Theater Review: Exciting Translated Shakespeare in the Village
Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3
By William Shakespeare
Translated by Douglas Langworthy
Play On! Festival/Oregon Shakespeare Company
Classic Stage Company, Manhattan
May 31 and June 1 2019
The current Play On! Festival is presenting all the works of William Shakespeare in roughly chronological order over one month, in a small theater in Greenwich Village. The unique aspect here is that each play has been “translated” by a writer, dramaturge, or actor. As described by Lue Morgan Douthit, literary director of the co-sponsoring Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the writers were first charged to “do no harm” and keep as much of the original text as possible. One thing the playwrights were not supposed to do was “fix” problematic or dated aspects of the plays, inject modern political commentary or spin, add or subtract characters, or adapt the story to new settings and situations. On the other hand, during the actual performances the director was told to get the plays down to 2 hours or so, necessitating performance cuts in the translations. The translator of the three Henry VI plays I saw, Douglas Langworthy, literary director of the Denver Center Theater Company, stated in an interesting talk after the play that he estimates that 40% of Shakespeare’s lines were absolutely untouched, particularly famous bits or those lines that were more poetic. He described the process as a slow process (6 years in this case) of microsurgery, only seeking substituted words or phrases when the original meaning would be obscure or contradictory to a modern ear. An example is substituting “you” for “thee” or “thou”, which were the familiar forms of address in Tudor times but now seem lofty or elevated to modern ears. I was both eager to hear how this translation process turned out in live performance, and leery that Shakespeare’s great poetic words would be lost in the shuffle. My fears were misplaced—these performances of very early plays by Shakespeare were clear, easy to follow, yet just as inspiring as always.
There is scholarly controversy about these three Henry VI plays, among Shakespeare’s first. Parts II and III were written together, but Part I may have been added on as a prequel to capitalize on the others’ popularity. In fact, Part I may not have been written by Shakespeare at all, or may have been a collaboration (the Oxford series says Shakespeare and Marlowe). This set of plays, followed immediately both in plot and in commercial production by the greater Richard III, focuses on England’s history from the death of Henry V through the accession of Edward IV. In doing so, we cover the end of the hundred years war, see England kicked out of France, and witness the War of the Roses, fought for control of the English throne between two royal houses. The dates are 1422-1475, about as distant for Shakespeare’s audience as the American Civil War is to us, and equally influential on their contemporary politics. Some of the “history” presented is clearly influenced by English prejudice of the time, e.g. Joan of Arc portrayed as a promiscuous fraud (more on that later). The Belgian director Ivo van Hove condensed these plays, along with Henry V and Richard III into his Kings of War that I reviewed in 2016, skipping around to the parts that he found most dramatic. While Mr. Langworthy’s translations were cut about 25% in these fast-moving performances, they conveyed far more depth and character interest than the van Hove condensation. The plots have lots of characters and are often described as hard to follow, but the translations fixed all that. It was amazing how not having to mentally translate phrases as they were spoken freed the mind to follow the plot and characters more carefully. Below is an example provided by Mr. Langworthy from Part II, Act I, Scene I, where the hyper-religious Henry VI is mocked by his queen.
QUEEN MARGARET
My Lord of Suffolk, say, is this the guise, My Lord of Suffolk, tell me, is this the custom,
Is this the fashion in the court of England? Is this the fashion in the court of England?
What shall King Henry be a pupil still Should King Henry still be a mere pupil
Under the surly Gloucester's governance? Under the surly governance of Gloucester?
Am I a queen in title and in style, Do I not have the title of a queen,
And must be made a subject to a duke? And yet I must be subject to a duke?
I tell thee, Pole, when in the city Tours Suffolk, when you were in the town of Tours
Thou ran'st a tilt in honour of my love And jousted once in honor of my love,
I thought King Henry had resembled thee I thought King Henry must resemble you
In courage, courtship and proportion: In courage, manners, even in physique;
But all his mind is bent to holiness, But all his thoughts are bent on holiness,
To number Ave-Maries on his beads; Tallying Hail-Marys on his beads;
His champions are the prophets and apostles, His heroes are the prophets and apostles,
His weapons holy saws of sacred writ, His weapons holy scripture from the Bible,
His study is his tilt-yard, and his loves He jousts with books, and his cherished loves
Are brazen images of canonized saints. Are brazen images of holy saints.
Two of the productions had an actor speaking the stage directions (e.g. “enter Edward”) but I did not miss this in Henry VI Part II which omitted this audience aide—the translated language was clear enough that I never had a problem following who was who. The director and actors were helpful in this, sometimes gesturing to another character when their name was mentioned. But, perhaps for the first time, I saw a Shakespeare history play as “normal”, and just focused on plot development and character, as I would with any modern play.
Most of the actors played multiple roles (as they would in Shakespeare’s time), and casting followed our century’s practice of gender- and color-blindness, even including a disabled actor in each production—quite on target for the “hunchback” Richard (who will become the famed King Richard III later). None of this was at all distracting. The acting was uniformly good, and sometimes outstanding. Particular praise should go to the two Queen Margarets, played differently but equally convincingly by Tala Ashe (quietly scheming in Part II) and Brooke Parkes (overtly angry in Part III) and the intensely moving Richard (the future Richard III) of Greg Mozgala (Part III). There were only three days of preparation time for the plays, so Parts I and II were largely done from behind music stands, focusing my attention on the words. It was a nice change, however, to see Part III done with staging, the actors carrying their scripts (no sets or costumes though), a remarkable achievement for the actors and director Nelson T. Eusebio III on such limited time, and with unfamiliar plays to boot. Sound effects were limited to taped drumrolls and fanfares, sometimes amusingly lip trilled by the actors themselves.
I think the best part of this experience was that I felt like a common man hearing these histories fresh, in the pit at the Globe Theater. This allowed me to make better critical judgements about the plays both pro and con. On the minus side, the clarity of the text in Henry VI Part I made it pretty clear to me that this was a patched-together effort of multiple authors, sort of a smorgasbord approach. Shakespeare only intermittently shone through. I noted that the playwright(s) could not agree on who Joan of Arc was---she was alternately religious and heroic (Act I), then just an ordinary general, then a whore, then a devil, and none of these sides were well developed, odd for such a historically compelling figure. This inconsistency would be very atypical for Shakespeare, or any single good dramatist. Also, a long passage of rhyming couplets for the English general Talbot and his dying son stood out as rather jolting. Rhyming of this sort is normally used by Shakespeare only in songs, or as a single couplet at the end of a scene or dialogue. While he did use extended rhyming later to portray passion in Romeo and Juliet, here it had less obvious purpose. When I examined the text, it looks patched in, since the first part of this father-son dialogue fails to use it, and the next scene (not involving these characters at all) continues it for a bit. It felt like the committee assembling Part I had some missing dialogue to write here, and got a playwright who liked rhymed couplets to fill it in. On the plus side, the clarity of text and exposition allowed moments of early Shakespearean eloquence to shine forth all the more, as if in a spotlight. The memorable example of this was the sociopathic, hunchbacked Richard’s long, extraordinary soliloquy ruing his deformity in Act III of Part III, a foretaste of his great monologues in the following Richard III:
Why, love forswore me in my mother’s womb;
And, for I should not deal in her soft laws,
She did corrupt frail nature with some bribe
To shrink mine arm up like a wither’d shrub;
To make an envious mountain on my back,
Where sits deformity to mock my body;
To shape my legs of an unequal size;
To disproportion me in every part
Like to a chaos, or an unlick’d bear-whelp
The clarity of the translation allowed passages like this to shine, as if I were hearing the genius of the young Shakespeare for the first time. All in all this was very successful and exciting way to see Shakespeare. I will try to get to more of this series later in the month, both to hear translated versions of rarely performed plays (Henry VIII, Two Noble Kinsmen) and perhaps also to hear a more familiar one like King Lear, in order to see how my perception of it is changes.
By William Shakespeare
Translated by Douglas Langworthy
Play On! Festival/Oregon Shakespeare Company
Classic Stage Company, Manhattan
May 31 and June 1 2019
The current Play On! Festival is presenting all the works of William Shakespeare in roughly chronological order over one month, in a small theater in Greenwich Village. The unique aspect here is that each play has been “translated” by a writer, dramaturge, or actor. As described by Lue Morgan Douthit, literary director of the co-sponsoring Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the writers were first charged to “do no harm” and keep as much of the original text as possible. One thing the playwrights were not supposed to do was “fix” problematic or dated aspects of the plays, inject modern political commentary or spin, add or subtract characters, or adapt the story to new settings and situations. On the other hand, during the actual performances the director was told to get the plays down to 2 hours or so, necessitating performance cuts in the translations. The translator of the three Henry VI plays I saw, Douglas Langworthy, literary director of the Denver Center Theater Company, stated in an interesting talk after the play that he estimates that 40% of Shakespeare’s lines were absolutely untouched, particularly famous bits or those lines that were more poetic. He described the process as a slow process (6 years in this case) of microsurgery, only seeking substituted words or phrases when the original meaning would be obscure or contradictory to a modern ear. An example is substituting “you” for “thee” or “thou”, which were the familiar forms of address in Tudor times but now seem lofty or elevated to modern ears. I was both eager to hear how this translation process turned out in live performance, and leery that Shakespeare’s great poetic words would be lost in the shuffle. My fears were misplaced—these performances of very early plays by Shakespeare were clear, easy to follow, yet just as inspiring as always.
There is scholarly controversy about these three Henry VI plays, among Shakespeare’s first. Parts II and III were written together, but Part I may have been added on as a prequel to capitalize on the others’ popularity. In fact, Part I may not have been written by Shakespeare at all, or may have been a collaboration (the Oxford series says Shakespeare and Marlowe). This set of plays, followed immediately both in plot and in commercial production by the greater Richard III, focuses on England’s history from the death of Henry V through the accession of Edward IV. In doing so, we cover the end of the hundred years war, see England kicked out of France, and witness the War of the Roses, fought for control of the English throne between two royal houses. The dates are 1422-1475, about as distant for Shakespeare’s audience as the American Civil War is to us, and equally influential on their contemporary politics. Some of the “history” presented is clearly influenced by English prejudice of the time, e.g. Joan of Arc portrayed as a promiscuous fraud (more on that later). The Belgian director Ivo van Hove condensed these plays, along with Henry V and Richard III into his Kings of War that I reviewed in 2016, skipping around to the parts that he found most dramatic. While Mr. Langworthy’s translations were cut about 25% in these fast-moving performances, they conveyed far more depth and character interest than the van Hove condensation. The plots have lots of characters and are often described as hard to follow, but the translations fixed all that. It was amazing how not having to mentally translate phrases as they were spoken freed the mind to follow the plot and characters more carefully. Below is an example provided by Mr. Langworthy from Part II, Act I, Scene I, where the hyper-religious Henry VI is mocked by his queen.
QUEEN MARGARET
My Lord of Suffolk, say, is this the guise, My Lord of Suffolk, tell me, is this the custom,
Is this the fashion in the court of England? Is this the fashion in the court of England?
What shall King Henry be a pupil still Should King Henry still be a mere pupil
Under the surly Gloucester's governance? Under the surly governance of Gloucester?
Am I a queen in title and in style, Do I not have the title of a queen,
And must be made a subject to a duke? And yet I must be subject to a duke?
I tell thee, Pole, when in the city Tours Suffolk, when you were in the town of Tours
Thou ran'st a tilt in honour of my love And jousted once in honor of my love,
I thought King Henry had resembled thee I thought King Henry must resemble you
In courage, courtship and proportion: In courage, manners, even in physique;
But all his mind is bent to holiness, But all his thoughts are bent on holiness,
To number Ave-Maries on his beads; Tallying Hail-Marys on his beads;
His champions are the prophets and apostles, His heroes are the prophets and apostles,
His weapons holy saws of sacred writ, His weapons holy scripture from the Bible,
His study is his tilt-yard, and his loves He jousts with books, and his cherished loves
Are brazen images of canonized saints. Are brazen images of holy saints.
Two of the productions had an actor speaking the stage directions (e.g. “enter Edward”) but I did not miss this in Henry VI Part II which omitted this audience aide—the translated language was clear enough that I never had a problem following who was who. The director and actors were helpful in this, sometimes gesturing to another character when their name was mentioned. But, perhaps for the first time, I saw a Shakespeare history play as “normal”, and just focused on plot development and character, as I would with any modern play.
Most of the actors played multiple roles (as they would in Shakespeare’s time), and casting followed our century’s practice of gender- and color-blindness, even including a disabled actor in each production—quite on target for the “hunchback” Richard (who will become the famed King Richard III later). None of this was at all distracting. The acting was uniformly good, and sometimes outstanding. Particular praise should go to the two Queen Margarets, played differently but equally convincingly by Tala Ashe (quietly scheming in Part II) and Brooke Parkes (overtly angry in Part III) and the intensely moving Richard (the future Richard III) of Greg Mozgala (Part III). There were only three days of preparation time for the plays, so Parts I and II were largely done from behind music stands, focusing my attention on the words. It was a nice change, however, to see Part III done with staging, the actors carrying their scripts (no sets or costumes though), a remarkable achievement for the actors and director Nelson T. Eusebio III on such limited time, and with unfamiliar plays to boot. Sound effects were limited to taped drumrolls and fanfares, sometimes amusingly lip trilled by the actors themselves.
I think the best part of this experience was that I felt like a common man hearing these histories fresh, in the pit at the Globe Theater. This allowed me to make better critical judgements about the plays both pro and con. On the minus side, the clarity of the text in Henry VI Part I made it pretty clear to me that this was a patched-together effort of multiple authors, sort of a smorgasbord approach. Shakespeare only intermittently shone through. I noted that the playwright(s) could not agree on who Joan of Arc was---she was alternately religious and heroic (Act I), then just an ordinary general, then a whore, then a devil, and none of these sides were well developed, odd for such a historically compelling figure. This inconsistency would be very atypical for Shakespeare, or any single good dramatist. Also, a long passage of rhyming couplets for the English general Talbot and his dying son stood out as rather jolting. Rhyming of this sort is normally used by Shakespeare only in songs, or as a single couplet at the end of a scene or dialogue. While he did use extended rhyming later to portray passion in Romeo and Juliet, here it had less obvious purpose. When I examined the text, it looks patched in, since the first part of this father-son dialogue fails to use it, and the next scene (not involving these characters at all) continues it for a bit. It felt like the committee assembling Part I had some missing dialogue to write here, and got a playwright who liked rhymed couplets to fill it in. On the plus side, the clarity of text and exposition allowed moments of early Shakespearean eloquence to shine forth all the more, as if in a spotlight. The memorable example of this was the sociopathic, hunchbacked Richard’s long, extraordinary soliloquy ruing his deformity in Act III of Part III, a foretaste of his great monologues in the following Richard III:
Why, love forswore me in my mother’s womb;
And, for I should not deal in her soft laws,
She did corrupt frail nature with some bribe
To shrink mine arm up like a wither’d shrub;
To make an envious mountain on my back,
Where sits deformity to mock my body;
To shape my legs of an unequal size;
To disproportion me in every part
Like to a chaos, or an unlick’d bear-whelp
The clarity of the translation allowed passages like this to shine, as if I were hearing the genius of the young Shakespeare for the first time. All in all this was very successful and exciting way to see Shakespeare. I will try to get to more of this series later in the month, both to hear translated versions of rarely performed plays (Henry VIII, Two Noble Kinsmen) and perhaps also to hear a more familiar one like King Lear, in order to see how my perception of it is changes.
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