Snippets of Shakespeare (with thanks to Radio 3)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

29 April

Some responses to hearing (part of - my fault, not Radio 3's!) the new radio production of Romeo and Juliet to-night


1. What are we to make of Friar Lawrence?

Not really what Prokofiev did in that singing melody that he gave to him in the ballet (and the piano suite that derived from it - at least, until I check, I think that it was in that order (not that the piano writing was fleshed out for orchestra)).

I have little idea whether it is still fashionable to call Shakespeare plays such as Measure for Measure (and All's Well that Ends Well) by the name 'problem plays' (or who originated that term), but the Duke's ethics in MfM seem no more dodgy than the friar's!


2. Whisky in Shakespeare

Not that it was called that in this play, but that is, essentially, what the acqua vitae* that is called for when Juliet's body is found, after she has taken the friar's concoction and so appears dead (but might be capable of being revived).


3. Overacting in Shakespeare

As the scene unfolded, it may have been the performance, but the reactions - in particular of Juliet's father - seemed overblown (and even ridiculous) in an age much more used to mortality at any age (Juliet's certainly being no safeguard) than ours.

For me, almost reminiscent of Lady Macbeth's awkwardly incriminating interjection, roundly put down as inappropriate given that the king has been killed, to the effect not in our house!


4. Sun and Moon

For those who have read - or dare to read - Lunch on the moon?, my own lines needfully do not bear comparison with:


Arise fair sun and kill the envious moon
Who is already sick and pale with grief
That thou her maid art far more fair than she

(Act 2, Scene 2)



5. Another link with Macbeth

Macduff, when he enquires after his wife, is told that she is 'well' (meaning, as used, really that she is at rest), and only comes to the realization about 'all my pretty chickens and their dam' a few lines later.

Here, with the economy that we will see below when Juliet kisses Romeo, Romeo introduces the word, in its usual sense:


How doth my Juliet? That I ask again,
For nothing can be ill if she be well.


To which Balthasar, his servant, directly replies:


Then she is well and nothing can be ill.
Her body sleeps in Capels' monument,
And her immortal part with angels lives.



6. The apothecary

Since the seeming source, in Brooke's Romeus and Juliet (1562), not only narrates the story, but gives characters speech, it should be possible to see how much invention there was in Shakespeare's Act 5, Scene 1, when, 60 lines in, Romeo procures poison**...

That said, before he does so, the Act opens with 11 lines' worth of a dream, in which Romeo begins by questioning the 'flattering truth of sleep', but also showing that, maybe, he is tempted to credit it, and, in any case, feels better for it (until the question in line 15, quoted above, to Balthasar):


My bosom's lord sits lightly in his throne
And all this day an unaccustom'd spirit
Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts


The purchase of the dram of poison, such soon-speeding gear / As will disperse itself through all the veins, put me in mind of a similar transaction in The Canterbury Tales, in the tale told by the Pardoner of the three young men who boast that they will seek out the villain Death to punish him - and find him.


7. The kiss

Brooke's narrative has Juliet kiss*** Romeus, but very differently from Shakespeare's portrayal of the touch of lips:

A thousand times she kist his mouth as cold as stone


Shakespeare's kiss is not only more tantalizing (as Romeo is clearly not long dead, and so might more nearly have been alive****), but there is a telescoping of several elements in barely more than half-a-dozen lines:


What's here? A cup clos'd in my true love's hand?
Poison, I see, hath been his timeless end.
O churl. Drunk all, and left no friendly drop
To help me after? I will kiss thy lips.
Haply some poison yet doth hang on them
To make me die with a restorative.
Thy lips are warm!


Two-and-a-half lines later, Juliet has stabbed herself, not having time for the long speeches and decisions of Brooke's narrative, as she does not want to be prevented from following Romeo in death when she hears voices.

No time for any more kisses than one, no time for farewells, but, more affectingly, the affectionate rebuke of her dead lover, and the conceit of wanting to share the means of death (with all its overtones) in that kiss.



End-notes

* Revd E. Cobham Brewer's delightful A Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, in an old edition that I have, reassuringly tells us, in the entry before, about Aqua Tofana:

A poisonous liquid containing arsenic, much used in Italy in the 17th century by young wives who wanted to get rid of their husbands.


Fair enough, one might think, but the entry puzzlingly continues (and concludes):

It was invented about 1690 by a Greek woman named Tofana, who called it the Manna of St Nicholas of Bari, from the widespread notion that an oil of miraculous efficacy flowed from the tomb of that saint. In Italian called also Aquella di Napoli.


** Which sounded like a woman, on Radio 3, not a man, make of which change what one will...

*** Sure a Freudian slip, I typed 'kill' just now!

**** I am reminded of Leontes, at the end of The Winter's Tale, kissing what he thinks a statue of his dead wife Hermione, and finding it warm to his lips' touch.


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here