This week Woody has a bit of a look at one the of the more famous speeches in English theatre.
Hello.We here at By Jove HQ are thinking on Shakespeare. Our current project is the Bard’s Othello. It’s new writing in conversation with the original text, and we play about with the ideas of discrimination in the original by having a lesbian Othello. It will be staged Saturday 9th to Thursday 21st August at CLF Art Café. I’ll let you know when tickets go on sale. (In the meantime if you’d like to contribute to the production and earn some perks you can do so here.)
Working on Othello means we here at By Jove HQ all have our thinking turned positively Shakespearean. For example, I am wearing a ruff and dictating this post to my manservant while awaiting an audience with a red-haired monarch. As I’m thinking thusly anyway, I thought I’d have a bit of a look at one of my favourite pieces of Shakespeare: Richard III‘s opening monologue. “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York” etc.
It is a wonderfully direct little speech. It is Shakespeare saying “Hell, boys and girls, this is my friend Richard and he is going to tell you about the story we’re going to show you.” In this relatively short tract of text we found out things are quite pleasant right now, Richard’s unhappy because of reasons, so he’s going to ruin things for everyone, and do so via treachery and falsehood. It’s a straightforward premise which we understand enough that the show can get rolling. Simple, wot?
Except it’s not that simple and I just lied to you. No one introduces Richard. He’s the one who starts the show and he’s starting it now, by intimately talking to us. The play does not begin “The winter of discontent will start once you’ve found your seats, opened your sweets and stopped fiddling with your programmes.” It is going on now. Pay attention.
We do pay attention and we are told that Richard is going to use deceit ‘to hate the idle pleasures of these days’. More than this, Richard himself tells us. He takes us into his confidence. It means we spend the rest of the play awash in dramatic irony. We know he’s lying and that fact changes how we view the rest of the story. Without it, the piece would be a case of Richard’s villainy being revealed. With it we get the slow realisation that what might have been a prankster messing with people for his and our amusement is something far more serious. Richard does a lot of damage. He does it for reasons.
We find out these reasons. Why is a matter of interpretation. One might think he’s stating his reasons deadpan, so there’s a record of the origins of what is about to happen, a diary or a manifesto. One might think he’s stating them with the same wry amusement one can read in the pun ‘sun of York’ and that he does what we later see him do to stave off boredom, like a Moriarty or Loki. One might think he reveals these things accidentally, that thoughts of the lady’s chambers he sees as denied to him upsets him, leads him onto the train of thought where voices the self-deprecating (self-loathing?) things he says breaks his concentration and he lets things slip without meaning to do so. It’s probably all three. All three of these captivating psychological insights into our protagonist in the very first speech of the play. You can see why it’s a popular one.
While we’re playing at being a shrink for a fictional person, the reasons themselves are also interesting. He does not feel loved, does not feel he can be loved. He feels an outcast and so resolves to destroy that which he cannot have. Richard is in line to the throne, though there are people ahead of him in the succession. Given what we know about dynasties and hereditary power, moving himself towards the throne would be a perfectly sensible motivation for us to assume. Indeed most of what Richard does in the play is of a markedly political tone. And yet, politics do not come up in this speech. He does not talk about power. He does not mention a crown. He does, granted, mention his ‘brother, Clarence, and the king’ by their titles, but not until the final part of the speech in which he is discussing what he will do and not why he will do it. What we do get is a dozen iterations on the theme of “I’m ugly and no woman wants to sleep with me”. He laments, full of bile, that he could not hope ‘to court a wanton, ambling nymph’. He is insulting women with whom he wants to sleep for their not having the good grace to do so. He is slut-shaming in hendecasyllables; moaning about the friendzone in pentameter. Seems familiar, doesn’t it? (Less so the verse; these days this sort of thing is conventionally done in poorly-punctuated prose. Forms may change, but certain themes are rather durable). The play progresses, we note him viewing Lady Anne as an object to be won, and witness him turning into something outward and destructive his own self-hatred.
So, yeah. We here at By Jove HQ are fascinated by Shakespeare. You can play with his texts and see they’re still startlingly relevant. There’s so much to find, so much one can do. Try to find a free day in August to see what we do with Othello.
One hopes you’re well,
yrs,
ADWoodward
