The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

As a dramatic historian, Shakespeare was bom at just the right time. Later, changes in the conventions and economics of the theatre made it an inadequate medium, and feigned histories became the province of the novelist. Earlier, dramatic history would have been impossible, because the only history which was recognized as such was sacred history. The drama had to become secularized before any adequate treatment of human history was possible. Greek tragedy, like the mystery play, is religious drama. What the hero does himself is subordinate to what the gods make him do. Further, the gods are concerned, not with human society, but with certain exceptional indi­viduals. The hero dies or goes into exile, but his city, as represented by the chorus, remains. The chorus may give him support or warning advice, but they cannot influence his ac­tions and bear no responsibility for them. Only the hero has a biography; the chorus are mere observers. Human history can­not be written except on the presupposition that, whatever part God may play in human affairs, we cannot say of one event, "This is an act of God," of another, "This is a natural event," and of another, "This is a human choice"; we can only record what happens. The allegorical morality plays are concerned with history, but only with subjective history; the social- historical setting of any particular man is deliberately ex­cluded.

We do not know what Shakespeare's personal beliefs were, nor his opinion on any subject (though most of us privately think we do). All we can notice is an ambivalence in his feelings towards his characters which is, perhaps, characteristic of all great dramatists. A dramatist's characters are, normally, men- of-action, but he himself is a maker, not a doer, concerned, not with disclosing himself to others in the moment, but with making a work which, unlike himself, will endure, if possible forever. The dramatist, therefore, admires and envies in his characters their courage and readiness to risk their lives and souls—qua dramatist, he never risks himself—but, at the same time, to his detached imagination, all action, however glorious, is vain because the consequence is never what the doer intended. What a man does is irrevocable for good or ill; what he makes, he can always modify or even destroy. In all great drama, I believe, we can feel the tension of this ambiva­lent attitude, torn between reverence and contempt, of the maker towards the doer. A character for which his creator felt either absolute reverence or absolute contempt would not, I think, be actable.

THE PRINCE'S DOG

Whoever takes up the sword shall perish hy the sword. And whoever does not take up the sword (or lets it drop) shall perish on the cross.

simone weil

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it has been observed that critics who write about Shakespeare reveal more about themselves than about Shakespeare, but perhaps that is the great value of drama of the Shakespearian kind, namely, that whatever he may see taking place on stage, its final effect upon each spectator is a self-revelation.

Shakespeare holds the position in our literature of Top Bard, but this deserved priority has one unfortunate conse­quence; we generally make our first acquaintance with his plays, not in the theatre, but in the classroom or study, so that, when we do attend a performance, we have lost that naive openness to surprise which is the proper frame of mind in which to witness any drama. The experience of reading a

play and the experience of watching it performed are never identical, but in the case of Henry IV the difference between the two is particularly great.

At a performance, my immediate reaction is to wonder what Falstaff is doing in this play at all. At the end of Richard II, we were told that the Heir Apparent has taken up with a dissolute crew of "unrestrained loose companions." What sort of bad company would one expect to find Prince Hal keeping when the curtain rises on Henry IV? Surely, one could expect to see him surrounded by daring, rather sinister juvenile delinquents and beautiful gold-digging whores. But whom do we meet in the Boars Head? A fat, cowardly tosspot, old enough to be his father, two down-at-heel hangers-on, a slatternly hostess and only one whore, who is not in her earliest youth either; all of them seedy, and, by any worldly standards, including those of the criminal classes, all of them failures. Surely, one thinks, an Heir Apparent, sowing his wild oats, could have picked himself a more exciting crew than that. As the play proceeds, our surprise is replaced by another kind of puzzle, for the better we come to know Fal­staff, the clearer it becomes that the world of historical reality which a Chronicle Play claims to imitate is not a world which he can inhabit.