Category: On Shakespeare

  • Shakespeare Uncut

    Among the hundreds of amateur and professional Shakespearean productions every year few, if any, honor the exact text, or even ninety percent of the text.  When was the last time we saw Hamlet (other than Branagh’s film version) performed without cutting—make that hacking—it? With the exception of a few theatre groups committed to “complete text” productions, the practice of cutting Shakespeare has become almost de rigueur, a mandate handed down to us since at least The Restoration, and is now a virtual epidemic in Shakespearean production.

    Ask any MFA directing student if she or he would even dream of leaving the text intact and you would probably be met with a look of horror.  Professional productions are just as bad, but the most egregious offenders are the Shakespeare Festivals all over the country, those Disneyesque pageants purporting to preserve the memory of the Bard yet systematically eroding his texts not merely by slashing the words but also by obfuscating them with a smorgasbord of multilayered effects and outlandish concepts.

    I am aware of the derision awaiting my suggestion that we produce the texts the way they were written.  I’ve heard the arguments: more than forty percent of Shakespeare’s words have fallen into desuetude; we would never find audiences to sit through endless reams of blank verse (citing the success of Festivals as proof positive that the general theatre-going public loves the production re-formatted to fit “their screen and their time slot!”); the same tired approaches to the plays are boring and stultifying; we have to find new ways to make the plays relevant to our time; how can we do the same thing over and over again?…even Shakespeare altered his texts…remember Peter Brook’s Dream…on and on…

    We know that all Shakespeare’s plays were constructed upon borrowed plots, a weak argument often used in favor of reconstructing, or deconstructing, productions (if he could do it, so can I…); which leads us to the next question: if the plots were not his, what then makes a Shakespearean play a Shakespearean play?  Among all the elements of the plays is there an essential quality that raises these works to dizzying artistic heights or does this question lead only to dissensus?  I suppose one could point to several aspects of the works—their penetration of the human psyche, the variety of characters, the sweep of emotions, the truth of the portrayed relationships; and the encapsulation of the sacred/profane, the beautiful/ugly, and the ridiculous/profound in a celebration of our essential humanity.  But the vehicle for all this, most Shakespeare aficionados would agree, is the language of the plays, or to be more precise, Shakespeare’s use of language.  This really is the intrinsic quality that sets his plays apart from the rest of the canon.

    Shakespeare’s deployment of tropes, the rhythm and arc of his verse, the sounds of words echoing through a passage; rhymes, homophones, assonants, alliterations, and a magnificent array of figures of speech tumbling from the lips of the greatest gallery of characters in the history of literature elevate those borrowed plots from the simple contexts of their origins to the realms of dramatic art.  The keyword here is dramatic.  Wherever Shakespeare’s linguistic flights of fancy took him, he never lost sight of the dramatic—read action-oriented—impact of the moment.  A close look at the text reveals his remarkable understanding of action (pre-dating the Stanislavskian definition of the concept).  Whatever other motives he may have had for employing a particular speech or scene (to give actors time to don armor or anything else) he intuitively understood that if it did not further the action it did not belong in the play.

    Obviously, one isn’t talking about simplistic definitions of Action.  Shakespeare was an accomplished raconteur, inventing ways to embellish an old plot to make it a new story.  Repetitions are the stock-in-trade of storytelling and he was unafraid to replay a moment from a slightly different point of view, thus giving us new insights into the moment or revealing a different aspect of a character.  These repetitions are often excised from productions on the pretext that the audience has that information, as if the whole point of a play is to disseminate data.  Beethoven spends the entire first movement of his Fifth Symphony repeating different forms of his opening theme, revealing tiny aspects of it each time and building it into a unified whole so that at the end the initial outburst is invigorated and energized into—well, a symphony.  In Beethoven’s piece we call them variations or motifs, in Shakespeare we cut them!

    We appreciate the gestalt of musical composition, yet would refuse the same courtesy to a play.  Music somehow seems to possess for us a greater sense of a unified whole; remove one part and the rest crumbles.  Such a perspective is missing from our apprehension of drama as we chisel, whittle, skive, and pare text with impunity.  Would we delete appoggiaturas or acciaccaturas from a sonata?!  Would we remove repeated measures, or refuse to reiterate sections when called for by the composer?

    When we sit through a play we don’t always understand everything we see and hear, at least not in intimate detail.  Most of the time we comprehend the sweep of the thing, making note of different individual parts and moments which add to the general experience, rather like listening to a symphony where we focus not on particular notes but on the emotional experience of the music.  It is, after all, a work of art and not a lecture. Yes, we do listen carefully and even minutely, but the experience has to do with feeling the music of the play.  And that music comprises all the moments–the sound of the verse, the figures and tropes, the direct and even obscure references; they’ve all been placed there for a reason, to add to the overall experience, the polyphony of the piece.

    Even minor playwrights weigh each word with care, making innumerable choices about every moment.  Why would we expect Shakespeare to have done otherwise?  Is our collective unconscious so cathected on an image of a frenetic playwright scribbling away with his quill, attentive only to the overall scheme of the work with no concern for the minutiae of every moment, that we forget that playwrights are also craftsmen?  Genius is the product of great industry, of awareness of detail.  Even Mozart, whose manuscripts are reputed to be remarkably free of deletions and scribbles (unlike, say, Beethoven), for all his experimentations, was painstaking in his attention to the demands of Tradition and Form.

    The evidence of Shakespeare’s texts with their careful concentration on the vagaries of iambic pentameter (often honored by himself more in the breach than the observance, to avoid the pitfall of rendering the passages metronomically mechanical), their abrupt shifts of verse forms from rhyming couplets to sonnets to unrhymed lines (each moment ringing in a dramatic change in the scene); their shared lines, their paused lines, and a plethora of other variations would suggest a master craftsman at work on a master plan.  In such a scheme every syllable is accounted for and every word significant.  Shakespeare reveled in language, for in his time it was in its nascency (at least in relation to Middle English), evolving to keep pace with a constantly varying world.  In that sense, at least, very little has changed, for language today is also borrowing and mutating to define its shifting contexts. But there may be a sense that we have devalued language, at least in its traditional definition, in our search for different ways to communicate.  Perhaps the angst of the modern age, characterized by stark precision, directness, and “computer-speak,” recoils from anything that smacks of ornamentation or heightened language.

    At this point let us draw a distinction between scholarship and production, although ultimately we must apply similar criteria to evaluate them.  Scholars and teachers will continue to dissect Shakespeare’s plays in the light of different philosophies; so we may have Marxist, Feminist, Postmodern, post-Postmodern, and a variety of other interpretations.  We may assume that all these approaches have their place and purpose within the pale of Shakespearean studies.  Or we may encounter the extrapolation of particular moments, scenes, or relationships from the text to be examined within certain historical, political, or sociological contexts that frame an entire gamut of perspectives.  In such cases, the perspective itself becomes the centerpiece of the discussion and its relative scene or relationship is perforce given an emphasis far greater than its value in the original text.  This is the nature of theorization—whether it is literary, historical, sociological or any other—that by definition it is an external application upon its subject.  For such theories and, in the case of productions, concepts to rise to the level of true interpretation, however, they must be validated by every aspect of the play rather than by certain selected portions, or at least not negated by the text itself.

    This is probably why productions that attempt to focus attention on a theoretical interpretation are almost always filled with deletions—whatever section of the text doesn’t conform to the “genius” of the directorial concept is summarily removed!  In some ways, although I am still troubled by it, I have more respect for such actions where a director is sincerely, if misguidedly, engaged in conceptual pursuits than for what has, alas, become customary, i.e., the practice of cutting the text merely because of a lack of training to interpret it or a lack of intelligence to comprehend it or the ludicrous claim that audiences will not appreciate or understand it!

    The advertising guru David Ogilvy once famously exhorted his copywriters not to underestimate the intelligence of their target group, saying, “The consumer is not a fool; he’s your wife!”  Holding to such a dictum—its implied sexism notwithstanding— with respect to our audiences would at least remind us that they choose to enter our theatres with some knowledge of the intellectual content of the plays they are about to witness.  It is we who should rise to the level of the text and demand that the audience follows suit rather than reduce the complexity of the play to the lowest common denominator of comprehension.  People will meet those expectations if the production is backed by homework and proper training.

    It’s one thing to talk about intelligent and sensitive cutting, but when so much of the editing is done before rehearsals even begin, it makes me wonder if enough thought has been given to the text.  Most of us would agree that the more complex moments in a play are discovered in rehearsal or in performance by actors attempting to communicate with one another.  If they take time to understand the text, they will find ways to communicate everything to the audience, as long as they realize the first thing about acting, which is that you’re trying to communicate with the other characters and only indirectly to the audience.  Perhaps in worrying so much about audiences we tend to underestimate and even denigrate them.

    Most contemporary productions set the plays in a “non-Elizabethan” context, whatever that means, as if the “setting” of the play is crucial to our understanding of it.  What this fails to realize is that many of Shakespeare’s locales were metaphors.  He didn’t know Italy except by report, or Vienna, or Denmark, or Bohemia, or many of the countries he used.  Half of Othello is set in Cyprus, which rendered Stanislavsky’s famous visit to Italy somewhat of an exercise in futility.  Cyprus, in that play, isn’t really Cyprus the nation; it is merely a rough outpost, a Dionysian locale distinctive from the Apollonian Venice, perfect for the overflow of emotions and the commitment of murder.  The same is true of Portia’s fantastical Belmont or the juxtaposition of Sicilia and Bohemia in The Winter’s Tale. It doesn’t matter where he “set” his plays; most of the references were English.  In fact, many of the disparities (in Measure for Measure, for instance, the setting is Vienna, yet many of the names are Italian) may have been deliberate artistic devices to blur the sense of time and space and set the plays in a kind of Neverland, where all plays really take place, and where he could focus on the interplay of emotions and relationships without regard to specificities of geography or customs.

    When we “re-set” Shakespeare’s plays in specific locations, with careful attention to historical detail, we run the risk of making extraneous statements about the play and, more often than not, such productions tend to draw attention to the artifice of their settings and away from the universal heart of the action.  In a way, I am suggesting that the plays work better when their sets and costumes are geographically “generalized,” rather than specific, as long as we bear in mind that costumes denote contrasts (Romeo & Juliet), cultural distinctions (Antony & Cleopatra), class divisions, etc. These are important to the action of the play and should be delineated.  Modern costumes—slacks, jackets, skirts, etc.—as long as they don’t draw attention to themselves or to a specific time period (“modern” is a vague enough term for our purposes) are as acceptable and workable as tights and doublets (but we do need to find a viable solution for Malvolio’s yellow stockings and cross-garters).

    So it isn’t a question of the text being inviolable in a prescriptive sort of way, but of it being necessary towards the complete experience.  I am not suggesting that texts are sacrosanct, but I am asking if enough effort is spent trying to enter into the “style” of the piece, the world of the play.  Branagh’s film of Hamlet, performed with an uncut text, certainly seemed clear (whether or not one can quibble with the individual performances or with his chosen version of the folio text) to the general film-going audience.  And he did this with the longest play in the canon!

  • The Winter’s Tale (Program Notes for Michael Kahn’s Production)

     

    The description of Shakespeare’s last plays as romances suggests that they contain certain features from a romantic tradition which began with the Roman playwright, Plautus (who in turn borrowed from the Greeks), and flourished throughout the Middle Ages in such tales as Beowulf, The Song of Roland, and the Arthurian legends.   In an age dominated by intolerance, strife, refugees, and attempts to reunite communities sundered by political callousness, the themes at the heart of these plays are remarkably relevant today.  Characterized by long adventures and wanderings, separations and reunions of family members, and themes of forgiveness and renewal, these plays are sometimes called tragicomedies, suggesting not a thwarting of tragic consequences but an inherent coexistence of tragic and comic rhythms—hubris headed toward a disastrous end merging with comic patterns of rebirth and a new order that are not without a strong skein of pathos, yet filled with all the passion and turbulence of tragedy.

    Despite highlighting thematic similarities between the plays, such categorizations tend to be reductive and limiting in scope, for their initial focus on commonalities also deflects attention from what is original in each play.  Shakespeare didn’t set out to write plays that fell into neat cubbyholes.  His objective was to express his unique vision of the human condition.  Of all the metaphors he uses in this quest, none is more fascinating than the theatre itself.  The very craft that occupied his life’s work became the central prism of artistic expression, from performances of songs and poems to plays-within-the-play (The Mousetrap in Hamlet), roles-within-the-role (Rosalind, Portia, Viola), and a hundred similes (all the world’s a stage; a poor player that struts his hour upon a stage) that draw parallels between the theatre and life.  Many great playwrights use metadrama pointedly, but Shakespeare seems to go beyond this self-referential aspect of dramatic writing.  It’s as if he saw little difference between theatre and life; to him they were virtually the same thing.  Modern critics argue that art doesn’t reflect life, it reflects itself.  With Shakespeare this is utterly true.  But in writing for and about the theatre, he writes abundantly about life.

    In The Winter’s Tale, the very title signals his intent.  From the outset he is patently a raconteur, with all the privileges of dramatic license such a role affords.  In The Tempest, he would take this idea further as Prospero appears to create the story in front of our eyes.  Some have suggested that Prospero is like a director or regisseur, but, all things considered, playwright seems more appropriate.  This tale, however, isn’t just any story; it’s a tale for winter, one with a plaintive tone, such as you would expect to hear huddled round a fire.  “A sad tale’s best for winter,” says young Mamillius to Hermione.

    The opening scenes waste little time in exposition except to tell us that Polixenes has been visiting his closest friend, Leontes, for nine months (a significant piece of information, for Hermione, Leontes’ wife, is nine months pregnant).  Immediately we are plunged into the main action of the play as Leontes is seized by jealousy that descends into a murderous rage.  Although a favorite Shakespearean subject, the jealousy in this play is not the smoldering fire we saw in Othello.  Here, the storyteller is off and running, spinning his tale in a rush of emotion.  We don’t need motivation, though it was there if we looked closely.  All of us can recognize the green-eyed monster that rises instantaneously and unbidden from the depths of our insecurities to overwhelm us with its debilitating effects.  In a king such rage can have devastating consequences.

    As the narrative grows ominous, Leontes spirals out of control and his language loses its stately rhythms, degenerating into sharp outbursts and interjections.  If this is not quite the prosaic incoherence of Othello’s fit, it is peppered with insulting asides, explosive phrases, and gross innuendo.  The raconteur is now in full flow and, in as much time as it takes to tell, a murder is plotted, a queen publicly accused and humiliated, a child is born, another dies, Apollo’s oracle consulted and declared, the queen is pronounced dead, and a king made to see the error of his ways!  Time (even in choric garb) and space are compressed to fit a master storyteller’s master plot.

    In several plays, Shakespeare uses a “green world” to solve urban problems—forests in As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Portia’s Belmont.  There is an Apollonian/Dionysian dialectic at work here.  The feminine, Dionysian milieu of creativity often provides solutions for imbroglios encountered in the unbending, masculine, Apollonian world of austerity and the letter of the law.  The tug between these complementary forces is also a negotiation toward a balanced lifestyle found at the heart of most cultures—Shiva/Vishnu in Hinduism, Yin/Yang in Chinese philosophy, Eshu/Ifa in Yoruban mythology.  From Sicilia, The Winter’s Tale rushes into Bohemia, seeking relief from the insanity of jealousy and tyranny.  Before that can happen, however, death lurks in the form of most people’s favorite Shakespearean stage direction, “Exit, pursued by a bear” (my personal favorite is “Enter Ariel, invisible”).  In a magical leap over sixteen years, the savagery of the Bohemian seacoast is transformed into a delightful, bucolic town.  Now we have clowns, shepherds, shepherdesses, and a floral feast as enchanting as any in literature.

    After stamping his genius on tragedies, comedies, and histories, Shakespeare demonstrates his mastery over the pastoral form favored by his contemporaries, Beaumont and Fletcher.  Act IV, Scene iv, the magnificent sheep-shearing scene, is one of the longest he ever wrote.  A folk festival replete with mythological references and the heady scent of nature, this scene provides the backdrop for two vastly different characters—Perdita and Autolycus—whose presence springs the comic rhythm that will alleviate the pain of Leontes’ folly.  Queen of the Festival, arrayed in metaphors of flowers and herbs, and partnered by the aptly named Florizel, Perdita is the personification of “great creating Nature,” recalling the Proserpina myth and its promise of Spring.  Autolycus is a full-fledged descendant of Hermes, the prince of thieves.  In the tradition of Falstaff, Mercutio, and the tricky slave of Roman comedy, he is a reincarnation of trickster deities (Krishna, Eshu, Legba), and kin to folk heroes (Brer Rabbit, Coyote).  His unabashed roguery is the perfect antidote to dispel the lingering pall of Leontes’ tyranny, and his lovely ballads restore harmony to a discordant play, even as a new society is being fashioned through the restoration of Perdita, the lost one.

    Of all the theatrical devices Shakespeare employs in this play, none is as breathtaking as the final scene.  His story-telling prowess knows it can’t sustain two recognition scenes without detracting from both, so he narrates Perdita’s reunion with her father and saves the magic for the resurrection of Hermione, literally drawing the curtain on a moment brimming with forgiveness, liberation, and renewal.  But there is a quiet intensity at the end, for the joy of embracing “that which is lost” cannot expunge the persistent echoes of time and love mislaid.  In our fractured world groping toward rapprochement, the message of redemption in The Winter’s Tale is miraculously clear.

  • Pericles–A Most Theatrical Event (Program Notes for Mary Zimmerman’s Production)

    Whenever a discussion turns to Pericles, critics are always at pains to delineate the various problems associated with the play—that Shakespeare had no part in the writing the first two acts, that the piece is devoid of fully-fleshed characters, that the title character is more sinned against than sinning, thus depriving him of any tragic tension, that only the magnificent brothel scenes are worthy of comparison with the playwright’s best efforts, and that the play’s major significance is in its foreshadowing of the romances to follow.

    While all the above criticisms may be true to a greater or lesser degree, what they fail to acknowledge is the sheer theatricality of the play.  Throughout his career Shakespeare was fascinated by the reverberations of the reality of the theatre beyond the confines of the formal stage.  Life seems to have unfolded before him as a medley of theatrical events in a more profound way than with any other playwright, indeed to such an extent that the central metaphor of his dramatic imagination became the theatre itself.  In the comedies and tragedies he had used the theatre in a myriad metaphorical devices.  In Pericles, the experiment appears to be an exercise in unabashed theatricality.  Value judgments and comparisons with earlier and later plays only reveal the limits of our own narrow imaginations and would deny Shakespeare free rein in his artistic experiments.

    Even if the first two acts seem a bit unwieldy on their pages, a good director and actors with an understanding of the expansive nature of the play can negotiate a skilful path through an apparently cumbersome plot not by ignoring it or cutting a swath around it, but by embracing it in all its theatrical aspects, of which there are plenty—a self-incriminating riddle created by Antiochus which, if solved, would lift the curtain on the heinous crime of incest, a murder plotted, an escape, a hurried journey, a shipwreck, a resurrection, a tourney for the hand of a princess, and a marriage, all in the first two acts.

    Envisioning the world of the play as a play itself—an entire play within a play—Shakespeare seeks a stage-manager for this production and turns, significantly, to a medieval poet, Gower, adorning him in choric garb to set the stage, define the changes in time and space, and control the rhythm of the drama.  The playwright as poet employs a poet as playwright to comment on the action and oversee the arrangement of the scenes.          In keeping with the theatrical structure of the piece, Shakespeare eschews the use of dramatic narrative language in some moments and replaces them with prologue-like dumb shows, thus enhancing the beauty of the visual feast that the play provides. This also allows him to compress time, space, and action, and to leap over them whenever his narrative desires.  The dumb shows and divine manifestations utilize marvelous and sacred elements to knit together the threads of this sprawling play as it zigzags around its theatrical corners, flinging itself across a network of far-flung cites—Antioch, Tyre, Tarsus, Pentapolis, Ephesus, and Mytilene.  Linking them is a turbulent ocean which, at different moments, becomes a birthplace, a cemetery, and, in the case of Thaisa, a passageway from death to life.

    But this play is not merely a visual spectacle; the theatricality woven into the action has a purpose similar to that of tragedy—to lay bare in all its glory the beauty and power of the indomitable human spirit in the face of a crushing fate.  If Pericles is about anything, it is about the vicissitudes of Fortune, the spinning wheel of one man’s shifting destiny and its effects on his family.  A birth at sea is countered by a death, a quasi-death, at sea.  Death thwarted by pirates leads to the verge of a fate worse than death and the valiant stand of virtue against impending moral disaster.  An assassin on the prowl and faithless foster parents are balanced by loyal ministers and a ruler with healing powers.  Integrating the whirling episodes are the romantic themes of reconciliation and reunion as sundered families are miraculously  restored and lost loves find one another.

    What many scholars agree upon is the power of the brothel scenes. As always, Shakespeare paints his most vivid pictures on the canvas of “low life” in the remarkable tone and flavor of the whorehouse and its denizens.  The plaintive figure of Marina, armed only with her virtue, is set in lovely counterpoint to the vibrant if unscrupulous characters who would profit from her virginal allure.  The broad comic overtones of the “marketing” of Marina’s maidenhead never overshadow the gravity or menace of imminent danger, and Marina’s healing of the distraught Pericles, the revelation of her identity, and the subsequent restoration of Thaisa to him are as moving as any scenes in Shakespeare.  To suggest that these moments are merely prologues to what would follow in the later romances is to deny the power of both.  Resurrections are the stuff of miracles as well as of the most theatrical imaginations.  The fascinating aspect of this ending is that not only are Marina and Thaisa resurrected to Pericles, but that he himself is revitalized from his moribund state of despair to hear “the music of the spheres.”  That which was lost is finally found, and under instructions from Diana the virgin goddess (whose protective mantle is now revealed to us) Pericles is promised happiness only if he tells his tale “before the people all.”  In this play we can expect nothing less than a call to narrate this most theatrical story, which of course reminds us that that indeed is what has just occurred.

    All that’s left is for Gower to tie up loose ends, to clear the stage, as it were, and pull down the curtain on the epilogue informing us that justice has been meted out to the wicked foster parents and their family.

     

  • A Midsummer Night’s Dream

    Few Shakespearean productions have run the gamut of critical deconstruction as has A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Over the years it has been interpreted as a light-hearted, fluffy frolic, a somber meditation on sexual politics, and an examination of latent violence, even bestiality.  At its heart, however, it is a mature, complex play about the nature of love, marriage, and, most of all, the imagination.  As an artist Shakespeare was obviously interested in the power of the imagination; as an artist in a romantic age, he virtually worshipped it.

    The journey into the forest in this play is a journey into the depths of the imagination where all things are possible, where our deepest emotions are unleashed, where identities dissolve, strange shapes and creatures abound, and where love, the greatest emotion, is painful, confusing, and wondrous.  The play begins in the stringent court of Athens, where Theseus holds his captive bride Hippolyta and Aegeus seeks to bridle his feisty daughter Hermia who is threatened with death if she refuses the man of her father’s choice.  This is the Court where women are subservient to the whims of men and feminine destiny is in thrall to a masculine world order.  For such a punctilious culture to survive it needs modulation into a new key, it must expand its simplistic rhythms to include more complex harmonies.  The straitlaced world of experience must embrace the greater reality of the imagination—the feminine, chaotic, and creative world of the forest—and move, as all comedy does, towards a new culture, one that is liberal and all-embracing.  This is Shakespeare’s earliest experiment with the redeeming power of the green world, a theme he would often revisit, particularly in the comedies and romances.

    To escape the fate of Theseus’ dictum on her marriage, Hermia seeks refuge in the woods.  We feel the power of nature almost instantly. As the two lovers plan their forestal retreat, their language changes—a Shakespearean device that signals a dramatic shift in the action.  Rhyming couplets replace blank verse as the magic of the green world starts to transform even their urban setting.  The dream has begun.  This forest is a fluid milieu, crammed with lovers’ tiffs, sexual play (more on Titania’s part than on Bottom’s; it is significant that he seems more interested in being chummy with the Queen’s minions than in responding to her advances), and impending storms.  Nature is alive and in full flux as the fairies share names with common insects and flowers; the first time we hear them—Mustardseed, Peaseblossom, Moth, Cobweb—we are treated to a glorious list of richly textured nature: apricocks and dewberries, purple grapes and green figs, mulberries, honey-bags, waxen thighs and fiery glow-worm’s eyes.   This is the world of love and fantasy.  Here lovers conduct amorous rehearsals and in the same spot blue-collar tradesmen practice the art of make-belief.

    Within nature’s depths the problems of the court, though not forgotten, are given imaginative play.  Who is in love with whom?  Who belongs to whom?  Does Lysander really love Hermia?  Or does he harbor a deep-seated desire for Helena?  Does Demetrius want Hermia or Helena?  Is Helena feeling sorry for herself because no-one loves her (be careful what you wish for!)?  Are Lysander and Demetrius really that different from each other?  Who are we and what do we really want?  In the mysterious woods inhibitions are shed, identities interchange, desire isn’t just a game of courtship; it becomes a passionate pursuit.  Love is transient, like a dream, yet it is the foundation of permanent relationships.  In these realms tradition and convention are reversed, women chase men, and a common weaver can become the paramour of the Fairy Queen.

    In the forest the tradesmen (rude mechanicals seems an unfair term for such vibrant creatures) meet to put on a play.  They begin indifferently enough, except for the irresistible Bottom whose imagination knows no limits as he bounces between every character in their little drama.  In his desire to play all the parts he demonstrates a boundless sense of fantasy and, although clownish, his unabashed creative playfulness is rewarded by Shakespeare who allows him to penetrate the furthest depths of his imagination and enter the realms of Oberon and Titania.  Bottom’s profession, weaving, contains magical associations so it is no accident that he finds himself tangled in the skeins of Puck’s web as he spins into the heart of fairyland.  He is the only character who straddles both worlds of experience and fantasy.  When he returns he can find no words to describe his adventure, resorting to a botched (of course, being who he is) biblical reference (“the eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen…”) to explain the bottomlessness of his vision.  When the laughter has died, we can see that he has been to the deepest regions of a spiritual experience (where Bottom’s words end, St. Paul continues: “the spirit searches all things, yea the deep things of God”).  Such an imaginative journey is profoundly religious.

    The other tradesmen seem terrified of performing their play, but led by Bottom and exhorted by Peter Quince they feel the liberating power of their art.  They learn that fancy can lift them out of their mundane lives into a magical world; how else could lowly craftsmen command the attention of the Duke and his nobles?  Although their production is ridiculous and their imagination unmatched by their skill, once they overcome their initial stage fright they hurl themselves into the play with the zest and energy of true amateurs, ones who love their art.  The blasé Athenian court, with its caustic remarks about the play, appears dull and bland by contrast.  One is left to wonder whether they learned anything from their sojourn in the woods.

    The end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, like the beginning, is set in Theseus’ court.  But where the court was once a place to lay down an unfair law and threaten Hermia with death, now it hosts a farcical play.  Has the spirit of the green world modulated the strict cadences of Theseus’ palace?  He certainly appears kinder and more generous than at the beginning as he sits through the festivities with an amused tolerance. At the end of the evening the fairies enter the court and as they wander through the castle they bring a woodsy flavor, replete with the magic and turbulence they always carry, into the heart of this urban center.  But their invasion has a beneficent goal, for Oberon promises to bless this palace with “sweet peace.”  The physical presence of the mystical, imaginative world finally imbues Theseus’ city with the grace, charm, and tolerance that were missing at the beginning.

     

  • Henry IV, Part One

    The label history play is almost a misnomer when used to describe Shakespeare’s plays about the English kings, not only because he played fast and loose with the facts but also because the term conjures up in the popular mind the image of a historical documentary.  In fact, these plays run the gamut of the human condition in all its sacred and profane, tragic and comic, beautiful and ugly aspects that characterize the comedies, tragedies, or romances.  One critic even described Henry IV as “the broadest, the most varied, and in some ways the richest champaign in Shakespeare’s extensive empire.”

    Although the title suggests that the central character might be Henry IV (the Bolingbroke of Richard II), and Falstaff has become one of Shakespeare’s most famous characters, the play revolves around the fortunes of Hal, the Prince of Wales, the future Henry V.  The main action of Henry IV, Part I charts Hal’s odyssey from profligate prince to chivalrous heir apparent in a Tudor version of the centuries-old theme of the prodigal son.  Dover Wilson, a Shakespearean critic, has drawn an interesting parallel between Henry IV, Part I and an early 16th century morality interlude Youth.  In the morality play Youth, the heir to his father’s land, first rejects spirituality in favor of a licentious lifestyle as he consorts with Riot (wantonness), Pride, and Lechery.  In the end, of course, Youth embraces Charity and Humility, and all is well.  Several clues in Shakespeare’s play suggest that the similarity of Falstaff to Riot and Hal to Youth was intentional.    At the beginning of Henry IV, Part I Hal is described as a degenerate cohort of Falstaff and his friends, and, indeed, he appears more at home in the taverns and on the highways of London than at court.  Even his father deplores his behavior, comparing him unfavorably with Hotspur and suggesting that he would not be unhappy if it could be proved that Hotspur were indeed his son and that the two boys were exchanged at birth.  Thus, at the outset we find Hal stranded, as it were, between three worlds–Henry’s court, Falstaff’s taverns, and Hotspur’s feudal countryside.  Everyone appears to have condemned him to Falstaff’s world, but if we follow the play closely we soon see that although he carouses with the merry-makers he remains apart from them in temperament.  His soliloquy at the end of Act I, Scene 2 leaves no doubt that he is only biding his time before stepping up to claim his destiny:

    So when this loose behavior I throw off
    And pay the debt I never promised,
    By how much better than my word I am,
    By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
    And, like bright metal on a sullen ground,
    My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault,
    Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
    Than that which hath no foil to set it off.

    Even as he plays, his vision is fixed far ahead on the task he must undertake.  During the first three acts he moves from the tavern to the court (even mobilizing Falstaff and company into an army of sorts), learning the value of responsibility from his father and earning the older man’s respect and affection, and by the end of the play he has even conquered Hotspur’s rebel world.

    In some ways, Hal’s destiny lies between the positions of Falstaff and Hotspur, who stand at extreme ends of the same pole, for both are knights who corrupt the chivalric code in different ways—Falstaff in a comically pathetic manner, Hotspur in a tragic pursuit of misguided ambition.  Hal emerges from the clash of these polarities to create a new ideal and a new world.  He proves himself gracious and forgiving, honorable and just.  Maynard Mack suggests that by the end of the play Hal “has practiced mercy as well as justice, politics as well as friendship, shown himself capable of mockery as well as reverence, detachment as well as commitment, and brought into a practicable balance court, field, and tavern.”

    If King Lear is about the decaying of a king, and Richard II about the “unmaking” of a king, Henry IV, Part I is about the making of a king.  In this world of the late twentieth century, where the character and private lives of kings, queens, and presidents are no longer considered unimpeachable and the debate rages as to what personality traits constitute a good ruler, this play raises some interesting questions.  Are the indiscretions of youth merely that, or are they emblematic of some more profound flaw in one’s character?  What, indeed, makes a ruler?  Can the sins of the father be forgiven in the son?  But over and above the philosophical questions it raises about kingship and governance, Henry IV, Part I is the dramatic unfolding of a personal journey that all of us must take–the evolution from youth to adulthood.  This is what gives it universal significance and why it appeals to us long after the very concept of the monarchy has become an anachronism and it no longer matters who sits on the English throne.

  • Henry IV, Part Two

    “Then you perceive the body of our kingdom
    How foul it is, what rank diseases grow,
    And with what danger, near the heart of it.”

    These lines, spoken by King Henry IV, symptomize the uneasiness that pervades this play.  In fact, the play opens with the entrance of Rumor (a role expanded in this production) who promises to “bring smooth comforts false, worse than true wrongs,”  thus leading us into one of the essential themes of this play–betrayal–which manifests itself in two major incidents: first, the rebels are promised that their grievances will be redressed, but once they sue for peace, Prince John executes them as rebels; second, at the end of the play, Falstaff is summarily dismissed from Hal’s presence as the young prince assumes his father’s throne.  Framed by these two “betrayals” are a host of “expectations mocked,” which began in King Henry IV, Part One when Hal, against all expectations, defeated Hotspur.  The language is filled with imagery that confirms the contrariness of the times.  Hopes, like ships, “touch ground and dash themselves to pieces,” while “in poison there is physic.” Even the comic moments find this theme pervading them–Mistress Quickly expects Falstaff to marry her, and is soon disabused of that notion.

    But, from within this vortex of deception and dashed hopes, Shakespeare continues the master plan begun in King Henry IV, Part One–the making of a king.  At the end of Part One, Hal seemed to have made the transition from profligate prince to mature heir apparent; yet, in another instance of “expectations mocked,” he now appears to have shunned the orderly, Apollonian world of his father’s court for the Dionysian revels of Falstaff’s libertine domain.  There are two main reasons why Hal (now Prince Harry) finds the transition difficult to navigate.  He intuitively understands what his father has discovered, that under the heavy burden of kingly responsibilities “uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.”  The other reason is that the freedom of Falstaff’s realm is too irresistible for the young prince to ignore, particularly when faced with a kingdom embroiled in a seemingly never-ending strife.  How much easier it is for him to roam the taverns and highways than to don the majesty of kingship which “dost pinch [the] bearer . . . like a rich armor worn in the heat of day, That scald’st with safety.”

    It is at his father’s bedside that Prince Harry finally resolves the doubts that have plagued him.  He recognizes that the crown, though blemished on his father’s head–for having wrested it from Richard II– will sit freely on his own, because he will have inherited it lawfully, as will his sons.  From this point on, Prince Harry assumes with grace and dignity the title of Henry V, transforming himself finally into the great king who would defeat the French at Agincourt and win for England her lost dominions.  But before making that great journey, he must first uproot himself from the attractive world of Falstaff, which he does with a chilling firmness: “I know thee not, old man.  Fall to thy prayers.”

    It is important to note that the Falstaff discarded by King Henry V is rather different from the Falstaff of  Prince Hal’s youth in Part One.  In Part Two, the fat trickster displays a roughness at the edges that was noticeably absent earlier.  The wit and humor, though still present, are characterized by coarse, scatological imagery–his first words are about his urine!  The braggadocio, so endearing once, is now tempered with a constant fear of old age and death.  If Harry is to be the bright sun on England’s horizon, if he is to “mock the expectation of the world” and show that he has “turned away [his] former self,” he must banish far from himself  all the symbols of decadence and everything and everyone who would restrain him. But, despite the change in the tenor of Falstaff’s life, the laughter, conviviality, and joie de vivre have not disappeared, and Harry’s dismissal of him–while necessary for the prince’s majestic assumption–remains a rejection of an abundant world as he ascends the cold, somewhat joyless court of formality and intrigue.