Enter Falstaff

The Merry Wives of Windsor introduces one of the most analyzed and timeless characters in all of Shakespeare’s plays: Falstaff, the knightly, intrepid, corpulent, man-about-town appearing in the two Henry IV plays and in The Merry Wives of Windsor. In The Merry Wives, he is a bumbling, fumbling, almost purely comic devise and, as such, has been somewhat derided over the years by critics, especially when contrasted with the much more nuanced Falstaff of the histories. Although I have not read Henry IV yet, the Falstaff there is apparently nothing like the Falstaff here. But the Falstaff here is still interesting, despite all the nay-saying. I found him very intriguing, and so did Anne Barton, as revealed in her Riverside introduction:

"Although Falstaff is without the mental agility he displays in the histories, he remains a large-than-life mythic figure. He is the spirit of festive consequence: self-indulgent, amoral, anarchic, a reveler who is out to disrupt the everyday social order."

What’s not to like? Indeed, this character sets up so much of the comedy of the play and is the basis for so much of the complexity and intrigue found within that it is scarcely possible to even imagine the play without him. Falstaff is clearly the linchpin of The Merry Wives of Windsor and this comedy is a comedy in a large part (no pun intended) because of him. It must have been a particularly delightful experience for contemporary audiences, to see this upper-crusty knight continuously humiliated and made low by The People, over and over again, throughout the play. You can almost hear the laughter of all those voices, across time, wholly reveling in the fun poked at that high character in that highly class-conscious society.

So go Falstaff! I look forward to meeting you again. But it is time to move on to the next one, a play I have been anticipating greatly: Much Ado About Nothing. For this one, a triple threat: reading the play, then watching the Branagh movie, then seeing the live performance by the Philadelphia Shakespeare Theater. Exciting, eh?

(8) The Merry Wives of Windsor

The Merry Wives of Windsor is a singular play in Shakespeare’s dramatic canon. Unlike most (all?) of his other plays, this one is set in Elizabethan England, not in Venice, Athens, Vienna, etc., but in The Bard’s own backyard. He also decides to make this a middle class affair, with the characters and action (with one notable exception…more on this later), circling around the loves, lives, and losses of the English middle class, circa 1600. This is clearly meant to be a play for The People. Indeed, I read somewhere that Friedrich Engels (co-writer of the Communist Manifesto) was a big fan, mainly because of the strong proletariat tone of the play. Shakespeare goes to great lengths to construct this façade of the everyday familiar, including the settings. Locales such as the English town of Windsor, the Garter Inn, Datchet Mead, etc. create a clear sense of the common. The Merry Wives is a definite effort to connect directly with his contemporaries through time, place, and action.

The question, then, is why? Or even more intriguingly, why only here, with this one play? It would seem (at least to me) that a real easy way to gather an audience is to reflect them like a mirror (however modestly they act, people like looking at themselves, right?), to show them by proxy, on stage and in public, to highlight. This creates a link of identification and recognition, a link that allows the artist to then gather his crowd and make his mark. But, again, Shakespeare generally avoids this. He more often goes far away, to lands with strange and foreign names, and even stranger and more foreign characters (and creatures…think A Midsummer Night’s Dream).

He writes what he does not know (at least in this respect), which I think is fascinating. It is a simple entertainment to show something new and foreign (it is inherently interesting to at once find yourself on the Acropolis in Athens or dockside in Venice). However, in most cases Shakespeare seems to veer away from this, eschewing the familiar in favor of the exotic. What is interesting here is that the plays, taken in their entirety, do not change in tenor based on the locale. His characters, with their flowery Greek or Italian names, living in their flowery Greek or Italian towns, are of course only Elizabethans in disguise. They were his contemporaries set aside, making one wonder about the implications of such contrasts, the implications of the familiar within the estranged. By forcing his audience to view themselves through another lens, is Shakespeare saying something here, something about the transience of it all perhaps? It seems to me that this is a cornerstone of his technique, this idea of separation, contrast, and difference.

Happy Birthday Shakespeare!

Not really, of course. No one really knows the date, but this is what we go by apparently (based on baptismal records). So, raise your glass to The Bard today. Happy 449th you old coot!

The Words of Shakespeare

Immersing myself in this stuff has prompted me to start a list of "Shakespeare-isms." These are words and phrases that you cannot use today (without sounding like a fool) that appear over and over in his plays:

anon
tarry
come hither
sirrah!
how now?
cur
forsooth
saiest thou
thee
hath
nay
woo
knave
pray you

Reads like some crazy, Lewis Carroll poem.

One of These Things Is Not Like the Other

Last night I watched (or tried to watch) the 2004 film adaptation of The Merchant of Venice. On the face of it, it seemed like a very promising proposition: a modern, big budget adaptation with all the bells and whistles, along with a stellar cast including Jeremy Irons as Antonio, Joseph Fiennes as Bassanio, and (most intriguingly) Al Pacino as Shylock. I must say, however, that this movie was extraordinarily boring and I was sleeping by Act IV. Also, Pacino’s performance was not good…it seemed stilted and just off, like he was sleepwalking through the part, uninterested and wooden, as if he were reading his lines for the first time, right off of a teleprompter. So, a no go on that one. A nonstarter. I think it is interesting (or maybe just interesting to me) that I really liked reading this play and disliked the movie version but, for Love’s Labor’s Lost, I disliked reading the play but loved the film version. Obviously, different forms take different things to make them work.

(7) The Merchant of Venice

My seventh play so far read. A good one for sure, and one containing a truly unforgettable character: Shylock, the Jewish moneylender bent on exacting a pound of flesh from the loan-defaulting Antonio. Much has been said over the ages about this one, but instead of adding my two cents into the fray (actually more like half cent), I thought I would try something else and comment on the commentary related to this character (which is pretty much the same as adding my two cents, isn’t it?). In researching some of this criticism, I was struck by the many, many levels of complexity afforded this character by most anyone who has studied/played him and the seemingly endless possibilities for interpretation. Take this passage, from Anne Barton’s preface to the play in the Riverside Edition:

“In the theater, the part [of Shylock] has always attracted actors, and it has been played in a variety of ways. Shylock has sometimes been presented as the devil incarnate, sometimes as a comic villain gabbling absurdly about ducats and daughters. He has also been sentimentalized as a wronged and suffering father nobler by far than the people that triumph over him. Roughly the same range of interpretation can be found in the criticism on the play. Shakespeare’s text suggests a truth more complex than any of these extremes.”

Indeed. Barton intimates that there is a lot going on here, and there is. The interesting part is the degree to which the character Shylock invites, in fact demands, such strong elucidation. This is of course standard territory for Shakespeare and clearly another hallmark of his great genius, that is, his ability to create characters of such depth and believability across the widest array of possibilities (oftentimes quite opposite). For me, that’s easily one of the most attractive bits motivating my desire to read all of his plays.

This may thus beg the following question: Is this wide ocean of meaning, as promulgated throughout the ages, an artifact of the deep genius of the writer or simply a product of time and the unceasing scrutiny afforded The Bard? Or, put otherwise, is Shakespeare’s genius innate or bestowed by us, his ever-appreciative audience? Probably both, for what is the artist without the audience?

William Shakespeare was William Shakespeare

At the end of my last post, I claimed to be moving on from Bryson’s book to The Merchant of Venice. I lied. Last night I went back and re-read the final chapter in Bryson’s book because it is just so entertaining and surprising. In it, he discusses the long history (400+ years) of the conspiracy theory that Shakespeare did not write some or all of his plays. He does such an excellent job of debunking this idea that I had to go back and check it out again. To review, these theories (and there are too many to actually list here) assert things such as the idea that someone of as low a social standing as Shakespeare could not possibly produce such detailed greatness, or that the plays are too widely styled to be by one person, or that Shakespeare was simply not educated enough (and Stratford-on-Avon was just too backward a place) to have produced such a man, and so on. Utter hogwash, and Bryson does a great job of washing the hog, so to speak, first by citing the origin of each theory and then pointing out, in his always humorous and brilliant way, its flaws and errors (my favorite adventure in this part of the book is his exploration of the idea that Francis Bacon was the real author of these plays. It is one of the more entertaining pieces I have read in a long time. Go read Bryson’s book for this tale alone).

Bryson finishes his book (don’t worry, no spoilers) on the following note that I would like to reproduce because it says it so much better that I ever could:

“One must really salute the ingenuity of the Anti-Stratfordians enthusiasts who, if they are right, have managed to uncover the greatest literary fraud in history without the benefit of anything that could have been reasonably called evidence, 400 years after it was perpetrated. When we reflect upon the work of William Shakespeare, it is of course an amazement that one man could have produced such a sumptuous, wise, varied, thrilling, ever-delighting body of work, but that is of course the hallmark of genius. Only one man had the circumstances and gifts to give us such incomparable works, and William Shakespeare of Strafford was unquestionably that man, whoever he was.”

Geniuses are Geniuses. William Shakespeare was William Shakespeare. Yes.

Bill Bryson

I took a brief break from the plays to read an account of Shakespeare’s life and times by one my favorite authors, namely, Bill Bryson and his truly excellent book Shakespeare: The World as Stage. It is vastly understated to say I enjoyed this book. I loved it. Bryson is brilliant, funny, clear, concise, relevant, and just plain readable. Basically, he is everything I would want to be if I could be a real writer. And that is perhaps the main thing that grabbed me about this book: Bryson has done exactly what I am trying to do with this blog, only light years (light centuries?) better. He takes what many would regard as a boring topic (Shakespeare...yawn) and proceeds to create a hugely entertaining page-turner of a book. Damn him!

The basic message of this book is this: we hardly know anything about this guy Shakespeare, a guy who is pretty much universally accepted as the greatest writer in the English language. Given this, Bryson focuses like a laser on what we do know.  The reader comes away feeling that it is extraordinary that we know as much (and have as much) as we do, appreciating this fact in all its facets, thoroughly and deeply.  The book is thus a detailed analysis of what we do (or think we do) know about The Bard of Avon and his works. Anyone with even a passing interest in such things would be well advised to pick this one up.

So, check it out if you know what’s good for you. Now, for me, back to The Merchant of Venice.