Brutus and Other Heroines Read online

  Whatever All’s Well ’s textbook reputation, Shakespeare wrote it to be performed rather than read or written about, and, as we hoped it would prove, with the flesh and blood of live performance the harpy Helena and the wastrel Bertram were revealed to be human beings of a mingled yarn.

  The production was received for the most part with rapture. The acting was praised, but I could not entirely enjoy the success. Despite all our efforts to clarify Helena’s motives, one male critic still referred to her as ‘the martyr/bitch’. Therefore I felt I had failed. Now, however, I’m inclined to think that that review told me more about the reviewer’s fears than about my performance, and that the prejudice and misogyny of a few male critics is their problem, not mine. If, despite the delicate ambiguity we placed in the final moments of the play, one critic managed to read a ‘triumphant smile’ into my apprehensive face as I took Bertram’s hand, and if, despite our leaving the audience with the tentative optimism we dared to believe that Shakespeare himself intended, some critics chose to read blatant cynicism into it, that is their right. What more could I do?

  Like many of the women we portray, we actresses have become expert at the subtle, the subversive, and the almost subliminal means of communicating our beliefs. The trouble is that this indirectness leaves the door wide open for misinterpretation. One’s personal statement obliquely infiltrated into a piece of work or a character is necessarily filtered through the eyes and ears of the beholder, and it is the beholder’s right to understand it as he or she feels.

  Whether in classical or modern drama, I fight for the right to portray women who are as contradictory, complex and diverse as the women I see all around me, and I uphold my right to present ordinary, flawed women at the heart of a play.

  Virtue and its opposite are human, not an endowment from the gods. There is always a chink in the halo, or a redeeming shaft of light under the black hood. As an actor you look for your character’s motive. That is almost all you have to know. You try to understand why they do what they do and then set the acting in motion. We do not sit in judgment at the centre of our character any more than we spend our day assessing our own character at every moment of our lives in the real world. Whether the part I am playing is deemed a heroine or a harpy, I only need concern myself with her thoughts, her words and her deeds—and by following them I find a complex human being.

  PORTIA, VIOLA (& IMOGEN)

  A Year of Playing Boys

  As Portia

  The Merchant of Venice

  Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, 1987

  In 1987 I was asked to play Portia in The Merchant of Venice at the Royal Exchange in Manchester and to follow that up with a season at the RSC in Stratford and London playing Viola in Twelfth Night and Imogen in Cymbeline. So I decided to write about playing the girls who play boys, as all three of them do. I hadn’t done any Shakespeare since the 1981–3 RSC season in which I had played Helena in Trevor Nunn’s production of All’s Well That Ends Well, and after a decent spell of television and contemporary theatre I felt ready for another season of classics.

  From the start I was intent on finding the differences between all three characters as I did not want to repeat myself. My worry was that perhaps there was only one boy in me, but I came to see that Shakespeare had given each girl a very distinct nature and a very different reason for their disguise. Initially the piece covered all three girls, but for this book, I have cut the section on Imogen because I was subsequently commissioned to write about her separately (see the following chapter).

  This was my first piece of writing on playing Shakespeare. It came from an invitation to write for a publication that never materialised, but, not having written anything since my schooldays, I decided to take up the challenge. I have reshaped it for this book but have preserved my original thoughts.

  Portia/Balthasar

  Funny to think Shakespeare never expected that a woman would ever play Juliet, or Cleopatra, or Portia.

  We are working in a live art-form, as was Shakespeare. We try to ‘talk’ to Shakespeare, to dig back through the centuries to reach the original germ that motivated Shakespeare to write and which still moves us to perform his works. So we ask, ‘What did Shakespeare mean?’ and in asking this question a woman meets an obstacle: ‘He never meant you to play the part.’

  Shakespeare wrote to the strengths of his company, so a modern actress’s expectations in the Shakespearean repertoire could be said to be proscribed by the limitations or excellences of two or three generations of Elizabethan boy players. Although many young male actors specialised in female roles and never played men, it is likely that others played the female roles during their apprenticeship before graduating to the male roles. I am grateful for that because, although they were junior in status within the company (and probably kept that way by the older actors), I don’t see much evidence that less acting ability was demanded of them by William Shakespeare. The verse is as dense and as beautiful, the emotional depth as great, the wit as brilliant (frequently more so), the psychology as complex in Shakespeare’s female characters as in the male.

  It may be that since today’s Ophelia might be tomorrow’s Hamlet and a possible manager of the company, there was a vested interest in stretching his capabilities to the utmost. Judging by attitudes towards female players when they did come along a century or so later, it is quite possible that if he had been writing for women, Shakespeare would have tailored the female roles to fit the accepted limits of female decorum and would have produced a much narrower range of characters for us to tackle; so again I am thankful.

  In some ways these quirks of social history that helped shape Shakespeare’s plays have given me a rare gift, but they have also limited the quantity of those gifts. I imagine that boy players quickly passed their prime of prettiness and graduated to playing men. So another consequence of social history is that modern actresses lack the continuum of female roles on up through the range of ages which would sustain us in an ever enriching and demanding career such as some of my male counterparts enjoy.

  But enough of this. I am currently enjoying my prime while it is with me, and I rarely forget how exceptionally lucky I am. I have been offered three ‘trouser roles’ in one year, so 1987 is the Year of the Boy for me. I need to differentiate between them. I ask these questions: Why did they disguise as boys? How does their disguise change other characters around them? Do they enjoy their own disguise? What do they learn from it? Each character answers differently, and I want to make use of these differences so that each play might teach me something new and explore something unknown in myself.

  The year began with Portia. The Merchant of Venice is often labelled an anti-Semitic play and, as its heroine, the same accusation has been levelled at Portia. I am puzzled by this. There is a big difference between a play that depicts an anti-Semitic society and an inherently racist play. Ben Jonson famously described Shakespeare as a man ‘for all time’, but he was also a man of his own historical time, so he sometimes comes up with attitudes which we now find hard to accept. I don’t want to get too hooked up on this argument, but I would say, firstly, that Shakespeare’s audience are unlikely to have known what anti-Semitism was as there were only a negligible number of Jews living in England at the time, and, secondly, that Shakespeare’s portrait of Shylock is largely sympathetic and famously emphasises our common humanity:

  Hath not a Jew eyes?

  Is a Jew not

  fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?

  And Shakespeare seems very modern in his understanding that abuse leads to abuse when he has Shylock say:

  If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me, I will execute.

  To me it seems that if Shakespeare is on anyone’s side it
is Shylock’s, but he also wants us to love Portia. The only thing that can possibly be construed as racist in Portia is that, in the trial scene, she upholds the law of Venice, which was a Christian, and therefore an inherently anti-Jewish, law. I tried hard to play this as a troubling rather than a triumphant moment for Portia, not because I wanted to whitewash her but because Shakespeare’s play can only work in its entirety if we approve of Portia. Therefore I made some little adjustments of emphasis where I could, so as to avoid alienating a twentieth-century audience. I worked on the premise that Shakespeare intended Portia to be a generous spirit, containing the hope for the future. To work against that is to undermine the final act and the spirit of the play.

  In the production I did in Manchester, the director Braham Murray, himself a Jew, realised that by putting a lot of focus on to the triangular love story of Antonio, Bassanio and Portia, he could unlock some of the impasse in which the play has left our post-Holocaust sensitivities. He posited very plausibly that the title, The Merchant of Venice, suggests that it was not Shylock but Antonio who was intended as the central character. Shylock only came into the plot because the economy of sixteenth-century Venice depended on moneylenders, and these were invariably Jews. Shylock was/is part of a subplot that connected the idea of bonds of love to that of financial bonds, but as Shakespeare developed him, he became the richly human character that is considered one of the greatest roles in the canon, attracting all the great actors through history to play him and thereby tipping Shylock into the central role.

  In our production he was played by a great old Norwegian actor, Espen Skjønberg who, although he in no way softened the danger in the man, could not avoid giving off a humanity and warmth that had the audience eating out of his hand. The actors playing the Christians in Venice did not avoid the vanity and anti-Semitism they found in the text, and the trial scene was cruel and terrifying. These factors all militated against any perceived anti-Semitism that might obstruct the audience’s way to the heart of the play. Indeed in Manchester, which has a large Jewish population, Espen reported that several people, including two rabbis, had approached him in the street and thanked him for his sympathetic portrayal.

  For my own part, as Portia, I tried to show a woman of great spirit and intelligence trapped by her father into a waiting game. Her father’s will forces her to wait for a husband until a suitor chooses the right casket out of three. As she watches these men going through their hoops, we see Portia as volatile and impatient, and no suitor escapes her barbed tongue. One by one, the suitors choose wrongly and reveal their vanity and shallowness, and Portia grows in her understanding of men. She begins to accept her father’s wisdom. Maybe he was right, as her sidekick Nerissa suggests: ‘Holy men at their death have good inspirations…’ Maybe her father knew that the right casket ‘will, no doubt, never be chosen by any rightly but one who shall rightly love’.

  In Portia’s eyes, when Bassanio chooses the right casket, these words are vindicated. Papa was right, and all is right with the world. Here you have to surrender to the benign paternalism of Shakespeare’s vision. A woman alone must have a God or a dead father to guide her, but I think I can say with the particular ‘authority’ I have acquired by playing Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well, that this is not the end of Shakespeare’s message on the subject. It is the application of this guidance that matters.

  Helena also receives a legacy from her dead father in the form of a precious medical remedy with which she manages to cure the King of France of a terminal disease. Her father has given her the wherewithal, but it takes her own particular force of character to recognise and grab the right moment to apply it. She cannot know what will come of it but she intuits that:

  There’s something in’t,

  More than my father’s skill…

  that his good receipt

  Shall for my legacy be sanctified

  By the luckiest stars in heaven.

  But she also realises that we have to help the stars along:

  Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,

  Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky

  Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull

  Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.

  Her hunch proves well founded. In both All’s Well and The Merchant of Venice, the match is made fairly early in the story and the heroine needs the journey of the play to teach her some hard truths about the man of her choice.

  Portia has another paternal mentor in her cousin Doctor Bellario, who instructs her in the law which she applies in the courtroom, and it is her (sometimes questionable) interpretation of that law that launches her as a rounded individual.

  Portia’s beautiful speech in Act III, Scene 2, where she offers everything she has up to Bassanio, ‘her lord, her governor, her king’, is not nearly so hard for an actress to get behind as the comparable speech of Kate to Petruchio at the end of The Taming of the Shrew. After all, Kate’s is her final word on the matter, spoken in the final scene, so the speech appears to be the message Shakespeare intended the audience to go out with.

  Portia’s similar speech comes far earlier in the play, and it is the expression of a woman brimming with love of life and generosity who for years has had nowhere to put it. She has had everything money can buy, and none of that has brought her happiness. She has been mistress of her world, and now, riding on a wave of sexual longing and love, she surrenders to the novel and refreshing idea of being owned and ruled by her husband.

  But how long does this last? Learning from Bassanio that he has a friend in danger of his life, the plot instantly thickens. Portia sees a chance to help, to save Antonio and thereby earn even more of Bassanio’s love.

  Within minutes she is taking charge of Bassanio’s life, organising the wedding, packing him off to Venice with money enough to get Antonio off the hook, and she will then order her servant to go to Doctor Bellario, entrust the running of her house to Lorenzo and Jessica (to whom, incidentally, she shows no racist hostility, contrary to what has sometimes been suggested), and recruit Nerissa into the ‘adventure’ of disguising as lawyers. Finally she will win a court case and save Antonio’s life. Hardly the achievements of a submissive wife!

  For Shakespeare’s audience there was an inherent rationale when a woman disguised herself as a man: she may need a job in an exclusively male court (Viola in Twelfth Night), or she may need to survive in a wild forest (Rosalind in As You Like It), or she may need an entrée into a world from which women were normally barred. In Portia’s case this is the legal profession. It is worth noting here that it was more acceptable for the lowly Helena to take on the role of a female doctor precisely because of her class. Portia, being an heiress, was more socially prized and therefore more strictly confined.

  Logically Portia could have sent for Doctor Bellario himself and paid him a tidy sum to fight Antonio’s case, but then Shakespeare’s audience would have been deprived of the comic irony of a boy playing a woman playing a boy. There is also a deeper psychologically rooted reason for her disguise which Shakespeare may or may not have intended, since it is only with the advent of women players that it could truly be revealed. This reason goes to the heart of the love triangle.

  Almost immediately after winning the man of her dreams, Portia learns that Antonio loves Bassanio so much that he is willing to give his life for him. Without necessarily suspecting that any homosexual love exists between the two men, Portia is troubled and indeed at first feels competitive with Antonio to demonstrate the extent of her love: ‘Since you are dear bought I will love you dear.’ (Note that Shakespeare gives a mercantile ring to the measure of her love, and this runs throughout the play.)

  Suddenly Portia is reminded that her husband is a stranger, a man with a past, with an allegiance to an older man that she doesn’t fully understand. It is this anxiety, I think, that prompts the idea of a disguise. As the lawyer Balthasar, she will enter the male world. She will get closer to Antonio and thereby tame her f
ears, or at least understand them, and she has a chance to save Antonio’s life, thereby proving her ‘superior’ love to Bassanio. What she hadn’t bargained for was meeting Shylock, and the lessons she would learn about herself, her husband, and the sullied, ‘real’ (i.e. male) world.

  Portia has a sharp mind that has been wasted in her sheltered life in Belmont. In the courtroom she will exercise her innate abilities that we often think of as ‘masculine’, those of decisiveness, logic and authority. Her disguise will make these qualities acceptable for themselves, rather than as ‘exceptional’ in a woman. She has been thoroughly briefed by Doctor Bellario in the laws of Venice, and she can’t wait to put all this to the test. She is used to commanding the world of Belmont, but this is an altogether different world.

  Imagine her exhilaration as ‘Balthasar’ struts into the court with the arrogance of ignorance. She quickly sizes up the room, her opponent Shylock, and her ‘rival’ Antonio. She spots Bassanio and hopes he doesn’t recognise her. Her eloquence soon starts to flow as she argues for the highest ideals in human nature in her famous speech about the quality of mercy. I used to think of this speech as the equivalent of my somehow bursting in on Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office and saying, ‘Lay off Nicaragua. You’d feel so much better for it in yourself.’ What she says in the Mercy speech is beautiful and true but, as it turns out, naive in the circumstances. She is humbled to learn that her idealistic silvery tongue has worked no magic on Shylock. She has no conception of his agenda.