To absent friends,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is indeed a wonderful play. Ernst has asked which characters “speak” most clearly to us at this moment. Let me take “this moment” literally and thus choose to choose Hippolyta, though my other choices would be Helena and Puck. For Hippolyta, who has thirty-five lines, perhaps I’m just continuing my whimsical attraction to minor characters. I’ve told my students I would try out for Rosaline in Romeo and Juliet to introduce the fact of boy actors in women’s roles, but then I’d confess the real reason is there are so few lines (none) to memorize. Once I was asked by an examining committee who was the “hero” of Hamlet, and I blurted out Voltemand, imagining it was a question like “who is buried in Grant’s tomb,” then I had to give a rationale for my choice. Well, if Branagh can cast Gerard Depardieu as Renaldo…
Ah, Hippolyta, bride-to-be of Theseus. Theseus opens with
Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour
Draws on apace. Four happy days bring in
Another mood; but, O, methinks, how slow
This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires,
Like to a stepdame, or a dowager,
Long withering out a young man’s revenue. (I.i.1-6)
Promising coda, no? There is the plot: “the nuptial hour,” which animates all four couples in the narrative which follows. It introduces “the moon,” which will be a major player until it is manifest by a physical appearance, resembling Starvling, during the performance of “Pyramus and Thisby.” And Theseus confesses his sexual tension, premarital desire, which animates so much of the following action. Ernst explores the speeches, rich in dark, dignified sounds and lovely drawn out metaphors. But I would like to isolate Hippolyta alone here:
Four days will quickly steep themselves in night;
Four nights will quickly dream away the time;
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities. (I.1.7-11)
Note the difference in Theseus’s simile (like to a stepdame withering out a young man’s revenue) and Hippolyta’s metaphor (days and nights personified, immersed, and the moon likened to an image of a bow drawn afresh). How no-nonsense, how material Theseus’s image is, a young man calculating the sheckles diminishing in his inheritance because his widowed mother insists on living a few more days, whereas Chipolata’s images are rich in nature, in imagination, and introduce the gap between “real” time and lovers’ time. She trumps Theseus’s “lingers” with her “steep” and “dream away.”
Theseus instructs his Master of Revels, Philostrate, to design entertainments, then explains to
Hippolyta, I woo’d thee with my sword,
And won thy love doing thee injuries;
But I will wed thee in another key,
With pomp, with triumph, and with reveling. (I.i.16-19)
Already, I suspect a predatory lover here. “I won thee doing thee injuries”—the queen of the Amazons, similar to Achilles’s Briesies, is merely a trophy won in battle. Notice there is no response, though Hippolyta remains present as the Duke turns his attention to business, Egeus’s petition that Theseus enforce the law of Athens, that daughter Hernia be put to death if she refuses to marry her father’s choice (a bit creepy in that we recently had the trial of Warren Jeffs, the high authority of the Fundamental schism of the Mormon church, for commanding the bedding of fourteen-year-old girls to his religious followers). Despite a courageous appeal by Hermia, Theseus hides behind the law:
For you, fair Hermia, look you arm yourself
To fit your fancies to your father’s will;
Or else the law of Athens yields you up
(Which by no means we may extenuate)
To death, or to a vow of single life. (I.i 117-121)
(Anticipate how much this immutable law will be so easily eroded by lovers’ time and the alternate universe of the imagination.) After Theseus rules, as he passes this sentence of death on young Hermia—another of those absolute grim laws which so many comedies open with, The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, for instance—he turns from the business and says “Come, my Hippolyta; what cheer, my love?” Stage this? After Theseus (“my love”?!?) has ruled Hermia merely a chattel to her father and has deemed betrothal to a man she despises, how do we see Hippolyta react? Surely the common sense Hippolyta doesn’t like this disposition of the young woman at all. Can we visualize her visible disgust? Indeed Theseus must ask “what cheer.”
Then, into the woods we go, elopement, pursuit, the night, the moon, the shadows, the faeries, delusions and illusions. At dawn, the sleeping lovers, all, except Demetrius, restored to natural affection, wake to the sound of hounds and hunting horns. Enter Theseus and Hippolyta (remember her?). Theseus tries to impress her, loosing his hounds up to the mountain top for “musical confusion/ Of hounds and echo in conjunction” but, as in the opening images, Hippolyta tops him:
I was with Hercules and Cadmus once [among the immortals],
When in a wood of Crete they bay’d the bear
With hounds of Sparta….
… I never heard
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder. (IV. i.112-114, 117-118)
Theseus blathers about the superiority of his dogs, trying to impress the Queen of the Amazons, but Hugh Richmond tells us to be skeptical of a warrior who marries his enemy and trains his hunting dogs so they are unfit for tracking. The dogs do discover the lovers, sleeping, after the mistakes of the night, and they tell their stories and, over Egeus’s insistence on that immutable Athenian law, Theseus acknowledges natural law (though he will have one more rejection of love and imagination) and heralds that “nuptial hour.” “Three and three,/ We’ll hold a feast in great solemnity./ Come, Hippolyta,” (IV.i.184-186).
I would direct Hippolyta as open-mouthed with astonishment and soon she remarks “’Tis strange, my Theseus, [what] these lovers speak of,” which provokes the Duke’s dismissal of lunatics, lovers, and poets, “of imagination all compact.” Theseus is regularly quoted out of context as a description of Shakespeare’s notions about poetry, dreams, romantic love, and other lunacies, but as my Hippolyta has demonstrated Theseus is the figure who is deficient in these qualities. Hippolyta is shrewder and less defensive than Theseus:
But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds tranfigur’s so together,
More witnesseth than fancy’s images,
And grows to something of great constancy;
But howsoever, strange and admirable. (V.i.23-27)
Something has happened to the lovers, whatever their stories, a creative transformation into a higher consciousness (as opposed to downward metamorphoses we read about in Ovid).
After this, the rude mechanicals perform “Pyramus and Thisbe,” and Hippolyta, again, is judicious: “I love not to see wretchedness o’ercharged,/ And duty in his service perishing.” As the travesty unfolds, she may seem to be among the snobbish derision the aristocrats heap on the guildsmen, but, to me, the most interesting line is her “This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.” Does she mean “Pyramus and Thisbe” itself and its romantic glop or the performance or possibly the jeering by Theseus and Demetrius, though that is not yet as vicious as it will soon be. But when Theseus plays critic and says “The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend it,” Hippolyta again clarifies imagination: “It must be your imagination then, and not theirs.”
Theseus, who has scorned antic fables and fairy toys, lunatics, lovers, and poets, finally is himself transformed and acknowledges “’tis almost fairy time,” And so to bed, Hippolyta inevitably with him. But I have seen Hippolyta double cast with Titania, and I have judged her superior to the pompous (see I.i.19) bureaucrat Theseus, superior in reason, nature, and the imagination. If there were a sixth act, can one imagine Theseus with ass’s ears?
Notes to Ernst’s other starters:
1. (cont.) Ernst, in September, invited us to choose a character “speaking” to us at this moment in the world. I hope I haven’t merely deconstructed Hippolyta, and I hope Ernst still remembers why he nominated Theseus back then so we can rassle. If not, I may try also to account for my connection to Helena (starting with a wonderful B. Iden Payne production in which Helena had a lisp and doomed me to refer to “Dimetweus” in front of my students) and of Puck (starting with me being cast as Puck, chosen over Richard Chamberlain in open audition). But that for another time. I notice Ernst’s first character is Bottom. Tempting. Cindy—can you make an argument for why Bottom is the only mortal in the play to see the faeries. That’s you, isn’t it, or did I hear it from our friend and colleague Dick Henze?
2. Great parallel between the openings of Richard II and Midsummer Night's Dream.
4. Bottom. Henry Myers has a little piece on Romeo and Bottom
5. Fairyland. I like the way Oberon gets hooked on the richness of describing nature.
6. Double casting in production. And there is a gaudy, but unexceptional film directed by Michael Hoffman with a memorable melancholy, contemplative Kevin Kline as Bottom. Calista Flockhart’s bare breast pale in comparison to those of Judi Dench as Titania in Peter Hall’s version.
Gilbert
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Monday, March 24, 2008
Midsummer Night's Dream - Shakespeare's Blues
Dreamers,
I'm sitting in a plantation-era shack in Clarksdale, Mississippi, about a mile from the legendary crossroads where Robert Johnson is supposed to have died of strychnine poisoning in 1938. And perhaps a little further on down the road, near Dockery Plantation if you believe the legend, he sold his soul to the devil for the ability to become the greatest bluesman ever. So I am surrounded by vibrant symbols of poverty, power, poetry, and the supernatural, all elements of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. Johnson's scant history suggests he was the son of itinerant field workers, an agrarian life not too far from the shepherds or cowherds depicted in pastoral (except for the nasty and brutish part that tended to come with picking cotton). Johnson, however, turned out to be something of a poet, and the 24 recordings we have from his mere five days of recording sessions in 1936 and 1937 include such lyrics as:
"You better come on
in my kitchen,
baby, it's goin' to be rainin'
outdoors.
Winter time's comin'
hit's gon' be slow;
you can't make the winter, babe,
that's dry long so." ("Come On In My Kitchen")
This last line may refer to Fate, suggesting that since the woman can't do anything about the coming winter rains, she should just hang out with him in his kitchen. Oh, the rain it raineth every day!
Johnson also concluded a song, from his final recording session, this way:
"When the train, it left the station
with two lights on behind
When the train, it left the station
with two lights on behind
Well, the blue light was my blues
and the red light was my mind
All my love's in vain" ("Love in Vain")
I'd say this would be a good song for Berowne in Love's Labor's Lost, only trains didn't exist yet and Johnson's a better poet than Berowne. My roundabout point here is that if the pastoral still existed, tragically dead Robert Johnson might be its American standard bearer, and that makes communing with his ghost, as I am this chilly moonlit night in northern Mississippi, appropriate for a discussion of pastoral in Midsummer Night's Dream.
In his opening remarks, Ernst pointed out Midsummer Night's Dream's "earmarks of a pastoral romance" and John qualified the reference, stating "the couples certainly escape the strictures of urban life to the freedom and magical, mischievous, but ultimately healing and benign, influence of the wild wood." I seem to be forever finding Shakespeare turning things on their head, but I do not see the playwright cozying up easily to this tradition; in fact I see some gentle mockery of it. But perhaps I misunderstand the genre, and you can set me straight with what I get wrong. My introduction to the pastoral came in college with John Milton's "Lycidas," a poem that reminds us of the Greek origins of the form and displays its key conventions while, if I remember, attacking church corruption. What I remember most about the form is the elevation of simple shepherds to idyllic literary geniuses. Yet in both Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It, the simple country folk are the worst poets. Take Bottom's extemporaneous poesy:
"The raging rocks
And shivering shocks
Shall break the locks
Of prison gates;
And Phibbus' car
Shall shine from far
And make and mar
The foolish fates.
This was lofty!" (1.2.29-37)
Funny, but doggerel. (And as an interesting comparison, note that Shakespeare's jest anticipates Milton's "Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew / Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme" ("Lycidas" 10-11). I could further annotate the less-than-accomplished talents of the uncouth swains in both plays, but I don't want to belabor the point … with Orlando's tortured rhymes to Rosalind, or Quince's lumbering prologue to "Pyramis and Thisbe." Now, both these guys are outsiders, city-dwellers, not trained shepherd-poets, but I do think Shakesepare is making fun. City people commune with nature, and it turns them into fools.
This point is made again as Shakespeare takes on the convention, if I remember it right, that the simplicity of rural life makes it idyllic. Midsummer Night's Dream gives us anything but idyllic life. Four city folk enter the woods, and they are nearly driven insane. They become enamored of the wrong people, they fight with their friends, they become lost and disoriented, and even after all is set right they can't tell what reality is (Demetrius concludes: "Are you sure / That we are awake? It seems to me / That yet we sleep, we dream."). Even the representatives of Nature are not at peace in Nature – Titania and Oberon are at war, making each other's lives (and the lives of the poor mortals around them) very complicated indeed.
As an interesting side note, Jonathan Miller, in his 1981 BBC production of the play, really plays up an anti-pastoral take on the text. He first has the fairies persistently standing in pools of murky water, Puck consistently hauling his head out of said pools before he speaks his lines, and the lovers emphatically ending up rolling in muddy water at the ends of their various confrontations. It's a decidedly messy and humiliating set of depictions, and it's what first got me looking at and becoming skeptical about the attitude toward the pastoral in the play.
I'm not supporting it very well, but my contention here is that Shakespeare specifically mocks pastoral conventions (as I thought he was specifically mocking epic conventions in Taming of the Shrew). So what say you? What important conventions am I missing? What hommage to pastoral does the play support? Or do you agree that Shakespeare might be tweaking pastoral in that way that he seems happy to tweak all established forms as he remakes them?
Okay. Tomorrow I'm off to New Orleans, so I'll be out of touch for a few days. Look forward to your Midsummer thoughts when I get back. Or, in the words of Robert Johnson:
"When I leave this town I will bid you fare farewell.
When I leave this town I will bid you fare farewell.
And when I return again, you'll have a great long story to tell." ("From Four 'Til Late")
Randall
I'm sitting in a plantation-era shack in Clarksdale, Mississippi, about a mile from the legendary crossroads where Robert Johnson is supposed to have died of strychnine poisoning in 1938. And perhaps a little further on down the road, near Dockery Plantation if you believe the legend, he sold his soul to the devil for the ability to become the greatest bluesman ever. So I am surrounded by vibrant symbols of poverty, power, poetry, and the supernatural, all elements of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. Johnson's scant history suggests he was the son of itinerant field workers, an agrarian life not too far from the shepherds or cowherds depicted in pastoral (except for the nasty and brutish part that tended to come with picking cotton). Johnson, however, turned out to be something of a poet, and the 24 recordings we have from his mere five days of recording sessions in 1936 and 1937 include such lyrics as:
"You better come on
in my kitchen,
baby, it's goin' to be rainin'
outdoors.
Winter time's comin'
hit's gon' be slow;
you can't make the winter, babe,
that's dry long so." ("Come On In My Kitchen")
This last line may refer to Fate, suggesting that since the woman can't do anything about the coming winter rains, she should just hang out with him in his kitchen. Oh, the rain it raineth every day!
Johnson also concluded a song, from his final recording session, this way:
"When the train, it left the station
with two lights on behind
When the train, it left the station
with two lights on behind
Well, the blue light was my blues
and the red light was my mind
All my love's in vain" ("Love in Vain")
I'd say this would be a good song for Berowne in Love's Labor's Lost, only trains didn't exist yet and Johnson's a better poet than Berowne. My roundabout point here is that if the pastoral still existed, tragically dead Robert Johnson might be its American standard bearer, and that makes communing with his ghost, as I am this chilly moonlit night in northern Mississippi, appropriate for a discussion of pastoral in Midsummer Night's Dream.
In his opening remarks, Ernst pointed out Midsummer Night's Dream's "earmarks of a pastoral romance" and John qualified the reference, stating "the couples certainly escape the strictures of urban life to the freedom and magical, mischievous, but ultimately healing and benign, influence of the wild wood." I seem to be forever finding Shakespeare turning things on their head, but I do not see the playwright cozying up easily to this tradition; in fact I see some gentle mockery of it. But perhaps I misunderstand the genre, and you can set me straight with what I get wrong. My introduction to the pastoral came in college with John Milton's "Lycidas," a poem that reminds us of the Greek origins of the form and displays its key conventions while, if I remember, attacking church corruption. What I remember most about the form is the elevation of simple shepherds to idyllic literary geniuses. Yet in both Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It, the simple country folk are the worst poets. Take Bottom's extemporaneous poesy:
"The raging rocks
And shivering shocks
Shall break the locks
Of prison gates;
And Phibbus' car
Shall shine from far
And make and mar
The foolish fates.
This was lofty!" (1.2.29-37)
Funny, but doggerel. (And as an interesting comparison, note that Shakespeare's jest anticipates Milton's "Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew / Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme" ("Lycidas" 10-11). I could further annotate the less-than-accomplished talents of the uncouth swains in both plays, but I don't want to belabor the point … with Orlando's tortured rhymes to Rosalind, or Quince's lumbering prologue to "Pyramis and Thisbe." Now, both these guys are outsiders, city-dwellers, not trained shepherd-poets, but I do think Shakesepare is making fun. City people commune with nature, and it turns them into fools.
This point is made again as Shakespeare takes on the convention, if I remember it right, that the simplicity of rural life makes it idyllic. Midsummer Night's Dream gives us anything but idyllic life. Four city folk enter the woods, and they are nearly driven insane. They become enamored of the wrong people, they fight with their friends, they become lost and disoriented, and even after all is set right they can't tell what reality is (Demetrius concludes: "Are you sure / That we are awake? It seems to me / That yet we sleep, we dream."). Even the representatives of Nature are not at peace in Nature – Titania and Oberon are at war, making each other's lives (and the lives of the poor mortals around them) very complicated indeed.
As an interesting side note, Jonathan Miller, in his 1981 BBC production of the play, really plays up an anti-pastoral take on the text. He first has the fairies persistently standing in pools of murky water, Puck consistently hauling his head out of said pools before he speaks his lines, and the lovers emphatically ending up rolling in muddy water at the ends of their various confrontations. It's a decidedly messy and humiliating set of depictions, and it's what first got me looking at and becoming skeptical about the attitude toward the pastoral in the play.
I'm not supporting it very well, but my contention here is that Shakespeare specifically mocks pastoral conventions (as I thought he was specifically mocking epic conventions in Taming of the Shrew). So what say you? What important conventions am I missing? What hommage to pastoral does the play support? Or do you agree that Shakespeare might be tweaking pastoral in that way that he seems happy to tweak all established forms as he remakes them?
Okay. Tomorrow I'm off to New Orleans, so I'll be out of touch for a few days. Look forward to your Midsummer thoughts when I get back. Or, in the words of Robert Johnson:
"When I leave this town I will bid you fare farewell.
When I leave this town I will bid you fare farewell.
And when I return again, you'll have a great long story to tell." ("From Four 'Til Late")
Randall
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
RE: Midsummer Night's Dream - Solemnities
Just to keep the ball that Randall has again set in motion rolling, I'm going to quickly post random responses rattling around in my brain now in no very coherent form, with plans to return with a more polished piece.
First, Ernst notes, rightly I think, that this play reveals a more mature Shakespeare. It seems to me that there is a marked qualitative shift in this play that I can't completely articulate. But this seems much more like the work that we praise as a product of the great Bard than most of the earlier works we read. Did something happen?
On a different tack, I've been thinking about Puck recently. Theseus sends him half way around the world to procure a desired flower with special properties. Now I'm no specialist in Elizabethan commercial history, but as I recall at the time, the English navy and commercial special interests were spreading around the world and regularly bringing back wonders to the English shores. Would it be too much to say that Puck partly represents a wonderment at the growing ability of people with means to obtain undreamed of exotic products from undreamed of farthest reaches of the world?
And what is our Puck today? Is it not the undying "person" with fairy-like super power to procure for us undreamed of goods from the farthest reaches, that is the corporation? While this fantastic entity can serve our desires, our modern Puck has also come to shape those desires, as well as controlling our government.
Sorry if I'm drifting into something perhaps resembling Marxist criticism here. Watching what looks like the beginning of the collapse of world capitalism this week has my mind walking down strange paths, perhaps.
I like the connection of this play to the pastoral tradition, not something I had thought of before. The couples certainly escape the strictures of urban life to the freedom and magical, mischievous, but ultimately healing and benign influence of the wild wood. Sounds like the dream that helped create the blight of suburbia across much of the land.
OK, enough random provocation for now. More later.
John
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Midsummer Night's Dream - Solemnities
As bears through the long winter hibernate,
nestled in their dark caves, breathing slowly,
body temperature low, body fat
supplying life-giving warmth, sustenance,
and protection from the cold, but all the
while inanimate to the outside world;
then stir, their reduced metabolic rate
recovering, their torpor shaken off;
So we William Shakespeare Experians
shed months of listless inactivity
and amble forward to the spring of our
continued dramatic conversation.
Ernst has posed a number of challenging prompts in his post. I am intrigued by the question about pastoral romance, mostly because I don't really know much about it. So I'm thinking I'll do something on that, and I may look to you all to fill in where I don't get it.
In the meantime, I'll start here: Ernst writes of Act 1, scene 1 that Midsummer Night's Dream begins with "speeches rich in dark, dignified sounds." I agree, but ask: what is a "dark" sound? Examples? Is it the 'd's: "draws," "days," "desires," "dream"? Is it vowels? John, is there a linguistic definition of a "dark" sound?
The idea of darkness, though, got me thinking. The most epiphanic moment of Shakespeare-going I ever had came back in 1985. I saw Liviu Ciulei's production of Midsummer Night's Dream at the Guthrie, the design of which was dominated by a huge, intimidating, blood-red, plastic wall. (Ciulei, a Romanian, was Artistic Director of the Guthrie from 1980 until 1985.) Before a single line of the text was spoken, the audience saw a striking African-American woman with an aggressive Grace Jones flat-top haircut and camouflage battle fatigues hauled out, in chains, to the center of the stage by two be-toga'ed white men with short swords. They threw her down, removed her chains, her clothes (I remember her wearing an olive-drab bikini), and wrapped her in white Athenian garb, before presenting her, with armed guards, to Theseus, who strode onto the stage, looked her over and said: "Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour draws on apace." Solemnities, indeed!
Three things happened for me. First, what I conventionally expected to be a light, comic discourse on "seriousness and frivolity" or any of those other themes that Ernst lists became something else entirely -- a dark, at times disturbing, reflection on the power, confrontation, and sexual violence lurking below the tension between genders. Ciulei's wordless prologue reframed the play, and no line, character, or scene that followed went unaffected by it.
Second, this was my first introduction to this technique of recasting an audience's expectations through the use of an aggressive reimagination. Ciulei's was seamless, coming both from the play and outside of it at the same time. I am wondering if any of you have had similar experiences -- familiar Shakespeare texts reshaped by some thought-provoking exposition, or a particularly apt but unexpected reading of a line or speech, or a particular characterization (when we get to Twelfth Night remind me to review Mark Rylance's Olivia)?
Third, given that Ciulei is taking Theseus at his word here ("I wooed thee with my sword...") and that he is treating her as the spoils of war, listen to what happens to the lines that follow. Theseus's "fair" in the first line becomes ironic. Her "fairness" is applied, as she has been metaphorically stripped of her culture and dressed in Athenian fashion. In addition, the casting of an African-American as Amazon against whites as Athenians recycles the postcolonial dynamic behind words like "fair" – not "fair" as in beautiful, but "fair" as in light-skinned, which she is not. Instead, Hippolyta is made fair in her acquisition by Greece. Next, Theseus's comment that the moon "lingers my desires / Like to a stepdame or a dowager / Long withering out a young man's revenue," takes on a more economic tone. The simile becomes less frivolous, as the moon (time) stands between Theseus and his rightful but unconsummated property.
Hippolyta's lines are no less affected. "Four days will quickly steep themselves in night," she says. Her transition from Theseus's "days" (line 2) to "nights," from light to dark, becomes significant because of the racial tension enforced by the scene. And Hippolyta matches Theseus's moon simile with one of her own, but here it becomes war-like, as befitting her warrior status: "And then the moon, like to a silver bow / New bent in heaven, shall behold the night / Of our solemnities." Is this a threat?
Through all of this Hippolyta does not look pleased, which may explain Theseus's mollifying words that bring the short scene to a close: "Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword / And won thy love doing thee injuries, / But I will wed thee in another key, / With pomp, with triumph, and with reveling." The male chauvinism that Ernst points to in Oberon is certainly here in Theseus (played by different actors in the Guthrie production). Triumph? How is she supposed to take that? As this scene dissolved into Egeus's interruptive complaint about Hermia and Lysander, the tone was set – power and the battle of the sexes would be presented in dark relief. And Puck's final concern – "If we shadows have offended" – became real.
I often am distressed about how little of live theater remains in my head, so many unremembered quality moments and images. It does not surprise me that film has surpassed theater in the 20th century as a dominant art form because of theater's fleeting and unretainable nature, especially in a society that consistently seeks to own experiences (thus, the cliché image of the tourist replacing true experience with picture-taking). What I love and respect about the opening five minutes of Ciulei's Midsummer Night's Dream is that they immediately became, for me, indelible.
So what am I asking that we do here? Ernst alluded to the difficulty of discussing this play because so much has been written and said about it already. I offer the memory of production, because I think we have probably all seen one, as a unique tool for processing the key moments and themes (enumerated by Ernst) of the play.
Randall
nestled in their dark caves, breathing slowly,
body temperature low, body fat
supplying life-giving warmth, sustenance,
and protection from the cold, but all the
while inanimate to the outside world;
then stir, their reduced metabolic rate
recovering, their torpor shaken off;
So we William Shakespeare Experians
shed months of listless inactivity
and amble forward to the spring of our
continued dramatic conversation.
Ernst has posed a number of challenging prompts in his post. I am intrigued by the question about pastoral romance, mostly because I don't really know much about it. So I'm thinking I'll do something on that, and I may look to you all to fill in where I don't get it.
In the meantime, I'll start here: Ernst writes of Act 1, scene 1 that Midsummer Night's Dream begins with "speeches rich in dark, dignified sounds." I agree, but ask: what is a "dark" sound? Examples? Is it the 'd's: "draws," "days," "desires," "dream"? Is it vowels? John, is there a linguistic definition of a "dark" sound?
The idea of darkness, though, got me thinking. The most epiphanic moment of Shakespeare-going I ever had came back in 1985. I saw Liviu Ciulei's production of Midsummer Night's Dream at the Guthrie, the design of which was dominated by a huge, intimidating, blood-red, plastic wall. (Ciulei, a Romanian, was Artistic Director of the Guthrie from 1980 until 1985.) Before a single line of the text was spoken, the audience saw a striking African-American woman with an aggressive Grace Jones flat-top haircut and camouflage battle fatigues hauled out, in chains, to the center of the stage by two be-toga'ed white men with short swords. They threw her down, removed her chains, her clothes (I remember her wearing an olive-drab bikini), and wrapped her in white Athenian garb, before presenting her, with armed guards, to Theseus, who strode onto the stage, looked her over and said: "Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour draws on apace." Solemnities, indeed!
Three things happened for me. First, what I conventionally expected to be a light, comic discourse on "seriousness and frivolity" or any of those other themes that Ernst lists became something else entirely -- a dark, at times disturbing, reflection on the power, confrontation, and sexual violence lurking below the tension between genders. Ciulei's wordless prologue reframed the play, and no line, character, or scene that followed went unaffected by it.
Second, this was my first introduction to this technique of recasting an audience's expectations through the use of an aggressive reimagination. Ciulei's was seamless, coming both from the play and outside of it at the same time. I am wondering if any of you have had similar experiences -- familiar Shakespeare texts reshaped by some thought-provoking exposition, or a particularly apt but unexpected reading of a line or speech, or a particular characterization (when we get to Twelfth Night remind me to review Mark Rylance's Olivia)?
Third, given that Ciulei is taking Theseus at his word here ("I wooed thee with my sword...") and that he is treating her as the spoils of war, listen to what happens to the lines that follow. Theseus's "fair" in the first line becomes ironic. Her "fairness" is applied, as she has been metaphorically stripped of her culture and dressed in Athenian fashion. In addition, the casting of an African-American as Amazon against whites as Athenians recycles the postcolonial dynamic behind words like "fair" – not "fair" as in beautiful, but "fair" as in light-skinned, which she is not. Instead, Hippolyta is made fair in her acquisition by Greece. Next, Theseus's comment that the moon "lingers my desires / Like to a stepdame or a dowager / Long withering out a young man's revenue," takes on a more economic tone. The simile becomes less frivolous, as the moon (time) stands between Theseus and his rightful but unconsummated property.
Hippolyta's lines are no less affected. "Four days will quickly steep themselves in night," she says. Her transition from Theseus's "days" (line 2) to "nights," from light to dark, becomes significant because of the racial tension enforced by the scene. And Hippolyta matches Theseus's moon simile with one of her own, but here it becomes war-like, as befitting her warrior status: "And then the moon, like to a silver bow / New bent in heaven, shall behold the night / Of our solemnities." Is this a threat?
Through all of this Hippolyta does not look pleased, which may explain Theseus's mollifying words that bring the short scene to a close: "Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword / And won thy love doing thee injuries, / But I will wed thee in another key, / With pomp, with triumph, and with reveling." The male chauvinism that Ernst points to in Oberon is certainly here in Theseus (played by different actors in the Guthrie production). Triumph? How is she supposed to take that? As this scene dissolved into Egeus's interruptive complaint about Hermia and Lysander, the tone was set – power and the battle of the sexes would be presented in dark relief. And Puck's final concern – "If we shadows have offended" – became real.
I often am distressed about how little of live theater remains in my head, so many unremembered quality moments and images. It does not surprise me that film has surpassed theater in the 20th century as a dominant art form because of theater's fleeting and unretainable nature, especially in a society that consistently seeks to own experiences (thus, the cliché image of the tourist replacing true experience with picture-taking). What I love and respect about the opening five minutes of Ciulei's Midsummer Night's Dream is that they immediately became, for me, indelible.
So what am I asking that we do here? Ernst alluded to the difficulty of discussing this play because so much has been written and said about it already. I offer the memory of production, because I think we have probably all seen one, as a unique tool for processing the key moments and themes (enumerated by Ernst) of the play.
Randall
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Twelfth Night - Performance Log (October 2007)
Twelfe Night, Or What You Will
Directed by David Esbjornson
Seattle Repertory Theatre
Seattle, WA
Oct. 3, 2007
Last Wednesday I went into Seattle to the Seattle Rep to a matinee of Twelfe Night [sic - just to be clever SRT uses the spelling from the First Folio, ] — I worried it would be in modern dress, but it was in eclectic theater costumes, a bright yellow suit here (Sir Andrew), Russian soldiers’ jackets there (Orsino’s followers), breathtaking velvet ball gowns for Olivia.
I would say I was the youngest person in the audience, until I noticed a couple of crocodiles of school kids, some ordinary scruffy sophomores not certain it was worth a day out of study hall, and twenty or so from Providence Classical Christian School (whom I thought to engage in a debate about oxymorons, Hellenic vs. Hebraic and all that, but the lights winked on for the second act), the latter in uniforms blue and gray, with the school crest over their hearts—nota bene SPA.
I was in row C, seat 7 in front of a breathtaking abstract set reaching 50 feet (?) or more up. Weathered planks the width of the stage, suggestively shattered in a couple of places (think shipwreck for a moment), a slightly raked acting area backed by a ridge or wave of the same planks, a tall twisted flat spire in the same planks, ragged at the ends, rising forty or so feet in front of the cyclorama. Gee, it’s really hard to describe an abstract set other than to say it was powerfully effective. Two ladies’ voices in the row behind me admired it, and one said if she were to come back for another life, it would be as a set designer.
Anyway, the play opened with an ornately made-up Feste, in a non-glaring spot on the apron, chanting the first three verses of “When that I was and a little tiny boy,” stage right a black-gowned Olivia bent in silent prayer over a flower-covered coffin, blue light and bubbles on the cyclorama, and the Captain and Viola, in sea-bedraggled clothes, “sinking” on ropes from the gods and, when they made landfall on the beach, he carried her off, and then Orsino appeared center stage through a door in the spire-thingee with a declamatory “If music be the food of love.”
Maybe not definitive, but I finished thinking it was top ten all time productions I’ve seen. Some curiosities: Fabian inexplicably was costumed as a flaming transvestite, fucia eye-shadow, a short black skirt and frilly blouse, but nothing in character or behavior made anything of this. The roistering scenes were excessive: Sir Toby had too many crotch-grabs and fart fannings, nor did I much cotton to Sir Andrew until he was clad in a suit of armor so heavy he could hardly walk for his duel with Cesario/Viola.
Mourning Olivia (Cheyenne Casebier) was severe, but after she is smitten she changed to a lively purple with flashy jewels and was effectively kittenish and coy. Viola handled the conflicted cross-gender duality powerfully (when Orsino is explaining love to Cesario there was almost a kiss).
Malvolio, an African American actor named Frank X (you can Google him as “actor Frank X” at the Lantern Theatre of Philadelphia) played an elegant English butler, until the M, O, A, I trick, after which he is grotesque, which is, I guess, appropriate. Then, he did remind me of a Snake (School for Scandal) I had seen in Ashland, also, curiously, an African-American. They cut down the Sir Topas torture (Malvolio was understage with his hands reaching up through bars) enough to get the spirit, but short enough that I was not uncomfortable.
For asides, there would be a spot on the speaker and the rest of the characters would be freeze framed in dimmer light. Very effective. For the first time, I noticed that Fabian setting on Augucheek is parallel to Maria and Toby setting on Malvolio. Very virile Sebastian, “twinned” to Viola by costume and red hair. Plausible with willing suspension. For the recognition scene, the cyclorama glowed violet.
At the end, Malvolio is in a straight jacket; Fabian pleads reasonably for forgiveness. Feste reprised his “little tiny boy” and curtain calls. Here’s something interesting: the company came on in groups, and the four lovers were next to last, while Feste and Malvolio were the “stars.” For the first time ever, I, from row C, led a standing O, joined by those in the audience who were physically able to stand and clap at the same time. Good show.
Posted by Gil
Photo: Christine Marie Brown as Viola/Cesario and Barzin Akhavan as Orsino in the Seattle Rep's Twelfe Night. Photo by Chris Bennion.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Midsummer Night's Dream - Late From Our Northern Arcadia
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a wonderful play. And Shakespeare, who might be said to have reached some sort of “maturity” with this play—especially as far as plotting goes—is a dramatist to be reckoned with. Here, his interweaving of three character types (tradesmen, aristocrats, and fairies) and his supplying attitudes for, and comments on, each, makes his mastery total.
We have all taught, and probably seen, the play many times, so it is a bit hard to provide tools and/or ideas to use in dealing with it. But I am already behind, so here goes:
1. In terms of “speaking” to me now, at this moment in this world, I would choose the following three characters in the following order, as my favorites: (a) Bottom; (b) Theseus, and (c) Helena. Which characters would YOU choose, and in which order? And why? And are there other ways of ranking them?
2. Notice the similarities between the beginning of Midsummer Night's Dream and Richard II. Both begin with a challenge, a kind of trial; and both are introduced by speeches rich in dark, dignified sounds. Notice also the lovely drawn-out metaphors in lines I.i.1-19, and the use of “Lingered” as a transitive verb. I would assign a line to each student, and ask him or her to find all the images, assonance, consonance, and other verbal tricks in that line (and in its pointing to other, nearby lines). What sorts of things are established in the first 127 lines of the scene? In terms of setting up the play’s larger shape and issues, the relationship between future seriousness and frivolity, etc.?
3. In the later part of the first scene (128 ff.), we are given many of the earmarks of a “pastoral romance.” How would you (or someone else) define the term, and in what ways does the play accord with your definition. Again, look at the language: our old friend stichomythia, the similes and metaphors. At such an early point, can one see any differences between Hermia and Helena (the tall, blond one—Shakespeare sometimes used taller, blonder female characters as a flattering references to the [tall, blond] Queen Elizabeth)?
4. In I.ii, we meet the tradesmen, or “mechanicals,” as they are sometimes called (we get the fairies in the next scene). For a country fellow, Shakespeare doesn’t choose to know very much about the moon—as the only moon that would appear during the last three days before the new moon would be a tiny sliver—shortly before dawn (despite Lysander’sand Quince’s intention to make use of it at an earlier point in the night. Bottom, all eagerness and willingness to plunge in, dominates the scene, but also serves as a foil for the other tradesmen, each of whose character is somewhat individuated here. Can one name the types? How would you describe Bottom’s character and its singular appeal?
5. In II.i.1-187, we spend an extended time in the fairy world and meet the principal characters there. Notice the Fairy’s rhymed tetrameter, Puck’s rhymed pentameter and Oberon and Titania’s more dignified blank verse. Oberon and Titania, of course, parallel Theseus and Hippolyta. To what effect? Sure, Oberon is a male chauvinist pig. At the same time, he has a lot going for him as a member of the whole cast. Such as? And, having thought about this, what do Puck and Titania add? And, finally,what does the whole fairy realm introduced here add?
6. So what carries over to us after the play is certainly (a) the magical world it embodies, (b) the unforgettable characters, including minor characters such as Aegeus and Snout, (c) the songs and the various pieces of almost pure poetry, and the folk-pure, archetypal structure of its plot and its characters’ careers – for starters. Then, finally, come the larger thematic questions: What does the play have to say or suggest about (a) the uses of the Imagination, (b) rulers and forms of government, (c) love, (d) marriage, (e) parents and children, (f) the unconventional, and (g) different classes and their relationships with one another – this too, only for starters. You may now plunge in.
Productions: For me, a Regent’s Park version of the play I saw years ago remains a delight. There were probably 10-15 fairies who rushed and tumbled across the set-in-the-woods scene during the earlier parts of the play. By its end, however, it had grown dark and all one could see of the fairies were tiny lights moving in and out of the trees. I remember finding that charming. A massive stump served as the mainstage. There is also an older production (BBC?) from which I have shown the final act to my classes. I used it because I loved its Bottom character. Someone out there will have to tell me which production it is. The one otherwise distinguishing thing I can remember is that Philostrate was played by a black man. Gilbert? Randall?
Ernst
We have all taught, and probably seen, the play many times, so it is a bit hard to provide tools and/or ideas to use in dealing with it. But I am already behind, so here goes:
1. In terms of “speaking” to me now, at this moment in this world, I would choose the following three characters in the following order, as my favorites: (a) Bottom; (b) Theseus, and (c) Helena. Which characters would YOU choose, and in which order? And why? And are there other ways of ranking them?
2. Notice the similarities between the beginning of Midsummer Night's Dream and Richard II. Both begin with a challenge, a kind of trial; and both are introduced by speeches rich in dark, dignified sounds. Notice also the lovely drawn-out metaphors in lines I.i.1-19, and the use of “Lingered” as a transitive verb. I would assign a line to each student, and ask him or her to find all the images, assonance, consonance, and other verbal tricks in that line (and in its pointing to other, nearby lines). What sorts of things are established in the first 127 lines of the scene? In terms of setting up the play’s larger shape and issues, the relationship between future seriousness and frivolity, etc.?
3. In the later part of the first scene (128 ff.), we are given many of the earmarks of a “pastoral romance.” How would you (or someone else) define the term, and in what ways does the play accord with your definition. Again, look at the language: our old friend stichomythia, the similes and metaphors. At such an early point, can one see any differences between Hermia and Helena (the tall, blond one—Shakespeare sometimes used taller, blonder female characters as a flattering references to the [tall, blond] Queen Elizabeth)?
4. In I.ii, we meet the tradesmen, or “mechanicals,” as they are sometimes called (we get the fairies in the next scene). For a country fellow, Shakespeare doesn’t choose to know very much about the moon—as the only moon that would appear during the last three days before the new moon would be a tiny sliver—shortly before dawn (despite Lysander’sand Quince’s intention to make use of it at an earlier point in the night. Bottom, all eagerness and willingness to plunge in, dominates the scene, but also serves as a foil for the other tradesmen, each of whose character is somewhat individuated here. Can one name the types? How would you describe Bottom’s character and its singular appeal?
5. In II.i.1-187, we spend an extended time in the fairy world and meet the principal characters there. Notice the Fairy’s rhymed tetrameter, Puck’s rhymed pentameter and Oberon and Titania’s more dignified blank verse. Oberon and Titania, of course, parallel Theseus and Hippolyta. To what effect? Sure, Oberon is a male chauvinist pig. At the same time, he has a lot going for him as a member of the whole cast. Such as? And, having thought about this, what do Puck and Titania add? And, finally,what does the whole fairy realm introduced here add?
6. So what carries over to us after the play is certainly (a) the magical world it embodies, (b) the unforgettable characters, including minor characters such as Aegeus and Snout, (c) the songs and the various pieces of almost pure poetry, and the folk-pure, archetypal structure of its plot and its characters’ careers – for starters. Then, finally, come the larger thematic questions: What does the play have to say or suggest about (a) the uses of the Imagination, (b) rulers and forms of government, (c) love, (d) marriage, (e) parents and children, (f) the unconventional, and (g) different classes and their relationships with one another – this too, only for starters. You may now plunge in.
Productions: For me, a Regent’s Park version of the play I saw years ago remains a delight. There were probably 10-15 fairies who rushed and tumbled across the set-in-the-woods scene during the earlier parts of the play. By its end, however, it had grown dark and all one could see of the fairies were tiny lights moving in and out of the trees. I remember finding that charming. A massive stump served as the mainstage. There is also an older production (BBC?) from which I have shown the final act to my classes. I used it because I loved its Bottom character. Someone out there will have to tell me which production it is. The one otherwise distinguishing thing I can remember is that Philostrate was played by a black man. Gilbert? Randall?
Ernst
Monday, July 23, 2007
RE: Rhetorical Richard II and History Plays
I am humbled and inspired by Gil's eloquence. I am indebted to him for his vision of this as a play containing a romantic element. I had not seen it before his post.
I have to now confess to an odd response I am having to these plays. Romeo and Juliet set me reflecting on the Old Norse story of the wooing of Gerd. The gods are in mortal battle with the giants, yet Njorthr, the sea god,falls in love with and woos Gerd, a mountain giant. (One happy outcome of their marriage is the invention of the sport of skiing, as a means of rapid transit between their two abodes.)
This story, according to many scholars (including that Anglo-Saxonist famous for his popular story telling, Tolkien), is reflected in the story of Ingeld and Freawaru, referred to in the Beowulf. Desires across irreconcilable boundaries are a deep part of the spirit and lore of the North (and of my life). I know there are many sources identified for this tale, most of them from the Romance languages, but I think an old Northern theme reverberates here as well.
As I am preparing now to teach something of the Arthurian tradition this fall, I am keenly aware of the tradition of the threat to kingship when the king is away fighting foreign wars. (What an advantage to our current "king"George that the tradition no longer holds that the king must accompany his soldiers in foreign wars.)
In the two versions I am working with (the metrical and alliterative Middle English "Morte D'Arthur"s), the king is away on foreign expeditions (to fight Lancelot or the Roman Emperor Lucius, respectively) when the regent at home (Mordred) decides to usurp the queen's bed and the throne (equivalent?).This story seems to supply the essential plot line of our play. Are there other overt or covert references to that most English (yet most un-Anglo-Saxon) of stories – Arthur and his knights – in Shakespeare? If not,why not?
Forgive me for again seeing a striking connection between ancient story and early modern dramatic representation. I think Will is drawing on some pretty deep wells in both cases. The yet deeper issue of the legitimacy of kings (or of any authority) is, of course, implied in both stories. What makes rule legitimate? What makes it illegitimate? These are deep and lasting questions for any society…why do we docilely accept the legitimacy of a 'ruler' who did not win the majority, nor even the peculiar electoral college in his first "election" while he drags us into a futile and fruitless, illegal war?
Enough mythopeia and realpolitik for one e-mail.
John
I have to now confess to an odd response I am having to these plays. Romeo and Juliet set me reflecting on the Old Norse story of the wooing of Gerd. The gods are in mortal battle with the giants, yet Njorthr, the sea god,falls in love with and woos Gerd, a mountain giant. (One happy outcome of their marriage is the invention of the sport of skiing, as a means of rapid transit between their two abodes.)
This story, according to many scholars (including that Anglo-Saxonist famous for his popular story telling, Tolkien), is reflected in the story of Ingeld and Freawaru, referred to in the Beowulf. Desires across irreconcilable boundaries are a deep part of the spirit and lore of the North (and of my life). I know there are many sources identified for this tale, most of them from the Romance languages, but I think an old Northern theme reverberates here as well.
As I am preparing now to teach something of the Arthurian tradition this fall, I am keenly aware of the tradition of the threat to kingship when the king is away fighting foreign wars. (What an advantage to our current "king"George that the tradition no longer holds that the king must accompany his soldiers in foreign wars.)
In the two versions I am working with (the metrical and alliterative Middle English "Morte D'Arthur"s), the king is away on foreign expeditions (to fight Lancelot or the Roman Emperor Lucius, respectively) when the regent at home (Mordred) decides to usurp the queen's bed and the throne (equivalent?).This story seems to supply the essential plot line of our play. Are there other overt or covert references to that most English (yet most un-Anglo-Saxon) of stories – Arthur and his knights – in Shakespeare? If not,why not?
Forgive me for again seeing a striking connection between ancient story and early modern dramatic representation. I think Will is drawing on some pretty deep wells in both cases. The yet deeper issue of the legitimacy of kings (or of any authority) is, of course, implied in both stories. What makes rule legitimate? What makes it illegitimate? These are deep and lasting questions for any society…why do we docilely accept the legitimacy of a 'ruler' who did not win the majority, nor even the peculiar electoral college in his first "election" while he drags us into a futile and fruitless, illegal war?
Enough mythopeia and realpolitik for one e-mail.
John
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Rhetorical Richard II and History Plays
Shakespeare as a master organizer of materials—in speeches, in scenes, in arrangement of scenes. Then he makes it harder and harder to hold it all together inside a structure of which he is the master ironist (e.g., making such things as Richard II’s deposition evanescent; giving Falstaff a role that potentially unbalances the politics of Hal and his father; making the villain Shylock “sympathetic”). Eventually, it all blows up, starting in Hamlet, where the master ironist leaves and the hero is set loose to decide his and his play’s motions and outcomes.
Ernst has said Shakespeare is writing a [second] series of history plays, and I agree, though I don’t think he sat down in some ur-Starbucks in Scotland and outlined the plots of the four Lancastrian plays on a napkin, as the myth of JK Rowling and Harry Potter asserts. Certainly there is “intertextuality” and projection; for instance, an almost gratuitous appearance of someone named Henry Percy in Richard II, and the insistence on the stain against order that must be punished even generations afterward, which is created by the usurpation of Richard II’s throne. This latter is even a motif in the earlier tetralogy, as we follow the anti-Henry V, his son Henry VI, to decadence and doom, then the apocalyptic scourge, Richard III, followed ironically with Justice for England’s wound with the rise of Tudor Henry VII (ironically, in that Richmond as Henry VII has less legitimate claim to succession than did Henry Herford called Bolingbroke to become Henry IV).
When I prepared for my swan song Shakespeare course, I spent a summer in the Northwest trying to think anew the plays before 1603, Hamlet. I read and read around and talked at length with my friend Roger Sale, and so I started my thirty-third University course with Richard III, Richard II, Merchant of Venice, 1 Henry IV, Henry V, and Julius Caesar. This summer, as I sit here back in Washington, I cannot seem to remember whatever wonderful bridge I had in mind, other than a memory that the students did not carry me triumphantly through the halls of academe. I do remember intending to follow the Lancastrian histories with Julius Caesar, lined up “as if” history was of the linear Lancastrian sort, then rattling the cage by suggesting Shakespeare could write Hamlet-like tragedies with Brutus and Cassius as central figures. Richard III would be the last of the “circular” histories, rise and inevitable fall.
My memory of discussions with Sale recalls the pattern of the Henry VI plays as simple inexorableness. Remember the rise and fall of powerful figures: Lord Talbot (part 1); Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester and the commoner Jack Cade (part 2); Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York (part 3); and finally, gloriously, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, crook-backed Dick himself. They rise, they flourish, they are killed, and the pattern of history does not stop. Sale says that what is important here is not so much that one enjoy the pattern, or that Shakespeare has developed an interesting idea of history, but that we feel the pattern and so feel that the characters are placed and caught in it, controlled by history.
A real chronological confusion that I mentioned in my last posting is that the historical reigns in these earlier plays follow the age of Richard II, but the composition of the Lancastrian plays and my reading of them comes after. And the new point is that Richard himself is an enigma, God’s anointed King, but vacillating (zig-zag), petulant, petty, vindictive. Think only for a moment to Richard III’s calculations, his master manipulation, his control of all in his path, his joy in the game. And I remember Sale saying that after Richard II returns from Ireland, Shakespeare turns away from the drama of factions of the Yorkist plays and for the first time he allows a character to shape his destiny and the play’s action. And to commit to this character as improviser rather than committing to an inexorable pageant is to leave that character exposed, vulnerable. Can you see Hamlet leaving the green room, getting ready to make an entrance?
Shakespeare seeks order and finds disorder and violence tragic. True in the histories, but we have seen it true in the comedies too. And Derek Traversi classes histories (and tragedies) as exploring the implications, personal and public alike, of political behavior, whereas comedies focus on the validity and the limitations of love in brittle and scintillating society, yet disorder must be addressed in both.
Richard II’s role is more central to his play than the protagonists of the Henry IVs or the Henry VIs. So the comparison is Richard III. But Richard III’s development is historically/ politically driven. He reaches for the throne, then he, alas, achieves it, while Richard II’s is improvisation of his self-images, of his roles. Richard II is a self-centered man and an inept ruler, so his fall seems both deserved and inevitable. For whom did you have the most sympathy, Shylock or Richard II? I have referred to Richard as zig-zag (both the “down-down”scene, III.ii, in which I count 7 diametrical shifts from arrogance to abject resignation and back, and the deposition scene, IV.i), and Charles Brice calls him “narcissistic and arrogant,; he does not rule; he enjoys himself in the role of ruler.”
The play’s most renowned passage is Gaunt’s famous peon to:
“This royal throne of kings, this scept’red isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
…
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings…. (II.i.40-68),
a passage which I have known since I was an English schoolboy. I had it, on my bedroom wall, superimposed on an outline of England on a tea towel (which was, ironically, made in Ireland). This passage, however, does not quite belong in this play, as Portia’s “quality of mercy” speech does not bear careful analysis for honesty in Merchant of Venice. Gaunt’s speech is elegiac, expressing the traditional spirit of a feudal England associated with Edward III, a nostalgic image which Richard II betrays and Henry IV sweeps away. It is more than symbolic that on the instant of Gaunt’s death, when Richard seizes Gaunt’s estate, he “usurps” the ancient law of succession, the “customary rights” of England’s landed gentry.
Richard, rather than declamatory, is eloquent and expansive, even verbose, and for me this texture, this poetic heightened rhetoric is striking contrast to the play’s content, a military coup. I choose three indelible passages, two of which I previously cited. Aumerle addresses Richard’s pessimism with “Comfort, my liege, remember who you are,” and Richard begins to seize the play from the pattern of history:
“I had forgot myself; am I not King?
Awake, thou coward majesty! Thou sleepest.
Is not the King’s name twenty thousand names?
Arm, arm my name! (III.ii.82-86)
But Scroop reports Bolingbroke’s rising power and many defections from Richard’s followers. Down goes Richard’s self-assertion, and he humbly makes his ‘I’m but a man’ appeal:
“For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings….
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends—subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?” (III.ii.155…177)
Soon, Bolingbroke arrives at Flint Castle, and Richard asks:
“What must the King do now? Must he submit?…
nd my large kingdom for a little grave,
A little, little grave, an obscure grave…
Down, down I come, like glist’ring Phaethon.” (III.iii.142-174, 177-182)
Notice how often Richard improvises, with rhetorical flourishes on the question of who he is, fascinated with the expression itself: “and my large kingdom for a little grave [melancholy contrast], a little, little grave [pathos], an obscure grave [bathos].”
Thirdly, Richard’s soliloquy in Pomfret Castle:
“I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world….
But whate’er I be,
Nor I, nor any man that but man is,
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing” (V.I.1-41),
in which Richard’s energy is mostly devoted to finding the right metaphor.
All these illustrate Richard’s unique self-shaping with language, not so much “character” as rhetorical constructs. The laconic Bolingbroke is only about opportunity and power. After the formal, chivalric exchanges with Mowbray, does Bolingroke have any extended utterance apart from the irrelevant—to this play—foreshadow, “Can no man tell me of my unthrifty son?” (V.iii.1)? But Richard seems to be fascinated with what he hears from himself about himself. It may be a bit of a stretch, but I’m reminded of the hyperromantic Cyrano, improvising a ballade during a duel or exploring all the variations of an insult to his nose: “when it bleeds, the Red Sea.” Cyrano, as Richard II, is a personage from history. Both, I think, rise by the power of rhetoric up into the clouds.
Gil
Ernst has said Shakespeare is writing a [second] series of history plays, and I agree, though I don’t think he sat down in some ur-Starbucks in Scotland and outlined the plots of the four Lancastrian plays on a napkin, as the myth of JK Rowling and Harry Potter asserts. Certainly there is “intertextuality” and projection; for instance, an almost gratuitous appearance of someone named Henry Percy in Richard II, and the insistence on the stain against order that must be punished even generations afterward, which is created by the usurpation of Richard II’s throne. This latter is even a motif in the earlier tetralogy, as we follow the anti-Henry V, his son Henry VI, to decadence and doom, then the apocalyptic scourge, Richard III, followed ironically with Justice for England’s wound with the rise of Tudor Henry VII (ironically, in that Richmond as Henry VII has less legitimate claim to succession than did Henry Herford called Bolingbroke to become Henry IV).
When I prepared for my swan song Shakespeare course, I spent a summer in the Northwest trying to think anew the plays before 1603, Hamlet. I read and read around and talked at length with my friend Roger Sale, and so I started my thirty-third University course with Richard III, Richard II, Merchant of Venice, 1 Henry IV, Henry V, and Julius Caesar. This summer, as I sit here back in Washington, I cannot seem to remember whatever wonderful bridge I had in mind, other than a memory that the students did not carry me triumphantly through the halls of academe. I do remember intending to follow the Lancastrian histories with Julius Caesar, lined up “as if” history was of the linear Lancastrian sort, then rattling the cage by suggesting Shakespeare could write Hamlet-like tragedies with Brutus and Cassius as central figures. Richard III would be the last of the “circular” histories, rise and inevitable fall.
My memory of discussions with Sale recalls the pattern of the Henry VI plays as simple inexorableness. Remember the rise and fall of powerful figures: Lord Talbot (part 1); Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester and the commoner Jack Cade (part 2); Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York (part 3); and finally, gloriously, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, crook-backed Dick himself. They rise, they flourish, they are killed, and the pattern of history does not stop. Sale says that what is important here is not so much that one enjoy the pattern, or that Shakespeare has developed an interesting idea of history, but that we feel the pattern and so feel that the characters are placed and caught in it, controlled by history.
A real chronological confusion that I mentioned in my last posting is that the historical reigns in these earlier plays follow the age of Richard II, but the composition of the Lancastrian plays and my reading of them comes after. And the new point is that Richard himself is an enigma, God’s anointed King, but vacillating (zig-zag), petulant, petty, vindictive. Think only for a moment to Richard III’s calculations, his master manipulation, his control of all in his path, his joy in the game. And I remember Sale saying that after Richard II returns from Ireland, Shakespeare turns away from the drama of factions of the Yorkist plays and for the first time he allows a character to shape his destiny and the play’s action. And to commit to this character as improviser rather than committing to an inexorable pageant is to leave that character exposed, vulnerable. Can you see Hamlet leaving the green room, getting ready to make an entrance?
Shakespeare seeks order and finds disorder and violence tragic. True in the histories, but we have seen it true in the comedies too. And Derek Traversi classes histories (and tragedies) as exploring the implications, personal and public alike, of political behavior, whereas comedies focus on the validity and the limitations of love in brittle and scintillating society, yet disorder must be addressed in both.
Richard II’s role is more central to his play than the protagonists of the Henry IVs or the Henry VIs. So the comparison is Richard III. But Richard III’s development is historically/ politically driven. He reaches for the throne, then he, alas, achieves it, while Richard II’s is improvisation of his self-images, of his roles. Richard II is a self-centered man and an inept ruler, so his fall seems both deserved and inevitable. For whom did you have the most sympathy, Shylock or Richard II? I have referred to Richard as zig-zag (both the “down-down”scene, III.ii, in which I count 7 diametrical shifts from arrogance to abject resignation and back, and the deposition scene, IV.i), and Charles Brice calls him “narcissistic and arrogant,; he does not rule; he enjoys himself in the role of ruler.”
The play’s most renowned passage is Gaunt’s famous peon to:
“This royal throne of kings, this scept’red isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
…
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings…. (II.i.40-68),
a passage which I have known since I was an English schoolboy. I had it, on my bedroom wall, superimposed on an outline of England on a tea towel (which was, ironically, made in Ireland). This passage, however, does not quite belong in this play, as Portia’s “quality of mercy” speech does not bear careful analysis for honesty in Merchant of Venice. Gaunt’s speech is elegiac, expressing the traditional spirit of a feudal England associated with Edward III, a nostalgic image which Richard II betrays and Henry IV sweeps away. It is more than symbolic that on the instant of Gaunt’s death, when Richard seizes Gaunt’s estate, he “usurps” the ancient law of succession, the “customary rights” of England’s landed gentry.
Richard, rather than declamatory, is eloquent and expansive, even verbose, and for me this texture, this poetic heightened rhetoric is striking contrast to the play’s content, a military coup. I choose three indelible passages, two of which I previously cited. Aumerle addresses Richard’s pessimism with “Comfort, my liege, remember who you are,” and Richard begins to seize the play from the pattern of history:
“I had forgot myself; am I not King?
Awake, thou coward majesty! Thou sleepest.
Is not the King’s name twenty thousand names?
Arm, arm my name! (III.ii.82-86)
But Scroop reports Bolingbroke’s rising power and many defections from Richard’s followers. Down goes Richard’s self-assertion, and he humbly makes his ‘I’m but a man’ appeal:
“For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings….
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends—subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?” (III.ii.155…177)
Soon, Bolingbroke arrives at Flint Castle, and Richard asks:
“What must the King do now? Must he submit?…
nd my large kingdom for a little grave,
A little, little grave, an obscure grave…
Down, down I come, like glist’ring Phaethon.” (III.iii.142-174, 177-182)
Notice how often Richard improvises, with rhetorical flourishes on the question of who he is, fascinated with the expression itself: “and my large kingdom for a little grave [melancholy contrast], a little, little grave [pathos], an obscure grave [bathos].”
Thirdly, Richard’s soliloquy in Pomfret Castle:
“I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world….
But whate’er I be,
Nor I, nor any man that but man is,
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing” (V.I.1-41),
in which Richard’s energy is mostly devoted to finding the right metaphor.
All these illustrate Richard’s unique self-shaping with language, not so much “character” as rhetorical constructs. The laconic Bolingbroke is only about opportunity and power. After the formal, chivalric exchanges with Mowbray, does Bolingroke have any extended utterance apart from the irrelevant—to this play—foreshadow, “Can no man tell me of my unthrifty son?” (V.iii.1)? But Richard seems to be fascinated with what he hears from himself about himself. It may be a bit of a stretch, but I’m reminded of the hyperromantic Cyrano, improvising a ballade during a duel or exploring all the variations of an insult to his nose: “when it bleeds, the Red Sea.” Cyrano, as Richard II, is a personage from history. Both, I think, rise by the power of rhetoric up into the clouds.
Gil
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Richard II - Toothy Rick
Patient Will Readers,
When John asked about the specific political situation when Richard II was composed, I shied away in that I have little New Historicist impulse, yet I have been thinking a little about complex chronologies. Indeed, Richard II was written in 1595 late in Elizabeth I’s reign (1558-1603), for an audience that had some awareness of history (which always arrives at the present subject to editing and cultural interpretation) including the reign of Richard II (1377-1399).
But we also have the chronological anomaly that Shakespeare composed, and we read, the Henry VI plays, covering 1461-1483, before the historically preceding Ricardian History Plays or the Henriad we are just starting to address. So I’m reading Richard II in 2007, and I’m seeing a play called The Tragedy of…, with a beginning and middle and end (Aristotle would be pleased), often lyrical in poetry and introducing a complex character whose vacillations lead me to think of two or three major ideas (God’s anointed king and the fragile man; order and the precedent of rebellion; elegiac chivalry and practical politics) yet I know Richard, in history, is the first step toward that hollow figure, Henry, Earl of Richmond, afterwards King Henry VII, who triumphantly usurps Richard III’s throne on Bosworth Field and commissions “The Tudor Myth” of history that justifies the line that begets Shakespeare’s boss, Elizabeth I. Long live [some] king!
As Ernst said, it is Shakespeare “once more setting out on a group of history plays,” but he cites the well-known story of the Earl of Essex’s followers staging Richard II on the eve of their rebellion in 1601 (as a result of which rebellion Essex, Elizabeth’s former favorite, was beheaded). Randall earlier noted that none of the five Quarto editions, and it is presumed performances contemporary with Elizabeth’s reign, contain IV.i.154-318 (the actual deposition, from about “Alack, why am I sent for to a king/ Before I have shook off the regal thoughts/ Wherewith I reign’d?” to “O, good! Convey! Conveyers are you all,/ That rise thus nimbly by a true king’s fall”—no matter the politics, the play itself is diminished by this loss, for me especially the thematic crux in those last lines that those who rise by rebellion set the precedent for their own fall). These lines do not appear in print until the First Folio,1623. This censorship is attributed to concern for the perceived vulnerability of the aging Queen.
Lastly, I have several times seen the anecdote that, when in 1601 the historian William Lambarde was showing Elizabeth the fruits of his researches in the royal archives and arrived at the time of Richard II, she broke in: “I am Richard II. Know ye not that?” (e.g., cited in C.W.R.D. Moseley – and cwerd is the word – Shakespeare’s History Plays, 77).
So, I’ll tiptoe onto New Historicist ground for just a moment. Moseley says that Elizabeth acceded to the most insecure throne in Europe in 1558. The throne was claimed by Philip of Spain; the Catholic Northern Earls revolted in 1569; in 1570 Pope Pius V formally issued a papal bull deposing Elizabeth and advocating her assassination; Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, with strong connections to France, had a good claim to the throne and was imprisoned in 1568, beheaded in 1587; Philip attempted to take England by force in 1588, hoping that when the Armada landed, he would be supported by a revolt of the Catholic gentry (hummm—sounds like Bolingbroke or even Henry of Richmond). In 1594, Jesuit Robert Parsons published A Conference about the Next Succession in which he adduced historical and legal arguments to prove the right of the people to alter the line of succession for just causes. I don’t accept for a moment that Shakespeare is writing a political tract, a piece a clef so to speak, in which Bolingbroke is Essex, etc. But it seems reasonable to consider the difference between the Henry VI trilogy and this play, apart from a deft advance is skill as a dramatist and poet, is found in the questions the play permits about succession, governance, loyalty, and followers.
Another question John posed, discussing Richard’s psychology in reference to Act II, scene 2 when, after York’s brother, John of Gaunt, has died and Richard has immediately seized his estates to pay for his foreign wars (ignoring those great spondees: “Watch my lips; no new taxes”), York is appalled and really argues against the precedent Richard thus sets:
“Seek you to seize and grip into your hands
The royalties and rights of banish’d Herford [Bollingbroke]?…
Take Herford’s rights away, and take from Time
His charters and his customary rights;
Let not to-morrow then ensue to-day;
Be not thyself; for how art thou a king
But by fair sequence and succession?…
If you do wrongfully seize Herford’s rights…
You pluck a thousand dangers on your head,
You lose a thousand well-disposed hearts,
And prick my tender patience to those thoughts
Which honor and allegiance cannot think.” (II.i.189…208)
John says York is thinking of rebellion, and York asserts a finer argument that Richard, in seizing Bolingbroke’s inheritance, violates the ancient law of succession which is the identical law that justifies Richard’s succession from his father Edward the Black Prince, eldest son of Edward III. York is right. It is as fundamental as tomorrow follows today, and to break this law justifies breaking any parallel law of succession. Executive privilege is no excuse. Bolingbroke’s subsequent claim (‘I just returned to claim what is rightfully and legally mine’) is just. Richard breaks the chain of order and succession. But Richard brushes off York’s argument with “think what you will, we seize into our hands/ His plate, his goods, his money, and his lands.” I am the Decider. Exit York, and Richard says “We will for Ireland” yet he tells Bushy, Bagot, and Green that he appoints York governor of England while he is absent.
I looked at David Gilles BBC production (1979), and there is no significant directorial touch here. The camera swings briefly to the lavishly clad courtiers, who do look at one another, but nothing, to me, that suggests they have suddenly fallen from Richard’s protection, though this moment will lead much later to their executions.
Richard seizes Gaunt’s huge estates because he is profligate and deep into deficit spending (York has noted that Richard’s noble father “did win what he did spend, and spent not that which his triumphant father’s hand had won”). His court is lavish. Do I remember a reference to 10,000 knights? Anyway, Richard is a character whom it is particularly easy to identify with homosexuality, says Stanley Wells, influenced as he is by “the caterpillars of the commonwealth" (II.iii.166).
Michael Redgrave is described as playing him in 1951 as “an out-and-out pussy queer, with mincing gestures to match” (Malcolm Page, Richard II: Text and Performance, 49). I’m indifferent to this, more so than the Antonio-Bassiano relationship we discussed in Merchant of Venice, but to return to the subject of the political situation of 1595, Richard’s followers do draw attention to the nature of political power and the influence of counselors, Elizabeth’s Privy Chamber, and the political world thus divided into factions. Power grew out of personal access to the monarch, says Moseley. And though not really a New Historicist, I have done some research into arcane documents and come up with historical first names: they are Dick Bagot, Karl Green, and Scooter Bushy.
Enough for now.
Best, Gilbert
When John asked about the specific political situation when Richard II was composed, I shied away in that I have little New Historicist impulse, yet I have been thinking a little about complex chronologies. Indeed, Richard II was written in 1595 late in Elizabeth I’s reign (1558-1603), for an audience that had some awareness of history (which always arrives at the present subject to editing and cultural interpretation) including the reign of Richard II (1377-1399).
But we also have the chronological anomaly that Shakespeare composed, and we read, the Henry VI plays, covering 1461-1483, before the historically preceding Ricardian History Plays or the Henriad we are just starting to address. So I’m reading Richard II in 2007, and I’m seeing a play called The Tragedy of…, with a beginning and middle and end (Aristotle would be pleased), often lyrical in poetry and introducing a complex character whose vacillations lead me to think of two or three major ideas (God’s anointed king and the fragile man; order and the precedent of rebellion; elegiac chivalry and practical politics) yet I know Richard, in history, is the first step toward that hollow figure, Henry, Earl of Richmond, afterwards King Henry VII, who triumphantly usurps Richard III’s throne on Bosworth Field and commissions “The Tudor Myth” of history that justifies the line that begets Shakespeare’s boss, Elizabeth I. Long live [some] king!
As Ernst said, it is Shakespeare “once more setting out on a group of history plays,” but he cites the well-known story of the Earl of Essex’s followers staging Richard II on the eve of their rebellion in 1601 (as a result of which rebellion Essex, Elizabeth’s former favorite, was beheaded). Randall earlier noted that none of the five Quarto editions, and it is presumed performances contemporary with Elizabeth’s reign, contain IV.i.154-318 (the actual deposition, from about “Alack, why am I sent for to a king/ Before I have shook off the regal thoughts/ Wherewith I reign’d?” to “O, good! Convey! Conveyers are you all,/ That rise thus nimbly by a true king’s fall”—no matter the politics, the play itself is diminished by this loss, for me especially the thematic crux in those last lines that those who rise by rebellion set the precedent for their own fall). These lines do not appear in print until the First Folio,1623. This censorship is attributed to concern for the perceived vulnerability of the aging Queen.
Lastly, I have several times seen the anecdote that, when in 1601 the historian William Lambarde was showing Elizabeth the fruits of his researches in the royal archives and arrived at the time of Richard II, she broke in: “I am Richard II. Know ye not that?” (e.g., cited in C.W.R.D. Moseley – and cwerd is the word – Shakespeare’s History Plays, 77).
So, I’ll tiptoe onto New Historicist ground for just a moment. Moseley says that Elizabeth acceded to the most insecure throne in Europe in 1558. The throne was claimed by Philip of Spain; the Catholic Northern Earls revolted in 1569; in 1570 Pope Pius V formally issued a papal bull deposing Elizabeth and advocating her assassination; Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, with strong connections to France, had a good claim to the throne and was imprisoned in 1568, beheaded in 1587; Philip attempted to take England by force in 1588, hoping that when the Armada landed, he would be supported by a revolt of the Catholic gentry (hummm—sounds like Bolingbroke or even Henry of Richmond). In 1594, Jesuit Robert Parsons published A Conference about the Next Succession in which he adduced historical and legal arguments to prove the right of the people to alter the line of succession for just causes. I don’t accept for a moment that Shakespeare is writing a political tract, a piece a clef so to speak, in which Bolingbroke is Essex, etc. But it seems reasonable to consider the difference between the Henry VI trilogy and this play, apart from a deft advance is skill as a dramatist and poet, is found in the questions the play permits about succession, governance, loyalty, and followers.
Another question John posed, discussing Richard’s psychology in reference to Act II, scene 2 when, after York’s brother, John of Gaunt, has died and Richard has immediately seized his estates to pay for his foreign wars (ignoring those great spondees: “Watch my lips; no new taxes”), York is appalled and really argues against the precedent Richard thus sets:
“Seek you to seize and grip into your hands
The royalties and rights of banish’d Herford [Bollingbroke]?…
Take Herford’s rights away, and take from Time
His charters and his customary rights;
Let not to-morrow then ensue to-day;
Be not thyself; for how art thou a king
But by fair sequence and succession?…
If you do wrongfully seize Herford’s rights…
You pluck a thousand dangers on your head,
You lose a thousand well-disposed hearts,
And prick my tender patience to those thoughts
Which honor and allegiance cannot think.” (II.i.189…208)
John says York is thinking of rebellion, and York asserts a finer argument that Richard, in seizing Bolingbroke’s inheritance, violates the ancient law of succession which is the identical law that justifies Richard’s succession from his father Edward the Black Prince, eldest son of Edward III. York is right. It is as fundamental as tomorrow follows today, and to break this law justifies breaking any parallel law of succession. Executive privilege is no excuse. Bolingbroke’s subsequent claim (‘I just returned to claim what is rightfully and legally mine’) is just. Richard breaks the chain of order and succession. But Richard brushes off York’s argument with “think what you will, we seize into our hands/ His plate, his goods, his money, and his lands.” I am the Decider. Exit York, and Richard says “We will for Ireland” yet he tells Bushy, Bagot, and Green that he appoints York governor of England while he is absent.
I looked at David Gilles BBC production (1979), and there is no significant directorial touch here. The camera swings briefly to the lavishly clad courtiers, who do look at one another, but nothing, to me, that suggests they have suddenly fallen from Richard’s protection, though this moment will lead much later to their executions.
Richard seizes Gaunt’s huge estates because he is profligate and deep into deficit spending (York has noted that Richard’s noble father “did win what he did spend, and spent not that which his triumphant father’s hand had won”). His court is lavish. Do I remember a reference to 10,000 knights? Anyway, Richard is a character whom it is particularly easy to identify with homosexuality, says Stanley Wells, influenced as he is by “the caterpillars of the commonwealth" (II.iii.166).
Michael Redgrave is described as playing him in 1951 as “an out-and-out pussy queer, with mincing gestures to match” (Malcolm Page, Richard II: Text and Performance, 49). I’m indifferent to this, more so than the Antonio-Bassiano relationship we discussed in Merchant of Venice, but to return to the subject of the political situation of 1595, Richard’s followers do draw attention to the nature of political power and the influence of counselors, Elizabeth’s Privy Chamber, and the political world thus divided into factions. Power grew out of personal access to the monarch, says Moseley. And though not really a New Historicist, I have done some research into arcane documents and come up with historical first names: they are Dick Bagot, Karl Green, and Scooter Bushy.
Enough for now.
Best, Gilbert
Monday, July 9, 2007
Richard II - Elizabethan Propaganda?
The only thing I know about Elizabethan politics is the well-known story of the Earl of Essex's followers staging Richard II around 1601 as a propoganda piece suggesting that, like Richard, Elizabeth was a weak ruler.
Weak? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I doubt it had much political significance when it was written, although I may be wrong. Mostly, I think it was Shakespeare once more setting out on a group of history plays.
Ernst
Weak? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I doubt it had much political significance when it was written, although I may be wrong. Mostly, I think it was Shakespeare once more setting out on a group of history plays.
Ernst
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