Filling the Cheap Seats
Page 11
fails, he dies. He solves the riddle, but in so doing he finds out the king is sleeping with his daughter. To avoid being killed, he runs away. He then travels around the Mediterranean, meets a much nicer princess, marries her, and conceives a child. He heads back home with his new wife, but while at sea she dies giving birth to his daughter, whom he calls Marina. The superstitious sailors insist on throwing the wife’s body overboard. You can see where this is going: she’s not really dead. Anyway at the end and after many years Pericles, his wife, and his daughter are reunited and everyone lives happily ever after (sort of) except for the first king and princess who died offstage before the play was half over.
Many Shakespeare plays have plots as silly as that of Pericles. What makes this one so bad? For one thing, the dialogue is too formal and formulaic. Characters do what they are supposed to do, behave as the audience expects them to behave. There is little original thinking in how the play develops. Also, there are simply too many asides where the characters explain what they are doing and thinking instead of suggesting it through what they do and what they say to each other.
Compare the chorus in Pericles (in this play he has a name and he is called Gower) with the nameless chorus in Henry V. Here, Gower explains the setting at the start, reappears three or four times to explain that Pericles has to move on, and closes the play with the epilogue.
In Henry V, the chorus opens not with long explanations but with a more subtle injunction to the audience to imagine the stage to be the setting, that the wooden “O” where the actors speak their lines can contain the vast battlefields of France. The play proper starts with courtiers convincing King Henry V that the crown of France belongs to him. Henry then receives the French ambassador and announces his claim. That's not explanation, it's dynamic, it's action.
The epilogue doesn't fare any better. In other plays, Shakespeare uses the epilogue provide a final meditation for the audience. Here, Gower uses it to restate what happened, just in case his previous explanations and all the asides didn’t do the job.
I am a little harsh when I say it is a bad play. If we forget this is Shakespeare, it’s quite a good play in fact. For one thing, it’s easy to read since Gower explains everything. But it’s poor Shakespeare. There are good things in it that probably are Shakespeare, for instance while Marina’s kidnapping by pirates is ludicrous, her situation in the brothel to which they sell her is captivating and the brothel keepers are funny, in a crude common way.
However, the play’s main redeeming feature is precisely everything that is wrong with it or missing from it. Reading Pericles enlightens you as to what is right and original in Shakespeare’s other plays.
Othello—Pride and prejudice?
Sometimes a tragedy doesn’t look like one because no one dies. For instance, we can think of The Merchant of Venice as a tragedy with Shylock as the tragic hero. Sometimes what looks like a tragedy isn’t one because even though the hero dies, he was the pawn of forces greater than he was; Antony and Cleopatra fits that way of thinking. But sometimes a tragedy is one even though the tragic flaw seems to come from outside. Othello is such a play.
Othello is a powerful man in Venice, despite being a black man in a white world. He’s not even a Christian yet he marries the beautiful Desdemona. They love each other deeply. Othello’s good fortunes bother Iago, the villain of the play. He frames Desdemona and convinces Othello she is guilty of adultery. In a fit of jealous righteousness, Othello kills Desdemona.
Othello’s flaw isn’t so much that he is jealous and possessive. He really did love his wife and it’s only when apparently incontrovertible evidence is laid before his eyes that he falls prey to jealousy. His flaw is in his willingness to believe. His pride won over his love. If he had let go of his pride, he would have believed both Desdemona and Iago; he would have lived with the contradiction between what he saw and what he knew. But Iago’s plan succeeds. Pride is very close to hubris and though Iago arranges the situation, he only tempts Othello.
In the end, the wealthy, resolute, generous Othello, is not the victim of forces beyond his control. After all, Iago’s abilities pale when compared to Othello’s. Othello falls through pride, through his inability accept a loss of face.
The Winter’s Tale—Sometimes, something broken stays broken
Can you really make up for lost time? If you betray someone, even if it’s only through bad luck or negligence, can you make up for it? You cannot. If years are lost, can things ever be as they were before? No, they cannot.
If a precious vase falls to the floor and shatters, the shards can be glued back together, but the cracks remain to remind you of the loss. The vase that was is gone, only an imperfect reconstruction remains.
Leontes is king of Sicilia and he has played host to his good friend Polixenes, the king of Bohemia. Polixenes must return home, but Leontes wants him to stay a while longer. “No, no, I must go” says Polixenes. Leontes asks his wife Hermione to plead with Polixenes to stay, who at last does relent and stays.
Leontes grows suspicious. Why does Hermione’s plea succeed where his plea fails? Is there something going on between the two? Jealousy overpowers Leontes. Polixenes goes back home and Hermione goes into hiding.
Leontes declares his baby daughter Perdita to be a bastard and wants her killed. A servant runs away with the baby to save her. For his troubles, he is pursued by a bear (Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction) and killed; Perdita is saved by shepherds. Twenty years pass. Leontes repents his rage and his irrational jealousy, and he miraculously finds Hermione and Perdita again.
But weren't there many years irretrievably lost? There were. When he first sees Hermione again, she is pretending to be a statue. Leontes marvels at how lifelike this statue is. Without knowing of the subterfuge, he immediately notices that "Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing so aged as this seems" (Act V scene 3 lines 28~29). He realizes those good years are gone.
The play thus ends bitter sweet. Leontes repents, Perdita is found, and Hermione returns, but those twenty years of what should have been family bliss are gone forever. The family was put back together again, but only as a reconstructed shattered vase.
This is quite dark for a romance audiences expect to end well. Hermione, Polixenes and Perdita all forgive Leontes, so to a point, this play is like The Tempest where Prospero also forgives those who wronged him. But nowhere in The Tempest is there a hint of the destructive power of time. Prospero feels the pain of having lived in exile on an island, but he is not bitter at having lost ten years or so of his life there. Neither he nor we really even think about those lost years.
The Tempest urges us towards virtue and forgiveness, but The Winter’s Tale is more realistic in that respect. Forgiving is not easy, and it doesn’t make up what’s been lost.
Cymbeline—A dunce for a king
Lear, Macbeth, Richard II, and Richard III fall because one way or another they go beyond their authority. They are proud, vain, or presumptuous. Cymbeline is merely stupid and he is allowed a happy old age.
With Cymbeline, Shakespeare outdoes himself in his plots and subplots.
The curtains lift on a conversation to bring the audience up to date on the situation. Cymbeline, King of the Britons, frowns. He is widowed, his sons are long dead, he remarried but his only living child and daughter Imogen refuses to marry the man he chose for her, Cloten, who is his stepson. Imogen loves Posthumus, a worthy man whom Cymbeline took in as a boy many years before. The lovers marry in secret and Cymbeline banishes Posthumus for it.
Meanwhile, Cymbeline at the urging of his wife refuses to pay any further tribute to Rome. The Roman ambassador sadly has no choice: this means war.
In Rome, Posthumus boasts of his wife’s virtue but is tricked into believing she betrayed him. Imogen disguises herself as a boy to avoid being killed by Posthumus who has sworn revenge; then she meets an ol
d man and his two sons, who are really Cymbeline’s long lost sons.
Cloten runs after Imogen wearing Posthumus’s old clothes, and he also runs into the two sons. But being an overbearing braggart, Cloten insults them and he is killed for his pains.
The Romans finally arrive in force attacking Cymbeline. The two sons with their adoptive father along with Posthumus join Cymbeline. Together, they decisively defeat the Romans. The queen dies, possibly of grief at losing her son, and reveals she never loved Cymbeline. She only loved his station and his power, which she was plotting to obtain for her son.
Once all is revealed, Cymbeline, in a genial mood, forgives more or less everyone.
He never realizes what a dunce he is. Cymbeline manages to lose not one but both his sons, falls for a woman who never loved him, alienates his daughter, banishes the best soldier in his army, chooses an imbecile to marry his daughter and become his heir, declares war on Rome and wins through sheer luck. The man is completely clueless, and frankly Shakespeare never makes it obvious.
Cymbeline contains some of Shakespeare's best standard bits: there is a lustful wife seeking power (like Lady Macbeth), a jealous husband (like Othello), long lost children (like in The Winter’s Tale),