Monday July 9 2012

Shorter lists this week, of course. And nothing from the Almanac. But still, a decent Shakespeare week.

Shakespeare sightings:

• In Dagens Nyheter, missed last week actually collected sometime in June, a not so positive review of a production here in Stockholm of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
• In Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility Mrs. Dashwood exclaims that they had never finished reading Hamlet before Willoughby took off.
• In the TV series “Desperate Romantics” (not watched, only glimpsed) that famous painting of Ophelia (the name of the artist escapes me) flashed by in the background.
• In an interview with those involved with the making of the movie “Frost/Nixon”, Oliver Platt, speaking of his role as Bob Zelnick and his colleague James Reston (played by Sam Rockwell), compared the two to Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern.
• Emma Thompson makes clever use of Shakespeare in her excellent screenplay to “Sense and Sensibility” on several occasions.

Further, this week:

• Started reading with Hal: Much Ado about Nothing
• Finished and posted: my text on Henry the Fourth, Part Two.

Henry IV Part Two Hal and His Pal

  Hal and His Pal

The Convoluted Relationship between Prince Harry and Falstaff in

Henry IV Part Two

This is another one of those plays that inspire several ideas for further exploration – in this case lying, aging, fathers, and more – but in which one glaring aspect has to be dealt with before going on to others: the relationship between Prince Hal and Falstaff. It was plenty complex in Part One. In Part Two it becomes positively torturous. Poor Hal. Poor Falstaff. Who's the good guy? Who's the bad guy?Haven't we asked this question before? Doesn't Shakespeare always do this to us? Well, yes. So we know the answer before we even start. Both are both. But that only makes it more interesting to look at.

We've already observed the boisterous relationship between Hal and Falstaff in the altogether more comical Part One. Although they were already at loggerheads with each other the tone was generally that of good, wild, prankish fun. At least sometimes. Hal, in spite of his early monolog in which he told us that he was just playing around with his plebeian gang and that he would grow up and return to his proper place, we could easily forget that in the rest of his romps with Falstaff et. al. Hal was sharp-witted, energetic, one of the boys. Falstaff was rambunctious, funny and, in his “honour” monolog, heroic.

Part Two is something else. The play is filled with ”many images of sickness, disease and old age, [and] permeated with intimations of mortality...” (Howard, p. 1323). Rarely funny, this play is “melancholy” and “somber” (ibid). Falstaff is no longer the mischievous and wise anarchist, he is a fat, old, pathetic and often cruel drunkard. And Hal is realizing that not only does he love his father from whom he has chosen to be estranged, but that old dad is dying and he will soon find himself – abruptly and shockingly – king.

Friendship can get messed up for less.

What we have here isn't merely the parting of ways of an old man in decline from a young man in ascension. It is the separation of the world of the tavern in which the working class characters know “that staying indoors by a warm fire with good company, food and drink was infinitely more sensible than braving the dangers of traveling at night or fighting a battle” (Egan, p. 18), from the world of courtly power, pomp and circumstance and, as we are told (and already know if we've seen or read Henry V) war with France.

But even this is not simple. The cozy world of the tavern of Part One was really a rather sinister place of petty theft and quarrels and in Part Two the “warm , roistering noise overheard in the tavern – noise that seemed to signal a subversive alternative to rebellion – turns out to be the sound of a whore and a bully beating a customer to death. And Falstaff, whose earlier larcenies were gilded by fantasies of innate grace...” (Greenblatt, pp. 47-48), now romps about with Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet but we don't find him loveable any more. Instead he is revealed as a two-timer and a long-term sponge who has borrowed money from Mistress Quickly while promising to marry her then calling her a madwoman (one wonders why she would want to marry him, she seems to be doing pretty well on her own). Still, he is caught between the tavern and the battlefield and in his blustering braggart way, already sensing perhaps that he's living in a fantasy, he boasts that though old and fat he is a man “of merit...sought after” (Act 2.4) as he heads off on his recruiting mission.

This is not Falstaff's best moment of shining nobility. He mocks the poor sods he's sending off to a more or less certain death and happily lets himself be bought off by those who can afford it. This “recruiting scene [is] one of the most brilliant passages Shakespeare ever created [but] we don't know whether to laugh or cry. Of course the five potential recruits are ludicrous. Falstaff' jeers at them, rather leadenly...Yet is is hard for us not to smile too. Does this not make us partly complicit in Falstaff's chicanery?” (Poole p. xliv). Yes, it does. We laugh, and cringe, at this cruel Sir John.

Just one more example of “Falstaff in decline” (Poole, p. liv): his long-winded monolog about the splendid qualities of sack in which he claims that “...valour comes from sherry...Hereof comes it that Prince Harry is valiant...If I had a thousand sons, the first human principle I would teach them should be to forswear thin potations, and to addict themselves to sack” (Act 4.2). As Poole writes, “Does he know what nonsense he's talking?” (p. liii)

While Falstaff is embarrassing himself, and us who quite liked him (oh! where is the Falstaff of the honour soliloquy?), Prince Hal – how banal and yet how grand – is growing up. And sobering up in more ways than one.

In the first of only two scenes in which Hal and Falstaff are on stage together we see that, as previously arranged, Hal and Poins are disguised in order to spy on Falstaff. In an earlier scene, in which Falstaff's page, provided by Prince Harry not so much to help the old man as to spy on him, we see that if Hal has ever trusted Falstaff (probably not), he doesn't now. He says to Poins: “How might we see Falstaff bestow himself tonight in his true colours, and not ourselves be seen?” (Act 2.2)

And so they spy. And Falstaff insults him. The Prince, he tells Doll Tearsheet, is, “A good shallow young fellow. A would have made a good pantler” (the Norton edition explains: pantry worker). Falstaff goes on to compare Hal to Poins as both having “a weak mind and an able body” (Act 2.4).

When Hal reveals himself Falstaff's first greeting is “Ha, a bastard son of the king's!” Their bantering exchange of insults continues and a deeper analysis of all the insults exchanged by the two in both plays would surely yield a book. Suffice it to say here that Falstaff is in fact disconcerted this time: “No no no, not so. I did not think thou wast within hearing” and, quickly running out of the sharp retorts he produced effortlessly in Part One Falstaff pleads, “No abuse, Hal”. Six times. He tries ungallantly to turn the Prince's abuse onto Mistress Quickly but Hal is having none of that. Shakespeare wisely ends the exchange by the arrival of Peto announcing the threat of war. The switch in Hal is immediate:

By heavens, Poins, I feel me much to blame

So idly to profane the precious time (all quotes Act 2.4).

As Poole puts it, “The Prince turns from prose to verse and exits from comedy into history, never to return...” (Poole, p. lv).

And indeed the next time they meet, Hal has become King Henry the Fifth. And Falstaff?

“I know thee not, old man.” Perhaps the most heartbreaking, but most inevitable, of all lines in Shakespeare.

Falstaff has been sure from the very beginning that once Hal has become king, he, Falstaff will have it made. Life will be a bed of roses, or more likely an endless fountain of sack. He has not seen the signs of Hal's distancing himself from him and right up to the very moment of King Henry the Fifth's entrance Falstaff - foolishly, with us crying, “No, don't!” - rejoices:

God save thy grace, King Hal, my royal Hal!

...God save thee, my sweet boy,

...My King, my Jove, I speak to thee, my heart! (Act 5.5)

“Oh, Falstaff,” we want to say. “You don't talk to a king like that, especially not in public. He isn't your sweet boy Hal anymore. You foolish old drunk, how could you not see this coming?”

We could. From the moment Hal left the tavern he was no longer Hal. He disappears from the stage and doesn't reappear until Act 4.3 as the prince to be reunited with his dying father. As he contemplates the crown, does he give a single fleeting thought to his old pal Falstaff? No. There is only the crown and his apparently dead father to whom he says:

...Thy due from me

Is tears and heavy sorrows of the blood,

Which nature, love, and filial tenderness

Shall, O dear father, pay the plenteously.

My due from thee is this imperial crown,

Which, as immediate from thy place and blood,

Derives itself to me.

[He puts the crown on his head.] (Act 4.3)

Henry IV has not died however but awakens to the pain of what he believes is the Prince's eagerness to ascend the throne. In his long and bitter monolog to his eldest son we can't help but see the hapless Harry as an ungrateful greedy pup, but then the soon-to-be king emerges when he answers his father:

God witness with me, when I here came in

And found no course of breath within your majesty,

How cold it struck my heart! ...

Coming to look on you, thinking you dead,

And dead almost, my liege, to think you were,

I spake unto this crown as having sense,

And thus upbraided it: 'The care on thee depending

Hath fed upon the body of my father;

Therefore, thou best of gold art worst of gold:

Other, less fine in carat, is more precious,

Preserving life in medicine potable;

But thou, most fine, most honoured: most renowned,

Hast eat thy bearer up.' Thus, my most royal liege,

Accusing it, I put it on my head... (Act 4.3)

The king is overwhelmed with relief at hearing these words and hastens to give some last advice: cultivate our noble and true friends, confound the rebels by making war on France. He ends with:

How I came by the crown, O God forgive,

And grant it may with thee in true peace live! (Act 4.3)

The prince's reply:

My gracious liege,

You won it, wore it, kept it, gave it me;

Then plain and right must my possession be,

Which I with more than with a common pain

'Gainst all the world will rightfully maintain. (Act 4.3)

Not a wisp of thought, memory, feeling for the world of the tavern. In the next act, in his confrontation with and acceptance of the authority of the Lord Chief Justice, Henry V makes only the vaguest reference to his wild youth, so recently ended:

...sadly I survive

To mock the expectation of the world,

To frustrate prophecies and to raze out

Rotten opinion, who hath writ me down

After my seeming. The tide of blood in me

Hath proudly flowed in vanity till now,

Now doth it turn, and ebb back to the sea,

Where it shall mingle with the state of floods,

And flow henceforth in formal majesty (Act 5.2).

Gone is the juvenile delinquent, who was only pretending all along. The new King has come forth in his rightful role.

Therefore, what else can King Henry the Fifth possibly say to the silly, joyous delusional old Falstaff's “My sweet boy Hal” but, “I know thee not, old man”?

The tragedy isn't in Hal's sudden meanness, the tragedy comes much earlier than the rejection. It is in the inevitability of the breaking of Falstaff's heart. Falstaff, the glorious anarchist who has spent his life poking fun and guffawing and conniving – to our immense amusement – at the powers-that-be, has metamorphosed into a lonely buffoon in a fantasy world in which he is not old, in which he is important, in which he and his great pal Hal will, stumbling and laughing, ascend the throne with a flask of sack in one hand and a young Doll Tearsheet by the other. Oh foolish Falstaff! Subversion doesn't work like that. Everything Hal has done has been part of the power structure of the Kingdom of England.

Yes, it is heartbreaking to see (or imagine) the look on Falstaff's face at the words “I know thee not, old man.” Yes, King Henry V regrets having to say them and banish his former fellow-carouser. But what choice did he have, really? He is bound up in the Great Mechanism that brought his father to the throne and will in time bring the pathetic Henry VI to the throne. In his repudiation of Falstaff, Henry V convinces us all “to magnificent and crushing effect” (Poole, p lx) that he is the king, and rightfully so. Falstaff may, as Jan Kott (of Great Mechanism fame) describes him, personify “the Renaissance lust for life and thunderous laughter at heaven and hell, at the crown and all other laws of the realm...[and possess] a plebeian wisdom and experience...” He may “not let history take him in.” He may “scoff at it” (Kott p. 99). But he is still, like the fierce Katherine and the enraged Shylock, crushed by the Great Mechanism. His time, like theirs, has not come. Hal's has.

July 2012

Works cited:

• The Norton Shakespeare, based on the Oxford Edition. Ed. Greenblatt, Stephen et al. Second edition. 2008.
• Egan, Gabriel. Shakespeare and Marx. Oxford University Press. 2004.
• Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations, “Invisible Bullets”. Clarendon Press. 1988.
• Howard, Jean E. in The Norton Shakespeare, see above.
• Kott, Jan. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. W.W. Norton and Company. 1964.
• Poole, Andrew. “Introduction” to the Penguin edition, 2005. 

Films seen:

• BBC, 1979. Director: David Giles. Cast: Prince Hal – David Gwillim; King Henry – Jon Finch; Falstaff – Anthony Quayle; Mistress Quickly – Brenda Bruce; Doll Tearsheet – Frances Cuka. As in Part One, Anthony Quayle is a masterly Falstaff, John Finch is perfect as Henry IV and David Gwillim can simply not compete with Kenneth Branagh who is forever and always Hal even though he never played him, at least not on film.
• Chimes at Midnight”, 1965. Director: Orson Wells. Cast: Prince Hal – Keith Baxter; King Henry – John Gielgud; Falstaff – Orson Welles; Mistress Quickly – Margareth Rutherford; Doll Tearsheet – Jeanne Moreau. Combining both plays as well as Henry V, Orson Welles portrays a tragic Falstaff in this beautiful black and white somewhat low key labor of love.
• My Own Private Idaho, 1991. Director: Gus van Sant. Cast: (Scott Favor) Prince Hal – Keanu Reeves; (Jack Favor) King Henry – Tom Troupe; (Bob Pigeon) Falstaff – William Richert; ) Mike Waters) Poins (or somebody) – River Phoenix. Truly a strange movie, this too makes use of both Part One and Part Two. Why Van Sant chose to incorporate a great deal of the plays, often literally word for word, into his story is a mystery to me but somehow it works. Sort of. 

Seen on stage: Yes! Seen at the Roundhouse in London on April 16, 2008, it was the first complete Shakespeare play we had ever seen in English. Had we but known, we could have seen more. The Roundhouse was presenting all of the History Plays, but this was at the beginning of our Shakespeare days, and we didn't have a clue. Still we saw this one! And that was a giant step in the whole process leading to this blog.

Monday Report July 2 2012

Finally! It's been a long month and even though I had many opportunities to talk about Shakespeare during the summer course (more often, undoubtedly, than my students really appreciated), I have missed blogging. It's nice to be back. Of course a month's supply of notations in the Almanac and of sightings have piled up. There are more than I can actually keep track of but I'll give it a shot:

From the Shakespeare Almanac:

• On May 30, 1593, Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare's rival, colleague, maybe friend, was murdered under mysterious circumstances. 
• On June 2, 1752, the first troop of professional Shakespearean actors arrived in America, in Yorktown, Virginia. 
• On June 5, 1607, Shakespeare's daughter Susanna married Dr John Hall at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. On June 9, 1622, Shakespeare's old company visited Stratford and were paid not to perform. 
• On June 29, 1613, The Globe burned to the ground. 
• On June 30, 1614, the new Globe opened. 

Shakespeare sightings:

• In the novel Still Alice by Lisa Genova, the main character, who is suffering from Alzheimer's, remembers loving King Lear. 
• In the movie “The Artist” an actress hams up Juliet in a silent movie. 
• In Percy Shelley's introduction to his wife Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, he compares the presentation of basic human nature in the novel to Shakespeare. Fair enough! 
• On an essay test on The Bean Trees, one of my students used a paraphrase of “All the world's a stage”. Since she knows of course that I'm a Shakespeare freak, this might not count as a true random sighting but still...Unfortunately, she didn't pass the test. 
• Steven Pinker, in his very fat and very strange book The Better Angels of Our Nature, mentions Shakespeare frequently. It doesn't make the book more believable however. While containing some interesting statistics I find Pinker's analysis disappointing. He is clearly not a historical materialist. 
• In the movie “V for Vendetta” Natalie Portman's mother quotes Macbeth. 
• In his book about the filming of Frankenstein, Kenneth Branagh of course refers to Shakespeare. 
• And speaking of Kenneth Branagh, he's been knighted, in part because of his work with Shakespeare. So, Sir Ken, when are you going to quit messing about and get back to your true calling?! There are a few plays left to make movies of! 
• In “The Big Bang Theory” when Leonard shows surprise at Sheldon's friendliness to Penny, Sheldon replies, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. 
• In the grammar book I used in the summer course, The Oxford English Grammar Course, Shakespeare turns up now and then. 
• In the novel The Passage by Justin Cronin, many of the sections of the book start with quotes from Shakespeare. 
• Dagens Nyheter has had lots of notices in the past month: 
• a glowing review of Othello on the island of Gotland 
• mention of an English speaking acting group doing excerpts from various works in a park near the main library (didn't make it to that performance) 
• an archeological dig has uncovered some of Shakespeare's old theater, the Curtain. “A fantastic discovery” says Chris Thomas. 
• And of course on Midsummer, the biggest holiday in Sweden except for Christmas maybe, A Midsummer Night's Dream showed up in various places including the crosswords. 

Further, this month:

• Finished reading aloud with Hal: Henry the Fourth, Part Two.
• Read aloud with Hal: various analysis of same. 
• Seen: Three movies about same. 
• Started writing: Text about same.

Monday May 28 2012

Even Shakespeareless weeks go by quickly. Four weeks have already passed since my last Shakespeare Monday and I'm back for a one-Monday landing. Next time I show up here on the blog will be in July. But for now, a lot has happened in May, so I'll get right to it.

From the Shakespeare Almanac:

• On May 4, 1597, Shakespeare bought New Place in Stratford, the second biggest house in the town. It cost £60. After returning to Stratford upon retiring, he lived there the rest of his life. Thereafter his daughter Susanna, her husband John Hall and their daughter Elizabeth moved in.
• On May 9, 1594, Shakespeare registered his second narrative poem, The Rape pf Lucrece.
• On May 15, 1611, Simon Forman writes in his diary that he has seen The Winter's Tale at the Globe.
• On May 17, 1603, King James issued a warrant authorizing William Shakespeare and his theater group to “freely use and exercise the Art and faculty of playing Comedies, Tragedies, Histories, Interludes, Morals, Pastorals; Stageplays, and such others...” The King's Men were thus created.
• On May 19, 1603, the Globe was closed for nearly a year because of the plague.
• On May 20, 1608, Antony and Cleopatra and Pericles were registered but not published. In 1609, the Sonnets were registered. In 1613, the since lost play Cardenn was performed.
• On May 21, 1471, Henry VI was murdered.
• On May 22, 1465, Henry VI was captured.
• On May 26, 1583, Shakespeare's first daughter Susanna was baptized.
• Busy month, May!

Shakespeare sightings:

• In the sci-fi novel Enchantress from the Stars by Sylvia Louise Engdahl there is an odd sighting. Elana, from another galaxy, is scouting a planet that could possibly by Earth, and when being chased by bad guys she claims that discretion is the better part of valor. Maybe Shakespeare really is well known in other galaxies? As usual this creates a contest with wonderful prizes for the first correct comment on the blog: which play and who said it?
• Emma Thompson, in an interview in the '80's in connection with her comedy series Tutti Frutti, was asked if she was bawdy to which she replied that she's “Shakespeare bawdy.”
• In the DN Friday crossword the following quote: “Upp flyga orden, tanken stilla står, ord utan tanken aldrig himlen når.” I'm proud to say I got it immediately even in Swedish. So this is the second contest: Which play and who? To make it fair to you non-Swedes, here's a direct (and therefore a bit twisted) translation: “Up fly the words, the thought unmoving stands, words without the thought never heaven reaches.”
• In DN the headline: “Much Ado about Shakespeare” about all the plays going on at the Globe.
• In an essay test written by a student on the subject of consumerism and the environment the final line was: “To buy or not to buy, that is the question.”
• In an educational film about England, a boy being interviewed about school subjects tells the world that Shakespeare is part of the required reading. What a surprise.
• In the teen fantasy novel Mist by Kathryn James, a picnic in the woods (which is actually occupied by hostile fairies), one of the characters is described as looking like somebody from A Midsummer Night's Dream.
• In the novel I See You Everywhere by Julia Glass, a love affair is compared to – how original! - Romeo and Juliet, and one of the characters writes in her suicide letter that she rents Hamlet to see Mel Gibson and muses, “I got into Hamlet, the guy Shakespeare created. Good questions lead to a bad end.”
• DN has a notice about a protest by Emma Thompson and others against an Israeli theater, which has performed in occupied areas, taking part in the Shakespeare festival.
• Steven Pinker, in his mammoth essay The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes, refers several times to Shakespeare to show how king-killing and other violence used to be the norm.
• In the movie “Honeymoon in Vegas”, a couple of lovers are compared to... guess! (No contest.)
• Jasper Fforde's second Thursday Next novel, Lost in a Good Book, is partly about finding the lost manuscript of the above-mentioned lost play, now known as Cardenio. The book is of course crawling with Shakespeare sightings. Here's a favorite: Illegal page-runners (characters who move out of their own book into another) are being chased by the book cops. One culprit: Feste, who has escaped from Twelfth Night after a night of debauchery with Sir Toby. Also they're keeping an eye on Falstaff: “You've been allowed to stay in Merry Wives but don't push your luck.” See further today's posting of my text on said play!
• DN reports that Othello is being performed this summer in the ruins of the Medieval church Roma on Gotland.

Further, this month:

• Finished reading aloud with Hal: The Merry Wives of Windsor.
• Received: Companion to Shakespeare: the Comedies. Edited by Jean E. Howard et.al.
• Posted: Wise Wives and Laundry Baskets
• Posted: On http://openshakespeare.org/2012/05/11/introduction-the-merry-wives-of-windsor . I've been trying to set up a link to Open Shakespeare on the blog but I haven't figured out how yet. Will keep trying.
• Started reading aloud with Hal: Henry IV Part Two.

Merry Wives of Windsor Wise Wives and Laundry Baskets

Wise Wives and Laundry Baskets 

in The Merry Wives of Windsor 

A raunchy, high-speed romp full of double-crossing, intrigues and matchmaking, filled with sexual innuendos and ambiguity – both intended and unintended – and more or less incomprehensible conflicts, that's The Merry Wives of Windsor! You have to listen very carefully to understand why Falstaff's buddies Pistol and Nym turn on him or what the would-be duel between Caius and Evans is all about. But frankly, who cares about figuring them out - they're funny, after all - when there is so much else to ponder in this silly play – maybe even sillier than A Comedy of Errors.

The first point to ponder is that this Falstaff is not the Falstaff of Henry IV Part One, in which his soliloquy on honor is, as I wrote earlier on this blog, one of the highlights of eloquence and wisdom in the Shakespearean canon. The question of why Shakespeare created this unpleasant unlikeable Falstaff I won't even begin to try to explore. (See “Shakespeare Sightings, May 28” on the blog for another angle to this question.)

Another striking aspect of the play is that Master Page is perhaps the only decent husband and father in all of Shakespeare. Not only does he trust his wife completely but he accepts cheerfully his daughter's choice of husband even though he had connived to have her marry another.

A third feature that deserves deeper analysis is the uniqueness of the emphasis on the bourgeois class in the play. As Walter Cohen points out in his introduction to the Norton edition, the play “retains a contemporary, domestic, and non-aristocratic feel unique in Shakespearean drama” and all the characters “ultimately function to underscore the assimilating power of the middle class”, that is, the bourgeoisie. “The play,” Cohen continues, “takes a jaundiced view of nearly every character with a claim to social standing” (p. 1255). This emphasis on the emerging power and increasing role of the bourgeoisie in the merchant-and trade world of the Renaissance is especially interesting when we get to the heart of the play.

This was and often still is considered by scholars to be Falstaff himself but I suggest, in concurrence with many current readers, that this play is in fact about – surprise, surprise – the merry wives themselves, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page. They deserve to have the play named for them. They good-naturedly but firmly put Sir John Falstaff in his place. In fact, they move him out of his place as a social superior into the dunce corner where he belongs. So what does he do to deserve this? A close look at this will comprise the heart of this essay.

What he does is he sends identical love letters to Mistress Page and Mistress Ford for the purpose of getting into their beds and their purses. Their reaction? Being neither young, frivolous, vain nor romantic they react wisely. Even before discovering that Falstaff has sent them identical letter, the two women are startled but amusedly skeptical and a little annoyed. Mistress Page says to herself, “What, have I scaped love-letter in the holiday time of my beauty, and am I now a subject for them?” (Norton explains that here “holiday” means “heyday”.) A few minutes later Mistress Ford arrives, joking about how she is about to be knighted – Mistress Page scoffs, “What?...Sir Alice Ford?” - and Mistress Ford goes on unheedingly, “...the truth of his words...do no more adhere and keep together than the hundred and fifty psalms to the tune of 'Greensleeves'.”

It seems the amorous and poverty-stricken knight is not to be so easily satisfied as he had anticipated. On the contrary, Mistress Page's immediate response upon actually reading her letter is to call Falstaff “well-nigh worn to pieces with age”, a “drunkard” and “unweighed” (i.e. unbalanced) to dare to make such a proposal. The solution? “I'll exhibit a bill in the Parliament for the putting down of men.” Mistress Page is about four hundred years before her time in proclaiming the private to be the political. Or is she? Could it be that we're four hundred years late in figuring this out? In the same breath Mistress Page takes her stand, “O God, that I knew how to be revenged on him! For revenged I will be...” To return to Mistress Ford's arrival, we see that her reaction is the same: “How shall I be revenged on him?” she asks while her friend reads the letter. On realizing that they've received identical letter Mistress Page declares, “I warrant he hath a thousand of these letters writ with blank space for different names...Well, I will find you twenty lascivious turtles ere one chaste man”. Mistress Page has no high opinion of men even though shes the one with the nice husband. So what to do? Not only do they see Falstaff as an unattractive fat old sot, they are affronted that he regards them as easy hits. Mistress Ford: “What doth he think of us?”

They are very quick in coming up with the perfect revenge. Mistress Ford: “I think the best way were to entertain him with hope...” Mistress Page: “Let's appoint him a meeting, give him a show of comfort in his suit, and lead him on with a fine bated delay...” (all quotes in this exchange are from Act 2.1). And so the plot is set. The particulars of their revenge has become one of the classics of European literature and music (most prominently in Verdi's opera Falstaff).

The willing and witty Mistress Quickly (of Henry 4 fame and well worth her own analysis) helps the two gentlewomen set up the tryst. Sir John rushes eagerly to the Ford residence where Mistress Ford slyly evades his advances while making him believe she is allowing herself to be wooed: “Well. Heaven knows how I love thee; and you shall one day find it” (Act 3.3). As arranged, Mistress Page comes running to warn them that Master Ford is on his way. Falstaff stuffs himself into the laundry basket and is transported out under the very nose of the jealous husband among “foul...stinking clothes...and thrown into the Thames” (Act 3.5).

Aside from being comical, the significance of Sir John's humiliation in the laundry basket is enormous. Laundry is one of the most important tasks in a household. Mistress Ford is the boss of the Ford household, as she tartly reminds her husband. When he attempts to interfere with the basket she sharply retorts “Why, what have you to do wither they bear it?” (Act 3.3) Some scholars interpret this as an example of how women, confined to the domestic sphere, use their limited power to perpetuate the patriarchal system (Well, p. 381). Possibly. Perhaps even likely. However, it cannot be denied that these two women use what means of power (or as Foucault would say, power slash resistance) to defend their position against a) a man and b) an aristocrat. And win. Funny, yes, but also a political statement of “affirm[ing] female domestic authority and middle-class ethics over and above an aristocratic male drive for power” (Well, p. 378).

And in a possible parallel to Shakespeare's view on his own strong and independent wife (see my review of Germaine Greer's Shakespeare's Wife), this is “the Shakespearean play in which women's power is most persistent and least contained and in which their status is most like that of Stratford women” (Carol Thomas Neely, quoted in Wells, p. 381). Furthermore, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, in using the laundry basket – filled, remember, with dirty laundry – instead of, say, weeping and wailing and being ashamed and keeping it all a secret, “protect the property and propriety of their households by demonstrating their competence as disciplined, yet discreet, domestic supervisors” (Korda, p. 90).

The play could end here somewhere but it doesn't. There is more merriment to come. In brief, Falstaff is lured back to the Fords' again only to be beaten out of the house disguised as an old woman by the jealous Master Ford. What one should think of the violence used against an old woman even if she is considered by Ford to be a witch will have to be dealt with in some other essay. Still not satisfied, the two wives, now in cahoots with their newly informed husbands, humiliate Sir John publicly by having him scared half to death by children disguised as fairies. How embarrassing is that? Poor old macho scoundrel! However, Sir John recovers more quickly than he deserves and the two women show that once they have re-established their authority, they bear no malice and Falstaff is invited home for dinner.

Compared to other Shakespeare plays, the Merry Wives has prompted vastly less critical analysis than, for example, Hamlet (for good reason obviously),or most of the others. Most scholars who have looked at it have argued about whether or not this Falstaff is the same of the H4 Falstaff (Oxford Compendium, p. 294). Harold Bloom says absolutely not and calls him the pseudo-Falstaff throughout his chapter on the play. Bloom is probably right but as I pointed out earlier what does it really matter? Just because Shakespeare has created this quandary for us, that doesn't mean that he, as Bloom claims to know for sure, was ashamed of the play. On the contrary, in some ways The Merry Wives of Windsor is among his most interesting for the very reason that it's called The Merry Wives and not The Lascivious Knight. Mistress Page and Mistress Ford run the show. And they win. Bloom doesn't like that. I do. Why shouldn't Shakespeare? He seems to have generally known what he was doing.

Works cited:

• The Norton Shakespeare, based on the Oxford Edition. Ed. Greenblatt, Stephen et al. Second edition. 2008. 
• Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare, the Invention of the Human. 1998. 
• Cohen, Walter in The Norton Shakespeare, see above. 
• Dobson, Michael and Stanley Wells, editors. The Oxford Compansion to Shakespeare. 2008.
•  Korda, Natasha. “'Judicious oreillades': supervising marital property in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” in Marxists Shakespeares, edited by Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow. 2001.
• Well, Wendy. “The Merry Wives of Windsor, Unhusbanding Desires in Windsor”, in A Companion to Shakespeare's Works, the Comedies, edited by Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard. 2003.

Films seen:

• BBC, 1982. Directed by David Jones. Cast: Mistress Ford – Judy Davis; Mistress Page – Prunella Scales; Falstaff – Richard Griffiths; Master Ford – Ben Kingsley; Master Page – Bryan Marshall; Mistress Quickly – Elizabeth Spriggs. The cast makes the most of the play and makes it really funny. Ben Kingsley (who needs no further introduction) does an excellent wildly jealous husband and Prunella Scales perfects her already perfect role as Sybil in Fawlty Towers by adding a good sense of humor. 

Seen on stage: No

Monday April 30 2012

Sadly, this will be the last Monday report for awhile. I've had to go back up to full-time in order to prepare courses for the fall term and to teach the intensive summer course in high school English in June. I'll try to make a quick appearance on May 28^th and then I'll be back in July. Hal and I will continue to read the plays and on weekends I'll scribble as much as I can so there will be things to post when I get back. Until then, and always, Shakespeare lives!

From the Shakespeare Almanac:

• On April 25 Shakespeare was both baptized (1564) and buried (1616).

Shakespeare sightings:

• In the TV comedy Högklackat (High heeled shoes) one of the characters finds herself at a party of English-speaking people. Knowing almost no English herself, she pretends by saying knowingly, “Brighton!”, and “Tottenham!” and, of course, “Shakespeare!” She fools no one....
• In the Swedish book 101 historiska myter by Åke Persson and Thomas Oldrup, they blame Shakespeare for the myth that Julius Caesar said, “Et tu, Brute”.
• In The Hunger Games the heroine Katniss and her on-screen if not true-life sweetheart Peeta are referred to as “star-crossed lovers”. Hmmmm, I wonder which play that's from...
• Rufus Wainwright has released a new CD and in the reviews Dagens Nyheter refers to his renditions of Shakespeare's sonnets with the insulting words “monotone piano-pounding”. Hmrph. I love Wainwright's Shakespearean interpretations, especially http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngk4sRQ2C-Y&feature=related
• In the weekly “Faxtra”, a sheet of news notices produced for students of English and provided to me by my colleague M.H., we are informed that research shows that All's Well that End's Well was co-authored by Thomas Middleton. DN has a notice about this too. Didn't we know that already? Or am I thinking of other plays?

Further, this week:

• Continued reading aloud with Hal: The Merry Wives of Windsor.
• Ordered: Companion to Shakespeare: the Comedies. Edited by Jean E. Howard et.al.
• Listened to: Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet and pictured the Russian ballet performance we have on DVD the whole while.
• Posted: A review of Shakespeare Our Contemporary by Jan Kott.
• Agreed upon: with James H.-S. of the Open Shakespeare blog to write an intro to The Merry Wives of Windsor.
• Accepted as: “fully, totally, officially onboard with the world's most popular Shakespeare blog. “  My first post on Blogging Shakespeare should appear soon.

Kott Shakespeare Our Contemporary

Shakespeare Our Contemporary by Jan Kott. 1964. Read in March 2009.

This book is one of the most important ever written about Shakespeare. First published in Polish in the 1960's it brought a radically new view of Shakespeare to Western literature analysis. As Peter Brook points out in the preface, Jan Kott, having lived in Poland in the turbulent 20's, 30's,40's, 50's and 60's, experienced personally many of the things Shakespeare wrote about. He could therefore, unlike almost all other modern scholars, consider Shakespeare his contemporary and unlike any other scholar I have come across so far, Kott succeeds in showing in his book why Shakespeare is not just some clever productive Renaissance author that we have to read because he's part of the canon, but that his plays are highly relevant to our lives today.

Careful readers of this blog will have noticed that I have often referred to Kott in my play analyses.

In his chapter “The Kings”, which I used in my texts on Henry VI, the Richards and Henry IV, Kott writes , “There are no gods in Shakespeare. There are only kings, every one of whom is an executioner, and victim in turn. There are also living, frightened people...The greatness of Shakespeare's realism consists in his awareness of the extent to which people are involved in history” (p. 19-20). Kott, himself a Polish Jew, a Marxist, a resistance fighter in World War Two, a literary critic leading the opposition to Stalin in the 50's (all according to Martin Esslin in the book's introduction), should know.

This book is not a cheerful read. Kott's experience and his academic depth find that in Shakespeare, and in life, “the abyss, into which one can jump, is everywhere” (p.146) and that, “[i]n Shakespeare's play [King Lear] there is neither Christian Heaven nor the heaven predicted and believed in by humanists” (p. 147). He shows throughout the book how Shakespeare avoids the absolute, in fact “the absolute has ceased to exist. It has been replaced by the absurdity of the human condition” (p. 137).

A prolific literary critic, Kott spent the last thirty or so years of his life in the United States. He died at the age of 87 in 2001. Since then Shakespeare Our Contemporary has remained one of the most influential books on Shakespeare and references to it can be found almost wherever one looks. I will certainly continue to refer to him. A grim book, yes, but very exciting. After all, what can be more exciting than the absurdity of the human condition? Nobody did it better than Shakespeare and nobody has so far made Shakespeare's connection to the 20^th century better than Jan Kott.