I couldn’t do much with “Cymbeline” on my own, but I had Holinshed, and I noticed it improved my assessment of the play to become aware that the protagonists, in part, were real people, living in a real Britain in an interesting time of change. I had already begun to mull over these Celtic BRITAINS who seemed so much more familiar to the contemporaries of Shakespeare, whereas to us they are just shadowy figures at the edge of the historically unknown. We don’t really know anything about how they lived, how their relationships were, how they thought about life, even though we have their mysterious and beautiful artefacts and know how they were fighting battles because the Romans told us … As I am using Holinshed as my reference for the “enlightened” Elizabethan mindset and was reading his chronicle from the beginning, I had this impression that the Elizabethans were still kind of logged in at this time as the beginning of their national identity. (Like the British of our day and age, in an ominous way I had been wondering about before. I don’t understand – as I probably don’t understand national identity at all – but it somehow felt right to use “Cymbeline” for a comment on Brexit, as the RSC did!) What I did therefore was to write out what happens in Cymbeline, focusing on the characters – who are partly historical and partly not. The bits that people at the time (=Holinshed) considered as historical I wrote in black. The rest, which I had already labelled “Rosamunde Pilcher” (=the kind of “unrealistic” romance I find notoriously uninteresting), I wrote in pink. A look at the result was the fastest way to explain to myself why I hadn’t particularly warmed to the play. Here is a sample (some from the beginning, some from the end):
(…)
Cymbeline
Eldest son of Cassibellan who follows his cousin Theomantius as king in 33 BC.
He grew up and was educated in Rome and got acquainted with Augustus Caesar.
He has two sons: Guiderius and Arviragus who, in C, were abducted as small children as an act of revenge by Belerius and raised by him.
At some point as king he ceased to pay tribute to Rome.
(…)
Guiderius and Arviragus, who were raised there in a cave in a bucolic state of innocence by Belerius. (…)
In the meantime, Lucius has returned to Rome where he is made proconsul and raises the Roman aristocracy for an invasion of Britain. (Invention or “bending the facts”? Lucius probably not historical.)
Cloten, who has found Posthumus’ letter on Pisanio, has followed Imogen to Wales in Posthumus’ clothes, to take revenge on him and rape Imogen. He meets Guiderius and gets into a fight with him. Guiderius kills him, takes his head and throws it into the river. In the meantime, Imogen has taken some medicine bestowed on Pisanio by the wicked stepmother and has fallen into a deadlike state. Her body is layed out beside Cloten’s, so that, when she awakes, she takes him for her husband. On their return, the Romans find the desolate boy, Fidele, beside the body of “his master”, and Lucius takes him into his service.
Upon the arrival of the Roman army, Guiderius and Arviragus, acting upon their royal blood, persuade Belarius to partake in the defense of their country. In the end, they rescue the king from being taken by the Romans.
Posthumus, deeply regretting the presumed killing of his wife, decides to dress as a peasant and join in the fight against the Romans. He fights valiantly at the side of his unknown brothers in law and is taken prisoner by the Britains and put in jail to be executed.
(…)
What I meant is: it looked increasingly pink.
This wasn’t the most exciting thing I’ve done with text, but it triggered a number of exciting insights. First of all, it added to the feeling that there was a real impact of history on the play – that the historical frame was not just there to support the romance - because historical figures like Cymbeline and his sons, or the emperor Augustus, would have ticked a box with educated people at the time. And, though I would probably not be able to recognize its content, I believe that the play would have meant more to people HISTORICALLY than it could ever mean to “us”. And - as history is mostly important to people who are not historians where their (national) identity is concerned - as a CONTEMPORARY political statement.
(I really feel at this point that I should define “we” so as not to have to put it in quotation marks all the time; but then I would have to repeat the explanation in every post … Nonetheless: “We” are the WEIRD (White, educated, individual, rich, diversified) Europeans I consider my own mindset to be an intersection of – as I consider Holinshed to be an even bigger intersection of the WEIRD Elizabethans. (It might even refer to a slightly different intersection at different times, as I noticed that I just referred to the WEIRD Europeans EXCLUDING the British! Something I usually wouldn’t do … 😀). And the quotation marks mean chiefly that I am conscious of MISSING a lot of things.)
Secondly, I could now lay a finger on it why I didn’t much care for the play in the first place. I don’t like Rosamunde Pilcher’s novels, but this doesn’t mean that they are not brilliant samples of a hugely successful literary pattern. Summing up the text in this way made me focus on this. I was sensitized already to the special status ROMANCE had at the time reading “Troilus & Cressida”. In this case, looking at the literary sources emphasized a crude discrepancy inside the romantic hero who has to be brutally efficient and cruelly warlike at the same time as sensitive and prone to falling in love. A psychological balancing act that in my opinion still messes with our definition of maleness and the impossibility of living up to it. Romance therefore became a means to uncover a historical difference as well as a similarity.
Where “Cymbeline” is concerned, we are dealing with romance on a broader scale – beyond the strange phenomenon of “falling in love” - so that I was looking for a more distinctive term, which landed me with Rosamunde Pilcher. Then my professor at uni came to mind who gave a surprisingly entertaining lecture on “baroque” literature – something that might only have existed in Germany, but some of the defining features were certainly widespread. He alerted us to the popularity of this kind of story-pattern and its “bow-legged” structure: people - like lovers, parents and children, or siblings - get separated at the beginning of a long action-packed romance (=novel at the time!) and reunited in the end. And “Cymbeline” – like Rosamunde Pilcher - is packed with these stories. I think there was a religious context to it at the time, one that fits in with the general religious dispute about everything being pre-ordained and having to learn to accept God’s grace. But, even though this seems to fit in somehow with the general political situation of Central Europe practically being a continuous battlefield, I am sceptical. Being separated from people you love must have been such a widespread traumatic experience at times like these – and probably always is in form of primeval fear! – that people get “sucked in” by these stories regardless.
Being now permanently infected with the “history virus”, as it seems, I am wondering if there might be a special significance of these stories AT THE TIME – one that we cannot appreciate anymore - as they seem to represent the PREDOMINANT kind of story-telling – like mysteries and thrillers do at present. In this case I know the reason from experience: they are hugely ENTERTAINING. But why are they? I think not predominantly because of the blood and cruelty but because we REALLY don’t know how they will end - or what might still come out. I take it that the “bow-legged” romance at the time was felt to be hugely entertaining as well, which suggests that the general sense of what is entertaining underwent a sea-change. Apparently, people appreciated not to know how the story would end much less than not to know what happened in between! I suppose that the bit about God’s grace and living in permanent insecurity somehow fits in at this point of the explanation, but I don’t pretend to know how exactly. It’s all more than a bit mushy, historically, but at least I got some stakes in and, at the moment, am just enjoying the DISTANCE. (Of course there are lots of people nowadays who don’t like thrillers and enjoy Rosamunde Pilcher – or who like both. In certain ways that I experience as comforting - albeit challenging to my idea of history! - people never change!)
By the way, Shakespeare didn’t seem to care about the “bow-legged” romance much – or didn’t find he could do much with these stories. We can already rule out all the “realistic” stuff, like tragedies, histories and the Roman plays, and, at a cursory glance, most of the comedies or “tragicomedies”. At the moment, only “The Tempest”, “Twelfth Night” and “The Winter’s Tale” come to mind where this kind of story has a defining impact. Romance as a motive appears more frequently, as in “Romeo & Juliet”, “Othello” or, of course, “Troilus and Cressida”, but, in my experience, is usually put in perspective by political and social realism. In my opinion, the latter is even the most cynical of all of Shakespeare’s plays. - What I meant is that – given the popularity of these stories – Shakespeare seemed surprisingly immune to them. I think this is why in “Cymbeline” I don’t really feel as if I am in “Shakespeare”. But, even though there are only a few plays I have not read closely, there must be a lot of territory I have not covered.
That there is always A LOT MORE is the third important discovery - which is not exactly news but seems to have to be made anew all the time. I always try to find out what a play is about – and am convinced I can do it. But this conviction can only stand if I am prepared to drop a lot of things because there are too many LEVELS. Summoning up the content in two different colours made me aware of how many additional levels there must be which come into the play for different reasons and – at first impression - might NOT coincide. “Cymbeline” - though it actually might be more black and pink than other plays – isn’t really “Shakespeare” before it turns out rainbow-coloured. Talking with Claudia we hit on the biographical level – which I personally think is not very important in “Shakespeare” – but this is also a CHOICE I am making. As for every author there must be a lot of personal stuff getting into these plays, it is just very unlikely, in my opinion, to hit the centre of the play in this way. But to look, for example, for father-daughter relationships and the way they CHANGED compared to the former plays may help to understand these relationships better. And this is always important as it is the bit where we usually “jump in”, or don’t …
As usual – and it seems as if I have to make this experience for every individual play individually – the most important level of all is the one I cannot add. At least it becomes so much easier to add it by watching a good production of the play – if available - to understand what it might be about. If “they” make the right choices and manage to convey them on the stage, and it works with me, they cannot have gone wrong. Therefore - though this is a presumptuous statement which cannot be strictly proven - ALL successful productions of a great play must have something in common.
It sounds a bit absurd, but they certainly had THE RIGHT ACTORS in common. I don’t think I ever realized to this extent – even though I had this experience so many times – how incomplete Shakespeare’s plays are if they are not PLAYED. This time it clearly came from my inability to take the human stuff of the “bow-legged Rosamunde Pilcher plot” as such seriously. The flawless, self-effacing wife who is tragically accused of adultery she would never even think of committing by her oh so perfect husband, the depraved womanizing Italian who almost destroys their marriage out of boredom, and so on always make for a dramatic story, but, on a human level, is just the perfectly black and white stuff I am not interested in.
Like most of the times, my reference production was the RSC’s most recent one. I had it on DVD and must have watched it about two years ago and found it insignificant, as I only remembered a female Cymbeline with a long, grey mane of hair and a lot of ragged costumes … But Claudia had seen it on the stage in London and had liked it, therefore it was likely I had just not understood the play. After having at least gained some ground on the historical and political plane, I was optimistic …
And this time I really enjoyed it. I won’t go into details right now. Instead I’ll focus on the bit I liked most about the whole production because it illustrates perfectly the scope of what I had MISSED about the play. The bit I enjoyed most was an actor called Oliver Johnstone playing Iachimo, the detestable Italian. I must have seen him before – probably in another production by the RSC – but it didn’t really register. I certainly hadn’t seen how perfect he was. He had this absolute precision about every tiny detail that I find so useful in “Shakespeare” because it always motivates me to approach the whole text in this way. I think he must have had serious ballet training on top of all the other stuff because even his movements were so precise and graceful. But, most importantly, he has this gift that great actors have and which can be brought to Shakespeare in a practically limitless amount: EMPATHY. I instantly chose him for my “Best actor playing a character whom nobody cares about (except the actor himself!)” award, which I gave only one time before to Tanya Reynolds playing Mrs. Elton in the newest “Emma” adaptation, because I remembered why I would have created it for her. I was so delighted because she showed REAL empathy for her character by not playing Mrs. Elton as we EXPECT her to be played. Not as if she was Mrs. Elton from “Emma” – which all her predecessors already did incredibly well! – but as if she was a proper human being outside a novel, with a human predicament that has to be taken seriously. I suddenly didn’t just enjoy Mrs. Elton, but I enjoyed Mrs. Elton infinitely more by UNDERSTANDING her. And this is something I wouldn’t rule out in “Austen” for ANY of the characters, but I would have ruled it out in “Cymbeline”. Therefore Oliver Johnstone kind of opened this play for me. The best bit was at the end where he achieved this change from the completely cynical and immoral guy at the beginning to someone who is deeply mortified and seriously craves forgiveness and redemption. I somehow didn’t think this kind of extreme change – with practically no transition – is possible, or “realistic” (– though I remembered this scene at the end of “Strike Back 1” where Andrew Lincoln – as the one who desperately needs to be forgiven – and Richard Armitage – as the one who desperately needs to forgive – raise the level of the series about ninety percent). And if this kind of thing happens – if some actor is able to change the pink romance stuff on paper into real human stuff on the stage – I have no choice but to take it seriously, even though it might remain pink romance stuff on paper. Great actors are contagious – therefore they often “spread out” over more of the play than their limited part, improving what their colleagues are doing and sensitizing the audience for what other interesting human stuff might be “buried” in the play. So, this was the moment where “Cymbeline” suddenly converted from paper and good RSC practice into something out of “Shakespeare” and real life. And, even though I liked the extensive preparations and don’t know if it will go any further, this became the BEGINNING of my reading …
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen