Filling the Cheap Seats
and other fun thoughts about the plays
of William Shakespeare
By Vincent Poirier
Copyright 2012 Vincent Poirier
With illustrations by Keith Perkins
For my parents Monique and Réal
And for my daughter Emilie
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Introduction
To Begin, Some Lesser Known Plays
The Comedy of Errors
Timon of Athens
Henry VIII
King John
The Henriad
Richard II
Henry IV Part One
Henry IV Part Two
Henry V
Interlude: A Very Underrated Play
Troilus and Cressida
The War of the Roses
Henry VI Part One
Henry VI Part Two
Henry VI Part Three
Richard III
Some Personal Favorites
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
King Lear
The Tempest
Hamlet
Macbeth
The Merchant of Venice
The Roman Plays
Coriolanus
Julius Caesar
Antony and Cleopatra
Titus Androdicus
Three Sonnets
The Sonnets- What are they
Sonnet 129
Sonnet 43
Sonnet 135
Tragedies and Romances
Pericles
Othello
The Winter’s Tale
Cymbeline
Romeo and Juliet
The Rest of the Comedies
As You Like It
Two Gentleman of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Love’s Labor Lost
Measure for Measure
Twelfth Night
Much Ado About Nothing
The Merry Wives of Windsor
And To Finish…
All’s Well That Ends Well
About the Author
Introduction: Filling the Cheap Seats
Being a businessman
Shakespeare was a business man and his business was the theater. He not only wrote his plays, he produced and performed in them too. (And since there were no directors in those days, he also provided the direction any actor would have.) He needed to earn a living, and he was lucky enough to do so with something he loved. If he had not been able to earn a living from the theater, he would have become a farmer, or a lawyer, or even a tradesman like his father.
He was co-owner of his own theatrical company and they had their own theater, the Globe. Shakespeare was a master at squeezing as much as possible out of a play. His aim was to make money, and the best way to do that was to fill every nook and cranny of the theater with paying customers. He wanted to fill the cheap seats as well as the expensive ones. He catered to the rich aristocrats and to the plebeians on the floor in front of the stage.
Every line had to speak to everyone, to the educated high-born as well as to the working men and women handing him their hard-earned coins. Shakespeare is often simultaneously refined and crude, elevated and base, funny and clever. You can’t please everyone, the saying goes, but Shakespeare came as close as one can.
And in the end, he was financially successful. He owned a beautiful home in Stratford. It was better to be the gentleman son of a gentleman than to be a first generation gentleman, so he bought his father a coat of arms and the title of “Mister Shakespeare” and he died a fairly wealthy upper middle class bourgeois.
Why Shakespeare?
My project for 2012 was to write short reviews on Amazon for every play by William Shakespeare. I’ve gathered them here in a single document.
I am not a scholar; I'm just someone who likes Shakespeare's plays. I make no pretense of adding anything original to what we know about Shakespeare and his works, and I’m sure many professionals would disagree with much of what you’ll find here. Nevertheless, I want to share personal insights and opinions about the works of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare is fun!
I’m a Canadian now living in Montreal but I lived in Japan for half my life. My first language is French but for theatrical drama I prefer Shakespeare to the French classics of Molière or Racine. For me, French novelists such as Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, and Dumas win over such English writers as Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Trollope, Austen and Thackeray but Shakespeare towers over everyone. Every line in the Shakespeare canon bursts with life.
There is no question that Molière and Racine created some of the greatest plays ever written. Like Shakespeare, Molière was an actor and ran his own company, but he worked in a much more constrained political environment than did Shakespeare. His satirical plays could only go so far, and it wasn't as far as what Shakespeare could chance. Also, Molière is famous only for his comedies. Racine, on the other hand, was a courtier and a favorite of King Louis XIV. He wrote refined plays in rhyming Alexandrine verse, works of exquisite genius- but they were all tragedies. Shakespeare created tragedies, histories, romances and comedies. Many of his works, the famous Problem Plays, can't be pigeonholed.
To my mind, Shakespeare invented modern drama. Plays written before Shakespeare offer speeches describing action, characters explaining what they have done and what they will do. In a Shakespeare play, characters do things and their lines and speeches are part of the action. The plays of Christopher Marlowe are easier to read, and perhaps his lines are individually more beautiful than Shakespeare's, but there is little action on stage unless it is announced or explained. Shakespeare's characters move and fight or wink and nod as they speak their lines, which of course makes his works more difficult to read.
When Shakespeare's Pandarus talks to Troilus of kneading the dough, we need to see the actor thrust his hips a little to get the dirty joke. Lesser writers would simply go for a cheap laugh about how having sex is like kneading dough. Lesser writers might be easier to read, but they are not as much fun to watch.
Another thing Shakespeare gets spot-on is that people are complicated. His characters are full of contradictions, they love and hate at the same time and his tragic heroes, like in all tragedies, are the agents of their downfall.
I am not beyond contradicting myself. As Walt Whitman writes in Leaves of Grass “I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” I prefer Shakespeare’s plays to French classics but I love best seeing plays in Montreal, especially the French classics of Racine and Molière. The reason has something to do with Shakespeare after all. Like the audiences of Shakespeare’s London, Montreal audiences go to the theater to have fun and the actors play to earn a living. Few French Canadian actors can or even want to make careers in Hollywood or Paris. Because our market is smaller, our actors are more approachable and less aloof. Montreal is one of the few places in the world where we can experience the theater with the same energy and intimacy that pervaded Shakespeare’s London.
Intimacy works. In 1996 I took my then wife to see Cyrano de Bergerac at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde in downtown Montreal. Being Japanese, she spoke not a word of French, but even so, at the end of the play she was crying like a baby as Cyrano died. (I was too.) It’s hard to imagine something like this in huge cities like New York, London, or Paris.
Even the magnificent reconstructed Globe Theater in London fails to deliver intimacy. The building is right but the attempt is forced, there are too many tourists, and there is no sense of community. The Globe is a deserving, raging success, but my point is that it’s not a local theater, whereas all the
ater in Montreal is local.
Shakespeare wrought plays
Shakespeare was a playwright. Note the spelling: it’s “playwright”, not “playwrite”. We think of Shakespeare and other playwrights as writers, so it’s easy to confuse the spelling. The word “wright” comes from the Old English word for a worker. We hardly use it nowadays, but it survives in the phrase “wrought iron”. But Shakespeare didn’t merely write his plays, he also produced and performed in them. And he kept track of the money too. He worked on every aspect of the theater business, so he was indeed a playwright.
Never forget that Shakespeare’s plays are not meant to be read or even merely seen. They are meant to be created or recreated on stage and that means the director and the actors must decide what the plays mean.
For example, at the end of Measure for Measure, the Duke asks Isabella to leave the nunnery and instead become his wife, but Isabella has no more lines. Does she accept the Duke’s proposal or does she turn him down?
That’s for each director to decide. Given that all his plays take for granted that a woman must marry, as does Elizabethan society, we can reasonably assume that this was Shakespeare’s intention. But if that is so, why doesn’t he have an overjoyed Isabella accept out loud? Shakespeare sometimes hides his intention.
Hiding things
A good example of Shakespeare hiding his real