If you take a look at the sources that influenced Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (his first tragedy as well as his first Roman play), Seneca's Thyestes and Ovid's story of Philomela from Metamorphoses, you'll see that the bloodiness of his play didn't come out of nowhere. Even by today's standards, these works are nasty. Not that Shakespeare didn't match them in this regard: he did. In fact, thanks to his unequaled verisimilitude, he surpassed them, and created a play that is harrowing to watch or read. But as I mentioned in my previous post, I think recent audiences and commentators are getting past this fact and seeing some of the many qualities that the play contains. I also mentioned in my last post that I think the writing of the play was crucial to Shakespeare, and that I would try to demonstrate some of the influence the play had on his later career. Here we go: 1. In the storyline itself, there are strong parallels with Coriolanus (particularly the story of Lucius joining forces with an opposing army to subdue Rome) and King Lear (not only are the opening scenes very similar in terms of stagecraft, but the subplots involving Edmund and Aaron are introduced and then integrated into the main plots in very similar ways). 2. The scenes set in the Andronici mausoleum can be seen as precursors to those in the Capulet tomb in Romeo and Juliet. 3. In terms of the story's arc, a very clear parallel can be drawn with Macbeth, as the two title characters go from being highly decorated and respected warriors to infamy in the eyes of their societies, from which point they discover their inner natures. 4. The theme of madness, real or assumed, as it pertains to Titus, of course brings Hamlet to mind. 5. Tamora's first speech in the play, in which she begs for her son's life by describing the importance of mercy, is clearly the seed that led to Portia's famous words in The Merchant of Venice. 6. The four other works set in Rome that he was to write later (in order of composition, The Rape of Lucrece, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus), which treat in every case a major turning point in Roman history, can all be seen as an attempt to answer the central question posed by this play (and which may have influenced the title of one of the most famous works in the study of history, Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire): What happened?

I'm not sure that there is an artist in any field that can compare with Shakespeare in terms of the depiction and understanding of time. Technically, his plays are largely the result of his treatment of it, and to get to know them from the point of view of craft, it's a vital area of study. I've mentioned it before in another context, but one of the many changes that Shakespeare made to his source material for Romeo and Juliet, Arthur Brooke's The Tragicall History of Romeus and Juliet (1562), was to telescope a four-month period into one of four days, while still allowing breathing room for characters such as the Nurse and Mercutio, and maintaining the audience's belief throughout. In terms of theme, time is central to many, perhaps most, of the plays, but some, such as Macbeth, are almost entirely absorbed by it: The play is perhaps best approached as a dramatic example of how people can destroy the present by obsession with the future. And in Henry IV, part Two, the king (i.e. Bolingbroke), nearing the end of his life, which was filled with civil wars, rebellions, illness, has these lines, as powerful as any in Shakespeare, about the entangled natures of life and time:

O God! that one might read the book of fate,

And see the revolution of the times

Make mountains level, and the continent,

Weary of solid firmness, melt itself

Into the sea; and other times to see

The beachy girdle of the ocean

Too wide for Neptune's hips; how chances mock,

And changes fill the cup of alteration

With divers liquors! O, if this were seen,

The happiest youth, viewing his progress through,

What perils past, what crosses to ensue,

Would shut the book and sit him down and die.

Here's an example of what I was referring to yesterday (i.e. the importance of building meaning line by line when reading Shakespeare). It comes from act one, scene five of Macbeth, shortly after we first meet Lady Macbeth. The scene opens with her reading the letter from Macbeth which informs her of the prophecies made by the weird sisters. She is delighted by the news, but is simultaneously worried that Macbeth's nature, "too full o' the milk of human kindness", will not allow him to seize the opportunity presented. She then resolves to bring him to it, perhaps more quickly than she has imagined, because immediately, a messenger enters with important news:

LADY MACBETH

What is your tidings?

MESSENGER

The king comes here to-night.

LADY MACBETH

Thou'rt mad to say it:

Is not thy master with him? who, were't so,

Would have inform'd for preparation.

MESSENGER

So please you, it is true: our thane is coming:

One of my fellows had the speed of him,

Who, almost dead for breath, had scarcely more

Than would make up his message.

LADY MACBETH

Give him tending;

He brings great news.

[Exit Messenger]

The raven himself is hoarse

That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan

Under my battlements.

The final sentence of this excerpt is the really famous one, but unless we read line by line, building each new idea, image or piece of information carefully on what came before, we won't see that the "raven" referred to is, in fact, the colleague of the messenger in the scene, who rode so fast that he was "almost dead for breath", with "scarcely more/ Than would make up his message".

The comparison of the characters of Richard III and Macbeth is a critical consideration of long standing. The practice dates back to the eighteenth century, in fact, and a bit of thought on the matter makes it easy to see why. They are both monarchs who achieve their positions through treachery and murder, whose crimes become increasingly vicious until they eventually reach the level of infanticide, who lose all manner of human connection, who become conscience-wracked and are eventually defeated in battle by nemeses who personify the attributes that they've left aside in their pursuit of power. There's more, including the fact that both were renowned for their feats in battle before their turn to villainy, and that the historical counterparts to the characters each have quite a number of vigorous defenders who have argued that Shakespeare's depictions of them were unfair, and were meant to flatter his own monarchs (Elizabeth I in the case of Richard III, and James I in the case of Macbeth). But the really surprising thing in all of this, after all of the parallels that can be drawn, is that the characters have very little in common in psychological, philosophical or dramatic ways. And to paraphrase several commentators, a dramatist of lesser skill would have made them interchangeable.

I've spent a lot of time reading about and trying to imagine performances in Shakespeare's time recently and I keep coming back to a comment that I received regarding my December 20 post of last year. The gist of it was that Shakespeare may have incorporated comic characters into even his most intense tragedies, the Porter in Macbeth for example, to keep his great comic actors, such as Will Kempe and Robert Armin, in work. This strikes me as very likely indeed, and it has led me back to another comparison with Duke Ellington, who wrote parts with the specific personalities and talents of his leading instrumentalists in mind. It seems logical to assume that Shakespeare must have done the same. And like Ellington, who collaborated not only with his players, but with Billy Strayhorn and others throughout his career, the most important thing was always to get the work in front of audiences. I remain convinced that Ellington's career is the career that most closely resembles Shakespeare's in terms of working methods and results.

George Kittredge, the great Shakespeare scholar from Boston, in writing on Macbeth, gave all the credit for the existence of the Porter to the requirements that Shakespeare needed to fulfill at that particular point in the play: He needed a character to fill a period of time between the murder and the re-entry of the cleaned-up Macbeths, but it couldn't be a major character and it couldn't advance the story. The play also needed relief from the "extreme tensions" of the bloody regicide and the discovery of the body by Macduff et al, and the type of relief had to be of a dark comic variety. Thus the Porter was born. It's an intriguing theory - as it shows how Shakespeare's understanding of what the audience would need at a given point may have been crucial to the creation of some of his great minor characters. Others of this type that come immediately to mind: the Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet, the Gravediggers in Hamlet, the Clown (carrying the asp and figs) in Antony and Cleopatra, and the Gardener in Richard II. If the theory is true, and necessity was integral to their development, it shows once more Shakespeare's unparalleled emphasis on detail: even the smallest characters in the plays are fascinating and believable.

One of the most important books in the history of Shakespeare criticism, Caroline Spurgeon's Shakespeare's Imagery and What it Tells Us, first published in 1935, contains many enlightening observations. One of the most telling is her comparison of Shakespeare's use of recurring image patterns with the illustrations found in the illuminated poetry of William Blake (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blake#Illuminated_books). First, she gives an astonishingly accurate description of these unique masterpieces, and in particular the illustrations found in them: "These are not, for the most part, illustrations in the ordinary sense of the term, the translation by the artist of some incident in the narrative into a visual picture; they are rather a running accompaniment to the words in another medium, sometimes symbolically emphasising or interpreting certain aspects of the thought, sometimes supplying frankly only decoration or atmosphere, sometimes grotesque and even repellent, vivid, strange, arresting, sometimes drawn with an almost unearthly beauty of form and colour."

She then brilliantly relates Blake's work to Shakespeare's by comparing the effect of these illustrations to the one created by poetic image patterns in the plays: "Thus, as the leaping tongues of flame which illuminate the pages of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell show the visual form which Blake's thought evoked in his mind, and symbolize for us the purity, the beauty, and the two-edged quality of life and danger in his words, so the recurrent images in Macbeth or Hamlet reveal the dominant picture or sensation - and for Shakespeare the two are identical - in terms of which he sees and feels the main problem or theme of the play, thus giving us an unerring clue to the way he looked at it, as well as a direct glimpse into the working of his mind and imagination." Tomorrow, I'll summarize some of Spurgeon's thoughts on the imagery of Romeo and Juliet.

The darkest moment in Macbeth, a very dark play, is the murder of Macduff's wife and children. It can be considered an illustration of what happens when a tyrant begins to feel threatened - that atrocity usually follows. The scene (4.3) during which Macduff is told the news (at the time he is gathering forces in England with which to oppose Macbeth) is very moving and thought-provoking. Malcolm repeatedly intercedes, hoping to convince Macduff to "let grief convert to anger", and we may feel torn, like Macduff, between the two. Particulary when we realize that Malcolm may be thinking rather more politically than empathetically - he needs Macduff to help him to reach the throne. At one point Malcolm tells Macduff to "dispute it like a man", and Macduff's reply is the following:

I shall do so;

But I must also feel it as a man:

I cannot but remember such things were,

That were most precious to me. Did heaven look on,

And would not take their part?

Emotions and questions such as these continue to follow disasters to this day, and will continue to do so as long as injustice exists. My point with all of this is as follows: If we are trying to move toward a world without violence, treachery and dictatorship, wouldn't we have a better chance of doing so if young people get the opportunity to read Macbeth?

I suppose wisdom could be considered an antonym of delusion. In Macbeth, the title couple are infected by the latter to such a degree that the normal courses of life, its processes and stages, are taken away from them by their lack of the former. There is a telling moment early in the play (1.7) where Macbeth, in considering the nature of his ambition, recognizes that a goal can become so all-consuming that "here, upon this bank and shoal of time,/ We'ld jump the life to come." But it doesn't prevent what follows, and late in the play (5.5) after a series of atrocities and disasters, and the death by suicide of his queen, he speaks the famous lines (which I've come to understand better with time) wherein he describes a world without process and meaningful work towards goals - where time equals emptiness, and actions are futile:

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.

Of course, the subtext (sometimes called the underthought) is simultaneously telling us something quite different, that life doesn't have to be this way, and that wisdom can prevent the errors in judgement that would lead to an end such as this one. Now where could wisdom like that be learned?

A fine example of Shakespeare's sophisticated method of exploring moral issues occurs in 5.3 of Macbeth, where the title character recognizes some of the things that his crimes have caused him to lose:

I have lived long enough: my way of life

Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf;

And that which should accompany old age,

As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,

I must not look to have; but, in their stead,

Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,

Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.

Auden, who had great insight into the play, said in his Lectures on Shakespeare: "Usually in tragedy a good person is made to suffer through a flaw in his goodness. In Macbeth this pattern is reversed: it is the streak of goodness that causes pathos and suffering." And now to return to the larger topic begun a few posts back (the importance of Shakespeare in the high school curriculum), this type of subtlety is exactly what is required when raising philosophical issues with young people. Any attempt at top-down moralizing will (rightly, in my opinion) be met with instant derision, whereas the discovery of moments like the one above, which are only found in the greatest literature, will not.

Objectivity is a quality that is central to the work of a serious dramatist. He or she must be able to present many types of conflict credibly, and to do so requires the imaginative comprehension of contrasting opinions. It is somewhat similar to formal debating, where a team will have to prepare to argue both sides of an issue. This is done for several reasons: for one, there are some issues that may provide one side with an emotional advantage over the other. (It's like changing directions in a soccer game at half-time so that both teams will have the advantage of the wind for a while.) But more importantly, it is to ensure that debaters "shed light not heat", or in other words, that "reason" maintain its "sovereignty", as Horatio put it.

Unfortunately, in political discussions, it often happens that people argue from an entrenched position that will admit no dissent - I've often felt that any position so constructed clearly disproves its viability - and that the party or politician that they support has all the answers, and that the other(s) do all the damage. This type of thinking is obviously flawed, dangerous even, but unfortunately it's frequently brought into classrooms, particularly those where literature has been replaced with social studies, when its opposite is really what should be encouraged.

Enter Shakespeare. One of the most astonishing things about his work is that it is impossible to pin down where it stands on political issues. For example, in the 404 years of Macbeth's existence, it has been seen from innumerable angles and used to support innumerable positions. And there's no end in sight. It will continue to produce thought and discussion of great sophistication - because it's dramatic art of the highest level, and because its author knew far too much to think that he (or anyone else) knew it all.

Over the last couple of years, PBS has broadcast productions of King Lear starring Ian McKellan, Hamlet with David Tennant and Macbeth with Patrick Stewart. All three were splendid, with inspired performances from the lead actors and thoughtful interpretations by directors and casts. McKellen's Lear, for example, is so intense that at certain points I feared for his safety. It's a daring and exuberant performance, even by his standards. It's still available for online viewing at the PBS Great Performances website: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/episodes/king-lear/watch-the-play/487/.

Tennant's Hamlet is equally "wild and whirling", full of humour and originality. Patrick Stewart is excellent as Claudius as well, and it's interesting to compare his work in the role with the one he did thirty years earlier in the BBC production starring Derek Jacobi. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be available for online viewing in Canada at this point - if I do find it, I'll let you know right away, but libraries will have it.

Finally, the recent version of Macbeth, with Patrick Stewart in the title role, might be the best filmed version I've seen, which is saying something because this play has been done very well many times over. It's not to be missed: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/episodes/macbeth/watch-the-full-program/1030/