This pair of exchanges tells us much about Shakespearian drama. The play-
within-a-play was a device he favoured: the players become spectators at a play; the
playhouse audience are both godlike spectators and foolish shadows, conscious that
they themselves are observed from above. Hippolyta, who found truth in dreams,
cannot accept the play; whereas her rational lord lends his imagination to complete
the inadequacy of the images. Are dream and play the same? Which can we trust?
That all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players, as Jaques
says in As You Like It, was a common conceit. A poem by Ralegh puts it neatly:What is our life? a play of passion,
Our mirth the musicke of division,
Our mothers’ wombs the tiring-houses be,
Where we are drest for this short Comedy,
Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is,
That sits and marks still who doth act amiss,
Our graves that hide us from the searching sun,
Are like drawn curtains when the play is done,
Thus march we playing to our latest rest,
Only we die in earnest, that’s no jest.At the last, in The TempestProspero predicts that the stage, ‘the great globe itself ’, will
dissolve.
Shakespeare now produced a series of more mature comedies in which averted
tragedy comes much closer, as in The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About
Nothing. He had earlier written the love-tragedy Romeo and Juliet and a political
tragedy of a kind new to him in Julius Caesar.Hamlet was written in about 1600, as
was As Yo u Like It. Shakespeare had bee n writing a comedy and a History a year; he
now beg an to alternate comedy and tragedy, mixing genres and pushing them to new
limits.
Twelfth Night, written in 1601, is shortly to be discussed, as the example of a
mature love comedy. In order of composition, there follow what a late 19th-century
critic called the ‘problem plays’,Measure for Measureand All’s Well that Ends Well,
bitter-sweet love-comedies, and Tr oilus and Cressida,a harshly satirical version of
Trojan love and Greek heroism. While most plays address a problem, the extreme
moral conundrums which these plays address are not resolved by the weddings with
which they end; their spirit is satirical, baffling rather than comic.
Measure for Measureaddresses sexual crime and punishment. Chastity is exem-
plified by the aspirant nun Isabella and the puritan magistrate Angelo, appointed to
clean up the vices of Vienna. She pleads for the life of her brother Claudio, forfeit for
having made his fiancée pregnant; the price Angelo asks is Isabella’s maidenhead.
Returning, the Duke of Vienna, disguised as a friar, works a ‘bed-trick’, in which
Angelo sleeps with his fiancée Mariana, thinking her Isabella; and a ‘head-trick’, in
which a murderer is executed instead of Claudio. In the dénouement the Duke
unties the knot by tying four other knots, marrying Isabella himself. Marriage is a
mean between convent and brothel: but the arbitrary nature of the Duke’s final
measures points to the intractability of the issues. Powerful early scenes give way to
ingenious technical solutions. The play has been found unsatisfactory – but it is a
play,not a test case in ethics. The tragedies that follow Hamlet also address
intractable problems: the justifiability of tyrannicide; the corruption of personal
honour by ambition and power; and the fate of goodness in the world.124 4 · SHAKESPEARE AND THE DRAMA