Category Archives: Shakespeare & his world

a true story, a propos of nothing

It is 1617. Edward Coke, until recently the Lord Chief Justice of England and before that the implacable prosecutor of Guy Fawkes, Sir Walter Ralegh, and the Earl of Essex, has been fired by King James for defending the common law and sent away in disgrace. But Coke has a new reason for hope. His daughter Frances, age 15, has an opportunity to marry Sir John Villiers, brother of the Duke of Buckingham. Buckingham is King James’ “favourite”–his inseparable partner, chief adviser, and probably his platonic lover.

Unfortunately for Coke, his own wife is his most bitter enemy. She is Lady Elizabeth Hatton, a beautiful, enormously rich, young, and fashionable courtier. Coke and Lady Hatton live apart and are constantly suing one another. Lady Hatton now choses to block her daughter’s proposed marriage to Sir John Villiers. In the middle of the night, she takes Frances away to a country house called Oatlands.

She tells the girl that a very high-born nobleman, Henry de Vere, the eighth Earl of Oxford, wants to marry her. This is a complete invention, but de Vere is safely in Venice on his Grand Tour and cannot be consulted. Poor Frances writes and signs an oath “gyv[ing] myselfe absolutely to Wyffe to Henry Vere Viscount Balbroke Erl of Oxenford to whom I plyghte my trothe and inviolate vows to keepe myselfe till Death us do part: and if I even brake the leaste of these I pray God Damne mee Bodye and Soule in Hell fire in the world to come: and in theis world I humbly beseech God the Erth may open and swallow mee up quicke to the Terror of all fayhte breakers that remayne Alive.”

That is a pretty clear and forceful oath; Frances’ marriage to Sir John Villiers now seems impossible. But Edward Coke arrives with a large band of armed men and a warrant to search Oatlands. He shouts that if he is forced to kill anyone to gain entrance, that will be justifiable homicide; but if any of his men are killed, it will be murder. With the help of a battering ram, he gains entrance to the house and removes Frances.

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a production of Lear

(Chicago) Last night, I saw King Lear at the Goodman Theater. Stacy Keach was the King, and the director was Robert Falls. It was a “strong” production, in the sense that the director’s choices were bold and potentially controversial. For example, the setting (stunningly produced) was somewhere in post-Soviet Russia or Eastern Europe.* Lear, Cornwall, and Edmund were either gangsters or Putin-like dictators. The “knights” were riot police.

I thought all of the director’s choices were defensible, and some were brilliant. For example, it was a good idea to make Cordelia a quietly rebellious teenager who detests her family’s vulgarity. The actress, Laura Odeh, is small and young-looking and wears plain jeans, whereas her sisters are gangster molls. Her rebelliousness plausibly explains why she refuses to make a speech in praise of her father.

Likewise, the setting reminds us how unjust is Lear’s original regime. He recognizes the injustice himself, once he loses his knights:

…. A man may see how this world goes

with no eyes. Look with thine ears: see how yond

justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark, in

thine ear: change places; and, handy-dandy, which

is the justice, which is the thief?

I also liked the violent, urban setting. Regan and Cornwall order Gloucester’s castle “shut up” against Lear. The stage directions tell us that the banished men wander on a “heath”–a natural place. Nature is a major motif in the play, always opposed to artifice. Several characters wrestle with whether nature is just or cruel. But the word “heath” is never spoken on stage, so it is a legitimate idea to make that barren place into nighttime streets, populated by the poor, the naked, and the crazy. When Edgar, Gloucester, and Lear are cast out, they become homeless–just like the homeless men in our cities.

Robert Falls’ bold directorial choices remind me of a general point. Any written text dramatically under-describes what is literally going on. It gives us only partial information about setting, clothing, “blocking,” tone of voice, pacing, facial expressions. Even a staged or filmed production must leave much to the imagination and will be seen differently by different people. But the director and cast fill in some missing details.

We might think that their first task is to figure out what is literally going on, so that we can watch and make up our own minds about general themes. But any intepretation of the literal meaning of the text must be informed by a theory of its general meaning. So, for example, Robert Falls knows from the end of the play that Lear will come to see his own kingdom as deeply unjust, arbitrary, and artificial. Therefore, Falls sets Act 1, Scene 1 in a Russian gangster’s club. If Lear’s regime is brutal, then Kent (his most loyal follower) must be a bit of a thug. That is how Stephen Pickering played him last night.

Likewise, toward the end of the play, Regan suspects a sexual relationship between Oswald and her sister Goneril. (“I know you are of her bosom.” “I, madam?” “I speak in understanding; you are; I know’t.”) Therefore, several scenes earlier, Falls introduces Oswald and Goneril in flagrante delicto. That is an extreme case of using gesture and stage position to illustrate a theme.

That scene underlines the play’s pervasive sexuality, which is often overlooked. Regan and Goneril are sexual rivals for wicked Edmund. Falls also thinks that Lear is sexually jealous of his youngest daughter. In this production, the King is not enraged by her first word — “nothing” — but by her explanation:

They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,

That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry

Half my love with him, half my care and duty:

Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters,

To love my father all.

Overall, Fall’s production could be described as nihilistic. He chooses, for example, to have Goneril suffocate Regan and then kill herself, joining a heap of bodies on stage. And Albany literally rapes his wife Goneril while he curses her:

Thou changed and self-cover’d thing, for shame,

Be-monster not thy feature. Were’t my fitness

To let these hands obey my blood,

They are apt enough to dislocate and tear

Thy flesh and bones: howe’er thou art a fiend,

A woman’s shape doth shield thee.

I don’t know if those are good choices, but there is no question that Lear is a bleak play. Since it is set in a pagan world, Shakespeare need not assume divine providence or a morally ordered universe. Post-Soviet Russia seems an ideal metaphor for cosmic disorder and cynicism. “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. / They kill us for their sport.”

*Charles Isherwood, the NY Times reviewer, says that the setting is Yugoslavia. That makes sense: a kingdom divided in parts turns to anarchy.

when chivalry died

I just finished James Shapiro’s very enjoyable book entitled A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, which is about the year when Henry the Fifth, Julius Ceasar, As You Like it, and Hamlet were written. It’s packed with interesting contextual information, such as this pair of facts:

1. In the year 1599, the Earl of Essex took an army to Ireland to suppress a revolt and also (his own goal) to restore English chivalry. He knighted hundreds of his followers, more than doubling the total number of Englishmen who held titles; challenged the Irish rebel Tyrone to single combat; held great heraldric feasts; and explicitly called for a revival of the nobility and its virtues. By the end of the year, he was under house arrest and awaiting execution. Essex’s feudalism was fundamentally incompatible with the unitary, professionalized, plenipotentary state that Elizabeth managed.

2. The same year, London merchants organized the East India Company and sent an expedition to Asia, thereby launching the British Empire. The Company and its expedition were run by the bourgeoisie; nobles were excluded from management.

You can never tell from reading the words of Shakespeare’s characters what he thought about anything. But Shapiro suspects that he was basically reactionary, in the sense that he preferred the disappearing world of chivalry to the new one of bourgeois trade and industry. Shakespeare could think his way into the minds of characters, both good and bad, who were martial, heroic, grandiloquent, and noble. He could conjure scenes of pomp, ceremony, and heraldry. He also presented some bourgeois scenes, for example in The Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet. But his bourgeois characters were far less memorable and developed than Hamlet, Lear, and their kingly company.

At first it seems surprising that a revolutionary writer should have held reactionary historical views. But Shakespeare was most innovative in his ability to represent the inner lives of diverse people. It was his breakthrough to show the private thinking of great public figures–to supply complex and ambiguous motives for acts of state. Perhaps to represent the interior lives of private people was not yet possible in 1599; bourgeois culture had first to develop.

Shakespeare in retirement

I recently finished Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World, a chronological series of essays about Shakespeare’s life and its influence on his work. It leaves me thinking about the reasons for Shakespeare’s early retirement around 1611. That year he turned 47 and was probably not in bad health, for he had bought an expensive annuity that would only pay off if he faced decades of retirement (Greenblatt, p. 364). Why then did he quit London and write nothing more on his own? Greenblatt explores three explanations, and I will add a fourth of my own that’s completely speculative:

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“every subject’s soul is his own”

(Continuing Friday’s theme. …) There is no doubt, after Nuremberg, that soldiers must question the justification of their side’s conduct during a conflict–and disobey any immoral orders. But should they worry about the purposes and legitimacy of the whole war? “Adam K. Anonymous” argued “no” on this blog. “In a democracy,” he wrote, “the military is a tool, subjected to our elected representative[s], who should worry about the legitimacy of the war. The military, who don’t represent the people, should not be in a position to make autonomous decisions about the legitimacy of the war.” One could add that soldiers don’t have all the information available to high elected officials, so they should simply follow orders about whether to wage war.

On the other hand, it might seem that soldiers in a democracy bear a particularly heavy responsibility for deciding whether to participate in a war. In a dictatorship, it’s very hard to obtain information relevant to a moral assessment of your country’s foreign policy. If you want to object, you may have no practical options; you certainly can’t agitate publicly against the government. And passive resistance will probably just get you killed. All of these problems are less serious in a democracy, so perhaps the individual soldier must treat the decision to participate in a war–and thus to help kill other human beings–as a matter for personal judgment.

I’m not sure what to think, but I’m struck by the relevance of Henry V, act IV, scene 1.

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