...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...