stars are lights in darkness. To a lesser extent, this mix of light and dark is also seen in the references to the moon.

The intermingling of opposites is also apparent in the many paradoxes heard in the play, such as the plethora Romeo gushes out in front of Benvolio when we first see them together (some of those paradoxes were seen in the second quote above). Other paradoxes come from Juliet, when she reacts to Romeo’s killing of Tybalt: ‘Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!/Dove-feather’d raven! wolfish-ravening lamb!’ Indeed, she goes back and forth between cursing and praising Romeo in that scene.

The first two acts of the play are mostly happy, and could almost even be part of a comedy; the remainder is essentially sad and tragic–more dualism. At the beginning of this ‘sad half’, we have two killings, the accidental one of Mercutio and the deliberate murder of Tybalt. The play also deals with two marriages: the planned marriage of Paris and Juliet, and her real marriage with Romeo. Juliet commits suicide two times, a fake suicide with Friar Laurence’s drugs, then her real suicide by stabbing herself with Romeo’s dagger.

As for duality, groups of two, there are two friars, Laurence, and Friar John, who was unsuccessful in delivering Laurence’s letters to Romeo in Mantua. Indeed, there are two cities that the play is set in: Verona and Mantua. Romeo has two romantic interests, Rosaline and Juliet. There are two Capulet parties, the actual one in which Romeo meets Juliet, and the planned party for her marriage to Paris. There are two drugs: Juliet’s, from Friar Laurence, fakes death; Romeo’s, from the Apothecary, causes real death.

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