Poem For A Thursday: Cardinal Wolsey

So farewell to the little good you bear me.
Farewell! a long farewell, to all my greatness!
This is the state of man, to-day he puts forth
The tender leaves of hopes; to-morrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honours thick upon him;
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost;
And, when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,
And then he falls, as I do. I have ventur'd,
Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
This many summers in a sea of glory,
But far beyond my depth: my high-blown pride
At length broke under me, and now has left me,
Weary and old with service, to the mercy
Of a rude stream, that must forever hide me.
Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate ye:
I feel my heart new open'd. O! how wretched
Is that poor man that hangs on princes' favours.
There is, betwixt that smile we would aspire to,
That sweet aspect of princes, and their ruin,
More pangs and fears than wars or women have;
And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer,
Never to hope again.

This is a soliloquy by Cardinal Wolsey from Henry VIII. Wolsey, has just been fired from his job as Lord Chancellor, because Wolsey was unable to secure a papal annulment of the marriage between Henry and his first wife, Katharine of Aragon. Ahem. Henry usually didn't just fire people, and Wolsey is on the run for what he fears is his life.

Henry VIII is a late play in the Shakespearean corpus, probably not entirely written by Shakespeare, but with the help of John Fletcher. If you look, you'll note a lot of the lines are eleven-syllable, ending with an unaccented syllable. This is supposed to be characteristic of Fletcher. But nevertheless an annotated edition I read once said this had to be written by Shakespeare, it was too good to be written by Fletcher. Poor Fletcher, maybe he had a good day, and still it was discounted...

Well, be it Fletcher or Shakespeare, this is one of my favorite soliloquies, and from a play not often read or performed. I bring it out now for all you who are (re)-reading Hilary Mantel in preparation for the drop of the final part of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy this spring. I haven't started rereading myself, but I'm planning on it.

'Mercy/of a rude stream' served Henry Roth as the title of his magnum opus.

Jennifer has a powerful Tony Harrison poem this week.

The Merry Wives of Windsor

Falstaff: "My honest lads, I will tell you what I am about."
Pistol: "Two yards, and more."
Falstaff: "No quips now, Pistol! Indeed, I am in the waist two yards about; but I am now about no waste; I am in thrift."

A 72" waist! Even the large (and admirable) Ambrogio Maestri above on the far right probably doesn't have that for his belt size.

It's been a long time since I read this, which is a little odd, since Falstaff has been in my life lately. I'm not much of an opera person--I would like to be better, but it tends to put me to sleep, while the Other Reader stays awake--but I really enjoyed watching a simulcast of the Met production of Verdi's Falstaff. That's the final scene of the production I saw in the video. I actually walked out whistling "Everyone is Fooled." I hadn't really realized until I just reread the play how closely Verdi followed Shakespeare.

And not too long ago I saw Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight, which includes a bit of Merry Wives, thought not too much, but is basically the tragedy of Falstaff. (Which Merry Wives of Windsor is not. A tragedy, that is.)

Anywho, I'm not an expert. I enjoyed rereading it. A couple of things I noticed: I was pretty surprised how much of the play was prose, especially in the early part. Once the scene changes to elves and fairies (even pretend fairies and elves) in the fifth act, there's more verse.

Also I was a little shocked how difficult the language was, especially in the first act. I mean it's Shakespeare, it's 1600, it's never easy. Still, I've read enough and seen enough plays at this point, I can generally get by. I don't know about you, but I find Shakespeare's quipping much more difficult to follow than his tragic-monologuing, and despite Falstaff's admonition above, there's plenty of quipping in the play. A good actor can make that easier, but I'm quite sure half the first act went right past me. There's a Welsh accent and a French accent, too, just to complicate things.

The Wikipedia article was pretty insistent this is one of Shakespeare's worst plays. Yowch! And the story I'd always heard, that Queen Elizabeth I commissioned the play because she thought Falstaff was such a great character, may not actually be true.

Doesn't matter. I still thought it was pretty funny.

Slender: "...for though I cannot remember what I did when you made me drunk, yet I am not altogether an ass."

Oh, yes you are, Slender! But that's OK, you didn't get the girl. (Or more importantly, the girl didn't have to put up with you.)

Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Shakespeare Company

For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

We went to see the simulcast of the new Royal Shakespeare Production of Romeo and Juliet yesterday, and I read the play first to have the language fresh in my head before seeing it.

That's Karen Fishwick as Juliet and Bally Gill as Romeo to the left there.

I thought the production was good, but not amazing. The actors were all allowed their regional and class accents, and I thought that was fun, though it made me especially glad I'd just reread the play. Karen Fishwick, for example, is a Scot, and Bally Gill is from Coventry. There was no Oxbridge or middle Atlantic sound to any of them.

The prince Escalus was played by a woman. Having seen a female Lear (once, very good!) and several female Prosperos, swapping a woman for a man in a leadership role is no longer very surprising. I'm happy to see it, but it doesn't earn one points any longer. She was good, though.

More interesting was the casting of a woman, Charlotte Josephine, as Mercutio, the high-spirited, perpetually joking friend to Romeo. Physically I thought she was interesting in the role, very lively, but maybe a little too frenetic, and some of her lines felt swallowed.

While the leads were both very good, I didn't see anything I didn't expect there. The most interesting interpretation I thought was that of Benvolio by Josh Finan, who plays the role with more comic verve than I expect. Especially in his first scenes, the looks he gives the exuberant Romeo are a hoot.

The director, Erica Whyman, in an interview before the play reminded us that the play ends with a reconciliation, that all this tragedy unusually enough leads somewhere, which is a good point. But I wasn't convinced by her overall interpretation, which didn't sufficiently lead up to the point she seemed to want to make. And, while there are Gothic elements around the crypt at the end, she really emphasized them in this production, with ghosts of Tybalt, Mercutio, and Montague present as well as the bodies of Romeo and Juliet. It felt a little odd as a ghost story.

Ah, well. In some ways, a competent standard production of Romeo and Juliet. Apparently it's a success and it's bringing young people in to see it, so that's all to the good.