Dan Maftei

Comedy of Errors

This underrated play is made (or broken) on the believability of the otherworldly encounters the principal characters find themselves in. Poor directing (whether live, or in ourselves as we read) will bog the play down in its slapstick, or its versified rhyming humor, but neither of those are the point. The wonder of this tiny, hasty play is its plot, and it’s worth noting that it was Shakespeare’s innovation to introduce a second pair of twins in the Dromios. Yeah, they do provide most of both slapstick and humor, but more importantly, they provide more opportunities for confusion, which abounds freely in this play. It’s even there in the first scene! We’re in a comedy: what are we doing with this bleak opening, this man being led to death, this fantastical story of shipwreck and family origins, this unwavering judge the Duke? It’s unsettlingly out of place.

With this bleak expose having framed the story, the plot unfolds at a maddening pace. The events in question don’t last much longer than the play depicting them, and we are faced with as many as FIVE of the principal characters on scene together, each in their own world of “who’s who?”, each asking and answering questions as their own perspective allows them, scene after scene after scene. But we, as readers/viewers, and unlike anyone else in the play, are privy to the whole truth, which is interestingly both a boon and a curse. It’s a boon because we are given the understanding the characters so desperately seek. But it’s our curse too because the multiple perspectives the truth has opened up all lend to our confusion.

It’s true, though, that the characters don’t respond to much else besides the situation they’ve been thrust into. They do, however, have distinct personalities, and occasionally touch upon something sublime. I loved the honesty of the Ephesian Dromio, and his “‘My gold!’ quoth he”‘s. Like many vitalists in Shakespeare, his cheer seems endless, as surely it must be, being sustained through beatings he’s been receiving long before this play. And the Syracusian Antipholus approaches something marvelously metaphysical. He introduces himself as “a drop of water / That in the ocean seeks another drop” (I.2:35), which is beautiful both in and out of context; and he has the most rational response of all to this absurdity: “Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell? / Sleeping or waking? mad or well advised? / Known unto these, and to myself disguised! I’ll say as they say, and persever so, / And in this mist at all adventures go.” (II.2:211-215) Compare to his Ephesian counterpart, a beast of an angry, petty, haughty man. “Known unto these, and to myself disguised!” is metaphysically unsettling, which fits the “witches and sorcery” view the Syracusians have of this odd town. Hell, it describes the play quite fittingly too.

Titus Andronicus

There is only one redeeming feature of this play, but I admit it’s intriguing enough that I’d surely see any and all performances of it live, even if I won’t be re-(re)-reading it anytime soon. The entire thing is farce: farce through and through. For the love of God, the sight of Lavinia, as described by the first person who finds her, is of a fountain with three heads. By all due laws of nature and comedy, this means veritable streams of red gushing a la Kill Bill during the entire duration of Marcus’ looooong speech. Similarly, Harold Bloom suggests anyone who takes this play too seriously repeat the phrase “Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thy teeth”, which I admit makes me literally lol even as I write this sentence. As for me, I suggest you picture, and I mean really picture, this serious, venerated, tragic old man, one-handed, gleefully but with deep-seated satisfaction, finally enacting his grisly revenge, in a God. Damned. Chef’s hat...

All this’s not to say there’s not something serious here too, but Shakespeare made sure that it was utterly subsumed by the copious graphic violence. I’m reminded, as I see Lavinia’s death, abrupt, short, and needless, of Chaucer’s frivolous “doctour of physik”, whose God-awful story concerns a father murdering his wrongfully-betrothed daughter as so to spare her dignity. I wouldn’t be surprised if Shakespeare was reminded of this as he killed off Lavinia without even a dying word. There’s ultimately no sanity or justification for the many rash murders here, so I suppose it was only necessary that it finally happen to one who was not just innocent, but who suffered far and away the worst fate of any of the characters (you’d expect Aaron’s torture to be significant, but instead, he’s left with his head above ground to yell obscenities at passer-bys for the rest of his days). But I admire Shakespeare’s craftiness in nonetheless distancing us from Lavinia too: when we first see her in her true person, she and her husband are childishly berating Tamora by way of her relationship with Aaron, and she does one better by continuing to insult her even while begging for mercy!

So, what of that seriousness? Mired though it is in the fact that the characters at their most earnest merely launch into long-winded and fruitless pleas (every major character gets one), there are tinges of grandeur, occassionally in Titus’ rare sagacity, but mostly in Aaron, a villain so clearly built to relish in the worst pains of life, primogeniture, and romance. My favorite of his pastimes is burning barns then asking the owners to put out the flames with their tears. It’s really quite something, to see the bounds of earnest evil and earnest love be pushed to their limits here, in what is essentially a stock character in a bit play, whose characters, in the end, don’t matter much at all. The play is, to use Bloom’s term, a cathartic exercise for a playwright just about to hit his stride. Just as he was toying with terse stagecraft in the Comedy of Errors, itself a weak play, he was toying with extravagant violence here. I suspect with Love’s Labour’s Lost, he’ll toy with the limits of language, then we will see a grand awakening with Romeo & Juliet, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Juliet Caesar, three beautifully lyrical plays.

Love's Labour's Lost

Jonathan Bate's "great feast of linguistic sophistication on the theme of the inadequacy of linguistic sophistication" works, as does Harold Bloom's "exuberant fireworks display in which Shakespeare seems to seek the limits of his verbal resources, and discovers that there are none", and still pithier Marjorie Garber's "a play about young lovers caught with their sonnets down", but Moth's "they have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps" (5.1), which is surely Shakespeare's, remains the aptest description of this love letter to a flawed genre, and like all such art (One Punch Man comes to mind), it's filled to the brim with what makes said genre amazing, namely, an English so sweet it would do Chaucer proud, and what makes it awful, namely, complete incomprehension. Such love letters are always self-mocking, as when Rosaline points out that "a jest's prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it, never in the tongue of him that makes it": who has understood this sophisticated fireworks display? The most honest character is poor Constable Dull, who responds to Holofernes "Thous hast spoken no word all this while" with "Nor understood none either, sir." Language is a marvelous mystery, and this play reminds me of that rare piece of palpable philosophy, Wittgenstein's closing thought in his Tractacus, "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent". Since just about every character ought really to have stayed silent, Shakespeare seems well aware of the limits of language, and that an overabundance of linguistic wit amounts to fuck all, to a "sweet smoke of rhetoric", to Hamlet's "words words words".

Much of my admiration for this peculiar and zany little play is rooted in its language, but its premise is so absurd, and its characters so willfully absurd with it, that I share with Bloom a good deal of unadulterated pleasure in reading it. The four male aristocrats fail immediately to uphold their implausible Academe against the made-up terror and screen that is "love" (read: "women"; read, as in Marx: "pretty women"), and the emblematic moment is the Queen's "whoe'er a was, a showed a mounting mind", the "he" being the king peeping childishly over a dale at his affection. Sex is the end-all of our existence, if only partly our livelihood (I'd add love), and this half-sensed truth bears down on all the main characters. Not even Berowne has a full comprehension, despite his pageant emphasis on eyesight and physical attraction. This speech, which so overtakes both Goddard and Bloom, is certainly a key to the play, but perhaps not, as those insightful critics think, to human nature.

Garber places her emphasis in this speech on love and love only, from "a lover's eye will gaze an eagle blind" to "when love speaks, the voice of all the gods / make heaven drowsy with the harmony" to "never durst poet touch a pen to write / until his ink were tempered with love's sighs", which is a valid reading, but downplays Berowne's own emphasis on women's eyes. The venerable Robert Christgau once mentioned Ellen Willis' litmus test for sexism in art: switch the genders, and ask if it still holds. In this way, the Stones' "Stupid Girl" and "Under my Thumb" do, but Cat Stevens' "Wild World" doesn't. He then immediately questions how valid this test really is, and points out that Willis, like any bardolator worth their salt, tends to transform their own deep love into the universal. And thus Garber, and thus Goddard, who reads in this speech a fundamental (his word) and ancient (ditto) truth of human nature, that "you need both sexes", quoting the Upanishads, Lao Tzu, Plato, etc., even Thoreau when he asks "why are women not more wise, why are men not more loving" (in massive paraphrase). This is a borderline grotesque "understanding" of human nature, and gleamed by a bit of historicism, and so not terribly interesting to dwell on, but I wonder why neither Goddard nor Thoreau turned self-aware-wolf like Montaigne, when he looked to some link between education (thus historicism) and wisdom (thus "human nature", to blaspheme that term).

All in all, perhaps the true human insight here is in Berowne's beaten down and almost pitiable "[twelve months] is too long for a play", correctly unwilling to undergo the awful flagellation that Rosaline imposes on him. So at odds with the rest of the light-hearted play, it fits right in with the last moments of the last scene, not just the sudden news of the Queen's father's death, but the downright abusive and unpleasant badgering of the low Worthies by the aristocrats. It is a mark of Shakespeare's something-or-other (who can know what?) that the character to pierce to the true heart of our morality is the utterly unlikeable and pompous pedant Holofornes, from which we suspect nothing after meeting him, and who amazingly stands up for himself and his comrades with the pointed: "This is not generous, not gentle, not humble." To quote Bloom: Shakespeare knew no genre.

Romeo & Juliet

If Love's Labour's Lost was Shakespeare's experimental masterpiece in which he realized there's no limit to the reach and obscurity of language, Romeo & Juliet, which I imagine was written right after, is Shakespeare's rightfully and eternally popular masterpiece in which he reigned in that grasp of language, and implanted it into vividly inward characters who speak an eloquent lyricism that makes much of the play read like a poem. Bloom points out in his own rough chronological re-read that Shakespeare rarely had a genre, which has certainly held true so far, and it's fitting, given the above proposed chronology, that Romeo & Juliet starts off as a comedy for a full two acts. All the tragedy is contained in the remaining three, kicked off by the doozer of the third, in which Mercutio gets himself killed, Romeo gets himself banished, and Capulet (bafflingly) marries Juliet off against her will. That the play maintains such strength of lyricism and characterization in both halves is striking, and that this is Shakespeare at the start of his canonical mastery is almost beyond me (think of what's still left to come for a moment).

Magnificent though the entire play is, its heart is Juliet. I can think of no other character in Shakespeare who is as flawless. I mean that literally: her hasty marriage notwithstanding, to which I'll return later, there's just nothing bad that we can say about her. The Friar's ultimately a little pushy, the Nurse is an enigma who clearly doesn't care for Juliet as much as we might think, Mercutio's a hotheaded asshole, poor Romeo's just playing a part and isn't smart enough to know it, the Montagues aren't present, and Paris evidently doesn't care for Juliet's opinion on the marriage. So what we do have is a young (very young) woman, since a woman apparently you were at that age, who gives us not only the sweetest poetry of the play (of course she gets "Parting is such sweet sorrow / that I shall say good night till it be morrow"), but who shows, at various times, wit, perception, courage, processing (as in emotions), wisdom: all in the text alone. I, too, have to wonder what her married life would have been like, but my worry isn't her, it's Romeo, who I'm not sure I understand as well as, I should hope, Juliet does.

It's not clear to me who Romeo really is. I suspect he's good-willed enough, which may be what Juliet sees in him, but it's like he decided one day he wanted to be in love and started acting like a lover should, with the frowns, the sadness, the poetry -- something which he does rather poorly, considering he can't help himself from joking around with his friends all the time. This might explain why he immediately (and oh so wholly) forgets Rosaline, just like he said he wouldn't. And it might also explain his most sincere moment, standing in shock over the body of Tybalt, processing what he did (or attempting to). This same rashness is also the cause of his death, as it's really not much to ask that he reign it in a tad and at least talk to someone close to Juliet (I suggest the confidante who married them), but instead, like a proper grieving lover, he launches headfirst into poetic suicide.

Romeo being what he is, or rather, what he doesn't seem to be, we're back to wondering why Juliet decides to marry him (although we might still ask the same about him). I suspect it'd take a good deal of research to truly place yourself in a world where girls younger than 14 were expected to bear children, and barring that, I don't feel qualified to offer much wisdom to the two lovers. Certainly Juliet's strained relationship with her parents and nurse plays some factor in her decisions, but most of that is left off stage. As I've mentioned before, this is exactly the sort of backgrounding that Shakespeare leaves untold before raising the curtain, and depending on how you fill in those blanks, you're led to different explanations for why the characters act the way they do. Maybe ultimately I'm just a sucker for the play's lyricism (or maybe that's why it's there?), but it's hard for me to find fault with their rushed marriage, and I can only wish them the very best.

Of course, the very best is not what they get, as they fall victims to some impeccable timing, kicked off by poor Paris just happening to be at Juliet's tomb as Romeo arrives, since Romeo dies only seconds before Friar Laurence enters the tomb and Juliet wakes up. I am struck by this unfortunate string of ill-timed events more than I am inclined to blame Mercutio or Capulet or Romeo. Except for giving Mercutio rein to tear apart the newly-married couple, which he certainly would do, there's no reason why the play couldn't have continued as a comedy , or even ended with their safe escape in Mantua, a real genre-bender. This inability to direct our own course of actions is a key point in this abundant masterpiece, and mirrors the contemporary Richard II's "What you will have, I'll give, and willing too; For do we must what force will have us do" (3.4.206). This very quality raises Juliet's death to an unrivaled pathos, as she rushes to stab herself after kissing her love one last time, hoping some left-over poison would save her the pain.

This abundance of character, poetry, and drama is certainly beyond anything Shakespeare wrote previously, and is unmatched except by a very select few of his later works. Romeo & Juliet is the youthful Shakespeare at his absolute best, a towering peak in his long career.