literature

Wuthering Heights – and Shakespeare

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

A few years back now, I bought the Franklin Edition of this novel.  Now I have just finished what was at least my fifth reading of the novel.  This edition is bound in leather, and the American drawings are almost photographic compared to the bleak wood cuts in the Folio Edition. 

After I had first read this version, I placed it at number 1 in the series of great books called A Curated Library.  It is elemental and unique, like the book that had been number 1 – Carlyle, The French Revolution.  And reading it again, I was reminded of the advice of a tutor at Cambridge.  ‘Don’t read it as history.  Treat it like opera or an epic poem.’

In the Foreword to the Folio, another Yorkshire novelist, Phyllis Bentley is recorded as saying:

On the moors one could escape from all the conventional restraint and battle fiercely with earth and sky… It is this untamed moorland and its untamed characters, who admit no restraint in their fierce passions, which give Wuthering Heights its incomparable air of dark, wild, stormy freedom.

That would accord with my sentiment that we are all like Hottentots tip toeing around the crater of a live volcano, when there is no known rule about who might fall in. 

I set out my impressions about fifteen years ago in the extract below, and I will just add a few observations about a novel about our inclination to lock out the outsider.

There is quite a bit of Antony and Cleopatra in Cathy and Heathcliff – a blazing untameable, but unworldly passion, except this time the gypsy is the male.  And there is a lot of Romeo and Juliet, except this time the lovers bring their dooms on their own heads.  And there are issues not just of class, but of caste.  There are aspects of this tragedy, for that is what it is, that call to mind Othello, theultimate outsider (depending on your view of The Merchant of Venice).

And this is a revenge story, as searing as the revenge in Titus Andronicus.  Then, in the end, two battered misfits survive the rubble to unite the two houses of the star-crossed lovers, and go out in quest of what Churchill called those broad sunlit uplands, in a way that calls to mind the magical finale of the Julie Taymor movie, or the ethereal peace found at the end of Die Walküre. 

You can, as they say, treat the novel as an opera, just as Wilhelm Furtwangler did for the symphony.  But, putting all labels to one side, this is one of the most searing and explosive moments in our literature.

Well, in addition to Shakespeare, Emily was brought up on the adamantine strictures of the Old Testament, the closet subtlety of Virgil, and the fiery imagination of Milton.  Perhaps no one else wrote like Emily because so few were brought up like that.

It is not just the location that makes this novel different – it is the times.  Class was all pervasive.  Servants were different – and less entitled to respect.  (That puts it softly.)  ‘Equality’ was a myth blown up by the French.  When Heathcliff returns, should he take food in the parlour, or stay in the kitchen with the servants?  Good grief, might they have had to set two tables?  Children were treated coldly, if not cruelly.  And sickness of any kind carried the threat of death.  Sick people had to be nursed over long periods.  Sanitation was not understood, and medicine was not far removed from the barber shop. 

The author died at the age of thirty.  When you compare her age and that of her sister, or Jane Austen, with that of Charles Dickens, you can gauge what we missed.

God only knows what may have happened if Mozart had lived as long as Shakespeare.

*

WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Emily Brontë (1847)

Franklin Library, 1971.  Fully leather bound, with gold edges and figured endpapers.  Illustrated by Alan Reingold.  Preface by Charlotte Bronte.

… and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.  It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am.  Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same….

Wuthering Heights has passages like this that some English ladies – and I do mean ladies – that you might meet at Oxford University know by heart.  It has become part of the English psyche.  It was the first and only novel of a young woman from Yorkshire who had probably scarcely been kissed by a man, and it fairly raises the question: just what did they put on the porridge of those young girls up there back then? 

Emily Brontë was brought up in Yorkshire with a Celtic ancestry of an Irish father and a Cornish mother.  Her father was an Anglican minister and the parsonage was the centre of the life of the family which included a sister, Charlotte.  The girls went to a harsh Curates’ Daughters’ School, but they had the run of their father’s library, so that their education in literature was so much better than what modern children get – the Old Testament, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, and the rest. 

The children’s mother died young, as was common in that time, and their aunt had a fiercely Calvinist view of the world.  The children began creating their own tales and legends and creating their own worlds for those legends.  They spent some time in Europe, but they were unhappy away from the parsonage.  The novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte came out two months before Wuthering Heights.  They are very, very different books.

When you think of Wuthering Heights, think not of a novel.  Think of Shakespeare – the passionate young Hamlet jumping into the grave in defiance of convention to embrace the dead body of a woman who went mad and then killed herself when Hamlet so coldly and cruelly rejected her; think of King Lear, plunged into madness by his sustained rage at being rejected by the one woman he loved; think of Othello, tipped over the brink of madness by the thought that the young, white woman he loved was not true to him; think of Macbeth, who allows the woman he loves to push him so that his ambition sends him and her to their respective hells; think of Malvolio, who is cruelly tricked into believing that his lady loves him and then is even more cruelly accused of being mad; and think of Prospero, who uses his powers of magic to bring together those who had wronged him and then brings them undone – and then buries his magic. 

Think of opera.  Think of The Flying Dutchman, and the thumping romantic drive of the music of the sea by Wagner, and the story of a rejected loner doomed to roam alone until he finds redemption.  Think of painting.  Think above all of La Tempesta by Giorgione.  Against a nocturnal European landscape, with sawn-off pillars and odd buildings, and lightning in the sky, a young man in contemporary costume stands calmly watching over a nude woman suckling a child.  Have you ever seen anything so enigmatic?  What on earth can it mean?  Or are we simply impertinent to seek to put into words what this great artist put on canvas?  Well, then, why not just enjoy it? 

Wuthering Heights is the story of a man despised and rejected of men, who is then rejected by the woman he loves, and who sets out to and does get revenge upon the whole pack of them, but who then, in the emptiness of his achievement, is reconciled to the memory of the woman he loved. 

The scenes between Cathy and Heathcliff on his return are the most blazing.  ‘I meditated this plan just to have one glimpse of your face – and a stare of surprise, perhaps, and pretended pleasure; afterwards settle my score with Hindley; and then prevent the law by doing execution on myself.’

The score settling would have to be terminal.  This is as elemental as Greek tragedy.

In their final argument Heathcliff looks to Nelly like a mad dog foaming at the mouth.  There is a level of sustained hysteria rarely seen outside of Dostoyevsky.  Heathcliff and Cathy flay and lacerate each other like mad monks.  It is like crossing Medea and Now, Voyager.

Has any other English writer unleashed emotional power – passion – like this?  The fury that Heathcliff unloads on those who should have been close to him – for example his wife and his son – must unsettle any reader.  Heathcliff twice refers to Cathy as a ‘slut’.  Nelly got it right when she said they were ‘living among clowns and misanthropes’.  But the more revenge and power that Heathcliff gets, the emptier becomes the shell of his life, and then we see that the second Cathy is looking to change things by being civilized.

For Heathcliff, God and Satan are one, and equally irrelevant, but somehow, he manages to induce his own death, so that he can be at one in the ground with his Cathy. 

The novel ends in this way: ‘I sought, and soon discovered, that the three headstones on the slope next the moor …I lingered around them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and the harebells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth’.  It is so English, and yet so wild.  And the ending is as rich as that of The Dead by Joyce.

This novel comes up at us out of the earth like a novel of Christina Stead –a rough uncut diamond.  It is all rawness, and it is found in Yorkshire, of all places.  Antony and Cleopatra, Abelard and Heloise, Tristan and Isolde, and Romeo and Juliet come at us from the mists of the past and foreign places.  (Charlotte found her male lead in Rochester in Jane Eyre – those Brontë girls sure liked their men strong and tough.)  

Our novel is altogether more modern.  Heathcliff is the original angry young man who comes undone because his girl is not ready for him – Cathy prefers the discreet charms of the bourgeoisie, with a little bit of bovver on the side. 

Well, who could blame her?  Heathcliff was a gypsy, and he had all the makings of a real bastard.  And yet we know that neither was ever going to find peace above the ground.  How come, then, that Geoffrey Boycott was so boring? 

*

And if I can bring this note to an end by swapping from cricket to footy, when you get into this book, you are playing with the big boys.  What a shame for us that we never got a reading of this book with Heathcliff read by Richard Burton.

All’s Well That Ends Well Revisited

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

This is one of my very favourite plays.  The other night I played for the first time the 2011 Globe production in a set of the comedies put out by Opus Arte.  It was a serendipitous choice.

I really enjoyed the show.   I see from the extracts below of my note in Windows on Shakespeare that I thought the Countess was a great role for a leading lady getting on.  Janie Dee at the Globe was perfect – fresh as a daisy – and she knows it.  She oozes West End sexiness – at altitude.

And the relief and redemption of Parolles – a victim of caste – is a very moving and under-rated part of this playwright’s output.

The final resolution is not quite as good at the Globe as in the BBC version – they dropped a critical line – and the performance of Michael Hordern does stay with me.  Otherwise, James Garnon was right up to Parolles.  He and the Countess are for me the two leads.  That view may be said to be idiosyncratic.

In the end, Lafew tells Parolles – ‘Good Tom Drum’ – he will ‘make sport’ with him at home.  It is just like Claude Rains saying ‘This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.’  It’s as if Lafew can not only smell onions, but see that all the world is but a stage.

And it is a reminder that plays are meant to be seen and heard.

Perhaps not enough attention has been paid to Helena’s introduction of Parolles in the first scene:

And yet I know him a notorious liar,
 Think him a great way fool, solely a coward.
 Yet these fixed evils sit so fit in him
 That they take place when virtue’s steely bones
 Looks bleak i’ th’ cold wind. Withal, full oft we see

 Cold wisdom waiting on superfluous folly.

If we parse the difficult ending, we may get something like: ‘In the cold light of day, it is often hard to do the right thing, but we often see that those at the bottom of the ladderdo better than those above them.’  Chivalry had been a target – why not mere gentility?  Good grief – it would all sound downright Bolshie at 36 Collins St.

This production is an English gift to the world.  I have been fortunate to see six of the plays at the Globe, but All’s Well is I think the only play of the thirty-eight that I have not seen on the stage (allowing that the three parts of Henry VI were condensed.)   This production may close that loop.

I could not think of a better introduction to William Shakespeare for children than this Globe production – not least because the cast take their bows in dance form to a cheering audience who had been with them all the way.  

And each of the BBC and Globe performances can be bought singly on Amazon.  I recommend both warmly.

And anyone who can trace the Shaw quote below will get a box of Jaffas (not to roll down the aisle at the flicks).

ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL – A TALE OF TWO CADS
It is always the Conservatives who stop behaving like gentlemen first.
(G B Shaw)

When an officer and sometime gentleman dumped on the late Princess of Wales, The Times newspaper published a column that concluded by saying that the system had flushed out ‘an absolute shit’. That is a more earthy and more general way of saying that he was a ‘cad’ or ‘bounder’ or ‘rotter’. We have a perpetual interest in this type of figure because it involves a failure in one of the better people, and that gives a degree of comfort to a lot of the rest of us. …. All’s Well that Ends Well has two different types of cad, Bertram, the Count of Rousillon, and his follower, Parolles (a variant of paroles, French for ‘words’). The play involves three themes well known in legends and fairy tales: the healing of a sick king; the completing of the hero of impossible tasks to achieve vindication; and the ‘bed trick’ – someone being duped into sleeping with someone other than the person they thought they were going to bed with. At least some might be precluded from denouncing the bed trick as an impossible fairy tale, because we first see it in Genesis between Jacob and Leah and Rachel……

We have, therefore, two cads. Let us look at the difference between them. Bertram is a spoiled brat……He has the magnificent incapacity of the egocentric to see that another person may be involved. He can think only of himself. He has little or no imagination. The snobbery is not the problem. It is not a question of class, but of caste….

No, the problem is that Bertram is all give and no take. He accepts the benefits, not the burden noblesse, yes; oblige, no. Bertram is the herald of the collapse of the aristocracy……

……..Parolles would have been the final nightmare for Mistress Quickly– he is the definitive ‘swaggerer’…….He is relatively harmless. There is not much malice in him. There is not much of anything there. He just comes and goes like an autumn leaf, but he can only address his betters – nearly everyone– in terms of fantasy. He is a permanent prisoner of fantasy land because he was not born able to cope with the world as the rest of us see it. …. Cads who come from a privileged background have so much more to answer for than cads who have never had a chance.

……. But Parolles knows he is skating on thin ice. ‘They begin to smoke me, and disgraces of late knocked too often at my door. I find my tongue is too foolhardy.’ (4.1.28-30) When the balloon goes up he is ‘thankful’.

… Captain I will be no more
But I will eat and drink and sleep as soft
As Captain shall. Simply the thing I am
Shall make me live. Who knows himself a braggart,
Let him fear this; for it will come to pass
That every braggart shall be found an ass. (4.3.346-351)

The second difference is caste. Bertram is a noble; Parolles is a nobody…. For a lot lesser failing, Parolles is utterly cast out, and returns to Court unrecognised as a beggar. One cad is humiliated and crushed; the other cad is forgiven and pampered – and told to come back for more. Bertram likes to see himself as a victim; Parolles doubtless is one.

This is where this play gets its real edge – in the benefits and burdens of caste – and this has not been sufficiently noticed. The kindly old Lord Lafew (wonderfully played by Michael Horden for the BBC) regularly reminded Parolles of his lack of substance. He does not recognise him on his return. There is a most affecting scene……

This is very high theatre. This broken wreck of a nobody is taken up by the informed charity of an older man who is a member of the real nobility in a way that would have been unthinkable to Count Rousillon or his mates. ‘Give me your hand. How does your drum?’ The simplest words are usually the best, not least with this author.

…. While Coleridge thought Helena was ‘Shakespeare’s loveliest character’, Shaw thought that the Countess was ‘the most beautiful old woman’s part ever written’. The Countess is a great role for great actresses in the autumn of their careers. You can listen to Edith Evans or Celia Johnson in the BBC production. They supply a marvellous blanket of humanity on the rough and nervous edges of the men. The 2009 National Theatre production was a little too twee for some; you feared that Puss in Boots might jump Little Red Riding Hood.

……. Here, then, is a comment on the class structure – if you like, the aristocracy– that looks forward to the protest in The Marriage of Figaro; and the sterner protest in the French Revolution. Just as directors and audiences have altered their perspective on Malvolio and Rigoletto, now it may be time to do so with Parolles……. Perhaps it is just a matter of time until some impious clown suggests that this ratbag Parolles may be a more substantial character than that ratbag Falstaff.  Such a promotion of Parolles would not be without precedent – of the highest order. Royalty. Falstaff may have been the favourite of Queen Elizabeth, but Charles I substituted Parolles for All’s Well as the play’s title in his copy of the Second Folio.

This is a very entertaining night at the theatre. We go to the theatre to be entertained, and also to sit and look down upon ourselves, and come out later with hopefully just a little more light inside than when we went in. From any other playwright All’s Well would be saluted as a great play– and it is a great play, because it affords us a lyrical insight into the way we are.

And let us hear no more of ‘problem’ plays, the subject of a Cambridge weekender.   Troilus and Cressida is too long, and its main characters or ideas are either boring or out of fashion.  But All’s Well and Measure for Measure are not ‘comedies’ as we know that term.  They are plays written with an edge that is just right for modern audiences and written by a great playwright when writing at the height of his powers.  We do not need to have them spoon-fed to us as fairy tales.  That is about all that they were before this genius got his hands on them.

Macaulay on Shakespeare

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Macaulay was rarely shy about hoisting his standard.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind…. By poetry we mean the art of employing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination, the art of doing by means of words what the painter does by means of colours.  (You will see Debussy put beside Impressionist painters like Monet for a similar analogy.) …. Truth indeed is essential to poetry.  The reasonings are just; but the premises are false.  (I do not follow that.)

…. it is the constant manner of Shakespeare to represent the human mind as lying, not under the absolute dominion of one despotic propensity, but under a mixed government, in which a hundred powers balance each other.  Admirable as he was in all parts of his art, we most admire him for this, that while he has left us a greater number of striking portraits than all other dramatists put together, he has scarcely left us a single caricature.

That is a useful reminder not to apply labels to any of the output of this genius.

But it is not by speeches of self-analysis, however great they may be in force and spirit, that the great masters of human nature have portrayed human beings…Shakespeare never tells us that in the mind of Iago, everything that is beautiful and endearing was associated with some filthy and debasing idea.

That looks spot on about Iago – and John Claggart in Billy Budd.

Macaulay did of course have notorious prejudices – against, say, Marlborough and Penn.  (He got himself tied up in knots over Glencoe because his pin-up boy, William of Orange, signed the warrant.) 

And he could show his prejudices in discussing letters, as in this pearler:

The conversation between Brutus and Cassius in the First Act of Julius Caesar is worth the whole French drama ten times over, while the working up of Brutus by Cassius, the stirring of the mob by Antony, and – above all – the dispute and reconciliation of the two generals, are things far beyond the reach of any other poet that ever lived.

Whoa!  Steady, Tom.  That is just the kind of thing that made de Gaulle so hard to handle.

And your reference to reconciliation may have suited the Victorian epoch, but the parts you first mention are immediately followed by the scene where the inflamed mob massacres an innocent poet, and then there is the scene where the not so innocent conspirators settle their hit lists.  I know of no more gripping theatre on our stage.  It is simply breathtaking.