Afterword

by Dr John Lavagnino

London Shakespeare Centre

King’s College London

 

 

OF COURSE, SHAKESPEARE did it too. We’ve long been familiar with the way his plays adapt and extend plots from other sources and reuse prior literary materials in every way; Monstrous Little Voices differs primarily in choosing always to extend and enrich the old story rather than to redo it.

In his history plays, especially, we see Shakespeare not only drawing extensively on his sources but also treating his own works as the basis for further development by prequels and sequels. The First Folio and most modern editions tidy things up so that it looks as though he planned all along to write two substantial historical tetralogies, but really they were accumulated piecemeal instead. It’s the histories that Monstrous Little Voices draws on less than any of the other plays—perhaps because Shakespeare was there first, exploiting the material and finding new possibilities himself.

In the first tetralogy—the three Henry VI plays and Richard III—Henry VI, Part One is actually a prequel written after Parts Two and Three. It’s the last in the series, Richard III, that became the biggest hit and has ever since attracted far more attention. Nobody questions how much more compelling than the first three parts it is; but today only a few readers and audiences get to discover how much richer it is when experienced after those parts and with the full story in mind.

Later on, Shakespeare used existing materials all the more: the second tetralogy picks up where the anonymous play Thomas of Woodstock leaves off, and after Richard II the Henry IV and V plays rework characters and events from The Famous Victories of Henry V. Far more than the first tetralogy, this one varies its style and approach with the material: the carefully planned and balanced Richard II with its famous poetical set-pieces, the extensive comic elements in the two parts of Henry IV, the martial and patriotic Henry V; they’re united by Shakespeare’s skill, not by their manner. Most surprising of all, in the middle of writing this sequence Shakespeare took the character of Falstaff out of his invented role in the historical story and made him the centre of a straight comedy, The Merry Wives of Windsor. Not even the tidy presentation of Shakespeare’s plays in modern editions can hide the way he chose to follow the same characters in very different directions; the most Shakespearean act is to do the same kind of rethinking.

Those tetralogies are Shakespeare’s only intentional shared worlds; all the other plays stand alone, without any characters or events to link them. But Monstrous Little Voices does something Shakespeare never did, and tells new stories that make connections among many of those standalone plays. We routinely talk about the world created by Shakespeare, as though it spans all his works taken together; in this book the storytelling is supported by an experiment in literary criticism, a skilful selection and development of characters and ideas that shows just how unified that world truly is—once you make the right additions here and there.

Why does it work? Writers have often thought of extending the story of this or that Shakespeare character beyond the end of the play, but what’s happening here goes much further: not just continuing the plot, but combining materials from many plays and elaborating the stories of the characters both before and after what we knew already. Those characters are the foundation of the new fiction: we learn more things about Miranda, Helena, and many others, it’s true, but it all builds on the sense we already had of their reality. We felt we knew them, and we wanted to follow their stories to the end.

And the places make a difference too: there’s already an extensive world of Mediterranean life in Shakespeare plays referring to Milan, Florence, Naples, Venice, Verona, Athens, and more, all drawn together here, and making very naturally a single broad canvas for new adventures. This world gets described in physical detail for the first time, since places on the Shakespearean stage never have the realized settings of prose fiction. The theatre of his day, without sets or lighting in the modern manner, had little beyond costumes and words to evoke distant places, but landscape description has a natural role in prose fiction.

Doubling that human world, there’s the world of fairies, encountered most fully A Midsummer Night’s Dream and glancingly in other plays. Shakespeare did new and different things with his source material on this topic, and this book does too. One of the great artistic developments of modern fantasy is to make the development of imaginary worlds far deeper than was commonly done before; these stories take Shakespeare’s fairies and make them a society, not just occasional visitors to our world whose ways are seen only in glimpses. Human characters in Shakespeare barely know that fairies exist: Bottom’s memories of a strange romance, and Mercutio’s evocation of Queen Mab, both eventually get explained away as dreams not reality.

But here, fairies are unquestionably real and could never be dismissed that way. What in The Tempest is just hinted at now becomes a solid and complex background. Everything we see is compatible with the events of Shakespeare’s plays, but we have a new vantage point from which the fairy realm is fully visible and intelligible. It is still magical and often dangerous: from the first pages we know what is clear in Shakespeare too, that fairies have greater priorities than the human world; and to the extent they notice us, they are not concerned to make human life happier or more peaceful.

The shared ideas and approaches of fantasy fiction are an important foundation of this book’s approach, just as the playwriting discoveries of the Elizabethan era were for Shakespeare. And along with modern artistic developments there are modern ideas about society and psychology: attitudes we often wish we’d see more of in Shakespeare, and explorations of territory his plays don’t ever quite reach. Perhaps it is no real surprise that the happy-ever-after of so many familiar characters is not quite like that, as we discover here in reading about many of them. But if the most passionate romances sometimes peter out, the Mediterranean world and the fairy realms offer possibilities for women that English reality did not. Miranda and Helena get the kinds of careers their intelligence and resourcefulness merit; even Parolles turns out to be more of a survivor than you might have thought, and positively useful in the right kind of scheme.

The real Mediterranean world of Shakespeare’s day had a far more vivid cultural mixture than his England; there is even more to draw on than he knew about. And so here the range of people and books behind and in the stories includes not only Shakespeare’s favourite writer, Ovid, but also Rumi and the Ottoman emissary Esperanza Malchi. Above all there’s the dramatic and dangerous world of the Medicis—a rich source for the work of other playwrights of Shakespeare’s time, for Marlowe, Webster, and Middleton in particular, but not used very extensively by Shakespeare himself; the Medician theme is in any case far more productive when the settings are international rather than focused on one city or another.

One Shakespeare play, above all, is especially like Monstrous Little Voices, though no reference is made to it; this is Pericles. This play is itself a collaboration: George Wilkins is thought to have written the first two acts, which differ in manner and style from the rest of the play. But still other authors are involved: the medieval poet John Gower is a member of the cast, narrating a story that is derived in part from his writings, but that ultimately goes back to the ancient Greek tale Apollonius of Tyre—a source for Twelfth Night as well.

Readers concerned about literary propriety and order have long been highly critical of Pericles: it is far too entertaining. In Shakespeare’s day it was one of his most successful plays, and in the last few decades, it has been performed more and more frequently, leading us to discover that it almost always succeeds in enthralling and moving audiences. What readers may think scattered and untidy is excellent material for actors. The story ranges all over the Mediterranean, with frequent journeys from one exotic place to another: ranging across Mytilene, Antioch, Tarsus, Ephesus, and Tyre, in modern-day Greece, Turkey, and Lebanon. There are encounters with royal courts both welcoming and treacherous, a large and varied cast, shipwrecks, unexpected twists of fate, and above all magic. It is a work that wants to be fantasy fiction, as it pushes the boundaries of the medium, seeming to need far more time and space than can easily be presented on stage; it wants to do everything.

Like several other late Shakespeare plays, Pericles returns to a plot resolution he’d used as early as The Comedy of Errors and found fascinating throughout his career: the astonishing reunion with those who seemed lost forever. That particular kind of wonder doesn’t appear here, and indeed fits a play better than this book’s new kind of exploration. Instead we get the richness of a fictional world that could continue rolling along forever, that could keep leading us to new places and startle us not by returning to our beginnings but by going on and on.

 

Dr John Lavagnino

December 2015