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.