Expanding Eyes: A Visionary Education

The Duke’s plan to fool Angelo by substituting the head of Barnardine won’t work because Barnardine humorously refuses to be hanged. So they substitute the head of an already dead criminal for Claudio’s. The Duke “returns” in Act 5. Isabella and Mariana accuse Angelo but are arrested for slander. Lucio unhoods the Friar—to reveal the Duke.

In the middle of Act 3, at a dark moment, the plot turns. The Duke speaks of Mariana, abandoned by Angelo, now in the “moated grange.” Tennyson’s famous monologue “Mariana.” Pompey and Mistress Overdone are arrested. Lucio has gotten a prostitute pregnant and refuses marriage and child support.

When Isabella informs Claudio of Angelo’s offer, that his life may be saved if she has sex with Angelo, in terror of death he begs her to do it. Her cold, angry response, lacking all compassion, is absolutely unChristian, and we have to probe her deeper psychology, her need to be sheltered from life and its imperfections.

Angelo is reluctant to come right out and say it, but finally tells Isabella that she must give herself up to him sexually in order to save her brother’s life. The Duke, as Friar, counsels Claudio that he should be detached about death because life is not worth living. This is a possible religious attitude, though not one that Shakespeare’s comedies ever endorse.

Elbow, the Constable, has arrested Pompey because something insulting was said to his wife when she entered the whorehouse to ask for stewed prunes. Elbow is so confused that we never learn more. Isabella pleads for her brother’s life, and Angelo, after she leaves, discovers he is sexually obsessed with her.

The Duke of Vienna puts young Angelo in charge in his absence, but disguises himself as a Friar and intends to observe what goes on in his absence. Angelo has Claudio arrested because his fiancée Julietta is pregnant, though they are engaged in a binding, though secret contract. Lucio goes to the convent to fetch Claudio’s sister Isabella to plead to Angelo for Claudio’s life.

The common pattern of all three plots in Twelfth Night: a deadlocked conflict of opposites into which a third factor enters to transform the situation. In all three plots, this involves a character with two identities and gender ambiguity. Introduction to Measure for Measure: the meaning of the designation “problem play.”

Feste as Sir Topas the cleric accuses Malvolio, desperate and shut up in darkness, of being mad. Act 5 is a single scene of multiple recognitions, climaxing when Viola/Cesario is standing on stage and her identical twin brother Sebastian walks on: “A natural perspective, that is and is not.” The couples are sorted out, Viola and Orsino, Olivia and Sebastian. Malvolio stomps out, vowing revenge.

Sir Toby’s crowd play a joke on both “Cesario” and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, pushing two terrified characters into a duel. Antonio intervenes, thinking “Cesario” is Sebastian. Malvolio acts so bizarrely that Olivia fears he has gone mad, though he is following the instructions of the fake letter, designed to humiliate him.

A false letter, faked by Maria, makes Malvolio think Olivia secretly loves him, and gives him advice which will humiliate him when he follows it. Another practical joke: “Cesario” is supposedly challenged to a duel by Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Antonio dares to stick by Sebastian, though he is subject to arrest if apprehended by the Duke’s officers.

Viola’s brother Sebastian, disguised as Roderigo, and his good friend Antonio. Orsino is increasingly drawn to Cesario, the disguised Viola. But Olivia is as well. The reveling crew of Sir Toby Belch hatch a plot against Malvolio. Songs of carpe diem and of death.

Viola, dressed as a young man named Cesario, is sent to woo Olivia on his behalf. Olivia is shut up, wearing a veil, vowing to mourn her brother for 7 years. In comes Cesario, and Olivia promptly is infatuated with her, not realizing that “Cesario” is another woman. The antagonism between the steward Malvolio and the rowdy crew of Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Maria. The contrast betwe...

Shakespeare transforms the New Comedy or comedy of manners pattern by having the action move through some realm of mysterious transformation. In Twelfth Night, Viola, the heroine, comes of out the sea, surviving shipwreck, disguises herself as a male, and enters the court of Duke Orsino, which eventually leads to the transformation of the whole society of Illyria, an imaginary country, the interse...

The mystery of how the English won, suffering small losses, though hugely outnumbered. Slapstick scenes with Fluellen, the true honorable soldier who publicly humiliates the fraudulent braggart soldier Pistol. Act 5 ends the play like a comedy, with a betrothal. The comic wooing of the princess Catharine by Henry, though neither speaks the other’s language very well.

The conflicts in Shakespeare’s tetralogy are one phase in the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, followed by the Wars of the Roses, a civil war that ended the Plantagenet dynasty. The astonishing victory at Agincourt on October 25, 1415, against seemingly impossible odds. The question of whether Henry followed the honorable rules of war.

The central theme of the play: what is justified in Henry V’s career? The death of Falstaff, and his replacement by the comic Welshman Fluellen. The comic pattern of alazon vs. eiron, boaster vs. self-deprecator. The siege of Harfleur. Another theme: the power of language. Henry’s speeches.

The portrait of Henry in this play as an idealized model or “mirror” of a “Christian king, not a realistic characterization. The mirror contrast with Richard II, who uses his imagination as escape into narcissistic fantasy. Henry inspires the imagination of others. A long disquisition over Henry’s legal right to rule France. In Act 2, the return of the lower-class characters, the quarreling Nym an...

Henry IV dies offstage between Acts 4 and 5. Hal, now Henry V, embraces his brothers and vindicates the Lord Chief Justice, who had had him arrested, notwithstanding he was the future king of England. The play ends as he rejects his false father figure, Falstaff, in a devastating speech. Henry V opens with a famous Prologue that is in fact about the power of imagination, working through language,...

Prince John defeats the rebels without battle by breaking his word to them with cold calculation. Falstaff carouses with Shallow and Silence, and remembers the “chimes at midnight” from the days of their youth. On the good news of the rebels’ defeat, Henry IV collapses. Hal enters his chamber, sees him unconscious, assumes him dead, and puts on the crown. Henry wakes and accuses Hal of being eager...

Northumberland is persuaded by his wife and Hotspur’s widow to betray the rebel cause a second time and flee to Scotland. An extraordinary reality-TV-style scene in the tavern. The prostitute and “drama queen” Doll Tearsheet loves to pick fights with men just as entertainment. She picks a fight with Falstaff, then with Pistol, the braggart soldier, and gets the two men to fight each other. Act 3 o...

Part 2 mirrors Part 1 but has a harsh, almost naturalistic realism that is quite different and modern-seeming. It takes place immediately after the first part, and a personified Rumour spreads fake news about the outcome of the Battle of Shrewsbury. Northumberland throws away his crutches and decides he isn’t sick anymore, now that the battle is over. Falstaff encounters the incorruptible Lord Chi...

The king offers clemency, but Worster and Vernon lie to Hotspur and Douglas and say the king showed “no mercy.” Walter Blunt is killed by Douglas. Falstaff’s famous soliloquy about honor. Hal saves his father’s life, then fights and kills Hotspur. He thinks Falstaff is dead, but Falstaff is “counterfeiting” death and “rises” once Hal leaves. The rebels lose and are captured.

The intense and moving confrontation of father and son, Henry IV and Hal, in which the king says that Hal is not only a failure but, for all he knows, possibly a betrayer. But Hal placates him. In Act 4, Falstaff has allowed the good men to buy their way out and instead conscripted troop of pathetic failures. On the eve of the decisive battle, one by one all the rebels send word that they are back...

The double tetralogy of history plays as the “Henriad,” a quasi-epic. Yet the surprising amount of humor in the play, subverting epic high seriousness. Hotspur and the Welsh Owen Glendower argue while trying to carve up a map of England. Hotspur deflates Glendower’s pretensions as a mighty magician. Hotspur and Kate: an attractive marriage, full of bantering, poignant because we know that Hotspur...

Plays relevant to our time, because they explore the social chaos that ensures when the rule of law is overthrown by various kinds of people with interests of their own. Henry’s allies have turned against him, the lower-class characters in the tavern are out of control. There is nothing to constrain aristocracy who do not like to be constrained, or who are psychologically disconnected from reality...