Reviews 2008
Reviews 2008
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written and directed by Peter Hinton
Stratford Festival, Festival Pavilion, Stratford
July 25-September 28 2008
"A Diffuse Theatrical Essay"
On July 25 the Stratford Shakespeare Festival inaugurated its fifth stage, the outdoor Festival Pavilion, with Peter Hinton’s revue “Shakespeare’s Universe (Her Infinite Variety)”. According to the Festival season brochure the point of this 75-minute presentation is “to complement our 2008 playbill ... and to explore the many-faceted and sometimes paradoxical role of women in Shakespeare’s world.” “Paradoxical” is the key word. On the one hand the show highlights the lack of rights women had in law and the vituperations of misogynists tracts of the time. On the other hand, we hear from the misandrist tracts women published and selected excerpts of plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries that show quite an awareness among their male authors of the plight of women. In the end the show is quite enjoyable for the fine performances from the six actors, but it seems more like a rather diffuse essay in dramatic form meant not to complement the 2008 playbill in general as much as Hinton’s own production of “The Taming of the Shrew” in particular.
From the outside the Festival Pavilion does not look promising--just a fenced-off piece of lawn to one side of the Discovery Centre across from the Festival Theatre. Inside, the enclosure is quite pleasant. The stage is a disc of wooden planks incorporating a large lovely tree and painted with a portrait of Elizabeth I with the signs of the zodiac around the perimeter. The backdrop is a blowup of the famous panoramic etching “Long View of London from Bankside” (1647) by Wenceslaus Holler showing old London Bridge and both banks of the Thames. The seating is on a semicircle of metal bleachers. The space is open to the sky so that the main concerns for theatre-goers are sun and rain. The performance I attended was halted because of a mere sprinkle. After a pause it continued to the end even though by then the sprinkle had become a true shower.
The six actors, who unfortunately appear in no other shows at Stratford this season, are each listed as a character type in the programme even though they each a wider range of characters than the name would suggest. The six are Peggy Coffey as the Shrew, Laura Condlln as the Moll, Matthew MacFadzean as the Puritan, Karen Robinson as the Witch, Michael Spencer-Davis as the Poet and Dayna Tekatch as the Maid. Designer Caroline M. Smith has given them each period costumes that reflect their “type”.
The piece moves freely back and forth from the late 16th to the early 17th century in a more associative than logical manner. The show starts with the rantings of one Joseph Swetnam (played by MacFadzean), author of the aggressively misogynist tract “The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women” (1615). His statements are so outrageous (e.g., “who can but say that women sprung from the devil”) that he becomes a kind of straw man for Hinton to attack through the revue. Swetnam’s tract provoked many counter-tracts published by women (e.g., Rachel Speght, “Ester Sowernam” and “Constantia Munda”), but Hinton prefers to cite the Italian writer Moderata Fonte (played by Robinson) whose work “The Worth of Women” (1600) makes the argument that since women were created in Paradise they always carry a bit of Paradise within them.
We learn that women were considered chattel in marriage and were valued more for their dowries than themselves. We have all heard the phrase “A woman’s work is never done”, but it is a pleasure to hear the entire poem from 1629 declaimed by Peggy Coffey with all its details about the drudgery of everyday home life. Wife-beating was not frowned upon although Hinton does at least cite Robert Snawsell’s “A Looking Glass for Married Folks” (1610) as one of the few to publicly oppose the practice. Hinton dwells on the horrors of a device called a brank or the “gossip’s bridle” used to punish scolds. It was a kind of cage put over the head of the accused woman that often included a metal, sometimes spiked tongue-depressor.
At the same time as women were thus viewed in law and common life as being to be chastened, England was ruled by a virgin queen deified in poetry of the period. We also learn of Amelia Lanyer (also spelt “Emilia Lanier”) (1569-1645), who became the first Englishwoman to become a professional poet, some speculating that she is Shakespeare’s Dark Lady of “The Sonnets” (also played by Robinson).
Far more interesting than the citation of all these tracts, laws and poems are the staged excerpts of plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Hinton mentions John Fletcher’s proto-feminist response to Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew”, “The Tamer Tamed”, in which Petruchio is tamed by his second wife Maria, but annoyingly does not quote from it. The first real excerpt is from “The Two Angry Women of Abingdon” (1598) by Henry Porter in which a girl (Tekatch) reacts with disgust when her father (Spencer-Davis) tells her of the marriage he has arranged. In the second we learn that there were women of Shakespeare’s day celebrated for their flouting of convention such as the infamous Mary Frith (1589-1659) better known as “Moll Cutpurse”. Oddly, rather than presenting an excerpt of the play “The Roaring Girl” (1611) where she is a character, Hinton gives us excerpts from Thomas Heywood’s “The Fair Maid of the West” (1603) that follows the life of a fictional “roaring girl” called Bess Bridges. There we see tavern-owner Bess (played by Condlln) in men’s clothing easily defeat and humiliate the cowardly man Roughman (Spencer-Davis) in the woods. Later at the tavern, Roughman tries to brag about his great fight only to have Bess reveal herself as his opponent and soundly thrash him in public.
The final excerpts come from an intriguing play based on then-current events called “The Witch of Edmonton” (1621) by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford. In it an old woman Elizabeth Sawyer (movingly played by Robinson) laments that her neighbours all view her as a witch because of the infirmities of her age. She is then tried (with Spencer-Davis as the prosecutor) and found guilty. Now, with nothing to lose, she decides to become a witch indeed and makes a pact with the devil who appears to her in the form of a dog (a mischievously nimble MacFadzean) to take revenge on her neighbours.
Hinton’s theatrical essay leaves one with the impression that there is no simple view of women in Shakespeare’s day. But then, who actually thought there was? Hinton concludes that Shakespeare reflects but is somehow beyond the squabbling of his day over the role of women by portraying woman, as his Enobarbus says of Cleopatra, in “her infinite variety”. The effect of the show, however, is not to make you rush out to see Shakespeare but to seek out a full production of one of the excerpted plays. Rather than presenting such a collection of tantalizing tidbits, wouldn’t staging productions by Shakespeare’s contemporaries more often be a more satisfying way of showing audiences the wide variety of themes and modes of expression that existed in Shakespeare’s time?
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Peggy Coffey, Dayna Tekatch, Karen Robinson, Michael Spencer-Davis and Matthew MacFadzean. ©David Hou.
2008-08-14
Shakespeare’s Universe (Her Infinite Variety)