SOURCE: “Toys, Prologues and the Great Amiss: Shakespeare's Tragic Openings,” in Shakespearian Tragedy, edited by Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer, pp. 3-30, Edward Arnold, 1984.

[In the following essay, Allen comments on the diverse openings of eight plays—Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet—with particular emphasis on the degree to which the ending of each tragedy is inherent in its beginning. Allen apportions the fullest coverage to the opening scenes of Macbeth, which he judges to be the most dense and profound of all Shakespeare's beginnings.]

The Greek cosmologists first brought the experience of human beginnings, centred as they must necessarily be around the experience of birth, to bear on the metaphysics of time and existence: When did the world begin? When did time begin? Did they begin together? What existed before them? How can there be a before before time itself? These and other cognate questions were keyed in turn to the notion of a ‘cause’. Indeed the Greek word arché means ‘beginning’ but also ‘cause’ and ‘principle’. Inevitably the Greeks were led to the notion of the very first or prime cause as the only possible explanation for the ultimate beginning, though some were attracted to the vision of a great prime nothingness, the void or ‘Night’ of the Orphics.

Aristotle, however, was the first systematic theoretician of causes, and his most distinguished, though controversial, contribution was the notion of an end cause, the object and goal towards which each thing would tend as its perfection, its perfecting or final cause. This notion is inappropriate to many analytical situations, but it is still integral to our conceptions of biological growth and adaptation, to our theories of maturation and even internal intellectual development, and therefore to the many phenomena to which the notion can be figuratively applied, as to the growth of human societies, of art forms, of a scientific theory, and so forth. Medieval scholastics were fond of arguing from what they considered to be the undeniable evidence of the end cause operating in our quotidian experience of ourselves and the world to the existence of the ultimate end cause, the goal of universal desire and action, animate and inanimate alike, namely God. In other words the existence of an end that is also a cause, an arché, a beginning, constituted one of the best arguments, the teleological argument, for God's existence. For Aristotle's end cause remains a paradox: it is the end which is there from the beginning; it is the cause of the beginning, is the ultimate, the prime beginning; and yet it remains the cause of all that follows from and on the beginning and eventually of the end itself. God as the end cause of all things is necessarily the beginning of all things and thus the universal cause, the beginning of beginnings, the end of ends, the end of all beginnings.

All this seems straightforward enough in the abstract. But what happens when we apply it to actual human affairs and to their beginnings? Ethicians have tended to assume that man is consciously goal directed, that his day-to-day choices, particularly in matters involving duty, right and wrong, responsibility and sensitivity to others, always have ends in view. Dramatists and novelists know otherwise; for they are attuned to the instability, if not the absolute undeterminability, of man's understanding of his own ends and particularly when caught up in a sequence of precipitous actions. A gulf exists between what is immediately understood and what is ultimately understood; between the beginning that is experienced as the beginning and the beginning that is understood in light of the end. But in certain imaginative contexts, and most notably in tragic drama, we are privileged as spectators to understand something of the end at the very beginning, even if it remains at the rudimentary level of knowing what happens. And there are certain tragedies such as Oedipus Rex whose beginnings are so encoded that we can return from repeated experiences of their ends—and not just of their plot dénouements, but of the words, images, sounds, and juxtapositions, of the extra-narrative events accompanying them—and read off adumbrations, premonitions, fore-echoings of these ends in the beginnings. We can even at times share in the Leibnizian fantasy of seeing the whole of the end monadically contained in the beginning. In such cases we are accorded a godlike vision and the dominant effects are achieved through dramatic ironies: we watch a protagonist with no knowledge of his end, or even more tantalizingly with a partial premonitory knowledge of his end, anticipating the future unconsciously or subconsciously by way of a chance word, or metaphor or symbolic action. Sometimes we admire the acuity of his near-misses in future perception, of his half-knowledge; more often we pity his failure of awareness, his imperceptivity to warnings and signs, his self-inflicted inner blindness. Such plays are at one end of the tragic spectrum; we might refer to them as plays whose ends are fully anticipated in their beginnings. Of such a kind, arguably the masterpiece of the kind, is Macbeth, where Shakespeare attains an extraordinary intensity and complexity almost from the first word, the kind of intensity and complexity we associate with symbolist poetry and which seems to demand the same kind of critical explication as such poetry.

To the accompaniment of thunder and lightning, the three witches materialize to pose their first question:

First Witch:
When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
Second Witch:
When the hurly-burly's done,
When the battle's lost and won.
Third Witch:
That will be ere the set of sun.

(I.i.1-5)¹

The reiterated when inaugurates a play dominated by a concern with the circumscription of future time, with ‘mortal's chiefest enemy’, Hecate's ‘security’, and with the riddles that deny such security. Macbeth's fixation on the future manifests itself not only in his compulsive piling of deed upon deed in an attempt to secure the throne by desperate prevention, but in his obsession with the grammar of riddles, with the conditionals, concessives, and future subjunctives that explore his fears, hopes, projections, volitions, speculations and choices; with such complex modes as the Second Witch's ‘When the hurly-burly's done, / When the battle's lost and won.’² Since time is the universal solvent for Macbeth, he too will want to know when, not merely as a temporal event but as a necessary condition. Significantly, it is only after the whens of their entrance that the witches can pose their next question:

First Witch:
Where the place?
Second Witch:
Upon the heath.
Third Witch:
There to meet with Macbeth.

(I.i.6-8)

The question meets in fact with a profoundly ambiguous answer, since the heath is not a real ‘place’—particularly if we have Rannoch Moor in mind with its ill-defined desolation, its awesome imprecision—and the question of place is clearly subordinate to the witches' need to determine the exact moment of the next meeting in time.

Just as the Second Witch's ‘When the battle's lost and won’—lost by Cawdor and won by Macbeth, lost by Cawdor and won by Macduff—has firmly implanted the when pattern in our minds, so the witches' final lines, ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair, / Hover through the fog and filthy air’, regenerate the question of when in terms of metaphysical values. We are compelled to ask when is fair foul and foul fair; when are they so equated. Ironically, of course, they will already be equated: when Macbeth crosses the heath on his way to Forres and observes, ‘So foul and a fair a day I have not seen’; when Banquo comments on Macbeth's ‘rapture’ at the witches' triple apostrophe, ‘Good sir, why do you start and seem to fear / Things that do sound so fair?’; and when we eventually see Lady Macbeth as the living embodiment of foulness in the fair, of the murderess in the hostess. In thus alerting us to the equivocal relationship of fairness and foulness and to the fact that each has become the other, the witches alert us from the beginning to the world of antinomian paradoxes and oxymora, a world created by an obsession with when as if it were independent of all other questions and presupposes what we might call a palimpsestical time that preserves the past even as it adumbrates the future, is linear and cyclical, circumscribed and free, that can be lost and won in an instant by the same bloody man.

As Macbeth rides towards the witches, the Sergeant describes the battle day at Fife to the court party. A strange figure, he is considerably more complex than his predecessors in Aeschylean and Sophoclean tragedy, the anonymous messengers. Malcolm introduces him as a warrior who had personally defended him; in this respect he prefigures other Scots captains who will flee to England to enlist in Malcolm's cause. When he arrives he is bleeding profusely. As such he is the first bloody man in a play dominated by bloody men: the regicide, his victim, Banquo, the murderers, Macduff. As a man whose blood has been fairly spilt, whose blood is fair, he recounts the deeds of another putatively fair man of blood against men of foul blood. The prefatory epic simile of the ‘two spent swimmers that do cling together / And choke their art’ anticipates the self-destruction the Macbeths will call down upon each other, choking themselves to moral death in their attempt to become one in deed; and it also anticipates of course the image of the sanguine ocean that is central to the later stages of the play.

The Sergeant isolates two combats: the one with Macdonwald, the other with Sweno. First he narrates the hand-to-hand encounter between the merciless highlander and brave Macbeth: the one ‘Worthy to be a rebel, for to that / The multiplying villainies of nature / Do swarm upon him,’ a man upon whom Fortune like a whore had smiled; the other deserving his noble epithet of ‘brave’ and utterly disdainful of Fortune. In the event Macbeth becomes the more merciless, and the initial contrast between ‘merciless’ and ‘brave’ becomes no more valid than the superficial contrasts between ‘lost’ and ‘won’ and ‘fair’ and ‘foul’. Fortune may smile on Macdonwald's damned quarrel but the battlefield is her brothel: he ends the day unseam’d from the nave to th’ chops, his head stuck upon the battlements. In its entirety the account anticipates Macbeth's transformation from ‘a valiant cousin’ into ‘a gentleman’ who had betrayed the absolute trust of the king and is worthy now only to be a decapitated rebel.³

After the rout of the kerns and gallowglasses, Macbeth and Banquo both engage Sweno, the Norweyan lord. The Sergeant's description becomes more passionately complex as it draws our attention to the ‘doubling’ and ‘redoubling’ which trammels Macbeth:

As cannons overcharg’d with double cracks, so they
Doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe.
Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds,
Or memorize another Golgotha,
I cannot tell—
But I am faint, my gashes cry for help.

(I.ii.37-42)

The disturbingly ambivalent reference to the Crucifixion aligns Macbeth, though still in his prelapsarian bravery, with Christ's persecutors. The bleeding Sergeant becomes by association Golgotha's victim, whose gashes cry for help as the gashes of the saintly King of the Scots and of his grooms are to cry out that very night. The situation is given a further twist by Banquo's role. As another eagle after the sparrows, another lion after the hares—and the disproportions are significant given the ultimate triumph of naked babes and unarmed innocence—he is paired with Macbeth. The future alone will enable us to distinguish the true eagle from the kite, the lion from the jackal. The Sergeant's image cluster seems to associate Banquo with the Roman soldiers at Calvary, but ultimately we must associate him with their victim-victor, the ‘warrior’ of The Dream of the Rood who ascended the Cross; for Banquo's 20 trenched gashes will bleed far more hauntingly than the Sergeant's bandageable wounds and his sacrifice be much closer in spirit to Golgotha's. Throughout this description we are made aware of the role played by the sacrificial victim in a scene ostensibly committed to honouring the sacrificer and of the Sergeant's gift of blood as the first witness to Macbeth's success at Fife. But the Sergeant survives and his role will be assumed and then transmogrified by Macduff, who will end the play by recounting another battle deed and need no surgeon afterwards.

The Sergeant exits forever and the Thane of Rosse enters to complete the triptych. Macbeth is now Bellona's bridegroom, the husband-to-be of the savage war goddess, the Lady Macbeth of Scene V. His opponent is either Sweno, or more ironically and plausibly since Rosse refers specifically to a ‘rebellious’ arm, the rebel Thane of Cawdor whose very name onomatopoeically suggests the raven croaking the fatal entrance of Duncan under Macbeth's portals. The two combatants confront each other with ‘self-comparisons’, aping their mutual moves like reflections, ‘Point against point, rebellious arm ’gainst arm.’ ‘Rebellious’ here does double duty, since it is no longer clear which arm is loyal and which traitorous. Each warrior is not fighting another so much as an extension of himself; each circles his own doppelganger, lunging and parrying with one and the same sword. Cawdor and Macbeth are for the moment matched so exactly that Macbeth emerges as the victor from a bout of murderous shadow boxing. This suggestion is given immediate point by the transference of title, the new and old Cawdors uniting in both victory and defeat:

Duncan:
No more that Thane of Cawdor shall deceive
Our bosom interest. Go, pronounce his present death,
And with his former title greet Macbeth.
Rosse:
I’ll see it done.
Duncan:
What he hath lost, noble Macbeth hath won.

(I.ii.63-67)

Of this triptych of descriptions at the beginning,⁴ two by the Sergeant and one by Rosse, Rosse's is the most obviously ironic, since the language itself of self-comparisons invites instant circumspection and analysis, but the Sergeant's are the more remarkable in that they proceed from the lips of a wounded man who is a victim on the winning side. They chart the three stages of Macbeth's future career where combat with a manifest enemy is succeeded by the mêlée and carnage of the fight with the Norwegians, which is in turn succeeded by the hand-to-hand encounter with a warrior who is a psychological self-projection. Thus the battle's progress prefigures Macbeth's defection from legitimate war against the king's foes to the wanton slaughter of Scotland's sparrows and hares to the self-slaughter on the high hill of Dunsinane. In narrating the events of one day of battle it also adumbrates the history of an individual after that battle. The modalities were after all established by the witches from the onset:

When the hurly-burly's done,
When the battle's lost and won.

There were always to be two battles and no true victory until the second. In hindsight the first battle was far from noble, since, though the king's foreign enemies were crushed, his greatest enemy was victorious. After the seemingly heroic sketches of Scene II, the first words of Scene III tell us what really happened:

First Witch: Where hast thou been, sister?
Second Witch: Killing swine.

We have been listening to the deeds not of Hector but of Ajax.

In many ways Macbeth is Shakespeare's cosmogony, for he is concerned there with the birth of that most intricate and unfathomable of all worlds, the world of human decision. No other play he wrote is so obsessed with the how and the why a course of action begins. Hence the continuing fascination of the theatre-goer with the relative values we should assign to the motivatory force of the witches, of Lady Macbeth, of a long premeditated ambition in Macbeth, of a sudden craze for power that comes upon him when time and place convene, of the impact of Malcolm's investiture with the princedom of Cumberland. Ultimately, however, these are tangential issues; for what is really at issue is the mystery of the birth of criminality itself. Macbeth is transformed before our eyes from a noble thane into a butcher with a fiend-like queen. We watch the process with a special fascination since Shakespeare has managed to present us with the illusion of truly organic change, of inward psychological degeneration, of a continuous life-like process that moves before our eyes and is never perceived as a series of stills. We seem to be witnessing the beginning in the beginning instead of having to uncover vital clues from the past, as is the case with Hamlet and with Oedipus. The play begins when Macbeth's choices begin; and it is surely the dramatist's triumph that he can focus our attention so sharply on Macbeth's freedom, on his deliberation and choices, even as he endows each scene with formidable ironies generated by our knowledge of what will eventually happen and how. With Oedipus a similar network of ironies had pointed to a sense of inexorable fate, of man's predestined helplessness to alter the unfathomable decrees of the gods. That we do not have this sense of predetermination and yet perceive the ubiquitous ironies is Macbeth's special achievement. For no other Shakespearian play contains so much of its end in its beginning, is so circular and self-contained, and yet affirms so eloquently the validity of human reason and the freedom of the will. No other play as a result is quite so fiercely moralistic, so magisterial, about the human condition: even as we know what will happen, we vehemently believe in Macbeth's power to reshape his future course and to reject his destiny as a regicide.⁵

Conceivably we might argue that the beginning of Macbeth is so dense, so fraught with fore-echoes and premonitions, so chock-full of ironies and palterings, that it constitutes a premature climax. After repeated experiences of the play, we bring too much to bear perhaps on the beginning; reading each line, each word, each sound too scrupulously, too curiously. In doing so we create something that is so intense, self-contained and symbolically complete that it becomes a dramatic poem in its own right. The ironies become so immediately prepotent that the experience of the beginning is effectively end-stopped. Knowing what we do from past readings of the play, we are dazzled to the point of blindness by the beginning's anticipations; we no longer see it just as a beginning but as a beginning dominated by its end, as simultaneously a beginning and an end. It becomes impossible to return to the pristine experience of accompanying Macbeth in not seeing the ironies, or at least most of them, until it is too late. And certainly it is true, as the sequence of actions and events later unfolds and the various premonitions of the beginning are validated, that the verbal texture becomes less concentrated, less connotative, less hallucinatory: what was infolded becomes unfolded, what was a knot becomes the long unwinding thread of destiny, what was a mysterious and awesome cipher becomes gradually interpreted and loses much of its primitive power, the power we always associate with the idea of the most contained in the least, of the tree in the seed, of the explosion in the gunpowder grain. But to be overwhelmed by the anticipatory force of the beginning is only a momentary, or at least a passing experience, the result sometimes of too much critical activity, too much precision in our mental footnoting, too nephritic a sensitivity to transient images that are intended to haunt us only much later. For no one perceives the beginning as imploding, as collapsing under its own too great a weight. The impact rather is explosive: we are hurtled forwards by the play's concern with future time and future choice, with what will be done and might be done; we are not permitted the time to consider too precisely, to hallucinate too freely, to hear too many echoes. Even so Shakespeare achieved a delicate balance. Of all his beginnings it is I believe the most profound, the most metaphysically exploratory, symbolically the richest precisely because it comes so close to being a climax, to fully articulating its end. And it is not surprising that the weight of the play which it begins is shifted so much further forwards than is the case with any of the other tragedies.

Shakespeare's other tragic openings, though to a lesser extent, are still encoded. However, our sense of his conscious exercise of control, his imaginative deliberation, not only over the narrative but over the metaphysical elements varies considerably.⁶ Sometimes we detect or at least suspect a failure on his part to conceive of his opening material in any particularly interesting or dramatically effective way; sometimes we see him concentrating on rhetorical and modal concerns rather than psychological or metaphysical ones; sometimes we are well aware that he is manipulating our reactions by withholding important information from us; and sometimes he seems to be entering upon the beginning with us, setting forth into a shadowy world where little is understood and where the basic determinations of genre and underlying structure have yet to be made by the material itself working in its own way and in its own time. In most of the beginnings, nevertheless, we are tantalized, though to varying degrees, by certain premonitory effects, by the felt presence of the end.

This is, unfortunately, not the case with Titus Andronicus. The tribunes and senators enter aloft and the contending brothers, Saturninus and Bassianus, enter from opposite sides below; Marcus Andronicus holds up a crown as the brothers press their irreconcilable claims. The effects are simple and predominantly visual. We are expending time in vain if we search for nuances, subtleties, ironies, for any kind of subtext. Straightforwardly the beginning tells us what we need to know, and we are engaged at the simplest rhetorical and narrative levels; it is workmanlike, but unremarkable; it serves adequately as a point of entrance into the play but no more.

If this can be ascribed to Shakespeare's immaturity as a tragedian, immaturity cannot account for the unravelling beginning of Timon of Athens, a play written, it is almost universally agreed, at the very height of his powers. The initial impression of Timon's opening is its controlled artificiality. The hyperboles, the ornate literary conceits, the posturing and affected business, all these perfectly reflect the atmosphere of flattery and fulsomeness that surrounds ‘A most incomparable man, breath'd, as it were, / To an untirable and continuate goodness’ and possessed of the greatest magic of all, the magic of ‘bounty’. The Poet's eulogistic description of the Painter's sketch of Timon as one that ‘tutors nature’ obviously points to the yawning disparity between such a painted man and the real man, between that which sets out to be livelier than life and life itself. His words are proleptic; for not only the true but the false too will be seen to have tended upon Timon's ‘good and gracious nature’. Some betrayal is at hand, some turn of fortune's felloe, some precipitate reversal that will set ‘the foot above the head’. But the Poet's and the Painter's immediate invocation of the figure of Fortune is so literal, so extended and so explicit that the opening mystery is effectively dispelled. As they rapidly construct the play's allegorical framework, the initial atmosphere of spidery sycophancy and deceit, of fogging hyperboles and busy attendance is blown away to reveal a simple abstract conflict between Bounty and the turn of Fortune's wheel, an abstract conflict from which the play will never really manage to free itself.

Hindsight is easy of course and it is otiose perhaps to maintain that the failure of Timon as a play was predictable from the failure of its beginning to develop on its own terms. It is not a question certainly of being given too much of the story at the beginning, but rather of the failure subsequently of other metaphors, other ideas, other strategies to loosen the stranglehold exercised by the image of Fortune. It seems that Shakespeare was defeated in a way by the magnitude and intractability of one idea; and the complexity of the opening's verbal surface manages to resist the onset of this idea for only a brief while. The end in this instance ruined the beginning in the beginning.

Another potentially ruinous abstraction, the idea of Fate conceived of in the most rigid Hardeian terms, was in the forefront of his mind when he set about the composition of Romeo and Juliet. But he hit upon the strategy of the ‘double’ beginning that not only fully subjugated the abstraction to his dramatic ends but enabled him to explore a dialectical vision not so much of tragedy itself as of the relationship between comedy and tragedy. Romeo and Juliet thus became his first unqualified success as a tragedy and its beginning prophetic of the infinitely more complex double beginnings of Hamlet and Macbeth.

The idea of Fate dominates the prologue but Shakespeare has subjected it to the special rigours and dynamics of the sonnet form. Evocative superficially of love, of Italy, of the dolce amarezza of Petrarch—and the differences between the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean rhyme schemes and the structure they subtend is immaterial at this point—the form is ultimately concerned with the whole notion of a volta, of the turn that antithetically folds two ideas the one upon the other, of the wit that must serve unhappy passion, idealized and crossed. The doom-laden story he carved out from the quarries of Bandello's story and Brooke's poem, of the fearful passage in fair Verona, of the death-marked passage of adolescent love, of the warring households and their fatal loins, this story star-blasted by its abstraction is subjected not only to the musical formality of the sonnet form, but to its argumentativeness, to its search for the counterturn, to its intrinsic dialecticity, which Shakespeare was to key in this instance to a dualistic metaphysics. The mention of the two hours' traffic of the stage⁷ points forwards to this dualism from the onset, to the hour of joy and the hour of sorrow, of Verona and of all without Verona's walls, of the moonlit orchard and the noon-scorched piazza, of the amorous turn and the duelling counterturn, of Mercutio the poet of Queen Mab and of Mercutio the grave man. Significantly the sonnet that begins the second act lacks most of these dialectical dimensions and seems to be almost wholly unattuned to the dualistic vision they subserve.

From the sonnet prologue we immediately pass to Sampson and Gregory with their swords and bucklers and their loud-mouthed, circumspect cowardice and their strings of quarrelsome puns:

Samp:
Gregory, on my word, we'll not carry coals.
Greg:
No, for then we should be colliers.
Samp:
I mean, and we be in choler, we'll draw.
Greg:
Ay, while you live, draw your neck out of collar.

It is significant that the scene begins with such puns, for lying at the heart of the love story is something closer to paronomasia than to some great cosmic paradox. For all its serious possibilities and its later transformation into the Liebestod, the Elizabethan pun on ‘dying’—Cleopatra with her celerity in dying—remains the source essentially of comic delight, of play, of the courting wit. It is significant too that the play's concern with violence—the violence of love and the violence of hate—begins in a comic key, with the biting of thumbs and the fingered fig; for the play will only modulate away from that key gradually and it seems to me reluctantly. The deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt are as witty as they are tragic. At least they begin in the Nurse's world, in her bawdiness and innuendoes, in her gossipy energy, in her vulgarity and street-bred shamelessness; only falteringly do they pass over into the sonnet world of Romeo and of Juliet with its passionate fateful music and its aristocratic closure.

Clearly the two openings depend and comment upon each other: the two households both alike in dignity are served by men that will not carry coals. But the openings' dependence is hardly organic: they establish a formal pattern of bold contrasts where we are struck by the chiaroscuro rather than by the subtlety of the design. Even so, it was a memorable achievement, for not only was it theatrically effective, it enabled Shakespeare to retain something of his comic vision in the very process of perfecting a tragedy. When we juxtapose the sonnet's lyricism, formal harmonies, midnight tonalities and intrinsic wittiness with the fortuitous logical-illogical punning and the calculating indecisiveness of Sampson and Gregory, we begin to see stranger and more complex patterns than those formed by the intersecting lines of Fortune's mapping of man, patterns that take us beyond the confrontational notions of love and of fate. We might argue that the double beginning of Romeo and Juliet may reflect, to a degree, a genre indecision on Shakespeare's part. Was this story to consist of a tragic duel between Capulet and Montague, or was it to retain crucial elements from the world of bully Bottom, of fluting Thisby, of the roaring civil lion, and the crannied hole or chink?⁸ More plausibly we can argue that it represents something much more interesting and experimental: the attempt of someone who was already a master of comedy to enter upon the tragedian's world without losing the resources of comedy and most particularly of its language, its bawdiness and its traditional fascination with serendipities and lucky chances, with puns in words, in actions with coincidences.⁹

With the beginnings of the three Roman plays, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare seems to be less concerned with uncovering the seeds of future action than he is with discovering what we might call the future rhetoric, with anticipating the how rather than the why or where or when of the end. Hence the fascination that the rhetorical language of all three plays exerts over us, the formal figures and tropes, and the essentially operatic attitudes they embody. Even so there are some signal differences in their deployment of this rhetoric.

If the prevailing device of Romeo and Juliet was the free-ranging, vespine pun, that of Julius Caesar is interrogatory in nature. Many have remarked the anachronistic thronging of the Roman streets with Elizabethan artisans, tradesmen in a sixteenth-century holiday mood, idle creatures on a labouring day. But we are struck by the tribune's concern to ascertain the trade of everyone they encounter, the reiterated question being ‘what trade?’ This concern for careful differentiation of each individual and his trade is belied, however, by the crowd psychology that obviously predominates, by the loss of individual differentiation among the cruel men of Rome. Unlike those in Romeo and Juliet, the puns and jests that accompany the replies are not intrinsically significant: they do not point to a comic matrix for the play, the quibbling is never metaphysical.

Of genuine significance on the other hand are the many rhetorical questions that do not merely punctuate this opening but form the very basis of its structure: ‘Is this a holiday?’ ‘What, know you not … ?’ ‘Where is thy leather apron and thy rule?’ ‘Wherefore rejoice?’ ‘Knew you not Pompey?’ ‘Have you not made an universal shout?’ ‘And do you now put on your best attire?’ The rhetorical question establishes itself immediately as the dominant figure. For it is the question that voices the opinions and feelings of the questioner and does not really expect an answer; that generates emotion and is a form often of incremental repetition; and that tends, ironically, to lead to more and more answers disguised as questions until finally released in rage, in the violent action of ‘Go fetch fire. Pluck down benches. Pluck down forms, windows, any thing’ (III.ii.257ff.).

The question that obsesses the tribunes is the political one. Isn't Pompey also present in Caesar's triumph? How can one rejoice in what is Pompey's loss rather than Caesar's gain? The identical question will be asked by Antony when Caesar has fallen and Brutus and Cassius have culled out their own holiday. In an exhortation manifestly lacking in questions, and therefore in stark contrast to what has by now been established as a rhetorical norm, is Flavius' concluding apostrophe to Murellus to help him keep Caesar at ‘an ordinary pitch / Who else would soar above the view of men / And keep us all in servile fearfulness.’ For eventually even the rhetorical question must compel some men to decisions, must compel them to answer to their own hearts.

Though simple, the opening is theatrically effective: its tidal motion, its noise, its harangues and passionate recriminations, its evocation of past pomp, past holidays, past acclamations, all these make for a richly rhetorical rather than an exploratory or ironic beginning. Operatically dominated by the tribunes’ emotional questions, it points to conflict broadly conceived: to Caesar versus Pompey, to plebeians versus patricians, to holiday and triumph versus murder and mourning, to the single leader and the jostling, many-headed crowd. And it points to conflict in the public and political world, the world that is always dominated by the rhetorical question. More workmanlike than the opening of Romeo and Juliet, it is less complex in its endeavour, less daring in what it sets out to do. Solidly successful, it eloquently attains its goal of showing us Caesar's huge wing outstretched and ready for imping, but tells us nothing of the ends of Brutus and Cassius except possibly that they too may be witnessed in the interrogatory mode.

Julius Caesar's two Roman successors likewise have highly rhetorical beginnings that establish a modality and style that is also basically forensic in structure and epideictic in intention. They anticipate the end by way of form rather than content and orchestrate our attitudes and sympathies by deploying particular figures. It would be going too far to suggest that Shakespeare conceived of the lives of the ancients as similar in many ways to speeches, and of the patterns of their destinies as reflected in the underlying patterns and figures of formal eloquence; but in all three Roman plays certain figures do seem to dominate our attention and our awareness of the plays' fundamental orientations is particularly keyed to what we might call their public language, the language of politics, of war, of altercation and debate.

Coriolanus commences with the plebeians agreeing in precipitate repetitions: ‘Speak, speak. Resolv’d, resolv’d. We know’t, we know’t.’ The ill-considered absoluteness of this agreement anticipates Coriolanus' absoluteness and the absoluteness of most of the attitudes dramatized in the play. We soon understand that the cause of the conflict is the surfeit in the belly, the superfluity of grain in the barns of the nobility, and the leanness in the limbs of the artisans, leanness reflected or conveyed in the ferocity and crudeness of the First Citizen's antithetical, lacerated style: ‘our sufferance is a gain to them’; ‘Let us revenge this with our pikes, ere we become rakes’; ‘If the wars eat us not up, they will.’ The Second Citizen's attempt to suggest that Coriolanus ‘cannot help’ his nature, that the extenuating circumstances of his character must be taken into consideration, is rapidly drowned out by the shouting from the rebels on the other side of the city, and by the arrival of Menenius.

From the menacing antitheses of the First Citizen we pass to formal fable. But built into the belly allegory are two contradictory traditions of interpreting the polity of the body.¹⁰ On the one hand is the tradition, as indeed the First Citizen assumes, of the ‘cormorant belly’ and the ‘kingly-crowned head’, a tradition that elevates the head and subjugates the belly and corresponds to what the medieval and Renaissance worlds acknowledged as the normative view of their relationship. On the other hand is the view that crowns the belly in the head's despite, the view voiced by Menenius in Plutarch's life of Coriolanus. At stake of course is the very nature of the senate and people of Rome. Every thinking member of Shakespeare's audience would have been struck by the fact that Menenius' version, though speciously persuasive and internally consistent, was nevertheless the incorrect, the heretical, the dangerously heretical version. For any allegory that elevated the stomach over the heart or head was obviously portraying a topsy-turvy, chaotic vision of things where the great chain of correspondences had been swept aside by the wolf of appetite. We thus have an irreconcilable conflict between the First Citizen's correct vision of the belly as the sink of the body, and Menenius' incorrect vision of it (and therefore of the patricians) as the granary of the state, an organ that has usurped both heart and head. This conflict is underscored by the contrast in their styles: the First Citizen's is microscopically obsessed with playing one word off another; the Senator's is telescopically concerned with allegory and universal figures. They too seem irreconcilable.

The fable itself goes far beyond the plebeians’ hunger and the patricians’ grain: it suggests the ultimate Thyestean nightmare, the cannibalistic devouring of one's enemies that turn out to be one's friends, or worse still one's children, one's own flesh. For Menenius' belly quickly ceases to be, as the First Citizen correctly realizes, an organ of the body, and becomes an organ (almost an organism) in the body, a monstrous growth that receives and hoards all the available nutriment and increases parasitically as its host declines. Interestingly it is only much later in the play that another, wholly antithetical vision of the belly dawns upon us as more relevant than this Menenian vision of it as a wholesale and retail distributor of food. Later it is the belly as the womb of Rome, the Volumnia pregnant with rebellion, a Rome where there is no longer room enough, and that gives birth to every mother's son, that comes to dominate our attention, replacing entirely the earlier vision of the belly as maw. The rhetoric, that is, will find different uses for the same figure as it continues to argue and persuade. The encounter ends abruptly with Menenius' stubbing of the Big Toe of the Assembly:

For that, being one o’ th’ lowest, basest, poorest
Of this most wise rebellion, thou goest foremost.

(I.i.157.8)

It is an ineffective rhetorical ploy; it can only serve to further antagonize.

The beginning of Coriolanus is ominous, electric, strident. Like Julius Caesar's it is concerned with political and class conflict, but the antagonism is more absolute, the confrontation more savage. The rhetoric asks far fewer questions than it does in the earlier play and turns instead to the latent, cancerous paradoxes that feed upon human pride and ambition, human abuse of privilege and power, ultimately upon human suffering itself. Unlike the rhetorical questions of Julius Caesar, however, those in Coriolanus demand answers, want actions and decisions here and now. The incipient violence of the First Citizen's language particularly is striking: it stays with us long after the fable of the belly has been compelled to feed on itself in the figure of Martius. The citizen disappears but his fierce antitheses survive as the rhetorical norm of the play: translated into action they become the uncompromising pride and anger that mammocks a butterfly and that flutters the dovecotes in Corioli and Rome alike. The fable presented itself as an alternative rhetorical norm and was found to be wanting: the toe does indeed go foremost. The content is lost in the hubbub of insurrection, but the form remains.

In Antony and Cleopatra's beginning the destructive is abandoned for the generative paradox, paradox that is not antagonistic to the allegorical and fabular dimensions both of Antony and Cleopatra themselves and of their love affair but profoundly dependent upon them. Wedded together the questions and the antitheses become a dialectic of paradox, a forensic fantasy that seems endless, that will always seek to persuade, and whose repetitions are not, like those of Coriolanus' First Citizen, aggressive or rebarbative but epideictic, wonder-producing: ‘Look where they come! Take but good note. … Behold and see.’ Behind many of the opening paradoxes lie rhetorical questions; they could indeed be the answers to such questions. It is almost as if Shakespeare could find no other way of contemplating the life of Antony but by way of rhetorical questions and their paradoxical answers. The resulting dialectic provides us, however, with a wealth of instances rather than analysis, with a gorgeous blazon of paradoxes rather than a penetrating enquiry into the nature of paradox and of its relationship to human change and destiny.

Philo's passionate inaugural speech obviously takes us into the middle of a conversation where Demetrius has just said something to prompt a ‘Nay.’ Whether this signifies a straightforward denial, or some kind of weaker qualification such as ‘Yes, but’ or ‘Well, it is more than an ordinary love affair’, we cannot tell. Probably it is a kind of affirmative denial that points to the conversation having been a pro et contra, a judicious consideration of Antony's actions in Egypt. Critics have often remarked the connotations of the ensuing phrase, ‘o’er-flows the measure.’ The twin notions of over-abundance, of exceeding the mean, of exceeding even the ability to measure at all, and of liquidity, of the element that naturally exceeds itself and knows no measurement, these more than suggest Cleopatra and the liquidity of her emotions and decisions, they suggest another world entirely where men's measurements cannot pertain nor the laws of the baser element on which he lives. Philo describes Antony's eyes in the past looking in long radii over the files and musters of his troops, in their measured, serried, calculable ranks—and the plating of Mars suggests the same notion of containment and measure—but now in their dotage ‘bending’ and ‘turning’ their gaze upon a tawny front. The image of the fierce linear glance down lines of men has been replaced by that of the bent, deflected, suppliant gaze. Moreover, the eyes themselves, instead of glowing with the light reflected from the armour of the ranks they hold in review, have become dimmed by the darkness of Cleopatra. Silently but rhetorically we ask, how could this have happened?

True, the image of Antony's heart heaving in battle with martial exertion and rending the buckles of his armour does present us with the notion of going beyond measure; but there is no accompanying suggestion of liquidity, the buckles ‘burst’ suddenly from his chest as if they were missiles. Moreover, the heaving heart is counterpointed not so much to the image of overflowing water which precedes it as to the images of the bellows and fan that follow: both instruments move air not the hot valorous blood that the heart pounded through Antony's chest in great fights. A few moments later we see Cleopatra's eunuchs fanning the air about her, as later we hear from Enobarbus how the smiling Cupids fanned the delicate cheeks to make them glow; we recall too the moment when the air and Antony were almost identified as he whistled in the market place to the wind that yearned to gaze on Cleopatra. Again, we ask rhetorically how could this armed man become a fan? his pulsing blood become the air?

Philo breaks off and demands that we witness for ourselves: we behold and see the huge upright pillar of the world bent and turned upon itself, a hunched strumpet's fool and yet Mars at his ease. The entire speech is extraordinarily rich and evocative because of the contrasts and counterpointing that organize its imagery: Mars and the gypsy, the measure and the flood, the musters of war and the tawny countenance, the buckles and the bellows, the heart and the fan, the pillar and the fool.

When Cleopatra and Antony enter, the paradoxical questions and the greater paradoxes that supply the only answers to such questions fly back and forth between the lovers themselves and serve as their medium of discourse. Echoing Philo, Cleopatra attempts to seduce Antony with the double doubt: Is this love (or lust), and if it is love (or lust), then how much love (or lust) is there? Antony answers by emphasizing the unanswerableness of such hypothetical interrogation: only beggars measure love, only men lacking love can be concerned with quantity; to find their love's limit they will have to find not only a new world but a new heaven also, a new cosmos. And suddenly a messenger, that archetypal though anonymous figure in this play, arrives from the old world with news from ‘the scarce-bearded Caesar’ or ‘the shrill-tongued Fulvia’, news that we never hear since the wrangling queen makes it an occasion to rally Antony by quarrelling with him, to chide him into extending the bourn of love still further.

The scene ends, as it had begun, with Philo and Demetrius chagrined for Antony. It has now become evident that Demetrius is the visitor and Philo the resident; and therefore that Philo is the observer most closely attuned to Antony, to what he was and is; that he is the one who suffers must acutely the pangs of friendship, of philia, and feels most poignantly the loss of that great property which still should go with Antony. Though we have seen Cleopatra, our eyes remain focused on Antony: it is his friends not hers that we have overheard; it is his passion, his dereliction, his refusal to hear the messengers, his dotage that intrigues us at this point, not her charm, not her coquetry. The rhetorical questions and the real ones are all centred on him, and he not Cleopatra evokes the initial paradoxes for answers. As Philo suggests, it is not important that we anticipate what will happen to Antony but that we see what has already become of him. At the end of the play when our gaze is turned exclusively upon Cleopatra we continue to ask the same rhetorical questions and to contemplate the same paradoxical answers as we did at the beginning with Antony. For the rhetoric of the beginning and that of the conclusion is one and the same: it answers questions to which there are no answers by transposing them to the key of paradox. The end and the beginning both burn on the water of a river that overflows the measure.

Othello and King Lear present us with beginnings of a very different kind. In both Shakespeare seems to be withholding important information from us deliberately, refusing us vital clues of both a factual and a psychological or rhetorical nature. Both beginnings are masterful theatre, but for reasons that are almost diametrically opposite to those that pertain for Macbeth. Shakespeare is clearly not concerned with alerting us to a myriad ironies in these openings, but delimiting their functions and therefore the range of questions we can ask: they reveal only portions of their ends even as the palpable degree of control that Shakespeare is exercising over them makes us well aware that the ends have been weighed and measured in their entirety and their causes assigned, his radically altered ending for the Lear story being the most obvious case in point.

Even so, the beginnings of Othello and of King Lear themselves diverge. The one follows in the footsteps of Richard III in that it presents us immediately with a strutting villain, a swingeing rhetoric, and a certain satanic jocosity; the other is superbly restrained, oblique, an antechamber scene that gives little intimation of the coming horror but provides us with only one or two premonitions of division and a vivid portrait of just one man, a father introducing his folly. In both we suspect that the ends are contained in these beginnings, but we have no means of extricating them; their significance is to a large extent sealed, their music in the minor key.

Othello's title encourages us to anticipate an Adriatic world of passion, of crime, of oligarchic cunning, of Titianesque colour, of Aretine lust. Roderigo enters with his great stringed purse, a scrotal sack that Iago can hold on to impudently. ‘Shouldst know of this. … If ever I did dream of such a matter.’ Of what? We are listening to something that we do not understand, to Iago's hatred of someone; a someone who we gradually learn has a lieutenant, to whom three great ones off-capped on Iago's behalf, who loves his own pride and purposes, who constantly resorts to bumbast circumstance and epithites of war, who has nonsuited Iago's mediators, who has already chosen his officer. And the gossiping, engaging malice turns to a Cassio, a Florentine, an arithmetician, a man with bookish rhetoric who never set a squadron in the field, a prattler apparently without practice. At last Iago emerges in his ancient's colours as the practised man, a man able to practise on men, a soldier practised in the rhetoric of practice. In the very last line of the opening speech we discover the ‘someone’, the ‘he’, is the Moor, the Moor who chose the theoretical man over the practical and whom the practical man can find no cause to love or follow except to exact a revenge, ‘to serve his turn’ upon him. With contemptuous honesty Iago declares himself the villain, the seemer-so with his peculiar ends. But the contempt is rococo not withering, a hatred stuffed with its own epithites and circumstantial conceits, with its own bumbast of scorn and resentment, its own hyperbolic Nymlike honesty: ‘I am not what I am.’

Roderigo suddenly switches key by introducing the notion of ‘a full fortune’ awaiting the ‘thicklips’ but only ‘If he can carry’t thus.’ Again we have no idea what he is talking about; yet, clearly, it is no longer Cassio's appointment. As pieces of information are gradually, even fortuitously presented to us, we acquire a vivid, and in the event substantially accurate, picture of Iago's character, but not of his plot; interestingly so, for it is character that causes Othello's downfall, not fate, not circumstances, not plot. Indeed, as has been frequently noted, Iago's plot, unlike Richard of Gloucester's induction dangerous, is an opportunity that is seized, something snatched up with the handkerchief, a careless trifle that Claudius or Hieronimo would probably have scorned.

Finally we receive another clue: ‘Call up her father.’ Again, we are thrown into doubt as to who the ‘he’ or ‘hes’ are in the rapid series of references that follow:

Rouse him, make after him, poison his delight,
Proclaim him in the streets; incense her kinsmen,
And though he in a fertile climate dwell,
Plague him with flies. Though that his joy be joy,
Yet throw such changes of vexation on’t,
As it may lose some color.

(I.i.68-73)

The ‘he’ seems to refer, initially at least, to the father; but with the words ‘poison his delight’ it can begin to refer to Othello as well, indeed must begin to. For there is no particular reason why Brabantio should be delighted or joyful, and every reason why Othello should. Retrospectively all this becomes clear, but at the time we are kept in a state of continuing uncertainty and provided with too little information to follow up the clues we are given. We cannot be quite sure of what we are overhearing and yet we are being made privy to a private, secret conversation that gradually emerges as a conspiracy; the interlocutors know precisely what they mean, what they intend to do, to whom each ‘he’ and ‘his’ refers. The beginning closes with the rousing of Brabantio to a terrible summons.

We have been introduced to a recognizable situation: a villain with a gull, plotting to bring down his lord, Othello, probably his rival Cassio also, and possibly somehow the daughter of a Venetian senator. Diabolic and cheerful, the villain is also a master hyperbolist, possessed of a vigorous anti-rhetorical rhetoric, and determined to execute a private revenge against a public figure, though in a manner as yet unknown to us, and perhaps still undecided by the plotters themselves. By the time Brabantio emerges in his nightgown, we have forgotten the opening image of Roderigo as a great purse, its strings in Iago's castratory hand.

Even as the audience thronged before the stage of King Lear with preconceptions derived from the older Leir play, they were introduced not to the principals but to the underworld of rumour and surmise that has begun to swirl around the ageing king and his latterday decisions. There is already division in the kingdom. Kent notes that hearsay says the King prefers the Duke of Albany over the Duke of Cornwall.

But Kent's prefatory clause, ‘I thought the King’, also suggests the King's unpredictability. Later we discover that the King has decided to third not halve his kingdom, and to endow Cordelia with the best third. And yet, as we shall also discover, the division does turn out to be between Albany and Cornwall in the persons of their wives. Ironically, that is, the rumour will hold true, not because of its own perspicacity but because of the King's waywardness. Ironically too, it is Gloucester who cannot detect a jot of difference between the King's affections: ‘curiosity in neither can make choice of either's moiety.’

We turn to the moiety of Gloucester's two sons. Kent's question either suggests doubtful recognition, or it is a gambit of courtesy that allows Gloucester the option of acknowledging the bastard if he so chooses. Gloucester admits to being brazed to the point of being able to jest, even to brag, about the night of Edmund's conception, an act it turns out of supreme folly, and asks naively ‘Do you smell a fault?’¹¹ Kent replies with a choice compliment to Edmund from which Shakespeare, notably it seems to me, has excluded any hint of irony or premonition. In contrast to Macbeth, he does not want us to suspect the very ground we walk on, to intimate that the future course of events will have any other beginning than the King's decision to divide his kingdom. However rash and incompetent Lear may have been in the past, however slender his self-knowledge, his tragedy is not predetermined: it will follow only upon his decision to divide and not to rule. None of the lines in this opening scene bears the premonitory dread of those that initiate Macbeth. Deliberately they defy too subtle a reading, too minute an examination.

Unexpectedly Gloucester adverts to Edgar and the ‘order of law’, primogeniture and due of birth. Surely Kent would know of Edgar, if not of Edmund? Yet apparently not. Both Gloucester's sons have been kept hidden. For a moment the young whoreson and the old Kent, the false and the true, acknowledge each other before Gloucester turns to whisk him away: ‘He hath been out nine years, and away he shall again.’ Of all the many meetings in this play, this one, ironically, is the least significant. Kent and Edmund never again acknowledge each other, never directly cross paths. There is not even good sport at their meeting: nothing of Kent's outspoken honesty and courage comes across here, nothing of Edmund's natural vitality or wit or rebelliousness. Strangely perhaps both characters are presented to us out of character, out of their natural elements even; they are pale preliminary sketches of heads that will ultimately assume fearful and memorable profiles. The only character to emerge in character is Gloucester: the fallen man with his lusts, his garrulity, his lack of judgement, his ambiguously paternal status, his acknowledgement both of the law and of the fault that cannot be undone. He turns to the sound of the trumpet's sennet to witness the division of the kingdom, the division of the world he inhabits, of his castle, his life, his very identity: he turns his nose to the stench of the King's great fault.

Thus we have been exposed to the subplot: to its everyman hero, to its villain, and, by virtue of mention and notice, to its saint. Additionally, we have been introduced to one of the play's few survivors, though one, ironically, who has little role, if any, to play in this subplot. The prose of the scene's discourse, prose, incidentally, without any signal rhetorical indebtedness to Lyly or Nashe or Cicero or Caesar, with its lack of any pronounced rhythms or wordplay or conceits or antitheses, points to a contemporary Elizabethan setting, not to the ancient Merlin-haunted, pagan, mythical Albion with which the play is ultimately concerned. Arguably, of course, the scene is the quiet before the storm: imperceptibly almost our eyes begin to focus on the fairness, the falseness and the whoresomeness of Edmund, on the son who has been acknowledged by his brazen father, who speaks with civil tongue, who must away again, who has a brother by order of law some year elder than he, who was conceived in good sport, who rounded out a fair womb, who came saucily into the world before he was sent for, and who now studies deserving. Like the beginning of The Winter's Tale, this beginning evokes on the one hand the world of normalcy, of natural rhythms, of friendly intercourse between man and man, of courtesy, of fathers and sons, acquaintances and friends. On the other hand it evokes the image of a shield with two sinister bars: the King's division and the return of the whoreson. Shakespeare was deliberately restraining his energies, confining himself to the quietness and familiarity of unstudied prose, entering in upon the play through an inconspicuous side-door. He presents us with the Elizabethan court before its confrontation with an Asiatic tyrant, a half-mad geriatric king of wrath with his three fairy-tale daughters, raging against the monsters of Niederheim, enmeshed in a cosmos of correspondences where he must bear all things patiently like Job to the very end.

Finally there is Hamlet, which has, along with Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra, a particularly complex and evocative beginning, though one that strikes us as far less premeditated, not artistically of course but philosophically, the state of indecision, or indirection, in which we remain throughout the opening being prophetic of the play's larger concern with indecision. Our sense is not that Shakespeare is holding back information in any manipulative way; but rather that he is allowing the scene to develop according to its own dynamics, to reveal itself as it will, to unfold by its own laws and write itself. Patently, the beginning is not all-revealing, and from its ambiguities, sounds and images we cannot tease out the whole story of Hamlet. Rather we are brought into the play as men, not as goods or possessed of godlike knowledge, in order to explore the faint glimmers of dawn in the prevailing darkness. In other words, Shakespeare makes for the middle path; he creates a beginning considerably more revealing than the beginnings of Othello or King Lear, but less encoded and fraught than that of Macbeth. It conceals as well as reveals mysteries, not in the way that Iago conceals his true intent, but in the sense that the scene's inner logic seems to remain at times as tantalizingly intangible to the dramatist as to us. In its gradual revelation of the dark secrets of the past, there are few of the sudden, lurchingly sudden, insights of Macbeth: it is a drama of delay where we are in the main prevented from attempting the kind of instantaneous Sophoclean readings that the later play forces upon us. And as it summons up the past, it too has recourse to a double beginning.

The play opens with the newcomer challenging the guard on duty though we ordinarily assume that the guard will make the initial challenge. Hence Francisco's refusal to answer Barnardo's ‘Who's there?’ and his own counter-challenge, ‘Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.’ Even so, it is Francisco who identifies Barnardo, not Barnardo himself. This opening confusion takes only a few seconds, but it is premonitory of the hunter-hunted, challenger-challenged reversals of the climax. Midnight is traditionally associated with the supernatural and with subliminal experience, but we are struck nevertheless by Francisco's unexpected addition to an expected observation: ‘’Tis bitter cold, / And I am sick at heart.’ The sickness at heart suggests foreboding, fear, a psychological malaise, something inwardly colder than the external bitterness of the air too frigid for a mouse to stir. Suddenly we realize that Francisco had watched alone. Before departing he, not Barnardo, challenges Marcellus and Horatio and this time receives a different pass-word.

The overall effect of this series of encounters is to heighten the uncertainty. Each relationship seems fluid: who is the guard, who the challenger? who is coming, who going? what are the passwords and why are they different? why is Francisco sick at heart? Across the network of order, efficiency, regularity, recognition that we associate with the whole notion of changing the guard flicker the uncertainties and fears that must also accompany such change, the dread of the foe disguised as friend. The dominant mode so far has been the question as challenge: we are in a martial context, unnaturally awake at the time of natural sleep, vigilant in the dark. But we have no notion yet of the enemy's identity or whereabouts. The guards have been posted on the battlements in the dead of night to watch it seems not so much for an enemy onslaught as for a spy or traitor, an enemy who materializes from the cold itself. But what is the connection between the prince of the play's title and this castle and this watch? Are they watching as his loyal servants or his enemies? Admittedly, the action is too rapid for us to clearly formulate these questions; they come as almost instantaneous fears, as perhaps barely distinguishable components in a mood of uncertainty rather than as recognizable questions, but later surely they will require answers.

The second stage of the beginning commences with Marcellus’ ‘What, has this thing appear’d again to-night?’ ‘Thing’ connotes something not human, perhaps not animate; yet it appeared as if it were living. It is a ‘thing’ because Horatio cannot define it not because it is necessarily inhuman or inanimate. Barnardo answers punningly (but we assume unwittingly so): ‘I have seen nothing.’ Thus Horatio emerges as a sceptic, a doubter and a rationalist in this context of credulity and praeternaturalism: ‘Horatio says ’tis but our fantasy.’

Marcellus makes us suddenly aware the ‘thing’—‘a dreaded sight’—has already been seen twice before. For the moment we do not know the circumstances, merely that Horatio must be convinced by seeing for himself: he must both ‘approve’ the eyes of Marcellus and Barnardo and also ‘speak’ to what is now specifically identified as an ‘apparition’ that cannot or will not speak until spoken to. As Horatio asserts boldly ‘Tush, tush, ’twill not appear’, our eyes strain to pierce the granular darkness: we tensely watch the minutes of the night. The suspense builds. While everyone sits down to hear a story that will ‘assail’ the ears, as later the Mousetrap will assail the ears of Claudius and Hamlet's tirade the ears of Gertrude, the story passes from relation into enactment: that which was to assail the ears begins to assail the eyes, the words become visualized. At the stroke of one—and we assume the precedent holds good from the previous occasion—the bell drowns out the words upon the ears as the ghost appears beneath the star that's westward from the pole, the time, the bell and the star constituting an astrologically propitious moment for its materialization.

Immediately ‘it’ is associated with the king that's dead: ‘it’ is like but cannot be that king. As the ‘scholar’ Horatio is enjoined to speak to, that is, to question ‘it’. Though a sceptic and rationalist he is clearly the privileged interrogator: the ghost will only answer a scholar and only a scholar will know what to ask of it, only he will have sufficient learning, specifically demonological learning,¹² to ask the correct questions in the correct way. For the ghost ‘would be spoke to’, though Barnardo and Marcellus do not know how or what to ask it. The beginning comes to a close with Horatio's demand for identity, ‘What art thou?’, essentially a repetition of the ‘Who's there?’ of the play's very first line. True to his doubt, Horatio hastens to distinguish between the ‘thing’ and ‘that fair and warlike form / In which the majesty of buried Denmark / Did sometimes march’, a form which the thing is now usurping as it usurps the time of night. ‘Offended’ by these pejorative distinctions, the ghost ‘stalks away’, the motion denoting anger, regal impatience, disappointment with the questioner and his questions. Though the ghost ‘would be spoke to’ it has refused to speak, or cannot speak to Barnardo, Marcellus, and now to Horatio who desperately cries out ‘Stay! Speak, speak, I charge thee speak!’ The ghost does not answer, will not thus be charged.

Up till now, there has been no question of the ghost's theological status; we are concerned solely with its identity and with its silence. And yet, like Hamlet's long opening silence while Claudius deals with Voltemand and Cornelius and then with Laertes, this silence is clearly enforced; eventually it will unpack its heart with words. An intruder has challenged the watch and will not unfold himself, an intruder who seems to be, ironically and confusingly, the very king, or something like the king, of the castle, alive though dead and buried, the friend and the foe, the commander of the vigil and yet the quarry of that vigil. Horatio, the sceptic, has been compelled in an instant to believe: the sensible and true avouch of his own eyes has dashed aside the questions that sprang to his tongue when the story merely assailed his ears; the ‘thing’ has become more than ‘fantasy’.

Throughout this beginning the pace is precipitous, the mode questioning, the reorientations sudden and unexpected; our ability to interpret each word and gesture is constantly subject to revision or reversal, our understanding of what is going on dubious, temporary, provisional. It is not simply a question of Shakespeare's having led us into the realm of the supernatural, but rather of his presenting us with everything as aetiologically doubtful and ambiguous, even the time frame. For the ghost is from the past, from the dead and buried, in their figure; and yet he is not dead, does not stay unmoved, stalks through the present of the guards’ instant challenges and instant replies. This battlement present, however, is one of anxiety, of inadequate information, of vigilance, not the hedonistic present of Herrick's rosebuds. Into this other transitory and ominous present comes the even more ominous past, armed cap-a-pe, challenging identification, wanting to speak and to be spoken to, silently proclaiming itself as more truly present, as more truly a cause, than the nervous challengers on the edge of time in that dark, cold, high place. It has already begun and yet it seems about to begin.

Hamlet's beginning is a Gordian masterpiece where we are captured by the very lack of information and drawn into a subliminal world of doubt, intrigue, mystery and dread; where our imaginations strain to enter into a beginning that is no beginning in itself, but merely the beginning of our understanding. When the ghost stalks away we know it must return; for it is an illusion that will and will not stay, the final cause from which and also for which the beginning had begun. And yet it will not release us; it demands that the beginning begin all over again with another guard, another night, another challenge, another scholar to question it on the stroke of one as he gazes at the northwest sky. Our questioning and engagement deepen as we gradually come to realize that this is not the real beginning at all, that another beginning has yet to come, make answer and be not offended, that the beginning must begin again.

The double beginning with which Shakespeare first experimented in tragedy with Romeo and Juliet has thus given birth to a labyrinthine double beginning which does not begin, which cannot begin at the beginning. Only with Macbeth a few years later did Shakespeare begin at the beginning and then only, as we have seen, with a devastating and omnipresent sense of the end.

Some conclusions. Obviously we must continue to be struck by the diversity of the tragic openings, and by the fact that Shakespeare never deigned to repeat an old success. This was not only because of his love of artistic experiment and dramatic variety but also because his understanding of what constitutes a beginning was constantly changing and developing. Different plays were begun in different ways because their matter presented different facets to his gaze even as he subjected the very notion of a beginning itself to scrutiny. Certain questions, however, constantly present themselves. How long is the beginning? When does it end? Does it seem to be merely the first stage in a series of actions or somehow complete in itself? What tense orientation dominates it? What does it reveal to us most: plot, character, mood, genre, setting, theme, symbol, modality, diction, style? And, most pressingly of all, how much of the end is present in the beginning? Is it in fact itself a kind of end? Clearly, most of these questions are retrospective, and mainly those we ask in the study not the theatre. At the time of actual enactment we remain uncertain or even in total suspense as to the kind of beginning we are witnessing. In particular extreme cases we might not be able to characterize the beginning until the play is over, hindsight alone providing us with a clear enough perspective. And it is precisely the experience of continuing uncertainty—the awareness of the beginning's present uninterpretability—that makes the witnessing of a play more compelling for most people than the contemplation of philosophical principles (in the fullest sense of archai).

Many of the more general points made in this essay could no doubt be brought to bear on any number of openings, epic, comic, tragi-comic, pastoral, pastoral-epic, the whole Polonian list. Nevertheless, they were generated by a concern with Shakespeare's tragic openings; for it is here that the notions of beginning and of end come into sharpest focus. Because endings are so important in tragedy, their force fields dominate their plays, though in varying and complex ways. All radii lead towards them and they constantly suggest themselves, even as we have seen, in their beginnings. Perhaps pre-eminently in their beginnings; for we keep wanting to read the play into the beginning, to outwit or outdistance the dramatic events by anticipating or overanticipating them in the beginning, even when we lack sufficient knowledge to do so, when, that is, the dramatist consciously thwarts our attempts and compels us to wait upon his delaying of revelation. This, I believe, is inevitable. For the whole notion of a tragedy is predicated on the assumptions that the culminating catastrophe had a beginning and its inception can be traced back to a particular time and place, to a particular set of circumstances; and that, moreover, if one returns to these circumstances, one can unravel the premises and conditions without which the tragedy would and could not have happened as it did, and thus discover eventually the beginning of the end.¹³

In the theatre, unquestionably, the touchstone of success is the beginning's independent effectiveness, its intrinsic interest, not the sense that it has been contrived only to suggest its end. The dramatist must strike a felicitous balance, that is, between writing a scene that has no prospective meanings and one that has so many that it ceases to be immediately interpretable at all. Ideally he will strive for something that has both instant and premonitory force. But the ‘mix’ will vary from play to play. In some we will be constantly alerted to the end even as we are fascinated by the dynamics of the beginning; in others the end will be only dimly descried and then perhaps only after we retrospectively retrace our steps to look at the beginning more closely in light of what we have subsequently learned; in still others we may be prevented or deliberately misled from perceiving the end. Nevertheless, it is the felt connection between the beginning and the end that, I believe, is the hallmark of tragedy. For we feel continually impelled to read more and more into the beginning, and are often inspired to do so the more the material is familiar to us. Often perhaps we read too much into the beginning, we overload its circuits. This tendency is not peculiar to literary critics, however: it is part of the very texture of shared theatre experience that goes back to the Greeks; part of the fundamental process of understanding tragedy, of recognizing tragedy as tragedy.

Whether the beginnings intensify the desire for foreknowledge, to the point even of overwhelming us with too many possibilities, making us prematurely godlike; whether they anticipate the modality of the end by way of their rhetoric and figures, attuning us to the style rather than the substance of the tragedy; whether they contrive to thwart our desire for foreknowledge by evasion, subterfuge, false clues, or simple protraction; whether they provide us with anticipatory meanings that we can explore as men witnessing the actions and dilemmas of men without assuming godlike powers; whether they fail to achieve any of these levels of intent, the point remains that we feel the need to search for a subtext, for causal significances, for the anticipated end in the beginnings. This is a legitimate, ineluctable, certainly in the case of Shakespeare supremely rewarding obsession with aperture.¹⁴ For it is precisely our sense of the connection between beginning and end, however diversely it appears, that can harrow us with fear and wonder (to draw upon the old Renaissance terms) when we witness a tragedy in art, or indeed occasionally in life, if we can trace back the tragedy's sequence to some complex cause, to some beginning's knot intrinsicate. However climatic our sense of the absolute ending in tragedy, our sense of this ending's beginning and therefore of its aetiology, whether clearly or obscurely perceived, is equally overriding. That is, the primary cause remains the teleological, the end cause first formulated by the Stagirite, and the cause underlying one of the most elegant of all the arguments for God's existence, and therefore for the existence of man, who, for Shakespeare at least, was made in God's image.

Notes

1. All references in this essay will be to The Riverside Shakespeare (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1974), textual ed. G. Blakemore Evans.

2. ‘Done’ is one of those, often quite simple, words which quickly become resonant in the play and soon possess a symbolic life of their own. ‘Done’, ‘undone’, ‘Duncan’, and ‘Dunsinane’ are all part of Macbeth's ‘doing’ and ‘undoing’.

3. Just as Macbeth eventually becomes Macdonwald, so Macduff eventually becomes the pristine Macbeth. As the armed head of the first apparition, he escapes from the second great slaughter at Fife where he loses the body of his family in order to become Valour's second minion and the conqueror of her first minion. On one side is the helmeted head of the King's champion, on the other the severed head of the traitor. Resolution comes, that is, when the proper head has been joined to the armed body, when the deceptively similar pieces in the bloody jigsaw have been distinguished and assigned correctly.

4. It is interesting that the finale also constitutes a triptych of battle episodes: the fight with young Siward, the fight with Macduff before he reveals the nature of his birth, and the fight to the death.

5. The play raises many of the same issues in this respect as Marlowe's Doctor Faustus.

6. Robert F. Willson, Jr, in his Shakespeare's Opening Scenes (Salzburg, 1977), p. 5, argues, to the contrary, that ‘Shakespeare seldom omits something from the opening scenes simply to surprise or outwit his audience. We are consistently kept fully informed about necessary details, generally because Shakespeare strives for maximum ironic effect.’

7. In The Tempest, of course, the traffic is said to last four hours, the time twixt two glasses past the mid season and six (I.ii.239-240).

8. Kenneth Muir, in his The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays (London, 1977), pp. 68-77, has drawn our attention to the medley of tragic and comic materials Shakespeare probably drew upon for his treatment of the Pyramus and Thisby story, including of course his sources for Romeo and Juliet.

9. See in particular Susan Snyder's fascinating study, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare's Tragedies (Princeton, 1979), esp. pp. 57-70.

10. See the interesting analysis by Leonard Barkan in his Nature's Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven, 1975), pp. 95-109.

11. Later, of course, he is forced to smell his way to Dover.

12. One of the most poignant aspects of Faustus’ fall from grace is his failure to question the demons correctly or to understand their answers.

13. I doubt whether one could ever predicate such an intimate connection, metaphysical in its essence, between beginnings and ends in comedy.

14. As opposed to closure; see Frank Kermode's The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York, 1967), ch. 3, esp. pp, 82-9.