Shakesblogging: Henry V

What I love about this play: I hardly know where to begin. I guess I’ll start by saying that it exemplifies a lot of the stuff I love about Shakespeare, especially in the complicated balance between the sordid and glorious faces of war, and between Henry’s admirable and reprehensible qualities. It’s a play that presents multiple viewpoints persuasively and makes room for multiple perceptions of the same event. Most readers, myself included, aren’t really up for dealing with that level of negative capability. Frankly, I always have to struggle to give Henry his props, since my own sympathies are with Pistol and Bardolph, and especially with Michael Williams, my favorite bit-part character in Shakespeare. But he is very, very good at what he does, and I think he honestly believes in justice – “the quittance of desert and merit / According to the weight and worthiness” – and tries to see it done. Also, I defy anyone not to get the shivers at the St. Crispin’s Day speech, and I think it’s heartfelt.

That said, I always get even more shivery at Michael Williams’s challenge to Henry’s entire ethos: “But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all, ‘We died at such and such a place’; some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left.” How do you answer that? The king doesn’t, really – Williams gets a glove full of gold and a pardon for speaking his mind, but the bigger questions linger.

Also, Pistol’s exit at the beginning of Act 5 breaks my heart: the disaffected former soldier who has lost everything that anchors him to society and is still trying to make a go of survival – by cheating, stealing, any way he can.

Favorite moment: Falstaff’s impromptu wake, which is also the last moment the tavern characters are together. You’ve probably gathered by now that I have a soft spot for all of them, but especially for Bardolph (“Would I were with him, wheresome’er he is, either in heaven or in hell”) and Mistress Quickly (“Nay, surely, he’s not in hell, he’s in Arthur’s bosom if ever man went to Arthur’s bosom.”) It’s such a poignant scene, and all the more so because the best way they know how to memorialize Falstaff is by retelling his jests. It’s also the last time they’ll ever see each other.

Shakesblogging: Henry IV, Part 2

What I love about this play: Most people don’t rate Part 2 as high as Part 1, and I have to admit that the first two acts sag a little – although they do have my favorite Prince Hal moment, that conversation with Poins in which he almost owns up to grieving for his father’s sickness, and Poins misses the gravity of what he’s trying to say. The last three are like setting off a string of firecrackers. There’s the “uneasy lies the head” speech, and our first glimpse of the ordinary country folk, and dirty tricks at Gaultree Forest, and Henry’s death scene (during which he drops not one, but two bombshells about that crusade he’s been planning for the last three plays; first, that it is a calculated move to “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.” And then, when we’ve scarcely absorbed this seemingly Machiavellian counsel, he reveals that he has always believed he’ll die there, and has been voicing this death wish all along without any of the other characters recognizing it for what it is). And then “I know thee not, old man” – a punch to the gut, no matter how many times I read it or watch it.

This is kind of a diffuse, decentered play – it’s named after a king that we don’t even see until Act 3, and who promptly dies in Act 4. If there’s a hero, I think it has to be Falstaff. I love the way that, after all of his shenanigans in Part 1, he turns out to have his own brand of courage – the courage to jest in the face of aging and sickness and death.

I really like the little interlude between Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet, observed by Hal and Poins, who see the absurdity of the relationship but miss its poignancy – “Do not speak like a death’s head, Doll; do not bid me remember mine end.” (Poor Doll. She’s dying of syphilis, which is a horrible way to go despite all the uneasy jokes that the characters make about it, and she sincerely loves Falstaff. I love the way even the bit parts get infused with humanity.)

Favorite moment: The scenes at Justice Shallow’s, with everyone having wine and pippins in the orchard, and Silence getting drunk, and all those glimpses of everyday life – bills to pay, conversation about the price of cattle, reminiscences about old friends. It’s a moment of warmth in an increasingly chilly and impersonal play, and it’s sweet and low-key and a bit tragic, because you know what’s coming, at least for Falstaff. Above all, it’s stable; in spite of all these convulsions in the state, things have not, after all, changed so much for the majority of the English.

Shakesblogging: Henry IV, Part 1

What I love about this play: This installment begins more or less where the previous one left off, with Henry’s resolution “to chase these pagans in those holy fields / Over whose acres walk’d those blessed feet / Which fourteen hundred years ago were nail’d / For our advantage on the bitter cross.” It never happens. Shaky alliances break down and civil war intervenes. Meanwhile, the story opens out: from the slightly claustrophobic world of the nobility we move into the Boar’s Head tavern, where Falstaff does impressions of the king with a pillow on his head, Mistress Quickly gets drafted to act the part of his “tristful queen,” and Hal deposes him unceremoniously.

I think that scene pushes every last one of my Shakespeare buttons: metatheater, kingship as performance, reversals between high and low, the sudden shift in tone from high hilarity to Falstaff’s recognition that he’s pleading for his life and Hal’s chilly “I do, I will.” And then there’s a knock on the door, and Falstaff protests, “Play out the play: I have much to say in the behalf of that Falstaff,” but he never gets the chance. I love that scene so much; there’s the cold edge of foreshadowing, but also so much warmth and wine and laughter in the moment, and it’s a rare glimpse of what these kings must look like to their subjects.

Also, the byplay between the rebels is delicious: Glendower sincerely believes he’s got magical superpowers; Hotspur, who has no patience for this sort of thing, relentlessly undercuts him; Mortimer, the man who would be king, is stuck running interference between the two. (“I can call spirits from the vasty deep.” “Why so can I, or so can any man / But will they come when you do call for them?”) And then Lady Percy and Lady Mortimer come out – two young women, neither of whom is going to keep her husband very long – and Lady Mortimer sings a song in Welsh, which is the only language she knows, and it all turns strangely melancholy and haunting.

Favorite one-liner: (I’m too tired tonight to think of anything except one-liners.)

Worcester: ... I do protest
I have not sought the day of this dislike.
King: You have not sought it! How comes it, then?
Falstaff: Rebellion lay in his way, and he found it.

Rebellion is always lying in people’s way in the history plays. Funny how that happens...

Shakesblogging: Richard II

What I love about this play: It opens so many conversations and sets so many threads in motion: what is kingship? Who gets to decide who will be king? What drives history – Providence, human agency, happenstance? What is history good for, anyway? Is there any room for women and commoners in all of this?

The play starts with an abortive trial by combat – which only makes sense, as a means of determining justice, if you believe that Providence takes a direct hand in human affairs. (It’s not clear that either of the combatants actually believes this, although I think King Richard does. I also don’t think the play leaves the slightest ambiguity about whether Richard bears any guilt in Woodstock’s murder. Of course he’s guilty. He wouldn’t be so dead set on stopping the combat if he weren’t.) The king’s word is, for the moment, absolute, save for the one crucial limitation that John of Gaunt voices: “Shorten my days thou canst ... but not lend a morrow.”

So by the end of the play, Richard, a lawful and anointed king, has been deposed and murdered; Henry Bolingbroke is king; and nothing is absolute. The world seems to be completely changed – thrown into chaos, if you read it one way; opened up to new and exciting possibilities, if you’re inclined to believe that kingship should be determined by ability rather than birthright. Except, not. In a lot of bitterly ironic ways, we’re back where we started – a king suffering from blood-guilt, a banishment, a lot of tense alliances that we know are about to fall apart. And Henry’s desire to “make a voyage to the Holy Land / To wash this blood off from my guilty hand” suggests that he is, after all, afraid that Providence will have retribution. (It also suggests a bunch of other stuff as well, of course, if you know everything about Henry’s motives, but he won’t be revealing them for another two plays.)

Favorite moment(s): Richard’s description of Bolingbroke’s “courtship to the common people ... What reverence he did throw away on slaves, / Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smiles ... Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench.” Even while Richard affects to find this absurd, he’s also implicitly acknowledging that political power is a craft like any other skilled trade and not merely a birthright; I think this is the moment when he realizes, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he’s screwed.

I also really like the bit with Aumerle and the Duchess of York in Act 5. It’s a nice little comedic subplot in a play that is otherwise relentlessly tragic, and it offers an alternative set of values to the power politics that shape most of the action: “I pardon him as God shall pardon me.” (This is perhaps the last time mercy and forgiveness will carry the day in the histories, except in isolated corners of the kingdom like Justice Shallow’s Gloucestershire. It’s nice that it works out.)

Shakesblogging: The Merchant of Venice

What I love about this play: It is so, so much fun to teach, especially 1.3., the scene where Shylock and Antonio maneuver each other into the bond that is bound to be disastrous for at least one of them. (I suspect Antonio has some inkling of how things are going to play out, and is quite willing to die as long as he can bring Shylock down with him. I know this is true of Shylock.) Oh, the gamesmanship! The manipulation! And the money, and all the complicated meanings it accrues! Students always want to argue about who has the upper hand, and who’s the real villain here, and it’s fabulous. And there’s all kinds of sly verbal stuff going on, like the multiple resonances of “kind,” and the moment when Antonio takes the kid gloves off and switches from “you” to “thou,” which make it my go-to bit for teaching demos.

In Bob Dylan’s eloquent phrase, “money doesn’t talk, it swears” – and the characters in Merchant use it to swear at each other, all the time. (Incidentally, I think one of the reasons why Shylock is so bitterly, corrosively, angry at Jessica is that he recognizes that in stealing his money and jewels, she has effectively stolen her own dowry and forced him to give his symbolic blessing to a union which he doesn’t sanction. There is nothing more intimate than wealth in this play, and the theft is a violation of that intimacy on a grand scale. And poor Jessica – her promise to “gild myself / With some more ducats” seems to speak to a fear that Lorenzo won’t love her without them.)

Genre-wise, I think it’s a heck of an interesting experiment, if not a totally successful ones. Most of the villains in the comedies are cardboard cutouts, like Don John and Duke Frederick; Shylock is an antagonist with real character and motivation who calls Christian Venice out on all of its hypocrisies, and he's so compelling that he pulls everything else in the play out of orbit. (My students always want to know how in the world this is a comedy. My quick, glib answer is “Because there aren’t any bodies on the stage at the end,” but of course it’s a play that resists quick, glib answers; the ending is steeped in doubts and loose ends and shades of grey, and the love-plots that all seemed to be resolved in Act 3 are already coming unthreaded. Bassanio and Gratiano choose homosocial bonds over their wives, much to the wives’ chagrin; Jessica and Lorenzo, who know each other slightly better than the other couples, have that lovely “In such a night as this” exchange, which reveals a touch more distrust than trust on her part.) Merchant anticipates the thorny, knotty late comedies, like Measure for Measure – making it an uncomfortable play to watch, but a fun one to wrestle with.

Favorite memory: Portia was my first favorite Shakespearean heroine; I’d even go so far as to say my first Shakespeare crush. I was eleven. Most of the uglier and more problematic aspects of the play went straight over my head; I just wanted to be friends with this girl who said witty, mocking things about her suitors and outsmarted a courtroom of learned men and played practical jokes on her husband. I kind of miss the purity of that love, as much as I also love being able to see all the additional layers.

Bonus YouTube video: Monsters of Venice

Shakesblogging: Much Ado About Nothing

What I love about this play: This is the best love story in Shakespeare. Well, OK, Antony and Cleopatra is right up there, but it’s certainly the best happy love story in Shakespeare, and I’d argue that Benedick and Beatrice have the edge because they’re down-to-earth, real, and not self-absorbed. How can you not love a play in which the heroine has a cold, the hero can’t write a sonnet to save his life, and they both acknowledge that vindicating Hero is far more important than pursuing their own courtship? (“Lady Beatrice, have you wept all this while?” has my vote for the most romantic scene in the canon, in part because so much about it is aggressively unromantic.)

Also, I must gush for a moment about how much I love Benedick – his relentless skepticism (well, except about the one thing he should be skeptical about, but nobody’s perfect), his quick wit, his willingness to suspend judgment when all of the other men in the play are piling on to condemn Hero. (See, not all of my Shakespeare crushes are on villains.)

As for the women, it goes without saying that Beatrice is all kinds of awesome, but Hero has this quiet courage and faith that always gets to me. This is especially evident in her “And when I lived I was your other wife / And when you loved, you were my other husband” line – which is enigmatic, and I think intentionally so, but the general sense seems to be that she recognizes that both she and Claudio have been transformed, and she trusts their new selves enough to go through with the marriage that went so terribly awry the first time. Which is really amazing, especially in a play that is so much about trust and faith – appearances deceive, and everyone has to rely on instinct and generosity.

I also really like the subplot with Dogberry, especially the “what your wisdoms could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light” line. This is one of the tropes of Shakespearean comedy that I always love, the clown who sees more deeply into things than the nobleman: Bottom, for example, can see fairies when none of the other mortals can even fathom their existence. It’s nice seeing these characters get their props.

Favorite memory: Watching Branagh and Thompson go through their paces in the basement of the English building when I was a freshman in college. Oh, that movie must have created a generation of Shakespeare geeks. I’m glad I was at the right age to be one of them.

Shakesblogging: Romeo and Juliet

I’ve been thinking about this play a lot over the last few days, because I’ve been watching the DVD recording of the Globe production I saw last summer. I’m still not sure how I feel about it, particularly most of the scenes with the young men – but I’m willing to accept some of this as my fault and not the production’s, because I’m not sure I ever have seen a Romeo who completely satisfies me.

What I love about this play:

OK, here’s why I think Romeo is such a difficult role. As tempting as it is to think of the lovers as a pair, they’ve really got quite different story arcs, and I feel like Romeo’s is both more interesting and less intrinsically satisfying. Juliet, pretty much, becomes who she ought to become. Her story is about growing up. She’s a pliant kid when we first meet her, but by Act 4, when she comes to the realization that “my dismal scene I needs must act alone,” she’s become a woman of great courage and determination in a matter of days. It feels right and natural, like an illustration of Ben Jonson’s maxim: “in short measures life may perfect be.”

I tend to think that Romeo’s story, on the other hand, is not so much about maturing but about falling away. (All of the really bad decisions in this play are Romeo’s; if you accept the premise that death is preferable to life without one’s love – and I think you have to accept it for the play to work at all – Juliet probably makes the best choices she can under the circumstances.) Still, I think most of the mistakes he makes are excusable. Here he is, a young man in a culture where “being a man” means brawling in the streets and making jokes about rape. And at least in the first two acts, he’s trying to grope his way toward a different mode of masculinity – and sure, it leads him into silly Petrarchan excesses, but his instincts are good. (It’s no accident, I think, that he seizes on Friar Laurence as a confidant – who is kind of an unlikely mentor for a would-be lover, but he is the only mature male character in the play who lives by an alternative set of values.) And Romeo’s tragedy is that he ends up becoming the man of blood that he tries so hard not to be, killing first Tybalt and then Paris. It’s messier and more complicated and really, really difficult to convey in performance. You also have to capture the fact that there’s something essentially countercultural and transgressive about his love for Rosaline, even if the love itself is shallow. It’s a tall order.

On another note, one of the small things I really like about this play is the number of casual references to unseen people and things, creating the illusion that the characters have backstories and off-stage lives. (I think this is a new tactic that Shakespeare is starting to perfect in R&J; I can’t think of too many examples from his very earliest plays, or from other Renaissance playwrights.) So, for example, in the space of about two and a half lines, we learn that the Nurse had a daughter named Susan, that she was Juliet’s age, and that she’s now dead (but the “she was too good for me” line, plus the fact that the Nurse uses Susan’s age as a reference point when she’s calculating Juliet’s, gives the impression that she did not die in infancy). Probably, we’re not supposed to make too much of this, but I can’t help wondering how this play would be different if Susan were alive (one of the striking things about Juliet is how isolated she is, in comparison to the heroines of the comedies; we hardly ever see her interact with anyone outside of her own household, other than Romeo and Friar Laurence, and there aren’t any other female characters her own age). I also wonder whether we’re meant to see Juliet as shaped by the early death of a playmate of her own age – whether this is why she perceives death as ever-present and life as a thing to be seized – or whether this is way too much psychology to read into a pre-modern play.

Favorite memory: Not sure this merits the name of “favorite,” exactly, but I do remember watching the Zeffirelli film in high school and being captivated by the language and the visual beauty of it all: a little oasis in the relentless ugliness that was ninth grade.