Ridiculous

In September, after the schools went back and when we hoped that London would be less busy, we decided to take a break and have a trip to the capital. One of our highlights was a visit to The Globe. Faced with a choice between 'Romeo and Juliet' and 'Twelfth Night' – we opted for the comedy of errors.

As with all his plays, Shakespeare wastes no time and immediately launches into the story and as it a long time since I last went to a play, the first twenty minutes did have me flummoxed – even though I had done my homework (albeit in a cursory slipshod way. This partly down to the unexpected modern setting juxtaposed with the traditional theatre setting, but more about my having to adjusted to the unfamiliar language and rhythms. As the play progressed, I started to appreciate how much our present modern day English language use was introduced to us by Shakespeare.

The Bard has singularly been responsible for so many phrases in common usage today – If you’ve ever been on a wild goose chase, but refused to budge an inch, played fast and loose only to find you’ve been hoodwinked and ended up in a pickle, so slept not one wink. And in the morning, as good luck would have it, you would have been living in a fool’s paradise, so laughed yourself into stitches, and cold comfort, but it would have been too much of a good thing, now you have seen better days, so, it is a foregone conclusion that you are … quoting Shakespeare.

Did the plays or the phrases come first? Perhaps picked up and bandied about, tested on his fellow pupils? I wonder…

Shakespeare At School

Forty boys on benches with their quills
Six days a week through almost all the year,
Long hours of Latin with relentless drills
And repetition, all enforced by fear.
I picture Shakespeare sitting near the back,
Indulging in a risky bit of fun
By exercising his prodigious knack
Of thinking up an idiotic pun,
And whispering his gem to other boys,
Some of whom could not suppress their mirth –
Behaviour that unfailingly annoys
Any teacher anywhere on earth.
The fun was over when the master spoke:
Will Shakespeare, come up here and share the joke.

                                                                                                  Wendy Cope

I’m sure that teaching methods have changed since Shakespeare’s times. Theatres certainly have. It was a little disconcerting to find ourselves sitting in a theatre that had been reconstructed to reflect how it may have been in Shakespeare’s day – and then to see a modern interpretation, but superb production of 'Twelfth Night'.

It all starts with a shipwreck and the twin siblings, Viola and Sebastian each believe the other to have perished. It all gets very complicated as the Shenanigans ensue. For some reason, Viola dresses as a boy and works for the Duke Orsino, whom she falls in love with. Orsino is in love with the Countess Olivia, and sends Viola to court her for him, but Olivia falls for Viola instead. Sebastian arrives, causing a flood of mistaken identity, and marries Olivia. Viola then reveals she is a girl and marries Orsino.

We think it is only in our modern more ‘enlightened’ times, that we invented “cross-dressing”, but in Shakespeare’s time it was a necessity, at least in the theatre, as women as actors were very much frowned upon, so rather than restrict the subject matter of a play so that it could use an all-male cast of actors, male actors (usually young boys) were required to dress up and act the female parts. I seem to recall the same expedient rationale being used by the boys at my local all-boys ‘Catholic College’ – until, finally, rules relaxed, and we were able to put on joint productions – “The Rape of the Belt” – memorable, to me at that age, because it daringly had the word ‘Rape’ in the title, although in reality it was a play loosely based on a tale from Greek Mythology and nothing to do with actual rape. I should have realised that in a convent, this was highly unlikely.

However, in the modern interpretation of the 'Twelfth Night' production that we saw, to make matters more confusing, if not downright ridiculous, Shakespearean expediency was further complicated as some of the major male roles were played by women. And to my mind, the female actors who played the Jester, Sir Toby Belch (aptly named, perhaps because of his love of pickled herrings, but in this play, was swigging of many cans of gaseous liquids) and Malvolio were, in my opinion, all by far the best.

I have a soft spot for Malvolio, Olivia’s steward Olivia’s steward, whose name could be translated as ‘ill-will’. He considered by many to be Shakespeare’s more famous villain, so I kept waiting for some evil action to happen. Granted, he is something of a puritan, disliking disorder and drunkenness, all in all a bit of a vain glorious kill-joy Despite this, I think he is undeservedly much maligned, more victim than villain.

I do question if Malvolio really deserved the cruelty he endured at the hands of his fellow household members, resulting in his entrance wearing the ridiculous yellow cross gartered stockings and, in this play, truly hilarious.. He is easily convinced that he fits the bill for:

“In my stars I am above thee; but be not afraid of greatness:
some are born great, some achieve greatness,
and some have greatness thrust upon 'em. In my stars I am above thee;
but be not afraid of greatness: some are born great,
some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em”

But by the end of Act 4, I personally felt they went entirely too far, telling him and treating him as if he were insane having him locked up in a dark room and not even offered any real apology for how he was mistreated. It seems a little extreme, practically bordering on abuse and would take a hard person not to pity him when he desperately pleads he isn’t mad:

“Fool, there was never a man so notoriously abused. I am as well in my wits, fool, as thou art.”

From being ridiculed, to being humiliated, it is but a short step to madness. It isn’t often that I think Shakespeare goes too far to ‘get a laugh’, but I do have to wonder who really is ridiculous as a consequence of this tomfoolery? Malvolio or his tormentors?

Yvonne Smallshaw