Two Part Structure- Emrys Jones
The beginning of the chapter called "The Two Part Structure" Jones reminds us that most of the act and scene divisions in Shakespeare's plays were imposed long after they were written (and after Shakespeare's death). However, he points out that there is a clear structure to nearly all the plays- and that an act division should at least mark this structure-- One part contains a "rising action"- followed by a slight pause and then a "descending action". Most of the time the end of the first part comes around what is usually marked as the end of "Act III" and the second part begins with the opening of "Act IV"--ending in Act V. Five acts is a neo classical structure imposed on the plays by later editors-- and it is not clear if Shakespeare ever intended this structure. However, the two part structure is clear. What is meant by Rising and Falling action? Towards the latter half of this excerpt Jones gives a very clear example from Richard III:
... Shakespeare is so exceptionally attentive to matters of continuity and causality that he is able to manipulate the audience's consciousness of time in such a masterful way. Indeed to the reader who has leisure to analyse how the illusion is effected, it can seem nothing less than audacious. When it suits his dramatic purposes Shakespeare will introduce his 'nights' and mornings' so that we have, at odd intervals, a vague sense of the passage of ordinary time, with its days and nights and with occasional specific hours of the day thrown in. At the same time we sense the lapse of much longer periods, although their duration is usually kept tactfully indefinite. Hours, days, years are all evoked; and it is in part due to the illusion we have that different time units are concurrently passing that the plays (or the greater ones) can make such a deepimpression on us:
For 'tis your thoughts that now mus deck our kings,
Carry them here and there, jumping o'er times,
Turning th' accomplishment of many years
into an hour-glass...
- Henry V, Prologue, 28-31
Suchg plays are, among other things, dense and complex images of time.
Shakespeare's concern with continuity is the most obvious means whereby he casts his spell on the audience, so ensuring that they accept his boldly imaginative treatment of time. Each long concatenation of scenes habituates us to an imagined system or world; but once the continuity is broken, as it must be if the play has an interval, the imaginative system is dissolved and another one must replace it when the play is resumed after the interval. T.M. Raysor's notion of a 'theatrical unity of time', referred to earlier, is relevant here. Such a unity, he maintained could be established only by continuous performance. But if a play were divided into two by an interval, then it would also divide into two distinct systems, each with its own 'theatrical unity of time'. This is, I think, what we find in many of the histories and tragedies; for within the larger imaginative unity of the play as a whole, each of the two main parts has its own lesser unity which will be best appreciated in continuous performance. Raysor's comparison of the 'flowing continuity' of these plays to that of music is entirely apt. It follows that their natural intervals need to be observed in performance at least as scrupulously as the pauses between movements in symphonic works.
If this suggestion concerning the imaginative unity of each of the two parts is accepted, several others lead on from it. An interval will have the effect of releasing us from the powerful dramatic illusion which has been established during the first part of the play. What shakespeare often does is to treat the interval as a licence to himself to make considerable changes in the substance and presentation of his material, changes which otherwise, that is without an interval-- might seem inadmissibly abrupt. Characterization, for example, can be radically modified. But also affected will be such things as tone and mood, quality and range of feeling, indeed the whole nature of the audience's involvement with the events on stage....."
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RICHARD III is a comparitively early and unusually clear example of shakespeare's structural method in this matter of the two parts. The interval comes where stage producers usually put it: at the end of the third act. The first three acts have had a single main concern. Richard's struggle to get the Crown. The first act, largely fictitious, deals with the disposal of Clarence; a subsidiary matter is the wooing of Anne. The second act is closer to history: Kind Edward dies, and his boy-heir is brought to London where his uncle Gloucester awaits him as Protector. Act Three sees a marked acceleration of events: the last obstacles to Richard are removed -- Hastings and others-- and finally the citizenry of London are manoevered into offering Richard the Crown. At this point there is a sense of completion and fullfilment, and the play pauses. This is the natural place for an interval-- indeed the way Shakespeare has disposed his material seems to require it. For the final two acts have a quite different orientation from the first three. Richard is now King; he is no longer murdering his way to a throne. The subject of these two acts is quite simply his fall, ultimately at the hands of the Tudor Richmond. ...
...The second part of Richard III is Richmond's although his stage role is very limited and kept well subordinated to Richard's. The over-all structurall lines of the play are clear: the first part might be called "Getting the Crown." and the second "Losing It."
The characterization of Richard is in keeping with this sharply differentiated two part arrangement. In the first three acts he is overpoweringly energetic, resourceful, witty, and sardonically amusing. Above all, he enjoys the peculiar close rapport with the audience which stage characters of his type inherited from the early Tudor "Vice." HOwever much our moral feelings may protest, Richard makes exhilarating stage company as he 'bustles' (his word) about the stage, manipulating the other characters, devising 'scenes' in which he will act the star part, and deploying his brilliant gifts of mimicry in a chain of clearly recognizable stage roles -- affectionate brother, willfully dominating wooer, honest 'plain' man, dutiful son, and finally in the third act a punctiliously moral and primly pious cleric, a kind of latter day Henry VI. But in the last two acts he is divested of his boisterous and savage gaiety; no gleam of humor is allowed him, and he no longer has any use for mimicry. He is now the Tyrant, ripe for overthrow, grim, sleepless, friendless, and on the night before death, anticipating God's judgement. Shakespeare has of course given Richard enough consistency of personality throughout all five acts to make him a convincing character, and in performance the actor will carry the audience with him; but there is unquestionably a sharp change after the third act, which affects the tone of the entire play, so that the first part might be described as in a large sense comic and upward moving (despite such isolated but powerful episodes as the death of Clarence), and the second part as tragic and declining.
There is, however a further structural feature well exemplified in RICHARD III which is clarified by being seen in the setting of a two part structure. This ist he placing of an elaborately developed climactic sequence in the third act. Bradly had noticed that such scenes or sequences tended to occur at this position: In Julius Caesar then assassination of Caesar and the Forum scene, in Hamlet the play scene, and its consequences, in Macbeth the banquet scene. But he had not related this feature with the possible occurrence of an interval shortly after it. In Shakespeare's two part arrangement the exciting material of his third acts was no doubt a highly satisfactory way of leading up to a break in the performance. We have reached a point of partial fulfillment and rest (a provisional ending), but the situation is rich in unrealized potentialities (a provisional beginning). The sme explanation accounts for the low tension of many of the fourth acts. The play now makes a fresh start; the dramatist has to re-engage his audience's interest, in some cases win their sympathy for an unfamiliar group of characters or a new kind of dramatic material. Of course the audience will want to know what happens next; they will have an interest in the heros fortunes which the dramatist can at this point take for granted; but Bradley's observation still holds; there will be sometimes 'a decided slackening of tension' in the fourth act, although this is not the same thing as a falling-off in real interest.
In RICHARD III the main object of the first part of the play-- getting the Crown-- has reached a crisis in Act Three.In the first half of the act Richard clears the stage for himself: the young Prince Edward is lodged in the Tower, the Queen's kinfolk are executed at Pomfret, and finally Hastings too is brought to a sudden and ignominious end. Then the second half of the act presents Richard himself as a main actor, paradoxically now taking an ostensibly passive role - the pious recluse, bitterly reluctant to take upon himself the cares of kingship. It is in this last phase of his climb to royal power (IIIV to III Vii) that Shakespeare devises a sequence so extravagantly histrionic in conception as to seem like a half acknowledged play within a play. The theatrical metahor is certainly in Shakespeare's and Richard's mind:
Gloucester: Come cousin, canst thou quake and change thy colour,
Murder thy breath in middle of a word,
And then again begin, and stop again,
As if thou were distraught and mad with terror?
Buckingham: Tut, I can counterfeit the deep tragedian;
Speak and look back, and pry on every side,
Tremble and start at wagging of a straw,
Intending deep suspicioun...
(III.V. I-8)
And the sequence that follows till the end of the act has a peculiarly heightened, histrionic intensity. This is largely because in earlier scenes Richard had usually been the sole 'actor'; he had assumed roles hypocritically and played them before audiences ignorant of the deception. But now he has engaged Buckoingham as a fellow actor, and this establishes the atmoshpere of true theatricality: a group assumpion of roles devised and rehearsed beforehand.
A sequence of this kind, highly elaborate, and often with distinctly self conscious or histrionic coloring is a feature which Shakespeare favored for his third acts and which he used at all stages of his career from the Henry VI plays to Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. (The Trial of Hermione in The Winter's Tale, III. ii. makes a similar effect.) In Henry Vi Part Two for example, the climactic third act prsents, first the baiting of Duke Humphrey by the Queen and her allies (III.I) then in a tableau the murder of Humphrey which is followed by a weighty court scene (III. ii), and finally the immediate consequences of the murder in the remorseful death of Cardinal Beaufort (III. iii) and the bansihment and killing of Suffolk (IV.i). (Here the Folio act division is questionable- though it may be right -- since Suffolk's death is arguably part of the sequnce which began in III. i. If an interval were laced after Sufoolk's death, the second movement of the play would open with the fresh interest supplied by Jack Cade, who enters in the following scene.) In Henry Vi, Part Three the alternative arrangement is used: the break in the action occurs earlier, at the end of the second act. For the play falls into two movements whose chief contents are indicated in the Qarto's title: The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of York and the death of Good King Henrie the Sixt... The first act culminates in the death of York at Wakefield, and the second in the major defeat of the Lancastrians at Towton and the death of Clifford. At II. vi. 31 the victorious Yorkists enter, and Edward, now king, announces what seems the conclusion of hostilities ("Now breathe we, lords: good fortune bids us pause/ And smooths the frowns of war with peaceful looks'). It sounds almost as if we are at the end of the play; a break in teh performance seems called for. The sequnce that follows makes a fresh start, and establishes an altogether different rhythm: Henry VI, now in Scotland, is captured (III.i); Edward woos Lady Elizabeth Grey, while Richard Gloucester announces in a tremendous monologue , his designs on the crown (III.i); and then, in France, WArwick indignatnly joins with Margaret on hearing of Edward's totally unexpected marriage (III.iii). From now on Warwick supports Henry. The first movement of 3 Henry VI, therefore, shows Warwick and the Yorkists, the second with the Lancastrians. In the first movement the Yorkist leader is killed (The True Tragedie of Richard Duk of York), in the second the Lancastrian ('the death of good King Henrie the Sixt'). The final scene of the play shows Edward IV with his bothers, again victorious just as II. vi had done. And again the note is one of confident, though, as we know, precarious -- stability. This large structural device -- having the two parts conclude on a similar note (it may be considered as a kind of structural rhyme)-- is one which Shakespeare returned to more than once in later plays.
He uses it in Julius Caesar and Hamlet, although in both cases his design has been obscured by misleading act -division. Julius Caesar is a particularly clear example of a play designed in two parts, with the division coming at about the end of the third act. The first part of the play concerns the conspiracy against Caesar and his assassination, with its immediate consequences in the Forum. The second part shows the defeat of the conspirators. The first part is set in Rome, the second in the 'field' (Sardis and Philippi). The planned differences between the two parts extend to such matters as characterization and the nature of the emotional response elicited from the audience. In the first part of Julius Caesar Shakespeare deliberately baffles our feelings and sympathies; it is hard to feel warmly about any of the characters and impossible to identify oneself with any of them for long. But in the second part of the play makes a strong and successful bid for our sympathies on behalf of Brutus and Cassius. The quarrel scene (IV. iii) the farewell scene (V.i) and the deaths of the two friends have a strong 'sentimental' interest which brings out by contrast the relative coldness and the critical distancing with which nearly all the characters have been presented in the first part. Cassius, for example, shows (so to speak) a different profile in each of the two parts. In the first, in keeping with his conspiratorial role, we are made ot observe his envy of Caesar, his restlessness, and the way he coolly goes about the task of working Brutus into a suitably discontented frame of mind. But in the second part he is the vulnerable, even weak, 'shortsighted', faithful friend, who has even undergone a modified form of religious conversion-- his earlier Epicureanism is discarded; 'now I change my mind,/And partly credit things that do presage' ( V.i. 77-8). As with Richard Gloucester, there is of course a real consistency of personality persisting throughout these changes which makes us accept them as developments rather than violations of his character. Nevertheless, there is a marked difference, indeed contrast, between the two profiles of Cassius in the first and second parts of the play.
I suggested that Julius Caesar makes use of the device of 'structural rhyming'-- the two parts of the play having like endings-- and that this feature had been obscured by wrong act-division. The First Folio ends the third act with the scene of the poet Cinna's death at the hands of the mob. The first scene of Act Four shows the triumvirate working out their list of proscriptions. This is the first time thatOctavius has appeared. Although he is quietyly ushered on to the stage, his appearance needs a discreet emphasis for it is Octavius who historically, is to survive all the other main characters of the drama, including Antony.
His presence in the play, though not on the stage, is first announced immediately after Antony's soliloquy, spoken over Caesar's body in III.i: Octavius' servant enters announcing that his master is 'within seven leagues of Rome'. He is next mentioned at the end of the Forum scene (III.ii.263 ff.) , when a servant again enters to Antony announcing "Sir, Octavius is already come to Rome', and the scene ends with a further reminder of their coming encounter: 'Bring me to Octavius'. The followoing brief scene shows the killing of Cinna, and the next (IV. i) the meeting of Antony, Octavius, and Lepidus, which opens with the ugly words: 'These many, then, shall die;their names are prick'd. These actions seem plainly part of a sequence which requires continuous performance if the ironies of its scenic juxtapositions are to be realized.
The scene after this one (IV.ii) shows Brutus and Cassius in their camp near Sardis; this makes a sharp break from what has gone before. It does not connect with anything before it in Shakespeare's usual closely knit manner; the last that we had heard of Brutus and Cassius was merely that they had 'rid like madmen through the gates of Rome' (III.ii. 270) The present scene in the camp initiates a new sequence that of the second part of the play. If this is so, the Folio's IV.i might be better numbered III.iv. Its detachment from its true position as the last scene in the sequence following Caesar's assassination is analogous to the Folio's placing of the scene of Suffolk's death in Act Four of 2 Henry VI. if Julius Caesar, then is considered as a play with a two-part structure the first part ends with the triumvirate-- or rather, (for Lepidus is sent packing early on in the scene, just as he was historically) with the two strong men Antony and Octavius. But the last scene of the second part of the play also ends with Antony and Octavius: they have the last two speeches of V. V just as they have the last two speeches of IV. i. It is of course appropriate that these two should occupy this conclusive position, because they had the last word over the assassins of Julius Caesar (Just as Richard Gloucester, later Richard III, had in effect had the 'last word' in the two parts of 3 Henry VI). it is further, just as appropriate that Octavius should in both parts of Julius Caesar hve the last speech of all, despite Antony's seniority in age and experience since he ultimately survived Antony. The formal elegance of Julius Caesar, which reveals itself in this 'structural rhyming', is therefore by no means empty of significance.
The same is true of Hamlet, probably the next tragedy after Julius Caesar to be written. In the modern standard editions Rowe's act-divisions have a particularly unfortunate effect. They do nothing to help the reader to see how the play is shaped. Partly as a result of this, it is not uncommon for Hamlet to be thought lacking in the patterning devices more readily discernable in some of the other tragedies. Rowe placed the end of Act Three after the closet scene (III. iv) , but this point could hardly be less well chosen, as subsequent editors often have observed (Granville-Barker called it 'cobbling of the clumsiest'). For this is not realy the end of a scne at all. Hamlet tugs off the corpse of Polonius leaving the Queen on stage; the King enters to her, and the dialogue continues. The Folio has it as follows:
Hamlet: Good night Mother.
Exit Hamlet tugging in Polonius.
Enter King.
King: There's matter in these sighes.
These profound heaves
You must translate; Tis fit we understand them. Where is your sonne?
If the exit ofHamlet is obviously not the place requireing a break in the performance, where is such a break to be located? The first and second cts, as divided by Rowe, make distinct stages: the first conclude thebusiness of the Ghost with Hamlet's "O cursed spite,/That ever I was born to set it right!'. and the second with his soliloquy "o what a rogue and peasant slave am I!" But the third act seemed to pose Rowe with a problem, since the sequence of scenes set going by the performance of the play with in a play (III.ii) is so exceptionally long that he probably thought it disproportionate. But this sequence is at the same time so close knit that any interruption of it must obviously thwart Shakespeare's intentions. The play scene ends with the Queen's summons to Hamlet, announced by Polonius, and with Hamlet's soliloquy. "Tis now the very witching time of night"; the next (III iii) i the King's prayer scene, which is followed by Hamlet's nterview with his mother (III. iv). This scene continues with the King's appearance to the Queen (Rowe marked this IV. i), his discovery of Polonius' death, and his orders to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to find Hamlet. The following two scenes show Hamlet being fetched before the King and dispatched to England. The next brief sene (IV. iv) sees Fortinbras with his army on their way to Poland. In the Second Quarto , though not in the First Folio, Hamlet appears while Fortinbras and his army march away; he soliloquizes for the last time: 'How all occasions do inform against me." The next scene (IV. V) opens with the Queen, Horation, and a Gentleman. The Queen says, "i will not speak with her.' and Ophelia's mad scenes follow, with the return of Laertes into the action. It is surely plain, as Granville-Barker noticed, that the sequnce here allows only one interruption: that after IV. Iv, the scene of Fortinbras' appearance, and in the Second Quarto -- of Hamlet's Solioquy. If an interval is placed here, it admittedly makes the first part of Hamlet exceptionally long-- but there is no getting away from the mere length of Hamlet. The play must have been drastically cut, as it usually is in midern productions. But if it is acted through without interruption from I.i to Iv. iv (as it was in Peter Hall's production at Stratford-Upon Avon in 1965 and 1966), it comes across with unusual clarity.
The two parts of Hamlet formed by this division need to be compared if the expressive purposes behind Shakespeare's design are to be appreciated. If we ignore all the detail of circumstance and consider only the essential lines of action, then the first part of the play presents us with a sequence as follows. Hamlet accepts the Ghost's command to revenge him; the arrival of the players gives him an opportunity to act, and by the end of this first part (IV. iv) he has abandoned himself to a course of passionate action. But his sole concrete achievement is to have killed Polonius, an act which serves only to deliver himself into the King's hands, and he is dispatched to England. The second part of the play opens with a new situation, an ironical reversal of the first. Laertes is now the injured son, whose father has been murdered; Hamlet is now, from this pont of view , the murderer who must be put to death. Moreover Shakespeare has again made use of the device of 'structural rhyming': each of the play's two parts ends with Fortinbras. Fortin bras is mentioned early in the first scene (I.i. 95ff); Claudius' business with Norway concerning Fortinbras is twice introduced in succeeding scenes (I.ii. 27 ff. II.ii 58 ff.) but thereafter he is allowed to be forgotten until his first appearance on stage in the final moments of the first part of the play. Hamlet just misses meeting him, if we accept the Second Quarto's version; in the Folio Hamlet does not appear at all, but the very brief scene of Fortinbas' army passing over the stage is left to make its own quietly eloquent point. The effect is not unlike the quietly emphatic first appearance fo Octavius in IV.i of Julius Caesar. The second appearance of Fortinbras is at the very end of the play, pointedly matching his scene at the end of the first part-- and again Hamlet just misses him. In the context of this exceptionally full and copiously written play, Shakespeare's use of Fortinbras is notable for its economy and reticence.
Closer examination of Hamlet would show the differences in characterization, tone, mood, and so on between the two parts. All Hamlet's soliloquies occur before the interval; when he returns from his sea voyage (the observation is of course a commonplace) he is a changed man-- although what precisely constitues that change may not be agreed. An important character, Polonius has no part to play after the interal; and this too is a feature of some of the other histories and tragedies-- namely that an important character has his role confined to the first part of the play (e.g. Duke Humphery, Mercutio, Julius Caesar, Lear's Fool, and Cornwall, Banquo). This sometimes has the effect ofmaking thesecond part of the play seem less complex, lighter, or even thinner in texture. But more positively, it sometimes allows Shakespeare to narrow the emotional range with view to tragic effect: characters likeMercutio and Polonius , are among other things, a source of laughter; when they are dead, their respective plays are free to move with a more unrelieved gravity to the catastrophe.
