Alice Munro’s “Walker Brothers Cowboy” and “Dance of the Happy Shades”

As a short story writer, Alice Munro is in the line of Chekhov. I like that she has great control and writes enough, suggesting much more underneath the surface. I like that she writes stories in which nothing happens, and yet at the end, something seems to happen to us. 

“Walker Brothers Cowboy” (in Selected Stories) is the first Alice Munro story I’ve ever read, and I like it a lot. It’s narrated by a young girl. Her father once had a fox farm but lost everything and now works for the Walker Brothers. 

“He sells cough medicine, iron tonic, corn plasters, laxatives, pills for female disorders, mouthwash, shampoo, liniment, salves, lemon and orange and raspberry concentrate for making refreshing drinks, vanilla, food coloring, black and green tea, ginger, cloves, and other spices, rat poison.”

The story flows slowly, naturally—the narrator introduces her father, then the location, then her father’s job, then her mother, then the story of the family—everything flows naturally—then the girl and her younger brother, to give the mother a rest, join the father on his trip to sell things at people’s houses, and we follow them—where is the story going? we wonder—then having done his job, he continues driving beyond his territory and meets a woman he hasn’t seen for a long time. That’s when “Walker Brothers Cowboy” takes a little turn, the way Chekhov’s stories always do. A little turn that gets you to see everything differently.

There are quite a few subtle things I like. For example, we’re not told till that moment in Nora’s house, when it’s necessary, that the father is called Ben Jordan. We’re never told about the relationship between him and Nora. We’re never told about the incompatibility between him and his wife. Everything gradually unfolds, and Alice Munro adds nothing superfluous. 

But the thing I particularly like is that she gets us to see the father differently: 

“She and my father drink and I know what it is. Whisky. One of the things my mother has told me in our talks together is that my father never drinks whisky. But I see he does. He drinks whisky and he talks of people whose names I have never heard before.” 

It’s so “soft” that it doesn’t feel like an epiphany. Shortly after, Nora puts music on and turns towards the girl: 

““A big girl like you and so good-looking and can’t dance!” says Nora. “It’s high time you learned. I bet you’d make a lovely dancer. Here, I’m going to put on a piece I used to dance to and even your daddy did, in his dancing days. You didn’t know your daddy was a dancer, did you? Well, he is a talented man, your daddy!”” 

These little moments make us see the father in a different light, and get us to care about him—about the man he once was, the man he might have been. At the same time, Alice Munro has the young daughter narrate the story and therefore adds the perspective, the relatable feeling when one discovers something new, something unexpected about one’s parents, about who they used to be and what they were like before getting married and becoming parents.  

“So my father drives and my brother watches the road for rabbits and I feel my father’s life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon, darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine.” 

The ending enlarges the story. 

“Dance of the Happy Shades” is a story in which there’s even less happening: it’s about one of the boring “parties”— more like recitals—of an old piano teacher named Miss Marsalles, who “was unable to criticize except in the most delicate and apologetic way and her praises were unforgivably dishonest; it took an unusually conscientious pupil to come through with anything like a creditable performance”. 

I could summarise the plot and write about the story but I’m more interested in the writing. 

“Even the shadow behind her of another Miss Marsalles, slightly older, larger, grimmer, whose existence was always forgotten from one June to the next, was not discomfiting—though it was surely an arresting fact that there should be not one but two faces like that in the world, both long, gravel-colored, kindly, and grotesque, with enormous noses and tiny, red, sweet-tempered and shortsighted eyes. It must finally have come to seem like a piece of luck to them to be so ugly, a protection against life to be marked in so many ways, impossible, for they were gay as invulnerable and childish people are; they appeared sexless, wild, and gentle creatures, bizarre yet domestic, living in their house in Rosedale outside the complications of time.” 

Like Chekhov, Alice Munro doesn’t have an ornate style, a style that draws attention to itself. But the style, or perhaps the voice, of “Dance of the Happy Shades” is more interesting than in “Walker Brothers Cowboy”—probably because it’s narrated by a pupil who doesn’t love Miss Marsalles? 

Like the narrator, most of Miss Marsalles’s pupils now are the children of her old pupils: 

“Here they found themselves year after year—a group of busy, youngish women who had eased their cars impatiently through the archaic streets of Rosedale, who had complained for a week previously about the time lost, the fuss over the children’s dresses, and, above all, the boredom, but who were drawn together by a rather implausible allegiance—not so much to Miss Marsalles as to the ceremonies of their childhood, to a more exacting pattern of life which had been breaking apart even then but which survived, and unaccountably still survived, in Miss Marsalles’ living room. The little girls in dresses with skirts as stiff as bells moved with a natural awareness of ceremony against the dark walls of books, and their mothers’ faces wore the dull, not unpleasant look of acquiescence, the touch of absurd and slightly artificial nostalgia which would carry them through any lengthy family ritual.” 

Not ornate, but not bland. 

“The plates of sandwiches are set out, as they must have been for several hours now; you can see how the ones on top are beginning to curl very slightly at the edges. Flies buzz over the table, settle on the sandwiches, and crawl comfortably across the plates of little iced cakes brought from the bakery. The cut-glass bowl, sitting as usual in the center of the table, is full of purple punch, without ice apparently and going flat.

[…] My mother seems unable, although she makes a great effort, to take her eyes off the dining-room table and the complacent journeys of the marauding flies. Finally she achieves a dreamy, distant look, with her eyes focussed somewhere above the punch bowl, which makes it possible for her to keep her head turned in that direction and yet does not in any positive sense give her away. Miss Marsalles as well has trouble keeping her eyes on the performers; she keeps looking towards the door. Does she expect that even now some of the unexplained absentees may turn up?” 

I shall not write about the little turn in the later part of the story, nor the ending. But I’d note that throughout the story, the narrator, clearly influenced by her genteel mother, sees and depicts Miss Marsalles as a pathetic, rather absurd old woman, a mediocre piano teacher who foolishly thinks she can see into children’s hearts; Alice Munro builds it up till that little turn near the end of the story, and then gets us to see Miss Marsalles and all the characters in a different light. And she presents her characters as they are, without moralising, in a style that doesn’t draw attention to itself.

It is very good. 

Chekhov’s “The Huntsman”

In Lectures on Russian Literature, Nabokov writes: 

“Russian critics have noted that Chekhov's style, his choice of words and so on, did not reveal any of those special artistic preoccupations that obsessed, for instance, Gogol or Flaubert or Henry James. […] He was not a verbal inventor in the sense that Gogol was; his literary style goes to parties clad in its everyday suit. Thus Chekhov is a good example to give when one tries to explain that a writer may be a perfect artist without being exceptionally vivid in his verbal technique or exceptionally preoccupied with the way his sentences curve. […] The magical part of it is that in spite of his tolerating flaws which a bright beginner would have avoided, in spite of his being quite satisfied with the man-in-the-street among words, the word-in-the-street, so to say, Chekhov managed to convey an impression of artistic beauty far surpassing that of many writers who thought they knew what rich beautiful prose was. He did it by keeping all his words in the same dim light and of the same exact tint of gray, a tint between the color of an old fence and that of a low cloud. The variety of his moods, the flicker of his charming wit, the deeply artistic economy of characterization, the vivid detail, and the fade-out of human life—all the peculiar Chekhovian features—are enhanced by being suffused and surrounded by a faintly iridescent verbal haziness.”

I have just finished Volume 6 of Constance Garnett’s Chekhov, and indeed there’s something magical about his stories.  

For example, “The Huntsman” is a very simple short story—basically a sketch of a meeting between a huntsman and a woman—on the surface, there doesn’t seem to be anything special or remarkable about it. But it is wonderful, and I’m trying to figure out why. 

“There was stillness all round, not a sound... everything living was hiding away from the heat.

“Yegor Vlassitch!” the huntsman suddenly heard a soft voice.

He started and, looking round, scowled. Beside him, as though she had sprung out of the earth, stood a pale-faced woman of thirty with a sickle in her hand. She was trying to look into his face, and was smiling diffidently.

“Oh, it is you, Pelagea!” said the huntsman, stopping and deliberately uncocking the gun. “H’m!... How have you come here?”

“The women from our village are working here, so I have come with them.... As a labourer, Yegor Vlassitch.”

“Oh...” growled Yegor Vlassitch, and slowly walked on.

Pelagea followed him. They walked in silence for twenty paces.

“I have not seen you for a long time, Yegor Vlassitch...” said Pelagea looking tenderly at the huntsman’s moving shoulders.” 

(translated by Constance Garnett) 

I suppose the story works so well because Chekhov withholds information and sets up some expectations, getting us to make assumptions about the two characters and form our thoughts about them, then slowly reveals the nature of their relationship and forces us to go back and see everything in a different light. And it is poignant. Chekhov presents the characters as they are, withholding judgement, and writes with compassion for both the huntsman and Pelagea. 

I also love Chekhov’s subtlety. 

“A silence followed. Three wild ducks flew over the clearing. Yegor followed them with his eyes till, transformed into three scarcely visible dots, they sank down far beyond the forest.

“How do you live?” he asked, moving his eyes from the ducks to Pelagea.”

That’s a nice touch. One thing I love about Chekhov and also Tolstoy is such subtle details—they capture the way a character’s thoughts wander, the way someone gets distracted by something then gets pulled back into the moment—that’s what we do, and that’s why the stories of Chekhov and Tolstoy feel so natural and seem so artless.

It is no wonder that Dmitry Grigorovich was so impressed with “The Huntsman” that he told Chekhov to move away from comic sketches and focus on more serious writings. It was, from what I understand, a turning point for Chekhov. 

Some idle thoughts on writers and range

Tolstoy, as you know, is the novelist I love and admire the most. One of the reasons is the vast range of characters, vast range of human experiences in his works: from childbirth scenes to death scenes; from battle scenes to intimate domestic scenes; from hunting to dancing; from farming to dressing; from children to old people to animals; from princes to serfs; from generals to mothers; from saints to madmen; from Russians to Cossacks to Chechens… Anna Karenina and War and Peace are about everything. Other novelists seem more narrow in comparison. 

But sometimes when I compare Tolstoy to Dostoyevsky or Chekhov, both of whom are generally more narrow in range and scope, I can think of things Dostoyevsky can do but Tolstoy can’t do (spite, humiliation, perversity, sadism, masochism), and I can think of things Chekhov can do but Tolstoy can’t do (female sexuality/ desire, goodness without religion). 

But then I think about Shakespeare, and all the things that these supreme writers seem unable to do can be found in Shakespeare. Female desire: Venus and Adonis and many plays. Spite: Iago in Othello, Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, Timon in Timon of Athens, Don John in Much Ado About Nothing, Edmund in King Lear… Humiliation: Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, Malvolio in Twelfth Night… Masochism: Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Viola in Twelfth Night… Perversity and sadism: Goneril and Regan in King Lear, Iago in Othello, a few characters in Titus Andronicus… The range of characters in Shakespeare is unmatched: there are characters of different classes, different backgrounds, different races, different sexualities... Everything can be found in Shakespeare. There’s a Harvey Weinstein (Angelo in Measure for Measure). There’s even a Marxist (Gonzalo in The Tempest). 

Shakespeare really is the “biggest” of writers. All-knowing, to use my friend Tom’s word. But how? How does Shakespeare seem to contain us all?  

Chekhov’s “The Witch” and “Peasant Wives”

Lately, I have been reading and enjoying Gary Saul Morson’s Wonder Confronts Certainty (about Russian literature and history). But I’ve put it aside for now, and returned to Chekhov.

I find it hard to write about Chekhov, probably because it’s difficult to pinpoint the moments of greatness in his works—or to steal Woolf’s words about Jane Austen, he is “the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness”. With Proust, I can write about details, metaphors, or methods of characterisation. With Dickens, I can write about imagery, motifs, or the different types of characters in his novels and the way a two-dimensional character becomes three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood. With Chekhov, his stories have the deceptive appearance of simplicity—his greatness lies in his ability to capture the subtlest emotional shades, his ability to have compassion for everyone and to present characters as they are, without judgement—his techniques are subtle and elusive, almost like there are no techniques. 

For example, “The Witch” in Volume 6 is a very simple story, almost like a sketch: there is a snowstorm and, as a postman knocks on the door, the sexton, Savely Gykin, accuses his wife Raissa Nilovna of being a witch, of causing snowstorms and luring young men into the house and seducing them. The story is simple, but I love the way the characters unfold. 

“Savely angrily puffed all the air out of his chest and turned abruptly to the wall. Three minutes later he turned over restlessly again, knelt up on the bed, and with his hands on the pillow looked askance at his wife. She was still sitting motionless, staring at the visitor. Her cheeks were pale and her eyes were glowing with a strange fire.”

(translated by Constance Garnett) 

Jealous, Savely places a handkerchief over the postman’s face. 

“And settling herself more comfortably, she stared at the postman again.

It did not matter to her that his face was covered. She was not so much interested in his face as in his whole appearance, in the novelty of this man. His chest was broad and powerful, his hands were slender and well formed, and his graceful, muscular legs were much comelier than Savely’s stumps. There could be no comparison, in fact.”

Chekhov is very good at writing about female desire, and he depicts it without judgement. Throughout the story, he gets us to empathise with Raissa’s loneliness, her having a fool for a husband—it’s reminiscent of “The Chemist’s Wife” and “The Husband”—but the story takes a slight turn near the end, as Chekhov’s stories always do. 

““Witch!” he muttered indignantly. “Tfoo, horrid creature!”

Yet, waiting till she was quiet and began breathing evenly, he touched her head with his finger... held her thick plait in his hand for a minute. She did not feel it. Then he grew bolder and stroked her neck.

“Leave off!” she shouted, and prodded him on the nose with her elbow with such violence that he saw stars before his eyes.

The pain in his nose was soon over, but the torture in his heart remained.”

Thus the story ends—not much happens in it—but the husband, who so far has appeared foolish and rather cruel (for forcing the postman to leave in the middle of the snowstorm), is now pitiful. A little stroke, and Chekhov gets us to see the husband and wife differently. 

Straight after “The Witch”, Constance Garnett aptly places “Peasant Wives”, a longer, more complex story with similar themes. A man named Matvey Savitch stops for the night at the house of a landowner named Dyudya, and tells the family about how he has come to adopt the boy Kuzka: he had an affair with Kuzka’s mother when the husband was in the army.

A large part of the story is Matvey Savitch telling the story, his sanctimonious remarks echoed by Dyudya—Chekhov lets us see that Matvey Savitch is a selfish hypocrite, speaking of sin and Christian charity but having an affair with a married woman, wanting to drop her when he himself wants to get married, and betraying her—then, as Matvey Savitch finishes the story and goes to sleep, Chekhov moves away from them and gives us a glimpse of the unhappy lives of Dyudya’s daughters-in-law, Sofya and Varvara. It’s almost like he begins a new story within the same story. Sofya and Varvara are unhappy married, like Kuzka’s mother Mashenka, like the sexton’s wife in “The Witch”. 

Like Mashenka, Varvara has an affair (or affairs). 

“And she began telling in a whisper of her midnight walks with the priest’s son, and of the stories he had told her, and of his comrades, and of the fun she had with the travellers who stayed in the house. The mournful song stirred a longing for life and freedom. Sofya began to laugh; she thought it sinful and terrible and sweet to hear about, and she felt envious and sorry that she, too, had not been a sinner when she was young and pretty.” 

That last line is what I mean when I say Chekhov captures the subtlest shades of emotions. 

He gives us a glimpse into the women’s unhappy lives and their suffering, then drops a hint of something that might or might not happen, leaving it open. Then the two women fall asleep, and a new day begins, and Chekhov returns to Matvey Savitch and the boy Kuzka. And just before the story ends, there’s a little stroke, a little turn that reveals something about the characters or makes us see them differently: except for a little moment when Kuzka wakes up to find some wrinkled women looking at him and cries out in fright, so far he has been only in the background and we know next to nothing about him, but at the end, in just a few sentences, Chekhov perfectly conveys the relationship between him and Matvey Savitch, and the boy’s torment. 

It is masterful. 

Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis

1/ Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare’s first narrative poem and first publication in general, is about the goddess seducing the beautiful man: 

““Fondling,” she said, “since I have hemmed thee here

Within the circuit of this ivory pale, 

I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer; 

Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale; 

Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry, 

Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie. 

“Within this limit is relief enough, 

Sweet bottom-grass, and high delightful plain, 

Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough,

To shelter thee from tempest and from rain.

Then be my deer since I am such a park;

No dog shall rouse thee though a thousand bark.”” 

Oo-er! 

If that doesn’t want to make you pick up the book, I don’t know what can. 

2/ So how does Venus try to persuade Adonis? 

““Torches are made to light, jewels to wear, 

Dainties to taste, fresh beauty for the use, 

Herbs for their smell, and sappy plants to bear. 

Things growing to themselves are growth’s abuse. 

Seeds spring from seeds, and beauty breedeth beauty. 

Thou wast begot; to get it is thy duty. 

“Upon the earth’s increase why shouldst thou feed 

Unless the earth with thy increase be fed? 

By law of nature thou art bound to breed, 

That shine may live when thou thyself art dead; 

And so in spite of death thou doth survive, 

In that thy likeness still is left alive.”

This makes me think of the sonnets, mostly the procreation sonnets (1-17). Sadly the comparison doesn’t do Venus and Adonis a favour: the sonnets are much more sophisticated.

Just look at two examples: 

Sonnet 3

Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest,

Now is the time that face should form another,

Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,

Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.

For where is she so fair whose uneared womb

Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?

Or who is he so fond will be the tomb

Of his self-love, to stop posterity?

Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee

Calls back the lovely April of her prime;

So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,

Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.

    But if thou live rememb’red not to be,

    Die single, and thine image dies with thee.

Sonnet 12

When I do count the clock that tells the time, 

And see the brave day sunk in hideous night; 

When I behold the violet past prime, 

And sable curls all silver’d o’er with white;

When lofty trees I see barren of leaves 

Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,

And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves 

Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard, 

Then of thy beauty do I question make, 

That thou among the wastes of time must go,

Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake

And die as fast as they see others grow; 

   And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence

   Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence. 

The language, the style in the sonnets is much better. 

3/ When Venus faints and “lies as she were slain”, Adonis, er, gives her CPR. Or kisses her, thinking she’s dead (are you a necrophile, mate?). 

She wakes up. You know, like Sleeping Beauty. 

“The night of sorrow now is turned to day: 

Her two blue windows faintly she upheaveth, 

Like the fair sun when in his fresh array 

He cheers the morn and all the earth relieveth; 

And as the bright sun glories the sky, 

So is her face illumined with her eye.” 

This goes on for a few more stanzas, but you get the idea: the story of Venus and Adonis may be unusual (a woman wooing and rejected by man), but the style is more conventional than in the sonnets. I should say that this narrative poem was published just a couple of years before Shakespeare was testing, bending, playing with the English language in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and his poetry was soaring in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet. 

It is interesting, however, when Adonis tells Venus that her feeling for him is lust, not love: 

““… Call it not love, for Love to heaven is fled

Since sweating Lust on earth usurped his name; 

Under whose simple semblance he hath fed

Upon fresh beauty, blotting it with blame; 

Which the hot tyrant stains and soon bereaves,

As caterpillars do the tender leaves. 

[…] Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies; 

Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies…”” 

Shakespeare’s essentially a dramatic poet, so the poem is more interesting when we get Adonis’s voice—though only for a bit—the poem largely focuses on Venus’s perspective.

I can’t help wondering if Shakespeare was taking a deliberate dig at those who waxed poetic about love when they’re just horny. 

4/ I like the passages of grief, when Venus thinks he’s dead, and when she finds him dead. I don’t like the narrator’s descriptions, like “crystal tide”, “silver rain”, “like a stormy day, now wind, now rain”, “pearls in glass”, and so on and so forth, but I like the expressions of grief from her mouth. Then we get the dramatic Shakespeare. 

““Dost thou drink tears, that thou provok’st such weeping? 

What may a heavy groan advantage thee? 

Why hast thou cast into eternal sleeping

Those eyes that taught all other eyes to see?...”” 

Or: 

“For he being dead, with him is beauty slain, 

And, beauty dead, black chaos comes again.” 

Or: 

““Alas, poor world, what treasure hast thou lost! 

What face remains alive that’s worth the viewing? 

Whose tongue is music now? What canst thou boast 

Of things long since, or any thing ensuing? 

The flowers are sweet, their colors fresh and trim, 

But true sweet beauty lived and died with him…”” 

I also like it when Venus looks at Adonis’s body torn apart by a boar, and thinks “Had I been toothed like him, I must confess/ With kissing him I should have killed him first”. A bit corny, but still. 

5/ If I have to pick a single line that is the most interesting in Venus and Adonis, I’d say “Before I know myself, seek not to know me” (from Adonis). 

Shakespeare’s sonnets and “A Lover’s Complaint”: first impressions

1/ Having read all the plays, I decided to go for Shakespeare’s non-dramatic poetry. There are a handful of sonnets I know quite well (18, 116, 130, 138), but this time I was reading through them all with the intention of studying them closely over time, so there isn’t much to say. I love Shakespeare’s sonnets—not all, some are harder to read and some feel quite early—but I love most. 

2/ Sonnet 116 feels very different this time: 

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me prov'd,

I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

3/ I don’t think the publication was unauthorised: the sonnets were arranged in such a meaningful way that they had to be planned for publication by Shakespeare himself.  

4/ The sonnets, to me, feel more like literary exercises than expressions of personal thought and feeling. I think he was aiming to kill the sonnet and give it a rebirth—English theatre was no longer the same with Shakespeare and neither was the sonnet—he went against all norms and conventions, creating a sonnet sequence unlike anything that came before.

5/ I think Shakespeare wrote about real feelings of joy and lust and desire and longing and anger and jealousy and disappointment and confusion and hatred and so on, but there’s not necessarily one Fair Youth or one Rival Poet or one Dark Lady. 

6/ That doesn’t necessarily mean that I think Shakespeare’s not bisexual. I would say he’s almost certainly not gay; he could be bisexual or straight, probably bisexual. 

7/ It’s very likely that he had some venereal disease at some point, as hinted in some of the last sonnets. Scholars have long debated this subject, I myself think it’s likely around the time he was writing Timon of Athens and King Lear, because of the hateful and vicious and often out-of-place rants against female sexuality in these plays. 

8/ I didn’t like “A Lover’s Complaint”. Apparently there’s some debate surrounding the authorship—I’m not sure—some of it sounds Shakespearean and some of it doesn’t. If it was entirely Shakespeare’s, it must have been an early work. 

So here’s a record of my impressions. Slowly I’m going to read and absorb the sonnets properly over time.

Hamlet (2018), ft. Andrew Scott

This is quite a creative production, and in quite a few ways, interesting.

It is set today: the Ghost for example is first seen on CCTV, and the actors all act modern (see the scene of Ophelia saying goodbye to Laertes and you’ll know what I mean). It feels fresh and works rather well for the large part, though one wonders why at a time when cameras, TV, computers, video calls… exist, Hamlet bothers to write to Ophelia on paper, like a hipster (this is also why I cannot sit and watch a contemporary Romeo and Juliet—a phone call would have resolved everything and prevented the tragedy). 

Joking aside, I do think the 2018 production is interesting, though a few choices don’t quite work for me. 

First of all, Robert Icke plays up the sexual attraction, the passion between Claudius (Angus Wright) and Gertrude (Juliet Stevenson), which works very well.

Secondly, he emphasises the surveillance theme, and our modern Polonius (Peter Wight) uses spy devices. Denmark feels like a prison indeed. But he also adds two overhearing moments and I don’t particularly like them: the first time, Hamlet (Andrew Scott) is, without intending to spy, hiding behind a couch as Ophelia (Jessica Brown Findlay) talks to her father and brother about her relationship with Hamlet, and her lines become less independent, less interesting when we see them spoken within Hamlet’s hearing; the second time, Hamlet overhears Claudius speak to Guildenstern and Rosencrantz of the England plan; the two moments make Hamlet appear less smart, as he discovers by chance how others are plotting against him, instead of having his own instinct and seeing through everyone as in Shakespeare’s play (and in the Kevin Kline production).

Thirdly, the production presents a very different Gertrude. There was one scene I didn’t recognise—there are three different texts of Hamlet, and my version was largely based on the second Quarto—so I looked it up and found the scene (slightly longer than in the production) in the first Quarto, often known as the bad Quarto: 

“Hor. Madame, your sonne is safe arriv'de in Denmarke,

This letter I euen now receiv'd of him,

Whereas he writes how he escap't the danger,

And subtle treason that the king had plotted,

Being crossed by the contention of the windes,

He found the Packet sent to the king of England,

Wherein he saw himselfe betray'd to death,

As at his next conuersion with your grace,

He will relate the circumstance at full.

Queene Then I perceiue there's treason in his lookes

That seem'd to sugar o're his villanie:

But I will soothe and please him for a time,

For murderous mindes are alwayes jealous,

But know not you Horatio where he is?

Hor. Yes Madame, and he hath appoynted me

To meete him on the east side of the Cittie

To morrow morning.

Queene O faile not, good Horatio, and withall, commend me

A mothers care to him, bid him a while

Be wary of his presence, lest that he

Faile in that he goes about.

Hor. Madam, neuer make doubt of that:

I thinke by this the news be come to court:

He is arriv'de, obserue the king, and you shall

Quickely finde, Hamlet being here,

Things fell not to his minde.

Queene But what became of Gilderstone and Rossencraft?

Hor. He being set ashore, they went for England,

And in the Packet there writ down that doome

To be perform'd on them poynted for him:

And by great chance he had his fathers Seale, 

So all was done without discouerie.

Queene Thankes be to heauen for blessing of the prince,

Horatio once againe I take my leaue,

With thowsand mothers blessings to my sonne.

Horat. Madam adue.” 

(source) 

One may ask why Gertrude knows about Claudius’s murderous intent but still lets Hamlet and Laertes (Luke Thompson) play at duel, but in the final scene, she becomes very different from the Gertrude I have always known from the text I’ve read and from the Kevin Kline production (Dana Ivey), as she deliberately drinks from the cup she knows to have been poisoned. 

It is an interesting change.

Fourthly, Robert Icke decides to use quite a bit of Bob Dylan’s music in the production. Does it fit? Generally, I don’t mind it too much, except in the duelling scene when the music takes over and we don’t have Shakespeare’s words. 

The last creative choice I’d like to mention is the final scene: old Hamlet’s ghost returns, then we see other ghosts, then the people who have just died turn into ghosts and follow the others. Does it work? I guess to many people it does, as this production is quite popular, but I don’t like it—I can’t quite explain why—too gimmicky? It also appears quite silly that Hamlet, having been poisoned, continues talking on and on when everyone else has turned into a ghost and walked off.  

But the important question you’d probably want to ask is: what do I think about Andrew Scott as Hamlet? I shall say that I much prefer Kevin Kline, partly because Kevin Kline’s Hamlet is much closer to the Hamlet in my head (funnier, more likable, more noble), and partly because he depicts better Hamlet in different moods. Andrew Scott’s Hamlet lacks humour—he’s darker, more bitter, more violent and dangerous, especially with the way he waves the gun at everyone—one watches this production and thinks Claudius is perfectly right for packing him off to England. He and Kevin Kline also approach very differently the scene at Ophelia’s grave: Kevin Kline’s Hamlet mocks Laertes’s “performance” (Michael Cumpsty) but afterwards turns towards Ophelia’s coffin and shows that he loves her, whereas Andrew Scott’s Hamlet goes to extremes mocking Laertes and doesn’t seem to care at all about Ophelia. 

Andrew Scott’s Hamlet is more like a psychopath. Perhaps G. Wilson Knight would have liked it, but I don’t—not really.  

I also think he overacts. One may argue that he feels every line, every word he utters with his hands, his arms, the whole of his being, and sometimes it does work well, but often I just think he overacts. 

This turns out to be a lot longer than my “review” of the 1990 Hamlet with Kevin Kline, but what can I say, the Kevin Kline version was so perfect that there was nothing to say.

Hamlet, A. C. Bradley, and Kevin Kline

1/ In Shakespearean Tragedy, A. C. Bradley makes an interesting point that Julius Caesar and Hamlet (two early plays in Shakespeare’s Tragic period) may be called tragedies of thought, whereas Othello, King Lear, Anthony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus may be called tragedies of passion—the main characters have passionate natures and “we may attribute the tragic failure in each of these cases to passion” (Lecture III, 1).

Perhaps that’s why I’ve always been more obsessed with King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello than with Hamlet? 

But Hamlet is undoubtedly a great play and, on this revisit, I found myself relating a lot more to Hamlet.

“O that this too too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!

Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fie on't! ah, fie! 'Tis an unweeded garden

That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature 

Possess it merely…” 

(Act 1 scene 2) 

People often say Hamlet is a play in which you find something new, something different each time you reread it—and it certainly feels very different when you yourself are weary of everything. I have lost all my mirth. Man delights not me.

After reading the play the third time, I also read A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, a classic of Shakespearean criticism. If only I had the time and energy to write at length about his analysis of each play! One thing I’d say is that I find myself more in agreement with A. C. Bradley than with G. Wilson Knight regarding the characters: Knight is right for pointing out, in The Wheel of Fire, the coldness and cruelty of Hamlet, which Bradley to some extent downplays, but I think Bradley gets it right for understanding the shock and disillusionment, the pain and weariness in Hamlet. 

“… his habitual feeling is one of disgust at life and everything in it, himself included,—a disgust which varies in intensity, rising at times into a longing for death, sinking often into weary apathy, but is never dispelled for more than brief intervals. Such a state of feeling is inevitably adverse to any kind of decided action; the body is inert, the mind indifferent or worse; its response is, 'it does not matter,' 'it is not worth while,' 'it is no good.' And the action required of Hamlet is very exceptional. It is violent, dangerous, difficult to accomplish perfectly, on one side repulsive to a man of honour and sensitive feeling, on another side involved in a certain mystery (here come in thus, in their subordinate place, various causes of inaction assigned by various theories). These obstacles would not suffice to prevent Hamlet from acting, if his state were normal; and against them there operate, even in his morbid state, healthy and positive feelings, love of his father, loathing of his uncle, desire of revenge, desire to do duty. But the retarding motives acquire an unnatural strength because they have an ally in something far stronger than themselves, the melancholic disgust and apathy; while the healthy motives, emerging with difficulty from the central mass of diseased feeling, rapidly sink back into it and 'lose the name of action.'” (Lecture III, 4) 

I think Bradley has more sympathy for, and therefore more understanding of, Hamlet.

I also think Knight exaggerates the good qualities of Claudius and the warmth of Elsinore. He’s right that Claudius appears to be a good king, and he and Gertrude love each other, but it’s a cold, vile world—a world without warmth, without loyalty, without honour, without trust—a world in which a widow remarries at most wicked speed and others don’t wonder at it, a world in which a father spies on and smears his own son and uses his own daughter as bait, a world in which a courtier spies on his Queen and Prince… Elsinore just appears sunny and happy because others don’t have the sensitivity of Hamlet. 

“The Queen was not a bad-hearted woman, not at all the woman to think little of murder. But she had a soft animal nature, and was very dull and very shallow. She loved to be happy, like a sheep in the sun; and, to do her justice, it pleased her to see others happy, like more sheep in the sun. She never saw that drunkenness is disgusting till Hamlet told her so; and, though she knew that he considered her marriage 'o'er-hasty' (ii. ii. 57), she was untroubled by any shame at the feelings which had led to it. It was pleasant to sit upon her throne and see smiling faces round her, and foolish and unkind in Hamlet to persist in grieving for his father instead of marrying Ophelia and making everything comfortable. She was fond of Ophelia and genuinely attached to her son (though willing to see her lover exclude him from the throne); and, no doubt, she considered equality of rank a mere trifle compared with the claims of love. The belief at the bottom of her heart was that the world is a place constructed simply that people may be happy in it in a good-humoured sensual fashion.” (Lecture IV, 5) 

This passage made me laugh. 

2/ A. C. Bradley makes an interesting point here, about Cordelia and Hamlet:  

“An expressiveness almost inexhaustible gained through paucity of expression; the suggestion of infinite wealth and beauty conveyed by the very refusal to reveal this beauty in expansive speech—this is at once the nature of Cordelia herself and the chief characteristic of Shakespeare's art in representing it. Perhaps it is not fanciful to find a parallel in his drawing of a person very different, Hamlet. It was natural to Hamlet to examine himself minutely, to discuss himself at large, and yet to remain a mystery to himself; and Shakespeare's method of drawing the character answers to it; it is extremely detailed and searching, and yet its effect is to enhance the sense of mystery. The results in the two cases differ correspondingly. No one hesitates to enlarge upon Hamlet, who speaks of himself so much; but to use many words about Cordelia seems to be a kind of impiety.” (Lecture VIII, 5) 

I’ve never thought of it that way. He has a point. 

3/ Last night I watched the 1990 New York Festival production, with Kevin Kline playing Hamlet and directing the play. 

For years, I thought it’s better not to watch Hamlet, not because it wouldn’t work onstage but because the character’s so complex and the play’s so rich in meaning that it would be so hard to get it right—but my friends Himadri and Michael both recommended the Kevin Kline version—and he’s got it right. It’s an excellent production, everyone in it is good, especially Kevin Kline. 

I will be brief. There are two main things I have to say about his performance.

First of all, I think he captures extremely well Hamlet in different moods: weariness, disgust, excitement, rage, hatred, fatalistic acceptance, and so on. His joy, his energy when he meets the players gives us a glimpse of what Hamlet once was, before the death of his father and the disillusionment about his mother.

Secondly, his performance makes me think that perhaps the key thing is the comic touch. Hamlet is volatile, often sardonic and cruel, but he is witty and funny. An unfunny Hamlet wouldn’t work—I had a look at the “Words, words, words” scene in the Laurence Olivier film and it’s so serious, so devoid of humour—Kevin Kline, in contrast, is very funny. Even when he’s being cruel to Ophelia, or mocking and provocative towards Claudius after the death of Polonius, there’s a comic touch in his performance—that’s the way Hamlet is. But his Hamlet can also be terrifying: in the “Get thee to a nunnery” scene, or the “Do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?” scene, he is terrifying.

I will have to watch other versions, but Kevin Kline comes very close to the Hamlet in my head. 

See: my blog post about G. Wilson Knight on Hamlet. 

Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov

1/ This is the first Chekhov play I’ve read, and it’s harder to read than Shakespeare or Ibsen—there are too many characters to keep track of, and too many things going on at the same time.

Here are my first impressions of Chekhov’s drama: 

- Chekhov’s characters frequently talk past each other, so there are always multiple threads in the same conversation. 

- As in his short stories, Chekhov writes about people suffering and feeling that they have wasted their lives, wasted their potential. However, in his short stories and novellas, he focuses on one thing (very often it’s a man and a woman and a reason for them to be unhappy) whereas in the play, there are many stories going on at the same time. 

- As in his short stories, he avoids overt drama. He and Ibsen are perhaps opposite—Ibsen is intense and depicts everything in a cold, brutal, uncompromising way, Chekhov leaves conflict and incident off-stage and depicts what appears to be ordinary life, suggesting a lot more underneath. 

In a way, Chekhov seems to write about “the moments between life”, or perhaps it’s better to say that life happens between the scenes that he depicts—for example, between Act 1 and Act 2, Andrey and Natasha have got married and had a baby, Andrey has got more debts and now works for the Council, Natasha has changed and slowly taken over the house, something has developed between Masha and Vershinin, Tuzenbakh has fallen for Irina—Chekhov throws us into a middle of a scene, then withholds all the changes and developments, and throws us into the middle of another scene some time later, forcing us to piece together the story. 

Later on, he doesn’t depict the two affairs, doesn’t depict the fire, doesn’t depict the quarrel, and doesn’t depict the duel. He leaves all the dramatic incidents off-stage. 

2/ I’ve noticed that many people, when praising Chekhov, talk about the range of his characters. It is true that he writes about different groups, different classes of people, but there are certain types that keep popping up in his works—such as the weak, ineffectual, spineless type, unable to stand up for himself or for anything, and Andrey in Three Sisters is that type. 

The scene of Andrey talking to Ferapont is so moving: 

“ANDREY: […] To be a member of the local District Council, when every night I dream that I am a professor of Moscow University, a famous scholar who is Russia’s pride! 

FERAPONT: I don’t really know… I don’t hear very well. 

ANDREY: If your hearing was all right, then perhaps I wouldn’t be talking to you. I need to talk to someone but my wife doesn’t understand me, and for some reason I’m afraid of my sisters, I’m afraid they’ll laugh at me or make me feel ashamed…” 

(Act 2) 

(translated by Peter Carson) 

Andrey and his sisters are all unhappy, all having wasted their potential, and they suffer in different ways. 

3/ I have said that people in Chekhov’s play talk past each other and don’t really listen, but it’s curious that in Act 2, Vershinin says several times that he hasn’t eaten since morning, but nobody cares. Even Masha doesn’t seem to notice. 

I read Three Sisters, then after a quick break with Chekhov’s letters, read the play again. Between the two readings, I talked to Himadri and he said this about Vershinin:  

“It would appear his wife (whom we never see) has some kind of mental condition. But the question remains unanswered: is his neglect of his family due to his wife making the home life so difficult? Or has she come to this state *because* he has neglected her?

He says he feels sorry for his daughters. So why isn’t he with them?” 

Masha gets bored with her simple, ridiculous husband and falls for a more intelligent man, but the one she’s in love with is probably a selfish, terrible man who neglects his own family. 

As I reread the play, I noticed Kulygin walking around looking for Masha and realising what’s going on, and it’s heartbreaking. Kulygin makes me think of Charles Bovary: both are boring, mediocre men, not particularly clever; both are betrayed, and suffer; and both don’t deserve to suffer that way.  

“KULYGIN […] Today the Army is leaving and everything will go back to what it was. Whatever they say there, Masha is a fine, honest woman, I love her very much, and I thank my destiny…” 

(Act 4) 

That is terribly sad. Kulygin is dim-witted, but he’s depicted with compassion and one can’t help feeling sorry for him. I especially love the scene where Masha breaks down, when saying farewell to Vershinin, and Kulygin, the kind Kulygin tries to distract the moment by putting on the moustache and beard he has confiscated from a boy at the school. 

4/ Instead of writing about Natasha, the villain of the play who slowly takes revenge on the family and ousts the sisters from their own house, I want to draw attention to a little moment when she shouts at Anfisa, the nyanya, and Olga does nothing. This kind of thing is depicted a few times in Chekhov—in “At Home”, for example—a good-natured but unhappy person is so wrapped up in her own problems that she does nothing when an injustice, a cruel act takes place before her eyes. 

In Three Sisters, a more cruel passivity is in the final Act, when Irina knows that there’s going to be a duel, that Tuzenbakh wants her to say something to him in the last moment, but she doesn’t—it’s heartbreaking. 

But it’s not just her or Masha: in the final Act, we see that Chebutykin, the army doctor, has also become cynical and indifferent. 

“MASHA: Everything has become muddled in my head… Anyway, I say they shouldn’t allow them. He could wound the Baron or even kill him. 

CHEBUTYKIN: The Baron is a good man, but one baron more or one baron less—what can it matter? Let it be! What can it matter!” 

(ibid.) 

Chekhov shows what suffering and failure do to a person. 

This is a great play, but a depressing play.  

On the 1983 King Lear, starring Laurence Olivier

Yesterday I was feeling down all day, so I thought I might as well tear my heart to pieces watching King Lear, having for some time felt an overwhelming urge to revisit the play. I went for the 1983 version, directed by Michael Elliott and starring Laurence Olivier. 

It didn’t tear my heart to pieces. 

But let’s talk about the good things first. In many ways, it is good, and it’s got a brilliant cast, especially Robert Lindsay as Edmund and Diana Rigg as Regan. Not counting Ran and the Kozintsev film, I have hitherto seen three versions of King Lear onscreen, and Robert Lindsay is my favourite Edmund. In the 2016 version directed by Michael Buffong, which otherwise would be perfect, Fraser Ayres lacks the attractiveness of Edmund and terribly overacts. In the 1982 BBC version directed by Jonathan Miller, Michael Kitchen delivers a bland performance, overshadowed by Anton Lesser’s Edgar (which also says something about Anton Lesser’s brilliance, considering that there isn’t a lot to the role of Edgar). Robert Lindsay is just right—Machiavellian; attractive and magnetic despite his spiteful and treacherous nature; but also pathetic in the final scene. The final moment makes one realise that Edmund sets a trap against his brother and turns against his father not only because he, as a bastard, is legally entitled to nothing, but also because he’s never been loved. 

Diana Rigg is also great as Regan. Debbie Korley and Penelope Wilton are also excellent in the role, especially the latter’s girlish smile as she says “One side will mock the other; th’ other too”, which is unnerving, but in the 1983 version, Diana Rigg steals the scene whenever she appears. She is cold and cruel and mesmerising as Regan.

The rest of the cast are John Hurt as the Fool, Dorothy Tutin as Goneril, Anna Calder-Marshall as Cordelia…

There are many brilliant scenes, and with such a cast, this should be a great production of King Lear, but something is missing—and that I think is in the performance of Laurence Olivier. I’m not quite sure how to explain, as I’m not sure myself what is lacking. 

In the first half of the play, he’s quite good, and the scene in the storm is also good. But from the scene in the hovel with Edgar, till the end of the play, I think his performance lacks power. The scene of Lear putting his daughters on trial, in this production, leaves no impression—perhaps Laurence Olivier isn’t very good at playing madness. The scene of mad Lear meeting blind Gloucester also doesn’t work quite well—King Lear is a bleak, devastating play but there is comedy in it, and there are comic elements, albeit dark and twisted, in that scene—Don Warrington in the 2016 version and Michael Horden in the 1982 BBC version both capture well the funny aspect of the scene, I don’t think Laurence Olivier does. 

More importantly, there are two key moments in King Lear that always make me cry—Lear’s reunion with Cordelia and the final scene—but I didn’t cry watching the 1983 production, I wasn’t strongly moved. In the reunion scene, I think the problem is in the way Laurence Olivier says the line “If you have poison for me, I will drink it”—the scene is devastating because of that line, but his delivery for some reason doesn’t quite work. In the final scene, it should break your heart, it should rip you apart, it should leave you shattered—“Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life/ And thou no breath at all?”—but the 1983 production doesn’t quite do so, and I think it’s partly because of Laurence Olivier’s acting and partly because of the music playing over the scene. 

With such a brilliant cast, it’s disappointing. 

Do I think you should watch it? Yes, for Diana Rigg and Robert Lindsay. It is currently available and free on youtube. But I would recommend Don Warrington and Michael Hordern for Lear.