Measure for Measure (1979)

By William Shakespeare (1604)
Riverside Studios, London, May 1979

In 1898 Bernard Shaw, no friend of Shakespeare’s, compared his own work, the Plays Unpleasant, to “such unpopular plays as All’s Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida” where “we find [Shakespeare] ready and willing to start at the twentieth century if the seventeenth would only let him”. That these were three plays in which the young Mirren appeared can be explained away as coincidence; but perhaps the old rogue was onto something else. He had the foresight to predict that Measure for Measure, in particular, would find new and receptive audiences in the next hundred years. We have a tolerance for difficulty, for moral irresolution, for messy endings, that our Victorian ancestors lacked.    

And so much in this play is murky. Why does the Duke absent himself from Vienna? In the scene with Friar Thomas (I.iii) where he establishes his disguise, he gives several reasons, not entirely consistent one with another. We learn that he is a reluctant public figure, who has “ever lov’d the life remov’d”. He tells us that he has let slip the “strict statutes and most biting laws” of the state, that a clean-up operation is needed, but that it would seem “tyranny” if he were to do it himself. So he has appointed a deputy, “a man of stricture and firm abstinence”, who may be relied on to do the dirty work. Yet this “precise” deputy is himself to be put to the test: “Hence we shall see | If power changes purpose, what our seemers be”. These are complicated motives, complicated further when we consider that he must already know of Angelo’s breach of his marriage contract with Mariana, evidence that the deputy is not as “precise” as he seems.

Is the Duke a cruel manipulator or a dispenser of wisdom? In the 1930s there was a trend in criticism, inaugurated by G Wilson Knight, to view the Duke as the prophet of an “enlightened ethic”, a Christ-like figure who preaches a new order of justice and forgiveness. The clue is in the play’s title, a reference to Matthew 7:1-2:

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

But if he’s a supreme moralist, why does he prolong the sufferings of the other characters so, letting Isabella believe her brother has been executed, telling Juliet that the father of her child is to die “tomorrow” when he has no intention of allowing the execution to occur? Why does he lie to them? Whilst we can hold these contradictions in our heads when reading the play, we generally look to a stage production to offer a line of interpretation.

And Isabella? If All’s Well is about a woman who yearns to lose her virginity and resorts to the ‘bed trick’ to accomplish it, Measure for Measure gives us a woman desperate to preserve her virginity who succeeds by the same means. Do we admire her? Some might say her dedication to chastity, which she values above her brother’s life, is revealed as an ethical absolutism as unbending as that of Angelo when he’s first installed in office. There’s a suggestion that it may proceed from sexual anxieties as much as selfless piety. Long before psychoanalysis was born in Vienna, Erasmus in his Encomium Matrimonii was troubling over young neophytes who would “profess and vow perpetual chastity before they sufficiently know themselves and the infirmity of their nature”.

The final scene raises more questions. This was never going to resolve in a neat comedy of pairings. There are marriages in prospect, but hardly the result of mutual romantic yearnings. Angelo is married off to a woman he has cast aside. He has shown his true colours by abusing his authority to proposition another woman. Like Helena in All’s Well, his new bride has unaccountably loved her man all along despite his unworthiness and indifference towards her. The foppish Lucio is married off to his ‘punk’ as a punishment. The Duke, a hitherto confirmed bachelor, meanwhile proposes to the novice nun Isabella. We don’t know her response – she has no lines after her intercession on Angelo’s behalf – but it would be hard for her to turn down such a public proposal from the head of state. In fact, this sudden offer of marriage from an authority figure she hardly knows – her previous encounters with him had been in his role as celibate friar – might suggest he’s exercising a kind of marital droit de seigneur, a tactic that would occur more naturally to his less principled deputy.

According to the Revels Accounts, a play called ‘Mesur for Mesur’ by ‘Shaxberd’ was acted in the banqueting hall, Whitehall, on St Stephen’s Night (26 December) 1604: the first known performance. We can never know what King James and the courtiers made of it. Some have suggested that the version we have, first printed in the Folio of 1623, is a later revision, even by another hand. Perhaps such textual anomalies would account for disjunctions in the play, those abrupt modulations, those suspended chords that never quite resolve. Or perhaps they were built in from the start, intentional subversions of tradition by one of literature’s greatest rule-breakers.

Much as I admire this play and enjoy fretting over its complexities, I find it flawed. The strongest scenes by far are the two meetings between Isabella and Angelo in which the deputy’s dark motives take shape, a surprise even to himself, and the prison scene between Isabella and Claudio, where the novitiate is startled to discover that her brother values his life more highly than her virginity. Is it fanciful to suppose that the psychological depths here are what drew ‘Shaxberd’ to this material? Like the good scriptwriter that he was, he then adapted the material to a ‘comedy’ format by grafting on motifs from fairy tale (the Absent Ruler, the Substitute Bride) and ensuring the whole thing ended in multiple marriages, however unhappy their prospects.   

History has not been kind to the 1979 Riverside production. It doesn’t even merit a mention in Graham Nicholls’s study, published in 1986, of the play in performance. His Isabellas of note are Estelle Kohler (Stratford, 1970), Ciaran Madden (Open Space, 1975), Paola Dionisotti (Stratford, 1978) and Kate Nelligan (BBC TV, 1979). Peter Gill had made a reputation at Riverside Studios for shedding new light on old plays by stripping them bare, by avoiding what one critic called “obfuscating directing and otiose gloss”. Whilst this approach had worked in The Changeling, which he staged the previous year, reviewers felt it was inappropriate for this text, a ‘problem play’ whose problems the director needed to confront in some fashion. Gill presented the action on a bare quarry-tile floor against a stark brick background:

On a wide bare stage, in dusty-looking doublet and hose, the play is presented with a business like briskness. It is not unenjoyable, but hardly fires the imagination. (Daily Telegraph)

For Peter Stothard this was “a prime example of the ‘theatre of purity’ gone mad… The cutting back of directorial accretions has meant a virtual copping out of all the play’s problems.” The Observer concurred: “If this play is about anything, it is about moral testing; with that dimension lost, all tension gradually seeps out of the play.” Some critics harked back to Peter Brook’s famous production of 1950 which, as John Barber suggested, had revealed this as the “most Freudian of Shakespeare’s plays, with its revelations of suppressed desires, subconscious motives and nightmare fantasies”. (One 1975 production, by Robert Phillips in Stratford, Ontario, had made this explicit by moving the action from the seventeenth-century city to Vienna in 1912.) But for Robert Cushman the Riverside version was a “bridled” Vienna, with little sign of “corruption boil[ing] and bubbl[ing] till it o’er run the stew”.

So theatre critics missed Gill’s customary clarity of direction, regretting that too few of the characters emerged with any colour or distinctiveness. They were, however, united in singling out Mirren’s performance. For the Daily Telegraph Isabella was the only character in the production who

might belong to a comedy of deeply moral implications and not an antiquated relic. In Nile green velvet with white cuffs, a crucifix on her magnificent bosom, she commands the fierce chastity of a Titian Madonna, and is hardly less beautiful. She speaks in cold horror of stooping to “abhorred… pollution” – with a telling pause before she can bring herself to utter the noun. If the actress will put to better use the good deep notes in her voice, a remarkable performance could become a great one.

Plays and Players agreed:

Helen Mirren has at least carved out for herself a role that is absolutely coherent; a more than usually reluctant entrant to the convent, she grows suddenly, inflexibly moral and in the end accepts marriage to the Duke as a softening fall to normality. Her performance has a tough, physical, almost balletic quality. At the first entreating of Angelo for Claudio’s life, she moves in and out from him in the strictest straight lines, as though approaching the hub of a wheel along each spoke in turn. Once Angelo is within her power her path changes from its pattern of advance and retreat to a spiralling encirclement of her prey. Dressed in slate-grey, floor-length velvet, she seems to glide rather than walk; and she stops dead with a timing that keeps you glued to her every movement, lest you miss its ending.  

For the Guardian, Mirren’s Isabella was “the strongest thing in the evening”:

Grey frocked and with her hair swept severely back, she is an unapologetic moralist exuding the odour of sanctity. She prods Angelo’s bosom with her little finger in a manner that would unnerve a saint, prowls round him like an excited Baskerville muttering the word “Seeming seeming” and on the notorious “more than our brother is our chastity” she flings her arms wide in a declaration of faith. As a portrait of inflexible religious morality, it is undeniably impressive.

Among the academic critics, David McCandless understood her portrayal as “defining chastity as an act of resistance against a normative femininity synonymous with sexual availability on male terms” (p189). It’s significant that Mirren (like Judi Dench in 1962 or Juliet Stevenson in a later RSC production) was never seen in the nun’s habit. In Michael Scott’s words,

her decision for celibacy or sexuality was involved with an almost secular awareness of the dignity of her own being… Here was a determined Isabella whom Angelo encountered at his peril, only his power offering any form of protection. Miss Mirren’s Isabella was a woman affronted by a male-dominated world. Her dignity as a human being was the price she was asked to pay and she refused to do so. (pp67-9)

At Stratford in 1970 Estelle Kohler had brusquely ignored the Duke’s offers of marriage, and at the end of the play was left alone on stage to gaze out at the audience in obvious shock and bewilderment. Mirren, by contrast, “quickly and decisively accepted the Duke’s proposal” (Bawcutt, pp39-40). I wish I’d seen the Riverside production. Mirren’s Isabella sounds feisty and independent-minded to the core. But without having seen it, how is one to judge that rapid acceptance of the Duke from someone hitherto “affronted by a male-dominated world”? On the page, the rest is silence.

References

John Barber, ‘Measure for Measure’, Daily Telegraph, 24 May 1979

NW Bawcutt, ‘General Introduction’, ‘Measure for Measure’: The Oxford Shakespeare (1991)

Michael Billington, ‘First night: Measure for Measure’, Guardian, 24 May 1979

Robert Cushman, ‘Open door’, Observer, 27 May 1979

Erasmus, A ryght frutefull Epystle… in laude and prayse of matrimony, tr. R Tavernour (1532)

David McCandless, Gender and Performance in Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies (1997)

Graham Nicholls, ‘Measure for Measure’: Text and Performance (1986)

Michael Scott, Renaissance Drama and a Modern Audience (1982)

George Bernard Shaw, Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898), I, xxi

Peter Stothard, ‘Measure for Measure’, Plays and Players, June 1979, 21-2

G Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (1930) 

Caesar and Claretta (1975)

By Jack Russell.
BBC TV, 9 May 1975.

In November 1971 Richard Burton received a visit from one Carlo Cotti, a “neo-fascist” who “appears to be a cut above the average in intelligence”. An assistant director itching to graduate to making films of his own, Cotti had a proposition for Burton and Taylor:

He wants to talk to me re Benito Mussolini I think for whom, I’m told, he has a great and relatively unfashionable admiration. He is anxious for me to play the last days of Mussolini in a film. Never know, it might be interesting and with E possibly playing his mistress Clara Petacci it would certainly set all Italy by the ears. (Diaries, 13 Nov 1971)

This intriguing project never got off the ground, although under a different director, Carlo Lizzani, it mutated into another venture for Italy’s Cinecittà studios: Mussolini – ultimo atto, a vehicle for Rod Steiger, with Lisa Gastoni as the dictator’s loyal mistress.   

Meanwhile, back in England and on a much smaller scale, the BBC had a Mussolini drama of its own in development. It was one of a series of single plays under the title ‘Private Affairs’. (Other episodes tackled the relationships between Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, David Garrick and Peg Woffington, Charles Stewart Parnell and Kitty O’Shea, and George, Prince of Wales, and Mrs Fitzherbert.) Clive James, writing in The Observer, was unimpressed by the whole concept:

These famous modern love stories must have looked a good idea in outline, but when it comes to the scripts there is not much for the actors to bite on, and they are obliged to spend most of their time coal-heaving the exposition.

This is a bit harsh, even by the Antipodean’s acerbic standards. Caesar and Claretta, in my view, is one of the strongest of Mirren’s early TV appearances.

The play is based closely on historical events. Mussolini was captured on 27 April 1945 as he tried to escape to Switzerland disguised as a German soldier in a German motorised column. They were stopped by partisans, who insisted on searching all the vehicles before allowing the Germans to proceed. One figure slumped in the darkness at the back of the truck had attracted attention. “His face was like wax and his stare glassy, but somehow blind,” the partisan leader later remembered. “I read there utter exhaustion, but not fear.” After being detained at the town hall of Dongo, Mussolini and his mistress were transferred overnight to a farmhouse near Lake Como while their captors pondered what to do with them. As is well known, the following day a group of communists arrived with orders from Milan to carry out summary justice on the Duce. He and Petacci were shot, their bodies later transferred to Milan where they were exhibited, to the howls of a raucous and unforgiving public, dangling upside down from scaffolding in the Piazzale Loreto.

Writer Jack Russell took that last night in the farmhouse as the basis for an intimate drama. The dictator and his mistress retire to a well-guarded bedroom for the night. According to the testimony of their guards, there was only a little whispered conversation before Mussolini fell asleep; Claretta stayed awake for a long time before dropping off. Russell used dramatic licence to imagine a long duet between the doubly impotent Duce (“my power is gone with my power”), unable either to “save” Italy or make love to his mistress, as he railed against the perfidy of the French, English, Americans and Germans (“my friends, the wolves”). Then the old vainglory stirred, and with it (we were to suppose) came a stirring in the loins. Many details of the historical record were woven into this compact drama: Petacci’s squeal of delight when she mistakenly believes that the leader of the execution squad has come to liberate them, her stumbling through the farmyard mud in fashionable high heels.

The production moved in and out of black-and-white, suggestive of Italian neorealist cinema, and Mirren in broad-brimmed hat and scarlet lipstick looked every inch the Cinecittà star. She has spoken of her early admiration for Italian actresses like Monica Vitti and Anna Magnani; here was her chance to make good. Michael Ratcliffe wrote of her performance in The Times:

Miss Mirren is an actress who always seems to know what she is doing and why. She is also very sexy and Mr Whatham [the director] was not going to let us forget it. He shot this Claretta Petacci… through the Duce’s own intermittently devoted, if not fetishistic eyes.

Yet, “against this pin-up presentation”, and here I agree with him, she “cleverly retained the essential simplicity of Claretta’s character.” Petacci, described by one of Mussolini’s biographers as hailing from the “comfortable Rome bourgeoisie”, was no intellectual, but, in Russell’s script, she was more than a gold-digger – more than just another Fascist groupie. Clive James’s TV review underestimated how these qualities were captured in writing and performance:

Mussolini and Claretta Petacci trailed a few tatters of tragic grandeur but that was scarcely the point – the point being that in real life there was no grandeur at all, since Mussolini in his last days was nothing but a farceur without a theatre and Petacci was a B-girl on the skids. Neither Robert Hardy nor Helen Mirren (especially not her) could play it that low down, even when supplied with dialogue drained as dry of interest as the Pontine Marshes.

The writing never sought to rehabilitate the old rogue or his floozy, merely to take baby steps in comprehending them. As the Telegraph’s reviewer commented,

It was essentially a melodramatic, operatic piece of writing, but very much, one felt, in the style Mussolini would have used in private as well as public. Towering over all was the virtuosic performance of Robert Hardy as Mussolini, a portrayal uncanny in its physical resemblance, memorable for its restraint as well as its power.

Mirren recalls this play with affection, likening Petacci to Eva Braun as “someone who is absolutely at the height of ‘mistressdom’ and then has to pay the ultimate price”. She’s also full of admiration for her co-star Robert Hardy, whom she sees as a great screen actor manqué. From him she learnt ”how much repressed energy has got to be there, underneath the performance”. These two giants were to have reunited on stage almost forty years later in The Audience, in which Hardy was scheduled to play Churchill opposite Mirren’s Elizabeth II. Alas, Hardy, now 87, had to withdraw after suffering cracked ribs as the result of a fall. Let’s hope he makes a full recovery. The man, like his erstwhile co-star, is a national treasure.

   

Sources

RJB Bosworth, Mussolini (2002)
The Richard Burton Diaries, ed Chris Williams (2012)
Clive James, “Formula for soap opera”, The Observer, 1 June 1975
Richard Last, “Robert Hardy makes Mussolini a man”, Daily Telegraph, 10 May 1975
Ray Moseley, The Last Days of Mussolini (2006)
Michael Ratcliffe, “Private affairs”, The Times, 10 May 1975

The Tempest (2010)

Do we become what we are, or are we what we become?

In the 1970s, when I was first aware of Helen Mirren, I wouldn’t have predicted the future she has made for herself. Nor, perhaps, would she. In a revealing interview she gave to Sean French in 1989, she looked back on a hoped-for future in European arthouse cinema:

What I wanted to do was to make films in France, in French. My own personal taste has been more towards European than American film. I don’t basically like American films. I think they’re fairly stupid, most of them. So I even went to the extent of renting a flat in Paris and getting an agent. But of course it was totally impractical. I mean why would anyone employ me, who couldn’t speak French very well, as opposed to some wonderful French actresses?

In the Seventies, if I’d thought about it, I would probably have imagined the 60-something Mirren dominating the British stage as a theatrical grande dame. I still think her time could be better spent, and her interpretative talents better used, on the stage than making “fairly stupid” – no, correct that, utterly stupid – Hollywood films like National Treasure: Book of Secrets or Love Ranch. In those days we used to hear the term “serious actress” a lot; Clive James applied it to Mirren in his withering review of her first encounter with Michael Parkinson. (The great and the good also used to talk about “serious music”, which meant classical music, i.e. the only music to be taken seriously.) In a way Mirren was ahead of her time in resisting the categorization implied by the term:

Journalists are always asking me, begging me, down on their knees, to say “I’m not a sex symbol, I’m a serious actress,” please say it, please say it. And I’ve always categorically refused to say that because I’ve always felt that you don’t have to talk about your work in that sense. You just do it. (Observer interview, 1989)

The peculiar impact of the early stage and TV work that I’ve discussed here came from a fearlessness in the face of contradiction and category distinctions; it lent freshness to her classic roles; even in period dress, her Shakespeare seemed to be of the moment. That could have translated into film, especially if we’d had a vibrant home-grown film industry, but it didn’t. I recall reading an interview with John Fowles in the late Seventies somewhere (was it in Isis, the Oxford student magazine?) where he said that Mirren was his personal choice to play the French Lieutenant’s Woman on screen. But the backers wouldn’t wear it, of course, it had to be a bankable American star – it had to be the mistress of funny foreign accents, it had to be Meryl Streep.

So this blog has ended up revolving two thoughts. The first is that I feel no great enthusiasm for the Mirren of 2012 with her homes in Los Angeles, London and Italy, Mirren the go-to interviewee for soundbites on every subject under the sun, purveyor of bland truisms served up for American TV stations, Mirren the red-carpet regular, to the women who congregate on the many fansites now devoted to her a poster-girl for the childless (or ‘child-free’) by choice. Doubtless the fault is mine, and the consequential loss mine too. Having failed to become, I remain what I was, still (in memory) dawdling outside the flat in Fulham I once identified after she surprisingly responded to a teenage fan by including her address in the letter.

And then there’s a thought about a thought of hers. You might call it the ‘Shakespeare in Love’ fantasy. Repeatedly she has said that Shakespeare would have written better female parts if he’d been writing for real women, not for boy-actresses. It was a sentiment echoed by Sir Harold Hobson in his famous verdict on her Lady Macbeth: “I really do regret that Shakespeare never knew Miss Mirren. We would then have had a different play.” Although in recent years she has been rarely seen in the English classics, there is one exception, and it allowed her to refashion Shakespeare in her own image. In 2010 she appeared in Julie Taymor’s film adaptation of The Tempest. In order to reclaim one of the plum roles in Shakespeare, Prospero was recast as ‘Prospera’. This required some rewriting of the protagonist’s backstory. We learn that the original Duke of Milan had encouraged his wife’s interest in magic, but when he died and left Milan to her, her brother Antonio spread rumours that she was a witch and had her banished. As the editors of the latest Arden edition observe, “this intriguing shift makes Prospera, Duchess of Milan, more clearly an alter ego of Sycorax” and “Shakespeare’s emphasis on confinement broadened to include the patriarchal entrapment of women”. I like this movie a lot. Shot in the volcanic landscape of Hawaii, it’s visually stunning, as a filmic Tempest should be. Some of the casting is strong (Ben Whishaw as Ariel, Felicity Jones as Miranda), some less so (Reeve Carney as Ferdinand, and Russell Brand as Trinculo, who’s a lot funnier in a lengthy riff included on the DVD extras than he is in the film). But, bestriding the action, the stand-outs are Djimon Hounsou, in a superbly physical performance as Caliban, and Mirren herself, alternating solicitude for her daughter with the calm exercise of power over her enemies.

The question that hung in the air as Beth Gibbons sang the play’s Epilogue over the end-credits was this: couldn’t one find a fresh take on the play without having to rewrite it? What if Prospero’s magic powers include gender-bending? He might live on the island as a woman, Teiresias-like, only reverting to his old self when he reveals himself to the courtiers at the end: “I will discase me and myself present | As I was sometime Milan” (5.1.85-6). Until she encounters the “brave new world” of the shipwrecked gentry, Miranda has no fixed concept of manhood, having only her father and Caliban as examples.

Of the making of books about Shakespeare there is no end, and an ever-fruitful topic is the gender assumptions that underlie the plays and poems. Are they the product of an androgynous sensibility – in which case Mirren-style revisionism is wide of the mark – or do they proceed from a benighted Elizabethan mindset which needs to be corrected for the twenty-first century? One day I may add to the termite mound of Shakespearean criticism by writing about these things, but for the moment let your indulgence set me free.

Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please.  

References

Sean French, “The tabloids’ thespian”, Observer, 27 August 1989

Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T Vaughan, “Introduction” to The Tempest, Arden Shakespeare, 3^rd series, revised edn (2011)

Cymbeline (1983)

By William Shakespeare (c1610)
Recorded July/August 1982
BBC TV, 10 July 1983

Sometime in 1611 Simon Forman, astrologer, quack, womaniser and ardent theatre-goer, made an entry in his ‘Bock of Plaies and Notes thereof’. He’d just been to see a play about ‘Cymbalin king of England’. We don’t know where – it was probably at the Globe, where he also saw Macbeth and The Winter’s Tale – but we can be sure it was Shakespeare’s play that he saw, for he records the plot in great detail. Frustratingly, that is all he sets down. The aspects of the production that would interest us – the staging, the acting style, the audience reaction – go unmentioned. What his account does show, and in this he may have been a typical member of the audience, is that he was swept up in the plot, not stopping to notice either the poetry or the characterisation.

Four hundred years later, Cymbeline still seems plot-heavy: a succession of strange and fabulous events strung together with the intention of evoking shock and awe, an unsatisfactory retread of themes that Shakespeare had dealt with rather better before. Sexual jealousy had been treated with a comic outcome in Much Ado About Nothing, with tragic results in Othello. Here we are closer to the anti-realism of the Jacobean masque. I’m attracted to Frances Yates’s approach (although I’m not sure it finds much favour with modern scholars.) She viewed the play in historical terms, as a court entertainment, its contrived plot designed to flatter King James and his heir, Prince Henry, on whose young shoulders rested hopes for a Greater Britain and European peace under Protestant hegemony. Why, in the play, do the Romans land in Wales, not the most obvious point of arrival for a march on ‘Lud’s town’? Because the young prince had recently been invested as Prince of Wales and because Milford Haven was the port at which Henry Tudor had landed in 1485 to establish the Tudor dynasty, a dynasty to which James I was keen to claim his own succession.

Once again, the ‘female’ lead adopts male disguise. But unlike Julia (Two Gentlemen of Verona), Portia (Merchant of Venice) or Rosalind (As You Like It), Imogen is a more assertive presence before she dons male attire. In his last treatment of the cross-dressed heroine, Shakespeare seems, in Michael Shapiro’s words, “to reverse his usual polarities by having an assertive female character become a shy and vulnerable boy”. If All’s Well That Ends Well canvassed the possibility of the heroine as free agent, in Cymbeline I sense a resurgent conflict between psychological realism, which is hospitable to Free Will, and Romance, which is deterministic, a genre where characterisation is subordinated to the working out of a providential plot.

Poetry was somewhat of a casualty in the 1983 BBC production, which made heavy cuts to the text. For example, we lost these crisp lines where Imogen, exiled from the court, contemplates a new life abroad, prefiguring the vision of international harmony with which the play ends (and strangely prophetic of our love-hate relationship with Europe in the twentieth century):

I’th’world’s volume
Our Britain seems as of it but not in’t,
In a great pool a swan’s nest. Prithee think
There’s livers out of Britain. (3.4.138-41)

As Imogen, Mirren gave an impassioned performance, but as she admits in the DVD interview accompanying the reissue of her BBC work, she had an uphill task. The play contains one of the toughest challenges in all Shakespeare, “horrendously difficult… the hardest, hardest scene in the world to play.” Imogen, recovering from the effects of a sleeping potion, wakes up next to a dead body. From the clothing she supposes it to be the headless corpse of her husband, Posthumus; in fact, it is that of the oafish Cloten, who has put on the other man’s clothes. Implausibly, she then confirms the misidentification by enumerating the body parts (“I know the shape of’s leg; this is his hand”, 4.2.310). Mirren played this more literally than other actresses; where others have delivered these lines turned away, only half-looking at the body, she went so far as to nod with an increasing, terrifying certainty as she proceeded with the identification. Roger Warren suggests that, while other readings may be more convincing, “it takes great courage to play the scene Mirren’s way, and it makes the valuable point that what is factually untrue is nevertheless horribly real for Imogen.” In similar vein, the line “Give colour to my pale cheek with thy blood” (4.2.331) was literalized by following a stage direction in the Oxford Complete Works, “She smears her face with blood”; other editions suggest “Falls on the body” or “She embraces the body”.

       

Mirren says that her approach to Shakespeare is to look for her own “secret story… what is it speaking to me about?” From this she derives her “internal energy”. In Cymbeline the story concerned “learning about love, learning all the fault-lines in love and how to repair them”. Certainly, the director, Elijah Moshinsky, was concerned to present Imogen as a fallible character. When Giacomo, her husband’s false ‘friend’, whispered poison in her ear (“I dedicate myself to your sweet pleasure”, 1.3.136), she almost fell for his seductive charm, almost allowed him to kiss her before breaking away.

If Forman heard ‘poetry’ on stage in 1611, he doesn’t record the fact. “Hang there like fruit, my soul, | Till the tree die” (5.4.263-4) – Posthumus’s words of reconciliation addressed to the wife whom he has wronged: Tennyson considered these to be “the tenderest lines in Shakespeare” There is much else to admire in the play’s tissue of language. I have always loved Guiderius’s elegy to the supposedly dead Imogen/Fidele, which I first encountered in the musical setting by Stephen Sondheim:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. (4.2.259-64)

Jonathan Bate points out that the final couplet acquires additional meaning when one realises that, in the Warwickshire dialect of Shakespeare’s day, a flowering dandelion was a ‘golden lad’ while one about to disperse its seeds was a ‘chimney-sweeper’.* Proof – and conspiracy theorists still demand proof – that the author of the ‘Shakespeare’ plays was originally a country boy and not some toff in a stately home. But the couplet also tells us something about interpretation. You don’t need the footnote about Warwickshire dialect to appreciate those lines; the contrast of light and dark, of the exalted jeunesse dorée and the begrimed working man, is already pregnant with metaphor. Yet, coincident with vague and ambiguous signification, with intimations of death as universal leveller, the lines are actuated subterraneously by a precise, directed image which roots us in the realities of field and hedgerow. If I labour this point it’s because elsewhere, in my efforts to explicate popular song, I am attacked for marring people’s listening pleasure by suggesting that lyrics can have precise meanings that complement – but do not cancel out – the subjective meanings that all of us bring to our experience of the arts. It’s always a smart move if the defence counsel can call in Shakespeare as an expert witness.

Sources

Bill Bryson, Shakespeare: The World As A Stage (2008)
Michael Shapiro, Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages (1994)
Roger Warren, Staging Shakespeare’s Late Plays (1990)
Frances A Yates, Shakespeare’s Last Plays: A New Approach (1975)

-------
*Bate as quoted in Bryson, p192. I’ve been unable to locate Bryson’s exact source for this. Anyone know, apart from the man himself? 

All's Well That Ends Well (1967)

By William Shakespeare (c1604-5)

Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford, June 1967

Helena, the low-born daughter of a famous physician, loves Bertram, the young Count of Roussillon and ward of the King of France. He, however, is indifferent to her. The King is dying of a fistula and Helena effects a cure using a prescription left by her late father. As reward the King allows Helena to choose a husband from among the court nobles. She, of course, chooses Bertram. He devises a supposedly impossible condition to prevent consummation of marriage with someone he considers his social inferior: that she may not call him husband until she can get the ring from his finger and is with child by him. Bertram has set his sights meanwhile on bedding Diana, daughter of a Widow of Florence. Helena reveals to Diana that she is already married to Bertram and they agree that Helena will impersonate Diana in the bedroom (the so-called “bed-trick”). Bertram is caught out when a pregnant Helena reveals all before the King. Where Shakespeare comedies usually end in betrothal(s), this play concludes with the attested consummation of a marriage already solemnized.

Rightly has it been called a “problem play”. All’s well that ends well – or is it? The problems start with the title. It’s capable of several interpretations, but one there’s no escaping is that a desirable end can justify the questionable means used to achieve it. Helena quotes the proverb directly on two occasions (IV.iv, V.i), but in justifying the bed-trick to the Widow, she is more explicit, arguing that there can be “wicked meaning in a lawful deed, | And lawful meaning in a wicked act” (IV.i).

Bertram is an unlikeable figure, with no obvious redeeming features, and the play does little to endear him to us. Even in the final scene, he is still wriggling: he calls Diana a “common gamester” and continues to set conditions to his love (if we can call it that) for Helena. The apology is perfunctory, and his final lines are addressed to the King rather than to the woman he has wronged. Has he learnt anything?

Helena, in a different way, struggles to earn our respect; it’s hard to understand her unwavering passion for someone so undeserving. And what are we to make of a woman who will go to such lengths to entrap a man who manifestly doesn’t want her? On the plus side, she’s considerably more reflective than other Shakespeare heroines (see her soliloquy before Parolles’ entrance in I.i) and she’s a healer, a proxy medic long before women could enter the professions, who has a fascinating scene with the King (II.i) when she convinces him of the efficacy of her powers: often played quasi-erotically (as in the BBC TV production), it explores the limits of the doctor-patient, analyst-analysand relationship.

Character is subordinated to plot, so that, unlike in earlier Shakespeare comedies, the resolution feels more like the squaring-off of a mythic pattern than the outcome of motivated behaviour. Ted Hughes suggested that All’s Well and Measure for Measure are re-enactments of the Venus and Adonis myth, but that Shakespeare “had difficulty in making his women real” because “the secularized characters of Helena and Isabella, with their human histories which the audience observes from the outside, are inadequately insulated from their mythic roles, which continue to galvanize them from the inside.” The high incidence of rhyming couplets in All’s Well (about 19 per cent of the whole) also lends a sententious tone to many speeches, as if the characters, taking their cue from the play’s title, are speaking in proverbs.

When faced with something we don’t like in Shakespeare, there’s a reflex to assume the text has been corrupted in some way, lines are missing, the text was reworked by another hand, or there was another hand in the original composition. The cynicism (or is it plain pragmatism?) that seeps into this play aligns it with the city comedies of his contemporaries. Perhaps we look in vain for a magnanimity or generosity of spirit that we expect to find in the Bard. One explanation, recently advanced in the pages of the TLS in the teeth of strong opposition, is that the play was co-written by Thomas Middleton. Another is to re-date composition to later in the decade, so that its fable-like tone brings it within range of The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline.

These objections notwithstanding, All’s Well has always found admirers. Defying the Victorians’ distaste for the play, Bernard Shaw viewed the play in Ibsenite terms, with Helena redrawn as a sort of 1890s New Woman. He praised Shakespeare’s “intellectual experiment, repeated nearly three hundred years later in A Doll’s House, of making the hero a perfectly ordinary young man, whose unimaginative prejudices and selfish conventionality make him cut a very mean figure in the atmosphere created by the nobler nature of his wife.”

And those admirers have increased in recent years. In her introduction to the Oxford edition, Susan Snyder relates this upsurge of interest to the “modernist penchant for irony” and trends in criticism “which value the very dislocations and gaps that distressed earlier organicist critics.” Directors, she suggests, now “see opportunity in the discord of modes, the signs of class and gender ideologies in conflict, that were only defects for earlier generations.” Furthermore, the “upsetting of the gender role system created by having the woman rather than the man take the sexual initiative” has brought new attention to the play as argument continues on whether Shakespeare can be recruited as a proto-feminist or must, regretfully, be dismissed as a man of his time.  

John Barton’s 1967 production, in which Helen Mirren played Diana, was one of the best received of the post-war era. John Peter welcomed a “sure-footed and thoughtful revival of a flawed but unjustly neglected play”. “A step-child of the theatre, neither heart-rending nor heart-warming” it might be, but still able to project a “scattered experimental brilliance”. He admired Timothy O’Brien’s set, which evoked the “full Caroline spendour of ruffs, cloaks and tall hats”. The whole production had a “flowing, consistent style of sophistication and rich baroque grace”, while the clarity of the verse-speaking was “flawless throughout”.

The Illustrated London News found the production “blessedly direct”, an effect achieved at the cost of cutting some 500 lines, including the whole of III.iv, and telescoping and transposing scenes elsewhere.

Philip Hope-Wallace praised the “extreme honesty, lucidity and sound interpretation” of Barton’s production but found the first half “dull”. Estelle Kohler’s Helena, although “charming”, had “little enough to offer of special radiance or sparkle and when not quite sure of herself tended to simper and to squeak”. For him the “first breakthrough” of the evening came when Diana duped Ian Richardson’s Bertram (scene IV.ii). According to the Sunday Telegraph, Bertram came across as “rather endearingly clumsy and over-eager as he trie[d] to seduce Diana across an awkward and uncomfortable travelling trunk.” She seemed to succumb to his entreaties, but then chose her moment to make her demand of him. Mirren let Richardson embrace her, then said unexpectedly, “Give me that ring”. Not for the first time in the play, the immature Bertram was outwitted by a more resourceful female:

Bertram
It is an honour ‘longing to our house,
Bequeathed down from many ancestors,
Which were the greatest obloquy i’th’world
In me to lose.

Diana
                              Mine honour’s such a ring.
My chastity’s the jewel of our house,
Bequeathed down from many ancestors,
Which were the greatest obloquy i’th’world
In me to lose. Thus your own proper wisdom
Brings in the champion honour on my part
Against your vain assault.

Helen Mirren complains that there are no parts for older women in Shakespeare (other than Cleopatra), but perhaps she should return to this play? Bernard Shaw, for whom Mirren professes an admiration I find hard to share, declared that the dowager Countess of Roussillon, Bertram’s mother, was “the most beautiful old woman’s part ever written”. JL Styan wrote in 1984:

The Countess of Rousillon is the maternal grande dame of the play’s events and Helena’s fortunes, the still centre which gives the audience faith that all will yet be well. This gracious part has never failed any actress in the distinguished line of those that have played her in recent times. (p24)

Over the years, that line has included Celia Johnson, Peggy Ashcroft and Judi Dench (Dames all). Why not add Dame Helen to an impressive roll-call?

Sources

Russell Fraser, ‘Introduction’ to New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of the play (1985)
Philip Hope-Wallace, ‘All’s Well That Ends Well at Stratford-on-Avon,’ Guardian, 2 June 1967
Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992)
Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith, ‘Many hands: a new Shakespeare collaboration?’, TLS, 20 April 2012
John Peter, ‘Producer’s triumph over material’, The Times, 2 June 1967
Susan Snyder, ‘Introduction’ to Oxford Shakespeare edition of the play (1993)
JL Styan, All’s Well That Ends Well: Shakespeare in Performance (1984)
Brian Vickers and Marcus Dahl, ‘What is infirm… All’s Well That Ends Well: an attribution rejected’, TLS, 11 May 2012

Photograph by Tom Holte. F. and Mig Holte Collection (© Shakespeare Birthplace Trust).

The Roaring Girl (1983)

By Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker (c1608)
Royal Shakespeare Company, Barbican Theatre, London, 1983

The Roaring Girl is a play you are more likely to encounter on an undergraduate reading list than in a London theatre, so all credit to the RSC for dusting it down and giving it one of the few productions it can have received in three and a half centuries. Director Barry Kyle was on a mission to rescue Jacobean drama from the condescension with which it was sometimes treated. As he told Christopher Warman, “a number of Jacobean works are as good as the worst ten of Shakespeare. Some are better.” The director was passionate in defence of The Roaring Girl: “This is a documentary in that it tells a story. It is a social examination of life, an original plot and not a rehash, as much of Shakespeare’s work is.” In reviving this little-known ‘city comedy’, the company had nevertheless to keep an eye on box-office receipts, and it was presented in repertoire with a surer bet, The Taming of the Shrew. In combination the plays offered differing views of the role of women in early modern England.

The Roaring Girl is unusual in being based on a living character. Mary Frith, better known as Moll Cutpurse, was a notorious London figure, who dressed in men’s clothes throughout her life and was an early convert to pipe-smoking. She earned her living by pickpocketing, prostitution and tavern-keeping. The play presents a somewhat sanitised version, with Moll using her ‘outsider’ status to effect good in the lives of those around her. In the main plot, the young hero Sebastian Wengrave is thwarted in his desire to marry the blameless Mary Fitzallard by his covetous father, who views her dowry as insufficient. In a subplot, various gallants dally with the (less than faithful) wives of London shopkeepers. Moll features in both plots. Sebastian hits on the idea of pretending that he has transferred his affections to Moll, knowing that his father will be so outraged at the prospect of a “monster with two trinkets” [testicles] for a daughter-in-law he will sanction the marriage to Mary out of sheer relief. Moll plays along, ensuring the true lovers are finally united. Meanwhile, she exposes fraudulent beggars and fights a duel with the reptilian Laxton, who has lecherous designs on her. It’s all good fun but, on the page at least, one comes away with the impression that Middleton and Dekker were the sort of collaborators who rarely met. Each episode, satisfying and amusing in itself, is set up and resolved within a scene or two, with only Moll’s vitality to hold the structure together. 

   

Moll rejects the conventional subordination required of a wife:

I have the head now of myself, and am man enough for a woman: marriage is but a chopping and changing, where a maiden loses one head, and has a worse i’th’place.

In fact, although she encourages others to tie the knot, she declares that marriage is not for her:

LORD NOLAND                  When wilt marry?

MOLL Who, I, my lord? I’ll tell you when, i’faith.
When you shall hear
Gallants void from sergeants’ fear,
Honesty and truth unslandered,
Woman manned but never pandered,
Cheats booted but not coached,
Vessels older ere they’re broached:
If my mind be then not varied,
Next day following I’ll be married.

LORD NOLAND This sounds like doomsday.

MOLL                                  Then were marriage best,
For if I should repent, I were soon at rest.

Reviewing the RSC production, Robert Cushman shared Kyle’s enthusiasm for the era but not his high opinion of this play: “The worst of Shakespeare [Two Gentlemen of Verona was his example] stands a better chance on stage than the best of his contemporaries: not through genius, but through competence”. The dramatists’ roaring girl “probably bears about the same relation to the original as Lionel Bart’s Fagin to Dickens’s.” He continued:

She is the comic spirit personified – a transvestite blend of Falstaff and Cupid – but playing a personification presents difficulties, and Helen Mirren’s performance is almost submerged in the general rough-and-tumble. Either Miss Mirren should be more rumbustious or the production less.

Michael Billington was more upbeat. The production “vindicate[d] Kyle’s one-man campaign to explore the byways as well as the highways of English drama.” Moll is “the moral centre of this jovially ramshackle play”. She “stands for honest dealing in a society based on deception… Dashingly played by Helen Mirren, with sleeves rolled up to her armpits and leather thongs round her wrist, this Moll has a sinister-punk appearance and a heart as big as Waterloo Station.”  Michael Coveney also praised a Mirren who “swaggered through the action with radiant singularity of purpose, filling in areas of light and shade that even Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker omitted.”

However, Francis King thought the play was a “corpse which would have been better “left to moulder in its grave”. Mirren’s roaring girl, “handsome in breeches and radiating spunkiness and jollity”, provided much-needed relief from “three hours of bone-aching tedium”:

But not even this highly intelligent actress can make psychological sense of a woman who remains on good terms with the rogues of London and yet constantly frustrates them in their villainy, and who associates freely with men and yet all but kills one of them when he makes an attempt on her virtue. 

“The case for Middleton the comic artist remains unproved”. Such was Irving Wardle’s verdict:

As Helen Mirren plays her, fetchingly putting down the assembled male talent in a Jacobean jump suit, [Moll] has little more dramatic substance than a principal boy. She certainly radiates mirth… But as her triumphs are so inevitable and the surrounding characters so sketchily drawn, much of the fun seems to be happening in the far distance.

Crucially, in turning the real Moll into a dramatic figure, the playwrights removed the economic base. More than one theatre critic picked up on this in 1983. She does not pretend to be a man, so how, in a culture where a woman was a daughter, a wife or a widow, does she survive? Sir Alexander (Sebastian’s father) assumes her to be a whore and a thief since, if she abjures marriage, these are the options for self-employment at the bottom of the social pile. It’s never explained how she acquired the detailed knowledge of thieves’ cant which she deploys to dazzling effect in Act V scene 1. Yet the authors insist on both her chastity and her honesty. In his ‘Epistle to the Comic Play-Readers’ appended to the 1611 edition, Middleton admits that they’ve added some literary polish to their source material:

Worse things, I must needs confess, the world has taxed her for than has been written of her; but ‘tis the excellency of a writer to leave things better than he finds ‘em.

Mary Beth Rose compares the end of this play with the conclusions of Shakespeare’s transvestite comedies. At the end of the latter,

the heroine gladly sheds her disguise with its accompanying freedoms… in order to accept the customary social role of wife, thereby allowing the play’s androgynous vision to remain spiritual and symbolic without awakening the audience’s dissatisfaction or desire for social change.

The temporariness of disguise makes this possible. But Moll’s is not a temporary disguise, so although The Roaring Girl achieves comic resolution in marriage (which Moll has helped to effect), she herself ends the play unchanged, the catalyst in a chemical reaction. Unlike Rosalind or Viola, Moll, despite her make attire, makes no attempt to conceal her identity. The other characters know she is a woman. To quote Rose again:

She therefore assumes the social and psychological freedom of the traditional disguised heroine without providing the corresponding reassurance implicit in the heroine’s eventual erotic transformation.   

TS Eliot famously praised the play in his essay of 1927 on Thomas Middleton, asserting that it “deserves to be remembered chiefly by its real – perpetually real – and human figure of Moll.” In his view, it was the “one comedy which more than any Elizabethan comedy realizes a free and noble womanhood”. In those two sentences lies the character’s ambiguity. Not only is she poised between male and female, she hovers between realism (“perpetually real”) and idealization (“free and noble womanhood”). However earthy her language, however appealing she is to modern feminist sensibilities, however vigorously she is played by a modern actress, she remains a cipher, a fairytale character almost (albeit several notches up from Wardle’s pantomime “principal boy”). As Marjorie Garber observes, Moll “is not really anti-social or disturbingly transgressive to a modern reader, though she stands as a placeholder for the energies of transgression”.  Whether a “placeholder” can come to life on the stage or is best left on the reading list is a question for another day.

References

Michael Billington, ‘Nothing like a dame’, Guardian, 27 April 1983
Michael Coveney, review, Financial Times, 27 April 1983

Robert Cushman, ‘The rumpscuttle’, Observer, 1 May 1983

TS Eliot, ‘Thomas Middleton’ (1927) in Selected Essays (1951)

Marjorie Garber, ‘The logic of the transvestite: The Roaring Girl (1608)’, in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (1991), 221-34
Francis King, ‘Common woman’, Sunday Telegraph, 1 May 1983
Mary Beth Rose, ‘Women in men’s clothing: apparel and social stability in The Roaring Girl’, English Literary Renaissance 14 (1984), 367-91

Irving Wardle, ‘Distant echo of Jacobean mirth’, The Times, 27 April 1983

Christopher Warman, ‘Moll who took her role seriously’, The Times, 23 April 1983

The Duchess of Malfi (1980/81)

By John Webster (c1613)

Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, 1980
The Round House, London, 1981

Jacobean tragedy has risen enormously in public esteem since the era when George Bernard Shaw railed against “the opacity that prevented Webster, the Tussaud laureate, from appreciating his own stupidity”. Even TS Eliot’s famous lines – “Webster was much possessed by death | And saw the skull beneath the skin” – may seem too limiting. Now we want every Jacobean to be one of us. In The Duchess of Malfi, the widowed Duchess, having assured her brothers that she will never remarry, promptly does so, choosing a man who is her social inferior, the steward Antonio. This defiance of male authority leads inexorably to her grisly end, orchestrated by the sinister hit-man Bosola, an ex-galley slave. For Helen Mirren in 1981, it was a “play for today”: 

It is essentially a feminist play about a woman who is fighting for her autonomy. I see the Duchess as a radical who adheres to her beliefs so totally that she is prepared to be murdered for them. There’s still moral outrage against people who step out of line. Look at the fuss Princess Margaret caused by getting divorced. Many people no longer look on her as part of the Royal Family. (Quoted in Colvin.)

Adrian Noble’s production, which opened in Manchester, was widely praised. The Guardian relished Mirren’s “passionate playing of the Duchess, all graceful lechery and looks of such intensity that they could not only kill but, in all probability, raise the dead as well… Marrying beneath yourself is not the sort of thing, these days, that would get you murdered by your brothers, even if they had got their eyes on your property.” But it happens “in this twitching world of Webster’s where everything is enhanced and heightened to a morbid degree. And the staging is so intense and the playing so powerful… that it actually seems not only credible but also natural, inevitable that people should carry on in this bizarre way.”

The Observer noted that the production “seems to owe little to currently approved trends, since it is neither puritanically simple nor outrageously ornate… (Its) final achievement is that it duplicates the precarious balancing of Webster’s forces, admitting a fascination in cruelty, but never wallowing in it.”

The Times told us to

banish all expectations of decadence elegance and baroque chambers of horrors. So far as characterisation is concerned, this is a tough, extrovert reading of the play, with characters in the early scenes as unbent as it is possible for them to be in Jacobean tragedy… No liberties are taken with the text, but the sensation is of seeing the play afresh.

This critic was impressed by a “ragged Bob Hoskins, whose Bosola does look as if he is straight off the galleys”. As for Mirren’s Duchess,

she rises by visible degrees to the grand scale, presenting every phase of her courtship an clandestine married life in vivid emotional detail before the horrors descend. When they do, she exhibits all the physical collapse of total despair before regaining human dignity. Again, nothing heroic is imposed on the character; everything has been thoroughly imagined.

When the production transferred to London, doubts set in about the later scenes, but The Times critic remained enthusiastic:

There are passages in the torment scenes when Helen Mirren lapses into a dull intensity that taxes the attention, but the whole shape of the performance, from the joyous games to the willing embrace of death, constructs an image of nobility with authentic human materials... The Duchess is more than usually isolated as the only figure combining virtue and power.  

Michael Billington found potency in these later scenes:

The virtue of playing up the horror is that it makes the inherent moral goodness of the Duchess an even more powerful moral antidote. Helen Mirren also plays her excellently as a woman of strong sexual instincts who yet has a reassuring nobility of character.

For Robert Cushman, likewise, the performance grew stronger as the events unfolded:

Helen Mirren starts out a trifle cool, especially when choosing a husband; she is better at giving orders than at giving herself. But she rises to the prison sequences. Her actual execution – with the strangling of her maid as its electric coda – is superbly done.

Words like “strength” and “virtue” occur again and again in these reviews, but where we locate strength or virtue is not necessarily where the original audience would have found it. What once were vices are now widely seen as virtues. In fact, for a secular society, the Seven Deadly Sins can be recalibrated. Pride becomes “self-respect”. Wrath is “being honest about your emotions”. Envy gets a makeover as “drive” or “competitive spirit”; Gluttony is now “treating yourself”, Avarice “taking care of business” and Sloth “chilling out”. As for Lust – that familiar topic of Cosmopolitan features – the Duchess’s brother voices a prevalent Renaissance prejudice about widows, a suspicion that, having known one man, they will be over-eager to take another to the marital bed: “… they are most luxurious | Will wed twice.”  

The scholar Lisa Jardine observes that the “sensual strain” in Middleton’s Beatrice-Joanna or Webster’s Duchess is designedly a marker of their “guilt”:

In the eyes of the Jacobean audience they are above all culpable, and their strength – the ways in which they direct the action, scheme and orchestrate, evade the consequences of their impulsive decisions, and ultimately face resolutely the final outcome – need to be seen in this context.   

Where we, and the actresses who take on the role, applaud the Duchess’s assertiveness in yielding to that “sensual strain” in Act One, selecting a new partner and “fighting for her autonomy”, the boy actor who first played her may have elicited very different reactions in a seventeenth-century audience. The Duchess is constantly judged by the play’s other characters and any of those judgements was a plausible contemporary response. Antonio, the lovestruck steward, paints an idealised Petrarchan portrait of her: her look “speaketh so divine a continence, | As cuts off all lascivious, and vain hope.” To her ambitious brothers she is “loose, i’th’hilts: | Grown a notorious strumpet.” Her maidservant Cariola is at a loss to explain her behaviour:  

Whether the spirit of greatness, or of woman
Reign most in her, I know not, but it shows
A fearful madness: I owe her much of pity.

All the characters are agreed that her “strength” manifests itself only later, in patient endurance of her allotted fate:

FERDINAND How doth our sister Duchess bear herself
In her imprisonment?

BOSOLA                              Nobly: I’ll describe her:

She’s sad, as one long us’d to it: and she seems
Rather to welcome the end of misery
Than shun it: a behaviour so noble,
As gives a majesty to adversity:
You may discern the shape of loveliness
More perfect in her tears, than in her smiles.

This raises an interesting question. When a text floats free of its historical context, is it our duty to put it back into that context, or to place it in our own context, regardless of what the original “meaning” may have been? Here, emphases may differ between theatre practitioners and academic critics, the latter more concerned with reconstructing historical “meaning”. And what of the dramatist himself? Do we see his attitudes as historically determined, or do we say, as Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare, that “he was not of an age, but for all time”, gifted with a breadth of vision that transcended his circumstances? Sure it is that Webster makes the Duchess a sympathetic figure, aided by his skills in fashioning dramatic architecture and muscular, speakable verse. Quality writing is a stuff that endures, even over centuries and across languages. But do we credit Webster, as we do Shakespeare, with a capacity, if not to challenge, at least to call into question, the status quo? Should we regard these dramatists as ethical futurologists, the counterparts of those Victorian and Edwardian pioneers of science fiction who anticipated aeroplanes and televisions, inventions unrealisable in their day but thinkable to those with minds capacious enough?

We laugh at the way the eighteenth century “improved” Shakespeare, rewriting plays to conform to the classical unities or giving King Lear a happy ending. But there was a mad consistency in such modernisation that may be lacking in our pick-and-mix approaches. Viewing The Duchess of Malfi today, we suspend our historical sense in the early part of the play, flattering ourselves that the Duchess is a Cosmo girl in a “feminist” play and reassuring ourselves of the continued “relevance” of a 400-year-old text. Then we reimpose the sense of history later, as we must if we are to accept the plot development and the climax. We accept that behaviour such as the Duchess’s can only end badly for an aristocrat in early modern Europe; but not as badly as the play depicts, since widows enjoyed privileges of action not available to wives or unmarried women. The grand guignol conclusion, the stage piled high with corpses – these things we accept (if we accept them at all and the last Act is not to be played for laughs) as literary conventions, a Jacobean ratcheting-up of the mechanisms of Elizabethan revenge tragedy.   

References

Michael Billington, “Duchess of Malfi”, Guardian, 2 April 1981
Clare Colvin, “Mirren in Malfi”, Observer, 29 March 1981
Robert Cushman, “Malfi and Merchant”, Observer, 5 April 1981
Lisa Jardine, “The Duchess of Malfi: a case study in the literary representation of women”, in Teaching the Text, ed. Susanne Kappeler and Norman Bryson (1983)
Robin Thornber, “Duchess of Malfi”, Guardian, 17 September 1980
Irving Wardle, “Clearing the vital hurdle boldly: Webster in Manchester,” Times, 17 September 1980
Irving Wardle, “Duchess of Malfi: Round House”, Times, 2 April 1981

[Photo credit: Photostage]