WoW Act V – The Maiden Phoenix: The Daughter Redeems the Father

Posted by Gail M. Burns - August 2010

Women of Will: The Complete Journey
Act V: The Maiden Phoenix: The Daughter Redeems the Father
Friday, August 27 at 2 p.m.

PART ONE
Scenes from Pericles and The Winter’s Tale
PART TWO
Scenes from The Winter’s Tale, Pericles and Henry VIII

The point of the art of rhetoric is to ask you to consider new ideas. In his later plays, Shakespeare starts putting all the pieces back together. He was constantly grappling with the big questions:
What does it mean to be alive? What is it to be human?
What is our collective action going to be?
What am I, as an individual, going to do?

Act V will consider Shakespeare’s late plays: Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest, and Henry VIII which he wrote with John Fletcher. “In these plays Shakespeare uses fairy tales or myths as the basis of his plots because you can’t tell the truth realistically, you need a story to tell the story through,” Packer explained. “In these later plays we don’t follow through to the logical conclusion of one person’s psychosis. There is always a sin at the top of the play, and then the characters go on a journey – there is usually a storm at sea – in order to cure the sin. You have to go back to nature to learn the truth.”

As the sexual and spiritual were equal during Shakespeare’s middle period, so the darkness was equal in his great tragedies. Now Shakespeare brings himself into the stories. “Notice in Pericles how often people are asked to tell their stories,” Packer said. “How would you respond, and how honestly would you respond, if you were asked to tell your story?”

Packer said that she had just learned that there are currently more young black men in prison than in school. “That just knocked me sideways,” Packer said. And, an audience member added, it costs us more per anum to house them in prison than it would for us to send them to an Ivy League school.

Packer launched into the plot of Pericles, which is a complex play, and introduced Pericles’ daughter, Marina, by saying that she healed people using the “womanly” arts of singing, dancing, weaving, and sewing. “Marina is one of those people with great inner authenticity. She is not a “flower child” like Miranda or Perdita. All of the daughters in these plays are courageous, strong, and innocent truth-tellers.”

At this point Shakespeare was living back in Stratford with his wife, Anne, and daughters, Susanna and Judith. In 1607 Susanna had married John Hall, a local physcian and herbalist. There is much herb lore in these later plays. Judith married a vintner, Thomas Quiney, in 1616, the year of her father’s death.

The Winter’s Tale is the strongest of Shakespeare’s plays about how women can change the structure of society. Herimone dies for her efforts, and the question becomes how can the feminine spirit be brought back to life? “Hermione can’t come back to life until love and redemption enter. Unless women are really empowered to speak equally with men, and unless men can connect with their feminine and artistic sides, the story can’t begin to change,” Packer explained. “Humans created the power structures and humans can change them. According to this play, it takes three women, one good man, and fifteen years to change the power structure.”

She singled out Florizel, Polixenes son, as a “good man” who chooses Perdita over inheriting his father’s throne, allowing the story to change.

Packer and Gore enacted a series of scenes from The Winter’s Tale with Packer playing Herimone and Paulina, and Gore playing Leontes. After the break, they returned to play scenes from the pastoral/comical part of the play, with Packer plays Perdita, Paulina, and Herimone, and Gore playing Florizel, Polixenes, and Leontes.

Packer related an experience in her youth of seeing the Winged Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre. “It affected me profoundly. I couldn’t understand it, but I knew it was something very important,” Packer explained. “It is the artist’s ability to bring stone to life.”

“We all have love and imagination, and we have to use them. You have to know yourself and then find a way to be alive and compassionate to other people,” Packer said.

Packer and Gore performed the scene in which Pericles and Marina are reunited, and then read the last thing Shakespeare wrote about a woman, Cramner’s blessing over the infant Queen Elizabeth I from Henry VIII.

This royal infant–heaven still move about her!–
Though in her cradle, yet now promises
Upon this land a thousand thousand blessings,
Which time shall bring to ripeness: she shall be–
But few now living can behold that goodness–
A pattern to all princes living with her,
And all that shall succeed: Saba was never
More covetous of wisdom and fair virtue
Than this pure soul shall be: all princely graces,
That mould up such a mighty piece as this is,
With all the virtues that attend the good,
Shall still be doubled on her: truth shall nurse her,
Holy and heavenly thoughts still counsel her:
She shall be loved and fear’d: her own shall bless her;
Her foes shake like a field of beaten corn,
And hang their heads with sorrow: good grows with her:
In her days every man shall eat in safety,
Under his own vine, what he plants; and sing
The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours:
God shall be truly known; and those about her
From her shall read the perfect ways of honour,
And by those claim their greatness, not by blood.
Nor shall this peace sleep with her: but as when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new create another heir,
As great in admiration as herself;
So shall she leave her blessedness to one,
When heaven shall call her from this cloud of darkness,
Who from the sacred ashes of her honour
Shall star-like rise, as great in fame as she was,
And so stand fix’d: peace, plenty, love, truth, terror,
That were the servants to this chosen infant,
Shall then be his, and like a vine grow to him:
Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine,
His honour and the greatness of his name
Shall be, and make new nations: he shall flourish,
And, like a mountain cedar, reach his branches
To all the plains about him: our children’s children
Shall see this, and bless heaven.

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