Kent Paul - 101 Short Essays on Shakespeare

101 SHORT ESSAYS
ON SHAKESPEARE

by

Paul Kent

Paul Kent, 2015

101 Short Essays on Shakespeare

First published in 2015

By Creative Content Ltd, Roxburghe House, 273-287 Regent Street, London, W1B 2HA.

Copyright 2015 Paul Kent

The moral right of Paul Kent to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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The views expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion or policy of Creative Content Ltd. or any employing organization unless specifically stated.

Typesetting by Creative Content

Cover Design by Daniel at HCT Design

eISBN 9781908807298

For Betty and Fred. The best.

Contents

Preface: Begin Here

I really dont like wasting time, and Im sure you dont either. Lifes too short, for one thing. And if youre studying Shakespeare, or simply want to know a bit more about his poems and plays, it would take several lifetimes to read the mountain of material currently available. Even deciding where to begin is a question that is getting more and more difficult to answer. So after long deliberation, I reached the conclusion that what the world just might need is an accessible introduction for the time-poor (in market-analyst-speak), which is a pretty huge and growing audience demographic that might well include you. And thats why I feel justified in adding one more book to the mountain: from four decades of reading, studying and playgoing, Ive tried to distil the most helpful one-volume introduction to Shakespeare that I know how to write. Its the book I wished I had on many occasions throughout my life, but could never find.

Just because these essays are short, it doesnt mean theyre superficial, patronizing, or packed with bite-size bits of Shakespearean nanoculture theres quite enough of that available on the internet already. What Ive tried to do is make it approachable and concise, while being meaty and satisfying at the same time. None of these 101 essays should detain you longer than necessary, and each can stand alone without reference to any of the others.

I dont claim that these are exhaustive treatments each topic could (and actually has) prompted at least one book-length study, and some many, many more than that; instead, the idea here is to drill down to the very core of each individual subject. A short list of suggested reading is included at the end should you wish to pursue your researches further.

The contents can be used in at least two different ways:

First way: Its easy to flip through this book as you would through a quick reference guide you can browse the contents and take what you want in whatever order you wish.

Each of the plays (38) and poetical works (5) has its own essay in Sections 24, complete with plot summary and character list, which should help you whether youre minded to go and see a production of Romeo & Juliet and want some tips on what to expect or simply have to bone up on The Phoenix and the Turtle.

Sections 57 contain a selection of crucial background topics:

Shakespeares biography in Section 5;

theatres, performance and performers in Section 6;

texts, sources and authorship in Section 7.

Pop it onto your smartphone, and itll always be to hand for the next Shakespeare emergency or if you find youve a spare ten minutes.

Second way: When read as a complete work, this book can also be used by those who dont know that much about him as a general short introduction to Shakespeare and his plays. I make no pretence that it is comprehensive Shakespeare is such a huge subject, it could never hope to be. But if you work your way through Section 1: Shakespeare FAQs before tackling the rest of the essays, youll be starting your journey from a position that takes nothing for granted not even a liking for Shakespeare. Once youve browsed these ten introductory essays, youll be ready to tackle the specifics, perhaps beginning with Section 5 before moving on to the plays and poems themselves the options are many and the choice is yours. Youll notice some small repetitions thats necessary for those dipping randomly in and out but by the end, I hope, youll be left with a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

I very much hope it proves useful and saves a lot of your precious time!

Foreword: Many and no one

This book has been a long time coming.

Since 1973, in fact, when my school arranged a visit to Stratford-upon-Avon to watch the Royal Shakespeare Company perform Richard II. I was 13 and, looking back, I wonder what my English teacher was thinking when he chose the power struggle between the eponymous monarch and the future Henry IV as my teenage classs first exposure to Shakespeare. Most school parties begin with more straightforward fare, like A Midsummer Nights Dream or even Macbeth but not us. We were thrown in at the deep end and left to drown in the political and ideological complexities of 15th-century English history. And drown we did.

It was a particularly hot summer; the air conditioning at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre either wasnt working or didnt exist back then, and I was quietly but severely reprimanded by a gentleman in the row behind for fanning myself with my programme. I think the set moved backwards and forwards on hydraulics. The two lead actors were made up to look like identical twins and I couldnt tell them apart. Thats pretty much all I can remember about the experience except that we ate cherry pancakes with squirty cream at The Golden Egg restaurant before the performance, and I bought a cassette copy of the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour that afternoon in Woolworths.

So as Bardic Epiphanies go, mine was pretty rubbish. In fact, it simply didnt happen.

I should have been gobsmacked by the towering performances of Ian Richardson and Richard Pasco, alternating nightly as Richard and Bolingbroke; the masterly direction of the legendary John Barton; the magnificence of the verse-speaking; the sumptuous costumes; the pyrotechnical display banging and fizzing in my imagination as I walked, dazed but elated, into the balmy Stratford evening after the show. This should have been what ignited my profound and abiding love of Shakespeare; this should have been the Damascene conversion that so dramatically changed my life and resulted in the book youre reading now.

Only it wasnt.

Life doesnt always resolve itself into drama, and on that occasion it failed dismally. So I returned home from Stratford with little more than a Beatles cassette and a profound hatred of Shakespeare. I couldnt understand him; hed made a fool of me, and that wasnt a good feeling, particularly for a hormonal adolescent.