On spending the COVID-19 pandemic with Shakespeare

 

A version of this appeared in AL.com in 2020.

Back before the lockdown, before I or most anyone had even heard of COVID-19, I made a silent resolution – in 2020, I would read every play written by William Shakespeare in as close to the order we think he wrote them as possible.

I’m not even sure why I resolved to do this. After all, January was many years ago.

I probably hoped it would make me a better writer. They say Melville read through Shakespeare’s plays before he wrote “Moby Dick.” He also died in relative obscurity and near poverty, which is not something I aspire to, as career moves go. We don’t know for sure when Shakespeare wrote each play, but we have a rough idea. That was enough for me. It was something I had told myself for years that I would eventually do. And hey, who knows what the new year will bring, right? Or as Shakespeare himself put it: “O, what men dare do! What men may do! What men daily do, not knowing what they do!”

I started with “The Taming of the Shrew” on Jan. 1. I resolved to also reread the ones I had already made my way through. I made a few modifications to the list – I took in all the history plays dealing with English kings in their historical order, to see the unfolding stories. I spaced out the readings because I didn’t want to go too quickly. Usually I read about six plays a month, often in two or three days' time for each. I breezed through the better ones – some were a harder fight. On the week of Halloween, I finally finished “The Two Noble Kinsmen,” the 38th and final play.

When I told a few people what I was doing, they asked, “How is it?” My answer was usually the same:

He’s good. He’s really good.

Just writing about the greatness of Shakespeare seems a trite thing to do, because it’s been done to death. But there were times as I was reading where I thought to myself, “Man, he’s having a ball.” It was an unexpected pleasure to see Shakespeare’s style develop over time. He goes from being a clever writer with a gift for wordplay and rhythm into a genius at plot, character and action. And then he goes beyond that, growing into a philosopher and a prophet, comedian and mourner. And beyond that again. And again.

The sheer inventiveness of the man is astounding. It’s easy to say that about someone whose writing has endured for four centuries, but to actually witness it flickering on the page, time after time, was a constant miracle. I discovered things I had never noticed about the plays I had read and seen before. I developed a new fondness for some of his comedies, which hadn’t really moved me so much. I would open plays I had no idea about and suddenly be carried away.

This man, who probably did more to shape our language and culture than we will ever know, took the five act play as his laboratory and flung away whatever the rulebook was. I was surprised by his history plays, and how he put the deepest observations into throwaway characters, so that the highborn will not listen to them, to their collective dooms. You can often see him, off in the shadows, deciding that the audience needs a break - so let’s have one scene of jokes and double entendres to lighten the mood. So, we have an all-male troupe of actors? Let’s have one of them who is supposed to be playing a woman instead play a woman pretending to be a man. Confused yet? It gets better. Oh, you think that character’s dead? Well, just you wait. And to think he just turned this stuff out year after year, page after page, play after play.

It was interesting to see how he shifted over time. He migrates from sometimes lighthearted comedies and history plays, around the midpoint of his career, to a vision that grows darker and more acidic. “Julius Caesar” is still my favorite, even though it peaks with Marc Antony’s funeral oration, and I couldn’t care less. “Hamlet” remains an endless sea to sail on, as profound a meditation on grief as it is on the human psyche: “What a piece of work is man…” “Troilus and Cressida” was absolutely blue black with cynicism about war and humanity. “Macbeth” is a wonderfully compact, brilliant horror show, still as spooky as when I first encountered it. “The Comedy of Errors” was genuinely funny and has been shamelessly stolen from countless times, just as it was likely stolen by him. “The Merry Wives of Windsor” barely registered – which was reassuring, as even Shakespeare had moments when he was probably doing it for the money.

And in a way I could never have foreseen, Shakespeare got me through the lockdown, the disappointments, the disasters, and the endless complications of 2020. About the time our dining rooms and theaters closed, I had made my way to “Romeo and Juliet,” where I was reminded that if Friar John had not been confined to a house suspected of harboring the plague, Friar Laurence would have received the letter that might have kept the star-crossed lovers alive. When Facebook kept reminding me of what Shakespeare did when he was a prisoner of the plague, I could read it myself in “King Lear,” with the assurance that “cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen.” As Americans took to the streets in protests and violence over issues of race, I saw Othello convulse in murderous anger because of the sinister machinations of Iago. I drew toward the end of the journey just as the presidential campaign headed toward its climax, with the court intrigues of Henry VIII speeding me along, reminding me to “Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself.”

I confess that I got a little weary toward the end, like a bad runner in the last mile of a marathon. But then came “The Tempest,” with the story of an old magician on a lonely island enacting his revenge, and then moving on to something more benign. It reminded me of the reason I had taken this journey in the first place. The air, cramped and constrained by the pandemic, was again filled with luminous magic. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep” is not just a bit of high-flown whimsy. More than once, Shakespeare reminded me, even in the worst and most challenging of times, about the gift of life itself, the inexhaustibly gracious wonder of existence. About the deep and abiding hunger of evil. About the human heart, lacerating itself and others, then suddenly drawn back from the abyss by that most alien and most welcome thing, love. I had seen all these pageants play out on the page, and on the stage, and in different versions on my television and in our streets. But as for the plays, our revels now had ended.

As I said, so much has been written about Shakespeare that it seems silly to add a few lines more. Whatever I think he says to our time, I think it’s more important that we remember what he says for all time. Our age, seemingly teetering on the brink of disaster, with all of us filling the air with selfies to document it, may argue about what Shakespeare meant, or means, of if he still means anything at all.

But when we do that, I think we sometimes lose sight of the very real man who I feel a little closer to now - an actual flesh and blood human, scribbling on deadline, trying to avoid putting those particular lines into the mouth of a barely competent actor he knows is incapable of saying them, mindful of the previous night’s intake at the box office, knowing that the audience is impatient and unforgiving, but ready to go anywhere that will leave them spellbound. For that man, where in his mind it was probably always 10 minutes to curtain, what we might think of his writing may not have entered into his mind.

But we want him to have cared, which shows how much he matters to us, still.

 

The Hamlet Project: Kenneth Branagh (1996)

 

By the time Kenneth Branagh made what is referred to as "The Eternity Version" of "Hamlet," he'd had more than twenty years to think about the part. Prior to directing his 1996 version, Branagh had played the part for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art,  had acted in the play as Laertes for the Royal Shakespeare Company production, tackled the part again with his own Renaissance Theatre Company and again in a radio version. Then, there was his meditation on the play, the 1995 comedy "A Midwinter's Tale" (known as "In the Bleak Midwinter" in the UK), about a ill-starred community theatre production at Christmastime:

TOM: ...but no, no, no, no, Hamlet isn't just Hamlet, oh no, no, oh no, Hamlet is me...Hamlet is...Bosnia, Hamlet is...this desk...Hamlet is the air. Hamlet is...my grandmother, Hamlet is everything you've ever thought about sex...about...about...geology...

JOE: Geology?

TOM: In a very loose sense of course.

Kenneth Branagh has gone on to become the first person nominated in seven different categories for an Academy Award. He has known critical and commercial success in big-budget Hollywood spectacle, small independent films and in large character pieces. He is still best known for his Shakespearean work, and even had a go at playing the Bard himself in the remarkable"All Is True." There is a sense one gets in watching Branagh's Hamlet that he has attempted to cram his entire biography - and all of his instincts as an actor and director - into this version which uses the entire text. In the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that this is my favorite film version of the play. 

When Branagh wrote about his experience on the project, he cited Goethe: "A genuine work of art, no less than a work of nature, will always remain infinite to our reason: it can be contemplated and felt, it affects us, but it cannot be fully comprehended, even less than it is possible to express its essence and its merits in words." Yet in making his own filmed version, Branagh was guided by the impression left on him when he first saw the play at 15 with the prince played by Derek Jacobi - he wanted a "Hamlet" that left the audience asking "what happens next." He wanted a film that was an event - in 70 mm with huge sets, international casting, a world that was big and brightly lit, glamorous, suspenseful, sexy. 

The film begins and ends with the image of the dead King Hamlet, as a statue, guarding the real life Blenheim Palace, which doubles for our Elsinore. The final view we get of the statue may remind viewers today of the toppling of images of Middle Eastern dictators, such as Saddam Hussein. However, audiences in 1996 would have flashed back to the fall of the Soviet Union only five years before. From the beginning, we have a sense that we are watching the end of something - the fall of the house of Hamlet. At this moment in time, which appears to be late 19th century, when a ghost appears on the ramparts, invading armies are marching, the days of the monarch are numbered. 

Because Branagh opts for the complete text, he is free not only to explore the psychological drama of "Hamlet," but the political. There is also the spiritual, for a restless ghost is haunting the kingdom. In this version, the rationalist Horatio, played by Nicholas Farrell, is left with a mystery which he must impart to his tortured friend up in the castle. 

The throne room of Elsinore is a wonderful combination of the Winter Palace and Versailles - a hall of mirrors with an overhanging walkway. One of Branagh's aims was to show the paranoia of royalty - of a public performance that is always watched and must never be relaxed. The King can not be allowed to be anything less than regal. That is why the palace is stocked with hidden doors and passageways for quick escapes. There is always something to hide. 

But the people are celebrating the marriage of their new king - Claudius, played by Branagh's teenage hero, Jacobi. At first sight, Claudius appears to be a thoughtful, politically savvy ruler. We can easily imagine him having long prepared himself solely for this moment, perhaps a feeling that he is more suited to the role than his predecessor, no matter how popular he was. And there is continuity, since the Queen has not changed. Gertrude, played by Julie Christie, is just as much a presence on the throne. With everything tidied up, confetti falls and the celebration of the change in power continues, leaving alone to contemplate his fate - Hamlet. 

Branagh's prince is dressed in a black military tunic, as one might expect. But as director, Branagh is careful to give us little glimpses of what Hamlet could have been. Perhaps what he was prior to the death of his father. He leaves no doubt that Hamlet has been to bed with Ophelia. He shows the two of them as naked, playful lovers. When Rosencranz and Gildenstern arrive, he is shown to be a warm, jocular friend. And when the ghost of King Hamlet appears, one is led to an inescapable conclusion - Hamlet looks more like his live, villainous uncle than he does his late, virtuous father. Draw your own conclusions on how long Claudius and Gertrude have been intimate with each other. Does this mean that in his vacillations, in his subterfuge, in his self-dramatizations, Hamlet is behaving more like the man who might actually be his father?

Polonius, played by Richard Briers, is more human and less comic than in other productions. He is the Prime Minister, and shows himself a warm and loving father to his children. When he gives Laertes his parting advice, these aren't pedantic nostrums from an old windbag. They are the anxiety of a father who wonders if he will see his son again. When he dies by Hamlet's hand, there is the feeling of accumulating tragedy.

In keeping with earlier decisions, Branagh makes it clear that Claudius did kill his brother, by himself. He gives us flashes of a memory that comes back to Hamlet as the ghost speaks - that of a moment where his uncle and mother got a little too close; an indication of something sinister that perhaps led to the time being out of joint. The ghost scene itself is interesting, for another reason. In the 1988 documentary "Discovering Hamlet," Branagh says the ghost scene is one of the more exhausting ones to deliver on stage. An actor has to respond to the ghost in such a way as to show the audience the proper amount of fear, wonder and horror. To reproduce the scene for the film, he plays it out in a series of closeups, between himself and the ghost, played by the whispering Brian Blessed. (Anyone who has seen the bombastic Blessed in other roles might barely recognize him in this restrained appearance.) 

Branagh's strategy is to keep the image in constant motion, to give the audience every sense of the largeness of Shakespeare's vision in as many ways as possible without pausing long enough for attention to wane. When Rosencrantz and Gildenstern appear, they are brought to the royal bedroom in one continuous take, a hallmark of Branagh's directorial style. The maids are making up the bed, while Claudius welcomes the two. At one point, the king sits down on the bed while his boots are shined. The maids pause in their work out of deference to the royal person. Then the party proceed down the corridors to the throne room in a "walk and talk" at least a century before "The West Wing." Bits like this extend throughout the movie, along with cameos to remind the audience that they are watching something big. When Charlton Heston's Player King begins Aeneas' tale to Dido, we aren't just allowed to visualize the scene through Heston's epic voice, we are treated to flashes of John Gielgud as Priam, and Judi Dench as Hecuba. Neither has any dialogue, but in seeing Gielgud, we are reminded of his own Hamlet, forever lost to us because it was not recorded on film. 

The 1988 Hamlet stage production Branagh starred in was directed by Jacobi, For it, Jacobi envisioned that Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy should instead be a speech delivered to Ophelia. For the film, Hamlet enters the throne room, aware that Claudius and Polonius are watching him from behind one of the mirrors. This allows the speech to be more than a contemplation of life or death, but also a (not-so) subtle threat to the life of the king. Then Kate Winslet's Ophelia enters the room to return his love notes, and Hamlet exploits the moment, and her watching father, by feigning madness and torturing her with the "nunnery" speech. These directorial decisions have the effect of making Hamlet less wild and more calculating, though at the same time rendering him even more heartless to his lover. 

There are many great performances in this film, but Jacobi's Claudius stands out. As the king confesses his murder, for just a second, Hamlet is allowed to imagine the culmination of his revenge with Claudius' death. But just as quickly, when he realizes the potential theological implications, he pauses. By showing this, we see just how close we came to a different resolution. Again, Branagh exploits the possibilities of alternative Hamlets. And because he lives, Claudius is shown to be a genuinely remorseful man, accenting his humanity and his villainy.

When Laertes arrives at the head of a revolutionary mob in the final acts, the King very carefully talks him down from anger and subtly redirects him toward vengeance. But then Gertrude enters to relay the information about Ophelia. It's at this point that Branagh does not do what he has up to now - he does not show us the dead Ophelia immediately. Why? Because his focus remains on the conniving king, because he must show the moment when Claudius beckons Gertrude to come with him, and the queen refuses. She has seen the true nature of her new husband, and of her mistake. Then we are shown Ophelia in one shot, submerged beneath water, given up to madness. 

When we see Hamlet again, he is no longer clothed in black. He has returned from England, there is resolution in him, and an easy grace that shows itself with the gravedigger. This continues, even after Ophelia's burial, when Hamlet is again with Horatio in the library, sneering at the foppish Osric, played with sufficient camp by Robin Williams. Yes, Branagh's "Hamlet" is occasionally busy. The cameos, such as Billy Crystal and Jack Lemmon, might feel awkward. Not everyone can speak the speech trippingly on the tongue. 

And Hamlet's final duel with Laertes is staged with all the drama and panache one could ask for, but crammed with bits of stagey stuff. Laertes falls from the second floor walkway once defeated. Hamlet remains up there, so he must hurl his sword at the king like a javelin and manage to pin Claudius to the throne, just as a chandelier comes crashing down on him. Then, in Errol Flynn style, Hamlet cuts a rope, swings down to the floor, grabs the laced cup, runs to the throne and forces the last of poison  down the king's throat. For a man dying of the same venom, Hamlet's daring-do feels like a bit much, no matter how exciting it all is. (Then again, Olivier leaped 14 feet down onto Claudius.) But Branagh intercuts the duel with the invading Norwegian army, so that when Fortinbras bursts in, all of the pieces fit together. Richard Attenborough's English Ambassador is there only a second, before Hamlet is carried out, Christlike, sacrificed to little salvation by his tardy revenge.  No matter how we got there, we are appropriately breathless. 

Later, in "All Is True," Branagh's retired Shakespeare gives advice to another man on the act of creation: "If you want to be a writer, and speak to others and for others, speak first for yourself." That may be one reason why Branagh's "Hamlet" succeeds. This busy, feverish, breakneck barrelhouse Hamlet is the Hamlet inside him, a Hamlet that is not just speaking beyond a mirror to his antagonist, but to the reflection that only he can see. 

Previously:

The Play's the Thing
Laurence Olivier (1948)
Toshiro Mifune (1960) 
Richard Burton (1964) 

 

The Sea of Fertility by Yukio Mishima

The Sea of Fertility was written in four parts in the late sixties by the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, a highly-Westernized writer whose works still enjoys wide acceptance and translation in the West. The four volumes of the series are, Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, The Decay of the Angel.
The title of the series mirrors the area on the surface of the moon, The Sea of Fertility, a lifeless, stark, cold area of mystery and dark grandeur. It is believed this was Mishima's feeling on his homeland. The last volume of the work takes on added significance when one considers that Mishima turned in the final manuscript for the novel on the same day he and his followers stormed the office of a Japanese general and forced him to assemble the men of that particular detachment of the Japanese Defense Forces. After giving a speech from a balcony urging the men to reject Western values and embrace Emperor worship, among other things, Mishima committed ritual suicide.

This last act, the significance of which is still debated in Japan, becomes even more incongruous when one reads the four parts of this work, which doesn't seem to spring from the same mind that committed that last act.

The four-volume work follows the life of Shigekuni Honda, whom we first meet in 1912 as a student through his association with Kiyoaki Matsugae, the son of a baron who falls in love with the daughter of a titled family. "Spring Snow" shows how this love affair touches the newly Westernizing families of Japanese aristocracy and the royal family, eventually ending in Kiyoaki's tragic death. However, in "Runaway Horses," Honda, now a judge in the 1930s, believes he encounters the reincarnation of his friend in the person of the young Isao Iinuma, a right-wing fanatic who blames Japanese capitalism for the country's decline in morals. Honda reaches this conclusion because of Kiyoaki's last delirious words to him, and the sight of three moles on Isao's chest that perfectly match a set Honda saw on Kiyoaki's chest.

The first two volumes of "The Sea of Fertility" are easily the best, the first a passionate love story while the next one is a celebration of doomed Japanese nationalism. The writing is, at times, poetic if a bit grandiose and lingers all too lovingly on a vanishing idyll. What struck me the most as I was reading them were the moments where Mishima came very close to Christian iconography - even in the midst of what is a nominally Buddhist social setting. “How strange man is!” one character observes in “Spring Snow,” echoing Hamlet. “His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.”

By the time of "The Temple of Dawn," Honda is now an old man whom we follow through various vignettes from the beginning of World War II into the late 1950s. This is the most obviously Buddhist of the series, where Honda begins to meditate on the implications of Buddhist theories of reincarnation. He takes a trip to Benares, to the Ganges in India, a city he describes as a place of extreme holiness and extreme filth.

This pilgrimage comes after he encounters a seven-year-old Siamese princess who believes she is the reincarnated Isao. However, Honda is unable, until late in the novel, to confirm whether this is so. By this time, Honda's character has become a much more Westernized, much more culturally and intellectually lax individual, and begins to indulge in voyeurism and an easy corruption. We feel in watching him that Mishima is commenting on how Western virtues have corrupted the purity of Japanese life at virtually every stratum of society.

The final volume, when considering that Mishima was planning his own end while writing it, feels rushed and thinly sketched when compared to the other volumes. By now, Honda is approaching eighty and believes he has found the latest incarnation in a student named Tōru Yasunaga. However, instead of encountering an innocent boy, an idealist, or a beautiful princess, our latest incarnation is overtly, consciously evil. Honda, believing he can somehow entwine himself in the boy's life, adopts him, hoping to somehow short circuit what he believes to be "destiny." In the end, he can't actually be sure of what his life means, or even if he was correct in any of his assumptions. How much did he have to do with these previous "incarnations" and the ends they met?

What can we glean from this work, so ambitious and uneven that we aren't even sure if the author was secure in his intentions? After all, Mishima gives Honda a fully-realized consciousness of reincarnation, yet by all accounts, Mishima himself didn't believe in the transmigration of souls. Instead, he is aiming at what he believes is happening to Japan - that in the middle of Coca-Cola advertisements and the Western Constitution and its mass entertainment culture is a feminizing slackness that is robbing it of knowing what it once was, and could be again. Are any of Japan’s endless incarnations still “Japan,” or has something been irrevocably lost?

One could make a case that Honda learns that no matter how much one is willing to superimpose a theological template on some events, the outcomes almost certainly undo our expectations. Life is more complicated than a narrative, as Mishima himself illustrated not just with his art, but his life. The dominant image of the novel cycle is that of a waterfall - “the direction of uncertainty, the realm behind this clearly defined world, a realm whose phenomena were flowing over a waterfall.” What one finds from that image is a rushing current of events with no discernible recognition of their meaning, or source.

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

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