37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 37 (The Series Finale!): Titus Andronicus

The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, first broadcast April 27th, 1985 (a year after the previous one)

• When was it written? Perhaps sometime between 1588 and 1593. Maybe his 6th play and probably his first tragedy.
• What’s it about? I’m too disgusted to regurgitate this loathesome plot. Suffice it to say that it has a horrific rape, a woman forced to eat her own sons, and not one, not two, but three behandings.
• Most famous dialogue: None
• Sources: Bits of the Gesta Romanorum, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Seneca’s play Thyestes, etc.
• Best insult: The only insult that stood out was really racist and I don’t want to reprint it here.
• Best word: None stood out.
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I’ve never read it or seen it.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Trevor Peacock returns as Titus.

How’s the cast? 

• They’re all fine. They actually cast a Black man as the Moor this time (unlike when they cast Anthony Hopkins as Othello) and Hugh Quarshie relishes the evil role.

How’s the direction by Jane Howell?

• Howell, who did such a great job with the Henry VI plays, can’t save this terrible, terrible play. Unlike those plays, the set and production design here are drab and unimaginative. The pseudo-spooky cross-dissolves between scenes feel tacky in that BBC Doctor Who sort of way.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: There Are Always Good Reasons to Go Chronologically

So now that we’re all done, let’s return to a question we began with, all those years ago when we began this series: Should I have done these plays in the BBC order or in the order they were (maybe) written? In some ways, it’s worked out to do the BBC order, but in other ways it hasn’t.

It’s a real problem when it comes to a play like this, which is in conversation with Othello (almost surely a later play). In retrospect, I can see how Othello revisits this play and tries to do a better job. Both plays feature white women in love with Moors, but in this early play Shakespeare clearly finds that union inherently revolting, while in Othello, though the relationship is equally doomed, the possibility that it could have been a good thing is very present. Othello is a deep, rich, three-dimensional character, capable of both good and evil, whereas Aaron the Moor in this play is as black-hearted as he is black-skinned, in a two-dimensional all-too-easy way.

Likewise, when we did our penultimate play, Love’s Labour’s Lost, I found myself wishing I’d seen it before A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which replicates elements of it. And I’d become convinced that all of Shakespeare’s wives were innocent of adultery before I finally watched his first three plays (the Henry VI plays) and found that he started his career with a very untrue wife indeed. And there are other things I could have traced the development of, such as his feelings toward democracy or homosexuality.

So, in the end, I think I probably made a mistake, and would have gotten more out of this series if I’d read the plays in their probable order. (But it sure would have been rough beginning with three four-hour Henry VI plays. I ended up really enjoying when I got to them later, but if I’d had to start with them, this thing might have ended before it started.)

Storyteller’s Rulebook: If Something Is Tasteless, Can It Still Be Tasty?

I had been warned about this play for years, but nothing could have prepared me for how stomach-churning and tasteless it is. Utterly gruesome and deeply unpleasant to watch.

If you’ve been listening to my new podcast “A Good Story Well Told,” you know that I couldn’t stand the Kill Bill movies because of the rape and other violence toward women. Well this play makes those movies look like Strawberry Shortcake. The only reason I finished watching the Kill Bill movies was because I felt I had to for the podcast, and, to put it mildly, the only reason I finished watching this play was because I felt I had to for this blog, especially because it was the last one and I was already massively invested in this project.

But here’s the thing: The Kill Bill movies are wildly popular and even this play has its defenders. When Julie Taymor moved from Broadway to movies she was given a blank check to do anything in the world she wanted. She used up that whole check and then some on an adaptation of this play.

She seemed to be saying, “Sure, it’s tasteless, but also tasty.” Surely, as a mature adult, she must have found the play revolting on some level, but she seems to have found it revolting in an appealing way.

Personally, I don’t get it. For me, tasteless almost always means taste-less. I never enjoy feeling revolted, or revolting others. James Kennedy kept trying to get me to watch Rick and Morty and I couldn’t even handle that (though, once again, it’s very popular). If you write something like this, you’re going to lose a lot of good people as fans (not all good people, but some). To what end? I don’t understand the impulse.

I am hereby declaring this to be Shakespeare’s worst play. I would say that it’s a bummer to end this way, but it’s not surprising. The BBC let directors choose their favorites, which is why we ended up with a lot of duds towards the end. This was the figurative bottom of the barrel, and you can tell from that broadcast date that it aired a full year after episode 36, bringing the series to a belated, revolting end.

But this has been a good series! I’ve learned a lot and I hope you have, too. If you haven’t read the whole thing, now’s a great time to explore them.  And I may have a few wrap-up posts coming next.

After that: I launch a new(ish) 89 part series. I’m not even kidding.

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 36: Love’s Labour’s Lost

Love’s Labour’s Lost, first broadcast January 5th, 1985

• When was it written? Maybe 1594 or 1595. Perhaps his 9th play.
• What’s it about? Ferdinand, the King of Navarre, and three companions swear off women for three years to devote themselves to study and fasting, but when the Princess of France and her ladies in waiting arrive, the boys break their vows and fall in love one by one. In the end, all the couples are about to marry, but the princess then finds out her dad has died so she declares a one year period of mourning and all of the other ladies decide to put off their men for a year as well.
• Most famous dialogue: None
• Sources: None! This seems to be mainly original.
• Best insult: Too many to choose from:
• “that low-spirited swain, that base minnow of my mirth, that unlettered, small-knowing soul, that shallow vassal”
• Or: “This wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy, This Signior Junior, giant dwarf, Dan Cupid, Regent of love rhymes, lord of folded arms, Th’ anointed sovereign of sighs and groans, Liege of all loiterers and malcontents, Dread prince of plackets, king of codpieces, Sole imperator and great general Of trotting paritors”
• Or: “His humor is lofty, his discourse peremptory, his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, his gait majestical, and his general behavior vain, ridiculous, and thrasonical. He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it.”
• Best word: Well, thrasonical is good, but I’ll go with “God dig-you-den” which was apparently a greeting?
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I’ve never seen it nor read it before.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: David Warner is Don Armado and the always-lovely Jenny Agutter is Rosaline

How’s the cast?

• Excellent. Despite the unhappy ending announced by the title, the cast plays it as a very sprightly comedy until the very end, and they’re all very funny.

How’s the direction by Elijah Moshinsky?

• This is the fifth one Moshinsky has done and he’s always been good. He makes the rather brilliant decision to set this one 100 years after Shakespeare’s time, which makes it feel more like a Moliere play than a Shakespeare play, especially since it has a lot of rhyming dialogue. Being a big fan of Moliere, I didn’t mind at all.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: One Up Yourself

We really wish we knew for sure what was written first, this or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, because the two plays are so clearly in conversation with each other, and it would be great to know which was responding to which. Notably, both plays get their lovers together early, only to have them sit down to heckle a buffoonish play-within-a-play.

But they also contrast each other in key ways. In Midsummer, it’s implied the new lovers will marry right away, but this play puts off all the marriages by a year at the end. Puck in Midsummer says “Jack shall have Jill” but Berowne sums up this play as “Jack hath not Jill” (or to put it another way, Love’s Labours have been Lost). The best guess we can hazard is that this play came first, which is fascinating because it really feels like this one is a twist on that one, but I guess that’s just because that’s the order I encountered them. If this one came first and Midsummer is the rewrite, then it’s an even-better rewrite of an already-excellent original.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Spying Upon Spying Is a Good Source of Comedy

The funniest scene is a scene that Shakespeare went back to over and over, and other playwrights would borrow from him (even for non-comedic plays, such as The Lion in Winter). Each of our four scholars reveals his feelings of love in a soliloquy, only to have to hide as another enters, slowly filling up the hiding places in the room as they’re all spying on each other as each breaks their anti-love oath, then they get to leap out and accuse each other one by one, until they all realize that they’re fools. Double or triple-spying is a good source of comedy gold.

(Of course, this asks a lot of your set decorators, who have to create three believable hiding spots. This production fails to do that, and at least one could be easily spotted, harming the scene.)

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Satire is Superior to Spoof

Most of Shakespeare’s comedies would best be described as farces.  Is this the only one that could best be described as satire? 

Google offers some challengers to the title: Some call Troillus and Cressida a satire of heroic narratives in general, but I would consider it to be more of an (unsuccessful) spoof of Homer and Chaucer specifically (though I realize the distinction is fine). Some cynics find Romeo and Juliet so unconvincing as a serious love story that they declare it to be a satire (intentional or not) of romances. But no, I don’t count either of those, so I would declare Love’s Labours to be Shakespeare’s only true satire.

Shakespeare is lovingly mocking those who would have us live by reason alone. He’s essentially writing a satire of the Enlightenment, which hadn’t begun yet, which is why it’s so brilliant for Moshinsky to set the play late in the 17th century.

Satire is a higher art form than spoof because it doesn’t just make sport of pre-existing works, it explores the human condition, impeaching extreme characters in order to impeach milder impulses in that direction that we all have. Satires also tend to have happier endings, as everyone lives, loves, and learns to admit their faults now that they’ve been made fools of. It can be sharply barbed but is often gentler in the end.

This play looks forward to Moliere not merely because it rhymes more than any other Shakespeare play. Moliere was a master satirist. Shakespeare just dabbles at that here, but shows that he could have done more great work using those tools if he had chosen to.

New Episode of "A Good Story Well Told" on Beloved!

It’s a new episode of “A Good Story Well Told” with Jonathan Auxier! We’re nearing the end of our Shame Shelf series, where we shame each other into reading or watching things the other somehow missed. This is the big one, where I force Jonathan to finally read the most acclaimed American novel of my lifetime, Beloved. It’s a heavy novel about slavery, but also a thrilling ghost / haunted house story and a touching romance.  Will I win him over to it?

Here it is on Spotify and here it is on Apple podcasts:

 

New Episode of "A Good Story Well Told" on the Kill Bill Movies!

Can you believe I never saw the Kill Bill movies? Jonathan shames me into finally watching them and I have a strong reaction! Discussion is had of repeated beats, “Save the Cat” moments, and characters believing in themselves.

Here’s the episode on Spotify…

…and here it is on Apple Podcasts!

 

Check it out!

New Episode of "A Good Story Well Told" on The Good, The Bad and The Ugly!

In this episode, I shame Jonathan into finally watching The Good, The Bad and The Ugly! Note for clarity, since we use actor and character names interchangeably: Clint Eastwood plays Blondie (The Good), Lee Van Cleef plays Angel Eyes (The Bad) and Eli Wallach plays Tuco (The Ugly). Keep that in mind as you listen!

Here it is on Spotify!

And here it is on Apple Podcasts!  

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 35: Much Ado About Nothing

Much Ado About Nothing, first broadcast December 22nd, 1984

• When was it written? Probably 1598 or 1599, possibly his 17th play
• What’s it about? Soldiers return from war to a lovely palazzo in Messina, Italy. Young Claudio quickly falls in love with a young lady named Hero, and Benedick loves Beatrice too, but neither of them will admit it. Benedick and Beatrice’s friends trick them into admitting they like each other. Evil Prince John tricks Claudio into thinking Hero has cheated on him, which Claudio takes badly, so Beatrice makes Benedick swear to kill Claudio, but bumbling sheriff Dogberry eventually solves the case and all ends happily.
• Most famous dialogue: I’ll go with “Man is a giddy thing”
• Sources: Matteo Bandello’s Tales, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and others …but the Beatrice-Benedick romance seems to be original to Shakespeare!
• Interesting fact about the production: You may have noticed that these final plays are all bottom of the barrel, with the big exception of this one. If they were starting with the most appealing plays, how did it take them so long to get to this stone-cold classic? Well, the story is very interesting. They originally intended to start the entire series with this play and shot it with Michael York and Penelope Keith! (Yes, Margo from The Good Life / Good Neighbors!) For some reason that has been lost to time, the BBC decided they didn’t like the result and canned it, starting the series with Romeo and Juliet instead, which was originally supposed to be the second episode. After that, it just never worked out to reshoot it until they had almost finished the series, so here we get it as the antepenultimate episode. Hey, I’m not complaining, it’s nice to get one more classic in amongst all these forgotten ones.
• Best insult:
• Beatrice and Benedick say many cruel things about each other, and Claudio says many cruel things about Hero at the wedding, but somehow my favorite is when Benedick insults someone who is singing a song: “An he had been a dog that would have howled thus, they would have hanged him.”
• I’ll also note: “Scambling, outfacing, fashionmonging boys, That lie and cog and flout, deprave and slander, Go anticly and show outward hideousness”
• Best words: unhopefullest, vagrom
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I’ve seen lots of great ones. The best one was probably at the Globe in London, with a bicycle-riding Dogberry zipping through the groundlings. But of course my heart lies with a Barbie-themed production wherein my daughter made her Shakespearean debut as Dogberry.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Just Jon Finch as Don Pedro.

How’s the cast?

• They’re delightful. Robert Lindsay’s Benedick and Cherie Lunghi’s Beatrice do a good job keeping things effervescent until things darken, then they play the weightier scenes just as well.

How’s the direction by Stuart Burge?

• He does a great job eliciting strong performances and the show looks great too. This is the only episode of the ones I’ve seen so far with really gorgeous realistic sets. All shot indoors of course, but it seems to have 10x the budget of other episodes.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Give Them Layers of Text to Play

My favorite filmed Shakespeare is the Kenneth Brannagh version of this play, so this had a lot to live up to. As it turns out, this is also excellent, but can’t compete. Most obviously because that one could shoot outdoors, but really on every level. The performances are all good here, but in the hands of all-time great actors like Denzel Washington and Emma Thompson, the parts shine a little brighter.

Brannagh finds little moments to add more kick to. When Don Pedro suddenly says to Beatrice “Will you have me, lady?” it’s usually played as just merry banter, but Washington and Thompson have a delicate moment. The two characters manage to both play it off as a joke but they both also recognize that it’s potentially serious, and the performers let that all play on their faces, lightning fast.

(The only element where this production is superior is Prince John. Keanu Reeves can be a great movie star, but Shakespeare is not his happy place.)

Rulebook Casefile: Look for Ironies

Benedick and Beatrice are always sparring whenever they meet each other. Their friends think they really love each other, deep down. So a group of men contrives to be overheard by Benedick saying that Beatrice is secretly in love with him, and likewise a group of women let themselves be overheard by Beatrice saying that Benedick loves her. As it turns out, that’s all it takes.

What makes it delightful is that this is an elaborate deception, but no one’s actually lying. The friends really believe that each loves the other already.

After hearing about Beatrice’s hidden feelings for him, Benedick is suddenly besotted and, when he takes his usual abuse, he sees nothing but hidden meanings …and he’s right. She is thinly veiling her love for him in her abuse. He has been deceived in a way that reveals the truth.

Straying from the Party Line: Does This Play Shoot Down Advice I Had in My Book?

In this post from 2013 (and in my first book) I complained about stories with couples who might say “We bicker all the time with rapid-fire, razor-sharp wit, but we really just want to jump each other’s bones!” I point out that screenwriters might cite His Girl Friday as their source, but they’re misreading that movie, because the man and woman there don’t just have conflicting personalities, they also have conflicting goals.

But of course, it now occurs to me that I should have pointed out that the real origin of such couples was this play. And this is more of the platonic ideal of the trope, because Beatrice and Benedick really don’t have conflicting goals, just conflicting personalities. As soon as they are tricked into seeing each other differently, they realize there’s nothing keeping them apart (yet).

So why does this play work so well, when I said in that post (and my book), that it shouldn’t? One key reason is that Beatrice and Benedick haven’t just met. They are reuniting after the war and resuming a quarrel they’ve had going for years. We don’t see the origin of this bickering, which may have once had a good reason that no longer exists.

In the negative examples I cite in that post (including Daredevil and John Carter), we see this dynamic emerge instantly between men and women who have just met.

But let’s try to find other exceptions. What about the “Cheers” pilot? That certainly falls into the category of “We bicker all the time with rapid-fire, razor sharp wit, but we really just want to jump each other’s bones!” and that’s a case where they have just met, but that script is great. But again, that’s a case where they do have conflicting goals.

I’m finding myself disagreeing with my old post. The basic point was sound: conflicting goals are stronger than conflicting personalities, but as this play shows, you can get great stories out of conflicting personalities. But just to be safe either give them conflicting goals (Cheers), or make it a long-time conflict (Much Ado) or both (His Girl Friday).

37 Days of (Maybe) Shakespeare, Day 34: Pericles

Pericles, Prince of Tyre, first broadcast December 8th, 1984

• When was it written? 1607 or 1608. Possibly his 33rd play
• What’s it about? Pericles tries to win the hand of a princess in a neighboring kingdom, only to discover she’s in an incestuous relationship with her father. Pericles goes on the run with this secret, chased by assassins, and ends up going all over the world for the next twenty years. (I can’t begin to summarize everything that happens.) Along the way, he has a wife, Thaisa, whose seemingly-dead body gets thrown into the sea (only for her to survive) and he has a daughter, Marina, who is seemingly killed but actually ends up in a brothel, where she never has to sleep with anyone because she saves their souls instead. In the end, the whole family is happily reunited.
• Most famous dialogue: None
• Sources: Primarily the Confessio Amantis (1393) of John Gower, an English poet and contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer. (Gower appears onstage to narrate this play.) A second source is the Lawrence Twine prose version of Gower’s tale, The Pattern of Painful Adventures, which was from 1576 but had just been reprinted in 1607.
• Interesting fact about the play: As with Timon of Athens, there is much debate about whether or not Shakespeare had an uncredited co-writer, possibly George Wilkins. Once again, some give full credit to one or the other, and others use computers to analyze word usage to divvy up the scenes.
• Best insult: Thou hold’st a place for which the pained’st fiend of hell would not in reputation change. Thou art the damned doorkeeper to every coistrel that comes inquiring for his Tib. To the choleric fisting of every rogue thy ear is liable. Thy food is such as hath been belch’d on by infected lungs.
• Best word: “but I will gloze with him”
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I’ve never read nor seen it before.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: A very young and cute Juliet Stevenson is Thaisa! (see above) Trevor Peacock returns brielfly as Boult.

How’s the cast?

• They’re good. Mike Gwilym suffers mightily as Pericles. Amanda Redman shines as Marina, a role that must make you believe she is saving the soul of every man in a brothel with her pure goodness (and persuasive power)

How’s the direction by David Jones?

• If this production were properly budgeted, with all its far-flung locations and epic storms at sea, it would have cost gazillions of dollars in 1984.  Jones, instead, has to make it all come to life on a typical BBC shoestring budget, but he does a shockingly good job. And can I say how glad I am to have ancient tunics instead of ruffs, as some of the directors in this series would have done?

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Sometimes You Should Skip the Irony

So I start watching this recording, knowing nothing about it, and boom, we start out with a lot of incest, and my first instinct is to say, “I don’t want to watch this play, maybe I can skip it.” Then I thought, “No, I’m committed to watching every play, I have to watch it.” Then I said, “Well, how much incest is there exactly? Is this whole play going to be about Pericles trying to win this girl away from her father? Because that would be very unpleasant.” So then I decide to read the plot in advance to get myself prepared to watch it, and hoo boy, what a plot.

I was very relieved that incest was just a brief red herring at the very beginning to get the plot going and then was forgotten after that. Whew. Instead our hero flees from that unseemly situation and goes on an epic 20 year journey.

But here’s the thing: Wouldn’t it make sense if incest returned at the end? At the end, Pericles is reunited with his beautiful grown daughter and doesn’t recognize her. Wouldn’t it be nicely ironic if the play began with Pericles discovering an incestuous relationship, and fleeing lest he be killed for discovering it, and going on this epic 20 year quest, only to end up reuniting with his daughter at the end and sleeping with her, and then realizing that the very thing he’d been running from all this time has caught up with him in an ironic way?

The answer is no. That would be perfectly ironic, but it would be gross and unpleasant and I wouldn’t like it. Sometimes perfect is bad. Sometimes ironic is bad. Thank you for not doing that, Shakespeare.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Was Aristotle Right?

One of the major criticisms of Shakespeare at the time, and for many years afterwards, was that his plays did not observe the Aristotelian Unities.

The three Unities were Unity of Time, Unity of Place and Unity of Action. Aristotle had said that little time jumps between scenes were fine, but the total time period covered by a play could not exceed 24 hours (You can see this in Moliere’s plays, written after Shakespeare’s time). Likewise, everything should take place in roughly the same location, and should all serve one main plot.

Shakespeare was, above all things, a Man of the Renaissance, and we associate the Renaissance with an increased reverence for the Greeks and Romans, rather than Christian thinkers, but Shakespeare has no respect for the Aristotelian Unities. In play after play, we jump from year to year, or continent to continent, or plot to seemingly-unrelated plot as easily as turning a page.

On the one hand, I greatly admire Shakespeare for breaking free from the arbitrary shackles imposed on him by a problematic slavery-defending dude from almost 2000 years prior. And indeed, if you look at the plays of Moliere, you can feel Moliere straining under Aristotle’s constraints, trying to cram stories into one setting and one 24-hour period that really should have had some space to sprawl.

The two Shakespeare plays, of the ones I’ve seen so far, that make the biggest hash of the Unities are Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, both of which follow families that are separated only to be reunited 20 years later. But here’s the thing: I don’t think either of these plays really work. They’re too sprawling. They’re too unwieldy. Was Aristotle right?

Ultimately, no, he wasn’t. If Shakespeare had observed Aristotle’s rules, we not only would have lost these two plays, we would have no Othello, which jumps continents. We would have had no Lear, which covers many months. We would have no Falstaff, a character who is hardly germane to the plot in the Henry IV plays.

Pericles and The Winter’s Tale stretch the artform to its utmost limit of Time, Place and Action, and, to my eyes, fall apart in the process. But they show the brashness of Shakespeare’s genius. These plays expanded the artform and created a freedom that other, better plays took advantage of.

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 33: King John (I’ve made it to the final five!)

The Life and Death of King John, first broadcast November 24th, 1984

• When was it written? Who knows? Somewhere between 1587 (when Holinshed was published) and 1598 (when someone mentioned this play in print.) It’s possibly his thirteenth play.
• What’s it about? After the death of his father Henry II and his brother Richard the Lionheart, weak King John is beset by enemies, including the French, who want their lands back, and the Pope, who wants more control over archbishops. His mom Eleanor of Aquitaine adopts Phillip, the bastard son of Richard, who becomes a loyal retainer of the king, even after Eleanor dies. John orders Arthur, a boy who is one of his rivals for the throne, killed, but then changes his mind, but then Arthur falls and dies while trying to escape, causing everyone to turn against John. John is poisoned by a monk and his son Henry becomes king. At no point is the Magna Carta signed!
• Most famous dialogue: None
• Sources: Holinshed, of course, but there was also a play around the same time published anonymously called The Troublesome Reign of King John. Either that one was based on this one or this one was based on that one.
• Best insult: a beardless boy, a cock’red silken wanton
• Best word: None stood out.
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I had never read it or seen it.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Claire Bloom is back, as Constance, and Phillida Law shows up as Lady Faulconbride.

How’s the cast?

• They’re fine. Leonard Rossiter (who died before the show aired) is an appropriately arrogant Richard. George Costigan stands out as Phillip the Bastard.

How’s the direction by David Giles?

• Tacky (see picture.) In interviews, Giles referred to his stylized sets as “emblematic” and “heraldic,” but they just look cheap. And there’s never any real sense that there’s a war going on. We get distant reports of battles, but with no immediacy.

Notes on Shakespeare’s most forgotten play:

The oddest thing about this play, is that it plays like a sequel to James Goldman’s 1966 play The Lion in Winter, but that’s a much better play. John and especially Eleanor are much more compelling there. It’s so odd to have Shakespeare playing second fiddle to another playwright.

This may be Shakespeare’s most forgotten play. To the degree that people on the street recognize the titles of Shakespeare plays, King John is the one they’re least likely to recognize. Does it deserve that fate? I would say no. The play is worth watching and not the weakest one I’ve seen as part of this series. The weakest thing about it is that so much of it (including all the fighting and John’s mysterious poisoning) happens off-stage.

The other big problem with this play is that, even though it’s a relatively early work, it’s already revisiting earlier, better plays. John is an odd combination of Henry VI (weakness in the face of the French) and Richard III (killing a kid to claim the throne) but not as compelling as either one. He doesn’t get a lot of soliloquies and generally lacks interiority. He ends up being somewhat unknowable.

Another oddity: John is primarily remembered for two things today, signing the Magna Carta and being one of the bad guys in the Robin Hood stories, but neither is mentioned in this play (though Robin Hood was name checked in the last play we looked at, The Two Gentlemen of Verona).

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Always Have an Exception to Your Rules

We’ve had lots of bad bastards in our 33 plays and no good ones, so I confidently declared earlier that there would be no exception to prove the rule, but not so fast! Shakespeare never wrote a play about Richard the Lionheart, but he does get to write about his bastard son here, and right away, he’s different from Shakespeare’s other bastards.

He’s witty, self-deprecating, and canny, quickly dropping his claim to legitimacy when he gets a better offer, then skillfully navigating choppy waters as things turn chaotic. He’s by far the most likable character in this play and our default hero.  He gets the concluding lines.  

Shakespeare was very supportive of primogeniture and traditional lines of succession, but here he shows us a way that even a bastard can make good, given some very unique circumstances. It’s always good for a writer to find ways to challenge their own prejudices.

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 32: Coriolanus

The Tragedy of Coriolanus, first broadcast April 21st, 1984

• When was it written? Probably around 1608 or 1609, possibly his 31st play
• What’s it about? Around the time of the founding of the Roman republic, general Gnaeus Marcius defeats the Volscian army at Corioli and gets the nickname Coriolanus. Returning home, many people encourage him to become a consul, but after he gives a disastrous speech his political rivals turn the common people against him and get him banished. He teams up with Aufidius, the Volscian general he defeated, and declares war on Rome, but his family is able to talk him out of it. He makes peace instead, and then Aufidius kills him.
• Most famous dialogue: None
• Source: The “Life of Coriolanus” in Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1579).
• Best insult: “You are no surer, no, than is the coal of fire upon the ice, or hailstone in the sun,” or “You common cry of curs, whose breath I hate as reek o’ the rotten fens, who loves I prize as the dead carcasses of unburied men that do corrupt my air”
• Best word: mammocked
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I had never seen or read it.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Noted ‘80s bad guy Joss Ackland does a great job as Coriolanus’s only steadfast friend in Rome, Menenius. (His reading of “Down with that sword” is chilling.)

How’s the cast?

• Alan Howard is a little stiff (no pun intended) as Coriolanus. Irene Worth is great as Coriolanus’s mother.

How’s the direction by Elijah Moshinsky? 

•  This is the most beautifully lit play I’ve seen so far, looking very cinematic.  And Moshinsky makes a clever decision to have cramped sets that look dangerously crowded even with just a few people, to create the sense that the roiling mobs are always a threat.  But Moshinsky’s biggest decision is to make the production so homoerotic, so let’s talk about that below…

Storyteller’s Rulebook: I Say Again, Not Everything Has To Be A Sex Scene

Earlier in this series we had Derek Jacobi’s Richard II, who was coded as possibly gay, and was a little fey. Then we had Troilus and Cressida with three gay-coded characters, all of whom seemed like caricatures. Now we get this play. With less support from the text, Moshinsky has decided to portray Coriolanus and Aufidius as two very masculine gay men whose every scene together, including their scenes of violence against each other, are played like sex scenes.

On the one hand, it’s nice to have two gay characters where neither is coded as effeminate, but on the other hand, it’s a brutal vision of male love. The intense homoerotic atmosphere of their scenes never seemed to me to be supported by the text, and always felt like an imposition, perhaps motivated by a belief of Moshinsky’s that there just wasn’t enough to this play without it.

I don’t know enough about this play to know how common this choice is. Tom Hiddleston was filmed in the role recently, and now I want to check that out to see if he played it this way too, or if the role could be made rich enough without it.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: A Play For Our Times

As with Henry VI, Part 2, this play was hard to watch, given what’s going on in the country right now. Shakespeare served at the pleasure of his monarchs, and one of his recurring themes was the inherent stupidity of democracy. He had already written about the downfall of democracy in Rome in Julius Caesar, due to the fickleness of crowds, and now we jump back 500 years earlier and find that, even at the beginning of Roman democracy, the crowds were just as jittery and easily swayed for evil purposes. (“The beast with many heads,” as Coriolanus calls them)

(Of course, if you’re going to play a Shakespeare lead, you have to know how to give a speech well, but this role is unique because it also requires that you know how to give a speech poorly. Coriolanus’s clumsy attempt at public speaking is the turning point of the play, and actors must love the chance to get to blow it for once.)

I know that, as a citizen of a democracy, I should be offended by Shakespeare’s wild-eyed contempt for voters, but given what’s going on right now, it’s hard not to see these two plays, bookending the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, as accurate depictions of the inherent idiocy of voters.