‘Is this the promised end?’
(King Lear, 5.3.238):
The Stagecraft of
Shakespeare’s Endings
26.10.15
Prologue: Hamlet gets jiggy
Why, let the stricken deer go weep,
The hart ungalled play,
For some must watch, while some
must sleep,
So runs the world away.
(3.2.234-237)
• Would not this [his performance
of the song], sir, and a forest of
feathers, if the rest of my
fortunes turn Turk with me, with
two Provencal roses on my razed
shoes, get me a fellowship in a
cry of players, sir?
Jigging
Noun
†4. A light performance or entertainment of a lively or comical
character, given at the end, or in an interval, of a play. Obs.
Perhaps originally mainly consisting of song and dance
(quot. 1632), but evidently sometimes of the nature of a farce.
Verb
2. a. intr. To move up and down or to and fro with a rapid jerky
motion; in quot. 1886 of a fish = JIGGER v.1
1604 SHAKESPEARE Hamlet III. i. 147 You gig [1623 gidge] &
amble, and you list you nickname Gods creatures, and make
your wantonnes ignorance.
The Eschatology of Endings
(eschatology = a. The department of theological science concerned
with ‘the four last things: death, judgement, heaven, and hell’.)
‘I would give you some
violets, but they withered all
when my father died. They
say a made a good end’.
Ophelia, 4.5.182
The Eschatology of Endings
• ‘The world is a stage, life is the play: we
come on, look about us, and go off
again’.
Democritus (4thC BC)
• God is the ‘Author of all our Tragedies,’
a playwright who ‘hath written out and
appointed what every Man must play’.
‘Death is the end of the Play, and takes
from all’.
Sir Walter Ralegh, History of the World (pub.1614)
Hardwiring?
Birth, copulation and death
That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks
Birth, copulation and death
‘Sweeney Agonistes’, T.S. Eliot
19 of Shakespeare’s plays feature the death of
a major character within the last seven
minutes or so of stage action.
Most of the other half end in the prospect of
marriage and/or some form of reunion or
reconciliation
A Theory of Endings?
Our composition must be more accurate in
the beginning and end, than in the midst; and
in the end more, than in the beginning; for
through the midst the stream bears us.
Ben Jonson, Discoveries (pub.1641)
Accurate =
1. Executed with care; careful.
Shakespeare’s Careless Endings?
•In many of his plays the latter part is
evidently neglected. When he found
himself near the end of his work, and
in view of his reward, he shortened
the labour to snatch the profit. He
therefore remits his efforts where he
should most vigorously exert them,
and his catastrophe is improbably
produced or imperfectly represented.
•Samuel Johnson, 1765
Theatre as durational art form
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Sonnet 60
Mortality / running time / endings
The Craft of Endings: some questions and
tentative answers
1) How long does an ending last? Final scene average: 240
lines or c.16 minutes (working on assumption that it takes
roughly one hour to speak 900 lines at pace)
2) What is the average length of the closing speech act? 9.25
lines
Contrast genre; compare Macbeth and Richard III: final
scenes are the shortest in the canon and are near-identical –
the tyrant has been slain and his successor defines the terms
of the regime change; as Malcolm says, ‘We shall not spend a
large expense of time’ and neither he nor Richmond do – 41
lines to be exact.
The Ending of the Dream
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: a play which doesn’t quite know
how to stop, offering a superabundance of closural devices –
bergamask, Theseus’s apparently concluding ‘off to bed’
speech; the dance of the fairies with Oberon and Titania…
and, finally,…
Puck’s epilogue.
The Craft of Endings: some questions
and tentative answers
2) What is the average length of the closing speech act? 9.25
lines
3) Who speaks it? A male character
not impossible that the same actor played Fortinbras, Edgar,
Malcolm and Octavius Caesar – the last of whom closes
both Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra.
The case is altered with the Romances – largely because the
established authority figure and the lead actor has survived
the plot: it was presumably Richard Burbage – as Pericles,
Leontes and Prospero – who enjoyed the privilege of vocally
closing those late plays.
The Craft of Endings: some
questions and tentative answers
4) What time elapses between the death of a major character
and the end of the play? Average = 64 lines
In Shakespeare’s two earliest tragedies – Titus Andronicus and
Romeo and Juliet – more than twice the average length expires;
notoriously in Romeo the Friar alone spends 31 lines telling
the audience what it already knows: ‘I will be brief’!
In mature tragedies Othello and King Lear, only 16 lines,
roughly 1 minute, elapses between the death of the titular
hero and the death of the play. The final tragedy Coriolanus is
comparably terse and abbreviated.
5) How many plays end in rhyming couplets? Approx. 75%
or three in four
The Craft of Endings: some
questions and tentative answers
6) How many plays end with the promise of offstage
discussion? At least 14
7) How many plays end with an epilogue or a jig?
Impossible to say, but 10 epilogues survive in print
Thomas Platter: September 1599: went to ‘the house with the
thatched roof’ and watched ‘the tragedy of the first emperor
Julius Caesar’: “At the end of the comedy, according to
their custom, they danced with exceeding elegance, two
each in men’s and two in women’s clothes, wonderfully
together.”
Plays within plays – various
models of endings
Henry IV, 1:
Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.
I do, I will. [Knocking within]
Hamlet:
Polonius: Give o’er the play
Dream:
Bottom: Will it please you to see the epilogue or to
hear a bergamask dance between two of our company
Theseus: No epilogue, I pray you; for your play needs
no excuse.
Epilogues: Henry IV, Part Two
[spoken by a Dancer]
Excusing the play: First my fear; then my courtesy; last my
speech. My fear is, your displeasure; my courtesy, my duty; and
my speech, to beg your pardons.
Paying the debt: If my tongue cannot entreat you to acquit
me, will you command me to use my legs? and yet that were but light
payment, to dance out of your debt.
Gesturing forward: One word more, I beseech you. If you be
not too much cloyed with fat meat, our humble
author will continue the story, with Sir John in it, and make you
merry with fair Katharine of France: where, for any thing I
know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat, unless already
a' be killed with your hard opinions
Epilogue to Henry V
Thus far with rough and all-unable pen
Our bending author hath pursued the story,
In little room confining mighty men,
Mangling by starts the full course of their glory.
Small time, but in that time most greatly lived
This star of England. Fortune made his sword,
By which the world's best garden he achieved.
And of it left his son imperial lord.
Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crowned king
France and England did this king succeed,
Whose state so many had the managing
That they lost France and made his England bleed,
Which oft our stage hath shown – and, for their sake,
In your fair minds let this acceptance take.
Of
Alternative Endings:
King Lear – Quarto (1608)
Lear. And my poore foole is hangd, no,
no life, why should a dog, a horse, a
rat of life, and thou no breath at all, O
thou wilt come no more, neuer, neuer,
neuer, pray you vndo this button,
thanke you sir, O, o, o o.
Edg. He faints my Lord, my Lord.
Lear. Breake hart, I prethe breake.
King Lear – Folio (1623)
The last lines of King Lear
The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath born most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
Exeunt with a dead march [s.d. Folio only]
Albany in Quarto (published 1608)
Edgar in Folio (published 1623)
The new puritanism?
For a variety of reasons theatrical
professionals continue to be unsatisfied
with the closing moments of
Shakespeare’s plays as scripted in the
Folio and the Quartos, so that a
playgoer is especially likely to encounter
some form of rescripting in Act 5.
(Alan Dessen, Rescripting Shakespeare, p.109)
Henry Irving’s end to Hamlet:
Good night, sweet Prince,
And flights of angels sing thee
to thy rest…
Whiles I behind remain to tell
the tale
Which shall hereafter make
the hearers pale.
George Bernard Shaw
Preface to Cymbeline Refinished
(1936)
The final act was merely ‘a tedious string of unsurprising
dénouements sugared with insincere sentimentality after
a ludicrous stage battle’. As Shaw pointed out in the
same preface, there has also been a long tradition of
improving the ends of Shakespeare’s plays by ‘supplying
them with what are called happy endings’, a practice
that has ‘always
been accepted without
protest by British audiences’.
The theatre’s defence against puritanism:
A production is only correct at
the moment of its correctness,
and only good at the moment of
its success. In its beginning is its
beginning, and in its end its
end.
Peter Brook
UNEXPECTED
ENDINGS…
Globe Burning: 29 June 1613
King Henry making a Masque at the Cardinal Wolsey's house,
and certain cannons being shot off at his entry, some of the
paper or other stuff, wherewith one of them was stopped, did
light on the thatch, where being thought at first but idle smoak,
and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly,
and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour
the whole house to the very ground. This was the fatal period of
that virtuous fabrick, wherein yet nothing did perish but wood
and straw, and a few forsaken cloaks; only one man had his
breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broyled him, if he
had not by the benefit of a provident wit, put it out with a bottle
of ale."
Sir Henry Wotton, letter dated 2nd July 1613
Shakespeare Memorial Theatre
fire 1926
Astor Place Riots, New York
City: 10th May 1849
Epilogue:
Endings in the early modern theatre had a theological
dimension
Far from being careless, Shakespeare deliberately experimented
with different forms of dramatic (non)closure throughout his
career, sometimes providing more than one ending for the same
play (e.g. Lear)
Shakespeare often embeds an interpretive (and post-performance
community-building?) injunction at the end of his plays
The playtext is a radically incomplete form of writing and the
performance does not end with language
This incompletion demands that theatrical practitioners exceed
the text and shape their own endings
It’s hard to say exactly when the performance ends
(applause; exiting the theatre; memory)
In the modern theatre, the ending is one of the key
moments in which the director asserts her
authority / interpretive stamp on the production…
[All statistics should be treated with caution and
require interpretation]