SOURCE: “‘You that way; we this way’: Shakespeare's Endings,” in Mirror up to Shakespeare, edited by J. C. Gray, pp. 44-54, University of Toronto Press, 1984.

[In this essay, Craik considers the manner in which Shakespeare employs stage directions and concluding couplets to achieve a sense of finality at the conclusion of a play's performance. Craik is particularly concerned here with the tragedies and the histories, but he also calls attention to the formal and informal epilogues of some of the comedies.]

This essay is concerned rather with the manner in which Shakespeare concludes a play's performance than with the manner in which he handles its dénouement, though it is not easy (or desirable) to consider these two aspects of dramatic technique separately. In both of them Shakespeare shows himself to be both artist and craftsman, aware of the final impression that he wants his play to make and equally aware of the conditions of the theatre in which he passes his daily life, as actor no less than as playwright.

While the comedies are to some degree admitted by Shakespeare to be fantasy, the tragedies and histories make a considerable claim, by their treatment, to be a realistic imitation of life. They therefore end with the powerful working-out of the human relationships upon which they have turned. To study their endings, then, is to see how Shakespeare theatrically reinforces the tragic fact, the death of the protagonist. His technique, however, varies from play to play.

The removal of dead bodies in a theatre without a curtain to lower between stage and spectators had usually to be written into the final lines. (Romeo and Juliet and Othello, which are exceptional, will be mentioned later.) In Julius Caesar, where Brutus's body is at the centre of the final tableau, its removal is not actually directed, merely implied, by Octavius's concluding speech, which follows Antony's tribute:

According to his virtue let us use him,
With all respect and rites of burial.
Within my tent his bones to-night shall lie,
Most like a soldier, ordered honourably.
So call the field to rest, and let's away
To part the glories of this happy day.

(V.v.76-81)¹

The somewhat similar ending of Coriolanus shows some interesting variations. Brutus's suicide, foreseeable yet attended by suspense as three of his friends refuse to kill him and the enemy draws nearer, is performed with resolute dignity. This is not a scene of violence. But Coriolanus's assassination, which Aufidius provokes him into inviting, is accompanied by mob outcries recalling the tearing of Cinna the poet, and when he falls, Aufidius stands on him (the direction is from the Folio). The shocked Volscian lords restore order and command Aufidius to remove Coriolanus's body with due honour. Aufidius assents:

My rage is gone
And I am struck with sorrow. Take him up.
Help, three o’th’chiefest soldiers; I’ll be one.
Beat thou the drum, that it speak mournfully;
Trail your steel pikes. Though in this city he
Hath widowed and unchilded many a one,
Which to this hour bewail the injury,
Yet he shall have a noble memory.
Assist. [Exeunt bearing the dead body of Coriolanus.
A dead march sounded.]

(V.vi.147-55]

The stage action here (unlike that at the end of Julius Caesar) is carefully written into the speech: three captains and Aufidius are to carry the body; a soldier is to beat a dead march on the drum; the rest are to trail their pikes. After the final couplet, the single word of command, ‘Assist,’ sets all the action going. It also, by putting a rough edge on the couplet, adds a touch of unexpected realism to the expected formal ending.

Shakespeare had given the same rough-edged finish to Hamlet:

Take up the bodies. Such a sight as this
Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.
Go, bid the soldiers shoot.

(V.ii.393-5)

The ‘Exeunt’ of the Second Quarto is appropriately expanded in the Folio into ‘Exeunt Marching: after the which, a Peale of Ordenance are shot off.’ The earlier part of Fortinbras's final speech, like Aufidius's, exactly specifies what is to happen so that the audience can fully absorb the respect which is being accorded to the dead hero:

                    Let four captains
Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have prov’d most royal; and for his passage
The soldiers’ music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him.

(V.ii.387-92)

The ‘stage’ (that is, scaffold) is the one on which he was asked by Horatio to expose the bodies to view; its mention shows that he has accepted Horatio's claim to speak authoritatively of the bloody spectacle. Horatio's importance has been strongly emphasized in the last sixty lines, most obviously by his impulse towards suicide and by Hamlet's reasons for staying him. It is also notable that Fortinbras's approach is heard off-stage before Hamlet dies, Osric explaining that ‘this warlike volley’ is his salute to the English ambassadors. This motivates Hamlet's recommendation of Fortinbras as the next king of Denmark (why else should he be in his thoughts?), and the preliminary announcement of his arrival prevents the audience's suspicion that dramatic convenience has dictated it. Shakespeare's concern for a realistic effect and a slow tempo at the end of the play appears in the ‘after the which’ of the Folio's stage direction (which must reflect the stage practice) and also in ‘Go, bid the soldiers shoot.’ The guns are fired not in response to Fortinbras's wish but to his command, which a soldier has to go and deliver to the gunners while others are removing the bodies of Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, and Laertes.

In Othello Shakespeare reverted to the couplet as conclusion. Lodovico, embodying the authority of Venice, speaks to Iago and, after him, to Gratiano and Cassio:

                                        O Spartan dog,
More fell than anguish, hunger, or the sea!
Look on the tragic loading of this bed.
This is thy work.—The object poisons sight;
Let it be hid. Gratiano, keep the house,
And seize upon the fortunes of the Moor,
For they succeed on you. To you, Lord Governor,
Remains the censure of this hellish villain;
The time, the place, the torture—O, enforce it!
Myself will straight aboard; and to the state
This heavy act with heavy heart relate.

(V.ii.364-74)

The finality of the couplet is emphasized by the balancing of ‘heavy act’ with ‘heavy heart.’ There are by now no bodies requiring removal. Desdemona, Emilia, and Othello have all died appropriately on the bed, and at ‘Let it be hid’ the bed's curtains are closed (‘the object’ is not the bed itself but its ‘tragic loading’). It remains on stage after the actors have made their exit and probably also until after the spectators have left the theatre—unless the tragedy is followed by a jig, as was Julius Caesar when the Swiss traveller Thomas Platter saw it in 1599. The end of Romeo and Juliet is presumably to be managed in a similar way, though this is not made so clear by the lines. The dying Paris begs Romeo, ‘Open the tomb, lay me with Juliet’ (as he duly does), which indicates that Shakespeare is concerned to place all the bodies (of Paris, Romeo, and Juliet, not to mention Tybalt) where they can be conveniently allowed to remain at the final general exit. But the prince gives no order to close up the tomb (‘Seal up the mouth of outrage for a while’ V.iii.215, which might be interpreted in this sense, relates rather, in the context of his whole speech, to the passionate outcries of Juliet's parents and Romeo's father); furthermore, the visible presence of the bodies till the very end will provide a much-needed focal point while all the lengthy explanations are going on, and the prince's lines

Where be these enemies? Capulet, Montague,
See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love!

(V.iii.290-2)

seem to require the enemies to see, not merely to understand, the form that divine vengeance has taken. So if the tomb was closed—as it almost certainly was—this must have been done silently while the general exit was taking place, Shakespeare having missed his opportunity of writing it into the dialogue.

The dialogue culminates in the quatrain-and-couplet spoken by the prince, a lyrical conclusion in stylistic harmony with the sonnet which formed the prologue:

A glooming peace this morning with it brings;
The sun for sorrow will not show his head.
Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon'd and some punished.
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

(V.iii.304-9)

These lines combine the functions of concluding speech and epilogue. The word ‘story’ is appropriate both to the recital of recent facts that the prince has just heard (as when Hamlet bids Horatio ‘tell my story’ or Kent tells Edgar ‘the most piteous tale of Lear and him’) and to the dramatized action that the audience has been witnessing. The prince's final couplet is directed outwards, to those in the pit and galleries as well as to those standing with him on the stage, and amounts to the rhetorical question, ‘Have you ever heard a more pathetic story than this?’

The final speech in King Lear, by contrast, is wholly addressed to the characters on stage (‘we that are young’ referring to Albany and Edgar, upon whose shoulders—Kent having resolved to follow his master—the government of Britain has now fallen):

The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

(V.iii.323-6)

‘Exeunt with a dead march’ is the Folio's direction, Albany's earlier command ‘Bear them from hence’ being now obeyed. The final tableau has had Lear and Cordelia at its centre; Goneril and Regan, after their violent deaths off stage, have been brought on earlier so that (as has often been noticed) Lear and his three daughters are all together on stage for the first time since the opening scene. It was perhaps to emphasize this visual effect that Shakespeare had Edmund borne off stage to die. He may also have considered that four bodies were quite enough to remove at the close. Furthermore, since it was Edmund's remorse that had prompted the attempt to save Lear and Cordelia, Lear's entry with Cordelia's body would demand an emotional response of some kind from him—and yet any such response would be an unwelcome distraction of the audience's attention. For the sake of completeness his death has to be reported to Albany, whose comment, ‘That's but a trifle here,’ reinforces the stage's emphasis on Lear and Cordelia. But the bodies of Goneril and Regan are not forgotten, for Kent tries to draw Lear's attention to them. Shakespeare thus ensures that there is no superfluous element in the close of the tragedy.

Macbeth ends with couplets which look confidently to the future, not dejectedly to the past. This is an unusual tragedy in that the hero-villain has been slain off-stage, his ‘cursed head’ being now presented to Malcolm as a symbol of the end of his tyranny: ‘The time is free’ (V.viii.55). If Macbeth's death had been given the prominence of inclusion in the final scene, Malcolm's subsequent accession might have seemed like anticlimax. Shakespeare further separates the two events by beginning the last scene with Old Siward's poignant response to the news of his son's death. He handles all this far better than he had handled the somewhat similar last scene of Richard III, where Richmond is given the crown at the very beginning of the scene and the safety of young George Stanley can hardly be of much concern to the audience, however much Richmond's concern for it is to his credit.

There is little resemblance between the presentation of Macbeth's head to Malcolm and that of Mortimer's head to Edward III in the last scene of Marlowe's Edward II. Mortimer has been executed at the young king's order in retribution for the murder of Edward II, which he has very recently caused: Macbeth had murdered Malcolm's father almost at the beginning of the play, and after his death he is denounced not as a murderer but as a tyrant (‘this dead butcher’ [V.viii.69] is not readily applied to the butchery of Duncan). There is more resemblance between the ends of Edward II and Richard II. In Marlowe's play not only Mortimer's head is brought in but also (at the young king's command) the hearse bearing his victim, on which the head is placed as a sacrifice to revenge:

Here comes the hearse: help me to mourn, my lords.
Sweet father, here unto thy murder’d ghost
I offer up this wicked traitor's head.

(V.vi.98-100)²

When the coffined body of Richard is presented to Bolingbroke, the resemblance adds to the ambiguity of Shakespeare's play, for the new king is not the late king's rightful successor and avenger but his supplanter and murderer. Exton, whose hand struck the fatal blow, emphatically gives him the responsibility: ‘From your own mouth, my lord, did I this deed.’ But Bolingbroke sees himself, and the situation, quite differently:

They love not poison that do poison need,
Nor do I thee. Though I did wish him dead,
I hate the murderer, love him murdered.
The guilt of conscience take thou for thy labour,
But neither my good word nor princely favour;
With Cain go wander thorough shades of night,
And never show thy head by day nor light.
Lords, I protest my soul is full of woe
That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow.
Come mourn with me for what I do lament,
And put on sullen black incontinent.
I’ll make a voyage to the Holy Land,
To wash this blood off from my guilty hand.
March sadly after; grace my mournings here
In weeping after this untimely bier.

(V.vi.38-52)

Being the king, he has the final word, and what he says goes. His grief and penitence may be perfectly genuine (though his relationship with Richard's actual murderer Exton is uncomfortably reminiscent of John's relationship with Arthur's supposed murderer Hubert), and his generous treatment of the Bishop of Carlisle has just raised him in our opinion, but even so, the end of the play is acutely uncomfortable. The final ‘Exeunt,’ I have little doubt, should take place in complete silence.

Richard III, culminating in Richmond's triumph, had probably ended with drums and trumpets. Parts 2 and 3 of Henry VI end in this way, with couplets so similar as to suggest that Shakespeare was falling into a formula:

Sound drums and trumpets and to London all;
And more such days as these to us befall!

(V.iii.32-3)

Sound drums and trumpets. Farewell, sour annoy!
For here, I hope, begins our lasting joy.

(V.vii.45-6)

But the end of 1 Henry VI, with a soliloquy for Suffolk, and a soliloquy wholly in blank verse at that, is strikingly unusual, so much so that it hardly seems like an end at all. Shakespeare's tragedies and histories characteristically end processionally, with or without sound effects. This convention (seen, for example, in 1 Henry IV) is subtly flouted in 2 Henry IV in order to dramatize the rejection of Falstaff. If Falstaff had not bulked so large in the play and its precursor, the ‘crown scene’ between the prince and his dying father and the prince's scene with his brothers and the Lord Chief Justice could have led straight on to a formal ‘coronation scene’ ending in the usual exhortatory processional manner. Instead, Falstaff's entry with his companions leads on to the prince's rejection speech, in which he demolishes Falstaff's hopes in over twenty lines; these culminate in a typical couplet-and-rough-edge cadence:

Be it your charge, my lord,
To see perform’d the tenour of our word.
Set on.

(V.v.71-3)

The effect is that of a false ending since, instead of the stage's being wholly cleared, Falstaff and his companions remain to resume their prose: ‘Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound’ (V.v.74). They in their turn must be got off stage, so we now have the return of the Lord Chief Justice to extinguish Falstaff's reviving hopes by ordering him to the Fleet. But this is not enough in itself to end the play, so we are also given his dialogue with Prince John about Falstaff's rejection and the prospect of a French campaign. I imagine that most readers, and many spectators, find this dialogue rather wooden, with Prince John telling the Lord Chief Justice what he knows already. The most that can be said for it is that it is a workmanlike way out of the difficulty that Shakespeare has made for himself by his striking dramatization of the rejection. The added epilogue—or choice of epilogues—seems a further indication that Shakespeare was doing his best to end his play in a definite manner as well as to advertise the forthcoming Henry V.

To end a play, as Haydn ends his ‘Farewell’ Symphony, with two players instead of the company's full complement is extraordinary for Shakespeare. He did it in The Comedy of Errors to make a comic point about the still-persisting confusion between each pair of twins; when the masters have left, the servants remain and, unable to settle the question of which is the first-born, depart hand in hand. The device is evidently appropriate to the dramatic material. But at the end of Troilus and Cressida Troilus's couplet

Strike a free march to Troy. With comfort go;
Hope of revenge shall hide our inward woe

(V.x.30-1)

is followed by Pandarus's entry (a thoroughly incongruous one on the battlefield) and his indignant repudiation by Troilus (in a couplet which, in the Folio, also concluded the scene where he brought Troilus Cressida's letter). It seems that the ending has been revised, at considerable artistic violence to the original version, in order to drag in Pandarus's epilogue and replace a tragic dignified ending with a satirical undignified one. Whether the violent reworking is a justified theatrical effect is debatable.

Shakespeare's epilogues are usually introduced with great propriety:

The King's a beggar, now the play is done.
All is well ended if this suit be won,
That you express content; which we will pay
With strife to please you, day exceeding day.
Ours be your patience then, and yours our parts;
Your gentle hands lend us, and take our hearts.

This epilogue to All's Well That Ends Well resembles Jonson's epilogue to Volpone, where a principal actor speaks well-turned heroic couplets and alludes to his role. Others of Shakespeare's epilogues similarly exploit the shift from the world of dramatic illusion to that of everyday reality. Thus Puck, at the end of a play where magic and sleep have been intimately connected, invites the spectators to imagine that they ‘have but slumb’red here / While these visions did appear’ (V.i.414-15); Rosalind, who has spent much of As You Like It in the disguise of a youth and has not resumed her woman's dress till the final scene, says she would kiss the attractive men in the audience if she were a woman—being in reality a male actor; Prospero, having broken and buried his staff and drowned his book, appeals for favours that he now lacks the magic power to enforce. All three epilogues are distinct from each other in tone, and a brief summary can hardly suggest the subtlety of any of them, particularly Prospero's. But in all of them—as also in Time's prologue to the latter part of The Winter's Tale—a playful wit is an essential ingredient. The epilogue to Twelfth Night is exceptional in depending not upon wit but upon humour. The clown's song reveals itself to be an epilogue only in its final stanza:

A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that's all one, our play is done,
And we’ll strive to please you every day.

(V.i.391-4)

(Compare the same promise in the epilogue of All's Well that Ends Well.) The point, I think, is that until that stanza the clown's song, as a sequel to the final lines of the final scene, had seemed completely pointless.

To have an epilogue spoken ‘in character’ is far more consistent with the nature of comedy than with that of tragedy, where, even though the deaths are known to be ‘fabulously counterfeit’ (as Hieronimo expresses it in The Spanish Tragedy, preparatory to showing that in the case of his court entertainment they are not), there is little to be gained by underlining the fact. No one would wish for an epilogue spoken by Lear or Othello. The comedies, though each of them fully absorbs the audience into its world, are accorded a different kind of belief, the make-believe element being sometimes pointed by remarks like Fabian's ‘If this were play’d upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction’ (III.iv.121-4). Consistent with this is Shakespeare's trick of introducing blandly and suddenly some improbable event into the last scene, as when Don John's capture, Duke Frederick's conversion, and the imprisonment of Viola's sea-captain at Malvolio's suit are reported, and Antonio's ships are restored to him by a letter which Portia as good as admits to producing out of thin air. A curious feature of two of the last plays, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, is that they end not with the usual couplet (as Cymbeline does) but with blank verse, which Shakespeare had hitherto used as a conclusion only in 1 Henry VI and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Perhaps this avoidance of the formality of rhyme reflects an absence of sententiousness from Leontes and Prospero, the speakers of the final lines; and their final words, ‘Hastily lead away’ (V.ii.155) and ‘Please you, draw near’ (V.i.318), both imply further harmonious conversation between the stage personages once they have left our view. Prospero's return to the stage to speak his epilogue does not counteract that implication, since, as we have seen, he returns not as Prospero but as a subtle amalgam of Prospero and Actor-of-Prospero.

Notes

1. All citations are to William Shakespeare. The Complete Works ed Peter Alexander, London 1951.

2. Edward II ed H.B. Charlton and R.D. Waller, London 1933, in The Works and Life of Christopher Marlowe gen ed R.H. Case