Romeo Verité

My favorite Shakespeare teacher (55 years ago) really gave a workover to Romeo and Juliet.  She showed how it is a flawed play but interesting, in that you can see  Shakespeare innovating, improvising, learning its trade.

How flawed?  Well, she is the one who first showed me that Romeo isn't really much of a tragic hero--he's just a kid. It was she from whom I head the quip that it is not really a tragedy--rather, a comedy that ends badly (my friend Dave adds: throw in a couple of ensembles and you could have a Rossini opera).

How interesting?  The same teacher points out how Shakespeare makes a whole bunch of calculated choices here--and how they are theatrical choices, designed to make the play work better on stage.

Example: It's 1595 and Shakespeare is just coming out of his ornate over-the-top sonnet phase.   The poetry in RJ is indeed over the top--but the dramatic point is that over-the-top poetry creates a problem: these are kids who do not know the difference between words and life, so besotted with words that they forget how words can kill.

Example: Fully rounded characters.  Not just the leads--Romeo himself is perhaps not fully rounded.  But the Nurse, Mercutio, Benvolio, old Capulet--and hey, I'm not half done yet. The Nurse in particular: she must be the first of those vessels of comic vitality that Shakespeare does so inimitably and so well (and yet in a mind-numbing irony, she can be read as the cheerful, unintentional villain of the piece).

Better example: In Shakespeare sources, the events extend over months--Shakespeare gets it all down to less than a week.  And in the sources, the leads are--I forget precisely, but they are older.  Shakespeare makes them early teens.

All of which is a long buildup to a short point: last night for the first time ever, I saw an RJ in which the leads really were early teens.  And you know what?  It works, in pretty much the way Shakespeare would want it to work.

Not perfectly, of course--hey, these are kids, for many I bet the first time they did anything on stage.  They talk too fast.  Sometimes they don't seem to know what their character is up to; sometimes you suspect that they do but you do not know what their character is up to.  Sometimes they seem to forget that there is anyone else on stage.

But they got so much right: they got the raw energy, the torrential hormones, the uncrimped delight in life, the impulsiveness that is ultimately fatal.  In short, they are so much fun to watch.  And whether they realized it or not, they got Shakespeare, and he got them.  I figured I was going to like it but in retrospect, I wouldn't have missed it for anything.  

Understated Shakespeare

Watching the last of those wonderful "Shakespeare Master Classes" with John Barton (I wish there were 20 more), I see that he picks up on a hobby horse of mine: some of the best moments in Shakespeare are the simplest, far from the legendary bombast.

Barton gets half a dozen actors to recite the first line of Merchant of Venice:

In truth, I know not why I am so sad.

That's Antonio. Ten syllables, ten words, as near to a perfect iambic as you're going to find. But as Barton shows, it can define his character for the rest of the play. He gets half a dozen of the actors in his company to give it a go; they come up with wildly different characters--not all of whom you'd want to watch, but no matter, the point is made.

It also sets Barton up to pursue again a point he has been pursuing through the series: actors have to earn a particular interpretation--a line, or a pause, or whatever. They have to figure out a way to create a context where a particular bit makes sense. So, for example, after Emilia discovers the murder of Desdemona (a few pages after) she shouts "O villainy, villainy!" Her husband Iago responds: "What, are you mad? I charge you get you home." And Emilia says:

Good gentlemen, let me have leave to speak.
'Tis proper I obey him, but now now.
Perchance, Iago, I will ne'er go home.

There is so much in those three lines. She's respectful of authority; she shows respect for her husband, the villain. There's a touch of domestic intimacy. But:

Perchance...I will ne'er go home.

In fact, a few moments later Iago kills her--so she does not go home. Or, ironically, "goes to her final home". Or simply: my life is so altered that no matter what happens, that nothing will ever be the same. In context--and with an actress who knows how to set it up--this can be as effective as anything in the play. But that, I think, is the real difficulty with Shakespeare for the audience--not the antique language, but the fact thst there is so much going on that you've got to be engaged every minute or you are going to miss the good stuff.

Barton also stages two bits of hugely effective poetry from non-obvious sources: one, Ian McKellen as Justice Shallow, only beginning to recognize his own mortlity ("Jesu, Jesu, dead!--a' drew a good bow; --and dead!"); and the other, a boffo performance by Donald Sinden and Peggy Ashcroft as Falstaff and the old whore Doll Tearsheet ("Kiss me, Doll!") as warm-hearted a piece of domestic intimacy as ever you are likely to see on stage. Did Sinden ever actually play Falstaff, I wonder? There are a lot of bad Falstaffs, but I would have gone a long way to see this one. And as to Barton--what a privilege and what an education it must have been to work with this guy: a director who makes everyone around him better. Like I say, I only wish there were 20 more.

Jude Law's Hamlet

We caught Jude Law's Broadway Hamlet this afternoon, on $25 tickets which offered a perfectly adequate view of the stage, albeit a long way from the bathrooms. I think a telling moment is in the "To be or not to be" soliloquy where he says

And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought...

Law says "thought" with something between a sneer and a snarl. But Hamlet doesn't disparage thought. He is the most thoughtful character ever. The "sicklied o'er part" may give him trouble but even here, he doesn't snarl: he is perplexed and respectful of the mystery.

It's a defining moment because Law maintains the same tone throughout the play. His is an adolescent Hamlet, a 1968 Hamlet, a never-trust-anybody-over 30 Hamlet. Also an 8,000-calorie Hamlet as Law leaps, prances, wriggles and elbows his way around the stage. In a narrow sense, there is nothing wrong with this. In fact everything that Law does on stage can find justification in the script. The trouble is that there is so much more. Hamlet is an adolescent, with a full repertoire of adolescent angularity. But he is also, as John Gielgud used to say, he is "a great Renaissance prince" (Gielgud said "ruh-NAY-sance," which turned the rhythm out nicely). Law's Hamlet is a catalog of missed opportunities.

By way of example, consider this non-exhaustive list: When Hamlet says "what a piece of work is a man," he speaks with awe and reverence; with the gravediggers, he is bantering and ironic; with his male friends, he is (at least some of the time) a model of masculine friendship; with his Ophelia and Gertrude he is jealous and obsessive; with Yorick, he gives us bittersweet nostalgia; with Horatio before the final conflict, he offers stoic acceptance. And so forth. It's why people who play Hamlet get to go into heaven by a separate door. Law doesn't have any of these except the adolescent part.

I don't suppose anybody gets them all (why Hamlet may work better in thee library than onstage. Branagh went a long way; he was old enough so he got the maturity, and artful enough to fake the youth (even Branagh had his limits (but then, Law is 36). I was never so nuts about Olivier but he did do some things right.

All this is a rotten shame, because so many things in this production work so well. Nearly everybody can mouth a classical line, which is no mean trick. The pace is right, the charcoal-brown setting is right. Polonius is a study in oily manipulation, and goes a long way to drive home the point that Denmark really is a prison: a nest of intrigue and betrayal. Gwilym Lee did an impressive job in what is thankless role as Laertes.

Geraldine James as Gertrude Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Ophelia brought a lot to the table, but each of them depends on what she can get out of Hamlet, and in any number of cases, it looked like they just didn't now how to respond to this young man living on emotional capital he hasn't earned. (Okay, gimme irony, Jude! Okay, now effusive! Okay....) When Ophelia says:

O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!
The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword;
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mold of form,
The observed of all observers, quite, quite down!

...you do a quick systems check and tell yourself: no, not tonight.

Afterthought: I admit I set a high standard here. Fact is, the one character I'd really like to see play Hamlet just doesn't seem to be on offer. That would be Michelangelo's David in the Accadamia in Florence. Now, there is a Ruh-nay-sance prince.

Afterthought II: My friend Lily reminds me of the classic Dorothy Parker review: he ran the gamut of emotion from A to B.

The Sonnet Niche

I went looking for Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 on Google yesterday and stumbled onto something new to me--sonnets on YouTube. Make sense when you stop to think of it: the sonnet form fits nicely with the YouTube form, so no wonder that there seem to be swarms, flocks, gaggles, of sonnets, and specifically Shakespeare sonnets, there for the listening. I got 111 hits on Sonnet 29; not all of them are the thing itself, of course, but I should say that maybe 50 of them are. This being YouTube, a lot of them are awful, mama's basement stuff, but not all. One carries the agonizing label "Do I have a good voice or not?" (I couldn't bear to listen). One is read by a guy who seems it his duty to channel James Earl Jones. One is a tribute to Heath Ledger, go figure. Quite a number are school projects; I thought this quite fine. One is done in American Sign Language. A few are more professional: a number of people who sing for a living seem drawn to the sonnets (no royalties?); Rufus Wainwright seems to have produced/presented quite a few.

In any event--"and trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries"--is surely one of the most haunting lines in the English language, not so?

Kristol's Shakespeare

Is it true, as The Economist says in his obituary, that Irving Kristol carried a copy of Shakespeare's sonnets around with him, "to remind him how to put great thoughts in the best and fewest words." If it is true that he did so, did he realize this vain gesture would mark him instantly as a fraud? The sonnets are, as any even moderately informed student of Shakespeare will recognize, about the weakest item in the Shakespearean canon, not to say the least Shakespearean. They have their virtues, of course, but I defy anybody except a specialist to identify any more than a dozen or so (of the 154). Even these display qualities that show Shakespeare at least advantage: they are formal and conventionalized little exercises, more devoted to demonstrating their own cleverness than to conveying any real content. All these limitations themselves may not be disabling in the hands of somebody who was really comfortable with the form--among Shakespeare's contemporaries, Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne and John Milton are obvious examples. It may even be that Shakespeare's sonnets at their worst are better than almost any of his contemporaries' at their best. They point is just that they weren't what he was good at, they weren't really Shakespeare. If indeed Kristol sincerely regard them as an exemplum, it says only that he was passing up a chance at something better.

What Do You Do to Stay Sane?

Research Digest asks: what do you do to stay sane? Tyler Cowen rounds up some plausible suspects: surprise hugs (watch it there, big guy); music. Commentators add good stuff, but I offer an item I haven't seen elsewhere: reading. But not just any kind of reading: I mean the kind of reading you turn to for solace, or as a means of therapy. Some people would interpret this to mean "reading the Bible;" actually, I can understand this choice, if you are choosy about how you read: (stick close to Song of Songs or Ecclesiastes; go easy on Leviticus). But my own choice would run elsewhere--specifically to Shakespeare, and Proust.

I don't want to make elaborate pretensions here: I don't think I've read an entire Shakespeare play, cover to cover since--oh, heavens, I can't remember when. But I do keep a copy of the Penguin Complete at the bedside, and I find it is the kind of thing I can dip into at any of 100 places and find something familiar and consoling and (often enough) still thrilling after all these years. Lately I've found I can do the same with Proust: in English at least; I am stretching for the French but I'm not there yet.

I can also work a bit with stuff that I have memorized: half a dozen Shakespeare sonnets, a scattering of speeches, fragments (mostly fragments) of other things; my only regret is that I haven't memorized more. Meanwhile:

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

This Just In: First Performance of Hamlet

Four hundred and one years ago today, the first dateable performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet—aboard the sailing vessel Red Dragon, anchored off Sierra Leone, as recorded in the log of its captain, William Keeling:

1607 September 5th
I sent the interpreter according to his desire abord the Hector whear he brooke fast and after came abord me wher we gae the tragedie of Hamlett.

...as reprinted in Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor eds. Arden Third Series Hamlet 53 (2006). A text of the play had been entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1602; date of first London production unknown, maybe 1601.

Well, God dild you. They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord, we know we are but know not what we may be. God be at your table.

—Hamlet IV, v (the mad Ophelia shortly before her suicide).

Ashland: Let Shakespeare be Shakespeare, Redux --Coriolanus

Once again, the subject is Ashland theatre, specifically the question of letting Shakespeare be Shakespeare. When I watched Othello, I thought they had decided to do it; then saw Midsummer Night's Dream and changed my mind. Now I've seen Coriolanus and I've changed my mind again. Takeaway point: this is one of the best, most fully formed, most convincing presentations of Ashland Shakespeare that I've ever seen--if ever a production speaks with its own voice, this is the kind that does it. Which is not to say it was reverential or pedantic: in was plenty innovative, in a conventional sort of way, what with the flashing lights and holes in the floor, all presented on a cozy in-the-roiund stage. But it was clearly put together by people who understood and respected the text, and who were determined to let it have its own way. Indeed, a presentation like this lets slip a remarkable secret about Shakespearean acting: a lot of Shakespearean actors--even those who have some sense of character--simply don't understand a lot of what they are saying, and wind up talking Shakespeare as if they were talking scat. For i\whatever reason, in this prouction of Coriolanus, every actor seemed to be able to convey meaning out of every sentence.

This is surely partly a credit to the actors, particularly Danforth Comins in the lead (and who would have guessed we'd a good Coriolanus from an actor who was also such a fine Cassio?) and Robynn Rodriguez as his mother (she's matured over the years, all for the good). But consistency like this must be the work of the whole cast. Coriolanus here reminded me of nothing so much as the splendid King John we saw here a couple of years back. Robynn Rodriguez turned in a fine performance in that one too. I'm intrigued to discover that John Sipes, who was fights director this time, was the director of King John (Laird Williamson directed Coriolanus). But perhaps most interesting, I see that Alan Armstrong served as dramaturge for both plays. I admit it; I've never been quite clear what a "dramaturge" does, but if Armstrong doesn't deserve some of the credit for the success (and similarity) of this pairing, then I'd say at least that he has astounding luck.

Another surely non-accidental parallel. No matter what T.S. Eliot thought, Coriolanus is not a wonderful way. The text is polished and proficient but the ending is almost perfunctory, and for the plotting--let's just say that in this play, more than any other, you suspect that Shakespeare is pushing an agenda rather than just putting on a show. So also King John: a different play than Coriolanus, but likewise not a great play, however worthy an effort. Anyway, the point here is twofold: one, Shakespeare never wrote a dull play, a play not worth watching. Even when he is off the top of his game, he has a lot to arrest one's attention and engage the mind. And two, cheers to the team that can take him seriously on those terms, and help him to display whatever it is he may have to say.

Ashland: Midsummer Night's Rave

Hm. I said yesterday that it looked like Ashland had decided to trust Shakespeare. I guess I spoke too soon. Lat night I saw the Midsummer Night's Dream, which is not a "play" so much as it is finals week at the drama school, where all the aspirants get to pluck something out of a hat and come up with an accent, or a decade, or a color, or a style; each then does his own turn while somebody tries to whip it all into a whole whose main theme is "loud." The result was a noisy melange of disco, Hog-farm Commune, Dick Tracy Sunday color panel, and--well, actually, mostly disco, complete with a strobe globe at the end--fitfully interlaced with words by some old coot. The audience (heavy on college students, here on a class assignment)--the audience mostly loved it: I can't remember that I've ever heard such ecstatic hallway chatter. And the truth is, it worked surprisingly well, though why they bothered drag the name of Shakespeare into this mishmosh is pretty much beyond me.

Okay, I exaggerate. Shakespeare actually did show through in a few spots. Item: I suppose the one real Shakespearean success of the night was Christine Albright as Titania. The queen of the fairies is pretty much of a disco queen herself, when you stop to think of it, with her posse and her toyboy and her assorted freaky entertainments. Dressing up like Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein would ber perfectly in character Kevin Kennerly as her Oberon just back from the gym, was as good as I've ever seen him, if I could see him inside that whacked-out costume.

And to be fair, the young lovers were pretty much on key, too, especially Emily Sophia Knapp as Hermia (who played it as straight as anybody in the company): this lot is after all, when you stop to think of it, a bunch of narcissistic twits, and so to play them that way wasn't at all a violation (they did tend to jog-trot the verse a bit, though, as they tried to hurry through it).

For the play-within-a-play--the "rude mechanicals" in their VW bus--let's just say that everyone in the audience seemed to like it except me. Okay, I grant you--I liked it too as noise, but as a reading of the text, it had about as much to do with Shakespeare as it did with the Internal Revenue Code. In particular Ray Price as Bottom the Weaver--Price did a splendidly comical imitation of Ray Price, but as to Bottom, the only connection seemed to be the way that Price was congratulating Bottom for having had the good sense to let himself be played by Ray Price.

Theseus and Hyppolyta were just another case of "whatever." It's pretty clear that neither the director nor the actors figured that the script had anything to the offer, so they decided to play around with comic-book costumes and comic-book furniture and then get them off the stage as quickly as possible.

On the way home a young friend asked me: well, after having seen this, would you rather see a more traditional performance? It's a good question. This kind of show is a bell you can't unring: once you've seen it so noisy, campy and over-the-top, almost any straight reading is bound to seem insipid. For Ashland itself, I suspect, the message is clear: MSN played to a full house of enthusiasts beside themselves with glee. Othello the night before had empty seats. I just hate to think what the next director of MSN will feel he has to do.

Afterthought: I have heard the great Stanislavski quoted as saying that too many actors think about what they can bring to the part, and not what the part can bring to them. Just sayin'.

Update: Turns out there is not just one "Shakespeare-The Musical" at Ashland this summer; there are two. Comedy of Errors appears in a modern avatar out West of the Pecos. It's an affable and plausible rework of what is, after all, a piece of Shakespearean juvenilia. The added songs are pretty insipid and the cast does run around a bit much (I suspect the whole thing would have been better about 15 minutes shorter). But once again, the management seems to understand its audience (I wonder, have they been watching the CD's of Slings and Arrows?).

Ashland: A Good, Straightforward Othello

We're back at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland for some more theater. I've complained before that Ashland seems to get spooked by its eponymous poet, apparently not willing to trust the verse to carry the play and insisting, instead, to clutter things up with irrelevant stage business (see, e.g., link). For this season, I'm happy to report that we are off on the right foot: a no-tricks Othello. This is a particularly welcome success for two extra reasons. One, Othello seems to be a particularly hard play to get right. It probably has something to do with the race background, but you've got to have apprehensions about a play that led to embarrassments like this one by Olivier and this one with Branagh (Ashland itself turned in an equally awkward entry a few years back with an a Moor who seemed to think he was an eye-popping silent movie clown). The other problem is the play itself: not doubt that it is a masterpiece of character, staging and verse, but it can be almost unbearably hard to take, particularly in the second half which turns into a kind of extended bullfight, with Iago as toreador and Othello as the bull.

There are other important characters in this play but I can't think of any one that depends so much on just two, and perhaps in particular Iago the villain who must (I haven't checked) have more lines than the Moor. So a lot of the credit for success here goes to Dan Donohue, who turns in a compulsively watchable performance in the villain's role. Not a surprise, really: a while back, Donohue turned in what might be the best performance we ever saw here, as Price Hal (Henry V) in Henry IV/V. Taking all in all, Donohue seems to be able to get his mouth round a Shakespearean line better than anybody else in the company. His Iago was suitably villainous, but in a way that I found new: I've never seen a Iago before so obviously looney, so much like the kind of guy who would take his dish of liver with a nice Chianti.

As Iago, Donohue was good all round but perhaps at his best in ensemble with Peter Macon as Othello: together they danced, wrestled, jousted and did almost everything a twosome could do on stage without the assistance of main drainage, making the whole thing an exercise in choreography. Macon full partner in the dance, though perhaps not quite Donohue's equal as a solo. Macon seemed to understand his character--brave, passionate, isolated, prickly-proud. In voice he got the tone right, although he didn't seem to handle individual passages so well.

As Desdemona, Sarah Rutan is another one who seems to understand her character, but she seemed just a bit miscast: Rutan was earnest and devoted like Desdemona, but I think of Desdemona as more dutiful, dependent and bewildered than she came across here: Rutan is a bit too tall, too not-young, too instinctively feisty for the role of a doomed ingeniue.

All this talk about "understanding the character" and "ensemble" suggests a powerful driving force--the director. I know next to nothing about directing per se, but everything about this suggets a strong and assured directorial hand. The possessor would be Lisan Peterson who, I see by the program, is new this year: perhaps Ashland is at last on its way to putting that old afraid-of-Shakespeare stuff into the rear view mirror.

Sister Miriam's Great Shakespeare Book

Well hey--here's a reprint of a book that probably couldn't be written by any person alive. Which is why it is so good to see that it is back in print: it is also one of the best, most enjoyable, and most instructive pieces of Shakespeare criticism you could want to read.

That would be Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language by a woman with the formidable handle of Sister Miriam Joseph Rauh, C.S.C., first published in 1947 and republished by Paul Dry Books, Inc., in 2005 (I'm slow to get the word). Sister Miriam is perhaps a tiny bit better known as the author of The Trivium (republished by Paul Dry in 2002) which is just what you might guess--an introduction to the Medieval learning impounded in "grammar, rhetoric and logic." Antique or arcane as it may appear, this venerable enterprise enjoys a certain cachet with some home-schoolers and other devotees of "traditional education."

The Shakespeare book is, in a sense, what you might expect from a person so learned in the grand tradition: it is a study of Shakespeare the artist as one who employs rhetorical devices--she counts some 200 of them, recognized in Renaissance studies, and at least one (see p. 62) that the commentators seem to have missed. She offers an introduction and analysis, but most of it is a catalog (with commentary) of examples, disclosing how the forms help to reveal the (as she calls it) "extraordinary power, vitality and richness of Shakespeare's language" (3).

You could be excused for assuming that to read such a catalog would be about as much fun as a root canal: excused, but you'd be wrong. In fact, it is a delight. In fact every page, every example, helps to elucidate the subtlety and flexibility of Shakespeare's art (not to mention the analyticsl invisiveness of the cataloguer). With her help, you get to see not just the range of devices available to the playwright, but the skill and forethought with which he deploys them.

And you get to see something almost as extraordinary when you reflect on Sister Miriam's own approach to her subject. She's a grammarian; yet surprisingly, she is the very oppposite of a pedant. Indeed one of the compelling allures of her book is her conviction that Shakespeare owes his effectiveness as much to his skill at breaking (or at least bending) the rules as at keeping them. "He uses every resource of language and imagination," she says,

to give life, movement and piquancy to his richly laden thought. Since the schemes of grammar owe much of their attractiveness to the very nearness of their approach toi error, he liks to teeter on the brink of solecism and like a tight-rope walker or an acrobatic dancer to display in precariousness of balance such sureness, poise, agililty, and consumate skill as to awaken tense admiration in the prosaic onlooker with two feet squarely on the ground. And all of this he does within the scope of an approved tradition ...

--Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language 97 (2005)

A book like this can prove surprisingly difficult to excerpt, because it is the sheer massiveness of its presentation that partly makes its point. Let me see if I can try by excerpting about half a page (with particular rhetorical terms rendered by me in boldface):

The omission of conjunctions between words, called brachylogia, emphasizes the grief and sense of loss felt by Paris and Capulet on discovering Juliet dead:

Paris. Beguil'd, divorced, wronged, spited, slain! ...
Capulet. Despis'd, distressed, hated, marty'rd, kill'd!

(R&J, 4.5, 55, 59)

It contributes an effect of piled-up derision to Enobarbus' description of Lepidus:

Hoo! hearts, tongues, figures, scribes, bards, poets, cannot
Think, speak, cast, write, sing, number--hoo!--
His love to Antony. (A&C, 3.2. 16)

Ariel's spirit-quality, and his swift and ready obedience to Prospero are enhanced by his use of asyndeton, omitting conjunctions between clauses.

All hail, great master! Grave sir, hail! I come
To answer thy best pleasure; be't to fly,
To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
On curl'd clouds. (Tem. 1.2. 189).

In contrast is the measured deliberateness of polysyndeton, the use of a conjunction between each clause.

'Tis as I should entreat you wear your gloves,
Or feed on nourishing dishes, or keep you warm,
Or sue to you to do a peculiar profit
To your own person (Oth. 3.3.77).

The figure primarily concerned with rhythm is isocolon or parison ...

--Id., at 59

Shakespeare Sighting

Terry Teachout discovers The Rough Guide to Shakespeare (link) --which he might have discovered here or here. Note that I get my two cents' worth in among Terry's comments.

Shakespeare, Caravaggio, and Four Other Guys

I can remember the first time that ever I saw a Caravaggio.

It was the summer of 1985. I was staying at a pension in Rome, out near the Milvian Bridge. On my first day, my friend Dick Lee—I guess you could say he was my boss—walked me down to the Piazza del Popolo, and into the church of Santa Maria Del Popolo, and up to the Cerasi Chapel, where are displayed the Conversion of St. Paul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter, two of the defining moments in the career of the painter, and indeed, in the history of Westeren Art.

I’d like to say I was stunned and bowled over by the spectacle; I can’t, really. I think I knew I was in the presence of something important (Dick told me). But it was all too new and unfamiliar. And anyway, jet lag.

I’ve had the great good fortune to go back there several more times since, and now I think I get it. Indeed, if you had to push almost everything else off a cliff, I'd say today that these (along with the Calling of St. Matthew, in the Church of San Luigi di Francesi, just a few blocks away) are on the short list of stuff I would try to save.

I’ve been thinking of all three of these paintings lately as I’ve been reading M: The Man who Became Caravaggio (1998) Peter Robb’s eccentric but appreciative biography of the artist. There seem to be a lot of biographies of Caravaggio and no wonder: with all the whoring and the swordplay, he offers more than enough to keep the biographer busy. Robb’s is perhaps the most informal of the lot, and it’s full of irritating stylistic tics (I think he may have spent too much time in the company of Robert Hughes). But he’s an enthusiast: when he turns his attention to a Caravaggio painting, he gives it his complete engagement and response.

Reading Robb, I did stumble on one insight, I’d never thought of before. That is: how close Caravaggio’s career tracks Shakespeare’s. For each of them, the flourit is the last decade of the 16^th Century and the first of the 17^th. The three great religious works that I mentioned above—they must date from just about exactly the time of Shakespeare’s great tragedies.

Of course, there isn’t the slightest reason to suppose they ever heard of each other (I forget who it was who said that Shakespeare must have been Italian). But it is hard to imagine how we would understand the world without them.

Afterthought: a propos of not much, one of the oddest pieces of Caravaggio arcanae must be this, which one of the teenagers in the family keeps on her bedroom wall. It is, indeed, the Calling of St. Matthew and it is, indeed, the Beatles, also known as “Renaissance Minstrels.” I have no idea whose idea it was or why, and it seems to be pretty obscure; fact is, I couldn’t even find on the web without help. I wonder if it is a bootleg, or simply a record so bad that no one wants to remember it.

Update: Thanks to Ken for an improved picture of the Beatles album--which, he assures me, is indeed a bootleg.

 

Barbara Everett on "Objective Attentiveness"

I don’t think I had ever heard of Barbara Everett until I ran across her piece on “Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Sonnet” in the May 8 issue of the London Review of Books. As a sample, here is Shakespeare’s sonnet 57, together with a comment from Barbara Everett. First, the sonnet:

Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do, till you require.
Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour
When you have bid your servant once adieu;
Nor dare I question with my jealous thought
Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,
But, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought
Save, where you are how happy you make those.
So true a fool is love that in your will,
Though you do any thing, he thinks no ill.

Everett observes:

Shakespeare wrote at moments more richly and deeply than this. But Sonnet 57 is the voice of the man, the man who achieved both great comedies and great tragedies. The poem is not actorish, it is quiet and private but—with its formidably intricate rhetoric—it is entirely in the round: it is full of feeling but has a poise and control at once humane and removed. It’s doubtful whether any love poetry of the last four hundred years sees more than Shakespeare’s, or sees it more levelly. When read, 57 will sometimes seem comic, sometimes tragic, it will sometimes sound abject, sometimes angry, sometimes bitter, sometimes ironic, sometimes amused, sometimes tender, sometimes dry. But always it has an extraordinarily objective attentiveness that says “What is this, and what am I?”

That’s Barbara Everett in the LRB. Worth seeking out more of her, perhaps here (although it is sometimes a challenge to know whether you have the right author or not).

A Booklist for Shakespeare's Birthday

For Shakespeare’s birthday (which may or may not be today), Ron Rosenbaum has a “reading list” up at Slate, but for a guy who did a book on Shakespeare, it’s oddly perfunctory (link). As a well-wisher’s to the world, the editorial board at Underbelly, herewith offers its own guide to Shakespeare reading.

First, some points of departure: Shakespeare is not that hard—an author whose big lines include “Never, Never, Never, Never, Never” (link) can hardly qualify as abstruse. But he’s not that easy, either: there is a threshold, well worth climbing and richly rewarding once you get over, but a threshold still.

Second: Shakespeare is a playwright, not a poet, and he’s best seen where he belongs. The trouble is, there is an awful lot of mediocre Shakespeare around: most often over-respectful and therefore flat and pompous. We’ve had the good luck to see some glorious Shakespeare these last few years, but if choose at random, you are likely to come up with something not so hot.

But here’s a tactic: for starters, stick with the amateurs. There will be rough spots, but often they will not die from the vice of solemnity, and they will compensate for their rough edges with brio. Bone up a little in advance: read at least a synopsis, maybe the whole thing, and maybe aloud--a couple of years back we worked our way through The Tempest with four adolescents. We didn’t do every word, but there is lots of horseplay to keep inquiring minds happy. By all reports, it was a big success.

What play? Oh, I guess any one will do, but perhaps Macbeth is the safest bet. There’s a reason why theatre companies play it when they are on the edge of going broke: it’s short, it’s fairly straightforward, and plenty bloody. Truth is, I’ve never seen a really good Macbeth, but never saw a really bad one either: it seems to survive even the worst of presentations. Midsummer Night’s Dream is another good choice: young love, betrayal, fairies, clowns, something for every taste. That Tempest we saw with the young folks—it was a company of Palookaville amateurs and it worked quite nicely, thanks.

Oddly enough, some of the most performed are less ideal. Taming of the Shrew is good fun, but it is about the least typical of all Shakespeare plays. Romeo and Juliet—yes, it’s about young love, but some of the languages goes near to the top, and the plot kind of unravels after Mercutio dies (but don’t misunderstand, there is some glorious stuff in Romeo and Juliet). But on the flip side, the very best Shakespeare plays—Hamlet, Antony & Cleopatra—come damn near to being unperformable (but I still love the Branagh Hamlet movie, no matter what they say).

Beyond that—for short intros to the individual plays, I think you still can’t beat Mark Van Doren’s Shakespeare (2005), newly back in print after half a century. Deceptively straightforward and modest, his introductions almost always say something worthwhile. Andrew Dickinson’s The Rough Guide to Shakespeare (2005) is amazingly rich: good straightforward introductions to the plays, with lots of stuff on performance history, and recommendations for editions and movies (sometimes pretty quirky, but hey).

Of the zillion biographies, I’d choose one of two—neither, so far as I can tell, in print. One is Peter Levi, The Life and Times of William Shakespeare (1988)—a poet’s appreciation of a poet (okay, I said he wasn’t a poet, but still…) The other is Russell Fraser, a two-volume jobby, Young Shakespeare (1988) and Shakespeare: The Later Years (2002)—winners at the very dangerous game of trying to relate “the art” and “the life “ But maybe the best overall text introduction is not a “ biography” per se, but more of an “appreciation”—Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (1988). Of the very recent books, I’ve read some, not others. Of the ones I’ve read, the most fun was James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2006).

By that point, you will know what you want, and it won’t be more advice for me. Oh, but one important afterthought: don’t get sidetracked into the “who was Shakespeare?” caper. It’s a mug’s game, and will do nothing more than get in the way of the real fun (Bate explains why).

And a final item: the only “excerpts” or “quotations” book that I know of worth the price is George Rylands, The Ages of Man—reweaves quotations from most or all of the plays into their own coherent story (out of print and not easy to find; there was a stage/TV version with John Gielgud).

Shakespeare on Pride

Ever notice how much “pride” figures in Shakespeare? Here is a light selection, out of many possibilities:

King Henry IV: …that title of respect
Which the proud soul ne’er pays but to the proud.

Henry IV Part I, I, iii

Richard II: fair cousin, you debase your princely knee
To make the base earth proud with kissing it:

Richard II. III, iv

Pembroke (of the young Price Arthur): Oh death, made proud with pure and princely beauty.

--King John, IV iii

Oberon: Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.

--Midsummer Night’s Dream II, i

Cleopatra: What's brave, what's noble,
Let 's do it after the high Roman fashion,
And make death proud to take us."

--Antony and Cleopatra, IV,xv

Appreciation: Pennington on Dream

Michael Pennington's "User's Guide" to Midsummer Night's Dream, didn't read as easily as his guide to Hamlet. Perhaps inevitably: Dream is a wonderful play but it isn't as rich or complex as Hamlet--what is? Also, Dream has some scenes of elegant near-choreography which require (and from Pennington, receive) the kind of careful explication that Pennington provides, and that may leave the non-techie reader a bit short of breath. Still, it is a rewarding book that offers any number of useful insights on the play likely to have escaped the eye of even repeat viewers.

Pennington also offers an instructive account of Dream spinoffs, from Mendelssohn through Britten to Kevin Kline (to whom Pennington is a good deal more charitable than I am). Through it all, Pennington leaves no doubt that Dream deserves recognition as Shakespeare's first masterpiece. But he ends with this tantalizing suggestion:

[T]he play remains a little remote and complete to itself. This is not the Shakespeare from which people quote a therapeutic line in daily life ... . In the Shakespearian community, Hamlet can be imagined having an interesting talk about life and death with Feste; Queen Margaret might discuss with Cleopatra how to reconcile love and power; Gertrude could advice Romeo. but there is realy no character in Dream who could sustain such a conversation. ... However, the play is very good for the health. Best of course to watch it among strangers in the special intimacy of a theatre; but it is also possible to sit by an open window, watching a honeysuckle circling an elm tree, and marvel at what Shakespeare made of such things in this play.

Cute

Just now learned (from Michael Pennington's excellent commentary on Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream) that the original meaning of "preposterous" was "putting the back end first." Pre? Post? Get it?

Then will two at once woo one;
That must needs be sport alone;
And those things do best please me
That befal preposterously.

...that's Puck, commenting on the confused lovers, as they chase each other around the stage in a crypto-proto Feydeau farce.

Appreciation: Kozintsev's Hamlet

Some people say the greatest Shakespeare movie is Russian. That would be the Hamlet (“Gamlet”!) of Grigori Kozintsev, first shown in the spring of 1964. Kozintsev, had been exploring his topic one way or another throughout his adult life, and this capstone performance counts as a kind of trifecta: himself as director with a script by Boris Pasternak, and music by Dmitri Shostakovich. Or a quadrifecta; the title role went to Innokenty Smoktunovsky, perhaps the most highly regarded Russian actor of his generation. Apparently the film counted as an important cultural event in its time but I wasn’t paying attention; I learned of it only last year and saw it for the first time last night on the big screen at Il Teatro Buce. My judgment is that it is not the greatest Shakespeare movie ever, but it is an interesting and worthwhile endeavor, and I think I can understand why it made such a splash in its time.

The film cries out for comparison with the benchmark Hamlet for that generation—Lawrence Olivier’s, released in 1948. No, not “cries out;” rather “insists upon” comparison, dressing Smoktunovsky in Olivier-esque black, with his close-cropped hair, his voice-over soliloquys, and his general air of moodiness and introspection. This comparison may not have been obvious at the time because Kozintsev also did so much to distance himself from Olivier: in particular, to showcase the political context that Olivier virtually excises.

The result is a Hamlet (or a “Hamlet”) hemmed in by posturing and intrigue, claustrophobic inside Elsinore, cut off by the vastness of the ocean and the great featureless northern plains. It must have carried a powerful message outside of (and in) the Soviet Union, at the end of the great thaw, and the beginning of the mean mendacity of the Brezhnev years. Apparently it still carries force today: some of the strongest framing scenes appear as theft homage in the Kenneth Branagh Hamlet of 1996.

Actors in a good many of the supporting roles function admirably to drive home the point: an intriguing, fussy Polonius, short and round and bearing what appears for all the world to be a rubber nose, would be comical if he did not remind us so much of the sinister supernumeries of the Kremlin in its time. King Claudius is a chillingly smooth manipulator and thug. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are no better than they ought to be. And the gravedigger looks like he has been waiting all his life for just this chance.

The script—or rather the subtitles, because I can’t read any Russian—is a mixed bag. It’s Shakespeare only by courtesy, which it may not deserve—mostly a collection of Shakespearean snippets assembled almost as if in a word game out of magnetic panels on a refrigerator door. Yet one has to concede that a straight translation just wouldn’t have worked in context. And you have to concede that even if he took snippets, still Pasternak seems to have found the right snippets for a lot of individual moments. Shostakovich’s score doesn’t seem to add a great deal. At some points, it threatens to intrude; at best it seems simply to remind us of other things that Shostakovich has done better (and more generally, perhaps, for his heroic presence in Soviet culture).

But the real trouble here is the star, though once again, I suspect the guilty party may be Olivier. It was Olivier who taught a generation of moviegoers that Hamlet is a young man in a permanent sulk. He is that; the catch is that he is so much more. John Gielgud called him “a great renaissance prince” (Gielgud pronounced it “ruh-NAY-sance,” the first time I ever heard it pronounce it that way). And that he is: sometimes sulky, but often ebullient, sometimes jaunty—and sometimes very close to downright brutal. It’s the reason I like Branagh so much: imperfect as he may be, he is the only film Shakespeare who seems to me to come close to capturing the full range of his possibilities.

So Kozintsev’s Hamlet is a Hamlet with a hole in the center—a hole we might not even have noticed in 1964, dazzled as we were by Olivier and gripped by mesmerized by the shadow of the Soviet Union. It remains a worthy achievement and an important artifact of its time. I like it well enough that I think I’ll go on and watch his Lear and even his Don Quixote. I might even watch this Hamlet again. But I wish it were better.

The Strumpet Shall Sound: Another Debunking

One more bit of debunking. This one is a tad recherché, but it is a favorite of mine so I will go on with it.

You remember Dr. Bowdler, who undertook to scrub all the naughty bits out of Shakespeare’s plays (link). Years ago I heard that made a particularly hilarious emendation to a famous bedroom scene. They way I read the account, the line was an accusation against Desdemona; so, Othello. Trouble is, I could never find that line in Othello.

Couple of months back, I saw the admirable new production of Cymbeline at Lincoln Center (link) and—hey! There it is! The infamous line! So, back to Dr. Bowdler—the ten-volume version on line at Google (link).

Uh oh. So far as I can tell, Dr. B let the offensive line stand as written. So much for prudery.

Only one more try—this time with a kind of success, only backhanded, and unsatisfactory. Anyway: do a general Google search for the offensive line, and caramba! There it is! --in an edition (not Bowdler’s) from 1844 (link, page 49).

Trouble is, it seems to be a simple mistake. The edition seems to print the line right. Google picks it up as “emended” by virtue of a simple misprint, or shall we say, of sloppy copying. No fault of Dr. Bowdler's, nor, indeed, of prudish busybody. Just a simple mistake.

So, no such emended line anywhere, except by accident. The phantom debunker rides again.

You were asking—what, exactly, is the line? I print the “Shakespearean” version below. If you can’t guess the “emendation,” you wouldn’t make a very good censor:

“Thy mistress, Pisanio, hath played the strumpet in my bed.”