Playing Shakespeare’s Monarchs and Madmen 2020000213, 2020000214, 9781433175220, 9781433175237, 9781433175244, 9781433175251

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Playing

Shakespeare’s

Monarchs and Madmen L O U I S FA N TA S I A , E D I T O R

Playing Shakespeare’s Monarchs and Madmen is the third volume in the Peter Lang series, Playing Shakespeare’s Characters. As in the previous volumes, a broad range of contributors (actors, directors, scholars, educators, etc.) analyze the concepts of monarchy, leadership, melancholy and madness with not only references to Elizabethan and Jacobean studies, but also to Trump, Brexit, cross-gender and multi-cultural casting. What does it mean to “play the king” in the 21st century? What is the role of an “all-licensed” Fool in the age of spin? Who gets to represent the power dynamics in Shakespeare’s plays? This volume looks at the Henrys, Richards, Hamlets, Lears and various other dukes and monarchs and explores the ways in which men—and women—approach these portrayals of power and the lessons they hold for us today.

Louis Fantasia, B.A., M.F.A., is the director of the Los Angeles Shakespeare Institute, a joint project of the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles and the UCLA/William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. His books include Instant Shakespeare, Tragedy in the Age of Oprah: Essays on Five Great Plays, and Talking Shakespeare.

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Playing Shakespeare’s Monarchs and Madmen

Playing Shakespeare’s Characters Louis Fantasia General Editor Vol. 3

Playing Shakespeare’s Characters series is part of the Humanities list. Every volume is peer reviewed and meets the highest quality standards for content and production.

PETER LANG New York • Bern • Berlin Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw

Playing Shakespeare’s Monarchs and Madmen

Louis Fantasia, Editor

PETER LANG New York • Bern • Berlin Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fantasia, Louis, editor. Title: Playing Shakespeare’s monarchs and madmen / edited by Louis Fantasia. Description: New York: Peter Lang, 2020. Series: Playing Shakespeare’s characters; vol. 3 ISSN 2575-9191 (print) | ISSN 2575-9205 (online) Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020000213 (print) | LCCN 2020000214 (ebook) ISBN 978-1-4331-7522-0 (hardback: alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4331-7523-7 (ebook pdf) ISBN 978-1-4331-7524-4 (epub) | ISBN 978-1-4331-7525-1 (mobi) Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Characters—Kings and rulers. | Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Characters—Mentally ill. | Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Criticism and interpretation. | Monarchy in literature. | Mental illness in literature. | Characters and characteristics in literature. | English drama—Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PR2992.K5 P57 2020 (print) | LCC PR2992.K5 (ebook) | DDC 822.3/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020000213 DOI 10.3726/b17173

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

  © 2020 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006 www.peterlang.com   All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.

For Mrs. Fantasia “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special ­ bservance: that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so o o’erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature …” (Hamlet, Act 3, scene 2)

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Mad World, My Masters! Louis Fantasia

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1. The Crack-Up: Modernity and the Mind of Richard II Heather James

7

2. Shakespeare’s Henry IV: Youth and Veterans Chris Anthony

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3. Re-“Claiming from the Female”: Shakespeare’s Henry V Janna Segal

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4. Once More into the ‘Breeches’: Female Portrayals of Shakespeare’s Monarchs 61 Terri Power 5. Measure for Measure Elaine Turner

81

6. Fortune’s Knave: Sex, Politics and Machiavellian Doctrine in Antony & Cleopatra Michael Peter Bolus

93

7. My Poor Fool: A Case for and against Double Casting Cordelia and the Fool in King Lear Jessie Lee Mills

105

8. Through Hamlet’s Eyes Timothy Harris

121

9. A Hamlet Autopsy Louis Fantasia

131

List of Contributors 147

Introduction: A Mad World, My Masters! Louis Fantasia

Americans have mixed feelings about monarchs and monarchies. We revolted against one, yet, in our periodic yearnings for the trappings of the occasional “imperial presidency” we sometimes wish we had a king. We embrace, unknowingly perhaps, the medieval concept of “the king’s two bodies,” often equating the health and stability of the man (almost always men in Shakespeare) who rules, with the “body politic” of the country itself, whether it is the Life magazine-style glamour of Kennedy’s “Camelot” or the Twitterfed tribalism of Trump’s “American carnage.” Americans, speaking again very broadly, tend to view Shakespeare’s histories through the first of these two bodies. We look to the plays for a study of the man, not the monarchy: Hal’s growing up, Hamlet’s angst, Richard III’s seductive villainy, Lear’s madness, etc. Then we pause and look kindly, if not condescendingly, on the political bits, cutting them where we can (“maybe the Brits get this stuff, I  don’t”) or trying to make them relevant (setting the Henriads in the American Civil War, for example). All of which tends to imbue the plays with an over-coating of rugged American individualism that I am not sure Shakespeare had in mind (as if one could ever know). One of the ways recent productions have tried to counter this, as several of our contributors point out, is to have women play the kings (not that women can’t be rugged individualists, let me hasten to add). It seems from the essays in this volume, as well as other recent commentaries, that the casting of women, and particularly women of color, has a democratizing effect on these plays; that their “kingships” seem more collaborative and their relationships less self-aggrandizing than when performed by men. But is that what Shakespeare “intended” (again, as if one could ever know)? Or does it simply frame the individualism through an alternative lens? A refreshing and

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needed lens, but an individualistic lens nonetheless. Is there yet another lens through which we can read the plays as more about the public body politic, than the private one? Jan Kott, in his seminal study “The Kings,” wrote of history as a “Grand Mechanism,” a staircase or a great wheel, on which a Henry or Richard is always rising or climbing to the top while another of the same name is tumbling down. History is a ruthless machine, implacable and impersonal. There was no Lord’s anointed in Shakespeare’s view of history, Kott argued, only a lust for power that drove monarchs to chop off heads, build or break alliances, and “busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels” (HIV2, 4.1.372–30). But when Henry V reads out the list of English dead after the battle of Agincourt, those mentioned are nobility, like himself, the one per-center “band of brothers.” Of those of no “name” but “five and twenty” who died (HV, 4.8.110), both Hal and Kott seem to have forgotten the likes of Mouldy, Shadow, Wart, Feeble, Fang, Bullcalf, Snare and Davy, who Shakespeare and Falstaff use for cannon fodder in Henry IV, Part 2. To the one percent they are indeed of no name. Shakespeare takes an uncommon interest in these common men and women. They are the Citizens in Richard III, who remain mute as “breathing stones” when Buckingham tries to get them to shout “God save Richard. England’s royal king!” (RIII, 3.7.20–25). They are Grooms and Gardeners in Richard II, the Quicklys and Tearsheets in Henry IV, the poor Bardolfs hanged in Henry V, the Pompeys and Overdones of Measure for Measure, the Servants in Lear who go to Gloucester’s aid, and the Soldier who somehow manages to find his way into Cleopatra’s bedroom to boldly beg Antony not to “fight by sea” (A&C, 3.7.77) on the morning of battle. It is through these men and women that we know something is rotten in Denmark. Note that Shakespeare is careful to have the foot-soldier, Marcellus, tell us that something is “rotten in the state of Denmark” (Hamlet, 1.4.100)—we already know the old king’s physical body has been poisoned. It is the body politic that is rotting now. Marcellus, a commoner, speaks truth to power about the corruption of the state. He is part of the body politic, erupting like a blister or abscess, who must be attended to but is often ignored. These nameless subject-citizens know when the country bleeds. They suffer most when Kott’s “Grand Mechanism” begins to turn. A Richard is replaced by a Henry, who courts the “common people,” and seems “to dive into their hearts”: KING RICHARD. Off goes his bonnet to an oyster wench; A brace of draymen bid God speed him well And had the tribute of his supple knee,

Introduction: A Mad World, My Masters!

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With “Thanks, my countrymen, my loving friends,” As were our England in reversion his And he our subjects’ next degree in hope. (RII, 1.4.25–37)

That Henry is followed by another Henry, and a Henry yet again, until another Richard replaces him, who is in turn replaced by a Richmond. Does it surprise us today if an audience might be confused by poor Margaret in her grief? QUEEN MARGARET. I had an Edward till a Richard killed him; I had a husband till a Richard killed him. Thou hadst an Edward till a Richard killed him; Thou hadst a Richard till a Richard killed him. DUCHESS. I had a Richard too, and thou did’st kill him; I had a Rutland too; thou holp’st to kill him. QUEEN MARGARET. Thou hadst a Clarence too, and Richard killed him. (RIII, 4.4.40–48)

Does it matter to those of no name which Richard it was or what Edward or Gloucester or Northumberland? No matter the name, it will not to turn out well for those at the bottom. At best you might get a Richmond, Malcolm or an Edgar/Albany (depending which ending of Lear you prefer). At worst, you get a Fortinbras, or the post-assassination civil war of Julius Caesar. It is always the body politic that pays for the madness of the body private.

II In planning this volume, several titles were tested and found wanting: Kings and Fools (rules out Queens), or Monarchs and Fools (seemed a little “ye olde-y”), until we came to the current Monarchs and Madmen. The “Monarchs” part, given the discussion above, was fairly clear. But who were the madmen and, yes, women? Obviously there is the Fool in Lear, Falstaff, Lucio in Measure for Measure, Puck etc. But, as our contributors point out, Cordelia and Angelo are also fools, foils to Lear and the Duke of Vienna. Antony and Cleopatra keep switching roles of Fool to Monarch, Monarch to Fool, as the mood, their “dotage,” takes them. Fools, yes, but “madmen?” Shakespeare’s mad men and women tend to be evil, the Iagos and Lady Macbeths of tragedy. As was discussed in the previous Playing Shakespeare’s Villains volume in this series, evil is perpetrated by those lacking empathy; those who grow and prosper at others’ expense, as Edmund the bastard does in Lear; or who revel, as Aaron the Moor does, in a catalogue of evils:

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Louis Fantasia AARON. But I have done a thousand dreadful things As willingly as one would kill a fly, And nothing grieves me heartily indeed But that I cannot do ten thousand more. (Titus, 5.1.143–6)

It is interesting that Shakespeare’s great villains, like Iago, Macbeth and Richard III, never quite go “mad,” but maintain a sort of self-control, even as the evil they instigate spirals out of hand. They remain detached, which is perhaps an even more frightening form of madness, that of the sociopath. “Demand me nothing,” declares Iago at the end of his villainy. “What you know, you know. / From this time forth I never will speak word” (Othello, 5.2.355–6). In the late Shakespearean Romances, one can view the monarchs of these plays also as madmen: jealous Leontes, revengeful Prospero, obsessive Pericles, and just about everybody in Cymbeline’s Britain. Reconciliation comes at the last minute, redeeming great pain and injury and restoring some sanity and balance to both king and kingdom. In the great Tragedies, without that reconciliation, madness is the coin of the realm. Lear, Hamlet, Othello, even Brutus in his oblivious fanaticism, are all mad in some sense, and we watch, as Ophelia does, noble minds overthrown, “like sweet bells jangled, out of time and harsh” (Hamlet, 3.2.172), realizing that “we that are young / Shall never see so much nor live so long” (Lear, 5.3.394–5). Yet it is in the Histories where the collision of monarchs and madmen does the most damage, because the monarch is more often than not his (or her) own madman. Rash actions, such as Richard’s banishment of Bolingbroke, bring equally rash reactions (rebellion and regicide), which, in turn move the Grand Mechanism to its next phase. In this context, Henry’s son Hal is less the foundational national hero of a St. Crispian’s Day emerald isle, than a pause in a long and inevitably downward turn of the wheel towards Richard III (which then turns upward in Richmond and the establishment of the Tudor line, and so on). The “band of brothers” of Henry V is the same set of nobles who carve up Henry VI’s kingdom like hyenas, leading to the assent of a madman for a monarch in Richard III. Shakespeare’s clowns and fools were known for three things: their malapropisms (think of Dogberry), their ability to speak “truth to power” (the Fools in King Lear and Twelfth Night), and their skills in jigs and tumbling (Will Kemp supposedly danced a 100-mile Morris dance from London to Norwich after leaving Shakespeare’s acting company). In the Histories, Shakespeare’s monarchs play their own fools. Richard III “capers” and dances across the stage. Henry VI is a trilogy about the manipulation of power through the language of curses, prophecies, oaths and commands, but Henry

Introduction: A Mad World, My Masters!

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is a king who, when he finally comes of age, is so intimidated by that power that he speaks only in political malapropisms, wishing he were a shepherd playing on pipes. Henry V plays jokes on his own men the night before battle, and makes a mash of the French language as soon as he conquers that country. Henry IV has a clown for a son and a fat fool for a rival and is weighed down by the crown he stole. Age and illness have robbed him of the bluster and common touch he used against Richard, who, more than any other monarch in Shakespeare’s histories, knows the absurdity of the role he plays. Give up the robe, scepter, and crown—just give me a little mirror with which to see my naked mortality. It is a joke played not only on the Lord’s anointed, but on all of us. To quote another monarch/madman, “they told me I was everything. / ‘Tis a lie. I am not ague-proof” (Lear, 4.6.123–4). We live in an era where the institutions of democracy and a civil society, such as free speech, a free press, and an educated electorate, seem to be at risk, not from some outside alien battering at our gates, but from within. We are in danger of letting the body politic rot, like the state of Denmark, because of the madmen we let rule. The times, indeed, are out of joint, and only we, in the lists of battle with no name, can set it right. One of the most exciting (not a word I often use) things for me about this collection of essays is to see the way young people in the youth theatres in Los Angeles and Louisville tackle both Shakespeare’s language and his politics. They are a physic the body politic desperately needs. Shakespeare, influenced by Montaigne, gives us the blueprint for a Jeffersonian utopia, a shining city on a hill to which we might aspire: GONZALO. I’ th’ commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things, for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; No occupation; all men idle, all, And women too, but innocent and pure; No sovereignty— … All things in common nature should produce Without sweat or endeavor; treason, felony, Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine Would I not have; but nature should bring forth Of its own kind all foison, all abundance, To feed my innocent people … I would with such perfection govern, sir, T’ excel the Golden Age. (Tempest, 2.1.1663–85)

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We are the madmen if we let our monarchs take this future from us. Resist!

Works Cited All textual citations refer to: Folger Shakespeare Library. Shakespeare’s Plays from Folger Digital Texts. Edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library, 15 January, 2019. www.folgerdigitaltexts.org. Kott, Jan. “The Kings.” Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Methuen, 1965. (pp. 3–46)

1.  The Crack-Up: Modernity and the Mind of Richard II Heather James All life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up”

When F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about the experience of self-shattering that left him permanently changed, he distinguished between two kinds of blows. There are the external blows that you repeat to yourself and rehearse to your friends in low moments. You know every detail of the history of these kinds of blows and identify them as the stumbling blocks or reversals in your studies, career, or public image. External blows come suddenly and violently and leave you feeling weak. You remember them in moments of self-pity and sometimes use them as the grounds to refashion your public reputation or sense of self. There is a different kind of blow, Fitzgerald remarks, which comes from within and remains unrecognized until it is too late to do anything about it. The second kind of blow “happens almost without your knowing it,” even though your awakening to its effects comes suddenly and completely. In his Poetics, Aristotle calls this tragic recognition: it is the horrifying moment in which a tragic protagonist realizes the devastating consequence of actions that seemed insignificant when they occurred. Fitzgerald’s own crisis prompted him to perform an extensive self-audit, whose end result was an unhappy moment of self-discovery, even a modern or new form of tragedy. “There was not an ‘I’ anymore,” he wrote, and “it was strange to have no self.”1 Of all the English kings in William Shakespeare’s history plays, Richard II is the most keenly affected by the prospect and process of breaking down from within. In his moments of high drama, however, he behaves as though

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the big, sudden blows come to him exclusively from outside. In the play’s central scenes, to be discussed in more detail later in this essay, he insists on sharing moments of weakness with his friends, who urge him to pick himself up, pull himself together, and, as one of them puts it, “remember who you are” (3.2.83). He is King of England. Yet Richard will have nothing to do with comfort or exhortations to be strong. He instead instructs his friends to “sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings” (3.2.1601), laid low by enemies and intimates. “All murdered” (165), he gloomily intones. His ultimate confession is that the most violent blows to his security as king do not come from without but instead from within. There is an undeniable staginess about Richard II. He vies for the stage and the rapt attention as well as the sympathies of his audiences—on the stage and in the text—rather than taking them for granted as England’s king and title character of Shakespeare’s history play. From Prince Hamlet and Macbeth to King Lear, Shakespeare’s tragic figures often make the stage and the entire playhouse seem like extensions of their minds and workshops for their thought experiments. Hamlet signals as much when, after the first visitation of his ghostly father, he refers to his own mind as a “distracted globe” (Hamlet, 1.5.104), which he can only put to order if he internalizes the Ghost’s suspect command of revenge. Shakespeare’s Richard II, however, presents himself as an actor on the stage of history, exposed to the judgments of audiences. He is the Shakespearean king who most swiftly and fully intuits that the story of his life will be the stuff of theater. In the Shakespearean play that bears his name, the entire history and theory of English monarchy will be staged as a high-stakes political question without a definitive answer. Shakespeare’s Richard seems to know that every time his story is performed the matter placed in question and on trial will be the status of an anointed king. The stage, far more than the historical records, will be the most enduring site on which the trials of his life, character, and rule will be enacted time and again. In Shakespeare’s script, Richards most powerful moments on the stage are those when he reacts to blows that seem to come from without—and more often than not from his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke—and also the blows that come from within the king himself. It is the second kind of blow that fully cracks him as a human subject, self, or “I,” as well as a divinely anointed king. The broadest question Shakespeare poses in Richard II concerns the validity of the social entitlements that make up a given person’s sense of self. To explore this scenario, Shakespeare chose an English king and, more specifically, a king who courts the strong opposition and aggression of nobles in his family and court who also have hereditary standing in relation to the crown.

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Shakespeare’s choice of an anointed king greatly amplifies the stakes of the question of social entitlement. It throws into sharp relief the political stakes of holding any member of a community or polity, whether a king, nobleman, or common subject, in an unquestioned and unquestionable position based on rank. Are social roles fixed points of order in an otherwise mutable world? Or are they also subject to radical change? The play explores these questions through the doubts that permeate and wound Richard II’s mind. Richard II is the first king to enter the Shakespearean stage with profound doubts about the political theory that invests him with divine as well as royal authority. He is also the first Shakespearean king who comes to know, and eloquently express, how it feels for a person born into the highest places of privilege to lose his self-possession, self-sovereignty, and crown.2 Shakespeare’s Richard II is not a “weak” king, unable to hold the reins of power, any more than Bolingbroke is a “strong” one, in full possession of the Machiavellian tactics it takes to bring down an anointed king. This perspective, which often comes up in Shakespeare criticism, makes no good sense of the play’s representations of the two men, who struggle with themselves and each other over the power of words (where Richard II has the advantage) and deeds (where Bolingbroke has greater opportunities). Bolingbroke, in fact, feels increasingly muddled about the moral philosophy that supports his increasingly open challenges to his flagrantly abusive cousin and king, Richard II. Bolingbroke is initially confident in his opposition to his king’s abuse but ultimately plagued by the negative side of his final decision to usurp the throne. Richard knows himself, flaws and all, a shade better than Bolingbroke does. He is a great Shakespearean king, gifted with intelligence, imagination and stagecraft. But he has the misfortune to be ahead of his time:  he disbelieves the political theory that derives monarchical rights from God, who alone endows the divinely anointed king with an inalienable claim to the English crown and throne. It is not the outward assaults coming from Bolingbroke that break Richard down, but the blows of doubt and disbelief in his own mind. Richard experiences a crack-up that shatters the medieval conviction in the perception of a king as God’s deputy on earth. This is a historical and political crack-up, which propels England into an era of massive cultural change.3 It also leaves Shakespeare’s Richard with the shards of a self.

The Gentle Art of Making Enemies Richard II spends the first two acts of the play alienating, double-crossing, and exiling the friends and family whose loyalties are instrumental to his own rule. His full control over the events of the opening acts is not immediately

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obvious, and neither is the fact that he, the king, is the intractable problem that has the full attention of the nobles and commons of England. These are the hardest acts of the play for modern readers to “track” in terms of continuity for a simple if initially puzzling reason. Shakespeare provides no backstory to explain the actions and speeches of his historical characters. He presents the events of history in the “real time” of drama but offers few clues about their causes and occasions. His characters are given to deeply emotional, highly figured, but enigmatic speeches. In one scene after another, they pour their hearts into the hints and implications of their speeches even as they hide the cause of their anguish.4 Only this is fully clear: the stakes of speech and decisive action could not matter more to all the characters in the play. We may think of Shakespeare’s strategy as a powerful experiment in dramatic representation of history, which is characteristically tidy and manageable only in retrospect but hard to articulate in the here and now of a social and political crisis. The open secret of the English court is that the King of England is testing the loyalty of his noblemen through flagrant abuse. In the first scene alone, Richard repeatedly insults and condescends to his uncle and counselor, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster; mocks Gaunt’s son, Henry Bolingbroke, for his “boist’rous late appeal” (1.1.4) against Thomas Mowbray, Earl of Norfolk; and refuses to protect Mowbray against Bolingbroke’s charges of treason, despite his loyal service. Mowbray, Bolingbroke asserts, has long defrauded soldiers of their pay and plotted treasons, including the murder of Richard’s uncle, Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester. Over the course of this scene, Bolingbroke and Mowbray amplify their claims to truth, honor, and divine authority. Neither man relents, despite the commands of father and king to back down from a public conflict that can only flush out the abuses at the highest level of political order. Neither man openly says what both men know to be true: Mowbray took orders to murder Woodstock from the king himself. The first scene comes to a tense end when Richard, giving up on his original demand that the two men make peace, calls for trial-by-combat. In a sense, both Bolingbroke and Mowbray want the same thing:  a scene of justice before the king who is in fact responsible for abuses ranging from misuse of funds to murder. Richard allows his nobles a brief space of time to prepare for the trial-by-combat and raise their hopes for redress. Just as the two combatants are ready to engage each other, however, Richard disappoints all parties by throwing down his gage, suspending the combat, and exiling both noblemen. There is a looming question, raised by Richard himself, about why the heavier sentence falls on Mowbray, the nobleman who turned assassin in his

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king’s service in an unshakable belief that his sovereign is God’s agent. To Bolingbroke, the “bold” and “boist’rous” (1.1.3–4) nobleman who brought the king’s legal, political, and ethical deeds into a public but not entirely open space, Richard gives a sentence of ten years of exile, which he swiftly and arbitrarily reduces to six. Mowbray receives a life sentence of exile. Mowbray understandably insists on both his honor and the value of his service. “My dear dear lord” (1.1.182), he says in response to Richard’s order to throw down his gage in the first scene, MOWBRAY. The purest treasure mortal times afford Is spotless reputation; that away, Men are but gilded loam, or painted clay. A jewel in a ten-times barred-up chest Is a bold spirit in a loyal breast. Mine honor is my life; both grow in one. Take honor from me, and my life is done. (1.1.183–89)

Mowbray is not the more contentious of the two men insisting on Richard’s attention, but he offends the king more directly. He refuses to obey his sovereign’s command to put aside his grievance. “Give me his gage,” Richard commands Mowbray, “Lions make leopards tame” (180), to which Mowbray responds, “Yea, but not change his spots” (181), which are, by implication, the spots on his conscience and reputation. He, not Bolingbroke, soon learns that he is to be eternally silenced for having spoken from the heart about the honor he feels is due to him, a subject, despite the duties he owes and readily gives to his king. Mowbray’s role in the play is carefully shaped by the tense relationship between the liberties and duties of subjects. Mowbray tells his sovereign that he expected “A dearer merit, not so deep a maim” (1.3.157–8) as exile: MOWBRAY. The language I have learnt these forty years, My native English, now I must forgo; And now my tongue’s use is to me no more Than an unstringèd viol or a harp, Or, like a cunning instrument cased up, Or, being open, put into his hands That knows no touch to tune the harmony. Within my mouth you have enjailed my tongue, Doubly portcullised with my teeth and lips, And dull unfeeling barren ignorance Is made my jailer to attend on me. (1.3.161–71)

He devotes his most important speech in the play and likely in his entire life to an effort to make Richard understand his plight as a loyal but compromised

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subject. In the first scene, he represented his loyalty—inclusive of his silence about the king’s role in his crimes—as a jewel locked in a ten-times barred treasure chest. In the third scene, his last, Mowbray tells Richard that exile is worse than being locked up in a prison such as the Tower of London, since his own body is to become the prison of his mind. Specifically, his own lips and teeth are to be made into jailers of his tongue. The special loss that Mowbray laments is speech, the use of the English language and his native tongue. “What is thy sentence then but speechless death,” he complains to Richard, “Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath?” (1.3.174–5). One of Shakespeare’s signal arts is to place a massively important speech in the mouth of a minor player. Mowbray’s lament for his tongue’s incapacity to speak is among the most haunting speeches in any Shakespearean play.5 He mourns the incapacity of his tongue to speak in his places of exile and, equally grievous, in the present moment, for he cannot speak openly before his king and the court. This speech, a heartfelt lament and bitter complaint, serves notice to all English noblemen facing the same dilemma about how to speak honestly to the king and still count as a loyal subject. Gaunt is the next of Richard’s nobles to take up the challenge of fearless speech from the position of a virtuous, loyal English subject.6 When Gaunt at last resists his king at the end of the play’s first act, he does so in the boldest possible terms. He finds his voice through the twin pressures placed on him by his bold son, who challenges the king through Mowbray in 1.1 and 1.3, and Woodstock’s widow, the Duchess of Gloucester, who vainly pleads with him in 1.2. He is also moved to bold speech by Mowbray, the man sentenced to life in exile for his loyalties. All three characters create pressures within Gaunt that lead him to break his silence in the face of rank abuse of legal powers. These pressures result in one of the great death scenes in all of Shakespeare’s plays, complete with two phenomenal speeches about England and her king. The most famous of Gaunt’s speeches is a virtual hymn to the sovereignty of England. When it is removed from its dramatic context and treated as a setspeech, it reads like a document in English nationalism. In context, however, it is a revolutionary speech act. In approximately twenty lines of rhapsodic praise, Gaunt meticulously transfers the idea of sovereignty from the English king to the English soil. As Gaunt hits his stride, he focuses his thoughts on England as a sacred, royal place separate from its king: GAUNT. This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war,

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This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, … This blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, Feared by their breed and famous by their birth … (2.1.45–51, 55–57)

Casting himself as a “prophet new inspired” (2.1.35), Gaunt conjures up a lavish description of England’s sovereignty, not her sovereign. The land generates the royalty of kings and the good fortune of men. Both maternally nurturing (a “nurse” with a “teeming womb”) and heroically militant (“the seat of Mars,” the god of war), England owes nothing to its king, who “leas[es]” the land as if it were “a tenement or pelting farm” (59–60). Gaunt does not deliver these words to the king, who could plausibly challenge the principles of law and political theory underlying Gaunt’s transfer of power from the king to the land. He instead delivers his blessing on the land to his sole-surviving brother, the Duke of York, who remains in the service and favor of the young king. Gaunt does not, as his brother hopes, “deal mildly with [the king’s] youth” (2.1.75). When the king arrives, Gaunt exchanges his blessings on the English land for open criticism and implicit curses on the king. “Landlord of England art thou now, not king” (2.1.119), he tells Richard: GAUNT. A thousand flatterers sit within thy crown, Whose compass is no bigger than thy head, And yet encagèd in so small a verge, The waste is no whit lesser than thy land. (2.1.106–9)

The so-called flatterers, chiefly Bushy, Bagot, and Greene, are nothing compared to the thousand self-flattering thoughts already in Richard’s head, and the cure is potentially the loss of that head. At the core of Gaunt’s invective is a fantasy of Gaunt’s own father, the powerful Edward III, anticipating the disappointment of his grandson and acting to remove him from lineal succession:7 GAUNT. O, had thy grandsire with a prophet’s eye Seen how his son’s son should destroy his sons, From forth thy reach he would have laid thy shame, Deposing thee before thou wert possessed, Which art possessed now to depose thyself. (2.1.110–14)

Gaunt does not waste his last speech, which touches a nerve in the young king:  Richard already knows and struggles with his compulsion to test the limits of his rule even at the risk of seeing himself deposed and dispossessed.

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Gaunt dies, as he prophesied, immediately after delivering himself of the indictment he has long locked up in his thoughts. Almost as soon as he leaves the stage, the Duke of Northumberland arrives to say, in language that unmistakably recalls Mowbray’s complaint about exile, “His tongue is now a stringless instrument, / Words, life, and all, old Lancaster hath spent” (2.1.149–50). In the first two acts of the play, the silencing of one man’s tongue leads another to find his own. When York, the last of King Edward III’s sons, hears that Gaunt is dead, he exclaims, “Be York the next that must be bankrupt so!” (2.1.159). A bankrupt, in the sense York invokes, is a person whose mental, emotional, or physical resources have been exhausted unto death.8 York finds his political voice, however, when Richard blithely declares his intent to seize, “The plate, coin, revenues, and movables, / Whereof our uncle Gaunt did stand possessed” (2.1.169–70). It is one thing to suspect the king ordered the assassination of Woodstock, another to accept Bolingbroke’s exile, and yet another to bear with the ruined health and death of John of Gaunt. The king’s absolute rule can extend even thus far. It does not, however, extend to the appropriation of another nobleman’s property and inheritance. “How long shall I be patient,” York asks, “ah, how long / Shall tender duty make me suffer wrong?” (2.1.171–2): YORK. Seek you to seize and gripe into your hands The royalties and rights of banished Hereford? Is not Gaunt dead? And doth not Hereford live? Was not Gaunt just? And is not Harry true? Did not the one deserve to have an heir? Take Hereford’s rights away, and take from time His charters and his customary rights; Let not tomorrow then ensue today; Be not thyself; for how art though a king But by fair sequence and succession? (2.1.198–208)

Through a desperate series of rhetorical questions, York reasons and pleads with the king, who is about to carry out his greatest abuse of his royal power. Only then does he issue a dire warning that he knows will fall on deaf ears: YORK. You pluck a thousand dangers on your head, You lose a thousand well-disposed hearts, And prick my tender patience to those thoughts Which honor and allegiance cannot think. (2.1. 214–17)

Richard already knows the logic that York unfolds to him: he is undermining his own claim to the English crown. Richard cannot undo the law of

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inheritance from father to son without overturning his own royal inheritance. Yet he glibly tells the uncle, “Think what you will, we seize into our hands / His plate, his goods, his money, and his lands” (218–19). A new gauntlet has been cast down. Richard has forced the problem of kingship. By the end of Act 2, he has laid the grounds for an inevitable test of his arbitrary rule in an open contest between himself and Bolingbroke, the cousin he has both exiled and dispossessed of his own inheritance.

Richard’s Ups and Downs In the play’s first two acts, Richard plays a game with increasingly risks by pressing home the point of his complete freedom, as monarch, from the law. He goes to such extremes that he breaks the underlying terms of social contract that make up the English constitution, which joins royal prerogatives and the liberties of subjects. Sacred power comes to kings in part because they do not construe the prince’s theoretical freedom from legal constraint in the same way that a tyrant does. For Richard II, this is an ethical fact but a theoretical problem for monarchical rule and, more concretely, for his own claim to the crown. In the first two acts, he is possessed to depose himself, as Gaunt puts it. When he enters the stage in the deposition scene of Act 4, however, he rewrites the moral and emotional stakes of the transfer of power that he himself initiated through acts that seem at once light-headed and grievously abusive. Summoned to Parliament to perform “the resignation of [his] state and crown / To Henry Bolingbroke” (4.1.188–9), Richard spoils Bolingbroke’s hopes for a smooth and stable transfer or power. “Give me the crown,” he commands, and, once it is in his hands, he directs his reluctant cousin to “seize the crown” (4.1.190). “Here, cousin” (191), he continues, holding out the crown to Bolingbroke and compelling him to grasp its other side, as if the two men were about to start a game tug-of-war. Holding Bolingbroke a hostage to his actual game—a parody of the scales of justice—Richard elaborates a curious and extended analogy between the two men and a pair of buckets used to draw water from a well: KING RICHARD. On this side my hand, and on that side thine. Now is this golden crown like a deep well That owes two buckets, filling one another, The emptier ever dancing in the air, The other down, unseen and full of water. That bucket down and full of tears am I, Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high. (4.1.192–98)

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The expected meaning of the two buckets would be that Richard, who was flighty and high-handed in the first two acts, has lost his political gravity to his cousin, Bolingbroke. Defying that script, Richard insists that he is the weighty bucket, while the usurping Bolingbroke is the emptier one. By a simple trick of inversion, Richard deftly flips the story about his former “lightness” and challenges the concept that the transfer of royal authority affirms Bolingbroke’s ethical weight and his own supposed unsuitability to rule. In fact, Richard implies by analogy with the two buckets, Bolingbroke has no legal ballast for his reign, while Richard, oppressed by the sheer weight of Bolingbroke’s ambition, reclaims the stage as the protagonist and victim of political tragedy. As a victim, Richard reinvests himself with sovereign authority. Only in the scene in which he is deposed is Richard able to regain rhetorical control over the patterns of rising and falling that permeate the play and especially dominate the play’s central scene, in which his emotions rapidly swell and crash by turns. They also rise and fall in relation to his confidence in his hereditary and divine right to the English crown. What is on the line is the doctrine of divine right, which gives Richard an unrestricted right to act on his own will as if it were the law itself. According to one theory of law, monarchical power is defined by its absolute freedom from laws (legibus solutus):  the king’s pleasure is the law (quod placuit principi, habet vigorem legis).9 According to a rival theory, the king and the people are both parties in a social contract: at the historical origins of the ancient constitution, the people granted their consent to be ruled by a king and may in principle retract their consent if the king abuses their liberties.10 As a mixed monarchy, combining royal and politic principles of political philosophy, England is in a sense primed for a legal crisis involving the king’s prerogatives and the subjects’ liberties. Although the historical King Richard II may have been shocked to find his prerogative challenged, Shakespeare’s Richard seems to expect and even demand it. He has evidently been testing the nobles for the political, ethical, and military challenge to his rule that Bolingbroke brings to him. The play’s central scenes expose the fracture in Richard II’s thinking about sovereignty and, in these scenes, Richard anticipates his deposition well before he and Bolingbroke come face to face. Richard II is the Shakespearean king who most fully and radically doubts the doctrines of arbitrary rule and divine right that place him on the throne and put the crown on his head. Throughout the play, his mind is riven by a fierce tension between knowing the basis of his power, which lies in the political tenet of divine right, and feeling that there is no divine right, at least not for him. This conflict drives the astonishing reversals in the king’s emotions and rhetoric in Act 3, scenes 2 and 3, when he returns to England from his

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Irish wars to confront Bolingbroke and, more importantly, his own tortured relationship to the English crown. In these scenes, Richard places the full contents of his mind on the stage without self-censorship. He reveals the most imperious thoughts in his head along with his most abject feelings of grief, self-doubt, and despair. From the moment he returns to England from his Irish wars, Richard understands his homecoming as a reckoning with the land he has tested, abused, and abandoned. Within four lines he is expressing joy to “stand upon [his] kingdom once again” (3.2.4) before kneeling to place his hands on the earth and do it “favors with [his] royal hands” (11). As he bends to the land that John of Gaunt recently invested with sovereignty, Richard casts himself not as England’s patriarchal lord but instead as “a long-parted mother with her child,” who “Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in meeting” (3.2.8– 9). Even as he summons spiders, toads, stinging nettles, and lurking adders to his defense, he emphasizes the natural intimacy between himself and the land. “Feed not thy sovereign’s foe my gentle earth, / Nor with thy sweets comfort his ravenous sense” (12–13), he tells the earth, and then conjures its secret powers: KING RICHARD. But let thy spiders that suck up thy venom And heavy-gaited toads lie in their way, Doing annoyance to the treacherous feet, Which with usurping steps do trample thee; Yield stinging nettles to mine enemies, And when they from thy bosom pluck a flower, Guard it, I pray thee, with a lurking adder, Whose double tongue may with a mortal touch Throw death upon thy sovereign’s enemies. (3.2.12–22)

This is the first of several fantasies about the land that Richard explores in the course of the two central scenes. It is the most private of his speculations: he whispers to the land itself, while the play’s audience or readers effectively overhear him. For Richard, the land comes first and his supporters as well as his political antagonists can wait for his attention. His opening address to the land is also the thought-experiment that is the least connected to patriarchal authority. Richard identifies with mothers, nurses, fairies, and witches, who all predate the political order of patriarchal rule in English folk lore. His first thought, when he returns to England, is that his own relationship to the land is both magical and outmoded. He goes farther than Gaunt did when he cast England as a divinely blessed isle with no debt to kings. Richard grounds the value of the land in natural philosophy. The mood does not last long, but it

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hovers over the whole act and play as a scientific as well as philosophical speculation on the relationship of land to patrilineage. Opposed to Richard’s sense of his magical bond with the land is the theory of the divine right of kings, which his friends and followers urge upon him even before the first huge wave of bad news arrives. The Bishop of Carlisle invokes the heavenly Father as the “Power that made you king” and “Hath power to keep you king in spite of all” (3.2.27–8). Nettled by the implicit correction of his mood and thought, Richard pivots to the theory of divine right. Yet he refuses simply to agree with Carlisle and Aumerle, another supporter, who urges him to “remember who you are.” Instead he outdoes them both by laying out an elaborate analogy between himself as the Sun, and Bolingbroke as a thief in the night. He invokes “murders, treasons, and detested sins” (44) carried out by “this thief, this traitor, Bolingbroke” (line 47), who has “reveled in the night” (48), while Richard, like the sun and “the searching eye of heaven” (37), was “wandering in the Antipodes” (49). Richard short-circuits his supporters’ rhetoric of divine right by pressing it beyond any comfortable limits. Applying the theory of divine right to his present situation, Richard powerfully but improbably asserts: KING RICHARD. Not all the water in the rough rude sea Can wash the balm off from an anointed king; The breath of worldly men cannot depose The deputy elected by the Lord; For every man that Bolingbroke hath pressed To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown, God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay A glorious angel. (3.2.54–61)

Richard first asserts that the laws of nature and the theory of social contract have no power over the “elected” deputy of God, a term that hovers between the Calvinist doctrine of election or predestination and the republican or democratic model of election to public office. It then shifts to an uneasy analogy between the Crown’s conscription or “pressing” of men into military service and the weird notion that God is pressing angels into service for his Richard. This vision is a grandiose, stagey, and possibly parodic response to his supporters’ confidence in Richard’s divine right. Yet Richard has even greater and higher claims to make. Learning of that his Welsh soldiers have left the field, thinking the king is dead, Richard’s spirits plummet and then apparently rally. “I had forgot myself,” he remarks, in a cross between rhetorical zeal and parody, “Am I not king?” (84):

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KING RICHARD. Is not the King’s name twenty thousand names? Arm, arm, my name! A puny subject strikes At thy great glory. Look not to the ground, You favorites of a king. Are we not high? High be our thoughts. (3.2.86–90)

At this exact moment, Richard shifts into a high rhetorical gear that places the doctrine of royal absolutism at direct and irremediable distance from more grounded and consent-based theories of political rule. He also pivots from defiance of his enemies and supporters alike to parody. By the end of Act 3, scene 3, Richard is pressing Bolingbroke to admit that he has come back to England for more than his own inheritance and urging his cousin and opponent to declare openly his ambition to be king in Richard’s stead. More surprisingly, he supplies cues that Bolingbroke might take the crown with Richard’s permission. What Bolingbroke does not hear is the sound of Richard’s speech as he descends from the castle where he and his friends and supporters have been conversing: KING RICHARD. Down, down I come, like glist’ring Phaëton, Wanting the manage of unruly jades. In the base court—base court, where kings grow base, To come at traitors’ calls and do them grace. In the base court come down—down court, down king, For nightowls shriek where mounting larks should sing. (3.3.83–91)

Phaethon, as readers of Ovid’s Metamorphoses know, was the bastard son of the Sun-God. He demanded proof of his paternity from his father, and received it, before revealing the terms he craved. Phaethon wanted to drive the chariot of the Sun across the world for one day: only a trial of his skills and strength could prove his divine descent. But the mortal youth, who could not manage the horse-drawn chariot of the Sun-God. Losing control, he nearly destroyed both earth and heavens until he at last fell to earth, shot down from the heavens by Jupiter, king of the gods. For Shakespeare and many of his contemporaries, Phaethon was no simple object of moral judgment. Falling from heaven to earth, he became a poetic image of human daring and audacity and an object of elegiac mourning. Shakespeare’s Richard II is his Renaissance successor, struck from the heavens by the king of the gods after testing his own divinely inspired and guaranteed claim to the English crown. At this point in the play, Richard feels that Ovid’s myth of Phaethon, the story of the fall of the bastard son of the Sun-God, is a closer analogue to his historical and psychological situation than the Christian myth of divine right.

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From Pins to Puns Richard II is highly attentive to the power of speech and the play of particular words. He keeps certain words in mind and pores over them, examining all of their ambiguities and multiple meanings. This is not to say that Richard chooses the words, measures, and rhymes that are most likely to bring his audiences and readers into sympathy with him and his cause. To the contrary. While Bolingbroke undertakes a “courtship to the common people” and “seem[s]‌to dive into their hearts / With humble and familiar courtesy” (1.4.25–27), Richard seems bent on deflecting sympathy throughout the first two acts, as if denying even Shakespeare’s stage audiences and readers any terms of intimacy with him as a character. He often chooses language to test the very persons upon whose good opinion his rule depends. It is as if his role as king requires isolation from all, even those who seem close to him, as his entourage of favorites and sometimes his queen seem to be. In the play’s central acts, Richard presses his absolutism to heights that are unrealistic rather than merely alienating and then pulls his audiences into his confidences, when he has nowhere to go but down. At his lowest moment in the play’s central scenes, Richard learns first that even his weakest subjects—old men, boys, and women—are taking up arms against him and second that two of his favorites are dead, executed on Bolingbroke’s order. This is a double blow, which prompts Richard to issue his first commands of the scene: KING RICHARD. Of comfort no man speak. Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs, Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth. Let’s choose executors and talk of wills. And yet not so, for what can we bequeath Save our deposèd bodies to the ground? … For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings. (3.2.149–55, 160–1)

Up to its halfway point of this extraordinary speech, Richard seems committed to the idea that all life is a process of breaking down, as Fitzgerald put it, but “the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once.”

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The second half of his speech shifts to the intimate workings of despair on one king, Richard, although he continues to generalize. Leaving aside the stories of how kings die—“all murdered”—Richard invites his friends and above all the play’s audiences and readers to look “[w]‌ithin the hollow crown / That rounds the mortal temples of a king” (3.2.165–66). Here, Richard continues, “Keeps Death his court” (167), KING RICHARD. [A]‌nd there the antic sits, Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp, Allowing him a breath, a little scene, To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks, Infusing him with self and vain conceit, As if this flesh which walls about our life Were brass impregnable; and humored thus, Comes at the last and with a little pin Bores through his castle wall, and farewell, king! (3.2.167–75)

Many Renaissance courts kept an “antic” or fool on hand, often for more than mere amusement. A court fool might sing, jest, riddle, and pun to sober the king up rather than simply make him laugh. The fool could be the one person able to speak to the king about his anger and abuses and the one person licensed to undermine and mock the absolute authority of the king when the need arose. It was the fool’s job to bring the king back down to earth, to mock, challenge, and subvert his absolutist authority. Anyone else speaking this way risked exile or death as a traitor. The Renaissance antic partly derives a classical tradition in which Roman conquerors marched in triumph but kept always at their ear the voice of a companion or slave especially appointed to remind him of his mortality: memento mori, remember death.11 Shakespeare’s Richard does not need a court fool to mock his absolute rule. Richard himself already has the piercing skepticism it takes to bore through the walls of his own mortal temples. The astonishing message that Richard brings to the play is that its greatest skeptic of royal absolutism comes from the mocking, scoffing voice in Richard’s own mind. The antic in his head has long been speaking to him about his mortality. Richard both mocks and confesses to his pretentions to divine right: KING RICHARD. Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood With solemn reverence. Throw away respect, Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty, For you have but mistook me all this while. I live with bread like you, feel want, Taste grief, need friends. Subjected thus, How can you say to me I am a king? (3.2.167–182)

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In just seven lines, Richard shifts his and his audience’s thoughts from selfpity, piously focused on fixed traditions, to puns. None of his friends and followers imagined that Richard was so far removed from the category of the human that he felt no needs or pains. But they could not have predicted the most astonishing feature of Richard’s confession of his basic human need. “Subjected thus, / How can you say to me I am a king?” This is the most extraordinary pun of Richard’s self-doubting career as an absolutist king.12 He is “subject” to death, doubt, need, and self-mockery and therefore no king. The breath of kings may have the power to effect change in the real world. It has the power of performative language:  what the king speaks becomes law. Shakespeare’s Richard, however, readily abandons the absolute power of the royal word in order to take up its apparent opposite, the pun. What is it about a quibble or play on words that is antithetical to the speech of kings? At their best, quibbles have the creative power to change people’s perception of, or perspective on, reality. In their fundamental impudence, however, they never affirm authority. Puns create an abundance of meanings that cannot be controlled or contained. Kingship works by grand analogies between God and his deputy on earth. Puns create meanings which rival each other for supremacy. Because the various meanings of a pun or quibble are all equally legitimate—although not all equally decorous—they ultimately level notions of priority and hierarchy. Editors and readers alike face challenges in making authoritative sense of quibbling passages. Which meanings are relevant, and for whom? In the service of what interpretation should a given meaning be activated or suppressed? Richard II takes up the impudent pun as a form of language that opposes stable order, hierarchy, and the absolutist rhetoric of kingship. He chooses the pun as an image of his own mind and thinking:  a pun may be politically subversive if it is used to destabilize singular and hierarchical meanings. Figuratively speaking, Richard allows a given meaning of a word—for example, “subjected,” “care,” “convey”—to be instated and given its moment to monarchize until a rival meaning boisterously challenges and deposes it. Puns are indiscriminate. They mix, mingle, or contaminate ideas that are typically kept separate. Shakespeare’s Richard takes the antic in his mind to his confrontation with Bolingbroke in the deposition scene. Richard also brings with him the subversive pun, which he uses to harass Bolingbroke and assert a measure of control over his own fall from grace. He begins by making an anamorphic or “perspectival” work of art13 out the possible meanings of the word care, forcing Bolingbroke to wrestle with him over it as they figuratively did over the crown while Richard spoke of buckets:

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BOLINGBROKE. Part of your cares you give me with your crown. KING RICHARD. Your cares set up do not pluck my cares down. My care is loss of care, by old care done; Your care is gain of care, by new care won. The cares I give I have, though given away. They ‘tend the crown, yet still with me they stay. (4.1.203–8)

Any court fool would be proud of this riddle on the nature of griefs and responsibilities. In Richard’s case, it leads to his extended, ceremonial act of self-cancellation. Challenged by Bolingbroke to say if he is “contented to resign to crown” (209), Richard enigmatically responds, “Ay, no; no, ay; for I must nothing be. / Therefore no ‘no,’ for I resign to thee” (210–11). The second line is the more declarative: since he is resigning to Bolingbroke, Richard has no option of saying “no” to the question of whether he is contented to resign his crown. The first of the two lines works as a rhetorical chiasmus, the “x” shape communicated by the a-b-b-a structure, in which Richard expresses his paradoxical consent and denial. In declaring, “Ay, no; no, ay; for I must nothing be,” Richard crosses himself out, undoing himself as a king and a subject, an “I.” The rest of his speech follows up on the logic of chiasmus: KING. RICHARD. Now, mark me how I will undo myself. I give this heavy weight from off my head And this unwieldy scepter from my hand, The pride of kingly sway from out my heart, With mine own tears I wash away my balm, With mind own hands I give away my crown, With mine own tongue deny my sacred state, With mine own breath release all duteous oaths. … Make me, that nothing have, with nothing grieved, And thou with all pleased that hast all achieved. Long mayst thou live in Richard’s seat to sit, And soon lie Richard in an earthy pit. (212–19, 225–28)

Like a God, Richard giveth and taketh away. He undoes himself, taking the victory away from Bolingbroke. He is both the all and nothing of the speech:  only Richard’s authority can depose Richard. The great shock that has come to Richard is one that he bequeaths to Bolingbroke’s court: there is a kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about. This will be true for the future Henry IV as it is for Richard. The most disorienting experience for Richard and Shakespeare’s audiences is that the events of a historical king’s life might result in an unhappy

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moment of self-discovery and a modern form of tragedy. “There was not an ‘I’ anymore,” as Fitzgerald wrote, “it was strange to have no self.”

Notes 1. The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1945), p. 16. 2. See especially Katharine Eisaman Maus, Being and Having in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 3. Harry Berger, Jr. makes a similar point in Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990) and other essays. 4. In other plays, characters make explicit use of the liberty of speech, as both Cordelia and Kent do in the opening scene of King Lear. 5. For an in-depth exploration of this theme, see Carla Mazzio, The Inarticulate Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 6. For an accessible discussion of the liberty of speech, see Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Semiotext(e), 2001). 7. In his Cambridge edition of the play, Andrew Gurr notes the implicit—and, in his view, unintended—violence in Gaunt’s image of Edward III “deposing” his grandson before he came into possession of the crown: the word technically means disinheriting, but “has an ominous ring” (p. 99 n107). In my own view, Gaunt intends the fantasy of violence, in which the powerful Edward III disinherits his grandson by laying out his dead body, a primary meaning of the Latin word, depono, or depose. King Richard II, ed. Andrew Gurr (Cambridge University Press, 1984, updated 2003). 8. The Oxford English Dictionary notes this sense as especially current in the late 16th century. 9. For a lucid account of the political and ideological debates that emerge from these legal constructions, see J.  P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603– 1640 (White Plains, New York: Longman, 1986). 10. Laurie Shannon, The Accommodated Animal:  Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales (Chicago and London:  University of Chicago Press, 2013), offers a simultaneously legal and literarily sensitive reading of the social contract. 11. See especially Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 12. There are words that kings do not wish to say, and these are some: What must the King do now? Must he submit? The King shall do it. Must he be deposed? The King shall be contented. Must he lose The name of king? I’ God’s name, let it go. (3.3.148–510) What linguists call modal verbs—words such as shall and must—do not apply to kings with the absolute rule to decree what shall be and are never subjected to obligation and force.

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13. To draw on earlier language of the play, puns are “like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon / Show nothing but confusion, eyed awry / Distinguish form” (2.1.18–20).

Works Cited All textual citations refer to: Folger Shakespeare Library. Shakespeare’s Plays from Folger Digital Texts. Edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library, 15 January, 2019. www.folgerdigitaltexts.org.

2.  Shakespeare’s Henry IV: Youth and Veterans Chris Anthony

Introduction Will Power to Youth Will Power to Youth is a youth development program founded in Los Angeles in the wake of that city’s 1992 civil unrest. At that time, leaders in both government and the private sector came together to inquire about the needs of urban youth. When asked what they wanted, teenagers from different parts of the city said that they wanted teachers who cared about them and cared about what they were teaching … and they wanted jobs! Will Power to Youth was jointly created in response to that need by two organizations. The National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ— known at that time as the National Conference of Christians and Jews) had several decades of experience creating dialogue across difference. Every summer their Brotherhood/Sisterhood camp had taken a diverse group of young people away from the city, where they could learn the communication tools needed to discuss their experiences concerning different aspects of identity, for example, Race, Gender, Sexuality, Religion, and Immigration. NCCJ partnered with the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles (SCLA), which, at that time, produced free Shakespeare plays in Downtown Los Angeles. Dani Bedau was an intern at SCLA who had been a teen leader in NCCJ programs. She had the vision to blend the two worlds and the insight to incorporate original dialogue into the process of rehearsing a play. From its beginning, Will Power to Youth has been a jobs program, translating the work of theatre artists into the terms of a traditional workforce. Also from the beginning, the artists guiding the program have worked to develop a community-based approach to classical texts that empowers youth to think critically about themselves and their world. The program has evolved

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to incorporate original, student-created dialogue throughout the process and into the final production, placing the words of WPY community members on the stage alongside Shakespeare’s dialogue. While the stated Program Goal of Will Power to Youth is to create a community of artists dedicated to each other and the work of producing an adaptation of a Shakespeare play, the ultimate goal is to help young people make a successful transition from youth to adulthood by helping them see themselves as agents of change in their own lives. Will Power to Youth approaches each Shakespeare play as a new work about a pressing issue in the lives of young people. This centers the young people as experts in their own experience. The community is responsible for all aspects of the production. All new participants in the program write and all of them perform, but each student chooses an artistic team as their primary focus. Professional artists mentor the teams (Acting, Writing, Movement, Sound, Scenic, and Costume Design) to create all of the elements necessary for the final production. Staff and contracted technicians support only as needed. Shakespeare is a key piece of the equation because the process of mastering his language is instructive and transformative. If students can work on this thing that is considered so difficult, what can’t they do? Also, there is great power in the WPY participants, largely Latinx, Asian, or Black, taking ownership of a language that has not been primarily considered “for” them.

Veterans in Art The goal of the Shakespeare Center’s Veterans in Art program is to help veterans successfully transition from military to civilian life. SCLA supplements vocational therapy for veterans with opportunities to work on theatrical productions. Vets in the program serve in a variety of roles such as construction, technical crew members, marketing team, or front of house staff. For some Vets in the program the opportunity to develop civilian job skills is important, but being a valued member of a team again, as they were in the military, is a key piece of feeling integrated into civilian society. In 2015, Will Power to Youth was presented with a unique opportunity to have military veterans join in the community alongside the teenagers. Both of these transformations—teen to adult, military to civilian—required a shift in identity that allowed a person to see him/herself as capable making changes. Along with helping teens understand more about themselves, the collaboration begun in 2015 presented the opportunity to help Vets and teenagers see themselves differently, see each other differently, and help audiences think differently about both.

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Youth & Veterans WPY participants are selected by interview, not audition. All participants live in Los Angeles and their families earn an income that puts them at or below the poverty level. Aged 15 to 21, the twenty-eight participants chosen in 2015 represented several neighborhoods and twelve Los Angeles area schools, including high schools, community colleges, and four-year universities. About half of the Youth interviewed had no first-hand knowledge of Veterans. Of the others who did, most had a relative in the Marines. During the interview process, one youth also mentioned that her 6th grade teacher was an Army Vet who had been called up from ready reserves and left for Iraq in the middle of the school year. Three years later, the teacher was still deployed as a civil affairs officer. Our original idea had been to find a group of Veterans who wanted to participate in the entire program, and there was a concentrated effort to recruit Veterans interested in the arts. Only one of the Veterans in Art members was available to participate in the entire 6-week program and perform in the show, and he had serious reservations about working with teenagers, questioning their commitment to the work. We were fortunate to find other Veterans who had worked with WPY before, and several others came in for interviews. In all, the Veterans selected served in several U.S. conflicts from the last fifty years, including Vietnam, the Cold War, the First Gulf War, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Production Our Approach Weeks before the summer program begins, staff and past participants weigh in on the issues that are important to them. The Program Director chooses a Shakespeare play that might provide an opportunity to discuss these issues and create art around them. One place where veterans and teenagers have equal expertise is the process of growing up. The WPY participants are right in the middle of this process (though some have had life circumstances that lead them to define that process in the past tense). Many military veterans entered the service as very young men or women. Many feel like they grew up in the service, and some in war. Shakespeare’s Prince Hal transitions from youth to adulthood across three war plays, making crucial decisions about his identity in Henry IV, Part One. Thus, that play was chosen for the basis of our work.

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Any Shakespeare play can be approached from many different directions. Henry IV, Part One can be positioned as a play about a young man, Prince Hal, who has to decide who he wants to be. He begins the play hanging out with a group of knuckleheads, knowing that his father wants him to assume the responsibility of the crown. The King, Henry IV, has a tenuous grip on the throne. His cousins are stirring rebellion and plotting to challenge his monarchy. Hal has to decide if he wants to accept the responsibility of being heir apparent and help his father manage affairs at court, or follow Falstaff’s example and continue having fun with his friends. War is on the horizon and Hal’s cousin Hotspur is much more in the model of what Hal’s father wishes the prince would become. Like all great origin stories, existential questions hang in the balance. Will Hal’s Peter Parker accept great responsibility and become Spiderman? What are the values that guide his way? Shakespeare gives us a road map for posing the questions: how do family expectations, living up to your potential, and seeing yourself as a leader resonate for youth and veterans in our community?

Finding the Signposts; Making the Map “Signpost” was a term used to indicate points of the Shakespeare story that the community will examine together in detail. A  signpost could be a full scene or a small piece of text that connects to the thematic conversation. Maybe the language is especially rich. Maybe the potential for design or movement is exciting or crucial to the story. Maybe it is a plot point that is confusing and needs further explanation. Taken together the signposts form an outline for the new text and give the artistic teams a place to start. I, as Program Director, working with Peter Howard, the director of the play, and Facilitation Director Jenna Delgado, identified key points in Henry IV, Part One that would serve as our outline and attached values that the characters might use to guide their decisions. Those key points were Honor, Duty, and Truth.

Signpost 1: History—Framing the Story As the second play in the “Henriad,” Henry IV, Part One, continues the events begun in Richard II. History plays have tangled webs of family conflict that often need explication. The young hothead Bollingbrook has become King Henry IV, having led his family in deposing his cousin Richard and sending Richard to his death in prison. The Writing Team, led by Alison De La Cruz and Rose Portillo, will open our show with the Richard II back-story,

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introducing the major characters and their relationships to each other, as well as the story of Henry IV. Writing prompt: What questions do you have about what is going on?

Inspired by actual events, the WPY community sets this adaptation in a classroom. The teacher has been called up from ready reserves and has left the classroom with an assignment:  read Henry IV, Part One and interview Veterans about the themes in the play. The students decide to fulfill their commitment to their teacher, the fictional Ms. Garcia, and complete the assignment. The new text generated in the WPY process is incorporated into the final script as a blend of Youth and Veteran voices. The new text recaps the story and explains character relationships. Text culled from Veteran interviews is presented as homework due for Ms. Garcia.

Signpost 2: Hal—Duty PRINCE. I know you all, and will awhile uphold The unyoked humor of your idleness. Yet herein will I imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the world, That, when he please again to be himself, Being wanted, he may be more wondered at, By breaking through the foul and ugly mists Of vapors that did seem to strangle him. If all the year were playing holidays, To sport would be as tedious as to work, But when they seldom come, they wished-for come, And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents. So when this loose behavior I throw off And pay the debt I never promised, By how much better than my word I am, By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes; And, like bright metal on a sullen ground, My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault, Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes Than that which hath no foil to set it off. I’ll so offend, to make offence a skill, Redeeming time when men think least I will. (1.2.202–24)

Hal acknowledges that he is not living up to his potential, but he is not ready to change his ways. Is he sincere, or just making excuses? Does Hal have a sense of duty to family or country?

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Chris Anthony Writing prompt: Has there ever been a time when you purposely did not live up to your potential?

Signpost 3: Hotspur—Duty/Honor (See Signpost 5 below for response) HOTSPUR. My liege, I did deny no prisoners. But I remember, when the fight was done, When I was dry with rage and extreme toil, Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword, Came there a certain lord, neat, and trimly dressed, Fresh as a bridegroom, and his chin new reaped Showed like a stubble land at harvest home. He was perfumed like a milliner, And ‘twixt his finger and his thumb he held A pouncet box, which ever and anon He gave his nose and took’t away again, Who therewith angry, when it next came there, Took it in snuff; and still he smiled and talked, And as the soldiers bore dead bodies by, He called them untaught knaves, unmannerly, To bring a slovenly unhandsome corse Betwixt the wind and his nobility. With many holiday and lady terms He questioned me, amongst the rest demanded My prisoners in your majesty’s behalf. I then, all smarting with my wounds being cold, To be so pestered with a popinjay, Out of my grief and my impatience, Answered neglectingly I know not what— He should, or he should not; for he made me mad To see him shine so brisk and smell so sweet And talk so like a waiting-gentlewoman Of guns and drums and wounds—God save the mark!— And telling me the sovereignest thing on earth Was parmacety for an inward bruise, And that it was great pity, so it was, This villainous salt-peter should be digged Out of the bowels of the harmless Earth, Which many a good tall fellow had destroyed So cowardly, and but for these vile guns, He would himself have been a soldier. (1.3.30–66)

Harry Percy, aka Hotspur, recounts an episode on the battlefield in which the King’s emissary came to claim prisoners that Hotspur captured in battle.

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Hotspur is a soldier first and diplomat never. He was so overcome with feelings after being disrespected, he is not actually sure what he said. Have you ever been so overcome with emotion that you could barely think straight? Do civilians ever unintentionally disrespect soldiers/veterans?

This piece was explored in an exercise inspired by Augusto Boal’s Rainbow of Desire. Why, the Youth wondered, would anything be worth all of that? How would it feel at that moment for someone to come in “neat and trimly dressed” and demand anything, let alone the only tangible thing that Hotspur could hold onto? The Youth community read the scene and brainstormed different emotions that Hotspur might be feeling. Words ranging from “pride” to “grief” were placed on a poster. Later, members of the Youth community embodied these feelings by making “living” sculptures. An Army Veteran of the Iraq war joined our community as we unpacked this section. He took a walk through the garden of human sculptures. WPY participants held their bodies in frozen shapes evoking victory, anguish, camaraderie, exhaustion, shock, rage, love, loss, and more. He silently took it all in, stepped back, and let out a quiet sigh. “Yes,” he said. “I felt all of that. I didn’t know it at the time, but I felt all of those things.” Other Veterans said: “Sometimes you want to just punch that person in the head. But you refuse to behave uncivilized. There’s so much civilians don’t understand.” “Life in combat is Technicolor. There’s nothing that you can compare to it. It is right here, right now. Not five seconds ago, not five seconds from now. Right now. You cannot forget the immediacy of that reality.” “Friends die and you can’t take the time to kneel down and cry, you have to keep going; you can’t stop the war and say ‘I need grief time’.” “I was on one of my first missions, we were doing a sweep through a ricepaddy and I came upon a jungle boot. I had this immediate judgment of ‘how careless that a trooper left his boot out here’. I leaned over and then I could see this shinbone from a rotting foot sticking up. This was my baptism. It wasn’t about being shot at or shooting people, it was the detritus of combat. Nobody, no death had ever affected me as much as that.” (All quotes here and below are from the unpublished Will Power to Youth adaptation of Henry IV, Part One, premiered August 13, 2015 in Los Angeles)

Signpost 4: Lady Percy—Truth LADY PERCY. Why dost thou bend thine eyes upon the earth And start so often when thou sit’st alone? Why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks And given my treasures and my rights of thee

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Chris Anthony To thick-eyed musing and cursed melancholy? In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watched, And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars, Speak terms of manage to thy bounding steed, Cry “Courage! To the field!” … Thy spirit within thee hath been so at war, And thus hath so bestirred thee in thy sleep, That beads of sweat have stood upon thy brow Like bubbles in a late-disturbed stream … (2.3.44–61)

Hotspur’s wife questions his secretive plotting. She describes his sleepless nights with language that, today, we might recognize as symptoms of PostTraumatic Stress. She is like many military spouses, in it but not of it. She has not been to war, but lives with the consequences. She tries to get him to talk about what he is going through. Artistic prompt: Has there ever been a time when you couldn’t tell the people you love how you really feel or what you were going through?

One of the places where Veterans and Youth found common ground was the experience of Post-Traumatic Stress. Several Veterans interviewed spoke frankly about their experiences of hyper-vigilance, intrusive thoughts, depression, and more. A  Marine veteran who works with Vets pursuing higher education reminded everyone that while we want to be mindful that many veterans are experiencing some form of stress, we could not assume that all Vets are grappling with the same conditions in the same way. Combat is just one stressor that can induce PTSD. The actual training itself could be traumatic. One of our female Vets declined to speak about her basic training in any detail because her experiences with abuse of power and outright assault were too difficult to discuss. Many Youth in the program wrote about times that they had experienced violence or the threat of violence, often as a regular feature of life in their neighborhood. Like the Veterans, WPY participants spoke of the need for support from family and community. Will Power to Youth had a therapist on staff who could support participants and refer anyone who needed it to follow-up services. Here are Youth and Veteran voices together. Sometimes it is not clear which is which: “The dreams never go away; the screams never go away.” “We became a new tribe of lost children. The hard part was burying that angry young man inside me. It took a long, long time. I  thought ‘do I  want to kill myself? No. I went through too much hell to get home.’ A piece of you

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never comes home. I was lucky enough to have a family that held me and fought with me.” “I had to learn to live with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It’s a pretty encompassing life-long condition. The really sticky part is that it’s not always immediate. I did very well for eleven years.” “When I got home, I destroyed everything I had that was military. And I’m still proud of my service. But that’s what I did. I isolated myself. I didn’t talk.” “I was on edge. I was taught to watch my sixes and always look over my shoulder. I was always ready for something to happen. In some ways I’ve relaxed; in some ways I haven’t.” “There is a dim light and a cracked mirror. And in that cracked mirror is someone whom I do not know. I am a stranger to myself. I’m lost and I want to be found.” “My past has affected me. I  isolated myself, put myself down … harmed myself. One day, I decided to tell my boyfriend. If he loves me like he says he does … I felt free. I felt good. He understood and has stayed with me. I don’t want to hide myself anymore.” “I was suffering from Survivor’s Guilt. A lot of people I cared about didn’t come home and I did. Why?” “You know you don’t have to be a soldier to get PTSD.”

Signpost 5: Prince Hal—Duty KING. Why, Harry, do I tell thee of my foes, Which art my nearest and dearest enemy? … PRINCE. Do not think so; you shall not find it so. And God forgive them that so much have swayed Your majesty’s good thoughts away from me. I will redeem all this on Percy’s head, And in the closing of some glorious day Be bold to tell you that I am your son … (3.2.126–36)

The King is worried that Hal will not step up to fulfill his responsibility. Hal may even align himself with the enemy camp. Hal vows to redeem himself and step into the role that has been chosen for him. What decisions do we make out of duty? What helps us step up to be our best selves?

One Veteran of the Cold War guarded missiles in West Germany. In a group panel interview he spoke of the tedium of standing watch for long hours with no interruptions. Tedium coupled with the threat that nuclear war could erupt at any minute. When asked what duty meant to him, he replied, “Get the job done.” That became one of his lines in the play. He was the only

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Veteran who performed alongside the Youth. In their retelling of the story, he was the “facilities manager” at their school. The Youth connected to Hal’s experience of family pressure and wanting to realize their parents’ hopes and dreams. In their journals they expressed feelings of frustration but also responsibility. One of the Youth summed up duty as “doing the right thing even when no one is watching.” From the Youth: “My dad is always pushing me hard. He doesn’t believe in limits. I try my best. But how I wish he would see the real me instead of who he wants me to be.” “I gave up a long time ago. My mother doesn’t care about my opinions. My sister criticizes me for everything. My friends are judgmental … it’s like a war that was lost long ago.” “I work a lot of hours. I decided it’s my responsibility to give money to my mom each time I get paid because that’s nothing compared to the sacrifices she’s made for me. It makes me happy to see her happy.” “I feel it’s my duty to speak up for our LGBT community and to stand up to bullying.” “I have a duty not to be violent like my father was; to help my sister who was a victim of violence. I have a duty to be more successful than my parents but I don’t want to be compared to my sister. We aren’t the same person. My dad pushes so hard. But it’s still my duty to do well and overcome what my parents weren’t able to do.”

From the Veterans: “I decided to join the military instead of going to college. I had to wait a year to sign the papers myself; my mother tried to convince me not to do it and go to college. I hate the idea of college. I want to be different. I feel it’s a duty to myself.” “Duty? Get the job done.” “No excuses. No ifs ands or buts, no matter what the circumstances.” “I come from a military family. I was a dance major, an actor, a teacher. I felt a duty to serve, to understand first-hand my family’s legacy.” “Duty is about integrity; it’s about the moral/ethical questioning that we go through in life. Fulfill your obligation to your country; make sure things move the way they should move.” “It’s about following all directives from my platoon commander; keep myself alive, keep my fellow Marines alive. And now … Take care of my mom. Take care of fellow Vets.” “Duty and responsibility are interchangeable. Now it means doing all I can to ensure my government fulfills its responsibility to the men and women they have used to conduct their foreign policy.”

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Signpost 6: Falstaff-Honor FALSTAFF. Well, ‘tis no matter. Honor pricks me on. Yea, but how if honor prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honor set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honor hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honor? A word. What is in that word “honor”? What is that “honor”? Air. A trim reckoning. Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no. Doth he hear it? No. ‘Tis insensible, then. Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism. (5.1.129–42)

Falstaff gives us his “catechism,” his perspective on Honor, which may run contrary to other depictions of honor in the play. His conclusion is that honor is an epitaph, a tombstone, and only means something once one is dead. Some of the questions about honor we raised; What is it? What is it worth? What motivates me, or “pricks me on”? What keeps me from giving up? What is honorable to me? How do I decide? What is my “true north”? What does it mean to honor our heroes?

One of the WPY program alumni was preparing to enter the Marine Corps. He had enlisted and was waiting for his date to ship out. He spent his early mornings exercising to prepare for his basic training, so he had time later in the day to visit with the WPY community. He came to the interview days and met the Veterans, who gave him important advice about the journey ahead; “Don’t have your loved ones write you mushy letters, they get read out loud in the mess hall. You will definitely get teased for it.” “They are going to put you in a gas mask and you think that you are going to die, but you won’t. Just know that. You will get through it.” “You can see San Diego from your window but you won’t be able to go there. You are not in the same world anymore.” “The point of basic is to break you down and make you part of a machine. When you come out on the other side, you will be you again.”

Knowing that one of us, one of our own was about to walk into this world shifted the questions for the WPY staff. For this alumnus, the military had been a lifelong dream. He did not frame his enlistment as a glorious act, but rather as seizing an opportunity for a better life. He did not want to go to college. In the Marine Corps he would learn a skill on the job. He eventually became an aircraft mechanic, having left the Corps with a valuable skill. He wanted to serve his country, but he also felt a duty to make his family’s sacrifices feel worthwhile. That was how he defined Honor, Duty, Truth.

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Instead of asking general questions about Honor, we simply took what the Veterans volunteered; “I was 17 years old. A recruiter met me at my homeroom door and that was it. I was taken to the enlistment center, took my physical, and was on a plane to San Diego. Drafted. 1969. That same day, my first day, I spent 36 hours standing at attention. You’re not allowed to move. When I did, I was beaten. The training was so intense. There were days I wanted to give up. Then you go to war. You don’t know one day from the next. All you care about is ‘let me survive’. You’re not the 17 year-old who wanted to be in a rock band anymore.” “There was a moment where I had 80 pounds of gear on my body and was climbing a mountain and my lungs were on fire. Fire. And I had no control over what I was allowed to do or whether I could stop or not. I thought, ‘So this is what it’s like to be a pawn.’ That’s when I realized I don’t want to ever be controlled by anything ever again if I can possibly help it. I want to take control of my own life.” “When I joined … I think I would be lying if I didn’t say one of the furthest things from my mind was that I was actually going to face the possibility of war.” “We looked after each other. We were trying to be friends but not be friends because friends die. When I came back, I took a road trip to places I’d never been and visited the homes and families of those that didn’t make it back. I wanted to know where they came from; it was my way to honor them. And myself.”

We then asked the Youth what they lived by: “Live with purpose.” “Life is precious you need to make it worth even more.” “Live for each day. Say what I mean and mean what I say.” “Listen to the other side of the story.” “Be open-minded.” “Own up to your mistakes.” “Love All. Trust Few. Do Wrong to None.” “You never know what someone else is going through, so stay in your shoes.” “It isn’t a sin to fight for the right cause.” “Do not harbor hatred for one who harms you. They had their reasons; it may have been the logical thing to do.” “Never be the reason for someone else’s failure.” “Respect me if you want to be respected.” “I will fight for a better life, not only for myself, but for others. I will be selfless and considerate. I will love before I fight and fight for what I love. The past will be my push for a better change.”

Conclusion As playwright Jonathan Larson wrote in Rent, “The opposite of war is not peace, it’s creation.” Or put another way, the opposite of war is art. Making

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art engages the generative, creative impulses in human nature. It is not therapy but it is therapeutic. In the end, the two communities engaged in this process did shift their perceptions. Each performance was followed by a post-show discussion with the audience. The discussions allowed all parties—youth, vets, and audiences—to speak directly to each other. The Veteran who performed in the project was surprised by his response to the young people. He was amazed by the dedication that they had brought to their work. They took him seriously as an artist, respected his experience as a veteran, and supported each other at every step of the process. The Youth participants expressed gratitude at learning more about the issues that veterans contend with. They found new compassion for veterans’ struggles and learned to appreciate their sacrifices. Youth also felt greater appreciation for their own strengths and skills. Both groups, the Youth and Veterans, expressed appreciation for the other. Veterans who participated in the interviews were amazed by the final production. They could see the tremendous work that the Youth put into every element of production. And they appreciated being heard in a new way by new audiences. Finally, the audiences not only expressed appreciation for all of the work, but the opportunity to hear Shakespeare in a new way. One Shakespeare scholar said that, as often as she has taught the play, it had never resonated as powerfully as it did in context with the Will Power to Youth/ Veterans in Art community. That was our final measure of success:  Youth, Veterans, and audiences leaving the theatre with a transformed sense of themselves, our community, and their relationship to Shakespeare.

Works Cited All textual citations refer to: Folger Shakespeare Library. Shakespeare’s Plays from Folger Digital Texts. Edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library, 15 January, 2019. www.folgerdigitaltexts.org. Boal, Augusto. The Rainbow of Desire:  The Boal Method of Theatre and Therapy. Routledge, 1995. Larson, Jonathan. Rent—The Complete Script and Lyrics of the Broadway Show. Applause Paperback. 1996.

3.  Re-“Claiming from the Female”: Shakespeare’s Henry V Janna Segal

Battle lines between scholars and among practitioners have been drawn over the political agenda of Henry V, Shakespeare’s third and final play depicting the transformation of England’s prodigal Prince Hal into a king “full of grace and fair regard” (1.1.24). Some poststructuralist critics, like Greenblatt and Tennenhouse, have positioned the play as state-solidifying stagecraft in service to the Elizabethan court.1 Others, such as Dollimore and Sinfield and Hedrick and Reynolds, have situated the play as inadvertently or otherwise undermining its seemingly state-consolidating function.2 Between these two factions are critics like Rabkin and Gurr who declare the play indecisive about the English monarchy’s martial impulses and the titular character who embodies them.3 Modern to postmodern stage and screen productions have tended to be divided into comparable camps that either celebrate, denounce, or ambivalently represent the historical monarch’s military conquests. For instance, Sir Laurence Olivier’s World War II-era film idealized the exploits of “the warlike Harry” (1.P.5). Unlike Olivier’s jingoistic depiction, Michael Kahn’s Vietnam War-era production for the American Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Connecticut, denounced the horrors of warfare.4 Produced two years after Trump’s triumph over the Oval Office, Robert O’Hara’s 2018 production for the New York Public Theatre’s Mobile Unit landed in between these politically-pendulum swinging wartime renditions. According to New York Times reviewer Alexis Soloski, O’Hara’s production was most notable for its indecisiveness: “it doesn’t seem to know which story it’s telling. This version isn’t an unthinking endorsement of rah-rah patriotism, but it’s not really an attack on nation-building either.” Despite their differing positions on the ideological imperatives of the play’s representation of Henry V, the scholarly factions share some common

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ground. These contrasting critical camps implicitly agree that Shakespeare’s version of this chapter of the Hundred Years War is largely concerned with the martial (and concluding marital) exploits of a male monarch in a male-dominated dramatic landscape. While some critics, like McEachern, Hedrick and Reynolds, and Newman, attend to the play’s representation of Princess Katherine of France,5 the tendency among critics of even the most polarized positions has been to follow the male characters’ voices and deeds. This is unsurprising given that among the play’s over 45 discrete characters written to be played by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, there are a mere four female-identified figures:  Hostess Quickly; Katherine; Alice, Katherine’s gentlewoman; and the Queen of France. With the exception of the Act Three scene between Katherine and Alice, these four only appear on stage with male characters. Moreover, these women are all directly or indirectly associated with France, and therefore among those vanquished by the invading Englishmen at the center of the action. Even the lone English woman among the cast, Hostess Quickly, is among the Frenchified enemy: a source of contention between the English soldiers Nym and Pistol, her final line in the play is the French salutation “Adieu” (2.3.62), and Pistol reveals in the final act that she has died “of a malady of France” (5.2.85–86). The text also linguistically defaults to a male subject position; indeed, according to the Oxford Shakespeare concordance for Henry V, the word “man” appears fifty-one (198–99) and “men” forty-six times in the dialogue (204–05), while “woman” is stated twice and “women” is uttered six times (350). Not unlike the common ground covered by those on the frontlines of criticism on the play, the British and American boards upon which Henry V has historically tread have primarily prioritized the play’s male-laden landscape; however, some more recent productions have used casting to pressurize assumptions, including those circulating in the play, regarding gender and power. Robert Hastie’s 2016 production at the Open Air theatre in Regent’s Park featured Michelle Terry as the King, a choice Dominic Cavendish of The Telegraph declared “the biggest cross-gender shock to the Shakespearean system this year.” According to Cavendish, Terry’s “neutral stance, neither overtly a woman in a man’s world, nor attempting male impersonation,” effectively encouraged “perceptions to shift” and threw “the gauntlet down to any prejudices.” The Guardian’s Michael Billington similarly praised Terry’s “astonishing” performance, and found the casting of a woman in a role written for and traditionally played by a man especially “appropriate” at this “time of heightened awareness of gender equality.” While not as critically well-received as Hastie’s version, O’Hara’s 2018 production also cross-gender cast the lead role: Zenzi Williams, an African American female performer, played

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the English King. In her New York Times review, Soloski praised O’Hara for this “canny move that makes us ask some useful questions about whom we expect to see leading an army and rocking a crown.” Unlike Cavendish’s praise for Terry’s gendered “neutral stance” as a female cast as a Henry operating within “a man’s world,” Soloski found O’Hara’s production’s indeterminacy regarding Henry’s place within a gender binary problematic:  “It’s unclear whether she’s playing the part as male or female. It’s extraneous, too. Gender doesn’t seem to matter to this production.” Given Henry V’s concentration on male characters’ exploits and its linguistically male preferences, it is hard to imagine a production in which “Gender doesn’t seem to matter.” The fact that the play’s central conflict is ignited in response to the imposition of a patriarchal law and after a lengthy discussion of gender-based entitlements further evinces the importance of gender to Shakespeare’s rendition of England’s conquest of France. As the Bishop of Canterbury tells the King in Act One, Scene Two, in order to deny Henry V’s claim to the French throne, the French court has invoked the Salic law that declares, “No woman shall succeed in Salic land” (1.2.43). Canterbury first argues that this law has been arbitrarily applied to Henry:  previous French kings “all appear / To hold in right and title of the female. / So do the kings of France unto this day, / Howbeit they would hold up this Salic law / To bar your Highness claiming from the female” (1.2.93–97). The Bishop’s exposure of the current French rulers’ hypocrisy is not what convinces the English King to take action. Henry’s immediate response to the Bishop, “May I with right and conscience make this claim?” (1.2.101), indicates he needs further justification than the arguably unjust application of a secular law to a nonFrench king to validate his “claiming from the female” a prerogative of power over France. Canterbury’s response to the King’s query further emphasizes the import of gender to the play’s central conflict. The Bishop invokes non-secular law to provide Henry with the “right” he seeks: “For in the Book of Numbers is it writ / ‘When the man dies [and hath no son], let the inheritance / Descend unto the daughter’ ” (1.2.103–05).6 The biblical positioning of “the daughter” as a conduit of her father’s property if there is no son provides Henry with the religious “right” he needs. The Bishop then invokes Henry’s male lineage to provide the King with the “conscience” he desires to “make this claim”: “Look back into your mighty ancestors. / Go, my dread lord, to your great-grandsire’s tomb, / From whom you claim; invoke his warlike spirit, / And your great-uncle’s” (1.2.107–10). Canterbury’s recourse to the King’s “great-grandsire” and “great-uncle” for validation is reiterated by the Bishop of Ely, who impresses upon the King that his claim to the French crown is warranted by his patrilineal inheritance of traits imagined as naturally

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male: “You are their heir, you sit upon their throne, / The blood and courage that renownèd them, / Runs in your veins” (1.2.122–24). The King’s uncle Exeter reiterates the Bishop’s “blood”-based point: “Your brother kings and monarch of the Earth / Do all expect that you should rouse yourself / As did the former lions of your blood” (1.2.127–29). According to the bishops and the King’s uncle, “courage” and a “warlike spirit” are fundamental characteristics passed through and among men. A “daughter” may be the channel for “the inheritance” of “the man” left without a male heir, and thereby provide Henry with a “right” to land originally belonging to a “man”; but, the imagined as innately masculine “conscience” Henry seeks to legitimize his authority over France is to be found in the “blood” that runs through the “veins” of his “brother kings” and other male relations. It is after hearing the claims concerning his inherited patrilineal privileges that Henry becomes “well resolved” that “France” is “ours” to “bend” to “our awe / Or break” (1.2.230–33). In this opening scene, the play establishes that while Henry may have a biblically defensible “right” to breach the Salic law that would bar him from “claiming from the female,” it is more important that he is the “heir” of men. This exposition scene’s discussion of matrilineal claims to property and patrilineal claims to manly power confirms that gender is a determining factor in the play’s dramatic conflict. Thus, even if Soloski correctly identifies O’Hara’s production as striving to make gender “seem” irrelevant, it remains at the root of the “matter” of the play. The role of gender in Henry V was forefront on my mind when I  was invited in November 2018 by director Jennifer Pennington to serve as dramaturg for an all-female production of the play for the Spring 2019 Young American Shakespeare Festival at the Commonwealth Theatre Center (CTC) in Louisville, Kentucky. Pennington’s initial impetus for an all-female Henry V was a desire to offer more Shakespearean performance opportunities for her female-identifying Conservatory students at the CTC. Founded in 2015 as a merger of Walden Theatre (established 1976) and the Blue Apple Players (established 1976), the TCG-affiliated CTC annually provides practical training, performance opportunities, and productions for roughly 50,000 youth and 5,000 adults. Operating under the umbrella of the CTC, the Walden Theatre Conservatory trains emerging theatre artists through classes and productions of classic and contemporary plays. The CTC’s Young American Shakespeare Festival, which is the nation’s longest-running Shakespeare festival for youth, is fundamental to the Conservatory students’ training. Cast in one of three Shakespeare productions or adaptations that run for two weeks in May, the Festival annually provides Conservatory students with Shakespearean production experience. The CTC routinely practices cross-gender casting

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in order to afford more female students parts in plays initially written for Shakespeare’s all-male company; however, the CTC had not yet attempted to produce an all-female Henry V. Artistic Director Charlie Sexton enthusiastically embraced Pennington’s casting proposal as an exciting challenge for the company and an innovative approach to the play.7 In our pre-production meetings, Pennington and I discussed a number of questions raised by her proposed casting of twenty young women in a play dominated by male characters. For instance, why should Shakespeare’s rendition of Henry V’s story, which is populated with men fighting a war over prerogatives then forbidden to women, be told through the voices of female-identifying performers to our American target audience? How might an Elizabethan drama depicting an English medieval king “claiming from the female” (1.2.97) a right to land initially held by a man and characterizing power as a male birthright be reclaimed to champion women’s rights in this #MeToo moment, when women are hash-tagging out sexual harassment while having their right to choose chipped away? How might the performers’ legibly female forms inform the patriarchal conceptions of gender circulated in the text and in our dominant culture? How might a play written for an all-male company that has a male protagonist, no lead female role among its over 45 individualized parts, and a scant four supporting female characters be performed by a company of twenty young women? Our answers to these questions led to production choices that punctuated the ways in which socially-prescribed gender designations regulate the characters’ lives, as well as Americans’ daily lives. Primary among these was a bookended, multi-media framing device and a cross-gender and multi-cast Henry. The following description of these choices is offered not as a prescription for future productions seeking to resolve the play’s patriarchal imperatives, which may be irresolvable and more productively engaged with dialectically. Rather, these strategies are discussed to open pathways for scholars and practitioners interested in pursuing the dramaturgically important matter of the female gender to the world of Henry V.

“Chorus to This History” (HV, 1.P.33) During our first conversation about the production, Pennington and I probed the possible resonance of war for our young actors. Born after 9/11, our cast had not experienced life untouched by the threat of terroristic attacks or encountered a world inaccessible over the internet. The omnipresence of iPhones ensured that our actors were routinely inundated with images of violence enacted at home and abroad. We wondered how these young women

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respond to the constant projection on small screens of video and still images of women under siege overseas and on our shores. This conversation ultimately led to what became the production’s framing device, with which we opened and closed our staging of Shakespeare’s rendition of a received history. The play’s first Chorus and concluding Epilogue uses direct address to bridge the space between the audience and “this unworthy scaffold” (1.P.11), and the time between the spectators’ lives and those of these “two mighty monarchies” (1.P.21). Similarly, our bookended frame was delivered to the audience in order to contextualize “this history” (1.P.33) and “work” upon the spectators’ “imaginary forces” (1.P.21). While layered on top of and in keeping with the metatheatrics of the play’s Chorus, our frame departed from Shakespeare’s text in significant ways: it provided a contemporary context; it was in multiple visual and aural mediums; and it was performed by a large, multi-generational group of female-identifying performers. Performed on a bare, thrust stage equipped with two platforms and a scrim backdrop, this Henry V started with the entrance from offstage right of a single young woman (Beatrice Friesen) dressed in the typical teenage uniform of jeans, a khaki green t-shirt, and sneakers. She entered engaged in an activity ubiquitous among her generation:  walking while staring at a cell phone screen. The audiovisual material emanating from her device was projected onto the scrim and played over the theatre’s speakers, situating the audience within her subjectivity. The actor and spectators were exposed to an image of women and children in a prison camp accompanied by the sounds of machine gun fire and a news report about the war in Afghanistan.8 As the performer dropped to her knees center stage, similarly dressed young women engaged in the same activity entered the space from the wings and the house, first two at a time, then three, and so on. Linked by their casual attire and cellphone use, but oblivious to each other or the audience, the actors stood or sat around the playing area, absorbed by the images and sounds springing from their handheld devices. Dispersed around the bare set, they stayed disconnected from each other while sharing the same space and induced by the same media. The scrim behind the performers displayed the montage of photographs flickering before the actors’ eyes on their cell phone screens, and the rapidly overlapping audio clips arising from their phones rang throughout the theatre. Like the performers, the spectators were inundated with such images as women and children fleeing violence in modern-day Syria; female soldiers in South Vietnam; Japanese rape victims in a World War II camp; and present-day migrants seeking refuge at the Greek-Macedonia border. The sounds cascading around actors and spectators alike included archival reportage from

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the Vietnam War, current reportage on the Syrian War, and the pro-life sound bites of prominent Republican politicians As Dan Rather’s commentary on President Trump’s response to a chemical attack in Syria played over-head, the actors looked up from their miniature screens and took a collective, audible breath in. Still oblivious to anyone else and still either seated or standing, they turned their backs to the audience and faced the scrim, which now featured a photograph of protesters at a #MeToo rally holding signs pronouncing the legitimacy of female voices. The sounds swirled as the flashing stills landed on that of an African American woman at a Black Lives Matter rally with white tape across her mouth, upon which was written Eric Garner’s final words, “I can’t breathe!” The first actor to enter the space, who had remained on her knees center stage, faced front, dropped her head backwards and, invoking Helene Weigel’s iconic silent scream from Brecht’s production of Mother Courage and Her Children,9 issued forth a voiceless cry. Recognizing this noiseless burst of anguish, the ensemble immediately became aware of the silent screamer and each other (Fig.  1). Theatricalizing the lifting up of women’s voices, those standing extended a hand to help raise those still seated on the stage floor. The now uplifted group

Fig.  1:  A silent scream heard by the ensemble in the Commonwealth Theatre Center’s production of  Henry V  (courtesy of Commonwealth Theatre Center, by Crystal Ludwick Photo)

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faced each other to collectively sing the Wyrd Sisters’ folk ballad, “Warrior” (1996).10 The Wyrd Sisters’ “Warrior” song was chosen and arranged by Sarah Hoeppner, Artistic Director of Nevertheless Arts Ensemble, a Louisvillebased, all-female arts collective with whom we partnered to create the framing device.11 Lyrically, the “Warrior” song traces a journey from youthful apathy to adult acceptance of responsibility; thus, it has parallels to the protagonist’s journey from the rambunctious Prince Hal to the conquering King Henry V.  The song’s protagonist, though, is neither male nor an invader; rather, it is an older woman reflecting upon the “shy and lonely girl” and the “lost and angry youth” she once was. The singing subject reflects on her younger iterations’ failure to act in response to “the echoes of her cries.” The song initially equates inaction with the female gender: “I cannot fight / I cannot a warrior be / It’s not my nature nor my teaching / It is the womanhood in me.” Towards the song’s conclusion, the “now” “older woman” vows she will “a fierce warrior be / ‘til not another woman dies.” Correcting the characterization of passivity as an essential trait of “womanhood,” the song attributes the newfound realization that “I can and will fight” to “nature,” “duty,” “womanhood,” and “sisterhood.” Embodying the “shy and lonely girl” of the song’s first stanza, our young female company sang facing each other until the first chorus’s line, “I cannot fight,” at which point the actors shame-facedly turned towards the audience, inviting them to correct the lyrical attribution of inaction to an imagined-as-innate “womanhood in me.” As they sang the next verse from the perspective of the “lost and angry youth,” Nevertheless Arts Ensemble members appeared on stage in long, colorful skirts and tops (Fig. 2). The Nevertheless collective vocally joined in with the more casually-clad younger performers as the song shifted perspective to that of the “older woman now.” The two groups were visually distinguishable, with the jeans and khaki tees of the teenage CTC cast in stark contrast to the flowing skirts and blouses of the adult Nevertheless singers. Their harmonic vocalization of the song’s coming-of-age and coming-to-resistance story connected the cross-generational groups. Fulfilling the lyrics’ promise that in time a “young girl” “can and will a warrior be,” the harmony situated the older singers as projections of what the younger performers could become. At the song’s conclusion, the Nevertheless ensemble left the stage and the CTC cast launched into the first act Chorus of the play. Starting the dramatic narrative at the Nevertheless singers’ exit suggested that the anticipated maturation process would begin with the young women collectively re “claiming from the female” (1.1.97) the identity of “warrior” repeatedly denied to women and assigned to men in such canonized texts as Shakespeare’s Henry V.

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Fig. 2:  The Commonwealth Theatre Center actors performing with the Nevertheless Arts Ensemble (courtesy of Commonwealth Theatre Center, by Crystal Ludwick Photo)

Forsaking the Epilogue, and along with it a concluding focus on the male “author” (5.E.2) and the succeeding Henry VI, our staging of Shakespeare’s play ended with an emphasis on two marginalized female characters: the Queen of France, who only appears in the final scene; and her daughter Katherine, who at the conclusion is the “first” “article” “granted” by the French King to the newly-minted “Henry Le Roi” (5.2.344–45; 351). At the end of Act Five, Scene Two, the male characters filed out through the house in preparation for the royal wedding, leaving behind Katherine and her mother to create a tableau that pronounced the agency denied to the Princess in the matrimonial negotiations. Seated diagonally and facing upstage right, Katherine (Lilly Stanley) looked anxiously at the standing Queen (Ruby Osborne) facing her. The Queen tentatively offered a hand, echoing the lifting gesture extended to the seated CTC cast members in the opening sequence. Despite the urge to assist her daughter, the Queen withdrew her outstretched hand, motioned with her head for her daughter to follow, and left the stage to join the male characters. Only Katherine remained on stage, muted by her assigned role in the historical record, but not yet ready to cross over the threshold of an arranged marriage necessary to unite “the contending kingdoms” (5.2.361).

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The abandoned Katherine stayed diagonally seated at this crossroad as the CTC and the Nevertheless ensembles slowly re-entered from the wings and house and sat or stood facing the Princess. Transitioning away from Shakespeare’s script and back to the contemporary frame, the young performer playing Katherine dropped her royal role and returned to her offstage persona. She began to tell the onstage, all-female audience facing her about a #MeToo moment she had at age thirteen. Other performers in the united ensembles began sharing similar experiences, creating a cacophony akin to the barrage of violent sounds and images with which the show opened. The vivid accounts reverberated off each other, and the resounding effect recalled the “echo of her cries” refrain from the opening sequence’s rendition of “Warrior.” The swirling stories gave way to their collective recitation, now for the offstage audience, of Teresa Willis’s poem “Unbreakable Heart.” The poem then bled into an acoustic performance of Catherine Dalton’s Celticflavored song, “She Rises” (2012).12 Willis’s poem’s insistence that “our voices rise” was complemented by Dalton’s lyrical assertion that “She rises up” and “she’ll rise again.” The theatre went dark after the unified, multi-generational company sang Dalton’s final line announcing that she “lights the fire within.” Thus, when the lights came back up for the CTC cast and Nevertheless singers’ shared bow, it seemed as if they were lit by the performers’ “fire.” This bookended, multi-modal framing device drew an analogy between the play’s depiction of the Hundred Years War and the military and cultural battles fought today. In an interview with local NPR reporter Ashlie Stevens, Pennington pronounced the parallels drawn between the battles fought in Henry V and those invoked in the frame: “There’s a lot of war against women right now, okay? Literally and figuratively and metaphorically […]. And this play, Henry V, is very masculine, like hyper-masculine, ultra-theatrical telling of a story of war. And specifically men at war.” By the end of their staging of the play, the CTC company had collectively appropriated Shakespeare’s “hyper-masculine, ultra-theatrical telling” of Henry’s successes in France. Opening and closing this chapter of history with the cast confronting today’s struggles re-impressed the relevance of Shakespeare’s text to our present moment, when there is, among other conflicts, wars being waged here and abroad against women. The framing device’s emphasis on the use of an all-female cast furthered the deconstructive pressure effected by their performance of roles Shakespeare conceived of as male and wrote for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The twenty female-identifying CTC performers’ occupation of these “hyper-masculine” parts revealed that “masculine,” like feminine, is “theatrical.” It is a construct reliant upon the repeated performance of gendered actions and the circulation

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of narratives that, like Henry V, essentialize a patriarchal binary.13 Challenging the play’s claim that the King’s “warlike spirit” is an innate male trait that only courses through the “veins” of men (1.2.107; .124), the legibly female actors played the male characters without adopting stereotypical “masculine” postures or lowered voices. They played the Shakespearean text and the contemporary text within the bookended frame in their socially-assigned roles as young women, which they play daily. In their designated-female forms, they embodied Shakespeare’s “hyper-masculine” history, re “claiming from the female” (1.2.97) the privileges, characteristics, leading parts, and heroic narratives often imagined as only available to men. Performed by an all-female cast within a frame addressing modern-day issues, Henry V was situated as a Shakespearean-play-within-a-play, with the early modern historical drama serving not as an endorsement or critique of an idealized monarch or as an ambivalent representation of war. Instead, Henry V was an onstage rehearsal for the warrior that the signifiably female performers, and members of all genders, are equally capable of becoming.

“She Is So Idly Kinged” (HV, 2.4.27) The frame established that this production of Shakespeare’s Henry V would be collectively devised by a group, lending a collaborative spirit to the proceedings. This communal storytelling suffused each of the play’s five Prologues, which were delivered by the ensemble in unison and with assigned lines. All of the casting choices were likewise informed by this collaborative approach, as was most evident by the use of five different performers (Cicely Warren, Lilly Stanley, Zoë Peterson, Brooklyn Durs, and Shannon Austin-Goodin) to represent the King, with one actor playing Henry for the entirety of each act. The ensemble-based Prologues were staged such that it seemed as if the company elected a Henry per act by selecting their leader from within. Each Prologue’s first reference to Henry became an opportunity for either the company to elect a ruler, or for the current actor playing the King to put forward a potential successor whose title might then be vocally conferred by the Chorus. Once confirmed as the monarch, the selected cast member received a red armband with gold stripes to indicate their new title. For instance, when the Act One Chorus says, “Then should the warlike Harry” (1.P.5), the ensemble repeated, “Harry?” three times before the group thrust forward its collectively agreed upon ruler (Cicely Warren). After this chosen Harry eagerly took the proffered red-and-gold armband, the Chorus repeated the phrase, “Then should the warlike Harry” to cement her occupation of the role. The selection of successive Harrys emphasized the import of collective

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action in the fight for women’s rights in our historical moment. Pennington pointed towards this goal in the program’s director’s note, which informed the audience that, “instead of having a typical hero,” the all-female cast would be “holding each other up” and would “lead together.” Pronouncing the selection of a ruler per act and spreading the King’s complicated political machinations among the cast also countered the play’s naturalization of power as a patrilineal birthright handed down through “blood” and God from one male “heir” to another (1.2.122–24). The swapping out of kings each act required other court and non-court roles to likewise be traded among multiple actors; thus, in this staging, leadership was granted by a populace of all social ranks that then shared in the responsibilities of governance. The cast distinguished through performance the various characters they played and, when necessary to clarify a character’s identity, we added an appellation to the text; however, no attempt was made to disguise the fact that the same character was played by different actors. The resulting casting tracks created dialectical exchanges between roles. For instance, the Act Two Henry (Lilly Stanley) also played an English soldier in Act Four and Katherine in Act Five, which added weight to Katherine’s silence after she is betrothed in Shakespeare’s play’s conclusion. The performer playing Katherine at the finale had experienced the throes of power in Act Two, during which King Henry condemns to death the Earl of Cambridge, Lord Scroop, and Sir Thomas Grey for their “conspiracy” with France (2.P.27); and she had fought alongside Henry in Act Four. Thus, this French Princess knew what it was to hold the English seat of power, and what it meant to be beholden to it. The passing of power between performers in the Prologue to each act also allowed for critical commentary on war and provoked questions concerning complicity. A reluctant Henry was selected in Act Three when a performer (Zoë Peterson) begrudging took the proffered armband tossed to her after no one responded to the Chorus’s call for a King with the repeated phrase, “Tells Harry” (3.1.31). The actor’s reticence was rooted in the violence exerted in Act Three, the first scene of which finds King Henry leading his soldiers “Once more unto the breach” (3.1.1). Cruelty hovers in the air in the Act’s post-battle scenes, as when Henry threatens the Governor of Harfleur to surrender, lest Henry give “the fleshed soldier” “liberty” to “range / With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass/Your fresh virgins and your flow’ring infants” (3.11–14). After conquering Harfleur and condemning the English soldier Bardolph to death, the performer playing King Henry was eager to relinquish the throne. During the Act Four Chorus, the third Act Henry handed off the part on the line, “O now, who will behold / The royal captain

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of this ruined band” (4.P.29–30). The “royal captain” Henry role was then given to a performer (Brooklyn Durs) strewn on the stage among the “poor condemnèd English soldiers” referenced in the Prologue (4.P.23). In this exchange of authority, the former Henry gently bent the chosen soldier’s forehead to her own in a gesture of anointment and of contrition for all the slain, including Bardolph (Fig. 3). That the crown was now taken up by an actor formerly playing a soldier added another layer to the Act Four King’s disguise as “Harry le Roy” (4.1.50). This was especially pronounced when, in a debate with the weary combatants in camp, the once soldier, now-monarchdisguised-as-a-soldier abdicated responsibility for the lives lost in war: “The King is not bound to answer the particular endings of his soldiers” (4.1.161). The fact that the actor playing this King was moments earlier laying among the “poor condemnèd English soldiers,” and could be returned to that status in the next Act, suggested that a ruler may be “bound” to the “endings” met by those under their command. The presence of legibly-female figures in the role of King Henry V heightened the play’s patriarchal imperatives, and at times created a dissonance that troubled gendered terms in the dialogue resonant today. We made no effort to soften the play’s more patriarchal rhetoric since, as Pennington explained

Fig. 3:  An exchange of authority between two actors (Brooklyn Durs and Zoë Peterson) playing King Henry in the Commonwealth Theatre Center’s production (courtesy of Commonwealth Theatre Center, by Crystal Ludwick Photo)

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to Ashlie Stevens, there was a “punch” created by “hearing some of these lines that are so awful, some of them, so misogynistic … hearing them come out of the mouths of these young ladies.” Such blows were felt when the Act Five Henry (Shannon Austin-Goodin) objectified Katherine by calling her “our capital demand” (5.6.98). Hearing the actress refer to Katherine as a thing to be “demand[ed]” in an exchange of “capital” suggested how women can participate in the commodification of women. In other instances, the visibility of a woman as the monarch pronounced the ways in which the play presumes power and daring are innately male. For example, the effeminizing tennis balls sent by the Dauphin in Act One, Scene One were gifted to a visibly female King Henry (Cicely Warren). The performers’ gender returned the gambit’s volley by revealing that bravery is not determined by the possession of balls. Having a legibly-female performer deliver lines positioning “man” as a universal subject had a distancing effect, as when the Act Four Henryas-Harry le Roy (Brooklyn Durs) told the soldiers, “I think the King is but a man as I am” (4.1.105–06). In this moment, the performer’s legible gender rubbed against the line’s assumption that “man” signifies all “humans.” While the “multiple roles” the King performs may be “commonplace” among criticism on the play (Hedrick and Reynolds 171), it is uncommon for a production of Henry V to showcase such multiplicity by having even more than one actor represent Henry. Casting five different performers in the role pointed towards what some critics have identified as the text’s interest in the performative qualities of an authoritative figure, whose control is consolidated through the repeated display of power for viewers, and thus reliant upon audiences to be maintained.14 Having five members of an all-female cast enact the role of Henry V pronounced the import of gender to this play’s representation of monarchical power, and problematized its patriarchal preconceptions. The presence of multiple female-identifying performers in a title role written for a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men yielded a canonized Shakespearean part traditionally restricted to men to new voices. The young women’s reclamation of a dramatic narrative whose conflict is launched by the denial of a leader’s legitimacy because of a decree that “no female / Should” rule (1.2.55–56) created a multiplicity of meanings that challenged gender constructions circulating in the text and reverberating in our post-2016 political climate.

“Our Bending Author Hath Pursued the Story” (HV, 5.E.2) Our production’s frame and casting intended to pressurize the gender politics of Shakespeare’s play and of our historical moment. In our efforts to

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interrogate the role of gender in Henry V, we made choices one might consider radical departures from Shakespeare’s text. One could argue, however, that our use of gender-specific casting and a framing device to impress the import of the play to a target audience was in keeping with the conditions in which Henry V was initially produced by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. We cannot know for certain how the gendered identities of the all-male company impacted the text’s conceptions of masculinity. Likewise, we cannot determine how the Elizabethan audience would have responded to the Chorus’s comparison of Henry to the Earl of Essex, “the general of our gracious empress” (5.P.31), who in 1599 was commanding English troops in Ireland (Gurr 1; Taylor 4). Nevertheless, the first quarto (1600) title-page’s pronouncement that the play was performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men suggests that the company’s socially-prescribed identities as a collection of male servants of a court figure had the potential to legitimize the text’s historical narrative.15 Similarly, the Chorus’s reference to Essex’s anticipated return “from Ireland” (5.P.32) indicates an awareness of the offstage conflicts on the minds of the Elizabethan spectators, and an interest in drawing parallels between their historical moment and that which was unfolding on stage. We, too, had a cast whose socially-assigned identities helped legitimize the story we sought to tell, and who told that story partly by making direct references to offstage struggles identifiable to their immediate audience. The story our Henry V production sought to tell through its multi-media frame and cross-gender, multi-casting was shaped by the cultural moment in which it was produced. Similarly, Shakespeare’s chronicle of King Henry’s conquest of France was informed by its time and place. Offstage cultural shifts are among the contingencies of live performance that impact onstage meaning. When we started rehearsal, we could not have foreseen that the run of our all-female Henry V (May 10–19, 2019) would coincide with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp’s passage of a “fetal heartbeat” law restricting a woman’s right to choose (May 7), and with Alabama Governor Kay Ivey’s passage of a law banning most abortions (May 15).16 These legislative acts enhanced the production’s parallels between the play’s war in France and that waging against women on our shores. The links audiences drew between these offstage battles and those on stage were evidenced by Arts-Louisville reviewer Keith Waits’ comment that the production’s framing of the play’s “war as a metaphor for the War on Women many claim to be happening in the United States right now […]. is a difficult point to argue against, especially on the day that Alabama’s Governor signed the most restrictive anti-abortion legislation ever written.”

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In Waits’ estimation, the CTC production’s “radical” casting, opening establishment of “a community of women telling the story,” and “stunning, evocative ending” was exemplary of how innovative approaches to Shakespeare can have “the power to enlighten.” The production sought to stage Shakespeare’s early modern English chronicle of Henry V’s conquest of medieval France for a postmodern American stage grappling with, among other issues, gender inequality. With an overt political agenda, we “pursued the story” of Shakespeare’s King Henry (5.E.2). This pursuit demonstrated that Shakespeare works are not static. As the Epilogue states, they were penned by a “bending author” (5.E.2). The flexible play has withstood a myriad of scholarly and artistic interpretations, some of which have sought to prove the text’s state-solidifying function, some its subversive potential, and some its ambiguity. The CTC production joined these ranks, but with important exceptions. It illustrated a way one might reclaim for women their pivotal role in the dramaturgy of Shakespeare’s Henry V; claim for them the right to a historical narrative that has been traditionally restricted to men; and encourage them to retell the “bending author[‘s]” history in a way that chronicles the times in which they live.

Notes 1. While the first quarto was published in 1600, scholars generally agree that the play was composed for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1599, towards the end of Elizabeth I’s reign. In their respective introductions to the play, Andrew Gurr (1) and Gary Taylor (4) both refer to the fifth Act Chorus’s reference to the Essex campaign in Ireland to fix the composition date to the summer of 1599. In “Invisible bullets:  Renaissance authority and its subversion, Henry IV and Henry V,” Stephen Greenblatt compares the overt theatricality of Henry V to that employed by Elizabeth I to consolidate her power (44–45). Like the play’s audience, Elizabethan subjects were “powerfully engaged” by the Queen’s “visible presence while at the same time held at a certain respectful distance from it” so as to occlude their role in conferring power onto the monarch (44). Leonard Tennenhouse likewise argues that Henry V serves to consolidate the authority of the Elizabethan state in “Strategies of State and political plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry IV, Henry V, and Henry VIII.” Tennenhouse asserts that Henry V’s use of “strategies of disguise and inversion to occupy a range of positions” centralizes the authority of the monarch, who is represented as “virtually everywhere” (122). In Tennenhouse’s estimation, Henry’s ability to occupy so many localities within the body politic is a form of containment: the King strips the social identities he embodies of their “autonomy but he gives them their ideal identity. In other words, he instates a political hierarchy by practicing forms of inversion” (123). 2. Jonathon Dollimore and Alan Sinfield’s “History and ideology: the instance of Henry V” uses the example of Shakespeare’s text to disclose how Elizabethan state institutions did not necessarily achieve ideological coherency. They write, “even in this play,

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which is often assumed to be the one where Shakespeare is closest to state propaganda, the construction of ideology is complex—even as it consolidates, it betrays inherent instability” (211). Donald Hedrick and Bryan Reynolds suggest in “ ‘A Little Touch of Harry in the Night’: Translucency and Projective Transversality in the Sexual and National Politics of Henry V” that the play has an overtly subversive effect. Analyzing the play’s employment of what they term the “principle of translucency,” which they define as “a mechanism […] by which one signifier or identity is incompletely concealed within another, a disguise apparently flawed or inadequate, producing a particular kind of mixed coding for audiences or spectators” (171), they come to the conclusion that Henry’s occupation of multiple subject positions serves to rupture the ideological parameters consolidating Elizabethan subjectivity. 3. Norman Rabkin proposed in “Either/Or:  Responding to Henry V” that the “ultimate power” of Henry V is its ambiguous representation of the titular character, which provokes opposing interpretations of the King as either an exemplary or a cynically Machiavellian monarch (35–36). In his Preface to his edition of Henry V, Gurr attributes the play’s “ambivalence” about the King to “the ideology of its day” (xi). Claire McEachern identifies the “ambivalent practice and effect” of Henry V as “critical commonplace” (292) in “Henry V and the Paradox of the Body Politic.” Rather than locate this indecisiveness in the protagonist’s personality, McEachern focuses on the play’s participation in “a particular Elizabethan political affect—that of corporate identity” (293). McEachern concludes that the uncertainty “is an ambivalence fundamental not to his personality but to a fantasy of social union which employs the tropes of personhood as a means to its realization” (314). 4. Emma Smith’s Introduction to Henry V praises Olivier’s 1944 film “as the most remembered and probably the most influential single production of the play” (50). Smith also lauds Kahn’s 1969 production as “The most important American production” of Henry V (64). In his 1969 New York Times review, Mel Gussow offered less effusive praise for Kahn’s production. Declaring Henry V “a patriotic hymn to Great Britain” whose nationalism accounted for the “timeless but also timely” success of Olivier’s film, Gussow found Kahn’s “antiwar” staging “heretical, but also tantalizing” (43). In addition to Smith’s Introduction, a stage and screen production history of Henry V can be found in Gurr’s Introduction to the play (37–55); and John Russell Brown’s “ ‘Henry V’ on Stage and Screen.” 5. Both McEachern and Hedrick and Reynolds find subversive potential in their respective readings of Katherine. Focusing on the Katherine and Alice French scene, McEachern notes that the Princess’s “titillating recitation is indeed a male-authored ventriloquist fantasy of female eroticism, but she also performs what patriarchy most fears” (313). Hedrick and Reynolds argue that the “linguistic instability” produced by Katherine’s “bad English” and Henry’s “bad French” undermines the coercive possibilities of language (179). Unlike these critics, Karen Newman concludes in Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama that these two scenes re-solidify a patriarchal structure and an English national identity. Newman argues that the bawdy scene with Alice, which “powerfully represents Katherine linguistic disadvantage” (101), also serves to subscribe “women discursively to the sexual sphere” (102). Newman determines that in the wooing scene, which she locates within “a long tradition […] that conflates courtship and pedagogy” (103), Henry schools Katherine so as to erase her cultural difference, thereby “refashioning the other as the same” (104).

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6. As Taylor (104) and Gurr (80) note in their respective editorial note accompanying the Bishop’s line, the cited passage specifies that “the daughter” inherits if the man is without a son. Q1 (1600) replaces “the man” with “the son” to clarify the point. 7. Further information about the Commonwealth Theatre Center can be found at www. commonwealththeatre.org. 8. Our designers were crucial to the production’s success. The set and projections were designed by Gerald Kean. Jacob Richie constructed the set and designed the lights. Sound design was by Kathy Preher-Reynolds. Lindsay Chamberlain and Jill Schierbaum created the ensemble’s red (English) and blue (French) armbands and uniform of jeans, sneakers, and khaki t-shirts. 9. Weigel’s silent scream was likewise a response to a still image of a women during wartime. In “The Mother Courage Model,” Brecht attributes the inspiration for Weigel’s “unscreaming open mouth and backward-bent head” to “a press photograph” Weigel encountered “years before” his production that featured “an Indian woman crouched over the body of her dead son during the shelling of Singapore” (113). 10. “Warrior” is on the Canadian trio’s Inside the Dreaming album (1995). A 1997 live recording can be found at www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvvVAzyH6o8. 11. Established in 2018, the Nevertheless Arts Ensemble is dedicated to creating a more inclusive artistic canon by focusing works by women. Further information about the organization can be found at www.neverthelessarts.com. 12. Willis’s unpublished poem was written for this production. The lyrics to Dalton’s “She Rises” (2012) can be found on her website, www.catherinedalton.net/works/ she-rises. 13. For a discussion of gender as performance, see, among other works, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 14. See footnotes 2 and 3. 15. The Q1 title page asserts that Henry V was “sundry times playd by the Right honorable the Lord Chamberlaine his Servants.” A  digital version of the title page can be found at https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/ henry-v-first-edition. 16. The New  York Times’s coverage of Georgia’s bill is available at www.nytimes. com/2019/05/07/us/heartbeat-bill-georgia.html. Coverage of Alabama’s law is available at www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/us/alabama-abortion-facts-law-bill. html.

Works Cited All textual citations refer to: Folger Shakespeare Library. Shakespeare’s Plays from Folger Digital Texts. Edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library, 15 January, 2019. www.folgerdigitaltexts.org. Billington, Michael. “Henry V Review—Astonishing Gender-Switched Reinvigoration.” Review of Henry V, directed by Robert Hastie. The Guardian, 23 Jun. 2016, www. theguardian.com/stage/2016/jun/23/henry-v-review-open-air-theatre-regentspark. Accessed 20 July 2019.

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Blinder, Alan. “Alabama Governor Signs Abortion Bill. Here’s What Comes Next.” The New York Times, 15 May 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/us/alabama-abortion-facts-law-bill.html. Accessed 29 July 2019. Brecht, Bertolt. “The Mother Courage Model.” Mother Courage and Her Children, edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim, translated by John Willett, Penguin, 2007, pp. 91–135. Brown, John Russell. “ ‘Henry V’ on Stage and Screen.” The Life of Henry V, edited by John Russell Brown, Signet, 1988, pp. 249–66. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990. Cavendish, Dominic. “This Female Henry V Cuts to the Heart of Warfare’s Horror— Review.” Review of Henry V, directed by Robert Hastie. The Telegraph, 23 June 2016, www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/this-female-henry-v-cuts-to-theheart-of-warfares-horror---revie/. Accessed 20 July 2019. Commonwealth Theatre Center. 2017, www.commonwealththeatre.org. Accessed 21 July 2019. Dalton, Catherine. “She Rises.” Catherine Dalton, 2015, http://www.catherinedalton. net/works/she-rises. Accessed 26 July 2019. Dollimore, Jonathon, and Alan Sinfield. “History and Ideology: The Instance of Henry V.” Alternative Shakespeares, edited by John Drakakis, Routledge, 1985, pp. 206–27. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V.” Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, edited by Jonathon Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, Cornell UP, 1985, pp. 18–47. Gurr, Andrew, editor. King Henry V. Cambridge UP, 1992.———. “Introduction.” King Henry V, edited by Andrew Gurr, Cambridge UP, 1992, pp. 1–64. ———. “Preface.” King Henry V, edited by Andrew Gurr, Cambridge UP, 1992, pp. x–xi. Gussow, Mel. “Stage:  Antiwar ‘Henry V’.” Review of Henry V, directed by Michael Kahn. The New York Times, 11 Nov. 1969, L 43, www.nytimes.com/1969/11/11/ archives/stage-antiwar-henry-v-michael-kahn-directs-brechtian-production.html. Accessed 20 July 2019. Hedrick, Donald, and Bryan Reynolds. “  ‘A Little Touch of Harry in the Night’: Translucency and Projective Transversality in the Sexual and National Politics of Henry V.” Performing Transversally:  Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future, edited by Bryan Reynolds, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 171–88. Henry V: A Concordance to the Text of the First Folio. Oxford UP, 1971. Oxford Shakespeare Concordances, edited by T.H. Howard-Hill. “Henry V, first edition.” Shakespeare Documented, Folger Shakespeare Library, https:// shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/henry-v-first-edition. Accessed July 29, 2019. Hoeppner Tonini, Sarah. Artistic Director. Nevertheless Arts Ensemble, www.neverthelessarts.com. Accessed 26 July 2019.

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Mazzei, Patricia, and Alan Blinder. “Georgia Governor Signs ‘Fetal Heartbeat’ Abortion Law.” The New  York Times, 7 May 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/us/ heartbeat-bill-georgia.html. Accessed 29 July 2019. McEachern, Claire. “Henry V and the Paradox of the Body Politic.” Materialist Shakespeare: A History, edited by Ivo Kamps, Verso, 1995, pp. 292–319. Newman, Karen. Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama. University of Chicago Press, 1991. Pennington, Jennifer. “Notes on the Productions:  Henry V.” Commonwealth Theatre Center’s Young American Shakespeare Festival Program, CTC, 2019. ———. director. Henry V. Commonwealth Theatre Center, 10–19 May 2019, Louisville, KY. Performance. Rabkin, Norman. “Either/Or: Responding to Henry V.” William Shakespeare’s Henry V, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea, 1988, pp. 35–59. Modern Critical Interpretations. Smith, Emma. Introduction. King Henry V, edited by Emma Smith, Cambridge UP, 2002, pp. 1–79. Shakespeare in Production. Soloski, Alexis. “Review: Does Power Corrupt in ‘Henry V’? Absolutely.” Review of Henry V, directed by Robert O’Hara. The New York Times, 13 May 2018 Stevens, Ashlie. “Commonwealth Theatre Reinterprets ‘Henry V’ With All-Female Cast.” 89.3 WFPL, 8 May 2019, https://wfpl.org/commonwealth-theatre-reinterprets-henry-v-with-all-female-cast/. Accessed 26 July 2019. Taylor, Gary, editor. Henry V. Oxford UP, 1982. ———. Introduction. Henry V, edited by Gary Taylor, Oxford UP, 1982, pp. 1–74. Tennenhouse, Leonard. “Strategies of State and political plays:  A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry IV, Henry V, and Henry VIII.” Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, edited by Jonathon Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, Cornell UP, 1985, pp. 109–28. The Wyrd Sisters. “The Wyrd Sisters—Warrior (live).” YouTube, 9 May 2013, Red River Relief Concert, Winnipeg, 1997, www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvvVAzyH6o8. Accessed 25 July 2019. Waits, Keith. “We Band of Sisters.” Arts-Louisville.Com, 16 May 2019, http://arts-louisville.com/2019/05/16/we-band-of-sisters/. Accessed 29 July 2019. Willis, Teresa. “Unbreakable Heart.” Unpublished, 2019.

4.  Once More into the ‘Breeches’: Female Portrayals of Shakespeare’s Monarchs Terri Power Since Siddons there have been more than fifty female Hamlets, many women Romeos and Shylocks, and Iagos and Richards. In fact, with the exception of Macbeth, Brutus, and Coriolanus, nearly every Shakespearean male character has been essayed by some actress. The New York Times (1911)

Influenced by the acceptance of women performing in familial commedia troupes across Europe, and in reaction to the growing distaste for the homoerotic lure evoked in the boy players’ performances, by the 17th Century women took to the stages throughout Europe in breeches. This convention “allowed women a freedom of action that could not be permitted to women” (Senelick 162)  and established a theatrical tradition wherein women could inhabit male roles, power, and privilege publically on stage despite not being able to do so in their private lives. Known professionally as ‘actresses’, several of these women desired to escape the trappings of sex and gender aroused in the portrayal of breeches parts, electing to step into leading male roles in Shakespeare’s plays, rather than play one of the 89 breeches roles written in the period between 1660 and 1700. Women began to reject the stigma attached to these roles as breeches parts and the costumes associated with them which “enhanced the actress’ charms, and advertised her availability” (Senelick 212), as well as emphasized her “most womanly attributes: her breasts, hips, thighs, and calves” (212). The proliferation of female cross-gender performances of Shakespeare’s male characters continued into the 20th century, and even prompted George Vandenhoff to write in Leaves From an Actor’s Note-Book (1860), “There should be a law against such perversions … In [Shakespeare’s] time women did not appear on the stage at all; now they usurp men’s parts, and ‘push us

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from our stools’ ”(232). Of particular note was the great number of women who portrayed the role of Hamlet throughout the 20th century. These princely female representations traversed genres and nations, and were met with polarized critical responses. The critical reactions reflected the shifting tastes and ideologies of the cultures from which the performances derived. Changing attitudes towards women performing in the roles of Shakespeare’s monarchs have been an ongoing battleground for female performers and companies, leading to various interpretations, styles, adaptations, and critiques. The current social and political climate in the U.K. and U.S. is reshaping Shakespeare’s monarchs once again. Movements such as #MeToo, and Equity and Diversity representation in theatre policies, as well as issues involving immigrants stemming from changes made in the U.K. because of Brexit and, in the U.S., President Trump’s administrative policies, have made theatre companies overtly conscious of how they present Shakespeare and which actors they employ in what roles. The result is exciting as more women and minorities get to take up positions of power on and off stage. As soon as women entered the stage in Shakespeare productions they were eager to play all the large, complex roles reserved previously for men. For many audience members and critics, including Vandenhoff, this was a breach too far. One of the major issues, besides usurping roles from male actors, was the question as to whether it was appropriate for women to play male representations, and women playing historical kings and princes of England was often deemed not only inappropriate, but also irreverent. However, Shakespeare’s theatre has always been a place of imagination. Shakespeare’s original audiences were able to suspend their disbelief and accept men and boy players in the roles of women including portrayals of England and Europe’s queens and princesses. Gender as a theatrical representation has always been part of the imaginative convention at play on stages for audiences in Shakespeare’s works. In the prologue of Henry V, Chorus steps onto the stage and requests that the audience take part in the playing by imagining a ‘kingdom for a stage, princes to act and monarchs to behold the swelling scene’ (HV, P.3–4) and to allow the actors to work with their ‘imaginary forces’ (19): CHORUS: Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts; Into a thousand parts divide on man, And make imaginary puissance; Think when we talk of horses, that you see them Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth; For ‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings … (HV, P. 24–30)

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Shakespeare’s theatre invites the audience to exercise its imagination and not only imagine the stage as kingdoms, fields, and time leaping over centuries, but also to redress and regender actors to suit the roles they inhabit. This theatrical invention should not only be applied to white men and boys, but to all actors in Shakespeare’s works regardless of race, ability, and gender.

To Be or Not to Be … A Female Hamlet Although many male Shakespearean roles have been assayed by women over the last few centuries, the most popular choice for interpretation, translation and experimentation has been Hamlet. Women’s performances of Hamlet have been so abundant and diverse in scope, that Tony Howard dedicated a whole book to this subject and study of many global performances across stage and screen. In Women as Hamlet (2007), Howard writes that of all the male roles in Shakespeare’s canon Hamlet, “most inspired tragic actresses to challenge expectations and cross gender lines. Several of the most brilliant performances of the part in our time have been by women, and the issue of Hamlet’s ‘femininity’ has fascinated artists in all media” (Howard 1). In 2014, Maxine Peake was cast in the role of the Prince of Denmark. Peake is a highly acclaimed British actor best known for her work in television productions such as Dinnerladies and Shameless. She also has a prolific career as a stage actor and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Not one to shy away from a challenge, playing the role of Hamlet was her opportunity to make her mark on British theatrical history. Of particular significance was the fact that this was the first time since Frances de la Tour played the role in 1979 that a celebrated female actor played Hamlet on a main stage in the U.K. Initially the expectations for the production and her performance were quite high, which placed tensions on the artists involved. However, the play was commercially and critically successful when it premiered at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester England on September 11, 2014. Heralded as the Royal Exchange’s “fastest-selling show in a decade” (thecolonialtheatre.com) the production’s success translated beyond Manchester. In 2015, a recording of the production was screened at movie theatres throughout the U.K., and in 2018 distributed on DVD by Omnibus Entertainment. One of the reasons for the production’s success was Peake’s interpretation of Hamlet, presented as a fresh and contemporary portrayal not yet seen on a main stage in the U.K. Peake chose to play the role as a masculine woman in a lesbian relationship with Ophelia was, for many critics, an ingenious stroke of fresh perspective that gave the play a new place in its ability to represent contemporary relationships and issues. Equally impactful was the

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casting choices made by director Sarah Frankcom such as the regendering of the characters Polonius and Rosencrantz. All of these creative, conceptual choices brought forth a unique and striking mix to an often over-produced and traditionally casted play. In an interview with the Shakespeare podcast platform 21st Folio led by host Alex Heeney,1 Peake described that her interpretative choice to play Hamlet as transgendered brought an ‘extra edge’ to the production, and that playing this Hamlet as a woman ‘feeling very male’ helped to highlight some of the aspects of the play wherein Hamlet’s sexuality is at question as well as his feminine qualities. Originally Peake wanted to play ‘Hamlet as Hamlet’—a man struggling in a world collapsing around him—and explained that she hadn’t considered playing with his gender. However, Director Frankcom envisioned Peake’s performance choice being that of a female Hamlet, and by the end of the regional theatre’s five-week rehearsal period, it naturally emerged that playing the role as a transgendered Hamlet would cast a contemporary spotlight on the centuries-old play. It also would reflect the struggles and experiences of the transgender community in Manchester. The theatre-makers felt strongly that this creative approach would help to “give some representation” (Heeney) to an often overlooked minority experience. Peake also explained how the gender swapping of Polonius and Rosencrantz came as a result of Frankcom’s commitment to casting an equal number of men and women in the production. Frankcom had very “conscious ideas about gender and diversity” (Heeney) and recognized that availability of roles, particularly in Shakespeare’s plays, is often “very difficult for women” (Heeney) referring to the issue of a lack of female roles and representation on the U.K. stage. Peake pointed out that traditional casting of Hamlet could easily result in only two women being cast in roles among many others occupied by men in the play. One revelation Peake had while playing the role came about as a result of portraying a female trans Hamlet’s sexuality. In scenes interacting with Ophelia, Peake discovered Hamlet’s masculine power and that “Hamlet is quite arrogant when it comes to Ophelia, and I think, all the women within the play” (Heeney). Further discoveries included that Hamlet “could quite easily switch his emotions off because it was about him and his survival and he was number one” (Heeney). The whole performance experience was enlightening to Peake. “It was a real eye-opener, ‘Oh, this is what it is like in a man’s world to feel you are top of the pile, especially as a prince as well” (Heeney). The Royal Exchange wasn’t the only Shakespeare production to explore issues of queer and trans experience through the medium of Shakespeare. In August, 2014, the Stance Theatre Company presented a transgender

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lesbian-centric appropriation of Richard III, entitled Drag King Richard III at the Riverside Studios in London. This production also included post-performance discussions with audiences in order to facilitate an in-depth dialogue between trans scholars, artists, and audiences to explore topical issues raised by the performance. In 2016 another lesbian/trans interpretation of Hamlet was offered as a way to reimagine the play and give its usual political message personal meaning. Produced by the Cohesion Theatre in Baltimore, Maryland, and directed by Alice Stanley, who does not identify with a gender, this production worked with a gender-fluid approach to casting that was explored in the collaborative rehearsal process. Stanley describes the current trend in theatre: “Gender diversity is at the forefront right now, and there’s a lot that can be played with and reimagined” (Gardner). The approach Cohesion took with the casting and staging of Hamlet reflected these ideas, and served “to remove the aloof, intellectual distance between the watchers and the watched, allowing the audience to connect on an emotional and intuitive level with the Dark Prince’s tale” (Mitchell). Unlike Peake’s Hamlet, Caitlin Carbone performed a Hamlet that was female and markedly lesbian. Set during the grunge era of 1993 Seattle, this Hamlet was diversely cast and easily relatable. The decision to portray a lesbian Hamlet, as with the Royal Exchange production’s choice to portray a trans Hamlet, shed a new light on the relationships between characters in the play, notably Hamlet and Ophelia, and Hamlet and Horatio. However, by setting the Cohesion production in an era many Americans can nostalgically recall, the theatre-makers were able to present characters that “no longer feel like literary archetypes—the tragic hero, the power-hungry villain, the foil; they seem like human beings” (Mitchell).

A Tale of Two Richards As noted above, it is not only Hamlet that has been used to stage and reflect minority experiences and representations. Many of Shakespeare’s plays and characters have been bent and redressed to reflect diverse cultures and changing global perspectives. These shifts, like mini-earthquakes, are altering the landscape of Shakespearean theatre. Over the last decade, an increasing number of main stage companies have contemporized their casting approach, and creative experimentation with representation through cross-gender performance has elevated the plays. The audience and critical acceptance of such evolutionary changes have been positive, which is a very different picture from what was reflected about 25 years ago.

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Consider, for example, the sharp criticism the award-winning Fiona Shaw received when she took the male lead in Richard II directed by Deborah Warner at The National Theatre in 1995. This was a groundbreaking production of Richard II. Nevertheless, Shaw’s performance was called “a disastrous performance in the main role” (Gross), “a Drag” (Tinker), “unconvincing as an anointed king of England” (Koenig), and it was even suggested that “Shaw doesn’t have enough maleness to play Peter Pan” (Koenig). Shaw describes the difficult experience in her Forward in Goodman’s The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance (1998), explaining that she had “no idea then how great the taboo was that I was breaking” (Goodman, xxiii) in playing a ‘man’ and masculinity on the English stage. Despite the fact that Shaw’s performance has been cited as ground breaking and paved the way for women to play male roles on the English stage, in interviews on the experience she fervently expressed her decision to never play outside her gender again. Despite such leading-edge performances, the critical response to women’s cross-dressed productions in the U.K. provides an interesting comment on how the perceived reception and validity of such artistic endeavors were received in the past. Shaw’s Richard II performance, though commanding and noteworthy in theatre history, was met with skepticism and condemnation by the critics, primarily because it challenged notions of gender and Englishness in Shakespeare country. Criticism of the performance may also have been a reaction to the vague approach Shaw took with the playing of her character’s gender. Shaw herself later explained in her Salon interview (Covington) that she “had no intention of playing a man” and instead was portraying King Richard II as “somebody who perceives himself to be a non-man.” Shaw’s comments might seem to be a kind of justification for what was, for her, a disappointing performance of a male character, but the very fact that she played this character was in itself an experiment for both Shaw and the theatre community. Her presence in the role was not only revolutionary because she was a woman, but also because her Irish identity interrogated notions of Englishness and sovereignty. Carol Rutter raises this point in her article “Fiona Shaw’s Richard II: The Girl as Player-King as Comic,” writing that: Shaw is Irish. Cork is in her blood and, despite Shaw’s professional training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, Cork survives in her voice, in her accent, in her witty, ironizing intonation. Hers is a voice that triumphs in comedy but that also interrogates politics. Given the history of the English in Ireland in the 1590s and the 1990s, and given, in 1995, the shabby daily spectacle of the English monarchy savaging itself in newsprint and on television, raveling out its “mystery” before the wearied eyes of its subjects, an Irish voice speaking an English king was bound to register skepticism if not downright mockery. (314)

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Although Shaw’s performance lacked critical acclaim and a successful attempt at portraying masculinity through cross-gender casting and full bodied and psychological exploration, her performance inspired other female actors to explore such possibilities in very public performances in England and abroad. Almost 25  years after Shaw played the role of Richard II in director Debra Warner’s production, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre (SGT) in London staged an all-female Richard II in February 2019, striking an assault on traditional theatrical casting and notions of Englishness. Unlike former all-female productions staged at SGT, this performance featured only women of color and was co-directed by Adjoa Andoh and Lynette Linton. In an interview for SheCAN with Alt-Africa.com, Adjoa and Linton explained that they wanted to make a Richard II that represented “unheard voices” and gave often overlooked women of color the opportunity to portray Shakespeare’s characters on a main stage. “When we say women of color, we mean women of color from across the Empire, so, from China to Iran to Pakistan to Jamaica to Guyana to Ghana you know we’re talking across the Empire” (Alt-Africa. com) This decision to stage such a radical production on a main stage would become the first of its kind in the U.K., and was a bold move for a theatre company that previously had been criticized for its lack of representation of women and minorities. In 2011 British Equity launched a campaign to put pressure on theatres to treat male and female actors fairly in terms of employment and access to roles. In a gender equality study conducted by the Equity Women’s Committee of UK of subsidized theatres during the 2009/10 season, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre had one of the biggest gender imbalances in the poll. It was reported that of the 71 performers hired that season at SGT only 14 were women. Such disparities between not only men and women but also between white and minority performers was reviewed and scrutinized as national arts funding bodies, such as the Arts Council U.K., prompted sweeping changes in the monitoring of casting choices of these subsidized venues. Richard II at SGT was clearly a product of these changes and pressures on theatres to cast openly and equitably. Adjoa details the decision made at SGT to cast the play with all minority women: What is our notion of who we are as a nation? And for me I really feel like we built this nation, the Empire of which this country is now the reduced project that’s left was built by the people that this country went out and colonized. So, who’s at the bottom of that pile? Women and people of colour, so women of colour. It’s our time it’s our turn to tell the story of Empire in this play because our voices are never heard, and we contributed to the wealth and prosperity of this nation and we don’t usually get the chance to be part of that. (Alt-Africa. com)

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The production unleashed a wrecking ball against traditional casting practices, and inspired more women and minority artists to break out of the fringes and step into the spotlight on and off stage. Since 1995, attitudes and policies regarding diversity and inclusion have evolved, and the sense is that being English is a multicultural experience which should be reflected in the mirror held up on stage. Minority communities are pushing to have their lives, stories, and faces reflected back to them in the theatre, and governing bodies such as Arts Council England and British Equity are in agreement with that movement. This is in stark contrast to the more conservative landscape of English identity and representation faced by Fiona Shaw in 1995. These cultural and identity shifts have occurred, particularly over the last five years, because global and national politics have forced citizens to reevaluate their definitions of nationhood and their participation in political processes. In the wake of the Brexit referendum, post-colonial Britain has begun to recognize its multicultural heritage, and that acknowledgment is leading to political reflections of these ideologies on stages across the U.K. These political shifts have not just influenced theatre artists; perceptions and expectations of audiences and critics have progressed as well. Consider the differences in critical reception of the 1995 and 2019 Richard II productions. The 1995 production featuring Shaw was considered “Gimmick casting” and referred to as, “The sort of thing you might see at the end of term in a boarding school” (Temple). The production’s political comment was also under attack by audiences and critics. Rutter clarifies this point: It was not the nature of gender that Shaw’s performance was deconstructing so much as the nature of politics—the politics of politics-the nature of kingship. ‘Kingship.’ It’s such a protected English word! The mystification of words such as kingship is incredibly conservative and fundamental in the British imagination. The British would rather protect the word than investigate it or play with it. (323)

Conversely, the 2019 SGT Richard II production was heralded by audiences and critics not only for its diversity in casting but also for staging a contemporary political message. The performances were deemed “Electrifying … a resounding success” (Halliburton), and even “remarkable” (Benson). Reflecting on the innovative casting Howard Loxton for British Theatre Guide remarked that: This is a production that is making a very strong and very positive statement. It is the first Shakespeare play presented by a major theatre to have a cast that is both all female and all women of colour. It isn’t gender and color blind: it demands

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that you notice as it casts these actresses in roles that have usually been played by white men. (Loxton)

Claire Allfree for Metro described Andoh’s Richard II as “a persistent, riveting delight as Richard” and that her performance “makes grippingly clear the existential dangers that can arise from believing too much in the innate right to sovereignty” (Allfree). In the review for Broadway World, Dzifa Benson writes about the production’s success not only in the performances of the cast but also in portraying contemporary political issues: The vivid articulation of the language, simultaneously of its time and current, is the anchor on which all the other things—politics, gender, society, racial—are layered … It makes for a play that feels fresh, timely and utterly modern. That’s the magic of theatre. (Benson)

American All-Female Companies Placing women in male Shakespearean roles may seem like a modern response to social, gender, and political change, but as previously discussed, the convention has been employed for hundreds of years. Not only have female actors been cast in leading male roles, whole casts of women in all-female productions have taken on male and female roles, giving access and visibility to artists often excluded from Shakespeare’s theatre. In an article published in the Stratford Herald on August 12, 1921, the reporter wrote, “A female Hamlet is not a novelty” but that “a Shakespearean production played entirely by women is rare.”2 The article continued giving details about “an interesting experiment” (Morris) wherein a production of King Henry V would be played by an all-female cast in the Memorial Theatre in Stratford Upon Avon led by Marie Slade. The Stratford Herald article refers to productions taking place in England during the 1920s, but it would be decades later that all-female Shakespeare productions in the U.K.  would rise to the fore. Conversely, women playing male roles and taking part in all-female Shakespeare productions in the United States was far more prevalent in the twentieth century. Theatre historians have wondered about this disparity between countries and often point to periods when American women, inspired by civil and feminist movements, took action to make women more prominent figures on and off stage. In her book Women Direct Shakespeare in America (2005), Nancy Taylor suggests that women’s increasing presence in U.S. Shakespeare productions during the 1970s was a direct result of the “flourishing women’s movement” (Taylor 27), and because “women were hired as artistic directors for a number

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of American regional theatres” (Taylor 28). However, Director Phyllida Lloyd feels that such advances for women in positions of power have not been easily adopted in the U.K. In 2012, Lloyd expressed that during the 1980s, when women had the opportunity to run large theatre establishments in the U.K., they “ran in fear away to freelance careers” ultimately because they could not reconcile “how you can run a building that is completely underfunded and direct plays at the same time” (Gompertz). Many female artists and women-led Shakespeare companies in North America faced similar challenges, but seemed to have more easily adopted feminist ideals and adapted to the financial and social challenges these positions presented them in the 1970s and 1980s. By the 1990s, female-driven and all-female Shakespeare companies began to arrive in the U.S. and Canada. Psychologist Carol Gilligan and voice expert Kristin Linklater, for instance, collaborated on productions that were born from their gender studies classes facilitated at Emerson College. These productions would later serve as the foundation for the first recognized all-female Shakespeare company, known as the Company of Women. Following in the successful wake of the Company of Women, many other regional all-female companies emerged throughout North America during the 1990s and 2000s. One such company is the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company (LAWSC). Founded in 1993 by actor/director/ playwright Lisa Wolpe, the company produces “professional productions of Shakespeare’s plays with an all-female ensemble” (stahome.org) and with multi-racial and interdisciplinary artists. The company was arguably one of the most prolific all-female Shakespeare companies in the United States producing dozens of Shakespeare plays for more than two and a half decades. During that time, Lisa Wolpe played a variety of Shakespearean male roles over the course of her career, including commanding Shakespeare’s monarchs on stage such as Hamlet, Richard III, King Lear, and Henry VI. No longer exclusively working with LAWSC, Wolpe inhabits male Shakespearean roles on stages around the globe, and shares her practice and insights through training workshops, inspiring the next generation of theatre artists to regender Shakespeare.3 Additional all-female American Shakespeare companies include Woman’s Will, the Judith Shakespeare Company, the Queen’s Company, and Chickspeare. While some of these companies had to close their doors, primarily due to a lack of arts funding, the Queen’s Company and Chickspeare continue to produce plays and place women in the spotlight. Increasingly, more all-female and female-led Shakespeare companies are forming in the U.S. as next generation artists become inspired by these first female companies

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and productions. Although the landscape is changing worldwide, all-female Shakespeare companies are still rare outside of America. Nancy Taylor suggests that American female Shakespeare directors and companies receive “less critical attention” and are allowed to explore and experiment with the genre because North America historically has a “less formal approach to Shakespearean productions” (Taylor 28). Whatever the reason for the proliferation of these companies and productions in the U.S. and Canada, it is clear that America has been the proving ground upon which a female Shakespeare tradition has emerged and continues to build, paving the way for other countries to follow.

All-Female Productions at the Donmar Remarkably in England, SGT’s 2019 Richard II was successful despite not employing any overt directorial concept or framing device in order to explain the all-female women of color casting, demonstrating, to a great extent, that times and tastes in the U.K. have evolved. In the past, many of these productions had been deemed ‘experimental’ and directors used framing devices and bold creative concepts in order to legitimize such unique casting choices. For her all-female Julius Caesar premiering at the Donmar Warehouse in London (2012), Phyllida Lloyd landed on the idea that the play might be set in a woman’s prison. She interpreted the script in a way that led her to discover that the main conspirators throughout the play “feel that they are somehow prisoners of Julius Caesar and his Rome” (Murray). This creative decision worked well in framing the play and legitimizing the casting choices. Lloyd would revisit this recipe in her all-female theatrical production of Henry IV (2016), starring Harriet Walter as the king of England, and adapted from both Parts 1 & 2. Although a few critics suggested the concept lost the freshness of Julius Caesar4 most gave the production glowing reviews and felt that the concept, and casting of formerly incarcerated women from Clean Break theatre company, lifted the play from being a history play to being far more contemporary. Sarah Hemming reveals that the casting and concept “might sound like a gimmick” but that, “in practice it proves terrific: an urgent, mischievous and subtly layered response to Shakespeare’s great plays”, and even calls the production “revelatory” (Hemming). In her review of the Henry IV production for The Guardian, Susannah Clapp praises Lloyd’s direction. “She detects in prison life some of the play’s concerns:  the fight for territory, the struggle for reformation” (Clapp). Dominic Cavendish of The Telegraph writes about the experience of viewing the production from a male perspective:

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Terri Power This production is about more than just giving the sisters more work, better parts. If it’s empowering for a woman to play a man then it’s also liberating for a man to watch a woman do so: the emphasis shifts to the similarities between the sexes, and the ubiquity of power struggles. (Cavendish)

The production’s success continued as it toured to the U.S. and was presented at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York. New York Times reviewer Ben Brantley also experienced a fresh perspective on the play via the all-female casting choice: [T]‌here’s something about putting these fighting words into the mouths of women that makes us listen with newborn ears for the ring of absurdity and desperation within. Directed by Phyllida Lloyd, this production out of London reminds us that casting against the grain can be a potent tool in theater. (Brantley)

It can be argued that Phyllida Lloyd and Josie Rourke, then Artistic Director of the Donmar Theatre in London, were the pioneers of all-female Shakespeare productions in the U.K. Their collaboration, and decidedly feminist approach, brought forth a trilogy of women-led Shakespeare plays to a major venue in England and abroad. The three plays (Julius Caesar (2012), Henry IV (2014), and The Tempest (2016)) were remarkable in execution and influential in redressing Shakespeare in the imaginations of its audiences. These productions helped set the stage for all-female productions to be given legitimacy as artistic endeavors worthy of primary scaffolding in the theatre, and also helped sparked a theatrical revolution in U.K. and American theatres. In an article for London Theatre Guide, Rourke reflected on the theatrical metamorphosis that took place during the years between Julius Caesar and The Tempest: I remember very clearly the furore created by the idea of an all-female Shakespeare, when Phyllida Lloyd first staged Julius Caesar with Harriet Walter in 2012. Phyllida Lloyd’s work with this diverse, all-female company has been genuinely ground-breaking and in the intervening four years, theatre has got into the fast lane of debate and change. (londontheatre.co.uk)

Henry V: A ‘Breech’ Too Far? Look back through the annals and you can spy a number of female incursions into the bastion of male privilege: Lear, Richards II and III, a fair few Hamlets (notably Maxine Peake, two years ago). But Henry V—that English warrior incarnate, whose battlefield rallying-cries are touchstones for the military today? The prologue invites us to suspend disbelief, but might putting a woman in this front-line heroic position be an imaginative bridge too far?  (Cavendish)

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Inspired by the rise of women performing in Shakespeare’s male roles on large and small stages, including contemporary portrayals of Hamlet, Henry IV and Richard II, several all-female Shakespeare productions and companies around the globe have set their sights on taking up the challenge of inhabiting the role of Henry V. The play is considered a masculine flex of power and presents the King as a hero, “ready to sacrifice his own life for the pleasure of destroying thousands of other lives” (Moraes). As a result of the play’s ‘macho’ status, approaching Henry V seems to present a far more challenging position for women to actively portray in the imaginations of audiences and critics than the “feminine” Hamlet or the boyking Richard II. Making the undertaking even more challenging is the fact that Henry V was a beloved monarch of England and was identified as “the king of goodfellows” (Moraes), despite having many flaws and “no idea of any rule of right or wrong, but brute force, glossed over with a little religious hypocrisy and archiepiscopal advice” (Moraes). Undaunted by the “manly” and “heroic” designations associated with the role, Director Jen Pennington directed the play with an all-female cast in May 2019 for Commonwealth Theatre Company in Kentucky (see previous essay). She was quick to acknowledge the challenge it would present to the female cast stating that, “Henry V is very masculine, like hyper-masculine, ultra-theatrical telling of a story of war. And specifically men at war” (Stevens). However, Pennington aimed to use the inherent masculinity to the production’s advantage, leveraging textual fluency and cross-gender performance to create a provocative and discursive performance. Pennington describes her approach to the play: Part of the punch I  wanted to have with this is hearing some of these lines that are awful, some of them, so misogynistic … hearing them come out of the mouths of these young ladies, these young women. (Stevens)

Pennington furthered the impact of the performance by starting the play with a preshow element that focused on the experience of being a young woman in the modern age. This included the audience listening to “snippets of news headlines detailing violence against women” which served to “signal to audiences that if there is a war against women, these young actors are ready to fight” (Stevens). Although Pennington’s Henry V was innovative in its framing in order to address wider socio-political issues, it wasn’t the only Henry V featuring women in the title role or performed by an all-female cast. Over the last five years many other women-led companies and productions have met the challenge presented by the play with varying degrees of success.

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In 2015 the Lazarus Theatre Company staged its version of Henry V in the heart of London at the Union Theatre to mixed reviews. In his review of the production Kevin Quarmby wrote that: To see Lazarus Theatre Companyʼs Henry V is to dispel any notion of cross-casting gimmickry. Within moments, the gender of the performers becomes insignificant. What remains is a narrative sweep that gains in nuance and focus, voiced afresh by a cast who relish the text rather than concern themselves with “manly” posturing or falsehood. The result? A very real, very disturbing image of nationalistic pride and patriotism. Indeed, the very heritage of patriotic behavior, as the fervent belief in a patris or “fatherland,” achieves its heightened significance in this subtly reimagined construct. (Quarmby)

Conversely, Chris Omaweng of LondonTheatre1.com took issue with the company’s departure from the original text writing that it “leaves the audience, in my humble opinion, short changed,” and that the work would have been stronger had they been “more faithful to the original Shakespeare text” (Omaweng). He also took issue with the adaptation of the play, explaining that the alterations made to the text were “too much for play purists” (Omaweng). Omaweng does give credit to the overall approach explaining that, “the show does not change the third person pronoun ‘he’ to ‘she’ in reference to King Henry or any other man. These are male characters, after all, who happen to be played by women” (Omaweng). In 2016, a far more successful London revival of Henry V was directed by Robert Hastie. Presented at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, this performance starred acclaimed actor Michelle Terry in the title role. In this Henry V Terry played the king amongst a mixed-gender cast and led a literal “band of brothers” by portraying the role as “pensive, serious, straight-faced and piercingly alone; not Man, not Woman, Human” (Cavendish). Susannah Clapp echoes this appraisal of the performance in her review for The Guardian. Describing the cross-gender casting of Henry V, Clapp detailed that Terry “makes something subtle and surprising of the prince. She does not do a girlman act. No shoulder-rolling. No big-boot work. But nor does she flirt. She is simply a truthful mouther, a dexterous speaker” (Clapp). The production must have left an indelible mark on Michelle Terry, who became the Director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in 2018, and chose to stage Henry V in her second summer season there. Like her turn as Henry in 2016, Terry extended the opportunity to play the role to another woman, passing the crown to Sarah Amankwah in 2019. Terry has expressed a deep commitment to equity and inclusion in casting and this was deliberately reflected in the Henry V production with resounding success. Amankwah was called “a brilliant young king,” “majestical” (Lukowski) and that “every

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word she speaks lands with a calculating fluidity, while her flickering eyes betray a regal mind outworking everyone else in court” (Wood). Many critics couldn’t help but make parallels to Terry’s Henry V, Lloyd’s all-female trilogy of Shakespeare plays at the Donmar, and even Peake’s (2014) Hamlet, yet as reviewer Natasha Tripney points out, the creative mixed race, as well as mixed gender, casting of Henry V at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre (2019) was, again, breaking new ground on a main stage in London: This production, however, more than those that proceeded it, pushes the idea that anyone can play any role in these most mythic of plays, exploding the notion that they need to be cast literally to make them comprehensible. (Tripney)

Contemporary productions of Henry V that cast women in the male title role are not a bridge too far, but rather a bridge to bring us together, one that provides much needed relevance to an outdated play. Such productions, like those previously discussed, have helped to bring ever more leading-edge performances and interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays to the fore. For instance, Oregon Shakespeare Festival will be staging Bringing Down the House, an all-female adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy as part of its 2020 season. Academy award-winning actor Glenda Jackson recently performed the role of King Lear on Broadway, demonstrating that a woman of age can command a huge Shakespearean male role and do so on one of the most famous theatrical avenues. The real question is not “is it a bridge too far?” but rather “how far can we cross on the bridge?”

Once More into the Breeches When women first stood on the stages of Europe and America, inhabiting the great roles of Shakespeare’s monarchs, they did so to exercise their artistic freedom and to demonstrate that they, despite their gender, could command the stage by inhabiting positions of power. They left a legacy of trailblazing performances that received both the condemnation and the praise of critics and theatregoers. Historically women’s cross-dressed performances have always been met with skepticism, questions of legitimacy, and polarized opinions of these portrayals. However, women have a long and rich history of performing in male Shakespearean roles and it seems that this history is finally being acknowledged, no doubt as a result of the hard work being fought on and off stage by women and allies to shed light on a previously shaded area of Shakespeare’s theatre. The result has been immeasurable. Currently critics are less prone to question casting women in these roles or to define such endeavors as an

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‘experiment’ or ‘gimmick’. Women-led and all-female productions and companies are being given the opportunity to play on main stages, and even the keys to previously male-dominated theatres are being passed along to our pioneering sisters. Audiences are able to suspend disbelief and allow their imaginations to ‘deck’ the kings regardless of whether the king in the play is being performed by a woman, or a person of color, or both. We are learning that it is not that the women in the roles of Henry V, Richard II, or Henry the IV are reinventing history, portraying that these figures were really women, but rather that women in these roles are making history, and that is to be fostered and celebrated. Contemporary Shakespeare productions must be innovative: staging our deepest fears and desires. Productions should have an immediate and political pulse to be current, and that means pushing boundaries—and sometimes men from their stools—to show alternative images of power. Placing people with curves and color at the helm of the storytelling is an impactful approach to keep these four hundred year-old plays relevant. No longer are directors and companies able to easily use artistic license as a license to discriminate, and the current movement to explore other casting possibilities and interpretations of these plays has had a positive impact on the theatre. Next generation audiences and artists are discovering the plays because, finally, modern Shakespeare productions are echoing their experiences, making the characters relatable, and reflecting their diverse identities. In our ever-evolving global sphere of diverse cultures and people, why wouldn’t we stretch the limits of our imaginations in work that asks us to do so in its Prologue?

Notes 1. All quotes were transcribed by author from the 21st Folio Podcast “Interview: Maxine Peake Talks Hamlet.” 12 May 2016. 2. As quoted in Morris, Sylvia. “Shakespeare for Women:  From Henry V to Julius Caesar.” The Shakespeare Blog, 10 Sept. 2012, theshakespeareblog.com/2012/09/ shakespeare-for-women-from-henry-v-to-julius-caesar/. 3. See https://lisawolpe.com/stage-acting/. 4. Critics such as Barbour, Cote, and Green (to name a few) called the framing device a ‘gimmick’, a ‘conceit’, ‘kitsch’, and ‘cutesy’, and generally felt that it didn’t work as well the second time used by Lloyd to justify the all-female casting of a Shakespeare play.

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Works Cited All textual citations refer to: Folger Shakespeare Library. Shakespeare’s Plays from Folger Digital Texts. Edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library, 15 January, 2019. www.folgerdigitaltexts.org. Allfree, Claire. “Theatre Review:  Richard II.” Metro Newspaper UK, Metro, 11 Mar. 2019, www.metro.news/theatre-review-richard-ii/1469117/. Barbour, David. “Theatre in Review:  Henry IV (St. Ann’s Warehouse).” Lighting& Sound America Online News, www.lightingandsoundamerica.com/news/story.asp? ID=4F2QLY. Benson, Dzifa. “BWW Review:  RICHARD II, Shakespeare’s Globe.” BroadwayWorld. com, BroadwayWorld.com, 8 Mar. 2019, www.broadwayworld.com/westend/ article/BWW-Review-RICHARD-II-Shakespeares-Globe-20190308. Brantley, Ben. “Review:  ‘Henry IV,’ Donmar Warehouse’s All-Female Version.” The New  York Times, The New  York Times, 12 Nov. 2015, www.nytimes. com/2015/11/12/theater/review-henry-iv-donmar-warehouses-all-female-version.html. Cavendish, Dominic. “Henry IV, Donmar Warehouse, Review:  ‘Unforgettable’.” The Telegraph, Telegraph Media Group, 10 Oct. 2014, www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/ theatre/theatre-reviews/11153732/Henry-IV-Donmar-Warehouse-review.html. Cavendish, Dominic. “This Female Henry V Cuts to the Heart of Warfare’s Horror—Review.” The Telegraph, Telegraph Media Group, 23 June 2016, www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/ what-to-see/this-female-henry-v-cuts-to-the-heart-of-warfares-horror---revie/. Clapp, Susannah. “Henry IV Review—Harriet Walter’s Kingly Power.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 11 Oct. 2014, www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/ oct/12/henry-4-review-harriet-walter-kingly-power. Clapp, Susannah. “Henry V Review—If Shakespeare Had Done Brexit.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 3 July 2016, www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/ jul/03/henry-v-open-air-regents-park-review-michelle-terry. Cote, David. “Henry IV: Theater in New York.” Time Out New York, Time Out, 18 Aug. 2015, www.timeout.com/newyork/theater/henry-iv-2. Covington, Richard. “Portrait of the Artist as a Non-Man.” Salon, Salon.com, 6 Apr. 1996, www.salon.com/1996/04/06/shaw1/. “Donmar’s Shakespeare Trilogy at King’s Cross.” London Theatre Guide, 17 Dec. 2018, www.londontheatre.co.uk/theatre-news/news/donmars-shakespeare-trilogyat-kings-cross. Folger Shakespeare Library. Henry V from Folger Digital Texts. Ed. Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library, 26 July, 2019. Gardner, Elysa. “Review:  ‘Hamlet’ at Cohesion Theatre Company.” DC Metro Theater Arts, 6 Mar. 2016, dcmetrotheaterarts.com/2016/03/06/review-hamlet-cohesiontheatre-company/.

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Gompertz, Will. “Director Phyllida Lloyd:  We Need More Women in Theatre.” BBC News, BBC, 6 Dec. 2012, www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-20630002. Goodman, Lizbeth. The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance. Routledge, 2005. Green, Jesse. “Theater Review: Women in Prison in Henry IV.” Vulture, Vulture, 12 Nov. 2015, www.vulture.com/2015/11/theater-review-women-in-prison-in-henry-iv. html. Gross, John. “Arts.” Sunday Telegraph, 11 June 1995. Quoted in Taylor, Paul. “Second opinion / Paul Taylor defends Fiona Shaw's Richard II from the baying critics.” The Independent. June 14, 1995. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/ second-opinion-paul-taylor-defends-fiona-shaws-richard-ii-from-the-baying-critics-1586371.html. Halliburton, Rachel. “Richard II, Sam Wanamaker Theatre Review—Electrifying Mixed-Race All-Female Production.” Richard II, Sam Wanamaker Theatre Review—Electrifying Mixed-Race All-Female Production, The Arts Desk, www. theartsdesk.com/theatre/richard-ii-sam-wanamaker-theatre-review-electrifying-mixed-race-all-female-production. “Hamlet.” The Colonial Theatre, thecolonialtheatre.com/programs/hamlet/. Heeney, Alex. “Interview: Maxine Peake Talks Hamlet.” 21st Folio Podcast, 12 May 2016, 21stfolio.com/2016/05/02/maxine-peake/. Hemming, Sarah. “Henry IV, Donmar Warehouse, London—Review.” Financial Times, Financial Times, 10 Oct. 2014, www.ft.com/content/ b62a4230-507b-11e4-8645-00144feab7de. Howard, Tony. Women as Hamlet. Cambridge University Press, 2007. Koenig, Rhoda. “The Girl Who Would Be King.” Independent, 5 June 1995.p. 22 “Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company.” Shakespeare Theatre Association, www. stahome.org/los-angeles-womens-shakespeare-company. Loxton, Howard. “Theatre Review: Richard II at Sam Wanamaker Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe.” British Theatre Guide, 2019, www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/ richard-ii-sam-wanamaker-t-17276. Lukowski, Andrzej. “Henry V Review:  Sarah Amankwah Makes for a Brilliant Young King.” Time Out London, Time Out, 9 Jan. 2019, www.timeout.com/london/ theatre/henry-v-or-harry-england-review. Mitchell, Patricia. “Review:  ‘Hamlet’ at Cohesion Theatre Company.” DC Metro Theater Arts, 6 Mar. 2016, dcmetrotheaterarts.com/2016/03/06/ review-hamlet-cohesion-theatre-company/. Moraes, Frank. “Hazlitt on Henry V • Frankly Curious.” Frankly Curious, 23 Aug. 2014, www.franklycurious.com/wp/2014/07/24/hazlitt-on-henry-v/. Morris, Sylvia. “Shakespeare for Women:  From Henry V to Julius Caesar.” The Shakespeare Blog, 10 Sept. 2012, theshakespeareblog.com/2012/09/ shakespeare-for-women-from-henry-v-to-julius-caesar/. Murray, Jenni. “Woman’s Hour, Phyllida Lloyd; Alaa Murabit.” BBC Radio 4, BBC, 6 Dec. 2012, www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01p3n2k.

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Omaweng, Chris. “Review of the All-Female Production of King Henry V at the Union Theatre.” LondonTheatre1.Com, 5 July 2017, www.londontheatre1.com/reviews/ review-of-the-all-female-production-of-king-henry-v-at-the-union-theatre/. Quarmby, Kevin. “Internet Shakespeare Editions.” Lazarus Theatre’s All-Female Henry V at The Union Theatre, London:: Scene:: Internet Shakespeare Editions, 5 Apr. 2017, internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/scene/2015/06/3410_quarmby/. Rutter, Carol Chillington. “Fiona Shaw’s Richard II: The Girl as Player-King as Comic.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 3, 1997, p. 314., doi:10.2307/2871019. Senelick, Laurence. The Changing Room. Routledge, 2000. “SheCAN:  Shakespeare’s Globe’s Richard II:  Talking to Adjoa Andoh and Lynette Linton.” SheCAN:  Shakespeare’s Globe’s Richard II:  Talking to Adjoa Andoh and Lynette Linton, 14 Feb. 2019, alt-africa.com/2019/02/14/ shecan-richard-ii-at-shakespeares-globe-adjoa-andoh-and-lynette-linton-talk/. Stevens, Ashlie. “Commonwealth Theatre Reinterprets ‘Henry V’ With AllFemale Cast.” 89.3 WFPL News Louisville, 9 May 2019, wfpl.org/ commonwealth-theatre-reinterprets-henry-v-with-all-female-cast/. Taylor, Nancy. Women Direct Shakespeare in America Productions from the 1990s. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005. Temple, Andrew. “Review.” Independent on Sunday, 21 May 1995. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/arts-to-play-the-king-and-be-a-woman-1620498. html Tinker, Jack. “Fiona’s King Is a Drag.” Daily Mail, 16 June 1995. Quoted in Klett, Elizabeth, “The King’s Two Bodies:  Fiona Shaw’s Richard II” in Cross-Gender Shakespeare and English National Identity:  Wearing the Codpiece. Palgrave MacMillan, New York, 2009. p.31. Tripney, Natasha. “Henry V, or Harry England Review at Shakespeare’s Globe, London.” The Stage, 11 May 2019, www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/2019/ henry-v-review-at-shakespeares-globe-london-sarah-amankwah-is-majestic/. Vandenhoff, George. Leaves from an Actor’s Note-Book with Reminiscences and Chit-Chat from the Green-Room and the Stage, in England and America. D. Appleton, 1860. Wolpe, Lisa. “Actor Lisa Wolpe, a Leading Shakespearian Actress.” lisawolpe.com/. “Women in Male Roles: Long List of Prominent Actresses Who Have Yielded To That Ambition.” New  York Times, 1911. https://www.nytimes.com/1911/02/12/ archives/women-in-male-roles-long-list-of-prominent-actresses-who-have.html Wood, Alex. “Review:  Henry V (Shakespeare’s Globe).” WhatsOnStage, 11 May 2019, www.whatsonstage.com/london-theatre/reviews/henry-v-shakespeares-globe_ 49055.html.

5.  Measure for Measure Elaine Turner “For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.” Matthew 6:14 (KJV) “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” Matthew 7:2 (KJV)

The enactment of power and its consequences are addressed in virtually all of Shakespeare’s plays—in some more directly than others, of course. Sometimes they are matched for comparative discussion. For example, in two of the plays a usurper murders the ruler, and his reign is elaborated through the dramatic action. At least three rulers give away their kingdoms while still expecting the benefits of power. Leaving King Lear aside, we find two more rulers handing over the job to a second in command. One, Prospero, so that he can go to his library; the other, the Duke in Measure for Measure, cannot bring himself to enforce the draconian laws he himself has created. The Duke fears his popularity may be at stake if he enacts these laws. His solution is to appoint a deputy, Angelo, to take his place and enforce the laws while he, the Duke, observes in the background, his reputation for kindliness intact. If all rulers have fools, at first glance one might expect that Angelo, the recipient of the Duke’s poison chalice, is the Duke’s fool. But Shakespeare is more clever than that. Angelo turns out to be more victim than fool, floundering in a situation well over his head. It seems that the Duke in his self-admiration casts himself as the classical fool, the character who is outside the action, able at once to be both critic and commentator. Too bad for the Duke, then, (given that the essence of his new role is disengagement), for as soon as he sees the virginal Isabella he is taken with her, and before we know it, the Duke is attempting to manipulate the action to his own benefit, transgressing his

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self-imposed role of observer/commentator. The Duke becomes a genuine fool, trapped in his own machinations, unable to save himself. It is unavoidable that our perspectives on all works of art are formed through the social, political and cultural experiences of our time. The Victorians, apparently comfortable and secure at the center of an empire, were reverent and supportive of those in power. Their responses to Shakespeare’s plays centered on beneficent (or well-meaning but misunderstood) rulers. A “duke of such a mild and gentle temper” begin Charles and Mary Lamb in their Victorian elaboration of Measure for Measure (https://www.bartleby. com/1012/14.html). Critic A.C. Bradley, writing over a hundred years ago, sees the play as one of forgiveness, in which a “good” Duke pardons all. “Forgiveness” is an interesting point here. The Duke, in the end, does forgive. He forgives everyone except Lucio, one of the few characters who interacts with him; the man who saves him by exposing his disguise. The Duke remains a genuine fool, who acts without knowledge, understanding, or a sense of responsibility, and consequently finds himself in unexpected difficulties. But he is also the Duke and he is a dangerous ruler. In Measure for Measure the misuse of power is elaborated in detail to the humiliation and near-punishment of the enactor, but also, and more importantly, to the final silencing of those who are powerless. In our time, when the clay feet of the powerful have, for better or worse, been horribly exposed, it is difficult to see the Duke as anything more than a man who craves power without responsibility, who wants credit without taking risks, and who sees personal benefit as a just reward for his position. Ultimately he will take what he wants and mold the world to his desires. With Isabella, we can see what happens to those without “voice” or power. Isabella, who only desires to be a nun and live in a convent, is manipulated by three different men, but fights courageously until she comes face to face with the highest authority. “To whom can I complain?” (2.4.185), she asks. When she confronts the Duke, however, he uses his position to absorb her. This exceptionally articulate woman is struck dumb. When power is absolute and used for personal gain, there is nowhere to turn. Simultaneously, the role of the fool is also elaborated. Its sacred untouchability, created through distance, insight and lack of personal engagement, is disrupted. You cannot be your own fool. One needs a fool to be able to say that one’s affections would become tender, “were I  human” (Tempest, 5.1.24–27). Playing the classical fool is the last chance one has to gain perspective and self-knowledge. I find Measure for Measure a shocking play. In its quiet, unprepossessing way, it examines the machinations of power in several forms, and its conclusions are not encouraging. There is much in the Duke that is familiar to us: a

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ruler who casts himself as a “fool” to gain sympathy, attention, and to mask the consequences of his actions. Power permits and exonerates everything. This Duke is the ruler of an enclosed city. Imagine if he were to rule an entire country!

I Measure for Measure is traditionally referred to as a “problem play,” generally because it is considered neither a comedy nor a tragedy in the canon.  However, Measure for Measure can be seen as a genuine “problem play” in that its entire purpose is to investigate a specific problem: given human frailty, how can we mete out justice so that it is equitable, so there is a “measure for measure”? Measure for Measure offers more opportunities than most plays for observation through a personalized lens. After all, no reading of any play can be totally objective. Underlying assumptions cannot help but color our responses. Nor can a reading be entirely personal, for our own prejudices and predilections are formed and influenced by the social, political and cultural preconceptions and assumptions of the world in which we live. Interest in power would focus our attention on the Duke. In today’s “#MeToo” world, Isabella might take center stage. The difficulty lies in giving each character his or her full value, as Shakespeare does, and then arriving at the end of the play with a sense of dramatic coherence. The following is an attempt to provide a coherent approach to this remarkable but often troublesome play. As the Duke is the character with the largest part, the most knowledge of what is going on, and the most power, it is the Duke we must first interrogate.  He does have a name, Vincentio, but it is never used. His position is his identity. The Duke opens the play with an almost incomprehensible speech (“Of government the properties to unfold” (1.1.3)) that boils down to telling an associate, Lord Escalus, that he is going away and leaving Angelo in charge. They agree that Angelo has a spotless reputation. Angelo arrives and modestly argues that he is not ready for such responsibility, but the Duke insists, telling Angelo he may “enforce or qualify” the laws, as he sees best. However, the Duke, two scenes later, in the process of disguising himself as a monk, tells Friar Thomas that he expects his laws to be enforced.  He himself has neglected them, he admits. However, they are so severe that he feels the public will turn against him if he revives them, so he has set Angelo to enforce them. The Friar disapproving, quite rightly, objects: FRIAR THOMAS. It rested in your Grace To unloose this tied-up justice when you pleased, And it in you more dreadful would have seemed

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The Duke fears this would damage his reputation for kindness and make him politically unpopular. He then explains there is another reason, which he describes with somewhat more passion than the first: DUKE. Lord Angelo is precise … / scarce confesses That his blood flows, or that his appetite Is more to bread than stone. Hence shall we see, If power change purpose, what our seemers be. (1.3.54–8)

Perhaps it is our sensitivity to psychological nuance that makes us flinch at the Duke’s rather excessive and bitter description of Angelo. Is it hatred? Jealousy? Whatever the cause, it is clear that this is personally set up by the Duke to discredit Angelo. Ironically, of course, the Duke could never have foreseen the appearance of Isabel, who actually proves to be Angelo’s undoing. There are several Shakespearean rulers who leave their kingdoms in the hands of others, and the result is never good. We could discuss the limits and possibilities left to a second-in-command, but suffice it to say the deputy can never exercise the full scope of an absolute ruler. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Angelo must carry out the tasks obligatory to the role, while at the same time be aware that these actions, and the manner by which he carries them out, will be scrutinized and judged by his superior. Angelo has a reputation for fastidiousness, and prides himself on it. Hence the idea that he has ice water in his veins. But Angelo initially does not plan to do anything disreputable. Yet, both Escalus and Isabel later suggest that Angelo might have violated the law in his youthful past, putting the audience on guard against hypocrisy: ESCALUS.  Whether you had not some time in your life Erred in this point which you now censure him, And pulled the law upon you.   (2.1.15–21)

And … ISABELLA. Go to your bosom, Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know That’s like my brother’s fault.  (2.2.166–8)

Angelo’s transgression is not sex outside marriage, but breach of promise of marriage. He was contracted to marry Mariana, but because her dowry was lost at sea, he did not marry her. Breach of promise is a civil crime, not

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a capital crime, and a good lawyer could probably argue that the dowry was part of the contract, so Angelo is not in breach of the contract.  So far he certainly cannot be judged as either a hypocrite or felon. The “bed trick” of switching bodies, by which Angelo is caught, was a common enough Renaissance dramatic trope, but Shakespeare never uses any trope without purpose. This “trick” has sinister implications regarding the Duke, who is not only acting as a pimp, but also forcing Angelo to break the law. All this casts doubts on the concept of a “good Duke.” His behavior is manipulative and outrageous. By this point in the play the Duke cannot be seen as a detached observer in any way. He wants Isabella. It is difficult to see how those who found him beneficent a century and more ago could excuse not only his embroiling her in his nefarious plot against Angelo, but also, more shocking, telling her that her brother had been executed in order to gain her unmerited gratitude. To see the Duke as excusable, one needs to see Isabella as cold-hearted. It is challenging for a modern reader to entertain this position. Of all the characters, it is probably Isabella who comes across most passionately today.  Those against her are turned so mostly by her insistence on her “chastity,” and feel it is cold and churlish of her to choose an ideal over the actual life of her brother. Many feel it is her duty to sacrifice herself, a suggestion that implies a relative value between brother-and-sister/man-andwoman which is unpalatable today. Isabella intends to be a nun. True, it is not a common occupation these days, but it is her desire. She responds readily to Lucio’s request to plead with Angelo for her brother’s life. Arguably, there is no heroine in all of Shakespeare who can hold a candle to Isabella when it comes to an argument. When she confronts Angelo, she begins hesitantly, but with Lucio urging from the sidelines, she becomes increasingly passionate: ISABELLA. How would you be If He which is the top of judgment should But judge you as you are? Oh think on that, And mercy will then breathe within your lips Like man new-made.  (2.2.99–103)

Isabella’s words flow from her deep-seated Christianity and mirror St Matthew’s description of justice. It will be important to remember these words in the last act. Angelo has seemingly never before been tempted by sex. It is Isabel’s goodness that undoes him: ANGELO. What’s this? What’s this? Is this her fault or mine? The tempter or the tempted, who sins most, ha?

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Is Angelo evil? It is difficult to credit that. First, there is limited premeditation. Second, he does not aim to harm, although he must do so to achieve his own desire. Third, as Isabel later says, he did not, in the end, do anything. Is he wrong? Of course!  Moreover, he commits blackmail, which is a serious crime. This blackmail is never mentioned by any of the characters; it is a secret Angelo and Isabel share with the audience. Like the Duke, Angelo takes advantage of the power of his position. Power and responsibility are ever in Shakespeare’s sights, and here we have two men, each with unquestioned power, using it for their own ends.

II The second meeting between Angelo and Isabella rings with passion, its language is rich with sexual innuendo. Isabella, perhaps, is unconscious of the intimations behind her words. Angelo thirsts, making them explicit. He tells her outright “I love you” (2.4.152), and that he will exchange her brother Claudio’s life for her body. Isabel threatens to tell the world “what man thou art” (2.4.165), and Angelo retorts that his unsullied name will speak for him, even though “my false o’erweighs your true” (2.4.184). “To whom should I complain” (2.4. 185), cries Isabella at the end of the scene; a clear and desperate cry that rings through the remainder of the play. There is only one person from whom she might obtain justice. The audience waits in expectation. I suspect most women today would identify with Isabella and see the issue not as one of chastity, but of violation.  Chastity is the language by which it is discussed, but violation is the subject. “Soul” is the description of the integral person in this play. For Isabella, her body and her integrity, her soul, are neither separable nor dispensable. The dead center of the play rests in Isabella’s meeting with her brother, Claudio. Here, too, our preconceptions are called upon. Do we feel with Claudio that sex between his sister and Angelo would be a small price to pay to save him from death? Or do we feel with Isabella that this violation is too great a price to pay?  She cannot dispense with her ‘self’, even for her brother. Shakespeare increases the scene’s tension with Claudio’s interruptions, in a rhythmic exchange:

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CLAUDIO.  O Isabel— ISABELLA. What says my brother? CLAUDIO. Death is a fearful thing. ISABELLA. And shamed life a hateful. CLAUDIO. Ay but to die, and go we know not where …  (3.1.129–33)

There is no justice in this scene. It is the Duke’s law, not Angelo’s, that Claudio is debating. The Duke’s manipulations against Angelo are unnecessary; Angelo has lost himself. I suggest that Angelo’s reaction in Act V is not horror in having been discovered as Mariana’s former betrothed, but shock at the shattering of his self-image. An entirely different person has burst from the pristine shell of which Angelo was so proud. He stands before himself as a man driven by passion; lustful, secretive and deceitful. Angelo has become the perfect image of human frailty: a man undone by his passions.  Add the fact that he has been manipulated, betrayed and publicly exposed by his employer and liege. No wonder he wants to die! How will he live with the new Angelo? Fortunately, he has Mariana. She has had the good fortune to somehow run into the Duke, who, disguised as a Friar, uses her in his plot.  The “bed trick” is more than a mere dramatic solution, it also reveals the Duke to be morally suspect in contrast to his own self-image as the wise and loving ruler. The Duke may have absolute power, but the audience, is in a position to assess him and his actions. Take, for example, his discussion with Claudio, where he attempts to convince Claudio that death is preferable to living: DUKE. Be absolute for death. … Thy best of rest is sleep, And that thou oft provok’st, yet grossly fear’st Thy death, which is no more. (3.1.18–20)

There are several critics, including Knight, who see the play as an illustration of Christian faith, and this monologue in particular as a confirmation of sacred values.  It is unlikely that the average 21st Century audience member will entertain this idea. Instead we are faced with a set of more complex responses. We know the Duke made the law himself. He is in a position to call a halt to its proceedings and save Claudio. Why doesn’t he? Given that the Duke engendered this law, doesn’t his attempt to encourage Claudio to embrace death come across as not only hypocritical but cruel?  The scene offers us the opportunity to assess both the law and the Duke. Similarly, the Duke’s interrogation of Claudio’s lover, Juliet (a choice of name perhaps meant to conjure memories of an earlier Juliet, also punished for love), provides another such opportunity. The heavily pregnant Juliet is humble and

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gracious in her expression of love for Claudio, as well as her acceptance of her situation. When the Duke hears that she willingly made love with Claudio, he tells her that her sin was of a “heavier kind than his” (2.3.31). Juliet replies: JULIET. I do repent me as it is an evil, And take the shame with joy. (2.3.39–40)

Again, it is difficult to assess the Duke’s intentions here. There is nothing we can take for granted as the play progresses. We are kept on our toes!

III So far, we have concentrated on the “better-off” characters of status; the characters who make the action, so to speak, and whose decisions others need to live by. But Shakespeare also treats us to a pimp and his mistress, and their concerns for their business. Brothels are being closed in the suburbs of Vienna, but these two know there is no chance of cleansing the city of sexual activity! Much Jacobean fun is had when constable Elbow brings tapster Pompey and his client Froth before Lord Escalus. Pompey, in grand style, accuses Froth of violating his wife. Shakespeare seems to have a fondness for these energetic reprobates. Their language is hearty and Shakespeare gives them some of his best jokes. However, Pompey is arrested, sent to prison, and then given a job as an assistant executioner; a series of actions which might be seen to express a “measure for measure.” In the prison we meet the irrepressible Barnadine. Despite its shadow of death, this play consistently calls our attention to the value of life through vibrant characters like Barnadine. The Duke’s law focuses on the significance of life and the naked opposition between physicality, the life force, and the finality of the death penalty.  Juliet’s pregnancy makes this visually explicit. Claudio’s plight, Angelo’s choices, Isabella’s resistance, the Duke’s conversations about death all focus our attention on the precious gift of life, which Barnadine literally embodies. He absolutely refuses to die! Again, we cannot escape the assumptions we bring with us. If one is an advocate for capital punishment this consistent focus on life/death choices (and its natural bias towards life) encourages us to see the Duke in a positive light. If one feels that the law is absolute (regardless of its viability), then Juliet, Claudio, Pompey and Barnadine must face their punishment. But if one seeks justice in the law then one has to consider human frailty and the ways that humans can be sabotaged by their own emotions. Juliet and Claudio were in love and were prevented from marriage. Angelo is turned inside out by his overwhelming passions. There will always be prostitutes and

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brothels, and justice is not served by the death penalty. (If you believe this, though, you will never become Duke!).

IV Before we come to the last act, we need to have a look at Lucio, who is the link between the two halves of this world. He is a good friend to Claudio and moves to help him when he is arrested. He has a certain social status, but he is also a friend to Pompey and Mistress Overdone and frequents their establishments. He has a certain sensitivity. He seeks out Isabella, is aware of her qualities, and he is able to convince her to confront Angelo. He stimulates her courage, cleverly coaching her from the sidelines. However, he has little discretion and is too full of himself for his own good. He cannot prevent himself from promoting himself, defaming the Duke to his face, when he believes he is the Friar. Ironically, Lucio several times bemoans the absence of the Duke, emphasizing the Duke’s precious reputation for kindness and beneficence. LUCIO. Would the Duke that is absent have done this? … He knew the service, and that instructed him to mercy.  (3.2.117–21)

And later: LUCIO. By my troth, Isabel, I loved thy brother. If the old fantastical duke of dark corners had been at home, he had lived. (4.3.168–71)

Double irony! Ironic, also, that it is Lucio’s bravado that reveals the Duke; a rare, humiliating moment for him. During Act IV, the Duke is heavily occupied with his own machinations. He sets Isabella and Mariana to “trick” Angelo who, in his panic to protect himself, has ordered Claudio’s early execution. The Duke, to save Claudio, decides to substitute a prisoner, but Barnadine refuses to be executed. Luckily, another prisoner has recently died. They will present the head of this unfortunate to Angelo as if it were Claudio’s. These are all familiar dramatic tropes, but in context, surely, they signify something more to the audience. How does an audience member relate to them? Are these human lives merely chess pieces to be manipulated as it suits those who are in positions to play? In Act V, of course, all must be resolved. The Duke has warned Isabella that he may be harsh with her, but to take no notice of it. The memory of Isabella’s plaintiff “to whom should I complain” rings in the air as she indeed complains to the Duke, now himself, of Angelo’s advances. Angelo claims she is mad, and the Duke, surprisingly, has her taken away. Mariana enters veiled. Through a series of oblique, innuendo-laden questions, it is revealed that Angelo has unwillingly, and unknowingly, been

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Mariana’s lover. Isabella calls the Friar as her witness. The Duke is obliged to go offstage and change, returning as the Friar.  Lucio denounces him to the point where Escalus orders the Friar to be taken to the prison, and the Duke seems caught in his own disguise. Lucio furiously pulls off the Friar’s hood and … lo and behold! When the Duke is revealed, he settles down to sorting everyone, and everything, out. To Angelo he says: DUKE. Being criminal in double violation Of sacred chastity and of promise-breach Thereon dependent, for your brother’s life— The very mercy of the law cries out Most audible, even from his proper tongue, “An Angelo for Claudio, death for death.” Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure; Like doth quit like, and measure still for measure.  (5.1.460–68)

But is this really what St. Matthew is saying? Is this Justice? An eye for an eye? Those who have found the Duke to be a kind and compassionate ruler have taken it for granted that he can do whatever he likes, because secretly he has everyone’s best interest at heart. If one’s image of the Duke is less accepting, one may well be disturbed by his quiet vendetta against Angelo, his manipulating and interfering in the lives of others, his relish of his power, and his disguise.  As I have said before, it is actually Isabella, not the Duke, who undoes Angelo. The Duke could never have imagined he would gain such an asset when he planned his absence! And what of Angelo?  The Duke condemns him to death and the devastated Mariana begs Isabella to plead for his life. Many critics have seen Isabella’s agreement here as the warming up of a cold woman, or proof of her learning about compassion. I  would like to present a different approach:  Isabella is a committed Christian and has shown herself to be so throughout. Charity, compassion, forgiveness, are central to Christianity. “Forgiveness,” as exemplified here, is central to the Christian ethos. Indeed, when Isabella first met Angelo she offered him a definition of justice that echoed St Matthew. Now she does so in a specific context: ISABELLA. … I partly think A due sincerity governed his deeds ‘Til he did look on me. Since it is so, Let him not die. My brother had but justice, In that he did the thing for which he died. For Angelo, His act did not o’ertake his intent … Thoughts are no subjects, Intents but merely thoughts.  (5.1.510–19)

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For Isabella, justice has always been informed by mercy. Isabella plays well in our world. She is intelligent, feisty, passionate and arguably the most verbally adept of all of Shakespeare’s women. Moreover, she is gentle and compassionate. And she knows what she wants. She wants to be a nun. All the more shocking, then, is the Duke’s capture of her. The Duke stale-mates Isabella by telling her Claudio is dead and then producing him at the right moment, telling her, almost in the same breath, that she can marry him. Is the silence of this unusually loquacious woman the silent pleasure of agreement? Or, more likely, is she literally struck dumb? Again, her former plea rings in our ears: “to whom should I complain?” By our final tableau, all the loose ends have been neatly tied. Indeed, all the couples firmly matched to each other, manipulated into marriage by this over-active, gloating Duke, a visual image of absolute power. The Duke goes his own way. He disguises himself, manipulates others, rearranges their lives and tricks them into breaking the law. He deceives them and takes what he wants. To whom can we complain when there is no limit or responsibility to power? The stated purpose of the Duke is to make sure that an unpopular law is enforced. Has it been? No. Has the law been vindicated? No. One might even contend that the law has been proved impossible to enforce. The Duke could repeal it at any point. Does he? No. Is the audience satisfied? Does marrying everyone off solve any problems? I think we can see how, at one time, especially with a happily married Victorian Queen on the throne, multiple marriages at the end of a play might have seemed a loving, satisfying idea, but in the 21st Century this is unlikely to be comforting. Rather, this tableau exposes the Duke and highlights one of Shakespeare’s favorite issues, the limits of power and responsibility. This Duke gave us a disturbing picture of unlimited power in his the manipulation of private lives for his own benefit against a background of draconian laws.  Shakespeare is indeed “for all times.” He speaks to each time in its own language. We may be hard-pressed to see the kindly Duke that 19th and early 20th century critics did, but our 21st Century Duke serves as an apt and serious warning for our time.

Works Cited All textual citations refer to: Folger Shakespeare Library. Shakespeare’s Plays. from Folger Digital Texts. Ed. Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library, 1 April 2019. www.folgerdigitaltexts.org Bradley, Andrew C. “From Shakespearean Tragedy.” Measure for Measure, Norton Critical Editions, 2009.

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Chambers, Raymond W. Man’s Unconquerable Mind. Jonathan Cape, 1952. Knight, G. Wilson. The Wheel of Fire. Methuen, 1965. Miles, Rosalind. The Problem of Measure for Measure:  A Historical Investigation. Vision Press, 1976. Shakespeare, William, and Eccles, Mark, editor. Measure for Measure (New Variorum Edition). Modern Language Association of America, 1980. Wells, Stanley, editor. Shakespeare: A Bibliographical Guide. Clarendon Press, 1990.

6.  Fortune’s Knave: Sex, Politics and Machiavellian Doctrine in Antony & Cleopatra Michael Peter Bolus

In the final Act of William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, the tempestuous Egyptian queen Cleopatra prepares to die by her own hand. In typically ostentatious fashion, she thrusts those now infamous and deadly asps to her breasts. She is, at least on one level, conceding defeat: CLEOPATRA. My resolution’s placed, and I have nothing Of woman in me. Now from head to foot I am marble-constant. Now the fleeting moon No planet is of mine. (5.2.291–294)

It is clear that she would rather die than subject herself to the indignity and ignobility of capture by the conquering Romans and the humiliating spectacle of her public shaming. But in a thrillingly peripatetic shift in perspective, she then utters words of impending triumph, seemingly convinced that she will have achieved that brand of immortality that her conquerors will not: CLEOPATRA. Give me my robe. Put on my crown. I have Immortal longings in me. (5.2.335–336)

The image of a once mighty Queen, now defeated, humbled, and shorn of power, jarringly juxtaposed against the moment when she defiantly proclaims her own greatness and victory-in-death is illustrative of the restless dichotomies swimming about in one of Shakespeare’s most enigmatic plays. Antony and Cleopatra is the story of the volatile and ill-fated love affair between Cleopatra and the Roman general and politician Mark Antony, set

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against the backdrop of Octavius Caesar’s brutal consolidation of power in the first century B.C.E. The political, social, and psycho-sexual schematics at work in Antony and Cleopatra feature an active and vibrant set of paradigms found in Niccolo Machiavelli’s seminal political treatise, The Prince, written in 1532.1 These paradigms are emphasized not only in the affairs of statecraft dramatized in the play, the affairs of most import to Machiavelli, but also in the inter-personal relationships that emerge as the drama’s primary dramatic and thematic interest. Both the strict adherences to and blatant violations of Machiavellian doctrine result in victories and defeats of varying degrees of import, relevance, and magnitude in the play. But the identification of the play’s moral and/or philosophical posture with regard to stratagems outlined in The Prince proves to be a problematic task. For Antony and Cleopatra, like most of Shakespeare, is imbued with a profound array of paradoxes and ambiguities which invariably expose the simplest conclusions as myopic and incomplete. It might be argued that Octavius’ military success is emblematic of the validity of Machiavellian thought specifically. But does such an assertion dismiss Antony’s entire existence as wasteful and misguided? Does Cleopatra’s military defeat and subsequent suicide exclude her triumph on some other level? Must the fruition of a political order necessarily eclipse the messy complications of human interaction? Has Octavius, in fact, won the loftiest of victories, or has he overlooked the value of treasures to be found in an altogether different realm of existence? And, perhaps most important, will his single-minded commitment to Machiavellian devices ultimately affect the way in which events actually unfold? For it seems that both Machiavelli and Shakespeare have a difficult time straying from the belief that we must all “endure the great and unremitting malice of fortune” (30). While the complex interweaving of the personal and political provides Antony and Cleopatra with a fertile arena for the exhibition of Machiavellian thought, the apparent contradictions inherent in the drama complicate any attempt to isolate Shakespeare’s own moral and/or political stance. Shakespeare is, after all, the master of articulating, with equal skill and conviction, a myriad of diametrically opposed arguments. The play does, however, propound the types of ideas which compel us to ask the most useful and relevant questions.

I If Machiavelli is correct in his assertion that “the art of war is all that is expected of a ruler,” (87) then Octavius Caesar would seem to emerge as the

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ideal Machiavel. From the beginning of the play, Caesar embarks upon a most calculated, prudent, and politically insightful course of action. His interests lie in the preservation and maintenance of the empire, and he soon exhibits the types of characteristics extolled by Machiavelli: [A]‌prudent ruler cannot, and must not, honor his word when it places him at a disadvantage and when the reasons for which he made his promise no longer exist. (99)

In Act II, scene ii, we witness a newly reunited Caesar and Antony ally themselves against a rebellious Pompey, “… to join our kingdoms and our hearts, and never / Fly off our loves again!” (2.2.182–183). When the two finally confront Pompey in Act II, scene vi, they seem to find common ground and retire to celebrate. Yet when we next hear of Caesar’s behavior toward Pompey and Antony, we learn of a new and unexpected set of circumstances: ANTONY.… but he hath wag’d New wars ‘gainst Pompey; made his will, and read it To public ear; Spoke scantly of me; when perforce he could not But pay me terms of honor, cold and sickly He vented them, most narrow measure lent me … (3.4.3–8)

We soon discover that Caesar has not only betrayed his pact with Pompey and slighted Antony, but has removed Lepidus from his former position in the Triumvirate: EROS. Caesar, having made use of him in the wars ‘gainst Pompey, presently denied him rivality, would not let him partake in the glory of the action; and, not resting here, accuses him of letters he had formerly wrote to Pompey; upon his own appeal seizes him. So the poor third is up, till death enlarge his confine. (3.5.7–13)

Caesar’s consolidation of power is executed without the slightest regard for promises made or treaties signed. He expertly manufactures public support for his subsequent campaign against Antony by describing seemingly treasonous and decadent behavior which he ensures is received by the Roman people. MAECENAS. Let Rome be thus inform’d. AGRIPPA. Who, queasy with his insolence already, Will their good thoughts call from him. CAESAR. The people knows it, and have now received His accusations. (3.6.21–25)

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Caesar’s most amazing feat, however, is perpetrating such treacherous deeds in the guise of honesty, loyalty, and nobility. This ability and willingness to create such illusions is consistent with Machiavellian doctrine. In describing the desired characteristics of a prince, Machiavelli writes: He should appear to be compassionate, faithful to his word, kind, guileless, and devout. And indeed he should be so. But his disposition should be that, if he needs to be the opposite, he knows how. (100)

Caesar’s actions lend great irony to his admonition to Antony:  “You have broken / The article of your oath, which you shall never / Have tongue to charge me with” (2.2.98–100). Caesar is most adept at creating the illusion of trustworthiness, as friend, brother, and leader, while concealing the true nature of his actions which are all designed to serve his own self-interests. Machiavelli might argue that that Caesar’s self-interests and the good of the state are one and the same. The ensuing Pax Romana might even support this claim. But does the play assume a moral position with regard to Caesar’s actions, or is Machiavelli correct in maintaining that, “In the actions of all men, and especially of princes, where there is no court of appeal, one judges by the result” (101)? While Pompey, like Caesar, understands the necessity of mustering popular support for his campaigns, he is, unlike Caesar, content to hire mercenaries to aid him in military engagements. Machiavelli, however, warns of the dangers of hiring mercenaries: “Wise princes, therefore, have always shunned auxiliaries and made use of their own forces. They have preferred to lose battles with their own forces than with them with other, in the belief that no true victory is possible with alien arms” (84). Menecrates and Menas, described as “pirates” (1.4.54), are employed by Pompey to ensure victory at sea. But Machiavelli’s warnings prove worthy of serious consideration. For after Pompey rejects Menas’s offer to assassinate the Triumvirate, Menas’s lack of true loyalty is revealed in the following aside: MENAS. For this I’ll never follow thy palled fortunes more. Who seeks and will not take when once ‘tis offered Shall never find it more. (2.7.94–97)

And although Caesar does make use of soldiers who betrayed Antony, they have ostensibly pledged their allegiance to Caesar. One might also add that Pompey’s failure to accept Menas’ bold offer was a grave mistake according to Machiavellian doctrine:

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We can say that cruelty is used well (if it is permissible to talk in this way of evil) when it is employed once and for all, and one’s safety depends on it, and then it is not persisted in but as far as possible turned to the good of one’s subject. (65)

While we may legitimately wonder what Caesar would have done if confronted with a similar set of circumstances, we suspect that he most likely would have found alternative measures toward the attainment of his goals. He does, after all, strictly adhere to another of Machiavelli’s exhortations, that, “he should appear a man of compassion, a man of good faith, a man of integrity, a kind and religious man” (101). Caesar still has other options available to him, but he understands that it would be unwise to behave in a blatantly treacherous manner. In true Machiavellian style, Caesar is keenly in tune with how he and others are perceived by the public. He echoes Antony’s comment about “Our slippery people, / Whose love is never linked to the deserver” (1.2.201–202) when he responds to Pompey’s rise with the following: CAESAR. It hath been taught us from the primal state That he which is was wish’d until he were, And the ebbed man, ne’er loved till ne’er worth love, Comes feared by being lacked. (1.4.47–50)

This type of acute perception enables Caesar to act in such a calculatedly successful manner. Once again, he seems to emerge as the living embodiment of Machiavelli’s perfect ruler. “There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others” (124). On a strictly political level, Caesar’s grasp of the aforementioned universal human truths seems to place him in the first category. Yet if Caesar is the personification of the Machiavellian ideal, how and why does Shakespeare leave us with the impression that Antony and Cleopatra, even in death, have emerged triumphant? In fact, Caesar’s “victory” seems to pale in comparison to Antony and Cleopatra’s. His very existence strikes us as much less significant than theirs. As we shall observe, it is the systemic subversion of Machiavelli’s entire treatise that enables Antony and Cleopatra to overcome Machiavelli’s most disciplined adherent.

II If Caesar is the Machiavellian ideal, then Cleopatra is surely that ideal’s antithesis. If Rome epitomizes duty, order, and reason, then Egypt epitomizes pleasure, decadence, and passion. Cleopatra’s image, life-style, and manner of

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governance run directly contrary to the models outlined in The Prince. Yet Shakespeare disallows the construction of such simple, binary antitheses. For it becomes readily apparent that while Cleopatra rejects Machiavellian doctrine in the political arena, she enthusiastically embraces it in personal and sexual realms. Cleopatra’s self-conscious, shameless employment of deceitful practices is illustrated quite clearly in her many attempts to manipulate Antony: CLEOPATRA. See where he is, who’s with him, what he does. I did not send you. If you find him sad, Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report That I am sudden sick. (1.3.3–6)

Her decadence should never be confused with naiveté, for she is well aware of the treacherous behavior of others. Her exclamation, “Riotous madness / To be entangled with those mouth-made vows, / Which break themselves in swearing!” (1.3.36–38) seems to echo Machiavelli’s statement that “The bond of love is one which men, wretched creatures that they are, break when it is to their advantage to do so” (96). Her relationships with those around her also seem to be in coincidence with much of what Machiavelli has to say about love and fear: From this arises the following question:  whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse. The answer is that one would like to be both the one and the other; but because it is difficult to combine them, it is far better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both. (96)

Cleopatra manages to be both loved and feared. While Cleopatra’s devoted servant Charmian proves to be devoutly loyal to her mistress, she says things outside of Cleopatra’s earshot which she would never say in her presence. “Find me to marry me / with Octavius Caesar, and companion me with my / mistress” (1.2.30–32). But, like a true Machiavel, Cleopatra is willing to instill pure, unadulterated fear in those attending her, like the poor Messenger who literally fears for his life. Machiavelli, however, goes on to state that, “The prince must nonetheless make himself feared in such a way that, if he is not loved, at least he escapes being hated” (97). It is interesting that it is Charmian who explores the same sentiment. “In time we hate that which we often fear” (1.3.14). In the same scene, Antony explores a different arm of the same phenomenon, “the hated, grown to … strength / Are newly grown to love” (1.3.59–61). Cleopatra strays from Machiavelli when it comes to flatterers. Machiavelli’s deep suspicion of flatterers (and the negative impact they can have on sound

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governance) informs his understanding of how strong monarchs should solicit and receive good counsel. While recognizing that not everyone surrounding a monarch should enjoy the privilege of speaking freely, he concedes that a discerning ruler must choose “certain discreet men from among his subjects, and allowing them alone free leave to speak their minds on any matter on which he asks their opinion” (38). The flatterers, by turn, should be ignored. Cleopatra, it seems, abides no such guidance. The Messenger, who was verbally and physically assaulted by the Queen, is later able to ingratiate himself by describing Octavia in terms that meet with Cleopatra’s approval. Cleopatra blindly accepts the information from the flatterer, even though everybody else’s description of Octavia would lead us to believe that he is lying in an attempt to win favor. He succeeds. Yet Cleopatra is not entirely averse to dispensing flattery when it serves her own purposes. In Act III, scene xiii, upon the arrival of Thidias, Cleopatra uncharacteristically subordinates herself to the victorious Caesar. “He is a god, and knows / What is most right” (3.13.73–74). And later, “Most kind messenger, / Say to great Caesar this in deputation: / I kiss his conqu’ring hand. Tell him I am prompt / To lay my crown at’s feet, and there to kneel. / Tell him from his all-obeying breath I hear / The doom of Egypt” (3.13.90–95). Despite any parallels which might be drawn between Cleopatra’s actions and the type of behavior extolled by Machiavelli, it must be conceded that, in the end, Cleopatra emerges as a most un-Machiavellian character. The decadence, extravagance, and effeminacy of both Cleopatra and her Egyptian court are in such glaring opposition to the political philosophy espoused in The Prince that even Cleopatra’s appropriation of some of its core components does little to eradicate the disparities. Not surprisingly, Cleopatra is defeated by the Machiavel Caesar, and rather than be subjected to public humiliation in Rome, she takes her own life to be with her beloved Antony. Yet Shakespeare doesn’t seem to be validating the wisdom and/or cognitive power of Machiavellian thought. Or, if he is, it is only on one level of discussion. The emptiness of Caesar’s victory, and the profundity of Antony and Cleopatra’s demise, complicates the equation to such an extent that it once again becomes difficult to identify the status of Machiavelli’s assertions in the totality of the play.

III As Antony and Cleopatra begins, we find the once great Roman warrior Mark Antony ostensibly corrupted by the sloth of Egypt in general and Cleopatra in particular. He manages to compose himself and return to Rome when

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trouble materializes, but it appears that the seeds of decadence have already been planted. Through the myopic prism of Roman circumspection, love has made Antony subservient, the deterioration of his once-admirable self-discipline has made him soft, and revelry has clouded his thinking. In Caesar’s estimation, Antony’s failure to meet Machiavellian standards greatly contributes to his downfall; he has allowed pride and rashness to pollute prudence. Yet what, if anything, does Antony gain from surrendering to his passion and its attendant vices? Certainly not military conquests, but, perhaps, conquests of another sort. What Caesar cannot see is that Antony’s presumed depravities are actually evidence of his being liberated by his love for Cleopatra; his new-found passion has served as the catalyst for his personal freedom and rejuvenated sense of self. Caesar’s description of Antony is an incredibly damaging portrait:  “he fishes, drinks, and wastes / The lamps of night in revel, is not more manlike / Than Cleopatra, nor the Queen of Ptolemy / More womanly than he” (1.4.4–7). Caesar’s disgust with the idea of “waste” is diametrically opposed to Antony’s willingness to waste, on a large and ostentatious scale, food, money, drink, and, most importantly, time. Antony’s relationship with time (“There’s not a minute of our lives should stretch / Without some pleasure now” (1.1.53–54)) is sharply contrasted with Caesar’s frugal approach to time management, “and to that end / Assemble we immediate council. Pompey / Thrives in our idleness” (1.3.85–87). Machiavelli has quite a lot to say about how idle time should be spent. He maintains that even during peace, a good ruler should spend his time preparing for war: We find that princes who have thought more of their pleasures than of arms have lost their states. The first way to lose your state is to neglect the art of war; the first way to win a state is to be skilled in the art of war. (87)

The above-quoted passage alone serves to illustrate the polarized differences between Antony and Caesar. But Machiavelli continues: So he must never let his thoughts stray from military exercises, which he must pursue more vigorously in peace than in war. These exercises can be both physical and mental. As for the first, besides keeping his men well organized and trained, he must always be out hunting, so accustoming his body to hardships … he must never take things easy in times of peace, but rather use the latter assiduously, in order to be able to reap the profit in times of adversity. (88)

It is not a stretch to cite Antony’s behavior as blatant violations of Machiavelli’s rules. And since Antony is indeed defeated by Caesar, it might seem that Shakespeare is lending a certain credence to Machiavellian schematics. But

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we cannot forget that Shakespeare manipulates this scenario in such a way that we are repelled by the idea of Antony becoming more like Caesar. We see his potential for happiness awaiting him at the end of another avenue. And although his military defeat has tragic consequences, the steps he would have needed to take to ensure victory would have cost him his own sense of self; a sense of self which is of utmost importance to him: “I am / Antony yet.” (3.13.115–116) And later: “If I lose mine honor, / I lose myself” (3.4.24– 25). Both Antony and Cleopatra seem to reclaim their honor at the end of the play, robbing Caesar of the opportunity to trample their dignity. Antony and Cleopatra are convinced that their “noble act” (5.2.335) will reunite them: “Husband, I come!” (5.2.342). Their subversion of Machiavellian doctrine has enabled them to triumph, on a profound level, over Caesar and the rest of the world. The idea of Antony and Cleopatra’s victory does not, however, completely invalidate the principles espoused in The Prince. For despite Machiavelli’s exhortations to act in a cold, calculated, and manipulative manner, he concludes with the following thought: I hold strongly to this: that it is better to be impetuous than circumspect; because fortune is a woman and if she is to be submissive it is necessary to beat and coerce her. Experience shows that she is more often subdued by men who do this than by those who act coldly. (133)

In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, it would seem, in light of the quote above, that Antony emerges in possession of a crucial Machiavellian quality. For Antony is as impetuous as Caesar is circumspect. But the passage also leads us to the idea which surfaces prominently in both Machiavelli and Shakespeare:  the concept of Fortune. In Act II, scene iii, the Soothsayer, speaking of Caesar, tells Antony the following: SOOTHSAYER. If thou dost play with him at any game, Thou art sure to lose; and of that natural luck He beats thee ‘gainst the odds. Thy luster thickens When he shines by. I say again, thy spirit Is all afraid to govern thee near him; But, he away, ‘tis noble. (2.3.30–35)

Even Antony must concur: ANTONY. Be it art or hap, He hath spoken true. The very dice obey him, And in our sports my better cunning faints Under his chance. If we draw lots, he speeds; His cocks do win the battle still of mine

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Machiavelli, in the chapter entitled “How far affairs are governed by fortune,” takes it upon himself to confront the issue of fortune, holding, as quoted above, that it is “better to be impetuous than circumspect’ (133). While he encourages men to prepare themselves for the violent fluctuations caused by fortune, he ultimately concedes that we have no control over it. We may only oppose it or embrace it. Cleopatra speaks of the “luck of Caesar,” (5.2.341) and exclaims, “Tis paltry to be Caesar; / Not being Fortune, he’s but Fortune’s knave, / A minister of her will” (5.2.2–4). Barring control of fortune, Antony must decide how to spend the time he has left. His decisions may not run parallel to Machiavellian dogma, but they allow him to savor his remaining time with the person with whom he will share his ultimate victory.

IV There is no question that Antony and Cleopatra is a vivid illustration of Machiavellian paradigms in practice. The ease with which one can identify and extract the many parallels swimming about Shakespeare’s respective dramas makes one wonder if The Prince actually served as one of his direct, if unreferenced, inspirations. Yet the play is so much more than a clinical exhibition of the political philosophy outlined in The Prince. Even if we remove the moral component from the discussion, we are still left with a play that seems to suggest that Machiavelli’s disinterest in the many other facets of our existence renders his entire thesis suspect by way of contrast. One might convincingly argue, in Machiavelli’s defense, that The Prince is a treatise concerned with statecraft exclusively, and not Man’s spiritual and/or metaphysical dilemmas. If such is the case, it becomes interesting to examine how Shakespeare can appropriate Machiavellian thought, preserve its inherent truths, transpose it, completely intact, into his own scenario, and end up calling its very foundational premises into question, simply by manipulating the context into which it has now been set. What we are left with is the belief that Machiavelli’s observations are insightful, accurate, and probing, but painfully incomplete, if not useless, when removed from the grand scheme of things. In Shakespeare’s play, it is the human element which assumes the position of primacy. In the end, Shakespeare’s Antony parts ways with Machiavelli over the question of priorities. If Fortune reigns supreme, then how does one fill the time one has been allotted? Machiavelli argues for order and stability through

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conquest and maintenance. Antony sees another option: an existence in which political order and traditional forms of accomplishment are not so highly prized; an existence described by the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, another author with whom Shakespeare may have been familiar:2 We are great fools. ‘He has spent his life in idleness,’ we say; ‘I have done nothing today.’ What, have you not lived? That is not only the most fundamental but the most illustrious of your occupations … To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. (850–51)

In this context, the way of life toward which Antony and Cleopatra were beginning to move together, Machiavellian thought seems to suddenly evaporate into obsolescence. What emerges in its place is the triumph of love, an unflinching devotion to personal ideals, a resolute recognition of the self, and a celebration of unbridled passion. In life and death, our lovers have defeated the Prince.

Notes 1. There is no hard evidence that Shakespeare read Machiavelli directly, although by the 1580s Italian, French, and Latin versions of The Prince were widely circulated throughout England, and many scholars are convinced that Shakespeare read Italian. It is also highly likely that manuscript versions in English would have been available (the first published English version of The Prince did not appear until 1640). In any case, Machiavelli’s central theses would have been known and understood in learned and cultured circles by the late 16th century. 2. As with Machiavelli, we are not entirely certain of the degree to which Shakespeare was familiar with and/or influenced by Montaigne’s writings, but an English version of Montaigne’s Essays (translated by John Florio) was published in England in 1603, three years before Shakespeare composed Antony and Cleopatra. For more on Montaigne’s influence on Shakespeare, see Hugh Grady’s Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet.

Works Cited All textual citations refer to: Folger Shakespeare Library. Shakespeare’s Plays from Folger Digital Texts. Edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library, 15 January, 2019. www.folgerdigitaltexts.org. Grady, Hugh. Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne:  Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet. Oxford University Press, 2002. Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince. Penguin Books, 1981.

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Montaigne, Michel de. “On Experience” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Translated by Donald M. Frame. Stanford University Press, 1943.

7.  My Poor Fool: A Case For and Against Double Casting Cordelia and the Fool in King Lear Jessie Lee Mills

Much has been written on the parallels between Lear’s Fool and his youngest daughter, Cordelia. Within the narrative, they serve as the two truth-tellers, prove to be Lear’s most loyal devotees, and do the most to uphold Lear’s dignity as he spirals into madness. Indeed, a number of productions have double cast Cordelia with Lear’s Fool, including the recent 2019 Broadway revival starring Glenda Jackson as Lear and Ruth Wilson as Cordelia and the Fool.1 This doubling is supported by many Shakespearean scholars, who “near the turn of the [nineteenth] century, [proposed] the hypothesis that the actor playing Cordelia doubled as the Fool in early productions of King Lear.”2 This argument, presented as early as 1894 by Alois Brandl, “arose as a means to explain the disappearance of the Fool in Act III, as well as for his failure to appear or even be mentioned in the first scene of the play.”3 Combing through the archives, scholars have hotly debated this hypothesis throughout the twentieth and now into the twenty-first century. Shakespearean scholars Thomas Stroup and Richard Abrams both trace the discourse quite succinctly in a footnote and endnote, respectively, noting that while some scholars dismiss the proposal outright, others believe the premise quite plausible and focus the debate on whether Robert Wilson or Robert Armin (two members of The Chamberlain’s Men) took on the dual roles.4 From a historical standpoint, this hypothesis offers a fascinating glimpse into Shakespeare’s troupe, performance trends, and writing. From a purely literary lens, this doubling hypothesis invites a flurry of exploration. There are, undoubtedly, a myriad of robust, text-centric analyses within this proposal.

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From a staging perspective, however, we must ask how this choice affects our audiences’ experience. As theatre-makers, we are tasked with understanding the corporeal, theatrical implications of such doubling. Be it performers, directors, designers, technicians, dramaturgs, administrators, educators, or practitioners, our job is to lift the words beyond the page and into the community. As such, I will present six cases for and against the doubling for Cordelia and the Fool with a theatre-maker’s and audience’s experience in mind, considering practical, thematic, and artistic rationales.

A Case for Double Casting The Practical: Logistics and Honoring History The doubling of roles can, undoubtedly, illuminate a number of interesting thematic and textual parallels. In a fully realized production, however, this decision is often enabled or defeated by logistics. A costume designer will be the first to point out the complications of a costume change, especially one concerned with period or intricate clothing. In King Lear, the text offers ample space for this changeover, even inviting the possibility. Cordelia and the Fool never overlap onstage and, more to the point, Shakespeare offers a buffer of time between one’s exit and the other’s entrance. Lear disowns and dismisses Cordelia at the end of Act I scene 1, when her newly avowed fiancé, the King of France, beckons her to “come, my fair Cordelia” (1.1.328). In the Folio, it is not until Act I, scene 4, with 343 lines to spare, that the Fool enters. Similarly, the Fool’s final spoken line rests in Act III, scene 6, announcing that he will “go to bed at noon” (3.6.90), though he does not exit until Gloucester’s invitation to “come, come away” (3.6.110). Cordelia reemerges in Act IV scene 4, with 419 lines in between. This timing, scholars argue, is no accident. Indeed, Thomas Stroup observes that “Between Cordelia’s exit and the Fool’s entry the same number of lines are spoken [in the Quarto5] as between the Fool’s final exit and Cordelia’s re-entry. Time is … meted out for some reason, probably for the change of costume and make-up.”6 Perhaps it is, similarly, no accident that both characters are beckoned away from their King. Unlike Lear’s other servants and daughters who often leave of their own, fraught accord, both Cordelia and the Fool leave at the invitation of another. A director might argue that this is the only way these two characters would leave their King. The act of leaving, then, is openended. Even as Cordelia is disowned and the Fool exhausted, both leave with unfinished business and with a connective thread still attached to Lear. In this way, their doubling allows one character to pick up where the other fell away.

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For a director, producer, and costume designer, these exits and entrances make a Cordelia/Fool doubling not only possible, but compelling. If 100 lines equals approximately five minutes of stage time, an actor has 15–20 minutes for both changeovers. This is time enough to lace or unlace a corset, remove and reapply any distinguishing make-up, and even provide a performer time to prepare her physical and psychological change in performance. More to the point, if this was the practice of Shakespeare’s troupe, there is a silent honor paid to The Chamberlain’s Men and the Bard himself. Conceptually speaking, this is a fascinating way to hook into the spirit and intentions of the original, historical productions.

The Thematic: Fools and Foolishness as a Dramatic Arc Thematically, doubling the role of Cordelia and The Fool illuminates the arresting parallels between the two characters and, therefore, has the potential to unlock deeper truths about the play. While scholars and literary experts have mined the plethora of minutia in the shared language and values of these two characters, I  will focus on an audience’s experience of this doubling. A potential theatergoer who has little familiarity with this play may only have a first blush, if rich and embodied, experience of this language and these characters. As such, an intriguing benefit to this doubling is the way in which it primes the audience to better understand the depth and beauty of the arc of King Lear. If the audience knows that Cordelia and the Fool are played by the same actor, a thematic link is formed, and both Cordelia’s lines and the Fool’s lines have a deeper meaning. For the audience, this experience can be tracked through the use of the word “fool,” as it takes on considerable double meaning. Shakespeare takes care to introduce the Fool before his arrival. Lear asks for him several times, beginning with a request to his court to, “Go you and call my Fool hither” (1.4.44), noting that he hasn’t seen his Fool in two days (1.4.72). His First Knight replies that since Cordelia’s banishment, “the Fool hath much pined away” (1.4.74). As Stroup notes, “the deliberate and painstaking association of the Fool with Cordelia, the stress laid upon his devotion to her, prepares the audience for his bitterness.”7 Moreover, knowledge of the Fool’s distress over Cordelia’s banishment prepares the audience to meet a Fool who is “sympathetic to Cordelia who will assume her defense and also remind them of her person.”8 The Fool, upon his arrival, promptly takes Lear to task for what he’s done to Cordelia, admonishing anyone who follows Lear to,

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FOOL. There, take my coxcomb. Why, this fellow has banished two on ‘s daughters and did the third a blessing against his will. If thou follow him, thou must needs wear my coxcomb. (1.4.104–108)

The Fool offers his own status and title to all those in accord with Lear’s rash decision. In a case of doubling, the audience sees the same truth in juxtaposing sentiments. Where Cordelia diplomatically points out the King’s foolishness and inability to see clearly by asking “Why have my sisters husbands if they say / They love you all?” (1.1.109–110), the Fool assertively offers his cap to wear to anyone who supports Lear’s foolish resolution. And then the Fool goes a step further than Cordelia could. He calls Lear a fool directly, for giving away his Kingdom and titles. When Lear asks, “Dost though call me ‘fool,’ boy?” (1.4.152), the Fool responds, cutting to the core, “All thy other titles thou hast given away. That / thou wast born with” (1.4.153–154). Or, without the titles of his birth, “fool” is the only status inherent to Lear that remains. Through the lens of doubling, the same actor playing Cordelia strips Lear of his title, just as he did of hers. The word fool is, indeed, used liberally throughout King Lear. Julian Markle notes: [In] King Lear Shakespeare … make[s]‌the very word “fool” a blessing and a sanctification. All of the good characters in the play, all who sooner or later stand up for Lear, in their purity or their purification are nevertheless called “fool.” The Fool, who always speaks true, calls Lear “fool” … When Lear wakes up in Cordelia’s tent, he confirms this judgment: in his earned humility he calls himself a fond and foolish old man.9

But the most potent use of the title is Lear’s solemn line spoken upon announcing Cordelia’s death, “And my poor fool is hanged” (5.3.369). In Lear’s deepest grieving, he assigns the affectionate term to his youngest daughter; a term that he at first resented, then to which he capitulated, and ultimately a term that held his most devoted affection. Indeed, Lear’s relationship with the very word “fool” itself parallels the trajectory of his relationship with Cordelia.

The Artistic: Fools and Madmen Artistically, there is much to be mined in the doubling of Cordelia and the Fool. While theatrical choices abound within this coupling, directors and designers might want to begin by deciding the aesthetic and appearance of both characters (be it costume, lighting, relationship to space, etc.), and how those elements might overlap. As this doubling will ask the audience to further suspend their disbelief, directors and designers may want to showcase

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stark differences, perhaps utilizing costume, makeup, and other design elements to create distinctions in gender, age, or other distinguishing characteristics between the two roles. Alternatively, a creative team might prefer to lean into Brechtian alienation affects, hoping that their audience will actively stay aware of the actor playing the two roles in tandem. In this case, a creative team might focus on the similarities between the two characters. In the 2019 Broadway production where Ruth Wilson played both Cordelia and the Fool, director Sam Gold and costume designer Ann Roth swapped Cordelia’s black gown for The Fool’s black tuxedo. The luxurious costumes “were inspired by Roy Cohn and the excesses of ‘80s Wall Street wealth,”10 according to Gold. In smart contrast to this aesthetic of excess, the artistic pair chose to simplify the transition from Cordelia to Fool; beyond the sartorial change, it was clear that Ruth Wilson was still behind the Fool. Moreover, as Glenda Jackson played Lear in a similar tuxedo at the top of the show, a change that did not emphasize gender disparity between Cordelia and the Fool shrewdly tied Cordelia to her gender-bending Mother. There is a middle ground, however, a liminal space where Cordelia and the Fool morph into and out of one another. Given Lear’s descent into madness, the opportunity for the hallucination of Cordelia in place of the Fool (and vice versa) seems ripe. The crescendo of Lear’s decent into madness occurs during the storm in Act III. Though scholars debate the exact onset of Lear’s madness, and scholar Josephine Water Bennett does a fine job chronicling this discourse,11 most agree that its height occurs in what Barker-Granville famously calls, “the lunatic trial of Regan and Goneril.”12 In this trial, Edgar (as Poor Tom) serves as the judge, and the Fool as Lear’s wise counsel. Regan’s imagined examination follows Goneril’s, and neither is spared Lear’s searing wrath. Lear speaks of Goneril: LEAR. Arraign her first. ‘Tis Goneril. I here take my oath before this honorable assembly, she kicked the poor king her father. (3.6.50–52)

And of Regan: LEAR. And here’s another, whose warped looks proclaim What store her heart is made on. (3.6.56–57)

In no uncertain terms, Lear denounces Goneril for her abuse and Regan for her corrupt and hardened heart, but to whom is he speaking? Of the three prosecutors, the Fool plays along but seems to be the only one fully in touch with reality, or the only one truly able to hear. If the Fool appears, aesthetically, to resemble Cordelia in that moment, the audience may imagine that

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she can finally hear her father condemn her sisters. Indeed, this scene and its dynamic echoes the play’s opening, where the three sisters are on trial for their devotion and where Cordelia seems the only honest, clear-eyed person in the room. If the Fool morphs into Cordelia in this space, it would allow her, and the audience, to sit with her father in solidarity against her sisters. Moreover, as Lear imagines his daughters brought into the courtroom, a director may decide to bring on the actual actors playing Goneril and Regan. If this scene is staged through Lear’s eyes, the audience should see what he sees. As such, if the Fool begins to morph into Cordelia, an audience would watch Lear reunite his daughters and finally amend his wrongs and restore justice. And here, the play would become all the more heartbreaking:  in Lear’s madness, he is able to right his world. Although Lear wishes often throughout the play that he not succumb to his madness (“O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!” (1.5.45)), perhaps it is only in madness that he is able to see his world restored. At the closing of the play, the audience may hold a compassionate, if complicated, wish for Lear to become mad again, so that he can see the world as it should be. Perhaps, in his madness, he may be reunited with his Cordelia.

A Case Against Double Casting The Practical: Casting, or, The Difference Between a Bitter Fool and a Sweet One Given the plethora of compelling reasons to double Cordelia and the Fool, it seems curious that so few productions have done so. Within the past century alone, of the nine productions of King Lear on Broadway, only the 2019 production doubled Cordelia and the Fool.13 Beyond the artistic merit, there are sizable practical benefits to leaving Cordelia and the Fool as separate entities:  namely, casting. While Shakespeare tied these two characters together thematically, they ultimately embody very different energies, physicalities, and sentiments. Of the eight non-doubled Broadway productions, all cast men (often older) as the Fool, and women (often younger) as Cordelia.14 Considering the ways in which each character is described throughout the play, this trend of casting appears reasonable. When Cordelia describes herself, often in asides, she mainly speaks about her trouble in finding the right words to say. In Act I, when her father demands she articulate her filial love and devotion, she worries in an aside that “my love’s / More ponderous than my tongue” (1.1.86–87). And when tasked to speak in front of her father and sisters, she admits “I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth” (1.1.100–101) and muses that,

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CORDELIA. If for I want that glib and oily art To speak and purpose not—since what I well intend, I’ll do ‘t before I speak—that you make known It is no vicious blot, murder, or foulness, No unchaste action or dishonored step That hath deprived me of your grace and favor, But even for want of that for which I am richer: A still-soliciting eye and such a tongue As I am glad I have not, though not to have it Hath lost me in your liking. (1.1.258–268)

Cordelia is thoughtful and straight to the point. She is not magniloquent, nor does she aim to be. She says plainly and confidently that such grandiloquence does not indicate love or honor. Other characters recognize this trait as a virtue. Kent, while counseling Lear, reminds the King that “Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least / Nor are those empty-hearted whose low sound / Reverbs no hollowness” (1.1.171–173). Even Lear, upon Cordelia’s death, finally sees the beauty in her eloquence, lamenting that “Her voice was ever soft, / Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman” (5.3.328–329). The Fool, on the other hand, is described as quite the opposite. Goneril rages that he is Lear’s “all-licensed fool” (1.4.206). Where Cordelia is soft-spoken, the Fool is loud-mouthed; where Cordelia is thoughtful, the Fool is brash; where Cordelia is gentle, the fool is blunt. Moreover, Cordelia is described as fair (1.1.290), virtuous (1.1.292), and kind (4.7.35), while the Fool is described as a knave (1.4.43), a mongrel (1.4.50), and bitter (1.4.140). The King of France defies Lear by claiming that Cordelia “is herself a dowry” (1.1.278) as he takes her to be his wife. The Fool, on the other hand, is lashed about. Lear belittles him by calling him “boy” more often than not and is scorned and embittered by the fool’s (once appreciated) mockery and buffoonery. Perhaps the biggest, and more nuanced, discrepancy between the two characters is their awareness of how “truth” affects their king. Cordelia believes honesty to be an extension of duty. When she tells her father, CORDELIA. You have begot me, bred me, loved me. I return those duties back as are right fit: Obey you, love you, and most honor you. (1.1.106–108)

She explains that her love will always sit with her father, but also extend to her husband and family. Lear, unable to see that her virtue in honesty matches her virtue in love, asks, “So young and so untender?” (1.1.118) To which Cordelia responds, “So young, my lord, and true” (1.1.119).

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The Fool, on the other hand, understands the tense nature of truth, knowing that some members of Lear’s household (Goneril and Regan, namely) believe “Truth’s a dog that must to kennel. / He must be whipped out” (1.4.115–116). The Fool, in his brash and blunt ways understands, implicitly, the danger in truth-telling. In fact, the Fool wishes he knew how to lie. He sings: FOOL. Then they for sudden joy did weep And I for sorrow sung, That such a king should play bo-peep And go the fools among. Prithee, nuncle, keep a schoolmaster that can teach thy fool to lie. I would fain learn to lie. (1.4.179–184)

Here, the Fool paints a painful picture of Lear’s status of child and fool, and begs for someone to teach him to lie so that he might not be forced to articulate such truths. Cordelia, in her fairness and virtue, cannot see how the truth harms her. Nor can she foresee the great personal tragedy that will ensue from her honesty. It is a casting challenge, indeed, to find a single actor to embody such a range. More challenging, still, in an age where actors fit neatly into “types,” to transform so would be the mark of a truly exceptional performer. If Brandl and others were right in their assertion that it was once commonplace to double Cordelia and the Fool, it stands to reason that we may live in an age where contemporary actor training precludes such a routine doubling. A bold evaluation, indeed, but what we lose in individual range, we gain in focused specificity. For instance, assuming that minimal costume and makeup changes could occur in the brief 15-to-20-minute changeover window, a doubling of Cordelia and the Fool would require that both parts be of a similar age. Cordelia is described as young quite frequently throughout the play (so young and so untender), so it stands to reason that Lear’s Fool would also have to be a young man. Fittingly, some scholars believe that the doubling of Cordelia and the Fool was written for a younger performer on the basis that “the two roles call for the same kind of voices … to [sing] the whimsical songs required.”15 While a young woman (or man, of course) could certainly have played both roles, many productions have cast Lear’s Fool as an older man, or a servant who has lived with Lear for a lifetime. Much is to be mined in this difference in age and experience. Cordelia’s truths are no less insightful than the Fool’s, but Lear may not be able to digest Cordelia’s words the way he can his Fool’s. There is real value in distinguishing the two roles, as they hold similar

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spaces in Lear’s ear, but not his heart. What he can understand intellectually he cannot bear emotionally, and this is a dramatic distinction worth watching. Perhaps it becomes a gift to move beyond the doubling structure and the protocol of the Chamberlain’s Men altogether. In an age where performers of all gender identity, race, ethnicity, ability, and lived-experience are (or, at least, should be) celebrated on the stage, perhaps in allowing an actor to dig in fully to a single character, we ultimately do the play more justice.

The Thematic: Hearing and Mishearing; Tethering and Untethering The more we separate Cordelia and the Fool via casting, the more clearly we can see Lear’s separate relationships with each of them. Richard Abrams notes that “during Cordelia’s absence the Fool takes over her function of telling Lear the painful truth about himself.”16 However, these painful truths, regardless of the speaker, are often met with Lear’s need for clarification or, perhaps, a hope that he misheard. When Lear asks Cordelia what she can say about her love and devotion to draw land and a title “more opulent than [her] sisters’,” (1.1.95) she responds, “Nothing.” (1.1.96). “Nothing?” (1.1.97) Lear asks, surprised, hurt, hoping he had misheard. And when she clarifies that she cannot outdo her sisters’ (falsely) professed love, Lear appeals with, “But goes thy heart with this?” (1.1.116). Similarly, when the Fool spends considerable time mocking Lear’s poor decision-making, the King seems unable to fully take in the Fool’s words, only finally realizing “Dost thou call me ‘fool,’ boy?” about 50 lines in to the exchange. However, when Lear does understand the truths spoken by Cordelia and the Fool, his response could not be more different. With Cordelia, the King is soft in his initial questioning (“But goes thy heart?”). He is heartbroken, and the pain is uniquely tender. But this initial reaction ratchets up and quickly spirals out of control. LEAR. Thy truth, then, by thy dower, For by the sacred radiance of the sun, The mysteries of Hecate and the night, By all the operation of the orbs From whom we do exist and cease to be, Here I disclaim all my paternal care, Propinquity, and property of blood, And as a stranger to my heart and me Hold thee from this forever. (1.1.120–128)

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Lear calls upon Hecate, a dark and powerful force, as he violently disowns his most beloved daughter. When Kent tries to pacify him, Lear warns, “Come not between the dragon and his wrath” (1.1.136). Lear’s blood boils; he cannot see clearly, and nothing can calm him. When the Fool speaks equally (if not more) painful truths, Lear has an inverse reaction. The King might begin in rage, but he settles into tranquility or pontification. In his rage, Lear twice reminds the Fool that a whipping is in order (1.4.114; 1.4.185), but never makes good on the threat. Rather, the King’s frustration is redirected where it belongs: to Goneril, Regan, and to himself, FOOL. If thou wert my Fool, nuncle, I’d have thee beaten for being old before thy time. LEAR. How’s that? FOOL. Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise. LEAR. O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! Keep me in temper. I would not be mad! (1.5.34–46)

The Fool, perhaps compassionately, perhaps mockingly, jokes about whipping Lear for becoming old before becoming wise. Lear’s senility is showing, and the Fool is not shy about pointing it out. Lear, in response, prays to the heavens to stave off his dementia. Where Cordelia was banished for speaking a truth about herself, the Fool, in directly addressing Lear’s faults, is held closer and with more regard. Separating these two characters into different actors allows an audience to truly see how Lear hears one and cannot hear the other. A fair amount of this has to do with gender and social contract,17 and some of this has to do with when Lear can process the truth. As he spirals closer and closer to madness, it seems that the truth becomes more palatable. Structurally, it makes sense that the Fool accompanies Lear into madness. It is, potentially, only in the King’s madness that he is able to see (and hear) clearly. And if the Fool is tethered to Lear’s madness, then it is by definition only the Fool who can truly make the King hear the truth. Cordelia, on the other hand, is banished while Lear is still stable and reunites with her father as he is coming out of his fog of madness. When cast as a single role, the audience is able to see her character return to her broken father in a devastating reunion. She is able to nurse him back into sanity and stability and he clings to her more dearly, now, than he ever did his Fool. His Fool, after all, served his part. The Fool was tethered to his King’s mind. Cordelia, his daughter, is tethered to his heart. In this way, separating the two characters into two different performers allows the audience to see the depth and richness of these relationships. While

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the Fool and Cordelia perform similar actions and occupy parallel roles, they are ultimately uniquely distinct. Perhaps, without doubling, we not only see the Fool and Cordelia more clearly, but we are better able to understand Lear himself.

The Artistic: Cordelia as the Fool One option not yet considered in this chapter is a rather provocative one: in lieu of doubling the roles, there may be a production where the Fool is, in fact, Cordelia in disguise. Shakespeare was no stranger to characters taking disguise and, indeed, two scholars believe this to be a plausible interpretation of the original text. Just three years after Brandl posited that Cordelia and the fool were doubled, it was Arthur J. Stringer who extended the argument. Stringer “adopted what … is now an unhesitatingly accepted belief: that is, that the Fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear is none other than Cordelia herself.”18 Although Stringer’s sentiments were later echoed by H. L. Anschutz,19 both Stringer and Anschutz’s hypotheses have been widely dismissed. Richard Abrams lists Anschutz’s assertion as the least plausible argument for the relationship between Cordelia and the Fool.20 Thomas Stroup, similarly, notes that Stringer’s theory comes by way of “disregarding the text.”21 Stringer, of course, would agree with Stroup’s assessment, and opined on the matter quite glibly: In attempting to give my reasons for believing that Cordelia and the Fool are one, it will be unnecessary to deal at length with the literary history of the text: for if the dramatic and artistic evidences fail, it is quite useless to rely on the probability of mere textual evidence.22

For a literary historian, this sentiment is pure blasphemy. For an artist, however, this statement is quite compelling. As Stringer notes, the success of a staged production of King Lear relies primarily on the dramatic and the artistic. So then, what are the artistic implications of Cordelia who is, herself, the Fool? For the audience, we no longer need to extend the suspension of our disbelief as we would have done if the characters were merely doubled. In place of this, a new cognitive dissonance may arise: an audience member might ponder how Lear or Cordelia’s sisters could not see their daughter or sibling through her mask, but Shakespeare has already written to the strength of his characters’ disguises. In Twelfth Night, Viola was so convincing as Cesario that the sea captain Antonio could not distinguish between her and her twin brother, Sebastian. Furthermore, when Sebastian meets Cesario, he sees a resemblance, but does not immediately know who she is. Sebastian

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asks, “Of charity, what kin are you to me? / What countryman? What name? What parentage?” (TN, 5.1.241–242). Sebastian is actively looking for his sister and still cannot see through her costume. Goneril and Regan, on the other hand, have no interest in finding their banished sister and are less likely to seek out or notice such a resemblance. As for Lear, As You Like It lays the groundwork for a father’s inability to see his daughter in disguise. Upon seeing his daughter Rosalind in the dressings of Ganymede, Duke Senior remarks, “I do remember in this shepherd boy / Some lively touches of my daughter’s favor” (AYL, 5.4.27–28). Similar to Sebastian, Duke Senior can sense a resemblance, but he cannot see through her convincing mask. Lear, on the other hand, does not have complete control over his faculties. While Lear certainly spends far more time with his daughter disguised as the Fool than Duke Senior does with Ganymede, the King’s wits are not about him, and he cannot fully see nor hear the world around him. Through this disguise we, the audience, now watch as Cordelia is forced to witness her father in decline. A heart wrenching experience, certainly, but one that Cordelia feels a duty to uphold. Stringer writes of Cordelia’s choice to follow her father: She makes the well intended [sic] but necessarily unfortunate sacrifice to check her father in his foolish exhibition of vanity and childishness: and is it not strange that she should selfishly desert him, when she knew, as a result of her unfortunate attempt, he would certainly end in misfortune and misery? It seems to me she was scarcely of nature to live contentedly and happily with the King of France, in the consciousness that the father she loved was suffering both mediately and immediately because of an act of her own. She was tender, but she was daring—else how that first opposition? She determines to cleave to her father in his unhappiness, as Edgar cleaves to Gloster [sic]. To do so openly would be impossible. Not only would it be dangerous to her personally, but the enraged King would refuse to receive her, So she becomes his Fool. She adopts the only possible disguise and remains with her weak and helpless father, to attempt to shield him from the selfish cruelty of her sisters, and to endeavor to check his growing madness by bitter speeches and caustic irony, even as she has failed to do by candor and uprightness.23

It is the very same duty that prompted Cordelia to speak the truth in Act I that motivates her to follow her father in disguise through Act III. As Stringer notes, an interesting parallel is now drawn between Edgar and Cordelia, which deepens “the lunatic trial of Regan and Goneril,” where Poor Tom and Poor Cordelia, together, help Lear see the dark truth of his treacherous daughters.

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With Cordelia concealed as the Fool, the audience is now “in” on the doubling. Through this dramatic irony, their experience and perspective has changed significantly, as they now actively watch the Fool through the lens of Cordelia’s experience. An audience is not only primed to understand the parallels between characters, but every word spoken by and to the Fool is now spoken by and to Cordelia. Likewise, every word spoken by or to Cordelia is now spoken by or to the Fool. When Lear says to the Fool “I did her wrong” (1.5.24), for instance, the audience must watch Cordelia grapple with his apology, even as she must stay the course as the Fool. And when Cordelia returns as herself, we interpret her lines as someone who has seen the entire trajectory of the King’s madness. When she asks Lear, CORDELIA. Sir, do you know me? LEAR. You are a spirit, I know. Where did you die? CORDELIA. Still, still far wide (4.7.55–57)

Cordelia notes that he is “still” far wide, as though she was hoping Lear would have snapped back to lucidity by now. Through this artistic lens, we see the full journey in Cordelia’s character. She was the daughter who refused to be banished, but later abandons her father at the height of his madness. Now, racked with guilt, she begins by begging her father to be healed (“O, my dear father, restoration hang / Thy medicine on my lips, and let this kiss / Repair …” (IV.7.31–33)), and ends by begging Lear to bless and, perhaps, heal her (“O, look upon me, sir / And hold your hands in benediction o’er me” (IV.7.65–66)). Perhaps this casting option ultimately offers the creative route where Lear is most deeply connected to Cordelia. If Lear moves in and out of his madness then perhaps in his more lucid moments he is able to see who his Fool truly is. Perhaps Stringer was wrong in his assessment that “the enraged King would refuse to receive her,” and it is, indeed, Cordelia seen through her disguise that guides Lear back to sanity. When the Fool rages against Goneril, Lear takes note. In the exchange where the Fool says, FOOL. For you know, nuncle, The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long, That it’s had it head bit off by it young. So out went the candle and we were left darkling. (1.4.220–223)

And Lear responds, LEAR. Are you our daughter? (1.4.224)

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The assumption is that this line is spoken to Goneril. A distressed question, wondering where his once devoted daughter went. In this staging, however, perhaps this line is delivered to Cordelia as a moment where Lear remembers who he is, and who his Fool might be. Perhaps Lear turns to Cordelia with clarity in his eyes, looking gratefully to the daughter who defends him, supports him, and truly loves him, to ask if she is truly with him, as he always hoped she would be, “[a]‌re you our daughter?” And once Lear emerges from his fog of madness, there is a chance that he knows what his daughter has done for him. When he and Cordelia are carted off to prison, Lear calms her by musing, LEAR. Come, let’s away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage. When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too— Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out— And take upon ‘s the mystery of things, As if we were God’s spies. And we’ll wear out, In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones That ebb and flow by th’ moon. (5.3.9–20)

Just as he did with his Fool, Lear and Cordelia will pray, sing, and tell old tales. And when his Cordelia is ultimately taken from him, Lear’s famous line now cuts more deeply than ever, “My poor fool is hanged.” It is his final honor, and the culmination of Lear’s anguished lament, paid to the daughter and companion he loved above all else.

Notes 1. Previews ran February 28—April 3, 2019. Official production ran April 4—June 9, 2019, Cort Theatre, New York, NY. 2. Richard Abrams, p. 354. 3. Brandl, p. 179. 4. Both Stroup and Abrams agree that Alois Brandl was an early advocate for this hypothesis. Abrams credits Wilfred Perrett (The Story of King Lear) as an early adopter of the doubling, where Stroup credits Brander Matthews (Shakespeare as Playwright). Stroup credits Brander Matthews with the proposal that Wilson doubled as Cordelia and the Fool, and Tucker Brooke with the proposal that it was, in fact, Armin. Both Stroup and Abrams eschew the assertion that Cordelia, herself, also plays the fool, but where Stroup cites Arthur Stringer’s 1897 paper, “Was Cordelia the King’s Fool?”, Abrams references H. L. Anshutz’s 1964 essay, “Cordelia and the Fool.”

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5. Stroup notes that, in the Quarto, there are 356 lines before the Fool’s entrance and 357 lines between the Fool’s exit and Cordelia’s reentrance. 6. Stroup, p. 127. 7. Stroup, p. 129. 8. Stroup, p. 129. 9. Markels, p. 76. 10. https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2019/04/sam-gold-king-lear-interview. 11. Josephine Water Bennett outlines a number of hypotheses as to the onset of Lear’s Madness in “The Storm Within:  The Madness of King Lear.” This includes, but is not limited to, A.  C. Bradley’s proposal that Lear’s madness begins upon seeing Edgar, whereas Kenneth Muir and Norman Maclean assert that the King’s madness occurs upon seeing Poor Tom. According to Water Bennett, authors Joseph Wharton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Sholom J. Kahn precisely pinpoint the onset of Lear’s madness with specific lines or stage directions in Act III scene 4. 12. Granville-Barker, p. 120 (footnote). 13. https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-show/king-lear-5064. 14. https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-show/king-lear-5064. 15. Thomas Stroup credits Janet Spens with this argument in “Cordelia and the Fool,” p. 127, though he does not supply a specific citation to follow up on her analysis. 16. Abrams, p. 354. 17. Much has been brilliantly written about the issues of the patriarchy and misogyny in King Lear, most notably, Lesley Catherine Kordecki and Karla Koskinen’s Re-visioning Lear’s Daughters: Testing Feminist Criticism and Theory, 1st ed. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), where they position each daughter on trial under the thumb of the patriarchy. 18. Stringer, p. 4. 19. Anshultz, pp. 240–260. 20. Abrams, p. 366. 21. Stroup, p. 127. 22. Stringer, pp. 2–3. 23. Stringer, p. 4.

Works Cited All textual citations refer to: Folger Shakespeare Library. Shakespeare’s Plays. from Folger Digital Texts. Ed. Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library, 1 April 2019. www.folgerdigitaltexts.org Abrams, Richard. “The Double Casting of Cordelia and Lear’s Fool.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 27, no. 4, The English Renaissance and Enlightenment, 1985, pp. 354–68. Anshultz, H.L. “Cordelia and the Fool.” Research Studies, Washington State University, vol. 32, pp. 240–60. Barker-Granville, Harley. “King Lear.” Shakespeare Criticism 1919–1935, edited by Anne Bradby, Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, 2004, pp. 95–129. Brandl, Alois. Shakespeare. Hoffman, 1894.

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King Lear. By William Shakespeare, directed by Sam Gold, June 1 2019, Cort Theatre, New York, NY. Performance. League, The Broadway. “IBDB.com.” IBDB, https://www.ibdb.com/. Markels, Julian. “Shakespeare’s Confluence of Tragedy and Comedy: Twelfth Night and King Lear.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 2, 1964, pp. 75–88. Stroup, Thomas. “Cordelia and the Fool.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 2, 1961, pp. 127–32. Stringer, Arthur J. “Was Cordelia The King’s Fool?” The American Shakespeare Magazine, vol. 3, 1897, pp. 1–11. Water Bennett, Josephine. “The Storm Within: The Madness of King Lear.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 2, 1962, pp. 137–55. Wear, Keziah. “Glenda Jackson as King Lear Puts Classic Power Struggles in a Freshly Gilded Frame,” Vanity Fair, 1 Apr. 2019. Online.

Additional References Bradley, Andrew C. Shakespearean Tragedy. Macmillan Publishers Ltd, 1904. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Lectures.” Shakespeare Criticism: A Selection 1623–1840, pp. 213–72. Wayne State University Press, 1989. Kahn, Sholom J. “Enter Lear Mad.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 3, 1957, pp. 311–29. Kordecki, Lesley, and Karla Koskinen. Re-Visioning Lears Daughters:  Testing Feminist Criticism and Theory. Palgrave Macmillan US, 2010. Lawrence, William John. Pre-Restoration Stage Studies. Blom, 1967. Maclean, Norman. “Episode, Scene, Speech, and Word:  The Madness of Lear.” The Journal of General Education, vol. 5, no. 3, 1951, pp. 186–201. Matthews, Brander. Shakespeare as Playwright. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913. Muir, Kenneth. Shakespeare’s Sources I. Methuen & Co Ltd, 1957. Perrett, Wilfrid. The Story of King Lear:  From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Shakespeare. Wagner, 1903. Shakespeare, William, Tucker Brooke, and William L. Phelps. The Tragedy of King Lear. Yale University press, 1947. Print. Spens, Janet. Elizabethan Drama. Nabu Press, 2010. Thaler, Alwin, and Alwin Thaler. Shakespeare’s Silences. Books for Library Press, 1970. Warton, Joseph. “The Adventurer.” Shakespeare Criticism:  A Selection 1623–1840, pp. 52–69.

8.  Through Hamlet’s Eyes Timothy Harris

Two years ago,1 Peter Brook’s version of Hamlet for eight players and a musician was performed at the Setagaya Public Theatre in Tokyo, where I saw it, and subsequently at the Young Vic in London. The original performances were at Brook’s base, Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris. I was very impressed by certain aspects of the production, particularly the performance of Adrian Lester as Hamlet, but had some reservations; reservations that have been reinforced by the high definition video of this Hamlet now available: (www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSfRZmNPHoE). By denying Brook the strengths that spring from live performance, the video brings out the weaknesses of the production more clearly. The principal weakness lies in Brook’s conception, and this weakness may be summed up by Harley Granville-Barker’s remark about the play as a whole, which is that Hamlet so dominates the play that we are too apt to see things “through his eyes.” In the interview that accompanied the showing of the video on Japanese television, Peter Brook Speaks About ‘Hamlet’, (www.youtube.com/ watch?v=_MgjX9qw9uI), Brook said that “many, many great authorities have said that Hamlet is an artistic failure,” and that this was so because Shakespeare did not conceive of the play as a whole since he was reworking an older and “not very good … melodrama.” Granville-Barker certainly thought that Shakespeare had been unable to assimilate character and story so that “no incongruities appear,” but equally certainly he did not judge the play an artistic failure (his Preface on Hamlet is by far the longest of the Prefaces). That was left to T.S. Eliot, recycling the opinions of some academic critic in The Sacred Wood. I do not know who the many other “great authorities” that Brook refers to are. Voltaire, perhaps, was one? Whoever they are, they are used to justify removing two hours of what has become “Romantic and rhetorical staging” or “what for today is

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no longer as important as it was at other moments of history,” in order to extract, according to Brook, “a very pure, essential myth in which the essential elements are a father, his brother who murders him, a wife who comes into an incestuous relationship with her brother-in-law, a son and a very pure young girl that the son loves.” This “essential pattern,” says Brook, “speaks to us directly without any decoration.” It speaks “straight to the heart of everyone’s interests and preoccupations.” It speaks to us “today.” And as soon as an audience sees Adrian Lester, they recognize him as a young man of “today.” There can be few directors who are Brook’s equal at creating a charged theatrical space. His most famous book is entitled The Empty Space, but that emptiness is replete and vibrant with possibilities before any actor sets foot in it. The “stage” for his Hamlet was something that resembled a large, square exercise mat, though refined in quality, and lit at the beginning so that it seemed to glow a warm, light orange. The proximity of the first rows of the audience, sitting on cushions on the floor, made the otherness and inviolableness of the performance area more distinct. Around the other three sides of the mat was a penumbral region in which actors would wait and from which they would emerge. From the first entrance, of Horatio through the audience, every entrance and every exit compelled attention. The Japanese have recognized better than anyone else the theatrical power of exits and entrances and refined the art of making them, and Brook has surely learnt from their theatre, as well as from Indian theatre. As in Noh or the Indian Kathakali, the performance of the actors was accompanied by music, which seemed largely Asian in provenance and was sometimes extraordinarily expressive. I still can’t forget the terror of the dry rustle and chirping of the sistrum that accompanied the appearances of the Ghost. There was one musician, Tsuchitori Toshi, who is Japanese, with a grand array of instruments. Like the musicians in the Noh and Kathakali, he was at all times visible and on occasion came completely on stage. But, apart from the sound of the music, all this is lost from the video, and it is not compensated for by the certainly beautiful old red walls of the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, where the video was filmed. The video begins not with Horatio’s slow, solitary and electrifying entrance through the dusk of the auditorium towards the glowing and expectant performance space and his “Who’s there?”, which seemed not only to be calling up a ghost, but calling on all of us to be truly present and to attend on a rite. It begins instead with Hamlet, in place, speaking very slowly and softly, and at the outset in the somewhat toneless tones of today, “O that this too, too sullied flesh” (1.2.113).

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The cutting and reordering of the “score,” for both stage and video versions (they are a little different) has been cunningly done, if not quite so cunningly and effectively as in the case of some of the tailoring in the often maligned First Quarto. It is an interesting idea, and one suited to the character of this production, from which Fortinbras has once again been excised, to put “To be or not to be” on the eve of Hamlet’s departure from England instead of “How all occasions,” whose last line and a half, “O, from this time forth / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” (4.5.67–8) replaces the last two and a half lines of the former speech, “Soft you now, / the fair Ophelia” (3.1.96–7). But what cutting all too often does, as I know from experience, having put on a number of such “reduced” versions of Shakespeare plays with a few actors, is to make of the play a chamber piece, a kind of lyrical variation on the original; a variation that is in fact dependent on the audience’s knowledge of the original. “Lyrical,” because the outcomes of action tend to be presented through juxtaposition, without enough of the action that leads to them:  turning points and climaxes without the development that justifies them. “Lyrical” also because the multiple viewpoints of the play tend be reduced to that of the protagonist alone. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this, but I think it needs to be recognized, in this case and others, that it is not so much that “a very pure and essential myth” is being allowed, “with respect and delicacy,” to emerge from the well- or ill-hewn block of the play, as Brook proposes, as that the varied articulation and tensions of drama are being foregone in favor of a refined singleness, a sort of Lamb’s Tale for stage and screen. Perhaps the word “myth” (which originally meant a “tale”) has a special meaning for Brook, but myths, as they have come down to us and particularly as they are presented in the work of collectors and myth-mongers like Frazer, Freud, Jung, Lévi Strauss, O’Flaherty and Campbell, are often schematic; they are not necessarily in themselves so interesting or profound. It is usually the “decoration” given to them by great artists like Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Ovid and Shakespeare, exploring the possibilities they present and using them to make discoveries, that renders them both interesting and profound. One of the most compelling moments in Hamlet, I  feel, occurs when Horatio makes what clearly comes across to Hamlet as an accusation:  “So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to’t” (5.2.63). Horatio is seeing a new and ruthless Hamlet, someone quite unlike the Hamlet of old, and he is shocked, as the audience should be if the moment is acted well. Something changes here between the two men. Hamlet responds chillingly with the self-justifying severity and, I think, bluster. “They are not near my conscience,” and that

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“ ‘tis dangerous when the baser nature comes / Between the pass and fell incensed points / Of mighty opposites” (5.2.65–69). The “mighty opposite” of Hamlet is Claudius, and by the end of the play, many lives have fallen between their “fell, incensed points.” But this brief exchange, with its glance into and away from giddy depths and its sense of recognitions too disturbing to be fully expressed, has been cut, perhaps because in Brook’s version, Hamlet has no “mighty opposite,” no real antagonist. We are back with Granville-Barker’s point that we are too apt to see things through Hamlet’s eyes. Myth or no myth, the true problem for any director of the play, it seems to me, lies in finding ways to ensure that Hamlet’s antagonist is a worthy one, and that it is not only “through Hamlet’s eyes” that we see the play’s events. If you excise the whole political dimension of the play, the sense of the vast Northern world where the “fell kings” of Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts engage in single combat and smite “the sledded Polacks on the ice” (1.1.74), and within which Claudius conducts his diplomatic maneuvers; if you remove the opportunities for Claudius to display his power publicly in the presence of a full court; if you reduce the scenes in which Claudius magisterially brings Laertes to heel and tempts Laertes to a treacherous revenge so that they amount to a few perfunctory exchanges in which all drama is lost and Claudius’ success becomes a foregone conclusion; if Hamlet is not allowed to stake the claim that, “This is I, Hamlet the Dane” (5.1.270–1), and if at the end you make Claudius agree meekly and “nobly” to his fate and cut his last gambler’s words, (“O, yet defend me, friends! I am but hurt” (5.2.355)), then there is no foil for Hamlet, there is nothing for him to push against, and consequently no real drama, whose “double demand,” to paraphrase Granville-Barker, is not solely for action or the revelation of character, but for character in action. There is no reason, apart from poor direction, why the staging of the court and other scenes should be “Romantic and rhetorical.” They certainly are not in Grigori Kozintsev’s brilliant and politically astute version, which remains by far the best film of Hamlet ever made. Aristotle, in the Poetics, pointed out that tragedies are focused on family relations (as, incidentally, are many detective stories, which revenge tragedies in some ways resemble), but he did not mistake a bare paradigm for the thickness and complexity of a particular human situation, whether real or imagined. The particular situation in Hamlet includes the facts that Claudius is a powerful king, that Hamlet is a powerless prince cheated of his right, and that something is rotten in the whole state of Denmark and not merely in the predicament of one family.

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The First Quarto returns Hamlet to a form closer to the kind of actionpacked revenge tragedy that Shakespeare was clearly seeking to go beyond. Brook domesticates the play, which surely is not a presentation of a pure and essential myth, but tells of rottenness, offences that smell to Heaven, jigging whores, rank sweat, enseamed beds, copulation over the nasty sty, worms, the guts of beggars, dust and pocky corpses; and, despite his talk of “today,” he gives to it a form that seems to encapsulate some late Nineteenth or early Twentieth-century idea of the play, in which character is conceived in isolation from situation. “Hamlet is about Hamlet,” Brook remarks in the interview, a statement which, though not wrong, is inadequate and certainly nothing new. His approach is fundamentally lyrical and Romantic, and never more so than in his use of Asian, or quasi-Asian, practices. This use derives obviously from a deep and justified respect for Asian theatre, but also, I suspect, from a more questionable belief that Asian theatre is somehow more wise and profound than European theatre, and that a Noh play, for example, is less a piece of theatre than some kind of mystical insight in theatrical form. In this Hamlet, it is as though Brook wants the refinement, or what he supposes to be the refinement, of certain forms of Asian drama (Kabuki and Peking Opera are often splendidly and unabashedly vulgar, and Kathakali has a grand and very physical energy). It is as though he is trying to interpret Hamlet in terms of rasa (the sentiment evoked in the spectator), which is the essence of Sanskrit drama, or of the yugen (“elegant simplicity” or “subtle profundity”) of certain Noh plays. The costumes and stage furnishings, too, are vaguely Asian in character, in what still strikes me as a slightly too tasteful, self-conscious and Age of Aquarius sort of way, though on stage the few furnishings were certainly used in wonderfully imaginative ways to create different scenes before the audience’s eyes, drawing the audience into the “play” of the play more deeply by making them co-creators, something that, again, does not happen with the video. I do not know enough about Sanskrit drama to judge, but in the case of Noh at least, an elegant simplicity or subtle profundity do not preclude the building and release of strong physical and emotional tensions, and it is this that is lacking in Brook’s, though not in Shakespeare’s, Hamlet. The second half of Brook’s version, particularly as filmed, is almost all on one elegiac note (the first half is rather more various). But the building and release of tension in Noh is not achieved in the same way as it is in the case of a kind of drama that depends strongly upon “character in action,” and upon the interplay and clash of characters whereby the action develops. It is achieved largely through the interplay between dancer and music. This music, though doubtless more refined, does not depart in a fundamental way from the folk music out of

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which it was developed, and which still exists in, for example, the mountains of Aichi Prefecture, where the festival known as hanamatsuri (“Flower Festival”) preserves some of the forms that went into the making of Noh. The music, with its repeated melodic patterns and fluctuating tempo and pitch, its intensifyings and slackenings, tends to create in the dancers as well as in the spectators a state of mind that the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe, speaking of the round dances of Romania and the Faroes, described as either ecstatic (with loss of ego-consciousness) or magical (with a kind of heightened awareness). The music of Noh retains this characteristic, and is used at times to create a hypnotic and almost unbearable tension, as during the final fast dance in Atsumori. But though the music in Brook’s Hamlet was often used, as in Noh, Kathakali, and Kabuki, as counterpoint to the action, it tended to be more evocative than energetic, and, particularly towards the end, became an elegiacally soothing accompaniment that colluded with the lack of strong dramatic articulation to soften and sweeten, the grimness and pain of true tragedy. It seemed more suited to the character of “The Murder of Gonzago” (what we have of it) than to that of Hamlet. All this is even more true of the video, which lacks the physical presence of the musician, than it was of the stage version. The desire for an Asian refinement perhaps lies behind what comes across, except in the case of Adrian Lester, as the largely generic nature of the acting, a quality that again denies any real contention as well as any profound meeting between the characters. Natasha Parry’s Gertrude seems no more than the idea of a “great lady,” quite beyond any sexual life. Bruce Myers as Polonius is a dapper nonentity, and his gravedigger, who sings, for no good reason that I  can think of, a Dublin children’s skipping song instead of the song Shakespeare wrote for him, is no creature of clay, bones, stinking corruption and gallows humor, but a slightly different dapper nonentity with an Irish accent. Shantala Shivalingappa was chosen to play Ophelia because Brook felt that a girl with her upbringing in a high-class Indian family was closer to a girl brought up like Ophelia than any modern Western girl could be. Brook is surely right. But being well brought up does not preclude the possession of a character. Oddly, Shantala Shivalingappa, who is clearly very gifted, comes across far more strongly in the video than she did on stage, but here, too, I have the impression that she has not been allowed to exert her full powers, particularly in the scenes of madness where at first you think, ah, something’s going to come alive, but then the music (not Ophelia’s) is used to turn all to favor and to prettiness, and the presence within her and the situation of “thought and afflictions, passion, hell itself” (4.5.211) is simply suppressed.

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The actors playing Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are good and competent, though the one who doubles as Laertes is wholly unconvincing with Laertes’ laments and rantings. But, again, one wonders how much this is the actor’s fault and how much is due to a directorial desire to avoid the naked expression of strong feeling, or furious bluster. Claudius has of course been left little that is dangerous to play with, but that little could still have been used better. The great speech “O, my offense is rank” (3.3.40) is done, as all too often it is, as a simple, self-pitying expression of guilt and despair, and not as a dramatic and desperate wrestling in which Claudius (who is a brilliant and heartless gambler, with all the gambler’s improvisatory nerve) speculates as to whether he might be able to trick Heaven as well, before concluding that, no, he can’t. Shakespeare’s may not be, but Brook’s Hamlet certainly is, all about Hamlet, and in Adrian Lester Brook has a wonderful actor: physically attractive, as Zeami thought actors should be. Lester is playful, dangerous, and with a powerful energy and physical presence, a good sense of comedy, and, despite a tendency to put too much weight on adjectives and other less important words, the ability to speak the verse in a lively and improvisatory way that is readily understandable to the ear. On stage, he had superb clarity of focus, and used the audience masterfully, breaching the fourth wall for soliloquy and aside to great effect, and reinstating it with a simple gesture or movement. This was never better done than in the grave-digging scene, where he set a skull on a stick so that it took on a life of its own, and through interplay with the audience created some brilliant and macabre comedy that suddenly turned chill. This episode, which requires the presence of an audience, does not appear on the video. And the soliloquies, which also require the presence of an audience, suffer in the video version, though even on stage “To be or not to be” (3.1.64) was far too much an introverted set piece, lacking energy and bite, a mere expression of J. Dover Wilson’s stage direction that Hamlet enters in deep dejection, as opposed to what Christopher McCullough discovered when performing the speech as it appears in the First Quarto: “To be or not to be,—aye, there’s the point,” actually only made sense if I said it to the audience. In fact I was using the soliloquy as a way of putting an argument to the audience as to what was going on in the narrative …2

The Second Quarto or Folio versions of the speech are no less an argument, a wrestling, and here, for once, I do not feel that, in Brook’s words, Adrian Lester is using “Shakespeare’s language in such a way that at every moment you feel it is the language of his thoughts, that he’s thinking and finding

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the only words that correspond at the moment to his experience.” Brook is mostly right in his praise of Lester, but he goes on to make what seems to me a hugely, and characteristically exaggerated claim when he speaks of “the false tradition of Shakespeare that has lasted for many hundreds of years all through Europe,” and says that, “at last you have an actor who can be so at ease with this complex language that he can make you feel he is inventing it.” Declamation, which is always with us, is simply bad acting, as is the overly informal, throwaway, streetwise style that has become fashionable of late. Good actors are, and surely always have been, able to make formal language like Shakespeare’s sound improvised, as if it were springing from a succession of fresh impulses; they make it new. That is why they are good. But of course this claim is not only about Adrian Lester, it is about Brook’s production as a whole, which is supposed to have stripped away all false traditions, all Romantic and rhetorical staging, all mere decoration, in order to speak directly to us “today.” If only “today” were so straightforward a category. But rather than bringing a great play of the past into the frame of “today,” would it not be more challenging, both as a task and a service, to take people out of their limited views of what “today” is, and to allow them to enter into the otherness of an imagined world, and into the otherness of those who inhabit it? Would this not enrich “today”? I  think of Marguerite Yourcenar speaking, in her reflections on the composition of the great Memoirs of Hadrian, of “that sympathetic magic which operates when one transports oneself, in thought, into another’s body and soul,” and reminding herself of the importance of a kind of self-abnegation before otherness: “Keep one’s own shadow out of the picture; leave the mirror clean of the mist of one’s own breath.”3 Hamlet speaks in not dissimilar terms of the discipline of holding the mirror up to nature words for the interpreter. Brook’s version of the play ultimately strikes me not as a true interpretation but as a fascinating curiosity, a reworking of an old play, just as Shakespeare’s tragedy is a reworking of an old play, but in terms of a philosophical and theatrical conception that does not measure up to Shakespeare’s greater vision, and is at odds with it.

Notes 1. This essay was written some years ago (PN Review 153, Volume 30 Number 1, September/October, 2003), and when the editor of this volume asked if it could be reprinted here, I looked at it with an eye to revising it a little so that it might address more explicitly the themes of monarchs and monarchy, but quickly determined that this would be an impossible task. I decided, therefore, to append the following brief

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note, whose assertions, for reasons of space, I cannot make an argument for here. The principal reason why most British (and, I suspect, American) productions of Hamlet, including the production discussed above, are unsatisfactory, is that they do not recognize the importance of its politics, as Grigori Kozintsev’s great film of it definitely does. This may be due in part to stage tradition, in part to a residual Freudian influence, and in part to the valued and supposedly a-political “individualism” of the modern AngloAmerican world. Hamlet returns from his “sea-change” a different man, having demonstrated, in his sending of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths, a ruthlessness that, however much it may shock us moderns, as it did Horatio, was proper and necessary for a monarch in those days if the state and commonweal were to survive (think of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots). He also shows a studied determination to bring Claudius publicly to book, which is what the deaths of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern on, apparently, Claudius’s orders may permit. Finally, in giving his “dying voice” to Fortinbras, as Elizabeth gave hers to James I, he assumes the status and prerogatives of a monarch. The consensus still seems to be that Fortinbras’s words about Hamlet, that “he was likely had he been put on / To have prov’d most royal” (5.2.442–5), are risible in the light of the events of the play. I think the consensus is wrong. 2. Christopher McCulloughs remarks on “To be, or not to be, I there’s the point.” Quoted in The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmark, ed. Graham Holderness & Brian Loughrey (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992). (Intro., pp. 25 & 26) 3. See:  Bayart, Jean-Francois, “Comparing from below” in Societes Politiques Comparees:  Revue Europeenne d’Analyse des Societes Politiques. No. 1, Jan. 2008. http://www.fasopo.org/sites/default/files/papier1_eng_n1.pdf.

Works Cited All textual citations refer to: Folger Shakespeare Library. Shakespeare’s Plays from Folger Digital Texts. Edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library, 15 January, 2019. www.folgerdigitaltexts.org. Bunting, Basil. Briggflatts. Bloodaxe Books Ltd. 2009. Eliot, Thomas S. “Hamlet and His Problems”. The Sacred Wood. Methuen, reprint. 1960, pp.95–103. Granville-Barker, Harley. Preface to ‘Hamlet’. A  Drama Book. Hill and Wang Publishers, 1962. Holmboe, Vagn. Experiencing Music: A Composer’s Notes. Boydell & Brewer, 1991. Marguerite, Yourcenar. Memoirs of Hadrian. FSG Classics, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005. Wilson, John Dover. What Happens in ‘Hamlet’. Cambridge University Press, 1951.

9.  A Hamlet Autopsy Louis Fantasia

Despite what we might consider as some of its more primitive aspects (such as bleeding, the use of leeches, ignorance of the circulatory or nervous systems, the failure to understand how germs transmit disease and the like), Elizabethan medical thought was a remarkably sophisticated, unified and holistic science that emphasized the tripartite balance of mind, body and soul as the key to health. Any imbalance in one of these three areas would manifest itself by disorders in the other two. Elizabethan doctors sought to cure not only the body, but also the mind and soul, of affliction and suffering. This was the distillation of medical thought from Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen, filtered through the new ideas of the Renaissance and conditioned by the teachings and dogmas of the Catholic Church.1 It was not until 1628, five years after the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio, that physician William Harvey published his near-heretical findings on the circulatory system. (Harvey delivered his first public anatomy lecture on April 17, 1616, five days before Shakespeare’s death). Prior to 1628, from the Greeks to the Renaissance, no one other than Harvey, would have believed that: … there might not be A MOVEMENT, AS IT WERE, IN A CIRCLE.  Now this I afterwards found to be true; and I finally saw that the blood, forced by the action of the left ventricle into the arteries, was distributed to the body at large, and its several parts, in the same manner as it is sent through the lungs, impelled by the right ventricle into the pulmonary artery, and that it then passed through the veins and along the vena cava, and so round to the left ventricle in the manner already indicated.2

Shakespeare’s death coincided with the end of Elizabethan medicine, which was a mix of common-sense folk arts and the more or less magical arts of alchemy and astrology, and the beginning of a new scientific method. The

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old Elizabethans were still in touch with their land, their gardens, their spirits and their goblins. In Shakespeare’s England, leading citizens, much like Friar Laurence, not only had time to smell the roses, but to actually “up-fill their osier cages” with them, taking full advantage of the “powerful grace that lies / In plants, herbs, stones and their true qualities” (R&J, 2.3.7–15). This common-sense aspect of Elizabethan home medicine would have been known to just about anyone familiar with the beneficial aspects of not only plants and herbs, but also of diet, exercise, mineral baths, poultices and a change of scenery. Many of Shakespeare’s characters possess this kind of common sense, hands-on knowledge. For example, Mistress Quickly describing the death of Falstaff says, “I put my hand into the bed and felt them (his feet), and they were cold as any stone” (HV, 2.3.23–24). Young King Henry admits that “the tide of blood in me / Hath proudly flowed in vanity till now” (HIV2, 5.2.130–31). Timon of Athens, cursing his countrymen, wants to “Give them diseases, leaving with thee their lust. / Make use of salt hours; season the slaves for tubs and baths; bring down the rose-check’d youth/ to the tub-fast and diet” TA, 4.3.93–97). But what about Shakespeare’s more famous, troublesome, complicated and complex patients? Where did Shakespeare learn the details of Lear’s dementia, Lady Macbeth’s insomnia, Caesar or Othello’s epilepsy, or Hamlet’s depression? Other than the possibility that he himself suffered from these diseases—or knew people who did—did Shakespeare need to be a member of the Royal College of Physicians to work this knowledge into his plays? Dr. Irving Edgar thought not. In his seminal work from 1970, Shakespeare Medicine & Psychiatry, he writes that “the Renaissance freed the mind from the scholastic prison of medievalism to send it forth with feverish activity to a thousand ports of intellectual exploration.”3 Not only did Shakespeare not need to be a physician in order to be curious enough to find out about the medical needs of his characters, he did not need to be the Earl of Oxford, Sir Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe or any other claimant to the authorship throne. The basic principles of medicine, law, astronomy or politics were available to any inquisitive mind. The Elizabethans, following Hippocrates, Galen and Laurentius, believed the world was made up of four physical elements: Earth, Air, Water and Fire. They also believed that the body was composed of four corresponding humors, or temperaments:  Blood, Phlegm, Choler, and Melancholy. These, according to the tradition of medical thought going back to Galen, were found in all ages and at all seasons, and were mixed together within the veins. This mixture was not the same for everyone. The perfect balance of four humors was aspirational not actual. One of the four temperaments or complexions

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would rule or dominate in the individual, depending on the specific fluid or “spirit”: phlegm for Phlegmatic; choler, Choleric; blood, Sanguine; and, lastly, melancholy for the Melancholic.4 This system of fours progressed in its logic from the four physical elements to the four psycho-physical complexions, or temperaments, to the spiritual passions which could be regulated by adjusting the four qualities of heat, moistness, dryness and coldness. Just think of the terms we use today; hotheaded, cold-blooded, lily-livered; one’s blood boils, and what are tears if not the excess leakage of an over-wrought brain? Three main organs, the liver, heart and brain, regulated this interlocking system of fours, while a fourth organ, the spleen, served as a kind of safety valve in venting “excess” humors. The Elizabethans, again drawing from Greek, Roman, and Renaissance thought, believed that the liver actually formed blood by distilling solid nutrients into liquids. The veins, considered a separate system from the arteries, traveled from the liver to various parts of the body, carrying life-giving fluids to be used whenever needed by that particular part of the body, as a river, flowing from some Alpine source, brings water down to the lands that need it. According to Galen, writing in the Second Century C.E., the heart was “the source, the fireplace, the innate heat by which the living organism is directed and controlled.”5 Within the left cavity of the heart, the “natural spirits” of the liver were refined and distilled into “vital spirits,” the thick blue blood of the veins transformed into the thinner red blood of the arteries, which brought the body strength and virtue. These vital spirits were seen by Elizabethans as having the functions we now attribute to the nervous system (sense, feeling, emotion) which were considered the chief attributes of the human soul. Pulsation was the constant bubbling up of these heated, life-giving spirits and only the brain kept us “cool.” Listen to Iago’s advice to Roderigo: IAGO. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners … If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most preposterous conclusions. But we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitten lusts. (Othello, 1.3. 368–75)

It is the brain (a sound mind in a sound body) that keeps us healthy, according to Aristotle, who considered it to be a secondary organ that served as a cooling agent for the heart, and a place in which spirit circulated freely, the “sensus communis” or locus of common sense. “There is nothing,” wrote Aristotle, “in the intellect that is not in the senses.”6 When we become agitated, disturbed,

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distressed, obsessed or possessed, our blood begins to boil because the vital fluids lack refrigeration, and the brain becomes dry, overheated and feverish. This inflammation, as Shakespeare’s characters well know, leads to suspicion, hatred, jealousy, madness, murder and death—“that way madness lies” (Lear, 3.4.24). It is up to the spleen to act as a sort of pressure valve, releasing these excess black fluids, governing our dispositions and temperaments. Hamlet, leaping into (or onto or next to) Ophelia’s grave, warns Laertes that “though I  am not splenitive and rash / Yet have I  in me something dangerous, / Which let thy wisdom fear” (Hamlet, 5.1.275–77). As Shakespeare writes in another play, “sickness is catching” (MSND, 1.1.189). Health, therefore, meant the proper spiritual/physical balance of the four humors within the body with the four elements of the external world. Physical illness, moral degeneration, excess passions or psychological neurosis in great ones, that is leaders or rulers, inevitably affected the rest of the kingdom. Something is rotten not only in Hamlet’s Denmark, but also in Vincentio’s Vienna, Orsino’s Ilyrium, Lear’s England, Macbeth’s Scotland, Prospero’s Milan, and, in most comedies, the forest of Arden. There is perhaps nothing more dangerous to your health in Shakespeare than love: My love is as a fever longing still For that which longer nurseth the disease, Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill, Th’uncertain sickly appetite to please. My reason, physician to my love, Angry that his prescriptions are not kept, Hath left me and I desperate now approve: Desire is death, which physic did except. Past cure I am, now reason is past care, And frantic-mad with evermore unrest; My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are, At random from the truth, vainly expressed. For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright, Who art black as hell, as dark as night. (Sonnet 147)

“The Spanish Inquisition,” writes Robert Burton in his 1621 Anatomy of Melancholy, is in no way comparable to love “in its torments and execution.” Love is detrimental to the body’s health, because it causes the bodily fluids to be in constant flux. In other words, you’re all shook up. Love “makes the blood hot, thick and black, and if this inflammation gets into the brain, with continual meditation and waking, it so dries it up that madness follows, or else they do away with themselves. In men, love affects the liver; in women,

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the organs of increase and fertility, and deserves to be called … burning lust (rather than) heroic love.”7 Burton writes of the Greek philosopher Empedocles, who “was present at the cutting up of one who died for love: his heart was combust, his liver smoky; his lungs dried up … so much that he (Empedocles) believed his soul [had been] roasted through by the vehemency of love’s fire …”8 Perhaps Polonius was not so foolish after all in ascribing Hamlet’s melancholy first to love for Ophelia. It is not easy to cure the lovesick. Burton again: “it is an easy passage down to hell; but to come back once there you cannot well.”9 Othello, who loves not wisely but too well, knows what it means to say farewell to the tranquil mind. “Farewell content! / Farewell the plumed troops and the big wars / That make ambition virtue! O farewell! / … Othello’s occupation’s gone!” (Othello, 3.3.400–410). However, if all else fails, the final remedy is to let the lovers have their desire, and let “Rome in Tiber melt,” as Antony puts it (A&C, 1.2.38). Eventually the lovers will cure themselves through boredom, suicide, or marriage. Even in the warm, moonlit, midsummer forest outside Athens, the lovers’ quarrel between Oberon and Titania, king and queen of fairyland, has its affects on the real world. TITANIA. The winds … have sucked up from the sea /Contagious fogs … The ploughman lost his sweat … The rheumatic diseases do abound And thorough this distemperature we see The seasons alter … And this same progeny of evils comes From our debate, from our dissension. (MSND, 2.1.91–120)

This “progeny of evils” would have most likely have been diagnosed by an Elizabethan physician not as the result of trouble in fairyland, but rather as the result of melancholy, the ubiquitous stress-related disorder of the Elizabethan era which covered most of what we would consider psycho-somatic illnesses today. Melancholy could be brought on not only by love, or the lack of it, but also by diet, idleness, poverty, life-style, lack of advancement, death of a friend or loved-one, possession by a ghost or bad angel, stagnant harbors and rivers. Turmoil, revolt, rebellion, indecision, lack of enthusiasm, laughing or weeping without obvious cause, headaches, stomach aches, agues and rheums were all seen to be manifestations of the most ubiquitous disease of the Renaissance and Elizabethan era—melancholy. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (republished in paperback by NYRB Classics in 2001, and available online as noted below) was the standard work on the subject and went through multiple editions. Although published five

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years after Shakespeare’s death, Burton’s book is a compendium of commonly held theories about the causes, symptoms and cures of melancholy with which Shakespeare would have been familiar, ideas which would have been current and in popular discourse during Shakespeare’s creative period. (Shakespeare, however, was probably familiar with Timothy Bright’s 1586 Treatise on Melancholy). Burton begins his investigation into melancholy by asking, quite simply, why most people don’t behave more sensibly. Why is there so much anger, sorrow, hatred and insanity in the world? Why do people behave so irrationally? His answer? It must only be because of an excess of black bile. If people were made aware of the cause and cures available to them, people would, of course, act in their own best interests. “If our leg or arm offend us,” writes Burton, “we covet by all means possible to redress it—and if we labor of a bodily disease, we send for a physician, but for the diseases of the mind we take no notice: lust harrows on one side; envy, anger, ambition on the other. We are torn in pieces by our passions, and which of us all seeks for help, doth acknowledge his error or know he is sick?”10 This desire for enlightened self-interest leads Burton to conclude that an agrarian, Jeffersonian-style Utopia, much like the one described by Gonzago in The Tempest, is the best of all possible worlds. It is a reaction to the burgeoning, bustling, bourgeois, mercantile, society that England was then becoming. “Public health” officials like Burton were beginning to draw the conclusion that a capitalist, industrialist society might not be so good for your health. I wonder what he would say if he saw today’s world with its drug and climate crises, and viral epidemics? I am certain he would insist that we all be bled of our excess black bile immediately. In his Anatomy, Burton goes on to list the various types of melancholy and mental illness, their causes and symptoms, including Dotage (frenzy) and St. Vitus Dance (epilepsy or palsy). Burton distinguishes between melancholy, which is a kind of silent depression, and madness or hydrophobia (Ophelia goes mad, but is not melancholic). And it is interesting to compare the melancholic “antic behavior” which Shakespeare’s Hamlet adopts, to the crowing rooster imitations the “mad” Amleth puts on in the source material Shakespeare may have used for his play. Melancholy, not madness, is the early modern world’s disease. Symptoms of melancholy include the complexion going to extremes of black, swarthy, pale, or ruddy colors. The patient is lean, withered, hollow-eyed and suffers from bellyaches and wind, vertigo, insomnia, palpitations of the heart, sweaty palms and twitching. He or she has headaches, distractions, talks or laughs when alone, is fearful, sad, lazy and dull. The

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patient has pale urine and diseases of the liver and kidneys. Melancholy may begin in one of two ways: obsession, which starts in fantasies such as love, and then overcomes the body, producing illness; or possession, in which a spirit, witch, or, sorcerer may lead a man into despair. In all cases, the essence of desperate melancholy lies in its anxiety and depression. Melancholy is a disease that preys on those with time on their hands and no physical labors to perform, particularly the idle upper class and scholars. According to Burton (and Machiavelli) melancholy is one of the five principal plagues of good scholars,11 and, as any comparison between Hamlet and Fortinbras will show, good scholars do not always make good soldiers. Too much study will make you mad. There are no artisan’s tools to be cared for and no rest from mental labors. Scholars suffer from the scorn of their colleagues and the ignorance of the general public. This continuous stress produces gout, catarrhs, bad eyesight, stones, colic, vertigo, consumption, and a general unhealthiness resulting from malnutrition and lack of exercise. Poets and philosophers, writes Burton, must “live like grasshoppers: sing in the summer and pine in winter.”12 This type of melancholy is at first pleasant. The patient enjoys his solitude and long hours of sleep. But then, little by little, melancholy reveals itself as the feral fiend, “as it stretches its summit towards heaven, so low that its roots reach to hell.”13 Fear and sorrow come and go without provocation. The patient is terrified, agoraphobic. Fearful of demonic possession, nothing can make him/her happy. Weary of life, plagued by suspicion, jealousy and doubts, the prognostics of melancholy lead more often than not to suicide. Against so strong a threat, the cures for melancholy are limited. They include, first, confidence in the physician. Next, clean air to mix with blood, for, as Burton writes, heaven is “penetrable.” He stresses that, for all types of melancholy, whether caused through love, despair or possession, the body, mind and soul need to be treated and cured together and simultaneously. In addition to the physical cures of diet (wine and “lascivious” meats are out; melons, lettuce, cucumbers and water-lilies, in) and moderate exercise such as gardening, tennis and walking, Burton recommends the spiritual cures of fasting and prayer. Music and other entertainments, such as the theater, the counsel of friends, and the company of beautiful women, all of which happen in Hamlet, are all recommended. Other cures include mineral baths, physics, solitary confinement for nine days, purging and blood-letting. If all else fails, the last cure is to finally let the patient have his or her desires. In Hamlet’s case, this might arguably said to be death, self-actualization, or a return to the womb. Given this context, Hamlet sounds downright clinical in describing his own anxious and depressed condition:

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HAMLET. I have of late … lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises and indeed, it goes so heavily with me … that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory … a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is man … and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me, no, nor woman, neither. (2.2.318–33)

In the course of the play, Hamlet will manifest, or perhaps pretend to manifest, most of the symptoms of melancholy that Dr. Burton has outlined. And Shakespeare will apply nearly every possible treatment that the good doctor recommends, in their prescribed, ever-escalating, dosages. In the course of the play, other characters populating Elsinore will attempt to analyze and cure Hamlet by the devices above. But one cure never suggested by Burton, Shakespeare, Polonius or anyone else in the 1600s, was psychoanalysis or psychotherapy, the so-called “talking cure.” This, of course, did not stop Ernest Jones, the founder of Freudian psychoanalysis in Great Britain, from analyzing Hamlet as if he were a patient on the doctor’s couch and not a character in a play. Dr.  Jones’ analysis of Hamlet had great impact on, among other things, Laurence Olivier’s performance (and film) of the play, which, in turn, colored much of how we saw Hamlet, Shakespeare and classical acting for decades; so I don’t believe a look at Dr. Jones’ analysis is out of order here. In his classic text Hamlet and Oedipus (reprinted, Norton, 1976), Dr. Jones refuses to take anything that Shakespeare has his melancholy prince say at face value, and instead insists upon looking for deeper, hidden meanings, as if Hamlet actually had a childhood, parents, and neuroses. Hamlet is quite clear about the cause of his temporary indecision and inaction in the early stages of the play. “The spirit that I have seen / May be a devil, and the devil hath power / T’assume a pleasing shape,” he says. “Yea, and perhaps, / Out of my weakness and my melancholy/ … Abuses me to damn me” (2.2.627–32). But Dr. Jones wants to tell his patient that there are no such things as ghosts, that they are only the manifestations of a deeply troubled psyche. Possession is just a figment of our imagination. Obsession, on the other hand, is a legitimate, twentieth-century disorder simply because we can analyze it. I believe the Elizabethans were right in assuming both internal and external manifestations—obsession and possession—existed. But Dr. Jones insists, that, for Hamlet, the thought of incest and parricide is too intolerable to bear. Hamlet is tortured and torn in an “insoluble inner conflict,” which can only be understood and resolved by correlating the “manifestations with what must have operated in his infancy and are still (emphasis Jones) operating now.”14 Oh? In what scene?

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If I were to give an instant analysis of the play, rather than the character, I  might come up with a dramatic structural pattern that looks something like this: 1. The world is in disorder when the play begins. The Norwegians are threatening Denmark, and the Ghost of the old Danish king is seen walking about. From the initial appearance of the Ghost, an Elizabethan audience would have known that something was indeed rotten in Denmark. The disorder is both political and social, as well as personal and psychological. The body politic of Denmark, person and state, is in critical condition. 2. An initial and inadequate order is imposed. The new king, Claudius, has married the old king’s wife in order to ensure stability in Denmark. He dispatches two ambassadors to Norway to resolve the Norwegian threat, and tries to treat his new wife’s son as his own. Claudius appears to be a good king, strong and efficient. There seem to be no objections to his having assumed the throne, certainly none from his Queen. 3. There is a rebellion against this imposed order, successful in comedy (Hermia rebels against her father, but winds up married to the boy she wants), and unsuccessful in tragedy (Macbeth rebels against his king and winds up dead). The rebellion here is the threat to the throne, first by Hamlet, then Laertes and, finally, Fortinbras. 4. The rebellion results in a new, or renewed, Duke or Prince assuming the throne.15 Invariably, we are less satisfied with the new order than the one we had. (Does anyone really think Malcolm is a success at the end of Macbeth?). Fortinbras takes over in Hamlet and something like a police state awaits the corruptible Danes. Hamlet’s rebellion begins with his very first line, “A little more than kin and less than kind” (1.2.67), which editors often marked as an aside. They could not believe Hamlet would be that rebellious. By turning inward the rebellion becomes internal, a fight for Hamlet’s mind and soul. But Hamlet’s decision, after seeing the Ghost, is to “set right” the times that are out of joint, a confirmation of his initial instinct to action. This finally leads to his avenging his father’s death and toppling the usurping king. Is Hamlet’s rebellion successful? No. Not only does Hamlet die in the end, but the Norwegians finally take over Denmark. Let’s look at the play structurally in another way. There is much talk of delay in the usual discussions of Hamlet, but I simply don’t see it. In fact, I  think the play has a compact, spring-like structure in which events occur over three compact “days” spread over a few months:

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Day One: comprises the entire midnight-to-midnight 24-hour cycle of Act I. Day Two: comprises two half days—all of Acts II and III up to Act IV, scene iv. Here the first part of the “day” begins about six or eight weeks following the end of Act I, or about the time it would have taken Laertes to travel to Paris. It would also be about the length of time needed to have Hamlet progress realistically through the stages of his feigned madness. Polonius and Shakespeare are absolutely accurate in their diagnosis of his symptoms. Hamlet … POLONIUS. Fell into a sadness, then into a fast, Thence to a watch, thence to a weakness. Thence to a lightness, and by this declension, Into a madness wherein he now raves … (2.2.156–59)

Polonius’ only error in this analysis is that Hamlet is mad because of love. For the remainder of the “day” Elsinore bustles with activity. Ambassadors return from Norway, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are brought to court, traveling Players arrive who will, we know, put on a show on the evening of our second day. From early evening to near dawn the action never stops. The play is played, the King reacts, Polonius is slain and Hamlet is sent to England, while Fortinbras marches twenty thousand men to their graves for a war in Poland. Day Three begins, again, several weeks later, following the time it takes Laertes to return from Paris—and for real madness to grip Ophelia. One of the fascinating tricks Shakespeare pulls off in this play is, of course, to make the characters seem real to us. For example, Hamlet and Polonius seem to speak like us, compared to the theatrical speech of the First Player. Not only does Laertes return and Ophelia die that third day, but Hamlet’s letter arrives announcing that he will face the King “tomorrow,” or the second half of the third “day,” when the action from Ophelia’s funeral to Hamlet’s death and Fortinbras’ invasion is separated by only an “hour of quiet.” Again, I ask, what delay? Still, there are two troublesome questions about the end of the play. First, can we trust Horatio to tell the truth? (Possibly, but should we?) And, second, if Hamlet’s ghost, like that of his father’s, were to walk the battlements and talk to us from beyond the grave, would he actually feel good about his corpse being carried off by four war-weary Captains? Would Hamlet really want a soldier’s funeral? Probably not. So what is Shakespeare’s point?

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Shakespeare, I think, is being bitterly ironic here. Hamlet, who struggled so long against the madness of violence and brutality, is to be memorialized as a soldier because it fits the winners’—the survivors’—purpose. Shakespeare does the same at the end of Romeo and Juliet. Would those youngsters really want their parents to erect a statue of gold to commemorate their love? I doubt it and I feel the same way here. Hamlet is literally turning in his grave at the idea of being a war hero. Given the two structural blueprints above, Hamlet becomes almost insignificant to the play’s action. He is, as Samuel Johnson noted, more of an “instrument than an agent.”16 Part of the answer, then, to questions of indecision, inaction and madness, real or assumed, in the play, lies in the fact that for much of the play Hamlet is reactive in his relationship to the world, improvising his way through Elsinore. When the entire play is looked at in this way, Hamlet’s personal and psychological struggles become contextualized within the political and social world of the play. This is why the play is called, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Part of the real issue, hinted at in the title, is whether or not Hamlet is fit to be prince and become king of Denmark. I hope it is not too much of an over-simplification to say that the play is about Hamlet being forced to grow up and accept his role in life, even if it is a role he does not wish to play, the role of avenging son. Hamlet learns that you can run but you can’t hide from what the “strumpet Fortune” has in store for you. There really is a “special providence in the fall of a sparrow” (5.2.234), and there is nothing you can do about when that sparrow falls. But Dr. Jones insists upon imposing a detailed Freudian analysis of the childhood Hamlet might have had, while ignoring what Hamlet actually says and does in the play. Jones’ reading of the text strikes me as a classic case of medical misdiagnosis and malpractice. “When a person cannot bring himself to do something that every conscious consideration tells him he should do … it is always because there is some hidden reason why a part of him doesn’t want to do it; this reason he will not own to himself and is only dimly, if at all, aware of it.”17 But what is this “conscious consideration” that Hamlet must act upon? It is nothing less than the murder of another human being, a violation of one of God’s Ten Commandments, which, as a thirty-yearold divinity student at Wittenberg university, one of the leading theological centers of the day, Hamlet would have held as a core belief in his life’s value system. It seems to me to be completely valid, and in fact, logical and obvious, that Shakespeare would need the full four and a half acts he takes to resolve the moral, theological, philosophical and political ramifications evident in

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committing such a murder on the promptings of a spirit which may indeed be the personification of evil. Dr.  Burton, however, was well aware that scholars, along with the idle aristocracy, were particularly susceptible to melancholy because of their sedentary life-style, poverty, lack of proper diet and exercise, and, in particular, the over-heating of their brains with endless investigations into (useless) questions that had no practical or definite answers, such as “Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” (3.1.66). Among the causes of such despair are predestination, doubt, fear of damnation, and lack of faith in God’s mercy and justice. In this type of religious melancholy the Devil is the cause of all despair. A weakness in faith provokes a guilty conscience. Thus melancholic despair leads to atheism, blasphemy, and violent death. The fact that in Hamlet’s final reference to God, “Sure he that made us with such large discourse …” (4.4.36),18 the “he” is spelled with a small “h.” This is not just a compositor’s or editor’s error, but rather, I believe, an indication that Hamlet has lost his faith.19 The irony is, of course, that once Hamlet has lost this faith, he is able to act in the rotten world of Denmark, where murder counts more than morality. Lust, revenge, and hatred, while all strong and dramatic passions and emotions, violated all reason and were not healthy for you. Any attempt to be rational or sane in an insane world, such as Denmark or Elizabethan England, is madness. In a world turned upside down, there are no moral codes, no center, and no sense. Hamlet is absolutely accurate when he says that “all occasions” (4.4. 34, Quartos only; the speech is not in the Folio) inform against him, teaching him, finally, that “to seem” great is the same in this rotten world as “to be” great. Hamlet’s entire arc as a character can be drawn as a kind of learning curve along his ability to “seem.” Almost his first words are “Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems’ ” (1.2.79). He cannot put on the trappings or the suits of woe. Yet by Act V, ready to leap into Ophelia’s grave, he dares Laertes to: HAMLET. Show me what thou’t do. Woo’t weep, woo’t fight, woo’t fast, woo’t tear thyself, Woo’t drink up eisel, eat a crocodile? I’ll do’t. Dost thou come here to whine, To outface me with leaping in her grave? (5.1.290–95)

While Gertrude observes keenly that “this is mere madness”(5.1.302), it is actually how most of Elsinore wants Hamlet to behave and how, I assume, an Elizabethan or Jacobean audience wanted him to behave for the previous four

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acts. Pretend to have an emotion, pretend to smile, and still be a villain. Seem. The world has finally infected Hamlet with its disease of madness. When Hamlet returns from the shipwreck on the high seas, invigorated by the salt air, the fighting and swimming for his life, not to mention the exercise that constant fencing provides, his melancholy appears to be cured, and he announces himself, splenitive and rash, with “This is I, / Hamlet the Dane” (5.1.270–71). This cure, direct from Dr.  Burton’s manual, has its price:  the loss of Hamlet’s long-standing, fundamental religious and moral beliefs. Hamlet now adopts a kind of fatal existentialism in which the “readiness” is all. “Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is ‘t to leave betimes? Let be” (5.2.233). Hamlet is not so much a tragedy as it is a documentary. How does one survive in a world out of joint? Those, like Claudius, with the thickest immune systems of hypocrisy and amoral pragmatism, live longest, while the most vulnerable, the most innocent, die first. Shakespeare’s gritty camera roams freely about Elsinore, from closets and bedrooms to gravediggers at work, as it covers Hamlet’s descent from the thin air of the battlements of Act I to the muck of Ophelia’s grave in Act V. Like any good documentarian, Shakespeare makes no attempt to help or affect his subjects as they play out their assigned roles. Consider Gertrude: one of the many interpretative questions in the play, for example, is the question of her innocence or guilt. Depending on how one sees her knowledge of her husband’s murder, Gertrude is either protected from this infection by massive amounts of ignorance, or is slowly but steadily devoured by its disease of complicity. The true tragedy of the play is that the world has come to this, where innocence and guilt are equally opaque, hidden from judgment, reward or punishment by “seeming.” Hamlet, as we all must, has given up some of his innocence, inoculating himself with the disease of madness (real or feigned) in order to survive in this world. We are forced to ask ourselves just how much we would do in his situation, and that—that rather unpleasant, compromised form of being and existing in the real world—is the real question. Hamlet replaces his former “insoluble” (to use Jones’ word) agony of “to be or not be” with an almost Zen-like “let be” at the end of the play. If Shakespeare, unlike the authors of other revenge plays such as The Spanish Tragedy or The Revenger’s Tragedy, had not bothered with these greater moral questions, then Hamlet’s task would have been much simpler: kill the king, watch him die slowly and painfully, and revel in vengeance. But had that been the case, I doubt we would be writing, thinking and talking about Shakespeare four hundred-plus years on.

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Had Dr. Burton rather than Dr. Jones looked over Hamlet’s corpse and heard Horatio’s account of “carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, / Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, / Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause” (5.2.423–25), I think he would have taken a much less morally superior tone. Dr. Jones’ mistake (and perhaps this is the mistake of humanism in general) was to assume that the world could be made rational through talk, and that we could understand and therefore defend ourselves against the plague of insanity known as Elsinore, the real world. Today, in a world filled with random acts of violence, from mass shootings and gang violence, to domestic and international terrorism, environmental suicide, violence against women, children and minorities, as well as the attack upon truth in our post-factual political moment, this may be one of the reasons why we escape into the virtual reality of the internet and social media: it presumes a certain safety from real world infection. But we have seen that the viruses of bigotry and hate, abuse and racism, let alone ignorance and misinformation, can infect our virtual worlds as well. Pornography, racism, greed and hatred stalk the internet as well as our streets. Even in Cyberspace you can run but you can’t hide from the strumpet Fortune. Burton understood the nature of his patients and the cause of most of their illnesses. “Who knows,” he wrote, “how we shall be tempted—we ought not be so rash and rigorous in our censures—God be merciful to us all.” He knew that, as Angelo says, that “we are all frail” (Measure, 2.4.130). Do not be depressed. We can take some control over our lives. It is the patient’s attitude that is primary. No one can be cured until he or she is ready. “Be merry,” writes Burton. “Live merrily, free from cares, perplexity and grief. Again and again, I request you to be merry. If anything trouble you or vex your soul, neglect and contemn it; let it pass, for without mirth, which is the life and quintessence of physic medicine … the life of man is dull, dead and of no force … I say be merry.”20 Laughter, even in the 1600s, was the best medicine. But Dr. Burton, like any good physician, knows that suffering and death can never be completely avoided or defeated, and so he writes that he “can give no better advice than this: Be not solitary; be not idle. We must all suffer and die. Faith, Hope and Repentance are the sovereign cures and remedies—confess, humble thyself and repent.”21 “SPERATE MISERI / AVETE FELICES” is his motto. “Have hope, ye wretched. Beware, ye who are happy.” Do you wish to be freed from doubt? Do you wish to escape uncertainty and therefore illness? Repent, says the good doctor, while you are of sound mind. “I assure you, if you have done

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so, you are safe, for you have done penance during a time when you were able to sin!”22 Or as Hamlet might have put it, the readiness really is all.

Notes 1. Osler, William, The Evolution of Modern Medicine—A Series of Lectures Delivered at Yale University April, 1913. https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/Books/osler/modern_ medicine.htm. 2. Harvey, William, Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus, Francofurti, 1628, G. Moreton’s facsimile reprint and translation, Canterbury, 1894, p. 49. Quoted in Osler above. 3. Edgar, Irving, Shakespeare Medicine & Psychiatry (Philosophical Library, 1970), p. 88. 4. Radden, Jennifer, ed., The Nature of Melancholy from Aristotle to Kristeva (Oxford: University Press, 2002), pp. 129–30. 5. Galen, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, quoted in Fishman, Alfred P., and Richards, Dickinson W., eds. Circulation of the Blood:  Men and Ideas (New York: American Physiological Society, (Springer), 1982), p. 203. 6. https://web.stanford.edu/class/history13/earlysciencelab/body/brainpages/ brain.html. 7. Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1621). https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/burton/robert/melancholy/S3.2.4.html. 8. Burton, https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/burton/robert/melancholy/S3.2.3.html. 9. Burton, https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/burton/robert/melancholy/S3.2.5.html. 10. Burton, https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/burton/robert/melancholy/preface4.html. 11. “Excessive Study v. Mental Health”, https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2019/07/21/ excessive-study-vs-mental-health/. 12. See Sidi J.  Mahtrow’s poem, Are All Poets Mad, https://www.poemhunter.com/ poem/are-all-poets-mad/. 13. Burton, https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/burton/robert/melancholy/S1.2.3.1. 14. Jones, Ernest, “The Oedipus-Complex as An Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery:  A Study in Motive.” The American Journal of Psychology 21.1 (January, 1910): 72–113. 15. For a more complete discussion of this type of dramatic analysis see: Fantasia, Louis. Instant Shakespeare (Chicago: Ivan R Dee, 2002), pp. 78–94. 16. Johnson, Samuel, “The Praise of Variety”. The Plays of William Shakespeare (London: J &R Tonson, 1765), vol. VII; p. 311. 17. Jones, Ernest, Hamlet and Oedipus (New  York:  W.W. Norton 1949)  quoted in:  http://mrjeremyyoung.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Excerpts-fromThe-Oedipus-Complex-as-an-Explanation-of-Hamlets-Mystery-by-Ernest-Jones.pdf (p. 2). 18. Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Arden/Methuen, 1982), p. 345. 19. Normally this anthology series follows The Folger Digital Texts of the plays (folgerdigitaltexts.org). As series editor, I have chosen this digital text for several reasons, not the least of which is its accessibility. However, in regard to Hamlet (at 4.4.38), the Folger

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editors, based on no textual reference that I can discover, have arbitrarily decided to capitalize the “He” in question, which I believe is a major editorial error. 20. Burton, https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/burton/robert/melancholy/S2.2.6.html. 21. Burton, https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/burton/robert//melancholy/S3.4.2.html. 22. Ibid.

Works Cited All textual citations refer to: Folger Shakespeare Library. Shakespeare’s Plays. from Folger Digital Texts. Ed. Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library, 1 April 2019. www.folgerdigitaltexts.org.

Contributors

Louis Fantasia (Series Editor) is the director of the Los Angeles Shakespeare Institute, a joint project of the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles and the UCLA/William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. He has served as director of the Shakespeare teacher institute at the Huntington Library, director of the London Shakespeare Globe Centre’s Teaching Shakespeare Through Performance Institute, and President of Deep Springs College. He is Artistic Associate at the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles. His books include Instant Shakespeare (Ivan R. Dee), Tragedy in the Age of Oprah: Essays on Five Great Plays (Scarecrow Press), and Talking Shakespeare (Peter Lang). Chris Anthony is Assistant Professor of Acting at the Theatre School at DePaul University. Holding an M.F.A. in Acting from the California Institute of the Arts, she has taught and directed in educational, professional, and community spaces, working at the intersection of art and community empowerment.  As Associate Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles, she oversaw the development of the company’s Youth & Education programs: Will Power to Youth, Will to Work, and Play On for youth; Will Power to Schools and the Youth Arts Professionals Institute for classroom teachers and community arts practitioners. Will Power to Youth won the prestigious Coming Up Taller Award, was studied by Harvard’s Project Zero for the study The Qualities of Quality: Understanding Excellence in Arts Education, and is featured in Ayanna Thompson’s  Passing Strange:  Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America. Dr. Michael Peter Bolus received his B.F.A. in Acting from the University of Southern California, his Masters Degree in Creative Writing from Boston

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University, and his M.Phil. and Ph.D.  in Theatre Studies from the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of Aesthetics and the Cinematic Narrative: An Introduction (Anthem Press), and editor of the upcoming anthology, The Light in the Dark: The Evolution, Mechanics, and Purpose of Cinema (Cognella Press). His articles, interviews, and criticism have appeared in the scholarly journals Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Slavic and East European Performance, Newsweek (Japan), The Montreal Review, and Modern Mask, and his poetry and prose were featured in the e.e. cummings Pre-Centennial Tribute. He currently serves as Department Chair of Liberal Arts at The Los Angeles Film School, and is an Adjunct Professor of Film Studies at Santa Monica College. Timothy Harris has lived in Japan for 46 years. His translations and essays on poetry, drama, music and art have appeared in PN Review (Manchester), Agenda (London), SNOW (Lewes), Quadrant (Melbourne), Plays International (London), Art International (Lugano), the Asian edition of The Financial Times, and The Chicago Review. He has also contributed to The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English (Oxford University Press). Mr. Harris acts, directs, and lectures on British and Irish literature. He also works as a diction coach for (English) opera, oratorio and song at the New National Theatre, Tokyo. Dr.  Heather James,  Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California.  Professor James’ research focuses on literature and culture of the English Renaissance. Her literary interests also include Latin poetry, Italian and French literature, genre studies (especially drama, lyric, epic, and pastoral), and the culture of classical transmission. Long-standing interests include empire studies, political theory and political philosophy, book history, women writers, and gender studies. Newer interests include the history and theory of education; the use of maxims, commonplaces, and gnomic pointing; classical recovery and cultural extinction; animal studies; and the place of Renaissance art and drama in the art of the American West. Jessie Lee Mills is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Pomona College and a professional director. She directs, adapts, and devises theater, opera, musicals, films, and new works in venues throughout the United States and abroad, including with the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, SC; The Lincoln Center & The Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York; The Goodman Theatre & The Grant Park Orchestra in Chicago; and The Sala Beckett Institute in Barcelona,

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Spain. She received her M.F.A. in Directing from Carnegie Mellon University and is a John Wells Fellow. Her scholarship and publications center on innovative theatre practices, ensemble-theatre, and comedy-as-community. She has created and initiated a number of grants, community centers, and programs, all of which promote bridging the divide between the academy and its surrounding community. Dr. Terri Power is a playwright, scholar, and professional theatre artist, with a B.A. in Theatre from UCLA, a M.F.A. in Staging Shakespeare, and a Ph.D. in Drama from the University of Exeter in England.  She served as Course Director for the M.A. in Performing Shakespeare at Bath Spa University, and was a Director and Education and Outreach Manager for the Bristol Shakespeare Festival. Her book Shakespeare and Gender in Practice (Palgrave 2016) was released globally and features the acclaimed London production of her play  Drag King Richard III  produced by Stance Theatre Company (2014), of which she is a founding member and resident playwright. Terri was also a contributing scholar to the British Black and Asian Shakespeare project. Her ­chapter Brave New Bard was published by Routledge in Shakespeare, Race and Performance:  The Diverse Bard  (2017). She has been associated with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, the SITI Company, Cleveland Public Theatre, and The Queen’s Company (NY). Dr. Janna Segal is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Louisville. Prior to U of L, she was an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Shakespeare and Performance at Mary Baldwin University, and an IHUM Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. in Drama and Theatre from the UC Irvine/UC San Diego joint doctoral program, her M.A. in Theatre from CSUN, and her B.A. in Theater Arts from UC Santa Cruz. She has published single—and co-authored works on Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Othello, Macbeth, Midsummer, The Roaring Girl, and Fo and Rame’s Elisabetta. Dr. Segal is also a freelance dramaturge and the Resident Dramaturg for the Comparative Drama Conference’s Staged Reading Series. Dr.  Elaine Turner (B.A., Brandeis University; Ph.D., University of Warwick): after working as stage manager and director on the London stage, Dr.  Turner became a lecturer at several universities including University of Warwick, Brunel University, Central School of Speech and Drama, and Queen Mary and Westfield University. She created and taught both B.A. and M.A. Distance Learning degrees at Rose Bruford College and Central. Dr Turner was a founding and long-term member of the Shakespeare studies

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teaching team at the International Shakespeare Globe Centre. Script reader and assessor at the Royal National Theatre and Channel 4, her publications include Continuum Encyclopedia of British Theatre (“War Plays by Women”), Routledge, 1999; St James Compendium of Playwrights and Plays (“Practical Theatre”), Stanley Thornes, 1997.

Playing Shakespeare’s Characters Louis Fantasia General Editor

Actors, directors, educators, and scholars bring diverse and wideranging insights into the motives, context, history and challenges of performing Shakespeare’s “infinite variety” of lovers, villains, kings, heroes and more. Firsthand accounts, advice, and experiences of bringing these infamous characters to life are shared for the enjoyment and education of scholars, actors, directors, and fans. For additional information about this series or for the submission of manuscripts, please contact: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. Acquisitions Department 29 Broadway, 18th Floor New York, NY 10006 To order other books in this series, please contact our Customer Service Department: [email protected] (within the U.S.) [email protected] (outside the U.S.) Or browse online by series: www.peterlang.com