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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