hbachrach essay, Shakespeare

OSF 2018 Part 2: How Do You Solve A Problem Like White Men?

(part one)

None of the program notes or publicity materials for this season’s shows use the phrase ‘toxic masculinity,’ but the concept saturates the season even so. Across the plays, the rage and resentment of white male characters is the corrosive force that causes communities to crumble. And always it is aimless, baseless violence, unmoored from any sense of proportion or logic– this season takes, in short, the opposite of Hollywood’s favored anti-hero tack, asking not what pain caused this anger, but instead whether there is any remedy for the free-floating rage of men who think the world should, by rights, be theirs.

Jud Fry (Michael Sharon), Oklahoma!‘s only true villain, is also the only (apparently) straight, white man amongst the named characters: the peddler Ali Hakim (here stripped of his clownishly racist trappings, not least through being played by Barzin Akhavan, who is actually Persian) is bisexual, Ado Andy’s father is now his mother, the local Federal Marshal and Will Parker are both black. His toxicity therefore becomes linked, just as it so often is today, with thwarted privilege: not merely that he cannot bear losing to or being thought less than Curly, but that he cannot bear losing to a black woman. He cannot conceive of the idea that he has caused Laurey’s fear of him by lurking outside her window at night. He is someone who has learned no outlet for his disappointment and frustration except violence– violence that will turn, as the noose he keeps in his shed implies, either against others or against himself. But by the end of his first full scene, it is clear he has chosen others. 

Oklahoma! ends with the frankly shocking implication that once they have made that decision– once they have decided that harming other people is the only way to soothe their own hurt– men like Jud must be permanently removed from the community one way or another if that community is to peacefully survive. It’s a radical and perhaps disturbing thought. Directors often want to resist the idea that Jud is irredeemable, and to see the ending as written as an awkward oversight in the rush to a happy ending. But it clearly seems to be what Rodgers and Hammerstein intended to suggest. Laurey’s kindness only made him feel entitled to her; Aunt Eller’s praise of his work can’t undo his past resentments. Curly mocks him, but mockery doesn’t justify threats of rape and violence. Recent productions (including, apparently, the one now bound for Broadway) have tried to play up sympathy for Jud and point a more skeptical finger at Curly and the eleventh-hour mock trial that acquits him. But that’s a reading Rauch’s production undercuts in part by casting Tatiana Wechsler as Curly. Just as contemporary political discourse makes Jud’s violent threat seem all the more urgent and frightening, who today (as I discussed in the previous post) is going to argue in favor of turning a black woman over to the police?

In Othello, it’s masculinity in all races that is, perhaps, too destructive to endure, which leaves the tragedy fittingly answerless. This production, also directed by Rauch, is not really one that has any answers for the suggestion that the play is racist and sexist as much as it is about those things, but set alongside Oklahoma!, it paints an intriguing picture of the ways the corrosive anger of white men eats away at communities that might otherwise remain whole. Unlike Oklahoma!, however, Iago’s power lies not only in his own toxicity, but in spreading it to others: Cassio (Derek Garza), drunk by Iago’s engineering, spews Islamophobic mumblings at Barzin Akhavan’s Muslim Montano and readily mocks Bianca (whom he otherwise seems to like) at Iago’s urging; Othello (Chris Butler), of course, murders his wife. The question that makes Othello so uneasy today is whether Iago is merely revealing the darkness that was already present in these men– in Othello’s case, a frankly racist implication, given the stereotypical associations between black men and violence– or if his power is to explode the niggling fears and petty weaknesses we all have into something strong and uncontrollable enough to destroy these men. But whether he engenders the spark of violence or only fans it, the seething envy and obsessive hatred of Danforth Comin’s disturbingly changeable Iago is the center from which the play’s darkness springs, the force that drags Othello, Desdemona, Cassio, Bianca, and Emilia– all of them, in Rauch’s production, people of color– into a spiral of destruction, the women just collateral damage in a crusade whose true purpose he refuses, at the last, to reveal.

In one of the more intriguing cases of cross-play casting this season, Comins also plays Jakob, a 17th century Dutch fur trader in Manahatta, a new play by Mary Kathryn Nagle. It’s not hard to imagine the destructive role white men play in a play partly about the Dutch settlement of New York and the native Lenape people who encounter them. Unlike The Way The Mountain Moved, the season’s other play to touch on interactions between Native Americans and white settlers, Manahatta doesn’t believe in good intentions. Jakob, like Iago, comes to represent how the most brutal betrayals come from the people you thought you could trust– from the white men who were supposed to be different than the rest. The play’s parallel plot takes place in 21st century New York City, and Comins’ character there is altogether more open, and might provide a spark of hope for a more harmonious future: he expresses a willingness to learn to be better, and actually follows through with it. But then again, it’s 2008, and he’s an executive at Lehman Brothers. There are all kinds of ways to ruin lives.

hbachrach essay, Shakespeare

“I defy you, [script]!” (or, changing Shakespeare)

There is (and has been for a while) a tendency in Shakespeare performance which implies that the more miserable your female characters end up, the more feminist your production is. To wit, Hero should be all but dragged to the altar at the end of Much Ado About Nothing, Jessica in The Merchant of Venice should seem like she’s made a terrible mistake, and no one in Twelfth Night should want the partner they’ve got. And, of course, we must keep on physically and psychologically abusing poor old Katherine Minola, just in case.

The opposite pattern– to try and smooth over the endings that are more obviously unsettling, like Measure for Measure and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, feels much less common these days. But that’s the angle I found myself thinking of while watching the Globe’s current production of Two Noble Kinsmen, which does its best to make the bizarre subplot of the Jailer’s Daughter, who goes mad for love of one of the titular kinsmen, as sweet and palatable as possible. As with so much in that play, the intended tone of her plot’s resolution is difficult to discern: a local doctor commands a local boy to pretend to be Palamon, who she loves, and have sex with her, at which point she’ll either be cured and they can marry, or she can just think she’s marrying Palamon. There are certainly some disturbing seeds there, particularly in a play that is overall so skeptical as to whether heterosexual marriage is really all it’s cracked up to be anyway. But in director Barrie Rutter’s version, there are no such concerns. Though there’s much joking about the Jailer’s horror at the doctor’s casual suggestion of extramarital sex, the fact of having sex with a girl under false pretenses is not really given much weight. The Jailer’s Daughter is eager enough, but as her final scene progresses, the softness and sweetness with which she and her faux-Palamon address each other seems to suggest either that her delusion is lifting and she is seeing and loving him for who he really is– or that we as audience are meant to set aside any concerns and accept that this lie-based love might be a kind of real anyway.

From a contemporary performance perspective, brightening up this subplot makes some sense, as the central plot’s resolution is murky and not particularly happy or satisfying. I’m not inherently opposed to this approach. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2014 production of Two Gentlemen of Verona, which I loved, took a similar tack, reassigning some of Valentine’s ending lines to Julia, so that she, too, had the opportunity to openly and explicitly forgive Proteus. Despite our tendency to devalue the power of forgiveness, this was an empowering and moving gesture. It was a choice that made the play better, from my perspective as a contemporary audience member, but they did have to change the play in order to make it.

Is changing Shakespeare in this way sort of like taking the n-word out of Mark Twain– censoring the past and attempting to turn a blind eye to the many shortcomings of the most iconic English-language playwright? If we are going to continue to produce Shakespeare, do we have a moral duty to then grapple with all the most troubling elements of his work and lay them bare– and to say, if we find certain elements too troubling to retain, then maybe we shouldn’t be performing the play at all? Or is it better to say that replicating offensive 16th and 17th century patterns is unnecessary, especially when it is often relatively simple to find an angle that allows for more hopeful and empowering readings?

I don’t have an answer, obviously. As you can probably tell, I was a little unsettled by Rutter’s take (though Francesca Mills, who plays the Jailer’s Daughter, is herself one of the highlights of the production), but I loved OSF’s very similar changes to Two Gentlemen. In general, I think in fact it’s more empowering to find ways for female characters to be happy than otherwise, particularly because subverting apparent happy endings often has the unfortunate side-effect of suggesting that even though these characters have told us what they want, we are not to believe them. Perhaps this is the difference between the cases of Julia and the Jailer’s Daughter: Julia is given new words, a new way to consent to what is otherwise unnervingly done on her behalf. The Jailer’s Daughter, on the other hand, has only her old words used a new way– but this new way requires that we take at face value what we know to be a lie.

It’s a trickier question, in other words, than ‘is it okay to change Shakespeare?’– and for now, it’s interesting to see the results of both approaches.

hbachrach essay, Shakespeare

Does Hamlet Hate Women?

As anyone unfortunate enough to follow me on Twitter knows, I watched the BBC2 broadcast of Andrew Scott’s Hamlet last night, directed by Robert Icke. While it was met with basically universal critical raves, I was more or less irrevocably turned off by the production around 40 minutes in. Icke compresses the first four or five scenes of the play so that they take place on a single, chaotic night– a feeling he uses to good effect later, in the aftermath of Hamlet’s play, but doesn’t add much here. Except, that is, for the opportunity for Hamlet to leave his ghost sighting and immediately surprise Ophelia as she is taking a bath, and attack her. The camera cuts to the scene, which takes place far upstage behind glass, after Scott has entered, so it’s hard to tell how the sequence begins, but he seems to have surprised her, and Jessica Brown Findlay, who plays Ophelia, is rubbing her head as if he’s startled her into banging her head against the side of the tub, or maybe has even pulled her hair. She turns to Hamlet, he bends to her, and they kiss. But then he grabs her by the arm and wrenches her hand violently towards him. She pulls away, and he reaches out and grabs her by the throat.

This is, it becomes clear in the next scene, the encounter Ophelia describes to her father, when Hamlet approached her with “his doubled all unbrac’d.” In her own description, Hamlet does indeed take her by the wrist and hold her hard. She says nothing about being grabbed by the throat– nor, of course, about being naked and vulnerable in a bathtub.

I can’t stop thinking about this sequence– how offended I am by it, how no one mentioned it to me despite months of raves (possibly, as a friend noted, because it was difficult to see clearly in the live performance, which only raises the question why bother doing it, then), and just generally what a bad, bad choice it is– particularly in a show that then goes on to seize every opportunity to have Hamlet enact violence on Gertrude and Ophelia.

But the key word in that sentence is, of course, opportunity— which is to say, the text does offer these opportunities. There is a long tradition of Hamlets manhandling Ophelias and Gertrudes– after all, he has to be acting so wild and violent that both Gertrude and Polonius sincerely think Hamlet might kill her (Scott’s Hamlet goes on assaulting Juliet Stevenson’s Gertrude long after this, at one point wrestling her to the floor). While I do feel that the sexual tone of this Hamlet’s attitude towards Ophelia was particularly marked– during the ‘nunnery’ scene, he kept forcing her to kiss him, as she struggled to try and break away– Hamlet is hardly less sexually crude and cruel verbally during the play scene, with his public taunting about country matters, with Ophelia offering terse responses that are hard to read as anything but embarrassment and discomfort. That is to say: did Icke’s addition of this assault (and unnecessary nudity) simply prime me to more readily notice what has always been there? Did the fact that I generally like the character Hamlet make me too willing to ignore his misogyny and violence?

Yes, I think. Sort of. To a certain extent. Hamlet is a misogynist. He treats Ophelia and especially Gertrude very, very badly. He constantly speaks slightingly of women, and his great love for Ophelia does not extend to actually speaking to her about anything or trying to let her in on his plan. Maybe, possibly, if you really think Gertrude helped kill her first husband, you can explain why Hamlet treats her the way he does, but otherwise it’s a stretch. Maybe, in a funny way, it’s good to lay his treatment of them bare– turn it into a midnight assault while she’s naked in a bathtub if that’s what it takes to make us see it.

But there are real differences between the way Ophelia describes her encounter with Hamlet and what Icke decides to show him doing. Though Ophelia describes Hamlet’s behavior as wild, and he grabs her by the arm, the bulk of her impression is of stillness and sadness: he stands staring at her, and she fixates on his sigh, “so piteous and profound, it did seem to shatter all his bulk and end his being.” She seems scared for him. Findlay’s Ophelia, on the other hand, should probably be scared of him. His attacking her in the bath turns their exchange in the nunnery scene more frightening: Hamlet, who previously realized that Polonius was bugged while speaking to him, tries to flirt and kiss her, and playfully gropes around the collar of her dress searching for a microphone. As it becomes clearer and clearer that Findlay is not joking or just putting on a show for her dad, Scott’s Hamlet gets angrier and angrier, culminating in the sequence described above, where he repeatedly forces her to kiss him. In light of his initial assault, I couldn’t read it as anything but an abuser growing violent when faced with repercussions– Ophelia breaking up with him– for his actions.

The ‘nunnery’ scene can certainly be frightening and violent, but the text leaves space for various explanations of what is happening. Is Hamlet trying to communicate to Ophelia that she should get the hell out of Denmark, and she doesn’t get it? Does she make it too obvious that she’s spying on him, and he loses his temper at the betrayal? None of these make Hamlet look great, but some make him seem less actively abusive.

But maybe I’m just trying to talk around the idea of Hamlet the abuser because I don’t want it to be true. Or, more accurately, I don’t know what to do with it. How do you perform that play? You can make it explicit, as Icke does, but that’s a risky choice, to say the least, and one the text doesn’t leave much space for dealing with. We have two and a half more hours to spend with this guy, what do we do with that time if we already hate the abusive protagonist? Can you even do Hamlet anymore if that’s who it’s about? It’s a case where you’d like to come up with a version that lays that bare, that centralizes the stories of Ophelia and Gertrude and maybe even Horatio and Laertes in response, but Shakespeare’s text simply does not allow for that.

That’s also clearly not the problem Icke was attempting to grapple with. I don’t know what he thought having Hamlet attack Ophelia in a bathtub would add, but it was certainly not meant to lessen our love for Scott’s Hamlet. He’s the star in every possible way, and we are so obviously meant to continue to find him intelligent and charming, and to feel bad for his pain. While Findlay’s journey through her scenes with Hamlet made perfect sense when read as a woman whose partner has suddenly attacked her, and for that reason she’s willing to go along with her father’s instructions to leave him, Icke’s not actually interested in Ophelia’s voice– a fact he makes abundantly clear by cutting almost all the text of her madness. The production overall cuts almost nothing– adds things, even including a very nice Q1 scene between Horatio and Gertrude– but Ophelia’s lines are gone. She has one or two of them, but it’s mostly singing. Where Shakespeare’s Ophelia repeatedly forces her way into the room, Icke’s is wheeled in in a wheelchair, not even allowed to move under her own power, her strange and troubling language of grief replaced with her beating her own chest and face. I have a lot of difficulty with Ophelia’s mad scene, and am always open to experimenting with it, but in this context, to replace language with silence and self-inflected violence felt frustrating and almost offensive in a context where almost no other lines had been cut, and this was an Ophelia who had explicitly been a victim of violence at the hands of the hero. It seemed to say that Icke values Ophelia more as an object upon which violence can be enacted than as a character who takes up space and has things to say.

So Hamlet may well be more problematic than I’ve fully allowed myself to realize before now. But I also think Icke made a textual problem much, much worse with wholly unnecessary nudity and sexualized violence towards the play’s female characters– and worst of all, didn’t really seem to realize he was doing it.

hbachrach essay, Shakespeare

The Lady Canon

The anecdotal agreement seems to be that so-called “gender blind” casting is on the rise. Dominic Cavendish got annoyed about it last year. But as long as only select roles within a production are cast against their written gender, it’s all but impossible for the casting to be “blind.” Their conspicuous altered presence, even tokenization, draws attention to the fact of the switch, and raises questions about which roles directors are open to switching and why. This latter question has been particularly interesting to me lately, as I’ve noticed distinct patterns not just in the specific roles that get offered to women, but the things these roles have in common. So I’d like to explore a few of the patterns I’ve been noticing. This is certainly not comprehensive– just some of the most interesting examples.

(A side note: I’ve really been struggling with how to break this conversation out of a gender binary, and haven’t yet found a way to do it. I’m comfortable referring to the roles themselves as male roles, because the characters are indeed written to be cisgender men, but I struggle to find the right language to for the individuals taking these roles (given the theatre industry as it stands now, these are almost exclusively cisgender women, but I’d like to find language that is more open to accommodating the expansion beyond this binary that I hope will someday take place) and for the process that is undertaken when this casting happens. “Switched,” “flipped,” and “swapped” all imply– at least to me– a binary, shifting from one pole to another. What is a verb that can contain the idea that these roles were male, but are being played by non-male individuals who are usually women? I’m still working on it, and for now, I apologize for the fact that this list will break down into a male/female binary, because that reflects the ways these roles have been cast in major productions so far. There is a whole separate conversation to be had about amateur/fringe Shakespeare and how such productions are more expansive in their experimentation with sexuality and gender, but that’s… one for the postdoc, maybe. And this isn’t even getting started on how much I hate using the word “female”…)

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern
I do literally mean Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are very frequently either both women, or a man and woman pair these days, but I also use it to stand in for similar small but speaking roles: Cornelius and/or Voltemand in the same play, the ambassadors in A Winter’s Tale, Henry IV’s other sons, Lady Grey’s older sons in Richard III. These types of roles are both easy and essential. If they are the only male roles being offered to women, then that’s just lazy. But a sufficiently wide spread of gender diversity, including such minor roles as well as major ones, is what helps shift attention from a single, token female lead, instead creating a theatrical world that can allow for actual “blindness” to gender.

Don John
I have seen three female Don Johns in the past two years, two of them within the past six months. Does this count as a trend yet? If so, I’m not sure I like it. I absolutely think that women should get a chance to swagger in black leather (don’t Don Johns always wear black leather?) and be pointlessly and a bit ineffectively evil, but when set against the gender politics of the play as a whole, this choice gets a little more troubling. I’m not sure if directors are making this choice because it will provide “motivation” for Don John’s envy of her brother and Claudio– of course she’s jealous! Women, amirite?– or because they think it will somehow soften the play’s incredibly troubling gender politics to have a women spearhead the aggressive (fake) slut-shaming of another woman. Neither of these sits right with me, the former for obvious reasons, the latter because it seems absurd and unfair to defang the play’s critique of chastity-obsessed patriarchy by turning its most active proponent into a woman. There are sexist women who hate women, of course, but Don John is not a role with sufficient complexity to responsibly explore that issue. Or they’re just not thinking about it at all, and think it would be fun to have a woman strutting evilly in black leather, which I empathize with. But my point is that we must think about these things beyond just the blanket assumption that any opportunity for women is narratively good– especially in a play whose embedded gender politics make “gender blindness” more or less impossible.

Kent, Benvolio, Horatio
The Globe’s King Lear this summer featured Saskia Reeves as Kent, and the Ian McKellan Chichester production soon to transfer to the West End had Sinéad Cusack, who I assume will also be in the West End version, but it hasn’t been announced.

Last year, I was at a conference about gender equity in the arts, and was attending a panel about the topic this post is exploring: making more space for women in the classics. I asked a version of the question I’m exploring here– what do you think of the fact that women are generally cast in the same types of male roles over and over?– and offered Benvolio as an example. One of the directors on the panel replied, “Well, I do think Benvolio should always be a woman!” Which both did and didn’t answer the question.

Finally, few recent major Hamlets have had women as Horatio, but it pops up quite a lot in regional production– my most recent was at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2016.

I lump all of these roles together because I think they are very similar tonally and in their relationship to the main character of their respective plays. They are all solid, prominent roles– Kent perhaps moreso than the other two, Benvolio perhaps less– but they make the top half of the cast list for sure. Their major function is to act as helpmeets and voices of reason in support of a male main character. Benvolio and Horatio are both pointedly non-violent in very violent plays. They are tirelessly devoted, even though they don’t always get the credit or respect they deserve for their efforts.

To say that a character like Benvolio should always be a women offers a slightly troubling implication about the types of roles we feel women “should” play. The thinking behind this assumption is obvious: he’s the pacifist of the group, he’s a voice of reason, he doesn’t really engage in the bawdy punning of the other boys. The same can be said, more or less, of Horatio and Kent. Only casting women in roles that reinforce stereotypes about femininity is contrary to the spirit of these casting experiments, in my opinion, and is not particularly creative at this point.

The Clowns: Feste, Touchstone, Jaques, Lear’s Fool, etc.
I think a major element of these is that most of the clowns are wholly sexless: there’s no risk of accidentally creating a queer relationship (the horror!!!)– except with Touchstone, but he’s also the one I’ve seen least. Their narrative isolation makes them easier to transform without much of a ripple effect. Even in a production that’s adhering to a historical setting that supposedly makes the introduction of women into more active roles complicated, the clowns and fools already exist in a set-apart place, literally granted license to live outside the ordinary social order.

To my mind, there is something a bit problematic about constraining women– especially under the excuse of “historical accuracy”– to these exceptional positions. There shouldn’t need to be a reason or an excuse for women to exist in your theatrical world– they’re already speaking in verse, for goodness’ sake. None of this is real. (And that’s not even getting into the fact that our popular ideas of “historical accuracy” as relate to the positions of marginalized groups tend to be wildly inaccurate anyway.)

It’s also sometimes difficult to know what the heck to do with the clowns, written as they usually were for specific performers, capitalizing on set bits and audience expectations that are now mostly lost. So I’m often readier to believe with the clowns and fools that they genuinely are a type of “gender blindness”– that the directors really have chosen the person who they feel will find something to bring to the role, some way to fill out and contextualize them, and the gender of the performer is sort of beside the point.

Cassius
Julius Caesar seems to be a show that is particularly likely to be cast wholly with women, or to feature “gender-blind” casting in various combinations– possibly because it is so often re-set into a contemporary context, and the relative lack of romance (you don’t tend to see female Brutuses in mixed-gender casts) makes it easy to avoid queering existing romantic relationships. I realize I keep alluding to this, and it’s because I can only assume this is a major concern for directors, because they so aggressively avoid it. The one time I’ve seen a female Julius Caesar (a choice I generally quite liked), Calphurnia was cut and her lines of warning reassigned to Mark Antony. 

In a mixed-gender cast (including right now in London), the lead most likely to be swapped seems to be Cassius. Though certainly one of the main roles, it is certainly the least impressive and least famous of the leading trio of Brutus, Antony, and Cassius. It is also the role explicitly identified as likely acting out of envy and insecurity. Unlike Brutus, he’s not particularly principled, is accused of accepting bribes, and even his death is actually just an accident resulting from a ridiculous miscommunication.

Is Cassius a great role? Absolutely. Am I arguing that it’s problematic to cast women as flawed characters? Absolutely not. But the nature of Cassius’s flaws– envy of powerful men, a hot temper and uncontrolled emotions, a death that results from a misreading of battlefield tactics– do evoke sexist stereotypes. I’m not necessarily saying women shouldn’t play Cassius, or directors can’t make something interesting out of these uncomfortable associations– but one does wonder why it’s Cassius they default to, and not the honorable Brutus, or the ultimately triumphant and scene-stealing Mark Antony.

Malvolio
Speaking of queering romantic relationships… I haven’t seen this that often, but it did happen twice in London recently. Turning the priggish, universally disliked (by the others onstage) character who is shamed and mocked for his inappropriate love interest into a lesbian? Yeah, cool.

Prospero
This one’s great because there’s a film! It’s not particularly easy to access, in my experience, but at least one instance of gender-swapped Shakespeare is permanently recorded as the Official Film Version. So that’s nice.

Despite their obvious differences in role size, power, and, uh, competence, I can’t help but think of Don John again, and the effect this casting has on the play’s themes I always slightly feel like a female Prospero disrupts or defangs the play’s patriarchal commentary. On the other hand, if you’re taking a post-colonial angle, white women are certainly as complicit in the violence of colonialism as white men.

But there’s also the more positive take on Prospero– one that I’m always slightly surprised to see because of the strong critical strain relating to Prospero’s patriarchal abuses, but which really is the more common theatrical version, in my experience. This taps into the cultural associations of Prospero with Shakespeare himself, and often comes in productions that bill the play as Shakespeare’s last, the epilogue serving as both the magician and the playwright’s farewells to their crafts. There is something compellingly subversive in having a woman inhabit this association (they do tend to be white women, though, so it’s not quite the height of radicalism just yet).

*

The title of this post is a reference to Dr. Jami Rogers’ concept of the “black canon,” a remarkably consistent set of roles in which black actors tend to be cast at the exclusion of other, usually better, parts. I believe we can see the same patterns in the roles generally offered to women, with related (probably subconscious) generalizations underpinning the choice of roles. Rather than blindly applauding casting choices on the basis that they provide opportunities for women, I’d like to see more rigorous interrogation of the types of opportunities that are consistently being offered, and more attention paid to these patterns, rather than approaching each instance as an isolated choice without broader resonance.

 

hbachrach essay, Shakespeare

Back to the Source

I’ve finally started reading some of the older Elizabethan history plays I probably should have read a long time ago. I’ve read some Holinshed and the other chronicle sources that have been identified as Shakespeare’s source material, but it’s instructive to see that some of his strongest influences were really earlier plays.

The case that has intrigued me most– in large part because it’s one I’ve barely seen discussed– is Shakespeare’s King John and its predecessor/maybe-source, The Troublesome Reign of King John. 

I fully recognize that this has almost certainly been discussed at length in scholarly literature I haven’t yet read, but I’m equally interested in the fact that while Shakespeare’s relationship to predecessor plays like The Famous Victories of Henry V and The True Tragedy of Richard III is common knowledge, this one doesn’t seem to be. Which is particularly interesting because some of the most famous features of the play– ones that Shakespeare gets a lot of credit for– actually derive from this earlier play.

Mostly, I’m talking about the Bastard.

He’s frequently correctly credited as Shakespeare’s only wholly fictional main character, but in such a way that also tends to give Shakespeare credit for making him up. But The Troublesome Reign of King John makes it plain that, fictional or not, he was an established aspect of the King John story that Shakespeare was adapting. So is the prominence of Queen Eleanor and Constance, and their sudden disappearance partway through the play, a structural feature I’ve seen frequently puzzled over.

While it’s not quite an answer just to say “it happens because he was copying his source play,” it does shed some light. We can’t fully understand what Shakespeare is doing in a play if we incorrectly believe he has originated characters and ideas that in fact he has borrowed from others. And it obscures what Shakespeare did innovate– in this case, for example, the deep ambivalence of the Bastard character, or Constance’s effusive mourning. And what he didn’t: the abrupt disappearance of Elinor and Constance.

It highlights the problems with only considering Shakespeare in isolation. Not only can it paint an inaccurate picture of the theatrical scene as a whole, it can create misleading assumptions about the plays themselves.

 

 

hbachrach essay, Shakespeare

Trumpius Caesar

So people are really mad about the Shakespeare in the Park Julius Caesar that dresses Caesar up as Trump. And lefty theatre people are sort of gleeful at the rightwing anger, because look! Theatre causes controversy! We’re important!

But one thing that’s jumped out at me in the furor is the implication– suggested by my Twitter timeline’s, “It’s Shakespeare, stupid,” response to a Fox news article attacking the “New York City play” in terms that made it seem like they thought it was a new anti-Trump play– is that there is inherent Trumpiness in Shakespeare’s play. That Oskar Eustis didn’t add anything except an orange wig and some pussyhats to what was already there.

But as always, Shakespeare is way slipperier and more equivocal than directors seem to expect, and the supposedly self-evident commentary on dictatorship that Julius Caesar offers is no exception. Today I keep thinking about a production I saw several years ago at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival where the Vilma Silva played Caesar. Suddenly, the conspirators’ accusations of tyranny took on a more suspicious cast. Why were they so threatened by her? Should we believe their accusations of actions we never get to see? Why is Cassius so obsessed with her physical weakness, with feeling degraded by being subordinate to her?

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival didn’t change the text either– Caesar still had a distinctly self-aggrandizing air, still less-than-secretly craved a crown. Was still a war hero, and beloved by the people. There was good and bad. But her gender added an additional wrinkle, forced a reexamination of the conspirators’ virulent hatred. That wrinkle went some way towards standing in for an Elizabethan audience’s acceptance of the self-evident good of monarchy, a counterbalance to the conspirators’ language about tyranny and freedom that tends to ring completely convincingly to contemporary audiences.

I can’t see the Public’s production, so it’s very possible that they offer much more complication than the reviews and responses have suggested so far. But it seems to me that they have unbalanced the play’s morality by depicting Caesar as Trump– especially given their New York City (read: probably liberal) audiences, who are coming in with a certain set of biases (to say the least). Caesar is not just a cardboard tyrant, and Shakespeare’s central question is more complicated than just “is assassination of an objectively horrible leader right or wrong.” I don’t think it would have been any better to put Caesar in a pantsuit and make Calpurnia her white-haired southern husband, but it might have left more room for the text’s uncertainty about Caesar’s dangerousness.

In short, while Oskar Eustis may not have added anything to turn Caesar into Trump, it’s reductive to suggest that he was just tapping into was was already obvious and explicit in Shakespeare’s words.

hbachrach essay, Shakespeare

A Response to Dominic Cavendish

In Dominic Cavendish’s article lamenting the demise of the male actor because women are stealing all their parts, he lists examples of women who have taken on classic male roles in the past year or so: Tamsin Greig as Malvolio, Glenda Jackson as King Lear, Michelle Terry as Henry V, “a female Cymbeline” (her name is Gillian Bevan, though Cavendish decided not to look that up I guess) at the RSC, and “some… innovations at Shakespeare’s Globe.”

In roughly the same time period in which those woman-led productions appeared, at just the companies listed above, the following canonical leading roles were played by men: Mark Antony (twice), Octavius Caesar (twice), Enobarbus, Orsino (twice), Sebastian (twice), Antonio (twice), Sir Toby (twice), Sir Andrew (twice), Cassius, Brutus, Casca, Julius Caesar, Pistol, the Dauphin, the Duke of Orleans, the Constable of France, Princess Katherine, Palamon, Arcite, Faustus, Mephistopheles, Hamlet, Claudius, Laertes, Polonius, Prospero, Antonio, Gonzalo, Ariel, Caliban, Edgar (twice), Edmund (twice), Gloucester (twice), Kent (twice), Othello, Iago, Cassio, Shylock, Antonio, Bassanio, Posthumous, Iachimo, Macbeth, Macduff, Petruchio, Pericles, Helena, Demetrius, Lysander, Oberon, King Lear, Henry V, Cymbeline, and Malvolio.

Among others.

The boys are just fine.

hbachrach essay, Shakespeare

The Collaboration Question

Over the holiday season, like many people, I made a lot of small talk with family and friends of the family, and a lot of them asked me about Shakespeare. Specifically, a lot of them asked about the headlines they’d seen claiming that Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare collaborated. When I was in London, I was lucky enough to attend a launch event for the New Oxford Shakespeare, the edition that sparked all those Marlowe articles by officially attributing him as a co-author, and that decision was likewise all anyone wanted to talk to the editors about.

In a recent article in Shakespeare Quarterly, a group of four scholars lay out their methods for determining authorship based on ‘word adjacency networks,’ or the likelihood that a certain word will appear within x number of words in a given writer’s work. Not being remotely mathematically minded, I can’t pretend I understood it perfectly clearly, and I think there’s a lot of interesting debate about the utility of these methods.

But when one of those family friends asked how I felt about these studies– whether I felt like it was some kind of desecration to apply math to art– I told him that I found these discoveries quite exciting. I can’t quite say that I think we should accept these findings as 100% accurate and without flaw, or that they firmly close the book on questions about who collaborated with whom, but I am interested them in as a starting-place for a new line of inquiry.

I wrote my MA thesis, for example, about female characters in Shakespeare’s history plays. The problem that scholars seem to consistently be trying to tackle with that topic is why on earth the female characters of Shakespeare’s early history plays are so different from those of the later plays. In the eyes of a contemporary feminist reader, he seems to distinctly regress in terms of his representation of women– but even taking away that ahistorical lens, something dramatic does shift in how he incorporates female characters into his historical plots between the first plays and the last.

So I’m intrigued by these findings. What if part of the answer is to read characters like Joan of Arc, the Countess of Auvergne, and the Duchess of Gloucester not entirely as Shakespeare characters, but as Marlowe characters– or perhaps most plausibly, some hybrid of the two, borne of their collaboration and efforts to blend their styles? Maybe nothing will come of it, but as someone who can’t help but approach textual questions from a dramaturgical perspective, I would be excited to explore and see if Marlowe’s hand provides a potential answer for some of the questions surrounding these plays.

hbachrach essay, Shakespeare

Don’t Blame Romeo and Juliet

In honor of Shakespeare’s 400th death-day, the New York Times celebrated by commissioning four writers to create “lost” scenes from Shakespeare plays. The entry for Romeo and Juliet, called ‘How Fast Love Curdles,’ had a premise that probably sounds familiar: the teenage lovers are nothing but hormone-addled idiots, their star-crossed love just adolescent lust. The piece is meant to be comedy, but it offers nothing more than the class smart-aleck in tenth grade English probably already pointed out. And it is in keeping with a frustratingly common dismissal of the play, rooted in disdain for its young central lovers.

Though it’s one of the most popular and most produced Shakespeare plays, scorn for Romeo and Juliet abounds. I wrote a blog post for Shakespeare’s Globe last summer, and for some reason, half the people who reblogged it on Tumblr felt the need to mention in the tags how much they hated the play. Professed Shakespeare fans on my Facebook page will periodically circulate this post:

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Setting aside the fact that ‘everyone who actually read it’ would notice that Romeo’s age is not specified, the smug tone that suggests those who really understand the play gets my hackles up for a whole host of reasons– not least of which being, this cynical reading is emphatically wrong. No, not an alternate take, not a deconstruction: wrong. Antony and Cleopatra is, arguably, a story about a probably misguided relationship that directly leads to a lot of deaths. ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore is almost definitely that. But to cast Romeo and Juliet as anything other than the victims of their own play- a status that the text of the play works very hard to make explicitly clear- is to completely miss the point of the tragedy and to strip it of its most radical commentary.

Start from the beginning. The prologue (always a useful means of signaling a play’s intentions) doesn’t even mention the leading lovers’ names. It is focused on the city of Verona itself. The first four lines are solely dedicated to the Montague-Capulet feud. After that, every mention of the lovers is contextualized by their relationship to both the feud and the city at large:

 

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes,
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whose misadventure’d piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which but their children’s end, naught could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage.

You could easily come away from this prologue expecting an equal split in the play to follow between lovers and politicians. Something is rotten in the state of Verona, and Shakespeare sets up the promise of an almost Christ-like redemption of the families through the love and deaths of their children.

While it’s easy to gloss over Romeo and Juliet’s extreme decisions in the latter half of the play as nothing more than the overreactions of teenagers, they’re pushed into all of them by outside forces: by the banishment of Romeo, who the Prince himself admits is just a scapegoat upon whom he can avenge his kinsman Mercutio’s murder; by Lord Capulet’s violent threats in the face of Juliet’s refusal to marry; and of course, by the feud, which binds the lovers to secrecy in the first place. Though youthful passion (of course not a force to be completely dismissed) drives Romeo and Juliet to one another, and to make some of the mistakes that hasten their downfall, Shakespeare provides continual reminders that their choices are also guided by unrelenting pressure from those in power to just give in to unthinking obedience and meaningless traditions of violence and revenge.

But are they even in love? the cynics will ask. Yes, they are. To argue otherwise is to completely ignore Shakespeare’s stylistic hints, or to suggest that Shakespeare’s use of verse is entirely meaningless. When Romeo and Juliet meet and talk, creating a sonnet with their dialogue that culminates in a kiss, the change that they undergo can hardly be understated. Romeo has punned with Mercutio and Benvolio and pined for the disinterested Rosaline, but Juliet is the first character who understands the language he is trying to speak. Throughout his early scenes, Romeo presents his friends with rhyming couplets which they use only to make witty quips. Juliet hears, understands, and builds a poem with him. Likewise, in contrast to an introductory scene in which Juliet can barely get a word in, Romeo listens to and welcomes her wit.

To imagine that their relationship is nothing more than emotionless lust, that Romeo and Juliet are to be blamed for everything that follows, is to entirely flip the redemptive promise of the play: that violence, hate, and fear can be undone by a radical act of love. The Prince’s final lines don’t place the blame on thoughtless youth, or an unruly young woman or an intemperate young man (as plenty of early modern tragedies do). Rather, he chastises the city leaders, including himself:

See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.
And I, for winking at your discords, too
Have lost a brace of kinsmen: all are punish’d.

Those who would blame Romeo and Juliet for their actions sound suspiciously like Friar Lawrence at his most cowardly, or Lord Capulet at his most tyrannous: insisting that the children under their care cannot possibly know themselves, cannot possibly understand what they have done or what the need to do next, must surely mind their elders’ advice- or else. But it’s this very advice, this very world created by cowardly, tyrannous guardians that drives them to secrecy, violence, and death. Left to their own devices- at the party, on the balcony, in Juliet’s bedroom- their world is one of peace and poetry. The very last endearment that Juliet calls Romeo the morning after their wedding is friend.

From the prologue’s focus on the warring families, to the ending lines centered around Lord Montague, Lord Capulet, and the Prince, Shakespeare frames the play as a civic tragedy, rooted in the failures of those in power on scales both large (the city of Verona) and small (the Capulet and Montague households) to put aside their personal hatred and prejudice and properly rule. But within this frame— quite literally nestled in the middle of the lines from the prologue quoted above— Shakespeare places love. The two are essential to one another: the power structures which doom the young couple, and the love which will blow those structures apart.

hbachrach essay, Shakespeare

The Glass of History

In the New York Times a few weeks ago, there was an article about historical accuracy in Oscar-nominated films. The Academy loves accuracy, according to the article, which goes so far as to suggest that having the accuracy of the events it depicts questioned can even lose films Oscars they seemed poised to win.

Unsurprisingly, this made me think about Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s histories are… not known for their complete accuracy, to say the least. The compression of time, conflation of events, and addition and subtraction of characters can make trying to pick the ‘truth’ out of most of the plays, frankly, pointless. Not that this stops people from trying, and you can easily find books and articles enumerating all the things Shakespeare got wrong.

Sometimes, knowing that Shakespeare changed a detail can illuminate something very interesting about his apparent intentions in structuring the drama. Knowing, for example, that the historical Queen Margaret was dead in France well before the events of Richard III, and the famous confrontation scenes between Richard and the female characters have almost no precedent in contemporary sources suggests that Shakespeare was much more interested in the female characters than many contemporary productions seem to be.

But very often, as with the linked article’s suggestion that inaccuracy loses Oscars, the claim of historical inaccuracy seems intended to double as a value judgment. Or, on the opposite scale, “revealing” that many of his details really are accurate after all seems meant to serve as a vindication.

It’s pretty clear that Shakespeare’s audiences didn’t care. None of the Elizabethan or Jacobean history plays have the kind of scrupulous accuracy that today’s audiences seem to demand.

In 1765, Samuel Johnson published his Preface to Shakespeare, which included an entire section enumerating Shakespeare’s faults and flaws. He alludes to inaccuracy, sort of, but specifically refers only to Shakespeare’s tendency towards anachronism, which I would argue is not quite the same as nitpicking all the ways in which he changed around timelines or conflated characters. If there’s anyone you’d expect to be a stickler for facts, it’s a neoclassicist like Johnson– but that doesn’t turn out to be the case.

Writing in 1817, Romantic critic William Hazlitt does briefly note the relative historical accuracy of Shakespeare’s plays, but proclaims them uniformly correct: ‘his plays are in this respect the glass of history’. And, he notes, the places where Shakespeare has had to fictionalize are as good as, if not better than, real history.

In 1837, a printer named Charles Knight embarked on a project to produce an illustrated edition of Shakespeare. He was far from the first to do this, but he intended to distinguish his version in one important way: rather than stage-inspired illustrations, he wanted engravings of the actual settings, the real historical personages, and historically accurate clothing and architecture. In this aim, his Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakespere was, intentionally or otherwise, keeping step with emerging theatrical trends.

Around the 1830s, British actors began returning to what they saw as Shakespeare’s roots. Restoration adaptations which had superseded Shakespeare’s texts in some cases began to be restored (others would last even into the 20th century), and there was a new interest in creating productions with historically accurate, highly detailed sets and costumes. It seems only logical that, with a surging interest in representing the historical periods of Shakespeare’s plays, Shakespeare’s own inconsistent depiction of that history would become newly noticeable– and perhaps newly irritating.

These days, of course, directors are much more likely to say to hell with history and set the plays in any time or place they wish. Our obsession with historical accuracy has drifted away from Shakespeare to more naturalistic forms of media, where we seem to expect that, because the action looks realistic, it ought to fact-check against reality, too.