Poolside Reading

The dogs, the wife, and I are unwinding with a week in St. Augustine, Florida, and the Oxford Middleton, alas, stays at home. Instead, I tucked a few choice entries from my list of "Renaissance Plays I'm Embarrassed I Haven't Read Yet" into my bag, and I'm enjoying working through them as I float around in the pool: The Alchemist, Sejanus His Fall, The White Devil (in my defense, I did see The White Devil, at the RSC's Swan in 1996). I brought The Atheist's Tragedy and The Duchess of Malfi, too, but it's not looking like I'll make it that far. Ah, well. On Google Docs, I have a list of something like 80 plays from the period, non-Shakespeare, non-Middleton, that I hope to read someday. I look at that list and think, "How have I made time for Mucedorus, but not Bartholomew Fair?"

That is one mis-spent youth.

Don't know if I'll have much to say about any of them; I'm enjoying playing the sponge this week. But I do have a handful of other items that have been piling up: links and blogs and articles, and I'll see if I can pry myself away from my gin and tonic long enough to put them in a presentable form. Also--accompanying me to Florida: Middleton's The Changeling on DVD, as filmed for the BBC in the very year of my birth, and starring the incomparable Helen Mirren!

I'll be back tomorrow. Right now, my ice is melting.

“A horse! A horse! My kingdom…”

(Image: Macbeth, Banquo and the Weird Sisters, from Holinshed's Chonicles.)

Reading through Gary Taylor’s remarkable text of Macbeth and his supporting notes, I keep veering between admiration and exasperation, sometimes quickly enough to induce dizziness. He supports one item with such an overwhelming surge of evidence and such well-reasoned argument that only a fool would stand against him, like Canute ordering back the tide. Then his next point appears to be based on little more than a hunch, and bolstered by such scanty documentation that you’re afraid to breathe on it, lest it evaporate.

Let me talk about one last example. It doesn’t make a big difference to our understanding of the play, but it illustrates how far Taylor is willing to go when the mood takes him. In Act I, Scene 3, Macbeth and Banquo make their first appearances on the stage, and meet the Witches or Weird Sisters. Taylor has concluded that the two Thanes (see footnote) made their big entrance “on horseback” in Shakespeare’s original play, and has changed the stage directions accordingly.

How could he come to such a conclusion? It seems a fellow by the name of Simon Forman saw Macbeth at the Globe sometime around 1611, and left a written account of his impressions. He described Macbeth and Banquo as “riding through a wood” when they encounter “three women fairies or nymphs.” So, voila: horses on stage.

To call this evidence “thin” is too generous. In the first place, they are clearly not in “a wood,” but “upon the heath,” or even a “blasted” heath, to use Macbeth’s own adjective. So Forman’s phrasing is immediately cast into doubt. If, in spite of this, you want to put such credence in a literal reading of the word “riding," what should we make of the later passage, where he writes that Macbeth “contrived the death of Banquo, and caused him to be murdered on the way as he rode.” (Emphasis mine) More horses? Of course not: in this case, Shakespeare has taken the trouble of explaining in the dialogue why characters are not on horseback when they logically ought to be:

First Murderer:
His horses go about!

Third Murderer:
Almost a mile, but he does usually.
So all men do, from hence to the palace gate
Make it their walk.

Shakespeare usually doesn’t bother with this (perhaps all the talk of “riding” earlier on made him conscientious). It’s just an unspoken convention of the stage that there are no horses, even when the characters would have been on horseback in the “real world.” Why would this be the one scene, in all of Shakespeare’s 38 or so plays, that explicitly calls for them? Messengers, generals, Kings: all walk when they really ought to be riding. There’s even an (abortive) joust in Richard II—all without benefit of horses.

In any case, look at the rest of the scene: after the Witches/Sisters vanish, Ross and Angus enter with messages from the King. Are they on horseback too? Wouldn’t it look odd if they weren’t? If they aren’t, how do they all exit at the end of the scene: some walking, some riding? Or maybe they double up with Macbeth and Banquo? And why aren’t they still riding when they get back to Duncan in the next scene?

It just doesn’t make sense. Far, far simpler to conclude that in this scene, as in every other scene of every other play by Shakespeare, there are no horses.

Two Notes:

Banquo was a Thane too—The Thane of Lochaber. Lots of people—even people who have played Banquo—are a little confused about just what his job is, but his title is in Holinshed’s Chronicles.

Simon Forman’s “Bocke of Plaies” is a remarkable document, containing reflections on Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, Macbeth, and a play about Richard II that was not Shakespeare’s. It’s short and well worth reading, especially to see what he did and did not find memorable about the three Shakespeare plays. For instance, he completely neglects to mention the “statue scene” at the end of The Winter’s Tale. And there’s a passage I find completely hilarious, where he’s trying to explain the impossibly tangled plot of Cymbeline, and just gives up, ending a very long sentence with a hopeless “&c” (et cetera). Additional information at that most wonderful of Shakespeare blogs, Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet.

"And question this most bloody piece of work, to know it further..."

(Image: From DramaTech Theatre's 2007 production of Macbeth: Gene Hullender as Macbeth, Lee Smith as a Weird Sister. Photo by Jon Drews.)

We’ve talked about the treatment of the Weird Sisters in Middleton’s adaptation of Macbeth, and, for what it’s worth, I’ve given you my opinion on those changes: negative, although granting they make a potent spectacle in the theatre. The one thing I’d add, because I don’t think I touched on this, is how much better the Hecate material reads in the “reconstructed” form in Gary Taylor’s text, compared to the drab “Music and a song: ‘Black spirits,’ &c.” in the First Folio and most modern texts of Macbeth. I still can’t stand the Hecate stuff, but at least I have a much better appreciation of how it would have looked and sounded and impressed an audience in the Blackfriars in 1616. I wish all editors would do something similar.

Of all the other items Taylor argues for making up Middleton’s revisions, only two strike me as having much impact artistically: the condensation of the opening battles in Act 1, Scene 2, and the cuts to the “England Scene,” Act 4, Scene 3, in which, supposedly, Edward the Confessor originally appeared in person. Both of these changes are primarily cuts, rather than additions, and are harder to judge without the benefit of the original text. Perhaps, thinking about these things at all is the kind of exercise in imagination that says more about the writer than the subject. It seems that’s always a huge risk in Shakespeare…but, fool that I am, I rush in:

The Opening Battles

Shakespeare loved a swirling melee on the stage, but the audience of 1616 found this sort of thing “old-fashioned and ridiculous” as Taylor puts it. He mentions Ben Jonson’s sneer (in the prologue to the revised edition of Every Man in His Humor) at the absurdity of staging a battle with “three rusty swords and help of some few foot- and half-foot words.” So Middleton moved the battles against Norway, Macdonwald, and Cawdor off-stage, and glued together some bits of the dialogue to narrate the story.

Convincing? Middleton’s fingerprints abound in this scene: vocabulary, phrasing, imagery. Taylor’s analysis of it all is enthralling, and perfectly convincing. Particularly telling is his discussion of the stage direction “Enter…meeting a bleeding captain.” The “enter…meeting” formulation is a Middleton hallmark; Shakespeare used “enter…severally,” or “enter X at one door, Y at another.” It seems certain Middleton condensed and re-wrote this scene, and what else could he have been cutting, but one of those old-fashioned Shakespeare battles?

But is it good? Times change, and tastes change, and a big battle is the highlight of many a modern Shakespeare production. Even in this age of summer blockbusters, we’re perfectly thrilled to see those three rusty swords on the stage. And I think it’s telling that both of the productions of Macbeth I’ve worked with have seen fit to restore some kind of on-stage battle in Act I. I can’t say the scene we have is bad—it’s often quite effective—but I sure wish we had the original.

Edward the Confessor

The “England Scene,” Act 4, Scene 3, is almost always the low point of a Macbeth production: overlong and endlessly talky. Macduff’s reaction to the death of his family is heartbreaking, but comes after so much ineffective dialogue that the audience has generally nodded off by this point. And yet the scene can’t be eliminated: it is here that the revolution begins, the long march to Dunsinane and final victory. In my script, I cut this scene savagely, wondering all the time how Shakespeare had left such a dud at this critical moment in the story.

Taylor argues for a very different interlude in England, in which Edward the Confessor is not merely a vague presence off-stage, but comes on to perform healing miracles in person and anoint Malcolm as Scotland’s rightful King. In a play that started dark and has grown ever bleaker, this is the first ray of light: a sign that Good is a force in the world, and will not allow Evil to rule forever.

Why would Middleton cut this material? Partly, to give the supernatural spotlight completely to his greatly expanded witches, and partly to downplay the significance of the Catholic saint, King Edward.

Convincing? I just don’t know. Taylor’s vision for this scene does feel right…but a feeling isn’t evidence, and the evidence here is quite slim. None of those obvious Middltonian tics in the language or the stage directions, no ragged edges in the verse or sudden shifts in style. That English Doctor is odd, with his speech about Edward curing skin diseases, but far more understandable if you think of the play being performed in front of King James I—he is praising the virtue and goodness of all English monarchs, not just Edward the Confessor. The most important item Taylor produces is an account of Macbeth on the stage written around 1611—before Middleton’s revision—which mentions the play is set in the time of “Edward the Confessor” (the existing text of Macbeth mentions “Edward,” but doesn’t give him the “Confessor” tag). It’s a slender enough reed to prop up such a weighty theory. While it stirs the blood to imagine the possibility, I think the only safe course is a healthy skepticism.

But is it good? If Middleton made this change, I would find it hard to praise him for it. What a wonderful scene the original might have been!

Other Changes

Most of the remaining changes Taylor ascribes to Middleton don’t seem to make much difference to a modern audience. Most significantly, he argues that Middleton added lines to the scene between Lady Macduff and her son (everything between the two places Lady Macduff says, “How wilt thou do for a father?”), punching up the dialogue with topical references to the Overbury treason trials of 1615. It seems convincing, but we’re left with much the same scene in the end.

Of course, what we can’t see—even with Gary Taylor’s literary X-Ray Glasses—are the potentially many, many deletions from the 1606 text. Based on the length of Shakespeare’s other tragedies, as much as one quarter of the original Macbeth may have been left on the Jacobean version of the cutting-room floor. From my experience editing Macbeth for performance, I can attest that it is possible to razor out a great deal of a Shakespeare play without leaving obvious gaps. Perhaps Macbeth was always a conspicuously short text, but it seems to me that we must credit Middleton for at least some of the “tightness” and “intensity” of the play we have today.

On the whole, though, and basing my judgment on the items we can most confidently ascribe to Middleton, I have to take a dim view of the revision. I mentioned that Inga Stina-Ewbank declined to argue (in her introduction to the text) that Middleton’s changes constituted an artistic improvement, and I will make so bold as to say that she did not because they do not.

The revised Macbeth was certainly a popular success, and I don’t deny that Middleton had to pay his bills like everyone else, but I will have to keep reading to find the proof that this is “our other Shakespeare.”

Happily, that is just what I mean to do. I’m not sorry I read this remarkable treatment of Macbeth first, but I’m hungry for the real article: some genuine Thomas Middleton drama. I’m starting with The Changeling, next week, and trembling with anticipation.

Something wicked(er) this way comes...

(Image: From DramaTech Theatre’s 2007 production of Macbeth: Michelle Hendrickson, Brittany Roberts, Lee Smith as the Weird Sisters. Much closer to the original “three women fairies or nymphs” reported by Simon Forman in 1611.)

In exploring my reactions to Middleton’s alterations of Macbeth, I find my thoughts falling neatly into two boxes: one labeled “Witches,” and the other, “Everything Else.” I suppose that’s only appropriate: Gary Taylor himself notes the most significant change Middleton made was “to transform into witches the three characters who are identified as ‘weird sisters’ in Shakespeare’s chief historical source and in passages clearly written by Shakespeare.”

We’ve talked about the specifics of that change already: spells, song, dance, and the superfluous character of Hecate. Taylor, in his notes, only delineates the Middletonian material; it falls to that redoubtable scholar, the late Inga-Stina Ewbank, to mount a defense of these additions on artistic grounds. She makes a game attempt, but I find her arguments ultimately unconvincing—and I note that even she is silent on the question of whether the revisions can seriously be taken to constitute an artistic improvement.

Probably the core of her argument is that Middleton’s passages “give the play a new dimension of theatrical magic,” but I would argue that this “new dimension” is at odds with what makes Macbeth such a chilling exploration of the darker places in the human soul. As she puts it, the effect is to make the drama “less focused on the moral self-destruction of Macbeth, and to shift the emphasis on to the witches as being in command, free and unbounded.” Which is exactly the problem: if Macbeth becomes nothing more than a kind of voodoo doll (as he becomes explicitly in the Orson Welles stage and film productions of the last century), why should we ultimately care? What can we take away from such a play—“stay away from witches?” If that were all there was to Macbeth, I doubt we’d still care about it.

In my own condensation of Macbeth for DramaTech Theatre’s 2007 production, I cut the witches deeply, removing not only most of Middleton’s additions, but a fair slice of Shakespeare, too (on the theory that even he “witched up” the characters, possibly to impress King James). Since the two things everyone in the audience knows from Macbeth are, “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” and, “Double, double, toil and trouble,” I devoted a large portion of my program notes to explaining why they wouldn’t be hearing one of those lines. I thought I’d quote from those notes in making my rebuttal:

...

Of all the cuts we made, perhaps the most missed will be all the witches’ rhymes and spells. So, we might as well get it out of the way up front: tonight’s production of Macbeth will be strictly cauldron-free. No eye of newt, nor tongue of frog, not even the tiniest fillet of a fenny snake.

The witches have been crowd-pleasers for four hundred years, and especially in a Halloween production of Macbeth, their cut lines are conspicuous. But our aim was to strip away those haunted-house trappings and make these characters something much bigger and more powerful, and, yes, scarier than three old crones cackling over a pot. No one in the play or in Shakespeare’s sources ever calls these beings “witches:” they, along with everyone else, call themselves “the weird sisters,” from the Anglo-Saxon wyrd, or “fate.” At bottom, they are the Goddesses of Fate, the Norns, the beings who know what was, and what is, and what shall be:

“All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Glamis!”

“All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor!”

“All hail, Macbeth—that shalt be King hereafter!”

As always in myth, one of the most terrible things that can happen to you is to catch a glimpse of Fate: it is too big and terrible for a human mind to process; it comes to us in seeming riddles that we interpret, foolishly, by hearing what we want and ignoring the rest. The Sisters never tell Macbeth, “You will be King tomorrow,” or, “You will be King if you kill Duncan,” but his ambition (and Lady Macbeth’s) seizes hold of the idea and his moral sense is not strong enough to win out in the end. When he returns to the Sisters and demands to see the consequences of his murder, the knowledge crushes him: a parade of kings descended not from him, but from Banquo, stretching out “to the crack of doom” (one of the monarchs in Banquo’s mirror—if you believe in the power of Prophesy—would be Queen Elizabeth the Second, sitting on the throne of Scotland nine centuries later).

Even in Shakespeare’s day, Macbeth was being “witched up” with all the haunted-house trimmings, but I think this makes the play a smaller thing. In 21^st-Century America, relatively few of us are genuinely scared of Halloween witches. But who isn’t afraid of the vastness of Time, against which background we all seem so impossibly small and all our actions futile?

...

And that, in a nutshell, is my case against the Witches…and for the Weird Sisters, spinning their threads of destiny, not even deigning to feel contempt or pity for us mortals. Witches may be powerfully dramatic, even in this age that we flatter ourselves to call “rational”, but I’ll take the Sisters of Fate any day.

Footnote: DramaTech Theatre is the student-run theatrical company of the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, United States, http://www.dramatech.org/, and was my emotional and artistic home through the long years of my undergraduate experience in the 1990s. A bunch of engineers doing theatre? Quixotic, yes, but, like Quixote, capable of occasional moments of grace and wonder.

The Maid's Tragedy: A Postscript

One last notable thing about The Maid's Tragedy is the inclusion of a fully-dressed marriage masque in the first act. It has room for lots of special effects, and mythological/allegorical figures like Night and Neptune and Eolus reciting tedious bombast, and is just as wretched as any other court masque you could name, though mercifully short and far easier to get through than most of Jonson’s self-important nonsense. It holds no intrinsic interest for the modern reader—doesn’t even resonate with the plot of the rest of the play, which would have been cool—but one imagines it would have been a real treat for the original audience, in a world where the masque was considered the pinnacle of high art, and invitations were an object of fierce wrangling. What redeems this indulgence—slightly—is that the play also contains the perfect dismissal of the whole masque form, offered by a nobleman as they’re preparing for the show:

Lysippus:
Strato, thou hast some skill in Poetry. What thinkst thou of a masque? Will it be well?

Strato:
As well as masque can be.

Lysippus:
As masque can be?

Strato:
Yes, they must commend their King, and speak in praise of the assembly, bless the bride and bridegroom, in person of some God; they are tied to rules of flattery.

Damn straight: conventional and obsequious. And Ben Jonson knew that perfectly well, whatever he told himself to get through the night.

Digression: The Maid’s Tragedy

(Image: illustration from the title page of the quarto printing)

Life has kept me away from this blog for a few days now. Mostly, I’ve been busy with an out-of-town conference, and I found the carry-on baggage restrictions less than amenable to my bringing my Full Textual Apparatus along for the ride. But it wasn’t all Sudoku in the airport bar: I thought I’d use to opportunity to caulk over one of the many, many cracks in my knowledge of the Renaissance Stage: Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy.

Why that play? Well, I own a copy, but that’s been true for like fifteen years without instilling a sense of urgency. I suppose talking about Cardenio put me in mind of it: Cardenio brings up the play George Buc (with the poetic heart of a government censor) called “The Second Maiden’s Tragedy,” and that always makes me think about how I’d never read the first. It’s anthologized and performed often enough to suggest that it’s not entirely devoid of artistic quality, and I rather enjoy Fletcher, based on what little of him I’ve read (Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII, mostly). So, maybe a funny choice for someone who hasn’t even read The Alchemist for crying out loud, but there you go.

To the fan of Shakespeare, much is familiar: bodies everywhere, cross-dressing, wild and wooly plotting, platitudinous closing speech by the new authority figure (who orders everyone to carry the bodies off the stage)…yep, that’s Jacobethan drama. I’m glad to know there are some things you can count on.

But there’s that hard edge of cynicism, too, that Shakespeare seldom dabbled in: that Troilus and Cressida quality where “virtue” is a word for chumps. Newly-married Amintor, in the best scene in the play, is taken aback when his bride, Evadne, refuses to go to bed with him—has sworn, in fact, an oath that she will not. He grapples for some charming explanation:

Amintor:
If you have sworn to any of the Virgins
That were your old companions, to preserve
Your Maidenhead a night, it may be done
Without this means.

Oh, Amintor, you poor, dumb kid. His wife practically snorts in reply:

Evadne:
A Maidenhead, Amintor, at my years?

No bashful virgin, Evadne is in fact conducting a liaison with the very man who arranged her marriage: the King. He won’t (or can’t—the play isn’t clear) marry her himself, and needs a nominal husband for her, to cover any pregnancies that come along. Amintor is the patsy, the beard, the front man—and on no account is he to sample the merchandise.

I was reading this scene in my hotel room, and it just smacked me. A complete sucker-punch. We’re in the second act at this point, and there’s been no indication this is coming. Evadne—no “maid”—isn’t even the title character. That honor goes to Aspatia, a lovely young woman of good birth, who was engaged to marry Amintor before the King hatched his own scheme and ordered Amintor to call it off. She takes this badly.

The play opens after the wedding ceremony, but just prior to the evening’s celebrations. Allegedly set on the island of Rhodes, there is no attempt to capture a foreign culture beyond giving everyone strange names. One of Evadne’s brothers, Melantius, has been summoned home from the wars to attend the festivities, but he was told only that it was his friend Amintor’s wedding, not Evadne’s, and he didn’t get the memo about the last-minute change of brides. Before anyone can clear this up, he sees the jilted Aspatia and congratulates her, giving us one of the other really potent moments in the script:

Melantius:
Hail, maid and wife!
Thou fair Aspatia, may the holy knot
That thou hast tied today last till the hand
Of age undo’t; may’st thou bring a race
Unto Amintor that may fill the world
Successively with soldiers.

Aspatia:
My hard fortunes
Deserve not scorn; for I was never proud
When they were good.

(Exit Aspatia.)

Melantius:
How now?

Awkward. That moment of understated dignity for Aspatia is, regrettably, the only one of its kind. She comes completely unglued soon enough, in really unattractive fashion: luxuriating in grief and pity, whining and wailing in front of anyone who will listen. As all the ladies are getting Evadne (un)dressed and prepared for what is supposed to be her big night, Aspatia won’t shut up:

Aspatia:
…this should have been
My night, and all your hands been employed
In giving me a spotless offering
To young Amintor’s bed, as we are now
For you…

Yes, dear, you had a bad turn, but now you’re just behaving badly. Why don’t you beg off and go home? Ah, but she’s only gotten started:

Aspatia:
This is the last time you shall look on me;
Ladies, farewell; as soon as I am dead,
Come all and watch one night about my hearse;
Bring each a mournful story and a tear
To offer at it when I go to earth…

Now that’s an unpleasant wedding guest. Sadly, this kind of operatic over-reaction becomes the dominant mode of the remainder of the play. The King drops in next morning to say hello, and flies into a jealous rage when Amintor plays the happy husband in public, which was the whole plan from the beginning, right? (The King is not only a lech, but a bit of a fool. Any resemblance to James I is purely coincidental.) Amintor goes crying to his new brothers-in-law, and the only discussion is about when and how they’ll kill the king. Bit harsh? Try the scene where Melantius confronts his sister and demands to have the truth from her mouth:

Melantius:
By thy foul self, no humane hand shall help thee,
If thou criest: When I have killed thee, as I have
Vowed to do, if thou confess not, naked
As thou hast left thine honor, will I leave thee,
That on they branded flesh the world may read
Thy black shame, and my justice; wilt thou bend yet?

This is, of course, perfectly disgusting, and it marked the moment in the play at which I stopped caring about much of anyone. But, in the forthrightly misogynistic world of the Maid’s Tragedy, this little talking-to was just what Evadne needed. She collapses in tears and resolves to sin no more. More than that: while the boys are cooking up some cockamamie plot to get control of the harbor fort, Evadne ties the King to her bed at their next encounter and stabs him. (In the last chuckle of the play, the King thinks it’s some kind of sex game at first. He finds it less charming when he learns the name of the game is “regicide.”)

Now it’s time for those bodies to start piling up, and what’s left of characterization, plot, poetry, all get shoved aside to make room for the blood and thunder. Remember Aspatia? She dresses up like her brother, seeks out Amintor, and challenges him to a duel—which she deliberately loses, so she can spend the remainder of the play gasping and expiring on the floor with as much melodrama as she can muster. By now, she’s grown so tiresome that I’m imploring Amintor to give her one more good stab and get it over with. In the middle of this, Evadne comes in to show her husband how she’s reformed her morals by progressing from adulteress to murderer, and Amintor demonstrates how the poetry has utterly collapsed at this point:

Amintor:
There is presage of some important thing
About thee, which it seems thy tongue hath lost:
Thy hands are bloody, and thou hast a knife.

Evadne explains how she has killed her lover, and now wants Amintor to give her another chance. Amintor has to leave the room for a minute to do the math on that one. As soon as he is gone, she takes a page from Aspatia’s book and offers proof of her love by killing herself with that aforementioned knife. Naturally, Amintor comes back on stage at that moment, thinking perhaps that with some counseling and a willingness to change and grow, they can make this work, but it’s too late. Evadne dies. Aspatia comes to just long enough to reveal her true identity, and dies. Amintor decides that death must be in fashion and rounds things out by killing himself.

Nothing left to do but mop up the mess. The new King (the former King’s brother) comes on with everyone else who’s still breathing, and Melantius tries to kill himself, but they wrestle his sword away from him. Melantius is almost—almost—a Miles Gloriosus figure, always blustering and whipping out his rapier, never actually doing anything. You can’t really read him as satire; just as you can’t read the play as satire, though it might work better that way. It’s all too earnest, too moralizing, even under that patina of cynicism. If Beaumont and Fletcher had had the courage of their lack of convictions, they might have made a better play: something genuinely dark and troubling. But they want to wallow in the filth and yet, ultimately, be above it, and like so many other writers who wanted to both have their cake and eat it, they get neither.

So, The Maid’s Tragedy: neglected masterpiece? No. Some good moments, one really good scene, but it falls apart badly after Act II, and ends up about as empty as any summer blockbuster at the multiplex. But I am glad that I’ve finally read the “First Maiden’s Tragedy,” and I’m ready for Middleton to bring on the Second.

I hope he makes a better job of it…

The Curious History of Cardenio...

I have to give a shout-out to Jeffrey Gantz for his excellent treatment of the whole vexed question of Cardenio, so often tagged as "Shakespeare's Lost Play," in The Phoenix. A Boston company is mounting a new play inspired by...well, lots of stuff, including Theobald's play Double Falsehood and material from Don Quixote.

Gantz recounts the entire history of the search for Cardenio, and brings a healthy scepticism to the table. I am always a bit surprised at how willing people are to accept the idea of Cardenio as a Shakespeare collaboration, when all we have to support that are two exceptionally dubious attributions well after the fact. (Attribution one is from bookseller Humphrey Mosely, and is worthless. Attribution two is from theatre impressario Louis Theobald, who was obliged to climb down when he printed Double Falsehood.)

There is even a Middleton connection, thanks to an eccentric book published by handwriting analyst Charles Hamilton in the 1990's: he examined the manuscript of the play I guess we're supposed to call The Lady's Tragedy now, but has traditionally been referred to as The Second Maiden's Tragedy, and pronounced it Shakespeare's long-lost Cardenio--even though it's not the right story from Quixote and everyone else believes Middleton wrote it. No one took that attribution seriously except for the odd company looing to stage a curiousity; Gantz calls Hamilton's book "dismally argued." I agree--I'm no expert, but it seems to me that Hamilton managed to convince himself that the English "secretary hand" was the same thing as "Shakespeare's handwriting."

I'll come back to The Lady's Tragedy in the fullness of time, as it is naturally included in the lavish new Middleton. I haven't read it before, but it seems to get a lot of praise--not from Gantz, who pronounces it "neither very good nor very Shakespearean." I'll give him the latter, but hope he's wrong on the former.