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King John
Richard II
Henry VI part one
Henry VI part two
Henry VI part three
Richard III
Henry IV part one
Henry IV part two
Henry V
Henry VIII

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Titus Andronicus
Romeo & Juliet
Julius Caesar
Hamlet
Othello
King Lear
Macbeth
Antony & Cleopatra
Coriolanus

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The Comedy of Errors
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of The Shrew
Love's Labour's Lost
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Much Ado About Nothing
The Merry Wives of Windsor
As You Like It

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The Merchant of Venice
All's Well That Ends Well
Troilus and Cressida
Measure for Measure
Timon of Athens

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Twelfth Night
Pericles
Cymbeline
The Winter's Tale
The Tempest

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This history play revolves all around King John, the son and heir of the much beloved and admired King Richard the Lionheart. Despite his absolutely rightful title, however, from the very get go there seems to be a common consensus of him possibly being not the best sovereign, and there is talk of his presumed «borrow'd majesty» [I, 1].King John may feel outdated, mainly because of its intricate political background, full of Lords, Barons, and the like. Among this never-ending string of nobles, in any case, Shakespeare does let some float just above the surface of anonymity, and such is the case of (for example) Eleanor of Aquitaine, one of the best known women in medieval history, who Shakespeare finally had the chance to include in one of his plays thanks to her being John’s mother. The playwright accentuates her legendary fierce attitude, by having her breed her typical fire in her attempts to defend and solidify her son's position on the English throne.Another worth-remembering character undoubtedly is Constance, a French duchess mother to Arthur, who slowly but majestically starts losing her mind as the realization of her son's life being endangered hits her.Arthur is in fact a possible candidate for the throne (being John's nephew), and a reasonably fairer choice at that. This opinion is commonly shared by the people, especially by the French, who provide their support through weapons and military solidarity to prove their point.What the common folk do not know, and the various Lords seem to prefer to ignore, is that a possibly even fairer choice exists in the person of Philip Faulconbridge, a character completely made up by Shakespeare (though the playwright had been probably inspired by the legend of Richard the Lionheart having had a bastard), and who technically can't be King because of his social position, but who proves many times throughout the play that he may really be the actual King England really needs. Because of this, Faulconbridge contents himself in being John’s faithful subject through and through.Faulconbridge is a great addition to the play because he is not at all bothered by the various machinations by which he is surrounded: he is just an observer and serves as a lens through which to comment and see the others for who they really are. He is a character who thinks and reasons for himself, and we can see this ability in various moments throughout the play, the most memorable of which is a soliloquy where he comments about the political situation: there, coining and immediately solidifying the concept around the word «commodity» (that means being financially comfortable), he overviews the state of the Country and the reasons that push its citizens to behave the way they do, himself admitting he is only able to understand it because he — a poor man with no high status — hasn’t been wooed by it yet:FAULCONBRIDGE: Mad world! mad kings! mad composition!
John, to stop Arthur's title in the whole,
Hath willingly departed with a part,
And France, whose armour conscience buckled on,
Whom zeal and charity brought to the field
As God's own soldier, rounded in the ear
With that same purpose-changer, that sly devil,
That broker, that still breaks the pate of faith,
That daily break-vow, he that wins of all,
Of kings, of beggars, old men, young men, maids,
Who, having no external thing to lose
But the word 'maid,' cheats the poor maid of that,
That smooth-faced gentleman, tickling Commodity,
Commodity, the bias of the world,
The world, who of itself is priced well,
Made to run even upon even ground,
Till this advantage, this vile-drawing bias,
This sway of motion, this Commodity,
Makes it take head from all indifferency,
From all direction, purpose, course, intent:
And this same bias, this Commodity,
This bawd, this broker, this all-changing word,
Clapp'd on the outward eye of fickle France,
Hath drawn him from his own determined aid,
From a resolved and honourable war,
To a most base and vile-concluded peace.
And why rail I on this Commodity?
But for because he hath not woo'd me yet:
Not that I have the power to clutch my hand,
When his fair angels would salute my palm;
But for my hand, as unattempted yet,
Like a poor beggar, raileth on the rich.
Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail
And say there is no sin but to be rich;
And being rich, my virtue then shall be
To say there is no vice but beggary.
Since kings break faith upon commodity,
Gain, be my lord, for I will worship thee
[II, 1]The figure of Faulconbridge is an undoubtedly fascinating one, and many scholars consider it a great leap in Shakespeare’s career as a playwright, but its great importance resides exactly in it not being essential to the story — Shakespeare in fact can’t really make him do much without changing the course that actual history had taken, but (paradoxically perhaps) this character, useless to the development of the story, is in the end what makes the story interesting.Throughout the play, Falcounbridge proves to be the King England really needs: a real heir to Richard the Lionheart, brave and cunning – but keeping the story faithful to actual historical facts, Shakespeare gets back to accuracy towards the ends, when Henry (John’s son) appears and Falcounbridge duly recognizes him as rightful King of England.King John is full of other rather fiery and passionate characters, — though no one stands out quite like the heroic bastard — among which we have the ambassador of the Pope, the two mothers (Eleanor of Aquitane and Constance) and the Duke of Austria, a character who appears for the mere purpose of allowing Falcounbridge to avenge his father by killing him and take possession of the lion skin the Lionheart was famous for wearing. It’s a play made up of small but effective moments.The play is written entirely in Blank Verse, and presents one of the most dramatic shared lines in all of Shakespeare, while John and Arthur’s keeper, Hubert, decide how to go about the boy’s future:HUBERT: My lord?
KING JOHN: ----------A grave.
HUBERT: He shall not live.
KING JOHN: --------------------Enough.
[III, 3]During the XVI Century, many plays had been written about King John, mainly for his very adamant attitude towards the Pope and for how it related to the current controversies between Anglicanism and Catholicism (and because no sensible playwright was going to make a play about Henry VIII).King John was probably written around 1596, the year of Hamnet’s (Shakespeare’s son) death. The relation between this event and the play, though apparently non-existent, lies in the speech the playwright gives Constance: the mother, believing Arthur is dead (though he is not quite yet), talks a few lines which Shakespeare might have felt on a — much more than professional — level:CONSTANCE: Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?
Fare you well: had you such a loss as I,
could give better comfort than you do.
I will not keep this form upon my head,
When there is such disorder in my wit.
O Lord! my boy, my Arthur, my fair son!
My life, my joy, my food, my all the world!
My widow-comfort, and my sorrows' cure!
[III, 4]Another important issue tackled in the play is that of succession. Openly discussing about it in Elizabethan times was nothing short of a crime, so when we consider King John under that aspect the play becomes quite provocative.John and Elizabeth, after all, are quite similar: both considered by some as unrightful sovereigns, both in a constantly fragile position, and both having an actual eligible substitute with rights to the throne, interestingly with some relation to France and with a faction ready to fight for their right to the throne.The play, after all, does concern itself with international politics, — it even includes the word «Armada», which had become of common knowledge after the war against Spain that had cemented Elizabeth’s authority.Arthur’s treatment is another provocative topic: if there is a clear parallel between King John and Queen Elizabeth, there is a just as strong one between him and Mary Stuart, the Queen of Scots who had been killed and whose death had made Elizabeth very uncomfortable. Not surprisingly then, in the play John initially intends to sentence him, but eventually retreats his bloodied intentions.Arthur ends up dying in the end, but not by the hand of the King: in his attempt to escape from a death he wasn’t even getting. Only Faulconbridge is able to solve the squabble caused by his death, proving yet again how great of a monarch he is.The play only ends with Henry (John’s heir) taking over after his father’s much belated death.King John could very well just be Shakespeare’s version of «hopping on» to a trend and use the occasion to make his own play about religious discrepancy, but how he blatantly leaves out the figure of Robin Hood (a very popular folk character in his days) and the controversies about the Magna Charta (which had both happened during John’s reign) clearly indicates that the playwright wants us to focus on something specific, and he even adapts the timeline adding many leaps of his own imagination to achieve that goal.And that specific «something», more than a simple commentary on the Schism of Catholicism, seems rather to be the issue of succession, which lies uneasy in the very threads of the play.

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King Richard II is trying to keep his position sound on the English throne. Inconveniently for him, by doing so he offends Bolingbroke, his cousin and most direct heir (he has no sons) by sending him off to exile and by robbing him of all his possessions.Bolingbroke is not that better of a man either, as he plans to have Richard imprisoned and eventually killed while taking his position on the throne.Shakespeare does not lean or show preference to either character: one elegantly-spoken, a King by «divine right» (in the fashion of medieval sovereigns); the other a more pragmatic, Machiavellian (The Prince’s translation appeared in England in the early 1580s) operator.The plot also quotes a rather more pressing (and current) debate: who would be Queen Elizabeth’s successor, being her without any heir herself. The question in the play on whether it is okay to have all the possible heirs killed or silenced (which would mean showing preference to Richard, and indirectly to Elizabeth) or to find a solution and get moving (showing inclination towards Bolingbroke and indirectly towards any Lord with a call on the throne) remains unanswered. Shakespeare remains in the domain of doubt and uncertainty, in his ever-present ambiguity.It is true that voicing out an opposite opinion to preferring Elizabeth was very dangerous, as the debate had bothered the Queen for so long that she had put a death sentence on anybody who would but dare to bring that up.Another fascinating anecdote is that the conspirators of Essex paid Shakespeare’s Company to perform this play in front of Her Majesty the night before what would reveal itself as a failed attempt at overthrowing the sovereign. We can clearly see that some people were outspokenly on Bolingbroke's side, while Providence seemed to remain loyal to its rightful, «divine-powered» Queen.

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VThe play begins with the funeral of the beloved King Henry V, but even such an important celebration is brutally cut short by a squabble that breaks between the various Lords and factions: we basically have no time to process the context, that we are led to understand that it is falling apart.We immediately get a sense that after Henry’s death, the world — somehow — has to change, and that the debate for succession is going to be bloody: Henry VI is still only a child; he cannot rule on his own.As Joan of Arc (a major character in the play) wisely states in Act I scene ii:JOAN OF ARC: Glory is like a circle in the water,
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself
Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought.
With Henry's death the English circle ends;
Dispersed are the glories it included.
[I, 2]She all but foretells what’s going to happen: a fight for the position on the throne is going to follow, and it most likely is going to last long (the cycle is of three plays, after all) — and as the audience would have undoubtedly known, that conflict was just about to expand and take the connotations of the legendary War of the Roses.The broad chronological order, however, is the only thing about the play that can be considered «historically accurate». For the rest, the playwright plays very loosely with his source materials, cherry picking key events and recombining them, squeezing the time frame to fit his literary purposes.And so battles get rearranged and characters are able to witness events that had technically happened long after their historical death —basically, history is here streamlined for dramatic effect.This is not a particularly shocking notion to anyone who’s spent even just some time with Shakespeare’s other histories, but given that this was his very first attempt at one, at the time of composing this was absolutely revolutionary.After all, if we have such a huge growth of histories in the late XVI Century it’s exactly because of these plays — they were the ones that put Shakespeare on the map.In any case, as this can be considered Shakespeare’s very first body of work, most scholars seem to be convinced that there were other hands at work for this play: however, Shakespeare would seem to be responsible for the so-called «Temple Garden Scene» [II, 4], one of the most elegant and memorable ones in the entire play.That scene can be considered as something like the Elizabethan equivalent of an origin story: in it, to settle an argument — or rather to see who has the majority — Richard the Plantagenet asks that all his followers pluck a white rose. His opponent, the Duke of Somerset, urges his followers to pick a red rose. In an inventive and dramatic scene, Shakespeare explains why the House of York was associated with the colour white throughout the play and why the House of Lancaster was associated with the colour red — he creates and contemporarily solidifies a whole tradition.But that’s not all: Warrick, one of the rose pickers, has a very foreknowing line — exactly the type we like to see in the early stages of an history cycle:WARRICK: And here I prophesy: this brawl to-day,
Grown to this faction in the Temple-garden,
Shall send between the red rose and the white
A thousand souls to death and deadly night.
[II, 4]So that’s the start of the War of the Roses, but the play is not too concerned with that quite yet: it’s only getting started!This play is more so remembered for the epic show-off between Joan of Arc and Lord Talbot.This also underlines the occurring shift between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: chivalry, codes, old values — all seem to be slowly fading away. And this anxiety of change, of a loss, runs through the play: Shakespeare is setting us up for persistent and unheroic conflict, and things will only go downhill from here on. The mood of decay is impressively palpable.About halfway through the play, Henry VI belies his youth with a brilliant and effective image:HENRY VI: Believe me, Lords. My tender years can tell
Civil dissension is a viperous worm
That gnaws the bowels of the commonwealth.
[III, 1]It’s grizzly, evocative, and really prepares us for the rot that’s coming.There is only one valiant English soldier (very much belonging to the older world): lord Talbot. He’s so ferocious that the French all but tremble at his name. But the force he comes against is quite unprecedented: none other than Joan of Arc herself.Now, placing such a famous figure on stage will always be a gamble: Shakespeare couldn’t have put her there and expected no one to voice out their opinion about it.Interestingly, Shakespeare seems unbothered enough and pushes his limits vastly, changing his own perception of her throughout the play — and ours too.At the beginning, she’s the French sweetheart, led by the voice of God, to lead them to victory; but those barbarous Frenchmen were however the ones who handed her to the Inquisition and lastly to the Stake.But this being an English play, there cannot be no playing about her and her reputation: for instance, much is made merely for the pronunciation of her name!In French, she’s known as Joan la Puisselle, and the tradition wants her to be a Virgin. But contemporary English slang could easily make «Puisselle» into «puzzle» — that, as it often goes, is yet another word for «whore». In the same exact play, she goes from being called «Amazon» and «Debora» (two images of mythical and biblical fighters) to a whore.In the end — in a scene that must have greatly intrigued the audience of an England increasingly obsessed with witchcraft — Joan summons up a group of demons to help her with her goal. But they refuse her, and she can’t shy away from her glorious death.Joan won’t be the only woman in Shakespeare doubling in the occult, but she’s surely the one who’s been made most famous for doing so. Some commentators might even suggest that this is her play (or at least hers and Talbot’s), but they are both dead in the end by the time we reach act IV.To assign this play to them alone, however, means to brush lightly on another interesting power dynamic that occurs all throughout the play, that’s especially important to not overlook given the time in which it was written: in fact, Henry VI explores vastly the submission of men to powerful magnetic women.Joan meets a sad end, but at the beginning she is a very vital and patriotic character. She transcends all the traps that had been laid for her by the French Dauphin and quickly earns his confidence — some might even say she seduces him, and the scene of their combat is laced by somewhat of a sexual undertone.Elsewhere, there’s the scene of the Countess Dauphine and Lord Talbot: she traps him in his castle, but he is in no way seduced by her — in fact, the old mediaeval character belongs to a world too serious for knights to be foolish enough as to be «seduced» by a woman.The women in the play are three: and the third, is Margaret. She’s the single largest role in all Shakespeare for a woman, and she appears in all of the four plays of this tetralogy — the only character to do so.In here, she manages to seduce the old Lord Suffolk with her oiliness and her beauty. But him being a strategist, rather than having her marry him, he acutely decides to have her marry young Henry and consequently become Queen.Another oath is therefore broken — Henry VI was in fact supposed to marry someone else. But the play is so full of celebrations broken (the funeral, Henry’s coronation, this marriage) that this is unsurprising — it shows a world that’s falling apart.Suffolk finally shows his hand in the last few lines of the play:SUFFOLK: Thus Suffolk hath prevail'd; and thus he goes,
As did the youthful Paris once to Greece,
With hope to find the like event in love,
But prosper better than the Trojan did.
Margaret shall now be queen, and rule the king;
But I will rule both her, the king and realm.
[V, 5]It’s worth remembering the affinity between England and Troy: Paris was the young Trojan prince who, having gone to Greece and having slept with the Queen there, had initiated the huge epic war.In his monologue, Suffolk hopes he’ll have greater success than his alter-ego and that his influence on the Queen will allow him to rule over her, her husband, and the whole realm.Very interesting is how — by extension — he likens Margaret to Helen: she’s also a foreign woman whose arrival might cause «great calamity», and while Joan might have been the trouble bringer at the beginning, it’s definitely not her by the end.Margaret will have many ideas of her own — as we will duly see in the later plays.Shakespeare is simply planning ahead of his time: this is only the first part of a trilogy, and there’s also a fourth play that can be added at the end.Suffolk even evokes his coming with images of Minotaurs and labyrinths: after all the squabble brought about by the War of the Roses, we are to get ready to meet the Minotaur that will arise in the end: the terrific, but ever so theatrically popular Richard III.

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This is a big, sprawling play. While it may only be the 10th longest in the Folio, it has the peculiar honour of having the largest cast of actors ever — over 60 of them!In fact, Henry VI part two is a play about images, ideas, politics just as much as it is a collection of actors and performances.What remains fascinating about it is that within the text we can see Shakespeare test out some very interesting ideas and stunts that might appear in later plays: this cycle is his first big success, after all, and the intricacy of the plot is a big reason why.So it’s worth searching for what additions were his, where he departs from his source material — and it does so (much like he did in the incredibly clever «Temple Garden Scene»), mainly in its potent imagery.The play chants the rise of Margaret and the fall of Gloucester. The young girl of Anjou goes on quite a journey over its course, asserting herself in direct opposition to the Duke of Gloucester, whose downfall she helps orchestrate.She is a phenomenal part — nothing less than the largest female part in all of Shakespeare!Gloucester, on the other hand, has been ruling the kingdom ever since Henry VI was nine months old, and will slowly be undone by the events in this play — and like one very symbolic scene depicts: as he reads a paper about losing his authority over some important French cities that same paper quite literally falls from his hands: power is quickly abandoning him.His wife’s downfall, however, comes first: the Countess, Eleanor, is an ambitious woman. With a slight help from the playwright, who rearranges the time to make it seem like she and Margaret can compete for the throne (Eleanor had in reality died a few years before Margaret’s coronation), this can be fully shown: it makes for incredibly good theatre!Eleanor in fact feels like her husband really should be King, and she has been hearing from a bonafide Witch for sometime. But she gets desperate because of the scarce results, and even calls for a Spirit in the afterlife to be conjured up so that they can tell her what really is to be expected, but she’s caught in this act and her life is threatened to be burnt at the Stake.Being married to such an influential man as Gloucester, however, comes to her favour, and she’s given a rather sweeter punishment: her days of influence are simply over.Gloucester is appalled at his wife’s behaviour, but nevertheless agrees immediately that she should be punished. His loyalty is with the prince.We already have some evidence about how he is ruling the kingdom: for instance, there is a scene about a peasant couple faking miracles, but they are smartly outwitted by the Duke.Similarly, in the settling of argument between two claimants, he solves the matter by announcing they should «duke it out» in single combat — but with saddlebags in the place of real weapons!We’re here being shown the breakdown of religious faith and of the old codes of chivalry: Joan has already been staked, and now miracles are being questioned, and traditional ways of combat refused. The old order is disintegrating — not least because the King is here completely useless!In the meanwhile, many others are chiming for power, especially Margaret and her lover, Suffolk. They work together to implicate Gloucester, and in the end he is forced to hand over his sceptre of power to the young King and walk away.One of the best scenes shows us Margaret talking in parliament for the first time. The Nobles answer her in a more than condescending way, — she’s a woman, after all — but her address to them is sharp, and methodic, and eventually causes their division.Gloucester is eventually murdered, before he can even be tried. This is a breaking point for Henry, wherein he realises — obviously too late — that Gloucester was an exemplary noble, and (most heartbreakingly) the only loyal subject he had left.Furthermore, we’re given the rare enough stage direction of his body to be brought on stage: it’s given an autopsy in which we hear of all the signs of a stranglement.Earlier in the play, the Duke had lamented to Henry that «Virtue was chocked with foul ambition», and this constatation sadly proves accurate.This focus on the body and on violence being done to it continues, and repeated descriptions of harm being done to people solidifies the idea of how harmful the lack of a good leader can be, and that the result of ambition is oftentimes suffering.Margaret and Suffolk are plotting against Gloucester, but the Duke of York is also in the background trying to gain the crown. He and Margaret are main antagonists, each the most impressive and effective figure in their respective families of York and Lancaster.But while they buy their time and tension builds, Shakespeare gives us yet another reproduction of an historical event: the Jack Cade rebellion.As our playwright would have it, Jack was egged on by York to rebel against the King — so even this paragon of freedom and mob rule is actually controlled by someone else.Cabe’s proclamations and policies are really frightening (among them systemic rape, punishment even for literacy and the like), and it seems like Shakespeare pulled on from ideas of other areas and other rebellions in his descriptions of the outraising.Cade’s progress is going well until yet another emerging character — Clifford —  appears and evokes the name of Henry V, at the hearing of which all of Cade’s supporters abandon him. He himself escapes and goes several days without food, until he finds himself in the walled garden of a man called Iden.The man is constantly waxing poetically about how much better life is in the country than in the city, and he is portrayed as the perfect country landowner — living in, as he would have it, a most idyllic Eden.Iden helps feed the poor, he minds his own building and has no idea above his station: it’s almost tempting to see a wistful William Shakespeare in this character, as he would end his days — decades after the writing of this play — in a quite similar set-up.But Mr. Iden isn’t just some random, bucolic guy: he also decapitates Cade’s head and brings it to the King, and for that service he is knighted.In fact, there is a quite disturbing number of beheaded characters in this play — more even than in Titus Andronicus! — and there is mention of how Cade’s mob enjoys putting them on spikes and rubbing them together, to make it even seem like they are kissing as they march along.But the most surprising victim of this killing method is Suffolk: he somehow winds up on a pirate ship, and is decapitated. His head is delivered to Margaret, who theatrically carries it around with her as she grieves.This is her last straw, the last hurdle she clears in her descent to naked villainy: and her behaviour in the third of the Henry VI plays is certainly blood curdling.The play ends with the first battle of Saint Albans: there has been some potential for a truce fight, but it falls apart, and we instead get a battle between Henry and Margaret versus York and his supporters.There are casualties on both sides and we don’t really get a conclusion — a part three is already in the works.There is no particular evidence for how Shakespeare decided to divide the three plays, but part two (called that because of its chronological order of publication) is considered the best one among the three — rival wives at court, conjuring of spirits, fake miracles, awkward justice, murder, headings, popular rebellions and pirates: this play really does have it all.On paper, it can easily feel like «too much», but if performed correctly and duly edited it can show a powerful insight to a Country falling apart — indeed, in it we can see the seeds of Julius Caesar, another play covering national arrest, assassination and the outbreak of a Civil War.

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Henry VI part three is a weirdly unruly play, full of seemingly endless fighting: Shakespeare really did take it upon himself to stage an historical period characterised by continuous battles — that are a defining feature of the play.On stage, it can feel rather overwhelming, but as we should technically be already acquainted with the characters and their various flaws and qualities, nothing should surprise us drastically.We are finally reaching the point of a final breakdown between Henry VI and the House of York: but the latter party has a new generation of sons of York joining the fight, the most dramatic of which being Richard, the wicked hunchback for whom Shakespeare has big plans in store.The pageant-like feeling that attends this play is emphasised by the fact that each character represents a very specific personality trait: indeed, that’s the safest way of keeping in track who everyone is. We have Margaret, increasingly outrageous, gentle King Henry, lusty Edward, ambitious Clifford, wicked Richard.As Philip Brockbank points out in his On Shakespeare: Jesus, Shakespeare, and Karl Marx, and Other Essays, in some way, the characters here are only two-dimensional:«So long as the characterization is neutral, the tetralogy displays barbarous  providence, ruling murderous automatons — reactions are predictable in terms of certain assumptions about human nature: when an argument fails, men resolve to force. When an oath is inconvenient, they break it. When they are challenged, they retort with violence. When they are power subdued, they resort to lies, murder, or suicide. Their honour imputed, they look for revenge. Their enemies at their mercy, they torture and kill them. And if a clash of loyalties occurs, they resolve it in the interest of their own survival. Such might be the division of a play’s pantomime, but the dimensions are not confined to that and to its rhetoric: the anarchic, ego-centric impulses are not presented as the inescapable laws of human nature — they are at most manifestations of forces that automatically take over when the constraints of government are withheld. Law and order cease to prevail when men cease to believe in them, and the ways in which this comes about is explored in the play’s dominant characters».The fact that the characters in Henry VI are simplistic or cartoonish might be explained by the fact that this trilogy was among the first things Shakespeare ever wrote: but the major achievement of the play is the way the playwright develops the character of Richard of York: the play opens with his father — York — coming to a weird agreement with King Henry: that they’ll let him live out his life as King of England, and that his crown will then pass onto the York family.Obviously, Margaret is beyond furious at this, and any civility she had left in her evaporates as she tears strips off her husband for abandoning her and their son for this deal.Meanwhile, Richard rather convincingly persuades his father that it would be nice to have the crown sooner, rather than later:RICHARD: And, father, do but think
How sweet a thing it is to wear a crown;
Within whose circuit is Elysium
And all that poets feign of bliss and joy.
Why do we finger thus? I cannot rest
Until the white rose that I wear be dyed
Even in the lukewarm blood of Henry's heart.
[I, 2]York — easily enough — is persuaded:YORK: Richard, enough; I will be king, or die.
[I, 2]But he won’t be the first to go: in a play full of fighting and death, the first that really packs the punch is that of young Rutland, the youngest of the Yorks. He is killed rather violently by the nasty Clifford, one of the play’s most brutal characters.He’s fighting with Margaret, who herself shows the true depths of her character when their faction wins and she gets the chance at last to torture York.Not content with tying him up in his post-battle agony, and indeed not content with putting a paper crown on his head and mocking him, she eventually produces a handkerchief stained in the blood of Rutland, his youngest son, and taunts him with it before announcing he is to be decapitated — certainly not the kind of behaviour to be expected by English royalty!York then gets a very long speech in which he is allowed to tell Margaret what he really thinks of her — but to small effect: he is killed immediately afterwards.And this shows just how nasty this Civil War, as any other, can be.Meanwhile, we start to wonder if the showdown will be Richard versus Margaret, Richard versus Clifford, Richard versus Henry... very telling is the fact that Richard is the common factor, always.In all this, one also starts to wonder where is the King. Sadly, he is quite useless, much better at talking about battles than engaging in them. Shakespeare, accordingly, gives him a big speech in which he ponders about his crown and his life and dreams of other things:HENRY VI: This battle fares like to the morning's war,
When dying clouds contend with growing light,
What time the shepherd, blowing of his nails,
Can neither call it perfect day nor night.
Now sways it this way, like a mighty sea
Forced by the tide to combat with the wind;
Now sways it that way, like the selfsame sea
Forced to retire by fury of the wind:
Sometime the flood prevails, and then the wind;
Now one the better, then another best;
Both tugging to be victors, breast to breast,
Yet neither conqueror nor conquered:
So is the equal of this fell war.
[II, 5]He goes on to dream about a peaceful life in the country, a nice escape in which to spend his time. It’s so utterly inappropriate that it’s almost glorious: the King that has had such an incredible thrust upon him.Meanwhile, while Henry is philosophising, Shakespeare puts on one of the most startling and effective scenes in any of his war plays: from one direction, a son enters carrying his dead father. From the other, we see a father and his dead son. It encapsulates perfectly the division, the heartbreak and the destruction of the Civil War to such a destructive extent.And in all this, Henry is posed at the centre of the stage and has to witness the whole scene:HENRY VI: What stratagems, how fell, how butcherly,
Erroneous, mutinous and unnatural,
This deadly quarrel daily doth beget!
O boy, thy father gave thee life too soon,
And hath bereft thee of thy life too late!
[II, 5]He doesn’t really come up with much of a solution: he poetically but uselessly muses that in order for peace to have so little as a chance, one of the roses has to wither: but that is hardly effective or decisive leadership.By contrast, Richard flips about in the background, saying the right things to the right people: and that as the House of York continues to fight for dominance.But Richard is the one to watch: he is the one who speaks directly to the audience, actually announcing his plans and letting them see his machinations — in the fashion of true Shakespearian villains.RICHARD: Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile,
And cry 'Content' to that which grieves my heart,
And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,
And frame my face to all occasions.
I'll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall;
I'll slay more gazers than the basilisk;
I'll play the orator as well as Nestor,
Deceive more slily than Ulysses could,
And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.
I can add colours to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school.
Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?
Tut, were it farther off, I'll pluck it down.
[III, 2]While many other protagonists might seem one-dimensional within this play in their various ways, Richard is not: more lusty than Edward, more violent than Clifford, more ruthless than Margaret and certainly more strategic than Henry. As he says, he can put on any face and any role. And by default, he becomes the star of the show, because he’s the one who’s really letting us feel apart of it.But what might it have been like for an audience to see this play for the first time? When this infamous King becomes — for the first time — the most dynamic character on stage.And obviously it was a success — not least because he is going to get a play all of his own.Things come to a head when the Yorks kill the son of Henry and Margaret, Prince Edward: he might have been another King Edward, and Margaret would have certainly been delighted with that, but the Yorks have quite opposite plans — and they take turns in stabbing him violently.Margaret is absolutely distraught, and tells them to kill her too. Richard is about to oblige, but his hand is distracted by his brother. Why should she live, just to fill the world with words?Margaret, however, isn’t going anywhere — in fact, she appears in all four of these histories.With her silenced, the last showdown is between Henry, and Richard. But the out-going King can only place in some last few words before he is fatally stabbed.It’s interesting that Richard does this and not the actual successor, his awkward, scheming brother. All throughout, he remains the one to watch!At end of the scene in which Henry dies, Richard comments with an exclamation that will resonate through Shakespeare for the decades to come:RICHARD: I am myself alone
[V, 6]Scholars have filled pages and pages over the years with discussions of Shakespearian self definitions — and we can be safe to assume that it all starts here!As the play concludes, the sons of York are celebrating their glorious summer, with all the clouds hidden in the bosom of the ocean — or almost all of them. In fact, Richard has a few more surprises in store for us, and he will announce them at the beginning of the play bearing his name.

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This concludes the first tetralogy of Shakespeare’s eight major history plays — but it stands alone as a singular body, and the most provocatively experimental (theatrically at least) at that.Shakespeare put many English Kings on the stage, some of which very popular and vastly worshipped (for instance, Henry V), but none of them is quite as fascinating nor as powerful as Richard III.After the sloppy cycle of Henry VI, you do really start to feel the lack of a protagonist: among all those plays, everyone is kind of equal and they really feel like «ensemble» plays. But in Richard III, we get the extraordinary development of a star turn, a leading role: this play belongs to Richard, and Richard alone.Indeed — uniquely when considering all Shakespeare’s other plays — it is he who starts it: and immediately, we are in his thrall.Across the length and breath of the plays, in fact, we’ve always had introductions about minor characters, who chat about the status quo, the current situation, the setting and the like: getting the opening line is a thrill, and a responsibility, and Richard is the only one who gets to start his own play, and keep talking — he begins with one of the most extraordinary soliloquies in all Shakespeare, wherein he lays out exactly what he is going to do and enlists our sympathy, or at the least very least our acquiescence for everything that will follow:RICHARD: Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barded steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the
King In deadly hate the one against the other:
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false and treacherous,
This day should Clarence closely be mew'd up,
About a prophecy, which says that 'G'
Of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be.
Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here Clarence comes.
[I, 1]It’s perfect: Richard tells us what happened, that the House of York has won, that it’s currently whirled in the joy of celebration which Richard disdains — he has no time for the happy activities of peace time, because he is «deformed», and so, as he cannot «prove a lover» he is determined to «prove a villain».Immediately, moreover, there’s a plot afoot: he’s arranged for Clarence (his brother) to be arrested because a prophecy has said that «G» (for George, Duke of Clarence) will murder Edward’s (the new King) children.Everyone in the audience should know that «G» also stands for Gloucester — Richard himself, Duke of Gloucester — and he will eventually kill Edward’s sons, the princes in the tower. It’s diabolical, and it’s only because Richard is so forthright in his villainy that we are somewhat charmed by it: there’s something compelling about him being so honest.His character most likely comes from the tradition of Mystery Plays, in which a town’s best actor would be called upon to play the devil: he always got the best lines and the best tunes, and likewise Shakespeare seemed to have enjoyed making this villain — the hero of the play.And there was no way he could’ve made Richard anything but a villain: this play was written during the reign of Elizabeth I, a Tudor Queen and granddaughter of Henry VII — who was the Earl of Richmond until he killed Richard and took the throne.The Tudors supplanted the reign of the Plantagenets, and so it would not do for Shakespeare to portray Richard as anything other than thoroughly wicked.But yet, he seems to have outdone himself in this: a few years back, Richard’s body was found in a car park in Lester. He had been hastily buried, but a team of archeologists managed to find a skeleton, and thanks to contemporary DNA analysis it has been proven fairly conclusively that it is his.Interestingly, the skeleton had a fairly severe scoliosis, confirming a significant deviation of his spine: it does not however suggest the limb or the withered arms that appear in the play — Shakespeare appears to have given him these for good measure.Naturally, there is no association between physical difference and personal morality, but in the play Richard himself relishes this: his physical difference and his very unique personality align in his wickedness.As if the stunt of having this very well-known King appear and introduce his own play detailing his awful plans wasn’t outrageous enough, the play’s second scene is more outrageous still: a funeral cortège enters, and it is the corpse of King Henry VI, attended by Lady Anne (his daughter-in-law). Almost unthinkably, Richard confirms in the presence of the body that yes — he killed Henry, and he also killed Edward of Westminster, Henry’s son and Anne’s husband.She spits at him, and calls him a litany of brilliant, horrible names — but despite all this, throughout the course of the scene, Richard talks Anne into marrying him: it’s a troubling, shocking, awful scene, the seduction over a regal corpse.The wickedness is almost extreme, but also very deliberate: this marriage did take place in real history, but Shakespeare condenses it so that it can happen right at the very beginning of the play.It’s all very well for Richard to have announced his wickedness at the top of the show, but this is kind of a test for us, the audience: his seduction of Anne, in some way is directed at us too. If we are prepared to accept him — as she does — then we are his creatures for the remainder of our time with him.He is quite compelling as he speaks to her: do we find ourselves willing for him to succeed, for her to say «yes», that she should marry this monster?By the time this scene ends, he undercuts everything with his exiting line:RICHARD: I’ll have her; but I will not keep her long.
[I, 2]It seems we shouldn’t believe a word to what he says to anyone — except for us, the audience. To us, he will continue to tell the truth, throughout.This play is one of the longer ones: in fact, it is second only to Hamlet for the number of lines in it. The actor playing Richard has about two hours and twenty minutes of work to do: this was the first big role given to Richard Burbage, and the beginning of the actor-playwright collaboration that gave us so many of his extraordinary plays and characters — and they only developed during their theatrical life together.But Anne isn’t the only female role casted: Margaret also manages to return, and haunts the play and the court with all of her shouts and outbursts: and in this, Shakespeare flouts history altogether: there is no way Margaret could chronologically have a comeback — but why not, if in possession of a good performer, and great character.The Henry VI plays, after all, put Shakespeare on the map, so why not have this terrific Queen come out and attempt to dominate one more play?The balance of roles in Richard III is unusual: there’s really nobody that can hope to compete with him, but he doesn’t actually become King until Act IV, and naturally he has to die by the end of Act V.This play, furthermore, has an enormous number of characters, including an unusually high number of women and children, and it can start to feel like a blur of would-be conspirators and competitors, all aware at some level that they cannot hope to steal Richard’s spotlight.This is the play that is most likely to have roles like «third speed-carrier» or «second murderer» and so on. Even the man who will eventually undo Richard, Richmond, only gets his first mention in Act IV, and only shows up in Act V.And as with so many of the people who are left standing at the end of a Shakespeare play, he is not very interesting: Shakespeare was taking no chances putting the Tudor’s patriarch on the stage — he arrives, and he does his job, but he will get nobody into trouble.Even Richard’s dream, on the eve of the play’s final battle, is showy: we get a parade of outraged ghosts, who all appear in succession to try and frighten him and make him despair. This feels almost like a rehearsal for the faithful visions in Macbeth, but it can be very impressive on stage.All in all, Richard III has an extravagant, theatrical dominance about him, and like the Devil in old Mystery Plays he is consigned to Hell: and he seems to smile as he is engulfed in flames. He is in complete control right until the very end.

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Despite its name, the play focuses mainly on the rise of Henry V, that most wonderful King who has become a sort of an icon to the English folk (and who already was by the time Shakespeare wrote the play): when we had last left him, Henry IV had just overthrown Richard II and was just starting his life as King of England. In the meanwhile, he had given birth to a son, the to-be Henry V and nicknamed "Prince Hal" (as a friendly diminutive but also as a way to differentiate him from his father and from his counterpart, Henry Percy). Unluckily for the King, Hal initially seems like a terrible successor to the throne: drunken, full of quick and dark humor, lover of gambling... the young prince is nothing like Henry Percy, nicknamed Hotspur, his arch-enemy and a devoted, practical, serious, hardworking young man.But, having given Henry IV his "ideal" son in the character of Hotspur, Shakespeare then proceeds to give Hal an "ideal" father: and that is Sir John Falstaff, just as equally drunkard, and with whom Hal spends most of his time in the beginning of the play.The first acts cover some extremely funny and witty jokes (written – not casually – in prose; for one of the most popular theories for the use of prose, besides its belonging to low-status people, is exactly it being directly linked to humoristic speeches), that showcase a Prince Hal as far from meeting his father's expectations as one could possibly get: there is one exception, however, and that is his soliloquy in Act I (the only soliloquy he has in the entire play), where he unexpectedly flips into a super sharp and acute Blank Verse, and where he subtly lets people know that he may seem just that, but that there is the potential of a great King lying underneath the immediate surface. This can also be seen as a very clever strategy to make others' respect for him grow even more, once he reveals his other just, logical and brave side:PRINCE HAL: I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness:
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder'd at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wish'd for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.
So, when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men's hopes;
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering o'er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I'll so offend, to make offence a skill;
Redeeming time when men think least I will.
[I, 2]This piece of information is however so well hidden that nobody catches on to it, Henry IV in the first place, who himself provides the play with some rather funny comedy, continuously putting off his Crusade to the Holy Land, the price he had to pay for having usurped Richard II's throne: a wild son and problems with the supporters of the former King might seem good enough reasons, but the number of times he himself brings the topic into conversation can't come off as nothing but sheer ridiculous.The showdown happens during the battle of Shrewsbury, where a rebellion breaks out, led by the family of Hotspur (still loyal to the deceased Richard II): Hal, quickly making up with his father, promises to lead the battle and to fight until his very last breath. Falstaff is even brought into this, being – after all – a knight, and together the two join the royal army and start suppressing the revolt. Hotspur, on his side, is fighting valiantly (just as we have grown to expect from such a rigorous and diligent noble), but the surprise comes when he is finally met with Hal: face to face for the very first time, the two youngsters start to combat, and Hal majestically defeats Hotspur, proving the still doubtful audience members of his evident value – as courageous as the noble people at court would have wanted him, and more loyal to the crown than his father could have ever hoped.Despite the dramatic tension provided by Hotspur's death, the play continues – and rightfully so, for if not there would not be much coherence between the title and the story itself. Falstaff finds Hotspur's corpse laying on the ground, where Hal had left him, and – quite shockingly – begins to stab him vigorously: this impulsive action might seem non-sequential at all, but it all makes sense when later, in the aftermath of the battle (successfully won by the royal forces), he uses the deep wounds in Hotspur's chest as proof of him being the one who killed the rebels' leader. Though Hal knows better, he decides not to reveal Falstaff's false claims – and perhaps he is right to do so, for Falstaff finishes by confidently stating he now wants to amend his life and begin «to live cleanly as a nobleman should do» [V, 4].Although being titled "part one", we ought to think of this play as a standalone: when Shakespeare first conceived it, in fact, it wasn't meant to have any sort of continuation. The sequel and the following play focusing solely on Falstaff were then written as a response to the massive success the play had with the audience – who, we can say, came there to see the rise of such a worshiped (almost mythical) king as Henry V, but remained for the hilarious contributions of Sir John Falstaff.

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Following the massive success Henry IV part one (particularly the character of Falstaff) had had with his audience, Shakespeare soon came out with its sequel, where he however takes a completely different route: probably messing with everyone's expectations, he cooks up a much darker, sparer play.Its introduction already tells us that: before starting, we are met with a Prologue. It is Rumor – or rather its personification, that would've been familiar with the public thanks to its presence in the early Morality Plays – who first starts talking, and honoring his name he warns us not to believe everything we say, and that the reign of England is currently sickly.The state of the kingdom is, naturally, reflecting that of its King: Henry IV, still dealing with the guilt of having usurped Richard II's crown, is affected by many illnesses, the most memorable one being his insomnia, that he expresses through a rightfully famous monologue that scholars have often used as evidence Shakespeare was himself an insomniac (although whether he actually was or was simply a sympathetic observer of human nature is anyone's guess), and that ends with the frequently misquoted line «uneasy lies the head that wears the crown» [III, 1]. It therefore isn't state business that's preventing Henry from going to Jerusalem anymore, but his own health. A prophecy that foresees he's going to die there – in Jerusalem – clearly doesn't help.Sad thing ― the King does not realize that in his own Palace, there is a room called Jerusalem. His dying scene is another particularly memorable one, as he is together with prince Hal, whom he still mistrusts, and who takes the crown off his head during a moment of weakness. Only, Hal truly believed that his father had just died, and so his gesture does not have to be seen as arrogant and ungrateful, but rather as conscious and responsible. The prince therefore manages to at last make peace and convince the father of his worth just a few seconds before the King's actual death.Henry IV is not the only character to suffer, however. The ever-great Fallstaff (probably the reason why people had bought the tickets in the first place) welcomes us by explaining he's affected by a multitude of diseases, and though trying as hard as ever to be that boisterous, effortlessly funny guy (for he himself still claims to be still «young»), he does not quite reach the levels of humor as in the great tavern scene of the previous play. But that's the point: in an ill world, where all is less, someone needs to take control and change the situation.And that is precisely Hal's role, now more ready than ever to finally step out of his worriless and carefree lifestyle to become the new King, and show to the world how worthy he actually is of that title. But there is one last step that needs to be taken, and that is to ― once and for all ― cut bonds with Fallstaff. The deed is hard, and takes a lot of courage, but the newly crowned Henry V purposefully stops his first celebratory procession to publicly deny having had any relationship with the knave.The play ends with an epilogue, that promises there will soon be a forthcoming play, «with Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Katharine of France; where, for all I know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat» [V, 5]. Only the remote remembrance of the mysterious welcoming by Rumor will have us ask whether the promise is a real one ― and the audience must've been eager to find that out.Lastly, it is worth remembering that Henry IV part two plays a lot on parallelisms: its prequel having been a great success, Shakespeare definitely wrote it with that in mind. The audience would have undoubtedly recalled that great Tavern scene when watching the beginning of Act II, or the battle of Shrewsbury when watching the conflict in the Forest of Gaultree. Only, everything seems to be less, more spare – and that's exactly the point.

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Henry V is the last of the major history plays by Shakespeare, and it definitely is the perfect one to conclude the series: Henry V is in fact one of the most celebrated and renowned Kings in English history, winner of the tremendous One Hundred Years War against France in the legendary battle of Agincourt, and the playwright takes advantage of that by filling the play with events and some pretty famous speeches all revolving around the pride Englishmen take in being English.The very nature of the themes covered — more specifically, the narrow targeted public — can make them mean a lot to native people, but somewhat uninteresting and distant to others (notably non-English), though we must acknowledge that the audience at the time would’ve undoubtedly fallen under the first category.There is also some resonance to the events which were going on at the very time of Shakespeare composing Henry V: Queen Elizabeth was in fact gearing up for the campaign in Ireland, sending Essex to lead the expedition. Shakespeare cooking up a play about a man likewise preparing for battle against a foreign Country without any guarantee of success, therefore, most likely isn’t a mere coincidence.Unfortunately for England, Essex was unsuccessful — but this isn’t the only contradiction seeping through the play: various clues are left, all hinting at the fact that being a good King, and being a good person, aren’t (then like now) exactly the same thing.This message is even reinforced by the Chorus (the only time a Chorus appears in a Shakespearian play; it is however designed to be played by a single actor and therefore takes little inspiration from Greek tradition), that invites the audience to watch the play smartly and using their own imagination when necessary, other than apologising for its sometime historical inaccuracy and finally requesting the public should piece together the imperfections in the play with their own fantasy:CHORUS: O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, and gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide on man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.
[Prologue]Even for his very last history, Shakespeare still finds a way to make the play interesting: battles, soldiers, swords... such themes were nothing new to an audience that had already watched other nine works all concerning the same topics, but acknowledging that, and openly telling the public they must put their work into it too, is completely revolutionary.The Chorus appears many times throughout the play, updating us and shortly explaining events it would take too long to stage. However, it makes somewhat of a poor judge, as it is nothing short of an Henry V superfan: and this vastly impartial and unconditioned praise sometimes does clash with what is actually shown by the actor.An example can be its part at the begging of Act IV, where it praises Henry’s attitude to his men, inspiring and motivating them and overall acting like the sun the soldiers desperately need in such moments of anguish — but the very next moment, we see Henry disguise himself and go through his soldiers to see whether he can truly trust them or not: the Chorus is not that trustworthy of a relator after all.In any case — as Hal hand anticipated with his first soliloquy «I know you all» — Henry V is a king who knows when it is necessary to act, be the deed good and honourable or bad and defaming: and these were all teachings monarchs all around Europe would have doubtlessly been following ever since the first publication of Machiavelli’s Prince in 1532, where it is clearly stated that a good sovereign must be as powerful as a lion, and as cunning as a fox — in the good and in the bad.Falstaff’s absence is also noticeable: it is telling how the only play that bears the name of Henry V sees no space for that majestic figure, highlighting how in order to become the King he ought to become, young Hal’s separation from Falstaff was inevitable — as already clearly stated at the end of Henry IV part two.Falstaff does die in this play, but we only get the news from Mrs. Quickly, and spot no actual sight of Sir John. Other characters from the Tavern in East Cheap appear, but without Falstaff, they merely act like planets without no sun around which to orbit.Consequently, this means that the serious and earnest side of Henry is the only one we get to see in this play, without anyone to have him take himself a bit less seriously.Henry in fact appears so heroic that he even gets compared to Alexander the Great (he even supports the comparison himself), but later on we get somewhat of a comical juxtaposition between the two, done from the welsh Captain Fluellen: he draws a parallel, describing at length the strengths and weaknesses of the two, but what is particularly interesting is that he also points out how Alexander eventually killed his best friend Clytus, and how Henry V «turned away the fat knight with the great belly doublet» [IV, 7]. Lest he appears too all-knowing, Fluellen appropriately forgets that «fat knight»’s name, but the point is clearly stated.This moment, in fact, encapsulates what is really difficult about this play: in order to become a great King (and the Chorus does not miss a chance to remind us that Henry is indeed a great King, a «Star of England» [V, 2] no less), he has to kill his friend. It’s chilling!The parallels do not stop there: at the beginning of the play, Henry draws some majestic comparisons between him and the biblical king Herod, mentioning the Slaughter of the Innocent and underlining the fact that he has been raised to fear no killing of his enemies. But by the end of the play, we are reminded that he has been raised to kill his friends too, when they are no longer useful.There is no question, however, of Henry being a great leader, as shows his great speech to the soldiers before battle:KING HENRY: This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
[IV, 3]All the things Henry promises the soldiers (like that their social status is suddenly going to be elevated should they remain alive) are unlikely to happen, but they are exactly what men going to fight, outnumbered, need to hear. «We happy few» indeed, and this heroic fight of Agincourt is doubtlessly one of the most fascinating and impressive ones in all European history.«When you die, you shall be remembered» that’s exactly what we want, and what we might find comfort in during such suspense-filled moments.In any case, as the Chorus eagerly points out that they cannot hope to fit the vastly fields of France all on one stage, Shakespeare can’t likewise fit the whole of Henry’s glorious jests all in one play. And that is why after the battle of Agincourt the play quickly comes to an end, but we at least get to see Henry’s woo of his wife, the Queen Catherine of Valois.Here as well we see the contrast between what is shown and what actually is: though Henry can be as charming as he may like, trying to convince the Queen that her opinion on him matters, the truth about their contrived betrothal must not escape our memory: the Queen had little choice but to agree, and — impressively — she does so in French, as Shakespeare has admirably composed all her lines in that most poetic Langue d’Oïl.The play is also most outward looking in its characterization of the various protagonists: we have the most proudly and gloriously Welsh character Shakespeare ever wrote, as well as Captains from Scotland and Ireland, all united for the kingdom. Given that Queen Catherine and her maid are French, and that Henry is himself of welsh origins, one might even be forgiven for wondering where the English people in this play actually are.Henry V, after his glorious victory at Agincourt, did not live long: he died at the age of 35, and the lands he conquered for England were soon afterwards lost. The chorus does mention this at the end, concluding the play in a sort of epilogue, where it affectionately jokes with the audience, hoping they’d still remember the aftermath from the various plays about Henry VI its company had already staged:CHORUS: Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen,
Our bending author hath pursued the story,
In little room confining mighty men,
Mangling by starts the full course of their glory.
Small time, but in that small most greatly lived
This star of England: Fortune made his sword;
By which the world's best garden be achieved,
And of it left his son imperial lord.
Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crown'd
King Of France and England, did this king succeed;
Whose state so many had the managing,
That they lost France and made his England bleed
Which oft our stage hath shown; and, for their sake,
In your fair minds let this acceptance take.
[V, 2]

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The play is among Shakespeare’s least frequently staged works.We know it as The famous historie of the life of Henry VIII thanks to the First Folio, but for much of its early life, it was known by another name: All Is True. It presents itself as being all about King Henry VIII and certain episodes of his eventful life, but is the title telling us to believe everything we hear?By the time of this play (which we can quite comfortably accept was written in 1613), Shakespeare hadn’t written a history play in well over a decade. He had collaborated on a play about Sir Thomas Moor, but his last proper history play had been Henry V, at the turn of the XVII Century. It was the genre that had brought him considerable success — his eight plays dealing with the vagaries of English history were the ones that put him on the map, not to mention that they were also usually a lens through which he could talk about contemporary issues, like the campaigns in Ireland or the controversies surrounding the succession.Richard III had been dead for over a Century before Shakespeare wrote his play, so there was a reasonable, comfortable gap of time between the past and the present. In 1613, Elizabeth I was ten years dead — so why did Shakespeare now decide to write a play about her famous father and his struggle to marry her equally famous mother?We can’t really know the answer, but there is an interesting possibility, perhaps even including a royal commission: this was a royal wedding that took place the same year, 1613. On Valentine’s Day, King James’ daughter, Princess Elizabeth, married the elector Palatine of the Holy Roman Empire, Frederick V (who was also known as the Winter King, and though parallels with Winter’s Tale are tempting, given also the elector’s relation with Bohemia, Winter’s Tale was written much earlier, around 1610).This marriage was a concrete, protestant alliance and was treated as a huge celebration. It’s very possible that Shakespeare’s showy, pageantry play was written for such an occasion, ending — as it does — with a love letter written to a Princess Elizabeth, and a celebration of all that the future holds for her.This is all very well, but that doesn't take away from this being quite an odd play. Shakespeare has always been quite diplomatic and cautious about what he puts on stage, and from the very beginning with his Henry VIs, he was always very careful to manage how he presented historical facts, particularly when it concerned the controversial transfer of power, or the dynastic legitimacy of the Tudors. It’s as if his caution never really went away, and here he gives us a very sanitised version of history.Certainly all the juicy bits of the almost soap opera-like story we have been led to expect between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn have been squeezed out.Anne has been a constant fascination of storytellers, who variously decide to redeem or vilify her, but Shakespeare seems to have very little to say, as if all of the events of this Court happen around her, without her having to get involved.The play progresses through various events: there are four trials, a wedding, three deaths and the birth of that particular baby. There isn’t really a lot of drama, nor many intrigues or machinations going on.We hear a lot from passing characters: they describe some of the grander events as they happen off-stage, and then go about their business as the next big on-stage event is being set up. While Henry VIII is the big role (which is not always the case, for the title character to also be the lead), this is not a Henry we really recognize. He is not the almost Falstaff-like figure of the merry old King, the lusty gold-chaser and prodigious eater.Some productions try to make him into more of a thinker, an introspective monarch haunted by the fact that he hasn’t produced a male heir. This is feasible, but quite a challenge for an actor, since he’ll be mining the text for material that isn’t really there. It’s ironic that Shakespeare has written a play about this towering figure of English History (one of the most famous English Kings), and then doesn’t quite give us the character we might expect.Meanwhile, Cardinal Wolsey has almost as many lines as Henry himself, and is a far more interesting character. Even as we are seeing him become more and more influential, not least thanks to the removal and execution of Buckingham at the start of the play, we get a sense that all is cyclical, and that whoever rises on this wheel of Fortune will also be heading for a fall.Many will fall in this story.Sure enough, Wolsey winds up hoisted on his own petard as a very silly error leads to all his papers being found, revealing that he has been making a lot of money off his efforts for King and Country.One faithful event has also occurred: Henry has encountered a young woman called Anne Boleyn at a party at Wolsey’s house — and we all know how that has to go.The trouble is that Henry has been married to Catherine of Aragon for now over twenty years, and despite their conjugal efforts they have not been blessed with a male heir.Shakespeare tip-toes quite respectfully on the issue of the divorce and the break with Rome, and to the political struggles that arose because of Henry’s rejection of Catherine.The couple, however, did have a healthy daughter named Mary, who did grow up to become Queen of her own right, but none of their other children survived, and so Henry had to find a way to choose another potential mother for his son.It’s interesting that Shakespeare can’t dwell on the horror of having only daughters: by the time he wrote the play, his own son had passed away, leaving him with two daughters. We can’t know if he felt any affinity with Henry, but he certainly couldn’t say too much about the weaknesses of women over male sons, given that Henry’s two daughters were both Queens of England (and some of the most influential in the Country’s history).However the playwright might feel, the play must continue, and so he has Wolsey removed and Thomas Cranmer made Archbishop of Canterbury, and Anne becomes Queen.While Anne might be a very physical presence in the play (particularly at the party where Henry encounters her and then at the pageant that sees her become Queen), it’s Catherine that has the bigger part: she’s got nearly six times of Anne’s lines.Catherine of Aragon was herself a very influential figure who ruled history: she was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the monarchs who had financed the voyages of Cristopher Columbus, and she was Henry’s wife for a very long time. It’s worth noting that she was married to him for about twice as long as all the other five wives put together.Sometimes, because of her position as the first, discarded Queen, her impact can be overlooked.Shakespeare redresses the balance, portraying her as an intelligent, rational woman with a broken heart.Her speeches are very effective — even though we know that the fortune will not go her way — and hers is probably the most compelling role in the play.Just as Catherine has to be removed, and conveniently die, to make way for Queen Anne Boleyn, we have to always have in the back of our minds that Anne will not last very long herself.Shakespeare’s audience watching this play will surely have remembered the historical outcome of all these various moves on this romantical checkerboard: Buckingham, Wolsey and Catherine are all dead by the end, but we know too that Thomas Cromwell and Anne Boleyn will lose their heads soon enough and that Queen Mary will eventually have Thomas Cranmer burned at the stake.Shakespeare’s depiction of Anne is quite cautious: the way he paints her and chops and changes the sequence of historical events for the sake of the play’s story all seem to question this title «All Is True».The play ends with the celebrations surrounding the birth of Princess Elizabeth: we get the extraordinary image of Bishop Cranmer praising this baby. As such, we have the most senior cleric of the Anglican Church quite literally holding the baby whose parents wedding was the main reason for the Reformation and the split from Rome. It’s almost like a prophecy that he gives, promising that the child will «reign marvelously, and virgin wedded».Of course, Edward VI, Jane Grey and Mary all took the throne before Elizabeth did, but their storylines surely didn’t quite match up to this myth-making pageantry, celebrating another protestant Princess Elizabeth and her wedding.Shakespeare left out an awful lot: he lightly mentions the taxation that hovered heavy on the Country, making it almost look like Henry was just really trying to give money back to the people (which is blatantly not true), and doesn’t even hint at the disillusion of the Monasteries, the outrageous scheme by which Henry VIII choked England’s traditional religious life and got extremely rich in the process. He certainly does not even get near to the salacious aspects of the courtship between Henry and Anne, as he was more so aiming towards an idealised version of Elizabeth’s birth as the «Savior of the Nation» and it is in the interest of any pageant for the Savior’s mother to be a virgin.This notion of it being a pageant brings us to how the play might have worked: the characters are famous figures, recognizable names for history or else anonymous kinds of people, Ladies in waiting, spear-carriers, lockers and so on. There isn’t anything about the introspective nature and psychological depth of Shakespeare’s more notorious characters, but perhaps they are just not meant to be.In some respects, this feels like it could be a return to the less sophisticated kind of theatre that was in play before Shakespeare existed. In staging the England of a Century before, Shakespeare dramatises it using the theatrical means and theatrical style that were available back then: stock characters delivering fairly one-dimensional descriptions of a story. It’s almost like a nod to the mediaeval Mystery and Morality Plays: we have the downfall of three major characters (and perhaps their redemptions, since the play gives very noble and lofty speeches to all of them in which they seem to accept their fates): Buckingham, Wolsey and Catherine all get to talk to their audiences about their ends, and they nobly acknowledge what is going to happen to them.Likewise, just like the Mystery Plays all dealt with Bible stories, leading up to either Easter or Christmas, this play leads up to the birth of a promised, special child.This of course is not very subtle, but it might be a means to make the play make sense on stage.On the stage, this is a very demanding play to put on. It has more stage directions than any other play, telling us who should enter, what kind of cries are announcing these entries and so on: they’re particularly detailed.As with many of his History plays, there is a forbidding number of characters in this play too. It’s a play that invites a certain excess and pageantry, and it seems always to have done so. The play is quite notorious for it.During one of King Henry’s entrances, in a performance in 1613, a shot of cannon set the roof of the Globe on fire, and the show — quite literally — brought the house down.This is surely a play that could be staged with outstanding results as a Promenade Piece. With the support of a great Palace’s garden, you could stage a very exciting pageant, bringing the audience on a journey throughout the various scenes and events of the play. It is quite a lengthy text however, so adding the time it takes for a big crowd to move places might not help, but some judicious cutting might not hurt either.Performing the play in an evocative place, giving architectural meaning to the various dances, trial scenes and even the more intimate, private scenes could be a really brilliant experience.For all that, or maybe exactly because of all this, Henry VIII is not a play that gets performed very often.Obviously, there is no shortage of material about King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn in any means one should choose, although not much of said material has been generated thanks to this particular play.Shakespeare and the Resistance by Clare Asquith might be an enlightening read to better understand how the Reformation might have influenced Shakespeare — particularly his poetry. She’s a firm proponent of the theory that Shakespeare was a secret catholic, but her discussion of the impact of Henry’s choices on the lives of ordinary English people is really interesting.For more on Anne Boleyn, a recent book with the dramatic title 500 Years of Lies attempts to paint a fairer picture of this most malign of women.All these titles (to which we might also add Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell) are just proof that many editors are still churning out stories about these dramatic, tumultuous times in English history. Shakespeare’s own contribution to this story can feel a little tapping by comparison, and a little wordy too — but then again, we should also conclude by mentioning that he didn’t write all of it. Much of the text, it seems, belonged instead to John Fletcher, but it was certainly Shakespeare enough to merit being included in the First Folio, without question, or caviar, or mention to Mr. Fletcher.Whatever might have been behind the writing of this play (whether commission, pageantry, historical revision, royal flattery, or even ironic commentary), we just cannot know. All Is True, indeed.

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Easily one of Shakespeare’s most terrifying and full of gore plays. Titus is a roman soldier who has just come back from battle with the Goths, but has lost 21 out of 25 sons in the process. He has the Queen of Goths as a hostage alongside her sons, whom he mercilessly sacrifices (although human sacrifice was actually not a ritual in Rome, but the intent in this play is to portray an utterly dehumanized and cruel society – that leaves you wondering who the barbarians really are) despite her compassionate plead.Titus’ only daughter, instead, is planning on marrying the current emperor’s youngest son, but when his older brother is crowned emperor (by Titus’ hand), the hope is lost and the new terrible sovereign goes so far as to rape poor Lavinia. In a final banquet scene, everyone from the queen of Goths and her sons, Titus, Lavinia, the emperor and his brother all die.Shakespeare probably wrote this play (not his highest work, as critics have been eager to point out that only Shakespeare’s name being attached to it makes it worth anybody’s time) for two main reasons: to compete with Cristopher Marlowe’s works, themselves full of horror and gore (at the time he was still the best Elizabethan playwright), and challenge his established success; and to rehearse for his later works, particularly his tragedies, that are themselves full of similar inhuman behavior: we see in Titus Andronicus traces of King Lear, Hamlet, and notably Macbeth.The setting is not historically accurate: the roman empire is a setting that Shakespeare transforms and adapts to his own intentions, molding it into a wild, beastly world (it is not accidental that Titus refers to Rome as «a wilderness of tigers» [III, 1] and that the characters at one point go hunting for panthers).Titus Andronicus also gives insight about Shakespeare's Latin: while not excellent, various quotations are scattered throughout the whole play and we can get a sense of a satisfactory knowledge from Shakespeare.The main goal of experiencing this play, lastly, is to have a thorough process of catharsis: much like Perseus preferred bearing the horror of murder instead of bearing that of his own nightmares, it is almost therapeutic for us to «sup up with horrors» ourselves, in order to purge and purify our spirits.

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Romeo and Juliet is a play set in catholic Verona, a hot-blooded, passionate place. Romeo is a young boy from the Montague family, which alongside the Capulets is always fighting for the supremacy of the city. It is not clear how this feud between the two families started, and how serious it might really be can be a reasonable question to ponder upon, as only Tybalt seems actually concerned about this conflict, which has become almost a mere tradition to stick to.
It is undeniable, however, that this feud is what propels the story into action, and leads an already-infatuated Romeo (with a girl named Rosaline, herself a Capulet but also a lot more reticent than her relative Juliet, playing hard to get and essentially forgotten after the first Act of the play, although a sort of metropolitan myth has it that she would later join the princess of France in her ever-eventful travel to Navarre in Love Labour's Lost) to quickly fall in love with an equal dose of passion with Juliet; to seal his marriage with her with the help of Friar Lawrence (simply trying to find a solution to end the ever-ending conflict, as well as genuinely wanting to help the young couple); to impulsively attack Tybalt after the Capulet had killed Mercutio, his best friend (the most witty character in the play, with an absolutely magnetic presence that led some critics to funnily comment he couldn’t have but died, for otherwise he would’ve ended making the play his own); to flee to Mantua in exile; and to at last get back to Verona, only to see his dear Juliet seemingly dead, and poisoning himself just a moment before the girl (who alongside Friar Lawrence had cooked up this plan in order to avoid marriage with another man during Romeo’s absence) could wake up, leaving her no other choice but to end her own life too, by the hand of a self-stabbed dagger.The prologue is a defining element for the play, although maybe of not such importance as we are led to believe, for its absence would lead to an even more dramatic surprise at the unexpected turn-of-events. When performed, however, besides satisfying our ears with a perfectly metrical blank-versed and rhymed Shakespearean Sonnet, it also gives us insight on how the play is going to end, helping us not to get our hopes too high: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 misadventured piteous overthrows
Do 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;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
[Prologue]Sonnets are sagely embroidered in the play's plot, from the prologue to Romeo and Juliet’s first meeting, and to the famous balcony scene.
Typical Neoplatonic images are very common: not by chance is Romeo the embodiment of the Neoplatonic lover. The ending for Juliet and him, however, is sadly titanicly decided: and we get a sense that the two lovers themselves could be aware of how unattainable their hopes are. In their speeches, in fact, they often address the Stars, the Galaxies and the infinite Universe, subconsciously aware of their unreachableness but apparently incapable of accepting what is presented even to them as an inevitable reality. The prologue itself, after all, addresses them as «Star-Crossed».The references to dreams are also quite jarring, perhaps because of the character who first expresses them: Mercutio, who is given a famous speech about dreams and how they are originated, starting a motif that would accompany the characters throughout the whole play, which initially suggests that dreams are assigned based off of a person’s inclination:MERCUTIO: O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon-spokes made of long spiders' legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider's web,
The collars of the moonshine's watery beams,
Her whip of cricket's bone, the lash of film,
Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not so big as a round little worm
Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love;
O'er courtiers' knees, that dream on court'sies straight,
O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees,
O'er ladies ' lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are:
Sometime she gallops o'er a courtier's nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;
And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig's tail
Tickling a parson's nose as a' lies asleep,
Then dreams, he of another benefice:
Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five-fathom deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night,
And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled, much misfortune bodes:
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage: This is she—
[I, 4]This is later both confirmed and disputed by Romeo, when after a good dream he claimed to feel as powerful as any King, without realising which ending he was about to get himself entangled with.Communication – or rather lack thereof – is an important theme throughout the play, being what really gets it going: the root issue can be found in the two lead characters’ impulsiveness. Their young age apart, there is an undeniable impatience leading the two lovers, one a passionate, Renaissance, Neoplatonic emblem, and the other a gorgeous, magnetic and courageous woman, who only seems to see the word as only black or only white.It is not in fact by chance that the play is often referred to as the «Play of Ifs», for it is easy to envision how things «could have gone». But they go differently, and perchance this is exactly the point: the messages Shakespeare wants us to get with Romeo & Juliet are mainly two: firstly, not to be too impatient nor too impulsive, to wait for events to unfold and not to dive right in things before thinking through them. Secondly, to stop trying to always please everybody: wanting at all costs to satisfy Verona’s expectations, their parents’ and their own, the two young lovers end up eventually dissatisfying everyone. It is however true that their death is what finally gets the two families to reconcile: for the spectators hotly engrossed in the play, it will certainly be a «at which cost», but logically, considering all the deaths this conflict could have potentially brought, it perhaps is not that big of a loss after all.

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The play is set in ancient Rome, a place Shakespeare would've been familiar with thanks to the works of roman historians such as Tito Livio and, for this play in particular, Plutarch.Julius Caesar tells the story of Brutus, who (influenced by the manipulative nature of his friend Cassius) decides to put an end to Caesar's rise to political hegemony, all in the name of the Roman Republic and of equality. Caesar, despite being depicted mainly as this godly and ever-strong figure (and therefore having a sense that perhaps something, in the state of Rome as in the state of Denmark, might be «rotten» [Haml., I, 4]), also shows traits of human weakness (mostly the secret fear of possibly being overthrown), and that prepares us for his otherwise unexpected death halfway into the play (death that prompted one of the most famous lines in all Shakespeare «Et tu, Brute?» [III, 1]). The two remaining acts follow the reaction of the roman masses, that (almost as a prefiguration of the later manzonian mobs), outraged at the killing of their "hero", end up killing Brutus and Cassius as well.Though named Julius Caesar, the play is not so much about the wannabe roman dictator, but about Brutus, his alleged son (although any kind of relative bonding isn't mentioned at all in the play): the title, as in the two Henry IVs, is not given based on the actual protagonist, but on the man with the highest social status (and men really are the protagonists of Julius Caesar, for the only two women present don't really get to do much, nor really hold much power).Julius as a character, in fact, does not have that many lines; but he is ever present through the speeches of others, as he seems to be the only topic romans would willingly discuss about: the themes this play covers are in fact mostly political, and its lack of personal and internal struggles is what makes it so adaptable, other than one of Shakespeare's most objective plays. It is a play about ideologies, particularly about the love of a man for his Nation, fighting against someone who wants to take away its freedom and its equality.One could make the argument of it being almost a bit "too monumental", or simply too serious. Unlike other tragedies, Julius Caesar does seem to take itself a bit too seriously, and falls into a state of obligatory reverence, without bringing about the factor of admiration, or self-immersion in it – but perhaps that was just the point; creating with words themselves the feeling marbled and candid roman monuments give off.Shakespeare's genius when constructing the play can be seen in how he decides to structure it: he narrates the story of Caesar, but through the eyes of his murderer, Brutus, and therefore offering a different perspective on the events. All throughout the Middle Ages, the murder of Julius Caesar had been considered a most unforgivable crime, with him personifying the greatness of Rome and its idealised peak (Dante, for example, had mercilessly put Brutus burning ferociously in the deepest pits of Hell): we can therefore assume that the Shakespearean audience would have expected a play mourning the tragical end of such a monumental figure, but instead Shakespeare decides to flip the tables, going so far as to describe Brutus «The noblest roman of them all» [V, 5]. And he might very well be: for his mightiness resides in his intentions, and in his motive behind his action – Brutus does not act to satisfy a personal instinct, nor for revenge: he kills Caesar for an ideology, in the name of a Rome where civil and human rights can be equal. And it is this factor, this «feeling», that truly makes him roman.One last nod in the play that needs to be addressed, for it often gets overlooked, concerns – once again – the roman mob, that after the death of Caesar, in an attempt to satisfy their craving for revenge and to placate their raging wrath, pour all their fury onto the figure of Cinna, a poor poet whose only crime is to have a name similar-sounding to Silla's (one of the main conspirators): despite his protestations and professions of his innocence, the poet ends up getting killed by the hysterically confused mass. This is a sour reminder, from the perspective of an artist himself, that in the good or in the bad, they are always the ones who get blamed, and that little respect and little mercy tends to be directed towards them.

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Othello will always be an uncomfortable play — centuries before the word intersectionality was even coined, Shakespeare managed to condense its truest and crudest moments in an agonising, pressuring play: of course it talks about race, because it can’t not to.The protagonist is a moor of Venice, but despite the quite terrible situation Shakespeare skillfully portrays of an «otherness» trying to blend in an already established aristocratic society, other forms of conflict also appear: conflict over age, class, rank, religion, sex, and even continents.But even this overflowing world is not destined to last: Shakespeare also encloses it, making it constantly smaller and smaller, so that all the hotspurs eventually face each other — we start in open air Venice, only to end in a closeted room in Cyprus.Additionally, Othello also has the smallest cast of any major tragedy, and the tightest time frame: it might’ve well been staged in a pressure cooker.The plot resembles quite a lot the subplot in Much Ado About Nothing: a villain (this time with much more things to say about himself) convinces a young man that his wife is sleeping with someone else, and the latter conveniently falls into the trap.But here there is no space for redemption: Othello is so utterly sold on the matter that — led by jealousy — he kills his wife on their marriage bed, only to then go on and commit suicide.A cruel and spikey piece, but as happens with most Shakespearian tragedies, we mainly watch it because of the curious pleasure dealing with pretty impossible circumstances gives us, and to see how humans try to cope with them according to their own moral compass, and — at most times — doing the best they can.Othello’s name seems to be Shakespeare’s own invention, but the play did have its own set of sources: notably, the «jealous husband» trope comes from Gli Hecatommithi by Giovanni Battista Giraldi.But that’s not all: during the XVI Century, English Pageants often saw a glorious, African leader or warrior of note who would be celebrated and brought around during festivities. Of course most of them would have been played by white people, but people of colour were still there: they worked, made money, had families... and the very same is for Othello in Venice, where he is a very renowned soldier.The play begins with Iago trying to convince an old man that Othello is secretly sleeping with his daughter — in the very next scene, Othello is brought by Duke: but the motive is different from what we might’ve been led to imagine through scene one, and we soon enough find out that there’s a military problem and his help is needed.However, his relationship with Desdemona is revealed, but the woman makes it abundantly clear that she consented because they truly are in love. Their union is accepted, but only to allow Othello to immediately depart and go deal with the Turks in Cyprus.Right from the get go, we are faced with the real root issue: Othello is loved and admired for his military prowess, but Venice has no real intention of having him marry a Venetian woman and becoming a part of the aristocracy there. A quandary of prejudice that is sadly the condition of many immigrants: social acceptance is hard to achieve. And what is most terrible in its reality — the set up is so quick that we barely have time to question it.In fact, the events move very fast in this play, and the only one who actually seems able to keep up with them is Iago: unlike Othello, his sources and materials come from a different tradition — like old Medieval Morality Plays, for example: the figure of the Devil there always had some of the best lines, and the various personifications of Sin, Evil and the like were often the most interesting characters.One of the famous Saints when the play was written, lastly, was the Spanish Saint Santiago Matamoros — the moor killer. That’s perhaps where Iago got that name.Iago is just that: throughout the play, he shares eight soliloquies, shows us his wicked acumen and clever plans, and proves to be by far the best improviser in all of Shakespeare.Furthermore, as one of Othello’s soldiers, he also goes to Cyprus. And he has a grudge: he resents Cassio, a fellow soldier who — according to him — seems to be getting all the promotions. Infuriated, he starts cooking up a plan to ruin his reputation.After all, it’s no wonder Shakespeare decided to shift the action from Venice to Cyprus: there, Othello is an outsider. Here, they all are — the Turks are conveniently removed by a tempest, so they never appear, but what’s important is that this allows the Venetians to still talk vastly about them: this means we get another «other».This «other» is not one to be taken lightly, in any case: Shakespeare seems to have given Othello all the gifts — he is brave, clever, elegant, a good leader, talks in very eloquent verse... if it weren’t for Iago, he and Desdemona could have had a brilliant honeymoon in Cyprus — the love land, after all, where Aphrodite was born.But Cyprus is also a halfway point: it stands between Europe and Turkey, and between Europe and Africa. It’s the perfect intersection for all these cultures!Othello himself is a bit of everything. He is a moor: someone who comes from southern Spain, or North Africa, but also Muslim. A Muslim might not necessarily be black, obviously, but the play speaks so consistently of the darkness of Othello’s skin that it can hardly be questioned. Not by chance, the word «black» appears eleven times, while the word «moor» a shocking sixty times.Even worse, Rodrigo (a man who’d go to any end in order to possess Desdemona) also calls Othello «thicklips» [I, 1]. It’s ugly, and if it weren’t enough, the lead character is also compared with an uncomfortable series of animal metaphors, often having to do with sex. This horrific, racist language appears all throughout. Given how hostile this environment is, it is no wonder Othello and Desdemona barely get past their wedding night — how a child of them would be treated, can only cause immense apprehension.Iago is also married, and his relationship with his wife, Emilia, is by far the most stable and least problematic in the play. She’s one of the fiercest women in all Shakespeare, and is given quite a few fiery speeches. She and Iago share basically every moment of their lives, and it is thanks to a joke told by her that he successfully manages to ruin the lives of all his enemies: as she sees Desdemona drop a handkerchief, Emilia decides to take it home and bring it to her husband: this is innocent enough, but it is that piece of fabric — however endued with significant emotional value — that Iago uses to undo everyone.It seems almost impossible that all his lies and fantasies should work so well: he quickly manages to turn Othello against his wife, and make him believe she has been sleeping with Cassio for years — and even logically, this is impossible, but those exaggerations are deliberate: it goes to show how far we are prone to believe things, when we are jealous.IAGO: O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on; that cuckold lives in bliss
Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger;
But, O, what damned minutes tells he o'er
Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves!But why is Iago so vicious, so unfathomably terrible? Othello wonders this himself, after both Desdemona and Emilia are dead. Iago’s answer is legendary, and it is perhaps this refusing to fully explain himself, that makes him so fascinating even to this day:IAGO: Demand me nothing: what you know, you know:
From this time forth I never will speak word.There is a hint at the beginning of the play that Othello might just be sleeping with his wife, but that is a mere suspicion, and Iago knows better than to react as rashly as his designed enemy. It’s also hinted that Cassio’s promotion has been at his expense — but these are only sprinkles of motivation for the feast of his villainy.Another particularly interesting notion is the suggestion that Iago acts to mercilessly and revengefully because he is jealous: we spend all of the play conditioned to think of jealousy only as Othello’s main characteristic, that it might escape our notice that the Moor might not be the only jealous soul in Venice.Equally unfathomable is the trust Othello puts in him — «Honest Iago» indeed! His military role also suggests he is everything but honest: he is Standard Bearer, meaning that he shows the flag to let everybody know which army it is. He’s all signs, and people believe only what he shows them — though there is no guarantee of that being the actual truth.Othello and Desdemona would probably be the happiest pair in Shakespeare, if it only weren’t for Iago: she loves listening to the various stories he has accumulated throughout his military career, and in her he finds someone whom he can build something on, and share a family after all the death he has witnessed — the light of his life, essentially. But he is so misled that he decides to extinguish this light. It is excruciating to watch — because you don’t really feel like they deserve it.Ironically, at the beginning Othello is represented as the unbothered, unjealous type: Desdemona even jokes that the weather in which he was born has washed away such humours from him. And this is an interesting comment because it implies that the time, place and climate in which someone is raised deeply influences their nature (as would seem to prove Falstaff’s grand decadence in the Merry Wives).But the fact that Othello does not naturally have it in him to be jealous, is perhaps exactly why it proves so deadly when it is finally arisen.Othello is often termed as Shakespeare’s «race» play — and perhaps even more tragic than the plot itself, is the fact that such racial matters are still ever present today.

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Under many aspects, King Lear is one of the most profound, interesting and fascinating plays Shakespeare has ever written.Proof of that could be that Lear often gets likened to other figures at various points in history and literature: some compare his sufferings with those of Job in the Bible, others equate his greatness with that of Soliman, also in the Bible, and so on. Parallels are drawn with every and any event of this play throughout history, and some scholars have even gone so far as to compare the bleak nihilism of the text to the works of Samuel Beckett in the XX Century.King Lear speaks to us at all times. Even today, it can be framed as extremely relevant: it’s about madness against the railing forces of nature, it’s about the splitting up of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, it’s about a power-crazed father who feeds on the fake adulation of his vicious and power-hungry children — it’s all that, and much more.Besides, it is also one of the best-constructed plays Shakespeare ever wrote, and it can boast one of the most exciting opening scenes ever: in there, we get all the main introductions, the two major families are presented, Lear’s bizarre and catastrophic competition between his daughters is announced, we see love and banishment and opportunism and true natures are revealed. Because through it all, Edmund watches: he watches everything like a chess champion, and when the play reaches chaos, he speaks and reveals his real intentions and his wicked plans. It’s an enormously lengthy scene, but it’s brilliant all the same.The detail of the language also lays the groundwork for how the play will unfold: there are many words about looking, and seeing more clearly, paving the way for the seeping blindness that will eventually happen literally to Gloucester, but will hover metaphorically onto everyone.By the end, the two elder daughters will have been reduced to squinting moles, and meanwhile, the youngest (Cordelia), answers his father’s proclamations for her love with... nothing. And that «nothing» sets in motion a train of annihilation — of reduction to nothing that will consume her, her father, and almost all of the cast to its greatest expression by the end — death.Lear is a man full of passions — and he engenders them in others, too! Nobody in this play is indifferent to him: his two daughters and those in their orbits seem to hate him, but the Fool and Kent and Cordelia all love him very dearly.However, him starting off as seemingly vain and quickly turning out to be excessively angry, we don’t really get the time to sympathise with him.He rages throughout the whole play so violently that, though we are not really supposed to like these ugly sisters at any time, when he comes with his soldiers causing havoc in their home, we almost do — their lack of filial piety, thankfully, stops this sympathy from escalating too quickly, as it becomes apparent that these two will stop at nothing to gain power, but it still says a lot about how potently magnetic the King is.Lear’s course of annihilation — of reduction to nothing — begins perhaps even before Cordelia’s faithful answer: he starts the play with the intention to retire, and split the kingdom over to his daughters, handing over his crown. Right from the very get go, scene one of the play really seems to be the beginning of the end!When he fights with his daughters, he rails that he wouldn’t even bother staying under their roof anymore, and states he’d rather brave the elements. He gives up his crown, family, shelter, and even his thousand faithful followers. He’s only got his Fool and a disguised Earl of Kent, and soon enough also loses his mind — not to mention that his wits and body take a not indifferent battering in the terrible storm that tears through play.But there’s also another narrative to follow, another family’s tearing apart to be witnessed: Gloucester is the first father we meet, and we quickly learn that he has two sons — Edgar, the legitimate one; Edmund, the illegitimate, natural one. And just like sisters are put against sisters in Lear’s family, brothers are put against brothers in this one.Edmund has the upper hand, however, and  he gets Edgar out of the way thanks to a letter implicating him. He then seduces both of the older daughters, who will eventually fight and die for him.The world Shakespeare is describing is one of social revolutions: brothers fighting against each other, children rebelling against their parents, servants revolting against their masters.At the heart of all this, Edmund is a doubtlessly captivating character, but Edgar probably has the hardest role play: bad enough that he’s banished, he’s also the first one to complete his annihilation, pretending to be a poor madman raging the Country — though the line between madness and lucidity here is quite unclear.The fool is also a character of great perception, blurring the lines of wisdom and mockery and of clarity and madness. When he and Lear meet Edgar out in the wilderness during a storm, there is a scene between the three that all but exists between madness and sanity, kindness and despair. The camaraderie between the three, who have nothing but each other, is fascinating, and the fact that no one seems to be fully in their right mind makes it even more so.The storm is the play’s greatest leveller: it’s the cause of Lear’s degradation, and one might even think he can regain all he has lost when it stops raging towards the end.In other versions and rewritings of the play this is certainly the case — the source material was nowhere as bleak as Shakespeare’s adaptation. For example, in the XVII Century, an Irish playwright rewrote the play with a happy ending (where Cordelia lived and married Edgar), but now it could only work as a mere academic exercise.After the horrors of the XX Century, in fact, King Lear has become a small insight in the bleakest ends of human experience, a lens through which we can come to terms with the cruellest aspects of life — its best known lines, in fact, all have to do with the cruel indifference of the Universe and the Gods towards our condition.LEAR: As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods. They kill us for their sport.
[IV, 1]It really doesn’t get much bleaker that that!Earlier in the play, Edmund has one of the most bitter descriptions of human nature ever compiled: there, he talks about how people like to blame the stars for their personalities or their lot in life, instead of acknowledging their faults and blaming themselves:EDMUND: This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are
sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make
guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if
we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion;
knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance;
drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc'd obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine
thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay
his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!
[I, 2]In this, he’s kind of like a brother to Cassius, who also protests that the fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves («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», [JC, I,2]).Edmund is up there with Iago for the most wicked character in Shakespeare, but he’s smart and he talks us through his schemes in a very entertaining way. Unlike Iago, he’s also given a glimmer of repentance (even after all he’s done): he tries to save Lear and Cordelia at the end of the play, but — naturally — it’s too late.When Cordelia passes away — that’s the last straw for Lear, who follows her suit, eaten up by grief.A popular question seems to be whether  the Fool and Cordelia are connected: it is possible that they were played by the same actor, as they never appear on stage together, but so many actors have to change costume in the play, and there is so much talk of garment and clothing — no wonder, as one has to invent a new identity for themselves in order to just survive — that this insight is actually just a small, ineffective addition a company staging the play could make.Cordelia’s death is by far the bleakest moment in the play: there has been hope for a future, for new beginnings when she is reunited with her father, (offering us very touching, unexpected scenes towards the end of the play): when he brings her corpse on stage, it’s almost unbearable.But perhaps that’s the point: with King Lear, Shakespeare wants to bring us to the darkest wells and to the worst moments of human life, without releasing us from it until the very end.King Lear has inspired a huge range of other stories, but there’s a chilling power that remains at the heart of Shakespeare’s version.But what would have been going on at home, for Shakespeare to write such a horrific breakdown of the relationships between father and daughters?Goneril and Regan are two of the most spectacularly wicked people in all Shakespeare, and they are deliberately shown as daughters having no sincere interest in their father with the only intention of appropriating his heritage to make it their own.Given that future plays will all present much more tender father-daughter relationships (most with happy reunions), King Lear comes as a shock: it’s always interesting to ponder whether there were some personal events that inspired Shakespeare to fill King Lear with such venom, and what might’ve possibly changed in later years to ease such tension.Tension that’s horribly palpable: for the curses Lear has for his daughters are among the most terrible the playwright ever wrote: real, bloody and hurdling stuff.

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This play is among Shakespeare’s most famous and infamous plays. Even to this day, it is considered incredibly bad luck in a theatre to say the name of this play aloud.Though part of this superstition about the Scottish play grew out of its popularity, the myth stands as strong as ever  — «if you want to make money, put on Macbeth»: this would mean that if you hear the name whispered in a theatre, it’s probably because you’re having money trouble; all but a good sign.But this is also a play that tends to be staged in a lot of darkness, often with fog and that contains a lot of fighting, of blood, and of daggers. There’s so much hurly-burly that it’s easy for accidents to happen — and they do. So this is how reputations and superstitions develop.These various factors — financial concerns and complicated stage demands — might ordinarily be more than enough to explain away a bad reputation, but there is a further one: this is a play that deals with the occult.We begin with Witches: we’ve got a lot of curses, and murder, and some very unnatural crimes. In arguably the most famous scene of the play, the Witches brew up a magic potion and the Goddess of Witchcraft herself is conjured: the play quite literally calls for trouble.Shakespeare’s source for the play was Holinshed’s Chronicles, although he does quite a lot of work with the rearranging of the historical material: the real Duncan seems to have been quite a brute, who himself ascended through crimeful actions. Macbeth, on the other hand, seems to have been a rather gentler King, helped to the throne by Banquo. So why would Shakespeare want to change things so drastically?Well, this is where the play starts looking very interesting indeed, and solves the mystery of one of Shakespeare’s weirdest stage directions —Towards the middle of the play, Banquo’s son, Fleance, manages to escape the murderous forces of King Macbeth, surviving the attack. Earlier in the play, the three Witches had told Banquo that he would «Father a line of Kings» [III, 1], and at least some member in the audience would’ve known that King James I (James VI of Scotland) was descended of the very Fleance. It’s also probable that this play was  staged at Court, as an homage to the King himself.What makes this very likely the case is that very stage direction during the Magic Scene: while the Witches show Macbeth a series of prophetic apparitions, Shakespeare gives us this direction: «A show of eight Kings, the last carrying a glass» [IV, 1].Now, it’s not like there are only eight Kings between Macbeth and James (in fact, there are about three times that number), but the number becomes relevant in relation to the fact that Banquo follows the last King (the one holding the glass): Shakespeare is constructing an image for his royal Patron, via this glass — this mirror — to his forebear, the now innocent Banquo’s plucky son, one of the only ones to escape the bloodbath of this play.The mirror might’ve never been as effective in any other performance, — though we can surely relish in the thought that King James would have been very flattered by it indeed — but this is not the only part of the play which reflected the interests of King James.The sovereign, in fact, was obsessed with Witches. He had even written a book on the subject, entitled Demonology. His was a Britain increasingly fascinated with Dark Magic, terrorised of trafficking with evil Spirits and particularly the dangers of Witches, and unruly women.Shakespeare was not the only playwright to put Witches on stage, but he was one of the very few that brought them to such a lasting and popular effect — although, quite ironically, his only interest in putting them in his play seemed only to be for the cheap thrill and entertainment they brought.Analysing the general context, in an extremely Puritan England, putting on a play about a murderous and usurping Scottish Monarch might have been politically provocative — but not so much if it’s a play that shows the King’s ancestors surviving and proving not to be murderers, and if it shows some gloriously alarming women casting spells and leading men to ruin.If these little nods to the contemporary cultural climate weren’t enough, we have one further element: equivocation.In the same year as Macbeth was published — 1606 — a public trial took place of a Jesuit priest called Henry Garnet. He had indirectly been involved in the Gunpowder Plot, and he had been tried for his complicity in March 1606. At his trial, he had drawn much anger from his use of equivocation, the sanctioned practice particularly popular among Jesuits of managing one’s answers to appear tactfully truthful, without giving oneself away.The Porter’s scene — the one following directly after Macbeth’s murder of King Duncan — includes many references to Garnet’s Trial: the various people the Porter acknowledges in his drunken vision of Hell — alternatively also known as Castle Macbeth — make little sense to us today, but an awareness of the Garnet Case can help us decipher it.This is Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, and people love to argue whether perhaps there are some parts missing. Theatre folk are particularly interested in the role of Lady Macbeth, and whether or not she should have another scene.She is one of the most powerful women in Shakespeare, and definitely one of the most interesting — but her role is very small indeed. Should she have another scene? Those she does inhabit are doubtlessly remarkable.She’s called a «Fiend-like Queen» by the end, but this probably wasn’t meant to be a particularly fair comment either way: Malcolm might be justified for hating the woman whose husband murdered his sleeping father, but the thing is — she didn’t do it. She convinced her husband to do it.The most moving and emotional shift in the play is how she and Macbeth drift apart: he shuts her out as his deeds get murkier, and bloodier, wanting to keep her innocent of his crimes. But this is where it all goes wrong: as a couple, together they can get away with murder; but when he draws a wedge between them, she loses her piece of mind and he loses everything.The sleepwalking scene is treacherous to any actress approaching it: but it’s amazingly structured nevertheless, and while we don’t really know whether she’s supposed to be mad or simply haunted by the dreams and memories of her actions, bit for bit, she seems to repeat the events that happen right after the murder: the panic, the concern of getting the blood off their hands, and the knocking on the southern gate.That she is insane is proved by the fact that she’s freely leaving clues that clearly indicate how she and Macbeth were responsible for Duncan’s death, rather than the sleepy officers outside of his chamber.The tragedy is that she’s left repeating all these little nuggets of information, revealing their joint blame to the staff, all as she’s sleepless, abandoned by her husband.The other big mystery about her is whether or not she is a mother: in one of her shockingly famous lines, she admits that she knows what it’s like to breastfeed, but that she would mercilessly squash the head of her child, if she had sworn like Macbeth had to their great enterprise: it’s a horrifying but tantalising scene.It’s not outside the realm of the possible for a woman to breastfeed without being a mother, but did Shakespeare want us to know that she and Macbeth had lost a child? Elsewhere, it’s pointed out without a single shred of doubt that Macbeth has no children.But just before he returns to his castle at Inverness at the very beginning of the play, Lady Macbeth calls on the Spirits of Darkness to harden her, and focus her on her ambition:LADY MACBETH: Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry 'Hold, hold!'
[I, 5]Never mind the Witches, Lady Macbeth is really the one that trafficks with the dark side. In this speech, she prays that all motherly instincts and possibilities be removed from her. This is a total rejection of all possibilities of motherhood: she wants nothing to distract her from her goal of becoming Queen.Though impossible to prove, it’s an exciting thought to consider she might’ve been pregnant at the time, but that the Spirits answered her bloody request by killing the still not-born baby.Very soon after this grim prayer, much more serious than any hocus-pocus from the Witches, Macbeth will tell her to bring on male children only: there’s a horrible irony in this.The Macbeths talk a lot about gender: she laments being too full with the milk of human kindness, he tells her to bring forth male children only; and when she tries to prick the sides of his intent, she holds nothing back: «When you durst do it, then you were a man».Now, traditional gender norms are exploited throughout Shakespeare: in an all-male theatre, with an unmarried Queen who had ruled the Country for half a Century, they had to be — but the Macbeths are different, because theirs isn’t a dynastic marriage, they are together because they match and love each other: there’s no adultery, no cheating, no inheritance in play. They’re a unit, and perhaps the most solid in all Shakespeare.Macbeth has a reputation for being one of the most poetic heroes in all Shakespeare, but the first description we get of him is rather violent, and the last word used to describe him is «butcher» — from beginning to end, he’s soaked with others’ blood.And yet we sympathise with him: in Richard II, we sympathised with the poor King who was dethroned and murdered. Now, Shakespeare pulls out a real stunt and has us sympathise with a King’s murderer.He is the real heart of the play: in him, Shakespeare gives us a real study of a great mind, stirred by ambition, derailed by false hopes and the siren song of the Witches, but uncommonly heroic in his determination.Throughout the play we see Macbeth thinking, even more than we do Hamlet (the Danish prince is smart enough to only show us what he wants us to see): Macbeth holds nothing back, and part of his problem is that he sees too much, and can articulate it so beautifully.When he hears that Lady Macbeth has died, we get this acknowledgment that all lives must end, even hers, even his:MACBETH: She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
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.
[V, 5]There’s a little nod to the theatre even here — Shakespeare’s most moving images all come from what he knows best.For a deeper and more complete understanding of the most Scottish of plays, some good affiliatory material are Diane Purkiss’ book The Witch in History and Bill Cain’s play Equivocation.

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Anthony and Cleopatra is one of the most famous plays — but not exactly as Egyptian as one might think. It’s a play full of English people, pretending to be romans, talking about Egypt.This is the third and last play named after a central couple: we had Romeo and Juliet, where Shakespeare rallied over the limits of comedy and created a tragedy of love against a background of youth and civic disobedience; Troilus and Cressida, a couple that’s a little older amid a conflict that’s a little bigger; and now we get to Anthony and Cleopatra, a little older again and this time the backdrop is a war for all the world.It’s an interesting notion that perhaps the actor playing Anthony had once been a Romeo, a Troilus, and the same Anthony in Julius Caesar: it could very well be so, as Polonius’ line in Hamlet seems to suggest («I did enact Julius Caesar»), and then perhaps we could imagine the same man coming back to the stage as he got a little older himself, as he started to realise that he wasn’t perhaps the romantic hero he used to enact anymore.However the case may be, the Anthony in this play definitely is starting to feel his age: and amazingly, the play begins — and it is the only play which does so — with a negative:PHILO: Nay, but this dotage of our general's
O'erflows the measure.
[I, 1]Within these few words, spoken by a frustrated roman, we get a map of the play’s ideas: we start in the middle of a conversation (in that most Shakespearian manner), and this roman, Philo, is arguing that Anthony’s dotage — this infatuation for this Egyptian lover — is overflowing, excessive. Love, lust, Egyptian delights, all are excessive and irresponsible behaviour: and this is what the play really seems to be about.According to the Folio, the title of this play reads The Tragedy of Anthony, and Cleopatra: she’s an afterthought; it’s his play, and she features. The number of lines given to the two characters seems to prove this: he has more, she doesn’t have as many.But, he dies in Act Four — and she dominates Act Five, and when she dies, so does the play. And of all the female characters in all Shakespeare, there is none as fascinating, as difficult or as powerful as Cleopatra.Obviously, you couldn’t really make a show about a roman general being bewitched in Egypt without providing a compelling reason for his dotage: Shakespeare makes Cleopatra a bit older than what she might’ve been in history, but he fills the play with her charms, her mutability, and her poetry. She’s frustrating, changeable, voluptuous, but a lot fun too!And none of the other women in Shakespeare are as powerful as she is: she gets to lead her own army, and she gets to control her own death. Someone might argue that Lady Macbeth is just as powerful, but there is a sense of her being cut off rather too quickly — but it’s not so with Cleopatra: if anything, her theatrical power only grows throughout the course of the play, so that it feels like it’s entirely her universe, and her play by the time it’s over.Anthony and Cleopatra was written just a few years after the death of Queen Elizabeth I: and it might have taken inspiration from the glorious Sovereign, who likewise felt like she was writing herself into the books of history, who resisted and manipulated marriage for the fear of what it might do to the stability of her power and her Kingdom, who was aware of how famous she was, who worked hard to flood the realm with pictures and images of herself, so that she could be in the hearts and imaginations of all her subjects.When Shakespeare describes Cleopatra’s public appearances, moments when it feels like even the air rushes out of the building so that it can follow her and catch a glimpse of her, it must have certainly dawned on the minds of his audiences that they too lived in a city which had been ruled by such a similarly powerful woman.Of course, Cleopatra does get called some terrible names throughout the course of the play, from gypsy to whore and much worse by the Romans of this world — she is a foreign other, a malign temptation.But back in Rome, people are fascinated with her, and are eager to find out what she might be like, what she might be doing.In fact, one famous speech in Shakespeare is a description of her by a roman:ENOBARUS: The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar'd all description: she did lie
In her pavilion—cloth-of-gold of tissue—
O'er-picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature: on each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-colour'd fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did.
[II, 2]And what’s even more interesting — this passage is actually a polished version of a fragment by Plutarch.In short, everyone seems to be spending the play thinking or talking about her: even Octavius, her main antagonist, is obsessed. On some level, you have to feel whether he needs to have her, if he ever hopes to lead Rome. Both Julius Caesar and Anthony have been her lovers, and we get a sense that he too wants her, whether romantically or politically.Shakespeare does not let us forget about how enchanting she is. As Domitius Enobarus continues:ENOBARUS: Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women cloy
The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies; for vilest things
Become themselves in her: that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish.
[II, 2]But she would have undoubtedly been played by a young man: as we move towards the older plays, we start to have some more powerful women — older, and more demanding than the girls who dressed as boys in the earlier plays. They all seem to be somewhat beyond the boy players whose voices have yet to break.Even when all is lost, Shakespeare still has Cleopatra refuse being brought back to Rome, displayed as a foreign prisoner, being commented and scrutinised as an inanimate object. She says:CLEOPATRA: Nay, 'tis most certain, Iras: saucy lictors
Will catch at us, like strumpets; and scald rhymers
Ballad us out o' tune: the quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels; Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I' the posture of a whore.
[V, 2]Remarkably daring: he has the character refuse the very thing we are watching. She, Cleopatra, resents the idea that she might be played by a boy, squeaking before reaching adolescence, who might, as she puts it, «boy her greatness».It’s a great nod to the limits of gender in the plays — the greatest one — and how even Shakespeare seems to revolt against them.This is another strange moment: presumably, the «monument» was the raised area of the stage likewise used for Juliet’s balcony and so on. It’s written into the text that Anthony, mortally wounded, is pushed and pulled up to the height of the platform, and Cleopatra and her ladies help him in.At this point, he’s still trying to speak, and she talks over him: they have so much to say, it really does «o'erflows the measure» [I, 1].But for all their talking, we get a quite surfaced depiction of their characters: they are celebrities, and what interests them both is how they play these roles.Cleopatra is constantly changing: she’s happy, sad, angry, defiant, petulant, beckoning, always on, always fresh, keeping Anthony intrigued and having to work for her. She’s constantly performing for him.When they’re tired or they’re fighting, it takes one to say «I’ll be Anthony» before the other agrees that then «Yes, I’ll be Cleopatra again» [III, 13].It’s as though they themselves are intrigued with the depth of their personas and their character.It’s fascinating that Anthony dies first: throughout the whole play, he is in continuous decadence, as Shakespeare mirrors the more level-headed sequence of events — he got distracted in Egypt, lost control, and eventually died there as Octavian seized power.It takes a remarkable actor to play Anthony, because of this decline throughout. He is the negative with which the play begins. He is not the rising star that dominates Julius Caesar anymore — this time, he is bloated, jitted, weakened, and getting a bit older.In contrast, Cleopatra seems to grow and rise throughout the course of the play. She’s the one who has immortal longings, she is (as she says) «fire and air» [V, 2]. She talks herself into «celebrity immortality» — and she does it for Anthony too.Despite valiant attempts from Dolabella (one of the politicians) to get a word in, her description grows and grows,CLEOPATRA: I dream'd there was an Emperor Antony:
O, such another sleep, that I might see
But such another man!
[V, 2]
But, if there be, or ever were, one such,
It's past the size of dreaming: nature wants stuff
To vie strange forms with fancy; yet, to imagine
And Antony, were nature's piece 'gainst fancy,
Condemning shadows quite.
[V, 2]Anthony is «past the size of dreaming»: he is beyond the colossus that destroyed the narrow world lamented by Cassius in that earlier play.For Cleopatra, it’s only after Anthony has died that she starts to speak of him in these epoch-making terms. Whether she knew or not, Shakespeare and the audience would have undoubtedly known that after Anthony, and after her, Octavian would issue in a new empire — particularly important for an audience in London, where the Puritan movement was starting to gain attention.It was during the reign of Octavius, in fact, that Christ was born. These two men each represent a new empire, a new world that dawns in the aftermath of Cleopatra’s death.Anthony and Cleopatra is a play about the end of an era, the end of a regime, and there is something heroic, spectacular, about how these two heroes know their time is up — and how they exit.Anthony is eclipsed by Cleopatra, who controls her death and leaves her capturers wonder how she died. She does not hang around, she does not try to change anything, and the world of the play — her world, in her play, does not survive long afterwards.Just as has happened to Malcom at the end of Macbeth, or whoever is favoured to pronounce the last lines in King Lear, Octavian ends this play: the three plays, all written the same year, are ended by people who have not had a major impact on the plays they were in.Octavian, to be fair, did hover and was present throughout the play as a sort of antagonist force, and like the two protagonists, he has «immortal longings» of his own, but he is smart enough to acknowledge he is seeing the end of something important:OCTAVIAN: No grave upon the earth shall clip in it
A pair so famous. High events as these
Strike those that make them; and their story is
No less in pity than his glory which
Brought them to be lamented. Our army shall
In solemn show attend this funeral;
And then to Rome. Come, Dolabella, see
High order in this great solemnity.
[V, 2]

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This is one of Shakespeare’s least accessible plays — of all them, it’s the one that’s the least comfortable giving up its secrets: but this is, perhaps, the point.As for all Shakespeare’s roman plays, it’s drawn from Plutarch’s Lives of the Greeks and Romans, but the story of Coriolanus is from a much earlier period of roman history — far before it became an empire.Shakespeare’s audience would’ve known the name (if they knew it at all) as one to associate with «betrayal» and «turning your back on your people»: Coriolanus did defect to the Volscians, but he ultimately came home and worked for Rome in the end.It’s quite a peculiar story for Shakespeare to have taken on, for this is a Rome seething with unrest: the play opens with the common people, as does Julius Caesar, but in much less of a good mood here, as they are marching to fight against their conditions — in fact, they’re starving because of grain shortages.In 1607, when this play was written, there had been many comparable demonstrations in England — known collectively as the «Midlands Revolts» — because many people were likewise starving: a combination of poor harvests and new measures allowing people to enclose common lands, meant that food was increasingly scarce.Interestingly, it doesn’t become a play about the power of the people, or daily bread; instead the angry population sets the scene for Rome, and slowly we’re drawing to the orbit of the title character.He begins the play as Caius Marcius, and from his first entrance, he seems to be little interested in the common people. In his first breath on stage, he calls them «Scabs» [I, 1].Despite this unpleasant introduction, he is afterwards praised for his military achievements against the Volscians at Corioli, one of their main cities. It’s for this that he’s given his new name, Coriolanus.Next he’s encouraged to run for political office — the thinking being that since he’s  such a good military operator, he might do Rome good as a politician too — but the trouble is that the first step in this is to speak exactly to the common people, and he’s not exactly good at this.Interestingly, Shakespeare seems to cut down on soliloquies in this play: unlike Hamlet, who relies on our attention and gains our sympathy by talking to us throughout his play, Coriolanus doesn’t really get us in at all. It’s almost as if we are an extent of these common people whom he doesn’t want to connect with.He doesn’t speak to us — and so we find it very hard to side with him.This is a play about men, and manhood, and what it means to be a good roman. We’ve already got two plays about the «noblest romans of them all» (JC [V, 5]), and now Shakespeare seems to have deliberately chosen to make a play about a roman who’s so notorious for his ignoble behaviour: abandoning his city, and then trying to make his story into a stage tragedy.We hear all about nobility, about class, about how to be a politician, how to be a soldier — but despite the fact that we meet Coriolanus’ wife and his young son and his mother, there doesn’t seem to be much discussion about how to be a husband, or a father.Coriolanus’ own father doesn’t feature: but there is a character called Menenius, an influential older man who is a far better politician and has some of the most interesting speeches of the play.As always, it’s hard to decode whose side Shakespeare might really be on: there are arguments to be made and support in either camp, and indeed this play has continued to ignite political behaviour for centuries. Of all Shakespeare’s plays, it’s this one that the old German master Bertolt Brecht chose to adapt — incidentally giving much more attention to the common people of Rome.This balance of opposing forces is knitted into a real person in the ladder portion of the play: we meet Aufidius, the Volscians’  leader and Coriolanus’ counterpart, so they are evenly matched.They spar throughout the remainder of the play, and there’s a kind of knowing awareness that between them is a death match: each knows he will eventually have to kill the other, or die in the attempt.When Coriolanus’ political plans fail — because he cannot bring himself to accept the idea of popular rule — Tribunes arrange for him to be banished. And in a terrific fit of rage, he banishes Rome from his sight instead.He decides that there is a world elsewhere, and he chooses to go join the Volscians,  those that he got a new name for defeating.There’s an interesting scene when he reaches their city: Aufidius doesn’t recognize him — in fact this is a recurring theme throughout the play: none can quite explain what Coriolanus really looks like, there’s nothing about him that’s really eye-catching, or memorable, or that you can really pin down, and maybe this is one of the reasons why the play can feel so inaccessible: not only is he withholding and difficult; anyone else is talking about how they themselves can’t get a hand on him either.Another quite hard thing to assimilate is how on earth would a young boy player have played Coriolanus’ mother, Volumnia: Cleopatra might’ve been the most fascinating woman Shakespeare has ever created, but Volumnia is by far the most commanding. She makes poor work of her daughter-in-law Virgilia, and dominates every scene in which she appears.It is thanks only to her intercession that the Volscians do not sack Rome: where all others fail to get through to Coriolanus, she manages, in a really amazing scene, to appeal to his deepest self and make him realise that he cannot wreck the city of his birth. And he himself by the end of all this knows what he has to do, and that it’ll probably be the death of him.Soon enough, he manages to broker a truce, but he is stabbed to death because of it.Just about any of Shakespeare’s plays can be made relevant if you see them from the right angle: this one feels like it’s screaming out for interpretation at all times, in a variety of different contexts — there’s a repugnance for general ignorance, and the poor political decisions that can be made by an incapable populus. The people, manipulated terribly and to a shocking extent by the Tribunes who have their own interests in mind are forced to realise that they have shouted very loudly for something that is now leaving them deeply vulnerable, hungrier than ever.There’s a great deal in the play about names, and about reputation: in ancient Rome, there was a particular punishment called damnatio memoriae, condemnation of memory — this was reserved to these whose influence was so damaging that it was decreed they’d be left out of all political accounts.Volumnia in particular is aware of this threat, that can so terribly and resolutely cancel someone’s name from history, and make them vanish into nothing. And in that powerful scene she reminds her son of it:VOLUMNIA: Thou know'st, great son,
The end of war's uncertain, but this certain,
That, if thou conquer Rome, the benefit
Which thou shalt thereby reap is such a name,
Whose repetition will be dogg'd with curses;
Whose chronicle thus writ: 'The man was noble,
But with his last attempt he wiped it out;
Destroy'd his country, and his name remains
To the ensuing age abhorr'd.'
[V, 3]Thanks to Shakespeare, the name Coriolanus has attracted a sort of tortured heroism: doing the right thing in the end despite your previous anger and choices that it may actually kill you.Shakespeare managed to change the reputation attached to this name: the final words are given to Aufidius, who insists that even though Coriolanus has widowed and orphaned so many of the Volscians, he will nevertheless have a noble memory:AUFIDIUS: My rage is gone;
And I am struck with sorrow. Take him up.
Help, three o' the chiefest soldiers; I'll be one.
Beat thou the drum, that it speak mournfully:
Trail your steel pikes. Though in this city he
Hath widow'd and unchilded many a one,
Which to this hour bewail the injury,
Yet he shall have a noble memory. Assist.
[V, 6]

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Proteus and Valentine are two “gentlemen” living in Verona. Proteus has a lover, Julia, while Valentine decides to go to Milan to «see the world»: in the original print there must be a mistake or a severe lack of knowledge of Italian geography, as the man apparently travels by ship; and it is not even clear whether his destination is Milan, or if it actually is Padua.While in Milan, Valentine falls in love with a young lady, Silvia, who eventually reciprocates his feelings. Proteus, however, decides to go to Milan as well to see how his friend is doing, and (quickly forgetting Julia) falls in love with Silvia, talking ill about his former lover and therefore making her an outcast in the city (good thing then that she decided to join Proteus in Milan by traveling dressed as a man to ensure a better protection; here Shakespeare is also introducing the trope of his usual heroine who dresses up as a boy to get to her ends).Proteus, in the meanwhile, seduces Silvia and brings her into a forest near the city, where he basically tries to assault her. The ending seems inevitable, but luckily Valentine pops up and stops the friend from continuing. Surprisingly, he’s not offended nor indignant, and instead, to save their «holy» friendship, suggests Proteus should keep Silvia.The idea of male friendship being the highest level of love is a recurring motif through Shakespeare’s works, both in his Plays and in his Sonnets, but no neo-platonic ideal can condone the terrible actions the two commit: Valentine, being helplessly clueless and ignorant, as well as slightly misogynistic by implying his friend’s opinion is far more important than his alleged lover’s; and Proteus (the real villain of the story), by acting dishonestly and remorselessly, abusing his position and degenerating as far as cheating on Julia and almost raping poor Silvia. The title, therefore, has an undoubtedly ironic connotation. We can assume Shakespeare’s intent when writing this play was simply to expose the (still common) mistreatment of women by presenting an array of equally detrimental examples.The two women in this play still do not have any of the importance female characters will later have in Shakespeare’s Comedies, being reduced as nothing more than objects men can toy and play with as they please: this very patriarchal vision would have already been perceived as old and antiquate in Elizabethan times, where women could accept of refuse engagement offerings, but the underlying misogyny and the very serious topics the play presents are hard to ignore. Not even the suggestion that the location, Italy, would allegedly have inspired Shakespeare to go down this «wondrous» dark route is much of an excuse: Italians were believed to be very passionate people, still living in old, hot and boiling times, under the protection of such an outdated régime such as that of the Catholic Church, but this remains only a weak explanation.Lastly, it is worth mentioning the only really comical character with no evident downsides in his figure: Launces (Proteus’ servant), who funnily laments how in his situation, the master allegedly is his dog and he is only the animal’s poor servant. This figure is a stark contrast to the behavior of the two «gentlemen», who instead treat their ladies like nothing more than beasts to be pleased by.

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The play starts in a rather unordinary way: Cristopher Sly, an utterly unpleasant drunken, is presented after a night spent drinking. A group of people, allegedly his friends, decide to pull a prank on him and have him believe, when he comes back to his senses, that he actually is apart of the nobility and that he’s betrothed to a young maid – actually Bartholomew, the page of one of them.The page is instructed on how to act like a perfect maid: a condescending, loving and accepting lover to Sly. In order to distract Sly from noticing his wife actually isn’t a woman, the friends prepare a play for the newly engaged: that is when the actual Taming of the Shrew starts.The «shrew» in question here is Katherina, the first daughter of a wealthy man of Padua, Baptista. Unlike her sister Bianca, Kate is very disrespectful, rude and ill educated (in short, everything Bartholomew was told not to be). That, in such a patriarchal society, was usually considered as absolutely horrible behaviour, but we could make a case for her just being frustrated at a family and at a social context that does not understand her nor try to value her real feelings and opinions.Furthermore, she’s not as pretty nor as sweet as her sister, and that puts the latter in somewhat of a sad situation. Bianca in fact can’t marry until Kate is engaged, and nothing but her hefty dowry is there to support her sister. That is, until Petruchio, a materialistic man drawn by no other reason than her wealth, proposes to Kate: the girl is forced to accept and eventually gets tamed by her husband, the only one strong enough to succeed in such a deed. It is not clear whether the two actually fall in love with each other or whether nothing more than pure hate unites them. A connection is in any case present, as it is the electricity of the pair that gets the plot moving. In fact, it is a popular belief among scholars that nothing other than this particular relation, and Shakespeare’s name being attached to this Play, makes it worth-studying.What many companies do, in any case, is to have the same actor who played Sly at the beginning continue as Petruchio: that is how he ought to be to his newly engaged «maid». Although still never staged this way, it would also make sense to have Bartholomew play Kate.The play ends with Kate, whose last speech leaves a very sour and resigned sense to women’s position at the time (position that was maybe exaggerated in the various plays Shakespeare composed, but that still had true elements rooted in English society): in it, she describes how women are actually both capable and worth of much more, but that sadly nobody seems to realise it and they are therefore forced into moulds they are not naturally made to fit into. A totally destabilising perspective, that makes us understand the real condition Kate finds herself in and how even a wild soul like hers can’t really do anything to fight against such a commonly shared belief.KATHERINA: 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 forward 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.
[V, 2]It is easy to judge Kate as a rude, mad woman who needs to be stopped, and when Petruchio actually manages to tame her the immediate reaction is to relax and be satisfied it finally happened, but in reality The taming of the Shrew should be analysed from a somewhat different point of view, starting with questioning whether the «Shrew» in question is really one to begin with, and not just the construct of what society has made her become.

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This is one of Shakespeare's earliest works, and shortest besides. It readapts the common trope of long-lost twins who eventually reunite in a happy ending. It is worth mentioning the allusions to Shakespeare's own set of twins, who didn’t live with him in London and who therefore would have undoubtedly helped deepen the ever-present theme in the play of being separated by one’s own kin.In The Comedy Of Errors, a husband and a wife are separated during a sea tempest, and with one twin each (and accompanied by one servant each – the poor servants also being twins) part ways. Years later, the father, whom is attempting to reunite with his own twin (who’d departed to go look for his couplet), finds himself in an enemy city, Ephesus, and only avoids a death sentence by appropriately touching the governor: he is therefore given one day to find someone who could help him pay a wager of some thousand bucks – and, going through a various succession of improbable but equally funny events, ends up with an even happier ending: the complete reunion of his family.The strictness of the state in Ephesus and of the composition of the play itself (set in only one place and in one day, respecting the Aristotelian rules) is a stark contrast to the actual state of the city, full of magic, witchcraft, alchemy, astronomy, and other various arts and sciences. Ephesus is a mystical place, but the play’s geography is not limited to the eastern-European city: Syracuse and other Mediterranean cities are also mentioned, alongside Ireland and going so far as America (the only time the name appears in Shakespeare). Obviously, geographical accuracy was not among Shakespeare's main interests when writing the play, but the overall abundance is a recurring motif: witchcraft is here mentioned more than in Macbeth, magic more than in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and madness more than in Hamlet. A hectic, esoteric, difficult place.The play was inspired by a work of Plautus, Menaechmi, who in his time had also worked with the ever-successful twin trope. Shakespeare, however, does make a few adaptations and enriches the plot with placing in another set of twins (the two servants). Plautus had set his play on the Albanian shore, but Shakespeare probably decided to move the setting to Ephesus both because it was easier to pronounce, and because the people in London would’ve been familiar with it thanks to Saint Paul’s letters. Having set the play in Ephesus, besides, also gives him the chance to mention the old temple of Diana, by having the wife and mother be a sort of mystical priestess in the city’s religious centre.

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The play starts with four young men, respectively the King and princes of Navarre, taking a vow to not entangle in any romantic activity for the duration of a year, that will instead be spent focusing on their studies. Their intentions however seem to be destined to fail, as the arrival of the princess of France and of her three ladies is announced.The plot therefore takes off with the men trying to resist the subtle advances of the women, who have obviously come to enjoy themselves and preferably find adequate parties, and it finally ends with the four arrangements being confirmed, but sadly postponed to the following year after receiving the news of the King of France passing away. The ending is therefore bittersweet, and although being referred to as a comedy it is by far not one of Shakespeare's most funny works (if anything, it feels like Shakespeare is here resisting any chance of having Love Labour’s end well).The play is full of high stylistic choices and Latinisms, all to make a very complicated, elegant language: we can therefore assume it was not really catered to the common groundlings, but rather for a private audience. The occasion in question might be some sort of celebration at Oxford (scholars would have undoubtedly understood all the aulic references), or a private event dedicated to Queen Elizabeth.The female protagonist (the princess of France) seems in fact to be somewhat of a reflection of Elizabeth I, being very amiable, polite, intelligent and diplomatically exceptional: the apparently perfect character seems to be an homage to the Queen.The other Ladies also have very strong characters, but perhaps not as refined: they all are very witty and shrewd, and in Rosaline’s case also somewhat aggressive – she is in fact the most hot-headed among them all, and in fact eventually gets together with the most reticent of the princes, creating a relationship that is reminiscent to Benedick and Beatrice’s in Much Ado About Nothing.It is not by chance, for example, that Rosaline’s the only «dark-haired» Lady, indicating her magnetic wickedness that contrasts the other two, presumably fair and blonde. Although there is no clear indication, it is a common belief the princess should instead be a redhead.Her name, lastly, is somewhat reminiscent of the Rosaline in Romeo and Juliet: although she never appears in the latter play, it is nice to think of her as the same girl, trying again to seize her chance, possibly still having to learn the lesson that she’d better stay away from the confessions and the profusions of young, passionate and hot-headed men.One of the most interesting characters, however, is hands down Don Armado, a man at the court of Navarre: Armado is a witty and funny lad, with a liking to double-meaning comments and remarks. His name is a clear quotation of the «Gran Armada», the Spanish navy Elizabeth had successfully defeated. Don Armado is an interesting character because of his way of expressing himself, often making him look quite unconnected to real and actual matters, and overall mad. His Spanish origins, his tendency to alienate from reality, and his helplessly likeable personality all make him very similar to another very famous protagonist in European literature – none other than Cervantes’ extravagant Don Quixote, the mad protagonist of the author’s homonymous novels.It is unlikely that Love Labour’s Lost Armado was inspired by Don Quixote, as the play was published at least some fifteen years before the novel, and the suggestions of some scholars that Cervantes’ ageless protagonist would actually be inspired by Shakespeare's Don Armado seem just as improbable: although timing would in this case match, how Cervantes would’ve been able to stumble across one of Shakespeare's less famous plays and get inspiration from one of its secondary characters is anyone’s guess. We might simply refer to this similarity as a «happy accident», and an impressive ability from the authors to gather the time’s current ideas and use them as a filter through which to create these witty, crazy characters.

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This is a play Polonius would have described as «pastoral-comical». The pastoral genre had had a sudden resurgence in late XVI Century England, London specifically, where fresh air and green fields free of any pollution or overpopulated areas were ever-so-rare.Despite its characteristic settings (longing for the calmness, the lightness and the simplicity of pastoral areas), however, pastoral works were usually filled with very aulic language, and many mythological and classical references. Not by chance, in fact, had the genre first set its roots in Ancient Greece, and had progressed to inspire many works of which Virgil’s Bucolics or the Arcadia’s poets’ poems are only few examples.The main source material for As You Like It is actually a prose tale called Rosalynde by Thomas Lodge (1590), which Shakespeare – as always – expands and adapts to transform it into a much more charming story (the world «sweet» appears over twenty times in this play only!)This was also one of the first plays performed at the Globe, the company’s own wooden treasure. When Jacques, a Jester, jokes about «fools» gathered «into a circle» [II, 5], that is a clear reference to the shape of the theatre:JACQUES:
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;
Then the whining school-boy, 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 every thing.
[II, 7]The story narrated is set in France and is about a young man, named Orlando. He is brother to Oliver, although not very loved by the latter (here, perhaps, Shakespeare is introducing the theme of brothers as enemies, which he will continue in Julius Caesar and obviously in Hamlet), and unlike his Italian counterpart (the passionate protagonist of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, a work that had travelled around Europe thanks to its great success), Shakespeare's Orlando is gentle, quiet, and generally mild. It is therefore a big surprise to everyone when he manages to defeat Charles (the court’s wrestler) in duel. He is however informed of Oliver’s plan against him, and decides to flee to the forest of Arden, accompanied by Adam, an old but faithful man (and it is rumoured, moreover, that he might have been played by Shakespeare himself).Orlando is not the only one who is forced to run away: still at court, Rosalind (Duke Friedrich’s niece) is banished by the Duke, by no other apparent reason than being her father’s (Duke Senior, Friedrich’s brother) daughter. She and her cousin, – although their bond is described as closer than sisterhood – Celia (daughter to Friedrich), are therefore also forced to flee to the forest, bringing another person with them: Touchstone, the court’s Jester. Only, Rosalind — appropriately considering that she’ll be much safer if travelling disguised as a boy — changes her appearance upon departure.The Forest of Arden (whose name is another curious nugget of information: Arden is both reminiscent of the fairyland forest of Ardennes, in France, and of Shakespeare's mother’s name — Mary Arden, born and raised in the village of Arden — and we can therefore understand why he connected that name to the countryside), where all have fled, is the actual «pastoral» setting of the play: and in a mixture of biblical and mythological references, the place where all the intricate plot line takes place. It is within its branches that Rosalind (disguised as Ganymede, a young boy whose name, apart from being a clear mythological reference, also commonly indicated a young man liked by an older one), meeting Orlando (who, much like Ariosto’s mad protagonist, had in the meanwhile been going around leaving papers with Rosalind’s name all around the forest), jokes with him and runs circles around him, contorting the perception that the audience has on her — or his — gender (and it is also worth noting that in Shakespeare's times a boy would’ve played the part); it is among its bushes that Touchstone falls madly in love with Audrey, a simple country girl, and they passionately plan their wedding; it is under that clear and fresh sky that Phoebe (a name common enough for Greek maids), a local shepherdess, falls madly in love with Ganymede, ignoring Silvius’ (himself a Shepherd, whose name means «of the forest») many woos. It is above that most green ground, lastly, that Oliver (sent by Friedrich to find his brother, Rosalind and Celia) is miraculously saved by a sudden attack by Orlando himself, and so while the two reconcile Celia also has the time to fall in love with Oliver.In the end, four marriages are celebrated: Celia and Oliver’s, Touchstone and Audrey’s, Silvius and Phoebe’s (the latter forced to accept reality when informed that Ganymede is not actually a man; and the former either so low in self-dignity as to accept the hand of someone who so clearly despises him, or simply moved by the necessity of sealing a marriage in the not-so-populated countryside), and lastly Orlando and Rosalind’s. The only person who does not get married is Jacques, the forest’s own Jester, something of a bitter creature who is however well looked after by everyone. The same, after all, also happens to old Adam: in this Eden where he has no Eve, this absence is made up by the cures of everyone around him. Even Duke Friedrich, at last, after a meeting with a holy man, forgives everyone (his brother Senior included), and speaks the famous lines there is «good in everything» [II, 1], which seem most fitting for this jovial world. Only Jacques, keeping us afoot, reminds us of the peculiarity of Friedrich’s sudden change, and refuses to believe it and to follow everyone back at court.The play, however, ends with an epilogue (rare enough in Shakespeare to be interesting but not rare enough as to be extraordinary): it is Rosalind who speaks, and with one last flourish stirs the pot of gender confusion once again. Her way is «to conjure you» [V, 4]: it could just mean a pact to which we all swear (following the literal meaning of the verb; to swear together), but it could also be that she is weaving her spell on all the theatre. In a play that’s all about performance, and change, this is a most fitting – and enchanting – ending.ROSALIND: It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue; but
it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue. If it
be true that good wine needs no bush, 'tis true that a good play
needs no epilogue. Yet to good wine they do use good bushes; and
good plays prove the better by the help of good epilogues. What a
case am I in then, that am neither a good epilogue, nor cannot
insinuate with you in the behalf of a good play! I am not
furnish'd like a beggar; therefore to beg will not become me. My
way is to conjure you; and I'll begin with the women. I charge
you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of
this play as please you; and I charge you, O men, for the love
you bear to women- as I perceive by your simp'ring none of you
hates them- that between you and the women the play may please.
If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that
pleas'd me, complexions that lik'd me, and breaths that I defied
not; and, I am sure, as many as have good beards, or good faces,
or sweet breaths, will, for my kind offer, when I make curtsy,
bid me farewell.
[V, 4]

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This play seems to have been personally requested by Queen Elizabeth, to satisfy her want of «another play with Sir Fallstaff in't», possibly where he could fall in love with some woman. It is therefore reasonable to assume the second Henry IV had still not been published, for the interactions between the timeless knight and Mistress Quickly could very well be described as «comic romance». The year of its publishing would therefore seem to be around 1597.Another curious fact about the play lies in its setting: though (or perhaps exactly because) the plot is of no particular complexity, Shakespeare could have easily made it more interesting by setting it in a more exotic place like France or Germany, but he instead settles for the countryside town of Windsor, making it what is often described as the most «English» of all his works. It is also worth remembering that this is a pretty rural Comedy, full of wordplay and even some smutty references. For all that, it is also the play with the least amount of verse, being composed of almost 90% prose.The reason why people believe the setting to be so domestic is easily explained: Windsor was a town of little to no importance, but what it did have was the Castle of Windsor, which the play references directly: towards the end of it, in fact, a long speech is given mentioning how perfectly cured it must be, in advance of something special happening there. That «something» is linked to the fact that an important investiture was taking place in 1997: that of the honorary title of the Knight of the Order of the Garter (the highest order of chivalry within the English aristocracy), founded in 1348 in Windsor by Edward III. The association is not only made evident by the historical facts, but also by the very nature of the speech given by Mrs. Quickly towards the end of the play, which has various mentions of heraldry and blazonry:MRS. QUICKLY: About, about;
Search Windsor Castle, elves, within and out:
Strew good luck, ouphes, on every sacred room:. That it may stand till the perpetual doom,
In state as wholesome as in state 'tis fit,
Worthy the owner, and the owner it.
The several chairs of order look you scour
With juice of balm and every precious flower:
Each fair instalment, coat, and several crest,
With loyal blazon, evermore be blest!
And nightly, meadow-fairies, look you sing,
Like to the Garter's compass, in a ring:
The expressure that it bears, green let it be,
More fertile-fresh than all the field to see;
And 'Honi soit qui mal y pense' write
In emerald tufts, flowers purple, blue and white;
Let sapphire, pearl and rich embroidery,
Buckled below fair knighthood's bending knee:
Fairies use flowers for their charactery.
Away; disperse: but till 'tis one o'clock,
Our dance of custom round about the oak
Of Herne the hunter, let us not forget.
[V, 5]In 1597, this title was to be given to Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon: he was cousin to Elizabeth, and (perhaps more importantly) the patron of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, Shakespeare's own company. This would very well explain why Shakespeare composed a play set in Windsor, celebrating in it the Castle of Windsor being prepared for an important celebration.As mentioned before, the plotline is nothing particularly extravagant: it initially sees Fallstaff arrive to the town in a shortage of money, and already in trouble for having poached a deer. The town in which he finds himself in is quite a normal one (and Shakespeare more than any other playwright knew how life in those little English villages worked), and two of the prevalent figures there are Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, who resolutely rule over their husbands and who attract the attention of Fallstaff ─ who, hoping for some pecuniary reward, starts courting them.The two women, however, run circles around him exactly like they do with their respective partners: they therefore trick him into hiding in a basket full of dirty clothes awaiting for laundry (only to then dump it all in the river), convince him to dress up as Mistress Ford's maid's aunt, the obese and terrific Witch «of Brentford» [IV, 2] (and this makes Fallstaff the only character in all of Shakespeare who, as a man, dresses up as a woman), and lastly have him dress as «Herne the Hunter» [V, 5] (a legendary creature of their own invention who supposedly inhabited the wood close to Windsor), telling him to show up at night and meet them in the forest.As Falstaff makes his own appearance with a brief soliloquy comparing himself to Jupiter (quite ironic considering his evident bad luck with courting the merry wives, and quite grand when catching the similarity between him and the Myth of Actaeon, a young boy who had been killed after having seen Diana naked in the forest ─ and Fallstaff likewise seemed to be helplessly looking for his own virgin goddess; this time none other than the Queen herself), the children of the town are gathered by the merry wives and instructed to pinch and bother Fallstaff, while making him believe they are fairies of the forest. So much for his poaching, Sir John ends up as the unfortunate poached deer.Among the fairy children is also Anne Page, daughter to Mistress Page. Her storyline is developed in the play too (it was probably a plotline Shakespeare already had in mind when Elizabeth requested yet another Fallstaff play): she is a young, clever girl who, according to her parents, should get married to two different suitors. While Mrs. Page is rooting for the French Dr. Caius, Mr. Page thinks Master Slender to be the best option. Obviously, Anne likes neither of the two, and instead falls in love with Fenton, a young gentleman of high social standing but with little money. Anne being rather rich, but of lower birth, their union would give the other exactly what they currently lack.During that last night spent in the forest, Mr. Page had arranged with Master Slender to run away with the girl, whom he’d be able to recognize as he’d make sure she was dressed in white. Mistress Page makes the same arrangement with Dr. Caius, but she would have her dressed in green. But Anne is way too clever to fall victim of such schemes, and informing Felton, she dresses up in neither colour, and runs away marrying her actual beloved instead. Fortunately, both parents are not disappointed by her choice, as they acknowledge theirs is a more than fair union.Other little nuggets present in the play are the apparent cosmopolitan attitude of the villagers of Windsor (for their being very traditionally English, more nations are named in the Merry Wives than in any other Shakespeare plays, and characters like Dr. Caius ─ as ridiculously French as Don Armado was Spanish ─ also inhabit the town), and the small references to Greek mythology («Herne the Hunter» being a clear example) and old languages in general. For his proverbial «Small Latin and less Greek», Shakespeare has Mrs. Quickly (who in the meanwhile had also made it to Windsor, participating even as «Queen of the Fairies») make quite a witty joke when commenting a lesson the extravagant host of The Garter Inn was giving young William Page on the Latin genitive case: for if William's genitive is horum, harum, horum, Mrs. Quickly suggests that if she be a whore, better let Jenny's case be without further commenting on it [IV, 1].The Merry Wives of Windsor most likely isn't among the favourite plays for any Falstaff enthusiast: for the timeless Sir John, so majestic in East Cheap London, seems to lose some of his grandeur in the quiet countryside town. Far from being one of his worst creations, this might just be Shakespeare's reminder that the place in which we dwell has a big influence on our spirits, and helps us become (or prevents us from becoming) who we truly aspire to be.

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Before even starting to discuss the play, there is much to discuss already about the title only: what has now become a rather common turning phrase in English, at the time Shakespeare coined it it may have had more than just the meaning we now associate it to today.In fact, many scholars seem to agree on the fact that at time «nothing» and «noting» were pronounced the same way — so the title can just as easily imply that the play is all about noting: and that includes seeing, spotting, earing, and even eavesdropping — other than warning us it’s not actually about that much.Finally, there is one last — and much ruder — explanation of the title: if Shakespeare had meant it as Much Ado about an O-thing, he would’ve been talking about nothing other than females’ genitals: but though (perhaps) a tantalising alternative, given how the plot later develops, it is unlikely the playwright had meant it to be this rather discourteous subject.Despite not being directly about them, the characters of Beatrice and Benedick are responsible for much of the play’s popularity: they are among the wittiest yet most vulnerable and relatable characters Shakespeare has ever written, and bound to have you spend an enjoyable time while reading about their shenanigans.The play is set in Messina, in the aftermath of some battle. Don Pedro of Aragon and his men have arrived to the Sicilian city with a view to staying for some time with Leonato, a local wealthy man.This being a perfect Shakespearian comedy, it can’t be too long until someone falls madly in love: and very conveniently, Leonato has a very pretty and charming daughter, Hero, and one of Don Pedro’s men — Claudio — immediately falls in love with her.Leonato also has a niece, Beatrice, who sometime in the past had had a liaison with another of Don Pedro’s men, Benedick: that relationship, however, does not really seem to have ended well, and now this kind of angry and mocking war has been established between them.But however headstrong the two may be, they are still the less complicated couple: Claudio is in fact shy and scared to pronounce his true feelings to Hero, so Don Pedro has to intervene and promises to help him do just that during the masked ball they had planned.So, much like in the Taming of the Shrew, we have got two couples: one seemingly uncomplicated young one, and an older pair who enjoys picking hairs at each other at all occasions — so far, we are set up for a perfect Shakespearian comedy!Interestingly, scholars have found a letter from some gentleman dating as back as 1598 talking about a comedy from Mr. Shakespeare called «Love Labour’s Won»: it was a rather shocking discovery, for we have no surviving play called Love Labour's Won, but a theory has arisen: as Love Labour's Lost ends at the point where everyone might just be happy, and Much Ado starts with many reunions and welcomings, we could hypothesise that Much Ado had been conceived as a sort of sequel to Love Labour’s, and that Love Labours Won might’ve been the play’s original name.However, Much Ado has a much more complicated plot: and much of it is thanks to the presence of a villain — in this case Don John, the bastard brother of Don Pedro, though as different from him as can be.Sulky and moody, from the very get go he announces he is a man «not of many words» [I, 1], and evidently finds no source of happiness in this jubilee, coming to the realisation that the only way to get through it is by deliberately messing with people, and persistently trying to mess with their happiness.The first attack is at the Masked Ball Leonato had so carefully set up: Don Pedro (as planned) is courting Hero on Claudio’s behalf, and John loses no time in finding Claudio, and pretending to confuse him for Benedick, he explains him how it is evident that Don Pedro is wooing Hero for himself.In the meanwhile, Beatrice had likewise pretended to confuse Benedick for someone else, giving him a total washout. She is however forced to stop when Claudio, upon receiving such news, takes a huge jolt, and only Beatrice at her most charming can calm the waters and set everything back into place.What is interesting is that nobody seems eager to question such a sudden and brutal behaviour, not even Hero. The play is in fact much more concerned with the relationships between the various men than with the women’s thoughts and feelings. Under that aspect, poor Hero especially is sadly underwritten.The play could easily end here, but Don John’s intervention is far too small and Beatrice and Benedick’s relationship too vague to allow such an abrupt ending: Leonato therefore insists they should wait at least a few days before getting married.Having time to kill, a new plot develops: the ladies, ecstatic at the idea of finally breaking Beatrice’s shell, will have her believe Benedick is madly in love with her, while the men will have Benedick believe Beatrice is madly in love with him.This sets up a great deal of noting: gossip, rumour, whispering and white lies all are generously showered on the two characters, and their hopeful reactions upon receiving such news are endlessly charming.Again, in the aftermath someone might have cared to point out Don John’s weird plotting and might have wondered what his intentions were, other than questioning why exactly Claudio had believed him, but such concerns seem to have happily exited everyone’s memory — but Don John’s.The bastard is in fact very sad at his failed attempt, and his men cook up a new plan in order to cheer him up: one of them, Borachio, will appear at one window with his girlfriend, Margaret, and make it seem like Margaret is Hero and therefore setting the poor innocent girl up as this heartless traitor: there really is no motive for such revenge, apart from perhaps the spite Don John takes for everyone else’s happiness, or perhaps for some secret feelings developed for Hero, or even Claudio himself.So, while Beatrice and Benedick gradually and charmingly fall in love, Don Pedro and Claudio are led to believe by Don John that Hero is actually painfully unfaithful.And as it always seems to go, no one has common sense enough to go and talk about things — they all simply and naturally assume every rumour to be true.Lastly comes the day of the wedding , where Claudio completely loses the run of himself, attacking Hero quite savagely, with one of the sourest, most spiteful speeches in all Shakespeare.Here the young soldier joins Troilus and Hamlet in the group of lads angrily and incessantly complaining about the inconsistency of women — only to be proved, much like the other two, perfectly wrong by the end.Thankfully Friar Francis (there to celebrate the wedding, and a much more compassionate fellow than his companion Friar Lawrence) takes the lead of situation: he suggests, in this key moment of Act IV, that everyone take a pause and listen for a moment: they will hide Hero away and pretend she is dead, so that anyone who’s done her wrong will hopefully repent and reveal themselves to ask for forgiveness.After this fiasco, Beatrice and Benedick find themselves alone in the Chapel, and end up admitting they are helplessly in love with each other — at least something seems to be going well, but in a most unexpected moment for the play, Beatrice (dead serious) answers Benedick’s request to tell him whatever she’d want him to do: she wants him to kill Claudio.Her frustration at not being a man, and consequently at not being able to fight Claudio herself, is powerful (though not as wicked and unnatural as Lady Macbeth’s), and she manages to convince Benedick to do it, other than to keep the secret of Hero’s «death».All this messy behaviour has been dragging the mood of this Italian comedy almost to that of a tragedy, but there is one last set of characters to appear: the Watch.Since it got rather dark at night at the time — electricity still not being a facility — watchmen were often hired to keep an eye on the streets: however, they weren’t exactly the brightest sparks, and all their rows usually turned out to be rather ineffective. Here they are deliberately hopeless, and their leader, Dogberry, is one if the most gloriously inarticulate characters in all Shakespeare.It is clear that the playwright purposefully made them so dim-witted because all the fun lies in them being the ones to uncover Don John’s plot: they in fact overhear his thugs laughing about their scheme to shame Hero, and manage to arrest them and bring the story to Leonato.All is revealed, Claudio repents heartily and everything would be okay — if only Hero weren’t dead.Conveniently, Antonio (Leonato’s brother) also turns out to have a daughter — who is so surprisingly similar to Hero! It is therefore suggested that if Claudio consented to marry her right away, without even doing so much as talking to her beforehand, all would be forgiven.The plan is agreed, and all the women appear veiled, until finally one of them unveils herself — it is obviously Hero, apparently not dead after all. «She died, but only until her slander lived» [V, 4].She an Claudio can be now happily married, if the soldier perhaps learns not to instantly believe everything he hears: all the troubles in their relationship wouldn’t have happened had he made less Ado about all this Nothing.Lastly, Benedick also mans up and asks in front of everyone which of the veiled beauties might be Beatrice. The two have one last skirmish of wit, trying to convince each other that they are only agreeing because they heard the other was dying of love for them so they will persist to keep the other alive and so on. And the only way to have them shut up is requested — a kiss.Two sets of imageries are particularly present all throughout: clothing, and dancing. It almost feels like an invitation.The way people dress in this world is particularly important: it seems like everything constantly needs to be «in good apparel». And dancing is an ever-recurring theme: there is a masked ball, at the end benedict suggest they hold a dance, and metaphors of dancing appear all throughout. Everything is dance!No wonder Beatrice should be so too — and she in fact gets one of the most loving self-descriptions in all literature: «There was a star danced, and under that was I born» [II, 1].After that very last dance starts, news arrive of Don John, who had ran away but had successfully been caught and arrested. But this rises no worries. He will be dealt with — tomorrow.Much is made of unfaithfulness, of sex outside marriage, and most importantly of John being a bastard (both in the old and current sense of the word): if the result of liaisons outside of wedlock oftentimes turns out to be this wicked, we might start to understand why in the play such a big deal has been made — and is sill made nowadays — about it.

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The play’s plot is mainly made up of three stories, all intertwined and communicating with each other: firstly, the one concerning Athens’ nobles and their attempts at carrying out the marriages they truthfully want (rather than those strict fathers or social instances would require).Theseus and Hippolyta’s the least problematic of the three unions, although the new King does not seem too concerned with the soon-to-be wife’s opinion on the match. We then have Hermia and Lysander, one the daughter to Egeus and the other a young man of a lower social extract: it is therefore no surprise that old Egeus would rather have Hermia married with Demetrius, another youth who is indeed into the young mistress.Unfortunately for him, the mistress’ heart already belongs to Lysander and in all this messy traffic, Demetrius is actually hurting poor Helena, Hermia’s friend and helplessly infatuated by his like.Problems start when Egeus, eager to see his daughter married to Demetrius, suggests the two should get married at the same time as Theseus and Hippolyta. Hermia, as a consequence, immediately tells Lysander and the two escape in the forest near the city, with a view to waiting in Lysander’s cottage until things get better. Hermia however contemporarily makes the mistake of informing Helena, who — convinced that Demetrius will be hers at last — tells him all about the couple’s plan, and is soon enough forced to follow a blindfolded lover into the forest, on a quest to find his crush.The second story is that of a company of travelling players, working hard to prepare a play they hope will be chosen as the main performance during the long awaited wedding between Theseus and Hippolyta. The players are somewhat rough, and definitely best fitted towards the comical, rather than tragical, but their drunken attempts at rehearsing are a good laughter inductor.The last story of the three is that which follows the doings of the forest’s fairies and magical creatures, led by King Oberon and Queen Titania, who have just gone through one of their frequent arguments.In that night of midsummer, in the bushy forest surrounding Athens (which is yet another geographical inaccuracy from Shakespeare, as surrounding the Greek capital there is no such thing, but that should not come to a surprise when realizing that the playwright’s intent is exactly that of rebuilding the setting to offset us, by throwing us in the very middle of the city known for its tragedies, and in the very depths of a wood that does not actually exist) the characters interact, bond, help and trick each other: from Oberon wanting to help poor Helena by sending Puck (his naughty, dwarf-like servant) to her rescue, impregnating her with the powers of winged Cupid and consequently making not only Demetrius, but also Lysander, to fall in love with her (and creating a reversing of roles Hermia was definitely not expecting); to Titania being tricked by her husband into luring one of the traveling players (whose head has been transformed into that of a Donkey) to sleep and possibly do some more things with her (and prompting the famous line «Methought I was enamour'd of an ass» [IV, 1]); to Egeus himself making his way into the forest and finding out the conflictual situation of the four lovers.In the end, helped by the magical aura that seems to reign, unstoppable, throughout the whole play, the wedding takes place, with all the right couples (Theseus and Hippolyta, Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius) ready to celebrate their immediate unions. The traveling company has appropriately also been chosen as the night’s entertainment, and showing its uncanny skills at making any tragical circumstance so ridiculous as to turn it into comedy performs a play about two unlucky suicides.The play ends with a last word from Puck, who seems to be the witty orchestrater of the whole play: his speech touches on a very intrinsic yet often overlooked element of theatre, that Shakespeare would have known full well (and that appears also in the play’s title) – its resemblance to a dream. When dreaming, we are fast forwarded into a world that is alienated from our ordinary lives, that transports us into another universe where we are but simple witnesses. A temporary place, where we are eventually forced to leave – just like a play:PUCK: If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.
[V, 1]

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The «Merchant» in question being Antonio, a very materialistic and money-thirsty man (as the city of Venice was conceived to be, after all, a full immersion of money, bargains and currency, all emphasised by the hot headed nature Italians were believed to have).Bassanio, Antonio’s friend, asks him to cover a bond of some thousand ducats to allow him to go court the wealthy heiress of Belmont, Portia. Antonio’s ships, however, are yet to arrive, and being in a money shortage he tells Bassanio he’s going to lend him the money he desires, if the friend manages to find him a lender.It is so that Bassanio reaches out to Shylock (one of Shakespeare's most memorable characters, and often mistaken as the protagonist of the play), a Jew who, as such, can freely work as a usurer, and who has already been antagonised by Antonio through the merchant’s talks showing his anti-Semitic tendencies. Shylock, rightfully offended by Antonio, agrees to serve as a lander, but if Antonio shouldn’t be able to give all the ducats back on a designated date, he would be allowed to take from him one pound of his flesh. Overly-confident as per his usual, Antonio easily agrees, seeing in the affair nothing but a bargain, and Bassanio is at last able to go visit Portia.In Belmont, the heiress is trying her best to resist any wedding proposals. Instead, she conceives a sort of a plan with which to trick her suitors: if they really want to have her hand, they’ll have to pick between three vases — a gold, a silver, and a lead one. The choice seems quite elementary, but all the rich suitors fail the challenge, either picking gold or silver. Bassanio, however, manages to make the right choice, and immediately becomes Portia’s betrothed. This could be just a reminder from Shakespeare that humbleness is always the way, but we cannot however ignore all the blatant hints that Portia gave him before he could make his choice, entertaining Bassanio with a speech full of words rhyming with «lead». The young Venetian is surprisingly rather liked by the rich heiress.Back in Venice, Antonio’s ships have drowned and he is incapable of repaying Shylock. The Jew, who after his daughter’s runaway with a young wicked Christian (Lorenzo) and after her conversion, is more angry than ever towards the Monotheistic faith. He therefore brings Antonio to court, where he hopes he can be rightfully avenged. Bassanio, as soon as he finds out about the process, quickly celebrates his marriage with Portia and rejoins the friend in Venice. Portia, however, does not want to be left in Belmont alone, and travels incognito as a man to follow her husband.During the process, the judge finds himself stuck, wanting to save Antonio but faced with the evidence that Shylock is technically in the right. He therefore decides to let a substitute speak, and that substitute is Portia herself, disguised as a Venetian: wanting to help Bassanio's friend, she makes the argument that Shylock will be free to take one pound of flesh from Antonio, but that he must not let even the tiniest droplet of blood out, as that was not in the plan. Cornered, Shylock is forced to give up his revenge, and to convert to Christianity unless he wants to be executed. The refund Bassanio had brought, instead, goes to his daughter and her partner. The usurer is therefore both humiliated and dehumanised, as he loses an otherwise correct deal and (most terribly) his faith and profession (Christians could not be usurers, as usury was seen as a sin).When Bassanio goes to thank the «substitute» (whom he does not recognize), Portia insists he gives her his ring as a means of truly expressing his gratitude: she's obviously testing him (she had gifted him her ring with the promise that he would never part from it), and Bassanio (after some initial reticence) gives in and gifts her the ring. The matter raises no problem, as later the substitute turns out to be Portia, but it does leave the public wondering how much Bassanio is actually invested in her sentimentally, and how much economically.The play ends with Portia informing Antonio his ships are actually not lost at sea, and that they are soon going to arrive. The news, however, do not seem to relieve Antonio that much, who at last answers the initial question he was pondering at the beginning of the play: «In sooth, I know not why I am so sad» [I, 1]. At the end, when everyone (poor Shylock spared) is content and where they truly want to be, he is left alone, bitterly realising he's actually in love with Bassanio! This explains why he was so willing to help the friend cover the bond, and why he dumps all his internal anger on other people, Shylock in particular — although this does not serve as an excuse; but rather as an explanation, and a pretty weak one at that.The real shadow that lies underneath the Merchant is Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, an outrageous play about a most wicked Jew, that however does not strictly transfer through Shakespeare's reinterpretation: Shylock could be easily written off as a rude, quick brute, but the playwright actually plays with him a lot more. Shylock has some of the most inventive and captivating prose Shakespeare has ever written, but when prose is not enough anymore to support his witty character, Shylock flips easily into a just as eloquent Blank Verse. Moreover, his character also raises debates on antisemitism, inclusion and minority, as well as social injustice and difference of heritages: there is a clear isolation between the Jewish and Christian communities (Shylock, for example, at least tries to keep his daughter as secluded as possible), but however all men are made of the same stock. As Shylock points out in his magnificent monologue about equality:SHYLOCK: To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else,
it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and
hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,
mocked 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 villany you
teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I
will better the instruction.
[III, 1]There is always something that is due, and something that is requested, and the best the two worlds can do when they collide is to find balance. The apparent superiority Christians showered themselves with, however, seldom allows for that to happen.Conversion was a hotly debated topic in XV Century England, with Protestantism and Catholicism quickly becoming the norm as imposed by various monarchs: in those instances, it was seen as the right and intelligent choice to make, but Shakespeare sheds a light on the other side of the coin. By converting, Shylock achieves nothing but misfortunes: he loses his place in his community, he loses his job, he loses his livelihood. It might have been perceived as a wise move to the unconcerned, but the fairness of it is completely non-existent from the perspective of a converted.A last nod goes to money: in fact, every relationship in the play is built on it – The Merchant of Venice even features the newly-coined word «argosy», taken from the Venetian port in Ragusa, and some of its most exciting poetry is all about commerce.

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The play was most likely written in the early XVII Century, during the beginning of King James’ reign. A popular genre that had developed at the time was that of «City Comedies», crude and sharp plays describing the decay and the wickedness of a London which was constantly growing in merchants, thieves, and prostitutes.Measure For Measure is set in Vienna, but as it always happens with Shakespeare, the setting in a far away Country is but a method that gives us the lens through which to watch at England’s own people.The setting of the play is quite strange: the Duke of Vienna suddenly decides to depart for a while, and leaves Angelo, a seemingly rigorous and morally rigorous young man (which seems to be a clear reference to the new strict climate of Puritan England). It is only later that we learn that the Duke has actually gone away disguised as a friar to look at his own people and see whether his strict laws were actually being followed.With Angelo left in charge, it is just too soon that we find out how totally corrupt he really is: in three mere minutes of stage time, he immediately announces the sentence to death of a young man, Claudio, for having got his companion pregnant before their marriage.In the source material, Claudio had actually been sentenced for rape: it is no doubt Shakespeare alters it to have us act sympathetically towards him (not least because the playwright’s own wife was probably already pregnant by the time the two married). The play goes in fact to huge lengths to explain us how Claudio and his companion were already basically married in all but name, but Angelo (whose name stands in ironic contrast to his actual character) will hear none of it.It is now that Claudio’s sister — Isabella — is introduced. She is a soon-to-be Nun, a modest girl trying to bloom in such a wretched and massified world. She personally goes to Angelo to plead for her brother’s life, but her intervention only brings some awfully bad consequences.Excited at the idea of deflowering a Nun, and helplessly attracted to her innocence, Angelo — trying to decide whether the fault was of the seducer (Isabella) or of the seduced (himself) — tells her he will only free Claudio if she consents to sleep with him.ANGELO: From thee, even from thy virtue!
What's this, what's this? Is this her fault or mine?
The tempter or the tempted, who sins most?
Ha!
Not she: nor doth she tempt: but it is I
That, lying by the violet in the sun,
Do as the carrion does, not as the flower,
Corrupt with virtuous season. Can it be
That modesty may more betray our sense
Than woman's lightness? Having waste ground enough,
Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary
And pitch our evils there? O, fie, fie, fie!
What dost thou, or what art thou, Angelo?
Dost thou desire her foully for those things
That make her good? O, let her brother live!
Thieves for their robbery have authority
When judges steal themselves. What, do I love her,
That I desire to hear her speak again,
And feast upon her eyes? What is't I dream on?
O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint,
With saints dost bait thy hook! Most dangerous
Is that temptation that doth goad us on
To sin in loving virtue: never could the strumpet,
With all her double vigour, art and nature,
Once stir my temper; but this virtuous maid
Subdues me quite. Even till now,
When men were fond, I smiled and wonder'd how.
[II, 1]To Isabella, the problem poses no question (this even prompts one of the most famous lines in the play: «More than our brother is our chastity» [II, 4]): there is the space for some pretty grim comedy when she goes see her brother, and tragically informs him he is in fact going to die.Claudio’s response to the news could even work as a b-side to Hamlet’s famous To Be or Not To Be soliloquy, with the only one (big) exception that Claudio does not in the slightest want to die:CLAUDIO: Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling: 'tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.
[III, 1]Whether a person’s life is worth more than a Nun’s chastity, or whether rape is a right price to pay to save another human being are questions people watching the play will undoubtedly ponder upon: it could be Shakespeare’s way to fully expose the wickedness of apparently perfectly just rulers (and a dig at King James himself, who had sparked a lot of controversy for having gifted his son a sort of «Educational» etiquette to instruct him on how to be morally impeccable, while deliberately — or not — ignoring the problems of a continuously more decadent London), but it can also work as a general reminder of how terribly affected others’ lives can be by our own «little pleasures».Right when a tragic end seems inevitable, the Duke comes back, still in disguise, and as soon as he finds out about Angelo’s terrible actions cooks up a plan to avenge Claudio and Isabella and to obviously punish the corrupt, temporary ruler: firstly, he contacts Marianna, Angelo’s ex-girlfriend, and has her substitute Isabella during that most wicked night of sleep.Angelo does not find out that he has been tricked, and the burning questions on the morality of forcing a girl to sleep with her ex or even of lying to someone about who they are consuming with are soon shut down by yet another turn-of-events: after having obtained what he wanted, Angelo still publicly announces he wants Claudio dead.It could just be Shakespeare’s sour reminder of how getting away with one sin might influence us to think we are in fact unstoppable, or maybe a show of twisted impulsiveness at Angelo realising that the only way he can stay with Isabella is by making sure no justice can intervene.Luckily, the Duke is still in business, and brings to court the beheaded head of some other prisoner, while contemporarily freeing Claudio and dealing with the figure of Bernardine, an absolute prisoner who openly acknowledges his own crimes but who strongly refuses to be executed – a quite lovely contrast of honesty to Angelo’s Machiavellian operations. The Duke also takes advantage of Angelo’s feeling of (temporary) absolute potence to crash down on him and denounce him of all his crimes.Angelo is left bewildered, and witnesses as Claudio is forgiven, and as Marianna becomes his betrothed — but only as a way to ensure her all his possessions, for he is finally sentenced.In a last, unexpected, almost incomprehensible moment, the two women pledge for his life to be spared: it is an act of uncomparable, powerful forgiveness, and not so much as to be comprehended as to understand that compassion can be found even in the most unjust events of life.It is important to remember that Measure For Measure is a comedy: or at least so it appears from the first Quarto, where it is grouped with other comedies. Though strange, when considering the topics tackled and many of the speeches told (most memorably the terrifying talk Angelo gives Isabella where he reminds her that even if she publicly denounced him, she will not be believed), it is a comedy and as such ends with a great deal of marriages: Angelo and Marianna, Claudio and his companion, and most unexpectedly, a proposal from the Duke addressed to Isabella herself. Even more curious is the fact that Shakespeare does not let her answer: we are therefore left with the doubt. Will the ever-chaste, Nun-in-training stick to her initial ideals or will she yield to the temptation risen by a justly sovereign?Of course, this leads us to question Isabella’s intentions. Interesting is also the fact that «Nun» at the time also seemed to have been the slang for «whore», or «prostitute». Much like Hamlet when he tells Ophelia to «get thee to a Nunnery» (Ham. [III, 1]), there is room for ambiguity in the character of Isabella. Driven by the intention of leaving behind her a world too common for her aspirations, we might really be facing some sort of Emma Bovary predecessor.

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All’s Well That Ends Well is among the strangest plays Shakespeare has ever written, to the point where it can feel rather inaccessible — though, in the same breath, we’ve got one of Shakespeare’s most spirited heroines, and one of the most preposterous clowns.The two are linked not because of a particular friendship bond between them, but because of their independent attachment to one of the least pleasant young men in the entire Folio: Bertram.The barebone story is somewhat of an inversion of a classic European narrative:  the plucky young man, who overcomes various obstacles for the hand of a fair woman far upon his station and eventually conquers her heart, making for a perfectly sweet «and all lived happy ever after» — so far, so Mediaeval, so good.But what Shakespeare does is he flips the genders: and so we have the story of a woman who tries her best to achieve the match she desires — and unsurprisingly, that’s a far more difficult position to be in.The play starts with Bertram’s father’s funeral. We are in Roussillon, France, and his mother is sending him back to Paris, where he will serve as a ward to the King.The woman is the Countess of Rousillon, and she has the remarkable distinction of being one of the very few mothers in Shakespeare — usually, they’re dead or absent, but here she’s rather central to the play.However sincere her feelings may be, the Countess is not the only one who’s sad about Bertram leaving: her young ward, Helena, is grieving too.Helena’s father had also recently died: he was a physician well known in the whole country for his skills, so we might be forgiven for considering his death (as the Countess does soon enough afterwards) the cause of her sadness, but we realise quite quickly that Helena is actually in love with Bertram.Before the young man goes to Paris, in any case, we get a little verbal squabble between Helena and Parolles (the Fallstaff to Bertram’s Hal): he’s quite the perfect courtier, all fashion and flags and scarves, but without ever actually having to fight. Helena mocks him for being a coward, and so he takes himself off to travel to Paris to follow Bertram.The Countess is surprised at Helena being so sad just after their departure, but she just assumes it’s because of her father’s recent death. However, she manages to tease out of Helena the real reason why: their scene together is very charming, particularly when Helena is awkwardly embarrassed at the Countess’ suggestion that she’s like a mother to her: this will not do!Thankfully, she comes clear to her in the next speech:HELENA: Then, I confess,
Here on my knee, before high heaven and you,
That before you, and next unto high heaven,
I love your son.
My friends were poor, but honest; so's my love:
Be not offended; for it hurts not him
That he is loved of me: I follow him not
By any token of presumptuous suit;
Nor would I have him till I do deserve him;
Yet never know how that desert should be.
I know I love in vain, strive against hope;
Yet in this captious and intenible sieve
I still pour in the waters of my love
And lack not to lose still: thus, Indian-like,
Religious in mine error, I adore
The sun, that looks upon his worshipper,
But knows of him no more. My dearest madam,
Let not your hate encounter with my love
For loving where you do: but if yourself,
Whose aged honour cites a virtuous youth,
Did ever in so true a flame of liking
Wish chastely and love dearly, that your Dian
Was both herself and love: O, then, give pity
To her, whose state is such that cannot choose
But lend and give where she is sure to lose;
That seeks not to find that her search implies,
But riddle-like lives sweetly where she dies!
[I, 3]She’s a romantic, and her passionate speech convinces the mother, who gives her her blessing.But (bad enough that Bertram and Helena have lost their father) the King of France is also dying, fading away because of a terrible pestilence. The Countess therefore suggests Bertram that Helena might perhaps be able to cure the fever — and even if she doesn’t, that’s still a good excuse to get her to the capital.The fairytale element of the story is quite strong in these first few scenes: Helena gets to Paris, manages to convince the King to let her treat him, and of course — she cures him.The King, eager to show his gratefulness for the young lady, immediately consents to her marriage with whatever young men at Court she likes best — and no prizes for guessing who she picks.But this is a Problem Play: and for the most part, Bertram is the problem. He pulls off an awful stink about marrying so below his station, and adds that he had liked her well and had been rightly affectionate to her, until he had moved to Paris and has seen more of the world.The King is however very stern and wants no argument, but Bertram conveniently decides to go to Italy to fight the wars there (with Parolles, of course). He therefore abandons Helena without consuming their marriage, and tells her he will not treat her like a wife unless she puts a ring on his finger, and gets pregnant with his child — making it exceedingly clear that he will not be helping her with either task.So, our heroine is left with seemingly insurmountable challenges, but she persists to make it to Italy herself. She soldiers to Florence and there finds a place at an inn ran by a charming widow — interestingly, this play has an abundance of women.The widow also has a daughter, Diana, and — by surprise — Bertram has got his eyes on her! He therefore attempts to seduce her (all the more unpleasant given that we know the great faithful love Helena has for him and the fact that they are married).However, what Bertram does not know is that Helena has asked for Diana’s help — and so, when she consents for an assignation with him at night, it’s Helena who shows up and gets pregnant with his baby.With XXI Century consensual laws this could pass as very problematic, but it being a fairytale does allow us some licence — and we can all agree on the fact that Bertram has it coming.To hammer down the fact even more, having done what he wants with Diana, Bertram abandons her too. The soldiers are back to France, and he duly follows. When he gets home, he hears that Helena has allegedly died. Being free again, he decides to marry yet another young woman, who has a conveniently attractive pile of land to her name.Since the King is also visiting Roussillon, all seems to be working quite nicely — only Diana shows up and demands justice for the way Bertram treated her. Everyone’s shocked, and when even the King seems about to completely lose his temper, she reveals the trick: she has travelled with Helena, who is alive, and pregnant! Bertram is reduced to tears and can’t but promise to love her dearly from now on.We’re told that «all’s well that ends well», but despite the fact that Diana is also granted the same offer of choosing whichever young Courtier she prefers (possibly starting a whole new cycle), we’ve heard the phrase a bit too many times to really believe it, especially with this ending.It’s all a bit sour, and a bit far-fetched. The final scene can be very effective on stage, but only because of Helena, who’s been so persistent and resilient and charming throughout the whole play, that we rejoice in finally seeing her nicely settled.The trouble is — she’s rewarded with this awful pig, Bertram. Couldn’t she do better? Couldn’t she find better? Or has she learnt that our wishes lose their potency when they’re granted?Of all the reunions and marriages that happen at the end of a Shakespearian comedy, this is surely the least likely to last, or — for that matter — to «End Well»: even the title seems to hover as a warning. Bertram and Helena have got a long way to go until death meets them, and God only knows what will happen in the meantime.Shakespeare’s source material for this is a rather long, complicated story — that he transformed in a long, complicated play.There is in fact also a sub-narrative, that covers the plot of Parolles: like Bertram, he too winds up being tricked, revealed and exposed as a terrible coward by those close to him. In a way, he’s blindfolded while Bertram is duped in the dead of night: they’re both blind, and no one really seems to learn how to see.Parolles is no Falstaff, but he’s made of the same cloth (though perhaps the remainders): he can lie and explain his way out of everything, and even when he’s reduced to nothing, he manages to keep going.One of the most troublesome problems of this problematic play is its geography: of course, we know from several other instances that Shakespeare didn’t really trouble himself too much with the land or the sea, but this play is very specific with its locations — and curiously, scholars seem perfectly happy to accept received opinions on the subject.A great many seem in fact willing to believe that the Roussillon is the old province of France close to the Pyrenees. This area of the map wouldn't have been unknown to Shakespeare, since the English Queen Catherine (Henry VIII’s first wife) was of Aragon, not too far south. Unfortunately, that Rousillon wasn’t Rousillon until about some one hundred years later, and the traffic and constant travelling in the play would be rather too much, if Shakespeare meant it this way.Instead, we can assume that he meant a different Roussillon: there in fact was another one, rather more conveniently situated, on the route from France to Italy, and indeed between the cities of Marseilles and Lion. This lovely chateau had been the court for many visits of Kings and Royals on the move. Fairly safe to assume, farewell to the Pyrenees!Elizabethan audiences would have also been familiar with many of the names in the play, made famous by their partaking in the French Wars of Religion that had happened in the XVI Century thanks to a play by Christopher Marlowe, The Massacre at Paris, that deals directly with the Bartholomew’s Day massacre, and several French notables populate it. in All’s Well That Ends Well, there is a sustain matrix of satirical allusions to different French courtiers. But why Shakespeare was so interested in French notables who had flourished some hundred years before the play, remains somewhat of a mystery.Again, the influence of his personal life are detectable within the play: his daughters would have been of marriageable age by the time it was written, and it’s not by accident that here he has shied away from the idea of parents controlling their daughters’ love affairs. Here, the older generation are all eager to help and ensure any marriages, it is the younger people who are difficult, jaded and obstinate, and need to get out of their own way — all except for Helena, who’s  almost staggeringly optimistic in her quest for Bertram’s affection.There are also many affiliated sources that go with this play and aim at making its comprehension maybe a bit less difficult: among them, Julia Smith’s lecture at a conference and the book Shakespeare and the Countess by Chris Laoutaris.

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Troilus and Cressida is among the longest and most wordy plays Shakespeare has ever written, and because of that it can often seem inaccessible to us nowadays. It's also the play with the scantest performance history, and many scholars seem to agree that it was most likely written for the Court's Inn, rather than for the groundlings at the Globe — its being probably the most intellectual and argumentative of all the plays would seem to confirm this hypothesis.Funnily enough, Shakespeare himself seems to feel this sense of «who cares» towards the play too. In its prologue, he opens with a curiously uninterested introduction: «Like or find fault; do as your pleasures are: / Now good or bad, ‘tis but the chance of war» [I, 0].The play is listed among the Comedies in the Folio, but it is not particularly funny. Because of that, scholars have ended up describing it as a «Problem Play»: Troilus and Cressida does not really fit into any category, it is a play that simply bursts out of any genre, that does not fit into any box.Besides, it’s also one of the three plays by Shakespeare named after a central couple — the other two being Romeo and Juliet and Anthony and Cleopatra — and rather surprisingly, the only one where the two protagonists actually manage to remain alive until the very end.In his Trojan play par excellence, — set during the seventh year of the Trojan War — Shakespeare gets the chance to talk about the characters as if they were already myth, despite them technically still living through the experience.That is not a random choice: their story was a rather known one in England — Chaucer had written his very own version of it too, and there were many translations of the Iliad available, the most famous of which being Chapman’s. The names were therefore somewhat famous, to the point where they were already starting to be associated with certain «stock characters»: Troilus the lover, Cressida the faithless woman, Pandarus the interfering father and so on.In a scene Shakespeare gives them, the three seem almost aware of their being well known, and Pandarus alludes to the fact that their actions may be very well remembered for a long time, and used as examples for the following generations:PANDARUS: If ever you prove false one to another, since I have
taken such pains to bring you together, let all
pitiful goers-between be called to the world's end
after my name; call them all Pandars; let all
constant men be Troiluses, all false women Cressids,
and all brokers-between Pandars! say, amen.
[III, 2]The play starts with a passionate exchange between the two lovers, but a series of events soon separates them: Cressida almost immediately runs away with Diomedes, a Greek soldier (betraying Troilus in doing so), but Shakespeare does justify it by making it clear she had no other choice but to yield to the Greek’s wishes. This works as a bleak representation of women’s treatment during war, but the worst it still yet to come: at the Greek Camp, all men take their turn to kiss Cressida as soon as she arrives, and she is not spared all the terrible treatments war prisoners were (and still are) bound to be subjected to. Troilus is also very much pained by the event, being left helplessly disillusioned until the very end of the play, when the two lovers finally manage to reunite.Troilus and Cressida has a very large cast of characters — almost thirty in total! Quite obviously, with that abundance of names and the importance of the events being represented, Troilus and Cressida are not the most famous nor the most high-rank characters to appear in the play: Hector, Aeneas, Priam, Achilles, Ulysses, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Helen of Troy (or rather of Sparta) are all present.Though recognizable, however, Shakespeare completely overthrows what our expectations of them — influenced by the many epithets Homer liked to gift his characters with — are: we only seem to be getting to see the very worst of them. Achilles is not the valiant and brave fighter, but a petulant and lazy cheater, who has his thugs kill Hector on his behalf only to then claim the deed as his; Agamemnon is an overly verbose and tiresome tyrant; Menelaus is an idiot; Ulysses is still cunning, but with a very manipulative cruelty simmering just underneath the surface: these Greeks are not heroes.But in England, that is not a surprising twist: the Trojans, though eventually losing to the Greeks, soon get their redemption, going on to found Rome, and eventually — thanks to the Trojan Brute — Britain. Troy and England were therefore commonly associated.Not by chance, the Trojans in the play are a lot more sympathetic: Hector is by far the most heroic of the bunch, and this reputation of his is even solidified by his death at the end.Among all these tragically unheroic characters, one does seem to shout louder than the rest: it’s Thersites, a minor Greek soldier that Shakespeare allows to comment and moralise all throughout the play. He is very sour and nasty, so we scarcely get away liking him. But he is so resolutely himself, that we surely remember him.The last point worth focusing on is the context in which the play was written: in an England whose fortunes were dependent on the Country's devotion to a single woman, writing a play about a war that had started just because of the devotion of the Greeks to a single, magnetic woman seems too fitting to be just a coincidence.What makes it inevitably provocative is however how Helen of Sparta is described in the play: being Elizabeth’s foil, the comparison should be made in such a way as to be flattering, and in a sense it is — Helen was certainly beautiful. But she is not only that: as that great truth-teller — Thersites — argues:THERSITES: Here is such patchery, such juggling and such
knavery! all the argument is a cuckold and a whore.
[II, 3]The cuckold and the whore in question being respectively Menelaus and Helen, we get a clear sense of the connection not being flattering at all!For its apparent never-ending talking, Troilus and Cressida does seem to be about a lot more than just the topless towers of Troy: Clare Asquith, in her book Shadowplay, gives the play a thorough re-reading explaining how the play is actually full of catholic references. Even if we were not to consider the alleged mentions to Philip II of Spain, to the Pope, or to Essex (Elizabeth’s favourite) as necessarily true, hers is surely a work that demonstrates how infinitely more complicated and subsequently interesting Shakespeare’s plays can truly be.

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Timon of Athens is very probably one of the most peculiar and most menacing plays that appear in the Folio — so much that it almost didn’t make the cut!The reasons are various, and though the main one is linked to the context in which the play was written, others are its alleged incompleteness and its being — very probably — a collaboration with another playwright of the time, Thomas Middleton. The fact that the play was never performed in Shakespeare's time, furthermore, has led many scholars to believe it had simply been abandoned.1761 saw the play's earliest documented production — it had suffered a thorough revision, made with the goal to transform it into a more digestible and easy-going version: the ending is in fact quite different, with Timon's daughter eventually marrying an exceedingly wealthy man so that all could be happy once again (the diversion from the original source is in this case quite understandable, but the lengths XVIII Century productions often went to to adapt Shakespeare's plays are not always this justifiable).At the beginning of the play, Timon is fabulously rich man from Athens: he throws a lot of parties, grand dinners, balls, and is very generous to his many friends and acquaintances, lending them money whenever they gently ask him to help them, always confident in his unconscious naivety that everything will be paid back to him eventually.Obviously, his hopes can't hold on for too long, and finally — weighted down by his utterly careless spendings — his financial funds collapse, and he suddenly, «unexpectedly», becomes the friend in need: his first reaction is to follow the path his helpless credulity had led him on, and he sends help to his many «friends», with a view to telling them of his situation and expecting them to repay everything they had been gifted.The «friends» come, still unaware of his bankruptcy, and therefore as cheerful as ever, expecting to receive presents and gifts as usual. Their bewilderment and amazement when they are asked for financial support are telling: never in their life had these immoral souls even so much as considered paying their debts duly.Everyone — of course — comes back empty-handed, and Timon, clinging onto the very last string of hope, organises what would become his very last dinner, serving his hosts nothing but mere water, and stones — all accompanied by a side of cruelly harsh words about their malice and unfaithfulness. Soon after, he runs away, renouncing the now empty pleasures of Athenian society altogether.We already are in the works of what seems likely to become a fully-developed misanthrope — and we could’ve got there much faster, probably, had Shakespeare not decided to have Timon find, just outside Athens, a great stack of gold: there really seems to be no way of escaping money and the thousand problems that come with it. Word circulates of the decayed man’s sudden luck, and many start to visit the forest in which he had found shelter, hoping to get some money as Timon quickly readapted to his past tendencies.Shockingly, the protagonist manages to do just that, and he gives it all away once more, only later realising the damage he had brought on himself and subsequently sending all his false friends to hell when they suggest he should come back to Athens. The shock and the disappointment are so huge to Timon, that Shakespeare can only allow him to write his own epitaph and pitifully die off stage.The infamous woods around Athens are as mythological as any of the many images Shakespeare often quotes — and for that matter, they seem to be just as mutable: the overgrown, ripe with languid and sexual temptation greenery of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are a stark contrast to the blasted, barren vegetation in which Timon struggles to find even the smallest root to feed on: his Athens is a much more hostile place, where little to no comfort can hope to be found.However relevant and necessary to the play, Timon is not the only character worth- mentioning: there’s also the outcast Alcibiades (a name already made famous by Plato in his Symposium; in there a colourful character infamous for changing alliance frequently, siding mostly with Athens but occasionally also with Sparta and Persia). In the play, he is a military man operating just outside the greasy world of Athenian society.Banished after defending a friend from a punishment that was unproportioned to his crime (though a crime had been committed), he had decided to wage war against Athens. Towards the end, however, he is informed that the politicians will be punished for having allowed such punishment to be adopted, and he finally decides to stop his army right outside of Athens, retreating back his initial thirst for revenge.The role of the cynical, unbothered commentator (made almost compulsory after the successful invention of Faulconbridge) is here given to the Fool. He attends Timon’s parties, but only seems to go there to insult him and to explain him that his friends are only posing and pretending to be such.Flavius is Timon’s only faithful friend — and he's also his steward. He’s the only one worried about Timon’s overspending at the beginning of the play, and the only one who’s actually undeserving of Timon’s implacable hatred towards mankind, and so he reminds him when he goes to visit him in the forest.Timon’s answer is kind of terrible, considering the situation in which he is in: grateful to have a friend, but disappointed about him only being a servant. Even in his abominable position, where comfort and affection should become the only things he should really care about, status remains a concern.The only women in the play — apart from the dancing amazons paid to perform at Timon’s parties — are two prostitutes: the absence of any uplifting female presence is yet another indicator of how grim, dark and uncompromising this play is: filled with constant insults, and unsympathetic characters, and where people are identified by what they own and what have to offer, rather than for who they are.The characters are all named after historical figures, whose lives and deeds Shakespeare would have undoubtedly learnt from Plutarch’s Lives, and where Greek names just fell too short, Roman ones were assigned — that is the case for Flavius, or Sempronius.As is the instance in many other of his plays, it is almost certain that Shakespeare decided to use a foreign setting to interrogate some current, local concerns. This is probably also why Timon of Athens was never performed in his time.The best waged date for Timon’s publication is 1608: by that time, James I was already reigning over England, and the English economy was very quickly changing because of international commerce. Aristocrats kept being exposed to new merchandise, and credit had become ever more present as a commodity. Everyone was constantly borrowing or lending money, trying to keep up in the new market. Though publicly condemned, in such a context usury was basically unavoidable.Shakespeare speaks here to something cruelly true: money and friendship, often go hand in hand. Generosity — it is seldom repaid! Surely a provocative message for the time. Funnily enough, the play also makes many references to cannibalism: there is much talk of eating men and their riches, of consuming their fortunes and the like.Another problem the play poses is how to categorise it: it is surely not a comedy, nor a history, nor a romance, nor a tragedy. The matter is however skillfully solved by none other than the Folio itself, which labels it the Life of Timon of Athens: a genre we should perhaps use more often when talking about some of Shakespeare’s plays — a Life, much like those of Plutarch.Timon was also a historical character, as testified — evidently — by Plutarch himself, and he had already become this sort of archetype of misanthropy. Timon, after all, is a man of extremes: excessively generous at first, only to then fall in the pitless well of hatred.However (unexpectedly perhaps), he does not learn any lesson in this play: as one of his hosts matter-of-factly observes: «one day he gives us diamonds, next day stones» [III, 6]. There is no in between!Some scholars take it so far as — though rather forcefully — finding some paragons between Timon and Christ: he is denied three times, abandoned, and then he dies. Even if that be true, the so-called «paragon» should work more in the terms of antithesis: Timon, in fact, does not seem to be looking for redemption of any kind, and he certainly does not resurrect (his epitaph, on the contrary, rather seems to be implying he does not even want to be remembered).Lastly, Timon is a figure mentioned many times in ancient literature (he even appears in some works by the Greek comedian Aristophanes) though perhaps later substituted by the great character of Alceste that Molière moulds in Le Misanthrope.A great fan of Timon of Athens is the critic Gee Wilson Knight, who in his book Ring of Fire rhapsodises about how good the play is: a worthy paragraph to end the presentation of an otherwise quite unattainable piece.

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This play marks the beginning of the group of works described as «Romances», plays belonging to Shakespeare’s later period as a playwright and focusing on the importance of forgiveness, and on the hope that there might just really be a «happily ever after». But, as it always goes, condensing the vastity of any Shakespearian play to such watered down terms is never ideal.Cymbeline is a giddily theatrical piece, that can feel very wordy and noisy on paper, but only because it just really needs an audience and a company of actors to bring it to life.At the off-set, Imogene (our heroine) has married Posthumus against her father’s will: this could be the start of any Shakespearian comedy — parents getting in the way of their children’s love life, true love overcoming social conventions and the like — except that it isn’t: Imogen is in fact daughter to Cymbeline, King of England, and her father was already planning a rather different marriage for her, wanting to betroth her to the son of his new wife, now Imogen’s step-mother: Cloten.This Queen, however, is so terrible (the kind to hurt animals!) that Shakespeare doesn’t even seem to bother to give her a name, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that Cymbeline’s completely under her paw. In fact, this play seems to contain many gender-flipped echoes of Hamlet: the protagonists suddenly finding themselves with a new cruel, poison-obsessed step parent.As a consequence of their marriage, Posthumus is sent in exile to Italy, and there he finds a man called Iachimo, made of the same cloth as many other Shakespearian villains. In an alarmingly though not surprisingly short amount of time, he convinces Posthumus that women are — by definition — not faithful, and that even if he thinks Imogen is, she isn’t either. In fact, he bets he could seduce her!... and Posthumus takes the bet and Iachimo heads over to England.Imogen is however made of sterner stuff: she’s not at all interested in him, and Iachimo has to cook up a different plan: he concocts a story about a treasure, and manages to get himself sent to her chamber in a trunk.What’s interesting about this play is that the characters tell us everything: we almost suffer from the amount of information that we have that could be useful to the clueless characters on stage, and that’s what makes the performance aspect for Cymbeline particularly important.The only surprise we get is precisely that of Iachimo’s appearance from this trunk: Imogen goes to sleep — incidentally, conveniently after having read about one of the worst rapes of all literature — and she has just prayed that she might be kept safe of all the tempters of the night:IMOGEN: I have read three hours then: mine eyes are weak:
Fold down the leaf where I have left: to bed:
Take not away the taper, leave it burning;
And if thou canst awake by four o' the clock,
I prithee, call me. Sleep hath seized me wholly
To your protection I commend me, gods.
From fairies and the tempters of the night
Guard me, beseech ye.
[II, 2]Waging her sufficiently asleep, Iachimo slips out of that trunk, analyses every single part of her room and of her body and finally steals a bracelet from her as proof to show Posthumus she has effectively betrayed him.The italian villain has an extraordinary accompanying speech in this scene as he eyes everything up: it’s awful and creepy behavior, but he doesn’t actually rape her:IACHIMO: The crickets sing, and man's o'er-labour'd sense
Repairs itself by rest. Our Tarquin thus
Did softly press the rushes, ere he waken'd
The chastity he wounded. Cytherea,
How bravely thou becomest thy bed, fresh lily,
And whiter than the sheets! That I might touch!
But kiss; one kiss! Rubies unparagon'd,
How dearly they do't! 'Tis her breathing that
Perfumes the chamber thus: the flame o' the taper
Bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids,
To see the enclosed lights, now canopied
Under these windows, white and azure laced
With blue of heaven's own tinct. But my design,
To note the chamber: I will write all down:
Such and such pictures; there the window; such
The adornment of her bed; the arras; figures,
Why, such and such; and the contents o' the story.
Ah, but some natural notes about her body,
Above ten thousand meaner moveables
Would testify, to enrich mine inventory.
O sleep, thou ape of death, lie dull upon her!
And be her sense but as a monument,
Thus in a chapel lying! Come off, come off:
As slippery as the Gordian knot was hard!
'Tis mine; and this will witness outwardly,
As strongly as the conscience does within,
To the madding of her lord. On her left breast
A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops
I' the bottom of a cowslip: here's a voucher,
Stronger than ever law could make: this secret
Will force him think I have pick'd the lock and ta'en
The treasure of her honour. No more. To what end?
Why should I write this down, that's riveted,
Screw'd to my memory? She hath been reading late
The tale of Tereus; here the leaf's turn'd down
Where Philomel gave up. I have enough:
To the trunk again, and shut the spring of it.
Swift, swift, you dragons of the night, that dawning
May bare the raven's eye! I lodge in fear;
Though this a heavenly angel, hell is here.
One, two, three: time, time!
[II, 2]Meanwhile, Cloten also has his heart set on marrying Imogen: he’s a revolting character, and does not like to lose — nor does he seem interested in Imogen’s opinion on the matter —  nor does he seem concerned with her being already married.The English princess, however, rejects him on no uncertain terms, and after a pitying projection allowed to the very worst kind of pantomime bully, he swears that he’ll be avenged: he’s exactly the kind of entitled savage who inherits a solid position from his parents and thinks he can have everything he wants.Imogen is in the meanwhile very worried about having lost her bracelet: Posthumus gave it to her, and she swore to mind it, just as he swore he’d keep the ring she gave him.By the supernatural laws of travel in Shakespearian works, Iachimo is very soon back in Italy, and he can describe in awfully clear details the inside of Imogen’s bedroom and indeed some identifying marks on her body, and he has her bracelet: to Posthumus that’s enough evidence, and he is convinced even more quickly than Othello that his wife is unloyal.Another humiliated loser, furious at this infidelity, he sends a letter to England to his servant, instructing him to kill Imogen: evidently, jealous husbands are a real preoccupation for Shakespeare.Happily, the servant Pisanio isn’t quite convinced by this narrative and he has no intention of killing Imogen. He instead suggests her to dress up as a boy and go out in the world to go find this errant husband.Ordinarily in a Shakespearian comedy, a girl disguising herself as a boy usually is a means of self discovery, of blossoming; but in this play it feels like Imogen is almost fading away the more time she spends with her alter-ego.Her boy name being Fidele — perhaps Shakespeare felt appropriate to leave a hint in this busy and uncertain play — she departs for Italy, and Pisanio sends a message back to Posthumus to inform him that the job has been done.In the source story, the good wife whose husband suspects her goes to the court of the Sultan of Alexandria, but Shakespeare has already introduced this play as set in England and Rome, and so he sends Imogen to the next exotic destination: Wales.Imogen gets lost in the wild, desperately trying to get to Milford Haven, she finds a cave: it’s the home of a pleasant man called Belarius, a good noble unjustly banished. He has two sons, Guiderius and Arviragus, actually Cymbeline’s sons stolen from him as a revenge of this banishment, but who have no clue about their parentage and who cannot possibly realise that the lost young man they take in is in fact their sister.But there however is a kind of loving precognition: soon enough they are ready to die for this «man», and instantly they make him apart of their little family: they give him all sorts of domestic tasks, that would ordinarily go to a woman, and joke that if he were a woman, they’d consider giving him their hand in marriage. It’s all very loving and romantic, and the thread of incest never really becomes a concern because they firmly believe that Fidele is a boy.But even in this secluded patch of Paradise, trouble arrives: and as in many other instances in the play, it takes the connotations of Cloten. He has followed Imogen and is determined to get his hands on her. As he swaggers, he encounters Guiderius, and they fight, and Guiderus chops off his head.Back in the cave, Imogen isn’t feeling too well, and so she drinks a poisonous concoction disguised as a medicinal herb that her step mother had gifted her, and she appears to die even though she is actually only asleep.The Queen herself would’ve been mad at the receiving of such news, as she in the first place thought she had given Imogen a mortal poison, but Pisanio had luckily seen through her wicked plans and exchanged the potion with another one, seemingly coming from the same book as Friar Lawrence’s, given it produced the same effect.Belarius and the two brothers are heartbroken, and lay her body beside that of Cloten. To her they sing one of the most famous songs in all Shakespeare:GUIDERIUS: Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
[IV, 2]They leave the stage and Imogen wakes up. We soon enough find out Cloten was actually wearing an armour that he had stolen from Posthumus, and obviously the princess thinks that the body lying beside her is him — and matters are not helped by the fact that there is no head!Juliet’s passionate outburst at the sight of her dead Romeo seems almost feeble compared to the potence of Imogen’s speech, that she gives right when she thought she might be safe from all.But the Romans now invade England, eager to collect an unpaid tribute. With nothing better to do, Imogen gets hired as a page with the Italians. Posthumus and Iachimo also get to England as a part of this expedition, but somehow Posthumus starts feeling guilty and shifts sides to fight for England. He has almost a death wish as he fights recklessly — regret really is catching up with him.But that’s not the last time we see him switching sides: for now, the Romans are defeated, not least because Belarius’ sons also decide to join the fight and do the State some service.Posthumus gets back to the Romans and is captured, evidently believing to be punished. In the depth of his despair, his dead ancestors and Jupiter himself appear to him and promise him to make it all up by the end.In the final scene, something like twenty-five different plots points and complications are all fixed and solved in a mere five-hundred lines: the audience is certainly ready for it to be all wounded up, (comprehensible, after having spent the whole play burdened with so much information that could have helped just about everyone): Imogen is revealed and reunited with Posthumus, Guiderius and Arvirsgus are revealed to be the sons of Cymbeline, Belarius is forgiven for having stolen them (as he’d done a fine job in raising them and had kept them out of the wicked Queen’s reach), the Queen is revealed to have died «roaring», revealing everything she had done, Iachimo is forgiven for his school doggery, and Cymbeline starts to look like a real leader, now that the malign influence of the dead Queen has been removed. He agrees to free the Roman prisoners and to pay the tribute, and the Kingdom is restored to peace and harmony.In many regards, this play is a complete hit: it contains many plot points and narrative echoes from some of Shakespeare's biggest successes, and tropes and themes from just as many more. It's a sprawling, splashy story that can make little sense on page, but that’s exactly what makes it so effective in performance.There are some key points, however, that might help explain some things, maybe even shed some light from within.Firstly, this play was written when James I was sitting on the English Throne: he was the first king to rule over Great Britain — and in other plays, we already see the shift from talking about «England» to talking about «Britain». King Lear’s a play about dividing the Kingdom just as James was trying to unite it, and Macbeth was expressly about the Scottish Throne, and of a lineage of Kings going from Banquo to James himself.Now, we have a play that has Cymbeline as King. He was actually King when Caesar Augustus ruled Rome, and he had himself lived in Rome and had been vastly favoured there, hence his having been given the option of not having to pay for the tribute — a question that instead becomes so important in this play.Of much more renown was an event that had happened on the other end of the Roman Empire during the reign of Caesar Augustus: the birth of Jesus in Nazareth. Cymbeline has more references to classical mythology than any other play, but it slightly feels like the world of Jupiter is coming to an end: his appearance is sketchy at best, and there is a feel of an old world in decline as something new is coming.Posthumus and Imogen do represent a new generation, a moving forward — and so does Iachimo, though negatively — and all the talk of Italy and Rome seems to reference the roman empire more than Renaissance Italy — but (again) for the figure of Iachimo, so typically Machiavellian.Shakespearian audiences often thought of Italy as representing a catholic, permissive, resolutely anti-England Country, and Iachimo is a fine ambassador for all that: by end of play, he has been forgiven and has learnt his lesson, but his opportunism and his slippery tongue still suggest a wickedness English audiences wouldn’t have easily forgotten about.As for the Welsh subplot, Milford Haven was very specifically the place where Henry Tudor — soon-to-be Henry VII — had landed in advance of his attack on Richard III. It would’ve undoubtedly been a flattering mention for James, likewise descending from Henry and through him claiming his legitimacy on the English Throne.We therefore have nods to James, and to a newly restored England with the premises of a Country that will flourish in an age of peace.The ending can be particularly moving, and it can also stand as eerily relevant to the world at any time: messily endless arguments over tariffs and tributes from England to mainland Europe, accords being reached and Rulers showing themselves capable of grace and decency, women being believed, jealous men being permitted a life with a wife whom they had so easily misjudged.Cymbeline is an extremely complicated and nerve-wracking play, but there are very few deaths: the Queen dies off stage, and — rather conveniently — the only person who’s actually killed is Cloten, and he is of such unspeakable malice that we hardly feel sorry for him.Overall, the play seems to transcend «Romance» or any other description of theatre — even Polonius’, who (despite having been obsequiously precise and inventive) could’ve never guessed that his creator would eventually make up this comical-pastoral-historical-tragical-romantic fairytale.

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A «Winter’s Tale» is commonly a shorthand for a fantasy, an obviously fabricated concoction, or a fairy story. And certainly, this is a play about wonders and miracles, and this title would have reminded Shakespeare’s audience that «it is required you do awake your faith».This is a surprising play in many ways — it is both comic and tragic, and it has a wide variety of characters, all of whom make different demands of us in the audience.It’s a play that’s famous for different bits and pieces that happen within it — it’s notorious as an example of Shakespeare’s exuberantly inventive geography (he even manages to give landlock Bohemia a coastline!), and it has what is probably one of the most widely known stage directions in all Shakespeare: Exits, pursued by a bear [III, 3].The first portion of the play happens at the Court of King Leontes in Sicilia (something, we might guess, like Sicily): regardless of what we think of when we think of Sicily, this is a rather cold Court, and we are led to believe that these scenes take place during winter.Leontes’ great friend Polixenes has been visiting, but the time has come for him to go home and attend to his own Kingdom of Bohemia.Try as he might, Leontes can’t quite convince his dear friend to stay any longer — but then his wife, Hermione, manages to persuade Polixenes to stick around.This is all charming enough: the kind of polite courtly chatter one might expect at the beginning of any such story. But then, quite literally out of nowhere, Leontes spontaneously combusts: a spark of jealousy flares up, quite hot, and he invents an entire fantasy dictated by it, wherein Polixenes has been sleeping with Hermione and is the father of the child she is expecting.There is absolutely no reason to suspect Hermione: and yet Leontes launches into a paroxysmal of jealousy that would make Othello look rational.In a startling scene, he switches his focus from chatting with his sickly son Mamillius,  to chatting with us in the audience, and to staring in horror at what he supposes is his faithless wife.This first portion seems to be moving as rashly and as breathlessly as Leontes’  jealousy, and soon Polixenes has been spirited away back to Bohemia, and Hermione is imprisoned for treason.Just as we start to wonder whether there is no one rational or sensible enough to stand up for her, a champion appears: she is Paulina, another heroine in this category of brilliant, intelligent, fascinating women that must surely have been quite difficult for Shakespeare’s boy players to interpret.She has little track with Leontes’ ravings, or with the proceedings of his pestered senses, and gives him a sequence of satisfying dressing downs: in one of the most extraordinary examples of Blank Verse ever, she insists on Hermione’s virtue in a simple but effective line:PAULINA: Good queen, my lord, Good queen; I say good queen.
[II, 3]Paulina is an older woman of uncertain rank in Leontes’ Court: she’s like the moral centre of the play, with a position of respect and authority that is secure enough that she can rave against Leontes for his madness.Unfortunately though, that is not enough, and he continues on this dark path: it’s quite maddening watching this leader fly against all sense, utterly convinced of a truth that he has fabricated in his own tortured head, founded on absolutely no evidence, and leading his whole family and his Court to nothing but destruction.The case eventually comes to Court and Hermione has a beautiful speech in which she attempts to exonerate herself — again, in full knowledge that her crazy husband will not believe her.Things go from bad to worse: she has her baby, a little girl, but when Leontes declares her guilty Paulina brings the horrible news that she has dropped dead. Still worse, their son Mamillius also dies.The only hope for Hermione was that a petition had been sent to the Oracle of Apollo — suggesting that we are in a world that still put faith in that Holy of ancient Holys, besides that being another blot on Shakespeare’s copybook: Apollo’s Oracle was at Delfi, in the mountains of Greek’s mainland, and Shakespeare has his Sicilians petition to the island of Delfos (though in his defence, we should also be mentioning that the island of Delos, also called Delfos in England during the Renaissance, was the birthplace of Apollo) — and word does come back from it, completely exonerating Hermione: but it’s too little, too late.Worse yet, the first thing that Leontes does is discredit the impartial proclamation, insisting that it’s probably corrupt anyway: this provokes another diatribe from Paulina and the harsh light slowly daunts on Leontes — he has lost his wife, and his son.However, he’s still far from actually mending his ways: he in fact insists that the «bastard» daughter is to be banished, exposed on a mountain.Paulina’s husband Antigonus is tasked with the job, and he makes his way to that infamous seacoast.The child is wrapped up with some treasure to pay for any safekeeping that could be possible, and just at the point when Antigonus is trying to say farewell to her, almost (again) out of nowhere the bear appears. It’s so bunkers that it often gets a laugh: and how could it not!At the time of the first performances of this play, there were still bearbaiting pits alongside the south bank in London, pretty close to Shakespeare’s theatre: while this could mean that they had brought a real bear on stage to frighten poor Antigonus, it’s probably more likely that they simply used a bear skin, and some impressive choreography to present this shocking interruption of the story.Antigonus is a decent fellow: nothing in the play suggests that he deserves this grizzliest of endings — and it’s all well for the stage directions to inform us that he is only pursued by a bear.Soon enough an eye-witness enters, and we are left with no doubt that the bear eventually gets him, and eats him.But at the same moment another man enters, and he finds the baby: these two — a Shepherd and his son, a Clown (a local, ordinary man) — decide to adopt the little baby girl:OLD SHEPHERD: Heavy matters! heavy matters! but look thee here, boy.
Now bless thyself: thou mettest with things dying, I with things newborn.
[III, 3]In this line, the play seems to shift: after the insanity of the bear, and of the deaths of Hermione and of Maumilius and of poor Antigonus, we’ve had all the horror and the tragedy that this play intends for us.We move from jealousy, destruction, and things dying to a new world of hope, and youth, and «things newborn».The name Antigonus is quite reminiscent of that of the old Greek heroine’s Antigone: its roots bring to something meaning more or less «against birth» — it’s perhaps a kind of foreshadowing, even in the classically-inspired name, that tragedy and the negation of birth have to die before «things newborn» can appear: and now they can.Things now move very quickly indeed: the play fast forwards sixteen years, and to help us along Shakespeare presents us with Time itself: it fills us in, and tells us to look out for Florizel, the son of Polixenes in this Bohemia, and explaining that the girl (Perdita; she who has been lost) has been growing up with this lovely Shepherd and his son.Shakespeare squeezed almost all the elements of a Greek Tragedy in the first portion of this play — at its heart we have a King with a very serious tragic flaw: Leontes’ jealousy sets him on a completely destructive path, and not even the warning from Apollo is enough to make him aware of his madness, allowing him to backtrack before all is destroyed. But like his jealousy, that story has flashed hot and fast, and we still have two Acts to go.Bohemia is presented as a total opposite to the frosty formality and suspicious, constricted Court of Sicilia. Hermione had at one point mentioned that her father was the Emperor of Russia: this little nugget of information quite often informs us of the design of the Sicilian part of the play — Leontes’ Court often looks like many periods from Russian history and design.The move to Bohemia is often a total break, with fresh sea air to reinvigorate proceedings. Here we are among Shepherds and lovely folk, happily involved in preparation for the harvest festival.The whole community seems quite charming, and it’s tempting once again to find echoes of Shakespeare’s own country life bringing up among the squabbles and the general hue and cry of the people.In the midst of all of this, Perdita seems to have blossomed (the proverbial «flower in the mob»), and — naturally — she has met with and fallen in love with Polixenes’ son Florizel, who’s also in disguise, hiding his highly-ranked status because he wants Perdita to love him for who he is, and not for what he is.And as if this weren’t enough disguise, Polixenes (the King) is also hanging about the festival, concerned about his son frolicking among the peasants. The conclusion seems quite obvious, but to keep us intrigued Shakespeare also throws in the figure of a trickster, Autolycus.Here, the playwright gets his Greek Mythology completely right: Autolycus himself knows that he is named after an infamous, ancient, mythological thief: he says it too, that he is «a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles» [IV, 3].He sings a number of songs, runs circles around those who are not as tricky as he is, and does a lot of gleeful but not malicious mischiefs. It’s quite a star-turn for an actor who can make the most of his comedy and his music, but Autolycus’ presence is not completely justified when inserted in the context of the play: if anything, there’s almost a sense of slowness that hovers over these scenes in Bohemia, and us knowing that Perdita and Florizel will eventually have to reveal their true identities does certainly not help with the feeling that Shakespeare is here embellishing the play with a number of unnecessary and superficial lines.In the end, father and son have that argument, and Perdita is revealed as being anything but that Shepherd’s daughter: and so finally we make our way back to Sicilia.Over the course of this sixteen years since the resuming of the Act, Leontes does seem to have calmed down considerably: he chastened, and has grown even more respectful of Paulina, who has luckily survived the intervening years and still has more speeches to give.Everybody makes it safely from Sicilia and there are reconciliations and reunions, as Leontes speaks with Perdita, Florizel and even Polixenes.As if all of this isn’t enough (and in other plays it might as well be), Paulina has another surprise: she invites the Court to visit her room, where she would like to present a statue of Hermione by an Italian Master — Giulio Romano (the only time Shakespeare mentions an artist’s name in his work), a late Renaissance and Mannerist painter and architect.This masterwork, presented by Paulina very cautiously and carefully, causes an entirely new wave of awe in Leontes, who is awestruck at the statue’s incredible similarity to Hermione — but an Hermione as she might’ve looked now, sixteen years after her death.He is so enchanted by the statue that he wants to touch it: but in a charming little moment Paulina insists that he shouldn’t, because the paint is still wet.Paulina has yet more surprises up her sleeve, and promises to make the statue move. Shakespeare here gives her a line about how everything is possible in the theatre, and about how a contract works between the art and the imagination:PAULINA: It is required You do awake your faith. Then all stand still;
On: those that think it is unlawful business I am about, let them depart.
[V, 3]In this hushed, almost reverent moment, the statue does indeed move, and Hermione steps down from her pedestal.Unlike many other plots in Shakespeare, the playwright this time does not let us in to this secret: it looks like he really wants us to believe that Hermione actually died. Like Hero, it was only so long as her «slander lived», but here Leontes had to repent for much longer.There isn’t much discussion of how Paulina was able to hide Hermione away for all that time, but it’s because in such a joyful moment (being reunited with someone we believed long dead and unreachable) we don’t really need it.We here have yet another character newborn: if a production can get an audience to go with it, to go along with the story it’s telling, this can be extremely beautiful, but it however also depends on whether or not we are willing to forgive Leontes for his unjustifiable brutality.Paulina has stage managed this reunion, bringing the family back together: Perdita (she who was lost), Hermione (she who was dead) and Polixenes (who was all but banished).Perdita will marry Florizel, and the old friends, Polixenes and Leontes reunited, will become a family thanks to their children’s wedding.Everyone gets a sort of happy ending — all except for Paulina:PAULINA: Go together,
You precious winners all; your exultation
Partake to every one. I, an old turtle,
Will wing me to some wither'd bough and there
My mate, that's never to be found again,
Lament till I am lost.
[V, 3]She’s still mourning poor Antigonus, but Leontes has a surprisingly sensible suggestion as he convinces her to marry noble Camillo, a steady presence in the play.What’s interesting is that this is a play that ends with matches of different ages: it’s not only young happy couples with their lives ahead of them, but also a middle-aged couple reunited and an older one who can hope to spend the autumn of their lives together.Having broken Leontes in half at the beginning of the story, Shakespeare does the unthinkable, and presents us a man in the aftermath of his actions: rather than ending the play in the wreckage of a tragedy, we’re given three couples — presumably happy — walking off into the sunset.The play is sprawling and intense and quite unique, but this scene in particular is very powerful.There have been many theories about who might have inspired Paulina, and about where the idea of the statue might have come from: for Paulina (as suggested in the book Shadow Play), she might’ve been inspired by the character of Magdalen Montague, a formidable catholic woman who would hide honesty and honour in her home in the form of various relics and religious items — and not only that, but she also had masses celebrated in her home, and so the mysterious final scene with its sacred language and hushed atmosphere, its drawing of curtains, its music, its kneeling, its confirmations and confessions has a distinct flavour of what was already the old religion.

As for the statue, at the same time as this play — 1611 — King James had his own mother, Mary Queen of Scots, exhumed from her first resting place and reburied at Westminster Abbey: her grave is marked with an extremely impressive statue, that took years to carve. Here is another (at least for King James) wronged Queen, several years dead but immortalised in the work of a Master artist. In the flickering lights of the Abbey’s Castle, who might’ve not felt that they saw it move?

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This is the first play in the First Folio, the collection of plays put together by Shakespeare’s colleagues John Hemmings and Henry Condell in the early 1620s. As a document, it isn’t perfect, and there are arguments for several other plays Shakespeare wrote (or contributed to) which aren’t included.There’s a lovely recent play by Lauren Gunderson called The Book of Will, that imagines the stress of trying to get the publishing rights to all of the plays. It certainly gives a sense of how complicated a document the Folio is, and how incomplete it must — by default — be.We don’t know why The Tempest is the first book in the volume — amazingly though, its position at the start of the Folio led for a very long time to the assumption that this was an early play by Shakespeare. Now that we can be secure that it was first performed in 1610 or 1612, we consider it a late play. As a result, a completely new set of assumptions has since then been floating about this play.Though the temptation to see something of Shakespeare’s own biographical life in his works is always very strong, it seems to be almost unavoidable for The Tempest, one of the most fertile for this kind of reading.We have in fact been led to believe that this play marks Shakespeare’s farewell to the theatre, since it is so packed with images about the magic of performance and indeed about saying a kind of farewell to it.Understandably then, a very tight relation has developed that links Shakespeare with Prospero, the lead character, and casts this play as Shakespeare’s own valedictory performance in the theatre: the last piece he wrote before he moved back to Stratford.It’s a lovely idea, but there are a few other plays (most of which are collaborations with other writers) that come after The Tempest, so it doesn’t quite hold true.The story of the play is quite a simple one: and interestingly enough, it’s Shakespeare’s own invention, not particularly drawn from any existing story.Experts believe that he was at least in part inspired by eyewitness accounts of a notable shipwreck of the boat The Sea Venture on the island of Bermuda, in 1609.The play appeared at the height of exploration of what was then called «The New World». A little more than a century after Columbus’ first voyage, it was all the rage to take the seas in the hope of finding treasures to plunder in the New Continents on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.The Tempest is named after the storm that opens the play, but it is really about Prospero, an exiled Duke who has been living in this exile on a magical island for the past several years.Prospero comes from Milan (pronounced Mílan in the play). He was usurped by his brother Antonio, and he barely escaped with his little daughter. They were shoved onto a boat and launched out to sea, and ended up drifting to this strange island.When they arrived, Prospero overcame a witch, called Sycorax, who had such magical powers that she could control the Moon and incarcerate her creatures inside trees. Prospero’s magic is stronger, and more beautiful, and better: there is a moral quality implied. Sycarax does not appear in the play, but she is (or was) the mother of Caliban, who is now Prospero’s slave.Caliban is native to this island, and he is one of the earliest depictions in literature of a person outside of European culture and civilization. His name is a sort of a jumble, something between «Carriban» (an early version of the word that gave us «Caribbean») and a rearrangement of the word «Cannibal».Cannibal became Caliban, which was how — unfortunately — many English people referred to any and all exotic, foreign people for far too long in history. Caliban is the first to have a voice, but Shakespeare also makes him dangerous, and lecherous, violent and very unpleasant at times: a range of negative qualities always associated with savages, cannibals, natives, or whatever other bad, pejorative word that might have been applied to foreigners and people who were «others».Even though Shakespeare made him a slave — and one that is barely human at that — he manages to articulate the pain of colonisation, even in this tiny microcosm on this little island with so few other inhabitants.CALIBAN: This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother,
Which thou takest from me. When thou camest first,
Thou strokedst me and madest much of me, wouldst give me
Water with berries in't, and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night: and then I loved thee
And show'd thee all the qualities o' the isle,
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile:
Cursed be I that did so! All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king: and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o' the island.
[I, 2]This argument continues after Prospero insists that Caliban should be grateful for all the good things and civilizing influences that he has brought, chief among them words and communication. Caliban’s response is wonderful:CALIBAN: You taught me language; and my profit on't Is, I know how to curse.
The red plague rid you For learning me your language!
[I, 2]Prospero’s island — or perhaps we should say Caliban’s island — has a few other inhabitants: the little daughter with whom Prospero had fled from Milan is now a young woman, and her name is Miranda.In deliberate contrast with Caliban is Ariel, one of Prospero’s servants, another supernatural creature blessed with amazing magic. It is Ariel that lifts up the magical but ultimately illusory tempest at the start of the play.The storm seems to wreck a ship that is, very conveniently, carrying Prospero’s usurping brother and many of his cronies: they’ve all just been to Africa for the wedding between the daughter of Alonso (the devil Duke’s dear friend) and the Prince of Tunis. This detail doesn’t have much to do with the story, except that it further colours the depiction of sea travel as a means of contact between the main cities and ports of the world.The world of Alonso and Antonio’s Italy is one of commerce, and conquest: only twelve years earlier, Prospero was set adrift at sea and presumed perished. But, almost a generation later, ships are now departing for new worlds and new financial opportunities.This Alonso, the evil brother’s friend, is the King of Naples: rather unusually then, we have the Duke of Milan and the King of Naples on the same ship — and with them, Alonso’s son and heir, who’s called Ferdinand. Having so many important folks on the same vessel is surely asking for trouble, and sure enough they are separated when Ariel’s storm seems to wreck the ship.After quite a long scene of introduction, in which Prospero explains their story to Miranda, we get a sense of all that must follow in the play.The idea of this magician trying to explain his craft to his daughter (now that she is old enough to hear it) is quite nice, especially if one meddles with the idea of Prospero being much like Shakespeare himself. It’s certainly tempting to wonder what it might have been like for Shakespeare, when he finally decided to talk about his own theatrical powers and his life at the Globe with either of his daughters.Prospero stage manages the experience of these shipwrecked men on this deserted island: he has Ariel lead them on, mess with them and wound up separated into carefully managed and dramatically effective groups.Antonio and Alonso and their men are in one group, but Ferdinand is separated, and just so happens to bump into Miranda, and — surprisingly — they fall instantly in love. Things slowly build up between them and, eventually, satisfied that he might be a respectable match for his daughter, Prospero agrees that Ferdinand and Miranda can get together. He even puts on a magical show for them, a little display for the vanities of his art, in which the Roman Goddesses Iris, Ceres and Juno appear and say many pretty things to the young lovers.Elsewhere in the island, clowns have rolled ashore, perhaps from a lower deck of the wrecked ship. Very soon, they cross paths with Caliban, who hails these creatures as his new Masters and potential friends.The two newcomers, Trinculo and Stefano, soon happen upon some Boos, and so this unlikely trio, the original strange bad fellows with which misery acquaints the man, get roared and drunk and fantasise about all they can achieve and acquire there.Meanwhile Ariel is starting to get a little agitated, since Prospero has promised liberty in exchange for all the services that he is demanding throughout the play.At the end of the Mask of those Roman Goddesses, Prospero gives one of the great speeches in the play, explaining to Ferdinand that the show is over and it has to be — over.PROSPERO: Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vex'd;
Bear with my weakness; my, brain is troubled:
Be not disturb'd with my infirmity:
If you be pleased, retire into my cell
And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk,
To still my beating mind.
[IV, 1]Ferdinand and Miranda withdraw into the cell, where interestingly Ferdinand, who came from Naples (which was a hotbed of the game at that time in Europe), plays chess, and it is the only instance of the game being played in all of Shakespeare.Meanwhile, Prospero is left to ponder all the plates that he has set to spinning. He imagines that it is time to break his staff and drown his books, swearing off his «rough magic» [V, 1]. So, he brings all the threads of this tapestry together, and lists the enchantments on the various acts he’s been directing, and stages his grand finale.He forgives the trespasses of those who have trespassed him, but he does threaten to blackmail anyone who doesn’t agree, and so Antonio and Sebastian have two reasons to toe the line. Prospero gets his title back, and agrees to return to Milan. Our two drunken clowns are put in their place, and even Caliban promises (or is made to promise) to be good. Ferdinand and Miranda’s wedding is secured with the approval of Alonso, the King of Naples, and poor Ariel is given one final job: to give everybody good weather for their return to Italy, and is at last set free.To end the play, we get an epilogue, in which Prospero again speaks alone to the audience:PROSPERO: Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
[V, 1]Again, it is important to not be too tempted to believe that these are the last words Shakespeare wrote for the stage: sadly, they aren’t. Even his life didn’t get to be that neat.The play’s story may seem very simple indeed: a shipwreck, real or magical, brings a bunch of Italians to a mysterious island. There, another exiled Italian and his daughter and his slaves await them, hoping for revenge and restoration. Having messed them around a bit and showed them who’s boss, the exiled man arranges a big reunion and everything ends rather nicely. What’s really exciting about this play is just how much theatre Shakespeare crams in this rather short text. There are echoes, and set-ups, and plot devices from a huge number of plays: we have brothers fighting rather severely, like in Hamlet; we have an exiled Duke, living in a new, more natural environment, like in As You Like It, we have an exuberant, confusing story that takes place in the course of a single day, like in the Comedy of Errors, we have a Duke trying to mastermind everything in the background, like in Measure for Measure, we have young lovers encountering the magical, like in Midsummer Night’s Dream.Like in many other of the Romances, we begin with a turbulent event that splits families apart, causes chaos and must be negotiated, before a reunion full of forgiveness leading to new couplings and hope for the future. Also, a frequent feature in the Romances is a strong focus on fathers and daughters — not only that, but spreading the native influence a little wider, we have the zany clown trying to hatch a plot with a misshapen old figure and in this Trinculo, Stefano and Caliban can trace a lineage that goes all the way back to the Commedia dell’Arte from Italy: there’s singing, there’s dancing, and in any decent production there is at least a bit of magic. On top of all of this (not to mention, of course, the reference to chess), there’s a new, very fashionable theatrical offering, called a «Masque».Masques had evolved throughout the Elizabethan period, and now, at the height of James’ reign, the «Jacobean Masque» was extremely popular and extravagant. In a play so stuffed with performance, and style, and almost everything that has to do with the theatre, it’s no surprise that Shakespeare’s only Masque appears here. It’s a gorgeous pageant of Goddesses, dancing, poetry, and songs.The real expert on Masques was Ben Johnson, and it is very interesting that instead of making something that at least tries to compete with Johnson’s style and flare, Shakespeare cuts his version off: the Masque is the show that Prospero puts on for Ferdinand and Miranda, and it’s lovely, but he ends it about his speech on how it all just fades into thin air. In this play, it’s more important to see the man behind the curtain, and it’s that man that addresses us,

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As things stand: the First Folio includes thirty-six plays; but there are two more works by Shakespeare that did not make the cut into this special collection — The Two Noble Kinsmen and Pericles.There are many reasons why this play didn’t make it into the Folio: perhaps the printing rights could not be secured, or perhaps the compilers didn’t feel it was enough by Shakespeare that it merited inclusion. We can’t know with any certainty why it was excluded, but what we do know is that it was one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays before the closure of the theatres by the Puritans.This play is weird from start to finish: but there’s something very special about it. On the page, it might feel a bit too fantastical, nonsensical, and very rambly indeed; but as a theatrical experience, a shared odyssey, it can be very, very moving.The whole story is narrated by the figure of the Poet, John Gower, who emerges from the ashes to tell this tale: «a song that old was sung» [I, 0].Gower was a mediaeval poet, who wrote at about the same time as his friend Geoffrey Chaucer. Throughout the play, he introduces scenes, and tells us what is going to happen in them. Indeed they are prefaced also by dumbshows: the whole affair seems like a throwback to a more mediaeval pageantry, not a million miles from how the players in Hamlet are likewise performing, in a recognizable but clearly old-fashioned manner.Shakespeare lulls us into a pattern with this, so that we begin to expect it, only to pull out quite a neat trick at the end of the play. We say Shakespeare does it, but we should also acknowledge that the ownership of this play has been a point of debate: the exclusion from the Folio is one reason why scholars don’t think Shakespeare wrote it (or wrote all of it), but then some people think Shakespeare didn’t write any of his plays at all!Certainly, the language of the play improves as it goes along, and there’s a feeling that another hand was largely responsible for the first two acts, and then Shakespeare — as it were — took the wheel for the remainder of the play. So yes — it was Shakespeare who engineered a surprise in our expectations at the end.Before we get there, however, we have quite an enormous journey to get through: Pericles, our hero, Prince of Tyre, starts his play in Antioch where he is hoping to win the heart of a princess.The story here is quite similar to that of the Puccini opera Turandot, wherein a princely suitor tries to earn the hand of a mysterious princess by attempting to solve a riddle.In both stories, if he gets the riddle wrong, he will have his head cut off. In Pericles, there’s the added horror that the Prince realises that the King of Antioch (conveniently called Antiochus), is actually sleeping with his daughter, the princess. The answer to the riddle, which is very easy, is «incest», and so out hero is left with the choice of exposing this lurid secret, or have his head cut off.It’s a gloriously wicked exercise of power, to make your subjects and supporters refuse to see the truth, and offend your Odysseus behaviour by pretending it’s not happening — not that this would ever happen in a civilised society of course.Pericles, faced with this awful choice, does the logical thing and runs away. Trouble is: Antiochus knows who he is. Surely someone this wicked would likely send him an assassin to kill him at home in Tyre.With this concern in mind, Pericles leaves the noble Helicanus in charge, and sets sail again. He makes his way to Tarsus, and brings food and salvation to its people, who are beset with famine. The governor Cleon and his formidable wife Dionyza are enormously grateful, and Pericles sets sail again.The first of the play’s storms shipwrecks Pericles’ ship, and he’s washed up on the shore of Pentapolis, in North Africa. He meets a group of very funny fishermen, and then as if by magic his armour, that had been gifted to him by his father, is recovered in their nets.As they chat, Pericles hears that there’s a festival in Pentapolis right now, celebrating the birthday of another princess. He decides that he will join the party.In the court of King Simonides, there’s a tournament — in this ancient Greek city, but better not raise too many questions. It’s best to blame Gower, the mediaeval poet, for staging so mediaeval an entertainment.The various knights present their arms, and Pericles does his best despite his humble shipwrecked state. He impresses the birthday girl, Thaisa, and soon enough her father the King is arranging their marriage.All is going beautifully, until word comes from Tyre that it might be best if Pericles came home. They decide to leave Pentapolis, despite Thaisa being heavily pregnant. Another storm breaks out, and in the wildness of the waves Thaisa breaks into labour, and dies in childbirth.In a remarkably bleak scene, the sailors insist that the storm will never let up unless they toss the body overboard. So, this new mother is carefully laid in a casket and thrown in the tumultuous Mediterranean sea, and a heartbroken Pericles rails against his fate.The storm breaks, and the casket washes up on shore in Ephesus. Here, a local doctor called Cerimon happens upon it, opens it, and figures that he can use his art to revive her — and sure enough, Thaisa recovers.She is so overwhelmed with grief at the assumption that Pericles and her baby died in the storm, that she joins the famous Temple of Diana there at Ephesus.Very surprisingly — Pericles also survived, and he makes a stop at nearby Tarsus, far closer than Tyre, and begs Cleon and Dionyza to mind his baby: a girl, that he calls Marina since she was born at sea.They still owe him from having rescued the city from famine, so they agree to take her in, and Pericles swears that he will not cut his hair nor his beard until he comes to collect her. It might seem that nobody in Tyre could possibly help to take care of this child, but this is not a play that holds up to too many of these such questions. Pericles, his wife and now his daughter are all now separated, stranded in their ways in different Mediterranean cities.Now, we get a gap in time, as Gower invites us to imagine that several years pass, in order for Marina to grow up into a beautiful young woman — far more beautiful, in fact, than her foster sister Philoten. Diana can’t bear that this surrogate daughter so outshines her own flesh and blood, and so she hires a murderer to kill Marina. The murderer and the young woman go for a long walk at the beach, at Dionyza’s best, but before the dreadful deed can be done, a gang of pirates kidnaps Marina and saves her. They sell her to a brothel in Mytilene, which is the last new city we hear of in this story.Marina is an amazingly virtuous young lady — she barely realises that she’s living in a brothel, in stark contrast to the rancid way in which her new colleagues discuss their trades. She manages to talk just about anyone out of any sexual impropriety: even when the governor comes for a visit, she manages to talk him out of what he wanted in such a way that he falls in love with her, and his name is Lysimachus. The brothel’s staff are already desperate, and give us the remarkably cruel image of her virginity being like a glass that just needs to be broken.Eventually, Marina convinces even them that the whole city would be better off if she taught lessons. and so she becomes a teacher, and sets up a little learning community. It’s a remarkable storyline for this perfect child of Thaisa and Pericles.Meanwhile, her father has no idea that she’s living in such constant danger of being raped, or murdered, and he comes back to Tarsus to collect her, where he thinks she should be. There, Cleon and Dionyza wickedly tell him that his daughter is dead.With no hope left, Pericles retreats into his own despair, and — this being a Romance, after all — his boat eventually shows up at Mytilene. Nobody can get through the thoroughly depressed Pericles: he’s solemn, broken, and just wants to be left alone.The governor has had no luck trying to entertain this foreigner prince, but Ah!, he thinks, perhaps he has a solution: he suggests that maybe that startling girl might be able to lift the poor Prince’s spirits.So, an interview is arranged between Pericles and Marina: this is the only bit in the play that hasn’t been introduced by Gower: we get no dumbshow to announce this, and so we are not quite prepared for the scene between father and daughter.Pericles is the first of Shakespeare’s so called «Romances», and this one sets quite a high bar. The play appears after the sequence of the major tragedies that includes Macbeth, King Lear, and Anthony and Cleopatra: barely any glimmer of hope left to be found in any of those three plays — ambition, and death; madness, and death; passion, and death.But then Pericles appears, and rather than death, we get this beautiful scene between two battered souls who have been surviving only in the hope of seeing each other again: they’re both cautious, both nervous of any further pain. And then the light shines through the cracks, and we have this lovely scene of realising that they have been restored.Of course, there’s another reunion that has to happen, and the Goddess Diana appears in a dream and tells Pericles to visit her temple at Ephesus. Most of the cast therefore sticks up and makes one final journey from Mytilene to Ephesus. At the Temple of Diana, we have a second reunion, where the family is restored.Gower appears one more time as a kind of an epilogue, filling in any outstanding gaps:GOWER:
In Antiochus and his daughter you have heard
Of monstrous lust the due and just reward:
In Pericles, his queen and daughter, seen,
Although assail'd with fortune fierce and keen,
Virtue preserved from fell destruction's blast,
Led on by heaven, and crown'd with joy at last:
In Helicanus may you well descry
A figure of truth, of faith, of loyalty:
In reverend Cerimon there well appears
The worth that learned charity aye wears:
For wicked Cleon and his wife, when fame
Had spread their cursed deed, and honour'd name
Of Pericles, to rage the city turn,
That him and his they in his palace burn;
The gods for murder seemed so content
To punish them; although not done, but meant.
So, on your patience evermore attending,
New joy wait on you! Here our play has ending.
[V, 3]So — the story is a bit bunkers, and it visits a wide number of cities that Shakespeare’s audience might only have known from the various letters of Saint Paul in the Bible.The source for this story is perhaps the Tale of Apollonius, but all the suggestions seem to present a very garbled process of transmission through the ages, including a poem by Gower himself, that Shakespeare remixed in his own inimitable way.There are echoes of many of Shakespeare’s own plays: the setting in Ephesus recalls the Comedy of Errors, also set there because that city was so deeply associated with magic and wonders and miracles; there are hints of All’s Well That Ends Well in Cerimon, a doctor whose art blurs the lines between medicine and magic (and it’s also important to bear in mind that Gower tells us from the very beginning that this is a story that has been told «for restoratives» [I, 0]; the story itself is going to make us feel better); the seedy Vienna in Measure for Measure is outdone only by the grime of Mytilene, and this play’s pander and bawd are a good match for the smut of Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida. There’s a hint of The Winter’s Tale in the way that a woman is reunited with her family after a long absence in the cool, old environment of a Temple Gallery. As in the other Romances, we have fathers and daughters trying to rebuild their relationships after a cataclysm.It’s interesting that these stories of families, of next generations, of dynasties, only start to appear after Shakespeare has smashed his way into tragedy, and after Elizabeth herself is dead. With the coming of the reign of King James, it became less dangerous to talk about new generations, or daughters, or succession, on stage.This is a play that is cram full of stories: reading it on the page doesn’t make for the most exciting experience, because it is not a play that is overstuffed with amazing poetry, but it has a tremendous power on stage, and can well be a testament to the power of storytelling and fantasy, and how both can be a balm in troubled times.Given that it seems like it came out so soon after that period of plague, during which Shakespeare wrote King Lear among others, it’s very fascinating to see that what follows is this sprawling, crazy story. After such a long time being locked up, quarantining, isolated, is it any wonder that his imagination led him to a story of travel across as much of the world as he knew it, of different cultures, different cities, worst excesses of human behaviour and transgression, and then a heart-stopping scene of reunion at the end.

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Twelfth Night is a holiday better known as the sixth of January, in Christian tradition the last day of the Christmas celebrations. It marks the day when the three Wise Men went to visit the newborn baby Jesus.It’s always been a day associated with practical jokes and merriment: Shakespeare’s play itself has little reference to the title, but then A Midsummer Night’s Dream has little reference to its title either. These two plays have been called something like «Shakespeare’s festive comedies», because they have been written specifically for performance at the times of year that they mention.Now, while the title of the play might not have any impact on its setting or its story, it might well have suggested to Shakespeare’s audience some of the things they were to expect to see in it.All the way back to ancient Rome, the festival of Saturnalia took place in December. This was the festival of the God Saturn, and it was one of exuberance and merriment, and often saw people dressing up, sometimes switching genders or indeed masters playing servants and servants getting some licensed time to mock their masters. Many of these traditions and shenanigans found their way into Christmas celebrations as late as Tudor and Stuart England, so «Twelfth Night» as a title might actually set the tone: we certainly have a good deal of dressing up, of misrule, of boozing and carousing and of cheeky attempts from servants and employees to change their relationship with their superiors.Not only that: this is one of the very few plays that have a subtitle. It’s called Twelfth Night or What You Will. This could mean something like «call it whatever you want» or indeed «a little of what you’re having yourself» — and it might indeed be an equally good title for the show, as perhaps we will see.The story takes place in Illyria, which is the former name for the land along the Adriatic coast that encompasses the many countries of the former Yugoslavia. We begin at the court of a local Count called Orsino, who is desperately in love with a young Lady called Olivia. Orsino has one of the most famous opening speeches in Shakespeare, and one of the most beautiful:ORSINO: If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.
[I, 1]Orsino pines elegantly in his love for Olivia: she is mourning for her father and her brother, and has insisted that it will be seven years until she will even think of having a lover. So, Orsino keeps trying to get her attention, knowing that perhaps he will get no response.Olivia wallows in her grief in a house that seems to be quite rousey otherwise: the Lady’s uncle, Sir Toby Belch, lives in her house too. He, as his name suggests, does an awful lot of drinking, and he has a friend visiting too, called Sir Andrew Aguecheek, another potential suitor for Olivia. There are some servants too: Maria and Fabian. Even in the shadow of so much death in the family, it feels like a much more fun house than Orsino’s indolent, if musical home.The behaviour of these people, in short, seems a lot like that of the end of Christmas holidays: there are some people pining for what they don’t have, some mourning for what they’ve lost and others just drinking to get through it. But at the same time, something needs to burst in, something needs to change — and sure enough, it does.A storm at sea wrecks a ship and a young woman is washed ashore. Interestingly, we’re not told her name. Sha asks various questions about this land she’s arrived in, and she’s told that there is a Lord and a Lady (Orsino and Olivia) that are the people of note here.If Olivia weren’t in mourning perhaps, this young lady might go and make herself known to her, but since that house is rather closed to outsiders, our heroine decides to dress as a boy and present herself as a young man to Orsino. Sadly her twin brother died in the shipwreck, but at least she has his clothes and so she can assume this new identity. Things go quite smoothly and soon enough Cesario (the name she’s chosen for herself) becomes Orsino’s new favourite page — and Cesario is falling madly in love with Orsino.That in itself could be a nice comedy, but things become more complicated when Orsino sends the young boy (who is of course a girl) with a renewed embassy to his beloved: Olivia.While all of this is going on, in Olivia’s house there’s tension between her steward, the stern Malvolio, and her ruckus drunken uncle, Toby Belch. Into the mix returns Feste, a clown who was a favourite of Olivia’s father. Feste has a very sweet and clever moment when he manages to cheer Olivia up, insisting that her dead brother is in Heaven and therefore she’s a fool to be so melancholic, mourning for him thus. This is a very worldly, even wise gesture.While all of this is happening, Cesario arrives at the house and demands to speak with Olivia. Today of all days, Olivia decides that perhaps she will listen to this young man, not least because surely they’re all so bored, any novelty is a welcome distraction from the grief.Olivia and the maid Maria veil themselves and there’s a very funny scene between Cesario and his addressees: Cesario is quite cheeky, almost mocking Olivia’s grand, self-imposed mourning — removing herself from the world like this.This narcissism, self-love and the distracted manner of the mythological Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection, is echoed in one of the most famous speeches in the play, when Olivia asks how Cesario might try to woo, and indeed this narcissism is reflected in the manner of Cesario’s language, which puts us in mind of Echo, who herself fell in love with Narcissus, and was condemned to reverberate:CESARIO: Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out 'Olivia!' O, You should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth,
But you should pity me!
[I, 5]The old man’s passion is so sweet, so sincere, that it makes an almost perfect foil for her grief. Olivia is quite overcome, and immediately she responds, finishing the previous line:OLIVIA: You might do much
[I, 5]He does plenty, and Olivia falls in love with him. Him, that is really — her.So now we have a rather complicated triangle: but it gets even better, because very soon another figure arrives in Illyria: Sebastian, the twin brother that we thought was dead!So now we have a fourth potential partner, and a hope that the play might end with two couples.Sebastian has arrived in Illyria with a close friend, or maybe even his lover, Antonio. The ladder isn’t supposed to be in Illyria by law, but chooses to stick around in case his dear Sebastian might need his help.In the meantime, the brooding Malvolio has been getting far too big for his boots, lording it over everyone else in the oblivious household: Maria and Sir Toby have had enough, and she cooks up a hilarious scheme to gull him into believing that Olivia is in love with him.Maria has observed that her handwriting is almost identical to her Mistress, so they draw up a letter telling Malvolio of this secret passion, seemingly in Olivia’s handwriting. Not only that, they tell Malvolio to show a smile (something that would have been so out of character for him) and to wear yellow cross-gartered stockings — a style (and a colour) that they know Olivia hates.They arrange for him to happen upon the letter in the garden, and he falls for it hook, line and sinker: what’s very funny is that this practical joke unwinds a much deeper truth — Malvolio himself has been nurturing a love for Olivia, and now he fantasies about all the perks that might become available if he marries her: velvet, which was reserved for the highest in society, and better still — the chance to tell sir Toby where he can go with himself. At this point, the plot seems to be as carefully constructed as a new watch — another of the privileges and new fangled luxuries that Malvolio hopes to achieve.Things begin to unravel: a challenge is incited between Sir Andrew and Cesario, two of the least proficient swordsmen of all Shakespeare, making for terrific comedy as they attempt to threaten each other.Just as things come to a head, Antonio appears, and intervenes, preventing Cesario from getting hurt. Just like that then the law appears and Antonio is arrested. He asks for the money that he lent Sebastian for help with getting out of this trouble, but of course the Sebastian that he’s seeing is actually Cesario, who has no clue what money he might be talking about.Elsewhere, the actual Sebastian crosses paths with Olivia, who thinks that he is Cesario, and somehow she manages to get him to agree to marry her almost instantly.With perfect timing on the way back to the Chapel, Sebastian manages to arrive in time for the duel and knocks Sir Andrew about the head, since he — unlike his sister — is actually trained in combat.As all of this builds and builds and builds, we finally reach this magical epiphany moment, when the two twins appear together on the stage: everyone is stunt, and most shocking of all is the reunion between the two siblings, each of whom thought the other lost.The play, however, doesn’t end on an entirely happy note: the joke against Malvolio went as far as locking him up for having lost his mind, and even getting Feste to show up as a fake Doctor to torment him even further.When all is revealed, and even Olivia explains that despite the similarities between the handwritings, the one of the letters surely isn’t hers, Malvolio storms off, proclaiming that he will be revenged on the whole pack of them.Somehow it works out that Sebastian is more than happy to marry Olivia, and she’s delighted with him: Orsino has, over the course of the play, become more and more taken with Cesario, and when it’s revealed that he is in fact a she, and that her name is Viola, it becomes all the more feasible for him to marry her. So these are the two couples at the end of the play: for reasons still pretty unclear, Sir Toby marries Maria off-stage, and they are a third couple.Antonio, Fabian, Curio and the rest of this staff are left unmatched, and the play ends with a song by Feste: The Rain, It Raineth Everyday. He doesn’t sing the whole of it, mind you — Shakespeare saved a verse of this little ditty for the Fool in King Lear!Even as we’ve been recounting this play exactly as it is, it truthfully is much more than the sum of its parts. Despite it being a play that is more in prose than in verse, it’s full of beautiful lines and clever observations: it’s a real gift for a company of actors, and has one of the loveliest little observations for any Shakespearian character: when poor Sir Andrew, poor wretch that he is, laments:SIR ANDREW: I was adored once
[II, 3]As mentioned, this is a tremendous piece of writing for actors: Shakespeare knew his company so well, and knew exactly how to write for them. We know that the parts for Feste were written for Robert Armond, who was famous for the beauty of his singing voice — and so Feste gets lots of songs throughout the play. Armond’s Clown roles are more sardonic and intelligent than those ruckus characters written for the previous clown, Will Kemp. But Shakespeare here was also able to rely on the talents of at least three brilliant young men to play the three women: Viola, Olivia and Maria.This play works beautifully when performed by female actresses, but there’s a particular level of meta-theatrical excitement to the way that in this play, Shakespeare has a boy playing a girl falling in love with another boy playing a girl who’s dressed like a boy.Having honed his craft on several comedies in the past, it feels like this play is Shakespeare’s comic masterpiece: there’s gender comedy, verbal and musical comedy, situational comedy, and even physical comedy when we see the two unlikely combatants attempting to arrange a duel. While zany things do happen within it, it’s a very sophisticated play.The first performance that we know about was at the Middle-Temple Hall indoors, and was documented in the journal of the law student John Manningham, who it performed on the second of February 1602. His jotted notes about the play mentioned how it reminded him of Menaechmi, the play by Plautus, and might well be inspired by the anonymous Italian play, called Gli Ingannati. Interestingly, Shakespeare seems to have invented most of this story himself. There are definite echoes of Menaechmi, A Tale Of Twins, and of his own Comedy of Errors. In the latter play, a man shows up in a new place and immediately says yes to his apparent new fortune, in much the same way as Sebastian does in Illyria.The various confusions and errors that occur because of these twins are all the more curious because Shakespeare changes their gender: Viola is a girl, after all — but he doesn’t seem very bothered about the science of twins. Only twins of the same gender, obviously, can be identical — but the playwright doesn’t seem too bothered about it, so neither should we.Another echo of The Comedy Of Errors comes in the language of the play: these two (Comedy Of Errors and Twelfth Night) feature more references to madness and being mad than any others. Nearly every character in Illyria is accused of being mad at some point, and perhaps they all are — as well they might be, at the end of the Saturnalian celebrations of the Christmas period.One of the most interesting factors about this this play, lastly, is Shakespeare being himself father of twins: Twelfth Night was possibly the play he wrote immediately after he wrote Hamlet. As it is impossible not to wonder about the circumstances that led Shakespeare to write a play about a father and a son separated by death and with a title character that bears a name with a striking similarity to the son he had lost when analysing Hamlet, it’s likewise hard not to see the repercussions of that same event when looking at Twelfth Night.But what about the twin that didn’t die? Directly after Hamlet, this existential play about death, about heredity, about choosing to live and act in the face of unbearable circumstances, Shakespeare writes a romantic, grown-up, melancholic, and very charming play, about a girl who has lost her brother and must make her way in the world without him.
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Despite all the madness around her she does her best, and is rewarded in the end not just by getting the man that she wanted, but with a reunion: her brother isn’t dead after all, and perhaps they’ll live both happily-ever-after. Now, goodness only knows whether Juliet Shakespeare ever got to read or see Twelfth Night, but it is possible that his father wrote this play for her. For all its romance and its comedy it has, as Orsino puts it, something of a «a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound» [I, 1].

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