Darkness in Macbeth- why I believe it was written for the Blackfriars Theatre

Shakespeare is rightly famed as a playwright who could transport audiences through the power of words alone. In the most uncongenial of settings- a bare stage, open to the elements, lit only by natural daylight and without any of the modern accoutrments of scenery, lighting or amplified sound- he effortlessly recreated the decadent splendours of ancient Egypt, a storm on a heath in pagan England or a magical island far away. Yet as well as the Globe, from 1608 Shakespeare's company staged plays in the Blackfriars Theatre, in which Shakespeare had a share. This was an indoor theatre, with some sort of lighting, so plays could be performed in the evening. This meant that for the first time Shakespeare was able to incorporate actual darkness into his plays and I am convinced that, although the first known production of Macbeth was in the Globe Theatre in 1611 it was actually written for the Blackfriars Theatre.

It is of course well known that darkness features prominently in Macbeth. It is in every way a dark play, with its regicide, its famous witches and its exploration of the inner thoughts of a psycopathic killer. In it, Shakespeare was effectively inventing the horror genre and darkness is a central element of all horror. Darkness is one of the key elements of the imagery he uses and he uses language with his customary skill and power to evoke darkness, both spiritual and actual. Certainly Macbeth was successful at the Globe, where actual darkness was impossible to achieve. Yet it is still remarkable the extent to which actual darkness is implicit in the action and referred to by the characters. Many of the key scenes (the scenes around Duncan's murder, Banquo's murder, the banquet, Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking) take place at night and characters frequently mention the state of the light. Below are just a few examples:
"The moon is down; I have not heard the clock.
...

There's husbandry in heaven;

Their candles are all out
...

by the clock, 'tis day,

And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp
...

 Good things of day begin to droop and drowse;

 While night's black agents to their preys do rouse
...

 The west yet glimmers with some streaks of day

...

What is the night?

Almost at odds with morning, which is which."

Of course it could be argued that Shakespeare has the characters say these things to remind the audience of the time of day- an indication that the stage was not literally dark. After all, Hamlet starts with a night scene and Romeo and Juliet have one scene at night (the balcony scene) and another at dawn (the morning after their wedding night). However, for me, Shakespeare makes more effort in those plays to have the lines render the time of day in our imagination. In Hamlet for instance the scene ends with "But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,/Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill:" and in Romeo and Juliet, Juliet really drums into the audience in Act 3 scene 2 that night is on its way:
"Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night,
...
Come, civil night,

Thou sober-suited matron, all in black

...

Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night,"

and so on.

and Romeo's description of the dawn for the audience is as poetic as Horatio's:
"look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east:
Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops."

What is striking in Macbeth is not only the number of scenes that take place in the dark but the way in which physical darkness seems to surround all of the characters, at least in Dunsinane castle. In Act 2 scene 4 Ross actually comments on this phenomenon, with the lines

" Is't night's predominance, or the day's shame,
That darkness does the face of earth entomb,
When living light should kiss it?"


To me, whereas Romeo's and Horatio's descriptions of the dawn invite the audience (with the use of the command "look") to imagine what their physical eyes cannot see, Ross' speech works much better if it is drawing their attention to an actual darkness that envelopes them to.

None of this is conclusive proof of course that Macbeth was written to be performed in a theatre where literal darkness was an integral element of the staging (as it is in theatres today). However there is one detail, easily overlooked, that convinces me that it was. Shakespeare was an impatient genius- constantly thinking and adapting his style and stagecraft. I believe that in writing for Blackfriars he suddenly began to realise what could be done on the stage in this theatre, and in Act 3 scene 3 of Macbeth he was suddenly struck with an idea that has become commonplace in theatre and film today.

One of the biggest challenges any playwright faces is to make violent death look convincing on stage. Stage blood is all very well but if you want to capture the true horror of brutal murder then having an actor collapse onto the stage in front of the audience and lie there trying not to breathe too heavily is not the most effective way to do it. This is why Duncan's murder happens offstage. Along with Lady Macbeth we hear strange, eerie night sounds but can see nothing, and our imagination does the rest.

In Act 3 scene 3 another crucial murder takes place, but this time on stage. Three murderers have been sent to kill Banquo and Fleance, who are out riding. They kill Banquo, but Fleance escapes. The scene is set up in an atmosphere of edgy suspicion as the first two murderers discover that Macbeth has sent a third, to keep an eye on them. The tension builds with short, disconnected exclamations. Banquo is heard offstage and the three murderers, who are men of few words, set on him.

Unfortunately, as is so often the case, the murder risks being a slightly farcical anticlimax after this build-up, with a confused tangle of bodies, or else an unconvincingly staged sword fight. And this, I believe, is where Shakespeare was suddenly struck with inspiration. Before the killing Banquo calls "Give us a light there, ho!" and the Second Murderer shouts "A light, a light!" The stage directions say "Enter BANQUO, and FLEANCE with a torch". Immediately after the murder (and Fleance's escape) the Third Murderer asks "Who did strike out the light?" 


Surely the implications are clear: Shakespeare is telling the actors that in the course of the scene the light is to be struck out so that the stage is in actual darkness. Why? So that, as with Duncan's murder, the audience will not be able to see anything, allowing their imaginations to take over. Shakespeare knew very well how "imagination bodies forth/The forms of things unknown" and here, I believe, he uses that power of the imagination to create the atmosphere of horror that would be that much weakened if the audience could actually see what was happening.

Of course successful film makers ever since Macbeth have used darkness and concealment in the same way. In real horror films it is what you cannot see, rather than what you can that is truly horrifying. So I believe that in that simple, unremarkable looking, short and easily overlooked scene, Shakespeare was pointing the way for future film directors in how to use darkness to invoke horror.

Learning to read

When asked what the study of English Literature is all about I generally answer that it involves learning to read. This is possibly not the best answer to recruit potential A level students but it is, I believe, completely true. Most people's initial reaction to this statement is that they had learned to read by the time they were five years old, so what am I on about. However reading is in fact a very dynamic and continually developing skill. Reading a text is not a mechanical process like scanning a document into a computer's memory but involves a complex interaction between the reader and the text, involving memory, imagination, analytical skill and empathy. There are texts that I have read dozens of time but would still be happy to read again- not out of nostalgia but because I know that there is more I could get out of reading them and thinking about them.

I find it useful to illustrate the process of reading with a diagram, as follows:

In this case, the reader is me. Note that my reading of this text will not be identical to yours, or to any other reader's. I bring my own imagination, previous experiences, thought processes, prejudices and assumptions to the process and they will be unique to me. Note also that on first coming across the text my reading would have been quite limited, maybe even distorted. The process of studying literature is about developing area C of the diagram- through thinking about the text, rereading the text, considering other people's readings of the text, rereading the text, thinking about it some more, rereading it... You get the picture.

This diagram is useful because it illustrates some of the potential pitfalls facing students of literature. A common error (particularly common when I was at school) is to move C too far towards B and away from A. This is where the reader works at the text but without engaging with it or thinking about it: they do not put anything of themselves into the reading. A student might be able to recount the plot of a novel flawlessly, even quote at length from a poem, but they have not engaged with it. If a child has learned a great poem off by heart and can recite it, but has absolutely no idea what it means, is it in any meaningful way a great poem for them?

At the opposite extreme the reading can move all the way over to A, almost losing its connection with B. This is where a student becomes intensely emotionally involved in an idea of what the text is about, which is based on a partial or superficial reading of it. Involvement in the text is a good thing and activities that encourage this involvement, like getting students to write Lady Macbeth's diary, were an excellent counter to the sort of sterile regurgitation encouraged by the first error. The problem is where this approach encourages students to develop their own version of the text with little or no reference to the original, so that we find in Lady Macbeth's diary that she had been conducting an illicit affair with King Duncan.

Each of these errors does at least involve the reader making some effort to develop a reading of the text. The worst error for me, and one that modern exam-pressured English Literature teaching seems very prone to, is where that process disappears altogether and the "reader" simply adopts wholesale a reading of the text from their teacher, a commercial study guide, Wikipedia or some impressive sounding but fundamentally vapid essay downloaded form the internet.

All of the above will of course present a reading of the text, and one would hope that all are informed by thought and by good knowledge of the text. They are all potentially of great value to the student if, and only if, they use them to develop their own reading further. If they listen to what the teacher has to say, read the resource, think about it and crucially go back to the text to test out their changed reading then all well and good. If on the other hand they simply adopt this other reading (let's make it a new balloon called "D" in the diagram) then we have a disaster. There is no connection between the reader A and the new reading D, and if there was a strong connection between the text B and the new reading D then the reader knows nothing of it.

Yet this is precisely what generations of students are being encouraged to do. When studying poetry they are given the impression that the most important aspect of the poem is the annotations the teacher has put up on the board for them to copy down. If a student misses a lesson then so long as they have copied down the annotations they'll be fine. When it comes to revision, many students spend more time revising the explanatory notes about a poem than rereading it for themselves. How through these activities are they developing their own reading of the texts they study?

Of course I understand that students need help and guidance to develop their reading of difficult texts. There is nothing wrong with teachers annotating texts with a class and obviously they want and need to give students input into shades of meaning they might miss, or literary techniques they might not be aware of. However central to the whole process should be the students' development of their own reading of the texts.

Fortunately there is one simple way that this can be improved: students need to spend more time actually reading the texts for themselves. Whenever it comes to revision time and students (or more likely their parents) ask me what is the best thing they can do to revise for a literature exam I always ask them how often they have actually read the text. If the answer is less than three (and it so often is) then I tell them that their first priority should be to read the text again. And then possibly another time. If I, as an English graduate and a teacher for over twenty years, do not believe I can develop a full reading of any complex text in less than three readings, then why should they?

Anthony and Cleopatra is the (other) greatest love story ever told

If, as I have claimed in a previous post, Shakespeare's intention in Romeo and Juliet was not to write the greatest love story ever told, then what about Antony and Cleopatra? This is no impetuous teenage passion- Shakespeare has taken as his subject one of the archetypal stories of doomed love. Antony, one of the triumvirate that rules the known world, abandons everything for the love of the enchanting Queen of Egypt, Cleopatra. Their story ends when Antony, believing Cleopatra to be dead, kills himself. Cleopatra then also commits suicide through the exotically tragic means of having an asp deliver a fatal bite. An archetype of tragic love down the centuries, appropriately played in the modern era by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, surely these two are the central characters in the greatest love story ever told?

Well, if that was Shakespeare's intention he had a strange way of implementing it. From the famous first line of the play Antony's love for Cleopatra is dismissed as "dotage" and Antony himself describes his time with her as "poison'd hours [which] bound me up/From mine own knowledge." Their rows are legendary and in Act 3 scene 13 Antony is vicious to Cleopatra, reminding her that "I found you as a morsel cold upon/Dead Caesar's trencher"

Cleopatra for her part knows how to provoke Antony, for instance in Act 1 scene 3 with her harping on about his marriage to Fulvia. Earlier in the scene she even announces her intention of doing so, giving her servant the instructions:
"See where he is, who's with him, what he does:
I did not send you: if you find him sad,
Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report
That I am sudden sick: quick, and return."
Her viciousness also echoes his, though her worst remarks are directed at the messenger bringing reports from Anthony. To him she says for instance "Thou shalt be whipp'd with wire, and stew'd in brine,/Smarting in lingering pickle."
Of course the fact that the two of them famously row does not of itself mean that this is not a great love story- look at the similarities with Taylor and Burton who played them. However many of the characters' actions within the play cast doubt on that interpretation too. Antony abandons Cleopatra for Rome half way through the play and actually marries Caesar's sister Octavia. This is a political move of course, and he returns to Cleopatra, but their interaction, for instance in Act 3 scene 4 is that of a genuinely married couple.

Cleopatra is capable of political calculations too, and in Act 3 scene 13 is prepared to go behind Antony's back and surrender to Caesar. He does indeed commit suicide thinking that she has already killed herself but the way Shakespeare presents this is hardly sympathetic. In fact, echoing her game-playing from Act 1 scene 3 mentioned above, in Act 4 scene 13 Cleopatra has her servant tell Antony of her suicide, just to get his reaction. This is hardly the behaviour of a character who genuinely and passionately loves her partner:
"Mardian, go tell him I have slain myself;
Say, that the last I spoke was 'Antony,'
And word it, prithee, piteously: hence, Mardian,
And bring me how he takes my death."

Even Cleopatra's actual suicide is not quite such an unequivocal gesture of undying love as it might appear. She survives Antony's death and in Act 5 scene 2 actually starts negotiating terms with Caesar, for instance asking for her son to remain King of Egypt. However what she keeps harking back to is how she is going to be treated in the future. She cannot accept the loss of her power and authority and is haunted by the idea that Caesar will "hoist me up/And show me to the shouting varletry/Of censuring Rome." It is not the loss of Anthony that will blight her future life but the loss of her dignity and power.

So why has this story so often been said to be the greatest love story of all time? I think that, precisely as with Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare is actually commenting on the ways such stories turn into myths. Caesar starts the process himself, with his concluding speech in which he says "No grave upon the earth shall clip in it/A pair so famous." However is motives for doing so are made absolutely explicit: he wants to gain some of the reflected glory as the person who was responsible for bringing this tragic story to its conclusion. As he says:
"High events as these
Strike those that make them; and their story is
No less in pity than his glory which
Brought them to be lamented."

In the end then, I believe that Antony and Cleopatra is a play about celebrity rather than love. Unusually for Shaekespeare tragedies there are very few soliloquies in the play, because both central characters are constantly on show and constantly aware of their importance and the fact of being watched and noticed. Antony's greatest dread in the end is the loss of that public identity. As he says "I am Antony/Yet cannot hold this visible shape." Cleopatra's, even more tellingly, is the prospect not of oblivion but loss of respect. One of the images of the future that seems to horrify her most is that of their story being presented in mocking, rather than nobly tragic, ways:
"Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I' the posture of a whore."

So in the end it is in  all of the characters' interest that this story of political intrigue, military incompetence and human pettiness be presented as "the greatest love story ever told." And that, I believe, is the point Shakespeare is making.

Lady Macbeth is the source of evil in the play- without her Macbeth would remain a noble, loyal soldier

This reading of Macbeth is so widespread that generations of students who have studied Macbeth for SATs or GCSE have stated it as a matter of fact. The situation is not helped by the practice of basing the study of the play on a plot synopsis and close reading of Act 1 scene 5, Act 1 scene 7 and Act 2 scene 2 alone.

Briefly, the interpretation states that at the start of the play Macbeth is a noble, loyal (I have even, incredibly, seen the words "kind-hearted" used of him at the start) soldier. Lady Macbeth on the other hand is an ambitious, scheming, evil temptress, probably in league with the witches. To serve her own ambition she seduces the noble Macbeth into murdering King Duncan and that is what destroys him. From then on his decline is inevitable, and she is to blame.

This is not just misogyny of course- Lady Macbeth herself describes the situation in much the same terms. She calls on the "mortal spirits" to "unsex" her and fill her "from the crown to the toe top-full/Of direst cruelty." She describes Macbeth as being "too full o' the milk of human kindness" and having explained to him her plan to murder Duncan tells him to "leave all the rest to me." When he tries to back out she turns on him with a bewildering series of emotional attacks that renew his resolve to murder the King and cause him to say admiringly of her "Bring forth men-children only;/For thy undaunted mettle should compose/Nothing but males."

It is also clear that before Lady Macbeth's intervention Macbeth is much admired. His prowess in battle is recounted admiringly by the Sergeant in Act 1 scene 2 and Duncan himself calls him "valiant cousin! worthy gentleman!" Immediately after the murder of the King the process of degradation begins, as he says "To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself" and by the end of the play he and Lady Macbeth are described as "this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen."

So there you go. Case closed, surely. As millions of student essays have laboriously explained, Lady Macbeth is the source of the evil in the play. She is responsible for turning a loyal soldier into a ruthless murderer.

Except of course that it is not as simple as that. Lady Macbeth 's influence on her husband is perhaps not as strong as she might believe. Although in Act 1 scene 7 she appears able to manipulate him with ease, in Act 2 scene 2 and again in Act 3 scene 4 he simply does not listen to her at all. When he arranges for Banquo and his son to be killed he not only does not tell her (saying "be ignorant of the knowledge dearest chuck/Till though applaud'st the deed.") he actively deceives her, saying of the banquet that evening "Let your remembrance apply to Banquo", knowing that Banquo will by then be dead. He then orders Macduff's wife and children to be killed, without any reference to her, and when he hears of her death all he can say is "she should have died hereafter" before launching into a nihilistic musing on the pointlessness of life, with his "Tomorrow..." speech.

Similarly, for all her talk Lady Macbeth simply is not the evil murderess she purports to be. In her rant at Macbeth for threatening to back down from the murder she says of her own baby that
"I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this."
However when it comes to it, she has the daggers in her hands standing over the sleeping Duncan but, as she admits to Macbeth, could not kill him because he "resembl'd my father as he slept."

Immediately after the murder she is the more controlled of the two and this can easily be seen as evidence of her icy ruthlessness. However actually it seems to me more like appalling naivety, as if, unlike Macbeth, she simply does not understand what they have done. She tells him that "a little water clears of this deed" and throughout uses the imagery of paint, as if the blood and the guilt are simply (as in the pun on "gilt") decorations, that can be applied and removed with ease. Speaking of the sleeping guards she says
"If he do bleed,
I'll gild the faces of the grooms withal;
For it must seem their guilt."
She even syas that "the sleeping and the dead are but as pictures."

It is not until the sleepwalking of Act 5 scene 1 that she realises what the more experienced Macbeth saw immediately- that the blood is not something any amount of water will remove. Her anguished "all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand" exactly echoes Macbeth's "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood/Clean from my hand."

In fact this is not the only occasion when the two echo each other. In Act 1 scene 5 Lady Macbeth calls on night to come, to conceal the dread crime she is contemplating:
"Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry 'Hold, hold!'"

This is frequently used as evidence of Lady Macbeth's role in bringing down the darkness of evil on the court of Scotland. What is less frequently mentioned is that this is an almost exact echo of Macbeth's own comment, in Act 1 scene 4, before she has had a chance to "pour [her] spirits in [his] ear":
"Stars, hide your fires;
Let not light see my black and deep desires:
The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be,
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see."

This, I think, is the key point. The image of Macbeth at the start of the play as a loyal, upstanding (let alone kind-hearted!) soldier is half way between simplistic and plain wrong. In the very first scene the witches announce the moral ambiguity that is at the heart of the play with the line "Fair is foul and foul is fair" and Macbeth's actions in the battle, whilst in support of the King, are bloodthirsty and ruthless. He shed so much blood that his sword "smoked with bloody execution" and when he came across Cawdor did not simply kill him but "unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps,/And fix'd his head upon our battlements." Is this a man "too full o' the milk of human kindness"? It is also clearly significant that his first words in the play directly echo the witches': "So foul and fair a day I have not seen."

Yet it is not simply a question of moral ambiguity. On hearing the witches' prophecies to them both Banquo is immediately suspicious and warns Macbeth that "oftentimes, to win us to our harm,/The instruments of darkness tell us truths." Macbeth reacts differently. As soon as he hears the first of the prophecies (that he will be Thane of Cawdor) confirmed he asks himself
"why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the use of nature?"
If we are not clear what that suggestion is he confirms it immediately after, by referring to "My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical." Clearly he does not need Lady Macbeth to put the idea of murdering the King into his head. Lter, when he finds that Malcolm rather than he has been named as Duncan's successor his plea (quoted above) for the stars to "hide your fires;/Let not light see my black and deep desires" is a clear indicator of how he intends to act henceforth.

It is true of course that at the start of  Act 1 scene 7 Macbeth expresses a decision that "we will proceed no further in this business" and that Lady Macbeth bombards him with a series of emotional attacks that turn him around. However his objections seem to be more over timing than principle, as he says
"He hath honour'd me of late; and I have bought
Golden opinions from all sorts of people,
Which would be worn now in their newest gloss,
Not cast aside so soon."
and one has to question just how profound his change of mind has been given that it takes just 45 lines until he changes back again and says "I am settled, and bend up/Each corporal agent to this terrible feat"

So in all, although Lady Macbeth might in some way act as a catalyst, the impulse to act as he does was in Macbeth from the start. Lady Macbeth is neither as evil nor as influential as either she or generations of school students would have us believe.

Romeo and Juliet is the greatest love story ever told

I am not denying of course that Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet contains a love story. It is this that makes it so useful to teachers trying to engage reluctant adolescents with the study of Shakespeare. The play contains some beautiful romantic poetry- in their first meeting in Act 1 scene 5 their conversation forms a sonnet. I have reproduced it below with character names removed:
"If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.
Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take."

Similarly the conversation between Juliet on the balcony and Romeo below in Act 2 scene 2 is beautifully poetic, with its imagery of night and the moon. Even more beautifully in Act 3 scene 5 after their wedding night the imagery of night and day, the nightingale and the lark, create a poetry that is evocative and poignant.

However it is also very clear throughout that this is an adolescent love story, redolent of sexual exploration and heightened teenage angst. It is no accident that in adapting his source story Shakespeare condensed the timescale hugely, so that the two are in bed together within 24 hours of their first meeting. It is also no accident that at the start of the play Romeo is madly in love already, but with Rosalind, of whom he says (with typical teenage excess) "the all-seeing sun/Ne'er saw her match since first the world begun." We are reminded of his immaturity when, in Act 3 scene 3, Friar Laurence tries to get him to hide himself as he hears a knock at the door. With teenage petulance Romeo refuses, saying "Not I; unless the breath of heartsick groans,/Mist-like, infold me from the search of eyes." and in the face of Friar Laurence's increasing exasperation behaves more like a toddler than a great lover.

Juliet is a far more mature character, yet we are forcibly reminded that she is a teenager too by the way her father talks to her in Act 3 scene 5.
"What is this?'Proud,' and 'I thank you,' and 'I thank you not;'
And yet 'not proud,' mistress minion, you,
Thank me no thankings, nor, proud me no prouds,
But fettle your fine joints 'gainst Thursday next,
To go with Paris to Saint Peter's Church,
Or I will drag thee on a hurdle thither."
Capulet may be entirely in the wrong and Juliet in an impossible position, but what parent of a teenage child does not hear their own voice just a little in this lecture?

The way their story ends, tragic as it is, is also rendered slightly farcical by their teenage impetuosity. Romeo kills himself because he thinks Juliet is already dead. Still caught up with thinking about Paris' death he notices that her lips are still crimson, but does not pause to think any more about that. Both characters are clearly caught by the dark glamour of death. Romeo cries "O you/The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss/A dateless bargain to engrossing death!" and Juliet, talking of the dagger entering her body says "there rust, and let me die."

So the play clearly contains a very sad story of two adolescents caught up in the heady passions of love and death. However what drives the narrative is not this young love but the "ancient grudge" of the prologue. The play starts with a fight between the Montagues and the Capulets and ends with the resolution of their differences. The turning point in the plot is Tybalt's killing of Mercutio and Romeo's of Tybalt in Act 3 scene 1. These events have nothing to do with the love story. Indeed, although Romeo initially tries to prevent Mercutio and Tybalt (Juliet's cousin) fighting, in the end it comes to a choice between his love for Juliet and his loyalty to Mercutio and hatred of Capulets. The latter wins out and his killing of Tybalt is what leads to his exile and the tragic ending.

In fact Shakespeare makes clear where Romeo's priorities lie when he bemoans the fact that he let Mercutio die with the words "O sweet Juliet,/Thy beauty hath made me effeminate/And in my temper soften'd valour's steel!" It is surely hard to maintain the belief that this is the greatest love story ever told when the central character, a typical teenage boy, is furious that his love for his girlfriend has weakened him in front of his mates.

So if this is not the greatest love story ever told, why do so many believe it is, and why has the play survived? The answer I believe lies in the final scene. The death of the central characters is not the end of the play. The Prince has been desperate throughout to end the fighting between the Capulets and the Montagues, so seizes on the youngsters' love and death to say "Capulet! Montague!/See, what a scourge is laid upon your hate," and force the families to resolve their differences. Capulet and Montague in response compete with each other as to how costly a gold statue each is going to build of the other's child. So the feud is over and the prince can round off the play with the rhyming couplet
"For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo."

So the process of mythologising Romeo and Juliet's brief, passionate, adolescent love affair begins within the play itself. As he so often seems to do, Shakespeare is not just engaging us in a story but engaging us in thinking about the story too. Sonnet 18 (Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?) is in the end not about his love at all, but about the poem itself, as its final couplet makes clear:
"So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
 So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."
In the same way Romeo and Juliet is not so much the greatest love story ever told as a play about the genesis of "the greatest love story ever told" - how that story came to be created and used for political purposes by the Prince (or for educational purposes by generations of English teachers).

Hamlet's weakness is his conscience- it is that which prevents his taking revenge

This supposition of course turns on the meaning of the word "conscience," particularly in the famous phrase "thus conscience doth make cowards of us all." Some have argued that it means "consciousness", or as Hamlet himself puts it "thinking too precisely on the event" and others that it has more or less its modern force. However to me it matters not: the "To be or not to be" speech is a metaphysical musing on the nature of human existence and cannot be taken as Hamlet's assessment of his own state of mind. Throughout he refers to "we", "us" and "he," never to "I" or "me."

The other source of this misconception is a careless misreading of Act 3 scene 3 that attributes Hamlet's failure to kill Claudius while he is praying to a crisis of conscience. This is patently absurd- Hamlet does not kill Claudius then because he believes him to have confessed his sins so that if killed he would go straight to heaven. This is not Hamlet holding back from a violent, murderous act because it would be morally wrong but the opposite- he does not kill because the act would not be violent or murderous enough. He wants instead to kill him in a state of sin so that "his soul may be as damn'd and black/As hell, whereto it goes." Absurd as this reading is though, I have seen it in the scene summary of that scholarly edition of the play, the Arden Shakespeare.

Over the rest of the play it is actually remarkable how little Hamlet is troubled by his conscience. I would argue that the degree with which we are brought to identify with Hamlet is actually quite disturbing given his cold-hearted ruthlessness in regards to the deaths of others who have done him little wrong. To summarise, as well as Claudius (whom he eventually kills without ceremony but with an unpleasant pun about his marriage and the poisoned pearl) Hamlet kills Polonius and Laertes, drives Ophelia to suicide and sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths in England. What is remarkable about all of these deaths is Hamlet's apparent complete lack of remorse about them.

Polonius is an interfering, scheming, devious old fool but he clearly cares about his children. Hamlet kills him in Act 3 scene 4 for no discernible reason at all. He hears a voice from behind the curtain and immediately draws his sword and stabs whoever it might be. On finding out it is the father of his loved one whom he has killed in cold blood he calls him a "wretched, rash, intruding fool" and after a mere three lines, where he effectively blames Polonius because "Thou find'st to be too busy is some danger." resumes his argument with his mother. Later, in Act 4 scene 3 he makes a series of unpleasant jokes to Claudius about the dead body, concluding "But indeed, if you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby."

Ophelia is alleged to be Hamlet's love, and the overt sexuality of his conversation with her in Act 3 scene 2 would suggest an intimate relationship ("I mean, my head upon your lap?" "Do you think I meant country matters?" "That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs." "It would cost you a groaning to take off my edge."). However Hamlet behaves towards her with intolerable cruelty that leads to her madness and suicide. When he hears (in Act 5 scene 1) that she is dead, he appears on the face of it to be mourning her, as he says "I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers/Could not, with all their quantity of love,/Make up my sum." However it immediately becomes clear that he is actually motivated more by a desire to compete with Laertes- the competition culminating in an unseemly wrestling match in the grave, with Ophelia herself forgotten.

It could be argued that in killing Laertes Hamlet is simply defending himself and in killing Claudius he is avenging his father. However it is notable how little comment he makes on either death- even Macbeth appears more affected by the murders he commits than Hamlet is.

This coldness, which argues a lack rather than an excess of conscience, is clearest in the case of the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. These two are duplicitous, self-serving courtiers who use their relationship with Hamlet to curry favour with the King. However there is no suggestion that they were party to the plan to have him killed on his arrival in England- Claudius reveals that in Act 4 scene 3 after they have left the stage. Nevertheless, as he takes great delight in telling Horatio in Act 5 scene 2, when Hamlet discovers the plot, rather than simply escape he forges a new letter to the King of England to ensure that on arrival his two erstwhile friends will be "put to sudden death,/ No shriving-time allow'd." This a brutal punishment- "shriving" means confessing and, as he makes clear in Act 3 scene 3, Hamlet strongly believes that this will mean that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern will got to Hell for all eternity. For Hamlet though, it is an occasion for light hearted humour in his account to Horatio.

So far from an excess of conscience, Hamlet in fact shows very little evidence of possessing a conscience at all. It is actually remarkable how Shakespeare draws us in, so that we overlook this and see poor Hamlet as a sensitive, tortured soul, weighed down with moral dilemmas.

Misconceptions about Shakespeare plays

One of the disadvantages of Shakespeare's position as national bard is that many more people are familiar with his plays than have actually read them with anything approaching close attention or enjoyment. In particular the compulsory assessment of 14-year-olds in England on their knowledge and understanding of (selected snippets of) at least one Shakespeare play has tended to produce some convenient "answers" to plays, that are often never really closely examined.

As an avowed Shakespeare lover I wish that more people would fully engage with the complexity, subtlety and beauty of his writing, rather than treat his plays as problems that require a quick and convenient answer. The next few posts will therefore present some possibly contentious views about some of the common statements made about Shakespeare plays. If they provoke anyone to go back and reread the texts for themselves (if only to prove me wrong) then I will be happy.

Hamlet's weakness is his conscience- it is that which prevents his taking revenge
Romeo and Juliet is the greatest love story ever told
Lady Macbeth is the source of evil in the play- without her Macbeth would remain a noble, loyal soldier
Antony and Cleopatra is the (other) greatest love story ever told

Monarchy in Shakespeare's tragedies

Part of teaching literature is making students aware of the cultural and historical context of the work they study. So like any other teacher of English when "doing Shakespeare" I have told students that to understand Shakespeare's great tragedies (Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear are the ones I have most often introduced with this explanation) they have to understand the concept of the Divine Right of Kings. Elizabethan people, I tell them, saw the world very differently to us. They believed that the monarch was there by divine right, and so represented the people's only direct line of communication with God. I show them, and sometimes get them to copy out, this diagram:

I go on to tell them that in all three of the great tragedies, Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear, the rightful King's departure throws the country into chaos, because the people's connection to God has gone. I even sometimes give them another diagram to show this situation:

Of course there is a lot of truth in this explanation. With the King gone Macbeth's Scotland descends into bloody chaos, a chaos symbolised in Lear's England by the central storm, and in Hamlet's Denmark "the time is out of joint." A character in Macbeth ("Lord" in Act 3 scene 6) puts it very clearly when expressing his hope that the English army will restore the rightful monarch:
"That, by the help of these--with Him above
To ratify the work--we may again
Give to our tables meat, sleep to our nights,
Free from our feasts and banquets bloody knives,
Do faithful homage and receive free honours:
All which we pine for now."

However, like almost everything in Shakespeare, I don't actually think it is as straightforward as that. Take the idea of order being restored at the end of the play by the rightful monarch being restored. On the face of it, all three of these plots end like that, but look more closely and the picture is less clear.

In Macbeth, Macduff greets Malcolm at the end with "Hail, king! for so thou art" and Malcolm concludes the play with a statesmanlike (if rather brief and unpoetic) summary of what he will do to restore Scotland to order. So what happened to Fleance? Both the witches' prediction ("Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none") and Macbeth's vision in Act 4 scene 1 have prepared us for Banquo's son to start a dynasty of Kings of Scotland (leading to James I and VI of course), but at the end he is forgotten.

In Hamlet the end is even stranger when, near the end of the marathon Act 5 scene 2 the dying Hamlet, just before his famous last words "the rest is silence", says "I do prophesy the election lights/ On Fortinbras: he has my dying voice." Fortinbras who? you might ask. This is a character who has had one appearance on stage so far, with half a dozen lines in Act 4 scene 4. In King Lear, it is Lear himself who is reinstated when, near the end of another marathon last scene, Albany says "for us we will resign,/During the life of this old majesty,/To him our absolute power." However mad old Lear, now insane with grief over the death of his daughter Cordelia, seems neither to know or care.

So if the concept of the rightful monarch is so central to the Elizabethan world view that their removal causes chaos and bewilderment, why does Shakespeare in these three great works treat the reinsitution of the rightful monarch with something approaching contempt?

The answer I think lies in another tragedy, Anthony and Cleopatra. Though set in the ancient Roman empire this play explores the notion of Kingship, but looks at it from the other side. Mark Anthony and Cleopatra are very keen at the end to present Mark Anthony as "the greatest prince o' the world" (Mark Anthony) whose "legs bestrid the ocean" (Cleopatra). Yet Mark Anthony actually feels that "I am Anthony:/ Yet cannot hold this visible shape" and when Cleopatra makes her famous speech about him she makes it to Dolabella and concludes "Think you there was, or might be, such a man/As this I dream'd of?" to which Dolabella answers "Gentle madam, no." Partly , Shakespeare is simply exploring Anthony and Cleopatra's self-delusion, but partly I believe he is saying that the very concept of Kingship is an illusion. These people are simply that: flawed and vulnerable people. The image of the "Emperor Anthony" whose "face was as the heavens" and whose "legs bestrid the ocean" is simply a fantasy that we create to fulfill our need for great leaders.

In fact, Hamlet and King Lear appear to me to explore a view that a King might be essential to the commonwealth, but being a good king is not the same as being a good person- in fact it is almost the opposite. Fortinbras says of Hamlet that "he was likely, had he been put on,/To have proved most royally" yet nothing could have been farther from the truth. Although he recognises that "the time is out of joint" he goes on to say "O cursed spite,/That ever I was born to set it right!" and certainly over the course of the play he is hardly very effective in doing so. If anything his actions contribute to the chaos: he upstes and frightens Ophelia to such an extent that she is driven to suicide; he murders Polonius for no good reason, and expresses no remorse at doing so; and he disrupts Ophelia's funeral by jumping into the grave and wrestling with her brother Laertes.

Hamlet's model for Kingship is Fortinbras, who he sees as being "with divine ambition puff'd". He admires him for the fact that he has risked his kingdom "even for an eggshell" and concludes
"Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake"
These images, of a bubble ("puff'd"), an eggshell and a straw are redolent of the insubstantiality of Kingship that Anthony saw just before his death.

In fact you could argue that the character in Hamlet who demonstrates best the strong, statesmanlike leadership required in a time of crisis is Claudius. Whilst Hamlet's pretend madness is sowing unease and fear in an already precarious kingdom, Claudius acts decisively. He resolves the tricky diplomatic crisis with the Norwegians and brings the volatile and dangerous Laertes to say "Lord, I will be ruled." It could even be argued that his sending of Hamlet to England and a quiet assassination was a shrewd move: this was a murderous lunatic after all. The circumstances of Claudius' removal as King are also hardly consistent with the notion of the restoration of the Divine order of human affairs. The last scene of Hamlet is almost farcically chaotic, with Hamlet's fatal stabbing of Claudius just one in a series of deaths that leaves the stage cluttered with bodies.

However it is in King Lear that Shakespeare develops most clearly the idea that good Kingship is incompatible with true humanity. When Lear renounces his kingdom at the start he is very clearly acting as a King. The formality and pomp of Act 1 scene 1 make it clear that this is a calculated political move, designed to leave Cordelia, allied with either France or Burgundy, in effective control. Unfortunately Cordelia refuses to play ball and Lear's furious response is what leads to his downfall. The seeds are clearly there when he tells his sons-in-law "This coronet part betwixt you"- a clearly concerning symbol of division.

It could be argued that it is Lear's human weakness here that leads to the destruction of the kingdom, but I would argue that in Act 1 he is acting as a King, not a human being. His speech is grandiose and redolent of power, in contrast with Cordelia's simple "Nothing." His denunciation of Cordelia is inhuman in its viciousness, and significantly full of images of exactly the sort of supernatural chaos and overturning of the natural order that Shakespeare's audience most feared:
"For, by the sacred radiance of the sun,
The mysteries of Hecate, and the night;
By all the operation of the orbs
From whom we do exist, and cease to be;
Here I disclaim all my paternal care,
Propinquity and property of blood,
And as a stranger to my heart and me
Hold thee, from this, for ever. The barbarous Scythian,
Or he that makes his generation messes
To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
Be as well neighbour'd, pitied, and relieved,
As thou my sometime daughter."

What the play explores is Lear's progress from this point, the highest in terms of his kingly power yet the lowest in terms of his humanity, to the last scene where he dies, wishing with true and heartbreaking humanity that Cordelia was not dead.
"Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
Look there, look there!" [Dies]
It is significant that at the end he echoes Cordelia's "nothing" with the words "No, no, no life! ... Never, never, never, never, never."

The turning point is the storm of Act 3. It is here that he reaches the nadir- stripped of power and influence, impotent with rage, surrounded by madmen and fools and overwhelmed by the furious power of nature he comes to the realisation that "unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare, forked animal" and casts off his clothes. Yet his speeches are not all insane ravings. It is here also that he comes to think about the
"Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these?"
and recognises that
"I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,"

What happens to Lear in the storm would clearly be characterised nowadays as a breakdown, yet it is also his redemption. However it is vital to understand that he is redeemed only when the last vestige of his kingship has gone. When he wakes up in Act 4 scene 7 he describes himself as a "very foolish, fond old man." His regal certainty has all gone, but despite his tentative self doubting, his judgment is now sound. He recognises Kent and Cordelia (though he does not believe his own eyes)
"I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
Methinks I should know you, and know this man;
Yet I am doubtful for I am mainly ignorant"
and asks them to "forget and forgive: I am old and foolish"

So by the end the concept of kingship is seen as almost irrelevant to Lear, and therefore to the audience. The decisive battle between France and England is dismissed with a couple of "alarums" offstage and Lear simply does not notice his reinstatement as King. He does talk of his former life in his last long and coherent speech, and I think what we see is a mixture of nostalgia and contempt for the life of the court:
"No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out;
And take upon's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,
In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon."

So does all this mean that the diagram I show students is worthless, or that cultural and historical context are irrelevant to the study of literature? Not at all. It is just that, in this as in most things, the picture is not as simplistic or clear as it might initially appear. Yes, I believe that the audience of Shakespeare's day had a powerful sense that the loss of a strong and righteous King was dangerous to the stability of the country, and Shakespeare reflected that feeling. Yet this was also the country where the thousand-year rule of the established Church had been rocked, principally by the publication of the Bible in English and this was the country that was shortly to sow the seeds of revolutionary fervour by executing its King. I believe that in Lear and Hamlet at least you can see an exploration of that unease with the nature of kings, alongside a recognition of the necessity of Kingship.

Why write poetry?

As students come to a fuller understanding of the complexity and power of poetry and the amount of work that clearly goes in to creating poems it is not uncommon to hear a heartfelt query: why does anyone do this? Why write poetry?

To be honest, when studying some poetry it can be difficult to come up with a convincing answer. The idea of a professional poet is virtually incomprehensible ("but that would mean other people paying to read the poems") and the answer that "poets wanted to write in order to explore their ideas and feelings or just to create beautiful verse" comes across as self-indulgent claptrap.

However when studying the war poets the question is very easy to answer indeed. Soldiers in the First World War wrote poems because they had to. Faced with the enormity of what they were experiencing and the utter inability of anyone who had not experienced it to comprehend any part of what they saw and felt they felt an irresistible compulsion to write and poetry was in many cases the only adequate way to express in writing what they wanted to say.

However it would be a mistake to assume that what they wanted to say was always the same. We are familiar with the anti-War messages of some of the great war poems. The final lines of Dulce et Decorum Est perhaps express this sentiment most powerfully
"My friend, you would not tell with such high zest,
To children ardent for some desperate glory
The old lie Dulce et Decorum Est
Pro patria mori"

However soldiers express other sentiments equally powerfully. Some may seem anachronistic to us now, though they were felt with a passion at the time. They include a sense of duty to a cause and loyalty to one's fellow soldiers, dead or alive. John McCrae's In Flanders Fields ends with a stanza that may be less welcome to the ears of modern readers but clearly arose from a genuine sense of duty and care for those who had died
"Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields."

Perhaps the most eloquent expression of this sentiment is Laurence Binyon's For the Fallen. Surely anyone, whatever their level of disgust with the whole concept of war sees the beauty in the lines
"They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them."

The poems that have the greatest hold on me though are the ones which explore the other facets of the experience of war. Unsurprisingly perhaps soldiers did not confine their thoughts and feelings to the issue of whether they were pro- or anti-War. Lost in such an alien and incomprehensible world one emotion that clearly came across at times was a bitter and intense anger with those at home who did not and could not understand.

Siegfried Sassoon, who seems to have felt this emotion more than most, expresses it powerfully in the final stanza of Suicide in the Trenches
"You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.”
and Owen puts it more softly, but with equal passion, in Apologia pro Poemate Meo
"You shall not come to think them well content
By any jest of mine. These men are worth your tears.
You are not worth their merriment."

However soldiers harboured darker and less noble feelings too. It is unsettling to come across disgust towards those who were wounded or dying, but it is there. In Owen's great Dulce et Decorum Est the face of the dying soldier is like "a devil's sick of sin" and the sound of the blood in his lungs is "obscene as cancer." His description of the shell-shocked soldiers in Mental Cases is even more disturbing: "Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,/Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,/Baring teeth that leer like skulls' tongues wicked?" Owen is the most compassionate of poets, and stated that "my subject is War, and the pity of War. The poetry is in the pity", yet here what we see is closer to disgust and anger.

Sassoon expresses this anger and disgust too, in the Hero. In the voice of the officer giving the news of a soldier's death to his mother he describes how "'Jack', cold-footed, useless swine,/Had panicked down the trench that night the mine/Went up at Wicked Corner." In this poem, Sassoon's disgust spreads to the mother, whose "weak eyes/Had shone with gentle triumph, brimmed with joy,/ Because he'd been so brave, her glorious boy." and to himself, who had "told the poor old dear some gallant lies/That she would nourish all her days, no doubt."

Although these attitudes to dead and wounded comrades are difficult and painful to read, perhaps the most disturbing emotion, though rarely fully explored, is that which lies behind the most shocking passage in Owen's Apologia pro Poemate Meo
"Merry it was to laugh there —
Where death becomes absurd and life absurder.
For power was on us as we slashed bones bare
Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder."
Whilst some of this is about self-loathing it also recognises the seductive pleasure of the adrenaline rush that accompanied battle. Julian Grenfell, not the most sensitive of men (he continued his hunting book into his time in the trenches, to record the "huns" he had "bagged") described it as the moment when "Joy of Battle only takes/Him by the throat, and makes him blind".

However Owen is that rare creature an anti-War poet who recognises and explores the exhilaration that going over the top can bring, along with the disgust and self-loathing it provokes afterwards. Spring Offensive is a powerful evocation of battle but ends by considering "the few who rushed in the body to enter Hell" and survived. He takes the familiar metaphor of War as Hell and questions it: if War is Hell, what does that make the soldiers? With searing honesty he forces himself and his readers to live through the emotions of one who has survived a battle in which he has fought both courageously and murderously.

Owen returned to the War in 1918, having already written all of his great poems. He was posthumously awarded the Military Cross for an action when "He personally manipulated a captured enemy machine gun from an isolated position and inflicted considerable losses on the enemy." Reading the last stanza of Spring Offensive, I can't help wondering how he thought afterwards of that action:
"But what say such as from existence' brink
Ventured but drave too swift to sink.
The few who rushed in the body to enter hell,
And there out-fiending all its fiends and flames
With superhuman inhumanities,
Long-famous glories, immemorial shames —
And crawling slowly back, have by degrees
Regained cool peaceful air in wonder —
Why speak they not of comrades that went under?"
Spring Offensive

Rhyme

Of all the features of poetry that students learn how to spot, with little understanding as to why, rhyme tops the list. Across the country students spend fruitless hours (well, minutes anyway) working out the rhyme scheme of poems. Having dutifully written out ABBA CDDC EFGEFG (a Petrarchan sonnet, in case you're wondering) they then stop and wonder why they just did that. When asked to write a paragraph about rhyme, many struggle to get beyond that old favourite "it helps the poem to flow."

Of course in studying sonnets there are useful things that the rhyme scheme can point you to- the division between the octave and the sestet for instance, or in Shakespearean sonnets the separation of the final couplet. However even these observations can seem mechanistic and unpoetic. Surely the study of poetry should not be reduced to this sort of arithmetic calculation.

In fact I believe that the power of rhyme in great poetry is best understood in exactly the same way as I have sought to explain the power of alliteration and assonance- through an understanding of connotations. The effect of rhyme is much the same as the effect of alliteration and assonance. When the ear detects that two or more words rhyme the brain subconsciously focuses a little more attention on the words, and links them together. Therefore a great poet can use rhyme to strengthen the power of individual words, to link connected words to bring out their connotations more strongly, or to force unexpected links into our minds.

With such a wealth of great rhyming poetry to take examples from I have decided to focus on just one, My Last Duchess, by Robert Browning. Because of the enjambment and the way the rhythm of the poem follows the fluency of the Duke's speech it is not immediately obvious that this poem rhymes, which makes it an ideal subject for this sort of analysis.

The use of rhyme that first strikes the attention is in line 11
"And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus."

Here it is a simple case of rhyme for emphasis. The word "durst" is the first hint of real menace in the urbane Duke's narrative, and the rhyme gives it even more force. The menace is carried forward by the link to "first", which helps us hear the Duke's suppressed anger and implicit threat to the listener.

A similar effect is used in line 16
                                     "‘Her mantle laps
Over my lady’s wrist too much,’ or ‘Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat:’"
Here it is the Duke's emphasis we hear. Since these are the Fra Pandolf's words, quoted by the Duke, we hear not only the painter's emphasis on the words with connotations to do with his art, but the Dukes contemptuous satirising of that emphasis too.

Perhaps the clearest example of this technique of mutual reinforcement is in  line 27, where the similar connotations of "mule" and "fool" compensate for the slightly forced rhyme
" The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace"
  However the most interesting use of rhyme in this poem, and what helps give it its menacing power, is the way it reveals the connotations the Duke (rather than the reader) sees in words. In the central section, as the Duke comes as close as he ever does to letting the mask of his urbanity slip he says
"She thanked men,—good! but thanked
Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame
This sort of trifling?"

To most readers the words "thanked" and "ranked", "named" and "blamed" have utterly different connotations and would not naturally be linked. Yet to the Duke all four words clearly have powerful connotations of prestige, authority, droit de Seigneur and his unalienable right to do whatever the hell he wants because he is the DUKE. Thanking is nothing to do with simple gratitude- it is a tribute owing to his rank. A name is not a simple signifier, it is central to concepts of rightness, appropriateness and correct conduct.

Perhaps the strongest example of this use of rhyme to reveal the Duke's twisted priorities is in the initially unremarkable couplet at line 25
"Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,"

For most of us, the subconscious linkage that the rhyme draws between the brooch and the beauty of the sunset would point out the insignificance of the former against the magnificence of the latter- compare "her breast" with "the West". However clearly for the Duke it is the other way round. The magnificence of the sunset is utterly unimportant as compared to the brooch HE gave her. The problem for him is that, unaccountably, the Duchess does not see it that way.

Connotations (and cut-up poems)

As I have said in other posts, I believe that understanding the idea of the connotations of words is central to understanding (and being able to write about) literature. Connotations are what give not only imagery but also alliteration, assonance and rhythm their power.

One way I have attempted to give students a clearer understanding of connotations is through an exercise I have called "cut-up poems." First, read Back in the Playground Blues, by Adrian Mitchell. Now read this little poem I made:

Playground in Summer
On the dusty ground
A small black chicken
Playing with a beetle.

With my back to the fence
In the lunchtime sun
I heard mother and father
Talking.

Clearly, though my poem is not particularly good it has a very different atmosphere to Mitchell's. Having established this I ask students to find the link between the poems. It generally takes a while to work out that the second poem is formed exclusively of words taken from the first. The question then is, if all of the words in the second poem come from the first, how come the atmosphere in the second poem is so different? Initially usually someone suggests that I have only taken the nicest and least scary words from the first poem, but this is clearly not true. So how does it work?

The answer is of course to do with connotations and the range of connotations a single word can have. Take the word "sun", indeed the phrase "lunchtime sun", that occurs in both poems. The phrase has a very diverse set of connotations: think of High Noon or Gunfight at the OK Corral, or any of those other Westerns where the showdown on the main street always takes place under the pitiless noonday sun. Think of the burning, killing sun of the Sahara, from films like Ice Cold in Alex. On the other hand think of lazy summer picnic lunches, or sunbathing beside the pool with a lunchtime cocktail, or those endless sunny lunchtimes of childhood holidays.

Quite simply, the poet of Back in the Playground Blues has triggered the first set of these connotations, by associating the phrase with the image of the beetle on its back, facing death. The "poet" of Playground in Summer has triggered the second set by associating the phrase with sitting against a sun-warmed fence and hearing the low murmur of your parents' voices.

So that's how connotations work. Simple really, and I think once students "get it" they find focusing on connotations a powerful way in to all poetry.

The evolution of language

It seems almost a truism that languages evolve. Taking English as an example anyone can see that this is the case: look at the development of English from Beowulf to the present day through Chaucer, Shakespeare and the rest. The concept does not even seem controversial, partly because evolution is almost universally seen as a positive process (largely I presume because humans, for some reason, see themselves as the pinnacle of evolution). However many people (not all Daily Mail or Telegraph readers) appear to accept the concept of language evolving whilst bemoaning any "decline" from the "correct" use of English, particularly by teenagers.

The metaphor of evolution for the process of development of language is actually a very interesting one. Evolution in the natural world is driven by two forces- random mutation and natural selection by survival of the fittest. Note that the mutations are random and the selection natural- neither is controlled or designed. In fact, both concepts apply very neatly to language development.

Mutations in language come about either through imports from other languages, or from neologisms (new coinages, often produced to name new discoveries or processes) or from simple errors. Of these only one source, neologism, is by design. Natural selection is the process by which new words or new usages enter the language: their formal entrance often being marked by an entry in such an august publication as the Oxford English Dictionary. We sometimes like to think that this demonstrates an element of design or control- that such dictionaries represent some over-arching authority that defines what is and what is not "correct" in our language. However in fact such dictionaries are simply a means of making a post hoc recognition that changes in language have already occurred. The actual selection, just as in natural evolution, is driven by survival of the fittest. Anyone can come up with a neologism, but it doesn't enter the language until it has become common currency: until enough people have decided to use it often enough for it to be accepted as a new word.

Over time, many people have felt this process to be worryingly random and chaotic. How can the beauty of our native language be subjected to such mauling in the court of uninformed public discourse? So attempts have been made in some languages to replace such natural evolution with a properly designed and systematic controlled approach. Classical Latin was one such, with its systematic definitions of conjugations and cases, declensions and moods. French attempted for a while to follow suit. The “immortels” of l’Académie Française laid down rigid rules on what was and was not “correcte” in order to root out anything “impur” from the language. So "self-service" was replaced by the clumsy (and to me equally unFrench) "libre service" and "le weekend" by "la fin de semaine."

Of course, what happened to Classical Latin is well known: it died. In its unchanged purity it simply fell out of use, whilst "Vulgar Latin" evolved into a whole range of languages from Romansch to Romanian. It will be interesting to see whether French goes the same way: certainly there are increasingly two different languages in use by French speakers, so that the same speaker can say “bonjour messieurs dames” when entering a cafe, then “salut les mecs” as he sits down at a table of friends. Both mean the same- more or less "Hello everyone"- despite having no words in common. The first is in formal, l’Académie Française approved French; the latter is not.

English has never taken this approach, much as Telegraph and Mail leader writers might wish it did, and this is the fundamental source of its vitality. Each of the forms of random mutation mentioned above has contributed to the development of English. To take just two examples of mistake-as-mutation, the word "adder" comes from the old English word "nadder". However over time "a nadder" appears to have been increasingly misheard as "an adder", hence the word "adder". Similarly, the phrase "apple-pie order" seems to have dervied from mishearing of one of two French phrases- "cap-à-pie" (head to foot) or "nappe plié" (folded linen). I was disappointed to discover in researching this essay though another example of what I thought was a similar mutation probably was not. I had always believed that Charing Cross got its name because it used to contain a cross built to Edward I's "chère reine" Eleanor. In fact according to Wikipedia, that fount of all wisdom, it is named after the Old English word "cierring" which refers to the bend in the river. Ah well.

So to what extent do modern usages contribute to the evolution of English and to what extent to its decline? For a start, the concept of "decline" in language is based on an odd desire to ascribe moral value to what is actually simply habit and tradition. The form of English we speak now is no more or less correct or elevated or worthwhile than the form Chaucer spoke or the form our grandchildren will speak. Nevertheless there are some random mutations that enrich or strengthen a species and others that do not. Here are my subjective judgments on just a few of the small changes detectable in modern spoken English:

• Use of "I was like ..." for "I said ...". I cannot see this surviving. There are hundreds of synonyms for "I said" and this is neither particularly expressive nor easy to say.
• Use of "I done" for "I have done". This is one of those examples that shows that informal English is NOT lazier nor less grammatical than Standard English. Standard English has only one simple past tense for "to do"- did, where informal English has two- did and done. However they are not interchangeable. Did is the past of "to do" as a modal verb. The sentence "I done my homework- did you?" is correct. "I did my homework- done you?" is not.
• Multiple variations in the conjugation of to be- "We was", "I ain't", "You is", "They be". Somehow this has to be sorted out, now that regional variations that developed over time have crashed into each other. Each individual variation had its own logic (from the Devonian I be, you be, he be etc. to the Alabaman I is, you is etc. but now we hear them all) My prediction (for the little it's worth) is that in 50 years we will have I am and you/he/she/we/they is for the present and I/you/he/she/we/they was for the past.
• The use of "disinterested" to mean "uninterested". This is fascinating as it appears to reflect the loss of a concept in contemporary society. The idea of a disinterested engagement with a topic or issue has come to seem part of some patrician, even patronising, outmoded set of attitudes. With so many claims on our attention and so much more emphasis on self-gratification perhaps the original meaning of "disinterested" is being lost because people cannot conceive of such a selfless attitude. It is the underlying attitude that is of concern; the loss of the distinction in the words is just a symptom.
• Use of "less" for "fewer" (as in "10 items or less"). Surely the distinction between less and fewer has to survive! "Less" is for a continuous quantity that is not numerically quantifiable. Du'uh! 

Perhaps my response to the last two issues reveals just a touch of moral indignation in my own attitude to the evolution of language. Perish the thought. Not all new 'distrotions' of English get me so fired up: take the use of "laterz" for saying goodbye. In fact this will, I am sure, survive as an alternative for some time. Goodbye is nothing more than a conversational marker to show that an interchange is at an end. It exists for no other purpose and I am sure few of those who use it know it is a contraction of "god be with you" (otherwise how could it become "bye-bye"?). It is of course useful to have a word that would be unlikely to turn up anywhere in conversation for any other reason, so over time other otherwise meaningless such markers have evolved (I can think of "cheerio" and "toodle-pip"). "Laterz" is simply another in the same tradition. The connection with the word "later" makes clear its intent, whilst the "z" makes clear it is the conversational marker and not the adverb. It will survive through natural selection because it is useful.

The other fascinating neologism is "lol" as a spoken word. What is fascinating is that, although it was created as an acronym for "laugh out loud" for online chat it has now settled down (in its spoken form) as an indication that the preceding remark was funny, but not funny enough to laugh out loud at. Brilliant!