Disclaimers: I have not seen this production in person at the Bridge Theatre. The following is a piece exploring the broadcast of this production which was streamed live to cinemas on the 22nd of March, 2018. The second disclaimer is that this piece is directed for a large part by the research materials of my PhD, broadcast "paratexts" or extra video materials. As such, this review does little to comment on the production itself, instead focusing on its mediation through live broadcasting. 

Photo by Manuel Harlan

As Brutus is wooed by Cassius to the cause of assassinating Caesar, he warily observes that ‘the eye sees not itself / but by reflection, by some other things’. Brutus is not alone in his attention to the power of a mediated view: a power which was exercised with visceral impact in the National Theatre’s live broadcasting of the production on Thursday 22nd of March. This broadcast of Hytner’s promenade production is the latest in the NT Live canon, which stretches back almost a decade. As such, it comes with a range of aesthetic expectations, not only through association with past NT Live broadcasts, but as part of the wider cultural colossus that is live-streamed productions of Shakespeare plays. Focusing first on the paratextual material and then on the stylised shot choices, this broadcast will be considered for its captivating deviance - for teasing the conventions of the live theatre broadcast (LTB) form, even making a fair few innovative rents into the corpus of Shakespearean broadcasts.

The liberality of cuts to the text means that this broadcast was notable for its omission of an interval. This would seem to place the cinema viewer in direct experiential partnership with those seeing the show in person, complete with in media res toilet trips. Furthermore, for all intents and purposes, this pre-set action showed no sign of adhering to the conventionalised format of a presenter giving a verbal commentary anticipating the action of the play, advertising upcoming NT Live broadcasts, and encouraging viewers to respond on social media (though, as it transpired, a presenter would indeed be used). The feed instead began with pre-material: a mini-stage on which a band plays a set, with the audience of the pit covering the largest majority of ground they will claim for the whole production. Flags, merchandise sellers, a drink stall and a majority young-adult audience all evoked the sense of a music festival.  So, too, did the sweeping aerial shots, close-ups of band equipment and performers, interspersed with headshots of audience members singing along call to mind other genres of broadcast entertainment - none more explicitly than the BBC’s broadcasting of the Glastonbury festival. Even the running banner along the bottom third of the screen, which appeared periodically with the NT Live logo, conjured the streaming of live Twitter commentary on festival broadcasts.

This parallel reached its apex with the band performing ‘Seven Nation Army’, whose thrumming guitar riff had been appropriated into the politically-charged crowd chant,

‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn’ at Glastonbury last year*. The effect of this was not solely to conjure a spirit of a politically disenfranchised (or perhaps empowered?**) youth, or even to set the play’s opening scene as one of festival recreation. Rather, the aesthetic misdirection of another live broadcast medium (here music festivals) established an experiential effort towards immersion. This is not the accustomed proscenium arch staging of the National Theatre’s Olivier stage, nor is it even the thrust stage and darkened auditorium of another external venue previously broadcast by NT Live, the Donmar Warehouse. By drawing on festival aesthetics, the pre-set action of this Caesar acted as a preliminary paratext whose focus was experiential - to ground this broadcast’s stance solidly within the pit and amongst the audience.

Also within the audience was the broadcast’s briefly-utilised presenter, Kirsty Lang. Lang, though fulfilling a role which is largely a convention within the medium, looked strangely conspicuous in the setting. Brandishing a microphone and artificially lit (all signifiers of standard LTB preliminary material, both in NT Live broadcasts and those of their main competitor, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s ‘Live from Stratford-upon-Avon’), Lang suffered from the strong festival aesthetics by looking as if she had been placed in the wrong broadcast genre. When she jokingly claimed, ‘It really is Shakespeare, it’s not a rock concert’, it felt as if she were willing it to be so more than declaring it. Nonetheless, Lang’s preliminary monologue transposed a number of NT Live and wider LTB conventions into the comparatively unconventional opening, narrating in-set slides to advertise upcoming broadcasts, naming a few of the production’s top-billed actors, inviting commentary on social media and generally anticipating the action.

Typically, alongside other preliminary video materials, the LTB presenter signifies the threshold from the cinema’s selected adverts into the world of the theatre and of the performance. She (and it is, with overwhelming frequency, she) ushers us, the cinema audience, from the medium-centred exclusivity of cinema viewing with all its privileged, behind-the-scenes voyeurism into the mediated theatrical performance which constitutes the “main event”. Yet, parallel to Lang’s introduction was the musical set, still audible and even slightly visible in the background. We, the cinema audience, were conscious that we were witnessing a framing device within a framing device, an intermediate interruption of what would have been a continual performance for the majority of audience members at the Bridge Theatre (particularly those oblivious to the filming of Lang’s introduction). The immersive filming aesthetics which had been established by this allusion to a music festival proved so immersive that even the broadcast’s introductory paratexts were consumed within those of the theatrical production.     

Therefore, Lang’s introduction parallel to, and in the middle of, the production’s pre-set action offered two oppositional ushers into the world of the play: the former of familiar and medium-centred convention, the latter of filmic and televisual intertextuality and tone-setting immersion. John Wyver has noted, with reference to the RSC’s debut season of broadcasts, that a common cinema audience complaint was that these preliminary and intermediary materials encroach upon the experience of watching the production***. But Lang’s immersion within the crowd and her position in the middle of the musical set reversed this relationship: it was the play’s idiosyncratic opening which imposed upon the preliminary introduction and made it appear, by contrast, awkwardly conventionalised.

As well as the NT Live introduction providing a seeming “interruption” to the theatrical experience, the broadcast’s use of stylised shots continually hinted at those slippery ‘some other things’ which might be mediating this particular reflection. Frequently, shots encompassed the broadcast’s cameramen. This was particularly noticeable in the production’s latter half, when occasional blackouts drew attention to the blue-lit screens of camera operators. It is not an overstatement to say that, outside of the extra video materials, it is still relatively taboo within the medium to highlight mechanics of a LTB. The deliberate invisibility of cameras, microphones and track equipment has long been acknowledged as an attempt to reduce the evidence that the theatrical performance (whose ideal reconstruction is, ostensibly, paramount) is in any way mediated. This is certainly the line delivered to actors as well, who are generally discouraged from trying to alter their performances****. However, just as the production’s rousing opening musical set stamped its authority on the NT Live paratexts, so too did the immersive promenade staging draw attention to the methods of its filming.

The camera-encompassing shots perhaps suggest that these glimpses are unintentional, the mechanics of the broadcast caught negotiating a complex and protean theatre space. Interestingly though, intentional nods to the broadcast’s mechanics of filming were recurrent in the form of stylised, handheld camera shots. Utilised with style for Caesar’s entrances, the broadcast’s handheld shots frequently alluded to the constructed reality genres of Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and Jerry Springer. Torso-level, behind the back shots traced Caesar’s entrances whilst setting the frame from the perspective of someone following in his train. This is a trope commonly used in WWE to hype crowds, place the gaze "within the gang" and therefore on the side of the wrestler, and (somewhat ironically for the ageing Caesar, though pertinent for the play’s fascination with his physical infirmities) to accentuate their physicalities.

Comparable shots are common to talk shows such as Jerry Springer and Jeremy Kyle, and are noticeable for their anticipation of an entrance (particularly when the person they are tracking is expected to cause trouble upon arrival). As with their sister-shots in WWE, these are intended both to hype the crowd and to anticipate violent action by drawing attention to the fast-moving capability of handheld cameras. This latter association is particularly pertinent considering the foreknowledge the majority of audience members will have when watching a play like Julius Caesar. As these handheld shots track Caesar’s entrances, they allow the cinema audience to continually, albeit subconsciously,  anticipate the violent action of the assassination in way which parallels the preoccupation of the play. These aesthetic allusions to the genre of constructed reality TV distinctly characterised the broadcast’s representation of Caesar in Rome, subtly imbuing his political power with the threat and the falsity of consciously performative, culturally maligned genres.      

In contrast, shots of the conspirators regularly rose above the crowd. Framing the shots at shoulder height, the broadcast’s more conventional, static shots were continually conscious of the dark space which encompassed the edges of the Bridge Theatre. Interestingly, these dark recesses of space did hold seated audience members. This selective lighting, which contrasted the illuminated and prominently displayed standing audience whilst occluding the theatre’s second, more removed audience, is testament to the broadcast’s foregrounding of the immersive experience. The dark edges of the Bridge space frequently broke down scenes of dialogue into shots which replicated studio monologues: this effect was particularly memorable as Michelle Fairley’s Cassius waxed revolutionary on the necessity of the assassination. As well as foregrounding performances by the production’s seasoned big-hitters: Michelle Fairley, David Morrissey and Ben Whishaw, the frequent shots which engaged the theatre’s dark abyss of a backdrop highlighted unexpected nuances. For example, Whishaw’s Brutus reasoned out the ethics of political assassination with an almost hypnotic legerdemain which, against a black backdrop, was all the more intricate and visible to a cinema audience. These comparatively static shots set a sophisticated aesthetic contrast between the conspirators and Caesar: the latter  “trash-television” and in-yer-face camerawork, the former pauses of stillness and deliberation. By juxtaposing the shots of Caesar’s entrances so starkly with those surrounding the conspirators, the mediating and potentially biased presence of the broadcast itself remained visible.

A final aesthetic choice is notable before we leave Rome. During Caesar’s funeral, the hyper-public ceremony bled into shots which embraced audience point of view (POV), even to the point of giving partially obstructed views of the action. The POV framing of this scene was consistent, and noticeably consistent when static shot captured only aurally the separate cries of the citizens. We, the cinema audience, here impersonated within the Bridge pit through the camera’s gaze, only heard the shouts turn from a support of Brutus to revolt against the conspirators. The commenting citizens remained visually anonymous - as, indeed, did we, embodied only by the cinematic gaze. As the stage space shifted - stewards shouting ‘Make a ring!’ - to encircle Caesar’s body, the anonymity of the cinematic gaze within the crowd continued periodically. The temptation (and, as is often the case in LTB, the obligation) to give an untampered view of the action did not hinder the aesthetic desire to give an immersed shot in this scene. A pertinent example of this came when Morrisey’s Antony bent to wipe the tears of a spectator (‘Oh, now you weep, and, I perceive, you feel / The dint of pity’). It was only discernible by piecing together wider shots that had come before that this spectator was in fact Wendy Kweh, who until this point we recognised as Calpurnia. In the theatre, attention to this moment of interaction - the tactical doubling allowing the feeling of a shared moment of mourning between Caesar’s closest political and personal allies - would have been poignant. No less poignant, however, was the experience of watching this moment from the camera’s position within the crowd and, potentially, identifying as cinema viewers with the anonymity and emotional response of someone we presume could be a normal theatre spectator, rather than a plant from within the cast.  

This type of framing, with all its connotations of conventional replication of the theatre experience for a cinema viewer, was also used to connote the havoc of warfare when the play’s action was hurtling towards its conclusion in Philippi. In time with the sound of gunfire and flashing lights, the solid blocks of staging in the Bridge pit fractured with speed and urgency. In the cinema, our experience of this scene change was tempered by POV shots, similar to those used for Caesar’s funeral. The biggest distinction, however, was that these shots threw us into the havoc of the pit. Shots of the fast-moving audience gave this scene change a tacit air of push-and-shove*****. (The same air of push-and-shove had been not so tacit in the Cinna the poet scene. Fred Fergus’s Cinna was the victim of what, through the broadcast lens, felt distinctly like a sinister nod to the camerawork of the “happy-slapping” criminal trend of around a decade ago.)

Where the same style of POV shots in Caesar’s funeral had provided an immersive and almost pseudo-embodied feeling of “being there”,  the comparable shots of the staging change for Philippi had the opposite effect. The physicality that dominated these particular POV shots and gave the impression of dangerous tactility also acted as a stark reminder of the camera as a mediating tool. Imagining oneself in the crowded pit for Caesar’s funeral is no big leap when the camerawork emphasises the gaze above all else. But, in mediating our experience of the tangible fracas which anticipates the play’s warfare, as a spectator in the cinema we are all the more aware that we are not the ones being maneuvered and manipulated into ever-changing spaces. The camera may attempt to recreate an embodied presence on behalf of the cinema viewer, as in Caesar’s funeral, but neither the camera nor the experience is bodily. That is not to say that the aesthetic effect of these shots was nullified - in creating a sense of chaos, they were potent and efficient. Rather, it is to point to the disjunct between cinematic embodiment and theatrical bodily reality that haunts this particular production and broadcasting of immersive theatre. This disjunct is one which characterises this nonetheless landmark broadcast: an homage to the production’s unapologetic promenade physicality which itself acknowledges the pitfalls and possibilities of mediation. Just as the eye sees not itself but by reflection, in this broadcast the reflective methods remind us that what we are seeing is both an inevitably doomed reconstruction and an artful adaptation.

* Thanks to Charlie Morton for pointing out to me, mid-broadcast and with a riveting demonstration, that this rhythm also fits 'Oh Julius Caesar'.

** While the production's wider bias towards the conspirators was pretty clear-cut, I've been wracking my brain to try and determine the intended sympathies of the opening musical set. If they are happy with Caesar being in power (as their adopted characters in the opening scene suggest, and as would be supported by Morrisey as Antony using the platform himself), what is the source of disillusionment behind their original chant, 'We're not gonna take it'? If anyone has thoughts on this, I'd love to engage a conversation about it (or, indeed, if you have any thoughts about this review, I'm on Twitter @mirthnomatter).

*** John Wyver, ‘Screening the RSC stage: the 2014 Live from Stratford-upon-Avon cinema broadcasts’, Shakespeare (2015), 11:3, pp. 286-302.

**** I was fortunate to be able to interview actors on their experiences of being broadcast for a collection which is being published in July this year, which I cannot recommend highly enough for anyone interested in studying broadcasts.

***** Though I can't comment on the production's real physicality, Andy Kesson has written engagingly on the issues of Hytner and designer Bunny Christie's choice of staging for the fantastic blog, Before Shakespeare.

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. 

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'. 

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. 

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. 

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.