In the 20 or 25 years of his theatrical career, Shakespeare produced 37 plays. All have survived on to modern stages; some are works of genius; and every one of them has its own stylistic and linguistic interest. Not much justice can be done to this situation in a brief note. Something might be gained by trying to analyse the significance of this or that passage extracted from The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Twelfth Night and The Tempest. But that significance might turn out to be intrinsic to the work as a whole. A good deal depends on what we mean by "poetry".
A case could be made for thinking (and the publishing history of the work would support it) that Shakespeare's best poetry, even his best lyric poetry, is to be found in his plays. He had difficulty in handling the "drama" of his Sonnets. In these and other poems the human story never seems to have gone quite right. Only in his plays was Shakespeare completely free to find himself as a poet. There is, of course, a latent paradox here. And it is one worth exploring, because it may explain what is exceptional about Shakespeare, who can seem somehow more three-dimensional than most other writers. He fused two forms which often exist separately and apart, even in self-contradiction. But in him they became one.
Theatre is the most public of all literary arts. (That offshoot of drama, opera, to develop in England some decades after Shakespeare died, can rely on its visible machinery of technique, often in tension with its movingness, to a point of potential farce.) Though a play can be read, it is fulfilled only in the theatre. And the theatre makes its own, non-verbal forms: stage business of all kinds, mime, music, even silence. Any born or true dramatist, at least in Shakespeare's day, worked through the expressive meaning of things acted out in time and physically. Ezra Pound once observed that the medium of drama was not words, but bodies moving on a stage. Shakespeare showed himself a dramatist in this sense. In his first plays he is a professional and competent rhetorician, sometimes a very striking one. But in what seems to be his most theatrically inexperienced play and so possibly his earliest, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, he had the audacity to made one of his dramatis personae a dog—a real live animal who accompanies his master Lance onto the stage. The same dimension of sheer physical presence characterizes the peculiarly mesmeric Richard III as a "crookback", Bottom as a braying long-eared "ass", Falstaff a "tun of man"—just as the most memorable character at the end of his career is Caliban, a "savage and deformed slave".
When Shakespeare was attacked in a pamphlet in 1592, the angry charge made against him was that a "Shake-scene", a mere "player", had upstaged the literate intellectuals. Perhaps the most literate and intelligent man of his time, Shakespeare was also manifestly a man of the theatre. It seems relevant that the plays whose success arouses jealousy here were his early history plays about Henry VI—relevant in the sense that history plays, a genre probably invented by Shakespeare himself, are a fully public genre, made out of the national and political history still just within the memory of his audience or of their fathers and grandfathers.
The three Henry VI plays are concluded and crowned by Richard III, a brilliantly worldly and claustrophobic political thriller. Linguistically, the play brings to a climax the academic rhetoric the poet perfects in these early plays, an intensely figured and formally witty verse. Powerful as Richard III is, and able to compete with the latest now in gangster films, not much in it would seem to foretell Shakespeare's greater poetry. And yet it possesses one long and wholly thought-provoking passage, when a quite different kind of writer seems to be taking over. In its first act Richard's elder brother, the doomed Clarence, has a dream. He has dreamed that, pushed by the lethal Richard from the deck of the ship in which they are travelling, he falls down and down to the bed of the sea:
Methoughts I saw a thousand fearful wrecks,
Ten thousand men that fishes gnawed upon,
Wedges of gold, great ouches, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,
All scattered in the bottom of the sea.
Some lay in dead men's skulls; and in those holes
Where eyes did once inhabit, there were crept—
As 'twere in scorn of eyes—reflecting gems.
(1.4.24–31)
Shakespeare was to write greater sea-poetry than this. There is a lifetime's exploration between Clarence's trudging vision and (let us say) the magical mimetic quietness with which Pericles will consign his wife's body to the seabed:
for a monument upon thy bones,
And aye-remaining lamps, the belching whale
And humming water must o'erwhelm thy corpse,
Lying with simple shells.
(11.60–3)
Poetry has ceased to be rhetoric and become an enactment, a sympathetic life of words. The Tempest does it even more briefly: "Those are pearls that were his eyes" (1.2.401).
The interest of Clarence's dream is that it begins this process. And it does so by making plain that poetry—Shakespeare's dramatic poetry or poetic drama—is not a mere matter of writing well. It defines the standard of a style as a capacity to meet, to rise to, the needs of a given vision or human imagination. Clarence sees, and Shakespeare is working to make us feel, a dimension of existence well beyond the hunt for power that governs the rest of the play:
my dream was lengthened after life.
O, then began the tempest to my soul!
Then came wand'ring by
A shadow like an angel, with bright hair,
Dabbled in blood.
(1.4.44, 52–3)
Clarence is accused by the shadow of a young prince he has himself killed in battle. Richard III is made up of a sense of history as peculiarly interlocked murders, a knotted network of cunning deaths and revenges. The dream narrated here gives a wholly different perspective of meaning, of moral judgement. And that judgement is a "dream", an inward apprehension so far from social realities as to demand the image of an ocean in which we drown alone. Shakespeare is making use of ancient symbols: the ship is the classical and Christian, medieval and Renaissance image of the ship of state; but it is also the individual soul, voyaging through this world. The public and the private interfuse here, like Clarence's remarkable image of diamonds flashing in the hollow eyes of skulls. This is the history of an individual consciousness, a poetry finding its own dramatic life.
The "dream" is an image of dramatic poetry useful to hold on to in considering how Shakespeare's writing develops. Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream are seemingly linked twin masterpieces, apparently produced immediately after Richard III. In his tragedy of young lovers, Shakespeare risked violating the lines of his character to allow the tough Mercutio his own "dream" set piece, in which the fairy queen brings to sleeping human beings by night fantasies that act out the mind's secret passions. The even richer and finer comedy sends its young lovers from Athens—a symbol of high Reason in the ancient world—into the wood by night, peopled by fairies and would-be actors, to confuse and then clarify their tangled loves. When they emerge, and as the last act of the play opens, the ruler Theseus, embodying that high Reason itself, looks down with kindly patronage on the life of imagination lived out by "the lunatic, the lover and the poet":
as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
(5.1.14–17)
This is, of course, spoken by a "shadow" in a poem, on that local habitation, the real stage of a theatre. As such, it hardly needs to be (as it is) answered by his Queen, Hippolyta, who tells him that he should give Reason a larger scope, admitting the truth to be found in dreams: a process which here entails understanding what the lovers have experienced during their night in the woods.
I glanced forward, earlier, from Richard III to the late romances. The debate between Theseus and Hippolyta again has its much later echo. In The Winter's Tale, the Queen, Hermione, innocent but on trial for her life, tells the obsessed Leontes, "My life stands in the level of your dreams" (the image is, I think, at once that of a levelled gun and a destructive male sexuality); Leontes answers wearily, "Your actions are my dreams" (3.2.80–1). The interchange is at once more intense than that of the earlier comedy, and briefer, more charged, more fraught; the language is now charged with implicit and inward suggestiveness, as Leontes' own nightmares darkly energize the play. Theseus in the earlier play writes down human fantasies with a high and sedate reflectiveness, and Hippolyta defends them with a more compassionate wisdom. It is Hermione, in the later, who embodies reason; while Leontes falls into an abyss of imagination where words like "play" and "nothing" madden him with their excess of meanings and possibilities.
Shakespeare's whole career is in this sense a meditation on the way human "dreams" and "actions" interconnect and inbreed. And the play between the two is a parallel to the debate between the public and the private, and, if we like, drama and poetry. In this sense, Shakespeare wrote no play that was anything but poetic. Certainly, some of his work cannot help striking a reader (in particular) as exceptionally beautiful, and therefore as more "poetic". Most readers would select Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest as spell-binding work. They have an inordinate harmony, both musical and imagistic; they have the highest possible count of gorgeous phrases and unforgettable rhythms. In the Roman play in particular, Shakespeare seems to be released by his dry dependence on his sceptical source into a kind of free flight of language, the sound of a verbal glory at once Roman-disciplined and Egypt-sensual. Yet even here, of course, the spell-binding quality—the dream dimension of imagination—can never be distinguished from dramatic meaning and function. The glamour of each of these plays has to do with what in them is aristocratic, removed, a high pastime played out within sound of the sea.
Not every play Shakespeare wrote has this musical coherence. But almost all hold together—each will possess what may be variously called "an atmosphere", "a world of the play", to which all dramatic elements contribute. Each is in that sense a poem. And, though obviously verse-writing will tend to indicate exalted or profound states of mind, a scene or a passage or a whole play may be in prose, may be indeed prosaic, and yet will have its place in Shakespeare's dramatic poetry. The second part of Henry IV, though primarily in prose, achieves something of a poetic order—does so in fact more remarkably than the brilliant Part 1. Part 1 crowns the theatrical mastery the dramatist achieved in his first decade, writing through the 1590s; Part 2 ushers in the stranger, more difficult, undoubtedly more magnificent explorations of the 1600s. The scenes of the old men in the Gloucestershire orchard (3.2, 5.3)—remembering the country dead and hearing "the chimes at midnight"—have certainly a sombre poetry. Again, there is an effortless and unsignalled drift from verse into prose and back again in both the "storm scenes" in King Lear (3.2, 4, 6 in the Folio) and the "Dover Cliff" scene (4.6), with the prose-writing as it were justified by the conditions of natural chaos, madness, rusticity. But the imaginative range and quality of these scenes is both sustained and extreme.
It is the second half of Shakespeare's career—roughly, from Hamlet to The Tempest—which produces the greatest triumphs of dramatic poetry. And it may be material that each of these two named plays has a peculiarity of plot. Neither, strictly speaking, has a plot; everything in them is transmuted into experience. If "What Happens in Hamlet" is questionable, this is because what happens in the play is less important than the feeling or meaning of what happens—and we may say something the same of all the tragedies. The most purely and alarmingly poetic must surely be Macbeth. Macbeth himself begins with the intuition that "My thought,
Whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man" (1.3.138–9): and the play shows how "thought" and "murder", like "dreams" and "actions", may make both public and private worlds fuse into one shaken "single state of man". Into this process each member of the audience is drawn, like the open-eyed sleepwalking Lady Macbeth (5.1).
Macbeth himself speaks, throughout his play, what is perhaps a more intense poetry than any uttered by any other chief character in the plays: a deep and strangling and ambiguous verse that lights his way downward. He is a man who dreams, and who loses himself in fantasies, without acknowledging that he is moving further and further from the real. The impassive ironies of the late romances are perhaps intended to counter this dark art. These are poetic works which from the first know just how unreal they are, and carry their conventions transparently. At the beginning of Cymbeline, one courtly gentleman says to another, "Howsoe'er 'tis strange - Yet it is true, sir" (1.1.66, 68): and truth in these last plays depends on the acceptance that poetry is only poetry, and that dreams are things we wake up from. But at the centre of the incomparable Tempest is Caliban, who given the "noises", "sounds", "sweet airs", and all other dreams of the island, will cry "to dream again" (3.2.138–46).
Barbara Everett
From The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare
