• About
  • Cats Dig Hemingway
  • Guest Bookings
  • John King’s Publications
  • Literary Memes
  • Podcast Episode Guide
  • Store!
  • The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film
  • Videos
  • Writing Craft Discussions

The Drunken Odyssey

~ A Podcast About the Writing Life

The Drunken Odyssey

Category Archives: Shakespearing

Shakespearing #38: Henry VIII

12 Sunday Jul 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, Shakespearing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Henry VIII

Shakespearing #38 by David Foley

Henry VIII

38 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 makes reading the next play he wrote a melancholy experience.

Or co-wrote. Clever stylometrists have pretty definitively assigned what of Henry VIII is Shakespeare and what is John Fletcher. Fletcher, who seems to have been the George S. Kaufman of his day, a skilled and witty collaborator, wrote most of the play, and you can amuse yourself noting differences of style and approach. But the play itself is not hugely interesting, and you might instead start telling yourself stories about Shakespeare’s retreat from the theater.

You might imagine that the King’s Men turned to Fletcher, their new house playwright, with some relief. Fletcher writes a clean, clear line, whereas Shakespeare’s love for compounded meanings and contortionate phrasing (like Henry James, his style got more rarefied as he got older) might at this point have been testing their patience. Here he is describing Henry’s encounter with French king:

When these suns

(For so they phrase ’em) by their heralds challeng’d

The noble spirits to arms, they did perform

Beyond thought’s compass, that former fabulous story,

Being now seen possible enough, at last got credit[.]

…which, in trying to compass a mental construct, pushes almost beyond thought’s compass.

You can note the unusually long and detailed stage directions and wonder if Shakespeare was no longer sitting in on rehearsals. Why not? Was he ill? Depressed? Tired of it all? Written out? Then why these last two collaborations with Fletcher. Generosity to a younger playwright? Crush on same? Business necessity?

There are no answers to any of this, of course, and you’re left with the image of a mysterious fading away: his last solo play written in 1611, three collaborations (one lost) in the two years that followed, and then nothing at all for the last three years of his life.

And you can see Jacobean theater moving on without him. Fletcher seems clearly impossible without Shakespeare. Some of Shakespeare’s facility for mental movement, for instance, has rubbed off on him, as in this speech of Wolsey’s:

What sudden anger’s this? How have I reap’d it?

…

                        I must read this paper;

I fear, the story of his anger. ’Tis so!

But this limns a mental action without capturing its destabilizing force. A hundred lines earlier, Shakespeare, through Norfolk, links Wolsey’s body and mind:

Some strange commotion

Is in his brain; he bites his lip, and starts,

Stops on a sudden, looks upon the ground,

Then lays his finger on his temple; straight

Springs out into fast gait, then stops again,

Strikes his breast hard[.]

When Henry describes how his doubts arose about his marriage to Katharine, he says they

shook

The bosom of my conscience, enter’d me,

Yea, with a spitting power, and made to tremble

The region of my breast[.]

He was left “hulling in/The wild sea of my conscience.” Do we lose this psychological immediacy (almost literally visceral) when we lose Shakespeare?

And something else: one of the most powerful scenes in the play is Katharine’s plea to Henry and against Wolsey, who she says is “cramm’d with arrogancy, spleen, and pride.” This voice rising up against power is heard throughout Shakespeare. The voice of justice, which is a human voice, is constantly opposed to the more destructive constructs of the human mind. Does it, too, fade out when Shakespeare goes?

_______

David Foley

David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.

Shakespearing #37.1: More on The Tempest

28 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespearing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

The Tempest

 Shakespearing #37.1 by John King

 The Tempest

Miranda_-_The_Tempest WaterHouse

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 trying to form itself into something like love.

Nicholas Rowe Tempest 1709

The trap that Prospero sets for the brother and king and the other conspirators who betrayed him feels like a pageant of robots who know their crimes, but are incapable of feeling anything about them, not even a stoic callousness that denies morality or loyalty.

The love story between Miranda and Ferdinand seems passionlessly bland—the meeting of almost unbearable innocents–a retread of a fairy tale or Greek myth (Psyche and Eros) turned on its head.

Miranda and Ferdinands Log

The alcoholic antics of Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo have a difficult time seeming funny.

Stephano,_Trinculo_and_Caliban_dancing_from_The_Tempest_by_Johann_Heinrich_Ramberg

Few productions can live up to this illustration.

Only Prospero’s relationship to Ariel, the enslaved sprite, feels emotional throughout the play.

Prospero and Ariel

David said, “the island is a created world, and it’s created through language, and you need to pay attention to that.”

The words are the world of The Tempest.

And it is a world that will return the fantastic to the ordinary, through a deliberate leave-taking of magick and the transcendent. Propsero vows,

[T]his rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.

This is the last play Shakespeare wrote solo, and its farewells fill me with sadness, this sense of the ending that Shakespeare had before the ending. Four to five years before his death in 1616, Shakespeare said goodbye as a thaumaturge.

_______

1flip

John King (Episode, well, all of them) is a podcaster, writer, and ferret wrangler.

Shakespearing #37: The Tempest

21 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespearing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

David Foley, Shakespeare, The Tempest

Shakespearing #37 by David Foley

The Tempest

The Drink: Dark and Stormy. Photo by Amy Watkins.

The Drink: Dark and Stormy. Photo by Amy Watkins.

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 night I went to see the new Shakespeare in the Park production, directed by Michael Greif, and irritably doubted if the play works at all.

Part of the problem was language. Nobody in the production—including, weirdly, New York Shakespeare Festival stalwart Sam Waterston—has been encouraged to think about it, and a good deal of Prospero’s magic is a magic of words. If anything makes him seem like a self-portrait of the playwright, it’s the way he builds a world of words and makes everyone play a part in it.

So the island is a created world, and it’s created through language, and you need to pay attention to that. On the other hand, with a lot of Shakespeare you can get away with short-shrifting the language. Even if you mess it up, Shakespeare the dramatist will pull you through.

But, as I say, there isn’t much drama here. Greif tries to deal with that by pumping up what he can find. Pitched intensities of speech keep burying the language, and the dialogue is underscored with kettle drums and flashes of light in an understandable but misguided hope that drama will happen if he just keeps hitting it hard enough.

It occurs to me that pretty much the opposite tack is needed for The Tempest. You should take your cue from its most famous line: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” This is not Midsummer, though; it’s a daylight dream. Prospero is insistent that everything needs to be concluded by “the sixt hour.” The play makes a dream of the drama of our waking life. Even the drama of grief is transformed in Ariel’s lovely song: “Those are pearls that were his eyes.”

The play is built on such dream-like images. Greif leaves out an important one. In the final scene, Miranda and Ferdinand are revealed playing chess. Chess is a game of rank and stratagems. It’s the world in small, if you understand the world and all our experiences of it (even love) as inextricably bound to skirmishes for power and advantage. The island, too, writes that world small. Far from civilization, it helplessly recreates structures of obeisance and aggression. Caliban, the least civilized character in the play, only needs to see a pair of drunks on the beach to create a little principality of them.

And yet The Tempest longs for a world innocent of all that. Gonzalo conjures this world in his vision of a “golden age” without “treason, felony,/Sword, pike, knife, gun” where “nature should bring forth” in “all abundance,/To feed my innocent people.” And Miranda and Ferdinand’s wedding pageant is an idyll of peace and plenty, of “turfy mountains, where live nibbling sheep,/And flat meads thatched with stover.” Miranda is radically innocent, always encountering the world as if for the first time. What loss of innocence does that chess game represent?

Caliban represents another kind of innocence. From a position beyond the reach of civilization, he calls into question its most cherished structures. As does the play. Perhaps The Tempest is less a drama than a diorama, framing all our structures and stratagems as a dream and hinting at the dream’s dark irrationality. As Prospero says of Caliban at the end of the play, “This thing of darkness/I acknowledge mine.”

_______

David Foley

David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.

Shakespearing #36: The Winter’s Tale

14 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespearing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

The Winter's Tale

Shakespearing #36 by David Foley

The Winter’s Tale

36 The Winters 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 his father’s wishes. But the shepherd who knows the secret of Perdita’s birth is also in the wings. In another minute, all will be revealed. And it is. Secondhand. We skip to the next scene, and a trio of gentlemen describes Leontes’ joyful and amazed recovery of his daughter, even though one of them insists we have “lost a sight which was to be seen, not spoken of.”

It’s one of those moments when you feel thrillingly (perhaps deceptively) close to Shakespeare as dramatist. In this play, presumably written just after Cymbeline, Shakespeare foregoes the extended recognition scene. We won’t have character after character come forward and reveal his piece of the tale. Either he wasn’t happy with the way that scene worked in Cymbeline, or he wanted to try something new and daring, or he knew that the major revelation of the play, the resurrection of Hermione, needed to be set apart. One way to do that is psychological. We’re being frustrated, denied the expected release of emotion, and that emotion will be invested where it matters, in the mysterious reappearance of Hermione.

Here, too, we’ll be frustrated. We won’t be told how Leontes was persuaded that Hermione was dead, or how she lived in seclusion all these years, and Hermione’s only speech, seven scant lines, will be addressed to her daughter, not her husband. Joy will be tempered by mystery and sorrow. Irrecoverable time has passed, as Leontes makes clear when, still believing he’s looking at a statue, he says, “Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing/So aged as this seems.” Who Hermione is now, what she has undergone, what has happened to the forceful, charming, loving woman we met earlier in the play, all this is denied us, and it becomes part of the deep redeeming melancholy of the scene. As one of the gentlemen says in the earlier scene, we are not sure if we’ve “heard of a world ransom’d, or one destroyed.”

The most extraordinary moment in The Winter’s Tale is the onset of Leontes’ jealousy. It happens in an instant, with what Leontes himself calls a “tremor cordis,” a tremor of the heart. There’s no Iago to provide an external impetus for it. It’s an “affection,” which the Riverside note defines as “a sudden, unexplained change in mind and body.” This is Shakespeare’s psychology at its most terrifying, our minds at the mercy of our bodies, we at the mercy of our minds, which swerve dangerously out of our control. At the height of his jealousy and rage, Leontes is horrifying. He tells Antigonus to take Hermione’s baby and burn it, or “the bastard brains with these my proper hands/Shall I dash out.” And then just as suddenly it ends, but not before the world’s destroyed. So destroyed that Hermione will fake her death and disappear for sixteen years even as Leontes expresses his determination to “new woo my queen.”

It’s a strange position to put women in, to redeem the broken world. It’s not the only way women appear in Shakespeare. There are ambitious cutthroats, virtuous victims, and venally comic bawds. But it’s surprising how often women oppose a grounded sense of reality to the madness around them. When her own reality is not enough for Leontes, Hermione insists on the reality of the cost.

_______

David Foley

David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.

Shakespearing #35.1: More Thoughts on Cymbeline

07 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespearing

≈ 1 Comment

Shakespearing #35.1 by John King

More Thoughts on Cymbeline

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 recognized marriage if not a wedding. The subplot of an exiled subject with two adopted sons who then adopts the heroine who is disguised as a man seems to amplify the threatening sense of alienation of almost every character in the play.

Outside of the geopolitical intrigue, though, the theme of the play could be seen as a precursor to “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Cymbeline is completely smitten with the woman who he married, while she, as a newly-minted queen, is scheming to poison both Cymbeline and his daughter, Imogen, so that her clout of a son, Cloten, would become king. Imogen has secretly married the man of her dreams, the unfortunately-named Posthumous, who is banished when he is suspected of merely fraternizing with Imogen.

Cymbeline has two sons who he believes are dead, but whom were hustled out of the royal court by the exile Belarius, who was wrongly suspected of conspiring with the Romans.

The queen has encouraged Cymbeline, already wary of Roman treachery, to send the Roman ambassador away with an insult rather than a tribute, a move that will lead to war.

What such a story obviously needs is a petty melodrama about romantic jealousy and suspicion worthy of the show Cheaters.

While in exile in Italy, Posthumous can’t stop prating on about his separation from Imogen, and won’t shut up about her beauty, so a mischievous rake named Iachimo wagers Posthumous that Imogen can be easily seduced (an echo of Much Ado About Nothing will ensue). Basically, the silliest part of this play’s plot is meant to elevate everything else (and frankly, that everything else seems borrowed from previous Shakespeare plays). Only a visitation from Jupiter himself can jolt the thing out of its own bizarre rut.

Except that Iachimo is a fine mischief-maker, like Iago, except that this Iago will not go silent at the end. Iachimo makes an emotional accounting that is harrowing in its language. That the true love of Imogen and Posthumous is seen as disingenuous by the king whose own respectable queen is poisoning him is bad. That the true love of Imogen is made to seem disingenuous to Posthumous himself is much, much worse.

Iachimo goes to great lengths to violate Imogen’s privacy, to discover the intimate details of her body so he can relate them back to Posthumous as evidence for their wager.

Imogen From Shakespeare's 'Cymbeline'. Wilhelm Ferdinand Souchon. (1825-1876). Oil On Canvas, 1872.

Imogen From Shakespeare’s ‘Cymbeline’. Wilhelm Ferdinand Souchon. (1825-1876). Oil On Canvas, 1872.

This “evidence” of Imogen’s infidelity is a violation not only of her privacy, but ultimately of her self–as an audience, we become voyeuristic, and our outrage at this violation of an innocent, loving young woman is perhaps commingled with our thirst for plot. Will Iachimo succeed? Will he be caught? And what is his motivation here? Is this the exploit of a gambler? Is this the ruse of a sexual creep who wanted someone’s permission to try to invade this woman’s locked bedroom? Is he merely a misanthrope who loathes the idea of anyone finding happiness on earth?

2. I’ve not seen Joanne Akalaitis’s infamous 1989 production of Cymbeline. In 2012, though, I reviewed Orlando Shakespeare Theater’s production in Shakespeare Bulletin (Volume 30, #3). As usual, OST did not disappoint.

Iachimo, portrayed by Geoffrey Kent, managed to pull of slapstick humor in sneaking into Imogen’s chamber, and managing to collect his evidence. This production also staged the slaying of Cloten with wickedly funny nonchalance.

Besides making the queen something like a Disney villain, and staging the visitation of Jupiter as a psychedliec deus ex machine, OST made the scene in which the men make the wager, in something like a Roman bath house, quite memorable. The masculine swagger of those present made the misogyny of the premise clear, since the ability of women to be worthy of adoration is called into question–a question simultaneously begged since women were expected to be given their identities and agency by men, such as Cymbeline to Imogen.

Geoffrey Kent’s emotional turn, the villain’s mea culpa, was delivered so believably, though, that the rough humor of so much of the play warps back into a world of consequences, a world that we can believe in, a world that is less funny than we thought, a world in which happiness is as fragile as our minds.

3. Of course, one could just try to make the play as stupid as possible, and Michael Almereyda was just the artist to do it.

In 2000, he released a Hamlet whose successes included Bill Murray as a subtle Polonius and Julia Stiles trying her best and mostly succeeding to be a worthy Ophelia. Ethan Hawke as Hamlet seemed like he was simultaneously stoned and constipated, and tended to be outmaneuvered by a silly knit cap with earflaps he insisted on wearing.

Silly hat

When the story seems to channel Hamlet’s point-of-view, the home video camera Hamlet uses for his experimental films dominate the scene. Almost none of the actors seem to know the meaning of Shakespeare’s language, and the lack of affect (what professionals sometime call acting) make this really dull as camp.

In last year’s Cymbeline, Almereyda again champions a slacker aesthetic, with motorcycles and skateboards updating Shakespeare in all sorts of essential ways. Instead of being a king of England, Cymbeline is the leader of a biker gang that runs a meth lab because … Breaking Bad, I guess?

As Imogen, Dakota Johnson, in her pre-Fifty Shades of Gray glory, gives off the impression of being a rather clean mop that has forgotten where it has left its keys.

imogen

What emotion am I supposed to be feeling? Wait, What’s my line again? Somebody send me a text…

Vondie Curtis-Hall puts in an appearance as one of the actors who can actually speak Shakespeare’s language perfectly (reprising his role of what-the-hell-am-I-doing-in-this-stupidity from Baz Lurmann’s Romeo + Juliet).

cymbeline 3

The girlfriends of motorcycle gang leaders always wear tiaras, kind of ironically, kind of not.

Almost every decision in this film looks ludicrous.

One gets the feeling, though, that Almereyda accidentally renders the tragic silly, and the humor gravely. It’s like listening to music that’s off-key.

Talented actors seem as psychologically lost as George Lucas actors in front of a green screen. Ed Harris comes off totally flat. John Leguizamo (another Romeo + Juliet alumnus) comes off flat. Whoever played Posthumous was too insufferably whiny and wimpy for me to look up his name.

And the crucial part that the entire drama hinges upon, Iachimo? Ethan Hawke, of course. He took the knit cap off, but the same stoned, billion-yard stare of affectless existence is his gift to the story.

Milla Jovovich does okay–she can say the lines with some conviction and emote–but I couldn’t help but wonder when she would start aerobically killing these zombies, one of whom is actually named Posthumous.

_______

1flip

John King (Episode, well, all of them) is a podcaster, writer, and ferret wrangler.

Save

Shakespearing #35: Cymbeline

31 Sunday May 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespearing

≈ 2 Comments

Shakespearing #35 by David Foley

Cymbeline

35 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 fell in love, with both the production and the play.

I don’t know what to make of this except that Akalaitis created, from a play I’d previously struggled with, a world that moved and excited me. I still remember Joan Cusack whirling about in grief and confusion when she understands that Posthumus has ordered Pisanio to kill her. And I remember her delivery of what instantly became one of my favorite lines in Shakespeare. When Pisanio says that since receiving his orders “I have not slept a wink,” she retorts, “Do’t, and to bed then.” (I also remember the king’s sons running around in what were essentially fur dance belts.)

It’s surprising, actually, on re-reading Cymbeline, to see how much of that excitement is there in the text. For a play that has a reputation for being baggily constructed, it makes a remarkably cohesive world. It counters loss with restitution, death with resurrection, nobility of position with nobility of soul, and infidelity of many kinds with forgiveness. It ends in a world renewed, and it feels like Shakespeare has renewed himself. Echoes of previous plays abound. Once again, a pre-Christian British king has a falling-out with a beloved daughter, but here the daughter claims the story as her own. As in Much Ado, we have a false accusation of infidelity, but Posthumus, before he learns of Imogen’s fidelity, must understand the horror of having his wife murdered “for wrying but a little,” and wish the gods had instead “strook/Me, wretch, more worth your vengeance.” And in Imogen it’s as if all Shakespearean heroines have reached their apogee: smart and spirited, sorrowful and funny, skilled at parrying the thrusts of father, stepmother, wooers, but possessed of a lyricism that sounds Dickinsonian at times: “O, learn’d indeed were that astronomer/That knew the stars as I his characters;/He’ld lay the future open.” Or, rebuking Pisanio for not watching Posthumus’s parting ship longer:

I would have broke mine eye-strings, crack’d them, but

To look upon him, till the diminution

Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle;

Nay, followed him till he had melted from

The smallness of a gnat to air.

It’s interesting to read Cymbeline in context of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and Tamburlaine. Those plays, written after and before Shakespeare respectively, are easier to read. Their language doesn’t tax us the way Shakespeare’s does with his coiled images and wordplay. If you need another reason to believe that Shakespeare wrote his plays (and you really shouldn’t), think of a line like this: “Stand,/Or we are Romans and will give you that/Like beasts which you shun beastly.” Only a playwright intimate with his actors can help them make sense of a line like that. (A great deal depends on how you hit the “we.”)

The line comes from Posthumus’s account of the rout of the Romans, itself a reminder that Shakespeare is often quite dramatic when by rights he shouldn’t be. He makes narrative dramatic. Robert Brustein has called the long final scene “unarguably the dullest…recognition scene in Shakespeare.” Shakespeare himself knows he’s going on. (Cymbeline urges the digressive Jachimo, “Nay, nay, to th’ purpose.”) But done right it’s moving and beautiful, a drama in itself. I don’t remember how Akalaitis did it. But it must have worked.

_______

David Foley

David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.

Shakespearing #34.1: ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore

24 Sunday May 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespearing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, John Ford

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 my head. I was also quite tired (theater may be the only art form we consistently go to when we’re exhausted). And both of those circumstances may have had something to do with my cranky response. As we left the theater I said to my friend, “I imagine that’s a really hard play to do, but it’s gotta be impossible if you don’t have some idea about it.”

Now, a couple of weeks later and having just read the play for the first time, I’m feeling more sympathetic. As Marion Lomax suggests in her introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition, it’s hard to get the balance right on this one. Like some of Shakespeare’s plays, it offers no comfortable readings, only warring uncomfortable ones. The incestuous love affair between siblings Giovanni and Annabella is both a form of nihilistic madness and the only convincing expression of love and mutuality in the play. The representatives of the church serve as both voices of the moral universe and guarantors of sin. And though most everybody in the play gets some version of the “wonderful justice!” that they acclaim when Hippolita (adulterous would-be murderess and wronged woman) is poisoned, justice is disconcertingly relative when every avenger is also a villain.

I read the play in an online version published by the University of Adelaide, which includes entertainingly waspish notes from an unidentified 19th century editor. The editor takes issue both with the play and with his previous editors: “This tragedy was selected for publication by Mr. Dodsley. The choice was not very judicious, for, though the language of it is eminently beautiful, the plot is repulsive.” And later, in a note on one of Annabella’s lines: “The insulting and profligate language of this wretched woman…is perfectly loathsome and detestable.”

What to do with a play like this? Red Bull took the not uncommon approach of what you might call grab-bag relatability, a moment-to-moment attempt to make the play accessible to a modern audience. The costumes were the po-mo hodgepodge that’s the go-to design choice for a production like this. The actor in the comic role was given free range and a curly blond wig, and the sex-and-violence quotient was upped. (An eye-gouging, offstage in the original, happened in full view, and there was an awkwardly staged nude scene, though, to be fair, a quick internet search indicates that a nude scene is almost required for contemporary productions of the play.) That this worked up to a certain point was attested to, the night I saw it, by the enthusiastic response of a group of students house right.

But relatability has its limits, and the production most obviously ran into them in the character of Giovanni. You can’t play Giovanni as Romeo. At best, he’s a sexed-up Hamlet, his intellectual rebellion soldered to his desire, a Lucifer of love. I don’t know if there’s a way to make him relatable to an audience for whom sin has no metaphysical or intellectual weight.

This presents a conundrum for companies like Red Bull. Their admirable project is to keep Jacobean theater alive on the New York stage, but such projects are always going to be dogged by questions about why and how you revive plays that no longer translate readily to a modern audience. It’s hard for such a project not to slip into academicism.

And it presents a mystery. Why do Shakespeare’s plays still translate? I think of Stephen Greenblatt who writes that “works of art…contain directly or by implication much of [their] situation within themselves, and it is this sustained absorption that enables many literary works to survive the collapse of the conditions that led to their production.” I’ve always liked that, but now I wonder if it’s true. It’s not because Shakespeare pulls so much of the Elizabethan “situation” into his plays that we still revere him. It’s because he gets to something at the heart of the Elizabethan situation that still resonates today.

34.2 Tis Pity  She's a Whore

Charlotte Rampling and Oliver Tobias in a 1971 film adaptation.

Ford’s world is alien to us, and not just because of what our 19th century editor calls the “detestable set of characters [he has] sharked up for the exercise of his fine talents.” It’s alien because it’s hard to find modern equivalents for the passions driving these people. They are rooted in a world—in a situation—we no longer comprehend.

It’s not, however, unplayably alien. That was my surprise on reading the play—what a brisk, involving play it actually is (and, to be fair, easier to follow sitting well-rested on a sofa than frazzled and dragging in a theater). Tamburlaine, too, is alien to us. The things that thrilled his Elizabethan audience now appall us. The recent gorgeous TFANA production didn’t make him relatable. It created a world in which we could imagine him, a world that refracted our vision so that we began to see our own world through new eyes.

So maybe what ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore needs is not an idea, but a world, a world in which the play can happen. That’s a tall order, and I’m not sure how you would go about creating that world. But it might give shape to the project of reviving such plays: not to make them relatable but to dazzle us with new seeing.

_______

David Foley

David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.

Shakespearing #34: Pericles

17 Sunday May 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, Shakespearing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

David Foley, George Wilkins, Pericles

Shakespearing #34 by David Foley

Pericles

34 Pericles lighter

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 say that by the standards of the Renaissance stage, it was very good theater.” At the same time, he says, Pericles “excites whatever interest it does today only because Shakespeare’s name is attached to it.” And even as I try to get my head around an understanding of “masterpiece” as “very good for its time” (or even of Pericles as “very good”), it occurs to me that if anything is keeping Pericles alive today it’s not Shakespeare’s name but Shakespeare.

Orgel makes his claims while wrestling with the authorship question. The second half of Pericles is understood these days to have been written by Shakespeare and the first by someone named George Wilkins. In making his case for Pericles as a whole masterpiece, Orgel cites the play’s choral figure, John Gower, as its “most striking element.” But Gower changes in both form and intent halfway through the play. The change is pronounced enough to make you feel that Shakespeare has seized the reins of the play from Wilkins with a certain irritable impatience.

Gower, a contemporary of Chaucer, wrote the narrative poem on which the play is based, and in the first half of the play, he narrates the story in a fusty tetrameter sprinkled with archaisms (“iwis,” “speken”). This is the kind of slightly academic conceit that can seem, to the amateur playwright, like a good idea, but in Wilkins’ hands it adds to the static, novelistic development of the early scenes. Shakespeare’s Gower moves; he sweeps the audience along with him, urging them to “think [Pericles’] pilot thought” as he “[thwarts] the wayward seas.”

Perhaps because the division of labor is so marked in Pericles, it’s easier here to see the difference not just between Shakespeare and his co-author but between a dramatist and someone just writing a play. The difference you feel when Shakespeare takes over is a sense of being lifted up into a livable world, a world of motion, of lives both animated and animating. You feel it in the reply of the villainous Dionyza when Leonine, charged with murdering Marina, objects that “she is a goodly creature”: “The fitter then the gods should have her.” You feel it in the intractable reality of the Bawd, who, like the Nurse, can’t leave a room when she’s dismissed. You feel it in Marina who, like many of Shakespeare’s women, anneals deep feeling to sharp intellect, whether she’s arguing with Leonides for her life or with Lysimachus and Boult for her chastity. “Do anything but this thou doest,” she tells the panderer Boult. “Empty/Old receptacles, or common shores of filth,” and you understand that the key to Shakespeare’s drama is the mind and heart in fierce motion.

It’s insane how moving Marina and Pericles’ recognition scene is, given the often clunky path that got us there (and the improbable set-up; it depends on no one actually mentioning Pericles’ name to Marina). It’s as if, in taking over from the clumsier playwright, Shakespeare reconnected with his own powers and at the same time began to imagine, after the bitterness of Coriolanus and Timon, a new dramatic world of clemency and reconciliation. “Did you not name a tempest,/A birth, and death?” Thais asks her rediscovered husband in the final scene. Well, yeah.

_______

David Foley

David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.

Shakespearing #33: Timon of Athens

10 Sunday May 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespearing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Collaboration, David Foley, Playwriting, Shakespearing, Thomas Middleton, Timon of Athens, William Shakespeare

Shakespearing #33 by David Foley

Timon of Athens

33 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 collaboration…was unusually close.” Which, I suppose, only matters if, like me, you keep pontificating airily on what “Shakespeare” is “doing” in his plays. The question of what Shakespeare is doing becomes vexed when you’re not sure who’s doing what.

Other than that, the idea of Shakespeare collaborating doesn’t bother me that much. Maybe it’s because I’m a playwright. When I was in college and double-majoring in English and Drama, I experienced a bit of a tug of war, pulled on one end by those who saw Shakespeare as literature and on the other by those who saw him as theatre. To literary types it might be unnerving to find out that Shakespeare didn’t always work alone, but theatre is a collaborative art, and it’s easy enough to imagine Shakespeare wanting to share the burden of a play, or another playwright wanting to avail himself of Shakespeare’s know-how. I suppose I’d be more troubled if it were revealed that Shakespeare had collaborated on one of the great, unified masterpieces, like Hamlet or Lear, but Timon is a mongrel kind of play, though like many a mongrel it packs some power in its yap.

Trying to track down the current thinking on the Timon collaboration, I found (in Wikipedia) this quote from Melville: “it is those deep far-away things in [Shakespeare]; those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality:—these are the things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare. Through the mouths of the dark characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago, he craftily says, or sometimes insinuates the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true, that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint of them.”

The first thing you can say about that is that it’s really Melvillean, and then you can worry whether those “sharp, quick probings” in Timon are Shakespeare or Middleton. But then you think maybe he’s right. Aren’t there moments in Shakespeare when you feel suddenly, like Pip in Moby Dick, bobbing alone on that mind-breaking sea?

It’s Timon’s curses that first made critics want to give chunks of the play to Middleton, as when he cries to the earth:

Teem with new monsters, whom thy upward face

Hath to the marbled mansion all above

Never presented!…

Dry up thy marrows, vines, and plough-torn leas,

Whereof ingrateful man, with liquorish draughts

And morsels unctious, greases his pure mind

That from it all consideration slips—

 Maybe that’s Middleton, but he seems to have been studying Lear, another mind sent bobbing out on that sea.

And Timon’s generosity is as terrifying as his bitterness. The play may (for all I know) reflect Middleton’s sardonic view of friendship and advantage, but the dizzying speed with which Timon’s beneficence sails free of reality seems Shakespearean. It occurs to me that Lear’s cry, “O, let me not be mad!” rings through much of Shakespeare’s work. It’s not what Iago says or insinuates that seems “terrifically true,” but the ease with which he unmoors Othello’s mind from reason. And you can feel the terror of Melville and Shakespeare come together when Timon says to himself, “Lie where the light foam of the sea may beat/Thy gravestone daily.”

_______

David Foley

David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.

Shakespearing #32.2: Even More Thoughts About Coriolanus

26 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespearing

≈ Leave a comment

Shakespearing #32.2 by John King

Even More Thoughts About Coriolanus

Last week, I discussed how Coriolanus eludes me because I don’t feel any empathy for its characters, the minor character Menenius excepted.

Considering that my chief axiom about Shakespeare is that he is best known in performance rather than on the page, I thought it best to carry over how I experience this lack of empathy in performance. I have seen Coriolanus twice, once with the Ralph Fiennes film of 2011, and once with the 2013 stage production mounted by the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival.

Now I have seen Hamlets I felt nothing for, due to bad acting, but even a modest success at Hamlet lets the humanity of his character surprise me, despite having too many Hamlets in my life.

Can a superior performance make me feel empathy for characters whose chief attributes seems to be they have their heads up their asses? Can I think of Coriolanus as being other than the -anus play?

Coriolanus poster

The 2011 film is deeply impressive on numerous levels.

still-of-ralph-fiennes,-brian-cox-and-john-kani-in-coriolanus-(2011)

The cinephile in me likes noticing that Fiennes, who played Francis Dolarhyde in Red Dragon, is acting with Bryan Cox, who was the first Hannibal Lecter in the first film version of Red Dragon, Manhunter.

CORIOLANUS

Vanessa Redgrave and Jessica Chastain and Gerard Butler look intelligently cinematic, yet appropriate to this twentieth-first century adaptation of Shakespeare.

And to hear Fiennes deliver Shakespeare’s lines so majestically and ferociously is exquisite, like hearing a Stradivarius go at something that might have been composed by Paganini.

Coriolanus3

Fiennes does not persuade me that Coriolanus’s pride (which rips apart both Rome and his sense of identity) is tragic, tragic precisely because it is morally necessary to give his very life meaning—although the delivery is compelling to hear, even if I don’t quite care.

Coriolanus 2

What Coriolanus does for me in such a performance is to dramatize how politics and rhetoric form a public mask that bears no true resemblance to the experiences as a soldier that has made Coriolanus a public figure to begin with. His relationship with his enemy, Tullus Aufidius, is more real to him that his relationship to his people, or to his wife. These experiences, these triumphs, are not translatable to those without such experiences. Hemingway wrote about this in “Soldiers Home,” from his story collection In Our Time.

I am not sure if it is a mark of boredom, or merely a different aesthetic experience, that my mind watches the tragic dramaturgy of Coriolanus from a vast emotional distance.

If I keep watching, it must be good, even if I cannot articulate why or how.

Coriolanus PBSF

When my friend, Kevin Crawford, performed this play in the summer of 2013, he made the spectacle even more abstract, a Rome sort of set in outer space. He and the other actors pantomimed the use of weapons, and when Coriolanus and his fellow soldiers lay siege Aufidius in Corioli—the conquest of which city the hero is granted the name of honor, Coriolanus—they banged the air, and the foleys boomed with their fury.

Kevin was beardless, and totally bald, thus removing one more mark of personality from the hero who was wrestling more with eternity than with Rome, its citizens, or Aufidius, for his sublime sensation of immaculate pride.

season2013_coriolanus2

The poster showed Kevin clutching his face, as if he were going insane.

Kevin was roughly my age, but had been acting since he was a teenager, and there were no huge challenges left for him in the great bard’s work. He wanted to mount a production of Cyrano, that dramedy about the distance between our public and private selves, about how complicated our need for companionship in essence is.

Sweating in a field in Jupiter, Florida, as Coriolanus raged to create a public self he could recognize, I felt more on his strange journey than ever before.

Most of the cast of the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival was now young, and had missed the twenty-two years of shows Kevin had experienced.

Coriolanus is a late Shakespeare play. Like The Tempest, it is weird. Perhaps this was Shakespeare sensing the end of his dramatic career. No one’s imagination in the history of letters had come close to his work—he was in an aesthetic isolation. He was trying to exist fully.

Kevin would churl at this psycho-biographic pass at Coriolanus, most likely, although he would have humored me.

That summer run of shows were Kevin’s last. He died quite suddenly on December 2nd, 2013.

I miss him more than I can say.

 _______

1flip

John King (Episode, well, all of them) is a podcaster, writer, and ferret wrangler.

← Older posts
Newer posts →
Scribophile, the online writing group for serious writers

Online, shop here:

If you must, shop Amazon and help the show.

Audible.com

Blogs

Not forgotten

Categories

  • 21st Century Bronte
  • A Word from the King
  • Aesthetic Drift
  • animation
  • Anime
  • Art
  • Autobiography
  • AWP
  • Biography
  • Blog Post
  • Bloomsday
  • Buddhism
  • Buzzed Books
  • Cheryl Strayed
  • Children's Literature
  • Christmas
  • Christmas literature
  • Comedy
  • Comic Books
  • Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart
  • Craft of Fiction Writing
  • Creative Nonfiction
  • David Foster Wallace
  • David James Poissant
  • David Lynch
  • David Sedaris
  • Disney
  • Dispatches from the Funkstown Clarion
  • Doctor Who
  • Drinking
  • Dungeons and Dragons
  • Editing
  • Education
  • Episode
  • Erotic Literature
  • Essay
  • Fan Fiction
  • Fantasy
  • Feminism
  • Film
  • Film Commentary
  • Flash Fiction
  • Florida Literature
  • Francesca Lia Block
  • Functionally Literate
  • Ghost writing
  • Graphic Novels
  • Gutter Space
  • Help me!
  • Heroes Never Rust
  • History
  • Horror
  • Humor
  • Hunter S. Thompson
  • In Boozo Veritas
  • Irish Literature
  • Jack Kerouac
  • James Bond
  • James Joyce
  • Jazz
  • Journalism
  • Kerouac House
  • Kung Fu
  • Like a Geek God
  • Literary Criticism
  • Literary Magazines
  • Literary Prizes
  • Literary rizes
  • Literature of Florida
  • Litlando
  • Live Show
  • Loading the Canon
  • Loose Lips Reading Series
  • Lost Chords & Serenades Divine
  • Magic Realism
  • Mailbag
  • manga
  • McMillan's Codex
  • Memoir
  • Miami Book Fair
  • Michael Caine
  • Military Literature
  • Mixtape
  • Music
  • New York City
  • O, Miami
  • Old Poem Revue
  • On Top of It
  • Pensive Prowler
  • Philosophy
  • Photography
  • Poetry
  • politics
  • Postmodernism
  • Publishing
  • Recommendation
  • Repeal Day
  • science
  • Science Fiction
  • Screenwriting
  • Sexuality
  • Shakespeare
  • Shakespearing
  • Sozzled Scribbler
  • Sports
  • Star Wars
  • Television
  • The Bible
  • The Curator of Schlock
  • The Global Barfly's Companion
  • The Lists
  • The Perfect Life
  • The Pink Fire Revue
  • The Rogue's Guide to Shakespeare on Film
  • Theater
  • There Will Be Words
  • translation
  • Travel Writing
  • Vanessa Blakeslee
  • Versify
  • Video Games
  • Violence
  • Virginia Woolf
  • War
  • Westerns
  • Word From the King
  • Young Adult
  • Your Next Beach Read
  • Zombies

Recent Posts

  • Episode 524: Yeoh Jo-Ann!
  • The Curator of Schlock #382: Dark Crimes
  • Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #175
  • Episode 523: Aaron Angello!
  • The Curator of Schlock #381: The Driver

Archives

  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • The Drunken Odyssey
    • Join 3,107 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • The Drunken Odyssey
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...