httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOkyZWQ2bmQ
Dame Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth in the sleepwalking scene
Today in 1606 is the first recorded performance of Macbeth.
Macbeth is the most concentrated study of tyranny as a force within an individual soul, which has to be cast out of that as well as out of society. The tyrant exists because the victims are tyrants to themselves. (CW 15, 243)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9zIw84dD_Y
From Ian McKellen’s film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III: “Was ever woman in this humour woo’d? / Was ever woman in this humour won? / I’ll have her, but I will not keep her long.” (I. ii. 232-4)
On this date in 1485, Richard III, the last of the Plantagenet line, was killed in the Battle of Bosworth Field, which brought the first Tudor king, Henry VII, to the throne.
Frye in the Notebooks on Renaissance Literature:
In the H6 – R3 tetralogy [1, 2, 3 Henry VI; Richard III] it isn’t until R3 emerges from the final play that we feel any dramatic integrity of character standing out from the tapestry. The reason is that he’s an actor, and a hypcrite or masked character, and he suggests a kind of real life, however reprehensible, which he & the audience at least know about. (CW 20, 240)
. . . R2 is isolated in the opposite way from R3. The latter is pure de facto & hypocrite; R2 is pure de jure, and is an actor who throws himself into every role suggested to him, most notably that of the betrayed Christ . . . (CW , 241)
The other world exists in Shakespeare, as in Dante, mainly to confirm the social set-up of this one. Jack Cade, according to Iden, goes to hell; Edward IV goes to heaven. Hubert is “damned” if he kills the rightful heir Arthur, yet H4 seem to get away with dodging the responsibility for killing R2. This principle of presenting a wish-fulfilment world as aristocratic is in the romances. It’s a bugger to try to understand a writer who has no personal attitude. The king de jure has a magical aura around him: the logic of such a superstition is that a king de facto who has any claim to the throne at all should exterminate everybody with a better one, & will thereby acquire that aura. R3 thinks he’s done it; this I why I call the principle of legitimacy comic: {the hidden eiron gimmick we’ve forgotten about}. (CW 20, 242)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr7T4Jn8WgQ
The earliest surviving film adaptation of Shakespeare, an 1899 British production of King John. (This clip cannot be embedded: hit the arrow and then hit the YouTube link that appears.)
On this date in 1215 King John of England put his seal on Magna Carta.
Shakespeare, of course, wrote a play about King John that makes no mention of Magna Carta. Happily, Frye has a point or two to make about Shakespeare by way of King John.
The action of King John has proceeded only for a few lines when the king says:
Be thou as lightning in the eyes of France;
For ere thou can’st report I will be there,
The thunder of my cannon shall be heard.King John, of course, had no cannon. It is habitual for us to say the audience would never notice. Audiences in fact have rather a quick ear for such things. Or we may say that Shakespeare was in a hurry, and was unwilling to spoil his record of never blotting a line. The assumption that Shakespeare was a hasty and slapdash writer has often been made, by hasty and slapdash critics, but has never proved fruitful. If we say that Shakespeare had more important things on his mind, we come closer to the truth: certainly the fine image of the thunderstorm is more important than fidelity to the date of the introduction of gunpowder. But it is better to think of such anachronism positively and functionally, as helping to univeralize an historical period, as representing a typical rather than a particular event. The past is blended with the present, and event and audience are linked in the same community. (A Natural Perspective, 20)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLs3-zUJc9M
Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, act 2, scenes i and ii
Today is the traditional anniversary of the sack of Troy in 1184 BCE.
Frye on Troy, British national mythology, and Shakespeare in A Natural Perspective:
History is a prominent genre in Shakespeare until Henry V, when it seems to disappear and revive only in the much suspected Henry VIII at the end of the canon. Yet the history of Britain to Shakespeare’s audience began with the Trojan War, the setting of Troilus and Cressida, and included the story of Lear as well as the story of Macbeth. Even Hamlet is dimly linked with the period of Danish ascendancy over England. Alternating with these plays in a Britain older than King John are the Roman or Plutarchan plays, dealing with what, again, to Shakespeare’s audience was the history of a cousin nation, another descendant of Troy. In Cymbeline the theme of reconciliation between the two Trojan nations is central, as though it were intended to conclude the double series started by Troilus and Cressida. (66)
On this date in 1405, Richard le Scrope, Archbishop of York, and Thomas Mowbray, Earl of Norfolk, were executed for treason by order of Henry IV.
Shakespeare renders the arrest of le Scrope, or Scroop, and Mowbray at the end of act IV, scene ii of 2 Henry IV:
Lord Hastings. My lord, our army is dispers’d already.
Like youthful steers unyok’d, they take their courses
East, west, north, south; or like a school broke up,
Each hurries toward his home and sporting-place.
Earl of Westmoreland. Good tidings, my Lord Hastings; for the which
I do arrest thee, traitor, of high treason;
And you, Lord Archbishop, and you, Lord Mowbray,
Of capital treason I attach you both.
Lord Mowbray. Is this proceeding just and honourable?
Earl of Westmoreland. Is your assembly so?
Archbishop Scroop. Will you thus break your faith?
Prince John. I pawn’d thee none:
I promis’d you redress of these same grievances
Whereof you did complain; which, by mine honour,
I will perform with a most Christian care.
But for you, rebels—look to taste the due
Meet for rebellion and such acts as yours.
Most shallowly did you these arms commence,
Fondly brought here, and foolishly sent hence.
Strike up our drums, pursue the scatt’red stray.
God, and not we, hath safely fought to-day.
Some guard these traitors to the block of death,
Treason’s true bed and yielder-up of breath.
That’s about as nausea-inducing an instance of victor’s justice as can be found. Frye in On Shakespeare:
In this play Henry IV is near his death: he is perpetually exhausted and he can’t sleep. His great strength has always been in his ability to take short views, to do what has to be done at the time and not worry about the remoter perspectives. But in this play a long and desolate speech breaks out of him about how any youth, if he could see the entire pattern of time stretching out in front of him, would simply lie down and die and refuse to go through with it. The nemesis of usurpation is working itself out: a good deal of the discussion between the king’s party and the rebels consists of rehashing feuds and grudges that go back to the beginning of Richard II, or even earlier. The implication is partly that rebellion is, among other things, caused by a sterile brooding on history with the object, not of building up a future, but of reshaping the past. (80)
G. Wilson Knight (1897-1985) was professor of English at Trinity College, University of Toronto, in the 1930s; he returned to Britain in 1941, where he taught at the University of Leeds until 1962; his main interest was Shakespeare, many of whose plays he produced and acted in; his best‑known book, Wheel of Fire, was published in 1930. What follows are the references to Knight in Frye’s writing:
1. There’s a series of New Directions studies on “Makers of Modern Literature,” by Harry Levin on Joyce, very well reviewed, & now one by David Daiches on Woolf, said to be not so good. Wilson Knight is producing another book, this time on Milton.[1] A new Simenon translated, two stories again. He’s so good that his stories don’t even depend for their interest on the puzzle. [Diaries]
2. Well, Crane’s third lecture was a little easier to follow: more names and historical connections. But his relativism and pluralism are breaking down into an Aristotle (and Crane) contra mundum attitude. Everybody’s in the other camp—the camp where poetry is treated as a form of discourse. Now I’ve lost Aristotle: I don’t understand how he’s distinguishable from this. Anyway, the discourse people include the Latin rhetoricians, the medieval people, the critics of the Renaissance who thought they were Aristotelians but weren’t, the romantics, and the romantic tradition extending to the new critics & the myth critics. The last group includes Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Francis Ferguson, Wilson Knight, and me. [Diaries]
3. King Lear attempts to achieve heroic dignity through his position as a king and father, and finds it instead in his suffering humanity: hence it is in King Lear that we find what has been called the “comedy of the grotesque,”[2] the ironic parody of the tragic situation, most elaborately developed. [Anatomy of Criticism, 237]
4. But he was quickly bored if the conversation ran down in gossip or trivialities. The personnel at his parties naturally changed over the course of years, but from Bertram Brooker and Wilson Knight in the 1930s to Marshall McLuhan and Douglas Grant in the 1960s, he never wavered in his affection for friends who could talk, and talk with spirit, content, and something to say. [“Ned Pratt: The Personal Legend”]
5. There were many little magazines and attempts at experimental theatre (I can’t answer for the dance groups, of which as I remember there were several), but they fought hard and died quickly—all but the unique and miraculous Canadian Forum, which a dozen university staff members, then as now, worked hard to keep going and up to standard. A few rumours also seeped through from other colleges, of how Wilson Knight at Trinity had revolutionized the study of Shakespeare, of how Gilbert Norwood had written of Classical drama with a sophisticated knowledge of the modern stage, of Charles Cochrane’s mighty struggle with Christianity and Classical Culture. [“Autopsy of a Old Grad’s Grievance,” in Northrop Frye on Education]
6. Surrey, however, established a new pentameter line for his century. Its prestige captured Spenser, who had begun with accentual experiments and contrapuntal singing-matches, but for his epic moved away from musical rhythms, as Milton moved toward them. Shakespeare, however, and most Elizabethan drama with him, grew steadily swifter in movement, breaking out of the line into galloping recitativos, with the diction becoming sharper and more dissonant, the imagery grimmer and more sombre, the thought more tangled and obscure—in short, more musical in every way. The use of music by Shakespeare, however, is outside our scope: his musical accompaniments and imagery have been dealt with, notably by Granville Barker and Wilson Knight, but such features as the contrapuntal construction of King Lear have yet to be analysed. [“Music in Poetry”]
7. This inductive movement towards the archetype is a process of backing up, as it were, from structural analysis, as we back up from a painting if we want to see composition instead of brushwork. In the foreground of the grave-digger scene in Hamlet, for instance, is an intricate verbal texture, ranging from the puns of the first clown to the danse macabre of the Yorick soliloquy, which we study in the printed text. One step back, and we are in the Wilson Knight and Spurgeon group of critics, listening to the steady rain of images of corruption and decay. [“Archetypes of Literature”]
8. The inductive studies of the recurring imagery of King Lear by Wilson Knight and Caroline Spurgeon have, for me at least, gone a long way to illuminate this meaning, and I think a careful comparison of the different contexts in which such words as “nature” and “nothing” appear would do a good deal more. [Review of Critics and Criticism]
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8VOZLjQbvQ
With both John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier in mind, here is a selection of Hamlets. Above, David Tennant in the recent Royal Shakespeare Company production.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ks-NbCHUns
The “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Olivier’s Hamlet
Today is Laurence Olivier‘s birthday (1907 – 1989).
Frye on New Year’s Eve 1948 records in his diary his impressions of Olivier’s film version of Hamlet:
Went to see the Laurence Olivier Hamlet this afternoon — its eleventh filming, according to the program. As Olivier directed the film & played Hamlet too, it was still the subjective fallacy, the conception of the play which derives from the accident that Hamlet is a fat actor’s role, not in the least scant of breath. In any production the actor who takes Hamlet’s part has a lot to say about the production, & his first care is usually to ensure that if any part is cut it won’t be his. Olivier wasn’t crude about it: he slashed the soliloquies to ribbons & turned it into a play of action. The subjective fallacy showed up chiefly in his treatment of Ophelia–he manipulated her part to make her just the “anima” of Hamlet, & deliberately cut out her mature intensity of feeling & her sharp sly humor. Consistently with this he made her death pure accident, thus making all the references to her “doubtful” death in the fifth act entirely pointless. The foils to Hamlet were also weakened — Laertes of course has a very badly written part, but the stability of Horatio was hardly in evidence & Fortinbras was abolished altogether, along with those dismal robot clowns Rosencrantz & Guildenstern. On the other hand, the king & queen were fully & excellently treated.
Hamlet is not about Hamlet at all, but about a situation into which Hamlet fits, and all attempts to treat the play as though it were primarily a character study of Hamlet destroy the symmetry of the play. For one thing, one needs all the rich counterpoint of the Polonius family, which plays the same role in Hamlet that the Gloucester family does in Lear. We have to see this subplot from its own perspective as well as from Hamlet’s. Ophelia corresponds to Gertrude, & her attraction toward Hamlet is, from Polonius’ point of view, a desertion to vice, just as Gertrude’s attraction toward Claudius is from Hamlet’s. The father-daughter hold here is as palpable as the bigger mother-son one. But more important, Hamlet is not a play about Hamlet’s indecision, but about the ritual element in revenge. In Hamlet the stimulus to revenge takes the creative form of the play: in Claudius it takes the form of a ritual sword-dance, a Druidical drama punctuated with choruses of toasts & cannon shots. But the question “why did Hamlet delay?” is no more important to the play than the question “why did Claudius delay?” for Claudius also has shallow excuses and self-analyzing soliloquies. There is something comic in the elephantine fumbling on both sides, especially in the fourth act.
There were excellent things in Olivier’s version, though: the winding stair & the general Piranesi setting, Hamlet as the Orc-hero brandishing the torch in Claudius’ face, a grotesque little wooden statue of Christ to which Claudius prays, the use of the cross on the sword-hilt in the Hamlet-Ghost scene, the whole Saturnalia or Balshazzar’s feast aspect of Claudius’ revels. The camera, by pushing closer to the characters, brings out the horror of tragedy the stage plays often gloss over, & reminds us that tragedy is after all about people getting hurt. (CW 8, 42-3)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE9tNBWZ7Hw
The unlikely alignment of Shakespeare anniversaries this week — the first publication of the sonnets yesterday, the death of John Gielgud today, and the birth of Laurence Olivier tomorrow — deserves some sort of commemoration. So how about the Reduced Shakespeare Company performing Hamlet in under 3 minutes? And then, for good measure, performing it backwards.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtuoNCfbnYM
On this date John Gielgud died (1904 – 2000).
In a letter to Frye in January 1935, Helen Kemp mentions having seen Gielgud’s Hamlet in London, a celebrated production which he also directed. There is, of course, no recording of that performance, but the clip above is still very fitting: the elderly Gielgud in his last leading film role delivering Prospero’s Epilogue from The Tempest, featured in Peter Greenaway’s adaptation of the play, Prospero’s Books.