The siege of Troy provides the backdrop for Troilus and Cressida, but – like Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde – Shakespeare opens by claiming that he “leaps o’er…those broils” of the war itself. But, again like Chaucer, Shakespeare finds some parts of the war unavoidable: the play is just as much about the petty rivalries of the Greek camp as it is about the doomed love affairs of the two eponymous Trojans. Love and war are inseparable and mutually destructive forces. The recapture of the “face that launched a thousand ships” is shown to lose its noble veneer, to be replaced by a lecherous act which has turned “crowned kings to merchants”.

The problems with classifying Troilus and Cressida are best exemplified in one of its final scenes: as the Trojan Cressida, transferred to the Greek camp, succumbs to the advances of the Greek Diomede, she is overlooked by two parties. One is Thersites, the sour fool whose relentless commentary on the perverse world of “wars and lechery”, where Greeks dine with the Trojans they will kill the next day, drives the play’s bitterly humorous satire. The other party consists of Ulysses and the spurned Troilus, whom Shakespeare endows with the sincere poetry of love that gives the play its heart and its tragic energy.

Shunted between classification as a comedy (in one of the Quarto editions) and a tragedy (in the First Folio), the play is a satisfying fit in neither. Were it written today, its ending would perhaps have been described as a descent into meaningless violence and the audience is left neither with catharsis nor reassurance that “all is mended”, instead having Pandarus bequeath them his “diseases”.

Although the immediate reception of the play remains unclear, this work only fully captured public and academic interest in the twentieth century, and is still often considered difficult and ‘elitist’. However, its refreshing anti-war stance when compared to the history cycle has made it popular production in contemporary peace-time, and audience’s unfamiliarity with it allows directors freedom in their interpretations.

Contributed by Jack Belloli

Richard II opens with a dispute between Mowbray and Bolingbroke, which, badly managed by the king, results in banishment for them both. Mowbray’s is the harsher sentence, since his exile will be permanent, and his parting words on how his banishment will mean his “tongue’s is to me no more / Than an unstringed viol or harp” begin an exploration of the power of language that runs the entire length of what one critic has called the ‘Henriad’.

Henry Bolingbroke, although banished, soon returns, ostensibly to reclaim his family lands, seized by Richard from an ailing Gaunt, who, in criticising the state of Ricardian England, delivers the famous definition of his country as “A precious jewel set in a silver sea” from his deathbed. Throughout the play, Bolingbroke and Richard II are opposed, and the former shown to be a consummate Machiavellian who remains to a large extent opaque to the audience.

Richard, by contrast, is perfectly and poetically open about his feelings: an openness that makes for wonderful poetry, but also for a poor Machiavellian. His character was much beloved by romantic critics, who saw him first and foremost as a poet, and it is a rare audience indeed that feels no sympathy for the weakening king. His final long speech seeks to populate his prison with “A generation of still-breeding thoughts”, but his invention slowly turns to the realisation that although he has “the daintiness of ear / To check time broke in a disordered string”, he “for the concord of my state and time / Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.” That image of broken time, like other moments of fracture and rupture in the play, establish a legacy that haunts all the following plays, as first Henry IV and then Henry V attempt the task of, in Hal’s words, “redeeming time”.

Written entirely in verse, and occasionally in couplets, the play has its own distinctive music. It also has a distinctive history: Elizabeth I famously compared herself to Richard II, and a performance of the play was requested by the Earl of Essex in the run up to his ill-fated and abortive attempt at a rebellion in 1601.

Contributed by James Harriman-Smith

To paraphrase another of his plays, Shakespeare’s decision to use All’s Well that Ends Well as the title for his play of 1602–3 is a case of protesting too much. The line is used twice towards the end of the play by Helena, the young woman who uses it to justify her possible “means unfit” of winning Bertram, the “hater of love” who spurned her. Her use of the ‘bed trick’, whereby Helena tricks Bertram into consummating the marriage by swapping places with the maid Diana, is perhaps more justifiable in the seedy Vienna of the contemporary Measure for Measure. But it sits at odds with All’s Well’s many folk-tale qualities: Helena’s quasi-magical healing powers, the parade of suitors, the girl’s quest to redeem a foolish beloved, all of which are intensified by an unusual emphasis on rhyme. When the lovers are reconciled at the end of the play, the King of France agrees that “all yet seems well”: for many readers, the conventional happy-ending is too swift and tidy to be believed.

The play is Shakespeare’s most faithful rendering of a tale from Boccaccio’s Decameron (which would also inspire plot points in Pericles and The Merchant of Venice), although Shakespeare continued his traditional imposition of a comic subplot, in which Bertram’s follower Parolles is exposed as a coward by his fellow French soldiers. This lack of adaptation is one of the reasons for the play’s failure to gain widespread attention. As with Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Parolles was more entertaining than the lovers to a Jacobean audience, to the point that the play was abridged and renamed in his honour.

Until the nineteenth century, much critical debate hinged on whether Bertram or Helena was more sympathetic, with neither coming out very well; indeed, many see the play as remarkably conservative in its sympathy with an older generation who successfully orchestrate what they think is best for their children. The fact that the text only survives in a corrupted manuscript is a further problem. Productions remain rare, but when the balance between traditional romance and social realities is struck correctly, All’s Well that Ends Well can be a satisfying play to watch.

Contributed by Jack Belloli

First performed in 1599, Julius Caesar is remarkable for being one of the best preserved of Shakespeare’s plays, not to mention one of only a very handful on which we have contemporary comment: Thomas Platter, a Swiss doctor from Basle, went to see an early performance and found it to be “very pleasingly performed” and to include an “admirably” danced jig at its conclusion. That jig would have come as a stark contrast to the events of a play that concludes with the suicides of Cassius and Brutus and pivots on the moment where the conspirators strike down Caesar in the name of “Liberty!” and “Freedom!”. These events and others are taken from North’s translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, principally those of Caesar and Brutus, although critics have also identified thematic elements originating in those of Alexander and Dion.

The Rome of Shakespeare is far more multi-faceted than that of Plutarch, particularly in the way each character seems aware of Elizabethan interpretations of their actions. Brutus’ description of Caesar as a “tyrant” echoes, for example, a verdict delivered in Elyot’s Book of the Governour”. Such theatrical and cultural self-consciousness comes to a peak in *Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida, but is already present here in an obsession with representation and interpretation that spans the length of the play. The word “like”, picked up from North and found in such phrases as “like himself”, highlights the sceptical difficulty of knowing another human, whilst the deciphering of Caesar’s dream proves to be a crucial moment of the plot.

Since the performance seen by Platter, the play has enjoyed a great deal of popularity, and is still frequently performed today, often with a political message. Certain lines, “Et tu Brute”, “Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears”, and “The evil that men do” have entered modern popular culture, the last featuring in both an Iron Maiden song and a Buffy the Vampire Slayer novel.

Arguably Shakespeare’s best-known history play, Henry V is actually a highly ambivalent work. Some directors, Kenneth Branagh (1944) famously among them, have seen the play as a celebration of British patriotism, whilst others have emphasised the awful casualties of war, and Henry’s Machiavellian habit of, in Stephen Greenblatt’s words, provoking disorder only to repress it further.

Falstaff dies offstage, Pistol is humiliated and Bardolph hanged – but they make us laugh before they go, as does the French princess Catherine’s unsuspectingly bawdy English lesson, and the many accents of the British army. However, as in the three plays that precede it, the question of what it is to be a king dominates the action of the play once more. Wherever we see him, receiving the French ambassador at the English court, coldly stopping a coup at Southampton, delivering an ultimatum at Harfleur and a battle cry at Agincourt, Henry V is always in authority, even when, in a scene reminiscent of his youthful antics, he wanders disguised amongst his soldiers, asking himself afterwards “what have kings, that privates have not too / Save ceremony, save general ceremony?” These lines reveal the tensions of kingship as both a construction and an ideal, a tension that finds an echo in the structure of a play whose chorus endlessly iterates the need for the audience to believe in that other constructed illusion, the spectacle of the actors on a stage, tasked to “cram / Within this wooden O the very casques / That did affright the air at Agincourt”.

Contributed by James Harriman-Smith

No consensus has ever been reached on the precise relation between this play and Henry IV, Part I. With Falstaff, Hal, an anxious Henry IV, a tavern and a battlefield much remains the same, but something has changed in the quality of events. The royalist victory in this play is not settled in noble combat, but through a trick by one of Hal’s brothers; although there is laughter in the tavern, Falstaff spends much of his time wandering the countryside, returning to London only to be spurned by Hal with the words “I know thee not, old man”. Those words are spoken by the new Henry V, and the play can be read as both Hal’s final steps to the throne and a double elegy for the end of the older generation of Falstaff and Henry IV.

In a discontinuity between this play and its predecessor, a new reconciliation takes place between Henry IV and Prince Hal, this time fraught with Hal’s error of being caught wearing the crown when his father awoke. Hal consoles his father with the idea that he only took it in “The quarrel of a true inheritor”, a reference to the fact that, for the first time since the regicide of Richard II, the crown will follow a bloodline, and so it shall, in Henry IV’s words, “descend with better quiet, better opinion, better confirmation”. The dying king then offers Hal the advice of using a foreign military campaign to unite the country, something that looks forward to the events Henry V.

The nature of this play, as both elegy and anticipation, makes it difficult to perform as a standalone production and some critics have speculated that the strangeness of its outlook is the result of a lack of material left in Holinshed for Shakespeare to use. Nevertheless, its distinctness from Henry IV, Part 1, may also be seen as a virtue: the worlds of the court and the tavern are more distinct here, and each adopts a particularly distinctive idiom, be it the Hostess’ request to “Do me, do me your offices”, or Henry IV’s reflection that if the “book of fate” were seen, then “The happiest youth, viewing his progress through, / What perils past, what crosses to ensue / Would shut the book, and sit him down and die”.

Contributed by James Harriman-Smith

“So shaken as we are, so wan with care”: so King Henry IV, the former Bolingbroke, begins a play that remains half in the shadow of the regicide at the end of Richard II. The King worries about his son, whom he sees as a prodigal and liable to be supplanted by the far more brightly shining Hotspur, just as he, Bolingbroke, supplanted Richard before. Yet only one half the play is held in fear of history repeating itself, for those scenes in the tavern or out robbing travellers with Prince Hal and Falstaff are shot through with a subversive and inventive energy that is in stark contrast to both the anxious court, and the factious rebel camp.

At the end of the first tavern scene, Hal, alone on stage, proves that he is no prodigal, and instead claims that “I’ll so offend to make offense a skill, / Redeeming time when men think least I will.” That reference to time recalls an earlier speech by the imprisoned Richard II, portraying the King as guarantor of his time, and, indeed, this play and those that follow it probe the questions of what it means to be a king, and to what extent kingship is just a construct, made from rich cloths and language.

As the play moves towards its conclusion on the battlefield, the world of the tavern and of the court are often side by side, with Hal shuttling between Falstaff and his father. The royalist victory at the play’s conclusion appears to confirm the end of Hal’s ‘prodigality’, and his reception into the royal flock. Yet the audience will also remember Falstaff, uproarious in the tavern, cynical on the battlefield, and ending the play claiming that he, not Hal, killed Hotspur.

James Harriman-Smith

The Life and Death of King John is cited by Francis Meres in 1598 as one of the plays demonstrating Shakespeare’s talent and status as the English Ovid. It was popular throughout Victorian times but has been one of the least-performed plays in more recent years. It is, however, one of the most thrilling history plays, containing many of Shakespeare’s favourite themes, such as the juxtaposition of tragedy with comedy, and with legitimacy.

“The Bastard”, one of Shakespeare’s most colourful characters, is the illegitimate son of the dead Richard III. The play in fact revolves around the disputed succession of King John to the English throne after Richard’s death; he is opposed by the vigorous Constance, an early manifestation of the Shakespearean strong older woman, whose son has an equally valid claim to the throne.

Despite King John‘s relative obscurity, Constance’s poetic speech on grief – beginning “Grief fills the room up of my absent child” – is one of Shakespeare’s most famous; it may reflect Shakespeare’s feelings about the death of his only son, Hamnet, who died about the time the play was written. King John, like many of the history plays, often fails to get the recognition it deserves; it is both exciting and lyrical, and makes a rewarding read.

Contributed by Colette Sensier

The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s last plays and distinguished as one of the most sharply divided ‘problem plays’, or tragicomedies, split between scenes of psychological tension and pastoral clowning, and concluding with an apparently happy ending. This division separates it from traditional ideas of dramatic unity and the 16-year gap between the third and fourth acts can make it seem stranger still. The play centres around two courts run by childhood friends, Leontes’ Sicilia and Polixenes’ Bohemia; the abandoning of Leontes’ daughter Perdita on the coast of Bohemia has been used as evidence of Shakespeare’s lack of education, as ‘Bohemia’ is roughly equivalent to the land-locked modern-day Czech Republic.

The Winter’s Tale deals with themes of sexual jealousy, patrilinearity and growth, joining pastoral fertility comedy with tragic culpability and deaths. It culminates with the most puzzling ending in Shakespeare, when Hermione – whether through magic or trickery, it is unclear – emerges from a statue, reborn. Study of The Winter’s Tale together with The Tempest is useful in looking at the fascination with artificiality and magic which enchants Shakespeare’s late work.

Contributed by Colette Sensier

The Tempest is generally accepted as Shakespeare’s last complete play, with a performance date around 1611. In the 1623 First Folio of his collected works its novelty is probably the reason for its being placed first; its opening storm scene fronts the book, literally starting proceedings ‘with a bang’. The shipwreck of a royal party on an island anchored somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea turns out to be no trick of fortune, as we are introduced to the magician Prospero, the disinherited Duke of Milan, washed up on this island with his infant daugher 16 years ago. He has engineered this accident in order to re-assert his rights over his usurping brother before the King of Naples. He carries out a series of chess-like machinations on the board of the island with the aid of his captive spirit, Ariel, employing the natural forces of the island: music and illusion. The play is a comedy, with interwoven farcical scenes, and will eventually conclude happily, as the king’s son is promised in marriage to Miranda, Prospero’s daughter, and Prospero himself reinstated as Duke of Milan before renouncing his magic staff and book with a final and powerful plea for the audience’s forgiveness.

Although no direct source has been identified for the play as a whole, there is a fascinating relationship to New World discovery evident throughout. This has particularly been highlighted in the figure of Caliban, a grotesquely formed and morally monstrous inhabitant of the island, once its master, now Prospero’s slave. For many critics he represents a certain view of the native populations of newly colonised lands in the Americas. Shakespeare’s evident use of passages taken from Michel de Montaigne’s essay Des Canibales, newly available in English, evokes the most idealistic images of the New world, as a new Eden. There is a clear tension at work between this ideal and any form of political reality – at the very least there appears to be an open question about the nature and validity of sovereignty and enslavement.

Other dichotomies brought into play surround the early modern (and particularly Jacobean) fascination with magic. Prospero seems to stand for a kind of erudite sorcery, closely related perhaps to neoplatonic magicians such as Agrippa. By contrast, the island itself seems to spontaneously produce supernatural experiences, and Caliban’s mother was a witch in the more generally accepted sense. Furthermore, we cannot really speak of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ magic, for Prospero at times seems himself corrupted by power. The parallel drawn between his charms and the ‘spell’ cast over a theatre audience also raises questions about the whole mimetic operation of the theatre. All Prospero’s various wrongs are righted by his “deliver all” of freeing Ariel and sending the royal party home.

However, the Prospero’s epilogue to the play surpsises us by revealing that the last (and unexpected) prisoner of the play is the theatrical magician himself, whose sovereignty is suddenly dependent on the release of the audience’s mercy. The final plea of his epilogue uses an image that draws as much on the theological language of absolution as that of political imprisonment: “As you from crimes would pardon’d be/From your indulgence set me free”. This idea of an appeal to the divine through an appeal to the audience brings out the commonality of the artistic creation, enacted through the ministration of spectator and actor, just as mercy is through priest and sinner, or politics through king and subject, but all vitally owe their power to that which surpasses all charms: the Divine. This final note seems a fitting one for Shakespeare to close his many meditations on power, guilt and the nature of theatre itself.

With influences from the masque tradition, this play would later prove a popular subject for operatic adaptations from the 17th century, including one by Henry Purcell’s. Whilst recent productions (notably the RSC’s 2008–9 co-production with The Baxter Theatre Company, Capetown) have continued to emphasise the colonial themes, there has been increasing attention to other less politicised aspects of the play as well. Besides studies on forgiveness, on magic, and on stagecraft itself, recent work on Shakespeare and music has particularly used The Tempest to comment on the Bard’s evident awareness and appreciation for this element of theatrical production.

Contributed by Arabella Milbank