To Be or Not to Be
PENGUIN BOOKS
TO BE OR NOT TO BE
Born in Liverpool and educated at Oxford, Michael Kerrigan is a freelance writer and journalist, reviewing regularly for The Times Literary Supplement and the Scotsman. His books include Who Lies Where: A Guide to Famous Graves (1995) and The Wit and Wisdom of Jane Austen (1996). He now lives in Edinburgh.
To Be or Not to Be
SHAKESPEARE’S SOLILOQUIES
Edited by Michael Kerrigan
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2002
8
Introduction and editorial matter © Michael Kerrigan, 2002
All rights reserved
The moral right of the editor has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-192832-6
Contents
Introduction
A Note on the Text
Two Gentlemen of Verona
Nay, ’twill be this hour ere I have done weeping
Even as one heat another heat expels,
To leave my Julia, shall I be forsworn;
How use doth breed a habit in a man!
The Taming of the Shrew
Thus have I politicly begun my reign,
Henry VI Part 2
Anjou and Maine are given to the French;
Now, York, or never, steel thy fearful thoughts,
Henry VI Part 3
The army of the Queen hath got the field;
This battle fares like to the morning’s war,
Ill blows the wind that profits nobody.
Ay, Edward will use women honourably.
What! Will the aspiring blood of Lancaster
Titus Andronicus
Now climbeth Tamora Olympus’ top,
Henry VI Part 1
My thoughts are whirlèd like a potter’s wheel;
Well didst thou, Richard, to suppress thy voice;
Richard III
Now is the winter of our discontent
Was ever woman in this humour wooed?
Give me another horse! Bind up my wounds!
Love’s Labour’s Lost
And I, forsooth, in love!
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
How happy some o’er other some can be!
Romeo and Juliet
But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
O Romeo, Romeo! – wherefore art thou Romeo?
Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,
Richard II
I have been studying how I may compare
King John
Mad world! Mad kings! Mad composition!
Henry IV Part 1
I know you all, and will awhile uphold
’Tis not due yet – I would be loath to pay him before his day.
For worms, brave Percy. Fare thee well, great heart!
Embowelled? If thou embowel me to-day,
Henry IV Part 2
How many thousands of my poorest subjects
I would you had but the wit;
Why doth the crown lie there upon his pillow,
Much Ado About Nothing
I do much wonder that one man,
Henry V
Upon the King! Let us our lives, our souls,
O God of battles, steel my soldiers’ hearts;
Julius Caesar
It must be by his death; and, for my part,
Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar
O conspiracy,
O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
As You Like It
Hang there, my verse, in witness of my love,
Hamlet
O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,
O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else?
O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
To be, or not to be – that is the question;
’Tis now the very witching time of night,
O, my offence is rank. It smells to heaven.
Now might I do it pat, now ’a is a-praying.
How all occasions do inform against me
Twelfth Night
I left no ring with her; what means this lady?
Troilus and Cressida
Peace, you ungracious clamours! Peace, rude sounds!
Words, vows, gifts, tears, and love’s full sacrifice
I am giddy; expectation whirls me round.
Sir Thomas More
It is in heaven that I am thus and thus,
Measure for Measure
What’s this? What’s this? Is this her fault or mine?
When I would pray and think, I think and pray
He who the sword of heaven will bear
Othello
This fellow’s of exceeding honesty,
It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul:
All’s Well That Ends Well
O, were that all! I think not on my father,
Timon of Athens
Let me look back upon thee. O thou wall
O blessed breeding sun, draw from the earth
King Lear
Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law
I heard myself proclaimed,
Yet better thus, and known to be contemned,
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
Macbeth
The raven himself is hoarse
If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
Is this a dagger which I see before me,
She should have died hereafter;
Antony and Cleopatra
I will o’ertake thee, Cleopatra, and
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
How courtesy would seem to cover sin,
Yet cease your ire, you angry stars of heaven!
Coriolanus
O world, thy slippery turns! Friends now fast sworn,
The Winter’s Tale
I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty,
Cymbeline
The crickets sing, and man’s o’er-laboured sense
Is there no way for men to be, but women
I see a man’s life is a tedious one.
Yes, sir, to Milford Haven. Which is the way?
Most welcome, bondage! For thou art a way,
The Tempest
All the infections that the sun sucks up
Here’s neither bush nor shrub
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves,
Henry VIII
So farewell – to the little good you bear me.
The Two Noble Kinsmen
Banished the kingdom? ’Tis a benefit,
Why should I love this gentleman? ’Tis odds
I am very cold, and all the stars are out too,
Yet I may bind those wounds up, that must open
Index of First Lines
Introduction
The news that Henry VI has ordered him to Ireland to put down an insurrection comes as a hammer-blow to the Duke of York, yet he soon sees that it presents him with an opportunity. With an army marshalled in his command, he will be practically a king himself – if only he can muster up in himself the determination he will need to press his high ambitions:
Now, York, or never, steel thy fearful thoughts,
And change misdoubt to resolution;
Be that thou hopest to be, or what thou art
Resign to death; it is not worth th’ enjoying.
Let pale-faced fear keep with the mean-born man,
And find no harbour in a royal heart.
Faster than spring-time showers comes thought on thought,
And not a thought but thinks on dignity.
(Henry VI, Part 2, III, i, 331–8)
We are for the moment removed from the alarums and excursions of history in the making, the dramatic confrontations of the Tudor court, yet in York’s musings we glimpse another, inward action which is if anything more frenetic, more urgently driven.
Although set back from the main dramatic narrative, Shakespeare’s soliloquies are generally anything but interludes. Nowhere do we come closer to the centre of things than we do in those moments in which characters speak when alone, or unaware of being overheard – in conversation, as it were, with themselves and with their audience. Episodes often of the utmost privacy, of introversion, presented publicly on the open stage, they present the paradox of the theatrical performance at its starkest: how is it that a single speaking voice can contain such infinite possibility? ‘I have been studying how I may compare/This prison where I live unto the world,’ says Richard II, and as he does so we seem to leave the narrow confines of the apron stage to see the whole human universe spread out before us. What could be more thrilling than that moment in the theatre when all extraneous circumstance seems to melt away into the wings and the individual consciousness is left in confrontation with the eternal problems of existence? ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…’, says Macbeth – and suddenly it seems as though time were standing still as the once-ambitious thane sees his entire career reduced to a tale of futility – a play, indeed – his lady dead.
Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth, V, v, 23–8
The great soliloquies may not make much noise but they are often show-stoppers in the more literal sense that they appear to suspend all normal narrative logic, reaching out instead for universalities that transcend any immediate dramatic setting.
High-flown? Without a doubt, but then in the popular mind, at any rate, soliloquy and sublimity have been near relations. Whatever the question he may pose, Hamlet certainly has a lot to answer for. His tortured will makes him the paradigm, for many, not only of the soliloquy but of Shakespeare’s plays in general. The Romantic image of the tragic hero standing high atop a craggy mountain yelling his defiance as lightning bolts play about his head is recognizably derived from Hamlet in his more rhetorical moments. Yet that stereotype, enduring as it has been, had arguably been debunked by the Bard himself long before it was installed in the cultural consciousness by Byron and his continental followers. Lear’s maunderings on the blasted heath, the sheer indignity of his aged helplessness, offered the most ironic commentary possible on this cult of the youthful Hamlet-hero, masterful in eloquence even if existentially adrift. It is worth noting that – though held by many to be Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy – King Lear has few significant soliloquies, those that there are being delivered almost exclusively not by the protagonist himself but by secondary characters. The reader will notice that other tragedies too are under-represented here. Othello and Coriolanus are both comparatively reticent, men of action rather than of words or introspection – yet their tragedies are of course no less powerful for that. Antony and Cleopatra make great speeches but add little to the sum of soliloquy: they confide either in one another, equal partners in a historic folie à deux, or in those attendants and comrades who stand by, the anxious witnesses to their tragically divided loyalties.
This book would not seek to claim, therefore, that the soliloquies contain the ‘essence’ of Shakespeare’s plays: only of Hamlet would that even arguably be true. None of the other tragic protagonists is anything like so self-conscious as the Danish Prince, while in the Comedies soliloquies are employed for altogether different ends. The Bard is not above using soliloquy for the most brazen background-briefings to the audience aimed at moving on what would otherwise seem impossibly convoluted plots. (Not that such speeches cannot make for memorable poetry: Petruchio’s soliloquy in The Taming of the Shrew (IV, i) is a blatant bit of coaching of precisely this sort, but a striking moment, in its awesome cynicism, none the less.) Since the grand, set-piece soliloquy is associated with operatic anguish and high seriousness, any comic uses would of course have to be ironic. The most obvious examples of these are broad anti-soliloquies burlesquing the exalted sentiments and profound philosophizing of the tragic ones. Hence the searing outrage of Launce’s denunciation of his dog’s ingratitude in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (II, iii), or Falstaff’s po-faced exposition of that ‘first humane principle’ of life which is sherry-drinking (Henry IV Part 2, IV, ii).
Yet Shakespeare’s comedies are never merely comic, any more than his tragedies are purely tragic: the lightest romance is liable to have its melancholy moments. Love may make the world of the Comedies go round, but – as Lysander reminds Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – its course never did run smooth. Their friend Helena certainly doesn’t find it so: she is forced early on to recognize the ungovernable arbitrariness of the heart. Her realization (I, ii) that her beauty doesn’t necessarily qualify her as fit object for so subjective an emotion as love is as harrowing in its way as the guilty consciousness of her namesake in All’s Well That Ends Well that her love for Bertram is displacing her grief – sincere as that is – for her recently-departed father.
O, were that all! I think not on my father,
And these great tears grace his remembrance more
Than those I shed for him. What was he like?
I have forgot him; my imagination
Carries no favour in’t but Bertram’s.
I am undone: there is no living, none,
If Bertram be away.
(All’s Well That Ends Well, I, i, 78–84)
The soliloquies in the comedies frequently offer as much wisdom as they do wit: Viola’s thoughts on women’s susceptibility in Twelfth Night, II, ii, are a case in point. A wary eye has to be kept, though, on just who is speaking and in what frame of mind – the tensions between speech and speaker are part of what gives such life to Shakespeare’s plays. Posthumus’ bitter reaction to his wife’s apparent infidelity in Cymbeline clearly draws on the hackneyed lore of alehouse misogynism, yet the real pain behind it is palpable.
Is there no way for men to be, but women
Must be half-workers? We are all bastards,
And that most venerable man which I
Did call my father was I know not where
When I was stamp’d. Some coiner with his tools
Made me a counterfeit…
(Cymbeline, II, v, 1–6)
That so many of these soliloquies have ‘something to say’ – however debatable – should not really be a surprise: long before soliloquy was seen as some sort of ‘window’ on the innermost individual psyche, it tended to be regarded as a jumping-off-point for more generalized remarks about human morality and the workings of human destiny. The plays of the Roman philosopher and writer Seneca, which exerted so strong an influence on the Elizabethan playwrights, including Shakespeare, were little more than dramatic vehicles designed to carry these lofty commentaries. To a modern taste, which Shakespeare did much to form, such sententiae seem sententious in a more pejorative sense: we prefer to draw our own moral conclusions from what we see rather than be directly preached at. (The more conspicuously high-minded Shakespearean soliloquies may reveal more about the speakers’ self-delusions than about the ways of the world: Brutus’ self-righteous meditations in Julius Caesar are a case in point.) Yet Shakespeare himself, for all his innovation, did not reject the Senecan model out of hand. The English Histories and the ‘Roman plays’ alike abound in generalized speeches on the responsibilities of office, the dangers of wealth and fame and the folly of the passions, all Senecan themes done almost to death by previous playwrights yet revived and re-humanized by Shakespeare. The protagonist’s reflections on his fall in Sir Thomas More are clearly Senecan in thought and feeling while remaining utterly Shakespearean in their psychological vividness and poetic power. In King John, the Bastard’s withering words on the force of ‘commodity’ in the world add a contemporary edge of Machiavellian cynicism to the basic Senecan structure.