As You Like It - Performance Log (July 2009)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Maren, it was the ukulele.

Logged by Randall

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

As You Like It - Arden

Gilbert writes:

Dear Denizens of the Deep,

Back to the realm, literally, of Comedy and to The Plot: a young man meets and desires a young woman, but obstacles to their union arise, until these are resolved and a new society is formed, most often by marriage, or at least a new harmony as symbolized by a dance. The obstacles, from Menander onward, are most often a parental generation blocking the union, but it may be law, family enmity (Romeo and Juliet is such a comedy until Capulet takes a wrong turn in Act III), or perhaps the need for the young man to prove himself worthy. In As You Like It, it is the young woman more than the young man who is in pursuit, and the obstacles are placed by both a repressive society and the necessity of the young man to pass a test (which he does not know he is taking). The resolution seems to be brought about by place, the Forest of Arden, as catalyst.

The structure of As You Like It is similar to A Midsummer Night's Dream. The play starts at a court ruled over by a repressive autocrat. The usurper Duke Frederick is more villainous than Theseus, but both impose edicts that drive the young couple into exile, into the forest, under threat of death. As You Like It doubles the threat; Oliver de Boys has reduced his youngest brother, Orlando, to uneducated servitude. Among the entertainments at Duke Frederick's court is gladiatorial sport in which the house wrassler is charged with maiming or killing all comers, specifically Orlando, who, somehow beats him, and therefore must flee for his life. So into the woods we go, the Forest of Arden.

I first saw this referred to as "the green world" in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, though perhaps this term was already a commonplace. The Forest provides freedom, respite, space so the obstacles of the court society can be resolved. In Midsummer Night's Dream the forest is supranatural, conjured by magic, whereas Arden is pastoral, imbued with the innocence attributed to Nature. Here Duke Senior is free to discover his inner self, apart from the social and political strictures of court, playing like the old Robin Hood of England; Rosalind, disguised in breeches, can display her assertive imagination; naïve Orlando can practice expressing love. The pastoral is an artificial literary convention, shepherds and shepherdesses but no beshitten sheep nor wolves, so it is essentially innocent and charming. However, Shakespeare does not send the exiles into a hermetically sealed otherworld. Duke Senior introduces Arden with a conventional:

Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,
The season's difference, as the icy fang
And churlish slicing of the winter's wind,
Which when it bites and blows upon my body
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say,
"This is no flattery: these are counselors
That feelingly persuade me what I am."
Sweet are the uses of adversity, (II.i.1-12);

that is, Arden is not court ("painted pomp"), and yet it is not prelapsarian Eden. Senior praises the winter wind because, somehow, it underscores his mortality. This is less the pastoral convention of Theocritus as anticipation of the Romanticism of Wordsworth, where the tongues of trees, the books of running brooks, and the sermons of stones teach essential good. Senior goes too far, into "green" sentimentality, when he considers harvesting some deer, and "yet it irks me the poor dappled fools,/ Being native burghers of this desert city, / Should in their own confines with forked heads/ Have their round haunches gor'd." I find it pretty difficult to assign idealism to someone salivating for venison burgers [sic]. But the ancient servant Adam (interesting name especially after the reference to Eden's old Adam) provides the key to the play as he and Orlando prepare to escape the court: "O, what a world is this, when what is comely/ Envenoms him that bears it!" (II.iii.14-15).

Soon Rosalind and Celia and Orlando and Adam will encounter the true denizens of Arden, not Oberon, Titania, and Puck, not Peaseblossom, Mustardseed or Moth, but the array of shepherds, from Corin ("I am a true laborer"), Sylvius, and the sweetly innocent William, to the anti-Rosalind Phoebe and the randy Audrey, and it is interesting that in this supposedly transformative world, only the court jester Touchstone is actually affected by interactions with them, and then it is more stones than trees and brooks that move him (sorry―strike that).

Thus, Arden is merely Not-Court rather than a green world, and when all the matches are made―Rosalind and Orlando, Celia and a miraculously repentant Oliver, Touchstone and Audrey (betimes finding an official blessing for their coupling), Phoebe and Silvius―and after Duke Frederick, though viciously determined to hunt down the merry folk in Arden, encounters some "old religious man" in a cave and is inexplicably converted to Saint Francis-like serenity, then we find that Duke Senior and Orlando and all the Merry folk except Jaques put venison and campfire songs behind them and repopulate the court with all deliberate haste.

Gil

PS: Time permitting (and if anyone is interested) I will review a survey of 400 years of production to see if the Forest of Arden has been set the way A Midsummer Night's Dream was, real trees and live rabbits. Or one of us might consider Rosalind in disguise, a boy actor cast as a woman disguised as a man pretending to be a woman so a man could practice courting her; or what happens if Maggie Smith is bitten in the face by her dog?

As You Like It - Marlowe's Shadow

Randall writes:

Quiet friends,

Jonathan Bate tells us, in The Genius of Shakespeare, that Christopher Marlowe "is the only contemporary whom Shakespeare overtly alludes to rather than subliminally absorbs" (104). That overt allusion comes in As You Like It, Act 3, scene 5, when Phoebe, smitten by Rosalind dressed as Ganymede, says in an aside: "Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might:/ Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?" (86-87). (My Folger edition puts quotes around the second line, but they're not in the first Folio.)

The quote, be it Phoebe's or Marlowe's, comes from Marlowe's poem "Hero and Leander," in which Leander sees and falls instantly in love with Hero, a virginal devotee of the goddess Venus, and she, seeing his inspired ardor, falls instantly in love with him. I think this puts Phoebe in some pretty serious company, yet I never feel compelled in As You Like It to take Phoebe's love seriously. Does Shakespeare mock, as it seemed like he was having a bit of fun with John Lyly in Love's Labor's Lost? Let's look closer. In Marlowe, the protagonists' love springs from their sight ― Leander's of Hero,

There Hero sacrificing turtles' blood,
Veiled to the ground, veiling her eyelids close,
And modestly they opened as she rose;
Thence flew love's arrow with the golden head,
And thus Leander was enamored, (158-162)

and Hero's of Leander,

Stone still he stood, and evermore he gazed,
Till with the fire that from his countenance blazed,
Relenting Hero's gentle heart was strook. (163-165)

Phoebe, on the other hand, is dismantling the power of sight in her opening speech to Silvius:

Thou tell'st me there is murder in mine eye.
'Tis pretty, sure, and very probable
That eyes, that are the frail'st and softest things,
Who shut their coward gates on atomies,
Should be called tyrants, butchers, murderers.
Now I do frown on thee with all my heart,
And if mine eyes can wound, now let them kill thee.
… But now mine eyes,
Which I have darted at thee, hurt thee not;
Nor I am sure there is no force in eyes
That can do hurt. (3.5.11-17, 25-28)

If our Shakespeare, who has run a few rings around Petrarch and tweaked disingenuously complimentary poets with "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun," is not poking some fun here, I'll turn in my Historical Critic badge and decoder ring. What to make then of the subsequent irony, when Phoebe sees Ganymede (Rosalind), falls in love with her, and in her aside to the audience, suggests that Marlowe (dead shepherd) was right after all?

Well, first of all Ganymede is no Leander; in fact, he's Rosalind. So the audience is separated from the seriousness of worshipful, willing-to-die-for-it, Petrarchan love by the dramatic irony. We don't pity Phoebe; we laugh at her. Beneath this is a second, subtler irony. In Marlowe's poem Leander leaps into the Hellespont to swim over to Hero, only to be trapped by Neptune who thinks he is Ganymede, a beautiful boy abducted by Jove who has fallen in love with him. I don't believe in coincidences in literature, so it's provocative that Rosalind has chosen Ganymede as a pseudonym: "I'll have no worse a name than Jove's own page,/ And therefore look you call me Ganymede" (1.3.131-132). Clearly, Ganymede ― the idealized, most beautiful of men ― accounts for Rosalind's beauty in the guise of a boy. But is he not also a symbol of homoerotic love? So when we get to all the "And I for no woman" stuff, we find a wicked double entendre; Phoebe's out of luck both ways ― she won't get Rosalind (a woman) and she won't get Ganymede (he likes boys).

In Phoebe's line, Shakespeare's explicit reference to Marlowe may be homage, but that doesn't mean he's not inclined to play a jaunty tune on the "saw of might."

Randall

As You Like It - Seamless Comedy

Derek writes:

Alrighty, I'm going first, it looks like. I'll keep this brief, as I'm in Iowa City at the moment, looking for a place to live when I (re)restart grad school in August.

As You Like It is my favorite of Shakespeare's comedies. Other great ones have their points ― Midsummer Night's Dream with its fairyland traipsing, Twelfth Night simply for Feste, Much Ado for the exchanges of wit ― but only As You Like It seems to combine so many elements of wonderful comedy so seamlessly. When I read Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human, Bloom's claim that As You Like It suffers, or Rosalind suffers, because there's no real EVIL in the play, it made me somewhat angry. One of As You Like It's great points, I think, is that, for once, there really IS evil ― not Malvolio threatening to ruin people's fun and make them go to bed on time; not Don John seeking simply to spoil everyone's joy (though he's closer to evil); not even Egeus threatening to kill his own daughter if she won't marry Demetrius (that's probably closest). In As You Like It, the world really is upside-down from the beginning, and not in any benign way. A wrongful, usurping ruler has taken the throne and banished the Duke Senior and Co to Arden. This is the stuff, potentially, of tragedy ― Macbeth, Hamlet, and so on. Or at least of problematic histories, like the War of the Roses octet. In As You Like It, the power of virtue and goodness and beneficence is immediately threatened on several levels by the cynical power-grabs of both Oliver and Frederick.

Okay, instead of going on and on about the wonder of the very explicit court v. country philosophizing, the romantically overmatched Orlando, Jacques as counterpoint to Touchstone, etc, etc, all of which I kind of want to write, I'll just stick to my point and close succinctly. Why I love As You Like It ― in most comedies, it seems to me (sorry, Mr. Bloom), as in most tragedies, actually, the end result requires a great deal of help from some external force like fate or happenstance; in As You Like It, though, that good wins out in the end is much more a result of the combined wills of Rosalind and Celia, I think. Not that they plan it that way ― but they are simply unflaggingly playful in the face of danger, and for that reason, I think, it feels to the audience that the happy ending is a foregone conclusion.

Derek

King John - Summation by Anti-Host

Gilbert writes:

Word bethumpers,

King John is a puzzlement. It is just not in any stream of awareness, main- or otherwise. Those Shakespeare festivals committed to the entire canon must do it, but my guess is that Ashland, Oregon, has done one King John for every six Midsummer Nights. As I noted, my undergraduate Shakespeare course started with John because the professor was certain no one had ever read or seen it. Maurice Charney gives it ten pages, though if he didn’t he couldn’t call his book All of Shakespeare, while Marjorie Garber writes eleven pages on John but twenty-nine on As You Like It in her Shakespeare After All. Thus, the Will Shakespeare Experience had a tabula rasa, and as we wrote on it, three foci emerged: women, history, and insights from structure, both the penetrating insight into moral dilemmas that Randall outlined (“tracing the link between politics and morals, Shakespeare is less cocksure and doctrinaire,” says Herschel Baker) and speculations on the Bastard, both central to and somehow detached from the play.

Cindy Calder was struck, then smitten with Lady Constance, assertive, passionate and wily, though I [Gilbert] might add one more little adjective, mad. In the cat fight with her mother-in-law, Queen Eleanor, she continues the earlier Faulconbridge argument mocking paternity, as each woman accuses her rival of adultery. Constance at least defends her son with the earlier “parts” argument: “this boy [Arthur] / Liker in feature to his father Geffrey/ Than thou [Eleanor] and John in manners, being as like/ As rain to water, or devil to his dam.” [Mike—here’s another water image to add to your collection.] Constance can ring changes on “plague,” and can reduce Eleanor’s appeal to Arthur to a parody of baby talk:

Do, child, go to it grandame, child,
Give grandame kingdom, and it grandame will
Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig.
There’s a good grandame. (II.i.160-63)

In all our glances at Shakespeare’s language, have we ever seen him quite so playful, except when he goes a-Dogberrying? Yet when a messenger reports her son has become a pawn in the political manipulation, engaged to marry Blanch of Spain (perhaps especially devastating to a mother, given that Shakespeare has heavily underscored that Arthur is still a boy), she veers toward madness:

Believe me, I do not believe thee, man,
I have king’s oath to the contrary.
Thou shalt be punish’d for thus frighting me,
For I am sick and capable of fears,
Oppress’d with wrongs, and therefore full of fears,
A widow, husbandless, subject to fears,
A woman, naturally born to fears. (III.i.9-15)

Her grief at the loss of her son, long before Arthur’s death (suicide?), swells to a threnody of inconsolable motherhood. Cindy cited the crescendo: “Death, Death, O amiable lovely Death!” Thus, structurally, King John starts with an essentially comic scene of Lady Faulconbridge faced with both her sons insisting on her infidelity, passes through a battle royal version of this between two royals (Constance is wife to a prince), then darkens to the mother-queens losing their sons, until, in what Marjorie Garber calls “acute dramatic irony, the passing of these two enemies and rivals twinned,” both die within days of each other.

Derek was moved to speculate that in order to be a tough woman in a Shakespearean play, you have to be an old, preferably widowed matriarch figure, and certainly the young woman in King John, Blanch of Spain, seems to be only a mousey cipher. But I’d like to make a case for fourteen-year-old Juliet, who in every comparison, is stronger and wiser than Romeo, and at last recognizes “If all else fail, myself have pow’r to die.” And after Rosalind and Viola, let’s relish the chance to be awed by the “sexed” and unmatronly (!) Cleopatra.

As to history, King John seems too muddled to be the accomplished generic practice that makes Richard II possible. It zigzags among John against Phillip; no, John and Philip against Pandulph; no, Salisbury and Phillip against…well, I lose track…all inflated with what Herschel Baker calls “tumid rhetoric.” Most puzzling for me is Hubert, citizen of Angiers, matchmaker, but later John’s assassin-designate, but who gives way to sentiment and conscience when he spares, movingly, young Arthur.

So, King John is not a fine example of the History genre, yet it does create all these triangles. Randall’s posting, “The Flow of Time,” explores how Shakespeare’s revision of history to set up balanced, though questionable, claims to the throne, create dramatic tensions, that will be the heart and muscle of the three great Histories which follow (leaving Henry V aside as political propaganda—masterful-—without this sort of dramatic tension). Yet without the magnetic field of Tudor history, Shakespeare does create the “three depictions of moral dilemmas—Philip’s, Hubert’s, and Salisbury’s—[which] expose very complex personal [not historical] views,” as Randall noted in “Moral Dilemmas,” and, together with the free radical Bastard, put us closer to Shakespeare than we have been in earlier History.

And finally, from this dramatization of the entwining of politics and morality, Shakespeare has left instruction to Barack Obama:“To set a form upon that indigest/Which he [your predecessor] hath left so shapeless and so rude” (V.vii.26-7).

Gil, aka Thumper

RE: King John and Shakespeare the Bastard

Randall writes:

Gentle friends,

I didn't want to let go of King John without responding to Gil's argument about Shakespeare and Philip Faulconbridge aka The Bastard. As I was reading the play, I shared Gil's question about whether there is another character like the Bastard in Shakespeare's works. The three "types" that occurred to me were "vice," "chorus" and "fool." I don't have my book in front of me (because I'm at a Shakespeare conference in New Hampshire and we're reading Antony and Cleopatra, so King John is at home on my desk) so I won't belabor the various supports and counter-arguments I might try Faulconbridge with. Instead I'll just toss out a few thoughts that occurred to me reading and have stuck with me since.

Outsider? Absolutely. I haven't put my finger on the right term for this yet but there's something about the way a character comments on action within a Shakespeare play that sets him/her apart. Faulconbridge has this quality, one that seems to me chorus-like, even though he is within the play. Gil points to Faulconbridge's freedom from class and "excess moral scruple" (this latter reminds me of some of Shakespeare's later fools: Feste in Twelfth Night, the Fool in King Lear), and I'd agree with both the categorization and the compelling argument that follows. What I'd add is this: Faulconbridge seemed to me fairly unique when I put the play down. Then finishing Antony and Cleopatra last weekend, I thought I found strong similarities in the character of Enobarbus.

In one scene in particular, Antony and Caesar are airing out their mutual grievances. Maecenas suggests that they cease arguing and focus on present needs -- the coming battle with Sextus Pompey. Enobarbus quips "Or, if you borrow one another's love for the instant, you may, when you hear no more words of Pompey, return it again. You shall have time to wrangle in when you have nothing else to do" (2.2.124-127). Antony shuts him down: "Thou art a soldier. Speak no more." And Enobarbus famously closes with "That truth should be silent I had almost forgot."

So here again is the outsider (soldier), whose anti-hypocritical comment on the primary action accords him the status of truth-speaker, elevating him above the action. Enobarbus in not quite as outside as Faulconbridge -- he lacks the same degree of ironic detachment -- but after his exchange with Antony, I think we as readers listen to him differently and he becomes an occasional chorus-like figure.

And I don't think Enobarbus is the only character like this. I wonder if the plays we're reading now signal a period in which Shakespeare consistently includes characters who have a portion of the quality that Gil defines, be they fools, friends, or foils. Even the quality of commenting on inflated rhetoric seems thematic in the plays we're currently reading (think Henry at the end of Henry V, wooing Katherine). Is this Shakespeare putting himself into his plays? I think we're always on dangerous ground when we say anything about Shakespeare the man (as I did in my last post), but I would find it hard to deny that in the outsider or commentator-type characters, a world view beyond character seems to emerge. I'd like to be more specific about this, so I'll note it as a characteristic to consider as we continue with our reading.For now I'll turn mute.

Your considerate stone,
Randall

King John - Mere Echoes or More?

Randall writes:

Companions,

A number of us have concurred with the chronological placement of King John's writing between the two tetralogies. Some critics that I've looked through, though, place Richard II immediately prior to King John (Edmund Chambers, Sylvan Barnet, Derek Traversi), dating it 1595-96 to John's 1596-97. Whatever the order, I am interested in certain echoes in character and sentiment that turn up, which I believe point to Shakespearean attitude. We praise Shakespeare for his nearly unlimited variety in character, in fully developed and unique motivation, in tone. Yes. But I want to look sometimes at those moments when characteristics recur or similar speeches are mouthed by different people because I think these kinds of repetitions allow us to examine concepts imported to the play.

One frequently cited example is Shakespeare's views on theater which turn up in characters as diverse as Hamlet and Jacques. But Richard II and King John provide a different echo, and one question might be: do such confluences occur because the two (history) plays are written so close together, or because Shakespeare takes opportunities regardless of the common moment of the two plays to mount some soapbox?

Take dying John of Gaunt's cornucopia of patriotic epithets in Richard II:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear'd by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry,
Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's Son,
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out. (Richard II 2.1.40-59)

I wouldn't be surprised to see this speech excerpted and put on inspirational posters in English classrooms. It's something of a diva speech, recalling Shakespeare's early willingness to pull out all the language stops in plays like Love's Labor's Lost and Romeo and Juliet. The overwhelming abundance of appositional phrases, not to mention the hugely delayed predicate whose absence emphasizes the preceding phrases all the more, shift our attention from Gaunt to Shakespeare. It's like when, in the blues or rock, a guitarist finds a brief phrase and repeats it over and over and over, until the crowd begins to cheer, recognizing that their focus has been shifted by the repetition from art to artist. Hence, it's easy to lose sight in this speech of what it's about ― pride in one's country and disappointment that others have failed in their allegiance.

A slight echo emerges in King John, when the Duke of Austria pledges allegiance to Arthur, whom he believes to be the rightful King of England. He promises:

That to my home I will no more return
Till Angiers and the right thou hast in France,
Together with that pale, that white-faced shore,
Whose foot spurns back the ocean's roaring tides
And coops from other lands her islanders,
Even till that England, hedged in with the main,
That water-walled bulwark, still secure
And confident from foreign purposes,
Even till that utmost corner of the West
Salute thee for her king. (King John 2.1.21-30)

While Austria reduces Gaunt's 17 versions of England to a mere five, his words elaborate on Gaunt's "fortress built by Nature" and expand Gaunt's epithets by adding personification. But in both we hear the clear tones of patriotic reverence, in one even from a foreigner (something that will occur again in Henry V when members of the French court speak in awed tones about the English power).

Certainly many characters in Shakespeare love their country (Othello commits himself to Venice, Titus kills a son for Rome, Hamlet is concerned about something rotting in Denmark), but Gaunt's effusive speech, Austria's addition of a paean to England to his promise of support for Arthur, and the King of France's quaking fear of Edward the Black Prince strike me as more than moments of rounded character. In repetition, in echo, they become themselves evidence of a motif that goes beyond character and highlights Shakespearean attitude.

So, while he prepares plays about recent kings that explore the complexities of usurpation, the confusion of political discord, the instability of allegiance, and the imprecision of moral choice, and then sets those stories in front of Elizabethan aristocracy, it must be reassuring to Shakespeare to know that at some point, some character is delivering a speech to remind his audience that, above all, Shakespeare loves England, and that England should be the god of one's idolatry. I'd cue up England's national anthem about now, but England doesn't actually have one (they have a commonwealth anthem). Perhaps someone should nominate a version of Gaunt's speech. Something like this:

(To the tune of "God Save the Queen.")

This royal throne of kings,
this earth of majesty,
this scepter'd isle.

This land of such dear souls,
this blessed plot, this earth,
this other Eden, this dear dear land.

This precious stone set in
the silver sea, this realm, this little world.

This happy breed of men,
Renowned for distant deeds,
For Christian service and
true chivalry.

This teeming womb of kings
feared for their lineage, famous by birth.
This fortress Nature-built
dear for her reputation through the world.
This England.

Oh, my stars and stripes,
Randall

RE2: King John - Constance

Gil writes:

Cindy, and the Lords on the left,

My original focus in King John, engendered deep down by my undergraduate prof William Matchett, was on a triangle among power or possession (John), right (Arthur), and character―duty, reputation, honor, or patriotism (the Bastard). Historically, John had a legitimate claim to the throne according to his brother Richard I's will, but the Elizabethan audience could listen to an argument for Richard's late older brother Geoffrey's son Arthur on grounds of primogeniture (we will soon be tangled in the wrangle between Mortimer and Bolingbroke). Shakespeare establishes this conflict from the beginning when the French ambassador refers to John's "borrowed majesty" (I.i.4) and to young Arthur, "thy nephew and right royal sovereign." John rebuts with "Our strong possession and our right," and his mother Queen Eleanor underscores that: "Your strong possession much more than your right," i.e., possession is nine-tenths of the law. So, once again in the Histories, the issues of usurpation, possession, and succession are in play.

But the creation of the non-historical Bastard makes it more complex, because he is given (bar)sinister royal blood, the direct son of Richard I, Coeur-de-lion, so he would have the most legitimate claim to the throne were he not born on the wrong side of the sheets: "something about, a little from the right,/ In at the window, or else o'er the hatch./ Who dares not stir by day must walk by night,/ And have is have, however men do catch" (I.i.170-73). It is neat he rhymes rather than blusters about his own illegitimacy, taking the sting from the possibility that Shakespeare nearly created King FitzRichard Ia.

Eventually, by character and action, the Bastard rises to viceroy of England: "Now hear our English King,/ For thus his royalty doth speak in me" (V.ii.128-9) and emerges victorious over the French, Rome, and his own treasonous lords, who whine "That misbegotten [literally] devil Faulconbridge,/ In spite of spite, alone upholds the day" (V.iv.4-5). John is poisoned by a monk, one of those pesky Catholics (Holinshed writes John died "through anguish of mind"). But a brand new character (baaad Shakespeare), young Prince Henry, is introduced in Act V, scene vii, duty or honor prevails, and the Bastard kneels "with all submission, on my knee./ I do bequeath my faithful services/ And true subjection everlastingly" (V.vii.103-5), and English history is again on track. Cindy and I are both pleased we do not need to go on to The Long Boring Life of King Henry III. Bring on Dick, the Tooth.

Cindy redirected me (though I spent 56 days in computer limbo and many hours in hospital waiting rooms) to the mother-son relationships. We first see a comic version, in which the Faulconbridge brothers appear before the king to argue contentiously that their mother has cuckolded their father. One thinks that we will see the old joke about a wife/mother's fidelity (e.g., Don Pedro: "I think this is your daughter." Leonato: "Her mother hath many times told me so," Much Ado, I.i.104-105), but this time questioning legitimacy is in earnest:

BASTARD
I, a gentleman
…and eldest son,
As I suppose, to Robert Faulconbridge…
Most certain of one mother
…and, as I think, one father
But for the certain knowledge of that truth.
I put you o'er to heaven and to my mother.
Of that I doubt, as all men's children may. (I.i.50-52, 59-63, italics mine)

Eleanor defends motherhood: "Out on thee, rude man, thou dost shame thy mother,/ And wound her honor with this diffidence" (I.i.64-5), though she does note a physical resemblance to her own son, Coeur-de-lion. King John, Coeur-de-lion's brother, caps it: "Mine eye hath well examined his parts,/ And finds them perfect Richard" (I.i.89-90). That settles it; in those pre-DNA times, parts is parts. Robert Faulconbridge insists King Richard had much employed his father, but the Bastard redirects him, " Your tale must be how he employ'd my mother."

Soon, the resolution is agreed upon: Robert, though not the eldest son and heir, gets the land, but Philip/Sir Richard Plantagenet/ aka the Bastard gets the face, the blood of his great father, and the honor to follow his grandmother Queen Eleanor, though his blunt, rude humor immediately emerges: "My father gave me honor, yours gave land./ Now blessed be the hour by night or day/ When I was [be]got, Sir Robert was away!' (I.i.104-6), though 'honor' may be a tenuous word, if one notes that 'hour' and 'whore' are homophones in Elizabethan England.

Enter Lady Faulconbridge: "O me, 'tis my mother," who is mighty piqued that her two sons have come before the king to besmirch her reputation, yet she must acknowledge that King Richard Cordelion was the Bastard's father; he "that art the issue of my dear offense,/ So strongly urg'd past my defense." The Bastard's rationale to absolve his mother from sin ("your fault was not your folly;" "Needs must you lay your heart at his dispose / Subjected tribute to commanding love') is touching. This guy ripped the heart out of lions; what defense would a mere woman have?

Cindy feels the Bastard lets his mother off easily, yet he truly thanks her that she has given him the heart of a lion, far better than a landed income of 500 pounds a year. I rehearse this at length because if the play underscores mother-son relationships, this first, as with everything we associate with the Bastard, is fraught with delicious irony. Yet, by the end of the play, it is the Bastard's honor, duty, patriotism, and character that prevail. And, thanks to his mother, we can see the root [pace Eric Partridge] from which this grew.

Gil

RE: King John - Its Place in the Flow of Time

Randall writes:

Ernst, et. al,

One good cheat deserves another. I notice in the excerpt of Herschel Baker's intro to King John, he writes that Shakespeare's play gives us a story of a king "plagued by a rival with a better claim." I like Peter Saccio's expansion and review of this idea in Shakespeare's English Kings: History, Chronicle and Drama. Saccio writes:

Shakespeare is unique (at least among sixteenth-century writers dealing with John) in his interpretation of the reign. In the contest with Arthur, Shakespeare's John is flatly a usurper. Eleanor of Aquitaine is made to remark that he holds the crown "by strong possession much more than … right." As we have seen, this notion entails stricter views of royal inheritance than were in fact current in 1199. It implies a firm legitimist rule of dynastic descent that was to develop only in much later times. The notion is also at variance with Tudor accounts of John. Most Tudor historians do not question the legitimacy of John's crown. In Holinshed there is no serious doubt about his right: Richard I wills all his dominions to John, the English lords swear fealty accordingly, and only a few French towns consider that Arthur has a better claim. Only if we go back to Polydore Vergil, a Catholic historian who reflects medieval monastic chroniclers hostile to John because of his defiance of the pope, do we find charges of usurpation. Even The Troublesome Reign, while manifesting the same pattern of events, does not harp on this string. (Saccio 202-203)

So my question is this: does the view of John as usurper take shape in the play because Shakespeare himself is a product of a time concerned with "legitimist rule" or because it is necessary for a more dramatic text? What leads to this particular characterization?

One place we might look is the earlier Richard III (I'm accepting various people's placement of King John between the two tetralogies). When we discussed Richard III, Gil connected us to Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, a detective novel in which the protagonist, Alan Grant, explores the veracity of the Richard character we've come to know from Shakespeare's play. Gil wrote: "Recognizing that the popular 'knowledge' of Richard is a monster, the crunchbacked murderer of the princes in the Tower, Grant sends young Carradine on multiple research missions, and 'solves' the historical truth ('Truth is the daughter of time') about the king. The history that we all know was written by John Morton (Bishop of Ely in our play), transcribed by Saint Sir Thomas More as The History of King Richard the Third, adapted by Hall, then Holinshed, and the latter three were Shakespeare's sources. All were writing under the patronage of the Tudors, Henry VII, Henry VIII, and then Elizabeth. Winners write history. Henry VII had a most marginal claim to the throne, his father Owen Tudor, married the granddaughter of John of Gaunt's illegitimate son. We know from Henry IV through Henry VI how usurpation is the stain from which there is no escape. Henry VII, with such tenuous legitimacy, then disposed of every more legitimate claimant, including ― TA DA! ― the princes in the tower. Then, his historians 'murdered' Richard's reputation post mortem. Richard was not even deformed, though apparently thin and one shoulder was slightly higher than the other. Yeah, it's only a detective novel, but it apparently is built on the more accurate account of Richard who, after the Tudor reign and their creation of the Tudor myth, has been rehabilitated."

So in Richard III, Shakespeare takes his popular history from Tudor sources and Richard is depicted as a Vice. But Saccio suggests that Tudor historians did not see John as a usurper, yet in King John John's legitimacy is seriously at question. What's more this inconsistency is reflected in Holinshed. One conclusion we might draw from this is that Shakespeare stages stories, not political propaganda. Richard III, as politically expedient as it may be in establishing a Tudor myth, is a whopping great tale ― seduction, murder, betrayal, war, absent horses. King John becomes a better tale as Shakespeare increases the dramatic tensions. What happens, after all, to the conflict between John and Rome if Arthur's claim to the throne and more specifically Philip's allegiance with Arthur do not become movable pieces in that chess game? We may think of King John as a lesser play (when comparing it to the Henrys IV and Henry V), but it is a cleverly and powerfully structured play.

I'm still wondering, maybe even more so now, what Elizabeth play-goers would have made of all this? When Oliver Stone directed JFK, the press was full of declaming sputtering about historical accuracy and the irresponsibility of promoting conspiracy theories in a popular medium. We have always allowed Hollywood to run rough-shod over historical accuracy, but we do get our dander up when it comes to important political figures. If the Globe Theatre is the Hollywood of its time, does that audience (aristocrats and groundlings both) ever raise a stink over the portrayal of kings, and if so, what documentation of that controversy survives?

Randall

King John and Shakespeare the Bastard

Gil writes:

Long "lost" friends,

Despite the linear mile of shelf-feet in libraries of such titles as Shakespeare’s Ideas, Meaning by Shakespeare, Materialistic Shakespeare, or Shakespeare Right and Left, I am reluctant ever to assert “according to Shakespeare.” Instead, I’m more comfortable with ‘Othello believes, while Iago insists’ or ‘according to King Henry IV, but alien to Falstaff.’ In King John, Cardinal Pandulph denounces King Philip: “So mak’st thou faith an enemy to faith,/ And like a civil war set’st oath to oath,/ Thy tongue against thy tongue” (III.i.262-4) and follows with a perfect example of strict and rigorous ratiocination, an example, I’m told by Garber and EAJ Honigmann, of the doctrine of equivocation. This casuistry, impossible, I imagine, for an audience to follow, proves all form is formless, all order orderless. Yet it does not “prove” Shakespeare is a nihilist; rather it articulates flawlessly a Roman Catholic doctrine, anathema to Elizabethan Protestants. Pandulph, and the Church he represents, is intelligent, powerful, arrogant, and — twisted. This argument creates dramatic tension within the play between the Church and the pusillanimous Kings Philip and John. Shakespeare the playwright speaks in many tongues.

Nevertheless, I am tempted to equate Philip Faulconbridge, the Bastard, to Shakespeare himself allowing his personal perspective and ironic asides into this chronology play. Faulconbridge is a fictional creation, not subject to the template of events, politics, betrayals, or even the history overseen by father Holinshed. From the first, he is an outsider, beyond hereditary class and freed of any excess moral scruple. After witty and bawdy calumniation of his mother’s honesty, thereby gaining an (unhistorical) lineage as the bastard son of Richard I, Coeur-de-lion, he can resign his rights in the English landed gentry and rely on his merit and virility, taking his chances with Queen Elinor when she, remarkably, declares “I am a soldier” (that is, she is man enough for him). His one constant is devotion to English patriotism. He declares independence: “And I am I, howe’er I was begot”― freedom, though still within the limits of time and place.

Is there another such character in Shakespeare? Berowne? Much of Richard III? Later some of King Lear’s Edmund (as a bastard)? Outside Shakespeare, perhaps some of Ernst’s malcontents such as Chapman’s Bussy d’Ambois, or Dryden’s blustery Almanzor (“For I alone am king of me”) though neither has a sense of irony. But preventing him from being a tragic figure, the Bastard maintains a detached, ironic counterpoint to politics, mores, hypocrisy. After John knights him as Sir Richard, Plantagenet, he muses on how he must behave now he is nominally a courtier, ‘a foot of honour better than he was,’ and he wonderfully parodies the artifices of court life, how to ‘make a leg,’ suck his teeth, and memorize pickup lines from an absey-book, and “from the inward motion to deliver/ Sweet, sweet, sweet poison for the age’s tooth.” An outsider’s aside, outside the plot. Where else does Shakespeare just fool around with phony court behavior? Maybe with Bushy, Bagot, and Green in Richard II, but they are historical figures, integral to the plot and elemental to Richard’s character and reputation.

In the military action before the besieged city of Angiers, we return to warrior virility, the Bastard as a man of action, so forceful that Austria calls him a “cracker.” The Bastard dismisses wavering by both kings: “O now doth Death line his dead chaps with steel;/ The swords of soldiers are his teeth, his fangs/ … Cry ‘havoc!’ kings (II.i.352-3, 357), poetry so rhetorically rich as to border on satire if we still remember his send-up of courtly artifice. The next time one hears “Cry havoc!” it will be Henry V, the perfect warrior. But here, the Kings of England and France, after all their threats and bloodshed, compromise into an emasculating truce negotiated by the marriage of Louis the Dolphin to John’s niece, Blanche of Spain, and the Bastard muses on how self-interest and opportunism dilute patriotism, honor, and human character in his analysis of “commodity,” prefaced with “mad world, mad kings, mad composition!”

I find the commodity soliloquy one of the great pieces of commentary in Shakespeare, akin to Henry V on “ceremony” or Ulysses on “degree.” It is personal, illustrated by images from observed life (even noting that self-interest will cheat the poor maid of her only possession, her virginity), yet at the end of the soliloquy the Bastard deflects it with an ‘or not!’

Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail,
And say there’s no sin but to be rich;
And being rich, my virtue then shall be
To say there is no vice but beggary.
Since kings break faith upon commodity,
Gain, be my lord, for I will worship thee! (II.i.503-8),

a sing-song pair of couplets deflating the penetrating philosophy. I hear Shakespeare seeing into the mad world, then Philip the Bastard joking his way out of high seriousness.

Yet, in the field before Angiers, Austria has worn a lion’s skin, a trophy from killing Coeur-de-lion, and the ‘cracker’ Bastard again and again baits him by calling it a calf’s skin—four times!—deflating the strutting warrior image as he has earlier been bemused by court artifice. Yet he is not a Dogberry (‘write me down an ass’) or a Thersites, because, despite his seeming levity, he still avenges his ‘father’s’ death, and displays Austria’s head on his pike. Finally, the Bastard is wryly amazed at Hubert’s swollen rhetoric relative to the truce of Angiers: “Here’s a large mouth indeed…zounds, I never was so bethumped with words/ Since I first call’d my father dad” (II.i.457, 466-67). So commenting, the Bastard is a critic of rhetoric (written, remember, by Shakespeare) akin to Hamlet’s famous advice to the players. It is often acknowledged that “Hamlet” is Shakespeare lecturing his acting company. Does it not seem that the Bastard steps outside the chronicle to comment on the rhetoric of chronicle plays?

Shakespeare the Bastard nears the end of his fifth chronicle play: “I am amaz’d, methinks, and lose my way/ Among the thorns and dangers of the world” (IV.iii.140-1). So he steers through the maze [Ernst—I’m placing King John before the Henriad] to four unified plays — that most lyrical exploration of sovereignty and the king’s two bodies, Richard II; the perfectly navigated course between King Henry IV and Falstaff toward sovereignty in 1 Henry IV; the touching display of old age in Northumberland, Falstaff and King Henry in 2 Henry IV; and the perfect portrait of the public political figure of King Henry V, all rising thanks to the objective outsider’s eye from the rather disjointed and sometimes overblown chronicle of King John.

Re-wired,
Gil