“Stay a little”

I’m not really a fan of Frank Bruni’s, but this op-ed is an outstanding statement of the value of culture, expressed with a telling example from King Lear (the kind of thing I’ll be hammering on when I get to that play—hope you’ll be paying attention, Ira Glass). A small balm after the shocking death of David Carr, the New York Times‘s most humane presence in these darkening days.

Hurlyburly

The hurlyburly’s done, and just as they promised, the Witches are back in 1.3 to wait for Macbeth. The actors can hardly have been off the stage for more than a couple of minutes, but the Witches have been busy. And notice how we’re carried along by the action to feel that they have been wreaking havoc all over the world in just those few minutes. We don’t really know how much dramatic time 1.2 takes, but it is so short that we feel the Witches have been gone only for minutes in dramatic time as well as real time. This is the first example we’ve considered of how Shakespeare plays with time for dramatic effect. We’ll see many more, and more famous examples, as we continue through the plays.

The Second Witch has been “killing swine” (1.3.2), and the First Witch has been rebuffed by a “rump-fed” woman whose chestnuts she coveted (several interpretations of “rump-fed” have been offered; I like “fat-assed” myself), and plans to take revenge on her sea-captain husband: “But in a sieve I’ll thither sail/And like a rat without a tail/I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do” (1.3.7–9). The other Witches offer their help: “I’ll give thee a wind . . .And I another” (10, 13). I can’t help but think this is a fart joke. As they finalize their plans, a drum sounds: “Macbeth doth come” (31), and they recite a little chorus:

 

The Weird Sisters, hand in hand,
Posters of the sea and land,
Thus do go about, about:
Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine,
And thrice again, to make up nine.
Peace!—the charm’s wound up.
(32–37)

 

I quote this to give you the flavor of the Witches’ language—singsongy, in tetrameter (four beats rather than the pentameter, or five beats, of blank verse) couplets, distinguishing them from any other character. This seems to be one of the reasons some scholars regard much of the Witches’ scenes as spurious—as if Shakespeare would never conceive of varying his language to suit his characters, or perhaps as if he would never write about anything so infra dig as witches. (The influence of the folk and fairy tale traditions on Shakespeare is greater than I see generally recognized; I’ll be pointing it out throughout.)

 

*         *         *

 

The previous scene opened with a bloody man, a soldier literally covered in blood. This scene gets going with the entrance of a man metaphorically covered in blood; a man whose soul is bloody and who soon will have blood on his hands in more ways than one.

Enter Macbeth.

Note well his first line:

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.
(1.3.38)

Nobody could possibly miss this callback to the Witches’ first appearance, but what does it mean? One scholar’s suggestion that Macbeth refers to the foulness of the weather contrasted with the fairness of his day of victory is surely accurate; it’s certainly what Macbeth must be thinking. But it is too literal to exhaust the meaning.

Shakespeare must have had a reason for making this first line a callback. The most obvious reason is to signal that we are back in the realm of the uncanny, where everything is turned on its head. But why does Macbeth rather than his comrade-in-arms Banquo make this observation? There is plainly some connection between Macbeth and the Witches. But what is its nature? Should we agree with the nineteenth-century critic Edward Dowden, who wrote that “although Macbeth has not yet set eyes upon these hags, the connection is already established between his soul and them. Their spells have already wrought upon his blood”? That would imply that he is already lost. (Those of you who are reading this to write your term papers on whether Macbeth is evil or just weak, take note. But I’m not writing that paper for you.) But that seems to me to go too far.

Think yourselves back, once again, into the world premiere audience. No more than Macbeth do you have any idea what is about to happen, apart from one huge advantage; you know what the Witches said earlier. Macbeth doesn’t. He doesn’t know he is echoing what you heard them say. He does not know they are specifically waiting for him (not Banquo); you do. You, as an attentive listener in the Jacobean audience, can already sense that this is going to end in tears. If Macbeth did, he would run the other way.

Macbeth is shot through with the form of situational irony that perhaps made its first, most memorable appearance in Western literature in Oedipus Tyrannos. Oedipus flees Thebes to thwart the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, and ends up unknowingly doing both. Irony flourishes in the gap between the audience’s knowledge and the character’s ignorance. The famous examples in Macbeth, as we’ll see and you probably already know, relate to Macbeth’s trust in the Witches’ prophecies; here we see it at work even before he meets them.

A Bee in My Bonnet: Two Posts I Never Quite Finished

Because Shakespeare is both popular and misunderstood, every year there are stories that aren’t really worthy of the ink spilled upon them. Here are two I almost wrote about at length before I decided it just wasn’t worth it.

A First Folio Found!

As you may remember, just at the end of last month a First Folio was discovered in the library of the French town of Saint-Omer. Wonderful news, and congratulations to Professor Eric Rasmussen, the distinguished scholar of the First Folio who authenticated the discovery—but worthy of no more than a passing mention, right? So I thought, until I saw this article in the Independent.

Now, I understand the impulse to hope that an eminent person is one of your coreligionists. Growing up Catholic in South Philadelphia when nuns ruled the Earth, I rejoiced every time I learned that some actor or politician was Catholic. The problem here is that the discovery of this book has absolutely no bearing on the question whether Shakespeare was a secret Catholic. Professor Rasmussen says: “People have been making vague arguments, but now for the first time we have a connection between the Jesuit college network and Shakespeare . . . the links become a little more substantial when you have this paper trail.” Um, no. no they don’t. The link is between this copy of the First Folio and the Jesuit college, not Shakespeare, who after all died in 1616, seven years before the Folio was published, and could have had nothing whatsoever to do with its distribution. (For once the comments, most of which make this point in some way or other, are—barely—worth reading.)

This still wouldn’t be worth a post if the argumentation weren’t so typical in Shakespeare studies. The ratio of wishful thinking to credible analysis is still far, far too high. Witness the Arden Shakespeare’s publication of Double Falsehood. Or the current fad of discovering the fingerprints of Middleton all over what sometimes seems to be every play from Shakespeare’s midcareer. Or Will in the World, where Shakespeare’s alleged Catholicism is the subject of some of Stephen Greenblatt’s most untethered speculations.

Sting Like a Bee?

But the story of the First Folio pales beside what I suppose was the biggest headline grabber of 2014 in Shakespeare studies; the announcement, timed to coincide with the birthday coverage, of “Shakespeare’s Beehive,” a 1580 dictionary with extensive annotations claimed by the owners to be in Shakespeare’s hand. For me, this story fell apart at the first and lightest touch. The owners are booksellers who bought the book on eBay, for crying out loud. Since they stand to profit by several orders of magnitude if they sell the book as belonging to Shakespeare, they face the weightiest possible burden of proof to authenticate it. (Even if they fail to sell the book, you can buy a $75 facsimile on their website; this is all too obviously a for-profit attribution.)

Equally important, these booksellers are nonscholars. Even apart from their self-interest, one immediately asks what authority their attribution can command. I would have expected, at the very least, that they would have addressed this glaring question head on. They would have shown the book to an acknowledged expert on Shakespeare and Elizabethan/Jacobean paleography and stamped that expert’s positive opinion on every press release. Did they?

Well, yes and no. Yes, they showed it to an expert. No, she unequivocally rejected the attribution to Shakespeare. Professor Grace Ioppolo of the University of Reading, who among other things has edited Measure for Measure, and is a paleographer, inspected the dictionary in 2012. Let’s let her speak for herself in a storified series of tweets (I’m afraid I’m too lazy to embed them, a process WordPress makes unnecessarily complicated. Take it up with them, but click and read: it’s worth it.).

To me, this screams “case closed.” There’s nothing more to be said about the booksellers’ claims unless an equally qualified expert were to come forward and contradict Professor Ioppolo, with equally persuasive evidence. But to my knowledge, the booksellers have never produced such an expert or acknowledged Professor Ioppolo’s assessment. In my view, they have not even tried to meet their burden of proof and must not be taken seriously.

In a world in which truth matters, journalists would have been falling over each other to interview Professor Ioppolo (let alone other scholars with better publicists). I have found no such interviews and only one piece of journalism (as opposed to several bloggers) that even mentions her series of tweets. Far more typical is this piece, in which the dreadfully overrated Adam Gopnik provides a master class in what’s wrong with journalism today. The Upper West Side has indeed changed for the worse, but I for one don’t see why this observation should open a piece ostensibly about a seventeenth-century text. But then this isn’t journalism: it is a piece of puffery in which the booksellers are made out to be lovable New York characters, as if Gopnik were actually Joseph Mitchell or A. J. Liebling. The only problem is that they have no answer to the three devastating objections Gopnik records, except for this peroration:

But I will always think that this was his copy,” Wechsler said. “Always. Whether or not this is given credibility in the scholarly community. But, of course, I hope it will be. I don’t want to be some guy mumbling and grumbling on Eighty-sixth Street! But negativity from the scholarly community? Hey, they can’t agree on anything. Why should they choose this book to get their start?

Why should they indeed? Just because it’s so obviously not what it’s claimed to be? And in fact those who have gone on record do agree. I have not found any serious Shakespeare scholar who endorses the booksellers’ claims. For example, Jonathan Bate saw the scans and said “On a quick glance at the web materials, I’m very sceptical . . .the handwriting certainly isn’t Shakespeare’s.”

The only possible verdict? Another triumph for wishful thinking and shoddy journalism (have you heard anything about this book since April?). And an injustice to Professor Ioppolo, which I hope this post does a tiny bit to rectify.

Let’s try to do better in 2015, shall we?

What Is a “Thane”?

One problem with Macbeth is the possibility of getting thrown by vocabulary that would have been familiar to any self-respecting eleventh-century Scot but that we never use. The most conspicuous such word is “Thane.” I’m willing to bet that you will never see this word in any context other than that of Macbeth.

So what is a thane? This is what glossaries are for, but in case your copy of the play doesn’t have one, I’ll beat you to Wikipedia and note that “Thane was the title given to a local royal official in medieval eastern Scotland, equivalent to a count, who was at the head of an administrative and socio-economic unit known as a shire or thanage.” See? I’m here to help.

You all know what a “shire” is. You’ve seen those interminable hobbit movies. Just don’t imagine that Macbeth is three feet tall and that his feet are covered with hair. And don’t expect any dragons. There are no dragons in this play.

Yes, I admit it. This post is clickbait. Well, not really, since I haven’t done any serious search engine optimization on it except for the title. It’s more of an experiment to see whether this post, a simple explanation of a term that can be easily found elsewhere, gets appreciably more clicks than others. (I’ve been curious for some time because one of my Romeo and Juliet posts gets substantially more traffic than others, perhaps because it has such an explanation.) If it does, more to follow. I’m trying to learn how to revel in my shamelessness.

There Will Be Blood

The witches depart—and what is the first thing we see? A “bleeding Captain.” A man covered in blood—another apparition. Although, as this BloggingShakespeare.com post indicates, we don’t know how much was used for any particular play, real blood (animal and perhaps even human) probably was used on the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage; after all, it “could not have been very hard to obtain!” It stands to reason that blood would have been splashed liberally at least on the Captain’s face and hands, emphasizing that we are still in the realm of the uncanny.

What are the first words we hear? “What bloody man is that?” They are spoken by Duncan, the king of Scotland, who little reckons that the central action of the play will be to make him a “bloody man” (“his silver skin lac’d with his golden blood,” as Macbeth thrillingly says at 2.3.110; I don’t usually like to do the term-paper motif-tracing thing, but it’s hard to ignore all the references to blood in this play. Scholars have counted over 100.).

The bloody Captain relates the outcome of the triple battle in which Duncan’s forces have been engaged. In one phase, the rebellious Macdonwald (“Macdonald”) is about to prevail when “brave Macbeth . . . unseam’d him from the nave to the chops/And fix’d his head upon our battlements” (1.2.16, 22–23). But there is little time to celebrate, as the “Norweyan [Norwegian] Lord” takes the opportunity to attack. The exhausted Captain gives way to one Rosse, who recounts the third phase of the battle; the king of Norway himself, aided by the treacherous Thane of Cawdor, “began a dismal conflict” but—again!—was defeated by Macbeth just in time. Duncan is not amused by the Thane’s behavior: “Go pronounce his present death/And with his former title greet Macbeth” (1.2.66–67).

It all seems straightforward enough: Macbeth has fought with uncommon valor for his king, and is to be rewarded with the title of Thane of Cawdor. But what was that I said about everything in this play going topsy-turvy without warning?

Fair Is Foul

The opening scene of Macbeth introduces the iconic Three Witches (called “witches” only in the stage directions and dialogue tags—in the play itself they are the “Weird Sisters”), so familiar they are a cliché—especially these very first lines of the play. In this post I’ll ask you to get beyond that familiarity, to try to imagine yourself back to the Jacobean premiere to feel how their very unfamiliarity sets the tone for the whole play.

I find it bizarre that some scholars think Shakespeare didn’t write this scene. I believe they are influenced by the presence of Act 3, scene 5, in which the goddess Hecate appears to lead the witches, and there’s a song from Thomas Middleton’s play The Witch. (Hecate also appears very briefly in Act 4, scene 1 (the “Double, double toil and trouble” scene), and there’s another song from Middleton, but most don’t reject the whole scene). Most scholars conclude that Shakespeare didn’t write 3.5. But that doesn’t show that 1.1 is “un-Shakespearean” or “a poor scene and a pointless scene,” as the once-famous critic Harley Granville-Barker put it. (Granville-Barker was a late-nineteenth- early-twentieth-century actor, director, playwright, and critic; to be fair to him, his stagings were influential and his plays are still occasionally performed. But his criticism, still popular in my student days, was the sort of soporific that made me loathe Three-Last-Names’s class—as you can tell from the diction of that seven-word quote above.)

The witch scenes are the counterpart in Macbeth to the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet; elements so encrusted by subsequent associations that we have to make a heroic effort to see their significance in Shakespeare’s actual play. Consider what you think of first when you hear the word “witch”: perhaps women persecuted and executed in the middle ages and at Salem, perhaps today’s benign Wiccans, but more likely Broom Hilda, the Wicked Witch of the West (or of Wicked), Samantha from Bewitched, Sabrina the Teenaged Witch, the girls of Charmed, Willow in Buffy the Vampire Slayer—mostly defanged, unthreatening figures, feminine in the worst sexist sense. (And yes, I suffered through season six of Buffy; did you really believe Willow as Big Bad? I didn’t think so.) Figures of fun. In Shakespeare’s time, “witch” would have had very different associations. The word would have referred to a malevolent being who wrought evil through the use of magic. All the more so for Macbeth, a play written with the recently crowned King James I, the author of a treatise on witchcraft, in mind. Put Elizabeth Montgomery aside. These witches are forces of evil; not human, maybe not even gendered (or multiply gendered; they appear female, but have beards). Bear that in mind when Lady Macbeth exclaims “Unsex me here.”

By the way, we’ll see the same problem sharply in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Today our concept of “fairy” is so strongly molded by Disney that we must make a conscious effort to recover the sense of spirits who meant humans no good, the sense that prevailed in Shakespeare’s time. Oberon and Puck are no Tinkerbells!

So once again, think yourself back to the Globe. You are attending the world premiere of Macbeth. You probably don’t know much about this quasi-legendary Scottish king unless you’ve read Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, Shakespeare’s main source. Even if you have read your Holinshed, you have no idea what to expect when three figures come on stage to initiate the action:

Thunder and lightning. Enter three WITCHES.
First Witch: When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
Second Witch: When the hurlyburly’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won.
Third Witch: That will be ere the set of sun.
First Witch: Where the place?
Second Witch:
Upon the heath.
Third Witch: There to meet with Macbeth.
First Witch: I come, Graymalkin!
Second Witch: Paddock calls.
Third Witch: Anon!
All: Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
(1.1.1–12)

And then we move into the main action, right at the end of the “hurlyburly”—there really was a battle going on. Thus, even though it isn’t designated as such, this little scene is a prologue (at twelve lines, it’s shorter than the prologue to Romeo and Juliet). As such, it’s Shakespeare’s signal to us about what we should be watching for in the play to come. What have we gleaned from it, careful Jacobean listeners that we are?

• This is a play in which weird, unnatural things are to be expected.
• Those things are sure to be evil; it’s general knowledge at this time that “Graymalkin” and “Paddock” are the names of witches’ familiars, so these three are certainly witches. They are, at the very least, not to be trusted.
• On that note, consider the most important line in the scene: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” This clearly signals that we are in a world turned upside down, where nothing is certain, where one thing can turn into another, where every utterance—especially from this trio—has two meanings. A world, in short—to use a word so important to the play I’m going to have to give you a fairly high-level Lit-Crit post on it somewhere down the line—of equivocation.
• A world in which everything “hovers in the fog and filthy air.” Not only can we not see our way to the true and the good, we are shrouded in a miasma of evil.

That Scotland is of course beset by fog just underscores how beautiful this line is. It works naturalistically and on two metaphorical levels.

And speaking of metaphor, we’re clearly justified in taking the witches not solely as malevolent external entities, but as metaphorical projections of states of mind. We don’t need to go all Freudian to see this (and given Freud’s terrible essay on Lady Macbeth, we would be ill advised to do so). We just need to keep in mind that, equivocators that they are, these Weird Sisters have multiple dimensions.

Put all this together and what do you get? Something familiar to us in 2014 to the point of cliché, but totally novel to the world premiere audience: Macbeth may well be the first true horror story. (Folk tales of witches, vampires, and so on certainly have horrific elements; I can see an argument that Beowulf is a horror story; but horror fiction as we know it did not get started until the Gothic era. Look at it as a horror story and Macbeth doesn’t really have any precursors. Thus, it looks like Shakespeare has founded yet another genre. And since this is a parenthesis, I’ll note that this could allow us to see Roman Polanski’s bloody 1971 adaptation in a new light.)

Consider yourselves warned.

Is This a Thane I See before Me?

Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s least humorous plays. It’s rich in irony, but not in laughs except for the audacious scene of the Porter, which we’ll deal with in detail presently. So let’s ease into it with some comedy and a bit of autobiography. (This is my journey, after all.)

If you know anything about Macbeth other than snatches of some of its famous lines out of context (“Double, double” and all that), you know that actors really do have a superstition that it is bad luck to mention the name of the play or its main characters in a theater. A theatrical tradition of disasters caused by violating this rule goes way back. Hence the phrase “the Scottish Play” to refer to the play, “the Thane” or “the Scottish King” or my favorite, “Mackers,” for Macbeth, and “the Queen” for Lady Macbeth.

Here is a clip about the curse. It’s from the second season of the brilliant—I say again, brilliant—Canadian TV series Slings and Arrows. The three seasons of Slings and Arrows deal with a theatrical company rather like the famous one in Stratford, Ontario, and their efforts to produce Hamlet (season one), Macbeth (season two), and King Lear (season three). If you’ve never seen it, run out and rent the DVDs the minute you finish reading this post. Seriously. You can thank me later. Anyway, the clip begins with a scene that shows off the curse’s terrible effect; it’s followed by the second season theme. The singer is Michael Polley, father of the divine Sarah Polley:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shZBPIy0nPg

See? “I won’t play Mackers.” And as if that didn’t clinch the point, this classic episode of Blackadder (which I somehow managed to find in its entirety) shows the lengths actors go to in order to exorcise any mention of the Scottish Play:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xvlysx_blackadder-season-03-episode-04-sense-and-senility_shortfilms

*                      *                      *

 But enough of this airy persiflage. When we get to The Merchant of Venice (which we may, or may not, do soon after we’ve finished with the Big Four—Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear), I’ll tell, or retell, the story of Mr. Doyle, the phys ed instructor who pinch hit as our English teacher my sophomore year in the Jesuit high school. However, that was not my first go-round with Shakespeare. The earliest exposure I can remember was to Macbeth—not the play itself, but the Classics Illustrated comics version. (Don’t knock Classics Illustrated. I can’t be the only child for whom it was a gateway drug.) I still remember images from this version, especially the scene with Banquo’s ghost and the vision of the kings. I think the illustrator went all out on that one. And who could forget the cover?

 

I certainly didn’t, though I must have repressed that winged helmet. But since I was reading Classics Illustrated before I started school, and this issue dates from 1955, it’s reasonable to think I knew about Macbeth, and Shakespeare, when I was very young. Searching my memory now, I am not sure how old I was when I read the actual play. Fragments have stuck with me for a long time (such as 2.1.50–51, “Where the Norweyan banners flout the sky/And fan our people cold”), but I might only have read it in college.

In any case, when I was little I had the interest. What a pity that it was crushed out of me! This traversal of Macbeth is therefore a memorial to my long-departed younger self, and is offered in the hope that it can prevent even one person in that self’s position from being turned off to Shakespeare.

 

The Failure of Two Gentlemen

There are two endings in Shakespeare that are likely to make contemporary Western audiences feel queasy. Both cause uneasiness because of their treatment of women. The better-known one is The Taming of the Shrew, in which Kate, who has been a “shrew” throughout (meaning that she doesn’t take shit from men), has been trained to be submissive to her husband Petruchio, even to the point of recommending subservience as a way of life to her sister.

The ending of Two Gentlemen is less well known, but even more disquieting. We’ve seen what happens, but let’s hit the highlights yet again:

• Proteus, who thinks nobody is watching, tries to rape Silvia.
• Valentine, who has been hidden and watching all along, reveals himself and confronts Proteus.
• Proteus apologizes to Valentine.
• Valentine forgives Proteus, and just to show that there are no hard feelings, gifts Silvia to him.

It’s an amazing course of events, to be sure. Editors, critics, and audiences have tried since at least the nineteenth century to get their heads around the fact that after all Valentine has seen, Proteus’s flimsy and not obviously sincere apology is enough to induce him to give Proteus the woman he supposedly loves. I won’t go into the interpretive contortions that have resulted from trying to make Valentine’s offer more palatable; the introduction to the Arden Third edition of the play contains a performance history that details a number of them. Sometimes the desperation is almost amusing.

Instead, I want to shift the focus. I can’t help but be struck by the fact that although everybody has problems with Valentine’s offer, nobody has problems with the immediately preceding attempted rape. Nobody wonders what Shakespeare could have meant by it, or insists it must be other than it seems, or cuts it from the text or in performance. William C. Carroll, editor of the Arden Third, strengthens this point by noting that recent stage history has tended to play up the rape scene to the same degree it plays down the offer. This seems downright weird. The offer may be awful, and it surely reflects awful notions about women as property, but there’s no way it is as awful as the rape. In fact, isn’t it obvious that what really makes us uneasy about the offer is that it is made to a rapist? As I’ve said, there is no way we can approve of Proteus, seeing what he’s done. That means there is no way we can identify with Valentine, who also saw what he’s done. Only a downright frivolous attitude could keep us from feeling irreparably alienated from both.

In my view, we can’t extricate the offer from the rape attempt—and it is the latter that needs to be explained, or explained away. And I’m not sure that it can be. Marjorie Garber’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt, in Shakespeare After All, to defang the offer helps suggest why. Like every other commentator including me, Garber reminds us that Two Gentlemen fits squarely into a male buddy literature tradition that goes way back. There were medieval bromances. In fact, as I mentioned, in the story of Titus and Gisippius, one of Shakespeare’s likely sources, there is even an offer of the woman, like Valentine’s. Garber also calls our attention to the genre of the distracted lover—the knight who spends all his time cataloging and contemplating the loved one’s qualities instead of, heaven forbid, actually doing something with her. Certainly any time Proteus opens his mouth he falls into this genre, but so does Valentine (who started out, remember, disparaging Proteus’s lovesickness for Julia). Speed’s diagnosis of his master’s lovesickness makes the point:

VALENTINE. Why, how know you that I am in love?
SPEED. Marry, by these special marks: first, you have learned, like Sir Proteus, to wreathe your arms, like a malcontent; to relish a love-song, like a robin redbreast; to walk alone, like one that had the pestilence; to sigh, like a schoolboy that had lost his A B C; to weep, like a young wench that had buried her grandam; to fast, like one that takes diet; to watch, like one that fears robbing; to speak puling, like a beggar at Hallowmas. You were wont, when you laughed, to crow like a cock; when you walked, to walk like one of the lions; when you fasted, it was presently after dinner; when you looked sadly, it was for want of money. And now you are metamorphosed with a mistress, that when I look on you, I can hardly think you my master.
(2.1.15–29)

“All That Was Mine in Silvia”

Act 5 is where Two Gentlemen comes together, or falls apart, or both. First, let’s recap what leads up to the ending. Silvia, disgusted by Proteus and Milan, has decided to flee to the very forest where Valentine has become the leader of a merry band of outlaws (who are a little too reminiscent of Monty Python’s Dennis More and company to take seriously, and who describe themselves as “gentlemen,” 4.1.43). She does so in the very brief 5.1. In 5.2, learning that Silvia has fled, the enraged Duke pursues her into the forest, dragging Proteus and Thurio with him, as Julia tags along (“And I will follow, more to cross that love/Than hate for Silvia, that is gone for love,” 5.2.53–54). Note how Shakespeare has arranged things so that everybody except the servants and Crab will soon end up in the same place. Actually, you can’t help but notice it; it’s that crudely done.

Silvia is captured by the bandits in 5.3 (as are Proteus and Julia, offstage). They take her to “our captain’s cave” (12), at which prospect Silvia interjects “O Valentine, this I endure for thee!” (15). Valentine hides himself as the little party, now including Proteus and Julia, approaches. So he is eavesdropping on the following scene (5.4). Remember, he sees and hears it all.

 

Proteus brazenly comes on again to Silvia (“Unhappy were you, madam, ere I came/But by my coming I have made you happy,” 5.4.29–30), only to meet another vehement rejection:

 

Had I been seized by a hungry lion,
I would have been a breakfast to the beast
Rather than have false Proteus rescue me.
. . .
I do detest false perjured Proteus.
Therefore be gone, solicit me no more.
(5.4.32–40)

 

But not only does Proteus not take no for an answer, he thinks that no means yes:

Nay, if the gentle spirit of moving words
Can no way change you to a milder form,
I’ll woo you like a soldier, at arms’ end,
And love you ‘gainst the nature of love—force ye.
SILVIA. O heaven!
PROTEUS.                    I’ll force thee yield to my desire.
(5.4.55–59)

 

Let’s pause for a moment and be absolutely clear about what just happened. Proteus, that gentleman of Verona, has just tried to rape the woman he says he loves.

I’m ashamed to acknowledge that we live in a world where this really happens. Rape is all too real and too prevalent (though even once is too often.) But in late 2014, at least we can say that it is a crime, however underreported and underprosecuted. And that morally a rapist or attempted rapist like Proteus places himself beyond the pale. Not only can we not approve of his act, we can no longer approve of him. We especially can’t regard him as anything like the hero of this play or as deserving anything other than punishment for what he’s done.

 

Note also that a play that has at best skirted the edge of frivolity for its entire length suddenly lurches into brutal reality. A play with a rapist as one of its comic heroes is—to say the very least—extremely problematic. It is no longer a comedy. We cannot laugh at what Proteus has done.

 

So what happens next? Valentine finally decides that the time is ripe to reveal himself, and denounces Proteus savagely. Not because he tried to rape a woman. No, Valentine is miffed that Proteus has betrayed their friendship:

 

Thou common friend, that’s without faith or love,
For such is a friend now! Treacherous man!
Thou hast beguiled my hopes. Naught but mine eye
Could have persuaded me. Now I dare not say
I have one friend alive; thou wouldst disprove me.
Who should be trusted, when one’s right hand
Is perjured to the bosom? Proteus,
I am sorry I must never trust thee more,
But count the world a stranger for thy sake.
The private wound is deepest. O time most accurst,
‘Mongst all foes that a friend should be the worst!
(5.4. 62–72)

 

I’ve quoted this whole speech to show you that there’s not a word about Silvia. But then, why should there be? She’s property, as will be underlined later. This is between the two gents, and it’s pure bromance. Proteus responds with the abasement appropriate to an offending bro:

 

My shame and guilt confounds me.
Forgive me, Valentine; if hearty sorrow
Be a sufficient ransom for offence,
I tender‘t here; I do as truly suffer
As e’er I did commit.
(5.4.73–77)

We can wonder, and many have, whether Proteus is even sincere, but he certainly gets the response he wants—the passage that has caused more dropped jaws than any other in Shakespeare:

 

VALENTINE. Then I am paid,
And once again I do receive thee honest.
Who by repentance is not satisfied
Is nor of heaven nor earth, for these are pleased;
By penitence th’ Eternal’s wrath’s appeased.
And that my love may appear plain and free,
All that was mine in Silvia I give thee.
(5.4.77–83)

He That Smelt It

Crab’s second appearance comes at Act 4, scene 4, lines 1–38. Just before, Silvia has determined to escape Milan and enlisted the gentil knight Sir Eglamour. Just before that, Silvia has scorned Proteus. Launce’s monologue will be interrupted by Proteus and Julia’s entrance, when Proteus bids Julia take his ring to Silvia. Thus, there is important action on both sides of the speech.

Crab doesn’t give a dog’s fart, even though he has a part in the action. Proteus, you see, has promised to give Silvia a lapdog, said to be the size of a squirrel; Paris Hilton was not the first to have a teacup Chihuahua (and if this reflects badly on Silvia, so much the better). He entrusts the dog to Launce, who promptly misplaces it and decides to give Silvia Crab instead; he’s ten times the size, so it will be ten times the gift. And that is when they wander onstage. I’m afraid I couldn’t even find a complete video rendition online, let alone one I liked at all; so imagine Will Kemp, Bill Irwin, or whoever you like going full throttle.

LAUNCE. When a man’s servant shall play the cur with him, look you, it goes hard: one that I brought up of a puppy; one that I saved from drowning when three or four of his blind brothers and sisters went to it. I have taught him even as one would say precisely, “Thus I would teach a dog.” I was sent to deliver him as a present to Mistress Silvia from my master, and I came no sooner into the dining-chamber but he steps me to her trencher and steals her capon’s leg. O, ‘tis a foul thing when a cur cannot keep himself in all companies! I would have, as one should say, one that takes upon him to be a dog indeed, to be, as it were, a dog at all things. If I had not had more wit than he, to take a fault upon me that he did, I think verily he had been hanged for’t; sure as I live, he had suffered for’t. You shall judge. He thrusts me himself into the company of three or four gentleman-like dogs under the Duke’s table. He had not been there—bless the mark!—a pissing-while but all the chamber smelt him. “Out with the dog,” says one; “What cur is that?” says another; “Whip him out,” says the third; “Hang him up,” says the Duke. I, having been acquainted with the smell before, knew it was Crab, and goes me to the fellow that whips the dogs. “Friend,” quoth I, “you mean to whip the dog?” “Ay, marry do I,” quoth he. “You do him the more wrong,” quoth I, “‘twas I did the thing you wot of.” He makes me no more ado but whips me out of the chamber. How many masters would do this for his servant? Nay, I’ll be sworn I have sat in the stock for puddings he hath stolen, otherwise he had been executed. I have stood on the pillory for geese he hath killed, otherwise he had suffered for’t. [to Crab] Thou think’st not of this now. Nay, I remember the trick you served me when I took my leave of Madam Silvia. Did not I bid thee still mark me, and do as I do? When didst thou see me heave up my leg and make water against a gentlewoman’s farthingale? Didst thou ever see me do such a trick?

And so, we see, Launce is returning from a failed mission. Silvia has rejected Crab, for reasons with which we can only sympathize. But sandwiched between his two recountings of his audience with Silvia, he slips in the most extraordinary story. As you know, I’ve written at length—great length—about Shakespeare’s fart jokes. The ones I discussed proceed by innuendo—the clown in Othello talking about “wind instruments,” Lear howling “Blow winds, and crack your cheeks.” They’re about wind, instrumental or natural. This one is about—farts. Dog farts, to be precise. Launce is reproving Crab by reminding him of how Launce took the rap for him when he, Crab, farted under “the Duke’s table,” and got himself whipped for it. Greater love than this hath no man, indeed!

But Crab is sublimely indifferent as always. Though I would give major props to a production that had him fart when Launce says “Thou think’st not of this now,” I suppose that isn’t strictly necessary, since Crab also pissed on Silvia’s farthingale. The object is a woman’s hoop skirt (and I’d wager that Will Kemp raised his leg to illustrate the line) but the word cries out for commentary from Beavis and Butt-Head. This, I think, is proof that this speech is by Shakespeare—certainly not a transcript of Kemp’s routine. For this kind of wordplay is utterly characteristic of him.

One other brief point. I’ve mentioned that some scholars draw an analogy between Crab and Proteus, which I don’t find especially plausible. But I note the verbal parallel between Launce and Julia: as the former asks “How many masters would do this for his servant?” the latter asks “How many women would do such a message?” But would Julia suffer to be whipped for Proteus’s faults? As we saw three posts ago, maybe.

So, what are we to make of Crab’s two appearances? I suppose Wells is right that they are both “groaners,” but I for one do not hold that against them. I’d only observe that groaners can be much harder to pull off than they appear. These two ought to be hilarious if they are at all well done, but look at just a few of the YouTube videos and you will see exactly how much the actor playing Launce needs to put into his performance to make it work. As Steve Martin said, comedy is not pretty.

Sometimes it’s not even funny. That’s our cue to turn to the finale, one of the most uncomfortable scenes in Shakespeare.