It's so long since I saw a Shakespeare play. I realise I've probably seen more Mozart operas in the last 20 years than I've seen Shakespeare plays - in fact, I can only remember seeing one - a delightful outdoor production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the grounds of a castle in the Lot in France. Most of the audience were ex pat Brits and Hollanders. I never managed to go to the Globe before, and it was a pretty good experience. We sat in a box beside the stage, so saw the performance from the rear, but it was excellent acoustically and we didn't really miss much.
MfM is a play I've never studied, but I saw it in the 80s at the NT in an all black production, with lots of then famous black actors like Norman Beaton and Rudolph Walker in it, and Bertice Redding as well as Frank Singuineau, who was my special friend when I worked there. I began to read it on the train and I realised how dense the language in the first scene is - it was a bit like reading Latin, I got the gist of it, but I had to pay great attention to actually "translate" it. Later on it's easier, but the first scene is off-putting for a child like Finn (18 next week) who has only read one Shakespeare play before. I find this hard, he is at a grammar school, I was at a grammar school, but we used to read one or 2 Shakespeare plays a year, I can almost remember what they all were. Roughly, from Y7 onwards we read: MSND, Julius C, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, Richard III, Twelfth Night, something else and Romeo & Juliet. This meant by the time we approached public exams we had a great deal of Shakespeare under our belts, and were familiar with the language. Poor Finn finds this very difficult, but then again, because he doesn't read he doesn't know words like "rebuttal" and "exonorate", which at his stage in the Upper 6th I was probably using regularly in essays. What can I say? He's just not that interested. It's not his thing, I was under the illusion that because his intellectual mechanism worked like mine, that he would want to use it to create a vast world view, but he doesn't.
So, back to MfM - it is full of good things, like all Shakespeare. The text was a bit chopped about, and it isn't as full of familiar phrases as some of them are. One thing I particularly noticed was in Claudio's speech to Isabella when he tells her how much he fears the afterlife. (Act 111, Sc. 1)
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling: 'tis too horrible!
These images seem to have been whipped from Dante - some at least of the punishments of the variously damned in the Inferno. Which led me to ask, did Shakespeare know Dante? He presumably knew Boccacio, because I think some of his plays are based on stories from the Decameron, and perhaps knew Petrarch because of his influence on the sonnet, but Dante? If one even asks if Shakespeare knew Italian, 1000s of people will start hurling aspersions and claims around, so I won't think of that. I also suppose that Dante's images of hell probably weren't entirely original (in fact that idea of an icy hell is meant to be some kind of racial memory of the last Ice Age). A lot of them may have been derived from theological writers. It does suggest though, how well entrenched Catholic theology still was in the culture. And if makes one think tantalisingly about that theory that WS was in fact a secret Catholic.
MfM is set in Vienna, which has a Duke. I am not totally sure, but I associate 16thC Vienna with being the centre of the Holy Roman Empire in this period, it has certainly always been a very Catholic city, and remains so. Therefore Catholicism is suggested throughout the play - Friars etc. of course. The issues of damnation and punishment in the afterlife are very present, and one is reminded forcibly, how people lived in greater fear of eternal punishment than anything that could be inflicted on earth.
Another thought occurs, WS uses friars a good deal in the comedies, but less often does he use regular clergy. Of course there are lot of political clerics (bishops, etc.) in his history plays, and I think there may be a priest in one of the comedies, but in fact he steers well away from the regular clergy. This is just slightly interesting in an era when Catholic clergy had to hide in England, and where the Anglican clergy were perhaps not as firmly established as the State would have liked. If it is true that WS was a secret Catholic, you can see that tension in there - "don't mention the priests!"... but friars are a different matter. While they later developed a terrible reputation for lechery (even I have once had my hand over-squeezed by a Capuchin), they were, despite their commitment to the poor and the marginalised (the prison visiting in the play) also, to some extent, figures of fun. It is quite a clever thing, turning the Duke into a friar. He subverts the secular power of the Duke, reducing him to insignificance and poverty, while at the same time, by taking on the role of a religious, the Duke is able to bless people, and his wisdom is somehow divinely sanctioned. There is thus a sense that he is almost a theocratic ruler. This could have been conveyed better, had Dominic Dromgoole (the director) not decided to camp the Duke up quite a lot. But there's a lot of that.
Because I am an insanely humourless old trout I rather wished for less vulgarity. There is plenty in the play - but it was very much played for laughs. Yes, it is a comedy - but... I had tears in my eyes during the final scene when Isabella pleads for Angelo... this is divine forgiveness in human form. It was wonderful.
MfM is a play I've never studied, but I saw it in the 80s at the NT in an all black production, with lots of then famous black actors like Norman Beaton and Rudolph Walker in it, and Bertice Redding as well as Frank Singuineau, who was my special friend when I worked there. I began to read it on the train and I realised how dense the language in the first scene is - it was a bit like reading Latin, I got the gist of it, but I had to pay great attention to actually "translate" it. Later on it's easier, but the first scene is off-putting for a child like Finn (18 next week) who has only read one Shakespeare play before. I find this hard, he is at a grammar school, I was at a grammar school, but we used to read one or 2 Shakespeare plays a year, I can almost remember what they all were. Roughly, from Y7 onwards we read: MSND, Julius C, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, Richard III, Twelfth Night, something else and Romeo & Juliet. This meant by the time we approached public exams we had a great deal of Shakespeare under our belts, and were familiar with the language. Poor Finn finds this very difficult, but then again, because he doesn't read he doesn't know words like "rebuttal" and "exonorate", which at his stage in the Upper 6th I was probably using regularly in essays. What can I say? He's just not that interested. It's not his thing, I was under the illusion that because his intellectual mechanism worked like mine, that he would want to use it to create a vast world view, but he doesn't.
So, back to MfM - it is full of good things, like all Shakespeare. The text was a bit chopped about, and it isn't as full of familiar phrases as some of them are. One thing I particularly noticed was in Claudio's speech to Isabella when he tells her how much he fears the afterlife. (Act 111, Sc. 1)
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling: 'tis too horrible!
These images seem to have been whipped from Dante - some at least of the punishments of the variously damned in the Inferno. Which led me to ask, did Shakespeare know Dante? He presumably knew Boccacio, because I think some of his plays are based on stories from the Decameron, and perhaps knew Petrarch because of his influence on the sonnet, but Dante? If one even asks if Shakespeare knew Italian, 1000s of people will start hurling aspersions and claims around, so I won't think of that. I also suppose that Dante's images of hell probably weren't entirely original (in fact that idea of an icy hell is meant to be some kind of racial memory of the last Ice Age). A lot of them may have been derived from theological writers. It does suggest though, how well entrenched Catholic theology still was in the culture. And if makes one think tantalisingly about that theory that WS was in fact a secret Catholic.
MfM is set in Vienna, which has a Duke. I am not totally sure, but I associate 16thC Vienna with being the centre of the Holy Roman Empire in this period, it has certainly always been a very Catholic city, and remains so. Therefore Catholicism is suggested throughout the play - Friars etc. of course. The issues of damnation and punishment in the afterlife are very present, and one is reminded forcibly, how people lived in greater fear of eternal punishment than anything that could be inflicted on earth.
Because I am an insanely humourless old trout I rather wished for less vulgarity. There is plenty in the play - but it was very much played for laughs. Yes, it is a comedy - but... I had tears in my eyes during the final scene when Isabella pleads for Angelo... this is divine forgiveness in human form. It was wonderful.
