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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The Spanish Tragedy

The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first big hit of Elizabethan drama, and still absolutely captivating. The scene constructions and rhetorical flourishes may strike some readers as offputtingly artificial. I thought they were impressively thought out, and rich in interpretative possibilities. Kyd gives us a play within a play within a play. The personification of Revenge orchestrates the action, coming to embody the protagonist Hieronimo who in turn stages a play that enacts his revenge. The pivotal scene in which he discovers the letter revealing the murderers of his son, which can feel quite arbitrary, can be staged in such a way that has Revenge come in to press his thumb on the scale and kickstart the revenge plot. The guiding hand of providence makes good in the end, delivering a sense of poetic and dramatic justice. It must have felt powerfully cathartic to an audience who were used to burying their children to have a figure embody and enact extra-worldly justice on the stage, although the disaster that ensues might complicate the response of a modern audience. Anyone interested in Shakespeare or the theatre of his day needs to read this play.

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The White Devil

The White Devil by John Webster
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Extremely plot-heavy to its detriment. Webster doesn’t have his characters explain themselves to the audience in soliloquy so it’s often hard to determine why they are doing what they are doing. The general sense conveyed is of courtiers and lovers driven to hysteria and madness as a result of serving the whims of their powerful patrons. Poison pervades the court and few escape it. The sham trial in the middle of the play is its finest moment. The ending is very confused.

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The Duchess of Malfi

The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hard to find a character in literature that embraces chaos more than Bosola – a scholar and a soldier who turns himself into a spy and assassin before rediscovering a sense of morality at the end, when it’s too late. The play continually makes reference to the melancholic humour of the characters – a kind of worldly depressive attitude that leads to ethical nihilism. It is the Duchess who provides an alternative model of being – confident in asserting her desires and dutiful towards her family. She is a shining light in the darkness, and cannot survive the maniacal melancholics who surround her. This play is not quite as outrageous as John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity, but it comes close. I’m all for it.

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The Tamer Tamed

The Tamer Tamed by John Fletcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A rare case where the sequel improves on the original, showing that The Taming of the Shrew’s dodgy sexual politics were questioned even in Shakespeare’s day. Fletcher turns the tables on the flamboyant “wife-breaker” by having the women in the play group together to go on strike and demand conditions for better treatment. There’s a bit of balancing there, as some of the demands seem then as now quite frivolous – Maria making free with her husband’s wealth in a way that doesn’t quite square with the responsible management of the household. But arguably this is just another ploy to “break” Petruchio’s will. Once achieved, Maria promises mutuality and obedience, although as the play’s beginning suggests, these promises at a play’s end don’t always last a marriage.

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The Taming of the Shrew

The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Solidifies my theory that Shakespeare didn’t write any great plays in the first seven years of his career, with the possible exception of Love’s Labour’s Lost (and even then I find that play hard to like). Emma Smith makes a good case for the fundamental ambiguity of whether Katherine is in fact tamed by Petrucio – the text leaves options open for different stagings. For what it’s worth, Katherine’s extended capitulation speech at the end of the play suggests to me an acceptance of her fate, rather than an ironic and hostile attitude to it. Shakespeare would grow out of the urge to humble his active and opinionated heroines, and his plays became better for it.

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Othello

Othello by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Othello's constant vows to heaven and his romantic view of himself sets up his marriage to Desdemona in such idealised terms that they demand interrogation – which the villainously sceptical Iago is more than happy to provide. The play was written in close proximity to Measure for Measure, which is very interested in how moral purity turns people into hypocrites – Angelo and Isabella are maneuvered by the 'Duke of dark corners' into sordid compromises. In Othello, sexual jealousy is the rotten apple in the barrel. Othello and Desdemona are more sympathetic figures than Angelo and Isabella, and Iago is more straightforwardly evil than Duke Vincentio, but there's a similar dynamic of heavenly ideals being dragged by the devil into hell. Iago's resentment is the driving factor in this process – all ideals must be torn down as a result of being overlooked for promotion. The real hero in the story is his wife Emilia, who betrays and exposes him in the end, but also shows Desdemona a more realistic attitude to love and marriage, one that reflects Rosalind's lectures to Orlando in As You Like It. Between heaven and hell is the world, and to live in it requires abandoning the absolutist attitudes that destroy the couple in the play.

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The Merchant of Venice

The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reading this play after The Jew of Malta does give an insight into Shakespeare’s temperament in my view. Marlowe’s villain is a caricature that nonetheless delights the audience with the audacity of his evil plots. Marlowe’s flamboyant personality and unorthodox opinions shine through. Shylock is also clearly a villain, but Shakespeare cannot help but fill out the sense of grievance that motivates his desire for revenge. He is in successive scenes abhorrent, pitiful and a figure of fun. Shakespeare is a man that sees all the angles. The ambiguity of his depictions in his plays I suspect reveals the reticence of his judgements in real life.

The Merchant of Venice isn’t quite as finely balanced as more political plays like Richard II or Julius Caesar. Antonio, the titular Merchant, is clearly a more heroic figure than Shylock, even if he does spit at and berate him. The play contrasts the self-interested practice of usury with Antonio and Bassanio’s open-hearted generosity. The financial metaphors for love that abound in the play ironise this liberality, but ultimately the play celebrates it. Shylock’s greatest sin may be his miserliness. It is incumbent on the fortunate to give and forgive freely.

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The Jew of Malta

The Jew of Malta: Christopher Marlowe by Stephen Bevington
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a tragedy in name only. Part of the appeal then and now is Barabas’s gleeful plotting to trick and murder anyone who crosses him. The language is clear and pacy, and the bodies pile up very quickly. It’s so cartoonish it’s difficult to take seriously. Shakespeare undoubtedly took that model but pushed it into more unsettling territory with Richard III and Titus Andronicus. The Jew of Malta is a simple black comedy in comparison, with very little depth to Barabas’s character. Yes, Ferneze gets him in the end, and is arguably a more authentically successful Machiavellian, but he’s hardly positioned as the real villain of the piece. The play nods to the prejudice the Jews face, but doesn’t suggest it is a motivating factor for Barabas’s murder spree. Shakespeare’s finely balanced viewpoints are not Marlowe’s style. His heroes are bombastic charismatics who break all the rules and delight audiences in doing so, even if conventional morality demands that they are punished at the end.

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Measure for Measure

Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I do think that Shakespeare here abandons some of the ambiguity that is a signature of his work. It’s just very difficult to take the conniving and duplicitous duke seriously as a force for moral and political instruction. His enthusiasm for manipulation tips the scales of sympathy against him, and it’s very clear how his whims have made a mockery of the laws of Vienna. The way he twists a tragic situation towards a comic resolution offends all sense of justice, and pushes the play towards satire. One wonders what James I would have thought of it. This may be Shakespeare at his most rancid and disillusioned, and it’s one of his finest statements on political decay and corruption.

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Love's Labour's Lost

Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This probably works really well on stage but I found it a bit of a slog to read – it felt like an awful long time for love's labours to get lost. The feel of the play is close to The Importance of Being Earnest via Jane Austen – gentility trading witty barbs and wasting time on dressing up and playing silly games. Woudhuysen's introduction in the Arden third edition provides a comprehensive guide to the way the jokes comment on the instability inherent to the use of language. Shakespeare is poking fun at booksmart narcissists, and engineers an ending that defers the marriages and undermines the expectations of the comic genre. Death and reality gatecrash the party and leave conclusions open. It should feel like a more radical break than it does, maybe because all the characters are so unserious that you can't invest much in their fates. The problem plays this gestures towards have higher stakes and are more effective in discomforting the audience.

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Pericles

Pericles by William Shakespeare
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was wildly popular when it came out – audiences really responded to the divinely-assisted reversal of fortune in the back half. The play feels quite flat to me – Pericles is a bit of a heroic non-entity who does the right thing and is eventually rewarded with the restoration of his family. Bearing misfortune nobly, and resisting the temptations of the world, may have resonated more strongly in a religious age where random ‘acts of god’ regularly ruined lives.

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The Two Noble Kinsmen

The Two Noble Kinsmen by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A play more Fletcher’s than Shakespeare’s and the Fletcher bits are great. I had a wonderful time with this. The scene where two good friends politely prepare to fight each other to the death is superb black comedy. The Jailer’s Daughter being driven literally mad with lust is dramatic and absurd. The tone is complex throughout – starting and ending with the concurrent evocation of nuptial and funeral rites. It is subtle and strange and very involving. An underrated gem and a play that should be performed more often.

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Arden of Faversham

Arden of Faversham by Anonymous
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An Elizabethan erotic thriller, made extra spicy because based on a true story of a wife murdering her husband. A Coen Brothers element comes in through the excellently named ruffians Shakebag and Black Will, who spend the majority of the runtime comically trying and failing to do the deed. That is intercut with the quarrels between Alice and her lover Mosby, as they waver over their devotion to each other and their commitment to the murder plot. That is the play at its most psychologically acute, providing an interesting insight into contemporary expectations of marriage, gender roles and social class.

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All's Well That Ends Well

All's Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The depiction of Helen and Bertram is emblematic of Shakespeare’s show not tell approach to drama. We don’t really know why Helen loves Bertram, neither is it very clear why Bertram rejects Helen. Motivation is left open to interpretation, something that actors can define in performance. Despite that openness, this is not a much-loved play. Bertram’s caddishness makes him clearly unsatisfactory as an aspirational love-interest for the intrepid Helen. The resolution of the “comedy” is distinctly uncomfortable and provisional – an explicit rejection of the harmony demanded by endings in the genre. Is a marriage cobbled together by underhand means a justified end? As usual, Shakespeare leaves the question hanging and refuses to provide an answer.

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The Shoemakers' Holiday

The shoemaker's holiday by Thomas Dekker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A feel good fantasy of feasting and upward social mobility, written at a time of poor harvests and high food prices to serve as a welcome bit of escapism. The central figure is the rambunctious shoemaker Simon Eyre, whose lines boom out of the page, and whose casting would make or break a performance. There is darkness at the edge of the play – including a war with France that must resume when the holiday is over – but it hardly balances out its overwhelmingly cheerful tone. A fun time.

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The Comedy of Errors

The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

One of Shakespeare's shortest plays. It forgoes his talents for characterisation to focus on a very knotty plot majoring on confused identity. That perhaps is the point – the characters aren't stable individuals but are defined by external appearances and expectations. That's fine, but it's also not very funny. It is also particularly unkind towards the servant characters, who are constantly beaten, and Adriana, who has to cope with her husband's obvious infidelities.

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Titus Andronicus

Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Better than its reputation suggests, but still not great. The intriguing contrast for me is between Titus, who has buried 20 children and will kill a few more during the events of the play, and Tamora and Aaron, who despite their villainy feel protective over their offspring. That complicates the presentation of Titus as a tragic hero – it is a lack of pity and familial affection that heaps horrors on his head. Aaron is an enjoyably Marlovian devil, but still has enough humanity to want to preserve his son.

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Coriolanus

Coriolanus by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An exceedingly well-designed political play – with scenes echoing each other in powerfully ironic ways. Coriolanus is allergic to explaining himself, he is a public figure who must be interpreted by the other characters and the audience. Lee Bliss’s introduction in the New Cambridge edition captures how his inflexibility in the world of public affairs makes him so wrong-footed and easy to manipulate. The ambivalences in the text, and the multiple meanings that can be generated from the way the play is acted and staged, makes this a play worth re-watching and re-reading. I like the charismatic Richard II a bit better, but Coriolanus is up there with Shakespeare’s best portrayals of the grubby compromises involved in politics.

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As You Like It

As You Like It by William Shakespeare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Such a delight. Not fully sold on James Shapiro’s theory that Orlando sees through Rosalind’s disguise before the final scene. His simpleness doesn’t detract from his merits, and he learns to be witty enough. There’s a lot of emphasis at the beginning on the interaction between nature and fortune (as we might put it: nature and nurture) which maps broadly over the timeless virtues of the country vs the workaday tribulations of the court. Agnes Latham’s introduction makes a good case for Arden being as magical a location as the fairy-infested forest in Midsummer Night’s Dream, with a god of marriage at its heart to bless the weddings at the end. The forest is the true touchstone of the play, testing and mending all who venture in it.

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King Henry VIII

King Henry VIII (All Is True): The Arden Shakespeare Third Series by William Shakespeare
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Gordon McMullen’s good-humoured case for the subtleties of this play in the Arden edition is interesting, but ultimately failed to convince me. The material should have furnished a more interesting play than the one we get. All Is True is a provocative title, but in performance it’s pretty clear which advisors are on the side of truth and which are not, and there’s only so much Shakespeare and Fletcher do to destabilise the impression that the Catholics are the bad guys and the Protestants the good guys. Henry’s wives, historically interesting personalities, are here rendered strangely bloodless. The cursing queens of the early histories, who provide actors with powerful dramatic parts, have been silenced. Shakespeare is adept at navigating the fraught political circumstances in which his political plays were performed, but here the edges were sanded down a bit too much.

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King Richard III

King Richard III by William Shakespeare
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Richard’s power to compel those who have excellent reasons to hate him strains credulity, and requires significant charisma in an actor to pull off. On the page his tricks are funny but hard to take seriously. He is still a bit of a stock character – a personification of Vice rather than an actual person. The most interesting choice Shakespeare makes is to contrast Richard’s rise to power with a chorus of female queens who curse him for destroying their families – a foreshadowing of the way Macbeth’s fall is prophesied by the witches. The women have their revenge at the end, although the abrupt ending eludes catharsis. Basically, Richard III walked so Macbeth could run.

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King Henry VI, Part 3

King Henry VI, Part 3 by William Shakespeare
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The stabbings and double-crosses become a bit exhausting by the end. The wheel of fortune revolves several times before the virtuous but ineffectual Henry VI falls and the demonically ambitious Richard, Duke of Gloucester commits to murdering his way to the crown. It’s a balancing of opposites that Shakespeare will refine in his later histories. This one is full of spectacular battles and magical omens, but the characters are flat and the language largely unmemorable.

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King Henry VI, Part 2

King Henry VI, Part 2 by William Shakespeare
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The baleful influence of Tillyard on the commentary of the histories is slowly being exorcised, but interpretations are still made in relation to his teleological theory. The rest of Shakespeare’s work should make it obvious that the plays thrive because of their ambiguities rather than their doctrines. Here factions face up against factions to wrest control of the kingdom from a weak king, and contingency rather than providence is the prevalent theme. This may be one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, and while the collaboration question remains open, his patterning of repeated motifs and counterpoints is already in evidence. The best bit is the ironic carnival of Cade’s uprising, and the justly famous line: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”.

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King Henry VI, Part 1

King Henry VI, Part 1 by William Shakespeare
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The mixture of elements in this play rather supports the suggestion it was the work of several dramatists. The broad sweep is the conflict between France and England symbolised by the warriors Joan Puzel and Talbot, the latter of course far more sympathetically drawn. But there’s a bunch of other stuff, including random amorous Countesses and a very contrived rose garden scene that sets up the idea of a war of the roses. Supposedly a prequel of what we now call parts two and three, and like a lot of prequels quite unsatisfying on its own.

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Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The superlatives rather overwhelm this biography, but that might be the author trying to reflect the bombastic style of her subject. It feels like a sales pitch rather than a study. The structure of short chapters on different facets of Donne’s character serve the argument that this was a uniquely multifaceted individual, which you can take or leave. It does nevertheless make the book very readable and easy to digest.

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A Song for Lya

A Song for Lya by George R.R. Martin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A story so heartfelt you can forgive the clumsy execution, not least the fact that the title gives away the ending. GRR Martin is suggesting here that the sense of belonging created by a grisly death cult is even stronger than the love between telepaths – that for some people the need to obliterate loneliness in the universe is more important even than their lives as individuals. Ultimately the ideal of love presented in the story is unachievable – real couples cannot read each other’s minds however well they know each other. In the story the cult fills the gap that remains between people, but the protagonist can’t take that step. He, and we, inevitably settle for less in order to retain our sense of self.

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Abercrombie Station

Abercrombie Station by Jack Vance
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The rare Jack Vance story with a female protagonist – women are usually peripheral (and objectified) in his works. Jean is a gold-digger who has to take her clothes off in the very first scene, so the objectification continues, but she is also a femme fatale who has buried a few bodies to survive, and Vance tries to generate some existential pathos to her obsession with getting rich. Ultimately she is about as well-rounded as any other Vance character, which is not very. The story moves in an unexpected and quite scary direction, cleverly subverting the expectation of more salacious content.

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1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: Winner of the Baillie Gifford Winner of Winners Award 2023 by James Shapiro
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Absorbing account of a pivotal year in Shakespeare’s career. Shapiro’s aggressively contextualist approach yields plenty of insights, not least a plausible conjecture on the reason behind not featuring Falstaff in Henry V, and possible sources for the development of Hamlet’s interiority. My favourite is the analysis of As You Like It in comparison with Shakespeare’s revision of his sonnets. Like with Year of Lear I hope Shapiro continues in this vein – I nominate 1595 for another project covering the events that surrounded the composition of Romeo & Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Richard II.

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The Miracle Workers

The Miracle Workers by Jack Vance
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“The future is for men of cleverness, of imagination untroubled by discipline”

The model for later Vance masterpieces The Dragon Masters and The Last Castle – where medieval lords war with a hive-mind alien race. Here Vance’s sympathies with the aliens is more pronounced, perhaps because they showcase an ingenuity that the humans have forgotten. Some ironic comedy is made of describing the scientific process of trial and error as miracle-working, as opposed to the fantastic psychic capabilities this society has cultivated and has come to rely on. As with the later tales, conflict drives innovation, and here the ending is more hopeful, with the two sides learning from each other and agreeing a stalemate. The Last Castle ends similarly, but I prefer the darker, more apocalyptic The Dragon Masters, where the aliens have the upper hand and the drama of human survival reaches its peak.

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The Last Castle

The Last Castle by Jack Vance
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A satire on aristocratic values and a critique of the slavery that upholds them. The class struggle powering the story has a surprisingly harmonious conclusion, with the pampered learning the value of labour and the moral imperative of survival, and the oppressed defeated and carted off to their own planet. Once again Vance’s privileges heroic ingenuity over collective effort. And while he is happy to mock decadent gentlemanly refinement, there is an admiration for the achievements of civilisation made possible by a stratified society.

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The Dragon Masters

The Dragon Masters by Jack Vance
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Cold War tale of human freedom facing up against an alien civilisation that turns humans into mindless slaves, except that the humans turn out to be just as bad. In the struggle between liberty and authority all opportunities must be exploited. A pivotal role is played by the apathetic, hippie-like sacerdotes, whose ideology is a milder reflection of the antagonists, and who await the great powers to destroy themselves so they can instigate a milder civilisation. Vance might be taking aim at the pacifists of his own day, who were unwilling to apply themselves to the struggle of overcoming communism.

This is wildly inventive fantasy that nonetheless reflects the concerns and prejudices of the time in which it was written. None more so than in the depiction of women, who are sidelined to be mothers and objects of male gratification.

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Edward III

Edward III by William Shakespeare
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The strongest part of the play is the bits purportedly by Shakespeare – the scenes in which a King demands that a countess sleep with him, and how the countess manages to navigate the conflicting allegiances to her husband and her sovereign. The drama of the scenario is all the more effective for the bits of absurd situational comedy that peep through, like Edward switching from writing love poetry to pretending to study maps and military manoeuvres when someone walks in. That moment effectively collapses the pull between human desires and political duties.

The countess escapes the King’s clutches with a bit of legalese about the precedence of oaths – a theme that is picked up in the rest of the play, where kings give orders that overrule the commitments they and their officials make, and have to be talked back into respecting the rules. Everyone ultimately does what they are supposed to do, which is why Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare’s Richard II are more interesting histories, as these Kings push the system past breaking point and lose their lives as a result.

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The Merry Wives of Windsor

The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A slight but still very funny play – I laughed out loud a few times while reading which I can't say I've done for other comedies of the period. It indulges in quite sadistic treatment of Falstaff, which fans of the character from the Henry IV plays might find unsettling. Here he takes on a similar role to that of Malvolio in Twelfth Night – a gull who is mercilessly tortured for his (financially-motivated) letchery. The extent to which Falstaff is pilloried for offending middle class propriety might suggest that Shakespeare wanted to moderate the sympathy we might feel towards him in his histories. Falstaff's riots are a source of fun, but they must ultimately be contained and repressed for civilised life to continue. The stars of the show here are the wives who skillfully weave their plots around the hapless men around them – their merriment is not a sign of loose morals but a tool of moral edification.

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King Henry V

King Henry V by William Shakespeare
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A patriotic pageant which the last 100 years of commentary – understandably uncomfortable with imperialism and monarchical government – has tried to complicate. The best and most machiavellian explanation for the unprovoked invasion in this play is actually found in the Henry IV Part 2, where the dying king urges his son to go on foreign wars of conquest in order to unite a fractious kingdom. Military success will wash away the sin of usurpation.

Henry V is a consumate politician, able to deploy the common touch he learned while carousing in his youth to motivate his followers. The coldness with which he treats his dissipated former associates may mar his reputation among the admirers of Falstaff (who dies off-stage of a broken heart), but reinforces the point that upon becoming King, Henry has to move on to bigger things than drinking and whoring and actually act the part of King. Richard II was also a good actor, but Henry V (the character if not the play) is a success because he knows which part to play.

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King Henry IV, Part 2

King Henry IV, Part 2 by William Shakespeare
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An uneven play probably written to cash in on the popularity of Falstaff, recycling scenes that were cut from Henry IV before it became part one, and perhaps also using some scenes originally intended for Henry V. Inevitably less cohesive, and while Falstaff’s self-interested schemes and the wider political conspiracies rarely intersect, there are patterns between them. The personification of Rumour introduces the play, and the preponderance of false reports dominate the plot, not least Falstaff’s reputation for heroism at the Battle of Shrewsbury – a theme that casts doubt on the overall project of narrative history. Falstaff is an irresponsible rogue, but the political machinations of the king and the prince are also somewhat grubby.

The play is at its most interesting in how Henry IV reflects on his usurpation, revealing the thinking that was denied to the audience in Richard II. Bolingbroke’s rise was carefully stage-managed, much like the swift reformation of Prince Henry when he inherits the crown. Despite their antagonism, father and son are shown to be master manipulators, and remarkably alike. Falstaff can only be his irrepressible self, his lies are so outrageous they are immediately seen through. That simplicity might be what was so attractive to the Prince. But his comedic, anti-historical spirit must be banished at the end for the history to continue.

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King Henry IV, Part 1

King Henry IV, Part 1 by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am unfortunately immune to Falstaff’s charms, which makes this difficult to appreciate. Prince Hal’s calculating attitude to his own dissolution is more interesting, and the extent to which it is a rationalisation or justification for his preferences can be brought out in performance. His affection for Falstaff lives off the page – the actual lines are a litany of fat jokes that seem mean-spirited, borne out by his callow rejection of this alternate father-figure at the end.

Hal’s equivocal attitude is authentically Shakespearian, but so is Falstaff’s disreputable behaviour. On the battlefield, the cowardly knight satirises the ideals of chivalry and honour, and the broader political system they support. But that comes at the same time as he leads over 300 poor people to their deaths before running away, which feels morally outrageous. Reading Falstaff as Shakespeare’s argument for the joys of eating and drinking as opposed to fighting and conspiring is a simplification, and Shakespeare is never that clear cut. Hal abandoning Eastcheap for the demands of kingship is as finely-balanced a dramatic finale as the deposition of Richard II. Shakespeare doesn’t show us who’s right, and that’s what makes the work live on.

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Dusk

I don't have much experience with the canonical 1990s shooters this is based on – your Dooms and Quakes – but it feels like this takes what made those games special and perfects it. You move quickly, the guns are loud, and the level design is stellar. The creators were taking ideas from Half-Life and Deus Ex as well as more cartoony keycard-based shooters, and one of the joys of the game is uncovering secrets that give you little power-ups. Exploration and attention is rewarded, and can give you a leg-up in encounters.

Dusk never gets tiring – it's always bringing something new to the table. In Episode 2 you start to see levels reconfigure. By Episode 3 you can swich the direction of gravity. Only in the last two missions was I ready for it to be over – there's a big combat arena where you face every enemy in the game in waves, and then two quite challenging boss fights. I dialled the difficulty down to get through it, and still had fun blasting away. 

King Richard II

King Richard II by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is Shakespeare’s masterclass in portraying controversial political material in such a finely balanced way as to avoid controversy – he was the only playwright of his time to avoid tussles with the law. This for me is a more successful staging of a regicide than Julius Caesar, because the charismatic ruler remains on stage until the end, and indulges in ever more fantastic self-pitying flights of fancy. Richard is a bad king and a great poet. In his heart of hearts he probably knows it, which is why he is weirdly eager to give up his title and his responsibilities. Shakespeare’s point (if he has one) may be that poetry is ultimately an easier vocation than politics.

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Edward II

Edward II by Christopher Marlowe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This struck me as structurally similar to Doctor Faustus – the subject of the play indulges in heterodox pleasures and is ultimately doomed by overplaying his hand. Substitute dalliances with devils to attain forbidden power and knowledge for dalliances with favourites of low birth and the same sex. Edward II like Doctor Faustus wants to live deliciously, and Marlowe clearly sympathises with that libertine spirit even while ensuring it is violently crushed at the end. Tragedy demands the reassertion of traditional religious, sexual and social norms. The sinners are punished and the audience should leave the theatre feeling righteous, except Marlowe never quite purges his (and our) admiration for the radicalism of his tragic heroes. The poet is of the Devil’s party, and Marlowe certainly knew it.

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Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Definitely a play of two halves, the second of which doesn't match the dramatic interest of the first. Basically everything after Mark Anthony's rhetorical showstopper with Caesar's body is quite dull. I find Brutus and Cassius's long quarrel scene odd and their subsequent deaths bathetic. Shakespeare does a good job balancing the different viewpoints, although I suspect that the conspirators' cries of liberty and enfranchisement would appear more suspect to an Elizabethan audience than they do now. Caesar's murder is essentially a regicide that unleashes a civil war, and eventually results in Octavian as emperor anyway, so while Brutus may have been high-minded he was certainly (and quite literally) misguided. The influence of rhetoric on politics is ultimately what the play is about – the tribunes chiding the mechanicals at the start, then Cassius drawing out Brutus as the figurehead for the conspiracy, and climaxing with Mark Antony's playing the mob like a fiddle. The latter half loses that thread a bit, which is why this reputedly balanced play feels lopsided to me.

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Volpone

Volpone by Ben;Brockbank Jonson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A play that’s better performed than read. On the page you can easily lose track of the disguises and tricks being played on the different gulls, which on the stage would be clear to see. This is nonetheless very funny, with the pace and lightness of a screwball comedy, despite the somewhat disturbing themes of rape and torture it touches on. Volpone and Mosca are delighted by their own ingenious dramaturgy, and you can sense Ben Jonson’s own satisfaction with his craft shine through his protagonists.

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