The
interesting thing about "romances" -- the term used to describe the late
phase of Shakespeare's dramatic creations -- is how regularly they build
around relationships between fathers and daughters.
"In
his later plays Shakespeare keeps returning to the theme of the daughter,"
Charles Nicholl writes in "The Lodger Shakespeare." "More precisely the
daughter lost or banished, then arduously found: a rhythm of breakdown and
reconciliation, expressed in the magico-mystical imagery which is the language
of the late plays or 'romances.'"
These plays that don't seem to fit the genre
categories of Shakespeare's earlier works -- histories, comedies, tragedies -- involve
some of the same themes and structural characteristics of the earlier genres,
but add other, sometimes disconcerting touches. Highly unrealistic plot
devices. Statues come to life. Gods appear on stage. Lost children are found.
Old enemies reconcile.
The
term romance was not used for theater pieces in Shakespeare's own time. It was invented
in the latter 19th century by a critic who saw a resemblance between their
"tall tale" character and stories told in the late Middle Ages and
again in his own times.
'Realism'
is conquered by devices found in fairy tales or wonder tales. Stories are set
across long stretches of time and action takes places at distantly removed
sites -- grotesque violations of classic literature's insistence on the
three unities, time, space, and completed action adduced by Aristotle from the drama
invented in his own time.
Deities
may appear on stage -- pagan ones -- as they did in Greek and Latin drama, but certainly did not
in the Elizabethan theater Shakespreare broke into. The vogue for spectacle
called the theatrical "masque," in which actors and titled aristocrats
portrayed figures from mythology, the pantheon of Greek gods or other story forms, and danced or, paced, or
simply showed off glamorous costumes in expensive, special-effect settings may also have influenced this genre of Jacobean
theater (as English theater during the reign of King James I is called).
Gods
may also serve the goal of seeing that plots move toward required resolutions:
the good are recognized, or returned to their rightful place; the evil are
defeated, their machinations exposed.
The
final, moral quality that makes for satisfying conclusions from the wide confusions
and evil deeds of the tall-tale "romance" plot is
reconciliation.
And
here we are back to fathers and daughters.
In
"Cymbeline," one of those late romances performed for the first time
by Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass. -- where I saw the play last
weekend for my first time anywhere -- the essential character is the not the
title character, a British king in Roman times, from whom it takes its name, but his
daughter, Imogen. She is not witty and complex, like the heroines of the earlier comedies,
she's simply a lovable, lively force for good. Bad things happen to her, but -- in
conformity with the structure of the romance-genre plots -- in the end everything
works out for the best. As director Tina Packer points out (staging this play
is also a first for this masterly Shakespeare specialist), everybody loves her. "She
stands up to her father, is not deceived by her wicked step-mother... resists the seducer's charms, and does her
sex proud!"
How's
that for a moral center?
An array of other characters serve the good, some with nobility of character, but none is
really a "hero." Their human 'character' is not the center of
interest. Saving Imogen will do -- and her reconciliation with her bamboozled father
is part of a general unveiling of secrets, along with a rediscovery of a pair of long-lost princes, is part of a hilariously dizzying sequence of stage business
of the sort in which Packer and Shakespeare & Company are the world class front-runners.
Audiences, in my opinion,
need not bother themselves with the question of what this play is supposedly
"about" or what it is "trying to say." Many other plays invite that kind of attention. "Cymbeline" is probably the purest bit of fairy tale in the romance genre. "The
Tempest" written a year later or so is far deeper, subtler, and more
challenging.
The
simplicity of "Cymbeline's" moral universe is the characteristic that enables
Shakespeare & Company to have so much fun with it. The
foolish, easily manipulated Cymbeline holds our attention because Jonathan
Epstein plays the part, and Epstein could command an audience even if he were
asked to sell toothpaste. The self-love of the fantastically, stupidly
ill-intended Cloten -- from whose clutches Imogen must evade -- reaches heights
that can only be described as Trumpian. (No explicit comparisons are made, but
this is my own evil mind at work.)
The
other characters, some solid-good, a few all-bad, with a couple of late-stage conversions
affirming the reconciliation and goodness theme can all be played as seriously
committed to their own nature role, but also self-parodied in their categorical
lack of self-awareness.
And
this is exactly how this production plays. The entire cast embraces the straightforward cast of mind and action required of them by Shakespeare's splendid honey-tongued dialogue, but all these deft players also leap
over the top into comic exaggeration, and parody whenever director or actor finds a handy seam in
the dramatic or linguistic web to exploit.
And the
show plays fast with speeches, argument, and repartee delivered with flawless
audibility. I
think that's what local theater reviewers mean by comments such as
"intoxicatingly funny... non-stop action" (CurtainUp, an online theater magazine) and "the
must-see play of the Berkshire season" (Berkshire Fine Arts, a Berkshire County website).
We're
not meant to confront the complexity of the mortal universe as we are in the
tragedies.
Instead we are assured that even though life appears to be a confused mess, and terrible things do in fact happen in the course of our lives, in the end life
is triumphant.
Sometimes,
maybe, that's what we want to hear.
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