WoW Act III – Living Underground or Dying to Tell the Truth

Posted by Gail M. Burns - August 2010

Women of Will: The Complete Journey
Act III: Living Underground or Dying to Tell the Truth
Thursday, August 26 at 2 p.m.

PART ONE
Scenes from Hamlet, Othello, and As You Like It
PART TWO
Scenes from Twelfth Night, Hamlet, King John, Measure for Measure and Macbeth

The room was now set up as a theatre in the round, with audience on all four sides f the playing area. Packer opened with Hamlet’s famous soliloquy:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

She then took us through an analysis of that speech, pointing out that the first five lines have feminine endings (they end with an unstressed syllable), then after the line that begins “No more;…” Shakespeare changes gear and all of the subsequent lines have masculine endings (They end with a stressed syllable), except for the lines beginning “Devoutly to be wish’d…” and “Must give us pause…”

“Hamlet has all of the feminine attributes,” Packer noted, “He doesn’t want to kill the man who killed his father and he breaks his relations with Ophelia and Gertrude. Socrates began a public examination of the revenge cycle an he was killed. We need to change our thinking and find different ways of looking at the world because our old ways aren’t working.”

Act III will look at Shakespeare’s middle plays, written between 1596-1604/5, where many of his female characters llive underground, i.e. dress and live as men, where they can speak truth to power. “If they stay in their frocks, they die or commit suicide,” Packer explained. “Shakepeare is beginning to realize that if women aren’t allowed to speak what they feel, terrible things happen to them.”

Packer offered her interpretation of Ophelia’s plight through Gertrude’s eyes: “Ophelia breaks her sexual/spiritual bond with Hamlet when she returns his love tockens, as her father has told her to do. Then her father dies and her brother is out of country and she has no male support system. She has to die for speaking the truth.”

In 1599 Shakespeare wrote Henry V which was his ultimate play about male honor and has very few female characters. “You can’t have women in an honor play because they’ll say the wrong thing,” Packer said.

Then he wrote Julius Caesar. “This was a radical play for a man living in a monarchy to write because it is about the leader of a republic who is killed for wantng to be a monarch,” Packer explained.

The two women in Julius Caesar, Calpurnia, Caesar’s wife, and Portia, Brutus’ wife, both try to speak the truth and enter into communication on an equal footing with their husbands. Calpurnia warns Caesar not to go to the senate, and he listens to her while they are alone, but then other men come in to the conversation and Caesar is ashamed that he even considered listening to Calpurnia. He goes to the senate and he is killed.

Portia begs Brutus to tell her what he is doing, although she already knows, and cuts her thigh to prove what she can bear. But he leaves without telling her about the assassination plot. Later Brutus is brought word that she killed herself by swallowing fire, which Packer sees as very symbolic of how women’s voices are silenced by the male structures of society.

Packer and Gore then performed an interesting interweaving of scenes between Rosalind and Orlando from As You Like It and Othello and Desdemona from Othello. Rosalind, the largest female part Shakespeare ever wrote, is the perfect example of a woman achieving freedom of speak and action by living “underground” as Ganymede. Desdemona, literally, dies for telling the truth. Also, Othello takes place in a world where the masculine institutional structures are in place, while As You Like It takes place in the Forest of Arden where there is no structure to society. (The following quotations are both from Rosalind’s lines in As You Like It.)

Were it not better,
Because that I am more than common tall,
That I did suit me all points like a man?
A gallant curtle-axe upon my thigh,
A boar-spear in my hand; and–in my heart
Lie there what hidden woman’s fear there will–
We’ll have a swashing and a martial outside,
As many other mannish cowards have
That do outface it with their semblances.

“…men are April when they woo, December when they wed:
maids are May when they are maids, but the sky
changes when they are wives…”

The second part of this Act opened with scenes from Twelfth Night in which Gore played Olivia and Orsino to Packer’s Viola. Packer spoke of Orsino’s “love” for Olivia, who he doesn’t really know. “Having someone adore you is very nice, but it doesn’t help you grow as an individual.”

Packer pointed out that both Viola and Olivia are in deep mourning. She also noted that Shakespeare didn’t write for female performers but for boys or young men who played the female roles. The actor playing Rosalind or Viola was a boy playing a girl playing a boy.

“When I was a young actor at the Royal Shakespeare Company I didn’t know who I was because the picture I was being presented with wasn’t really me,” Packer recalled. “Before I went on stage the director would say ‘Tits and teeth to the fore, Tina.’ My inner truth didn’t match what the leaders of that company, who I like and respect very much, were telling me. It made me get good and mad and say, ‘I’ll start my own Shakespeare company!’”

“As actors here at Shakespeare & Company, we try to own what we say on stage, which means we have to own what we say in our daily lives, too. We pledge to tell each other the thruth. We had to when we were all living together at The Mount,” Packer explained. “Our most recent financial crisis wasn’t our first – it was more like our tenth! But during it the company itself was stronger than ever. We weren’t falling apart, it was the institutional structures that were failing us.

Packer addressed the topic of lamentation. Turning back to Hamlet’s grief over his father, Packer said: “Claudius says that such grief is unmanly. Of course Claudius killed Hamlet’s father and so obviously he doesn’t want a lot of fuss made over his death, but the masculine ideal says that everyone should repress their grief.”

Before the rise of the Athenian city-states women held the rites of birth and death. The female poets would write long laments which they would recite while tearing their hair, etc. They believed that the sounds they made would carry the soul of the deceased up to heaven, and they knew the soul was finally at rest when the family experienced catharsis. The question is whether that catharsis then released them into, or from, revenge.

But with the rise of the city-states men were being asked to fight and die for their city, not their family, and it was hard to rally them to battle when the women were telling the truth about the horrors of war and death. So women’s voices of lamentation were silenced and what was heard instead were men’s hero stories, which do a very good job of promoting male bonding and comradry on the battlefield.

Women’s right to publicly lament was banned in different countries at different times. the rites are still practiced to a certain extent in Ireland. In England they were banned during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Nowadays we downplay lamentation because it is too painful. If we don’t tell the truth about war we can’t know who those who suffer and die are.

Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, died in 1596 at the age of eleven. Did writing Constance’s deep lamentation in King John give Shakespeare relief from his grief over Hamnet’s death?

Packer considers Measure for Measure a very important play and confessed she couldn’t decide whether to include it in Act II or Act III of WoW. Both protagonists – Angelo and Isabella – consider themselves very spiritual people, but they don’t know their sexual selves at all.

There was much hilarity when Packer donned a nun’s wimple to play Isabelle to Gore’s Angelo. Gore had a particularly hard time regaining his composure!

“Measure for Measure is a profound play, but Shakespeare didn’t really get it right,” Packer said. “I’ve directed it three times and I’m still not sure we end up with love.”

In the next phase of his writing Shakespeare goes on a journey of despair, and Packer confessed she didn’t know why. In 1603 James I ascended the throne and Shakespeare’s company, The Chamberlain’s Men, became The King’s Men and performed at court thirty times a year instead of just six times the year before.

“The artist has to be able to live on the edge and see both the beauty of the world and the darkness,” Packer explained.

At the conclusion of Act III the audience was divided into three sections and read the following passage from Macbeth chorally:

“The weird sisters, hand in hand,
Posters of the sea and land,
Thus do go about, about:
Thrice to thine and thrice to mine
And thrice again to make up nine.
Peace! The charm’s wound up.”

Tomorrow morning Act IV will commence with scenes from Macbeth, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, and King Lear, so Packer advised everyone to eat a hearty breakfast!

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