Hannibal Hamlin

Review of Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well (directed by Marti Maraden) and Hamlet (directed by Adrian Noble) for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival at the Festival Theater, Stratford, Ontario, August 2008

As if to demonstrate the legitimacy of renaming the Stratford Festival of Canada the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, the largest repertory company in North America last year staged five of Shakespeare’s plays, including a much lauded Hamlet and a less acclaimed but equally compelling All’s Well That Ends Well. All’s Well has regularly been labelled a ‘‘problem play’’ ever since F.S. Boas coined the label in 1896, and it is not often staged. Remarkably, however, this is the fifth production at the Stratford Festival; the first was directed by Tyrone Guthrie in the festival’s first season in 1953, and starred Alec Guinness as the King and Irene Worth as Helena. The ‘‘problem’’ with All’s Well is that, like all comedies, it requires a happy ending, which in Shakespeare’s handling of the genre means a marriage (or two). Many of Shakespeare’s comic marriages are less than entirely satisfactory, the women often having to put up with less than adequate men. But while audiences may wonder at Hero’s forgiveness of Claudio in Much Ado, or ask whether Orlando will really sustain Rosalind’s interest in As You Like It, they are likely to see Helena’s pursuit of Bertram as closer to a death wish. Bertram is perhaps Shakespeare’s most repellent leading man, and he does absolutely nothing to earn our forgiveness or Helena’s. All’s Well that Ends Well does have a dark side, and deciding how to balance the light and the dark is more difficult in this play than any other of Shakespeare’s, except perhaps Troilus and Cressida. Should we be uncomfortable, for instance, that Helena can match Parolles in a battle of verbal wit about sex and virginity? Should we note that Helena’s interest in saving the King seems only to occur to her as a means of winning Bertram? Is all really fair in love and war, such that we accept the bed-trick, in which Bertram thinks he is deflowering an attractive Italian virgin while actually consummating his marriage to Helena, and Helena loses her virginity to Bertram only because he thinks the body he is having is not hers? Finally, can we accept the ending, given that this is the emphasis of the play’s title? Is Bertram worth Helena’s extreme efforts? Can we respect a love that has so unworthy an object or which achieves its object by such dubious means? And what of the conditionality of the final scene? As You Like It draws attention to the tenuousness of its own ending, much depending, as Touchstone puts it in his disquisition on duelling, on the ‘‘virtue in ‘if’’’ (5.4.100 1). If we accept all the improbabilities, then the play works, and,

Review of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (directed by David Muse for the Shakespeare Theater Company) and Antony and Cleopatra (directed by Michael Kahn for the Shakespeare Theater Company) at Sidney Harman Hall, Washington, DC, April–July 2008

Cassius’s words have a peculiar resonance in Washington, DC, since the most famous performance of the type of ‘‘lofty scene’’ he speaks of was not in a Shakespeare production but in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth. The son of an English actor, Booth was weaned on Shakespeare and had acted in an 1864 New York production of Julius Caesar with his brothers, Edwin and Junius Brutus, Jr. Although in New York he had played Marc Antony, he was clearly playing Brutus the following year when he shot Lincoln at Ford’s Theater with a cry of ‘‘Sic semper tyrannis’’. Connections between the stage and the world were thankfully not quite as vivid in the Shakespeare Theater Company’s recent ‘‘Roman Repertory’’, but Shakespeare’s Roman plays must always have a special poignancy in a city so politically charged as the capital of the American republic. Julius Caesar, directed by David Muse, and Antony and Cleopatra, directed by Artistic Director Michael Kahn, played in repertory from 26 April to 6 July 2008 in the newly opened Sidney Harman Hall. This was an obvious pairing but a problematic one in some ways. Julius Caesar dates from 1599, Antony and Cleopatra from 1606 1607. Between these dates, Shakespeare wrote his major tragedies, two of his greatest comedies, and two complex ‘‘problem’’ plays. Julius Caesar follows Shakespeare’s English chronicle plays, whereas Antony and Cleopatra already looks forward to the miraculous and fantastical world of the late Romances. Thus, despite representing consecutive periods in the history of Rome, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra were written at quite different periods in Shakespeare’s career. England’s political situation had changed with the passing of Elizabeth and accession of James I, and the theatre world had changed too: Julius Caesar was the first play staged by the Chamberlain’s Men at the Globe (Shapiro 117); Antony and Cleopatra, with its masque elements, may have been played indoors by the King’s Men at the Blackfriars (Rosenberg 49). There is no evidence to suggest that Shakespeare conceived of the later play as a sequel to the earlier, which makes staging the two plays together in a ‘‘Roman Repertory’’ seem more strategic in terms of marketing than artistic considerations. Yet Shakespeare, as a professional man of the theatre, would have understood the practical necessity of marketing, and in fact the pairing works surprisingly well in practice.

Selected Sermons and Lectures (review)

examples, Professor Kinney’s book is richly suggestive about Elizabethan stage props and their embeddedness in the plays’ language. Given the current popularity of material culture as a theoretical topic, it is refreshing to read about the reality and importance of that culture on the Shakespearean stage, presented without jargon but with a wealth of contextual detail. BRIDGET GELLERT LYONS Rutgers University, Emerita

Review of Shakespeare's The Tempest Directed by Richard Monette, Designed by Mérédith Caron, at the Stratford Festival of Canada (7 July 2005)

So Trinculo asks as he stumbles upon Caliban, and this might be seen as a central question for interpreters of The Tempest over the past century. The line gets a good laugh, especially when a disgusted Trinculo clarifies that Caliban ‘‘smells like a fish’’ (2.2.25 /26). But the question takes on a more sinister implication as both Trinculo and, later, Stefano consider whether this singular man-fish might make some money in a European freakshow. As Trinculo says of his countrymen, ‘‘When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian’’ (2.2.31 /33). If Caliban is a man, he has some claim to being treated humanely, but if he is a fish or some kind of ‘‘monster of the isle’’ (2.2.65), he can be exploited freely. For the audience of the play, it makes a difference whether Caliban seems, as Prospero introduces him, ‘‘A freckled whelp, hag-born’’ who is ‘‘not honored with/A human shape’’ (1.2.283 /85), or simply a native islander, uncivilized but nonetheless human. For much of the last century, and increasingly in recent decades, critics (Stephen Greenblatt and Paul Brown among others) have emphasized Caliban’s humanity and drawn sharp parallels between his condition, enslaved to the powerful European conqueror Prospero, and that of so many native peoples, similarly enslaved by Europeans as they expanded their colonial empires across the globe. Directors of the play have followed suit, representing Caliban in the distinctly ‘‘human shape’’ of a black African, often with dreadlocks (as in the Royal Shakespeare Company production of 1982 and the Washington DC

Essayes in Divinity: Being Several Disquisitions Interwoven with Meditations and Prayers (review)

a chapter in which Mack considers “the place of the Apology in the debate over the origin and nature of modernity” (xiv). In thirty-two pages, Mack examines the relationship between Sidney’s classical and religious sources and then tries to propound a theory of human creativity, ranging from ancient to modern times but focusing largely on Sidney and the Romantic poets. I might say that this chapter raises more questions than it answers, or, to give it a more positive spin, I could say that it is wonderfully provocative. The latter locution is probably more accurate, for any discussion of human creativity is likely to raise more questions than it answers. Reviewers often criticize reviewees for not having written the book they would have written. I imply no such criticism when I say that I wish that Mack had extended his study by one more chapter, a chapter in which he could have considered how Sidney’s theories, which he illuminates so well, might have applied to Sidney’s own literary creations. Surely Astrophel is more “brazen” (in two senses) than golden; and we can hardly hope that reading Arcadia (in any of its manifestations) would make readers behave more like Basileus, Gynecia, Pyrocles, or even Musidorus. So is the theoretical stance compatible with the literature? And if it is not, what might we learn thereby about that stance? Mack, having thought so deeply about the theory, would be in a fine position to respond to such questions, and I hope that at some point he will. In the meantime, Sidney’s Poetics is well worth reading, even at a price that, like our infected wills, “keepeth us from reaching unto it.” THEODORE L. STEINBERG State University of New York, Fredonia