Sweet winds do shake the darling buds of April

Spring has finally sprung here. I used the complete works to prop open the window in my French class this morning. My professor would have a conniption if he knew, but sometimes the doorstop-like qualities of my Shakespeare tome come in quite handy.

...the barge she sat in, like a burnished throne...

I'm still working through the backlog of plays I read in March, so this post is following hard on the heels of the previous one. That seems appropriate, though, as it actually mirrors my initial reaction to Antony & Cleopatra. When I started reading it I was coming down off of Lear and feeling that the latter should have been the last play ever written, that the world should have ended when King Lear's did, that any further work could be but a pale echo, and so on. I resented A&C; it seemed too scattered; all over the map and full of inconsequential people with annoyingly similar-sounding Roman names.

Fortunately, that first impression did not last long. It helped that the professor is really passionate about this play (even in the context of how he feels about the other plays), and went to great lengths to help unpack it for us. He showed us the passage from Plutarch that Shakespeare had virtually lifted for the description of Cleopatra on the river Cydnus, but helped us see how the poet had recrafted it in blank verse and enlivened it by putting the words in the mouth of Enobarbus, the plainspoken, sensible soldier, who sets the with the moral center of the play. He hardly wants to glorify Cleopatra and her influence over Antony, but he cannot help himself, and as he tells the story he is swept up in the memory of the illusion she created and the influence she wielded.

One of the moments of the play that stuck with me the most (perhaps partly because my father quoted it to me before I started reading), was the scene in which Cleopatra recounts her dream of Antony as a colossus, striding the earth. "Think you be there was or might be such a man / As this I dreamt of?" she asks her guard, Caesar's soldier, and on hearing his denial she cries out, "You lie, up to the hearing of the gods." It is an instance of longing for, and belief in a greatness that has gone, that has passed by and will never come again, but whose memory still enlivens the moment with passion. It is that passion for a lost world, for a glory slowly slipping away that gives this story its poignancy, even as it is balanced on a knife-edge between the heroic and the tawdry.

Howl, howl, howl

I have wasted time and now doth time waste me. It has been a while since I have posted (for those of you I failed to email the last couple times, it has been a really long time, and you should read down below this post). I have excuses that are only slightly better than those the Athenian senators trumped up when they refused to lend Timon money--midterms happened, spring break happened, etc., etc..

Before all that, though, I read Lear, and it had such an effect on me that I did not even feel I could say anything about it. When I was reading the last two acts, I could not put it down, and I had the feeling that I was rushing towards an inevitable and crushing end, like a comet caught in the gravity well of a black hole. When it was over I felt drained and empty.

I told the professor this, and he said, "When I was younger I would weep every time I finished King Lear. Now that I am older I know more about the injustice of the world and I weep less."
I can't say anything as powerful as that, but I think that the words of the play express it best when they speak for themselves.

Seeing Cordelia dead and Lear despairing, Kent asks, "Is this the promised end?" and Edgar responds, "Or image of that horror?"

In the face of such as story we can only "Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say."

The Eye of the Beholder

It took me a while to respond to the production of The Tempest I saw, partly because I wasn't that moved by it. I thought the As You Like It with the same actors was better. However, I also think my expectations were higher for the Tempest--I know it better as a story, and I've thought about it more. Also, it's so full of magic and fantasy that it's hard for a staged version to live up to the story as you have imagined it in your head. A performance would have to have the production budget of Avatar to create the storm and the ship and the island--let alone Ariel and Caliban--as I envisioned them. Actually, the idea of the Avatar version of the tempest is kind-of cool...

There was a review of the performance in the New Yorker that, although well written, I did not particularly agree with (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/theatre/2010/03/08/100308crth_theatre_lahr) I don't think he's right that the play is all about Prospero, although I can see how that could be an interpretation. Partly, I did not think that the actor playing Prospero was that strong, even though he was great as Jacques. He kept yelling at his daughter, which seemed unnecessary. The actor I thought did really well in the production was the man who played Caliban. I felt particularly aware, watching him, of the colonial interpretations of the play, and the contrast between the two different types of bondage that Caliban and Ariel were under. In contrast, that was an interpretation that the NYer review did not see as very important in the Mendes production. I suppose that is one of the great strengths of Shakespeare--the plays allow us to see such different things in them.

Next time, I must write about Lear, which I just finished reading. That ending...

Foul is Definitely Foul

I finished Timon of Athens yesterday, and since I am going to see The Tempest tonight at BAM, I thought I should write some of my impressions since before I lay another play over them. I have to say, though, that I hope visiting Prospero's island will help reduce some of the bad taste that reading Timon left in my mouth. It is not a nice play!

This was certainly my least favorite of the plays we have read so far. It is hard to read, and not just because the characters are unappealing and the events are enough to make you lose faith in human decency, but because the writing itself feels disjointed. I know that that is partly because it is a work with two authors, Shakespeare and Middleton, but I think my experience of it was worse because I was switching between reading it in my Bevington "Complete Works" edition, and in the Oxford paperback, which saves me from getting a hernia lugging the entire oevre around. Usually this does not present a problem, but for this play the two editions were so different (Oxford's was not even broken up into 5 acts) that I kept losing my place. It probably didn't help that I wasn't very engaged with the story to begin with. Part of the problem is not just that the emotions all the characters exhibit are so ugly, but that they are very petty. There is no grand villainy or monstrous crime, just a lot of little failings. Except for Timon's epic fits of rage, none of the players even seem to show much emotion.

As I was getting towards the end of the play, however, I had a realization that helped me get into it a little more. This is a play that is basically about a credit crunch and the social fallout it inspires. If I was going to stage it today, I would have Timon be the head of Bear Sterns or General Motors, the senators be Washington politicians, and the steward be someone whose house was foreclosed. The sort of bitter misanthropy, recrimination, and disgust that washes through the majority of the play is certainly evocative of some of the public responses of the last two years. That's not very comforting, but it makes it more engaging to think of it in that way.

Other than that, I don't think I was able to take very much from this play, so I will be interested to hear what the professor has to say. I imagine that he will be able to open it up for me a little more.

Foul is Fair

Well, I said that I wouldn't be able to post again until after my draft was due, but then I first made a lot of progress on that, and second realized that I cannot work constantly at one thing for two weeks, so I have slunk back to this blog, rather like Macbeth seeking out the witches on the heath for a second interview.

Also, I know that I won't be able to remember all my impressions if I put off writing about it until well after I have finished the reading and discussion.

Today was the second day of lecture devoted to the Scottish play, and the professor took us through a whirlwind tour of the political context in which it was written and first played in 1606, a time when plays about regicide and tyranicide and particularly powerful political significance. I had not realized how closely the November 5th plot (as in Guy Fawkes) fell to the play's premier. Not to mention the fact of a new Scottish king on the English throne who was trying to bring the kingdoms of England and Scotland into closer political alignment. Professor Shapiro then went on to say that one of the great ambiguities of the play, for him, was whether to read it as a political tragedy or a psychological one.

I was interested to hear that he thinks it is one of the most difficult of the plays (although I am beginning to think that he says that about all of them...) He professed horror at the numbers of high schools that make it assigned reading. I do think it's a hard play, but I'm afraid I have a high enough opinion of my high school English teacher (and of my high school self) to think that it was not a waste for me to read it then. It certainly meant that I retained a lot more when I read it this time. I had forgotten how creeeeepy it is, though. It should be a standard Halloween work, like The Legend of Sleepy Hollow or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

One of the most difficult things, I think, about this play is the fact that you cannot properly understand your relationship, as the reader or spectator, to Macbeth. He is a villain as much as Iago was (maybe more so, since Iago didn't kill children), but he makes you see inside his soul in a way that you can't with Iago. You want to sympathize with him. You can see the dagger with its handle towards his hand just as he can. You want to see him as a victim of supernatural fate. Yet you also want to condemn him. What he does is terrible, and it merits the dark portents that riddle the play. It is this simultaneous attraction and repulsion that was the the hardest part about my reading of the play, on this go round.

Next we have Timon of Athens, about which the professor warned us, "This won't be your favorite. Just hold your breathe and push through it." Inhaling now...

OtHELLo

Due to my thesis situation, I am going to have to greatly reduce my attentions to this blog for the next two weeks, or so, which is vastly disappointing, since I really like Othello and next week's play, Macbeth--probably because I read both in high school, and so I feel as if I have a little more perspective on them. Perhaps I will be able to make a few post-mortem (pun intended) comments on these two tragedies when I get out from under my first draft after a week from Sunday. Unfortunately, there won't be much up here until then.

See you on the other side...

M4M (and love for Professor Shapiro)

Partly because I also read As You Like It this past week in preparation for going to the play, and partly because two lectures is really an insanely fast pace to go through an entire play, I felt as if Measure for Measure went by in a flash. I think that that feeling also owes a lot to the fact that Professor Shapiro in incredibly well informed and engaged, and gives you the feeling that he could talk for a month about each play. Despite the fact that the class has probably fifty people in it, he does not really lecture, but engages everybody in discussion. This could be deadly, but he is a strong enough teacher that can keep the discussion going in the direction he wants it to, and he is able to strike a balance between telling us things and having us figure them out on our own. One of the things he said about Measure for Measure (which is, by the way, a disturbing play full of unappealing characters and STDs) is that one of the most troubling things about it is the fact that it shows people outside the bounds of normal society, who have lost their way and are stuck in some terrible holding pattern. Mariana, who was betrothed to a lover who refused to marry her when her dowry money was lost, and can only live the life of a recluse, "on the shelf," is one such character, and Barnardine, a prisoner on death row, who forgotten by ruler and justice, continually drunk, and ever unrepentant, is another. This was very powerful point, and one I had not thought of on my own.

Another thing that's great about the Professor is his reading ability. He read some key speeches aloud in class yesterday, and it just made you feel the lyricism an the emotion of the verse. It's amazing, the way that Shakespeare's words can make you agree with, or at least sympathize with and try to understand, the most incredible range of perspectives. Take the speech of the Duke's that Shapiro read us:

Thou art not thyself,
For thou exists on many a thousand grains
That issue out of dust. Happy thou art not,
For what thou hast not, still thou strive'st to get,
And what thou hast, forget'st. Thou art not certain,
For thy complextion shifts to strange effects,
After the moon. If thou art rich, thou'rt poor,
For like an ass whose back with ingots bows,
Thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey,
And death unloads thee.

Basically, what Shakespeare is saying is, "life is bleak and then you die," but it's so beautiful you could almost agree with him.

NB: On the subject of things that the Professor said that broadened my perspective, I feel as if I should make a postscript to my T&C comments. I no longer think it is quite so misogynist. Although some of the dialogue is terrible towards women, I realized after the discussion in class, that Shakespeare is showing the viewer, though the action of the play, the injustice of women's vulnerability in the midst of the brutality of warfare, and the way that Cressida has to take steps to protect herself by finding a new lover. It does not make her appealing to the audience, but it shows the way that she can take control of her own fate in an adverse situation.

And now, on to Othello...

A Journey in Disguise

Rather than simply reading, I went to see a play last night, and since I had to write a theater review for my class, I thought that I would just put that up, and save me writing a separate post about it.

As You Like It may be a tale of young love, but it is also a story of growth and experience, of introspection as much as of exuberance.

At least, that was the way it was played in Sam Mendes’s Bridge Project production, performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music January 29. Mendes chose to present the play, which can seem one of the frothier of Shakespeare’s comedies, in a somber register. Set in modern times, some parts were downright menacing, notably the scenes at Duke Frederick’s court. These were played before a monolithic wall of dark wood that foreshortened the stage and suggested the interior of a prison or a stockade. The massive barrier took up so much of the playing space because behind it flourished the Forest of Arden, revealed by the end of the first act as mist-wreathed and mysterious place, fantastic, but with the magic of an unconscious dream rather than of a fairy tale.

Over the course of the play Arden turned from silent, icy winter into balmy spring, a gradual change which mirrored the production’s larger themes. Mendes wrote in his playbill notes that As You Like It and it companion, The Tempest, were “designed and conceived as part of a single gesture, a single journey,” and the idea of a journey, through time as much as through space, was emphasized throughout. Jacques’s famous, “All the world’s a stage,” speech describing the developmental arc of a man’s life, spoken with measured tones and subtle emphasis by Stephen Dillane, encapsulated the focus of the whole.

Unhurried dialogue was, with a few violent and comedic exceptions, common throughout, the actors using the stillness between their words as much as they used the words themselves. Occasionally, this restraint inhibited character development—Orlando, for example, was too thoughtful for a romantic and feckless youth. More often, though, the production’s quietude succeeded in evoking a sense of laden emotions and of nostalgia, as when the Duke and his courtiers slouched around their brazier in the forest, softly strumming guitars like a bunch of old hippies at a Woodstock reunion (an impression that was strengthened by Jacques’s riff on Bob Dylan during one of the songs).

Mendes’s production was a very completely realized vision of the play. Lighting, sets, acting, and music were all carefully contrived to give complementary impressions. There were only a few artistic misfires, such as the interpretation of the vicar Sir Oliver Mar-text as the sort of loopy itinerant you might hear in Union square, the use of Pheobe’s character to trot out some overdone, “it’s not over ‘til the fat lady sings” humor, or the faint whining drone of a dulcimer that arose whenever a character gave a particularly heart-felt speech. Generally, however, the performance succeeded in elucidating the heart of the story as one of love and transformation, both physical and emotional.

That success was aided by a cast of strong actors. Juliet Rylance as Rosalind carried well the most-exposed role in the play. Clear-voiced and emotive, she was most compelling in her scenes as Ganymede, where she struck a balance between demonstrating her ability to manipulate Orlando and her own vulnerability to his charms. Michael Thomas, who played both duke brothers, was also excellent. He disappeared so fully into his roles, first playing Frederick as an innately threatening figure, and then showing Senior as a noble but unassertive man, that he obviated the potential disjunction for the audience of seeing the one transform into the other.

Anti-Heroics

I just finished Troilus and Cressida last night. It was a very modern-feeling play; I could imagine it written between the two world wars, when artists were generally trashing the progressive vision of human nature, and T.S. Eliot was treating the western canon to a nihilistic mash-up. In a way, Shakespeare mashing up his own great masters (or at least some of them) in T&C by re-presenting the epic story of the Trojan war as a pastiche of human failures. I felt, as I read, as if the characters were struggling to act with chivalry and to fulfill the ideal heroic roles their era called for, but they just couldn't maintain it. Noble dialogue would ensue for a scene or so, and then they would descend into scheming, selfishness, malice, lust, and turpitude. Most often, this seemed to happen when a woman entered the room, or even the conversation. Which brings me to another point: I think that this was the most outright misogynist of Shakespeare's plays that I have ever read, including The Taming of the Shrew. I was trying to think if there is another play in which a woman's actual infidelity is at the center of the drama, and I couldn't think of one. There are lots of instances in which women are falsely accused--e.g., Othello, Winter's Tale, Much Ado--and everybody is very upset by it, but I don't know another play in which female perfidy is so clearly on display. (Admittedly, my knowledge of Shakespeare is not that exhastive, which is one of the reasons I am taking this class, so I would welcome any corrections from the peanut gallery). More than the events of the play, however, the tone of the dialogue really turned on the falsity of women's virtues and the availability of women's bodies, especially Helen's. You would think that if they all despised her so much they would just go home, instead of fighting for ten years.

I do not mean, by all this carping, to say that I utterly disliked the play, or that I was sorry I read it. The characters were all so unpleasant, and their motivations so base (except for Hector, who was kind-of a bore) that reading it aroused a morbid fascination. It was like the attraction of Jersey Shore, I suppose. Also, Shakespeare really knew some good insults, and this was a chance for him to display the best of them. At one point Patroclus calls Thersites (the clown of the play, whose acidic comments about human nature could corrode steel), "you ruinous butt." Further, there are some more poetic speeches, especially about the inevitability of Time and the fragility of human intent, that appear every so often, like jewels flashing out beneath the swirling waters of a polluted and toxic river. "Time has," Ulysses says, "a wallet at his back,/Wherin he puts alms for oblivion,/A great-sized monster of ingratitudes./Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devoured/As fast as they are made, forgot as soon/As done."

Talk about existential angst.

Well Met by Moonlight

This is the start of my blog for Shakespeare II, spring 2010. In it I will be responding to the plays of the course, as I read them (Unfortunately, I will not actually be reading Midsummer this semester, since the syllabus covers the later plays only, but the moon is out right now...) I do not guarantee that I will be equally inspired by all the plays I read, but I will try to post at least something perfunctory about each of them, delving into greater depth when I feel so inspired. I am currently toiling through Troilus right now, and should post about it soon.