The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 24.0535 Monday, 25 November 2013
[1] From: Mari Bonomi <
Date: November 22, 2013 at 12:28:15 PM EST
Subject: Re: SHAKSPER: Reality
[2] From: Steve Urkowitz <
Date: November 23, 2013 at 10:10:55 PM EST
Subject: Re: SHAKSPER: Reality
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Mari Bonomi <
Date: November 22, 2013 at 12:28:15 PM EST
Subject: Re: SHAKSPER: Reality
Re: Michael Egan’s question about reality in, for example, A Man for All Seasons:
For me there is most emphatically a reality created, a reality in which I have lived virtually my entire adult life:
More: Why not be a teacher? You’d be a fine teacher, perhaps a great one.
Richard Rich: If I was, who would know it?
More: You, your pupils, your friends, God. Not a bad public, that.
Mari Bonomi
[Editor’s Note: My favorite line from A Man for All Seasons is “To sell your soul for the whole world is one thing Richard. But for Wales?”
NB: My grandmother Margaret Morgan was Welsh. –Hardy]
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Steve Urkowitz <
Date: November 23, 2013 at 10:10:55 PM EST
Subject: Re: SHAKSPER: Reality
Michael Egan wrote,
>I’m a great admirer of Steve Urkowitz but his parsing of
>how the playwright’s (any playwright’s, i.e., all drama’s)
>“mirthful impersonations and flamboyant games” creates
>“reality itself” is just hot air, like the statement itself.
>Perhaps he could note one or two “mirthful impersonations”
>in say Macbeth or a flamboyant game in—let’s accept
>his example—Antony and Cleopatra. The battle of Actium
>maybe or that funny moment with the asp. At a stretch the
>Porter may be said to “mirthfully impersonate” but he’s
>famously a tension reliever not a creator of “reality itself.”
>Perhaps Steve could tell us how in the comedies, where
>we do indeed find mirthful impersonations and flamboyant
>games, what “reality” is created in (say) Two Gentlemen
>of Verona or even Twelfth Night? If you want a
>non-Shakespeare example, how about Tamburlaine or
>A Man for All Seasons or Equus?
Michael Egan has some trouble thinking about tragic drama as a participatory game, full of laughter even at the edges of death, or seeing “reality” in the fantastical inventions of comedy. So I’ll walk along with him a while, hoping that maybe he’ll learn to value the ephemeral smell of a rose even when it pierces with its thorns or the burning intensity of wet tears when laughing close to death. (I’m led to recall that magnificent testimony to flamboyant games by Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, written in that laugh-a-minute year, 1938. or from the same neck of the woods, Breughel’s “Children’s Games” and a brilliant analysis of it, Edward Snow, Inside Breughel: The Play of Images in Children’s Games.)
Instead of calling it “just hot air” maybe think about fabricated realities as the poetic invention that turns biological rutting into Valentine’s songs and turns the bio-electrical cessation of heartbeat into the store-house of memory, value, and transcendent love. In Twelfth Night, unless we comprehend and feel Olivia’s grief at the opening as something recognizably “real” then we’re left with just a coy mistress. Sure, many productions won’t give you that recognition, and with them we experience a reduced potentiality for her later recovery of sexual excitement. Same at the moment when Orsino is ready to kill “the lamb that I do love to spite a raven’s heart within a dove.” If the player of Orsino can’t act the intensity of pain needed to prompt that line as “real,” then we’re in the safer, less intense world of Hallmark greeting cards. But, I hope, you see that his intensity still has to be feigned, acted, artificial, as the rhyme cues us to recognize. We can’t be led to believe that he’s really going out to kill that nice actor playing Cesario. We have to be able to fear AND laugh, or be at the edges of each. And know that we are watching a simulacrum. The actor has to be willing and able to display himself as ridiculous, as an impersonator who can in a moment to come laugh at himself (as Malvolio cannot).
That’s what I do as a director—help actors bring their impersonations to a level of acrobatic beauty that audiences laugh while in awe, fear while in laughter, feel together with the others sharing the same sight.
One of the blessings of my life has been having a daughter who at maybe nine years of age painted the image of an anemone, maybe 15 x 24 inches. It’s so fine that I learned to look at flowers in whole new ways, as potentially painted images in addition to being biologically real objects.
Yes, I confess, I’m indeed blowing hot air. It’s called “life,” “awareness,” “art.” Cleopatra is laughing when she knows that “we are for the dark.” During her final night, my darling wife Susan knew she was dying, and she yet was able to murmur a delightfully obscene Yiddish theater joke on her way. Caesar can’t laugh; his ironies go only as far as putting Antony’s revolted generals in the forefront of his battle line so that he may seem to spend his energies against himself. An explosion of laughter requires multiple intensely discordant awarenesses reconciled through the smile, the giggle, the guffaw. Caesar has only his own point-of-view. Shakespeare wrings us with such wreaths of wisdom.
Walk with me? Or not.
Steve Walkowitz