William Shakespeare Experience

All's Well...eventually.

2011-10-14T15:09:00.000-07:00

All's Wellies,

All's Well, even if it's a little late, eh?

All’s Well was a completely new play for me, as I have never seen it produced for the stage anywhere in Colorado, and I have faithfully been attending the Colorado Shakespeare Festival every year (except this one), and the Denver Center typically produces one Shakespeare offering every year. I, too, wonder why this play is not produced more often. There are some beautifully drawn, complex characters that would be entertaining indeed.

As always, I am curious and intrigued with Shakespeare’s depiction of his women. I am crazy about the Countess and her support of Helena. She asks that Helena speak honestly, and when Helena does, the Countess responds:

Why Helen, thou shalt have my leave and love,

Means and attendants, and my loving greetings

To those of mine in court. I’ll stay at home

And pray God’s blessing into thy attempt.

Be gone tomorrow; and be sure of this,

What I can help thee to, thou shalt not miss. (I.iii.253-258)

Perhaps the Countess reminds me of Constance in King John. Curiously, at this point in the play, we have not seen Bertram onstage, thus Helena doesn’t look foolish for loving him so, but I digress. When we do learn what an ass Bertram is, even his own mother supports Helena: “He was my son,/But I do wash his name out of my blood/And thou art all my child” (III.ii.68-70). The strength, integrity, and assertiveness of the women in this play make the roles of women a natural focus of study for my students.

Now, Helena. She perplexes me and I want to slap her for loving a cad like Bertram. But that aside, I adore her other qualities and applaud Shakespeare for creating a woman who is not only intelligent, but also resourceful, confident, and assertive. In fact, she strength eclipses that of Viola, who amidst her angst and yearning for Orsino, and the subsequent love triangle complications, submits to fate: “O time, thou must untangle this, not I./It is too hard a knot for me t'untie.” Helena informs us early on that she is a woman of action: “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,/Which we ascribe to heaven; the fated sky/Gives us free scope; only doth backward pull/Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull” (I.i.223-226). Helena is not about to sit at home and wait for Bertram’s return. We see her confidence in action when she asserts that she can cure the King, and later her resourcefulness as she uses Bertram’s lust for Diana to entrap him in the same substitute bride motif we see in Measure for Measure. Helena=really great character, but one who falls for one who is unworthy of her. Sure, she might be trying to marry above her station, but who is going to argue with the approval of the Countess and the King? I didn’t discover any evidence to suggest that anything but love is her motivation. Silly girl.

In the high school English classroom, I would ask students to make thematic connections between this and other plays. For example, the aforementioned substitute bride motif, the “bride is dead” deception a la Much Ado About Nothing and A Winter’s Tale. I would also have them attempt to categorize this play: comedy? problem play? We would look at characters and language, as well as the subplot. I, for one, find Parolles tedious, whereas the subplots in Twelfth Night are so rich indeed. In most comparisons, All’s Well pales in language, wit, and overall experience, but characters Helena and the Countess, at least for me, redeem it.

...that ends well,

Cindy

All's Well That Ends Well - On the Road

2011-06-16T13:31:00.000-07:00

Ernst writes:

I am sitting, early morning, in our Adirondack cabin, on the second beautiful day in a row.

I read the first act of All’s Well That Ends Well last night. I know I skim-read it once, but I am now looking at it with very different eyes. I am also reading it in our Rockwell Kent-illustrated edition (Cambridge version c. 1936) filled with statuesque figures of various characters in a sort of Roosevelt-era style (think: Rockefeller Center). Rockwell Kent lived in the Adirondacks, and some of his paintings with their geometric shapings and use of northern light are terrific.

What a pastiche of strange bits and pieces. Why did Shakespeare write it and when? (intentional fallacy, but Harold Bloom reminds us that such terms are dead). Was it a hurry-up job? Was it an earlier play re-written? Is it in any way satirical?

Some things I noticed:

The play opens in prose—spoken by characters who would normally speak in blank verse.
Helena’s “I do affect a sorrow, indeed, but I have it too” calls to mind Hamlet’s distinction between shows of sorrow and real sorrow.
The Countess’s advice (“Love all, trust a few’) is clearly a variant on Polonius’s famous “advice’ (how frequently one used to see Polonius’ words published on school bulletin boards as the right way to behave).
I don’t know what to make of Helena’s initial, somewhat over-the-top description of her love for Bertram. Parts of it sound a bit artificial to me, although her description of Parolles as one of St. Bertram’s “reliques” is very clever. (“Parolles” means “words” in—is it?—Italian—related to our word, ”palaver”?).
The discussion beginning around I.i.107 (my book has no line numbers in the text) has, I believe, been called a “blot,” and is frequently left out of productions.It is certainly a strange bit, with its frank discussion of bodily sex, but it seems excessive. Just before it, Helena has told us that Parolles is a man of “superficial folly” and then proceeds to engage him in a lengthy dialogue that makes that point clear. It might be the sort of banter that goes on between Viola and Feste, except it is hard to see Parolles as a Feste-like figure (for me, at least). Did Shakespeare owe Robert Armin a favor? (That is if Armin took this role and not that of the Clown)
End of I.i. Helena’s final monologue is rich, vaguely reminiscent of Edmund’s view of his father’s beliefs in cosmic fate in “Lear.” (Sonnet 15: “cheered and checked by that self-same sky.”
There are, again, some rather rich musings on death and courtiers (a favorite Shakespeare concern) in Scene ii.

This is good stuff, but does its seriousness work--especially early on in a comedy?

There’s more, but we want to get out into this beautiful day before driving back down to Kingston.

Ernst

The Henry Explications - Part M

2011-06-09T13:00:00.000-07:00

The following is one in a series of mini-articles resulting from an exercise I had my St. Paul Academy 2011 Shakespeare students complete. The articles focus on selected speeches spanning Shakespeare’s Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V.

KING HENRY V
Upon the king! let us our lives, our souls,
Our debts, our careful wives,
Our children and our sins lay on the king!
We must bear all.
... What infinite heart's-ease
Must kings neglect, that private men enjoy!
And what have kings, that privates have not too,
Save ceremony, save general ceremony?
And what art thou, thou idle ceremony?
What kind of god art thou, that suffer'st more
Of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers?
What are thy rents? what are thy comings in?
O ceremony, show me but thy worth!
What is thy soul of adoration?
Art thou aught else but place, degree and form,
Creating awe and fear in other men?
Wherein thou art less happy being fear'd
Than they in fearing.
What drink'st thou oft, instead of homage sweet,
But poison'd flattery? O, be sick, great greatness,
And bid thy ceremony give thee cure!
Think'st thou the fiery fever will go out
With titles blown from adulation?
Will it give place to flexure and low bending?
Canst thou, when thou command'st the beggar's knee,
Command the health of it? No, thou proud dream,
That play'st so subtly with a king's repose;
I am a king that find thee, and I know
'Tis not the balm, the sceptre and the ball,
The sword, the mace, the crown imperial,
The intertissued robe of gold and pearl,
The farced title running 'fore the king,
The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp
That beats upon the high shore of this world,
No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony,
Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave,
Who with a body fill'd and vacant mind
Gets him to rest, cramm'd with distressful bread;
Never sees horrid night, the child of hell,
But, like a lackey, from the rise to set
Sweats in the eye of Phoebus and all night
Sleeps in Elysium.

(Henry V 4.1.230-274)

In this soliloquy, the fact that it is Henry V speaking changes the mood of the passage, especially when he says, “Upon the King! let us our lives, our souls/Our debts, our careful wives/Our children, and our sins lay on the King!/We must bear all.” Because the King says this, it can be inferred that he is saying it with a somewhat ironic tone. He appears to be overwhelmed with his duties and laments his people thinking they should lay all of their burdens upon him. As the King, he has personal knowledge and experience with what he goes on to talk about and he uses sleep to show how his duties affect him: he is so tired by night that he doesn’t wake at all in the night.

The speech is perhaps motivated by Henry’s recently becoming King and becoming overwhelmed with all his duties. He is obviously in despair over the fact that he is no different from anyone else except for the ceremonies he has that come with the title of King, yet he has the burdens of his people thrust upon him. He mentions that he sleeps as well as a starving, exhausted slave due to all the work he must do as King. The novelty of being named King may have worn off at this point, and now the King just laments all the work he has to do and explains how he feels that all his citizens put all their needs in his hands.

He mentions all the perks people generally think that kings get, such as his "imperial crown" and gold and pearl "intertissued robe," and says that this is all just ceremony and that there are no real benefits. He uses this speech to complain about the position he has been given, even comparing himself to a slave. His use of mythology in the speech, mentioning Phoebus and Elysium, show that he is well educated but more importantly show the feeling that although King Henry V does not think the king gets any benefits, he does see that kings do have power and honor associated with their names. Perhaps this shows that his disapproval of the role of King is fleeting in the chaos of his first months on the throne, or that it does not truthfully represent what he believes. By implying that at night he sleeps in Elysium, King Henry V says that he is honorable. Either he believes this honor stems from his role of King, or from the work he has to do in supporting his people, although his earlier statements discount both of these ideas when he says that he is just like a commoner.

The King is still young at this point, so he probably does not know exactly what he believes and is impulsive in his thoughts and actions.

Rachel Kinney (SPA '12)

The Henry Explications - Part L

2011-06-07T13:00:00.000-07:00

The following is one in a series of mini-articles resulting from an exercise I had my St. Paul Academy 2011 Shakespeare students complete. The articles focus on selected speeches spanning Shakespeare’s Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V.

MICHAEL WILLIAMS
But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs, and arms, and heads, chopp'd off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all, "We died at such a place" -- some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it.

(Henry V 4.1.134-145)

Williams' speech, in Henry V, illustrates both the violent nature of war and the human cost of honor. Williams outright states, "If the cause be not good, then the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make." The issue of tactics and strategy -- good or bad -- in the fighting does not come up. Rather, the issue stands on whether or not the reason for fighting was at all sound. It brings to mind the Chinese idea of the Mandate of Heaven, or the divine right of kingship. The king remains in the right only if the heavenly powers favor him.

However, in the case of 1 Henry IV, honor comes into play where divine favor might have in another story. Is the king right in taking his cause to the battlefield? If he is not, then his soldiers will have died in vain and the king will have to pay "a heavy reckoning," making everything right again in the eyes of heaven and his troops alike.

Williams also uses the image of severed body parts -- arms, legs, and heads -- all crying out that they were killed, but not the wounded soldiers themselves. In death, the common soldiers are reduced to the sum of their injuries -- their body parts. No longer alive, they become meat in the eyes of the survivors and the king. The parts shall "join together at a later day" to state the way they died and what they left behind. And if it is an unjust way to die, then they will haunt the king. Unjust deaths tend to do that in Shakespeare. Consider Hamlet and Macbeth. The ghosts of unjustly killed men tend to stick around and taunt those responsible, or give advice to those who can arrange the downfall of the responsible party.

"I am afeard that there are few die well that die in battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument?" Williams asks, exposing the realistic side to the play's romantic notion of fighting. Though a common soldier himself, Williams does a bit of philosophical musing over whether or not the soldiers who died in the fighting actually died a "good" -- or just -- death, for they have little to bargain with when heaven comes rolling around, only blood, both theirs and some belonging to others spilled by their hands. Their "argument" is their ticket into heaven and while a loyal soldier may be willing to go downstairs for the sake of fighting for his king's good cause -- murder being against the Ten Commandments and what not -- the same cannot be said if the king's cause is not just. No one wants to be told that they fought for a bad cause. Soldiers cannot "charitably dispose of anything" with their hands so dirtied. They cannot say they are innocent upon reaching the afterlife, whatever form it happens to take. The dead ones had families, wives and children in some cases, and those survivors will be left alone. Hopefully it was for a good cause.

The last part of the speech wraps up and reinforces the message nicely: "Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it." Williams' speech is not confusing. The meaning does not disguise itself with fancy language, only violent imagery, perhaps a testimony to Williams' standing as a common soldier and not a member of the nobility as Hal is.

Emma Johnson-Rivard (SPA '11)

The Henry Explications - Part K

2011-06-05T13:00:00.000-07:00

(2 Henry IV 5.5.47-65)

Ah, divorce. Medieval style. Is Henry V's restraining order against Falstaff the first instance of the proverbial "ten-foot pole" concept? Ten miles is significant. If you have Google Earth, and you type in "London, England" you'll notice the city's current sprawling urban density goes on for miles and miles. To keep out of Henry's way today, Falstaff could just pick up and move to East Ham, where there is sure to be a sufficient number of pubs for him to satisfy his craving for a capon and a small beer. But in the 15th century, Falstaff's ten-mile punishment means complete expulsion from London, for the city is barely two miles in diameter (click on the historical map above). If London is heaven, Falstaff has been tossed out.

I think the religious imagery here is intriguing. It feels like Hal has a bit of anxiety about his transition from bad boy to good king, so he evokes God's omniscience to corroborate his transformation. The people may be skeptical, but God knows. Falstaff (along with Poins and Bardolph), on the other hand, is a "misleader" and "tutor" of dissolute behavior, which sounds distinctly fiend-like. Thus, Henry V's banishment of him is like God's expulsion of the rebel angels:

"And the great dragon, that old serpent, called the devil and Satan, was cast out, which deceiveth all the world; he was even cast into the earth, and his Angels were cast out with him" (Revelation 12.9).

Notice the neat connection between "old serpent" and Hal's double taunt ("old man," "so old") regarding Falstaff's age. To take this one step further, Falstaff's banishment, by analogy, elevates King Henry into the place of God. His decree, then, further establishes the divine right of his rule.

Randall

All's Well That Ends Well - Against Coleridge

2011-06-04T01:12:00.000-07:00

Well-wishers,

While we’re ruminating on All’s Well That Ends Well, and Gil’s comments, I thought I’d invite a “literary light” into the discussion: Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In one of his briefer table talk pieces, Coleridge takes Bertram’s side, explaining that Bertram is not an intolerable jerk because he has every reason to be disgruntled with an arrangement that finds him forced to marry a woman he has previously considered only a friend. Coleridge calls the king’s decree “tyrannical.” Of “Helena,” he opines the following:

“Indeed, it must be confessed that her character is not very delicate, and it required all Shakespeare’s consummate skill to interest us for her; and he does this chiefly by the operation of the other characters,–the Countess, Lafeu, etc. We get to like Helena from their praising and commending her so much” (Hawkes 254).

Really? That’s a pretty odd argument, that we only engage with a character because others are there to prompt us. Let’s take a couple scenes where this is demonstrably not possible: Act 1 scene 1 and Act 3 scene 2. Those are the scenes in which we find Helen’s soliloquies. Often, soliloquies define what is compelling about a character – Iago’s gleeful villainy (“And what’s he, then, that says I play the villain, when this advice is free I give and honest”); Hamlet’s incapacitating grapple with suicide and despair (“O that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter”); Hal’s lawyerly crash course in Medieval public relations (“If all the year were playing holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work, but when the seldom come, they wished-for come, and nothing pleaseth but rare accidents”); Juliet’s crisis of confidence regarding the reliability of those who would protect her (“What if it be a poison which the Friar hath subtly ministered to have me dead, lest in this marriage he should be dishonored because he married me before to Romeo?”). And soliloquies establish this character while he/she is alone on the stage.

Do Helen’s soliloquies reveal a depth of character? Here’s the first:

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie
Which we ascribe to heaven. The fated sky
Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.
What power is it which mounts my love so high,
That makes me see, and cannot feed mine eye?
The mightiest space in fortune nature brings
To join like likes and kiss like native things.
Impossible be strange attempts to those
That weigh their pains in sense and do suppose
What hath been cannot be. Who ever strove
To show her merit that did miss her love? (1.1.222-233)

There’s a sexist tang to Coleridge’s assessment, as if the concerns of women (love and matrimony) do not carry the weight of men’s. Yet here we find concerns about fate, free will, and the restrictive boundaries of social class. And parsed in couplets, too. If her thoughts lack gravitas, what do we make of the first lines’ similarity to Cassius’s comment in Julius Caesar?

Men at some time are masters of their fate.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But ourselves, that we are underlings. (1.2.146-148)

Helen’s ambition is to marry above her station; Cassius’s is to assassinate a Roman leader. Both challenge socio-political order. And isn’t that what we find most compelling about Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines? Their fearlessness in confronting the cosmos and seeking to reorder it? Her comment, “Impossible be strange attempts to those that weigh their pains in sorrow and do suppose what hath been cannot be,” shows just how far she’s willing to beyond the established order of things. Her quest will be “strange,” out of the ordinary, uncommon, remarkable, the kind of thing others have failed at because they lacked imagination or were defeatist – a hero’s vision. Her final question, it seems to me, is rhetorical, not plaintive. She’s saying “if I strive, I will succeed” – a hero’s stance.

I’ll save a close reading of the second soliloquy for another time.

Randall

The Henry Explications - Part J

2011-06-03T13:00:00.000-07:00

(2 Henry IV 5.2.102-121)

Shakespeare begins this passage with a play on words. "Justice" can be a judge (he's speaking to the Chief Justice), but it can also mean "fair" or "right," ideas symbolized by "the balance and the sword." In a way, we can see Hal find balance, or rightness, in his own life by the end of 2 Henry IV. This passage shows his transformation since "Part 1." In the first play, he is very laid back, lazy, unready to be king, and scheming to manage his image and create an insincere metamorphosis. Here, he shows himself to be the true self he projects in "Part 1." He has emerged as a very honorable man, one who has matured and is ready for the responsibility of being king.

Shakespeare emphasizes this transformation and maturity with his use of imagery that evokes fatherhood and the implication that King Henry IV's influence on Hal has been significant. In the first play we see his struggle to maintain (or regain) his father's approval in his declaration: "I shall hereafter, my thrice gracious lord, be more myself" (1Henry IV, 3.2). In 2 Henry IV, Hal's true "self" has emerged. He mentions to the Chief Justice that he hopes the Justice will be able to see Hal's sons "offend you and obey you, as I did." This shows Hal taking on his father's role, as he is trying to act and discipline people how his father would have, with fairness. In addition, he is arriving at the balance between his youthful behavior (which he understands definitely influenced who he is now) and his future responsibility. He expects no special treatment for his son, but he also acknowledges that youthful rebelliousness is part of the equation.

Calvin Va Her (SPA '12)

All's Well That Ends Well, I Hope

2011-06-02T16:09:00.001-07:00

Gil writes:

The Will Shakespeare Experience seems to have choked on The Merry Wives of Windsor, and I am not confident that All’s Well That Ends Well will succeed as a Heimlich maneuver (there’s an analogy that gets out of control).

My own history with the play is minimal, though I may have been prejudiced against it very early in my 60 years of association with Shakespeare. Once upon a time elementary-school Gilbert saw an evening of excerpts from Taming of the Shrew and Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by either Eva Le Gallienne or Margaret Webster, both of whom toured the US at the time, when I was in grade school, but the only image I’ve kept was being allowed to move to the front row at intermission where I was fascinated to see the detail of Puck’s makeup. My first full production was a Tempest when I was in junior high (again, either Webster or Le Gallienne), and from that I remember the scenery, a backdrop of the tempest on a giant roller so the storm sped by as the sailors tilted back and forth to simulate being rocked by waves. Caliban wore a tortoise shell.

It wasn’t until I was in England in high school, and I saw Peggy Ashcroft and Leo McKern in Twelfth Night at the Old Vic that I was hooked for life. Soon thereafter was a Love’s Labour’s Lost with Michael Redgrave (in Newcastle, for some reason), and then acting in my own high-school productions of Henry V—want me to recite the “Upon the King…” speech for you? And since, I have spent many more than a hundred nights (and days during all those summer Shakespeare festivals) in the theatre, read the plays close to a hundred times, and taught at least eighteen.

So where in all that is All’s Well That Ends Well? Well (that didn’t end well), I’ve seen it only once, in Ashland, Oregon, on my honeymoon in 1961, forty-nine years, eleven months ago. What was most memorable about it? It finished last among Midsummer Night's Dream, 1 Henry IV, Hamlet with Richard Russo, and The Alchemist. Honeymoonwise, I remember tubing on the Rogue River, being amused by the Oregon Vortex (“center of mystery”), and splurging on chateaubriand for two in the Mark Antony Hotel. And I vividly remember the young woman I was with, the focus of so many memories for the last 49 11/12 years.

But I’m stalling. Of All’s Well my indelible memory is what an unpleasant play I witnessed, and that was concentrated on what an intolerable jerk Bertram is. He is callow from the start, stiffs the admirable and beautiful Helena (played by Elizabeth Huddle who later was director of the Intiman Theatre in Seattle ) in the complication phase of the plot, and yet when reconciliation and resolve might be anticipated by conventions of comedy, he is still the same, or worse, egocentric pig. To a honeymooner, a play about how grim marriage must be, even at its beginnings, is not promising.

So we left Ashland and went to the Oregon Caves—“see how this single match can illuminate this entire cavern; that illustrates one candle-power.” Bertram was played by a young Nagle Jackson, who has since flourished as a director, including six shows at Ashland (I saw his Pericles in 1967), and playwright (I’ve seen The Quick Change Room, This Day and Age, and Taking Leave). He was guest director at Carleton in 2002, where he directed his own The Elevation of Thieves (he and prof Frank Morral were classmates at Whitman College). He must have given a memorable performance or it wouldn’t be so indelible. I confess that when an actor is so good as a creep that I despise him, I later don’t want to see that actor again anywhere (Jason Alexander after Pretty Woman or Michael Gambon after The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover; I know it’s foolish to penalize excellence, but there you are). I didn’t hold Bertram against Jackson, because he also played a definitive Face in The Alchemist as well as bits as Westmoreland and the Player King, but I seem to have dismissed All’s Well forever.

For a graduate course in Shakespearean Comedy, we read nineteen plays—Comedies, Romances, and both Henry IV’s—the final was a take-home (“You have just read a book with nineteen chapters; now write the twentieth chapter”)—and I see that I have no marginal notes for All’s Well at all. (Ernst, don’t tell Bill Matchett that I didn’t read it.)

Reading it this week, it was hard to resist being frivolous:

the Countess sends Bertram to court with parental advice: “Love all, trust a few, Do wrong to none,” Polonius to Laertes again, and we know how that worked out;
Parolles first described as “you go so much backward when you fight,” a miles gloriousus, but he will never come up to Falstaff’s example;
Helena, having miraculously resurrected the King wins her reward: Enter three or four Lords. “Fair maid, send forth thine eye. This youthful parcel/ Of noble bachelors stand at my bestowing,” so for background, you’re going to make me watch The Bachelorette?!? Not to say that Helena journeys on a quest to the King, cure him or die, but if she succeeds she gets to marry the prince, the old fairy tale [but in this case it’s Bertram who wants to marry the King; I said it was as fairy tale—just kidding!!!!]
Parolles is hooded by a disguised band of strangers (the French Lords) and they speak to him in tongues: “Boskos vauvado…Oscorbidulchos volivorco…Throca movousus, cargo, cargo, cargo.” And I don’t even know where my Klingon dictionary is.
And the unnamed 1 Lord and 2 Lord are at last named in act IV: Capt. Dumaine and Capt. Dumaine, that is my brother Daryl and my other brother Daryl.

OK, you can see my skepticism. But now The Will Shakespeare Experience has been challenged by Randall to redeem All’s Well from the abyss. Mirabilis dictu (that’s Klingon for “oh, wow!), I think we might. I am reading with the attention of a man two generations older than the one who dismissed the play at Ashland in 1961 and am willing to take up the challenge of structure and genre. This is a comedy, “problem” or not, and I’d like to trace that motion of comedy which celebrates change, the younger generation supplanting the older one.

I’d like to listen to Cindy and Mike (and Randall) on what might resonate with contemporary students—something beyond Bachelorette and the Klingons, I hope. And I’d like, not alone, to take on Ellen Terry and account for my Helena. May my second fifty years rise above the prejudice of the first.

Gilbert

The Henry Explications - Part I

2011-05-30T13:00:00.000-07:00

(2 Henry IV 5.2.44-61)

Through the new king Henry V's speech to his brothers (John of Lancaster, Thomas of Clarence, and Humphrey of Gloucester) after their father's death, Shakespeare deals with the realities of succession — that difficult negotiation between governmental stability and chaotic power struggle — and the death of a king while keeping his character true to his personality. This speech touches on everything from propriety and external perception, to the fear that naturally comes in a shift of power, to different kinds of mourning.

Mourning, whether for a king or commoner, can also be a difficult balancing act. Tradition requires particular rituals and outward displays, while the loss itself exacts things, even less predictably. Hal, newly King Henry V, must take his place as king and reassure everyone of the continuing stability of the regency, demonstrate a proper degree of public mourning as both a subject of and the son of the former king, and deal with his own grief. Thus, when he says "this new and gorgeous garment, majesty, sits not so easily on me as you think," he is not merely trying to dispel any jealousy or thought of opposition amongst his brothers, but telling the absolute truth.

As he does with the epitaphs of both Hotspur and Falstaff in the previous play, Hal continues to use honesty in order to lend a more genuine tone to his otherwise fairly ceremonial words. He reassures them of his intention to support them by bluntly telling them that he knows they fear what he may do (implying even that they might fear for their own lives), but that it "is the English, not the Turkish court, not Amurath an Amurath succeeds, but Harry Harry." He introduces and dispels comparison between himself and a ruler who literally strangled his brothers, thus addressing the most extreme of possibilities quickly.

By the end, he assures them that not only will he not harm them, he will protect them and do well by them: "I'll be your father and your brother too. Let me but bear your love; I'll bear your cares." In that, he furthermore introduces the potentially uncomfortable issue of personal relationships. Once their brother, he is now also their king; once his brothers, they are now his subjects. He works with this beautifully, referring to their mourning and sadness for the death of their father as "a joint burden laid upon [them] all" before he moves on to the things he himself promises, thus connecting himself with them in one way even as he has to separate himself from them in another.

Gavi Levy Haskell (SPA '11)

All's Well That Ends Well - Opening Thoughts

2011-05-29T21:28:00.000-07:00

Shakespeareans,

I mentioned earlier that I’ve had the chance to see All’s Well That Ends Well twice in the last year, the only times I’ve seen the play produced in 34 years of Shakespeare-going. Having now read the play, I don’t understand why it’s not produced more frequently. The characters are distinctly drawn, the play has a clever fairy tale-like quality, the plot addresses a moral question seriously, the humor is accessible to a modern audience, and our heroine, I think, holds her own against Rosaline and Viola. She’s resourceful, intelligent, devout, and interestingly the only one of the three who need not disguise herself as a guy to successfully complete her quest. Sure, Bertram is a scoundrel. And his lying to the King at the end of the play is cowardly, but it’s not really the problem that critics who label All’s Well a “problem play” make it out to be, depending on how you set up the characters and themes in production.

So that’s my first question. And I address it to Stu and Doug, particularly – Why isn’t All’s Well That Ends Well a more regular part of the Shakespeare comedy rotation? Last year, Stu’s company performed A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the sixth time in its 35-year history. But in all that time Shakespeare and Company has staged All’s Well only once. Doug’s company, Great River Shakespeare Festival, still in its first decade, has not yet produced it. So, theater people, when you’re selecting plays for the upcoming season and someone says “How about All’s Well,” what tends to be the response? And what are the real criteria for any decision?

Second, for those of you interested in structure and genre, a question about what this play is. Despite its perfection, Twelfth Night is not the last comedy Shakespeare writes (probably). Does a play like All’s Well represent a further development in his concept of comedy, or is it (and the other “problem comedies”) something altogether different?

Third, I’m just now wrapping up a semester of Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, 1 Henry IV, Othello, Twelfth Night, and Measure for Measure), pretty happy with the selection of plays and their success with students. For you high school teachers – Cindy and Mike – if you taught All’s Well what aspect of the play do you think would resonate with your students the most?

Fourth, has anyone seen a production of this play? What was most memorable about it?

Fifth, actress Ellen Terry is supposed to have called Helen a “doormat.” Is she?

And finally, Ernst, here’s one for you: You noted a while back that Elizabethan youth found it hip to be melancholy, to dress all in black and mope around, probably to tick off their parents, and we see this culture reflected in Hamlet. I’m wondering if characters like Lucio in Measure for Measure, who is listed as a “fantastique,” and Parolles in All’s Well, with his gaudy and unapologetic clothing, are also a “type”? Are these satirical characters? Or just fops?

All’s well that starts well,
Randall

The Henry Explications - Part H

2011-05-28T13:00:00.000-07:00

The following is one in a series of mini-articles resulting from an exercise I had my St. Paul Academy 2011 Shakespeare students complete. The articles focus on selected speeches spanning Shakespeare’s Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V.

(Hal has tried on his dying father's crown when his dad comes to and scolds him.)

HAL
I never thought to hear you speak again.
KING HENRY
Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought:
I stayed too long by thee, I weary thee.
Dost thou so hunger for mine empty chair
That thou wilt needs invest thee with my honors
Before thy hour be ripe? O foolish youth,
Thou seek'st the greatness that will overwhelm thee.

(2 Henry IV 4.5.91-97)

Hal's action, trying on his father's crown, tells us he is impulsive, anxious to become king. and without the respect or sense of propriety that he claims to possess. Hal seemingly cannot wait for his father to die to put on the crown, although his father's catching him would result in shame and hurt feelings, and clearly treasures the crown as a sign of kingdom, although it is only a symbol.

While his desire to take on the power that he rejected throughout 1 Henry IV shows that he has changed and grown into his title of prince, his actions are still juvenile, like those of any son trying on his father's clothes in an attempt to be more like him. Hal shows some kingly feelings, but lacks the sense of what is socially acceptable and what is honorable that his father so desires to see in him.

The king, when he wakes and sees his crown on Hal's head, is disappointed and angry. Hal does not acknowledge that he has committed a transgression and instead attempts to calm the situation by saying "I never thought to hear you speak again," an ambiguous sentence that could show his caring for the king and his gladness at his father's recovery, but one that could also simply mean that Hal thought his father unable to recover, certifying his ascension into the role of king.

His father takes the latter view of this statement, despite Hal's previously voiced good intentions, and accuses him of wishing for his death: "Thy wish was father, Harry, to thy thought." Not only does this accusation communicate his belief in Hal's ambition, it also puns on the word "father." As Hal would prematurely step into his father's role, so are his wishes usurpatious. And those wishes, in turn, sire rebellious thoughts, much as Henry fears he has sired a rebellious son.

Despite his harsh attitude toward Hal's indiscretion, the king also still cares for him. While he speaks of the king's role as something that Hal cannot fill, he does this seemingly out of fear for Hal's happiness and health, saying that Hal is looking to take it on "before [his] hour be ripe" and that Hal will inevitably become overwhelmed by the duties involved.

The passage as a whole highlights the reemergence of the differences in outlook between the king and Hal that seemed to be resolved in 1 Henry IV. The king's language indicates a reverence for kingship; he speaks of kinghood as something honorable, majestic, and incredibly powerful, in an almost spiritual way. Hal, by his previous actions and current action, does not seem to feel this same reverence. Instead, as we see in his reaction to King Henry's "recovery," he is unrepentant and does not acknowledge that he has done anything wrong, yet another sign that he does not yet possess the necessary maturity and consideration that his father expects. And King Henry's disappointment in Hal is amplified by his realization that he is entirely powerless to change him.

Hannah Lutz (SPA '11)

The Henry Explications - Part G

2011-05-26T13:00:00.000-07:00

The following is one in a series of mini-articles resulted from an exercise I had my St. Paul Academy 2011 Shakespeare students complete. The articles focus on selected speeches spanning Shakespeare’s Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V.

HAL
What, old acquaintance, could not all this flesh
Keep in a little life? Poor Jack, farewell.
I could have better spared a better man.
O, I should have a heavy miss of thee
If I were much in love with vanity.
Death hath not struck so fat a deer today,
Though many dearer in this bloody fray.
Emboweled will I see thee by and by;
Till then in blood by noble Percy lie.

(1 Henry IV 5.4.104-112)

Since Prince Hal believes that he is completely alone with the body of an old acquaintance, Falstaff, his small monologue is almost a soliloquy. It is addressed to Falstaff, but since Falstaff is “dead,” it’s much more for the benefit of the audience/himself in intention.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the passage is the dramatic irony. In some ways, Hal is forgiving Falstaff for all of his cowardice by confessing that he cares for him and will mourn his passing. It’s an interesting commentary on how much more fondly we remember the dead than we appreciate the living. But it’s not just because he’s dead. Falstaff becomes more worthy of Hal’s forgiveness because Hal assumes that Falstaff has done the honorable thing and died defending the monarchy. But the audience knows that Falstaff is just pretending to be dead to save his own hide, an act of cowardice so complete that (the new) Hal would probably never forgive him for it. It completely tints the audience’s perception of Hal’s speech.

At the same time, Hal isn’t forgiving all of Falstaff’s faults, even if he does think he’s dead. In fact, he seems to switch back and forth between insulting and complimenting Falstaff, revealing that Prince Hal really does have one foot on the throne and the other on the table of a bar. He begins by calling Falstaff an acquaintance. Not a love, not a friend, but an acquaintance. His next sentence is a fat joke, as usual. But after that, the tone get’s a bit more serious. “Poor Jack, farewell,” says Hal, “I could have better spared a better man.” This is the most important line. In this line, Hal comes to realize (or has he realized it all along? It’s hard to tell with him) that he knows there are many men better, more honorable, more true than Falstaff. And yet he wishes that one of them could have died, that Falstaff could have lived. This suggests that there is something lasting and loving about Hals feelings for Falstaff.

His next line basically expresses the amount he would have missed Falstaff (heavy; another fat joke) if Hal were still the man he used to be (a man of frivolity). He then compares Falstaff to a Deer (an animal? A fat animal? A dumb animal? A sweet and defenseless animal? I’m still not sure) and again states that many who were more valuable than Falstaff died today. But he’s talking to Falstaff’s body, not to those other bodies. He knows, intellectually, that Falstaff’s life is not as valuable as others, but emotionally, Falstaff’s death hits him hard.

In his final line, Hal lays the body (drags the body? Doesn’t move it at all?) near Percy and says “Till then [your funeral], in blood by noble Percy lie.” The added bit about “in blood” implies that Falstaff wouldn’t be good enough to lie next to Percy in, say, honor, but he is good enough to lie next to him in blood. Or maybe it’s just an appropriate expression considering that there’s probably blood everywhere.

Nadja Milena (SPA '11)

The Henry Explications - Part F

2011-05-24T13:00:00.000-07:00

(1 Henry IV 5.4.48-50)

Redemption emerges as a prominent theme in 1 Henry IV. In these student explication passages alone we've seen it three times -- when Hal says "I'll so offend to make offense a skill,/ Redeeming time when men think least I will"; when he says "God forgive them that so much have swayed/ Your Majesty's good thoughts away from me./ I will redeem all this on Percy's head"; and in the passage above, where King Henry brings closure to the promise Hal makes in the first citation. In addition Hotspur uses the image twice, both times in reference to honor regained.

In fact, one could read all six of the play's redemption metaphors fairly secularly. People redeem, in the sense that they recover something or fulfill some obligation, time and honor and lost reputation, and we can leave it at that. But redemption is a big word, and we must ask: what religious implications are present?

So, because I'm pretty uninformed when it comes to religious imagery, I sent my friend Jim Bofenkamp (who teaches a Shakespeare and the Bible class) a note, asking for a quick run down on redemption in the Bible. His rejoinder was that it would take most of a lifetime to answer the question. The Bible, he wrote, from Genesis to Revelations "covers the story of our redemption by the second Adam (Jesus Christ) because of what the first Adam did at the very beginning." This is significant because some clear parallels suggest that we can read Richard, King Henry, and Hal allegorically.

In fact, a number of critics, including Steven Marx and Marjorie Garber, have already done so. Garber, in Shakespeare After All, spreads the net wide. "Much of the imagery in Richard II," she writes, "was concerned with England as a little Eden, a 'demi-paradise,' and with Richard as a kind of Adam and a kind of Christ, suffering what his queen called 'a second fall of cursed man.' By the beginning of 1 Henry IV the tide of public opinion has already reversed itself. Richard's loss is mourned, and Bolingbroke, now King Henry IV, is the villain. Even Hotspur, who with his father Northumberland, swore allegiance to Bolingbroke's cause, now expresses fury at the fact that the usurpers chose to 'put down Richard, that sweet lovely rose, / And plant this thorn, this canker, Bolingbroke.' This is post-fall language ... Yet like most falls in English literature, this will turn out to be a fortunate fall, because after the fall of Adam, as Shakespeare's Christian audience would have believed, came the redemption through Christ, and after the fall of Richard will come the redemption of Prince Hal" (314-315).

Marx too, in his Shakespeare and the Bible, sees broader implications in the play's redemption imagery, citing "the perennial tendency of the British to identify themselves with the Israelites" and noting that "Shakespeare's sources, Holinshed and Halle, modelled English history on the Bible's providential pattern" (41).

In the passage above then, we can prepare to look beyond the mere redemption of Hal's reputation in King Henry's eyes and read it as the conclusion to Hal's own goal, stated in the first act, to redeem "time" (1.2.224). The Folger edition of the play indicates that this line alludes to Ephesians 5:15-16, Paul's admonition to "Take heed therefore that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, for the days are evil" (Geneva Bible). (A note: I almost missed this by checking first in my Revised Standard Version Bible, which does not have the "redeeming the time" phrase; let's hear it for contemporary sources!)

Hal, then, is promising to make amends for his bad behavior, later. King Henry's comment tells us he has. But, to my mind, nowhere do I find Hal portrayed as a Christ figure in this play. Yes, one may argue that the fall of man is reflected in the Richard/Bolingbroke story, and that the civil wars Henry laments at the beginning of the play reveal mankind in a state of sin, and that Henry himself uses language that suggests he will receive God's vengeance, personified by Hal:

He'll breed revengement and a scourge for me.
But thou dost in thy passages of life
Make me believe that thou art only marked
For the hot vengeance and the rod of heaven
To punish my mistreadings. (3.2.8-12)

But Hal's redemption is particularly personal, reinforced by King Henry's use of the pronoun "thy." And if we take the Ephesians allusion at face value, then Hal parallels the object of Paul's letter, not Christ but the followers of Christ, those who would walk a more righteous path. In Garber's summary, the pronouns expose the distinction: it's "redemption through Christ," but "redemption of Hal" (emphasis mine).

The text is clearly available to scriptural interpretation -- one might look at the fact that Hal has "rescued," or saved, his sinning father -- and so the conversation is opened here for a discussion of the Biblical reading of Shakespeare's tetralogy (that's an invitation). A reading of these three lines, however, on their own or even extended to include the other redemption images, does not, I think, bring us all the way to Hal as Christ figure.

Randall

The Henry Explications - Part E

2011-05-22T13:00:00.000-07:00

The following is one in a series of mini-articles resulted from an exercise I had my St. Paul Academy 2011 Shakespeare students complete. The articles focus on selected speeches spanning Shakespeare’s Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V.

PRINCE HENRY
Do not think so. You shall not find it so.
And God forgive them that so much have sway'd
Your majesty's good thoughts away from me.
I will redeem all this on Percy's head,
And, in the closing of some glorious day,
Be bold to tell you that I am your son.

(1 Henry IV 3.2.134-139

This passage is an example of the changing relationship between Hal and his father. Hal is motivated by lies that have been told to the king in order to attempt to change his view of his son. He tries, in this passage, to adjust the king's opinion and express his anger about the lies that have been told. The language of Hal’s speech is generally forceful, the boldest parts being: “all this on Percy’s head” and “Be bold to tell you that I am your son.”

This language reveals an aspect of Hal’s character we have seen little of in the first few acts or the play (or in the latter act of Richard II). Up to this point, we've seen Hal in a bar with Falstaff slacking off and avoiding responsibilities; however here Shakespeare reveals Hal's inner strength that one would not necessarily guess was there. Hal seems on the verge of making his "I know you all" speech a reality. In addition, Hal's request that "God forgive" those who have lied about him suggests a certain piousness we haven't seen in the Boar's Head scenes, a devout aspect to his identity not unlike King Henry's.

Ben Palmer (SPA '12)

The Henry Explications - Part D

2011-05-20T13:00:00.000-07:00

The following is one in a series of mini-articles resulted from an exercise I had my St. Paul Academy 2011 Shakespeare students complete. The articles focus on selected speeches spanning Shakespeare’s Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V.

HAL
I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humor of your idleness.
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder'd at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him ...
So, when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men's hopes;
And, like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering o'er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I'll so offend, to make offense a skill,
Redeeming time when men think least I will.

(1 Henry IV 1.2.202-210, 215-224)

I am surprised at my students' general animosity toward Hal in this speech. They find him dishonest and manipulative and vain, and ignore the irony of disregarding Hal's more lofty goals because he's not being straightforward with his loutish pub friends. They expect honor, as it were, among thieves. How dare he refer to the guys he hangs out with as "base contagious clouds"!

I wonder, how can they not recognize the favorite children's allegory of "the ugly duckling" in Hal's statement that those clouds "smother up his beauty from the world" and that he will break "through the foul and ugly mists/ Of vapors that did seem to strangle him"? Isn't that the dream of every adolescent? How do they not hear echoes of the Bush administration's frequent attempt to lower our expectations before major announcements? Isn't that a wise tactic for managing people's unrealistic expectations? Or if that seems too politically manipulative, how can they not recognize the standard rubric of successful businesses: "underpromise/overproduce"?

Hal is real world, pragmatic and clever. Even without the foreknowledge of what use he will make of his "wilder days," we must be impressed by his plan to capture people's imagination and turn it in his favor; it is masterful.

But no; they label him "Machiavellian." And I think the problem centers on his admitting that he will "falsify men's hopes." That just sounds ugly. Hope is a powerful force in our lives. (Questioning it, poet Kay Ryan refers to it as "the always tabled/ righting of the present.") And young people are full of optimistic hope. Having that challenged, along with their sense of loyalty to one's comrades, however unacceptable they may be to one's father, makes accepting Hal's careful character-building less palatable.

Posted by Randall

RE: Performance Log - All's Well That Ends Well (May 2011)

2011-05-19T11:50:00.000-07:00

Stu writes:

For the most part, when performing indoors, in theater lighting, you can barely see the audience. Even when facing out towards the audience, you are generally looking over the heads of the people in the first few rows. I don't want to say that one is not aware of the audience, because you can also hear them and sense them in other ways, but it is much easier to focus on the actors on stage and, to some degree, disregard the audience. Indoor performance and lighting are the principal elements that create the "fourth wall" separating audience and actors.

Working outdoors, you are constantly aware of the audience right in front of you. When you look out, you are looking into people's faces! When I started working in outdoor theater, I found it intimidating that you could see people and their expressions. Initially I had to be careful not to focus on any individual. Now that I am more used to it, I don't hesitate to speak directly to the audience or even individual in it.

Personally, I enjoy doing outdoors because it allows you to connect with the audience. When I'm talking about children, or pretty girls, or bald men, I can take gesture or take the line to a child, a pretty girl, or a bald guy. There's a big difference when doing something like Shakespeare, which was written to be performed outdoors. Indoors, I see many actors doing soliloquies as thinking out loud to oneself. Outdoors, I encourage actors to take soliloquies or asides direct to members of the audience.

Doing something like Moliere allows you to break the fourth wall and involve members of the audience. One of my favorite memories was playing Harpagon in The Miser. As Jacques described what my neighbors thought of me, he pointed to a member of the audience as the source; it was hilarious: "One says that you have special almanacks printed, where you double the ember days and vigils, so that you may profit by the fasts to which you bind all your house; another, that you always have a ready-made quarrel for your servants at Christmas time or when they leave you, so that you may give them nothing. One tells a story how not long since you prosecuted a neighbour's cat because it had eaten up the remainder of a leg of mutton; another says that one night you were caught stealing your horses' oats..." Ultimately Jacques had to drag me back onstage to keep me from strangling one of the audience members.

-- Stu

The Henry Explications - Part C

2011-05-18T13:00:00.000-07:00

The following is one in a series of mini-articles resulted from an exercise I had my St. Paul Academy 2011 Shakespeare students complete. The articles focus on selected speeches spanning Shakespeare’s Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V.

HAL
Thou art so fat-witted, with drinking of old sack and unbuttoning thee after supper and sleeping upon benches after noon, that thou hast forgotten to demand that truly which thou wouldst truly know. What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day? Unless hours were cups of sack and minutes capons and clocks the tongues of bawds and dials the signs of leaping-houses and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-colored taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time of the day.

(1 Henry IV 1.2.2-13)

During Hal's descriptive insult to Falstaff, the audience learns more about the prince than the pub-crawler. Hal scolds his friend Falstaff for his lethargic and irresponsible behavior, a speech he is motivated to deliver due to his irritation with his companion. Deeper within the relationship, though, one may see that his irritation might not just be with Falstaff, but also with himself. Hal has been ignoring his princely duties and spending time in the dirty parts of London with Falstaff, actions of drunkenness and lack of accountability he may not believe in.

Further, Hal's insults represent the strain on his friendship with Falstaff. He knows that if Falstaff does not adapt to the man Hal truly is, a prince with responsibility, he can no longer be Hal's companion. Hal's inner mental struggle foreshadows his upcoming declaration of maturity and reform to his father. By speaking out against Falstaff's immature and unruly behavior, he is criticizing his own indolence and implying that he does believe in his royal duties and does want to embrace them.

Malika Dale (SPA '12)

Performance Log - All's Well That Ends Well (May 2011)

2011-05-18T00:10:00.000-07:00

All’s Well That Ends Well
Directed by Joseph Papke
Classical Actors Ensemble
Minneapolis, MN
May 6, 2011

Last summer I saw the American Shakespeare Center’s production of Othello at Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia. Prior to the play, Benjamin Curns (who played Iago) explained for audience members unfamiliar with the company’s approach that they would be performing in conditions similar to those of Shakespeare’s day, specifically with stage and house under the same lights, a relatively naked stage, and a lot of interplay between actors and audience members, some of whom would even be sitting on the stage. I’ll tell you; it really increases the suspense when you find yourself weighing the chances that a paying customer will end up skewered by rapier during a fight scene. Although there were no fatalities, except those planned by Shakespeare, I found it a very refreshing approach to indoor staging, and I especially enjoyed how the opportunity for audience/character interaction allowed Curns to play up Iago’s villainy.

Fast forward to May 2011. The Classical Actors Ensemble, a relatively young company in Minneapolis, is performing All’s Well That Ends Well at the Walker Community Church under similar conditions, “a simple platform stage with few scenic elements surrounded on three sides by the audience, universal lighting …, and music performed between acts” (by the actors, still in costume), director Joseph Papke writes in the program. Now, how much one enjoys a show (as I did this one) may be independent of whether they leave the lights on, but I’m intrigued: what’s the difference, for the performers, between a play performed in the dark and one performed with the audience in full view?

Obviously, to those of us who regularly attend Shakespeare performances in the park, an illuminated audience is nothing new. But I’d never considered that the different “feel” of Shakespeare in the park is due to more than just its being outdoors until I began to think about the similar feeling one gets indoors when the lights are on. “Actors are usually very aware of the audience,” Papke wrote me in an e-mail, “whether they can see them or not (dark theaters mean we usually pick up on them aurally). With being able to see them clearly, instead of becoming hyper-aware of the audience, I find that some of the performance-related pressure is alleviated—there is no 'fourth wall,' no pretence of verisimilitude; the white elephant of ‘we’re other human beings pretending in front of you’ is gone. The audience is no longer a potential critical void that the actor must pour himself into; instead, a beneficial and necessary communication is heightened between actors and audience, and a truer communal experience can be reached.”

I like what Papke says about the elephant. I often find myself during a performance waiting for the theatrical experience to take over and for my sense of the affectation of theater to dissipate. I think the dark enhances that sense of affectation. From the actor’s point of view it’s just a fourth wall, but from ours it makes us voyeurs, sitting in the dark, disconnected from the stage action, looking in on the characters’ lives. I think that works against the theatrical. Turn the lights on and we’re involved in the performance, easy co-conspirators, available for asides and spur-of-the-moment magic, and less likely to fall asleep. It’s this communal experience that accounts for a lot of the charm of Classical Actors Ensemble’s All’s Well That Ends Well. For one it really frees up the comic characters, in this case Levatch (played by Papke) and Parolles (Christopher Kehoe) who are able to use the audience more naturally for comic effect.

I remember a similar feeling a couple years ago, in Stu Naber’s production of Much Ado About Nothing for Shakespeare and Company, outdoors in White Bear Lake. Benedick, played by Tim Perfect, hid in the audience during the garden scene where Claudio and Don Pedro trick him into believing that Beatrice is in love with him. The great humor of it wasn’t that Benedick was among us, ridiculously crawling around on his hand and knees, audaciously dipping into patrons' picnic dinners (well, that was pretty funny), but that he was in plain sight of everyone. That’s what I mean by co-conspirators. It’s the difference between being told a joke and being in on it.

Papke’s tone in All’s Well That Ends Well is relatively and successfully light (I saw a darker, literally and figuratively, version last summer at American Players Theatre) even though key characters are not likeable people – Bertram (David Darrow) who heartlessly rejects the devoted love of a talented woman; Parolles the blowhard braggart, liar, coward, and traitor. I found myself both believing in Bertram’s final acceptance of Helena (Danielle Silver) and even, at one point, feeling sorry for Parolles. Perhaps this mitigation of their dislikability is because, with the lights on, we see them more clearly both as comic figures and as characters. Or perhaps it’s because we learn, between acts, that Bertram also blows a mean trumpet and Parolles is capable of a show-stopping deadpan spoken version of ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man.”

This whole universal lighting question is just that, a question. I’m not sure it would be effective to suggest that all theatrical productions turn on the house lights. And lights or no lights, what really matters is the talent on the stage. But theater involves live actors plying their trade in front of a live audience. Why remove one of those from the equation, especially when it can have a positive effect for the other party? Let film-goers, communing with two-dimensional celluloid versions of human beings, sit in the dark. For me, I’ll agree with King Claudius: “Give me some light!”

Logged by Randall

Photo credit: David Darrow and Danielle Silver in All's Well That Ends Well. Photo by Zach Curtis, courtesy Classical Actors Ensemble.

The Henry Explications - Part B

2011-05-16T13:00:00.000-07:00

The following is one in a series of mini-articles resulted from an exercise I had my St. Paul Academy 2011 Shakespeare students complete. The articles focus on selected speeches spanning Shakespeare’s Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V.

KING HENRY IV
Yea, there thou mak'st me sad and mak'st me sin
In envy that my Lord Northumberland
Should be the father to so blest a son,
A son who is the theme of honor's tongue,
Amongst a grove, the very straightest plant,
Who is sweet Fortune's minion and her pride;
Whilst I, by looking on the praise of him,
See riot and dishonor stain the brow
Of my young Harry. O, that it could be proved
That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged
In cradle-clothes our children where they lay,
And call'd mine "Percy," his "Plantagenet"!
Then would I have his Harry, and he mine.

(1 Henry IV 1.1.78-90)

King Henry, throughout 1 Henry IV, is revealed to be a very religious person, and it is no surprise that religious imagery turns up in this speech ("mak'st me sin in envy") where it provides a snapshot of the king's concerns. Here is a man who relies on religion and God as a pillar of strength in his reign, and who clearly feels that he is the "good guy" in this situation, but it is necessary to remember how he came to power.

I think it is possible that deep down the king recognizes his own guilty hand in the dethroning and indirect execution of Richard II, and therefore he may think that God could seek to punish him for his actions. So he acknowledges the possibility that he is committing a deadly sin (envy) for the otherwise forgivable frustration he feels about Hal. In this he overexerts himself in his religious efforts in order to mollify the God who could be angry with him, an early indication in the play that he is in constant search for forgiveness from the heavens for his actions.

Nathan Rice (SPA '11)

RE: The Henry Explications - Part A

2011-05-15T21:23:00.000-07:00

I did not see the clear subtextual connections between "unrestrained loose companions" and "dissolute" (indifferent to moral restraints) and "wanton" (dissolute or unrestrained) in this speech. Now that King Henry's concern about restraint emerges more clearly, we can look also at that first line: "Can no man tell me of my unthrifty son?" Signet (Kenneth Muir) defines "unthrifty" here as "prodigal," fitting with King Henry's growing spiritual observances. However, the more common definition of frugality suggest yet another form of restraint, extending Henry's expectation of it to social, moral, and economic.

What is the king's attitude about restraint? Is it a particularly Medieval concept? Is it particular to his character? Is it also couched in religious observance? Do we see it equally in 1 Henry IVand 2 Henry IV? Is it, as Paul suggests, wrapped up in Henry's attitudes about class, a euphemism for sticking with your own kind? Thoughts?

Randall

The Henry Explications - Part A

2011-05-14T13:00:00.000-07:00

The following is one in a series of mini-articles resulted from an exercise I had my St. Paul Academy 2011 Shakespeare students complete. The articles focus on selected speeches spanning Shakespeare’s Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V.

HENRY BOLINGBROKE
Can no man tell me of my unthrifty son?
'Tis full three months since I did see him last.
If any plague hang over us, 'tis he.
I would to God, my lords, he might be found.
Inquire at London, 'mongst the taverns there,
For there, they say, he daily doth frequent,
With unrestrained loose companions,
Even such, they say, as stand in narrow lanes
And beat our watch and rob our passengers,
Which he, young wanton and effeminate boy,
Takes on the point of honor to support
So dissolute a crew.

(Richard II 5.3.1-12)

King Henry IV's speech to the court in Richard II, Act 5, scene 3, reveals his strong disappointment in his son, the prince. He criticizes Hal's carelessness, criminal behavior, femininity, and overall poor demeanor. Motivated by this overwhelming disappointment and embarrassment, the king angrily vilifies Hal's life, citing both his poor behavior and his decision to associate with socially inferior friends, a lifestyle not befitting royalty.

Stating that Hal "takes on the point of honor to support so dissolute a crew," the king's belief that his son wastes honor by associating with criminal, roguish commoners, such as Falstaff and Poins, reveals several character traits, including social classism and anger. Labeling such fellows as "unrestrained loose companions" and "a dissolute crew," Henry makes it clear that appropriate behavior involves restraint, both moral and social. Given Henry's own actions, including deposing a king, one might consider his complaints a bit ironic. Or it may be that Henry simply would rather his son associate with others of higher social stature.

The king's concern about restraint is also evident in his attack on Hal's masculinity. When criticizing Hal for his conduct and lifestyle, King Henry IV describes him as "wanton" and "effeminate." Yet Henry offers no support for this effeminacy. It seems enough that Hal is not involved in activities similar to Hotspur's, activities steeped in leadership and testosterone and honor, and instead involves himself in "wanton" activities, robbing and drinking and rebelling against his father's wishes. To Henry this is womanish because it fails to follow his concept of order, and that which defies order (unrestrained) is automatically unmanly.

Paul Micevych (SPA '12)

RE: Merry Wives of Windsor - Musings

2011-05-13T14:33:00.000-07:00

Randall writes:

And so we learn that Derek Traversi (and Gil, too) was right, and Merry Wives of Windsor is not dealt with at much length at all, despite the best of intentions. But the William Shakespeare Experience does go on. Here's what's in store.

1) The Shakespeare-in-the-Park season is gearing up even in the midst of ongoing indoor productions. I just saw a wonderful All's Well That Ends Well performed by the Classical Actors Ensemble (a relatively new company). If you have a mind to post a performance log or review of something you see, please do.

2) My Shakespeare class has started its fifth and final play, Measure for Measure. A while back, we read 1 Henry IV and I asked the students to write brief explications of speeches from the entire second tetralogy. I'll be posting those at intervals over the next few weeks.

3) It's time to start a new play. Which will be All's Well That Ends Well. And then Hamlet. And perhaps we'll return to Merry Wives at a later date.

Randall

Merry Wives of Windsor - Musings

2010-08-11T22:44:00.000-07:00

Gilbert writes:

Greetings,

“It will hardly be necessary to deal at any length with The Merry Wives of Windsor,” says Derek Traversi in his Approaches to Shakespeare, and then, indeed, he doesn’t. I am pretty sympathetic, but then I thought that won’t start much conversation either. So I began to think about language. What happens to an audience who settle into a theatre and the first four or five scenes assault one with a—no, two—malapropists (Slender and Mistress Quickly), a bombastic literary allusion mangler (Pistol, and Nym who has a humor to say “humor”), and a—no, two—“foreigners” (Welsh Evans and French Caius) who abuse the King’s English so severely that the Folger Shakespeare Library edition’s facing gloss pages exceed the text itself in length?

I really do look to the opening of a play to orient me – exposition, grace notes to character, setting, maybe a little plot complication – and it was discouraging to find I had spent two hours over the first three scenes, not yet even encountering Dr. Caius or the focative lesson on the obscenity of Latin grammar. Perhaps I was disadvantaged because the last time I saw this play all the lines, alas unmemorable, were sung and translated from Italian.

Anyway, my impression is this is the most language-playful (or –jerked around) play since Love’s Labour’s Lost. What gives with language? Could we say that the subtext insists that the inverse of all this language miasma is a newly accepted default English, that “King’s English” that all the above mangle?

It is inevitable we should talk about Falstaff. Yet who is this guy? Fat, of course, and transported to the twenty-first century bearing the traditional theatrical tradition that Merry Wives of Windsor was written because Queen Elizabeth told Shakespeare she would like to see Falstaff in love (though this myth was not recorded until 1702 by John Dennis, a century after the appearance of the play, and anyway why would Elizabeth tell this to Shakespeare if Edward de Vere wrote Merry Wives?) But this Falstaff is hard to recognize if we have already known the witty, inventive, playful quick-study Falstaff of 1 Henry IV and the aging, touchingly emotional, outsider Falstaff of 2 Henry IV. This one is primarily a wencher, gullible, bombastic without wit. He is alazon, self-deluded, ripe to be deflated. What has the playwright done with my Falstaff?

Yet, this is a comedy. Forget, for a while, the “banish fat Jack and banish all the world” Falstaff, and think of the conventions of comedy. Boy meets girl; obstacles arise; boy gets girl; all dance. Falstaff is no boy and much of the plot iterates and reiterates and rereiterates Falstaff arranging to assignate with Mistresses Page and Ford, revealing his plan (and rerevealing and rererevealing) to “Mr. Brook,” and then being abused—dirty laundry, then cudgels, then exorcism while wearing horns at midnight. He is the butt of all these intrigues, hoist by his own self-inflated ego, left fallen (literally) in the forest and pinched black and blue by fairies/children, then finally invited home to sit with the families by a country fire—only by an afterthought reintegrated into the harmonious society of “all dance.”

Still there is the Anne Page plot: boy (Fenton) sees girl; obstacles arise as alternative suitors engage in courting plots, Slender backed by William Page and Caius backed by Margaret Page until both are drawn away by boys in disguise in the forest; and Fenton gets Anne (oh, wait, like Bassanio and Portia, they have known and been bonded to each other from sometime before). Anyway, all ends in harmony, except Dr. Caius finds himself married to “oon garsoon, a boy: oon pesant” (I gloss that last piss-ant, but then my French is not so good any more). A comic plot, indeed, but notice Verdi entitled his opera Falstaff, not Fenton. Still, Merry Wives of Windsor is “comedy of intrigue” slightly “comedy of manners,” somewhat anticipatory of the great comedies of the Restoration. I think I’d like to come back to intrigue before we are finished with Merry Wives, remembering that intrigue is artificially manipulated social situation, contrived comic artifice, not to be tested by reality.

Merry Wives of Windsor is unique for Shakespeare in its English setting and its class. This is "city comedy." There will be more of this in Jacobean drama. It is unflinchingly middle-class. Page and Ford are merchants, and Falstaff targets their wives, at first, because they control their husbands’ purse strings (even Fenton confesses he wishes to repair his fortune with Anne Page’s money). We’ve often seen English folk (in addition to the histories), especially among the Warwickshire guildsmen and rustics (do you suppose Edward de Vere ever met Nick Bottom or Dogberry or Elbow or Launce?) but they show up in Athens or Verona, whereas all these Merry Wives folk live within a mile of Brainford, Hearne’s oak, Frogmore, Eton all surrounding Windsor. So, what does the introduction of middle-class values do to the crux between the feudal-romantic (Hotspur) and the mercantile (Joseph Addison’s Sir Andrew Freeport)? Is this money-oriented play the true fulcrum between Claudius who knows how to run his kingdom-corporation and Hamlet who finds, therefore, the world is out of joint?

Gilbert

Merry Wives of Windsor - Witchcraft

2010-08-08T21:04:00.000-07:00

Jim writes:

Hi Everyone,

I just finished Merry Wives of Windsor and can think a several topics to discuss – most center on Falstaff and how different and weaker he seems in this play than in the histories. But before we get into that I have a question for Randall that relates to his last TSI post on the blog.

The last practical joke played on the fat knight is centered on him dressing as Terne the Hunter and being set upon by Satyrs and Faeries in the forest. Falstaff is beaten earlier in the play when impersonating Mistress Ford’s maid’s aunt, who is not only large enough for the impersonation to work but also considered a witch. Mr. Ford says of the aunt: “A witch, a quean, an old cozening quean! Have I not forbid her my house? She comes of errands, does she? We are simple men, we do not know what’s to brought to pass under the profession of fortune-telling. She works by charms, by spells, by th’ figure, and such daub’ry as this is, beyond our element; we know nothing. Come down, you witch, you hag you, come down, I say!”

My first thought was that this passage is probably a better representation of the common perception of witchcraft and who practiced it in Elizabethan society than Macbeth, though I’d need to do some work before I could back that up.

But it seems to me that the kind of “forest magic” that is being faked in the last practical joke (faeries, satyrs, etc.) is more common in Shakespeare than the type of dark magic seen in Macbeth’s witches. The other thing that struck me is that the “forest magic” elements seem odder and more foreign for modern readers and audiences than Macbeth’s witches. My daughters think that A Midsummer’s Night Dream has a very strange story, with Puck and the Faeries, but Macbeth makes perfect sense to them on the level of magic. The very brief examples of laws you quoted in your TSI entry in the blog made me wonder if you saw evidence that the apparent view of witchcraft changed over time, moving toward the “modern” view that witches were evil, in league with dark forces, dealing with the devil, etc.

Was there a change in what audiences believed about witchcraft during Shakespeare’s lifetime? Or is this more of an American/English divide, with American falling with King James on the Puritan side and viewing all witches as in league with the devil and refusing to believe in faeries, while the English still hold the realm of Faerie in their cosmology (hence Peter Pan….)?

It’s kind of a convoluted question, but I’ve reached the point where I have enough data that I would easily have been able to write the five paragraph essay in college arguing the point but nowhere near enough to know if actually have a sustainable case either way.

Randall, what do you think?

Jim Darling

TSI 2010 - Final Thoughts

2010-07-28T15:29:00.000-07:00

My students are always asking me what my favorite book or movie is. And I’ve reached a point where I’ve experienced so much of both that picking a favorite is no longer a sensible activity. Do I like Lolita more than Angle of Repose or Great Expectations? The Incredibles more than Good Night, and Good Luck or Cool Hand Luke? At some point, one just wants to respond, “why choose?” I like blue and purple.

So I’m not going to try to isolate one favorite aspect of the Teaching Shakespeare Institute. There are too many moments, lessons, and people to single any one out. I could go on about Mike Lomonico taking my favorite Shakespearean film clip lesson to the next level by breaking student responses into different film-making components. Or Sue Hench’s masterful ability to structure a student-centered experience. Or Stephen Dickey changing much of what I thought I knew of Twelfth Night. Or Synetic Theater’s silent production of Othello. Or Amber Caron’s awesome “why is this man head-butting a cat” presentation. Or Kevin Costa prefacing every question with an experience or book recommendation I wanted to follow up on. Or Chris Lavold’s “Joe Shakespeare” moment. I could go on.

One moment, though, captures the excitement I felt throughout my four weeks at the Folger – finding the Statutes of the Realm. My research paper ended up focusing on witchcraft in Macbeth. To prepare I had read Marston’s The Wonder of Women, or The Tragedy or Sophonisba and Thomas Middleton’s The Witch, as well as various section of a variety of Shakespeare’s plays that included examples of or allusions to witchcraft. In the library I pursued original documents that defined witchcraft: Lambert Daneau’s Dialogue of Witches (1575), Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), George Gifford’s A Discourse of the Subtill Practices of Devilles (1587), Nicholas Remy’s Demonolatry (1595), and King James’s Daemonologie, In Forme of a Dialogue (1597). And, as I narrowed my focus to Shakespeare’s historical plays, I read relevant sections of Edward Hall and Raphaell Holinshed’s chronicles.

My goal was to illustrate a connection between the perceived reality of witches and the theatrical depiction of them. In the process of writing the paper, I came across a number of Internet citations to sixteenth century “witchcraft acts,” laws in England that defined and penalized the practices of sorcerers. Now one of the big problems with the Internet is that lots of people who create web sites simply repurpose stuff from someone else’s site. You’ll notice this when you do a Google search, and the exact same info comes up on three different sites. It can be difficult to determine who posted it first, and doubly difficult to determine where it originally came from before it got on the web.

So it was with the Witchcraft Acts. The closest I got to a corroborating source were some weird numbers, like “1⁰ Jac. I c. 12.” I took these numbers to a Folger librarian, asking for help in finding the actual Witchcraft Act documents. I spent some time in the card catalog room looking under Great Britain – History – King James, to no avail. I did find some similar numbers in a secondary source, so I took them back to the librarian, who asked, “have you checked the Statutes of the Realm?”

Where are those, I asked.

In the basement of the Folger Shakespeare Library, on a shelf in the corner, there are a number of heavy brown folio-sized volumes. It turns out that George III, in the interest of historical preservation, had recorded a complete list of laws passed by his predecessors. These were organized by the year of each monarch’s reign, the monarch, and finally by law (listed as chapters). Quickly I found the statute passed under James I in 1603: “An acte against conjuration, witchcraft, and dealing with evill and wicked spirits.” But I had found a lot more.

Our laws define us; they define our fears, our culture, our knowledge and ignorance, our current events, and over time our history. The Statutes of the Realm opened an amazing window into Tudor and Stuart life. I wanted immediately to spend the next two months sitting in the Folger basement just reading statutes. Working my way backwards in my final forty minutes in the Library, I found Elizabeth’s, then Edward VI’s, then Henry VIII’s witchcraft acts. But I also found curios around which one could build an entertaining and scholarly career. In Edward VI’s laws, for example, exists an act that defines, thereafter, any death caused by poisoning as murder. Which begs the question: what was it before?

I made rapid xerox copies of the acts that pertained to my paper. There’s lots to think about, beginning with the easy comparisons that demonstrate how public opinion and concern about witches changed from 1541 to 1603. Henry VIII’s act begins: “Where dyvers and sundrie persones unlawfully have devised and practised Invocacons and conjuracons of Sprites, pretendying by such meanes to understande and get Knowledge for their own lucre in what treasure of golde and Silver shulde or mought be founde or had in the earthe or other secrete places” (33⁰ Hen. VIII c. 8). It goes on to condemn other, more fantastical, practices, but I think it’s interesting that it begins with the simple use of conjuration as a form of graft.

By James I, the concern over conning folks out of their money is gone. James repeals the Elizabethan laws, then replaces them: “for the better restrayninge of the said Offenses, and more severe punishinge the same, be it further enacted ... That if any pson or persons, after the saide Feaste of Saint Michaell the Archangell next coming, shall use, practise, or exercise any Invocation or Conjuration of any evill and wicked Spirit, or shall consult covenant with, entertaine, employ, feede, or rewarde any evill and wicked Spirit to or for any intent or purpose; or take up any dead man, woman, or child out of his, her, or their grave, or any other place where the dead bodie resteth, or the skin, bone, or any other parte of any dead person, to be imployed or used in any manner of Witchcrafte, Inchantment, Charme, or Sorcerie ... that then everie such Offendor or Offendors, their Ayders, Abettors, and Counsellors, being of any the saide Offences dulie and lawfullie convicted and attainted, shall suffer pains of deathe as a Felon or Felons, and shall loose the priviledge and benefit of Clergie and Sanctuarie” (1⁰ Jac. I c. 12).

We learn from James I’s Daemonologie, a reaction to Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, that there’s a fairly significant tension between those that believe in the supernatural power of witches and those that don’t. That statutes clearly show that shift toward the more punitive view, and in doing so, reveal a fascinating aspect of Tudor and Stuart life.

I had been skeptical about my ability to take advantage of my reading card, which gives me a year to continue my studies at the Folger. School keeps me busy, even during my breaks. But now I know I’m going back, whatever it takes. Somewhere, there’s a statute waiting which will reveal untold contemporary attitudes about parts of Shakespeare’s plays that I know I currently overlook. It’s like being on a treasure hunt, and finding the Statutes is like being handed a reliable map. The “X” is at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Randall

TSI 2010 - Grasshopper Tacos

2010-07-23T14:05:00.000-07:00

I have a conversation at least once a year with students about what they eat. It usually starts when I mention that I’ve had tacos with lengua (beef tongue) and they blanch. Who eats beef tongue? Ick!

Actually, it’s quite good, and I use the example to make the point that what we consider edible depends primarily on what we’re used to eating by the time we’re adolescents, our attitudes are set, and the mere sensual experience of taste matters little. In other words, I think there’s a point where our appreciation of taste becomes not physical but psychological and cultural. And in the mix, novelty becomes intimidating while familiarity becomes comforting.

Case in point: I marinated and grilled chicken hearts for my book club last year as part of a Brazilian themed dinner. Grown men declined to try them, despite that fact that Americans, according to the American Meat Institute, consume over 85 pounds (based on “retail weight”) of chicken each year, and the heart, like much of the rest of the chicken we eat, is merely muscle.

Given that living involves experiencing, and experiencing involves one’s senses, it is curious to me that we so willfully limit the experience of one of the most pleasurable of senses – taste.

That's my preamble to the most interesting meal I had during the Teaching Shakespeare Institute which came from Oyamel, a restaurant near Chinatown that takes a fusion approach to regional Mexican cuisines and serves its offerings tapas style. My friend Martha Anderson and I began with an excellent ceviche de cayo de hacha con limon y chile. That’s a small bay scallop topped with a tiny slice of blood orange and sitting on top of a tequila and ancho chile sauce covered key lime. You pick up the key lime and take the whole scallop in your mouth while squeezing the lime gently to get a sort of citrus chaser.

(If you’re making this at home, know that Oyamel serves these on a plate of rocks, which keep the limes from rolling over and dumping the little scallop towers onto the plate. If you believe that great dining involves not just taste but a visually pleasing arrangement, then Oyamel’s plating adds a lot to the experience.)

Martha and I also selected a variety of tacos: chicken with guacamole, beef tongue with radishes, fish with red onions and cilantro, and chapulines. Chapulines is Spanish for grasshoppers. I’d never heard of grasshopper tacos let alone tried them. Oyamel claims they’re a Oaxacan specialty and sautées them in onion, garlic and tequila. They’re fairly salty and taste a little like dried, grilled beef, with a slight crunch. Right now, a number of you are probably thinking you'll never, ever, ever knowingly eat anything with bugs in it. All I ask is, if you've never tried something like chapulines, that you consider how much your attitude comes from a reality-free perception. Tasting is believing, and great food deserves a chance without prejudice.

In short, the chapulines tasted great. And it’s nice to know that in the coming economic or environmental apocalypse, I’ll be happily surviving the collapse and subsequent looting of Cub Food, Safeway, and Piggly Wiggly by capturing, sautéing, and eating the bugs in my backyard.

Randall

(Photo credit: The grasshopper taco pictured above comes from the blog “Girl Meets Food.” Many thanks to Mary for its use, and if you’re in the Washington, DC area and want great recommendations for adventures in dining, read Mary’s blog.)

RE4: Twelfth Night - The Language of Love

2010-07-19T12:06:00.000-07:00

Viola is a fine actress, playing and making use of the Petrarchan game from time to time. It might be interesting to compare her brilliant use of it to Orsino's tired, self-indulgent use of it. Theirs is a marriage that was not exactly made in heaven. No wonder Feste is a bit cynical.

Ernst

RE3: Twelfth Night - The Language of Love

2010-07-18T11:36:00.000-07:00

Randall writes:

Cindy,

That's a good question. Viola does not strike me as particularly Petrarchan, as Romeo is ("I ne'er saw true beauty till this night!"), nor does Orsino overwhelm her with beautiful language. So what is it that establishes her love for Orsino?

Is she susceptible to flattery? Orsino compliments her lips, her voice, and her womanliness, although to us it's ironic because he's seeing a boy. But Viola is not that kind of fool for love, the type who could be won over by mere appreciation of her physique. To work, that requires a certain vanity. If anything, Viola is full of humility.

Yet, after Orsino explains his expectations for Cesario's surrogate wooing, Viola says, "Yet a barful strife! Whoe'er I woo, myself would be his wife." She's in love. How?

In our seminar at the Teaching Shakespeare Institute, we briefly considered one possibility. The following exchange occurs in Act 1, scene 2, between the recently shipwrecked Viola and Captain:

VIOLA
Who governs here?
CAPTAIN
A noble duke, in nature as in name.
VIOLA
What is his name?
CAPTAIN
Orsino
VIOLA
Orsino. I have heard my father name him. He was a bachelor then.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Say you're at a party and you see someone vaguely familiar across the room. You turn to your friend and ask who it is. When he tells you, which of the following are you most likely to ask?

a. Oh, I've heard of him; isn't he a Republican?
b. Oh, I've heard of him; doesn't he work at Home Depot?
c. Oh, I've heard of him; he's single, isn't he?

Viola's response is suggestive. Is she thinking about Orsino's availability already? Is she already in love with him? Add this: Under what circumstances did her father "name him"? We're too deep in speculation land here, with too little textual evidence, but comparing fathers and daughters' conversations in other plays, notably Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, they often focus on appropriate husbands.

Then, there's the vaguery of Viola's plan. Originally, she wants to serve Olivia so that she "might not be delivered to the world/ Till I had made mine own occasion mellow,/ What my estate is." She wants to establish her social position, sure. But this position would also give her access to Orsino who, she learns, is currently seeking Olivia.

Finally, listen carefully to her instructions to the Captain:

Conceal me what I am, and be my aid
For such disguise as haply shall become
The form of my intent. (1.2.56-58)

What is her intent? No, what is the form of her intent? It would not be socially possible for her, as a woman, to approach Orsino in courtship. But disguised as a boy, taking on a new form, will give her access to Orsino. Is Orsino, then, as opposed to the mere establishment of social position, her intent? Or more specifically, is marriage to Orsino how she intends to make her own occasion "mellow"?

So, as we consider the origin of Viola's love for Orsino, we have to consider the possibility that we don't find it in the text, in the love-language, because it pre-dates the opening of the play.

Randall

RE2: Twelfth Night - The Language of Love

2010-07-17T15:18:00.000-07:00

Ooooooooooh! I LOVE this. :-)

It makes me think, just a little, about Viola's love for Orsino. Hmmmmm, from whence it springs?

Cindy

RE: Twelfth Night - The Language of Love

2010-07-17T01:22:00.000-07:00

Randall writes:

Hear me,

I’ve been thinking a bit about Gil’s argument that Orsino is a bad poet, and that Olivia loves language more than Cesario. The latter comment reminds me of Romeo, whom we frequently declaim in high school English classes for being in love with love rather than Juliet. Given the amazing words spilling from his heart to describe his love, we might argue that Romeo, too, is in love with language, for it is the words that create his passion. Or to put it another way, they are the food of his love.

So Orsino is wrong. It’s not music, it’s language, specifically Shakespeare’s language. Orsino’s mistake may confirm Gil’s point. As a bad poet (“most radiant, exquisite, and unmatchable beauty”), he finds no sustenance in love-language and so must turn to music. And certainly that’s no match for Shakespeare.

John Berryman is as impressed as Gil. In a section from Berryman’s Shakespeare, he calls Olivia’s response to Cesario’s delivery of Orsino’s overtures (“Your lord does know my mind, I cannot love him.”) an “utterance so perfect: it satisfies perfectly” (93). Looking at the sixteen lines that follow, including the “willow cabin” wooing, Berryman notes their intensity and concludes “Olivia falls in love upon her intuition that the person before her is capable of love” (94). Funny word, that: “intuition.” Of course, Berryman means it in its modern guise – implicit understanding without benefit of the five senses – but its closest usage to Shakespeare’s contemporaries would have associated it, according to the O.E.D., with spiritual insight. Do Cesario’s words penetrate to Olivia’s soul? Is that why she's so moved?

Again, this doesn’t reflect well on Orsino. After all, if Cesario’s capability for love is a revelation, then it would stand that Orsino, in Olivia’s eyes, is not so capable. No, that’s not quite right. I mean, in Olivia’s ears; in Shakespeare, lovers’ language does not enter through the eyes. Even Olivia gets this wrong: “Methinks,” she says, “I feel this youth’s perfections/ With an invisible and subtle stealth/ To creep in at mine eyes” (1.5.304-302). Notice the twin confusions, first that she feels (touch) that which enters through her eyes (sight) and second, that which is entering through her eyes is invisible. What’s more, her eyes are lying to her – she thinks she’s seeing a man. Berryman is right about intuition; the rest of her senses are pretty flummoxed.

Olivia repeats the mistake a few lines later: “I do I know not what, and fear to find/ Mine eye too great a flatterer for my mind.” She continues to miss that her heart has been wooed and won through her ears. Interesting that she began the conversation with Cesario by saying: “Once more we will hear Orsino’s embassy.” And further she dismissed her attendants, saying “We will hear this divinity.”

Yes, she did. Cesario’s “willow cabin” lament is a feast for the ears: “call upon my soul,” “sing them loud,” “hallow your name,” “babbling gossip of the air,” and “cry out ‘Olivia!’” Cesario’s love-language is all sound.

But once Olivia hears this divinity, its power is too great; she requires intuition to recognize its effect. So, let’s get back to Gil’s point about Orsino’s poetry being bad, being “Petrarch turned to cliché.” Remember that eyes, especially as a path through which we are trapped by love (love at first sight?) are a persistent Petrarchan motif. We find, then, that Shakespeare once again has his way with his rivals, aligning Petrarch with Orsino (the bad poet), establishing the ears, not the eyes, as the true path of passion, and filling Gil’s, Berryman’s, and ours with perfect language, so that like Olivia we are won over. Completely.

Randall

TSI 2010 - Sonnet

2010-07-15T22:02:00.000-07:00

For fun, in between the performance practices, the research, the curriculum sessions, the lectures, the seminars, and the colloquia, we've been give the opportunity to write a sonnet, with the final rhyming words given to us (so everyone has the same end rhymes), due at 8:30 a.m. this morning. Here's what I came up with:

What 'In Jam' Meant

“I’ve had just about enough of you, love-
er,” she announced, departing, all my err-
ant affections entombed; I’d need a shove-
el to unearth them. My distress, unbear-

able for months, amply seasoned with hate-
tred and hysteric temp’ramental see-
sawing mood swings, compelled me thus to late-
er seek mortal release, to set me free

of love’s astringent ends. But my child’s smile-
ing face, covered in jam, restor’d my poor
heart’s life, reminding me that though each trial,
each open challenge, may end as a door

slamming, as long as you continue cheer-
ful progress, life will never box your ear.

Randall

TSI 2010 - The Unkindest Cũt

2010-07-09T22:27:00.000-07:00

One might expect the sort of things gleaned from working in a place like the Folger Shakespeare Library reading room to be rather erudite, if not downright stodgy. But more than once I’ve come across information that reaffirms what rascals some of the early modern writers can be.

Not all of them, of course. For example, I’ve been studying books on witchcraft printed in the sixteenth century. One of my first concerns has been whether it is more appropriate, when I’m quoting from a text, to reproduce the wacky words, characters, and punctuation? Or should I modernize the archaic spelling and other obsolete typographical elements, and save some time? Take the following passage from the English translation of Lambert Daneau’s A Dialogue of Witches (1575):

Getting used to reading through the long “s,” the extra “e” on words (“meanes,” “arte”), the other extra letters (“magicall”), the different vowel representations (“lyke”) hasn’t been too hard. And the old thorn with a superscript “e” (for “the”) is kind of fun. New to me, though, was the practice of omitting the “m” or “n” (known as “minims”) and indicating the absence with a wavy or straight line over the preceding letter. This happens twice above: with whõ (whom) and cõquest (conquest).

Now, not too long ago, I posted a short comment about the bawdy word-play in Twelfth Night’s Box Tree scene. (You know where this is going.) In it, Malvolio thinks he recognizes Olivia’s handwriting, commenting:

"By my life, this is my lady's hand! These be here very c's, her u's, and her t's, and thus makes she her great P's."

Would that be c-ũ-t?

It’s a stretch, because the audience is hearing the letters, not seeing them, and the effectiveness of the joke would rely on the audience’s familiarity with typography. Alfred Harbage argues in Shakespeare’s Audience, that “it seems probable that the rank and file were more literate in the sixteenth century than in the eighteenth. In view of the profusion of schools, of the tendency of the trade guilds to make literacy a qualification even for entrance into apprenticeship, and of the manifest interest in self-instruction, we must revise any impressions we may ever have had that London workmen were ‘nine-tenths illiterate’” (146-147).

Further, Harbage footnotes L. C. Knights’ comment about the most of the Globe’s spectators being “likely to have received an education of the Grammar school type.” At this point I’d like to check the type in one of those 10,000 copies of The A B C and Little Catechism primer Harbage says were distributed in 1585. But that’s not my topic, and my library time is too limited for the quixotic substantiation of dirty jokes.

But the more I think about it, the more I’m sure Shakespeare is indulging his inner rascal, perhaps appropriately in a play that pokes so much fun at puritanical natures. As a teaching artist from the Acting Company told my class a couple years ago, in Shakespeare, “if it sounds dirty, it probably is.”

This surprises students. Really, I think time tends to misapply a patina of decorum to popular texts. We are sure if something is old or complex or revered, it must be above populist humor or prurience. Even when a text is serious, these moments aren’t hard to find. I just finished John Marston’s The Wonder of Women, or the Tragedy of Sophonisba (ca. 1605). In it Syphax, an evil king, conjures up a witch named Erictho from whom he wants a spell that will enchant the chaste heroine, Sophonisba, into his bed. Erictho describes her home, once a temple to Jove, but now in ruins, its hymns replaced by the ominous noises of jackdaws, crows, ravens, and magpies, and “Where statues and Jove’s acts were vively limned,/ Boys with black coals draw the veiled parts of nature/ And lecherous actions of imagined lust” (4.1.153-155).

Yeah, I don’t have to travel to ancient Libya to see that. The same images decorate the boys’ toilet stalls at my school. I just didn’t expect to find phallic graffiti in the middle of a speech in my Marston, any more than I expected to find yonic imagery in Shakespeare.

Randall

TSI 2010 - Freudian Slip

2010-07-07T22:22:00.000-07:00

Caleen Jennings’ classes at the Teaching Shakespeare Institute are all about freeing oneself from the usual strictures of education, whether we’re finding physical ways to communicate the written word or lying on the floor in the dark scrawling barely connected words on a sheet of paper as both a vital part of the writing process and a way to access Othello.

We did the latter activity today. Jennings wrote a word – “cause” – on a large, white sheet of paper, and our job was to yell out word associations. She’d pick the first she heard, add it to the paper linked to the previous word, and we’d suggest associations for the new word. “Cause” led to “effect” led to “affect” (English teachers!) and so on until we got, in a dilatory way, to “air conditioning.”

Then it was back to “cause” again, with a new association. “Cause” led to “way” led to “curds” which led to “Saddam Hussein.” Eventually we got a word balloon on the paper that said “Harry Potter.” In the cacophony that followed, the loudest next association was “Twilight.” Even free association suffers from rivalry. But Jennings heard something else; she wrote down “toilet.”

Looking at the final word webs on the paper, to one who didn’t witness the process, it may have made a perverse sense how we got from “Potter” to “toilet,” but it must have been mystifying how the next word ended up being “sunrise.”

“Moonrise” would have made more sense.

Randall

Othello - Performance Log (July 2010)

2010-07-04T21:15:00.000-07:00

Othello
Directed by Paata Tsikurishvili
Synetic Theater
Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Washington, DC
July 3, 2010

Here’s a conversation starter: the best production of a Shakespeare play I’ve ever seen cut every single line of the text.

That’s right. No words. Synetic Theater, which just completed a run of Othello at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, employs the “art of silence,” removing all speech and redirecting not just the story, but the rich textures and imagery of Shakespeare’s language into dance, dumb show, music, video projection, and visual motif, or what Synetic refers to as “non-realistic theater.” The result is a stunning visual and aural experience, powerfully evocative and emotive, but also paradoxical.

Can, after all, a production without a single line from Shakespeare’s text be considered a Shakespeare play? The adaptors here, Paata Tsikurishvili and Nathan Weinberger don’t claim that it is. The program clearly indicates that their work is “based on” Shakespeare’s play. But unlike something like Otello, Verdi’s opera that takes Shakespeare as its starting point and becomes Shakespearean but not Shakespeare in its new medium, Synetic’s Othello seeks to transform the purely Shakespearean experience – language – into a new form: text becomes subtext, dialogue becomes dance, and characters’ inner landscape of emotion, motivation, and psychological turmoil become motion and visual representation. [To get some sense of the production's approach to motion and dance, watch the YouTube "trailer."]

Take Iago (Philip Fletcher, Irina Tsikurishivili, and Alex Mills). In some ways, Synetic’s approach makes this Iago’s play. In Shakespeare, it’s never clear why Iago decides to play the villain (he gives conflicting reasons, and to a Jacobean audience it wouldn’t have mattered because they would have seen him as a representation of the Vice character, malicious for its own sake). But here, his jealousy at being passed over as Othello receives promotion is palpable. Tsikurishvili sets his anguish in front of a triptych of mirror-like mylar panels, behind which are two more Iagos. A struggle follows as the Iagos begin to grapple with each other and throw themselves through the panes, each attempting to be the central figure, and finally all three are present. It’s as if the conflicting emotions within him drive him insane, until his murderous personality is multiplied and physically present.

This sense of menace is magnified throughout by the production design, from the black, white and red color scheme to the almost industrial music and sound (composed by Konstantine Lortkipanidze) to the set, which takes a page from German Expressionism. If you’ve seen the disorienting angles and warped perspective lines of Robert Weine’s 1920 silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (above), then you have some idea of the broken planes and tilted triangles Anastasia Rurikov Simes puts together for this Othello.

Tskurishvili also makes wonderful use of the handkerchief. In Shakespeare, it is the central proof in Iago’s false accusation of Desdemona, a single piece in an elaborate seduction. But Synetic makes it much more. We see Othello (Roger Payano) receive it from his mother as she dies after being beaten to death by a slave driver. We see him give it to Desdemona (Salma Shaw), knowing it is the most precious thing he has. And we see it wind its way through the plot against him, until it takes on a final fatal role, replacing the pillow that ends Desdemona’s life (a striking scene that is graphic not in its explicit violence but in its visual depiction of Othello’s act).

There are so many beautiful visual touches that allude to Shakespeare’s verse: the paper flower that represents Rodrigo’s desire for Desdemona, the amorous satyrs that comically suggest Iago’s version of Othello’s courtship, the grainy black and white videos of groping lovers that project Othello’s deepest fears, the color red as a component only of the Iagos costumes, the small candles in Desdemona’s room, extinguished one by one by Othello.

Without the language, Synetic Theater’s Othello is not, in the end, Shakespeare. But this production achieves what adaptations rarely do – it informs Shakespeare as much as it is informed by Shakespeare. And it is more a work of art on its own than a derivative effort. Its beauty of movement, and sound, and visual expression matched, for me, that transcendence which I find in the best of Shakespeare’s verse.

This Othello’s language may not be English, but it speaks.

Logged by Randall

photo credit: Irina Tsikurishvili, Philip Fletcher, and Alex Mills as Iago; photo by Graeme Shaw.

TSI 2010 - Folger Faux Pas

2010-07-02T17:55:00.000-07:00

It has finally sunk in. I am a reader at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

When I got here, I really had no clue what that meant, which is a bit embarrassing given that others work so hard to get here and recognize the honor immediately when they do. When I applied I was focused mostly on the workshops we would be doing about using performance techniques to improve students’ experience reading Shakespeare by engaging them more physically with close reading and intensifying their exposure to the text. I thought more about the curriculum of the Institute than where it would be held.

Then on Tuesday we received an introduction to the collection and a tour of the reading room and holdings. Georgianna Ziegler, Head of Reference, brought out a cart of 16th-and 17th-century books, including a first Folio and a hand-written manuscript (in the late 1500s that would be redundant) on demonologie by James VI of Scotland (later James I of England). At which point my perspective shifted from “I’m doing a set of intense workshops” to “I’m studying in a museum.”

And yes, we were allowed to touch the books. If you ever want to see people in their twenties and thirties act like excited elementary students, tell a Shakespeare teacher he or she can touch a first Folio. Instantly, the Folger went from mere museum to rare literature petting zoo.

Last year, when I attended Phillips Exeter Academy’s Shakespeare Conference, we were allowed to look at both a second Folio and a Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, the revised second edition I think. (Note to SPA librarian Nick Bancks – can our library have a Holinshed?) We were asked to wear white gloves in order to keep dirt and oils from our hands from getting on the books. At the Folger, I noticed, no one wears gloves. Ziegler explained that they believe wearing gloves may lead you to do greater damage to the books because you lack the fine touch and sensitivity if your hands are covered. It’s easier, for example, to tear a page if gloves cause you to handle it more roughly than you would otherwise. As for grimy fingers, she added, we expect you to wash your hands before coming to the reading room.

That’s just one of the rules. There are a lot of rules that come with the reading room: exit cards, clear plastic bags for your belongings, no umbrellas, appropriate writing utensils. I spent much of the afternoon deciding what rare books I wanted for my research paper on contemporary attitudes about witchcraft and the supernatural in Macbeth. I decided on Lambert Daneau’s Dialogue of Witches (1575), Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), George Gifford’s A Discourse of the Subtill Practices of Devilles (1587), and William Perkins’ Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (1610). To get these books, you fill out special request cards and extremely kind librarians descend to the vault and retrieve your books. It’s a little like getting money out of Gringotts, only without the goblins.

So I took my request cards to the librarian who looked at me in horror and said, in a voice almost not a whisper, “you can’t have a pen in here!” He made me fill the cards out again. In pencil.

Ah well, we learn from our mistakes right?

Randall

photo credit: Old Reading Room, photo by Julie Ainsworth

TSI 2010 - Some Thoughts on the BBC Shakespeare

2010-06-30T20:40:00.000-07:00

As part of the TSI 2010 first week, tonight we watched the BBC production of 1 Henry IV (1979) with Jon Finch (who also played Macbeth in Roman Polanski’s 1971 film) as Henry IV, David Gwillim as Hal, Anthony Quayle as Falstaff, and Tim Piggott-Smith as Hotspur. The BBC films tend to provoke a fairly tepid response from both critics and students. It’s great to have an available version of each of Shakespeare’s plays, especially those that rarely see time on film, but that benefit is not always followed up by an entertaining or, in some cases, even a completely watchable production.

I remember watching these as a junior high and high school student when they originally aired and being struck by an unfortunate sameness to them. Look at the costumes in Midsummer Night’s Dream (directed by Elijah Moshinsky) and Othello (directed by Jonathan Miller), for example; it’s as if the actors from Act 1, scene 1 of the former walked right into the senate scene of the latter.

After watching a number of these, you should get a pretty clear sense of the BBC’s goal. They wanted to get an archival production committed to video without any directorial flourishes that might have “dated” the production for viewers far into the future. The costumes are distinctly renaissance-y, the character interpretations straightforward, and the direction focused primarily on presenting the language rather than creating a context for the language; it’s museum theater on videotape.

David Giles’ 1 Henry IV, which coasts along on some very strong acting by its principals, particularly Quayle, is among the better productions. But I still felt it had a certain static quality that would give me a little concern if I were showing the entire 155 minutes to a high school class. I don’t mean that it lacks action and fails to satisfy the Braveheart and Gladiator standards for battle violence (that’s apples to oranges), but that Giles, like many of the other BBC Shakespeare directors, hasn’t given the play’s narrative much shape. Competent scenes follows competent scene without much sense of where it’s all going.

Take Quayle’s Falstaff. His scenes with Gwillim through the first part of the play are wonderful and his Falstaff is a man who has settled into his braggadocio and deceits, both of self and others, like comfortable old clothes. There is also a vulnerability about him, which Quayle ties to his age more than his overindulgences, that evokes a fair amount of sympathy no matter what outrageousness he’s perpetrating.

Then, in Act 4, when the play turns to battle scenes, his Falstaff begins rather abruptly to speak directly to the camera. Yes, these are his first scenes alone (4.2, 5.2, 5.3, and 5.4) and his speeches are necessarily monologues, though they tend to be directed to dead bodies. Looking into the camera, though, makes the viewer a participant in the action. It’s as if we’ve replaced Hal as his audience, and Falstaff needs an audience. But breaking the fourth wall here also shifts an arrangement Giles has previously made with the audience, that we are watching these characters in some far off world populated primarily by Shakespeare’s language. Quayle’s looking at the camera is jarring, in part because it shifts our relationship to Falstaff’s character, deviating from both the tone of the production and the direction this Falstaff has established.

One could argue that such a shift is appropriate because, as Gail Kern Paster suggested earlier this week, Falstaff’s actions during the battle have consequences in the way that his shenanigans in Eastcheap do not. But how does breaking the fourth wall amplify this? How does the winking “you’re in on this” involvement of audience bring the character to some logical conclusion in this production? The Falstaff who looks at us knows himself more completely, knows his villainy and shortcomings more casually, lacks our sympathy, betrays more of a calculating nature. The choice may serve to best present the speeches he’s making in the play’s latter part, but it disconnects Falstaff a bit from the character established prior.

I was also struck by another aspect to the BBC’s museum theater approach that amplifies the static feeling of their productions. The films are what Shakespeare-on-film critic Samuel Crowl would refer to as “theatrical,” that is they are films of stage productions. The BBC has removed the literal theatrical stage, but the physical sense of it is still there – the shots are confined to cramped locations, there are no landscapes or depictions of the world without characters (no establishing shots for example), the camera is limited to a theatrical audience’s viewpoint, and nearly all the camera movement (pans, tilts, tracking shots) and perspective (high and low angle, long shots) we associate with movies is absent.

But in a theater there is sound. Not necessarily music or even the constant voices of acting, but the sound of an audience experiencing live theater – laughing, shifting in their seats, gasping, coughing, breathing. The air in a theater is alive, vital. Film cannot capture this organic symbiosis of actor and audience. It replaces it, in fact, with relentless soundtrack noise – orchestrated music that swells and ebbs with the story’s emotional fluctuations, life sounds associated with the setting, popular music inserted into the narrative. When you watch the BBC productions, what you get is an absence of both. Essentially you get the actors speaking their lines into dead air. It’s disconcerting and, for me, it has the effect of sucking a lot of life out of some of the most beautiful poetry ever put to action.

The medium does make a difference. And that’s something I think the BBC Shakespeare never understood.

Randall

photo credit: Anthony Quayle as Falstaff in the BBC Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1.

TSI 2010 - From ThighMaster to Ballbuster

2010-06-28T22:11:00.000-07:00

As most of you know, I’m doing the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Teaching Shakespeare Institute (TSI) this summer, four weeks of scholarship, pedagogy, and performance studies focusing on 1 Henry IV, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, and Measure for Measure. I will devote a bit of this space for the next month to exploring some topics and ideas that relate to what we’ve been doing here at the William Shakespeare Experience. Comments, as always, are welcome.

TSI 2010 began with a lecture by Gail Kern Paster, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Director, on 1 Henry IV. After begging off her original topic – “Why Shakespeare?” – Paster took us through a detailed comparison of Hotspur and Hal, looking at questions of governance (what makes an effective leader?), character (Hotspur’s intemperance vs. Hal’s calculation), and poetic motif (hot vs. cold).

I thought the most interesting moment came during the question-and-answer. Asked to extend her comments to Hal’s relationship with Falstaff, Paster explained that she finds Falstaff a very disturbing character and, because of his actions on the battlefield in Act 5, unredeemable. Falstaff rises after his feigned death and finds Hotspur dead near him. He remarks, “How if he should counterfeit too, and rise? By my faith, I am afraid he would prove the better counterfeit. Therefore I’ll make him sure, yea, and I’ll swear I killed him. Why may he not rise as well as I? … Therefore, sirrah, with a new wound in your thigh, come you along with me” (5.4.125-131).

The editors of the Folger edition have added the stage direction, “stabbing him,” between “sirrah” and “with a new wound.” The Arden edition adds “stabs the body” in the same place. (The 1613 Quarto available in the Folger Library has no stage direction.) Paster compares this action to the horrors committed by Welsh women after Mortimer’s battle with Glendower before the play begins. Westmoreland reports to King Henry:

A post from Wales loaden with heavy news,
Whose worst was that the noble Mortimer,
Leading the men of Herefordshire to fight
Against the irregular and wild Glendower,
Was by the rude hands of that Welshman taken,
A thousand of his people butchered,
Upon whose dead corpse there was such misuse,
Such beastly shameless transformation
By those Welshwomen done, as may not be
Without much shame retold or spoken of. (1.1.37-46)

What is this misuse, this shameless transformation? Paster argues that the Welshwomen have castrated the dead soldiers. What’s more she suggests that Falstaff has done the same to Hotspur. Then he lies. And on the battlefield, where his actions matter in a way they do not in Eastcheap, it becomes impossible to disconnect him from these reprehensible actions.

I would add that Falstaff’s actions at Shrewsbury are startlingly disturbing even before the incident with Hotspur. He’s been given money by the King to conscript an army, but he has taken bribes to excuse his men, and instead gathered a weak force of “ragamuffins,” all but three of whom are summarily killed. Robbing passers-by is one thing, but robbing the king and putting a battle strategy in jeopardy seems a bit traitorous to me. Second, Prince Henry demands a sword of Falstaff in the middle of the battle. But Falstaff refuses to give one to him, offering him instead a bottle of sack, a jest that seems beyond inappropriate considering what, and who, is at stake.

So there’s a lot on which to build an argument about Falstaff’s dishonor and atrocious behavior. But Chris Lavold, a teacher from Wisconsin, asks Paster the key question: how does one get from Falstaff’s explicit “a new wound in your thigh” to castration? To most readers, that requires a bit of a leap. Paster argues that the specificity of Falstaff’s words implies something. Why does he single out the “thigh”? And from there the discussion moves to where the wound would have to be, what armor Hotspur might be wearing (cuisses), and the relation of this moment to Westmoreland’s earlier horror at Welsh battlefield atrocities.

For me, the conversation revealed the tension that exists between literary criticism as a means of explicating a text or addressing ambiguities and the world of lay readers that tends to include high school students like the ones I teach.

Quick exercise: right now, point to your thigh.

Where’s your finger? Are you pointing at your groin area? In the mind of a student, we have a new question: when does “thigh” not mean “thigh”? Leading students toward successful, complex critical thinking involves a certain amount of decoding, which is not a huge stretch since reading itself is a form of decoding. But it also involves trust, established by clear lines of connection between disparate ideas. The more tenuous those lines, the more we need to clothe conclusions in the language of possibility or probability (Holden Caulfield might be struggling with repressed homosexual feelings). But where critical theory can be frustrating is in its necessary tone of certainty (Holden is gay). And this is doubly frustrating in the teacher’s milieu where we necessarily entertain any line of thought that can be supported by thoughtful argument and avoid definitive or exclusive conclusions.

In the end, I very much enjoyed Paster’s concept of Falstaff’s craven behavior, although I didn’t agree with the castration interpretation. Where I’d like to see her vision realized, and where skeptical opinions would become moot, would be on stage. There the academic argument would be easily sidestepped by the reality of the performance.

Perhaps the director could set the play in the milieu of American politics circa 2000 (we’re back to George W. Bush as Hal). The audience would be left to confront a particular view of Falstaff and debate whether his action is supported by the text. Would W.’s fat father figure, Dick Cheney, really emasculate his fallen Democratic counter-part (well, maybe). Or would he simply gore him?

Sorry. Couldn’t resist.

Randall

Edward III - Women

2010-06-26T15:24:00.001-07:00

Gendered beings,

I'm struck in this play by the two women, who I think stand out a bit because there are always so few active women in these history plays. I remember Cindy writing about Constance during our discussion of King John, celebrating the verve both Constance and Queen Eleanor brought to the play.

In her book Shakespeare and Women, Phyllis Rackin writes, "It is interesting ... to compare Shakespeare's treatment of warlike women in his early history plays with their far more sympathetic treatment in the anonymous contemporary play Edward III. This play is sometimes attributed to Shakespeare, and it even appears in recent editions of his collected works, but it has yet to achieve a secure place in the Shakespearian canon, and its female characters are depicted in strikingly different terms from those in the canonical Shakespearian history plays. In Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, Joan is both the chief enemy to the English kingdom and a witch as well. In Parts 2 and 3, Margaret is a bloodthirsty adulteress. the more sympathetically depicted female characters in Shakespeare's history plays, such as the victimized women in Richard III and the Duchess of Gloucester and the Queen in Richard II, never go to war, they play no part in the affairs of state, and they seem to spend most of their limited time on stage in tears. Helplessness seems to be an essential component of female virtue in most of Shakespeare's English histories.

"Edward III, by contrast, depicts courageous women warriors who are also models of feminine virtue. The Countess of Salisbury resists the Scots king's siege of her castle and the English king's assault on her virtue with equal courage and resolution. The English queen, equally virtuous, leads her army to victory over the Scots at Newcastle, 'big with child' but still 'every day in arms' (4.2.40-6). In Edward III, warlike English women defend their country against foreign threats. In Shakespeare's English history plays, warlike women embody those threats" (48-49).

I think Constance, and the attributes Cindy discussed, would satisfy Rackin's point about the embodiment of threat. I'm looking harder for a Shakespearean character who is similar to the Countess. Certainly none exists in the history plays. But what about Isabella in Measure for Measure? (I'm a couple weeks away from reading this play for my Folger experience, so if no one has any thoughts, I can revisit the question then.)

And finally, does Rackin's differentiation between the English women in Edward III and the English women in Shakespeare's history plays, ring true?

Randall

RE3: Edward III and Historical Myth

2010-06-25T14:38:00.000-07:00

Randall writes:

Ernst and all,

That's an interesting question about the genesis of theme. As a high school teacher, I spend a lot of time encouraging students to look at a text's implicit values. Do I suggest they are all intentional? No. A writer may completely avoid establishing thematic coherence as part of the creative process and think nothing of it. Themes, we suggest, emerge. But is the expectation that writers concern themselves with narrative coherence merely a product of a certain way of looking at literature? Or can we assume that all playwrights work toward a satisfactory narrative. If a writer establishes the most basic structure -- a beginning, middle, and end -- doesn't that imply a beginning, middle, and end of something?

Taking Edward III specifically, are we looking at the beginning, middle, and end of Edward III's battle for France? Or the beginning, middle, and end of a personal and public crisis in his life? Or the beginning, middle, and end of the rise of Edward the Black Prince? Can the playwright(s) in this case be expected to have asked themselves, "what story are we telling?"

Beyond the simple, we talk about comedy and tragedy, among the generic conventions of which we find a narrative component, a relationship between order and chaos and a transition from one to the other. Certainly, history plays can challenge narrative coherence, pre-determining a character's biography, choices and actions, the existence of social order and chaos, and even the public's attitude toward the story's figures and events. Perhaps history plays expose an author's creative process more completely precisely because history has provided a template by which we can observe narrative choices, deviations, amendments, agreements. And when we can put our finger on an author's choices we can determine attitude.

For me, that provides a connection between narrative coherence and theme. For example, in 1348, a third of the English people died from the plague, eight years before the battle of Poitiers. The Edward III playwright chooses to leave out Edward's successfully getting his people through this portion of English history. Did the ravages of the disease not fit the warrior story? Is reference to the plague box office suicide? Does the play let us explore the possibility that the real challenges of leadership come from within or from other people, rather than forces of Nature? The Edward III playwright does include Edward's interaction with the Countess of Salisbury, which he gets from William Painter's Palace of Pleasure (1566). Again, he has a choice: either depict the temptation as Painter did (Edward is single, the Countess a widow) or retain the historical fact that both are married. The latter path addresses Edward's stature as a hero in the story. Can we move from that to the idea that the story has something to say about heroism?

Ernst has given us on a number of occasions the suggestion that Shakespeare may approach his stories from the standpoint of a question: why would a character act this way? That question has been quite fruitful for me in reading the plays. With Edward III, though, I don't find adequate exploration of the Countess sequence. I don't find a clear foundation for Edward's harsh refusal to rescue the younger Edward in Act 3, scene 4 (Audley says, "O cruel father"), and by the end of the play I'm uncertain about the kind of person I'm expected to associate with Edward. I certianly don't feel that way about Henry V or even Henry VI or, to extend beyond Shakespeare, Thomas of Woodstock.

One last thought: given that this play may have undergone some revision, which may account for the possible Shakespearean passages, we might even have a greater right to expect a narrative coherence and the resultant emergence of some thematic coherence, as playwrights work to smooth the story into a pleasurable, and marketable, piece. On the other hand, too many cooks may spoil the soup, but with this play it's hard to tell which situation we have.

Randall

RE2: Edward III and Historical Myth

2010-06-24T15:31:00.000-07:00

Ernst writes (from Rome):

It could be said to boil down to the matter of how consciously coherent that play we have in front of us is. It is clearly episodic, and, at the same time, a sense of coherence can be derived from it. I have limited belief in some of the themes here, not that they don't make sense looking at later plays. How, indeed, do themes develop in a playwright's mind? Are they consciously planned out in advance, or do they arrive slightly after such a play has been written and thought about?

I lean out a window in a stone building not far from the Campo di Fiore here in Rome--in order to catch an open website to deal with.

Ciao Amici,
Ernst

RE: Edward III and Historical Myth

2010-06-23T14:11:00.000-07:00

Randall writes:

Edwardians,

Gil asks, in his "Edward III and Historical Myth" posting, if Edward III's seeming disconnect between Edward's seduction sequence and the "heroic victories on the killing fields of France" isn't analogous to the transition from the Eastcheap and Falstaff sequences to "the emergence of the militarily unprepared Prince Harry as he arms to fight Hotspur at Shrewsbury." I don't think the analogy holds, though, for two reasons.

We are led to make some comparison by the opening scene of Edward III, where Edward, seeking a legal foundation for his battle with France, discusses his right of rule with Robert Artois. Edward's claim will rest on the fact that his mother is the sole heir of France's previous king, Philip LeBeau, his three sons having died without issue. France, of course, denies her claim due to Salic law, which excludes women from inheriting the throne. This is the same Salic law that Henry V learns has exploitable loopholes allowing him to make his claim on France with "right and conscience." Hence, both plays begin by justifying England's right to do battle in and for France, a predictable bit of national propaganda in two plays that present great historical English victories.

Once we have similar starting points it is easy to extend the comparison to the two kings. In Edward III and Henry V, though, we get two very different rulers. Edward's lapse into temptation and attempted seduction represents a deviation from his role as king, putting his success in France at risk. In fact, at the moment that he becomes smitten with her, he says:

What strange enchantment lurked in those her eyes,
When they excelled this excellence they have,
That now her dim decline hath power to draw
My subject eyes from piercing majesty
To gaze on her with doting admiration? (1.2.102-106)

Giorgio Melchiori, in his footnote to this passage in my New Cambridge edition, points out the contrast between "subject" and "majesty." In short, Edward is unkinged by his lust ... um, admiration ... for the Countess. (And it's no surprise that in unwittingly wielding this power over him, the Countess has been cast as a witch by the playwright's use of the word "enchantment." As we learn from Joan of Arc in Henry VI or Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, women who exert power over men can only be in league with the devil.) And this is where the comparison between Edward and Hal begins to fall apart for me.

Both men face publicly acceptable and unacceptable paths to their future. Edward begins on an acceptable path (rightful king pursues legal claim to greater territory and national pride) but deviates to an unacceptable path (seduction of chaste, married woman, a personal rather than public goal inappropriate for someone who wields the royal "we" and the moral obligations that go with it). Gil reminds us that our comparison begins not with Henry V but with 1 Henry IV, where Hal is hanging out in a tavern, plotting robberies with scruffy ne'er-do-wells. Hal, then, has begun on the unacceptable path, as noted bitterly by his father ("riot and dishonor stain the brow/ Of my young Harry"). By the end of 1 Henry IV though Hal has moved to the accepted path, defeating Hotspur and distinguishing himself in battle. Even before the final showdown between the two Harrys, Sir Richard Vernon, who might be seen as a sort of public voice, acquaints Hotspur with Hal's kingly qualities:

...let me tell the world:
If he outlive the envy of this day,
England did never owe so sweet a hope
So much misconstrued in his wantonness. (1 Henry IV, 5.2.68-71)

Ah, "misconstrued." We're asked to finally recognize what Hal has been arguing all along -- that his "wantonness" is part of an essential path to kingship. Or, as Hal puts it,

Yet herein I will imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him. (1 Henry IV, 1.2.204-210)

So, Gil asks, is the disconnect between the two worlds, the two paths of each character, so different? I think so because while Edward's represents a clear deviation from (and therefore a challenge to) his success as a king, Hal's is not. Instead of being unkinged by his association with Falstaff and his cohorts, it has made him a better king. As he tells the emissary from the Dauphin in response to the gift of tennis balls in Henry V, "we understand [the Dauphin] well,/ How he comes o'er us with our wilder days,/ Not measuring what use we made of them" (1.2.266-268). To turn this around, what use is Edward's temptation by and attempted seduction of the Countess? In the second half of the play, does his emergence from the temptation reveal him to be something stronger, greater, or more aware than he was? No.

In fact, and this would be my second reaction to the comparison, Edward's disappearance as a main character in the second half of Edward III shifts the emphasis on to Edward the Black Prince. While 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V keep a fairly strong focus on Hal's journey, mitigating a division between Hal's experiences in the tavern and his experiences on the battlefield, Edward III emphasizes the disconnect between its two parts with a significant character shift. This reminds me of the focus on events rather than on central character that we found in the Henry VI plays, and if we agree with Gil about Edward III's probable placement between those plays and the Henry IV and Henry V trilogy, that would make some structural sense. Ernst suggested we spend some time comparing this play to the Henry VI trilogy, "especially with regard to the nature and depth of Edward III's characters." I throw that out there for anyone willing, and I'll leave it at this: while Shakespeare's second set of Henry plays treats Hal like an epic hero, this play, Edward III, is more like the first set of Henry plays, a dramatic mirror for magistrates.

Randall

[Quotes: 1 Henry IV from Folger edition; Henry V from Signet edition; Edward III from New Cambridge edition.]

Edward III and Historical Myth

2010-06-05T16:53:00.000-07:00

Gilbert writes:

“Edward the Third, my lords, had seven sons,” genealogist York explains to the Earls of Warwick and Salisbury (2 Henry VI, II.ii.10), though I hope these are not the same Warwick and Salisbury who are the father and husband of the Countess in Edward III. “Edward’s seven sons … were as seven vials of his sacred blood,” laments the Duchess of Gloucester, widow of number six, Thomas of Woodstock (Richard II, I.ii.11-12).

The Plantagenets (Lancasters and Yorks) put historian Holinshed to work full time; when the eldest son, Prince Edward, the Black Prince (so called because of the armor he wore at Crecy), died, his son, Richard II, became king. The third son, Lionel of Clarence, was the grandfather or great grandfather of Edmund Mortimer, heir presumptive of Richard (remember Hotspur taught a starling to cry “Mortimer” to bedevil Henry IV). Son number four was John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, whose son, Henry Bolingbrook, was acclaimed King Henry IV, father of King (Saint) Henry V, in turn father of Henry VI. The fifth was Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, patriarch of Edward IV, father of Edward V (the prince in the Tower), and brother of crook-backed Richard III, and of an Elizabeth who married Richmond who usurped the throne as Henry VII, father of Henry VIII, who fathered Edward VI, Bloody Mary, and Elizabeth I, and whose sister Margaret, married James VI of Scotland (James I of England), Shakespeare’s quasi patron, who may have suppressed Edward III as anti-Scot.

Got that? Therein are nine of Shakespeare’s plays (until we find manuscripts of plays of the histories of William of Hatfield and William of Windsor, sons number two and seven, The Two Bills?).

If Shakespeare did not write Edward III, he should have. It is the cornerstone of all the bloodlines I have just outlined, and thus a necessary part of what Randall called “English monarchical myth building.” More important is “stage-ability,” English attitudes toward “honor, chivalry, leadership, political expediency.” I find a draft of Henry V here, the military coming of age of Prince Edward, his Agincourt-like victory against odds at the battle of Poitiers, arrogant and insulting French (three Heralds offer a horse and a prayer book instead of a tun of tennis balls), a siege of Calais (with a glance at Harfleur) threatening annihilation, but elevating to mercy.

If Edward III dates to 1594, it would follow the Henry VI’s (and my ear finds its verse more mature), but precede Richard II and the Henriad. If this is accurate, then rather than merely being a draft of Henry V, it prefigures the whole Henry IV progression—the Hal-like Gadshill hijinks slightly in a class with temptation of seducing the Countess, then the apotheosis of patriotic heroic victories on the killing fields of France by the father & son Edwards. There is more chivalry in Edward III—Salisbury’s safe passage is the prime example. Edward III is a bifurcated play, but isn’t Eastcheap and Falstaff almost as disconnected as the emergence of the militarily unprepared Prince Harry as he arms to fight Hotspur at Shrewsbury? So, I’d like to explore coming-of-age, and also the touch of skepticism about honor and politics (if you remember, I think Henry V is the perfect politician, manipulating perception, rather than embodying the perfect warrior). I’ll try to look at Greenblatt’s “Invisible Bullets” before I proceed.

Gil

Edward III - Connections

2010-06-04T07:46:00.000-07:00

Ernst writes:

Here's a copy of an introduction to Edward III from William Kozlenko’s Disputed plays of William Shakespeare, which contains more connections to other Shakespeare plays than could sink an oil well. I think Kozlenko considers the play as having been written a bit later than I do.

(Click on the images to see an enlarged version of the pages.)

RE3: Edward III - Authorship

2010-06-03T20:15:00.000-07:00

Ernst writes:

I could envy Derek’s coming stay in Basel, a city famous both for its metabolism and for its love of smallish, light-brown Siberian dogs, which accounts for their saying “Chow” every time they turn around.

I also sympathize with Derek’s impatience with contemporary (but already dead) criticism. Bah! My father’s dissertation was on German translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets for Hyder Rollins at Harvard—a sadly narrow topic in certain respects—good for only a few notes in Rollins’ book on Shakespeare. My father who was also far better educated and more brilliant than his son, never got to teach Shakespeare. The Shakespeare course had already been taken over by a woman at Hobart and William Smith, where he had been invited to establish a Harvard-like Western Civ, program. And though he was English Department Chair for years, he honored the woman’s claim to the course.

And so it goes.

Ernst

RE: Edward III - Opening Thoughts

2010-06-03T20:07:00.000-07:00

Ernst writes:

My first response to Edward III was how wonderfully clear the iambic pentameter is—clean, efficient, tremendously easy to follow. Having read (at one time or other) all the surviving English plays written between the mid fifteen hundreds and 1615 or so, I should have something of an “ear,” but I wouldn’t trust it too far.

To me, however, the play feels as it was written around 1589-90. Shakespeare, who, people argue convincingly, surely had a (considerable) hand in it, would have been around 25-26 at the time, married for a number of years and with two children—old enough to have a relatively firm sense of himself as a writer. The chief playwrights of and before the time were John Lyly (fading from favor at the Court), Robert Greene (who wrote competent blank verse), Thomas Kyd (who wrote The Spanish Tragedy in 1587—our melodramatic sense of which may be affected by Ben Jonson’s later, over-the-top additions) and, most sensationally, Christopher Marlowe, whose Tamburlaine plays were an earth-shaking event for the English Theater.

I felt that the characters were pretty flat. What strikes me as Shakespeare’s abiding question in most of his history plays (“What sort of character would do these sorts of things?”) goes largely unanswered. But I found the language that these flattish characters speak to be—often—quite delightful. I could certainly feel Marlowe in the grand posings that sprinkle themselves through the play—especially its earlier parts. Confrontations like those between Kings John and Edward in III.iii remind me of similar confrontations in Tamburlaine—most especially those between Tamburlaine and Bajazeth, or Cosroe, or the coalition of emperors who try to stop his rise to power. Phrases like “Fairer are thou than Hero was;/Beardless Leander not so strong as I,” etc. (II.ii) remind me of Tamburlaine’s apostrophe to his beloved Zenocrate, or the mention of the stars, “When, to the great star-chamber o’er our heads,/The universal session calls to count/This packing evil…” sounds like Marlowe (and foreshadows King Lear).

The cute/clever wordplay reminds me a good bit of Lyly: the carefully balanced remarks such as:

COUNTESS
As easy may my intellectual soul,
Be lent away, and yet my body live,
As lend my body, palace to my soul,
Away from her and yet retain my soul.
My body is her bower, her court, her abbey,
And she an angel, pure, divine, unspotted;
I I should lend her house, my lord, to thee,
I kill my poor soul, and my poor soul me. (II.i.236-243)

Like Lyly for adults, not for the children who generally performed his plays. And there is also stichomythia, the bouncing back of lines echoing and answering other lines, a typical Lylyesque trick:

Edward: Thinkst that thou canst unswear thy oath again?
Warwick: I cannot; nor I would not if I could.
Edward: But, if thou dost, what shall I say to thee?
Warwick: What may be said to any perjured villain… (II.i.327-330)

There is a good bit of this Lylyesque word-play in Shakespeare’s earliest comedies, The Comedy of Errors and Love’s Labors Lost. It would be good to think of those two plays when trying place Edward III in context, as it might be good to compare the plays to the Henry VI plays—especially with regard to the nature and depth of Edward’s characters. There are certainly echoes of situations and character types that Shakespeare uses in this play throughout his later work. I will try to get to that next broadcast. Also, the play mentions two (relatively early, less complex) types of Malcontentedness (my dissertation topic)—Edward being a lover’s-melancholy sort of “malcontent” in his dealing with the Countess, and King Charles referring to England as harboring “malcontents,/Blood-thirsty and sedition Catalines,/Spend-thrifts and such as gape for nothing else/But change and alteration of the state.” Robert Greene put himself forward as having been a “malcontent” in 1592. And the word had been used by both Lyly (jokingly) and Marlowe (darkly) only a year or two earlier than 1590. And Robert Greene was probably returning to England and “ruffling out [his] silks in habit of a malcontent” at about the same time.

Many people seem to think that Shakespeare wrote many of his sonnets during the mid-1590’s, but one wonders how many of them he got started with earlier. The play’s often-mentioned use of the phrase, “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds” (Sonnet 94) makes one wonder whether Shakespeare was writing sonnets more vigorously during these early years than many suppose. The order in which the sonnets were written is very much up in the air.

Finally, I enclose with this post a discussion of Edward III I pulled from the Internet.

Ernst

Edward III - Character Matters

2010-06-03T15:08:00.000-07:00

Randall writes:

I opened our discussion of Edward III with some questions about structure and contemporary attitude. I'd like to add a few inspired more by the play's characters.

Where does the Countess of Salisbury fall in our experience of Shakespearean women and/or Elizabethan or Tudor drama? Is she a type, a stock character? Or is she more fully developed? Given the usually peripheral roles women tend to play in historical dramas (Joan of Arc and Margaret in Henry VI, Lady Percy in Henry IV, Katherine in Henry V, Queen Isabel in Richard II, and Lady Anne in Richard III), how does the Countess shape our experience of Edward? If you were to pick an actress to play her in your production, who would it be?

Edward undergoes a grand temptation in Act 2, then retreats to occasionally worrying about or stoically ignoring his son. Is he the play's central character? (If not, who is?) As an audience presented with a piece of our vital history, what does this particular king teach us? Given our modern desire for stories with central heroes or at least clear protagonists, how do we react to an Edward III?

And Edward, the Black Prince. I guess if you've got a Hal, you can have a Ned. Despite the many parallels though, our Ned is not quite so deftly realized in the text. How is the prince not like Hal? What makes him fit to be king? What impresses the playwright most about him?

Does King John of France emerge at all as a notable character? Are there any real villains in the play? Or mostly opposing forces?

And is there one of those enjoyable outsider characters, the one who comments -- chorus-like -- on a particular proceeding, someone like the Bastard in King John?

Characteristically,
Randall

Twelfth Night - Sympathy for Malvolio

2010-05-30T18:26:00.000-07:00

It's Shakespearean karma. I'm reading Twelfth Night again as I prepare for the Folger workshop. The play has now achieved "desert island" status in my life. I might as well have it tattooed on my person.

So I've been musing about Gil's question regarding the anagrammatic names (Viola, Olivia, Malvolio), but drawing a blank. If, for example, all the lovers' names are anagrams, why isn't Orsino included? One could joke that Orsino is an anagram of "orison," indicating that the duke can only pray for Olivia's love.

All this led me to consider another moment of word play -- Malvolio's comment about Maria's forgery:

"By my life, this is my lady's hand! These be here very c's, her u's, and her t's, and thus makes she her great P's. It is in contempt of question her hand" (2.5.88-91).

The prevailing trend among my students is to assume that this passage is a dirty joke (especially if you gloss Malvolio's "and" as " 'n' "). And Andrew Aguecheek's repeating Malvolio's observation, because it's not clear what it means, enhances the idea that it's a dirty joke, as if he were saying "get it?" In addition, there is a homophonic echo a few words later: "contempt."

But here's the mystery. What is Malvolio reading? Ostensibly, it is the address on the exterior of the envelope or letter: "To the unknown beloved, this and my good wishes." Scanning this salutation, where do we find the letters "c" and "p"? Remember, the letter is sealed, and no names appear on it, or else Malvolio wouldn't be puzzling out who wrote it and to whom it is writ.

Chew on that for a bit. Next, let's assume that it is indeed a dirty joke, referring to a c-word or some Elizabethan variant. Malvolio does not make the joke; he's merely its conduit. His innocence rests on the apparent randomness of the key letters that identify Olivia's handwriting and on his established Puritanism. Such a joke wouldn't even occur to him. Thus the scene presents us with a brief comic duo in which Malvolio is the straight man or stooge and Shakespeare is the funny man, puncturing Malvolio's self-importance by getting him to mouth the lowest of low-brow humor. If it is dirty, we laugh both because its source is unexpected and at its unexpected source, the same way we laugh at Moe when Bart Simpson's prank phone call gets him to ask if "Jacques Strap" or "Mike Rotch" is in the bar.

So, when Cindy asks if it is possible for Malvolio's character to elicit sympathy, I think it is. Yes, we want him to fall. His self-importance, his pomposity, is irritating (although his attempt to move beyond his station, I think, no longer resonates with us), and we enjoy the comeuppance. But as with Shylock in Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare has endowed the Malvolio story with moments that dissuade the audience from merely dismissing him as a villain and also from taking pure pleasure in his humiliation. He is more than just the butt of jokes. First, his captivity when he is accused of insanity has never seemed to me to be fair, a punishment that did not fit the crime. While Feste's Sir Topaz continues the mockery, the scene's emphasis seems to be on Malvolio's suffering.

Second, Shakespeare gives Malvolio a moment -- "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you" -- unusual in a comedy and for a character meant simply to suffer the slings and arrows of comedic characterization. Olivia nails home the point, commenting: "He has been most notoriously abused." The double adverb there is significant. I wonder if we hear both these moments differently than Shakespeare's contemporary audience would have. We are raised in a culture steeped in the traditions of Horatio Alger and Andrew Carnegie, one that suggests that nothing stands in our way as we climb whatever ladder we choose. We also believe in fair play (although we don't necessarily practice it). We are more than willing to watch pompous people get their just desserts, usually in the form of being laughed at, but we don't like abuse, in any form. In the mocking of Malvolio, Olivia's people go too far.

In his final words to them, Malvolio may merely confirm his name -- ill will. For the rest of us, he seems to have suffered the unkindest c-u-t in the Play.

Randall

RE2: Edward III - Authorship

2010-05-29T21:34:00.000-07:00

Derek writes:

You know, I just got back from Europe a couple of days ago, and am still fighting jet lag, and so am about to head to bed (at what continues to feel like 4:30 am), but just the briefest response: yes, there is something Shakespearean about Shakespeare, something in way the words sound together, the way the characters speak, that distances "his" works from those of his contemporaries. I remember reading Dr. Faustus for the first time a few years ago and being struck by how stilted much of the language sounded. I hadn't expected to be so struck. But the difference was unmistakable.

Claim 2: That said, I don't think we'll get anywhere, ever, by attempting to atomize the writing and explicate the origin of that difference. And I think that's what people in this situation are tempted to do -- to LOCATE and describe the source of the problem. But just in the way that an obviously brown desk will lose all its brownness as we peer into its atomic structure, so will that which makes Shakespeare's writing so particular to him vanish as we try to train our eyes upon it.

I mean, we can try. I just think that we won't succeed.

good night,
Derek

RE: Edward III - Authorship

2010-05-29T19:56:00.000-07:00

Vere-ing off course,

I wish I'd included the small joke I'd intended about having a pool for how long it would be before one of us ripped into the authorship controversy. But I was thinking of an over/under number in terms of responses to my original e-mail. Not in terms of minutes. Derek wins.

I'm going to agree with Derek in principle, then explain why authorship matters. Ron Rosenbaum wrote, in his Slate.com article "The Double Falsehood of Double Falsehood," "The point is not who wrote Shakespeare (though I'm entirely convinced Shakespeare did) but what Shakespeare wrote, and what is falsely passed off as Shakespearean. The 'someone else wrote Shakespeare' types (and those who waste time arguing with them) are sad and pathetic because, frankly, life is short and if one has to choose between rereading King Lear or Othello and arguing about who wrote them, then one's priorities are profoundly misaligned. Any amount of time spent on the latter is subtracted from the former, alas."

When it comes to Edward III, I think we'll have a richer conversation if we focus on what is happening in the text or, by extension, what might happen on the stage. Every year that I teach Shakespeare, at least one student asks if Shakespeare actually wrote the plays attributed to him. And I give a version of Rosenbaum's response. Now, I'll add a bit of Derek's attitude as well.

But that said, I read Edward III with that question firmly in the back of my head: did Shakespeare write this? This is a question to which there is no definitive answer; asking it, though, leads us to an important form of assessment. Let's separate, for a moment, Shakespeare the man from Shakespeare the body of work. Then we must ask ourselves what makes the body of work unique? And finally are those attributes we've identified present in Edward III?

Why would we do this? Because to be able to do it means we recognize the essence of Shakespearean texts. Not the plot or the storylines or even the famous quotes, but something deeper -- the identity of the language. The question of whether Shakespeare might have written Edward III is the ultimate test of our familiarity with his work. By "familiarity" I don't mean that we have read it all and know it from memory; I mean that we have become familiar enough with the character of his writing that we know it from what it is not. Consider for a moment a more mundane version of this: the blind taste test. I have students who swear they can tell Pepsi from Coca-Cola. I like to pour a few colas (usually adding others like RC or Jones) into unmarked glasses and see. I'm impressed when they actually can. It means that they're familiar enough with the subtle differences in flavor that they "know" their colas. I want to know Shakespeare like that, because absent that familiarity, that understanding, I wonder if I really know "Shakespeare," as opposed to his fame. If I ripped a passage from a Shakespeare play you haven't read yet, maybe Coriolanus or Cymbeline, and one from Peele, one from Marlowe, and one from Fletcher, and sent them to you blind, could you tell who wrote which? Does it matter?

Randall

Edward III - Authorship

2010-05-29T17:54:00.000-07:00

Derek writes:

Okay, having not posted a thing on Twelfth Night, I'm going to take a break from the ridiculous amount of reading, grading, writing, indexing, and teaching I'm doing over the summer and respond IMMEDIATELY to question 5.

Who wrote the play? It really does not matter, especially now. Arguments between the Oxfordians and the Baconians, or whatever, are all predicated upon the belief that the plays' authorship does something important for the meaning of the work, as though 400 years of theatrical tradition, summer Shakespeare festivals, and literally billions of student-hours have not entirely effaced whatever traces of authorial intention (if that's even a reasonable thing to point to anymore) once obtained in these works.

I've been reading Stephen Greenblatt this summer -- not the recent money-making Will in the World, but the original work of New Historicism, Shakespearean Negotiations. I expected to hate it, because I detest New Historicism generally, and particularly as it is applied to Shakespeare. Another scholar in this tradition, a guy named Kastan, who pretentiously titles his work Shakespeare After Theory (as though New Historicism does not have metaphysical commitments of its own), describes The Tempest like so: it is not a commentary on colonialism brought about by the recent discovery of the New World. No, it is rather best understood as pertaining to -- I'm not kidding -- protestant/catholic strife in southern Italy.

I'm not an expert on Early Modern Europe by any means, and I never have been, but I've enjoyed The Tempest when I've seen it. I have felt it speaking to me. While it would be easier to hear colonial undertones there, I certainly heard not the slightest suggestion of religious unrest, and yet the play filled my ears.

Whatever Shakespeare means, however we as a culture have come to value these plays, I am certain that searching back through 400 years of history, either to the genius of the Author himself or to the "energeia" out of which the plays emerged, will not help us answer these questions for ourselves. If what we hear now are but echoes of some original thing, the echoes remain what we hear, and they are enough. The original would not speak in a language we can understand anyway, the world in which it resounded having died away long ago. We should call off that particular search.

It does not matter who wrote the plays. The plays exist, and as much as we may hate on Joe Dowling for botching them, part of the reason it bothers us is because we recognize that every performance has, to some degree, a lasting impression on the content of the play. And because we paid money for our seats, of course.

That's enough of a rant for the time being. In the fall, I am off to the Eucor universities of the Rhein valley in order to start a second PhD at the universities where Heidegger and Nietzsche taught -- Shakespeare, obviously, will be the subject of the dissertation, but the broader project will be attempting to account for the way the plays interact with or have their being in our culture without resorting to either a claim to "universality," authorial intention, or historical context (that looks back to the originary period for meaning). I think in order to understand Shakespeare, we have to look at the way those plays exist now. I'm off now to downtown Iowa City, in fact, to read Julian Young's Heidegger's Philosophy of Art.

Ciao, as they for some reason say in Basel,
Derek

Edward III - Opening Thoughts

2010-05-29T15:10:00.000-07:00

Shakespearenauts,

Welcome to our discussion of The Reign of King Edward III. Up to this point, we've read and discussed 21 of Shakespeare's plays, and we will be entering a stretch where many of the plays we read will be most familiar. I wonder if that doesn't have something to do our relative paucity of comment on Twelfth Night, for which I want to apologize to Cindy who got us started with some very good questions. Is there much left to say when we get to the Macbeths and the Hamlets? I hope so, and perhaps that will be a good discussion starter (when we get there): how does one continue a tradition of vital comment with a play about which there has already been so much?

We also have put the bulk of Shakespeare's history plays behind us. Which is too bad. I found Talbot, the Richards, Henry IV, Hotspur, and Hal to be fascinating characters, great fun to read about as characters as much as historical figures. Edward III gives us the opportunity to have another conversation about history as drama and the stageability of English monarchical myth building; Elizabethan attitudes toward honor, chivalry, leadership, political expediency, their own past, their neighbors, and warfare; the value, joy, and disadvantages of teaching lesser known works; and the beauty of English language from this period.

Edward III was printed in 1596 by London bookseller and publisher Cuthbert Burby, although it was probably written earlier; the title page, which includes no author's name, declares "As it hath bin sundrie times plaied about the Citie of London." I want to set aside, for the moment, the lurking question of authorship (did he, or didn't he?) and focus on some qualities of the play.

First, you put the play down, and you are struck by the clear division that seems to split it into two parts. Acts 1 and 2 present a King Edward on the brink of scuttling his continental ambitions in favor of a rather squalid attempt to seduce the Countess of Salisbury. Acts 3, 4, and 5 present the heroism of Edward the Black Prince and the fall of France. You wonder: have I seen this sort of bifurcation before? Is there some theme or characteristic that joins the two parts, unifying them? Is this "bad" playwriting?

Second, upon reflection you might recall that on a number of occasions we've commented on the chivalric values present in Shakespeare's history plays, and how they have seemed to fare in the presence of an edgier, distinctly Tudor, realpolitik. Talbot fell, Falstaff mocked honor, Hal manipulated his own image in order to create a certain impression of leadership, the war of the roses foregrounded political intrigue over "precedents" (or the rules of chivalry). Edward III seems to uphold chivalry and honor. How does it fit into the historical attitudes we've already discussed?

Third, Henry V came off as a fairly patriotic hagiography at times. Edward III? Even more so? Less? What takes precedence here: history, the English myth, drama?

Fourth, one night, over a couple drinks, you have a brilliant idea for staging this sucker. Your producing director thinks you're nuts and willfully seeking the financial ruin of your theater. What argument do you make to convince her otherwise? (And what is your brilliant idea?)

Fifth, who wrote this play? How do we know? Does it matter? I assume this is a question about language. Is it?

So, colleagues, invocate some golden Muse
to bring hither a discussion bedeck'd
with jewels of wit and sparkling intellect.

Randall

The Loneliness of Shakespeare Apocrypha

2010-05-17T23:16:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me that we could have played our Shakespeare Apocrypha game with a number of plays, including Thomas of Woodstock, which Ernst and I discussed a couple years ago. There's also things like Yorkshire Tragedy, Locrine, and The Second Maiden's Tragedy. A little research suggests that scholars before us have pretty much settled the authorship of these. (It's surprising how often the answer seems to be a committee.) Not that that would have reduced the enjoyment of rooting around in the periphery of the Shakespearean experience.

As we begin Edward III, where I'm less interested in an authorship debate than I am in exploring stylistics, I thought I'd share Ron Rosenbaum's latest for Slate.com, a heap of righteous indignation aimed at Arden's attempt to "extend the brand" to a play Rosenbaum considers laughably undeserving:

The Double Falsehood of "Double Falsehood."

Enjoy,
Randall

Twelfth Night - More on the Language of Love

2010-05-06T09:21:00.000-07:00

The Will Experience is theoretically a discussion, but forgive me if I talk to myself for a bit. I’m still thinking of the language of love (obsessively thinking, perhaps—please read the revised last two paragraphs of my last post, because I tinkered with the conclusion; now I think it actually says what I intended.)

After the “willow cabin” declaration, the scene moves on to the ever-inebriated Sir Toby who gives the Clown a sixpence for a love song. What to expect?

What is love: ‘Tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty,
Then come kiss me sweet and twenty;
Youth’s a stuff will not endure. (II.3.48-52)

Sir Andrew has chosen a love song rather than a song conducive to virtue, yet it is quite sobering in its warning to these aging knights that love belongs to the young and youth’s a stuff will not endure. It articulates a version of the warning to Viola and Olivia that it is their duty to marry and perpetuate their beauty before it is marred by age: “For women are as roses, whose fair flow’r/ Being once display’d, doth fall that very hour” (II.4.38-39). Do you remember Findlay’s Comic Flaw: we are mortal? We are back to language about love.

Switch to besmitten (besotted?) Orsino who also commands from Feste an old and antique song, “that dallies with the innocence of love.” Did you expect this:

Come away, come away, death,
And in sad Cypress let me be laid.
Fly away, fly away, breath,
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
O, prepare it!
My part of death, no one so true
Did share it. (II.4.51-58)

The fair cruel maid and even the sad cypress return to Orsino’s Petrarchan romanticism, yet I find this truly melancholy, a foreshadow of the unsentimental realism of Feste’s epilogue, “When I was and a little tiny boy … For the rain it raineth every day.” Once again Shakespeare arcs from the Romantic (If music be the food of love) to the Realistic (the rain it raineth every day), from Hotspur to Henry V, from golden Duncan to black Macbeth, and soon from Ophelia and Laertes to Hamlet, though in Twelfth Night the arc soars first between the elements of air and earth.

Gil

Twelfth Night - The Language of Love

2010-04-23T17:59:00.000-07:00

Ah, the language of love …

I seem to have hit a wall of silence on Twelfth Night, perhaps because I’m intimidated by my favorite Shakespeare or maybe I am still in awe of the play after falling in love with Peggy Ashcroft as Viola when I saw her at the Old Vic in my teens (Leo McKern, "Rumpole of the Bailey," was Feste). Still, I just can’t let the play go with only my “dramatic irony” musings, especially after Cindy gave us such a provocative challenge in December. So let me start by clearing my throat (a term I use for those often empty opening paragraphs freshman composition writers use when confronted by a blank page). How about: "from beginning of time until present the language of love has been depicted by poets …."

Ahem! Ya’ know, I’ve been around this play for 50 years and this spring is the first time I’ve noticed that VIOLA, OLIVIA, and MALVOLIO are anagrammatic. Now I’ve noticed it, what should I do with it?

Hem, hem! I’ve always known Viola. The Dramatis Personae names her. The speech tags identify her from act I, scene 2 -- Vio. “What country, friends, is this?” But, again, until this spring, I did not notice her true name is not spoken until act V, scene 1:

SEBASTIAN
Were you a woman, as the rest goes even,
I should my tears let fall upon your cheek,
And say, ‘Thrice welcome, drowned Viola!’” (V.1.238-240)

Earlier she has posed riddles about her identity to both Olivia (“What is your parentage?” “Above my fortunes”) and to Orsino (“my father had a daughter lov’d a man”), then Sebastian has submitted her to a rather tedious identification process (which an impatient audience must greet with “well, duh; don’t you remember you have a twin??”), so perhaps this articulation of her true name at last suggests that all identity is a form of riddle. Is that too clever?

Ah, hem, hem! I was reading a most unShakespearean book, Victoria Finlay (no relation), Color: a Natural History of the Palette, about the pre-chemical histories of ochre, black and brown, white, red, etc. Finlay finds an ochre stone in Italy’s Valle Camonica, associated with Neolitic petroglyphs, then she is off to Arnhemland in northern Australia for another source of the first colored paint (boy, what a way to write off one’s travels on income tax). In her “red” chapter, she describes how in 1513, Vasco de Balboa crossed the isthmus of Panama (pace Keats) and found gold, silver, and the color red in the New World. This color comes from the female cochineal beetle—or “grana’ as it is locally called—which lives on prickly pear cactus, and soon the Spaniards had started one of the biggest color export businesses the world had ever seen. In 1575 alone about 80 metric tons of red arrived in Europe via the cochineal fleet, and by 1600 several trillion bug bodies had been imported. The fashion world reacted quickly, and Europeans demanded their cloth be made in this new deep red, crimson, often called either ‘grana’ or ‘in grain,’ and it was seen as the ultimate cosmetic [wait for it, Will Experiencers].

In Twelfth Night, act I, scene 5, Olivia at last removes the veil with which she has been teasing Orsino’s messenger, Cesario:

OLIVIA
“We will draw the curtain, and show you the picture. Look you, sir, such a one I was this present. [Unveiling.] Is’t not well done?”
VIOLA
“Excellently done, if God did all.”
OLIVIA
“’Tis in grain, sir, ‘twill endure wind and weather.”
VIOLA
“’Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white Nature’s own sweet and cunning hand laid on.” (I.5.233-240).

Pun alert! In grain (cosmetic red) and ingrained (natural) tell the Elizabethan audience that Olivia is indeed a great beauty and also on the cutting edge of (expensive) fashion. [Footnotes for “in grain”: Riverside: it is fast-dyed, i.e., it won’t wash off; New Cambridge: indelible, not painted; Bevington: fast dyed; Norton: the dye is fast; Signet: fast-dyed, indelible—who says these guys don’t copy from each other.] It is a delicious scene; Olivia is underplaying her obvious beauty; Cesario zings her with a crack about cosmetics and women’s vanity; Olivia tops “him” with the little “Tis in grain” statement, seemingly understated again, yet, in 1600, claiming she is the confluence of both Nature and art. Lovely, indeed.

I would tell my students, after their essays were finished, to go back and throw away the throat-clearing paragraphs, but that was too much fun, so now I’ve seemed to have stumbled on Act I, scene v…

But first, Twelfth Night opens with what Stevie Davis calls Shakespeare’s “most hypnotically memorable and quotable” opening lines (or, at least, equal to those of Richard III):

If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again, it had a dying fall;
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odor. Enough, no more,
“Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou,
That notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe’er,
But falls into abatement and low price
Even in a minute. So full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical. (I.1.1-15, italics mine)

This epitomizes the language about love. Orsino, as most critics note, is in love with love, and thus one can suspect that these sentiments are a parody of amorous discourse. Certainly, this recalls courtly love, the smitten lover thriving on the emotion itself, the more unrequited the better, because the suffering is more exquisite. Orsino’s beloved cannot requite his emotion, because she has vowed seven years of mourning for her late father and more recently late brother, a perfect situation for a courtly lover.

Not only that, Orsino has sufficient wealth and position, that he need not himself sing sad (and bad) sonnets beneath his beloved’s window. He can send his minions, first Valentine, then Cesario with his verses. Both The Comedy of Errors (Egeon) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Hermia) begin with sentences of death, while The Taming of the Shrew (no marriage for Bianca until Kate is wed), Love’s Labour’s Lost (vows of seven years celibate study), and As You Like It (cruel Oliver denies his brother Orlando his birthright) all begin with a denial or perversion of nature, where youth naturally flourishes thorough love to marriage and fertility. And Illyria, too, is the scene of such an unnatural situation: the most beautiful, eligible, and emotion-ready woman vows “like a cloistress she will veiled walk,/ And water once a day her chamber round with eye-offending brine,” a reclusive melancholic, which enables (allow me a cheesy pop-psych term) Orsino to indulge in this binge and purge lyric to love.

Mike long ago (The Comedy of Errors posting) noted such water-into-the-ocean images, which here defuses love into some vast element. Yet these lines are beautiful, musical. The promise of logical argument in the “if”-clause, then four caesurae, flowing into the unstopped lines 5 and 6, “upon a bank of violets” (and we know a bank where the wild thyme grows), then reversed with a full stop in the middle of line 7, followed by a couplet, breaking the argument into an octet, almost evoking a nonce sonnet. This is the rhetoric of hyperbole, even metaphysical conceit, and it is hard for me to remember what an unnatural, narcissistic fool Orsino is. Orsino is to love as Volpone is to gold: “Hail, the world’s soul, and mine.”

Soon, Orsino dispatches his new courtier, Cesario, to the cloistered Olivia to “unfold the passion of [his] love,/ Surprise her with the discourse of [his] dear faith” though, aside, Viola confesses to that most conventional of fictions, love at first sight (which we know does not exist in nature): “Whoe’er I woo, myself would be his wife.” We have dramatic irony—Malvolio’s jealousy of Feste—and Olivia’s little disquisition on fools:

O, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a distemper’d appetite. To be generous, guiltless and free of disposition, is to take those things for bird-bolts that you deem cannon-bullets. There is no slander in an allow’d fool, though he do nothing but rail, nor no railing in a known discreet man, though he do nothing but reprove” (I.5. 90-93).

I could not teach comedy without the idea of ‘the allowed fool.” And note how Olivia’s rebuke of Malvolio is also a critical commentary on Orsino’s earlier excesses about love. Soon, we have the fun of the veils, disguises and potential mistaken identities. Poor Cesario has memorized Orsino’s text and does not want the effort to be in vain. Olivia’s inventory of her features, no lips like Petrarchan cherries nor teeth like pearls allowed. But then, when Cesario does get to recite Orsino’s lines, they are merely the classic conventions of love poetry, Petrarch turned to cliché, and the lines are awful, declamatory—thunder love, sighs of fire, my master’s flame. Declaim these aloud. Lots of end-stopping here. But when Olivia asks Cesario what “he” would say to a rejection of love, Viola says rejection would be incomprehensible, and we get the lovely “willow cabin” response:

OLIVIA
Why, what would you?
VIOLA
Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love,
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Hallow your name to the reverberate hills,
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out “Olivia!” O, you should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth
But you should pity me! (I.5.267-276)

Yes, Cindy, that is still my nomination for the best poetry in Shakepeare. Even though I have encountered hundreds of students who reject "poetry" the moment they hear terms such as synecdoche or couplets, yet nonetheless will write, when I am their audience, "this is a good poem because it has alliteration," allow me to point out this passage has only one caesura. Few end stops until it reaches the climax [sic]. Simple, yet fresh imagery such as "reverberate hills" and "babbling gossip of the air," which immediately cleanse my ear of "groans of thunder love." Forceful, active declarations: make, call upon, write, sing, hallow. I challenge readers to put themselves into this scene, with their name rather than Olivia. How could they resist?

Make sure to parse “pity” not as condescension but as feeling. I feel the intensity of the passion of love unfold here as in no other poetry I know. Meanwhile, we know that Viola is addressing the absent Orsino, who wrote the goddawful stuff recited above. Even old Thunder-love would have to hear this. And then Olivia's quiet “You might do much,” and her unnatural vow of seven years of mourning collapses in a moment. Dramatic irony, of course, in that she falls in love with a woman, but in truth she falls in love with the poetry, the language of love. Three hundred years later, Roxanne will fall in love with Cyrano’s poetry/soul rising from under the balcony. So beyond the situational irony, this is truth. Just look at Shakespeare, mocking Petrarch, and inventing the finest love poetry ever, more “true” even than in Romeo and Juliet.

Gil

Macbeth - Performance Log (March 2010)

2010-03-31T17:50:00.000-07:00

Macbeth
directed by Joe Dowling
Guthrie Theater
Minneapolis, MN
March 30, 2010

The Joe Dowling Macbeth at the Guthrie was crisp and clean; crisp in that they brought it off in 2 hours 10 minutes (without intermission), so Shakespeare's third shortest play moved with a concentrated intensity. I was not aware of cuts, though perhaps (wishful thinking?) Malcolm's test of Macduff may have been a bit shorter. I didn't hear a witch say "Fair is foul, and foul is fair," a crucial line for me. I was listening for it, but maybe it was swallowed up is the opening battle stage business.

It was good attending with my thirteen-year old granddaughter, Kaia, who had previously seen this production. This allowed me to see the play partly through her eyes, as she could anticipate action and flesh out her first impressions. From her previous experience she thought the witches were good. I would guess that meant they were memorably exotic (their voices may have been electronically filtered), but I better remember the acrobatic trio at the Berkeley Rep and the Polanski witches digging for corpses in the sand (backed, later, if I remember, by 75 naked crones).

This Macbeth was clean in that it did not seem to attempt any fresh vision. no chances taken, so it was finally as bland as the Dowling Hamlet that closed the old Guthrie.

The Dowling touch was violence and sex. The play opens with a long, busily choreographed battle, pre-witch. Lots of bodies (with a little audience distraction of how to get them off the stage in a thrust theatre). The uniforms do not particularly demonstrate, for an audience not quite settled in their seats, who is fighting whom, which the Scots, which the Norwegians, which Cawdor's traitors. I looked for Macbeth (Erik Heger), whom the bloody Captain will describe as heroic, but amid the smoke and business, I did not distinguish him (as he reportedly distinguishes himself). I was trying to orient myself, so the use of firearms (an AK 47 or two?) before they all got down to short swords, was irritating, compounded by the set which salted the stage with rubble -- a decaying civilization (surely not: Duncan is described as the ideal, fertile, sun-drenched king) -- with a prominent, rusted bike rim prominently in front. Whatever Dowling was attempting to do achronologically didn't reach me. But it didn't matter much because the chronology was only peripheral (not like setting the whole thing in a banana republic as one production I saw did).

The opening battle was a bookend for the finale, Macduff and Macbeth with a dozen of Macduff's troops as spectators (didn't any of them bring his AK47?), so the motif of a primitive warring tribal culture came across (Beowulf-time), yet this diminished Malcolm's "People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along" resolution (V.viii. 60-75 -- I'm probably paraphrasing from memory).

The sex is not so dramatic, but Lady Macbeth (Michelle O'Neill) had five costume changes, each, except the madness nightgown. displaying her impressive superstructure. She reads Macbeth's letter recounting the projections of the witches nearly orgasmically, and when hubby comes home she strips him down to his bare pecs. That's it, but it does remind us that sex and violence underscore ambition, and I certainly prefer this to sects and violins (Amadeus?).

I sometimes find the Porter (Kris L. Nelson) a drunken bore. Not here. But I never quite got Lenox and Rosse and Menteth and Cathness and Angus straight. Were they really all dressed in business suits? The Doctor, dressed in a grey Hillary Clinton power suit, looked like she had wandered in from another play. They pronounced Seyton "see-ton" whereas Shakespeare pronounced it "say-tan," perhaps here avoiding confusing the audience. I'm almost sure Seyton was the third murderer. I've seen a production where the third murderer was Macbeth -- a stretch.

As a Scotsman, I counted how many future kings were evoked by the witches in Act IV -- eight, so Dowling got that right (there were eight Scottish kings, including five James's descended from Banquo, between Malcolm and James I, who was in the opening night audience.

Logged by,
Gilbert

Photo credit: Lady Macbeth (Michelle O'Neill) encourages Macbeth (Erik Heger) after Duncan's murder. Image courtesy of the Guthrie Theater; photo by Michal Daniel.

Twelfth Night - Dramatic Irony

2010-03-04T16:05:00.000-08:00

Dear souls,

Cindy asked, long ago, for Twelfth Night teaching moments, and though this is far too late, let me at least try to contribute something for her teaching folder for the next time the play appears in her syllabus (I’m soooo sorry, Cindy.)

For me, I think the most profitable focus in Twelfth Night might be on dramatic irony, when the audience is in possession of information which is unknown or unperceived by one or more of the characters. We know from the opening scenes that Viola is disguised as a man, Cesario: Orsino, who takes “him” on as a courtier; then Olivia, who falls in love with “him” when he appears as Orsino’s messenger; then Sir Andrew, who is goaded into challenging “him” to a duel, do not know. Thus, all three say foolish things or take foolish actions that they would not if they were more fully informed of the facts. For instance, we, the audience, can evaluate, seeing through, how foolish Orsino’s patriarchal commonplaces seem when we recognize it is a woman who is listening. (“For women are as roses, whose fair flow’r,/ Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour,” II.iv.38-9.)

There is the same dramatic irony when Sebastian makes landfall—we know there are now “identical” twins in Illyria, but mistaken identity is inevitable for everyone else. There has been the same “error” in Plautus’s Menaechmi, then in Comedy of Errors. In Twelfth Night it is insisted on in I.ii (Viola’s arrival and her gender disguise—a reasonable protection for a woman in a strange land), then in II.i (Sebastian’s arrival), together with Viola’s frequent imparting of her deepest hopes, fears, and perplexities in soliloquy proper (an audience can always take soliloquy as unalloyed communication) or utterances whose full meaning is a secret to all but ourselves.

OK, but dramatic irony is not just a literary-critical term. The power of the audience in possession of full knowledge when the characters are not emerges because we can then see into and see why “what fools these mortals be.” That is, outside the theater none of us ever knows everything, yet we speak and act based on the best of our knowledge. Orsino can talk pompously of love to his young boy-courtier freely, but would not to a woman, and especially not to a woman who loves him. We are always alazons (someone who pretends or tries to be something more than he is, a self-deceived character—thank you Northrop Frye); dramatic irony makes us, as audience, eirons (someone who sees through self-deceptions or pretensions; akin to irony itself). Thus, reading/seeing Twelfth Night sets your students up to see into an essential element of human discourse. We make mistakes hourly based on only partial perception. But seeing or reading the play, we are in on the secrets, so we are in a perfect position to evaluate the flawed nature of human communication.

The punch line of all this is the Viola/ Sebastian denouement, where even "ocular proof” is no longer trusted. In Comedy of Errors, all the “facts” are so inexplicable that one explanation is magic or enchantment. In Twelfth Night, Antonio is a fact, so when the Illyrians see him, they arrest him. But Sebastian is not perceived as a “fact” so when Sir Andrew sees someone he presumes is the pusillanimous Cesario, Sebastian breaks his pate. POW! Probably all comedy is an exercise in dramatic irony (tragedy is, of course, too, but it is not THE point of tragedy, where misalliance with the pure laws of the universe is).

Same, same for Malvolio [I hope to return to Cindy’s initial query about him soon]. Maria’s “practice” (the forged letter) manipulates Malvolio into exhibiting his day-dreams (fantasies) to the cruel light of public scorn. They can practice on Malvolio because they know exactly what he wants [I have been reading Stevie Davies’s Penguin Critical Studies here]. We can easily be influenced by what we want desperately to believe. CL Barber uses the box-hedge scene as a central example to define his “Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy,” with its saturnalian play and its festive Lord of Misrule (now, of course, think of Falstaff and all the shows he puts on for Hal—13 men in buckram or killing Hotspur with a thrust to the groin, etc.) Davies refers to the Malvolio plot as a play-within-a-play, complete with on-stage audience selling the house audience on the joke, watching Malvolio acting out his fantasy life (dramatic irony: we know the letter is forged, so we can see how he makes a fool of himself as he lusts to believe in it; like Othello, innocence has no defense against being gulled, even if the gull somehow “deserves” it). Then the letter becomes an acting script for the yellow-stocking scene (III.iv) and the persecution of Malvolio (IV.iv).

Yes, he is tricked; however, ask your students how many believe in “personality,” then remind them the term comes from persona, Greek for “mask,” and note that almost all of our perceived “personality” is taken from others’ observations of our play-acting, role-playing, living according to a received script.

Olivia and Orsino, however ‘genuine’ their claims of feelings may be, are both characters who perform their aloof (grieving) or love-sick states as theatrical scripts from which their actions must never deviate. For me, both are doomed because of unnatural excess: Orsino’s amorous binge-and-purge—“if music be the food of love, give me excess of it that surfeiting the appetite may sicken and so die” (“hurl” won’t scan here)—while Olivia, the most eligible, fertile, naturally sexual damsel in Illyria has taken an unnatural vow of seven years of chastity. The audience has to know that both unnatural vows are doomed from the moment we hear of them, but we can enjoy how each is hoist on inevitable disillusionment, though as the aristocrats, neither is punished for such folly, unlike poor Aguecheek.

Ah aristocrats. At the end of the Helena Bonham Carter Twelfth Night, directed by Trevor Nunn, all dance, as in a “good comedy.” No, wait. No Aguecheek, no Malvolio, no Antonio, no Feste, all outside the dazzling crystal-lit ballroom, outside the castle. So the happily ever after is exclusive to those who are back in the illusion of romance. Inability to play the game (Sir Andrew) or clear, disillusioning, rational understanding (Antonio or especially Feste) are dangers to the romantic illusion we all thrive on.

Think of Hamlet, the only person in Denmark unable to belong to the fourteenth-century script, must at last be borne away by flights of angels. In Twelfth Night, even the seeming outsider, Sebastian, is now part of the dance (because, apparently, he has good abs—what more could a girl ask for?). Now the irony is on us, we who wistfully lust after happy endings.

My favorite class would be a tight exploration of I.v, “Cesario’s” embassy to Olivia that produces the “Make me a willow cabin at your gate” declaration, a scene overflowing with dramatic irony, but I’ll save that for a post on love poetry, unless Cindy has a moment and can tell us in advance what she knows I am going to say.

The castaway,
Gilbert

Twelfth Night - Twenty-Ninth Night

2010-01-23T14:37:00.000-08:00

Let me mention some of the various forces that come down upon Twelfth Night, one of the two singularly brilliant plays that come at the center of Shakespeare’s career.

1. Christmas revels in contemporary England lasted until 12th Night (or Epiphany), January 6th. To various degrees and in various places, the twelve days of Christmas was a time for merrymaking, self-indulgence, and making fun of authority. In some communities and countries it contained a kind of topsy-turvy festival in which government (in medieval times, the Church) was made fun of by setting up a "Lord of Misrule" (complete with "court" and attendants" who governed for a day of festivities. This was the sort of figure Wayne Burns would refer to a "panzaic," a kind of drunken, disorderly-but-appealing Pan-like figure. Falstaff (once described as a mini suckling pig (i.e. Christmastime food) was Shakespeare’s first essay into this popular type. Sir Toby Belch is clearly another.

2. Twelfth Night, which may or may not have been written after Hamlet, is, as much as any other, Shakespeare’s "Humors" play, reflecting the Chapman/Jonson/Marston vogue for such plays. Humors plays—mostly comedies—as I have said before—use a number of relatively flat types of characters, who, in the course of the play, are gotten "out of their Humors" and (hopefully) reintegrated into their societies. Although Shakespeare’s characters are nearly always dealt with more richly than the more singularly focused characters created by the playwrights mentioned above, the characters in Twelfth Night are certainly types. Orsino—the melancholic lover; Olivia—the over-the-top melodramatic mourner; Sir Andrew Aguecheek—the stupid would-be courtier; Sir Toby—the drunken, out-of-money knight (archetypically, the "lord of misrule"); Malvolio—the pompously officious servant/climber (there existed novels about good and faithful stewards who end up marrying the "lady" they work for—not the case here). All these characters are got "out of their prevailing "humors" by the play’s end.

(As a footnote, I might remark that Hamlet itself is a kind of "humors" tragedy—in that the characters surrounding Hamlet are also relatively flat—in that their essential natures can be described in a word or two—all of which focuses us on Hamlet’s character, which is essentially ours as well.)

3. Shakespeare’s company was also keenly aware of the inroads the boy actors in the private theaters were making into their public-theater audiences. The courtiers and would-be courtiers went to the private theaters, which were lighted and somewhat more comfortable than the public theaters, to see contemporary vogues (and, often, people) satirized or made fun of by what Hamlet refers to as the "little Eyasses." Shakespeare’s challenge in both plays was to overpower his contemporaries’ appeal.

4. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were also aware of the increasing threat of Puritanism, and they made fun of puritanical zealots often. (We have seen Shakespeare’s own detestation for shallow, officious types in a number of plays so far. Hamlet’s "Young Osrick" is a fine example of this.) Malvolio, then, is an attack at both Puritanism and shallow, self-serving officiousness.

While all this was going on (I won’t even mention anxiety about crop failures and the consequences of Elizabeth’s coming death), a group of Cambridge students was writing a set of three plays lamenting the poor job outlook for literary graduates and commenting on contemporary literary activities in general. The pays are called the "Parnassus Plays" because, in Greek myth, Mount Parnassus is the place that great artists end up going to. Needless to say, the clever artists and writers in the Parnassus plays fare very badly in a "real world" that doesn’t appreciate them.

The plays do, however, give extensive commentary on the London dramatic scene, praising Shakespeare as being the best of the playwrights of their time. They also make a curious comment on how Shakespeare "put Jonson down," a comment no one that I know has ever explained. Shakespeare was not a playwright to put others down—although there was a vicious "War of the Theaters" going on at the time involving Marston, Jonson and Dekker (who often wrote and play-doctored for Shakespeare’s company), who attacked one another flamboyantly on both the public and private stages drawing large audiences).

I have sometimes wondered whether or not the Cambridge students did not see Malvolio as a put-down of Jonson, who frequently dressed in black, tended to have a certain pompousness and, it is said, wandered about the galleries where one of his plays was being put on, muttering about his actors’ goof-ups—not to mention the fact that "element," which word Malvolio uses several times, was on of Jonson’s favorites.

5. I have not spoken at all here about the psychological aspects of the charcters’ interactions with one another—a subject worth pursuing: How do Viola’s words help develop Olivia’s thinking? How does she interact with Orsino? How do Maria and Sir Toby affect one another? How do Feste and Malvolio affect one another? Etc.

Nor have I gone into Feste’s place in the larger picture of Twelfth Night: What is his function? Is his Shakespeare’s voice? What is his equivalent in earlier plays? How does he compare with Touchstone? Etc. I will remind you that Feste was originally written for the comedian Robert Armin, Shakespeare’s company’s new "comedian," a singer with a good voice. (Armin is also said to have played Touchstone, although one wonders why he doesn’t sing in that play. Why not? I can only think that it was written with the previous "comedian," Will Kemp, in mind. I keep the two straight in my mind by remembering the Will Kemp reminds one of "hempen homespun" types, which Kemp frequently played. Silly me.)

Finally, I will note that Gil’s and my former teacher Bill Matchett, used to suggest that Malvolio will not end up cast of the play-ending reintegration of things, but will be invited back later. I don’t go with this opinion. I think a reminder that there are some people who can never be re-integrated into society is too powerful a truth for Shakespeare to pass up.

Speaking of destructive self-importance, I note a letter to today’s New York Times, which describes the Republican notion of democracy as being "One dollar = one vote."

Enough, or too much.
Ernst

Twelfth Night - Opening Thoughts

2009-12-05T10:40:00.000-08:00

Greetings, my fellow bardnuts. Make that, Season's Greetings! How appropriate that we read Twelfth Night at this time of year, yes?

My first exposure to this play was via a lovely production at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. The director set it in the Victorian era, so costume fabrics were luxuriant. The set included a very tall Christmas tree and all the details and elegance of a Victorian home (the inside theatre allows for more set decoration). Truly a treat for the eyes. To this day, when I read this play, I can still envision the lovely young woman who played Viola and exactly how Malvolio looked in his ridiculous yellow stockings. The production was clearly strong enough to shape my own directing efforts when I worked with a group of juniors on a Super Saturday project a number of years ago. But this play, although similar in plot to other comedies with twins, mistaken identities, and cross-dressing, renders itself more mature, more sophisticated than Shakespeare's earlier comedies. How did this evolution happen?

Thoughts to ponder as we embark:

1. The role of Malvolio is troubling to me. Details are wrapped up so neatly at the end of this play with the exception of Malvolio. Is he really all that BAD, as the root of his name suggests? Or is it possible for his character to elicit sympathy?

2. Compare/contrast Viola and Olivia. I would cast my vote for Viola as one of Shakespeare's most intriguing heroines. :-)

3. Ahhhh, the language of love. It's all here ― from the lyrical (gpf, I know exactly which line you will use here!) to the absurd.

4. The role of the fool compared to the fool we see in King Lear. Does comedy dictate a different social commentary than tragedy?

5. And last, but certainly not least, I will be teaching this play in January. Gimme some favorite teachable moments, or the "stuff" I can't possibly leave out.

Cheers to all!
Cindy

RE: Julius Caesar - R.I.P.

2009-10-24T13:47:00.000-07:00

Ernst writes:

That wonderful line, "We owe God a death," is used by a Spanish-speaking doctor the Cary Grant figure in Howard Hawks' Only Angels have Wings warns about the dangers of flying with him and landing on an island mountain top. (trans: "As your own Shakespeare says in Henry the Fourth, 'We...'")

This doctor, like Caesar, is a generation older than most of the other characters. His moral choice lies between retiring comfortably and carrying on boldly with a pretty god notion of who he is and what bravery in this world amounts to. Something THIS old man (thinking of Yeats' "Why Should not Old Men be Mad') does not find particularly ignoble.

Ernst

Julius Caesar - Then and Now

2009-10-03T14:36:00.000-07:00

Ernst writes:

Julius Caesar is a challenging play in several ways. I would begin by noting that the play contains no Talbots, Queen’s gardeners, Poinses, Bastards, French ambassadors—middle level characters to enrich the play’s viewpoints and give you various angles on its larger world. Shakespeare keeps to his historical sources pretty closely, so his play is more a telling of what everyone knew/knows with little embellishment.

Then to some other reflections. I find myself thinking about Julius Caesar then and now. We in the early 21st century have been increasingly surrounded by the dangers, stupidities and failures of so-called ”republican” (“democratic”? “liberal”?) governments for years and years. We have seen incident after incident of initially idealistic revolutions gone bad, have listened to years and years of “democracy’s” demagogues and their tricky doubletalk, which breeds fear and hate in the “mob” (and, by the dint of the mob’s overwhelming numbers, in us). We have seen the two last great political romanticisms, Communism and Fascism, rise, kill, and turn to ashes. We presently fear that our own government is bound for its grave. To us, a lot of the politics of Julius Caesar is old stuff.

Where were the democracies of Shakespeare’s time? There weren’t any. Even in the “Brave New World” of the western Hemisphere” (which The Tempest reminds us is but a flashily put on set of surfaces [Facebook, anyone?]), there was little beside exploitation and butchery with a smattering of mini-theocracies more authoritarian than most of England at the time. There was the possible exception of Champlain’s dream of settlers and Native Americans living in harmony, but Shakespeare and his audience knew little about that that dream. And anyway, Champlain would be in an English prison for three years and would die only a couple more after getting back to Canada—his dream with him.

The people Shakespeare was writing for did not know what we know about this subsequent history. They had not seen revolution after revolution decay into triumvirates of clever pitchmen (Antony/Rush Limbaugh), bankers (Lepidus/Lehman Brothers) and cagey politicos (Octavius/Dick Cheney).

They probably agreed with Shakespeare that Julius Caesar was the best bet to become a king like the ones they were accustomed to and admired (as, one might note, admiration for Elizabeth was waning), and that he would die with stoic nobility. They probably also realized that, once he became emperor, Augustus wouldn’t be all that bad either, and that imperial Rome would achieve more wonders (including 200 years of relative peace) than the world had seen before or since (England’s attempt at its own “Augustan Age” was, after all, only a century and a bit away).

So the question is: what new and what would a contemporary audience have found compelling about this play which, to a modern reader, is a little bit boring? Yes, the various orations are beautifully wrought, and the sight of historical giants upon the humble stage re-enacting their well-known stories is stirring, but what else?

To me, the most interesting aspect of Julius Caesar is the way in which Shakespeare continues his deepening study of individual characters—using some of the psychological tools of his time. I remember some teacher from days gone by explaining that Brutus was in the grips of the melancholic humour and that Cassius’ humour was choleric or fiery. This makes sense as far as it goes, I suppose. These seem to me to be the only characters that really interest Shakespeare; the others are mostly treated as historical figures who need to be fleshed out for dramatic purposes, but not gone into too deeply. (Is Caesar slightly over-the-hill sanguine?) Cassius seems pretty straightforward to me also.

This leaves Brutus as the most interesting study, and what I find interesting about him is that he is a break from Shakespeare’s earlier melancholic. Yes, he has a case of melancholia (the “scholar’s melancholy,” but he would not strike one as a flat character like Don John, Jacques, or even—to an extent—an “antic-disposition” Hamlet puts on. He is related to a humours character, but he is more than one. Caesar’s team might call him a malcontent in one of their historical revisions, but he is not. He is a whole character dealing with serious decisions. Hamlet—here we come.

Postscript: If this is incoherent, it is partly because it is coming to you from the Champlain Valley Physicians Hospital, where I am in a bed, having had a very close call with an eschemic (blood supply to intestine blocked) small intestine (lost more than a yard). At least I am not on the terrible “trip” (hallucinations of the worst sort) Adavan put me on the day after my surgery.” I hope to leave soon and get back to Kingston, and also to get into further correspondence with you all.

Ernst

Julius Caesar - R.I.P.

2009-09-18T17:08:00.000-07:00

Gil writes:

Caesarians,

My Julius Caesar challenge is to consider why three significant figures in this dramatization of Roman history rejected, ignored, or turned away from sound advice or astute observation, each with fatal—or tragic—consequence. Caesar, Cassius, and Calphurnia intuit danger, but Antony, Brutus, and then Caesar reject heeding such warning.

Randall asked if intuition matters when after Caesar observes “Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look,/ thinks too much. Such men are dangerous,” Antony tells him to “Fear him not.” Then, after Cassius has argued that Mark Antony should not outlive Caesar, Brutus replies, “for Mark Antony, think not of him,/ For he can do no more than Caesar’s arm/ When Caesar’s head is off.” And after Calphurnia has dreamed Caesar is murdered on the steps of Pompey’s monument, she pleads with her husband and lord not to stir out of the house, yet Caesar changes his mind and leaves to visit the Senate when Decius plays on his vanity and predicts he will there be crowned. Yet, of course, to ignore all three warnings or predictions turns out to be disastrous, and the question is why the warnings are ignored.

Take Caesar first. Of the three, he is the most self-absorbed. Brutus is correct—Caesar is ambitious, and he is also vain. It is interesting that Shakespeare (or Plutarch) emphasizes his fallibility: he is deaf (“Come on my right hand [Antony], for this ear is deaf” I.ii.213), he is possibly impotent (he instructs Antony, about to run in the Lupercal fertility festival race, “To touch Calphurnia: for our elders say,/ The barren, touched in this holy chase,/ Shake off their sterile curse” (I.ii.6-8), though I’ve been told it takes two to procreate) , and he has epilepsy (“He fell down in the market-place, and foam’d at the mouth, and was speechless…’Tis very like he hath the falling sickness,” I.ii.252-54).

Cassius interprets such signs of mortality, and adds a long description of Caesar failing to swim the frozen Tiber and of when the two were in Spain: Caesar shook violently with a fever (ah, cursed Swine Flu). “[Yet]this man has now become a god” (I.ii.115-16). Admittedly both Casca, reporting the falling sickness, and Cassius, stirring up the conspirators, are bent on underscoring Caesar’s mortality, but these physical frailties are arrayed as background to the susceptibility of character which allow Decius to play on his pride, ambition and vanity, so that he goes forth to the Senate on the Ides of March to meet his death. Still, Caesar is also a fatalist: “What can be avoided/ Whose end is purpos’d by the mighty gods?” (II.ii.26-7) and more nobly “Cowards die many times before their deaths,/ The valiant never taste of death but once” (II.i.32-33), an heroic sentiment worthy of the most noble Feeble in 2 Henry IV: “A man can die but once, we owe God a death.”

So the physically fragile Caesar rejects his wife’s nightmare prophesy (as well as that of the Soothsayer), goes forth to the Senate, likens himself wonderfully to the constant, true-fix’d Northern Star, and dies on the steps of the Senate at the hands of a coven of conspirators. Dead by Act III, scene 1 of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, yet is it, my challenger asks, a function of tragedy that Caesar fails to heed the words of wisdom? Caesar proceeds to his doom because he is significantly human, and it seems that Shakespeare has underscored his personal frailty. Despite the title, The Tragedy of… and both Aristotle and A.C. Bradley, Caesar’s death is the fall of a political figure whose “flaws” are both fragility and complacency rather than heroic ruthlessness. The gods are not looking down on Caesar.

The play that preceded Caesar, Henry V, is also a study of political behavior. King Henry is exclusively a public figure, everything we see is calculated to inspire or manipulate his public performance. The “tragedy” is left for the epilogue which reports that all the victories and patriotic pride achieved by King Hal would be pissed away by his son, Henry the Sixt. Caesar, in ignoring the vision of Calphurnia (don’t let the rabble claim you are hen-pecked), goes forth to an event that changed the course of history, from Republic to Empire, for reasons that seem more to do with Time than tragedy. So the great North Star falls from the sky after all.

Brutus? To be continued.
Gil

RE: Julius Caesar - Is Poetry Fatal?

2009-08-23T11:15:00.000-07:00

Mike writes:

Rereading Caesar's "I could be well moved, if I were as you" speech now, it sounds a lot like he's "the decider" ― i.e. constancy is held as a virtue in and of itself, even should the metaphor point toward massive narcissism: how many Caesars does it take to screw in a light bulb?

One.

The world revolves around him.

And as it turns out (et tu, Brute?), he was right. He had "no fellow." The end result of egotism is isolation.

Brutus, on the other hand, in his "our cause is ripe" speech, sees the world as a place of interconnected flux, where forces move that are much bigger than us, and we must catch the tide accordingly. He's the liberal, maybe, to Caesar's W. Or at least the Colin Powell. He reflects the world around him, and is perhaps ultimately presented as too reflective in a number of senses. When Cassius offers to be his "glass" and reminds Brutus that "the eye sees not itself/but by some other thing," he is tapping into Brutus as a creature of context. What Brutus perhaps forgets is the paradox embedded in the metaphor: on the one hand, the mirror never lies, while on the other, that's all it can do ― offering a two-dimensional world of complete reversals where left is right, and right is wrong.

I'd be tempted to put the two side-by-side for my students and consider how they intereact in terms of nautical navigation. The constellations and Caesar's Pole star constancy would be necessary to find one's way, yet knowledge of the currents and tides would be equally beneficial, perhaps.

Mike

Julius Caesar - Do the Tides of History Flow or Ebb?

2009-08-21T22:04:00.000-07:00

Randall,

I pose two queries, but you may only respond to one:

Between about 1596 and 1599, Shakespeare wrote four English history plays: King John and the last three in the Henriad, and then, in 1599, he wrote Julius Caesar, his last play before Hamlet. Absent a possible The Long, Boring Reign of King Henry III, he had mostly exhausted the history of English monarchs, at least until he discovered a couple of lines in Holinshed recalling Cymbeline. Luckily, North published a new edition of his translation of Plutarch's Lives in 1595, including lives of Caesar, Brutus, and Antony. Eureka! More history. Superficially, Julius Caesar looks like another chronicle play; there are 39+ named characters (the three Henry VI's average 40) and it records historical time, March 44 BC to November, 42 BC, Caesar's assassination to the second Battle of Philippi.

1) But The Tragedy of Julius Caesar veers away from dramatized history into a character study of moral ambiguity in a political setting, which precipitates personal tragedy. The play's title names the tragedy of Caesar, yet he is dead by the middle of the play. Which is the most tragic among ambitious Caesar, ethical Brutus, or aristocratic Cassius? [If you are desperate for time, you can parody this question by choosing Cinna the poet―The Tragedy of Bad Verse.]

[If it is useful, Northrop Frye, Fools of Time, describes three categories of tragedy: tragedy of order (e.g., Julius Caesar), tragedy of passion (e.g., Antony and Cleopatra), and tragedy of isolation (e.g., Othello), and in each, the tragic action is played out through an order figure (here Julius Caesar), a rebel figure (Brutus), and a nemesis or avenger figure (Mark Antony).]

2) Often Shakespeare traces an evolution from "things-known-for-sure" to a complex multifaceted response to "a world-out-of-joint." Hotspur's chivalric honor to Hal's imitation of the action of the sun; Richard II's romantic delusion to Bolingbrook's political pragmatism; Claudius's decisive order to Hamlet's world out of joint. In Julius Caesar, Brutus is an anachronism, locked in a golden dream of principle while history inexorably moves forward to the passions of Antony or the rational calculations of Octavius. Brutus, responding to his understanding of Caesar's threat to the Republic, asserts the only solution, "It must be his death; and for my part,/ I know no personal cause to spurn at him,/ But for the general." (II.i.10-12). Contrast Mark Antony's funeral oration (III.ii.73-252), a marvelously orchestrated persuasive speech, with the repeated coda "For Brutus is an honorable man." But Antony, solus, prefaces this with "O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,/ That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!" (III.i.254-5), and after the oration, after the Plebeians swarm away shouting "Revenge! Seek! Burn! Fire! No socialist health care! Kill! Slay!," Antony, left alone, concludes "Now let it work, Mischief, thou art afoot,/ Take thou which course thou wilt!" (III.ii.260-61).

Do you find Antony morally pragmatic, passionate, or ruthless? Yet when we first meet young Octavius, he joins with Antony in a cool and detached meeting to generate a proscription list, death by committee discussion, and at Philippi Octavius is colder than Antony: "I do not cross you; but I will do so" (V.i.20). So who best represents the mirror to the society in which we are reading this play? Or, alas, who in this tragedy is the villain (nemesis)―the passionate Antony or the calculating Octavius?

Gil

RE2: Julius Caesar - A Woman's Place

2009-08-21T15:17:00.000-07:00

Randall writes:

I think Cindy's right on about Portia and Calpurnia (I've been spelling the latter with an 'h' because my Folger does). And I had not noticed the degree to which Shakespeare compels us to compare the two women (they both kneel in back-to-back scenes) or their two situations.

I have two thoughts I'd like to add to Cindy's response. First, in my Folger there is a stage direction after Caesar responds to Calpurnia with "Mark Antony shall say I am not well,/ And for thy humor I will stay at home": He lifts her up. Around this stage direction are the little superior half-brackets indicating that the editors have intervened, adding something not found in the first folio. The Bevington edition of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare does the same: He raises her, in brackets. Neither my Signet (Rosen) nor the Penguin (Sanders) do this. What gives?

One might argue that Caesar's response, an acquiescence to her concern, does spiritually or emotionally lift Calpurnia up, and therefore the emendation is metaphorically appropriate. But I really like Cindy's suggestion that Caesar leaves her on the ground as Decius enters, marking a clear distinction between him and Brutus. My guess is that the interventionist editors look at the next 40 lines of text, at which point Caesar asks Calpurnia to get his robe, and wonder if it's practical to leave her on her knees for that long. And directors, wary of angry actors with bruised knees, are probably glad to have the added cue.

Second, Cindy reminds me that I am sad that Portia disappears after only two scenes. Unlike Calpurnia's, Portia's presentation to her husband strikes me as laying the foundation for a rich, interesting character. She defines the bounds and expectations of marriage skillfully, personally, and she extends the possibilities of a woman's domestic role by defining "wife" as more than furniture (meal-time companion, bed-mate, occasional conversationalist). She argues that she is his unlimited self, what we might call today his better half. She perceptive and persuasive. And in her language there is an efficient lawyerliness that makes me feel she has some connection to that other Portia.

Given this as a set-up, it's disappointing when Shakespeare dismisses Portia two scenes later with "Ay me, how weak a thing/ The heart of woman is!" After her earlier discussion with Caesar, I think she's really made of sterner stuff, but because the play moves on to the Capitol (men only) and then the battlefield (men only), she's left like Hotspur's Kate forgotten on the sidelines.

Randall

RE: Julius Caesar - A Woman's Place

2009-08-19T22:51:00.000-07:00

Greetings, comrades,

The female characters in Julius Caesar, unfortunately do NOT save this play from being a "boy play." I see Portia and Calpurnia as mere devices against which to reveal the characteristics of their husbands. For example, Shakespeare gives Portia stage directions:

PORTIA:
… No, my Brutus,
You have some sick offence within your mind,
Which by the right and virtue of my place
I ought to know of: and, upon my knees,
I charm you, by my once commended beauty,
By all your vows of love and that great vow
Which did incorporate and make us one,
That you unfold to me, yourself, your half,
Why you are heavy… (II.i.267-275)

Brutus, similarly has a pseudo-stage direction in telling his wife to rise:

BRUTUS:
Kneel not, gentle Portia. (II.i.278)

I can see Brutus extend his hand to help her rise. Portia seems, to me, very sincere in caring for Brutus, and wanting to understand what troubles him. Portia's efforts to get information out of her husband are not unlike any wife's attempts to get her spousal unit to talk about feelings, right gentlemen? She uses several tactics here, from reminding him of his marriage vows to perhaps dealing him the "guilt" card by suggesting she is nothing more than his harlot. (hee hee) Has she used these tactics before? hmmmm… I personally like his response to her:

BRUTUS:
You are my true and honorable wife,
As dear to me as are the ruddy drops
That visit my sad heart. (II.i.288-290)

My female students like that one too (sappy girls, we'll fall for anything!). But at least the kindness of his words, as well as his actions, show his care for his wife, making Brutus look pretty good, right? She should not be supplicating herself to him; in raising her, he acknowledges her as his partner, and indeed the other half of him. He tells her that he will tell all:

BRUTUS:
Portia, go in a while
And by and by thy bosom shall partake
The secrets of my heart.
All my engagements I will construe to thee
All the charactery of my sad brows. (II.i.304-308)

Now, Gil asserts that Brutus never gets around to telling Portia the truth. I'm not so sure. It's not necessary for Shakespeare to depict this conversation; we already know why Brutus is so troubled. Brutus might very well reveal his dilemma to his wife in the "white spaces" that we don't see. Regardless, the purpose of the scene is to peel back another layer of Brutus' character.

In contrast, we have Caesar and Calpurnia. Calpurnia beseeches her husband not to go to the capital; all the signs of impending doom are present: Calpurnia's dream in which all of nature is awry (connect to Macbeth!), the soothsayer's warning, the priests' reading of the sacrifice. Caesar's line tells us that Calpurnia, too, supplicates herself to her husband:

CAESAR:
And these does she apply for warnings and portents
And evils imminent, and on her knee
Hath begg'd that I will stay at home to-day. (II.ii.80-82)

Unlike Brutus, Caesar leaves her on her knees (according to Shakespeare's copious stage directions―just kidding), and goes on to the capital thus swayed by the weak rhetoric and flattery of Decius (sappy Caesar, he'll fall for anything). Hence we see Calpurnia as the undeveloped female character, like Portia, serving only to reveal characteristics of her husband. These are not Shakespeare's deliciously strong or richly developed women like we see elsewhere. I'm skipping the auditions.

Cindy

Julius Caesar - Is Ambition Bad?

2009-08-18T15:14:00.000-07:00

John,

Brutus, in explaining his decision to put Caesar to death, uses "ambition" as a dirty word: "As he was ambitious, I slew him" (3.2.28). Antony seizes on this and uses it in his famous oration (3.2.83ff), juxtaposing the claim of Caesar's ambition with Brutus' honor. I'm wondering, do we find negative connotation in the etymology of "ambition"? Or does it come from elsewhere, somewhere cultural?

And, in a play where we are asked to mistrust a primary conspirator, Cassius, because "he thinks too much," where do Elizabethan values seem to lie? In thoughts or deeds?

Randall

(Quotes from Folger edition)

Julius Caesar - Does Intuition Matter?

2009-08-18T14:23:00.000-07:00

Dad,

When Caesar sees Cassius, he tells Antony, "Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look./ He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous" (1.2.204-205). And Antony replies: "Fear him not."

As John McLaughlin might say – Wrong!

When Cassius and Brutus are plotting against Caesar, Cassius argues that, "I think it not meet/ Mark Antony, so well beloved of Caesar,/ Should outlive Caesar. … / Let Antony and Caesar fall together" (2.1.168-170, 174). And Brutus replies, "for Mark Antony, think not of him,/ For he can do no more than Caesar's arm/ When Caesar's head is off."

Wrong!

And poor Calphurnia has had a dream in which Caesar is murdered and the Capitol and a statue of Caesar run red with blood that bathes the hands of smiling Romans. She recommends to Caesar that "You shall not stir out of your house today" (2.2.9). Caesar, after Decius suggests this is his only chance to earn a crown from the senate, says "How foolish your fears seem now, Calphurnia!/ I am ashamed I did yield to them./ Give me my robe, for I will go."

Wrong!

In all three cases, good advice is overlooked. What does this say about the characters of those who fail to heed such words of wisdom? And is it a function of tragedy that they do so? In Romeo and Juliet, such moments suggested the intercession of Fortune, Fate, or mere coincidence, but in Julius Caesar, the events that lead characters to their doom are significantly human. Has Shakespeare freed himself from concerns about Fate?

Randall

(Quotes from Folger edition)

Julius Caesar - Is Poetry Fatal?

2009-08-17T23:23:00.000-07:00

Mike,

Perhaps Caesar's most arresting speech is his response to Cassius' pleas for Publius Cimber.

CAESAR
I could be well moved, if I were as you;
If I could pray to move, prayers would move me;
But I am constant as the Northern Star,
Of whose true-fixed and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
The skies are painted with unnumb'red sparks,
They are all fire and every one doth shine;
But there's but one in all doth hold his place.
So in the world; 'tis furnished well with men,
And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive;
Yet in the number I do know but one
That unassailable holds on his rank,
Unshaked of motion; and that I am he. (3.1.58-70)

Quite the extended metaphor, no? What, in your opinion, does it reveal about Caesar? Is he a poet?

Here is another metaphor from nature, as Brutus discusses battle tactics with Cassius before Phillippi:

BRUTUS
Our legions are brimful, our cause is ripe.
The enemy increaseth every day;
We, at the height, are ready to decline.
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures. (4.3.214-223)

And what, in your opinion, does this tell us about Brutus, how he thinks? What differences do these "arguments" establish between Caesar and Brutus? How would you ask your students to unpack the poetry of these two passages?

Gil

(Quotes from Signet edition)

Julius Caesar - Toga, or Not Toga?

2009-08-17T22:47:00.000-07:00

Stu,

I once saw a production of Julius Caesar that emphasized its Orwellian undertones. (In Act 3, scene 1, Brutus follows the murder of Caesar with statements like "death is a benefit," and "we are Caesar's friends," and "let us bathe our hands in Caesar's blood … And, waving our red weapons o'er our heads,/ Let's all cry 'Peace' …".) So the production updated the costumes (Faux Fascism), displayed a big head of Caesar looking over the stage, and kept the lights low to create a moody and oppressive feel.

Have you ever done a production of Julius Caesar? If so, how did you approach the play's setting – traditional or adapted? Or more specifically, what are your thoughts on staging Caesar? Would you do it with togas? What effect does the Roman look have on the audience's reception of the play?

Randall

Julius Caesar - Is the Play the Thing?

2009-08-17T22:20:00.000-07:00

Doug,

Can I use the term "metatheater" in the William Shakespeare Experience? We readers should nod when Caesar condemns Cassius:

I do not know the man I should avoid
So soon as that spare Cassius. He reads much,
He is a great observer, and he looks
Quite through the deeds of men. [But] He loves no plays,
As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music. (1.2.200-204)

And Brutus admonishes the conspirators with:

Let not our looks put on our purposes,
But bear it as our Roman actors do,
With untired spirits and formal constancy. (2.1.226-228)

Then, as Casca describes Caesar among the people as a performance – thrice refusing the crown, fainting, offering his throat for cutting, wringing "Alas, good soul" from several wenches – he concludes: "If the tag-rag people did not clasp him and hiss him, according as he pleased and displeased them, as they use to do the players in the theater, I am no true man" (1.2.258-261).

With these early references to theater, are you set up as a director to impose an overt theatrical style on the whole play or, for instance, Antony's funeral oration? Setting aside for a moment the fact that all performed plays are "theatrical," does Julius Caesar call especial attention to the theatricality of its characters' public relations?

Gil

(Quotes from Signet edition)

Julius Caesar - Whose Tragedy Is It Anyway?

2009-08-17T22:16:00.000-07:00

Derek,

It says right on the cover of my Folger edition, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. But what kind of tragedy kills off its titular tragic figure in the first lines of the third act?

You may argue that it's really Brutus' tragedy, that the title should be The Tragedy of Marcus Junius Brutus. If so, where does Brutus fall in the spectrum of tragic figures, Shakespearean or otherwise? Does he conform to the oft over-used Aristotelian definition, or Northrop Frye's sense that Shakespeare presents tragedies of character, or something else?

Is the play even a tragedy? Or a history play masquerading as tragic?

Randall

Julius Caesar - A Woman's Place?

2009-08-17T21:08:00.000-07:00

Cindy,

Not to pigeon-hole you to distaff comments, but what is your reaction to Portia's concern about Brutus' failure to share his concerns with her (2.1.234-309)?

PORTIA
Within the bonds of marriage, tell me, Brutus,
Is it excepted I should know no secrets
That appertain to you? Am I your self
But, as it were, in sort or limitation,
To keep with you at meals, comfort your bed,
And talk to you sometimes? Well I but in the suburbs
Of your good pleasure? If it be no more,
Portia is Brutus' harlot, not his wife. (2.1.280-287)

Is communication what distinguishes a wife from a harlot? And how does Portia stand up to characters like Constance (Geoffrey's wife and Arthur's mother), Kate (Hotspur's wife), Portia (Bassanio's fiancée in Merchant) or Titania (Oberon's wife)? Does Portia redeem Julius Caesar from being a boy-play if you're trying to teach it?

Nota bene: If you haven't finished Julius Caesar yet, Brutus never gets around to revealing "the secrets of my heart" to Portia (2.1.306) and, alas, by 4.3.146, she is tired of waiting.

Gil

(Quotes from Signet edition)

Julius Caesar - Brutus as Malcontent?

2009-08-17T20:28:00.000-07:00

Ernst,

You've pointed out how Jacques, Don John, and Hamlet, with his arms "encumbered," represent versions of the "Malcontent" character. In reading Julius Caesar, I came across the following passage:

PORTIA
Y'have ungently, Brutus,
Stole from my bed. And yesternight at supper
You suddenly arose and walked about,
Musing and sighing, with your arms across,
And when I asked you what the matter was,
You stared upon me with ungentle looks.
I urged you further; then you scratched your head
And too impatiently stamped with you foot.
Yet I insisted; yet you answered not,
But with an angry wafture of your hand
Gave sign for me to leave you. (2.1.257-267)

My italics ("with yours arms across"). My question: Does Brutus fit into your thesis on the development of the stage malcontent? If so, how does this stock character evolve our understanding of him? And how does he relate to others like Hamlet (tragedy) and Jacques (comedy)? If not, what accounts for this odd behavior that Portia describes, since it seems so out of character with the rest of the passages by which we come to know Brutus?

Randall

(Quote from Folger edition)

King John - Performance Log (August 2009)

2009-08-12T10:22:00.000-07:00

King John
directed by Teresa Thuman
GreenStage
Warren G. Magnuson Park
Seattle, Washington
August 6, 2009

Gil: Performances of King John are indeed rare, but it showed up on one of the Seattle’s summer companies’, GreenStage’s, schedules. Randall and I were the first to arrive while the actors were gathered on one of the terraces surrounding the playing area, and an actress teased, “we’re only here to rehearse; the play is tomorrow.” Randall lamented he had come from Minnesota just to see King John, so she said they would give in and put the production on anyway.

Randall: That’s one of the things about going to Shakespeare-in-the-park that I enjoy most – the frequent interaction one has with the actors and production, prior to the play, after it, and even during it. In general, with Shakespeare-in-the-park, the world beyond the “stage” is much more likely to become part of the stage. At The Strange Capers’ production of As You Like It in Minneapolis this summer, a group of bicyclists rode past the performance meadow as Rosalind was attempting to teach Orlando to woo, and one of the actors turned and waved as they went by, essentially making the bikers part of the production (no doubt casting them in La Tour de la Foret d’Arden). This gave the cyclists the license to shout out comments, and each of them did.

Gilbert: In Wooden O’s Taming of the Shrew, the starving Kate begged cookies off a group in the audience, stuffing them into her mouth even as Petruchio was denying her other food – a great laugh-inducing moment that required the audience and the character’s interaction with it. You have to wonder what happens on the afternoons when Kate can’t find anything edible in the audience.

Randall: And at Shakespeare and Company’s production of Much Ado About Nothing, Benedict hid in the audience (as did Beatrice later), crawling around on the grass and crouching behind lawn chairs, while Claudio and Don Pedro pretended he wasn’t there. The audience laughed more because of where he was than what he was doing.

I think Shakespeare-in-the-park falls into a spectrum of Shakespeare performance styles differentiated by the level of audience involvement: proscenium (which emphasizes the fourth wall), arena stage (more intimate), theater in the round (which requires characters to enter and exit through the audience), Shakespeare-in-the-park (which is clearly enhanced or improved when the audience becomes part of the action), and promenade-style (where the audience is on stage with the action). This spectrum gives us a rich set of options that allow directors to control the effect the performance has. I wonder if one is preferable to some directors, or if each is determined by the space available for the performance?

Gilbert: This really highlights the idea that Shakespeare-in-the-park is a sub-genre, and the sub-genre has some constant parameters, like an increased audience engagement. No production, for example, is more than two hours, and this King John, sub-generically without intermission, came in exactly in that time. No scenes were cut, though many of the longer speeches were streamlined, reducing what Herschel Baker has called “tumid rhetoric.” All the characters were there except James Gurney, servant to Lady Faulconbridge; we even saw the Count Melun, who makes a very late Act V appearance, takes a message to the rebellious English nobles, learns they are twice-turned turncoats, and dies.

Randall: I think the cutting a director has to do for Shakespeare-in-the-park requires real skill. I can’t count the number of times over the last few years that I’ve walked away from a park production and thought not only that the director did an excellent job reducing a text by 30 percent but that I didn’t miss the redacted lines. Stu Naber’s Much Ado for Shakespeare and Company, particularly, left me feeling this way, but I think if I knew the King John text better – I’ve only read it once – I’d feel the same way about Thuman’s cut which didn’t seem to lose anything significant but still only ran the length of a typical film.

Gilbert: Another Shakespeare-in-the-park generic difference worth considering is that summer acting companies are small, so there is more frequent cross-gender casting and double casting, Your typical Guthrie or Seattle Rep production rarely works with the same company size or its effects.

Randall: Right. And I think nothing is done in a theatrical production without an interpretive consequence. The stage manager for The Acting Company’s Henry V (directed by Davis McCallum) explained to my class before we saw the play that the double casting was done very carefully, so that more than just one actor doubling roles, there was some connection between the roles created by having the same actor play them. In that production, after Henry V exposes the plot of Scroop, Cambridge, and Grey who would have betrayed Henry to the French, the same actors turn up two scenes later as members of the French court.

Gilbert: The cross-gender casting evokes the same thought-provoking connections. In Wooden O’s Taming of the Shrew, Lucentio’s servant Tranio was female, allowing for a piquant twist of jealousy when Lucentio is smitten with Bianca.

Randall: I had to think hard about that one. What benefit to the production is there to having a love-lorn Tranio, whose yearnings for Lucentio will go unrequited? It occurred to me later that my discomfort came from Taming of the Shrew’s being a comedy, used to uniting lovers rather than holding them at arm’s length. Only Malvolio seems to walk away, his love for Olivia mocked and unacknowledged. Giving Tranio this dead-end love does what? Her character doesn’t even get the explicit resolution that Malvolio does, exiting with the line “I’ll be reveng’d on the whole pack of you.”

Gilbert: In King John, GreenStage’s youngest-looking actor, Anthony Duckett, played Arthur, whom Shakespeare has ahistorically insisted is a boy, then, after Arthur’s death, Duckett reappeared as the very young King Henry III, making for an interesting parallel of two aspirants to the throne or—possibly—for real audience confusion in that Arthur has just fallen to his death and there is no foreshadowing that a Prince Henry will be introduced as an Act V surprise.

Randall: When we saw Ken Holmes’s production of Henry VI, parts 1, 2, and 3, condensed by GreenStage into a single play, the double casting worked both to allow the company to perform dozens of characters and to unite generations of the same family by having fathers and sons played by the same actor. It was a little confusing, but we were led to expect the generational shift by the scope of the production.

Gilbert: Of course, the sine qua non of this subgenre is the park itself—al fresco, audience on the grass, many with picnics; passers-by, often with dogs, curious about why these standing people are shouting at those sitting people (“Look, Luke, they have swords; they must be jousting with The Society for Creative Anachronism”). This is maybe the only time of all the Shakespeare performance formats that acoustics become a major part of the production experience. The night of our King John was overcast so the flight pattern of passenger jets approaching SeaTac airport circled under the clouds and obliterated about 50 lines. We have been on lawns within five feet of the “stage” at Twelfth Night or Henry VI, 1, 2, 3, but at Magnuson Park there is an amphitheatre of terraces, stone backs for wide grass rings. Occasionally, there will be a backstage of trees, or, more crass, one will be on a baseball field and hope that Little League didn’t schedule a game for the evening. Whatever arrangement, the actors must project—no whispered dying words or subrosa asides.

Randall: I am usually against mic’ing actors, but I think it works really well for Shakespeare in the park, although a little wind across the microphones can create its own acoustical nightmare.

Gilbert: Another side effect of the park subgenre is the audience. It’s free. It’s a neighborhood activity. It’s informal. It can be family time. At our production there were two boys, about eight, who were not interested from the beginning, and they talked, with great animation, nonstop, through the first third. A mother put her figure to her lips. Audience turned and stared. One audience member shushed the boys more than once. The boys put a blanket over their heads and thus invisible went right on with their conversation. With no intermission, the house manager could not come up and duct-tape their mouths shut. So I’m afraid I missed the Bastard’s ‘commodity” speech and much else had to be sort of pieced together. It wasn’t GreenStage’s fault, but it left Randall and me to spend half our post-production discussion on parental responsibility rather than the Bastard’s comic relief, baiting Austria about wearing a calf-skin instead of a lion’s pelt.

Randall: All these things not only affect the audience, they become part of the performance, and that’s largely unique to Shakespeare-in-the-park. The kids wouldn’t have been such an issue if King John were not such a rare play to see performed. If it’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, you know the plot, characters, and maybe even the lines, by heart. A little interruption, be it airplanes or uninterested children, isn’t going to disorient you. But I came within a hair’s breadth of getting up and asking that mother to remove her children from the area because I needed to concentrate on what was being said; I was unfamiliar with the play. Maybe that’s one reason so much summer Shakespeare in the park tends to be of commonly produced plays.

Gilbert: It was wonderful to see a rare performance of this chronicle play. Unlike the Henriad, King John is not obviously unified thematically or dramatically. The Will Shakespeare Experience explored mothers and sons, history, the power of possession and right, politics, and moral dilemmas. In that many characters have a moment of reversal or change, there is the possibility of character exploration. But this production, directed by Teresa Thuman, chose, or was obligated, to play in declamatory style, with special attention to scene-ending couplets. The lines were shouted, clearly and confidently (no Leo DiCaprio speaking lines he didn’t understand), with an obvious awareness that every line was iambic pentameter (uncut, John is 2,570 lines long, all verse, not a single line of prose). This style tended to homogenize all the speaking parts, Louis the Dolphin sounding much like the Earl of Salisbury.

Randall: The speaking parts may have been homogenized, but I thought the declamatory style de-emphasized character in favor of speech. Many of the speeches stood out as well done, and the production seemed to move from speech to speech. But I had a harder time differentiating characters other than King John and Pandulph (who was the only character dressed in red silk and so he stood out). Is that an effect of declamatory style? Can you create three-dimensional characters with complex motivation if you are faced with a play dominated by lengthy speeches that you need to give emotional shape to so that the audience doesn’t get bogged down? Where do you turn when the emphasis is so much on long oratory?

Gilbert: The chronicle was underscored with plenty of choreographed battle, similar to GreenStage’s Henry VI three years ago. In King John most of the characters make some shift: John (played by Corey McDaniel) is warlike, then pusillanimous; Hubert (Drew Dyson Hobson) is dutifully committed as King John’s assassin-designate, then heart-achingly compassionate in sparing Arthur; Blanche (Ashley Flannegan) is a mousy cipher in her betrothal to the Dolphin, then warlike in her resistance to French reneging of a peace treaty; Constance (Erin Day) is fierce in the interest of her son, Arthur, then deeply sunk into grief; only the Bastard (Daniel Stoltenberg) is really multi-faceted—a witty satirist, a mocking warrior, a loyal viceroy for the collapsing kingship. Yet in Thuman’s production, these shifts do not seem to illustrate the evolution of character. Instead, the production is marked by the occasional emergence of a passage of deeply-displayed feeling, breaking the steady flow of rather muddled chronology.

Randall: I wonder if this is another effect of Shakespeare-in-the-park, where frequently you have fewer of the tools available on stage – set design, music, elaborate costuming – that lend support to character interpretation or thematic perspective? I did think that many of the speeches came off really well, in fact giving character where I had lacked it when I read the play.

Gilbert: Yes. When Cindy Calder first read King John, she was thrilled with the women, especially Constance, but I dismissed Constance’s “Death, death. O amiable lovely death!” as mere madness, agreeing with French King Philip, that she is more fond of grief than of her child, yet Erin Day’s moving, beautifully orchestrated interpretation directed me to reexamine emotion, and therefore character, in the whole play. Cindy is right. Constance is a great part.

Randall: And I found Hubert’s sympathetic reaction to Arthur’s pleas not to put out his eyes very moving because of the way that Hobson handled Hubert’s breaking down and shift of allegiance. It’s great to get the opportunity to discuss the play this way. I wish more Shakespeare-in-the-park performances would feature the more rarely produced plays. I get the opportunity each year, between Seattle and the Twin Cities, to see maybe 10 different Shakespeare plays in the park, but without GreenStage and its devotion to the chronicle plays, I would have no “first time” Shakespeare productions to reflect on. That’s worth traveling some distance for.

Gilbert: Which is why it was funny when it was over that an alms-collecting actress approached us and said “all the way from Minnesota just for us?’ Yes, indeed.

Logged by Gil and Randall

Photo credit: Pandulph (Andrew Perez) lectures King John (Corey McDaniel) in GreenStage's King John. Photo courtesy of GreenStage.

Taming of the Shrew - Performance Log (June/August 2009)

2009-08-05T20:43:00.000-07:00

The Taming of the Shrew
directed by Mishia Edwards
Chameleon Theatre Circle
Logan Park, Minneapolis, MN
June 27, 2009

The Taming of the Shrew
directed by Aimee Bruneau
Seattle Shakespeare Company/Wooden O Productions
Allen York Park, Bonnie Lake, WA
Aug. 2, 2009

1) Country and Western Shakespeare:

Imagine for just a minute that you are from Lubbock, Texas. Born and raised. You have the accent. Say the following:

"What? Will you not suffer me? Nay, now I see – she is your treasure, she must have a husband; I must dance barefoot on her wedding day, and, for your love to her, lead apes in hell. Talk not to me; I will go sit and weep 'til I can find occasion of revenge."

Rolls nicely off the tongue, doesn't it, the western lilt giving a clear rhythm (though not necessarily iambic) to the language. In fact, pull any speech out of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and see if this accent not only succeeds in negotiating the Shakespearean verse but also lends the speech a certain understandability that recovers both arcane vocabulary and syntax.

This linguistic shift is at the heart of two productions of Taming of the Shrew I saw in parks 2000 miles apart this summer. Mishia Edwards' production in Minnesota sets the play smack dab in the mythical landscape of the American west – cowboy hats and boots, thumbs in jeans pockets, plaid shirts, and even a lariat to capture a wayward filly. But it's not the accoutrements of the western genre that catch one's attention, it's the language. Specifically the marriage of the western twang and Shakespeare's poetry.

The same is true of Aimee Bruneau's Taming of the Shrew in Washington, set in a modern trailer park replete with all the class stereotypes that brings to mind: a barefoot-and-pregnant woman opening the play, staring off to the horizon; a worn Airstream trailer parked to the side, the residence of "wealthy" Mama Baptista and her two daughters; tractor hats and t-shirts advertising "Hooters" and bars; Grumio sporting the camo pants and mesh shirt of a backwoods militia wannabe; Bianca returning home with tiara and sash after winning the "Miss Padua" beauty pageant; Hortensio taking on the mannerisms of an Elvis impersonator to teach Bianca music; and everyone traipsing through their lines with a country accent.

If I enjoyed anything about either of these productions, it was listening to the language. I won't turn this into a treatise on how dialects close to our southern speech have more affinity for British English than the northern ones, nor do I feel up to a meticulous scansion of western and country argots for comparison to Shakespeare's blank verse, although one could certainly look at the lyrical qualities of those dialects. But I sat in these two performances and was struck in both how these dialects drew attention to the language. Each, for example, places a heightened emphasis on certain syllables and words in a way that homogenized mainstream English has forgone. When I teach Shakespeare, I spend very little time on iambic pentameter because I don't want students saying "but SOFT what LIGHT through YONder WINdow BREAKS!" I want them to find the natural meaning in a speech, not get caught up in its rhythmic artifice, as delightful and impressive as it may be.

But with both our stereotypical country and western dialects, one can have the attention to meaning as well as a heightened sense of rhythmic quality. When Petruchio says to Baptista "I am a gentleman of Verona, sir," the standard reading has to work with what to do with the extra syllable, the line's hiccup. But in western dialect, the "of" gets swallowed into the unstressed final syllables of "gentleman" and the lilt pounds out the stressed syllables in VeRONa and SIR: "Ah am a gen'lemenuh Verona, suh." What's also emphasized is the fun, language reshaped to create ambiance, in this case a twang or backwoods articulation that lifts us away from our preconceptions of Shakespeare and recasts setting and character through aural modes without changing much of the text. There were a number of moments in Bruneau's production specifically when I thought, counter-intuitively, "this is the way Shakespeare ought to sound."

2) The Irony of Pop Culture Shakespeare:

Taken further, though, there is a dissonance here, away from the logic of dialect. Americans have a very specific relationship with both the western narrative genre and the trailer trash stereotype. Both representations are examples of low culture, at the opposite end of the spectrum on which we might also locate Shakespeare. The western may be one of the deepest of American mythologies, but it is also the stuff of countless early TV programs, radio shows, comic books, b-movies, and serials, and pulp literary ventures. Most westerns are not so much explorations of who we are, but escapist fantasies reflecting who we want to be – outlaws, noble gunmen, rugged individualists. Edwards' mashing this genre up with Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew makes the same kind of sense that we find in Stanley Donen's Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (the lineage of which can be traced back to the classical story of the rape of the Sabine women). Both rely on comic structure, characteristics, and expectations to bridge the gap between their high art source and popular form by connecting the remarkable with the mundane. Watch, in Donen's film, how common frontier labor becomes beautiful choreography while the ageless story of love, courtship, and marriage is lampooned as bride-stealing and shotgun marriages.

So Donen goes both ways on the bridge, one elevating and the other ironizing; Edwards, meanwhile, sticks mostly with the irony. Watching her production, I kept thinking, "does Shakespeare work as a western?" "What do we find in the western genre that elevates our understanding of Shakespeare or Shrew?" In the end I felt the west was just an unusual place for Edwards to locate her Padua, and that the play would have clicked more forcefully embracing the irony. I wanted Hortensio (played by Trish Fike), teaching Bianca music after she's clearly been making eyes at Lucentio, to belt out "Your Cheatin' Heart." I wanted Grumio (James Reijo), placed in the sidekick role here, to milk every Gabby Hayes/Pancho/Tonto stereotype available, and I wanted a Petruchio (Adam Scarpello) cut more from the John Wayne mold, someone whose rough-cut manliness is both repulsive and finally irresistible to his woman. That would explain Kate's arc. That would say that Shakespeare is in control of American archetypes as much as Elizabethan ones.

Bruneau's trailer park Shrew does fully embrace its irony because the white trash/trailer park setting is more derogatory stereotype than pop culture genre, so there's no disguising the fact that we've come a very long way from the Globe Theater. Shakespeare's language tends to lend his characters, no matter how foolish, a sort of nobility. In this Shrew, though, the dialect, as well as the Pabst Blue Ribbon, Hooters t-shirts, and possibility of a Spam dinner for Kate, does the opposite. The effect, at least initially, is sort of like Andy Fickman's She's the Man which resets Twelfth Night in a boy's boarding school and turns its chiaroscuro comedy into mere farce. I worried that Bruneau's embracing of such two-dimensional and negative stereotypes would rob Taming of the Shrew of its opportunity for wit and for our ability to care for characters rather than just laugh at them. Would I be made simply to feel superior to this Shrew's world?

In short, no. Bruneau's directorial choices and some excellent acting on the part of David Quicksall (Petruchio) and Kelly Kitchens (Kate) expose the dishonesty of all stereotypes, that they are a shortcut which impede our ability to see people as they really are – complex, heroic, vulnerable, foolish, disappointed, resilient, etc. This production points out that the idea of a shrew itself is a derogatory stereotype, and beneath it (and the jokes that go with it) is a Kate caught in a disappointing and unfair world with no seeming prospect of escape. Kitchens gives her anger, a sharp tongue, violence, rebelliousness, all as attempts to escape the trailer park vortex. She slams doors. She throws things. She flips the bird. But underneath is someone who wants to be loved, who wants her qualities recognized, who wants happiness.

Similarly, Petruchio's "do what I say woman" attitude is softened as the play progresses. Quicksall's Petruchio wants more than just "to wive it wealthily in Padua," and he seems genuinely frustrated and disappointed by Kate's contrariness. As a result, his actions against Kate that seem so harsh in other productions, become a kind of common-ground seeking, and I had a lot more sympathy for him than I have had before. In addition, Bruneau's deft management of these two complex characters results in the impression, at the end of the play, that they really do love each other. The irony of the setting (can one wive wealthily in this trailer park?) and characters embraced, her production escapes it, escapes farce too, and reminds us of what is best about Shakespeare.

3) When a Man Loves a Woman:

Beyond the irony, one advantage of both the western genre and the trailer park stereotype is that they provide a convenient approach to a significant difficulty one faces guiding Taming of the Shrew through the 21st-century landscape of gender politics. Regardless of how it's handled, I always find myself nervous at the image of Petruchio deprogramming Kate (deprivation of food and sleep used as behavior modification techniques) and downright scared by the impending ugliness of Kate's hand-under-the-boot speech at the end of the play. Placing these two productions in communities that conform to male-superior visions of America smoothes over these rough waters because we accept the gender roles more readily, our modern attitudes defused a bit by generic willing suspension of disbelief. In addition, as a character Kate works to undermine the masculine status quo. Whether we see her rebellion as a failure (Edwards) or not (Bruneau), the outcome in both these shows relies on our acceptance of the narrative in which the productions are framed.

And because these framing narratives, the western and the trailer park, are more intimately familiar to us than some remote Padua and appropriate to the comic dynamics of the play, both Edwards and Bruneau have created productions that promote Shakespeare's comedy into our own culture. I think Bruneau does this more successfully but both shows created an opportunity to rethink Shakespeare in a satisfactory way.

Logged by Randall

Photo credit: David Quicksall as Petruchio and Kelly Kitchens as Kate in Seattle Shakespeare Company/Wooden O Productions' The Taming of the Shrew. Photo by Erik Stuhaug.

RE: As You Like It - Rare Triumphs

2009-07-22T20:38:00.000-07:00

Ernst writes:

A third, curiously interesting play is the anonymous romance, The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune (1582). If more such plays from this period had survived, says P. P. Wilson, "the gap between Greene and the young Shakespeare and their predecessors might not seem so striking. If Damon and Pythias and Three Ladies of London show a growing concern among playwrights over the dangers of corruption, parasitism and Machiavellian intrigue in the court and in the city, The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune supplies an early dramatic example of the melancholic posing and attitudinizing that has such a profound influence on the malcontent strain.

The Rare Triumphs is essentially a play-within-a-debate. Venus and Fortune begin the debate by arguing over which has more power. Finally, Jupiter suggests that the two put their debate to the test by comparing their abilities to influence a "real" situation involving a pair of lovers he has been watching. Thus the story itself begins with Act II, and the immortals step back to watch. Venus and Fortune reappear briefly, alternately claiming that the ensuing events prove one or the other superior and ultimately stepping in at the end to bring the whole business to a happy close, counseling that "Wisdom ruleth Love and Fortune both" (Rare Triumphs, p. 243).

The romance involves a young man, Hermione, who loves Fidelia but is scorned by Duke Phizanties, her father, and Armenio, her brother. Hermione's father, Bomelio (a distant ancestor of Prospero), is also a duke, but has been banished by Phizanties' father, become a hermit in the forest, and taken up magic. Bomelio finds and reveals himself to his son and sets out to help Hermione win Fidelia by using his magic to strike Armenio dumb, presumably with the idea that he will be able to trade his ability to cure Armenio for Phizanties’ acceptance of Hermione as a son-in-law.

Bomelio immediately catches one's eye. He has clearly spent most of his time sitting in his cave and brooding:

He that hath lost his hope, and yet desires to live,
He that is overwhelm'd with woe, and yet would counsel give;
He that delights to sigh, to walk abroad alone,
To drive away the weary time with his lamenting moan;
He that in his distress despaireth of relief,
Let him begin to tell his tale, to 'rip up all his grief,
And if that wretched man can more than I recite
Of fickle fortune's froward check and her continual spite,
Of her inconstant change, of her discourtesy,
I will be partner with that man to live in misery. (173-174)

Indeed, not only does he bewail his "dainty dish … of fretting melancholy" (175) for nearly fifty lines (making this initial speech twice as long as any other in the play), even his rascally servant, Lontulo, laughs at his posing:

He'll do nothing all day long but sit on his arse, as my mother did when she made pouts:
And then a’ looks at this fashion, and thus and thus again; and then, what do ye?
By my troth, I stand even thus at him, and laugh at his simplicity. (177)

One would suspect that Lentulo crosses his arms or makes some such characteristic gesture when he says "and thus and thus," for he seems to have studied his master’s melancholia thoroughly.

Lentulo is a great imitator, and he soon falls under the influence of Penulo, Phizanties' parasite-servant, who is so proud of his ability as an informer that, before he tells Armenio about his discovering a secret meeting between Fidelia and Hermione, he gloats:

This is a step that first we use to climb:
We that, forsooth, take hold on every time.
Men of all hours, whose credit such as spites,
In heat forsooth hath called us parasites. (172)

Ever eager to serve his own best interest, Lentulo so prefers Penulo's courtly ways to his own austere life with Bomelio that he soon deserts his master and accepts Penulo’s promise that he will "prefer" him to "a service in the Court presently" (182). Lentulo next steals a set of fancy clothes and begins to ape the manners of the court. Indeed, he decides to fall in love and ape the melancholia to which courtiers are prone as well:

PENULO
Thy love with a woman! Are you in love, sir, then, with your leave?
LENTULO
What an ass art thou: couldst thou not all this time perceive,
That I never sleep but when I am not awake,
And I eat and I eat till my belly would ache?
And I fall away like a gammon of bacon.
Am I not in love when I am in this tacon?
Call'st thou this the court? would I had ne’er come thither
To be caught in Cupido. I faint, I faint!
0h gather me, gather me! [Pretends to swoon]
PENULO
Come up, and be hanged. Alack, poor Lentulo! [Aside]
Tell me with whom thou art in love so.
LENTULO
You kill me, and you make me tell her name. No, no.
0 terrible torments, that trounce in my toe!
Love, my masters, is a parlous matter! how it runs out of my nose!
It's now in my back, now in my belly; O, now in the bottom of my hose. (196-197)

Not only does Lentulo make fun of Bomelio’s melancholy, he suffers from pseudo-melancholy himself. Clearly, the author of The Rare Triumphs is totally familiar with the conventions of melancholia: indeed, he is one of the first dramatists to bring these conventions so richly into play.

The gloomy, morose Bomelio, who is at once a part of this world and alienated from it, is thus an intriguing figure. Not only is he a melancholic, he shares other characteristics with malcontents to come. He is also (like Hamlet) a revenger, who sees his plotting against the corrupt Phizanties as part of a "Just revenge that here I undertake" (208). He wears disguises masquerading both as a hermit and (shades of Malevole's "virtuous Machiavellianism") as an Italian doctor who claims he can cure Armenio’s dumbness. He is a manipulator, having magically caused this dumbness himself―a fact which Armenio senses, suggesting in sign language that his affliction was caused by "some old man, that threatened to be revenged on him" (208).

Finally, after a capricious fit of righteousness causes Hermione to destroy his father's magic books, the apparently overwrought Bomelio plunges into a fit of madness:

What can'st thou tell me? tell me of a turd. What, and a’ come? I conjure thee, foul spirit, down to hell! Ho. ho. ho! the devil, the devil! A-comes. A-comes, a-comes upon me, and I lack my books. Help! Help! Help! Lend me a sword, a sword! 0, I am gone! [He raves.] (226)

Indeed, like the distracted Hamlet's, Bomelio’s raving turns to anti-feminism. When Fidelia tries to comfort him, he rails:

Hark the whore! See what an impudent whore it is. Sleep, you whore? I’ll sleep with you anon. Gog’s blood, you whore, I'll hang you up! [He threatens her.] (231)

Although no dramatic character would be so labeled for two years, I would argue that Bomelio its, indeed, an early “Malcontent.” The melancholy, disguise, tendency for virtuous intrigue, madness, railing against women and hermit-like reclusiveness which comprise his character are all attributes of malcontents to come. In addition, he represents a bit of the scholar—although his romanticized scholarly abilities (magic) are for him a source of power rather than a source of frustration—and he moves in a milieu where flattery and parasitism abound—although, unlike his descendant Malevole, he refuses to indulge in either.

In the final analysis, as far as literary history is concerned, it is perhaps melancholy—derived from the novels of men like Sidney, Lodge, Greene, and Lyly, and found in plays like The Rare Triumphs—which, aided to the other characteristics we have delineated, produced the earliest stage malcontents, of which Bomelio is one.

This literary phenomenon may well reflect contemporary cultural trends. The eighties were the period in which the so-called "Elizabethan younger generation," the sons of Elizabeth's older courtiers were coming of age. Frustrated in their attempts to supplant their elders, angered by the growth of flattery and parasitism at Elizabeth's court, and discouraged by the aging Queen's growing conservatism and their own parents' distrust of ambition, various members of this generation turned to romantic fiction as a means of reasserting the idealism they found lacking in the increasingly materialistic court. They thus established escapist realms into which their frustrated imaginations could move, and cultivated literary melancholy as a means of reflecting their own (frequently university-bred) melancholy at not obtaining the preferments formerly given their elders.

In a play such as The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune these concerns enter the world of the drama. In a sense, the early malcontent can be seen as representing both the frustrated melancholy of the younger generation and a romanticized version of their suppressed ambition, desire for power and eagerness to revenge themselves upon the flatterers they felt to be swarming about the court.

Potentially “Malcontent” themselves, members of this younger generation allowed their personal melancholy fuller range in their literary works and produced surrogates like Bomelio, who, drunk with melancholy, seeks a reordering of priorities which would produce, at least in the idealized world of the play, a kind of contentedness. Thus it is that the author of The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune allows his hero's melancholy to push Bomelio’s desire for revenge to the extreme:

Eternal gods, that know my true Intent,
And how unjustly wrongéd I have been,
Vouchsafe all secret dangers to prevent,
And further me, as yet you do begin.
Sufficeth you my travail heretofore,
My hungers cold, and all my former pain.
Here make an end, and plague me now no more:
Contented [italics mine], then, at rest I will remain. (206)

Ernst

As You Like It - Rare Triumphs

2009-07-22T18:27:00.000-07:00

Ernst writes (from Northport, Maine):

Ladies and Gentlepods,

My special interest in As You Like It is, of course, how the play fits in to the development of the stage malcontent, of which Jacques is a major part.

I believe the stage malcontent developed out of romances—both written (Sidney’s Arcadia, Lyly’s Euphues, Greene’s Romances, etc.), and dramatic (Lodge’s and Lyly’s plays—primarily). I include my dissertation discussion of a relatively early play (1582) that seems to me to contain an important "malcontent"— although he is never named as such (the first dramatic use of the word "malcontent" comes in a Lyly play of 1584, in which two minor characters banter: "Are you a male-content? No, I’m a fe-male content."

The term "malcontent" was pretty frequently used during the ‘80s. Greene writes of having toured Europe and come home to "Ruffle out my silks as a malcontent," a use of the term suggestive of what I take as a vogue among University and law-school students, not unlike the "punks" or "Goths" of our own time. These young men wore black, brooded publicly, felt quietly superior, read satirical or philosophical books, had often traveled, had a liking for bitter satire—often attacking women—and dressed sloppily, often crossing their arms and wearing black.

It was a popular pose—so much so that when Hamlet asks his friends not to let on to his post-Ghost disguise, his audience knew that he was going to cross his arms, start reading a philosophical book, and unlace his black clothes a bit.

The romances of the '80s and early '90s very often consisted of a court that retires to the pastoral world, where things change and odd characters appear, who eventually solve their various problems and return to civilization. The play I discuss herewith is a fine example of how this sort of arrangement could play out on the stage—complete with its own proto-malcontent.
There was increasing bitterness about the regime as Elizabeth’s reign drew toward a close. Sure, the victory over the Armada brightened things up a bit; but, on the other hand, the death of Elizabeth’s most admired "Renaissance Man," Sir Philip Sidney, in 1586 seemed a waste. Crops were often bad. Too many were graduating from the law schools and the universities for the jobs open to them (hence, a number turned to writing), and even older sons found making their way into the Elizabethan establishment difficult (think of Orlando’s problems with his brother).

As a result, the urge for satire grew increasingly during the late 1580s and '90s. Marlowe’s plays were actually quite satirical (or, at least, filled with political advice) as were Kyd’s. Lyly got himself fired around 1586—probably for coming too close to "advising" the Queen in his romances (which were all variants on Elizabeth’s court).

Indeed, a group of satirical writers including George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston (Marston = "mar stone" = castrator = kinser (a castrator of sheep) = kin to a satyr = kinsader (also a castrator), which is the pen name Marston used in his satires. There was a wild outpouring of verse and prose satires in the late '90s—so much that satire writing was banned—with the partial result the above-mentioned three satirists turned to (generally satirical) playwriting—mostly for boys’companies, popular with the educated and upper classes.

The satires these three wrote never directly attacked the Elizabethan establishment, but they readily attacked many of the types the satirists saw moving about their world. In one such satire, Marston established the character of Bruto, the malcontent, whom he describes at some length.

This, then, was the world for which Shakespeare wrote As You Like It. And, of course, he seems unable to have avoided putting a malcontent satirist into the middle of it. Thus the conversation between Jacques and Duke Senior is similar to the discussions going on at the time, and the "All the world’s a stage" set-piece was similar to some of Bruto’s (and others’) spoutings, only a heck of a lot better.

One thing that is remarkable to me is that this is the first instance (I think) in which Shakespeare pulled a voguish (somewhat literary) contemporary character into his play—specifically. I might note that, as the above-mentioned satirists turned to playwrights they were—at this very moment—moving in the direction of "Humors" play, plays containing a number of "humorous" (i.e. "type,") flat characters.

Chapman was the first one to do this; however, Jonson took over the idea and wrote a number of plays containing such characters. The notion was that such characters were "in their humor" and the play’s dramatic action revolved around their being got "out" of their various "humors." Jonson usually did this by creating a central, righteously noble, character (quite like himself), who helped arrange things so that the humors characters would be made fools of or suffer some sort of miserable defeat that shook them into reforming themselves. After a while, other playwrights grew a bit tired of Jonson’s personal self-pride (and that of his central characters)—so that they started to make fun of him. This led to the "War of the Theaters," but that is another story.

Shakespeare is said to have "put Jonson down" at some point. If such a thing occurred in any of his plays, I wonder whether or not the self-imporant, judgmental, and humorless Malvolio was not taken as an attack on Jonson by some.

So one could argue that Shakespeare went, in As You Like It, from borrowing one "humors" character from the world and writers about him to, in Twelfth Night, borrowing a whole raft of flat humors characters to be "got out of their humor" in the course of the play—a play whose title suggests 12 days of bingeing, after which period most of us would probably be very likely to change our ways. (One could carry this a step further by suggesting that Hamlet is also a "humors" play—as Hamlet is, like Viola, surrounded by a bunch of relatively flat characters who, like all the narrow-minded, stupidly stubborn obsessives we encounter daily, are especially difficult to deal with.)

Both Jacques and Malvolio go off at the end of their plays—although one feels Malvolio as a far more dangerous person in a far more dangerous world. More on this when we get to Twelfth Night. I also sometimes wonder if, at one point while As You Like It was a-making, Shakespeare didn’t consider making the OTHER Jacques, Orlando’s and Oliver’s third brother, into his malcontent/satirist. He was, after all, a "student," and, as I have suggested above, too much education can produce a malcontent’s world view. Fortunately, Shakespeare didn’t follow through on this. It would probably have pushed the DeBoys family complications over the edge.

On the As You Like It we watched at the Globe. It was a solid production, much praised in the press. We sat way to the side, and so it was hard to get the perspective from the front. Both Jacques and Touchstone appeared to be relatively young—in their early thirties, I would say. Jacques seemed much less a grumpf than I might have expected (never having seen the play); rather he acted benevolent and friendly throughout. Touchstone was a lusty young man. He didn’t pronounce the gloriously dirty "Hour to hour" speech as broadly in the direction of "whore to whore" as I would have expected, but the audience seemed to get it. I thought the Rosalind character was a bit TOO boyish. She was played by a quite boyish actress. I had little sense of the woman underneath the disguise. One of the most enjoyable characters, one we might barely notice on the written page was Amiens, the singer, who was about fifty (although thin and fit) and had a lovely tenor voice. He drew out the songs a bit—moving back and forth along the apron of the stage as he sang. Delightful.

Ernst

RE: As You Like It - No Evil Shall Escape My Sight

2009-07-21T18:38:00.000-07:00

Derek writes:

Brief reply: I read Lodge's "Rosalynde" a few years ago, and was struck mainly by how straightforwardly Lodge recapitulates the forms and standards of classical comedy, with much more weight given to eclogues between shepherds, and so on. I also remember being entirely underwhelmed by the title character of the play, who bears little resemblance to the one that eventually emerges in Shakespeare's version. I don't remember a thing, really, about the villains in the story, sadly.

But it turns out that I misquoted Bloom, and so please allow me to correct myself. He in fact writes, "Rosalind's high good fortune ― which exalts her over Falstaff, Hamlet, and Cleopatra ― is to stand at the center of a play in which no authentic harm can come to anyone… The glory of Rosalind, and of her play, is her confidence, and ours, that all things will go well."

Bloom spends considerable time in the passage leading into the one I quoted above talking about why scholars have focused for a long time on Falstaff and Hamlet, and what the nature of their deaths have had to teach us. I guess I did a little inferring and came up with the idea that although…

Oh WAIT! He DOES say what I thought he said, only a few pages later! Quoth Harold Bloom: "I have been urging us to see Rosalind in sequence, between Falstaff and Hamlet, just as witty and as wise but trapped neither in history with Falstaff nor in tragedy with Hamlet, and yet larger in her drama even as they cannot be confined to theirs." ― compliment, right? But no! ― "The invention of freedom must be measured against what encloses or threatens freedom: time and the state for Falstaff, the past and the enemy within for Hamlet. Rosalind's freedom may seem less consequential because As You Like It brushes aside time and the state, and Rosalind has no tragic sorrows, no Prince Hal, and no Gertrude or Ghost. Rosalind is her own context, unchallenged save for the melancholy Jaques and the rancid Touchstone." And that's the end of the paragraph ― in fact, of the whole section. Although he says that Rosalind's freedom "may SEEM less consequential," which implies that it really isn't any less consequential, he sure doesn't do a thing to make the reader think that the way her freedom seems is any different from the way it truly is.

That's the passage wherein Bloom dismisses the presence of evil ― that which encloses or threatens freedom. And my contention remains. That Rosalind doesn't take it seriously, or that she behaves MOST of the time like she doesn't take it seriously, does NOT mean that the play as a whole "brushes aside" evil. It's Rosalind who brushes it aside. That was my point, I think.

Thank goodness I hadn't packed up the Bloom yet, as I'm filling box after box with books. And I have a tiny collection compared to certain others of this group. Randall, never move.

Derek

As You Like It - No Evil Shall Escape My Sight

2009-07-21T18:03:00.000-07:00

Randall writes:

Arden-t readers,

Derek started us off by stating that one of As You Like It's great points "is that, for once, there really is evil." I've been thinking about evil and Shakespeare for some time, and evil itself fascinates me in all its literary incarnations.

For example, I taught a class today in which students are writing an analytical essay on Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams' Green Lantern, issue 76 (1970), and they are trying to discern what is remarkable about the comic's story. One idea that emerges pretty quickly is that, as a student named Conor put it in the last session, "evil doesn't always have to don a costume and have super powers; normal evil people have fairly similar goals to normal people, only with more devious ways of achieving them." Today, I noticed a couple students were throwing the "evil" word around somewhat carelessly, so I asked them to make sure the explained what they meant by "evil" if it was going to be a focus of their essays.

Over on the Shakespeare Geek blog, Duane is asking readers to consider which Shakespeare villains suffer no guilt for their actions. He writes:

"It’s easy to find ways in which Shakespeare’s villains feel guilt for their actions, whether it’s Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking, or Claudius’ outright 'My offense is rank, it smells to heaven' prayer. Should we count Edmund’s last minute redemption, too?

"What I’m interested in is bad guys who feel no guilt at all. I was trying to explain to my boss last week why Iago is such a nasty son-of-a-gun, and I realized that when it comes to his actual crimes, there are other bad guys that did far worse. It’s just something about him. I think it has a great deal to do with the fact that, as far as I can tell, he never feels a shred of anything for his victim, right up until the last words we hear. That’s what’s so scary."

I think Duane's question gets to the heart of evil, that to be evil, not just to do evil, demands that one knowingly act to the detriment of others without remorse. In the golden and silver ages of the comic book world, stories are full of villains bent on world domination, the destruction of the human race, theft of various items for no other purpose than to perpetrate the theft, etc. Just evil. Frequently, a character in a comic will refer to the villain as an "evil-doer," a term few outside the comic book world actually use (except our former president who once said, "My administration has a job to do and we're going to do it. We will rid the world of evil-doers.").

In the Green Lantern issue, a slumlord named Jubal Slade is evicting impoverished, elderly, immigrant residents so he can convert the property to a profitable parking lot. He asks Green Lantern, "You expect me to pass [up] a fat profit 'cause a lot of worthless old geeks are gonna get rained on?" The question is rhetorical, and if we focus on his use of the word "worthless" we can see that Slade is more than just an uncaring businessman, he's a misanthropist. The story is entitled "No Evil Shall Escape My Sight!" (comic books are all about exclamation points), and O'Neil's scenario connects Slade with the title's "evil"; he is the remorseless villain. And an actual criminal ― he tries to have Green Lantern's pal Green Arrow assassinated. I'm sure you visual pun lovers would enjoy the story's final scene in which Green Lantern, who can make the green beam that emanates from his power ring take any shape he wants, transports Slade to prison pinned in a giant rat trap.

We've previously noted the presence of dark undercurrents in Shakespeare's comedies ― Duke Solinus's death sentence for Egeon at the beginning of Comedy of Errors, Egeus's demand that Hermia either marry Demetrius or be put to death in Midsummer Night's Dream, Shylock's determination to kill Antonio if his bond is not paid in Merchant of Venice, Don John's parthenogenic villainy in Much Ado About Nothing. Derek's claim ― that the villainy in As You Like It achieves the level of evil, that this evil outweighs the villainy of Shakespeare's other comedies, and that in threatening the power of goodness and virtue, evil carries the play closer to tragedy than we expect comedy to go ― relies on a fairly severe assessment of Duke Frederick and Orlando's brother, Oliver. This assessment is not as simple as it might sound. Ernst has suggested that one of the great qualities of Shakespeare is that he has endowed his characters, no matter how small, with clear motivation. And motivation, especially if it relies on a connection to some moral or legal foundation, to my mind, is the enemy of evil.

Solinus must obey the law, which forbids that Syracusians caught in Ephesus, die. What's more the law has a twin in Syracuse. What's more Solinus clearly feels conflicted about the law. His decision, then, to condemn Egeon is not evil, although it is misguided.

Egeus also has the law ("the ancient privilege of Athens") to rely on and one might argue he has no intention of having Hermia put to death, that rather he expects his appeal to Theseus will result in Hermia's obedience. What's more to Egeus, it is Hermia's disobedience that is the transgression. As Thesus explains to Hermia, "to you, your father should be as a god," and gods must be obeyed.

Shylock also has the law (do we detect a theme here), his bond, and it takes some pretty semantic slight of hand by Portia to free Antonio of its stipulation. Shylock cannot be evil unless we see him as deliberately undermining the legal system in order to kill Antonio, and while that may have been the way one saw him in the 17th century when his Vice characteristics would have highlighted his villainy, it's hard to look past Shylock's explanations for the fatal consequence of forfeiture ― that he and his people are spit upon by the likes of Antonio and that those who make the laws do not see jews as people ("if you prick us…") or respect their traditions (i.e. lending). There is righteousness as well as cleverness in his revenge (the kind of thing Europeans have celebrated in folk tales for centuries, I might add).

Setting aside, for the time being, Don John, we come to As You Like It. In the three previous examples, none of the "evil-doers" thinks he is doing evil. But in Duke Frederick and Oliver, as Derek suggests, we find both the logic and the evasiveness of villainy. One might argue that Oliver is a lot like Egeus. Despite his brutish treatment of Orlando, he has the law, of primogeniture, on his side. His father's will works against Oliver's behavior somewhat, but he is the inheritor of the estate and has near absolute power over it. But Oliver goes outside the law's power and plots to have Orlando killed. To do so, he lies to Charles the wrestler, claiming that Orlando is "a secret and villainous contriver against me, his natural brother," a calumny more true of Oliver than Orlando. What's more, Oliver knows what he is doing is morally wrong:

"I hope I shall see an en end of [Orlando], for my soul ― yet I know not why ― hates nothing more than he. Yet he's gentle, never schooled and yet learned, full of noble device, of all sorts enchantingly beloved, and indeed so much in the heart of the world, and especially of my own people, who best know him, that I am altogether misprized" (1.1.161-168).

This recognition of Orlando's qualities is extraordinary and, coupled with Oliver's confusion about his hate's source, indicates the older brother's awareness of his own turpitude. Neither Shylock, nor Solinus, nor Egeus ever claim to not understand why he wanted something that might result in the death of another.

Duke Frederick, as we often find in Shakespeare, echoes Oliver's experience. He also has a brother he hates and has found a way to drive him out. He does not, though, have the law on his side; he is a usurper, so he's already off the moral path. After the wrestling match, when he explains his animosity toward Orlando, his rationalization directly parallels Oliver's about Orlando: "The world esteemed thy father honorable,/ But I did find him still my enemy" (1.2.220-221). Evil, here, is that which willfully does wrong against the innocent, even in the face of general recognition of the victim's virtue. To fully compare As You Like It to Comedy of Errors, Midsummer, and Merchant, we might also look at the virtue of Egeon, Hermia, and Antonio, but I suspect that none of them are as spotless as Orlando and Duke Senior.

So I think Derek is right, that As You Like It opposes its heroes and heroines with something closer to evil than most of Shakespeare's previous comedies. I would argue that Two Gentlemen of Verona, specifically Proteus's machinations against Valentine and Julia, approaches the level of evil we find here. And then there's Don John, who for me is not a three-dimensional character as the others we've discussed are. Instead he's more of a stock character, malcontent or vice or what have you, and I guess I would ask if that qualifies his evil, which is every bit as repugnant as that we see in Duke Frederick and Oliver. Don John would be at home in a Green Lantern comic book.

I'm not sure what Harold Bloom means by "suffers," and specifically I'm confused by his application of the term to Rosalind (although I haven't read the article which Derek quotes). Is her expulsion from the court her burden? I'd agree that it doesn't seem that evil, but again, it's not what one does but what one is, that invokes the evil. Oliver's suggestion that it is his soul that hates Orlando is provocative. But it suggests that evil comes from deep within and is subject to no external law.

What accounts, if anything, for this difference in seriousness of Shakespeare's comedies? What has happened to the concerns about law? As we move on, does this growing presence of evil in non-tragic story suggest an evolving way of looking at comedy, at the world? Does any one know Lodge's "Rosalynde" and what it makes of these characters?

Not looking for any trouble,
Randall

As You Like It - Performance Log (July 2009)

2009-07-13T23:22:00.000-07:00

As You Like It
The Strange Capers
directed by Randy Reyes
Boom Island, Minneapolis
July 12, 2009

At dinner on Sunday, Maren, my 10-year-old, asks me, "What was your favorite part of the play, dad?" It takes me five minutes to come up with an answer.

Is it when Orlando (Max Polski) and Charles the wrestler (Josh Fazeli) face off in their death match, slap hands together, then simultaneously chant "1-2-3-4, I declare a thumb war!" (which is, I notice, pentameter if not iambic)? Or when Orlando subsequently defeats Charles by tickling him until he passes out?

Is it when, at the end of Act I and the last scene in Duke Frederick's court which as been staged in a sweltering, concrete clearing lacking comfortable seating, the entire audience is asked to get up and walk a hundred yards to a grassy, shaded clearing (the Forest of Arden) for the remainder in the play?

Is it when Celia (Christian Bardin), groping for an alias, stumbles over the name she chooses, pronouncing it "alien … uh," and then it becomes a running gag and that's what she gets called for the rest of the play?

Is it that 19 characters are played by nine actors, providing us with a variety of interesting, often cross-dressed parallels and juxtapositions? Audrey, for example, played by the same actor who played Charles, in a skimpy dress and a ridiculous set of blond braids and a little girl voice belying his six-foot, 200 pound frame. Or Duke Frederick and Duke Senior, played by the same woman (Sigrid Sutter), one dressed all in black, the other all in white.

Or is it the playful rendering of the play's songs, as the upbeat ones Amiens (Julie Kurtz) sings, accompanying herself on the ukulele?

It's hard to pick out a stand-out moment, and in a way it's hard to put one's finger on the moment when this production of As You Like It really comes together. In The Rake, a local magazine, Kate Iverson asked director Randy Reyes what one might expect from his production. "First of all," he said, "it won't be a 'puffy pants' production. I've never understood companies that do outdoor theater in heavy costumes." And so there are no puffy pants in the show. Instead there are funny hats ― sombreros, fedoras, baseball caps on backwards ― and one character wearing a funny nose and glasses. I think this is a good metaphor for the production; everyone's trying on something humorous and playful, and some of it fits and some of it doesn't. Why, for example, does Corin seem so devoted to Bocce?

What works best for me are a few images that emerged naturally from the setting. It is this particular theatrical space itself ― the park ― that Reyes' production celebrates and from which it gets its energy. In the court, for example, the audience sits on either side of the square. The actors perform between us moving back and forth on the grid-like concrete (or should I say grid-dle) in straight lines. Moving to the "Forest," the audience arranges itself in a wide semi-circle and the actors tend to move in circular patterns, sometimes running in circles around the entire periphery of the clearing. This spatial delineation of court and pastoral setting, I thought, was very moving. And I would add to that the simple experience of sitting under a tree on the grass watching this celebration of rural life with the tall reminders of city life in the form of downtown Minneapolis starkly visible across the Mississippi River.

Reyes is clearly thinking about the differences between the two settings. In addition to audience location and character costuming (the court dress is dark and formal; the forest is white and/or casual), he calls attention to the difference by beginning and ending the play with very different dances. This As You Like It opens with a very structured dance, the actors moving back and forth and diagonally together in a block, taking stiff off-kilter mannequin-like poses. They freeze as Orlando begins his opening complaint. In the forest at the end, the actors form a line and sing the final verse of Hymen's "wedding song," but in as informal a style as possible, appending a sort of Hawaiian chorus to it. Why the wikki wacki stuff? I don't know. But it was light and frothy, a clear contrast to our impression of court life.

All the playfulness, even in the court where Charles and Orlando's fight (which ostensibly is supposed to end with Orlando's being maimed) becomes silly, tends to run roughshod over the play's darker themes. That seems fine with The Strange Capers. This production is comedy through and through, and one leaves with the impression there'll be no returning to the dreary and depressing court. Duke Frederick's repentance and conversion is edited out. Rosalind and Orlando are dressed in white and dancing in the park.

And I think, in the end, my favorite part of The Strange Capers' performance is its existence itself, that there are now, with Cromulent and Chameleon Theatre Circle, three free summer Shakespeare-in-the-park companies in the Twin Cities area. As long as The Strange Capers is devoted to finding entertaining ways to put Shakespeare on, something memorable will always emerge.

For Maren, it was the ukulele.

Logged by Randall

Photo: Emily Shain as Rosalind and Max Polski as Orlando in The Strange Capers's As You Like It. Photo from rehearsal by Amanda Hanson.