Email: oliver@essame.clara.net ‘Consider how rarely Shakespeare’s characters pay close attention to their physical environment,’ says Don Cupitt in Life, Life. True to his non-realist principles, he does not mention any particular play. But what he says about Shakespeare’s characters in general is not true. There is only room here to give a few examples. First, King Lear in the storm (III.2):
Blow winds, and crack your cheeks; rage, blow you cataracts, and hurricanoes spout, till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks, you sulphurous and thought-executing fires, vaunt couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts singe my white head.
Lear goes on to say the storm is not as unkind as his daughters have been. He is reluctant to be led indoors because: ‘this tempest will not give me leave to ponder on things would hurt me more.’ The storm is the central image and the dark heart of the play.
Macbeth meets the witches on a blasted heath. ‘So fair and foul a day I have not seen,’ he says. When they have incited his ambition with their alluring prophecies – ‘blasted’ his life – he asks them (I.3.):
Say from whence you owe this strange intelligence or why upon this blasted heath you stop our way with such prophetic greeting?
When Macbeth arrives home he has a coded conversation with his wife. He tells her, ‘My dearest love, Duncan comes here tonight.’ She asks: ‘And when goes hence?’ Macbeth answers: ‘Tomorrow as he purposes.’ They agree that he shall never leave the castle. King Duncan arrives and praises the castle’s environment (I.6):
This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air nimbly and sweetly recommends itself.
Macbeth in his own castle is well aware that killing his king is an even more heinous crime when he is his host (I.7):
He’s here in double trust:
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject – strong both against the deed; then as his host, who should against his murderer shut the door, not bear the knife myself.
In Romeo and Juliet the characters’ awareness of the grim mausoleum, in which Juliet lies still in all her beauty, adds greatly to the climax of the play. Romeo breaking into the tomb says (V.3):
Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death, gorged with the dearest morsel of the earth, thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open.
In The Winter’s Tale Perdita describes what grows in every season in her cottage garden – among the spring flowers she would like to give her love Florizel: ‘daffodils/ that come before the swallow dares and take/ the winds of March with beauty’. She and the disguised King Polixines discuss grafting, which she disapproves of and he, ironically in the circumstances, recommends. When he reveals himself and orders his son, her Florizel, not to see her any more because she is a mere shepherdess, then stalks off, she reflects (IV.4):
I was not much afeared: for once or twice I was about to speak, and tell him plainly the self-same Sun, that shines upon his Court, hides not his visage from our cottage, but looks on alike.
The Forest itself is one of the main themes of As You Like It. In contrast to the violent hatreds of the Court in Act I, Act II opens with the banished Duke enthusing at length about life in the Forest (II.1), which Amiens praises in his song (II.5):
Under the greenwood tree, who loves to lie with me, and turn his merry note unto the sweet bird’s throat, come hither, come hither, come hither.
Here shall he see no enemy but winter and rough weather.
The characters continually talk about the Forest, often contrasting it with the Court. The shepherd Corin argues with Touchstone (III.2):
Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country as the behaviour of the country is most mockable at the court. You told me you salute not at the court but you kiss your hands: that courtesy would be uncleanly if courtiers were shepherds. ‘Instance,’ demands Touchstone. Corin replies:
Why, we are still handling our ewes and their fells, you know, are greasy.
Shakespeare’s characters, says Cupitt, talk non-stop. Of course they do, they are, after all in a play. They talk for all sorts of reasons, one being to report what has happened and advance the action of the play. They talk about their physical environment, giving it ‘a local habitation and a name’ so that the audience can ‘see’ it. As Shakespeare’s plays do not obey the requirement of the ‘classical unities’ that all the action should happen in one place, the characters will mention or describe a change of scene for the audience – this is not film or television. Queen Gertrude’s account of Ophelia’s drowning ‘with fantastic garlands’ (Hamlet IV.7) both reports the event and describes the ‘weeping brook’. Hamlet, of course, talks non-stop and fails to act, but that’s his problem.
Reader's letter/article responding to Don Cupitt, printed under the letters/Mayday Notes pages.