Where Lacy Defies a King

The Shoemaker's Holiday by Thomas Dekker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My first play by Thomas Dekker. I found it interesting and sometimes amusing with a story I kinda enjoy, but it could have been better. So--about 3 stars.

Perhaps the best characteristic of the play is how the characters have distinctive voices and mannerisms. I think the intention is to play that for laughs, though it's a bit flat on the page; I expect Dekker knew who would play certain parts and knew they could make the delivery comedic. Our MC pretends to be Dutch, so he's speaking Dutch throughout, in a way I take to be amusing to an audience in this time. Eyre, the rich shoemaker boss, is full of playful bluster and pretend anger, forever calling his wife and workers goofy names. "Peace, you cracked groats, you mustard tokens," he says to the men, later referring to them as drabs and scoundrels and a lot of other things. "Work, you bombast-cotton-candle-quean," he says to the wife of one of his men. Then, to his wife and his servant, he says, "Come out, you powder-beef queans! ...What, Madge Mumblecrust!" But he's actually considerate and helpful to all of them, and is forever stopping his men in their work to give them drink and to be merry. (If this had been a musical, you'd see them dancing and singing in the shoe shop. Wait, the jolly shoemakers actually do have two songs... It feels like medieval Newsies.) His wife is always complaining or listing injustices (in what I took for an aggrieved voice) before adding "but let that pass," in a passive-aggressive way. Half her lines end with that, and it has a comedic sound that I bet worked with an audience.

I'm supposing. I dunno. It seems kinda funny to read, but the line delivery would probably make it or break it.

The plot and subplot are entertaining to a degree. One character, Rowland Lacy, is to be sent to France leading some troops for the king, but he wants to stay to try to woo Rose, the daughter of the Lord Mayor. She's not exactly lowborn, but he's the nephew of the earl who doesn't want him to end up with her. Lacy bails on the plan, putting on a disguise, speaking Dutch, calling himself Hans, and getting a job as a shoemaker, which he learned while living for a time in Holland. All this is so he can try to get close to Rose. The subplot is about Ralph and Jane, a pair of newlyweds who get separated when he's in France fighting. He returns lame but can't find her; she's been told he was dead and isn't looking for him. Another man is pressuring her to marry, and she agrees in the end, very reluctantly.

The problem with most of the plot is that nobody puts in too much effort to make things work out. They just do. Things happen; it turns out okay. Happy endings. Ralph and Jane find each other in time; Lacy is forgiven for not going to France, and he and Rose marry, with the king's blessing.

I love a happy ending. I could have used a little more of the characters working through their conflicts, achieving something by their efforts. That's where the play lost me.

Anyway, I was amused. I almost gave it a 4, but I'll hold out for a better play by him. We'll see.

People who like Elizabethan comedies might enjoy this.

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Where Witgood Tricks Everybody

A Trick to Catch the Old One by Thomas Middleton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the first Thomas Middleton play I've read, and it's okay. A little up and down. Parts of it are quite entertaining, and it's not too hard to understand (comparatively speaking), but a lot of the action is annoying and hard to get behind, so started off by giving it a 3. However, I'm talking myself into a 4 as I review the story and realize it's pretty good, actually. :)

A young man--Witgood--has been messing around, wasting money gambling and paying for prostitutes, and just generally being irresponsible. His rich uncle (Uncle Lucre) has taken advantage of him when he needed a loan instead of helping him out and has taken control of his property. (Before the play, even.) I'm not sure how he did that, but it's part of the setup. But through the course of the play, Witgood gets his property back, has his debts wiped out, marries a good girl, and foists his prostitute/mistress off on his uncle's worst enemy, another usurer named Hoard. It's all tricks; they make everyone think that the courtesan is actually a rich heiress, and from that point just let all the greedy gold-diggers drive the action.

I was put off by the attitude everyone took toward the poor woman who had been Witgood's mistress. She's clearly a decent person, seems very kind, and yet she's spoken of as if she's monstrous. Witgood, who we are meant to be very sympathetic to, helps her out by setting her up with a husband, but Lucre is a horrible person. It's treated like a great joke on the greedy old man, but I'm imagining the poor girl having to be stuck with him. Witgood, meanwhile, has moved on from her to another girl who he marries, because you don't marry your mistress, right? One of Lucre's friends, invited to his wedding feast, is furious when he recognizes his wife and starts to leave like everyone else. As he's going, he says to Lucre:

"Fie, fie! A man of your repute and name!
You'll feast your friends, but cloy 'em first with shame."

Anyway, I get it. That's the attitude of the time. Can't really blame the author. But their hate toward one of the few sympathetic characters in the play was kinda shocking. (She very carefully never lies to Lucre. She says she has no money or property. He just thinks she's being secretive and doesn't believe her. In the end, it's his greed, not her statements, that makes the scheme work.)

The tricks were good, getting revenge on greedy money guys, getting Witgood out of trouble and setting his mistress up for life (hoping, I suppose, that the rich old guy she tricked into marriage doesn't last long). There are happy endings all around. Pretty solid story, all told.

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Where the Doctor Knows He Doesn't Know

The Doctor in Spite of Himself by Molière
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a light bit of drama, a quick read, and I liked it a little bit. I disliked parts, too. I'm sure most of the amusement afforded by this little play is in seeing the burlesque, the overacting, the slapstick, rather than looking at the words on the page, but I'm not sure I'd ever pay money for the privilege.

This three-act plays speeds along almost like a one-act play, so fleeting that I wonder how long it ran when it was originally performed. But I like it better for being quick. What I don't like is the Punch and Judy feel, the making light of assault. I get it that marital strife is a comedy staple, but it's still distasteful. Even when looking at it like a sketch, pure lampoon, it's still emerging from a very dark place.

I don't think anyone feels too bad for Sganarelle when his wife gets him back for beating her. She convinces a couple men that her husband is a great doctor, but he pretends not to be, and she directs them to beat him until he confesses he is a doctor. If you picture him as Elmer Fudd or the coyote, maybe it's a funny bit. The genuine, redeeming, useful (IMO) satire follows. He passes himself off as a doctor, prescribing things to anyone who needs a doctor, demanding payment while caring not at all whether any of his remedies work. (They don't, of course.) Now, that sucks, but he makes the reasonable point that doctors of the time did no better than him. I think that's true. In his own words:

I find it's the best of all trades because whether you do good or harm you still get your money. We never get blamed for doing a bad job. We just hack away at the stuff we are working on, and whereas a cobbler making shoes can't spoil a piece of leather without having to foot the bill himself, in our trade we can make a mess of a man without it costing us a penny. If we make a mistake, it isn't our look out: it's always the fault of the fellow who's dead.

He's not wrong.

Sganarelle is not better a human at the end than at the beginning, and he's horrible at the beginning. There's a happy ending for a couple of lovers, though--at the cost of some Deus Ex Machina, come in the form of a sudden inheritance. But this isn't meant to be serious, I guess. A frothy little nothing that makes a good point earns from me a barely passing, probably-skip-it 3.

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Where Volpone Doesn't Get Away With It

Volpone by Ben Jonson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I thought this was good. Ben Jonson is growing on me. I didn't really enjoy "Every Man in His Humour," but I liked "Sejanus" quite a bit. Volpone (my autocorrect keeps changing it to Vulpine!) was even more entertaining, IMO, and I wonder if that trend will continue.

Scoring it on the "Reading Renaissance Plays at Home Just for Fun" scale, I give it a 5. (I have a lot of scales. On the "Reading Before Bedtime" scale, for instance, this is maybe a 2.) My interest here isn't just in the entertainment value of the story--I would never pick it up if that were the only point. (I can imagine a modern novel based on this story that would be a lot more fun to read.) But there are other benefits besides. Learning things about society and the times is cool. Getting insight into the sensibilities of people living 400 years ago is worth something to me: discovering what they think is justice, and what they think is funny. Getting a feel for a writer I only vaguely know is worth something too.

And to be fair, the story itself is pretty entertaining, even in this format.

Like anything from this era, though, it's a bit of a struggle. Without notes, I don't know what exactly the characters are really trying to say a lot of the time. Irony is hard to pick out when you're struggling with unusual vocabulary. Anything that is understood but left unsaid, especially stuff that relies on familiarity with social structures that don't even exist anymore, can fly right by me as the reader. Tone can be impossible to pick up when looking at the words on the page (rather than seeing it performed, I mean.) But taking those difficulties into account (and applying the "Reading Renaissance Plays at Home Just for Fun"scale), this is a good read.

Volpone is a rich jerk who cons other rich jerks out of their money. The whole play is about him convincing different men to give him expensive gifts so that he will choose them to inherit his wealth, because he's supposedly on death's door. (He's fine.) I wish Jonson had given them all real names, though; Volpone means fox, and his marks are all named versions of crow, raven, and vulture. I would have preferred regular names, allowing us a little more suspension of disbelief. Anyway, with his servant (named Mosca, which means fly) he fleeces those guys and embarrasses them, though he gets caught in the end. They all pay the price.

The only thing I would have liked to see at the end, when everyone gets their punishment, is a scene with the two good characters, Corvino's sweet wife, Celia, and Corbaccio's noble son, Bonario. Corvino is trying to sacrifice his wife to Volpone to win him over, and Corbaccio disinherits his good son to convince Volpone to choose him. Bonario catches Volpone trying to assault Celia and rescues her. Later, all the old guys, covering their tracks, collude in saying that Celia and Bonario have been sleeping together. There are some court scenes at the end straightening all this out, but we never see Bonario and Celia together, which I would have liked. (If Corvino had died, and maybe Corbaccio, too, we could have had that happier ending.)

Despite that little disappointment, I found the story amusing, the plot well constructed, and the verse top notch (even when thorny). I realize that Ben Jonson isn't exactly forgotten, and his work is still taught some and no doubt performed here and there, but it's a shame he isn't a little more prominent in our collective consciousness.

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Where I Read It Again, And It Got Better

The Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

[This is a reread. My review below stands, pretty much; I'll just add that reading it this time from a No Fear edition really is worth it. This is not a difficult play to read, as far as Shakespeare goes, but there were still bunches of lines that I only half understood or just passed over, looking for action. This usually happens when there is simple, everyday language, but it's used in a very different way than what we usually do now. With this help, I understood more of the sarcasm and humor, stuff I didn't even know I missed the first time. Overall, I enjoyed the play more this way, with fewer gaps in comprehension. So--I recommend reading it from these editions. All of Shakespeare. It's not cheating or anything. My preference as a teacher? Read a half page or so in the original, read the modern text on the opposite page (unless you really got all of it the first time), then reread the original bit, or at least skim it. Then go on to the next part in the original language. Best of all the worlds, IMO]
...........................................
I should have read this one years ago. It's another very intelligible play (from a 21st century perspective, I mean, especially as compared to more difficult plays) with plot, characters, language, and themes that still readily make sense.

Now I recognize the lines Gwyneth Paltrow's character used to audition in Shakespeare in Love, and I understand some of the plot and setting of Benet Brandreth's Shakespearian historical mystery, The Assassin of Verona. I didn't love that novel, but now I see some of the stuff that didn't work for me comes straight from this play, so I can absolve the author a little...

In this story, a couple of best friends (Proteus, who is changeable, and Valentine, who is a true lover) part a little unhappy with each other because Proteus had fallen in love, and his friend thought that was a betrayal of their friendship. Shortly after Valentine goes to the Duke's court in Milan, Proteus follows, parting sadly with Julia. When he gets there, he joins the service of the beautiful daughter of the duke, Silvia, who is Valentine's love. (Yes, Valentine immediately fell in love, even though he had just chided his friend for that.) Proteus falls in love with her too, betraying both Julia and his best friend. In fact, he reveals the relationship to the duke, getting Valentine exiled so that he can swoop in. Before long, Julia shows up, in disguise, and sees how Proteus has failed her.

Valentine ends up with some nice brigands in the woods, and by the end everybody is out there, getting their heads straight. The conclusion comes very quick--lots of apologies, easy forgiveness, pardons for criminals, and making up all around. It's a happy ending, which I never fault, though I would have liked Proteus to earn it a little more.

But it's fun (ish) to read, and some of the wooing and sarcastic asides that read sort of funny are doubtless improved in a live performance, which I'd like to see sometime.

There's a whole list of continuity errors and naming mistakes throughout (saying Padua when they mean Milan; calling the duke emperor at times; sailing from one land-locked city to another; stuff like that) which could be its own topic. This definitely needed an editor before it went to print, but this is how we got it, and I think it's humanizing. Shakespeare's rough draft errors. LOL.

Good play. It could be a good movie. Maybe it is. As always, I'll go check now. Fingers crossed.

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Where Falstaff Gets Dunked On

The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

One of my least favorite plays by Shakespeare.

The last act is kind of entertaining, but I don't love the rest. Falstaff is portrayed here as just a fat fool to be mocked, and that's not too fun. He wants to seduce a couple of married women, really just to get some money from them, and he goes about it in the rudest, clumsiest way. But the rest of the story is how they lead him on just to trick him and let him embarrass himself. To escape an angry husband, he gets carried out in a basket and then tossed in the Thames with laundry. To escape a second time, he dresses as a woman--a well known witch, in fact--and gets beaten on the way out. And the last episode has him dressed like Herne the Hunter, with stag horns, going out to a haunted wood at midnight, where a bunch of actors and local people dress up like fairies and the like. They have prepared a song that they scare him with as they pinch him black and blue.

I'm thinking: people sure had a lot of time on their hands to go to so much trouble to embarrass a guy like they did here.

The good part was a subplot with a young woman who wants to marry one guy but her mom wants someone else and her dad wants a third man. They're all part of the midnight pageant, and the mom and dad's picks are told to come find her dressed in white or in green and steal her away to get married. She tricks them both, having other people dress in white and in green, so that she can leave with the man she loves. Yay! a happy ending. I would have liked it better if the play was mostly about her, not Falstaff.

Maybe it's funny on stage. I thought it was mostly mean-spirited and didn't love it. YMMV

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Where Warlock Holmes Gets a Backstory

The Hell-Hound of the Baskervilles by G.S. Denning
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is pretty good. I didn't really enjoy the first book in the series as much as I hoped to, and almost didn't read this one. Looking back, I see I gave the first book 4 stars, and I'm a little surprised; I remember it more in the 3 range. I graded easier back then, I guess. But this one is better, more fun beginning to end, more like what I hoped the series would be, and I might get on with the next book a little quicker. (5 years between books 1 and 2.)

It's an odd mashup--Sherlock Holmes with comic fantasy. I'm down for it, actually, and I have a pretty wide range of things I'll accept and try to enjoy, but the first one didn't work for me through most of it. It made suspension of disbelief really hard, in the same way that you see The Flintstones and think that's not possible; a dinosaur would never do that. (Maybe that's just me.) It strayed too far from fantasy and broad comedy into just spoof, the kind of book where the author and the reader shake hands and say, "Isn't this completely ridiculous?" That stretches my interest too thin, right to the breaking point.

This book, based on the Hound of the Baskervilles, dances close to that point early on, but then settles in for something I like better--a weird, fantasy version of Sherlock. It is pretty silly in parts (a race on tricycles, for example, that is almost more than I can bear) but keeps close enough to fantasy conventions pretty much everywhere else that I don't have to toss it in frustration. In fact, I enjoyed it quite a bit.

This book is intentionally a spoof, I suppose, and I understand that now, though it is farther along the spectrum than I thought before buying the first two books. It's kinda like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which also blends fantasy and elements of the ridiculous with a strait-laced property. That book took itself more seriously than this one, though, or so it seemed to me, and I liked it better for that.

I wander. In sum, this is not precisely my thing, especially in parts, but I liked reading it, and I feel like it's a better example of--[waves hands]--whatever it is than the first book in the series. YMMV.

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Where I Still Don't Know What the Second Apostrophe Is For

Love's Labor's Lost by William Shakespeare
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Yeah, I didn't love it.

I'm usually (recently, as an old man, I mean) pretty psyched for a Shakespeare comedy. I usually find them clever and fun, with lots to pay attention to. My intuition is, with further study, maybe with the help of an updated version to refer to, I might come around on this one. But right now, this ain't it.

I like the silly premise. The king and some men in his court agree that they will focus on study and self-improvement (for 3 years, was it? I forget) and keep themselves apart from women entirely. They'll barely sleep. They make the vow, then immediately see the difficulties when an embassy arrives that includes important women. When they are forced to keep the women outside, living in tents, it's obvious that this is a bad plan. It become more obvious when all four men fall in love.

Nice. Should be fun. But the fifth act, which is about 60% of the whole play, is all about playing games and messing around. The women join together to mock the men, and I'd be okay if it was good-natured, but it isn't. It's just page after page, scene after scene, of low-key arguing and playing tricks. Even that would be sort of okay, since they're all privileged men and women who should be able to take a joke, but when some regular folks try to entertain them with a pageant portraying "nine worthies," like Hercules and Pompey and other famous men from myth and history, the nobles interrupt them and confuse them and laugh at them and make them forget their lines. Rich people amusing themselves by mocking poor people just doesn't ever play well, IMO.

In the end, the women promise to consider the men's suits if they spend a year in various ways, mostly in service and in thought. I suppose we're meant to believe it works out after that year. I'd rather have seen that happen, though, rather than leave the play hanging.

The plot fizzles out. The characters disappoint. The humor is mean, much of it punching down. I didn't love it. It's clever, for sure; that's still true. Lots of Shakespearean wordplay. But I didn't like it the play. Not much, anyway. Maybe sometime, on second read, I'll have some brilliant insights that make it work for me. Probably nah.

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Where Helen Gets Her Man

All's Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've never seen this performed, but it seems pretty entertaining, pretty fast-moving. Should be fun to see.

I knew the story from the Decameron, and it's a pretty typical plot for that collection of stories--a husband or wife tricking the other one to get their way is a common motif. It's hard to have any feeling for the main characters, though. I kinda like Helen, who proves her worth by her medical knowledge and ability, but making the king force a guy to marry her is pretty wrong. And then for that guy to abandon his wife is also pretty wrong. I'm not on either one's side.

But letting it be a kind of farce, one clearly based more on literary models than on real life, it is clever and amusing. Bertram has promised never to be a real husband to Helen until she has his ring (which he'll never give her) and presents him with his child (though he'll never sleep with her), so it looks like it's impossible. But Helen finds a way. She manages to substitute herself in for a young woman near Florence that her husband wants to sleep with, after the girl first demands the ring that she needs so badly. Apparently, in a dark room, he'd have no idea who he was really with. It works, she gets pregnant, and she gets the ring from the girl to take back to court in France to win her husband back.

There's more to it than that, because she needs additional proofs, but it all comes out in the final scene. I don't know how they can possibly live happily ever after, but we're given the impression that everyone is reconciled, and I'm just going with it.

I appreciate the theme dealing with true merit. Bertram doesn't see any value in low-born Helen, but she proves herself to be someone who deserves respect because of her wit and achievements. Others, like the coward Parolles, deserve scorn despite being born to a higher class. It's disappointing that this argument ever needed to be made, but I'm glad it makes the case here.

Overall, this play is pretty intelligible and easy to follow, IMO, for a modern audience. Whether we could be made to warm up to the main characters in a production of this or not, I'm not sure. I think probably. Anyway, it's worth reading.

Recommended.

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Where Jack and Algy Are, at Last, Earnest

The Importance of Being Earnest Annotated by The Importance of Being Earnest Annotated Oscar Wilde
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Oscar Wilde is a clever, funny writer, and this is as good as anything he's written. Might be my favorite. (I also enjoyed "An Ideal Husband," "A woman of No Importance," and "Lady Windermere's Fan." Lots of similarities.) His characters are comic rather than realistic, always slightly askew, which could be a turnoff for some. But if you hear them as if they're always being tongue-in-cheek and only partly sincere (which is not too far off), as if they are always in on the joke, like a character in an SNL sketch, and always about a second from bursting out into laughter, it makes a lot of sense. People get angry here, but they're always performatively angry. They give and take offense, but forgive it immediately. They behave badly but but feel shame and embarrassment for about one line--and then they're over it.

It works for me.

Jack, who calls himself Ernest while in London, pretends when he leaves his home in the country that he's going to London to visit his *brother* Ernest (who doesn't exit), a poor young man who's always supposed to be in some kind of trouble, and he wants to marry Gwendolyn, his friend Algernon's cousin. Algernon, who leaves London occasionally to visit his imaginary sick friend Bunbury, finds out Jack has a young female ward who he wants to meet. He tracks down Jack's home, finds Cecily, pretends to be the poor brother Ernest, falls in love with her, and convinces her to marry him. Jack, returning home in mourning pretending Ernest is dead, is horrified to find Algernon pretending to be the fake brother Earnest in excellent health.

Then, the hijinks. Really, though, it's the ironic dialogue that's funniest. Here's Jack when he's caught in a lie and forced to confess:

Jack: Gwendolen--Cecily--it is very painful for me to be forced to speak the truth. It is the first time in my life that I have ever been reduced to such a painful position, and I am really quite inexperienced in doing anything of the kind...

And here's Algernon explaining to his aunt that his friend Bunbury is dead:

Algernon: My dear Aunt Augusta... The doctors found out that Bunbury could not live... so Bunbury died.
Lady Bracknell: He seems to have had great confidence in the opinion of his physicians. I am glad, however, that he made up his mind at the last to some definite course of action, and acted under proper medical advice.

A mystery gets solved, problems are cleared up, and everybody gets a very nice happily ever after.

It's a very funny play, light and silly, and I recommended it.

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Where Figaro Gets His Start

The Barber of Seville by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is somewhat entertaining; I suspect it would be a little more entertaining in the actual theater, performed instead of read. That's what pushed a 3.5 or so in my head to a 4. I'm sure this is funny in person.

The Benjamin Franklin series, where he meets with Beaumarchais in Paris, got me interested in reading this. I only have a vague idea of Figaro, mostly informed by Bugs Bunny cartoons, and assumed they were only operas. I didn't know that Beaumarchais was such a renaissance man, and I didn't know he wrote these plays (and got himself in trouble for them).

Part of my misapprehension, corrected by reading this first one, was that these were highbrow tales. I mean, opera, right? LOL. Nope.

So, as far as plotting and dialogue, this whole play is just Figaro helping Count Almaviva get access to Rosine, a beautiful young woman who is going to be forced to marry her guardian, Bartholo. (First of all--wtf? Who does this. Second--I recall an older Spanish play that is almost the exact thing, with the same opening sequence in the street outside the window...) Bartholo is a jerk taking advantage of a helpless young woman, so he's the villain, but literally everyone else spends most of the play lying or scheming to lie. Or accepting bribes.

The dishonesty strikes me as odd, and not very honorable in main characters. It's acceptable, maybe, to defeat the villain, but it's weird. I've had the same thought reading Dumas, where characters lie to each other and aren't even embarrassed when caught in the lies since, apparently, everyone else would do the same thing. I'm not sure if this is a coincidence, a cultural thing, or if it's a convention of French literature, but it's surprising to me. I'm trying to think of a non-villain in English literature of a similar era who lies like these guys do. Not Darcy or Edmund, for example. But I guess Tom Jones gets away with lies and bad behavior. Hmm. Maybe it's the era.....

So here, Figaro, kind of a trickster, is working to get all the servants sick or sleeping and get Bartholo out of the house so the count can sneak in and marry the girl. The comedy is in the lying and the goofy songs they are singing extemporaneously and, especially, the moments when the count (in disguise as a music teacher) is trying to whisper with Rosine, while the jealous and suspicious Bartholo keeps intervening.

It's a romp is what I'm saying. It's just young good guys outwitting an old jerk, tricking him and making up quick lies to win the girl away from him. That's fun.

The second play, The Marriage of Figaro, is supposed to be more subversive, more of a commentary on society and nobility, and it's the one that got Beaumarchais in trouble. I'm eager to see if it feels meatier. But sometimes something light and silly is just fine.

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Where the Rake Is the Hero

An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is, IMO, a great play. I've enjoyed the movie many times--Rupert Everett, Minnie Driver, Kate Blanchett, Jeremy Northam--and considered the themes a bit, but the ideas cut deeper when reading it, and I agree with a lot of it. (Not all, certainly.) While enjoying dozens of comic lines, we still get to think about the impossibility of perfection and the ramifications of accepting that, whether we should forgive ourselves and others or if we should withdraw from society and hide our faces.

We learn quite early that Sir Robert Chiltern, a rising star in parliament, owes his wealth to selling a big secret when he was very young, and Lady Chevely has arrived to used that information against him, to make him support a "scheme" (as they called it then) that was really a scam but would make her money. Sir Robert agrees to do what she asks, though he had been about to deliver a strong speech saying the opposite. He is as afraid of losing his wife's love if she found out what he had done as he was of any scandal, but he's stuck, because she knows he considers the scheme a fraud; there's no way he can address parliament supporting it without her learning that something is wrong. He fails either way.

Slacker Lord Goring, brilliantly played by Rupert Everett in the movie and in my head, turns out to be the voice of reason and morality both in the play, the one most responsible for leading the story to a happy conclusion. Everybody thinks he's just a degenerate playboy, including his father, but he's the one who intercepts Lady Chevely, gives both Sir Robert and Lady Gertrude good advice, and models forgiveness, or more accurately a judgment-free friendship, that spreads to the others.

The funniest lines are those delivered between Lord Goring and the woman he (almost secretly) loves, Sir Robert's sister. (Minnie Driver in the movie.) Their amused ironic banter keeps the play light when it could seem dark. Lord Goring's interactions with his father are also very fun.

Lord Cavendish: Why don't you propose to that pretty Miss Chiltern?
Lord Goring: I am of a very nervous disposition, especially in the morning.
Lord Cavendish: I don't suppose there is the smallest chance of her accepting you.
Lord Goring: I don't know how the betting stands today.

There's a lot of amusing fluff in a Wilde play, but lots of musings on the classes in England at that time, on what good government means (if anything), on morality, and a preoccupation with those trying to be perfect. It would be wonderful to talk to him about what he was thinking when he wrote about such topics.

Anyway, it's a good story with lots of humor and the right amount of ironic detachment to make the satire bite. Highly recommended.

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Where Proteus Causes All the Trouble

The Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I should have read this one years ago. It's another very intelligible play (from a 21st century perspective, I mean, especially as compared to more difficult plays) with plot, characters, language, and themes that still readily make sense.

Now I recognize the lines Gwyneth Paltrow's character used to audition in Shakespeare in Love, and I understand some of the plot and setting of Benet Brandreth's Shakespearian historical mystery, The Assassin of Verona. I didn't love that novel, but now I see some of the stuff that didn't work for me comes straight from this play, so I can absolve the author a little...

In this story, a couple of best friends (Proteus, who is changeable, and Valentine, who is a true lover) part a little unhappy with each other because Proteus had fallen in love, and his friend thought that was a betrayal of their friendship. Shortly after Valentine goes to the Duke's court in Milan, Proteus follows, parting sadly with Julia. When he gets there, he joins the service of the beautiful daughter of the duke, Silvia, who is Valentine's love. (Yes, Valentine immediately fell in love, even though he had just chided his friend for that.) Proteus falls in love with her too, betraying both Julia and his best friend. In fact, he reveals the relationship to the duke, getting Valentine exiled so that he can swoop in. Before long, Julia shows up, in disguise, and sees how Proteus has failed her.

Valentine ends up with some nice brigands in the woods, and by the end everybody is out there, getting their heads straight. The conclusion comes very quick--lots of apologies, easy forgiveness, pardons for criminals, and making up all around. It's a happy ending, which I never fault, though I would have liked Proteus to earn it a little more.

But it's fun (ish) to read, and some of the wooing and sarcastic asides that read sort of funny are doubtless improved in a live performance, which I'd like to see sometime.

There's a whole list of continuity errors and naming mistakes throughout (saying Padua when they mean Milan; calling the duke emperor at times; sailing from one land-locked city to another; stuff like that) which could be its own topic. This definitely needed an editor before it went to print, but this is how we got it, and I think it's humanizing. Shakespeare's rough draft errors. LOL.

Good play. It could be a good movie. Maybe it is. As always, I'll go check now. Fingers crossed.

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Where Wilde Hits a Few Targets

A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a pretty entertaining play with a couple nuggets of truth well worth finding out, and it's filled with sayings that amuse but probably distract from what's at the heart of the play more than they add to it. IMO. But the play is more successful than not, especially if one is inclined to like Wilde, as I am, and would like to see it performed.

But it seems like Wilde let loose with the aphorisms that look like they mean something but probably don't. I got tired of that. Lots of "women do this and men do that," including the famous bit about women becoming like their mothers being their tragedy and men not becoming like their fathers being theirs. That's the best one. Among the rest, some draw blood; others are too by-the-numbers to feel like they truly say anything. Probably got laughs, I suppose.

It takes a while to figure out who the play is about and what's happening with them. The story of Mrs. Arbuthnot and her adult son, who's being offered an amazing position with Lord Illingworth, emerges from a lot of random dialogue in the first act, where a number of guests at Hunstanton Chase are talking about nothing in particular. Much of it tends toward the behavior of men and women, but all with a jaded, insincere, ironic tone. Lady Hunstanton, explaining why a particular young lady didn't receive an offer of marriage from Lord Illingworth: "But I believe he said her family was too large. Or was it her feet? I forget which." That's funny, and shows how ridiculous marriage had become among the upper classes of England, but it's also pointless conversation. Later: "Poor Lord Belton died three days [after eloping] of joy or gout. I forget which."

It's all just fodder for endless, pointless conversations, where the details hardly mattered. That's a critique of the institution, but the reader also begins to feel that nothing means anything; nothing they say is worth attending to. When asked about uneducated people voting, Lord Illingworth says he thinks they are the only people who should. Then he cautions against taking sides, because that "is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore." Later he says that he adores simple pleasures, adding "they are the last refuge of the complex." Maybe that means something. I can imagine something deep there, but I got the feeling that even Wilde was just tossing out jokes, hoping they sounded significant. The whole conversation seems to be just setups for clever bon mots that don't really mean much, and I started to wonder if anything would happen in the story.

But we find out that there are secrets and connections and a history between people, and the story does get interesting. It's all about how women get squashed by society for sexual impropriety, but men never have any consequences. It's disappointing that religion and strict morality are taken for granted here, and the prevailing perspective, as a result, is that men should suffer as much as women do, not that women should not. That feels like a missed opportunity, even considering the time of publication. However, you can read the ending as supporting that notion, of treating "sinners" (if you must) charitably, with forgiveness, especially since the least judgmental person in the play is the religious American woman who is often referred to as "the Puritan," and she refuses at the end of the story to hold a woman's past against her.

So maybe I should let that perspective get the final word on the topic.

For too long, I thought we were supposed to see Illingworth as the lovable cad, like Rupert Everett's Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband. (I haven't read that play yet--it's just the movie for me so far.) Turns out--spoiler--Illingworth's just a cad. His wordplay is self-serving, not self-deprecating, and his apparent immorality is who he actually is. TBH, it all makes a lot more sense when you read the beginning the second time, supplied with backstories and true natures. I wonder if people went multiple times to the play back in the day...

My favorite character, in the end, is the earnest and mocked young American woman. I don't know how she would have been received by Wilde's contemporaries, but she's just alright with me. Direct. Sincere. Forgiving. Good stuff.

Lots of it is funny, and I like the story. Wilde can absolutely do "clever." Just a bit more heart early on and it would have really worked for me. Still, 4 stars--it comes close.

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Where the King Loses It (But Gets Some of It Back)

Shakespeare's Play a Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of my favorite Shakespeare plays, now. I knew nothing at all about this play until very recently, and am surprised to learn it's as popular as it is. Never was taught in any classes I took...

But it should be. It's more fun than most of his plays, and reasonably comprehensible without much assistance--more than many.

Somewhere between romance and myth, we a king who, like Othello, doesn't believe in his wife's faithfulness (though she is absolutely faithful), and everyone suffers, especially his wife and son, but much of the harm is undone by the end, including an Ovid-like metamorphosis that repairs the worst of it. (The son and everyone on the ship remain dead, unfortunately.) Some of it is like tragedy, and fairly realistic, but the statue of his wife returning to life is pure fantasy or myth, and that's cool. It would have been fun to see performed.

The common trope of this time (from Shakespeare to Austen and almost to our time) that a noble young man in love with a beautiful girl--peasant, servant, or, as in this case, a shepherdess--is absolutely NOT to think about marrying her; but if that girl turns out to be a lost princess (which, of course, she must be, or she wouldn't be beautiful, right?) then all is well. Marry away! Nobody is bothered by the fact that nothing actually changed about the girl--if she was worth marrying as a princess, she should have been worth marrying as a shepherdess, because she was the same either way. But I can't change the minds of people long dead.

Anyway, I like a happy ending, and this one will do. If we had seen a bit more of Perdita being amazing and sweet in the middle, someone worth infuriating a king for, in act III or act IV, I would have liked it a bit better. She doesn't get enough time on stage to suit me. Still, 4 stars for the first couple acts and the last one. Good fun.

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Where Ralph Takes a Beating

Ralph Roister Doister by Nicholas Udall
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Some of this translates to modern sensibilities and tastes, and some of the language is decently accessible, but most of this only works for someone who has mid-16th-century jargon down and finds certain kinds of joking funny.

I was not the right audience.

Having said that, there is some clever stuff here and a few genuinely funny moments. More on that.

Mostly, this is a play about a rich dork (Ralph) who wants to marry a certain attractive widow (Lady Custance). He's terrible at getting the girl, and it's all made harder by a hanger-on (Merygreke) who pretends to help while just making a fool of him for grins. It's like a cruel practical joke. The widow wants nothing to do with him and his gifts or letters and is already engaged to be married to a better guy (Gawyn) who's out of town.

The best bit is a long misread letter that Ralph had a scribe prepare for him. Merygreke reads it aloud all wrong, like this (in part):

...ye shall never please me.
But when ye are merry, I will be all sad;
When ye are sorry, I will be very glad;
When ye seek your heart's ease, I will be unkind.
At no time in me shall ye much gentleness find...

The widow is furious at the insults, and Ralph is furious at the scribe. But when confronted, the scribe reads it properly:

ye shall never please me But when ye are merry;
I will be all sad When ye are sorry;
I will be very glad When ye seek your heart's ease;
I will be unkind At no time; in me shall ye much gentleness find.

There's quite a bit more, and it's good comedy writing, especially considering this is about 1553. I could see a Dick Van Dyke episode, or some other classic TV show, based on almost the same lines.

The other decently funny bit is a mock battle near the end between Ralph's servants and Lady Custance's servants, Ralph marching with a colander on his head. Merygreke manages it where he keeps appearing to swing at Custance and "accidentally" hits his good friend, over and over. In the end, Ralph and his army have to run away.

Giving Udall his due, it was a better comedy than one might expect in that era. The rhyming couplets and forced rhymes are annoying, and the vocabulary (a long generation before Shakespeare) is impenetrable without a gloss, but there are some fun parts. Mostly not a pleasure, though, to a modern reader. 2 stars. YMMV

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Where Lady Windermere Has Many Protectors

Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I found this thoroughly enjoyable. Emotional. Witty. Funny. Clever.

What's not to like?

It's in this play that we find the quip, "I can resist everything except temptation." There are so many effective, witty quips in the play, you could probably write a book about them. Maybe there is one.

Lady Windermere has never had reason to suspect her husband, but another gentleman, Lord Darlington, reveals some actions which call his faithfulness into question. The facts are confirmed. Then her husband insists she invite the woman named in the gossip to the ball at their home. The setup is complete when, certain of her husband's shockingly open infidelity, Lord Darlington offers to take her away to live in true love.

In a fit of pique, she writes a letter to her husband and goes to meet her admirer. But Lady Erlynne reads the letter and chases her down...

There are many parallels with An Ideal Husband, but that doesn't detract from the charm of this rather cozy comedy. One can admire virtually every character here in one way or another (which reinforces the theme that no one is wholly good or bad, making such categorical distinctions among people foolish and harmful). I like Lady Windermere; I like her husband; I like Lady Erlynne, who still has a great deal of good in her despite her shocking career; and I like simple old Lord Augustus, who is willing to believe everything she tells him so that they can marry. I'm not too keen on Lord Darlington, but I can hardly blame him.

I'm surprised that there isn't a fun movie adaptation from this generation. (There is one poorly-received modern version, but I'm not eager to try that one.) It is very straightforward and rather brief; it would need a bit of fleshing out to be a 100 minute movie. But I'd go see it, for sure, if someone made it happen. (I'm manifesting another movie. It hasn't worked so far.)

I love Wilde's comic style, though it may not suit everyone. If you tend to like it, you should read or go see this. I thought it was great.

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Where He Called Dibs On the Princess

The Two Noble Kinsmen: William Shakespeare (Drama, Plays, Comedy) [Annotated] by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Attributed to--and correctly so, as far as I know--Shakespeare and John Fletcher.

I found this pretty entertaining. It's more straightforward than some Shakespeare plays, having just one main plot and a minor secondary plot. Well, sorta two, I guess. This makes it more comprehensible on the first read than many of his plays. Besides, the original story comes from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, so there's a good chance you already kind of know the plot.

Set in Thebes and Athens, if Thebes and Athens were in East Anglia or something, it's the story of a pair or noble cousins who fall in love with the same woman who they just happened to see at a distance at almost the same moment, and it comes between them. There are a lot of hurdles between them and Emilia, as they are stuck in jail and she's the daughter of the king. But yadda yadda yadda they both end up free and, at the command of Athens' king, must do battle, with the loser dying and the winner marrying his daughter. The sweet young woman likes them both and wants nothing to do with a duel, but she has no say.

In many ways, this is a sad story, with many tragic elements. It starts with a war against a cruel king who would not allow widowed queens to bury their husbands, and it ends with a life-and-death battle between good friends. Lots of death and grief and separation. But it ends happily enough, which is a saving grace for me.

I think this would be fun to see. I'm curious about the parts with the jailer's daughter who goes crazy for love of Palamon but is cured by sleeping with her lover playing at being him. This could be poignant and touching or it could be played for laughs; I'm not sure how it would come off.

Supposedly, the easier sections were written by Fletcher, and the parts with denser language were Shakespeare's. I dunno. It all seemed like one thing to me. I liked it fine.

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Where I Offer Molière a Few Notes

Tartuffe by Molière
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Though there are a number of things about this play that I don't appreciate and don't much enjoy, there is enough to like that, even from a 21st Century English-speaking American perspective, I can give a modest nod to Tartuffe and say "Pretty entertaining."

In terms of construction, emerging as it does from its own history and tradition, it has a different organization and approach than I am used to. It's got 5 acts broken into scenes, so that's pretty much the norm, but it doesn't feel like 5 acts; it feels like one long scene. The play takes place all in the same place, the home of the family unfortunate enough to open their doors to the scammer, Tartuffe, and over a very short time. On the page, that comes off as bland, lacking in imagination, but I can't answer for the play as staged. Maybe it works.

Another format kind of issue is the annoying back-and-forth of the dialogue. It didn't resonate with me, and I had to work to try to fit it into my understanding of the work as a whole. Much of the dialogue found throughout, in scene after scene, is simple argument, with the same points repeated again and again in almost identical language. It read as if a rough draft had been left unedited, so much so that I wondered if it was truly a stylistic choice intentionally made (which is the default assumption when reading classics of world literature). The maid especially, arguing with Orgon, the head of the house, says nearly the same thing multiple times. (In much the same way that TV characters hang up without saying goodbye, you seldom find them repeating an argument. There isn't enough time for that, and it would sound weird.) However, considering that this is coming out of a tradition rich with homegrown farce and the broad slapstick of Italian Commedia dell'arte, the angry, snappy, in-your-face dialogue makes more sense. If I could see an audience laughing red in the face with the Dorine's effrontery, I expect it would make more sense than it did on the page. (I assume they laugh. I hope.)

The plot is terribly straightforward. It's all about the family hating having Tartuffe live with them while the father loves him. Every scene is about that central idea, and it's that single-mindedness that makes it feel like a long one-act play. Hiding a friend's subversive materials for him emerges very near the end as a bit of secondary plot, but it would have been so much better to introduce that near the beginning and make a little more of it, IMO.

And so on. The play didn't match my expectations. But it did some things I like.

For one, it pokes religious bigots and hyper-devout hypocrites in the eye. That's good. It got Molière in trouble--a lot of trouble--with religious authorities, and anything that upsets them is good in my book. Too bad we didn't continue down that road.

Also, I liked the ending. The scene with Orgon hiding to eavesdrop on the foolish Tartuffe trying to seduce his wife would make good comedy, I'm sure. And though I didn't love that the problems are solved off-stage by the king, I liked that the bad guy got caught and the good guys (the family, the daughter and her betrothed) all reconciled. A better version of this story (again, IMO) has someone, maybe the maid, producing evidence that convinces the king what was happening, or maybe something is done with the hidden materials that Tartuffe stole--frame him for the damning documents?--but I understand Molière was working with his audience's expectations, not mine. So bummer for me.

Kudos for annoying the religious extremists of his day, and fair play to Dorine, who showed no deference to her bosses at all. Class solidarity.

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Where Imogen's Play Is Named after Her Dad

Cymbeline by William Shakespeare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm not angling for any hot takes or anything, but Cymbeline has become my new favorite Shakespeare play. I liked it. I enjoyed reading it. I would like to see it performed.

And I'm maybe the only one.

First of all, it's a very entertaining story, based mostly on one of the tales from the Decameron, where a dude bets a guy he could seduce his love and then cheats (lies and produces stolen evidence) to prove that he did it. Then the supposedly-injured man despises his love... and after that, hijinks ensue. Lots of "kill her!" and "No, second thought, don't kill her!" and "Oh no, I hope you didn't actually kill her!" Also: lots of people in disguise and lots of secrets coming out.

A subplot is about the courtier falsely accused of treason who is banished 20 years before the start of the play; he kidnaps the two princes and raises them in the wilderness, just in time to enter the story as noble young Aragorn types.

Then there's the evil queen stirring up shit between the Britons and the Romans, along with her evil son.

Altogether, it makes a pretty good Romance-style story, one that could have been 500 pages of beautiful prose from the pen of Sir Walter Scott. And best of all--for me, because this is what I like--it's a comedy with a happy ending. Imagine Othello, but where he learns the truth BEFORE he kills Desdemona, and instead of murdered wife and murderer husband they live happily ever after. (Don't @ me. I taught that play many years in school and I contemplated changing the ending every time. Don't kill that sweet woman! Stop! Horrible ending.)

(Jesus, Grandpa! What did you read me this thing for?)

I was curious to see if others took to the play like I did, and it doesn't look like it, but it's hard to say. In numerous articles purporting to list the "best" plays in order (which is not what I was looking for, but I peeked), Cymbeline ends up in the middle, or a bit closer to the end. In the one article I found listing "most popular" plays, which actually measured whether people knew it or not, it ends up second to last, just ahead of Pericles. (Which I also liked, btw.) Neither answered the question of what people like. Most people don't know it because it's seldom used in classrooms; scholars don't rank it very high because they don't like fun things. But that doesn't really tell us what regular people (which I think I am, thank you) *would* think of the play if they saw it or read it.

I think they'd like it.

Recommended

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