Shakespeare: The Word and the Action

Shakespeare's wavelengths are conventions of speech and action that he used to construct his plays. The first lecture focuses on speech: words and their arrangement. Examples of prose, blank verse, and rhymed verse are drawn from Richard III, The Merchant of Venice, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. The lecture shows how poetic meter and its variations may relate to the subject matter of a given speech or scene or to the feelings expressed by a character.

The lecture discusses A Midsummer Night's Dream, emphasizing plot construction. Analogous actions constitute a primary wavelength in Shakespearean drama. Each of the plot lines in Dream concerns love; each displays aspects of love as personal emotions and powerful forces in society and the universe. The lecture concludes by showing the diversity of Dream organized into binaries of place such as court/forest and sunlight/moonlight; binaries of emotion such as duty/desire and reason/madness; and binaries of existence such as illusion/constancy.

This lecture introduces Shakespeare's Sonnets as a volume of 154 poems that we may read as a series of lyric meditations on love, representing Shakespeare's most disciplined writing. He maintains the standard English (or "Shakespearean") sonnet form: 14 lines of iambic pentameter verse arranged in three quatrains and a closing couplet. The lecture explores what Shakespeare was able to do within that limited form.

This lecture explores five of Shakespeare's sonnets and asserts that the poet does not have a particular philosophy of love. Sonnet 116 offers a resounding definition of love endorsed by many readers while making most of its assertions in negatives rather than in concrete positives.

In this lecture we move from the individual voice of love as expressed in the sonnets to the social words and actions of love in two comedies. The male suitors of Love's Labor's Lost try to break through the artificiality of verbal courtship to something more natural but are outstripped by the larger realities of time, death, and seasonal change. In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare's characteristic use of multiple plot lines works out the conflict between artifice and nature in two contrasted actions.

Another wavelength Shakespeare used repeatedly is the fairy tale. This lecture explains the advantages of fairy tale as a base for dramatic plots. It explores four kinds of response we may have to such material and shows how Shakespeare deliberately prompts them all.

The three plays named after Henry VI introduce two fresh senses of the word "action": the large patterns of action by which Shakespeare organized a trilogy of plays, and the physicality we see on stage when the plays are performed. This lecture explores thematic patterns: how the actions have been organized to make specific points about politics and warfare in each play. Stage directions that a reader may pass over lightly present graphic images and actions to a theater audience. The lecture closes by contemplating the deformed physique of Richard of Gloucester.

This lecture explores Shakespeare's characterization of Richard III as marking important aspects of the early modern era. Shakespeare's greatest innovation in the received account of Richard was to make him a conscious actor or role-player who constantly refashions himself to accomplish his political goals. We relate this discovery of the player-king to new political theories by Niccolo Machiavelli, to Renaissance ideas about human freedom, and to the breakdown of ideas about fixed order.

We delve further into the workings of human action in history. Is Richard's decision to be a villain a free choice or a Calvinistically predestined event? Similarly, Henry IV, Part II asks whether history and the consequences of prior action deprive men of free choice. The first three acts of the play lack action: four major characters appear trapped by their own pasts. The lecture then examines three of these men in the Shakespearean wavelength of parallel scenes. The play thus highlights relationships between fathers and sons.

This lecture plumbs Hamlet on the matter of action. It investigates five aspects of the play's action, each one demonstrating a characteristic Shakespearean skill. The action is vivid; it explores alternatives: Ophelia and Laertes, like Hamlet, act in response to the death of a beloved father. The action can be suddenly and mysteriously arrested, and it can be utterly ambiguous, as in the confrontation of Hamlet with his mother. The action can also be conclusive—witness the exciting and satisfying releases of energy in the final scene.

Coriolanus offers an experience different from other tragedies and requires getting on a new wavelength. The hero is a direct and uncomplicated man living in a relatively primitive Rome; his tragic flaw (pride) leads to a tragic fall. The simplicity of the play leads to an especially powerful effect. The play also raises the question of whether a man can remain human when he is cut off from society.

In words and actions, Shakespeare creates an unusual world in Antony and Cleopatra, a fluid world in which nearly everything changes shape and place. This lecture tallies the unusually high number of events that change the appearance of the stage. The language of the play stresses contradiction, transformation, paradox, shape-changing, longing, and other forms of mutability. In all this flux, only two things reach stability at the end: Normally mutable Fortune becomes constant in favor of Octavius Caesar. Cleopatra herself becomes constant—in death.

Cymbeline adds to our sense of what Shakespearean action can be by providing the most extravagant and complicated plot Shakespeare ever created. Some have found the story ridiculous, but it is nonetheless constructed with extraordinary skill. The action is always clear to the audience, the bizarre development provides a roller coaster of emotional opportunities, and the final scene ties up all the threads. A detailed pattern of early virtue, sin, symbolic death, repentance, and rebirth proves, on different scales, to be a repeating pattern in the play and give the audience the experience of life in a providential world.

This lecture introduces the genre of romance, which include Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale; it is a capacious genre that can combine actions characteristic of comedy, history, and tragedy. We explore the rich relationship of nature and art in The Winter's Tale. Nature provides the means by which humans create art and civilization; art in turn extends, fulfills, and preserves worthy things in nature.

The Tempest, a romance like Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale, strips down the constituent actions to great simplicity; the leading character has godlike powers; and Caliban is a semihuman creature. These circumstances lead playgoers and scholars to strenuous efforts of interpretation: The play may deal with the imperialist or colonialist movement of early modern Europe; it may explore the possibilities for magical or protoscientific power; it may be a Christian comedy of forgiveness.

This play demonstrates Shakespeare's continuous experimentalism with, at the end of his career, yet another mode of dramatic action. Henry VIII combines history with the patterns of romance. It is spectacular history in which the title character is a godlike personage with a mostly inaccessible mind. The more interesting characters, Buckingham, Katherine, and the defeated Wolsey, are interesting precisely when they split from history.