Shakespeare was born at a good time in history. He lived during a good time and he died at the right time. Some forty years after his death most of what he had built would be destroyed, or at least driven underground for a considerable time. With the execution of Charles I and the ascendancy of Cromwell, a puritanical tyranny settled over England; the theatres were torn down and artistic exuberance drastically curtailed. The great era of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama was over and English theatre would never quite recover from the devastation.
The execution of the King could have led to the establishment of a republic, but it was too soon for that. Most of Europe would have to wait for more than a hundred years until the political philosophers had laid a gunpowder trail all the way to the Bastille. But republican ideas were in the air and being openly flirted with. Venice, with its elected Doge and senators, had proved what a vibrant republic could achieve. The Renaissance love affair with democratic Athens and republican Rome threw up plenty of heroic role models, and somewhat idealised images of those ancient civilisations were posited as utopian alternatives to absolute monarchy.
What did Shakespeare think of all this? Was he a dyed-in-the-wool monarchist, a closet republican, an anarchist? Or a detached observer, a political agnostic? Although he is sometimes accused of sucking up to his royal patrons, he was censured for not contributing to the ostentations of public mourning following the death of Queen Elizabeth. And although he engaged the interest of King James with his portrayal of Macbeth, treason and witchcraft, he was playing a dangerous game. A play about a paranoid Scottish tyrant might be taken the wrong way, as might his portrayal of the snooping, manipulative ruler in Measure for Measure, not to mention King Lear, where a king has to go mad before realising that he has no divine status, but is only a poor, bare, forked animal like other men.
All of Shakespeare’s monarchs (even the mighty Henry V) are fallible, insecure human beings. Some are downright wicked; others, like Bolingbroke, are opportunistic usurpers; some weak and unworthy; all painfully aware that the hollow crown that rounds the mortal temples of a king is no shield against treachery and death. Henry V is sometimes exhibited as Shakespeare’s ‘ideal’ of what a king ought to be, but as I suggested in my earlier chapter on the Histories, there is enough in Shakespeare’s text, let alone history, to see Henry as a pious hypocrite and unscrupulous war criminal. All in all, it’s very difficult to accept Shakespeare as an apologist for the monarchy. Over and over he stresses the idea that ‘the king is but a man as I am’. Kings may claim a semi-divine status and authority but it is a chimera. Death will eventually bore through their castle wall ‘and farewell, King’.
This stance of Shakespeare is all the more remarkable in that he was, actually, a servant of the King, one of the King’s Men players and a Groom of the Chamber, a part-time courtier and hired hand. One might have expected his flattery of the crown to be both fulsome and servile. It is neither. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he was an enthusiastic republican.
In The Tempest, Shakespeare mocks the likeable but slightly dotty Gonzalo’s vision of a utopian republic. It’s a kind of Garden of Eden, innocent, pure, free of all traffic and commerce—an idyllic commonwealth. The only catch is that Gonzalo sees himself as the king of it. Debating the merits of republicanism in Elizabethan England was simply out of the question. Despite the Queen’s charisma, she was aware that her grip on power was tenuous and that there were frequent plots against her. She had been denounced as a bastard and her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, had schemed to take her place, backed by Catholic noblemen and French sympathisers. Spain too was her deadly enemy and the Pope condoned her assassination. Childless, with no named successor, she held on to power by sheer strength of character. King James was a devout exponent of the divine right of kings but crept about, fearful of treason, with armour under his doublet.
The only safe place to sing the virtues of republicanism was ancient Rome, which became a haven for Elizabethan dramatists. Shakespeare wrote four Roman plays: Titus Andronicus, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. In the last three particularly he pits the man against the system, examining the role of the individual personality in shaping history, just as he had done in his English history plays.
Titus Andronicus stands apart from the other three. Its aim is not to dissect a political situation but to cash in on the public taste for blood-soaked melodrama. It’s a deliberate challenge to established playwrights like Thomas Kyd, Robert Greene and Christopher Marlowe. Like every grammar-school boy, Shakespeare had studied Seneca and must have been thrilled by his gory, extravagant tragedies. Seneca was private tutor to the young emperor Nero, who later had him murdered. He must have witnessed his fair share of horrors and was playing up to the decadent taste of a public who got off on the wholesale slaughter of wild beasts, prisoners of war and gladiators in the arena.
This relish of bloody spectacle was not far removed from that of Shakespeare’s audience, who flocked to public executions to see victims hanged, drawn and quartered, or else to the animal shows to watch bears, bulls, horses and apes torn apart by English mastiffs. Up to a hundred and twenty of these huge dogs were kept in kennels next to the cages for the bears, bulls and other animals in an area now occupied by the Tate Modern. Foreign visitors were dismayed by the stench of the area, but that did not deter Philip Henslowe, father-in-law of the actor Edward Alleyn. He set up home here in Pike Garden, and from here he ran his empire of taverns, theatres and brothels. His Rose Theatre stood a mere eighty yards away from Shakespeare’s Globe.
Titus Andronicus
I began writing this book while sitting backstage in Brisbane during a performance of Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome: A Shakespeare Commentary by Heiner Müller, which really set out to test an audience’s staying power and caused a considerable number of walk-outs every night. But that’s nothing new with Titus. When Peter Brook did the play at Stratford with Olivier and Vivien Leigh in 1955, audience members fainted every night and extra St John Ambulance officers were put on duty.
Many academics over the years have dismissed Titus as a vulgar horror show and have been loath to associate it with Shakespeare’s name, but in performance the play has enjoyed considerable success. (In Shakespeare’s day it was calculated that half the population of London went to see Titus.) In Eastern Europe since World War II the play has enjoyed wide popularity, its horrors being commensurate with those suffered by its audiences. The mutilations, brutality and casual violence were a true reflection of their everyday experience. More recent events in Srebrenica, Rwanda, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan have reinforced the play’s vision of a world careering into madness. And when put next to the mindless violence and destructiveness of so many Hollywood blockbusters, Titus looks like a model of dramatic decorum and restraint.
People rarely complain or walk out of such movies, but with an on-stage Titus it’s a different matter—they are disgusted, shocked and outraged. Why? Is it because it’s live? Is it because the play is supposed to be a classic and therefore chaste and respectable—something you’d take your mother to? (Incidentally, when we played Kosky’s King Lear in Canberra, some woman made the mistake of bringing her mother as a treat on her eighty-third birthday. The poor old dear was sick for a week afterwards and the outraged daughter demanded her money back! Of course we agreed—on compassionate grounds.)
Those who can stomach the violence in Titus relish the play’s irony, its dark humour, its grotesquery and Shakespeare’s provocative image of an absurd and godless universe—a precursor to King Lear and Waiting for Godot.
The world conjured up by Shakespeare obviously appealed to Heiner Müller, who had first-hand experience of life under the Nazis, the devastation of Germany in World War II and the subsequent grim reign of terror in the German Democratic Republic. He adapted the play, cutting some of the more arcane or verbose passages, substituting his own running commentary which brought Titus’s Rome and the GDR into a synthesis:
THE CORRUGATED IRON IN THE OUTSKIRTS
ALREADY TREMBLES FROM THE MARCHING FEET
THE LOOKOUTS IN THEIR TOWERS CAN SEE THE DUST
COLUMN FROM THE ADVANCING ARMY ROME WAITS FOR
THE SPOILS SLAVES FOR WORK MEAT FOR BROTHELS
GOLD FOR THE BANKS WEAPONS FOR THE ARMOURY
THE PEOPLE AT THE BEER TENT AND HOT DOG STANDS
AND IN THE EMPTY FOOTBALL STADIUMS WAIT
FOR HEROES DEAD AND LIVING . . .
When Michael Gow, artistic director of the Queensland Theatre Company, suggested we collaborate on Heiner Müller’s Titus I was attracted to the idea for several reasons: it meant we could share the risks of a notoriously difficult box office, while engaging with a major contemporary European playwright and collaborating with another major theatre company from interstate. The production costs would be split, Michael would direct and Robert Kemp would design the show. I would play Titus and the rest of the all-male cast would consist of actors from both Sydney and Brisbane.
The decision to use an all-male cast turned out to be a felicitous one. Audience members remarked that to see a female actor as Lavinia being abused and humiliated in the way it was done would have been too much to take. The fact that it was a male actor—making no attempt to play feminine—gave the horror the necessary degree of alienation and distance to make it more or less bearable.
The all-male presence had a whiff of the locker room about it and the violence was pretty full-on. Not that it was simulated naturalism: a large bucket of blood stood in the middle of the empty stage and was freely splattered around until most of us were drenched in it. (It was a good recipe, imported from Wales—it looked real, didn’t harm the skin and washed out of clothes easily.)
A high wooden wall was lined with Penguin copies of Shakespeare and these were trashed, dunked in blood and flung about as weapons; the play was about the destruction of literature and culture as much as it was about the destruction of bodies. Given this degree of stylisation, I am surprised some audiences were so distressed. I guess it demonstrates the power of metaphor and suggestion as well as the potency of live performance.
The stylisation made it quite difficult for me to find my feet in the first part of the play—was I being a ‘character’ or a choric figure? It’s not until about halfway through that Heiner Müller pulls back and gives Shakespeare free rein, at which point I was able to engage with Titus on an emotional as well as purely cerebral level. Titus is the epitome of the military man. As far back as we can trace military history, whether we’re talking about Leonidas and his Spartans, the Imperial Japanese forces, the SS or the United States Marines, the army has found it necessary to drum into soldiers that their enemies are not people but subhuman objects. Titus, after his many campaigns and the loss of many sons, can feel no empathy for the grief-stricken Tamora, whose sons must be butchered as a Roman sacrifice.
It is only when his daughter is raped and mutilated, his younger sons unjustly executed, that Titus’s humanity is rekindled, his heart torn by a father’s grief. He is apparently driven crazy by his despair and engages in bizarre rituals. But I chose to keep him sane, coldly calculating and bent on revenge in much the same way that Hamlet dons the disguise of madness to throw his enemies off the scent.
Of course in this play all talk of madness is relative, and you may well judge Titus to be insane in plotting to kill Tamora’s remaining sons (the ones who ravished his daughter) and serve them up to her baked in a pie; but that is the world of Titus Andronicus, a world gone mad with blood lust, conquest, vengefulness and cruelty. It was also close enough to the experience of Elizabethan Englishmen to cause them to flock to the theatre in multitudes to witness this exercise in Senecan tragedy.
Looking over the body of his work, one has the impression that Shakespeare felt a certain attraction to ‘the pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war’, but was also fully alert to its horrors and futility. The seductive glamour of military might persists today, with so many countries ploughing their treasure into an endless arms race while their citizens die of hunger and disease. So it’s refreshing to meet the occasional enlightened military man like the Commandant of the Royal Military College, Duntroon, who contacted my wife and me some twenty years ago. He invited us to Duntroon, just outside Canberra’s CBD, for the day, and asked us to perform some Shakespeare for his junior officers. Over lunch in the mess I asked him the purpose of the exercise, and he said, ‘Well, in the future soldiers will have to know how to do a lot more than just arrive in a war zone and start shooting people. They’ll be flung into emergency situations in foreign countries and will have to make instant assessments of the problems, the people, the culture . . . In other words, they’ll have to empathise—and what better way to approach empathy than by studying scenes from Shakespeare?’
Julius Caesar
Up until the age of fifteen I had my heart set on going to art school and being a painter. Then I discovered Shakespeare and all my energy and passion switched to theatre. But from a very early age I was obsessed with drawing and would spend hours crouched by the radio with my paints, crayons or coloured pencils and piles of scrap paper. I loved making storybooks and comic books for my three younger sisters, but it was really for my pleasure rather than theirs. I guess there were also early intimations of my future as a performer and theatrical producer: I made a series of toy theatres featuring homemade puppets and, later, ‘movies’, which consisted of long scrolls of adding-machine paper (like toilet rolls, only better quality) with up to a couple of hundred coloured drawings—like comic strips without the speech bubbles. These would be scrolled, spool to spool, through a small proscenium opening while I sat behind doing all the voices and sound effects. At first they were versions of Disney movies, but then I graduated to Shakespeare and Orwell. I made full-length versions of Animal Farm and Macbeth. For the latter I created a tape-recorded soundtrack complete with music and atmospherics, but I still did all the voices.
Anyway, it was one evening when I was sitting by the radio beavering away with my coloured pencils that I experienced my first real shock of Shakespeare. The ABC was broadcasting Julius Caesar and I was mildly interested in hearing the story; all I knew was that it had something to do with Roman soldiers and murders and battles.
I’m pretty sure Ron Haddrick was playing Brutus and it was early on in the play. Brutus was agonising over whether or not he should join the conspiracy to assassinate Caesar. He acknowledges Caesar’s friendship and sterling qualities but is fearful that public acclaim may stir Caesar’s latent ambition and make him a threat to the Republic. He says:
It is the bright day that brings forth the adder,
And that craves wary walking . . .
I felt a cold shiver run down my spine and the hairs on my neck stand on end. Suddenly I knew what poetry meant. Rather than stating a blunt prosaic fact, you employ metaphor, allusion, metre and sound so that the idea resonates and stays with you. It’s a creepy and sinister image: Caesar’s ambition is like a deadly snake that slithers from hiding in response to the sunshine. It’s an unsettling image and it stays in your mind, especially when reinforced by the steady, deliberate rhythm of that first line: every word is monosyllabic except the last, ‘adder’, which thereby gains in strength despite its feminine ending. The next line, in contrast, has long, slow vowels—‘craves wary walking’, a deliberately ironic understatement.
Shortly after this my father took me to see the Mankiewicz movie. I responded to the film very emotionally, finding it both exciting and deeply disturbing. I couldn’t figure out why it was called Julius Caesar when the hero dies so early on. Was it really about Julius Caesar, or something else? And, in movie terms, he was an unlikely hero. I’d been expecting someone more like Alexander the Great, an exercise in hagiography, yet Shakespeare seemed intent on making him somewhat decrepit and fallible. And as for the others, who were we supposed to side with? Was Brutus the real hero or was it Mark Antony? It was a puzzle . . .
Julius Caesar was one of the plays in the first season of the new Globe Theatre in 1599. London’s grandest playhouse was a great drawcard, especially with plays like Julius Caesar and Henry V in its repertoire. Perhaps stung by Ben Jonson’s criticism of his verbosity, Shakespeare set out to write a play in simple, classic, unadorned language. He was also competing with Jonson on his own turf. Jonson regarded himself as the great classicist and delivered a couple of epics set in ancient Rome: Sejanus (1602) and Catiline (1611). Shakespeare himself acted in Sejanus. Jonson’s plays were big on erudition but made for stodgy theatre. As Leonard Digges wrote in 1640:
So have I seen, when Caesar would appear,
And on the stage at half-sword parley were
Brutus and Cassius; O, how the audience
Were ravished, with what wonder they went thence,
When some new day they would not brook a line
Of tedious though well-laboured Catiline.
As opposed to Jonson’s cardboard ancients, Shakespeare’s Romans are human, fallible, wrong-headed. They were not Romans at all, of course, but Elizabethan Englishmen. It was always Shakespeare’s natural bent to reflect his own life, times and fellow citizens, but in this instance he was dealing with explosive material—regicide and republicanism—and that indeed craved wary walking. If he had called the play The Tragedy of Marcus Brutus, that would have signalled that he approved of Brutus’s part in the assassination. By titling the play after the relatively minor character of Caesar, who is a victim rather than a protagonist, Shakespeare deflected this criticism. Besides, the play is about more than regicide. It is about the chaos that follows and the collapse into civil war. This was a theme that preoccupied Shakespeare in his earliest work, his Henry VI trilogy. No matter how ambivalent he felt about the crown, his plays demonstrate a horror of anarchy, mob rule and civil war.
In some ways Brutus seems like a sketch for Hamlet—an intellectual almost paralysed by introspection, caught on the horns of a moral dilemma. Caesar is his friend and patron (perhaps, historical sources hinted, even his natural father). Caesar has iconic status as a war hero and is a natural leader of men. Yet there are hints that his ambition is urging him to overthrow the Republic, restore the monarchy and install himself as king. It would seem that others, such as Mark Antony, support this move. It would also seem that the only way to avert it is to kill Caesar—no other options are canvassed.
The hard part for Brutus is that Caesar’s plans are only guessed at—there is no hard evidence; then again, if Brutus waits for the hard evidence to emerge, it may be too late to avoid disaster:
And therefore think him as a serpent’s egg,
Which, hatch’d, would as his kind, grow mischievous,
And kill him in the shell.
Brutus is acknowledged, even by Mark Antony, as ‘the noblest Roman of them all’. He is renowned for his integrity and sensitivity. That’s why the other conspirators need him as their frontman. It’s interesting that Shakespeare takes this angle on Brutus, who in earlier times had been reviled for regicide; Dante consigns him to hell for his crime. The Globe audience would have been surprised, even disconcerted, to see him receive such a sympathetic hearing. While Brutus and Cassius are, technically speaking, the villains of the play, Shakespeare gives them an heroic status at least equal to that of Caesar himself. But nothing is clear cut. Like all the people in this play, Brutus has his faults as well as his virtues. He has an air of moral superiority that comes dangerously close to smugness, and he is a harsh judge of others’ failings. When threatened by Cassius in the heat of their great quarrel he responds:
There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats;
For I am arm’d so strong in honesty that they pass by me as the idle wind,
Which I respect not.
Convinced that he is always in the right, he can be stubborn and inflexible and so make catastrophic mistakes. Maybe his first mistake is joining the conspiracy; but putting that aside, he should have listened to Cassius’s advice that Mark Antony and Caesar should die together. Antony turns out to be a wily and deadly enemy, the nemesis of all the conspirators. But Brutus’s high-mindedness, combined with a contempt for Antony, means he can’t see it coming. His next mistake is overruling the others’ advice and allowing Antony to speak at Caesar’s funeral. Again he vastly underestimates Antony’s abilities, trusting that his own oratorical skills will carry the day. Finally he quashes Cassius’s battle plan for Philippi, even though Cassius is the more experienced soldier. In each of these key moments, Brutus makes the wrong call.
And at each of them, Cassius gives way. While Brutus may have a superiority complex, Cassius has too little sense of self-worth. Of all the conspirators, Cassius is the most passionate and committed. But his motives are mixed and his republican ideology swamped by envy and bitterness. He sneers at Caesar’s physical infirmities and cannot bear the thought that his old comrade in arms
Is now become a god; and Cassius is
A wretched creature, and must bend his body
If Caesar carelessly but nod on him . . .
. . . Ye gods! It doth amaze me
A man of such a feeble temper should
So get the start of the majestic world,
And bear the palm alone.
That ‘alone’ is a giveaway of all the resentment Cassius feels at having been sidelined after years of service. Cassius is clear-eyed enough to admit this weakness in himself and to see that he needs Brutus as an ally, someone who will give the cause a respectable image. But he can’t help resenting Brutus’s sense of moral superiority and, in a Machiavellian way, relishes the thought of corrupting him:
Well, Brutus, thou art noble, yet, I see,
Thy honourable metal may be wrought
From that it is dispos’d. Therefore it is meet
That noble minds keep ever with their likes;
For who so firm that cannot be seduc’d?
Caesar doth bear me hard; but he loves Brutus.
His bitterness makes it hard for us to warm to Cassius, yet he is intensely human; perhaps nowhere more so than in his dependence on Brutus and desire to be loved by him. He idolises Brutus and by constantly yielding to Brutus’s stubbornness brings about his own downfall and the failure of the coup.
If Brutus and Cassius have their failings, so does the eponymous hero of the play. Throughout medieval times and the Renaissance, Julius Caesar was revered as one of the Nine Worthies, the heroes of antiquity. Shakespeare paints a very different picture and cuts this epic hero down to size. His Caesar is a man in decline: deaf in one ear, prey to epilepsy, superstitious, vain, arrogant and easily swayed. Yet there is something expansive about him that sets him apart from the more mean-minded of the conspirators—he is generous, brave and trusting. He reposes too much trust in Brutus, but can be a shrewd judge of character:
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look,
He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous . . .
. . . He reads much,
He is a great observer, and he looks
Quite through the deeds of men . . .
Such men as he be never at heart’s ease
Whiles they behold a greater than themselves,
And therefore are they very dangerous.
Caesar’s protégé Antony is an indolent playboy who gets a lucky break and runs with it. He proves himself to be a master of improvisation as well as a master opportunist. His funeral oration, besides being a model of rhetoric, is a model of spin. He plays his audience like a fiddle, and stages a couple of theatrical coups: the first is displaying Caesar’s torn garment while recalling his past glories. (At this point in my 2001 Bell Shakespeare production I had Antony signal the sound operator to bring up the schmaltzy background music.) His second is flourishing Caesar’s will and reading out his legacies to the populace. (Here I had Antony kiss a baby and sign a few autographs.)
The speech is a masterpiece of crowd manipulation. John Weever saw the play in 1599 during its first season at the Globe, and wrote:
The many-headed multitude were drawn
By Brutus’ speech that Caesar was ambitious.
When eloquent Mark Antony had shown
His virtues, who but Brutus then was vicious?
After the mob had rushed off stage to lynch the conspirators, I had Antony show the will to the audience: it was a blank piece of paper. I did this for two reasons: first to show that Antony had invented the whole thing in order to fire up the mob, and second because it is borne out by the text. In the scene following the funeral, Antony, Octavius and Lepidus are at Antony’s house devising death warrants for their opponents. Antony says to Lepidus:
But Lepidus, go you to Caesar’s house;
Fetch the will hither, and we shall determine
How to cut off some charge in legacies.
If Lepidus is now being despatched to Caesar’s house to fetch the will, what was the piece of paper Antony read to the mob? It follows Plutarch’s assertion that Antony manipulated Caesar’s will to serve his own ends. My staging of the scene was deliberately ironic, playing up Antony’s insincerity, because too often it is taken at face value as an exhibition of raw emotion and misses Shakespeare’s point about political wheeling and dealing. Antony certainly has a lot of charisma but that should not blind us to other characteristics: he can be selfish, treacherous, punitive, brutal and cynical. In the scene I have just mentioned (Act IV, Scene 1), the triumvirs are preparing their proscription list and doing deals over who is for the chop. Antony sends Lepidus off to fetch the will then immediately suggests to Octavius that Lepidus should be dumped:
This is a slight unmeritable man,
Meet to be sent on errands. Is it fit,
The threefold world divided, he should stand
One of the three to share it?
Antony’s brutality here recalls Plutarch’s story regarding his hatred of Cicero, who had denounced him in the Senate house. Antony hunted Cicero down, murdered him and had his hands and tongue nailed to the door of the Senate. Yet for all his brilliance, Antony turns out to be no match for the cold-eyed young Octavius, whom he totally underestimates.
In this very male world of politics and the military, women have a subservient role, but both Portia and Calpurnia are strong-willed and persuasive. Brutus’s wife Portia fights desperately to change her husband’s course, wounding herself in the thigh as a mark of her constancy. Calpurnia for a time actually changes Caesar’s mind, persuading him not to go to the Capitol. Her recounting of her nightmare visions is sometimes played as if she were an hysteric, but this is not the case. She herself is not frightened but she knows her husband is superstitious and these visions will impact on him. Unfortunately her good work is undone by the wily Decius who plays on Caesar’s vanity and ambition to lure him to the Capitol, thus making him change his mind again.
In the long run it’s a man’s world; women are disempowered and the only way they can register their despair is by swallowing fire, as Portia does.
Given the complexity of the characters, their inconsistencies and ambivalences, it is a grave mistake to be judgmental when acting in or directing the play. Brutus can come across as too ingenuous, too sonorous or too priggish; Cassius too sinister and manipulative, etc. You must never take sides but give each character his or her due, playing them with empathy from their points of view, and let the audience decide. In fact the audience should be something like the mob on stage—now siding with this person, now that—unsure who to believe. If you load the dice, what you get is political commentary or satire. If you want to show the face of tragedy then you must play each role with all its facets. Just as in life, each character has strengths and weaknesses, attributes that are admirable and some that are less so. That’s true of the mob as well, who are often portrayed as ragged blockheads from central casting.
Shakespeare is sometimes accused of snobbery, flattering the aristocrats and putting down the lower classes. As I’ve demonstrated many times elsewhere in this book, the obverse is true. It is aristocrats who are the most common butts of his satire and the common folk who earn his approbation. Nevertheless he does have a recurring fear of mob rule, or mob mentality, which is not the same thing as class snobbery. He could see in the theatre as well as in other public places how a crowd could be manipulated by clever oratory. I think we’ve all seen enough of mass hysteria and violence to share his apprehension. TV footage of race-hate riots or football hooligans on the rampage remind us how easily the wild beast can be unleashed. In the 1590s London had seen a string of serious riots (largely against foreign refugees) resulting in mass executions.
The mobs in Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, King John, Richard III, and Henry VI with its rebel leader, Jack Cade, are all examples of crowds being swayed and persuaded by crafty orators. But how can we exclude ourselves from this? How can we kid ourselves that a lot of the ideas and opinions we espouse are not the scraps we pick up from the media, the shock-jocks, the advertisers, the opinion pages? Of course they are. We are a lot less original than we like to think.
That’s why the mob in my Julius Caesar was not a crowd of ragged blockheads. They were a mix of lawyers, doctors, teachers, students and housewives. They were us. And they were not stupid—just persuadable, like us. If you play the mob as a lot of dolts, they’re a pushover. There’s no tension. The more intelligent and aware you make the citizens, the higher the stakes and the more frightening the reality.
Inspiration for a production can come from various sources. Sometimes a particular painter will provide an image that gets the imagination going. When I directed The Comedy of Errors Matisse provided the colour palette and nonchalant joyfulness that play seemed to demand. When I was seeking an Australian reference for As You Like It, Fred Williams had a spaciousness and lightness that underpinned the design. With Julius Caesar I turned to de Chirico, who has always intrigued me with his vast, haunted public spaces, deserted and ominous. They are full of extreme perspectives and sick, heavy colours. There are long shadows, sometimes without explanation. The light is always harsh but overcast, not cheerful, and you feel that hidden eyes are watching you, that at any moment danger could spring out of one of those long and meaningless colonnades.
I scattered my sparse mob throughout the auditorium so that the audience itself became the mob and Brutus and Antony could address us directly. And they were dressed in such a way that you could not distinguish who were the actors and who were not—except at school matinees, where it became a bit obvious.
What do we take away from Julius Caesar? We have seen, on the one hand, misguided idealism, self-deception and mixed motives. On the other, opportunism, insincerity, casual brutality and an exercise in smoke and mirrors.
We have seen the world of politics: as it was, as it is, and, no doubt, as it shall always be.
Antony and Cleopatra
You’d expect Antony and Cleopatra to be a natural follow-on to Julius Caesar but it didn’t appear till eight years later (1607) and the plays could hardly be more different. The language of Julius Caesar is spare, straightforward and unadorned, whereas the poetry of Antony and Cleopatra is lush and extravagant, studded with fanciful metaphor, sensuality and playfulness. Julius Caesar has a tight structure and obeys pretty closely the classical unities of time and place so beloved of Ben Jonson. But Antony and Cleopatra ranges across half the world, hopping from one location to another with an almost bewildering rapidity.
It’s as if Shakespeare deliberately set out, in Julius Caesar, to show Jonson that he could beat him at his own game. He experienced as a performer the constraints of the classical model and saw how readily a slavish obedience to the rules could produce barren entertainment. But in Julius Caesar he demonstrated that he could be as good a classicist as the best of them and still produce a political thriller that was both human and modern. Now, in Antony and Cleopatra, he threw the classical rules to the winds and unleashed his vast imagination and passion for theatricality.
The play is yet one more example of Shakespeare’s fascination with how individual people shape the course of history. In Julius Caesar we saw men trying to save the Roman Republic, only to end up tearing it apart by civil war. Now we are presented with irreconcilable factions burying the Republic altogether and on its grave establishing the foundations of Imperial Rome and its first emperor, Augustus. Shakespeare gives us two mutually exclusive worlds, Rome and Egypt. Where Egypt is female, Rome is rigidly male. Egypt is flexible, Rome is not. Egypt is sensual whereas Rome is cold-blooded and politic. Egypt is playfully irresponsible, Rome sternly businesslike. While Egypt is fantastical, Rome is practical and pragmatic.
Again Shakespeare allows himself to wander through a pagan classical landscape free of Judeo-Christian inhibitions. Sexuality and adultery are openly enjoyed—Cleopatra herself is ‘with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black’.
The play’s triumph is in so successfully melding the global and the domestic. We feel the size of empire with messengers scuttling to and fro, with sea battles and armies on the march. Shakespeare gives himself an enormous canvas on which to splash his extravagant colours. The Antony of this play is a far cry from the ruthlessly ambitious and energised young politician of Julius Caesar. He is now a ruin of his former self, an overindulged raging bull, losing control of his destiny. It would have been both inspiring and depressing to see Marlon Brando attack this role in his later years. He gave us a superlative Mark Antony in Julius Caesar—to see him play the older Antony would have shown us a marker of both his and the character’s sad decline. Brando was one of the greatest actors of his generation and I feel cheated that he never gave us a Hamlet or a Lear. Like Antony he threw away an empire.
Cleopatra is undoubtedly one of Shakespeare’s most magnificent creations and probably the greatest female role ever written. She is fantastically intelligent, sensual and self-regarding; comfortable with her body and her passions but painfully aware of encroaching age. One of the funniest scenes in the play shows Cleopatra receiving news from Rome that Antony has made a political marriage with Octavia. Having physically attacked and abused the unfortunate messenger, Cleopatra calms down sufficiently to recall him and question him about her rival.
The terrified messenger answers all her questions as diplomatically as he can and we see how ready Cleopatra is to deceive herself by believing him:
Cleopatra: Come thou near.
Messenger: Most gracious majesty!
Cleopatra: Didst thou behold Octavia?
Messenger: Ay, dread Queen.
Cleopatra: Where?
Messenger: Madam, in Rome. I looked her in the face and saw her led between her brother and Mark Antony.
Cleopatra: Is she as tall as me?
Messenger: She is not, madam.
Cleopatra: Didst hear her speak? Is she shrill-tongued or low?
Messenger: Madam, I heard her speak. She is low-voiced.
Cleopatra: That is not so good. He cannot like her long.
Charmian: Like her? O Isis, ’tis impossible!
Cleopatra: I think so, Charmian. Dull of tongue and dwarfish. What majesty is in her gait? Remember, if e’er though looked’st on majesty.
Messenger: She creeps. Her motion and her station are as one. She shows a body rather than a life, a statue than a breather.
Cleopatra: Is this certain?
Messenger: Or I have no observance.
Charmian: Three in Egypt cannot make better note.
Cleopatra: He’s very knowing, I do perceive’t. There’s nothing in her yet. The fellow has good judgement.
Charmian: Excellent.
Cleopatra: Guess at her years, I prithee.
Messenger: Madam, she was a widow—
Cleopatra: Widow! Charmian, hark.
Messenger: And I do think she’s thirty.
Cleopatra: Bear’st thou her face in mind? Is’t long or round?
Messenger: Round, even to faultiness.
Cleopatra: For the most part, too, they are foolish that are so. Her hair—what colour?
Messenger: Brown, madam; and her forehead as low as she would wish it.
Cleopatra [giving money]: There’s gold for thee.
Probably the only sour note is struck by the messenger’s ‘And I do think she’s thirty’. He is no doubt exaggerating Octavia’s age, but it doesn’t do much good: Cleopatra herself saw thirty some time ago. It’s a wonderfully comic scene for the two actors (assisted by the faithful Charmian) and gives us yet another colour in the portrait of this charming, domineering, selfish, generous, formidable yet vulnerable woman.
Like Antony, Cleopatra is wildly extravagant and admires that quality in others. Of Antony she says:
For his bounty,
There was no winter in’t: an autumn ’twas
That grew the more by reaping: his delights
Were dolphin-like, they showed his back above
The element they lived in: in his livery
Walked crowns and crownets: realms and islands were
As plates dropped from his pocket.
She can be selfish, treacherous and sarcastic but her enormous charm, wit and sexual allure are matched by a girlish vivacity, as Enobarbus describes her:
I saw her once,
Hop forty paces through the public street;
And having lost her breath, she spoke, and panted,
That she did make defect perfection
And, breathless, power breathe forth.
Put this against the eloquent profundity of her grief as Antony lies dying:
O, see, my women,
The crown of the earth doth melt. My lord!
O, withered is the garland of the war,
The soldier’s pole is fallen: young boys and girls
Are level now with men. The odds is gone,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.
Enobarbus supplies her only possible epitaph:
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies. For vilest things
Become themselves in her, that the holy Priests
Bless her when she is riggish.
She is indeed a lass unparalleled. When stood alongside Antony and Cleopatra, Octavius must needs appear cold-blooded and humourless, but it reduces the play’s impact to present these facets only. The actor playing the role has to find the qualities in Octavius that make his victory inevitable, not simply won by default. Seen from his point of view, Antony’s sloth and abdication of responsibility spell disaster for the triumvirate. This may suit Octavius’s long-term ambitions, but meantime there is an empire to run. Octavius is not simply a prude: to his stoic Roman upbringing the wantonness and extravagance of ‘the Orient’ are distasteful if not downright disgusting. It is both possible and necessary in the playing of Octavius to demonstrate a genuine love for his sister, a frustrated admiration for Antony and a degree of compassion for Cleopatra. Without these the play lacks a certain tragic strain. While he is undoubtedly one of the ‘new men’ whom Shakespeare regarded with suspicion and distaste—pragmatic opportunists like Malcolm, Fortinbras and John of Lancaster—Octavius needs to be played with a sympathy and understanding that make him a substantial protagonist. After all, this was the man destined to become Augustus.
In an exceptionally large cast of characters, Enobarbus stands out as a true original, Shakespeare’s own creation. His betrayal of Antony is one of the play’s most tragic episodes and Antony’s subsequent forgiveness an overwhelming display of magnanimity. It says a lot for the highly charged emotional world of Antony and Cleopatra that the worldly, witty, sceptical Enobarbus can die of a broken heart.
One of the few productions of the play I have seen was directed by Peter Brook for the RSC, starring Alan Howard and Glenda Jackson. It was curious casting: in place of a pair of fleshy voluptuaries we had two dry, reedy intellectuals, skinny and ironical. This gave a squeeze of lemon to the verbal contests but there was little evidence of sensuality in their relationship or in the production overall. There was more sex and passion in a TV production I saw (black and white) in the early sixties. Keith Michell and Mary Morris had the bigness of passion and fire in the belly the roles demand—the relationship is not a cerebral one.
When I directed the play for Bell Shakespeare in 2001, I wanted to avoid togas and loincloths; that sort of production can easily end up looking like Carry On, Cleo. I wanted to create a space where fortunes are easily won, lost and frittered away, a place of materialistic irresponsibility like Cleopatra’s court. So I finished up with something reminiscent of a casino: the text is full of references to cards, dice, chance and fortune. I must admit those places both intrigue and horrify me. They are often fitted out with fake palm trees, waterfalls and grottoes like something out of the Arabian Nights. You lose all track of time and cannot tell whether it’s day or night because the romantic lighting is as constant as the muzak and free drinks. Sometimes people dress up and pretend they’re in Las Vegas, but even if they don’t there is an air of fantasy and escapism like you used to get in the old picture palaces during the Depression.
This sense of unreality, of being perpetually on holiday—‘Let’s to supper, come, And down consideration’—seemed appropriate to Antony and Cleopatra’s view of the world.
I could not have wished for a more emotionally free and committed pair of lovers than Paula Arundell and Bill Zappa, and for the most part the casino environment worked well with the Romans in black tie and the Egyptian court dressed in flowing haute couture silks. The battle scenes posed something of a problem—a shoot-out in the casino is not quite the Battle of Actium. Battle scenes work better the more metaphorical and suggestive they are, and I trimmed and elided some of the battles just as I had done in Julius Caesar. They do get very confusing if you don’t know your ancient history and, by today’s standards, Shakespeare was perhaps being a little too faithful to his sources. But then, if he had not been he would no doubt have had angry audiences accusing him of getting his history wrong: every schoolboy knew his Plutarch.
It’s likely that Shakespeare’s audience saw in Cleopatra—imperious, intelligent, witty and charismatic—a shadow of the late Queen Elizabeth and in the crumbling of her empire the passing of a Golden Age.
Antony and Cleopatra succeed in convincing us that it’s a world well lost, and, as with others of Shakespeare’s mighty protagonists—Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth—their passing seems to leave the world a shrunken and less interesting place.
Coriolanus
So our virtues
Lie in the interpretation of the time.
My first day at Sydney University in 1959 was a fateful one. An eager freshman, I strolled through the gates of the Gothic pile and down Manning Road past the Union. The roadway was crowded with the booths of the various student societies spruiking their wares and drumming up recruits. The first one I came to was that of the Sydney University Players, manned by the stocky and persuasive Ken Horler. Ten years later he and I would go on to found the Nimrod Theatre: for now he was president of the Players. After the briefest of introductions I signed up and continued on my way with the feeling that I now had a passport, a stake in the place. A few yards further on I came across the booth of the older and more established Sydney University Dramatic Society; but it was too late—I had thrown in my lot with the opposition. The two groups enjoyed a friendly rivalry and people occasionally slipped from one to the other as well as seeking a billet with the Revue, the Gilbert and Sullivan productions, and whatever else came along. We enjoyed a substantial audience from ‘downtown’, as we called it, because whatever the productions’ shortcomings, there was nowhere else in Sydney where you could see Brecht, Sartre, Aristophanes, e.e. cummings, Goldoni, Anouilh, or even Shakespeare.
The politics of the Players were not very complicated and anybody could make a pitch. So having scored a couple of successes, including Malvolio in Ken’s Twelfth Night, I proposed we put on Coriolanus with Ken directing and myself playing the title role as well as designing the set and costumes. My designs were not inspiring, but we were able to hire, at a very reasonable rate, some bits and pieces from the Elizabethan Theatre Trust’s recent production of Julius Caesar. We were fortunate to have in the cast John Gaden playing Menenius (John excelled at aged character roles even then) and Arthur Dignam as Titus Lartius. The reason I proposed Coriolanus was, of course, because it was another of Olivier’s great roles and I was still very much under his spell, seeking to imbibe, through imitation, some of his qualities.
As undergrads we responded enthusiastically to what we saw as the cynicism of the play’s attitude to politics and militarism. The plebeians are a shallow, cowardly lot, their Tribunes devious and manipulative. But the patricians are just as bad—arrogant, contemptuous and presumptuous; real old-style Tories. This view of the political spectrum fitted neatly with our admiration of Brecht, the mentor of much student theatre and politics.
In 1966, the year after I joined the RSC, the company mounted Coriolanus with Ian Richardson in the title role. John Barton directed the production which was tough and austere. I had the very minor role of Nicanor, a Roman spy, and hammed it up appallingly, being as sinister as possible, lurking all over the set. (The most important part of being in the RSC was getting noticed.) To augment still further my sinister mien I suggested to Barton, ‘Perhaps I could play it with an eye patch?’ He dismissed me curtly with, ‘You’re playing it with two eye patches already!’
I remained intrigued by both the role of Coriolanus and the play itself, and when I heard that Steven Berkoff had done a production of it, I invited him to come and replicate the show for Bell Shakespeare in 1996.
Replication is the right word for it because Berkoff directed like a choreographer. There was little room for input from the cast because Berkoff had predetermined the staging, the tempi, almost every gesture and how it should be executed. His way of directing was by demonstration—‘Do it like me’—and much of the declamation was accompanied by precise percussion and underscoring. While this method has its limitations (mainly in denying the actors any individual contribution), I had to admire the painstaking attention to detail. There were no props in the show—everything was mimed, including the weapons. This meant that the fight scenes could be as graphic and violent as you wanted without the risk of anyone getting hurt. But you had to act the exact weight and deadliness of the weapons, otherwise it would have looked paltry.
Where Berkoff got it wrong, to my mind, was the politics. Given his London East End and Russian-Jewish background, Berkoff saw Coriolanus simply as a fascist—black shirt, jackboots and all. But that is both inaccurate and simplistic—the character is prejudged as soon as he walks on. (Ian McKellen and his director made the same mistake with the film of Richard III. That play is not about fascism either. Apart from lacking credibility—we know the Nazis didn’t take over England in the 1940s—it skews the entire social apparatus of the play. It’s true that members of the British royal family may have had fascist sympathies, but that is a red herring and makes Richard’s aberration less remarkable. Richard is not driven by political ideology but by a selfish and psychopathic desire to be top dog. His victims have no political ideology either apart from clannish self-interest.) The politics of Coriolanus are far more complex and fascinating than simply sticking labels on people.
Shakespeare wrote the play in 1608. It’s a late play, coming between Pericles and The Winter’s Tale. It was partly inspired by the dramatic events of the year before—the Midland Rising which saw savage riots directed against landowners. The violence was particularly acute in the Forest of Arden: there were food shortages and landowners had enclosed the common land hitherto used for pasture. Much of the forest also disappeared to feed the ironworks in Birmingham and elsewhere.
The rising began on May Day and quickly spread throughout the Midlands. The military killed scores of rioters and many of those captured were hanged, drawn and quartered. This took place, almost literally, on Shakespeare’s doorstep in Stratford, and he must indeed have had ambivalent feelings about the events, himself being a substantial landowner and under suspicion of hoarding malt in his barns in order to force up the price.
The play begins with the Roman citizens rioting because of food shortages and blaming the patricians, especially Coriolanus, for hoarding grain for themselves. The silver-tongued patrician Menenius almost succeeds in talking the mob down when Coriolanus enters and treats them with the utmost derision and contempt. The stand-off is resolved by the urgent news that the Volsces are about to attack Rome and the so-called rabble are instantly conscripted into the army. In the ensuing campaign Coriolanus again proves himself an outstanding military leader, but then comes the peace. He proves to be an impossible candidate for political office because of his entrenched patrician views and values, a man incapable of compromise or respect for any class other than his own.
Wyndham Lewis remarked that snobs like Coriolanus must have ‘pullulated’ in the courts of Elizabeth and James—overgrown schoolboys with ‘crazed’ notions of privilege and a ‘demented’ ideal of authority. Plutarch provided a Coriolanus who was merely ‘churlish and uncivil, and altogether unfit for any man’s conversation’. But Shakespeare makes him much more complex—a potentially great man of stern integrity who is undone by his absence of fellow feeling and a pride that bars him from playing politics. He is not a character who inspires affection in an audience the way a Hamlet or Rosalind does, but some actors have made the role a formidable vehicle for their talents. Olivier had great success with it (largely by finding the comedy in the character) and Richard Burton endowed it with a fierce glamour. Shakespeare makes no excuses for him. On his first entrance Coriolanus drips with venomous contempt for the plebs. He is a killing machine as well as a stiff-necked patrician. He believes the lower orders should have no voice in government and despises their cowardice as well as their ingratitude for his military service.
The plebs are an unappealing lot. They are led by the nose by their Tribunes—canny, opportunistic shop stewards who seek out Coriolanus’s weak spots in order to destroy him. The patricians find their true epitome in Volumnia—the ultimate matriarch wedded to the myth of military glory. You can see where Coriolanus gets it from, which goes some way to mitigating our harsh assessment of him. What chance had he with Volumnia for a mother? She is the only one with any real influence over Coriolanus and, in the scene where she dissuades him from sacking Rome, proves herself to be a powerful orator, moving, manipulative and relentless.
The most agreeable of the patricians is Menenius, a bon vivant and wheeler-dealer; a power broker, a numbers man and kingmaker—a figure not unfamiliar in Australian politics.
One may detect an inkling of Shakespeare’s political views in his depiction of the citizens and their Tribunes. He undoubtedly has an empathy with the common man, but also a dread of the unruly mob. They are as much in need of political education as are their aristocratic overlords. Hazlitt said that reading Coriolanus saves one the trouble of reading Burke attacking the French Revolution and of Paine defending it, because Shakespeare gave both sides of the argument. There is no doubt that Coriolanus is a marvellous commentary on politics, but can it be a great tragedy when it elicits so little sympathy for its protagonists? Many critics have thought it can and that Shakespeare proves himself yet again capable of arguing an empirical case in terms of the most profound humanity. T.S. Eliot called Coriolanus Shakespeare’s ‘finest artistic achievement in tragedy’. George Bernard Shaw was making much the same point, in a typically perverse paradox, by calling it the best of his Comedies.
Which side does Shakespeare himself take in the political debate? Typically, neither. As Peter Ackroyd says: ‘There is no need to take sides when the characters are doing it for you.’ That’s the key to directing Coriolanus—to fully expose the faults of all parties but also to seek out their virtues; be reasonable to all sides—they each have a case to make. If you dress them as fascists or French revolutionaries (that’s been done too) you are telling the audience what to think rather than making them puzzle it out for themselves. If you can achieve that balance then the production may go beyond commentary or satire and achieve tragic status. Tragedy is experienced when you, the audience, can see a way out of a dilemma but the characters can’t.
As an actor you cannot play a type, you can’t play an attitude, you can’t play a message and you can’t play a concept. You have to play a person. I guess the frustration I felt playing in Berkoff’s Coriolanus (despite admiring features of the production) stemmed from the fact that I was trying to play Steven’s concept. There was no room for flexibility, for ambiguity, spontaneity, or those fascinating psychological contradictions at the heart of Shakespeare’s characters. I was just being a big, bad fascist.
Coriolanus’s tragedy is that what virtues he has (and they are considerable) are inappropriate to the circumstances. Both his greatness and his folly lie in the fact that he cannot adapt to an unfamiliar situation. Bred as a war machine, he (like George Patton among many others) is redundant in peacetime, leaving room for the lesser men, the bureaucrats, time servers and men of no conviction to scuttle in and claim their place in the sun.
. . . the biggest disservice anyone can do to Shakespeare is to be so dazzled by his works as to argue that they could not have been written by anyone so ordinary as a Stratford-upon-Avon-born actor. The very essence of Shakespeare was his humanity: that he was neither a blue-blooded nobleman nor a university-trained academic, but a humbly born player who wanted to give his calling the sort of material that could really make it soar, to reach every level of society. Where he was different from his contemporaries is that he felt with and for others in all their faults and frailties. In Julius Caesar Shakespeare has Julius say of Cassius, ‘He is a great observer, and he looks quite through the deeds of men,’ and he could hardly have coined a more appropriate description of himself.
Ian Wilson, Shakespeare: The Evidence