The Wheel of Fire

The Wheel of Fire by George Wilson Knight
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Extremely idiosyncratic takes on Shakespeare, written with such whirling enthusiasm that it can be hard to maintain a grasp of the argument. Wilson Knight is dismissive of critical approaches that focus on character and intention (which cards on the table I'm amenable to), preferring to look at the symbolic significance of the plays and something that today might perhaps uncharitably be described as their general vibe. Most valuable for me were the readings of Measure for Measure and Trolius and Cressida, which the critical consensus interprets as satirical if not farcical in tone, but Wilson Knight takes more seriously. I thought it was impossible to see Duke Vincentio as a hero, but Wilson Knight shows that there can be positive readings of the character, showing in turn how Shakespeare's skill in balancing perspectives is evident even in plays that today's readers are liable to only interpret in a certain direction.

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The Alchemist

The Alchemist by Ben Jonson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Despite Jonson’s interest in seeing this play printed and read, it still belongs best on the stage, where the rapid-fire back and forth and madcap pace is more evident. The plot starts fast and gets faster, as the various gulls first get introduced and then pile up on each other, with the con men having to think of ever more extravagant tricks to separate them from their money. Quite a bit of it is pretty turgid on the page. The jokes need great performances to bring them alive.

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Philaster: Or, Love Lies A-Bleeding

Philaster: Or, Love Lies A-Bleeding by Francis Beaumont
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The dramatic trick this keeps playing is to bring characters to the edge of death and then pulling back. The subtitle ‘Love Lies a-Bleeding” gestures towards that – the main couple are both near mortally wounded but recover and are united at the end through a twist that makes less sense the more you think about it. The blood that is shed is proof of their honour. The most radical aspect of the play is that it is the intervention of the people against a tyrannical king that delivers the happy ending. Shakespeare borrowed some elements of this play for Cymbeline and improved on them in almost every way.

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The Tempest

The Tempest by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a strange one. Prospero starts the play as a revenger, and his authoritarian disposition towards his daughter, Ariel and Caliban provides plenty of scope for modern day readers to see the character as an upholder of patriarchy, colonialism and racism. But at the end of the play, there’s a swerve away from revenge and towards high-minded forgiveness. Prospero overcomes his baser nature – which the play elsewhere associates with conspiring courtiers, drunken louts and 'savage' men in faraway lands. He is the stage manager as hero, whereas in most Shakespeare plays the stage-manager tends to be the villain (see in particular Iago and Edmund). He is not as compromised as the 'Duke of Dark Corners' in Measure for Measure – whereas that play's ending descends into farce, The Tempest strikes a more wistful tone. Prospero's magic engineers a happy ending – a restoration of the natural order, with natural slaves put in their place and the rightful rulers reassuming theirs. Shakespeare's contemporary audience may have accepted this at face value. A modern audience may find it harder to do so.

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The Changeling

The Changeling: Full Text and Introduction by Thomas Middleton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Bit of an odd one. There are thematic connections to be made between the largely unconnected main plot and sub-plot, but they are rather flimsy. Middleton’s moralistic policing of female chastity is quite an unattractive trait, but the villainous De Flores, obsessed with bedding the beautiful Beatrice-Joanna even if it kills him, is a fun role.

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The Witch of Edmonton

The Witch of Edmonton by Thomas Dekker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A play full of ambiguities. To what extent is the titular witch created by the prejudices of her community? How much agency does she really have? She is both a scapegoat and a revenger. The play revels in the fascination with witchcraft while at the same time portraying Mother Sawyer as a victim. Both her and Frank Thorney are pressured into doing evil by the fraught economic circumstances they find themselves in. Both get sent to the gallows, but while Mother Sawyer goes out cursing, Frank is penitent – a slightly heavy-handed insistence by the dramatists on the importance of forgiveness. The most ambiguous character of all is of course the satanic talking dog, who either inspires or encourages the chaos that engulfs Edmonton. In the end he is beaten an away by the good-natured simpleton Cuddy Banks – a Bottom-like figure who consorts with demons but can’t be corrupted by them. It is another one of the play’s ironies that the most heroic character is the clown.

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The Knight of the Burning Pestle

The Knight of the Burning Pestle by Francis Beaumont
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It is a testament to the rapid evolution of the theatre in Renaissance England that basically within 20 years of the medium establishing itself we get deconstructions like this. Here a rote city comedy with shades of Dekker’s Shoemaker’s Holiday is disrupted by a grocer family who park themselves on the stage and insist on the addition of a heroic adventure subplot (heavily influenced by Don Quixote). Their interjections provide a meta commentary on the different tastes and expectations of the audience, although the jokes do start to wear a bit thin towards the end. The author’s preface seems to be a defence against accusations of snobbery – the play is written to “please all, and be hurtful to none”. It’s certainly a delight.

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The Revenger's Tragedy

The revenger's tragedy by Cyril Tourneur
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Takes the revenge tragedy genre established by Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy to its limit and beyond – stripping out any potential for pathos or catharsis and replacing it with farce. Middleton (more likely to have been the dramatist than Tourneur) was best known for acerbic heavily-plotted city comedies, and those inclinations are present here – with disguises creating absurd situational comedy and the revengers deploying wildly inventive methods of murder. Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus had a similar blackly comic tone, but The Revenger’s Tragedy refines the formula and introduces a contempt for the machinations of courtly life that points towards Webster’s nihilistic White Devil and Duchess of Malfi. A lot of fun.

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Hamlet

Hamlet by William Shakespeare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The last time I read Hamlet I came away thinking it was a play haunted by depression and suicide rather than revenge. This time around, what struck me was how the Ghost sets up a theological mystery that Hamlet needs to investigate. It is only with the staging of the play within the play that Hamlet can see the Ghost is honest and the King is a regicide. But that reveals his hand, and gets him packed off to England. Revenge is deferred because of Hamlet’s probing at the workings of heaven. It is after seeing Fortinbras marching with his army to fight over “an eggshell” that he lets go and surrenders to what may be. The sea voyage turns him into a creature of impulse – “the readiness is all”. In the final scene the deaths feel random. Providence takes over and resolves the feud where Hamlet’s intellectualising could not. His antic disposition enters a new lighter mode in Act 5. The angst is replaced by a sense of comic absurdism, where weighty matters of death are treated as skulls to be thrown about. But in his last moments he suddenly starts caring about his reputation, contradicting his earlier claim that not knowing what might happen after death means he is ready for it. Fundamentally this character fascinates more than any other not just because of the poetry he is capable but because of the several transformations he undergoes.

The Arden 3rd edition’s textual notes are excellent. A lot of the introduction and appendixes focus on the decision to present the different versions of the play separately, rather than conflating them. That is new and interesting, but it leaves less room to explore the historical context and staging history of the play.

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