SOURCE: Snyder, Susan. “‘The Norwegians Are Coming!’: Shakespearean Misleadings.” In Elizabethan Theater, edited by R. B. Parker and S. P. Zitner, pp. 200-13. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Snyder remarks on a similar absence of a crucial battle scene in both Othello and Hamlet, noting that Shakespeare did not dramatize the Turkish attack against Cyprus in Othello and represented Fortinbras's invasion of Denmark in Hamlet as a relatively bloodless one. Both tragedies, the critic suggests, depict the enemy within as a greater threat than the foreign antagonist.]

To explore what seems to me a characteristic Shakespearean strategy, I want to consider two battles that don't happen: the Turkish attack against Cyprus in Othello and the invasion of Danish lands by Fortinbras and his Norwegian force in Hamlet. Both of these loom large in the early action of their respective plays. The upcoming wars are the focus for agitated discussion, diplomatic maneuver, and (especially) martial preparation. For a few scenes at least, we have every reason to believe that the Turks/Norwegians will attack and that the ensuing wars will be the main substance of the dramas we are watching. Yet early in act 2 of Hamlet, the ambassadors Voltemand and Cornelius report back to Claudius that Fortinbras has been diverted to Poland. By this time, in any case, we have heard the Ghost's tale of fratricide and know that Denmark's malaise has nothing to do with Norwegians. At a similar point in Othello, the Turkish peril and the expectations it arouses are even more cleanly cut off when a storm demolishes the enemy's fleet. Speculation, anxiety, and mobilization end abruptly with “News, lads! Our wars are done.”¹ Why so much ado about these wars if they are to be “done” so quickly, in fact never to happen at all?

Of course these lines of action, even unfulfilled, have some secondary functions in their respective dramatic designs. Fortinbras's mission to recover the lands Old Hamlet took from his father introduces the repeated motif of the revenger-son in Hamlet. And the shrewd move by which Claudius forestalls this danger begins the buildup of the King into a suitably mighty opposite for the hero-prince. In a similar way, the formidable threat posed by the Turks affirms Othello's stature by showing how much the state depends on his generalship. It also occasions a significant move of the action from civilized Venice to the demonic green world of Cyprus. Even so, what is the structural point of these abortive wars? What does Shakespeare accomplish by raising expectations he is not going to fulfill?

Something is already deeply wrong in Denmark when Hamlet opens. We are immediately introduced to a jumpy, apprehensive watch and fragmentary reports of a supernatural presence. “This thing,” “this dreaded sight,” “this apparition,” as the watchers call it, is perhaps only “fantasy,”² but in any case it is not yet described or named. Then the Ghost appears—fully armed and holding the truncheon that marks the military commander (1.2.200-204). The audience has not been prepared for anything beyond the fact of the Ghost: when it appears, its martial accoutrements thus have greater impact for being unexpected. Now “this thing” is identified with the dead King Hamlet, and specifically the King as leader in battle. This is what Horatio registers in saluting “that fair and warlike form / In which the majesty of buried Denmark / Did sometimes march” (1.1.45-47, emphasis added). Later remarks add to the military emphasis. Old Hamlet's Ghost moves with “martial stalk” (1.1.65), he frowns (1.1.61, 1.2.229-30).³ A generally bad omen, the King who walks abroad after death instead of lying in suitable repose, is thus apparently specified in its import, directing the mind to his role as defender of Denmark against foreign adversaries. Specificity pinpoints the adversary, too: the Ghost appears in the same armor he wore long ago in combat with “th'ambitious Norway.”

It is natural that the frightened onlookers should look immediately to Norway as the source of the current trouble. When the Ghost disappears, Horatio predicts from it “some strange eruption to our state,” and at once the talk turns to the warlike vigilance and preparation that are already present as signs of trouble, in addition to the armed specter. The strange eruption on the horizon is young Fortinbras's mission of revenge against Denmark, occasioned by that long-ago fight between Old Hamlet and “ambitious Norway,” Fortinbras's father. The elder Fortinbras was defeated and killed, and now his son wants to refight the battle. It all fits: the strict watch, the munitions-makers and shipwrights working overtime, and now this ghost in the likeness of the original combatant. Barnardo adds it up:

Well may it sort that this portentous figure
Comes armed through our watch so like the king
That was and is the question of these wars.(4)

Horatio the scholar seeks parallels in history, especially the unnatural events before Julius Caesar's fall. Viewers who were familiar with Roman history, perhaps through Shakespeare's own recent dramatization in Julius Caesar, might be subconsciously troubled by the parallel—it was, after all, his closest friends who destroyed Caesar, not a foreign force⁵—but the main emphasis is consistent, as Horatio points to similar, more recent harbingers of disaster in Denmark's own past. Frank Kermode observes, “So far as plot goes, this might be the opening scene of a play about a Caesar-like Hamlet now dead but still posthumously interested in empire.”⁶

In the next scene we leave the midnight watch on the battlements for a formal court gathering, but the signs seem to go on pointing the same way. The threat of Fortinbras and his lawless resolutes is the first business of the new king. Only after taking steps against that threat does Claudius turn to other concerns, the petitions of Laertes and Hamlet to leave the court and especially the embarrassment of Hamlet's prolonged grief. Claudius with characteristic wiliness speculates on what has prompted the belligerent boldness of young Fortinbras: perhaps contempt for the new king himself as not the equal of his mighty brother, or perhaps conjecture that a state in transition between rulers will be “disjoint and out of frame” (1.2.20). Since we suspect that both these propositions are true, however Claudius tries to dismiss them, the false signal continues, reinforced: beware the Norwegians, ready on the horizon to take advantage of internal disruptions in Denmark.

Claudius counters Hamlet's grief with platitudes, and, having given Laertes leave to travel to Paris, refuses his nephew-son's request to go back to Wittenberg. I have observed elsewhere that this play is full of young men coming and going on foreign expeditions. Only Hamlet is, until late in act 4, confined to his Danish “prison,”⁷ thus enacting physically the claustrophobic quality of the play's central action. When the false lead of the Norwegian invasion fizzles out after attracting such attention in the opening scenes, this claustrophobic inwardness is reinforced. The threat is not the visible foreign one but a hidden one at home, not even a serpent slithering from somewhere else into the secluded royal retreat. The enemy is not outside at all, but inside the kingdom, inside the family—“The serpent that did sting thy father's life / Now wears his crown” (1.5.39-40). And perhaps inside Hamlet's own self as well.

The Turks in Othello are similarly clear as outside enemies. Their intentions and strategies may occasionally be in doubt, but their status as alien adversaries is not. To understand their role, I would like to examine a general perspective on war and peace that colors several of Shakespeare's plays. Though he is no particular friend to bloodshed, at times he presents war as having certain advantages over peace. It offers clearcut action, more or less publicly sanctioned, against known enemies: something straightforward—that is, as opposed to the temptations, complications, and evasions characteristic of society's peace-time practices. In All's Well That Ends Well Bertram gladly goes off to war in Italy to escape from married life with Helen, a situation in which personal dislike strains against obligation to his patron the King. By comparison, doing battle in a foreign land looks easy and desirable. “Wars is no strife / To the dark house and the detested wife.” The dying Henry IV recommends to his son and successor a campaign abroad as a way out of intrigue and dissension at home. The “giddy minds” Henry fears have in the past turned all too readily against himself and each other, and “daily grew to quarrel and to bloodshed, / Wounding supposed peace.” In counseling Hal to occupy those unstable minds in foreign quarrels, Henry makes a different but relevant distinction: not war as opposed to peace, but overt war against a sharply defined Other as an alternative to the tragic muddles of internecine struggle. Henry's strategy is successful. Henry V shows us the new king leading an army away from England against an outside enemy—if not the absolute Other his father had dreamed of fighting, the Muslim infidel, still the notably foreign French, who go far beyond the variant versions of English that divide Henry's Irish, Scots, and Welsh contingents to speak another language entirely. (Or rather, they necessarily speak the same tongue as the English most of the time so that London audiences can understand them, but even apart from Princess Catherine's language lesson Shakespeare colors the defending army's discourse with enough incidental French to keep their differentness constantly before us.) And the “English,” after the treason of Cambridge, Scrope, and Grey is disposed of, are indeed more or less united against this obvious foe, their internal differences submerged in the common cause, in the manner of those heterogeneous U.S. bomber crews in World War II films.⁸

Several plays present war as a kind of prologue to the main action. Much Ado About Nothing opens just after a war has ended. Don Pedro and his officers are unsuspicious, ready to relax and play. During the war, Don John's hostility was clear when he “stood out” against his brother.⁹ Now, the defeated John dissembles malice under apparent accord—and becomes twice as dangerous in the intricate pastimes of peace: dances with masked partners, the merry wars of courtship. Destructive forces are present still, but concealed: in the bastard brother, and even in the unthinking assumptions of Pedro himself and his callow protégé Claudio. The troubles of Titus Andronicus also begin after open battle has ended. Titus goes by the rules. The principle of primogeniture rather than personal merit dictates his choice for emperor, the requirements of ritual lead him to sacrifice Tamora's son and thus set her against him, and an oversimple idea of honor bids him kill his own son. The straightforward, rigid code that served Titus well enough in the field fails miserably in the tangle of passion and ambition that he encounters at home. What Aufidius criticizes in Coriolanus marks Titus's limitations as well: “Not to be other than one thing, not moving / From th' casque to th' cushion, but commanding peace / Even with the same austerity and garb / As he controlled the war” (Coriolanus 4.7.42-45). Coriolanus himself can conquer a whole city singlehanded, but he finds civil life as unnegotiable a maze as Titus finds personal relationships. The corresponding prologue-battle in Macbeth is over almost before we hear of it. Seventy-five lines into the play, the bleeding captain and Ross have given their report and Duncan is rejoicing in total victory. Even before Macbeth makes his first entrance, their glowing accounts call attention to his sphere of achievement—and then cut it off. Macbeth is a highly effective warrior, but there are no more wars in prospect. Though he is not as unused to civil life as Coriolanus is, the shift to peace opens him to more complex imperatives of self-fulfillment, as it brings to Coriolanus a different, more perplexing duty. It is women who promote these new roles, Volumnia the mother and Lady Macbeth the wife, domestic counselors with their own devious agendas who replace the male companions of the straightforward combat. Different from each other as these plays are—the comedy, the early and late Roman plays, the tragedy—they all use the war-prologue to make us conscious of the transition from the loud clash of armies to more oblique and subtle encounters.

So does Othello, another play about a professional soldier. From this perspective the jubilant cheer that greets the perdition of the Turkish fleet, “Our wars are done,” is as ominous for the hero's future as any of Iago's sneers. The play has begun with concerns of peacetime like intrigues for professional advancement, courtship, and marriage. In the second scene, however, the war threat breaks into these preoccupations with disruptive force. The danger is at first unnamed, as in Hamlet: Cassio and the officers arrive with breathless tidings of “something from Cyprus,” “a business of some heat” in which the Duke has urgent need of his general. “The galleys / Have sent a dozen sequent messengers / This very night at one another's heels.” Othello is “hotly called for,” must come “haste-post-haste” (1.2.37-44). Great national events are clearly in the making. As the summons to the Venetian council interrupts Othello's conversation with Iago about his recent marriage, the dynamic of action suggests that the public emergency will displace this private matter. In the council scene that follows, there are almost fifty lines of agitated speculation about the numbers and intentions of the enemy, now identified as the Turks, punctuated by two more of those sequent messengers arriving with fresh news. Only after all this does Brabantio enter to plead his personal grievance against the Moor for marrying his daughter. But Brabantio's cause makes little headway amid pressing affairs of state. After hearing the defenses of Othello and Desdemona, the Duke turns quickly back to his overriding concern and orders the Moor at once to Cyprus.

Not only does the imperative of war seem to put parentheses around Othello's new marital relationship—he himself exits telling his bride, “We must obey the time” (1.3.300)—but even his long lyrical account of their courtship has served to remind us that Othello's proper scene is war. We have already learned that from the age of seven his home has been the tented field, his experience all “feats of broil and battle” (1.3.83-87). This is what Othello knows. There is a sense in which, when the Turkish fleet is suddenly blown to destruction early in act 2, Othello's occupation is already gone, even before Iago poisons his mind against Desdemona. The end of hostilities is the signal for revelry; and, as in Much Ado, revelry is a good cover for the insidious attack. The Otherness to be feared now shifts from the defeated Turks to the concealed enemy, Iago, who wears his honesty like a mask and is all the more dangerous for being the trusted battle-companion as well as the domestic counselor who acts, ostensibly, out of love.

(To Cassio) Good lieutenant, I think you think I love you. … I protest, in the sincerity of love and honest kindness.
(To Othello) My lord, you know I love you
.....I humbly do beseech you of your pardon
For too much loving you.(10)

The Turks were a convenient manifestation of the Other in Shakespeare's time. They were foreign. They zealously followed and promulgated an alien, inimical religion. Powerful in battle, they were a real and continuing threat at the gates of southern and eastern Europe. “Not-us” in race, nation, and religion, Turks were also traditionally imaged as the epitome of rampant, unchecked sexuality. Edgar as Poor Tom, claiming that he “in women out-paramoured the Turk” (Lear 3.4.85-86), invokes that stereotype, which perhaps was based on Europeans' knowledge that Muslim men were allowed four wives as well as additional concubines.¹¹ When the Other in Othello is relocated to the familar and close-at-hand, it is Iago who manifests the Turk's malevolence and formidable power, and his foreignness as well: though Venetian and nominally Christian, Iago is alien to all human community. The dialogue slyly links him with the missing Turk. Challenged in banter with Desdemona for a wholesale slander of wives that anticipates the later, greater deception, he protests, “Nay, it is true, or else I am a Turk.” It is not true. Later when Othello surveys the drunken brawl that has interrupted his wedding night and caused Cassio's disgrace, he asks, “Are we turned Turks, and to ourselves do that / Which heaven hath forbid the Ottomites?”¹² The answer, at least for Iago as sole architect of the recent disaster, is yes.

Iago is somewhat like Don John of Much Ado in his urge to sabotage whatever is attractive and admirable and in his closeness to the people he means to harm. If not trusted as much as Iago, John at any rate attracts no suspicion from Claudio, or even the brother he has betrayed once already, Don Pedro. Indeed, these two siblings are close in another sense, both meddlers in the affairs of others who back off from real human engagement. Pedro has more surface charm, but the bastard brother at his elbow reminds us that his drive to control has its dark underside.¹³ There is a shadow side to Othello as well, which Iago makes manifest. He could not have succeeded without the Moor's self-doubts, his sexual and social insecurities, and his defensive pride, all of which Iago helps bring into full articulation in order to play on them.

In the same shake of the kaleidoscope pattern brought about by the disappearance of the external enemy, the Turk's raging sexuality finds a new but different home: not in actuality with Iago and Othello but in fantasy, projected by Othello onto Desdemona. Such imaginations of female desire as out of control and insatiable are as old as stories of Eve, part of the more general male impulse to construct the woman as feared Other. Othello discovers the “curse of marriage” almost by reflex: “That we can call these delicate creatures ours / But not their appetites!” (3.3.272-74). Only after Desdemona is dead does he finally recognize the enemy in himself. In timing his own death blow to coincide with that earlier stroke in his story, by which he punished the Turk who did harm to Venice and its native citizen, Othello identifies with that “malignant” felon—malignant gathering in not only “rebellious,” but “contagious,” like a disease, poisonous.¹⁴

In both Hamlet and Othello, the relocation of the Other is a destabilizing shift from out there to right here: in someone or something close at hand, in one's own being. My uncle (O my prophetic soul!), my brother, my self. Inevitably this brings with it a displacement like that in Much Ado and Titus, from the prospect of marching out against a declared foe, with the battle lines clearly drawn, to the confusions inherent in the concealed enmity of one's own kind. This distinction comes through well in the second scene of Macbeth, where the enemies detailed in the complicated battle report are of both kinds. On the one hand are the foreigners, the Norwegians (again!)¹⁵ who come on like obvious adversaries, defiantly showing their banners (Macbeth 1.2.49). To these we might add the Hebridean soldiers whose label of “kerns and galloglasses” links them with the alien Irish.¹⁶ These, the official Other, present a hard fight but no particular confusion or ambiguity. But there are inside enemies too, the rebels Macdonwald and Cawdor. In these cases of Scot against Scot, as reported by the Captain and Ross, ambiguities abound. When the Captain describes Macbeth's confrontation with Macdonwald, the signifying pronouns “he” and “his” slide about so loosely as to leave us unsure for a moment just who was killing whom when Macbeth

Carved out his passage till he faced the slave,
Which ne'er shook hands nor bade farewell to him
Till he unseamed him from the nave to th' chops,
And fixed his head upon our battlements.

(1.2.20-23)

If it is hard at this point to sort out Macbeth grammatically from the enemy Macdonwald, the later account of Macbeth's fight with the traitorous Thane of Cawdor seems designed to muddle rebel and loyalist even more thoroughly: “Bellona's bridegroom … Confronted him with self-comparisons, / Point against point, rebellious arm 'gainst arm” (34-36). The Scots Macdonwald and Cawdor bring with them the tensions and confusions of the Other as “we,” beginning the more radical relocation in this play that will find in the hero himself the King's worst enemy and his own.

How does this redirection of our expectations work on us? If the road we thought we were traveling turns out to be a dead end, if the signs keep saying “this way … this way” only to pull us up short with “no, this way,” the result should be that we are now paying closer attention to the new road on which we find ourselves. What are its landmarks and what do they mean? How will this new journey both substitute for the aborted one and differ from it? Since the first frustration of expectation has shaken our passive, easy acquiescence in the playwright's guidance, we should become more alert, more actively focused on the new, subtler markers of our progress. Or, to change the metaphor, think of a sleight-of-hand artist, who keeps us focused on one hand while performing his magic with the other: when we see the result, we concentrate with special force on the hand newly identified as powerful. This spotlighting of the real tragic arena, by presenting an alternative and then leaving it in darkness, need be no less effective for operating below the level of consciousness.

I have used “should be” rather than “is” about this effect because I am trying to recover at least theoretically an experience that was far more available to Shakespeare's original audiences than to most of us. Playgoers at productions of Hamlet nowadays usually know that the Norwegians are not the real menace: they studied the play in high school, they saw the Olivier film or the Mel Gibson one, or they just absorbed the outlines of the dramatic action through cultural osmosis. Test this on your students. Even if they have never read the play, they probably know the Ghost's mission is not to alert the Danes to danger from Norway but to lay a burden of revenge on his son. Since the plots of Shakespeare's great tragedies are the common currency of our English-speaking culture, lay audiences as well as professional Shakespeareans experience the plays in ways that might have surprised Shakespeare. They have no hope that King Lear or Romeo and Juliet will end happily, they are confident that the Ghost of Old Hamlet is telling the truth about his murder and Claudius's guilt—and they are probably not taken in by the Norwegian decoy. The same osmosis deprives Othello of its novelty too. Even if the plot is somewhat less familiar than that of Hamlet, people know enough about what is coming to focus on Iago as the important destructive force rather than on the Turks.

But the Globe audiences had no such certainties. Unfamiliar with the stories of Othello and Hamlet, they could be made to watch the wrong hand first, to follow the ignis fatuus, and then in reassessment to be jolted into superawareness. In several of his sonnets, where Shakespeare uses a similar strategy to develop lyric material that is less familiar in our culture than the major plays, the experience is still available to modern readers. In Sonnet 129, for example, “Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” the whole body of the poem is given over to sexual nausea. The couplet starts out still on this tack, summarizing “all this,” but then turns aside with “yet” to find a radically new direction.

All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

The climactic point is not disgust but ecstasy, a “heaven” of pleasure so intense that it can effortlessly sweep away the weight of denunciation of the first twelve lines. The “in spite of” or “nevertheless” structure intensifies the affirmation. “Nevertheless” also drives home with extra force the point of Sonnet 130, “My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun.” One quatrain after another presents a clear-eyed, judicious view of the mistress as an ordinary woman, nothing special, not living up to the extravagant analogies of the sonnet convention. Again the couplet changes direction, continuing the satiric gaze at traditional love poetry with its shopworn conceits (“false compare”), but now celebrating the mistress as very special indeed. She is not only as “rare” as other sonnet heroines, but by implication even rarer than these, in that she has not been degraded by impossible analogies.

The three-quatrains-and-a-couplet format lends itself to this kind of italicizing reversal in the last two lines. Sonnet 66, however, “Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,” keeps its reversal for the very last line. The first thirteen lines enact deep disgust with a society that disdains virtue and skill while exalting worldly power and gaudy show. The basic structural unit here is not the quatrain but the single line, one following another in parallel grammatical form to create the cumulative effect of one injustice after another:

And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden honour rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority …

(lines 4-9)

The catalogue of wrongs ends with a climactic summing-up and conclusion in line 13: “Tired with all these, from these I would be gone.” Only the final line enters a telling reservation, turns the “would” from the simple wish we heard first to a conditional: “Save that to die I leave my love alone.” “My love” gains extraordinary power through placement. Just the simple two-word allusion counters the whole negative accumulation of abuses and affronts, and in effect cancels them—if not as realities, at least as grounds for despair.

World-weariness is the keynote of Sonnet 30 as well, “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought.” Since the poem is about griefs remembered and reexperienced, there is seemingly no end to its sorrow. Repetition and alliteration enact endless recapitulation: “old woes new wail … grieve at grievances foregone … woe to woe tell o'er … fore-bemoaned moan.” How can a poem so bound up with recurrence ever end? But the couplet breaks the circle, leads us quickly out of the maze. A simple appeal to the beloved friend allows poem and speaker to find their place of rest, appropriately, on the word “end”:

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored, and sorrows end.

Sonnet 84, part of the “Rival Poet” group, is especially unpredictable. The body of the sonnet offers apparently straightforward praise of the friend, who is so excellent that those who write of him need only copy what is there. Rhetorical embellishment is unnecessary, even detrimental (“making worse what nature made so clear”). But then without warning the couplet turns on the friend himself, accusing him of being “too fond on praise”: perhaps “too indiscriminate in commending tributes” to himself, but chiefly “too greedy for compliments of any kind.” Because of this “curse,” the friend encourages embellishment whether it is needed or not, and thus cheapens praises of himself.¹⁷ The battle lines between ally and enemy have apparently been clearly drawn in Sonnet 84. On the one hand are the bad poets with their too-elaborate meretricious praises, and on the other are the poet-speaker and his exemplary young friend. The couplet, however, transfers those meretricious impulses to the friend himself. As in Hamlet and Othello, the enemy is no longer out there but right inside the circle of intimacy. As an italicizing relocation of the Other, this sonnet returns us from this excursus to our main concern.

Though the changes of direction in the plays are less patterned than those appropriate to the highly formalized sonnet, they are just as deliberate. In fact, the plays themselves call attention to the strategy they employ. They make it a matter for comment and show us characters who make use of it for their own ends. In Othello, it is the Turks themselves who borrow Shakespeare's device of the false direction. First they seem to be making for Cyprus (1.3.8), but then according to a new message they are heading for Rhodes (14). The self-reflexive dimension is accentuated when Shakespeare has a Venetian senator analyze the Rhodes maneuver as sleight-of-hand: “'tis a pageant / To keep us in false gaze” (19-20). Iago, of course, takes over the trickery of the false gaze along with other aspects of the Turkish Other. In Hamlet, the hero has his own devious strategies to approach Claudius on the bias, but the one who articulates the basic theory of false leading to underline the truth is—perhaps unexpectedly—not Hamlet but Polonius. His elaborate instructions to Reynaldo on how to check up on Laertes' behavior in Paris (2.1) are themselves a kind of dramatic false lead, since we never see their result. More important, Polonius assumes that the true report he wants on his son cannot be got at by any direct question but must be evoked at one remove, by hypothesis and conjecture. True, Reynaldo is to focus on his real topic, Laertes, and not start by asking about some other young man. Still, he is ordered to be consciously deceptive in order to jolt the people he questions into a truth they would otherwise not have given up so readily.

                                                                                                                        See you now,
Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth;
And thus do we of wisdom and of reach
With windlasses and with assays of bias
By indirections find directions out.

Polonius's summary suggests his own skill in plotting, and in a different register Shakespeare's as well. Norwegians and Turks are bait; by such pageants that detain us in false gaze he refocuses that gaze with special intensity.

Notes

1. Othello 2.1.20. Here and elsewhere in this essay the plays and poems are cited from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

2. 1.1.19, 23, 26, 21.

3. Old Hamlet's frown is linked to a specific occasion, of an “angry parley,” but Harold Jenkins notes that the frown is generally appropriate for the warrior, citing Merchant 3.2.85 and Cymbeline 2.4.23: Hamlet, Arden ed. (London: Methuen, 1982), 169, 195.

4. Additional Passages, A. 2-4. These lines, like the discussion of Julius Caesar immediately following, are in Q2 but not in F.

5. Similarly, eruption, “violent outbreak,” suggests trouble within rather than without.

6. Introduction to Hamlet, Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1138.

7. 2.2.241-48; see Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare's Tragedies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 115.

8. All's Well 2.3.288-89; 2 Henry IV 4.3.323-24. Michael Neill considers the varieties of English in Henry V as on a continuum with the more foreign French, all ultimately playing out linguistically England's forcible colonization: “Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language, and the Optic of Power in Shakespeare's Histories,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 18-22.

9. Much Ado 1.3.20. Stood out means “mounted a rebellion,” but the phrase also functions in its modern sense of “was conspicuous.”

10. 2.3.304, 320; 3.3.121, 216-17.

11. Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 82-83.

12. 2.1.117; 2.3.163-64.

13. Jean E. Howard, in an excellent essay, shows how both brothers use “theatrical deceptions” that call on cultural stereotypes to manipulate others: “Renaissance Antitheatricality and the Politics of Gender and Rank in Much Ado About Nothing,” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion O'Connor (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 172-83. While her sociological argument emphasizes the contest between Don Pedro and Don John for control of an aristocratic male prerogative, the two brothers in their close parallelism can also be seen as different angles on a single problematic activity, two versions of the same thing.

14. OED, s.v., “malignant,” a.1, 2, and 3.

15. The Viking marauders of medieval history and legend are a far cry from the cheerful ski fans of the 1994 Winter Olympics, let alone the repressed good citizens chronicled by Garrison Keillor. In any case, Holinshed's account of the incursion used by Shakespeare in Macbeth assigns it to the Danes.

16. Kenneth Muir, ed., Arden Macbeth (London: Methuen, 1953), note to 1.2.13.

17. In certain sonnets reversals like these feel strained and unconvincing, as the speaker tries to accommodate the inequalities of devotion, his own great dependency and the friend's waywardness and shallowness. In Sonnet 34, for instance, “Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day,” the couplet cannot entirely blot out the effect of the preceding three quatrains of anguished question and reproach. The young man's “tears of pearl,” which are set up to “ransom all ill deeds,” seem merely decorative against the earlier blunt pain of “Though thou repent, yet have I still the loss.”