the merry wives of windsor

I had a lot of fun last night: the world premier of Panoply, an original play by 11:11 Theatre, opened on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, MA, and I was part of it. Magnificent fun, acting. But surprising as well. Not only does one learn a lot about themselves when they act, but they also learn quite a bit about audiences.

Audiences are just people, but they’re a particular mix of people, living in a particular time and place. Their reactions to the story being told to them may vary depending not only on the day of the week and hour of the performance, but also the much larger social and historical contexts of their lives. Also, their reactions depend heavily on the quality of the story’s authorship and its storytellers.

You already know all this. But it provides a context for the observation that Shakespeare’s humorous moments aren’t necessarily funny to a modern audience. “Yes, duh,” you mutter as your mouse drifts to the Close button on your browser. But wait! This is important: it’s not just that we read a Shakespearean joke and judge it to be either 1) funny or 2) not funny. Rather, there are several layers of humor that, as they go deeper, become more and more invisible to us but, if understood, could lead you to a much deeper understanding of Will’s world and his plays (mind you, I’m not implying here that I have anything beyond a shallow understanding of these things–I am also a student, not an expert, of Shakespeare’s works, so let’s learn together!).

Before I list the layers, I feel it’s appropriate to quote Donald Rumsfeld:

“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are “known knowns”; there are things we know we know. We also know there are “known unknowns”; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also “unknown unknowns” — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
(Thanks, ‘Pedia.)

People laughed at this quote because the word “know” is repeated 14 times in some form or another, but they shouldn’t have laughed. Its message is important and relevant to understanding almost anything. To illustrate, I will now (finally) make up, I mean explain the four layers of humor in Will’s plays:

1. Humor we get
2. Humor we know we don’t get (for instance, when you don’t know what “maidenhead” means, you can’t quite get the pun @ Rom.I.1.39, even though it’s probably obvious to you that a pun takes place at that spot)
3. Humor we know is probably humor but is going over our heads (for instance, you naturally assume that everything Falstaff says in Henry IV is supposed to be funny but you’re not quite able to tell why)
4. Humor we didn’t even know was supposed to be humor

It’s layer #4 that I came across while reading The Merry Wives of Windsor, inspiring me to write this post. An insult, delivered by Pistol, labels Falstaff as a “Base Phrygian Turk” (Wiv.I.3.86). If I hadn’t glanced at the Pelican’s footnotes, I never, ever would have recognized this as a funny thing to say. In fact, I had to go back to the ‘Pedia and do research to figure out why this is funny. It turns out that although Phrygia does, in fact, exist in Turkey, it would have been remembered by Elizabethans as a mostly mythological region in ancient Turkey that acted as an ally to Troy in the fabled Trojan War. So calling Falstaff a “Base (low) Turk” would have been one thing, but calling him a “Base Phrygian Turk” makes no sense, crisscrossing times and places, and demonstrates the ill-educated nature of Pistol’s wit.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I know. It’s not all that funny. And I didn’t even know it was supposed to be funny to begin with! But that illustrates my point: Pistol says a lot of things similar to this, and in order to fully appreciate his character you have to educate yourself to recognize jokes an Elizabethan would get but a modern reader/observer would miss. Otherwise, you’ll think Pistol’s a complete waste of space, and he’s not; he’s a strong comic presence.

Try a handful of simple things:

1. Look up words you don’t know. Sometimes this will lead you recognize humor you didn’t know was there.
2. Pay attention to the presence of misspellings and homophones.
3. When a line seems to come from nowhere, investigate. There’s probably a reason for its existence, and it may be humorous. To your inner-Elizabethan.
4. Read annotated versions of the plays (it’s actually hard to find non-annotated versions of the plays) and pay attention to the notes. After a while you’ll start to pick up on patterns yourself.
5. Go watch good Shakespearean actors perform the plays. If they really are doing their job, they’ll somehow let you know when humor is afoot. Then you can investigate afterwards if you like. (Kenneth Branagh in Much Ado comes to mind: when Benedick is talking about “hanging his bugle in an invisible baldrick” (Ado.I.1.230) Ken delivers the line whimsically even though most of us have no freaking idea what he’s talking about.)

The world premiere of Panoply went smashingly well, I think, and both the actors and the audience were pleased with the way it turned out. But I was still shocked by the points at which the audience responded with laughter versus the points at which they responded with silence. I suppose audiences are all unique, just like the stories that are told to them, and we can’t always see all the layers of humor, emotion, and social context at play before them.

I started reading comic books recently. Every time I would walk into a Newbury Comics I’d wish that I was part of the comic-reading culture. So now I am. What’s it going to cost me, $3-$6 a month? Plus my habit of buying Pelican Shakespeares… that’s $5-$6 a month…

They’re both much cheaper than a drug habit.

Anyway, I picked Iron Man: Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. as my continuing series of choice. A writer of the series discusses it on CBR.com here. (This is where you’re saying to yourself, Uh, I thought this was a blog about Shakespeare. I’m getting to that.) I remember Iron Man from my youth, and the Iron Man I’m finding in this series is very different. He’s an executive, emotionally distraught, hard-nosed-politician Iron Man who makes tough leadership calls, manages budgets, investigates internal affairs, and negotiates national security policy. The Iron Man I remember as a kid used to blow stuff up with lasers. But I love this new Tony Stark.

Why is Iron Man doing this now? What is it that makes putting a well-known character in a brand new position that delights us so much? And what makes it work? If you created a television series about James Bond’s new position as a hot-shot lawyer in Los Angeles after he retires from MI6… would it fly? Or would we rather keep seeing Bond doing traditional Bond things?

Turns out this practice of reinventing recurring characters in the media is pretty old. (Here we go: the Shakespeare part of the post is upon us!) Queen Elizabeth asked Will to bring Falstaff back to the stage after Henry IV parts 1 and 2 were produced. So Will wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor. How did it turn out…? Rather than give my own personal opinion, I’ll let Wikipedia tell us how stodgy Shakespeare critics the world over have received the work:

Most critics consider Merry Wives to be one of Shakespeare’s weaker plays, and the Falstaff of Merry Wives to be much inferior to the Falstaff of the two Henry IV plays. That Shakespeare would so stumble with one of his greatest creations is puzzling, and a satisfactory reason for this remains to be found. The likeliest explanation, if the Garter Feast theory is accepted, is that the play was written hastily, to order for a special occasion, within severe time restraints.

That’s too bad. If I were to speculate (and may I point out that speculations compose a good 97% of what I write in this blog), I’d say the problem isn’t that Falstaff isn’t a reinventable character. Rather, his application to a romantic comedy simply didn’t fit his character.

Any well-written character should be at least two-dimensional. Sometimes we can hope for three. Let’s take the idea of dimensions literally for a moment, and not just as an analogy for how filled-out an idea can be. Let’s imagine for a moment that well-forged characters actually have two or three identifiable qualities, or dimensions, that justify their behaviors in the context of a story. Apparently Iron Man possessed not only an I-heroically-destroy-evil-with-lasers dimension, but also a confident-leadership dimension and, as Christos Gage mentions in the CBR.com article, an emotionally-troubled dimension. While the first, heroic dimension was prominent in the comics of my youth, those other sub-characteristics of Tony Stark allowed him to be placed in this new role of a troubled executive and have it work. Falstaff, however, probably didn’t have the right sub-dimensions to fit into The Merry Wives of Windsor. In Henry IV, his dimensions seemed to be:

• Primary: Coward.
• Secondary: Carefree lover-of-life.

But he was never really clever or ambitious enough to hatch the plan he hatched in Merry Wives, nor could he ever be capable of wooing well-to-do ladies of society. Perhaps his cowardice came into play in Merry Wives, but since cowardice was his primary dimension in Henry IV we’re left with a modification of an existing Falstaff rather than a reinvention of his role in the universe. Had Shakespeare chosen to take advantage of Falstaff’s carefree dimension and make him into a wanderer-thief running from the law, that might have worked.

Who knows.

What other role might you be able to play? Which of your three dimensions are you using most of the time now, and which of the other two could you put to use if you decided to reinvent your role in this world? What other things could you be doing with your life right now?

Photo by InfoMofo.