See further below scholars/critics' quotes as well as selected quotes from Shakespeare's plays, as resources from which you may select to prepare for the midterm exam.
The in-class 75-minute midterm exam is over two plays from different groupings (bring “blue or green books” or notebook ruled paper, your Norton/Shakespeare edition text (but not McEvoy or other texts), and also you may bring one standard (8.5"x11") piece of paper on which you have written two to six quotes from scholars/critics, and one to several lines (a quote) from each of the plays that you plan to write upon, selected from materials below or from articles in Blearn and from the text of each play.
Part 1/Essay 1—approximately 300-400 word essay on one of the following plays: Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It , or Henry V (15 points maximum);
Part 2/Essay 2—approximately 550-650 word essay on one of the following plays: The Merchant of Venice or Hamlet (35 points maximum).
This midterm directs you to explore significant issues and strategies in these plays, that you situate in relation to your choice of one to three critical/scholarly commentary/perspectives on the play and/or genre, and also with a selected quote (one to three lines quote) from each play as a starting/anchoring point for each essay; you may select such quotes from among the provided excerpts on Shakespearean history, on comedy, and on tragedy, and/or the scholars'/critics’ comments on respective plays, or by selecting quotes/citations from any of the scholarly articles/chapters from folders in Bblearn. These selected quotes (from scholars and from the plays) serve as points of reference and departure, then, for your two analyses.
Your essays are (to be) succinct, but I encourage you to develop and to support your ideas as clearly and as cogently as space allows, including brief citations of specific lines that illustrate your understanding, and use of summary and paraphrase in support of each analysis. It is helpful for your argument (advisable) to include a statement that makes a claim or presents a thesis with explanation and support. Your interpretations are to be explanatory and implicitly argumentative: an occasion for you to clarify and advance your understanding. This is a chance to share your perceptions, enthusiasms, and doubts as you delve into an aspect of each play's significance, purpose, and effects. Assume that your audience is familiar with each play and take care to articulate clearly your inquiry into the material, especially problems or contradictions that seem difficult to resolve.
On Shakespeare’s histories:
Shakespeare’s history plays “show an awareness that the old feudal world had gone and that in its place was a new world in which monarchs demanded absolute power . . . [claimed] God’s support” while justifying their authority by their “more or less convincing performances in the monarch’s role” in an emerging modern, market-based, capital-led economy where profit is regarded as more important than personal loyalty (McEvoy, Shakespeare: The Basics 196, 171).
“These plays show that royal power is actually not very different, either in content or execution, from the actions of thieves and fraudsters” (McEvoy 178).
“Women’s potential for undermining men’s right to inherit is in these plays kept in check by the threat of violence” (McEvoy 197); “Men in Shakespeare’s plays are constantly in fear of losing these [masculine qualities of reason and self-control]. . . and so falling back into a state of womanhood” (McEvoy 189).
“By the time he wrote 1 and 2 Henry IV, Shakespeare had developed what can only be called a rich contrapuntal style of dramatizing history in which the actions of one group of characters mirror, comment upon, and offer other alternatives to the actions of other groups of characters” (Jean E. Howard, "Shakespearean History" The Norton Shakespeare, Second edition, Essential Plays/The Sonnets 588).
McEvoy argues that "Power in the history plays comes down to one of three things: first, having the military force to take what you want; second, being able to persuade people; or, third, being able to put on a convincing performance which makes effective use of the most powerful beliefs of the time" (Shakespeare: The Basics, Second Ed. 194).
In Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (1991), Karen Newman analyzes the ways that a sense of English national identity is fashioned through opposition to others, including women as well as the Welsh, Irish, and Scots, and particularly via contrasting uses of language (dialect and register). For example, in Henry V, in Henry's speech before the walls of Harfleur (3.3.33) as well as in other scenes, Newman finds that "expansionist aims of the nation state are worked out on and through the woman's body” (101-102).
On Shakespeare’s comedies:
“Given that Shakespeare was writing in a very male-dominated society, some critics read these plays as a kind of playful rebellion in sexual matters by young people against the authority of parents. That rebellion is, however, always absorbed by those in authority. At the end passionate love is transformed into safe, socially sanctioned, marriage. Other critics argue that although a kind of social order is imposed by the event of marriage at the end, the subversive comic energy of the ‘rebellion’ is such that it demonstrates that a more equal kind of relationship between men and women is possible, and indeed desirable. [In addition] The playful, riddling language of some of the comedies in performance not only delights the audience but draws attention to itself, sometimes to radical effect.” (Sean McEvoy, Shakespeare: The Basics, Third Edition 162)
In Shakespeare’s comedies, “No single story, no single individual, has a monopoly on the stage nor, implicitly, a monopoly on the truth. . . . One effect of this refocusing of perspective [from matters of state politics and war that dominate the history plays] is that women, typically excluded from politics but central to domestic life, become likewise central to Shakespearean comedy. . . . Shakespeare’s comic women are highly realized and distinctive. He [Shakespeare] has a special partiality for vocal, opinionated heroines. . . . the premarital virginity of Shakespeare’s comic heroines is a nonnegotiable requirement . . . . The wit of Shakespeare’s heroines, then, is not simply anarchic or subversive; it coexists with implicit constraints upon their conduct” (Katherine Eisaman Maus, “Shakespearean Comedy” The Norton Shakespeare: Essential Plays, Second edition 108-111).
“Shakespeare’s comedies thus hold in suspension two apparently disparate views of love: one highly idealized and idealizing, the other subjecting the idealism to critique and mockery” (Katherine Eisaman Maus, “Shakespearean Comedy” The Norton Shakespeare: Essential Plays, Second edition 114).
“In many of his plays, Shakespeare manifests keen interest in the psychological mechanism by which people project their faults onto others and the way uniting against a despised ‘outsider’ can help a community cohere more tightly” (Katherine Eisaman Maus, “Shakespearean Comedy” The Norton Shakespeare: Essential Plays, Second edition 117).
On Shakespeare’s tragedies:
“Shakespeare lived at a time when the medieval world was giving way to the modern one. The principal characters in tragedies can be destroyed because they are trying to live in a world that no longer has any secure basis, or, more often, because the contradictions within the way they understand the world makes their lives impossible. The tragedies show the operations of power in society by revealing how the stories and displays of those in authority convince those without power of their superiors’ right to rule, baseless though these stories may well be. In particular, the tragedies reveal the ideological means by which men at this time ensured dominance over women. The tragedies have also recently been seen as telling us something about other philosophical issues: the nature of representation in the theatre itself, or general ethical principles about how we should live our lives now.” (Sean McEvoy, Shakespeare: The Basics, Third Edition 227-228)
“There are strange moments in these plays in which the principal characters seem to have an intimation of forces that are compelling them to act and react as they do . . . . but the characters themselves cannot and do not live as if they had no agency at all . . . they are never merely victims. . . . almost all of Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists are socially important people, people whose inherited rank, office, and wealth accustom them to the exercise of power. The power, as they learn to their cost, is never absolute. . . . Shakespearean tragedies are political as well as psychological . . . . and searching explorations of moral ambivalence. . . . Each play is a complex hall of mirrors, cunningly constructed to examine certain key motivations and relationships from multiple perspectives.” (Stephen Greenblatt, “Shakespearean Tragedy” The Norton Shakespeare: Essential Plays, Second edition 921-923)
Other selected quotes from scholars on Shakespeare, including quotes specifically on As You Like It and Hamlet (and also The Merchant of Venice):
Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield explain that the "principal strategy of ideology is to legitimate inequality and exploitation by representing the social order which perpetuates these things as immutable and unalterable—as decreed by God or simply natural" (“History and Ideology” 211-12). They also observe that the "more ideology (necessarily) engages with the conflict and contradiction which it is its raison d'être to occlude, the more it becomes susceptible to incorporating them within itself. It faces the contradictory situation whereby to silence dissent one must first give it a voice, to misrepresent it one must first present it" (215).
On Much Ado About Nothing:
"The crucial point is that there is nothing absolute and automatic about the code of manners. Social rituals are vulnerable to disruption and misunderstanding, and this vulnerability underscores the importance of consciously keeping up appearances, patrolling social perimeters, and fabricating civility" (Stephen Greenblatt, The Norton Shakespeare, Third ed., p. 1397).
"Honor and shame are particularly social emotions, the emotions of those who exist in a world of watching and being watched" (Greenblatt, Norton Shakespeare, 1397).
"Language is violence, and language is the alternative to violence: the play entertains both hypotheses and plays them off against each other" (Greenblatt, Norton Shakespeare, 1398).
"Beatrice and Benedict constantly tantalize us with the possibility of an identity quite different from that of Claudio and Hero, an identity deliberately fashioned to resist the constant pressure of society. But that pressure finally prevails. Marriage is a social conspiracy" (Greenblatt, The Norton Shakespeare, 1401).
The play is vitally concerned with "fashion, a frequent source for metaphor, and with self-fashioning. The masks worn at the dance and at the second wedding are material symbols for more subtle disguises. Each character is aware of having adopted social camouflage; thus, most suspect the others of concealing genuine identities under public personas" (The Bedford Shakespeare, 666).
Hero's "relation with her ideal self has broken down because it is so dependent on what others think. This, in itself, may produce further shame: the shame that she is nothing more than the construct of other people, of patriarchal values" (Alison Findlay, 2010, qtd. in The New Oxford Shakespeare).
"Beatrice is the wittiest speaker in the play, but there is also a certain pathos in her character, produced not only by the hint of a former relationship with Benedick, but also by the conventionality of Leonato, who tells her she will never get a husband 'if thou be so shrewd of thy tongue' (2.1.217), and of Antonio, who says she is 'too curst." (Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All, 377)
"We might notice that while Hero has a watchful father and uncle, and Claudio an offstage uncle . . . and the protective Don Pedro, Beatrice and Benedick have no parents, and Leonato has no influence over his niece" (Garber, Shakespeare After All, 390).
"Eyes in Much Ado are not what one sees with, but what one sees through--the filters that lead characters to see people in particular, conventionalized ways" (Nova Myhill, "Spectatorship in/of Much Ado About Nothing" (293).
Selected quotes from Much Ado About Nothing:
"She speaks poniards and every word stabs" (Much Ado About Nothing 2.1.220)
"May I be so converted and see with these eyes? I cannot tell; I think not" (2.3.20-21).
"No, not to be so odd and from all fashions, / As Beatrice is, cannot be commendable" (3.1.72-73).
"Take her back again. / Give not this rotten orange to your friend. / She's but the sign and semblance of her honor" (4.1.30-32).
"Kill Claudio." (4.1.285).
"We have been up and down to seek thee, for we are / high proof melancholy and would fain have it beaten away. / Wilt thou use thy wit?" (5.1.121-123).
"A college of wit-crackers / cannot flout me out of my humor. Dost thou think I care / for a satire or an epigram? No." (5.4.100-102).
"Tomorrow in the congregation, where I should wed, there will I shame her" (3.2.105-106).
On As You Like It:
“As You Like It is poised carefully on the razor’s edge separating fantasy from harsh reality. . . . [the play] is to a remarkable degree open to the infinite malleability of human beings and their social practices. . . . It is with the heroine, however, that As You Like It offers its richest dramatization of a figure who plays endlessly with the limits and possibilities of her circumstances. . . . this he/she, continues to the end to defy the fixed identities and the exclusionary choices of the everyday world, offering instead a world of multiple possibilities and transformable identities.” (Jean E. Howard, The Norton Shakespeare, 378-384)
“Male friendship, exemplified by the reconciliation of Duke Senior and Orlando, provides a framework that diminishes and contains Rosalind’s apparent power. . . . Concentration on Rosalind to the neglect of other issues distorts the overall design of As You Like It, one that is governed by male ends. . . . as the play returns to the normal world, [Rosalind] will be reduced to the traditional woman who is subservient to men” (Peter Erickson, Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare’s Drama 16, 21).
“The play is not over when it is over. There is something yet to be done. . . . This complex ending leaves us in doubt about its central affirmation, that the good has been re-installed in the courtly heart of society . . .” (Nick Potter and Graham Holderness, Shakespeare, "Out of Court" 104)
“As You Like It transforms the problem of sexual relations insofar as it suggests a world of possibility for the continued negotiation of these differences. (Barbara J. Bono, “Mixed Gender, Mixed Genre in As You Like It” 147)
“Phoebe describes the object of her desire as a ‘pretty youth,’ ‘not very tall,’ with ‘a pretty redness in his lip’ (3.5.112-119). The premise underlying [this infatuation] is that what women naturally desire is not mature, virile men, but effeminate boys whose bodies are more like their own” (Phyllis Rackin 2005).
“The forest people in As You Like It do not, actually, ‘fleet the time carelessly.’ They have hierarchy, property, and money, and give little serious thought to living without them. The forest does not represent an alternative, golden-world model of social organization., therefore, but an occasion for a miraculous change of heart in bad apples among the ruling elite—who remain, as a body, the only plausible form of government. The happy ending is not defined by the spirit of pastoral, but by the return of the exiles to their property and status in the proportions that they held before” (Alan Sinfield 2006).
Selected quotes from As You Like It:
1. "I see thou lovest me not with the full weight that / I love thee" (1.2.6-7).
2. “Now go we in content, / To liberty and not to banishment” (1.3.131-132).
3. (2.1.1-20), includes "That can translate the stubbornness of fortune / Into so quiet and so sweet a style" (2.1.19-20).
4. "The constant service of the antique world" (2.3.58) in contrast to the present "Where none will sweat but for promotion" (2.3.61).
5. “They say he is already in the forest of Ardenne, and a / many merry men with him; and there they live like the old / Robin Hood of England. They say many young gentlemen / flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world” (1.1.99-103).
6. ORLANDO: “What were his marks?
ROSALIND: A lean cheek, which you have not; a blue eye and sunken, which you have not; an unquestionable spirit, which you have not . . . But you are no such man. You are rather point-devise in your accoutrements, as loving yourself than seeming the lover of any other” (3.2.336-46).
7. (4.3.102-19) includes " A wretched, ragged man" (4.3.105).
8. "But O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man's eyes" (5.2.38-39).
On Henry the Fifth (also see quotes above on the histories):
"Just as the Choruses seem determined to discredit the represented action, the represented action often seems designed to subvert the heroic words of the Choruses. . . . the Chorus advertises the historical business to come, but never acknowledges the existence of the comic scenes that increasingly intrude to interrupt and retard the progress of the historical plot and parody the heroic action. . . . Like the Chorus, Henry seems oblivous to everything in the represented action that threatens to complicate the celebratory account of his reign" (Phyllis Rackin "Reading: Henry V" 206-207).
"On the one hand, [Henry V] has been cast as Shakespeare's contribution to English patriotism . . . . On the other hand, it has often been read as a work which is sharply critical of the patriotic ambitions of its subject, and the methods he uses to secure his goal of conquering France. . . . Henry V . . . is Shakespeare's most sophisticated analysis of kingship" (Andrew Hadfield, "Henry V" 452, 464).
"The sentiments [4.1.101-112] are meant to appear democratic and egalitarian, but are actually authoritarian" (Hadfield, 458).
"Henry V only in one sense is 'about' national unity: its obsessive preoccupation is insurrection. . . . systematically, antagonism is reworked as subordination or supportive alignment. . . . What really torments Henry is his inability to ensure obedience" (Sinfield and Dollimore, "History and Ideology, Masculinity and Miscegenation: The Instance of Henry V" 118-119).
"Critics have shied away from the thought that, after the princess's initial refusal to submit to the pretense that Henry is a courtly wooer, the king resorts to a sadistic exercise of power over her" (Sinfield and Dollimore, "History and Ideology, Masculinity and Miscegenation: The Instance of Henry V" 137).
Selected quotes from and embedded perspectives about Henry the Fifth:
a. “Now thrive the armourers, and honour’s thought / Reigns solely in the breast of every man” (2.0.3-4).
b. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield explain that the "principal strategy of ideology is to legitimate inequality and exploitation by representing the social order which perpetuates these things as immutable and unalterable—as decreed by God or simply natural" (“History and Ideology” 211-12). They also observe that the "more ideology (necessarily) engages with the conflict and contradiction which it is its raison d'être to occlude, the more it becomes susceptible to incorporating them within itself. It faces the contradictory situation whereby to silence dissent one must first give it a voice, to misrepresent it one must first present it" (215).
c. McEvoy argues that "Power in the history plays comes down to one of three things: first, having the military force to take what you want; second, being able to persuade people; or, third, being able to put on a convincing performance which makes effective use of the most powerful beliefs of the time" (Shakespeare: The Basics, Second Ed. 194).
d. In Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (1991), Karen Newman analyzes the ways that a sense of English national identity is fashioned through opposition to others, including women as well as the Welsh, Irish, and Scots, and particularly via contrasting uses of language (dialect and register). For example, in Henry's speech before the walls of Harfleur (3.3.33) as well as in other scenes, Newman finds that "expansionist aims of the nation state are worked out on and through the woman's body” (101-102).
e. “What infinite heartsease / Must kings neglect that private men enjoy?” (4.1.218-219).
f. "I love France so well that I will not part with a village of it. . . . Nay, it will please him well, Kate, it shall please him, Kate. . . . [she is] our capital demand" (5.2.178-180, 261-263, 296).
g. “Dear Kate, you and I cannot be confined within the weak list of a country’s fashion. We are the makers of manners, Kate” (5.2.250-252).
On The Merchant of Venice:
McEvoy states that "it can be argued that this is a play that ends with a woman very much empowered, while the men have been embarrassed and outwitted" (Shakespeare: The Basics p.165 in Second Edition) and he suggests that the play also may pose the question: "Could a woman be the sort of friend (/lover) to a man that Antonio was to Bassanio?" (168).
“Portia’s unruliness of language and behavior exposes the male homosocial bond the exchange of women insures, but it also multiplies the terms of sexual trafficking so as to disrupt those structures of exchange that insure hierarchical gender relations and the figural hegemony of the microcosm/macrocosm analogy in Elizabethan marriage. . . . I have therefore argued that the Merchant [of Venice] interrogates the Elizabethan sex/gender system and resists the ‘traffic in women,’ because in early modern England a woman occupying the position of a Big Man, or a lawyer in a Renaissance Venetian courtroom, or the lord of Belmont, is not the same as a man doing so. For a woman, such behavior is a form of simulation, a confusion that elides the conventional poles of sexual difference by denaturalizing gender-coded behaviors; such simulation perverts authorized systems of gender and power. It is inversion with a difference” (Newman 32-33). -Newman, Karen. “Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice.” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Spring, 1987), pp. 19-33.
Selected quotes from with some embedded perspectives/questions about The Merchant of Venice:
a. “I am a Jew. Hath not a / Jew eyes? . . . . The villainy you teach me I will exe- / cute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction” (3.1.49-3.1.60-61).
b. “Madam, you have bereft me of all words. /Only my blood speaks to you in my veins, / And there is such confusion in my powers” (3.2.175-177).
c. “The moon shines bright. In such a night as this . . . “ (5.1.1).
d. “Say how I loved you. Speak me fair in death, /And when the tale is told, bid her be judge / Whether Bassanio had not once a love” (4.1.270-272).
e. “Art thou contented, Jew? What dost thou say?” (4.1.388).
f. Consider the extent to which Portia's cross-dressed disguise (as the young lawyer, Balthasar, 4.1.162 ff.) offers greater liberty of action for her, and also consider how her behavior and disguise may be connected to the presence of an alien/outsider figure such as Shylock.
g. Venice is represented as a cosmopolitan marketplace and community where trade among nations and different cultures is important. Explore some aspect of the play in relation to such social and economic relations.
h. McEvoy states that "it can be argued that this is a play that ends with a woman very much empowered, while the men have been embarrassed and outwitted" (Shakespeare: The Basics p.165 in Second Edition) and he suggests that the play also may pose the question: "Could a woman be the sort of friend (/lover) to a man that Antonio was to Bassanio?" (168). To what extent do such egalitarian sentiments have force or effects in this play?
On Hamlet:
“. . . the play as a whole explores the twin hierarchies of the family and of the state. In both, there is a polarization of those who command and those who are commanded, those who act and those who are acted upon, those who speak and those who remain silent” (Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, “Hamlet” in Shakespeare: Texts and Contexts 175).
“This split between words and thought, words and meaning, is essential to the way Hamlet works. When the everyday language of human beings cannot be trusted, the only ‘safe’ language is deliberate fiction, plays and lies. The only safe world is the world of the imagination, not the corrupt and uncontrollable world of politics.” (Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All 483)
“Eventuality is . . . a quality of an ensemble of persons and actions . . . . there is a certain sprezzatura in the plot of Hamlet that makes the poisoned rapier ‘happen to come with the grasp’ of the wounded prince in a given performance. . . . Things could always have been otherwise. . . . Whether it is a political revolution, a divine revelation, or a piece of street theatre, contingency is the fickle friend of all those who act in circumstances that are not of their own choosing. . . . all of these contingencies simply amplify the theatrical power of the concluding action, suggesting that it might easily have not taken place” (Michael Witmore, 2013).
“’There’s such divinity doth hedge a king / That treason can but peep to what it would’ (4.2.123-124). It would have been wildly imprudent, in Elizabethan England, to propose that the invocation of divine protection, so pervasive from the pulpit and in the councils of state, was merely a piece of official rhetoric, designed to shore up whatever regime was in power. But how else could the audience of Hamlet understand this moment? Claudius the poisoner knows that no divinity protected the old king, sleeping in his garden, and that his treason could do more than peep. His pious words are merely a way to mystify his power and pacify the naïve Laertes” (Stephen Greenblatt, 2016).
Selected quotes from Hamlet:
1. (1.2.129-59)--“How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world!” (1.2.133-34)
2. “Be wary then; best safety lies in fear” (1.3.43)
3. “Taint not thy mind” (1.5.85)
4. “What a / piece of work is a man!” (2.2.293-94).
5. (2.2.527-82) “Am I a coward” (2.2.548) and/to “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king” (2.2.581-82)
6. “And thus conscience does make cowards of us all, / And thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” (3.1.85-87)
7. “Give me that man / That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him / In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart, / As I do thee” (3.2.64-67).
8. (4.4.9.1-9.56) including “That inward breaks and shows no cause without / Why the man dies” (4.4.9.18-19) and “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” (4.4.9.43-46).
9. “The readiness is all” (5.2.160).
10. “There’s such divinity doth hedge a king / That treason can but peep to what it would” (4.2.123-124).