What I experienced at a recent postmodern production in the park was Shakespeare in the dark, devoid of the living presence of goodness, truth, and beauty that flows from Shakespeare’s Muse. No matter. Shakespeare still lives in the timeless truth and beauty of his works and laughs at the folly of those modern Falstaffs, who do not see that the joke is on them.
One of the most egregious pursuits in our current meretricious culture is the widespread practice of Shakespeare abuse. This entails taking the living work of art which Shakespeare has created and vivisecting it viciously until it lies as dead on the stage as the denizens of the culture of death who stage it. Having experienced this Shakespeare abuse on both the stage and the screen, I tend to avoid postmodern productions of the Bard’s works whenever possible. It’s simply too painful to watch something so profoundly good, true and beautiful, and so profoundly Christian, being brutalized by barbarians.
I recall, for instance, attending a production of The Merchant of Venice in which all the Christian characters were portrayed as skinheads who punctuated their spleen-ventingly delivered lines with acts of violence on the hapless Shylock. More recently, I endured a production of Othello by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon which included a drunken debauch to the accompaniment of rap “music”.
Carrying the scars of these past experiences of Shakespeare-abuse, my wife and I attended with more than an air of trepidation a local “Shakespeare in the Park” performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Hoping for the best but half-expecting the worst, I braced myself for what was in store. Acknowledging T. S. Eliot’s cautionary wisdom that a shadow always falls “between the potency and the existence”, I harboured no unrealistic expectation that an amateur production would do justice to the magnificence of Shakespeare’s merriment in this most marvelously rambunctious of all his comedies. The real question was whether the production would be true to the spirit of Shakespeare’s play, reflecting its clear and unabashed Christian morality, or whether it would violate this spirit with the vile viciousness of the spirit of pride.
Let’s look at the pure “potency” of the play that Shakespeare actually wrote before we venture into the shadows that this particular production casts upon it.
It is significant that the play’s original title was Sir John Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsor because it largely serves as a vehicle or an excuse for the lampooning of the character of Falstaff, who had been the dissolute and drunken sidekick of Prince Hal in Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2. Prince Hal’s conversion and rite of passage from dissolute youth to the fullness of responsible kingship, following his accession to the throne as Henry V, is made manifest in his professed rejection of Falstaff and his degenerate lifestyle. “I know thee not old man,” he tells him. “Fall to thy prayers.”
Apart from Falstaff, whose incorrigible vanity serves as the humorous inspiration and dramatic driving force for the comedy, the principal characters are Master and Mistress Page and their friends, Master and Mistress Ford; Anne Page, the Pages’ daughter, a virtuous maiden; and the three suitors to Mistress Paige: Slender, Dr. Caius and Master Fenton.
Falstaff, blinded by his vanity, sends love letters to Mistress Page and Mistress Ford in the conceited belief that they are attracted to him. He is short of the necessary funds to continue his drunken debauched lifestyle and believes that these married ladies will keep him in the lap of luxury in return for his amorous favours. Upon receipt of the letters, the two “merry wives” decide to have fun at Falstaff’s expense, feigning their love for him and their willingness to cuckold their husbands at his adulterous behest. Throughout the remainder of the play, Falstaff is made to look increasingly absurd and ridiculous, falling into folly after folly, outwitted by the wives and by his own self-conceited blindness.
A humorous subplot is provided by the jealousy of Master Ford, who is too ready to believe the worst of his wife, prefiguring in comic form the tragic and destructive jealousy of Othello.
Paralleling the “love” of Falstaff is the love of the three suitors for Anne Page, two of whom are unworthy of her hand in marriage and whose advances are clearly unwanted. The third suitor and the one who ultimately wins her hand in marriage is Master Fenton, a reformed prodigal whose conversion to a life of virtue parallels the conversion of Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part 2 and also serves as a counterpoint and foil to Falstaff’s viciousness. Whereas the virtuous suitor wins the hand of his beloved, the vicious suitor is left empty-handed and becomes the object of public ridicule. Master Fenton, the reformed and repentant sinner, is, therefore, the mirror of whom Sir John Falstaff ought to be.
So much for the play that Shakespeare wrote. Let’s now turn to the production of it which I witnessed this weekend. The highlight of the performance was the merry wives themselves, who were festively feisty and enjoying themselves greatly at the drunken Falstaff’s expense. As for the portrayal of Falstaff, it was good in the sense that he was suitably gross and grotesque but the actor playing him insisted on adlibbing with the audience in a manner which Shakespeare, in persona Hamlet, had strictly forbidden.
What was worst about the production was the killing of all virtue within the plot, especially in the cheapening of the two noble characters, Anne Page and Master Fenton, the love interest. Whereas Shakespeare had painted these characters in the full splendour of Christian virtue, they are trivialized and trashed in the production to the level of the shallowness of our current culture. Shakespeare makes Anne a modest maiden who is bold enough to resist the efforts of her parents to force her into an arranged marriage with wealthy but worthless suitors; the producer of the production in the park had turned her into a vacuous valley girl. Shakespeare makes Master Fenton a true Christian convert who has forsaken his previous dissolute and reckless lifestyle to embrace the responsibility necessary to become a good and worthy spouse to the virtuous Anne, willing to lay down his life for her; the producer of the production in the park, had made him a jock, the epitome of the public-school athlete, all brawn but little sign of brain. Instead of the triumph of self-sacrificial marital love, we have the coupling of the quarterback with the cheerleader.
What I experienced in the park was Shakespeare in the dark. It was all slapdash slapstick devoid of any real gravitas beyond the mere levitas. The producer, like a veritas vampire, had sucked the very lifeblood from the living heart of Shakespeare’s Muse, that very lifeblood which is the living presence of goodness, truth, and beauty. It is as though Sir John Falstaff himself was the director of the play!
No matter. Shakespeare still lives and laughs. He lives in the timeless truth and beauty of his works and he laughs at the folly of those modern Falstaffs, drunk with the pride of their own Pride, who do not see that the joke is on them. Let’s allow the words of the Fairies’ Song at the end of The Merry Wives of Windsor speak for themselves:
Fie on sinful fantasy,
Fie on lust and luxury!
Lust is but a bloody fire,
Kindled with unchaste desire,
Fed in heart, whose flames aspire,
As thoughts do blow them, higher and higher.
As for Shakespeare’s judgment on this latest Falstaffian abuser of his plays, perhaps he would repeat the very words that Henry V says to Falstaff: “I know thee not old man. Fall to thy prayers.”
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
The featured image, uploaded by Christian Michelides, is a photograph of Ambrogio Maestri as Falstaff, Vienna State Opera, 2016. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.