Shakespearing
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Shakespearing #39: Two Noble Kinsmen
Shakespearing #39 by David Foley The Two Noble Kinsmen “There’s many a man alive that hath outliv’d/The love o’ th’ people.” This is Palamon in The Two Noble Kinsmen, congratulating himself that his impending execution will spare him this and “prevent/The loathsome misery of age.” It’s a line Shakespeare supposedly wrote. One of the stories Continue reading
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Shakespearing #38: Henry VIII
Shakespearing #38 by David Foley Henry VIII As John King wrote two weeks ago, there’s sadness in The Tempest. The notion that, in Prospero, Shakespeare is throwing down his own books of magic (what John calls “the ending before the ending”) gains force when you’ve followed the trajectory of his work from the beginning. It Continue reading
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Shakespearing #37.1: More on The Tempest
Shakespearing #37.1 by John King The Tempest I adore The Tempest. David Foley was entirely right last week: the drama of this play is peculiarly light and strangely weighted. The wizard Prospero’s grievances seem unfathomable, and his sense of family, of relationships, is both intense, yet distant, pushed through his mind like a vicious abstraction Continue reading
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Shakespearing #37: The Tempest
Shakespearing #37 by David Foley The Tempest Sometimes it takes a production that doesn’t work to make you understand how a play does. As I re-read The Tempest, I wondered guiltily if I’d ever much liked it. Coming after Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, it felt tepid. Where was the drama, the deep emotion? The next Continue reading
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Shakespearing #36: The Winter’s Tale
Shakespearing #36 by David Foley The Winter’s Tale The second most extraordinary moment in The Winter’s Tale is Act V, Scene ii, the penultimate scene of the play. We’ve just been brought to a place of high, incipient drama. The King of Bohemia has arrived offstage, exposing Florizel’s plan to marry a shepherd’s daughter against Continue reading
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Shakespearing #35.1: More Thoughts on Cymbeline
Shakespearing #35.1 by John King More Thoughts on Cymbeline 1. Cymbeline is, admittedly, a strange play, as David Foley explained in its theatrical and historical context last week. Cymbeline is a fairy tale, with comic and tragic turns that has some dead bodies at the end, but ends as a comedy, with some reconciliations and a Continue reading
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Shakespearing #35: Cymbeline
Shakespearing #35 by David Foley Cymbeline “Staggeringly, unremittingly, unconscionably absurd,” wrote John Simon. “Reckless,” “a travesty,” “a waste,” said Frank Rich. Joanne Akalaitis’s production of Cymbeline, which I saw at the Public in May 1989, was notoriously excoriated by every critic in the city without exception. I saw it before the reviews came out and Continue reading
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Shakespearing #34.1: ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore
Shakespearing #34.1 by David Foley ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore Note: Another interlude as the Shakespearing project heads into the final stretch… When I went to see Red Bull Theater’s production of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, I’d just begun my Pericles posting, and therefore had the issues of academicism and problematic old plays in Continue reading
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Shakespearing #34: Pericles
Shakespearing #34 by David Foley Pericles Last week I mentioned a tug-of-war I’d felt in college between the Shakespeare-as-literature and the Shakespeare-as-drama camps, but now I wonder if I just don’t get academics in general. In his introduction to the Pelican edition of Pericles, Stephen Orgel of Stanford calls the play “a masterpiece—which is to Continue reading
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Shakespearing #33: Timon of Athens
Shakespearing #33 by David Foley Timon of Athens Timon of Athens is supposed to be one of the plays Shakespeare collaborated on. The speculation is that Thomas Middleton (Women Beware Women) wrote about forty percent of it. To make matters worse, according to James Shapiro, “individual scenes [are] divided between the two, suggesting that the Continue reading
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