Viola:...tis poetical.

Olivia: It is more like to be feigned.

(Twelfth Night, I,v.)

Eliot, in his essay "Poetry and Drama", writes of the transparency of language in the first act of Hamlet:

No poet has begun to master dramatic verse until he can write lines which, like these in Hamlet (I,i), are transparent. You are consciously attending, not to the poetry, but to the meaning of the poetry. If you were hearing Hamlet for the first time, without knowing anything about the play, I do not think it would occur to you to ask whether the speakers were speaking in verse or prose.... I do not say that there is no place for the situation in which part of one's pleasure will be the enjoyment of beautiful poetry--providing the author gives it, in that place, dramatic inevitability...in the immediate impact of the scene we are unconscious of the medium of expression.

This view is clearly the definition of a kind of mastery and a challenge to the dramatic poet: to transcend any awareness of stylization for its own sake in speech on stage. It should not be taken as a manifesto of simple naturalism, but as an indication that even the best known defense of dramatic verse for the current theater must pay tribute to this constant pressure in drama. I am not referring here to what has been understood as "realism" or some conversational Basic English as "ordinary language." Certainly ordinary and extraordinary people talk about the weather, God, plead for their lives, seduce, defend, play, mock, woo, joke, parody, assault, philosophize, moralize, thrill and bore. I am speaking rather of the conservative, mimetic convention of real speech--the language in which we ordinarily express our thoughts and feelings to others, no matter how extraordinary they are. Real speech is the point of departure from which stylization is measured.

The conservative norms of a genre are seen in the recurrent pressure exerted in their direction as people argue for their return when styles become elaborated, sophisticated, serve the present, and it is felt that the art has lost its proper home. The values that are appealed to most steadily through the history of the genre are what I intend here. Descriptions of the conservative norms for the language of the lyric and the dramatic would probably look like the following.

For the dramatic: the use of real speech without formality or affectation beyond the immediate dramatic purpose; it is speech between characters and generally cannot seem rehearsed or formulated, except when the dramatic occasion demands it; it must seem a response to action and spontaneous, and this must override the sense of artifice inherent in the medium. Eva LeGallienne described Duse's voice in terms that are the stock in trade of the acting teacher: it was "true, simple, and real as if she had never said those words before that moment." Hamlet's "o'erstep not the modesty of nature" points in that direction.

One can see how close Eliot's sense of dramatic poetry stays to

this perennial sense of all language in drama.

For the lyric: great value placed on design, intensity of vision and feeling, musical values, precision of formulation and vividness of description. It can be highly personal and directed inward and therefore the mimetic pull of ordinary speech is not so strong or constant (speech overheard rather than heard). Delight in pattern can override other values, hence the importance of music as a metaphor for the art (lyre-lyric); generally short, complete and self-contained in reference and implication.

For all its urgency and direct address, it is impossible to imagine a context on stage, even the Elizabethan stage with its variety and musicality, where the following could be spoken by a character.

O Rose, thou art sick.

The invisible worm

That flies in the night

In the howling storm

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy,

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

This could be sung on stage, but not spoken. It is too deliberate. The meter, though intricately varied, is too highly patterned and the rhyme (though worm-storm is inexact) is too insistent to be real speech. The focus is solely on the emotional intensity and elaborate irony of the speaker's vision, and not at all on what the poor rose who is ostensibly addressed might think or feel or--crucial for drama--how it might respond. The formal organization of the poem calls attention to itself in a way that indicates that another function of language is being called on, and consequently a different relation to experience, than that called for on stage, for it is the speaker's voice and vision alone that matter here. There is clearly no need in this lyric to appear spontaneous or responsive to action, and it therefore has no need to use the formal organization of colloquial speech.

The English literary tradition habitually includes moral issues in arguments about art, and there has always been a moral tone to the revolutionary arguments for real speech, especially as they join forces with the arguments for the deepest sincerity in accord with the inner voice and inner light in radical Protestant theology, or with the Universal Rights of Man or the Romantic discovery of ordinary men or with the embattled Victorian and modern religious function of secular literature. We can see how real speech is true speech, and the artificial is a veil, a mask to disguise the deceitful face, elevate the evil oppressing class, obscure the vision and serve falsehood. The divisions are obvious, and penetrate the historical discussion of style in every age.

It should not be a surprise that Shakespeare, whose work has made the dramatic voice and real speech so important for the English lyric tradition, should involve himself at some point with the difference between the lyric and the dramatic. The distinction between these genres has a startling role in Hamlet, where it is moralized as the difference between the real and true and the artificial and false, and the lyric as such is denigrated. Along with all forms of "art speech" in the play, the varieties of the lyric are interrupted, distorted, are made documents of either feigned or real insanity, mocked, and set apart sharply from the language in which people really think and talk. In this Republic the lyric is sequestered severely, whether through the assertion of public emotion over private emotion (as J.V. Cunningham suggests in Woe or Wonder) or the simple assertion of the purity of the medium, in keeping with Hamlet's speech to the players. In its complex way the play certainly reflects the special value placed on sincerity and "true speech" in the English Reformation. For here, even Shakespeare's beloved metaphor of theatrum mundi is kept at a distance. In Hamlet's response to the Player's speech, "Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I," the fiction of acting is held up in sharp contrast to the real situation that he faces.

And all for nothing!

For Hecuba!

What's Hecuba to him, or he to her,

That he should weep for her? What would he do

Had he the motive and cue for passion

That I have?

In another play, that nothing might become an emblem for the self, for Macbeth, say, or Lear. Hamlet hedges his own acting, his madness, very severely. His madness is not himself. The true self is embattled in this play, and held to with a fierce tenacity. Hamlet's dying plea to Horatio is that he should live to reveal the truth about Hamlet to the world and his advice to the players is an argument for being true to the person, because "the modesty of nature" has behind it an extended meditation on false appearances, human and ghostly. Even the word modesty reminds us of an archaic meaning, the suggestion of sincerity, in the discourse of the play. Hamlet says to Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern,"...there is a kind of confession in your looks which your modesties have not craft enough to color." The whole speech to the players is charged with the moral purpose of true art, and naturalness is held up in opposition to "the pitiful ambitions of the fool."

Underlying the struggle for the self is the struggle for the grasp, the control, of political power in this play, and this is carried over into the battle about artistic means. Of course, the lyrics and all of the "art speech" in the play are not powerless or meaningless. The highly artificial play and the fragmented songs of Ophelia have great power to move but only in their dramatic context, and their power is irrational and explosive. They are fictions, they pretend, they play, they work as art--that is what is problematic about them for this play.

When we come to the most telling songs in the play, those of Ophelia in her mad scene, we find that when she sings the first stanza of "How should I your true love know," she is interrupted by Gertrude: "Alas sweet lady: what imports this song?" Ophelia responds: "Say you? Nay pray you mark!" Then she sings the second stanza and cries out, the Queen interrupts again and the King enters after the first line of the third stanza with yet another interruption. Ophelia concludes the song:

Larded with sweet flowers;

Which bewept to the grave did not go

With true-love showers.

The metrical disorder of the next-to-last line is more than the disorder of Ophelia's mind. It is part of the consistent strategy throughout the scene and play of having the speaking voice intrude on the songs and on all of the set-off "art speech," namely Hamlet's poems, the player's speech, The Murder of Gonzago, the Gravedigger's song, Osric's courtly patter and so forth. The extra-metrical not in the phrase "did not go" calls for a speech emphasis that makes the song apply to the hasty burial of Polonius.

"They bore him barefaced on the bier" is interrupted by Ophelia herself (in the Folio) between the lines of the art-song burden with an inappropriate folk song refrain, "Hey nonny, nonny, hey nonny." And she instructs Laertes to sing "A-down a-down" and "Call him a-down-a." The last song follows a line of a love song that is started and dropped, and turned into a short lament that conflates the death of a lover (whose death will lead to the death of his beloved, like "Barbara Allen") in the first stanza and of an old man in the second, continuing a motif of the group of songs that tangles together lover and father. (The Folio runs the end of the song into a little prayer, though the editor of the current Arden series regularizes the printing of the song, quite reasonably as if that indeed were the point.) In keeping with these interruptions and confusions, as if to say again that there will be no fine art about death, the Grave-digger alters a meditative, courtly memento mori lyric by Vaux into a crude folk song. The extra-metrical "O's" that interrupt the flow of the song are gasps of exertion as he digs, the sound of real life again intruding on meter and art.

Performed with the plays in the cycles of Classical tragedy, the satyr plays (and in the Noh cycles the kyogen) subverted the pretensions of tragedy, the agonies and lofty style of the exalted and heroic with a realistic and often low-life version of the central issues of the plays. Shakespeare builds this tradition of irreverent comedy that multiplies perspectives into his tragedies themselves, and not exclusively in clown and fool scenes. Hamlet's own clowning and madness take up some of the task. At the end of the Gravedigger scene Hamlet turns an impromptu epigram:

Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay,

Might stop a hole to keep the wind away;

O that earth which kept the world in awe

Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw.

This epigram, probably because it serves to complete an irreverent scene with its own irreverence, is as close as we get to an intact lyric in the play. Perhaps as an impromptu it may pass as a kind of real speech, since it is meant to sound immediate and not premeditated. Hamlet's other impromptu epigram, "Why let the stricken deer go weep," seems to be a satirical twist on an old ballad. It is interrupted by dialogue, the second part bears a very tenuous relationship to the first and the last line substitutes the word pajock for the word ass that is called for by the rhyme and the logic. This trick at once perverts the form and gets the force of both words, the spoken one and the conspicuously unspoken one. Like the other impromptu, this one seems to fall into the rhythm of a conversation--here one that is passionate, witty and angry.

In Hamlet's remaining poem, we find that he undermines his numbers artfully in his letter to Ophelia. The poem is full of rhetorically easy antitheses, and trite and cold imagery.

Doubt thou the stars are fire,

Doubt that the sun doth move,

Doubt truth to be a liar,

But never doubt I love.

Hamlet repudiates it with an urgent and sincere prose statement: "O dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers. I have not art to reckon my groans..." Even in a letter, not speech, the lyric must be rejected in order to express true feelings.

The Player's speech, Aeneas' tale to Dido ("The rugged Phyrrus..."), is at first misremembered by Hamlet, then the Player's performance of it is twice interrupted by Polonius and by Hamlet himself, before it concludes. The metrically regular, strong stressed and prosodically old fashioned passage, full of heavy handed rhetorical tropes, is clearly set apart from the remaining blank verse of Hamlet by its technique. While it is hardly the noble epic verse that Coleridge praises, it is not the fustian that Dryden mocks either. Their different assessments merely reflect Coleridge's sentimental antiquarianism on the one hand and Dryden's love of modern polish on the other. The speech is a type of narrative filler that is seen in creaky play construction, and it commits itself by its length, formality and elaborate rhetoric to the narrative mode itself, with melodramatic half-lines punctuating the blank verse. The extended epic simile that begins, "But often as we see against some storm," along with the paucity of unstressed line ends, the relative shortage of iambic substitutions, set it apart from the flexible vehicles of natural speech in Hamlet. The style of the verse marks it, and it falls into place with all the other interrupted or mocked "art speech" in the play. Hamlet's introduction to the speech (which is about the death of Priam, the royal father of Troy!) is in prose, as if to contrast more sharply with the artificiality of the verse. Yet he praises its "honest style."

'twas caviare to the general....an excellent play, well digested in the scenes, set down with as much modesty as cunning. I remember one said that there were no sallets in the lines to make the matter savory, nor matter in the phrase that might indict the author of affectation, but called it an honest method, as wholesome as sweet and very much more handsome than fine.

It is, after all, dramatic poetry and blank verse, and on the side of virtue despite "mobled queen" and other archaic elements.

The choice of heroic couplets for The Murder of Gonzago identifies the play-within-the-play accurately enough as "very choice Italian"--though it could as well be French. Rhyme had not yet been used for English tragedy. The verse is full of formal parallelism and antitheses (it is the dominance of these in French poetry, by the way, and not diction, that Verlaine was talking about when he said he had to wring the neck of rhetoric), tied off in end-stopped couplets, and proceeds with an exaggerated stylization in the old declamatory manner. In general, heroic couplets were to prove too difficult or uncongenial a medium in English for tragedy. They were in use for less than 20 years. Dryden and Otway, who tried them, gave them up to return to blank verse "disencumbered by rhyme," as it is put in the preface to All for Love. As inflected languages, French and Italian are richer in rhymes and their conventions of rhyming allow many more legitimate rhymes than English, hence it can be used with less sense of artifice, tight design or strain.

The Murder of Gonzago is interrupted by the Gertrude, Hamlet and Claudius, and is ended abruptly by Claudius' "starting," which confirms his guilt to Hamlet and Horatio and precipitates the tragic denouement. The play's power to reveal the truth is due to the fact that it is fiction and can be bent to the purposes of the maker. We should not make a fetish of it as the thing which catches the conscience of the King. As poetry and drama it is awful, and Shakespeare makes a joke about his own medium when he uses it in Hamlet, almost as if "Pyramus and Thisbe" were performed in Romeo and Juliet.

We should also remember that after he sees the play Claudius is most aware, in the following scene, of his need to kill Hamlet, because he understands that Hamlet has found him out. It is only after this murderous business is arranged that he allows himself to be conscience stricken. Knowing that one's guilt has been found out is a great prodder of conscience and we cannot make too much of the play-within-the-play as revealing Claudius' soul to himself. At the performance he leaps up only when Hamlet challenges him directly with what he learned from the Ghost: "'A poisons him in the garden for his estate...You shall see anon how the murderer gets the love of Gonzago's wife." The lines of Luciano that Hamlet responds to here are jerky, mustachio-twirling fustian that trowels it on with both hands.

Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit and time agreeing,

Confederate season, else no creature seeing,

Thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected,

With Hecate's ban, thrice blasted, thrice infected,

Thy natural magic and dire property

On wholesome life usurps immediately.

Any argument for the moral purpose of art has to be made on the basis of Hamlet, not The Murder of Gonzago. Contrast this with Iago or even Aaron, the Black villain from Titus, to see how far we are from the blank verse in which Shakespeare presents his characters' speech. Hamlet's praise of the Player's speech, quoted above, would not apply to this kind of inflated, over-designed poetry. The Murder of Gonzago is written to be performed in the French or Italian declamatory style, not observing "the modesty of nature."

Blank verse is not naturalistic dialogue, nor for that matter is the prose in Hamlet. They are highly stylized forms but are adapted to representing real speech by their openness relative to other forms. As such, they relentlessly break in and assert their primacy over all forms of "art speech" in the play, of which Osric's courtly, Euphuistic prose is the final and most ominous instance. It is mocked mercilessly by Hamlet, and it throws a pall of falseness and murderousness over the prepared word in the moral universe of the play. It is a final turn of the knife to the moralized split between real speech and "art speech."

Speech in poetic drama can bear stylization but never lyric completeness like, for example, the songs in plays. Of course, there are tour de force adaptions of lyric forms, like the sonnets buried in the dialogue of the lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream that emphasize the dreaminess of their love-world. But these are secret delights for aficionados. A different presence of the lyric can be found in Horatio's address to the Ghost, for example, which falls into a litany-like form, of which the refrain is beautifully and slightly varied: "Speak to me", "Speak to me", "O speak" and finally "Speak of it, stay and speak." Yet despite the structure and meaning provided by a lyric organization it does not seek lyric self-containment and completeness. It begins and ends in dialogue with Marcellus and Bernardo and it does not have a motive separable from the action of the play.

There is a song subject, a carol, in Marcellus' description of the Christmas season, "Some say that ever gainst that season comes/ Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated..." But it is not song, it is spoken. A carol would not begin with "Some say." It would assert its belief and not propose it as an opinion. It is really a lyric subject domesticated by speech.

Polonius' advice to Laertes is a Classical and Medieval form of advice giving (sententia). Kipling's "If..." is a well known example of the form. For this kind of poem to work as a lyric we must believe in the sincerity of the poet, speaking in propria persona. Here we can only believe in the sincerity of Polonius. It remains a lyric form, but transformed to meet entirely dramatic ends. This counsel of prudence and definition of taste is appropriate to Polonius. The famous last lines about sincerity, with their simple view of self and truth, reverberate throughout the play with a profound and complex irony. What we see, after all, is a world of false dealers, players whose false selves protect their true selves, and the self a subject of the most searching kind of doubt. The function of these lines in the play would be something like having the sentence, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free" appear in Oedipus Rex.

In the less well known speech of Claudius to Laertes, as he wins him to his side after the death of Polonius, we have the startling appearance of a sonnet subject, seemingly separable from the dramatic thrust for the moment, and in fact often cut from the play. Claudius says:

There lives within the very flame of love

A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it;

For nothing is at a like goodness still,

For goodness, growing to a pleurisy,

Dies in his own too much: that we would do

We should do when we would; for this 'would' changes

And hath abatements and delays as many

As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents,

And then this 'should' is like a spendthrift sigh,

That hurts by easing.

We can imagine this as the beginning of a sonnet on the tangled relationship of love and will. Its doubling back on itself is characteristic of the Sonnets. In Hamlet it is buried in a speech that is an invitation to commit murder, and its dramatic function is a reflective demi-aside serving as a preparation for the punch. It is a very different punch than the one we would expect from the sonnet that we could imagine containing this passage and that might conclude as a clouded carpe diem. In the play this passage is a foil to Hamlet's hesitation by urging direct murderous revenge for the death of a father.

The systematic violation and sequestration of "art speech" in Hamlet keeps before our eyes the conflict between anarchic and self-delighting pleasure in pattern-making and the sober and sincere business of art and real speech. And we can speculate that in this opposition we can find a moralized version of a peculiar pattern in the subsequent history of the lyric in English.

The major revolutions in English poetry since the Renaissance, those at the beginning of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, have all invoked "the language of ordinary men" as the source of renewal. There are two common explanations for this: the first is that as literary styles become rigid and predictable, their diction, forms and subjects need to be revivified. The second common explanation is that the language of poetry needs to catch up with the changes in colloquial language. These are not incompatible views, and they both contain a measure of truth: conventions do get rigid and usage does change. However they both ignore the fact (largely unnoticed) that this is a pattern unique to English. While these revolutions often go hand in hand with the recurrent Horatian call for simplicity and clarity that we find in all literatures that inherit the Classical tradition, the pattern of poetry in English is more specific. While it emphasizes the Horatian naturalness, colloquial ease and directness and avoidance of stylized poetic diction, it goes a crucial step further and includes a positive embrace of the conservative norm for the stage, real speech. In none of the major European national literatures do we find this consistent pattern of revolutions in poetry.

It is interesting to speculate whether this has come about because the poetic tradition in English, unlike any other, has as its dominating paragon a dramatic poet, and whether this has not given it a tilt toward the conservative norm of dramatic poetry. Shakespeare as a dramatist is a figure of worldwide influence, but his impact on the lyric tradition is especially dominating for English alone. For example, this is unlike Italian, with Dante, an epic poet whose version of a plain style is not theatrical real speech, nor Russian and German where Pushkin and Goethe have an impact on poetry largely through their lyrics. We must keep in mind that Faust is essentially a closet drama and that Eugene Onegin is a narrative poem. (The opera libretto is by Tchaikovsky with the aid of a minor poet, Shilovksy.) Gongora remains centrally important to poetry in Spanish despite the fact that Lope's arguments for real speech against Gongora's elaborate and artificial style sound so persuasive to the English speaker. It is arguable as to whether the French lyric tradition has one dominating poet of this kind--the likeliest ones are all lyric poets, Villon, Ronsard, Hugo, Baudelaire.

This is not to say that real speech is the exclusive value in the English lyric tradition, or the theatrical tradition for that matter. The stylization of speech, artificiality, the establishment of a special kind of language for art, can be seen throughout both genres. Dramatic poetry is clearly not naturalistic dialogue, but a highly artificial convention. It is poetry, though not lyric, but its conventions have had a pervasive effect on English lyrics. Meter in the lyric tradition in English is extremely irregular--the most irregular of all post-Renaissance literatures--and this may be one of the effects of the genre switch whereby real speech asserts its importance. Here is Brecht on the impact of the drama on poetry ("On Rhymeless Verse With Irregular Rhythms"):

I wrote more and more poems with no rhymes and with irregular rhythms. It must be remembered that the bulk of my work was designed for the theater; I was always thinking of actual delivery...

Rhyme seemed to me most unsuitable, as it makes a poem seem self-contained...Regular rhythms with their even cadence fail in the same way...what was needed was a tone of direct spontaneous speech.

The pressure is clearly stated here. Dramatic poetry needs metrical flexibility in order to represent speech without artificiality, and here Brecht explains the impact of his dramatic poetry on his later lyrics in a way that suggests the example in English.

Metrical practices have roots that must be looked for in many features of English prosody, and in the nature of the language. Of crucial importance is the fact that our system for measuring the sounds of poetry was developed to deal with the length of syllables which, in the Classical languages from which the system was derived, were fixed quantities governed by clear rules. However, our "fixed" element in English, stress, varies to express meaning and feeling (What do you mean? What do you mean? I love you. I love you.) And it also varies from country to country and region to region. Educated English stress is considerably less emphatic than American, which is a great advantage for an English actor trying to speak iambic pentameter. It is easier to do without a sense of forcing to fit the meter, since the counter movement of speech stress against metrical stress is less insistent. It is nearly impossible, for example, for an American actor to speak Hamlet's phrase "all trivial fond record" as iambic.

The primacy of dramatic poetry in the lyric tradition in English may explain as well its recurrence of dramatic forms (monologue and dialogue) and also the domination of free verse in this century. The restraint on excessive regularity of rhythm goes hand in hand with the pressure to represent real speech.

The dialectical conflict between real speech and stylization exists within the dramatic and within the lyric as well as between them. Artists are riddled by theory and technique, and for good reasons, since both breed their own insights. Especially for the young artist there can be a fetish surrounding technique, because it teaches a kind of concentration and discrimination among the resources of any medium. However, as it becomes an end in itself, technique can remove an art form from its roots, its sources. The periodization in the history of English poetry is an aspect of this process writ large, although a warning is needed here. A literary revolution does not sweep everything before it. The picture is not tidy, since in all periods we find poets who seem distinctly out of phase, and poems as well that seem uncharacteristic of their authors and times. Wordsworth, Dryden and Pound were all capable of writing in a highly artificial style at almost all stages in their careers. In the following generation the Augustan Swift as a poet often seems truer to Dryden's poetics than Dryden himself, and the technically traditional Frost wrote in a more colloquial style than Pound did early in his career.