William Shakespeare, Women and Theatre

William Shakespeare is considered the most influential Elizabethan playwright: he was just a magician of the English language, as described by the critics who wrote “Reinventing Shakespeare”. His plays echo the political situation, problems, social antagonism: but although this reflects his age, he also was able to express “the new theatricality of English life”. Shakespeare was not of an age, but for all time - said Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s contemporary and a friend shortly after his death. He showed certain patterns of human behaviour, but went far beyond political and social situation. On the other hand, Shakespeare was shrewd enough to be able to see the situation; he flattered the Queen and later the King, only to get away with some of the sharp criticism of the system.

Shakespeare is an interesting ‘celebrity’ to analyze. He and his works are a subject of different approaches: feminist, Freudian, biographical, historical etc. The targets of the research or analysis are many: from the artist’s childhood, history background, his relationships with people and romantic relationships. He had and is still being put in books, poems and films. Film Shakespeare in Love, for example, offers an interesting insight of Shakespeare’s personal (love) life: although the director’s and the writer’s imagination ran freely and incorporated many not very likely and realistic events in the artwork, the viewer still gets a clearer image about the author, his relationships with women and his view on love.

Shakespeare in Love is a romantic comedy that introduces us to varies layers of love through psychologically diverse characters. The film is pushing the spectator into a romantic atmosphere; with music, poetic lines and acting itself. The spectators may find themselves in those depictions of love(rs), depending on their views on love as a concept. The actress Gwyneth Paltrow (Viola) dives into an emotionally unstable character: an inexperienced and naive young woman, who had known love from poems and plays rather than her own experience. Viola lives in abundance; her life is privileged and safe. She interprets the literary works too much on a personal level and creates unrealistic illusions and expectations and she tends to follow the emotions blindly. She “feeds on the shadows of perfection“: “I will have poetry in my life, and adventure. And love, love above all. /… love that overthrows life. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart /…/“ Her love to William is a realization of the love concepts that were shaped in her mind; concepts, taken from the world of poetry. She is expecting love by the book.

Shakespeare (the character), on the other hand, has quite a diverse love life: besides his wife he has had relationships with Black Sue, Fat Phoebe, Rosaline, Burbage’s seamstress and Aphrodite (as listed by the apothecary in the film). He is accustomed to the biological rush of hormones that make him a ‘prisoner of love’, an addict; love affairs are his fuel for writing and living. Without love he is experiencing a creativity, if not existential crisis. Viola is just another ‘tool of addiction’ that creates a flow of creativity and for him, the break-up is, though heart-breaking, not the end of the world. As long as he keeps falling in love, his literary works will continue to live.

While Shakespeare considers love as a phenomenon binding both body and spirit, Rosaline’s definition of love lies exclusively in a physical desire; she is a lover to Shakespeare, Richard Burbage and Mr. Tilney at the same time. Although she has had less love affairs than Shakespeare, she is viewed more negatively; the product (or the cause) of these affairs is not love as a complex emotion, but purely lust and benefit. “Burbage has my keeping … but you have my heart!“ Her relationships do not include intense feelings of loving and being loved; when William confesses he has lost the gift, her answer is simple –“you left it in my bed! Come look for it again.“ In contrary to Shakespeare she is not using this ‘love’ as a power to create, but only to satisfy her sexual cravings.

Lord Wessex is another character that exploits love as a benefit. To him, love is a title; marriage is a status and financial opportunity. In his eyes, Viola is seen as a property rather than an object of affection and actual love. She has desired body features, she has a status (a virgin) and she is available. The marriage is a tactical escape from financial problems and includes satisfying physical desire.

Audience in Shakespeare’s time had much more developed perception of sound: since few of the common people were literate they focused more on the sound (going even further in history, when the prayers were meant be heard, read only by the priest): they were able to hear the rhythm of the plays much easier, for example iambic pentameter. Nowadays the mentioned metric line in theatre seems redundant, while it actually contributes the melody, the importance to character (Shakespeare used it only for the most important characters), a clue when to enter for the next actor by the one already performing, and additional meanings (in Romeo and Juliet, the two lovers ‘share’ the iambic pentameter, as two perfect pieces fitting together). The rhythm in poetry and plays is quite challenging for the English students nowadays and the amount of time devoted to practice at recognizing different patterns (metric feet) indicates how important it really is.

According to to Shakespeare, life and theatre often get mixed: they are very much connected. Theatre reflects life as read from this famous line – it mirrors life to nature. A play within the play is an interesting tactic that gives Shakespeare a chance to direct the actors and criticize them. In Hamlet, for example, Hamlet gives advice to the actors on how to act. His view is that they should exert a conscious self-control over their speech and their manner of acting rather than being emotionally carried away by what they play; not to exaggerate. He stresses the importance of theatre: according to him, the theatre keeps the record of the time. “Good my lord, will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used; for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time: after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.”

His idea is to find evidence through the response of Claudius and Gertrude: “The play 's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king”. “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.”

The actors should not cry out their line, the gestures need to be controlled and not show emotions. “O, it offends me to the soul, to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags”

This is referring to stereotypical actors who exaggerate, all dressed up in wigs: the audience does not believe them. It is not true to life, meaning the theatre then does not mirror life. That was precisely Shakespeare's view: mimesis, theatre as an imitation of life. “/.../ to split the ears of the groundlings, who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise: I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it out-Herods Herod: pray you avoid it.”

Groundlings are people who stand just beneath the stage. They suffer, their ears suffer: they are capable of dumb shows (gestures without speaking) or screaming - this is not true to life. “It out-herods Herod, avoid it.”

In this first address he tells them to balance; in the second part: “Be not too tame neither; but let your own discretion be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature: for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own image, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now, this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which one must in your allowance, o'erweigh a whole theatre of others.”

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The purpose is mirroring, reflecting life; “O, there be players that I have seen play,--and heard others praise, and that highly,--not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.”

He uses a word imitation: bad actors, typical Elizabethan actors strutted and bellowed, they exaggerated and therefore failed to imitate. In As You Like It: Shakespeare once again discusses the relationship between art and life with a character called Jacques uttering these famous lines: “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages. ” > from childhood to adulthood, entrance – they are born; exit – death; each has many parts to play

Back to Shakespeare and women in his works: Hamlet’s relationship with Ophelia is in a yo-yo situation, drifting further with every encounter. Ophelia asks about the status of their relationship. She tells him that he made it clear that he felt something for her; she expected to be married to him.

Hamlet: Ha, ha! are you honest? - Ophelia: My lord? Hamlet: Are you fair? (the same as in Othello where he accuses Desdemona). He concludes by saying that she is beautiful but she should not allow her beauty to change people around her.

“Hamlet: Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness: this was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did love you once.”

Ophelia: ”Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.”

Hamlet: “You should not have believ'd me; for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it: I loved you not.”

He is disgusted with the situation; because of your beauty you are also morally frail and because of that I love you no more - here he even uses past tense, denying what he has just said.

“Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. Where's your father?”

Here Hamlet is accused of misogyny and Ophelia of being morally frail – this is based on his feeling that she is spying on him. He's not only critical of people, sinners, but also of himself; father is an important figure for Ophelia and he made her spy. The nunnery can also mean the brothel.

He uses a cynical, mocking tone, he teases her by exaggerating. He shows a deal of self-loathing. He asks Ophelia of the whereabouts of her father, he is haunted by the idea that he is watched constantly. “Ophelia: O, help him, you sweet heavens!”

Ophelia has this impression that he is mad because he repeats his statement: Get thee to a nunnery. “Or, if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool; for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them. To a nunnery, go; and quickly too. Farewell.”

Hamlet suggests that she should marry a fool. “Ophelia: O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown! The courtier's, scholar's, soldier's, eye, tongue, sword, the expectancy and rose of the fair state, the glass of fashion and the mould of form, the observ'd of all observers,--quite, quite down!” She laments that this noble mind now mad. He was the prince, the heir, he was like a role-model, a soldier, a scholar, a courtier, he was good as fencing, good at speaking – the perfect renaissance men and people followed his fashion.

Conclusion

If Venetian husband cheats on his wife, he is not judged very harshly. This is all the anticipation of a catastrophe and as far as the position of gender is concerned in the marriage. For men, adultery is sport, for women it is something serious and punishable. The speech of Ophelia is very consistent in terms of verse; Hamlet, however, not always. He is emotional, stressed, his verse is not always consistently used.