So Musicall a Discord. Such Sweete Thunder.
It is during times of change that Shakespeare's plays can be best understood. They seem to invite conflicting interpretation. For example, Henry V, for example, can be played as a heroic epic or as a cruel and meaningless grandiosity.
Shakespeare grew up with a profound sense of ambiguity. It is one of the defining principles of his life and art. The themes and situations of his plays are endlessly mirrored in the plots and sub-plots, so the audience is presented with a series of variations on the same subject without anyone dominate view of the subject. He starts three stories all at once but they are all going in the same direction. Certain characters from opposite sides of the class system seem to either parallel or parody the other.
Shakespeare used all the tricks of Elizabethan stagecraft. They did simultaneous staging, in order to show that the dramatic world is an uncertain one. Despite the apparently orchestrated harmony of his endings, there are in fact no real resolutions to his stories. He simply showed actions on stage for the purposes of spectacle and entertainment. Yet generations of readers have been affected by his profound observations. There has never been a great English dramatist whose art has remained so mysterious and thus is why he still retains the power to keep us completely enthralled.
Shakespeare is endlessly variable but the connections or associations become darker. The comic servants in the first dramas become Iago and Malvolio; the clown of the early comedies become the Fool of King Lear. His imagination was drawn to the same patterns again and again. His plays are best seen to be in relation to each other.
The majority of the plays start as if there is conversation already in progress and the audience has just tripped over. Elizabethan stagecraft is all about the art of the entrance and in Shakespeare the players enter from an ongoing world which is fully alive in another magical place. The action is a sequence of intense episodes but the pacing and the writer's sense of variety are so fluent that it is a continuous stream that mimics the process of life itself.
Obviously, Shakespeare is a master dramatist. He was an actor, a playwright, a sharer in the proceeds and, part-owner of the theatre itself. He seems to have ensured all of the cast were used in his plays and he probably tried to keep costs at a minimum. Once his popularity and success had been assured in his early days and was able to strike out in whatever direction he wanted. If he wanted to write a play about a Moor as the tragic hero the rest of the company were prepared to trust his judgment. As long as he provided two or three plays a year, his castmates seemed satisfied.
His whole life, social, financial and imaginative was bound up in the theatre and he was present for every part of the life of his plays, from the first words written down in a fury to the final adjustments at rehearsal. He was a swift worker. It should also be remembered that the majority of plays written in this period have been lost. Within the hundreds that have been lost, there will have been many touches of genuine Shakespeare.
His role as a company man may help to explain why he was not as concerned about the publication of his plays during his lifetime. The fellowship of the players was so intense that the plays themselves were probably public property. It would have considered inappropriate for him to publish the plays under his own name. He would have felt a deep obligation to give them work.
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