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“Shakespeare’s most enthralling characters are driven by forces of darkness.”
Discuss this statement with close reference to a play or plays by Shakespeare you have studied.
In order to discuss the statement “Shakespeare’s most enthralling characters are driven by forces of
darkness”, we must first define the meanings of the terms. “Forces of darkness” is another term that
merits definition – we will use the definition put forth by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his essay on
characterisation in Othello, “being driven by the (otherwise motiveless) desire to cause harm to
others”. Any characterisation of a particular set of characters as being the “most enthralling” must of
course be entirely subjective, and it is not the place of this essay to set out some universal measure
of the capacity of a character to enthral. Given the impossibility of coming to an overarching
conclusion, this essay will limit itself to attempting to prove that certain characters judged by the
writer of this essay to be enthralling – Portia and Shylock from The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet
from the play of that name – are not driven by the forces of darkness, but instead by human
emotions. This essay will argue that it is this humanity which makes them enthralling, even four
hundred years after their plays were written.
Portia is perhaps the most clear-cut example of a character not driven by the forces of darkness. Her
motivations are based entirely around first love for Bassanio, who she believes alone of her suitors is
“worthy of thy praise”, and then a genuine desire to help her husband’s friend, no matter the price:
“Pay him six thousand, then treble that, before a friend of this description shall lose a hair…”. Even
when faced by Shylock’s obstinacy in the courtroom scene, she persists in giving him chance after
chance, and delivers one of the great moral speeches – indeed, according to A.C. Bradley, the great
moral speech of Shakespeare:
“The quality of mercy is not strained
it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
upon the place beneath.
It is twice blest – it blesseth him that giveth, and him that taketh.
It is mightiest in the mighty.
It becomes the throned monarch better than his crown.
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power
But mercy is above this sceptered sway…”
Here, she appeals in ways that have been echoed thousands of times for mercy in justice, and does
so from a place of absolute moral righteousness. “Fair Portia” is one of the few utterly moral
characters in Shakespeare, but nonetheless, she is a complex character, driven by a strong sense of
her own value and morality, as well as her native morality, to act in ways that would be entirely
unacceptable for most (especially married) women at the time, disguising herself as “Balthazar” a
male doctor of laws, and acting in court to save Antonio from the “currish Jew”.
The source of her capacity to enthral, then, is more in the remarkable activity and self-confidence
that drives her actions than any “forces of darkness”. She, much like Shakespeare’s other
remarkable comic heroine Rosalind, is the force that finally resolves the play well for all concerned
(with the famous “Tarry a little, Jew, there is something else. This bond doth give you no drop of
blood.”), and does so despite - because of - her entirely virtuous nature. She is in of herself proof
that Shakespeare’s most enthralling characters do not have to be driven by the forces of darkness.
Shylock, from the same play, is a more complex case, appearing prima facie to be driven by evil and
nothing but. He, however, serves as an excellent example of the fact that even Shakespeare’s
villains, who we might expect to be purely driven by the forces of darkness, are complex and
developed characters who rely as much on human emotions as “motiveless malignity” (to use
Coleridge’s phrase for Iago). At the start of the play, Shylock’s motives and driving ideas appear to
be simply evil, with him declaring that “I hate [Antonio] for he is a Christian”. His daughter Jessica
declares that “Our house is hell” - implying, of course, that her father is nothing less than the devil
“Shakespeare’s most enthralling characters are driven by forces of darkness.”
Discuss this statement with close reference to a play or plays by Shakespeare you have studied.
given human form. However, as the play goes on, our picture of him softens. We hear from the first
that while he hate Antonio “for he is a Christian”, this is not the whole story – “But not only that; he
has rated me often about the Rialto, spat on me, called me dog…”. It must seem to us as readers that
Shylock has to a certain extent been unfairly treated, a feeling which intensifies when we hear that
Jessica has stolen “the ring I had from my wife” who is now dead, and we see how much he is hurt
by this. This feeling comes to a climax when he delivers a speech cast from the same mould as
Portia’s, albeit from a less lofty moral stance:
“And what’s his reason? I am a Jew! Hath not a Jew eyes?
Hath not a Jew hands, organs, senses, dimensions, passions?
If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we shall resemble you in that...”
While Shylock concludes this speech with a declaration that “the villainy you teach me I shall
execute” and goes forth to try to hurt Antonio, we as audience must be certain at this point that
there is more to this character than malignity. Indeed, in kinder times – in a straight comedy, for
instance - it is entirely possible that a character like Shylock could have resolved his anger through
“mercy”, and bid Portia “tear the bond”. It is worth noting that Shakespeare did not have to take this
stance, and indeed it was very unusual at the time. In the source play for The Merchant of Venice,
the Jew of Malta by Marlowe, the Jew was entirely evil, with no redeeming speeches of any kind.
Shakespeare has made an active decision to make his villains driven by human emotions instead of
the forces of darkness, and this is evident in Shylock.
This conception of enthralling characters as driven by complex non-evil motives persists outside of
The Merchant of Venice. Hamlet also exhibits this, most importantly in the titular hero. He is driven
by a complex and contradictory array of motives, most importantly his sense of filial obligation to
avenge the murder of his father, which is contrasted with his personal dislike of action against the
state. For the Elizabethan audience for which Shakespeare was writing, Hamlet’s aversion to
regicide, declaring about the prospect of murdering Claudius that “no, not for a king, / Upon whose
property and most dear life / A damn'd defeat was made” and almost rejecting it was noble, but so
too was the idea that the proper recourse to his father’s murder was swift vengeance: “I should have
fatted all the region kites / With this slave's offal: bloody, bawdy villain!”.
Taken together, these two motives drive Hamlet’s actions throughout the play, but neither can be
called a “force of darkness”. Both are noble motives in the eyes of the audience Shakespeare was
writing for, and to some extent to us today. Hamlet’s great question, in this play (”To be or not to
be…”) is fundamentally one about what it is “nobler in the mind” to do – to obey his father’s
injunctions, or to obey his monarch’s claims. He is a fundamentally moral person in that at no point
does he consider his own interests, or anything outside of the strict moral answer to this question,
demonstrating beyond all doubt that he is not driven by the forces of darkness. His final declaration
that “conscience makes cowards of us all” is an extension of this, as he finds himself unable to act
against the dictates of either strand of moral thinking.
In conclusion, there can be no doubt that some at least of Shakespeare’s characters are
fundamentally driven by human, positive ideas, instead of the forces of darkness. This essay has
taken certain characters as enthralling, and while this decision is a purely subjective one, it is
nonetheless sufficient to show that the capacity to enthral is not inherently linked to the forces of
darkness. Portia is an enthralling character despite being driven by solely positive motives, Shylock is
a villain but even so is driven more by his justified sense of grievance than through evil, and Hamlet
is a nearly overwhelmingly moral character who binds us to him through his ability to articulate a
“Shakespeare’s most enthralling characters are driven by forces of darkness.”
Discuss this statement with close reference to a play or plays by Shakespeare you have studied.
moral dilemma. All of these characters have something in common – each of them takes a positive
virtue and makes it more obvious. While two of these characters, Shylock and Hamlet, do not end
well in their plays, this is as much because of their “virtue” as through other causes – both are driven
to bad ends through over-application of a trait that might in happier times be laudable. To quote
Father Laurence from Romeo and Juliet, another play with protagonists driven by almost entirely
positive motivations instead of the forces of darkness, “virtue turns to vice, being misapplied’.
Shakespeare’s characters enthral us more because of their demonstration of the fact that the
springs of morality are the same springs that lead to horrible events and tragedy than because of
their evil, and are more fundamentally demonstrations of human nature than of the power of
motiveless evil.
You are very well prepared for this exam – a detailed and mature understanding of the texts;
reference to secondary critics; individual response
Work on better integration of textual details
ET5