historia teatro

Late Medieval Drama   ‘I am sent from God: Deth is my name’, the figure of Mors announces as he ominously intrudes into King Herod’s feast and prepares to strike the over-confident king: ‘To hym wyl I go and geve hym such an hete That all the lechis [doctors] of the londe his lyf xul [shall] nevyr restore’. Mors’s unwelcome intrusion probably delighted certain members of the original audiences of the cycle of English mystery plays in which the incident occurs (Herod had been portrayed as a ranting villain and his sudden demise may have stimulated a certain sense of satisfaction). To other observers, the entry of the figure of death may have provoked an acute and chilling unease. At the end of the cycle of plays, God proclaims the Day of Judgement. A virtuous soul welcomes the event and the opening prospect of heaven; the sinful souls, by contrast, dread the ‘hydous horne’ that summons them to judgement: ‘Allas! for drede sore may we quake, Oure dedis (deeds] beis oure dampnacioune’. The texts of the four surviving cycles of religious dramas are none of them earlier than the mid-fifteenth century, though all four would seem to have originated in the late fourteenth century when vivid memories of the Black Death must have rendered the idea of the four last things  - death, judgement, heaven, and hell - perilously familiar. The cycles stress the goodness and the grace of God, but they also point to his awesome power and the justice of his purposes. They trace the history of the divine will from the fall of Lucifer, through the creation of the world and the fall of Adam, to Christ’s acts of redemption. They end with a calculated bang as God’s ‘for-thoght’ is fulfilled in the ending of ‘all erthely thyng’. English theatre had its formal beginnings in the Latin liturgical enactments of the Church, certain of which were dramatized for particular effect on major feast-days. On Palm Sunday, for example, the faithful processed bearing palms   [p. 74]   in imitation of the people of Jerusalem and they heard the great passion narrative chanted by various voices, each playing a distinctive role (as Jesus, Pilate, Peter, etc.). On the greatest of all feasts, Easter, an instructive prelude to the main Mass of the day acted out the visit of the three Maries to the empty tomb of Christ (though the Maries were decorously played by men vested in albs and copes). It would seem that the greatest stimulus to non-liturgical religious drama was provided by the institution of the feast of Corpus Christi in the Western Church in 1264. The new feast, generally observed in England from 1318, required that the Blessed Sacrament be ceremoniously carried round the streets of the parish. In greater towns the procession would have been accompanied by guildsmen, representative of various established trades, dressed in livery and bearing the banners of their craft. In England, as in other European countries, this summer feast-day also became the focus of urban street theatre organized under the auspices of these same, largely secular, guilds. The guilds added to their prestige not only by commissioning and maintaining the texts of the plays that they engaged to perform, but also by making and storing the costumes, the stage-properties and, above all, the movable platforms which the performances required. Records survive of the annual productions of the cycles in many British cities, from Aberdeen to Canterbury, but the complete texts of the plays exist only for York (consisting of 48 plays), Chester (24 plays), Wakefield (32 plays), and for an unknown Midlands town (42 plays). There are also surviving fragments from Coventry (plays once celebrated throughout England), Norwich, Northampton, and Newcastle as well as cycles in the Cornish language of the mineral-rich far south-west of the island. In some instances particular guilds would perform a play appropriate to their trade or mystery. At Chester, for example, the scene of Noah’s flood was presented by the ‘Water-leaders and Drawers in Dee’ (that is, those who supplied the city with water drawn from the river Dee); the Crucifixion was re-enacted by the Ironmongers (men who sold nails) and, somewhat less appositely, the Harrowing of Hell was performed through the good offices of the Cooks and Innkeepers (men certainly used to the virtues of a good fire). At York the Fishers and Mariners  presented the story of Noah, the Pinners and Painters the Crucifixion, and the Bakers the Last Supper. Although the majority of the actors were amateurs it would seem that they were supported both by fine stage effects (the records of the Coventry Drapers Company list a ‘Hell-mouth’, a barrel designed to produce the sound of an earthquake, and ‘a link to set the world on fire’) and by seasoned performers (the clerk, Absolon, in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale delights to ‘shewe his lightnesse and maistrye’ in playing Herod ‘upon a scaffold hye’). The surviving cycles suggest that the major centres of performance were cities in the North and the Midlands of England where the trade guilds could proudly demonstrate their independence from the jurisdiction of the Church. Though no ‘original’ survives, there is evidence that certain plays directly parallel others in shape, language, and style. Six plays from the so-called   [p. 75]   Towneley cycle (probably performed at Wakefield) closely resemble their York equivalents. The work of the anonymous fifteenth-century writer known as ‘the Wakefield Master’, to whom are ascribed the two Shepherds’ plays which accompany the representation of the Nativity, is particularly remarkable for its extensive use of a distinctive Yorkshire dialect and local reference. The two Shepherds’ plays, written perhaps for performance in alternate years or for different guilds, reveal a close understanding of the hardships endured by northern shepherds whose labour sustained the local wool-trade. The two plays also suggest a greater awareness of the realities of rural life than does the more emphatically urban York cycle. The shepherds complain frankly of the cold weather and of oppressive landlords in what at first seems to be a harshly comic farce.  With the appearance of the angel, however, their coarseness is transformed into an instructive humility before the miracle of the birth that they have been privileged to witness. It is as if the old covenant of wrath melts away with the establishment of the new covenant of love. The Wakefield Master was no mere secular proto-realist; he had a mind carefully attuned by theology and symbolism (as his use of a stolen sheep swaddled in a cradle as a witty parallel to the birth of the Lamb of God serves to suggest). The comedy which relieves the agonies of human and divine history in the other cycles also suggests a devout intermixture of game and earnest rooted in popular story-telling and performance. King Herod’s rampaging almost topples over into the pantomimic (‘I wot not where I may sit for anger and for teen [rage]’) and the truculence of Noah’s wife, when she refuses to go into the ark, threatens the future of the entire human race. In the Chester play she is finally forced aboard by her sons, while in the Wakefield version she has to wait for the flood to touch her toes (‘Yei, water nyghes so nere that I sit not dry’) before she grudgingly assents to be saved. In none of the cycles is comedy or individual characterization allowed to detract from the central theme of the unity of human history and its perceived pattern of salvation. Characters from the Old Testament are seen as archetypes of the suffering, triumphant Christ while God’s hand is seen prompting patriarchs and prophets to help realize the pre-ordained scheme of redemption. Far more so than the stained-glass windows of the great medieval churches (many of which were barely decipherable to the myopic or the uninformed), these plays were genuinely the ‘books of the illiterate’. Like the graphic doom-paintings which featured so prominently in many parish churches during the period, they also brought home to the faithful the mighty workings of God and the fearfulness of falling unprepared into his hands. The urgency of the call to repentance, and the necessary response to divine mercy in the face of the advances of death, are also evident in the ‘morality’ plays which have survived from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. These moralities seem, for the most part, to have been tailored to suit the needs of groups of travelling actors who were prepared to perform in the more intimate and contained spaces of inn-yards and halls. Everyman (c. 1495), which derives   [p. 76]   from a Flemish original, shows a representative figure of the human race summoned unexpectedly by death (‘O Deth, thou comest whan I had the leest in mynde’) and made acutely aware that his erstwhile friends, Fellowship, Kindred, Cousin, and Goods, will not go with him. It is Good Deeds who finally supports him and who offers to justify him before the throne of God. The East Anglian play Mankind (written c. 1465), which opens with a sermon delivered by Mercy, shows its title character, an ostensibly upright countryman who is prepared to defend himself with his spade, variously tempted by the vices and the grotesquely comic devil, Titivillus. Mankind is increasingly drawn by spiritual sloth to despair of his salvation (‘A rope, a rope, a rope! I am not worthy’) but, having learned to be wary of his ‘ghostly enemies’ - the world, the flesh, and the devil - he is ultimately delivered up to God’s justice by Mercy. The most elaborate, and the earliest, of the surviving morality plays, The Castle of Perseverance (c. 1405) demands a cast of 36 actors and a grand, diagrammatic open-air staging in order to dramatize the life of Humanum Genus (Humankind) from birth, via a staged tournament between vices and virtues, to a concluding pageant of death and judgement. The popular significance of the performances of religious drama is witnessed by their relatively long survival. Although the texts of the plays were systematically revised, excised, and amplified long before the impact of the Reformation was felt, certain plays which grated on new Protestant sensibilities in the 1540s and 1550s (notably those representing the posthumous triumphs of the Virgin Mary) were quietly suppressed. By the 1560s the civil and ecclesiastical authorities were clearly intent on a wholesale extinction of the plays, regarding their performance as offensive to the dignity of God and his saints. The York cycle was last performed in 1569, the Chester cycle in 1575, and the Coventry plays in 1580. It is theoretically possible, therefore, that Shakespeare (born in nearby Stratford in 1564) could have had his first experience of the theatre by seeing the far-famed Coventry mysteries before their texts were consigned to a Protestant dustbin. The powerful emotional impact of performances of the surviving cycles and morality plays had otherwise to wait to be released by their revival in the less religiously susceptible, but infinitely more secular, twentieth century. Early and Mid-Sixteenth-Century Drama   The most important effect of the Tudor Reformation on contemporary writing was in many ways the result of its increasingly secular, as opposed to devotional, emphases. The official ideology that preached that Church and   [p. 103]   Nation were constitutionally linked in the sovereign state and that God  was best served in the world and not in the cloister was echoed, parroted, or merely tacitly accepted in a broad range of the literature of the period. The stress on the secular is particularly evident in the prolific development of vernacular drama during the sixteenth century. Protestant suspicion, allied to the disappearance of its old sponsors-the monasteries, the chantries, and the guilds-gradually suppressed local traditions of popular religious drama (though in some towns morality cycles flourished until the 1570s). In London, civic intolerance and government censorship, banning plays which conflicted with authorized religion or which suggested any degree of profanity, steadily determined a shift away from a drama based on sacred subjects. Even given the number of play-texts that survives, any attempt to chart the rise of a secular theatre in the period is hampered by the often random selection of printed volumes, manuscripts, and records which have come down to us. Certain plays or interludes, written to commission or for specific festivities in royal, noble, or institutional halls, were probably regarded as ephemeral pieces while others which circulated as printed texts were neglected or destroyed as theatrical and literary fashions changed. Skelton’s only surviving play, the ‘goodly interlude’  Magnyfycence, was probably written at some point between 1515 and 1523. Although it is an entertainment ostensibly shaped, like the earlier Mankind, as an externalized battle between Virtues and Vices for the human soul, its moral concerns seem to be specific rather than general. Magnyfycence treats the importance of moderation in the affairs of a great Someone, not the general virtue of circumspection in the life of an Everyman. Very much in the manner of the humanists, it offers indirect advice to a princely figure by warning against pride, corruption, profligacy, and folly. If, as some commentators suppose, the protagonist’s situation offers an allegorical reflection of Cardinal Wolsey’s extravagant splendour, the play proceeds to represent the stages of a political and moral collapse. ‘Magnificence’, laudable enough in itself, here is distorted by pride; pride leads to false magnificence, and the decline into false values provokes a fall from both grace and prosperity. In the hands of John Foxe’s friend and ally, the former Carmelite friar, John Bale (1495-1563), the moral interlude was severed from its increasingly weak Catholic doctrinal roots to become a vehicle for Protestant polemic. Bale, an early protege of Archbishop Cranmer’s, was the author of some twenty-one plays, all of them written in the years 1533-43. His Kyng Johan of c. 1536 is often claimed as the first English drama to be based on national history, though it uses that history exclusively to make narrow propagandist points and it balances its gestures towards presenting historically based characters with traditional enough embodiments of virtue and vice. King John, the victim of papal displeasure in the early thirteenth century, is shown as a brave precursor of Henry VIII trying to free ‘Widow England’ from the oppressive grip of ‘the wild boar of Rome’. Bale's  Three Lawes, and the plays that stem from it, God’s    [p. 104]   Promises, John the Baptist, and The Temptation of Our Lord, all consider the human corruption of the divine scheme of redemption. All four plays equate the distortion of the pure Law of Christ with the former triumphs of the papal Antichrist, and all four look to individual repentance and general reformation as a means of restoring humankind to grace. When, for example, Christ is tempted by Satan in the fourth play, his adversary approaches in the guise of a dim-witted hermit who at first pretends not to recognize biblical quotations (‘We religious men live all in contemplation: Scriptures to study is not our occupation’). Once exposed for what he really is, he gleefully proclaims to Jesus that his prime allies in his scheme to corrupt the Church will in future be popes. Very little that indicates a particularly vigorous Catholic response to Protestant dramatic propaganda has survived. Much of the acceptable drama performed or revived in Queen Mary’s reign suggests a tactful avoidance of contentious issues. John Heywood (1497-?1579), a loyal Catholic who claimed to have achieved the difficult feat of making the Queen smile, was prepared to expose the long-familiar peccadilloes of hypocritical pardoners and friars, but he chose to do so in the form of untidy farces with tidily orthodox conclusions, such as The playe called the foure PP (which ends with a declaration of loyalty to the ‘Church Universal’) and  The Pardoner and the Friar (which arbitrarily concludes with attempts by the parson and the constable to drive the hypocrites away). Nicholas Udall (1504-56), a schoolmaster who, despite his earlier unconcealed Protestant sympathies, managed to find favour in the palaces of Queen Mary and of her Lord Chancellor, Bishop Gardiner, concentrated on writing plays for the boys in his charge. The comedies ascribed to Udall, most notably  Ralph Roister Doister (c. 1552), suggest a writer, well versed in the work of Plautus and Terence, who possessed a modest talent for finding English equivalents to the stock characters of the ancients. The text of  Ralph Roister Doister is divided, on the  ancient model, into acts and scenes, but its boisterous language, its songs, and its tediously rhymed doggerel are confidently those of modern London and not just a dim reflection of ancient Rome. The influence of Terence also shows in the five-act structure of the anonymous Gammer Gurtons Nedle, a comedy first performed at Christ’s College, Cambridge, probably in the early 1560s (it was printed in 1575). The play’s ‘low’, rustic, and somewhat slight subject (the loss of Gammer Gurton’s needle during the mending of a pair of leather breeches and its painful rediscovery when the owner of the breeches is kicked in the backside) is decidedly unacademic (at least in the narrow sense of that term). Although its author was determined to squeeze what entertainment  value he could out of a series of trivial domestic crises, the very shapeliness of the play suggests a degree of subtlety and structural sophistication new in English comedy. English universities and many of the schools that fed them with literate students shared the pan-European vogue for reviving and performing classical plays and for sponsoring new entertainments which would show of the   [p. 105]   proficiency of their authors and actors. Children’s companies, and notably the boys of the Chapel Royal in London, remained a significant feature in the development of Elizabethan drama, but it was the revival of interest in classical tragedy that proved decisive in the evolution of a distinctive national mode. Native English tragedy was distinctly marked by the bloody, high-flown, and sombre influence of Seneca. Between 1559 and 1561 Jasper Heywood (1535-98), the younger son of the author of The playe called the foure PP, published English translations of Seneca’s Troas, Thyestes, and  Hercules Furens. His enterprise was matched in the mid-1560s by workmanlike English versions of four further tragedies, all by young graduates determined to demonstrate that the art of the heathen Seneca could provide Christian England with a lesson in moral gravity and, equally importantly, with a salutary example of dramatic decorum. His plays were seen as model structures, suggesting the serene workings out of divine justice and revealing the effects of human vengeance; they dwelt on the vicissitudes of earthly fortune and they traced the tragic falls of men of high degree; above all, they expressed pithy moral sentiments with an exaggeratedly rhetorical flourish. When Sir Philip Sidney claimed in his Defence of Poesie that Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Gorboduc was ‘full of stately speeches and well sounding Phrases, clyming to the height of  Seneca his stile, and as full of notable moralitie’, he was offering what would have struck his contemporaries as the zenith of praise.  Gorboduc, sometimes known by its alternative title  The Tragidie of Ferrex and Porrex, remains perhaps the most striking and novel of the dramas produced in the opening years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. It does more than naturalize Seneca for an educated English audience; it attempts to harness the potential of national history and myth as a dramatic contribution to an extended political discourse. The play, first acted by the gentlemen students of the Inner Temple in the January of 1562, was performed again at court some days later before the Queen herself. Norton (1532-84) is believed to have contributed the first three acts, Sackville (1536-1608) the last two, but what particularly marks the play is its consistently high-toned exploration of the roots of political decay. Its story, derived from Geofrey of Monmouth’s fanciful history of the descendants of the Trojan Brutus, considers the end of the dynasty brought about by the follies of the old and the jealousies of the young (its parallels to  King Lear, written some forty years later, would have been evident to Shakespeare’s first audiences). As the play’s chorus pre-emptively insists at the end of its first act, its action could provide ‘A myrrour ... to princes all To learne to shunne the cause of suche a fall’. At its end, the dead King Gorboduc’s counsellor, Eubulus, is given a speech of some ninety-nine lines which mourns the loss of national unity and civil order and insists, with unashamed anachronism, that a proper way forward should have been the summons of a Parliament that would have appointed royal heirs ‘To stay the title of established right, And in the people plant obedience While yet the prince did live’. It was a warning that was doubtless clear both to an audience of   [p. 106]   lawyers and to the court of an unmarried Queen. The achievement of Gorboduc is not merely political and monitory. The play’s effects depend on the steady, intelligent, and dramatic development of its theme and on its spectacle. Each of the acts is introduced by a dumb-show; in the first, accompanied by ‘the musicke of violence’, six wild men act out a demonstration of the dangers of disunity; in the fourth, the ‘musicke of howboies’ introduces three Furies in black who drive before them a king and a queen ‘who had slaine their owne children’; in the last, ‘drommes and fluites’ are succeeded by armed men ‘in order of battaile’ who march about and (again anachronistically) noisily discharge their firearms. Despite the presence of what might strike a twentieth-century reader as an excess of both pomp and pomposity, the text of Gorboduc can be seen as setting a standard against which later Elizabethan dramatists had to measure their theatrical ambitions.   Theatre in the 1590s: Kyd and Marlowe   The widespread prejudice, which has held sway since at least the middle of the eighteenth century, that Elizabethan literature was dominated by the drama would not have been one that was shared by Shakespeare’s educated contemporaries. If the fiction of the period was systematically marginalized by subsequent generations of readers and critics, and if perceptions of its poetry were clouded by a predisposition for lyric verse, the work of its playwrights has long been seen as reflecting something of the glory of the steadily read, readily performed, and much eulogized Shakespeare. To the select, but substantial, audiences who first saw Elizabethan and Jacobean plays performed on the London stage, or perhaps acted outside town during provincial tours by the London companies, Shakespeare himself must have seemed one gifted metropolitan dramatist amongst many, while his dramatic enterprise, like that of his rivals, would probably have been viewed more as entertainment than as high art. Published play-texts purchased for domestic study or private diversion were sometimes pirated from illicit copies or, as was the case of the ‘bad’ Quarto of Hamlet of 1603, clumsily assembled with the aid of the erratic memories of members of the cast. In most cases, the title-pages of published plays bear the name of the acting company for whom they were written rather than the name of the author. The relatively prolific Shakespeare, who prepared   [p. 145]   his narrative poems for publication in the early 1590s and who probably authorized the appearance of his Sonnets in 1609, may well have sought to protect the rights of the companies with which he was associated by reserving the majority of his play-texts for their exclusive use. The first Folio, published posthumously in 1623 by two fellow ‘actor-sharers’ (shareholders) in the company known as the King’s Men, contains thirty-six plays of which eighteen appeared in print for the first time. Ben Jonson, who boldly printed his poems, plays, and masques in 1616 as his Works, went to considerable lengths to demonstrate that his plays were to be considered as serious literature and that the actable word deserved the distinction of being transmitted as the readable word. Nevertheless, when Sir Thomas Bodley established his Library at the University of Oxford in 1602, he insisted that it should exclude the kind of ephemera that he referred to as ‘idle books and riff raffs’ (by which he meant ‘almanacks, plays and proclamations’). Modern drama, as Bodley appears to be recognizing, was as transient as it was popular. It was also likely to distract the scholar from more fulfilling demands on his time. In late sixteenth-century London, however, suburban theatres, outside the control of less than sympathetic City magistrates, had begun to establish themselves as an essential, and internationally acknowledged, part of popular metropolitan culture. They were visited and (fortunately for theatre historians) described and sketched by European visitors; companies of English actors were, in turn, to perform plays on the Continent (Kyd’s  The Spanish Tragedy, for example, was acted at Frankfurt in 1601 and at Dresden in 1626 when its popularity at home was waning). Such prestige, even if qualified by an incomprehension of the English language as a medium, is testimony to the flourish and flexibility of the public theatres and theatre companies of late sixteenth-century London. Both were relatively new creations. A Royal Patent was granted to the Earl of Leicester’s men in 1574 and by 1576 James Burbage, a joiner turned actor turned entrepreneur, had recognized the opening presented by royal and aristocratic favour and established a permanent playhouse in Shoreditch. This playhouse, trumpeting its classical pretensions by calling itself the Theatre, signalled the end of the rudimentary performances by actors in inn-yards. The Theatre was followed in 1577 by Burbage’s second purpose-built playhouse, the Curtain (also in Shoreditch), and by the more celebrated structures on the south bank of the Thames, the Rose (1587), the Swan (1595), the Globe (1599), and the Hope (1613). From what is known of these theatres, each probably followed a related, pragmatic, but rapidly evolving plan. These wooden, unroofed amphitheatres were either polygonal or so shaped as to allow a polygon to pass itself off as a circle (the ‘wooden O’ of the Globe referred to in Shakespeare’s  Henry V). It is possible that, both in shape and in orientation, the later playhouses, such as the Globe, contained echoes of the principles of theatre design established by Greek and Roman architects, though the vagaries of the London weather required a roofed stage and unbanked tiers of covered galleries in which richer spectators were seated.    [p. 146]   In 1597 Burbage attempted a new venture by leasing the remains of the domestic buildings of the disused Dominican Friary at Blackfriars and requesting permission to convert it into an indoor commercial theatre. Although the move was temporarily blocked by local residents, it was to the new Blackfriars Theatre that Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, moved in 1609. A Dutch visitor to Bankside in 1596 claimed that the Swan Theatre held as many as 3,000 people, a figure which has been recently justified by estimates that the smaller Rose (the remains of which were excavated in 1989) could hold some 1,937 spectators, a capacity which was increased to an uncomfortable maximum of 2,395 when the theatre was rebuilt in 1592. Given London’s population of between 150,000 and 200,000 people, this implies that by 1620 perhaps as many as 25,000 theatre-goers per week visited the six playhouses then working. In 1624 the Spanish ambassador complained that 12,000 people had seen Thomas Middleton’s anti-Spanish political satire  A Game at Chess. The theatres that these large audiences patronized were likely to have been richly decorated according to current English interpretations of Renaissance ornament. Given the substantial income that these audiences brought in, the professional actors they saw were expensively, even extravagantly, costumed. Surviving records indicate, for example, that the wardrobe for Marlowe’s  Tamburlaine contained scarlet and purple satin cloaks, white satin and cloth-of-gold gowns for women characters and, for Tamburlaine himself, a particularly sumptuous doublet in copper lace and carnation velvet; in 1613 the management of the Globe paid no less than £38 for a costum e for Cardinal Wolsey in Shakespeare’s  Henry VIII (Shakespeare himself had paid £60 for his large house in Stratford). These costumes may have set the actors apart from their audiences. They worked without sets but in close physical proximity to a mass of  spectators referred to by Jonson as ‘a rude, barbarous crew’. They would scarcely have expected the reverential atmosphere of a modern auditorium. A company would initially have performed a new play a mere handful of times, reviving it or adapting it only as occasion, public demand, or a wide repertory determined. Finally, it should be remembered that the professional companies were composed exclusively of male actors, with boys or, as seems more likely given the demands of certain parts, young men playing women’s roles. The evolution of theatre buildings and companies in the last years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign was to some degree paralleled by the rapid development of a newly expressive blank-verse tragedy. The key figures in this evolution were Thomas Kyd (1558-94) and his close associate Christopher Marlowe. Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy: or, Hieronimo is Mad Again, presented at the Rose Theatre in the early months of 1592 and published anonymously later in the same year, proved amongst the most popular and influential of all the plays of the period. It introduced a new kind of central character, an obsessive, brooding, mistrustful and alienated plotter, and it set a pattern from which a line of   [p. 147]   dramatic explorations of the theme of revenge developed. Prominent in this line of ‘revenge plays’ are Marston’s The Malcontent of 1604, Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy of 1607, and, above all, Shakespeare’s Hamlet published in 1603 (though Kyd himself is believed to have written an earlier, now lost, play on the same subject). Although it continued to be revived into the early years of the seventeenth century, The Spanish Tragedy ultimately proved to be a play as parodied and ridiculed by other dramatists (notably Jonson) as it had once been flattered by imitation. What particularly established its reputation was its intermixture of dense plotting, intense action, swiftly moving dialogue, and long, strategically placed, rhetorically shaped speeches. The soliloquies of Hieronimo, a father determined to revenge the murder of his son, both gave prominence to an inward drama of private disillusion and created an impression of an agonized soul writhing as it debated with itself. Unsubtle and declamatory these speeches may often seem (‘O eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears; O life, no life, but lively form of death; O world, no world, but mass of public wrongs, Confus’d and fill’d with murder and misdeeds’), but they were integral to the fusion of violent action, exaggerated gesture, and boisterous rhetoric which mark Kyd’s theatrical style. Calculated exaggeration, coupled with a far greater control of metrical pace and inventive poetic effect, help to determine the often startling and disconcerting quality of Marlowe’s dramatic verse, verse that  brought English iambic pentameter to its first maturity. If we can trust the evidence wrung from Kyd by the Privy Council in 1593, the ‘atheistical’ disputations found in the lodgings that he shared with his fellow playwright were Marlowe’s, not his. If this is indeed so, the ‘atheistical’ speculations of Marlowe’s plays probably stem from a private fascination with ‘forbidden’ knowledge, with ambition, and with the disruptive leaps of the human imagination which the Elizabethan political and religious establishment would readily have interpreted as seditious. What also emerges from his plays, however, is the equally disruptive awareness that imaginative ambition must, for good or ill, confront its own limits. In Marlowe’s first great theatrical success,  Tamburlaine the Great (published 1590), for example, Tamburlaine sets out to demonstrate that, though he was born a shepherd, his deeds will prove him a lord. Nature, he claims, teaches us all to have aspiring minds, and he, the aspirer par excellence will seek to hold ‘the Fates bound fast in iron chains, And with my hand turn Fortune’s wheel about’. But Marlowe does not allow such naked military and political ambition to parade itself unchallenged. In the fifth scene of Act II Tamburlaine relishes the prospect of sway in Persia by revealing a commensurate relish for the rolling rhythm of words, names, and reiterations:   And ride in triumph through Persepolis! - Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles! - Usumcasane and Theridamas, Is it not passing brave to be a king, And ride in triumph through Persepolis?   [p. 148]   Tamburlaine’s subsequent question to his companion, ‘Why say, Theridamas, wilt thou be a king?’ receives the disenchanted answer, ‘Nay, though I praise it, I can live without it’. Marlowe impels his dramas forwards by evoking the power of dreams and then deflating them. His deflations can be hard-headed refusals to believe in dreams or, sometimes comic, disinclinations to indulge in the fantasies enjoyed by others. Both are equally subversive of  pretensions to power. The two parts of Tamburlaine the Great (the second written in response to the popularity of the first) confront audiences with a picture of a conquering ‘hero’, a breaker of moulds and a forger of new orders. Nevertheless, somewhat like those nineteenth-century European writers who belatedly attempted to come to terms with the phenomenon of Napoleon, Marlowe seeks to expose the concept of heroism as well as to praise it. His Tamburlaine is not so much unheroic as hollow. He may not be  presented as an unwitting slave to historical or social circumstance, but he is shown as susceptible to the beauty and to the pleas of the beloved Zenocrate and he is finally defeated by Time and Death. Although his aspiration is limitless, his ability to obtain fulfilment is shown as being restricted by forces beyond his control. A similar pattern can be observed in Marlowe’s other tragedies. Although God may seem to be an indifferent observer and although his religion may be mocked as ineffective, his instruments continue to wreak havoc on those who challenge his authority. If some commentators have chosen to see Marlowe as finally retreating from the consequences of the freedom of thought and action that his plays begin to proclaim, the punishments he brings down upon his protagonists in fact derive from their own unbending Promethean daring. In a significant way, each is obliged to confront his own self indulgence. In The Jew of Malta (performed c. 1592 though not published till 1633) the situation of the overreacher is presented with the kind of exaggerated gusto which threatens to topple over into black comedy. Barabas, whose very name is likely to grate on Christian sensibilities, is glorious in his cupidity, extravagant in his selfishness, and splendid in his ingenuity. His energy is directed to his advancement in the face of his enemies and he glories in the kind of illicit manipulation spoken of in the play’s prologue by ‘Machiavel’. Barabas himself acknowledges the importance of ‘policy’ at the point when his attempts to pit one side against another reach their zenith: ‘Since by wrong thou got’st authority, Maintain it bravely by firm policy; At least, unprofitably lose it not’. It is ultimately by a miscalculation in his ‘policy’ that he fails, outwitted and sent screaming to his death by a double-crosser far less spirited in his malevolence than is Barabas himself. The tragedy of  The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (performed at the Rose in the early 1590s and belatedly published in 1604) hangs on an even greater miscalculation. Faustus’s intellectual world is one in which humanist new learning has broken free of the strait-jackets of medieval science and divinity. For Faustus himself, restlessly moving from book to book and discipline to discipline in his opening speech, knowledge is power. As with   [p. 149]   Tamburlaine, the humbly born man aspires to the realization of his proper natural authority; as with Barabas, the outsider seeks to demonstrate that he is at liberty to reject the imposed restrictions that he despises. Like both, when Faustus sets himself against convention he slips into an arrogant self justifying fantasy of his invincibility. Marlowe also allows him to confuse opposites and blur distinctions (he sees his necromantic books as ‘heavenly’ and, more damnably, he signs away his soul to Mephistophilis with Christ’s last words on the cross: ‘Consummatum est, ‘It is finished’ or ‘completed’). Before this fatal contract reaches its term, Faustus has frittered away the large opportunities that it has opened to him. He may have gloriously welcomed the spirit of Helen of Troy with an empassioned desire to share her eternity (‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships? And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make  me immortal with a kiss’), but he has also played silly practical jokes on popes and innkeepers and dumbfounded dukes with unseasonal bunches of grapes. His final speeches, uttered as a clock chimes away his last hours, do, however, force on us an awareness of quite how horridly he has corrupted his genius and ignored the implications of Christian redemption:   Now hast thou but one bare hour to live. And then thou must be damn’d perpetually. Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven, That time may cease, and midnight never come; Fair Nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make A year, a month, a week a natural day, That Faustus may repent and save his soul. O lente, lente currite, noctis equi. The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn’d. O, I'll leap up to my God - Who pulls me down? - See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament. One drop would save my soul, half a drop: ah, my Christ -    Here Faustus both clings to his cleverness by quoting, out of context, an amorous line from Ovid (‘run slowly, slowly, horses of the night’) and desperately attempts to reverse his old dismissal of the scheme of salvation as he claims to see the sacrificial streams of blood and to claim Christ for his own. Yet still, as any orthodox member of Marlowe’s audience would recognize, neither will his arrogance admit true repentance nor will his intellect fully accept service to the God he has so spectacularly rejected. Edward ll (published in 1592) differs from Marlowe’s other tragedies in that it exploits a far greater equilibrium between its central character and those surrounding him. Where the other plays insistently celebrate the dangerous detachment of the hero from the limiting restraints of society, Edward II explores the problem of moral conflict within an established society. Unlike the megalomaniac seekers after military, political, or intellectual power,   [p. 150]   Edward is born into an inheritance of royal government but effectively throws it away in favour of another mastery, that of a homosexual love unacceptable to the weighty historical world in which he is obliged to move. Edward is a king without command, a lover denied fulfilment, a lion transformed into ‘a lamb encompassed by wolves’ and a man finally reduced by his enemies (including his wife and son) to the depths of human misery. He is Marlowe’s most conventionally ‘tragic’ character in what is perhaps also his most deeply unconventional tragedy.   Shakespeare’s Plays Politics and History   For some 250 years after the deaths of the dramatists the plays of Shakespeare completely eclipsed those of Kyd and Marlowe. As has become increasingly evident, however, Shakespeare’s early tragedies and histories existed, and continue to exist, in a symbiotic relationship with those of his contemporaries. Kyd’s revenge dramas stimulated a public appetite to which Shakespeare responded with a sensational replay of Kyd’s themes and echoes of his rhetoric in  Titus Andronicus (c. 1587, published 1594). Shakespeare’s professional rivalry with Marlowe was to be more intense and to prove more fertile. Some of Aaron’s speeches in  Titus Andronicus distantly echo the cadences of Tamburlaine and, far less distantly, the malevolent gusto of Barabas. It was, however, with the first sequence of plays based on English history that Shakespeare found a distinctive voice and presented a considered riposte to the radical challenge posed by Marlowe. The ‘tiger-hearted’ Queen Margaret of the three parts of  Henry VI (c. 1588-91), who learns to spit curses, to wheedle, and to fight, is also the mistress of the kind of flamboyant gesture that audiences might readily have associated with Marlowe’s male protagonists. It is she who so extravagantly insults the royal pretences of the captured Duke of York and his ‘mess of sons’ by putting a paper crown on his head and then knocking it off again to the words ‘Off with the crown and with the crown his head’. But it is one of these sons, the Gloucester whom she has characterized to his father as ‘that valiant crookback prodigy ... that with his grumbling voice Was wont to cheer his dad in mutinies’, who as Richard III most menacingly outcapers Marlowe’s Machiavellian villains. If, as some critics believe,  Edward II was Marlowe’s reply in historical kind, its moodiness and its exploration of the tragic dimension in the fall of a king were in turn to stimulate both the new departures and the plangency of Shakespeare’s Richard II (c. 1595, published 1597). Shakespeare’s two sequences of English historical plays (the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III; and Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV of c. 1596 and c. 1597, and Henry V of 1599) plus King John of c. 1595 and Henry VIII of c. 1612-    [p. 151]   13, reinvent the myths, memories, and constructions of recent history which had so preoccupied Tudor historians. They explored divisions, depositions, usurpations, and civil wars, but they also bolstered the concept of secure monarchic government propagated by officially approved apologists for the Tudor dynasty. If the subject-matter of Richard II proved to be sufficiently contentious for the deposition scene to be omitted in the three editions published in the lifetime of Queen Elizabeth, and if in 1601 the Earl of Essex and his fellow conspirators recognized that a performance of the play might arouse support for their proposed coup d’état, such susceptibility served to prove how well Shakespeare had understood affairs of state. His history plays have continued to shape British perceptions of the national past and of nationhood. They remain political and patriotic statements of some potency (as Laurence Olivier’s cinematic reworking of Henry V proved at a crucial phase of the Second World War). The ten history plays are central to the conception of Shakespeare as a, perhaps the, national poet which began to emerge in the late seventeenth century. To Samuel Johnson, writing in the mid-1760s, the Henry IV plays seemed to mark the apogee of a certain kind of dramatic art. (‘Perhaps no author has ever in two plays afforded so much delight’). To English and European Romantic poets, from Keats, Browning, and Tennyson to Goethe, Hugo, and Pushkin, Shakespeare emerged as the key figure in the moulding of a particular national consciousness and the deviser of the model from which future national historical dramas could develop. In all, Shakespeare refers to England 247 times in his plays and to the English 143 times. It is scarcely surprising that the vast majority of these references should occur in the history plays (the intensely nationalistic King John, for example, mentions England no less than 43 times,  Henry V 49 times, and  Henry VIII 12 times). To many fond anthologists, the central statement of Shakespeare’s feeling for his homeland occurs in Richard II as the dying John of Gaunt feels himself ‘a prophet new-inspired’:   This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house Against the envy of less happier lands; This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, ...   This statement of an ideal, separate, secure, peaceful, kingly, little island is frequently truncated by those who cite it before the prophetic Gaunt gets to his point: the ideal does not exist and the England of Richard II ‘hath made a   [p. 152]   shameful conquest of itself’. Gaunt’s idealized vision is used in the play, and, by means of echoes, in the three dramas that follow it, to expose the reality of a realm descending into disunity and war. The ‘other Eden’ and the ‘demi-paradise’ are, if they ever existed, now lost. If, on one level, Richard II and its successors explore the consequences of the disruption of the direct line of royal descent from the Conqueror, on another they demonstrate that power-struggles and conflicts of interest are not exclusively concerned with dynastic rights nor does civil peace automatically stem from the legitimate rule of divinely appointed kings. The Earl of Essex would not have been alone in 1601 in recognizing that history was ramified in the guts and minds of the living. The historical play entitled  The Reign of Edward III, which was once loosely ascribed to Shakespeare, was published in 1596 (it was registered for publication a year earlier). In its first two acts it is concerned not with showing us a golden age basking in the glory of a chivalrous warrior King, but with that King’s dishonourable pursuit of the Countess of Salisbury. Edward emerges as a flawed hero who redeems his ‘honour’ by chasing the chimera of his supposed rights in France (the same chimera to be pursued, as Shakespeare himself showed, by another ‘hero King’, Henry V).  The Reign of Edward III provided the context from which Richard II and its successors developed. The memory of Edward III and his foreign wars served to show up the domestic disasters of the reign of Edward’s grandson Richard (whose only military campaign is a failed one in Ireland). In turn, the deposition of Richard leads to the disorders which so shake Henry Bolingbroke and which persuade the sleepless king to acknowledge that the crown has sat ‘troublesome’ upon his head. Even though Henry V attempts to distract minds at home from civil ills by taking up Edward III’s claims in France, he too is obliged to muse sleeplessly in the night before the battle of Agincourt on ‘the fault My father made in compassing the crown’. Despite Henry’s military triumph and despite his French marriage, Chorus reminds us at the end of the play that his heir’s inheritance will be bitter; France will be lost and England will bleed, an event ‘which oft our stage hath shown’. Henry V returns us, therefore, to the historical point at which Shakespeare began to explore the civil disasters of late medieval history, the first of the three Henry VI plays. What distinguishes I and II Henry IV from the history plays that Shakespeare wrote both before and after it is his presentation of an England which prospers and suffers beyond the King’s court and the circle of the King’s aristocratic enemies. In a sense, the cue for this celebration of a wider, popular England lay in the traditional interpretation of the transformation of the scapegrace Prince Hal into the gracious and honourable King Harry. Where Holinshed excused the former as some kind of adolescent prelude to the famous victories of the King, Shakespeare sought to show us a Prince who carefully calculates in all that he does. He is both prig and prodigal son, but in his prodigality he encounters a world which is more than an alternative to his father’s troubled   [p. 153]   court. Hal does not simply drop  out from a fraught ruling class, he drops  in to the society of the ruled. Through Falstaff, he learns the intense delights of irresponsibility and experiences the exercise of an elastic morality, but he has to teach himself the significance of responsibility and the law. Where Falstaff discounts honour as ‘a mere scutcheon’, Hal has to outface his father’s enemy, Hotspur, who once rejoiced in the idea of plucking ‘bright honour from the pale-faced moon’. Where Falstaff claims to have misused the King’s press ‘damnably’ in Part I and cynically demonstrates his scandalous methods of recruitment in Justice Shallow’s Gloucestershire in Part II, Hal has, with, perhaps, a parallel degree of cynicism, to learn the bluff arts of military command. Falstaff, Shakespeare’s amplest comic invention, squashes all endeavour; Hal, the playboy Prince, has occasionally to pause to remind us that he is in fact in earnest training for his future role as ‘the mirror of all Christian kings’. Falstaff is warned of his, and Hal’s, destiny, in one of the most carefully modulated exchanges in I Henry IV. In Act II, scene v the two men play an acting game which parodies an interview between the penitent Prince and his sorrowing father; when Falstaff in the part of Hal mounts a highly imaginative defence of the character of ‘plump Jack’, the real Hal royally responds to the challenge of banishing him with the blunt force of ‘I do: I will’. The scene is suddenly interrupted by the sound of knocking, and it is for the actors to determine how pregnant is the potential pause, how potent is the moment of truth. The England that contains Justice Shallow’s orchard and the battlefield at Shrewsbury, Gad’s Hill and the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster, is a hierarchically ordered nation threatened on all levels by disorder. The English history plays consider how civil order is related to central government. If government is generally represented by the medieval concept of rule by a divinely appointed king from whom honour and justice spring, Shakespeare also suggests that king and subject are linked together by mutual responsibilities. It would be anachronistic to suggest that these responsibilities imply some kind of contract between ruler and ruled, but in certain plays, notably in Henry V, he seems to be stressing that a king can rule legitimately only with the assent of those whom he rules, be they nobles or commoners. Powerful noblemen break their feudal oaths in Richard II, and in 2 Henry VI insurgent peasants attempt to break feudalism itself, but throughout Shakespeare’s works it is rulers who more often seem to fail in their moral, communal, and governmental responsibilities. The usurping Duke Frederick poisons relationships in As You Like lt; Vincentio, the Duke of Vienna in Measure for Measure, admits that he has ‘ever loved the life removed’ and that he has for fourteen years neglected ‘the needful bits and curbs to headstrong weeds’; Prospero, sometime Duke of Milan, confesses in  The Tempest that he ‘grew stranger’ to his state by ‘being transported And rapt in secret studies’; in Hamlet, Claudius destroys his brother, marries his sister-in-law, assumes the throne, and introduces a rot into the state of Denmark; and in Macbeth a usurper and regicide proves as   [p. 154]   tyrannical and bloody a curse to Scotland as Richard III had to England. By looking beyond England, whether in the comic mode or the tragic, Shakespeare seems to have accepted, as the vast majority of his contemporaries did, that good government meant the rule of an assiduous and virtuous prince with a sanctioned claim to the throne. It was only in the more austere Roman plays, dramas which offer a retrospect on governmental systems alien to those of most of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century European states, that Shakespeare was obliged to confront alternatives to the rule of Christian princes. But  Julius Caesar (1599) and Coriolanus (c. 1608) deal with historical alternatives, they also vividly reflect back on Shakespeare’s present (corn riots, as an English audience of 1608 would readily have recognized, were not purely a Roman phenomenon). The compact Roman Republic of  Coriolanus is riven by patrician arrogance and plebeian self assertion; in  Julius Caesar and  Antony and Cleopatra a now tired republic commands an empire; it staggers on the brink of a lapse into imperial autocracy before beginning the long slide into the imperial decadence of  Titus Andronicus. To most men and women of the Renaissance, the sweep of Roman history contained within it paramount examples of sober ideals, barely attainable splendours, and dire warnings. As Shakespeare represents that history in his four Roman plays it is the warnings against demagoguery and decadence that predominate. The same warnings have continued to resonate into the twentieth century.   Tragedy and Death   When the disconsolate Richard returns from Ireland to his troubled kingdom in the play to which Shakespeare gave the full title  The Tragedy of King Richard the Second, he insists that no one speak to him of comfort. ‘Let’s talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs’, he suggests before proceeding, in a homely and unregal manner, to sit on the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings: ‘How some have been deposed, some slain in war, Some haunted  by the ghosts they have deposed, Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed, All murdered.’ For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, as much as for their ancient Greek and Roman predecessors, the very nature of tragedy seemed to require that it explored the sad stories of kings, or at the very least of men and women dignified by royal blood or civil authority. An exemplary dramatic fall, one which stirred the emotions of pity and fear in lesser mortals, had to be a fall from a height of influence and honour. Shakespeare’s tragedies deal almost exclusively with the destinies of kings and princes on whose fortunes depend those of the nations they rule. If neither Julius Caesar nor his noble murderers are of royal rank, Caesar at least aspires to it and, as the phenomena which accompany his murder appear to suggest, his greatness is supernaturally affirmed. Only Othello, the noble servant of the Most Serene Republic of Venice, has a merely military rank, but, though his tragedy may ostensibly seem   [p. 155]   domestic, seventeenth-century audiences would have been well aware of the threat his downfall posed to Christian supremacy in Cyprus at a time of Turkish ascendancy over the Eastern Mediterranean. As Kyd, Marlowe, and earlier sixteenth-century English dramatists had defined it on the stage, tragedy was reinforced by explicit enactments of the death of kings. The popularity of the revenge plays that developed from the example of  The Spanish Tragedy also demonstrates that English audiences rejoiced in the representation of what Shakespeare’s Horatio describes as ‘carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts ... accidental judgements, casual slaughters ... [and] deaths put on by cunning and forced cause’. Although, as the sometimes vexed reputation of Hamlet (c. 1599-1601) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries serves to suggest, such deliberate or casual slaughters on stage may not have been to the taste of neo-classical critics, they were integral to the kind of tragedy that Shakespeare accepted as normative. To think of a performance of  Hamlet without its murders is as absurd an exercise as to contemplate excising the Prince’s lengthy meditations on mortality from his soliloquies. Shakespeare’s tragic world is uncertain, dangerous, and mortal, and the catastrophes to which all his tragic dramas inexorably move are sealed by the deaths of their protagonists. It is possible that this dramatic emphasis on mortality reflected the violence of contemporary political life, both at home and abroad. If Protestant England claimed to be righteously indignant over the slaughter of French Huguenots on St Bartholomew’s Day 1572, and if it sometimes dwelt pruriently on the seamy side of French, Italian, and Spanish court life, it was itself an uneasy society, haunted by ideas of treason and assassination. It was also ready enough both to extract information from suspects by torture and to execute those it deemed to be traitors according to the bloody ritual of public hanging, drawing, and quartering. The idea of murder as politically expedient may have seemed repugnant to the professionally self righteous but assassination was by no means a remote or alien phenomenon (as the carefully staged trials of the so-called ‘Gunpowder’ plotters in 1605 brought home to contemporaries). The glancing references in  Macbeth (c. 1606) to the moral issues raised by this same Gunpowder Plot suggest how a representation of the hurly-burly of the politics of the Scottish past could be made to reverberate into the tangled British present. A historical tragedy written to flatter a Stuart king descended from both Banquo and Edward the Confessor it may be, but Macbeth also reflects a deep political unease in which, despite the hiatus between past and present, no monarch could find reassurance. The exploration of turbulence and distrust in the play is not limited to the images of blood and dismemberment with which it begins, nor is it given full expression in King Duncan’s inability to find ‘the mind's construction in the face’; it is rendered implicit in nature and explicit in the fatal visions, the brain-sickly thoughts, the butchery, the desperate defences, and the fearful isolation of Macbeth himself. Far more so than the sleepless Plantagenets of the history plays, Macbeth is a monarch haunted by   [p. 156]   personal desolation and by the extinction of royal ideals and of effective royal influence:   My way of life Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf, And that which should accompany old age, As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have, but in their stead Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath Which the poor heart would fain deny and dare not.   In  Macbeth Shakespeare explores a monarch’s despair at having to live with the consequences of his desperate and bloody appliances to the inherent political diseases of autocratic government. The usurping Claudius in  Hamlet, still clinging to ‘those effects for which I did the murder  - My crown, mine own ambition and my queen’, seems, despite his own soliloquy of ineffective penitence, to experience relatively little of Macbeth's heavy affliction of conscience. Claudius is Shakespeare’s supremely politic king; manipulative, calculating, smooth, secretive, suspicious, and generally well-served by malleable courtiers. His Elsinore is characterized by its eavesdroppers, its note-takers and its double agents. It is not a place where innocence thrives. Elsinore forms a tortuous, patriarchal maze for Ophelia who fails both to negotiate its pitfalls and to understand the cynical logic of its twists and turns; it is a prison for Hamlet who multiplies its complexities while ostensibly attempting to purge them. Hamlet’s public problem is how to avenge a political murder in a culture where private vengeance is politically and morally unacceptable; his equally pressing private problem is how to come to terms with the death of his father, with his uncle’s accession, and, above all, with his mother’s remarriage (and possible complicity in Claudius’s crimes). The intertwined dilemmas posed  by those problems render the Prince an unsteady and an ineffective revenger. Hamlet the drama confuses and complicates the clean lines of a ‘revenge play’ as soon as Hamlet the character begins to assume roles, to experiment with devices, and to debate issues which veer off from the central one. His meditations, one of which leads Horatio to suggest that he considers ‘too curiously’, confront him again and again with the fear not of judgement, but with the chill shiver of death and the prospect of a dream-haunted afterlife. The active life is waylaid by the idly contemplative, the confident Renaissance prince by the restless melancholic, the concept of man as the paragon of animals by the  memento mori. Hamlet’s most significant stage-props are a rapier and a skull. Hamlet ends with a certain moral neatness which compensates for the disordered heap of corpses which litters the stage. Its protagonist has proved himself ready both for his own contrived death and for the wild justice he brings down upon Claudius and Laertes. Nevertheless, his is an end which contrasts with the more resolute deaths of Shakespeare’s other tragic heroes.   [p. 157]   If throughout Hamlet suicide is seen either as forbidden by a canon of the Everlasting or as an untidy quietus for the unhinged Ophelia, in  Othello and the Roman plays it is raised again to its pre-Christian, classical dignity. For many members of Shakespeare’s first audiences, however, suicide remained a damnable act, a rash end to present woes or accumulated sins on earth (as in the case of Kyd’s Isabella and Hieronimo), or a dark act of despair (as in the grave temptation of Spenser’s Redcrosse). In  Romeo and Juliet (c. 1594-5) the defeated lovers rush into death as precipitously, as incomprehendingly, and as clumsily (if not as fulfillingly) as they had earlier embraced a passionate l...