
Lost Masterpieces
David Ellis looks at the literary ones that got away
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Jan
23
Feb
01
My introduction to
the Wordsworth Romeo and Juliet cites
the famous feminist, Germaine Greer, who praised Shakespeare for taking the
progressive side in a very controversial matter.
This matter concerned the basis for marriage. Should a marriage be
arranged by the family and its advisors, or should it be based on the free
choice of loving partners? Germaine Greer says that Shakespeare influentially
sided with the latter criterion, which in course of time became dominant (in many
but not all countries). He does so most evidently and dramatically in Romeo and Juliet; but the case is explicitly
made in The Merry Wives of Windsor,
when Fenton, who has clandestinely married Anne Page (Fenton and Anne being
lovers), rebukes the parents who sought an arranged marriage for her:
You would have married
her most shamefully,
Where there is no
proportion held in love...
Th’offence is holy that
she has committed,
And this deceit loses
the name of craft,
Of disobedience, or
unduteous title,
Since therein she does
evitate and shun
A thousand irreligious
cursèd hours
Which forcèd marriage
would have brought upon her.
Lawrence Stone, in The Family, Sex and Marriage in England
1500-1800, asserted that in Shakespeare’s day, ‘the accepted wisdom of the
age’ was that
marriage based on personal selection...was if anything less likely to
produce lasting happiness than one arranged by more prudent and more mature
heads.
But that is
certainly not the impression given by Romeo
and Juliet. Shakespeare always presents sympathetically the young people
who seek to marry for love and in defiance of parental will: we may add
Valentine and Sylvia in Two Gentlemen of Verona, Hermia and
Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
and Jessica and Lorenzo in The Merchant
of Venice. The historian Ralph A. Houlbrooke, in The English Family 1450-1700, alleges that Lawrence Stone neglected
evidence indicating ‘a widespread belief among would-be marriage partners that
freedom of choice was their right’. Nevertheless, among the ruling class,
predictably, arranged marriages would long remain the custom: so much prestige,
wealth and property were involved. In Henry
V, in a cunning compromise, Shakespeare ensures that the
politically-expedient marriage of Henry to the French Princess, Katherine, is
combined with Henry’s assurance that he loves her.
In addition, of course, it can be
argued that Shakespeare aided the feminist cause by creating so many strong
female characters. The most impressive of these is surely Cleopatra – an
astonishingly full, rich, complex characterisation. She is sexy, funny,
poignant, imaginative, arrogant, angry, sentimental, vicious, affectionate, cunning;
she expresses ‘infinite variety’ indeed. Furthermore, she is granted the theatrical
accolade, in tragedy, of the final death: her death follows Antony’s and thus
gains ultimate emphasis; and a spectacular, proud and yet poignant death it is
too.
A sceptic may say, ‘Wait a minute. In Shakespeare’s day, all female
parts were played by males, usually boys: so doesn’t this undermine your
feminist claim?’ The answer to that is that the audience’s conscious awareness
that a female part is played by a boy would vary from play to play: sometimes
awareness would be strong, sometimes it would be intermittent, and sometimes it
would fade to zero. In The Taming of the
Shrew, such awareness would be quite strong, because the play’s preamble or
‘Induction’ had made elaborately explicit the disguising of a boy as a woman.
In As You Like It, there would
probably be a flickering, intermittent awareness. Rosalind disguises herself as
the boyish Ganymede (the name – cognate with ‘catamite’– is that of the youth
loved by Zeus), who pretends to be Rosalind, urging Orlando to woo him/her; and
the vertiginous sexual comedy is surely made more confusingly but delightfully
complex by our intermittent remembrance that Rosalind is, in any case, a part
played by a male.
In the case of Cleopatra, however,
there is striking proof that the part was meant to be fully convincing – that
Cleopatra would be deemed by the audience ‘all woman’. That proof comes when
Cleopatra says that if she permitted herself to be taken captive by Octavius,
she would be taken to Rome, and there:
The
quick comedians
Extemporally will stage
us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels:
Antony
Shall be brought drunken
forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra
boy my greatness
I’th’posture of a whore.
In other words, she
will be mortified by seeing a squeaking boy-actor depict her not as a truly
great person but as a mere prostitute. At this point, as a powerful female
character, Cleopatra is so convincing that we don’t for a moment think ‘But a
boy is indeed, already, representing your greatness’; what we think is ‘Yes, it
would indeed by demeaning for you, Cleopatra, to see yourself vulgarly
performed by a “squeaking” boy.’
Shakespeare repeatedly presents to
us female characters who are intelligent, resourceful, eloquent, even powerful:
after Cleopatra, we rapidly recall Juliet,
Volumnia, Portia, Hermione and Paulina, for instance. In doing so, in setting
such memorable examples, he surely encouraged women in real life to become more
assertive and empowered.
A mystery remains. We know the names of many of Shakespeare’s fellow-actors:
Richard Burbage, John Heminge (or Hemmings), Augustine Phillips, William Kemp
(or Kempe), Henry Condell, Robert Armin, etc. He often created a part with a
particular actor in mind. We know this because sometimes, in the printed text,
the given name is that of the actor, not the character: thus we learn that
William Kemp played Peter in Romeo and
Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado about
Nothing. His great tragic roles, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Antony, Lear,
were written originally for Richard Burbage. (The acclaimed Burbage,
surprisingly, was said to be short and stout, which might explain why Hamlet is
‘fat and scant of breath’ in the duel scene.) When conceiving the immense role
of Cleopatra, Shakespeare must have had in mind a young male actor of exceptional
memory, intelligence and eloquence: someone capable of performing convincingly
an utterly demanding rôle. But no boy-actor has ever been identified as the
player of Cleopatra. The identity of the lad who enabled (and perhaps even
elicited) the writing of Antony and
Cleopatra is lost to posterity, lost without trace.
Meanwhile, if you insist on being
awkward, you may argue that The Taming of
the Shrew, with its climactic speech in which Katherina exhorts wives to be
utterly submissive to their husbands, is the most un-feminist play imaginable.
But that speech has been filled with irony by a winking actress (Mary Pickford
in the 1929 film version); and the whole drama can become a feminist
celebration when acted by an all-female cast, as it was in the highly-praised Globe
Theatre production in 2003. Although, in Shakespeare’s day, females were played
by males, in our times, his males are often played by females: yes, even King
Lear has been performed by a woman: by Glenda Jackson (when aged 80), who
earned a standing ovation.
Would Shakespeare have objected to
such free adaptation? The answer is, ‘Surely, no.’ He took great liberties with
the source-tale (by Arthur Brooke) for Romeo
and Juliet, for example, so that his version is sexier and livelier; and he
even dares to present a thirteen-year-old heroine (who was sixteen in the
source) who gives lessons in courtship to her lover. It is she who firmly steers
his wooing towards matrimony. (In Elizabethan England, the legal ages of
consent were twelve for a female and fourteen for a male.) And, like Cleopatra,
Juliet is also given the accolade of the final death, signalling that
dramatically she has greater significance than Romeo.
Again, Shakespeare deliberately departs from his sources to give King Lear a particularly bitter and
sceptical ending. Remember Hamlet, too. He is far more sophisticated than the
Amleth of the old source-legend. Notice that Hamlet is happy to shorten a passage
of verse: if a player’s speech seems too long, ‘It shall to the barber’s’. Furthermore,
Hamlet is excited by his deed of augmenting a received text (the ‘Mouse-Trap’)
so that it has greater relevance to the immediate situation.
Shakespeare could be radically experimental not only in Hamlet, with its peculiarly ambiguous
ghost and its enigmatic protagonist, but also in Troilus and Cressida, with its bold use of symbolically collapsing
structure: its disorderly end is thematically apt. Shakespeare would surely,
therefore, have looked benevolently on today’s radical experimentation, which so
often has a feminist agenda.
Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex is the editor of our Shakespeare Classics series