Listening to Shakespeare with My Eyes ClosedPart I: Henry VI (i,ii,iii)byNicki Leone One dark afternoon in January this year I happened to be putting some books up on already-overloaded shelves—in this case a copy of an account of William Shakespeare’s life on Silver Street called The Lodger Shakespeare by Charles Nicholl—when the forces of physics overcame the forces of optimism, and half the shelf of Shakespeare books came tumbling down. My theory that there is always room on a bookshelf for one more book was emphatically disproved. As I bent to pick up the fallen books and put them back in some kind of order I was struck by the fact that there were nearly forty books at my feet, and only one of them—The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, which let me tell you left quite a bruise when it landed on my bare feet—was an edition of his actual plays. No, mostly the shelf was a collection of biographies and histories, criticism, interpretation, speculation and investigation, and exploration. There was even a cookbook, which will never get any practical use because English cooking in the Elizabethan era was vile.I found myself wondering, as I attempted to get forty books back onto a shelf meant for twenty, when was the last time I’d actually read or seen a Shakespeare play. (And I’m not counting the movie Shakespeare in Love, which I stick into the DVD player whenever I’m feeling depressed). Too long, I decided, and made a New Year’s Resolution (several days late, perhaps, but I had no one to answer to but myself) to see—either in production or at least on DVD—every one of Shakespeare’s plays this year. I thought it would be an easy resolution to keep. It was an exercise in indulgence, not denial. And I did spend a few happy months with various productions of Kenneth Branaugh, Ian McKellan, and Lawrence Olivier. It hasn’t been a hardship, let me tell you. But I realized, as I combed the DVD stores, that I was going to have some trouble keeping my resolution. Some of Shakespeare’s plays just didn’t seem to be easily available. I was sure I could count on my own local Shakespeare Company to stage The Comedy of Errors or Taming of the Shrew (the comedies are always so popular for the picnicking atmosphere of our Shakespeare in the Park). But where or when would I get a chance to see Pericles? Cymbeline? King John? Well, I thought, if I can’t see them, I can at least hear them. So with the help of a couple gift certificates and some serious economizing, I procured for myself a copy of The Arkangel Shakespeare. This massive collection contains a full audio production of each and every Shakespeare play from All’s Well That Ends Well to The Winter’s Tale—all thirty-eight of them. The box was so large that it forced me to extend my “Shakespeare Shelf” to the shelf below, mercilessly evicting a series of books about grammar in the process. I was going, I knew, where no rules of grammar could follow. The Arkangel had arrived with the plays arranged in alphabetical order. The first thing I did was re-arrange them in the approximate order which scholars believe the plays to have been written, because I’m just like that. I hoped to get a sense of the development of Shakespeare, the writer, and for that I was willing to listen to the History plays out of order—to endure the story of Henry VI before that of Henry IV and Henry V. And it was with Henry VI, (parts i, ii, and iii) I began—these are generally agreed to be Shakespeare’s first produced plays. Probably written in collaboration with others, and most certainly revised many times hence to better fit the demands of different theaters, audiences, and companies of actors. I knew that there wasn’t really such a thing as a “definitive” edition of the play. That Shakespeare himself quite ruthlessly wrote, revised, altered and cut to meet the demands of censors and the tastes of possible noble patrons. So I was quite aware, when I stuck Act I, Scene I of Henry VI Part I into my car’s CD player during a long drive that I would be listening to just one version of how the play might sound. My first thought was that it sounded confusing. There was a logistical issue to listening to an unfamiliar Shakespeare play in the car I hadn’t thought to consider—it took a while for me to figure out what was going on. I had no playbill in front of me, nothing to tell me who the characters were or who they were to each other. I couldn’t read along with the performance and still drive. I couldn’t see the actors to associate faces with the names. My grasp of English history during the time in question—that frantic period known as “The War of the Roses”—is uncertain at best. I had only the vaguest notion of the nature of the strife between the houses of Lancaster and York, which sometimes hampered my ability to follow the plot. And I couldn’t tell who was speaking until I had got used to the characters well enough to be able to recognize and distinguish their voices. It was very much like attending a performance while insisting on keeping my eyes shut. The fight scenes were especially confusing. And Henry VI, Part I has more than its share of fight scenes. I spent the next few weeks listing to the Henry VI plays on car trips—a drawn-out experience since I don’t actually take too many car trips because I work out of my house. So I would sometimes repeat a scene or even an entire act, because I had lost my place, or needed to remind myself of each character’s voice and nature. I persevered. Partly because it was Shakespeare, after all. And listening to even mediocre Shakespeare is hardly torture. But also because I’ve discovered that the way I best overcome things I don’t understand, especially literary things, is to immerse myself in them. Not trying too hard to unravel each and every mystery, but simply let the language wash over me until it sinks into my skin. When I’m finally “in tune” with the language of a book I will go back and read it again, this time less conscious of what I was missing and more aware of what is worth noticing. What I began to notice about the three early Henry VI dramas was a series of brief and vivid moments of human pathos, passion and cruelty. The story of Henry the VI’s slow rise to his majority and then agonizing downfall careens from action to action—now in the middle of war, now in flight, now strategizing one man’s downfall, now at the mercy of another’s stratagems. If you blink, you are likely to miss something important. But in the midst of all this frenetic activity I would find my attention suddenly arrested by some brief, sharp, contained scene that would rise up vividly in my imagination. There is a sharp exchange between Joan of Arc and the English champion Lord Talbot where he rails at her to bring her army out of the town of Rouen and fight. She wisely refuses and laughs at them, asking if they have come for market day, much to Talbot’s fury. Which is not at all cooled, I might add, by her jeering final words from high upon the city walls: “Good-bye, my lord. We came but to tell you That we are here.” Alas, Talbot soon finds himself in a hopeless battle and begs his son to flee the field and so save his life—something the son will not do. Talbot’s pleas, angry words, and miserable, frantic bargaining fall on deaf ears. The son won’t leave his father undefended. Joan of Arc, when she comes upon their bodies when the battle is over, is not kind: “Him that thou magnifi’st with all these titles Stinking and flyblown lies here at our feet.” And that there was another thing I had forgot about Shakespeare. He’s really quite gory. Quite vicious. By the time I had made it through the end of the Henry VI trilogy, I was a shocked and a little numbed at the easy brutality. There is a scene in the third play where Queen Margaret—defending the rule of her ineffectual, pious (Shakespeare called him “bookish”) husband—has captured Richard, Duke of York and is taunting him with a kerchief soaked in the blood of his murdered twelve-year-old son. He weeps; she uses it to wipe his tears and smears the boy’s blood all over his face. He bows his head in grief, and she twists it into a parody of a crown and places it on him. Then she laughs and dances. It is quite mad. I had to pause the disc for a moment and let the quiet drone of the road take over. So the plays grew on me, and remain in my mind as a series of vivid, often pathetically sad moments. I have more experience, I think, with Shakespeare as literature than as drama. Even when I am watching the plays or listening to them, I am doing so as a reader. As a modern reader who looks for things like psychological complexity and realism, notes, narrative pacing and devices, and demands an underlying consistency of vision from her books. “Character development” as it is understood today did not really exist when Shakespeare first began to write for the stage. It isn’t until Hamlet that the idea of charting a character’s internal psychological development (or dissolution) bursts forth with the memorable, eternal question "to be, or not to be?" But it is here in Henry VI nonetheless, leaking out it bits and pieces from different scenes. Elizabethan audiences no doubt attended the play and saw a morality story—a cautionary tale against the dangers of riot, discord, and disloyalty, punctuated by lots of action and a fair amount of biting comedy. It seemed quite clear to me that Shakespeare had a horror of civil war and strife for the story of Henry VI is nothing if not a long series of cautionary tales against the tragic consequences of rebellion and disorder. Oh, he seasoned the drama with comic moments (“First, let’s kill all the lawyers!”) and crowd-pleasing sensationalism; there is nothing like a couple scenes with witches raising demons to capture everybody’s wandering attention. But the overall message is a relentless condemnation of rebellion against royal authority. I can see why he became a favorite of Queen Elizabeth, but as messages and morals go, this one was unimportant to me. My life is not marred by that kind of political unrest. Instead, I saw Richard of York’s horrified expression, cringing at the feel of his son’s blood on his face. I saw Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester’s agonized, paralyzed grief when he forces himself to stand and watch his wife walk bareheaded and barefoot through the streets of London, spat upon as a traitor. And John Cade’s pathetic defiance when, on the run and starving, he tries to steal from a man’s orchard, and is discovered and challenged. He fights of course, but he knows he is too weak to even lift a sword. Am I hearing too much? Am I imposing my own modern sensibilities onto Shakespeare’s more prosaic intent? No doubt. The man was writing to entertain and curry favor, not create an entirely new kind of literature. But that is what he did, because that’s what his language sparked in me. It was my anticipation of that next vivid human moment that kept me riveted through nearly seven hours of senseless war and strife over whether the king of England should bear a white rose or a red, and had me hanging on every well-chosen word. Which is why, when I put away Henry VI at last and reached for the next play, I was all but knocked over as I came face to face with the vicious, villainous, gloriously vile Richard III. Next: Bent Dick Books mentioned in this column: The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street by Christopher Nicholl (Viking Books, 2008) The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (Penguin Books, 2002) The Arkangel Shakespeare (Audio Partners, 2003) Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.
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