Will the Player

Habla aquí Shakespeare el actor, en el teatro del mundo, también hombre de teatro cuando se bajaba de las tablas. Este párrafo sobre la teatralidad de nuestro yo y de la vida cotidiana viene de la magnífica novela Will, de Christopher Rush (2007). Es este libro una especie de testamento vital de Shakespeare—escrito un poco a modo de concordance novel, redistribuyendo las palabras de las obras de Shakespeare para recontar su vida. Aquí habla desde el trasmundo, después de contar su muerte en primera persona. Pero lo que dice sobre su drama personal ni siquiera Shakespeare lo dijo tan bien, aunque todo ya lo dijo Shakespeare antes.

Those who knew me often called me gentle — affable, amusing, urbane, a perfectly charming man. And such was my London self. It was a costume, which on this occasion I have chosen not to wear, though many have dressed me up in their own ignorance. You, my masters, are among the chosen few. You have seen something of Will, without the daily beauty wear. You've seen something of my feet of clay. I could tell you more. I was fastidious, over sensitive for my age — and Age — to many things. I loathed smoky lamps, greasy dishes, sickly foods, untidiness, sweaty armpits, bad breath, unwiped arses, dribbling dicks, lickspittles, lackeys, hypocrites, Hooray-Henrys, King Henrys, beadles and bullies, dogs obeyed in office, Puritans. I abhorred the abuser of power, the perverter of justice, the mob, instability. What else? A hatred of hunting, of violence, especially committed against all those who are weak and vulnerable — animals, children, the poor. Also a suspicion of change, a respect for the social order. Love may be an illusion, sex a cesspit, politis a bear-pit, religion a fairy-tale and chivalry a shadow and a dream. I had little time for such abstractions. But I never lost faith in the social nuts and bolts, in the lives of ordinary people, just living, just living.

As for the extraordinary ones, the movers and shakers, history for me was a rogues' gallery. The angel of history is the angel of death. Idealists sooon become tyrants and cheats, as power corrupts. Listen to them whine and bark. Their convictions divide the world and only an honest doubt can unite it again. But their minds are closed and moulded, they have none — no honest doubt — and that's what makes them dangerous. Certainty is lethal. Conviction kills. That's my credo. All I know is that I know nothing, and that truth is like January, Janus-faced, looking to a lost year and one to come. My father wore a Protestat face and my mother kept on her own face at home while her husband made his a vizor to his heart, so they were split, as man and wife often are, and he was fractured too, public and private, outward and real. And that split is the best keys to the plays his son came to write. I saw that it was possible to be two people at once, to lead a double life, and out of this came Hamlet, Iago, Hal, and many others, good and bad, including me, who mocked authority, aristocrats, land-grabbers, players, but strove for substance, standing, armorial bearings and theatrical assets, while regretting every inch that staged me to the public view and turned my art to profit.

And so the exterior me — discretion, moderation, and reserve. How careful was I when I took my way, each trifle under truest bars to trust. I hid my beliefs in history, buried my voice in time and place, like the Bay of Portugal had an unknown bottom. I was ever unquarrelsome — even abject, some would say, still begging each treacherous friend to spare me some crumb of love. Not one whose help you could clearly count on, because much of the time the man you thought you saw was never there. A playmaker who avoided the first person and in so doing became no person. A man who in writing about other men reprieved himself from the man he was. A man wanting a litle self-confidence perhaps, except in plays. And outside the making of plays, a man even wanting in imagination, a compulsive acquirer, a land man, an Osric, burying his personal flaws in property, the safe palpabilities of earth and income, bricks and mortar, stocks and stones. A reversion, if you like, and a regression, back to the sucking dung that had clung to me and from which I'd longed to escape. The simple life. Yes, I could always smell the countryside through the squalor and the stench of London and the suffocating falsities of the court.

Yet, I longed for play, like any actor, and I longed for land, like any peasant. I loved beauty, especially woman's, and I paid for the pleasure, loved children and birds and plants for their simplicity and innocence, and all who kept boredom at bay and conquered the empire of dullness. Life itself I found far more interesting than anyone's opinions about it. I loved the surface of the earth and the whole process of human existence, which never ceased to fascinate me. I was enchanted by the maltworms and by the tapsters who served them. The human story was meat and drink to me. Osmotic, omnivorous, endlessly curious, that was me, that was your Will.

(...)

Of what manner of man is he, then, your Will? Why, of mankind. If your really want an image of myself as I was, look in the mirror and there you'll seem me, rather sadder and wiser than I'd have elected to be at my age, or you at yours. One of yourselves, that's all, one of the race of human beings, good enough for neither animals in their innocence nor gods in their wisdom. I was marked out not in appearance but in fortune—which buckled a talent on my back, a talent for words. I died in words and rose again like the phoenix, transformed.

La mejor página sobre Shakespeare

 

 

 

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Epifanía del Mundo como Teatro

En la increíble —pero verosímil— novela de Christopher Rush, Will,  Shakespeare (Will) redacta su testamento (Shakespeare's Will) a la vez que repasa lo que ha sido su vida—will in the world, como decía Greenblatt. El mundo como teatro ha de ser uno de los ingredientes, claro, de esta ficción plausible. La noción del mundo como gran drama le era cara al que seguramente fue quien puso nombre al Globe Theatre—yea, the Great Globe itself—e inventó su lema, "Todo el mundo actúa". 

Veamos un episodio de Will en el que se presenta este Teatro del Mundo en forma de revelación, o epifanía—un modo de aparición que le sienta bien al teatral mundo, puesto que lo propio de las epifanías modernistas—la chica-pájaro en la playa, en The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, la pincelada final de Lily Briscoe en To the Lighthouse— es una fusión estética de la vida y el arte, o una súbita infusión de la percepción estética en la vida cotidiana, para transformarla a la vez que dejarla como estaba y revelarla en lo que es. Una obra de arte immersiva, una película en 4-D, con un ritmo complejo, con disonancias inesperadas y oculta melodía, un gran videojuego con unos gráficos cojonudos. 

A Will le pilla por sorpresa la revelación, como debe ser, justo a tiempo para rescatarlo de una crisis vocacional cuando estaba a punto de tirar la toalla, o de cerrar el telón. Andando de cómico errante por esos caminos de Dios.

How I stuck it Christ knows. Days uncounted I nearly left the road and went straight back to Stratford. Once I remember—it was my turn for walking—I just stopped in my tracks and watched the wagon clanking on into nowhere in particular till it turned into a tiny cloud on the skyline, and of no more consequence, so it seemed than any of the other spots and specks on landscape and skyscape. Nothing of it had anything to do with me—I could have gone like an arrow into Warwickshire. Then, suddenly, I heard the clown Kempe's voice coming out of the cloud, a thin little birdsong on the wind.

When that I was and a little tiny boy
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain;
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.

Those were my lines Kempe was singing. I remembered he'd asked me for a song to help fill out a poor part and I'd dashed it off. When I heard it now wafting across the melancholy fields, made poignant by distance, it affected me strangely. The words transformed the landscape, turned it into a vast stage, while the landscape itself gave something back to the song: a context and a setting that made it echo and linger in the mind. It struck me as sadly pleasing. At the same time I thought the song a little too good for friend Kempe, a touch subtle for such an ordinary clown, though he was a cut or two above Tarleton. Even so, I thought, this song could grace another play. Or twinkle on the lips of a wiser fool than Kempe. Who knows? Cheered a little, I trudged on again after the wagon, in the wake of my own words about the wind and the rain, and through the wind and the rain themselves, somehow become a theatre, part of a vast setting, and the faceless actors in some impersonal universal play.

En esta novela, claro, nos llega Will previamente dramatizado y mitologizado por sí mismo, siguiendo la huella—aquí sí que sí—de sus propias palabras, pues la novela de Rush es un vasto mosaico de frases y situaciones shakespeareanas recombinadas y reinventadas. Hay algo de profecía autocumplida en el ejercicio de Rush, e incluso de distorsión retrospectiva—pero tanto más nos ayuda esto a ver el elemento de profecía autocumplida que hay en la vida, en la vida como voluntad... y representación. En este Will intentando alcanzarse a sí mismo, o siguiendo sus propios pasos por anticipado. También es narración en curso, la vida, además de ser impromptu dramático.

Hegel: La comedia y la vida como metadrama

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Sobre el lema del Globe, "todo el mundo actúa" o "todo el mundo imita a los actores":

_____. "The Whole World Plays the Fool." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 13 Dec. 2023.* (From the preface to Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy).

         https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-whole-world-plays-fool.html

         2023

An Apology for Actors

Not the one written by Thomas Heywood, but an apocryphal apology for actors and theatre, in the context of a conversation on 16th-century London, put in Shakespeare's mouth by Christopher Rush, in his novel Will (2007).

 

Whores and actors are not so far apart—both faking it for cash, and both die and rise again. But the Puritans accepted the whores as they could never accept the actors. Whores descended from Eve, theology sound as Genesis. The prostitue was easy to understand and to embrace. She was recognizable—her feet go down to death, her steps take hold on hell, her cunt is a cauldron of unholy lusts, and there is no whore without Eve. No Eve, no sin; no sin, no damnation; no damnation, no redemption—no Christ, no Church, no Pope. And no Pope, no Reformation, no Puritan to oppose the Great Whore herself, Babylon the great. The whores of London, kept the Puritan in his post, gave him his living. The Puritan could not exist without the whore. Whoredom was as needful to his church as it was to fallen man, fornicating his life away in London.

'And the players?'

With the players it was the contrary. Actors descend from neither Adam nor Eve but from Satan, who came onto the world's stage disguised as a serpent. It was the first costume and the devil the original actor, and a good one too. His tongue dropped honey and Eve was taken in. She fell down and worshipped him and her suddenly naked navel became the entrance to the theatre. That's why Puritans and players could never live together. Our false idols lined the route to hell—Dick Tarleton, Ned Alleyn, Bill Kempe popular as primroses—and so the player was far more damnable than the whore.

'Mass magic'

Your whore can take only one man at a time. If a dozen a day go through her she's doing well by doing ill. But a single player, he could command an entire theatre of spectators in one speech. In one world.

'Why, they would hang on him—'

As if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on. One word? I tell you even a word was not necessary. Windy suspiration of forcèd breath, a sweeping gesture, your fingers on your lips I pray, yes, even silence. Even the very thought of silence. To die: to sleep; no more.

'No more.'

And that's how it was done. Nailed them to the ground and galleries and kept them from the pulpits, lured them to the theatres instead, to applaud the actors to the very echo that should applaud again, to wait breathless in the London afternoon for the next word, for the very next syllable. Oh yes, the player could do all this, all this and more. He was the god of the groundlings, idol of the aristocrats. The Puritan, though he played the orator as well as Nestor, could never sermonise an audience into such submission. Even the silver-tongued friar who made the fields his pulpit—the audiences walked over his ghost, trampling him into daisies, and streamed straight into the theatres. Fear had been the weapon up till now. But now seduction was stronger than fear, and seduction was in the air—no, it was in the air, the very air we breathed. And all the Puritan could do was rage.

'Conscience, morality, divine reason?'

It was the theatres that brought men's humanity out of chests and closets and whispering chambers and placed it up on stage, where a handful of poor players, with four or five most vile and ragged foils, right ill disposed in brawl ridiculous, blazoned it to the world. As for right reason, the fear of God, wisdom, understanding, the knowledge of the holy—ah, these are not the stuff as dreams are made on, these are but pale shadoes of people beside the player's ability to be a walking mirror to everyman, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure, to make every spectator in that wooden circle see himself standing up there, standing up in the world for exactly what he is: man, tragical-comical, historical-pastoral, aspiring-despairing, delighted-deluded, in love, in hate, in heaven, in hell, a thing of darkness and of light, a lover, a tyrant, a madman, a poet, a dragon, a worm. So the poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage was rich in that one enormous regard, his ability to see himself and present himself in the round and inside out by a species of sorcery that left the Puritan gaping.

    For the player was the man who showed you life as it is, not as it ought to be, who said what he felt, not what he ought to say.

'Truth's a dog must to kennel, I remember from somewhere.'

But a man's occulted guilt can itself unkennel in one speech, and guilty creatures sitting at a play are struck so to the soul that suddenly their spirits are off the leash and barking out the theatre, howling through the world. Did the spectator leave the theatre a purged and purer person? Or did he leave it corrupted? All a player can say is that he sent the theatre-goer out more human than he'd come in—which is the end of art and no bad boast: to make us more ourselves, not less ourselves, as the Puritans would have had it, by plucking us out of the murk and mire of humankind.

    Whatever the truth, the Puritan feared the player. And he feared the play, which staged several players, and the playhouse, which put out many plays. Theatres were outposts of hell, Satan's garrisons. Hell was an occupying force in England and its legions were in London, where the traffic of the stage took two thousand to hell in two hours. A frightening figure. Worse—with half a dozen plays running on any given afternoon the theatres were capable of ushering the entire cast of London into hell in ten days flat—which ought to have pleased your Puritan. So many souls bound straight for hell, with damnèd speeches buzzing in their ears, surely all the greater space for the elect and élite of God in their silent white heaven. But that perhaps is what they feared most—being with themselves.

'So you hated them, Will.'

The very name's a lie. Puritan. To the Puritan all things were impure. They could find no good in man, nor any god in man, and they lashed man himself and his eternal companion and corrupter, woman, for all evils. Even the queen was not spared. And puritan Stubbes, who pamphleteered against her, had his offending hand cut off. But in all their accusations they never accused themselves, though within their snow-broth blood there bubbled the same old cauldron of unholy appetites. Your Puritan wants to fuck the thing he fears and then to kill the thing he fucks—or, if he cannot have it, he must kill it to ease his fury. What was he really? At best he was a boil on the bum, spoiling your seat in the theatre: at worst a wild beast in the bowels. The ultimate revenge is to put him in the play, show him sick of self-love and laugh him to scorn—or stop the laughter and make the people hate him for what he is: ambassador of death, killer of laughter, a syphilis in the soul, a negation of all that is human and lovely and of good report.

'And graven images—?'

Are what we want—and what the players give us. We long for imitation. We long to be happy. Only the gods are bored. And the Puritans wanted us to be as gods. So I gave them instead unregenerate man, incapable of their Jesus: the poor wild Bedlam who ate the old rat in the fury of his heart, and the darkness that was Caliban. I gave them not their strait and narrow gateway to God, but the broad primrose way, the playhouse way. For the theatre was the only place in London you could go to outside the ale-house to hear an honest comment on our lives, uncolored by fear of God or the grave. Here the players were indeed the only men. Their theatres were islands of art rising out of the crude sea of corruption that surrounded them on all sides. They were the clear bright bells of London, beating loudly and sweetly over the sodden city.

(Christopher Rush, Will, Beautiful Books, 2007, pp. 200-204).

'Like a Comet I Was Wonder'd At': Shakespeare y las supernovas

 

 

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