Shakespearing #37: The Tempest

21 Sunday Jun 2015

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David Foley, Shakespeare, The Tempest

Shakespearing #37 by David Foley

The Tempest

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.”

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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

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David Foley, George Wilkins, 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 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.

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Shakespearing #33: Timon of Athens

10 Sunday May 2015

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

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 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.”

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Shakespearing #31: Antony and Cleopatra

15 Sunday Mar 2015

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Antony and Cleopatra, David Foley, Rhetoric, Shakespeare, Shakespearing

Shakespearing #31 by David Foley

Antony and Cleopatra

One reason I wouldn’t be a good playwriting teacher is that I wouldn’t know how to teach inconsistency. It’s one of those things I think you either get or you don’t, one of those things that suggest certain elements of writing can’t be taught. Mostly I mean inconsistency of character, and the not-quite-playwright usually produces one of two effects when drawing a character. Either the character is diagrammatically laid out, sometimes with painstaking psychological nuance, so that everything the character does is motivated with crystal clarity, or else the character makes no sense whatsoever, shifting and chopping according to the whims of the playwright or the needs of the plot. Neither resembles an actual person.

If I wanted to try to teach characterization—if I wanted to give a student some idea of how to portray a character whirling, like most of us, around some wavering core—I’d say, Read Shakespeare. Read Antony and Cleopatra.

In this play Shakespeare seems to set up inconsistency as the signature of a noble soul. His two leads, equals in stature and in confounding behavior, are set against the chilling single-mindedness of Caesar. They tack back and forth (sometimes literally) on the impulses of the moment. This, of course, is a problem even if you’re not trying to win an empire. How can you construct a recognizable self from a welter of warring impulses? Antony seems to sense this in a speech in which he compares himself to a drifting cloud, “A vapor, sometime like a bear or lion,/A tower’d citadel, a pendant rock,/A forked mountain” until “the rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct.”

Two things save Antony and Cleopatra: the largeness of their passions and their rhetoric. And here’s where I’d feel compelled to warn my young playwright. You have to be careful with Shakespeare, I’d say, because he can leave you with a fascination with characters who shape themselves through rhetoric. And that dynamic structure—the fragmentary, contradictory character willing itself into shape through continued acts of speech—can puzzle those used to cleaner forms of characterization. (Though this itself is a puzzle since many great playwrights—Chekhov, Williams, O’Neill—have done it.)

Cleopatra’s last moments are flight after flight of rhetoric, as if daring herself to new heights. It’s hard to tell who’s getting higher on her fumes, she or Shakespeare. It begins in Act IV: “O, wither’d is the garland of the world,” and “It were for me/To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods,/To tell them that this world did equal theirs/Till they had stol’n our jewel.” In her final scene, she pulls out all the stops: “Rather on Nilus’ mud/Lay me stark nak’d, and let the water-flies/Blow me into abhorring.” She even takes some meta-jibes at the actor playing her, who as “some squeaking Cleopatra [will] boy my greatness/I’th’ posture of a whore.” By the time she gets to “I have immortal longings in me,” we’re entirely swept away by this magnificent act of self-recreation on the verge of self-destruction.

But maybe she’s on to her own game. The more fatal master of rhetoric is Caesar, for whom rhetoric is not about self-creation but political force. When he smoothly, persuasively lies to her about how she’ll be treated as a captive, she replies, “He words me, girls, he words me.”

How strange in this last act of Antony and Cleopatra to be reminded both of the falseness of rhetoric and its thrilling power. It creates worlds, it creates people, and when all else is lost, it builds a pyre on which to throw yourself.

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Shakespearing #25: Troilus and Cressida

11 Sunday Jan 2015

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Cressida Among the Greeks, David Foley, Shakespearing, Troilus and Cressida, Trojan War

Shakespearing #25 by David Foley

Troilus and Cressida

You have to let critics do what they do, and one who reviewed my play Cressida Among the Greeks said that, although the press release cited both Chaucer and Shakespeare, I was clearly following Shakespeare much more closely. I found the claim bewildering at the time, and it’s even more bewildering now that I’ve re-read Shakespeare’s play. For better or worse, my play is a pretty straightforward telling of the old tale, and Shakespeare’s is…um…not.

For one thing, he’s not much interested in Troilus and Cressida, or rather he’s interested in them as one piece of a larger image he’s constructing. The image is a two-way mirror in which love and war become dark reflections of each other, both suffuse with vanity, irrationality, duplicity, and senseless loss. Of course, the Trojan War invites such linkage. Helen comes in for a fair amount of abuse here (Diomedes commends her “whorish loins”), but like all the other tarnished ideals in the play, she remains serenely unconcerned.

The ideals of love and war keep crossing currents in Troilus and Cressida. When Aeneas delivers Hector’s challenge to single combat, it’s on the grounds of love: to contend who “hath a lady, wiser, fairer, truer.” In an irony so fleeting you might miss its acrid bite, Agamemnon answers, “[I]f none else, I am he.”

In this context, Troilus and Cressida are just another ideal mocked in the execution. Their closest parallel in the Greek camp is Achilles and Patroclus—Patroclus whom Thersites refers to as “Achilles’ brach [bitch]” and his “masculine whore.” The men spend their time lolling “upon a lazy bed,” and now and then Patroclus pops up to parody the Greek commanders. This last information comes from Ulysses, who uses it both to work up Nestor and Agamemnon’s wrath and perhaps to slyly mock them. (How is he able to describe the scene so vividly if he hasn’t sat there laughing along with Achilles?)

It may be that the pair truly at the heart of Troilus and Cressida is Ulysses and Thersites. Ulysses is given the longest speeches and the richest language. His speech about degree is often cited as Shakespeare’s ringing endorsement of the social order. That makes sense. I guess. But the speaker is Ulysses, the Odyssey’s “man of twists and turns,” and he’s devious here as well, manipulating the vanity of Achilles and Ajax at the service of a cause everyone agrees is absurd. Thersites is the intellectual id of the play, turning all the finely wrought wisdom of Ulysses and Nestor into bile. We’d like to believe Ulysses speaks for the play’s ideals, but the world of the play belongs to Thersites.

Which bring us to Cressida. I’ve always told people that I wrote Cressida because both Shakespeare and Chaucer seem to lose interest in her after she goes to the Greek camp. Now it strikes me that Shakespeare loses interest earlier. In her first scenes Cressida is vibrantly witty and alive, but in the scenes of love and parting her emotions seem ginned up, the language, for Shakespeare, pallid. And her explanation of her treachery is a moralizing treatise in rhymed couplets. It may have been Shakespeare’s intention to pull back from Cressida, to have her retreat into mystery. She becomes another ideal that dissolves, without explanation, into mockery. Troilus’s bafflement turns metaphysical: “This is, and is not, Cressid…[A] thing inseparate/Divides more wider than the sky and earth.” Troilus and Cressida is a bitter play, but is the bitterness directed against love or war or just the failed world itself?

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Shakespearing #24: Twelfth Night

04 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, Shakespearing, Theater

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David Foley, De Profundis, Jeanette Winterson, Shakespearing, Sonnet 20, Twelfth Night

Shakespearing #24 by David Foley

Twelfth Night

I am sure that a lot of the coyness and silliness that accompanies productions of Shakespeare that include cross-dressing roles is an attempt to steer them clear of the Queer.

This is Jeanette Winterson in one of her more high-handed modes, and it always makes me want to roll my eyes a bit. “Oh, Jeanette,” I want to say.

And yet.

You have to give her Twelfth Night. It’s pretty queer. It’s queer even if you’re just reading it, and I can only imagine what it was like seeing it back in the day when an adolescent boy played Viola who’s disguised as an adolescent boy who’s hiding a secret crush on an older guy (who agrees to marry him/her without ever having seen him/her in women’s clothes). And another boy played Olivia who falls in love with a boy who’s really a girl played by a boy. And then there’s Antonio, the seafaring man (you know how they are) whose desire for Sebastian, “[m]ore sharp than filed steel,” drives him to risk all in Illyria, and whose anguish at the supposed Sebastian’s betrayal (“how vild an idol proves this god!”) might come from De Profundis. What kind of echo is it that Antonio shares a name with the man who pledged a pound of flesh for his beloved Bassanio in Merchant of Venice?

Scholars will tell me I’m misunderstanding these things, that the Elizabethan ideal of male friendship would amply contain the love of both Antonios for their friends. Sure. But. It’s also true that the obliviousness of straight folks has always allowed the signals of queerness to travel through the ether unremarked, caught only by certain attuned apparatuses.

If you sometimes get a queer vibe off Shakespeare, it’s more a matter of catching those signals than, say, Sonnet 20, which can still be construed as a hyperbolic expression of male friendship.

One such signal, though admittedly an ambiguous one, is how good he is with women. It’s exciting to see Shakespeare produce, so soon after Rosalind, a cross-dressing female of an entirely different stripe. Where Rosalind is witty, Viola is lyric, whether in the yearning breadth of the “willow cabin” speech or the pooled melancholy of “Patience on a monument.” And Olivia is just a great character. She’s smart, funny, contradictory, and wonderfully human. I said in my Hamlet posting that Shakespeare is sometimes not good with female sexuality. But I want to temper that. He’s actually quite good with female desire. (Perhaps another signal?) Look at Juliet. Look at Olivia.

These signals, faint enough, may be illusory, but I’m interested in the question they bring up, which I can express (clumsily), “How does a culture of queerness express itself in this or any age?” When I search the internet for information on Elizabethan homosexuality, I get lots of stuff about male friendship and the severe social, religious, and legal strictures against homosexuality, plus the usual caveats that the notion of a homosexual person is a relatively recent construction. But it seems to me that certain things persist through time, and among these are the ways in which men who share a sexual taste proclaim to each other their separate and special status. It doesn’t so much matter whether Marlowe actually said, “All they that love not Tobacco and Boys are fools.” It matters that, to his accusers, it sounded like something someone might say. Shakespeare may not have intended to send the signals Twelfth Night does, but there must have been men in the audience who winked at each other when they received them.

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Shakespearing #23: Hamlet

21 Sunday Dec 2014

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David Foley, Hamlet, Shakespeare, Shakespearing, Stephen Greenblatt, The Ghost

Shakespearing #23 by David Foley

Hamlet

For a certain kind of theatre/English lit nerd, Hamlet was our Catcher in the Rye. Hamlet not Holden was the disaffected hero who awakened our sense that we were surrounded by phonies in a messed-up world. I remember being puzzled to learn that scholars argued back and forth about Hamlet. Is he mad or just pretending? To me Hamlet was viscerally real. His world had been turned upside down. How else should he behave?

But Hamlet isn’t an adolescent. He’s thirty, a few years younger than Shakespeare when he wrote the play. This, too, is part of the play’s allure: the perhaps illusory sense that we’re getting close to Shakespeare himself, as close as Shakespeare got to self-portraiture. We can note the deep-dyed sense of personal anguish, Hamlet’s savvy as a playwright, and (less appealingly) his revulsion against female sexuality, a revulsion that bubbles up from time to time in Shakespeare’s plays.

John Austen, Illustration for Hamlet (1922).

Still, on re-reading the play, the problem jumps out at you, the problem that, according to C.S. Lewis, caused some critics to call the play “an artistic failure” (though he added, “[I]f this is failure, then failure is better than success.”). And the problem is this: plot becomes divorced from action so that character becomes opaque. The problem is not whether Hamlet is mad or only pretending. The problem is that he says he’s going to “put an antic disposition on,” but everything he does seems only the acting out of a soul in anguish. His maddest acts—killing Polonius, hiding the body, arranging for the murder of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—are way past role-playing. We can’t draw a line between the plot development—“I must play mad in order to revenge my father’s murder”—and the action.

And it’s not just Hamlet. By the end of the Closet Scene, we think we should be able to say whether Gertrude has genuinely repented or if she’s humoring her crazy son, but we can’t, and nothing afterwards enlightens us. We can’t see what effect the scene produced on her. She’s also the first person who can’t see the Ghost, throwing another mystery into the mix. The Ghost is driving the plot. Has he now become a figment?

Stephen Greenblatt calls this “strategic opacity,” “[taking] out a key explanatory element” and thus “occluding the rationale, motivation, or ethical principle that account[s] for the action.” Greenblatt claims that this was Shakespeare’s “crucial breakthrough” in Hamlet, a new approach to character. Hamlet affects us so powerfully because he can’t be explained. We experience him as real because, like us, he’s fragmented.

It’s not just the removal of motivation, but the unlinking of motivation and action that makes Hamlet so disorienting. Our inability to say what effect the Closet Scene has had on Gertrude begins to strike us as eerie. We’re approaching Joan Didion’s “world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended and, above all, devious motivations.”

The other day I picked up Shakespeare’s Montaigne, which has an introduction by Greenblatt. Greenblatt says that Montaigne “experienced existence as a succession of inconsistent and disjointed thoughts and impulses,” with the result that, in the essays, “he is constantly in motion.” Montaigne himself says, “I describe not the essence but the passage.”

This seems to be Shakespeare’s method in Hamlet, to get not the plot but the passage, the motion of a soul. The irony of the play may be that Hamlet, done in by plot in the end, nevertheless escapes plot’s prison. He eludes those who would, in his own words, “pluck out the heart of my mystery.”

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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 #22: As You Like It

14 Sunday Dec 2014

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As You Like It, David Foley, Shakespearing, William Shakespeare

Shakespearing #22 by David Foley

As You Like It

I’ve probably fallen too easily into the assumption that the order I’m using for Shakespeare’s plays reflects an actual order of composition. Go online and you’ll find chronologies that vary significantly from Riverside’s. So my sense that As You Like It acted for Shakespeare as a kind of palate cleanser between Julius Caesar and Hamlet might be an illusion. But I like the idea. I like the idea that Shakespeare fell upon As You Like It with a kind of relief. The play takes us out of the churn of history and politics, far from Rome’s clashing ambitions and Elsinore’s venal and venomous court. Even Much Ado About Nothing seems, by comparison, poisoned by intrigue, ambition, and malice.

It’s not that there isn’t malice in As You Like It. Duke Frederick and Orlando’s brother Oliver are the Malice Twins, so alike that they can’t stand each other. “I never lov’d my brother in my life,” says Oliver. “More villain thou,” says the duke, seemingly without self-consciousness. Duke Frederick has, of course, overthrown his own brother and banished him to the woods, which turns out to be like throwing Brer Rabbit into the briar patch.

This is the relief of As You Like It: how lightly, how charmingly it slips away from the conniving world. In Much Ado, villainy must be revealed and expunged. Here it’s powerless to breach the forest borders. Duke Frederick makes it only to “the skirts of this wild wood” before he’s converted and wanders off to a monastery. Oliver falls asleep in the forest and wakes up reconciled with his brother. It’s true that while he slept “a green and gilded snake…wreath’d itself” around his neck, and “with her head nimble in threats, approach’d/The opening of his mouth,” but “with indented glides [she slips] away” when Orlando appears. Maybe it’s a good thing Oliver has denied Orlando the education proper to his station. It gives him power not just to deflect the coiled serpents that fill a courtier’s mouth with lies, but to kill a lion, exorcising the court’s corruption and the forest’s dangers in one swift sequence.

But the great relief of As You Like It is Rosalind. She shakes us free, and you can feel Shakespeare shaking himself free as he writes her. There’s no accounting for a Rosalind. There’s no accounting for the way a character can take hold of a writer’s pen (or keyboard) and seemingly write herself, so that it becomes impossible to think of craft or construction, only of being, perhaps the way Gaston Bachelard describes a poetic image as an “origin,” “[spoken] on the threshold of being.” Perhaps we can try to account for Rosalind, like that poetic image, through language. Rosalind rides language like a windhover, whether she’s disparaging love (“Men have died from time to time, and worms of eaten them, but not for love.”) or pining for it (“I’ll go find a shadow, and sigh till he come.”), whether she’s bantering with Jaques or insulting Phebe.

Her imposture as Ganymede seems not so much to free her as to express her freedom, to make it visible. She is the “master mistress” of the final pageant, promising a return to order through a kind of jazz improvisation. (“And I for no woman!”)

But, in truth, we haven’t been much disordered. We found a new order when we entered the forest, and it’s almost a disappointment to see Rosalind emerge in women’s clothes at the end of the play, as if we’ve retreated from the threshold of being.

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Shakespearing #19: Much Ado About Nothing

09 Sunday Nov 2014

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David Foley, Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespearing, William Shakespeare

Shakespearing #19 by David Foley

Much Ado About Nothing

Why are Beatrice and Benedick so funny? Maybe you can’t appreciate the force of the question unless you’ve been reading a lot of Shakespeare lately, unless you’ve struggled through the sometimes dusty corridors of his humor, laboriously reconstructing jokes and trying to imagine how they landed four hundred years ago. So why is it so easy to laugh with Beatrice and Benedick?

I find among some old notes the following thoughts on The Importance of Being Earnest:

What survives in Shakespeare, as in Wilde, is wit (Beatrice and Benedick, e.g.). This seems counterintuitive. You’d expect the low humor to survive. What’s more universal than a fart joke? What’s easier to get than a pratfall? This ignores the extent to which wit is an action, an action of the mind. “Play of mind” is one way we describe it to our students, and both terms—play and mind—seem important. Earnest proceeds by paradox. A paradox, if we’re to believe Wilde, is the basis of the play. Its theme, he said, is “that we should treat all trivial things in life very seriously, and all serious things of life with a sincere and studied triviality.” The action of that paradox—the way that play of mind plays in your mind—is the work of the play. The reason we need wit is that it remakes the world for us, reorganizes it, reimagines its constraints. “Heartless,” Shaw called the play, but can any gift be more generous than a remade world? Or to be more precise, the gift is not the remade world—since why should we care if late Victorian England gets remade?—but the act of remaking it.

This puts the relationship between the parallel plots of Much Ado in a new light. Riverside says that Beatrice and Benedick are the “subplot” that provides a “vital interest” to the main plot of Hero and Claudio. But if that’s true, why do we leave the play convinced that they’re our leads?

My guess is it’s because they manage the meaning of the play for us; they tell us how to read its putative main plot. Most art, it seems to me, even before the open rebellion of the Romantics and the Modernists, registers an uneasiness about existing forms; and Hero and Claudio represent the existing forms. Claudio’s love for Hero is entangled in advantage. Even in its first throes, he asks for assurances that she’s her father’s heir. He throws her off as tainted goods only to be persuaded to marry another (albeit fictional) heiress of Leontes’ family. This idea of love as acquisition and woman as commodity, subject to inspection and repudiation, gives poignancy to Beatrice’s repeated cry: “O that I were a man!” As if that would give her power to remake the world.

Instead Beatrice and Benedick remake the world through wit. Like Wilde, they look at the “serious things of life with a sincere and studied triviality.” Their last exchange in which Benedick takes Beatrice “only for pity” and she takes him “partly to save your life, for I was told you were in a consumption” is a liberating critique of the sturm und drang of the other plot, whose seriousness seems strangely trivial.

The forms are sturdy: the audience of 1598 was not likely to question the happy ending of Claudio and Hero. But Beatrice and Benedick allow us to reimagine it. Like Elizabeth and Darcy, in another work where the forms are sturdy, they allow us to breathe the bracing air above the constraints while remaining firmly anchored to them.

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Shakespearing 17.2: Lears

26 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, Shakespearing, Theater

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Beckett, David Foley, Joseph Marcell, Lear, Shakespeare

Shakespearing 17.2 by David Foley

Lears (An Interlude)

Note: In my project of reading all of Shakespeare’s plays in order, I’m still a long way from King Lear. What follows are thoughts about seeing a recent production.

When I entered NYU’s Skirball Center a couple of weeks ago—exhausted from four hours of teaching, a little nauseous from the peanut butter cookie and double espresso I’d substituted for dinner—I was having a hard time remembering why I’d wanted to see my fourth King Lear in two years. I’d hurried to secure tickets to this touring production from the Globe Theatre in London, but since then, it had been dismissively reviewed by Charles Isherwood in the Times, and now the sparseness of the audience suggested that word-of-mouth wasn’t doing it any favors either. To top it off, I had my Brazilian boyfriend with me, and though his English is good, it’s not Shakespearean good, and it wasn’t clear he needed to be subjected to it either.

The signs continued bad. There, as Isherwood had promised, were the actors chatting with the audience, a chumminess that continued with a cozy opening speech, which, among other things, announced that the house lights would be left up in an attempt to recreate the Globe’s outdoor setting. And then the play began, still recognizably the production Isherwood had reviewed: a game cast of eight actors, accordion music and singing, broad acting, jokey staging, everything spelled out as if the production had to be toured to high schools.

Why then was it so devastating? None of the Lears I’ve seen in the last two years have brought me so immediately back to the play’s primal power to move, its bone-deep sorrow. Of course, what you most need in King Lear is a Lear. Joseph Marcell gives an emotionally immediate and inventive performance, a kind of vaudeville of grief and madness that’s never less than fully felt. Isherwood says that Marcell’s performance lacks “emotional thrust and stature,” and this language itself might start to get at what this Lear accomplishes. I don’t know what “emotional thrust” is, and “stature” seems to be what this production is assiduously avoiding. What the company seems to realize is that Lear is not a play of “stature” but of harrowing simplicity. It is a kind of vaudeville. Two of its most wrenching scenes are absurd. There’s the scene in the hovel in which all the “poor Tom’s a-cold” stuff is never credible: we never believe there’s any reason for Edgar to commit himself so wholeheartedly to his disguise. And there’s Gloucester’s attempt to throw himself off the cliff, the blind old man somehow convinced that he’s fallen from a great height when he’s only fallen on the ground. This is not a world of stature. It’s not a world of grandeur. It’s a world where we’re brought close to the echoing absurdity at the center of our lives, the “nothing” that is the play’s sounding note from Cordelia’s first response to her father.

The fact that this is not drenched in Beckettian futility but instead is bound to our deepest human sorrows and a kind of love is the strange alchemy of the play. How does it work? This production seems to understand that it works the way a fairy tale does: in all simplicity, as a tale that, before you know it, has touched wells of hidden and terrible knowing. “[W]hat can you say to draw/A third more opulent than your sisters?” Lear asks Cordelia, and in that moment, when logic says that she can’t win a better portion than her sisters, that there’s only one third left, we understand that we’re in the logic of, the rhetoric of a fairy tale. The mistake you can make with King Lear is to miss this note: to aim for tragic grandeur instead of primal tale.

In the deep wells of the play, in its echoing nothingness, is love. The play blasts a gaping hole where we suppose love is, and finds in its place a love so elemental that it barely comforts. The reason the scenes with poor Tom are so moving despite their illogic is that they sound this note at its deepest. This is why we have to, for the moment, believe that Edgar is not Edgar but Tom. “Unaccommodated man.” “The thing itself.” In the Globe’s production, Marcell clings to Tom, as if only the madness of the shattered self could bring him to such terrifying depths of love: love not for those who comfort and reward us, but for the thing itself. The acts of love in the play—Edgar helping his father to the edge of the false cliff, Lear holding the dead Cordelia in his arms—attempt to bridge the nothingness that keeps opening up around them, and these attempts, a kind of heroism of the absurd, are what give the play its power to devastate.

Isherwood says that the production “may serve as a nicely accessible entertainment,” but “don’t expect to feel much deep emotional engagement.” And yet, with the house lights embarrassingly up, I found myself furtively wiping away tears and struggling to suppress sobs. The problem is not that the production is accessible; the problem is what, in its jolly simplicity, it manages to access.

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