Behind the Arras

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

Visitors to the ASP's peripatetic theater in the basement of the Garage in Harvard Square, previously the site of productions of Titus Andronicus and Love's Labors Lost, and now of Henry V, have all been struck by the intrusive presence of a good-sized pillar--three, in fact--that stand near the center of the room, and become either impediments or advantages, depending (quite literally) on your point of view. Since the room at the BU Fine Arts Center in which we performed King Lear and Macbeth has similar features, while the theater at the Cambridge Y in which we did Julius Caesar and especially All's Well that Ends Well, had a whole semicircle of smaller ones, dealing with pillars has become quite a feature of the company's work--almost a signature.

It is my own sense that the pillars stimulated the designers of all these productions, and the directors and actors of King Lear and Titus, at least, to theatrically inventive and effective adaptations, which in the end offset the periodic inconvenience to spectators of having the pillars standing between them and one or more actors. I think especially of Ken Cheeseman as the Fool with his back against the pillar slowly sliding down it as the deadly wound he had just received from the King took effect, and the way the pillar in Titus became shrine, then hitching post, then shrine again, and of the rack of knives and other kitchen implements dangling from the pillar in Macbeth and waiting, like the gun on the wall in Ibsen, to go off. At this writing I have not yet seen Henry V, but would be very interested to read comments about the pillars in that production and the others, as I'm hoping to present a talk about them to the Blackfriars Conference next fall.

David Evett
Scholar in Residence

Our images of Macbeth start with the witches, and then go on to the Macbeths gazing in horror at their bloody hands, and then maybe extend to Banquo's ghost, with "twenty mortal murders on his crown," sitting in Macbeth's seat at the banquet table, and maybe-maybe-maybe beyond that to Macduff making a final entrance with a gruesome thing on a skewer.

Working through the play yet once more, however, what I keep finding is children, and beyond them parents, and beyond them families.

Shakespeare is fascinated, even obsessed, with families, from the fractured group of Aegeus, Aemilia, and their twin sons and twin servants in Comedy of Errors at the beginning of his career, to Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn and the joyously received baby Elizabeth at the end. Comedies start with broken families and end with new ones just starting out. Histories follow one Plantagenet with a father and some uncles and aunts and cousins and brothers and one or more sons and nephews (and a wife or two, and even one daughter!) through four plays, and then another similar set through four more. Tragedies turn out to be comedies manquées, in which already cracked families are broken to pieces, and despite some promising early steps are decisively not renewed.

Shakespeare only occasionally presents us with an image of even a small complete family group—mother, father, child. Very briefly, if unequivocally, at the beginning and end of Merry Wives and at the end of Comedy of Errors and Pericles. Briefly and equivocally in I Henry IV (the Yorks) and at the end of All’s Well. Most extensively, and very equivocally, in Romeo and Juliet. Far more commonly we find childless couples, or single fathers or mothers (but not both together), and one or more children, and then perhaps some uncles and nephews and cousins.

The Scottish play does not break the mold: the familial element is subtle but inescapable. Lord and Lady Macbeth are childless (though Lady M says she has “given suck,” there are no living kids). Duncan has two sons but not, evidently, a surviving wife, and his death not only leaves the boys fatherless, but also separates them from one another. Banquo has a son but no wife; his death makes Fleance an exiled orphan. At the end of the play we meet the soldier Siward and his soldier son; the latter is Macbeth’s final victim. There is one whole family, the Macduffs. We do not see them together, however: Macduff the paterfamilias leaves Fife and Scotland for England to join the resistance to Macbeth’s increasingly tyrannical rule, and in his absence the tyrant brutally slaughters his wife and children.

In a way this moment serves as the moral hinge of the play. Until then, the murderous usurper carries all before him. It is as though killing other noblemen to gain and sustain political power were so normal as to be quite acceptable; indeed, if you read the preceding and following chapters of Raphael Holinshed’s chronicle history of Great Britain, Shakespeare’s source for this and many other plays, you get the idea that Macbeth’s bloody deeds were just business as usual. When Macbeth orders his underlings to kill Lady Macduff and the Macduff children, however, for no reason of state but apparently only out of spite at Macduff’s refusal to honor him, some crucial line is crossed, and thereafter everything goes wrong for the tormented king.

The sequence of scenes is powerfully suggestive. Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost, and is deeply shaken. He consults the Weird Sisters and is initially cheered to learn that his throne is secure unless an impossible event occurs—that the trees of Birnam Wood cross the 15-mile width of the Tay valley to Dunsinane Castle. Then he is further shaken by apparitions that show Banquo’s descendants, not his, mounting the throne of Scotland. He learns of Macduff’s flight to England and resolves to “give to th’edge of the sword / His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls / That trace him in his line” (4.2.150-52). That is, if Macbeth cannot found a dynasty, neither can Macduff. The next scene mingles apprehension with comedy, as Lady Macduff snaps out irritably at her absent husband and their feisty son cracks witticisms on politics and violence. Their murder (perhaps by a member of their own household secretly also working for Macbeth) is swift and brutal. News of their deaths rouses Macduff to seek vengeance, and he it is, in single combat, who kills Macbeth and brings the usurper’s head to the stage as evidence. At the end of the play, not even partial families remain on the stage—Lady Macbeth has died before her husband, perhaps by her own hand, Siward’s son has fallen to Macbeth, Macduff is a childless widower, the unmarried and virginal Malcolm has only an absent brother. The final lines speak of reunification and a promising future, but phenomenologically, the family units that might produce it are nowhere to be found.

David Evett
ASP Scholar in Residence

The language of The Winter’s Tale has a reputation for difficulty, and a fascinating element of the rehearsal process has been the attempt to make sense of the mature Shakespeare’s astonishingly free use of the complete resources of English grammar and wording.

On deeper experience, however, the problem is concentrated in a few scenes and a few characters. The speeches of the heroine, Hermione, the innocent victim of her royal husband’s insane and apparently baseless jealousy, turn out in performance to be remarkably clear and straightforward. So do those of her ally Paulina. The love-talk of the young people, Perdita and Florizel, is more idealistic (and grammatical!) than that of the average Hollywood teen, but still comprehensible and charming. The language of the two comic shepherds, father and son, remains very largely accessible.

Their comical assailant (and later savior), the thief and con-man Autolycus, poses greater problems. Although the other characters have their roots in Shakepeare’s source, Robert Green’s pastoral romance, Pandosto (1588), Autolycus is entirely Shakespeare’s invention, almost certainly in order to give his musical clown, Robert Armin (for whom the part of Lear’s Fool was also written) a role commensurate with his gifts. Since Autolycus is only peripherally involved in the plot, much of what he says is directed at the audience, not the other characters, and since a lot of it involves satirical comment on early 17th-century practices no longer current in our society, it is hard to come at on its own. Since the ASP’s John Kuntz (like Armin, a fine musician) is a great physical performer, however, he has come up with one ingenious turn after another that effectively translate the obscure Jacobean references into visual antics we can all find laughable.

The toughest case is that of the jealous king, Leontes. For this character, whose psyche is literally shredded by the dark passion that surges up almost out of nowhere and ends by seeming to destroy almost everything he cherishes, Shakepeare invented an appropriate language, which turns on itself, then turns again, as it follows a mind coursing through a maze of contradictory and terrifying thoughts. Here is a representative speech, in which Leontes inquires whether Camillo, his trusted counselor, has also perceived the queen’s adultery:

Ha’ you not seen, Camillo—
But that’s past doubt; you have, or your eye-glass
Is thicker than a cuckold’s horn—or heard—
For, to a vision so apparent, rumor
Cannot be mute—or thought, for cogitation
Resides not in that man that does not think—
My wife is slippery.

Six full lines intevene between the verb, “seen, “and the short noun clause that is its direct object, “my wife is slippery.” In between , the thought dodges to and fro: “or . . . or . . . or.” Leontes’ own assurance is expressed in reverse,“past doubt,” his fear in an image, “the cuckold’s horn” applied not to a person but a cornea. Positive ideas are expressed in single and then double negatives: “cannot be mute,” “Resides not in that man that does not think.” Seeing—“vision”—is confused with hearing—“rumor”—and the very private business of thinking calls up a public and social verb, “resides.” Heavy midline pauses choke the flow of the verse, and only the fifth line is a normal iambic pentameter. The writing is mad, as contorted and tangled as the fantasies from which Leontes cannot escape.

This production’s Leontes, Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, has found this language a challenge. Much of his previous experience has been in contemporary plays about contemporary American life, where the language on the stage is pretty much that of the language in the lobby. When the demands of Shakespearean blank verse are piled on top of such contorted syntax and such muddled imagery, the task is doubly daunting. Still, Ricardo, and the rest of the company as they struggled along with him, have grown to understand how powerfully this writing presents one of Shakespeare’s most complex and fascinating characters, whose agonized dilemma is only a radical version of the kinds of personal and social confusion we all pass through a dozen times a day. We’ve all come to believe that the personal authenticity at the heart of his performance, and those of his fellows, will allow audiences to open themselves up to the witchery of the writing, and so come to a correspondingly rich new understanding of themselves.

David Evett
Scholar in Residence