Al Drake’s Revised Introduction to Shakespeare: Genre, Metaphor, etc.
Introduction to “Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays” for Fall 2026
Course M/O and Approach to the Plays
We’ll watch brief film clips and discuss the plays as drama and in terms of the insights they offer about life more broadly. Questions and comments are always welcome, but of course we should keep them relevant to the play or issue at hand. Please remember to raise your hand.
I treat Shakespeare’s work as a text as much as a visual production. We hear a Shakespeare drama as much as we see it.
My Shakespeare web at https://ajdrake.com/shakespeare offers journal-article-length commentaries as well as questions, guides, hyperlinks to other resources, and a dedicated OLLI page where (among other items) you can find links to our course syllabus in WordPress and PDF formats.
Brief Introduction to Shakespeare’s Genres: History, Comedy, Tragedy, and Romance
I like to concentrate partly on how Shakespeare deals with the frames of experience we call “genre.” Aside from the small number of sonnets we’ll talk about next week, we will go on to cover one play from each of Shakespeare’s subgenres: history (3 Henry VI), comedy (Much Ado About Nothing), tragedy (Coriolanus), and romance (Cymbeline).
History
With regard to the history plays, while Shakespeare had access to the major English chroniclers—Edward Hall, John Stowe, Polydore Vergil (an Italian writer) and especially Raphael Holinshed, those chronicles themselves favor Elizabeth’s Tudor line, and Shakespeare himself semifictionalizes English history to adapt it to his imperatives as a dramatist.
In one of his historical texts, Winston Churchill writes that if some things didn’t happen exactly as he says, they should have. Shakespeare’s attitude doesn’t appear to differ much—I don’t suppose he was overly concerned with whether, say, King Richard III was really such a monster as the Tudor-based historians insisted he was, or whether some of the other great figures in English history and politics were as he depicted them. He was after a good story and compelling characters, not absolute historical truth. If we were to demand that everyone must know their national history with 100% accuracy from lengthy non-fiction works, the compliance rate would most likely be pretty disappointing.
No doubt Shakespeare wrote his history plays for a variety of reasons. One would be to deepen the English people’s love of their country and help them remember the greatest events in English history. Doesn’t a film like Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln or a musical like Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton keep America’s early history alive for us latecomers? Sure it does, at least in its own imaginative way.
Also part of the program—even though we hardly think of Shakespeare as a didactic “schoolmaster” artist any more than we consider him a professional historian—was a willingness to offer representations of English history and its characters (good and bad) that could instill moral lessons in the public. The great Renaissance courtier and critic Sir Philip Sidney said that literary artists provide us with “speaking pictures” of virtue and vice, making us love the former and hate the latter. I think Shakespeare would agree.
I say this even though the great eighteenth-century moralist critic Samuel Johnson, whom I admire for his steady common sense and wisdom, lamented that Shakespeare’s most wicked characters were sometimes too charismatic, and that his fondness for obscene quibbles interfered with his wonderful gifts as a storyteller. Shakespeare wasn’t writing for eighteenth-century moralists; he was putting on plays for a somewhat “wilder” audience.
There was also the imperative to turn English history into something memorable and exciting—again as Philip Sidney points out (adapting a thought from the Roman critic and poet Horace), art doesn’t just preach at us, it teaches us by delighting us. Shakespeare subjects the events and characters of history to the fires of art: it has to be stirring, compelling, at times breathtaking or shocking, and at other times beautiful and endearing.
While there is plenty of royalty in Shakespeare’s history plays, there is also room for rascals like the rebel Jack Cade and the corrupt knight Jack Falstaff and his pals as well as for the poor, uneducated English people who fought in the wars stirred up by the “great” men and women of the kingdom. Shakespeare understood that poor folks suffered most from the age’s brutish, terrifying conflagrations. While some people made money from wars that stemmed mostly from greed, ambition, and egotism, most participants didn’t.
Comedy
In comedy, the world around us, or our “society,” has a lot to do with how things turn out for us. Life may not convert all our woe into “hey nonny, nonny” like the song in Much Ado About Nothing says, but it gives us a decent ride. There’s an Italian saying that runs la vita è bella, and at least in comedy, life is beautiful. If you’re not too pretentious, massively greedy, or viciously selfish in your dealings with others; if you’re generous, genial, and open to the experiences life brings, there’s a place for you in the circle of happiness.
Comedy doesn’t take individuals too seriously. It doesn’t insist on strong individuation at the expense of the pleasure principle because in comedy, pleasure is the main purpose of life. Have you ever noticed how many mistaken identities, mix-ups, and silly obstacles there are in comedy? Such things drive the genre. While we don’t expect society (in the sense of a body of laws, rules, customs, and broad imperatives) to step in and directly resolve a given conflict, the things that have been blocking happiness in comic plays are possible, and often even easy, to resolve. The characters don’t need to be brilliant, incredibly strong, or amazingly accomplished or noble to end up unconflicted and happy.
In comedy, the disposition of the world, and time itself, is friendly. Because of this, many people can live happily, even if not “ever after.” Should we say that some higher power is making things better because unassisted, we would never get things right? Say, a species of divine grace in the form of the pansy-flower’s juice, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or the appearance of a god, like Hymen in As You Like It? I don’t know. Maybe sometimes we come up with our own social fix, and sometimes the gods do us a solid.
Northrop Frye wrote that the way comedy ends involves a “myth [i.e. story] of deliverance”—that is, comic resolution entails reaching a state of “expanded energy and freedom” for the most successful characters in a given comedy. I like that reading, though as I’ve mentioned, I don’t know that we need refer to any deep state of enlightenment or interiority on the characters’ part to get us there. More basic human capacities and endowments seem to do the trick.
Tragedy
As for tragedy, it works from a very different perspective, one that refuses to accommodate even our most reasonable hopes for a stable, meaningful life. Moreover, we want to lay the blame where, or with whom, it belongs so we don’t have to affirm an unappealing principle rigidly opposed to comedy, like, say, la vita è brutta, “life is ugly.”
We can’t always blame Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists, though: their ethical quality ranges from very flawed individuals to noble characters who get pulled down by unfortunate circumstances. Macbeth and Lear, for example, are responsible for their own downfalls, but can we really say that about Romeo and Juliet’s tragic end? Or Hamlet’s? Shakespeare clearly didn’t put any stock in a unified concept of tragedy. Although in some respects his tragedies connect with Classical tragedy, he is by no means an Aristotelian.
Still, we can say that Shakespeare is interested in a number of key things in his tragedies. Here is a non-exhaustive list:
1. The first thing is the necessity, as Rhodri Lewis tells us in Shakespeare’s Tragic Art (2024), of stripping away life’s guarantees, its illusions of sanity and security, even when that renders life unbearably bleak, as in King Lear. In tragedy, whether we have precipitated a crisis through our own mistakes, or circumstances beyond our control have brought us the unsettling news that—as Matthew Arnold says in “Dover Beach,” the world “Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain”—there’s a strong drive towards understanding. Understanding must be gained at all costs, even at the price of what we hold most dear. That isn’t true in comedy.
2. Placing understanding aside, we can say that in tragedy, there is also an imperative to bear witness to human suffering, whatever its cause. There is dignity in that imperative—it lays a demand of strength upon us. I find this emphasis in Shakespeare wonderfully Classical in spirit—which is also true of the first thing I mentioned, by the way (the stripping away of illusions until only harsh truth remains). It’s fun to think of Shakespeare as a “poet of nature” and to insist pointedly that he never went to Oxbridge, but we should realize, too, that a little bit of Classical learning (“small Latin and less Greek,” as Ben Jonson put it), especially in the mind of a person of Shakespeare’s capacity, goes a long way.
3. A number of Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists show signs of a robust interiority, a depth of character and a complexity of consciousness that isn’t required in comedy or the romance plays: Hamlet is obviously the prime example, but King Lear and Macbeth meet this criterion, too, and we could defend the inclusion of others. It is in this regard that Harold Bloom says Shakespeare was for at least part of his career engaged in a project of “inventing the human”—or rather he worked hard to learn how to represent the workings of emotion, intellect, and consciousness more generally.
4. There’s an interest in Shakespeare on how social tragedy happens, too. He seems determined to show us what happens when a society no longer respects the values that once animated it. There are times when “things fall apart,” as Yeats says, and “the center cannot hold.” Shakespearean tragedy of this sort posits that once that happens, it is very hard to put a society back together and live meaningfully and with sufficient regard for others. Making things right would involve more than a stiff penalty for one or a few persons.
King Lear is probably the best example of Shakespeare’s interest in the social dimension of tragedy. In some of his other tragedies (and not only the tragedies), he at least acknowledges the harm done to a society by its worst transgressors and villains. Who can forget Act 4, Scene 2 of Macbeth, in which a group of the murderous, usurping king’s henchmen slaughter his opponent Macduff’s entire family?
Romance
The romance playsmight be called “tragicomedies” since they offer a mixture of the comic mode and sensibility with the tragic. Even so, romance—a term that Shakespeare and his contemporaries would not have used in connection with any of his plays—is not just a jumble of comic and tragic moments. It’s more accurate to say that the five Shakespeare plays we call “romances” (Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and The Two Noble Kinsmen) are grounded in a blending of comic and tragic assumptions and conventions.
Perhaps it’s easiest to sum up romance this way: by the final act, some degree of bittersweetness will exist in the main characters’ consciousness because their actions will have brought real, painful consequences. The romance world isn’t as accommodating as the fully comic one is: characters can’t take such a carefree or even reckless attitude as they can in comedy, at least without paying for it in some way that is bound to make us all think twice.
Consider The Winter’s Tale. In a fully tragic universe, King Leontes’ insane jealously would flat-out kill his innocent wife Hermione. That loss and the consequent guilt of it would destroy the foolish king of Sicilia. In a comic world, by contrast, some way would emerge to get Leontes and Hermione out of trouble without permanent damage or suffering. What Shakespeare’s romance play gives us is neither of these outcomes: Hermione doesn’t die, but she and Leontes are apart for many years. Their dear son Mamilius sickens and dies, and they miss out on their lovely daughter Perdita’s childhood.
The universe demands a good deal of humility from Leontes, and only then does it grant him the feeling of wonder that flows from seeing his beloved, wronged, older wife appear to turn from a statue back into a living, breathing human being. Were he not granted this gift, he would be a fully tragic figure. As it stands, our romance protagonist is filled with gratitude and astonishment at the reattainment of what would have been his to enjoy all along, but for his self-inflicted, soul-warping fit of jealousy.
In Act 5, Scene 4 of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Friar Francis, by way of conditioning the public’s response to Hero’s seemingly miraculous return to life, says elegantly, “let wonder seem familiar.” That’s a good way to encapsulate what happens at the conclusion of a romance play: “fallen” human beings experience as little short of miraculous the recovery (even partial recovery, in some cases) of something precious that, in their foolishness or arrogance, they had thrown away.
Humility and self-restraint are required of The Tempest’s Prospero before he is granted what he desires, too: the return of his duchy of Milan and the successful entry of his daughter Miranda into the world beyond the enchanted island of their exile. In part, the cost of Prospero’s early selfishness and inattention to his duties as a ruler entails the alienation of what we may presume should have been a much friendlier disposition of time. When Prospero finally gets back what was his to begin with, he has already come to understand that death isn’t far off. “Every third thought,” he confesses in Act 5, Scene 1, “shall be my grave.”
The comments above are hardly meant to be exhaustive. Literary texts are complex, even messy, historical, cultural, and authorial objects, so it’s best to take them as you find them.
Shakespeare’s Language and Verse
With regard to Shakespeare’s dramatic verse, the following things are useful:
1. It’s blank verse, mostly unrhymed. This is simple iambic pentameter, dee-DUM dee-DUM dee-DUM dee-DUM dee-DUM with some substitutions, mainly DUM-dee, the trochee, and dee-dee-DUM, the anapest. (The “dee” is unaccented or unstressed, and the DUM is accented or stressed.) There are also feminine endings and feminine rhymes, which occur when a line ends with an extra unaccented syllable. (“A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted.”)
Iambic pentameter involves five beats or stressed syllables. Listen to conversations, and you’ll hear iambic rhythms: “Today I gave away a pair of jeans. / They never really fit me anyway.”
2. Shakespeare knits the words in his lines together with antithesis. I’ll read the opening of Richard III so you can see how the language is made memorable in part by antithesis: “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son (son/sun) of York, / And all the clouds that loured upon our house / In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.” This is strong blank verse. One can speak it boldly without losing subtlety. Winter/summer (and sun as a homonymic pun); clouds high up in the sky/ocean deep below the earth.
3. Shakespeare writes to bring out the drama in a scene. Hamlet’s advice to the traveling actors who visit him at Elsinore Castle is instructive. In Hamlet 3.2.17ff, he tells them “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature.” So the actors shouldn’t ham it up. Shakespeare would doubtless tell us that Hamlet’s injunction to suit “the word to the action” should be directed equally to the playwright: know the action, and craft your lines so that they clarify and enhance the action, the situation, the circumstances. Shakespeare himself honors this advice, even if, to modern sensibilities, his language sometimes sounds rather ornate.
4. Even as Shakespeare suits characters’ words to the action or the circumstances, he combines this achievement with an astonishing facility in using figurative language, metaphor above all. Here’s a good definition I’ve seen: “Metaphor clarifies or deepens the meaning of a first thing by ascribing to it or transferring over to it the qualities of a second, unrelated thing.”
The thing to be clarified or better understood is called the tenor, while the “second, unrelated” thing is the vehicle. The latter, the vehicle, is like a delivery van loaded with deeper insight into something important. So when in his “Sonnet VII,” John Milton writes, “How soon hath Time the suttle theef of youth, / Stoln on his wing my three and twentieth year!” he is using “theef/thief” as the vehicle that will help us better understand the nature of the tenor, “Time.”
Let’s use as our example for both #3 and #4 above one of the best dialogues in all of Shakespeare—a passage in which the speaker’s words movingly suit his circumstances and the play’s immediate action, and in the course of accomplishing these things deploy several excellent metaphors.
In Act 2, Scene 4 of King Lear, the king’s wicked daughters Regan and Goneril have been engaged in a savage reverse bidding match to strip him of his hundred companion knights, with Goneril asking him why he needs 25, 10, or even five such men, and Regan capping things off with “What need one?” This is too much for Lear, who flies into a rage and speaks the following words:
O, reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous:
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need,—
You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age; wretched in both!
If it be you that stirs these daughters’ hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger,
And let not women’s weapons, water-drops,
Stain my man’s cheeks! No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall,—I will do such things,—
What they are yet, I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think I’ll weep;
No, I’ll not weep:— [Storm and tempest.]
I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
Or ere I’ll weep.—O fool, I shall go mad!
(public domain text)
I used the term “rage” above, but that doesn’t capture the full meaning of the old king’s performance, does it? He starts off with a fatherly observation that ought to show his daughters how wrong they are to invoke a principle like “necessity” in the service of a cruel cause. Regan is scantily clad in cold weather, and he asks pointedly what her spicy fashion choice today had to do with nature, at least in the sense she would give that term. The skimpy outfit reminds us that people, unlike other creatures, mostly live by excess, artifice, and ego, not “nature” in the sense of bare, stark necessity.
With respect to human beings, then, it is this generous excess that we should refer to as natural—not those things about our behavior that link us to bears, lions, cobras, and sharks. The metaphoric quality of this first part of Lear’s speech runs so deep that we almost forget to call it that. Shakespeare is using a reference to fine clothing as a metaphor to “figure forth” the better element of human nature, which is our propensity for artifice, which can be defined broadly to include the love of beauty, luxury, good manners, and, best of all, generosity.
No doubt Regan doesn’t see any of the clothes she wears in this metaphorical, spiritual light; but then, as readers and viewers of King Lear will surely know, both Regan and Goneril, like the other bad characters in the play (mainly Edmund and Cornwall), are vulgar literalists. They are illiterate when it comes to their own proper nature.
But once Lear has made this excellent observation, he quickly loses patience, and with it he loses control over his rhetoric. He calls upon the gods to fill him with righteous anger, and begins—so impotently that it’s hard to suppress a laugh—to threaten these “unnatural hags” his daughters. Then, to judge from his words, he notices that those same “hags” are looking at him with eye-rolling exasperation. (Perhaps they’ve been treated to this kind of performance before?) Lear swears he won’t burst into tears, and then does so (any good actor would play it that way). He does it pitifully enough so that by the end of his outburst, he seems like a confused, frightened, out-of-control child.
More to the point, Lear’s sputtering diatribe suggests that Shakespeare is familiar with the way an aged person with incipient dementia speaks and behaves. The king is right about his two evil daughters, but his disordered manner and speech underscore his extreme frailty and vulnerability, and reinforces our understanding that it’s way too late to fix this situation. He has surrendered control; he won’t get it back, and he couldn’t wield it competently if he did.
We have already given some thought to one excellent metaphor in the above passage, but there are of course others. One is implied in the phrase “women’s weapons, water-drops,” but the second stands out as particularly brilliant. Just as Lear finishes his tirade, he utters the line, “this heart / Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws / Or ere I’ll weep.”
“Flaws” here means something like “shattered pieces of glass,” so the old king, who has rejected the shedding of tears as an effeminate weakness (pardon the term), is picturing his heart as a brittle, hard vessel that will fracture into tiny pieces under the stress his daughters have caused him. He will break before he melts into water, he is telling us.
Well, it’s obvious that Lear does fall to weeping. He, too, is subject to the wet, wild, thunderous storms figured by the tempestuous skies above him, which obviously function as yet another powerful metaphor, this time for the emotion and mental distress shaking Lear’s being to the core. By his words and gestures, Lear seems to be suggesting, “I’ll handle this my way, like a man,” but as Shakespeare’s metaphors of sky and glass bring home to us, the aged king’s brittle state and vulnerability could scarcely be more extreme.
It’s Lear’s refusalto go the way of the storm, to open himself to the risks and consequences of being human, that has been the greater part of his troubles up to the present. That’s why Shakespeare makes the wicked Regan and Cornwall order Gloucester, “Shut up your doors.” Lear is to be sent out into the storm, to suffer and feel what he must, even if it drives him mad.
All good poets work excellently with figurative language—for them, it isn’t merely decoration or teacherly explanation, but a fundamental way of perceiving and expressing reality. Still, Shakespeare takes figuration to another level. See also shakespeare-online’s list of metaphors. Before we leave the issue of metaphor, it’s worth suggesting that even similes (as in, “this is like that”) often take on the power of metaphor in Shakespeare. When in King Lear Act 4, Scene 1 the despairing Gloucester observes, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, / They kill us for their sport. It would be a mistake to allow the word “As” here to keep us from registering the full significance of this utterance and put it down only for a fanciful statement.
Easy Stuff about the Language. Pronouns and verb conjugations. Thou/thee/thy/thine. Est/eth in third-person singular. Odd verbs: have (hast, hath), be (art), do (doth, dost), say (saiest or sayest, saieth or sayeth). Syntax inversions (“He to England shall along with us”), and anthimeria (“What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time?”), etch…. Visit Shakespeare Resource Center’s page: https://www.bardweb.net/content/grammar/grammar.html.
Adjusting our Expectations. We moderns tend to be utility-minded or instrumentalist when it comes to language. Shakespeare’s audiences made more room, I think, for imaginative and figurative language. But we can appreciate Shakespeare’s words, even 400+ years on.
The difficulty is often due to the author’s command of the language of flowers, folklore, heraldry, hawking, law, early modern medicine, tradesman’s lingo, and so forth. But most of all, it’s probably due to the quality that most distinguishes poetry from prose: compression. Poetry is very compressed language: it packs a lot of meaning into few words. That makes it harder to understand than prose, so we shouldn’t expect transparency from poetry—it will often challenge our understanding, startle us out of stale truisms, and so forth.
Prose does more work for us, while poetry expects more work from us. I think the payoff is worth the effort. I’m not sure who said that poetry is where language goes to be most fully itself—meaning something like “least reducible to a tool that we use to get things done.”
Look over your Shakespeare edition’s notes. You can supplement them with guides such as Ben and David Crystal’s book Shakespeare’s Words, or older lexica such as the Shakespeare Glossary by OED editor Charles Talbut Onions, which you can find online at Tufts University’s Perseus Project. There’s also Alexander Schmidt’s Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary, and as with Onions’ book, you can find it both online and in print. The Links page of my website at www.ajdrake.com/shakespeare connects to many such resources.
The Nettlesome Authorship Question
See James Shapiro’s 2011 book Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? He investigates not so much the alternative-authorship theory itself as whysuch a theory gained traction around 200 years after Shakespeare’s death. There has long been some disappointment regarding the evidence that has come to light about Shakespeare as a man—what little there is pretty much suggests a businessman intent upon making a good living, like his father John Shakespeare before him. Did the ordinary-seeming Mr. William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon actually create all those awesome plays? Wasn’t he too busy lending money, collecting rents, suing people over debts, and hoarding malt to do anything “geniusy” like that?
As time went by, an epistemological shift around the beginning of the nineteenth century led critics and readers to start positing deep connections between Shakespeare’s personal life and the characters and actions in his plays. Both “bardolatry” (near-deification of Shakespeare) and, more generally, biographical literary criticism came into vogue by the early-to-mid nineteenth century. Shapiro explains that these developments helped to generate and spread the so-called authorship question.
How did bardolatry or hero-worship of Shakespeare put the authorship of the plays in question? Well, when you turn an author into a god, some people will insist on saying, “God is dead.” Or more prosaically, “This guy doesn’t look or behave the way we think a towering genius should, so he can’t be Shakespeare.” Shapiro points out that those who came to espouse what many of us would today call conspiracy theories about Shakespeare’s relationship (or non-relationship) to the plays now have a ready method for promoting their view: the post-romantic expressive habit of turning the play-texts into a rich field for connections to something other than the plays’ immediate situations and characters.
Just as one could use biographical, expressive criticism to promote Shakespeare as a transcendent genius, one could “unlock” all sorts of references to, say, external, real-life political events, social conditions, and so forth—coded messages—that might be interpreted as suggesting Shakespeare the man from Stratford did not, in fact, write the plays we have been claiming he did.
My view? We live in an age wherein conspiracy-slinging is a primary mode of thinking, so it isn’t surprising that Shakespeare is in the crosshairs of authorship conspiracies. I think it’s fair to point out that no actual evidence has ever been adduced to prove that the “Stratford Man” did not write the plays we call “the works of Shakespeare.” Stratford-Dude was in fact a man of the theater, who owned part of the Globe and Blackfriars theaters, led the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and The King’s Men, and was manifestly much respected and at times envied by his contemporaries. Ben Jonson was his friend and wrote a memorial poem for the 1623 First Folio.
Sure, I wish Shakespeare had written some critical treatises and taken pains to supervise a manuscript-based edition of his plays, but those things are not strictly necessary to establish authorship, and most artists in Shakespeare’s day didn’t do them either.
Document Timestamp: 9/10/2026 5:31 PM