Shakespeare's plays can often seem extremely baffling to a modern audience. Not only is the language obviously of another era, but the poetry communicates in such an extraordinary style that, although we feel sure of its initial meaning, closer scrutiny seems to make it less rather than more intelligible. If we approach the critical body of work that clings to him, it is only more confusing. He's right-wing, he's left-wing, he's a neutral observer, an atheist, a Catholic, too learned, too little-read, overwritten, under-plotted, inspired or careless. The contradictions continue bewilderingly, and the texts we are told are botched, cut, re-written, misprinted, censored, interfered with, perhaps not even written by Shakespeare.
Characterisation is what pulls many to Shakespeare and we will look at words and actions to see how a sense of living, engrossing figures in a living world are produced. In this course we shall concentrate on two plays, one a comedy, the other a tragedy.
In Hamlet we meet Shakespeare’s most famous hero, a man whose father has been murdered and whose mother has rapidly married the murderer. The play shows Hamlet debating good and evil and the appropriate actions that should follow and forces us into the debate ourselves. As a result does a discrepancy emerge between our judgement of Hamlet and others’ judgements? And, indeed, his own? Does he come out as simply pure as Horatio thinks? What is our relationship to him by the end of the play?
In Measure for Measure, we enter a comedy where little makes us laugh and much makes us cry. Again, it demands its characters to debate morality and again, demands of us that we enter the fray.
Both plays force us to judge, to sift evidence, to weigh deserts. Both give us powerful poetry through which we enter the characters’ hearts and minds. Both require our absolute involvement. Both represent Shakespeare at his most rewarding.
