RosieBell

Speeding Up Jane Austen

I've been unwell so my brain has only been up to mild entertainment on the internet. The paid companion who used to read to rich semi-invalids in Victorian time has been digitised and democratised.  We all have paid companions now.

Philanthropists on the internet upload films and television serials and now I can watch Jane Austen adaptations by the dayful.

I was taught that when you watch a film adaptation of a novel you should judge it by its own merits, not how it relates to the source material. Also, that good films are usually made not out of great novels but okay ones. However, watching differing versions of Jane Austen is like watching different versions of classical plays. Will the Ghost of Hamlet's father be a projection of Hamlet's own mental state or a material ghost? Will they set Julius Caesar in 1930's Italy or modern Africa or among the mafia?  The enjoyment includes assessing the interpretation. What will they do with - well to start - 

Persuasion 2007:-

 

Not bad - rather a nice Anne Elliott with her inward pain and patience, though her sister Mary is shown as neurotically deranged, not just snobbish and fretful.  But that last scene when Anne runs through Bath seeking Captain Wentworth.  Young ladies in Jane Austen's time did run but in the countryside, not through the streets.  Anne was going it like Jessica Ennis.  Jeez - it's the curse of the feisty heroine. To be attractive to modern eyes a film woman has to be physically energetic and outspoken.

So here's Billie Piper playing at shuttlecock, chasing a pug dog and generally tearing about like a mad thing with tumbling hair. Billie Piper is charming and was delightful as a companion to Doctor Who. She would make a delicious Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey. Here she's totally miscast playing Fanny Price - timid, bookish and delicate - in a garish adaptation of Mansfield Park (2007), where Mary Crawford, who is a sophisticate, flashes her ankles at Edmund Bertram and William Price dances the hornpipe. So when the internet didn't let me watch the third chunk of upload I was happy to give up on a vibrant adaptation for the perpetual motionists. 

 


Billie Piper - no Fanny Price did not look as cute as that

I hadn't much liked the film of Mansfield Park (1999) which had shown the influence of Edward Said* by including scenes of the slave trade (mentioned in one sentence in the book) but I did find the 1983 BBC version. The adaptation was faithful to the book and it made 1983 seem as spacious and stately as the days when families listened to Dickens novels being read out loud.  This adaptation got the novel's atmosphere - the formality, the authority of the paterfamilias, the repressed emotion obliquely expressed in walks through a grand garden or private theatricals. .

It did have some odd touches.  Sylvestra Le Touzel who played Fanny looked like an actress from the silent film era, when they widened their eyes emphasising the whites. She moved awkwardly with the same lunging gait as Joyce Grenfell playing a hockey mistress and in outburst was hysterical to the point of needing medication. Henry Crawford was repellent - creepy instead of attractive. And Lady Bertram was catatonic rather than just languid.  Anna Massie was excellent as the meddling Mrs Norris, as was Samantha Bond as Maria Bertram. The final great scene was touching, Edmund and Fanny are sitting by a window one rainy Sunday evening when he tells her of his final disillusionment with Mary Crawford. No running about, only their two faces and the rain outside on the paths and lawns.

 

Sylvestra Le Touzel as Fanny Price - slightly weird

I am now part way through the 1971 production of Persuasion, again done at an easy pace and staying close to the novel.  The autumnal scenery and the women trailing their dresses and shawls on the Cobb at Lyme are very good, the ladies of the English leisure classes at their pretty play. They have also added some poetry for Anne to quote (that time's equivalent of songs for life's soundtrack).  Anne Elliot has an absurd hair style, a kind of beehive. But she is good, the grown up woman always trying to make the peace among the exuberant giggling girls. All the characters are done well, except for a shrieking Louisa Musgrove who is such a pain you think Captain Wentworth shows bad taste in his flirtations. I was quite pleased when she was knocked unconscious.

 


Anne Firbank with bad hairstyle

I find there was a 1960 version of Persuasion but it was cleaned out by the BBC in the 1970s.

The Disciple: Master - will we have eternal life?
The Master : If we are digitised, my child.

*Culture and Imperialism

Lord of the Trees

As everyone knows, ash dieback has arrived and may wipe out tens of millions of ash that make up about 30% of Britain's trees.  Even for those who couldn't tell an ash from an oak, this is a terrible thought.   Britain is an urban nation and its people use the woods and countryside for refreshment.  The favourite activity among the British people is a stroll in the country.  Some of the those strolling will be gardeners, or know something of botany and be able to name the trees, but many will only see the "trees" - bare and budding, green or yellow leafed, according to the season.

Larkin, who caught British attitude to their churches (affection, residual wonder, ignorance) in Church Going also caught the city-dweller's view of trees.  "The trees are coming in to leaf"  he says about the signs of spring approaching that the workers in a city will comment on along with the lengthening days and the crocuses in the park. What trees he doesn't specify - oaks, beech, lime or whatever else grows in a city park. Their relations to human beings are symbolic - that of life renewing  - begin "afresh, afresh, afresh."

An earlier rural age, when writing about trees, knew their names and properties - the uses of the timber and the fruit.  So in Edmund Spenser's Fairie Queene you have one of those lists that medieval poets loved so much, whether of birds, animals, sins, virtues or mythological figures.  His people take shelter in a grove:- 

Much can they prayse the trees so straight and hy,
The sayling Pine, the Cedar proud and tall,
The vine-prop Elme, the Poplar never dry,
The builder Oake, sole king of forrests all,
The Aspine good for staves, the Cypresse funerall.

The Laurell, meed of mightie Conquerours
And Poets sage, the Firre that weepeth still,
The Willow worne of forlorne Paramours,
The Eugh obedient to the benders will,
The Birch for shaftes, the Sallow for the mill,
The Mirrhe sweete bleeding in the bitter wound,
The warlike Beech, the Ash for nothing ill,
The fruitfull Olive, and the Platane round,
The carver Holme, the Maple seeldom inward sound.

"The Ash  for nothing ill" - I thought that faint praise like calling someone "harmless" - then read this:-

The resilient and ubiquitous ash has always been respected for its benevolent or healing properties. At least three British saints threw their wooden staffs to the ground to see them sprout miraculously into ash trees.

Among the rituals associated with the tree is a widespread practice involving the passing of an injured or ill child through a cleft deliberately made in the tree, which subsequently heals over, as does the child.

There is usually a utilitarian aspect to such veneration, and ash wood has been used to make ploughs, axles, blocks (on sea and land), planks and all manner of sporting accoutrements, from tennis racquets to oars.

The ash then is the healing tree and the making tree.

Spenser's tree list is not what someone could realistically observe in a forest. Olives and beech are unlikely to co-exist on the same terrain. These are trees that are known and trees read about jumbled together, but it's an educated man of his time's view of a tree.  They are fine to look at and, being useful, are woven in to human life.   

But then came the Romantics and trees became part of Nature with a capital "N". Hopkins in Binsley Poplars. 

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,   
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,   
All felled, felled, are all felled;   
 Of a fresh and following folded rank   
 Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled   
Shadow that swam or sank   
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.   
 
O if we but knew what we do   
When we delve or hew—          
Hack and rack the growing green!   
Since country is so tender   
To touch, her being só slender,   
That, like this sleek and seeing ball   
But a prick will make no eye at all,         
Where we, even where we mean   
To mend her we end her,   
When we hew or delve:   
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.   
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve       
Strokes of havoc únselve   
The sweet especial scene,   
Rural scene, a rural scene,   
Sweet especial rural scene.

The tender and fragile country that needs protection.  It is a beloved being under assault from humanity, its foe.  But the rural scene - were these trees being cleared for factories, housing developments or as part of woodland management?  The "rural scene" is English countryside, where trees are felled, coppiced, pollarded and generally managed.   Felling trees is not necessarily wanton destruction.  But there are only two attitudes towards Nature in Hopkins - being her friend and fan or  her destroying foe.  We are here, the trees over there as separate being. 

The complete tree-worshipper was Tolkein.

Frodo . . . laid his hand upon the tree beside the ladder: Never before had he been so suddenly and so keenly aware of the feel and texture of a tree's skin and of the life within it.  He felt a delight in wood and the touch of it, neither as forester nor as carpenter. It was the delight of the living tree itself.

Tolkein's forests and trees are his most atmospheric writing - whether the gloom of Mirkwood, the malice of the willows in the Old Forest, and reached its apotheosis in the Forest of Fangorn with the Ents, who are half tree and half human:-

Some recalled the chestnut: brown-skinned Ents with large splayfingered hands and short thick legs.  Some recalled the ash: tall straight grey Ents with many-fingered hands and long legs; some the fir (the tallest Ents), and others the birch, the rowan and the linden."

Tolkein said of how he was inspired by trees:-

One of its sources was a great-limbed poplar tree that I could see even lying in bed. It was suddenly lopped and mutilated by its owner, I do not know why. It is cut down now, a less barbarous punishment for any crimes it may have been accused of, such as being large and alive. I do not think it had any friends, or any mourners, except myself and a pair of owls."

From the introduction to Tree and Leaf

So he gets fictional revenge on the cutters and loppers when the Ents and their arboreal infantry charge as a heavy brigade on Isengard, the evil fortress of the tree-killer Saruman. The tree-men rip down the hellhole of stone and metal like a tree's roots can split stone.  Nature takes revenge on the industrial revolution.

At the end of The Lord of the Rings the tree-killer Saruman has continued his evil work by felling trees in The Shire and replacing them with polluting machinery.  He is of course routed and the trees finally prevail.

Tolkein's forests are rather empty of other forms of life - very few birds (which a medieval poet would have had perching on every branch ) and scuttling mammals that I can find even in our fragmentary woods.  A more modern sensibility (post Rachel Carson) that loves the natural world sees trees as habitats and that the loss of swathes of trees is not just those trees gone but the ecosystem they sustained of birds, mammals, fungi, and invertebrates.  A whole world has been lost.

Lost worlds is of course the background of Lord of the Rings.  We are constantly told that Middle Earth has dwindled from an unfallen time when the Elves taught Ents to talk, and the warriors and heroes of this age are picking up the pieces from an earlier grander time. But this is fantasy for the child in us, not grown up tragedy.  Gandalf falls into a deep crevasse, everyone weeps and sings laments, but then he comes back to life.  (Can you imagine Hamlet springing back to his feet, or Lydgate in Middlemarch losing his obstructive wife and making scientific breakthroughs after all?) Along with the pseudo elegaic tone you get the fairy tale ending of all being put right.  The returning Hobbits thwart Saruman and Sam's magic powder makes saplings grow at four times their normal rate.

I remember the yellow marks like the cross on a plague victim's door on the trunks of elms which meant they would be destroyed.  A couple of weeks ago I saw a wych elm sapling in my local park - but I won't ever see the great elms again.  "Many fair things will be lost," says Elrond.  Many fair things have been lost - hedgehogs and sparrows, hedgerows and elms - and now the ash tree.  A percentage of the trees will be resistant to ash dieback and will grow again - but at a much slower pace than the Shire did. Evolution is a magic that takes time.  A species may prevail, but the individual will not be there to see it.

Rhythmic prose

 

Distinguished literary critic James Wood kitchen-table drumming.  I'm a big admirer of Wood's literary criticism - any drummers around to say what they think of his drumming?

Should he stick with the day job?

Occasionally Wrong

Carol Ann Duffy does rise to her job as Poet Laureate by turning out occasional  poems, though she doesn't always rise to the occasion.  In her poem for the Olympics she sank like a Lib Dem poll; like Tony Blair's credibility; like the brotherly love in the Coalition - insert your own political metaphor. 

Enough of the soundbite abstract nouns,
austerity, policy, legacy, of tightening metaphorical belts;
we got on our real bikes,
for we are Bradley Wiggins,
               side-burned, Mod, god;
we are Sir Chris Hoy,
Laura Trott, Victoria Pendleton, Kenny, Hindes,
Clancy, Burke, Kennaugh and Geraint Thomas,
               Olympian names.

We want more cycle lanes.

               Or we saddled our steed,
or we paddled our own canoe,
or we rowed in an eight or a four or a two;
our names, Glover and Stanning; Baillie and Stott;
Adlington, Ainslie, Wilson, Murray,
               Valegro (Dujardin's horse).

(No we aren't and we didn't.  Speak for yourself.  "We" mostly sat on the sofa.)

She has received a lot of derision for it , and nowhere more than at That Place, where some commenters complained that Betjeman would have done it better, and inquired how would Larkin have done it? 

"Lamia" produced this fine pastiche, which caught the Larkin mood (glass three quarters empty and a fly drowning in the remaining liquid).

Prize-giving MMXII

by Philip Larkin

With a stern blazered smile the judge draws near,
Headmasterly, to where I loiter, bald
Bowing my head, and blinking behind my specs.
And then a velvet fumbling, a falling into place
As something heavy slithers round my neck
To hang in awkward gaudiness. A cheer,
And then the National Anthem strikes up gold.

Gold? Or something else? Stepping down slowly
From the podium to piss, I wonder
What it was all for. ‘Run for Team GB’
They said. But where does one run from here?
The crowds will quietly drift away,
The stadiums will crumble into pieces.
The asphalt lanes will gather weed and leaf.
This cycling Kraut, that weightlifting Bolivian,
That crew of sailing Japs, each year will sink
A little further into blank oblivion.

And poised between my thumb and finger
This cold token of autumnal grief.
In a bare wintry drawer it will linger,
for a while, gathering dust, unsold,
Among dead stamps and a leaflet about wine.
An old wives' charm to ward away new failure.
Something to please the nephews and the nieces.
Something to taunt those pricks in Australia.

In the Olympic bar I stand a drink
For a Danish woman and some ass from Spain.
The hot triumphant evening turns to thunder,
And somewhere out beyond the finish line
The first small medals of rain. Strange to think
We will never be so happy again.

The theme "Lamia" has taken. that no happiness endures, is in the tradition of Pindar, the poet who wrote poems to celebrate the victories of the original Olympic athletes.  Here are the last verses of his Ode to Aristomenes of Aegina, the winner of the boys' wrestling contest.  He speaks of the humiliation of the losers as well as the joy of the winners:-

Now from on high on four young bodies
You hurled your strength with fierce intent.  For them
No happy homecoming from Pytho was decreed,
As that of yours, nor at their mother's side
Could pleasant laughter ring a joyful greeting
For their return.  But shunning hostile eyes, they creep
By quiet paths, o'erwhelmed by their ill-fortune,

But he to whom is given new glory
In the rich sweetness of his youth, flies up,
Aloft, high hope fulfilled on wings of soaring valour,
In realms that brook no dullard cares of wealth,
But man's delight flowers but for a brief moment,
And no less swiftly falls to the ground again, shattered,
By destined will that may not be gainsaid.

Creatures of a day!  What is man?
What is he not? A dream of a shadow
Is our mortal being.  But when there comes to men
A gleam of splendour given of Heaven,
Then rests on them a light of glory
And blessed are their days.

(Translated by Geoffrey S Conway)

Duffy of course is entitled to write about the Government's economic policy with the fiercest anger - but a poem about the Olympics is not the best place to start, at least not in this tone - Yay Hoy! Boo Cameron! Inserting a local political message jars with the events and sounds ridiculous.  "Lamia" as Larkin and Pindar describe an event which becomes haloed with a universal theme.  

When Larkin did write an occasional poem it was for the opening of the Humber Bridge, which became part of a broader theme of isolation and joining. If he'd been in Duffy mode he would have added something about more money should be spent on cycle paths, and damned transport policy generally.

 

The winds play on it like a harp; the song,
Sharp from the east, sun-throated from the west,
Will never to one separate shire belong,
But north and south make union manifest.

Lost centuries of local lives that rose
And flowered to fall short where they began
Seem now to reassemble and unclose,
All resurrected in this single span,

 Reaching for the world, as our lives do,
As all lives do, reaching that we may give
The best of what we are and hold as true:
Always it is by bridges that we live.

Victorious, happy and glorious, for a while

The Hollow Crown ended with the fourth play in the series, Henry V. It was brilliant, like the whole series, and it was great to see Henry V in sequence after the two Henry IV's.  I've seen Henry V several times, and the Falstaff and Mistress Quickly scene at the beginning doesn't make much sense in a stand alone Henry V. 

I thought framing the play with the funeral at beginning and end was a fine device.  At first I was puzzled when a woman in black, who I couldn't identify, turned up at the beginning, but at the end you see her again and it makes sense.  By then you have enjoyed her as the radiant, playful Princess Katherine with rippling golden hair and a pale blue. girlish dress, and now she is transformed into a braided, draped piece of mourning and motherhood.  The adventures and romance of Henry were glorious, but short-lived. 

Henry V is a play with a fantastic action hero at its centre and so there were plenty of shots of Henry galloping on a white horse, his cloak flying behind him. Tom Hiddleston looked right - the director had left off the usual pudding basin haircut -and was a young man full of energy and warmth, surrounded by a posse of capable old codgers (all excellent, and Paul Freeman as Erpingham was perfect in his smiling delivery).  Henry is an epitome of Rudyard Kipling's If - he walks with kings (he is one) and has the common touch, all men count with him and none too much.  This was an unbombastic Henry.  Hiddleston seems to be able to do anything, so no doubt he could perform the famous motivational speeches, the once more in the breach, dear friends, and the Crispin Day one as a leader to his troops.  But he was directed to get in a huddle with his immediate comrades urging them on hoarsely, like a coach at a football team rather than Elizabeth I at Tilbury.  Very different from Kenneth Branagh's Henry V. One of Branagh's strengths is to convince as a leader of men, as he did in Shackleton. 

They didn't cut the Harfleur speech, when Henry threatens atrocities if the town does not surrender, as Laurence Olivier's wartime version did.   Any modern production of a play with a war setting will emphasise the cruelties and terrors, so there were plenty of shots of the Boy, who follows the army after he picked up the St George Cross armband at the beginning reacting to the deaths and fear around him.  

I thought that a production that underlined the horrors was going to rob us of excitement - the advance of the cavalry and the arrow shower, but we got them both - a lovely wide shot of the horses approaching, the English bowmen waiting and the hooves thundering closer and closer.  Not as good an arrow shower as in the Olivier and Branagh film versions, but pretty good. 

Henry V is - well not pure jingoism, as nothing Shakespeare ever does is pure and simple - cynics, nay sayers and no-shows have their turns  - it's got a touch of the Wilfred Owen among the Rupert Brookery   - but full on aggressive patriotism, with everyone in the play telling us how marvellous Henry V is - and of course he is marvellous, like James Bond with heavier responsibilities.  His enemy is a sneery  Dauphin (Edward Akrout, an English bloke's nightmare of a handsome, French dude advertising perfume).  The Dauphin and his henchmen are arrogant sods whose horses wear dressy armour - that concertinaed neck protector on the Dauphin's horse looked amazing.  The English stand stoically covered in mud.  If there any image of Frenchman vs Englishman that has staying power with the English, this one is it, the flashy smoothy vs the dogged rough substance.

Like James Bond Henry gets the girl, who is delightful and French to boot (Melanie Thierry - utterly charming, whether giggly or serious).  When in the final wooing scene Henry adds to his other virtues a GSOH and amusing self-deprecation and the beautiful young Prince and Princess kiss each other, it's the end of a fairy tale, but they do not of course live happily ever after   Henry dies, and England bleeds.   The Chorus in the play tells us so, this production showed us, that glory existed but was cut short.

The Hollow Crown - Henry IV Parts I and II

The Hollow Crown series has been marvellous in direction, acting and settings. 

Jeremy Irons, who played Henry IV, also presented a thoughtful documentary about the three Henry plays in the series.  This includes footage of different productions especially those at The Globe and you get an idea of how those plays worked up their audience with contrasting scenes - a comic bit, followed by a love scene, followed by a fight.  

I am glad that the plays have been set in medieval times, when these dynastic discords occurred,  and that the actors are wearing chain mail or robes.  The battle scenes, in snow or through bare woods, are excellent, as the warriors get into single combat and  go to it clanking sword againstsword.  Single combat always makes a good spectacle.  Why else employ light sabres in Star Wars? 

That is a problem with modern settings of Shakespeare.  How do you make the fights work, especially when the dialogue constantly mentions swords?.  Baz Luhrmann's production of Romeo and Juliet tried to get round this by making the camera zoom in on the brand names Sword and Dagger printed on the guns that the Mafia style gangs fought with, but it was a clumsy fix.  Two recent modern productions, Patrick Stewart's Macbeth and Ralph Fiennes's Coriolanus managed to sneak in a little hand to hand engagement from the blood-thirsty combatants, however unlikely that would be in the age of ballistics.

Macbeth and Coriolanus were both updated to be political thrillers, and they worked well.   But it can  be annoying to have modern parallels pushed at you.  I once saw a production of Coriolanus with the main man goose-stepping, which infuriated me because (a) Coriolanus isn't a Fascist, just a general bad at democratic politics; (b) even if he were, I don't want the director holding up Think Mussolini! signs like that  It's slightly insulting, like being harangued about politics by Rory Bremner.

However, that doesn't mean you can't find parallels in your own times.  Young Prince Hal goes slumming among the low-life and I thought of a rich boy, the son of a CEO or banker, hanging out with rappers, Falstaff being the veteran MC and the Godfather of the Dive Club. 

The talking heads in the Jeremy Irons documentary agree that, as King Henry IV wishes Hotspur was his son, so Prince Hal is seeking a father figure in Falstaff.  That is neatly symmetrical, but while there are lines where King Henry says that of Hotspur, there is not one to suggest Hal regards the reprobate Falstaff as anything but a playmate.   Hal is eloquent, quick witted,  - one of Shakespeare's smart-arses, like Hamlet, a great world-wielder -and his and Falstaff's exchanges are duelling performances as each out-nouns and out-adjectives each other.

Hal: I'll be no longer guilty of this sin; this sanguine coward, this bed-presser, this horseback-breaker,   this huge hill of flesh,—

Falstaff: 'Sblood, you starveling, you elf-skin, you dried neat's tongue, you bull's pizzle, you stock-fish! for breath to utter what is like thee! you tailor's-yard, you sheath, you bowcase; you vile standing-tuck,—

Tom Hiddleston as Hal suggests lithe and young energy and is an eyeful lounging with the bad ass Poins (David Dawson) in the bathhouse scene.*  He gets all of Hal's moods - his enjoyment of his own talents and pranks, the splinter of ice that observes coolly his low-life chums while acting as one of them, the growing awareness that one day he will have to do the equivalent of graduating from Harvard and taking his seat on the board.  His knowledge that his wild ways are a gap year before returning to his real life make him unlovably cool and self-contained.   Prince Hal has to grow out of Falstaff, put on the armour and start fighting as a modern privileged roaring boy starts wearing the suit, tapping the blackberry and spending his days in a glass tower to maintain his position in the world.

Simon Russell Beale was a sound fat Falstaff. with his mixture of intelligent cynicism, warmth and the pathos of one feeling age approaching.  Age presses more and more on him while his corruption becomes less amusing as he accepts bribes from the press-ganged working men and exploits the daffy Mistress Quickly's affection for him (Julie Walters, good, but isn't Mistress Quickly a marriageable forty or so, not sixty?).

Prince Hal and Falstaff are both complex characters that could come from novels, in that we are given much of their thinking as well as their words.  Around them are simpler and vivid characters - the king, Hotspur, Glendower, Pistol, Justice Shallow. 

Jeremy Irons as the king, sick and furrowed with anxiety and guilt is superb. Joe Armstrong, playing Hotspur as a touchy, scrappy whippet of a Geordie lights up every scene he is in, whether rousing his troops, undercutting the operatic Owen Glendower's grandiosity or teasing his wife.  The scene when Glendower's daughter sings in Welsh by the fire in the Great Hall while Hotspur and his wife (Michelle Dockery) are together for the last time is very poignant.

 
This scene's poignancy is echoed later by Falstaff's last hours with Doll Tearsheet ( Maxine Peake).  I liked her fierceness and also her tenderness, but in late medieval England surely even a cut-price whore would wear some finery, not just a torn hempen sack.

When Hal and his father go off to do serious business together, i e. put down a rebellion, Hal speaks his father's language.  The rapping has stopped:-

Henry IV: How bloodily the sun begins to peer
Above yon busky hill! the day looks pale
At his distemperature.

Hal: The southern wind
Doth play the trumpet to his purposes,
And by his hollow whistling in the leaves
Foretells a tempest and a blustering day.

I have not seen the Henry IV plays before.  They are as rich and complex as the great tragedies.   The old feel themselves failing and dwindling and fear the burning young waiting to take their place in the world.  Is there any scene in literature about ageing that is as sad as those between Falstaff and Justice Shallow (a lovely thin reed, David Bamber) talking of their youth?  The powerful use the less powerful and then discard them.  Power colours every relationship - father, son, spouse, friends, comrades.

*Totally gratuitous, as the stage directions just say "A street" but they are fine male specimens.

Small screen Shakespeare

The Beeb has been broadcasting a lot of Shakespeare at the moment.  It repeated one of its great achievements, Vivat Rex, and in the last week has shown Julius Caesar and  Richard II, the first play in The Hollow Crown series, which will follow with Henry IV Parts 1 and II and Henry V.  

Julius Caesar is a televised version of the Royal Shakespeare Company's production.   Some of it worked well,  but the televised theatre medium sets limitations, especially when it came to the final battle scenes, which are seven guys dispersing themselves through what looked like the ablutions block of a disused factory. 

It has an all-black cast and is set in a modern African state.  This makes sense, a play about a coup d'etat set in that continent of coups. It also gives some local colour e.g. the women's cloth head-dresses and the men changing from white shirts or tunics to ceremonial robes for the assassination, so when Octavius Caeasar  (Ivanno Jeremiah) appears in modern battle-dress you take one look at his ironed shirt and  know that cool, self-possessed youth is going to come out on top   Cinna the poet is lynched by necklacing and the soothsayer is daubed in white ash.  Also, the verse delivered with African stresses and full utterance is lovely to listen to and makes the grand rhetoric seem like natural speech. 

The televised  play is billed as "a fast-moving thriller. A vivid story about a struggle for democracy, Julius Caesar is also a love story between two men united by an explosive act of political violence "   Caesar (Jeffery Kissoon) ageing and fattening on the arrogance of his power is excellent and some scenes - the conspirators gathering on a stormy night, the actual assassination on an escalator, Mark Antony's speech to the crowd - do in fact thrill.  But much of the play is Brutus (Paterson Joseph) and Cassius (Cyril Nri) in discussion and as they are not clearly characterised, they tend to blur into each other.     Also - and it's a problem with the play itself - Brutus, supposedly the noblest Roman, is a bad modern hero because he is always wrong.  Brutus over-rules Cassius in advancing to Phillippi, where their forces are defeated, and in allowing Mark Antony not only to live after the assassination but to make a speech at Caesar's funeral, which Antony of course uses to pull the rug from under the conspirators' feet.   Brutus is most sympathetic in his gentle manner to his slave Lucius, a nice boy, touchingly played by Simon Manyonda as one of the youthful followers being caught up in events way beyond their understanding, let alone control.

From the first sight of him flashing his gorgeous teeth, Mark Antony (Ray Fearon) steals the play as the character he plays stole the revolution.  Handsome, charismatic, part playboy, part PR man collecting industry awards he is the portrait of a successful politician - a devious and ruthless opportunist.  He bides his time by shaking the assassins' bloody hands and he then seizes the moment with a literal vengeance through his Friends, Romans, Countrymen speech.  He's a great orator - and the thrust of his speech springs from a real emotion - he does believe that Caesar's murder was an outrage and that the murderers should be punished.  Ruthless opportunist he is, but not a hypocrite.  Antony dwarfs Brutus as the winner through realpolitik will always dwarf the losing idealist. 

The politics of the play are universal - a tyrant overthrown, a would-be revolution that goes wrong and then clever manipulators grabbing power and killing off the opposition. 

Another sort of politics features in Richard II - that of how the powerful, unaware of the difference between respect, fear and flattery, can be deposed. Richard spends his time enjoying his own divine right and not enough time holding on to it. 

Richard II is directed by Rupert Goold specifically for television and uses small-scale spectacle and slanting camera angles, often highly effectively and beautifully e.g. jousting scene with the jousters and their horses in wonderful armour.  There are sumptuous backgrounds of carved and painted interiors and bleached, silvery wood.  In a play which is full of love for England Bolingbroke returns from exile to walk through flowery meadows or along a track among bracken, and Richard stands on the only litter-free, sandy beach in the whole of these islands (it looked like the south coast - how did they manage to clear it of dog-walkers?)

It is highly visual.  At his end a bearded Richard echoes an IRA hunger striker in his cell and then Saint Sebastian shot full of arrows.  Like Marlowe's Edward II Richard is insufferable as the theatrical king, and most pitiable and dignified when brought low to simple suffering, realising that he has been a man of straw with a crown.

It has often been noted that in democratic societies only big name entertainers like Madonna or Mariah Carey dare to come on these days like royalty - a president or prime minister cannot demand that their hotel-suite be decorated with white on white brocade.  So Richard Goold directed Ben Whishaw to play Richard as a Michael Jackson figure, a man who lives in a fantasy world with an entourage of grasping hangers on.

This fey Richard II crashes against the stolid Henry Bolingbroke (Rory Kinnear).  Bolingbroke believes in the prerogative of kings, and he represents the actuality of power as against its ceremonies and decorations.   So Bolingbroke appears as neither cruel nor unfeeling,  but with a heavy face and stance asserts his rights to the end, while the grimmer colder Northumberland, (a menacing David Morrissey) acts as his instrument.  This is kingship - not the fine cloth tents and banners, not the jewelled crown but the heads of the defeated rolling on the floor.  Quite magnificent. 

I have some quibbles.  The lines that show Richard exercising his power badly through his irresponsible and greedy underlings are mostly cut  Also, when Patrick Stewart's John of Gaunt delivers the precious gem set in a silver sea speech it doesn't need music as an accompaniment.  The words, the delivery and  Patrick Stewart's worn out face are enough.  

However it's marvellous television.   I'm really looking forward to the next play in the series, Henry IV Part 1. 

Richard ends starved and abused in a cell, musing on the hollowness of power. "I wasted time and now doth time waste me".   There is no evidence that recently deposed tyrants e.g. Ghadaffi and Saddam Hussein  philosophised that way in their final hours.  A modern western politician's fall is not so bloody.  But the spectacle of a fall from power jolts the heart.  At the end of Margaret, the play about Thatcher's fall, Margaret Thatcher goes to her office and finds the lock have been changed.  In an organisation I worked there was a boardroom coup and the locks were changed on the front door against the ousted managing director.  Then he successfully staged a counter coup.  That was drama and fear and some excitement for us underlings.

Here's a piece about Harold MacMillan's famous Cabinet reshuffle in 1962, the one known as The Night of the Long Knives.  Selwyn Lloyd, the Chancellor, got the boot.  His private secretary was Jonathan Aitken, who in Richard II's style of appointment, owed his job to being Lloyd's godson. 

After the meeting with MacMillan "the Chancellor returned a broken man, pleading with his godson to keep him company. ''What he really wanted to do,’’ recalls Aitken, ''was let his hair down and have a glass or two of whisky when his heart was opening up with worries of a personal kind. He had no money apart from his ministerial salary. In the middle of [his] stream of consciousness the doorbell rang and it was a GPO engineer to remove the scrambler telephone secure line. I remember [thinking] how quickly power fades.’’

At least he wasn't locked up in in Pomfret Castle.  The rise and fall - it's a story we never get sick of, be it kings, politicians or contestants in X-Factor. 

Vivat Rex

I've been listening to Vivat Rex, which they have repeated in honour of the Queen's diamond Jubilee.  It was created in 1977 for the silver one.  I've only heard snippets before.  Now, thanks to  Iplayer, I can listen for an hour a day to fine actors repeating great lines dramatising 200 years of English nobles fighting for the crown.  (What a lot of ruthless cut-throats the Queen's ancestors were).

It kicked off with Christopher Marlowe's Edward II. John Hurt played Edward, managing a note of affronted whingeing that made me sympathise with Mortimer and Queen Isabella for deposing him, then his simple and dignified suffering at the end had me pitying him.  I saw this play many years ago done by the Lyceum in Edinburgh, and it has stuck with me - they had an excellent arrogant Mortimer and a creepy Lightborn, the assassin, with big clumsy red hands, quite horrible when he lay them on the broken Edward.  The Lightborn in Vivat Rex was equally cold and sinister.

Edward II was Marlowe's only play set in England.  What a loss it was, his death in Deptford at the age of 29.

23 April 1564 to 23 April 1616

Shakespeare's birthday and death day so here's a bit from Kenneth Branagh's Henry V.  This is the speech of parlay at the siege of Harfleur.  I think it was left out of the Olivier version, which was made in World War II, and was colourful and patriotic..  Branagh's take on Henry V was to make it far greyer, muddier and bloodier than Olivier's, emphasising the horrors of war.

   

Henry V. How yet resolves the governor of the town?
This is the latest parle we will admit;
Therefore to our best mercy give yourselves;
Or like to men proud of destruction
Defy us to our worst: for, as I am a soldier,
A name that in my thoughts becomes me best,
If I begin the battery once again,
I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur
Till in her ashes she lie buried.
The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,
And the flesh'd soldier, rough and hard of heart,
In liberty of bloody hand shall range
With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass
Your fresh-fair virgins and your flowering infants.
What is it then to me, if impious war,
Array'd in flames like to the prince of fiends,
Do, with his smirch'd complexion, all fell feats
Enlink'd to waste and desolation?
What is't to me, when you yourselves are cause,
If your pure maidens fall into the hand
Of hot and forcing violation?
What rein can hold licentious wickedness
When down the hill he holds his fierce career?
We may as bootless spend our vain command
Upon the enraged soldiers in their spoil
As send precepts to the leviathan
To come ashore. Therefore, you men of Harfleur,
Take pity of your town and of your people,
Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command;
Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
O'erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
Of heady murder, spoil and villany.
If not, why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls,
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen.
What say you? will you yield, and this avoid,
Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy'd?

Last Words

I got a copy of Christopher Hitchens's Arguably from the library, who now want it back after a 3 week loan. It's a fat book, made fatter by large, wide spaced print. I don't think it's as good as Unacknowledged Legislators.  The sense I had was that of Hitchens not at the very top of his game - however I'd rather read him in that mode than others at their best, so I'll buy a copy when I'm less skint.

He most reveals his political self in the essay on Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. There are some passages where you can guess he is seeing with a small jolt of recognition his own stance post September 2001 

He says of Rebecca West's guide and friend "Constantine" who is "supposed to speak for all those who have resisted the long, rival tyrannies of Austria-Hungary and Turkey, and who are now trying to teach the discordant peoples of Yugoslavia to speak with one voice. . .When dealing with an incensed young Bosnian who accused him of being a government stooge, he responds with some gravity by saying: "Yes.  For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition."  This is one of the more profoundly mature, and also among the most tragic, of the signals that West's ear was attuned to pick up."

So Hitchens preferred to speak to Paul Wolfowitz than to the readers of The Nation, since Wolfowitz had some power of action. 

Hitchens has often been accused of trying to re-live the 1930s, seeing in the excuse making for political Islam from the left a re-run of the Nazi-Soviet pact. You can guess he hears a familiar chime in these words of Rebecca West, about her own disillusionment with ineffective progressive and pacifistic circles:-

"She reflects on the "anti-war" meetings that she has attended back home. . .

"The speakers use all accents of sincerity and sweetness, and they continuously praise virtue, but they never speak as if power would be theirs tomorrow and they would use it for virtuous action. . .They want to be right, not do right. ."

He also says that George Orwell was "a great admirer of Rebecca West".  Is that wishful thinking?  I can remember one passing reference to her in his work and she's not in the index of the four volume Collected Essays.  However,  I don't have the complete works, so I may have missed something.