This is the fifth summer Randall and I have worked up a tour de Shakespeare-in-the-parks, starting when he lived in the Bay Area, where we could choose from five or six festivals within driving distance of Berkeley (try a Merchant of Venice in a Napa Valley winery, the vineyards stretching out behind the set, a bottle of the sponsoring wine helping get through casting that may include the vintner’s daughter) and more recently here in Puget Sound where two companies tour Seattle and neighboring counties.
This Romeo and Juliet, produced by Seattle Shakespeare Company's Wooden O Productions, had all the aspects of such a summer show. It was outside, the audience of about 200 seated on blankets on a grass berm semi-circling a paved area fronting a two-story building in the Seattle Center. One hopes for fair weather, and though darkly overcast and a bit chilly, the evening was dry. “Curtain” time was 6 p.m., so the production did not have to race against the dark, though cuts and lack of an intermission reduced playing time to a little over two hours. On a summer Sunday, seaplanes flew off Lake Union for a tourist view of the city, and of course the Seattle Center, Space Needle and all, is a necessary point of interest (observe the people in the Needle observing the people in the float plane), so I lost about thirty lines to engine noise. Less obtrusive, but more distracting, were the seagulls which flew low over the set, one of which perched on a nearby sign and commented for about five minutes (critics, critics everywhere). I was especially interested in a crow onstage chez Capulet, remembering that when I posted the history of A Midsummer Night’s Dream productions, I mentioned the nineteenth century had reached for natural authenticity in the forest scenes by loosing 50 live rabbits on stage, so I wondered if the director introduced the crow as an omen of tragedy, but he (the crow) flew away before the scene ended.
As the audience gathered, some with picnics, we could contemplate the set. Shakespeare in the park must have minimal sets, suitable to be loaded in a van and carted to another park in the next county by the next afternoon. The Romeo set was scruffy, an ill-fitted two-story façade stage right with a couple of doors or windows with torn curtains. There was a substantial balcony. Stage left was another façade fronted by what appeared to be a pile of garbage, and the gap between the facades had a traffic control gate in blue and white attached to a control box with a UN emblem. Behind was a large white tent. Both sets were dirty streaked yellow with bullet holes. “This set is crappy,” I thought.
[Contextual aside: I know Romeo and Juliet really well, having taught it and recently been immersed in it by The Will Shakespeare Experience. Also in the previous two weeks, at Ashland, Oregon, I had seen nine plays, four of them Shakespeare, by a company with 63 Equity actors and an operating budget of $24 million, including some lavish dressing of sets and costumes.]
The play opened with soldiers clad in camouflage, bearing rifles and side arms, a recording of jets muffling the prologue, running through the audience to hassle two guys I assumed were Sampson and Gregory dressed in arabic tunics. I’m afraid my knowledge of the play tuned my ear to listen for cuts, so all the risqué jokes and the exposition about the feud from these swanking servants was lost. There was some physical fighting, Tybalt’s brief challenge to an armed Benvolio (or Benvolia, given the part went to an actress), until Prince Escalus, in military uniform, declares “If ever you disturb our streets again/ Your lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace.” But soon he worried about his son Romeo. And thus the play unfolded, with Prince Montague, with all Capulet’s lines rolled into Lady Capulet’s, and later Friar John and his donkey gone entirely.
But I began to have affection this production. The Nurse (Julie Jamieson) had a light touch, a sweet smile, and her advice to Juliet to go ahead and marry Paris was offered with an emotional concern as the only possible solution for Juliet’s tragic dilemma, so when Juliet curses her, “Ancient damnation! O most wicked fiend!” I felt compassion rather than my usual smug satisfaction that the Nurse got what she deserved.
Friar Lawrence (John Farrage), in what appeared to be a Greek Orthodox robe, was perfectly orchestrated as mature, often bemused, perspective on young love. Mercutio (Taylor Maxwell) was hugely energetic, loud, arrogant, swigging from a flask, everything one might expect/scorn of a young soldier in a combat zone. Romeo (Michael Place) had good growth and modulation, even if his Petrarchan introduction and almost all mention of Rosaline were cut. Juliet was a little light and inexperienced, and given the limits of community theatre I can overlook the County Paris (Trick Danneker) somehow reminding me of a cross between Archie and Jughead, until he had a choreographed fight, fists and knives, with Romeo in the Capulet tomb. It wasn’t Ashland, but I have seen worse (a Macbeth in Harrogate, England, that provoked laughter), and I shifted from wondering if we had outgrown Shakespeare on the grass to a fair appreciation of the company.
Did I call Mercutio “a young soldier in a combat zone”? After the show, the actors pass among the audience with hats, and Randall asked Lady Capulet where they had set the play—Iraq? Bosnia? Israel?—and she said they had tried to keep it ambiguous so it would not be reduced to a narrow political statement. I was—English schoolboyism alert—gobsmacked. I had sat for 2 ¼ hours, leaning into the characters, the lines, the acting, and the penny never dropped that there really were no Capulets and Monagues, but a resentful native population and an arrogant occupying military force, a UN force at that. And suddenly it all made sense; how could I have been so dumb? This clears up the murkiness of “ancient grudge.” It even adds a suggestion of miscegenation to Romeo and Juliet. The visual information and text cuts did not guide me, because my mind insisted I was looking at Montagues and Capulets, and I was prepared to attribute my confusion to inadequacies of an unAshland company.
But this vision of an occupying military force is interesting. I’m not going to try to catch another performance now I “get it,” and I’m not sure it would really lead me into new understanding of Shakespeare’s play, yet I think the star of this production is director George Mount who showed the audience—except for too dense Gil—a different way of looking at Romeo and Juliet.
Logged by Gil
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Romeo and Juliet - Performance Log (July 2008)
Romeo and Juliet
Directed by George Mount
Seattle Shakespeare Company's Wooden O Productions
Fisher Pavilion, Seattle Center
Seattle, WA
July 27, 2008
1. Feud shortage in war-torn Verona. When it comes to re-imagining Romeo and Juliet, it seems like you can't do the feud thing. Does anyone have feuds anymore? Either way, people thinking of Appalachian hillbillies arguing over inter-family marriage or ownership of a pig or whatever hardly provides logical entry into Shakespeare's tragedy; it's a bit silly. We want a more realistic conflict, something that would really drive the two sides, the Montagues and the Capulets, apart. Racial bigotry; that's been done. Religious animosity; done. So, with a nod to modernization and realistic enmity, the Seattle Shakespeare Company's Wooden O Productions (an unwieldy company name that had to result from a merger) production of Romeo and Juliet gives us war – in an unnamed war-torn country (think Iraq or the Balkans), the Capulets are the civilian population at odds with an occupying military force (Montagues), in this case a squadron of U.N. peacekeepers.
The set design establishes the vision: entrances to two ravaged buildings are separated by a blue and white U.N. checkpoint barrier. Both buildings look burned out and pockmarked by shrapnel or bullets, rubble strewn in front of them. Costume design follows suit – the Montague side dresses in camouflage and olive drab with blue U.N. berets; the Capulets in civilian clothes reminiscent of some middle-eastern or Aegean culture. (I had a brief discussion with Amy Fleetwood, who played Lady Capulet, about where Wooden O was setting the production. "We're not sure," she said. Nor is it clear what religion the civilians are practicing. Fleetwood indicated that the ambiguity was intentional.)
This setting demands a very interesting character/casting approach. The ostensible authority in Romeo and Juliet is Prince Escalus, but he's neutral. If you have a military unit trying to maintain control over a local citizenry rife with insurgent opposition, the Prince, as a local, would naturally be in the Capulet camp, probably opposed to the military. That doesn't really fit his lines. Or the situation. So director George Mount combines the Montague/Prince characters, making them one. Now "Prince" Montague (played by David Quicksall) is in charge but attached to the military side, and in the opening scene when two Capulet servants get in a tiff with armed peacekeeping soldiers and the imbroglio is escalated by Tybalt, it makes perfect sense when a general shows up to demand that everyone stand down. There are creaks – Escalus's line about "neighbor-stained steel" fails to reflect a battle between locals and outsiders, but what the heck. It's tougher at the end, when the Prince shows up to castigate both the Montagues and the Capulets ("all are punished!"), then makes an awkward transition that reminds us that he IS a Montague and father of Romeo.
2. All the world's a stage. I felt a deeper consequence to the production vision, though, than this particular melding of characters. In the play, the feud between Capulets and Montagues is personal, an "ancient grudge" (a line edited out of Wooden O's brief prologue) between two families. Mount's choice makes the conflict more impersonal, more intransigent. In this case there is no ancient grudge, only an imposed will on one side and a legitimate fury on the other. Shakespeare's play suggests love, or the tragic aftermath of Romeo and Juliet's, can heal the festering wounds of a private feud. Wooden O suggests this love can heal the wounds of savage international politics. Really? Perhaps what we need in Iraq is a swinging singles Saturday, when the daughters of Muqtada al-Sadr's followers can date American servicemen. Surely love will follow, then intense anger, and no doubt peace will reign. (Let's call General Petraeus and set this up.)
Hey, it's just a story.
Directed by George Mount
Seattle Shakespeare Company's Wooden O Productions
Fisher Pavilion, Seattle Center
Seattle, WA
July 27, 2008
1. Feud shortage in war-torn Verona. When it comes to re-imagining Romeo and Juliet, it seems like you can't do the feud thing. Does anyone have feuds anymore? Either way, people thinking of Appalachian hillbillies arguing over inter-family marriage or ownership of a pig or whatever hardly provides logical entry into Shakespeare's tragedy; it's a bit silly. We want a more realistic conflict, something that would really drive the two sides, the Montagues and the Capulets, apart. Racial bigotry; that's been done. Religious animosity; done. So, with a nod to modernization and realistic enmity, the Seattle Shakespeare Company's Wooden O Productions (an unwieldy company name that had to result from a merger) production of Romeo and Juliet gives us war – in an unnamed war-torn country (think Iraq or the Balkans), the Capulets are the civilian population at odds with an occupying military force (Montagues), in this case a squadron of U.N. peacekeepers.
The set design establishes the vision: entrances to two ravaged buildings are separated by a blue and white U.N. checkpoint barrier. Both buildings look burned out and pockmarked by shrapnel or bullets, rubble strewn in front of them. Costume design follows suit – the Montague side dresses in camouflage and olive drab with blue U.N. berets; the Capulets in civilian clothes reminiscent of some middle-eastern or Aegean culture. (I had a brief discussion with Amy Fleetwood, who played Lady Capulet, about where Wooden O was setting the production. "We're not sure," she said. Nor is it clear what religion the civilians are practicing. Fleetwood indicated that the ambiguity was intentional.)
This setting demands a very interesting character/casting approach. The ostensible authority in Romeo and Juliet is Prince Escalus, but he's neutral. If you have a military unit trying to maintain control over a local citizenry rife with insurgent opposition, the Prince, as a local, would naturally be in the Capulet camp, probably opposed to the military. That doesn't really fit his lines. Or the situation. So director George Mount combines the Montague/Prince characters, making them one. Now "Prince" Montague (played by David Quicksall) is in charge but attached to the military side, and in the opening scene when two Capulet servants get in a tiff with armed peacekeeping soldiers and the imbroglio is escalated by Tybalt, it makes perfect sense when a general shows up to demand that everyone stand down. There are creaks – Escalus's line about "neighbor-stained steel" fails to reflect a battle between locals and outsiders, but what the heck. It's tougher at the end, when the Prince shows up to castigate both the Montagues and the Capulets ("all are punished!"), then makes an awkward transition that reminds us that he IS a Montague and father of Romeo.
2. All the world's a stage. I felt a deeper consequence to the production vision, though, than this particular melding of characters. In the play, the feud between Capulets and Montagues is personal, an "ancient grudge" (a line edited out of Wooden O's brief prologue) between two families. Mount's choice makes the conflict more impersonal, more intransigent. In this case there is no ancient grudge, only an imposed will on one side and a legitimate fury on the other. Shakespeare's play suggests love, or the tragic aftermath of Romeo and Juliet's, can heal the festering wounds of a private feud. Wooden O suggests this love can heal the wounds of savage international politics. Really? Perhaps what we need in Iraq is a swinging singles Saturday, when the daughters of Muqtada al-Sadr's followers can date American servicemen. Surely love will follow, then intense anger, and no doubt peace will reign. (Let's call General Petraeus and set this up.)
Hey, it's just a story.
3. This man's army. I loved Mercutio (Taylor Maxwell) as a grunt. The swagger, the self-confidence, the sardonic humor in the face of death; there's a lot of Mercutio that matches up well with our image of the soldier. Mount casts Kate Parker as Benvolio, and she's good, easy with the language, earnest in the right spots. This casting calls attention to the modern co-ed army and adds a layer to the difference between Romeo, Benvolio, and Mercutio. (Benvolio translates as "well-wisher" or "peacemaker," not only a good description of Benvolio's frequent position in the play, but one that fits nicely with the nurturing role we associate with women.) I think it might have emphasized the intensity of the conflict, though, if all the U.N. (Montague) forces had been played by males. Still, the discomfort of having a soldier secretly dating a 13-year-old townie is already in place, especially in light of the indictment of PFC Steven Green for the 2006 rape of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, for which federal prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
I've alluded to real-world parallels to Mount's vision for Romeo and Juliet a number of times now. Curiously, they all occurred to me after the fact, not during the production. Mount's is a production content to make its points subtlely; it is neither polemic nor propaganda, a result in part of the ambiguous setting. There are moments during which the production is uneven, when moments are rushed through without fully realizing their own implications, when actors don't quite raise themselves up to the production's bar, when design choices are interfered with by Shakespeare's text. But in the end, this Romeo and Juliet is one I'll probably remember because it attempted, often successfully, to place the story on a world stage.
Logged by Randall
Picture: Hana Lass as Juliet, John Farage as Friar Laurence, Michael Place as Romeo in Romeo and Juliet.
I've alluded to real-world parallels to Mount's vision for Romeo and Juliet a number of times now. Curiously, they all occurred to me after the fact, not during the production. Mount's is a production content to make its points subtlely; it is neither polemic nor propaganda, a result in part of the ambiguous setting. There are moments during which the production is uneven, when moments are rushed through without fully realizing their own implications, when actors don't quite raise themselves up to the production's bar, when design choices are interfered with by Shakespeare's text. But in the end, this Romeo and Juliet is one I'll probably remember because it attempted, often successfully, to place the story on a world stage.
Logged by Randall
Picture: Hana Lass as Juliet, John Farage as Friar Laurence, Michael Place as Romeo in Romeo and Juliet.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
RE: 1 Henry IV - Identities
Self-ish philosophers,
If I read Gil right, the identity of the self is an elusive quality in 1 Henry IV. Henry's self is buried in his public "office of authority." The line I pointed to, in which the King suggests he will reveal his true self, is in Gil's reading simply a moment when Henry unveils a different public face, one that is "mighty and to be feared" instead of the one he describes as "smooth as oil, soft as young down." No wonder kings adopt the royal "we"; they are a variety of personae, depending on the dictates of the moment.
So I agree with Gil, but it begs an interesting question. Henry's lines create a clear parallel with Hal's "I will be myself" moment. Is Hal's revealed persona, then, not his true self? Does he have one? Perhaps what he's referring to when he compares himself to the sun, covered for a moment by "base contagious clouds" only to reveal himself when they pass, is also an adopted persona. This would certainly be borne out by one reading of the line "I will imitate the sun" (my italics). So, who is Hal?
I begin to wonder if the "self" exercise has meaning, or if, as my car of criticism careens off the road, I'm just stepping on the gas? So let me put the question in context a bit. Lately, I've been reading a little late Tudor drama, specifically Udall's Roister Doister and somebody's Gammer Gurton's Needle. Editors for both indicate that the plays "illustrate the increasing influence of humanism." On the one hand, humanism refers to a return to the study of Latin and Greek texts, and more specifically the adoption of classical style and structure in drama. In addition, though, comes emphases on the arts, human experience, and the innate dignity of the self or individual. So, as we move through the 1590s and Shakespeare's history plays, where is this humanist self in chronicle drama?
Or more specifically, what is self? For Shakespeare? The suggestion here is that, pre-humanism, the self is subordinated to such things as predestination, codes of conduct like chivalry and honor, and what else? Well, the most interesting implication in Gil's argument is "Poetry."
"'Anti-poet' Hotspur," he writes, "is the most poetic, and yet is farthest from Randall's call for exploration of the nature of identity." Are poetry and individual self, then, opposed? If so, why?
It would seem to me that a humanist view implies that there is something beneath the faces that we wear, whether poetry obscures it or not. I am reminded of the mime Marcel Marceau's famous exercise, "The Mask Maker," in which his character tries on a variety of faces before a mirror (or more metaphorically before a series of audiences), only to find at the end that he cannot remove the final mask. Marceau's sketch is pretty modernist; it assumes the self, but suggests we can be caught, finally, by our falsenesses and lose connection to who we really are. Clearly, neither Hal nor Henry (nor Falstaff, Hotspur) could even conceive of this sort of danger, as close as they are to medieval characters defined by deeds as opposed to values or any inner landscape. Rather, I wonder if they are Marceau's sketch in reverse, removing various "faces" from situation to situation until a nature is revealed.
One further note on Renaissance humanism. The Dutch humanist Erasmus (1466-1536) and Italian philosopher Machiavelli (1469-1527) both wrote pamphlets for princes, The Education of a Christian Prince and The Prince, respectively. Wikipedia compares the two, suggesting "Machiavelli stated that, to maintain control by political force, it is safer for a prince to be feared than loved; Erasmus, on the other hand, preferred for the prince to be loved and suggested that the prince needed a well-rounded education in order to govern justly and benevolently and avoid becoming a source of oppression." I find it interesting that in this summation of Machiavelli, we hear King Henry's lines ("I will from henceforth rather be myself/ Mighty and to be feared") and in the gloss on Erasmus, we see the definition of Hal ("a well-rounded education" toward just and benevolent rule). So, can we see the shift from Henry IV to Hal as the shift, metaphorically, from medieval value to Renaissance humanism?
Randall
If I read Gil right, the identity of the self is an elusive quality in 1 Henry IV. Henry's self is buried in his public "office of authority." The line I pointed to, in which the King suggests he will reveal his true self, is in Gil's reading simply a moment when Henry unveils a different public face, one that is "mighty and to be feared" instead of the one he describes as "smooth as oil, soft as young down." No wonder kings adopt the royal "we"; they are a variety of personae, depending on the dictates of the moment.
So I agree with Gil, but it begs an interesting question. Henry's lines create a clear parallel with Hal's "I will be myself" moment. Is Hal's revealed persona, then, not his true self? Does he have one? Perhaps what he's referring to when he compares himself to the sun, covered for a moment by "base contagious clouds" only to reveal himself when they pass, is also an adopted persona. This would certainly be borne out by one reading of the line "I will imitate the sun" (my italics). So, who is Hal?
I begin to wonder if the "self" exercise has meaning, or if, as my car of criticism careens off the road, I'm just stepping on the gas? So let me put the question in context a bit. Lately, I've been reading a little late Tudor drama, specifically Udall's Roister Doister and somebody's Gammer Gurton's Needle. Editors for both indicate that the plays "illustrate the increasing influence of humanism." On the one hand, humanism refers to a return to the study of Latin and Greek texts, and more specifically the adoption of classical style and structure in drama. In addition, though, comes emphases on the arts, human experience, and the innate dignity of the self or individual. So, as we move through the 1590s and Shakespeare's history plays, where is this humanist self in chronicle drama?
Or more specifically, what is self? For Shakespeare? The suggestion here is that, pre-humanism, the self is subordinated to such things as predestination, codes of conduct like chivalry and honor, and what else? Well, the most interesting implication in Gil's argument is "Poetry."
"'Anti-poet' Hotspur," he writes, "is the most poetic, and yet is farthest from Randall's call for exploration of the nature of identity." Are poetry and individual self, then, opposed? If so, why?
It would seem to me that a humanist view implies that there is something beneath the faces that we wear, whether poetry obscures it or not. I am reminded of the mime Marcel Marceau's famous exercise, "The Mask Maker," in which his character tries on a variety of faces before a mirror (or more metaphorically before a series of audiences), only to find at the end that he cannot remove the final mask. Marceau's sketch is pretty modernist; it assumes the self, but suggests we can be caught, finally, by our falsenesses and lose connection to who we really are. Clearly, neither Hal nor Henry (nor Falstaff, Hotspur) could even conceive of this sort of danger, as close as they are to medieval characters defined by deeds as opposed to values or any inner landscape. Rather, I wonder if they are Marceau's sketch in reverse, removing various "faces" from situation to situation until a nature is revealed.
One further note on Renaissance humanism. The Dutch humanist Erasmus (1466-1536) and Italian philosopher Machiavelli (1469-1527) both wrote pamphlets for princes, The Education of a Christian Prince and The Prince, respectively. Wikipedia compares the two, suggesting "Machiavelli stated that, to maintain control by political force, it is safer for a prince to be feared than loved; Erasmus, on the other hand, preferred for the prince to be loved and suggested that the prince needed a well-rounded education in order to govern justly and benevolently and avoid becoming a source of oppression." I find it interesting that in this summation of Machiavelli, we hear King Henry's lines ("I will from henceforth rather be myself/ Mighty and to be feared") and in the gloss on Erasmus, we see the definition of Hal ("a well-rounded education" toward just and benevolent rule). So, can we see the shift from Henry IV to Hal as the shift, metaphorically, from medieval value to Renaissance humanism?
Randall
Thursday, July 24, 2008
1 Henry IV - Identities
Welcome to the Henriad, part two,
What happens in a play which begins “no more”? (Please don’t evoke the “no way/ way” joke.) Well, of course … more! King Henry, our Bolingbroke, has ascended to Richard II’s throne (and the guilt of usurpation will follow until his son, King Henry V, attests “Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay,/ Who twice a day their withered hands hold up/ Toward heaven, to pardon blood” [Henry V, IV.i. 303-50]), after Northumberland, his son Harry Percy and others have supported an insurrection against Richard and his party, York, Carlisle, Scroop, etc.
Henry addresses his council with a state of the realm declaration: the antidote to such civil unrest is, of course, foreign war (“I am the war king, and I get to decide”).
"So shaken as we are, so wan with care,
Find we a time for frighted peace to pant
And breathe short-winded accents of new broils
To be commenc’d in strands afar remote.
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. Those opposed eyes,
Which, like the meteors of a troubled heaven,
All of one nature, of one substance bred,
Did lately meet in intestine shock
And furious close of civil butchery,
Shall now, in mutual well-beseeming ranks,
March all one way and be no more oppos’d
Against acquaintance, kindred, and allies." (I.i.1-16)
Listen to this blank verse with formal tropes. Though eight of the sixteen lines run on, the constructions are formal, carefully constructed, the syntax is thrice inversed in the opening period, the opening lines have alliterations, then assonance. The coda, “no more,” is thrice repeated. The figure of civil war—earth extended to lips daubing blood, hoofs trenching channels and bruising flower’ets—are metaphors that are grotesque in their extremity, and they coalesce in “civil butchery” evoking Montagues and Capulets. This is public speech, Henry being kingly, employing such rhetoric that will later empower his son to declaim “Once more into the breech, dear friends, once more;/ Or close the wall up with our English dead!” (Henry V, III.i.1-2). The speech is so political, so rhetorically composed that today we would automatically assume a committee of speech writers has generated it. There is no opportunity here to infer Henry’s identity. He is the office-of-king, using the royal “we” six times in the opening address. As public speech, it is so finished, so definitive, yet so ponderous. The irony, of course, is that “no more” lasts only 48 lines, when news of troubles in the North reverses public policy: “It seems then that the tidings of this broil/ Brake off our business for the Holy Land” (I.i.47-8).
Contrast this to Prince Hal’s soliloquy after some Boar’s Head chatter about sack, highway robbery, and the moon’s men, larded with fat jokes.
"I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humor of your idleness.
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wond’red at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him." (I.ii.199-207)
This is “personal” speech. Hal is talking to himself about himself, declaring not the state of the union, but describing his private, Machiavellian strategy. Not only does it begin with ‘I” rather than a royal “we,” it builds the extended simile, starting with a sun/son pun, and then explaining how and why the comparison will work. Still blank verse, four of the nine lines run on, but that is necessary to build the logic of the comparison. The last half of the whole soliloquy unpacks the trope, connecting point-by-point the beclouded sun to the loose-behaving son, until he “pay the debt I never promised.”
To me the contrast of public to personal is striking. I hope we will return to Hal in our discussion, but this soliloquy fires the first round of individualism, ironic because Hal is confessing that he is playing a role, though that role beclouds some hidden self, as yet unrevealed. Soliloquy is a convention that suggests the audience can accept as truth what is said uninfluenced by the tactics of conversation, but I hope we can also test whether Hal’s asserted self itself can be trusted.
Preceding the “I know you all” declaration, Hal has been exchanging insults and all-boys-together badinage with (Sir) Jack Falstaff, who riffs on his vocation of highway robbery:
“Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not us that are squires of the night’s body be called thieves of the day’s beauty. Let us be Diana’s foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon, and let men say we be men of good government, being govern’d, as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal” (I.ii.22-9).
This is, I say with trepidation, prose. Trepidation, alas, because as a teacher if I would point this out to a class, I would always have a dozen students who would thereafter insist that any one who spoke prose was eo ipso lower class (and it didn’t help to tell them that John Stuart Mill was shocked to discover he had been speaking in prose all his life). Forty-five percent of 1 Henry IV is in prose. Falstaff’s utterance is filled with similes, word play, puns, repetition and variation, and sheer joy in talk. It is not just prose that separates Falstaff from King Henry. Though a denizen of taverns he is still a knight of the realm, and he will be selected to captain a company of foot soldiers in the Battle of Shrewsbury. But what separates much of Falstaff from Henry’s ponderous conceit about the blood-soaked earth is exuberance, joix de vivre. Identity? Yes, I think so.
But Falstaff is always putting on a show. When he is claiming he was attacked by two, no four, no seven men in buckram (after Hal has reminded him he had first said “two”), he is performing to amuse the audience. Even when he stabs Percy’s corpse and claims his own valor, it’s just a little show for Hal’s sake. He has been, after all, lying on the ground within ear-, and eye-, shot of Hal’s victory in combat and the epitaph Hal bestows on the fallen Hotspur. And when Falstaff rises and stabs Hotspur, he intentionally does it in the groin, not something I like to think about, but clearly not a mortal wound. Thus, he knows Hal knows he is just having a little fun, a Hawkeye Pierce offering a comic interlude at the peak of the horror of war. We must return to Falstaff’s catechism on honor before we finish our discussion, but I think Falstaff may be “himself” if we allow that he is always at play, and such play may allow him to avoid facing the truth about himself.
Lastly, Hotspur. Nothing fancy for him:
"I had rather hear a brazen canstick turn’d,
Or a dry wheel grate on the axle-tree,
And that would set my teeth nothing an edge,
Nothing so much as mincing poetry," (III.i.129-132)
a surprising declaration for Hotspur who belongs in the tradition of chivalric Romance. It recalls Theseus’s Platonic theory:
"And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name." (Midsummer Night's Dream, V.i.14-17)
Theseus also dismisses lovers and fairies, but soon greets midnight with “Lovers, to bed; ‘tis almost fairy time." Similarly, Hotspur dismisses his ally Owen Glendower:
"O, he is as tedious
As a tired horse, a railing wife;
Worse than a smoky house. I had rather live
With cheese and garlic in a windmill far
Than feed on cates and have him talk to me
In any summer house in Christendom." (III.i.158-163)
I could choose almost anything Hotspur says and it would illustrate how he summons up marvelous terse similes in order to make his case both precisely and tediously, given he almost always makes his point four or five times. Think of his unstoppable account of the “popinjay” sent from court to (legitimately) claim Hotspur’s prisoners in the name of the king—40 lines without a breath—or his own dying words:
"But thoughts, the slaves of life, and life, time’s fool,
And time, that takes survey of all the world,
Must have a stop. " (V.iv.81-3)
(Frye notes the Folio reading of 81 is “But thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool,” closer to the heart of tragic vision.)
One of us must address his “By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap,/ To pluck bright honor from the pale-fac’d moon.” But my point is that, of these four, “anti-poet” Hotspur is the most poetic, and yet he is farthest from Randall’s call for exploration of the nature of identity. King Henry is public, the expression of the office of authority. Prince Harry claims a disguised self, apparently fully-formed but unrevealed. Falstaff, the comic hero, may have an identity, but because he is always performing, we must look, perhaps, to his catechism against honor to discover that his core identity is consistent with his repudiation of all values hostile to life. And the most vivid character, Hotspur, impetuous, passionate, “heroic” could be the most attractive, yet he has least identity, made up as he is of the now-lost values of chivalric Romance, devoted to “honor,” which is a value in service of death. His true epitaph is spoken by his uncle Worcester:
“[My nephew’s trespass] hath the excuse of youth and heat of blood,
And an adopted name of privilege—
A hare-brained Hotspur, governed by a spleen." (V.ii.17-19)
See? I have called monsters from the vasty deep,
Gil
What happens in a play which begins “no more”? (Please don’t evoke the “no way/ way” joke.) Well, of course … more! King Henry, our Bolingbroke, has ascended to Richard II’s throne (and the guilt of usurpation will follow until his son, King Henry V, attests “Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay,/ Who twice a day their withered hands hold up/ Toward heaven, to pardon blood” [Henry V, IV.i. 303-50]), after Northumberland, his son Harry Percy and others have supported an insurrection against Richard and his party, York, Carlisle, Scroop, etc.
Henry addresses his council with a state of the realm declaration: the antidote to such civil unrest is, of course, foreign war (“I am the war king, and I get to decide”).
"So shaken as we are, so wan with care,
Find we a time for frighted peace to pant
And breathe short-winded accents of new broils
To be commenc’d in strands afar remote.
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. Those opposed eyes,
Which, like the meteors of a troubled heaven,
All of one nature, of one substance bred,
Did lately meet in intestine shock
And furious close of civil butchery,
Shall now, in mutual well-beseeming ranks,
March all one way and be no more oppos’d
Against acquaintance, kindred, and allies." (I.i.1-16)
Listen to this blank verse with formal tropes. Though eight of the sixteen lines run on, the constructions are formal, carefully constructed, the syntax is thrice inversed in the opening period, the opening lines have alliterations, then assonance. The coda, “no more,” is thrice repeated. The figure of civil war—earth extended to lips daubing blood, hoofs trenching channels and bruising flower’ets—are metaphors that are grotesque in their extremity, and they coalesce in “civil butchery” evoking Montagues and Capulets. This is public speech, Henry being kingly, employing such rhetoric that will later empower his son to declaim “Once more into the breech, dear friends, once more;/ Or close the wall up with our English dead!” (Henry V, III.i.1-2). The speech is so political, so rhetorically composed that today we would automatically assume a committee of speech writers has generated it. There is no opportunity here to infer Henry’s identity. He is the office-of-king, using the royal “we” six times in the opening address. As public speech, it is so finished, so definitive, yet so ponderous. The irony, of course, is that “no more” lasts only 48 lines, when news of troubles in the North reverses public policy: “It seems then that the tidings of this broil/ Brake off our business for the Holy Land” (I.i.47-8).
Contrast this to Prince Hal’s soliloquy after some Boar’s Head chatter about sack, highway robbery, and the moon’s men, larded with fat jokes.
"I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humor of your idleness.
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wond’red at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him." (I.ii.199-207)
This is “personal” speech. Hal is talking to himself about himself, declaring not the state of the union, but describing his private, Machiavellian strategy. Not only does it begin with ‘I” rather than a royal “we,” it builds the extended simile, starting with a sun/son pun, and then explaining how and why the comparison will work. Still blank verse, four of the nine lines run on, but that is necessary to build the logic of the comparison. The last half of the whole soliloquy unpacks the trope, connecting point-by-point the beclouded sun to the loose-behaving son, until he “pay the debt I never promised.”
To me the contrast of public to personal is striking. I hope we will return to Hal in our discussion, but this soliloquy fires the first round of individualism, ironic because Hal is confessing that he is playing a role, though that role beclouds some hidden self, as yet unrevealed. Soliloquy is a convention that suggests the audience can accept as truth what is said uninfluenced by the tactics of conversation, but I hope we can also test whether Hal’s asserted self itself can be trusted.
Preceding the “I know you all” declaration, Hal has been exchanging insults and all-boys-together badinage with (Sir) Jack Falstaff, who riffs on his vocation of highway robbery:
“Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not us that are squires of the night’s body be called thieves of the day’s beauty. Let us be Diana’s foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon, and let men say we be men of good government, being govern’d, as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal” (I.ii.22-9).
This is, I say with trepidation, prose. Trepidation, alas, because as a teacher if I would point this out to a class, I would always have a dozen students who would thereafter insist that any one who spoke prose was eo ipso lower class (and it didn’t help to tell them that John Stuart Mill was shocked to discover he had been speaking in prose all his life). Forty-five percent of 1 Henry IV is in prose. Falstaff’s utterance is filled with similes, word play, puns, repetition and variation, and sheer joy in talk. It is not just prose that separates Falstaff from King Henry. Though a denizen of taverns he is still a knight of the realm, and he will be selected to captain a company of foot soldiers in the Battle of Shrewsbury. But what separates much of Falstaff from Henry’s ponderous conceit about the blood-soaked earth is exuberance, joix de vivre. Identity? Yes, I think so.
But Falstaff is always putting on a show. When he is claiming he was attacked by two, no four, no seven men in buckram (after Hal has reminded him he had first said “two”), he is performing to amuse the audience. Even when he stabs Percy’s corpse and claims his own valor, it’s just a little show for Hal’s sake. He has been, after all, lying on the ground within ear-, and eye-, shot of Hal’s victory in combat and the epitaph Hal bestows on the fallen Hotspur. And when Falstaff rises and stabs Hotspur, he intentionally does it in the groin, not something I like to think about, but clearly not a mortal wound. Thus, he knows Hal knows he is just having a little fun, a Hawkeye Pierce offering a comic interlude at the peak of the horror of war. We must return to Falstaff’s catechism on honor before we finish our discussion, but I think Falstaff may be “himself” if we allow that he is always at play, and such play may allow him to avoid facing the truth about himself.
Lastly, Hotspur. Nothing fancy for him:
"I had rather hear a brazen canstick turn’d,
Or a dry wheel grate on the axle-tree,
And that would set my teeth nothing an edge,
Nothing so much as mincing poetry," (III.i.129-132)
a surprising declaration for Hotspur who belongs in the tradition of chivalric Romance. It recalls Theseus’s Platonic theory:
"And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name." (Midsummer Night's Dream, V.i.14-17)
Theseus also dismisses lovers and fairies, but soon greets midnight with “Lovers, to bed; ‘tis almost fairy time." Similarly, Hotspur dismisses his ally Owen Glendower:
"O, he is as tedious
As a tired horse, a railing wife;
Worse than a smoky house. I had rather live
With cheese and garlic in a windmill far
Than feed on cates and have him talk to me
In any summer house in Christendom." (III.i.158-163)
I could choose almost anything Hotspur says and it would illustrate how he summons up marvelous terse similes in order to make his case both precisely and tediously, given he almost always makes his point four or five times. Think of his unstoppable account of the “popinjay” sent from court to (legitimately) claim Hotspur’s prisoners in the name of the king—40 lines without a breath—or his own dying words:
"But thoughts, the slaves of life, and life, time’s fool,
And time, that takes survey of all the world,
Must have a stop. " (V.iv.81-3)
(Frye notes the Folio reading of 81 is “But thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool,” closer to the heart of tragic vision.)
One of us must address his “By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap,/ To pluck bright honor from the pale-fac’d moon.” But my point is that, of these four, “anti-poet” Hotspur is the most poetic, and yet he is farthest from Randall’s call for exploration of the nature of identity. King Henry is public, the expression of the office of authority. Prince Harry claims a disguised self, apparently fully-formed but unrevealed. Falstaff, the comic hero, may have an identity, but because he is always performing, we must look, perhaps, to his catechism against honor to discover that his core identity is consistent with his repudiation of all values hostile to life. And the most vivid character, Hotspur, impetuous, passionate, “heroic” could be the most attractive, yet he has least identity, made up as he is of the now-lost values of chivalric Romance, devoted to “honor,” which is a value in service of death. His true epitaph is spoken by his uncle Worcester:
“[My nephew’s trespass] hath the excuse of youth and heat of blood,
And an adopted name of privilege—
A hare-brained Hotspur, governed by a spleen." (V.ii.17-19)
See? I have called monsters from the vasty deep,
Gil
Sunday, July 20, 2008
1 Henry IV - Opening Remarks
Shakespeareans,
Ernst opened our Midsummer Night's Dream conversation by suggesting that Shakespeare might have reached some sort of maturity in that play. Certainly the same can be said of 1 Henry IV. As in Midsummer Night's Dream, in 1 Henry IV we have three distinct character types ― Henry's court, Hotspur's rebels, and the rabble at the Inn. Within each of these groups are individuals so deftly drawn, both in terms of language and character, each could probably support a spin-off play of his own. (Oh, that's right, two of them do, but I wish Shakespeare had gotten around to The Tragedy of Young Harry Percy or a heroic Rebel Without a Pause: Tales of Owen Glendower or a sit-com simply called Poins!)
The plot is remarkable, not only because Shakespeare so easily endows historical event with narrative momentum here, but also because he's built a structure in which each scene seems to echo or create intriguing juxtapositions with the ones that precede and follow it. We find Henry in Act I, scene 1, preparing a battle overseas; in scene 2, we find Hal preparing for a different "battle," the robbery of wealthy travelers. Act 2, scenes 2-4 juxtapose Hal and Hotspur. And so on, creating a complex system of foils against which characters are shaped and judged.
In addition, 1 Henry IV is a play in which Shakespeare is making forceful statements, about governance, about heroism, about war. I hope we can discuss these and others that you have noticed in the coming weeks. To get us off to a decent start (I hope), I offer the following questions:
1. What do the words tell us? We secondary school English teachers like to focus on motif. We hand out Macbeth and mention that Shakespeare uses the words "blood" and "bloody" 35 times and the word "night" 22 times in the play. "What might that suggest?" we coyly ask. Mount Ararat High School takes it one step further; students have prepared "word frequency lists" for many of the plays. Here we are at 1 Henry IV, and I notice that the words "honor" and "honorable" combined occur 27 times, and the words "shame" and "ashamed" 14 times. ( You can use Shakespeare Searched to find out who says what and when.) Checking my observational sense of emerging motif against Mount Ararat's lists, I find our old pals "blood" and "night" occur 23 and 18 times, respectively. And just for good measure, there's some talk of "peace." Fifteen times.
This is a close reading approach to asking what themes emerge for you. But I'd like to take that further. Shakespeare has a lot to say about honor as well as, less directly, chivalry and valor. Given the nature of his hero, the hero's foils, the motifs and subsequent themes, and implications of the play, what can an audience be expected to take away from 1 Henry IV about honor, chivalry, valor, shame, and heroism. Those are my words. Give me your words.
2. Should George Bush read 1 Henry IV? With every history play we've read so far, I've had a moment of historical conjunction, during which the play seemed to comment on or reflect something in current or recent politics. I'm a little stunned that the tales of medieval kings can be so applicable to our modern world. Take, for example, Worcester's comment:
"We of the off'ring side
Must keep aloof from strict arbitrament,
And stop all sight-holes, every loop from whence
The eye of reason may pry in upon us." (4.1.72-75)
In the margin of my Folger Shakespeare Library edition of the play, I have written that because they have started the war ("the off'ring side"), Worcester and his cohorts are concerned about how their action, which may be neither just nor lawful, must be politically controlled so that it cannot be questioned. Specifically, I have noted: "Iraq?" What moments in the play, for you, have most directly informed or spoken to or brought illumination to our own political times?
3. Is Shakespeare a misogynist? That should set some of your teeth on edge. 1 Henry IV is a guys' play. Women don't appear until Act 2, scene 3 and they're out of the play by the end of Act 3. But when women are mentioned, it seems that the gender is insulted as often as a specific individual. Hotspur tells his wife, "constant you are,/ But yet a woman," explaining why he won't let her in on his plans (2.3.114-115). And he makes a back-handed stab later when he describes his own inability to hold his tongue as "a woman's fault" (3.1.249). We have Glendower's general impression that women are emotional basket-cases prone to insanity. And Falstaff's all-encompassing insult: "Go to, you are a woman" (3.3.65). So, is this just Shakespeare capturing the attitude of accurately drawn military males? Or do we perceive some dissonance here given the more lively, self-determined women of previous plays? Can these characters' slurs be extended to Shakespeare, or chalked up to Elizabethan (wait a minute …) attitudes?
4. Can I see some I.D., please? One of my favorite echoes in the play is Hal's comment (my italics):
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at." (1.2.204-208)
This is followed in Act 1, scene 3 by King Henry's declaration, "But be sure/ I will from henceforth rather be myself,/ Mighty and to be feared" (1.3.4-6).
So here we have two guys, a father and son, both feeling like they are or have been playing a role from which each, a "self," will soon emerge. What then is the nature of identity in this play? How do we feel about Hal's argument that his deliberate mucking about with his reputation will allow him to be greater because of his greater ascension? And, given that we've grown up in a 20th- and 21st-century America where consumerism (consumer as valid identity), cultural narcissism and self-infatuation are a way of life, how do we differentiate between our own mythic value of individualism and what Shakespeare might have thought of the concept of self?
5. Long live/down with the king? In the Thomas of Woodstock conversation, Ernst made the comment that "Shakespeare isn't in the habit of attacking either the British polity or the reigning royals." I'm wondering about the level of royal nervousness here. While this may have been a hotter question with Richard II ― reigning foolish king vs. popular usurper ― what would have been the contemporary view of these kings and their challengers? Is Shakespeare taking risks here by portraying them one way or another? Does the hagiography of Hal/Henry V distract us (or them) from a depiction that might ruffle royal feathers? Would their feathers have been ruffled by this play?
6. Will you be my Naber? You're thinking about directing this play. Soon. Where do you start? Are you worried about its being a history play? What specific difficulties might that entail? In what ways might you cut it? In what ways might you contemporize it, to give it modern resonance? How might your experience of recently read/performed/directed Shakespeare history plays inform your choices?
That's enough. Just for fun here are my two favorite words from the play: tradefallen (4.2.30) and enfeoffed (3.2.171). Methinks many Americans, in these difficult economic times, are tradefallen. Yet, now that President Bush has enfeoffed them with 600 dollars, everything will be fine.
Yours,
Randall
Ernst opened our Midsummer Night's Dream conversation by suggesting that Shakespeare might have reached some sort of maturity in that play. Certainly the same can be said of 1 Henry IV. As in Midsummer Night's Dream, in 1 Henry IV we have three distinct character types ― Henry's court, Hotspur's rebels, and the rabble at the Inn. Within each of these groups are individuals so deftly drawn, both in terms of language and character, each could probably support a spin-off play of his own. (Oh, that's right, two of them do, but I wish Shakespeare had gotten around to The Tragedy of Young Harry Percy or a heroic Rebel Without a Pause: Tales of Owen Glendower or a sit-com simply called Poins!)
The plot is remarkable, not only because Shakespeare so easily endows historical event with narrative momentum here, but also because he's built a structure in which each scene seems to echo or create intriguing juxtapositions with the ones that precede and follow it. We find Henry in Act I, scene 1, preparing a battle overseas; in scene 2, we find Hal preparing for a different "battle," the robbery of wealthy travelers. Act 2, scenes 2-4 juxtapose Hal and Hotspur. And so on, creating a complex system of foils against which characters are shaped and judged.
In addition, 1 Henry IV is a play in which Shakespeare is making forceful statements, about governance, about heroism, about war. I hope we can discuss these and others that you have noticed in the coming weeks. To get us off to a decent start (I hope), I offer the following questions:
1. What do the words tell us? We secondary school English teachers like to focus on motif. We hand out Macbeth and mention that Shakespeare uses the words "blood" and "bloody" 35 times and the word "night" 22 times in the play. "What might that suggest?" we coyly ask. Mount Ararat High School takes it one step further; students have prepared "word frequency lists" for many of the plays. Here we are at 1 Henry IV, and I notice that the words "honor" and "honorable" combined occur 27 times, and the words "shame" and "ashamed" 14 times. ( You can use Shakespeare Searched to find out who says what and when.) Checking my observational sense of emerging motif against Mount Ararat's lists, I find our old pals "blood" and "night" occur 23 and 18 times, respectively. And just for good measure, there's some talk of "peace." Fifteen times.
This is a close reading approach to asking what themes emerge for you. But I'd like to take that further. Shakespeare has a lot to say about honor as well as, less directly, chivalry and valor. Given the nature of his hero, the hero's foils, the motifs and subsequent themes, and implications of the play, what can an audience be expected to take away from 1 Henry IV about honor, chivalry, valor, shame, and heroism. Those are my words. Give me your words.
2. Should George Bush read 1 Henry IV? With every history play we've read so far, I've had a moment of historical conjunction, during which the play seemed to comment on or reflect something in current or recent politics. I'm a little stunned that the tales of medieval kings can be so applicable to our modern world. Take, for example, Worcester's comment:
"We of the off'ring side
Must keep aloof from strict arbitrament,
And stop all sight-holes, every loop from whence
The eye of reason may pry in upon us." (4.1.72-75)
In the margin of my Folger Shakespeare Library edition of the play, I have written that because they have started the war ("the off'ring side"), Worcester and his cohorts are concerned about how their action, which may be neither just nor lawful, must be politically controlled so that it cannot be questioned. Specifically, I have noted: "Iraq?" What moments in the play, for you, have most directly informed or spoken to or brought illumination to our own political times?
3. Is Shakespeare a misogynist? That should set some of your teeth on edge. 1 Henry IV is a guys' play. Women don't appear until Act 2, scene 3 and they're out of the play by the end of Act 3. But when women are mentioned, it seems that the gender is insulted as often as a specific individual. Hotspur tells his wife, "constant you are,/ But yet a woman," explaining why he won't let her in on his plans (2.3.114-115). And he makes a back-handed stab later when he describes his own inability to hold his tongue as "a woman's fault" (3.1.249). We have Glendower's general impression that women are emotional basket-cases prone to insanity. And Falstaff's all-encompassing insult: "Go to, you are a woman" (3.3.65). So, is this just Shakespeare capturing the attitude of accurately drawn military males? Or do we perceive some dissonance here given the more lively, self-determined women of previous plays? Can these characters' slurs be extended to Shakespeare, or chalked up to Elizabethan (wait a minute …) attitudes?
4. Can I see some I.D., please? One of my favorite echoes in the play is Hal's comment (my italics):
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at." (1.2.204-208)
This is followed in Act 1, scene 3 by King Henry's declaration, "But be sure/ I will from henceforth rather be myself,/ Mighty and to be feared" (1.3.4-6).
So here we have two guys, a father and son, both feeling like they are or have been playing a role from which each, a "self," will soon emerge. What then is the nature of identity in this play? How do we feel about Hal's argument that his deliberate mucking about with his reputation will allow him to be greater because of his greater ascension? And, given that we've grown up in a 20th- and 21st-century America where consumerism (consumer as valid identity), cultural narcissism and self-infatuation are a way of life, how do we differentiate between our own mythic value of individualism and what Shakespeare might have thought of the concept of self?
5. Long live/down with the king? In the Thomas of Woodstock conversation, Ernst made the comment that "Shakespeare isn't in the habit of attacking either the British polity or the reigning royals." I'm wondering about the level of royal nervousness here. While this may have been a hotter question with Richard II ― reigning foolish king vs. popular usurper ― what would have been the contemporary view of these kings and their challengers? Is Shakespeare taking risks here by portraying them one way or another? Does the hagiography of Hal/Henry V distract us (or them) from a depiction that might ruffle royal feathers? Would their feathers have been ruffled by this play?
6. Will you be my Naber? You're thinking about directing this play. Soon. Where do you start? Are you worried about its being a history play? What specific difficulties might that entail? In what ways might you cut it? In what ways might you contemporize it, to give it modern resonance? How might your experience of recently read/performed/directed Shakespeare history plays inform your choices?
That's enough. Just for fun here are my two favorite words from the play: tradefallen (4.2.30) and enfeoffed (3.2.171). Methinks many Americans, in these difficult economic times, are tradefallen. Yet, now that President Bush has enfeoffed them with 600 dollars, everything will be fine.
Yours,
Randall
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Midsummer Night's Dream - Performance Log (July 2008)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Directed by Mark Rucker (though rumor says he left town before he blocked and Festival Artistic Director Bill Rauch stepped in)
Angus Bowmer Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival
Ashland Oregon
July 10, 2008
This is my third Midsummer Night's Dream at Ashland. In 1961 we saw it directed by B. Iden Payne. He had been central in Shakespeare production since 1913, the director of Stratford’s Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, head of theatre at Carnegie Tech and University of Texas, etc. We remember a delightful comedy in Elizabethan costume, probably a descendant of Granville-Barker without Mendelssohn, with the whole text. I’ve previously mentioned the lisping Helena (‘Demetweeus’) and the animated ass’s head, Disneyesque, with long coy eyelashes.
Then, in 1998, we saw another, directed by Penny Metropulos, which may have been a faithful reproduction of Peter Brook’s white “handball court” show. The Ashland set was light blue, though a huge orange moon was projected at night. As in Brook, Titania’s bower was a bed raised on cables to the second doors-to-empty-space level. After the first act the fairies were ever-present, blue-gowned with red fright-wigs, version of Chinese property men, invisibly handing props to the mortals, etc. Thus, I have seen the two major strings of Twentieth Century Dreams.
This Ashland production is over the top, no holds barred, full of energy and color and surprise, unlike any Midsummer Night's Dream I’ve ever seen film or stage. Everything in it was new (or novel) except the lines. I noticed no cuts or additions, except some lines were sung, notably the last 67, from Puck’s “Now the hungry lion roars,” through Oberon’s fertility blessing, and finally, though obscured by rhythmic clapping for extended curtain call, Puck’s “If we shadows have offended.”
The (indoor) thrust stage opened with two halves of 30-foot arches with dozens of ceramic circles on them, arcing over two white vinyl overstuffed armchairs, the backs rising at least eight feet. Theseus, in a double-breasted ice-cream suit and shades, sat rigidly in one, Hippolyta in silky silver lamé in the other. His “Now fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour” was evenly delivered, even calculating. Ernst would have been disappointed in the dry rendition of the poetry. Hippolyta’s “Four nights will quickly dream away the time” was sensuous, squirming in her huge chair. Then off to the Egeus and Hermia business, now with perfect rhythms. I took several Will Shakespeare Experience questions to Ashland, one being my own attention to Hippolyta’s response to Theseus siding with Egeus against his “chattel” daughter. Theseus then concludes “Come my Hippolyta?” but Hippolyta had crisply stood and exited behind the chairs, leaving Theseus, to pause, then address the empty chair: “What cheer, my love?” I couldn’t have asked for better.
After the court scene (exeunt chairs) those ceramic circles lit up with multicolored neon and onto the (big) stage drove a … Merry Prankster VW micro bus, headlights shining, and out tumbled the rude Mechanicals, tall and short, eclectic costume, Francis Flute played by a little middle-aged woman, leading to audience delight on her “Nay, faith, let not me play a woman. I have a beard coming.” We were in Oregon, but I suspect the resemblance of Ray Porter, as Bottom, to Ken Kesey was no accident. After the VW backed off stage, doing no set damage, the arches twisted into towers, neon starbursts filled the sky, and on came a … chorus line from Les Ballets Trokadero de Monte Carlo—flaming fairy fairies—in tutus and multicolored hair, and awaaay we go.
Both the passages Randall finds crucial to Titania’s strength were fine, uncut. Her “These are the forgeries of jealousy” was delivered with anger until she softened at “the moon, the governess of floods,” and Oberon was moved away from his harsh “Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania” greeting. Her “fairy land buys not the child of me” was lushly poetic, transported, tender. Despite the prancing fairies, none of this descended into farce. Bottom was not an oaf; he was sweet, naïve, enthusiastic.
The key question, what did I learn from a new production of a familiar play, probably came from the mortal lovers, scorned for 250 years. These four actors were sexual, hands-on, jealous, lustful, threatened, confused, sincere, passionate. The course of true love never did run less smooth. The “Athenian garb” Puck is sent to search for was white, white dusters over white blouses and shirts and trousers and skirts and lace stockings. During the mistakes of the night, more and more garments are discarded or ripped off until the boys were down to boxer shorts and the girls in pastel teddies. In some struggle poor Helena lost a strap and had a scene clad an unplanned Wonder Bra and a stocking around one ankle, though her garter belt tabs dangled interestingly around her thighs. No matter. The physicality merely punctuated the lines.
The only part that did not enhance my understanding—and pleasure—in this production was Puck, taller but really just another in the fairy chorus line. But then you remember that I own the part of Puck because once upon a time I won the part from Richard Chamberlain. Oh, well.
Then, being in Ashland, we were off to Coriolanus and Othello and an adaptation of The Comedy of Errors set somewhere west of the Pecos….
“No more,” quoth King Henry, and Gil, too.
Directed by Mark Rucker (though rumor says he left town before he blocked and Festival Artistic Director Bill Rauch stepped in)
Angus Bowmer Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival
Ashland Oregon
July 10, 2008
This is my third Midsummer Night's Dream at Ashland. In 1961 we saw it directed by B. Iden Payne. He had been central in Shakespeare production since 1913, the director of Stratford’s Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, head of theatre at Carnegie Tech and University of Texas, etc. We remember a delightful comedy in Elizabethan costume, probably a descendant of Granville-Barker without Mendelssohn, with the whole text. I’ve previously mentioned the lisping Helena (‘Demetweeus’) and the animated ass’s head, Disneyesque, with long coy eyelashes.
Then, in 1998, we saw another, directed by Penny Metropulos, which may have been a faithful reproduction of Peter Brook’s white “handball court” show. The Ashland set was light blue, though a huge orange moon was projected at night. As in Brook, Titania’s bower was a bed raised on cables to the second doors-to-empty-space level. After the first act the fairies were ever-present, blue-gowned with red fright-wigs, version of Chinese property men, invisibly handing props to the mortals, etc. Thus, I have seen the two major strings of Twentieth Century Dreams.
This Ashland production is over the top, no holds barred, full of energy and color and surprise, unlike any Midsummer Night's Dream I’ve ever seen film or stage. Everything in it was new (or novel) except the lines. I noticed no cuts or additions, except some lines were sung, notably the last 67, from Puck’s “Now the hungry lion roars,” through Oberon’s fertility blessing, and finally, though obscured by rhythmic clapping for extended curtain call, Puck’s “If we shadows have offended.”
The (indoor) thrust stage opened with two halves of 30-foot arches with dozens of ceramic circles on them, arcing over two white vinyl overstuffed armchairs, the backs rising at least eight feet. Theseus, in a double-breasted ice-cream suit and shades, sat rigidly in one, Hippolyta in silky silver lamé in the other. His “Now fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour” was evenly delivered, even calculating. Ernst would have been disappointed in the dry rendition of the poetry. Hippolyta’s “Four nights will quickly dream away the time” was sensuous, squirming in her huge chair. Then off to the Egeus and Hermia business, now with perfect rhythms. I took several Will Shakespeare Experience questions to Ashland, one being my own attention to Hippolyta’s response to Theseus siding with Egeus against his “chattel” daughter. Theseus then concludes “Come my Hippolyta?” but Hippolyta had crisply stood and exited behind the chairs, leaving Theseus, to pause, then address the empty chair: “What cheer, my love?” I couldn’t have asked for better.
After the court scene (exeunt chairs) those ceramic circles lit up with multicolored neon and onto the (big) stage drove a … Merry Prankster VW micro bus, headlights shining, and out tumbled the rude Mechanicals, tall and short, eclectic costume, Francis Flute played by a little middle-aged woman, leading to audience delight on her “Nay, faith, let not me play a woman. I have a beard coming.” We were in Oregon, but I suspect the resemblance of Ray Porter, as Bottom, to Ken Kesey was no accident. After the VW backed off stage, doing no set damage, the arches twisted into towers, neon starbursts filled the sky, and on came a … chorus line from Les Ballets Trokadero de Monte Carlo—flaming fairy fairies—in tutus and multicolored hair, and awaaay we go.
Both the passages Randall finds crucial to Titania’s strength were fine, uncut. Her “These are the forgeries of jealousy” was delivered with anger until she softened at “the moon, the governess of floods,” and Oberon was moved away from his harsh “Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania” greeting. Her “fairy land buys not the child of me” was lushly poetic, transported, tender. Despite the prancing fairies, none of this descended into farce. Bottom was not an oaf; he was sweet, naïve, enthusiastic.
The key question, what did I learn from a new production of a familiar play, probably came from the mortal lovers, scorned for 250 years. These four actors were sexual, hands-on, jealous, lustful, threatened, confused, sincere, passionate. The course of true love never did run less smooth. The “Athenian garb” Puck is sent to search for was white, white dusters over white blouses and shirts and trousers and skirts and lace stockings. During the mistakes of the night, more and more garments are discarded or ripped off until the boys were down to boxer shorts and the girls in pastel teddies. In some struggle poor Helena lost a strap and had a scene clad an unplanned Wonder Bra and a stocking around one ankle, though her garter belt tabs dangled interestingly around her thighs. No matter. The physicality merely punctuated the lines.
The only part that did not enhance my understanding—and pleasure—in this production was Puck, taller but really just another in the fairy chorus line. But then you remember that I own the part of Puck because once upon a time I won the part from Richard Chamberlain. Oh, well.
Then, being in Ashland, we were off to Coriolanus and Othello and an adaptation of The Comedy of Errors set somewhere west of the Pecos….
“No more,” quoth King Henry, and Gil, too.
photo: (above) Jeffrey King, Josiah Phillips, Ray Porter and U. Jonathan Toppo in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Photo by David Cooper.
Midsummer Night's Dream - Production History Review
Greeting, Dreamers,
OK. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is Shakespeare’s last play, or at least the play most recently “discovered.” But before you write in defense of Henry VIII or The Tempest, let me chat a while.
As with most of Shakespeare’s plays there is hardly a surviving record or comment on contemporary productions: there is only Dudley Carleton’s reference to seeing “a play of Robin goode-fellow” at court in 1604, a reference in Edward Sharpham’s play, The Fleire (1607): “Faith like Thisbe in the play a [sic] has almost killed himself with the scabbard,” and the differences between the quartos and the Folio. Jay Halio asserts “we can infer that it was revived fairly often and therefore quite popular,” citing a Folio stage direction at V.i.125, ‘Tawyer with a Trumpet before them,’ referring to an actor who was not in the King’s Men until after the first quarto of 1600. But after the restoration of the closed theatres in 1660, Midsummer Night’s Dream is virtually absent. I have just read Jay Halio, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Shakespeare in Performance, Manchester, 1994, and Trevor R. Griffiths, “Introduction” to Shakespeare in Performance: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Cambridge, 1996, and I’ll cherry pick some highlights without citation.
Midsummer Night's Dream, perhaps more than any other play, strayed or was detached from what we might consider the text as originally staged in 1595 or 1596 and more fully printed in the First Folio. There followed more than three hundred years of cutting, adaptation, editing, addition, bowdlerization (in Garrick and JC Smith’s opera, The Fairies in 1755, Puck gets Ariel’s line “Where the bee sucks, there lurk [sic] I” (what a relief for your students not to contemplate “suck” twice in one sentence, especially if they are aware of the printed long ‘s’ which sure looks like ‘f’), transformation into masques, opera and ballet (Mendelssohn’s overture was first used in 1833), much of it emphasizing spectacle (“a Chinese man and woman sing, six monkeys come from between the trees and dance, and two sopranos sing in parts a song summoning Hymen” in Elkanah Settle’s opera, The Fairy Queen, with music by Henry Purcell, 1692) or, in the 19th century, realism (worry about live rabbits in the woods for a moment). For most of these centuries, the fairies were played by children, with wings (I have an edition illustrated by Arthur Rackham (Grammercy Books, 1990) whose fairies have always formed my ‘default’ image). By Italian contralto Lucia Elizabeth Vestres’s production (1840), the fairies were winged, flying fairies and Madame Vestris played (sang?) the part of Oberon.
I see four obstacles evolving to prevent the realization of our wonderful play. Diffuse plotting with three or even four separate plots only partially intertwined created difficulties with dramatic coherence. Even a shadow of neoclassical Unities was threatened, and many of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century travesties reduced the play to The Fairy Queen (1692), A Fairy Tale (1763) or masques or afterpieces called Pyramus and Thisbe (1716, 1745). Our discussion of Puck showed that Shakespeare drew the fairies themselves from four different traditions.
Second, to oversimplify, after the Restoration we have the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, and there was “a growing skepticism in the late 17th century about the intervention of supernatural beings in everyday life” (Griffiths), and a shift toward realism made representation of the supernatural somehow outside the scope of production. Thus, opera and later ballet offered unrealistic conventions which could accommodate the supernatural. Consider this a play about fairies or, Harley Granville-Barker asks “is it not all meant to appear only as the fierce vexation of a dream?" But a decline in belief in magic, a growth of skepticism and empirical science are factors which contributed to a hostile intellectual climate. How can one represent fairies (or dreams or spirits or magical projections of human nature, especially adolescent behavior) with real actors on a stage, especially as theatre size, ingenious machinery, scenery, costuming, and eventually lighting evolved. Anti-supernatural critics also scorn ghosts in Hamlet or Macbeth.
Then, in the Nineteenth Century, again to oversimplify, Romanticism pervades. There is Romantic anti-theatrical prejudice. Ever seem a Wordsworth or Byron play? I have, I’m sorry to say. “Poetry and the stage do not agree together,” dictated Hazlett. The gothic and fantastic reappear. Author originality—inspiration—regain credit. But this atmosphere also invited realism. When the scene shifts to night in the woods, productions gave us romantically realistic scenery or wild landscapes. Shakespeare’s lines call for fairies who can sleep in an acorn cap. So the fairies were cast smaller and smaller. I’m relieved Samuel Phelps, 1853-61, and Charles Kean, 1856-59, didn’t think of Munchkins. And in mid-century there was a demand for authenticity. Madam Vestris not only had a master machinist with experience of flying fairies, she had an antiquary, JR Planche, as advisor. Midsummer Night's Dream starts with Theseus, Duke of Athens. Swell, but Charles Kean’s archeological exactitude necessitated changes because Periclean Athens was not a duchy, so Theseus is referred to as ‘Prince,’ the painted scenery began to include the Parthenon, and costumes were Athenian rather than whatever. All productions between 1840 and 1926, with the exception of eclectic costuming for Granville-Barker in 1914, were Athenian.
The production history of A Midsummer Night’s Dream may at least trace evolving perceptions. Vestres played Oberon and a girl played Puck, a tradition that continued throughout the nineteenth century. London’s huge Covent Garden required spectacle, and scene painters provided a long perspective of temples with the Acropolis towering in the distance, and forest scenes where all is sylvan and visionary. For Puck’s first appearance he/she rises up from the center stage trap riding on a mushroom. In Charles Kean’s 1856 production, eight-year-old Ellen Terry, perhaps the preeminent actress of the nineteenth century, played Puck, though for Kean the rest of the fairies were full-grown adults, with a final spectacle of "some ninety fairies tripping up and down the stairs of Theseus’s palace, waving bell-like lanterns while the fairy chorus sang Mendelssohn’s 'Through this house give glimmering light’.” By Augustin Daly’s 1888 production, Isadora Duncan in paper-maché wings was one of the dancing fairies, and in a review of a 1895 Daly production Bernard Shaw was especially harsh on Lillian Swain as Puck and criticized Daly for his persistent illusionism, which destroys rather than complements the effect of Shakespeare’s verse.
Lastly, both the Eighteenth century and the Nineteenth were crabbed by decorum, propriety, concerns with “warm ideas.” For 150 years, Lysander’s suggestion of a little pre-marital coziness with Hermia, II.ii.47.-70, “One heart, one bed, two bosoms, and one troth,” was edited or cut on grounds of ‘delicacy’ from Francis Gentleman [sic—ironically], 1764, until restored by Harley Granville-Barker, who, at last, in 1914, restored the full text. Notice: 1914! “The time was ripe, if not overripe, for reaction,” says Jay Halio.
The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries seem unable to trust the chorus of Henry V when he demands:
“let us…on your imaginary forces work…
Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’ th’ receiving earth;
For ‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,” (1.1.18, 19, 27-29)
as their productions embraced realism and spectacle. But the rebuttal to this is in our play. The Mechanicals gather in the wood to assign parts for “Pyramus and Thisbe,” and Quince notes that it will be hard to bring the moonlight into a chamber when Pyramus and Thisbe meet by moonlight. They immediately consult a calendar, an almanac, and find that indeed the moon shines the night of their performance, so they may leave a casement of the great chamber window open and the actual moon may shine in. But to assure the theatrical representation of moonshine, Robin Starveling, the Tailor, is assigned to come in with a thorn bush, a lantern, and a dog, to represent the man in the moon with his bush, dog, etc. And, of course, when “Pyramus and Thisby” is underway before the Athenian spectators and, ta da!, the theatre audience, too, Prologue says “By moonshine did these lovers think no scorn/ To meet at Ninus’ tomb, there, there to woo.” So how many moons are on the stage during the enactment of this little play? Give up? Three: the actual, literal, material moon shining in; the representational theatrical moon presented by the actor with his lantern, bush, and dog; and the metaphoric or archetypal moon evoked in the imagination of the audience. Archetypal? Everyone in the audience has myriad exposures to moonlight, and the language accesses this experience. The last is the most credible.
In Shakespeare the language evokes the images, until realistic scenes or costumes or, later, with film, the settings and scenes make the language redundant (the lush landscape in Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet filmed in Tuscany forces cuts in all those rich poetic descriptions of the scenes). So, if the Enlightenment actualists and the Romantic realists had just let themselves see the language, there would not have been a 300 year gap before A Midsummer Night’s Dream could emerge—revert?—to the wonderful balance among its three plots keeping dramatic tension between the rational and the irrational, the natural and the supernatural, time and timelessness, reality and illusion, the conscious and the dream, the forms of fairies and the nature of theatre.
In the Twentieth Century directors continued to use or be condemned for not using Mendelssohn and Athens or Elizabethan and folk, eclectic and new composition. In 1914 Granville-Barker directed the complete text (though he still had ballet); Bridges Adams mounted Midsummer Night's Dream eight times at Stratford and on tour between 1919 and 1934; Max Reinhardt made a glorious film (Mendelssohn, Jimmy Cagney as Bottom, Mickey Rooney screeching away as Puck, Victor Jory lurking disguised as a tree as Oberon); Tyrone Guthrie, a full-text, though Victorian, production at the Old Vic in 1937 (Ralph Richardson as Bottom); Peter Hall, in 1959, 62-63, staged in an Elizabethan great hall — all I suppose, evolving from Victorian, until Peter Brook blew it all open at Stratford, staging the play in a white box, with doors opening into space at the second level and musicians and fairies observing from a cat-walk at the top of the box. I have read detailed descriptions of the Brook, and it appears to be seminal, revolutionizing all subsequent Shakespeare production, creating "a blank page upon which imagination can play its tricks,” “allowing a concentration on the possibilities of the text where other more traditional stagings had been more limiting” (Griffiths, 69).
Gil
OK. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is Shakespeare’s last play, or at least the play most recently “discovered.” But before you write in defense of Henry VIII or The Tempest, let me chat a while.
As with most of Shakespeare’s plays there is hardly a surviving record or comment on contemporary productions: there is only Dudley Carleton’s reference to seeing “a play of Robin goode-fellow” at court in 1604, a reference in Edward Sharpham’s play, The Fleire (1607): “Faith like Thisbe in the play a [sic] has almost killed himself with the scabbard,” and the differences between the quartos and the Folio. Jay Halio asserts “we can infer that it was revived fairly often and therefore quite popular,” citing a Folio stage direction at V.i.125, ‘Tawyer with a Trumpet before them,’ referring to an actor who was not in the King’s Men until after the first quarto of 1600. But after the restoration of the closed theatres in 1660, Midsummer Night’s Dream is virtually absent. I have just read Jay Halio, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Shakespeare in Performance, Manchester, 1994, and Trevor R. Griffiths, “Introduction” to Shakespeare in Performance: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Cambridge, 1996, and I’ll cherry pick some highlights without citation.
Midsummer Night's Dream, perhaps more than any other play, strayed or was detached from what we might consider the text as originally staged in 1595 or 1596 and more fully printed in the First Folio. There followed more than three hundred years of cutting, adaptation, editing, addition, bowdlerization (in Garrick and JC Smith’s opera, The Fairies in 1755, Puck gets Ariel’s line “Where the bee sucks, there lurk [sic] I” (what a relief for your students not to contemplate “suck” twice in one sentence, especially if they are aware of the printed long ‘s’ which sure looks like ‘f’), transformation into masques, opera and ballet (Mendelssohn’s overture was first used in 1833), much of it emphasizing spectacle (“a Chinese man and woman sing, six monkeys come from between the trees and dance, and two sopranos sing in parts a song summoning Hymen” in Elkanah Settle’s opera, The Fairy Queen, with music by Henry Purcell, 1692) or, in the 19th century, realism (worry about live rabbits in the woods for a moment). For most of these centuries, the fairies were played by children, with wings (I have an edition illustrated by Arthur Rackham (Grammercy Books, 1990) whose fairies have always formed my ‘default’ image). By Italian contralto Lucia Elizabeth Vestres’s production (1840), the fairies were winged, flying fairies and Madame Vestris played (sang?) the part of Oberon.
I see four obstacles evolving to prevent the realization of our wonderful play. Diffuse plotting with three or even four separate plots only partially intertwined created difficulties with dramatic coherence. Even a shadow of neoclassical Unities was threatened, and many of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century travesties reduced the play to The Fairy Queen (1692), A Fairy Tale (1763) or masques or afterpieces called Pyramus and Thisbe (1716, 1745). Our discussion of Puck showed that Shakespeare drew the fairies themselves from four different traditions.
Second, to oversimplify, after the Restoration we have the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, and there was “a growing skepticism in the late 17th century about the intervention of supernatural beings in everyday life” (Griffiths), and a shift toward realism made representation of the supernatural somehow outside the scope of production. Thus, opera and later ballet offered unrealistic conventions which could accommodate the supernatural. Consider this a play about fairies or, Harley Granville-Barker asks “is it not all meant to appear only as the fierce vexation of a dream?" But a decline in belief in magic, a growth of skepticism and empirical science are factors which contributed to a hostile intellectual climate. How can one represent fairies (or dreams or spirits or magical projections of human nature, especially adolescent behavior) with real actors on a stage, especially as theatre size, ingenious machinery, scenery, costuming, and eventually lighting evolved. Anti-supernatural critics also scorn ghosts in Hamlet or Macbeth.
Then, in the Nineteenth Century, again to oversimplify, Romanticism pervades. There is Romantic anti-theatrical prejudice. Ever seem a Wordsworth or Byron play? I have, I’m sorry to say. “Poetry and the stage do not agree together,” dictated Hazlett. The gothic and fantastic reappear. Author originality—inspiration—regain credit. But this atmosphere also invited realism. When the scene shifts to night in the woods, productions gave us romantically realistic scenery or wild landscapes. Shakespeare’s lines call for fairies who can sleep in an acorn cap. So the fairies were cast smaller and smaller. I’m relieved Samuel Phelps, 1853-61, and Charles Kean, 1856-59, didn’t think of Munchkins. And in mid-century there was a demand for authenticity. Madam Vestris not only had a master machinist with experience of flying fairies, she had an antiquary, JR Planche, as advisor. Midsummer Night's Dream starts with Theseus, Duke of Athens. Swell, but Charles Kean’s archeological exactitude necessitated changes because Periclean Athens was not a duchy, so Theseus is referred to as ‘Prince,’ the painted scenery began to include the Parthenon, and costumes were Athenian rather than whatever. All productions between 1840 and 1926, with the exception of eclectic costuming for Granville-Barker in 1914, were Athenian.
The production history of A Midsummer Night’s Dream may at least trace evolving perceptions. Vestres played Oberon and a girl played Puck, a tradition that continued throughout the nineteenth century. London’s huge Covent Garden required spectacle, and scene painters provided a long perspective of temples with the Acropolis towering in the distance, and forest scenes where all is sylvan and visionary. For Puck’s first appearance he/she rises up from the center stage trap riding on a mushroom. In Charles Kean’s 1856 production, eight-year-old Ellen Terry, perhaps the preeminent actress of the nineteenth century, played Puck, though for Kean the rest of the fairies were full-grown adults, with a final spectacle of "some ninety fairies tripping up and down the stairs of Theseus’s palace, waving bell-like lanterns while the fairy chorus sang Mendelssohn’s 'Through this house give glimmering light’.” By Augustin Daly’s 1888 production, Isadora Duncan in paper-maché wings was one of the dancing fairies, and in a review of a 1895 Daly production Bernard Shaw was especially harsh on Lillian Swain as Puck and criticized Daly for his persistent illusionism, which destroys rather than complements the effect of Shakespeare’s verse.
Lastly, both the Eighteenth century and the Nineteenth were crabbed by decorum, propriety, concerns with “warm ideas.” For 150 years, Lysander’s suggestion of a little pre-marital coziness with Hermia, II.ii.47.-70, “One heart, one bed, two bosoms, and one troth,” was edited or cut on grounds of ‘delicacy’ from Francis Gentleman [sic—ironically], 1764, until restored by Harley Granville-Barker, who, at last, in 1914, restored the full text. Notice: 1914! “The time was ripe, if not overripe, for reaction,” says Jay Halio.
The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries seem unable to trust the chorus of Henry V when he demands:
“let us…on your imaginary forces work…
Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’ th’ receiving earth;
For ‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,” (1.1.18, 19, 27-29)
as their productions embraced realism and spectacle. But the rebuttal to this is in our play. The Mechanicals gather in the wood to assign parts for “Pyramus and Thisbe,” and Quince notes that it will be hard to bring the moonlight into a chamber when Pyramus and Thisbe meet by moonlight. They immediately consult a calendar, an almanac, and find that indeed the moon shines the night of their performance, so they may leave a casement of the great chamber window open and the actual moon may shine in. But to assure the theatrical representation of moonshine, Robin Starveling, the Tailor, is assigned to come in with a thorn bush, a lantern, and a dog, to represent the man in the moon with his bush, dog, etc. And, of course, when “Pyramus and Thisby” is underway before the Athenian spectators and, ta da!, the theatre audience, too, Prologue says “By moonshine did these lovers think no scorn/ To meet at Ninus’ tomb, there, there to woo.” So how many moons are on the stage during the enactment of this little play? Give up? Three: the actual, literal, material moon shining in; the representational theatrical moon presented by the actor with his lantern, bush, and dog; and the metaphoric or archetypal moon evoked in the imagination of the audience. Archetypal? Everyone in the audience has myriad exposures to moonlight, and the language accesses this experience. The last is the most credible.
In Shakespeare the language evokes the images, until realistic scenes or costumes or, later, with film, the settings and scenes make the language redundant (the lush landscape in Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet filmed in Tuscany forces cuts in all those rich poetic descriptions of the scenes). So, if the Enlightenment actualists and the Romantic realists had just let themselves see the language, there would not have been a 300 year gap before A Midsummer Night’s Dream could emerge—revert?—to the wonderful balance among its three plots keeping dramatic tension between the rational and the irrational, the natural and the supernatural, time and timelessness, reality and illusion, the conscious and the dream, the forms of fairies and the nature of theatre.
In the Twentieth Century directors continued to use or be condemned for not using Mendelssohn and Athens or Elizabethan and folk, eclectic and new composition. In 1914 Granville-Barker directed the complete text (though he still had ballet); Bridges Adams mounted Midsummer Night's Dream eight times at Stratford and on tour between 1919 and 1934; Max Reinhardt made a glorious film (Mendelssohn, Jimmy Cagney as Bottom, Mickey Rooney screeching away as Puck, Victor Jory lurking disguised as a tree as Oberon); Tyrone Guthrie, a full-text, though Victorian, production at the Old Vic in 1937 (Ralph Richardson as Bottom); Peter Hall, in 1959, 62-63, staged in an Elizabethan great hall — all I suppose, evolving from Victorian, until Peter Brook blew it all open at Stratford, staging the play in a white box, with doors opening into space at the second level and musicians and fairies observing from a cat-walk at the top of the box. I have read detailed descriptions of the Brook, and it appears to be seminal, revolutionizing all subsequent Shakespeare production, creating "a blank page upon which imagination can play its tricks,” “allowing a concentration on the possibilities of the text where other more traditional stagings had been more limiting” (Griffiths, 69).
Gil
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Introduction to Stu
Sadly, I haven't read Orson Welles' cut of the Henry IV plays. I did perform in a 1996 production entitled Henry IV: The History Plays, which, I have no doubt, borrowed heavily on previous sources, including Welles. Clearly, you lose something in the cutting, but there are benefits to putting the two together. The role of Northumberland, for example, is certainly enhanced by putting the two parts together―we see both the run up to his son's death and the aftermath.
I read Randall's post regarding Thomas of Woodstock with interest, since I am currently playing Mowbray in Richard II, which would make me "Sir Not Appearing in This Play" in Woodstock. Odd to think that if Shakespeare had actually had a hand in Woodstock, the movers and shakers in the first act of Richard II, Bolingbrook and Mowbray, would be absent. Looking forward to hearing from you all. You'll have to excuse me if, new to your group, I lurk for a while. I doubt that, with two jobs for the summer, I will be as prolific as Randall.
Stu
Also, check out my theater company: Shakespeare and Company
I read Randall's post regarding Thomas of Woodstock with interest, since I am currently playing Mowbray in Richard II, which would make me "Sir Not Appearing in This Play" in Woodstock. Odd to think that if Shakespeare had actually had a hand in Woodstock, the movers and shakers in the first act of Richard II, Bolingbrook and Mowbray, would be absent. Looking forward to hearing from you all. You'll have to excuse me if, new to your group, I lurk for a while. I doubt that, with two jobs for the summer, I will be as prolific as Randall.
Stu
Also, check out my theater company: Shakespeare and Company
RE5: Thomas of Woodstock - Oh No He Di'n't
Plus, Shakespeare isn't in the habit of attacking either the British polity and/or the reigning royals.
Ernst
Ernst
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
RE4: Thomas of Woodstock - Oh No He Di'n't
Essex is an interesting comparison, but that's 1599 or 1600. Most scholars ― Malone Society, Corbin and Sedge, Eagan according to Wikipedia ― date the play prior to 1595, even if the manuscript doesn't come until later. And if the play has anything to do with Shakespeare, it can't possibly come after more competent plays like Richard III or Richard II.
Randall
Randall
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
