Shakespearing #17: The Merry Wives of Windsor

12 Sunday Oct 2014

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David Foley, Falstaff, Shakespearing, The Merry Wives of WIndsor

Shakespearing #17 by David Foley

The Merry Wives of Windsor

The Merry Wives of Windsor was one of three Shakespeare plays I’d neither read nor seen when I began this project. (The other two were King John and The Two Noble Kinsmen.) I can’t say I was missing much. Riverside’s introduction repeats the tradition that it was written (in fourteen days) at the request of Queen Elizabeth. If so, she may not have been thrilled with what she got. James Shapiro speculates that Merry Wives might have been “the displeasing play” for which Shakespeare appears to apologize in his epilogue to Henry IV, Part 2.

Riverside says she’d asked for “a play about Falstaff in love,” and the imagination of a playwright being hard to herd, Shakespeare hasn’t come through as commissioned. Falstaff isn’t in love (we can wonder what it says about the Queen that she wanted or could even imagine such a thing). He’s being driven mostly by money and a little by lust, and if the Queen had a more sentimental idea in mind, Shakespeare might well find himself apologizing the next time the Christmas court entertainments rolled around.

So Merry Wives might be a lesson about the dangers of writing to order. Or it might be an early example of the chancy nature of the spinoff. Despite being “in the waist two yards about,” Falstaff is much diminished here. He’s shrunk in language. The insouciant verbal play in Henry IV, Part 1 is reduced to drollery, and the play as a whole is linguistically bare. Shakespeare has a couple of tiresome traits, and one is an apparently boundless faith in the comic possibilities of malapropism. Mistress Quickly who is comically inapt in Henry IV (“any man knows where to have me!”) is here given a stream of malapropisms. Perhaps the most tiresome scene in all Shakespeare is the one in which Evans instructs William in Latin while Mistress Quickly follows along with labored misprisions.

As always, we have to remember how far we are from Shakespeare’s language. The Riverside notes are full of things like “Shallow’s meaning has not been satisfactorily explained” and “A crux.” (Until I read this play, I never knew that “crux” could mean “a particular point of difficulty.”) Just because the Queen didn’t like it, doesn’t mean the groundlings weren’t rolling on the ground when they saw it. But it’s a puzzle, isn’t it? Why has some of Shakespeare’s language become foreign to us while much of it remains so immediate?

There’s something here about language rising to the occasion, or perhaps language and occasion rising together. One fascination of Merry Wives is that you get to see what a Shakespearean first draft might have looked like. It’s almost all prose, with lines of verse popping up at odd moments. Some of these make sense—maybe we want verse in Fenton’s love scenes—but why does Pistol speak his few lines in verse? Towards the end, in the midnight fairy masque—the kind of thing that reliably gets Shakespeare’s juices flowing—we get big chunks of verse.

It’s pretty tepid verse, but you can imagine that in another draft we’d start to soar. We’d also have a new play. Whether you’re talking about Jane Austen or David Foster Wallace, the language of a great writer is bound up in the structure of the worlds he creates, and vice versa. (For this reason I tend to get impatient with novels and plays whose language is noticeably fine. If I’m noticing it, it’s become separate from the created world.) What world would Merry Wives have become with another two weeks?

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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 #16: Henry IV, Part 1

04 Saturday Oct 2014

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Shakespearing #16 by David Foley

Henry IV, Part 1

I wasn’t looking forward to re-reading Henry IV. It’s not that I don’t like it, but its central trope has become stale from a hundred Hollywood films: the wastrel son redeeming himself when the chips are down. Do we really need to run that tape again? And indeed the Hal/Henry plot strand is the least alluring element of the play—particularly since, like most of the history plays, Henry IV loses some steam when the battle’s engaged.

But before then, what fun! Falstaff has become so much his own trope that you forget the mercurial, intractable, hilarious life of him. If he’s a trope, we need more such tropes, especially since the mercury of his mind is made of language. The scenes between Hal and Falstaff are scenes about the protean pleasures of words. Between his “compulsion” and his “instinct,” Falstaff is a master of words not as parry and thrust but as evasive pirouette.

His match in linguistic agility is oddly not Hal (though the prince parries and thrusts like a pro) but Hotspur. Hotspur may be the real Hollywood hero of the play—the man’s man with no patience for the world’s milquetoast niceties. Cattle rustler or rogue cop, in a movie he’d save the world from itself in the final reel. He’s sexy, in a Mel Gibson sort of way. Like Gibson, he yokes the vivid soul of a poet to a cripplingly insufficient world view. Late in the play he says he has “not well the gift of tongue,” but this is just a man’s man’s boast. Even as he’s deploring a courtier’s effeminacy—“Fresh as a bridegroom, and his chin new reap’d/Show’d like a stubble land at harvest home”—he displays a virtuosic satisfaction in word and image that rivals Falstaff’s. The problem, as Northumberland warns, is that he “[ties his] ear to no tongue but [his] own.”

That this is a kind of insanity is revealed in Lady Hotspur’s speech in Act II, scene iii. It’s strange that after the ferociously alive women of the Henry VI cycle the women here should be so pallid, so tristely subservient to their men. But, however wanly, Lady Hotspur limns the mental instability beneath her husband’s bravado. Not only has she been “a banish’d woman from [her husband’s] bed” (another trope: the faint suggestion that the man’s man is not all that interested in women), but when he sleeps “the beads of sweat have stood upon [his] brow/Like bubbles in a late-disturbed stream.”

It occurs to me that Henry IV is about layers of personality. If Shakespeare is moving towards more psychologically complex methods of characterization, he seems to be doing it here by refraction, a kind of prismatic splitting. Why else would Hal’s speech in Act I, Scene ii, be so mysteriously moving? (“I know you all and will a time uphold/The unyok’d humor of your idleness.”) It seems like plot. Like foreshadowing. A utilitarian aside to the audience to let us know what’s coming. But it echoes down in the deepest things we suppose about ourselves: that we are more various than the world perceives.

This sheds some light on the deep melancholy of King Henry: the charismatic, destabilizing figure of Richard II, feels frozen now in kingship, while in a tavern somewhere Hal and Falstaff take turns playing him, shifting in and out of parts in a way that gestures at the freedom—both personal and political—that theatre models for us. As in a saturnalia, theatre allows us to imagine our roles as not fixed, but provisional, poised for new improvisations.

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Shakespearing #13: Romeo and Juliet

14 Sunday Sep 2014

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David Foley, Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare

Shakespearing #13 by David Foley

Romeo and Juliet

One of the pleasures of re-reading a familiar text is that things you’ve taken for granted suddenly leap out at you. Like that prologue. Why would Shakespeare begin his liveliest play with a plodding plot summary in sonnet form?

My first playwright’s thought is producer interference. “But how will they know it’s a tragedy?” Shakespeare’s colleagues worry. (It’s a producer’s job to assume audiences are dumb.)

How indeed? The play begins with a comic bit which, in most productions, turns the fight that follows into operetta, despite the fact that blood clearly flows. (As evidence, we have not just the Prince’s “neighbor-stained steel” but Romeo’s line, “O me, what fray was here?” What could he be seeing but blood?) Then we get Romeo mooning hyperbolically about love, Capulet’s bustling preparations for the party, some comic business with the servingman, after which our heroine is introduced in a scene dominated by one of the theatre’s most richly drawn comic characters. What kind of way is that to start a tragedy?

My second thought is that Shakespeare himself wanted the prologue. Lately I’ve been reading James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. One of Shapiro’s points is that Shakespeare increasingly chafed against the conventions of Elizabethan theatre. One of those conventions might have been starting a play while the audience was as yet imperfectly attending. How long did it take for the spectators to finish shushing each other and listen up? The prologue famously ends with a dig at the audience: “What here shall miss our toil shall strive to mend.”

And then we’re plunged into action. This seems breathtaking to me now. I can’t think of a previous Shakespeare play that does this. The prologue now (third thought) seems like a form of joke, its stodgy locutions a carpet that’s about to be yanked out from under the audience.

You notice, too, how fluidly he’s using the stage space. In the opening scenes, the main characters—Benvolio, Capulet, Romeo, Paris—weave in and out, coupling and re-coupling, swirling the stage with life.

If you want to know why Shakespeare remains a touchstone for playwrights (a friend tells me that Arthur Miller learned his craft by typing out Shakespeare’s plays), read Romeo and Juliet. Read the scene in which the Nurse returns to Juliet with her message from Romeo. Feel the joy of what Tennessee Williams once called “that cloudy, flickering, evanescent—fiercely charged!—interplay of live human beings…”

You can learn subtler lessons from Shakespeare. The compressed time frame of the play is astonishing, but this compression also happens within individual scenes. When the Nurse brings news of Tybalt’s death, Juliet suddenly intuits the narrative the Nurse hasn’t quite explained. These lacunae, easy to notice on the page, play out on stage only as an electric charge leaping a gap.

The other playwriting lesson to be learnt from Shakespeare is one some playwrights never learn. Shakespeare never allows a vibrating tension to resolve. (This, too, I’m getting from Shapiro.) I wonder if Romeo and Juliet’s story would still be as potent if it weren’t so hard to name it as either love or desire. Various characters (Mercutio, Friar Laurence, the Nurse) keep reframing love as desire, and even the second chorus describes the lovers as “alike bewitched by the charm of looks.” Juliet’s (and actually Shakespeare’s) insistence on Romeo’s beauty keeps their love from resolving into a sentimental idea and makes Juliet’s love both intense and girlishly real. We’re left with a spectacle that’s both a massive mutual crush and an enduring tragedy of love.

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Shakespearing #8: The Taming of the Shrew

10 Sunday Aug 2014

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Shakespearing #8 by David Foley

The Taming of the Shrew

In my memory, The Taming of the Shrew was a rambunctious farce with two larger-than-life roles and a Stepford Wives ending. On reacquaintance, it’s a joyous work of art. But about that ending: the reasons Kate gives for submitting to Petruchio are not comfortable, but they express an ideal of marriage still to be found in many parts of the country today. What rankles is the taming of Kate’s glorious refusal to submit. But there’s plenty to suggest that Kate has not so much been tamed as she’s learned to manage the relationship between self and society more astutely, and in the service of love.

The play is actually quite subversive about the relationship between love and the social forms. Shakespeare worked in pairings, and it’s no accident that Petruchio’s absurdist wooing of Kate is echoed immediately by Tranio and Gremio wooing Baptista for Bianca’s hand. “’Tis deeds must win the prize,” he tells them, only to clarify that by “deeds” he means “dower,” the money, land, and luxuries they then fall over each other to promise him. It’s Petruchio, despite having “come to wive it wealthily in Padua,” who has to remind everyone that you marry a person, not an estate, nor yet a social form:

To me she’s married, not unto my clothes.

Could I repair what she will wear in me,

As I can change these poor accouterments,

’Twere well for Kate and better for myself.

But the play is more subversive still. I don’t know how common it is these days for productions to leave out the Christopher Sly “Induction” (the first productions I saw didn’t have it), but to do so cheats both audience and play—the audience because the Sly scenes are charming and funny, and the play because the Induction provides a key to all that follows. It not only frames the main action of the play as a performance, but, like the play itself, it’s a series of performances by people pretending to be people they’re not. Most significantly, the Lord’s page pretends to be Sly’s wife: “I am your wife in all obedience.” To put this neat foreshadowing in the mouth of a boy who’s pretending to be a woman and a wife suggests that Kate’s final speech is just another performance, that marriage itself is a performance as artificial as all the other performances in the play.

Kate and Petruchio come to terms not in the last scene, nor even on the road back to Padua, when Kate is clearly humoring Petruchio (she’s learning to perform), but in Act V, Scene 1, when they “stand aside” like spectators at a play to watch the unraveling of all the performances in the Lucentio/Bianca story. At the end of the scene Petruchio asks Kate to kiss him, and she at first resists. She’s not ashamed of him, she says, “but asham’d to kiss.” “Why then let’s home again,” he says, but she replies, “Nay, I will give thee a kiss.” It’s a public performance of the privacy of marriage, whose public face, we now understand, is a necessary absurdity, a performance within which love is shielded.

None of this fully accounts for the joyousness of the play, which I put down to something else. According to the Riverside notes, the Sly scenes are full of references to people and places around Stratford. It may be that in Shrew Shakespeare went nearer to home than he ever had before. There’s a sense of fondness in the Induction and the play itself: a fondness for the frantically performing folk of everyday life.

Shakespearing #7: Titus Andronicus

03 Sunday Aug 2014

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Shakespearing #7 by David Foley

Titus Andronicus

Titus Andronicus is such a mess that people used to argue Shakespeare didn’t write it. Indeed, the latest scholarship says that George Peele wrote significant chunks of it. The problem is the messy parts are Shakespeare. This doesn’t have to disturb us unduly. Shakespeare is messy. He’s Exhibit A for the adage, “Great art rises above its faults while good art never gets past its virtues.” The stuff Peele wrote is good. It’s believed he wrote the entire first act and a bit of Act II, plus a scene in Act IV. Act I is a single continuous scene in which Peele (if it is Peele) delivers quite a lot of exposition and action smoothly in a clear, forceful dramatic voice. If there’s anything that seems non-Shakespearean about it, it’s his approach to character, which leans towards the rhetorical. His characters declaim, stake out positions. The drama is in the shifting and counter-shifting of those positions. Shakespeare’s approach to character is more mobile. It follows the shifting mind. Here’s Tamora pleading with Titus not to kill her son:

Victorious Titus, rue the tears I shed,

A mother’s tears in passion for her son;

And if thy sons were ever dear to thee,

O, think my son to be as dear to me.

Compare this to Margaret in 3 Henry VI, after her son has been murdered:

What’s worse than murtherer, that I may name it?

No, no, my heart will burst, and I will speak,

And I will speak, that so my heart may burst.

Butchers and villains! bloody cannibals!

I’m interested in this collaboration. James Shapiro suggests that Peele wrote the opening because Shakespeare was “the less established writer.” But doesn’t that leave all the juicy stuff for Shakespeare? And why just one random scene in the rest of the play? It’s as if, in the end, Shakespeare found he couldn’t bear to give his play over to another writer. Did Peele write scenes that Shakespeare rejected? Rewrote? Why did he need Peele? Did he not have time to write the play himself? Certainly, the last act feels rushed and perfunctory, a double-time cavalcade of murder and retribution. (Tamora barely has time to register that she’s eaten her sons before she’s killed.)

Which brings us to the mess. Yeah, it’s messy. At times absurd. Which can make it a lot of fun, in a macabre way. But it stays with you. Even the moments of high, almost hilarious grotesque—Lavinia exiting with her father’s hand in her tongueless mouth because she has no hands to carry it—linger in your mind. And then there’s Aaron, another of Shakespeare’s outcast villains. Aaron’s determination to save his child does what Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew” speech does; it humanizes him without making him one jot less villainous. Perhaps the result is not that he becomes more like us, but that we become more like him. That may be a key to understanding the play. Titus may be extreme, but it’s an extreme version of themes already in Shakespeare. Are the horrors of Titus really that far away from the ones of Lear? The horror of human cruelty—which is ultimately a political cruelty—is never far away in Shakespeare. We are implicated in its relentless pull.

Titus in his age, his foolishness, his madness, and his grief foreshadows Lear, but his predicament foreshadows Kafka. His “goodness” consists in being a deferential servitor for the violence of the state. Like a Kafka hero, he’s a functionary crushed for serving the machine too well.

Shakespearing #2: Henry VI, Part 1

29 Sunday Jun 2014

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Shakespearing #2 by David Foley

Henry VI, Part 1

Let’s imagine that Shakespeare has been hanging around London theatre for a while, acting in productions but also using his “honey’d” way with words to tart up some old warhorses for this or that company, and finally someone persuades him to write, or he persuades them to let him write, his own play, something like the English history plays that have been such hits for other companies.

Or maybe he just arrives at the theatre one day with it already written. “Here, try this one out,” he says. “No, really.” Let’s assume, that is to say, that Shakespeare wrote Henry VI, Part 1 first, and all by himself. What can we notice? He begins by nodding to the stage itself. “Hung be the heavens with black,” which refers not only to the death of Henry V but, according to the note in Riverside, to the black bunting hung from the “heavens” or canopy of the stage to indicate a tragedy.

I don’t know how unique such meta-moments are to Shakespeare, but he does them a lot. There’s the “wooden O” speech at the top of Henry V, the “two-hours traffic of our stage” of Romeo and Juliet, the Christopher Sly framing device in Taming of the Shrew, and the various envois with which he ends plays, such as Puck’s at the end of Midsummer.

The line (Bedford’s) continues, “Comets, importing change of time and states,/Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky.” There’s that Shakespearean compression: the “crystal tresses” of the comet anneals metaphor to metaphor. There are also signs in the play of what Virginia Woolf called his tendency to “[follow] recklessly” “the trail of a chance word” so that “[f]rom the echo of one word is born another word.” Here is Joan of Arc: “Care is not cure but rather corrosive.” And William Lucy blames “[t]he fraud of England, not the force of France” for the defeat of Talbot. There are less felicitous lines, lines perhaps that an older Shakespeare might have blushed to re-read: “O, were my eyeballs into bullets turn’d,/That I in rage might shoot them at your faces!” says Lucy. All these lines give you a sense of the meter of the play: steady, unenjambed iambic pentameter. No prose.

As for staging, everything seems rather rambunctious, with people brawling and scaling walls and attacking and counter-attacking, and for all that the plot lacks a certain narrative momentum. But Shakespeare is already holding his plays together with iterations of the same pattern, in this case a series of squabbling rivalries that undermine the nation, leading, among other things, to the tragic deaths of the heroic Talbot and his son. Weirdly, in the scene in which the Talbots prepare to die together, the dialogue falls into thumping rhyming couplets and all verbal play drains from the language, perhaps a sign that these lines come from an earlier play or perhaps a sign that Shakespeare was uncomfortable with full-on heroics.

His oddest creation in 1 Henry VI is Joan of Arc or Joan de Pucelle, whom he portrays, according to the best English tradition of the time, as a crazy, conniving witch. But she’s also wily and funny and hence may be the first of Shakespeare’s double-edged women, women smarter and more powerful and fascinating than the men around them, whether they’re Rosalind or Juliet or Lady Macbeth or that most urbane of heroines, Beatrice, who can sling an epigram with the best of them, but can still cry, “O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market-place!”