Pater Familias

ANOTHER NOVEL PRODUCTION CONCEPT FOR SHAKESPEARE. I posted here on a director’s concept of Prospero as a pizza chef who’s lost his position. The Onion has a report on another novel concept. To quote the director: I know when most people hear The Merchant Of Venice, they think 1960s Las Vegas, a high-powered Manhattan stock brokerage, or an 18th-century Georgia slave plantation, but I think it’s high time to shake things up a bit. The great thing about Shakespeare is that the themes in his plays are so universal that they can be adapted to just about any time and place.” The novel setting he has chosen: 16th century Venice.

PLAYWRIGHTS AND STATISTICS. A difficulty confronting the statistical analysts of Shakespeare’s plays is that they reach different conclusions. Lukas Erne in his review summarizes the findings of contemporary scholars about Henry VI, Part I.

Gary Taylor: Part I is by Shakespeare, Thomas Nashe and two unknown collaborators. Brian Vickers: It’s by Shakespeare, Nashe and Thomas Kyd. Hugh Craig and Arthur Kinney: It’s by Shakespeare, Nashe (perhaps) and Christopher Marlowe.

I posted here on Richard Feynman’s explanation of how difficult it is to design statistical experiments. As I posted here, “Nature doesn’t run very good experiments.” It looks like Elizabethan dramatists didn’t either.

FIGURING OUT WHO SHAKESPEARE’S COLLABORATORS WERE. How do scholars determine that Shakespeare had collaborators on a play? One current way is by statistical analysis. Lukas Erne in the Times Literary Supplement (June 4, 2010) writes about the “growing consensus…that Shakespeare repeatedly collaborated with other dramatists….” He was reviewing SHAKESPEARE, COMPUTERS, AND THE MYSTERY OF AUTHORSHIP, edited by Hugh Craig and Arthur F. Kinney. A typical computer analysis is based on word frequency. The study looks at a segment of a play whose authorship is contested and sees whether it contains an above average number of words that Shakespeare used frequently. The word frequency in the segment may instead reflect that of another playwright. Interestingly, the word that Shakespeare used least, compared with contemporary dramatists, is “Yes.” He tended to use “yea” or “aye” instead. The word Shakespeare used most, compared with his peers, is “gentle.”

HOW RAFFISH WAS SHAKESPEARE? I mentioned what I had read about George Wilkins, the brothelkeeper and collaborator with Shakespeare, to a friend of Nick’s who has acted in Pericles. He smiled and said something about how that was consistent with how he thought of Shakespeare. I was surprised. I have always thought of Shakespeare as a respected bourgeois citizen of Stratford.

SHAKESPEARE’S LOW-LIFE COLLABORATOR. Charles Nicholl wrote a book, THE LODGER: SHAKESPEARE ON SILVER STREET, about Shakespeare’s testimony in a court case involving his landlord. Nicholl has an article in the London Review of Books (June 24, 2010) which contains new information about the landlord. What struck me, however, was the information about George Wilkins, who is thought to have collaborated with Shakespeare on Pericles. (Marjorie Garber says: “It seems clear from internal evidence that most of the first two acts of Pericles were written by someone else, probably George Wilkins….”) Nicholl’s article refers to George Wilkins as a “hack author and brothelkeeper” and says that “Wilkins frequently appeared before the Middlesex magistrates, sometimes on charges of gross violence against the prostitutes who worked for him.” Despite the expertise of Wilkins, Marjorie Garber says that the brothel scenes in Pericles are surely by Shakespeare.”

A HORSE ON A TREADMILL. The Bridge Project, founded by Sam Mendes, has been bringing Shakespeare and Chekhov to audiences around the world for the past two years. An article about the company in the weekend Financial Times (June 18/June 19) included comments by one actor abut the differences in audiences. The German audiences, he thought, were “unnervingly polite”—no laughing, no coughing, no shuffling. On the other hand, “In Paris and Madrid they were so exuberant….” I mentioned this to Mary Jane, and she said that she had been to a play in France once, but that her experience was different. It was a performance of Cyrano at the Theatre Mogador that she found very exciting, but there was little response from the audience until a scene where there was a horse moving forward on a treadmill. The audience went crazy about the horse.

SEEING KING JOHN VERSUS READING IT. Reading all the Shakespeare plays is different from seeing them. There is good reason to being a completist. The Guerrilla Theatre cast found all kinds of things that I had not seen when I read the play. For one thing, I had commented to Mary Jane that I couldn’t imagine how Constance could be played because she enters at high intensity and her lines keep ratcheting up from there. The actress playing Constance, Ginger Eckert, gave meaning to each hysterical line. Tom Schwans captured the Bastard’s duality—participating in the action and standing aside to provide the perspective of a later time (there is an element of time travel because the Bastard seems to speak to and for an Elizabethan audience living four centuries after the action). Mary Jane had wondered how they could find a young boy to play the part of young Arthur (of course,in Shakespeare’s time, not only did boy actors play all the women, but there were important companies where boys played all the parts.) The problem was solved by a fine performance by a young woman, Patricia Lynn. Finally, I had not succeeded in imagining a King John who spoke forcefully and acted weakly as Jordan Kaplan did.

KING JOHN IS A GOOD PLAY. I had never read King John, and had heard no good things about it. Seeing it confirms my view that lesser Shakespeare plays are good plays. As with the lightly-regarded Titus Andronicus and Henry VI plays, there were lots of vivid scenes, and a complex story line. There were foreshadowings of a number of future plays—Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Lear….A problem that history deals the playwright is that King John was a weak and indecisive king. Another problem for the playwright is that the action of the play (reflecting much of King John’s reign) involves diplomacy, negotiations and betrayals on the part of the English and French kings and the Papal emissary, all of which calls for formal speeches. Shakespeare develops a character from a play he used as a source: the Bastard (a bastard son of Richard the Lionheart). Tony Tanner says that the character has been compared by different critics to Petruchio, Berowne, Mercutio, Autolycus, Jaques, Touchstone, Falstaff and Henry V. The Bastard is a character an audience can identify with, but, as newcomer to the court, he also provides an outsider’s comment on medieval courts.The picture of medieval courts is persuasive—diplomacy leading to broken truces and broken vows. The Bastard’s commentary also solves the problem presented by the heightened rhetoric at the court by undercutting and mocking it. (One aside: ” Zounds! I was never so bethumped with words/ Since I first called my brother’s father dad.” Note the short informal word at the end).

A COMPLETIST GOES TO SEE KING JOHN. I am a completist. Mary Jane and I saw Shakespeare’s King John last weekend. It was done by the Guerrilla Theatre Company, and it was done splendidly. I wanted to see it because I always try to see Shakespeare plays, but also because it gave me a chance to get closer to having seen all of Shakespeare’s plays. I have now seen 32 of them (I count seeing the movie Titus as equivalent to seeing a performance of Titus Andronicus.) This article calls people who try to see all the works of an author “completists” and cites completists who are working on Horton Foote, Sondheim and August Wilson. The article tells about an English couple who completed all of Shakespeare by going to New York to see The Two Noble Kinsmen. Interestingly, they saw it at the Guerrilla Theatre Company, and I came across the article at the Guerilla Theatre Company website. The article indicates that Edward III should be included in the list of Shakespeare’s plays, so it looks like I still have 7 to go, but I have been very lucky to see as many as I have.