All of this is consummate silliness, of course; there is no honesty in it, as Touchstone would say. And yet it is also just and true. When Rosalind says, “The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love-cause,” we know she is right; and when she adds that “Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love,” we know that is right, too. And yet in no play of Shakespeare, or in hardly any other play, is love so potent, do we feel its great power so deeply. If Rosalind can be so much in love, she the mocker, the sprite, the free woman, then love must be strong indeed. Which is, after all, as good a moral as one is likely to get from a comedy.
Around the year 1600, the author of Shakespeare’s plays—whoever he was—seems to have undergone a radical change in temperament and outlook, which ushers in the third period of his career. Gone, never to be found again, is the delicious merriment of Much Ado and As You Like It, the inspired foolishness of Falstaff, even the warmly touching love-tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. “Shakespeare” continues to write comedies, but of a very different sort; there is a bitterness in Troilus and Cressida, in Measure for Measure, and in All’s Well That Ends Well that has not been seen before. Indeed, this third period is not noted for comedy. It is the period of the great tragedies, from Julius Caesar and Hamlet, both about political treachery, to Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, about political failure. In between lie Othello, Lear, and Macbeth, which plunge the reader-viewer into depths of feeling and experience not equaled in any other works in any language.
One of the many miracles of Shakespeare’s career is that he did not founder in despair, but lived and worked his way through it and came out, safe and sound, on the other side. The fourth period is almost the best of all. Five plays mark it, one rather boring history, Henry VIII, and four wonderful romances, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Of these my own favorite is Cymbeline, partly, I admit, because it is probably the least known and most infrequently performed.
Cymbeline is a long, immensely complicated play; I would not try to outline the plot in fewer than ten pages. Suffice it to say that it is about all of Shakespeare’s favorite subjects: love, loss, and treachery; the unequal conflict between the good and the wicked; the fragile balance between men and women. The love story here is particularly moving; Imogen and Posthumus are one of Shakespeare’s finest couples, and Imogen especially is a magnificent creation; she is another Rosalind, but on a higher and more dangerous plane. The treachery is also devastating, as it is in Othello, and the friendship of Posthumus and Pisanio reminds us of Hamlet and Horatio. But none of these things, rich and fine as they are, defines or orders the play.
When you have written thirty plays and know everything about writing plays, and in particular know that your skill will not allow you to make any really bad mistakes, you may be willing to take some very big chances and try things that have never been tried. This is what Shakespeare does in Cymbeline, and it is the reason above all why I love the play.
Aristotle was the first to observe that the denouement, or unwinding, of the plot is the test of a good playwright. If this is awkwardly or ineptly done the play cannot be good, no matter what other merits it has. In most plays, the denouement occupies only a portion of the last act; even when it is well done it does not take much time to do it. But the denouement of Cymbeline dominates the play; it is the reason for the play’s existence.
The complexities of the plot are all set forth in the first few scenes, and they are many and various. Once the basic complexities are presented, changes are rung upon them so that the audience, to say nothing of the characters themselves, are simply bewildered. Everyone on the stage during the denouement is under one misconception or another, and these misconceptions are serious matters; if they continue, almost all the main characters will go to their deaths. But Shakespeare doesn’t want such an unhappy ending to his lovely story. Slowly, one by one, he unties the knots, picks apart the web of confusions and mistakes, and reveals everyone to everyone else: daughter to father, husband to wife and wife to husband, sister to brothers, master to servant, friend to friend. At the end the poetry of the play, which has never been base, rises to heights. And Cymbeline himself, the old King of Britain to whom is now restored all that he has ever loved and lost, sums up the theme in these lines:
Never was a war did cease Ere bloody hands were wash’d, with such a peace.
This is the great peace of Shakespeare’s last plays. This peace, in the solitary certainty of a task superbly done, is what Prospero refers to in the famous speech that closes The Tempest:
Let me not
Since I have my dukedom got, And pardon’d the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell; But release me from the bands With the help of your good hands.
As you from crimes would pard’d be Let your indulgence set me free.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
1547–1616
Don Quixote
It would be good to know more about Miguel de Cervantes, but records are sparse. He lived long ago, not an important man as importance was measured in the Spain of four centuries ago. In another sense, of course, he was more important than anyone else in Spain, including King Philip II, and his only peer in Europe and, indeed, the world, was an Englishman who was writing plays for the Globe Theatre when Cervantes was composing Don Quixote. In fact, some reference books still report Shakespeare and Cervantes as dying on the same day, April 23, 1616, and that is very pleasant to think about, although it probably is not true. At any rate, we can imagine the two of them arriving together at Saint Peter’s Gate, perhaps even hand in hand, but more likely arguing about the relative merits of plays or novels, of comedy or tragedy, or whatever.
We do know that Cervantes had an eventful life before he sat down in the kitchen of his little house in Esquivias and wrote the first part of Don Quixote. He had been born in 1547, in the university city of Alcala de Henares, the son of an itinerant barber-surgeon. He received little or no formal education but read all the books he could get his hands on. While still a young man, he was stage struck to the extent that he spent much of the rest of his life dreaming of success as a playwright. When he was twenty-four he sailed from Messina, in Sicily, on board the Marquesa in the armada led by Don John of Austria against the Turks, and he fought valiantly at the Battle of Lepanto, receiving three gunshot wounds, one permanently maiming his left hand—“to the greater glory,” he said, “of the right.” Recovered, he served in other campaigns and was an effective soldier, a fact confirmed by letters of commendation given him by Don John and the Viceroy of Sicily. He left Naples with these letters in hand to return to Spain in the fall of 1575.