Brutus and Other Heroines Page 5

  I have one heart, one bosom and one truth,

  And that no woman has; nor never none

  Shall mistress be of it, save I alone.

  She wants to be discovered and released from this farce.

  What’s so funny?

  To Elizabethans there was an almost inexhaustible joke built into the situation of a boy playing a girl playing a boy that we modern audiences have to go without. In its place we have an altogether new joke, unintended by Shakespeare; that of a girl playing a boy playing a girl dressed as a boy. Maybe it is not such a good ‘joke’. Some say that women are not as funny as men. I look around me in a time of burgeoning female comic talent and I doubt this. Maybe it has been a case of audiences finding it hard to laugh at women.

  Portia and Viola are allowed to make lewd quips, protected as they are by their male disguise. The boy players of Shakespeare’s day were also protected by the fact of their masculinity, so that many female characters can be quite blue in their language with one another (Princess Katherine and her maid Alice, or Doll Tearsheet and Mistress Quickly, to name a couple of examples). It also rather depends on their social position as to whom they can share these jokes with. Portia makes them with Nerissa, never Bassanio. Viola’s sole confidantes are in the audience, and she tells only them that

  A little thing would

  Make me tell them how much I lack of a man.

  I wonder whether Shakespeare would have written that joke if a woman had played the part.

  I don’t think that Viola is a naturally comic role. In the reviews in Stratford someone commented that I played the first scene too like a tragedy, but consider her situation:

  Viola is shipwrecked, an orphan in a foreign land where no one knows her, and she believes her twin brother and only relative has been drowned. She then falls in love with a man who thinks she’s a boy, and who is infatuated with another woman, and is sent to woo that rival on behalf of the man she loves. Olivia then falls in love with her boy disguise. The audience revels in these complications. Viola does not. Viola isn’t Rosalind, loved and in love, delighting in the freedom of her disguise and knowing she can drop it at any time (in the forest at least).

  Viola triggers a lot of comedy but does not crack a lot of jokes. It seems to me that the comedy in Twelfth Night works along a spectrum of self-knowledge with the most self-deceived at one end (Malvolio, Aguecheek), whose idiocy we laugh at, and at the other, the most self-aware, Viola (the only character on stage aware of her real identity), whose wit we laugh with. We laugh at Orsino, who is blinded by love, and at Olivia, who is blind to her vanity in mourning, and at both of them, who are blind to the fact that Cesario is a girl. Sebastian, the ‘drowned’ brother, walks into a chaos he cannot make head or tail of, and we laugh at his confusion. We wryly laugh with Feste, the all-knowing fool, and with Maria, the traditional cunning maid, and we uncomfortably laugh with Belch, who thinks he knows it all and revels in exploiting other people’s weakness.

  Although Viola is the most knowing in one way, she is on totally unfamiliar ground (physically and emotionally), and this is a source of comedy for the all-knowing audience.

  So I do get into the comedy eventually, and I have changed the first scene a bit for the London run (and got better reviews!). There is so much fun in the scenes with Olivia, but any wit in the scenes with Orsino remains a wistful wit, laden with Viola’s desperate trapped love. The audience smiles rather than laughs at her.

  Then there is the physical comedy of the sword fight between the terrified Cesario and the cowardly Aguecheek (which was enhanced for me by the instability of David Bradley/Aguecheek’s wig), at the end of which Viola detects a glint of hope that Sebastian may be alive. From this point on, Shakespeare seems to let go of Viola’s pain. The audience knows that Sebastian is en route to meeting up with her, that a happy ending is in sight, and all will be resolved. Or will it?

  In the final scene there are some untied-up ends that leave a residue of unease. Malvolio’s humiliation seems unwarranted (and unfunny) to a modern audience, and I never can quite get what that is all about—something to do with puritans versus ‘cakes and ale’ guzzlers? The Roundhead-versus-Cavalier schism that was already building up to the Civil War forty years down the road? What was Malvolio’s terrible sin? Self-deception, pomposity and narrow-mindedness don’t seem to deserve being locked in a dark room and driven mad, so that leaves a bit of a stain on the evening. And then there is poor Aguecheek with his broken pate dealing with the harsh rejection of his ‘friend’ and champion Sir Toby. And what about Orsino and Viola?

  In the last scene of the play, I still find it unspeakably hard to ditch the logic I have painstakingly built up and suddenly play a Viola who is so thick she doesn’t twig that Sebastian is alive and the cause of everyone’s confusion. After all she was quick enough on the uptake at the end of Act III, Scene 4. When she hears Antonio tell her, ‘Thou hast, Sebastian, done good feature shame’, her immediate reaction as Antonio is led off under arrest is: ‘O, prove true, / That I, dear brother, be now ta’en for you!’

  She has almost pieced it together with:

  He named Sebastian: I my brother know

  Yet living in my glass; even such and so

  In favour was my brother…

  For him I imitate: O, if it prove,

  Tempests are kind and salt waves fresh in love,

  but for the sake of his comic dénouement in Act V, Shakespeare changes Viola into a dumb watcher of a ping-pong match. After my initial resistance, I now willingly surrender to the rules of the comedy game, although there is still a slight insecurity in Viola over Orsino’s love. We will be wonderful pals and even maybe have great sex, but will he still dream of Olivia?

  At the start of their respective stories, Bassanio and Orsino have this in common: they put women on a pedestal. Their love is idealistic and immature, and they have no real knowledge of the women they adore. On the other hand they experience a strong connection with a boy (in Bassanio’s case very fleetingly), and both are disturbed by this attraction they feel. But all is well in the end, when that boy proves to be a woman. That woman has now gained stature in the man’s eyes by dint of having been enabled by their disguise to show their ‘male’ attributes of daring action, forthrightness and worldly knowledge. They have shown themselves to be one of the lads. Shakespeare could have his fun and then restore convention at the end, to please and appease the crowd.

  A feminist postscript

  The hardest thing to get behind in Viola is that she trusts that Time will and must sort everything out. She happens to be proved right, but not before various pates have been broken and she herself has volunteered to be sacrificed.

  One textual change I have made is in Viola’s ‘I left no ring with her’ speech, where she talks of impressionable women with their ‘waxen hearts’. Instead of

  Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we!

  For such as we are made of, such we be,

  I have substituted ‘For such as we are made, if such we be’. One vowel change makes quite a big difference to me, and I have read this version in one or two editions.

  A feminist actor sometimes has to find clues and take chances to express her character in the most positive light possible without damaging the whole truth of the piece. ‘Why do I use this word and not that?’ ‘Why do I agree to betray so and so?’ ‘Why do I allow myself to be treated this way without protest?’ One hopes that honest questioning will lead to honest answers. We can and must try to be as open as possible to new experiences, to be as unprejudiced as possible and willing to learn from other people, but at the end of the day we test everything up against our own truth.

  I experience myself as a subjective whole, not as defined by men, or as being that which men are not. I see the women in Shakespeare’s plays as whole people, and, when ‘inhabiting’, I imagine that the constraints I feel as to what I am ‘allowed’ to do or say are equally frustrating to me as they were to the women of
the day.

  I have thought of Shakespeare as a fixed and finite person, just as we fix our parents’ identities and lock them into some unchanging attitude or role. Then I remind myself that he wrote as a young man and a middle-aged man, and that he was thrashing out ideas throughout his life and changing his mind as we all do. The plays are each written at a different point in his own life story, and his own fluid sexuality weaves through so many of them.

  If I glance at the chronological order of his plays, his first really sympathetic female portrayal is Juliet. From Romeo and Juliet till 1600 he writes some fabulous women’s roles: Constance in King John, Margaret of Anjou in Henry VI, Beatrice in Much Ado, Portia in The Merchant, and Helena in the Dream. Then suddenly we get Hamlet and his bitter misogyny, and around the same time he writes Twelfth Night almost to redress the balance. In the Sonnets he seems to be working through the pain of lost, forbidden or unrequited love, and if in Hamlet he expresses the dark side of these themes, Twelfth Night seems to bring them out into the comic light.

  Twelfth Night is his most perfectly balanced play. He is kind to all the characters except Malvolio—and even he gets his moment of pity at the end.

  IMOGEN

  Peeling Back the Layers

  As Imogen

  Cymbeline, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1987

  I wrote this piece for Volume 3 of Players of Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 1993) at the invitation of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford, who had initiated and developed a connection between the actors currently playing at the theatre and their academic students. Our production of Cymbeline in the RSC’s 1987–8 season was directed by Bill Alexander. We started off at The Other Place (the original building, which was little more than a tin shack and a thrillingly close-up venue for actors and audience alike).

  Princess/Wife

  I once heard a joke about an actor in King Lear being asked what the play was about; he replied, ‘Oh, it’s about this doctor who has to tend a sick demented old man who thinks he’s King of Britain.’ He, of course, was playing the doctor. From the moment we are invited to play a part, a mental process gets under way, intended to bridge the gap between ‘me’ and the character. Subjectivity begins to set in, and for a while our character becomes the centre of our universe. Consequently there is a sense in which for me Cymbeline is about Imogen. As work is beginning, however, we fight to keep our objectivity, to keep doors open, to allow the not-yet-too-subjective insights of fellow actors to throw light on the whole play and our part in it, because, of course, the meaning of the play is revealed through all the characters.

  In the early stages of rehearsal, we focused on identifying the main themes of Cymbeline. We had ambitious talks about politics and world peace, animated discussions about love and sexual jealousy, and so on. Before I became too obsessed with Imogen, I hoped to root my work firmly in the common ground discovered with the company. If I succeeded, then anything I now say about the journey of Imogen might help uncover more of the meaning of the play.

  Imogen is a coveted role. It is her range that chiefly appeals. In one evening an actress can play a bit of Desdemona, Juliet, Cordelia, Lady Anne, Rosalind and Cleopatra. In reading up about Imogen, I came across many descriptive adjectives: ‘divine’, ‘enchanting’, ‘virtuous’, all of which are observations and judgments not terribly helpful to the player.

  As I see it, my preparatory task is to read and read and read the text and not make too many decisions about the character. I let the rhythm of her words work on me. I hoped this would help me retrace Shakespeare’s steps from the word, to the thought, to the motivation, to the heart of Imogen. I must understand her choices, temporarily inhabit the mind that makes them, say her words and perform her actions, and hope thereby to make her ‘live’. In performance, I will inevitably expose her to the audience’s judgment, but I myself must approach her without prejudice. Luckily, Cymbeline not being a much-performed play, Imogen is not well known.

  What are the given facts? She is the only daughter of the King of Britain. Her two brothers were stolen in infancy. Her mother is dead. Her father has remarried a scheming woman who plans to marry off her son Cloten to Imogen, now the sole heir to the British crown. Imogen has in fact secretly married Posthumus, an orphan whom her father adopted at birth and reared as Imogen’s childhood companion. The opening scene of the play establishes what at court is commonly thought of all these people. Imogen and Posthumus are goodies, and reflect one another’s worth:

  To his mistress…

  …her own price

  Proclaims how she esteem’d him; and his virtue

  By her election may be truly read

  What kind of man he is.

  Cloten and the Queen are baddies, and King Cymbeline is a potential goody who has lost his way.

  Imogen is no ordinary obedient virgin, though she is assumed by everyone at court to be both. The audience knows that Imogen is secretly married.

  We learn from Posthumus (Act II, Scene 5) that

  Me of my lawful pleasure she restrain’d,

  And pray’d me oft forbearance.

  We decided that the marriage was consummated, but she sometimes had a headache.

  The ‘pudency so rosy’ that Posthumus describes when she occasionally turns him down could demonstrate an acceptably modest appetite or, more likely, a practical mind. Imogen must not get pregnant and blow their cover prematurely.

  So Imogen has dared go against her father’s wishes by marrying Posthumus, which is tantamount to rebelling against her King. I decided she had married impulsively with no great plan in mind, but somehow was instinctively defending herself with a fait accompli in order to put a stop to the projected marriage with Cloten. When the shit finally hits the fan she’ll think again.

  The clue to this characteristic impetuosity I found in her later lines (Act III, Scene 2):

  I see before me, man; nor here, nor here,

  Nor what ensues.

  She seems to have a defiantly independent version of what is right and she sticks to it. Call it integrity or call it arrogance, her strength and her chief fault are two sides of the same coin. She starts off the play with a strong sense of her own importance, both as lawful wife to Posthumus and as Princess of Britain. Her sense of self is intricately bound up in those two titles, and the events of the play unsettle her faith in both.

  At the beginning of her story I discovered a quality in Imogen that I could never clearly describe. It was a kind of self-dramatisation. It is as though in order to bear her misery, she casts herself in a noble role, and, in playing that to the hilt, she cannot be seen to give in or let herself down. She starts by choosing her own roles, but as the play goes on, fate and other people will force her into many disguises. These have a narrative justification and function, but on a deeper level they have the quality of metamorphoses. They are in some way like a series of small deaths and rebirths in another form, and involve giving up some outer trapping of her identity the better to find her true self.

  Through all these outward changes she retains the core of her Imogen-ness. I hoped that if I didn’t define that Imogenness in advance but played each situation and role for what it was, the Imogen-ness would take care of itself. It would reveal itself not in spite of, but because of, the disguise. I found it helpful to signpost her journey in terms of these metamorphoses, which could be labelled: Princess to Princess-Wife/Princess-Wife to Rebel/Rebel to Franklin’s Housewife/Franklin’s Housewife to Boy/Boy to Roman Page/Roman Page to Princess-Wife.

  First Metamorphosis: Princess-Wife to Rebel

  A wedded lady, that hath her husband banish’d.

  Cymbeline has discovered that Imogen and Posthumus are married. Posthumus is banished, and Imogen is under house-arrest. What with Posthumus’s banishment, her father’s rejection, Cloten’s assaults, and the scheming of the Queen, she has a lot to cope with. In Act I, Scene 1, she yearns to be a ‘neat-herd’s daughter’, but, sensible of her royal status, she d
raws strength from a knowledge that she isn’t just anyone going through a personal tragedy, but that there are subjects out there relying on her to survive with all the values of the Old Britain intact.

  This sureness of her role gives her the courage to tell her father,

  I am senseless of your wrath.

  He is like the ‘tyrannous breathing of the north’ that ‘shakes all our buds from growing’.

  Both David Bradley (playing Cymbeline) and I wanted to show that theirs was the rage that comes from betrayal of what had been great love between them. This endows Cymbeline with the humanity he will need in the final scene and helps our reconciliation at the end. This was not an intellectual imposition on our part but arose from both of our instinctive responses to the scene as soon as we put it on its feet. There seemed to be something so immediate and intimate in the confrontation between them; a suggested matching of temperaments. It reminded me of other father/daughter conflicts—Cordelia and Lear, Juliet and Capulet— that, despite the hostility of the moment, show quite uncluttered channels of communication, open to great love as well as great antagonism.

  Apart from the loyal Pisanio, whom Posthumus has left her as a kind of parting gift, Imogen has no ally. For most of the run in Stratford we emphasised the friendship between Pisanio and Imogen. Actors are often both tactile and insecure (maybe the former because of the latter), so I found myself accompanying every ‘good Pisanio’ and ‘true Pisanio’ with a clutch of Jim Hooper’s wrist or an arm round his shoulder. Wrong: he is a servant and she a princess, and when we came to re-rehearse the play for Newcastle, Bill Alexander encouraged me to be more regally distant with Pisanio. Stressing this gulf in status pays off later when Imogen must somehow believe Pisanio capable of murdering Posthumus. She has not been reared in an atmosphere of great trust, if Belarius’s descriptions of the court are accurate, but because of Pisanio’s connection to Posthumus she trusts him with all her plans.