Filling the Cheap Seats
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intention can be found in The Merchant of Venice. Jews have always been the scapegoats for all the ills that befall the world. In Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Barabbas is an out-and-out, unredeemable villain and an Elizabethan audience would expect nothing less.
It would have been impossible for anyone, even Shakespeare, to get a hit with a Jew as the hero unless there was some sort of trick involved. Antonio is obviously the character in the play meant to evoke the audience’s sympathy, while Shylock is obviously presented as the vile money lender out for revenge.
But Shakespeare is seldom obvious and Elizabethan audiences were ready to accept, grudgingly perhaps, an oppressed Shylock. A converted Jew, Rodrigo Lopez, had been accused of conspiring to poison Queen Elizabeth. He proclaimed his innocence until the end, even on the scaffold before his grisly sentence of being drawn, hanged, and quartered was carried out.
But the facts are plain: Shylock is a businessman- like Antonio, like Shakespeare, and like many people in the audience. He is reviled for being a Jew even though he is first a man. And when in the end he loses his family, his religion, and all of his material possessions, audiences might have been ready to feel sympathy for his plight as a man.
What’s a tragedy?
The tragic element is present in most of Shakespeare’s plays; even his comedies and romances have subplots involving a tragic story. But what is tragedy exactly? It’s not merely a sad story or a story where the hero is killed. It’s a story with a particular structure that dates all the way back to the Greeks.
The defining model of a tragedy is the story of Icarus. Icarus and his father Daedalus were imprisoned by King Minos in the labyrinth built by Daedalus. To escape, Daedalus fashioned wings for himself and his son. He warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun but Icarus, overcome by the experience, climbs higher and higher until he is so close to the sun that the wax holding his wings together melts and Icarus falls into the sea.
Icarus climbed higher than he should have, even though he had been warned not to. Further, he died as a mechanical consequence of his action. He went higher on purpose, he came too close to the sun and died as a consequence of doing that; he was not singled out for punishment by a capricious god.
That’s the essence of tragedy: to bring about our own downfall by doing something we know we should not do. When we willfully do it anyway, we are displaying hubris, that form of pride and confidence that forms the tragic flaw of the tragic hero.
But all of Shakespeare’s plays are a mix. Comedies and romances such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Winter’s Tale have a dark side, while his tragedies have light moments and jokes. The humor we find in the tragedies is more than counterpoint to the gravitas of the play. Shakespeare is not just giving his audience a rest between moments of emotional exhaustion.
A word on the craft of acting
Working in a Shakespearean company offers actors tremendous opportunities to play a variety of roles. In the BBC Shakespeare, we can see an actor take on a variety of roles. Frank Middlemass for instance plays the aristocratic Bishop of Winchester in the Henry the Sixth plays, while he plays a drunken brothel-keeper in Measure for Measure. Kenneth Branagh plays the evil Iago in his production of Othello, while taking the lead heroic role in Hamlet.
Theatrical training makes for better acting. Working in theater, actors learn as part of their trade to disappear into whatever role they are playing. Hollywood and Bollywood stars on the other hand don’t act so much as they perform.
Even superstars are typecast. Bruce Willis and Sean Connery are the strong silent type. Julia Roberts is the accomplished woman. Sally Field is the plucky type.
In the United Kingdom (as in Quebec and in Japan, and probably many other places too) actors often disappear into their role and we often don’t realize we are watching the same actor playing different people. Alec Guinness plays several completely different roles in the 1949 classic Kind Hearts and Coronets. Some Hollywood actors successfully resist the Hollywood trend. For instance Meryl Streep convincingly morphs into different personas in The Devil Wears Prada and The Bridges of Madison County.
More typically, look at Bruce Willis in a few Hollywood pictures. We see him being concerned in The Story of Us, we seem him pissed off in Die Hard, we see his caring side in Sixth Sense. Please don’t get me wrong, I like Bruce Willis, but he is an expert at showing us how Bruce Willis feels. Just watch the Hollywood remake of The Jackal where Willis plays a hired assassin who must elude the police on his way to his target. He does this by changing from one disguise to another, all of which make him look like Bruce Willis disguised. We see Bruce Willis with bleached hair (Bruce’s club look) and Bruce Willis with a red wig (his gay look) and Bruce Willis with a pot belly (his working man look).
To see what an actor can do, take a look at two Akira Kurosawa films: High and Low and Only the Bad Sleep Well. Toshiro Mifune stars in both films as a contemporary company employee. In the first film he plays a driven, outgoing, crusty, hard-nosed company president, in the other film he plays a quiet, serious, clerk with a secret. He has the same face and the same voice, but his body language is different, his mannerisms are different, his pitch is different. We see two men, neither of whom are Mifune.
Hollywood produces entertainment by delivering Hollywood stars performing in blockbusters. It’s fun to see Bruce Willis beat the bad guys in Die Hard. It’s enlightening to see Julia Roberts play Erin Brockovich. There’s nothing wrong with this, but acting is simply something different from merely performing.
To Begin, Some Lesser Known Plays…
All of Shakespeare’s plays are famous, but not equally so. Everyone has heard of Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, but the same cannot be said of Timon of Athens or Henry VIII. Here are a few plays that don’t immediately come to mind when we think of Shakespeare.
The Comedy of Errors—As close to pure as Shakespeare gets
Shakespeare isn't usually pure. We can't label many of his plays as pure tragedy or pure drama or pure comedy. King Lear has jokes, A Midsummer Night's Dream has moments of terror, and even a violent revenge play like Titus Andronicus offers subtle psychological insights. But The Comedy of Errors, along with The Merry Wives of Windsor, is one of two Shakespeare plays that can be played as an almost pure farce.
The plot revolves around two pairs of twins separated as infants and unaware of each other's existence. Each pair is composed of a master and a servant; both servants are named Dromio and both masters are named Antipholus; one pair lives in Ephesus where the play takes place, and the other pair lives in Syracuse. At the start of the play, the pair from Syracuse arrives on a visit to Ephesus.
It is a situation comedy built on an impossible premise involving ludicrous confusions and misunderstandings. Money is given by Antipholus of Ephesus, in order to pay a debt to a merchant, to a surprised Dromio of Syracuse who doesn't quite know what to do with it. The creditor, seeing Antipholus of Syracuse on the street, asks him for the money but is rebuffed. Antipholus of Syracuse denies ever having seen the wife of the Antipholus of Ephesus. Meanwhile, the intended bride of the Ephesus Dromio henpecks the Syracuse Dromio.
This is pure commedia dell'arte. It’s jolly good fun, full of action and slapstick. If you can, see the BBC production starring Roger Daltrey (the lead singer of The Who) as the two Dromios.
The Life of Timon of Athens—Scrooge, reversed
Timon of Athens is a good man. He helps friends, he plays host to one and all, he lends money freely, and he believes himself to be loved by all. He is a sap and a sucker.
Timon then finds himself in need of help. Not much help, but it is vital he gets it. His friends disappear. At a loss, he falls into despair and sees the world for what it is: a cold place full of ungrateful freeloaders. The universe is indifferent to his needs. With the few coins left him, he gives one last dinner for his fair-weather friends, whi
ch they attend. Who knows? Perhaps the foul weather has turned for the better.
Unlike Scrooge who has ghosts visit nightmares upon him, Timon has reality do this to him. Scrooge's visions of horror turn him into a generous philanthropist who performs good deeds to atone for his past miserly ways. Timon's wretched experiences of treachery turn him into a misanthrope who repudiates all past good deeds.
He feeds stones to his guests. He forsakes them, his life, and all human company. He seeks solace on the windswept seashore, in the wrack of a storm. He goes on a while, a living man with a broken soul.
The Life of King Henry the Eighth—Propaganda
This is Shakespeare's only “here and now” play, or at least as close to one as he could get away with. It takes place at the birth of the reigning monarch, Good Queen Bess, the younger daughter of Henry VIII. A commoner writing about the ruler's father had better write nothing but praise.
Henry divorced his first wife Catherine of Aragon with whom he fathered Queen Mary, and then married Anne Boleyn. The Church did not grant Henry a divorce, so the King established his own Church. Mary, daughter of Catherine, remained Catholic, while Anne’s daughter Elizabeth of course had no choice but to stay Protestant. Doing