Brutus and Other Heroines

by Harriet Walter

  I have read Ellen Terry and other actresses on Portia, and I talked to Peggy Ashcroft about her interpretation. This is not to copy them (if only!) or steal their ideas, but it was enlightening to discover that each actor had made slightly different choices for Portia in the trial scene. I was also reassured to find that I was at least addressing myself to familiar questions: To what extent has Portia prepared her argument? When does she go ‘off book’? Does she enter the court knowing that she has an ace up her sleeve should all pleas for mercy fail, or does she invent it on the spot?

  There is no right answer, only what can be sustained within the production you are in. No one else need know your decisions, and it is by holding on to your own private secret that the part becomes truly your own. You start thinking as and for Portia.

  This was my plan (and for the above reasons, other actors will choose otherwise): Portia must prove beyond doubt that Shylock will carry out his bond to its logical end, i.e. Antonio’s death. In seeking this proof she exceeds her brief. She is thinking on her feet. She impresses on him at the end of the famous Mercy speech that if he proceeds in his case,

  This strict court of Venice

  Must needs give sentence ’gainst the merchant there.

  In other words, ‘You do realise exactly what you are doing, don’t you?’ She tries two or three times to inspire him to be merciful. She offers him ‘thrice thy money’. Still he refuses. She has an attitude to this: a mixture of disgust, sorrow and humiliation. Now she is improvising. Why doesn’t she stop then and say ‘Got you!’? No. She wants further proof. (That Antonio is her rival and she wants to see him suffer is a red herring that I have heard suggested. Isn’t that using a sledgehammer to crack a nut? And where is this idea of Portia’s sadism borne out in any other part of the play?)

  Shylock believes in the rule of law. Portia must demonstrate justice by using only the rule of law and thereby teach Shylock about mercy by playing the rules of his game. She of the quick wits seizes on a clue about Shylock’s character: his insistence on the absolute letter of the law. At one point, when ‘Balthasar’ tells Antonio to ‘Bear your bosom’, Shylock jumps in:

  Ay, his breast!

  So says the bond, doth it not?…

  Nearest his heart, those are the very words.

  And again later when Portia/Balthasar asks Shylock to have a surgeon standing by to stop Antonio’s wound, Shylock asks,

  Is it so nominated in the bond?

  Portia (slightly shocked) replies,

  It is not so express’d: but what of that?

  ’Twere good you do so much for charity.

  Shylock protests,

  I cannot find it: ’tis not in the bond.

  Suddenly Portia switches the focus on to Antonio and asks him to speak. This buys her time to scrutinise the bond. She has suddenly had a brainwave, unlooked-for and unplanned. ‘Okay, Shylock, if you’re going to nitpick about the letter of the law, I’ll play that game too.’ She builds Shylock up to expect his moment of triumph. He is almost whetting his knife… Then, with the most perfect theatrical timing, Portia suddenly stops him with:

  Tarry a little; there is something else.

  Unison intake of breath from the courtroom. Portia is chancing her luck:

  Prepare thee to cut off the flesh.

  Shed thou no blood, nor cut thou less nor more

  But just a pound of flesh: if thou cut’st more

  Or less than a just pound, be it but so much

  As makes it light or heavy in the substance,

  Or the division of the twentieth part

  Of one poor scruple, nay, if the scale do turn

  But in the estimation of a hair,

  Thou diest and all thy goods are confiscate.

  The letter of the law made no mention of blood and everyone knows it will be impossible for Shylock to cut just one pound of flesh from Antonio’s body without spilling a drop of his blood. For Portia and the actresss playing her, it is a thrilling but disturbing moment.

  The extraordinary and wonderful thing about the trial scene in particular is that it teaches you how to play it. I laid my plans, thought it through logically step by step, but when I came to play it I experienced it. I learnt things about myself, and I am sure Portia learnt similar things, and this added a whole other dimension that Shakespeare never envisaged since he never expected a woman to bring her experience of life to bear in the playing of it. Portia triumphs, and Shakespeare’s audience would have delighted in the cleverness of the boy. My own woman’s sensibilities in going through the trial scene picked up the horror Portia must have felt on first entering this hate-filled arena, the pain she must have felt on hearing Bassanio say to Antonio that

  Life itself, my wife, and all the world,

  Are not with me esteem’d above thy life,

  and, more strange than all of these, I felt the disconcerting thrill of power.

  Few acting roles for women let loose this opportunity to command, to match the great weight of Shylock and control the rhythm, timing, thoughts and feelings of audience and courtroom alike. I learnt that I could do it. I enjoyed it, felt ashamed of it, felt jealous of my male counterparts that they so often get a go at it. Like Portia I had a moment’s insight into what it was to be a man. At the end of this scene, I played her troubled by her own victory, unhappy at her part in upholding the law made by Venetian men against an alien, and disturbed by the suffering of Shylock when she hears him say,

  You take my life

  When you do take the means whereby I live.

  This lack of complacency pays dividends when entering the final act, where Portia and Nerissa put Bassanio and Gratiano through a mock trial for having given away their betrothal rings. Portia now sees that: ‘So shines a good deed in a naughty world ’, and we feel her to be authorised now to judge Bassanio.

  In the little interlude just after the trial (Act IV, Scene 1), we highlighted the moment at which Portia intuits that there is a possible sexual relationship between Antonio and Bassanio. As a boy, I openly flirted with Bassanio in order to get him to part with his ring. Protesting that he promised his wife never to part with it, Bassanio resisted ‘Balthasar’ but was obviously turned on by him/her, much to his confusion. Then, minutes later, Gratiano comes running up to Portia/Balthasar and gives her the ring that Bassanio has now surrendered. Portia can only guess that Antonio has persuaded him to change his mind.

  It is a bitter pill for her to swallow. Knowing all this, it is essential that Portia take Bassanio through the consequences of his act to finally realise that the boy and the woman are one and the same. She does this in Act V, in a delightfully funny and ultimately merciful way, though not without an underlying seriousness, nor without the sad acknowledgement that it is finally Antonio’s word that releases Bassanio into heterosexual love.

  Portia is by no means perfect, but she has a loving spirit and a capacity to learn and understand life that earns her the right to carry the moral torch at the end of the play. If she never moved from Belmont why would we listen to her, to a woman who hasn’t glimpsed the real world nor ever dirtied her hands? We need to respect Portia even when we don’t yet particularly like her.

  The fun of the part is to show her transition not only from girl to boy and back, but from spoilt little rich girl to a somewhat sobered, wise and generous wife. It is the lessons she learns that make her tolerable, and by Act V we feel for the hurt love she has experienced and we want a bit of payback for Bassanio, before the forgiveness and the moving on to what we hope will be a fairly balanced marriage. All this is achieved in a lighthearted bitter-sweet manner which, for me, more than justifies the existence of the final act—which Henry Irving cut because Shylock’s part was over!

  Viola/Cesario

  Twelfth Night also deals with the transition of love from the homosexual to the heterosexual via an androgynous catalyst; this time Viola/Cesario. For me, Twelfth Night is the play in which Shakespeare perfects his gender-mixing theme
and puts it at the very heart of the plot. Twelfth Night plays with pain and dresses it as comedy. We laugh, cry and wince at the madness of love and feel the aching pleasure of it.

  The disguise

  In my ongoing quest to vary the ‘boys’, I make notes about the differences between Portia and Viola. Portia is in charge, knows how to act, has a legal brain, knew she had these all along and was ‘aweary of this great world’ that wouldn’t let her use them. She is also a convincing actor. Viola, on the other hand, is catapulted unwillingly into her disguise by her extreme circumstances, and that disguise is so see-through that all at Orsino’s court take a jibe at it. Feste the clown has a few ambiguous comments about ‘him’ and even Malvolio has noticed that

  He is very well-favoured and he speaks very shrewishly.

  Call me pedantic, but I wanted to find a psychologically believable reason for Viola’s disguise over and above a pretext for comedy and confusion. I am sure this is a modern-day approach that the boy players of Shakespeare’s day eschewed. Shakespeare has done all the thinking work for you, so why not just get on with speaking the lines, mimicking the emotions and expertly serving up the gags, as I suspect the boy players did? Blame it on the cinema, or Method Acting, or simply on the natural evolution of taste, but modern audiences set up more barriers to the suspension of disbelief than was true in Shakespeare’s day.

  It has been suggested to me that Viola has her eye on the main chance, noting Orsino’s bachelor status in the first scene, and entering his service with a view to trapping him into marriage. (Does anyone think that clearly when they’ve just escaped death and believe their brother has drowned?)

  Theories can sound attractive, but when you come to play the part they often just don’t stand up from the inside. It has also been suggested that Viola uses her wiles to make Olivia fall in love with her so she can string out her job as messenger and not lose her place in Orsino’s court. It sounds a bit flimsy to me. My answer to all this is that Viola soliloquises, and there is no example in the canon of a character lying to the audience in a soliloquy. Viola’s soliloquies are full of confusion and ‘what the hell is going on?’ If she harboured any of the above schemes I think the audience would be let in on them.

  So this is my thinking: ‘Here I am shipwrecked, a lone virgin, having lost my twin brother. What would Daddy have done?’ (Again the endorsement of the dead father.) ‘He’d have gone straight to the top man…’

  —Who governs here?…

  —Orsino? I have heard my father name him.

  He was a bachelor then.

  Even better, Daddy actually knew of this man. ‘Daddy’ died when I, Viola, was thirteen, and if Orsino was remarkable for being a bachelor then, it could argue for an older Orsino who is more acquainted with wars than women. Or, if Orsino is younger, it might suggest that Daddy had mentioned his name in front of Viola, thinking that, one day, when they were both older, they would make a good match. Both scenarios are plausible but we opted for the former.

  ‘If Orsino is a bachelor,’ thinks Viola, ‘I can’t seek asylum in his household as an unchaperoned virgin…

  What’s that? He’s in love with Olivia? Who’s she?’

  ‘A virtuous maid, the daughter of a Count / That died some twelve-month since.’ He left her in the care of her brother ‘who shortly also died’.

  ‘What a coincidence! We two should get along famously! I’ll go and serve her till something shows up… But she might not let anyone enter her household?… She’s a recluse? Ah well then, there’s nothing for it. I’ll have to go to the Duke’s house, but for reasons of propriety I’ll dress as a boy and serve in his household.’

  All perfectly logical, I thought, but somehow when I started rehearsing, it seemed too rational and too schematic for someone as traumatised as Viola is at that point, and I eventually found a more instinctive, more unconscious motive.

  Here is my potted psychology: Sebastian is Viola’s twin. They were both orphaned at thirteen. Together they make a whole. They are yin and yang. If Sebastian (yin) is drowned, Viola (yang) needs to become that yin in order to fill the gap that the loss of her other half has made and to complete the male/female circuit within herself.

  Viola ditches her old identity and invents Cesario (and in fact her real name is never mentioned in the play until Sebastian greets her in the last scene, and her identity is restored). There is also the thought that somehow by becoming her brother he is no longer dead. So her disguise is her hope. It is also the trigger for a whole set of new problems for her.

  The go-between

  Viola/Cesario is in more than one sense the go-between. Not only is she the messenger who can pass freely between the female-centred household of Olivia and the exclusively male court of Orsino, but she also crosses fluidly over the lines between girlhood, boyhood, youth and maturity. Malvolio describes him/her as:

  Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy; as a squash is before ’tis a peascod, or a codling when ’tis almost an apple.

  Viola embodies the cusp between all these states. Both Olivia and Orsino have created a sort of ghetto around themselves and only Feste and ‘Cesario’ can move between the two. Viola becomes subjectively involved in both places, and both are transformed by her presence. She achieves all this by default. She does not feel her instrumentality in the transformation. Fate is playing with her as much as with anyone else. She has none of Portia’s proactive confidence.

  On her first assignment to Olivia, Viola overplays the part and pushes the bravado a bit too far, out of nervousness. But the enmeshing of two sexual personae in the physical presence of Cesario works on Olivia, who has ‘abjured the company / And sight of men’ and will only admit a creature that is ‘in standing water between boy and man’.

  It also works on the all-male household of Orsino, who finds ‘I have unclasp’d / To thee the book, even of my secret soul’, and who, when describing Cesario, says ‘all is semblative a woman’s part’.

  When playing Viola I never forget I am a woman, just as she can’t because she is so in love with a man who thinks she’s a boy. This is a constant, painful reminder for her, and her femininity risks seeping out all over the place to betray her. There is also a sense in which she wants to be unmasked. She seems to be flying deliberately close to the wind when she tells Orsino that

  My father had a daughter loved a man,

  As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman,

  I should your lordship.

  —and then smilingly describes that daughter as sitting like

  Patience on a monument,

  Smiling at grief.

  Even more nervy, she looks Orsino in the eye tempting him with the riddle,

  I am all the daughters of my father’s house,

  And all the brothers too,

  then the ambiguous

  and yet I know not.

  which I played in various ways, but lately I have been playing it as ‘I know not whether I am the only brother, because I still hope that my real brother is alive.’ Then, having boldly offered the Duke a glimpse into my heart, I recover man-to-man, servant-to-master decorum with

  Sir, shall I to this lady?

  In Olivia’s presence, Viola transforms from the subservient adorer to unwitting adoree. The scenes with Olivia are like perfect musical duets between a flute and a clarinet (or perhaps a violin and a viola?). Hovering over the scenes is the thought of a girlie sisterhood that would unite the two orphans mourning their brothers’ deaths. (It is not for nothing that their names are almost anagrams.) With Olivia, Viola feels more at ease acting out her masculine side than when she is inhibited by the presence of Orsino. She quickly takes over the initiative of the scene from the haughty Olivia, who in her turn backs down to become a babbling, lovelorn fool. The turning point seems to be when Viola’s own passion for Orsino bursts out with:

  If I did love you in my master’s flame,

  With such a suffering, such a deadly life,

&n
bsp; In your denial I would find no sense;

  I would not understand it.

  Something in that passion prompts Olivia to ask,

  Why, what would you?

  Her interest has switched from the message to the messenger.

  Unaware of this, Viola relishes the question and acts out the wooing she would do if only she were free, in her famous ‘willow cabin’ speech. Viola is released into a transport of beautiful invention which surprises even herself, and Olivia is well and truly smitten.

  Viola soon becomes aware of what has happened when Malvolio delivers Olivia’s message with the ring. Her immediate response is:

  I left no ring with her: what means this lady?

  but she hits on the truth in the very next line:

  Fortune forbid my outside have not charm’d her!

  —which is a pretty speedy conclusion and indicates that something odd in Olivia’s look or behaviour had already set up the thought in Viola’s unconscious mind. After all, she knows the signs of a woman in love.

  Never in the play does Shakespeare give Viola a jealous thought or word about Olivia, and now, as it becomes clearer and clearer to her that Olivia is in love with the non-existent Cesario, she expresses nothing but sisterly pity. It is a wonderful soliloquy that brings her step by step into line with the audience’s understanding. But she is in the play, and they are not. They cannot help her.

  O time! thou must untangle this, not I;

  It is too hard a knot for me to untie!

  From this point on, Viola is caught in the absurd situation of having to keep visiting Olivia for both Orsino’s and Olivia’s own reasons and all very much against her own will. She has now got personal proof that Olivia will never love Orsino, and she needs to tell Olivia not to waste her time on ‘Cesario’. She is becoming impatient with Orsino. ‘Leave off that hopeless case and see the love here under your very nose!’ She also has to be cruel to Olivia and reject her while understanding the pain of rejection. Does this make her understand better how Olivia can reject Orsino? Her speech wraps up her true identity in another riddling hint: