Shakespeare the Man

Abstract

‘Darkness and enigma’ in Hamlet, writes Barbara Everett in an interesting essay, ‘give way in Othello to a hard, clear light.’1 In order of composition Measure for Measure may come in between, and it has affinities with both tragedies: from one viewpoint it might be a dark, jokey play, with hard, clear minor jokes and enigmatic major ones. Pompey’s ‘Dizie’, or Master Caper, ruined by costly peach-coloured suits, may be what they patently seem; but it is not so with the leading figures. ‘There is a kind of character in thy life’, the Duke has informed his deputy Angelo, ‘that to th’observer doth thy history/Fully unfold’. The word character, signifying ‘a mark or inscription’, is here used figuratively for deeply typifying behaviour or appearance, and in this sense character is a will-‘o-the-wisp. The Duke suspects a man who hardly admits that ‘his blood-flows’ and Angelo’s nature is obscure in Act 1, and can be problematic to the last.2 Angelo’s hiddenness is a comically heightened matter in the play, but hiddenness is a social symptom of the author’s time, and a source of difficulty for modern biographers of Renaissance persons.KeywordsWord CharacterSocial SymptomClear LightContinuity AuthorBiographical StudyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.