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‘Is this the promised end?’
(King Lear, 5.3.238):
The Stagecraft of
Shakespeare’s Endings
Prologue: Hamlet’s Jig
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?
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)
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
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
• 2) What is the average length of the closing
speech act? 9.25 lines
• 3) Who speaks it? A male character
• 4) What time elapses between the death of a
major character and the end of the play?
Average = 64 lines
The Craft of Endings: some questions
and tentative answers
• 5) How many plays end in rhyming couplets?
Approx. 75% or three in four
• 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
• 8) When does a performance end? Discuss
The Ending of the Shrew
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)
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…
Conclusions:
• 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
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
• [All statistics should be treated with caution
and require interpretation]
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.
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)