Christopher L. Bennett's Blog, page 3

Another technology upgrade

Back in November, I posted about the installation of a fiber optic network in my apartment building, which didn’t extend to actually bringing the fiber into the apartments and hooking it up, since that was for the individual providers to take care of. I was left waiting to see what the next step would be, and it finally came when my phone/internet provider sent me e-mails announcing that they were going to discontinue use of the old copper phone lines and that I had to schedule a mandatory upgrade. I don’t trust links in e-mails, so even though the mails looked real enough, I waited to make my appointment until I got a print letter in the mail confirming it.

Yesterday was the big day. A couple of days earlier, they’d sent me a permission slip to print out and get the building manager to sign, since the tech would need permission to drill through the wall and such. I was pleased that the technician was on time, more or less, but it took several hours for him to get everything sorted out, including getting the managers to unlock the utility room, figuring out where the optical distribution hub was outside and how to hook up to it, etc. (It turned out that he didn’t need the signed permission slip after all, which might be why the manager acted as if she’d never seen one before.) As I expected, he had to drill through nine inches of wall to string the fiber in from outside, but that wasn’t nearly as noisy as the initial installation in November had been, which was a relief.

Watching the procedure was interesting. At one point, he taped the very thin fiber to a wooden rod to help him thread it through the hole, like a sewing needle writ large. (And then he accidentally pulled the fiber out and had to string it through again, which often happens to me in my infrequent attempts at sewing on lost buttons and such.) To attach the new fiber to the old, and then to the plug for the new wall unit, he had a machine that apparently lined up the fiber ends and fused them together, since it has to be optically clear. It had a screen that appeared to show a microscopic view of the fiber ends to ensure they were aligned and clean. He had a flexible, adhesive-backed channel that he stuck to the wall as a guide for the fiber. At first, I thought it was just double-sided tape that the fiber was stuck to, but on closer inspection, I see it’s got sort of a U-shaped cross section and the fiber is protected inside the central groove. That makes it feel a little less fragile.

Once the fiber was in place, the tech attached a big white box to my wall (I had to partially empty and move the bookcase by my desk so he could get in there); my landline phone and the new modem were then plugged into it. The modem is simply a white box, featureless except for the rear ports and the brand name, with a single white LED that shines through the plastic when it’s powered on. It’s quite different from my old modem with its multiple status lights; this time, the status lights are on the wall box. (Also, is the paradigm for tech design swinging back from black plastic to white plastic again? My old modem was black, as are pretty much all my devices except my new laptop, which is silver.)

The tech had me download a phone app with which I assigned my network name and password; fortunately he gave me enough advance warning that I had time to think of a password, something I hate doing. He had some trouble with the provider’s system not letting him scan in the new devices and register them as active, but they eventually went through, at which point the provider switched over my number to the new network so that the other phone I still had plugged into the copper line went dead. (So now I no longer have a landline in my bathroom in case of emergencies; I’ll just have to rely on my cell. Also, the fiber doesn’t provide power to the phone line the way the copper would. I’ve got both new devices plugged into the battery-backup side of my power strip, though I don’t know if that will be sufficient to maintain service in a power outage.)

At first, I tried putting the modem on my computer desk behind the monitor, but I found out pretty soon that the modem gets rather hot. So I decided to put it on top of the same cooling-fan platform that my mini-PC rests on. The wooden panel on the back of the computer desk made it tricky to move the modem without unplugging it, but I managed to lower it slowly by its cords until it touched gently down on the floor, whereupon I could easily lift it to the fan platform. It still feels warm to the touch, but mildly so compared to how it felt atop the desk. The cooling fan runs constantly even when the PC is off, which I considered a power-wasting annoyance before (it didn’t do that when it was attached to my old laptop), but now I’m grateful for it, since the modem’s active 24/7. (At the same time, I finally got around to swapping out my old USB hub that had to be plugged into an outlet for the one my sister sent me that doesn’t, so I freed up a space on my power strip.)

With the copper line now shut down, and the new fiber line coming in right next to my desk, I could finally get rid of the realllllly long phone cords I had looping around the edges of the room to get to the inconveniently positioned phone/internet jack in the hallway, and I no longer have to have the modem sitting on a bookshelf partway between the desk and the wall jack. I was glad to get rid of those, and I’m tempted to find something decorative that I can hang over the now-useless jack.

As for the new fiber internet service, it works well so far. Logging in my devices proved easy, and it turned out I didn’t need to log in my PC because it’s connected directly by ethernet cable instead of wifi, which the tech confirmed is faster. Some things on my PC, phone, and TV are distinctly faster now, but other things aren’t as fast as I expected, so I assume those must be slowdowns due to something other than connection speed, which registers in a speed test as hundreds of times faster than before. This morning, the Hulu app on my TV gave me an error message saying it couldn’t find my data and to check my network connection, but that was after the app loaded much faster than it usually has before, and I haven’t seen that message before. It might have had more to do with the TV not yet having fully loaded its own software, or something — an internal TV issue rather than a connection issue. Shows on Hulu also have higher image quality right from the start, when before they started off at lower resolution for the first few moments or so.

–

In other news, I reported last time that my car battery had died in the cold. I took it into the garage last week, and they tested it and told me that it had just been drained and would work fine once they recharged it. But the next time I tried to drive it, just a few days later, it was dead again. So I made an appointment for a replacement battery, which was for today. (I almost made it for yesterday until I remembered the tech was coming that day.)

Last week, I had trouble getting the car to start with my portable jumpstarter battery pack, but I finally got it. This morning, I had comparable trouble, and after multiple attempts where it didn’t quite turn over, I noticed to my alarm that the jump battery pack was bulging outward, which I understand to be an explosion hazard. So I abandoned my attempts. Fortunately, there were a couple of people waiting in their cars nearby (one was waiting to pick up a friend, I don’t know about the other), and I was able to get some help getting a jumpstart. The first person I asked had a weak battery of his own and thus had to decline, and the second person was willing to help but had never jumped a car before. Luckily, the friend he was waiting for arrived and turned out to know a lot about cars, so he got us sorted out. Once I got to the garage, I asked them to safely dispose of the bulging battery pack (though I still have the mini-jumper cable that plugged into it, which is probably useless to me now because it can only plug into a pack of that design). It took them only minutes to swap out the car battery for a fresh one while I waited. Once I got home, I ordered a new jumpstarter pack online. I decided to shop for a more expensive, hopefully better-quality model (the old model doesn’t seem to be available anymore anyway), but fortunately I found one at a 50% discount, so it only cost a little more than the old one.

Before that, though, I had a bit of a scare. I found I couldn’t turn on the alarm with my key fob, and then couldn’t unlock the doors with it. Oh, no — was the new battery defective? Did my alternator fail? But when I unlocked the door manually and tried it, the engine went on fine, and what’s more, I had enabled the alarm after all, even though I couldn’t get the confirming horn beep. Apparently my fob battery just died between the first and second pushes of the lock button. So I’ve had to replace three batteries associated with my car on the same day — the actual car battery, the jump battery pack, and the fob battery. It’s a battery of batteries!

I have a new laptop

Well, I have a newer laptop now, but it’s a used laptop, a hand-me-down from my sister and brother-in-law in Seattle. When I mentioned in my previous post that I was planning to look for a new laptop, I idly thought, “Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if a friend or relative offered me a used laptop?” But I was quite pleasantly surprised when that actually happened, so thanks to Morgan and Larry.

This laptop is a Microsoft Surface 4 with touchscreen capability, significantly thinner and lighter than my old one, since it doesn’t have a DVD drive and uses a solid-state hard drive. But it’s a significantly higher-end model than I probably would’ve bought for myself. It’s also much faster than the old one, which I was surprised to realize I’ve had for ten years, and which was refurbished to begin with, so I guess I was way behind the curve. This is also the first non-HP laptop I’ve had in at least 20 years — in fact, by coincidence, it arrived in the mail exactly 20 years to the day after my purchase of the first of my past 3 consecutive HP laptops. (I don’t remember what laptop, if any, I owned before that one.)

I took my time loading the software, since I have no urgent need for it, and I hit some frustrating snags getting my e-mail client set up on the laptop, so I took a couple of days’ break from it to destress before returning to the process. But the rest went smoothly, and now I’ve gotten it mostly set up the way I want it. One thing I haven’t quite figured out, though, is how to get my two computers to read each other’s files. They can only seem to see each other’s “Public” folders, which don’t have anything in them.

My former laptop used to be my primary computer, hooked up to my desktop monitor and keyboard, but since I got my mini-PC a year and a half ago, I haven’t used my laptop for much of anything except during my trip to Shore Leave and during internet outages when I had to take it to the library. It was just too slow and cumbersome to be worth doing much more with. Now that I have a faster, lighter laptop, I might try getting back into my old habits of writing on the balcony or on the nearby university campus, or just on my couch or in the bedroom to get a change of scenery. It’s a bit small for the laptop pouch in my backpack, but the pouch seems to fit it snugly enough between my back and the weight of the pack’s other contents, which might be adequate for walks to campus. But my siblings sent the original box along too, and that fits perfectly into the backpack’s laptop pouch, if a bit snugly. So I might use that for car trips. For now, I’m storing it in my backpack as I did with my previous laptop. It remains to be seen how often I’ll use it at home.

They also sent a few more items they didn’t need, including a spare power cable, an unfolding laptop stand (which I couldn’t figure out how to use until I found a similar one online), a touchscreen stylus (which I haven’t used on the laptop yet but has proved useful for typing on my phone), a USB hub, and a laptop docking station, i.e. a box that has all the different connectors that modern laptops have sacrificed for lightness. Unfortunately, the docking station’s old enough that it doesn’t have an HDMI port for my desk monitor. One reason I wanted a laptop was as a backup in case my desktop mini-PC needed repair, so I was hoping I’d be able to connect my monitor and keyboard to it if need be. But to do that, it looks like I’d need to buy a USB-to-HDMI adapter. At least those apparently don’t cost much.

–

Meanwhile, our recent cold snap in Cincinnati appears to have killed my car battery. I guess the solar trickle charger can keep it from running dry, but can’t protect it from the cold. The solar panel being buried under 5 inches of snow for several days probably didn’t help. I found out the battery was dead when I tried to go to a vaccination appointment, but fortunately it was close enough that I could walk there and only be 15-20 minutes late. Luckily it was warm enough that the unshoveled sidewalks were slushy rather than slick. (But seriously, homeowners, please shovel your front walks!) Unfortunately, it’s continued to be really cold since, so I’ll probably have to wait until it warms up a bit to take my car in for a new battery, since I’d have to walk home from the garage and then back when it was ready. I’m wondering if there’s anyone that makes house calls to change batteries in situ, but that might cost extra.

Looking back on 2024: a quietly productive year

As 2024 comes to a close, I realize that, due to the unfortunate delays in completing the cover art for Aleyara’s Descent and Other Stories, my only professionally published work in 2024 has been the Star Trek Adventures campaign Synthetic Diplomacy, plus its associated essay (yes, I get paid for those). My only fiction publication on my Patreon, “High and Flighty,” doesn’t even count as a “real” publication, since it’s more by way of a “deleted scene,” an abandoned early draft of concepts I used differently in my professional fiction — and since my Patreon fiction audience is in the single digits (come on, folks, it’s only three bucks a month). Otherwise, my published output this year has consisted only of reviews. My Patreon review series this year have included the latter 3/5 of my comprehensive Alien Nation revisit (including every film, episode, comic, and novel); rewatches of two superhero comedy series, Stephen J. Cannell’s The Greatest American Hero and Javier Grillo-Marxuach’s The Middleman (covering both TV and comics for the latter); and my recently-started rewatch series of the classic British space adventure drama Blake’s 7. Also, here on Written Worlds, I did a comprehensive Shakespeare binge (if you can call something that takes 7 months a binge) including the entire BBC Television Shakespeare, finally achieving one of my lifetime goals.

So I’ve earned very little money from writing this year, mostly small amounts from Patreon, royalties, book sales from the Shore Leave convention, and the Aleyara’s Descent Kickstarter. I did no contracted writing this year, although I did write a pitch for a licensed project that I hope will be approved. I had pitched a couple of short story ideas to the Star Trek Explorer magazine before this year, but unfortunately the magazine was cancelled before my pitches could be approved. But it’s okay, because I’m still living comfortably on the surprisingly large inheritance I got from my late Uncle Clarence. So I’ve been free to extend my semi-voluntary sabbatical and continue focusing on my original writing. In addition to writing that licensed pitch and revising and compiling the stories in Aleyara’s Descent, I’ve completed the Troubleshooter novel I was working on last year, and have written two novellas, the first of which I’ve submitted and am hoping to get a response on soon. If it sells, it will be my first original novella-length sale.

Indeed, I now have two new Troubleshooter novels in manuscript. A couple of years ago, I wrote a spec script for an original Troubleshooter graphic novel, set after Only Superhuman and “Conventional Powers” but before “Legacy Hero” (my Patreon story about to be reprinted in Aleyara’s Descent). The comic script was adapted from an outline for a potential second prose novel, streamlined to fit the format. I submitted it to a colleague who works in comics, but there hasn’t been any progress on getting it published.

So in October, it struck me — why not turn it back into a novel? I liked the idea of doing a canonical comics-exclusive Troubleshooter book, but I realized I couldn’t guarantee it would be published as a comic, and that if it were, it wouldn’t hurt (and might even help sales) to have both prose and comics versions of the same story. Moreover, I’ve been thinking of pitching a novel to agents in hopes of finally landing representation, and I realized the graphic novel would probably work better than the other novel as a standalone tale introducing the universe and characters to new readers — or to agents. After all, I did intend it to be my comics debut, so it had to be accessible to a new audience. On the other hand, its story does connect to conceptual and character threads from elsewhere in my work, so it makes sense to incorporate it fully into the prose publishing sequence.

In addition, since this was mostly a process of reformatting the existing scenes and interpolating new scenes and narration, it allowed me to generate a new novel in less than two months, nearly half of which was spent thinking up new scenes and subplots to pad it to novel length. Having two complete, consecutive Troubleshooter novels to pitch to agents might improve my chances. (Although I’m way out of practice at querying agents, and it looks to me like there are some new online tools that have something to do with that, so I’ll have to look into that. If anyone reading this has tips about agent-hunting, I’d appreciate hearing them.)

I’m not giving up on getting the graphic novel published, though. I’ve tried to make sure that the novel remains entirely consistent with the comic, and vice-versa. They have their differences; the novel has substantially more content, while omitting some bits from the comic or replacing visual montages with dialogue conveying approximately the same information. Some scenes are longer in the novel, but sometimes it worked better to omit expository dialogue at the start of a comics scene and convey it through narration instead. My goal is to create two versions that are equally canonical and mutually consistent where they overlap, but differing in emphasis, so each will offer something new to those who’ve read the other.

The biggest changes I’ve had to make were to the flashback segments. In the original novel outline, these were intended as whole chapters from the perspective of various Troubleshooters, but in the comic script, I streamlined the flashbacks to present-day first-person narration illustrated by visual flashback images, occasionally cutting back to the present for some dialogue between storyteller and listener. There’s even one flashback that switches narrators midway through, giving the same story from two sides. But for the novel, I’ve expanded the flashbacks into (nearly) full chapters as originally intended, and I decided it was best to stick with third person. Although I do still have a couple of places where I cut back to the present in mid-story.

This is the reverse of a process I attempted a few decades back with my first stab at an Emerald Blair novel, entitled simply Troubleshooter. I had ambitions of doing an ongoing original comic series in parallel with the novels I hoped to do, and thus I adapted the spec novel into four double-length comic scripts, again attempting to keep the two versions exactly consistent with each other where they overlapped, while omitting some novel scenes and adding some new comic-exclusive material more suited to the format.

Of course, if both versions do get published, there’s no guarantee I could keep them completely consistent, since they’d both have editing processes that might change things, and some details might get lost in the shuffle. If they were in the works at roughly the same time, the odds of inconsistency would increase, since one version might be finalized before a change in the other could be incorporated. In the event of inconsistency, the prose novel would presumably take canonical precedence, although any comic elements not contradicted by the novel could be regarded as accurate. At the very least, I’d love to get the comic published so that I could establish visual designs for the characters, costumes, tech, and world.

Anyway, I’m just glad I realized this was a way to add another novel to my roster of spec manuscripts, and to do so quickly, getting it out of the way by the end of the year (well, nearly, since I still have to do a bit more editing and put together a pitch packet) and clearing the board for whatever projects come next year. Hopefully that will include the licensed novel I pitched, or some other contract work, since I can’t live off my inheritance forever. I also have a couple more original ideas — one novel, one novella — in tentative outline stages, though both need refinement before I can write them.

I’ve realized that, beyond those two remaining things, I don’t have much of anything specific planned out for the Arachne-Troubleshooter Universe, other than a few tentative story ideas. I’ve been checking things off my long-term to-do list, and once I get them done, I’ll finally be free to think about what comes next. But I only have vague ideas for that, since it’s taken me so long to get through the existing stuff. It’s both liberating and intimidating. Although I do have one big idea for a whole new universe, one where I have the worldbuilding worked out but have been stalled on specific plot ideas. Maybe I’ll finally get to apply myself to working that out at last.

–

Otherwise, this has been a quiet year for me, solitary but fairly comfortable, since I’ve bought a number of items to make my standard of living incrementally better, including a solar battery tender for my car, long-overdue new eyeglasses, a robot vacuum cleaner, and a smart TV. (I still have the slightly flawed desktop mini-PC, but I’ve learned I can mostly avoid its tendency to freeze when left idle too long by turning on the screen saver so it stays active.) Most recently, I finally found some blackout curtains for my odd-sized bedroom window (which is directly across the street from a very bright safety light that illuminates the front of my building). For two decades, I’ve just used an old blanket clipped to the curtain rod, reaching up to pull it down every night and stuff it back up behind the rod every morning. I got so used to the habit that it was only recently that I remembered my long-abandoned search for proper blackout curtains and searched for some online. I wasn’t sure what the right size was, but the ones I picked are just about the perfect size and work quite well.

I’ve also been planning to buy a new laptop, but I’ve been busy with writing and I don’t really need a laptop except on my Shore Leave trips. I’ll probably proceed with that soon, though.

So that’s about it for a year that’s been outwardly very quiet but inwardly pretty eventful. As for next year, Aleyara’s Descent and Other Stories will hopefully come out quite soon, and Arachne’s Legacy is still slated for publication in 2025 if things go as planned. I’ve got those couple of things I’m hoping to get contracts for soon, which would probably come out next year if they sell at all. And with any luck my agent search will bear fruit. I’ve enjoyed the chance to catch up on so much original writing, but I’d really like this to be the last year where I have so little published output. I need to build up my audience again.

Finishing up my Shakespeare survey

The BBC Television Shakespeare, which I’ve just completed watching, was an essentially comprehensive collection of all William Shakespeare’s plays, but it has a couple of omissions by modern standards. The series excluded a play that multiple sources already counted as part of Shakespeare’s canon at the time — The Two Noble Kinsmen, credited to John Fletcher and Shakespeare, with scholars believing the majority to be Fletcher’s work. Another play that’s only begun to be counted since the 1990s is King Edward III, believed to be an early collaboration that’s as much as 40% the Bard’s work. Shakespeare is also believed to have added a few pages to the anonymous play Sir Thomas More, and scholars have recently concluded that Shakespeare added a few hundred lines to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. Then there’s Cardenio, a lost Fletcher/Shakespeare collaboration based on a portion of Don Quixote, which is recorded as having been performed though no copy of the text is known to have survived, though 18th-century playwright Lewis Theobald claimed, perhaps fraudulently, that his play Double Falsehood was an adaptation of it.

The Two Noble Kinsmen

This is an obscure one. I wasn’t able to find any professionally filmed or taped productions of it anywhere. I could only find a couple of amateur productions on YouTube — a 2014 college production from Victoria University at Wellington, New Zealand, directed by Lori Leigh, and a 2015 Shakespeare in the Park production from Seattle, directed by Ryan Higgins. I ended up watching them both, as they omit different parts, and it was sometimes hard to follow the dialogue without reliable captions, so it helped to watch it twice. The VUW production has fewer cuts, with clumsier acting but better staging, though it goes a bit overboard with the modern anachronisms. The Seattle production is acted out on bare grass at shouting volume to be heard over the traffic and jet noises, but performed at a brisk, energetic pace with even more playful stage business than the VUW production had.

The Two Noble Kinsmen is believed to be Shakespeare’s last play. Co-author John Fletcher was Shakespeare’s successor as the house playwright of the King’s Men theater company, and was as famous in his own day as Shakespeare, though that fame didn’t last. T2NK is a largely faithful adaptation of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale from The Canterbury Tales (adapted in turn from Boccaccio’s Teseida), previously one of Shakespeare’s inspirations for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Indeed, T2NK (which begins with a prologue likening a new play’s debut to a maiden’s loss of virginity, setting its raunchy tone) is basically an immediate sequel to Midsummer. When last we left Theseus, Duke of Athens, he was hosting festivities in his palace to celebrate his imminent wedding to the Amazon queen Hippolyta. Or maybe it was just after the wedding, I’m not sure, but let’s pretend otherwise, because this play begins when Theseus and Hippolyta’s wedding ceremony is interrupted by three mourning queens whose husbands were killed in battle against the evil King Creon of Thebes, who’s refusing to repatriate their remains for cremation. They want Theseus to raid Thebes to get the remains back. Theseus sympathizes, but he’s eager to finish the wedding and get Hippolyta out of her girdle. The queens object that once he gets that sweet Amazon lovin’, it’ll drive all other thoughts out of his mind, so they convince Theseus to place business before pleasure. He promises to get back before the wedding feast is over, which is making pretty good time given that Thebes is about a 15-hour walk from Athens according to Google Maps. But then, I think he said in Midsummer that the wedding feast would be two weeks long.

But Theseus is doomed to remain a supporting character, since our titular pair of noble kinsmen are the first cousins Palamon and Arcite, nephews of King Creon. They’re not fans of their tyrannical uncle or his corrupt kingdom, so they’re just about to defect when they’re called to the battle against Theseus, which they join out of honor and patriotic obligation rather than love for their king. Man, Creon really gets blasted here for a guy who doesn’t even appear in the play.

Back in Athens, Hippolyta has a Bechdel Test-failing conversation about men with her sister Emilia, who might be loosely based on Hippolyta’s mythological sister Melanippe given the similarity of names. (Various myths list either Hippolyta, Melanippe, or their other sister Antiope as the Amazon that became Theseus’s wife.) Emilia insists she’s got no use for men — which, for an Amazon, makes perfect sense. Theseus returns with the bones of the queens’ husbands, but he’s somehow also accidentally brought along the not-quite-dead bodies of Palamon and Arcite, who were badly wounded in the offstage battle. Theseus remembers being deeply impressed by their combat skills, so he orders them nursed back to health — a dubious honor, since he wants them to be healthy lifelong residents of the Athenian penal system.

The Jailer and his unnamed 18-year-old Daughter (who blows off an equally nameless Wooer) are honored to have two such noble kinsmen gracing their prison — particularly the Daughter, who says “It is a holiday to look on them,” a cool line that’s probably by Shakespeare. (Everything up to this point except the prologue is attributed to Shakespeare, though the last two scenes of Act I are iffy. Most of it from here to the start of Act V is attributed to Fletcher.) In the prison, Palamon and Arcite tell each other it doesn’t feel like prison as long as they’re together, since they only need each other and they’ll be each other’s family, even each other’s wives — uh, yeah. I guess that kind of prison joke was around even then. But once they look out the window and see Emilia gathering flowers, they instantly fall in love with her and start fighting over who gets her, forgetting their vows of mutual love and togetherness (and not even considering her opinion in the matter).

But Theseus pardons and banishes Arcite for unclear reasons, while Palamon is moved to a windowless cell so he can’t gaze on Emilia anymore. Seeking a chance to be near Amelia, Arcite dons a disguise to enter a wrestling and racing tournament being held before Theseus and his court, performing so well that he gets a job as a manservant or courtier of Amelia’s.

The Jailer’s Daughter falls in love with Palamon and helps him escape, but he only has eyes for Emilia, and doesn’t even bother to thank a mere commoner like the Daughter. In the forest (in the one scene attributed to Shakespeare in this portion), Arcite soliloquizes about how close he’s getting to Emilia (and also about Hippolyta breaking up with Theseus, apparently, though they’re still together later, perhaps a miscommunication between collaborators). He’s overheard by the starving, still-manacled Palamon, who’s determined to fight it out over Emilia, though they still hold each other in high esteem. Arcite brings him food and a file for his shackles so they can have an honorable swordfight over who gets the girl (who still hasn’t been consulted). Palamon briefly suspects Arcite of intending to poison him (and both YouTube productions independently have Arcite jokingly pretend to be poisoned when he tastes the wine), but soon they’re reminiscing about old girlfriends — until Palamon remembers their feud over Emilia and gets hostile again. Arcite agrees to return with swords and armor so they can have it out honorably.

The Jailer’s Daughter, meanwhile, has been wandering the woods in search of Palamon. Convinced he’s been eaten by wolves, she goes mad. (Coincidentally, both YouTube productions represent her disheveled state by having her blouse strap fall off her left shoulder.) She happens across a band of Morris-dancers, who decide a madwoman in their troupe will be great for ratings and give her a job. They put on a show for Theseus and Hippolyta (which the Seattle production omits and the Wellington production updates with modern pop music and dance moves). The Daughter doesn’t do anything notable, but Theseus is satisfied enough to slip them a twenty before sending them on their way.

Palamon and Arcite help each other don their armor, and again we see their close bond as they encourage each other to fight bravely and say a fond farewell before going at it. But Theseus’s hunting party shows up and he’s outraged that they’ve stepped on his state monopoly on violence by fighting without his permission. Palamon confesses everything (outing Arcite in the process, thanks a lot, cuz), and Theseus condemns them to death. Hippolyta asks Emilia to intervene on their behalf, since her face launched this, err, shipstorm. Emilia denies responsibility but intervenes on general principles, pleading with Theseus to spare them and banish them from Athens and from ever seeing one another. Both cousins reject the plea deal, saying they’d rather die than be parted from the woman who clearly wants nothing to do with them. Theseus doesn’t help, deciding unilaterally that Emilia should pick one cousin to marry while the other dies. Emilia refuses to have that choice forced on her, so Theseus plans a knight’s tournament whereby whichever cousin forces the other to touch a pillar will get Emilia while the other gets the sword. Emilia is pressured into agreeing, since otherwise they’ll both die. For this she left the Amazons?

The Jailer is relieved that Palamon absolved him of culpability in his escape, but is saddened when his Daughter’s Wooer reports her madness. A creepy doctor shows up and insists that the only cure for her mad obsession with Palamon is for the Wooer to impersonate Palamon and sleep with her, which today would be defined as rape by fraud, but as we’ve seen, nobody in this play has heard of consent. The Jailer raises a token objection, at least, but gives in at the doctor’s insistence.

Emilia tries to convince herself to pick a kinsman, but she’s warmed to them both equally and can’t decide. A messenger comes to Theseus and describes Arcite’s and Palamon’s respective trios of supporting knights in exhaustive detail (both YouTube productions omit this), and Emilia regrets that more men might die in battle over her. (There are doubts about whether Fletcher wrote this part.) Before the battle, there’s a sequence probably by Shakespeare in which Arcite prays at Mars’s temple, Palamon to Venus, and Emilia to Diana (apologizing to the goddess of chastity for having to abandon it), each receiving a sign from their respective gods.

The final two scenes are probably Shakespeare’s. Emilia can’t bear to watch the offstage tournament, but she insists that her servant keep her updated. Arcite wins the tournament and is awarded Emilia’s hand, and Palamon is sent to the executioner’s block. But fate intervenes: Arcite is fatally thrown from his horse, and with his dying breath he bequeaths Emilia to her. (The Seattle production simplifies this to Arcite killing himself to spare his brother.) Theseus wraps up by saying the dying Arcite confessed that Palamon saw Emilia first and therefore had dibsies on her all along by the bro code or whatever.

–

This is actually a pretty darn good play. The story of the two cousins torn between their love for each other and their rivalry over the woman they love is pretty effective, because of the contrast of the kinsmen habitually falling into displays of mutual affection and support despite their conflict. It was pretty engaging, because I couldn’t predict how the dilemma would be resolved. (Arcite falling off a horse is a hell of a copout, though. The Seattle version where Arcite voluntarily sacrifices for his cousin is a more touching payoff, and the actors there convey the kinsmen’s loving bond very well.) I also enjoy how Emilia resents having all these men making decisions for her and forcing her into an untenable situation, instead of falling into the usual role of a lovestruck woman. Theseus really comes off as a bad guy for forcing the men to fight it out and forcing Emilia to accept the outcome.

The Jailer’s Daughter is Shakespeare and Fletcher’s addition to Chaucer’s (and Boccaccio’s) tale, mostly played as a comic figure, though the actress in the VUW production is a standout in the cast (unfortunately that video doesn’t include credits). She has a nice amount of agency at first, even if it is in the name of unrequited love, but her story ends up in an unfortunate place. Still, at least Fletcher specifies she’s 18, which is surprising for a play from this era, where girls as young as 13 were considered of marriageable age.

It’s a shame this play is so overlooked. Yes, it’s considered more Fletcher’s than Shakespeare’s, but it still deserves attention on its own merits.

–

King Edward III

As with Kinsmen, I could find no professional productions of this play. I found two amateur videos of stage performances on YouTube, as well as two Zoom-meeting-style group readings recorded during the pandemic, but none of them had satisfactory audiovisual or performance quality. So I settled for simply reading the play on Project Gutenberg.

It’s generally (but not universally) accepted that Shakespeare co-authored this play early in his career, either with Thomas Kyd or with a “writers’ room” of multiple authors (to borrow a metaphor from one of the YouTube videos I sampled). Bardology’s analysis of the play says that Shakespeare is probably responsible for the whole of Act II and Act IV Sc. 3-4.

If it is partly Shakespeare’s, it extends his continuous chronicle of English kings by one, since Edward III was Richard II’s predecessor. Regardless of authorship, the events depicted here are relevant to the canonical history plays. Richard II and Henry IV were both Edward III’s grandsons, and Henry V invaded France on the grounds of renewing Edward III’s territorial claim.

The play opens with the Count of Artois informing King Edward III of England that he’s also the rightful king of France through his mother, a claim the French reject by insisting that descent through women doesn’t count; this is the very same dispute that prompted the war in Henry V. The Duke of Lorrain arrives as ambassador from France’s monarch John II, who offers Edward a mere dukedom in France. Edward angrily counters that he won’t be subordinate to a usurper but will come take the throne by force. Like father, like great-grandson.

But first, Edward has to rescue the Countess of Salisbury from the capture of her castle by Scotland’s King David II (son of Robert the Bruce). The play paints the Countess as a redoubtable woman who mocks her Scottish captors, portrayed as cowardly fools who boast of their might, yet flee the moment they hear Edward’s army is coming. (It’s suspected that the play’s negative portrayal of the Scots may have contributed to it falling into obscurity after the Scottish King James I succeeded Queen Elizabeth.) Edward falls instantly in love with the Countess even though they’re both married, but she rebuffs his advances.

In Act II, Edward praises the Countess’s perfection in Shakespearean love poetry. He orders his secretary to write a love letter, but doesn’t think the secretary’s praise is glowing enough, so he sends him away and tries to write it himself. When he presses his suit, the Countess reminds him that the oath of a husband predates the oath of a king (since Adam was the former but not the latter), so his kingly power doesn’t entitle him to break his wedding oath, or hers. Still determined, Edward orders the Countess’s father, the Earl of Warwick, to command her to sleep with him. Warwick, torn between his oaths to his king and his daughter, reluctantly passes along the king’s order but praises his daughter for refusing it. (In real life, Warwick wasn’t the Countess of Salisbury’s father, and Edward’s infatuation was actually with the Earl of Salisbury’s sister-in-law, not his wife. And I still think it’s weird that in English nobility, a countess’s male counterpart is an earl instead of a count.)

The king’s son, Edward the Black Prince aka Prince Ned, arrives with the army for the French campaign, but the king is too lovesick to go to war. Seeing his wife in his son’s face, the king briefly comes to his senses, but as soon as the Countess enters, his adolescent crush reasserts itself. The Countess lays it on the line, telling Edward that the only way she’ll agree to be his is if he murders his wife while she murders her husband. He almost agrees to go through with it, but finally realizes he’s been a fool (as she intended) and leaves with his army.

The first half of Act III is very procedural as the characters recount England’s invasion of France. Edward and John meet and trash-talk each other, with John calling Edward a plunderer and offering to buy him off, while Ed insists he’s only after his rightful throne. Both accuse each other of tyranny and promise to meet in battle later. But first, the king and nobles adorn Prince Ned with the trappings of a knight, though Edward says Ned must earn his knighthood in combat. When Ned is seemingly overwhelmed by the French, Edward’s nobles plead with him to intervene, but Edward says his son has to save himself, and if he can’t, well, Eddie’s got other sons. Man, what a jerk. Still, Ned pulls out a win against the odds and gets his knighthood.

In a very compressed scene, Edward besieges Calais, which caves after only 60-odd lines, and he’s notified that his wife Queen Philippa is sailing to France, since her man Copland has captured the Scots’ King David and will only turn him over to Edward in person. Meanwhile, the Earl of Salisbury releases Villiers, a captured French nobleman, to obtain a passport for him from France’s Prince Charles, in exchange for his word of honor that he’ll return to imprisonment if he fails.

Shakespeare’s other two (probable) scenes begin here. In Poitiers, Prince Charles encourages Villiers to blow off his oath now that he’s free, but Villiers insists that an oath is sacrosanct, continuing the theme of the Countess’s storyline. Charles caves and authorizes the passport. Then he relates a seer’s prophecy that the French army will face a dreadful day “[w]hen feathered fowl shall make thine army tremble, / And flint stones rise and break the battle [ar]ray” (Yabba-dabba-doo!), which John considers as impossible as, say, Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane. The prophecy also says “Yet in the end, thy foot thou shalt advance / As far in England as thy foe in France,” which John also takes as a good sign, since he’s clearly never read a story about an ambiguously worded prophecy.

John’s confidence is partly because his forces have Prince Ned surrounded and hugely outnumbered — which Ned’s man Lord Audley describes in a poetic soliloquy about how radiant the hillsides look covered in thousands of soldiers’ armor, perhaps the most beautiful way anyone’s ever said “We’re screwed.” Ned replies with a philosophical musing about how it’s easier to cope with thinking of it as one collective entity rather than thousands of individual men, each redoubtable in their own right. (Did Ned just invent the inverse ninja rule?) Three heralds come in succession, relaying King John’s demand for his surrender, Prince Charles’s offer to help him flee, and a second prince’s prayer book to prepare himself for death. Ned rebuffs them all, and Audley makes a philosophical speech about the folly of fearing death, a cousin to Julius Caesar’s “a necessary end” speech.

The next scene isn’t attributed to Shakespeare, but it continues the plot threads and themes from his portions. A massive flock of ravens cows (or caws) John’s army, evoking the first part of the prophecy. Salisbury is taken captive, and John orders him hanged, rebuffing Prince Charles’s promise of safe passage and insisting that he can override his son’s oaths. (Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to burn Salisbury at the stake?) John finally gives in to Charles’s pleas not to nullify his word of honor, but smugly advises Salisbury to tell Edward that Prince Ned is doomed.

But Ned sees the French army unnerved by the ravens and has his archers throw flint stones at them, or something — it’s not clear, but it spooks much of the French army into desertion (perhaps because the prophecy predisposed them to fear the worst), and the loyalists fight with the deserters so that the French defeat themselves. (In history, Ned won the Battle of Poitiers through superior strategy.) King John rallies his remaining forces, but Ned defeats and captures the king and his sons. Audley is wounded and near death, but Ned urges him to hold on, which apparently works, since he has a cameo in the final scene.

King Edward captures Calais and threatens to execute its citizens who plead for mercy, but Queen Philippa convinces him to show clemency, since if he’s the king of France now, he needs to consider them his own subjects and protect them. Copland arrives to turn over King David as promised, earning his knighthood. Salisbury arrives with a premature report of Prince Ned’s death, but Ned shows up with King John captive. Edward orders John taken to England to be held for ransom, completing the ironically misinterpreted prophecy.

–

Alas, Edward III is not a hidden gem like Kinsmen. The non-Shakespeare parts are mostly mediocre; like Henry VI, Part I and Henry VIII (also believed to be collaborations), they feel more like a history lecture than a play. The verse is flowery and elaborate, but is mainly just exposition of plot points and events. By contrast, the (probable) Shakespeare portions are driven by character and philosophical commentary — the mark of an author who cared less about what people did and more about who they were, why they did it, and what it all meant. It’s a reminder of why Shakespeare’s work stands out from that of his contemporaries.

Even so, the Shakespeare parts aren’t among his best work. Edward’s sophomoric obsession with the Countess in Act II makes him come off terribly. Maybe that was the intent — it’s not as if Shakespeare didn’t have plenty of fatally flawed and irrational protagonists — but it makes him seem pathetic rather than tragic or comic. It’s also an odd mismatch with the rest, basically a whole separate romantic comedy that interrupts the main war story for an act and a half.

–

Minor additions

Shakespeare is now believed to be the author of the 300-odd lines added in 1602 to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, which solidified the Elizabethan revenge-play genre and was an influence on Hamlet. The play is about a Spanish night named Don Hieronimo seeking to avenge the murder of his son Horatio (Alas, poor Horatio; I knew him, Yorick). Most of the new portions seem to add little to the play, either giving Hieronimo moments where his grief seems to drive him temporarily mad or just expanding a bit on his dialogue. But there’s one impressive soliloquy where Hieronimo philosophizes over why we care for our sons when they cause so much trouble, but ends by expressing his love and praise for Horatio. This part feels the most Shakespearean to me.

Shakespeare is believed to have added a couple of scenes to the anonymous Sir Thomas More, which Kyd may also have co-written. The second is unremarkable, a brief monologue where More reflects on rising from his humble beginnings to Lord Chancellor of England, but the first is kind of amazing. It depicts More trying to talk down a mob of peasants before they launch an anti-immigrant riot, driven by the usual prejudices and fears against immigrants. More points out that if they use force to drive others out, it’ll just open the door for someone else bullying and abusing them the same way. He also asks them to consider that if they were banished for violating the King’s laws, they would become immigrants in some other country, and how would they want to be treated then? It’s a potent reminder that demagogues have been stirring up anti-immigrant hate throughout history, that the same debates keep repeating. A lot of Americans in 2024 could’ve stood to listen to a speech like this.

–

The Poems

Shakespeare also wrote a number of popular poems, which I gather were actually considered a classier form of literature at the time. I’ve seen it suggested (at least in fiction) that Shakespeare may have seen the plays as something he wrote to pay the bills while pursuing respectability as a poet, but his first major poem — perhaps his first published work — was apparently written while the theaters were closed due to a plague outbreak (because pandemic lockdowns were a frequent fact of life before the age of vaccines).

That poem is Venus and Adonis, a pastoral/erotic verse in an Italianate form that was popular at the time, written for Shakespeare’s patron, the Earl of Southampton. Based on Shakespeare’s favorite mythology source, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, it relates how the goddess Venus falls head over heels for the beautiful adolescent youth Adonis, who’s got no interest in women, even goddesses of love, but only wants to go hunting. Venus is so aggressive that she rips Adonis clear off his horse and kabedons him against a tree, lavishing him with hugs and kisses while he struggles to get away, a gender-flipped Pepe LePew cartoon. He finally breaks free, but his horse is more heterosexually active than he is and runs off after an alluring mare. Venus tries to seduce him some more and faints (or pretends to) at his rebuffs, and when he kisses her to wake her up (which seems unmotivated given his established asexuality), she gets aggressively amorous again. He finally convinces her to let him go, but when he tells her he’s hunting boar the next day, she gets a premonition of his death and has a sleepless night. Indeed, the next day she finds him gored to death and weeps over him, whereupon he turns into an anemone flower that she carries between her breasts. Hmm… We’ve seen previous Shakespeare characters give little thought to consent, but I hadn’t expected to see a female character be so forcible.

But this is nothing compared to his next poem, whose title is its own content warning: The Rape of Lucrece. (Warning for suicide as well.) Also written for Southampton and based on Ovid (his history writing this time), intended as a “graver labor” than Venus, this tragic poem is based on the legendary crime of Sextus Tarquinius, son of the Roman king, that enraged the people and led to Lucius Junius Brutus overthrowing the king and establishing the Roman Republic. We’ve seen Brutus’s son as an antagonist in Coriolanus and his descendant as the protagonist in Julius Caesar, and Tarquin’s crime was referenced in Cymbeline when Iachimo snuck into Imogen’s bedchamber, and briefly by Macbeth before he snuck into Duncan’s for entirely different reasons.

Shakespeare opens with an “Argument” summarizing the story in prose, where a group of Roman soldiers boasted to each other of their wives’ “chastity” (meaning fidelity to their husbands, I suppose), with Collatinus, or Collatine, insisting that his wife Lucretia, or Lucrece, was the chastest of them all. Returning to Rome, the other men all found their wives partying it up, while Lucrece was at home doing her spinning, proving Collatine’s boast. But Tarquin was so covetous of Lucrece’s beauty, and perhaps resentful of losing the challenge, that he resolved to force himself on her. The Argument tells the whole story to the end, then the verse jumps back to Lucrece welcoming Tarquin for an overnight stay while Collatine is away, not suspecting a thing in her purity. He wrestles with guilt and fear of the consequences, but is too aroused to heed his better judgment and forces his way into Lucrece’s bedchamber. When his groping wakes her, he threatens that if she resists, he’ll kill her afterward, making it look like he found her sleeping with one of her slaves and killed them both, which will call the parentage of her children into question. If she gives in, it will remain their secret.

Lucrece pleads with Tarquin, appealing to his pride, his empathy, his friendship with Collatine, and his duty as a future king to set a good example. Her pleas just inflame him more, though Shakespeare only speaks of the assault in abstract terms for a few stanzas. Tarquin slinks off guiltily afterward, leaving Lucrece to her shame; the threat to kill her may have been a bluff, or perhaps he felt too guilty to go through with it.

The bulk of the poem is Lucrece’s lament in the aftermath, in the form of a “complaint poem,” a popular genre at the time. She feels guilty for violating her marriage oath even though it wasn’t her choice; I’m not sure if that means she gave in after all, or if it’s just the screwed-up value system of the age that saw a violated woman as incurably tainted, as we saw in Titus Andronicus. She curses Night, Opportunity, and Time for allowing this to happen, pleads with fate to bring guilt and suffering on Tarquin, and resolves to kill herself to end her supposed dishonor, but not before she reveals what Tarquin has done. After sending a brief letter to call her husband home, she reflects on a painting of the Trojan War and how it all could’ve been avoided if Paris hadn’t raped Helen. Troilus and Cressida also referred to Helen’s abduction as a rape, though the word originally meant abduction or forcible seizure, with the meaning of sexual assault emerging only in the 15th century. So it’s unclear how Troilus meant it, but it’s unambiguous here that Lucrece likens Helen’s plight to her own.

When Collatine arrives with the other knights, including Lucrece’s father Lucretius, she reveals what happened and makes the knights vow vengeance before she names Tarquin. In contrast to how these things often play out today (or probably back then in real life), the men all instantly believe her story and insist that she’s not to blame for what was done to her. Still, she promptly commits suicide, and her husband and father basically compete over who has more right to grieve her most, until Brutus shuts them down. He says Lucrece shouldn’t have felt it necessary to kill herself, but in the closing lines, he instructs the knights to parade her body through the streets to rally the Romans to take revenge on Tarquin (although that hardly seems respectful toward her).

I admit that when I was in my early teens, I read this seeking out the lurid sexual parts, but there really isn’t much of that here. It’s far more about Lucrece’s state of mind afterward than about the event itself. It’s basically Shakespeare’s early practice at writing tragedy, the exploration of human cruelty, grief, and revenge.

In Riverside‘s order, the sonnets come next. I’ve read most or all of them before, though I only recognize some of them. There are 154 sonnets, but many go together in pairs or longer sequences with shared themes or narratives. In the majority, the narrator — perhaps Shakespeare writing to a real person, perhaps a fictional character whose perspective the Bard is exploring — addresses a beautiful young man that he’s having an affair with, but has mixed feelings toward. The first bunch of sonnets implore the young man to take a wife so his beauty will be passed on to his children. This anonymous Adonis is much beloved of the ladies but is also having a secret, scandalous affair with the male narrator, with occasional fights and jealousy. The narrator has a rivalry over this man with another male poet whose writing the narrator deems superior to his own. The introductory essayist in Riverside (published in 1974) bends over backward to insist the love expressed in the sonnets is strictly platonic, but that seems highly disingenuous. It’s true that men in Shakespeare’s plays were far more open about expressing platonic love toward one another than men in modern American culture, but the sonneteer calls the young man his true love, constantly praises his physical beauty, makes sexual innuendoes about him, says he dreams of the man regularly, suggests that their relationship will bring scandal and shame, expresses jealousy toward the women he dates — come on, you have to be in deep homophobic denial to pretend these guys are just friends.

Though I hesitate to assume the sonnets are autobiographical, since they were evidently mostly written in Shakespeare’s thirties and published when he was 43, yet many are from the perspective of an aging narrator contemplating his looming mortality and loving the younger man as an embodiment of his lost youth. True, average life expectancy was maybe in the 30s-40s then, but that was because infant mortality was so high, weighting the average downward even though your typical adult could expect to achieve the Biblical threescore years and ten barring accident or disease. Shakespeare only lived to 52, but several old men in his plays (including King Lear) are explicitly in their 70s or 80s. It seems more likely that the thirty-something poet was exploring a then-common theme of poetry as a way to achieve immortality for its subjects.

On the other hand, a few of the later sonnets pun on the name Will (emphasized) with the word “will” (whose meanings at the time included sexual desire), which would imply that they were at least partly autobiographical. There’s a series of 26 sonnets at the end (nearly) that shift focus from the beautiful young male lover to the Dark Lady (as she’s known in scholarship, though the title never appears in the actual verses), a woman that the narrator is having an extramarital affair with despite her being darker in hair and complexion than was considered beautiful by the fashion of the time (one is tempted to think she may have been nonwhite, but in Elizabethan England, anyone less than Nordic-pale might have been considered “swart”). Whereas he celebrated his male lover’s godlike and unaging beauty, a lot of these sonnets basically insult the Dark Lady’s looks at length, saying he loves her despite the evidence of his eyes. But the DL is apparently an older woman who’s seduced the young male Adonis as well as the narrator, and the narrator is concerned that the Adonis will be hurt.

We never find out how that soap opera resolves, though. The Dark Lady series just cuts short, and the last two sonnets are adaptations of a Greek epigram, offering a mythological origin for the hot springs at Bath and extolling their healthful virtues. I can’t help but wonder if these were a product placement, a word from a sponsor who helped fund the sonnets’ publication.

The sonnets were published in the same collection as A Lover’s Complaint, a short narrative poem that returns to the “complaint poem” genre but is considered a far lesser achievement than Lucrece. It’s a fairly insubstantial piece in which the narrator describes watchinga weeping woman throwing a bunch of love letters and tokens into the river, when an old shepherd comes along, sits by her, and offers to lend an ear to her troubles (while the narrator continues to eavesdrop creepily). She’s a relatively mature woman who tells a tale of a young, gorgeous but duplicitous womanizer whose charms she resisted more successfully than other women, until he won her over with a sob story but later abandoned her. The last stanza is her lament that she’d probably fall for him again, but the poem just kind of cuts off; indeed, some theorize it was unfinished.

Shakespeare’s only other confirmed poem is The Phoenix and the Turtle, a 67-line allegorical verse describing a funeral for a phoenix (symbolizing perfection) and a turtledove (symbolizing faithful love) who were a couple but died together without an heir. Apparently there are various interpretations of what it’s an allegory for, such as an ideal marriage, the Trinity, or a reference to a real couple’s relationship. It’s hard to pin down, and unique among Shakespeare’s known works.

Riverside also includes The Passionate Pilgrim, a collection of love poems (including several variations on Venus hitting on Adonis while he was bathing) by multiple unattributed authors, including reprints of two of Shakespeare’s standalone sonnets and three of the love-letter sonnets from Love’s Labour’s Lost. Some people have attempted over the centuries to attribute some of the other poems to Shakespeare, but none are in his style or of comparable quality.

Apparently there are a number of other plays and poems that have been apocryphally attributed to Shakespeare, but none of the claims seem solid enough to make them worth tracking down. So I guess I can now say I’ve seen or read every one of Shakespeare’s accepted works (though often in abridged form). That’s one more life goal finally achieved!

So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.

Thoughts on the BBC TELEVISION SHAKESPEARE, Season 7

Now we come to the final season of the BBC’s essentially complete Shakespeare run, still produced by Shaun Sutton, the BBC’s former Head of Drama who produced the last 3 seasons of this as his swan song, and has done a pretty good job so far in my opinion.

The Life and Death of King John

Wow, spoiler alert. I know King John mainly from his villainous role in Robin Hood stories (as Prince John); from Doctor Who: “The King’s Demons,” where he’s impersonated by an alien android; and from his connection to the Magna Carta. He’s generally depicted as a villain and a bad king, but every successive king Shakespeare wrote about is directly descended from him, meaning that Shakespeare’s entire English-history canon is about the squabbles within a single extended family. (Lear and Cymbeline are based more in legend than history.)

The Life and Death of King John (which is new to me) was evidently adapted from an anonymous recent play called The Troublesome Reign of King John (generally attributed to poet/playwright George Peele), though some have proposed that Troublesome Reign is a bad transcript or first draft of Shakespeare’s play. However, Shakespeare’s version includes details from Holinshed’s Chronicles, which the Bard often drew upon, and paints John more negatively.

A bit of background: John was the youngest son of King Henry II of the House of Plantagenet, the last surviving one when Richard the Lion-Hearted died. The second-youngest son, Geoffrey, had left behind a son, Arthur, who was 12 when Richard died in 1199. Richard had named Arthur his heir, but decided Arthur wasn’t old enough and named John his successor before he died. King Philip II of France, eager to stir conflict among the Plantagenets, backed Arthur as the rightful king.

The play opens with King John (Leonard Rossiter) rejecting the French ambassador’s demand that he abdicate in Arthur’s favor, with the backing of his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine (the venerable Mary Morris, last seen in Richard II in season 1). Of course they realize this means war, but they’re fine with that. Right after, John adjudicates a dispute between Robert Faulconbridge (Frasier‘s Edward Hibbert) and his illegitimate older brother Philip (George Costigan), with Robert asking the king to make him heir to his father’s lands instead of Philip. Eleanor and John realize that the witty and blunt-spoken Philip is a dead ringer for the late Richard I and must be his son. Philip renounces his land claim in exchange for acknowledgment as a member of the royal family. Philip tells his mother (Phyllida Law) that she shouldn’t be ashamed for letting a king seduce her, and he’s happy with the outcome.

Historically, Richard I did indeed have an illegitimate son, Philip of Cognac. His mother is unknown; the Faulconbridges are fictitious, coming from The Troublesome Reign. The stage directions call him “Philip the Bastard,” or just “Bastard,” but he’s called Faulconbridge in dialogue, so I’ll go with that.

Act II takes place outside the walls of Angiers (known today as Angers) in France, represented in director David Giles’s stylized production by a very stagey battlefield set with a “sky” backdrop adorned in fleurs-de-lis. King Philip II (Charles Kay) is besieging Angiers in support of Arthur (Luc Owen). Claire Bloom, who’s played queens in her three previous appearances in this series, gets demoted to Duchess of Brittany as Lady Constance, the most vehement advocate for her son Arthur’s kingship.

John’s forces arrive accompanied by Eleanor, Faulconbridge, and John’s niece Blanche of Castile (Janet Maw) for some reason. Both sides ask the people of Angiers/Angers whether they recognize John or Arthur as the legitimate king. (Angers management! How democratic, kinda.) Atop the wall, a spokes-citizen (Clifford Parrish) says they’ll happily open their gates to the King of England, as soon as the two rival factions hash out just who that is. With the buck passed right back to them, the two sides wage a bloody offstage battle, then return claiming victory, which the First Citizen ain’t having, since he reminds them he could see the battle from the city’s towers and knows it was a draw. So all that bloodshed achieved exactly nothing. The whole thing has a touch of Pythonesque farce to it.

Both armies are getting pretty annoyed at this guy for demanding that they take responsibility for solving their own problems, and Faulconbridge lives down to his epithet by proposing that the two armies join forces to seize the city, then fight it out for the spoils. (Angers damagement!) The First Citizen panics and offers a more peaceful alternative: a marital alliance between Blanche and King Philip’s son, Lewis the Dauphin (aka the future King Louis VIII). Lewis (Jonathan Coy) and Blanche are down with it despite having just met, so John and Eleanor agree, handing over most of England’s French holdings as Blanche’s dowry. (In reality, Louis and Blanche were 13 and 12 at the time, but the play depicts them as adults.) Lady Constance is outraged to learn that King Philip sold out Arthur to take the deal.

Since Shakespeare just loves compressing timelines, the married couple haven’t even left for their honeymoon yet when the papal legate Cardinal Pandulph (Richard Wordsworth) shows up and excommunicates John from the Catholic Church for not backing the Pope’s choice for Archbishop of Canterbury, which actually happened 13 years later. The Protestant Shakespeare paints the pope’s representative as a ruthless schemer who says that anyone who kills King John will be blessed by God, putting out a hit on the king in broad daylight. King Philip hesitates to break the marriage alliance he’s just sworn to, but he gives in and resumes the war. Blanche gets a nice soliloquy about how she’s torn between the two sides and loses either way, but ends up going with her new husband.

The British seize Angiers, Arthur is captured, and John entrusts the boy to his officer Hubert de Burgh (John Thaw), secretly ordering his execution. The scheming cardinal anticipates this and tells Lewis that Arthur’s death will give him a claim to the throne through marriage. Lewis agrees to foment rebellion in England.

As in history (approximately), Hubert can’t go through with killing Arthur, but pretends he did. The English nobles including the Earls of Salisbury and Pembroke (John Castle, Robert Brown) lead a popular rebellion against John for this; meanwhile, Lewis has invaded England and Eleanor of Aquitaine has died offstage (along with Constance), leaving England’s holdings in France untended. John regrets ordering Arthur’s death, and he snivelingly blames Hubert for making him give the order by being there to be ordered, and why didn’t you know I was just kidding? Hubert finally gives in and reveals Arthur’s alive.

Except Arthur then foolishly decides to jump from the castle wall to escape, but dies in the fall. Disbelieving Hubert’s protests of innocence, Salisbury’s group vows vengeance and joins forces with Lewis. (When Faulconbridge tells Hubert to carry the boy away for burial, John Thaw almost loses his grip on Luc Owen and George Costigan has to stop the boy from falling without interrupting his monologue).

This is more historical compression, since in reality, Arthur lived another year and mysteriously disappeared, though some suspected John of ordering him killed again. The First Barons’ War was actually provoked by John’s failure to abide by the Magna Carta, a dozen years later. So Shakespeare completely omits the Magna Carta, probably the most important event in John’s reign. Perhaps this is because Shakespeare tended to sympathize more with monarchs than with populists.

Faulconbridge resents the earls’ disloyalty, and is outraged to learn that the weak-willed John has caved and reconciled with the pope in exchange for Cardinal Pandulph negotiating peace. Faulconbridge (who’s far more serious in the second half of the play) urges John to at least put up a good defense, and John puts him in charge of the war effort.

In the French camp, Salisbury weeps at the prospect of having to kill many soldiers to avenge one death, and Lewis praises his noble tears. It’s interesting how differently masculinity was defined back then, before the comparatively modern notion set in that men have to be unemotional. Shakespeare’s characters often did equate crying with femininity, but his male characters still cried a lot, openly declared love for each other, etc. Anyway, Pandulph shows up and says, Good news, everybody, John caved to the Pope so the war is over! Except that’s not why Lewis and the earls are fighting, so they resent the cardinal treating them like Rome’s lackeys and continue the war for their own reasons.

But a dying ally of Lewis confesses to the earls that Lewis plans to execute them all after he wins, so they defect back to the English side. John has been randomly poisoned offstage (which I guess sounded better than his real cause of death, dysentery), and dies before hearing that Lewis has fled and the war is over. Faulconbridge eulogizes him and swears loyalty to his teenage heir Prince Henry (Rusty Livingstone), who would become King Henry III. Which means I was short by one when I said in my Season 5 post that every King Henry from IV to VIII inclusive had appeared in Shakespeare. Although the play ends before Henry III is crowned, so maybe he technically doesn’t count.

–

This is a rather cynical play. It portrays John as weak, cowardly, scheming, and indecisive, and doesn’t have a high opinion of the French monarchs either, let alone the Catholic Church. The sympathetic figures — Constance, Hubert, Arthur, the earls — are generally victims or protestors of the dishonorable choices of those above them. As for Faulconbridge, he’s hard to get a handle on. After John buys peace with France, Faulconbridge has a big soliloquy where he resolves to be loyal to personal gain above any higher principle, since it seems kings do the same. Yet in the rest of the play, he’s unshakeably loyal to John and then Henry III, even when it seems his own interests would be better served by switching sides. Maybe it’s just because his good fortune results from being part of the royal family, but the stalwart champion and loyalist in the second half of the play is hard to reconcile with the roguish Bastard of the first half.

Even so, George Costigan is strong and appealing as Faulconbridge. Leonard Rossiter is less effective as King John, playing him with a sniveling villain voice that reminds me slightly of Victor Buono’s King Tut on Batman (1966). He could’ve played against the text and tried to bring more nuance to John, but he leans into the conventional interpretation.

I find it interesting that the first half of the play gives prominent showcases to both Lady Constance and Blanche, but then not a single female character appears onstage in the last two acts.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre

(Content warning: discussion of incest and sexual coercion)

This is another new one for me, classed by Riverside as the earliest of the romances. The general consensus is that the first two acts are not Shakespeare’s work, most likely written by George Wilkins, who published a prose novelization of the play. Riverside says the only extant text was “reported,” i.e. reconstructed from memory, so it may not be entirely accurate.

The play is based on the Ancient Greek tale of Appolonius of Tyre, specifically the version in Confessio Amantis by John Gower, a friend of Geoffrey Chaucer. Gower’s ghost introduces each act as its narrator/chorus, played here by Edward Petherbridge, who gives Gower what might be intended as a Middle English accent but sounds American to me.

Mike Gwilym (Aufidius in Coriolanus) plays Pericles (renamed from Appolonius), who’s called a prince but is actually king of the Phoenician (now Lebanese) city of Tyre. He’s come to Antioch (in southern Asia Minor) to try to win the daughter of King Antiochus (John Woodvine), which entails answering a riddle that he’ll be killed if he doesn’t solve, reminiscent of the riddle in The Merchant of Venice. Weirdly, the riddle is a confession that Antiochus is sleeping with his daughter (Edita Brychta, who’s very well-cast as a woman beautiful enough to risk death for, but only has two lines), and Pericles realizes the king will kill him to protect his secret (making me wonder if the previous victims were killed for solving the riddle, since it’s pretty dang easy). Unfortunately, the play depicts the daughter as a willing partner in the incest, as guilty as her father, even though Confessio Amantis had portrayed her as an unconsenting victim.

Pericles flees, and Antiochus sends an assassin to hunt him down. Back in Tyre, Pericles fears Antiochus will invade his city to get to him, so his wise advisor Helicanus (Patrick Godfrey) advises him to go on a long vacation until it blows over, which should spare Tyre (rimshot). Cut to Tarsus, not far from Antioch, whose ruler Cleon (Norman Rodway, previously seen in Timon of Athens and King Lear) laments that the city is suffering a devastating famine — making me realize why Star Trek‘s Shakespearean-themed “The Conscience of the King” used Tarsus IV as the name of the famine-struck planet where Kodos the Executioner murdered half the population. Tarsus is saved by relief ships brought by Pericles, though luckily Cleon was too busy monologuing exposition to murder anyone.

Gower narrates that Helicanus sent Pericles a message advising that it wasn’t safe to stay in Tarsus. Pericles leaves, but his ships are wrecked and he washes up nearly naked in Pentapolis (in northern Libya, Shakespeare’s only African location other than Alexandria in Antony and Cleopatra), where he’s found by a trio of comic-relief fishermen headed up by Gordon Gostelow (Bardolph in the Falstaff plays). No sooner have they agreed to take in this prince reduced to a beggar that Pericles’s armor improbably turns up in their fishing nets, allowing him to participate in the knights’ tournament King Simonides (Patrick Allen) is throwing to pick a husband for his daughter Thaisa (Juliet Stevenson, the Oracle in the BBC’s 2013 Atlantis series). You’d think Pericles would be wary of kings’ competitions for their daughters’ hands by now, but he goes all in, predictably winning the contest and Thaisa’s heart.

Back in Tyre, Helicanus learns that Antiochus and his daughter were randomly struck down by a divine fireball to punish their incest (why wait so long, gods?), so it’s safe for Pericles to return. But nobody knows where he is, and the nobles offer Helicanus the throne. Helicanus says he’ll only take the gig if Pericles isn’t found within a year.

The rest of the play is probably Shakespeare’s work. Hearing the news, Pericles sails for home with the now very pregnant Thaisa. The weather starts getting rough, the tiny ship is tossed (I’m paraphrasing), and Thaisa apparently dies in childbirth, so the grieving Pericles has her sealed in a trunk and put to sea with instructions for whoever finds her to give her a proper burial. He orders a course change to Tarsus, the nearest safe haven from the storm.

The trunk washes ashore in Ephesus (the setting of The Comedy of Errors, fairly far from Tarsus) and is brought to the physician Lord Cerimon (Clive Swift), who recognizes that Thaisa is only mostly dead and revives her. Thaisa can’t remember if her child was born alive and assumes she’ll never see Pericles again, so she gets her to a nunnery — or rather, since this is Ancient Phoenicia, she takes Vestal livery.

In Tarsus, Pericles leaves his infant daughter, whom he’s named Marina for her birth at sea (you’d think he wouldn’t want the reminder), in the care of Cleon and his wife Dionyza (Annette Crosbie) while he returns to Tyre, vowing not to cut his hair until Marina marries. Oh… kayyy….

Gower fast-forwards the timeline, telling us that Marina (Amanda Redman) grew up alongside Cleon & Dionyza’s daughter but outshone her in all things, making Dionyza murderously resentful. Di appoints her servant to kill Marina, but her pleas delay him enough for Marina to be randomly grabbed by pirates. The pirates sell her to Boult (Trevor Peacock, seen in Twelfth Night and Henry VI Part 1 & 2), the procurer for a brothel in Mytilene (on Lesbos, not far north of Ephesus but pretty far from Tarsus), but Marina resolves to keep her “virgin knot” intact at all costs. Back in Tarsus, Dionyza convinces Cleon to cover up Marina’s presumed death. Pericles mourns his daughter and sets out to wander the seas, refusing to bathe or cut his hair ever again. What is it with this guy and performative hair-care neglect?

Back in Mytilene, Marina radiates such a pure and virginal aura that she somehow convinces the brothel’s clients to renounce debauchery. (Maybe this is how she withstood the pirates for what must have been a lengthy sea voyage.) Even Mytilene’s governor Lysimachus (Patrick Ryecart, last seen in the series premiere as Romeo) is so moved by her purity that he repents his whoring ways and gives her gold without demanding anything in return. The brothel’s Bawd (Lila Kaye), determined to break Marina before she puts them out of business, orders Boult to rape her, but Marina buys him off with the gold and convinces him to help set her up as a teacher.

A while later, Pericles’s ship arrives in Mytilene, and Helicanus (who’s left the rule of Tyre in the hands of a bit character) tells Lysimachus that his lord has refused to speak for months, so Lysi calls in the saintly Marina to try to bring him out of it. By contrivance, nobody introduces anyone by name, so it’s only gradually, as Marina tells her own sob story, that Pericles begins to suspect she’s his daughter, though he resists believing it at first. Finally they figure it out and have a happy reunion. The goddess Diana (Elayne Sharling) sends Pericles a vision telling him to go to her temple at Ephesus, where he’s reunited with Thaisa. Since King Simonides has died, Pericles and Thaisa return to Pentapolis to rule, leaving Lysimachus and Marina to marry and rule Tyre, though nobody addresses who’s going to run Mytilene — let alone Tarsus, since Gower tells us that its citizens burned Cleon and Dionyza in their palace on learning of their attempted murder of Marina. So most of them lived happily ever after. (Thank goodness they didn’t burn Tyre — that would’ve smelled horrible.)

–

Well, it’s pretty clear why the first two acts of Pericles aren’t believed to be Shakespeare’s work, since they’re kind of random and superficial. A lot of that probably owes to the Apollonius story, but the storytelling and language are richer in the later acts and the characters feel less sketchy, even though there’s still a lot of random chance, or more likely divine intervention. I can see why I wasn’t taught this one in school, given its dark sexual themes. Yet it’s a very moralistic story in which the universe rewards righteousness and purity and punishes the selfish and malign (although the brothel staff, among the vilest characters in the play, meet no punishment beyond loss of revenue).

This production, directed by David Hugh Jones, is pretty solid. I didn’t care for Edward Petherbridge as Gower, but Mike Gwilym is effective as Pericles, and Juliet Stevenson and Amanda Redman are appealing as Thaisa and Marina. I didn’t like Patrick Ryecart any better here than in Romeo and Juliet; he makes Lysimachus pretty creepy even after his reform.

The geography here puzzles me, since ports that are distant in reality seem close in the play and vice-versa. I’m tempted to say Shakespeare must not have been very good at geography (this is the guy who gave Bohemia a coastline in The Winter’s Tale), but I suppose it’s possible that the currents of the Mediterranean make it easier to get to some relatively distant places than to other, nearer ones.

Much Ado About Nothing

A version of this comedy was taped as the debut episode of the BBC series, but was scuttled for unknown reasons and postponed until now. The play may have been based on a story by Matteo Bandello, though a lot of it is original to Shakespeare. This is one I’ve certainly read and seen before, most recently in the 2012 film adaptation that Joss Whedon filmed at his own house during a 2-week vacation from his work on The Avengers. The title, by the way, is a multilayered pun, part of which is that “nothing” was Elizabethan slang for the vagina.

The play is set in Messina (in Sicily), where the young men are returning from a war. The governor, Leonato (Lee Montague), is relieved to hear that no gentlemen died, only common soldiers, who evidently don’t count as people. Oy. The prince of Aragon, Don Pedro (Jon Finch, last seen hamming it up to the rafters as King Henry IV), returns from the wars accompanied by his bastard brother Don John (Vernon Dobtcheff, last seen as Agamemnon in Troilus and Cressida), and by Don Pedro’s heroic proteges, Benedick (Robert Lindsay in his fifth role in the series, last seen as Iachimo in Cymbeline) and Claudio (Robert Reynolds). Claudio is smitten with Leonato’s daughter Hero (I, Claudius‘s Katharine Levy), while Benedick resumes a long-established bickering rivalry with Leonato’s niece Beatrice (Cherie Lunghi, Guinevere in Excalibur). Beatrice & Benedick insult each other with such enthusiasm that it’s obvious they’re in denial about being in love. (There’s a line that implies they’re exes, but it’s unclear.) Benedick scorns love as a weakness, so he’s dismayed to see Claudio going weak-kneed from Hero worship. B&B both swear they’ll never marry, though they’re really holding out for a partner who can match their wit and intensity and meet their impossibly high standards, unable to recognize what’s right in front of them.

Claudio, meanwhile, is holding out for a Hero, and not just ’til the end of the night. Don Pedro agrees to woo-woo-woo Hero on his behalf, which we’ve seen before was apparently a thing back then. But Don John resents his brother and resolves to sabotage the romance with the help of his men Borachio and Conrade (Tony Rohr, Robert Gwilym). I got the impression that John had led the opposing forces in the battle and is under some kind of house arrest, since he talks of being muzzled and caged, but that isn’t made clear.

After Hero agrees to marry Claudio, the mischievous Don Pedro ropes them and Leonato into helping him with his next Cupid project: getting B&B to fall in love with each other. They allow each B to overhear them saying that the other B is secretly in love with them and is only acting hostile to cover for it. The fact that both Bs fall for it so easily and turn on a dime from hostility to open love is pretty much proof that they were in love all along. They both start acting like lovesick teens, and Pedro & co. are thrilled at their success.

John arranges for Claudio and Leonato to witness Borachio sneaking into Hero’s bedchamber, let in by Hero’s handmaiden dressed in her clothes. Later on, Borachio boasts of this to Conrade, but they’re overheard by city night watch members led by Dogberry (Michael Elphick), the comic-relief constable who speaks in malapropisms (also known as Dogberryisms). The two are arrested for slander against a gentlewoman, but by the time Dogberry reports to Leonato the next morning, the governor is in a hurry to get to the wedding and tells the constable to send him a report later.

Thus, the plot isn’t exposed in time to prevent Claudio from denouncing Hero before the altar. Leonato is so outraged that he tells his daughter he wishes she were dead, and he briefly thinks she is dead when she faints. The priest, Friar Francis (Graham Crowden), rightly condemns Leonato for assuming the worst rather than trusting his daughter. The friar suggests pretending that Hero died of shock so Claudio will regret his accusation and take her back happily when she turns up alive. Man, what is it with Shakespearean friars scheming to fake women’s deaths?

After the others exeunt, a subdued B&B sit together in the church and tentatively confess their love; but Beatrice is outraged at Claudio and asks Benedick to kill him. He resists, but finally agrees out of love for her. Claudio and Don Pedro are puzzled when Benedick confronts them angrily, but he backs out of dueling Claudio there and then, promising they’ll fight it out later.

Dogberry shows up with Don John’s henchmen, who confess their crimes, horrifying Claudio and Pedro that they accused Hero falsely. Leonato says he’ll forgive Claudio if he agrees to marry Antonio’s hitherto-unmentioned daughter who happens to be a dead ringer for Hero. (Antonio is Leonato’s brother and Beatrice his niece, but apparently Antonio is not Beatrice’s father. I guess there’s another sibling we didn’t meet.) The “niece” naturally turns out to be Hero, and she and Claudio are reunited. Benedick proposes to Beatrice, who retreats to her old bickering and denial before Benedick stops her with a kiss. The play ends with a celebratory dance, and in a first for this series, the camera cross-fades back and forth between the end credit scroll and the dance, so that the final fadeout is over live action instead of text.

–

This is an effective romantic comedy and a template for countless later stories about witty bickering couples who end up together. Cherie Lunghi is superb as Beatrice, strong and multilayered and understatedly beautiful, and Robert Lindsay is also effective and has good chemistry with her. Katharine Levy is a very sexy Hero, and Vernon Dobtcheff is marvelously malevolent as Don John. The weak link is Jon Finch, who overacts almost as obnoxiously as he did as Henry IV, though at least his foppish overplaying fits this character somewhat better. Stuart Burge’s direction is effective, with some clever stage business and nonverbal interplay.

–

Love’s Labour’s Lost

The final comedy in the BBC series is one I have no memory of reading, although my leftover college Shakespeare notes include a few references to it. It fell out of favor not long after Shakespeare’s time, with interest not reviving until the 19th-20th centuries. It’s one of Shakespeare’s few plays not based on a specific source, though its characters are namesakes of recent historical figures well-known to Shakespeare’s audience. Apparently the play is rich in Elizabethan references and wordplays that are lost on later generations. Perhaps that’s why the BBC performance is heavily cut down, coming in at just under 2 hours.

Despite its Elizabethan grounding, director Elijah Moshinsky staged this one in an 18th-century setting with powdered wigs, since he felt the story resonated with that era. This is the only installment to base its sets and costumes on an era post-dating Shakespeare’s lifetime.

The story revolves around King Ferdinand of Navarre (Jonathan Kent — no, not the farmer from Smallville) setting up a No Gurlz Allowed retreat devoted to intellectual pursuits, its members signing an oath to live as ascetics and eschew women for three years. There are three main gentlemen who attend him, the only significant one being the resident wit, Berowne or Biron (Mike Gwilym, with lighter hair than he had as Pericles). Berowne signs the pledge reluctantly, although he points out that the king will have to strike out the line about not even talking to women, since he’s forgotten that the Princess of France is coming with a diplomatic delegation. Still, the king forbids any woman within a mile of his court, aside from one country-wench servant, Jacquenetta (Paddy Navin). After all, peasants don’t count as real people, remember?

It takes about two seconds for local rustic Costard (Paul Jesson, a frequent player in this series whose notable roles include George Plantagenet in Henry VI/Richard III and Cloten in Cymbeline) to violate the rules by fraternizing with Jacquenetta. He’s ratted out by a visiting Spanish knight, Don Adriano de Armado, who’s played by the great David Warner (Time After Time, Star Trek TNG, etc.). Don Armado is a pompous, verbose knight who’s also in love with Jacquenetta, which we learn as he trades wordplays with his young pageboy Moth — inexplicably played by John Kane, who was 38 at the time and looked older.

The Princess of France (Maureen Lipman, the villain in Doctor Who: “The Idiot’s Lantern”) arrives with her attending gentleman Boyet (Clifford Rose) and three ladies, the only significant one being Rosaline (Jenny Agutter of Logan’s Run and Captain America: The Winter Soldier). Conveniently, the three ladies know of King Ferdinand’s three gentlemen and are respectively in love with them. The Princess (unnamed but presumably based on Margaret of Valois) is offended at being forced to make camp in the parkland a mile from the king’s court. Nonetheless, when the king and his posse arrive, the men are respectively lovestruck by the corresponding women (how fortunate that nobody fell in love with the wrong person).

Berowne breaks the bro code and clandestinely writes a love letter to Rosaline, which mailman Costard mixes up with a love letter from Don Armado to Jacquenetta. The women have a good laugh over Armado’s absurd excesses of verbiage, while the illiterate Jacquenetta takes Berowne’s letter to the pompous intellectual Holofernes (John Wells), who tells Costard to show it to the king. Berowne spies on the other three men mutually discovering each other writing love letters, and makes a show of condemning them all for their hypocrisy until Costard delivers the letter ratting him out. Berowne convinces the other three that there is no worthier study than love, and they mutually agree to drop the whole renunciation thing and get a-wooing.

Boyet overhears the men’s plan to romance the gals in disguise as Muscovites (putting on cheesy Russian accents). Since they’ve made a show of renouncing love, the Princess assumes it’s a cruel joke and gets back at them by having the masked women switch the tokens the men sent them so that the men woo the wrong ladies. (The production puts the women in veils that don’t really hide their faces.) Once the women reveal the switcheroo the next day, the men apologize and make it clear their interest is genuine.

The four couples reconcile by watching a pageant that Don Armado, Moth, Costard, and Holofernes put on ineptly, with the men heckling them and the women being more encouraging, until Jacquenetta interrupts to announce she’s carrying Armado’s child. But just when Shakespeare’s audience thought things were heading for a quintuple wedding, the messenger Marcade (Valentine Dyall’s third bit part in the series) arrives with news that the king of France is dead. The Princess and her court have no choice but to return home and devote themselves to mourning. She says that if the men devote their next year to penance and renunciation, the women may take them back. Rosaline asks Berowne to use his witty tongue to go to hospitals and try to bring laughter to the terminal patients, which brought a tear to my eye. The men accept the deal, and Berowne leans on the fourth wall to comment that this isn’t a typical ending for a comedy play. The only man who gets hitched at the end is Don Armado, who’s agreed to do right by Jacquenetta.

–

This is mostly an insubstantial play, an exercise in wordplay and witty banter with relatively little plot and only superficial conflicts. Most of the play is in the expected iambic-pentameter blank verse or prose, but a couple of the scenes with the Princess and her court are in rhyming anapestic tetrameter, which apparently was common in English poetry but which I can’t help but associate with Dr. Seuss.

The four main romantic leads are all effective, with Gwilym and Agutter as the standouts. David Warner is always great to listen to, but I wish he’d been cast as one of the great Shakespearean villains rather than a comic-relief knight. The Enlightenment-era sets and costumes are well-done, though the Princess’s camp doesn’t feel convincingly outdoorsy. A notable bit of added comic business is a brawl that ensues when Berowne tries to tear up his incriminating love letter and ends up in a tangle on the floor between Costard and Jacquenetta.

I was interested when Holofernes mocked Don Armado for not pronouncing the “b” in “doubt” or “debt” or the “l” in “calf” or “half.” I wondered whether this reflected normal pronunciations in Shakespeare’s time, but according to the annotation of that passage on p. 199 of The Riverside Shakespeare, “Holofernes represents the group of Renaissance educators who sought to bring the spelling and pronunciation of English words as close as possible to their Latin originals.”

There are contemporary references to a play called Love’s Labour’s Won, which many believe to be a lost sequel; the Doctor Who episode “The Shakespeare Code” revolved around this theory. However, sequels to comedies were almost unheard of in the day, and some believe Won is simply an alternate title to a different comedy. The sequel theory is based on the oddity of the romance plot being unresolved, but to me, it feels more like Shakespeare deliberately chose to subvert the comedy formula. I think if it had been meant as a cliffhanger, it wouldn’t have had such a sense of finality to it. Besides, why name a play Love’s Labour’s Lost if you don’t plan to end it in failure? The play is basically about the pursuit of exercises in futility, of goals that prove unattainable. Maybe the point is that the men denied themselves love for so long that they missed their chance.

–

Titus Andronicus

(Content warning: sexual assault, extreme violence, infanticide)

The final installment in the BBC series is Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy, presumably saved for last because it’s considered the least of the tragedies. It’s Shakespeare’s attempt to write a sensationalist revenge play of the sort that was popular at the time, and thus it’s his most violent, gruesome play.

Unlike Shakespeare’s other Roman plays based on historical figures, this one is entirely fictional, and apparently original. Multiple textual analyses have concluded that Act I, Act 2 Sc. 1, and Act IV Sc. 1 were probably written by George Peele, mentioned above as a possible source for King John.

After several appearances in this series by David Burke (The Winter’s Tale, Henry VI Parts 1-3), the first Dr. Watson to Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes, this play features Brett’s better-known Watson, Edward Hardwicke, as Titus’s brother Marcus. Another member of the Henry VI ensemble, Trevor Peacock, plays Titus. The “Moorish” villain Aaron is played by Hugh Quarshie (Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Doctor Who: “Daleks in Manhattan”/”Evolution of the Daleks”), who, thanks to the unfortunate choice in season 4 to cast Anthony Hopkins in brownface as Othello, is, I believe, the only non-white actor to play a central role in the entire series.

Director Jane Howell’s production opens with a close-up of a skull, which fades to Titus’s grandson Young Lucius (Paul Davies Prowles), wearing anachronistic spectacles even though everybody’s in Roman garb. The opening scenes rearrange events from Act I (which is all one scene in the text but three separate ones here), opening with Titus Andronicus’s return to Rome from a campaign against the Goths, accompanied by four living sons and several dead ones. (It turns out he’s lost 21 sons in all. We learn he’s a 40-year veteran, so if he had 25 sons in all, that’s more than two per year. What, did he keep a harem?) He also brings in a bunch of Goth prisoners (no, they aren’t in black clothes and eye shadow). To avenge his sons, he sacrifices the eldest son of the Goth queen Tamora (Eileen Atkins), ignoring her pleas for mercy. Tamora’s younger sons Chiron and Demetrius (Michael Crompton, Neil McCaul) vow revenge.

The emperor (an unspecified Caesar) has just died, and his sons Saturninus (Brian Protheroe, Edward IV in the Henry VI/Richard III miniseries) and Bassianus (Nicholas Gecks) are fighting over the succession when Tribune Marcus Andronicus (Hardwicke) comes in and tells them the people have chosen his brother Titus as their emperor. But when Marcus offers his brother the throne, Titus says no thanks, I’m old and I want to retire. Titus endorses Saturninus for emperor, and Satty frees Titus’s surviving Goth prisoners as a gesture of benevolence.

But it seems Brian Protheroe has been typecast, since Saturninus is even quicker than Edward IV to abuse his power in the name of his libido. He claims Titus’s daughter Lavinia (Anna Calder-Marshall, previously Hermione in The Winter’s Tale) as his bride even though she’s engaged to Bassianus, and when Titus gives him Queen Tamora as his slave, Saturninus immediately falls for her (Goth chicks, am I right?) and starts straying on the woman he chose as his wife just 20 lines earlier. Bassianus seizes Lavinia back, and her brothers cover their retreat. But Titus is more loyal to the new-fledged emperor than to his own family, and kills his own youngest son in the scuffle. Saturninus denounces Titus along with his whole family, but Titus despises his sons for the shame they’ve brought him. Tamora, seeing a chance to sow dissension in her enemies, pretends to play nice and convinces Saturninus to forgive and forget. Titus accepts and invites everyone to a celebratory hunt the next day.

Aaron has been watching silently in the background, but now soliloquizes about his plans to help Queen Tamora, his secret lover, gain power and revenge against the Romans. Demetrius and Chiron have somehow managed to fall in love with Lavinia even though they’ve had no direct interaction with her, and Aaron convinces them they’ll never woo the chaste Lavinia away from her royal husband. He convinces them instead to abduct and rape her during the next day’s hunt, which the brothers agree to, proving their talk of “love” was nothing of the sort.

If the scholars are right, Shakespeare’s part begins here. During the hunt, Tamora slips away from the emperor and tries to get frisky with Aaron, but he he’s too busy setting up his revenge plot. Bassianus and Lavinia show up and say some racist things about Aaron and Tamora’s involvement, giving Tamora an excuse to ask her sons to avenge her. They stab Bassianus and seize Lavinia. She pleads with Tamora, woman to woman, to kill her before letting her be violated, but Tamora gladly lets it happen in revenge for her father’s execution of Tamora’s son. Aaron plants evidence that two of Titus’s sons killed Bassianus, and Saturninus orders their execution.

Here’s where it starts to get gory, I’m afraid, since Chiron and Demetrius cut off Lavinia’s hands and tongue so she can’t identify her attackers. Marcus finds her like that and gives a long soliloquy about how horrifying it is, rather than actually trying to stop her bleeding or anything.

Titus’s eldest son Lucius (Gavin Richards), father of the bespectacled Young Lucius, tries and fails to free his brothers and is banished, which doesn’t stop him from sticking around for a long scene with Titus where they lament the cruelty of the Roman officials. Marcus arrives with the mutilated Lavinia, who just has to stand there while Titus laments her condition in another long, long speech that just rubs it in. Aaron arrives and lies that the emperor has agreed to spare Titus’s sons if another family member sacrifices a hand in tribute, leading to a farcical scene where Titus, Marcus, and Lucius argue over who gets to do it, until Titus tells Aaron to cut his left hand off while his brother and son are searching for an axe (that’s not a joke). When a messenger delivers his sons’ heads along with Titus’s rejected hand, the surviving family members vow revenge, and Titus sends Lucius off to ally with the Goths and build an army to invade Rome.

The family sits down to eat, even though Lavinia can no longer feed herself, and Titus keeps rubbing it in about their handlessness. In one of the play’s more infamous scenes, Marcus kills a fly, which makes Titus furious at the gratuitous murder of a poor innocent fly, until Marcus says it was black like Aaron, whereupon Titus praises him for destroying the evil thing. Oh, come on, Shakespeare!

In the next maybe-Peele scene, Lavinia paws through Young Lucius’s schoolbooks with her fake wrist stumps and teeth until she lands on the passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses about the rape of Philomela, who also had her tongue cut out but was able to knit her accusation into a tapestry. Marcus has the idea to let Lavinia write in the sand with his staff, and she names her assailants. (Why couldn’t she use her toes? Or they could’ve tried a series of yes-no questions instead of monologuing incessantly about how horrified they were.) Marcus and Young Lucius want revenge, but Titus warns that they have to play it subtly. Well, subtly by this play’s standards.

Things take an interesting turn when Tamora gives birth to an obviously biracial baby, proving that the emperor’s wife cheated with Aaron. (Somehow more than nine months have passed since the day of the hunt.) Chiron and Demetrius want to kill the baby to destroy the evidence, but Aaron reminds the racist creeps that the baby is their half-brother, and he’ll allow no one to harm it. Instead, he kills the nurse to silence her and flees to raise his child among the Goths.

Presaging Hamlet, Titus feigns madness, and gratuitously arranges to have a pigeon-keeping Clown (Tim Potter) take the emperor a threatening message wrapped around a knife, which gets the Clown sentenced to execution for no reason. Oh, nice one, Andronicus!

Saturninus panics on learning that Lucius is leading a Goth army and has the common people’s support. Tamora has apparently abandoned her Goth loyalties, I guess because she’s hooked on the power of being Rome’s empress or something, so she convinces Satty to let her manipulate Titus into bringing Lucius into her clutches.

Lucius’s forces capture Aaron, who had the bad luck to be overheard by a soldier while recapping the plot to his infant son in self-incriminating detail. Aaron promises to confess if Lucius spares his son, then gives a monologue about how gleefully evil he is for the sake of evil, before revealing the details of all the crimes he orchestrated.

Tamora puts on skull-like makeup (finally, some Goth eye shadow) and comes to Titus as the goddess Revenge (Nemesis, I guess?), identifying her sons as her junior avengers. Titus remarks on how uncannily they resemble Tamora and her sons, but pretends to be delusional enough to fall for their act. TamoRevenge convinces Titus to invite Lucius and the emperor to a banquet to talk peace, then leaves her sons to watch him. Titus’s men capture Chiron & Demetrius, hang them upside-down, and slaughter them (Jane Howell’s staging has the scene set up like a meat locker with slabs of beef hanging around).

It gets worse at the banquet, where Titus stabs Lavinia to death so she doesn’t have to live with her shame, oh good grief (with Lavinia presented here as willing to die, though she’s passive in the text). Titus reveals Chiron & Demetrius’s crime, then tells the emperor and Tamora that the meat pie they just ate was baked from the heads of Tamora’s sons. (Oh, if only they’d gotten Angela Lansbury to play Tamora…) But Titus barely gives the horror a moment to sink in before he stabs Tamora to death, making the whole gruesome exercise seem kind of pointless. With equal swiftness, Satty kills Titus and Lucius kills Satty, with none of Shakespeare’s usual dying speeches.

Marcus and Lucius explain the whole story to the Romans, who forgive them and acclaim Lucius their new emperor. Lucius sentences Aaron to be buried alive up to his chest and Tamora’s corpse to be thrown to the wolves. In the text, Aaron’s baby is alive in the hands of an attendant, but Howell goes much darker, with the baby’s coffin on display throughout the scene while Young Lucius stares at it in sorrowful horror. The staging comes full circle, closing on the boy’s silent face and dissolving to skulls.

–

Holy Grand Guignol, Batman! I see why this has a reputation as Shakespeare’s most gruesome play. I feel sorry for Anna Calder-Marshall having to go through half the play doing clumsy pantomime with fake stumps stuck over her hands, often reduced to little more than a prop. The story is crude, farcical, and simplistic compared to Shakespeare’s usual work, the prose often blunt and ineloquent. It’s also racist as hell, much worse than anything in Othello, with Aaron depicted as the most caricatured evil-for-the-sake-of-evil villain in all Shakespeare and having that depravity equated with his race.

Still, Aaron’s redeeming love for his infant son is an unusual twist, giving him more nuance than a lot of Shakespeare’s villains. Hugh Quarshie is by far the standout performer here, giving Aaron dignity and swaggering charm in contrast to the ignoble figure of the text. It’s easy to read his villainy as a reaction against the blatant racism of the play’s nominal heroes, or defiance against the Romans who pretend to be the embodiment of civilization but are no better than savages. There’s certainly no defending what Aaron encouraged the brothers to inflict on Lavinia, but when he claims that his actions are motivated by simple villainy for its own sake, it feels like he’s mocking the racist assumptions the Romans make about him, at least the way Quarshie plays it. It was easier to get a handle on Aaron’s motivations than Tamora’s, who switches sides without explanation.

Trevor Peacock is effective as Titus, well-cast physically as an aging Roman general. What he has to work with isn’t all that great, but he handles it well. Edward Hardwicke’s Marcus is workmanlike, not that different from his Dr. Watson. Brian Protheroe’s Saturninus is petulant and dilettantish. I found Eileen Atkins unconvincing as the alluring femme fatale Tamora was supposed to be. Paul Davies Prowles had little to do as Young Lucius beyond staring hauntedly at things, but when he did have dialogue, he was underwhelming.

Composer Dudley Simpson gives this play fuller scoring than a lot of previous installments, in the same style as his Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 work, mostly brass and percussion. Jane Howell’s staging and direction are pretty effective, though far from subtle. Elizabethan audiences apparently enjoyed the graphic violence and gore of the revenge-play genre, sort of the Game of Thrones of its day. So I guess it makes sense that Howell leaned into that, though she worked in commentary on the horror of it all through the eyes of Young Lucius.

Overall, this is a very weak ending for the series, and I feel it was a mistake to air it last. It would’ve been better to get it out of the way earlier and finish up with something stronger. Most of the plays this season were lesser-known leftovers, but Much Ado is considered a classic, and it would’ve been nicely symmetrical to close the series with the play that had originally been intended to open it.

–

So we’ve come to the end of the BBC Television Shakespeare, considered complete by the standards of the day. It’s been an uneven series with some terrific work, some major misfires, and a lot that was just workmanlike, but then, Shakespeare’s own canon was uneven in quality too. Some installments were cut down more than I would’ve preferred, and it mostly gets an F for inclusive casting; but overall, it was a fairly impressive achievement for what it was.

New connections

Since everyone lately, particularly in the writing community, seems to be ditching X/Twitter for Bluesky, I’ve made the transition as well, though I’m keeping my Twitter account active for the time being. I don’t really use social media for much beyond reposting blog and Patreon content and promoting my writing, so the more outlets I have for that, the better. And I still have a few friends and connections who haven’t made the switch yet. Anyway, you can find me there at @clbennettauthor.bsky.social. I see that WordPress has added Bluesky to their share menu, so hopefully this post will share there automatically, though the automatic sharing hasn’t worked with Facebook for years.

So far, I like how things are going. I accumulated more followers on Bluesky in four days than I gained on Twitter in over three years, probably because my friend and colleague David Mack was kind enough to add me to his “starter pack” of Star Trek creators — a helpful feature Bluesky uses to allow people to build lists of members with shared interests or professions to help new arrivals find each other.

Meanwhile, my apartment building finally got fiber optic phone lines installed last week. Since it would’ve been prohibitively difficult to get inside the walls of the building to string the new cables through them like the old copper phone lines, the workers installed them along the walls and ceilings of the building’s hallways, which was very noisy with all the drilling into the brick to attach bolts. Now that they’re done, there’s a little plastic box above every apartment door, connected to the fiber lines that run along the tops of the walls and then down through protective sheaths to a cable running along the ceiling of the laundry room and into the utility room where the phone lines are connected. Before they put the covers on the boxes, I saw that each box contained a fair length of coiled-up fiber ending in a boxy green plastic connector of some sort that isn’t yet connected to anything.

I’m not sure what comes next, but I partially recall a phone tech describing the process to me sometime a year or two ago when he came out to repair my copper phone line. I gather that something will be installed inside the apartments that a modem and landline phone can be plugged into in place of the old phone lines — with the drawback that the landline will no longer work in a power outage the way it currently does, which is one of the main reasons I’ve kept mine in case of emergency. I assume the coils of fiber sitting in the box are just there to be available for uncoiling and extending inside the apartments when the final installation happens, though I don’t know when that will be. I’m wondering if that will involve drilling a hole all the way through the wall (which seems unlikely given how thick it is) or stringing it through the top or corner of the door frame (maybe cutting a bit of a channel for it to rest in so the door doesn’t squish it). The latter seems more likely.

Once the upgrade happens, I’m kind of hoping I can keep using my current modem, but if it isn’t fiber-compatible, I guess I’ll have to replace it, which would mean having to log four devices into a new one — computer, phone, TV, and robot vacuum. Such is the price of progress.

I hope I don’t have to wait too long, since the much faster fiber lines would probably cure my smart TV’s slow logons to the modem and occasional signal dropouts mid-program, while also helping with some slow-loading sites on my computer.

I suppose the other “connection” I’ve made recently is the discovery that the small chain department store next to the university, about three long blocks’ walk from my home, has recycling bins just inside the door that take plastic bags as well as cans and bottles. That’s very helpful given how many plastic bags I accumulate from picking up groceries. I occasionally remember to bring them with me when I drive to grocery pickup and give them to the store clerk to take for recycling, but I still tend to accumulate a whole bunch of bags in my closet. Now I have a closer place to recycle them, which helps a lot. At least, in theory. I gather that there isn’t really a lot of plastic-bag recycling actually happening, that it turned out to be more difficult than expected, and that the bags may not actually go anywhere useful. All I can do is hope it makes some difference.

Settling in with my smart TV

I did some online searching and found a fix for the “insufficient memory” interruptions I was getting on my Fire TV, apparently a common problem for that model. It’s a glitch from an application called Amazon Photos, and you just have to disable it, according to this page. That fix worked, so I haven’t needed to buy a memory stick.

The TV’s been working pretty well since, though the display glitch on the home screen happened again yesterday and I had to reboot. Also, the Hulu app froze at one point, but another web search told me how to go into the settings and force stop a frozen app. I only noticed afterward that the enclosed sheet of basic setup instructions included a web address to download the full manual, but it turns out the manual doesn’t actually go into any of these details, so it’s not that helpful.

A few days ago, the TV started prompting me to enable some kind of activity tracking for tailoring ads, every time I turned the set on. The only options it gave me were “Enable” and “Ask Again Later,” which is really obnoxious. I finally got rid of it by going into settings and turning the tracking on and off again. I’m hoping it won’t bug me again for a while.

The replacement remote I ordered on eBay finally arrived, although the old remote’s volume buttons weren’t as completely worn out as I thought when I ordered it — just as well, since it took a couple of weeks to arrive. The replacement is designed to work on several different models of Sony receivers, and it has 54 buttons of which I only need 4 (power, volume up/down, and mute).

I debated whether I wanted to buy Bluetooth earphones for the TV, since I tend to be an early riser at my age and might occasionally want to watch something in the early morning without bothering the neighbors. I have an old pair of corded headphones that plug into the 1/4-inch jack on my receiver/amplifier, but the cord is just a bit too short to reach the couch. So I decided to buy a short extension cable, which was cheaper than new earphones. After trying it out, though, I realized those old headphones don’t have very good sound quality. What I should’ve done instead was to get an extension cable for my corded earbuds, since I already have a 3.5mm-to-1/4″ jack adapter. Fortunately the cables are cheap.

Now that I’m spending more time in front of the TV again, I decided I needed a clock there. There’s a clock on the front of my VHS-to-DVD dubbing deck (whose DVD tray is malfunctioning so it’s just a VCR at this point), but it’s dim when the deck is turned off, and it’s complicated to reset it whenever the power goes out, so I’d just left it blank for a while. I remembered a battery-powered clock that I’d written off as unusable and shoved in a drawer years ago. On a whim, I decided to take it out and verify whether it was functional, and it turned out that it still works perfectly; it just had a lot of green corrosion residue inside the battery compartment. I guess I was afraid the corrosion was toxic, though now I know it just needed to be cleaned out, which I did as best I could. So I’m glad to have a clock there again, without needing to buy a new one. (It can set itself automatically from the NIST time signal, but I can rarely get a good signal from my apartment, so I had to refresh my memory of how to set it manually. Luckily, I always keep the instruction booklets. Except for the dubbing deck, since it turns out I somehow ended up with the instruction book for a completely different brand of dubbing deck.)

Speaking of the dubbing deck, it belatedly occurred to me to check whether it had an HDMI output, which would save me a step in switching to it to reset the clock. I dragged it out of its cubbyhole and turned it around until I could see that it did indeed have an HDMI port in back — after which I noticed that it says “HDMI” on the front, so I could’ve saved myself a bit of effort. I wasn’t sure the shorter HDMI cable I had was long enough to reach, but I tried it and it worked, although the cable’s short enough that I’ll have to unplug it from the TV first if I need to pull out the player again. Although in this case, turning the player on doesn’t automatically turn the TV on the way the Blu-Ray player does, although turning off the TV does turn off the player. Not sure if that’s a function of the players or because it’s in HDMI 2 instead of 1. The bigger issue is that I can’t set the aspect ratio to 4:3 on the HDMI feed, at least for the VHS player; it stretches out the image to fill the screen. I tried all the video settings on both TV and player, without success. So if I want to watch a VHS tape, I’ll have to go through the RCA cables like before; but I’m keeping the HDMI connected since it will make resetting the clock easier. But neither of those things will be frequent occurrences anyway.

With fall-season shows premiering now, I finally had a chance to try watching live TV off the digital antenna, and it worked pretty well, except somehow the picture and sound aren’t always in sync (a problem that went away when I changed the channel and came back). I read somewhere that there was a sound mode setting you could adjust on the HDMI audio if it was out of sync (which happened at one point with the DVD/Blu-Ray player), but I couldn’t find that setting on the sound options for the antenna feed. It turns out that the NBC app won’t let me watch new episodes the morning after, only a week later; I thought I’d been able to fix that by signing in with my phone/internet company as a content provider, but apparently it doesn’t entitle me to next-day viewing. (I guess I’d need to pay more for a TV plan from my provider, or something.) So I did need the antenna after all. Glad to know that wasn’t a waste of money, at least.

Thoughts on the BBC TELEVISION SHAKESPEARE, Season 6

Shaun Sutton’s first full season as producer kept the same title visuals used since season 3 (which I only just figured out are a reproduction of the text font and decorative borders of the First Folio), but mostly abandoned the theme music, instead giving most of the plays their own distinctive opening music. The series would continue to air intermittently, with one installment in July 1983, one in November, two in December, and the final one of the season in April 1984.

Cymbeline

This is a play I knew nothing about besides the title, and the fact that my Riverside Shakespeare classes it with the romances. I didn’t even know who Cymbeline was. Turns out that, like King Lear, Cymbeline or Cunobeline is one of Britain’s pre-Roman kings, reigning from about 9 to 40 CE, possibly as a client king of Rome (which the play assumes). Unlike Lear/Leir, Cunobeline’s existence is confirmed in the historical record and through surviving artifacts such as coins, though the play’s version of him is rooted in legend.

We’ve got a few Doctor Who veterans in this one — from the classic series, Michael Gough (“The Celestial Toymaker”) and Marius Goring (“The Evil of the Daleks”), and from the modern series, Claire Bloom (“The End of Time”). Bloom plays Cymbeline’s nameless Queen, the third queen she’s played in this series after Catherine of Aragon in Henry VIII and Gertrude in Hamlet.

Cymbeline (Richard Johnson) is also similar to Lear in being irrationally angry at his daughter, Imogen (Helen Mirren, also a third-timer in this series), sometimes called Innogen (as in the BritBox subtitles, which use a different text of the play than the BBC did). Her father and her wicked stepmother (Bloom’s Queen) wanted her to marry her stepbrother Cloten (Paul Jesson), whose name is pronounced like “clot,” fitting his obnoxious personality. It’s creepy, but apparently her heir would have to be of fully royal blood to inherit the throne. But at the start of the play, she’s already gone ahead and married Posthumus Leonatus (Michael Pennington), an orphan raised in Cymbeline’s court, widely regarded by those who know him as the finest and noblest man on Earth (even though he’s literally a contemporary of Jesus Christ, which the characters don’t know but Shakespeare should have). Still, Cymbeline and Queen No-Name are outraged and exile Posthumus to Rome. The play opens with a very clumsy infodump of all this between two random gentlemen, though this production makes one a lady and replaces the other with court physician Cornelius (not Roddy McDowall, alas, but Hugh Thomas).

In Rome, the lord Iachimo (Robert Lindsay), aka Jachimo or Giacomo, gets sick of Posthumus extolling Imogen’s beauty and purity above the local Italian women, so he bets Posty that he, Iachimo, can seduce Imogen — a bet that Posty takes because he has absolute faith in his wife’s loyalty. Indeed, when Iachimo makes his play for her back in Britain, Imogen rebuffs him. But Iachimo sneaks into her bedchamber and creeps on her as she sleeps so he can collect enough details to convince Posty that he slept with her and win the bet. This includes a mole on her breast, implying that he partially undressed her, though the camera angle is discreet about it. Mercifully, he doesn’t violate her further, even though he likens himself to Tarquin from Shakespeare’s epic poem The Rape of Lucrece.

Back in Rome, Posthumus is way too quick to believe Imogen cheated on him even before Iachimo “proves” it by mentioning the mole. Posty calls his wife a whore, even though he literally invited Iachimo to try to seduce her. More than that, he damns women in general, saying that even men’s evil comes from their “woman’s part,” which is taking misogyny to creative depths. The finest man on Earth, ladies and gentlemen.

It gets worse, though — Posthumus orders his faithful servant Pisanio (John Kane) to lure Imogen to Milford Haven (on the Welsh coast) and murder her there. Luckily, Pisanio actually is a good man and helps Imogen fake her death through that old Shakespearean strategy, impersonating a boy. Under the assumed name Fidele (Faithful), she happens upon a trio of hermits, Morgan (Michael Gough) and his twentysomething sons (Geoffrey Burridge, David Creedon), who feel an instant affinity for “Fidele” and take her in as a brother. Unbeknownst to Imogen and the sons, this is literally true (gender aside), for these are actually Cymbeline’s long-lost sons Guiderius and Arviragus, whom Morgan (actually a soldier called Belarius) abducted as toddlers in revenge when he was falsely accused of treason and banished.

When Cloten follows Imogen to Milford Haven intending to forcibly make her his wife, he gets into a fight with Morgan/Belarius’s sons and gets his head lopped off. By contrivance, he was wearing Posthumus’s clothes at the time. Meanwhile, a distraught Imogen takes some medicine that Pisanio gave her on the Queen’s recommendation, not knowing that the Queen actually intended to poison her, because she’s a wicked stepmother (who’da thunk it?) who plans to murder everyone to take the throne. But Dr. Cornelius substituted a drug that only feigns death, just like Romeo & Juliet. So the hermit family lays her to rest with Cloten’s corpse, and when she wakes up alongside a headless body in her husband’s clothes, she assumes it’s the posthumous Posthumus.

While all this is going on, the evil Queen talks Cymbeline into refusing to pay his tribute to Rome (Oh, Cymbeline, why can’t you be true?), so the Romans send an invasion force led by Caius Lucius (Graham Crowden), who adopts Imogen/Fidele as his page when he’s moved by her loyalty to the corpse of the man she claims is her former master. The actual Posthumus is compelled to join the Roman legion, but he’s guilty about ordering Imogen’s death and defects back to Britain to atone. In an offstage battle, he, Belarius, and the secret princes quadruple-handedly hold a narrow pass against the entire Roman army, securing Britain’s victory.

But Posty lets himself be arrested with the Romans and is eager to be condemned to death. In a spiritual vision, the ghosts of Posty’s long-dead parents appeal to Jupiter (a cameo by, who else, Michael Hordern) to have mercy on him, and he agrees to dole out a miracle. Jupiter lays a book of prophecy on his chest (though as staged here, it’s on his lap, contradicting the dialogue) which he still has when he wakes up, proving it really happened. By Jove (literally)!

Cymbeline brings everyone to his court, either to commend them as heroes or condemn them as prisoners. Cornelius interrupts with the news that the Queen pined away to death at the disappearance of her son, conveniently confessing all her evils on her deathbed. This starts a rather comical chain of confessions and revelations as all the secrets come out, every non-evil character believed dead is revealed alive, and nobody has good enough eyesight or hearing to recognize Imogen in pageboy drag before she outs herself, except Pisanio, who arranged the disguise, and Cymbeline, who finds “Fidele” familiar but can’t place “him.” (I have a theory that Shakespeare characters’ failure to see through disguises seemed plausible at the time because indoor lighting was so bad in those days, but it happens in outdoor scenes too.) The princes are restored to their rightful place (and get excused for killing Cloten because of their higher-ranking bloodline, yeesh), Imogen and Posty get a happy ending, and Cymbeline resumes paying protection money to Rome so they won’t invade again, which is somehow supposed to be a good thing.

Wow, this is a convoluted story. Shakespeare assembled it from several sources, explaining the multitude of subplots. The Cymbeline stuff comes from Holinshed’s Chronicles, and Posthumus’s story is loosely based on Cunobeline’s eldest son Adminius, who was banished and sought refuge with Emperor Caligula, although the play is anachronistically set during Augustus’s reign. (Making this the third Shakespeare play where Octavian/Augustus Caesar is a participant in events, albeit an offstage one in this case.) It’s got some resonances with other Shakespeare plays, particularly R&J, but with a happier ending. But it’s not clear to me why Shakespeare decided to combine the story of Posthumus testing Imogen (derived from Boccaccio’s Decameron) with Cymbeline’s clash with Rome, a story element that seems almost incidental in a play that’s mostly about the misunderstanding among lovers and the secret of the long-lost princes (which was borrowed from a relatively recent play). It’s all kind of a hodgepodge and could’ve done with more focus.

This production, directed by Elijah Moshinsky, is pretty good, though it continues the series’s annoying habit of using Elizabethan dress for stories set far earlier in history. Helen Mirren is excellent as Imogen, a role that lets her show more range and power than Rosalind or Titania, since Imogen goes through much darker and more wrenching experiences. John Kane is also excellent as Pisanio, a loyal servant placed in an impossible position where he must betray his master’s orders to spare his master’s soul. I like Pisanio; someone who refuses to obey an order he knows is wrong is more honest and true than someone who obeys an unjust order and enables his superior’s immorality. Richard Johnson is suitably hard-edged as Cymbeline, and Claire Bloom and Michael Gough are as effective as one would expect, though they don’t get a lot to do for much of the play.

Macbeth

After one that was entirely new to me, we get one of the best-known plays, another one where I played the title role in my English class’s read-through, this time in 11th grade. (I was really looking forward to performing “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” which I rehearsed extensively, but unfortunately someone came into the classroom and distracted the class while I was doing it.) This version was directed by Jack Gold and starred Nicol Williamson (Sherlock Holmes in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Merlin in John Boorman’s Excalibur) in the title role. Williamson was born in Scotland but raised in England, and the entire cast performs the play with English accents, as usual, with the exception of Irish actor Tony Doyle, who lays on a mild Scottish brogue as Macduff. (See what I did there?)

“The Scottish Play” needs no introduction, I assume. Three witches tell Macbeth he’ll be Thane of Cawdor and then king hereafter, and his buddy Banquo (Ian Hogg) won’t be king but his heirs will (since Shakespeare operated from the fictitious thesis that his monarch at the time, King James I, was descended from Banquo). Once the Cawdor prediction comes true, Macbeth claims he’s okay with letting chance make him king, but doesn’t need much goading from Lady Macbeth (Jane Lapotaire, who was Cleopatra in season 3) to go ahead and murder King Duncan (Mark Dignam). Duncan’s sons flee Scotland to protect themselves from assassination, which lets Macbeth accuse them of being the assassins, and the throne falls to Macbeth, who immediately decides he can’t enjoy it unless he kills Banquo and his son. (Macbeth doesn’t consider the inconsistency between the accuracy of the witches’ predictions about himself and his hope to avert the prediction about Banquo.)

But he’s haunted by Banquo’s ghost, or else by guilt, and degenerates into tyranny and madness, buoyed by the witches’ prophecies that he needn’t fear until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane and that he won’t be killed by any man born of woman. So even as Lady Macbeth is driven mad by her own guilt, Mac is unconcerned with the army raised by Malcolm (James Hazeldine) and Macduff (with help from England’s king Edward the Confessor), and boy, is he surprised when the army uses branches from Birnam as camouflage and then Macduff turns out to be a C-section delivery, which somehow doesn’t count as being born (I’ve been puzzled by that since high school). Just goes to show — always read the fine print in the license agreement.

Director Jack Gold (who previously did The Merchant of Venice in season 3) chooses to ignore the stage directions and keep Banquo’s ghost and the other apparitions invisible, implying that they’re only in Macbeth’s mind. It’s a fairly stylized, minimalist production, with even Birnam Wood represented only by green lighting gels. Some scenes are rearranged and combined to flow more smoothly, and the scene where the Weird Sisters report to their boss Hecate is omitted. Gold adds a wordless moment at the end where the victorious Malcolm, now King Malcolm III, sees his younger brother Donalbain staring at him ominously (I think that’s who it is — I’m not great with faces), presumably foreshadowing the historical fact that Donalbain would succeed Malcolm III as king. Although Malcolm’s death was through an accident rather than any foul play on Donalbain’s part, so it’s an odd moment to throw in there.

Williamson is somewhat effective as Macbeth, but he gets way too broad and snarly as the play goes on, and I think he would’ve benefited from a different director pulling him back. I’m even less fond of Lapotaire’s interpretation of Lady Macbeth, which is too much like her Cleopatra, coquettishly seductive and more vulnerable than Lady M should be. She delivers the “unsex me now” soliloquy seductively while rolling around in bed with her legs spread and fondling her breasts, essentially faking an orgasm at the end, which is pretty much the exact opposite of what “unsex me” means. It’s a ludicrous misreading of the soliloquy’s intent (that Lady M wants to cast off her feminine softness and be as hard-edged and ruthless as a man). Just as strangely, Williamson and Lapotaire play their later scenes together, once Macbeth is king, as if he’s an abusive husband that she’s terrified of, a bizarre reversal of the usual dynamic where Lady M is the tough one goading Macbeth to set aside his weakness. I find this a deeply wrongheaded interpretation of her character, although I guess it does set up her eventual degeneration into madness and implied suicide. (Man, Shakespeare’s villainesses have a way of deteriorating and dying offstage, don’t they?)

Though the characters here are based on real historical figures, Shakespeare took extensive liberties to make Banquo look better and Macbeth far worse. Historically, Macbethad mac Findláech was actually a pretty good king with a mostly peaceful reign. The version of Macbeth’s life depicted in the 1990s animated series Gargoyles was far more historically accurate than Shakespeare’s, though both feature supernatural elements. As usual, the play also compresses the timeline rather extremely, since Macbeth reigned for 17 years.

Once you know it, it’s striking how clear it is that this play was written to pander to King James I. It glorifies his putative ancestor and foreshadows his reign, and it caters to his preoccupation with the “threat” of witchcraft (as dramatized in Doctor Who: “The Witchfinders”), a subject not featured nearly so heavily in earlier Shakespeare plays. It’s also the Bard’s sixth-shortest play, in keeping with James’s preference for shorter works. (Hamlet is his longest, Cymbeline the third-longest.)

The Comedy of Errors

By coincidence, we go right to the shortest of Shakespeare’s canonical plays. (Unless you count Lewis Theobald’s 1727 play Double Falsehood, which Theobald claimed to be adapted from John Fletcher’s lost play Cardenio, which might have been coauthored by Shakespeare. Yeah, I’m not gonna count that.) It’s also one of his earliest comedies, if not the earliest, and his most farcical, adapted from the Menaechmi, a farce by the Roman dramatist Plautus. Director James Cellan Jones stages the whole thing on a stylized stage representing the city of Ephesus (pronounced like “emphasis” without the “m”), with a troupe of mimes as townsfolk, spectators, and wordless Greek chorus to the proceedings.

Shakespeare gives the story higher stakes than a typical farce by opening with the Duke of Ephesus (Charles Gray in his fourth role in this series) condemning the Syracusian merchant Aegeon (Cyril Cusack) to death unless he can pay the fine for, well, being Syracusian and therefore banned from Ephesus due to a trade war. Aegeon says he welcomes death and spins his tragic tale. He fathered twins that, for some reason, are both named Antipholus (though he initially says they “could not be distinguished but by names”), and that by a staggering coincidence were born on the same day as a pair of peasant twins both named Dromio, whom Aegeon bought (!!) to be raised as the Antipholi’s servants. But they were shipwrecked, and Aegeon, one Antipholus, and one Dromio were separated from the other two boys and their mother Aemelia, never to see them again. At eighteen, Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse went off to roam the Mediterranean in search of their twins, and Aegeon has been alone ever since. The Duke is moved and gives Aegeon until nightfall to beg and borrow enough money to buy his life.

The Syracusian Antipholus and Dromio coincidentally arrive in Ephesus that day, and as you can guess, they both get mistaken for their Ephesian doubles/namesakes, who, by an unaddressed coincidence, are also wearing identical clothing. Both Antipholi are played by Michael Kitchen, while The Who‘s Roger Daltrey plays both Dromios — which is appropriate, since “Who Are You?” will often be a relevant question and a lot of people will Get Fooled Again.

Though Antipholus of Syracuse soliloquizes about his search for his long-lost twin, he subsequently forgets it for the rest of the play as he’s mistaken for Antipholus of Ephesus by the locals, including Ant-Eph’s wife Adriana (Suzanne Bertish) and her sister Luciana (Joanne Pearce), whom Ant-Syr falls in love with. Between that and various mixups as each Antipholus mistakes the opposite Dromio for his own and punishes him for failing to carry out errands the other one was given, the Syracusian duo end up thinking they’re in a town of oddly generous witches and lunatics; Ant-Eph gets angry at his wife, servant, and friends betraying him; and Adriana becomes convinced her husband has gone mad and has him and Dromio tied up, only to be surprised to find the other pair at large, where they retreat into an abbey for sanctuary.

The duke shows up and everyone petitions him for justice, and Aegeon (whom Jones has had wandering around wordlessly in the background so he wouldn’t be forgotten) finally mistakes the Ephesian duo for his own pair, forgetting the whole twin thing for some reason, until the Abbess (Wendy Hiller, who was the Duchess of York to Charles Gray’s Duke in Richard II) emerges with the Syracusian duo and announces that she, to further compound the coincidences, is actually their long-lost mommy, separated from them after the shipwreck. Everyone’s reunited (at an improbability level of 267,709 to 1 against, possibly much higher), with help from a bit of split-screen work, and all the misunderstandings are resolved. The Kids Are Alright, and The Song Is Over.

I’d known this was a play about twins and mistaken identities, but I hadn’t realized how gradually Shakespeare reveals what’s going on, since he starts with Ant-Syr getting confused at Dromio’s inconsistency and a strange woman claiming to be his wife before we finally meet Ant-Eph and get his side. We don’t see either pair of twins together until the end, which I assume allows them to be played by the same actors onstage, though there would have to be doubles in the final act. Jones does, however, give the Dromios a brief, wordless scene early on that pays homage to the Marx Bros.’ mirror routine as they mistake each other for reflections, which is fitting, since Daltrey’s curly blond hair and affably goofy performance give him a Harpo Marx quality.

The play is fairly clever and wittily written, but the contrivances of the situation are hard to buy, given that the Syracusians know they have long-lost twins and should begin to piece it together eventually. Giving both sets of twins the same names is especially bizarre. There are also some bits that have aged badly, like the casual acceptance of slavery, the Antipholi’s tendency to beat their Dromios, Drom-Syr making fat jokes about an unseen cook who’s in love with Drom-Eph, and Luciana’s lecture to her sister about how women’s place is to obey their husbands absolutely, the same submissive attitude Katherine was broken to at the end of The Taming of the Shrew. There’s even a bizarre bit where the Abbess blames Adriana for driving her husband mad by berating him for cheating on her with a courtesan, basically saying boys will be boys and she’s the one in the wrong for complaining about it — the diametric opposite of slut-shaming, you could say. The young Shakespeare’s attitudes about women needed a lot of work.

The stylized production is pretty effective. Kitchen and Daltrey both try to differentiate the twins’ personalities, though it was hard for me to see the difference clearly until they were together at the end. Both Ephesians are played more broadly than the Syracusians; the Ephesian Dromio is goofier and more clownish, and the Ephesian Antipholus has a curt, impatient, condescending delivery, as if Kitchen is doing a John Cleese impression. Of the two, Daltrey’s characterizations are more entertaining.

Ephesus was a Greek city in Ionia on the coast of Asia Minor, making this one of only two Shakespeare plays set entirely in Asia, the other being Troilus and Cressida (set in Troy, just a couple hundred miles to the north). Going by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Shakespearean_settings, Pericles, Prince of Tyre (coming next season) is set mainly in Lebanon and Asia Minor, but has a portion set in Libya, making it the only play other than Antony and Cleopatra to be set partly in Africa (since much of A&C is in Alexandria). Othello is mainly in Cyprus, a Mediterranean island considered part of West Asia, but its first act takes place in Venice. The only other Shakespeare play set even partly in Asia is Antony and Cleopatra, which has one scene set on a plain in Syria. The only other debatably non-European setting in Shakespeare is the island in The Tempest, which is an ambiguous blend of Mediterranean and Caribbean elements. But that’s essentially a fantasy realm unconnected to real geography.

Just for the heck of it: The northernmost setting in all of Shakespeare is probably Forres in Macbeth (the site of Duncan’s castle and the blasted heath), while the southernmost and easternmost are respectively Alexandria and Syria in Antony and Cleopatra. The westernmost is Milford Haven in Cymbeline, located on the west coast of Wales, which, though it doesn’t quite look it on a standard map projection, is a bit further west than Navarre in Love’s Labour’s Lost. (The Tempest would take southernmost and westernmost if you went for the Caribbean theory, though.)

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Next comes yet another candidate for Shakespeare’s earliest comedy, argued by many to be his first play ever, due to its conventional forms and underdeveloped writing and themes. Thus, it’s not highly regarded among the comedies.

The titular gentlemen, Proteus (Tyler Butterworth) and Valentine (John Hudson), are probably around the same age as Shakespeare’s other famous gentleman of Verona, Romeo. Proteus is madly in love with young noblewoman Julia (Tessa Peake-Jones, Doctor Who: “The Time of the Doctor”), while Valentine, despite his name, scorns love and craves travel and adventure. So Val goes to the court of the Duke of Milan (Paul Daneman), where, to his own surprise, he falls madly for the Duke’s daughter Silvia (Joanne Pearce, returning from The Comedy of Errors). Silvia returns his affections, but the Duke is determined that she should marry the foolish, unappealing Sir Thurio (David Collings, the Doctor Who veteran we saw earlier as Cassius in Julius Caesar), whom she loathes.

Julia loves Proteus back, but plays hard to get at first, so no sooner have they finally gotten together in Verona that Proteus’s father decides he’s led too sheltered a life and needs to travel, shipping him off to Milan. The fast friends Proteus and Valentine are reunited, but Proteus’s affections prove protean, as he’s instantly smitten by Silvia. He wrestles briefly with his conscience before deciding to betray both his girlfriend and his best friend and make a play for Silvia. He tips off the Duke to Val’s plan to elope with Silvia, getting Val banished, and then convinces Thurio to let him romance Silvia, supposedly on Thurio’s behalf. Meanwhile, Julia decides to come to Milan — disguised as a pageboy so she doesn’t get sexually assaulted traveling alone — and gets there just in time to see Proteus serenading Silvia, breaking her heart.

Silvia, for her part, despises Proteus for his infidelity to Julia and rejects him soundly. When Proteus recruits the disguised Julia (inevitably failing to recognize her) to bring his love message to Silvia, there’s a really lovely scene where Silvia condemns Proteus and expresses sympathy for Julia, unaware that Julia is standing right there and moved by her consideration. It’s really nice that Shakespeare chose to make the women sympathetic to each other, united as victims of Proteus’s fickle and treacherous behavior, rather than jealous enemies.

Meanwhile, Valentine gets waylaid by outlaws in a forest near Mantua, and when he tells them he has nothing for them to steal and claims he was banished for killing a man honorably, they immediately… err… elect this guy they met two minutes ago as their leader. When Silvia flees to the woods in search of her Valentine, she’s captured by the outlaws, then rescued offstage by Proteus (with “pageboy” Julia in tow), who expects Silvia to be grateful for his rescue and is so angry at her continued rejection that he threatens to rape her. Valentine overhears and confronts him, and if you thought the knockoff Merry Men electing a total stranger their Robin Hood was weird, buckle up. Proteus is suddenly overcome with remorse for his toxic masculinity and begs forgiveness, and Valentine is so moved by his apology that he abruptly offers to surrender the woman he loves to the guy who just tried to rape her 25 lines ago. Luckily, this outrageous bros-before-(mumble) offer causes Julia to swoon and give herself away, whereupon she and Proteus are reunited even though any self-respecting woman would’ve kicked him to the curb by now. Then the Duke and Thurio show up randomly, Val threatens the cowardly Thurio into withdrawing his suit for Silvia, the Duke pardons everyone when Val promises he’s reformed the outlaws, and yeah, I can see why people think this was the work of an inexperienced playwright.

Still, for all its plot absurdities, it’s an entertaining piece overall, noted for its comic-relief servants including Launce (Tony Haygarth), who’s defined by his love-hate relationship with his dog Crab, even to the point of taking the blame for Crab’s misbehavior and taking the punishments onto himself, which is very sweet. The other comedy servant is Val’s pageboy Speed (Nicholas Kaby), who’s just there to rattle off fast-talking wisecracks and to give the Two Gentlemen someone to talk to other than the audience. There’s also a comic relief knight called Sir Eglamour, played very broadly by Frank Barrie, who serves little evident purpose in the play, mentioned in passing in Act I (in Verona) but not showing up until Act IV (in Milan), where he arranges to escort Silvia in her flight, but then flees and abandons Silvia when the outlaws attack them in Act V (offstage in the text but onstage in this production). Generally, all the gentlemen and noblemen in this play, except Valentine, are jerks or disappointments to some degree (many of the outlaws are exiled gentlemen like Valentine), while the noblewomen and servants are more admirable. I’d say that tracks.

Shaun Sutton and director Don Taylor make this a lively production; as with Errors, they add a lot of colorful stage business with background players and musicians, with the score adapted from authentic Elizabethan compositions. The Verona and Milan sets are fairly naturalistic (though there’s an odd bit where Friar Patrick’s cell has bars like a prison cell, either a visual pun or a weird miscommunication), but the forest is highly stylized, represented by fat metal poles adorned with green tinsel and bird statues. The cast is generally effective; for me, the standout is Tessa Peake-Jones, who’s lovely, poignant, and compelling as Julia. As for Tyler Butterworth, I think he plays Proteus too sympathetically, like a romantic lead rather than the toxic, duplicitous villain of the piece. I think Butterworth and John Hudson might have been better suited to each other’s roles, since Butterworth comes off as pure and clean-cut while Hudson has an edgier quality.

I couldn’t help notice a bit where the Duke says he was informed of Silvia’s flight into the woods by “Friar Laurence.” This may have been a typo for Friar Patrick, but I’m amused by the idea that it might be the same Friar Laurence from Romeo and Juliet making an offstage cameo, thus creating a shared universe of Shakespeare plays about young Veronese gentlemen making reckless life choices under the influence of hormones.

The Tragedy of Coriolanus

After Shakespeare’s shortest play two episodes ago, we now get his second-longest, exceeded only by Hamlet. Coriolanus is also one of his latest tragedies, roughly contemporaneous with Antony and Cleopatra. As with Cymbeline, I knew nothing whatsoever about this play going in, not even who its title character was. (Indeed, I tend to confuse the two titles with each other.) Like Cymbeline, its title character is a legendary figure from the Roman era, this one of more uncertain historicity. Coriolanus was the cognomen of a legendary 5th-century BCE Roman general named Gnaeus Marcius, though Shakespeare calls him Caius Marcius or Martius, following the precedent of Plutarch, his chief source. The play is set early in the Roman Republic, and is thus something of an indirect sequel to The Rape of Lucrece, a crime reputed in legend to have triggered to the overthrow of the monarchy and establishment of the Republic by Lucius Junius Brutus, purported ancestor of Julius Caesar’s assassin Brutus.

The play opens with a mob of Roman plebeians rioting against the Senate for failing to distribute its grain stores to the starving public during a shortage. Joss Ackland (Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey) plays Menenius, a most non-heinous dude who urges them to be excellent to each other (or at least to the senators), chastising them with a parable about the body parts rebelling against the stomach on which they all depend. Caius Marcius (Alan Howard, the voice of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings movies) shows up to hurl abuse at the peasantry before grudgingly revealing that the Senate caved, released the grain stores to prevent an uprising, and appointed a pair of tribunes to represent the plebeians’ interest, namely Sicinius (John Burgess) and Brutus (Anthony Pedley in his fifth role in this series). Apparently this is supposed to be Tiberius Junius Brutus, the son of Lucrece‘s Brutus, although in reality he was executed more than a decade before the events of this play.

Caius despises political maneuvering and seeks only military glory, egged on by his warmongering mother Volumnia (Irene Worth), who insists she’d rather see her son die valorously in war than live in peace. So he’s happy when he’s sent out as second-in-command to the consul Cominius (Patrick Godfrey) to put down an uprising of the Volsci (one of the tribes of Italy) in the city of Corioli. Caius’s wife Virgilia (Joanna McCallum) is less sanguine about her husband possibly dying in war and resolves to sequester herself at home until her husband returns, the Penelope to his Odysseus. She’s coaxed out of seclusion by a family friend named Valeria (Heather Canning), because apparently Shakespeare felt like confusing generations of English students by giving literally every significant female character in the play a name starting in V. (As it happens, the real Coriolanus’s mother, if she existed, was named Veturia.)

The Volsci are led by Caius’s nemesis Tullus Aufidius (Mike Gwilym), who’s fought him eleven times and never prevailed, so both are eager for a twelfth go-round. Since this is one of Shakespeare’s later plays, the battles are offstage as per the fashion of the time, but director Elijah Moshinsky substitutes stylized onscreen action for much of the dialogue in Act I, Scenes vi-vii. Moshinsky gives Caius and Aufidius’s rivalry a homoerotic subtext so blatant that it’s practically text. I.viii contains the stage direction “Here they fight, and certain Volsces come to the aid of Aufidius. Marcius fights till they be driven in breathless.” Moshinsky omits the “certan Volsces” and interprets this as an extended shirtless, sweaty, one-on-one swordfight that fades out on Caius chest-to-chest with Aufidius and moving in as if to kiss him.

Aufidius gets away, err, somehow, ahem, but Corioli is retaken, and for his dizzying victory against Corioli’s forces (physics pun!), Cominius offers Caius a 10% cut off the top of the spoils of war (which he refuses to accept) and dubs him Caius Marcius Coriolanus, at which point the stage directions and dialogue tags switch from “Marcius” to “Coriolanus” for the rest of the play.

Back home, Coriolanus is slated for promotion to consul, but he resists, preferring war to politics and despising the common people he’d have to represent. Menenius and Cominius talk him into going through the semi-democratic ritual of seeking the people’s approval by wandering the streets in humble robes and showing off his war wounds to plead to the plebs to reward him for his service by approving his consulship. He chafes at boasting of his victories as much as at gladhanding the rabble, but he makes a clumsy effort and tentatively wins their support. But since Shakespeare lived in a classist, monarchical society, he had to paint the populists as the bad guys, so the tribunes Sicinius and Brutus scheme to turn the people against Cori before he’s officially appointed. (Of the three members of the Brutus lineage who appear in Shakespeare’s works, this one is the only outright villain, though he’s like his later namesake in that he conspires against the play’s title character.) This quickly escalates to Cori denouncing the whole political system and getting accused of treason by the tribunes. Volumnia persuades him to feign repentance by likening it to the deceptions he’d use against an enemy in war, but it only takes the barest provocation by the tribunes to bring on an impolitic rant of his true feelings. The tribunes exile him on pain of death, to the dismay of his family.

Seeking vengeance on Rome, Coriolanus tracks down Aufidius, who doesn’t initially recognize him in supplicant’s clothes, in keeping with Shakespearean characters’ desperate need for corrective eyewear. Cori gives Aufy the choice of either slitting his throat or accepting his help in conquering Rome. Aufy picks door #2, glad to have the warrior he so admires on his own side, and his expressions of admiration toward his old enemy are impassioned enough to make me realize the homoeroticism was there all along.

The Volscian army tears relentlessly through Roman territory under Cori’s command until they’re at the gates of Rome, where he refuses to hear the pleas of Cominius or Menenius. Yet the three V ladies come to him with his young son (Damien Franklin), and Volumnia shows character growth by realizing she’d rather see her son make peace than die a traitor or destroy the ones he loves. Her tears finally melt his heart and he agrees to the peace, though he returns with his Volscian allies. But Aufidius tells his lieutenant Adrian (Valentine Dyall, Doctor Who‘s Black Guardian) that he despises Cori for betraying his Volscian allies for a mother’s tears. In the original play, Aufidius leads a mob of conspirators to kill Coriolanus, but Moshinsky cuts the conspirators and makes it a one-on-one confrontation where Cori seems to welcome being, err, penetrated by Aufidius’s sword.

I’m surprised that this is one of the lesser-known and lesser-regarded tragedies, since I found it quite compelling. Coriolanus is perhaps Shakespeare’s most cold and forbidding protagonist, but that ambiguity is what makes him interesting. He’s a product of his upbringing, raised to know nothing but war and thus no good at any other kind of human interaction. There’s a fascinating moment where, after Corioli is taken, he pleads to Cominius for leniency toward a now-imprisoned local who aided him during the conflict, but then can’t remember the man’s name and shrugs it off. He’s just bad with people; his closest relationship is with his mortal enemy. He’s not a good person, but as an introvert I can’t help but sympathize with his resistance to playing the expected social games and living up to the expectations of others. Yet I can also sympathize with his friends and family trying to save him from being his own worst enemy with his stubborn pride, even if the only remedy they know how to suggest is to hide his true self.

This is also an excellent production, with terrific acting and strong, stylish direction by Moshinsky, even if it’s cut very tightly with lines omitted and very abrupt transitions between scenes. Joss Ackland is most bodacious as Menenius, though Alan Howard is effective as Coriolanus, reminding me somewhat (in both appearance and performance) of Paul Darrow as Blake’s 7‘s similarly harsh and forbidding Avon, crossed with a bit of Chris Barrie as Red Dwarf‘s misanthropic Arnold Rimmer.

As usual, the play takes enormous liberties with chronology. Not only is Brutus anachronistically alive, but Shakespeare conflates the plebeian uprising and the creation of the Tribunes of the Plebs in 494 BCE with the grain shortage, which actually happened three years later in 491 BCE and precipitated Coriolanus’s exile. The long rivalry between Caius Marcius and Aufidius seems to be entirely Shakespeare’s invention, as history/legend says Marcius was a young man whose actions at Corioli in 493 BCE were his first major claim to fame.

–

Well, this season has been an interesting mix of plays, some better than others. But aside from the problematical portrayals of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and the questionable choice of playing Two Gentlemen‘s villain as a sympathetic romantic lead, this has been a very strong season in its direction, performances, and production values, with some creative staging enhancing the texts of the plays. At this point, I think I can say that Shaun Sutton has been a better producer than his predecessors.

Next up, the final five plays, at least three of which are new to me.

KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES Review (Spoilers)

I just did something I’ve wanted to do for years — rewatched all three Andy Serkis Planet of the Apes films back-to-back — before moving on to the fourth film (or rather, the first film in a potential sequel trilogy), Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, now streaming on Hulu and Disney+ along with the other three films. (Well, you have to have the D+/Hulu package to get them unlocked on D+, but they still play within the D+ app. I watched the first two on Hulu, but on my new smart TV, the Hulu app sometimes stops and gives me an error message when my relatively slow wi-fi connection lags too much, so I watched the other two on D+.) It’s still a remarkably solid trilogy, although the CGI in Rise of the PotA sometimes looks a bit unreal compared to the sequels. It holds together well continuity-wise despite changing directors from Rupert Wyatt in the first to Matt Reeves in Dawn of… and War for…, and despite being unable to hold onto any human characters from one film to the next. But then, the human characters have never been the real focus. (I didn’t review Rise here, but I covered Dawn and War.)

Kingdom is written by Josh Friedman of the excellent Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and directed by Wes Ball of the Maze Runner film trilogy (which I’m unfamiliar with). Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, who developed and wrote Rise and co-wrote Dawn, remain on board as producers.

After a prologue showing the funeral of Andy Serkis’s Caesar immediately after the end of War (to remind returning audiences and seed the idea of Caesar for new audiences), Kingdom jumps forward 300 years (though the caption only says “many generations”) and introduces an intriguing chimpanzee subculture called the Eagle Clan, whose members train hunting eagles and form bonds with them. The lead character Noa (Owen Teague), the adolescent son of the clan’s leader (The Flash‘s Neil Sandilands), gets a pretty standard Hero’s Journey trauma when his father is killed and his clan taken captive by soldiers of a chimpanzee leader calling himself Proximus Caesar, led by gorilla general Sylva (Eka Darville of Power Rangers RPM and Jessica Jones) and wielding electric shock staffs, a remnant of human tech.

Noa’s search for his captive people is reminiscent of Caesar’s arc in the previous movie, and like Caesar, Noa gets an orangutan partner, a history nerd called Raka (The Orville‘s Peter Macon), last survivor of the society that kept Caesar’s teachings alive and preserved books from the past. Raka believes that apes built the fallen civilization and provided for the humans they coexisted with, and it’s both amusing and sad that the sole surviving keeper of history (as far as we know at this point in the film) gets it so very wrong. The duo are followed by a human hanger-on (The Witcher‘s Freya Allen) who turns out (in a human-hunt scene blatantly homaging the one from the ’68 original) to be intelligent and verbal, unlike most surviving humans. Named Mae, she’s no fan of the apes, and she turns out to have her own plan to get into the same human military bunker that Proximus has been gathering slaves to try to break into.

Proximus (Stargate SG-1‘s Kevin Durand) is an interesting character who tries to sell Noa on his vision for a great kingdom uniting the apes and advancing civilization. He actually comes off as an intelligent, visionary leader who might be admirable if he weren’t so ruthless. But he feels that his extreme measures are necessary to defend against the existential threat of humanity, which he’s determined to wipe out.

This felt like a smart, thoughtful movie while I was watching it, though in summary it does seem kind of simplistic and formulaic. The substance is really more in the characters than the plot, since there are some interesting ambiguities. Noa and Mae never really trust each other, and it’s unclear for much of the film whether she deserves our sympathies. Proximus is a tyrant in some ways, but his arguments make a lot of sense and he has impressive vision, even if he’s co-opted Caesar’s name and symbology to support a more aggressive ideology than Caesar would have favored.

It’s rather sad that the world Caesar tried to build has been mostly lost. Only a few even remember his name, and many of those who do appropriate it to their own ends. His integrated society of chimps, gorillas, and orangutans has become more segregated, with the Eagle Clan being exclusively chimps. I’d wanted to see what culture would grow from the foundations Caesar laid, but instead we see a culture built amid its ruins, as much as amid the ruins of human civilization. The film’s worldbuilding is imaginative and interesting — Eagle Clan is a lovely and clever idea — but still somewhat tragic for what it lacks. (Incidentally, the ruins of human structures pervading the film are far more intact than they’d realistically be after 300 years, but hey, it’s an improvement on the Statue of Liberty somehow surviving 2000 years in the original film.)

I’m less sanguine about the human side of the worldbuilding. I can buy a small percentage of humans being immune to the dumbing-down virus, just like a small percentage were immune to the original virus that killed most of humanity between the first two films. But intelligent, high-tech humans are revealed to be a larger presence in the post-apocalyptic world than any previous live-action PotA production has depicted. (I believe the mutant Underdwellers in the 1975 animated TV series Return to the PotA had futuristic technology, but that show was set in a universe similar to the original Pierre Boulle novel where the ape civilization was at a 20th-century level.) It’s hard to believe so much of technological human civilization has survived this long. And given how the Caesar trilogy shifted focus increasingly from humans to apes as it went, having humans turn out to be so prominent in the fourth film feels like a step backward, a regression toward the familiar.

Also, the attempt to make us believe that Mae is feral is never convincing, as her clothes are clearly of more advanced manufacture than the feral humans’ loincloths and fur bikinis, and her body language is too controlled and fearless. I knew from the trailers that she’d turn out to be intelligent, but I think it would’ve been obvious even without that foreknowledge.

I also have an issue with Sylva, who’s too much in the mold of the original movies’ thuggish gorilla soldiers. The perception of gorillas as the most violent great apes is antiquated and wrong, the self-serving invention of 19th-century gorilla hunter Paul Du Chaillu. In reality, gorillas are generally placid unless provoked, and chimpanzees and humans are the most violent great apes. The Caesar trilogy got that pretty much right, but this film’s portrayal of Sylva seems to regress to an old stereotype. At least Proximus is a chimp, so the film gets that right. (Kevin Durand apparently believed he was a bonobo, the least violent great ape species, but the filmmakers disagree.) Also, though Raka’s scholarly role resonates with the original films’ portrayal of orangutans as the politicians and scholars, his solitary existence before Noa shows up is consistent with orangs being the least social great apes in real life.

Overall, Kingdom is a pretty good continuation of the series, maintaining the previous films’ serious tone, strong characterizations, interesting worldbuilding, and excellent CGI. Owen Teague is reasonably effective, if not as compelling as Andy Serkis, and Freya Allen is also effective. Peter Macon and Kevin Durand both do excellent work. (I’m amused that Durand’s Stargate SG-1 character was also a monarch whose army used energized staff weapons.) But there are elements of the story and concepts that feel formulaic, derivative, or questionable, so I wouldn’t call it the best of the series. It’s good, but could’ve been better. Still, it’s promising enough that I wouldn’t mind seeing a sequel exploring the apes’ early civilization more fully.

It concerns me, though, that the filmmakers tend to talk as if their long-term plan is to converge toward a remake of the original 1968 film. Since this is such a distinct, reinvented universe — and since its version of the rise of the apes completely conflicts with the last three films of the original series — I don’t see the value of being bound by the original film’s events as an inevitable endpoint. What this series has created is worthwhile on its own terms, so much more than just a rehash, and I’d rather see future filmmakers embrace the freedom to take it in its own direction.

Thoughts on the BBC TELEVISION SHAKESPEARE, Season 5

After Jonathan Miller’s sporadic output on the previous two seasons, the BBC replaced him for the 1982-3 fifth season with Shaun Sutton, who had recently stepped down from the Head of Drama role he’d held since the late 1960s. (Earlier in the ’60s, he’d turned down the chance to be the first producer of Doctor Who.) The handoff actually came after Miller had produced two of season 5’s plays, though they would air third and fourth. Season 5 also kept the season 3-4 main theme and title format.

Although Miller was let go in part due to his slow, erratic release schedule, the first episode of Sutton’s debut season would air three months before the rest.

King Lear

Though Sutton produced this one, Miller directed, recreating the production he’d done for the stage in 1969 and in an abridged BBC version in 1975, using the same costumes and staging and the same two lead actors, our old friend Michael Hordern (Lord Capulet, Prospero) as Lear and Frank Middlemass (who was in Measure for Measure in season 1) as Lear’s Fool. Other returning faces include John Shrapnel (Alcibiades in Timon of Athens, Hector in Troilus and Cressida), Norman Rodway (Apemantus in Timon), Penelope Wilton (Desdemona in Othello), and Anton Lesser (Troilus). The production is indeed very theatrical, a lot of it performed on sets with wooden floorboards.

King Lear, I’ve only just learned, is based on a legend told by Geoffrey of Monmouth about an ancient British king named Leir, allegedly the founder of Leicester in the 8th century BCE. He was supposedly a descendant of Aeneas, which I suppose makes this a very loose sequel to Troilus and Cressida. Geoffrey said Leir came to the throne when his father Bladud, who’d founded the city of Bath after bathing in its mud cured his leprosy, died in an attempt to fly with artificial wings he created through necromancy — which makes me wonder why Shakespeare didn’t write a play about that guy, because that sounds like a hell of a story.

Instead, we get the well-known tale of the elderly Lear succumbing to his fatal flaw of vanity. Lear is planning to retire and divide his kingdom among his three daughters and their husbands: Goneril (Gillian Barge) and the Duke of Albany (John Bird); Regan (Wilton) and the Duke of Cornwall (Julian Curry), and his favorite Cordelia (Brenda Blethyn) and whichever of her two suitors wins out. He offers the largest share to whichever daughter declares her love for him most extravagantly, and when Cordelia is unable to match her sisters’ insincere hyperbole, the vain Lear mistakes her lack of bombast for lack of love and has her exiled, splitting his kingdom between his other two daughters. When the Earl of Kent (Shrapnel) protests, he gets exiled too. The King of France (Harry Waters) accepts Cordy as his wife even without a dowry, and they depart for now.

Determined to continue serving Lear, Kent shaves his head and beard and adopts a commoner’s accent, offering his services to Lear under the name Caius. As usual in Shakespeare, nobody can see through his flimsy disguise. (Well, his name is Kent…) Goneril soon kicks Lear out because he can’t keep his hundred rowdy knights from eating her out of house and home, and when he goes to Regan, she’ll only permit him 25 knights. This is supposed to show the daughters’ disrespect for their father, but their objections seem valid to me. Anyway, the proud Lear would rather go homeless than actually show his daughters some consideration, so he ends up screaming at a storm and going mad for a couple of acts. (“Old Man Yells at Cloud.” Shakespeare did it first.)

The B plot also revolves around a father and children: the Earl of Gloucester (Rodway), his heir Edgar (Lesser), and his bastard son Edmund (Michael Kitchen), who resents being excluded from the lineage by a circumstance of birth and tricks Gloucester into believing Edgar is conspiring against him. Edgar also adopts a secret identity, but he doesn’t think it through as well as Kent, opting to play a nearly naked madman called Tom o’ Bedlam, whom Miller for some reason puts in a crown of thorns with stigmata on his palms, even though the play is set eight centuries before those symbols would mean anything. He gets drenched in the storm with Lear and his Fool, but I’m not sure why he puts himself through all this, unless it’s just self-pity, which seems like a pathetic overreaction.

There’s a lot of scheming as the Duke boys conspire against each other (just two bad ol’ boys, meanin’ plenty o’ harm) and Edmund seduces both sisters even though they’re married. Edmund frames his father Gloucester for treason the same way he did his brother, and Cornwall puts Gloucester’s eyes out, enraging a random servant who stabs Cornwall to death. Edgar/Tom finds the blinded Gloucester and knocks him out of his suicidal depression through the strange expedient of tricking him into jumping off a nonexistent White Cliff of Dover on flat ground, then pretending to be a different guy who found him “at the bottom” and told him he was saved by a miracle. How the heck does that work?

Anyway, Cordelia and the King of France invade England and war with the sisters’ forces, and as usual in Shakespeare’s later plays, the war happens offstage and we just see the aftermath. Lear returns to sanity and reconciles with Cordy (an entente Cordelia?), but Edmund’s last scheme before Edgar kills him in a duel gets Cordy hanged in prison, which causes Lear to die of grief, and the evil sisters die offstage and only Kent and Edgar are left. Secret identities for the win, I guess.

While this is considered one of Shakespeare’s great plays, I found its plot rather cluttered. Also, given current events in the United States, I found it hard to sympathize with a narcissistic, elderly, mentally ill authoritarian who throws people under the bus when they don’t flatter him enough and makes no effort to control his unruly followers. Still, the key difference is that Lear eventually learns from his mistakes and repents. That, and he can speak eloquently, though some of his stream-of-consciousness ranting has a familiar ring to it.

Michael Hordern is quite good as Lear, and Anton Lesser is strong as Edgar when he’s not babbling gibberish. Penelope Wilton, who impressed me as the pure and loyal Desdemona, is equally impressive as the devious and treacherous Regan. Rather than playing Edmund as bitter and angry, Michael Kitchen interestingly goes for a wry, playful manner, giving the audience knowing glances through the fourth wall as if sharing the joke with us. It’s reminiscent of how Bob Hoskins played Iago, but more laid back. Kitchen and Norman Rodway play their early scenes together somewhat like a comedy duo’s banter, even though the scenes aren’t written that way. As for Brenda Blethyn, she leaves little impression, although at 5’2″, she conforms to the traditional advice from Lear actors to their successors: “Get a small Cordelia” (as Lear has to carry her in the final scene). Many sources claim that was Sir John Gielgud’s advice to either Hordern himself or Ian McKellen, but apparently it goes back to an early 20th-century actor, Donald Wolfit.

Unfortunately, I found Frank Middlemass simply obnoxious as Lear’s Fool. A court jester or fool should be someone who speaks truth to power in a playful, entertaining way, but Middlemass’s Fool is just an old grouch shouting insults at Lear in a loud, abusive, humorless tone that grated on me. It’s strange casting, going with a man in his sixties for a character addressed as “boy.” It’s also gravely disappointing, since I’d confused this TV production in my memory with one from the following year starring Lawrence Olivier as Lear and John Hurt as the Fool, a role in which I remember finding Hurt very impressive. I would’ve much rather seen his version again.

Shakespeare plays fast and loose with history, as usual. The play mentions states like France and Burgundy that didn’t exist until long after the 8th century BCE, as well as using the title of Duke, which didn’t exist until the Middle Ages, and featuring generally modern (to Shakespeare) customs of marriage, dowry, etc. But then, there’s the end of Act 3, Scene 2 where the Fool makes a prophecy and says “This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time.” So the play is explicitly meant to be in the time of ancient legend, yet is flexible with both chronology and causality.

Much the same can be said about our next play.

The Merry Wives of Windsor

Shakespeare’s only spin-off centers on Sir John Falstaff from the Henry IV plays (and peripherally Henry V) and his supporting cast. There’s a legend that Shakespeare wrote it in 2 weeks after Queen Elizabeth asked for a play about “Falstaff in love,” but there are conflicting theories about whether it was written after Henry V or, as some evidence suggests, between Parts 1 & 2 of Henry IV, introducing supporting characters that Shakespeare then incorporated into the history trilogy.

In any case, it’s a loose spinoff, taking Falstaff and his allies out of their historical setting and putting them in a contemporary Elizabethan story, adjusting their characterizations to fit the plot (one of Shakespeare’s few plots not adapted from a specific work, though elements may have been borrowed from Ser Giovanni’s ribald fabliau tales).

So it’s perhaps fitting that this production, directed by David Hugh Jones, recasts the characters returning from the Henry plays, with the sole exception of Gordon Gostelow as Bardolph. Falstaff, previously played by the 66-year-old Anthony Quayle, is assayed here by Richard Griffiths (Harry Potter‘s Vernon Dursley), then only 35. Mistress Quickly (previously Brenda Bruce) is now Elizabeth Spriggs. Justice Shallow (previously Robert Eddison) is now played by writer/actor Alan Bennett. Pistol (previously Bryan Pringle) is now Nigel Terry (King Arthur in Excalibur), and Nym (previously Jeffrey Holland) is now Michael Robbins.

Headlining the new characters are Ben Kingsley as Frank Ford and Judy Davis as Mistress Ford. The other Merry Wife, Mistress Page, is Prunella Scales (the third and final core cast member of Fawlty Towers to appear in this series, after John Cleese in The Taming of the Shrew and Andrew Sachs in The Tempest).

Basically, this play takes a cleaner, more moralistic tack toward Falstaff’s debauchery and thievery than Henry IV. Seeking to improve his dwindled fortunes, Falstaff attempts to seduce Mistresses Ford and Page simultaneously. His sidekicks Pistol and Nym refuse to play along, and when he fires them for it, they get back by telling both wives his intentions, so the women conspire to punish him for seeking to compromise their virtue. Mistress Ford strings him along but contrives with Mistress Page to have him discovered both times and “escape” in humiliating and painful ways.

To complicate matters, Frank Ford is so untrusting of his wife’s loyalty that he goes to Falstaff under the alias Mr. Brook and hires him to seduce Mistress Ford on his behalf, so that “Brook” can sleep with her (though I’m not sure how that’s supposed to work). He’s trying to entrap his wife into committing the very infidelity he suspects her of, and doesn’t realize how messed up that is. Falstaff keeps telling Ford/Brook about the things Mistress Ford was hiding from her husband, embellishing his success and making it sound even worse. Eventually, though, the wives let the townsfolk in on the joke, and Ford is deeply contrite for mistrusting his loyal wife.

Meanwhile, the Pages are trying to marry off their teenage daughter Anne (Miranda Foster) to two different suitors. Her father favors Master Slender (Richard O’Callaghan), a foppish gentleman who doesn’t love her (and seems to be implicitly played here as gay), while her mother favors the arrogant Frenchman Dr. Caius (Michael Bryant); yet Anne is in love with Fenton (Simon Chandler), of whom her father disapproves. (Anne is referred to by the same “Mistress” title as the married women. “Miss” didn’t catch on for adult women until later in the 1600s, and the use of “Miss” vs. “Mrs.” to denote marital status didn’t settle in until the mid-1800s.)

At the climax, the townsfolk play one last elaborate trick on Falstaff, arranging a nighttime assignation in the forest, then dressing up as faeries to make Falstaff think he’s being divinely punished (and having Falstaff dress in the antlered guise of the legendary Herne the Hunter for some reason). Meanwhile, the Pages both arrange for Anne’s respective suitors to spirit her away during the masked festivities, and Anne uses boys in dresses as decoys for Slender and Caius while she elopes with Fenton, who reveals afterward that they were already engaged (and maybe implicitly already slept together), so it would’ve been a sin for her to marry anyone else anyway.

This is a moderately fun bit of fluff, unusually low-stakes for a Shakespeare comedy (with no risk of anyone dying or being disowned), and also unusually clean and moral (which might lend credence to the legend that he wrote it at the queen’s behest). Mistress Quickly, a whorehouse madam in the Henry trilogy, is simply Dr. Caius’s maid here, a stranger to Falstaff. Her main role is to help everyone without partisanship in their attempts to woo each other, which I guess is a similar role in a more innocent way.

The play is also unusual for Shakespeare in its detailed depiction of a real location, Windsor, the town adjacent to Windsor Castle. Thus, it’s fitting that this production reverts to the realism of the first two seasons’ set design, offering a very detailed and lifelike recreation of an Elizabethan village and the surrounding woods, right down to very well-done forced-perspective miniature houses in the soundstage background. Another fun bit of set design is Falstaff’s top-floor room at the Garter Inn, which has a massive wooden beam through the middle that people have to keep ducking under.

The cast’s performances and stage business are effectively comedic, with Ben Kingsley going particularly broad as the insecure and foolish Ford, as one might expect given his performances as Trevor Slattery in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s interesting that, when Ford pretends to be Brook and listens to Falstaff saying the things he least wants to hear, he doesn’t show anger but just laughs with veiled despair, suggesting what a feeble-spirited man Ford is. As written, it’s easy to imagine Ford played as mean and angry, but I’m glad they chose to play him as more of a milquetoast, which makes him seem less potentially threatening to his wife.

Richard Griffiths is merely adequate as Falstaff, a role that should ideally be far more. As one might expect of the future Vernon Dursley, he’s most animated when playing Falstaff’s anger and frustration, far more bland in a jovial mood. If anything, I felt Michael Graham Cox as the Host of the Garter Inn gave a more Falstaffian performance than Griffiths did. But in a way, it’s appropriate, because Falstaff is a weaker, less commanding figure here, less witty in himself than the cause of wit in other people at his expense. Still, it doesn’t feel right that Falstaff is not the standout performance in a play literally written to center on him.

I find myself skeptical of the theory that this play was written before the latter two Henry plays, since Falstaff’s supporting cast besides Quickly are basically token presences, contributing little to the plot. It seems more likely that he created the characters for the Henry plays, then gave them bit parts here because audiences would expect them in a Falstaff play.

Henry VI Parts 1-3 & Richard III

The rest of the season is a 4-part saga covering the Wars of the Roses — the earlier-written of Shakespeare’s two 4-part history cycles, yet effectively a continuation of the Richard II/Henry IV/Henry V tetralogy. Indeed, these are believed by some to be Shakespeare’s first four plays, or at least his first history plays (see here), and there are doubts about whether he even wrote most of Henry VI Part 1.

The plays aired on consecutive Sundays from January 2 to 23, 1983. Although the first two were produced by Miller and the latter two by Sutton, Jane Howell directed all four, approaching them as a 14-hour miniseries with a continuing ensemble cast, a number of whom play multiple roles. It’s all staged on a single stylized set, designed like a children’s playground as sardonic commentary, and symbolically deteriorating as the saga continues. The production plays up its artificiality as a kind of Brechtian distancing effect (quite a contrast with Merry Wives‘s realism). Even the play’s titles are displayed in onstage banners at the start, getting progressively rattier until Richard III opens with Richard writing the play’s title in chalk.

This cycle has several characters (assorted dukes and an earl or two) in common with Henry IV/V, but all are recast. Yet there are a number of returning actors from other installments, including Brenda Blethyn, Frank Middlemass, David Burke (The Winter’s Tale), and Trevor Peacock (Twelfth Night). Notable genre actors herein include Bernard Hill (Theoden in The Return of the King), Mark Wing-Davey (Zaphod Beeblebrox in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), and Zoë Wanamaker (Harry Potter, Doctor Who). Dudley Simpson (Doctor Who, Blake’s 7) does the music, mostly using only horns and percussion, with an impressive fanfare-style closing theme.

Previously on Henry Street Blues, Henry V invaded and conquered France, which we were supposed to see as heroic. Henry VI Part 1 begins with Henry V’s funeral just two years later, after which France rebels against English occupation under the leadership of the Dauphin Charles (Ian Saynor) and Joan of Arc (Blethyn), herein called Joan la Pucelle (Joan the Maiden). Most of Part 1 is a very procedural, action-packed account of the final phase of the Hundred Years’ War, a series of conquests and reversals between the French patriots and the English occupiers led by the mighty warrior Lord Talbot (Peacock — perhaps a casting in-joke, since Joan actually calls Talbot a peacock in Act III, Sc. 3). Henry VI was an infant when his father died, so he doesn’t show up until Act III, although the tetralogy heavily compresses the time frame. Peter Benson plays Henry as gentle, naive, and ineffectual, reminding me of a more philosophical version of Bob Denver’s Gilligan.

A squabble over succession arises between the House of York and Henry’s House of Lancaster, which respectively adopt white and red roses as their symbols. York is led by Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York (Hill), while Lancaster is represented by the Earl, later Duke, of Somerset (Brian Deacon), a composite of two real-life brothers. The characters are referred to as York and Somerset throughout. York’s chief ally is the Earl of Warwick, and while Wikipedia claims that the Warwick in Part 1 is the 13th Earl, Richard de Beaufort, while the one in Parts 2-3 is the 16th Earl, Richard Neville, Mark Wing-Davey plays him in all three parts. (Well, Warwick’s just this guy, you know?) The young King Henry, once he shows up, orders York and Somerset to get along. But their inability to cooperate in battle leads to Talbot and his son getting killed. The houses blame each other and the feud is deepened.

Joan is captured and executed, and the Bishop of Winchester (Middlemass) relays the Pope’s order to end the war. Two rival factions offer different French noblewomen as brides for Henry to secure the peace; the Duke of Gloucester (Burke), Henry’s uncle and Lord Protector (i.e. regent) who’s been feuding with Winchester the whole play, offers up an earl’s wealthy daughter, but the Earl of Suffolk (Paul Chapman) sells him on the poorer Margaret of Anjou (Julia Foster), upsetting Gloucester.

The first three acts of Part 2 are overloaded with court intrigue among a tangle of different factional rivalries. Part 2 has the most characters of any Shakespeare play, and it’s commensurately hard to follow. Suffolk and Margaret are having an affair, and Suffolk arranges marriage/peace terms that give away some of England’s occupied French territories to Margaret’s dad, outraging Gloucester, York, and Warwick.

Gloucester’s wife is a prototype for Lady Macbeth, scheming with Suffolk to take the throne and dabbling in black magic, though the pure and noble Gloucester will have none of it. Yet Winchester and Suffolk conspire to get Gloucester falsely accused of treason (making him the second Gloucester this season that’s happened to), then murder him in his bed. When the elderly Winchester gets correctly accused of arranging that, the shock kills him. (Middlemass overplays his deathbed scene rather comically.) Gloucester’s wife and Suffolk get separately banished, and Suffolk is beheaded by a random pirate crew. So they’re all out of the play by early in Act IV.

Meanwhile, York convinces his supporters that he’s the rightful heir to the throne, giving a tediously long genealogy lecture on how he’s descended on his mother’s side from an older son of King Edmund III than Henry is (though from a younger son on his father’s side, which I guess is why his claim was disputed; yes, his parents were cousins). Assigned to quell an uprising in Ireland, he takes the opportunity to build an army for his eventual coup. To give himself an excuse, he convinces a common ruffian named Jack Cade (Trevor Peacock in a new role, with David Burke as his sidekick Dick the Butcher) to launch a peasants’ rebellion in Kent under the pretense that Cade is a long-lost heir to the throne. (In reality, there’s no proof that Cade’s Rebellion was connected to York, although he claimed to be from the same Mortimer line as York’s mother.) Yes, York is willing to stir up populist unrest and chaos in his own country as an excuse to take power, just like today’s aspiring fascists. Cade is portrayed as a violent thug who despises literacy and foreigners and has his mob burn books and records, which also has a familiar feel. Henry and his court are forced to flee Kent, but his forces return and rout the rebels, who desert Cade in exchange for pardons. As in reality, Cade is slain by a random squire on whose land he trespasses.

When York arrives with his army, the rebellion he intended as his pretense is already quashed, so he declares his claim to the throne openly and launches the Wars of the Roses, assisted by his family including the hunchbacked Richard Plantagenet (Ron Cook), who kills Somerset, while York kills Henry’s military leader Lord Clifford and forces the king into retreat.

Part 3 opens with York seizing the throne, justifying his royal claim by pointing out that Henry’s granddad usurped the throne. Realizing he has a point, the peace-loving Henry makes a compromise: Let Henry live out his reign in peace, and he’ll cede the throne to the House of York upon his death. York accepts this compromise for the sake of his sons, including Edward (Brian Protheroe), George (Paul Jesson), and Richard.

But the devious, hard-edged Queen Margaret refuses to accept the disinheritance of her son Edward, Prince of Wales (Nick Reding), so she divorces Henry and leads the Lancastrian army to continue the war against York. She’s joined by Young Clifford (Oengus MacNamara), who swears revenge on York’s entire bloodline for the death of his father. In return, Richard Plantagenet contrives a legalistic excuse for his father York to break his oath and resume the war. York doesn’t need much convincing.

But the war goes badly for the Yorks. Young Clifford murders York’s preadolescent son Rutland (Matthew David) — who was older than George in reality — then kills York himself after Margaret captures and taunts him. The Yorks regroup under the leadership of Edward, declaring him the rightful heir to the throne. (York’s and Henry’s sons are both named Edward, which is confusing but helped build suspense, since I didn’t know which one would become King Edward IV.)

During the next big battle, there’s a stylized scene where King Henry laments how much easier it would be to live as a peasant, then watches unnoticed as a son mourns a father he unknowingly killed, and then a father mourns a son he unknowingly killed, a very heavyhanded commentary on the horrors of civil war. A lot of scenes in these plays are written in a very artificial formula of parallel/contrasting dialogue that apparently was popular at the time. Shakespeare was still young and hadn’t yet broken free of older theatrical conventions. (Including the convention of showing battles onstage, which he’d later stop doing because it was seen as lowbrow.)

The Yorks kill Clifford in revenge, and it’s Protheroe’s Edward who’s declared Edward IV, while the deposed Henry flees. Richard isn’t happy when Edward appoints him the new Duke of Gloucester, and who can blame him at this point?

Henry is soon captured, while Margaret and Prince Edward seek aid from King Lewis (Antony Brown), i.e. Louis XI of France. Warwick simultaneously makes a rival petition for Lewis to give his daughter Lady Bona (Merelina Kendall) to King Edward in marriage alliance. But back home, Edward proves a capricious and corrupt ruler. When the widow Lady Elizabeth Grey (Rowena Cooper) petitions for the return of her lands seized in the war, he tries to blackmail her into sleeping with him, and when she refuses, he instead offers her marriage, which she eventually accepts. Brother George is not pleased that Edward scuttled his plans for marriage alliance with France in order to marry a commoner on a whim.

At Lewis’s court, when Margaret and Warwick learn that Edward reneged on his promise to marry Bona, the affront not only causes Lewis to take Henry’s side, but humiliates and outrages Warwick so much that he switches sides, deposing Edward alongside his brother George, Margaret, and the French. His crown restored, the weary Henry appoints Warwick and George to govern jointly as Lords Protector while he lives out his life in pious seclusion, keeping the title of king but not the responsibility.

It doesn’t last long. Richard frees Edward from imprisonment, and Edward deposes Henry again, imprisoning him in the Tower of London. His forces face Warwick’s at Coventry, and just when it seems Warwick has the numerical advantage, Richard whispers something unknown to George and convinces him to rejoin his brothers, turning the tide. King Edward kills Warwick, captures Margaret, and executes Prince Edward (and yes, it’s confusing having both Edwards in the same scene). Richard goes on his own initiative to murder Henry in the Tower of London, then gives a soliloquy about his bitterness at being a deformed outcast and his determination to murder all his rivals and take the throne. Edward holds court and throws a party, but I doubt it’ll last, given he’s the only crowned English monarch in this cycle who doesn’t have a play named after him. (Even though Edward has a larger role in Part 3 than Henry does, second only to Warwick.)

Richard III opens with England enjoying a new era of peace. The first line is the famous “Now is the winter of our discontent,” and it turns out that’s out of context; it’s actually “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York,” meaning the winter is over and things are hunky-dory now thanks to Edward IV. But it doesn’t last. The hedonistic Edward has nearly partied himself to death, and Richard exploits Edward’s weakness by tricking him into arresting George for treason, eventually sending assassins to kill George in his Tower cell. (They drown him in a wine cask, so I guess he died happy…?)

Meanwhile, the Lady Anne (Zoë Wanamaker), wife of the slain Prince Edward, weeps over the body of her father-in-law Henry VI, still fresh after 7 years thanks to Shakespeare’s tricks with the timeline. She hates Richard for killing both of them, since Shakespeare apparently forgot it was King Edward who killed the prince. Yet Richard desires Anne, pretends to show remorse, and is somehow able to seduce her into marrying him, which is very implausible. He tells the audience he’s just using her.

The dying Edward tries to convince his squabbling nobles to make peace, but the news of George’s death finishes him off. Richard is appointed Lord Protector to the child king Edward V (Dorian Ford), but he conspires with his cousin the Duke of Buckingham (Michael Byrne, who played several smaller roles in the Henry trilogy) to seize the throne for himself. He systematically drums up false charges to execute those in his way, and coaches Buckingham to spread rumors that Edward V was illegitimate because Ed IV was already married to Lady Bona when he wedded Elizabeth Grey (which he wasn’t). When Buckingham leads the populace to plead with Richard to claim his “rightful” throne, Richard does a Henry VI impression, pretending to be a pious, retiring sort and refusing the burdens of kingship, but finally “giving in” to the people’s demands for England’s sake.

But when the new-crowned Richard III orders Buckingham to assassinate Edward’s young sons, Bucky finds the line he won’t cross and falls out of Richard’s favor. Richard hires the assassin Tyrell (the second of three supporting roles Mark Wing-Davey plays herein) to do it instead, after which their mother Elizabeth commiserates with Richard’s mother the Duchess of York (Annette Crosbie) and the Lady Anne, who’s having buyer’s remorse about letting Richard seduce her into marriage and correctly predicts he’ll have her killed before long. Which leaves Richard in need of another wife, and his depravity deepens as he targets his teenage niece, Edward IV’s sole surviving heir (also named Elizabeth), since marrying her will secure his line’s legitimacy. Meanwhile, the now-elderly Queen Margaret hovers around the background, watching in glee as her enemies suffer in chaos.

Richard gets more and more paranoid as he faces rebellions led by Buckingham and by Henry, Earl of Richmond (Brian Deacon), heir to a Welsh branch of the Lancasters, whom Henry VI had sent into exile in Part 3 when he was still a child, prophesying (thanks to the author knowing the ending) that Richmond would grow up to be England’s salvation. Buckingham is arrested and executed, but Richard’s and Richmond’s forces (yeah, it’s confusing again) ready for battle at Bosworth Field. The night before, the ghosts of Richard’s victims visit both leaders in turn, unanimously telling Richard to “despair and die” and blessing Richmond’s victory.

Before the battle, both leaders orate to their troops. Richmond/Henry rallies his men to defeat a tyrant for the good of everyone including the tyrant’s own misled followers, while King Richard insults Richmond’s Welsh troops and stirs up his followers’ bigotry against foreign invaders. Whoa, sounds familiar again.

Richard’s allies desert him and he’s unhorsed, hence the famous line “My kingdom for a horse.” Yet he refuses to flee the field, defiant to the last, and is slain — which Howell depicts rather graphically by having him surrounded by spearmen and impaled like the boar that was his heraldic symbol. Richmond is crowned King Henry VII and unites York and Lancaster by marrying the same Princess Elizabeth that Richard coveted, founding the House of Tudor that would produce Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. (That means that every King Henry from IV to VIII inclusive appears in Shakespeare.) The bard wrote this as a happy ending, but Howell ends the play with Queen Margaret cackling as she cradles Richard III’s corpse atop a huge pile of bodies.

–

Somehow I managed to go until now without realizing Shakespeare had written a play about Joan of Arc. Maybe it doesn’t come up much because it’s one of his weaker plays. It’s also very unflattering, painting Joan as a scheming seductress who sleeps with the Dauphin and pretends to be pregnant upon being condemned to the stake. Brenda Blethyn plays her with a rural English accent (Northern, I think) as brash and confident but not at all saintly. Still, she’s shown as a gifted warrior who’s able to win men to her cause through inspiring rhetoric. But the British demonize her as a witch and a prostitute, as men have done with powerful women throughout history (even in the current presidential race, sadly), and the play at least implies that those accusations are correct.

Part 1’s characters are mostly shallow, broad archetypes intoning about martial honor and so forth. The writing style feels simplistic for Shakespeare, though we may never know if that’s due to his inexperience or due to lesser hands writing most of the play. Jane Howell’s production treats it all with a mocking tone, with scenes of warriors bravely running away from battle and Joan’s French forces taunting the British from atop Rouen’s walls reminding me of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I can understand the need to poke fun at this mediocre play, which seems more like a dramatized history lecture than anything else.

Oddly, there’s a minor character, Sir John Fastolf (Arthur Cox), based on a real-life knight whose cowardice supposedly led to Talbot’s capture in the Battle of Patay, who’s basically a first draft of John Falstaff (though Falstaff was originally called John Oldcastle until the real Oldcastle’s descendants complained). His name was spelled Falstaffe in the First Folio, and the BritBox subtitles spell it Falstaff even though the actors pronounce it “Fastolf.” It can’t be the same character, since Falstaff died in Henry V, though of course Shakespeare hadn’t written that one yet. Well, I guess it’s less of a continuity problem than Falstaff time-jumping to the Elizabethan era in Merry Wives.

Part 2 is weirdly structured, with the piled-on intrigues dominating the first three acts getting swept aside to clear the board for Cade’s Rebellion in Act IV and St. Albans in Act V. I guess it’s because Shakespeare had to follow the outline of real events, more or less, but a lot of his later plays had similarly awkward focus shifts.

Henry’s character emerges more clearly in Part 2. We learn that he’s very pious, better suited to be a priest than a king. He firmly believes in the innocence of Gloucester, but is too weak to protect the Protector. He also has little influence over the ambitious Queen Margaret, who’s played very unpleasantly by Julia Foster as an angry harridan. The standout performance here is David Burke, who makes Gloucester very strong and sympathetic.

Part 3 is where Warwick emerges as a main character, and I was impressed by Mark Wing-Davey, given that I’d only ever known him as Zaphod Beeblebrox before. Peter Benson is also more impressive as Henry, who’s still soft-spoken and vulnerable, but far sadder and less innocent.

It’s kind of implausible how quickly the characters’ allegiances turn on a dime in Part 3, but I guess Shakespeare had to compress the timeline a lot. For instance, Warwick’s alliance with Margaret came six years after Edward married Lady Grey, but in the play it happens as soon as he hears the news. But Shakespeare stays pretty faithful to the broad strokes of real events, albeit with some speculations about motivation, and Richard murdering Henry is the Bard’s invention (although historians generally assume Edward ordered Henry’s death).

As for Richard III, it’s considered one of Shakespeare’s greats, but I found it rather unpleasant, a Grand Guignol of nonstop betrayals and murders as Richard picks off all the obstacles to his power and then turns on his own allies. I suppose it’s an effective portrayal of that kind of paranoid, self-destructive tyrant, but it gets exhausting after a while. Perhaps that’s because it’s at the end of such a long series of plays about war, chaos, betrayal, and hatred. It’s frequently performed solo, with the references to the previous trilogy edited out, but Howell argued that the context of the trilogy makes Richard more understandable, for he’d grown up knowing nothing but war and intrigue for the crown, making him a product of his dysfunctional upbringing.

Ron Cook initially seemed a poor choice for Richard due to his boyish voice and look, sort of Dudley Moore crossed with Michael J. Fox. But he becomes more effective as we get to know Richard better, though maybe I just got used to him. He’s in the same vein as Iago, a villain with an outward mask of benevolence and cheer, so it makes sense that they cast someone who seems innocuous at first glance. I wouldn’t say Cook was great in the role, but he was reasonably effective.

As for the other characters, I can’t think of any real standouts. Buckingham is Richard’s ally and enabler until he isn’t, and that’s about it. Anne and Elizabeth are both implausibly susceptible to Richard’s flattery even after he killed their loved ones. Margaret hovers as a vindictive presence but is little more than a Greek chorus. Richmond, the grandfather of Shakespeare’s monarch, is pure and blandly heroic. Even Richard himself isn’t as rich as many of Shakespeare’s later villains. He has a lot in common with Macbeth, but Macbeth was conflicted about his crimes in pursuit of power. Richard III only has one mode throughout, a malignant narcissist who gladhands and flatters those useful to him and viciously sabotages and destroys anyone who gets in his way. His self-pitying soliloquies earn little sympathy, since he brought it all upon himself.

If nothing else, this sequence has reinforced my conviction that monarchy is a stupid way to run anything, and our cultural need to romanticize royalty in fiction is deeply self-deluding. Too often, monarchs only care about their own power and that of their heirs, and they don’t care how many thousands have to suffer and die in pursuit of it. Across the eight connected history plays, we’ve seen four or five generations of English rulers scheming for power and tearing countries apart in its pursuit, rarely having time to govern because of all the jockeying for advantage. Granted, Shakespeare was playing up the big dramatic conflicts and skipped over the calmer years in between, but it makes me glad I live in a democracy and hopeful that we can keep it.