Qualities of the Plays
Everyone loves a good story, and Shakespeare was one of the very best storytellers. Most of Shakespeare’s stories have an almost universal appeal, an appeal often lacking in the plays of his contemporaries, who clung more closely to the tastes and interests of their own day. An even greater achievement is Shakespeare’s creation of believable characters. His people are not the exaggerated types or allegorical abstractions found in many other Elizabethan plays. They are instead men and women with the mingled qualities and many of the inconsistencies of life itself. The very richness of Shakespeare’s language continues to delight, and it is always amazing to be reminded how many common words and phrases have their origin in Shakespeare’s art. His poetic and theatrical artistry has created plays that continue to attract readers and theatergoers, and he properly remains one of our own age’s most popular playwrights.
Shakespeare's Characters
Shakespeare’s characters emerge in his plays as distinctive human beings. Although some of the characters display elements of conventional dramatic types such as the melancholy man, the braggart soldier, the pedant, and the young lover, they are nevertheless usually individualized rather than caricatures or exaggerated types. Falstaff, for example, bears some resemblance to the braggart soldiers of 16th-century Italian comedy and to representations of the character Vice in medieval morality plays, but his vitality and inexhaustible wit make him unique. Hamlet, one of the most complex characters in all literature, is partly a picture of the ideal Renaissance man, and he also exhibits traits of the conventional melancholic character. However, his personality as a whole transcends these types, and he is so real that commentators have continued for centuries to explore his fascinating mind.
The women in Shakespeare’s plays are vivid creations, each differing from the others. It is important to remember that in Shakespeare’s time boy actors played the female parts. Actresses did not appear in a Shakespeare play until after the restoration of Charles II to the English throne in 1660 and the introduction of French practices such as women actors. It says much about the talent of the boy actors of his own day that Shakespeare could create such a rich array of fascinating women characters. Shakespeare was fond of portraying aggressive, witty heroines, such as Kate of The Taming of the Shrew, Rosaline of Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Beatrice of Much Ado About Nothing. However, he was equally adept at creating gentle and innocent women, such as Ophelia in Hamlet, Desdemona in Othello, and Cordelia in King Lear. His female characters also include the treacherous Goneril and Regan in King Lear, the iron-willed Lady Macbeth, the witty and resourceful Portia in Merchant of Venice, the tender and loyal Juliet, and the alluring Cleopatra.
Shakespeare’s comic figures are also highly varied. They include bumbling rustics such as Dogberry and Verges in Much Ado About Nothing, tireless punsters like the Dromios in The Comedy of Errors, pompous grotesques like Don Armado in Love’s Labour’s Lost, elegant wits like Feste in Twelfth Night, cynical realists like Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, and fools who utter nonsense that often conceals wisdom, such as Touchstone in As You Like It and the Fool in King Lear.
Shakespeare drew his characters with remarkable insight into human character. Even the most wicked characters, such as Iago in Othello, have human traits that can elicit understanding if not compassion. Thus, Macbeth’s violent end arouses pity and awe rather than scornful triumph at a criminal’s just punishment for his deeds. The characters achieve uniqueness through their brilliantly individualized styles of speech. Shakespeare’s understanding of the human soul and his mastery of language enabled him to write dialogue that makes the characters in his plays always intelligible, vital, and memorable.