routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

98 The Renaissance 1485–1660
most of the play, disguised as a priest. A false priest, giving false advice
to an innocent man who is condemned to death, in a play which is
basically a comedy, is an indication of the complexity of Shakespeare’s
experimentation with form and content at this stage of his career.
When the false priest/humanist Duke says ‘Be absolute for death’, it
is almost exactly the reverse of Hamlet’s decision ‘to be’ – and is rendered
the more ambiguous by the Catholic friar’s costume. The reply of the
condemned Claudio must catch the sympathy of the audience, making
them side with young love against hypocritical justice:
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
. . . ’tis too horrible.
Shakespeare’s plays do not present easy solutions. The audience
has to decide for itself. King Lear is perhaps the most disturbing in
this respect. One of the key words of the whole play is ‘Nothing’.
When King Lear’s daughter Cordelia announces that she can say
‘Nothing’ about her love for her father, the ties of family love fall
apart, taking the king from the height of power to the limits of
endurance, reduced to ‘nothing’ but ‘a poor bare forked animal’. Here,
instead of ‘readiness’ to accept any challenge, the young Edgar says
‘Ripeness is all’. This is a maturity that comes of learning from
experience. But, just as the audience begins to see hope in a desperate
and violent situation, it learns that things can always get worse:
Who is’t can say ‘I am at the worst?’
. . . The worst is not
So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’
Shakespeare is exploring and redefining the geography of the human
soul, taking his characters and his audience further than any other
writer into the depths of human behaviour. The range of his plays
covers all the ‘form and pressure’ of mankind in the modern world.
They move from politics to family, from social to personal, from public
to private. He imposed no fixed moral, no unalterable code of
behaviour. That would come to English society many years after
Shakespeare’s death, and after the tragic hypothesis of Hamlet was
fulfilled in 1649, when the people killed the King and replaced his