The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street Read Online Free PDF

likeable characters not at all admirable. The humour is bitter; it has ‘a grating quality which excludes geniality and ensures disturbing after-thoughts’. 41 They are also ‘problem plays’ in a more direct sense: plays which deliberately pose problems - ethical conundrums, tangled motives, characters ‘at war ’twixt will and will not’. They continue, in a different register, the mood ushered in by Hamlet at the beginning of the new century - nervy, questioning, ‘sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’; and sickly also in the perception of malaise and corruption beneath the veneer of society: something ‘rotten in the state’. This is a particular theme of Measure for Measure , where the city’s ills lie less in the visible squalor of its prisons and brothels than in the concealed corruption of those in government:
     
Authority, though it err like others,
Hath yet a kind of medicine in itself
That skins the vice o’ th’ top . . . (2.2.135-7)
     
    The overall quality of these plays is summed up by A. P. Rossiter - one of the most eloquent of the mid-twentieth-century analysts - as ‘shiftingness’:
    All the firm points of view or points d’appui fail one, or are felt to be fallible . . . Like Donne’s love-poems, these plays throw opposed and contradictory views into the mind, only to leave the resulting equations without any settled or soothing solutions. They are all about ‘ Xs ’ that do not work out.
     
    Or as it is sinuously expressed by the sceptical Lafeu in All’s Well : ‘Hence it is that we make trifles of our terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear’ (2.3.3-6).
    In formal terms - indeed in terms of theatrical fashion and therefore partly market-driven - these plays are Shakespeare’s experiments in tragicomedy. The term originates with Plautus, the Roman comic dramatist much admired by Shakespeare, who called his play Amphitryon a ‘tragicomoedia’ because it improperly mingled gods and ordinary middle-class Romans. In Shakespeare’s day the new models were Italian writers like Giovanbattista Giraldi Cintio (known in England as Cinthio) and Giovanbattista Guarini, both products of the sophisticated court of Ferrara. The poet and diplomat Guarini, whose pastoral tragicomedy Il Pastor Fido (‘The Faithful Shepherd’) was translated into English in 1602, offers some interesting precepts. ‘True’ tragicomedy, he writes, avoids the ‘great themes’ of tragedy. It is realistic rather than fantastic, it blends ‘contrary qualities’, and it brings the characters through dangers and perplexities - through what he calls the ‘feigned knot’ ( il nodo finto ) of the story - to happiness. 42 These elegant definitions, from an essay published with the English Pastor Fido in 1602, could well have been in Shakespeare’s mind when he was writing All’s Well that Ends Well a year or two later. The very title of the play is a somewhat ironic definition of tragicomedy, though at the end of it the best the King can muster is ‘All seems to be well.’
    Hamlet has a humorous comment on these fashionable hybrids, as Polonius struggles to itemize the repertoire of the players newly arrived in Elsinore - they are, he assures us, ‘the best . . . either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical- pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral . . .’ (2.2.397-400).
    The keynote of this new kind of tragicomedy is its mingling of disparate tones and emotions - what Guarini calls ‘contrary qualities’. Again Hamlet is a prototype, with its intrusions of sharp and sometimes seamy banter into the traditionally relentless format of Senecan revenge-tragedy. This is precisely the quality praised in what is probably the earliest surviving critical comment on the play. In his preface to Daiphantus (1604), the mysterious ‘An. Sc.’ hopes his own poem will be popular with the