Behind the Arras

We've been in the space for about a week now - translating the work we did in our small, white, classroom at Boston Conservatory to the warm and expansive room at the Cathedral. It's been really good - and the show looks great in there.

I've had a particular challenge gnawing at the back of mind for months now, which I finally could confront. One of the things that makes the room unique is the presence of a painted labyrinth on the floor. It looks kind of like this one, which comes from Chartres Cathedral:

It is used in a practice called "praying the labyrinth" which is a spiritual journey that is taken during Pentecost. It's not a maze, in that you can't get lost in it - rather a long and winding journey from out to in (or maybe it's in to out, I'm not actually sure). It's a wonderful image - it forms a natural stage boundary - our own "Wooden O", and a nice texture underneath the action.

But I have known from the beginning that I would have to find a way to use it during the production - it is an essential element of the space, and, as you know, we always try to take inspiration from the space we are in. But how? Who would walk it? Constance, when she has lost her boy? Arthur as he tries to escape from prison? John? I had no idea until I got in there and saw the play begin to live in the space.

I'm not going to say what I did - you'll have to see for yourself! All I can say is that I take my hat off to my brilliant sound designer Cam Willard, whom I made write a whole 2 and half minute piece of music with three days before previews start. I hope it works for you...

Ah, the excitement of being a small itinerant company! The Boston Conservatory has generously donated a rehearsal room for King John - a good sized room with relative quiet, a good floor, some light, a place for actors not being used to hang out. Well, until this weekend. A fire alarm malfunctioned on Friday, and suddenly our rehearsal space was locked down for the weekend, with no access to the room or to any of our stuff - rehearsal props and costumes, etc.

BoCo scrambled to find a place for us to rehearse - thanks to Katie Shinay in the Theatre Office - and we ended up in a dance studio in the basement of the performing arts building. We can hardly complain, because at least we had enough room (barely!) to work, but it sure was an interesting weekend. For much of our rehearsal time this weekend we had either piano waltzes, or, more frequently, incredibly loud music from Hairspray or Chorus Line blaring through the paper thin door from the studio next door, not to mention exuberant BoCo dance students whooping, hollaring and chattering through the halls just outside. Add to that a loud car alarm, two tow-trucks and an insistent leaf-blower, and you begin to get some sense of the challenge that we faced.

So my hat is way-way off to my flexible and resilient actors, who not only survived this sonic onslaught, but got a lot of great work done in the process - and to my ingenious stage management team for digging up enough chairs, tables and makeshift props to get us through. If only there had been a street percussionist banging his trash cans out there as well...

We're most of the way through the second week of rehearsal, and I'm finally catching a chance to set down some thoughts about the process. It's such an interesting play. So much of the it is so gleefully amoral, so matter of fact in its assessment of opportunism as a driving force in social interaction, that you almost forget what an empathic playwright Shakespeare is. Then suddenly, he strikes with a deep and moving moment that gets to very heart of human care and emotion. In particular, his treatment of the boy, Arthur, and his loss. It's devastating. We were rehearsing the scene in which Constance responds to loss of her boy today, and I couldn't even speak to give notes, it touched me so much.

Grief fills up the room of my absent child
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;

I can't help thinking of poor little Hamnet, Shakespeare's boy who died in 1596, right around the time this play was likely written. The understanding of the loss of a little boy is so specific, so profound, its utterly heartwrenching - what he must have been going through - as a father of two little boys I can't even begin to contemplate a loss like that. But there it is, deep in the fabric of the play.

The plots of all of Shakespeare's history plays arise from familial relationships, and especially from problems of succession--the process by which the crown passes from one person to the next. The first tetralogy, comprising the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III, draws most of its energy from the struggle over whether the descendants of two younger sons of Edward III, Edmund Langley, Duke of York, or his brother John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, both sons of Edward III, are rightful heirs of the crown. The second tetralogy, comprising Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, and Henry V, explores the roots of the Lancaster-York conflict in the usurpation of the throne from Edward II's grandson, Richard II, by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke (Gaunt's son), and then the efforts of Henry and his warrior son, Henry V, to secure their claim to it.

Interest in these questions in the last decade of the sixteenth century was high, because questions about succession faced the England of Elizabeth. The problem this time was not too many claimants, in a sense, but too few. Elizabeth was childless. So were the siblings who had preceded her as monarchs, her younger brother, Edward VI, and her older sister, Mary I. This meant that in order to find a legitimate successor, it was necessary to go back two generations--and to look at the female rather than the male line. The search led to the sister of Henry VIII, Margaret Tudor; it was her grandson, James VI of Scotland, who by the mid-1590s was pretty clearly established as the heir apparent, and who did indeed succeed Elizabeth as James I of England. He was a foreigner, however--king of a country with which England had been at war forever. Worse, his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, had been Queen of France before her French husband died and she returned to Scotland, and associations between Scotland and France had been close for generations, so he was seen as more French than English.

We know nothing directly of Shakespeare's own ideas about these things--though almost as soon as he was crowned, James became the patron of Shakespeare's company. None the less, it was in this environment that Shakespeare wrote King John, probably in 1595-96, in the gap between the two tetralogies. And the ground of this play, as in the matter of the Elizabethan succession, was a complicated family history involving French and English connections. A history, indeed, in which power achieved and sustained through the female line was central.

The play treats John's reign from his accession in 1199, aged 33, to his death in 1216. It is useful to know two things. First. that since the conquest of England by William Duke of Normandy in 1066, the English monarchs had retained land in France and close connections to the French aristocracy. Their family language and customs were French; they made dynastic marriages with the children of French monarchs and peers. John's father, Henry Plantagenet, Duke of Anjou, claimed the English throne because his mother Matilda was the daughter of Henry I of England, and supported by much of that country as queen, though much of England was loyal instead to her cousin Stephen. Henry's own wife, John's mother, Eleanor of Acquitaine, was the daughter of the Duke of Aquitaine, and for a time the Queen of France. When her marriage to her French husband, Louis, was annulled, she married Henry Plantagenet, bringing with her control of Aquitaine, the southwestern third of modern France; her lands bordered Henry's. Henry was 11 years younger than she, and their marriage was so turbulent that for the last years of it Henry kept Eleanor emprisoned to inhibit her meddling in his affairs, but they had five sons and three daughters, and when Henry forced the dying Stephen to accept his claim, so that he became king Henry II of England, Eleanor became his queen.

All of their children were lords of extensive lands in France, and spent more time there than in England. The oldest, William, predeceased his father. So did the second, Henry. The next three, Richard, Geoffrey, and John, all ambitious, fought with and against their father and each other. Both Richard and Geoffrey were at one time allies of Philip, King of France. Richard, who became king, died childless; Geoffrey died before Richard, and his son, Arthur, Duke of Brittany, was thought by many (including Philip) to be the rightful heir to the English crown. Eleanor, however, favored John, and helped arrange a will whereby Richard named John his successor. He was thus duly crowned King of England on April 6, 1199. His French associates and relations, however, supported his nephew Arthur, and through Arthur, their own interest in the English crown.

That's the situation when the play begins. It's pretty messy. And the process by which it arose, involving dynastic marriages, annulments, interfamilial fighting on the Continent, in England, and across the channel, was in many ways different from the process by which Elizabeth and James came to the throne. Shakespeare's immediate source, the anonymous author of an earlier play called The Troublesome Reign of King John, was somewhat confused about it. So, perhaps, was Shakespeare. So, perhaps, am I--there are certainly complexities I have overlooked or misunderstood--the many connections among the ruling families of Anjou, Aquitaine, and France, for example, and the role of the Church of Rome, which was repeatedly called upon to ignore ties of blood that might normally have prevented dynastic marriages--or to assert them. We'll leave it to the actors to clarify the ones that matter.

David Evett
Scholar in Residence

The Tempest is the first play in the Folio (collected dramatic works) of 1623, but perhaps the last that Shakespeare wrote entirely on his own (Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen are probably later, but also probably written in collaboration with John Fletcher). It has thus been very often treated as Shakespeare’s farewell performance—a valediction that its central character, Prospero, will signal by breaking the staff and drowning the book that are the instruments of his magical power. The play does look backward in some important ways. It draws its structural principles from classical drama: five acts, a relatively small cast of characters, a strongly integrated action completed in a single place on a single day, centered on the actions of a noble protagonist and involving supernatural forces. Its central figure is near the end of his life, not the beginning; much of his own speech and that of his one-time antagonist, now his prisoner, Alonso, is retrospective, and includes celebrated musings about the nature of image-making in general and dramatic writing in particular, from the perspective of an experienced practitioner.

Much about the play looks ahead, however. It incorporates features of the two hottest trends in Jacobean theater: tragi-comedy (grief and separation at the actual or apparent death of an important character giving way to comic reunions and reconciliations and joy) and the masque (a hybrid form, extensively and expensively patronized by the royal family, in which rudimentary stories conveying clear-cut political and moral messages are filled out by singing, dancing, and slapstick comedy, with elaborate costumes and props). The mechanism that turns it from death toward life is the love-story of two youngsters who are as fresh and lively as Romeo and Juliet, if less fully developed. It incorporates utopian images of a political order in which the firmly established social hierarchy that had characterized European life for centuries, and which was indeed in the process of breaking down, would be replaced by something much more egalitarian. Over against this, the play refracts extensions of English power that would entail major changes in the country’s political makeup—the early steps, following the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England, toward unification of the two countries under one crown and parliament, consolidation of the recently reaffirmed control of England over Ireland, the first British experiments with overseas colonies in North America and elsewhere. Increased contact between Britons and the indigenous peoples of East Asia, Africa, and the New World, light skins and dark, seems to explain elements in the treatment of Caliban, a theme that has dominated scholarly and critical approaches to the play in recent years. Shakespeare had worked with these forms and issues in three earlier works also termed romances by modern critics—Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale—but The Tempest takes them up with a concentration and economy that is both brilliant and highly demanding; it has an apparent clarity and simplicity that turn out to be full of ambiguity and complexity, and that pose severe challenges to actors, directors, designers, and audiences.

David Evett
Scholar in Residence
The Actors' Shakespeare Project