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SHAKESPEARE

Objectives 'Shakespeare' is a Group B Advanced Unit. The Unit is concerned with the drama of William Shakespeare as dramatic literature in the context of the theatrical milieu of his time, and with his poems. The subject guide has been designed:

i) to help you identify what is characteristic of Shakespeare's writing

ii) to develop your understanding of the early modern theatre industry for which Shakespeare's plays were written

iii) to help you locate the plays you study in their socio-cultural contexts

iv) to provide a context for the application of a range of critical approaches to Shakespeare

v) to develop your knowledge of dramatic forms and terminology (such as soliloquy, chorus, blank verse, couplet, stichomythia, feminine endings)

It is important that you refer to these objectives in the planning of your syllabus and when assessing your progress through the syllabus. (Self-assessment procedures are discussed in the Handbook.)

Subject Content You should organize your course of study around individual plays and topics. The following ten plays are the ones from which six extracts will be drawn for Section A of the examination:

Titus Andronicus (Roman History 1592)

Richard 3 (English History 1592-3)

King John (Tragedy 1596)

King Lear (Tragedy 1605)

Henry 5 (English History 1598-9)

Troilus and Cressida (Problem Play 1602)

Measure for Measure (Problem Play 1603)

Antony and Cleopatra (Roman History 1606)

Pericles (Romance 1607)

The Winter's Tale (Romance 1610)

The generic categories in brackets are conventional and subject to dispute; the years given are the likely dates of first performance. You may refer to both the above list and Shakespeare's other plays and his poems in your examination answers for Sections B and C.

* However, no answers are allowed on the plays listed for study in Explorations 1 (namely Hamlet and The Tempest) and Renaissance Comedy (namely Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, and Twelfth Night).

* Note also that candidates may NOT discuss the same text in more than one answer, in this examination or any other Advanced Level Unit examination. This means that if you have answered on Henry 5, for example, in Section A of the examination, you may not use Henry 5 again for an answer in Section B or in Section C.

The following is a list of the kind of topics which you might choose to investigate:

* the plays' engagement with contemporary debates about governance

* gender politics

* the formal structure of verse drama

* sexual 'deviance' and transvestite theatre

* Elizabethan ideas about history

* Shakespeare's use of his sources

* the original staging of Shakespeare's plays

* representations of racial and ethnic difference

* Shakespeare's non-dramatic verse

* the expanding world of Elizabethan England

* characterization through language

* the characteristics and boundaries of genre

* the relationship between politics and war

* rhetoric

You should not feel restricted by this list of topics and you are not expected to know all of them in depth. This list of topics includes some of the central themes and approaches to Shakespeare. It is, however, quite acceptable for you to include other topics not referred to here in your syllabus.

Using This Subject Guide This subject guide is not designed as an overview of the whole of Shakespeare. The content of the course of study you construct for yourself will consist of both the primary texts you choose and secondary material such as literary criticism, historical and cultural studies, biography and so on. The guide is intended as a model to show how you might decide to organize and develop your programme of study. The plays and topics which we consider here might not coincide with your own choices, but the critical procedures indicated should be of general application. This guide does not constitute the syllabus itself, but a guide to how an appropriate course of study might be constructed by you and to appropriate ways of studying the material which you will choose. It also indicates the range of material which is the MINIMUM amount necessary for you to face the examination with confidence. Simple regurgitation in the examination of the illustrative material in this subject guide will be regarded as plagiarism and heavily penalized. You must adapt such material in ways appropriate to your own chosen syllabus of study. Examiners will always look unfavourably at examinations which are composed of answers which draw solely on the illustrative material provided in this subject guide.

In this guide we will consider just one extract in detail as preparation for the Section A question (see Chapter One), but you will need to try your skills out on a number of passages in the course of preparation for the exam and we have identified two other extracts in the Suggested Study Syllabus below. If you prepare on four plays there is a one in 210 chance that none of them will be among those appearing in Section A. If you prepare five plays one of them is certain to appear. Attempting to cover more than six plays will probably prevent you achieving the necessary depth of knowledge. For Sections B and C we will use plays drawn from the above list of ten, but you are free to answer on any of Shakespeare's works upon which you have not already answered in Section A, other than those on the foundation units specified above.

Methods of Assessment You will be assessed by one 3-hour examination. The examination paper will be in three parts. You will have to answer one question from each section.

Section A will consist of a series of short extracts from six of the plays on the above list of ten. You will be asked to comment on one of these extracts, putting it "in the contexts of the play from which it is drawn and of Shakespeare's other writing, and commenting on the language, dramatic interaction, and themes".

Section B will contain questions inviting discussion of a single work by Shakespeare (a sequence of about twenty sonnets, or a single narrative poem such as Venus and Adonis, may be considered a work) allowing you to demonstrate detailed knowledge of the language, style, and themes of that work. The questions will not name particular works: you are free to choose from the entire Shakespeare canon (but note restriction in rubric below).

Section C will contain questions inviting comparison between at least two works by Shakespeare in terms of specific themes, forms or critical approaches. The questions will not name particular works: you are free to choose from the entire Shakespeare canon (but note restriction in rubric below).

Please note the rubric of the exam appended to this booklet. As well as instructing you to answer three questions, one from each section, it says: 'Candidates may NOT discuss the same text in more than one answer, in this examination or any other Advanced Level Unit examination.' This means that in the examination you will be answering on at least four plays (one in Section A, one in Section B, and at least two in Section C). Note also that no answers are allowed on the plays listed for study in Explorations 1 (namely Hamlet and The Tempest) and Renaissance Comedy (namely Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, and Twelfth Night).

This subject guide will be organized around the structure of the examination paper. You will find examples of the kinds of question you can expect in the exam as you work through the guide and a sample examination paper at the end.

Examination technique

If you have followed the instructions offered in the subject guide, read as much of the suggested syllabus as possible and engaged with the topics under consideration, you should be well-prepared for the examination. However, in order to do justice to yourself and the subject on the day of the examination, it is useful to think about your examination technique. Certain basic procedures should be followed:

* if possible, read a sample examination paper from a previous year so that you are familiar with the range and type of questions you might expect to encounter .(See the sample paper at the end of this guide)

* use the sample paper to practise writing timed examination answers

* in the examination, always read the rubric carefully twice and follow the instructions given

* read the whole paper through before choosing which questions to attempt

* leave yourself sufficient time to answer all the questions you are asked to complete. If you do run out of time, write down in note form all the points you would have included. (You may be given credit for an outline of an answer which you have not had time to write in full.)

* proof it! At the end of the exam, read through what you have written, correcting spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc. and checking titles and the names of authors for inaccuracies. Simple errors or slips can detract even from a good answer.

These rules may seem obvious but are essential for a good examination performance in any subject. To further develop and improve your examination technique in relation to the 'Shakespeare' paper, you should read the Examiners’ report from the previous year(s) and consider the following additional points.

One of the most important examination techniques is the ability to choose the kind of question that you are well-equipped to answer, that will enable you to demonstrate the particular knowledge and skills you have acquired during your course of study. For instance, if a question asks you to discuss plays in which young women cross-dress as young men (as frequently occurs in Shakespeare), you will need a framework of historical knowledge to answer this question adequately. (You should know, for instance, something about the anxiety regarding Elizabeth 1's successor as she grew older, and the Sumptuary Laws that controlled who could wear what kinds of clothing.) Avoid making generalizations about the entire period if you wish to relate literary works to known historical events.

In order to answer questions effectively, it is important to understand what you are being asked to do, so look at the terms of the question (i.e. to consider, compare, contrast, define, evaluate or discuss) and make sure you do what the question asks you to do. If you are asked, for example, to "consider the dramatist's treatment of old age", it is not sufficient to list plays in which old people appear. To describe or list is not to ‘consider’. With this question, you might need to start by considering how we know characters' ages: do they make explicit reference to being old? (King Lear, for example, say he is very old, whereas Richard 3 could be any age from 20 to 60.) Think about the things that usually go with old age such as worldly experience, wisdom, disease, and often a concern to secure the futures of children. You might want to take a pair of contrasting characters such as the sick old king in All's Well that Ends Well and see how he differs from the dying Edward in Richard 3. Alternatively, you can look for moments where commonplace sayings about old age are implicitly refuted by the ensuing action, as with Jaques' Seven Ages of Man speech in As You Like It, which ends grimly with "Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything". This is immediately followed by the stage direction "Enter Orlando bearing Adam" and Duke's Senior's "Set down your venerable burden" (2.7.166-7), which action provides a much more positive view of old age: a young man acknowledges his debt to one who has served him and returns the labour. Be aware that Shakespeare's works contain many beautifully constructed aphorisms which we should not take at face value: action can speak louder than these words and must be factored into the equation. There are many ways of answering a question, depending on the texts you choose and the argument you wish to construct, but the important thing is to engage with the question asked and to develop an answer which is clearly and consistently relevant to the question.

In selecting topics on which to write practice essays, remember that your essays will be preparing you to answer examination questions, and therefore you should select essay topics that relate to the three sections of the final examination.

Remember that you may decide to look at any of the works of Shakespeare, except Hamlet, The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, and Twelfth Night. The examiners are particularly impressed by answers that explore the lesser-known works and ones not discussed in this study guide. The balance you draw between Shakespeare's dramatic work and his poems is up to you, and you may well find that even if you do not answer directly on the poems they throw a useful light on the concerns of some of the plays. (For example, the homoeroticism that many people find in Coriolanus can be illuminated by a consideration of the homoeroticism in Shakespeare's Sonnets.)

Reading List

The best way to read a Shakespeare play or poem is in a critical edition devoted to that particular work. The Arden Shakespeare (general editors Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thomson, and David Scott Kastan) is a series of such individual volumes available in paperback. Equally good is The Oxford Shakespeare series (general editor Stanley Wells) which is published in paperback in the Oxford World Classics series. As well as extensive explanatory notes, these single-work volumes give you introductory essays and suggested further readings.

A cheaper alternative is to buy a complete works of Shakespeare and good modern examples are these:

William Shakespeare. 1988. The Complete Works. Ed. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett and William Montgomery. Compact edition. Oxford. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198711913

William Shakespeare. 1997. The Norton Shakespeare Based on the Oxford Edition. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York. Norton. ISBN 0393970868

William Shakespeare. 1998. The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works. Ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thomson, and David Scott Kastan. Walton-on-Thames. Thomas Nelson. ISBN 1903436613

General Background Reading

Peter Hyland. 1996. An Introduction to Shakespeare: The Dramatist in His Context. Basingstoke. Macmillan. ISBN 0333598806

Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin, eds. 2003. Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide. Oxford. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0199245223

Russ McDonald. 1996. The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents. Boston. St Martin's Press. ISBN 0333947118

Park Honan. 1998. Shakespeare: A Life. Oxford. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0192825275

David Scott Kastan, ed. 1999. A Companion to Shakespeare. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture. Oxford. Blackwell. ISBN 0631218785

Stanley Wells and Margreta De Grazia, eds. 2001. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies. 2nd edition. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521658810

Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells, eds. 2001. The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. Oxford. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198117353

John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, eds. 1997. A New History of Early English Drama. Foreword by Stephen J. Greenblatt. New York. Columbia University Press. ISBN 0231102437

Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry and William Ingram, eds. 2000. English Professional Theatre, 1530-1660. Theatre in Europe: A documentary history. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521230128

 

Anthologies of recent critical work

Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds. 1994. Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism. 2nd edition. Manchester. Manchester University Press. ISBN 0719043522

John Drakakis, ed. 2002. Alternative Shakespeares. 2nd edition. London. Routledge. ISBN 0415287235

Terence Hawkes, ed. 1996. Alternative Shakespeares 2. New Accents. London. Routledge. ISBN 0415134862

Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton, eds. 1992. New Historicism and Renaissance Drama. Longman Critical Readers. Harlow. Addison Wesley Longman. ISBN 0582045541

Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow, eds. 2001. Marxist Shakespeares. Accents on Shakespeare. London. Routledge. ISBN 0415202345

Deborah Barker and Ivo Kamps, eds. 1995. Shakespeare and Gender: A History. London. Verso. ISBN 0860916693

James C. Bulman, ed. 1996. Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance. London. Routledge. ISBN 0415116260

John J. Joughin, ed. 1997. Shakespeare and National Culture. Manchester. Manchester University Press. ISBN 0719050510

Ivo Kamps, ed. 1995. Materialist Shakespeare: A History. Verso. London. ISBN 086091674X

Ronald Knowles, ed. 1998. Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bakhtin. Early Modern Literature in History. Basingstoke. Macmillan. ISBN 0333711424

Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds. 1985. Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. London. Methuen. ISBN 0415051134

Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, eds. 1998. Post-colonial Shakespeares. Accents on Shakespeare. London. Routledge. ISBN 0415173876

Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer, eds. 1999. Shakespeare and Appropriation. Accents on Shakespeare. London. Routledge. ISBN 0415207266

Hugh Grady, ed. 2000. Shakespeare and Modernity. Accents on Shakespeare. London. Routledge. ISBN 0415212014

John J. Joughin, ed. 2000. Philosophical Shakespeares. Accents on Shakespeare. London. Routledge. ISBN 0415173892

Jennifer Richards and James Knowles, eds. 1999. Shakespeare's Late Plays: New Readings. Edinburgh. Edinburgh university Press. ISBN 0748611533

David Skeele, ed. 2000. Pericles: Critical Essays. Shakespeare Criticism. New York. Garland. ISBN 0815329113

Gillian Murray Kendall, ed. 1998. Shakespearean Power and Punishment: A Volume of Essays. London. Associated University Presses. ISBN 0838636799

A convenient way to get a range of critical opinions on a particular work is via the 'Casebook' and 'New Casebook' anthologies of essays (one anthology per play) published by Macmillan/Palgrave, the 'Critical Introduction' series from Harvester Wheatsheaf, and the 'Critical Reader' series from Longman. For the 10 plays considered in this subject introduction, the relevant books are:

John Drakakis, ed. 1994. Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra. New Casebooks. Basingstoke. Macmillan. ISBN 0333555325

Kiernan Ryan, ed. 1993. Shakespeare: King Lear. New Casebooks. Basingstoke. 1993. ISBN 0333555295

Graham Holderness, ed. 1992. Shakespeare's History Plays: Richard II to Henry V. New Casebooks. Basingstoke. Macmillan. ISBN 0333549023

Frank Kermode, ed. 1992. Shakespeare: King Lear. Revised edition. Casebook Series. Basingstoke. Macmillan. ISBN 0333533577

Neil Taylor and Bryan Loughrey, eds. 1990. Shakespeare's Early Tragedies: Richard III, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet. Casebook Series. Basingstoke. Macmillan. ISBN 0333424891

John Russell Brown, ed. 1991. Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra. Casebook Series. Basingstoke. Macmillan. ISBN 0333533607

Peter Jones, ed. 1977. Shakespeare: The Sonnets. Casebook Series. Basingstoke. Macmillan. ISBN 0333212371

Priscilla Martin, ed. 1976. Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida. Casebook Series. Basingstoke. Macmillan. ISBN 0333186427

C. K. Stead, ed. 1971. Shakespeare: Measure for Measure. Casebook Series. Basingstoke. Macmillan. ISBN 0333008790

Michael Quinn, ed. 1969. Shakespeare: Henry V. Casebook Series. London. Macmillan. ISBN 0876950489

Kenneth Muir, ed. 1969. Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale. Casebook Series. London. Macmillan. ISBN 0876950543

Kiernan Ryan, ed. 1999. Shakespeare: The Last Plays. Longman Critical Readers. Harlow. Addison Wesley Longman. ISBN 0582275741

Wilbur Sanders. 1987. The Winter's Tale. Harvester New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare. Brighton. Harvester. ISBN 071081075X

Jane Adamson. 1987. Troilus and Cressida. Harvester Critical Introductions to Shakespeare. Brighton. Harvester. ISBN 0710810334

Harriett Hawkins. 1987. Measure for Measure. Harvester New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare. Brighton. Harvester. ISBN 0710809972

Maurice Charney. 1990. Titus Andronicus. Harvester New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare. Brighton. Harvester Wheatsheaf. ISBN 017081304X

Alexander Leggatt. 1988. King Lear. Harvester New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare. Brighton. Harvester. ISBN 0170809190

Sheldon P. Zitner. 1989. All's Well That Ends Well. Harvester New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare. Brighton. Harvester Wheatsheaf. ISBN 0170810164

John Drakakis, ed. 1992. Shakespearean Tragedy. Longman Critical Readers. Harlow. Addison Wesley Longman. ISBN 0582051150

Gary Waller, ed. 1991. Shakespeare's Comedies. Longman Critical Readers. Harlow. Addison Wesley Longman. ISBN 0582059275

Graham Holderness, Bryan Loughrey and Andrew Murphy, eds. 1996. Shakespeare: The Roman Plays. Longman Critical Readers. Harlow. Addison Wesley Longman. ISBN 058223770X

Monographs

Terry Eagleton. 1990. William Shakespeare. Rereading Literature. Oxford. Basil Blackwell. ISBN 0631145540

Peter Hyland. 1996. An Introduction to Shakespeare: The Dramatist in His Context. Basingstoke. Macmillan. ISBN 0333598806

Graham Holderness. 2000. Shakespeare: The Histories. Basingstoke. Macmillan. ISBN 0333624971

Wolfgang Iser. 1993. Staging Politics: The Lasting Impact of Shakespeare's Histories. New York. Columbia University Press. ISBN 023107588X

William Ingram. 1992. The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan England. Ithaca. Cornell University Press. ISBN 0801426715

Roslyn Lander Knutson. 1991. The Repertory of Shakespeare's Company 1594-1613. Fayetteville. University of Arkansas Press. ISBN 1557281912

Gerald Eades Bentley. 1984. The Profession of Player in Shakespeare's Time, 1590-1642. Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691065969

Andrew Gurr. 1992. The Shakespearean Stage 1574 - 1642. 3rd edition. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521410053

Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa. 2000. Staging in Shakespeare's Theatres. Oxford Shakespeare Topics. Oxford. Oxford University Press. ISBN 019871159X

Thomas Vivian. 1987. The Moral Universe of Shakespeare's Problem Plays. Beckenham. Croom Helm. ISBN 0709943229

Barbara E. Bowen. 1993. Gender in the Theater of War: Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. Gender and Genre in Literature. New York. Garland. ISBN 0815300425

W. R. Elton. 2000. Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and the Inns of Court Revels. Aldershot. Ashgate. ISBN 1859282148

B. J. Sokol. 1995. Art and Illusion in The Winter's Tale. Manchester. Manchester University Press. ISBN 071903857X

Marilyn French. 1981. Shakespeare's Division of Experience. New York. Summit. ISBN 0224020137

David Skeele. 1998. Thwarting the Wayward Seas: A Critical and Theatrical History of Shakespeare's Pericles in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Newark. University of Delaware Press. ISBN 0874136466

Heather James. 1997. Shakespeare's Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire. Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521592232

Alexander Leggatt. 1988. Shakespeare's Political Drama: The History Plays and the Roman Plays. London. Routledge. ISBN 0415006554

Suggested Study Syllabus The following is a sample 20 week subject outline to give you an idea of how a syllabus could be constructed for this unit. You may adapt this outline in any appropriate way according to your own particular interests.

Week 1. Background reading on Shakespeare's career and the London theatre world of 1580-1610

Week 2. Section A Context Question Study: Titus Andronicus 5.1.40-87 (Aaron's bargaining for his son's life). See Chapter One below

Week 3. Section B Single Play Study: King Lear

Weeks 4. Section C Topic Study: 'Contrasting models of kingship: Richard 3 and Henry 5'

Weeks 5-6. Historical context: The theatrical milieu and staging

Week 7. Section A Context Question Study: Troilus and Cressida 4.6.18-64 (Cressida is kissed by the Greek soldiers)

Week 8. Section B Single Play Study: Measure for Measure. See Chapter Two below

Weeks 9-10. Section C Topic Study: 'Death and gender: Pericles and The Winter's Tale'

Weeks 11-12. Section C Topic Study: 'Women in Shakespeare's plays: King Lear, Richard 3, Antony and Cleopatra'. See Chapter Three below

Week 13. Section B Single Play Study: All's Well that Ends Well.

Week 14-15. Section C Topic Study: 'Sexual continence: Troilus and Cressida and Antony and Cleopatra'

Week 16-17. Section C Topic Study: 'Scenic form in Shakespeare's plays'. See Chapter Four below

Week 18. Section A Context Question Study: Pericles Sc.19.1-40 (Lysimachus comes to the brothel)

Week 19. Section C Topic Study: King John and Henry 8

Week 20. Revision. Continue practice on examination paper sections A, B, and C

Suggested Secondary Reading

Week 1

Gabriel Egan. 2003. "Theatre in London." ISBN 0199245223. Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide. Edited by Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin. Oxford. Oxford University Press. 22-33. ISBN 0199245223

Park Honan. 1998. Shakespeare: A Life. Oxford. Oxford University Press. Chapter 7 "To London--and the Amphitheatre Players" (pp. 95-119) ISBN 0192825275

Park Honan. 1998. Shakespeare: A Life. Oxford. Oxford University Press. Chapter 11 "A Servant of the Lord Chamberlain" (pp. 196-224) ISBN 0192825275

Jonathan Hope. 1999. "Shakespeare's 'Natiue English'." A Companion to Shakespeare. Edited by David Scott Kastan. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture. Oxford. Blackwell. 239-55. ISBN 0631218785

Jean E. Howard. 1999. "Shakespeare and Genre." A Companion to Shakespeare. Edited by David Scott Kastan. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture. Oxford. Blackwell. 297-310. ISBN 0631218785

Peter Hyland. 1996. An Introduction to Shakespeare: The Dramatist in His Context. Basingstoke. Macmillan. Chapter 1 "Life and Times" (pp. 7-54) ISBN 0333598806

Peter G. Platt. 1999. "Shakespeare and Rhetorical Culture." A Companion to Shakespeare. Edited by David Scott Kastan. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture. Oxford. Blackwell. 277-96.  ISBN 0631218785

George T. Wright. 1999. "Hearing Shakespeare's Dramatic Verse." A Companion to Shakespeare. Edited by David Scott Kastan. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture. Oxford. Blackwell. 256-76.  ISBN 0631218785

Week 2

See Chapter One below

Week 3

Jonathan Dollimore. 1992. "King Lear (C. 1605-06) and Essentialist Humanism." Shakespearean Tragedy. Edited by John Drakakis. Longman Critical Readers. Harlow. Addison Wesley Longman. 194-207. ISBN 0582051150

Terry Eagleton. 1993. "Language and Value in King Lear." Shakespeare: King Lear. Edited by Kiernan Ryan. New Casebooks. Basingstoke. Macmillan. 84-91. ISBN 0333555295

Jonathan Goldberg. 1993. "Perspectives: Dover Cliff and the Conditions of Representation." Shakespeare: King Lear. Edited by Kiernan Ryan. New Casebooks. Basingstoke. Macmillan. 145-57. ISBN 0333555295

Margot Heinemann. 1992. "Demystifying the Mystery of State: King Lear and the World Upside Down." Shakespeare Survey. 44. 75-81. ISSN 0080-9152

Coppelia Kahn. 1993. "The Absent Mother in King Lear." Shakespeare: King Lear. Edited by Kiernan Ryan. New Casebooks. Basingstoke. Macmillan. 92-113. ISBN 0333555295

Kathleen McLuskie. 1985. "The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure." Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. Edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Manchester. Manchester University Press. 88-108. ISBN 0719043522

Alessandro Serpieri. 1992. "The Breakdown of Medieval Hierarchy in King Lear." Shakespearean Tragedy. Edited by John Drakakis. Longman Critical Readers. Harlow. Addison Wesley Longman. 84-95. ISBN 0582051150

Week 4

Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. 1992. "History and Ideology: Henry V." Shakespeare's History Plays: Richard II to Henry V. Edited by Graham Holderness. New Casebooks. Basingstoke. Macmillan. 182-99. ISBN 0333549023

Stephen Greenblatt. 1985. "Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V." Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. Edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Manchester. Manchester University Press. 18-47. ISBN 0719043522

Graham Holderness. 2000. Shakespeare: The Histories. Basingstoke. Macmillan. Chapter 4 "Richard III" (pp. 79-108) ISBN 0333624971

Graham Holderness. 2000. Shakespeare: The Histories. Basingstoke. Macmillan. Chapter 6 "Henry V" (pp. 136-155) ISBN 0333624971

Wolfgang Iser. 1993. Staging Politics: The Lasting Impact of Shakespeare's Histories. New York. Columbia University Press. Chapter 3 "The End of the First Tetralogy: Richard III" (pp. 44-68) ISBN 023107588X

Wolfgang Iser. 1993. Staging Politics: The Lasting Impact of Shakespeare's Histories. New York. Columbia University Press. Chapter 6 "Henry V" (pp. 167-187) ISBN 023107588X

A. P. Rossiter. 1990. "Angel with Horns." Shakespeare's Early Tragedies: Richard III, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet. Edited by Neil Taylor and Bryan Loughrey. Casebook Series. Basingstoke. Macmillan. 56-75. ISBN 0333424891

Leonard Tennenhouse. 1985. "Strategies of State and Political Plays: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VIII." Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. Edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Manchester. Manchester University Press. 109-28. ISBN 0719043522

Weeks 5-6

Ian W. Archer. 1999. "Shakespeare's London." A Companion to Shakespeare. Edited by David Scott Kastan. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture. Oxford. Blackwell. 43-56. ISBN 0631218785

Gerald Eades Bentley. 1984. The Profession of Player in Shakespeare's Time, 1590-1642. Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton University Press. Chapter 9 "Conclusions" (pp. 234-243) ISBN 0691065969

Ann Jenalie Cook. 1997. "Audiences: Investigation, Interpretation, Invention." A New History of Early English Drama. Edited by John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. New York. Columbia University Press. 305-20. ISBN 0231102437

Richard Dutton. 1997. "Censorship." A New History of Early English Drama. Edited by John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. New York. Columbia University Press. 287-304. ISBN 0231102437

Andrew Gurr. 1992. The Shakespearean Stage 1574 - 1642. 3rd edition. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Chapter 6 "The Staging" (pp. 172-211)  ISBN 0521410053

Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa. 2000. Staging in Shakespeare's Theatres. Oxford Shakespeare Topics. Oxford. Oxford University Press. Chapter 2 "Shakespeare's Theatres and the Evidence of the Texts" (pp. 21-52) ISBN 019871159X

Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa. 2000. Staging in Shakespeare's Theatres. Oxford Shakespeare Topics. Oxford. Oxford University Press. Chapter 5 "The Three Openings in the frons" (pp. 96-113) ISBN 019871159X

William Ingram. 1992. The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan England. Ithaca. Cornell University Press. Chapter 4 "John Brayne, Grocer: Stepney, 1567" (pp. 92-113) ISBN 0801426715

William Ingram. 1992. The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan England. Ithaca. Cornell University Press. Chapter 5 "New Economies for the 1570s: The City of London, 1574-1576" (pp. 119-149) ISBN 0801426715

Norman Jones. 1999. "Shakespeare's England." A Companion to Shakespeare. Edited by David Scott Kastan. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture. Oxford. Blackwell. 25-42. ISBN 0631218785

Roslyn Lander Knutson. 1991. The Repertory of Shakespeare's Company 1594-1613. Fayetteville. University of Arkansas Press. Chapter 1 "The Repertory System and Commercial Tactics" (pp. 15-55) ISBN 1557281912

Jean MacIntyre and Garrett P. J. Epp. 1997. "'Cloathes Worth All the Rest': Costumes and Properties." A New History of Early English Drama. Edited by John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. New York. Columbia University Press. 269-85. ISBN 0231102437

Peter Thomson. 1997. "Rogues and Rhetoricians: Acting Styles in Early English Drama." A New History of Early English Drama. Edited by John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. New York. Columbia University Press. 321-35. ISBN 0231102437

Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry and William Ingram, eds. 2000. English Professional Theatre, 1530-1660. Theatre in Europe: A documentary history. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Chapter VII "The Popular Image of the Stage-Player" (pp. 157-190) ISBN 0521230128

Week 7. Suggested Secondary Reading

Jane Adamson. 1987. Troilus and Cressida. Harvester Critical Introductions to Shakespeare. Brighton. Harvester. Chapter 1 "'And that's the quarrel'" (pp. 1-27) ISBN 0710810334

Barbara E. Bowen. 1993. Gender in the Theater of War: Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. Gender and Genre in Literature. New York. Garland. Chapter 3 "Eye to Eye Opposed: Troilus and Cressida and the Illusion of Presence" (pp. 69-120) ISBN 0815300425

Barbara E. Bowen. 1993. Gender in the Theater of War: Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. Gender and Genre in Literature. New York. Garland. Chapter 5 "'Read My Labia: U.S. Out of Saudia Arabia': Gender in the Theater of War" (pp. 161-178) ISBN 0815300425

W. R. Elton. 2000. Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and the Inns of Court Revels. Aldershot. Ashgate. Chapter 1 "Burlesque, Mock-Epic and Folly" (pp. 21-45)  ISBN 1859282148

T. McAlindon. 1976. "Language, Style, Meaning." Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida. Edited by Priscilla Martin. Casebook Series. Basingstoke. Macmillan. 191-218. ISBN 0333186427

Kenneth Muir. 1976. "The Fusing of Themes." Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida. Edited by Priscilla Martin. Casebook Series. Basingstoke. Macmillan. 82-95. ISBN 0333186427

Thomas Vivian. 1987. The Moral Universe of Shakespeare's Problem Plays. Beckenham. Croom Helm. Chapter 3 "The Fractured Universe: Wholeness and Division in Troilus and Cressida" (pp. 81-139) 0709943229

Week 8. Suggested Secondary Reading

See Chapter Two below

Weeks 9-10. Suggested Secondary Reading

Janet Adelman. 2000. "Masculine Authority and the Maternal Body: The Return to Origins in Pericles." Pericles: Critical Essays. Edited by David Skeele. Shakespeare Criticism. New York. Garland. 184-90. ISBN 0815329113

Nevill Coghill. 1958. "Six Points of Stage-craft in The Winter's Tale." Shakespeare Survey. 11. 31-41. ISSN 0080-9152

Inga-Stina Ewbank. 1969. "The Triumph of Time." Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale. Edited by Kenneth Muir. Casebook Series. London. Macmillan. 98-115. ISBN 0876950543

Howard Felperin. 1999. "'Tongue-tied, Our Queen':? The Deconstruction of Presence in The Winter's Tale." Shakespeare: The Last Plays. Edited by Kiernan Ryan. Longman Critical Readers. Harlow. Addison Wesley Longman. 187-205. ISBN 0582275741

Howard Felperin. 2000. "The Great Miracle: Pericles." Pericles: Critical Essays. Edited by David Skeele. Shakespeare Criticism. New York. Garland. 114-32. ISBN 0815329113

Margaret Healy. 1999. "Pericles and the Pox." Shakespeare's Late Plays: New Readings. Edited by Jennifer Richards and James Knowles. Casebook Series. 13. Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. 92-107. ISBN 0748611533

M. M. Mahood. 1969. "The Winter's Tale." Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale. Edited by Kenneth Muir. Casebook Series. London. Macmillan. 214-31. ISBN 0876950543

Stephen Mullaney. 1999. "'All That Monarchs Do': The Obscured Stages of Authority in Pericles." Shakespeare: The Last Plays. Edited by Kiernan Ryan. Longman Critical Readers. London. Longman. 88-106. ISBN 0582275741

Carol Thomas Neely. 1999. "The Winter's Tale: Women and Issue." Shakespeare: The Last Plays. Edited by Kiernan Ryan. Longman Critical Readers. Harlow. Addison Wesley Longman. 169-86. ISBN 0582275741

Ruth Nevo. 1999. "The Perils of Pericles." Shakespeare: The Last Plays. Edited by Kiernan Ryan. Longman Critical Readers. London. Addison Wesley Longman. 61-85. ISBN 0582275741

Jennifer Richards. 1999. "Social Decorum in The Winter's Tale." Shakespeare's Late Plays: New Readings. Edited by Jennifer Richards and James Knowles. Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. 75-91. ISBN 0582275741

B. J. Sokol. 1995. Art and Illusion in The Winter's Tale. Manchester. Manchester University Press. Chapter 2 "Leontes' Tale: Shakespeare's Portrait of the Individual as an Emergent Being" (pp. 31-54) ISBN 071903857X

Weeks 11-12. Suggested Secondary Reading

See Chapter Three below

Week 13. Suggested Secondary Reading

David Haley. 1993. Shakespeare's Courtly Mirror: Reflexivity and Prudence in All's Well That Ends Well. Newark NJ. University of Delaware Press. ISBN 0874134439

Joseph G. Price. 1968. The Unfortunate Comedy: A Study of All's Well That Ends Well and Its Critics. Liverpool. Liverpool University Press. Chapter 8 "A Defence of All's Well that Ends Well" (pp. 133-172) ISBN 0853230005

Howard C. Cole. 1981. The All's Well Story from Boccaccio to Shakespeare. Urbana IL. University of Illinois Press. Chapter 7 "Helena and her Sisters: A Comparative Reading of All's Well the Ends Well" (pp.114-137) ISBN 0252008839

J. L. Styan. 1984. All's Well That Ends Well. Shakespeare in Performance. Manchester. Manchester University Press. Part 1 "Issues of performance" (pp. 1-33) ISBN 07190 09596

Sheldon P. Zitner. 1989. All's Well That Ends Well. Harvester New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare. Brighton. Harvester Wheatsheaf. ISBN 0710811227

Nicholas Marsh. 2002. Shakespeare: Three Problem Plays: All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida. Basingstoke. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0333973682

M. C. Bradbrook. 1950. "Virtue is the True Nobility: A Study of the Structure of All's Well That End Well." Review of English Studies. 1. 289-301.  ISSN 0034-6551

Susan Snyder. 1992. "Naming Names in All's Well That Ends Well." Shakespeare Quarterly. 43. 265-79. ISSN 0037-3222

Weeks 14-15. Suggested Secondary Reading

Janet Adelman. 1996. "Making Defect Perfection." Shakespeare: The Roman Plays. Edited by Graham Holderness, Bryan Loughrey and Andrew Murphy. Longman Critical Readers. Harlow. Addison Wesley Longman. 71-93. ISBN 058223770X

Catherine Belsey. 1996. "Cleopatra's Seduction." Alternative Shakespeares 2. Edited by Terence Hawkes. New Accents. London. Routledge. 38-62. ISBN 0415134862

Elizabeth Freund. 1985. "'Ariachne's Broken Woof': The Rhetoric of Citation in Troilus and Cressida." Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. London. Methuen. 19-36. ISBN 0415051134

Rene Girard. 1985. "The Politics of Desire in Troilus and Cressida." Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. London. Methuen. 188-209. ISBN 0415051134

Heather James. 1996. "The Politics of Display and the Anamorphic Subjects of Antony and Cleopatra." Shakespeare's Late Tragedies: A Collection of Critical Essays. Edited by Susanne L. Wofford. New Century Views. 13. Upper Saddle River NJ. Prentice Hall. 208-34. ISBN 013807819X

Heather James. 1997. Shakespeare's Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire. Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Chapter 3 "'Tricks we play on the dead': Making History in Troilus and Cressida" (pp. 85-118) ISBN 0521592232

Heather James. 1997. Shakespeare's Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire. Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Chapter 4 "To search a place in the story: Resisting the Aeneid in Antony and Cleopatra" (pp. 119-150) ISBN 0521592232

Jan Kott. 1976. "Amazing and Modern." Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida. Edited by Priscilla Martin. Casebook Series. Basingstoke. Macmillan. 143-50. ISBN 0333186427

Alexander Leggatt. 1988. Shakespeare's Political Drama: The History Plays and the Roman Plays. London. Routledge. Chapter 7 "Antony and Cleopatra" (pp. 161-188) ISBN 0415006554

Ania Loomba. 1996. "Theatre and the Space of the Other in Antony and Cleopatra." Shakespeare's Late Tragedies: A Collection of Critical Essays. Edited by Susanne L. Wofford. New Century Views. 13. Upper Saddle River NJ. Prentice Hall. 235-48. ISBN 013807819X

Jyotsyna Singh. 1994. "Renaissance Anti-theatricality, Anti-feminism, and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra." Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra. Edited by John Drakakis. New Casebooks. Basingstoke. Macmillan. 308-29. ISBN 0333555325

Leonard Tennenhouse. 1996. "Antony and Cleopatra." Shakespeare: The Roman Plays. Edited by Graham Holderness, Bryan Loughrey and Andrew Murphy. Longman Critical Readers. Harlow. Addison Wesley Longman. 66-70. ISBN 058223770X

Richard Wilson. 1996. "'Is This a Holiday':? Shakespeare's Roman Carnival." Shakespeare: The Roman Plays. Edited by Graham Holderness, Bryan Loughrey and Andrew Murphy. Longman Critical Readers. Harlow. Addison Wesley Longman. 18-31. ISBN 058223770X

Weeks 16-17. Suggested Secondary Reading

See Chapter 4 below

Week 18. Suggested Secondary Reading

T. G. Bishop. 1996. Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder. Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture. 9. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Chapter 4 "Pericles; or, the Past and Miracle" pp. 93-124 ISBN 0521550866

Howard Felperin. 2000. "The Great Miracle: Pericles." Pericles: Critical Essays. Edited by David Skeele. Shakespeare Criticism. New York. Garland. 114-32. ISBN 0815329113

Lisa Hopkins. 2000. "'The Shores of My Mortality': Pericles' Greece of the Mind." Pericles: Critical Essays. Edited by David Skeele. Shakespeare Criticism. New York. Garland. 228-37. ISBN 0815329113

G. Wilson Knight. 2000. "The Writing of Pericles." Pericles: Critical Essays. Edited by David Skeele. Shakespeare Criticism. New York. Garland. 78-113. ISBN 0815329113

Peter G. Platt. 1997. Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvelous. Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. Chapter 6 "Pericles and the Wonder of Unburdened Proof" (pp. 124-138) ISBN 0803237146

David Skeele. 1998. Thwarting the Wayward Seas: A Critical and Theatrical History of Shakespeare's Pericles in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Newark. University of Delaware Press. Chapter 5 "Pericles Deconstructed" (pp. 126-145)  ISBN 0874136466

Week 19. Suggested Secondary Reading 

Adrien Bonjour. 1988. "The Road to Swinstead: A Study of the Sense and Structure of King John." King John and Henry VIII: Critical Essays. Edited by Frances A. Shirley. Shakespearean Criticism. 6. New York. Garland. 105-25. ISBN 0824083849

James L. Calderwood. 1988. "Commodity and Honour in King John." King John and Henry VIII: Critical Essays. Edited by Frances A. Shirley. Shakespearean Criticism. 6. New York. Garland. 127-44. ISBN 0824083849

Frank Kermode. 1972. "What is Shakespeare's Henry VIII About?." Shakespeare's Histories. Edited by William A. Armstrong. Harmondsworth. Penguin. 256-69. ISBN 0140530185

Alexander Leggatt. 1988. Shakespeare's Political Drama: The History Plays and the Roman Plays. London. Routledge. Chapter 9 "Henry VIII" (pp. 214-237) ISBN 0415006554

Gordon McMullan. 1999. "'Thou Hast Made Me Now a Man': Reforming Mannerliness in Henry VIII." Shakespeare's Late Plays: New Readings. Edited by Jennifer Richard and James Knowles. Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. 40-56. ISBN 0748611533

Kristian Smidt. 1988. "From Uncomformities in Shakespeare's History Plays." King John and Henry VIII: Critical Essays. Edited by Frances A. Shirley. Shakespearean Criticism. 6. New York. Garland. 361-78. ISBN 0824083849

Leonard Tennenhouse. 1985. "Strategies of State and Political Plays: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VIII." Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. Edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Manchester. Manchester University Press. 109-28. ISBN 0719043522

Eugene Waith. 1988. "King John and the Drama of History." King John and Henry VIII: Critical Essays. Edited by Frances A. Shirley. Shakespearean Criticism. 6. New York. Garland. 31-50. ISBN 0824083849

Douglas C. Wixson. 1981. "'Calm Words Folded Up in Smoke': Propaganda and Spectator Response in Shakespeare's King John." Shakespeare Studies. 14. 111-27. ISSN 0582-9399

Week 20. Suggested Secondary Reading

None

Study Questions

Week 1. Study Questions

* What was Shakespeare's occupation in the 1590s? And from 1600 to 1610?

* What were the official titles of the social classes in Shakespeare's time? In particular make sure you know in outline how the guild system regulated trade in the cities and what it meant to be a 'citizen' (which is quite unlike the modern notion of citizenship).

* What different kinds of performance venues existed in Shakespeare's London?

* What are the main differences between performance in an open-air amphitheatre of Shakespeare's time and a modern indoor theatre? (Think in terms of lighting, actor/audience relationship, and scenery.)

* Why did playing companies need aristocratic patrons?

* Who were the enemies of the late sixteenth-century theatre industry and why?

* What kinds of people went to the theatres?

Week 2. Study Questions

See Chapter One below

Week 3. Study Questions

* "CORDELIA Why have my sisters husbands if they say / They love you all?" In what ways are father-daughter relationships in the play like or unlike husband-wife relationships? (Be sure to consider each pairing in turn.)

* How embarrassed should Edmund be in the opening scene when his bastardy is discussed?

* Are we to think of 100 knights as a reasonable size for Lear's retinue? (Bear in mind the limitations of the Elizabethan stage and consider his daughters' objections that the knights are riotous.)

* What reasons can you conjecture for Edgar's deception of his father on the imaginary Dover cliff? If he has a specific purpose, does he attain it?

* Compare the mad ravings of Edgar with those of Lear. The former require an actor to pretend to be a man pretending to be mad and the latter require an actor to pretend to be a man who is mad; are these different kinds of mimesis?

* Make a note of each act of aggression (verbal, mental, physical) in the play, what causes it and what consequences follow. Is this pattern simply a crescendo?

* Do any of the characters benefit from the philosophies they espouse in the play?

Week 4. Study Questions

* What can we make of Henry's most immediate reason for invading France, the tennis-balls insult? Are we to understand him to have already resolved to start the war?

* Although the chorus promises exciting action, Henry 5 begins with a long conversation between two priests. What other disjunctions can you find between the promises of each inter-act chorus and that which follows it?

* Richard 3 tells the audience his thoughts and plans in his soliloquies; do soliloquies in Henry 5 operate in the same way?

* Make a summary of Richard's arguments in his wooing of Lady Anne. Is he right to congratulate himself for his rhetorical power?

* In Richard 3, Clarence's dream of drowning prefigures the manner of his being murdered. Are the dreams of Richard and Richmond in the final act also to be taken as premonitions? (Consider the problem that the ghosts speak to Richard and Richmond in turn.)

* What personal attributes do Richard 3 and Henry 5 share that enable them to led others into war?

Weeks 5-6. Study Questions

* Take a scene from one of the plays you have studied so far and plan how it would be staged in an open-air amphitheatre such as the Globe.

* Take three soliloquies from the plays you have studied so far and for each one answer these questions:

i) Where should the actor stand to make this speech?

ii) Does anything said in the speech suggest that the character is talking to him/herself, or should we imagine the character addressing the theatre audience?

iii) Is there any suggestion in the speech that the character fears being overheard?

    Repeat this for three asides from the plays you have studied so far.

* Look for stage business (actions) which are implied by what characters say but are not stated in stage directions. (Examples might be implied kneeling, holding of hands, or threatening gestures.) In each case, consider how you would instruct actors to carry out this business. To what extent does the script limit a director's freedom to give such instructions?

* The world in which the action of a play takes place is usually larger than the dimensions of the stage. By what techniques does Shakespeare fit the fictional world into the theatre?

* Which scenes of which plays demand use of an 'above' playing space? What do you notice about these scenes and the relationship between the main stage and the 'above'?

Week 7. Study Questions

* Does the action of the play demonstrate the point made by Ulysses in his 'degree' speech in 1.3?

* How does Troilus respond to his grief at Cressida's betrayal? (You should be thinking about philosophic notions such as stoicism.)

* What happens to Thersites's satire when Patroclus dies?

* Why does Ulysses end up repeating Thersites's derogation of Patroclus?

* Consider the range of options for staging Cressida's behaviour with Diomed in 5.2. How might she be portrayed as a victim instead of a betrayer?

* What aspects of the play might cause difficulty in assigning it to one of the three genres of comedy, history, and tragedy?

Week 8. Study Questions

See Chapter Two below

Weeks 9-10. Study Questions

* What is the significance of the 16-year time spans of both plays?

* Is Leontes's sexual jealousy entirely unmotivated? (You may want to consider what a theatre director might do in the opening scene to create or remove causes for his suspicion.)

* Compare the brief moment of incestuous desire in The Winter's Tale (Leontes's "I'd beg your precious mistress, / Which he counts but a trifle" 5.1.222-3) with the extensive incest in Pericles. What difference does a father's knowledge of the sin make in the plays?

* What reasons can you imagine for the scene of recognition (anagnorisis), in which Perdita is found to be Leontes's daughter, being narrated rather than shown to the audience?

* What kinds of 'magic' accompany the coming-to-life of Thaisa's corpse in Pericles and the coming-to-life of Hermione's supposed statue in The Winter's Tale?

* Compare the role of disease, and fear of disease, in The Winter's Tale and Pericles.

Weeks 11-12. Study Questions

See Chapter Three below

Week 13. Study Questions

* Bertram is forced to marry a woman he does not love. Usually Shakespeare's plays invoke sympathy for those pressured into an unwanted marriage, such as Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew and Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. What is different about Bertram's case?

* The war in All's Well that Ends Well is entirely inconsequential, indeed some of the young French join one side and some the other, so they might find themselves fighting old friends. (Parolles's comment about Captain Spurio, 2.1.41, shows that this has happened before.) Are we encouraged to think it honourable that these young men fight merely "For breathing and exploit" (1.2.17)?

* How much importance should we attach to the fact that Bertram is a habitual liar? (Consider ideas about what constitutes a gentleman in this period.)

* The 'clown' Lavatch has a very small part in the play, and it has been entirely cut in more than one production. Are there thematic connections between what Lavatch says and the main plot?

* Look at the exchange between Helen and Parolles about virginity (1.1.108-61). Are the paradoxes in it (such as "there was never virgin got till virginity was first lost") related to the riddle of Bertram's letter? 

* To what degree should we think that Bertram has reformed by the end of the play? If he has scarcely changed, should we think him unworthy of Helen?

* "PAROLLES Who cannot be crushed with a plot?" (4.3.326). Shakespeare occasionally evokes audience sympathy for a character who has been humiliated, even if the treatment were deserved. Is this the case with Parolles?

Weeks 14-15. Study Questions

* The 'armed' prologue to Troilus and Cressida promises a play of war, but the opening scene shows Troilus refusing to fight. Is love an emasculating force in the play?

* THERSITES All the argument is a whore and a cuckold.
   (Troilus and Cressida 2.3.71)

   Who is the whore and who the cuckold? Does the play invite us to agree with Thersites?

*  THERSITES (To Patroclus) Thou art thought to be Achilles' male varlet
    . . . . his masculine whore.
    (Troilus and Cressida 5.1.14-7)

    What views of homosexual love does the play offer? Is it more debilitating to a warrior's prowess than heterosexual love?

* How is the difference between Rome and Egypt evoked in Antony and Cleopatra?

* The verb 'to die' could mean 'to experience a sexual orgasm' in Shakespeare's time. Does Antony and Cleopatra encourage us to consider the deaths of Charmian and Cleopatra as sexual consummation? You might want to consider the solitariness of the play's several suicides

* The hauling of Antony's body to the top of Cleopatra's monument is often an awkward moment in the theatre. Would it be inappropriate for the audience to laugh?

Weeks 16-17. Study Questions

See Chapter Four below

Week 18. Study Questions

* How does the verse of Gower's choruses differ from the Shakespearian norm?

* How does the theme of incest in the opening scene relate to the tree imagery throughout the play?

* Is Marina's abduction by pirates a 'creaky' device, or in keeping with the impossibilities of the rest of the play? (You may want to consider this in relation to the wider conventions of Romance literature.)

* Does Lysimachus's pre-existing familiarity with the brothel suggest that the governor is, until meeting Marina, a dishonourable man?

* How is the use of dumbshow in this play like or unlike that in other Shakespeare plays? (You might usefully think about the dumbshow in the play-within-the-play in Hamlet or compare it to the elaborate stage direction describing silent rituals in The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry 8.)

* Are the many geographical locations in which the action takes place distinctly different one from another? If not, what reasons might the dramatists have for Pericles's extended touring of the Mediterranean?

Week 19. Study Questions

* How is Philip Faulconbridge's biological legitimacy related to King John's monarchical legitimacy?

* Is King John's subornation of Hubert to the murder of Arthur like other scenes of its kind in Shakespeare? (You might consider the role of Tyrrell in Richard 3.)

* To what extent are King John and Henry 8 concerned with the legitimacy of their power? (In both plays there is a break from the Church of Rome; how is this related to a king's authority?)

* Both plays have scenes in which the Roman church is described as corrupt. To what extent are the audience encouraged to agree that this is so?

* Is disobedience of monarchical authority shown to be always wrong in these plays?

* To what extent do the history plays you have studied (of which King John is the earliest, historically, and Henry 8 the latest) substantiate the Tudor myth?

* The baby who becomes Elizabeth 1 is brought on at the end of Henry 8, providing a focus for hopes for the future. Does the ending of King John serve a similar function?

Week 20. Study Questions

* To what extent do the plays you studied fall into 'periods' in Shakespeare's life?

* What trends, if any, can you discern in the formal characteristics of Shakespeare's writing across his career?

* Would it be fair to say that Shakespeare's women almost always exceed the social roles allotted to them?

* After 1660 women were allowed to act on the English stage. What might be lost in not having boys play female roles?

* Is it reasonable to infer from your readings of a number of plays the dramatist's opinion on, say, loyalty to masters or political rebellion?

* Does your reading of critics on Shakespeare offer hope that we may recover the original meanings of the works, or is each age merely using the works to explore its own concerns?

* Does your study of the plays suggest reasons why the less-studied, less-frequently performed works--Titus Andronicus, King John, Troilus and Cressida, and Pericles--are relatively neglected?

Chapter One. Section A Context Question Study: Titus Andronicus 5.1.40-87 (Aaron's bargaining for his son's life)

Introduction The compulsory Section A question will consist of one extract from each of six of the ten Shakespeare plays on the syllabus. You will be asked to discuss one of the extracts "in the contexts of the play from which it is drawn and of Shakespeare's other writing, and commenting on language, dramatic interaction, and themes". It should be clear that this part of the paper differs from the kind of 'practical criticism' exercise with which you may already be familiar. You will be applying the skills of close textual analysis, but in addition you are expected to place these passages in various related contexts. This means that your critical reading of 'the words on the page' should, ideally, be informed by some of the following contexts:

* knowledge of the dramatist's professional output

* knowledge of dramatic forms and terminology (such as soliloquy, chorus, blank verse, couplet, stichomythia, and feminine endings)

* conventions governing drama of the period (such as cross-dressing) and genres (such as the formal differences between comedy and tragedy)

* knowledge of the social and political history of the period

In addition, your critical reading may raise ideological and theoretical questions. These might be consciously and determinedly deployed, because of your own theoretical stance, or specific critical approaches might seem to be invited by the nature of the extract you are considering.

A significant percentage of the marks available can be awarded to your reading of the free-standing text, but an ability to bring in these wider contexts in relevant ways is equally important. Essentially we will be testing your ability to judge how far any passage is representative of Shakespeare's style and the concerns that recur in many of his works. To structure your responses you might choose to start with the words on the page and build out to these wider contexts. But there are no hard and fast rules about structuring, except that, however your answer is organized, the line of argument must be clear and relevant to the question. Consider the following extract:

An extract in Section A of the examination will typically be between 30 and 50 lines long, as is the above quotation, and there will be six extracts to choose from; you will answer on one of them. Unlike the above quotation, the extracts will not name the play from which they are taken nor will they name the act, scene, and line numbers which indicate where in the play the extract occurs. The first part of your task in a context question is to identify the play and roughly where in the play the passage occurs; you do not need to identify the act and scene numbers of the extract--although this might be useful, especially if you wish to discuss how the dramatist uses scene-breaks and act-intervals--but you must at least say where it occurs in the action of the play. If you cannot identify the play or the approximate location in the play for a particular extract, you should not attempt an answer on it.

Aaron is one of the few black characters in Shakespeare's works (Othello being the most well-known), and his skin colour is made much of in the play. Here Lucius ironically calls him a 'pearl' (line 4)--ironic because his colour is precisely the opposite of a pearl's whiteness--and draws a parallel between his 'fiendlike face' (line 6) and his evil deeds. The association of whiteness with good and blackness with evil was common in Shakespeare's culture and persists in the varied meanings of the modern word 'fair' (light-skinned, just, equitable, reasonable, moderate). Lucius's language here is of a piece with that of Bassianus ("swart Cimmerian", 2.3.72) and Marcus ("a black ill-favoured fly, / Like to the Empress' Moor", 3.2.65-6) earlier in the play, and together these suggest that the play's Romans are bigots who judge by skin colour. Because the baby's mother is Tamora, Aaron claims that it is "of royal blood" (line 10) but for Marcus this nobility is overwhelmed by the baseness (lowliness) of its father, for whom Tamora could not have had love but only "burning lust" (line 4). We have seen Aaron committing acts of extreme and pitiless violence, including killing the nurse who delivered the baby to ensure her silence, but it is possible that in the scenes with the child Aaron receives some sympathy from an audience. In the above passage, it is Marcus who appears unnatural in bargaining with the baby's life for information and using the threat of immediate, and ignoble, execution. Royal executions in this play are by beheading and hanging is the kind of death that a low-class criminal might expect to receive. Yet once Aaron has, in the lines immediately following the extract, revealed the full extent of his evildoing--much worse than that shown in the play--Lucius postpones the execution because hanging is insufficient punishment, and not until the final moments of the play do we learn that he is to die of hunger and exposure.

Aaron is concerned to protect his child and strikes a bargain to which Lucius must swear. Lucius comments that since Aaron does not believe in the gods a religious oath should not impress him. The historical period of the play is ancient Rome before the Christian era, so although Aaron is a moor he could not be a Muslim since that religion began with the teachings of the prophet Muhammad in the seventh century after Christ's birth. Moors in Shakespeare's plays are usually Muslims--Othello must have converted to Christianity before being allowed service the Venetian state--and Aaron has many of the characteristics (sexual appetite, appeal for non-moorish women, delight in pointless evil) of the Moorish/Muslim dramatic stereotype of the period. Aaron's catalogue of evils has parallels in the claims of the moor Ithamore in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, and indeed the names are linked in the bible: "Ithamar the son of Aaron the priest" (Numbers 4:28). Yet Lucius is sure that Aaron is not at all religious, which is not the same as being of a different sect ultimately derived from Judaism (as Christians and Muslims are). It is surprising, then, that Aaron anachronistically speaks of Lucius's religion as "popish tricks and ceremonies" (line 38). This comment would be appropriate for a Protestant of the sixteenth century, and arguably the force of this line is to liken Protestantism to evil non-belief and foreignness. A major strand of the schism which separated the Protestant movements of sixteenth-century Europe from the church of Rome was the worship of representations of divine figures, and Aaron's "An idiot holds his bauble for a god" (line 41) is squarely within the Protestant tradition of rejecting 'graven' (that is, carved) images. Yet Aaron's comment has a wider application and sounds rather like the things Christopher Marlowe was accused of saying about Christian religion (see Stephen Greenblatt. 1985. "Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V." Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. Edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Manchester. Manchester University Press. 18-47.). It is also echoed in Karl Marx's comment on fetishism: the savage carves an idol of his god and then immediately falls to his knees to worship the object he has just made (see Karl Marx. 1954. Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. Ed. by Frederick Engels. Vol. 1. 3 vols. London. Lawrence and Wishart. pp. 70-80). Agreeing to Aaron's bargain, Lucius swears by a singular "god" (line 48) which, like the other religious material in the extract, makes sense only in the Christian era that began well after the events depicted. That Aaron does not know what god or gods Lucius holds in reverence is quite compatible with his being a Moor unfamiliar with the details of classical Roman religion which, although it had an entire pantheon of gods, permitted individuals to favour one god in particular. Lucius does not respond by naming his god, however, and his "my god" sounds monotheistic even though technically it could, perhaps, be interpreted simply as an odd reluctance to name his particular choice from the pantheon.

We cannot be sure what Shakespeare's religious beliefs were, but a number of his plays seem concerned with the details of Christian faith such as the role of providence guiding human affairs and the nature of the afterlife. If a character has an identifiable religious conviction (say, a Calvinist belief in predestination), try to determine whether the ensuing events confirm or challenge the truth of that conviction.

The entire extract is in iambic pentameter verse, as indeed is the entire play except for a few lines spoken by, and to, the Clown. The passage is typical of early Shakespeare in that the ends of sentences mostly come at the ends of lines, the only exceptions being the exclamations and exhortations of Lucius in lines 6 and 7 which the modernizing editor has treated as short sentences wholly contained within a line. As Shakespeare's writing changed over his career, he increasingly came to start and end sentences in the middle of a verse line, but you should be careful not to confuse that technique with 'enjambment', the practice of carrying over a sentence from one line to the next. The extract has enjambment throughout, but the particular form is noteworthy: most of the sentences comprise exactly two lines of verse, for example lines 1 and 2, 3 and 4, 5 and 6, 8 and 9, 12 and 13, 15 and 16, 17 and 18, 19 and 20, and 21 and 22. In the middle of the extract this pattern abruptly ends with the Aaron's summarizing list of the kinds of crimes he has committed (lines 23-30). Lucius and Aaron then exchange single lines (with just one two-line sentence from Lucius) until Aaron launches on another long sentence of 13 lines (lines 35-47) explaining his faith in the power of Lucius's religion, which he does not share, to make an oath effective. The extract, then, shows the cut and thrust of dialogue punctuated by two longer speeches by Aaron. It is typical in an execution scene for the condemned man to be allowed a speech and commonly this is used to accept the justice of his fate and the righteousness of the authority that condemned him. The worst kinds of villain in Renaissance drama have a habit of resisting this tradition and speaking, as Aaron does here, of their regrets about not being able to perpetrate more crimes and exalting in the ones they have achieved. Barabbas in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta dies with just such a speech of defiance, although his 'execution' is actually his own murderous device turned against himself. Aaron in the above extract remains manipulative despite being, so he believes, about to die and his bargaining position is based on knowledge of the reasons for the catastrophes that have befallen the Andronici. (If one re-reads this play attending entirely to the perspective of Titus and his relatives, it becomes apparent how little Shakespeare allows them to know of the machinations of Tamora and those close to her; the Andronici appear more cursed by fate than schemed against by people.) Aaron and Lucius are concerned with two kinds of posterity: the story of what happened to the Andronici which Lucius longs to hear and the continuation of Aaron's lineage via the black child. To ensure that latter, Aaron gives up the former but he needs to secure an oath from Lucius that the deal will be honoured. It is an index of Aaron's intellect and cunning--specifically his ability to imagine what is in another's mind--that he can predict the hold of a religious oath over Lucius even while believing this to be a delusion.

Reread the list of contexts, some of which the passage should have been placed in by the above comments. Which were not explored? Using the above comments as a model, consider how you would go about placing the extract in those contexts. 

Write a response to one of the passages from Section A of the examination paper at the end of this subject guide. Evaluate your essay on the basis of the criteria and guidelines given at the beginning of this chapter.

Chapter Two. Section B Single Play Study: Measure for Measure

Selected Reading

Jacqueline Rose. 1985. "Sexuality in the Reading of Shakespeare: Hamlet and Measure for Measure." Alternative Shakespeares. Edited by John Drakakis. London. Routledge. 95-115. ISBN 0415287235

Kiernan Ryan. 2001. "Measure for Measure: Marxism Before Marx." Marxist Shakespeares. Edited by Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow. Accents on Shakespeare. London. Routledge. 227-44. ISBN 0415202337

Terry Eagleton. 1990. William Shakespeare. Rereading Literature. Oxford. Basil Blackwell. Chapter 3 "Law: The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida" (pp. 35-63) ISBN 0631145540

Thomas Vivian. 1987. The Moral Universe of Shakespeare's Problem Plays. Beckenham. Croom Helm. Chapter 5 "Order and Authority in Measure for Measure" (pp. 173-209) ISBN 0709943229

David McCandless. 1998. "'I'll Pray to Increase Your Bondage': Power and Punishment in Measure for Measure." Shakespearean Power and Punishment. Edited by Gillian Murray Kendall. London. Associated University Press. 89-112. ISBN 0838636799

Arthur L. Little Jr. 1998. "Absolute Bodies, Absolute Laws: Staging Punishment in Measure for Measure." Shakespearean Power and Punishment. Edited by Gillian Murray Kendall. London. Associated University Press. 113-29. ISBN 0838636799

Robert N. Watson. 1998. "The State of Life and the Power of Death: Measure for Measure." Shakespearean Power and Punishment. Edited by Gillian Murray Kendall. London. Associated University Press. 130-56. ISBN 0838636799

Jonathan Dollimore. 1985. "Transgression and Surveillance in Measure for Measure." Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. Edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Manchester. Manchester University Press. 72-87. ISBN 0719043522

Kathleen McLuskie. 1985. "The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure." Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. Edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Manchester. Manchester University Press. 88-108. ISBN 0719043522

Bernice W. Kliman. 1982. "Isabella in Measure for Measure." Shakespeare Studies. 15. 137-48. ISSN 0582-9399

Measure for Measure is sometimes referred to as one of Shakespeare's 'problem' plays. Some of the problems that critics have perceived in it are these:

* The character of the Duke is mysterious. We are not told if he left Vienna for a good reason. His return to spy on the citizens in the likeness of a holy man seems excessively intrusive. Some of his actions--such as hearing the confession of Mariana--are reprehensible to modern audiences.

* Angelo's conversion to goodness is unconvincing: he seems coerced (especially regarding his marriage to Mariana) rather than reformed.

* The play's main source of comedy, Lucio, is forced to marry a prostitute.

* The Duke unexpectedly proposes to the play's heroine, Isabella, in the play's closing moment. The script contains no lines for Isabella's answer, so we are left with no clue how Shakespeare wanted her to respond.

In short, the play concludes with marriage but the reader/spectator is not left with a comfortable sense of dramatic closure at the end: instead, there is a distinctly uneasy sense that these forced partnerships will not be happy. The problem seems one of genre, the play being technically a comedy but lacking the pleasurable sense of resolution we expect in comedy. The differences between comedies and tragedies can be many and varied, but the simplest distinction was the one identified by the poet George Gordon Byron:

All tragedies are finished by a death,
All comedies are ended by a marriage
(Byron Don Juan, 3:65-66)

Typically a Shakespearian comedy ends with marriage and the reconcilement of people who had previously been in conflict, as when the young soldiers are reconciled to Leonato, governor of Messina, and his brother Antonio in Much Ado About Nothing, and at the same time Beatrice marries Benedick and Hero marries Claudio. Often an 'outsider' figure also has to be cast out of the community, as with Shylock at the end of The Merchant of Venice or Don John at the end of Much Ado About Nothing, but the tone at the close of Shakespeare's comedies is nonetheless usually integrative: the community is 'healed' and its borders re-established by determination of who is within and who without. This sense of 'healing' is not entirely present, or if present then not entirely convincing, at the end of Measure for Measure. It is as though Shakespeare took the formal requirements of the genre 'comedy' and decided to see if he could conform to them yet produce something more troubling and complex than a romantic comedy.

The play's second scene begins with a discussion of a looming international crisis:

Enter Lucio, and two other Gentlemen
LUCIO If the Duke with the other dukes come not to
composition with the King of Hungary, why then, all
the dukes fall upon the King.
FIRST GENTLEMAN Heaven grant us its peace, but not the
King of Hungary's!
SECOND GENTLEMAN Amen.
LUCIO Thou concludest like the sanctimonious pirate, that
went to sea with the Ten Commandments, but scraped
one out of the table.
SECOND GENTLEMAN `Thou shalt not steal'?
LUCIO Ay, that he razed.
FIRST GENTLEMAN Why, 'twas a commandment to command
the captain and all the rest from their functions:
they put forth to steal.
(Measure for Measure 1.2.1-14)

The detail of the conflict between Austria and Hungary is not important and it is hardly mentioned again in the play, but the way these men relate it to scripture is significant. The First Gentleman appears to think that war is preferable to reaching a peaceful settlement with Hungary, but Lucio claims it is hypocrisy to acknowledge the Christian injunction to find peace yet advocate war. Lucio thinks of this as being like editing one's own copy of the Ten Commandments, removing a commandment one does not like rather than treating the text as an integrated unit. The First Gentlemen admits that where religious text runs counter to one's entire purpose--as in the imagined example of a pirate erasing 'Thou shalt not steal' from the commandments--then the given text must be altered to suit the circumstances. Thus this scene raises the question of adherence to biblical injunctions that is explored throughout the play, and indeed in its title. The commandments are part of the Old Testament and thus are Old Law to be understood as later modified by the Christian New Testament which softened some of the Old Law's harshness. In particular, Christ reversed the injunction to revenge:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:
But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. (King James Bible, Matthew  5:38-39)

And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloak forbid not to take thy coat also. (King James Bible, Luke 6:29)

He giveth his cheek to him that smiteth him: he is filled full with reproach. (King James Bible, Lamentations of Jeremiah 3:30)

In the final scene of the play, the Duke pretends that Angelo must die to pay for the death of Claudio, and he invokes the Old Law to justify this:

The very mercy of the law cries out
Most audible, even from his proper tongue,
`An Angelo for Claudio, death for death'.
Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure;
Like doth quit like, and measure still for measure.
(Measure for Measure 5.1.404-8)

Of course, the audience knows that Claudio has not died, but even if he had the Duke's interpretation of Biblical notions of justice is not right. Even in the Old Law (which he should not be using, since Christ overturned it), "An eye for an eye" was not supposed to indicate the minimum retributive penalty a wrongdoer must suffer (which would be 'no less than an eye') but the maximum (it must be 'no more than an eye'); this was a rule to limit retribution not promote it. In using the expression "measure for measure", the Duke becomes like Lucio's "sanctimonious pirate" who rewrites scripture for his own purpose, and where the pirate wants to make it more lenient, the Duke wants to make it more harsh.

In the event, Angelo is not killed to pay for Claudio's death, but transactions of the kind "X for Y" are a recurrent theme in the play. As Kiernan Ryan observes in the essay cited at the beginning of this chapter, the play's sequence of substitutions is long: Angelo for the Duke as ruler, Escalus for Angelo in the 'trial' of Elbow, Mariana for Isabella in bed with Angelo, Mariana's virginity for Claudio's head, Barnadine's head for Claudio's head, Ragozine's head for Barnadine's head, and Pompey's old trade of prostitution for his new one of executioner. For Ryan this sequence is noticeable for it crossing of class boundaries (every social class of person is involved), so it is a universal principle in Vienna that is matched by symmetries in the play's language such as closing chiasmus of "What's mine is yours, and what is yours is mine". Ryan concludes that this principle of substitution cuts across the social classes in a politically radical way, suggesting that difference is cut across by likeness and "the grounds of incongruity dissolve".

Consider Ryan's sequence of substitutions. Although there are examples from different social classes, no example shows in itself a substitution across different classes. Does this invalidate Ryan's claim? Look for other examples of verbal symmetry in the play; how are they like or unlike the chiasmus of "What's mine is yours, and what is yours is mine"?

One of the play's (indeed the Shakespeare canon's) most striking omissions occurs at the end of Measure for Measure when the Duke proposes to Isabella and the script gives her no lines with which to answer him. If Isabella wanted to be a nun she presumably would not welcome the idea of being a wife, and those involved in a performance often try to indicate Isabella's response to the Duke's surprising offer by silent action. In some productions she has smiled at the Duke as if to show that this is what she hoped for all along, but dared not show it, and in others she has appeared horrified but too frightened by the Duke's power to resist. In the latter case, the Duke has achieved by manipulation the sexual access to Isabella that Angelo could not, and one is left with the impression that rather than being moral opposites, the Duke is simply the more expert manipulator. But what if Isabella did not want to be a nun? Even without consulting historical sources outside the canon we can tell that Shakespeare expected his audience to accept the idea that women might be forced into a nunnery by circumstance, for in the opening scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream Hermia is told that if she rebels against her father Egeus by refusing to marry Demetrius, she must either die or for the rest of her life "endure the livery of a nun" (1.1.70). Likewise in his ranting against Ophelia, Hamlet repeatedly exhorts her to get "to a nunnery" (3.1.123, 132, 142) as though this were a punishment for her sins. In her essay cited at the beginning of this chapter, Bernice Kliman makes an unusual but persuasive case for thinking that Isabella does not want to be a nun but is forced into the nunnery because her parents have died.

One of the most influential readings of the play in recent years has been that offered by Jonathan Dollimore (cited at the beginning of this chapter) which builds on the ideas about institutions of authority advanced by French philosopher Michel Foucault. Dollimore notes that critics have tended to believe the claim made by the authority figures in the play that unrestrained sexuality threatens the state, and so they tend to think that Angelo is an excessive man who is nonetheless doing what he does for essentially the right reasons. This claim is one made by the powerful to justify authoritarian reaction to all sorts of threats that it perceives might be emerging from amongst the oppressed, and the real subject of the play (from which all the talk of sexual corruption is just a distraction) is the political corruption amongst the rulers; sexual deviants become scapegoats for wider problems. Fears that society was disintegrating, and that 'masterless' deviants were to blame, were genuine in Shakespeare's time--but, of course, wrong--yet this was not the only reason for increasing persecution of deviants. There was also the desire by the authorities to control the criminal underworld, with which deviance is associated, for their own practical ends. The war, plague, trials and executions in the Vienna of the play are much like what was feared in London around the time the play was first performed. In 2.1, Escalus asks whether are any officers more competent that Elbow because those running the 'state' have anxieties about their abilities to operate surveillance on its people, and the Duke's use of a religious disguise engages with the contemporary question of whether religion is a means of ideological control, operating on the inner man where other forms of state control can only operate on the outer. Barnadine's unrepentant recalcitrance shows the state failing to reform the inner man, while Claudio's spiritual renunciation shows its success. The demand made by rulers for personal integrity in the play is a means of exerting authority, and what annoys the Duke most is the subversive slandering that he is powerless to silence:

DUKE No might nor greatness in mortality
Can censure scape; back-wounding calumny
The whitest virtue strikes. What king so strong
Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue?
(Measure for Measure 3.1.444-7)

The resolution of the play, according to Dollimore, is not the ending of authoritarianism, but rather the victory of omniscient rule achieved through the Duke's disguise and plotting. The transgressors in the play are "exploited to legitimate an exercise in authoritarian repression". The brothels, which publicly manifest personal desire, were in fact in London very strictly controlled through bribery and were often owned by the same people who operated theatre. Transgression is not a 'good' in the play--Angelo is as transgressive as any denizen of brothels--but it is the occasion for revealing strategies of power. In itself, transgression threatens to reproduce exploitation as it reveals it and noticeably the prostitutes, who are so important to the themes of the play, are absent from it and thus voiceless.

Dollimore's reading is explicitly political. What aspects of the play cannot be accounted for by politics? Consider, for example, the meetings of Isabella and Claudio in prison, and especially his pleading for her to give up her virginity. Is the emotional force of these encounters less important than the matters of governance attended to in Dollimore's reading? Is it in fact outside of the reach of Dollimore's approach?

Study Questions

* Isabella is often performed as a novice nun (as Lucio calls her, 1.4.19) although her questions to the Francesca suggests she is only about to enter the convent. Is it clear from Isabella's speech in this scene, and indeed elsewhere in the play, that she wants to be a nun? 

* The Duke's disguise as a friar allows him to hear the confessions of Angelo (3.1.168-9) and Mariana (5.1.526), although since he is merely pretending he has no power to absolve sin. Should we be concerned that his meddling places the souls of his subjects in danger?

* Consider the 'trial' of Pompey in 2.1. Is it merely a mockery of the larger trials of the play (of Claudio, and later of Angelo)? Are the differences merely ones of degree (the crimes and punishments being less severe) or are there fundamental differences in the quality of the justice?

* Consider the disguised Duke's responses to Lucio's claims about him, such as "his use was to put a ducat in her clack-dish" (3.1.390). What evidence, apart from Lucio's opinion, can you find for the Duke's behaviour before he left Angelo in charge?

* Claudio's speech on death beginning "To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot" (3.1.118-32) focusses on the physical and omits the spiritual. What kinds of beliefs about the afterlife are evident in the play?

* The 'bed-trick' by which Angelo consummates his marriage to Mariana while thinking he is having sex with Isabella is entirely implausible. Should we be concerned with the play's lack of realism, or is it appropriate that the messy problems of reality are solved by a pseudo-magical event?

* Lucio says that by his flight the Duke "usurp[s] the beggary he was never born to" (3.1.359). What can we tell about the economic situation in Vienna, and what might it tell us about people's motives? (Consider, for example, the representation of prostitution in the play; does it seem a last resort of desperate women?)

Chapter Three. Section C Topic Study: 'Women in Shakespeare's plays: King Lear, Richard 3, Antony and Cleopatra'

Selected Reading:

Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin. 1997. Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories. Feminist Readings of Shakespeare. London. Routledge. ISBN 041504748X

Juliet Dusinberre. 1975. Shakespeare and the Nature of Women. New York. Barnes and Noble. ISBN 0333641388

Lisa Jardine. 1983. Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare. Hemel Hempstead. Harvester Wheatsheaf. ISBN 0710804369

Dympna Callaghan, ed. 2000. Shakespeare Without Women. Accents on Shakespeare. London. Routledge. ISBN 0415202310

Valerie Wayne, ed. 1991. The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Hemel Hempstead. Harvester Wheatsheaf. ISBN 0745008275

Dympna Callaghan, Lorraine Helms and Jyotsna Singh, eds. 1994. The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics. Oxford. Blackwell. ISBN 0631177973

Kathleen McLuskie. 1985. "The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure." Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. Edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Manchester. Manchester University Press. 88-108. ISBN 0719043522

Kate Chedgzoy, ed. 2001. Shakespeare, Feminism, and Gender. New Casebooks. Basingstoke. Palgrave. ISBN 0333716515

Kate Chedgzoy. 1995. Shakespeare's Queer Children: Sexual Politics and Contemporary Culture. Manchester. Manchester University Press. ISBN 0179046572

There are about 1400 speaking men in all Shakespeare's plays, and only about 150 women, which is such a difference from real life that we have to consider its causes. Shakespeare's plays are almost entirely concerned with powerful people, monarchs, emperors, and aristocrats, and they feature ordinary working people only in minor roles. One might argue that things that happen in the plays could only happen to 'superior' people, so that the social class of Shakespeare's characters was determined by the kinds of stories he wanted to tell, or as George Bernard Shaw put it, "Hamlet's experiences simply could not have happened to a plumber. A poor man is useful on the stage only as a blind man is: to excite sympathy" (Preface to The Dark Lady of the Sonnets). If this is true, the relative absence of women in Shakespeare's plays can be explained as a corollary of it, since until recently women were almost entirely absent from the institutions and the social circles that rule societies. In other words, if Shakespeare wanted to write about the powerful he had to write mostly about men. There is a at least one other explanation for the absence of women in Shakespeare's plays, and that is that the conventions of performance limited the number of female roles in any one play. Although women were not quite forbidden to act on the stage, in Shakespeare's time female roles were played by teenage boys, each of whom was apprenticed to one of the adult actors in the company and would continue playing women until his voice broke at around 18 or 19 years of age. Most companies of actors had only between 1 and 3 of these boys actors so they could not perform plays with many women's parts. That this explanation alone is sufficient to account for the absence of women in many plays is indicated by the plays performed by specialized companies consisting only of boy actors: they do indeed have many female characters.

Many of Shakespeare's plays feature fathers but not mothers, and a notable example is King Lear. No explanation is offered in the play for the absence of Lear's wife, but it serves to simplify the familial relationship that the play dramatizes: male parent versus female offspring. The relation of parent to child is, here as elsewhere, compared to the relationship of husband to wife, especially at the moment when a daughter breaks from a parent to form a new relationship with a husband. Shakespeare had dramatized this in his previous play Othello as Brabantio asks his daughter to name, of all the people present in the Senate, the one she thinks she most owes her duty to. Desdemona replies

DESDEMONA My noble father,
I do perceive here a divided duty.
To you I am bound for life and education.
My life and education both do learn me
How to respect you. You are the lord of duty,
I am hitherto your daughter. But here's my husband,
And so much duty as my mother showed
To you, preferring you before her father,
So much I challenge that I may profess
Due to the Moor my lord.
(Othello 1.3.179-88)

Part of the persuasive power of this speech (its rhetoric) is Desdemona's turning the question back upon the questioner: as Brabantio necessarily took his wife from her father, so Othello has taken Desdemona from Brabantio. The cyclical pattern of marriage and parenthood visits upon the father the same treatment he visited upon his father-in-law. At the start of King Lear Goneril and Regan are married but Cordelia is not, so Lear has gone through the process of having his child taken away by another man twice. This fact might well condition our view of Lear's response to the impending betrothal of Cordelia, who for her part observes a contradiction in her sisters' proclamations of absolute love for their father:

CORDELIA Good my lord,
You have begot me, bred me, loved me.
I return those duties back as are right fit -
Obey you, love you, and most honour you.
Why have my sisters husbands if they say
They love you all? Haply when I shall wed
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty.
Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters.
(King Lear 1.1.95-103)

Cordelia begins this speech like Desdemona speaking to Brabantio, asserting a reasonable limit to her duty, but her phrasing "Obey you, love you, and most honour you" is surprising for these are virtually the same as the words of the Christian marriage ritual prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer. If Cordelia intended to state the limit of her love, reserving some for her future husband, in this moment she appears to redirect that portion back to her father by imagining him as her husband. The contradiction Cordelia observes--that her sisters swear absolute love for their father and reserve none for their husbands--is first 'solved' by this impossible marriage that undermines her emulation of Desdemona's argument.

To understand the women in Shakespeare's plays it is necessary to have some sense of the social position of women in Renaissance England, for even if the play you are studying is set elsewhere it is likely that the women in it will behave much as contemporary women did in England. It is a common exaggeration to say that women had no right to own property, were entirely dominated by their husbands and fathers, and could be treated as little better than property. (A useful corrective that considers just what property rights a middle-class woman had is Natasha Korda. 2001. "'Judicious Oeillades': Supervising Marital Property in The Merry Wives of Windsor." Marxist Shakespeares. Edited by Jean Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow. Accents on Shakespeare. London. Routledge. 82-103.) It is true that woman had far fewer freedoms than we are used to, and that ideas of feminine behaviour have changed considerably. When Lear enters carrying the body of Cordelia in the final scene, his lament that "Her voice was ever soft, / Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman" (5.3.247-8) is apt to raise a laugh in modern performance that almost certainly did not happen in Shakespeare's time. Cordelia is, of course, a queen and throughout Shakespeare's life until about 2 years before King Lear was first performed, England was ruled by a queen. (The contradictions that this created, especially in relation to ideals of feminine passivity and deference, are explored in Louis Montrose. 1996. "'Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture." Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream. Edited by Richard Dutton. New Casebooks. Basingstoke. Macmillan. 101-38.) Necessarily, the political situation at the beginning of King Lear is tense, being the kind of succession crisis that England itself had recently undergone, although the politics is shot through with familial concerns. In demanding protestations of love, Lear seems concerned with his family relationships, but the play begins with two courtiers discussing how the king feels about his daughters' husbands, not the daughters themselves:

KENT I thought the King had more affected the Duke of
Albany than Cornwall.
GLOUCESTER It did always seem so to us, but now in the
division of the kingdom it appears not which of the
Dukes he values most; for qualities are so weighed that
curiosity in neither can make choice of either's moiety.
(King Lear 1.1.1-6) 

Notice that Kent does not say "I thought the king more affected Goneril than Regan". For some, never-explained, reason, Cordelia is sought in marriage only by two French rulers, Burgundy and France. In a three-way split of the kingdom between the daughters, Cordelia's marriage to either suitor is going to give a third of the kingdom to France. When considering Shakespeare's women there is often the need to keep such a focus in mind, for they often are senior aristocrats married to powerful rulers of other countries for reasons of politics, not love.

It is possible to read Shakespeare's history plays in the chronological order of the events they depict (King John, Richard 2, 1 Henry 4, 2 Henry 4, Henry 5, 1 Henry 6, 2 Henry 6, 3 Henry 6, Richard 3, Henry 8) rather than the order in which he wrote them. If one does this, the Queen Margaret who appears in Richard 3 is first encountered at the end of 1 Henry 6 as the Earl of Suffolk's French prisoner with whom he is falling in love:

SUFFOLK (aside) She's beautiful, and therefore to be wooed;
She is a woman, therefore to be won.
(1 Henry 6 5.5.34-5)  

Remembering that he is already married, Suffolk decides to woo her on behalf of the English king, to have "peace established between these realms" (5.5.48), much as Cordelia is in King Lear is used. The striking repetition of "wooed . . . woman . . . won" Shakespeare had used before in a much darker context. In Titus Andronicus Demetrius says almost the same thing of Lavinia, but is persuaded by Aaron to rape her instead:

[DEMETRIUS] She is a woman, therefore may be wooed;
She is a woman, therefore may be won;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
[AARON] . . . strike her home by force, if not by words,
(Titus Andronicus 2.1.82-119)

Queen Margaret appears in all three of the Henry 6 plays and in Richard 3 where she lingers as a reminder of the Lancastrian dynasty that Richard's family, the Yorkists, have displaced. A remarkable set-piece of dramatic writing is the second scene of Richard 3 in which the body of Margaret's husband, the murdered Henry 6, is brought in by daughter-in-law Anne. Richard is one of Henry 6's murderers, and he also murdered Anne's husband, Henry's son Edward, yet in this scene Richard attempts to woo Anne. The moment seems unpropitious and the presence of the bleeding corpse makes it highly distasteful, but these impediments only heighten the intensity of Richard's pleasure at his own audacity, and as soon as she leaves he comments

Was ever woman in this humour wooed?
Was ever woman in this humour won?
I'll have her, but I will not keep her long.
What, I that killed her husband and his father,
To take her in her heart's extremest hate,
With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,
The bleeding witness of my hatred by,
Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,
And I no friends to back my suit withal
But the plain devil and dissembling looks--
And yet to win her, all the world to nothing? Ha!
(Richard 3 1.2.215-25)

There is undeniable theatrical pleasure in seeing Richard's achievement, even though the idea of his wooing a woman who is trying to bury the man he killed is, on the face of it, distasteful. To our modern sensibilities the problem to be addressed is what goes through Anne's mind as she succumbs to Richard's rhetorical force. For most of the scene Richard and Anne engage in emotionally charged exchanges in which each returns the other's phrases back in a new form to reverse the intended meaning, a rhetorical device known as stichomythia:

RICHARD GLOUCESTER Fairer than tongue can name thee, let me have
Some patient leisure to excuse myself.
LADY ANNE Fouler than heart can think thee, thou canst make
No excuse current but to hang thyself.
RICHARD GLOUCESTER By such despair I should accuse myself.
LADY ANNE And by despairing shalt thou stand excused,
For doing worthy vengeance on thyself
That didst unworthy slaughter upon others.
RICHARD GLOUCESTER Say that I slew them not. LADY ANNE Then say they were not slain.
(Richard 3 1.2.81-9)

This kind of back-and-forth exchange occurs throughout the scene, and Richard calls it a "keen encounter of our wits" (1.2.115). Indeed, in her rhetoric Anne is Richard's equal, and that is quite an achievement since Richard's persuasive power is central to his rise to power in the first half of the play; he is not merely a deceiver but a manipulator. That Anne finally succumbs to him is, perhaps, not as important as the fact that she sees through his lies, refuses to accept his version of reality, and she fights back with rhetoric as powerful as his own.

The play is full of men who do not perceive what Richard is up to, and women who do see it. Queen Margaret performs a prophetic function in warning others about him, and also curses Richard directly. Take a look at Margaret's curses in 1.3 and see if, like Anne's language, they constitute a form of resistance that the play encourages us to admire.

In Renaissance drama, women's sexual desire barely figures at all, although they frequently are the object of men's sexual desire; a significant exception, however, is Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. As observed above, women are marginal in the Shakespeare canon generally but three of them do make it into play titles: Cleopatra, Juliet, and Cressida. Of course, they achieve titular mention only in partnership with men and whatever power they have is always mediated through their relationships with men. Juliet and Cressida are young women embarking on their first serious love relationships, but Cleopatra is markedly older and already sexually experienced, and there is plenty of evidence of disgust at her sexual appetite. Yet even this is measured primarily by its effect on a man, Antony:

PHILO Nay, but this dotage of our General's
O'erflows the measure. Those his goodly eyes,
That o'er the files and musters of the war
Have glowed like plated Mars, now bend, now turn
The office and devotion of their view
Upon a tawny front. His captain's heart,
Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst
The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper,
And is become the bellows and the fan
To cool a gipsy's lust.
Flourish. Enter Antony, Cleopatra, her ladies, the train, with eunuchs fanning her
(Antony and Cleopatra 1.1.1-10)

Cleopatra is figured as alien to these Roman men, dark-skinned ("tawny") and lustful, and, most peculiarly, hard to satisfy: a "fan" cools what it blows upon but a "bellows" blows air upon a fire to heat it, so Philo's language begins the play's representation of Cleopatra's paradoxical inversions. Enobarbus also says that what cools Cleopatra heats her:

[ENOBARBUS] On each side he