Ernest Schanzer - Problem Plays of Shakespeare

IT SEEMS that the first to have thought of grouping together All's Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and Hamlet, and of calling them ' Shakespeare's Problem Plays', was F. S. Boas. In Shakspere and his Predecessors ( 1896) he wrote:

All these dramas introduce us into highly artificial societies, whose civilization is ripe unto rottenness. Amidst such media abnormal conditions of brain and emotion are generated, and intricate cases of conscience demand a solution by unprecedented methods. Thus throughout these plays we move along dim untrodden paths, and at the close our feeling is neither of simple joy nor pain; we are excited, fascinated, perplexed, for the issues raised preclude a completely satisfactory outcome, even when, as in All's Well and Measure for Measure, the complications are outwardly adjusted in the fifth act. In Troilus and Cressida and Hamlet no such partial settlement of difficulties takes place, and we are left to interpret their enigmas as best we may. Dramas so singular in theme and temper cannot be strictly called comedies or tragedies. We may therefore borrow a convenient phrase from the theatre of to-day and class them together as Shakspere's problem-plays.

(p. 345)

It is already implicit in this passage, and his subsequent discussion of each of the four plays makes abundantly clear, that the problems he finds in them are of the most diverse sorts. In All's Well and Measure for Measure they are moral problems: he speaks of their 'perplexing moral entanglements' (p. 409)-though it is difficult to see how this accords with his detailed discussion of the two plays, in which, on the contrary, he insists that the presentation of their moral issues is quite unequivocal and devoid of perplexity. The problem he finds in Hamlet is psychological. Its protagonist 'remains a mystery, eternally

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fascinating, eternally inscrutable' (p. 389). The problem that he sees in Troilus and Cressida, on the other hand, is neither moral nor psychological, but rather one of interpreting so complex a play, above all of discovering the relation of the war-plot to the love-story (p. 370). It presents the reader with a problem in the sense of 'a difficulty' of understanding what Shakespeare was up to. And a further kind of problem which he finds in the four plays is one of classification. 'Dramas so singular in theme and temper cannot be strictly called comedies or tragedies.' But although he gives the most diverse meanings to the term 'problem play', he nowhere gives it the meaning it had in the theatre of his own time, from which he declares to have borrowed this 'convenient phrase': namely, a play dealing with problems confronting not a single and unique individual but contemporary society as a whole, as is the case with some of the drama of Ibsen and the early Shaw.

What chiefly unites the four plays for Boas is 'the atmosphere of obscurity which wraps' them and which 'closes most thickly round Hamlet' (p. 384). And he compares the change from this group to what he calls 'the tragedies in the stricter sense' to 'the passage from a valley swathed in folds of mist into a bare, storm-swept upland' (p. 409). On this upland one is surprised to encounter not only Macbeth and Lear, Othello and Coriolanus, but also the Queen of Egypt, though we are told that 'in Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus the dead-weight of historical material hampered the free movement of the tragic spirit' (pp. 409-10).

Although Boas's notion of what constitutes the Shakespearian problem play is, to borrow a convenient phrase from him, 'swathed in folds of mist', although it is undefined and muddled --or, dare one suggest, just because of these qualities--both his grouping and his label found very general acceptance in the decades that followed.

Thirty-five years later W. W. Lawrence published his Shakespeare's Problem Comedies ( 1931). He decided to exclude Hamlet from his discussion and to confine it to the other three plays in Boas's group, largely because he felt that the term 'problem play' is most usefully applied 'to those productions which clearly do not fall into the category of tragedy, and yet are too serious and analytic to fit the commonly accepted conception