This rare play is fascinating and surprising. It is first of all political, highly political. The queen, or rather wife of the king of Britain in Roman times, is a plotter who tries to get the crown for her own son. The king has lost his two own sons and the queen has to get rid of his daughter. She plots and plots but to no avail apparently since she will die and her own son will be killed by one of the lost but surviving sons of the king. But things being complex the queen leads the king to refuse to pay the tribute to the Romans so that, she hopes, the Romans will come and get the king. Unluckily the two sons and the man who has raised them and the husband of the king's daughter who the king had banished save the day and defeat the Romans. So much for politics.
That's were Shakespeare turns magic. Till the very last instant in the last scene everyone is under the threat of being killed for some crime he has or he is accused of having committed. And the various death sentences that are hovering over the heads of them all fall like leaves in the autumn, but fall flat on the ground. Shakespeare uses contrived explanations that are so marvelous that no one can refuse to believe them and then we have a father who meets his two supposedly dead sons, is reunited with his supposedly lost daughter, is confronted to his son in law who he had banished and yet helped defeat the Romans, is brought face to face to a soldier he had banished a long time ago and who had taken care of his two sons. And he finally ends up the day by granting pardon to every one prisoner. That's a charming happy ending but constructed so swiftly and wisely that we doubt it will really end without any more killing till the last word about a general pardon is uttered. Then a soothsayer can come in and explain some mysterious prediction the son in law had managed to receive from Jupiter himself and all is well that ends well.
Yet the play is a lot more interesting than that after all. It contains some patterns that are so Shakespearian. Two brothers are quite a common pattern in many plays. A difficult or impossible marriage, that's common too, in a way a primordial feature in many comedies. An old king that has become bitter and a wife that is manipulating him into unwise political decisions and human crimes is there to remind us of Lady Macbeth. A son in law who is receiving some poison in the ear when he listens to some report or rumor about his wife is there too reminding us of Hamlet. The exiled people living in the wild, or nearly so, can make us think of King Lear and his period outside in the wild nature. The disembarking Romans are not far from King Lear again. And of course the daughter of the king disguised into a page is so common that no one could miss it. We could actually be surprised that there be only one disguised girl.
This production has another charm. It is systematically played in Renaissance costumes and the setting is Dutch or Flemish looking. That's in fact a charm added to the play because it enables it to move from the Roman paraphernalia on one side and the rustic if not barbaric attire and accoutrement on the other side. It makes recognizing who is who a little bit difficult but it gives the play a real universal fragrance. The BBC was already getting globalized in 1983 when they decided (in 1978) to produce the complete plays by Shakespeare. And that project was a unique decision in a time when DVDs did not exist yet, and the Internet was still a secret military tool in some laboratories and universities in America. It is a good thing they did it and many other public television networks in the world could do the same thing for their classics: all Molière, all Racine, all Corneille, all Goethe, all Schiller, and I guess we could move then to more modern projects. I won't speak of operas because that is being done, little by little somewhere in the world: all Handel, all Mozart, all Wagner, all Richard Strauss, etc, without speaking of the Italians, Verdi, Rossini, and so many others. It is a fine treat to get into 32 plays by Shakespeare.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID
That's were Shakespeare turns magic. Till the very last instant in the last scene everyone is under the threat of being killed for some crime he has or he is accused of having committed. And the various death sentences that are hovering over the heads of them all fall like leaves in the autumn, but fall flat on the ground. Shakespeare uses contrived explanations that are so marvelous that no one can refuse to believe them and then we have a father who meets his two supposedly dead sons, is reunited with his supposedly lost daughter, is confronted to his son in law who he had banished and yet helped defeat the Romans, is brought face to face to a soldier he had banished a long time ago and who had taken care of his two sons. And he finally ends up the day by granting pardon to every one prisoner. That's a charming happy ending but constructed so swiftly and wisely that we doubt it will really end without any more killing till the last word about a general pardon is uttered. Then a soothsayer can come in and explain some mysterious prediction the son in law had managed to receive from Jupiter himself and all is well that ends well.
Yet the play is a lot more interesting than that after all. It contains some patterns that are so Shakespearian. Two brothers are quite a common pattern in many plays. A difficult or impossible marriage, that's common too, in a way a primordial feature in many comedies. An old king that has become bitter and a wife that is manipulating him into unwise political decisions and human crimes is there to remind us of Lady Macbeth. A son in law who is receiving some poison in the ear when he listens to some report or rumor about his wife is there too reminding us of Hamlet. The exiled people living in the wild, or nearly so, can make us think of King Lear and his period outside in the wild nature. The disembarking Romans are not far from King Lear again. And of course the daughter of the king disguised into a page is so common that no one could miss it. We could actually be surprised that there be only one disguised girl.
This production has another charm. It is systematically played in Renaissance costumes and the setting is Dutch or Flemish looking. That's in fact a charm added to the play because it enables it to move from the Roman paraphernalia on one side and the rustic if not barbaric attire and accoutrement on the other side. It makes recognizing who is who a little bit difficult but it gives the play a real universal fragrance. The BBC was already getting globalized in 1983 when they decided (in 1978) to produce the complete plays by Shakespeare. And that project was a unique decision in a time when DVDs did not exist yet, and the Internet was still a secret military tool in some laboratories and universities in America. It is a good thing they did it and many other public television networks in the world could do the same thing for their classics: all Molière, all Racine, all Corneille, all Goethe, all Schiller, and I guess we could move then to more modern projects. I won't speak of operas because that is being done, little by little somewhere in the world: all Handel, all Mozart, all Wagner, all Richard Strauss, etc, without speaking of the Italians, Verdi, Rossini, and so many others. It is a fine treat to get into 32 plays by Shakespeare.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID