A Bard Thing: 2013

Showing posts with label 2013. Show all posts

07/05/2014

All’s well that ends well: Shakespeare’s Romances as restoratives

This essay was first published online at thespellofwakinghours in December 2013.

Thou met’st with things dying,
I with things newborn.

Old Shepherd, The Winter’s Tale (III.3)

Of the four genres that Shakespeare’s plays can be broken into, it is the final group that is perhaps the most maligned and misunderstood. Yet it is this very same group that perhaps holds the keys to unlocking the humanism at the heart of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. These four plays, the ‘Romances’ – comprising Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest – are generally believed to have been written between 1608 and 1612. When viewed together, they form a valediction to one of the most consistently human and moving bodies of work in the modern-English literature canon, and are characterised by their almost fairytale-like plots and structures, and almost-absurdly contrived turns of events that carry them from one incredible scene to the next. Read as a progressive series of Chinese boxes, this quartet (or quintet, as I shall suggest) forms a coda to the plays, poems and sonnets that have come before them. There is a restoration of balance at their heart, a distinct sense of regaining an inherent aesthetic equilibrium, one that sets out to right wrongs; like Prospero at the conclusion of The Tempest, they seem to be asking readers and audiences alike, “As you from crimes would pardon’d be, Let your indulgence set me free.”

Richard II

Royal Shakespeare Company, 2013

Photo by Kwame Lestrade for Royal Shakespeare Company.

The Comedy of Errors

Bell Shakespeare, 2013

Photo by Matt Nettheim for Bell Shakespeare.

Cymbeline

NIDA, 2013

Image by Catherine Steele.

Set upon a series of tiered white planes, this Cymbeline foregrounded Shakespeare’s jagged and uncompromising prose, his torturously fractured speech-rhythms and borderline incomprehensible plot. Not because the actors, all second-year acting students, were anything less than superb, but simply because it is such a strange play. The actors carried the play with aplomb, making the lines that extra bit clearer, doing their utmost in their beautifully designed and tailored jackets and dresses and skirts to make the play as believable, as real, as possible. One of his Romances, Cymbeline’s ending – another classic revelatory ‘wonder-upon-wonder’ scene – can seem rather awkward and implausible on the page. Here, under the direction of Tom Wright, the scene – indeed, the production – was measured, carefully timed and beautifully judged; what could have fallen over itself became moving, and the grace with which it was played fed reversely back through the previous two-and-a-bit hours, leaving us drained, ours brain fizzing as we tried to make sense of the whole crazy mad tale.