Vere-ing off course,
I wish I'd included the small joke I'd intended about having a pool for how long it would be before one of us ripped into the authorship controversy. But I was thinking of an over/under number in terms of responses to my original e-mail. Not in terms of minutes. Derek wins.
I'm going to agree with Derek in principle, then explain why authorship matters. Ron Rosenbaum wrote, in his Slate.com article "The Double Falsehood of Double Falsehood," "The point is not who wrote Shakespeare (though I'm entirely convinced Shakespeare did) but what Shakespeare wrote, and what is falsely passed off as Shakespearean. The 'someone else wrote Shakespeare' types (and those who waste time arguing with them) are sad and pathetic because, frankly, life is short and if one has to choose between rereading King Lear or Othello and arguing about who wrote them, then one's priorities are profoundly misaligned. Any amount of time spent on the latter is subtracted from the former, alas."
When it comes to Edward III, I think we'll have a richer conversation if we focus on what is happening in the text or, by extension, what might happen on the stage. Every year that I teach Shakespeare, at least one student asks if Shakespeare actually wrote the plays attributed to him. And I give a version of Rosenbaum's response. Now, I'll add a bit of Derek's attitude as well.
But that said, I read Edward III with that question firmly in the back of my head: did Shakespeare write this? This is a question to which there is no definitive answer; asking it, though, leads us to an important form of assessment. Let's separate, for a moment, Shakespeare the man from Shakespeare the body of work. Then we must ask ourselves what makes the body of work unique? And finally are those attributes we've identified present in Edward III?
Why would we do this? Because to be able to do it means we recognize the essence of Shakespearean texts. Not the plot or the storylines or even the famous quotes, but something deeper -- the identity of the language. The question of whether Shakespeare might have written Edward III is the ultimate test of our familiarity with his work. By "familiarity" I don't mean that we have read it all and know it from memory; I mean that we have become familiar enough with the character of his writing that we know it from what it is not. Consider for a moment a more mundane version of this: the blind taste test. I have students who swear they can tell Pepsi from Coca-Cola. I like to pour a few colas (usually adding others like RC or Jones) into unmarked glasses and see. I'm impressed when they actually can. It means that they're familiar enough with the subtle differences in flavor that they "know" their colas. I want to know Shakespeare like that, because absent that familiarity, that understanding, I wonder if I really know "Shakespeare," as opposed to his fame. If I ripped a passage from a Shakespeare play you haven't read yet, maybe Coriolanus or Cymbeline, and one from Peele, one from Marlowe, and one from Fletcher, and sent them to you blind, could you tell who wrote which? Does it matter?
Randall
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Edward III - Authorship
Derek writes:
Okay, having not posted a thing on Twelfth Night, I'm going to take a break from the ridiculous amount of reading, grading, writing, indexing, and teaching I'm doing over the summer and respond IMMEDIATELY to question 5.
Who wrote the play? It really does not matter, especially now. Arguments between the Oxfordians and the Baconians, or whatever, are all predicated upon the belief that the plays' authorship does something important for the meaning of the work, as though 400 years of theatrical tradition, summer Shakespeare festivals, and literally billions of student-hours have not entirely effaced whatever traces of authorial intention (if that's even a reasonable thing to point to anymore) once obtained in these works.
I've been reading Stephen Greenblatt this summer -- not the recent money-making Will in the World, but the original work of New Historicism, Shakespearean Negotiations. I expected to hate it, because I detest New Historicism generally, and particularly as it is applied to Shakespeare. Another scholar in this tradition, a guy named Kastan, who pretentiously titles his work Shakespeare After Theory (as though New Historicism does not have metaphysical commitments of its own), describes The Tempest like so: it is not a commentary on colonialism brought about by the recent discovery of the New World. No, it is rather best understood as pertaining to -- I'm not kidding -- protestant/catholic strife in southern Italy.
I'm not an expert on Early Modern Europe by any means, and I never have been, but I've enjoyed The Tempest when I've seen it. I have felt it speaking to me. While it would be easier to hear colonial undertones there, I certainly heard not the slightest suggestion of religious unrest, and yet the play filled my ears.
Whatever Shakespeare means, however we as a culture have come to value these plays, I am certain that searching back through 400 years of history, either to the genius of the Author himself or to the "energeia" out of which the plays emerged, will not help us answer these questions for ourselves. If what we hear now are but echoes of some original thing, the echoes remain what we hear, and they are enough. The original would not speak in a language we can understand anyway, the world in which it resounded having died away long ago. We should call off that particular search.
It does not matter who wrote the plays. The plays exist, and as much as we may hate on Joe Dowling for botching them, part of the reason it bothers us is because we recognize that every performance has, to some degree, a lasting impression on the content of the play. And because we paid money for our seats, of course.
That's enough of a rant for the time being. In the fall, I am off to the Eucor universities of the Rhein valley in order to start a second PhD at the universities where Heidegger and Nietzsche taught -- Shakespeare, obviously, will be the subject of the dissertation, but the broader project will be attempting to account for the way the plays interact with or have their being in our culture without resorting to either a claim to "universality," authorial intention, or historical context (that looks back to the originary period for meaning). I think in order to understand Shakespeare, we have to look at the way those plays exist now. I'm off now to downtown Iowa City, in fact, to read Julian Young's Heidegger's Philosophy of Art.
Ciao, as they for some reason say in Basel,
Derek
Okay, having not posted a thing on Twelfth Night, I'm going to take a break from the ridiculous amount of reading, grading, writing, indexing, and teaching I'm doing over the summer and respond IMMEDIATELY to question 5.
Who wrote the play? It really does not matter, especially now. Arguments between the Oxfordians and the Baconians, or whatever, are all predicated upon the belief that the plays' authorship does something important for the meaning of the work, as though 400 years of theatrical tradition, summer Shakespeare festivals, and literally billions of student-hours have not entirely effaced whatever traces of authorial intention (if that's even a reasonable thing to point to anymore) once obtained in these works.
I've been reading Stephen Greenblatt this summer -- not the recent money-making Will in the World, but the original work of New Historicism, Shakespearean Negotiations. I expected to hate it, because I detest New Historicism generally, and particularly as it is applied to Shakespeare. Another scholar in this tradition, a guy named Kastan, who pretentiously titles his work Shakespeare After Theory (as though New Historicism does not have metaphysical commitments of its own), describes The Tempest like so: it is not a commentary on colonialism brought about by the recent discovery of the New World. No, it is rather best understood as pertaining to -- I'm not kidding -- protestant/catholic strife in southern Italy.
I'm not an expert on Early Modern Europe by any means, and I never have been, but I've enjoyed The Tempest when I've seen it. I have felt it speaking to me. While it would be easier to hear colonial undertones there, I certainly heard not the slightest suggestion of religious unrest, and yet the play filled my ears.
Whatever Shakespeare means, however we as a culture have come to value these plays, I am certain that searching back through 400 years of history, either to the genius of the Author himself or to the "energeia" out of which the plays emerged, will not help us answer these questions for ourselves. If what we hear now are but echoes of some original thing, the echoes remain what we hear, and they are enough. The original would not speak in a language we can understand anyway, the world in which it resounded having died away long ago. We should call off that particular search.
It does not matter who wrote the plays. The plays exist, and as much as we may hate on Joe Dowling for botching them, part of the reason it bothers us is because we recognize that every performance has, to some degree, a lasting impression on the content of the play. And because we paid money for our seats, of course.
That's enough of a rant for the time being. In the fall, I am off to the Eucor universities of the Rhein valley in order to start a second PhD at the universities where Heidegger and Nietzsche taught -- Shakespeare, obviously, will be the subject of the dissertation, but the broader project will be attempting to account for the way the plays interact with or have their being in our culture without resorting to either a claim to "universality," authorial intention, or historical context (that looks back to the originary period for meaning). I think in order to understand Shakespeare, we have to look at the way those plays exist now. I'm off now to downtown Iowa City, in fact, to read Julian Young's Heidegger's Philosophy of Art.
Ciao, as they for some reason say in Basel,
Derek
Edward III - Opening Thoughts
Shakespearenauts,Welcome to our discussion of The Reign of King Edward III. Up to this point, we've read and discussed 21 of Shakespeare's plays, and we will be entering a stretch where many of the plays we read will be most familiar. I wonder if that doesn't have something to do our relative paucity of comment on Twelfth Night, for which I want to apologize to Cindy who got us started with some very good questions. Is there much left to say when we get to the Macbeths and the Hamlets? I hope so, and perhaps that will be a good discussion starter (when we get there): how does one continue a tradition of vital comment with a play about which there has already been so much?
We also have put the bulk of Shakespeare's history plays behind us. Which is too bad. I found Talbot, the Richards, Henry IV, Hotspur, and Hal to be fascinating characters, great fun to read about as characters as much as historical figures. Edward III gives us the opportunity to have another conversation about history as drama and the stageability of English monarchical myth building; Elizabethan attitudes toward honor, chivalry, leadership, political expediency, their own past, their neighbors, and warfare; the value, joy, and disadvantages of teaching lesser known works; and the beauty of English language from this period.
Edward III was printed in 1596 by London bookseller and publisher Cuthbert Burby, although it was probably written earlier; the title page, which includes no author's name, declares "As it hath bin sundrie times plaied about the Citie of London." I want to set aside, for the moment, the lurking question of authorship (did he, or didn't he?) and focus on some qualities of the play.
First, you put the play down, and you are struck by the clear division that seems to split it into two parts. Acts 1 and 2 present a King Edward on the brink of scuttling his continental ambitions in favor of a rather squalid attempt to seduce the Countess of Salisbury. Acts 3, 4, and 5 present the heroism of Edward the Black Prince and the fall of France. You wonder: have I seen this sort of bifurcation before? Is there some theme or characteristic that joins the two parts, unifying them? Is this "bad" playwriting?
Second, upon reflection you might recall that on a number of occasions we've commented on the chivalric values present in Shakespeare's history plays, and how they have seemed to fare in the presence of an edgier, distinctly Tudor, realpolitik. Talbot fell, Falstaff mocked honor, Hal manipulated his own image in order to create a certain impression of leadership, the war of the roses foregrounded political intrigue over "precedents" (or the rules of chivalry). Edward III seems to uphold chivalry and honor. How does it fit into the historical attitudes we've already discussed?
Third, Henry V came off as a fairly patriotic hagiography at times. Edward III? Even more so? Less? What takes precedence here: history, the English myth, drama?
Fourth, one night, over a couple drinks, you have a brilliant idea for staging this sucker. Your producing director thinks you're nuts and willfully seeking the financial ruin of your theater. What argument do you make to convince her otherwise? (And what is your brilliant idea?)
Fifth, who wrote this play? How do we know? Does it matter? I assume this is a question about language. Is it?
So, colleagues, invocate some golden Muse
to bring hither a discussion bedeck'd
with jewels of wit and sparkling intellect.
Randall
Monday, May 17, 2010
The Loneliness of Shakespeare Apocrypha
It occurred to me that we could have played our Shakespeare Apocrypha game with a number of plays, including Thomas of Woodstock, which Ernst and I discussed a couple years ago. There's also things like Yorkshire Tragedy, Locrine, and The Second Maiden's Tragedy. A little research suggests that scholars before us have pretty much settled the authorship of these. (It's surprising how often the answer seems to be a committee.) Not that that would have reduced the enjoyment of rooting around in the periphery of the Shakespearean experience.
As we begin Edward III, where I'm less interested in an authorship debate than I am in exploring stylistics, I thought I'd share Ron Rosenbaum's latest for Slate.com, a heap of righteous indignation aimed at Arden's attempt to "extend the brand" to a play Rosenbaum considers laughably undeserving:
The Double Falsehood of "Double Falsehood."
Enjoy,
Randall
As we begin Edward III, where I'm less interested in an authorship debate than I am in exploring stylistics, I thought I'd share Ron Rosenbaum's latest for Slate.com, a heap of righteous indignation aimed at Arden's attempt to "extend the brand" to a play Rosenbaum considers laughably undeserving:
The Double Falsehood of "Double Falsehood."
Enjoy,
Randall
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Twelfth Night - More on the Language of Love
The Will Experience is theoretically a discussion, but forgive me if I talk to myself for a bit. I’m still thinking of the language of love (obsessively thinking, perhaps—please read the revised last two paragraphs of my last post, because I tinkered with the conclusion; now I think it actually says what I intended.)
After the “willow cabin” declaration, the scene moves on to the ever-inebriated Sir Toby who gives the Clown a sixpence for a love song. What to expect?
What is love: ‘Tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty,
Then come kiss me sweet and twenty;
Youth’s a stuff will not endure. (II.3.48-52)
Sir Andrew has chosen a love song rather than a song conducive to virtue, yet it is quite sobering in its warning to these aging knights that love belongs to the young and youth’s a stuff will not endure. It articulates a version of the warning to Viola and Olivia that it is their duty to marry and perpetuate their beauty before it is marred by age: “For women are as roses, whose fair flow’r/ Being once display’d, doth fall that very hour” (II.4.38-39). Do you remember Findlay’s Comic Flaw: we are mortal? We are back to language about love.
Switch to besmitten (besotted?) Orsino who also commands from Feste an old and antique song, “that dallies with the innocence of love.” Did you expect this:
Come away, come away, death,
And in sad Cypress let me be laid.
Fly away, fly away, breath,
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
O, prepare it!
My part of death, no one so true
Did share it. (II.4.51-58)
The fair cruel maid and even the sad cypress return to Orsino’s Petrarchan romanticism, yet I find this truly melancholy, a foreshadow of the unsentimental realism of Feste’s epilogue, “When I was and a little tiny boy … For the rain it raineth every day.” Once again Shakespeare arcs from the Romantic (If music be the food of love) to the Realistic (the rain it raineth every day), from Hotspur to Henry V, from golden Duncan to black Macbeth, and soon from Ophelia and Laertes to Hamlet, though in Twelfth Night the arc soars first between the elements of air and earth.
Gil
After the “willow cabin” declaration, the scene moves on to the ever-inebriated Sir Toby who gives the Clown a sixpence for a love song. What to expect?
What is love: ‘Tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty,
Then come kiss me sweet and twenty;
Youth’s a stuff will not endure. (II.3.48-52)
Sir Andrew has chosen a love song rather than a song conducive to virtue, yet it is quite sobering in its warning to these aging knights that love belongs to the young and youth’s a stuff will not endure. It articulates a version of the warning to Viola and Olivia that it is their duty to marry and perpetuate their beauty before it is marred by age: “For women are as roses, whose fair flow’r/ Being once display’d, doth fall that very hour” (II.4.38-39). Do you remember Findlay’s Comic Flaw: we are mortal? We are back to language about love.
Switch to besmitten (besotted?) Orsino who also commands from Feste an old and antique song, “that dallies with the innocence of love.” Did you expect this:
Come away, come away, death,
And in sad Cypress let me be laid.
Fly away, fly away, breath,
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
O, prepare it!
My part of death, no one so true
Did share it. (II.4.51-58)
The fair cruel maid and even the sad cypress return to Orsino’s Petrarchan romanticism, yet I find this truly melancholy, a foreshadow of the unsentimental realism of Feste’s epilogue, “When I was and a little tiny boy … For the rain it raineth every day.” Once again Shakespeare arcs from the Romantic (If music be the food of love) to the Realistic (the rain it raineth every day), from Hotspur to Henry V, from golden Duncan to black Macbeth, and soon from Ophelia and Laertes to Hamlet, though in Twelfth Night the arc soars first between the elements of air and earth.
Gil
Friday, April 23, 2010
Twelfth Night - The Language of Love
Ah, the language of love …
I seem to have hit a wall of silence on Twelfth Night, perhaps because I’m intimidated by my favorite Shakespeare or maybe I am still in awe of the play after falling in love with Peggy Ashcroft as Viola when I saw her at the Old Vic in my teens (Leo McKern, "Rumpole of the Bailey," was Feste). Still, I just can’t let the play go with only my “dramatic irony” musings, especially after Cindy gave us such a provocative challenge in December. So let me start by clearing my throat (a term I use for those often empty opening paragraphs freshman composition writers use when confronted by a blank page). How about: "from beginning of time until present the language of love has been depicted by poets …."
Ahem! Ya’ know, I’ve been around this play for 50 years and this spring is the first time I’ve noticed that VIOLA, OLIVIA, and MALVOLIO are anagrammatic. Now I’ve noticed it, what should I do with it?
Hem, hem! I’ve always known Viola. The Dramatis Personae names her. The speech tags identify her from act I, scene 2 -- Vio. “What country, friends, is this?” But, again, until this spring, I did not notice her true name is not spoken until act V, scene 1:
SEBASTIAN
Were you a woman, as the rest goes even,
I should my tears let fall upon your cheek,
And say, ‘Thrice welcome, drowned Viola!’” (V.1.238-240)
Earlier she has posed riddles about her identity to both Olivia (“What is your parentage?” “Above my fortunes”) and to Orsino (“my father had a daughter lov’d a man”), then Sebastian has submitted her to a rather tedious identification process (which an impatient audience must greet with “well, duh; don’t you remember you have a twin??”), so perhaps this articulation of her true name at last suggests that all identity is a form of riddle. Is that too clever?
Ah, hem, hem! I was reading a most unShakespearean book, Victoria Finlay (no relation), Color: a Natural History of the Palette, about the pre-chemical histories of ochre, black and brown, white, red, etc. Finlay finds an ochre stone in Italy’s Valle Camonica, associated with Neolitic petroglyphs, then she is off to Arnhemland in northern Australia for another source of the first colored paint (boy, what a way to write off one’s travels on income tax). In her “red” chapter, she describes how in 1513, Vasco de Balboa crossed the isthmus of Panama (pace Keats) and found gold, silver, and the color red in the New World. This color comes from the female cochineal beetle—or “grana’ as it is locally called—which lives on prickly pear cactus, and soon the Spaniards had started one of the biggest color export businesses the world had ever seen. In 1575 alone about 80 metric tons of red arrived in Europe via the cochineal fleet, and by 1600 several trillion bug bodies had been imported. The fashion world reacted quickly, and Europeans demanded their cloth be made in this new deep red, crimson, often called either ‘grana’ or ‘in grain,’ and it was seen as the ultimate cosmetic [wait for it, Will Experiencers].
In Twelfth Night, act I, scene 5, Olivia at last removes the veil with which she has been teasing Orsino’s messenger, Cesario:
OLIVIA
“We will draw the curtain, and show you the picture. Look you, sir, such a one I was this present. [Unveiling.] Is’t not well done?”
VIOLA
“Excellently done, if God did all.”
OLIVIA
“’Tis in grain, sir, ‘twill endure wind and weather.”
VIOLA
“’Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white Nature’s own sweet and cunning hand laid on.” (I.5.233-240).
Pun alert! In grain (cosmetic red) and ingrained (natural) tell the Elizabethan audience that Olivia is indeed a great beauty and also on the cutting edge of (expensive) fashion. [Footnotes for “in grain”: Riverside: it is fast-dyed, i.e., it won’t wash off; New Cambridge: indelible, not painted; Bevington: fast dyed; Norton: the dye is fast; Signet: fast-dyed, indelible—who says these guys don’t copy from each other.] It is a delicious scene; Olivia is underplaying her obvious beauty; Cesario zings her with a crack about cosmetics and women’s vanity; Olivia tops “him” with the little “Tis in grain” statement, seemingly understated again, yet, in 1600, claiming she is the confluence of both Nature and art. Lovely, indeed.
I would tell my students, after their essays were finished, to go back and throw away the throat-clearing paragraphs, but that was too much fun, so now I’ve seemed to have stumbled on Act I, scene v…
But first, Twelfth Night opens with what Stevie Davis calls Shakespeare’s “most hypnotically memorable and quotable” opening lines (or, at least, equal to those of Richard III):
If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again, it had a dying fall;
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odor. Enough, no more,
“Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou,
That notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe’er,
But falls into abatement and low price
Even in a minute. So full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical. (I.1.1-15, italics mine)
This epitomizes the language about love. Orsino, as most critics note, is in love with love, and thus one can suspect that these sentiments are a parody of amorous discourse. Certainly, this recalls courtly love, the smitten lover thriving on the emotion itself, the more unrequited the better, because the suffering is more exquisite. Orsino’s beloved cannot requite his emotion, because she has vowed seven years of mourning for her late father and more recently late brother, a perfect situation for a courtly lover.
Not only that, Orsino has sufficient wealth and position, that he need not himself sing sad (and bad) sonnets beneath his beloved’s window. He can send his minions, first Valentine, then Cesario with his verses. Both The Comedy of Errors (Egeon) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Hermia) begin with sentences of death, while The Taming of the Shrew (no marriage for Bianca until Kate is wed), Love’s Labour’s Lost (vows of seven years celibate study), and As You Like It (cruel Oliver denies his brother Orlando his birthright) all begin with a denial or perversion of nature, where youth naturally flourishes thorough love to marriage and fertility. And Illyria, too, is the scene of such an unnatural situation: the most beautiful, eligible, and emotion-ready woman vows “like a cloistress she will veiled walk,/ And water once a day her chamber round with eye-offending brine,” a reclusive melancholic, which enables (allow me a cheesy pop-psych term) Orsino to indulge in this binge and purge lyric to love.
Mike long ago (The Comedy of Errors posting) noted such water-into-the-ocean images, which here defuses love into some vast element. Yet these lines are beautiful, musical. The promise of logical argument in the “if”-clause, then four caesurae, flowing into the unstopped lines 5 and 6, “upon a bank of violets” (and we know a bank where the wild thyme grows), then reversed with a full stop in the middle of line 7, followed by a couplet, breaking the argument into an octet, almost evoking a nonce sonnet. This is the rhetoric of hyperbole, even metaphysical conceit, and it is hard for me to remember what an unnatural, narcissistic fool Orsino is. Orsino is to love as Volpone is to gold: “Hail, the world’s soul, and mine.”
Soon, Orsino dispatches his new courtier, Cesario, to the cloistered Olivia to “unfold the passion of [his] love,/ Surprise her with the discourse of [his] dear faith” though, aside, Viola confesses to that most conventional of fictions, love at first sight (which we know does not exist in nature): “Whoe’er I woo, myself would be his wife.” We have dramatic irony—Malvolio’s jealousy of Feste—and Olivia’s little disquisition on fools:
OLIVIA
Why, what would you?
VIOLA
Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love,
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Hallow your name to the reverberate hills,
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out “Olivia!” O, you should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth
But you should pity me! (I.5.267-276)
Yes, Cindy, that is still my nomination for the best poetry in Shakepeare. Even though I have encountered hundreds of students who reject "poetry" the moment they hear terms such as synecdoche or couplets, yet nonetheless will write, when I am their audience, "this is a good poem because it has alliteration," allow me to point out this passage has only one caesura. Few end stops until it reaches the climax [sic]. Simple, yet fresh imagery such as "reverberate hills" and "babbling gossip of the air," which immediately cleanse my ear of "groans of thunder love." Forceful, active declarations: make, call upon, write, sing, hallow. I challenge readers to put themselves into this scene, with their name rather than Olivia. How could they resist?
Make sure to parse “pity” not as condescension but as feeling. I feel the intensity of the passion of love unfold here as in no other poetry I know. Meanwhile, we know that Viola is addressing the absent Orsino, who wrote the goddawful stuff recited above. Even old Thunder-love would have to hear this. And then Olivia's quiet “You might do much,” and her unnatural vow of seven years of mourning collapses in a moment. Dramatic irony, of course, in that she falls in love with a woman, but in truth she falls in love with the poetry, the language of love. Three hundred years later, Roxanne will fall in love with Cyrano’s poetry/soul rising from under the balcony. So beyond the situational irony, this is truth. Just look at Shakespeare, mocking Petrarch, and inventing the finest love poetry ever, more “true” even than in Romeo and Juliet.
Gil
I seem to have hit a wall of silence on Twelfth Night, perhaps because I’m intimidated by my favorite Shakespeare or maybe I am still in awe of the play after falling in love with Peggy Ashcroft as Viola when I saw her at the Old Vic in my teens (Leo McKern, "Rumpole of the Bailey," was Feste). Still, I just can’t let the play go with only my “dramatic irony” musings, especially after Cindy gave us such a provocative challenge in December. So let me start by clearing my throat (a term I use for those often empty opening paragraphs freshman composition writers use when confronted by a blank page). How about: "from beginning of time until present the language of love has been depicted by poets …."
Ahem! Ya’ know, I’ve been around this play for 50 years and this spring is the first time I’ve noticed that VIOLA, OLIVIA, and MALVOLIO are anagrammatic. Now I’ve noticed it, what should I do with it?
Hem, hem! I’ve always known Viola. The Dramatis Personae names her. The speech tags identify her from act I, scene 2 -- Vio. “What country, friends, is this?” But, again, until this spring, I did not notice her true name is not spoken until act V, scene 1:
SEBASTIAN
Were you a woman, as the rest goes even,
I should my tears let fall upon your cheek,
And say, ‘Thrice welcome, drowned Viola!’” (V.1.238-240)
Earlier she has posed riddles about her identity to both Olivia (“What is your parentage?” “Above my fortunes”) and to Orsino (“my father had a daughter lov’d a man”), then Sebastian has submitted her to a rather tedious identification process (which an impatient audience must greet with “well, duh; don’t you remember you have a twin??”), so perhaps this articulation of her true name at last suggests that all identity is a form of riddle. Is that too clever?
Ah, hem, hem! I was reading a most unShakespearean book, Victoria Finlay (no relation), Color: a Natural History of the Palette, about the pre-chemical histories of ochre, black and brown, white, red, etc. Finlay finds an ochre stone in Italy’s Valle Camonica, associated with Neolitic petroglyphs, then she is off to Arnhemland in northern Australia for another source of the first colored paint (boy, what a way to write off one’s travels on income tax). In her “red” chapter, she describes how in 1513, Vasco de Balboa crossed the isthmus of Panama (pace Keats) and found gold, silver, and the color red in the New World. This color comes from the female cochineal beetle—or “grana’ as it is locally called—which lives on prickly pear cactus, and soon the Spaniards had started one of the biggest color export businesses the world had ever seen. In 1575 alone about 80 metric tons of red arrived in Europe via the cochineal fleet, and by 1600 several trillion bug bodies had been imported. The fashion world reacted quickly, and Europeans demanded their cloth be made in this new deep red, crimson, often called either ‘grana’ or ‘in grain,’ and it was seen as the ultimate cosmetic [wait for it, Will Experiencers].
In Twelfth Night, act I, scene 5, Olivia at last removes the veil with which she has been teasing Orsino’s messenger, Cesario:
OLIVIA
“We will draw the curtain, and show you the picture. Look you, sir, such a one I was this present. [Unveiling.] Is’t not well done?”
VIOLA
“Excellently done, if God did all.”
OLIVIA
“’Tis in grain, sir, ‘twill endure wind and weather.”
VIOLA
“’Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white Nature’s own sweet and cunning hand laid on.” (I.5.233-240).
Pun alert! In grain (cosmetic red) and ingrained (natural) tell the Elizabethan audience that Olivia is indeed a great beauty and also on the cutting edge of (expensive) fashion. [Footnotes for “in grain”: Riverside: it is fast-dyed, i.e., it won’t wash off; New Cambridge: indelible, not painted; Bevington: fast dyed; Norton: the dye is fast; Signet: fast-dyed, indelible—who says these guys don’t copy from each other.] It is a delicious scene; Olivia is underplaying her obvious beauty; Cesario zings her with a crack about cosmetics and women’s vanity; Olivia tops “him” with the little “Tis in grain” statement, seemingly understated again, yet, in 1600, claiming she is the confluence of both Nature and art. Lovely, indeed.
I would tell my students, after their essays were finished, to go back and throw away the throat-clearing paragraphs, but that was too much fun, so now I’ve seemed to have stumbled on Act I, scene v…
But first, Twelfth Night opens with what Stevie Davis calls Shakespeare’s “most hypnotically memorable and quotable” opening lines (or, at least, equal to those of Richard III):
If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again, it had a dying fall;
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odor. Enough, no more,
“Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou,
That notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe’er,
But falls into abatement and low price
Even in a minute. So full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical. (I.1.1-15, italics mine)
This epitomizes the language about love. Orsino, as most critics note, is in love with love, and thus one can suspect that these sentiments are a parody of amorous discourse. Certainly, this recalls courtly love, the smitten lover thriving on the emotion itself, the more unrequited the better, because the suffering is more exquisite. Orsino’s beloved cannot requite his emotion, because she has vowed seven years of mourning for her late father and more recently late brother, a perfect situation for a courtly lover.
Not only that, Orsino has sufficient wealth and position, that he need not himself sing sad (and bad) sonnets beneath his beloved’s window. He can send his minions, first Valentine, then Cesario with his verses. Both The Comedy of Errors (Egeon) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Hermia) begin with sentences of death, while The Taming of the Shrew (no marriage for Bianca until Kate is wed), Love’s Labour’s Lost (vows of seven years celibate study), and As You Like It (cruel Oliver denies his brother Orlando his birthright) all begin with a denial or perversion of nature, where youth naturally flourishes thorough love to marriage and fertility. And Illyria, too, is the scene of such an unnatural situation: the most beautiful, eligible, and emotion-ready woman vows “like a cloistress she will veiled walk,/ And water once a day her chamber round with eye-offending brine,” a reclusive melancholic, which enables (allow me a cheesy pop-psych term) Orsino to indulge in this binge and purge lyric to love.
Mike long ago (The Comedy of Errors posting) noted such water-into-the-ocean images, which here defuses love into some vast element. Yet these lines are beautiful, musical. The promise of logical argument in the “if”-clause, then four caesurae, flowing into the unstopped lines 5 and 6, “upon a bank of violets” (and we know a bank where the wild thyme grows), then reversed with a full stop in the middle of line 7, followed by a couplet, breaking the argument into an octet, almost evoking a nonce sonnet. This is the rhetoric of hyperbole, even metaphysical conceit, and it is hard for me to remember what an unnatural, narcissistic fool Orsino is. Orsino is to love as Volpone is to gold: “Hail, the world’s soul, and mine.”
Soon, Orsino dispatches his new courtier, Cesario, to the cloistered Olivia to “unfold the passion of [his] love,/ Surprise her with the discourse of [his] dear faith” though, aside, Viola confesses to that most conventional of fictions, love at first sight (which we know does not exist in nature): “Whoe’er I woo, myself would be his wife.” We have dramatic irony—Malvolio’s jealousy of Feste—and Olivia’s little disquisition on fools:
O, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a distemper’d appetite. To be generous, guiltless and free of disposition, is to take those things for bird-bolts that you deem cannon-bullets. There is no slander in an allow’d fool, though he do nothing but rail, nor no railing in a known discreet man, though he do nothing but reprove” (I.5. 90-93).I could not teach comedy without the idea of ‘the allowed fool.” And note how Olivia’s rebuke of Malvolio is also a critical commentary on Orsino’s earlier excesses about love. Soon, we have the fun of the veils, disguises and potential mistaken identities. Poor Cesario has memorized Orsino’s text and does not want the effort to be in vain. Olivia’s inventory of her features, no lips like Petrarchan cherries nor teeth like pearls allowed. But then, when Cesario does get to recite Orsino’s lines, they are merely the classic conventions of love poetry, Petrarch turned to cliché, and the lines are awful, declamatory—thunder love, sighs of fire, my master’s flame. Declaim these aloud. Lots of end-stopping here. But when Olivia asks Cesario what “he” would say to a rejection of love, Viola says rejection would be incomprehensible, and we get the lovely “willow cabin” response:
OLIVIA
Why, what would you?
VIOLA
Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love,
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Hallow your name to the reverberate hills,
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out “Olivia!” O, you should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth
But you should pity me! (I.5.267-276)
Yes, Cindy, that is still my nomination for the best poetry in Shakepeare. Even though I have encountered hundreds of students who reject "poetry" the moment they hear terms such as synecdoche or couplets, yet nonetheless will write, when I am their audience, "this is a good poem because it has alliteration," allow me to point out this passage has only one caesura. Few end stops until it reaches the climax [sic]. Simple, yet fresh imagery such as "reverberate hills" and "babbling gossip of the air," which immediately cleanse my ear of "groans of thunder love." Forceful, active declarations: make, call upon, write, sing, hallow. I challenge readers to put themselves into this scene, with their name rather than Olivia. How could they resist?
Make sure to parse “pity” not as condescension but as feeling. I feel the intensity of the passion of love unfold here as in no other poetry I know. Meanwhile, we know that Viola is addressing the absent Orsino, who wrote the goddawful stuff recited above. Even old Thunder-love would have to hear this. And then Olivia's quiet “You might do much,” and her unnatural vow of seven years of mourning collapses in a moment. Dramatic irony, of course, in that she falls in love with a woman, but in truth she falls in love with the poetry, the language of love. Three hundred years later, Roxanne will fall in love with Cyrano’s poetry/soul rising from under the balcony. So beyond the situational irony, this is truth. Just look at Shakespeare, mocking Petrarch, and inventing the finest love poetry ever, more “true” even than in Romeo and Juliet.
Gil
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Macbeth - Performance Log (March 2010)
Macbeth
directed by Joe Dowling
Guthrie Theater
Minneapolis, MN
March 30, 2010
The Joe Dowling Macbeth at the Guthrie was crisp and clean; crisp in that they brought it off in 2 hours 10 minutes (without intermission), so Shakespeare's third shortest play moved with a concentrated intensity. I was not aware of cuts, though perhaps (wishful thinking?) Malcolm's test of Macduff may have been a bit shorter. I didn't hear a witch say "Fair is foul, and foul is fair," a crucial line for me. I was listening for it, but maybe it was swallowed up is the opening battle stage business.
It was good attending with my thirteen-year old granddaughter, Kaia, who had previously seen this production. This allowed me to see the play partly through her eyes, as she could anticipate action and flesh out her first impressions. From her previous experience she thought the witches were good. I would guess that meant they were memorably exotic (their voices may have been electronically filtered), but I better remember the acrobatic trio at the Berkeley Rep and the Polanski witches digging for corpses in the sand (backed, later, if I remember, by 75 naked crones).
This Macbeth was clean in that it did not seem to attempt any fresh vision. no chances taken, so it was finally as bland as the Dowling Hamlet that closed the old Guthrie.
The Dowling touch was violence and sex. The play opens with a long, busily choreographed battle, pre-witch. Lots of bodies (with a little audience distraction of how to get them off the stage in a thrust theatre). The uniforms do not particularly demonstrate, for an audience not quite settled in their seats, who is fighting whom, which the Scots, which the Norwegians, which Cawdor's traitors. I looked for Macbeth (Erik Heger), whom the bloody Captain will describe as heroic, but amid the smoke and business, I did not distinguish him (as he reportedly distinguishes himself). I was trying to orient myself, so the use of firearms (an AK 47 or two?) before they all got down to short swords, was irritating, compounded by the set which salted the stage with rubble -- a decaying civilization (surely not: Duncan is described as the ideal, fertile, sun-drenched king) -- with a prominent, rusted bike rim prominently in front. Whatever Dowling was attempting to do achronologically didn't reach me. But it didn't matter much because the chronology was only peripheral (not like setting the whole thing in a banana republic as one production I saw did).
The opening battle was a bookend for the finale, Macduff and Macbeth with a dozen of Macduff's troops as spectators (didn't any of them bring his AK47?), so the motif of a primitive warring tribal culture came across (Beowulf-time), yet this diminished Malcolm's "People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along" resolution (V.viii. 60-75 -- I'm probably paraphrasing from memory).
The sex is not so dramatic, but Lady Macbeth (Michelle O'Neill) had five costume changes, each, except the madness nightgown. displaying her impressive superstructure. She reads Macbeth's letter recounting the projections of the witches nearly orgasmically, and when hubby comes home she strips him down to his bare pecs. That's it, but it does remind us that sex and violence underscore ambition, and I certainly prefer this to sects and violins (Amadeus?).
I sometimes find the Porter (Kris L. Nelson) a drunken bore. Not here. But I never quite got Lenox and Rosse and Menteth and Cathness and Angus straight. Were they really all dressed in business suits? The Doctor, dressed in a grey Hillary Clinton power suit, looked like she had wandered in from another play. They pronounced Seyton "see-ton" whereas Shakespeare pronounced it "say-tan," perhaps here avoiding confusing the audience. I'm almost sure Seyton was the third murderer. I've seen a production where the third murderer was Macbeth -- a stretch.
As a Scotsman, I counted how many future kings were evoked by the witches in Act IV -- eight, so Dowling got that right (there were eight Scottish kings, including five James's descended from Banquo, between Malcolm and James I, who was in the opening night audience.
Logged by,
Gilbert
Photo credit: Lady Macbeth (Michelle O'Neill) encourages Macbeth (Erik Heger) after Duncan's murder. Image courtesy of the Guthrie Theater; photo by Michal Daniel.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Twelfth Night - Dramatic Irony
Dear souls,
Cindy asked, long ago, for Twelfth Night teaching moments, and though this is far too late, let me at least try to contribute something for her teaching folder for the next time the play appears in her syllabus (I’m soooo sorry, Cindy.)
For me, I think the most profitable focus in Twelfth Night might be on dramatic irony, when the audience is in possession of information which is unknown or unperceived by one or more of the characters. We know from the opening scenes that Viola is disguised as a man, Cesario: Orsino, who takes “him” on as a courtier; then Olivia, who falls in love with “him” when he appears as Orsino’s messenger; then Sir Andrew, who is goaded into challenging “him” to a duel, do not know. Thus, all three say foolish things or take foolish actions that they would not if they were more fully informed of the facts. For instance, we, the audience, can evaluate, seeing through, how foolish Orsino’s patriarchal commonplaces seem when we recognize it is a woman who is listening. (“For women are as roses, whose fair flow’r,/ Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour,” II.iv.38-9.)
There is the same dramatic irony when Sebastian makes landfall—we know there are now “identical” twins in Illyria, but mistaken identity is inevitable for everyone else. There has been the same “error” in Plautus’s Menaechmi, then in Comedy of Errors. In Twelfth Night it is insisted on in I.ii (Viola’s arrival and her gender disguise—a reasonable protection for a woman in a strange land), then in II.i (Sebastian’s arrival), together with Viola’s frequent imparting of her deepest hopes, fears, and perplexities in soliloquy proper (an audience can always take soliloquy as unalloyed communication) or utterances whose full meaning is a secret to all but ourselves.
OK, but dramatic irony is not just a literary-critical term. The power of the audience in possession of full knowledge when the characters are not emerges because we can then see into and see why “what fools these mortals be.” That is, outside the theater none of us ever knows everything, yet we speak and act based on the best of our knowledge. Orsino can talk pompously of love to his young boy-courtier freely, but would not to a woman, and especially not to a woman who loves him. We are always alazons (someone who pretends or tries to be something more than he is, a self-deceived character—thank you Northrop Frye); dramatic irony makes us, as audience, eirons (someone who sees through self-deceptions or pretensions; akin to irony itself). Thus, reading/seeing Twelfth Night sets your students up to see into an essential element of human discourse. We make mistakes hourly based on only partial perception. But seeing or reading the play, we are in on the secrets, so we are in a perfect position to evaluate the flawed nature of human communication.
The punch line of all this is the Viola/ Sebastian denouement, where even "ocular proof” is no longer trusted. In Comedy of Errors, all the “facts” are so inexplicable that one explanation is magic or enchantment. In Twelfth Night, Antonio is a fact, so when the Illyrians see him, they arrest him. But Sebastian is not perceived as a “fact” so when Sir Andrew sees someone he presumes is the pusillanimous Cesario, Sebastian breaks his pate. POW! Probably all comedy is an exercise in dramatic irony (tragedy is, of course, too, but it is not THE point of tragedy, where misalliance with the pure laws of the universe is).
Same, same for Malvolio [I hope to return to Cindy’s initial query about him soon]. Maria’s “practice” (the forged letter) manipulates Malvolio into exhibiting his day-dreams (fantasies) to the cruel light of public scorn. They can practice on Malvolio because they know exactly what he wants [I have been reading Stevie Davies’s Penguin Critical Studies here]. We can easily be influenced by what we want desperately to believe. CL Barber uses the box-hedge scene as a central example to define his “Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy,” with its saturnalian play and its festive Lord of Misrule (now, of course, think of Falstaff and all the shows he puts on for Hal—13 men in buckram or killing Hotspur with a thrust to the groin, etc.) Davies refers to the Malvolio plot as a play-within-a-play, complete with on-stage audience selling the house audience on the joke, watching Malvolio acting out his fantasy life (dramatic irony: we know the letter is forged, so we can see how he makes a fool of himself as he lusts to believe in it; like Othello, innocence has no defense against being gulled, even if the gull somehow “deserves” it). Then the letter becomes an acting script for the yellow-stocking scene (III.iv) and the persecution of Malvolio (IV.iv).
Yes, he is tricked; however, ask your students how many believe in “personality,” then remind them the term comes from persona, Greek for “mask,” and note that almost all of our perceived “personality” is taken from others’ observations of our play-acting, role-playing, living according to a received script.
Olivia and Orsino, however ‘genuine’ their claims of feelings may be, are both characters who perform their aloof (grieving) or love-sick states as theatrical scripts from which their actions must never deviate. For me, both are doomed because of unnatural excess: Orsino’s amorous binge-and-purge—“if music be the food of love, give me excess of it that surfeiting the appetite may sicken and so die” (“hurl” won’t scan here)—while Olivia, the most eligible, fertile, naturally sexual damsel in Illyria has taken an unnatural vow of seven years of chastity. The audience has to know that both unnatural vows are doomed from the moment we hear of them, but we can enjoy how each is hoist on inevitable disillusionment, though as the aristocrats, neither is punished for such folly, unlike poor Aguecheek.
Ah aristocrats. At the end of the Helena Bonham Carter Twelfth Night, directed by Trevor Nunn, all dance, as in a “good comedy.” No, wait. No Aguecheek, no Malvolio, no Antonio, no Feste, all outside the dazzling crystal-lit ballroom, outside the castle. So the happily ever after is exclusive to those who are back in the illusion of romance. Inability to play the game (Sir Andrew) or clear, disillusioning, rational understanding (Antonio or especially Feste) are dangers to the romantic illusion we all thrive on.
Think of Hamlet, the only person in Denmark unable to belong to the fourteenth-century script, must at last be borne away by flights of angels. In Twelfth Night, even the seeming outsider, Sebastian, is now part of the dance (because, apparently, he has good abs—what more could a girl ask for?). Now the irony is on us, we who wistfully lust after happy endings.
My favorite class would be a tight exploration of I.v, “Cesario’s” embassy to Olivia that produces the “Make me a willow cabin at your gate” declaration, a scene overflowing with dramatic irony, but I’ll save that for a post on love poetry, unless Cindy has a moment and can tell us in advance what she knows I am going to say.
The castaway,
Gilbert
Cindy asked, long ago, for Twelfth Night teaching moments, and though this is far too late, let me at least try to contribute something for her teaching folder for the next time the play appears in her syllabus (I’m soooo sorry, Cindy.)
For me, I think the most profitable focus in Twelfth Night might be on dramatic irony, when the audience is in possession of information which is unknown or unperceived by one or more of the characters. We know from the opening scenes that Viola is disguised as a man, Cesario: Orsino, who takes “him” on as a courtier; then Olivia, who falls in love with “him” when he appears as Orsino’s messenger; then Sir Andrew, who is goaded into challenging “him” to a duel, do not know. Thus, all three say foolish things or take foolish actions that they would not if they were more fully informed of the facts. For instance, we, the audience, can evaluate, seeing through, how foolish Orsino’s patriarchal commonplaces seem when we recognize it is a woman who is listening. (“For women are as roses, whose fair flow’r,/ Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour,” II.iv.38-9.)
There is the same dramatic irony when Sebastian makes landfall—we know there are now “identical” twins in Illyria, but mistaken identity is inevitable for everyone else. There has been the same “error” in Plautus’s Menaechmi, then in Comedy of Errors. In Twelfth Night it is insisted on in I.ii (Viola’s arrival and her gender disguise—a reasonable protection for a woman in a strange land), then in II.i (Sebastian’s arrival), together with Viola’s frequent imparting of her deepest hopes, fears, and perplexities in soliloquy proper (an audience can always take soliloquy as unalloyed communication) or utterances whose full meaning is a secret to all but ourselves.
OK, but dramatic irony is not just a literary-critical term. The power of the audience in possession of full knowledge when the characters are not emerges because we can then see into and see why “what fools these mortals be.” That is, outside the theater none of us ever knows everything, yet we speak and act based on the best of our knowledge. Orsino can talk pompously of love to his young boy-courtier freely, but would not to a woman, and especially not to a woman who loves him. We are always alazons (someone who pretends or tries to be something more than he is, a self-deceived character—thank you Northrop Frye); dramatic irony makes us, as audience, eirons (someone who sees through self-deceptions or pretensions; akin to irony itself). Thus, reading/seeing Twelfth Night sets your students up to see into an essential element of human discourse. We make mistakes hourly based on only partial perception. But seeing or reading the play, we are in on the secrets, so we are in a perfect position to evaluate the flawed nature of human communication.
The punch line of all this is the Viola/ Sebastian denouement, where even "ocular proof” is no longer trusted. In Comedy of Errors, all the “facts” are so inexplicable that one explanation is magic or enchantment. In Twelfth Night, Antonio is a fact, so when the Illyrians see him, they arrest him. But Sebastian is not perceived as a “fact” so when Sir Andrew sees someone he presumes is the pusillanimous Cesario, Sebastian breaks his pate. POW! Probably all comedy is an exercise in dramatic irony (tragedy is, of course, too, but it is not THE point of tragedy, where misalliance with the pure laws of the universe is).
Same, same for Malvolio [I hope to return to Cindy’s initial query about him soon]. Maria’s “practice” (the forged letter) manipulates Malvolio into exhibiting his day-dreams (fantasies) to the cruel light of public scorn. They can practice on Malvolio because they know exactly what he wants [I have been reading Stevie Davies’s Penguin Critical Studies here]. We can easily be influenced by what we want desperately to believe. CL Barber uses the box-hedge scene as a central example to define his “Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy,” with its saturnalian play and its festive Lord of Misrule (now, of course, think of Falstaff and all the shows he puts on for Hal—13 men in buckram or killing Hotspur with a thrust to the groin, etc.) Davies refers to the Malvolio plot as a play-within-a-play, complete with on-stage audience selling the house audience on the joke, watching Malvolio acting out his fantasy life (dramatic irony: we know the letter is forged, so we can see how he makes a fool of himself as he lusts to believe in it; like Othello, innocence has no defense against being gulled, even if the gull somehow “deserves” it). Then the letter becomes an acting script for the yellow-stocking scene (III.iv) and the persecution of Malvolio (IV.iv).
Yes, he is tricked; however, ask your students how many believe in “personality,” then remind them the term comes from persona, Greek for “mask,” and note that almost all of our perceived “personality” is taken from others’ observations of our play-acting, role-playing, living according to a received script.
Olivia and Orsino, however ‘genuine’ their claims of feelings may be, are both characters who perform their aloof (grieving) or love-sick states as theatrical scripts from which their actions must never deviate. For me, both are doomed because of unnatural excess: Orsino’s amorous binge-and-purge—“if music be the food of love, give me excess of it that surfeiting the appetite may sicken and so die” (“hurl” won’t scan here)—while Olivia, the most eligible, fertile, naturally sexual damsel in Illyria has taken an unnatural vow of seven years of chastity. The audience has to know that both unnatural vows are doomed from the moment we hear of them, but we can enjoy how each is hoist on inevitable disillusionment, though as the aristocrats, neither is punished for such folly, unlike poor Aguecheek.
Ah aristocrats. At the end of the Helena Bonham Carter Twelfth Night, directed by Trevor Nunn, all dance, as in a “good comedy.” No, wait. No Aguecheek, no Malvolio, no Antonio, no Feste, all outside the dazzling crystal-lit ballroom, outside the castle. So the happily ever after is exclusive to those who are back in the illusion of romance. Inability to play the game (Sir Andrew) or clear, disillusioning, rational understanding (Antonio or especially Feste) are dangers to the romantic illusion we all thrive on.
Think of Hamlet, the only person in Denmark unable to belong to the fourteenth-century script, must at last be borne away by flights of angels. In Twelfth Night, even the seeming outsider, Sebastian, is now part of the dance (because, apparently, he has good abs—what more could a girl ask for?). Now the irony is on us, we who wistfully lust after happy endings.
My favorite class would be a tight exploration of I.v, “Cesario’s” embassy to Olivia that produces the “Make me a willow cabin at your gate” declaration, a scene overflowing with dramatic irony, but I’ll save that for a post on love poetry, unless Cindy has a moment and can tell us in advance what she knows I am going to say.
The castaway,
Gilbert
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Twelfth Night - Twenty-Ninth Night
Let me mention some of the various forces that come down upon Twelfth Night, one of the two singularly brilliant plays that come at the center of Shakespeare’s career.
1. Christmas revels in contemporary England lasted until 12th Night (or Epiphany), January 6th. To various degrees and in various places, the twelve days of Christmas was a time for merrymaking, self-indulgence, and making fun of authority. In some communities and countries it contained a kind of topsy-turvy festival in which government (in medieval times, the Church) was made fun of by setting up a "Lord of Misrule" (complete with "court" and attendants" who governed for a day of festivities. This was the sort of figure Wayne Burns would refer to a "panzaic," a kind of drunken, disorderly-but-appealing Pan-like figure. Falstaff (once described as a mini suckling pig (i.e. Christmastime food) was Shakespeare’s first essay into this popular type. Sir Toby Belch is clearly another.
2. Twelfth Night, which may or may not have been written after Hamlet, is, as much as any other, Shakespeare’s "Humors" play, reflecting the Chapman/Jonson/Marston vogue for such plays. Humors plays—mostly comedies—as I have said before—use a number of relatively flat types of characters, who, in the course of the play, are gotten "out of their Humors" and (hopefully) reintegrated into their societies. Although Shakespeare’s characters are nearly always dealt with more richly than the more singularly focused characters created by the playwrights mentioned above, the characters in Twelfth Night are certainly types. Orsino—the melancholic lover; Olivia—the over-the-top melodramatic mourner; Sir Andrew Aguecheek—the stupid would-be courtier; Sir Toby—the drunken, out-of-money knight (archetypically, the "lord of misrule"); Malvolio—the pompously officious servant/climber (there existed novels about good and faithful stewards who end up marrying the "lady" they work for—not the case here). All these characters are got "out of their prevailing "humors" by the play’s end.
(As a footnote, I might remark that Hamlet itself is a kind of "humors" tragedy—in that the characters surrounding Hamlet are also relatively flat—in that their essential natures can be described in a word or two—all of which focuses us on Hamlet’s character, which is essentially ours as well.)
3. Shakespeare’s company was also keenly aware of the inroads the boy actors in the private theaters were making into their public-theater audiences. The courtiers and would-be courtiers went to the private theaters, which were lighted and somewhat more comfortable than the public theaters, to see contemporary vogues (and, often, people) satirized or made fun of by what Hamlet refers to as the "little Eyasses." Shakespeare’s challenge in both plays was to overpower his contemporaries’ appeal.
4. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were also aware of the increasing threat of Puritanism, and they made fun of puritanical zealots often. (We have seen Shakespeare’s own detestation for shallow, officious types in a number of plays so far. Hamlet’s "Young Osrick" is a fine example of this.) Malvolio, then, is an attack at both Puritanism and shallow, self-serving officiousness.
While all this was going on (I won’t even mention anxiety about crop failures and the consequences of Elizabeth’s coming death), a group of Cambridge students was writing a set of three plays lamenting the poor job outlook for literary graduates and commenting on contemporary literary activities in general. The pays are called the "Parnassus Plays" because, in Greek myth, Mount Parnassus is the place that great artists end up going to. Needless to say, the clever artists and writers in the Parnassus plays fare very badly in a "real world" that doesn’t appreciate them.
The plays do, however, give extensive commentary on the London dramatic scene, praising Shakespeare as being the best of the playwrights of their time. They also make a curious comment on how Shakespeare "put Jonson down," a comment no one that I know has ever explained. Shakespeare was not a playwright to put others down—although there was a vicious "War of the Theaters" going on at the time involving Marston, Jonson and Dekker (who often wrote and play-doctored for Shakespeare’s company), who attacked one another flamboyantly on both the public and private stages drawing large audiences).
I have sometimes wondered whether or not the Cambridge students did not see Malvolio as a put-down of Jonson, who frequently dressed in black, tended to have a certain pompousness and, it is said, wandered about the galleries where one of his plays was being put on, muttering about his actors’ goof-ups—not to mention the fact that "element," which word Malvolio uses several times, was on of Jonson’s favorites.
5. I have not spoken at all here about the psychological aspects of the charcters’ interactions with one another—a subject worth pursuing: How do Viola’s words help develop Olivia’s thinking? How does she interact with Orsino? How do Maria and Sir Toby affect one another? How do Feste and Malvolio affect one another? Etc.
Nor have I gone into Feste’s place in the larger picture of Twelfth Night: What is his function? Is his Shakespeare’s voice? What is his equivalent in earlier plays? How does he compare with Touchstone? Etc. I will remind you that Feste was originally written for the comedian Robert Armin, Shakespeare’s company’s new "comedian," a singer with a good voice. (Armin is also said to have played Touchstone, although one wonders why he doesn’t sing in that play. Why not? I can only think that it was written with the previous "comedian," Will Kemp, in mind. I keep the two straight in my mind by remembering the Will Kemp reminds one of "hempen homespun" types, which Kemp frequently played. Silly me.)
Finally, I will note that Gil’s and my former teacher Bill Matchett, used to suggest that Malvolio will not end up cast of the play-ending reintegration of things, but will be invited back later. I don’t go with this opinion. I think a reminder that there are some people who can never be re-integrated into society is too powerful a truth for Shakespeare to pass up.
Speaking of destructive self-importance, I note a letter to today’s New York Times, which describes the Republican notion of democracy as being "One dollar = one vote."
Enough, or too much.
Ernst
1. Christmas revels in contemporary England lasted until 12th Night (or Epiphany), January 6th. To various degrees and in various places, the twelve days of Christmas was a time for merrymaking, self-indulgence, and making fun of authority. In some communities and countries it contained a kind of topsy-turvy festival in which government (in medieval times, the Church) was made fun of by setting up a "Lord of Misrule" (complete with "court" and attendants" who governed for a day of festivities. This was the sort of figure Wayne Burns would refer to a "panzaic," a kind of drunken, disorderly-but-appealing Pan-like figure. Falstaff (once described as a mini suckling pig (i.e. Christmastime food) was Shakespeare’s first essay into this popular type. Sir Toby Belch is clearly another.
2. Twelfth Night, which may or may not have been written after Hamlet, is, as much as any other, Shakespeare’s "Humors" play, reflecting the Chapman/Jonson/Marston vogue for such plays. Humors plays—mostly comedies—as I have said before—use a number of relatively flat types of characters, who, in the course of the play, are gotten "out of their Humors" and (hopefully) reintegrated into their societies. Although Shakespeare’s characters are nearly always dealt with more richly than the more singularly focused characters created by the playwrights mentioned above, the characters in Twelfth Night are certainly types. Orsino—the melancholic lover; Olivia—the over-the-top melodramatic mourner; Sir Andrew Aguecheek—the stupid would-be courtier; Sir Toby—the drunken, out-of-money knight (archetypically, the "lord of misrule"); Malvolio—the pompously officious servant/climber (there existed novels about good and faithful stewards who end up marrying the "lady" they work for—not the case here). All these characters are got "out of their prevailing "humors" by the play’s end.
(As a footnote, I might remark that Hamlet itself is a kind of "humors" tragedy—in that the characters surrounding Hamlet are also relatively flat—in that their essential natures can be described in a word or two—all of which focuses us on Hamlet’s character, which is essentially ours as well.)
3. Shakespeare’s company was also keenly aware of the inroads the boy actors in the private theaters were making into their public-theater audiences. The courtiers and would-be courtiers went to the private theaters, which were lighted and somewhat more comfortable than the public theaters, to see contemporary vogues (and, often, people) satirized or made fun of by what Hamlet refers to as the "little Eyasses." Shakespeare’s challenge in both plays was to overpower his contemporaries’ appeal.
4. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were also aware of the increasing threat of Puritanism, and they made fun of puritanical zealots often. (We have seen Shakespeare’s own detestation for shallow, officious types in a number of plays so far. Hamlet’s "Young Osrick" is a fine example of this.) Malvolio, then, is an attack at both Puritanism and shallow, self-serving officiousness.
While all this was going on (I won’t even mention anxiety about crop failures and the consequences of Elizabeth’s coming death), a group of Cambridge students was writing a set of three plays lamenting the poor job outlook for literary graduates and commenting on contemporary literary activities in general. The pays are called the "Parnassus Plays" because, in Greek myth, Mount Parnassus is the place that great artists end up going to. Needless to say, the clever artists and writers in the Parnassus plays fare very badly in a "real world" that doesn’t appreciate them.
The plays do, however, give extensive commentary on the London dramatic scene, praising Shakespeare as being the best of the playwrights of their time. They also make a curious comment on how Shakespeare "put Jonson down," a comment no one that I know has ever explained. Shakespeare was not a playwright to put others down—although there was a vicious "War of the Theaters" going on at the time involving Marston, Jonson and Dekker (who often wrote and play-doctored for Shakespeare’s company), who attacked one another flamboyantly on both the public and private stages drawing large audiences).
I have sometimes wondered whether or not the Cambridge students did not see Malvolio as a put-down of Jonson, who frequently dressed in black, tended to have a certain pompousness and, it is said, wandered about the galleries where one of his plays was being put on, muttering about his actors’ goof-ups—not to mention the fact that "element," which word Malvolio uses several times, was on of Jonson’s favorites.
5. I have not spoken at all here about the psychological aspects of the charcters’ interactions with one another—a subject worth pursuing: How do Viola’s words help develop Olivia’s thinking? How does she interact with Orsino? How do Maria and Sir Toby affect one another? How do Feste and Malvolio affect one another? Etc.
Nor have I gone into Feste’s place in the larger picture of Twelfth Night: What is his function? Is his Shakespeare’s voice? What is his equivalent in earlier plays? How does he compare with Touchstone? Etc. I will remind you that Feste was originally written for the comedian Robert Armin, Shakespeare’s company’s new "comedian," a singer with a good voice. (Armin is also said to have played Touchstone, although one wonders why he doesn’t sing in that play. Why not? I can only think that it was written with the previous "comedian," Will Kemp, in mind. I keep the two straight in my mind by remembering the Will Kemp reminds one of "hempen homespun" types, which Kemp frequently played. Silly me.)
Finally, I will note that Gil’s and my former teacher Bill Matchett, used to suggest that Malvolio will not end up cast of the play-ending reintegration of things, but will be invited back later. I don’t go with this opinion. I think a reminder that there are some people who can never be re-integrated into society is too powerful a truth for Shakespeare to pass up.
Speaking of destructive self-importance, I note a letter to today’s New York Times, which describes the Republican notion of democracy as being "One dollar = one vote."
Enough, or too much.
Ernst
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Twelfth Night - Opening Thoughts
Greetings, my fellow bardnuts. Make that, Season's Greetings! How appropriate that we read Twelfth Night at this time of year, yes?
My first exposure to this play was via a lovely production at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. The director set it in the Victorian era, so costume fabrics were luxuriant. The set included a very tall Christmas tree and all the details and elegance of a Victorian home (the inside theatre allows for more set decoration). Truly a treat for the eyes. To this day, when I read this play, I can still envision the lovely young woman who played Viola and exactly how Malvolio looked in his ridiculous yellow stockings. The production was clearly strong enough to shape my own directing efforts when I worked with a group of juniors on a Super Saturday project a number of years ago. But this play, although similar in plot to other comedies with twins, mistaken identities, and cross-dressing, renders itself more mature, more sophisticated than Shakespeare's earlier comedies. How did this evolution happen?
Thoughts to ponder as we embark:
1. The role of Malvolio is troubling to me. Details are wrapped up so neatly at the end of this play with the exception of Malvolio. Is he really all that BAD, as the root of his name suggests? Or is it possible for his character to elicit sympathy?
2. Compare/contrast Viola and Olivia. I would cast my vote for Viola as one of Shakespeare's most intriguing heroines. :-)
3. Ahhhh, the language of love. It's all here ― from the lyrical (gpf, I know exactly which line you will use here!) to the absurd.
4. The role of the fool compared to the fool we see in King Lear. Does comedy dictate a different social commentary than tragedy?
5. And last, but certainly not least, I will be teaching this play in January. Gimme some favorite teachable moments, or the "stuff" I can't possibly leave out.
Cheers to all!
Cindy
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