The Hollow Crown: Henry IV part 1

One way to fight the winter blues is to accept that it’s too cold for any sane person to leave the house. Instead, we must find ways to enjoy the great indoors. My proposed solution is twofold: the first is the miracle of slow-cooked applesauce. While you don’t get the pleasure of licking the tinfoil lid off the childhood favorite, eating it warm, straight out of the slow cooker, will change your life forever. The second part of the solution is to get into your jam-jams and comfiest robe, and watch lots and lots of movies.

Jeremy Irons as Henry IV

…Shakespeare movies, that is! I’ve been downloading way too many BBC adaptations and watching too few, so last night I decided to change that. I’ve been on a little Tom Hiddleston kick lately (can you blame me?), so I started with 1 Henry IV. I consider this the most unfortunately-named Shakespeare play, as its boring title doesn’t signify its compelling main character (Prince Hal), the fun he has with Shakespeare’s most comic character (Falstaff), and coming of age that Prince experiences in this play.

Michelle Dockery as Lady Percy

This production is certainly well cast. Few actors make better brooding, guilt-ridden rulers than Jeremy Irons, slightly less lecherous than in his role as Rodrigo Borgia, and Hiddleston plays a bright-eyed mischievous Prince Hal. Michelle Dockery, fresh from Downton Abbey, glows, alabaster as ever, and I really enjoyed the way Richard Eyre amped up the flirtiness between Kate and Hotspur, who is often portrayed as loving his horse more than his wife.

Prince Hal and Falstaff, besties for life?

Simon Russell Beale, who has been treading the boards of the English stage nonstop for the past couple of years, was a good Falstaff. Good, not great, and I’ve been trying to put my finger on why. I love the character, an irresponsible, lecherous, glutton who leeches off friends both high and low, yet his true devotion to Hal peeks through. What I don’t appreciate is that Richard Eyre thought it necessary to back each of Falstaff’s sympathetic speeches with an affecting violin track. I recognize that medium of film allows for certain enhancements to the text that the stage does not, but that does not mean that Shakespeare’s words themselves need more enhancing than an actor’s clear voice. Take, for example, the following speech:

Well, ’tis no matter; honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? how then? Can honour set to a leg? no: or an arm? no: or take away the grief of a wound? no. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? no. What is honour? a word. What is in that word honour? What is that honour? air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? he that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no. Doth he hear it? no. ‘Tis insensible, then. Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? no. Why? detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon: and so ends my catechism.

This is one of the most profound speeches in the Shakespearean canon. Honour inspires me to fight, by why should I, when I might just die? What is the value of dying in the name of honour? Will honour heal my bloody wounds? Will honour take care of my family when I’m gone? The dead man can find few, if any, practical applications for honour, so why pursue it? Falstaff asks these rhetorical questions, offering a catechism in the name of the Abbot of Unreason, all the while showing just exactly how reasonable he is. Falstaff is the one to make us question the nature of heroism: is the king heroic for forcing his army to fight and kill a hundred thousand “rebels”, who on any other day would be counted as fellow countrymen? Is Hal heroic for leaving the tavern in order to aid the King in a war that was only brought on after his father took the crown from Richard II? Falstaff may be a leech on society, but Shakespeare’s words show he is the one shrewd enough to know the finality of death, a truth that need no violins to prove it.

Cymbeline at the Stratford Festival

Cymbeline is, in a word, a doozy. It is rarely taught in schools because the plot is so darn complicated; the chief reason for this is that not one, not two, but at least five characters, at some point or another, intentionally or inadvertently, go about this play in disguise. While this makes for a tough read, director Antoni Cimolino proves that it can be significantly more entertaining to watch.

Posthumous gives Innogen a token of his love

Going to the theatre, we expect to be entertained but in the best cases, we are also moved.  After largely overlooking them in my annual pre-show lecture to my ever-patient mother, I was most touched by the performances by EB Smith and Ian Lake, who played the roles of Guiderius and Arviragus. These characters know themselves as Polydore and Cadwal, the supposed sons of Morgan, actually Belarius, a courtier that had been banished for treason and took the boys with him into exile, twenty years earlier.[1] One appealing feature was, no doubt, their brawniness, but more so, I was touched by their bright-eyed innocence, their playfulness with each other, their genuine affection for the old man who they think is their father, and the way their hearts open wide to accommodate the beautiful boy Fidele, actually Innogen[2] incognito, who they take in as a little brother for no more reason than “Love’s reason’s without reason.”

The main love-match in the play is Innogen and her betrothed, Posthumous Leonatus. King Cymbeline banishes him when he finds out that they are all-but married. As Cymbeline’s only remaining biological child, Innogen must marry for the kingdom’s advantage rather than her heart’s. Exiled on the continent, Posthumous’s false friend Iachimo[3] tricks him into believing that Innogen is unfaithful, and Posthumous sends his servant, Pisanio, to kill her. Charmed by her, he reveals his master’s plans and tells her to disguise herself as a boy and hide. Clearly, Pisanio is far nobler than his master, who I usually resign alongside Othello and Claudio as weak and gullible, unworthy of my tears. Onstage, though, Posthumous redeems himself, not through his own actions, but through the love and forgiveness of Innogen, who literally throws herself at him in the concluding moments of the play. At that final moment, she is no longer the gangly Fidele, but the tragic princess for whom things are finally going right.

To oh-so-sauve Geraint Wyn Davies as King Cymbeline

The beauty of the Shakespearean Romance is that the Bard never lets too many bodies pile up onstage before he sets everything right. Belarius comes forward to tell Cymbeline that his sons are alive, consequently shoving castle-raised Innogen back to third in line for inheritance. This resolution is unsettling, but characteristic of the Romances: things have changed for the better, but there’s no rule dictating that the result is fully just (or just on today’s terms). This moment should leave readers with a sour taste in their mouths, but Cimolino chose to overlook this aspect. This omission leaves the play’s conclusion with less of that unsettling dimension that we should be exposed to when watching the Problem Plays and Romances, but I applaud the director’s focus on the other crucial aspects of the genre: redemption and reconciliation. The “Evil Stepmother” of a Queen is dead, and the King finds his only daughter alive and able to reconcile with her true love, clearly caring more for their reunion than the throne she no longer has claim to. The play ends with a glorious group hug, a moment which might sound cheesy in print, but one that brought tears to my eyes as I was the first to jump up and give the cast its much-deserved standing ovation.

 

 

---

[1] See what I’m saying? This gets complicated!!

[2] Also spelled Imogen, but let’s not make this any more difficult.

[3] Pronounced Ya-chemo and spelled numerous ways, more unnecessary confusion in print.

Trauma gravitates towards trauma

This post was originally published in my Secret Diary of PhD Candidate column for The Shakespeare Standard.

My 2012 recreational reading/listening list looks a bit like this:

-       Jane Austen’s Persuasion (audio book read by a wonderful librivox.org volunteer)

-       The Hunger Games (the entire series, twice; first in print and then over audio book)

-       Ernest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms (also an audio book, extra points because Mad Men’s John Slattery reads it)

-       The Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s Twelfth Night Soundtrack

When I look at the list, I feel the satisfaction of having enjoyed good books and music – a pretty fair way to spend the time that I was recovering from some family trauma of my own.

Today, after a trip to see a previously-recorded version of the Stratford Festival’s 2011 production[1] of Twelfth Night, I realized that now, more than ever before, I had become addicted to trauma narratives. No longer was Twelfth Night the same old story of “girl-dressed-as-boy meets boy, boy loves other girl, but other girl is obsessed with girl-dressed-as-boy.”

Suzy Jane Hunt as Viola (disguised as Cesario) in Stratford's Twelfth Night. Photography by Cylla von Tiedemann.

I mean, think about it this way: Viola of Messaline was on one of those Costa cruise ships with her twin brother, her counterpart, when it hits a storm and the boat capsizes. They each survive, but she lives in grief thinking that Sebastian has been lost to the waves. Viola lands in Illyria, the country against which her country is at war. How convenient – landing in the country of your enemy, a woman, escorted only a moment longer by the captain, who has survived (how are we not surprised?). She begs him to hide her identity so she can live under the protection, and enjoy some of the privileges, of a great house. Smart girl.

But Viola doesn’t pick just anyone to live with – at first she wants to serve Lady Olivia. We can tell by the similarity of names that there will be some similarity of character. Here is what Viola learns about Lady Olivia:

A virtuous maid, the daughter of a count
That died some twelvemonth since, then leaving her
In the protection of his son, her brother,
Who shortly also died: for whose dear love,
They say, she hath abjured the company
And sight of men.

Viola gravitates towards the person who can empathize with her grief – they both carry the burden of fresh wounds, having lost their brothers earlier in the year. Olivia’s father has also recently died and Viola, whose voice is high enough to pass for a eunuch, had experienced the same grief when only a couple of years before, her father had “died that day when Viola from her birth / Had number’d thirteen years.” Trauma on one’s birthday – I’ve been there and don’t recommend it. Before she decides to work as a boy for Orsino, Viola shows how that she had rather be a lady-in-waiting for a woman who “like a cloistress, … will veiled walk / And water once a day her chamber round / With eye-offending brine” – tears.

I could go on. Of course Maria thinks Olivia will order to “hang the fool” – he has abandoned her in her time of grief. Why is this? In this pansexual play, is he, too, grieving over the untimely loss of Olivia’s brother? The Stratford production offers some interesting sexual tension between Olivia and Feste – hath she abjured the sight of this man? She lets Malvolio stick around, and doesn’t even wholeheartedly cast off Sir Andrew. Interesting. Feste proves Olivia the fool by catechizing her into admitting that one mustn’t grieve for those living in luxury in heaven above. Only then can her heart begin to open for a return of our usual programming, throwing herself at the girl Viola, dressed as a boy, Cesario.

Percy Shelley wrote: “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” and I’d like to think that this production offers that same message of hope.

---

[1] Hilarious at the Festival itself, the filmed broadcast added dimension to my understanding of Des McAnuff’s production because I got to see the characters’ facial expressions close-up. It was excellent, but the machines playing it kept cutting out. On the bright side we got passes, so I’m going to try to see it in full on the 21^st, when it’s playing at 7 pm for an encore presentation.

Studying on my feet

This post was originally published in my Secret Diary of PhD Candidate column for The Shakespeare Standard.

Dearest Readers and Well-wishers,

Apologies for the long period of silence…let’s just say I’ve been gathering material to share with you. Although my enthusiasm still shines bright, I can’t tell stress how far it’s been put to the test these days: studying for my 8-hour Comprehensive Exam, piecing together a coherent (and, ideally, cogent) scholarship application, writing a paper that I could proudly deliver to the luminaries at Cambridge, and, well, a slew of events in my personal life (funny how it gets in the way sometimes!), that required my attention and emotional investment.

Yet, here I am, once again, sitting in an airport after an outstanding conference, feeling all warm and fuzzy inside for the friends I’ve made and the thoughts they’ve provoked. Two weeks ago, I sat in my office, resignedly acknowledging its function as an on-campus retreat for the occasional panic attack. — Trot off to England for a week when my ‘Comps’ studies aren’t even close to complete? When I can’t even articulate my proposed dissertation topic for a mandatory scholarship application, due in less than a month? And move apartments even sooner? — I knew I needed a vacation and kept reminding myself that it would be a working one, but somehow it felt like the most reckless and irresponsible thing to do when my nose was meant to be firmly affixed to the grindstone.

Spacey rockin' Gaddafi’s signature shades

On my very first night, I attended closing night of The Bridge Project’s Richard III at The Old Vic. Sam Mendes and Kevin Spacey did not disappoint. Spacey’s Richard reminded me of the character’s roots in the stock Machiavel figure, but the role took on modern relevance with undeniable parallels to the Libyan dictator who clings to power by the skin of his nails, Muammar Gaddafi.

The next day, on a specifically non-Shakespearean date for afternoon tea, my friend and I got lost in the labyrinth known as Kensington. We came upon the former home of T.S. Eliot. This prompted flashbacks to a particularly torturous study I undertook on the writer’s philosophy that Hamlet was an artistic “failure” in its lacking of the crucial objective correlative. Clearly, there is no escape from Shakespeare in London – you turn the corner and he’s always there in spirit!

I soon moved on to Cambridge, where I finally got to meet some colleagues from Open Shakespeare and the Open Knowledge Foundation. I had recently written an article for them about my experiences with Shakespeare and the Internet, and it was great to sit with the team in real-time and brainstorm innovative ways to bring Shakespeare’s texts to life online in an interactive way. It’s amazing how I spend so much time communicating with both my Open Shakespeare and Shakespeare Standard colleagues online, but it’s really so nice to meet the team in person. It was a fantastic experience, and one I hope to repeat soon!

Dragging my blistered feet back to my dormitory at St. Catherine’s College, I shivered in my drafty quarters and thought of scholarship student Christopher Marlowe, snuggling up to roommate Robert Thexton for warmth, and supposedly even some nocturnal enjoyment.

Tastes like chicken?

On Tuesday, the day of the conference, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the Centre for Material Texts was overrun by Early Modernists. This led me to learn the invaluable lesson of, in the future, checking the conference program, not simply as I narcissistically had, for the joy of seeing my name in print amongst ‘pros’, but also to develop a better understanding of said pros’ research interests. A rookie error, I had assumed that the conference, “Eating Words: Text, Image, and Food” was geared to scholars across historical fields and faculties, but I ended up explaining humanist pedagogy to those who had indeed written the book on it. A valuable learning experience nonetheless, I was fortunate to have had it amidst such gracious, supportive hosts.

It was wonderful to spend a couple of days surrounded by fellow bibliophiles, and I even had the opportunity to attend an event at Plurabelle Books celebrating bibliophagy – the literal, rather than the commonly figurative, consumption of books. I managed to nibble on a tiny corner of a page, but I think I’ll stick to my personal vice, the casual sniffing of printed media.

English Poet Laureate Andrew Motion marveling over the texts at the Ritblat Gallery

When I returned to London, I took advantage of my close proximity to the British Library and visited the ‘Treasures’ at my beloved Ritblat Gallery. Aside from marveling over Jane Austen’s writing desk and reading specs (and indeed caving in and buying a Persuasion mug at the BL gift shop), I got a chance to stand inches away from several Renaissance quartos and, my personal favorite, Shakespeare’s First Folio. I must give credit to the curators of this exhibit, as they show Shakespeare’s works as not simply standing on a pedestal of the author’s own wit, but also as largely indebted to source texts and the works of his contemporaries, such as Marlowe and Ben Jonson.

Good from far

That evening I met up with two of my favorite people in the world – fellow bardolators from my MA days, future Shakespearean heavy-hitters, otherwise known as my London Theatre Buddies. Quickly becoming tradition, we enjoyed our second biennial ‘Thai Food and Tempest’ night, heading to the Theatre Royal Haymarket to catch Trevor Nunn’s rendition of the play, starring Ralph Fiennes. While the use of an hourglass prop was a great way to remind us that The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s few plays to maintain Aristotle’s unities of time and space, the production was otherwise a disappointment. I jokingly defend Nunn by suggesting that he must have spent the show’s budget in paying for the principal actor, but I’m serious when I say that nothing was gained from the sparse set. This is especially disappointing because Nunn himself had proved that a deliberately austere mise en scène can be beneficial with his seminal production of Macbeth in 1979. I wish I could justify this production that seemed far too concerned with the smoke-and-mirrors use of harnesses to make Ariel fly, but really, this production added little to nothing to the vibrant legacy of this “rich and strange” play.

The good and evil angel fighting for Faustus’s soul

A much more memorable production was the Globe Theatre’s Dr. Faustus. This was the first time I’ve seen Faustus in performance and it genuinely contributed to my understanding of the play. It made me realize that Mephistopheles is a much more dynamic, but also sorrowful, character, and the Globe can always be relied upon to bring the bawdiness and vulgarity of Early Modern plays to life onstage, replete with plenty of [hopefully] fake urine. My favorite part of the play? The concluding jig in which the resurrected Faustus and Mephistopheles entertained the audience with a bout of ‘dueling lutes’.

And now I’m back at Heathrow, feet throbbing from such a busy week, but all the while feeling intellectually rejuvenated and incredibly blessed. Friends, both old and new, have given me exceptional food for thought (pun most definitely intended) for my scholarship applications, and the living, breathing, examples of Early Modern Drama that I’ve encountered have inspired me to get back to blogging and, more importantly, confront that grindstone head-on!

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!

If music be the food of love, play on – Twelfth Night at The Stratford Festival

Alas, Poor Yorick! The summer’s almost over! Now I sip at the dregs of my final Balzac’s iced tea and while I try to articulate what I experienced this afternoon. Twelfth Night is a wonderful play; it’s a family favourite, which is why the Stratford Festival (nay, any Shakespeare festival) seems to play it on a 4-year loop with As You Like It, Much Ado, and Midsummer. That being said, Twelfth Night is far from fluff, and although it’s a comedy, there’s personal trauma, tragedy, loss, and grief bubbling not too far beneath the surface for those who are looking for it.

Dennehy as Sir Toby on Stratford's Official Twelfth Night Poster

I’m not going to lie, I had my reservations when the audience began to wildly applaud as stage/film star Brian Dennehy (best known to me as Montague in Luhrmann’s R+J) came onstage. It reminded me of last year’s The Tempest, where you could actually see Christopher Plummer break character and bask in the applause, which is why I tend to grumble when people blindly worship the stage vetran. But Dennehy didn’t force the audience to see this ensemble-driven play as being led by his shining star. I appreciated this, especially because Sir Toby is but half of the slap-stick tag-team, completed by Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Not having done any research on the cast before I got there, I was over the moon to find that the role was being played by Stephen Ouimette, also known as the deliciously snarky ghost of director Oliver Welles in Slings and Arrows. Onstage, the two were a hilarious team, but their achievements were crowned by Sir Andrew’s spontaneous vomiting in one scene (staged but shocking), and his accidental dropping of his towel in a steam-room scene, a gaff that I’m sure was not staged. It shocked the audience into a two-minute round of applause and I applaud Sir Toby and Fabian’s heroic efforts to maintain straight faces in character.

Feste was also a favorite of mine. An excellent character on the page, I’ve been disappointed by some stage renditions of it, and tend to use Sir Ben Kingsley’s take on the character in the Trevor Nunn film as the standard by which to judge others. Ben Carlson’s took a much different take on the character, proving that an actor’s goal mustn’t be to replicate or emulate another actor playing the character, but rather to emulate the essence of the character himself, finding within the text rationale for playing him a certain way. While Ben Kingsley played a more stoic, Buddha-like, but ultimately fun-loving and kind-hearted Feste, Stratford’s Ben basked in the character’s ambivalence: mischievous but doleful, and entirely unapologetic in his perpetual pan-handling.

In writing the character of Feste, Shakespeare introduced an entirely new fool to the stage: gone were Will Kempe’s slapstick Clowns as found in the Dogberries and Nick Bottoms, and present was Robert Armin’s Fool, the “corruptor of words,” manifested by the likes of Feste and Lear’s Fool. These vagabond-like characters are professionally attached, but never harbouring any physical or permanent attachment to any character. My mysteriously fading away when their guidance is no longer needed, these characters likewise appear out of nowhere. Maria tells Feste: “My lady will hang thee for thy absence,” and Carlson forbids us from being sure where he’s been: could he have fled the scene upon the death of Olivia’s brother, a lamentable time in which the Fool’s gibes were unwelcome? Or perhaps he was suffering from the loss, too, harbouring a homosexual love for him much akin to Antonio’s for Sebastian? For a moment, I even felt like his character might have been in love with his mistress Olivia, not unlike Malvolio. Whatever the case, he has returned from beyond. He brings with him the carnivalesque celebration of Twelfth Night, the night when all social structures are inverted and the fool himself performs the roles of Lord of Misrule and Abbot of Unreason.

Ben Carlson as Feste on the album cover - I still can't get the songs out of my head!

By far the most exciting part of this production was its musicality. At first I was skeptical, thinking that it couldn’t have possibly been a coincidence that Stratford was staging a musical Shakespeare in the same year that Josie Rourke staged an 80’s music-inspired Much Ado, but frankly, I needed the reminder that not everyone is as doggedly anglocentric as I am. My favorite professor at Royal Holloway was always hinting that somebody should write a dissertation on the mysteries hidden within the songs in Shakespeare’s plays. Twelfth Night is especially full of them, as per the play’s famous opening lines: “If music be the food of love, play on.” Sometimes, like in the exceptionally hilarious kitchen scene, the Fool riles up his audience with a joking ditty and playful banging on pots and pans until they wake up the surly Malvolio. Later in the play, we are reminded that this fool is not all benevolence, standing above the imprisoned Malvolio’s cell and tauntingly singing that the servant’s mistress “loves another.” Unapologetic for truly being the only character rational enough to expose the foolishness of those around him, Feste is silently exiled from the romantic final action of the play, because, as we’re told in Midsummer Night’s Dream, “To say the truth, reason and love keep little company together now-a-days.”

Final verdict? A heartfelt “go see it!”: bring the whole family, and then buy the cd for cheesey singalongs on the way home!

Twelfth Night is playing at the Festival Theatre in Stratford, Ontario, until October 28. 

Loving Shakespeare does not make me noble

This post was originally published in my Secret Diary of PhD Candidate column for The Shakespeare Standard.

I know that ol’ Will Shakespeare has been sitting comfortably upon his pedestal for the past few centuries, but sometimes we have to step back and remind ourselves of two things:

One: Shakespeare’s work contains a certain levity that implies that he didn’t take himself too seriously. I’m not prescribing opinions to him when I say that, but I am saying that his work is chock-full of seriously bawdy, sexist, and racist humour that prompts me to believe that he was havin’ a laugh while writing the words that have inspired us all this time.

That brood was pretty sexy when I was 14

Two: The love of Shakespeare does not require you to start wearing horn-rimmed glasses and elbow patches (although the latter is highly recommended), or take your own study of Shakespeare too seriously. In my opinion, it’s perfectly acceptable if one’s motive for watching R&J is to see Leo, rather than watching for the Shakespearean content exclusively.

Likewise, I enjoy taking my guilty pleasure of reading celebrity gossip to the level of reading it in a Shakespearean context. Preferring not to read into the speculative biographies (“Didn’t you know that Shakespeare was gay?”), I take pleasure in the scandals within the plays themselves and those that inevitably erupt during their production.

This started with an obsession with Antony Sher’s biographies and theatre diaries, Year of the King, Beside Myself, and Woza Shakespeare!: I got to learn about the gritty research he did in interviewing murderers for his role as Macbeth, and enjoyed unfolding his complex colleagues-and-lovers relationship with now-husband, RSC Chief Associate Director Gregory Doran.

Last summer, I got to read some seriously scandalous stuff, less related to Shakespeare but rather focused on the sadomasochistic life (and published diary) of 20^th century dandy-cum-theatre-critic Kenneth Tynan, which I highly recommend.

This is not going to end well...the map scene in King Lear

Today, I feel no shame in telling you that I am anxiously awaiting David Weston’s book about his time as Ian McKellen’s understudy on the American tour of Trevor Nunn’s production of King Lear. Covering McKellen: An Understudy’s Tale is said to revolve around the escapades of a cast that includes a napping principal actor, an “arrogant” Romola Garai as Cordelia, and another actress vindictively enjoying a negative review given to another actress.  But were Goneril and Regan any less vindictive? Did Cordelia’s principles not set her on a high-horse that led her sisters to order her death? In a production most notable for Sir Ian’s dropping trou, as it were, I can’t wait to hear all the juicy gossip that will doubtlessly be as entertaining as the scandals that abound Shakespeare’s tragedy itself.

Loving Shakespeare does not make me a more noble reader: it simply proves that my taste for scandal knows no bounds!

 

Family field trip to the happiest place on earth: Stratford!

My name is Erin and I’m an Anglophile. No surprise there. That being said, Canada holds a huge place in my heart. Aside from the free health care and government-subsidized university education, I love my country because it’s so keen on Shakespeare that its devoted a whole town to celebrating his work! Stratford is not just the hometown of Justin Bieber (can you believe that spell-check doesn’t recognize that name yet?); it’s home to the wonderful Stratford Festival.

A 13 year-old Biebs jamming out in the steps of the Avon Theatre

Dedicated to the classics without taking themselves too seriously – they got Canadian sweethearts the Barenaked Ladies to compose the tunes for As You Like It in 2005! – I’m so excited to be enjoy the 2011 season with my family.

What are we going to see? I’m hitting up Twelfth Night, a standard Stratford crowd-pleaser with my mother, father (aka, The Doctor), and Grandma, who’s totally into Shakespeare and will even listen to my little pre-show lecture on our way up. I joked with my dad that I would bring him a copy of Twelfth Night so he has time to read it before the show, and I swear I could hear his eyes roll 250 kilometres away. I know he comes along for me and I love him for it.

Seana McKenna as Richard III

My mom is the biggest trooper of all: after all those years of schlepping her family to “get some culture,” I think she’s accepted the “you’ve made your bed, now sleep in it” mentality and agrees to see any play I want. This includes a female-led Richard III, which we’re excited for after hearing great reviews. She may be looking forward to that but I am 99% sure she’s not at all excited about Titus Andronicus, which I’ve been going on about incessantly since my MA year. Is it wrong to talk about forced cannibalism over supper?

Stratford is exceptional and not just for the theatre. Before an oh-so-dangerous Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory appeared at my local mall, it was a huge treat to get it in Stratford. Oh! would I pace … trying to decide on the perfect confection (whoever can figure out what the answer is, I’d love to hear it). Now my guilty pleasure is Distinctly Tea, where I buy loose-leaf tea faster than I can consume it!

What really keeps us coming back to Stratford is York Street Kitchen. I shouldn’t even be telling you about this place, seldom can we get a table without standing in line, but it is the best build-your-own sandwich place, ever. Or maybe it’s because my Type A personality enjoys an endorphin release every time I check something on a checklist! And then there’s Balzac’s, which boasts some really special treats, including a Margaret Atwood-endorsed bird friendly coffee. But why do I go there? A chance to stalk Colm Feore. Has it worked yet? Alas, poor yorick!…no. But I’ll tell you one thing: I’m super excited to be going and I can’t wait to keep trying!

Ralph Fiennes taking on Prospero in London this fall!

That's right: I went for a smouldering picture. Deal with it.

Whether you pronounce his name Rafe, Ralph, or Lord Voldemort, this is excellent news indeed! I received the greatest surprise this morning: Ralph Fiennes will be taking on the role of Prospero in The Tempest this autumn! Could we be any luckier? Yes! Trevor Nunn will be directing!

Fiennes is a well-known thespian in England, known to most on the North American side of the pond for his roles in The English Patient and Schindler’s List, or, to a slightly younger generation, for playing opposite J.Lo in Maid in Manhattan and fighting in “deadly enmity” with Harry Potter in the eponymous blockbuster films.

Sir Trevor Nunn is a huge theatrical heavy-hitter: you may not have directly heard his name, but you’ve definitely experienced his work! Nunn was the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Artistic Director for the heroically long span of 1968-1986, his work included a landmark production of Macbeth, starring Ian McKellan and Judi Dench, the first production of the hugely successful Les Miserables, the longest running show on London’s West End. His work outside the RSC includes being the first director of Cats, which is possibly the longest-running show in Broadway history. So yeah, he’s kind of a big deal.

Performances will begin at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London on August 27: will you be standing in line for tickets?

How do I define a good Shakespeare production?

“It’s totally subjective,” – right? Sort of, but I’ve taken the liberty of defining some parameters to help us come to our subjective judgments.

In my adolescence, I saw some really excellent Shakespeare productions at the Stratford Festival, namely, Paul Gross’s Hamlet and Christopher Plummer’s King Lear. I don’t know whom they tortured more: myself, restless and unable to appreciate the action, or my father, a general non-fan of non-musical theatre and narcoleptic extraordinaire. When I finally began to study and understand the plays that I went to see, I soon defined ‘a good production’ as the ones I could sit through without impatiently yearning for them to end.

A decade older and hopefully more than a bit wiser, I’d like to revise my definition: to me, a good Shakespeare production is one that sheds light on key themes and passages of the text in a way that makes you aware, and makes you aware that they’re aware, of their significance to the whole. An unsuccessful production (I’m loath to actually use the word ‘bad’ – symptomatic of a high school instructor who would not let us use such a cop-out of an adjective) is one that obscures these key issues and ideas from the reader’s attention.

I’d like to explain this in greater detail, using the example of two productions that I’ve recently seen. For those of you who correspond or go to school with me, you’ll know that I had the highest of hopes in seeing both and, if I can be honest with my dearest Readers, was so excited I could hardly contain myself! My closest friends and mother will already begin to roll their eyes, knowing that my expectations are often too high, often at the expense of my own disappointment.

But here’s perhaps where I might seem a little hypocritical, but bear with me: once you’ve studied a Shakespeare play, if you can afford to go see a production, it’s worth it. Even if it’s not great – it’s worth a check-out (followed by an indignant march out at intermission, because life really is too short to sit through bad Shakespeare in its entirety). Perhaps this is my Bardolatry coming in and I don’t have sympathizers with this opinion but to me, it’s fun to amass a whole repertoire of productions to compare and play off each other; no one production can satisfy the infinite readings of a certain text because the privileging of one reading necessitates the disregard of another.

So excited I can hardly contain myself!

In the case of Julie Taymor’s adaptation of The Tempest, we have a situation that the directorial powers-that-be disregarded many of the important, nay, indispensable, issues that the text offers for our intellectual delight. In short: a freaking cop-out! Let me tell you: I am a huge fan of Julie Taymor’s work. Across the Universe was genius and Titus is certainly one of my favourite films in general – a strong endorsement, considering how protective I am over my favourite play. I’d only been looking forward to seeing this film for about two years, was literally bouncing up and down in my seat when the time had finally come (or, in the words of my dear friend Alexis, had a bit of a Shakespearegasm), and was disappointed. But why??

Well, I studied The Tempest for an entire semester during my MA, so I’d like to think that I’ve got a grasp of its possible meanings. I’d like to think that Taymor and her production team had studied it for at least that many hours: so why did she neglect to shed light on some of the most important meanings?

The passage I hold most dear to my heart (thanks to the guidance of my former card-carrying Communist of an instructor) is: “What cares these roarers for the name of king?” I waited excitedly to hear how the character would say it and it either got muffled by the unsurprisingly gratuitous special effects, or was left chopped up on the editorial room floor. I was flipping indignant when I didn’t hear my favourite line, and those sitting in my immediate vicinity experienced my wrath.

Spoken by the Boatswain to the sweet but uber-Establishment Gonzalo, it couldn’t have been more audacious for someone of such a low social caste to point out that Mother Nature trumps the entire social hierarchy! These words were so treasonous in the Early Modern period that, had they been spoken in real life and on dry land, the Boatswain would have been “perfect gallows,” do not pass Go, do not collect 200 ducats. This exclamation is even more important because it foregrounds the unconventional social philosophy of the rest of the play! I’m thinking specifically of both Antonio and Caliban’s attempts to overthrow the rulers of their homeland. In an effort to inspire Sebastian to usurp his brother, King Alonso, Antonio tells him: “Here lies your brother, / No better than the earth he lies upon,” implicitly stating that nature pays no attention to social hierarchy, as all men are equally mortal as they sleep. Again, while this is a comment that we take for granted today, it would have been considered treason 400 years earlier. Caliban, who claims, “The island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother,” seeks out a “master” in the drunken Stephano in order to get him to kill Prospero while he takes his customary afternoon nap. Clearly this spectacularly egalitarian notion is of vital importance to the many overthrow-plots of the text: so why neglect it when it deserves our critical attention?

For the sake of brevity (it is the soul of wit, after all), I’ll offer one more example from The Tempest before moving on to Lear. Whoever has studied The Tempest at any level of their education will remember spending at least 45 minutes on close-reading the Epilogue. And I’m not saying that Taymor has to use it just because we studied it: I’m saying we study it because it’s of vital importance. Let’s have a look:

Exeunt

EPILOGUE
SPOKEN BY PROSPERO
Now my charms are all o’erthrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own,
Which is most faint: now, ’tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon’d the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon’d be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

All hail ProsperA?

Everyone leaves the stage, and Prospero returns. Once again, a character brings up this notion that no magic or title can change the fact that he’s just a man (or in Helen Mirren’s case, an overly gender-conscious female ProsperA, as she incessantly reminds us), standing in front of a crowd of judges who are ready to hear his closing remarks. He tells the audience – “I must be here confined by you, / Or sent to Naples.” To be the reinstated Duke of Milan and humbly stoop to the opinion of both the nobility and the dregs of society that comprised the Globe theatre audience is as egalitarian as it gets. This is the moment where the audience gets to participate in the final action of the play –fun!!! – by casting the final judgment.

So my question is this: why the heck would Julie Taymor want to prevent this from happening? Doesn’t she want her own audience to “release [her] from the bands” (of all the negative hype that’s been going around about both The Tempest and her ill-fated Spiderman musical?), “With the help of your good hands” (with applause and positive reviews by professional critics and leisurely bloggers, alike)? Well, perhaps this is telling that she doesn’t want the production to self-consciously speak for itself. Maybe she wants it to be a movie you play in the background at a house party rather than a Shakespearean adaptation you absorb. So what does she do? She gets her husband and frequent collaborator to compose it to a tune that will run during the final credits! If I haven’t yet made it clear, this is unsatisfactory. She’s basically obscuring literary gold with the sounds of winter boots crunching spilled popcorn.

Can I say the same about Michael Grandage’s King Lear for the Donmar theatre company in London? I’m so happy to say: definitely not. And I’m not flaunting my obvious Anglophilia in order to assert that English theatre is the best theatre. What I’m saying is that he got it right.

Derek Jacobi as a classic Lear

I usually maintain a preference for the text over stage/screen adaptation because the director must choose one interpretation to privilege over all others, whereas with the text you can simultaneously maintain an understanding of each of the possible directions the text can take. That being said, I really enjoyed what Michael Grandage did in fleshing out Shakespeare mathematical language in order to amplify the theme of domestic division within the play. Shakespeare’s tragedies, more often than not, center at the “fear of what lurks at the heart of the family,” to quote one of my favourite professors and King Lear guru, Kiernan Ryan. Not doing anything particularly new but simply doing it really well, Grandage introduces the notion of divide by placing a map of England on the floor of the stage, having Lear, a man so robust that he seems to have too much energy for retirement, divide it with his staff amongst the daughters that deign to tell him in the most florid language how much they love him. Daughters Goneril and Regan multiply their love, while Cordelia tells her father that she has “Nothing” to offer in tribute. His rage erupts. He tells her that “Nothing will come of nothing,” and beseeches her to try again. It’s not that she doesn’t love him at all, she tries to explain, but that she loves him no more and no less than an unmarried daughter ought love her father:

Good my lord,
You have begot me, bred me, loved me: I
Return those duties back as are right fit,
Obey you, love you, and most honour you.
Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty:
Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters,
To love my father all.

These words get Lear so angry that he disowns this one daughter, leaving the kingdom to be split 1 part Goneril, 1 part Regan, 0 parts Cordelia, 0 parts Lear. Smart? Doubtful. Significant enough to produce a timeless tragedy? It worked for the Bard!

And while I love Derek Jacobi to bits and think he did an excellent job as Lear, I’ve seen enough Lears to know that they’re usually pretty close variations on a theme. It’s the Fool that has the opportunity to make us, and the king himself, think and feel.  How is this possible? Because he is the one person onstage who Lear pays to tell him the truth. And what is this truth? That he’s divided up his nation, divided up his family, and at the end of the day, he’s left with nothing.

FOOL

Can you make no use of
nothing, nuncle?

KING LEAR

Why, no, boy; nothing can be made out of nothing.

FOOL

[To KENT] Prithee, tell him, so much the rent of
his land comes to: he will not believe a fool.

The Fool is the one to remind Lear that he has brought this nothingness upon himself, pulling all his land from under his feet and offering it on a silver platter to his duplicitous daughters. The Fool knows it, the audience learns it from the Fool, and the tragedy lies in the fact that it takes five acts and three hours for this to cut to the King’s heart.

Djimon Hounsou's body language alone was well worth the cost of admission

And that’s not to say that there’s nothing left to be desired from Grandage’s Lear: his Cordelia seems to be onstage for the purpose of practicing her received pronunciation rather than evoking extreme pathos from the audience, only doing so when she stops talking and plays dead in the final scene. And The Tempest, not a complete failure, certainly had moments of light: Djimon Hounsou’s muscular, beautiful, tragic, earthy, and graceful Caliban’s pained and angry exclamation of “this Island’s mine” certainly evoked pathos from my cold, academic heart.

So where do we stand, dear Reader? I’d like to suggest that there’s no single Shakespearean production that is unequivocally bad (although the Complete Works of Shakespeare Abridged comes dangerously close). Instead, I like to think of each production as offering me something more to learn about Shakespeare, a new way to think about a character or a theme, bringing a multitude of possibilities to light. When a production keeps an important theme in the dark and I feel that loss, I become more understanding of how vital that theme was in the first place. So I choose to remain optimistic. I will just keep on coming back to these new visions and revisions of Shakespeare. Why? The beauty of Shakespeare is that the interpretive possibilities are infinite.

Shakesetelly: To watch, or not to watch?

Dearest Reader,

I am so happy to be in Kingston, don’t get me wrong, but alas, I can’t be in two places at once! Sometimes I miss London so much that I get a digging sense of missed opportunities, a feeling which usually sets in when I find out that my favourite actors are performing the best Shakespearian roles on the West End. I was feeling really down about not being able to see Derek Jacobi perform King Lear at the Donmar when I got the most wonderful surprise: on February 3rd, 2011, there will be a live screening of his Lear at select movie theatres! I was overjoyed and am, as ever, impressed with the current state of technology in bringing great Shakespeare that much closer to those of us who don’t live in the GSA (Greater Stratford Area).

Another residual obsession from my time in England is reading The Guardian. It’s important to read several reviews in order to get a better-rounded understanding of the plays I can’t see, but I think that Guardian reviewer Michael Billington’s columns are a good place to start. Although he lacks the roguish flamboyance of the late Kenneth Tynan, I genuinely respect his attention to detail and ability to reflect on each production as unique as well reflective of the greater trajectory of Shakespearean performance history.

Today, Billington wrote an especially relevant blog post (is it silly how excited I am to consider myself as his contemporary/peer in terms of mutual Shakesblogging experience?) about the future of Shakespeare’s transition from stage to screen. In particular, he reflects on the very popular televised adaptations of the Gregory Doran/David Tenant production of Hamlet (with Sir Patrick Stewart as Claudius) and Stewart’s own starring role in Rupert Goold’s Macbeth. What’s awesome about these productions? They have the biggest names in British acting! Tenant is well-known in the UK for his role on Dr. Who and the rest of us know him for playing Barty Crouch Jr. in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; Stewart had memorable roles as Professor X in the X-Men films and commanded the Enterprise as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation. High-profile actors bring in mass numbers to the theatres, and those who live outside of the cities or don’t have the spare cash to throw around can cozy up in front of the tv and watch these stage-to-small-screen adaptations from the comfort of their own homes!

But Billington suggests that even this isn’t successful. Why? Because the plays are being aired on unpopular channels during the very popular timeslot that hosts X Factor, the UK equivalent to American Idol. Thus, Billington laments: “we live in a barmy, upside-down world where Simon Cowell is considered to be more significant than Shakespeare.” Is this true? Has weekly television prevailed over the timeless works of Shakespeare, or is it that we’re forced to study Shakespeare in school, thus increasing our favour of reality television as a guilty pleasure?

Now, I’m not going to judge you, but which would you prefer to watch? Even without being a bardolator, I’m so starstruck that I would rather see Capt. Picard kill Duncan than watch a nobody kill a classic show-tune, any day!

So you tell me: free Shakespeare, offering us a connection with a golden past of culture, or free music, watching the history of democratically chosen music stardom unfold before us?

And possibly even more important: who wants to come see Lear on February 3rd in Kingston???