jsburbidge | Entries tagged with drama

I am not, in general, a great defender of As You Like It. The two themes in the air of the time which it made fun of - pastoral and melancholy - have long passed out of the common ken; it has even less plot than most Shakespeare comedies; it has remained popular primarily because of the character of Rosalind.

That being said, it has its points. It is full of clever speech; it is, I believe, the first Shakespeare play with a Robert Armin fool rather than a Will Kemp fool, and so the first of his philosophic fools. It has a really clear distinction between the comic and everyday worlds which makes it a sort of concentrated template for Shakespeare's other festive comedies. ("How full of briars is this workaday world" over against Arden).

The performance by the Canadian Stage Company at the Dream in High Park mangled the play so badly that none of its virtues survived. This wasn't just the usual cutting in the interests of length, though it involved liberal cutting. It also involved adding extended amounts of slapstick, not just where the text might call for it, but in many places where it could get in only by beating the text over the head. It has the most distracting costumes; I gather, after the fact, that for some reason the production presents all the characters as flowers. The court looks just as bizarre as Arden.

Much of Jaques and Touchstone was mangled or dropped, much to the detriment of both. At least they were not among the players who simply shouted their lines, or abbreviated versions of their lines.

It was, in short, an appalling production. I am disinclined to see any of their other productions.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to see the Stratford production of The Tempest, and while it was a well produced play, with good acting and staging, they got something wrong which seems to me to relate to a fundamental change between the sort of understanding Shakespeare had and that which we have.

It's a commonplace to note that the play is, thematically, focussed on the nature / nurture polarity (and uses both terms regularly, or their synonyms). There's some playing with the (very typically Renaissance) opposition between nature and artifice, but it's mainly about nature / nurture and savage / civilized.

In writing about Tolkien, Tom Shippey quotes a Norse saying as a contrast to Lord Acton's "power corrupts": "When a man can do what he likes, he shows what he's like". Most of The Tempest reflects that pre-modern view of humanity: it's a succession of scenes which give people the opportunity to show their nature by giving them apparent power, or, at least, opportunity in its despite. Thus Ariel's casting of the Neapolitan party into sleep gives Antonio and Sebastian the chance to show their (continuing - certainly for Antonio) treacherous natures. The appearance of rich apparel left out tips Trinculo and Stephano into petty theft: as drunken sots, they can't even remain focussed on a scheme of attaining power promoted by Caliban. On the other extreme, Ferdinand's response to the harsh tasks set for him by Prospero reveals his essentially kindly and noble nature.

Even Alonso never really changes in nature: his previous actions against Prospero were hostile but not treacherous, war but not an inversion of hierarchy, and the nature he reveals is kingly even if not ideal.

Caliban represents the unchanging as the incorrigible. In light of some of the modern approaches to the play, it may be worth pointing out that although Shakespeare's presentation is influenced by some narratives of the New World, Caliban is neither native to the island - it was barren before Sycorax came there in her exile - nor an example of natural man, having a devil for a father as well as a goetic witch for a mother. Nature, earth's nature, in the play, as in As You Like It, is presented as a fecund and pleasant force, offering fruits and fresh waters ready to hand: Shakespeare is to some degree playing off the theme of a golden age. Caliban knows how to exploit nature, but he is not presented as, in that sense, natural. The nature - in the sense of characteristics - he has is set; Prospero teaches him speech but cannot alter his character.

The production tried to make Prospero an exception to the rule, to suggest that Prospero changes his mind, is taught pity by Ariel. But they were working against the strong sense of the text. There are plenty of indications that what happens, down to and including the recognition scene, is exactly what Prospero has intended should happen from the very first, and that he stage-manages everything except the final applause.

By and large, Shakespeare really isn't very accepting of fundamental character change. The exceptions prove the rule: the younger Duke in As You Like It converts miraculously on his progress towards Arden with an army, but we are barely to treat that as anything other than a wonder, a deus ex machina. Leontes is seized with a madness of jealousy suddenly and just as suddenly falls out of it on the reported death of his wife and son. Whatever that is, it is not character development in any modern sense. (Perdita, by the way, is a classic example of nature triumphing over nurture in a trope going all the way back to the Greek Novel.) Claudio may repent of his actions regarding Hero, but not as the result of any inward change of character; only because he's proved wrong. Macbeth may be the closest to a counterexample, but it's arguable that the play depicts his being revealed as ambitious and ruthless rather than becoming so after the (very minimal) nudge by the witches and encouragement by his wife.

Moderns are habituated to narratives of character change. Aesthetically, they're burnt into the novel (Fielding and Sterne and Austen and Bronte place growth and learning front and centre (although Jane Austen, the most conservative of the set, tends more towards combining constancy of character with reform of manners, her narratives nevertheless involve her central characters learning: "Until this moment, I hardly knew myself.")). Morally, we tend to favour an emphasis on nurture rather than nature, and politically we favour believing in social mobility based on mutability of character rather than the "blood will out" fixed nature of an aristocratic age. (These are tendencies: the Renaissance has a long history of conversion stories; modern discourse has plenty of examples of people who cannot seem to learn, or, occasionally, never need to. But the weight still falls differently on balance, overall.)

Importing those preferences into a play which was written to showcase the older view, though, is problematic. If a canon with any depth into the past has a value, it's that it teaches us how other, different people approached the world. A modern-dress production (Richard III as fascist) or a production which explicitly departs from the text - adjusts Kate and Petruchio, or Claudio and Hero - to make an explicit point accept the text but then enter into a dialogue with it. But a period-dress staging which puts forward a problematic modern reading as what the play puts forward is engaged in distorting the past and playing to our prejudices.

Shakespeare, at a reasonable guess, agreed with Ulysses and Menenius Agrippa regarding degree and accepted a divine stamp on the role of a monarch. He seems to have been at the very least a pragmatic social climber, working within the system to raise his status and wealth, and may very well have been a strong adherent of that system. The idea of unchanging character, largely derived, ultimately, from the classical world and transmitted via the chivalric ethos, is not a part of a universal Renaissance world view - a Christian model holding out a continual possibility of conversion of life was also tremendously important and the ancestor of our modern attitude by way of the bourgeoisie - but it was certainly part of Shakespeare's view. If you want a Renaissance play about personal growth, you might try Samson Agonistes instead.

In the summer of 1979 or 1980 - I'm not sure which, though diligent research could determine the question - I walked across the river from my parents' house at Trent's Champlain College to Wenjack Theatre to see the original production of Billy Bishop Goes To War.

On this past Saturday I went down to the Distillery District in Toronto, to a theatre not yet built when I saw the original production, to see Grey and Peterson's updated version of the same play. In between it has become an iconic Canadian play (far more so than it's elder sibling[1] 1837: The Farmers' Revolt, also being revived this summer at Shaw) and the perspectives of both audience and actors has changed.

In 1978, when the play was first performed, Canada's most recent combat which had not been incidental to a UN peacekeeping mission had been in the early 1950s. Britain, though post-imperial, was neverthess pre-Thatcher. Although the play was about war, what it spoke about to audiences was more strongly the colonial/imperial dialogue. (There were still plenty of people alive, like my grandparents (all living at the time) who had been grown adults when the Statute of Westminster was passed in 1931.) Now we're more likely to focus on the personal reactions, the skirting/escaping PTSD aspects of getting through that number of high-stress missions.

In parallel, the ageing of the actors has been accompanied by a deliberated transformation of the perspective of the play, a change from a capturing of the young, post-war soldier's autobiography (Winged Warfare, the source for much of the material, dates from 1918) to an old man's reminiscences (or perhaps those of his shade: Peterson is now older than Bishop was when he died). Transitions are more gradual, depictions a little more settled and less energetic; the risk a sense, at the beginning, of memories being dredged up.

(Personally, I think the play's subversive centre of gravity comes towards the very end, in "The Empire Soirée", with the world-weary possibility that all of this was, in the end, irrelevant, a minor bump on the road in the continuing churn of national and imperial powers, the Untergang des Abenländes; that the resignation of the English, willing to have their heroes dead, is a recognition of a zero-sum game populated by elegiac or tragic stories.)

All in all, it's a worthwhile performance.

[1]Grey and Peterson were at Theatre Passe Muraille when they came up with the idea for the play; Salutin's play was an earlier product of TPM.

In 1966, the newly formed Peterborough Theatre Guild bought the ruins of St. Luke's Anglican Church, which had burned down in 1959. (The parish had decided to rebuild on a different site somewhat to the south.) As its first production it put on Christopher Fry's A Sleep of Prisoners, directed by Fern Rahmel ("Miss Rahmel" to those of us who went to PCVS), using the not-fully-reconstructed body of the church (it followed up by doing a full reconstruction: during my days in Peterborough, beginning in 1970, it was recognizably based in a building which had been a church, but it was by no means "a ruined church"). A connection who was at the first performance remembers that one could still smell the smokiness of the burned timbers.

Trent University's archives have a copy of a script for ASOP from Rahmel's papers with director's notes. I have a copy a the first edition from Rahmel's library with light notes which indicate that it was also a director's copy.

Flash forward fifty years. Last year a member of my parish (St. Mary Magdalene's, Toronto) who is also a professional actor and director (Alistair Martin Smith) floated the idea of directing a play there, with the inevitable Murder in the Cathedral as a suggestion. Now I like the Eliot play and consider it an important piece of work -- but it is regularly covered in parish dramas, so I suggested A Sleep of Prisoners instead.

He took this suggestion up. Feeling responsible, I got myself pulled in as one of the actors...

It is likely to be a mildly interesting production. My view of the play is that it shows different perspectives shed on an essentially static set of figures chosen by Fry as types -- a man of action but little reflection; a man of reflection with little aptitude for action or "normal" interactions (he's not obviously Autism spectrum but he could be played that way); a practical figure whose authority comes from his position (Corporal among Privates); and an older man who has inherent authority as a result of experience and temperament. Martin Smith's view is less static, and his presentation also departs from the model given in the script's stage directions.

Fry is an interesting figure. He never appears on "great writers" lists, but he has a substantial body of work with a consistently high level of accomplishment. He's visibly influenced by Eliot's later work (dramatic and non-dramatic) but is in no way a Modernist in approach.

Like Eliot, Sayers, and Williams he wrote "religious verse drama", if by that one means dramas with events in church history or biblical narratives as topics: The Boy with a Cart, A Sleep of Prisoners, The Firstborn, Thor, with Angels, arguably Curtmantle and One Thing More; The Tower is on the history of Tewkesbury Abbey and was commissioned by them but does not seem to be in print or accessible. However, his focus is on human rather than divine action (he was a Quaker by conversion, C. of E. by birth) and many of them seem to me to be in intention explorations of scenes in a common English history where religion is one thread. (One exception is Thor, With Angels, which was written for the Canterbury Festival on commission, in succession with Eliot Murder in the Cathedral, Williams (Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury), and Sayers (The Zeal of Thy House): its focus is on conversion: both individual and the group conversion of Kent by Augustine. It also manages to diverge from history by bringing Merlin onstage.) By contrast, Eliot, Sayers, and Williams all came from one part or another of the High Church spectrum and their works play off sacramental themes.

His most popular plays, like The Lady's Not For Burning, were comedies, not explicitly religious; Fry himself said that he saw little difference between the two sets of plays other than their settings.

He has no successors: the next generation of English dramatists were the Angry Young Men. When they came along he went on to screenwriting (partly big blockbusters like Ben-Hur).

The performances will be on the 11th and 12th of March at 8:00 pm at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene, Toronto.

Towards the end of a rant on performance style, which seems to have been directed more by Shakespeare at the Admirals' Men and contemporary competitors rather than the performances of a past generation, Hamlet says: "O! it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise: I would have such a fellow whipped for o’er-doing Termagant; it out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it."

There is some suggestion that Shakespeare might have seen the last traces of the Mystery play cycles in England before they were thoroughly suppressed under Elizabeth (the last performance of the Chester Cycle was in 1575, eleven years after his birth; the last performance of the York Cycle was in 1569). Even if he did not, he grew up in a recusant household, where they might very well have been described and referred to nostalgically.

(There is some discussion of the possible, possibly indirect, influence of the Mystery Cycles' performance mode on Shakespeare in Anne Righter/Anne Barton's Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play which is well worth reading, but seems to be out of print.)

In the cycle performances, the audience was a part of the play itself -- there was no fourth wall -- and characters such as the princes or prophets spoke directly to the audience and in some cases mingled with them: the audience in effect stood in as a player itself representing the common people of the prior times, or mankind (the title of a miracle play, itself) as a single player.

But I am interested in Herod specifically here, and in particular the mapping he represents.

Here is Herod:

The clowdes clapped in clerenes that ther clematis inclosis-
Jubiter and Jouis, Martis and Mercurij emyde-
Raykand ouere my rialté on rawe me reioyses,
Blonderande ther blastis to blaw when I bidde.
Saturne my subgett, that sotilly is hidde,
Listes at my likyng and laies hym full lowe.
The rakke of the rede skye full rappely I ridde,
Thondres full thrallye by thousandes I thrawe
When me likis.
Venus his voice to me awe,
That princes to play in hym pikis.
The prince of planetis that proudely is pight
Sall brace furth his bemes that oure belde blithes,
THe mone at my myght he mosteres his myght,
And kayssaris in castellis grete kyndynes me kythes.
Lordis and ladis, loo, luffely me lithes,
For I am fairer of face and fressher on folde-
The soth yf I saie sall-seuene and sexti sithis
Than glorius gulles that gayer is than golde
In price.
How thynke yoe ther tales that I talde?
I am worthy, witty, and wyse. (The York Cycle, Play 16)

or again:

HERODES. Bien soies venues, royes gent.
Me detes tout vetere entent.

TERTIUS REX. Infant querenues de grand parent, et roy de celi et terre.

HERODES. Syrs, avise you what you sayne!
Such tydinges makes my harte unfayne.
I read you take those wordes agayne
for feare of velanye.
There is none soe great that me dare gayne,
to take my realme and to attayne
my power, but hee shall have payne
and punished appertlye.

I kinge of kinges, non soe keene;
I soveraigne syre, as well is seene;
I tyrant that maye both take and teene
castell, towre, and towne!

I weld this world withouten weene;
I beate all those unbuxone binne;
I drive the devils all bydeene
deepe in hell adowne.

For I am kinge of all mankynde
I byd, I beate, I loose, I bynde
I maister the moone. Take this in mynd--
that I am most of might. (Chester Cycle)

Or yet again, from the Towneley collection and the Wakefield Master, a little more "in his raging":

ffy, losels and lyars! / lurdans ilkon!
Tratoures and well wars! / knafys, bot knyghtys none!
had ye bene woth youre eres / thus had thay not gone;
Gett I those land lepars / I breke ilka bone;
ffyrst vengeance
Shall I se on thare bonys;
If ye byde in these wonys
I shall dyng you with stonys,
yei, ditizance doutance.

I wote not where I may sytt / for anger & for teyn;
we haue not done all yit / if it be as I weyn;
ffy! dewill! now how is it? / as long as I haue eyn
I think not for to flytt / bot kyng I will be seyn
ffor euer.
Bot stand I to quart,
I tell you my hart,
I shall gar thaym start,
Or els trust me neuer. (Towneley Cycle, The Play of Herod)

The mystery plays are thoroughly anachronistic: bad men swear by Mahound (Muhammed) despite the fact that he had not been born yet, and attendants at Jesus' birth have a thoroughly post-Nicene understanding of the nature of God and of salvation history.[1] They are like the people whom the audience would have known, in person or by reputation, as contemporaries. In most cases, this creates realistic touches: shepherds who act like the poor the townsfolk would have known, or well-off figures who echo the burgesses of the towns where the plays were performed.

Herod is one of a set of rulers who are mapped to a contemporary good king / bad king pair of molds. (Usually bad king: David, whom one might expect to appear as a good king, has an occasional appearance among the prophets of the Old Testament, and not as a king. Come to think of it, the only good rulers I can think of are penitent sinners who appear in the Last Judgement plays). The writers of the plays were burghers, not courtiers, and their kings are almost completely abstracted into types: they bear little resemblance to the kings who were the contemporaries of the writers, or their predecessors. They expound, threaten, command, whether they are Balaak, Caesar Augustus, or Herod the Great. (Interestingly, Pilate gets a rather more ambiguous treatment: in some cycles he fits the mold and in others he is treated more leniently.)

Among this company, though, Herod is a bit of an oddity. For one thing, he is King of the Jews, not a pagan, but gets treated as a pagan. (Technically, the historical figure was an Idumaean convert to Judaism, but I doubt that this played any part in his depiction.) He also, consistently, claims to be king of the world, and to have gods and / or demons subject to him. (This despite the fact that the same cycles also refer to Augustus as lord over the whole world at the time of the Nativity, as the Martyrology had it: "anno Imperii Octaviani Augusti quadragesimo secundo, toto Orbe in pace composito, sexta mundi aetate, Jesus Christus, aeternus Deus aeternique Patris Filius, mundum volens adventu suo piissimo consecrare, de Spiritu Sancto conceptus, novemque post conceptionem decursis mensibus in Bethlehem Judae nascitur ex Maria Virgine factus Homo".) He goes beyond bombast into the territory of the terminally deluded.

Finally, he is an essentially slapstick figure in performance:

"The mediaeval context, however, allowed Herod to rage through the streets as well as in the pageant, and to do so without becoming either a circus clown or, as in the modern theatre, a self-conscious illustration of a thesis about 'reality'." (Righter/Barton)

One must think of Herod as descending from the pageant wagon to stalk among the crowd, threatening random onlookers as he went. This is the "tyrant" of Bottom's wish ("a part to tear a cat in"), only a hair's breadth removed from comedy.

The "bad" characters in the Mystery plays are close cousins to the allegorical figures in the moralities: they represent the vices in an enhanced form. All the rulers are there not just as historic characters, but as representations of the sin of Pride; Herod gets a dual role in representing the sin of Wrath as well. This lies behind the otherwise absurd over-the-top quality of their parts.

Herod is, not the but an anti-Christ, a figure who is set as a contrast to the central figure of the mystery plays. He is raging as his opposite was pacific ("No war, nor battle's sound / was heard the world around"), bombastic as his opposite was (depicted as, generally) quiet (wordless as an infant contrasted with Herod, wordless at trial in front of Pilate).

[1]This is not an indication that the (sometimes quite sophisticated) writers of the plays really thought that Caesar Augustus, say, was a Moslem ("Mahowne that is curtes and heynd, / he bryng thi Iornay well to eynd, / And wysh the that all wate."). They worked with standard tropes to signal that a figure was a pagan (they would have said, paynim) in a contemporary manner.