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)

I.

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.”

Mirrors, or The Play Chooses You

This is an edited version of an essay that first appeared on thespellofwakinghours in March 2012.

O, is all forgot?
All school-days’ friendship, childhood innocence?

A Midsummer Night’s Dream [III.2]

People often talk about having a favourite Shakespeare play, the one play that they love and admire above all the others, for any number of reasons. While it’s a fantastic thing, I also think it’s not possible to have just one favourite Shakespeare play for life, for the simple reason that as we mature and grow, so do our tastes; we keep looking in the mirror and seeing new things reflected back at us. Throughout my early teens, like a lot of people, Shakespeare was just this guy, you know, who wrote some plays about four-hundred years ago, and people think he’s pretty okay still, but I never really ‘got’ why Shakespeare was Shakespeare, why he held such a godlike position in the literary canon. Mum and Dad took me to see The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) when I was twelve, and I ‘got’ enough of it to thoroughly enjoy myself. (I particularly remember the ‘balcony scene’ in Romeo and Juliet. One actor knelt in front of a chair with three tiny flowerpots strapped to his head, while another actor stood on the chair with a small watering can. ‘The balcony scene,’ the waterer said, deadpan, and the audience roared and applauded.) You could say that was the beginning, if you really wanted to. But if you think about it, this idea of having a sequence of ‘favourite’ Shakespeare plays is actually a part of our education whether we like it or not (or at least it was when I was at school; I believe the continuity and design behind it has been amended and inverted somewhat since then). Consequently, I have a theory happening, and I’m beginning to think it’s more purposeful and subtle – more conscious – than we’d ever assumed at first.

The Tempest

Julie Taymor, 2010.

In The Tempest, Julie Taymor creates another visual feast from Shakespeare’s rich text. Eschewing ‘traditional’ modes of producing cinematic Shakespeares, she filmed the majority of her film on the islands of Hawai’i – the black rock, deep orange gorges, lush tidal forests, rocky shores, cliffs and colours the perfect complement for her vision of sorcery, magic, redemption and love. Prospera’s island, as in the play, becomes a reflection of isolation, creating a new hierarchical order in a ‘new world’, and becomes a kind of antithetical evocation of Donne’s famous observation that ‘no man is an island’. Helen Mirren’s Prospera is a force of nature to be reckoned with, and while the decision to make Shakespeare’s magician a woman was always going to be controversial for many people, I actually prefer it to Shakespeare’s original, simply because there is so much more at stake, between Prospera and Miranda, between both of them and Ferdinand, between Caliban, towards the court and the usurping Duke. While her visuals are excellent and her cast, crew and rough magic all superb, it doesn’t quite reach the insane heights of Titus’ carnivalesque, though it is hard to distinguish exactly how or why.