Review of Periodicals (72.2)

A Danish Yorick?

Peter Anderson offers some thoughts on why a clown character, present in an apparently contemporary German source for Hamlet, does not figure in Shakespeare’s play. His description of Hamlet as “a play without a clown” is a bit strange, given that Hamlet is a tragedy, a genre in which clown parts are famously limited. Shakespeare likes briefly to include them, but he certainly does so in Hamlet in the Gravedigger scenes, and, to a certain extent, with Osric and Polonius, which Anderson concedes, but seems to think it noteworthy that a clownish figure does not play some larger part. Generally missing from his article is some acknowledgment that genre strongly influences the scope of clown roles. Thus he compares the Danish clown “Jens” found in a German version of Hamlet, Der bestrafe Brudenmord (Fratricide Punished), to Shakespeare’s Launce, Costard, and Launcelot Gobbo, without remarking that these clowns are prominent in their plays because their plays are romantic comedies, a genre which conventionally allows for more clowning. Anderson’s argument that the German play might have preceded Hamlet, and should be regarded as a source, is compelling; Der bestrafe has in fact been alluded to as such by scholars before him, as he acknowledges. More speculative is his hypothesis that Will Kempe of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men played Jens in the play on the continent in the 1500s, and that the part was cut from Shakespeare’s Hamlet because by 1600 Kempe had departed from (or been kicked out of) the company. Anyone reading some of Jens’s lines would agree that there were plenty of dramaturgical reasons not to include him in Hamlet, even if we concede the play as source. It is, however, intriguing that Hamlet, though, as a tragedy, relatively clown-free, shows an unusual interest in clowns and how capable they are of messing up serious plays (see Hamlet’s speech to the players), which gives some weight to any thesis which links the “improvisatory” and recently departed Kempe to the play. Anderson also notes an interesting parallel between the German Jens and both Shakespeare’s Launce and Launcelot Gobbo: the humor of all three is bound up with their desire, expressed in soliloquy, to flee situations where people are behaving intolerably (Shylock’s grim house, Launce’s domicile full of weeping relatives, and the twisted Danish court). The essay clarifies what Shakespeare’s clowns do, and what’s missing when they’re gone, and that’s all to the good.

[“A Danish Fool at Elsinore? Some Thoughts on Hamlet’s Lost Clown,” Critical Survey 35:4 (2023): 10-25]

“Silence” Among Shakespeare’s Characters

David Bergeron discusses “gradations of silence” in an interesting essay that encompasses Henry IV, Part 2 (in which “Silence” is a character), Troilus and Cressida, As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew, and Measure for Measure. He initially states what should be obvious, and is obvious to all readers approaching the plays with their performance in mind: the fact that characters are more than their lines (“Shakespeare may … attribute to them all kinds of meaningful gestures”). Bergeron’s argument is the shakier when he ascribes meaningful silence to characters who simply talk less in one scene than another, or have no lines in a scene, even when no remarks about their silence, or about silence as an issue, are made anywhere in the play, or where the situation provides no tantalizing reason for their silence. For example, because of the fact that As You Like It’s Celia stops talking at play’s end, and it is Oliver alone who announces his and her engagement, Bergeron concludes that “Her silence suggests something much less than consent.” The idea that Celia is reluctant to be paired with Oliver goes against the elsewhere reliable Rosalind’s comment that ‘clubs cannot part’ the two, and doesn’t jibe with the joyous tone of As You Like It‘s ending. Bergeron’s argument about meaningful gradations or intervals of silence is more persuasive when applied to a play in which a character’s “silence” is remarked (Bianca’s “silence” which “flouts” the voluble Kate, and is later amusingly jettisoned for wifely wit once a suitor is obtained). It also makes sense to discuss, as Bergeron does, Isabella’s silence in response to the Duke’s marriage proposal in Measure for Measure, given the profound potential barriers that play, and that final scene, has exposed between Isabella and marriage to anyone, and to someone like Duke Vincentio in particular. Bergeron also spends a bit too much time on this scene’s forgettable Varrius, giving him much more thought than Shakespeare apparently did, though his inclusion, in this section of his article, of an account of a scene in performance is helpful. The subject of silence in Shakespeare is fascinating, and the article prompts the desire for a study of the issue done with greater attention to the history of and possibilities for moments of character “silence” in performance.

[“Silence in Shakespeare’s Comedies,” Essays in Criticism 73;3 (July, 2023): 275-96]

Shakespeare in Bengal

Sukanta Chaudhuri’s “Shakespeare Comes to Bengal” is a fascinating account of the history of Shakespeare in Calcutta and its environs, which spans several centuries of growth and change. Chaudhuri demonstrates her claim that India’s involvement with Shakespeare has been and is “a creative development that appropriates and reorders the materials of a colonizing culture.” As always, she notes, the Empire writes back. Chaudhuri informs us that the performance of Shakespeare in Bengal dates back to 1775, when a Calcutta theater opened within a few years of the British founding of theaters in Bombay and Madras. Shakespeare was performed there, to a mostly British audience and “a sprinkling of English-educated Indians.” Not until the mid-1800s did the plays begin to star Indian performers; in 1848, the “native gentleman” Baishnab Charan Auddy played Othello. But inclusion was thereafter swift. In 1853, some plays were being performed with an all-Bengali cast. Chaudhuri argues that performed Shakespeare outstripped academic Shakespeare in its assimilability to native culture, as, eventually, theaters began to offer the plays in translation, in productions which included Bengali traditions of jatra: exaggerated stage action, and song and dance, even in tragedies like Hamlet. These plays’ adapters “used Shakespeare as Shakespeare used Plutarch.” Independence in theatrical Shakespeare interpretation increased after India’s literal political independence from Great Britian was achieved in 1947. Meanwhile, academic instruction in Shakespeare at all levels tended, throughout the 1800s and most of the 1900s, to ignore performance traditions (Indian or otherwise) and focus on the plays as literature. Thus there have for centuries been a rich variety of ways to experience Shakespeare in India – perhaps especially in Bengal.

[“Shakespeare Comes to Bengal,” Multicultural Shakespeare 27:42 (2023): 31-46]

Evil Disgusting Horrible Falstaff

At first I thought Jonathan P. A. Sell’s attack on Falstaff was a Swiftian satire, not only because of its eloquence and humor, but due to the depth of its disdain for any reader or theatergoer’s finding in Falstaff some measure of healthful laughter or laudable fun. I am still not sure he is serious. So well written is his haughty dismissal of those benighted critics who find redeeming qualities in Falstaff, that I will quote him extensively rather than paraphrase. Sell laments the fact that “generations of sentimentalists have sided with a boozy, aggressive philanderer, capable of organising armed assault on innocent victims but too cowardly to take active part; and, in consequence, have branded as a disloyal blackguard a young prince who tires of what he has sufficient maturity, intelligence and moral pride to recognise as an arid and senseless life of Riley.” According to Sell, “This momentous, collective loss of moral bearings may be imputed in part to [the eighteenth-century editor] Theobald’s conjecture” that the famous crux in Henry V, where Mistress Quickly incongruously follows her claim that the dying Falstaff’s “nose was as sharp as a pen” with a reference to a “table” of “green fields,” actually meant that Falstaff “babbled of green fields.” Theobald’s emendation, Sell claims, has led to a misguided notion of the Boar’s Head Tavern as a “pastoral” haven from Henry IV’s strife-ridden world of battle and court, when it is really quite literally a den of thieves with absolutely nothing good about it. Thus we Falstaff fans are victims of “sentimentalizing greenwash.” To Sell, “when Sir John is reported to have ‘babbled of green fields’, he is elevated above the dirt and sleaze of the Boar’s Head to those blessed meadows from which, ever since Theobald, he has lovingly tended his human flock of black sheep, reprobates and rascals. His putative pastoral idiom saves him from the mark of Cain” which he deserves for a criminal existence marked by “bad debts, coarse humor, and shabby sex.” In fact, most readers and playgoers, scholarly and otherwise, find Falstaff and the Boar’s Head scenes refreshing and hilarious without reference to that line in Henry V, and the contention of some critics that the tavern is a kind of urban “Green World” has rather to do with Prince Hal’s (and our) own fun in it, and the way in which these scenes sharpen Hal’s ability to engage with all ranks and “humors” of men through witty encounters, as Hal himself exults (1HIV 2.4). His education there may not be a moral one, but it is an education, and there’s more to life than morality. Sell, however, doesn’t think so. He finds that Quickly’s Theobald-emended words sadly “restore the fat, idle and cowardly lecher to an infant innocence” (as though anyone sees Falstaff that way!) and have wrongly “transported editors, critics and ordinary punters ever since.” As an ordinary punter, I myself do not read Shakespeare so puritanically, and cannot agree with Sell’s final definition of Falstaff as a sexual exploiter. (With Doll Tearsheet, it’s not clear just who’s zooming who.) Yet I am persuaded by Sell’s defense of another eighteenth-century editor, Grey’s, substitution of “table on green fells” for the crux. This makes way more sense than “babbled of green fields,” as it yields the meaning that Falstaff’s nose was as sharp as a pen against a table (a common Shakespeare word for book) of green skins (fells; skin of new sheep, or vellum, here alluding to Falstaff’s sickly-green facial hue). I do not, however, think all playgoing or literary friends of Falstaff merit the accusation that they view him as a “messianic tippler” – though if anyone could persuade me, it would be Sell, whose verbal gifts rival those of the fat knight.

[“Quickly’s Rawhide Notebook: Desentimentalizing the Crux of Henry V 2.3.15-16, Shakespeare 19:3 (2023): 355-76]