Category Archives: arden shakespeare

Romeo And Juliet

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By William Shakespeare. First published in Britain in 1597 by John Dexter (Q1), then in 1599 by Cuthburt Burby (Q2). Review copy from ‘The Arden Shakespeare: Third Series’, edited by René Weis.

This actually came out in printed format a couple of years ago, but I never reviewed it, mostly as I don’t have much to say about Romeo And Juliet as a play. It’s sort of like giving your opinion on Hamlet – I’m not sure where to begin, or if my opinion is even relevant. I’d really never gotten as attached to it as I had to, say, Measure for Measure or Troilus and Cressida, though I can recognize its greatness. However, it coincidentally happened to be the first Arden Shakespeare release to come out as an ebook – I got mine on Kindle via Amazon – and so I thought I’d take a look, seeing what the ebook version can give to me, and also reassessing the play.

romeo

I generally prefer Shakespeare’s comedies to his tragedies, so it helps that this one is structured very much like a comedy till the deaths start happening, with lots of back and forth between servants and comedic sexual banter from Mercutio. But where in Much Ado the characters might get a bit angry at times, here almost everyone is constantly on edge – the first scene has the two families come to blows pretty much because they walk past each other – and therefore even comedic situations can ignite a spark. This is not helped by Mercutio (again), who practically goads Tybalt into killing him. Mercutio is much beloved as a character, mostly as he’s a more ‘modern’, with it guy compared to soppy Romeo and raging Tybalt, but he’s just as bad at keeping his temper and not doing dumb things.

And so tragedy does happen, as the crazy scheme to feign Juliet’s death till Romeo can come spirit her away goes soup. Juliet is one of the great female characters created by Shakespeare (which yes, was created for a young boy to perform), and it’s not just to avoid scandal that the actresses are usually much older than the ‘about to turn 14’ Juliet is. The audience is willing to suspend disbelief in order to see a truly stellar piece of acting, and Juliet gives a lot of fuel to burn there. Not to sell Romeo short – he starts off as a callow youth going through the motions of being lovestruck, but the way Shakespeare changes his vocabulary once he meets Juliet is one of the best parts of the play.

I actually found it easier to read this as an ebook – the printed version has the annotations (telling you what this Elizabethan term meant, etc.) on the bottom of the page, but your eyes still bounce up and down constantly as you track when the next note is. With the ebook you can tap to the endnote, then tap right back, making it flow better. The endnotes and annotations are positioned well – some ebooks have issues with endnotes, meaning you have to wait 30 seconds for the book to ‘catch up’ to you before you can return to the text, but not here. The only issue I had was with the facsimile of Q1 being too small to read on my phone, but larger ebook devices shouldn’t have that problem.

The scholarship here is good – Weis’ introduction is informative without overstaying its welcome, and the text fuses together Q1 and Q2 in ways that make sense (and are explained throughout), making this a very readable Romeo And Juliet. I suspect it was chosen to debut the ebook editions simply as it was one of the more recent books – formatting books like these doesn’t come quickly – and would not be surprised if Coriolanus, which came out in 2013, is the next one we see. In any case, those looking to dip their toes into Critical Editions of Shakespeare’s plays or just wanting a good readable ebook Romeo and Juliet should greatly enjoy this edition.

The Tempest

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By William Shakespeare. First published in Britain in 1623 by Edward Blount, William Jaggard, and Isaac Jaggard. Review copy from ‘The Arden Shakespeare: Third Series’, edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. Revised Edition.

First off, let’s get one thing clear right off the bat: no matter how much lovers of Shakespeare want it to be, and try to rewrite history to make it so, this is *not* the final play that Shakespeare wrote. Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen, both co-written with John Fletcher, followed this, as well as the lost play Cardenio (also with Fletcher). There’s no denying that it would be awesome if we could read the play as an allegory of Shakespeare’s playwrighting and the final speech as his retirement form the stage. But that’s not what actually happened.

This is not to take anything away from The Tempest. There’s a reason people want it to be Shakespeare’s last play – it’s fantastic, easily his best ‘romance’ and among his top plays, with some superb dialogue, especially from the magician who many say was Shakespeare’s self-portrait, Prospero. It has a lovely palindromic structure, and some supporting roles that an actor can really sink their teeth into in the form of the island’s two natives, Ariel and Caliban. And, despite many saying that she’s just a passive girl who does whatever her father tells her to, there’s more teeth to Miranda than one might expect if played in the right way.

I must admit when I first read this in college I did not get any colonial subtext at all – most of my classes were not dedicated to finding the political or social themes in Shakespeare’s work, merely focusing on the plot and language. But apparently there’s been a lot of discussion about how much Shakespeare was influenced by colonial trips England was taking to the Bermudas, so much so that some used to describe this as Shakespeare’s American play. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but certainly the conflict between Prospero and Caliban has been what many directors enjoy focusing on as the centuries have passed.

As times and mores change, the way we view the three main characters also develops. Caliban was a hulking, ape-like villain at times, but has also been portrayed as something of a noble savage – though one has to be careful not to make him too noble, given how he willingly admits to attempting to sexually assault Miranda shortly before the play began. Likewise, while it is tempting to keep to the symmetries of Shakespeare’s play by portraying Ariel as the light to Caliban’s dark, this does not necessarily make him any less of a servant – and many excellent productions have focused on Ariel’s truculence when dealing with Prospero, and his joy once freed.

As for Prospero himself, his character seems to have experienced a similar trajectory to Shakespeare’s, as so many scholars and readers saw Prospero’s magic and arts as Shakespeare’s discussion of his own writing. And, as the ‘bardolatry’ of the earlier centuries has given way to a more balanced look at Shakespeare’s life and works, so Prospero is not viewed with the rose-colored glasses anymore. He can be surprisingly petulant and stubborn, even in his final speech, and it’s possible to read his decision to leave behind his magic and return to the real world as a particularly bitter pill to swallow.

I’ve talked before about how I would stage a production of the play I’ve just read, but unlike Shrew and Merchant, I have less to say here. Certainly there would be a few more special effects needed than I’m normally used to in my Shakespeare – I’ve mostly performed the comedies – but that shouldn’t pose too much of an issue. Other than that, though, just reminding the actors that they need not necessarily lock themselves into one interpretation on their first reading, an to let their own view of the character come about during rehearsals and multiple readings. I hope that this would allow the ambiguities I prize so much in Shakespeare to shine through.

I feel I haven’t said as much as I normally do about this play but, slight controversies about Prospero and Caliban aside, there’s not as much controversy here as in the prior plays I’ve reviewed. This is the last truly great play Shakespeare ever wrote – Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen are interesting yet flawed, I would say – and anyone who loves the theater or language should read it if they have not already. As for this Arden edition, it’s great to read if you want to hear about the backstory of the play and get into the nitty gritty of Shakespearean scholarship – I loved the discussion about whether a speech should be assigned to Miranda or Prospero – and reads smoothly. This edition also updates it to cover the last 10 years or so of Tempest discussion, including the recent Helen Mirren version.

Sir Thomas More

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By Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle; with additions and revisions by Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood, and William Shakespeare; coordinated by ‘Hand C’. First published in Britain in 1844 by Alexander Dyce. Review copy from ‘The Arden Shakespeare: Third Series’, edited by John Jowett.

As you can see from the above, this is not exactly a play by William Shakespeare. Its inclusion in the Arden Shakespeare series will no doubt be somewhat controversial, although I hope not as much as Double Falsehood was. It was never published in Britain around the time it was written, and most likely was never performed either, being censored to death until it was finally abandoned as unworkable. The sole text comes from a manuscript that is slowly falling apart, although the British Library is doing their best to halt that. And honestly, it’s a very awkward play to perform, never quite deciding if it’s a history or a tragedy, and never quite deciding how it feels about its leading man.

One thing that the majority of Shakespeare scholars agree on in modern times is that Shakespeare DID write one of the revisions of the original text that are attached to the manuscript. A good deal of Scene 6 is in his handwriting, and there are some other bits written by the anonymous ‘Hand C’ who put it all together that might also be his work. Of course, that still leaves a great deal of the play – the majority of it, in fact. And most of the play is thought to have been written by Anthony Munday, who is… almost as interesting as Shakespeare himself. I’ll leave it to curious people to buy the text I’m reviewing to find out more, but I’ll note that one of the supposed main texts that Sir Thomas More was taken from would appear to be a manuscript stolen from More’s descendants by Munday in an anti-Catholic raid. That’s a lot more hardcore than cribbing from Boccaccio.

There’s a lot of civil unrest in this play – indeed, that’s probably one of the main reasons that it was never performed. The city is seen to be on the verge of riot, with foreigners implied to be the general cause. The play sides with the Londoners against the foreign rabble a bit too much for modern liking, and indeed the censor who went through the manuscript with his metaphorical red pen demand they be made ‘Lombards’ to make everything a bit less inciting. The main issue with the play, though, is that it dances around the King. King Henry VIII is not in it, and More is asked to sign ‘certain articles’ which he refuses to do, and is then executed for. These are, of course, the papers that acknowledge Anne Boleyn as the new Queen, but the play never outright states this. It’s a bit of a political gaping hole that begs to be filled in (and indeed some modern productions have done so).

You don’t see many productions of Sir Thomas More these days. Partly due to the fact that 75% of all audience members will think they’re seeing A Man For All Seasons; partly due to the canonicity problem (you never want to see Shakespeare scholars pelting your actors with fruit); but mostly due to a very familiar Shakespearean quality; ambiguity. More is a very hard role to grab a hold of. If you play him too light he comes across as heartless, especially in the later scenes with his wife. Too serious and the whole play gets unbalanced. It’s meant to be more of a history than a tragedy, but the tragedy is never far away, what with the play almost divided into two halves, each ending with an execution.

Is it Shakespeare? Well, that depends how much Shakespeare you want. We’ve already allowed co-written plays such as Pericles, Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen. But this isn’t just something that was co-written. It’s something that was written entirely by other people and then revised by a committee of writers, one of whom was Shakespeare. I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable performing it as a piece of Shakespeare, but I think I’m OK with reading about it, even if it’s such a mess that it’s far more fascinating to read about its creation than to read the play itself. Something which, come to think of it, is very Shakespearean.