#MyPlayToday ... The Merry Wives of Windsor

It's as Sir John would have wanted, butter on the stove and fudge in hand

First impressions of the draw: Did anybody see that absolutely mental performance from Verdi's Falstaff as part of Shakespeare Live? Yeah, that.

Had I read the play before? No

Had I seen the play before? Yes

'What tempest, I trow, threw this whale, with so many tuns of oil in his belly, ashore at Windsor?'
MWoW, 2.1

I have a confession to make - when I drew Merry Wives from Jarthur (the official name for my plays jar: because he's cute, small, and is always perched precariously on a ledge in my room), I felt quite the drop in my stomach. Firstly, because I am so disorganised that I had drawn this play thinking that to read it right at this moment would be inopportune, not realising until about five minutes ago that Merry Wives IS in fact on my to-read-list for the coming week. Secondly, because coming back to the blog after almost two months of scholastic distraction is scary. Add to that a play that isn't regarded as the richest literary goldmine and you're left with a particularly anxious fledgling student of Shakespeare. 

But the sense of trepidation and of heightened expectations that I felt drawing Merry Wives this morning is inseparable from the reputation of this play. I had always heard that Merry Wives is to Shakespeare what The Hound of the Baskervilles is to Conan Doyle; a way to 'resurrect' a popular character and keep the party swinging for at least another two hours traffic. Certainly, the characters and language lifted straight from the Henry IV plays into this domesticated comedy have the flavour of a fan fiction. To me, it's a laboured squeeze to reset Falstaff outside of the relationships that are so indelibly bound within his character: the subversive soldier, the pseudo-father, the huge heap of flesh that really would need a crane to lift him out of that Cheapside tavern and into rural Windsor. 

No food on the tables? I had probably already eaten it all

What is interesting is this sense of squeezing something that doesn't quite fit kept throwing itself at my face as I read the play today. Simple is shut in a closet, Falstaff is famously smuggled out of Ford's house in a basket of filthy linen. Even his beard struggles to be confined under women's clothes and in this way, the play ties its comic tendency toward the anxiety of cuckoldry with a visual and theatrical counterpart of claustrophobic, domestic spaces. Just as Ford, like Leontes, cannot contemplate being sealed inside the label of 'cuckold', the play gives us vignettes of domesticity that always warp into someone being confined. It's a Don Juanesque comic trope, the unfaithful wife's secret lover being bundled into a closet as her husband returns home, and this particular mise-en-scene of domestic entrapment just won't stay concealed in Merry Wives. 

Perhaps this also has something to do with Falstaff. I'm indebted, as ever, to Emma Smith's Approaching Shakespeare lecture on 1 Henry IV which may as well have taken Falstaff as its titular focus. Smith, I think crucially, reminds us that it's near impossible to read that particular play and to forget that Falstaff is fat. The same lexicon of largesse that makes Falstaff an impossible character to ignore in the Henry IV plays makes him seem something too large for every role Merry Wives presents to him. For example, when Mistresses Ford and Page receive identical love letters from Falstaff the 'lover', they imagine an excess of letters which casts Falstaff as a printer (in the early modern, rather than the Hewlett Packard, sense):

'I warrant he hath a thousand of these letters,... sure, more, - and these are of the second edition: he will print them, out of doubt'

MWoW, 2.1

Similarly, Falstaff is just too big to successfully play the role of 'cuckolder' to the anxious Ford: 

'he cannot creep into a halfpenny purse, nor into a pepper-box ... I will search impossible places.'

MWoW, 3.5

For all the play's gluttony and domesticity, coming home from uni to my absolute-dream-but-definite-feeder of a mother made Merry Wives a terrifying mirror to nature. Is there anything more Falstaffian than arriving through the door and making cakes in the first ten minutes? Particularly the most beautiful autumnal cake from my insanely-talented-but-also-a-feeder best friend. All that was missing was sack (does gin count?) and a laundry basket which, bucking the cliche, I actually didn't bring home with me. 

Today was, as it turns out, as good a day as any to be pleasantly surprised by this play. I feel that sounds like a laboured, false smile conclusion. But I was pleasantly surprised, as I expect to continue to be. For now, I'm going to jump back into the fragrant laundry basket of MA life and hopefully I'll be able to pop my head out periodically here as I rummage. And whilst we are heading that way with the metaphor, if I stay any longer at home, I'm going to need cranes to lift me out of Cheapside. 

One entirely random thought/question the play inspired of me today:
More of a 'note-to-self': It would be super interesting to look at Leontes' and Ford's visual lexicon of cuckoldry. Particularly Ford's 'hole in my coat' metaphor. Early modern men be crazy. 

#MyPlayToday ... Antony and Cleopatra

First impressions of the draw: Damn it, I was really hoping for something pre-1599... (these are the ones I'm looking at in my MA in the next few months) 

Had I read the play before? Yes

Had I seen the play before? No

So, apparently my Shakespeare lucky-dip has caught wind of the RSC's most recent season announcement and is feeling very Roman. Enter the world's most famous pair (Caesar's words, not mine), Antony and Cleopatra. I decided to take my reading of this play way back to Rome. I didn't quite hop on a flight, but in true middle-class-stereotype style I hit my local National Trust site; the ruins of a Roman bathhouse in Letocetum. Or, we call it Wall nowadays. 

Antony and Cleopatra is a play I read a few years ago for a module during my undergrad. In a group, we presented on the play's contributions to the Cleopatra 'legacy', complete with a life sized cardboard Cleo cutout. Now, that makes it sound as if I'm about to go all Stanley Wells and drop some miles-deep insight on this play. In fact, I actually remember very little about reading or even studying this play the first time round. And I think this has a lot to do with the fact I've never seen A&C on the stage. 

Of all Shakespeare's plays, I'd want to argue for A&C being the one which most furiously begs to be performed. Or, at least of all those I've read, A&C strikes me as the most overtly about performance. To argue this I'm going to kick off with a speech from Enobarbus (and no, it's not the barge one. What?!?!): 

'Under a compelling occasion, let women die: [...] Cleopatra, catching but the least noise of [Antony's leaving Egypt], dies instantly; I have seen her die twenty times upon a far poorer moment: I do think there is such mettle in death, which commits some loving act upon her, that she hath such a celerity in dying.' 
(A&C, 1.2.)

Enobarbus' speech pokes a great deal of fun at Cleopatra's histrionic performances of death in reaction to any inconvenience. To put this in the context of Shakespeare's theatre, histrionic performances of death were associated with the stage rather than the court, although it is clear theatricality permeated both these very public arenas. This is the stage which gave us dying lines in the First Folio peppered with 'O, o, o,..'; if these were truly memorial reconstructions of particular performances we are to expect an early modern audience picks up exactly what Enobarbus is dropping in this speech. Cleopatra is an actress. Like the boy player behind her role, the character is described as putting on performances of death quite regularly. We also hear the stage management of these performances from Cleopatra's own lips in the comic scene in which she implores her handmaids to improvise: 

'If you find him [Antony] sad / Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report / That I am sudden sick'

(A&C, 1.3)

So, Antony and Cleopatra's relationship is consciously theatrical. I'm not exactly breaking new ground here. But what really fascinated me in a second reading is how the theatricality of the pair begins to disintegrate and where this opens up pockets through which the tragedy emerges. It's as if as soon as Antony leaves Egypt, the pair begin to forget their cues. Cleopatra's fleets on the sea literally get stage fright and fail to perform for Antony, Antony botches the stage trick of his own suicide, his body becomes a stage prop which is clumsily manoeuvred (Emma Smith introduces this idea in her fantastic lecture on the play), Cleopatra has her stage-hand maids redress her as a Queen for her final performance of death. The tragedy is brought about because the patches begin to emerge in these performances. Finally, both Antony and Cleopatra refuse to act in a piece of Roman theatre in which they have no control over the direction: 

'Wouldst thou be window'd in great Rome, and see / Thy master thus with pleach'd arms, bending down / His corrigable neck, his face subdued / To penetrative shame'

(Antony, A&C, 4.12)

'the quick comedians / Extemporally will stage us, and present / Our Alexandrian revels: Antony / Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see / Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I' the posture of a whore.'

(Cleopatra, A&C, 5.2)

The absolute mind blowingly spectacular irony Shakespeare throws in particularly Cleopatra's lines here is one he wrote for his own theatre, rather than ours. A 'squeaking [...] boy' is already playing Cleopatra. In fact, it is of course a boy player and not the Queen herself who speaks those lines. Oh, Will. I really think Shakespeare's fascination with Rome and Roman figures is bedded in the idea that, like the Elizabethan England he grew up in, highly theatrical performance underpinned displays of power. Of course, we still live in that society where 2 billion people tune in to see ritualised performances from powerful and attractive people. But that is why (CLICHE ALARM) Shakespeare still speaks to us, or rather we still find connections in the world of these plays.

Perhaps, too, the dichotomy of 'worlds' that obsesses the characters of the play and critics alike is not so much the opulent Egypt and the regimented Rome, but behind the curtain and in front of it. If Egypt is the free space of the stage, Rome is the shrouded mechanics of backstage. Look at what Cleopatra says about the release of Egypt compared to Roman restraint: 

'[Antony] was disposed to mirth; but on the sudden / A Roman thought hath struck him.'

(A&C, 1.2)

Egypt, then, is the space of liberation, performance and recreation for Antony and Cleopatra. Egypt is the Elizabethan theatre.  The gender anxieties of early modern theatre also work their way into the gendered analogies of geography given by the play through this model. It is perhaps not the luxury of Egypt that feminises Antony, but the dangerous, potential femininity of performance. And that is why if someone could find me a time machine and take me back to Mark Rylance's 1999 performance of Cleopatra at the Globe I would be eternally grateful. 

Mark Rylance, looking hotter than all of us in a dress since 1999. 

One entirely random thought/question the play inspired of me today: You have to write an essay about Antony's Duchess of Malfi moment, 'I am Antony yet'. 

#MyPlayToday ... Richard II

First impressions of the draw: Mental image of David Tennant's incredible portrayal, the lingering question of whether they gave him super-subtle breast implants?  

Had I read the play before? Yes

Had I seen the play before? No

Like the erring Bollingbroke, I'm back to the blog after a short, self imposed banishment. Travelling, tutoring, upcoming Masters faff (I've discovered what Shakespeare was up to in all those lost years. He was trying to find student accommodation in Stratford upon Avon) and reading War and Peace have kept me off these keys for now. Particularly the latter; I love the material Tolstoy, but does there have to be so much of it?

Richard II is a play I feel quite familiar with - my DVD of the RSC production is well loved and I had previously read the play in my bid to read them all chronologically (More on why I changed tactics here). It's also an absolute joy for me to read because it appeals to one of my favourite things about Shakespeare; rhythm. The formality of early modern English, the poeticism characteristic of Shakespeare's early works and the sheer volume of plays he produced make Shakespeare a go-to for anyone who, like me, has a bit of a weird thing about rhythm. Lines of speech that dance as you speak them is what unites my love of Shakespeare and rap (was there a whiter sentence ever spoken?). 

Yes, those are dry cornflakes.

The all-verse form of this play means it is full of elaborate, poetic lines that really do dance as you speak them. Even in the opening war of threats between Hereford (later Bolingbroke, later Henry IV. Phew.) and Mowbray, rhyming couplets abound. What a fantastic juxtaposition of form and context; to have a pair of noblemen arguing furiously in a tight, regulated iambic pentameter. Or, when I reconsider poetry slams and rap battles, perhaps not such a juxtaposition. Not only do characters harangue each other with jaunty rhythmic rhymes, they finish each other's rhyming couplets. This is one of my favourite phenomena in  all of Shakespeare's works; the rhyming couplet split over more than one character. 

'Why uncle, thou hast many years to live.'

'But not a minute, King, that thou canst give.'

RII, 1.3.219-220

This kind of form, in my opinion, lives and breathes on stage. It crackles with tension and immediacy and spares no eloquence. That's the good stuff. 

Talking of form that comes alive on stage, we get it in spades in this play. Take the Duchess of Gloucester's fragmented trains of thought, which split and explode with contradiction and the sheer confusion of grief. She is so bereft she can hardly speak, but it's not left for the actor to dictate. Her fractured emotions stain the text itself. On the other hand, take York's persistent and sassy word-play. The old man's weapons are his words and he wields them mercilessly on a stage of flowery diction. For example: 

'My gracious uncle -'

'Tut, tut! Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle.
 I am no traitor's uncle: and that word "grace"
In an ungracious mouth is but profane.'

RII, 2.3.85-7

By interrupting Bolingbroke and dismembering his courtesy, York both jumps on the play's bandwagon of finishing another character's rhyming couplet and sticks his middle finger up to the whole process. Not so incidentally, York's give-zero-fucks linguistic style makes him one of my favourite characters. 

For all its imagery of overgrown gardens, pestilence, power and Christ, one of the most powerful meaning systems lying under this play is language itself. As in Love's Labour's Lost, characters are preoccupied with words; their native tongues; the form of flattery; the power of a dying man's diction; the rhythm which holds music and speech in place. Outside of it's merit as a play therefore, Richard II encapsulates an era of Shakespeare's linguistic style but not in the genre we would expect. We read Romeo and Juliet, LLL or A Midsummer Night's Dream and we expect rhyming couplets to effuse from lovers. But from a dusty, dead King? What a cracking curveball. 

One entirely random thought/question the play inspired of me today: Note to self - write an essay about Kingship, inheritance, in relation to images of castration and effeminacy. Hell, it's undoubtedly been done already. 

#MyPlayToday ... Hamlet

First impressions of the draw: 'Right then, it's time to have that talk with the blog'

Had I read the play before? Yes

Had I seen the play before? Yes

Could we have gone from a lesser known play to a more well known one? Whether we are talking Shakespeare, defining roles for actors and actresses, or even theatre itself, Hamlet is perhaps the play. It certainly was the play for me, the play that I consider my first encounter with Shakespeare. What an introduction that was. 

This is neither the time nor the place to bring some academia-demolishing insight into the play's depths, so I'll save all that glimmering, innovative analysis for my MA (SWEATS NERVOUSLY). Rather, let's instead talk Hamlet and my day. Let's talk Hamlet and all my days, because I can say with slightly bashful sincerity that reading this play changed me. 

'who still hath cried,
From the first cor[p]se till he that died to-day,
"This must be so."'Ham 1.2

When you're annotating Hamlet but you have a flair for the dramatic

For all it's generic shaping of a revenge tragedy, Hamlet wears the trappings and the suits of a intellectual's bildungsroman. Hamlet has returned home from university, a personal and geographical shift I too have been navigating recently, and is initially desperate to go back. The Royal Shakespeare Company's latest production wore this fact on its sleeve, emphasising Hamlet's youth and even featuring a prologue which gave us the young Prince's graduation. He's desperate to learn, but the effect of this knowledge begins to fester inside him when his rationality is challenged by the irrationality of life.  

I'm in a classroom at seventeen years old, in my element studying for my A levels in a subject I adore. While discussion centres on the most familiar line of the play, 'To be or not to be...', I'm hit by an overwhelming feeling of unfamiliarity. I look around as if the voices reverberating around me can't really be there, this can't really be happening. I'm in a room with people who I talk to, people I laugh with, people I look in the eye every day and we are talking about the most terrifying, unspeakable inevitability - death. '"This must be so."' 

When people ask me why I love Shakespeare, I find it hard not to regress and mentally sit myself down in that classroom. Of course I was, and I am, afraid reading those words. Isn't Hamlet's fear all of ours, too? But to read them and to speak them felt like an honesty I had never encountered. In my opinion, that honesty exists wherever Shakespeare is read and if that honesty speaks to you as a male or a female actor, as a teenager or when you're past your dancing days, in a different language or without words at all then you are entitled to it. 

'many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills'
Ham, 2.2

Does this make Hamlet my favourite play? Yes and no. I have been fortunate beyond my deserving to have seen some incredible actors in the role (I'm looking at you Cumberbatch and Tennant) and each time the connection between Hamlet and the audience that is woven so beautifully into the text sets my world on fire. When I read the play the lines chime with the devotion I felt for the text as a seventeen year old (and not just because my exam was closed-book). Every time I read it or see a new production is like polishing an old vase and feeling like the design has shifted when I turn my back. Because this most lauded of plays was my introduction to Shakespeare, I will always greet it like an old friend. 

It's ancient but it's fluid and for this, I love the play. But perhaps because Hamlet is the play, my attention is always being caught by the quirks and tricks of other plays in Shakespeare's cannon. Moreover, I know I can never come back to this play and polish away that mark that shows the complete beauty of the design, because people far greater than me have been trying to do that for 400 years. There will be a time for my thoughts to piece together amongst all the others on this play and although my 'random thought' can't help but indulge my inner critic, that time is not right now (and if it be not now, yet it will come etc, etc.).

#yayhamlet 

One entirely random thought/question the play inspired of me today: All Polonius's espionage behind-the-arras antics has got me thinking of the value of eavesdropping as a generically malleable trope - contrast, for example, the comedy afforded by the eavesdropping scenes with Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado against the tragedy-tinged-with-slapstick-comedy of Polonius' death in Hamlet. 

#MyPlayToday... The Second Part of King Henry VI

First impressions of the draw: 'Will I love you to death but did you have to make this thing in 3 parts?'

Had I read the play before? Yes

Had I seen the play before? No

Back to the histories as my luck of the draw so far heavily favours the Wars of the Roses narrative. Perhaps my jar full of Shakespeare plays is suddenly sentient and can gauge my deep affection for my university town of York, from which I write this late blog post. It is, in fact, the evening before I graduate. Just as the 'bookish' King Henry shakes of his Lord protector in this, the second part of the triad but possibly the first play (ever? Scholars disagree but this one is a strong contender...) that Shakespeare wrote, so too I'll be asserting a new level of adult bookishness tomorrow. And hopefully not falling while I do it. 

I find the history plays generally tough to access without a prominent dramatic figure (Falstaff for the Henry IV plays, Richard in Richard III for example) to anchor all the overflow of spewing plot and the sheer volume of characters. Not only is Henry VI2 no exception to this, it pretty much makes the rule. Last week, I attempted a plot summary of the late and narratologically complex Cymbeline. If you were to ask me what happens in Henry VI2, I'd have to look at you blankly and answer 'A lot'. What I noticed structurally was how much the recent Hollow Crown adaptation for the BBC had chopped and changed. They fearlessly dismembered the neglected body made of these three plays and, with some big names to galvanise the creation, made a coherent narrative creature. Perhaps in this (I hesitate to say) the may have gotten one up on the original. 

The closest I felt character whom I attuned with as almost was the slightly ridiculous Cade. The workman-with-nobility-delusions launches a starkly relevant assault on the educated classes within the play, including the monarchy, which resonates with the toxic culture of anti-intellectualism that is festering in the air of British politics at the moment. But, it's midnight in a Premier Inn which is simply no time for my soapbox. Although he has a soliloquy, a few contemptuous but hilarious asides and a dramatic exit, Cade does not manage to elude the play's structural flaws; being mentioned fleetingly and then completely dropped for a few acts before his spell of narrative action. 

What I loved and hadn't expected to find (I have read this play before in my chronological cycle of reading the plays but I honestly remembered almost nothing) was a vignette in 3.2, where Warwick and a few lords examine the body of the recently murdered Duke of Gloucester. They are unaware he has been murdered, but Warwick considers the body of the nobleman with a depth that borders on medical ekphrasis. Highlighting the signs that Gloucester's death could not have been natural (including distension of the eyes and blood pooling in the face associated with strangulation, self defensive injuries etc.), this scene is the makings of CSI Shakespeare. I know I shouldn't be, but I was pretty impressed that these Dexter-style postmortem methods had developed by the early 1590s (and, if we accept Shakespeare's dating of the historical narrative, the 15th century).

My day had no thrilling forensic investigation but was certainly not short on plot - nor on reading locations. In the hairdressers, at home in front of the fire, in the car, in a Premier Inn; as it happens its always a good idea to whip out the ancient copy of the Complete Works. 

One random thought/question the play inspired of me today: Well, it's going to be two. 1) 'alderliefest'? Are you serious Margaret? 
2) Interesting to see Gloucester's power figured through his 
staff as a limb which is then 'lopp'd off', Titus Andronicus style (that exact phrase references both Lavinia and Alarbus respectively within that early tragedy). The comparison is particularly interesting when approached with a cautious eye to chronology. 



P.s. I didn't fall. 

#MyPlayToday... Cymbeline

First impressions of the draw: I had hoped for something a little more politically alive... In truth the current political climate had my fingers crossed for Coriolanus or Julius Caesar. But, the Gods of the Draw have decreed we won't mention that hideous B word today. 

Had I read the play before? Yes

Had I seen the play before? Yes

From one oddball play to another - with a brief transatlantic adventure and a 21st birthday in between. Today's reading was the late, great, generic pick and mix, 'fantasy-come-romance-come-history with a Roman play trying to elbow its way in', Cymbeline. I realise I haven't really sold the play very well. Let me explain. 

A few years ago, I was deep in the midst of what I term my 'Shakespeare Hipster' phase - that is, swearing adoration for lesser known plays in an attempt to forge some sense of originality in a thoroughly ploughed field of scholarship. Hell, I'm still in that phase and if my dissertation on Titus Andronicus doesn't prove that, I don't know what will. In tribute to my adolescent devotion to Cymbeline and with a bashful acknowledgement that little of this blog will make sense to readers who are entirely unfamiliar with the plot (of which there will be many), I here offer an attempt at a plot summary. It's as brief as I could keep it but still really rather hefty so feel free to jump over the next few paragraphs. 

[Three main story lines dominate and intersect within Cymbeline; that of the eponymous king of England and a threat to the country from Roman dictatorship, Cymbeline's daughter Imogen (or Innogen) whose banished husband Posthumus bargains a wager on her chastity with an Italian named Iachimo (or Jachimo), and two young princes who were unknowingly stolen from Cymbeline at birth and have since been living as mountaineers with their kidnapper/adopted father/disgraced courtier. 

Against a backdrop of political tensions between England and Rome, the princess Imogen has upset her father by marrying the lowly but worthy Posthumus instead of the Queen's god-awful son, Cloten. Posthumus is banished and meets up with a band of greasy misogynists in Italy, including the slimiest of them all, Iachimo. Placing a bet on her chastity, Iachimo uses deceptive and downright intrusive methods to trick Posthumus into thinking he has slept with Imogen. Posthumus orders Imogen's servant Pisanio to murder her, when Pisanio (convinced of Imogen's innocence) instead advises Imogen to dress as a boy and stick it out in the woods, safe within the trusty Shakespearean trope of cross-dressing heroines. She is promptly picked up by her mountaineer birth-brothers who take the 'young boy', 'Fidele' into their 'household' (it's really a cave) as a page. Meanwhile, Imogen's hopeless suitor, Cloten, has fled with the intention of raping Imogen in Posthumus' clothes but instead meets with the aforementioned mountaineers. Brother-with-a-name-impossible-to-pronounce Number 1 kills Cloten and chops of his head for being a little bitch. 'Fidele' has since taken a potion concocted by the evil Queen which she thinks to be restorative. It in fact pulls a Juliet on her and convinces her devastated mountaineer birth-brothers that she is dead. They bury 'Fidele' next to Cloten's headless body who, if you remember, was wearing Posthumus' clothes. Imogen wakes and assumes the dead body next to her is her husband's and is then picked up as a page by the invading Roman forces. Turns out the most employable asset to have on your CV is part time cross dressed boy. 

TAKE A LEFT TURN, IT'S TIME FOR SOME BATTLE SCENES. The Roman invasion and Cymbeline's consequent victory brings all the characters together into a huge final scene. NB: Except for the Queen, who has died and hilariously confessed she never loved Cymbeline, along with a monstrous list of crimes, on her death bed. Recognitions, reparations and reunions follow in abundance as essentially every plot twist and disguise I have weaved above unravels like a jumper caught on a nail. It's all very emotional - that is, after Posthumus mistakenly beats a still-disguised Imogen, which is quite disturbing.]

TL,DR: Everyone lies to each other for five acts until the final scene where everyone tells the truth. Oh, and Jupiter rides in on an eagle at one point which is pretty cool. 

And, exhale. Despite its spaghetti junction of a plot, Cymbeline truly did hold its own amongst my favourite plays for years because I find it gripping to read. This is an odd sensation with Shakespeare plays - largely I am enthralled by productions. I am equally captivated by reading the plays for the beauty of the language and the depth of the characters, but not necessarily for the plot convulsions. Cymbeline is the reverse of this. Many of the characters are painfully two-dimensional. The Queen, for example, is ripped straight from fairy tales as the stock-type of an evil step mother. The play's demanding plot takes precedence largely over character development or motive; the explanation for Rome's invasion is tenuous and the scene where this is established seems pulled from a different play, we don't really know what motivated Belarius to steal the two princes beyond a strangely vague explanation, Posthumus wildly switches sides in the battle scenes with almost no justification for doing so. The play itself admits that the strange things that happen are beyond the comprehension of the characters; 'Howso'er it is strange ... / Yet it is true, sir' one Lord tells another in the play's opening scene. If there was a line to capture the tone of the play, it ought to be this. 

Reading today, an odd thematic parallel occurred to me that hadn't in my previous few readings of the play. Cymbeline shares a number of themes with it's supposed near-contemporary play, John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. Webster's most famous tragedy shares with this play a marriage whose potential for social mobility discomforts many of the characters, it shares a disdainful and toxic court environment which is seemingly purged by the play's conclusion, a language which dances the boundary between servitude and romantic love (watch out for Iachimo particularly here - as in below). I hadn't expected to find the gory and bleak Malfi as a bedfellow to Cymbeline. 

'Let me tender my service on your lips'
Cym. 1.6.136

There is a world of things I'd love to unpack within this weird play - not least the trunk scene (2.2), which I was so devoted to as a tangential parallel in my dissertation that I was damn close to holding a memorial service when I had to edit it out. For that scene, so deliciously uncharacteristic of Shakespeare and so brimming as a dramatic spectacle, I refer you to the 1982 BBC production with Helen Mirren as Imogen and Robert Lindsay as Iachimo. It is spectacularly worth a watch. 

My day, not unlike the play, was busy. A get together with a best friend and a very interesting screening of Branagh Theatre Company's Romeo and Juliet, perhaps more to come on the latter. This being perhaps my longest post to date, I feel a very abridged summary of the day is needed. 

One entirely random thought/question the play inspired of me today: The parallel between Pisanio and 'Fidele' is a very interesting one. Pisanio gets a mistakenly terrible reputation in the play for truly faithful service and 'Fidele', who famously doesn't give a toss about her Roman master at the play's conclusion, is largely renowned as a devoted page. 

(If you've made it this far, damn. Thanks.) 

#MyPlayToday ... Timon of Athens

Thankfully I haven't since been typecast as the disease-ridden whore... 
(L-R and with respect to my friends who may not wish to be named in full) Imogen (Timandra), Me (Phyrinia), Paul (Alcibiades) and John (Timon). Photo courtesy of Arts York, exact credits unknown. 

First impressions of the draw: General nostalgic, warm glow-ey feeling. Shucks. 

Had I read the play before? Yes

Had I seen the play before? In it's fractured entirety, no. But...

Nothing says 'Happy Father's Day' like a torrent of betrayal and misanthropy! It is, however, rather more fitting for me to do a play reading on Father's Day - it is my wonderful father via whom I first came to love Shakespeare. Perhaps not even to love his works: having been raised amidst the quotations, it is through my Dad predominantly that I grew knowing the world and my own emotions had a lens more beautiful and eloquent than anything I could struggle to comprehend them through. So, thank you, Dad! 

It's also worth a mention that this my first #MyPlayToday since leaving uni. There's something cruelly ironic in pulling the friendless, family-less Timon from the jar days after leaving my second home and the dear, dear friends who are my second family. So to the fates I raise a huge middle finger.

'Nothing brings me all things'
Tim. 5.1.207

But, to the play and to my day. My cryptic answer regarding whether or not I have previously seen Timon of Athens begs an explanation - I have not seen Timon but it is one of the Shakespeare plays I have acted in. That's right. One production amongst the play's performance track record (an illustrious record that I imagine you could count on one hand) featured yours truly. 

Hopefully talking about the play here will elucidate both why this complex tragedy is so difficult to translate to the stage and also why it holds such a high place in my affections. Let's first address the giant Athenian elephant in the room - Timon is a structural mess. Uniquely amongst Shakespeare's plays, it is thought to be both a (potentially unperformed) collaboration and an unfinished play. This poses the biggest challenge in staging the play and I have a big fat bias coming at the play having been in what was a coherent and very accomplished production (our director, Ruby, was a boss). 

I came to reading today with a major soft spot for Timon personally, but giving this troubled and troubling play a reread has given me a renewed interest in the work critically. Like a meringue that is dropped on the way to the table, Timon may be fractured and tragic but some of the fragments are still very tasty. For example, running through this otherwise messy play like a delicious gooey meringue centre (I'm cracking the wind of this poor analogy) is an image system of proto-capitalism as cannibalism that gives the play, quite literally, a distinct flavour. Consumption - monetary and dietary - threatens the play in a way which barbarically blurs the distinctions between the two. It's as if Timon and his wealth (though the two are crucially indistinguishable) is a rich wine, drunk by his flatterers who wake up to the hangover of their lives and that familiar feeling where you swear you will never touch alcohol again. 

'For mine own part,
I never tasted Timon in my life'

Tim. 3.2.78-9 

In this respect and as was highlighted by the recent National Theatre production, the play touches modern nerves on materialism and the human price of capitalism - topics Shakespeare rarely speaks to us upon. It has biting misanthropy and slagging matches that make Hermia and Helena's spat look tame. But it also has touching, defeated loyalty from Flavius. I truly feel Timon, Apemantus and Flavius are gems for any actor and more than this, gems that break the mould drastically on some Shakespearean stock-types of Patriarch, Fool/Cynic and Servant. 

Timon, who in my head will always have the voice of my wonderful friend John, has not only shades of the nakedness-inclined Lear but also has suicidal leanings reminiscent of Hamlet. The plotline is frankly weird and akin to a fairytale, which makes this play the sister to another Shakespearean oddball which is beginning to undergo theatrical rehabilitation, Cymbeline. But I mustn't argue the merits of this play for its resemblance to others: like its eponymous anti-hero, Timon is something of a difficult loner. It is perhaps too often read as a simplistic manifestation of the 'single tragic flaw' taken to its reductive limits. The play is this but it's also more. A study in recognisable greed and loyalty, a bitter purge of tragic/late play world-weariness (think Prospero's 'my charms are all o'erthrown' speech on steroids), an extenuated feast of human flesh, a moralistic take on the insecurities of loneliness. And, perhaps oddly enough, for me Timon is a catalogue of memories and good friends.  

To close up this blog post on a suitably sickly note in honour of Father's Day, 

'I'll have no father, if you be not he'
AYL. 5.4.117

One entirely random thought/question the play inspired of me today: 

Is there a bigger slap in the face of gender-diverse casting than Timon of Athens? I should know - I've been in it. 

#MyPlayToday ... Macbeth

First impressions of the draw: 'Blood. Kilts. Reading in an accent. Let's do this.'

Had I read the play before? No

Had I seen the play before? Yes

I should open with an astonishing fact not even the weird sisters might have prophesied: today was 25 degrees. TWENTY-FIVE. What a beautiful day to contemplate freezing Scottish moors and cold-blooded murder. Macbeth is one of the 'bigger' plays whose GCSE-tenure escaped me (if I remember rightly, we did The Merchant of Venice). I have seen productions professional and amateur; productions live and live-screened, filmed and revamped for the BBC. 

I promise this isn't the effect of post-dissertation and heat infused delirium, but I had never realised how sleepy the play is. Sleep is so alike to death in the imagination of the characters, which makes Lady Macbeth's somnambulistic episode and her subsequent absence from the stage until we hear the news of her death all the more poignant. Is sleep for Lady Macbeth, as she argues it is for the sleeping guards of Duncan's chamber, some transitional period towards death? But sleep is also deprived; as Macbeth professes, sleep is murdered when Duncan is. How does this, too, link the sovereignty of sleep with the comfort of a good monarch? And how, finally, does this work into the essential arse-kiss for James that underlies Macbeth? (Philomena Cunk's words, not mine.)

A moment of contemplation for the beauty that is my 1887 Victoria Shakespeare Tragedies. 

'He has no children. All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?'

Mac. 4.3. 222-6

A favourite scene (amidst a play, I realised today, that I have grossly undervalued) is when Macduff hears the news of his murdered family. Macduff's grief is reminiscent of Constance's in King John (particularly, above), which made me reflect on the biographical dating of that play based on Constance's spectacular speech in 3.4. 'All my pretty chickens' is a line, oddly enough, I have grown up hearing - it's one of my Dad's favourites. The rupture of genuine, raw and disbelieving grief from Macduff with the play's imposition of a 'masculine' ideal of mourning is the subtlest of dramatic tensions from Shakespeare. Gosh, he isn't half good sometimes. 

'Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care, 
The death of each day's life'
Mac. 2.2.37-8

As for my day, nowhere in York could I find a way to incorporate haggis into my day. I did, however, have a tragically insular day reading on my own in the Dean's gardens (Can I use a very tenuous interpretation of Bamber to link my day to Macbeth? It seems I just did). Though the inevitable sunburn I received may have been better suited to Leontes' penchant for baby-burning in The Winter's Tale, my reading setting today was tranquil bliss. 

One entirely random thought/question the play inspired of me today: An unprecedented amount of the play's phrasing I found I could sing along to. I hadn't expected Macbeth to be quite so full of recognisable phrases.