Prof. dr. habil.

Monica Matei-Chesnoiu

SHAKESPEARE FOR THE DUMMIES

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A DIGEST GUIDE FOR FRESHMEN
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A good story is a good story in the 16th century, the 20th century, or the 21st century.
Shakespeare's plays defy minor differences of a few hundred years. Romeo and Juliet appeals
to readers of all ages, whether Leonardo DiCaprio plays a modern Romeo or Natalie Wood
portrays Maria in West Side Story. The characters and plots are just as interesting and exciting
today as they were 400 years ago.
Where did Shakespeare get the ideas for his stories? Mostly, he took his ideas from existing plays and
books. He borrowed plots, characters, and entire speeches. He often mixed ideas from two stories into a single play.
Always, though, he modified his sources and improved upon them. That's why most people have heard of As You
Like It, but only literature majors know about Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde. Shakespeare based his play on Lodge's
novel, which was based on the 14th-century Tale of Gamelyn. Reusing plots and characters from other stories was as
common then as it is today. To whet your appetite for Shakespeare's plays, this Introduction tells you all about the
different kinds of stories that Shakespeare wrote.

Five Acts
Every play has five acts, not necessarily because Shakespeare wrote
them that way, but because modern editors always divide the plays that
way. Many of Shakespeare's plays were divided into five acts when they
were first printed. Some plays lack act or scene divisions, so editors
enforce some uniformity by making up act divisions in those plays.
Different editors might put the divisions in different places, but every
modern edition has five acts:
 The first act introduces the characters and sets up the story. In most
comedies, you meet the prospective lovers, who are usually at odds.
 The second act expands the story and tells you more about the
characters. In a comedy, the situation usually involves some confusion: Most often the lovers don't love each
other or they love the wrong person. In a tragedy, you've had a chance to meet the heroes and the villains.
Modern writers sometimes hide the heroes and make them seem like villains and vice versa, but Shakespeare
usually makes the characters less ambiguous. By the end of the second act, you usually know who the heroes
are, and who the villains. In some ways, this makes Shakespeare's plays easier to follow and understand.
 The third act is the pivotal act. In a comedy, the confusion is usually at its maximum, but you can see how the
confusion will be resolved. In a tragedy, the villains have set their evil plans in motion, and the heroes must
respond. The heroes make mistakes, though, and their decisions ultimately lead to their deaths. Scholars like to
call the third act the climax of the play because it is the pivotal moment at which decisions are made and plans
become clear. Nonetheless, you have to wait until the last act to see the full results of these decisions and plans,
which is what most people consider to be the play's climax.
 The action unfolds in the fourth act, and the heroes' plans collide with the villains' plans. If this were a modern
movie, you wouldn't be able to tell who will win, but this is Shakespeare. You know that the villains will be
caught in the end and that the heroes will triumph, but, in a tragedy, at the cost of their lives.
 The fifth and final act brings all the pieces together. The villains are caught. The heroes learn their lessons. In a
comedy, the lessons are light, and the lovers get married. In a tragedy, the heroes die to pay for their mistakes.
The world is cruel to demand such a high payment for learning a lesson, but, hey, it's just a play. It's part of
making the tragedy grander than real life.

Think You've Got Problems?

Common themes in Shakespeare's plays
Shakespeare wrote plays about people and their problems. The biggest reason his plays remain popular
today is that people haven't changed much in 400 years, and we still have the same problems. The kings, tyrants,
murderers, and lovers about whom Shakespeare wrote face the same issues that everyone else faces, more or less.

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You may never have to decide who will sit on England's throne, but you may have to help decide who will fill a job
vacancy, which is much the same thing, albeit on a smaller scale.
The following sections describe the two problems that Shakespeare tackled most often in his plays: love
and revenge.

Love
The most popular topic in Shakespeare's comedies is love: unrequited love, forbidden love, disguised love,
misguided love. These same subjects are popular today in films, on television, and in the daily news. Do you admire
someone who doesn't even notice you? Or perhaps someone you don't like is pestering you for love and attention.
Shakespeare delighted in such situations, and he examined them in many plays.
Twelfth Night is a prime example. Orsino loves Olivia, but she ignores him. Viola loves Orsino, but she
must hide her love because she is dressed as a man. Olivia falls in love with Viola (thinking that she is a man
because of how she's dressed). The rule for comedy is that all the relationships must be straightened out by the end
of the play. Shakespeare untangles this knot by means of Viola's twin brother, Sebastian. Once Viola is unmasked,
Sebastian marries Olivia, Viola marries Orsino, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Shakespeare gives you lots of hints at the start of each play, so you can tell who will marry whom by the
end. The first two acts introduce the characters and their relationships. If a couple is happy together when the play
begins, you can be fairly sure that something will go wrong, but that matters will be patched up by the final act, and
they will be together again at the end. If a play opens with a man pressing unwanted attention on a woman,
Shakespeare is usually telling you that they don't belong together. In a comedy, the only solution to this kind of
problem is to find a suitable mate for the misguided lover.
Even Shakespeare's tragedies examine some of the facets of love. King Lear, for example, disowns his
daughter Cordelia because she doesn't love him enough, or so he thinks. Othello is never quite sure that he is worthy
of Desdemona's love, so he readily believes Iago's lies about her. In both plays, you see how insecurity and low self-
esteem can mar a relationship.

Revenge
It happens to everyone: Someone cuts in front of you in line or
spills a double cappuccino on your best suit, or you get home
from a hard day at work to find that your pet has been struck
by a car whose driver never bothered to stop. Life just isn't
fair. Sometimes life's trials and tribulations make you want to
scream. Sometimes you really do scream, and on occasion you
do more than scream. This is also true in the worlds that
Shakespeare created.
Maybe your problems aren't quite a big as Hamlet's:
His uncle murders his father, steals the throne of Denmark, and
marries his mother; then his girlfriend kills herself, and her
brother blames Hamlet and seeks revenge. But even if your
problems don't measure up to Hamlet's, you can gain much from the play. Perhaps your rival for the big promotion
stole your idea to sell as his own. You want to pop him one, but Hamlet doesn't do that. He watches and waits until
just the right moment. Except that Hamlet gets it wrong; he waits too long; he plans and schemes his revenge too
much. Hamlet is a planner, not a doer. So the lesson is to think and plan, but just the right amount. When you finish
your plans, put them in action. (But don't assault your coworker. Or if you do, don't say that I told you to do so.
Blame it on Shakespeare!)
Revenge is a popular theme in Shakespeare's plays, especially in his tragedies. But revenge is usually just
one element of a more complex story. As you read or watch the play, pay particular attention to why someone seeks
revenge and how he or she carries out the plan. Inevitably, revenge begets revenge. In Shakespeare's plays, the
barter rate is never an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Instead, revenge escalates until the final act, when
villains and heroes alike face the consequences of their unbridled hatred.
Different plays have different lessons about revenge, so pay attention to what each play tells you. If
Shakespeare had only one take on revenge, he would have written only one play. To see the limits of how far one
can take revenge, read or watch Titus Andronicus.

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 Prof. dr. habil. Monica Matei-Chesnoiu

Tragedies, Comedies, and Histories Oh My!

What makes a comedy a comedy and a tragedy a tragedy
People like to put things into categories. Movie critics do so with films: romantic, western, war, and more.
You can do the same with books: science fiction, gothic romance, and so on. Shakespeare's plays also have
categories: tragedies, comedies, and histories. But these terms don't mean exactly what you may think they mean.
A tragedy is a play in which the protagonist dies. In a comedy, on the other hand, the protagonist lives and
usually gets married, too. Shakespeare wrote the history plays about the kings of England. Sometimes the king dies,
perhaps at the hands of his successor. In other history plays, the king lives to star in another play. Usually, a history
play focuses on a significant event in a king's reign, such as an important war.
Some editors of Shakespeare's works choose different categories. For example, The Two Noble Kinsmen,
instead of being a comedy, might be called a romance or a tragicomedy. Palamon and Emilia get married, as in a
comedy, but Palamon's brother Arcite dies, adding a tragic element. Some of Shakespeare's later comedies have a
dark and somber tone, such as The Winter's Tale. They are different from his earlier comedies, such as As You Like
It, so some modern editors call these plays romances. The most common categorization, though, is into comedies,
histories, and tragedies, which is the grouping used when the plays were first published.
Shakespeare did not care about categories. Sometimes he labeled a play with a category title, such as The
Comedy of Errors or The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Often, however, a play's title gives no hint about
how Shakespeare thought of the play. It was up to the editors of The First Folio, seven years after Shakespeare's
death, to group the plays into the three traditional categories of comedies, histories, and tragedies, and that is the
categorization used in this book.

Aristotle's rules for playwriting

In Shakespeare's day, playwrights had rules for writing plays. The
rules didn't come from a Renaissance Writers' Guild (there was no
such guild), but from an ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle. He
wrote the rules in Poetics about 2,000 years before Shakespeare
was born. Europeans forgot about the great Greek and Roman
philosophers and writers for hundreds of years but rediscovered
their writings during the Renaissance. (That's one reason we call
that era the Renaissance, or rebirth. It represented a rebirth of
ancient knowledge.) The invention of the movable-type printing
press made it easy to publish new translations of ancient classics,
and soon everyone who was anyone had a copy of Poetics and
was eager to discuss its merits.
In the Renaissance, many people turned to ancient writings as sources of true knowledge and wisdom.
Shakespeare's contemporaries were adamant about following Aristotle's rules, or at least their interpretations of the
rules. These rules became the standard form of plays in Shakespeare's day. Shakespeare never followed the rules
exactly, but his plays have the Renaissance mark about them. The most important rule was the unity of action,
namely that a play should have a single plot line. Shakespeare followed this rule in a few plays, such as The Comedy
of Errors, but usually he mixed multiple plots to make the plays more interesting.
The unity of time required that time onstage closely match real time. The rules allowed a play to stretch
time a little bit and take as much as a day, but Shakespeare often folded, spindled, and mutilated time. He often let
events sprawl over many days, weeks, or even years. Shakespeare followed the unity of time in The Comedy of
Errors and The Tempest, but usually he let time pass as much or as little as he needed in order to write interesting,
exciting plays, and he paid little heed to this particular rule.
Aristotle's Poetics
Aristotle wrote his Poetics almost 2,400 years ago. His work was rediscovered early in the 16th century and
was translated into several languages. In Poetics, Aristotle lays out the rules for writing a good tragedy, comedy, or
epic poem. The most important rule is that a good play must have a single plot line. This is called the unity of
action. The plot should tell a coherent story, with a beginning, middle, and an end. Aristotle singles out as
particularly bad the style of telling a story through a series of unrelated episodes.
A second rule is that the hero should be an illustrious person (such as a king, general, or other leader) but
should have a character flaw (such as pride). The play should unfold around the hero's reversal of situation, brought
about by his own frailty, and not through an accident of circumstance. This flaw is often called a tragic flaw.

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Aristotle also stipulates that a tragedy should inspire pity and fear: pity for the tragic hero and his suffering,
fear that the same might happen to you. A comedy, on the other hand, ends when enemies become friends, and no
one is killed. Aristotle has many other rules concerning diction, language, and poetry.
The unity of space rule dictated that a play should take place in one particular location. For example, The
Comedy of Errors could be performed so that all the action takes place in the streets of Ephesus, or in houses
adjacent to the street. Pericles, on the other hand, ranges all around the Mediterranean Sea, so it doesn't follow the
unity of space rule. In many plays, the action simply takes place. Some scenes have a definite setting, but other
scenes have no location more specific than a town name. The action just happens. Somewhere… You have to use
your imagination.
In other words, Shakespeare felt free to break the rules whenever he felt like it. After all, his audience didn't
care whether the plays followed the rules, and Shakespeare wrote to please his audience, not to please neoclassical
writers and scholars.
Tragedy
Shakespeare's most famous plays are his tragedies, such as Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth.
These plays follow the standard rules for tragedies: The hero has a basic human frailty that brings about his downfall
and death, but before he dies, he learns an important lesson about his frailty and how it destroyed his life (and
usually the lives of those he loved). Shakespeare didn't write these plays to deliver a moral message, but that doesn't
stop us from learning from his plays. He fills his plays with ordinary people, and we can see ourselves in their
situations. When the heroes face their tragic ends, we can learn from their mistakes and ordinary problems (albeit
exaggerated for dramatic emphasis), and we can see ourselves with the same problems. At the same time, we can
watch a play that is fun and entertaining, full of action, intrigue, and excitement.
The tragic hero
In some ways, all of Shakespeare's tragedies follow a similar course. Each tragedy has a central figure, the tragic
hero. The hero is a person of high degree, often a king or prince. He is a good person, but not perfect. Like every
human being, he has flaws. A tragic play takes one of those flaws and shows how it affects the hero's life. To make
the play more thrilling, the action in a tragedy is magnified, so much so that the hero dies. Just as a modern film
about police and criminals magnifies the conflict and action, Shakespeare's tragedies make everything seem grander
than in real life.
In many plays, the protagonist is a true hero. Hamlet, for example, is clearly an honest, decent person who
is wrongly cheated out of the throne of Denmark by his conniving uncle, Claudius. We root for Hamlet, cheer his
triumphs, and pity his failures. The protagonist is not always a hero, though. Sometimes he is his own worst enemy.
Coriolanus, for example, is too proud. He is a great Roman general the best, and he knows it. His arrogance and
conceit affect all around him and drive away those who would be his friends. In the end, you almost cheer when they
conspire against him and he gets his due.
Villains
Shakespeare's villains are often his most interesting
characters. Although they seem at first to be pure evil, as
you get to know them, you realize that they're human, too.
They act in response to injury, although their response is
out of proportion to the hurt. Othello passes over Iago and
promotes Cassio to lieutenant. Iago considers Cassio to be
less qualified, so Iago gets mad and plots revenge. You
can understand Iago's feelings, but you wouldn't respond
in the same way if your boss promoted her friend instead
of you, even though you're more qualified. Othello is a
tragedy, so everyone's emotions are magnified, including Iago's. Instead of just getting mad or getting even, Iago
goes overboard and takes an awful revenge. The villain's role in a tragedy is to take advantage of the hero's flaw and
bring it out into the open. The villain shows the audience how we all have a little bit of the villain in us.
The bastard is a common villain in Shakespeare's plays. Throughout much of European history, the children
of unmarried parents had few rights. In Shakespeare's England, for example, the eldest son inherited his father's
wealth, title, and land, but not if his parents weren't married at the time. Perhaps they were young and in love, and
they started their family a little too soon before their wedding. Nonetheless, a son born out of wedlock was labeled a
bastard and could not inherit. Such is Edmund's case in King Lear. It isn't Edmund's fault that his parents were not
married, but the law punished the son. Edmund points out that he is the same as anyone else whose parents were
married. In other words, villains and heroes, kings and commoners, Nature's laws see no differences between
legitimate and illegitimate children. The only differences are in the curious laws of nations. Because society's laws

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treat him unfairly, Edmund decides to turn down the path of villainy. Shakespeare's plays contain numerous varieties
of villains, from the merely disgruntled to the envious to those hell-bent on revenge. Conflict is a natural element to
any dramatic story, and Shakespeare's villains usually provide all the conflict you could hope for. Not every play has
a dastardly villain, though. Comedies may have villains, but some do not.

Comedy tonight
A Shakespearean comedy isn't the same as a modern
comedy. In Shakespeare's day, a comedy was a play in
which the protagonist didn't die. The rules for comedies
required that they be less grandiose than tragedies, and
part of toning down the plays meant that the heroes might
learn a lesson, but they wouldn't die. Similarly, the
villains would get caught and face justice, but not the
death penalty.
Most comedies are love stories, and in the end,
the hero and heroine get married. (Except in Much Ado
about Nothing, in which one of the heroines is named
Hero. In that case, the hero and Hero get married.) Of course, a good comedy is more than a love story. Even in
comedies, the characters grow and learn, although the lessons are simpler than in tragedies.
Comedies do not follow as strict a formula as tragedies. Sometimes, a villain causes the mix-up, and you
know that by the end of the play, the villain will be caught and will get his just punishment (although this isn't a
tragedy, so the villain rarely dies). Other times, the confusion is the result of honest circumstance, such as mistaken
identity. Occasionally, the hero causes the mix-up, intentionally or accidentally.
In a tragedy, the action usually arises from the hero's character flaw. In a comedy, the action might originate with the
hero, but just as likely, it arises from circumstances that are outside the hero's control. Perhaps a nasty relative has
booted the hero out of his or her proper home. Sometimes, a wandering eye causes a would-be hero to fall in love
with a woman other than his fiancée. Needless to say, that always causes trouble.
Although Shakespeare's comedies are not comedies in the modern sense, they can be funny nonetheless.
Much of the hilarity comes from the situations his characters land in.

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