(no subject)
I'm stuck indoors this weekend with a stomach bug, so I'm zipping through the plays. Yesterday, I read the entirety of "Twelfth Night", and this morning I finished "Troilus and Cressida".
On a broad scale you could say "Twelfth Night" is a cross between "The Comedy of Errors" and "As You Like It". Its central plot device is that a pair of fraternal twins, a brother and sister who look identical except for their gender differences, are separated by a shipwreck (as per Comedy of Errors). The sister, thinking her brother dead, assumes the identity of a young man and befriends a local count, with whom she secretly falls in love (as per As You Like It). Eventually the brother returns, looking exactly like his sister in drag, and comedy relating to their mistaken identities ensues.
The recycling of plot devices is something I've noticed a lot, in reading so many Shakespeare plays. Mistaken identities are the chief of these, usually through disguises but sometimes through other means, such as letters of introduction. In fact, every Shakespeare comedy and tragedy I read up until Hamlet included a disguise or mistaken identity scene. Hamlet and Troilus & Cressida both leave it out, so perhaps it was something he did in his early career and then later dropped.
Anyway, on the whole I thought Twelfth Night had more heart than The Comedy of Errors or As You Like It, although it wasn't as zany as those two. The added heart, I suppose, came from the love triangle in the play, which, unlike most love triangles, was a cyclic one, like the recycling symbol. Viola-as-Cesario loves Orsino, Orsino loves Olivia, Olivia loves Viola-as-Cesario. In The Comedy of Errors there's very little romance (only the flirting between Antipholus of Syracuse and the sister-in-law of Antipholus of Ephesus). In As You Like It, Rosalind is in love with Orlando from early on, but strings him on for the duration of the play simply for idle amusement. In Twelfth Night, however, Viola performs the heart-wrenching duty of wooing Olivia on behalf of Orsino, simply so she can spend more time with Orsino. She is, to some extent, taking the role of the pathetic shepherd in As You Like It, who is sent to by his cruel mistress to pass love-notes to Rosalind.
I rather preferred "As You Like It", though, as I found it to be a funnier play. "Twelth Night" felt somewhat flat to me, although I did appreciate some of the speeches that Viola makes on behalf of women. When Count Orsino talks bitterly about how women don't feel love as passionately as men:
ORSINO: There is no woman’s sides
Can bide the beating of so strong a passion
As love doth give my heart; no woman’s heart
So big to hold so much; they lack retention.
Alas, their love may be called appetite,
No motion of the liver but the palate,
That suffer surfeit, cloyment, and revolt;
But mine is all as hungry as the sea
And can digest as much.
Make no compare
Between that love a woman can bear me
And that I owe Olivia.
VIOLA: Ay, but I know-
ORSINO: What dost thou know?
VIOLA: Too well what love women to men may owe.
In faith, they are as true of heart as we.
My father had a daughter loved a man
As it might be perhaps, were I a woman,
I should your lordship.
ORSINO: And what’s her history?
VIOLA: A blank, my lord. She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i’ th’ bud,
Feed on her damask cheek.
She pined in thought;
And, with a green and yellow melancholy,
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?
We men may say more, swear more; but indeed
Our shows are more than will; for still we prove
Much in our vows but little in our love.
ORSINO: But died thy sister of her love, my boy?
VIOLA: I am all the daughters of my father’s house,
And all the brothers too, and yet I know not.
It's one of those interesting moments in Shakespeare where he seems to discuss an understanding of the universality of human nature, regardless of sex, which seems downright twentieth century. Of course, the play is also full of lots of Elizabethan thoughts about the differences between men and women, which balance this out. For instance:
ORSINO: Let still the woman take
An elder than herself: so wears she to him,
So sways she level in her husband’s heart;
For, boy, however we do praise ourselves,
Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,
More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn,
Than women’s are.
VIOLA: I think it well, my lord.
ORSINO: Then let thy love be younger than thyself,
Or thy affection cannot hold the bent;
For women are as roses, whose fair flow’r,
Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour.
VIOLA: And so they are; alas, that they are so.
To die, even when they to perfection grow.
Somehow Viola did not feel as engaging or fully realized to me as Rosalind from "As You Like It", though. There's also a comedic B plot in which some of Olivia's hanger-ons (including the Falstaff knock-off Sir Toby and the Touchstone knock-off who doesn't have a name other than "Clown") trick Olivia's ill-tempered steward Malvolio into thinking Olivia is in love with him, which leads him to behavior that has him declared mad and locked in a dark room, where they further torment him. This is apparently the favorite part of the play for many people, although for myself, I didn't find it as funny as the mistaken identity section of the play where Viola is challenged to combat, from which she shrinks having no training in it, and is then replaced by her brother Sebastian, who can fight quite well.
Moving on, the next play I conquered was "Troilus and Cressida". This was one of those plays whose name has always stood out to me on lists of Shakespeare's plays, but which I've known nothing about. I'm sure I've even tried to read a plot synopsis of it at some point or other, but was unable to follow it, as the main plot is slightly too complex to lay out in a single sentence, especially when you don't yet have any sense of emotional weight attached to the characters. But I'll try to lay it out in a couple of sentences right now anyway. The story takes place during the Trojan War. Troilus, a dude in Troy, is wooing Cressida, a lovely lady in Troy. He finally gets her to admit her love for him, and they spend the night together at her uncle Pandarus's house, swearing eternal loyalty to each other. But by bad luck, the very next morning Cressida is sent off in a prisoner exchange to the Greek camp. She swears to remain loyal to Troilus, but a couple of nights later he sees her cheating on him with the Greek Diomedes.
And that's pretty much the A-plot. Troilus swears vengeance on Diomedes, and Diomedes likewise swears to kill Troilus, but neither manages it. The play ends suddenly due to the actions of the B-plot. The Greeks' number one warrior, Achilles, has gotten too prideful to go fight, and is spending all his time hanging out in his tent with his male lover Patroclus. Ulysses (everyone knows him from the Odyssey) comes up with a plan to make Achilles less prideful by having everyone pretend that they like the Greeks' second best warrior, the big dumb Ajax, better. But it doesn't work, Achilles remains uninterested and Ajax becomes just as prideful and lazy as him. In the last act of the play, the Trojans' best warrior Hector kills Achilles's lover Patroclus, and this finally stirs Achilles into action, sneakily killing Hector when he's unarmed and then telling his followers to spread the story that he killed Hector single-handedly. The play ends, quite abruptly, with the Trojans lamenting Hector's death.
So, the play was structured a bit strangely, with its abrupt ending that failed to wrap up all the storylines. The other strange thing about the play is that, although it is billed as a tragedy, it read mostly like a comedy, a satire of the Trojan War in fact. In Shakespeare's Trojan War, the Trojans and the Greeks are both sitting around, questioning why they're fighting a war for the sake of "a cuckold and a whore" as one puts it; over Menalaus's anger that Paris stole his wife. Likewise, the heroic figures and famous names on the Greek and Trojan side are seen to be bumbling, shallow, and laughable, which stands in contrast with how I think of them from what I've read of the Iliad and Odyssey. In fact, the play was so satirical it felt more like Gilbert and Sullivan than Shakespeare to me.
Here's Troilus complaining about the war:
TROILUS: Fools on both sides! Helen must needs be fair,
When with your blood you daily paint her thus.
I cannot fight upon this argument;
It is too starved a subject for my sword.
The play has some lovely lyrical passages about love between Troilus and Cressida. As this, where Cressida talks about how she hasn't yet revealed her love to Troilus because she thinks that men lose interest in a woman once they've won her (ironically she winds up being the more disloyal one)
CRESSIDA: Words, vows, gifts, tears, and love’s full sacrifice
[Pandarus] offers in another’s enterprise;
But more in Troilus thousandfold I see
Than in the glass of Pandar’s praise may be.
Yet hold I off. Women are angels, wooing;
Things won are done, joy’s soul lies in the doing.
That beloved "she", knows nought that knows not this:
Men price the thing ungained more than it is;
That "she" was never yet, that ever knew
Love "got" as sweet as when desire did sue.
Therefore this maxim out of love I teach:
Achievement is command; ungained, beseech.
You might arguably call it a misogynistic play, as Troilus winds up railing on all women as a result of Cressida's betrayal. But, as with any theme in Shakespeare, it's unclear whether the play is meant to advocate that viewpoint, or whether it's just the character's view. For instance, when Troilus first views Cressida and Diomede together, Troilus cries out, oh my god, the woman-haters were right! And Ulysses replies, along the lines of, well, no, Cressida's actions only disgrace Cressida, not all women including our mothers.
TROILUS: Let it not be believed for womanhood!
Think, we had mothers.
Do not give advantage
To stubborn critics, apt, without a theme
For depravation, to square the general sex
By Cressid’s rule. Rather think this not Cressid.
ULYSSES What hath she done, prince, that can soil our mothers?
It's also a great play for Shakespeare insults, as Thersites the Greek fool spends pretty much the whole play insulting everyone he meets, and being insulted in turn. So we get lines such as Ajax telling Thersites "I will beat thee into handsomeness!"; and Thersites saying "I will begin at thy heel, and tel what thou art by inches." and "thou idol of idiot-worshippers" and "he has not so much brain as earwax". Here's Thersites railing on Patroclus, by request:
PATROCLUS: Who’s there? Thersites? Good Thersites, come in and rail.
THERSITES: If I could ’a’ remembered a gilt counterfeit, thou wouldst not have slipped out of my contemplation. But it is no matter. Thyself upon thyself! The common curse of mankind, folly and ignorance, be thine in great revenue. Heaven bless thee from a tutor, and discipline come not near thee. Let thy blood be thy direction till thy death. Then, if she that lays thee out says thou art a fair corpse, I’ll be sworn and sworn upon’t she never shrouded any but lazars. Amen.
... and a little later ...
THERSITES: Agamemnon is a fool, Achilles is a fool, Thersites is a fool, and, as aforesaid, Patroclus is a fool.
ACHILLES: Derive this. Come!
THERSITES: Agamemnon is a fool to offer to command Achilles, Achilles is a fool to be commanded of Agamemnon, Thersites is a fool to serve such a fool, and this Patroclus is a fool positive.
PATROCLUS: Why am I a fool?
THERSITES: Make that demand to the creator; it suffices me thou art.
I love that last line. :) Anyway, other than the abrupt ending, I liked this play a lot. It just needs some sort of conclusion! Maybe Troilus dying in the fall of Troy. Instead, it ends with Troilus telling Pandarus to fuck off, and then Pandarus giving a brief comedic epilogue about prostitutes and STDs to the audience.
Oh, one interesting closing note, is that although this play takes place during the Trojan War, it is not part of classical Greek mythology. The story of Troilus, Cressida, and her uncle Pandarus, was invented by medieval writers. Another interesting thing to note, the word "pander", i.e. to act as a pimp, comes directly from Pandarus in this story. Not from the Shakespeare version, but from the earlier Chaucer version. By Shakespeare's time I think Pandar had already come to mean a pimp, because there's an ironic scene where Pandar swears "If ever you prove false one to another, since I have taken such pains to bring you together, let all pitiful goersbetween be called to the world’s end after my name; call them all Pandars."
On a broad scale you could say "Twelfth Night" is a cross between "The Comedy of Errors" and "As You Like It". Its central plot device is that a pair of fraternal twins, a brother and sister who look identical except for their gender differences, are separated by a shipwreck (as per Comedy of Errors). The sister, thinking her brother dead, assumes the identity of a young man and befriends a local count, with whom she secretly falls in love (as per As You Like It). Eventually the brother returns, looking exactly like his sister in drag, and comedy relating to their mistaken identities ensues.
The recycling of plot devices is something I've noticed a lot, in reading so many Shakespeare plays. Mistaken identities are the chief of these, usually through disguises but sometimes through other means, such as letters of introduction. In fact, every Shakespeare comedy and tragedy I read up until Hamlet included a disguise or mistaken identity scene. Hamlet and Troilus & Cressida both leave it out, so perhaps it was something he did in his early career and then later dropped.
Anyway, on the whole I thought Twelfth Night had more heart than The Comedy of Errors or As You Like It, although it wasn't as zany as those two. The added heart, I suppose, came from the love triangle in the play, which, unlike most love triangles, was a cyclic one, like the recycling symbol. Viola-as-Cesario loves Orsino, Orsino loves Olivia, Olivia loves Viola-as-Cesario. In The Comedy of Errors there's very little romance (only the flirting between Antipholus of Syracuse and the sister-in-law of Antipholus of Ephesus). In As You Like It, Rosalind is in love with Orlando from early on, but strings him on for the duration of the play simply for idle amusement. In Twelfth Night, however, Viola performs the heart-wrenching duty of wooing Olivia on behalf of Orsino, simply so she can spend more time with Orsino. She is, to some extent, taking the role of the pathetic shepherd in As You Like It, who is sent to by his cruel mistress to pass love-notes to Rosalind.
I rather preferred "As You Like It", though, as I found it to be a funnier play. "Twelth Night" felt somewhat flat to me, although I did appreciate some of the speeches that Viola makes on behalf of women. When Count Orsino talks bitterly about how women don't feel love as passionately as men:
ORSINO: There is no woman’s sides
Can bide the beating of so strong a passion
As love doth give my heart; no woman’s heart
So big to hold so much; they lack retention.
Alas, their love may be called appetite,
No motion of the liver but the palate,
That suffer surfeit, cloyment, and revolt;
But mine is all as hungry as the sea
And can digest as much.
Make no compare
Between that love a woman can bear me
And that I owe Olivia.
VIOLA: Ay, but I know-
ORSINO: What dost thou know?
VIOLA: Too well what love women to men may owe.
In faith, they are as true of heart as we.
My father had a daughter loved a man
As it might be perhaps, were I a woman,
I should your lordship.
ORSINO: And what’s her history?
VIOLA: A blank, my lord. She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i’ th’ bud,
Feed on her damask cheek.
She pined in thought;
And, with a green and yellow melancholy,
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?
We men may say more, swear more; but indeed
Our shows are more than will; for still we prove
Much in our vows but little in our love.
ORSINO: But died thy sister of her love, my boy?
VIOLA: I am all the daughters of my father’s house,
And all the brothers too, and yet I know not.
It's one of those interesting moments in Shakespeare where he seems to discuss an understanding of the universality of human nature, regardless of sex, which seems downright twentieth century. Of course, the play is also full of lots of Elizabethan thoughts about the differences between men and women, which balance this out. For instance:
ORSINO: Let still the woman take
An elder than herself: so wears she to him,
So sways she level in her husband’s heart;
For, boy, however we do praise ourselves,
Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,
More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn,
Than women’s are.
VIOLA: I think it well, my lord.
ORSINO: Then let thy love be younger than thyself,
Or thy affection cannot hold the bent;
For women are as roses, whose fair flow’r,
Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour.
VIOLA: And so they are; alas, that they are so.
To die, even when they to perfection grow.
Somehow Viola did not feel as engaging or fully realized to me as Rosalind from "As You Like It", though. There's also a comedic B plot in which some of Olivia's hanger-ons (including the Falstaff knock-off Sir Toby and the Touchstone knock-off who doesn't have a name other than "Clown") trick Olivia's ill-tempered steward Malvolio into thinking Olivia is in love with him, which leads him to behavior that has him declared mad and locked in a dark room, where they further torment him. This is apparently the favorite part of the play for many people, although for myself, I didn't find it as funny as the mistaken identity section of the play where Viola is challenged to combat, from which she shrinks having no training in it, and is then replaced by her brother Sebastian, who can fight quite well.
Moving on, the next play I conquered was "Troilus and Cressida". This was one of those plays whose name has always stood out to me on lists of Shakespeare's plays, but which I've known nothing about. I'm sure I've even tried to read a plot synopsis of it at some point or other, but was unable to follow it, as the main plot is slightly too complex to lay out in a single sentence, especially when you don't yet have any sense of emotional weight attached to the characters. But I'll try to lay it out in a couple of sentences right now anyway. The story takes place during the Trojan War. Troilus, a dude in Troy, is wooing Cressida, a lovely lady in Troy. He finally gets her to admit her love for him, and they spend the night together at her uncle Pandarus's house, swearing eternal loyalty to each other. But by bad luck, the very next morning Cressida is sent off in a prisoner exchange to the Greek camp. She swears to remain loyal to Troilus, but a couple of nights later he sees her cheating on him with the Greek Diomedes.
And that's pretty much the A-plot. Troilus swears vengeance on Diomedes, and Diomedes likewise swears to kill Troilus, but neither manages it. The play ends suddenly due to the actions of the B-plot. The Greeks' number one warrior, Achilles, has gotten too prideful to go fight, and is spending all his time hanging out in his tent with his male lover Patroclus. Ulysses (everyone knows him from the Odyssey) comes up with a plan to make Achilles less prideful by having everyone pretend that they like the Greeks' second best warrior, the big dumb Ajax, better. But it doesn't work, Achilles remains uninterested and Ajax becomes just as prideful and lazy as him. In the last act of the play, the Trojans' best warrior Hector kills Achilles's lover Patroclus, and this finally stirs Achilles into action, sneakily killing Hector when he's unarmed and then telling his followers to spread the story that he killed Hector single-handedly. The play ends, quite abruptly, with the Trojans lamenting Hector's death.
So, the play was structured a bit strangely, with its abrupt ending that failed to wrap up all the storylines. The other strange thing about the play is that, although it is billed as a tragedy, it read mostly like a comedy, a satire of the Trojan War in fact. In Shakespeare's Trojan War, the Trojans and the Greeks are both sitting around, questioning why they're fighting a war for the sake of "a cuckold and a whore" as one puts it; over Menalaus's anger that Paris stole his wife. Likewise, the heroic figures and famous names on the Greek and Trojan side are seen to be bumbling, shallow, and laughable, which stands in contrast with how I think of them from what I've read of the Iliad and Odyssey. In fact, the play was so satirical it felt more like Gilbert and Sullivan than Shakespeare to me.
Here's Troilus complaining about the war:
TROILUS: Fools on both sides! Helen must needs be fair,
When with your blood you daily paint her thus.
I cannot fight upon this argument;
It is too starved a subject for my sword.
The play has some lovely lyrical passages about love between Troilus and Cressida. As this, where Cressida talks about how she hasn't yet revealed her love to Troilus because she thinks that men lose interest in a woman once they've won her (ironically she winds up being the more disloyal one)
CRESSIDA: Words, vows, gifts, tears, and love’s full sacrifice
[Pandarus] offers in another’s enterprise;
But more in Troilus thousandfold I see
Than in the glass of Pandar’s praise may be.
Yet hold I off. Women are angels, wooing;
Things won are done, joy’s soul lies in the doing.
That beloved "she", knows nought that knows not this:
Men price the thing ungained more than it is;
That "she" was never yet, that ever knew
Love "got" as sweet as when desire did sue.
Therefore this maxim out of love I teach:
Achievement is command; ungained, beseech.
You might arguably call it a misogynistic play, as Troilus winds up railing on all women as a result of Cressida's betrayal. But, as with any theme in Shakespeare, it's unclear whether the play is meant to advocate that viewpoint, or whether it's just the character's view. For instance, when Troilus first views Cressida and Diomede together, Troilus cries out, oh my god, the woman-haters were right! And Ulysses replies, along the lines of, well, no, Cressida's actions only disgrace Cressida, not all women including our mothers.
TROILUS: Let it not be believed for womanhood!
Think, we had mothers.
Do not give advantage
To stubborn critics, apt, without a theme
For depravation, to square the general sex
By Cressid’s rule. Rather think this not Cressid.
ULYSSES What hath she done, prince, that can soil our mothers?
It's also a great play for Shakespeare insults, as Thersites the Greek fool spends pretty much the whole play insulting everyone he meets, and being insulted in turn. So we get lines such as Ajax telling Thersites "I will beat thee into handsomeness!"; and Thersites saying "I will begin at thy heel, and tel what thou art by inches." and "thou idol of idiot-worshippers" and "he has not so much brain as earwax". Here's Thersites railing on Patroclus, by request:
PATROCLUS: Who’s there? Thersites? Good Thersites, come in and rail.
THERSITES: If I could ’a’ remembered a gilt counterfeit, thou wouldst not have slipped out of my contemplation. But it is no matter. Thyself upon thyself! The common curse of mankind, folly and ignorance, be thine in great revenue. Heaven bless thee from a tutor, and discipline come not near thee. Let thy blood be thy direction till thy death. Then, if she that lays thee out says thou art a fair corpse, I’ll be sworn and sworn upon’t she never shrouded any but lazars. Amen.
... and a little later ...
THERSITES: Agamemnon is a fool, Achilles is a fool, Thersites is a fool, and, as aforesaid, Patroclus is a fool.
ACHILLES: Derive this. Come!
THERSITES: Agamemnon is a fool to offer to command Achilles, Achilles is a fool to be commanded of Agamemnon, Thersites is a fool to serve such a fool, and this Patroclus is a fool positive.
PATROCLUS: Why am I a fool?
THERSITES: Make that demand to the creator; it suffices me thou art.
I love that last line. :) Anyway, other than the abrupt ending, I liked this play a lot. It just needs some sort of conclusion! Maybe Troilus dying in the fall of Troy. Instead, it ends with Troilus telling Pandarus to fuck off, and then Pandarus giving a brief comedic epilogue about prostitutes and STDs to the audience.
Oh, one interesting closing note, is that although this play takes place during the Trojan War, it is not part of classical Greek mythology. The story of Troilus, Cressida, and her uncle Pandarus, was invented by medieval writers. Another interesting thing to note, the word "pander", i.e. to act as a pimp, comes directly from Pandarus in this story. Not from the Shakespeare version, but from the earlier Chaucer version. By Shakespeare's time I think Pandar had already come to mean a pimp, because there's an ironic scene where Pandar swears "If ever you prove false one to another, since I have taken such pains to bring you together, let all pitiful goersbetween be called to the world’s end after my name; call them all Pandars."