The strong tilt toward marriage in Shakespeare’s plays creates interpretive problems for contemporary actors. In As You Like It, for example, the witty and boldly enterprising Rosalind, who spends most of the play disguised as a boy, instantly falls in love with Orlando, an amiable lunk who seems nowhere near her level. He is athletic and sweet but slightly slow, like Joey (played by Matt LeBlanc) on the long-running hit TV show, Friends. Rosalind’s infatuation with Orlando exemplifies Shakespeare’s favorite theme of the quirky madness of love, but it must not seem as if she is adopting and training a large, goofy dog. Her ritual divestment of her male garb before her wedding restores the Renaissance gender code and magically generates an approving apparition of Hymen, the guardian spirit of marriage. Rosalind’s inseparable friendship with her cousin Celia is one of the few places in Shakespeare’s plays where any trace of homosexuality can arguably be detected. (Another is Antonio’s quick attachment and unusual generosity to Sebastian in a subplot of Twelfth Night.) Although his celebrated contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, wrote openly about a gay king in Edward II, Shakespeare’s plays are overwhelmingly committed to heterosexual love. In his private life, Shakespeare was evidently split: his love sonnets are directed to a forceful, dusky-skinned woman and a well-born, aimless, beautiful young man.
Shakespeare is very sensitive to the dignity of women. Sexually degrading remarks about women in his plays are automatically symptomatic of a twisted, corrupted character or of a temporary state of mental disease, as experienced by Hamlet and Lear in their darkest moments. Nevertheless, modern productions of The Taming of the Shrew must struggle with the issue of misogyny. The play has long been the focus of feminist ire, with only the dissident Germaine Greer, a Shakespeare scholar among her other public roles, willing to stoutly defend it. The bad-tempered and violent Kate the shrew (a sharp-toothed mole) cows her inept father and breathes fire at any man who crosses her. It is possible to interpret Kate’s hostility as a frustrated product of her entrapment in a world lacking any outlet for women’s talents and pent-up energies except marriage. Petruchio, who frankly admits his motive for marrying is mercenary (he’s on the hunt for the fattest dowry), breaks down Kate’s rebellious personality by treatment that today would be classified as spousal abuse—denying her food and sleep, letting her wallow in the mud, and generally humiliating her. The actor playing Kate is confronted at the finale with one of the thorniest challenges in the Shakespeare canon: a long public speech where she declares that women are “soft and weak” and must “serve, love, and obey” their husbands (V.i.176–77). After the rollicking humor of the play, modern productions are reluctant to end on a sour note, so the speech is now performed as if it is overtly satirical—whether that is true to Shakespeare’s original conception or not.
The dramatis personae of Shakespeare’s plays are always a mix of social classes. Because of Britain’s still entrenched class system, with its sometimes cash-poor but highly visible landed aristocracy, British actors have little trouble in playing Shakespeare’s upper-class roles. In the United States, in contrast, status is conferred solely by wealth, celebrity, or transient political power. Furthermore, since the 1960s, American authority figures, from politicians, ministers, and bankers to parents and teachers, have gradually adopted a less formal, remote, and dictatorial style. Young people today will often startlingly say that one or both of their parents are their “best friends.” Dress codes have also relaxed with the spread of sportswear, sneakers, and proletarian blue jeans, even marketed by a mandarin heiress, Gloria Vanderbilt. It is now hard to appreciate why John F. Kennedy caused a sensation by not wearing a hat at his presidential inauguration in 1961.
Because of these broad social changes, American actors coming to Shakespeare have few or no direct models of hierarchical authority and class assertion. The audience must clearly perceive the class differences among Shakespeare’s characters. Working-class women, for example, would paradoxically take up more space on stage than their upper-class counterparts: their movements are physically freer and their clothing looser, because designed for labor. Upper-class posture is reserved and contained, as if housed in an invisible bubble. Actors with prior training in classical ballet, which descends from the elegant seventeenth-century court, or continental equitation (called English riding in the United States) have a distinct advantage here. Even among young British women actors winning parts these days in productions of Shakespeare, Jane Austen, or Oscar Wilde, there is an irksome trend for mannish arm-swinging, which originated among the new sportswomen of the 1920s who took up golf and tennis. Until World War One, respectable ladies kept their elbows close to their bodies and their hands clasped gracefully above the waist or otherwise occupied with some object like a fine handkerchief—an accessory crucial to the plot of Othello. Nor did ladies flash their teeth or grin like Huckleberry Finn, another anachronism currently epidemic in period roles.
Manners are not superficial trivialities but the choreography of social class. Manners both define and limit character and must therefore be represented in the actor’s process. Without attention to class distinctions and stratification, important plot elements in Shakespeare will be blurred or missed altogether. In King Lear, for example, it is a violation of propriety for Goneril, who is the Duchess of Albany, to be confiding private matters about her father and sister to her steward, Oswald. In Twelfth Night, the countess Olivia is too flirtatious with the duke’s page, Cesario (Viola in drag), just as her own steward, Malvolio, is later too presumptuously forward with her. On the other hand, Shakespeare presents as evidence of Prince Hamlet’s refreshing lack of snobbery his gracious affability to the visiting troupe of players as well as his easy cordiality with the gravedigger at work in the churchyard. Precedence and rank are pivotal in the banquet scene where Lady Macbeth, trying to divert notice from her husband’s hysteria at Banquo’s bloody ghost (which only he can see), abruptly orders everyone to leave: “Stand not upon the order of your going, / But go at once” (III.iv.137–138). The ugly lack of ceremony in this chaotic mass exit represents the breakdown of social cohesion in a Scotland ruled by a criminal.
Witty banter, the signature sound of the upper-class comedy of manners, comes easily to British actors, whose culture is oriented toward verbal panache, from Oxbridge debating societies to Question Time in the House of Commons, with its scathing sallies met by laughter and applause. American actors today are overexposed to snark, the dominant style in TV comedy. With its snidely ironic put-downs, snark lacks the arch competitive rhythm, like that of fencing, which has always characterized the thrusts, parries, and repartee of great high comedy. For help with Shakespeare’s witty dialogue, I recommend to my theater students such classic film comedies as The Philadelphia Story, All About Eve, and The Importance of Being Earnest (the 1952 version directed by Anthony Asquith), which show how epigrammatic lines can be crisply shaped, timed, and delivered. The Mid-Atlantic accent (midway between American and British) once heard among scions of prominent, affluent families such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Katharine Hepburn, used to be taught to actors in theater school. It was perfect for high comedy but became too affected and artificial over time. However, Sigourney Weaver, playing an imperious Wall Street stockbroker in Working Girl, shows how that elite accent can be subtly modified for use by American actors playing upper-class roles.
* * *
Shakespeare’s plays famously survive transfer into any locale and time period. They have been set, for example, in medieval Japan, Nazi Germany, a space colony, and a suburban high school. But this amazing flexibility does not necessarily give infinite latitude to high-concept directors. In The Goodbye Girl, Richard Dreyfuss hilariously plays an earnest young actor struggling with a narcissistic Off-Off-Broadway director who sees Richard III as a flaming queer. Radical experiments with Shakespeare make sense in Britain, where new angles on the fatiguingly familiar are welcomed. But in the United States, live professional productions of Shakespear
e are so rare that, like it or not, they are thrust into an educational role. Actors of Shakespeare are exponents and defenders of a high culture that is steadily disappearing.
Because of the dominance of the Method in theater training here, American actors seeking their own “truth” are sometimes impatient with the technical refinements in which British actors, with their gift for understatement, are so skilled. Rehearsal is central to the Method actor as a laboratory where the ensemble merges through self-exploration. American culture, from Puritan diaries and Walt Whitman to Jackson Pollock and Norman Mailer, has always excelled in autobiography. But which is more important—the actor or the play? Shakespeare’s plays are a world patrimony ultimately belonging to the audience, who deserve to see them with their historical distance and strangeness respected. The actor as spiritual quester is an archetype of our time. But when it comes to Shakespeare, the actor’s mission may require abandoning the self rather than finding it.
1. Citations taken by editor Susannah Carson from the Royal Shakespeare Company edition of 2009, which was modernized from the First Folio.
* [From Living with Shakespeare: Essays by Writers, Actors, and Directors, ed. Susannah Carson (2013).]
31
SCHOLARS TALK WRITING: CAMILLE PAGLIA*
Rachel Toor: Do you think of yourself primarily as a writer?
Camille Paglia: Yes, I do, and that is how I am mainly known outside the U.S. From college on, my ambition was to establish the legitimacy of the genre now widely accepted as creative nonfiction.
How did you learn to write?
Like a medieval monk, I laboriously copied out passages that I admired from books and articles—I filled notebooks like that in college. And I made word lists to study later. Old-style bound dictionaries contained intricate etymologies that proved crucial to my mastery of English, one of the world’s richest languages.
What have you done that has helped you reach an audience beyond academe? Did that involve unlearning things from grad school?
Good Lord, I certainly learned nothing about writing from grad school! My teacher was Yale’s Sterling Library, that Gothic cathedral of scholarship. I was very drawn to the lucid simplicity of British classicists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where one could hear a distinct speaking voice.
In my final years of grad school in the early 1970s, French post-structuralism was flooding into Yale, and I was appalled at its willful obscurantism and solipsism. After a talk by some preening Continental mandarin, I complained to a fellow student, “They’re like high priests murmuring to each other.” I deeply admire French literature, but that post-structuralist swerve was one of the stupidest and most disastrous things that American humanities departments ever did to themselves or to the great works of art that were in their custody. It was mass suicide, and the elite schools are now littered with rotting corpses.
How do you think about crafting your literary persona/e? What choices do you make when you’re thinking about that?
I was very influenced by American colloquial speech and slang. My mother and all four of my grandparents were born in Italy, so English was a relatively recent acquisition for my family—brash and dynamic. I adored the punchy, pugnacious sound of American media—Ann Landers’ column in the newspaper (“Wake up and smell the coffee!”) or the raucous chatter of 1950s disc jockeys.
Like Andy Warhol, another product of immigrant culture, I was fascinated by the bold crassness and rhetorical hyperbole of American advertising and comic strips, with their exploding exclamation points. I still listen constantly to radio, at home or in the car—it’s a central influence, especially sports shows where you hear working-class callers going off on hilarious tirades.
For scholarly essays, I erase myself as much as possible, but my default literary persona—the one people instantly recognize—is a barking, taunting, self-assertive American voice.
Is there anything you’re afraid of, or that you struggle with (when it comes to writing)?
Yes, the actual writing! My system of composition has four parts. There’s a long period of very enjoyable rumination, where I assemble information and jot ideas and phrases at random on legal-size notepaper—pages upon pages. Then as the deadline approaches, I study my notes and bracket or underline principal themes in colored ink to map out a skeletal general outline. Third comes the dreaded moment of writing—which is total torture! It’s a terrible strain, and I’m literally tied up in knots of anxiety as I toil over it. Once a draft is blessedly complete, my fourth stage of reviewing and tweaking the text (which can go on for days, if there’s time) is pure, serene pleasure—there’s nothing I love more!
I must stress that all of my important writing, including my books, has been done in longhand, in the old, pre-digital way. I absolutely must have physical, muscular contact with pen and page. Body rhythm is fundamental to my best work. I may write interviews and columns for the Web directly on the computer, but nothing else.
What is your process for revision?
After every few scribbled pages, I trek to the computer and type it all up, so that I can see what the text will look like to the reader. My later tweaking is always done on printed-out text.
But my sole revisions are stylistic. My preparation for writing is so slow and extensive that I never revise per se, as others might understand it. For example, perhaps only twice in my entire career have I changed the position of a paragraph. The consecutive logic of my block-like paragraphs (as in Roman road-building) is always resolved at the outline stage, before I ever sit down to write. Revision for me is essentially condensation—that’s where the Paglia voice suddenly emerges. By subtracting words, I force compression and speed on the text. Through long practice, I’ve achieved a distinct flow to my writing—a compulsive readability, even when the reader hates what I’m saying!
I learned condensation from two principal sources: the impudent, crisply written Time magazine of my childhood and the epigrams of Oscar Wilde, which I discovered collected in a secondhand book when I was an adolescent in Syracuse. My Wilde-inspired ability to strike off sharp one-liners was a major reason for my rise to national visibility in the 1990s. For example, when Time contacted me at deadline for comment on its Viagra cover story in 1998, I replied within minutes, “The erection is the last gasp of modern manhood.” Any compendium of contemporary quotes usually has a ton of mine.
In addition to condensation, I also employ syncopation, modeled on the jazz-inflected Beat poetry that had a huge impact on me in college. When people try to parody my prose, this is what they miss—those subtle, jagged twists, turns, and tugs, whose ultimate source is music. In short, the secret of my writing is focus, planning, persistence, labor, and attention to detail.
Your thoughts on academic prose. Who are the academics whose style you love?
Cue the laugh track! What’s to love in any living academic’s style? You’d have to go all the way back to Jane Harrison, C. M. Bowra, and Rhys Carpenter to find an academic style I cherish. I’ve spent 25 years denouncing the bloated, pretentious prose spawned by post-structuralism. Enough said! Let the pigs roll in their own swill.
* [“Good Lord, I certainly learned nothing about writing from grad school!,” Rachel Toor, Scholars Talk Writing series, The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 9, 2015.]
32
SHAKESPEARE’S ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA*
Shakespeare is one of the supreme political analysts in world history. Through the lens of drama he examines the forces of social consolidation and destruction that cyclically sweep through human life. He documents the bursts of energy and idealism that motivate heroic achievement, and he re-creates with chilling precision the practical give-and-take, the compromises and trade-offs, and the malicious machinations that dispirit and disillusion and often drive the noblest spirits from the political arena.
Antony a
nd Cleopatra is, I would argue, the greatest of Shakespeare’s political plays. Based on Plutarch’s portrait of Mark Antony in Parallel Lives (which Shakespeare read in Sir Thomas North’s 1579 translation), it evokes a pivotal point in European history, when control of the Mediterranean hung in the balance. Had Antony and Cleopatra defeated Octavius Caesar in the naval battle at Actium in 31 B.C., the political and cultural center would have shifted from Europe to Africa, changing the course of the next two millennia.
In our era of Romantic individualism, audiences tend to favor star-crossed lovers and to be colder to characters representing reason or duty. Despite his reputation as a bard of love, Shakespeare has a very clear sense of the eternal conflict between passion and realism. His sober Caesar in Antony and Cleopatra lacks the ostentatious empathy of our therapy-minded television talk-show hosts, who are now so much imitated by smiling presidents and prime ministers. Caesar feels no one’s pain.
But we cannot forget that this Caesar is the future Augustus, creator not just of the Roman Empire, with its expansionist military brutality, but the Pax Romana, a period of peace, prosperity, and legal codification in which Christianity would be born and spread. Shakespeare sees that Antony and Cleopatra, for all their personal magnetism and lust for life, lack the steadiness and self-discipline that we require in leaders, who are responsible for the public welfare and for the systematic administration of justice.
Antony and Cleopatra had a generally low reputation with most critics (save for the astute A. C. Bradley) until just after World War Two. Its series of startlingly short scenes, bouncing all over the Mediterranean, seemed confusing and inept. And its heroine, one of the few female protagonists in Shakespearean tragedy, seemed sexually loose and morally obtuse. In the Victorian period, in fact, when decorously feminine images of saintly self-sacrifice like Cordelia and Desdemona were the most venerated Shakespearean women, Cleopatra looked like a whore.
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