Shakesblogging: A Midsummer Night's Dream

What I love about this play: Two things, in about equal measure. First, the fairy world, which is one part lyricism to one part menace. One of my favorite bits is Titania’s “These are the forgeries of jealousy” speech, which is easily the most gorgeous thing anybody has ever said about climate change:

The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set: the spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change,
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.

Titania is aware of the suffering she and Oberon are causing in the human world – the ploughman who sweats in vain, the rotting corn, the crows fattened with diseased livestock – but she’s prepared to prolong it; the mortals are vague, distant figures, and bigger games are being played. Ultimately, of course, harmony is restored, and the fairies cross the bridge into the mortal world to bless the lovers: “So shall all the couples three / Ever true in loving be; / And the blots of Nature’s hand / Shall not in their issue stand...” This sounds reassuring, until you stop to consider the implications: doesn’t the power to bless also imply the power to blight?

Second, the artisans. Have I mentioned yet how much I adore metatheater? And the whole “Pyramus and Thisbe” subplot (quite apart from being hilarious in performance no matter how many times I’ve seen it before) is all about the power and dangers of the stage. I mean yeah, the whole “dramatic illusion is scary and we’d much better not have any of it” attitude of Bottom and his comrades is exaggerated to the point of absurdity, but they have got accurate instincts; in this world it is terribly easy to lose yourself in illusion, and there are also real risks to displeasing one’s aristocratic patrons. I also like Bottom misquoting Corinthians as he gropes his way, clumsily, toward trying to express what he’s just seen and experienced: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was...”

Favorite memory: Our recent campus production. This was the first time I’d actually sat in on a rehearsal and watched a play come together, and it was cool. I liked a lot of the things about the final result, but I’ll confine myself to mentioning one: this adorable moment when Snug, who was played by a young woman in this production, stood there tongue-tied for a long moment and then suddenly found her inner lion. RAWWWRRR!!!

Shakesblogging: The Taming of the Shrew

I feel rather guilty about liking this play, as if it makes me a Bad Feminist. (I’m also unreasonably fond of the Stones’ “Under My Thumb,” as long as we’re getting Bad Feminist Confessions out of the way, and had fantasies of doing an ironic, gender-switched cover version back when I was fourteen and wanted to be a rock star.) Nevertheless, I think there are a lot of elements that redeem the gender politics, or at least complicate them. (I have a hard time taking Petruchio seriously as a domestic abuser when his Grand Plan to tame Katharina by depriving her of food and sleep involves doing exactly the same thing to himself.) And hell, it’s just too much of a romp not to enjoy, what with all of those fake schoolmasters, and that completely daft wedding, and Lucentio’s two fathers.

What I love about this play: The Christopher Sly framework, for a start. (I have yet to see a stage or film version with the full Induction, which saddens me because I have a soft spot for metatheater. I do own a DVD of a Stratford Festival production from the 1980s that includes a bit of it, but the main action is framed as Sly’s drunken dream rather than an actual play.) I imagine it becomes quite a different play when the entire plot is presented as a purposefully constructed fiction – and there are so many other characters engaging in various sorts of role-playing and fiction-crafting that it must work like a set of nesting dolls.

The other bit that I really like – and which redeems a LOT of the potentially uncomfortable moments for me – that scene on the road to Padua when Katharina and Petruchio stop being adversaries and become co-conspirators. (And yes, I think she is a free and voluntary participant in the game – she’s clearly having far too much fun hailing the old man as “young budding virgin, fair and fresh and sweet,” and “Happy the man, whom favorable stars / Allot thee for his lovely bed-fellow!” is her own elaboration – Petruchio doesn’t tell her to go that far!) In Petruchio-land, words don’t have to correspond to anything real, and Katharina is finally getting this and starting to grasp the possibilities. Since both of these characters have shown so much delight in speaking absurdities with a straight face, I feel perfectly free to read the “Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper” speech as one of those absurdities rather than a serious homily.

Favorite memory: I was going to say that I didn’t have one, but then I remembered that Shrew plays a big part in the abortive novel I wrote when I was nineteen, the one that was going to be a lesbian Catcher in the Rye. (Why I decided to pursue such a project when I wasn’t actually a lesbian is something of a mystery, as is the fact that I decided to set it at a snooty girl’s boarding school, a world that I knew nothing about.) My protagonist, a rebellious teenager obsessed with Shakespeare and secretly in love with her roommate, has an evil stepfather who tries to molest her, stroking her hair. In a fit of revulsion, she runs off to the nearest hairdresser and gets it all shaved off, and then pretends – for some reason – to have cancer. This garners her a lot of sympathy from her schoolmates, but when they discover she’s faking it, they all turn against her. She runs away to the nearest large city and hides in a theater, where she watches a performance of The Taming of the Shrew. The actor playing Petruchio eventually discovers her, realizes she’s in trouble, and brings her back to his apartment. Petruchio’s boyfriend arrives, who happens, by an extraordinary coincidence, to be the protagonist’s favorite teacher from prep school. He briefly freaks out, because he doesn’t want anyone at the school to know he’s gay; Petruchio calms him down, and then – for no apparent reason whatsoever – launches into a two-page monologue about the gender politics in the play. Then the protagonist’s mother arrives, and announces that a) she’s pregnant; and b) the evil stepfather has been arrested for having sex with a thirteen-year-old prostitute in Vietnam. (What the heck was he doing in Vietnam? I haven’t the foggiest.)

At this point, wisely, I realized I wasn’t cut out for novel-writing, abandoned the project, and decided to pursue a career in which it actually makes sense to pontificate about Shakespeare at random moments.

Shakesblogging: Love's Labour's Lost

What I love about this play: I adore the way it springs to life in performance. It feels rather dead on the page – all those 400-year-old literary in-jokes are tedious when we no longer recognize their thrust – but on the stage it’s absolutely charming. I’ve loved all three of the live performances I’ve seen.

And it has Berowne, the first of a series of witty rebels. (As much as I love Shakespearean comedy, so many of the young men lack character. The women don’t; Lysander and Demetrius, for example, are more or less interchangeable, while Hermia and Helena are not. But a handful of them have real personality and force – and it’s with Berowne’s skeptical question, “What is the end of study? let me know” that this character type is born.)

As with so many of the comedies, the tonal play gets me every time. We start with four young men trying to become SERIOUS SCHOLARS, YO (and swearing impossible oaths just to prove how very very Serious then are), but almost immediately they get drawn back into a courtly culture that seems entirely frivolous – a world of wordplay and wit, masks and love-tokens and entertainments. And then, suddenly, real grief intrudes; the world takes on weight and substance, and they recognize that maybe, cherishing those moments of youth and love and frivolity while you can is the wiser choice after all – for winter, as it does in the songs at the end of the play, will get the last word.

Favorite memory: Finding myself in Exeter last summer on just the right weekend to catch a free student performance, staged at different locations in a public park. For some reason, both of the undergraduate productions I’ve seen were really good – I guess because the play is not so well-known as to be intimidating, and because the young protagonists are so much like bright students at every college in the world, with their exuberance and wit and their silly but heartfealt earnestness. And it is a play that’s meant for outdoor staging; the scene where all the guys are eavesdropping on each other works so much better when they have actual trees to hide in.

Shakesblogging: Richard III

What I love about this play: First off, that verbal fencing scene with Lady Anne? Hothothot, if it’s done right. Oh yes, she should know better, but I can’t blame her for yielding in the slightest, because the Richard of Act I is almost impossible to resist. He’s not, as yet, noticeably worse than the rest of the nobles; indeed, he’s got his finger on the pulse of all of their vices, and makes them fodder for his abundant wit. (“Naught to do with Mistress Shore! ... / He that doth naught with her, excepting one / Were best he do it secretly, alone.” “Simple, plain Clarence! I do love thee so, / That I will shortly send thy soul to heaven, / If heaven will take the present at our hands.”)

And there’s that barbed edge of self-pity that makes me want to make excuses for him, even though I know better: “Upon my life, she finds, though I cannot, / Myself to be a marvelous proper man.”

All in all, it’s a hell of a sexy combination:


Anne: He is in heaven, where thou shalt never come.
Richard: Let him thank me, that holp to send him thither;
For he was fitter for that place than earth.
Anne: And thou unfit for any place but hell.
Richard: Yes, one place else, if you will hear me name it.
Anne: Some dungeon.
Richard: Your bedchamber.

Much later in the play, Richard matches wits with another woman, in a scene that closely balances this one. By then, of course, most of the audience is no longer rooting for him (and I think that Queen Elizabeth does come off the victor in this exchange; he’s pretty clearly on the verbal defensive as she twists his words and uses them against him, whereas he’s on the offensive with Lady Anne).

And, finally, there’s the wonderful “The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight” speech, in which four plays’ worth of civil wars culminate in Richard’s internal monologue, as all that violence turns inward:

What do I fear? myself? there’s none else by.
Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am:
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why:
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? for any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O no! alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself.
I am a villain: yet I lie, I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well: fool, do not flatter...

Favorite memory: Falling in love with Richard – dizzyingly, violently, against my better judgment, and in precisely the way Richard wants you to fall in love with him – when I first read the play as a freshman in college. As an older, more dispassionate reader, I can see all the ways he’s playing the audience. He induces us to fall into the same trap as Lady Anne, dazzling us with his wit and apparent candor, playing up his disability and self-loathing when it suits him to make us pity him, making us feel that we understand him when the rest of his world does not. But I kind of miss coming to this play as a naive reader, unable to see him pulling the strings.

Shakesblogging: Henry VI, Part 3

What I love about this play: Part 3 is dark, violent, and chilling; first the Lancastrians, then the Yorkists, kill the head of the opposing family and one of its children. Revenge piles upon revenge; both sides make claims on the audience’s sympathies and then lose them; in a lot of ways, it’s a more morally complex world than the sequel, Richard III, although the two plays are clearly of one piece, and there are lots of touches of foreshadowing. (Particularly of note is Richard of Gloucester’s verdict on Margaret: “Why should she live, to fill the world with words?”) It’s also an increasingly claustrophobic world, as the focus grows narrower and narrower. We don’t see much of the commons in this one, apart from the scene where poor King Henry encounters two of his subjects who emblematize the kingdom as a whole: a father who has unwittingly killed his son, and a son who has killed his father.

This is very much Queen Margaret’s play. I’m not sure she really coheres as a character across all four parts of the tetralogy – she seems more like a collection of feminine archetypes: ingenue, dangerous French adulteress, queen, mother tiger, witch. But she’s a great, tragic character in this installment. She leads armies. She fights for the kingdom her husband has abandoned. She takes bitter, cruel revenge on her enemies, and they butcher her son in front of her in return. She pleads for death, and those pleas are denied, so she curses, and those curses take root.

I also like the fact that the hapless Henry VI – alone of all the characters who surround Richard – calls him on his essential falseness: “What scene of death hath Roscius now to act?” (Pretty nearly everyone will accuse Richard of being a monster by the end of R3; but it is only Henry, in that sharp moment of clarity before his death, who accuses him of being an actor.)

Favorite moment: I’m running out of Henry VI-associated memories, so it’ll have to be a favorite moment: the end of 3.2., when Richard of Gloucester comes into his own. There have been little character touches, lines that are clearly intended to play up the contrast between Richard and his brothers, from the middle of Part 2 onward, but in this 70-line soliloquy he bursts into life – confessing his ambitions, taking the audience into his confidence, promising to put on the performance of a lifetime: “I’ll play the orator as well as Nestor / Deceive more slyly than Ulysses could ... I can add colours to the chameleon, / Change shapes with Proteus for advantages, / And set the murderous Machiavel to school. Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?” This is the speech where Richard becomes Richard, and it’s awesome.

Shakesblogging: Henry VI, Part 2

What I love about this play: Pirates! Witches! Popular rebellion! More severed heads than any other play in Shakespeare, including Titus! What’s not to love?

This is probably the cheeriest installment of the first tetralogy, although that isn’t necessarily saying much; Shakespeare’s first cycle of history plays is a story about a world spiraling farther and farther into chaos, and conflicts that are growing more and more insular. The international war of Part 1 has been replaced by feuding factions of English nobles; later, the focus will narrow to a single family torn apart by treason and violence; and finally, at the very end of Richard III, to Richard’s inward war with himself. The bitterest moments are in the future, though; there’s trouble enough in Part 2, but there’s also time, as yet, for the carnival mood of the Jack Cade scenes, and a few moments of slapstick as Gloucester exposes the con man Simpcox, and the combat between Peter and Horner, in which there is lots of drinking and a victorious underdog. (This is also the one installment of the first tetralogy in which the commoners play a major role; like Shakespeare’s later histories, it feels like it’s about England instead of about the nobility.)

And then there’s Suffolk and the pirates! This is the first appearance in Shakespeare of the Plot Device Pirates – that convenient band of buccaneers that shows up whenever the playwright has written himself into a corner. (See also Hamlet and Pericles.) Poor Suffolk just can’t get over the fact that he’s about to “die by vile bezonians,” although in fact the pirates are surprisingly erudite, and socially conscious enough to blame the ambitious nobleman for most of the kingdom’s ills.

Favorite memory: Seeing this live in Stratford, Ontario. They did all three parts (condensed into two plays, but I’m counting it as three on my life list). What I remember most about that production are the Cade scenes – all that riot and energy, and rebels tossing loaves of bread at each other, and you get that the rebellion is a holiday for people who haven’t had many chances at liberty in their lives.

Shakesblogging: Henry VI, Part 1

I must admit that I found it hard to come up with stuff to say about this play, even though I wrote large chunks of my master’s thesis about it. I think it’s essential for setting up the rest of the tetralogy, so I didn’t want to skip it, but it doesn’t grab me as much as the three sequels, in large part because Talbot just doesn’t interest me all that much. That said:

What I love about this play Evil Joan of Arc! Kicking ass and taking names! Yes, she is the villian – and either a cynical manipulator or totally deluded, or possibly both – but she’s strangely compelling. Also, she feeds fiends with her own blood (for this version of Joan is basically a witch), and there’s this gloriously creepy scene when they abandon her and refuse to do her bidding. In desperation, she offers one of her limbs, her body, and finally her soul in exchange for one last French victory. The stage directions tell a grim story in a few words: They walk and speak not ... They hang their heads ... They shake their heads ... They depart.

Immediately after this moment, we also meet Margaret of Anjou, Joan’s spiritual successor. As yet, she’s a minor character and a wide-eyed young pawn in the men’s political games, but there are a few hints of the formidable figure she will become: “To be a queen in bondage is more vile / Than is a slave in base servility.” The ambitious Suffolk falls in love with Margaret and, weirdly, determines to marry her off to the king and seduce the king through her: “Solicit Henry with her wondrous praise ... That when thou comest to kneel at Henry’s feet / Thou mayst bereave him of his wits with wonder.” The play closes with Suffolk’s final, ominous lines: “Margaret shall now be queen and rule the king; / But I will rule both her, the king, and realm.”

On a somewhat random note, I also like the awesomely assonant line: “Why ring not out the bells aloud throughout the town?”

Favorite memory: Um. Finally getting done with my MA thesis?