staging antiquities.

I have been reading "Shakespeare's Victorian Stage" this week, and today I was focusing on a chapter titled "The prince of theatrical antiquaries," which is an allusion to the Shakespearean actor-manager Charles Kean. This man was quite famous in his time, and even now you can find many images of Kean in his Shakespearean costumes. Kean was also largely invested in making Shakespeare on stage as historically authentic as he could. Now, before I read too much of the chapter, I thought I would find that Kean tried to recreate the Elizabethan stage as close to how it was when Shakespeare plays were produced on it, but I of course was wrong in that assumption. Instead I found that Kean wanted to make Shakespeare's plays as accurate to the historical time that they were set in as he could. This involved a lot of money, and a lot of artistic freedom with Shakespeare's works. I find that Kean's goal particularly fascinating because while he was trying to be as authentic to history as he could, he was not showing Shakespeare, also a historical figure, in a very historically accurate light.

Before I get into Kean's productions of Shakespeare, I wanted to just add a little background information on Kean as a person. He was the son of a famous actor, Edmund Kean, and Kean junior just couldn't match up to his father's acting presence or ability. His father even denounced his son since he was such a poor actor. But, that didn't stop Charles Kean. In fact, as the book mentions, mid-Victorians "admired nothing so much as a man who had the courage and resolve to overcome the obstacles which beset him," and being an actor was very much an obstacle for young Charles Kean, so that's what made him famous and what made him stand out, that he kept trying even though he wasn't very good.

After growing up a bit and marrying an actress by the name of Ellen Tree, the both of them went into the business of being theater owners and stage managers. The purchase of the Princess's Theatre is what aided Kean in fulfilling his desires to create plays in an entirely historically accurate way, and after the Theaters Regulation Act of 1843, the Keans could perform Shakespeare without having to gain access and permission before hand. And Charles Kean's pursuit of historical accuracy began right away with the purchase of medieval furniture of high quantities, so much so that the Princess's Theatre was named "Mr Charles Kean's furniture warehouse on Oxford street (27)."

Kean went all out as far as new stage technologies and elaborate settings and scenery, and he was very much questioned for his actions by many critics, but by the time the Princess's Theatre had been open and running for a while, the costs and intricacies of his stage were no longer scrutinized, but were mentioned and praised for being so very accurate. In fact, because of Kean's attention to detail on the stage, many other actor-managers were expected to have their plays at the same level of accuracy as did the Kean's stage.

quite kean.

As per my schedule, I will be focusing on Charles Kean as one of Shakespeare's top Victorian actors. I've been reading through a book titled "Shakespeare's Victorian Stage," and I don't doubt I'll find some fascinating information, and hopefully I'll be able to formulate something substantial from what I read.
I really wanted to get a posting of my findings tonight, but, well...my body is getting tired of the whole school routine, which is bound to happen near the end of the semester. But, I'm still on schedule to make Mr. Kean my focus for this week.

miss terry.

As promised in my last post that was on the"new woman"of the Victorian era , I will be going over some things I found out this week about Ellen Terry, one of the famed Shakespearean actresses of the Victorian stage.

Ellen Terry, circa 1880.

Ellen Terry's first experience acting out Shakespeare on stage was when she was nine years old, playing that part of Mamillius from The Winter's Tale (victorianweb). Perhaps it was at that time, or even earlier, that Terry fell in love with the Bard, and she consistently, throughout her acting career, played many of Shakespeare's leading ladies. She began a life-long engagement with all things Shakespeare, and wrote about his works in letters and even presented many lectures on Shakespeare. In one of her letters to Henry Irving, an actor-manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, Terry states that

Shakespeare was the only man she had ever really loved. 'When I was about siteen or seventeen, and very unhappy, I foreswore the society of men...Yet I was lonley all the same. I wanted a sweetheart! I read everything I could get hold of about my beloved one. I lived with him in his plays.' (Marshall, 155)

But this "romance" with Shakespeare was not particular to Terry. Many women of the Victorian era used "images of domestic or sentimental attraction[...]in relation to Shakespeare (Marshall, 155)." This, in some ways, makes me think of the trouble that Jane Austin (and Stephenie Meyer, I suppose...) caused in setting too high of standards for men, so much that women wouldn't even look at a man if he was not a "Mr. Darcy," and, well, the Victorian men must've felt some sort of anguish that they couldn't be like the Bard in wooing women. But because of Terry's infatuation with Shakespeare, she was able to become a most sincere and engaging Shakespearean actress: it was as if it was her duty and obligation to show audiences how powerful Shakespeare wrote his female characters, and Terry did a bang-up job at that. Many reviewers responded quite favorably to Terry's role as Imogen in the 1896 production of Cymbeline:

Miss Terry plays the part with a radiance and a charm all her own, with a pathos and a grace of which she, among modern actresses, seems to possess the unique secret...It is long since we have seen such girlish abandon, such womanly tenderness [...]. Time seemed suddenly to be effaced, the years to roll back, and before us stood Miss Terry as young, as fragrant, and as bewitching as ever she was in the seventies. (Marshall, 156)

the new woman, and the new shakespearean actress.

This week I've been reading a book called "Shakespeare and Victorian Women" by Gail Marshall, and in particular, I have been focusing on a chapter on Shakespearean actresses in the 1890s. But before I get too far into what I've found out, I want to set a foundation and explain, briefly, the "new woman" of the 1800s.
Beginning in the very last bit of the 19th century, female education was growing rapidly, and many more female students were getting into secondary education. At the same time this was happening, new technologies were emerging, and although men were still more highly favored for hiring, women, because of their education levels and skills, were also getting jobs and leaving their position as the angel of the home (CSI).
These new womanly ideals had a major affect on the stage, and in particular the Victorian Shakespeare stage. Because Shakespeare in general dealt with gender issues in his plays, it acted as a perfect conduit to express the new ideals of the late 19th century woman. One stage director by the name of William Poel tried to re-create the Elizabethan stage with a twist of adding all-women casts. These travesi performances became a well-established tradition in performing Shakespeare on the Victorian stage (Marshall, 154).
The actress Sarah Bernhardt performed in several traversi productions, in which her most famous role was that of Hamlet in 1899. This was actually a very popular role for actresses to play, and one critic mentioned of Berhardt that "she is not the first Dame to assume the role of the Dane (171)." It has been reported that there were fifty or more sited cases of females taking on the role of Hamlet long before Bernhardt did (171). But while these other actresses were wearing the black cloak of Hamlet, Bernhardt was playing seductive roles such as Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra, aiding in her reputation of "serpentine sensuality" (171), which makes it all the more interesting that her new role as a man did not evoke any mention of her gender in reviews of her Hamlet.

Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet, circa 1899.

I think that the lack of mention of Bernhardt wearing a man's clothes and acting out a man's role on stage coincided with what people were seeing on the streets at the end of the 19th century: because of the invention of the bicycle, women started wearing knickers so that they could ride this new contraption, so seeing a lovely woman in men's clothes was nothing new to the end of the century.
Indeed, Shakespeare is proving to have played a role in the whole feminist movement of the late 19th century, and in my next post I'll mention the more feminine side of Shakespeare's Victorian stage through the actress Ellen Terry.


Sources.
Marshall, Gail. Shakespeare and Victorian Women. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print.
http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/386/newwoman.html

the scottish play.

I've been reading Macbeth since yesterday, and I'm afraid I just haven't finished it yet, but something in the Bevington got me thinking:

Macbeth is a difficult play to present on stage, at least according to stage tradition: ever since the early twentieth century, actors have referred to [Macbeth] superstitiously as "he Scottish play" as a way of avoiding bad luck that otherwise can hover menacingly over the action company (714).

Now, although this quote says that the plague of the play only began since the first bit of the twentieth century, I did some internet research and found that from the very first production of Macbeth there were incidents: the lead actor dying off before the production of the play, an actor killed when stabbed with a real dagger instead of a prop, real witches who were offended about how they were portrayed cursed the play, etc. So, knowing that the Victorians were also very superstitious and were very interested in incantations and seances from earlier periods of history,there has to be something about all the magic and mayhem in Macbeth that they felt akin to. So I plan to dig a little deeper to find out exactly what the Victorians did with the magic within Macbeth, and also if they had their own scary superstitions they adhered to when performing "the Scottish play."

hermione as an ideal victorian woman.

I read up on a few Victorian appropriations of The Winter's Tale and I came across an essay explaining an 1851 production done in New York. There were several changes from Shakespeare's original text, but one of note is that the character of Hermione was changed to fit into the ideal woman of the Victorian era. Instead of the Hermione who was the tragic queen Shakespeare intended her to be, the actress Amelia Warner interpreted Hermione's character to be "chaste, subdued and natural," and not at all like the strong-spoken queen who valiantly defended herself, her honor, and her daughter. The essay further states that this 1851 Hermione demonstrated all the appropriate traits of an upper middle class woman: " she was 'playful, graceful, dignified, and majestic."
As for the trial scene, a review from the New York Albion dated 27 September, 1851 stated that

 [Mrs. Warner's] pathos is of the genuine stamp...the trial scene cannot be surpassed. Its exhibition of physical weakness and moral power, of injured innocence and gentlest submission to the hard decrees of fate was as near perfection as it well could be (Bartholomeusz, 101-2).

Not from the 1851 NY production of TWT ,
but a Hermione nonetheless from an
1887 production.

After reading both the trial scene in TWT and the essay "The Winter's Tale in New York," I searched for what exactly the ideals of womanhood were during the Victorian era. Obviously, Queen Victoria was the ultimate icon of what a woman should be, so for middle-class women, that oftentimes meant pretending to be richer than they actually were, in order to fulfill that standard of the ideal woman. But even beyond that, the Victorian woman was expected to be pious, pure, submissive, and the "master" of domesticity. These ideals were the same both in Britain and in America. I came across a quaint little poem written to further the cause of the perfect woman:

Her eye of light is the diamond bright,
Her innocence the pearl.
And these are ever the bridal gems
Worn by the American girl. 

I couldn't find the source of this poem, but it was very popular in the Victorian era, and continued to be until the feminist movement of the 20s.
So, to sum it all up, Amelia Warner's interpretation of Hermione fit quite nicely into the Victorian ideals of what a woman should be. I'm sure because of Mrs. Warner's role that this 1851 production of TWT had such favorable reviews, which I'm guessing were written by men, and they liked that this Hermione was submissive and  pure in her personality.

And, just for fun, here is a quiz from the BBC to see how familiar you are with the ideal Victorian woman.


Sources Cited. 

Bartholomeusz, Dennis. The Winter's Tale in Performance in England and America, 1611-1976. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire: Cambridge UP, 1982. Print.

https://wikis.nyu.edu/ek6/modernamerica/index.php/Reform/TheRoaring20s

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/trail/victorian_britain/women_home/ideals_womanhood_01.shtml

victorians taking on shakespeare.

I still have to get back to the questions I raised in my previous post on The Winter's Tale, but that will have to wait for later tonight.

Actress Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth.
John Singer Sargent. 1888.

As for now, I just wanted to get in to typing what I have decided to focus on for the remaining of the semester, that being VICTORIAN SHAKESPEARE. Dr. Burton jogged my memory last class that I had previously mentioned taking a deeper look in how Shakespeare was received and studied in the Victorian era. Thanks Dr Burton.
So Wednesday, I went to the library, and just started wandering from the very first row of Shakespeare books, and spent a good hour reading titles, until finally I reached the 19th century critiques on Shakespeare. I think I pulled all the books available on Victorian Shakespeare, plus a few Shakespeare in the arts books that centered around the Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite period.
I came home with two very full bags of books from the HBLL, and I can't wait to crack those babies open to start making connections and discoveries between two of my most favorite eras, as far as art and literature go.
Oh, I will also be referencing the Victorian Web, and I just came across a blog on the Pre-Raphaelite sisterhood that might have some fun things to explore.
Hazzah!

the slaves of chance and flies of every wind that blows.

I have been reading The Winter's Tale this week, and I absolutely love it. I went in to this play not knowing anything about it, which, i think, aided my imagination and I was really able to get in to the minds and actions of the characters, as well as really visualize the setting of the different acts and scenes.

There are a few things I noticed right off that I wanted to pursue further, so I'll just list them off here, and get to them later, either in this post or another.

• First off, TWT was mentioned by Bevington as being the best example of Shakespeare's genre tragicomedy. After reading the whole play, I was able to see why it was named so: the first half was definitely tragic, while the second half was full of love and forgiveness. What's interesting is that the play was set up in a very stark contrast between the two emotions, rather than mixing the two, as is done very frequently in even Shakespeare's tragedies and comedies, they will mix all sorts of emotions without a very clear-cut scene for each emotion. Example, Hamlet; you get wit and comedy swirled in here and there even though the whole over-arching theme is very traumatic and disturbing.
• TWT boasts to have the most unique stage direction of any Shakespeare play, that being "Exit, pursued by a bear." This made me wonder how many productions of this play really did stage a live bear, as the Bevington intro indicates. That certainly would cause a scene.
• TWT has a significant amount of prose, more so than any other Shakespeare play I've read, other than The Tempest, which I wonder, and know, there has to be some reason Shakespeare turned toward the more natural speech of man during his last years. 
• TWT is obviously set in a pre-Christian world. The play is very consistent in referring to the Roman gods that were so highly favoured, as well as the oracle at Delphi. However, I did notice one reference of a chapel in act 3, scene 2. In my mind, chapel refers to Christianity, so I'm very curious...was this word ever used in describing temples of the Roman gods? Or did Shakespeare use chapel because he knew his audience would be more familiar with that term? I could just be fixating on a small detail, but it did made me wonder enough to note it here.
• There is a fair deal of mentioning the improbability of such stories as TWT within the play. It's almost like Shakespeare is making a commentary of the silliness of fantastical tales that he himself is so expert at weaving. 
• In act 4, scene 4 there is a reference to BOWLING! I was curious about how the game has changed since Shakespeare's time.
• And finally, Queen Hermione...why did Shakespeare fool the audience in to thinking she had died? Or did she really die and Paulina was a sorceress who brought the statue of Hermione to life at the end of the play so she could offer a blessing to her daughter and forgive her husband Leontes? Either way, Bevington, once again, was right in saying that Shakespeare used "a kind of trickery found in no other Shakespearean play." 

Hopefully, during this three-day weekend, I can address most of these questions I have brought up to myself.

musings on lear.

My mom has always mentioned to me how much she loves King Lear, so after reading the play, thinking about it, and watching a film adaptation on it, I wanted to get her interpretations of Lear. So here is a brief interview!

King Lear is a pretty heavy text. Do you have any suggestions for first time readers?

Yeah, I think the best suggestion is to have children and enter your senior years. It’s amazing how much more that life experience in those particular areas affects your reading of the play, and you have much greater sympathy with him as a character and with the situations that he’s finding himself in and with this progressive decent into an apparent madness. But you start to wonder if really the world around him is mad.

So when was the first time you read King Lear?

I think the very first time I tried to read it was after I did a production of Macbeth under the direction of my fifth grade teacher and I pulled out a large volume of the complete works of William Shakespeare that we had somewhere in the house and tried to go straight through it and remembered feeling totally lost, that somehow this was like the Bible; it was one of those things that you had to read, so I tried to plow through it but it didn’t mean much. And then I read it as an undergraduate, then as a graduate. I had a class in San Diego and had a teacher who was very big on formalist criticism and we read it very thoroughly, and by that time I had children and life experience, so it was a very different kind of thing that when I had read it as an undergraduate, young student.

So what were the different impressions you had reading it as an undergrad as opposed to when you were a little bit older, reading it as a grad student? What did you take differently from the text?

I think as an undergrad it was rather confusing to me to keep things straight, or to understand this idea of appearances, and the metaphor of the clothing and the nakedness, and it just all seemed like a contrived thing that this man was getting worked up over nothing, I guess there wasn’t the pathos in it that I felt when I read it as an older adult, and when I read it and really went through some of the major themes, I was much more sympathetic to Lear as a character, and that his motivations for doing things, even when they are not completely understood, but at least the outward symptoms of what would seem to be his motivations, started having much more relevance and meaning for me.

What do you think are the basic themes of Lear?

Well, you know it’s easy with Shakespeare to just say the same trite things of parental relationships, or growing old, or loss of control and power, or feeling like your losing those, but those are really so many of the things of our lives. And so they take on layered nuances, you know to see children quarreling about things, which every parent hates to see their children contending for things or resenting each other, that’s just very hurtful as a parent. And then also for someone with that kind of power, it doesn’t matter whatever your little domain is, whether it is around your home, or at work, or relationships with other people, that it’s very threatening to a person’s identity to start sensing power shifts and that somehow you’re being dismissed; that your role, your identity are being challenged. So that was something that really touched me, but also this idea of someone who had been a well-respected, and again a powerful individual, but the appearance or manifesting the appearance of things going out of control, and so manifesting, or exhibiting some of these characteristics are being interpreted by others simply as madness, but to know that there is so much else going on. And the relationship with the fool, that sometimes that inner voice that’s trying to get you to behave, or act, or perceive something a certain way, really is soul-stirring, is troubling, is just so very poignant with Lear that it kind of brings together this idea of family, of growing old, of personal hurt, and not quite knowing how to deal with change.

Do you think that Lear is one of the more relatable plays of Shakespeare? That people can take it into their own lives and relate it to their own experiences?

I think if they choose to. If you have any desire to sympathize with Lear and you don’t just put it off as something too grand, too big, but you find that common element that you might relate to. I think it is difficult because there are so many layers, the metaphors are this range from very complex to kind of simple, overt, but I think that it is definitely one that’s worth exploring, and when people get afraid of taking it on, I think it’s because they’ve had some preconceived notion of it being difficult. I actually loved the fact that I had this teacher who was very much formalist take us through it because seeing those pieces and then stepping back away from that into my own life experience made it one of the most richly rewarding, and if I can say, without being trite, easily understood because it does reflect so many of those things that have become part of my life.

I, like you, was very sympathetic to Lear, although I don’t have children yet, but do you think that there are those who read in to the play being unsympathetic to Lear, and just see him as a mad man? And if so, why would they take that sort of view?

Sure, because he’s not exactly likeable. I mean, you get a sense that his history has been one that has been full of a power struggle, this ascent, that the people around him are responding to. So through their response you kind of get a sense of a man who was probably not easily likeable, and I think that’s entirely believable. That he’s not this person that you want to identify with, because in many ways he doesn’t drive you to be want to be nobler or greater, but I think that’s the very thing that being able to get over that and get some insight. It’s interesting that reading this book, “What the Dog Saw” by Malcom Gladwell, to consider  that things are not just puzzles to be solved; there’s not just one bit of information that you need when you’re studying a Shakespearean play, they are mysteries, there are so many levels and layers, and if you look at them just as puzzles, well, yes, Lear does things that I don’t like, that I really can’t be sympathetic with, but it goes back to those broader, maybe even universal themes, that if you’re willing to take that chance, or give the play a chance, you may not find many things about Lear that you like, but there certainly may be things that you identify with.

Have you read any other version of King Lear?

I have read Faerie Queen, but it’s been a long time. I actually read it the same semester that I was reading Lear, and it’s been long enough that I don’t actually recall anything like that. But the Lear story shows up in all kinds of ways. In fact I do remember reading Death of a Salesman, and talking about the sons and this salesman as being someone that you kind of want to be sympathetic with, but again you see that are you just being sympathetic because you start identifying with him. And yeah, the sons had been done wrong, but I’m trying to think of anything else specifically. The Lear idea does come to mind a lot, when you see how other artists have incorporated that idea of filial contention, or growing old, or even when films show patients, even now Alzheimer’s patients, or those descending into madness, I think they’re all drawing on a Learesque theme or character.

I even thought about Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth.

Yeah, and you know a lot of fairy tales and things, this idea of the child wanting the throne, or the sons being sent out on their own, and how they respond to that. So I think that any time you see that you kind of wonder how much of that is within this collective imagination.

Good. Anything else you would like to add?

Yeah, Lear, the whole play to me, seems very gray. If you were to ask for a metaphor, and I’ve been, in my work, trying to come up with an identifiable metaphor in working with an exhibition on a work of art or something, I’m trying to think if I were to do something with Lear, it’s just everything about it is gray, from the color of the skin, from the interaction, from the gray hair, from the stripping of the clothes,  and a kind of a sallow body, to a gray, lifeless court relationship and family relationship, and it’s interesting to think about that. And yet I have always loved gray, windy days, and so, for me, there’s a bit of romanticism, I guess, in that. But there’s also something that’s very powerful, that’s not just black or white, its somewhere in the middle. 

the prince and the queen.

I had a thought I wanted to bring up yesterday in class, but our time was spent rather quickly.
When I read act three, scene four earlier this week, I was trying to pay careful attention to why this scene is often adapted into a very incestuous exchange between Hamlet and his mother. It's true that there are many accusatory words placed on the queen by Hamlet, but think of how enraged you would be if your mother or father quickly fell in to the arms of another so soon after the death of your other parent. I think he was expressing his disgust at his mother's actions, but nothing more than that.
I had a brief discussion with my mom about the matter, and we came to an agreement that the incestuous adaptations of this scene came about at a time when there was a trend to read everything in an Oedipal light. Just like how many t.v. shows, plays, movies, etc., now have a homosexual read into it, there was also a time not too long ago when the public looked into incestuous relationships as the default psychological background.
I did think of another explanation as to why these adaptations of incest between Hamlet and the queen occur, and I think it comes with modernity and a better understanding of the psychology behind men who are rapist. The heated discussion between Hamlet and his mother could be seen as a need for Hamlet to prove his power, therefore forcing himself upon his mother who he sees as being "whorish" for so quickly marrying his uncle.
Anyway, I guess in order to look at the psychology behind different adaptations of Shakespeare's plays, we need to look at the psychology of the times in which the adaptations were performed.

the act of decay.

I live in Salt Lake, my mom lives in Salt Lake. She works on campus, and I go to school on campus (imagine that). So we carpool back and forth every day. We get a lot of talking done in those commuting hours, and the other night as we were headed back north, I read an essay out loud to her from last year's Criterion. It's titled "Something Rotten: Hamlet's Onto-Ecology." We were able to discuss several elements of Hamlet with each other as they came up in the essay. The essay focused largely on the body and the existence of the soul, and how human beings are a part from other creatures because we know and can ponder on our own existence. We sorted through that philosophy a little, and then we went off on another tangent about the conspiracy that Shakespeare was a closet Catholic in the very Protestant England. If you read Hamlet that way, as Shakespeare being a Catholic, there is a lot of underlying proof, mostly in respects to purgatory and the salvation of the soul.
Very interesting stuff.
The essay also focused largely on the theme of decay in Hamlet. Because of the death of his father, Hamlet was undoubtedly cornered by thinking of decay, and he mentions so frequently the matter of bodies lying in the earth becoming rotten and decomposed. After reading this mentioned essay on onto-ecology, I read more of Hamlet, and in act four, scene three when Hamlet is being questioned on where he put the body of Polonius, Hamlet tells his uncle that Polonius is "at supper...Not where he eats, but where 'a eaten." Then he goes on to say, "A man may fish with the worm that hath eat / of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that / worm." This quote right here illustrates the cycle of decay, and that once our souls separate our bodies, our bodies become sustenance to maintain other forms of life.
Anyway, I'm glad I read the ontology essay before finishing Hamlet so I was able to read in to the theme of decay and death.
After all, something was indeed rotten in Denmark.