The Works Alexander Brown Bell

LECTURE - SHAKESPEARES METHOD OF WRITING HIS PLAYS

Lectures about Shakespeares literature appears to  have been a popular topic at this time. As a brief survey of the newspaper archives shows that there were several lectures and lecturers presenting along this general theme then, clearly with a similar remit of bringing Shakespeare and what was considered “literature of a high order “ to the wider working population of Britain.

He notes that this was First delivered to the local branch of the English Association at the Mechanics Institute, Bradford, Approximate date, February, 1920. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to locate any entries in the British Newspaper Archives relating to ABB giving that particular presentation of this lecture. Though there is an entry in the “Todays Appointments” column of the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer - Wednesday 22 November 1922 - that lists this particular lecture as to be given at the Bradford branch of the English Society at the Commercial College. So he clearly presented this on several occasions.

Editors Notes:

The English Association was founded in 1906 by a group teachers and scholars to develop English studies in schools and advanced studies in further education. The appreciation and study of Shakespeares literature was a common feature in the founders of the Associations research interests. The founders included the English Literature Scholars: F.S. Boas, A.C. Bradley and Sir Israel Gollancz.

Shakespeare method of Writing His Plays

Like most attempts to condense a big theme into a few words, the title of this lecture is somewhat misleading. Shakespeare is our greatest English poet, perhaps the greatest the world has ever seen; and for any man--especially a man who makes no pretension to Shakespearean scholarship--to pretend to fathom the depths of Shakespeare's mind, and explain how his imagination functioned, would be a colossal piece of impudence which you would be quick to detect and condemn. I hasten, therefore, to assure you that I do not propose to attempt such an impossible feat. 

But there are two aspects of an artist's creative work. If you have ever thought upon the subject, you will realise that there is a great element of mystery in the act of original writing. Even so simple a matter as writing a letter to a friend brings you up against it. And when you consider what I may call creative composition, the mystery becomes still greater. For forty years I have been trying to earn my daily bread by means of my pen; and I can honestly say that the process by which I do it is more mysterious to me now than when I began. Day by day I sit down at the appointed time with a blank pad in front of me, and in due course the prescribed number of pages are filled and handed to the printer; but whence it comes I cannot tell you. if you ask me to try, I must fall back on figurative language, and say that there seems to exist somewhere a vast reservoir of ideas with which, somehow, your mind is able to get into contact, and that from its inexhaustible resources you are able, with greater or less ease, to draw what you want. 

Note:--This is no mere fancy. Various witnesses could be called in support, including some of the greatest writers. I venture to quote three, two of which were unknown to me when I wrote the sentences given above.-- 

 “The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; the power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure”. Shelley, “Defence of Poetry". 

"It [poetry] jutters somewhat above a mortal mouth.”--Ben Johnson. 

‘After our subtlest analysis of the mental process, we must still say that our highest thoughts and our best deeds are all given to us.-- George Eliot, 

If you try to stand aside and watch your mind at work--I doubt whether you can do so deliberately: it is only now and then, and accidentally, as it were, that you catch a fleeting glimpse of it--the mystery only deepens until you are stricken with a kind of awe. Your mind seems to be a complete blank, Then suddenly an idea presents itself Whence does it come? How does it clothe itself in words? How is it that the form and actual cadence of a sentence sometimes shape themselves in your mind before the words come that are to occupy and fill out the body thus born in advance for them? And that is not an automatic, foolproof process, by any means, for sometimes the words, when they do come, do not fit; and you have to sit still, often for quite a long time, shuffling and discarding phrases until the right one presents itself. 

While the work of original composition Has its mystical side, however, it also has its practical side, which one learns from experience, and to some extent can be taught; and, since newspaper proprietors are not pure philanthropists, and I have earned my bread and butter by working for them for over forty years, I think I can claim without undue egotism that I know something about the job. Now Shakespeare, though he was one of the greatest geniuses that ever lived, was a man of like passions with ourselves. His mind differed from ours, not in kind, but in degree. He lived more intensely than we do, but he lived in the same world. There are certain ways in which the mind works when it is engaged in creative writing which are common, more or less, to all who essay such a task with any success; and it is with these that I am concerned tonight. I want, if i can, to try to act the part of the friend who, after you have witnessed a particularly clever conjuring trick, takes you aside and whispers to you how it is done. 

Now, although it is supposed to be difficult in these days to find anybody who has not attempted to write either a novel or a play, or both, I cannot flatter myself that I am speaking tonight to an audience composed entirely of playwrights and novelists. To those of you who are, what I have to say may prove largely a recapitulation of the common places of your own experience, To those of you who are not, I may seem to be wandering in a strange and unknown realm of thought where it is difficult to follow me. Yet I can assure you that the effort is worth making; for you will find your enjoyment of a play is doubled, and more than doubled, if you are able to appreciate the technique of its construction. So I propose tonight to take one of Shakespeare's plays, lay it on the dissecting table for you, show you something of its anatomy, and, if I can, send you back to him with a warmer love for his writings and a deeper appreciation of his genius, I have chosen "King Lear" for the autopsy; because it is peculiarity suitable for such a purpose; but any one of his maturer plays would have served, and 1 shall not hesitate to draw illustrations from them if these are likely to prove useful. 

Now suppose for a moment that, instead of being a slightly bored audience listening to a lecture by a metaphysical Scotsman, you were the company of the Globe or Blackfriars theatre in Queen Elizabeth's time, and that you are all agreed that it is time you put on a new play. Shakespeare is among you, and the manager of the company turns to him and tells him he must write one, and be quick about it. What, in such circumstances, is the first thing Shakespeare must do? 

Obviously, he would have to look out for an idea. A play must have a subject. It may be an historical subject, like King John, or an imaginary subject like the Love-making of Falstaff; it may even be something purely parochial, such as a quarrel about the village pump. But, before a dramatist can begin to write a play, he must have some notion in his mind what it is to be about. Novel writing and play-writing are the same in this respect. The first thing the author wants is some germ of thought out of which his novel or play can grow, some idea that will serve him as a jumping-off place. 

Now this process, which we may call the Search for the idea, is something of a paradox; for the more intense the search is the less likely it is to be successful. The familiar law is reversed here, it is a case of :"Seek not, and ye shall find," Hard work comes afterwards; but here we still touch the mystical side of the process of composition, and a wise passivity is called for. the Idea just “comes".

 You may be thinking of something entirely different when suddenly it flashes across your mind; or you may be turning over a rubbish-heap of memories when one of them jumps up before you, alive, and plastic to your purpose. A paragraph in a newspaper, or some incident across which you accidentally stumble, may give you what you want. Some quaint or comical character you have met may serve your turn. I know one case in which a man woke up one morning after a remarkably vivid dream. He could only remember one tiny fragment of it; but that fragment struck him as containing the germ of a good story. Somehow or other, the germ would not fructify. Time after time, the fragment of his dream would emerge into consciousness, and he would turn it over in his mind trying to see how he could turn it into a story; but it was no good. Then, many years afterwards, as he was walking along a quiet road on the outskirts of a country town, the idea suddenly cropped up again in his mind, But this time it was no longer a dead memory. In a flash, the theme which he had so often turned to in despair unfolded itself. The whole thing was there. In a modest way, it was like Minerva springing fully armed from the head of Jupiter; and when he got home all he had to do was to sit down and write it as fast as he could push along his pen. The sub-conscious mind, or, if you prefer it, the subliminal self, is a strange thing, and works in a mysterious way.

Whatever the idea is, once you have got it, it begins to germinate in your mind, just like a seed in the earth; and the plot of your play or story develops. Logically, the broad outline of the plot comes first, then its detailed structure, and finally the elaboration of the characters. Those of you who have studied Greek will recognise that I am touching on the verge of a very old controversy here-whether it is the characters who determine the plot, or the plot that determines the characters. No absolute rule can be laid down. Iu some authors, such as George Meredith, for instance, it is fairly obvious that character comes first, in others, such as Wilkie Collins, plot seems to be the main considerstion. For purposes of analysis, I have taken the three things, Idea, Plot and Character, in what I conceive to be their logical order; but, in practice, we have to remember that their actions and re-actions are very close and intricate, and you cannot always separate them in point of time. 

Shakespeare did not trouble much hunting round in search of ideas, in many cases they seem to have been given him by the management of the theatre: he was handed an old play, and asked to furbish it up a be bit so as to make it look like new. When his reputation was established, he had more freedom of choice; but even then he usually took some story from an earlier writer, and remoulded, it to his purpose. Literary ethics were not so exacting in those days as they are now; and, in any case, we can readily forgive Shakespeare his plagiarisms in view of the use he made of what he stole. As an old teacher of mine used to say, Shakespeare was the greatest and grandest literary thief the world has ever seen. 

So far as "King Lear" is concerned, we know that Shakespeare got the Idea and the outline of the Plot ready made,as it were. He took them either from Hollinshed's "Chronicle" or from an existing play callded,"The frue Chromicle History of King Leir and his Three daughters", printed in 1605 by Simon Stafford. The critics rather scoff at that play; but the impression it left on my mind when I read it some years ago was that there was a good deal of vigour in it, and that , when acted, it would be rather an effective stage piece. As literature, I admit, it is quite hopeless, But whatever Shakespeare touched he turned to gold; and, whether he founded his tragedy on that older play, or on the bald narrative of Leir the son of Baldud as set forth in Hollinshed's “Chronicle",the alchemy by means of which he transformed what he stole into the masterpiece we are considering tonight lies to a large extent beyond our ken. We can only see something of the means he used to convey to the public eye the magical transmutation that has taken place in his own mind.

Note first that in neither of the two possible sources of his play is there a hint of tragic passion, Listen to the old chronicler:

-- but the greatest griefe that Leir toke, was to see the unkindnesse of his daughters, which seemed to thinke that all was too much which their father hadde, the same being never so little: in so much, that going from ye one to ye other, he was brought to that miserie, that unneth (hardly) would they allow him one servant to waite upon him. In the end such was the unkindnesse, or (as i may say) the onnaturalnesse which hefound in his two daughters, not withstanding their faire and pleasante wordes uttered in time past, that, being constrayned of necessitie, he fled ye land, and sailed [into Gallia, there to seke some comfort of his yongest daughter, Cordeilla, whom beforetime he hated.

This daughter and her husband champion his cause, invade Britain, discomfit the two wicked sisters and their husbands, with the result, as Hollinshed puts it, that:-- 

Then was Leir restored to his kingdome, which he ruled after this by the space of two years, and then died, fortie years after he first began to raigne. His bodie was buried at Leycester ina vault under ye channel of ye River of Sore beneath ye towne. 

"The true Chronicle History" also has a happy ending; but, in both cases, the story, as you can see, is essentially on the middle levels of feeling. There was even a touch of middle-class pride in the funeral pomp in that detail about Leir's burial in a vault beneath the river. If Shakespeare had tried to put the passion of his Lear into the mouth of a tame, commonplace person like the Leir of the Chronicle or the old play, the story would have broken down. You might as well try to domicile leviathan in a duck-pond.

Shakespeare was not content with a single plot. His custom was to take two or even three, and link them up more or less closely with the main one. In the "Merchant of Venice", for instance, we have four plots:--the story of Antonio and Shylock, the story of Portia and the caskets, the story of Lorenzo and Jessica, and the story of Verissa and her ring, In the case of Ring Lear, we have two plots. 

There is a story of a blind king in Sir Phillip Sydney's “Arcadia" which, it is supposed, gave Shakespeare the idea for his second plot. Anyhow, in the play as we have it, over against the story of Lear and his unnatural daughters, Shakespeare has set the story of Gloucester and his unnatural son. 

We have now got before us the skeleton, or framework, of the play; and the next question we have to consider is how Shakespeare contrived to make that dull piece of stage carpentry a living work of art. 

The first thing he did was to evolve characters that would fit in to the story. Look right through Shakespeare's plays, and you will find that the characters grow naturally out of the plot. 

In fact, the problem before the creative artist here is almost a scientific one, and may be summed up in the formula:-- Given such and such actions, from what sort of man, or woman, would those actions be likely to proceed? “King Lear" was written in what is known as Shakespeare's Dark Period. Something had happened which had hurt him deeply, and made him take a bitter and tragic view of life. In that mood, he determined to give "King Lear” a sad instead of a happy ending. It followed naturally that, if his principal character was to do what Shakespeare proposed to make him do, he must be a man whose passion at times over-clouds his reason, and a foolish manwho cannot see through outward professions to the real nature of the person making them. Gloster again, if he is to be lifelike in time part assigned to him, need not be so passionate, but must be highly credulous. Edmund must be a villain, of course; but he must be presentable in person and plausible of tongue if he is to play the part he is meant to pray in the tragedy. And so, if it were worth while, we might go through the whole list of dramatis personae, and find the same adaptation of character to the action necessitated by the plot. 

Now please do not misunderstand me here. I do not mean to say that Shakespeare, or any other creative artist for that matter, deliberately sat down and evolved his characters in the way I have just shown, working them out with mathematical exactness as if they were a sum in proportion or a mixed quadratic. The actual process is, for the most part, instinctive and unconscious. What I have shown you is mechanism, not life; and yet it is the mechanics of life. Just so a surgeon in a dissecting-room will take a leg to pieces, show you muscle, bone, and sinew,and how they act and re-act when in use. The parts are not the leg; but what the surgeon shows you enables you to understand now the leg works when you go out for a walk.

The next thing to note is that, once the characters begin to develop, they often profoundly affect the plot. The author may see that a good feature in a character is not quite consistent with his plot, and adjusts his plot to suit it. These modifications in the plot, in their turn, may entail corresponding modifications in other characters. All through the writing of a play or a novel, in fact, this interplay of character and plot goes on; and the finished product may truthfully be described as the resultant of opposing forces. 

Some writers are more interested in character than in plot. George Meredith is a good example. In his novels the plot becomes a secondary consideration; and to some extent he justifies Oscar Wilde's criticism that, as a novelist, he could do everything but tell a story. At the other extreme, I might take a friend of my own, Who, in is younger days, wrote a number of sensational novels. We were talking one day of the diverse Ways in which authors worked; and he told me that his method was always to write the last chapter of his story first. After that, he would write any scene, or passage of description, or dialogue that he fancied at the moment, then, when the pile of typewritten pages began to reach the height which he knew his publishers would require, he took the various sections thus haphazardly produced, arranged them in order, and, where necessary, link, them together with a bit of narrative. He assured me, that it was surprising how a little extra writing of that sort was required. You will recognise that, using such a queer method, the characters in my friend's novels were pound to be more or less static, although the stories, once you began to read them, were difficult to lay down. Shakespeare strikes the happy mean, His plays are delightful stories, and, at the same time, are full of Living characters. 

So much, then, for what I may call the anatomy of the mental process involved in the writing of Shakespeare's plays. I want now to dissect "King Lear" in a similar way, and show you some of the methods by means of which Shakespeare got his dramatic effects. 

Did it ever strike you how wildly improbable the plots of Shakespeare's plays often are? You do not notice it so much in the plays themselves, because Shakespeare's art makes them convincing to the spectator; but read the story of the plays in plain prose, even the delightful prose of Lamb's "Tales", and the weaknesses and absurdities of the plots hit you in the eye. Yet, if a play is to be a success, a true dramatist must be able to make even the absurd seem true for the time being; so that, while you are in the theatre, disbelief is suspended and your critical faculties are hushed to sleep. Consciously or we instinctively--I do not know which-- Shakespeare realised this; but bow did he manage to do it? 

The methods he used make a most interesting study, for they varied, according to what the play required. In "Hamlet", for instance, he begins on the most commonplace Level imaginable--two soldiers on sentry go meeting and exchanging a few words- but from that he rises imperceptibly step by step until the Ghost's appearance is not only accepted, but expected, in “Macbeth", he reverses this method, plunges us headlong into the supernatural, and leaves it to the glamour of the witches' cauldron to bemuse us into acceptance of the story. But time does not allow of enlarging on this: I shall have quite enough to do if I analyse in some detail the methods Shakespeare employs to make the story of "King Lear" credible. 



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