Seeing All of Shakespeare

Shakespeare is one of those cultural assets that humans seem to absorb like the air, just by being alive. Often, we are not even aware that we are quoting a phrase first set down 400 years ago, it's simply a set of words we are used to hearing together. So even if you have some mental image of Hamlet holding a skull and saying "Alas, poor Yorick I knew him...something something"...you may be surprised later to hear "every dog has its day". Or to watch Othello and hear Iago describe jealousy as a "green-eyes monster". Hundreds of English language expressions appear to have originated in Shakespeare's work!

Watching the Shakespeare plays over the years has been a fascinating discovery process like that for me. At first, the process was slow. Seeing "The Merry Wives of Windsor" with the university Basilian Literary Association. An occasional Shakespeare in the Park or local production. But it wasn't yet a serious pursuit, yet.

The big turning point was listening Peter Saccio's Great Courses audio course about Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. A distinguished and illuminating lecturer, Professor Saccio's course underscores brilliantly how much stimulating material there was to learn. This quickly led to acquiring a small collection of books and DVDs about the plays.

About a year ago, this BBC box set appeared in the mail, including their versions of nearly all the plays ("The Two Noble Kinsmen" wasn't included in the BBC productions). This series was produced and broadcast by the BBS during the late 70s and early 80s. Watching them wasn't power-watching weekend fare for me, I was trying to get a good understanding with as many of the plays as possible. The usual process would be to flip through the Rough Guides Shakespeare book to get a rough idea of plot, then read commentary about the play by Marjorie Garber or Harold Bloom, two favorite critics regarding matters Shakespearean. Watching these Region 2  DVDs on computer made following along in the text easy. This has been a FANTASTIC experience, offering the experience of many neat bits in the less-performed plays.

Around a month ago, I realized that I had seen almost all of the plays and made it a goal to see them all before year's end. The lack of "The Two Noble Kinsmen" was made more complicated by there not seeming to be any versions on DVD. Fortunately, there are a couple enjoyable versions available on YouTube. The version performed at Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand) was a lot of fun: the New Zealand accent mixes well with iambic pentameter!

Well, yesterday I checked off my last play, "Pericles: Prince of Tyre".

Is that it for my Shakespeare-watching? HARDLY! Many or these plays are deeply entertaining and deserve additional viewings and closer study. There are also a number of great versions available for some of the plays, such as the Royal Shakespeare company, Kenneth Branagh productions, the Globe in London. There is years of material yet to be seen and explored are tremendous amounts of critical analysis to be pored over. There are metaphorical side streets to be explored, like learning about the rhetorical devices used in the plays, learning about Elizabethan history and culture, as well as the history of the Plantaganets.

This is only the beginning....

Pericles, Prince of Tyre

My first reaction after seeing this play was that there were some heartwarming and also hilarious bits but that the play overall is one of the weirdest plays I've seen from Shakespeare. But the overall shape of the play comes from the classic "Apollonius of Tyre" and as with his other embellishments on existing material, the Bard managed to impart his qualities of humanity and humor onto a very odd play.

The hero, Pericles, starts the play by solving the riddle of a king and nearly loses his life as a result. The riddle of King Antiochus is supposed to be a challenge where a champion can win his daughter but lose his life upon failing. But solving the riddle reveals his incestuous relationship with his daughter and the king decides to kill Pericles for solving the riddle. Since he will kill anyone who either solves or fails to solve it, it's not clear whether the point is providing the king and his daughter a bit of sport.

Antiuchus sends his henchman Thaliart to kill Pericles, following him to Tyre when he flees for his life. Realizing the assassins are likely to follow him there, Pericles boards a ship and flees (rather than simply having Thaliart arrested or executed for coming to kill him in his own kingdom). Pericles' ship bestows food on a starving city of Tarsus and later sinks. He survives and wins the heart of Thaisa, who unfortunately appears to die on another ship during a storm, after giving him a daughter. Her body is dropped from the ship in a sealed box which conveniently protects her from drowning and she is revived by a kindly doctor. Pericles leaves his daughter Marina and her nurse with the people of Tarsus but, unfortunately, the queen tries to have the daughter killed when she grows up. Instead, she is kidnapped by pirates and sold into captivity in a brothel.
 

The character of Boult, a servant in the brothel, is played by Trevor Peacock, an actor who has played some terrific roles in the BBC Shakespeare series, including Lord Talbot (terror of the French) and Jack Cade (whose companion suggests "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers") in the first two Henry VI plays.

In the brothel, the plot really takes some comedic turns, with some seriously outrageous lines. Just as Marina appears, the brothel has had bad luck keeping suitably, er, staffed. At one point, Boult describes prospective customers anticipating sex with a virgin:

    'Faith, they listened to me as they would have
    hearkened to their father's testament. There was a
    Spaniard's mouth so watered, that he went to bed to
    her very description.

And another:

    I warrant you, mistress, thunder shall not so awake
    the beds of eels as my giving out her beauty stir up
    the lewdly-inclined. I'll bring home some to-night.

However, Marina's virtue is so strong that she converts prospective customers from lust to chastity, increasing the brothel's existing cash flow problems. Her virtue is so strong that Boult cannot even follow through with his plans to rape Marina and instead helps her find employment as a sort of healer. Meanwhile, her father revisits Tarsus and, believing Marina dead, sinks into despondency and mourning. But in the end, chance encounters reunite Pericles, Marina and Thaisa.

Pericles the play itself is narrated by a figure named Gower without any explanation of who Gower is. As it turns out, he is a 14th century poet and contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer. The screen shot below is of Gower on board a ship near the end of this play. I thought it conveyed a quiet, thoughtful sense of what viewing this play was like for me, as this was the last Shakespeare that I had never seen (blog post about THAT to follow).