Shakespeare's Geography
By Robert Brustein
For eleven days last month, right before
an election that caused more anger and heartache than any in memory,
I was sailing blithely through the Mediterranean. The occasion
was one of those university-sponsored voyages that function less
as holidays from thought than as continuing education courses.
This journey was my first exposure to such cultural cruises. And
although prepared to scoff, I came away impressed by the genuine
hunger for learning displayed by most of the passengers. It was
the kind of university event (this one sponsored by Harvard) where
alumni and their wives, most of them elderly, are dispatched on
luxury ships to ports of historical and literary interest. On
board between stopovers, they digest talks by experts in a specific
field, along with three-course meals--passing timelines, broadening
mindlines, expanding waistlines. The subject of this particular
trip was “Shakespeare in the Mediterranean,” the ports of visitation
suggested by the settings of Shakespeare’s plots. The noted classicist,
Alan Shapiro of Johns Hopkins, lectured on the art and archaelogy
of the historical locations; I spoke about the plays.
The irony, of course, was that while Shakespeare
placed twenty-one of his thirty-eight plays in Mediterranean locations,
he probably never set his foot in that part of the world (though
he may have spent a few months in the Netherlands). What he wrote
about Rome and Egypt in Julius Caesar and Antony
and Cleopatra was borrowed from Plutarch’s Lives
and Samuel Daniels’ Cleopatra; his notions of Venice
in Othello and The Merchant of Venice were probably
gleaned from Italian sources, travel books, or novels like Nashe’s
The Unfortunate Traveller; his idea of Troy in Troilus
and Cressida was drawn from George Chapman’s translation
of The Iliad; his references to Ephesus and Syracuse
in The Comedy of Errors were taken from his Roman model,
Plautus’s Twin Menaechmi. Shakespeare may have floated
on his imagination to ports in the Aegean, the Adriatic, and the
Ionian seas, but physically he remained in London, earning a living
as an actor, playwright, and occasional money lender.
This made the geographical aspect of my
lectures a bit of a stretch. Our ship, the Clelia II, sailed to
Kusadasi though the Dardenelles, visiting the ruins of Troy where
Cressida proved faithless to Troilus, and we entered the waters
near Prevezzo to observe where Antony was betrayed at sea by Cleopatra
in the Bay of Actium, a pretty tight area to support such huge
fleets. We went to Odunluk in Turkey and Naplion in Greece. We
took bus tours, climbed broken steps and jagged hills, took promenades
along the waterfronts, and swam from stony beaches in the clear
blue Mediterranean. But the fact is there wasn’t a genuine Shakespearean
relic in sight. Nor were there any signs of Shakespeare in our
stopovers in Athens (the site for A Midsummer Nights Dream,
Timon of Athens, and The Two Noble Kinsmen) or Messina
(the location of Much Ado About Nothing). The Illyria
of Twelfth Night was hardly the arcadian, bucolic court
where Orsino mooned about music and love, or Sir Toby consumed
his cakes and ale, but rather a third world town in Albania named
Saranda, filled with scores of uncompleted concrete condos, and,
inexplicably, lots of Mercedes cars and trucks navigating narrow
dirt roads. It was hard to imagine a shipwrecked Gwynneth Paltrow
approaching these broken shores as she waded towards Illyria at
the conclusion of Shakespeare in Love.
The major sites of interest in most of
these places were Greek and Roman ruins, but there was also an
ancient Sephardic synagogue in Dubrovnik (the oldest in that part
of Europe), and an imposing palace built by the 3rd Century Roman
Tetrarch Diocletian in Split, Croatia, its basements perfectly
preserved as a result of the garbage that sixteen centuries earlier
had been deposited there and petrified. The most habitual tourist
stops were Greek and Roman theatres, especially intriguing to
those who had never visited Epidaurus or Ephesus or Syracuse.
And the classicist, Alan Shapiro, was eloquent in describing how
the orchestra where the Greek chorus sang and danced around an
altar was gradually absorbed into a space where more secular Roman
spectators were seated. Some of the more jaded passengers, bored
by seeing so many performance spaces, began to substitute JABT
(“Just another boring theatre”) for the proverbial JABC (“Just
another boring church”), especially since these outdoor ruins
had so little to do with Shakespeare.
But to tell the truth, geography was never
Shakespeare’s strongest subject. For example, he tacked a seacoast
onto landlocked Bohemia in A Winter’s Tale. His idea
of Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream was a composite
of an ethereal court, out of Spenser’s Fairy Queen, and
a real English countryside, similar to the Forest of Arden owned
by his mother, and featured in As You Like It. Midsummer’s
Theseus and Hippolyta, who also rule Athens in The Two Noble
Kinsmen, are Elizabethan versions of the legendary Athenian
philanderer and his Amazon bride. But Puck (aka Robin Goodfellow)
is an early sketch for an English hobbit, and Shakespeare’s pastoral
imagery (“I know a bank where the wild thyme grows”) derives from
direct observation of Stratford horticulture. One can almost sniff
the eglantine and the woodbine.
At least one of his contemporaries, Ben
Jonson, was bothered by Shakespeare’s contextual inconsistencies.
Although he professed to love Shakespeare “this side idolatry,”
he never missed an opportunity to strut his own learning, often
at Shakespeare’s expense. Jonson famously charged that Shakespeare
had “small Latin and less Greek,” and hinted that he was a careless
writer (when informed, incorrectly, that Shakespeare rarely blotted
a line, Jonson snorted, “Would he had blotted a thousand”). Actually,
as Stephen Greenblatt demonstrates in his wonderfully informative
biography, Will In the World, Shakespeare’s classical
education in the public schools of Stratford was really quite
intensive. True, he often mixes up his periods and his cultures.
In Midsummer, for example, he mentions the Roman deities
Diana and Cupid in the same breath as the Greek God Phoebus Apollo
and the Greek hero Leander (Pyramus’ “Phibbus” and Thisbe’s “Limander”).
He marries Titania, the Roman poet Ovid’s name for Diana, to a
fairy out of Celtic romance named Oberon (both are now reunited
as moons of Uranus). And he even makes reference to Saint Valentine,
an early Christian martyr.
But
Theseus and Hippolyta come out of classical Greek myth, and so
does that army of mistresses (Phyllida, Perigenia, Aegles, Antiope
and Ariadne) whom Oberon accuses Titania of procuring for Theseus.
(He also accuses his wife of sleeping with this tireless Athenian
Don Juan herself.) Unlike most of Shakespeare’s plays, A Midsummer
Night’s Dream has no known source. But it is the product
of a lot of classical homework. If the play’s references are more
Roman than Greek, that may be because the English Renaissance
was essentially a Latin phenomenon.
Despite our trip to the Bay of Actium,
it was hard to talk about Antony and Cleopatra without
a visit either to Cairo or Rome. True, Cleopatra is not really
Egyptian. Despite vaguely racist references in the play to her
“tawny front” and “gypsy lust,” she was actually of Macedonian,
which is to say Greek, descent. Yet, in no other work does Shakespeare
make such a clear distinction between two cultures--the hard Machiavellian
world of Roman politics versus the sensual exotic world of Egyptian
enchantment. If the play draws a contrast between public and private
behavior, between duty and passion, between love and honor, it
is also a study of an aging hero trapped in a passion he cannot
control (Antony was 52 at the time of the action, while Cleopatra
was 38). When Dryden rewrote the play some decades later and called
it All for Love, he was much more judgmental towards
Antony and what he called his “crimes of love.” He was also closer
to Shakespeare’s source, Plutarch, who wrote about Antony: “The
love for Cleopatra which now entered his life came as the final
and crowning mischief which could befall him. It excited to the
point of madness many passions which had hitherto lain concealed,
or at least dormant, and it stifled or corrupted all those redeeming
qualities in him which were still capable of resisting temptation.”
Shakespeare is considerably more tolerant
of Antony’s autumnal passion for Cleopatra, even though he also
sees it as emasculating. (Antony complains that “she robs me of
my sword,” while a soldier notes, “The god Hercules whom Antony
loved now leaves him”). The coldhearted Puritan Octavius, who
obviously doesn’t like girlie men, may complain that Antony “fishes,
drinks, and wastes the lamps of night in revel,” but Shakespeare
seems as irresistibly drawn to the Egyptian Queen as Antony is.
Thanks to his readings in Plutarch, Antony and Cleopatra
is one of the most authentically foreign plays Shakespeare ever
wrote. But even here, his geography is ocassionally inconsistent.
When Cleopatra realizes that she will be led in triumph through
Rome, Shakespeare, in a remarkable metatheatrical moment, translates
this into a projection of how she will be depicted on the English
stage in plays like his own, exposed to “mechanic slaves” in “greasy
aprons,” enacted by some “squeaky Cleopatra boy.” It is this prevision
of her theatricalization in some future Shakespeare play rather
than the loss of Antony that drives her to her suicide.
Regarding Othello, the real revelation
of the trip, for me, was discovering just how powerful a part
Venice had played in the various parts of the world we visited.
After its conquest of Byzantium in 1204, this Northern Italian
city became the leading maritime power in the Mediterranean, subduing
many Adriatic nations to its will. The huge fortifications in
Dubrovnik, for example, like those in other nearby Mediterranean
cities, were erected to repel the Turkish invaders. And this tangible
evidence of invasion from the sea made the mission of Othello,
under orders of the Duke of Venice, suddenly take on new reality
for me. It is true that this particular campaign does not play
a very large part in the play. Despite the “mightly preparation”
with which the Turks are making towards Cyprus, their entire fleet
is destroyed between the acts by a sudden tempest.
It is a storm that somehow leaves Othello’s
forces untouched, but it frees Shakespeare to concentrate on the
Moor’s domestic problems rather than his military campaigns. And
it allows the playwright to cram the whole action of his play
into a period that doesn’t seem much longer than twenty-four hours
(it is a real question whether Desdemona, despite her urgent entreaties,
ever manages to get her husband into bed). But in the context
of our cruise, that Turkish disaster took on a new reality. Sailing
to Venice (retracing, in reverse, Othello’s route to Cyprus),
the winds blew up with such a vengeance that the ship started
creaking. I couldn’t help thinking of The Tempest’s opening
scene (“We split, we split”), and the irony of sailing to Venice
from a town called Split. We eventually weathered the storm and
disembarked in a city whose streets were totally under water,
then flew back to the United States--just in time to submit an
entirely futile ballot. It was a rude return to reality, where
we would henceforth be contemplating not the ruins of ancient
civilizations, but the potential undoing of our own.
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