The best classical and modern essays on the works of Shakespeare, includes those by Samuel Johnson, A.C. Bradley, Harold Bloom and Marjorie Garber.

Shakespeare Siloliquys Performed

Videos of performances of the great siloliquys by Lawrence Olivier, Judi Dench, Ian McClellan, Kenneth Branaugh, John Barrymore and other greats.

Reviews of Live Performances

If there is a live performance of Shakespeare scheduled anywhere in Central Florida, I try to see it.  This section of The Wooden O contains my reviews of those performances.

I was reading the director’s note in the playbill before the curtain came up on the debut performance of Rollins College’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The cast, the director said, had had only 5 weeks to prepare for opening night.

Some of the actors had never played Shakespeare before.

None of them, I am sure, had ever bombasted a blank verse while hanging upside down from a silken sheet.

Annie Russell Theater

If you live in Central Florida and have never seen a play at the Annie Russell Theater at Rollins College, hie thee hither anon.

The theater was built in 1931 and, I am told, retains much of it’s original design and charm.

The oversized red cloth seats feel like thrones compared to what you’re required to contort yourself into in other, more modern, venues.

And there is ample space between your knees and the row in front of you, which means no Falstaffian-shaped, lifetime patron en route to his center seat is going to squeeze his sagging derreirre in your face.

They even gave us two tickets for the price of one, which meant we were able to see live Shakespeare for the same amount it cost us to see Benjamin Button.

(Actually, we only saw the first half of Button which is a testament to how bad we thought it was. My wife didn’t even want to hang around long enough to see Brad Pitt get young.)

Reviewing a Shakespeare play is unlike reviewing any other.

You don’t, of course, critique the play itself.

It’s Shakespeare, by Jove!

That leaves you with the staging, the directing and the acting.

Of which I am an expert in none.

It doesn’t matter, though, because I suspect that trying to define what constitutes a good production of a Shakespeare play is lot like trying to define obscenity.

I can’t do it, but I know it when I see it.

Friday night at the Annie Russell, I saw it.

What stood out for me was the physicality of the performances. 

It’s no small task for an actor to play Shakespeare straight side up, but the young man who played Oberon, King of the Fairies, spoke a full quarter of his lines suspended upside down from a silken sheer.

The student actor who played Bottom the Weaver spent half of the play crowned with an oversized asses head.

A half a dozen or so fairies spent the entire play flitting around the stage on their haunches.

And  last, not least, Puck, albeit a chubby good fellow, several times sprinted from one end of the stage to the other, truly seeming to “put a girdle about the earth in forty minutes.”

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, of course , timeless.

Written in 1598 when Will was just 34 years old, it explains the inexplicability of love as the machinations of fairies who have far too much time on their hands.

There is so much human suffering in King Lear that for nearly two hundred years the most frequent version staged was a bowdlerized one by Nahum Tate.

Tate’s version ends happily with Lear and his much sinned against daughter, Cordelia, reunited, Edgar crowned and the villains Goneril, Regan and Edmund lying dead as earth on the stage floor.

And if that isn’t enough, Tate omits altogether the part of the Fool, one of Shakespeare’s greatest comic creations.

It just isn’t the same play without this:

Fool

That lord that counsell’d thee
To give away thy land,
Come place him here by me,
Do thou for him stand:
The sweet and bitter fool
Will presently appear;
The one in motley here,
The other found out there.

KING LEAR

Dost thou call me fool, boy?

Fool

All thy other titles thou hast given away; that
thou wast born with.

KENT

This is not altogether fool, my lord.

Despite Tate’s butcherings and emendations, his version of Lear was the popular version for nearly two centuries. 

There has to be an explanation for this and it begs the question: Did Shakespeare over-extend the tragic form by having Cordelia die in the mad King’s arms?

In Poetics, Aristotle wrote that for a play to be a tragedy there must be a change in circumstance for the tragic figure. The change could from good fortune to bad fortune or from bad fortune to good.

For Aristotle, a tragic figure is one who has made a mistake or committed a sin.

Finally, and most famously, Aristotle wrote that the object of the Tragedy is to arouse a feeling of awe and wonder (translated into English as ‘pity’ and ‘fear’) in the audience and thereby purge the audience of these emotions.

But why do audiences and readers of Shakespeare accept the murder of Desdemona, the butchering of all MacDuff’s pretty ones, and the suicide of Ophelia and yet recoil at the death of Cordelia and Lear?

Surely Desdemona, MacDuff’s children and Ophelia are as innocent or moreso than Cordelia.  In fact, Cordelia, it could be argued, is less passive than they are. She is an active participant in the tragedy even if she is not to be blamed for its unfolding.

Had she given her father the encomiums he wanted, she would have gotten a third (still larger than Goneril’s and Regan’s shares) of Lear’s kingdom and with that might have been able to ward off her evil sisters’ designs. Of course, she had no way of knowing what her failure to falsely flatter her father would induce, but it’s still more than sweet Desdemon, MacDuff’s wife and kids or Ophelia ever did.

Now, to be sure, the death of Lear is more painful than the deaths of Hamlet, Macbeth or Othello.

In the case of Macbeth, only tyrantophile could possibly mourn his beheading by MacDuff. The man was probably the first serial killer.

Othello’s murder of Desdemona is gut wrenchingly painful. And made even moreso by Shakespeare by this death-bed exchange between Desdemona and her mistress, Emilia:

Emilia:  Who has done this deed?

Desdemona: Nobody. I myself.

I don’t belive there is anything in the English language to match the Saintliness of those three words, although Cordelia’s “no cause, no cause” comes close.

Hamlet hurts more people by far than his fratricidal Uncle Claudius does.

He drives Ophelia to suicide, kills her father, Polonius, for being a prating, pedantic old fool, and sends his own college pals, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths.

In Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth we believe the title characters deserved their demises.

We don’t feel that way with King Lear.

He is guilty only of foolishness as his fool wisely points out. And if we handed out death sentences for that, most of us would be planning our last meal.