Tag: shakespeare

Never came trouble to my house… – MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, I i

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After two solid weeks of travel which involved no small amount of crashing in the houses of kind friends and family, and weather fluctuations from blizzard to unpleasantly warm 75 degrees (in February? In Massachusetts?! We broke it; sorry, kids), I’m at last in the range of 66-75% done with annotating the summer scripts for Kentucky Shakespeare and, as always, primed for self-distraction. My mind is a wanderer. This time I can at least trace the path:

– The Wife and I are thrilled to be able to say out loud now that we’re taking on Beatrice and Benedick this summer (come on down; we guarantee a good time);

-the only time we’ve approached these roles before was in a reading of Davenant’s The Law Against Lovers, his 1662 adaptation/squishing-together of Measure for Measure and Much Ado About Nothing, a weird little thing that I can see the reasons for, MfM being such a dark piece except for the randy people, who quickly became socially inappropriate for squeamish theatregoers. There’s a company in Louisville, Savage Rose, that alongside its regular season hosts readings of such under-heard classics as this and has for years now. Lots of fun to partake of.

-this squishing-together of Much Ado and some other thing popped into my head during the Much Ado editorial process (which I’m still during-ing and instead of finishing, writing this) when I came across two exchanges, one spurring a notion, the other cementing it. Hear me out…

Act One, Scene One. Soldiers show up looking to crash on the abundant sofa of Leonato and the Prince who leads them enters and says to his host:

          Good Signior Leonato, you are come to meet your trouble: the fashion of the world is to avoid cost, and you encounter it.

To which Leonato replies:

          Never came trouble to my house in the likeness of your grace.

Innocuous host-/guest- flattery. But it reminded me of a similar situation in a slightly less wacky play in which royalty shows up at a crashpad to declaim:

          The Love that followes us, sometime is our trouble,

          Which still we thank as Love. Herein I teach you,

          How you shall bid God-eyld us for your paines,

          And thanke us for your trouble.

And the hostess (Lady M., if you haven’t recognized Duncan’s howdy by now) responds:         

          All our service,

          In every point twice done, and then done double,

          Were poore, and single Businesse, to contend

          Against those Honors deepe, and broad,

          Wherewith your Majestie loades our House…

…and so on, fancier and more versified than Leonato (King vs. Prince and acquaintance vs. spouse’s boss certainly comes into play here), but substantially the same thing. So what happens…

…if we replace Don Pedro with Duncan…

…and leave in Leonato’s silent wife. I should explain.

In the Folio/Quarto, Leonato has a wife, Innogen, mentioned only in two stage directions in the first part of the play that call for her to enter. She has no lines and is only referred to barely in one of those “Is this your kid?” “Well, her mother says she’s mine, heh heh” bits of banter that reappear with variations in a couple of the plays. In almost all productions, she’s taken as a “ghost character” (one who is named in stage directions or Dramatis Personae but never speaks) and just written out, seeing as how actors expect to be paid and all. What if she stuck around, this silent hostess, and…

“But”, I thought, “that’s silly. Get back to work.” Which I did.

So on I went, annotating this for understanding and slightly modernizing the spelling of that for clarity and removing the odd anti-Semitic remark for crying out loud. And on another pass of the same scene, but a few dozen lines later, the Prince returned with:

          …in the meane time, good Signior Benedicke, repaire to Leonatoe’s, commend me to him, and tell him I will not faile him at supper, for indeede he hath made great preparation.

And thought I had heard such an oath to be there in time for supper before; that’s right:

          To night we hold a solemne Supper sir,

          And I’ll request your presence.

To which Banquo replies:

          Let your Highnesse

          Command upon me, to the which my duties

          Are with a most indissoluble tye

          For ever knit.

That dinner ends even worse than Hero’s first wedding, but there’s a history of thrift in Shakespeare when it comes to using funeral food for weddings, so vice versa seems legit, non?

Which brought me back to Innogen. What if we gave her some lines…made her a more complicated hostess…

…assume the comedy is either simultaneous to the tragedy or – no, wait…

…is a backstory for it…they’re soldiers after all…

…squeeze Benedick/Beatrice together with the title couple of That Other One…

…ditto the younger lovers and the Macduffs…

“But”, I thought, “that’s silly. Get back to work.” Which I did.

…as magnanimous as Agamemnon… – HENRY V, III vi

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The first of March is St. Davy’s Day, and my Monmouth cap is ready for a leek.

I made it myself – the cap, not the leek – out of New Hampshire sheep’s wool from a pattern someone retrofigured from a several-hundred-year-old knit Monmouth hat that still exists in a museum somewhere. It’s sort of bell-shaped and has a nifty little lanyard loop meant, I’m led to understand, to allow for hanging on the hilt of one’s sword when the situation requires or permits an exposed pate.

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It’s also a perfect mechanism from which to dangle a huge leek.

I’m not Welsh in any way I’m aware of, though I do think dragons and Tom Jones are neat. And Kentucky is coal country, too – it’s in the water here, which doesn’t seem to upset as many people as it should. But a few years ago a director (with a cruel streak I hadn’t suspected in her) decided to cast me as Captain Fluellen in Henry V.

He quickly became one of my favorite Surprise Roles, that is to say a role I had no particular opinion of one way or another before taking it on. I was playing Bottom that summer, which had been a dream for some time, as well as Polonius (too young, really, but if the baldness broadens my casting possibilities, then bald I shall be), who was fun, but requires some tricky juggling, what with the oafish-yet-controlling-yet-relatable-enough-that-you-don’t-necessarily-want-him-dead notes to be hit.

Fluellen was just…the thing I had to do in the other play of the repertory season. The slight relaxation between two larger roles. No one told me he was the best part in the show (in that people are always happy to see you arrive, but you don’t have to memorize/put over any famous speeches). I suppose I should have, as should we all, listened to the wisdom of Good Tickle Brain whose favorite male Shakespeare character is none other than Our Mighty Welshman. He’s steadfast, well-read, a dedicated Harry P(lantagenet) fanboy. Perhaps a little too by-the-book, but in wartime that’s maybe a good thing. No, he can’t answer a simple question with brevity, but neither can I. I mean, I’m writing this and exactly zero people have even asked for it. I suspect that number will drop once this is posted.

Now, I’m an American, so I don’t have any particular grip on Welsh-ness, whether typical or stereotypical, beyond those few I may have encountered via Harry Secombe on my beloved Goon Show. (Though I understand even Disney partakes of Welsh festivities nowadays…)

But ignorance is no excuse for not doing your acting homework, so I set out on the steep uphill journey that was figuring out a Welsh accent. And I can now hear and identify the active sounds and cadences that make for a Welsh accent. Whether I managed to issue any forth from my mouth in an effective way is another story.

The important thing, though, was that my attempts at that accent at least gave me a glimpse into something important about the role that an American not attempting the accent might not have given me: the role is the accent. By which I mean, if you’re writing for Elmer Fudd, you throw in as many r-laden words as you can; for Sylvester the Cat, it’s s-words.

And for a bombastic Welsh captain, you deliberately write something like:

          The Duke of Exeter is as magnanimous as Agamemnon, and a man that I love and honour with my soule, and my heart, and my dutie, and my life, and my living, and my uttermost power.

          He is not, God be praysed and blessed, any hurt in the World, but keepes the Bridge most valiantly, with excellent discipline.

And the poor sap who has to say it all has to establish him as a bit of a blatherer right away (Bottom, Fluellen, and Polonius in one summer; talk about typecasting) while also making sure to say Dook while everyone else says Dyook, hisses the esses a bit, adds an extra schwa-ish vowel between double consonants like gn, mn, tt, and makes that lovelee Welsh long ee sound even within diphthongs. So it comes out something like:

          The Dook of Ek-seh-teh iss …(lag while he chooses a word, which also makes Gower and the audience think he might simply answer the question “Is the Duke of Exeter safe?”)…ass magananimous ass Agamemenon, and a man that I luff and on-nuh with my soul, and my haat, and my doo-tee, and my laeef, and my lif-fing and my ut-tah-most pah-weh.

Oy. Or rather, Cod pee praissed and plesst. The entire text of the role reads like a oral exam of a “recognizing the signature sounds of a Welsh accent” course, down to the very phonetic spelling of “Llewellyn”. Which, it being primarily a comic role, though not really a foolish one, isn’t a worry. Finding the jokes is a vital part of Fluellen, and the language and how you say it is Where the Jokes Are. Plus spitting all the hell over my Gower, which was a hoot, for me anyway. I don’t think she caught anything communicable from me.

There’s also the cadence, which is, again, to American ears, not far off from a broad Subcontinental accent, which made me wonder what similarities between the Hindi and Welsh languages would make native speakers sing so similarly when speaking English. I never found an answer.

Somehow I doubt anyone noticed any of this homework, though, because the note Fluellen leaves on is all anyone remembers – being, of course, the scene in which I forced a man to eat a raw leek onstage, which in our production was doubled down on when I a) obeyed the stage direction “strikes him” by doing so with the flappy green bits of said leek, b) leaned into the bawdy fun of getting uncomfortably close to his face with my crotch when saying “or I have another leek in my pocket which you shall eat” and c) took a giant and spiteful bite of the thing myself just before exiting – “…and heal your pate.” [crunch]. Me and my big dumb comedy notions. I swear I can still taste it sometimes when the wind is right.

But the crux of this wonderful, loquacious fellow was, for me, in his little exchange with Gower the night before the battle, quoted in full:

          Gower: Captaine Fluellen.

          Fluellen: ‘So, in the Name of Jesu Christ, speake fewer: it is the greatest admiration in the universall World, when

          the true and aunchient Prerogatifes and Lawes of the Warres is not kept: if you would take the paines but to

          examine the Warres of Pompey the Great, you shall finde, I warrant you, that there is no tiddle tadle nor pibble ba-

          ble in Pompeye’s Campe: I warrant you, you shall finde the Ceremonies of the Warres, and the Cares of it, and

          the Formes of it, and the Sobrietie of it, and the Modestie of it, to be otherwise.

          Gower: Why the Enemie is lowd, you heare him all Night.

          Fluellen: If the Enemie is an Asse and a Foole, and a prating Coxcombe; is it meet, thinke you, that wee should

          also, looke you, be an Asse and a Foole, and a prating Coxcombe, in your owne conscience now?

          Gower: I will speake lower.

          Fluellen: I pray you, and beseech you, that you will.

There he is. Don’t doubt for a minute he salivates all over Gower as he stage-whispers this warning, and yes, the obvious joke is the long-winded admonition not to talk, along with the singular opportunity to say “tit-tle tat-tle and pip-ple pap-ple” onstage, but the matter contained in that long-windedness is everything I love about the guy. Gower has, to Fluellen, not only shown a lack of basic and sensible self-preservation but has insulted his own training and the very tradition of soldiering, its ceremonies/cares/forms/sobrieties/modesties. If the French army jumped off a pridge, would you? He loves his job in every detail, and what with there being no standing army back then, he has to relish every moment of it.

But enough of this. Back to your happy St. Davy’s Day. Wear the leek in your Monmouth with pride and if mocked by swelling turkey-cocks, let them eat it.

A drum! A drum! – MACBETH, I iii

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I hear from a friend (and drummer) that Clyde Stubblefield is dead.

Clyde Stubblefield was one of THE drummers, particularly known for his work with James Brown in the mid-1960s-early 1970s and for being one of if not the most sampled drummers in hip-hop. But here’s just a tiny taste that serves my purposes.

(This is the spot where I’d imbed THIS ONE MINUTE VIDEO of Stubblefield performing but the vagaries of the Internet are being vagarier than usual this morning so I suppose I’ll just let you click the link. It rewards clicking, I assure you.)

This is primarily a blog about Shakespeare, so perhaps I should explain. Stubblefield (along with great Bernard “Pretty” Purdie, who also did/kept time with Brown, among hundreds of others you know) is my go-to example for how I firmly believe speaking verse ought to work. To wit (and I promise not to get utterly crazy here, but I feel I owe Messrs. Stubblefield and Shakespeare some specificity):

Hamlet. Act Four, Scene Three. I chose this at random and only went digging into Hamlet because it has plenty of long chunks to dig into. Claudius soliloquizes (relatively) briefly and tells us

          I have sent to seeke him, and to find the bodie:

          How dangerous is it that this man goes loose:

          Yet must not we put the strong Law on him:

          Hee’s loved of the distracted multitude,

          Who like not in their judgement, but their eyes:

          And where ’tis so, th’Offenders scourge is weigh’d

          But neerer the offence: to beare all smooth, and even,

          This sodaine sending him away, must seeme

          Deliberate pause, diseases desperate growne,

          By desperate appliance are releeved,

          Or not at all.         (Enter Rosincrantz.)

                                   How now? What hath befalne?

 

So take the basic rules of the verse as our kick drum – ba BUM ba BUM ba BUM ba BUM ba BUM. Ideally four acts into a play that spends the majority of its time in this basic heartbeat rhythm, you can rest your leg and kick no longer because the audience is hearing it without it even being there. You lock back into it now and again, but you don’t need to hammer it every time. They’ve got it.

That said, we’re not in a free jazz place here. It’s funk/soul. It plays around with the beat, but we’re not allowed to just run off on our own, here. People came to dance.

          I have sent to seeke him, and to find the bodie:  

Or rather: “I have SENT to SEEK him, AND to FIND the BODY,” and pretty quick out of the gate on the not-quite-I’ve “I have”. But then, you also, without beating it to death, must manage to play “find” off of “seek” and therefore “body” off of “him”, which, this being a line full of monosyllables, isn’t impossible, but is a skilled but of rhythm-futzing to enter a scene with. Plus you’ve got that comma/caesura/pickup breath in the middle, which is a breath you-the-actor don’t need yet, having just started the scene/sentence, but there it is, some kind of hiccup, and it’s not grammatically necessary, so better to assume it’s a rhythmic notation. I’m guessing this whole line is handled in about three seconds. Uh-oh – then a colon – we’re drifting into another facet of the thought…

          How dangerous is it that this man goes loose:

I love that two-syllable DAIN-jruss. The brain is moving along. But right back to staccato. Is. It. That. This. Man. Goes. Loose. I defy you not to hear the hi-hat in “is it that this”. (Also: “this man”? Pretty cold words. And I don’t mean Claudius chose them to be cold. I mean as he’s thinking (aloud, alone), them’s the words that pop out.) But then, though still monosyllables, “goes loose” kind of stretches out. No comma – I mean, let’s not be barbarians –but still. Rounder and less spitty. This is one of the most James Brown lines of pentameter in the speech. Try it.

          Yet must not we put the strong Law on him:

What?! Wait. So it can’t be straight rhythm – Yet MUST not WE put THE strong LAW on HIM – because that’s not how humans speak English, unless you believe the lyrics of Tim Rice, which, again, we’re not barbarians. So…Yet MUST not WE (I think you can play with how hard to smack that Royal “We”, if you want to throw weight to getting someone else to do the dirty work, which is in fact what happens) put the STRONG LAW on HIM. But not hitting the “him” that hard but not letting the “on” off that easy. Feel it out. And “put the” almost inevitably becomes just two plosives, a syllable each but with hardly any vowels when spoken, almost an unspellable “P’T”. So double word score lands on “strong law” because it’s a weird phrase anyway and it’s what they’ll hear. But this colon begs the question, “Why not, exactly?”

          Hee’s loved of the distracted multitude,

LOVED…TRAC…MUL and the rest sort of just bitterly simmers. Real hardcore Folio types would even insist that extra long “Hee” has to be given it’s due, and certainly in this spot I can hear the argument for some extra sneer (snare?) in it, to lead you into some snark in “loved”. And you can hear impatience with the idiot mob (who buy their US Weekly with Hamlet on the cover (again!)) in the even-spittier “disTraCTed mulTiTude”. Comma…

          Who like not in their judgement, but their eyes:

Back to mostly solid backbeat for the first half. Who-like-not-in-their-JUDG-ment- (oh, but comma – nice chance to really bite off that “t”)-but-their-EYES.

          And where ’tis so, th’Offenders scourge is weigh’d

More pops and crackles, a breath, and that lovely “th’Of-fenders” where he hurries over “the” so he can say the most frustrated letter of all, “FF”*.

          But ne’er the offence: to beare all smooth, and even,

Now, a slight edit here – Folio says “neerer”, but most agree that “never” makes more sense, though the Elizabethans often elided their “v” in the middle, so we get “e’en”, “se’n”, and of course “ne’er” (which inevitably sounds all fancified when Great Actors do it, despite the fact that in my own Kentucky stomping grounds, this is still a perfectly normal thing offstage). In a hurry again. BUT. But. The “the” is fully written out. BUT. But. There are still too many syllables. It’s not “th’offense” or “e’en”. Now, we can cheat a spare weak syllable dangling off the end there by the Rules of Pentameter, because Quiller-Couch or whoever says so, but maybe one could describe “theeyuh-FENCE” as having a cheated grace beat in there. Which ends the pre-colon section, where we grind a new facet of our shiny thought – stop philosophizing and focus, Claude. (Still bearing in mind that each these lines takes really three to five seconds to speak, tops.)

          This sodaine sending him away, must seeme

“Sodaine” is of course “sudden”**. This one’s pretty clear, comma and all.

          Deliberate pause, diseases desperate growne,

(I like to think of the start of this one as a Bluebottle/Ted Baxter/Ron Burgundy stage-direction-accidentally-read-aloud. I know it isn’t but I like it anyway. Sidenote Within Parenthetical: I watched the 1942 To Be Or Not To Be yesterday afternoon with the nephews and enjoyed again the delicious pause before and after the prompter unnecessarily feeds Jack Benny the title line. Every actor I know is in that pause. “I know the line – I was acting!!” Anyway.)

This is also a good microcosm of the “play the verse” argument: you can’t just say “must seem deliberate pause”. What the hell fun is that? “…must seem (inhale) (must seem what? Uh…)/ DeLIB’rate pause…”) The mid-line comma here is usually turned into a period in modern editions, which is grammatical, but also implies a full stop instead of the move-it-along pace of a guy who doesn’t get too many moments alone. So pickup breath, but don’t overdo it. You do this when you’re thinking, this hopping forward to the next part of the thought; no reason not to do it aloud. The two-syllable “DES-pr’t” is nice particularly because…

          By desperate appliance are releeved,

…it has to be a drawn-out three syllables immediately after. And again with the spit-spit-spit-spit-releeeeeeeved action. Let off the hi-hat pedal and let it ring.

          Or not at all.         (Enter Rosincrantz.)

                                   How now? What hath befalne?

Shut up! There’s some one here! Stop plotting out loud and get the info! Why hasn’t he answered you in the no-time you’ve given him to do so? “Hath befall’n” is a clumsy Sylvester mouthful which could either slow you usefully down, or make you sound like you’re clumsily changing direction. Both have their advantages.

Now, that is ridiculous. That’s eleven lines that take maybe forty-five seconds to speak and in a standard two-hour version of Hamlet are likely to be cut anyway and I’ve wasted a lot of your time and mine on it. But the late Mr. Stubblefield would I hope agree with me that once it’s in you, it comes out easy. You sweat, but it’s no sweat. Ride the beat and feel around the edges of it until it snaps you back in line. When you’ve put the proper, as his boss occasionally said, glide in your stride and gut in your strut.

I imagine Funky16Corners will be putting up a tribute mix of some kind soon, which I will preemptively recommend. I pray you. Give the drummer some.

 

 

*mileage may vary in Wales

**I used to find charm in spellings like “sodaine” for “sudden” until I worked with a director who so hated audiences and actors that in the midst of a flat, Midwestern accent (and, ahem, production) he’d insist on actors pronouncing them like they were spelled, which succeeded as entertainment only in that it made me sing the word to Clapton’s “Cocaine” under my breath in rehearsal. He did this with about five cherry-picked words he had probably heard about when he woke up in the middle of some lecture he missed the point of – upon consideration, he could have been giving the lecture and this would still be true – and regarding which most sane people would just opt for audience clarity. Again, these weren’t Original Pronunciaption productions, just by a goof who wanted to talk (and talk and talk) in rehearsal about how a “divell” and a “devill” were two utterly different supernatural entities and only the most callous and sloppy actor wouldn’t play the difference. Then he’d doze back off and we’d get some rehearsal done. I seem to have let all the bitterness about it go, right? The moral is never let Bottom believe he’s Prospero.

…travellers must be content – AS YOU LIKE IT, II iv

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I quite enjoyed Andrew Dickson’s Worlds Elsewhere, at least as much a travel book as a Shakespeare book, in which he looks at the ways Shakespeare has been interpreted, adapted, and adopted by non-British places on several continents – Germany, America, India, South Africa and China.

I don’t want to get into a synopsis here, especially for a book that is, by its nature, all over the place, since half the fun is discovery, but it’s a fun ride. The more distant the culture is from his own, the more fascinating things he finds – Shakespeare so within the fabric of Bollywood that hardly anyone notices it, a history of the Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft (the first organized Shakespeare literary society) and its WWII-era intrigues (the Germans like to translate Twelfth Night by its subtitle, Was Ihr Wollt, which is admittedly less controversial than straight-up calling it Triumph of the What You Will, but I suppose Shakespeare Himself had worn out the world’s tolerance for “will”-based wordplay long before Weimar, so I’ll quite while I’m ahead), a primary-source debunking of the mythology surrounding Mandela’s Robben Island Bible copy of the complete works, and the latter-day awakening of China’s fascination with the Bard (A nice primer for 1616: Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu’s China, which is high on my stack right now).

Or maybe it’s the more distant the culture is from my own. I would have enjoyed the book even more if either he hadn’t dedicated about twenty percent of it to America or I didn’t live in America. Not that an outsider’s view of one’s own culture isn’t always welcome and intriguing; more that the modern differences are hair-splitting and the historical differences are something I’m already reasonably well versed in. Your mileage, as they say, may vary. That said, any chapter in which I get to pull out the phrase “a profusion of esculents” (found here in a newspaper account of an unruly Nevada City, California audience and the sorts of edible projectiles they toted circa 1856) is not a waste of my time.

The segment most intriguing to me was his brief glimpse into the life of South Africa’s Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, whose works I immediately started seeking out to add to the (growing; ever growing) stack. Besides being a linguist, politician (performer, journalist, traveller, intellectual…), Plaatje translated several works of Shakespeare into his native Tswana; I’m probably going to try out his novel, Mhudi, or Native Life in South Africa first – my Tswana is a little rusty…

Another thing that stuck with me was his recounting of an anecdote from American anthropologist Laura Bohannon, who spent time with the Tiv people of West Africa in the early 1950’s. Frustrated by a rainy season in which indoor song, storytelling, and beer (not necessarily in that order) got in the way of her cultural study (I will not editorialize; I will not editorialize), she joined in by telling them the story of Hamlet, which just meant fifteen different things to them, culturally speaking, that it did not mean at all to her. But they seemed to enjoy it:

Some time…you must tell us some more stories of your country…We, who are elders, will instruct you in their true meaning, so that when you return to your own land your elders will see that you have not been sitting in the bush, but among those who know things and who have taught you wisdom.

Even for those of us simply trying to translate these plays for an audience whose cultural distance from Shakespeare is very nearly that of the Tiv, worth tattooing on the arm.

Worlds Elsewhere is  a pleasurable read even for the non-geek. And if you’re not already checking it out, Dickson’s blog (WorldsElsewhere.com) is well worth your time as well.

Mountainish inhumanity – SIR THOMAS MORE, II iv

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This has been floating around in Shakespeare- type circles quite a lot lately, particularly this past year and even more in the past couple of days for painfully obvious reasons which my constitution can’t abide. Nor can the country’s.

Very little needs be said about it, but in briefest contextual terms: it is believed that one of the only professional examples of Shakespeare’s own handwriting is a bit of the unfinished group-authored probably unperformed (in its era) play The Book of Sir Thomas More. His work is part of a scene set during the May Day Riots of 1517, during which immigrants from northern Italy were being threatened by Londoners for the usual pig-ignorant reasons.

At the time of the plays writing, the same thing was happening to French Huguenots in London (some of whom were friends of Shakespeare’s, including Christopher Mountjoy, wigmaker and landlord. I don’t know if he made wigs for Will, but he did rent to him), as it continues to happen constantly and everywhere.

Anyway, More is addressing an unruly mob.

 

MORE.     Alas, poor things, what is it you have got,

                   Although we grant you get the thing you seek?

GEORGE. Marry, the removing of the strangers, which cannot choose but much advantage the poor handicrafts of the city.

MORE.      Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise

                     Hath chid down all the majesty of England;

                     Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,

                     Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,

                     Plodding tooth ports and costs for transportation,

                     And that you sit as kings in your desires,

                     Authority quite silent by your brawl,

                     And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;

                     What had you got? I’ll tell you. You had taught

                     How insolence and strong hand should prevail,

                     How order should be quelled; and by this pattern

                     Not one of you should live an aged man,

                     For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,

                     With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,

                     Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes

                     Would feed on one another….

                     …Say now the king

                     (As he is clement, if th’ offender mourn)

                     Should so much come to short of your great trespass

                     As but to banish you, whether would you go?

                     What country, by the nature of your error,

                     Should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders,

                     To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,

                     Nay, any where that not adheres to England,—

                     Why, you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased

                     To find a nation of such barbarous temper,

                     That, breaking out in hideous violence,

                      Would not afford you an abode on earth,

                     Whet their detested knives against your throats,

                     Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God

                     Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants

                     Were not all appropriate to your comforts,

                     But chartered unto them, what would you think

                     To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case;

                     And this your mountanish inhumanity.

 

But as will anything written to be in a play, it’s going to have more literal and figurative resonance if a pro takes it on. I give you two, Sir Ian McKellen (speech at 2:20) and Dame Harriet Walter. See you at the airport.

Where Will doth mutiny with Wit’s regard – RICHARD II, II i

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Still hard at work on trimming and annotating Richard II today, and for some reason (which though well known to me, I yet will gag), rang louder today than when last I read it.

At the top of Act Two, a dying John of Gaunt is talking to his brother Ed (let’s call him York) about hopes that the uncounselable Richard will at least listen to a dying man’s advice. Or, In Gaunt’s words:

           Though Richard my lives counsell would not heare,

          My death’s sad tale, may yet undeafe his eare.

To which his brother responds (ellipses, emphases, and a bit of clarifying punctuation are mine):

         No, it is stopt with other flatt’ring sounds

          As praises, of whose taste th’unwise are fond…

          Where doth the world thrust forth a vanity

          (So it be new, there’s no respect how vile)

          That is not quickly buz’d into his eares?

          That all too late comes Counsell to be heard,

         Where Will doth mutiny with Wit’s regard:

          Direct not him, whose way himselfe will choose,

          Tis breath thou lackst, and that breath wilt thou lose.

 

One chunk of this that stood out to me could roughly be restated as, “When any novelty is so distracting to him, can well-reasoned & perspective-considering advice ever come fast enough to be heard by ears where stubbornness rebels against sense?”

Just sittin’ here, readin’ Shakespeare, tryin’ to avoid the news. Good day, all.

And all the men and women merely players – AS YOU LIKE IT, II vii

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Well worth your time is Harriet Walter’s Brutus and Other Heroines: Playing Shakespeare’s Roles for Women. Walter (who I’m pleased to say is among the ranks of those with their own “fuckyeah” Tumblr tribute) is someone about whom – and this is rare for me – I remember the moment I thought, “Oh, that’s someone doing their work well.” I was a college actor working my first technically professional, technically acting gig at what was technically a theatre performing what the dictionary would define as a role in what we’ll generously call a play. I went to see Sense and Sensibility one night with my landlady (long story) and remember clearly two things (well, three, if you count my general Emma Thompson/Kate Winslet Thing; I am a human): the first was that Elinor Dashwood was the first non-male role as an adult with pretenses toward being an actor that made me think immediately, “oh, I get that person; I’d play that part at the drop of a hat”; the second was that the woman who played her vicious sister-in-law Fanny made this gesture in that scene in the stable, her arm outreached to get Edward to go with her. Right. This. Second. Without saying anything or waggling the fingers at the end of that arm. No big deal in the grand scheme, just a little acting moment, but something I remember thinking of later from a craftsperson’s viewpoint. That she’s only Doctor Tending to Chewbacca in Episode VII to many people is…sad but unsurprising. (Though I’m glad the Lee family was represented again – she’s Christopher’s niece. And the Doctor’s name is Kalonia. I am a human.)

Anyway, while the angle getting this book into conversations is Walter’s recent foray into playing the leads in a trilogy of Shakespeare’s plays set in a women’s prison (and that is covered and covered well in the book’s final chapters as well as an epilogue in the form of a letter to Shakespeare you should most definitely read), even without that up-to-the-minute discussion of stage trend, she just brings such clear and useful perspective to a book that is neither a collection of anecdotes about her creative partners nor a scholarly feminist rethinking of the plays but simply a professional’s recounting of how she deals with character, how that has changed over the span of a career, and how it is still changing forty-some years into that career, which she’s not particularly keen on slowing down.

Full disclosure: I am not a woman, nor was my performing type ever very youthful – I’m in my early forties and have the luxury of only just beginning to age into the roles I’m right for, and while I share good old Keats’s fears that I may cease to be, etc., for women on stage, as Walter notes in her “letter”, particularly in Shakespeare and sadly almost as much in the centuries of plays that have emerged from his impressive shadow and found it difficult not to use his as a template, the challenge is almost always the opposite – an age is reached and the parts disappear, doubly so if a significant piece of one’s career has been spent inhabiting the classics. To Will Himself she writes kindly:

I do appreciate that you were a jobbing playwright with a living to earn and that, in your day, women weren’t allowed on the stage, and I also understand that women (pace your Queen) were not allowed at the centre of public life, so why would female characters feature at the centre of the drama that holds the mirror up to that public life?…Nowadays we are challenging all preconceptions about gender, both in terms of personal identification and public roles, so I hope you don’t mind but I have been playing men recently. I am only following your own example. It seems as legitimate for women to play men as it was for boys to play women.

(I should add here that this is a crusade I’m actively a part of, if only as an actor/sometime director who knows all too well the dispiriting ratio of character gender to qualified, available performer and would love to see audiences willing to embrace all sorts of stage magic and transformation given a chance to embrace another kind.)

But as noted before, while this is the book’s hook, you’ll come for the 21st Century Rethinkings and stay for the wise professional’s thoughts on craft. I have no idea whether this sort of thing is of any interest to people outside the profession, but Brutus is primarily a series of famous roles and how one actor took on each. I should admit here that one of the reasons I’m so pleased to read her thoughts on how all this nonsense we get up to on stage and in rehearsal works is her tendency to reaffirm something I already believe but like to hear stated clearly, so I was prone to be happy to read:

As I see it, my preparatory task is to read and read and read the text and not make too many decisions about the character.

(There, actors of Shakespeare. Just do that. If you must get a tattoo, get that wrapped around your bicep a couple of times. I’m sorry, Dame Harriet. I’ve interrupted. Go on.)

I let the rhythm of her words work on me…I must understand her choices, temporarily inhabit the mind that makes them, say her words and perform her actions, and hope thereby to make her ‘live’.

Walter has a keen sense of where the decision points are in a role/relationship/play, but has an equally keen sense of where mileage may vary. That said, she slaps down a few decisions that don’t hold up under textual scrutiny, the sort that seem like shanties built atop the character instead of gold mined from inside. In plays full of irony and deception, she’s wise about when characters need to be taken at their word. On whether Viola is a schemer in Twelfth Night:

Theories can sound attractive, but when you come to play the part they often just don’t stand up from the inside….My answer to all this is that Viola soliloquises, and there is no example in the canon of a character lying to the audience in a soliloquy. Viola’s soliloquies are full of confusion and ‘what the hell is going on?’ If she harboured any…schemes, I think the audience would be let in on them.

Similarly, she reminds a student (and herself) that emotion (in this case, while playing Cleopatra in Act V) is a byproduct, not a goal:

[‘I dream’d there was an Emperor Antony…’] is one of the greatest speeches I have ever had the luxury of speaking, but there lies the rub. One must not luxuriate in it. The student was delivering the speech so engulfed in her own luxurious misery that the words were indecipherable…I too had loved the luxury of the speech, but I also knew that more important than my feelings were the words and the images that I/Cleopatra had to sell to the audience and of course, to Dolabella, who will take the message back to Caesar.

It’s a quick read, but one I sense I’ll go back and pull thoughts from later, and one that will certainly reward your time. I heartily recommend.

I am most dreadfully attended – HAMLET, II ii

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The blog has been dormant for the last week or so because it turns out Guildenstern (and honestly the entirety of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead) is mentally exhausting. Who knew? To the point, in fact, where I was unable to chat with friends who came afterwards; the tip-of-the-tongue-the-teeth-the-lips, like a ballet dancer’s feet when unchoreographed, were accustomed to such Stoppard-enforced precision by the end of the night they couldn’t really do much articulating on their own. This seems to have continued over into having anything intelligent to say about the play – or anything that the play doesn’t say just fine on its own.

The pleasure came when the audience showed up – not that rehearsals weren’t fun, but the amount of legitimately hold-for-laughs comedy they mined out of it was even more, I think, than we anticipated. Or I may just have been so mired in learning the whole show over a period of months (memorization was a multi-front war, as it increasingly is with age/repertory, of highlighting, listening to myself recorded, writing it all out in unintelligible longhand, doing the dishes, etc., with a page or two of the script at hand to go over and over, pacing, mumbling, and of course actual rehearsals) that I couldn’t even be bothered to concern myself with how much the audience might respond to it.

It was nice to do for a modern audience we could still guarantee had some familiarity with Hamlet, many of them having seen Kentucky Shakespeare’s 2014 production. For instance: I consistently got a fair (cheap?) laugh with a slight pause – relative to the rest of the pauses in this script – after the second word of the line, “Words, words, they’re all we have to go on” which I thought would be at best a way-homer. There were others.

Unfortunately, I can’t seem to escape. Once I was solidly off book, I allowed myself time for some pleasure reading again and picked from my room-sized To Get Around To stack Kazuo Ishiguro’s recent The Buried Giant, a novel about, among other things, a mist of vague amnesia and attendant anxiety creeping across post-Arthurian England. It’s a lovely book but it’s rather cruelly played into one of the trickiest parts of R&G: the difficulty of remembering a ludicrous amount of very delicate, articulate, repetitive, nay, loop-prone lines, many of which are precisely about the characters’ lack of memory. Not a nice thing to do to oneself.

Then I started catching up on the New Yorkers I’ve left sitting about for a couple of months and opened the December 19/26 issue to find this Alan Burdick piece on the psychology of time, which would have been exactly the sort of thing I picked up a New Yorker to read were it not for having spent the last while trying to get the rhythm right on a line like:

          G: Yes, one must think of the future…

          R: It’s the normal thing.

          G: To have one. One is, after all, having it all the time…now…and now…and now…

          R: It could go on for ever. Well, not for ever, I suppose.

Those “nows” and more importantly their accompanying ellipses are a bear if you want them to sound non-contrived and therefore funny. (The effect was aided by the staging, which had Rosencrantz trying to sit down but startling a bit as each was said, so timing the line was a matter of keeping another actor’s left hip in my visual periphery.) So to pick up an article that quotes William James on the passage of the instant – “We tell it off in pulses…We say ‘now! now! now!’ or we count ‘more! more! more!’ as we feel it bud.” – is to relive something one is trying to clear one’s mind of to make room for the next show.

(I could have given James a hand here, honestly. The concept of time exists so punchlines land properly. Any other usage is tangential. Steve Martin once joked in Q&A form (G: “Question and answer. Old ways are the best ways”) that the perfect amount to pause for a punchline was “a second and a half”…which was how long he waited to answer that very question with that very answer. Had James, St. Augustine, and Burdick watched that special sixty or seventy times as a youth as I did – Comedy Is Not Pretty – they’d have had fewer such nagging questions. Though the show had more to say on Socrates than Augustine, I guess.)

This isn’t uncommon, this seeming attack from the outside by the very topic you have no particular intention of being obsessed with or consumed by but which seems to enjoy your company, which seems drawn to you like the disproportionate amounts of dust that surround electronic equipment at home while one is at rehearsal all the damn time. Or not uncommon to me, at least. 

But it does have a way of making one feel like Michael Corleone, as bememed above, is all.

O dainty duck, O dear! – MIDSUMMER, V i

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Let me introduce you to my Patronus…

No doubt you are familiar with the Warner Brothers Merrie Melodies animated classic “Duck Amuck” (1953), written by Michael Maltese, voiced by Mel Blanc, scored by Carl Stalling, layed out by Maurice Noble (in some of his finest work this side of the 24 1/2 century) and directed by one of my primary (also prime and primal) artistic influences, Chuck Jones. (This post was very nearly titled “…dearest Chuck…” (Macbeth, III ii) instead, but Bottom won the toss.)

If you haven’t ever seen it, a) I envy the opportunity you’re about to get (though never miss a chance to see it on the big screen) and b) here it is, not in the best visual quality but still magical.

I’ll wait.

Now, as I’ve mentioned one hundred times in self-aggrandizing plug after plug, I’m playing Guildenstern next week in this stellar production of Stoppard’s classic. And what I’m going to suggest to you now, before I get buried in tech for several days and have to lay off the blog while I mumble my four thousand lines to myself for a couple of hours a day, is that the two aforementioned works are as spiritually analogous to each other as the latter is textually with Hamlet.

If you aren’t familiar with Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, a) I envy the opportunity you’re about to get to see it on stage (if you’re within driving distance to Louisville, directions are at the link above – January 3-8, curtain times vary) and b) you could always read it, too.

I’ll wait.

I should note here that I’ve always been of the opinion that comedy, especially of the goofier sort, is always a few steps ahead of the avant garde. Beckett is a wonder and a favorite, but Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, & Harry Secombe were pop stars doing the same thing on radio first, not to mention Laurel & Hardy. The following falls into that line of thought.

Now:

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern = Daffy split;

The Player = The Pencil/Brush;

Shakespeare = Bugs;

Chuck Jones, et al. = Stoppard.

Demolish.

 

Now to a few tedious work days of tech, then the relative sport of the playing holidays of performance. And then, as Silence drunkenly sang, “we shall

          doe nothing but eate,

          and make good cheere,

          and praise heaven for the merrie yeere” – Happy 2017, y’all!