So let's start up our Shakespeare book again. It's been two years or more since I've written from this book. This is Chapter 43: See, See They Joyne, Embrace, and Seeme to Kisse.
Shakespeare's new company had the benefit of more or less new scripts. It is clear he revised The Comedy of Errors, and it is likely he "enhanced" other plays he had already written. This is also the period where he created such plays as Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Love's Labour's Lost, and A Midsummer Night's Dream (one of my favourites!). The hard edges of the Italian comedies, along with the ornate eloquence of the history plays, now give way to gorgeous lyricism and softer, more complex characters. He had a set of actors he knew could convey every mood and every sentiment. He was now the single most important dramatic poet of the period, and he had the priceless advantage of a stable group of actors he could write for.
It is possible to imagine the cast of Romeo and Juliet. We know that Will Kempe played Peter, the bawdy servant of the Capulets and that Richard Burbage played the leading role of Romeo. One the boys played Juliet, and another boy, or perhaps an older actor, played Nurse. It has been assumed that Shakespeare would have played the friar and the chorus. The standout character of Romeo and Juliet, however, is Mercutio, the gallant and witty friend of Romeo. His speech on the activities of Queen Mab is the most fanciful and eloquent in all of Shakespeare's work.
Romeo and Juliet is a play of youthful impulsiveness, a dance of swordplay, measuring out the energy with sudden violence and swift transitions. He incorporates sudden changes of mood and thought.
It's been said that Romeo and Juliet are all that lovers were and will ever be but it is important to notice the sheer artistry with the writer entwines them, by echoing each other's speech, as if seeing their souls shining from the other's face.
This had never been achieved on the English stage before and must have been amazing to witness for the first audiences watching the play unfold before them. Shakespeare had taken courtly love and poetry and dramatised it for his audiences. There were other themes in the play as well. Themes of banishment, the inequality of love, of honour and repudation but love remains the central theme.
The play, of course, ends in tears. It concluded with a funeral procession which was then succeeded by a jig by William Kemp. He accompanied Romeo to his meeting with death. It is another indication of the essential stridency of Elizabethan drama, with no room for middle of the road thinking, so that the play can be interpreted as both a tragedy and a comedy.
It has been suggested that A Midsummer Night's Dream was written in order to celebrate the marriage of Southampton's widowed mother, Mary, Countess of Southampton, to Sir Thomas Heneage. The play itself seems to bear witness to the very wet summer of 1594, in the long complaint by Titania that "the seasons alter". But other noble marriages have been identified as the occasion for this enthusiastic song of praise for the state of marriage. It is ironic that historians, in looking for the wedding that the play might celebrate, have found no fewer than three possibilities. But the world in which Shakespeare moved was a small one, in which affinities are not hard to find, and in any even these real Elizabethan marriages make no difference to A Midsummer Night's Dream.
With its woodland setting, its noble protagonists, and its fairies, this is the "sweet Shakespeare" of contemporaneous discourse, the Shakespeare of burlesque humour. All of his reading of Chaucer and of Ovid, of Seneca and of Marlowe, combines to create an enchanting landscape, where the mythical Theseus and Hippolyta celebrate their marriage, where Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, squabble over the possession of a changeling child, where Bottom and his country players put on an entertainment, and where star-crossed lovers are allowed at the close to fall into one another's arms. It is a play of patterns and of symmetries, of music and of harmony restored. One of in great delights lie within the formality and fluency of design.
There are three plays of Shakespeare that seem to be without primary "source": Love's Labour's Lost, The Tempest and A Midsummer's Night's Dream. They are a window into his art and thus into the English imagination itself. A Midsummer Night's Dream in his first great contemplations of drama itself.
Like all of Shakespeare's plays of this period A Midsummer Night's Dream is composed in a highly wrought and polished English, where lyrical grace is not incompatible with a hundred different rhetorical "schemes". The play is suffused with a dreamlike atmosphere and yet it is a magnificent piece of theatre. The characters sleep on the stage and when they wake up they find themselves transformed.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is the occasion, too, for Theseus's remarks upon the imagination itself when he suggests that:
The Lunatick, the louer (lover), and the Poet
Are of imagination all compact.
It is all the more interesting on the assumption that Shakespeare himself played the part of Theseus. It is doubly interesting when an examination of the text reveals that the lines upon the imagination were added later, in the margins of his papers, as a kind of after-thought. We might, then, fruitfully speculate upon the nature of Shakespeare's imagination.
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