theatre

Words and language in opera

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

My first Summer School at Oxford was on Verdi and Shakespeare.  Verdi had written operas for Macbeth Othello.  His last opera was Falstaff.  The tutor, who was excellent, explained why in his view Italian was the best language for opera – which is theatre set to music.  It all sounded very logical, and we discussed the differences with English and French – and giggled when we spoke of German – just a little bit of Jingoism at Oxford.

But I recalled a previous visit to England when I saw a great performance of Billy Budd at Covent Garden.  This was in the 90’s when the AO was blazing.  I had asked Moffat Oxenbould, the Artistic Director of the AO, whether I should see Billy Budd or La Bohème.  One reason he gave in favour of the former is that it would be good for me to hear an opera in my own language.  This was very good advice, because at that time I found the music of Britten to be challenging.  Billy Budd is now my favourite opera – beside Falstaff.  (I would add Die Walküre, with the proviso that I must skip the second act – and watch the closing duet at the bar.)

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Simone Young will conduct Wagner’s Ring Cycle at La Scala.  (She was the first female conductor of it at Bayreuth, just as she had been the first female conductor with the Vienna State Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic.) 

She will share the function with a younger conductor who has learned under her.  (The person first appointed pulled out at short notice.) 

Simone had come to Wagner via Barenboim, who in turn came to Wagner via Furtwangler.  She and Barenboim had started their roles in Wagner on the piano.  Since Furtwangler is my favourite conductor, this is some pedigree. 

You can get an idea of what is involved by watching a video of Young talking in fluent Italian about preparing for Das Rheingold.  (She had previously held a long appointment at Hamburg.)  It is a great comfort to see learning being passed down from one generation to another in this high art form.

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Young told The New York Times that it was essential for the conductor to concentrate on the words in the libretto, as well as the music – then she knew how to place the accents of the orchestra – if I may be permitted the phrase. 

That makes sense.  The composer of the music wrote it to be played with the libretto written for just that purpose.  And it was written to be played with the score in the language in which the libretto was written.  Nessun dorma can’t come out like ‘None shall sleep.’

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Now, when we who speak English see Shakespeare, we follow it in our own tongue – and miss some of the archaisms of plays written more than four hundred years ago.  We get the meaning and the poetry at the same time.  And while we may cut the text, and take other liberties, no one has suggested that we may in some way flirt with the text itself.  That would be the civil equivalent of blasphemy.  Like fiddling with the text Dante or Goethe.  Or the opening chords of Don Giovanni.  Or the background to the Mona Lisa.

Poetry, like music, is a mix of imagination, form, and rhythm – and, for the want of a better word, alchemy.  (When Wordsworth referred to a ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ he was expressing a view good for Keats, but not so good for Wordsworth.)  And if you fiddle with either the music or the poetry, you might just wreck it.  Hamlet in French is a very different beast compared to Hamlet as it was written.

But most Australians who go to see the big operas of Mozart, Verdi, Wagner or Puccini do not speak the language in which the opera was written.  And with the possible exception of late Puccini, they are not the same as the audiences for which the operas were originally created.  Recording only started in the twentieth century.

This will not trouble those who go along to hear the big numbers and just bide their time otherwise.  (The Italians were notorious for gossiping until a set piece came on – when they exploded with applause – or derision.  Rather like a soccer match – or a bull fight.  Simone Young said that some thought that you had flopped in Germany with Wagner unless you got both raspberries and applause.  On the other hand, on one of my visits to Glyndebourne, the loudest applause came from the toff behind me who snored the loudest.)

But for the rest of us, at least two issues arise.  We are not getting the opera in the manner that its creators intended, and we cannot match the music to the language of the script.  We therefore have to put our trust in the translator, and in those directing the opera. 

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These misgivings – and that is what they are – show the wisdom of the advice I got from Moffat Oxenbould about listening to operas written in English.  This has led me to something like an addiction to Britten. 

Curiously, I have also become attached to Janacek, who was a fanatic about linking the music exactly to the text.  He used to patrol the streets listening to people and watching them speak, so that he could mould his compositions accordingly. 

My absorption with Janacek and Britten came at a time of extended leave from the great Italian composers.  I got to the stage that I had got to with Swan Lake and Giselle many years ago – if I heard La Bohème or La Traviata yet again, I might just give it all away.

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I doubt whether this gap for most of us between the text and the music in opera is grasped by many in the audience at the opera house or at home.

We are familiar with the problem with, say, French poetry.  On a good day, I can stagger through Verlaine and some of Victor Hugo.  (I subscribe to Paris Match, but I may say that is mostly for the photos – which is the precise opposite of what we schoolboys said when we smuggled in a Playboy.)  With Latin, I am on much firmer ground, and I have the luxury of not being called on to speak it. 

But take a well-known part of the Aeneid by Vergil.

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

We can have a sporting chance of translating that.  ‘Even things have tears, and our mortality touches our minds’.  That may get the meaning of the words, but it sounds ugly, and however we translate it, we know it does and cannot have the poetic effect of the original text.  Latin has a very different structure and ring to it compared to English.

Or take an example plucked from Gutenberg:

In the midway of this our mortal life,
I found me in a gloomy wood, astray
Gone from the path direct: and e’en to tell
It were no easy task, how savage wild
That forest, how robust and rough its growth,
Which to remember only, my dismay
Renews, in bitterness not far from death.

That is among other things ugly and apparently wrought.  This is how Dante began the Divine Comedy.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura

esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte

che nel pensier rinova la paura!

Tant è amara che poco è più morte;

ma per trattar del ben chi vi trovai,

dirò de laltre cose chi vho scorte.

You do not have to speak a word of Italian to know that the translation into English now sounds like an act of strangulated butchery.

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In course of the opera named after him, the third in the Ring Cycle, Siegfried kills his foster father before the latter kills him; he slays the dragon; he talks to the birds; he walks through a fire to free Brunnhilde from the spell put on her by her father; and then he takes off with her to the tune of what Simone Young says is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written.  The final two lines of the text are:

Leuchtender Liebe,

Lachender Tod!

Even allowing that Siegfried is the dull child who refuses to grow up, those lines could surely not be as banal as their translation:

Radiant love,

Laughing death!

(And there is certainly nothing to laugh about in the death of either in Götterdämmerung.) 

The splendid Penguin version of the text and translation gives this comment of Nietzsche, who knew something about this.

Wagner’s poetry is all about revelling in the German language, the warmth and candour in his communion with it, something that as such cannot be felt in any other German writer except Goethe.

That is close to saying the text in this context is barely translatable. 

The score of the Ring was formally dedicated ‘with faith in the German spirit’.  You would not want it get into the wrong hands, especially one who like Wagner wanted to plant frenzy in the German audiences; a leader who, like the master, could wield magnetic power over the German psyche; a German whose favourite opera was Götterdämmerung, but who failed to see that it prophesied the fall of his regime, and of the whole German volk.

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There is another way of looking at what happens when the demands of the audience or reader require tampering with the work of a genius.  Goethe and Pushkin are celebrated in their own country to about the same extent as Shakespeare is in England, but neither travels well.  (Ibsen and Chekhov do not have the same problems.  Homer is seen as untouchable, in part because of intellectual snobbery, and the myth of Oxbridge that ancient Greece was civilized.) 

It is hardly surprising that mutilation carries huge risks.  Rare people of nerve and imagination and the soul of a director can occasionally succeed.  Nearly forty years ago, I took my young daughters to see Goethe’s Faust put on at the little Russel Street theatre, blessed of memory.  I warned them that it might be long and tedious.  I think a young Barrie Kosky directed it.  At the start, the lights went right out.  Gorillas were just seen running up and down each side aisle.  Then, two spotlights shone down the middle aisle.  A gorilla emerged at the front of center stage.  From out of it emerged the smiling face of Barry Otto.  There may have been the sound of machine-gun fire.  And our close attention was held for the duration.  I still recall it.

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Which brings me back to the suggestion that Italian is the ‘best’ language for opera.  Well, opera was born in Italy, and a majority of its superstar composers were also born there, but, putting to one side what experts in linguistics and phonetics might say, you may want to be careful in expressing that view in Amsterdam, Bayreuth, Berlin, London, Madrid, New York, Salzburg, Stockholm, Vienna and other cities that know something of music and theatre.  Or Commedia dell’ Arte.

And the discovery of the meaning of what you have heard so often may have its own entertainment value.  Nessun dorma is the best-known aria.  Who knows the real circumstances of ‘None shall sleep’?  Who knows just how plain silly Siegfried, the great hero of the Ring, is?  (Even the Master thought he was stupid.  The Rheinmaidens knew he was mad.  And by the time he finally gets to depart, we do not go into mourning.)  Heaven knows how many times I had heard Jussi Bjoerling sing Mama chel vino es generoso, before I saw Cavalleria Rusticana, and I started to giggle.  ‘Well might you need a stiff drink from your Mum, Comrade, because you are about to greet the guy with whose wife you have been playing tootsies, and in your part of the world, there can only be one result.’

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We should be careful about talking about meaning in this context.  We have trouble with the meaning of some passages in Hamlet because our language has changed – it is always evolving.  We have even more trouble with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but with some tuition and encouragement – like I got at another Oxford Summer School – you can get by.  Then Beowulf is beyond all but those taught at tertiary level.

It is obviously silly to ask the meaning of the Pietà or the Moonlight Sonata – or Rigoletto or Don Giovanni.  Or Ode to a Nightingale. 

Macaulay said that ‘perhaps no person can be a poet without a certain unsoundness of mind…. Truth indeed is essential to poetry; but it is the truth of madness.’  That may sound over the top, but Ibsen admired Michelangelo because he had ‘the courage to commit a madness now and then.’  A psychiatrist asked – ‘Why cannot more light enter a mind that is cracked than one that is whole?’  Einstein and Keynes would have had a view on that (as would Barrie Kosky).  Keynes said that Newton was ‘the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians…. the last wonder-child to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.’  And, of course, Newton was up to his neck in alchemy.

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When we speak of a libretto in a foreign tongue, we are in some kind of hinterland when it comes to meaning.  Logical analysis is on very shaky ground.  We face three filters.  First, we depend on the conductor and director to present their version of this musical drama called opera.  Secondly, we depend on the translators to tell us their view of the meaning of the script in English.  And, finally, we get a very different account of the carefully managed marriage between the music and the text. 

You would not want to be on an ascent of Everest or undergoing heart surgery on such a wobbly footing.

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Opera translated into English does not have a good name – for good reason.  (One exception is the Mackerass Makropoulos Case.)  There is therefore a lot in favour of operas created in our own language.  We could never have survived Faust in German with voice over or subtitles.  Like the time some well intentioned internationalist got us at a Melbourne festival to see a Romanian theatre group do Titus Andronicus – in Romanian!  And our Romanian friends just hung their heads in horror. 

This was I think the ultimate risk in fiddling with the work of a giant, but at least to some extent, we take on some of that risk whenever we go to see most of the operas that are put on, especially in the straitened times since Covid.

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And the great success of Simone Young in Bayreuth, Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna is a sad reflection of the decline of the AO since its glory days of the nineties. 

I had been to a talk given by Simone on Tristan, which she opened with a thundering chord on the piano, and I saw her conduct that opera and a Wagner gala.  On each occasion, I was transfixed.  A chairman of the AO told me that Simone had allowed him to stand at the back of the pit during a performance.  He said his hair stood on end as she entered the pit, and she stayed back later to talk to the orchestra.  She may be our best export since Melba or Sutherland – but she is just not seen by those up the back as having that éclat.

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Well, at least my girls got to see our team at its best.  But it is sobering for an eighty-year-old lawyer who has been listening to or going to the opera for more than sixty years to reflect that not only can he not read the score – he cannot even read the script. 

That is just one of the reasons why I wonder if I am not much better off watching the live theatre of a test match – cricket or rugby – or a Grand Prix or Grand Final.  Or the Melbourne Cup.  Then I know just what is going on, but I have no idea how it all may end.  There is a lot to be said for that – it is called drama.

Then there is the shortest poem of Chris Wallace-Crabbe.  ‘Whatever Christ meant, it wasn’t this.’

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.

Richard II

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Richard II has been one of my favourite plays for more than fifty years – when I first heard Gielgud in the lead.  The reasons are set out in the note below, which I wrote more than ten years ago for a book on Shakespeare. 

After listening to the play for the nth time, I ordered a book The Reign of Richard II.  It is a collection of papers given at the University of York on subjects like A Personal Portrait, The Chivalry, His Sense of English History, and His Reputation.

Two things struck me about the papers.  First, many commentators, who are historians, felt happy about looking at the psychological or psychoanalytic aspects of this medieval king and evaluating the evidence and conclusions. 

Secondly, and much more remarkably, no one saw fit to mention how Shakespeare saw this character.  This unmatched genius could see inside us and our history, but no one at this conference thought Shakespeare was worth mentioning. 

What about Divine Right?  How do you square that with the barons putting their king under contract in 1215?  Were the references to Pilate and Judas justified?  What other aspects of the passion play do we have here?  Opinions may differ on whether Shakespeare painted Bolingbroke as shifty – I think he did – but is clear that Shakespeare saw this usurpation as an infection that would culminate in the Wars of the Roses.  Did Shakespeare get it right or was he just wrong?

This silence is at the university very odd.  But there is an upside.  Here is an extract of the psychoanalysis.

The most plausible way of reconciling the opposites in the king’s character is to see Richard’s character as essentially narcissistic – a condition in which only the person himself – his own body, his own needs and feelings – are experienced as fully real.   Generally, a narcissistic person achieves a sense of security in his own subjective conviction of his perfection.  This is a condition characteristic of rulers with a high sense of mission, and having an obsessive interest in the trappings of power.  Its sufferers have ‘an appetite for self-worship.’  It finally detaches its victims from reality so that they become cocooned from the outside world by groups of yes-men and by physical isolation, which was Richard’s eventual fate.  By the final years of his reign, there can be little doubt that Richard’s grasp on reality was becoming weaker.

The author of the paper from which that quote is taken went on to say that Richard was ‘vengeful’ and ‘reacted very badly and very aggressively, to any criticism made of him’.  ‘The general attitude [of low confidence] is…. domineering, attacking, hostile, blaming, mistrustful, status-seeking, and punitive.’

Well, we now have the AI model of that narcissist in Donald Trump.  One difference is that he would never abdicate.  Rather, he would not accept being deposed – even when done with due process of law.

Otherwise, as the book says, there is nothing new under the sun.  Which make the omission of reference to Shakespeare even more remarkable.

The play is called ‘The Tragedy of Richard II.’  It is certainly a tragedy, and it is in my view the most operatic play ever written.  Of course, Churchill reveled in it.  It is a rolling twenty-one-gun salute to the majesty of the English language and history.

(Set out below is my earlier note of more than ten years ago.  Since then, Opus Arte has released its version at the Globe, which is not as mangled as many are there now, and the RSC has released the version with David Tennant directed by Greg Doran.  Sadly, they sent Tennant out as a rampant hairy queen desperate to be debagged, and in so doing trashed the whole play.)

RICHARD II
AN EFFEMINATE ROYAL IN A PASSION PLAY

In this man’s reign began this fatal strife

The bloody argument whereof we treat
That dearly costs so many a prince’s life

And spoil’d the weak and ev’n consumed the great

(Daniel, Civil Wars)

Jussi Bjoerling is frequently said to have been the most popular tenor of the last century.  He had a clear, high, lyric tone that still sounds as pure as silver. (Caruso was more golden and chiaroscuro.)  Some have the same sensation listening to Richard II, of a clear, high lyric tone that sounds as pure as silver.

This play evokes our sense of opera in another way.  Most composers like to load up their operas with big arias for their big singers.  Puccini did it so that his guns could really unleash themselves in a way that highbrows think is shameless, but that the rest of us enjoy shamelessly.  A few people know Vissi d’Arte; many have heard Un Bel Di; but everyone knows Nessun Dorma.  

Shakespeare loaded this play up with set pieces for the big guns of the stage, so that listening to the recording featuring John Gielgud as Richard and Leo McKern as John of Gaunt has for some about the same impact as coming to terms with an ’86 Grange.

Richard was the last of the Plantagenets.  He took by succession and Divine Right.  His misrule and weakness led to his being deposed, and so to generations of civil strife.
A medieval king was the fountain of justice.  At the beginning of this play, this King breaches his obligations in that position fundamentally– twice.

The King failed to follow the established legal process to rule on a dispute between two of his barons.  They were entitled to and did seek under the common law of England trial by battle of the issue between them.  One of the parties, Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV, says:

Look what I speak, my life shall prove it true. (1.1.87)
He has another charge:
… and I will in battle prove. (1.1.92)

The second charge related to the murder of a duke. This was a sensitive charge since the King, the judge if you like, had given orders for the murder.  Well, for whatever reason, Richard intervened after a massive display of chivalry, and stopped the combat, a form of judicial duel.  He banished both of the litigants, but Bolingbroke and his family for a lesser time.  The King had therefore made enemies of two families by interfering with the due process of the law.  Bolingbroke laments his exile:

How long a time lies in one little word.
Four lagging winters and four wanton springs
End in a word – such is the breath of kings. (1.3.212-214)

As the second scene of the play shows, the supporters of the King include those who are under a duty to avenge the death of the murdered duke.  How do you fight a judicial duel with the substitute of God?  How can the King try a case that involves one of his political assassinations?

The second mistake of Richard was to confiscate the property that had belonged to the father of Bolingbroke, John of Gaunt, after his death.  This was illegal.  (Richard needed funds for a foreign war – this has long been an incentive to illegality.)  In doing this, Richard was breaking the laws of inheritance– but these laws are the source of his own title.  York says just this:

Take Hereford’s rights away, and take from time
His charters and his customary rights,
Let not tomorrow then ensue today;
Be not thyself. For how art thou not a King
But by fair sequence and succession. (2.1.195-199)

As a result of these two great fallings off by the King, Bolingbroke returns to England.  He says he does so just to claim his own private rights and not to claim the crown, but Bolingbroke– who does not show us his mind by a soliloquy– is as evasive about his intention as a modern politician is when thinking of challenging for the leadership of the party. After he had become King, he was to say:

Though then, God knows, I had no such intent

But that necessity so bowed the state,
That I and greatness were compelled to kiss. (2 Henry IV, 3.1.72-74)
From the time when Richard returns to Ireland, it is all downhill. As Tony Tanner remarked:
Perhaps … he can already see the writing on the wall; but to a certain, quite distinct extent, he himself is doing the writing.

Here is some of the high poetry of this failed king.
… I weep for joy
To stand upon my kingdom once again.
Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand;
Though rebels wound thee with their horses’ hoofs. (3.2.4-7)

So when this thief, this traitor, Bolingbroke,
Who all this while hath revelled in the night
Whilst we were wand’ring with the Antipodes
Shall see us rising in our throne, the east,
His treasons will sit blushing in his face,
Not able to endure the sight of day,
But self-affrighted tremble at his sin.
Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king;
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord.
For every man that Bolingbroke hath pressed
To shift shrewd steel against our golden crown,
God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel; then, if angels fight,
Weak men must fall, for Heaven still guards the right. (3.2.47-62)

 No matter where– of comfort no man speaks.
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs.
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow in the bosom of the earth.
Let’s choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can be bequeath
Save our deposèd bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke’s;
And nothing can we call our own, but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed
All murdered – for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keep Death his court, and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchise, be feared, and kill with looks
Infusing him with self and vain conceit
As if this flesh that walls about our life
Were brass impregnable;, and, humoured thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell King! (3.2.144-170)

He is very up and down. He rallies and then he falls.  Here is a rally:
Yet know, my master, God omnipotent,
Is mustering in his clouds on our behalf
Armies of pestilence, and they shall strike
Your children yet unborn and unbegot
That lift your vassal hands against my head,
And threat the glory of my precious Crown.
Tell Bolingbroke– for yon methinks he stands –
That every stride he takes upon my land
Is dangerous treason.  He has come to open
The purple testament of bleeding war … (3.3.84-93)

But he gives in. Here is a real down.
What must the King do now? Must he submit?
The King shall do it. Must he be deposed?
The King shall be contented. Must he lose
The name of King? A God’s name, let it go.
I’ll give my jewels for a set of beads;
My gorgeous palace for a hermitage;
My gay apparel for an almsman’s gown;
My figured goblets for a dish of wood;
My sceptre for a palmer’s walking staff;
My subjects for a pair of carved saints;
And my large kingdom for a little grave,
A little, little grave, an obscure grave … (3.3.142-153)

Has the theatre – the theatre– ever known language of such silver grace?  When in Act 4, Richard formally surrenders the Crown, his disillusion takes him to a different tone.

Now, mark me how I will undo myself.
I give this heavy weight from off my head,
And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand,
The pride of kingly sway from out my heart;
With mine own tears I wash away my balm,
With my own hands I give away my crown,
With my own tongue deny my sacred state,
With mine own breath release all duteous oaths;
All pomp and majesty I do forswear … (4.1.202-210)

He calls for a mirror:
… Was this the face
That, like the sun, did make beholders wink?
Was this the face that faced so many follies,
And was at last outfaced by Bolingbroke?
A brittle glory shineth in this face,
As brittle as the glory is the face,
[Throws glass down]
For there it is, cracked in a hundred shivers.
Mark, silent King, the moral of this sport:
How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face. (4.1.283-290)

Richard, the actor, starts to comment on his own performance:
… Say that again.
‘The shadow of my sorrow’? Ha, let’s see.
‘Tis very true, my grief lies all within … (4.1.292-294)

Richard is now the very picture of self-centred self-pity, but his subsequent murder haunts Henry IV and the nation as a whole for the rest of this series of plays.

It is not surprising that Elizabeth did not like this play being performed.  Dethroning a king is a not a good precedent. (Verdi had to convert the murdered king of The Masked Ball to a Governor of Boston to get it performed.)  Medieval kings were the Lord’s Anointed, and it was almost inevitable that Richard would see himself as some Christ-like figure betrayed by Judas and arraigned by Pilate.  Indeed, some see in this play Richard enduring the Stations of the Cross.

He loses it completely, as we now say, at times, as shown by his shift in pronouns in:
I had forgot myself: am I not King?
Awake, thou coward majesty! Thou sleepest.
Is not the King’s name twenty thousand names?
Arm my name!  A puny subject strikes
At thy great glory.  Look not to the ground,
Ye favourites of a king, are we not high?
High be our thoughts. (3.2.83-9)

Bolingbroke has shown his intention to take control by executing his opponents before he was crowned. He said that ‘to wash your blood / From off my hands’ (3.1.5-7) he will say why they die. Richard refers to:

… some of you, with Pilate, wash your hands. (4.1.238)

And right at the end, Bolingbroke, now the King, says:
I’ll make a voyage to the Holy Land,
To wash this blood from off my guilty hand. (5.6.49-50)

Going on a Crusade was a way of doing penance and getting remission from sins for those who subscribed to the medieval church, which was everyone in the Middle Ages.  This was all still real to Elizabethan audiences.  For us, Richard is a shallow man not up to his job – 10 for noblesse; 0 for oblige.  Richard had a weak, effeminate, showman side.  Coleridge said Shakespeare did not mean to represent Richard as ‘a vulgar debauchee, but merely as a wantonness in feminine shew, feminine friendism, intensely woman-like love of those immediately about him, mistaking the delight of being loved by him for love for him.’

Coleridge also said that Richard endeavoured to ‘shelter himself from that which is around him by a cloud of his own thoughts’ and went on:

Throughout his whole career may be noticed the most rapid transitions – from the highest insolence to the lowest humility – from hope to despair, from the extravagance of love to the agonies of resentment, and from pretended resignation to the bitterest reproaches.  The whole is joined with the utmost richness and copiousness of thought, and were there an actor capable of representing Richard, the part would delight us more than any other of Shakespeare’s masterpieces – with perhaps, the single exception of King Lear.

We may agree with Coleridge, especially since we found the actor capable of representing Richard.  For people who love language and care for history, Richard II is the play. The best way to take this play is with the Gielgud recording.  Derek Jacobi did not under-camp the role in the BBC production.

We should not leave this play without referring to some of its most famous lines:
This royal throne of kings, this scept’red isle,
This earth of majesty, the seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise
This fortress built by nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happy lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This nurse, this teaming womb of royal kings … (2.1.40 – 51)

It is by such things that nations are formed and history is made. The author has as good a title as any to be called the greatest historian of his own nation.

Shakespeare’s Kings in Their Time

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

It was always yet the trick of the English nation if they have a good thing to make it common.

Death, as the Psalmist saith, is certain to all; all shall die.  How a good yoke of Bullocks at Stamforth Fair?

Shakespeare wrote his ten English history plays when it suited him.  It is instructive to view both the history of England and his development in the chronological order of the plays.  (The references to the shows are to those on Arkangel.)

King John (1199-1216)

(c1596)

This is a vitally medieval play – the king against his barons; the French against the English; and God and his Church over all.  We may as well be on Mars – but for the humanity of the playwright.  It is about perfidy and treachery on high – a favourite theme in drama. 

But the actors that get to us are not noble –the Bastard ( the son of Richard Coeur de Lion), Hubert, and the Papal Legate (Pandulph) – put there to fire up a Tudor Protestant audience (and the modern one I was in when in London once).  Constance is a pain.  (Very unlike Connie in The Godfather.)   The bastard is like a Greek chorus on the nobles – and he prefigures the politician.  Hubert is humanity in the raw – and an English man to boot.

King John is a rat.  He is the epitome of weakness – he urges brutal murder – and then he blames the chosen killer – who has had to defy ‘superior orders’.  The king is one of God’s gifts to the English – provocative but containable.  (The Stuarts in embryo.)  He would lead ineluctably to rebellion and Magna Carta – the foundation of the rule of law. 

Bill Nighy as Pandulph is insidiously malicious – like a gliding taipan in uncut grass.  The intervention of a foreign potentate will come to an end in the last of these history plays, Henry VIII.  The ‘supremacy’ vainly asserted by King John is a reality under King Harry.  What a difference a king makes. 

This  play is in my view sadly very underrated as theatre.  It  is high political drama.

Richard II (1377-1399)

(c1595)

Possibly because the first recording of Shakespeare that I bought had Sir John Gielgud in this role, it has remained very high in my favourites.  It has the aural beauty of Iussi Björling.  As a passion play, it has the pathetic majesty of The Saint Matthew Passion.  (And the recording has Leo McKern groaning that this other Eden is ‘now leased out’ – King John had hocked the kingdom to the Vatican.)

Another weak king is brought to heel – this time terminally, by deposition and death.  Put to one side the law – if a medieval English king did not measure up, he risked being deposed – on a good day.  It is the familiar story of a weak king surrounded by flatterers.  The play starts with full medieval chivalry – that would be detonated in the next play.  The last Plantagenet aborts the process of the law and then unlawfully seizes the property of one side.  This is the dilemma of the whole series – if you take the law into your own hands, how do you stop someone doing the same to you?  ‘How are you a king but by fair sequence and succession?’

Bolingbroke reminds me of the Inquisitor of El Greco – shifty.  And with him we now get populism and a new world.  He is seen to court the commons – ‘Off goes his bonnet to an oyster wench.’  Dead right.  He is the first spin doctor.  He will school his son in stealing ‘all courtesy from heaven’ – and young Harry will be a ready pupil in or out of the stews of London.  We will even get the phrase ‘vile politician’.  When the coup is complete, the rebels prefigure the Inquisition and Stalin.  They want to give a ‘confession’ to the Commons.  The flatterers had said that the love of the Commons ‘lies in their purses’ – how very modern!   And this is another play where a ‘misunderstanding’ leads to the execution of a king or an heir. 

But here is pathos not seen since the Greeks – in the most operatic play ever written.  Rupert Graves grows into the role as the hero softens in his crashing descent.

Henry IV (1399-1413)

(c1597; c1599)

The whole world has changed.  In the second scene of the first of these two plays – which many say are the best this playwright put on the stage – it explodes with the entrance of his most famous character, Sir John Falstaff – and theatre would never be the same again.  Falstaff is fat, old, a liar, a coward, a drunk, a thief, and a womaniser – and that’s on a good day.  But the audience loves him.  He is the living repudiation of honour and chivalry, and he arrived at about the same time as Don Quixote, who was on a similar mission.  But he has that most priceless attribute on the stage – he endears himself to the audience.

So does Percy Hotspur, that most feisty son of Northumberland (who had taunted Richard II, while Percy mocked the heir apparent).  He carries the audience with his reckless energy: he embodies the old world of chivalry.  He is in truth a hero, of the kind Wagner never got close to.  And he too rushes like a torrent to his inevitable death.  Percy also stands for the provincial nobility and the seeds of the Wars of the Roses.  ‘An if we live, we live to tread on kings’.

There is very little that is endearing about Prince Hal.  He is cold and calculating.  He will use Falstaff and his rough mates and others in the taverns until it suits him to drop them.  He is two faced, and in some cultures repudiating a mate is the ultimate crime.  Percy calls him a ‘vile politician’ – ‘a fawning greyhound’ who proffers ‘a candy deal of courtesy.’  Falstaff said Hal is ‘essentially mad without seeming so’.  Auden did not hold back.  He says ‘Hal has no self.’  Auden compares the ‘scoundrel’ Henry V with Richard III.  ‘Hal is the type who becomes a college president, a government head, and one hates their guts.’  Boy – does that ring a bell! 

At least Hal is honest.  ‘I’ll so offend to make offence a skill.’  Say hullo to Boris.  Hotspur?  ‘It were an easy leap to pluck bright honor from  the pale-faced moon.’  Falstaff?  ‘What is honor?  A word.’

Richard Griffith and Alan Cox are up for the leads and the tavern scene is a triumph.

Those who seek to exculpate Hal for his premeditated betrayal of Falstaff are blinded by the poetry, and forget that the object of the game for Shakespeare was to give the audience a great show – one that tells big truths.  If Hal stands for chivalry, was not Falstaff right to repudiate it?  And might we say the same for Hotspur, who seemed to think more of his horse than Kate and who resembles the crazy Siegfried as he staggers laughing to his doom?

In Part I, we get stews and pubs like those in Measure for Measure.  In Part II, we get the middle class and landed gentry like those in Merry Wives of Windsor.  We are a very long way from King John and the feudal barons, and the word ‘feudal’ was not in use then – and Rome is nowhere in sight. 

The whole mood is now autumnal.  ‘We have heard the chimes at midnight.’  (And somehow, I see the gaze of Orson Welles flickering in the firelight.)  And another son of Bolingbroke breaks his word in a way that would have thrilled Hitler, before we get to the scene of the transmission of the Crown – and there are not many scenes as strong as that.

Someone said that watching Shakespeare was like touching the face of God.  Falstaff is a paternal Master of Fun with roots in commedia.  But, as Sir Anthony Quayle said, he is also ‘frankly vicious.’  Well, he is human and so are we.  That I think led Tony Tanner to say that we ‘invariably feel a spasm of pleasure and liberation when someone blows the gaffe on human nature as Falstaff so often, consciously or subconsciously, does.’

That’s when you hear the chimes at midnight.  It is pure alchemy.  Which is to say: it is beyond analysis. It is, like the Pieta, what it is.

(Opera-goers might note that the Falstaff of Verdi, my favourite of his operas, is not that of these plays, but the watered down and worn-down version of Merry Wives of Windsor – a rom.com that the poets turn their noses up on.)

But there remains the conundrum of Falstaff.  He trades in human souls.  He figures that only three of his 150 ragamuffins will survive the battle.  The Hostess complains that she has been ‘fubbed off, fubbed off, and fubbed off.’  The truth is that Falstaff rides roughshod over the whole lot of them.  All chivalry is gone.  It was at best a pretty conceit to soften the brutality of the ethnic cleansing of the Crusades.

Donald Trump could have modelled himself on Sir John.  If you are going to lie, lie big.  The more you outrage the Establishment, the more popular you shall be.  He gets away with things quite out of our reach.  We should forever bear in mind the caution of Dr Johnson. 

The moral to be drawn is that no man is more dangerous than he that with a will to corrupt hath the power to please ;and that neither wit nor honesty ought to think themselves safe with such a companion when they see Henry seduced by Falstaff.

Or vice versa.

And at the end – there is a new player.  ‘Now call we our high court of Parliament.’  And the next play begins with power brokers discussing a bill in the Commons.  The political landscape is shifting massively.

Henry V (1413-1422)

(c1599)

Prince Hal is now King Henry.  As promised, he has cast off Falstaff et al and he is justly blamed for Falstaff’s death.  He and the Holy Church are fit to prey on each other.  The Church will fund a war of national pride.  Honour.  This leads to posturing on both sides.  And tennis balls.  And bloody carnage.

The puppeteer can now play deadly games with traitors before issuing blood-red threats of war crimes before the gates of Harfleur.  Then he presides over the death of Bardolph with sickening hypocrisy.  ‘I know you not old man’ becomes ‘We would have all such offenders so cut off.’  Then he does commit a war crime by ordering the killing of prisoners.  Olivier and Branagh left that out.  For Olivier and Churchill, the Second World War was the reason: I am not sure for Branagh.  Those who do not paint the full picture leave us with Kiplingesque jingoism that is not Shakespeare, no matter how much it warms the cockles at home.  Auden thought ‘the most brutal scene in Shakespeare is Henry’s wooing of Katherine’, and I know what he means.

The scene of the death of Falstaff comes from the gutter.  It is wonderful theatre.  No other playwright has claimed this range.  And at the end, Harry still plays games with those beneath him.  Narcissus to the end.

Henry VI (1422-1461, 1470-1471)

(c1592- 1596)

‘The cease of majesty’.  These three plays are about the weakest king, and the strongest queen, my favourite character, Queen Margaret, the She Wolf of France, especially as played by the immortal Dame Peggy Ashcroft.  (A younger David Tennant is just right as this pathetic young king – like a lost child late for Sunday School.)

But somehow the times are out of joint.  Perhaps here the sequence of composition asserts itself and we seem to be going backward.  There is a jolt – a palpable jolt.  The fingerprints of the Church pervade.  Crashing warrior barons clash with each other and crash out of France.  A champion woman is cruelly treated because she is French – an English failing, and not this author’s high point.  It all feels so medieval.  There are king-makers whom no king can ignore.  And, then, for the first time, we see the masses rise up in the rebellion of Jack Cade: about three hundred years before the French Revolution.  (And that sounds about right on the scales of history.)

But above all, we see the inhuman misery of a weak monarchy and a grizzly civil war, that people I respect simply cannot bear to listen to.  It is like Mad Max.  The Wars of the Roses will be the last hoorah of the magnates.  Next, the English will celebrate Religious Home Rule in the Reformation, and the Stuart kings will cede sovereignty to Parliament. 

Perhaps my editor may forgive me for quoting my favourite lines of Queen Maragaret once again hissed out by Peggy Ashcroft.

Where are your mess of sons to back you now?
The wanton Edward, and the lusty George?
And where’s that valiant crook-back prodigy,
Dicky your boy, that with his grumbling voice
Was wont to cheer his dad in mutinies?
Or, with the rest, where is your darling Rutland?

They would have blushed at that out the outer at Windy Hill or Victoria Park in 1948, the year of the blood premiership.  Even Quentin Tarantino might pause.  This is a long way from Midsummer night’s Dream, and this playwright is nothing if not rounded.

Taken as a whole, the three plays are I think sadly underestimated.  There is plenty of blood and guts.  Kings and nobles were in the front in the wars, but this was a time when winners could cut the heads off their enemies and display them in triumph.  In that they were savages.  Kings and nobles were merely human – but, like the rest of us, capable of dragging us back to the primeval slime. 

There are family or tribal vendettas like those in The Godfather.  The howling protests of the father and son in Part II have no parallel on our stage.  Chivalry?  A ‘gigolot wench’ looks with contempt at the ‘stinking and fly-blown’ corpse of a noble – who had murdered a child in cold blood. 

The plays are intensely political – and politics are about people, not policies.  It was only a matter of  time before the playwright let sex rear its potent head.  There is wall to wall duplicity – and faction, and grinding discord in the caucus.  One faction resorts to murder; another incites the mob to rebellion.  If you cannot get rid of your opponent lawfully, do what you must for the good of the state – or for your party – or for yourself.  What is the upshot of that policy?  ‘I am myself alone.’  And he is the subject of the last of this quartet of plays.

Richard III (1483-1485)

(c1597)

At the start of Act 4 in Part III, we see a bitchy split in the York brothers when Edward IV puts his sex drive before the crown.  Clarence defects.  Richard gives notice of future horrors.  Judas had nothing on him – played by David Troughton with lascivious malice.  ‘I am myself alone…Counting myself but bad til I be best.’

From weakness at the top and chaos below, to evil and misery everywhere.  The trouble is that this evil king sucks us the audience in with him.  The style and ambience are all so different.  This man lives for conflict – that is his oxygen: a small-scale Napoleon or Hitler or Trump.  He will be the last unguided missile to sit on the English throne, and the earth sighs with relief at his inevitable fall. 

This Richard has at least two things in common with Donald Trump.  First, his ego does not allow for a superego, or conscience.  Secondly, and relatedly, ‘he hath no friends but what are friends for fear / Which in his dearest need will fly from him.’  It is just a matter of time before someone who gets too close is cut off – with extreme prejudice.  ‘Richard loves Richard, that is I am I.’

Franco, the Caudillo, used to read through the sentences of death of his enemies while taking his coffee after a meal, often in the presence of his personal priest.   He would write an ‘E’ against those he decided should be executed, and a ‘C’ when commuting the sentence.  For those he considered needed to be made a conspicuous example, he wrote ‘garrote y prensa’ (garrotting and press coverage).  Richard wanted to be told after supper in detail how the two infant princes died – after which he will again be ‘a jolly thriving wooer’.  Well, you could not levy that charge against Hitler, but the psychotic paring is there – and it all gets a bit too much.  The dramatic technique is evolving, but I still prefer the regal tragedy of Richard II.

But this author and producer has now found his feet, and he knows how to play with us.  If you can go the distance with the whole play, it is worth it.  It has about it the aura of an ancient Greek family cursed by fate, with discarded queens hissing curses from a barbed wire fence.  In that way, it is utterly timeless, as is the remark that all power corrupts. 

Plus ça change….

Henry VIII (1509-1547)

(c1613)

Home waters at last as in Yes, Minister – power, greed, corruption, deceit – and pure bullshit.  Above all , put not your trust in princes. 

The king has imposed a tax that makes him unpopular.  Naturally, he blames his first minister, and tells him to fix it.  In turn, the first minister, Wolsey, summons a flack: ‘let it be noised that through our intercession this relief comes.’  Sir Humphrey Appleby, eat your heart out.

It is a play of people falling from a great height, pushed by a randy British bulldog, not much of a rock to build a church on.  ‘Then in a moment, see how soon this mightiness meets misery.’  Given that the Armada and Guy Fawkes were well within living memory, Queen Katherine (Jane Lapotare as I saw it at Stratford and heard on Arkangel) is extraordinarily generously dealt with by Shakespeare, and the authors do not shy away from the issue of the impact of Harry’s sex drive on this world-shaking constitutional issue.  It is masked by high ceremony, that the English are so good at.  Buckingham feels ‘the long divorce of steel’, and the Queen and the Cardinal go their ways to God. 

Timothy West was made to play Cardinal Wolsey.  This ‘holy fox’ is the archetype of the modern politician.  He intrigues with the Vatican to prevent the king marrying Lady Anne, ‘a spleeny Lutheran’ – and he gets caught, and sacked.  When told of the appointment of Sir Thomas More: ‘That’s somewhat sudden.’  When told of the marriage of Anne: ‘There was the weight that pulled me down.’  In the end, he might resemble an up-market Paroles.  The kind Griffith, Katherine’s usher, said of him after his death: ‘His overthrow heaped happiness upon him/ For then and not until then, he felt himself.’  That is very Shakespeare – as is the remark about Cranmer – ‘He has strangled language /In his tears.’

Paul Jesson plays Henry VIII as a vicious manipulator, a man who fancies dark corners.  He reminds me of Churchill on Stalin – as I recall, it was to the effect that he smiled like a crocodile.  (I was told never to get between one and the water; with Putin, you steer clear of sixth floor windows.)  Lytton Strachey said that ‘the Defender of the Faith combined in a peculiar manner the unpleasant vices of meanness and brutality; no! he made the Reformation – he saved England – he was a demi-god.’  It would be left to a daughter to put a humane face on the House of God.

But Archbishop Cranmer survives in a great scene when the king puts the gutless plotters to shame.  It is wonderful theatre when the accused shows his accusers the royal seal.  It could be an ALP caucus in 1948 or a Liberal Party caucus in 2024.  And it is not kind to one of those leading the posse – Sir Thomas More – who would have to be axed before he could be ensainted.  (Which Rome was inclined to do for those killed by English kings.  Henry VIII was furious about their treatment of Becket.)

The king does not get his son, but the now Stuart audience gets a ritual salute to the birth of the daughter, Elizabeth Gloriana.  OK – this is propaganda, butto my mind, this play, although not intended as such, sits well as the epilogue of a great historical cycle.

And if you look back at this motley of kings, there is no stand-out.  This playwright was not there to glorify his kings – although his warmth to the realm is everywhere.  Rather, he is there to show us not just English kings, but the humanity in all of us.  And no one else has got even close.

I am forever reminded of that remark of Richard Burton, when he referred to the ‘staggering compassion’ of William Shakespeare.  The full comment in the diary was –

What chance combination of genes went to the making of that towering imagination, that brilliant gift of words, that staggering compassion, that understanding of all human frailty, that total absence of pomposity, that wit, that pun, that joy in words and the later agony.  It seems that he wrote everything worth writing and the rest of his fraternity have merely fugued on his million themes….

Happy Christmas from Hamlet and the Wolf, and the Storm – Covert acts in Hamlet

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Covert acts in Hamlet

The word ‘covert’ has a bad press thanks to the CIA. These people have to defend Americans and us against the forces of evil, against people who do not know much less accept our notions of rules of the game. The CIA operatives are left to work in darkness and deceit knowing that they just have to cop it sweet if they get caught – because we decent people cannot be seen to have got our hands dirty in our own defence. You might find some room for hypocrisy there.

Darkness and deceit fill Hamlet with murderous covert acts. Murder and revenge are everywhere, but always covert until the end. Even revenge is covert – until the end. There is obviously some room for hypocrisy here, too.

The deceit begins with the Danish equivalent of the PMO, the Prime Minister’s Office. After Claudius has poisoned his brother King Hamlet, he causes the news to be put out that the king was stung to death by a snake while taking a nap in his orchard. Well, we might nowadays read of a myocardial infarction, but when the ghost of the murdered man tells young Hamlet of the truth, his ‘prophetic soul’ had suspected something like this. The rest of Denmark has however been taken in by this ‘forged process.’

But the level of deceit in Denmark was such that young Hamlet does not trust the ghost. He wants independent evidence. He arranges for a doctored – ‘forged’ if you like – version of a play called The Mousetrap to be put on. He hopes to and does entrap the king by this device.

Hamlet is right into deceit. He feigns (or forges) madness as a kind of cover for his covert inquiries and actions. The king and queen are troubled by this apparent transformation in this highly strung university student. They engage two mates of Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to maintain a covert watch on him. The queen assures them that the king will look after them as spies, but Hamlet is not deceived. He gives them a kind of shirt-front, but they just hang on, like barnacles.

When Hamlet puts on the mask of madness, he is engaging in a form of deceit that causes great and obvious pain to his mother, something that the ghost had forbad him to do point blank. Under cover of the same false madness, Hamlet coldly and cruelly repudiates Ophelia, the young woman he had pledged his love to ‘in honourable fashion’, even while her family were warning her off. This wounded young woman does not know that the madness or rejection are part of an act. She is driven mad and then dies in an apparent suicide. Ophelia is an innocent victim of all this darkness and deceit. Other innocent victims are not so easy to spot in this play.

Polonius, the father of Ophelia and her hypocritical and snaky brother Laertes, is a silly old courtier. He is heavily into surveillance in a land that Hamlet describes as a prison. He arranges with the king to eavesdrop on Hamlet while she is talking to the queen his mother. Gertrude is not told of this surveillance. So, when the old man makes a noise in the background, Gertrude cannot warn Hamlet that there is nothing to worry about. Hamlet runs him through, exulting in a chance to be a man of action, and who knows, he might have taken out the king?

When Claudius tries to explain to Laertes later why Hamlet was not prosecuted for this homicide, he is most unconvincing. If Hamlet had been found guilty of manslaughter, and you had been asked to put in a plea for him in extenuation, the word ‘remorse’ would hardly pass your lips. There was none. The young prince was as cold, cruel and superior to the dead father as he had been to the disintegrating daughter. ‘Thou wretched rash intruding fool, farewell……I’ll lug the guts into a neighbour room.’ It was as if he had shot a beater by mistake on a pheasant shoot, an unfortunate interruption to the better people’s sport.

Now, the king, who is an accomplished murderer just getting into his stride, realises that that dead body might be his. He sets about sending Hamlet to England where he hopes the English will honour his request to kill the anointed heir to the Danish throne – ‘Do it, England.’ Rosencrantz and Guildenstern may or may not have been parties to this murderous attempted coup d’etat, but their sometime friend outsmarts them again. (Let’s face it, these two have ‘losers’ written all over their unlovely faces.) Hamlet picks their pocket. He destroys their commission to England and he substitutes a forgery. The commission from the King of Denmark to England now is that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are to be put to death forthwith. These poor creatures must have got a very nasty shock as they watched the perfidious English unfold the parchment and then proceed to shoot the messengers. But the conscience of young Hamlet, which is otherwise so sensitive, is not moved by these occasional murders.

Claudius and Laertes go one better with their plot to kill Hamlet. Laertes wants revenge for the death of his father and sister, but he is content to go along with Claudius in a covert scheme to murder Hamlet without inquiring of his co-conspirator what had caused the prior clemency of the king to evaporate – presumably it is because the people are now up in arms for Laertes against Claudius. Laertes will kill Hamlet as if by accident in a duel. To be sure, he poisons his weapon. Then to be trebly sure, Claudius will give Hamlet a poisoned drink.

You do have to wonder about the psychic efficacy of a secret anonymous revenge. And think of the overdrive in wait the PMO – the heir to the throne has accidentally killed the father of his girlfriend who has accidentally committed suicide, and then the brother and son of those two accidental victims has accidentally killed the man responsible.

Well, we know that the plan goes off the rails when the queen drinks the poison and Hamlet kills the king in hot blood for the death of his mother and his father.

But what for me is the grandfather of all these lies comes when Hamlet seeks to reconcile with Laertes. He tells Laertes that he Hamlet has done Laertes wrong, but then he says it was not he Hamlet that did the wrongs but his madness. This is a bare-faced lie, a lie upon a lie. It is a weak and cowardly lie. Nor are we surprised that Laertes is not moved. He says that he is satisfied in nature, ‘but in my terms of honour I stand aloof.’ Laertes is red hot for revenge for the death of his father and sister. In that heat, that we can understand, he descends to darkness and deceit. But his talk of being satisfied in nature, while not in honour is addressed to an unashamed liar who has committed himself to one pole-star in his life:

….Rightly to be great

Is not to stir without great argument,

But greatly to find quarrel in a straw

When honor’s at the stake. (4.4.53-56)

What a weasel word ‘honour’ is, and how right it was to use the word ‘aloof’ with it! And what murderous bullshit and pious claptrap from a spoiled prince do we have here? How many millions of people have died because the honor of a prince was at stake? And what place is there for any honour whatsoever among all these characters thrusting about in their own darkness and deceit?

The great A C Bradley published his famous lectures on Shakespearian Tragedy shortly after the death of Queen Victoria. He saw in Hamlet ‘a soul so pure and noble.’ Each of those three words now dies on our lips. Stalin and Hitler ravaged our faith in mankind. And we have given up the abracadabra or Open Sesame theory that says that you just have to find the right key to unlock the secret of a work of art. That childlike view, which used to be put about by psychoanalysts who should have known better, involves arrogance at our end, and downright bloody rudeness at the other. We don’t think that life or letters are so simple, and the people who have the best chance of staying sane are those who are happy to live with some mystery about them.

The prince who moves into the vacuum left by Hamlet and his uncle – and they did not leave much standing – was a man of action that Hamlet had a very rosy view of. Even in death this young man returned the compliment and said that Hamlet was ‘likely to have proved most royal.’ This was comity among Scandinavian royals, but do we agree?

We might now see that Hamlet had some key attributes, as the personnel consultants say, of a high-end CIA operative – a product of the noblesse oblige with a penchant for intellectual analysis and guesswork; a keen observer of the behaviour of others, and a taste for covert action in high affairs of state; a practised capacity for seamless dissimulation (if you must, a seasoned liar); a man who could handle himself in one-on-one armed combat to the death; a capacity coldly to drop someone very close to him if they got in the way of his mission; and, above all, and contrary to a very widely held view about this man, an operative who could override his conscience just like that if the stakes were high enough. Perhaps there was more to this young prince than first meets the eye.

Folies Bergere

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

Whatever else you might say about the French, they have style. Folies Bergere is about as un-French a movie as you could get. It is a movie in search of a genre, domestic, quotidian, embarrassingly gauche, banal even, a teaser, and at times a teaser of the cruder sort. But it gets by because of Isabelle Huppert, who is the living embodiment of French style.

We knew that she would age well – I know that from the French photo gallery in my bathroom – but here she is at sixty-one, not so much radieuse or lumineuse in the grand French tradition, but an actress at peace with herself and with her own womanhood, and one who can still come on like the pretty girl that she is. It is a part of a remarkable assurance that can also show vulnerability that lights up what might otherwise have been a desultory sit-com of American tawdriness. For men as well as women of what the French call a certain age, this is a performance to savour.

She is married to a cattle farmer in the country. Life is fixed and less than thrilling. Their son is up to God knows what in a school for acrobats in Paris. (What good could come of that?) She is ripe for what in some quarters is called a fling, and your teeth might be put on edge by a frightful twerp who knows that the Net code word for randy granny is cougar. He mercifully passes, and a more urbane figure appears, and nature takes its course. My one regret is that she does not slap the face of the twerp. (I recall a movie where the serene Julie Christie snapped a young twerp to his senses.)

This is not a strong film, and it may hold little for those who do not yet know the fear of terminal irrelevance, but this woman – this actress – delivers in high French style, and the baby-boomers might find an affirmation of life that is a kind of comfort to them. I made my debut at the Melbourne Emporium on my way to the cinema, and I could relate to the estrangement of a country girl in a glitzy capital full of much younger foreigners.

And if you have one bit of theatre in your blood – and God help those who do not – you must see this film for just one scene. You will hardly see it coming, but when you do, you will gaze in wonderment. It will knock your socks off, and you will walk out better than you walked in. That last proposition comes with a cast iron guarantee.

And why did women give up on hats? Just look at the allure of the lead in the fur hat in the ad.