My dissertation discussed whether Shakespeare portrayed writers he knew as characters in his plays. Juliet Dusinberre, who edited As You Like It for The Arden Shakespeare, believes that he often created characters who speak with the voice of the author of the work that was Shakespeare’s source for that particular play. Her examples are Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet, Jaques in As You Like It and Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra. I show however that Shakespeare does not employ such biographical representation. My argument, however, shows what a careful and strategic artist Shakespeare was.

Poet characters in Shakespeare’s plays

First I looked at characters in Shakespeare’s plays who are poets. There are four: Gower, the chorus in Pericles; Cinna the Poet and the Poet in Julius Caesar; and the Poet in Timon of Athens. Gower was a medieval poet whose poem Confessio Amantis was the source for Pericles. Using a poet for the chorus was an out-of-date technique in Shakespeare’s day, and Shakespeare doubled that effect by having his Gower speak in ancient-sounding verse.

In Julius Caesar, there are two poets; the first is Cinna the Poet, who the Roman mob mistake for another Cinna, one of Caesar’s murderers. They tear him apart onstage. The other poet forces his way into Brutus’s tent when he is arguing with Cassius. He offers the two men three lines of terrible verse and is laughed offstage. Shakespeare seems to imply that poets have nothing to do with politics—they either look ridiculous, or worse, are victims of it.

In Timon of Athens, the Poet brings a moral poem to Timon in hope of receiving a reward. Judging by his description, in verse so obscure that it confused even Dr. Johnson, it must be very bad. But curiously, his description of its argument—a warning to Timon against flatterers—sounds suspiciously like Shakespeare’s poem, the play itself. In all three plays Shakespeare compares himself to other poets and implies that he is a superior artist.

Biographical representations of writers

Romeo and Juliet

In Shakespeare’s source, Arthur Brooke’s poem Romeus and Juliet, Brooke condemns the young lovers for their lust in pursuing a secret forbidden love. Though Shakespeare’s Friar Laurence still is a moral voice in the play, he does not condemn the teenagers. But he does help to form our response to them as seeing their love as authentic and earnest.

As You Like It

Neither Jaques nor any character analogous to him appears in the source, Thomas Lodge’ s novella Rosalynde. Because of this and also because his speeches have such depth, he is often supposed to satirize a real person, perhaps Lodge or Jonson. Lodge’s biography—traveller and libertine—is similar to Jaques’s, but their language is nothing similar. Many of Jaques’s speeches do sound Jonsonian, though their biographies have no correlation. In fact, Jaques is most like the common Elizabethan stereotypes of the satirist and the traveller.

Antony and Cleopatra

Enobarbus stems from two persons mentioned in Shakespeare’s source, Plutarch’s Life of Antonius, but a significant number of Enobarbus’s speeches are taken from Plutarch’s exposition. While this might suggest that Enobarbus is a representation of Plutarch, Shakespeare made strategic additions to his lines so that, more than any other character, Enobarbus guides the audience’s reactions to Antony and Cleopatra.

Perhaps more than anything else, by looking at these plays and these characters, it is possible to see that Shakespeare always had a specific strategy in mind for influencing his audience’s reaction, but most of all—and rather mischievously—he instructs us in his own pre-eminence among poets.

Greg Hicks as Leontes, king of Sicilia, plunges terrifying quickly into jealousy in the fear that his wife Hermione, played by Kelly Hunter, is unfaithful to him with Darrel D’Silva’s Polixenes, King of Bohemia and Leontes’ childhood friend. Any fear that perhaps the switch from trust to suspicion was too quick is quickly forgotten in Hicks’ powerful portrayal of groundless fear. Hicks carries the play, helped by strong performances from Hunter as a spotlessly loyal and stately Hermione, Brian Doherty as a wonderfully funny (and smelly) Autolycus, and Noma Dumezweni as a noble Paulina.

Perdita, played by Samantha Young, was queen over the Bohemian, Arcadian festival before her entrance was called for: she entered hanging from a tree that was lowered down onto the stage, where Tunji Kasim as a very eager young Prince Florizel found her. She was the hardest of the actors to hear and played Perdita much more as a country belle than a royal lady placed in a forest; her Perdita seemed somewhat uncomfortable in her costume change in the last act. The young couple did not command sympathy as much as the elder generation.

I couldn’t help liking Dumezweni as Paulina, even though the last scene was played much differently than I expected or wished. Paulina’s protestations were hurried, frantic, as if she was hiding something, as if she didn’t want Leontes to be reunited with Hermione, as if Hermione were captive in some sort of voodoo magic, and instead of Leontes’ conscience Paulina were a kind of worser spirit. There was a humor in her franticness that was perhaps unneeded. Nevertheless the reuniting was touching as Hermione and Leontes wordlessly embraced; touching, looking, slowly, only slowly believing they were together again, and an increase of joy when Hermione turns to see her daughter.

The scenery captured the artfulness of the play. It opened with a Christmas party, complete with crackers, laid on a long table framed by two twenty-foot tall bookcases filled with blue books. When, just before intermission, Leontes’ jealousy destroyed all that was good in his kingdom, the bookcases crashed around him, the books tumbling out onto the stage and pages fluttering around his head in a suitably painful (especially for bibliophiles in the audience) image of Leontes’ new barren life, robbed of wife, of heirs. The books became first snow drifts in the cold waste of Bohemia, then leaves in the Bohemian forest, then the barren waste of Sicilia in the last act. Books too formed the body of the enormous bear puppet that consumed Antigonus; art in this production was capable of both devastation and of healing.

I haven’t seen As You Like It yet, but I am willing to bet that The Winter’s Tale is the strongest of the plays currently in repertoire at The Courtyard Theatre. Go see it; it was delightful.

All this said, the play while good was not great. Cassius and Brutus might have been the center of the play but failed to capture my heart. In their first scene together they stood and declaimed like Roman orators, but not like modern actors. Brutus’ speech “It must be by his death”, likewise, was delivered standing still, directly addressing the audience. There was no evidence of the inner turmoil the words betray, the fatal private musings of a rational man who has already made up his mind but almost shirks from acknowledging it. His pause after the first line was barely present; its effect was not allowed to fall upon the audience.

When Portia enters soon after, a screaming, emotional marital spat ensued. I had to wonder where was Portia’s stoicism? She cried, she screamed, and Brutus, who should have been quiet, his mind still unsure of his decision, not listening to his wife, nearly hit her.

Antony was stronger, but he was more the worn general of Antony and Cleopatra than the youthful carouser of Julius Caesar. He and Brutus might well have changed roles, as might have Portia and Calphurnia. Noma Dumezweni as Calphurnia was excellent, as she was in the role of Paulina in The Winter’s Tale; so too was Greg Hicks as Julius Caesar who was Leontes, who managed to show most clearly why the conspirators were driven to their fateful decision while being surprisingly funny. The spirit of Caesar in the second half was wonderfully spooky; and one of the nicest details in the play came when Caesar’s spirit killed Brutus even as Strato mimed that Brutus had run upon his sword.

I was not fond of the projection screen above the stage, which was put to good effect in projecting images for the weather but sometimes ruined the aura with what seemed like poor rendering of images but perhaps was just a strange conception. It drew attention away from the acting, and perhaps was a unflattering foil. But the rotating, semi-transparent screens that formed backdrop and doors for entrances and exits were breathtaking the first time they spun around. Actors could stand between to blend in with the projected crowd scenes, and a quick spin could change the scene and the tone quite effectively.

I suppose I ought not to have expected after the opening Romulus and Remus scene to see the sort of titan-like Romans I hear speaking when I read the play to myself. I was dissatisfied that Brutus and Cassius were not the monumental characters of Roman history. This was not a play that plugged in to traditional conceptions of what is Rome. It was bloody, it was dirty, quite the dirtiest Julius Caesar you are likely to see, almost as if the director Lucy Bailey (who directed a notably bloody Titus in recent years for the Globe) was trying to make Julius more like Shakespeare’s early revenge tragedy. It did not serve the lyricism of the play well, but nevertheless it is worth seeing.