Sessions 3, 4, 5 -- AYLI, the rest

Yes, I have to admit in the end, it’s actually very good. Not so much for reading -- needs to be performed for all that clever choreography of gender swops, synchronised marriage and sudden conversions to have its full clever or touching impact. But much of it is truly delightful and, while never quite attaining to funniness, is slightly smile-inducing.

Big problems still remain both for the unsympathetic teenage reader and for me. What are we to make of Touchstone’s ‘wit’ and what is to be done with it? A typical example:

Touchstone:         Art thou wise?
William:                Ay, sir, I have a pretty wit.
Touchstone:         Why, thou sayest well. I do now remember a saying: ‘The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.’ The heathen philosopher, when he had a desire to eat a grape, would open his lips when he put it into his mouth, meaning thereby that grapes were made to eat and lips to open....Art thou learned?
William:                No, sir.
Touchstone:         Then learn this of me. To have is to have. For it is a figure in rhetoric that drink, being poured out of a cup into a glass, by filling the one doth empty the other; for all your writers do consent that ‘ipse’ is he. Now, you are not ‘ipse’, for I am he. (V.i)

Presumably enough of the audience must have found this amusing. More infantile they -- which is the impression I also get from medieval writing, as quoted from letters, home-made prayers etc that I find in books of medieval history. They wrote like 8-year-olds of our own time, and seem to have as sophisticated a sense of humour. Thank God for progress.

Session 2, Act II

Now that I have set aside the perspective of a drugged-up, angry teenager attending class in between rioting, I get along fine with this play. Everything in this act is delightful, I find; nothing to complain of except some unintelligible stuff from Jacques (textual corruption, suggests the notes at one point). Even ‘All the world’s a stage’ now seems appropriate and amusing. The earlier passage about the weeping deer was touching, as is Orlando’s care for Adam and the generosity of the good -- the forest -- Duke. And it’s full of music -- which productions usually mess up with some horrible, specially composed tune.

I can almost see why that Walworth class in 1951 might have enjoyed preparing scenes for the Shakespeare festival.

‘Lack-lustre eye’ rang a bell: Hazlitt uses it, more than once, I think, to describe some misery-guts like Bentham.

Second time round: is As You Like It as I like it now?

As I said a few days ago, I reread it with the prospect of attending a semi-staged performance, found little merit in it and didn’t go. Ever since, and talking to people who love the play, I've wondered whether I was right in my reaction. So rather than put the book away on its shelf I've kept it out, and today felt I wanted to try again, picked it up and so started a re-read -- and decided to keep a log of my findings, act by act.

So, first stint, Saturday teatime.

I've just read Act I and thought it terrific. There’s lovely language, some characters are feisty -- all powerfully display their natures -- and I’d little trouble with understanding. Orlando forcefully expresses -- in gutsy prose -- his dissatisfaction with the way his elder brother treats him, and shows himself a spirited youth. I find myself respecting his interlocutor, his father’s old servant, Adam, a feeling confirmed when we see how the brother treats him, too, after showing himself vindictive and insulting to Orlando and provoking the latter to show his mettle. This deliciously wicked brother, Oliver, with no redeeming features except reluctantly recognising his brother’s qualities while persisting in his enmity -- implausible, yet I have no trouble accepting that the plot is schematic and conventional -- persuades the soon-to-perform champion wrestler to finish Orlando off when challenged by him, which in the event he fails to, even more implausibly and yet, to me, acceptably, thus establishing Orlando as indeed the courageous gentleman whose denial by his brother appears all the more dastardly.

My one point of confusion arises from the arrival on the stage of another delicious dastard, indistinguishable in his meanness and spite, the Duke, Frederic, who has usurped and banished his brother, the father of the witty Rosalind who, accompanied by her friend Celia, the Duke’s daughter, falls in love with Orlando (and he with her, natch) -- and is now banished, like her father, by the Duke. The loyal and loving Celia, another faultlessly virtuous character, decides to accompany her. Sounds nothing but corny, in fact delightful.

The clown Touchstone has been around, in the company of the girls, and even his clowning was more or less comprehensible and didn’t annoy me.

And, throughout, the verse, as spoken by the noble characters, as opposed to the proley prose of others and of themselves off duty, as it were, is lovely.

So, first take: why do I react so differently this time?

For a start I'm taking my time, while previously I was racing to get through it before the performance. Perhaps also, in the expectation of that performance, I couldn’t help envisaging how embarrassing and excruciating a bad reading by amateur luvvies might be (not that I’d any good reason to suppose it would be bad, except that the readers would be amateurs).

I think the other reason is that I find myself thinking quite a lot about the teaching of Shakespeare in schools, something I never attempted except for GCE exams, as few of us did in those days. And I was thinking all the time in part of my mind how a stroppy class of, say, year 9 kids would take it -- think of that group Simon Callow made such a hash of teaching in that Jamie Oliver experiment. And I can’t see what it would take, even if the language ceased to be an obstacle, to get them to accept the absurd conventions of the genre -- like accepting that characters sing in operas.

I recall though that at Walworth School in the early 1950s a third year class (year 9 in today’s terminology) did a production of scenes from As You Like It at a drama festival with their English teacher Arthur Harvey. We have a photograph of it and recollections by someone in the class and I have the impression that they loved it. Different kids from Jamie’s, of course, but still poor and working-class.

Hopeless Shakespeare

I've sounded off before about this and now, a current experience to report.

I was contemplating going this afternoon to a reading of As You LIke It, by amateurs with a professional director, wine and mince pies included in the very modest £3. I remember enjoying the play at the Globe not many years ago. So in preparation I've reread it over the last couple of days. And now I'm not going.

There were bits I enjoyed. Always good to get into reading Shakespeare again, and I recall what insatiable and incessant readers of him some people I admire have been, like Ted Hughes (see the terrific volume of his letters). But the pleasure soon palled as I was confronted with a text that seemed in the greater part to be either unintelligible or, because of the tastes it appealed to in humour and conventions, was simply, to modern reader who was not a specialist, pointless. I was left fuming at the stupidity of making young teenagers study it in school: what young person today, with all his or her exposure to the wit and sophistication we’ve enjoyed in English drama since the Restoration, most recently with classic American films and the best TV comedy, would find anything appealing in this?

It’s not that the plot is silly. That doesn’t matter either with Lear dividing his kingdom or Duke Frederick’s vendetta against his brother and niece and sundry others: the banishing scene and the others in court are effective. As Germaine Greer said in her book on Shakespeare, there’s nothing so magnificent as a Shakespearian king or duke.

Rosalind is captivating, it’s true, even when playing silly games. ‘All the world’s a stage’ is a nice piece, but gains nothing by being in that place in that drama.

And there’s the fact that I really did enjoy it when I saw it, or remember myself as having done, when I saw it. There the main actors were terrific -- I don’t recall the clowns and fools and simple folk, who are usually a disaster on stage. What stays in the memory is the atmosphere of Arden, with lute music and gentle singing, absolutely seductive. I suppose some nice bits of scenery or props, even at the Globe. So I guess the text can be made something of -- but that’s what it’s a case of.

I suppose I should read it again to be fair. I don’t remember taking against it when I first read it long ago so it may just be that I'm getting sour with age.

But I don’t think a semi-staged performance by amateurs will help me to feel more kindly. So, no, I'll give it a miss.

Coriolanus and Hazlitt again

This follows my last but one posting. Uttara Natarajan has kindly let me see her paper, which is part of a chapter that will appear in July in a Continuum volume in their Great Shakespearean series.

It seems Hazlitt published the same argument only one week later and in that version it’s quite clear that it’s a specific attack, on the ‘Modern Poets’, namely Coleridge, Wordworth and Southey, and Wordsworth in particular for his shameful commemoration ode celebrating the reactionary ruling power and the slaughter at Waterloo. In this case poetry clearly is siding with tyranny, but while imagination is certainly drawn to the fearful, vast and awesome, so it can be to the good, and there is no reason why poetry should always make the oppressor the more impressive and sympathetic. In King Lear, indeed, the good is as potent as the evil.

That’s the argument and Uttara’s case seems convincing.

The point that’s of educational relevance, however, remains-- and it’s not Uttara’s purpose in her chapter to address it. If Imagination is so drawn to what impresses the emotions, and poetry is the faculty of imagination, then isn’t the other faculty, that of understanding, left at a serious disadvantage? And isn’t this a worry for education?

What is there to animate the activity of the head and understanding that is comparable to that poetry that sets the heart on fire?

Coriolanus and curriculum

Hazlitt, in his essay on Coriolanus, writes about imagination, the faculty that makes poetry, and understanding, that that informs analytical and deliberative prose, as follows:

The imagination is an exaggerating and exclusive faculty: it takes from one thing to add to another: it accumulates circumstances together to give the greatest possible effect to a favourite object. The understanding is a dividing and measuring faculty: it judges of things, not according to their immediate impression on the mind, but according to their relations to one another. The one is a monopolizing faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of present excitement by inequality and disproportion; the other is a distributive faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of ultimate good, by justice and proportion.

If this is right, it needs to appear in a theory for English. It implies that any hope in the curriculum of integrating the experience of literature with the study of history or sociology in schemes of single-subject ‘humanities’ is doomed to failure, if the integration is to be one of substance and not just of timetabling. If education is primarily about the Enlightenment concerns with understanding, knowledge and reason, then any intense exposure to literature, or at any rate poetry, would seem to work against education’s purpose.

But surely Hazlitt’s wrong?

Well, note how he goes on:

The one is an aristocratical, the other a republican faculty.

HIs reason for bringing up the distinction between imagination and understanding in an essay on Coriolanus is that Shakespeare’s poetry all goes to the ‘aristocratical’ Coriolanus and none to the people in its democratic, undifferentiated mass, and that that’s in the nature of poetry.

On Saturday there was the tenth annual Hazlitt Study Day in Oxford. Uttara Natarajan’s opening lecture addressed this issue by suggesting, on the basis of related writings by Hazlitt, that his point wasn’t general but was meant to relate only to the specific context of this play. But her talk was so interesting that I constantly set me off thinking, so I kept finding I’d missed key things she said.

If I can get the written version I'll come back to the issue again.

The rhetorical and the serious

The Introduction to my Penguin Shakespeare The Winter’s Tale says that romance is sometimes considered a little too popular: late in his career Shakespeare's longer-lived contemporary Ben Jonson scoffed at two of Shakespeare's late plays, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest,

mocking the fantastic dimension that makes them distinctive. All these complaints derive from Jonson's contempt for the popularity and conventionality - what he considered the vulgarity - of dramatic romance, and they represent a moral objection. He seems to have felt that Shakespeare was squandering his talent by peddling entertaining fantasies; he believed that fiction ought to be instructive, ought to expose the follies and errors of the society for which it was written by showing 'an image of the times', ought to employ 'deeds and language such as men do use' (Prologue to Every Man in His Humour; composed c. 1604-16). To such a neoclassical sensibility, the moral function of drama depended on a credible representation of familiar experience, an illusion of the world in which spectators could recognize themselves and their own culture. Thus Jonson set Epicoene, or the Silent Woman and The Alchemist in the very London neighbourhoods through which the audience had travelled to the theatre. (Russ McDonald, Introduction to The Winter’s Tale, Penguin 1986, xxxiv)

Strangely, that emphasis on familiar language and experience recall the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, two poets who were precisely not neoclassical.

But whereas Wordsworth followed that agenda in so far as he did write of ordinary people and did avoid the conventional language of much eighteenth century verse, Coleridge and the next generation of Romantics went in for strange tales (‘The Ancient Mariner’, ‘Kubla Khan’, ‘Christabel’…) that were closer to Shakespeare's late plays than to Jonson’s.

A ‘moral objection’ is what Leavis and his followers could be said to have had to novels that didn’t deal ‘seriously’ with men and women and society as they were: they had no time for magic, fantasy and the Gothic. Wuthering Heights maybe but no Frankenstein and no Poe. Nor had they any time for tales that declared their conformity to the conventions of tales: no Conan Doyle, no ghosts, no The Avengers, no Dr Who – no popular culture, in fact.

The agenda of the 1960s-70s version of English built on everyday experience and ordinary vernacular language was informed by something of that spirit, even if it didn’t derive directly from Leavis. The enemy was artificiality: genres that looked like genres and didn’t conceal their conventions and artifice; children’s writing that wasn’t ‘sincere’ and ‘authentic’. Strongly influenced by that ideology in my training, I may have tolerated but certainly didn’t encourage those children who enthusiastically wrote long adventure stories and tales of horror, ponies and space. Only when my pupils were describing their streets and neighbours and examining their relationships would I have been happy for my PGCE tutors and teacher mentors to drop in and see what was going on.

But we don’t now agree with Jonson and most of us very much approve of The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest and Cymbeline. And in the same way, while I still cringe at all the Gothic stuff that’s now so big in school and university English, I now feel there was a dimension missing in the ‘realist’ English of 30-40 years ago. Part of me welcomes the postmodern turn to playfulness with language and genre and to the embracing of artifice: I hugely enjoy Marquez, Calvino and Vonnegut and if teaching now would give my younger pupils (‘Key Stage 3’ the absurd UK jargon – what are the off-key stages, I wonder?) loads of Arthurian legend, classical romance (the Odyssey) and Midsummer Night’s Dream; perhaps even ghost stories.

Richard Lanham wrote a few years ago about the alternation in literary history of periods dominated by homo seriosus (Virgil, Milton, George Eliot, D.H. Lawrence) and homo rhetoricus (late Shakespeare, Sterne, Melville, Saul Bellow). We’re certainly now in a more rhetorical era – except that we wouldn’t acknowledge (nor would Lanham, I'm sure) that The Tempest or Much Ado were any the less serious because they were rhetorically playful.

Against performing Shakespeare

I feel I'm in small minority of Shakespeare-lovers when I say that I can rarely stand performances. I was largely unmoved by King Lear the other night at the Young Vic, with some undoubtedly good actors, including Pete Postlethwaite. I was happy to leave after the second interval. What a philistine! But Lear is a play that works for me when I read it – at least until the last act.

There’s a video of a rehearsal of a rehearsal of the earlier Liverpool version here.

There were some good scenes, fine drama that nearly got me engaged. The set was good and the modern dress ok. But here are some things that were either irritating or unwatchable (quite apart from some inadequate actors):

(1) Regional accents that had no point but brought irrelevant and distracting associations, even when they were genuine (as Kent’s Yorkshire or whatever it was wasn’t); there was a Welsh accent so strong, whether fake or real, that it prevented one attending to what the man was saying. No reason, of course, why Edmund shouldn’t have a Northern Irish accent, but it seemed to get in the way of doing justice to some of the speeches (‘Thou, Nature, art my goddess…’, for a start).

(2) The Fool. Fools are impossible to put on stage, partly because so many of their sayings make no sense to anyone who hasn’t digested the notes in a learned edition, and even then often not. I've seen worse than this Fool, but it was still excruciating, like watching the Krankies. His idea of being funny with movements, voice and gesture was like nothing that makes anyone laugh in a real person, nor did his pathetic moments bring him sympathy. Every line had to be accompanied hyperactively by a gesture – phallic, cowering, crowing, cavorting -- mimicking the meaning. Who carries on like that? How are we to read such antics? This is third-rate school play stuff. Such contorsions relate to nothing that people actually do. No one with a normal sense of humour in the face of funny people could be anything but embarrassed and uncomfortable. You can tell the people in the audience who laugh either are very young or don’t get out much.

This is a problem with low life characters generally in classic theatre– they never seem to get staged in a way that accords them any respect – they’re always stage idiots, stage cheery villains, stage plucky young cards or whatever -- offensive depictions drained of all dignity. If that’s how Shakespeare wanted them, tough – I can’t take it. (You get the same problem with characters in opera performances – in The Marriage of Figaro, for instance. The sort of people who dominate opera audiences laugh away. Perhaps that’s what they think the working classes are really like.)

(3) Staging. Edgar runs laps in his tracksuit while Gloucester (with whistle) talks to Edmund – what’s that supposed to be about? Characters in hunting kit with rifles… Albany wheeling a pram. ‘A modern interpretation’ etc… I can do without these gratuitous extras that simply get in the way. I don’t want tights but I don’t want the dress and settings of a particular historical period or social milieu either.

What I want is Shakespeare, but what I get is some director. If it’s the case that there’s no way of doing Shakespeare on stage without putting it in a particular setting or staging, giving it some ‘interpretation’ – in other words, if there’s no way of doing more or less straight Shakespeare without the intrusion of a director’s ego -- then I'd rather Shakespeare wasn’t staged at all. I admit that if Shakespeare is to be staged his characters have to be represented somehow. But since I know of no way in which especially fools and low life types can be shown credibly and non-demeaningly, then we should give the job up as impossible, and agree that unsatisfactory attempts do nothing but harm to the playwright’s reputation.

Behind this opinion is a view of performances. It’s frequently argued that the plays were written to be performed and in a sense only exist in their performances, just as musical scores do. I disagree. That view assumes that there are only two things involved: on the one hand the inert, lifeless text or score and on the other the enacted performance . The former is just indications of possibilities, with no reality until given flesh; the latter, in its multiple versions, is the real thing. (Compare, in architecture, the drawings (‘blueprints’) and the building -- though each plan, being site-specific, is usually realised in only one ‘performance’ (unlike the technical drawings for a Ford Escort – but that’s another story).)

My view is that there’s a third thing, the play. It’s brought into being by the text: the words, sentences, speeches, exchanges. It’s created by the playwright, but has to be created afresh in the theatre of the mind of whoever attends to the text, through reading or some other means of reception. The reader of Shakespeare, providing he or she knows enough to understand it, doesn’t inevitably mess it up in the way that its performers invariably do. Performers can’t do any other than put flesh on the play, and more often than not it’s the wrong flesh for me, out of key with my own sense of the play.

But – this is the crucial point – the performers’ realisation of the play isn’t out of key with my play simply because I have one picture in my head and they stage a different one. It’s also because they have no option but to present a picture whereas I don’t have to. The play doesn’t include what it doesn’t tell us. Some of the things it doesn’t tell us I have, as reader, to supply from imagination, simply to make the play work– but not to the extent of supplying details of costume, historical settings, this or that accent, even particular ways of speaking the lines. In my reading I can supply more or less flesh, as appropriate; where no cubic inch of the stage can be without matter or air to fill it, my mental stage need have nothing except where it’s strictly called for. In creating the play as I read it, I don’t, beyond a certain minimum, have to imagine it pictorially, vocally, gesturally; the amount of such imagining I do will be sometimes more, sometimes less.

I have in my head less a picture than a concept of Lear. The Russian psychologist Vygotsky observed that though concepts have their origin in childhood as vivid visual images, by adolescence their visual content has largely drained away; they are greyed out, so they can serve their purpose as ideas, abstractions. So it is with Shakespeare’s characters in my mind, with my concept of King Lear: they are ‘realised’ in visual terms only to the extent that they need to be, while fully charged with the essential meanings: for Lear, for instance, kingly dignity, petulance, frustration…. The only way I can made fools and clowns tolerable is by reducing them to simply however much of a minimal persona there needs to be for language to be language, not noise. So, my mental fools are neutral disembodied voicers, gnomic utterers of strange sayings, their beings little more than whatever speech intention the words themselves imply, the characters mere enunciators of lines. Stupid trousers and ridiculous posturings with bums sticking out are the last thing I need.

I admit it’s complicated. My reading of a play is undoubtedly influenced by performances I've seen or heard, not just of it but of other plays. My knowledge of how a play can be realised in the flesh and the voice enriches the possibilities I bring to the reading. But I still maintain that the play, like the design or the music, is something that is created and has its own existence – that it isn’t the same as the text, score or drawing -- whether or not it gets performed or constructed. And I think my experience of the play as reader isn’t reduced to one specific incarnation. Where the play doesn’t specify Rupert trousers, I don’t have to either – or any particular trousers.

And I think it’s possible to read a Shakespeare play as lines, speeches, poems that already have force before they are imagined as being spoken – as layings-out of rhetorical moves, expressions, thematic volte-faces, activations of imagery, generators of associations and semantic reverberations, potential embodiments of anger or pity. They don’t need to be performed; the utterances don’t need to happen: it’s enough that they be potential speeches for me to appreciate them. I don’t have to put a particular voice into them. The speakers don’t need to be given flesh, any more than the speaker of a poem: we create the speaker as we read; the speaker is no more than he or she who would be saying those things in the context of the other things said and done in the situation.

Perhaps performances based on such an idea have been attempted; if so, I'd like to see one. I'd like Shakespeare done more as oratorio: the players still, in positions, speaking their lines rather than acting. This actor isn’t being the Fool; he’s speaking the Fool’s lines, without necessarily ‘putting himself into them’ at full throttle. I'd like to see a Brecht Shakespeare in which the actors don’t pretend to be the characters but in which Shakespeare’s language on its own, in the mouths of the actors/speakers, brings them into being.

Disservices to Shakespeare

A current production of Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Rose Theatre, Kingston, left me wanting to protest. The director, Peter Hall, has a great reputation, though I think I had found another of his recent productions disappointing -- can’t remember what it was, though. I've read a few reviews from the main papers and find them all over-generous.

I suppose Hall had to work with the actors he could get at this rather unsought-after venue (the building is new and terrific, the arrangement Elizabethan style but with comfortable seats that seemed all to afford a good view of the apron stage, but the place was half-empty and the audience middle-aged and older). I felt that only one actor, Finbar Lynch as Berowne, had any stage presence, carried conviction and spoke well. The rest were to varying degrees not up to it.

I have to be a bit careful in commenting on how the lines were spoken since my hearing isn’t what it was, but it seems to me that some contemporary actors lack consonants. But on that point I'll stand corrected by persons who can hear better.

More serious, though, was a failure that must have been as much the director’s as the actors’ fault, and it’s one that’s common to nearly all productions of Shakespeare that I see and also to traditional opera productions, especially of The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville. It concerns low-life, comic and ridiculous characters: clowns, constables, common people, teachersand parsons. Simply, these characters are demeaned in the performance and bear no resemblance to any recognisable type of real person, so that an audience with any social sensitivity will feel uncomfortable at being invited to laugh at people for their deficiencies, their lack of education, cultivated manners and gentlemanly/ladylike qualities of restraint, sense of appropriateness etc. They are played as types that exist only on the stage with no hint of realism -- and the result is they are not in the slightest funny, though some old members of the audience laugh because that’s what they’ve learned to do from an early age, from school productions onwards.

The comic characters are given false cockney or mummerset accents (or sometimes, these days, geordie or Liverpool), fall over for no reason, are surprised out of all proportion when someone pulls on their chains, do ridiculous double-takes, dance up and down on the spot with delight and act out their speeches with unintelligible gestures, frolickings and posturings. Moth, a delightful page character in the text -- which I reread before going -- was simply offensive on stage: his strategy with his difficult lines that were full of intricate word-play, was to make no attempt to make them intelligible but simply to overlay them with hyperactive gesture and clowning. I felt like turning away and blocking my ears whenever he came on.

Maybe this is how it was done in Shakespeare's time but it won’t do today.

In the end the play more or less redeemed itself because a couple of key late scenes were really well directed, so I emerged not too dissatisfied. But I also felt, and still feel, angry because I think Shakespeare deserves better. For example: I think children and teenagers can enjoy some Shakespeare plays, and I imagined bringing along a group from a London comprehensive and their being utterly alienated by this production -- by the language, of course, because in this play it’s peculiarly intricate and difficult, but more because of the unfunniness of what was clearly thought by the actors and director, and part of the audience, to be funny. The outcome would be a probably lasting disinclination ever to try Shakespeare again and a sense of having attended some archaic class- and age-bound event like grouse-shooting from which those in the know appeared to derive enjoyment more from being in the know than from anything obviously pleasurable about the proceedings.

I recalled some awful tv programme in which celebrities had to vote for things to be tipped down the toilet. The comedian Frank Skinner, who I liked when I heard him on the radio twenty years ago, nominated Shakespeare. He made his case by showing bits of purportedly funny scenes from BBC productions - and one could exactly see his point: they were excruciating -- actors behaving, as so often, like tits.

It’s some time since I've seen a convincing Shakespeare production and I suspect that the comic scenes just can’t be done any more. I hope I'm wrong about that, but if not, perhaps it’s better not to put Shakespeare on if the plays contain such characters, and certainly don’t take kids to kids to any such.