Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

RSC King Lear @ BAM

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Sometimes you get lucky and see a major theatrical star play a canonical role in a transformative way. The contours of the role remain familiar, but the actor inhabits them more fiercely than you expect. He surprises you, even though you’ve seen the play lots of times and don’t expect to be surprised. He fixes your attention whenever he’s onstage. At times he slightly distorts the way you see the play, bending it just a bit in his direction. You start to imagine a slightly different play, tilting slowly out of its usual orbit into a different perspective.

I drove home from Brooklyn last night with my imagination inflamed by Paapa Essiedu’s brilliant performance of Edmund, the Bastard of Gloucester and sub-plot’s villain in King Lear.

It’s true that I was supposed to be afire with a different performance. Anthony Sher’s mad King was strong and lucid. As he devolved from inacessible tyrant carried in atop a litter in the opening scene to doting Dad who doesn’t mind prison as long as he can sing with Cordelia “like birds i’the cage,” he became somewhat more engaging — but he never captured my attention the way Essiedu’s Edmund did. Sher was stately, plump, a bit formal in his clarity. Essiedu was the thing itself.

Anthony Sher as Lear and Graham Turner as the Fool

I’ve got a pet theory about the relationship of the plot and subplot in the final scene. While Edmund’s minions are killing Cordelia off-stage, the action presents a long interlude in which disguised Edgar challenges and defeats his till-then-triumphant evil brother Edmund. The combat set-piece runs for 145 lines in the Arden 3 edition (lines 90-235), or 35% of the stage time before Lear enters howling with his daughter’s corpse. (Actually, since the silent stage combat takes some time, the Gloucester brothers subplot occupies more of the scene than that percentage indicates.) In an unstageable gambit that seems meaningful to me, I imagine a split-screen for those 145 lines, showing the audience that while we enjoy the chivalric episode of the battling brothers, Edmund’s murderers hang Cordelia. If only we didn’t like sword-play so much perhaps we’d pay attention in time to rescue her! “Great thing of us forgot!”

Paapa Essiedu as Edmund

The relationship between plot and subplot in King Lear is a bit strange. The play is the only major tragedy to have a substantial independent sub-plot — such plots are more common in comedies — and the two stories come from very different sources. The main narrative of the King and his daughters is a medieval tale from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain by way of Holinshed, the Mirror for Magistrates, and the anonymous play the True Chronicle History of King Leir. The sub-plot of rival brothers and their blinded father comes via Sir Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia, published around the same time as the Leir play in 1590, but Sidney’s source in turn was the classical prose romance The Aethiopian History of Heliodorus — a book that’s my personal pick for the greatest mostly unread text in Western literary history. The sinuous way in which Shakespeare’s King Lear entangles and disengages the medieval chronicle history and the Byzantine Greek romance comprises a thorough study in the legacies of these major genres and story-patterns in early modern English literary history.

Last night, I was on the side of Heliodorus, Sidney, Edmund, and Essiedu, even though I know the production wanted me to be with Geoffrey, the Mirror, Lear, and Sher. I’m probably susceptible because my first book on Elizabethan romance narrative had a Heliodoran heart. But Essiedu’s intensity carried me along. He’s a rising star, as I already guessed when I saw his Hamlet in Stratford in 2016. I thought his Edmund was even a tick better. He’s one to keep an eye on!

There were some other good performances in the RSC Lear, including David Troughten as an imposing Earl of Gloucester, Mimi Ndiweni as a compelling Cordelia, and Nia Gwynne as a charismatic and beautiful Goneril, whose face-off with her father while he cursed her “organs of increase” was especially powerful. The understudy Patrick Elue did a great job playing Kent last night, and the appreciative cast gave him his own curtain call at the long play’s end. It took me a little while to warm to Oliver Johnstone’s Edgar, who was strongest when naked and mad, perhaps a bit less compelling when sane and compassionate.

There’s still time to get to the Harvey Theater to see this one before April 29!

Anthony Sher as Lear with Mimi Ndiweni as Cordelia

#shax2018: Conversations & utopias in LA

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  1. The Hotel Postmodernism

    Her small grey head peaked out of the swell about twenty feet away from us. The curve of her back echoed the small waves rolling in through the slate-green Pacific off Venice Beach. In all the years I’ve been swimming in this little slice of ocean, down the street from where I lived in 1993-1994 right before grad school, I’d never had one of these creatures swim with me before. A selkie totem for #shax2018, the seal’s nearness startled us and calmed our shivering flesh. She swam between where we splashed into the water and where neoprene-armored surfers caught a few small waves. I lost sight of her after I body-surfed one little roller into shore. I don’t have a pic — I was phoneless in the water when we saw her — but that seal is my utopian totem for #shax2018. The benediction of nonhuman presence in the ocean!

  2. The last of four conversation topics in “The SAA, Shakespeare, and Us,” the  seminar I co-lead with Carla Della Gatta, with incisive and generous respondant-ing by Erika Lin, asked the room for possible SAA-utopias. The floodgates of the wonder-world gushed forth: we sought communities of labor, changes in infrastructure and scale, “psychosocial mentoring” (which clarifying term Erika brought to us via Tracy Davis of Northwestern and ASTR) , recurrent seminars, more streamed or recorded sessions, “Half-assed Shakespeare,” the value of allowing ourselves to be wrong, “radical hospitality” (via Becky Fall and the Public Theatre, though I also thought of the glories of the BABEL Working Group), stewardship, service, public-facing events, “conflict is part of community” (paraphrased from Erika). What is “Shakespeare”? Who is “us”? What can and should the SAA become? So many good questions to keep asking!

    Inside the Bonaventure

  3. My core takeaways from the two hours traffic of our seminar swirled around support and especially mentorship, how it happens and what it could be. The topic came up again in the brilliant and necessary “Shakespeare beyond the Research University” session on Saturday, the second iteration of the “Shakespearean Futures” initiative that started with “The Color of Membership” last year in stormy Atlanta. I personally feel deeply fortunate to have been mentored by the SAA, both by many discrete individuals and more diffusely by the organization itself, since I started coming to the conference in the mid-1990s. Drafting this post Sat night as I wait to board a red-eye back to JFK while #shax2018 still dances, I’m abuzz with ideas to extend and support that process in the new & larger 21c SAA. We don’t need to start from zero: RSA and ASTR have ongoing mentorship programs, both among members (I have been in touch this year with two early career mentees via RSA) and at the conference itself (a student of mine was lucky to be matched with my co-seminar leader Carla Della Gatta at ASTR this past fall). We should formalize something, perhaps in time for #shax2019 in DC. #mentorhappyhour (with EANABs = “Equally Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages”)?
  4. Thursday afternoon’s NextGenPlen set the bar high for two reasons that I suspect are interwoven: the five early career speakers presented brilliant and innovative projects in queer theory, theater history, race theory, drag, and transgender rhetoric — and all five kept to time and dazzled the room with precise & powerful language. It made me think that ten minute talks are always better than twenty, because the short form prioritizes direct argument. It also made me eager to watch these young scholars develop their work and change our field!
  5. I suspect that few Native American languages have previously been spoken from the plenary stage at SAA. I found the Friday morning session with Scott Stevens, Lehua Yim, Terence Reilly, and James Lujan powerful and moving. The cultural and global dominance of Shakespeare represents, in a troubling way that the panel helped reveal, a global-cultural settler colonialism, in that the Bard goes everywhere and never leaves. There’s a lot of great scholarship on Global Shakespeares today — but I’d not encountered indigenous responses and approaches at the SAA before. During the panel I remembered my post-undergrad summer of 1989, when I was in Windy Bay, Alaska, laboring in the vain clean up of Exxon Valdez oil and sharing a fishing boat with perhaps two dozen members of an Athabascan community, mostly from English Bay. I’m embarrassed to say that I now can’t remember any of the tiny vocabulary I developed in Athabascan that summer.
  6. The first question we asked in our seminar was “What is Shakespeare?” And — importantly, I think — we supplemented that question with “Do we all have to agree about the answer?” The first question was hard to contain, but I think the answer to the second question must be no. Too much agreement is bad for conversation.

    A substantial pageant

  7. Our seminar’s second major exchange took up another key word in our title: “Who is ‘us'”? We had lots to say again, and our discussion balanced honesty and generosity in ways that made me really happy. For me, I think the best possible answers to both “Shax” and “us” emerge from conscious and cultivated differences: we and our symbolic center must be many things, multitudinous things. It’s through allowing differences in all their discomfort, challenge, and surprise that we navigate our seminars, conferences, and oceans. I also recognize that myriad-mindedness has long been a canonical & perhaps even neoimperial cliche, effectively confining while purportedly open. Does it make sense to ask now for different and tangible differences, rather than just the same old infinite variety? That’s a project I’d like to continue exploring, and I hope the members of the seminar will continue to pursue it also.
  8. The 8 am ocean swim on Saturday morning kept me from the “End of Study,” alas, but my adventure with surfers, seal, and maritime companion Lowell Duckert drew me back to my early ’90s haunts in Venice Beach, from which locale I launched myself into graduate school and the professional life I’m living now. In some sense Venice in those days was my last stop before Shakespeare, the moment at which I found a fork in young adulthood and turned. I loved being back there, and I no doubt bored Lowell by showing him my favorite coffee shop (the Rose Cafe), my old apartment building on Westminster Ave, the sandy bike path on which I roller bladed and where musicians, artists, and hippies were setting up in the early morning mist. We ate breakfast at the Sidewalk Cafe, my old local, where I ate with my neighbors during the eerie dawn just after the Northridge MLK Day earthquake of 1994, which had jolted us out of bed. The electricity was out that morning but the gas stoves worked, so the Cafe made us all omelettes that we paid for later. We watched the sun come up behind the beach and hoped the ground would stop shaking. #anothermetaphor?
  9. What should the SAA become? I loved the “Lena Orlena” pageant and Wendy Wall’s multi-genred luncheon speech. No scholarly gathering makes me feel so at home and so eager to engage with people I don’t know yet as well as old friends and colleagues. “Beyond the Research University,” organized by Sharon O’Dair and Deborah Uman, seemed to me to get close to the heart of the matter. The diverse populations of SAA have much to learn from each other. Highlighting the worlds and labors of colleagues teaching at HBCUs, community colleges, and other non-elite places seems to me an essential step forward. Looking back now through the #shax2018 hashtag reveals outflows of generosity, curiosity, and playfulness. More of this, please! Excess of it!

  10. A surfer of Venice

    My only moment of real discomfort all weekend, other than fatigue, came when I considered the symbolism of matching the roundtable on “Beyond the Research University” against a brilliant research panel on “Slavery, Service, and Fictions of Consent” in the Saturday 11 am slot. What does that choice represent for the SAA as a collective: must we choose between research and beyond-research? I have deep regard & affection for the leadership of SAA and recognize the challenge of too many sessions angling for finite time — but I believe it was a mistake not to make the Futures session, which spoke to the experience of the majority of the SAA membership, a Plenary with no competing sessions. For most of our near half-century as an organization, the SAA has imagined the R1 experience as at least aspirationally normative — but as much as I value humanities research, that’s an error we should have the honesty to stop making. One striking moment in the Roundtable called for the demolition of the “myth of academic meritocracy.” We need that demolition so much — and, if we could do it, or even begin to unravel that foundational myth of academia, it could lead, I believe, to better things, even in hard times.

  11. The Futures session was well-attended, including by the incoming Executive Director, though I was sorry that only a small fraction of the Trustees were there. I don’t mean to blame the people who were next door. I’d previously heard a snippet of one project on early modern slavery that was presented in that session, and I think it’s as brilliant as any new project I know in our field. But that’s why I think it was problematic to force that choice on the membership. A session on the careers that the majority of SAA members present and future live “beyond the research university” should not have to compete for its audience with the fruits of research. The SAA can, does, and should support both cutting-edge research and inquiry into state of our profession. We don’t need to put th0se conversations in competition with each other, even implicitly. Or at least that’s what I think.
  12. I’ll wrap up this overlong blog post with another story of nonhuman intervention. This second encounter will provide an alternative allegory for our gathering. As our pomo architectural sage Fredric Jameson didn’t say, #alwaysallegorize! This one erupted during the “Shax and Us” seminar, just before we opened the conversation to the full room of auditors. It wasn’t a seal in the surf but a cockroach on the table: I don’t know if the bug actually crawled out from beneath a pile of seminar papers, or if that image of reading as unearthing the hidden is just the way I like to imagine all seminars. Carla moved fast when she saw it, and I think she swept the roach onto the floor. I jumped out of my chair, but by the time I got to the other side of the long table the beastie had scuttled away & besides what would I have done with or to it?

  13. One afternoon, as our conversation turned toward anxious visions of futurity, #shax2018 woke to discover that while we sat together around the table our collective conversation had been transformed into a monstrous bug.

  14. #shaxfutures #whatwillwebecome? #metamorphoses!

    Post-immersion selfie

  15. It’s our task to love the nonhuman, to welcome interruptions, and to imagine capaciously in the face of challenges. Which creature best represents Shakespeare as settler colonialist and superlative poet? The graceful seal gliding through Pacific waves, or the impervious bug whose resilient carapace will outlast nuclear and ecological catastrophes? Which do we want our bald playwright hero to represent? #sealorbug?
  16. We know what the answer must be.
  17. Both seal and roach, utopia and dystopia. #forward!
  18. See everyone in DC!

Alan Cumming’s Macbeth

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2013-05-20 17.26.55This One-Scot Show was my end-of-semester treat, and this poster gets it right, if hitting the spot means catching you between the eyes. The production interwove an inventive performance by Cumming that only occasionally slipped into caricature — mainly in his whining, petulant child-king Duncan — against a spare institutional backdrop. The performance opened in silence, as a female doctor and husky male orderly medicated Cumming and changed him into a hospital gown. He clutched a paper bag labelled “Evidence” that will eventually reveal a child’s sweater, later appropriated to play the part of Macduff’s doomed son. Concerned faces on the medical personnel implied that the patient might at any time explode, implode, or scatter his bloody fragments about the stage. (But we know that already from Shakespeare.) The first lines spoken were also the first lines in Macbeth, but they worked doubly, referring both to the Weird Sisters and to the institutional trio — patient, doctor, orderly — who are the only figures on stage:

When shall we three meet again?

Some reviewers found the constant shuttling among different characters distracting, and it clearly confused at least a few of the chattering people sitting near me in the theater. There were some over-flashy touches, like the rapid-towel shifting that switched from Lady Macbeth — torso covered — to Macbeth — naked to the waist — but in general Cumming gave an engaging performance and has a great, clear, Scottish voice. The shifts were disorienting enough to draw attention away from some powerful speechs, especially early in the performance, but others took on new force:

Is this a dagger which I see before me?

photo (1)The backdrop of mental illness made the hero somewhat less than awe-ful in both the ethical and purely theatrical senses. I can’t agree with Ron Rosenbaum that this production provided unique insight into the nature of evil, but by performing the play as a kind of auto-investigation, self-generated therapy or protest against therapeutic invasion, it does show off the paranoid closeness of perhaps Shakespeare’s most hero-centric play. The super-warrior who unseams his enemies from the nave to the chops isn’t much in evidence, but Cumming’s mad, obsessed figure, dragging himself from bed to bathtub to sink, always aware of the overlooking eyes of his attendants and their three video camera-witches, provided menace and danger. He also became, perhaps because he’s the only person to look at much of the time, powerfully sympathetic, in a slightly disjointed, almost Beckettian way.2013-05-20 17.26.41

It will have blood, they say. Blood will have blood.

The most powerful prop on stage was a large doll, dressed in pink, that stood for baby-prince Malcolm, named heir to boy-king Duncan. Without engaging over-much in extra-textual speculations of the sort mocked in the famous essay, “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” I kept thinking that the emotional core of this production wasn’t so much vaulting ambition or shared lust for power but a fundamental rage against the Child and the futurity that children represent. (Does Lee Edelman talk about Macbeth in No Future? He did recently write a great essay on Hamlet.)  When the doll gets propped up on the wheelchair-throne for the final tableau, it’s hard not to feel that Macbeth’s death — the conflict with Macduff ends with “him” drowned in the bathtub, where Macduff’s sweater-son had also been immersed — marks the triumph of an infant’s future over an adult’s present.

How does your patient, doctor?

Addressed to the female doctor who has returned to the stage, this line, like the performance’s opening line, works both within the theatrical frame and in Shakespeare’s play. It also edges toward the death of Lady Macbeth, often the emotional high point of the play. The last great Macbeth I saw, by Cheek by Jowl in 2011, had me wanting a production of just the love story, with no one on stage but Him and Her. Cumming’s performance of the marriage was quite strong — he did slightly overdo some of the sexual impersonation jokes when Lady Macbeth read her letter in the bath, and the inventive staging of her seducing her husband into the murder seemed to rely on a sophomoric reading of the line, “Screw your courage to the sticking point.” The central loss or crime or catastrophe in the ambiguous frame story seemed to involve a child, but Lady Macbeth, and the concerned, sympathetic female doctor, were somehow at the heart of it too.

…full of sound and fury, / Signifying…signifying…signifying…nothing.

Certain lines in Shakespeare are too over-familiar to be performed easily. At times Cumming’s soliloquies, in particular, suffered from their clear, direct enunciation: we know the words already, I wanted to say, what else can you do? (Sometimes I think I’m not the intended audience for Shakespeare on Broadway.) Probably the most interesting twist on a canonical phrase was Cumming’s triple-take on what follows sound and fury. He struggled and stopped three times before getting to “nothing,” as if he couldn’t quite get through it, couldn’t quite accept his wife’s off-stage death, his pronouncement of an absurdist universe, the rounding close of the play itself. What comes before nothing?

2013-05-20 17.27.10In the end Cumming’s production stayed, of necessity, within one head. It was propelled by rage of the present against the future, the desire never to cede the stage, not to be displaced —

If it ’twere done, when ’tis done, ’twere well

It were done quickly…

We watched on the video feed as the hero held himself underwater in the bath where young Macduff had been drowned. He couldn’t hold out, and emerged with a splash. Exhausted, avoiding the enthroned doll at center stage, he dragged himself back to his hospital bed. He looked up at the doctor.

When shall we three meet again?

A great performance of the theatrical “now,” packed into a scant 100 minutes. The sun was going down as I left the Barrymore Theater.

Three Nows for Temporal Thinking

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This post has been hanging around half-finished since the periodization kerfluffle some time ago. I’ll post it now as a place-holder for more thinking about that slipperiest of temporal modifiers, “now.” As in, right now, exactly now, this particular time — but that just-spoken now is gone & then, not now anymore.

Here are three quick literary markers (hatches?) for thinking the now —

1. Iago’s “now, now, very now” — an erotic, off-stage and unforgettable time, never visible but always happening. Rounding out the familiar line — “An old black ram…” — leads now down so many pathways of human errancy: sex, race, animals, the struggle for dominance…

2. Hardy’s world historical “Now!” from “The Convergence of the Twain”: “Till the Spinner of the Years / Said “Now!” And each one hears, / And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.”

3. Borges’s polytemporal “now” from “The Garden of the Forking Paths”: “Then I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that really is happening is happening to me…” (Labyrinths 20)

 

King Lear by Wu Hsing-Kuo

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I missed the Shakespeare Olympiad in London this summer, but saw  Wu Hsing-Kuo’s one-man Chinese opera version of King Lear last night — pretty amazing.

Wu, a trained master of Chinese opera who has broken with tradition by staging Western literary classics, made Lear into a vehicle for psychodrama, leaving much of the play’s action to the side and embracing the internal dilemma of Lear as character. As Alex Huang oberserves in an excellent essay on Wu’s career,

The tension between father and child in King Lear is turned into an allegory about Wu’s uneasy relationship with his jingju [Beijing opera] master.

Act 1, “The Play,” starts and ends in storm. I always think of these scenes as the heart of the play, but it was great to cut directly to it, to see the rest of the place as architecture surrounding this basic confrontation of human body with unfriendly elements. Wu’s Lear engages himself, his elaborate costume, his long white beard, and his world in an apparently vain attempt to connect. It’s Shakespeare as Beckett — interesting the Wu has also performed “Waiting for Godot” — and it’s both intense and moving.

Act 2, “Playing,” followed a 20 min intermission with manic energy: Wu starts as the Fool then becomes Lear’s dog (!), followed by Kent, Lear, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, the blinded Gloucester, Edmund, and the “mad” Edgar, who calls himself, in one of a few English words spoken to comic effect, “Tom.” Particularly powerful as the evil sisters and as Gloucester seeking the cliffs of Dover, Wu’s physical inventiveness buoyed this longer act, constantly reinventing himself and his surroundings. His Gloucester climbed atop a large rock formation at the climax of this scene — the rocks had been half-broken human statues in Act 1 before they had fallen — and the roar of the ocean made this scene seem less invented, less acted, than it sometimes does on stage.

Act 3, “A Player,” features Wu playing himself, as the super-titles and program notes reveal. He’s still reconnizably King Lear, but filtered through Wu’s own struggles with his master, his artistic career, and perhaps — I’m not certain about this, or exactly what it amounts to– about the relationship between Chinese and English dramatic traditions. He performs no other characters, but when he walks on stage carrying the elaborate costume he wore in Act 1 in his arms, it’s hard not to thing of the old man bearing his daughter’s body.

I left thinking about Taiwan as an especially fraught cultural location, caught between China and a global world that has become increasingly, since Wu and  his colleagues started the Contemporary Legend Theater in 1986, Anglophone. Alex Huang reads Wu’s Lear — which apparently also goes under the title, Li Er zai ci [Lear Is Here], though the program last night, at New Haven’s Festival of Arts and Ideas, didn’t mention that — as a “local” rather than “global” production. I agree with his focus on the intimacy of the performance, the way Wu’s Lear burrows down into internal questions, so much that (for me at least) I felt the performance was richest in Acts 1 and 3, when he wasn’t switching between characters but was just the mad old king / Chinese Shakespearean actor, inviting the audience to see him try to work himself out.

The dialogue, spoken in Chinese but also projected with English translation on two screens flanking the stage, was largely — 2/3? — straight translations from the play, but an extended poetic riff on things that the self does to itself — I hate myself / I love myself / I forget myself / I imagine myself… — had the feeling of a strong distorting reading of the play rather than a production of it.

I’ll be thinking about Wu Hsing-Kuo the next time I see anyone else play this role.

This sort of thing isn’t for everyone, though the house was pretty full last night.  “I would never,” said Olivia when I told her where I was going, “see a play with only one Chinese character.” Then she smiled to make sure I understood her joke, about “characters” being units of Chinese writing as well as people. Clever girl.

Romeo and Juliet in CT

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I’ll see this one twice this summer. Once tonight in Greenwich with Olivia and my colleague Lee Ann Brown and her daughter Miranda — possible that Olivia may convince me to decamp at halftime, either b/c she needs her 9-year old sleep or because the play’s so much happier without Acts 4 and 5.

Then again only July 18 with my summer Shakespeare class in Rowaytan.

Looking forward to it!

Coriolanus

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He’s a hard guy to look at close up.  Ralph Fiennes’s presentation of Caius Marcius Coriolanus hits with murderous intensity.  He is, as his make-up artists worked hard to show us, a “thing of blood.”

Transposing the Roman Republic to a faux-Bosnian contemporary warzone works surprisingly well, with the scruffy citizens as a rebelious mob, the Tribunes as Party Bosses, and Coriolanus and his fellow aristocrats as well-dressed generals in battle fatigues and bespoke suits.

Much of the film, esp. the early scenes in Corioles, is close-up action following the hero as warrior, heavily burdened by 21st-century battle gear, but still fighting intimate, hand to hand battles.  When he comes out of the mortal gates of the city, alone and covered with blood, it’s easy to see why he carried the day.

Fiennes is brilliant, and his movie-star face beneath make-up scarring and lots of blood communicates both Coriolanus’s powerful public inhibitions — the general seems physically unable to play to the crowd — and also his over-powerful heroic charisma.  He cannot be consul, he must be consul — and then suddenly he’s not.

The other performance that resonated was Vanessa Redgrave as Volumnia.  I’m not sure she hit the final confrontation as powerfully as she might have — the famous pause, “holds her by the hand, silent,” wasn’t quite as wrenching as it might have been — but in the early scenes her palpable combination of pride, blood-lust, and maternal intimacy was gorgeous and hard to watch.  “He is wounded,” she said with a sly smile that you almost felt you weren’t supposed to see, “I thank the gods for it.”  The production cut my favorite over the top line about the breasts of Hecuba and Hector’s Achilles-split skull, but the wolf mother’s brutal pride and terrible grip on her son was wonderfully visual.

But the hero’s isolation was the main visual point.  He was a general with no allies, no connection to family or country or troops.  Even the love-fight with Aufidius was never, in this version, an attraction of near equals, but instead a lonely dragon’s futile attempt to find someone in the world as violent as powerful as him.

I saw a little trace of Voldemort only once, in the film’s final moments when, after Coriolanus has betrayed his Volscian allies and saved Rome, Aufidius’s men murder the Roman on a deserted road.  The hero opens his moth spits his final words like the Dark Lord taunting Harry —

Alone I did it.  Boy!

As good a modern Shakespeare film as I’ve seen in a while.  

“Half-fish, half-flesh”: The Poetics of Dolphins

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I’m reading copy proofs today for a forthcoming article on dolphins in the early modern imagination.  It’ll be out fairly soon in The Indistinct Human, a great-looking collection edited by Jean Feerick and Vin Nardizzi.  I have some fun with Thomas Browne, Shakespeare, Lucian, Ovid, William Diaper, Thomas Pynchon, and a few others.

My favorite part was digging into the classical origin story, in which the first dolphins had been human pirates, transformed by the child-god Bacchus after they seemed ready to kidnap him.  Pirates and dolphins, with their frightening or happy faces, present inverse visions of the mammal-ocean relationship.

I also enjoyed writing the Mason & Dixon part —

To draw out the contemporary relevance of this human-dolphin hybrid, I’ll introduce each of the five remaining sections with an excerpt from a much more recent literary vision of humanity living intimately with the ocean, Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern historical novel, Mason & Dixon (1997).    My point in directing attention to an episode in the novel in which the eponymous cartographers inscribe a Line across the Atlantic where they eventually settle in quasi-oceanic space is to show how enticing and problematic the human-ocean boundary remains.  This episode of Mason & Dixon presents a postmodern literary iteration of the basic human desire to engage oceanic space that underwrites early modern representations of dolphins.  Pynchon’s novel uses imagined technology, rather than mammalian bodies, to create its utopian solution, but Pynchon’s portrayal of human life in direct, transformative contact with the deep reveals the continuing urgency of the fantasy dolphins represented in the early modern period and before.  In conclusion I shall bring Pynchon’s ocean-crossing Line together with early modern dolphin-humans to speculate about the changing relationship between technological utopianism and natural difference in visions of maritime humanity.

Still harping on that Aquaman Fantasy…

Titus at PublicLab

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An intense, high-spirited night last night at the Public.  Michael Sexton’s production of “Titus” was bloody bloody and lots of fun.  They really nailed the play’s strange combination of hyper-melodrama and almost-playfulness, leading up to an over-the-top finale at the final banquet, complete with (actual) buckets of blood, cartoon post-it notes, and a food-fight between Titus and Tamora with mushy pieces of pie.

In the chaos, Titus’s recipe almost sounded simple, a straightforward and literal way of making sense out of disorder —

Let me grind their bones to powder small,

And with this hateful liquor temper it,

And in that paste let their vile heads be bak’d.  (5.2.197-200)

Several performances stood out in a strong cast.  Jacob Fishel as Saturninus and Jennifer Ikeda as Lavina were both veterans of Red Bull’s brilliant Women beware Women in 2009, a production that gets better each time I remember it.  (I think about the old joke about Juan Rulfo, author of Pedro Paramo, whose reputation supposedly grew with each new novel he didn’t write.)  Fishe’ls fey Saturninus made me want a bigger part for him next time. Ikeda’s mute presence during Marcus’s interminable Ovidian lament upon discovering her maimed (“Alas, a crimson river of warm blood, / Like to a bubbling fountain…” 2.4.11-57) made a devastating critique of poetic fancies.

Ron Cephas Jones, who I thought did a decidedly mixed job as Caliban and Charles the wrestler in the Bridge Project’s As You Like It / Tempest double bill a few years ago, was a great Aaron: smart, sexy, charismatic , and powerful.  Strung up by Lucius and awaiting execution, he rained brags down on his captors’ heads —

Even now I curse the day — and yet I think

Few come within compass of my curse —

Wherein I did not do some notorious ill… (5.1.125-7)

Rob Campbell’s Lucius and Stephanie Roth Haberle’s Tamora were also strong, but I’m ambivalent about Jay O. Sanders as Titus.  He’s big and imposing, with a bear-ish presence that filled up the stage in army camo during the first scene — but too often, esp in the opening parts of the play, his bear was more teddy than grizzly.    He hit his stride after losing his mind, and in some ways the part felt more Lear-like and aged than I might have liked.  He made a compelling mad father, but less of a conquering general.  “I am the sea,” he claims when trumpeting his grief — but he didn’t quite get there, at least not for me.  The bad guys — Aaron, Saturninus, Tamora — had the flash in this production.

The lab-budget staging was great: a stack of maybe 3 dozen 8 x 4 plyboard sheets were moved, illustrated, and shuffled around to create almost everything — late in the action they were tables, kitchen counters, and an executioner’s board, earlier they had been thrones and gravestones and pits and caves.  I especially loved watching Frank Dolce, who played the boys’ parts, draw symbolic cartoons — birds, crowns, swords — on wood and on post-it notes, and Lavina’s mouth-held drawings in act 5 extended this conceit.

I also had the strange experience of slightly mis-hearing Aaron’s line about surprising Lavinia in the woods — I heard “The woods are roofless, dreadful, deaf, and dull,” but the line reads “ruthless” — and thinking Robert Frost.  Not sure what to make of that.

Early Modern Theatricality at Rutgers

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I caught the last half of a lively two-day conference at Rutgers last Friday.  Early Modern Theatricality in the 21st Century, organized by Henry Turner, brought an international crew together to put pressure on “theatricality.”   The organizing gambit was 10-minute papers and one-word titles, from “now” (Scott Maisano) to “formactions” (Simon Palfrey)  to “festivity” (Erika Lim) and “indecorum” (Ellen MacKay), plus a few dozen others.  I missed the early sessions, at which Henry seems to have entertained the crowd with multiple dramatic readings of the conference’s one-paragraph blurb, but caught the last 13 speakers in 2 sessions.

A couple things struck me.  Most of all was the concentrated effort to expand  theatricality’s range, to move this concept away from familiar haunts.  I missed Peter Womack’s “Offstage,” but many of the talks gestured beyond the wooden O to street festivals or Parliament or philosophy.  Even when we stayed on or near the stage, we often lurked at the margins, or at the borders between players and audience.

The presentations also collectively showed how little current criticism defines early modern drama as consubstantial with Shakespeare.  Will made some appearances, but his plays were part of a group and a broad culture of theatrical practice.  Perhaps the signature moment of this tendency came when Mike Witmore semi-apologized for drawing all the examples in his talk about “eventuality” from the final moments of Shakespeare’s romances, “because of where I work.”

Some familiar border skirmishes between history and literary habits showed themselves in a cluster of talks by Peter Lake (“Import”), Chris Kyle (“Parliament”) and Blair Hoxby (“Passions”), but in general the anachronism police were not in evidence.  Everyone seemed happy to think in divided chronologies, standing astride the 21st and 16th-17th centuries.  “Theatricality,” of course, is abstract enough to draw from both periods, w/o the special difficulties of a 19c term such as “ecology.”

I was left mulling about limits and senses of ending.  One of the things I love about going to the theater is that it ends, the curtain closes, and we get to go home.  If we invest our critical energies in pushing theatricality offstage, might we risk attenuating the pleasures of closure?  Where might theatricality end?  There is a significant performative aspect to all human interactions, but might the difference between theatricality and performativity be that theatricality is a sub-set, a special case in which a certain space and time gets marked off as different, temporary, luminous?  I’m tempted to think so.

We ran out of time before I could ask whatever half-phrased version of that question I was trying to squeeze in, but Scott Maisano’s conference-ending comment also pointed toward the limit or borders of the theatrical transaction.  Scott observed that Britomart’s ordeal in the House of Busirane (FQ III.12) contains virtually all the features of theatricality the conference had raised — but, as Scott did not polemically conclude, can a poetic epic really be theatrical?  Mike Witmore had also framed his talk by describing the pleasurable and bewildering experience of teaching Heliodorus to undergrads — but when I chatted with him about that at the break, he suggested that the scene in the Ethiopian court was an ekphrasis of the theater, & thus, perhaps, about theatricality even if not presented on stage.

Clearly both Spenser and Heliodorus are thinking hard about theatricality– but surely these moments are not theatrical is the same sense as The Winter’s Tale or the Shoemaker’s Holiday or a Lord Mayor’s show or even a session of Parliament?  Don’t we need at least two real human bodies in a particular shared space and time to have theatricality?

Poetic epics and prose romances can be theatrical, or meta-theatrical, or engage in a critique of theatricality.  But I suspect that it might be worth drawing a distinction between a performative enactment in an at least partially marked-off time and space, and a textual product like a poem or a prose fiction.  There are lots kinds of of overlap and exchanges between page and stage, and artifacts like a film or a digital audio file might blur these lines, since they are artifacts that contain traces of “real” bodies.  The long tradition of oral recitation as a primary means of transmitting prose texts — the “fair ladies” in Sidney’s Arcadia — also pushes these two modes together.  But bodies and words still might be distinguishable from words alone.