In A Word: The Importance of Shakespeare's Subtexts

The subtexts of Shakespeare's plays often provide surprisingly accurate insights not only into the central themes of the plays, but also a greater understanding of the unifying elements. The subtexts from a representative sampling of plays from each of the major periods reveáis that such subtextual elements as repeated words, near synonyms and recurrent images are fairly accurate assessors of the playwright's central intent. The best way to approach the plays is through a method that considers not only the text and plot, but the poetic devices that arise by considering the subtext. This study explores the nature-nothing subtext inKingLear, the seeing-seeming disparity in Othello, the repeated references to chains and gold in A Comedy ofErrors, the explorations of fortune in As YouLikelt, the persistent emphasis on words and voices in Coriolanus, and the subtextual significance of wonder and rebellion in The Tempest. In each case, attention to the sound devices, repetitions and patterns of imagery yields a more thorough understanding of the play under consideration than the standard imagery studies or plot analyses. Those of us who teach Shakespeare primarily to undergraduates find that most of our class time is taken up with explication, as students are confounded not only by the peculiarities of Elizabethan English but also by the complexities of Shakespeare's themes. As a result, we find ourselves discussing plot rather than poetics. An approach to the plays that begins with the subtext, however, will enable the teacher and student alike to become more directly involved with the artistry of the plays. Each of the plays is a poem, after all, and yields to an approach that recognizes its poetic structures and harmonies. The poetic structures of the plays have often been compared to tapestries, and, like tapestries, demónstrate a complexity of colour and texture. The subtext, like a thread in the elabórate design, can be utilized as a means of approach to the whole. Tug at a single strand of Shakespeare's tapestry and the thread will lead you toward the central pattern. Because Shakespeare was a conscious artist with total control of his material, cióse attention to repetitions and seemingly innocuous "threads" will provide a means of approaching the whole that is accessible to most students. 34 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses The subtext is a simple means by which students can bring the larger ideas of the works into focus. The subtext is a part of the poetry of the text which lies beneath the plot, including the patterns of imagery, the sound devices—particularly words which are repeated so often that they take on a life of their own as sound, rather like a leit motif in music—and all the connotations that arise from the juxtaposition of the repeated words and images in new contexts. A sensitivity to the subtext reveáis that the repeated tollings of a single word and its variants often have reverberations through the play as a whole. The great directors have been sensitive to the nuances of the subtext in preparing for their productions. Charles Marowitz, for example, Peter Brook's Assistant Director for the 1969 film of King Lear, wrote about the subtext for the Tulane Drama Review (8 [1953]). Marowitz's essay is a rhapsodic poem in itself on the subtextual words that he and Brook had emphasized in the 1962 stage production. Although critics like G. Wilson Knight and Caroline Spurgeon had written about the patterns of imagery in the play, Brook carried the idea one step further, paying particular attention to repeated words, or words that appear in new contexts (and which take on new meanings as a result) in different parts of the play. Examination of sounds of the subtext reveáis that Shakespeare's plays were written to be heard, and that many of his meanings are emphasized through sounds that are picked up almost subliminally by dint of repetition, or by the use of several words in succession that are similar in sound with related meanings. A comparison of the standard imagery studies of King Lear with the Brooks/Marowitz essay is instructive. In Leading Motives in the Imagery of Shakespeare's Tragedles, Caroline Spurgeon notes the recurrence of images of torture in King Lear which she finds to be often linked with animal images. She notes that these images flow naturally from the drama and mental suffering of Lear. The sensation of Lear's pain is increased by means of verbs and metaphors of a human body in anguished movement: "a body tugged, wrenched, beaten, pierced, stung, dislocated, flayed, gashed, scalded, tortured and finally broken on the rack" (29-30). G. Wilson Knight, in The Wheel ofFire emphasizes, as the title suggests, the same ideas. These patterns of imagery are, obviously, central to the drama of Lear's painful discovery of himself and of the meaning of love. Peter Brook, however, has explored some of the other word patterns in the play and has developed his production of the work around four repeated words: nature, nothing, foolish and blindness. These words are those which a concordance tells us appear most often in the play, and each one is linked to the others in different contexts as the play proceeds. Students can readily utilize an approach like Brook's to this play by the simple exercise of keeping their ears open for the single word in the play which is on everyone's lips. "Nature" is readily located since it is repeated (if you include its negative form) fifty-five times. Once the word "nature" has been located, the next step is to ask why Shakespeare has called our attention to this word. What does nature mean? Does nature mean the same thing to everyone who uses the word? And, finally, how does nature relate to the work as a whole? Proceeding with a single word, like nature, as a tool, eventually one can uncover the central meanings of the play. Virtually every work of criticism on King Lear includes a statement about nature. Derek Traversi mStratford Papers on Shakespeare calis Lear an allegory of "man's relation to nature." L. C. Knights in Some Shakespearean Themes says the play attempts to answer the question: "What is essential ¡nA Word: Shakespeare 's Subtexts 35 human nature?" Robert Heilman in This GreatStage believes the play is "an essay upon nature," and H. B. Charlton offers an important discussion of the theme of nature in Shakespearean Tragedy. As well, John Danby in Shakespeare 's Doctrine of Nature, explores the various uses of the word nature throughout the play. Clearly the word is central to the meaning as well as the poetry of the work. The students' interest in the play is greatly stimulated by letting them malee the discovery of this central word, unravelling for themselves the reasons for its prominence rather than telling them that many critics feel nature to be central to the meaning of the play. Using the inductive method will also lead to an exploration of the poetry of the play. Students will become aware of connotation when they consider what the word nature means when the "natural" i.e. ¡Ilegitímate, son, the bastard, Edmund, calis upon Nature as his "Goddess." They will become aware of the irony of Lear calling his loving daughter, Cordelia, a "wretch whom nature is asham'd almost t'acknowledge hers," and of the doubled irony when the "natural" son, Edmund, convinces his father that his brother, Edgar, is an "unnatural detested brutish villain." The. student will also become aware of analogy and allusion through the idea of the "natural order" in the Renaissance, when Edmund draws our attention to the diré consequences for the cosmos when there is "unnaturalness between the child and the parent." The student will also discover, as Peter Brook did, that the word nature is frequently linked to the word nothing, which oceurs in different contexts throughout the subtext. Cordelia's response to her father's demand for a word of love is "nothing," which he repeats in bewilderment and she repeats in affirmation until it rings in our ears in all its emptiness. Lear's response that "Nothing will come of nothing" picks up new connotations in each subsequent act of the play as Lear is stripped of everything he is and everything he thought he was. When his daughters, who will "allow not nature more than nature needs," strip Lear of his attendants, Lear finds a nothing in nature; Edgar, disguised as natural man, shows Lear "Man's Ufe as cheap as beasts." The "unnatural hags," Goneril and Reagan, forcé Lear to confront the state of bare nature. Eventually Lear, like Edgar, "nothing is." In a similar vein, the words foolish and blindness are linked with the word nature and reverberate through the subtext, for Lear must become a "fool of nature" before he can become wise. Lear, like Gloucester, was blind when he had eyes, and learns true sight when he "sees feelingly" the natural beauty of his loving daughter. Looking at the subtext in several other plays, we can find a similar amplification of the playwright's ideas and insight into his poetic method. To consider, first, another tragedy, the subtext in Othello similarly amplifies and focuses the central themes. As has been noted by William Empson and every critic since, the word repeated most often in Othello is honest. "Honest, honest lago" deceives everyone into seeing him as he is not. Everyone in the play calis him "Honest lago" including those whom he most deceives: Desdemona, Cassio, Othello, and his own wife, Emilia. The word takes on a bitter irony when dishonest "honest lago" casts doubt upon the honesty of Cassio by refusing to firmly attach the word to Cassio at Othello's bidding. The best lago can manage is the assertion that "I daré be sworn I think that he is honest" (III.III.125). lago forces Othello similarly to question Desdemona's honesty (in the Renaissance honesty also implied chastity) until Othello is left with the confused idea that "I do not think but Desdemona's honest." The irony is 36 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses more bitter following as it does upon straightforward and unequivocal assertions of Iago's honesty by everyone in the play. This aspect of the play is straightforward and understood by most readers. The subtext, however, adds another layer to the ironies through the use of words which sound so much alike that one almost hears both words when one is sounded. These repeated words are see, and seem. The words see/seen/saw appear forty-eight times ín the play; the words seem or seeming twelve times. The association which is made by the ear through the sound brings us to the heart of the conflict in the play which involves the difference between seeing and seeming. lago tells us in the first scene that he is not "for love and duty" but "seeming so, for my peculiar end." As noted, everyone sees him as honest and loyal but this is due only to his seeming so. The idea of seeing and seeming is linked to Desdemona in the first act of the play as well. Brabantio is a deceived father; he has seen no signs that his daughter was in love with Othello and is genuinely convinced that Othello must have used charms or magic upon her to bring about their marriage. He warns all Fathers to "trust not your daughter's mind/By what you see them act"—thereby calling the audience's attention to the difference between what seems to be true and what is finally seen to be true. The third scene in Act I amplifies the problems of seeming and seeing. The Duke and the Senators are in a state of confusión as to whether the Turks plan to attack Rhodes as they seem to be doing or whether they will attack Cyprus which would make more political sense. The Senators realize, finally, that the Turks must be moving toward Cyprus, and the movement toward Rhodes is "a pageant to keep [them] in false gaze." Here, the emphasis on seeing as deception in the subtext of a subsidiary scene points toward the central issues once again. In this same scene, the charges of wítchcraft which Brabantio brings to the Duke about Othello are seen through immediately by the Duke as "poor likelihoods of modern seeming." Although Othello himself is free of any "false gaze" and is able to present himself in such a way that everyone can see his worth clearly, Shakespeare reiterates the idea of a false show in Brabantio's parting words to his daughter's husband: "Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see/She has deceiv'd her father and may thee." Indeed, in Iago's soliloquy which concludes Act I, we learn that Othello's tragic flaw and the agent which will bring about his downfall is connected to the business of seeing and seeming. lago notes "The Moor is of a free and open nature/That thinks men honest that but seem to be so." The action of the play focuses upon Iago's use of this idea. If Othello thinks men honest that but seem to be so, all lago has to do is to let Othello think Desdemona dishonest by making her seem to be so. Iago's great gift in cunning lies in his abilíty to créate "false pageants" in people's mínds, so that they see only the images that lago has created for them. Cassio for example, admits to a "poor head" for drinking and lago convinces everyone that this is a serious problem. He encourages Montano to "see this fellow" and "see his vice." When lago has fanned Cassio's poor head for drinking into a general mutiny in Cyprus, Othello is forced to question lago at Montano's urging in the face of a "seeming" reluctance to speak about what he has seen in Cassio. The end result is that the seeming flaw which lago has InA Word: Shakespeare's Subtexts 37 produced carries more weight than the actuality of Cassio's observed performance under Othello, and he is dismissed. The climax of the play, the "Temptation Scene," Act III, scene iii, wherein lago convinces Othello of Desdemona's unfaithfulness, likewise is filled with words that refer to seeing and seeming. When lago first casts aspersions upon Desdemona's chastity, Othello's response is: "she had eyes and chose me. No, Iago;A'll seebefore I doubt." lago warns Othello simply to use his eyes: Look to your wife, observe her well with Cassio; Wear your eye thus, not jealous ñor secure . . . Look to it I know our country disposition well; In Venice they do let heaven see the pranks They daré not show their husbands. (III.IH. 198-203) On an unconscious level, this has a powerful impact upon Othello. Brabantio felt his daughter could seem to be one thing but be another, and since Othello does not know the world of Venice, he has to assume that what lago tells him about the custom of Venetian dissembling is correct. Othello's fate is sealed when lago reminds him of Brabantio's wounds: "She that, so young, could give out such a seeming,/to seal her father's eyes up cióse as oak" (III.iii.209-10). When Othello holds back, retaining some fondness for his wife, lago provides Othello with images of Cassio's love and Desdemona's response so vivid that Othello believes he sees them. Just as lago created the image of the "beast with two backs" to enrage Brabantio, so he creates verbal images of copulating animáis and suggests that even were Desdemona and Cassio as "prime as goats, as hot as monkeys" (III.III.403) it would be impossible that Othello should "see her topp'd." lago skillfully adds incriminating image to image as he describes Cassio's alleged sleeptalking and the gestures in which Cassio's thigh fell upon his own, and Cassio's lips touched Iago's, whispering "Sweet Desdemona." Having created this "false pageant" which affects the Moor with all the credence of actual seeing, lago then holds back, asking Othello to wait for more proof noting: "We see nothing done: she may be honest yet." Othello, however, has been a man not easily shaken by words, ñor influenced by opinions of others. He demands an "ocular proof." If he had stopped with this directive, Desdemona might have been saved, but it is too late, for Iago's portraits of her adultery have captured him with all the vividness of seeing. This is emphasized when Othello is distracted from state business muttering "goats and monkeys" (IV.i.254). The final ocular proof, the handkerchief which convinces Othello of his wife's adultery, would be an absurd basis for taking the life of one's spouse were it not prepared for by all these other "seeming" proofs and by the constant reiteration of the importance of seeing in all these other situations. Even the image of the handkerchief as proof of adultery is created more vividly for Othello's mind's eye than it exists in reality when lago tells Othello that he saw Cassio wipe his beard with it. The fact that lago controls what is seen is emphasized through the subtext of the first scene of the last act, the scene in which Cassio is wounded by Roderigo. Everyone is 38 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Inglesa fumbling around in the dark here; so that Roderigo wounds Cassio, and lago kills Roderigc in the midst of confused voices on all sides asking questions. Who is calling for help? Whc is the assassin? Who the defender? Is someone really in trouble or is this the work oi thieves? lago enters in the midst of the confusión he has caused, bringing a light which symbolizes his ability to make people see what he wants them to see. His light is the light of Lucifer whose rationalizing creates a view of reality that seems to make sense. In the denouement, all the characters who believe what they have seen, are informed that it has only seemed so. In the end, Othello has seen only a handkerchief and all else has been the artful illusion created by a man whose seeming honesty has led credence to a false gaze, the vivid seeming of false pageants. In a word, the idea of seeing or seeming in the subtext directs the audience toward the central conflíct and provides a unifying link between various minor scenes in the play. In each case the central issue is identical to Othello's main question—Do I see or do I seem to see? In the end, Othello's ocular proof has deceived him because he had been unable to do what Lear and blind Gloucester were able to do, to "see feelingly," to see the blackness in lago and the spiritual innocence of Desdemona with his heart rather than his eyes. Although this method works best with the unified later plays, Shakespeare's earliest works, the comedies, can also be amplified by attention to the subtext. However, since the themes and structures of Shakespeare's comedies are less demanding to explícate, the subtexts, also, yield more direct insights than they do in the later work. They do, however, help to explain minor problems in the structure and assist in clarifying the central issues of the plays. Even in Shakespeare's first comedy, the repeated words in the subtext amplify the moral visión of the work. Virtually everyone who has written about A Comedy of Errors has noted the recurring references to chains and gold. Since the chains of emphasis are made of gold, and since the play involves family bonds and several sets of marriage partners, the images connote wedding rings and the golden bonds of social ceremonies. Richard Henze in his essay, "The Comedy ofErrors: A Freely Binding Chain," directs our attention to the relationship between the image of the chain and the idea of social bonds. He notes, and most critics would agree with his assessment, that the theme of the play involves the paradox of "finding oneself by losing oneself and the freeing of one's self by binding oneself" (36). The forty-five references to chains and the thirty references to gold and goldsmiths point the audience as well toward the philosophical stance of the play. Harold Brooks in "Themes and Structures in The Comedy ofErrors" writes: "At the centre is relationship: relationship between human beings, depending on their right relation to truth and universal law: to the cosmic reality beneath appearance, and the cosmic order" (68). While this is true enough, the subtextual images of chains and gold take on a different light when looked at in the context of the enveloping action of the story. Shakespeare's primary contribution to the source is his addition of the framing story of Aegeon and Emilia, the agingparents of the twins whose errors form the comedy. The image of chains takes on a more sinister aspect in terms of the parents, for the play opens with Aegeon in chains and a punishment by death threatening the oíd man. The first line of the play is Aegeon's plea for a quick death to end his anguish. Here, the chains which bind Aegeon are those of the debtor's prison, and gold is the price of his redemption. The Duke tells InA Word: Shakespeare's Subtexts 39 him "Beg thou, or borrow, to make up the sum/And Uve; if no; then thou are doomed to die" (I-i-154-56). This image of an oíd man in chains waiting for the gold which will set him free forms a darle counterpoint to the glitter of the gold and golden chains that oceupies so much of the conversation and attention of the characters in the body of the play. The first error in the comedy involves gold coins. One servant is beaten for losing money given to his twin, and the word money enters the subtext alongside the word gold so that we can see that this is base gold that the characters are pursuing. Confusión about money is also interwoven with confusión about one's identity. The beaten servant believes his master has lost his wits: "Sure, he is stark mad./When I desired him to come home to dinner,/He ask'd me for a thousand marks in gold" (II.I.59-61). Each character's identity is defined in terms of money. Those who receive the money belonging to their twins also take on the identity of their brothers. Those who lose the money, lose themselves. Shakespeare is exploring a profound moral problem here, when one's identity is only secondary to the problem of missing money. Toward the end of the play, Antipholus of Ephesus finds himself in chains (a reminder of his father's state) over money. In this case, he has paid his debt to the goldsmith but the money has gone astray in another error of mistaken identity. On a deeper level, Shakespeare reveáis that money cannot effect the desired redemption of the characters in the play, ñor does the money aid any of the characters in sorting out the errors of identity. Money can be paid, but since Antipholus lacks his own identity, the money does not buy reléase. This continúes until the last scene of the play, when Aegeon is released without paying the ransom. The Duke frees him as a result of the human story of love and loss which he has heard. In the end, the chains that link the members of the family are not made of the kind of gold one can exchange for cash, but are love's golden chains of kinship and community. Just as the subtext in A Comedy of Errors leads to an understanding of the important issues which have been confused with money, so in As You Like It, the subtext leads more directly to the heart of the play than the imagery studies do. Spurgeon notes that the imagery that dominates this play is drawn from nature, agriculture, and animal Ufe, more so than in any other of Shakespeare's plays. There is nothing startling here, ñor unexpected, in finding images of nature, animáis and agriculture in a work that utilizes the pastoral conventions of the sixteenth century. The pastoral images lead simply to the main themes of the play which involve an analysis of multifaceted views of love with an end, as Marilyn French has noted, of bringing the reader in touch with "the deep heart of courtship—which is . . . self-knowledge." We are, she notes, presented with "a march and countermarch of self and persona . . . geared to the essential purposes of self-discovery and mating" (110). The subtext directly clarifies the boundaries of this quest for love by penetrating the illusions that prevent us from knowing ourselves or one another. From the beginning, in Orlando's speech which opens the play, we encounter the two structures which form these boundaries of "self-discovery and mating"—nature and fortune. Orlando is poor through fortune but rich in nature, as are the other heros and heroines of the play. Orlando is full of spirit, although his natural gifts have been allowed to fester on a dunghill since his fortune was put in the hands of his older brother. Shakespeare reveáis, through frequent 40 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses references to fortune in the subtext, that misfortune alone will not keep the good from surfacing. In a doubling of Orlando's situation, Celia and Rosalind decry the ínequities of fortune in which one cousin, Celia, has everything, the other, Rosalind, only forbearance, and decide to "mock the good housewife Fortune from her wheel, that her gífts may henceforth be bestowed equally" (I.H.34-36). Both girls realize that Fortune's gifts may be stolen or borrowed but the gifts of nature are those worth having. Rosalind notes: "Fortune reigns in gifts of the world, not in the lineaments of nature" (I.II.45). The lovers in the story likewise see through the rank bestowed by fortune and love one another for natural gifts rather than material ones. Each lover affirms the necessity of seeing clearly, of seeing beyond the trappings of fortune to the nature of the beloved. Each recognition before the wedding ceremony which ends the play is prefaced with the words "If there be truth in sight." This suggests that truth lies in seeing beyond ordinary sight, for these weddings would not be taking place if any of them had been content to judge one another on the basis of fortune. One of the most frequent criticisms levelled againsMs You Like It is about its lack of structure. Harold Jenkins, for example, comments on the "lack of cause and effect plotting" in the play, and Marc Parrott feels that Shakespeare put "little intellectual labor into the construction of the plot" (518). Yet, this lack of structure can be accounted for by considering the message of the subtext. The world of fortune is the world of plots. The world wherein nature's gifts are seen and felt without regard for fortune is a world where logical processes of cause and effect, the focuses of a world seeking wealth and power, give way to illogical intuition. Fortune's world is the world of the "fat and greasy citizens" of fashion who plot their roles upon fortune's stage, a world which Shakespeare contrasts with the settled low content" enjoyed by fortune's fools in Arden. As Amiens pointed out at the beginning of Act II: "Happy" are those "that can transíate the stubbornness of fortune/Into so quiet and so sweet a style" (II.I.19-20). A more difficult test of the usefulness of the subtext is whether such study can bring one closer to an understanding of a play like Coriolanus whose primary focus is intellectual. Although T.S. Eliot wrote an essay in appreciation of Coriolanus, even the most dedicated Shakespearean finds something elusive and difficult about this play. John Palmer has compared the work to a statue in a public square which one can encircle and appreciate but not take to heart. The imagery studies of this play do not bring one any closer to an imaginative appreciation of the work. Indeed, each of the critics exploring the imagery has come to a different conclusión. Caroline Spurgeon, for example, feels that the central symbol is the image of the body politic presented by Menenius in the first scene of the play, with its emphasis on the belly, the body and sickness. She concludes, however, that this symbol "has not been born out of the creator's feeling of the tragedy; it has just been taken over by him wholesale, with much else from North's Plutarch" (347). Derek Traversi inAnApproach to Shakespeare focuses upon the fable of the body politic as well. He concludes that "greed and satiety" are the main images by which we are prepared for the tragedy of Coriolanus" (154). He also observes the preponderance of hard, machinelike images which are attached to Coriolanus and views these as a means of showing his rigid character. "The failure of Coriolanus," he states, "is a faílure in sensitivity, a failure in living; it represents a failure on the part of the whole society." G. Wilson Knight in The JnA Word: Shakespeare 's Subtexts 41 Imperial Theme also emphasizes the hard and metallic nature of the city and war imagery, and links these images to the theme of Coriolanus's iron-hearted pride. He theorizes that just as in Antony and Cleopatra "the two valúes, love and war oppose each other, so the same contrast is at the core of Coriolanus." Yet, none of these patterns leads us much closer to the central question of what Coriolanus is really about. W. H. Clemens in The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery gets a bit closer. He sees the imagery as emphasizing and repeating the play's main theme, "the contrast between the commanding figure of Coriolanus and the baseness of the rabble" (154). The studies of the play as a political work carry us a bit farther, for although the play is called The Tragedy of Coriolanus, the tragedy is not one of passion but a political tragedy brought about by the inbred reactions of the soldier protagonist to the political realities of Román Ufe. Obviously, the playwright could not, as Marc Parrott has noted, sustain interest in a play "whose hero through repellent pride plans the monstrous destruction of his native city" (908). Instead, Shakespeare is concerned with the political process, in particular, with the way that the words of politicians have a life of their own and créate a world antithetical to the world created by the men of deeds, the soldiers. Ultimately, the play can be seen as a political play in the truest sense. As A. P. Rossiter