What Kind of Fool was Shakespeare?
What Kind of Fool was Shakespeare?
Climate Change; Olivia & Malvolio; Ophelia & Polonius; Politics in Hamlet and Twelfth Night
[1]
How should we best think of Shakespeare’s relationship to his patrons and the powers-that-be? As an enthusiastic supporter of the English monarch and English church, regardless of its faults or occasional oppressions? Or might we better think of him like The Pianist, the film about a musician and piano player who escapes death in a concentration camp, and briefly entertains a Nazi military leader who would protect him? Or like the musicians in the 1980 film, Playing for Time, about musicians in a Nazi concentration camp allowed to escape death as long as they entertain their captors?
[2]
Or as a court fool, paid to entertain royalty, but required to speak awkward and inconvenient truths, as long as he could do so in a witty and entertaining manner?
I’ve been thinking about this question for the past few weeks in light of a news item in The Guardian, and have been gravitating toward thoughts about Polonius in Hamlet and Malvolio in Twelfth Night, and those two plays as political commentary on Shakespeare’s times.
[3]
A few weeks ago (June 21), a UK article in The Guardian announced that Shakespearean actor Sir Mark Rylance was resigning his position in the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) because they accepted a sponsorship from BP, British Petroleum. BP is also the company responsible for the terrible historic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It has also been known for more than a decade that major oil companies like Exxon hired scientists to research climate change, found that humanity was causing global temperatures to rise, and yet instead of sounding the alarm and investing in research and development for more sustainable energy sources, they hired PR to invest in sowing seeds of doubt in the public mind about the true causes and dire consequences of climate change. In other words, instead of sounding the alarm, they doubled down on their commitment tto their own profits. In a just world, oil companies would therefore be found grossly negligent in any continued ongoing damage from climate change, and responsible for expanded damage due to delays in action to remedy its effects.
BP, for their part, has a lot of money to donate, and they thought it would help their image to sponsor very affordable tickets for young people, a move that many might think would be popular, especially among the less informed regarding climate change and corporate oil's research, PR efforts, and negligence.
Would Shakespeare Approve of BP Sponsorship?
Among the various quotes and paraphrased statements in this news item that I noticed, one was Rylance's claim that Shakespeare would not approve of BP as a sponsor for the RSC.
This factoid has been nagging at me. After all, Shakespeare had a complicated relationship with his sponsors and worked in an England where works of the theater were censored and required government approval to make sure there was “no offense in it” (as Claudius puts it in Hamlet, before The Mousetrap).
During Elizabeth’s reign, Shakespeare’s playing company was with only brief exception the Lord Chamberlain's men, under the patronage of Henry Carey, and later his son George. After Elizabeth’s death, his patron became King James, and his company was called The King’s Men. The censor was the Master of Revels. For most of Shakespeare’s career, this was Edmund Tylney, who approved 30 of Shakespeare’s plays. Tilney may have been the one who eventually required Shakespeare to change the name of Corambis, advisor to Claudius. According to some, the character’s name was changed to Polonius: “Corambis” (double-hearted) was thought to be too obvious a play on William Cecil’s personal motto, “Cor unum, via una” (Latin for “One heart, one way”). It would be like calling someone a double-crosser, a liar with a forked tongue.
If we think of Shakespeare as a sincere and conforming English citizen and English Protestant, then we might view some aspects of his plays as supporting his sponsors and the English Monarch. But if we consider that he may have been a secret Roman Catholic, or had Catholic sympathies, then perhaps we’d have to think him more like Fania Fenelon in Playing for Time, and artist entertaining the captors and oppressors.
Or is it better to think of Shakespeare as a kind of court fool, obligated to entertain but also allowed to speak certain truths with wit, given a certain limited artistic freedom to do so?
When I first saw Romeo and Juliet, I assumed that Mercutio's line in Act III, Sc. 1, "A plague o' both your houses!" was merely about the two feuding families. But over time, I've come to believe that this is really about English Protestant and Catholic monarchs and the killing of Catholics by Protestants, and Protestants by Catholics. Surely at least some audience members in Shakespeare's time considered the play as a possible allegory for Catholic-Protestant violence, but veiled enough in a fiction set in Italy to avoid the censors.
Did Shakespeare also offer criticism of political authority figures? I think so, and would illustrate with two examples of what may be references to Elizabeth and William Cecil:
Olivia’s Name and Steward
First, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1601-2), Olivia bears certain resemblances to Elizabeth: They have the same number of syllables in their names; both begin with a vowel, followed by the letters L and I. Olivia is resisting marriage, she says, because she is mourning the death of a father and brother. Elizabeth resisted marriage and was predeceased by her father (Henry VIII) and brother (Edward VI, who died at the age of 15). Olivia has a steward, Malvolio, who always reminds me of Polonius and of William Cecil, whose relationship to Elizabeth was like that of a steward.
Olivia’s Wedding
In Twelfth Night, the fool Feste jests with Olivia about getting over her father and brother and being open to courtship and marriage. Many in England hoped that Elizabeth would marry and produce or name an heir. But it’s interesting that, in this play, the person who eventually becomes Olivia’s husband comes from a family that resided in a country where the citizens were considered enemies of Illyria where most of the play takes place, and where Olivia lives. The fact that Viola and Sebastian are in enemy territory is the reason why they must assume disguises. So for Olivia to marry one from an enemy country would be like Elizabeth marrying someone from Catholic Spain. This makes sense of Shakespeare were a secret Catholic, or at least if he were an English playwright who firmly believed that a peaceful future for England required some sort of reconciliation or healing of the rift between Protestants and Catholics. If we take the play too literally, it’s just about a woman from Illyria who finally agrees to be courted and wed, but if we take the plot as a kind of analogy for things in England, it’s potentially dangerous to say such things. Not too dangerous, however: All in good fun, as it’s a comedy after all, right?
Twelfth Night as Political Critique
So it would seem that Twelfth Night can be read as political commentary on Elizabeth, William Cecil, and England’s relationship with its enemies.
- It seems to say Elizabeth should get married, let go of the deaths behind her, and embrace love and life. It uses a conspicuously Protestant Feste (a fool who seems not to believe in purgatory, or at least jests at not believing) to prod Olivia toward letting go of death and mourning, leave her brother and father to God, and live. This takes place in the following scene (1.5):
CLOWN (Feste): Good madonna, give me leave to
prove you a fool.
OLIVIA: Can you do it?
CLOWN: Dexterously, good madonna.
OLIVIA: Make your proof.
CLOWN: I must catechise you for it, madonna: good my mouse
of virtue, answer me.
OLIVIA: Well, sir, for want of other idleness, I'll bide your proof.
CLOWN: Good madonna, why mournest thou?
OLIVIA: Good fool, for my brother's death.
CLOWN: I think his soul is in hell, madonna.
OLIVIA: I know his soul is in heaven, fool.
CLOWN: The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother's
soul being in heaven. Take away the fool, gentlemen.
I claim Feste the clown is either conspicuously Protestant or playing well at it, because the Catholic position would be to mourn the dead long and have masses said to save the brother's soul from the pains of purgatory, but the Protestant position would not believe in purgatory and, instead, advocate more abbreviated mourning since the dead are in the hands of God, and no actions or masses said for the dead to obtain indulgences can change their fate - so why should not the living choose to live fully, and abandon their mourning? This scene cleverly uses English Protestant reasoning to argue that people like Olivia - including Elizabeth - should give up their grieving and be open to love and marriage. In that sense, the scene offers a kind of political commentary on Elizabeth, who is still alive at the time of the play's first performances. Pittsburgh Public Theater notes, "Twelfth Night had its world premiere probably in 1601. No less than England's reigning monarch at the time, Queen Elizabeth I, commissioned the play from William Shakespeare as part of her festivities to end the Christmastide season. This final celebration of the holidays was known as Twelfth Night."
[4]
- The play makes two of the main characters with whom we sympathize most (Viola and Sebastian) victims of a storm (or of fate, weather), and encourages that Illyria should make peace with its enemies through the power of love. If we take the play very literally, it’s not at all about England but about Illyria. But if we take it as veiled political commentary, Shakespeare here is heading in a very different direction than Thomas Kyd’s popular play, The Spanish Tragedy, which demonizes England’s enemies.
- If Malvolio is a veiled commentary on Elizabeth’s advisor William Cecil, this is perhaps the most scathing critique offered by Twelfth Night. Malvolio is uptight and controlling, and in the end, is tricked into believing Olivia is in love with him, and imprisoned and given a mock interrogation, treated as if he is mad or in need of exorcism, a ritual that was outlawed and considered too Roman Catholic by late Tudor England. When one considers Malvolio as commentary on Cecil, it’s hard to avoid the impression that some in England would probably have wished for the powerful Cecil to get some of his own medicine, being jailed and harshly interrogated.
Ophelia’s Name and Father
Like Olivia, in Hamlet Ophelia’s name bears resemblance to Elizabeth. And like Olivia who has a strict steward, Ophelia has a strict father-figure who seems to want to exert more control over her preference for marriage than she would prefer. It’s easy to imagine the advisor Cecil counseling Elizabeth on good or bad marriages, and perhaps especially the young Elizabeth being somewhat afraid of rejecting Cecil’s advice, allowing him to have too much power over her. Essex was for a time the queen’s favorite and considered as a replacement for William Cecil after his death, but instead, the job went to Robert Cecil, William’s son, a choice that displeased Essex and further heightened tensions of the fierce in-fighting in Elizabeth’s court.
[5]
Ophelia as Tool of Corrupt Elders
I’ve written before about Frank Ardolino’s good insights regarding the eavesdropping scene in The Spanish Tragedy as being a version of the (apocryphal) biblical tale from Daniel about Suzannah and the corrupt elders, and also how the eavesdropping scene in Hamlet can be read as a revision of that tale:
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2019/02/ophelia-elizabeth-i-suzannah-jephthahs.html
In the biblical tale, Suzannah is a virtuous and pious married woman, but two corrupt judges spy her bathing in her garden and lust after her: They want to coerce her into sex with both of them, saying that if she does not comply, they’ll tell everyone that they caught her meeting with a lover in her garden. She refuses but is later vindicated when Daniel recommends interrogating the men separately.
Ardolino claims that Elizabeth was sometimes defended as an upright Suzannah figure, and her critics were thereby compared to the corrupt judges in the biblical tale. So if we read Ophelia’s participation in the Hamlet eavesdropping scene as a revision of the Suzannah tale, and as political commentary, what do we find? Instead of Elizabeth being like the strong and virtuous Suzannah, opposing corrupt elders, Elizabeth-as-Ophelia becomes a woman who has willingly been used as a tool by corrupt elders (like Polonius, a stand-in for Cecil), and she has been used against one who might have legitimate claims to the throne (Hamlet), one who might have been her betrothed, who made to her “almost all the holy vows of heaven” (perhaps like Essex).
Again, if one wishes to read or experience the play as simply entertainment, and as a retelling of a much older tale of a prince of Denmark, one might not - and need not - notice the possible political commentary. And it certainly might escape the watchful eyes of the censor.
As in Twelfth Night, where Malvolio is dealt with quite harshly, the play Hamlet deals harshly with Polonius, the stand-in for William Cecil.
Some might claim and assume that people in Shakespeare’s day may not have thought of his plays as political commentary. But Elizabeth certainly did. Essex commissioned a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard II on the eve of his failed rebellion, and Elizabeth was known to have commented to William Lambarde, Keeper of Records in the Tower of London, “I am Richard II know you not that?”
[6]
If Elizabeth was clever enough to view certain plays as political commentary on her reign, it’s easy to consider that she and others viewed more aspects of more of the plays as political commentary.
So What Kind of Fool was Shakespeare?
So this still leaves us with questions: What sort of fool, jester, artist, and political commentator was Shakespeare? How much artistic freedom did he have and use to advance certain kinds of political commentary in his plays? Would Shakespeare have opposed BP as a sponsor? Or would he have accepted the economic realities of sponsorship, but tried to encode in his plays veiled commentary on the flaws of his sponsors? It’s hard to say, because the author of the plays centuries ago lived in very different times and had a very different sort of relationship to his key patrons than Sir Mark Rylance has had in recent years to the RSC and its key sponsors.
If Ophelia and Olivia at least in part represent aspects of Elizabeth, we might observe that Shakespeare was braver in being critical of Elizabeth-as-Ophelia-as-revised-Suzannah-figure than he was of Olivia-as-Elizabeth a few short years earlier when Elizabeth was still alive. The first known performance of Twelfth Night was in February of 1602, but in fact William Cecil had already died in August of 1598, so even if Malvolio and Polonius were not-so-veiled commentaries on Cecil, he was already dead, although his son Robert still held his father William’s position in Elizabeth's court and was instrumental in helping to ensure that the succession would go to James.
How free is the playwright in Elizabethan England (or how brave the artist?) if one must wait until after William Cecil's death to offer Malvolio and Polonius as caricature/satire? How likely would it have been for the censor to have noticed it as political satire if it had been performed and published earlier? A line attributed to Michael Corleone in The Godfather (and often attributed to Machiavelli and Sun Tsu) is, "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer." Did Elizabeth tolerate creative liberty in Shakespeare's plays so that she could better understand her opposition? It's also possible that her closest advisers found ways to exploit freedom given to Shakespeare: If people were talking implied political commentary in his plays, that would be something for state spies to watch for.
It may have been somewhat dangerous for Shakespeare to be too critical of William Cecil as satirized in Malvolio and Polonius, given the continued power of the Cecil family in the son Robert. But unless we believe that Shakespeare was assassinated in a conspiracy that was hushed up, it would seem Shakespeare got away with it and lived long enough to write new and important plays during the reign of James (plays that included Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest).
If we consider that many in England lived in dread and fear of their government and the possibility of being executed for heresy and treason, then the more sincere and interested one was in one’s religion and political opinions, and/or interested in art speaking truth to power, the more dangerous it might be to express those opinions in any obvious way.
Saving humanity from climate disasters & corporate greed may be a lost cause at this point, given the predicted likelihood of crop failures and other troubles like arctic and tundra methane accelerating climate change. But if the young may not live to be 50 due to the coming disasters and related crop shortages, shouldn't they get cheap tickets from the oil companies, just for irony's sake?
What if military drone manufacturers sponsored cheap tickets for the kids? Or the NRA?
Wouldn't it make the death of Cordelia, or of Desdemona, or of Lady Macduff & son more meaningful, if we knew the corporate sponsors of the very play we were watching were guilty of helping to facilitate even more gruesome killings than those enacted in the plays, given the reputation of the US military-industrial complex?
Or might that ruin the effect?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[1] Image via Las Vegas Review Journal, who got it from the Utah Shakespeare Festival, 2014.
https://www.reviewjournal.com/entertainment/arts-culture/twelfth-finds-its-best-true-self-with-balance-of-heart-and-humor/
[2] The Wikipedia artilce on Playing for Time has the following note on a historical controversy related to the film: "Playing for Time the movie, and the memoir upon which it is based, have assumed an important place in Holocaust scholarship. Since its publication and tremendous commercial success, Fénelon’s testimony has been accepted as truth and widely dispersed in a plethora of academic, popular, and musical resources. This has proved a source of great frustration and heartache for the other survivors of the orchestra, who almost unanimously found Fania’s representation of their orchestra and its personnel false and demeaning. They have fought a fierce battle in the decades since Playing for Time appeared to have their version of the orchestra and its history represented. Some attention has been paid to their concerns, but in large part they have been ignored. The greatest sources of anguish are the supposed inaccurate portrayal of Alma Rosé, the alleged slanderous portrayals of many of the other musicians, and the portrayed diminishment by Fénelon of their bond and support for one another." [FN Eischeid, Susan (2016). The Truth about Fania Fenelon and the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz-Birkenau. London: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 3. ISBN 978-3-319-31037-4.]
[3] The Guardian, June 21: "Mark Rylance resigns from RSC over BP sponsorship"
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/jun/21/mark-rylance-resigns-from-royal-shakespeare-company-rsc-over-bp-sponsorship
[4] https://ppt.org/ppt_home/news/the-first-night-of-twelfth-night
[5] See the last chapter of Bradley J. Irish’s book, Emotion in the Tudor Court: Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling
[6] See the following blog from Oxford University Press which addresses this issue of Elizabeth-as-Richard II:
https://blog.oup.com/2012/07/was-elizabeth-i-richard-ii-lambard/
and also regarding how both Richard II and Elizabeth depended on powerful advisors & favorites - and produced no heir, see the following link at Historic UK -dot-com:
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Shakespeare-Richard-II-Rebellion/]
Climate Change; Olivia & Malvolio; Ophelia & Polonius; Politics in Hamlet and Twelfth Night
[1]
How should we best think of Shakespeare’s relationship to his patrons and the powers-that-be? As an enthusiastic supporter of the English monarch and English church, regardless of its faults or occasional oppressions? Or might we better think of him like The Pianist, the film about a musician and piano player who escapes death in a concentration camp, and briefly entertains a Nazi military leader who would protect him? Or like the musicians in the 1980 film, Playing for Time, about musicians in a Nazi concentration camp allowed to escape death as long as they entertain their captors?
[2]
Or as a court fool, paid to entertain royalty, but required to speak awkward and inconvenient truths, as long as he could do so in a witty and entertaining manner?
I’ve been thinking about this question for the past few weeks in light of a news item in The Guardian, and have been gravitating toward thoughts about Polonius in Hamlet and Malvolio in Twelfth Night, and those two plays as political commentary on Shakespeare’s times.
[3]
A few weeks ago (June 21), a UK article in The Guardian announced that Shakespearean actor Sir Mark Rylance was resigning his position in the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) because they accepted a sponsorship from BP, British Petroleum. BP is also the company responsible for the terrible historic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It has also been known for more than a decade that major oil companies like Exxon hired scientists to research climate change, found that humanity was causing global temperatures to rise, and yet instead of sounding the alarm and investing in research and development for more sustainable energy sources, they hired PR to invest in sowing seeds of doubt in the public mind about the true causes and dire consequences of climate change. In other words, instead of sounding the alarm, they doubled down on their commitment tto their own profits. In a just world, oil companies would therefore be found grossly negligent in any continued ongoing damage from climate change, and responsible for expanded damage due to delays in action to remedy its effects.
BP, for their part, has a lot of money to donate, and they thought it would help their image to sponsor very affordable tickets for young people, a move that many might think would be popular, especially among the less informed regarding climate change and corporate oil's research, PR efforts, and negligence.
Would Shakespeare Approve of BP Sponsorship?
Among the various quotes and paraphrased statements in this news item that I noticed, one was Rylance's claim that Shakespeare would not approve of BP as a sponsor for the RSC.
This factoid has been nagging at me. After all, Shakespeare had a complicated relationship with his sponsors and worked in an England where works of the theater were censored and required government approval to make sure there was “no offense in it” (as Claudius puts it in Hamlet, before The Mousetrap).
During Elizabeth’s reign, Shakespeare’s playing company was with only brief exception the Lord Chamberlain's men, under the patronage of Henry Carey, and later his son George. After Elizabeth’s death, his patron became King James, and his company was called The King’s Men. The censor was the Master of Revels. For most of Shakespeare’s career, this was Edmund Tylney, who approved 30 of Shakespeare’s plays. Tilney may have been the one who eventually required Shakespeare to change the name of Corambis, advisor to Claudius. According to some, the character’s name was changed to Polonius: “Corambis” (double-hearted) was thought to be too obvious a play on William Cecil’s personal motto, “Cor unum, via una” (Latin for “One heart, one way”). It would be like calling someone a double-crosser, a liar with a forked tongue.
If we think of Shakespeare as a sincere and conforming English citizen and English Protestant, then we might view some aspects of his plays as supporting his sponsors and the English Monarch. But if we consider that he may have been a secret Roman Catholic, or had Catholic sympathies, then perhaps we’d have to think him more like Fania Fenelon in Playing for Time, and artist entertaining the captors and oppressors.
Or is it better to think of Shakespeare as a kind of court fool, obligated to entertain but also allowed to speak certain truths with wit, given a certain limited artistic freedom to do so?
When I first saw Romeo and Juliet, I assumed that Mercutio's line in Act III, Sc. 1, "A plague o' both your houses!" was merely about the two feuding families. But over time, I've come to believe that this is really about English Protestant and Catholic monarchs and the killing of Catholics by Protestants, and Protestants by Catholics. Surely at least some audience members in Shakespeare's time considered the play as a possible allegory for Catholic-Protestant violence, but veiled enough in a fiction set in Italy to avoid the censors.
Did Shakespeare also offer criticism of political authority figures? I think so, and would illustrate with two examples of what may be references to Elizabeth and William Cecil:
Olivia’s Name and Steward
First, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1601-2), Olivia bears certain resemblances to Elizabeth: They have the same number of syllables in their names; both begin with a vowel, followed by the letters L and I. Olivia is resisting marriage, she says, because she is mourning the death of a father and brother. Elizabeth resisted marriage and was predeceased by her father (Henry VIII) and brother (Edward VI, who died at the age of 15). Olivia has a steward, Malvolio, who always reminds me of Polonius and of William Cecil, whose relationship to Elizabeth was like that of a steward.
Olivia’s Wedding
In Twelfth Night, the fool Feste jests with Olivia about getting over her father and brother and being open to courtship and marriage. Many in England hoped that Elizabeth would marry and produce or name an heir. But it’s interesting that, in this play, the person who eventually becomes Olivia’s husband comes from a family that resided in a country where the citizens were considered enemies of Illyria where most of the play takes place, and where Olivia lives. The fact that Viola and Sebastian are in enemy territory is the reason why they must assume disguises. So for Olivia to marry one from an enemy country would be like Elizabeth marrying someone from Catholic Spain. This makes sense of Shakespeare were a secret Catholic, or at least if he were an English playwright who firmly believed that a peaceful future for England required some sort of reconciliation or healing of the rift between Protestants and Catholics. If we take the play too literally, it’s just about a woman from Illyria who finally agrees to be courted and wed, but if we take the plot as a kind of analogy for things in England, it’s potentially dangerous to say such things. Not too dangerous, however: All in good fun, as it’s a comedy after all, right?
Twelfth Night as Political Critique
So it would seem that Twelfth Night can be read as political commentary on Elizabeth, William Cecil, and England’s relationship with its enemies.
- It seems to say Elizabeth should get married, let go of the deaths behind her, and embrace love and life. It uses a conspicuously Protestant Feste (a fool who seems not to believe in purgatory, or at least jests at not believing) to prod Olivia toward letting go of death and mourning, leave her brother and father to God, and live. This takes place in the following scene (1.5):
CLOWN (Feste): Good madonna, give me leave to
prove you a fool.
OLIVIA: Can you do it?
CLOWN: Dexterously, good madonna.
OLIVIA: Make your proof.
CLOWN: I must catechise you for it, madonna: good my mouse
of virtue, answer me.
OLIVIA: Well, sir, for want of other idleness, I'll bide your proof.
CLOWN: Good madonna, why mournest thou?
OLIVIA: Good fool, for my brother's death.
CLOWN: I think his soul is in hell, madonna.
OLIVIA: I know his soul is in heaven, fool.
CLOWN: The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother's
soul being in heaven. Take away the fool, gentlemen.
I claim Feste the clown is either conspicuously Protestant or playing well at it, because the Catholic position would be to mourn the dead long and have masses said to save the brother's soul from the pains of purgatory, but the Protestant position would not believe in purgatory and, instead, advocate more abbreviated mourning since the dead are in the hands of God, and no actions or masses said for the dead to obtain indulgences can change their fate - so why should not the living choose to live fully, and abandon their mourning? This scene cleverly uses English Protestant reasoning to argue that people like Olivia - including Elizabeth - should give up their grieving and be open to love and marriage. In that sense, the scene offers a kind of political commentary on Elizabeth, who is still alive at the time of the play's first performances. Pittsburgh Public Theater notes, "Twelfth Night had its world premiere probably in 1601. No less than England's reigning monarch at the time, Queen Elizabeth I, commissioned the play from William Shakespeare as part of her festivities to end the Christmastide season. This final celebration of the holidays was known as Twelfth Night."
[4]
- The play makes two of the main characters with whom we sympathize most (Viola and Sebastian) victims of a storm (or of fate, weather), and encourages that Illyria should make peace with its enemies through the power of love. If we take the play very literally, it’s not at all about England but about Illyria. But if we take it as veiled political commentary, Shakespeare here is heading in a very different direction than Thomas Kyd’s popular play, The Spanish Tragedy, which demonizes England’s enemies.
- If Malvolio is a veiled commentary on Elizabeth’s advisor William Cecil, this is perhaps the most scathing critique offered by Twelfth Night. Malvolio is uptight and controlling, and in the end, is tricked into believing Olivia is in love with him, and imprisoned and given a mock interrogation, treated as if he is mad or in need of exorcism, a ritual that was outlawed and considered too Roman Catholic by late Tudor England. When one considers Malvolio as commentary on Cecil, it’s hard to avoid the impression that some in England would probably have wished for the powerful Cecil to get some of his own medicine, being jailed and harshly interrogated.
Ophelia’s Name and Father
Like Olivia, in Hamlet Ophelia’s name bears resemblance to Elizabeth. And like Olivia who has a strict steward, Ophelia has a strict father-figure who seems to want to exert more control over her preference for marriage than she would prefer. It’s easy to imagine the advisor Cecil counseling Elizabeth on good or bad marriages, and perhaps especially the young Elizabeth being somewhat afraid of rejecting Cecil’s advice, allowing him to have too much power over her. Essex was for a time the queen’s favorite and considered as a replacement for William Cecil after his death, but instead, the job went to Robert Cecil, William’s son, a choice that displeased Essex and further heightened tensions of the fierce in-fighting in Elizabeth’s court.
[5]
Ophelia as Tool of Corrupt Elders
I’ve written before about Frank Ardolino’s good insights regarding the eavesdropping scene in The Spanish Tragedy as being a version of the (apocryphal) biblical tale from Daniel about Suzannah and the corrupt elders, and also how the eavesdropping scene in Hamlet can be read as a revision of that tale:
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2019/02/ophelia-elizabeth-i-suzannah-jephthahs.html
In the biblical tale, Suzannah is a virtuous and pious married woman, but two corrupt judges spy her bathing in her garden and lust after her: They want to coerce her into sex with both of them, saying that if she does not comply, they’ll tell everyone that they caught her meeting with a lover in her garden. She refuses but is later vindicated when Daniel recommends interrogating the men separately.
Ardolino claims that Elizabeth was sometimes defended as an upright Suzannah figure, and her critics were thereby compared to the corrupt judges in the biblical tale. So if we read Ophelia’s participation in the Hamlet eavesdropping scene as a revision of the Suzannah tale, and as political commentary, what do we find? Instead of Elizabeth being like the strong and virtuous Suzannah, opposing corrupt elders, Elizabeth-as-Ophelia becomes a woman who has willingly been used as a tool by corrupt elders (like Polonius, a stand-in for Cecil), and she has been used against one who might have legitimate claims to the throne (Hamlet), one who might have been her betrothed, who made to her “almost all the holy vows of heaven” (perhaps like Essex).
Again, if one wishes to read or experience the play as simply entertainment, and as a retelling of a much older tale of a prince of Denmark, one might not - and need not - notice the possible political commentary. And it certainly might escape the watchful eyes of the censor.
As in Twelfth Night, where Malvolio is dealt with quite harshly, the play Hamlet deals harshly with Polonius, the stand-in for William Cecil.
Some might claim and assume that people in Shakespeare’s day may not have thought of his plays as political commentary. But Elizabeth certainly did. Essex commissioned a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard II on the eve of his failed rebellion, and Elizabeth was known to have commented to William Lambarde, Keeper of Records in the Tower of London, “I am Richard II know you not that?”
[6]
If Elizabeth was clever enough to view certain plays as political commentary on her reign, it’s easy to consider that she and others viewed more aspects of more of the plays as political commentary.
So What Kind of Fool was Shakespeare?
So this still leaves us with questions: What sort of fool, jester, artist, and political commentator was Shakespeare? How much artistic freedom did he have and use to advance certain kinds of political commentary in his plays? Would Shakespeare have opposed BP as a sponsor? Or would he have accepted the economic realities of sponsorship, but tried to encode in his plays veiled commentary on the flaws of his sponsors? It’s hard to say, because the author of the plays centuries ago lived in very different times and had a very different sort of relationship to his key patrons than Sir Mark Rylance has had in recent years to the RSC and its key sponsors.
If Ophelia and Olivia at least in part represent aspects of Elizabeth, we might observe that Shakespeare was braver in being critical of Elizabeth-as-Ophelia-as-revised-Suzannah-figure than he was of Olivia-as-Elizabeth a few short years earlier when Elizabeth was still alive. The first known performance of Twelfth Night was in February of 1602, but in fact William Cecil had already died in August of 1598, so even if Malvolio and Polonius were not-so-veiled commentaries on Cecil, he was already dead, although his son Robert still held his father William’s position in Elizabeth's court and was instrumental in helping to ensure that the succession would go to James.
How free is the playwright in Elizabethan England (or how brave the artist?) if one must wait until after William Cecil's death to offer Malvolio and Polonius as caricature/satire? How likely would it have been for the censor to have noticed it as political satire if it had been performed and published earlier? A line attributed to Michael Corleone in The Godfather (and often attributed to Machiavelli and Sun Tsu) is, "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer." Did Elizabeth tolerate creative liberty in Shakespeare's plays so that she could better understand her opposition? It's also possible that her closest advisers found ways to exploit freedom given to Shakespeare: If people were talking implied political commentary in his plays, that would be something for state spies to watch for.
It may have been somewhat dangerous for Shakespeare to be too critical of William Cecil as satirized in Malvolio and Polonius, given the continued power of the Cecil family in the son Robert. But unless we believe that Shakespeare was assassinated in a conspiracy that was hushed up, it would seem Shakespeare got away with it and lived long enough to write new and important plays during the reign of James (plays that included Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest).
If we consider that many in England lived in dread and fear of their government and the possibility of being executed for heresy and treason, then the more sincere and interested one was in one’s religion and political opinions, and/or interested in art speaking truth to power, the more dangerous it might be to express those opinions in any obvious way.
Saving humanity from climate disasters & corporate greed may be a lost cause at this point, given the predicted likelihood of crop failures and other troubles like arctic and tundra methane accelerating climate change. But if the young may not live to be 50 due to the coming disasters and related crop shortages, shouldn't they get cheap tickets from the oil companies, just for irony's sake?
What if military drone manufacturers sponsored cheap tickets for the kids? Or the NRA?
Wouldn't it make the death of Cordelia, or of Desdemona, or of Lady Macduff & son more meaningful, if we knew the corporate sponsors of the very play we were watching were guilty of helping to facilitate even more gruesome killings than those enacted in the plays, given the reputation of the US military-industrial complex?
Or might that ruin the effect?
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[1] Image via Las Vegas Review Journal, who got it from the Utah Shakespeare Festival, 2014.
https://www.reviewjournal.com/entertainment/arts-culture/twelfth-finds-its-best-true-self-with-balance-of-heart-and-humor/
[2] The Wikipedia artilce on Playing for Time has the following note on a historical controversy related to the film: "Playing for Time the movie, and the memoir upon which it is based, have assumed an important place in Holocaust scholarship. Since its publication and tremendous commercial success, Fénelon’s testimony has been accepted as truth and widely dispersed in a plethora of academic, popular, and musical resources. This has proved a source of great frustration and heartache for the other survivors of the orchestra, who almost unanimously found Fania’s representation of their orchestra and its personnel false and demeaning. They have fought a fierce battle in the decades since Playing for Time appeared to have their version of the orchestra and its history represented. Some attention has been paid to their concerns, but in large part they have been ignored. The greatest sources of anguish are the supposed inaccurate portrayal of Alma Rosé, the alleged slanderous portrayals of many of the other musicians, and the portrayed diminishment by Fénelon of their bond and support for one another." [FN Eischeid, Susan (2016). The Truth about Fania Fenelon and the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz-Birkenau. London: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 3. ISBN 978-3-319-31037-4.]
[3] The Guardian, June 21: "Mark Rylance resigns from RSC over BP sponsorship"
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/jun/21/mark-rylance-resigns-from-royal-shakespeare-company-rsc-over-bp-sponsorship
[4] https://ppt.org/ppt_home/news/the-first-night-of-twelfth-night
[5] See the last chapter of Bradley J. Irish’s book, Emotion in the Tudor Court: Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling
[6] See the following blog from Oxford University Press which addresses this issue of Elizabeth-as-Richard II:
https://blog.oup.com/2012/07/was-elizabeth-i-richard-ii-lambard/
and also regarding how both Richard II and Elizabeth depended on powerful advisors & favorites - and produced no heir, see the following link at Historic UK -dot-com:
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Shakespeare-Richard-II-Rebellion/]
How about the Fool in King Lear as the mask for the Bard?
ReplyDeleteThanks, Shobha! Yes, I think it works as a metaphor, certainly.
ReplyDeleteAnother option scholars and historians have put forth: Because Shakespeare belonged to a playing company of limited size, certain roles had to be doubled, with the same actor playing more than one part. They say the actor who played Cordelia (who leaves in the first scene) probably played the fool, whose death is mentioned at the end, when Cordelia also dies and is in the arms of Lear, like a reverse-gender Pieta.
But I do think you're right, and that Shakespeare probably saw his own role as an actor and playwright as something like a court fool, entertaining, prodding the powerful with humor and wit. Every age needs that!