Welles on Falstaff

"I think Shakespeare was greatly preoccupied, as I am in my humble way, with the loss of innocence. And I think there has always been an England, an older England, which was sweeter, and purer, where the hay smelt better and the weather was always springtime and the daffodils blew in the gentle warm breezes. And its the..you feel the nostalgia for it in Chaucer, and you feel it all through Shakespeare.

And I think that he was profoundly against the modern age, as I am. I'm against my modern age, he was against his. And I think his villains are modern people, just as they're likely to be continental. I always see the villains in Lear are non-Anglo Saxon, they're from over there; they're from, they represent the modern world...

Innocence is what Falstaff is. He is a kind of refugee from that world. He has to live by his wits, he has to be funny. He hasn't a place to sleep if he doesn't get a laugh out of his patron. So it's a rough, modern world that he's living in. But I think you have to see in his eyes--it's why I was so very glad to be doing it in black and white, if it's in color he must have blue eyes. You've got to see that look that comes out of the Age that never existed, but exists in the heart of all English poetry."

Okay, another. James Earl Jones reads Othello I.iii

Chiwetel Ejiofor Othello Act I Scene iii (2007)

OTHELLO:	Her father loved me; oft invited me;
	Still question'd me the story of my life,
	From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes,		130
	That I have passed.
	I ran it through, even from my boyish days,
	To the very moment that he bade me tell it;
	Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,
	Of moving accidents by flood and field
	Of hair-breadth scapes i' the imminent deadly breach,
	Of being taken by the insolent foe
	And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
	And portance in my travels' history:
	Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,		140
	Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven
	It was my hint to speak,--such was the process;
	And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
	The Anthropophagi and men whose heads
	Do grow beneath their shoulders. This to hear
	Would Desdemona seriously incline:
	But still the house-affairs would draw her thence:
	Which ever as she could with haste dispatch,
	She'ld come again, and with a greedy ear
	Devour up my discourse: which I observing,		150
	Took once a pliant hour, and found good means
	To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart
	That I would all my pilgrimage dilate,
	Whereof by parcels she had something heard,
	But not intentively: I did consent,
	And often did beguile her of her tears,
	When I did speak of some distressful stroke
	That my youth suffer'd. My story being done,
	She gave me for my pains a world of sighs:
	She swore, in faith, twas strange, 'twas passing strange,		160
	'Twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful:
	She wish'd she had not heard it, yet she wish'd
	That heaven had made her such a man: she thank'd me,
	And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her,
	I should but teach him how to tell my story.
	And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake:
	She loved me for the dangers I had pass'd,
	And I loved her that she did pity them.
	This only is the witchcraft I have used:

Olivier's Othello (1965)

Despite the blackface, he's incredible here. And a very young Maggie Smith as Desdemona. Compare to Welles scene of weird ritualistic creepiness. I like both versions, but Olivier's is more empathetic somehow, less a mad man than one tragically manipulated.

Welly, Welly, Welles. Welles as Othello (1952).

The murder scene. Creepy erotic with that smothering kiss of death:

And in entirely with commentary from Bogdonovich:

Scribblings on Othello: Honesty, Skepticism, Irony, Tragedy

This scribbling is for my purpose. I'll be teaching Othello soon, and want to get some ideas down. I've never taught Shakespeare, but I think this play while complicated will be very teachable i.e. easy to get students interested, even immersed in the aesthetic swirling of this play--so much is going on! I've quite a bit of time to simply scribble before formally planning anything. I'm reading Hazlitt, Goddard, G. Wilson Knight, Bloom, Bernard McElroy, Jan Kott's fabulous Shakespeare Our Contemporary, and Millicent Bell's Shakespeare's Tragic Skepticism. The students are undergraduates, so I want to approach with close reading rather than beat them about with wonky theory. Theory can open up new worlds of a text, but you really need to read it with a clear head first. Scribbling begins:

Valences of "honesty": trust, and virtue/chastity. William Empson counts 52 occurrences of the word (or its variations). The increasing irony of such a word as the play moves along. To be true, or to be false. To be black or white. Is this a black and white world? Or can something be both? Is this a grey world? Can you trust what you see, what you hear? Are things what they seem? Appearance/Reality becomes the major philosophical concern of this play:

"I am not what I am."

 "Speak of me as I am."

"Men should be what they seem." 

Moral vs. intellectual truth. Does one prevail? Do both fail? Shakespeare vs. Iago. Which author/manipulator wins? What is the significance of Iago's silence at the end of the play? Are Othello's last words to be trusted i.e. are they honest words?

The tragic exploitation of the gap between appearance and reality. Deception vs. honesty.

Motivations of Iago--that old question. Is he a devil, or man who hates himself and the world? A man who would have agreed with Hamlet that the world seemed "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable," seeing abject fecunity everywhere: "tis an unweeded garden / That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in / nature / Possess it merely."

Is this a cosmic play? Is it trapped, as G. Wilson Knight claims, within the boundaries of its own literality? I'm tending toward the former.

Cosmic rhetoric (language of heaven and hell) and also the animal/bestial rhetoric.

Moving more toward a reading of Othello's tragical skepticism. Certainly Othello is tragic in the Classical sense. Edith Hamilton tells us that "[t]ragedy's preoccupation is with suffering," and certainly in Othello we have suffering. But the stakes are always immense, if not cosmic, in the very best tragedies. We need "[t]he suffering of a soul that can suffer greatly" (The Greek Way). Othello suffers greatly. But what do I mean by tragical skepticism? If we do read Othello as cosmic rather than literal--dealing with the universal as well as the particular--then the tragic letdown has to be ultimate.

Things are not, cannot be, what they seem in this world. Stanley Cavell wrote that skepticism was "that anxiety about our human capacity as knowers that can be taken to open modern philosophy in Descartes". Cavell links this anxious awareness of the limitations of human perception to tragedy: skepticism becomes "the playing out of tragedy" and tragedy "the working out of skepticism" (see In Quest of the Ordinary). We're talking about disappointment, about getting exactly nowhere. I think of Thoreau's quiet desperation.

Anxieties of appearance and perception--how fascinating and troubling in a play steeped in race. Things aren't black and white. We want to keep the world black and white! No philosophical or biological miscegenation allowed!

Tim Morton's definition of irony as an aesthetic exploitation of a gap between levels of signification really cleared up many vague ideas about irony I had previously been pretending to understand. From Timothy Morton's Realist Magic, near the end of Chapter 2: "Magic Birth":

"Beginnings thus involve a peculiar brand of irony that I call apoleptic. We’re all fairly familiar with proleptic irony: the irony of anticipation in which we know something that a character in a narrative doesn’t know yet. Now meet its weird sister, apoleptic irony. Apoleptic irony is the retroactive irony we feel when a narrative’s ending causes us to look back differently at the narrative. The gap between what we thought we were reading and what we are now reading is exploited. (While teaching I describe irony as gapsploitation: the aesthetic exploitation of a gap between 1+n levels of signification. Which is more of a mouthful than “gapsploitation.”) What is ironic about Alanis Morisette’s song “Ironic”? [66] What’s ironic is the fact that none of the examples she gives are examples of irony. There is a gap between what the song says it is and what it actually is...

 

Monozygosity

An essay always under revision for me. I was reading too much Joan Didion at the time (first draft in 2012) and it certainly shows. My first draft contained an absurdly pretentious pose--I plopped in the entire Shakespeare sonnet without explication of any kind: figure it out! I must have thought. I hope this version is more humble. 

We were at one time a singular being. This is a curious feeling.

We were born on the same day in March of 1990. About nine months earlier, for a certain period of time, were were a single individual. Did we itch to be two? As monozygotic twins—identical twins—we come from one egg, one strand of DNA. What possible combination of cosmic motivations, global environmental factors, genetic susceptibilities, evolutionary hiccups, astrological alignments, and regional weather conditions could transform one person into two people? More simply put: what split the egg? To counter a common question put to me—usually unthinkingly—What is it like being a twin? I will often play the cynic: I don't know, what is it like not to be a twin? This is both coyly humorous and strategically avoidant. But after all, what a stupid question. Nevertheless, I will deign: What is it like to be a twin? In truth, it’s wonderful.

*

My sister and I are walking up the hill to campus for final exams. We are arguing about music, bickering and bantering in our own shorthand, and I wonder if I could ever do the same with a romantic partner. I have showered and been up since seven, I dress in an affected manner, deliberately (ashamedly) academic; she has rolled out of bed and thrown on a hooded sweater. I am headed to an English Lit. exam, she is headed to History of Rock and Roll. Our argument is preposterous: The Ramones vs. Glenn Gould. I am saying things like, “What did the Ramones do for music? They knew three guitar chords,” and she cannot believe we are related. Even I realize I am full of it, but I enjoy (as does she) the back and forth.

For as long as I can remember, my very identity has itself been a conversation piece, a nice icebreaker if you will. Hello have you met Laura? Did you know she’s a twin? Identical. They look exactly alike. A lazy but accurate skeleton of the conversation I will have with a previously unacquainted stranger for possibly at least the next ten minutes. Topics we are likely to cover:

-Do you fight a lot?

-Do you share boyfriends?

-What are the key differences in appearance as well as personality?

-Who is Baby A?

-What’s it like?

-Did you ever switch?

-Has your being defined as ‘one of two’ ever resulted in a sort of anxiety-ridden identity crisis?

I was only asked the latter once by a psychology major deeply interested in Jungian archetypes. I think I answered yes.

I remember being struck by the story of Castor and Pollux, the twin brothers of Helen of Troy (they are often conflated under one label, the Dioscuri, the sons of Zeus. One wonders whether they—if any Castor and Pollux ever existed—would have felt their individuality erased by such a label, or whether they would have cared at all. Or perhaps the common name would have been a comfort). Whether they were born out of one egg or two varies; regardless, the two are never depicted without the other. The two fought in battle together until Castor, fatally wounded, called out to his brother. All-powerful Zeus offered Pollux either a full ticket to Olympus, or merely half time, sharing his immortality with his brother. Pollux chose the latter; the brothers split their time between Hades and heaven. I do not imagine the choice was much of a choice at all for Pollux.

Imagine if you will having someone around, with whom you may always converse and bicker and banter and yet never tire. Imagine having the privilege of claiming: I am a solitary person, I require space and quiet and myself alone with my thoughts, and yet always knowing to the very pith of your being that you are not, and have never really ever been, alone in the world.

*

She is, once again, telling me about the greatness of The Beatles. The record player makes its revolutions in the background, the diamond needle moving against the miniscule ridges of a vinyl copy of Rubber Soul. We take turns flipping the finished record over, not bothering to put on something new. Her animated face will never grow old, not like this, not when expressing her admiration for Lennon-McCartney. Prosaic moments such as these are when the mind, relaxed and open, wanders down paths without particular intention or chosen destination. I feel the warmth of this moment, the darkness of the winter evening outside exaggerated by the bronzed light within the room. We will live like this forever.

We are permeable beings, porous, full of holes at the microscopic level. What is it, exactly, that separates one person from another? We have never been far apart, always like Castor and Pollux, in relation to the other. I am never really alone. This is a comfort. But while you are half of a whole, created and formed in the same moments, there is unfortunately no precise way to determine who will die first.

I think of a Shakespeare sonnet, number sixty-four. When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced / The rich proud cost of outworn buried age…loss, death is inevitable. I worry too often, the thought creeps up in the places I am most comfortable, unreasonable scenarios. I wonder who would cope better, which survivor? When I have seen such interchange of state, / Or state itself confounded to decay: the worst scenario. Norman Rush calls it the “hellmouth,” the “opening up of the mouth of hell right in from of you, without warning, through no fault of your own.” Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate / That Time will come and take my love away. Living involves loss, but loss always shocks us. The injustice of it, the utterly unwelcome, yet wholly predictable facts of life seem still distant to me. I am young but already sense, abstract and foreboding, a shortness of time.

Who will die first?

Families, people in love have the same thought, but I cannot help but wonder whether the knowledge of a common origin, a onetime shared existence, might increase the loss; or am I exaggerating my own tragedy? Nevertheless, two possibilities: who will be left behind?

Since I first conceived of her mortality I have never not been afraid.