As I thought more about this, I thought about Essex's rebellion and its supporters, whose vision of Elizabeth may have been something akin to the play's attitudes. And Catholicism? Dunno. I still can't find the date, but I have something that will give me a pretty good idea at home. In terms of politics, I do know that several plays praising (the late) Elizabeth appeared about eight years or so after her death.
Ernst
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Monday, July 14, 2008
RE2: Thomas of Woodstock - Oh No He Di'n't
Ernst,
Absolutely. Woodstock comes off as champion of the oppressed, clear-headed patriot, and saintly. I was being sarcastic about his being "boorish." (I included a lot of sarcasm in the synopsis.) In that scene, Richard's concerns are so far from anything kingly, Woodstock's rebukes seem almost school-marmish. You raise an interesting point about contemporary attitudes toward historical characters. Where does one pick up that kind of info? How did the Elizabethan audience feel about Bolingbroke, for example, usurper of a rightful, but foolish king?
Randall
Absolutely. Woodstock comes off as champion of the oppressed, clear-headed patriot, and saintly. I was being sarcastic about his being "boorish." (I included a lot of sarcasm in the synopsis.) In that scene, Richard's concerns are so far from anything kingly, Woodstock's rebukes seem almost school-marmish. You raise an interesting point about contemporary attitudes toward historical characters. Where does one pick up that kind of info? How did the Elizabethan audience feel about Bolingbroke, for example, usurper of a rightful, but foolish king?
Randall
RE: Thomas of Woodstock - Oh No He Di'n't
Yep, I read that one years ago, but have pretty much forgotten it ― except that it cast Woodstock in a very positive light, as I recall. For example, Woodstock may be boorish in I.iii, but you can be pretty sure most theatre-goers agreed with him. I got the sense he was a very popular figure in Tudor days. (An acceptable Puritan?)
IV.i: the disguised masquers is the same trick used in a number of plays, most especially The Malcontent and its parodic/comic successor, The Revenger's Tragedy. I forget when Woodstock was written.
V.i. Many things come in pairs in The Revenger's Tragedy also. And, it is refreshing to read something in which a Cheney is a good guy.
Ernst
Thomas of Woodstock - Oh No He Di'n't
Once more into the interim, dear friends!
A wonderful perk of summer and its generous grant of a free hour here and there is the ability to read peripherally. I don't know if this happens to you, but reading one book usually inspires me to pursue others, and I end up keeping a book list cataloging the inspirations, most of which I never expect to get to. For example, I'm currently reading James Salter's novel A Sport and a Pastime, in which I came across this line:
“Henri is forty, perhaps. Juliette about twenty-nine. But Dean has read Radiguet. Twenty-nine isn’t old.”
That’s it. A one word allusion to a French writer who died young, having written only two novels. I’ve read Radiguet’s curious and spare Count D’Orgel’s Ball, but what Salter is probably evoking here is his other, The Devil in the Flesh, a love story set in France, as is Salter’s book, that Radiguet wrote when he was 17. I put it on my list.
Sometimes the peripheral connection is more oblique, a barely visible path of implications and associations, blazable only with the luxury of time. I followed such a path as I was re-reading The Tragedy of King Richard the Second and Bolingbroke’s accusation against Thomas Mowbray:
“Further, I say and further will maintain
Upon his bad life to make all this good,
That he did plot the Duke of Gloucester's death,
Suggest his soon-believing adversaries,
And, consequently, like a traitor coward,
Sluiced out his innocent soul through streams of blood."
(1.1.98-103)
Prodded by my Signet Classic's tiny superscript degree symbol indicating a footnote next to "Duke of Gloucester," I glanced down to read the agate type: "Gloucester Thomas of Woodstock, who had been murdered at Richard's orders." Now during the school year, this results in a brief “isn’t that interesting,” but during the summer, I’m off to Google to see what other information I might turn up about Thomas of Woodstock.
The Google search turns up two Wikipedia entries, the first biographical, the second an odd reference to Richard II, Part 1, "an untitled, anonymous, and incomplete Elizabethan play." Hmmm. Amazon reveals a copy of the play, also titled Thomas of Woodstock because the script that was discovered lacked a title page as well as the final pages of the text, edited by Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge, and priced at $75, too rich for my blood. Back to Google.
I love the Internet. The Hampshire Shakespeare Company (Amherst, Massachusetts) staged the American debut of Thomas of Woodstock in 1999, and because the play is incomplete they had a contest challenging people to write a conclusion. They posted the play online and the winning text, by a musician and supermarket porter named Frederick Carrigg.
As one begins to dig up commentary on the anonymous play, one finds a frequent provocative suggestion that Shakespeare had something to do with it. The play may never have been published and even its initial performance date is hazy, but some scholars place it circa 1592. That, combined with its topical relation to Shakespeare’s Richard II, begs the question: could Shakespeare have had a hand in writing it?
Well, before we get to that, let me fill you in on the play, believed to be, by some, Richard the Second, Part One.
1.1 – We begin in medias res as Sir Thomas Cheyney has alerted Richard’s uncles, the Dukes of Lancaster and York, to a plot by Richard’s flatterers – Bagot and Greene – and a lawyer named Tresilian, to poison them. They avoid the wine. Thomas of Woodstock, the Duke of Gloucester, arrives and they discuss what Thomas should wear to Richard’s wedding. “Country habit” is passé.
1.2 – Tresilian, Bagot, and Greene moan about the failure of their plan. Tresilian tries on the title he expects to get from Richard – Lord Chief Justice of England – and trades insults with his henchman, Nimble.
1.3 – Woodstock has shown up at Richard’s wedding dressed in pounds’ worth of clothes, not measured in money, but weight. Despite this, celebrants make fun of his usual “tother hose,” an antiquated and common fashion. Woodstock boorishly politicizes the conversation by suggesting that haute couture leads to overtaxation of the poor. A verbal scuffle ensues and the king’s uncles try to warn him about the evil designs of his flatterers. Thumbing his nose at his elders, Richard bestows titles on Bagot, Greene, and Tresilian. There is word of rebellion in the land.
2.1 – The king’s flatterers give Richard a history lesson. They do not say “Edward the third had seven sons.” But they do point out that Richard is older than he thought, 22, and old enough not to be bossed around by grumpy uncles. York arrives to invite Richard to parliament.
2.2 – At the parliament, York and Lancaster are discussing how much they like Richard, when he shows up, pissily points out that he’s a full king, watches Woodstock, York, and Lancaster hand over their various symbolic implements of protectorship, and dismisses both them and their parliament. After they are gone, Richard, Bagot, Greene, and Scroope discuss their budget. Scroope says “we must have money to buy new suits.”
2.3 – The Queen, Anne of Bohemia (referred to consistently as “Anne-a-Beame”) and the Duchess of Gloucester discuss the Queen’s practice of selling her valuables to provide money for England’s poor (“The wealth I have shall be the poor’s revenue.”) so that they will not rebel against Richard. Woodstock’s right-hand man, Cheyney, arrives to tell the Duchess they’re going home (Plashey) since they are no longer needed/wanted at court, where Richard and his cohorts “sit in council to devise strange fashions … such as this Kingdom never yet beheld: French hose, Italian cloaks, and Spanish hats, Polonian shoes with peaks a handful long, tied to their knees with chains of pearl and gold.”
3.1 – Tresilian arrives at court with an ingenious plan to fleece the English people. Sheriffs and officials all over the land shall be enjoined to have landed men put their names on blank charters, “documents with blank sections (for the insertion of names and amounts of money) for the collection of loans by … ‘executores’” (Dickinson, 377), an exotic loan method the lawyer believes will bring the king “cartloads of money.” Tresilian also intends to have the same sheriffs take down the names of anyone who grumbles about it, an early form of warrantless eavesdropping, and they shall be accused of being “privy whisperers” and have their goods and lands confiscated. Think of that the next time you mutter to yourself while you’re in the bathroom.
3.2 – At Plashey, Woodstock, Lancaster, and York do not go gently into retirement. Cheyney shows up with a blank charter, says the woods is full of them causing the people much distress. The Dukes magnanimously head off to tame rebellious thoughts among the people. A courtier shows up with a message for Woodstock, but mistakes him for a groom because of his plain attire. Once identities are cleared up, the two discuss, at length, what the king is wearing these days, then the courtier tells Woodstock his presence is requested at court.
3.3 – Cue the clowns. Nimble is out with blank charters, getting illiterate people to put their names on them. He is assisted by the Bailey (bailiff) of Dunstable, one Master Ignorance, whose favorite word is “pestiferous.” He says it every time he speaks.
4.1 – Back at the castle, the king is dismayed to learn that Woodstock has refused to visit. Simply forcing him to come won’t work because it will arouse rebellious thoughts in the people. Tresilian proposes that they disguise themselves as masquers, go to Plashey, catch Woodstock unawares, bop him on the head, dress him up as a masquer so he can’t be identified when they kidnap him, and drag him off to court. Richard says “I like it well.” The difficult business dealt with, Richard and the flatterers agree to divide up the kingdom with Bagot, Bushy, Greene, and Scroope as renters and Richard as their landlord.
4.2 – At Plashey, the masquers, including Richard, arrive and kidnap Woodstock, accusing him for good measure of treason. They plan to deliver him to Lapoole in Calais, far from any English people who might be inspired to rebellious thoughts, where he can be killed.
4.3 – The king’s policemen hear complaints from local sheriffs, who point out that blank charters are not in keeping with a) ancient liberties from William the Conqueror sparing the men of Kent from any fines or taxation and b) the rights of “free-born” men. These arguments, for some reason, are ignored and they go to jail. Word comes that the queen is sick. Oh, she’s dead. Richard arrives, very sad, and repents his harsh sentence on Woodstock. “Send post to Calais and bid Lapoole forbear/ On pain of life, to act our sad decree,” he says. Uh oh.
5.1 – Best scene in the play. At Calais, Lapoole wants Woodstock’s murder to look “a common natural death.” It’s a busy night in Woodstock’s cell, as he is visited by the ghost of Edward the Black Prince, the ghost of Edward III, Lapoole who suggests he write some letters to Richard airing his grievances, and finally two murderers who strangle him with a towel then smother him with a mattress. Everything seems to come in pairs in this scene.
5.2 – Tresilian and Nimble review the lack of success at pressing commoners into service in the coming war between Richard and the Dukes. They argue about which of them will run away the fastest.
5.3 – On the field before battle, the Dukes meet with Richard. Lancaster reveals Richard’s greatest crime – he’s not a king, but a landlord. Both sides call each other “traitors.”
5.4 – In battle, Cheyney and Arundel fight with and kill Greene. There’s no word of what he was wearing when he died. Richard finds Greene’s body and speaks words that might be misconstrued by future Queer Theory critics.
5.5 – Nimble and Tresilian in full flight consider their plight. Nimble realizes that he can escape punishment (and even earn a thousand marks) if he “captures” Tresilian and turns him over to the authorities. So much for honor among thieves.
5.6 – Richard’s flatterers are routed. Nimble arrives and turns Tresilian over to Lancaster.
Scholars may argue over authorship for centuries, but clearly Thomas of Woodstock is a play written by a tailor.
I have left off a summary of the final scene written by Mr. Carrigg as not relevant here. I am fascinated instead by the argument that one finds Shakespearean fingerprints on this play. In the journal Early Modern Literary Studies (Sept. 2003), for example, Michael Eagan writes, “It is impossible to come away from the text without an overwhelming sense of Shakespeare's presence – one way or another. Either he wrote it or knew it extraordinarily well, stealing scenes, characters and lines with ruthless abandon.” It turns out Mr. Eagan is fairly convinced Shakespeare actually wrote the play. He has recently published a four-volume, 2100-page argument supporting his claim. One reviewer, Ramon Jimenez, finds the argument convincing.
I haven’t read Eagan. But I have to say, I put down Thomas of Woodstock and my first thought was “no way Shakespeare wrote this.” And the only argument I have on my side is Malcolm Gladwell. Not too long ago New Yorker writer Gladwell wrote a book called Blink in which he argues that “decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately” (11-12), like in a 2100-page essay. This process, if one can call a two-second impression a “process,” is called the “adaptive unconscious,” and with it Gladwell raises one’s intuitive decisions to the same level as our conscious ones, then supports his conclusion with a pile of entertaining anecdotes.
Now I’m a Shakespeare amateur, so my decision that Shakespeare had nothing to do with this play is surely suspect. I strongly encourage anyone with brains, evidence, and more than two seconds to spend on this to write and point out my varying levels of idiocy here. Please.
That said, the William Shakespeare Experience has just spent that last two and a half years reading all of Shakespeare’s early work, and the would-be Richard II, Part 1 is unlike anything we’ve read in a number of significant ways.
For one, I’m suspicious about the poetry. The text I read, and lord knows where the Hampshire Shakespeare people got their version, made it difficult to distinguish iambic pentameter from prose because even though different characters clearly speak in one or the other, all the lines are broken as if they are poetry. So I did a lot syllable counting, out of curiosity. And I found, in passages that tend toward iambic pentameter, consistent over-syllablizing of lines. Yes, a lot of them were 11 syllables, and Eagan argues that this is typical of Shakespeare’s early use of feminine verse endings. Thinking back to Titus Andronicus and Love’s Labor’s Lost and the Henry VI plays, I don’t remember the lines, even if they included a lot of feminine endings, feeling like this. Instead I came away with a clear impression of a playwright struggling to maintain poetic form. (Again, I admit the difference between impression and scientific method here.)
And that’s interesting because one thing I remember clearly about Love’s Labor’s Lost is the show-offiness of the language. (I checked three speeches at random – King, Princess, and Berowne – and found few feminine rhymes.) Perhaps a better comparison is one of the Henry VI plays. But rather than embark on an odyssey myself (what page am I on already?), I’ll throw it out as a question: aside from the evolving tone, temperament, and maturity, have you felt in reading the first 13 plays, that Shakespeare has moved from rough poet to polished? Is there even a way to distinguish between these characteristics?
And when you have blinked and decided, take at look at or scan this Thomas of Woodstock speech of Richard’s, again chosen at random:
“Methinks it is strange, my good and reverent uncle,
You and the rest should thus malign against us,
And every hour with rude and bitter taunts
Abuse King Richard and his harmless friends.
We had a father, that once called ye brother:
A grandsire too, that titled you his son;
But could they see how you have wronged King Richard
Their ghosts would haunt ye; and in dead of night
Fright all your quiet sleeps with horrid fears.
I pray, stand up; we honour reverend years
In meaner subjects. Good uncle, rise and tell us:
What further mischiefs are there now devised
To torture and afflict your sovereign with?” (Woodstock 2.1)
Second, if Shakespeare did write this play as Richard II, Part 1, then I am suspicious about the continuity. The playwright of Thomas of Woodstock records events that make no sense in relation to Shakespeare’s Richard II. For example, Greene dies, slain on the filed of battle in the first play. Then, oddly he’s resurrected in the second play, until Bolingbroke captures him and has him beheaded.
Similarly, I found myself disoriented by the chronology of the two plays taken together. Thomas of Woodstock concludes with a bellicose confrontation between Richard and the Dukes, a battle the Dukes appear to win. Yet at the beginning of Richard II, we seem to have not only reconciled but turned the table of power to Richard’s side, restoring Bagot, Bushy, and Greene to their lofty perch as flattering “favorites.” I looked to Antonia Fraser’s The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England to see if historically they reached some sort of truce between the events of the two plays, but I found myself even more confused. Gloucester (Woodstock) dies in 1397, but there’s no battle afterwards. There is a battle earlier in 1387 when Gloucester, Arundel, and Warwick “forced Richard to agree to the trial of five of his friends” (Fraser 113). The friends flee but they are caught by the Dukes’ army, which incidentally now includes Mowbray and Bolingbroke, two characters who do not appear in Thomas of Woodstock. The result of this skirmish is the “Merciless Parliament” of 1388.
Where this particular parliament falls in either play, I’m not sure. But that’s how disorienting the timeline is between the two. I don’t remember the three parts of Henry VI having the same disorientation. But I may be mistaken. Surely Shakespeare is effective at collapsing and rearranging history to suit his narrative purposes. Still, as we moved from 1 Henry VI to Richard III and as we go from Richard II to 1 Henry IV, Shakespeare did not provide and is not providing us with a comparable continuity paradox.
Finally, I am suspicious about a thematic element. One of the dominant motifs in Richard II, indeed an idea that unifies Richard’s character throughout, is the idea of his divine right to rule. Each of Richard’s modes – Machiavel, Greedy Opportunist, Coward, and Poet – I described in the “Faces of Richard” section of the Shakespeare and Company review can be connected by Richard’s sense that he is god’s “deputy.” Reading the play, I felt it is Shakespeare’s least secular play, so fundamental is Richard’s connection to God. When Northumberland and Bolingbroke show up at Castle Flint, for example, to ask Richard to submit, the king responds:
“We are amazed, and thus long have we stood
To watch the fearful bending of thy knee,
Because we thought ourself thy lawful king:
…
If we be not, show us the hand of God
That hath dismissed us from our stewardship” (3.3.71-73,76-77)
And he returns to this conviction throughout. (With his dying breath, he tells Exton: “That hand shall burn in never-quenching fire/ That staggers thus my person.”) And it is a conviction completely absent from Thomas of Woodstock. “God” is mentioned 14 times in Act I of Woodstock, but 12 of them are by Woodstock, the most devout character in the play. This ratio continues in the subsequent acts. In fact, Richard, in the entire play only mentions God once. When he does, though, it is fascinating, because the speech is so unlike anything he has said previously:
“Although we could have easily surprised,
dispersed and overthrown your rebel troops
that draw your swords against our sacred person,
the highest god's anointed deputy,
breaking your holy oaths to heaven and us:
yet of our mild and princely clemency
we have forborne; that by this parliament
we might be made partaker of the cause
that moved ye rise in this rebellious sort.” (5.3)
In this we find Eagan’s Shakespearean hint, for Richard’s words echo those Gaunt will speak in Richard II:
“God’s is the quarrel; for God’s substitute,
His deputy anointed in His sight,
Hath caused his death, the which if wrongfully,
Let heaven revenge, for I may never lift
An angry arm against His minister.” (1.2.37-41)
I wouldn’t be surprised if Shakespeare used Thomas of Woodstock as a source. So many of his plays make use of antecedent texts. But I remain unconvinced that Shakespeare collaborated on or wrote much of this play. Maybe next summer, with a few more hours to spare, I’ll dig into Eagan’s argument and learn just how wrong I am.
Wow, all that and not a single joke about rock and roll or Max Yasgur’s dairy farm!
Randall
A wonderful perk of summer and its generous grant of a free hour here and there is the ability to read peripherally. I don't know if this happens to you, but reading one book usually inspires me to pursue others, and I end up keeping a book list cataloging the inspirations, most of which I never expect to get to. For example, I'm currently reading James Salter's novel A Sport and a Pastime, in which I came across this line:
“Henri is forty, perhaps. Juliette about twenty-nine. But Dean has read Radiguet. Twenty-nine isn’t old.”
That’s it. A one word allusion to a French writer who died young, having written only two novels. I’ve read Radiguet’s curious and spare Count D’Orgel’s Ball, but what Salter is probably evoking here is his other, The Devil in the Flesh, a love story set in France, as is Salter’s book, that Radiguet wrote when he was 17. I put it on my list.
Sometimes the peripheral connection is more oblique, a barely visible path of implications and associations, blazable only with the luxury of time. I followed such a path as I was re-reading The Tragedy of King Richard the Second and Bolingbroke’s accusation against Thomas Mowbray:
“Further, I say and further will maintain
Upon his bad life to make all this good,
That he did plot the Duke of Gloucester's death,
Suggest his soon-believing adversaries,
And, consequently, like a traitor coward,
Sluiced out his innocent soul through streams of blood."
(1.1.98-103)
Prodded by my Signet Classic's tiny superscript degree symbol indicating a footnote next to "Duke of Gloucester," I glanced down to read the agate type: "Gloucester Thomas of Woodstock, who had been murdered at Richard's orders." Now during the school year, this results in a brief “isn’t that interesting,” but during the summer, I’m off to Google to see what other information I might turn up about Thomas of Woodstock.
The Google search turns up two Wikipedia entries, the first biographical, the second an odd reference to Richard II, Part 1, "an untitled, anonymous, and incomplete Elizabethan play." Hmmm. Amazon reveals a copy of the play, also titled Thomas of Woodstock because the script that was discovered lacked a title page as well as the final pages of the text, edited by Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge, and priced at $75, too rich for my blood. Back to Google.
I love the Internet. The Hampshire Shakespeare Company (Amherst, Massachusetts) staged the American debut of Thomas of Woodstock in 1999, and because the play is incomplete they had a contest challenging people to write a conclusion. They posted the play online and the winning text, by a musician and supermarket porter named Frederick Carrigg.
As one begins to dig up commentary on the anonymous play, one finds a frequent provocative suggestion that Shakespeare had something to do with it. The play may never have been published and even its initial performance date is hazy, but some scholars place it circa 1592. That, combined with its topical relation to Shakespeare’s Richard II, begs the question: could Shakespeare have had a hand in writing it?
Well, before we get to that, let me fill you in on the play, believed to be, by some, Richard the Second, Part One.
1.1 – We begin in medias res as Sir Thomas Cheyney has alerted Richard’s uncles, the Dukes of Lancaster and York, to a plot by Richard’s flatterers – Bagot and Greene – and a lawyer named Tresilian, to poison them. They avoid the wine. Thomas of Woodstock, the Duke of Gloucester, arrives and they discuss what Thomas should wear to Richard’s wedding. “Country habit” is passé.
1.2 – Tresilian, Bagot, and Greene moan about the failure of their plan. Tresilian tries on the title he expects to get from Richard – Lord Chief Justice of England – and trades insults with his henchman, Nimble.
1.3 – Woodstock has shown up at Richard’s wedding dressed in pounds’ worth of clothes, not measured in money, but weight. Despite this, celebrants make fun of his usual “tother hose,” an antiquated and common fashion. Woodstock boorishly politicizes the conversation by suggesting that haute couture leads to overtaxation of the poor. A verbal scuffle ensues and the king’s uncles try to warn him about the evil designs of his flatterers. Thumbing his nose at his elders, Richard bestows titles on Bagot, Greene, and Tresilian. There is word of rebellion in the land.
2.1 – The king’s flatterers give Richard a history lesson. They do not say “Edward the third had seven sons.” But they do point out that Richard is older than he thought, 22, and old enough not to be bossed around by grumpy uncles. York arrives to invite Richard to parliament.
2.2 – At the parliament, York and Lancaster are discussing how much they like Richard, when he shows up, pissily points out that he’s a full king, watches Woodstock, York, and Lancaster hand over their various symbolic implements of protectorship, and dismisses both them and their parliament. After they are gone, Richard, Bagot, Greene, and Scroope discuss their budget. Scroope says “we must have money to buy new suits.”
2.3 – The Queen, Anne of Bohemia (referred to consistently as “Anne-a-Beame”) and the Duchess of Gloucester discuss the Queen’s practice of selling her valuables to provide money for England’s poor (“The wealth I have shall be the poor’s revenue.”) so that they will not rebel against Richard. Woodstock’s right-hand man, Cheyney, arrives to tell the Duchess they’re going home (Plashey) since they are no longer needed/wanted at court, where Richard and his cohorts “sit in council to devise strange fashions … such as this Kingdom never yet beheld: French hose, Italian cloaks, and Spanish hats, Polonian shoes with peaks a handful long, tied to their knees with chains of pearl and gold.”
3.1 – Tresilian arrives at court with an ingenious plan to fleece the English people. Sheriffs and officials all over the land shall be enjoined to have landed men put their names on blank charters, “documents with blank sections (for the insertion of names and amounts of money) for the collection of loans by … ‘executores’” (Dickinson, 377), an exotic loan method the lawyer believes will bring the king “cartloads of money.” Tresilian also intends to have the same sheriffs take down the names of anyone who grumbles about it, an early form of warrantless eavesdropping, and they shall be accused of being “privy whisperers” and have their goods and lands confiscated. Think of that the next time you mutter to yourself while you’re in the bathroom.
3.2 – At Plashey, Woodstock, Lancaster, and York do not go gently into retirement. Cheyney shows up with a blank charter, says the woods is full of them causing the people much distress. The Dukes magnanimously head off to tame rebellious thoughts among the people. A courtier shows up with a message for Woodstock, but mistakes him for a groom because of his plain attire. Once identities are cleared up, the two discuss, at length, what the king is wearing these days, then the courtier tells Woodstock his presence is requested at court.
3.3 – Cue the clowns. Nimble is out with blank charters, getting illiterate people to put their names on them. He is assisted by the Bailey (bailiff) of Dunstable, one Master Ignorance, whose favorite word is “pestiferous.” He says it every time he speaks.
4.1 – Back at the castle, the king is dismayed to learn that Woodstock has refused to visit. Simply forcing him to come won’t work because it will arouse rebellious thoughts in the people. Tresilian proposes that they disguise themselves as masquers, go to Plashey, catch Woodstock unawares, bop him on the head, dress him up as a masquer so he can’t be identified when they kidnap him, and drag him off to court. Richard says “I like it well.” The difficult business dealt with, Richard and the flatterers agree to divide up the kingdom with Bagot, Bushy, Greene, and Scroope as renters and Richard as their landlord.
4.2 – At Plashey, the masquers, including Richard, arrive and kidnap Woodstock, accusing him for good measure of treason. They plan to deliver him to Lapoole in Calais, far from any English people who might be inspired to rebellious thoughts, where he can be killed.
4.3 – The king’s policemen hear complaints from local sheriffs, who point out that blank charters are not in keeping with a) ancient liberties from William the Conqueror sparing the men of Kent from any fines or taxation and b) the rights of “free-born” men. These arguments, for some reason, are ignored and they go to jail. Word comes that the queen is sick. Oh, she’s dead. Richard arrives, very sad, and repents his harsh sentence on Woodstock. “Send post to Calais and bid Lapoole forbear/ On pain of life, to act our sad decree,” he says. Uh oh.
5.1 – Best scene in the play. At Calais, Lapoole wants Woodstock’s murder to look “a common natural death.” It’s a busy night in Woodstock’s cell, as he is visited by the ghost of Edward the Black Prince, the ghost of Edward III, Lapoole who suggests he write some letters to Richard airing his grievances, and finally two murderers who strangle him with a towel then smother him with a mattress. Everything seems to come in pairs in this scene.
5.2 – Tresilian and Nimble review the lack of success at pressing commoners into service in the coming war between Richard and the Dukes. They argue about which of them will run away the fastest.
5.3 – On the field before battle, the Dukes meet with Richard. Lancaster reveals Richard’s greatest crime – he’s not a king, but a landlord. Both sides call each other “traitors.”
5.4 – In battle, Cheyney and Arundel fight with and kill Greene. There’s no word of what he was wearing when he died. Richard finds Greene’s body and speaks words that might be misconstrued by future Queer Theory critics.
5.5 – Nimble and Tresilian in full flight consider their plight. Nimble realizes that he can escape punishment (and even earn a thousand marks) if he “captures” Tresilian and turns him over to the authorities. So much for honor among thieves.
5.6 – Richard’s flatterers are routed. Nimble arrives and turns Tresilian over to Lancaster.
Scholars may argue over authorship for centuries, but clearly Thomas of Woodstock is a play written by a tailor.
I have left off a summary of the final scene written by Mr. Carrigg as not relevant here. I am fascinated instead by the argument that one finds Shakespearean fingerprints on this play. In the journal Early Modern Literary Studies (Sept. 2003), for example, Michael Eagan writes, “It is impossible to come away from the text without an overwhelming sense of Shakespeare's presence – one way or another. Either he wrote it or knew it extraordinarily well, stealing scenes, characters and lines with ruthless abandon.” It turns out Mr. Eagan is fairly convinced Shakespeare actually wrote the play. He has recently published a four-volume, 2100-page argument supporting his claim. One reviewer, Ramon Jimenez, finds the argument convincing.
I haven’t read Eagan. But I have to say, I put down Thomas of Woodstock and my first thought was “no way Shakespeare wrote this.” And the only argument I have on my side is Malcolm Gladwell. Not too long ago New Yorker writer Gladwell wrote a book called Blink in which he argues that “decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately” (11-12), like in a 2100-page essay. This process, if one can call a two-second impression a “process,” is called the “adaptive unconscious,” and with it Gladwell raises one’s intuitive decisions to the same level as our conscious ones, then supports his conclusion with a pile of entertaining anecdotes.
Now I’m a Shakespeare amateur, so my decision that Shakespeare had nothing to do with this play is surely suspect. I strongly encourage anyone with brains, evidence, and more than two seconds to spend on this to write and point out my varying levels of idiocy here. Please.
That said, the William Shakespeare Experience has just spent that last two and a half years reading all of Shakespeare’s early work, and the would-be Richard II, Part 1 is unlike anything we’ve read in a number of significant ways.
For one, I’m suspicious about the poetry. The text I read, and lord knows where the Hampshire Shakespeare people got their version, made it difficult to distinguish iambic pentameter from prose because even though different characters clearly speak in one or the other, all the lines are broken as if they are poetry. So I did a lot syllable counting, out of curiosity. And I found, in passages that tend toward iambic pentameter, consistent over-syllablizing of lines. Yes, a lot of them were 11 syllables, and Eagan argues that this is typical of Shakespeare’s early use of feminine verse endings. Thinking back to Titus Andronicus and Love’s Labor’s Lost and the Henry VI plays, I don’t remember the lines, even if they included a lot of feminine endings, feeling like this. Instead I came away with a clear impression of a playwright struggling to maintain poetic form. (Again, I admit the difference between impression and scientific method here.)
And that’s interesting because one thing I remember clearly about Love’s Labor’s Lost is the show-offiness of the language. (I checked three speeches at random – King, Princess, and Berowne – and found few feminine rhymes.) Perhaps a better comparison is one of the Henry VI plays. But rather than embark on an odyssey myself (what page am I on already?), I’ll throw it out as a question: aside from the evolving tone, temperament, and maturity, have you felt in reading the first 13 plays, that Shakespeare has moved from rough poet to polished? Is there even a way to distinguish between these characteristics?
And when you have blinked and decided, take at look at or scan this Thomas of Woodstock speech of Richard’s, again chosen at random:
“Methinks it is strange, my good and reverent uncle,
You and the rest should thus malign against us,
And every hour with rude and bitter taunts
Abuse King Richard and his harmless friends.
We had a father, that once called ye brother:
A grandsire too, that titled you his son;
But could they see how you have wronged King Richard
Their ghosts would haunt ye; and in dead of night
Fright all your quiet sleeps with horrid fears.
I pray, stand up; we honour reverend years
In meaner subjects. Good uncle, rise and tell us:
What further mischiefs are there now devised
To torture and afflict your sovereign with?” (Woodstock 2.1)
Second, if Shakespeare did write this play as Richard II, Part 1, then I am suspicious about the continuity. The playwright of Thomas of Woodstock records events that make no sense in relation to Shakespeare’s Richard II. For example, Greene dies, slain on the filed of battle in the first play. Then, oddly he’s resurrected in the second play, until Bolingbroke captures him and has him beheaded.
Similarly, I found myself disoriented by the chronology of the two plays taken together. Thomas of Woodstock concludes with a bellicose confrontation between Richard and the Dukes, a battle the Dukes appear to win. Yet at the beginning of Richard II, we seem to have not only reconciled but turned the table of power to Richard’s side, restoring Bagot, Bushy, and Greene to their lofty perch as flattering “favorites.” I looked to Antonia Fraser’s The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England to see if historically they reached some sort of truce between the events of the two plays, but I found myself even more confused. Gloucester (Woodstock) dies in 1397, but there’s no battle afterwards. There is a battle earlier in 1387 when Gloucester, Arundel, and Warwick “forced Richard to agree to the trial of five of his friends” (Fraser 113). The friends flee but they are caught by the Dukes’ army, which incidentally now includes Mowbray and Bolingbroke, two characters who do not appear in Thomas of Woodstock. The result of this skirmish is the “Merciless Parliament” of 1388.
Where this particular parliament falls in either play, I’m not sure. But that’s how disorienting the timeline is between the two. I don’t remember the three parts of Henry VI having the same disorientation. But I may be mistaken. Surely Shakespeare is effective at collapsing and rearranging history to suit his narrative purposes. Still, as we moved from 1 Henry VI to Richard III and as we go from Richard II to 1 Henry IV, Shakespeare did not provide and is not providing us with a comparable continuity paradox.
Finally, I am suspicious about a thematic element. One of the dominant motifs in Richard II, indeed an idea that unifies Richard’s character throughout, is the idea of his divine right to rule. Each of Richard’s modes – Machiavel, Greedy Opportunist, Coward, and Poet – I described in the “Faces of Richard” section of the Shakespeare and Company review can be connected by Richard’s sense that he is god’s “deputy.” Reading the play, I felt it is Shakespeare’s least secular play, so fundamental is Richard’s connection to God. When Northumberland and Bolingbroke show up at Castle Flint, for example, to ask Richard to submit, the king responds:
“We are amazed, and thus long have we stood
To watch the fearful bending of thy knee,
Because we thought ourself thy lawful king:
…
If we be not, show us the hand of God
That hath dismissed us from our stewardship” (3.3.71-73,76-77)
And he returns to this conviction throughout. (With his dying breath, he tells Exton: “That hand shall burn in never-quenching fire/ That staggers thus my person.”) And it is a conviction completely absent from Thomas of Woodstock. “God” is mentioned 14 times in Act I of Woodstock, but 12 of them are by Woodstock, the most devout character in the play. This ratio continues in the subsequent acts. In fact, Richard, in the entire play only mentions God once. When he does, though, it is fascinating, because the speech is so unlike anything he has said previously:
“Although we could have easily surprised,
dispersed and overthrown your rebel troops
that draw your swords against our sacred person,
the highest god's anointed deputy,
breaking your holy oaths to heaven and us:
yet of our mild and princely clemency
we have forborne; that by this parliament
we might be made partaker of the cause
that moved ye rise in this rebellious sort.” (5.3)
In this we find Eagan’s Shakespearean hint, for Richard’s words echo those Gaunt will speak in Richard II:
“God’s is the quarrel; for God’s substitute,
His deputy anointed in His sight,
Hath caused his death, the which if wrongfully,
Let heaven revenge, for I may never lift
An angry arm against His minister.” (1.2.37-41)
I wouldn’t be surprised if Shakespeare used Thomas of Woodstock as a source. So many of his plays make use of antecedent texts. But I remain unconvinced that Shakespeare collaborated on or wrote much of this play. Maybe next summer, with a few more hours to spare, I’ll dig into Eagan’s argument and learn just how wrong I am.
Wow, all that and not a single joke about rock and roll or Max Yasgur’s dairy farm!
Randall
Sunday, July 13, 2008
RE: Richard II - Performance Log (July 2008)
Randall,
Actually, believe it or not, Colorado Shakespeare Festival is doing Henry VIII this year. I guess I should go see it considering it only comes around every 30 years or so.
I saw their Love's Labour's Lost last week. Not so great, and yet, not sure why I didn't enjoy it like I have in the past. Still thinking on that one.
Apparently CSF's really strong show is a musical tribute to Woody Guthrie. Ooh! Now, that's a must see for me. :-)
A former student told me of a production of a play that he is rehearsing:
"Have you ever heard of Chimes at Midnight? Apparently it's a film Orson Welles made that condensed Henry IV parts 1 and 2 into a single show. The play for which I am rehearsing is Chimes at Midnight and I have to admit, I'm impressed with it. At first I was skeptical … but the director really seems to know what he's doing and I think he has developed a fantastic show. I'm playing the role of Prince John (Hal's younger brother) though I am the understudy to Prince Hal. I'm having a blast! I directed Part 1 at the seminary last year (not a bad production) so I'm quite familiar with the text and the characters of this show. And I'm delighted to be a part of this tiny little theatre company that performs Shakespeare outdoors!"
Have you ever heard of this one? Sounds interesting.
Cindy
Actually, believe it or not, Colorado Shakespeare Festival is doing Henry VIII this year. I guess I should go see it considering it only comes around every 30 years or so.
I saw their Love's Labour's Lost last week. Not so great, and yet, not sure why I didn't enjoy it like I have in the past. Still thinking on that one.
Apparently CSF's really strong show is a musical tribute to Woody Guthrie. Ooh! Now, that's a must see for me. :-)
A former student told me of a production of a play that he is rehearsing:
"Have you ever heard of Chimes at Midnight? Apparently it's a film Orson Welles made that condensed Henry IV parts 1 and 2 into a single show. The play for which I am rehearsing is Chimes at Midnight and I have to admit, I'm impressed with it. At first I was skeptical … but the director really seems to know what he's doing and I think he has developed a fantastic show. I'm playing the role of Prince John (Hal's younger brother) though I am the understudy to Prince Hal. I'm having a blast! I directed Part 1 at the seminary last year (not a bad production) so I'm quite familiar with the text and the characters of this show. And I'm delighted to be a part of this tiny little theatre company that performs Shakespeare outdoors!"
Have you ever heard of this one? Sounds interesting.
Cindy
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Richard II - Performance Log (July 2008)
Sometimes the stars align; I was able to see a performance of Richard II just as we begin reading 1 Henry IV. For me, Richard II is a lifer, meaning it’s a play I’ve never seen on stage before. (I have about 10 to go, including most of the usual suspects – Timon, Coriolanus, Cymbelline, Troilus, Henry VIII. Does anyone ever do Henry VIII?)
Richard II
Shakespeare & Company
Directed by George M. Roesler
Century College Outdoor Theatre Complex
White Bear Lake, MN
July 5, 2008
1. The Faces of Richard: When we read Richard II last year, I came away with the impression that Richard is all of a piece – a poet king, lyrical but milquetoasty. Perhaps my reading was colored by remembrance of Derek Jacobi’s solid performance for the televised BBC series (1978), which gave the character some consistency that, as I reviewed the text prior to seeing Shakespeare & Company's production, is not so obvious in the text. Or perhaps I just didn't read the play very well.
Upon rereading, I believe we find a more chameleonic Richard in Shakespeare's account. Certainly, a historical figure is more difficult to reconcile in a narrative than a fictional one, human nature being erratic. To the fictional, authors can apply coherence where necessary, and we are about to discuss some history plays in which I think Shakespeare succeeds in doing the same with the historical Henry IV and Hal. In Richard II, however, Shakespeare seems disinterested in establishing a connection between or glossing over the king’s different facets.
We get a Machiavellian Richard, the plotter of the assassination of Gloucester. Richard never admits this in the play, but Gaunt fingers him, rebuffing his wife’s desire for vengeance against the assassin by saying:
“God’s is the quarrel; for God’s substitute,
His deputy anointed in His sight,
Hath caused his death, the which if wrongfully,
Let heaven revenge, for I may never lift
An angry arm against His minister.” (1.2.37-41)
Why Richard has had Gloucester rubbed out isn’t discussed, but the opening scene of Richard II, in which Bolingbroke accuses Mowbray (“he did plot the Duke of Gloucester’s death”) becomes politically intriguing when a scene later we learn that Richard, who was adjudicating in scene 1, must have known who was lying and who was truthful, and banished both men anyway. Certainly, he has chosen a politically expedient path, and the “appeals” of both men against the other are something of a sham. Do we see this shrewd political animal again in the play? Not really.
Rather, we get a more obtuse, avaricious Richard. In Act 1, scene 4, upon hearing of Gaunt’s illness, Richard responds:
“Now put it, God, in the physician’s mind
To help him to his grave immediately!
The lining of his coffers shall make coats
To deck our soldiers for these Irish wars.
Come, gentlemen, let’s all go visit him:
Pray God we may make haste, and come too late!” (1.4.59-64)
Okay. It at least appears pragmatic, even if it’s a tad crass to desire the immediate death of one’s uncle in order to pay for war in a time of growing deficit. But it doesn’t take the Duke of York long to point out the illogic of the plan, when Gaunt subsequently dies. After Richard seizes Gaunt’s property, York prophetically warns him “You pluck a thousand dangers on your head,/ You lose a thousand well-disposèd hearts” (2.1.206-207). So, what happened to the king who neatly eliminated risks to his power by trapping them into exile? Well, he foolishly just gave one of them reason to come back and challenge him.
And when Bolingbroke does return, we get the ineffectual, coward Richard. One of the most shocking moments in the play, for me, is in Act 3, scene 3. Bolingbroke sends Northumberland to Richard, holed up in Flint Castle, to tell him:
“Henry Bolingbroke
On both his knees doth kiss King Richard’s hand,
And sends allegiance and true faith of heart
To his most royal person; hither come
Even at his feet to lay my arms and power,
Provided that my banishment repealed,
And lands restored again be freely granted.” (3.3.34-40)
Richard’s response is abdication, essentially: “Stop kissing the ground; here take my crown.” Weird. Yes, it’s historical. Bolingbroke does usurp the throne. But Shakespeare shows us little of his ambition in the earlier scenes; he sounds sincere about supporting Richard as long as his rights are restored. Gil made a very eloquent argument when we covered the play that Northumberland’s request (“May it please you to come down”) amounts to what Gil calls “a huge movement” and can be metaphorically seen as the deposition. Sure. And Ernst pointed out the play’s ability “to lay open the disconnect between politicians’ words and their actions.” But in both cases we get words first, then radical (historical, but narratively unexpected) actions follow. And the disconnect isn’t explored.
So, I think it’s easy to chalk all this up to some gutlessness on Richard’s part, a characteristic we see earlier when he quails upon hearing of Bolingbroke’s growing strength and the deaths of Bushy, Bagot, and the Earl of Wiltshire. Bolingbroke arrives, and Richard coughs up the crown at the sight of him, ostensibly unasked.
Finally, we get the poetic Richard, the speaker of:
“Then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king.
Then I am kinged again and, by and by,
Think that I am unkinged by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing. 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.” (5.5.34-41)
Existential, philosophical, introspective, articulate – all qualities he lacks in his avaricious mode and which he buries in petulance in his coward mode. In the end I have a new appreciation for this character, Richard, but I yearn for a director and an actor who can pull these disparate qualities together and make sense of them, one who can find a line to connect their far-flung dots.
2. Portrait of the King as a Young Man: How does an actor handle a difficult and complex role of this nature? In George Roesler's production for Shakespeare & Company, Lucas Gerstner as Richard hops from one to the other without much transition. But there’s an element of the callow to him throughout the production. He can sit on the steps with his flatterers and diss Gaunt with a smile, a sort of brash disrespect for one’s elders. He can crumble in the face of ill news and Bolingbroke’s approaching power, a dissipation of courage originally based not on prowess but rash overconfidence. He can wax poetic about the loss of his crown, dashing a looking glass to the floor and trading melancholy bon mots (“Say that again. ‘The shadow of my sorrow’?”) with Henry IV, a newly minted wisdom born of recent loss.
So Gerstner’s Richard is a youthful one, belying a bit the historical scope of the play, kind of a Plantagenet That Was the Week That Was. I wished for a bit more maturity in the role and depth to the character; but for an audience unfamiliar with British monarchical history and probably Shakespeare’s Richard II as well, the adolescent vibe is engaging.
3. Death Speaks. A nice touch in this production is Roesler’s adding both a prologue and an epilogue to the play as a way of helping the audience a bit with its sense of history. The prologue seemed to be cadged together from the prologue for Henry V (“O, for a muse of fire”) and 2 Henry VI (“Edward the Black Prince died before his father,/ And left behind him Richard, his only son”). I’ve seen this technique used before, and I think it works especially well with the sequential history plays and an American audience’s understandable ignorance.
Jordan Klitzke delivers the prologue, but independent of any particular role in the play. He doesn’t get up there as, say, Gaunt. The epilogue, on the other hand, is delivered by Death. Death, a tall figure swathed in a black robe, appears throughout the play as a physical portrayal of the doom that hangs over Richard’s reign. And Roesler avoids easy metaphor, putting him into an unexpected scene here and there, which encourages the audience to connect the moment with the larger course of history. Why, for example, would Death be strolling through the Queen Isabel and the gardeners scene? Either he’s calling attention to the Gardener’s not so veiled allegory (“I will go root away/ The noisome weeds which without profit suck/ The soil’s fertility from wholesome flowers”) or the topiary’s time is up.
So, Death arrives, after Richard’s murder and Bolingbroke’s speech lamenting his death, and taking lines largely (I may have missed a source) from 1 Henry IV, brings an ironic closure to the play:
“No more the thirsty entrance of this soil
Shall daub her lips with her own children’s blood.
No more shall trenching war channel her fields,
Nor bruise her flow’rets with the armed hoofs
Of hostile paces.”
This is ironic for two reasons. First, the lines are Henry’s and they turn out to be overly optimistic, not only within the action of 1 Henry IV but with the War of the Roses on the horizon far beyond as well. Second, the epilogue is spoken by Death! It’s a bit weird to have the prophecy of lasting peace spoken by a character who benefits from, and throughout the play has been a specter of, the fruits of war and civil unrest.
4. Who Killed Richard? Death’s appearance as epilogue is not the only time in the play Roesler makes an interesting casting choice. With a small cast, it’s difficult to fill every character’s role in the play. Hence we have Bushy and Green but not Bagot, and the poor Gardener has only one apprentice, and there’s no Exton. This last may seem inconsequential, but it is Exton (“I am the King’s friend, and will rid his foe”) who does in Richard. In his place, Roesler taps … Hotspur (Jordan Klitzke). He even changes Henry’s lines in Act 5, scene 6 (from “Exton, I thank thee not” to “Harry, I thank thee not”) to call attention to the change.
Let’s consider for a moment what this change implies. In the next play Hotspur will be Hal’s foil, all honor, chivalry, and, as Gil has said, “romantic self-delusion.” Can such a character speak these lines?
“As full of valor as of royal blood!
Both have I now spilled. O, would the deed were good!
For now the devil that told me I did well
Says that this deed is chronicled in hell.” (5.5.113-116)
These lack a sense of honor and temperament that will be consistent in Hotspur in the next play. And there’s a certain toadiness to Exton’s initial interpretation of Henry’s words that Hotspur also lacks. Now on their own Richard II and the switch of characters withstand such criticism. If you’re headed home to American Idol after Death speaks the epilogue and unlikely to take in 1 Henry IV any time soon, who cares if Hotspur plays social-climbing assassin here? And Henry’s rebuke of him could certainly play into Hotspur’s realigning himself in the next play. But for those who consider this play as part of Shakespeare’s second history tetrology, it brings up an interesting continuity question.
A question, I might add, we could ask a guy who told me other day that he’s considering directing 1 Henry IV for Shakespeare & Company next year: Stu Naber. If you scroll back up to the top of this entry and look at the attached picture, Stu is the guy on the right playing Thomas Mowbray. He’s also a fellow Carleton grad. And he’s also the newest member of the William Shakespeare Experience. I welcome Stu now and hope, as we head into 1 Henry IV soon, that he can help us with those interesting questions that arise in the territory between play and production, and whatever else piques his fancy.
Logged by Randall
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Merry Wives of Windsor - Performance Log (June 2008)
Shakespeareans,
Summer Shakespeare performance choices conform, it seems, to the same sort of trendiness we find in other industries. One can go years without seeing one of the rarer plays, then abruptly it's all King John all the time. So it was this year, when I got to see a production of Merry Wives of Windsor for the second time in two years.
The Merry Wives of Windsor
The Chameleon Theatre Circle
Directed by Carin Bratlie
Logan Park, Minneapolis, MN
June 28, 2008
1. An Objective Production: "In this ensemble-created version of The Merry Wives of Windsor, we have embraced the whimsy of Shakespeare's most prose heavy play (75 percent) and created a world inhabited by inanimate objects." ― Carin Bratlie, director.
Wait a minute! We're going to take a linguistically less lively play and enliven it with lifeless characters? How's that work?
Well, as the actors emerge (this is in a park, so entrances are made by simply strolling down "stage" from the picnic table where the props are kept) each is carrying an object ― a shoe, a fan, a broom, a lantern, a bellows, a marshmallow ― and sometimes more than one because the cast of seven is required to perform multiple roles. So, as Act I opens here come Shallow (Anna Sundberg), Slender (Andrew Troth) and Sir Hugh Evans, the parson (Anna Sundberg). Troth is holding a broom, upside down, out in front of him, and Sundberg has a sock pulled over one hand, sock puppet style, and a mop in the other. They shake the objects slightly to emphasize when they are speaking. It takes a few minutes to get used to.
If Bratlie is looking for whimsy she gets it. The audience spends a few minutes, each time a new character enters, bemusedly trying to make some connection between the role and the object chosen to represent it. Some connections are easier than others: Mistress Quickly is a corset; the host of the Garter Inn a beer stein; Master Ford a bellows; Fenton, Anne Page's wimpy suitor, a bouquet of plastic flowers. And some are a bit more mystifying. Why is Dr. Caius, the French physician, a shoe? Why is the parson a sock? Why is Simple an umbrella?
I kept wishing the company had gone further with the puppets, perhaps constructions of found objects rather than just single objects, the variety giving them both more versatility and more opportunity for metaphorical representation. Or that they had chosen objects that all had some way to be "articulate," like the beer stein with its top that snapped open and closed, or the bellows.
2. Is He a … Staff? You're wondering about Falstaff. He's a group of, well four, large balloons. This leads to a couple nice moments. In one, the balloons are punctured, a representation of the "deflation" of Falstaff's hopes, each time he fails to win his mistress. And I suppose you could also make a joke about Falstaff being a big bag of wind. (Although Falstaff would disagree with you, claiming he is short of wind: "Well, if my wind were but long enough to say my prayers, I would repent" [4.5.99-101].) In addition, Bardolph, Pistol, and Nim (all played by Tamara Philbrick) are each represented by single balloons, the long kind clowns use to make balloon animals out of, and each has been shaped into an initial: "B" for Bardolph, etc. And this affinity or continuity between character design is satisfying.
3. Not So Deep As a Well: The question is how long the whimsy lasts. I'd give it about 10 minutes, then you start to look for something deeper, something like character. And not all of the "puppets" can achieve character, regardless of what movement or voicing the actor brings to the object. When one does work, it's a lot of fun. Master Ford (held by Megan Engeseth), the bellows, seems to huff and puff and is capable of emitting deep sighs. And I especially liked Mistress Page represented by a hand-held folding fan, giving the actor, Anissa Brazill, the opportunity to snap her open or closed to punctuate moments with a kind of hauteur. Would that Mistress Quickly (the corset), Mistress Ford (a lantern), or Dr. Caius (the shoe) could achieve such transcendent, if minimalist, moments.
4. The Actor Prepares: This Merry Wives of Windsor comes off as more of an actor's exercise ― how to animate an inanimate object ― than a comprehensive production with puppets. Falstaff never quite works. His balloons are pretty big, the only puppet that obscures the actor (Andrew Troth) playing it. Bratlie writes in her program note that "the actors learned … how to physically create one stage picture with their bodies while creating a different one with their puppets." With Falstaff, one of those pictures is obscured, dampening the effect of the character.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the play's three most farcical moments when Falstaff is turned from wooing wolf to butt of joke. Mistresses Page and Ford plot to turn the tables on Falstaff each time he attempts to cuckold Master Page, one time dumping him in a dirty clothes hamper (and then in a river off stage), the next time dressing him up in drag, and finally convincing him to dress as a deer then beating him.
Farce works best when it highlights transgressive behavior; we laugh at human impropriety. The use of inanimate objects in The Chameleon Theatre Circle's production removes the sharpness of the transgression. With Falstaff translated to a bunch of balloons, these moments of farcical comeuppance are also translated ― the laundry basket incident becomes balloons stuffed in a cloth bag, dressing Falstaff as a woman becomes draping a lace cloth over the balloons, and Falstaff's buck disguise becomes tying balloon "antlers" around the balloons; not quite the same effect.
I thought, in the end, that the weirdness of using inanimate objects as characters in Merry Wives of Windsor would have one especially compelling result ― it would entertain the children in the audience. (We accounted, through relation and friends, for six.) Despite the kooky antics of shoes and socks, and bouquets and balloons, and handkerchiefs, six-year-old critic Annika Findlay delivered a double blow to the concept. She proclaimed it "too chatterboxy" and took Act V off to go play in the park.
Logged by Randall
Summer Shakespeare performance choices conform, it seems, to the same sort of trendiness we find in other industries. One can go years without seeing one of the rarer plays, then abruptly it's all King John all the time. So it was this year, when I got to see a production of Merry Wives of Windsor for the second time in two years.
The Merry Wives of Windsor
The Chameleon Theatre Circle
Directed by Carin Bratlie
Logan Park, Minneapolis, MN
June 28, 2008
1. An Objective Production: "In this ensemble-created version of The Merry Wives of Windsor, we have embraced the whimsy of Shakespeare's most prose heavy play (75 percent) and created a world inhabited by inanimate objects." ― Carin Bratlie, director.
Wait a minute! We're going to take a linguistically less lively play and enliven it with lifeless characters? How's that work?
Well, as the actors emerge (this is in a park, so entrances are made by simply strolling down "stage" from the picnic table where the props are kept) each is carrying an object ― a shoe, a fan, a broom, a lantern, a bellows, a marshmallow ― and sometimes more than one because the cast of seven is required to perform multiple roles. So, as Act I opens here come Shallow (Anna Sundberg), Slender (Andrew Troth) and Sir Hugh Evans, the parson (Anna Sundberg). Troth is holding a broom, upside down, out in front of him, and Sundberg has a sock pulled over one hand, sock puppet style, and a mop in the other. They shake the objects slightly to emphasize when they are speaking. It takes a few minutes to get used to.
If Bratlie is looking for whimsy she gets it. The audience spends a few minutes, each time a new character enters, bemusedly trying to make some connection between the role and the object chosen to represent it. Some connections are easier than others: Mistress Quickly is a corset; the host of the Garter Inn a beer stein; Master Ford a bellows; Fenton, Anne Page's wimpy suitor, a bouquet of plastic flowers. And some are a bit more mystifying. Why is Dr. Caius, the French physician, a shoe? Why is the parson a sock? Why is Simple an umbrella?
I kept wishing the company had gone further with the puppets, perhaps constructions of found objects rather than just single objects, the variety giving them both more versatility and more opportunity for metaphorical representation. Or that they had chosen objects that all had some way to be "articulate," like the beer stein with its top that snapped open and closed, or the bellows.
2. Is He a … Staff? You're wondering about Falstaff. He's a group of, well four, large balloons. This leads to a couple nice moments. In one, the balloons are punctured, a representation of the "deflation" of Falstaff's hopes, each time he fails to win his mistress. And I suppose you could also make a joke about Falstaff being a big bag of wind. (Although Falstaff would disagree with you, claiming he is short of wind: "Well, if my wind were but long enough to say my prayers, I would repent" [4.5.99-101].) In addition, Bardolph, Pistol, and Nim (all played by Tamara Philbrick) are each represented by single balloons, the long kind clowns use to make balloon animals out of, and each has been shaped into an initial: "B" for Bardolph, etc. And this affinity or continuity between character design is satisfying.
3. Not So Deep As a Well: The question is how long the whimsy lasts. I'd give it about 10 minutes, then you start to look for something deeper, something like character. And not all of the "puppets" can achieve character, regardless of what movement or voicing the actor brings to the object. When one does work, it's a lot of fun. Master Ford (held by Megan Engeseth), the bellows, seems to huff and puff and is capable of emitting deep sighs. And I especially liked Mistress Page represented by a hand-held folding fan, giving the actor, Anissa Brazill, the opportunity to snap her open or closed to punctuate moments with a kind of hauteur. Would that Mistress Quickly (the corset), Mistress Ford (a lantern), or Dr. Caius (the shoe) could achieve such transcendent, if minimalist, moments.
4. The Actor Prepares: This Merry Wives of Windsor comes off as more of an actor's exercise ― how to animate an inanimate object ― than a comprehensive production with puppets. Falstaff never quite works. His balloons are pretty big, the only puppet that obscures the actor (Andrew Troth) playing it. Bratlie writes in her program note that "the actors learned … how to physically create one stage picture with their bodies while creating a different one with their puppets." With Falstaff, one of those pictures is obscured, dampening the effect of the character.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the play's three most farcical moments when Falstaff is turned from wooing wolf to butt of joke. Mistresses Page and Ford plot to turn the tables on Falstaff each time he attempts to cuckold Master Page, one time dumping him in a dirty clothes hamper (and then in a river off stage), the next time dressing him up in drag, and finally convincing him to dress as a deer then beating him.
Farce works best when it highlights transgressive behavior; we laugh at human impropriety. The use of inanimate objects in The Chameleon Theatre Circle's production removes the sharpness of the transgression. With Falstaff translated to a bunch of balloons, these moments of farcical comeuppance are also translated ― the laundry basket incident becomes balloons stuffed in a cloth bag, dressing Falstaff as a woman becomes draping a lace cloth over the balloons, and Falstaff's buck disguise becomes tying balloon "antlers" around the balloons; not quite the same effect.
I thought, in the end, that the weirdness of using inanimate objects as characters in Merry Wives of Windsor would have one especially compelling result ― it would entertain the children in the audience. (We accounted, through relation and friends, for six.) Despite the kooky antics of shoes and socks, and bouquets and balloons, and handkerchiefs, six-year-old critic Annika Findlay delivered a double blow to the concept. She proclaimed it "too chatterboxy" and took Act V off to go play in the park.
Logged by Randall
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Midsummer Night's Dream - Fairyland
Friends,
Just before we wrap up the fairy world, I remember a student writing about “…Puck, or Robin Bottom…” which opens up a never-before explored dimension of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Could it be that Puck disguises himself as Bottom in order to have sex with Titania? Or that Bottom and Puck are the same “person,” a sort of Jekyll and Hyde, the stolidly literal and the ephemeral imaginitive? Or maybe it is a double-casting trick I hadn’t thought of (put an ass’s head on Egeus, and Puck and “Bottom” can be on stage at the same time)? I know that Hugh Richmond’s Shakespeare’s Sexual Comedy has a “Bottom as Romeo” chapter: “the treatment of sex in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an explicit confirmation of Shakespeare’s verdict on the sexual conduct of Romeo” (105). So why not Robin Bottom? I missed this on Wikipedia.
Randall has probed the shift in Oberon’s language over the course of the play, after a stiff and stately introduction (“Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania” is not unlike Theseus’s introductory “Now, fair Hippolyta…four happy days bring in another moon”) to a more poetic voice, and he also glories in Titania’s eloquence. I believe the two are of a texture. The wrangle between Oberon and Titania has reversed Nature itself. Each accuses the other of a sort of infidelity in devotion to a mortal, Oberon to Hippolyta and Titania to Theseus. Titania refutes the accusation with detailed argument:
These are the forgeries of jealousy:
And never, since the middle summer’s spring,
Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,
By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
Or in the beached margent of the sea,
To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,
But with thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport. (II.i.81-87)
What starts as an answer to Oberon’s accusation swells to a lyrical passage, enlarging on all the variety of nature. The complaint is sufficient with “forgeries of jealousy,” yet the pentameter sings, compounds, pauses and rushes, catalogues and contrasts to the crescendo of “to dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,” and what began as an argument swells to a celebration of nature. Only at the end of the digression can we conclude that because the fairies have not danced their dance, nature is disordered.
Meanwhile Oberon is furious with his Queen over the Indian changling boy and in his anger he plots to humiliate Titania into submission. He charges Puck to fetch the love-in-idleness flower for a love potion.
Enter Puck
Oberon. Hast thou the flower there? Welcome wanderer.
Puck. Ay, there it is.
Oberon. I pray thee, give it me. (II.i.247-48)
There you go: prosaic stage business as the plot requires. But:
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine.
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight;
And there the snake throws her enamell’d skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in;
And with the juiced of this I’ll streak her eyes,
And make her full of hateful fantasies. (II.i.249-258)
His instruction to Puck starts with all the businesslike authority which Randall notes, but Oberon, like Titania, gets lost or distracted and digresses into a poetic celebration of nature. Wild thyme and nodding violets? Musk roses and eglantine? This is no GPS: you will find her a couple dozen yards to the left of the old oak tree. Both digress into fairyworld. Neither is limited by time or reason. The prosody is blank verse, but the texture is not governed by logic. The two passages have a single end stop, after “eglantine,” and that is really only to take a breath. Oberon’s semi-colons flow directly into “and’s.” It is lyrical. In the fairy realm, neither Titania nor Oberon can keep up the anger as they are distracted into the music of nature. What an effort Oberon must make to reverse from “weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in” to “make her full of hateful fantasies,” and even with the shift in subject, he still carries over the alliterative music.
Between “to dance our ringlets to the whistling wind” and “I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,” Athenian youth has trespassed into the wood:
Demetrius. I love thee not; therefore pursue me not.
Where is Lysander and fair Hermia?
The one I’ll slay; the other slayeth me.
Thou toldst me they were stol’n unto this wood;
And here am I, and wode within this wood,
Because I cannot meet my Hermia.
Hence, get thee gone, and follow me no more. (II.i.188-194)
Listen to the three passages. All three are blank verse, but the fairies’ lines all flow through commas to continuities embellishing the natural pictures, while the mortal’s lines are all end-stopped increments of complaint. There is some syntactic parallel (slay/slayeth) and a little word play (wode/ wood), but though he is in the wood, he is impervious to nature. As he abuses Helena he is probably stomping on wild thyme and nodding violets. It might as well be prose. And Demetrius has only a single matter in mind—I, me, I, me, me, here I am, etc.—himself, his ego.
Randall noted that audience reacts to character more than language. I agree. Yet as these passages show, the language itself creates a realm beyond dimension of space and time, that the poor Athenians, leaders and youth alike, can only stumble in.
*****
When I return from Ashland, I’ll report on the Dream I will see there, and even if the discussion of the play has closed, I’ll try to sneak in the comment on the effect of double-casting Hippolyta and Titania which I have hinted at. Hint about the hint: as all gather for “Pyramus and Thisby,” Hippolita makes eye contact with Bottom—and winks.
Gentles, do not reprehend,
Gil
Just before we wrap up the fairy world, I remember a student writing about “…Puck, or Robin Bottom…” which opens up a never-before explored dimension of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Could it be that Puck disguises himself as Bottom in order to have sex with Titania? Or that Bottom and Puck are the same “person,” a sort of Jekyll and Hyde, the stolidly literal and the ephemeral imaginitive? Or maybe it is a double-casting trick I hadn’t thought of (put an ass’s head on Egeus, and Puck and “Bottom” can be on stage at the same time)? I know that Hugh Richmond’s Shakespeare’s Sexual Comedy has a “Bottom as Romeo” chapter: “the treatment of sex in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an explicit confirmation of Shakespeare’s verdict on the sexual conduct of Romeo” (105). So why not Robin Bottom? I missed this on Wikipedia.
Randall has probed the shift in Oberon’s language over the course of the play, after a stiff and stately introduction (“Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania” is not unlike Theseus’s introductory “Now, fair Hippolyta…four happy days bring in another moon”) to a more poetic voice, and he also glories in Titania’s eloquence. I believe the two are of a texture. The wrangle between Oberon and Titania has reversed Nature itself. Each accuses the other of a sort of infidelity in devotion to a mortal, Oberon to Hippolyta and Titania to Theseus. Titania refutes the accusation with detailed argument:
These are the forgeries of jealousy:
And never, since the middle summer’s spring,
Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,
By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
Or in the beached margent of the sea,
To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,
But with thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport. (II.i.81-87)
What starts as an answer to Oberon’s accusation swells to a lyrical passage, enlarging on all the variety of nature. The complaint is sufficient with “forgeries of jealousy,” yet the pentameter sings, compounds, pauses and rushes, catalogues and contrasts to the crescendo of “to dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,” and what began as an argument swells to a celebration of nature. Only at the end of the digression can we conclude that because the fairies have not danced their dance, nature is disordered.
Meanwhile Oberon is furious with his Queen over the Indian changling boy and in his anger he plots to humiliate Titania into submission. He charges Puck to fetch the love-in-idleness flower for a love potion.
Enter Puck
Oberon. Hast thou the flower there? Welcome wanderer.
Puck. Ay, there it is.
Oberon. I pray thee, give it me. (II.i.247-48)
There you go: prosaic stage business as the plot requires. But:
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine.
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight;
And there the snake throws her enamell’d skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in;
And with the juiced of this I’ll streak her eyes,
And make her full of hateful fantasies. (II.i.249-258)
His instruction to Puck starts with all the businesslike authority which Randall notes, but Oberon, like Titania, gets lost or distracted and digresses into a poetic celebration of nature. Wild thyme and nodding violets? Musk roses and eglantine? This is no GPS: you will find her a couple dozen yards to the left of the old oak tree. Both digress into fairyworld. Neither is limited by time or reason. The prosody is blank verse, but the texture is not governed by logic. The two passages have a single end stop, after “eglantine,” and that is really only to take a breath. Oberon’s semi-colons flow directly into “and’s.” It is lyrical. In the fairy realm, neither Titania nor Oberon can keep up the anger as they are distracted into the music of nature. What an effort Oberon must make to reverse from “weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in” to “make her full of hateful fantasies,” and even with the shift in subject, he still carries over the alliterative music.
Between “to dance our ringlets to the whistling wind” and “I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,” Athenian youth has trespassed into the wood:
Demetrius. I love thee not; therefore pursue me not.
Where is Lysander and fair Hermia?
The one I’ll slay; the other slayeth me.
Thou toldst me they were stol’n unto this wood;
And here am I, and wode within this wood,
Because I cannot meet my Hermia.
Hence, get thee gone, and follow me no more. (II.i.188-194)
Listen to the three passages. All three are blank verse, but the fairies’ lines all flow through commas to continuities embellishing the natural pictures, while the mortal’s lines are all end-stopped increments of complaint. There is some syntactic parallel (slay/slayeth) and a little word play (wode/ wood), but though he is in the wood, he is impervious to nature. As he abuses Helena he is probably stomping on wild thyme and nodding violets. It might as well be prose. And Demetrius has only a single matter in mind—I, me, I, me, me, here I am, etc.—himself, his ego.
Randall noted that audience reacts to character more than language. I agree. Yet as these passages show, the language itself creates a realm beyond dimension of space and time, that the poor Athenians, leaders and youth alike, can only stumble in.
*****
When I return from Ashland, I’ll report on the Dream I will see there, and even if the discussion of the play has closed, I’ll try to sneak in the comment on the effect of double-casting Hippolyta and Titania which I have hinted at. Hint about the hint: as all gather for “Pyramus and Thisby,” Hippolita makes eye contact with Bottom—and winks.
Gentles, do not reprehend,
Gil
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
RE: Midsummer Night's Dream - Performance
I would have one question, that occurs to me every time I take in one of the more frequently produced plays: what is one thing in the production that is fresh? What makes it fresh? And does it illuminate the play in any way?
Randall
Randall
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Midsummer Night's Dream - Performance
Hi, All,
It’s July 1, and on July 3 I leave for Ashland, Ore., to see a Midsummer Night’s Dream performance. Is there anything you would like me to look for? I’ll focus on the two Titania passages Randall worked with in his June 28 posting, especially to note how the director (or actress) understands poetry, and whether the dramaturg edits. Also if Bottom is played as a pompous oaf, the rest of the mechanicals will be stupid and “Pyramus and Thisby” would be farce and will have no chance to explore the nature of dramatic illusion. And, of course, I will be focused on Hippolyta in the first scene, especially on Theseus’s “what cheer my love.” I already know the production will not double cast, so I hope to have something to say about two productions I have seen that did comment on the important insight such casting had on the play.
I’ll also see Othello, Coriolanus, and Comedy of Errors. Any suggestions? I’ll be computerless so tell me soon, though I may phone Randall, so you could pass on suggestions to me through him.
Gilbert
It’s July 1, and on July 3 I leave for Ashland, Ore., to see a Midsummer Night’s Dream performance. Is there anything you would like me to look for? I’ll focus on the two Titania passages Randall worked with in his June 28 posting, especially to note how the director (or actress) understands poetry, and whether the dramaturg edits. Also if Bottom is played as a pompous oaf, the rest of the mechanicals will be stupid and “Pyramus and Thisby” would be farce and will have no chance to explore the nature of dramatic illusion. And, of course, I will be focused on Hippolyta in the first scene, especially on Theseus’s “what cheer my love.” I already know the production will not double cast, so I hope to have something to say about two productions I have seen that did comment on the important insight such casting had on the play.
I’ll also see Othello, Coriolanus, and Comedy of Errors. Any suggestions? I’ll be computerless so tell me soon, though I may phone Randall, so you could pass on suggestions to me through him.
Gilbert
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