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.

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 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 #31: Antony and Cleopatra

15 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, Shakespearing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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.

_______

Shakespearing #28.1: Four Observations About Othello

15 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Shakespearing, Theater

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

A.C. Bradley, blackface, Fintan O'Toole, Iago, Laurence Olivier, Othello, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Shakespeare

Shakespearing #28.1 by John King

Four Observations About Othello

1. In Shakespeare is Hard, But So is Life, the Irish theater critic Fintan O’Toole says,

If you look at the character of Othello in isolation, and in particular if you look at him through the notion of the “tragic flaw’, then he is not, for all his facility with words, very bright. He can talk up a storm, but he’s not much for thinking. His tragic flaw is jealousy and he carries it around like a crutch, just waiting for someone to kick it from under him. He is manipulated by Iago, a man he didn’t enough trust enough in the first place to make him his lieutenant, without ever attempting to ascertain facts for himself. Suspecting his wife, he fails to confront her with her supposed infidelity, or to question her alleged lover, or to ask any of the other people who could tell him what’s going on. He is driven demented by a handkerchief. (69)

Now O’Toole is setting up a discussion of the chaotic Elizabethan context of the social construction of social status and political power, but if we look at Michael Cassio as being the hero of the play, then his tragic flaw is that he cannot hold his liquor. Sad, really.

2. Othello is about race, or more particularly, it is like a litmus test about race. We out ourselves in how we react to the race and racism of the play.

O’Toole remarks on how icky 19th century scholarship was about the interracial couple at the core of the play (76-77). O’Toole is so keen to show how progressive he is that he misreads A.C. Bradley entirely.

In a lengthy endnote in his Shakespearean Tragedy, Bradley chronicles the ridiculous debate over whether or not Shakespeare actually intended Othello to be a black man because, you know, Othello would have kissed Desdemona, which means that our beloved bard has perhaps accidentally almost wanted people to consider interracial love. This dimwitted denial among otherwise intelligent people so enervated Bradley that he writes wearily in the first person plural, in this endnote, “We do not like the real Shakespeare” (416). Bradley’s dry sarcasm was lost on O’Toole.

I once got to hear James Earl Jones discuss his career, and on the subject of Shakespeare, he said that he preferred the part of Michael Cassio to Othello.

When portraying Othello for the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival, Kevin Crawford forewent any pigmented make up at all so as to avoid the stench of blackface, and considering the emotional and political climate post-9/11, made Othello a converted Muslim.

White actors are still drawn to this perplexing role in Shakespearean tragedy, but have stopped using blackface since at least the 1990s. There are so many black actors that the grotesquerie of blackface is easily avoided, and while this has long been true, we are now at least two generations into being fully aware that this is true.

If many audience of previous ages have found the color of Othello’s skin disgusting to contemplate, when that skin color is the bizarre co-optation of blackface, I must confess that the spectacle does make me queasy, as in Olivier’s turn as the Moor.

othello

3. From Olivier’s perspective, the convention of using make up to render him black was an established stage convention, and the connection to Step and Fetchit perhaps seemed especially remote to him.

I have, over the years, shrugged off my aversion to Olivier and his seemingly old-fashioned acting. In his own ways, he was bold, and funny, and worthy of some indulgence (not that the blackface thing in Othello is tolerable). Olivier was a term used throughout my childhood to indicate an absurdly perfect actor, when in fact he was a human actor devoted to Shakespeare. The Shakespeare thing is why, for so many people, he wasn’t quite real.

For Olivier, the challenge of Othello was finding an appropriate voice for the Moor. In his autobiography, he writes,

I decided to have a bash at that voice. I have always felt nervous about roaring and screaming at home, but feel no self-consciousness if I can get out into the hills. I remember once screaming King Lear at a group of cows that had formed a ring of curiosity around me. “God,” I thought, ‘I hope the audience is as patient as they are.’

4. In 2009, I got to see Philip Seymour Hoffman portray Iago in Peter Sellars’ production of Othello in the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at NYU. Very little of that experience stands out to me, although I may have been a little drunk and certainly gastrointestinally encumbered by too much Arturo’s pizza.

Othello and Desdemona’s bed was plexiglas and filled with television images, a tableau that looked stupid rather than expressionistic or meaningfully postmodern, since sleeping on plexiglas seems like a non-starter no matter what such weird behavior is supposed to mean.

But what I do remember is the strangeness of Iago himself–the play seemed to be about Iago’s attempts at having human relationships with his wife, with Othello, with Desdemona, and his transgressive ways of breaking some unspoken barrier between human loneliness and the emptiness of convention to the secret authentic core of other people’s lives. Hoffman’s Iago seemed, in his soliloquy, to be having a hard time having a relationship to himself, an outsider, even when he is all alone.

_______

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

Shakespearing #27: Measure for Measure

25 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespearing, Theater

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

David Foley Measure for Measure, Measure for Measure, Shakespeare

Shakespearing #27 by David Foley

Measure for Measure

When I was in college, I was robbed at gunpoint coming home from buying a pint of ice cream. They took my coat, they took my watch, they took the ice cream, and when they discovered I had only a few dollars on me, one of them pressed the gun to my temple and threatened to blow my brains out. But they let me go.

A policewoman came by our apartment to take a report. She drawled, “You were lucky. We found a guy last night with half his head blown away. Needless to say, his family’s making funeral arrangements.”

It so happened that, for someone’s directing class project, I was acting in the Isabel/Claudio scene from Measure for Measure.

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where,

To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,

This sensible warm motion to become

A kneaded clod…

It was probably the best performance of my brief acting career.

It helps that it’s a great scene, as are Isabel’s scenes with Angelo. You remember what Shakespeare can teach you about writing a scene which pulses with shift and counter-shift, discovery and response. Angelo and Isabel make a great matched set of opponents, and the Duke is charmingly beneficent, and there are unexpected plot twists, and all this makes Measure for Measure play better than it reads.

When you read it, you really notice how weird it is.

For one thing, the Duke seems much less beneficent when you slow him down. His reasons for leaving Angelo in charge are pretty bad (essentially, he wants Angelo to be the meanie). He never seriously questions the justice of Claudio’s sentence, only its mercy. And he lets Isabel believe that Claudio’s dead because it’s better for her soul or something. He makes a shaky moral center for the play.

All this could just be the strangeness of a moral world four centuries removed from ours, but when you read Measure for Measure in presumed sequence with Troilus and All’s Well, it’s hard not to feel that Shakespeare himself is thrashing about morally. After Hamlet and Twelfth Night, he seems to have plunged into a moral wilderness. Perhaps we can’t get a handle on the moral world of these plays because Shakespeare can’t. The sense you sometimes get in Shakespeare—that he’s spouting the party line but feels deep down that something’s wrong with it—here produces what feel like painful fractures.

Or perhaps we can’t get a handle on it because Shakespeare himself is, of necessity, disguising his own meanings. At the beginning, the Duke hints that the play intends “[o]f government the properties to unfold,” and it’s possible to trace a steady critique of authority throughout the play. It’s no accident that the executioner, representing the power of the state at its most brutal, is named Abhorson (ab-whoreson), or that he’s put on the same level as a brothel-keeper. Moreover, this is the third play in a row which has a character who provides a comic counter-narrative to the poses of authority. Like Parolles in All’s Well, Lucio unwittingly slanders a noble character to his face, burlesquing the illusions of nobility. Lucio may be the moral center of the play: genial, mendacious, venal, and for all that well-intentioned. He’s the one who fetches Isabel to plead for Claudio and urges her on when she does. He becomes a real-world corrective to the Duke’s complacent platitudes. As he says to him, “Nay, friar, I am a kind of burr; I shall stick.”

_______

Shakespearing #23: Hamlet

21 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespearing, Theater

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

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.”

_______

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.

Episode 126: A Craft Discussion About Horace’s Ars Poetica, with Vanessa Blakeslee!

16 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Craft of Fiction Writing, Episode, Poetry

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Ars Poetica, Game of Thrones, horace, Shakespeare, The Wild Bunch

Episode 126 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I talk about Horace’s Ars Poetica with Vanessa Blakeslee,

plus Sam Slaughter talks about the ignominious beginning of Two Drunken Writers Brewery.

Photo by Oxley Photography 2014

NOTES

At 3 P.M., on Tuesday, November 18, the memoirist and novelist Marya Hornbacher will read at the University of Central Florida. Get info here.

Congrats to Tiffany Razzano, on the successful launch of Florida Bookstore day!

_______

Episode 126 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

Shakespearing 17.2: Lears

26 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, Shakespearing, Theater

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

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.

_______

Shakespearing #8: The Taming of the Shrew

10 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, Shakespearing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

David Foley, Shakespeare, Shakespearing, The Taming of the Shrew

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 #2: Henry VI, Part 1

29 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, Shakespearing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

David Foley, Henry VI Part 1, Shakespeare

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!”

Episode 94: Eleanor Lerman!

12 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Poetry, Shakespeare

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Alden Jones, Eleanor Lerman, Krystie Lee Yandoli, Leonard Cohen, Orlando Shakespeare Theater, Shakespeare

Episode 94 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

On this week’s show, I talk to the poet Eleanor Lerman,

Plus Alden Jones writes about her time working in Cuba.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

Check out episode 48 to hear Eleanor Lerman’s essay about Leonard Cohen’s Spice Box of Earth.

NOTES

Check out the indiegogo crowd-sourcing effort to bring St. Mark’s Bookshop to a new home in the East Village. Endorsed by this show and Anne Waldman.

I recommend Orlando Shakespeare Theater’s production of Julius Caesar, playing until April 20th.

Check out Beating Windward Press’s call for essays for its forthcoming essay collection, The Things They Did For Money: How Writers, Artists, and Creatives Support the Habit.

___________

Episode 94 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.