WoW Act IV – Chaos Is Come Again: The Lion Eats the Wolf

Posted by Gail M. Burns - August 2010

Women of Will: The Complete Journey
Act IV: Chaos Is Come Again: The Lion Eats the Wolf
Friday, August 27 at 9:30 a.m.

PART ONE: Scenes from Macbeth & Coriolanus
PART TWO: Scenes from Timon of Athens & King Lear

This Act opened in a darkened room with a chilling score of mechanical/percussive sounds composed by Bill Barclay. Packer and Gore launched right into their wonderful conflation of the scenes between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (I am still lobbying for a full Nigel Gore/Tina Packer Macbeth at Shakespeare & Company SOON!!) Most moving is the concluding scene, when Macbeth is informed of the Queen’s death with Packer present and in Gore’s arms.

After the scenes, which received tumultuous applause, Gore spoke of his love for the role of Macbeth, which he has played several times. “I love Macbeth to death. He is my favorite character. When he goes to war with his better self, it unleashes Shakespeare’s greatest poetic imagination. He doesn’t come back to himself until Lady Macbeth dies, when he realizes that it all signifies…nothing.”

Packer explained that Macbeth is an example of what happens when the woman abandons her traditional role of truth-teller and joins with the male quest for power and honor. “Macbeth believes that if she becomes ‘his dearest partner in greatness” that it will bring them closer and be the culmination of their relationship. But as he divorces himself from his better self by doing what he doesn’t want to do (killing Duncan) he leaves Lady Macbeth’s bed and ‘sleeps no more.’ He becomes closer to the Witches and goes to them more often. The result of the female going over to the male is Fascism.”

“Do all people who take on power do terrible things? And when you get power, what do you do with it?” Packer asked. “The Macbeths do absolutely nothing with it. What is that desire to get power and hold on to it when you’re not going to use it to do anything for the good of humankind?”

“But the human spirit is bigger than what is being shown to you in Macbeth,” Packer explained, “And the beauty is in the redemption.”

Packer then turned her discourse to the examination of the artist. “The driving force for every artist is to try to tell the truth. You know you have achieved that goal because you feel it in your body. The artist tries to make form out of chaos, and the result is beauty.”

Shakespeare had been living and working in London, away from his family, for many years at this point. He didn’t earn much money from Coriolanus or Timon of Athens (or earlier from Troilus and Cressida).

Packer gave a recap of the plot of Coriolanus and explained the parallels between the famine and refusal of the public to ratify Coriolanus as Consul to a similar situation in Warwickshire, where Stratford is located. Also, Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden, died in 1608. “And he wrote about this monster mother, Volumnia, in Coriolanus,” Packer noted.

Packer and Gore performed a few scenes from Coriolanus with Gore as Volumnia. At the conclusion Packer asked the audience if they enjoyed the gender roles being reversed and the majority response was yes, although a few dissenting voices were heard.

CORIOLANUS: “Why did you wish me milder? would you have me
False to my nature? Rather say I play
The man I am.

VOLUMNIA: O, sir, sir, sir,
I would have had you put your power well on,
Before you had worn it out.

CORIOLANUS: Let go.

VOLUMNIA: You might have been enough the man you are,
With striving less to be so; lesser had been
The thwartings of your dispositions, if
You had not show’d them how ye were disposed
Ere they lack’d power to cross you.

The only female roles in Timon of Athens are “a couple of whores,” according to Packer. The play is an odd one in Shakespeare’s canon because Timon shows NO insight into his situation. Some have opined that it is composed of all the rejected lines from King Lear, which Shakespeare was writing at the same time. “Perhaps he just wrote down all the horrible, awful things he could think of,” Packer suggested.

To prove her thesis, various members of the audience were given lines from the play – all horrible, venomous curses – which they were asked to read cold. Packer explained that Elizabethan actors never received complete scripts, only pages with their own lines and their cue lines and that they rehearsed for a scant three days. They never knew the whole plot of the play they were performing.

The audience had great fun reading their nasty lines, and I give their performance two thumbs way up!

TIMON: Hate all, curse all, show charity to none…

Packer then moved on to King Lear which is the first play in which Shakespeare writes about daughters and which marked the end of his time in London.

Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603. She had been the first monarch to say “I serve the people. James I, who succeeded her, said “The people serve me” and “I am God’s anointed. He brought England back to a more patriarchal society, which resulted in the Civil War after his son, Charles I, ascended the throne.

“Was Shakespeare’s perception of what the societal structures were and that there was no way out of them the cause of his depression?” Packer mused. “But don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that we don’t need structure in society, but that they need to be shifted.”

Packer played Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia to Gore’s Lear and Gloucester in cuttings of scenes from the play in order to look at Lear’s daughters and the love he demands of them. “Goneril is most like her father, and he curses her womb,” Packer explained, pointing out that we never know who the girls’ mother or mothers were. “Regan is the most violent, which could be a sign that she was abused as a child.”

Towards the end of the play Lear and Cordelia are reconciled, which changes the revenge story and “takes us to another place,” according to Packer. “But they all die in the end. I find Lear an almost unbearable play.”

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