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 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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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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 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 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 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?

The 2011 film is deeply impressive on numerous levels.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 2^nd, 2013.

I miss him more than I can say.

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