Books to the Ceiling

Those devoted to the works of Shakespeare should enjoy this article about Stephen Greenblatt that appeared in the Sunday New York Times’s Arts & Leisure section. Seems that Greenblatt, one of our leading Shakespeare scholars and author of the wonderfully readable Will in the World , has himself written a play!

[Stephen Greenblatt, left, with his collaborator Charles Mee]

Here’s a review of Will in the World that appeared recently in the Howard County Library’s blog, “Highly Recommended.”

This is the scariest, most formidable Macbeth imaginable. The play begins, in a sense, before it begins, with a lengthy announcement, presumably from the management. The announcer’s spiel is cut short in a way that theatergoers will not soon forget. (I will say no more about this, in case you are lucky enough to have tickets.)

Extreme stagecraft was employed in this production. Sudden loud noises, abrupt appearances and disappearances, blindingly bright strobe lights - and buckets of blood. In the capable hands of directors Teller (of Penn and Teller fame) and Aaron Posner, these elements intensified the focus on Shakespeare’s language and on the anguish of the characters. A collective “Ah!” seemingly arose from the packed house on many occasions. I felt as though I were watching the prototype of tragedy, reduced to its most laserlike capacity to terrify.

Ian Merrill Peakes as Macbeth is transfixed by “a dagger of the mind.”

The acting is first rate. I admit to a prejudice where Shakespeare performances are concerned: I prefer the actors’ speech to have a British inflection. These were American actors, so they spoke American English. After the first five minutes or so, it ceased to matter. I was mesmerized and stayed that way, right to the end.

As this most inexorable of tragedies unfolded, certain lines of dialog seemed to leap out and hang in the air. Many of them were uttered by that archetype of bad influence, Lady Macbeth:

“The raven himself is hoarse / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan / Under my battlements.

“We fail!/ But screw your courage to the sticking place / And we’ll not fail.

“Look like the innocent flower / But be the serpent under’t.

There she is, giving her hapless husband lessons on how to be evil! But of course all of it catches up with her and overpowers her in the famous sleepwalking scene in Act Five. Here she plaintively voices her amazement:

“Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?”

And finally, this line, which for some unaccountable reason chilled me to the bone: “The Thane of Fife had a wife; where is she now?”

Ian Merrill Peakes, with Kate Eastwood Norris as Lady Macbeth

The play’s most famous speech is uttered by Macbeth himself, when he hears of his wife’s death:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

These may be the most despairing, nihilistic lines Shakespeare ever wrote.

In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom observes: “Macbeth suffers intensely from knowing that he does evil, and that he must go on doing ever worse.” Later in the same paragraph: “He scarcely is conscious of an ambition, desire, or wish before he sees himself on the other side or shore, already having performed the crime that equivocally fulfills ambition. Macbeth terrifies us partly because that aspect of our imagination is so frightening: it seems to make us murderers, thieves, usurpers, and rapists.”

I think Bloom is saying that because Macbeth seems at first to be a decent sort - decent in the way we like to think ourselves as being decent - that his swift descent into an infamous kind of Hell seems to exemplify a fate that could befall any one of us. Perhaps this accounts for the claustrophobic unease of the viewer caught up in the play’s precipitous downward trajectory.

“By the pricking of my thumbs, / Something wicked this way comes.” The three witches, truly gruesome hags, were played by male actors. The witches are more often referred to as the the weird sisters. In Shakespeare After All, Marjorie Garber tells us that “Wyrd is the Old English word for “fate,” and these are, in a way,classical witches as well as Scottish or Celtic ones, Fates as well as Norns. The Three Fates of Greek mythology were said to spin, apportion, and cut the thread of man’s life. But the Macbeth witches are not merely mythological beings, nor merely historical targets of vilification, and superstition; on the stage, and on the page, they have a persuasive psychological reality of their own.”

The run for the Folger’s production of Macbeth has been extended; tickets are currently almost impossible to get. People are advertising for them on Craigslist. I’m not surprised.

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Addendum, March 11: I meant to mention Thomas De Quincey’s tremendously insightful essay, “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” first published in 1823. In this passage, De Quincey describes the moments that follow Duncan’s murder:

“Here, as I have said, the retiring of the human heart and the
entrance of the fiendish heart was to be expressed and made sensible.
Another world has stepped in; and the murderers are taken out of the region
of human things, human purposes, human desires. They are transfigured: Lady
Macbeth is “unsexed;” Macbeth has forgot that he was born of woman; both
are conformed to the image of devils; and the world of devils is suddenly
revealed. But how shall this be conveyed and made palpable? In order that a
new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear. The murderers,
and the murder, must be insulated–cut off by an immeasurable gulph
from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs–locked up and
sequestered in some deep recess; we must be made sensible that the world
of ordinary life is suddenly arrested–laid asleep–tranced–racked into
a dread armistice: time must be annihilated; relation to things without
abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and
suspension of earthly passion. Hence it is, that when the deed is done,
when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes
away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard; and
it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced: the human has made
its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat
again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we
live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had
suspended them.

The Folger Theatre in Washington D.C. has begun its 2007-2008 season with As You Like It. I was privileged to attend this past Sunday’s performance. It was the first time I’ve ever seen this play, and the experience reinforced my belief that in order to fully appreciate Shakespeare’s genius, you must both read and see the plays.

This production starred Amanda Quaid as Rosalind and Noel Velez as Orlando. I say “starred,” but to me, it was great acting - and good chemistry - on the part of the entire ensemble that made the production work. The supporting cast was truly excellent. The review in the Washington Post was generally favorable, with a few reservations, not necessarily shared by me. I don’t have the critical skills or knowledge to evaluate theatrical productions; I tend merely to be very grateful to be there and to be both entertained and enlightened, as I was on Sunday. Favorite moments: When Amiens (Jon Reynolds) and one of the shepherds sang “Under the greenwood tree.” I had tears in my eyes, not sure why. (”Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean…”) Also almost any scene featuring Touchstone. The role was played by actress Sarah Marshall; her comic turns and impeccable timing alone would have been worth the price of admission!

One of the many joys of attending a Shakespeare play is hearing phrases and expressions that you’ve heard all your life. For instance, Celia (Miriam Silverman) exclaims, “Well said: that was laid on with a trowel.” ( Act I, Scene II) And then there is the pleasure of hearing old friends in context, like the famous “All the world’s a stage” disquisition, delivered with a sort of bemused wonder by Jacques (Joseph Marcell).

Other favorite quotes:

“O, how full of briers is this working-day world!” (Rosalind, Act I, Scene III)

“Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold.” (Rosalind, Act I, Scene III)

“Blow, blow, thou winter wind, / Thou art not so unkind / As man’s ingratitude.” (sung by Amiens, Act II, Scene VII)

“When a man’s verses cannot be understood, nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward child, understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.” (Touchstone, Act II, Scene III) I have read that the “reckoning” alluded in that line might be an oblique reference to the murder of Christopher Marlowe. Hearing it, even spoken in jest, I broke out in goose flesh!

“Come woo me, woo me - for now I am in a holiday humour and like enough to consent.” (Rosalind, Act IV, Scene I)

“But O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes.” (Orlando, Act V, Scene II)

“Do you not know I am a woman? When I think, I must speak.” (Rosalind, Act III, Scene II). I hadn’t heard these lines before, but Rosalind/Quaid delivered them with just the right emphasis, causing the audience to burst into laughter!

And my own favorite favorite passage, spoken by Duke Senior in Act II, Scene I, as he celebrates the conditions of his exile in the forest of Arden:

“And this our life, exempt from public haunt, / Finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, / Sermons in stones, / And good in everything.”

To this Amiens adds, simply: “I would not change it.”

Indeed not.

Last month I saw The Tempest at the Folger Theatre in Washington DC. It was the first time I had seen that particular play. I enjoyed it greatly and learned from the performance. I loved the way Ferdinand and Miranda gazed out over the audience as Prospero presented his fabulous pageant. But then, suddenly: “Our revels now are ended.” Here is that famous passage in its entirety:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Act 4 Scene 1

These are “…lines that seem to resonate across the centuries,” observes Marjorie Garber in her mighty tome, Shakespeare After All. (And isn’t Marjorie Garber worthy of admiration! The William R. Kenan Professor of English and American literature and the chair of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard, possessor of homes in Cambridge and Nantucket, here she sits, looking justifiably proud, with her two splendid retrievers.)

I was deeply moved by Prospero’s forgiveness of those who had wronged him; even more so, by his deliberate decision to abjure sorcery and return to live in the world of men, in his rightful place as the Duke of Milan.

Then, of course, there is the other famous passage from this work, Ariel’s haunting song:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Hark! now I hear them,–ding-dong, bell.

Putrefaction has been transformed into a thing of beauty, almost of reverence.

The Tempest seems to me a transcendent, mystical play, in which two worlds miraculously exist side by side. It is not only a brilliant but also a consoling work of art, ultimately filled with hope for the redemption of mankind through the sheer force of goodness. (For details about the paintings featured in this post as well as other paintings based on Shakespeare’s works, see Shakespeare Illustrated .)

I remember reading somewhere in a review of Stephen Greenblatt’s hugely enjoyable Will in the World, that the truly strange thing about Shakespeare is not that almost four hundred years after his death in 1616, we know relatively little about him, but that from a vantage point of all those many years ago, he knew so much about us - now.