The Shakespeare Diaries

How He Did It: Titus Andronicus

2011-07-17T15:59:00.011+02:00

Taking a step back and looking at this, it’s stunning how much big, kitschy motifs he stuffs into this thing. He doesn’t shy away from anything, never says, “Hey, you can’t have a rape and a murder and torture and patricide in one play.” He’s not interested at all in the little subtle everyday stories that are so fascinating in their details. Fuck that, he wants more blood.

In fact, it’s almost as if you could take his plays and write a catalog of “Big Things” – all the huge themes and motifs that go far beyond everyday life:

Rape
Murder
Family murder (here: father kills son, but also, in other plays, patricide and fratricide)
Loyalty and Betrayal
Honor and Betrayal of Honor
Sorrow and Suffering
Ranting against the gods / fate
Madness
Revolution
Decadence and Hypocrisy
Tyranny
Incest (not here, in other lays – can’t believe he left out incest)
Evil (Aaron, others)
Young Love
Stealing of someone’s else’s love
Friendship
Character / Courage / Honor
Youth and Old Age
Miscegenation
Racism and Sexism
Bodily Mutilation
Gore and Imaginative Ways of Killing, Maiming and Torturing
Downfall of a nation / dynasty
Brotherly rivalry and family disintegration
Loss of children
Loss of / theft of fortune
Cannibalism (Cooking your enemies into a pie and making your other enemies eat it)

What else? There must be more here.

In fact, I am tempted to take the catalog and try to write a play and stuff all these things in it and see what happens. That must be how Shakespeare wrote this one.

The Movie: Titus

2011-07-17T15:59:00.009+02:00

The definitive movie is Juilie Taymor’s “Titus” with Anthonly Hopkins and Jessica Lange (1999). It’s very mixed.

On the one hand, it’s probably the only good filming of the play. On the other, it’s often ridiculous.

Taymor wants to be Peter Greenaway and puts a lot of effort into the images, but it only works half of the time. A lot of it is too kitschy and overwrought to be charming, and she tries too hard. The acting could have been more subtle and here again is that old problem: The play is written to be declared, but the scenes are played for a kind of pseudo-realism, and it’s often not credible.

On the other hand, it almost works, and this is a play that could easily be grueling torture to watch.

One good thing she does:

She cuts the action enough to make almost everything motivated. Whereas in the play it is much more loopy and disjointed, here you can follow the reasoning of the characters as the plot progresses.

One bad thing she does:

Shakespeare had the bad habit of really playing up the tears. Titus and just about everyone is constantly complaining to the gods and moaning and groaning. Taymor cut out a lot of the play – well done – but she left in most of the bellyaching. It’s too much. Give these people a little dignity, turn your eyes away the five hundredth time they bewail their fate to the gods, please, it drags on you more than the constant bloodshed does.

(The popularity of moaning and groaning is not limited to Shakespeare’s time. Looking at image from earlier productions of the plays, most poster-makers and illustrators seem to concentrate on Lavinia, who does nothing but suffer – there are all kinds of images of her bleeding and being raped etc. She is the weakest character in the play and I can imagine that Shakespeare did all those horrible things to her because she was so annoying. But when putting on the play, directors tend to play her up big for the pity effect.)

Best lines: Titus Andronicus

2011-07-17T15:36:00.006+02:00

The reason why no one seems to notice Tamora nowadays is that for pure evil, she is eclipsed by Aaron the Moor – “Moor” meaning “black guy.” He gets all the good lines, and it’s wonderful to see him not regret his evil deeds, but to regret not having done more of them:

LUCIUS. Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?

AARON. Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day- and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse-
Wherein I did not some notorious ill;

As kill a man, or else devise his death;
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it;
Accuse some innocent, and forswear myself;
Set deadly enmity between two friends;
Make poor men's cattle break their necks;

Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.

Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends' door
Even when their sorrows almost was forgot,
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters
'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.'
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly;
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more.
What a guy! You gotta love him.

Titus Andronicus

2011-07-17T14:55:00.007+02:00

Everyone hates, is fascinated by and is scared by Titus Andronicus.

It’s so brutal and amateurish that it shouldn’t be from Shakespeare, but it is. No one wants to believe it, so they try to explain it away. Bloom thinks he was trying to out-Marlowe Marlowe, what with all the blood and the splashy unmotivated violence for effect, but he is underestimating his own hero.

This is my thinking:

Maybe he wasn’t quite Shakespeare yet. Maybe he was still fumbling around, looking for the way he wanted to write. Maybe someone said: “Will, you gotta have a shocker every five minutes. To keep these people watching.” Or: “Will, you’re holding back, you’re not going all the way. You’re too timid. Go to the limit and go one step beyond. Don’t worry about whether it makes sense, don’t wait for a logical opportunity within the story, just slap another rape on it, another murder, more blood, send another severed hand flying through the air: Go over the top.”
This is Shakespeare’s over-the-top play, and maybe that’s why I like it. It’s full of stuff that makes no sense and is clearly just there for effect.

Throughout the play Titus complains that everyone is unjust to him and his beloved family, yet in the very beginning he butchers his own son completely out of the blue (not quite, actually: Titus is demonstrating in a big flashy way his loyalty to the emperor and to Rome and his sense of honor after his son insults the emperor). Then, after getting revenge on the people who raped and mutilated his daughter, he butchers her, too. It’s like that the whole time. Surreal, like a serial killer’s drug dream of ancient Rome.

Hell, it works for me. By inserting some kind of bizarre, horrible blood-letting every five minutes or so, he sure does keep me awake. I had to think of the TV series 24, which pounds you with one twist after the other, most of them related to violence. It has a similar feel. I really liked “24”. I felt like someone was trying – successfully – to mess with my brain, and I let him do it. I also let Shakespeare do it. I’m not afraid of my inner voyeur, and there is something adventurous about being led down a road that takes such crazy turns.

But there is still method to his madness.

What's It All About # 1
One way of looking at it is that Titus is about the sacking of Rome by the barbarian tribes of Europe. The hordes of barbarians didn’t have to overrun the gates, the Romans let them in.

It starts out with Titus returning from conquering the Goths with Tamora the Goth queen as his prisoner. About five minutes later Tamora is Empress of Rome and all of a sudden everyone is playing her game.

The Romans did admire and fear the barbarians just as we today admire and fear the things that may eventually destroy us. How that is happening – a loss of liberal values, for example, or a loss of civil rights on the other hand – depends on your political view. No matter: now as then, faced with a strong enemy, a kind of Stockholm Syndrome ensues, and soon our enemy is controlling us, just when we think we have defeated him.

What makes it all possible is Rome's inner weakness. Outwardly powerful, as demonstrated by Titus' victories, it is inwardly corrupted by intrigues, egocentrism and decadence. Though you can’t see it yet from the outside, it is ripe for plunder. Everything that happens in Titus happens only because the Romans themselves encourage it.

You can also see it as a rape story: The Rape of Lucrece taken one step further. The rapist in this case is Titus and him victim is Tamora, whose country Titus rapes. When Titus's competitor Saturninus spots the proud, sexy Tamora in chains, he marries her, lusting perhaps after a piece of that great barbarian … freedom, strength, pride and vitality, which he as an over-civilized decadent Roman lacks. She sees her chance to take her revenge on Titus and basically rape Rome just as Rome raped her people.

The interesting thing is how she manages to go from victim to doer. She doesn’t do it by moaning and groaning all the time. He shows the Romans her strength, and Rome, which has no real strength, is turned on.

Lavinia, Titus's pure, virtuous, idealized and over-civilized daughter, is the opposite – she does nothing but suffer, and in the end dies at Titus's own hand. Why Titus murders her in the end in unclear, but you can figure it out yourself: Either he is a chauvinist creep who sees a violated daughter as a breach to his honor, or he is simply putting her out of her misery, or he is disgusted by her unwillingness to rise above her victimhood.
Once Tamora comes to power, Titus, the original conqueror/rapist, is put on the defensive. Now it’s his turn to be raped by Tamora in a similar way. He sees how it feels, and the challenge now is: Can he rise above it and prove to be Tamora’s worthy opponent?

If you look at it this way, you have in Tamora the first of Shakespeare's great female characters – as strong, smart, powerful and bloody as the men. Tamora reminds me a lot of Kriemhild in the Nibelungenlied. Ah, but what doesn't remind me of Kriemhild in the Nibelungenlied?

What's It All About # 2

You can also see it as the education of Titus, who starts out a Great Man of Rome with all the virtues befitting such a station – loyalty, statesmanship, honor (he sacrifices/kills his own son when the boy insults the Emperor). But soon he must learn that the virtues of a society or merely a façade perpetrated by the ruling class to control their underlings; that Rome is really only selfishness and betrayal and greed and hatred.

He was duped, as we all are, into believing the propaganda of the ruling set and thus serving them. But when he sees that he is only and always will only be a dumb pawn in another violent game that he was never meant for him to win, he stumbles, almost falls, but finds the strength to get revenge. Which, by the way, is not a bad thing, but in fact the only valid move he can make in this game.

There is a point in the story where he says,

"Marcus, we are but shrubs, no cedars we,
no big-bon'd men fram'd of the Cyclops' size;
but metal, Marcus, steel to the very back… “ (Act 4, Scene 3)
It comes at a point when his suffering is so great and his madness coming on that you think he can't stand another blow. But now he crosses that point and discovers there is strength there, corrupted and bent by suffering, but the steel is still there, and he is strong enough to continue and toward revenge.

It’s all true, of course: Virtue is a tool used by those in power to control others, revenge is a language they understand, victimhood is neither the end to anything nor in any way admirable, and when you think you can’t take it anymore, quite possibly you can.

The Passionate Pilgrim

2010-12-16T07:41:00.000+01:00

None of the poems in “The Passionate Pilgrim” are good.

Most likely, Shakespeare wrote only five of them, though the publisher back then claimed he wrote all. There are 20 total, the authors of the others are sometimes known, other times not.

The best poem in the little collection is not Shakespeare’s and it’s not much of a poem. It’s very simple and straight-forward, more like song lyrics than poetry, but it really moves along in a simple and affecting way. That guy had potential. Too bad he never got famous. Oh, wait, he did: Apparently, it was Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s great competitor:

Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield…

But if you compare them the other poems (and assuming Shakespeare really only did write five of them), you see a difference. Shakespeare is more assured than the others and more importantly, his words carry more weight. The others are flouncing around, it’s all shepherds and Adonis and love and lying in the grass. Shakespeare gives you the feeling that he is going beyond that. In the best cases, he plays with logic in a paradoxical way.

Here’s a presumably non-Shakespeare beginning (Poem Nr. 4):

Sweet Cytherea, sitting by a brook
With young Adonis, lovely, fresh and green…

Here’s Shakespeare (Poem Nr. 1 / Sonnet 138):

When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies…

It’s not just images or pretty scenes of love, immediately there’s intellectual connection.

Also, he nails the endings. He knows that it’s the end that more impresses the reader, and it’s strange that the other poets sometimes don’t seem to get that (oddly enough).

Here’s Nr. 4 again (the poem is about Cytherea trying to seduce the beautiful but inexperienced Adonis – he, being stupid, resists):

Then fell she on her back, fair queen, and toward:
He rose and ran way; ah fool too froward!

I like his foolishness, but it just end it with a little comment thrown at his back while he beats it is a let-down.

Here’s Sonnet 138:

Therefore I’ll lie with love, and love with me,
Since that our faults in love thus smother’d b e.

All of a sudden, everything is wrapped up and the thought is also somehow new – a conclusion that surprises and satisfies.

Shakespeare mastered 1) the art of challenging and surprising the reader and 2) the art of the ending.

Weirdest line

2010-10-28T08:56:00.001+02:00

(in Lucrece, but maybe in Shakespeare so far):

For men have marble, women waxen, minds.

As the Shakespeares of today say: WTF?

The Rape of Lucrece

2010-10-22T08:57:00.006+02:00

It seemed to me when I read the long poem “The Rape of Lucrece,” that something completely different was happening than what had happened in Shakespeare’s works so far (assuming the chronology of his works is right).

Lucrece is about a mythical/historical event from pre-Republic Rome in which the beautiful Lucrece ist raped by the ruler of Rome, Tarquin, then she kills herself and after her body is paraded through the streets the people rise up, kill Tarquin and establish the republic.

It sounds really boring. I have a hard time imagining an interesting rape, except maybe as porn. I mean, you know what’s going to happen. The only way to make it interesting is if suddenly the rapist and victim turn out to be someone they didn’t think they were – the victim turns out to be the president’s wife who’s snuck out of the White House to meet a love, and now the Rapist is in big trouble. Or as a comedy: the rape takes place in some kind of funny place where the rapist is continually struggling to open a lawn chair or tripping over toys left lying around by children or something like that.

Shakespeare does the same thing – the post-modernist thing – he did in “Venus and Adonis”, which was to slow time and go off on every possible digression he can find. Between the time that Tarquin, who is a guest in Lecrece’s house, gets out of bed and goes to her room and rapes her, the narration goes all over the place and it becomes a rumination on motivation, rationality and animal desire:

Tarquin wonders how he can do this, knowing he’s taking a huge political and personal risk, knowing he’s not going to think it was worth it in the morning, but still this animal desire, so overpowering in the night, cannot be denied.

Good line:

The sweets we wish for turn to loathed sours
Even in the moment that we call them ours

He’s not a psychopath, he’s everyman, who, late at night returning home alone and lonely, passes a whorehouse and tells himself: Don’t go in there, it’s a waste of money, it’s a waste of time, you don’t need this, in the morning you will regret it, but he keeps circling the block until finally he gives up and goes in.

The discussion during the rape and Lucrece’s actions and ruminations afterward are similar – self-aware and self-reflective, but not in a psychological way, more in a universal way. Shakespeare grasps at these big, abstract ideas: What is time? He even puts in a detailed art-historical description and critique of a painting, and Lucrece wonders how outward appearances can so well disguise inward character.

The amazing thing is: This isn’t just a pot-boiler, like “Venus and Adonis” is an erotic pot-boiler, it’s intellectually satisfying, it makes you think about a series of abstract ideas that nonetheless are applicable to you.

No one screams and goes nuts. Lucrece doesn’t do what rape victims in TV shows do today, “I just closed my eyes and went to a better place”. That’s one the great advantages to pre-Freudian writing: You can use action as a platform for ideas or whatever you want. Nowadays the only use of rape in literature is to create shock and pity, and I’m so tired of that. Victims always have to be victims, evil deed-doers always have to by sick psychopaths. Everyone needs therapy, everyone’s a victim, everyone’s always suffering.

You could argue that Shakespeare is not treating rape as the horrible thing it really is, the need for control, the breaking of a human soul, etc., and I would say: fine with me. I’m tired of that. I get the point already that rape is bad and hurts. Frankly, I can figure out that rape is horrible just by imagining it, I don’t need a psychologist to pop up and explain: “It’s not about sex, it’s about control.”

I want to hear something new, I want to hear what the writer has to say, about anything, really. As long as it’s intelligent and engaging. I really like the feeling that there is a restless, coherent brain behind the prose I am reading, and that he’s talking to me and not just parading schoolbook emotions past my eyes.

Fickle, false and full of fraud

2010-09-03T11:44:00.002+02:00

I just misquoted Venus’s last words to my girlfriend:

“Fickle, false and full of fraud.”

“What’s that?”

“Women.”

“And what about men? Good, gullible and goofy?”

Venus and Adonis

2010-09-03T11:29:00.002+02:00

“Venus and Adonis” is real work to read. It’s one long string of love clichés without anything really happening and on top of that there’s something unpleasant about it: I couldn’t avoid the feeling that I was reading a love poem written by a frustrated female high school teacher to one of her boy students with peach fuzz on his lip.

It’s a long poem that largely consists of the goddess Venus knocking a boy hunter off a horse, trapping him in the grass and dousing him in love poetry. In the end he escapes and is killed by a boar and Venus is sad. That’s the story, but it’s really just an excuse to go endlessly on and on about love. In the first three quarters, the rhetoric doesn’t end, it’s a love poetry marathon, Venus can’t stop whispering sweet moaning things into his poor disinterested ears and drooling over him like a dirty old man over a sleeping teenager. It’s kind of embarrassing for Venus.

Rhetorically, everything Shakespeare does well later is already here, but flat: The metaphors, etc. But they are somehow loveless and pedestrian. In some sections, he just strings one love metaphor after the other as if he’s going through that thesaurus of his he had in his brain, filling space. Probably he really was filling space, too. It’s a published poem – he never published his plays – and presumably had to fit a certain amount of pages:

Even as the wind is hush’d before it raineth,
Or as the wolf doth grin before he barketh,
Or as the berry breaks before it staineth,
Or like the deadly bullet of a gun…

You want to keep going with the list:

Or as the foot is kicked before the teeth are broken,
Or as the crap is crapped before the foot steppeth in it,
Or as the thesaurus opens before the word is spoken…

Still, there are some interesting things about it.

First of all, Shakespeare picks a duality again. Right at the beginning he states the conflict: She wants love, he wants to hunt. He doesn’t bother to set it up or show why he loves the hunt and she hunts for love – he just states it so he can skip all preliminaries and get right into the thick of it.

Then there’s the comparison to the other famous version of the story, from Ovid. But that version is flat and unambitious. In Ovid, goddess and pretty boy are lovers. Shakespeare turned it into a story of unrequited love, and there is a lot of drama in this heavy-breathing goddess trying to seduce a young boy that has a lot in common with a wet noodle.

But the really interesting thing is the inner monologue, because that’s really what Venus’ rhetoric is. The kind of thing that modernists and post-modernists would do later, right down to Harold Brodkey, who could extrapolate whole pages of gush from a single motion, Shakespeare was already doing: Turning a few moments of action into a bottomless pit of feelings spewed out in endless monologue.

The action seems to go on and on, but really they’re just grappling with each other for a few moments: She grabs him, he gets away, that’s pretty much it. But every moment, every attempted kiss, is argued endlessly out with dialogue that is really inner monologue pushed to the surface, then layered again, examined and reexamined and spun around, going around in circles searching for a way into some kind of center but never finding it. Which is, come to think of it, much like what a lover does in his mind.

As far as the poetry itself goes, there are some good parts. But they are not in the gushing first section. It gets good when the woods get dark and Venus’ soul with it, and she wanders about filled with dread for no particular reason, foreseeing his death, for example, or toward the very end, when Venus gets her final monologue about the horrors of love, which I really like:

Venus speaking:

“Since thou art dead, lo here I prophesy,
Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend:
It shall be waited on with jealousy,
Find sweet beginning, but unsavory end;
Ne’er settled equally, but high or low,
That all love’s pleasure shall not match his woe.

It shall be fickle, false und full of fraud,
Bud, and be blasted, in a breathing while;
The bottom poison, and the top o’erstraw’d
With sweets that shall the truest sight beguile;
The strongest body shall it make most weak,
Strike the wise dumb, and teach the fool to speak.

It shall be sparing, and too full of riot,
Teaching decrepit age to tread the measures;
The staring ruffian shall it keep quiet,
Pluck down the rich, enrich the poor with treasures;
It shall be raging mad, and silly mild,
Make the young old, the old become a child.

It shall suspect where is no cause to fear,
It shall not fear where it should most mistrust;
It shall be merciful, and too severe,
And most deceiving when it seems most just;
Perverse it shall be, where it shows most toward;
Put fear to valour, courage to the coward.

It shall be cause of war and dire events,
And set dissension ‘twixt the son and sire;
Subject and servile to all discontents,
As dry combustions matter is to fire.
Sith in his prime death doth my love destroy,
They that love best, their loves shall not enjoy.”

Bouncing with Two Gentlemen of Verona

2010-08-02T07:18:00.004+02:00

Watching two fictional characters bounce from one end of the extreme to the other in their desires and motivations for no apparent reason, I wondered if that is possible in life, in my life for example.

I would have to say: Yes.

One of my “bounces” took place over a long period of time (unlike anything that ever happens in a Shakespeare play). I realized that I did not want to be a Mormon.

I was raised a Mormon and discovered Germany when I was sent on a mission here, and I believed in the church with a hot fervency that was like holding on with the tips of my fingers to a reason to life. But even then, in the beginning, there was an alternative in my mind: To be able to write, they said, you had to break out of a strict moral confines and a conforming society and experiment, see the other side, see all sides, be free of ideologies to observe what life really is. Well, all that was theory. What bugged me most was a single sentence: “There has never been a great Mormon writer.” I knew there was truth to that and if I was ever going to be a writer…
Yet, should I sacrifice God and the Truth just for a career and earthly kudos? What kind of a superficial soulless man am I?

I didn’t break out until there was more reason to do it.

In Germany, at 30, I realized that my life itself was crippled by the church, contained, dominated. My will was not my own, it was like a child’s, who asks permission for everything. It was the midlife-crisis-at-thirty that made me leave the church.

That may say something about me as a writer – that I am not dedicated enough. Maybe. You know the old Faulker addage about being willing to sell your grandmother.

It may also say that the dream of career was never the most important thing in my life, though I’d always thought it was. Life itself, what life is, the experience of it, was always more important, though I didn’t know it.

The second bounce was, as with Proteus, a woman.

I really was all fire and lust over this one beautiful, mysterious and sensual woman, and I still am (like many men, I tend to fall into love often but never really out of it). But she was not an intellectual, a writer, a brainy type. It was inevitable that I would meet her opposite: A writer. Also mysterious, also sensual, but it was not her sex I was after. It was her brain. As soon as I met her I knew I had to have that brain, and I made the trade-off quickly and without thinking twice.
Women like to say that men only want sex, but it’s not true. Even if they say it. Even if they believe it. Sex is the carrot before the jackass and the first order of business, but “urgency” is not “priority”. We confuse that sometimes. It’s sex and sexualized women we think about constantly and look at on the street, but what we really want is usually something else. Sometimes we don’t know it until we are faced with both options.

5. The Two Gentlemen of Verona

2010-07-29T07:43:00.001+02:00

Everyone says this is Shakespeare’s worst play and they have a point. The plot is half-baked, the characters are comic-book-cut-outs and the language is all clichés. Much of it is a real displeasure to read. People say the best parts are the parts about the clownish servants, mainly Launce and his monologues about his madcap dog (if this really is Shakespeare’s first comedy, these are his first of many funny servants), but even these are not worked out.

1. Comedy:

Shakespeare’s comic strategy in this play seems to consist of three elements: 1) the funny servants, 2) sarcastic asides, especially in one comic dialogue in which Julia, the wronged lover disguised as a boy servant, provides them, and 3) everyone’s a little bit kooky in the sense that they do things that don’t make sense. Today people would call these characters “unmotivated” and unbelievable. If you put them all in clown suits and made them fall all over each other while they say the lines they say, maybe you would get a laugh: I can’t imagine any other way to make it work (yet, the play was successful with early audiences).

But still, Shakespeare must have been thinking something when he wrote this, and if you look closely you can see signs that there was some kind of idea behind it.

2. Violent Dualism:

The main reason why the characters seem to act so unbelievably is that they are constantly going from one extreme to another without warning. That becomes especially visible in the end. Proteus, the Evil Gentleman, nearly rapes Silvia, the lover of the Good Gentleman Valentine. Valentine preaches at him for about half a minute, Proteus repents and asks forgiveness for all the bad things he’s done against his pal Valentine throughout the play, Valentine forgives him, they are close friends again. All this you can accept if you really want to. Then Valentine says, “Okay, since we’re friends again, I’ll give you the love of my life Silvia, because friendship is greater than love.” If you’ve taken anything in the play seriously up to now, that’s the last straw, you’re the last one in the audience to walk out. It’s just bizarre, this character veering so suddenly away from everything he has worked for and believed in, and it makes his love to Silvia, which he is constantly preaching about, a joke.

On the other hand, this is a comedy. I can imagine what Shakespeare was trying to do: Throughout the entire play, he plays with dualities; he shows people jumping from one extreme to the other.

In the beginning, Valentine and Proteus discuss what is best, love or career (more or less). Proteus is all for career. Then he meets Julia. Suddenly he’s all for love. (Julia too, is all back and forth about Proteus.) Then he meets Silvia (who is in love with Valentine) and he completely forgets Julia and is head over heels for Silvia. Everything he talks about in theory flies out the window immediately. He doesn’t know his own heart at all, it’s all just talk. Nor does he know what a horrible bad person he is until he meets Silvia and plots to steal her away from Valentine.

Sudden reversal of personality characterizes everyone in the play: Valentine, in exile, meets robbers who want to kill him, but instead they make him their boss. It’s all crap in our eyes, completely out of character from beginning to end. But it’s also all about people saying one thing and doing another and even surprising themselves, doing it.In the end, when Good-Gentleman Valentine offers to hand over the love of his life, for whom he has sacrificed all, to his friend, whom she hates and who has just tried to rape her, Valentine is again doing what he thought he wouldn’t do: He’s showing that friendship is more important to him than love, even though it’s love he can’t stop taking about thought the play.

Of course, Valentine also proves thusly that he is a wimp in general compared to Proteus’ more predatory nature. Then there’s the gay thing: Depending on how you play it, you can make a good case for Valentine simply being secretly in love with Proteus all this time and Silvia just an elaborate beard. This theory makes a lot of sense in the end, but there’s not much in the rest of the play to back it up – Valentine never pines for Proteus when they’re apart – so it probably wasn’t some kind of conscious thing on Shakespeare’s part.

3. Plotting: The Boxing Model vs. the Bolero Model

Shakespeare’s idea of plotting is taking shape. So far I see two methods:

In Richard III he used “The Bolero Model” – that is, he keeps slowly building up one idea until it implodes. With Richard, it was his way to the throne plastered with bodies. The bodies kept piling up, Richard kept getting more and more evil. There was impressively little resistance throughout the play – we’re just astounded again and again as Richard proves himself more and more evil. I kept thinking, if I were to stage it I would set up a huge checklist with all the names of everyone he has to kill in order to get the keep the throne, and whenever he gets one more step toward ultimate power, he’d check off another name. Finally, in the end, resistance gets its act together and finally fights back, and Richard gets his come-uppance. But the resistance doesn’t fight back until the very end.

In Two Gentlemen, Shakespeare uses the Boxing Model: Resistance is immediate and continual. Every time a protagonist makes a move, the antagonist makes a counter-move. It’s slug for slug, back and forth.

The Bolero method only works if build-up is fascinating enough, and Richard of course is a fascinating character. The one-step-forward-two-steps-back Boxing Method keeps us on the edge of our seats no matter if the character is weak or not: We want to know if the protagonist will reach his goal and get anxious every time he experiences a setback. In Gentlemen: Everything Valentine and Proteus do gets reversed, and they have to fight to become master of the situation once more.4. Villainy:

Speaking of Richard – the only interesting character in Two Gentlemen is Evil-Gentleman Proteus. Even though he is poorly drawn, he is a scoundrel, compared with goody-goody/weak-kneed Valentine. He has no compunction against betraying his friend. He acknowledges certain irony in his actions, even the amorality of them, but that doesn’t stop him. The big difference – the reason Richard is so vibrant and fascinating and Proteus, who is actually very villainous for a character in a comedy, is so pale, is that Proteus doesn’t revel in his evil, as Richard does.

The whole time, reading, I kept having this unexplainable urge to rewrite it. I couldn’t help feeling that Shakespeare should have gone further with Evil Proteus and with the entire reversal of personality thing. I thought: If I had a chance to rewrite it, that’s what I would do, I would make Proteus more villainous, more kooky and emotionally erratic, and make Valentine more of a weakling, dreamy-for-love but unable to get his act together (and possibly more in love with Proteus) and also, like Proteus, not knowing his own heart.

Was Shakespeare Shakespeare?

2010-03-06T16:29:00.010+01:00

There's a newish book out in Germany by a literary scholar named Kurt Kreiler who claims that Shakespeare's plays were in fact written by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (book on Amazon.de here).

It's an old theory and one which, as far as I can tell, is not taken very seriously in the English-speaking world (but it's new here). It seems doubtful to me that an aristocrat with the responsibilities that de Vere had could have turned out the sheer mass of material that Shakespeare did. Not to mention: Whoever wrote those plays understood his paying audience well, and I suspect de Vere knew more about this aristocratic fellows than he did about a general theater audience.

But more interesting to me was the elan with which some Germans jumped on the issue. That goes for Kreiler too: Why should a German, whose Literary God is officially Goethe, invest so much passion into "debunking" Shakespeare (the book is 600 pages). Many people are skeptical, of course, but the newspapers are taking it very seriously, and some, like Spiegel, are praising it as hugely important, a breakthrough. An acquaintance of mine who studied the classics at university in the forties triumphantly crowed: "Shakespeare is yesterday! Long live de Vere!"

I began to wonder if there is a cultural component to this Shakespeare/de Vere question: Maybe de Vere simply fits German assumptions about literature better than Shakespeare.

Here's my insta-theory:

Germans prefer de Vere because:

- They believe in hierarchy: Someone born or educated at the top is more likely to create great art than someone born at the bottom. There is some merit to this: Aristocrats have better education and more leisure time. But Germans in general tend to trust people more coming from within the system than people coming from without. A system they can understand and trust; all else is chaos.

- They also believe in the non-commericality of literature. Great literature, they think, cannot be commercial - money dirties art. If de Vere wrote the plays, he didn't do it for the money. He didn't need money - he did it for art. That is pure in German eyes. To write for money, as Shakespeare did, is to be hack; it's hard for Germans to accept that great art can be created for money.

Anglo-Americans prefer Shakespeare because:

- They (and especially Americans) distrust the political heirarchy and romanticize the outsider, the little guy who makes good. You can see signs of this in the Magna Charter, in the various Glorious Revolutions, in the various starts and stops of English democracy, also in the economy: Adam Smith distrusted the ability of politicians to make better decisions than the little guy - in Germany it's the opposite. Compare Smith to Marx, who distrusted the little man to do anything right and demanded that the political hierarchy make all economic decisions. The idea that a guy out of no where with no family and no class could be a super-genius appeals to the English-speaking world.

- Also, Anglo-Americans have a different relationship to money. Sure, the English aristocracy were afraid of the idea of free trade as much as the German aristocracy was, but the idea that the little guy could make good financially was, in England and especially in America, a positive thing, while in Germany it is seen with a certain amount of mistrust: The "rags to riches" story is considered a fraud and the rich are seen to have done something immoral to get where they are. For Anglo-Americans, it is positive to make money off art (no one begrudges James Cameron his millions), and art that makes money is still art. The idea of a little guy making good on the London stage and retiring a rich guy to Stratford-upon-Avon is, for us, a heroic and reassuring story. For many Germans, Shakespeare's wealth detracts from the majesty of his art.

And then, of course, there's simple patriotism in general. Even Germans accept Shakespeare as the world's Nr. 1 literary genius and see their beloved Goethe as, unfortunately, Nr. 2. So anything that cuts Shakespeare down a notch (even though the de Vere theory doesn't detract from the genius of the work) gives them a certain satisfaction.

MORE: As coincidence would have it, more just came in on this issue. Two Americans have published books on the issue. One is about the De Vere theory (including an incestuous affair with Queen Elizabeth) and the other is a history of the various theories about the "true" identity of the author of Shakespeare's plays, not just the de Vere theory. Here's the review in the New York Times.

Best Line: Richard III

2010-01-07T08:59:00.001+01:00

My favorite line in all Richard III:

Richard:
Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass,
That I may see my shadow as I pass.

(Act 1, Scene 2, 269-270)

I have no idea what it means, but I love it.

Watching Richard III

2009-12-31T09:14:00.006+01:00

Watching the film versions of Richard III, you see the weaknesses and the strengths - not only of Richard, but of Shakespearean playwriting in general.

The weakness is definitely that Richard has no equally matched opponent. The story basically is a moralist checklist story - the more murders he checks off on his way to kingship, the more the list grows and the fewer friends he has to support him, until he has done himself in. It’s a lesson, not a drama.

The strengths are the language and the all-out evil character of Richard.

The two main film adaptations are the 1955 Laurence Olivier version and the 1995 Ian McKellen version. (The only important versions I missed were the 55-minute silent version from 1912 with Frederick Warde, the BBC television versions and, sadly, the horror versions: “Tower of London” with Basil Rathbone from 1939 and it’s remake in 1962 with Vincent Price, and “Theatre of Blood,” also with Price, about a theater actor who goes on a killing spree using Shakespearean methods, including one Richard III-murder - I assume it’s the wine barrel murder.)
McKellen is the most fun to watch, just because of the spectacle of this great actor chewing up the scenery: His Richard is all-out, over the top, grinning monster. McKellen was having a ball.

However, Olivier’s is still the best. He plays Richard as a simmering, controlled, over-articulated, slightly effeminate schemer. Ironically, what makes Olivier’s version better is that he plays Richard as a play, not a movie.

Let’s face it, Shakespeare wrote for a very limited, artificial and static stage. McKellen tries too hard to adapt the language to the dynamic of moving pictures, where everything moves, where everyone interacts, where you’re always thinking: Could it really happen this way?

Alas, it could not really happen this way. When two people are talking to each other, the one person does not go on and on, it’s a discussion. On real life, people don’t go off on monologues. That's the main problem with Shakespeare today: the style comes off as un-modern and stilted.

Shakespeare wrote speeches, not dialogues, even in scenes where two or more people are present. McKellen thought he could get around this by making someone nod or raise his eyebrows every couple of lines, or by accompanying a monologue with other interaction: He signs a paper while he talks, he wanders through a building, nodding to people, while he talks, the result is the feeling that his is fake. That the director isn’t doing his job: Why isn’t that guy reacting? Why is Richard going on and on as if no one else is in the room? It was a nice try, but it feels more artificial the more he tries to add a sense of pseudo-realism.
Olivier’s version is artificial and theatrical. He lets his Richard just stop the action and speak for minutes on end to the audience; his dialogues are really monologues; he declaims in a loud, over-articulated, theatrical voice instead of mumbling as per “The Method.” He embraces the formalism of Shakespeare and it brings it off: This is the kind of acting that Shakespeare wrote for. It’s poetry, not dialogue. Here, you feel all the nuances; you see the beauty of it. Where McKellen cuts monologues into snippets to disguise their monologue-ness, Olivier gives Shakespeare the full time and breadth that he needs. You feel the luxury of the language.

4. Richard III

2009-09-15T09:37:00.002+02:00

1. Sentences That Eat Themselves

The opening of Richard III is an example of my favorite kind of sentence: Sentences that eat themselves. “Now is the winter of our discontent” sounds pretty depressing and threatening, but by the second line it turns into something else: positive. It continues: “…made sunny and bright by York’s ascension to the throne” or something like that. (My book is behind me as I write and I’m too lazy to get it – it’s the first part of the sentence that is famous enough to quote from memory).

Of course, the first part of the sentence remains, even after it is negated, negative – Richard is discontented. You’re supposed to have that impression. I just love a sentence that unexpectedly changes meaning in midstream.

2. At last, strong language

There is a light year of difference between Henry VI (1-3) and Richard III, which some scholars assume were the first plays Shakespeare wrote. The difference is so great and so easy to see that some scholars think Shakespeare didn’t write the Henry VI plays, or only a very small part of them (most likely there was at least one other collaborator involved). The language in Richard is immensely strong and clear. Shakespeare is absolutely confident here, you can feel it. It’s hard for me to say exactly how he does it, but every sentence that Richard speaks in his monologues and throughout the play is not only loaded with evil, which is what most people notice about it, but with strength and clarity. It’s the language itself, the choice of words, the ways Shakespeare puts the sentences together – it is as if in Henry VI he was goofing around, trying things out, laying with the hammer and nails instead of using them; in Richard III every nail is pounded in with a single beat of the hammer, it’s amazing.

The contrast works not only comparing Richard III to the Henry VI plays – it works within Richard III as well. The dialogue of the other characters, the Yorkists he is about to murder, is uncertain and blathering, like it was in Henry VI. It’s like the characters themselves inspire Shakespeare or not: Richard inspired him and Richard’s language is stunning; the Lancastrians and Yorkists in general did not inspire him, and their language is indecisive, repetitive and moaning.

3. Court of Weaklings

Did I mention that all the other Yorkists and Lancastrians – the court of the king that Richard III murders – are a bunch of whiney indecisive fawning wordy boring shallow spineless moaning slackers? It’s not only that Shakespeare paints them this way, to contrast with Richard, they were this way in the Henry VI trilogy and they are just bring to see on stage. From the viewpoint of the audience, that has to sit through all their “sweet cousin” s and “your most loyal servant” s, they all deserve to die. If I were the stage director I would just let a piano fall on them from the rafters in the middle of their speeches and get it over with.

4. Where’s the Antagonist?

What this means is that Richard has no antagonist that can be taken seriously.

I’ve always loved the idea of stories without a “bad guy.” The reason, I suppose, is that I grew up on Hollywood movies, most of which have a clear antagonist/bad guy, and in action moves that bad guy not only follows goals that are somehow disadvantageous to our hero, they are personally evil. That’s one of the reason I am fascinated by the Nibelungenlied: It does fine without a bad guy. All its characters that fight each other are all about the same in terms of good/evil and in terms of whether their cause is just. There is no moral reckoning there. No one spends a lot of time biting the heads off chickens; they’re just caught up in a major conflict of interest. It’s a purely political story.

Richard III manages to do without an antagonist and at the same time be a moral tale.

Sure, Richmond pops up in the end to defeat him in battle, yes, but he’s just the means to defeat in the end, not a player all the way through the play. It is clear to us by then that Richard is his own worst enemy: The reason Richmond defeats him is that all his allies have fled to Richmond’s side. Richard’s sheer evil-ness carried him to the throne, but it also destroyed him. Caesar would have turned around after conquering his enemies and showered them with gifts and shown the world what a nice guy he is and been generous and bought all his former allies; Richard is not evil for the sake of power, he is evil for the sake of evil, and that is his undoing. Thus, Richard III is a morality play in an almost Protestant sense: “Look at him, he is evil, do not follow in his footsteps.”

5. Minor character steals the show

One morning, I woke up bitter and depressed – things weren’t going as fast or as good as they should and I was feeling old and as if everything was passing me by; I felt like I was treading water, I felt like a failure.

Then I read Queen Margaret.

Up to now, Margaret has not been a very fascinating character. In the Henry VI trilogy, she is basically the bitchy wife for whom Henry can never do anything good enough and who takes things into her own hands but isn’t really very effective either. In Richard III, she appears to complain about her loss and woe and about everyone else, and that’s really all she does. You can’t take her seriously because you think: Why is she still hanging around? She never really liked it here in the first place, and all she’s doing now is complaining. She’s like a ghost.

But now, after Richard III is crowned and kills the two cousins in the Tower and everyone knows he is evil, Elisabeth and the Duchess come to the Tower to mourn the boys’ death and Margaret pops up. Now, of course, instead of despising her, the Duchess and Elisabeth have a lot in common with her, and they listen.

What comes now really surprised me. Margaret has a long overblown speech about how everyone is so nasty and then the other two women says: Wow, you’re really good at moaning and groaning, teach us how to do that. And in a very short – to short – speech, Margaret maps out how to complain:

Margaret:
Forbear to sleep the nights and fast the days;
Compare dead happiness with living woe;
Think that thy babes were sweeter than they were,
And he that slew them fouler than he is:
Bettering thy loss makes the bad-causer worse.
Revolving this will teach you how to curse.

Image: Queen Margaret of Anjou

It’s like an tiny instruction manual about blowing up your own woe into a thing so big everyone has to notice, whether there’s any reason to or not. I had to think of the RAF – the German terrorist group Red Army Fraction – who went grew up in and lived in a wealthy, democratic, well-functioning society without any real cares and hated every minute of it. The only thing they were right about was: 1) German society in the 70s was capitalistic, but already then it was very clear that life under Communism was much worse and 2) there were still a lot of Nazis around and the Nazi generation had never come clean and said Mea Culpa and asked their grandchildren for forgiveness.

Comparing that to life, say, in Africa, those two complaints are pretty minor. Sure, the young generation had a feeling that the media and political structures were so overbearing and rigid that they would never change without some kind of radical solution, and that was partly true, but calling for a revolution in order to point out that the older generation was a bunch of Nazis – that seems like taking a bazooka to swat a fly.

And you can say the same thing about a thousand different complaints all around the world – the actual injustice that people are complaining about is often miniscule compared with the excitement and indignation the protesters get caught up in.

That’s the Margaret Syndrome: Take some grievance you have and completely exaggerate it as well and as loud and as long as you can and you will get attention. Make it your hobby, make it the contents of your life, make it your cause and the philosophy of your soul. (It’s not that Margaret wasn’t right about Richard being evil – it was that she was no better, and that the Duchess and Elizabeth probably could have stopped Richard long ago if they had wanted, but they didn’t make a move, and now their only recourse is to play the victims.)

I read this, thought of my complaints about my own bitter failed life, and said to myself: This is not what I want to be.

6. The Asides

Here’s one of Shakespeare’s weaknesses: He’s in love with himself.

All writers are, of course, and all writers are afraid that the reader won’t notice how brilliant they are, how ironic, how subtle, so they find ways to repeat their subtlety until the reader finally gets it, and to point out their irony so the reader doesn’t pass it over. Shakespeare also does this.

In Richard III he shows how evil Richard is and then Richard pretending to be god and righteous and even quoting scripture to fool all his enemies into trusting him. We see him do it. We’re not stupid, we know he’s dissembling, we know he’s pretending to be good while being evil and doing it well. Then he turns to the audience and tells us how evil he is and that he’s just pretending to be good and isn’t it clever that he, such an evil guy, is quoting scripture to pretend to be good?

Richard
I say, without characters fame lives long
[aside] Thus, like the formal Vice, Iniquity,
I moralize two meanings in one word.

That’s the writer thinking: I wonder if they got the irony? I’d better point it out to them, just in case.

7. Why this murder scene and not another?

It’s interesting to see what Shakespeare chooses to show and what not. Early on he has a very moving and beautifully-written scene where Clarence is murdered in the Tower. Clarence is imprisoned, he wakes up from a nightmare and relates it in detail to his jailor, then is murderers come in and he tries to reason with them and they even show a bit of conscience (there’s even some humor here – they are the Laurel and Hardy of assassins),and then Clarence dies.

A few scenes later, the two young princes are also murdered in the Tower. As victims, these boys are much more emotionally involving than Clarence, but we don’t see the scene: It is reported. (To be fair: Clarence is Richard’s brother, but to see, onstage, two little kids pleading for their lives – that’s 50% more ticket sales right there.) There are more murders to come, and we don’t see any of them. Shakespeare chose to show the first one and just report the others.

The structural reason of course is so that he doesn’t repeat himself the whole time. You see one murder, you’ve seen them all. But why show Clarence and not the far more emotional murder of the boys? Was it chance? Did Shakespeare just say: We show the first murder, then no others. Was it the audience? Was Shakespeare writing for a political-savvy audience that knew about Clarence’s historical reputation as a politician? (Clarence existed, played an important role in the War of the Roses, was tried for treason and drowned in a vat of wine – though Shakespeare’s audience might not have known all the details, they knew about him and that he was an important historical character.)

Maybe he didn’t want the play to dip from political into sentimental, with the murder of young innocents being just too sob-worthy for his adult audience to take seriously. One way or the other, it makes the play a bit more adult: After all, in writing his historical plays, one of the goals Shakespeare is trying for it to tell a little bit about history in some way. Going for a politically important character treats the whole thing a little more seriously.

Image: George of York, Duke of Clarence

8. Two Nightmares

There are two dreams (or waking-up-from-dreaming passages) that are handled differently and are very interesting.

The other is early on: Clarence relates his nightmare to his jailor about drowning and seeing all kinds of things underwater. Bloom loves this passages, and it’s a great passage, one of the three or four best in the play.

The second right at the end: Richard wakes up on the eve of the final battle with self-doubts and questions who he is and why he is evil and is a bit confused. It’s his dark hour.

The difference is interesting for writers: Clarence’s nightmare is stronger, because it’s more concrete and has more tactile imagery – it’s full of fish eating eyeballs out of eye sockets and all that. Richard’s dream on the other hand is pure abstraction, it’s like he just got out of therapy. He’s all, “Who am I?” etc.

It’s what the Germans call “Bauchnabelschau” – navel-gazing. (Hey, we English-speakers call it that too!) And that’s the second problem with it: First, it’s too abstract without sensory images, and second, it’s nothing special. We all feel sorry for ourselves all the time, we all indulge in navel-gazing, and seeing it on the stage is nothing special. Seeing Richard in the beginning scenes talk about destroying the entire world – that was abstract too, but it was interesting. It’s something we don’t all do every day. But navel-gazing – we know all about that already, thanks.

There’s something else about that last dream.

Bloom hates it. I wasn’t so sure t was that bad the first time I dead it: I read it in Bloom’s synopsis of the play before I read the play itself, so I read the dream passage out of context, and it seemed okay to me. Then I read it in the context of the play and saw that true, it’s bad. The problem is: It breaks character, it even destroys character.

The whole time, we love and hate Richard, we’re fascinated by him. But all of a sudden, he gets up on the stage and tells everyone that he himself is a horrible person and empty inside and that – in moral terms – he deserves to die. What happened to the evil gut chewing up the scenery? That’s the guy we love. We want to see him brawling and cursing and generally being hubristic to the very end. But with this dream, Shakespeare wrote a very Protestant moral ending. It’s like his “asides”, in which he tells the audience what to think. He’s saying: “Dear audience, even Richard, in the end, sees that he himself is a horrible person, so don’t think for a minute that just because you loved him up to now that anything he’s done was worth it. Don’t do this at home!”

9. The Build-Up

I gotta say I really like the almost-end. The last page was a let-down, but the four or five pages before that were elegant and somehow rewarding.

It’s the final battle on Bosworth Field. The two armies gather and we see them the night before the battle. It’s set up so we see them parallel to each other – there are even stage instructions that specify that Richard’s tent is on one side of the stage and Richmond’s on the other. Then they talk to their men, they monologue, they dream.

Shakespeare really takes his time doing this – it’s the build-up and at the same time a kind of elegiac preparation for doom. Build-up for Richmond, doom for Richard. Nothing else in the play is this elegant – there’s symmetry to it, there is poetry in the scene itself (Shakespeare has written better language elsewhere) and it’s very satisfying.

I don’t know if it was really necessary to send eleven – count ‘em, eleven – ghosts to haunt Richard’s dreams, and of course in the morning he wakes up and his monologue (see above: Nightmares) is a let-down, but the simple fact of the symmetry of the scene and the fact that the battle afterwards (it’s almost non-existent) is far less important to Shakespeare than the build-up before makes this beautiful. It’s the first time he does something this pleasingly-constructed on stage.

It’s the final scene of the War of the Roses – after tomorrow’s battle, the War will be settled for good. It’s not the climactic battle Shakespeare savors, but the peace before the storm. That moment of introspection, that moment where no one on earth knows what the outcome will be, but is determined to take that final step – Shakespeare seems to have chosen that moment as the most human of moments, and it’s certainly the most human in the four War of the Roses plays.

10. Sucking up to Queen Elizabeth

The end deteriorates. From Richard’s dream to the final battle and Richmond’s crowing victory, it becomes clear that Shakespeare has become a patriot. We get preaching about what this means for England. How the terrible day are over at last. And how a new era now begins. It’s the Elizabethan era – Richmond, the Lancastrian, paved the way for the Tudors.

The Richard portrayed by Shakespeare was far more evil than the historical Richard, and the reason is probably that Shakespeare was working from a pro-Tudor/pro-Elizabeth history book, which portrayed Richard as horribly as possible in order to justify his overthrow (he was king, after all) and the ascension of the Tudors. So in retrospect the entire War of the Roses project was really about legitimizing the Tudors, which Shakespeare does most clearly in Richard. He’s sucking up to his queen.

I can imagine that this was very self-affirming for many in Shakespeare’s audience, not only the audience member attached to Tudor politics. It’s patriotic. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it doesn’t age well: Now, the end is just dreary, a let-down, a cop-out.

1-3. Henry VI, parts 1-3 (The War of the Roses Trilogy)

2009-08-28T09:06:00.006+02:00

1.

You can say what you will about Henry VI – “It doesn’t stand up to Shakespeare’s better works, it’s clumsy and repetitive, it’s so bad that maybe Shakespeare didn’t write it himself,” etc. (Bloom calls all three plays simply “tedious”.) But for a play, it still manages to give you a certain image of war, which must have been writing-wise, the main challenge.

The problem with a play about war, as opposed to a war movie, is that you can’t show the battles, not really. It’s too much and even if you put a lot of guys on stage fighting back and forth, it’s just a lot of confusion. It only get dramatic when you can identify the individual characters, and so you are more or less reduced to showing a series of duels.

But Shakespeare manages to get around this by narration. He brings is characters onstage, out of breath and just out of reach of the thick of the battle, and they describe to each other what they just went through. It’s war second-hand. But it still works. There are sections where you do get an idea of how the battle was.

There are even one or two sections that really bring it home – the language is clear and dramatic, the imagery is extreme and tactile. Here’s an example:

York:
The army of the queen hath got the field:
My uncles both are slain in rescuing me;
And all my followers to the eager foe
Turn back and fly, like ships before the wind,
Or lambs pursu’d by hunger-starved wolves.
My sons, God knows what hath bechanced them:
But this I know, they have demeaned themselves
Like men born to renown by life or death.
Three times did Richard make a lane to me,
And thrice cried, “Courage, father! Fight it out!”
And full as oft came Edward to my side
With purple falchion, painted to the hilt
In blood of those that had encountered him:
And when the hardiest warriors did retire,
Richard cried, “Charge! And give no foot of ground!”
Edward, “A crown, or else a glorious tomb!
A scepter, or an earthly sepulcre!”
With this we charged again: but out alas!
We budged again; as I have seen a swan
With bootless labour swim against the tide
And spend her strength with over-matching waves…

He’s basically narrating to us what can’t be staged. It’s not great, but it works. It is a bad play(s), but the fact that he tackled this difficult challenge of staging an epic on a tiny space is impressive.

2.

Let’s talk about overplotting.

Shakespeare is not known as a plotter, he’s known for character. But the Henry VI is almost only plot. In fact there’s too much plot.

The plot is continually going back and forth: The Lancasters are on top, then the Yorks are on top, then the Lancasters are on top. It never ends. That’s why it’s so tedious. At some point, we don’t really care.

The question is: Did Shakespeare write it that way because he thought we’d gasp every time fate changes course (of course, we do a little, it’s true, but there are so many characters, and for us today at least there are no clear sympathies with either the Yorks or the Lancasters, so we don’t quite suffer with any of their ups and downs)? Or did he say: “It has to be this way, this is how the War of the Roses went historically, I have to stick to the facts, I have no choice.”

That’s possible. It’s hard to imagine Shakespeare not having the guts to change history if he wanted to, but this is early Shakespeare. (I’m not a guy who respects history enough to say its portrayal in art has to be accurate - I know enough about history to know that you never get it right anyway, and I know enough about writing to know that the writer’s first responsibility is to the story, not the facts.)

On the other hand: I’m not sure the plays would have worked better if they had been less complicated.

3.

And the main reason for that is: The characters are not all that fascinating. Henry VI, the Lancastrian, is mealy-mouthed and weak-kneed; York is tentative – he wants to usurp the throne but he has his moral limits. He won’t murder, he won’t break a vow, he takes a long time warming up before he goes for the throat. Queen Margaret is probably the strongest character here, and she waffles too – she’s big on words but in the end she remains ineffective.

Don’t get me wrong: Shakespeare paints a humanly-accurate portrait of a bunch of weak-kneed wanna-bes thrashing half-heartedly at each other until finally something happens, but wanna-bes are generally not that interesting. Not even Shakespeare can make us love them. No one can. You just can’t make an indecisive character interesting. Everyone says that literature portrays mankind as it really is and gives us truth, but the truth is, some parts of mankind don’t translate into literature and thus are never really well-portrayed, and the wanna-be is one of them. There may be truth about mankind in Henry VI, but it’s truth no one will ever know because no one wants to see the plays.

But wait – that might not be true. Shakespeare will return to the character-as-waffler later in his greatest play, Hamlet. There’s the rub, if you ask me: Why did he fail to make the Lancasters and Yorks, who after all changed the history of England, interesting, while succeeding with a little worm like Hamlet?

Images: Henry VI of Lancaster (above) and Edward of York (below). They both look like waffelers - in fact, they look exactly alike.

4.

Image: Joan of Arc

Then there are the minor characters. If the Henry VI trilogy is interesting at all, it’s because of the minor characters, mainly Joan of Arc and the scary rebel John Cade. Shakespeare is clearly fascinated by these characters and he makes them fascinating, giving them more space than is really necessary. And that’s good, because they are the best part. It’s John Cade who gets off the best line in the plays: “Kill all the lawyers”.

To get off a great line like that, you need a great character to do it. A character like Henry VI can’t utter a line like that. He’s a king – he can’t be crazy at the same time.

That’s always the problem, in any story. The audience wants to identify with the hero, the good guy, the guy who finds happiness. But the interesting characters are the bad guys, or the losers, or the servants and fools who have nothing to lose and thus can afford to be cynical and funny. That’s why Shakespeare always has these great minor characters and great villains: They’re more interesting. Like the old adage about morality and fiction: Evil is always more interesting that goodness. Like Tolstoy said: “All happy families are the same, all unhappy families are different.”

It is these three characters that Shakespeare invest great lines, he goes crazy with them, pulls out all the stops, even though they are minor characters and really, the plays could do well without them. A character could come onstage and say: John Cade is rebelling… Now he’s defeated... Now he’s been captured and is dead.” We wouldn’t notice the missing scenes.

This is one of the most difficult problems with writing. It’s really hard to make a main character or hero as interesting as these guys – the all-out-evil villains or the little guys who have nothing to lose and can make fun of everything. Detective novels try to do it by giving their heroes some kind of weakness – they are alcoholic, they are sad, their wife was killed and they did nothing to stop it, etc. The amazing TV shows The Shield and Dexter did it by turning the villains in the main characters, as Shakespeare did with Richard III. Comic books try to do it by investing their superheroes with weird and interesting superpowers that would be interesting even if there were no supervillains around – it’s just as nice to watch Hulk punching a building as it is to watch him punching a bad guy. But in general it’s hard to make a main character interesting.

Which brings us to Richard III. This – the Henry VI trilogy - is where Shakespeare discovered and introduced Richard III, here as a minor character but already chewing up the scenery. He is as interesting as John Cade and Joan of Arc, but for different reasons: He is clearly evil.

Order of Reading and Bloom

2009-08-01T09:02:00.007+02:00

I am reading Harold Bloom's "Shakespeare - the Invention of the Human" alongside the plays, as I like his theory that humanity began with Shakespeare.

I am also following Bloom's estimated chronology of the 38 plays, which is of course uncertain.

In his book, Bloom does not tackle the plays chronologically, but I will, as would like to see if I can notice some kind of progress or change in Shakespeare's writing over time. (That means I am reading Bloom out of order!)

Thus my order of reading is going to be:

1. Henry VI, Part 1 (1589?)
2. Henry VI, Part 2
3. Henry VI, Part 3
4. Richard III
5. The Two Gentlemen of Verona
-- A Lover's Complaint (narrative poem)
-- Venus and Adonis (narrative poem)
-- The Passionate Pilgrim (narrative poem)
6. The Comedy of Errors
-- (Sonnets 1589 - 1609)
-- The Rape of Lucrece (narrative poem)
7. Titus Andronicus
8. The Taming of the Shrew
9. Love's Labour's Lost
10. King John
11. King Richard II
12. Romeo and Juliet
13. A Midsummer Night's Dream
14. The Merchant of Venice
15. King Henry IV, Part 1
16. The Merry Wives of Windsor
17. King Henry IV, Part 2
18. Much Ado About Nothing
19. King Henry V
20. Julius Caesar
21. As You Like It
22. Hamlet
-- The Phoenix and the Turtle (narrative poem)
23. Twelfth Night
24. Troilus and Cressida
25. All's Well That Ends Well
26. Measure for Measure
27. Othello
28. King Lear
29. Macbeth
30. Anthony and Cleopatra
31. Coriolanus
32. Timon of Athens
33. Pericles
34. Cymbeline
35. The Winter's Tale
36. The Tempest
37. Henry VIII
38. The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613?)

My text: "The Arden Shakespeare - The Complete Works" (1310 pages). All images from Wikipedia.com.