In light of all the new traffic I'm getting, I have gone back and tagged the key posts on this blog as "Essential Posts." For those who have just read, or are reading, or are interested in reading THE MASTER OF VERONA, I would like to commend these to your attention. From the initial concept to thoughts on a few Shakespeare plays, these are the most vital and, I hope, enjoyable.
From there, please move on to the Muppet postings.
Cheers, DB
There are two battles at the top of Macbeth. Whenever I am in charge of the staging, I try and open the show with both of these, just to make things clear. But whether or not they're staged, they are laid out in Act I scene ii. Appropriately, they come from two sources - the Bloody Sergeant, and the Thane of Rosse.
The first battle is the nearest, fought right on king Duncan's doorstep. We know this because his son Malcolm was in it, and almost captured. The Bloody Sergeant got wounded keeping Malcolm safe, and Malcolm has returned with the king, his father - or else, the Sergeant is being carried from the field. Either way, this is the first battle we hear about, from the Sergeant's own lips.
He tells us that the battle was looking bleak, and he names the reason why - "the merciless MacDonwald, worthy to be a rebel..." Note, MacDonwald is a Scottish lord, joined with the enemy (supplied with soldiers from the small islands nearby). Historically, this was common in Scotland. Norway had a strong foothold in Scotland, and many thanes swore oaths of loyalty to one or both kings, Norway and Scottish.
But history isn't necessary to the story. The facts as laid out tell us enough: MacDonwald has betrayed Scotland, and was winning the battle until Macbeth arrives. With Banquo fighting alongside him, Mac fights his way through the press of Norwayans until he faces MacDonwald. They fight, and Mac "unseems" the traitor "from the nave to the chops" (what a great turn of phrase). Then Mac fixes the traitor's head on the battlements.
But that battle isn't done. Seeing that Mac's forces are distracted, the Norwayan lord takes advantage and, reinforced with supplies and fresh men, attacks. But Macbeth and Banquo "doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe" and win the day.
That takes care of the first battle, close at hand. The second is taking place at the same time, in Fife. One supposes that King Sweno (Sven) of Norway planned a two-pronged invasion - one north, one south. And, arguably, the northern attack was the most dangerous, because "Norway himself" is there, leading his troops on. Here, too, there is a Scottish traitor - the Thane of Cawdor. And here, too, they are beaten back by a Scottish lord.
This is where productions go awry. 99% of the time, people play it as if it is Macbeth who has won the battle in Fife. Some productions go so far as to add his name to Rosse's speech relating the events. But it seems ludicrous to me. Given the immediacy of the current battle (the Sergeant is still bloody and his wounds have yet to be tended), and the distance to Fife, Macbeth would have to be in two places at the same time. Now, I grant that this is a story with elements of magic, but really, no, it isn't right. Besides, in Rosse's speech, the true hero of the battle in Fife is unnamed, referred to only as "Bellona's bridegroom."
But, wait - Fife. Fife is an important place in the play. Why? Because Macduff is the Thane of Fife.
Which means that it is Macduff who has captured Cawdor, turned back the Norwayan king, and won not only the battle but a huge sum of ransom from the enemy forces. This makes even more sense when you realize that Rosse and Macduff are cousins, just as Macbeth and Duncan are kinsmen. Rosse comes from Fife to bring Duncan the news of his cousin's great feat.
Which brings up an interesting point. Duncan gives Cawdor to Macbeth, his kinsman, not to Macduff, who earned it. Already there is strife between these thanes. Just as Macbeth feels he should be Prince of Cumberland, not that coward Malcolm who had to be protected and who fled the field to find his father, so too does Macduff feel he should be Cawdor, a title he earned with his sweat, toil, and blood.
This is why I get frustrated when I see productions where Macduff is hanging around with the king at the start. His arrival at Invernes is his real entrance, and he's arriving with hopes to be honored for his great travail. Awkwardly, he's coming to the castle of the man who has been given the title he himself feels he's earned. It allows for a whole world of play.
But all of that is beside the point I want to make here, which is simply that there are two battles, two traitors, and two heroes at the start of Macbeth.
Taken together, these two battles are immensely important. They symbolize the final expulsion of Norway from Scotland, thus creating, for the first time ever, a single unified Scottish nation - Alba, or Scotland.
Also note that it is Malcolm, at the end of the play, who brings the English forces into Scotland. It is also Malcolm who turns the thanes into earls, an English title. So, even setting aside the historical Macbeth (a great king who ruled for almost twenty years) - who is the true villain, in the eyes of Scotland? Macbeth, a bloody Scottish tyrant, or Malcolm, who set in motion the perpetual English claims on Scottish lands?
Food for thought.
- DB
There are perhaps three uber-famous speeches in Macbeth, but the one that is most often quoted is the "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" speech. It's often taken as an existential lament, recited by actors and professors with a deep sorrowful intonation.
That's not wrong, but it's not right either. It loses any context. And, like my rather unusual take on the Capulet-Montague feud, I have an unorthodox idea about this speech. I saw the first hint at it in the summer of 2001, while playing the Thane of Ross at First Folio Shakespeare. That fall I played Mackers for them on tour, but didn't follow through with my idea until I played the part for A Crew Of Patches in our first season, in the fall of 2003. Page Hearn, our director, allowed me to chase the notion, and I've made use of it ever since. For me, the actor, it works on many levels. And I hope that it makes sense for new viewers of the play, while at the same time challenging those familiar with the text.
Side note - I always like to flout audience expectations, even more when I can do so by returning to the text. So many of us are taught Shakespeare in such a poor way, that we have truly misformed notions of what we should be seeing and hearing. People expect R&J to be a dirge from the word go, Othello to be without humor, and Viola to look like a man (which loses the joke entirely!).
Anyway, a little context:
1) The first communication between Mac and his Lady is a letter - the letter, in fact, in which he tells her about the witches and their prophecy;
2) After the murder of Duncan, the Macs begin to drift apart. He kills the grooms without consulting her, and cuts her out of the murder of Banquo entirely. The process is solidified by the end of the banquet scene, after which they never speak together again. He can't sleep and she is stuck in a dreamstate, sleepwalking and reliving the horror of the night of Duncan's murder.
3) During the sleepwalking scene ("Out, out, damn spot!"), before Lady M enters, the Doctor and the Gentlewoman have this exchange:
Doctor
I have two nights watched with you, but can perceive
no truth in your report. When was it she last walked?
Gentlewoman
Since his majesty went into the field, I have seen
her rise from her bed, throw her night-gown upon
her, unlock her closet, take forth paper, fold it,
write upon't, read it, afterwards seal it, and again
return to bed; yet all this while in a most fast sleep.
4) When Seaton enters to tell Mac that his wife is dead, Mac's response is "She should have died hereafter; There would have been time for such a word." (emphasis mine).
5) Within the speech itself, there seem to be two distinct parts, the first having multi-syllable words and soft consonants and vowel sounds, the second having mainly one syllable words full of plosive sounds-- as though originating from two minds. The speech seems to be divided thus:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Bearing all that in mind, imagine this - Seaton enters after the blood-curdling cry offstage. The king says, "Wherefore was that cry?" In reply, Seaton holds out a blood-stained bit of paper with mad scribblings of writing all over it. The seal on it tells us that it is the same letter that Mac sent in the first scene, but it has been written over and over, in corners and on edges, until it is covered with words. Seaton says, "The queen, my lord, is dead."
Macbeth takes the letter from Seaton and waves him off. Looking at the paper, he says, "She should have died hereafter; there would have been time for such a word." Then, squinting, he begins to read, trying to make sense out of the squiggles and shapes written by a sleepwalker in despair.
It was my wife, Jan, who recognized the conversation between the gentlewoman and the doctor and brought to my attention that we had already heard that Lady Mac was frantically writing in her sleep. She also pointed out the change in style in the famous "Tomorrow" speech. Her analysis, found when she was playing Lady for the Patches, combined with my initial conception of the mirrored communication, made a strong case for the playing of one of Shakespeare's most famous speeches as one part letter, one part realization.
Our thesis, then, in brief: The first half of "Tomorrow, and tomorrow" is Lady Macbeth's suicide note.
We like this idea for two reasons. It mirrors their first communication in the play and it gives them a final moment of connection, allowing Mac to realize how far they've fallen, and how little is left to him. I originally liked the simple mirroring of first communication and last communication being a letter-- and it helped me play the powerful soliloquay thrown into the center of such frenzied action at the end of the play. It was Jan who showed me how much textual sense it made, when combined with the "mad" scene, which isn't a mad-scene at all - it's a sleepwalking scene, where the Lady's conscience forces her to re-enact nightly the events that haunt her (Jan points out that in the other famous "mad" scene - Ophelia in Hamlet - the madwoman spouts actual nonsense, gibberish. That is not the case here).
Since I have no intention of writing a Macbeth historical novel (it's been done, several times, though Dorothy Dunnett's is the best, the most detailed, and the hardest), Jan and I thought we would lay this out here, sending it into the aether for other actors and directors to use or not, as they choose.
Have at.
Note: Since there are hundreds of students showing up here each week, I've provided an example of how this concept should be attributed in your papers: "According to David Blixt, Shakespearean actor and author of THE MASTER OF VERONA,..."
I never enjoy productions of Romeo & Juliet that play the Tragedy from the beginning. In fact, I think the famous Prologue is tacked on - it doesn't appear in the First Folio! In the earliest texts we have, the show begins with two guys walking down the street talking about sex and violence - "I'll push Montague's men from the wall and thrust his maids to the wall!"
No, I think if the Prologue was in fact written by Shakespeare, it was as a disclaimer - "Don't laugh too much, folks, because they're gonna die." Shakespeare didn't think much of Prologues. The only other times I can think of that he used them was in Troilus & Cressida, where he was aping the Greek style, and in Henry V, where he was making a political statement at the top of each act.
Why use it in R&J, then? Because this show could have gotten him lynched. Imagine if the disclaimer wasn't there. The audience is laughing at the nurse, smiling at the familiar banter of the lovers, enjoying the light-hearted swordplay. Then, snap, someone's dead. Then another person is dead. Then weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then, oh, look, "they're going to be fine - what, they're dead?!"
So, it's a warning to the audience. One that the author felt the need to repeat, because just before the balcony scene the Prologue returns to remind them, as if to say, "Glad you're enjoying the show, folks, but they're still gonna buy it! See you at the Epilogue!"
I've said it before, but Romeo & Juliet really was the Snow White of its day. Just as in 1937, no one had ever seen anything like it. Snow White revolutionized film-making and animation, comedy and music. R&J revolutionized the world of theatre, shook up the idea of formula and stock character.
More R&J thoughts soon.
DB
For the last nine or ten years, I've been giving a lecture on Romeo & Juliet to students at Howell High School in Michigan. In a couple of days, I'll be doing it again, six hours straight of repeating a fun but exhausting run-through of all the important bits of R&J that I wish someone had pointed out to me as a teen.
(The students aren't there for six hours - they've got, like, 42 minutes per class period. It's about two hundred kids each time, which keeps things lively for me)
The high points that I'll be hitting:
Romeo & Juliet is not a Tragedy. A Shakespearean Tragedy (or Aristotilean, if you're being picky) is the tale of a single strong central male figure who is the best at everything a man can be - lover, poet, politician, warrior, philosopher - but who has one tragic flaw that leads to his ultimate destruction. With Macbeth it's Ambition, with Othello it's Jealousy, and so on.
That definition doesn't apply to R&J. Romeo is a prat. At the start of the show he locks himself in a dark room during the day, then wanders the edge of the forest at night, thinking about his love, Rosaline, who he's never really spoken to, and who is going to become a nun! He's an idiot!
No, Romeo is much more an Orlando, a Claudio, an Orsino. He's a Comedic lover.
With that in mind, look at the elements of a Shakespearean Comedy: a young lovesick fool, a smart and capable young girl, clowns, disguises, musicians, and mistimings, secret weddings. Then run down the list for R&J : lovesick fool - Romeo; capable girl - Juliet; clowns - Mercutio, Nurse, Peter, Potpan, etc.; disguises - masked ball (though it's only the boys who are crashing who show up in masks!); musicians - the often cut, but truly funny (if played right) musicians when they discover Juliet "dead"; mistimings - Friar Lawrence's message misses Romeo, Romeo kills himself just before Juliet wakes, Tybalt kills Mercutio by accident, yadda yadda yadda; and a secret wedding to boot! The only thing it's missing is shipwrecks and Juliet dressing as a man!
So, think about R&J in that light. The first half of the show is a Shakespearean Comedy, complete with sex jokes and idiot lovers. Only, at that point where in, say, Shrew, everything is revealed, people start to die. That leaves these Comedic characters trapped in an awful situation, trying to find the Comedic solution. It's not a mistake that the Friar's plan is the exact same one that Frair Francis uses in Much Ado.
Romeo and Juliet is not a Tragedy. It is something much worse. Because first it makes you laugh.
DB
The title has given me fits, far moreso than the actual story.
The original title for the first book was ‘Il Veltro.’ Italian for The Greyhound, it has several other, wonderful, connotations. Firstly, it is the title used for the hero of the prophecy in the first Canto of Dante’s Inferno:
‘For that beast that moves you to cry out
Lets no man pass her way,
But so besets him that she slays him.
Her nature is so vicious and malign
Her greedy appitite is never sated -
After feeding she is hungrier than ever.
Many are the creatures she takes to her bed,
and there will yet be more, until the Greyhound
shall come, who’ll make her die in pain.’
For hundreds of years people have debated the identity of Il Veltro. General consensus lands on Cangrande, Dante’s patron and friend, the ruler of Verona whose very name (Cane Grande) means the Great Hound.
Secondly, Il Veltro also led nicely to the titles for the sequels. In the Inferno, Dante is confronted by a leopard (La Lonza), a lion (Il Liono), and a she-wolf (La Lupa). I have created an outline using these allegorical figures, working in other animals so that each novel has an underlying animal motif. I still use this outline, even though these titles have gone.
Finally, Il Veltro has another, earthier meaning. It is Italian slang for ‘The Bastard.’
So, in a book where Cangrande adopts a bastard child as his heir, where Dante figures prominently, Il Veltro seemed – and still seems – the clever title.
But readers will understand all this only after they’ve read the book. Which, as was pointed out to me several times by people smarter than I, doesn’t get readers to pick up the book in the first place. Italians might get it, but readers in English never would. I was killing my sales to be clever.
Fine. So, next came the literal translation – The Greyhound of Verona. Michael Denneny, my editor and agent, suggested it, which was nice because it had been in the back of my head too. I liked adding the place to the title, allowing a sense of scope.
But once the book was sold, Keith, my editor at St. Martin’s, was nonplussed by The Greyhound. Which added to the fact that my wife kept whispering in my ear, “Why is there a bus in Verona?”
At my first meeting with Keith from St. Martin’s, we discussed other series we enjoyed. As always, it came back to Dorothy Dunnett. Her titles have wonderful consistency between them, relevant to the stories yet abstract as concepts. Her first series bore titles having to do with chess, culminating in Checkmate. In her second historical series, each book had a title to do with signs of the zodiac – which makes me insane, because it would be so damned perfect for my series, but it’s already been done.
Keith and I discussed what there was to create consistency between my novels. I offered up lines from Shakespeare and Dante, to which he nodded non-committally. Then Jan said, “David, don’t all those medieval fight moves have names? Why not use those?”
“Brilliant!” cried Keith.
“Brilliant!” cried I.
So for six months or so the book was entitled The Murder-Stroke. Keith liked using murder in the title, a good hook. I liked the name of the second book better, THE MASTER’S GRIP. For some reason, The Murder-Stroke seemed – small. It lacked any reference to the actual story, except that I had carefully worked the actual move from Talhoffer’s medieval fightbook into the novel. Michael pointed out that it also didn’t connect with Keith’s tagline for the book – "Romeo & Juliet is the greatest love story ever told – and every story has a beginning."
In early May 2006, I wrote to both Michael and Keith in desperation. What should I do about the title? By now I was just throwing random words at the wall. The Prince of Verona? The Lord of Verona? Murder in Verona? Death in Venice? Death in the Bayou? Jimmy Goes to the Moon?
Then, in early June, Keith wrote:
“To my mind, we're looking for something that has a certain grandeur to it (reflecting the sweep of the novel itself), something that has a hint of historical feel, and brief enough that it'll work well in conjunction with the eventual cover. Which, when one looks at the David Liss books, is the element we are missing. (The Coffee Trader doesn't thrill as a title - but it's rescued by a great cover.)”
His suggestion? THE MASTER OF VERONA. Though I still had Prince of Verona kicking around in my head, I decided to go with Master. It leads nicely to the second book, THE MASTER’S GRIP, though where we go from there I’m not sure. And Keith’s right, it has a bit of grandeur and scope.
So, a year away from publication, the title stands at THE MASTER OF VERONA. I like it. But in my head and when I talk about the book with Jan, who’s been with me for the whole ride, it’s still Il Veltro.
The bastard.
* * * *
I'm interested in hearing reactions to the title. Perhaps I'll set up a poll. In the meantime, I'd love to get e-mails on this, and on how people think this week-old site is going - what works, what doesn't, how I can improve it. It's a big help hearing from all of you out there. I'm trying to post every day, and I'm going to run out of topics eventually. Is there something you're interested in hearing about? Let me know.
Cheers,
DB
Not happy with how the novel was progressing, I fought halfway through a bad version before I realized I wasn’t writing the story I wanted to tell.
More research, more false starts. Finally I took a deep breath and settled in to read Dante’s Divine Comedy, something I would have bet money against at any other point in my life. It wasn’t the great revelation Shakespeare was, but it did give me the landscape of the time. And halfway through Dante knocked my socks off by mentioning the feud between the Capelletti and the Montecchi. Capulet and Montagues, anyone?
In reading both the history of the period and the footnotes to Dante’s work, one man’s name kept cropping up. A man who stood above all his peers, outshone the luminaries of his day. Giotto’s patron, Dante’s friend. A man fit to be a tragic hero of one of Shakespeare’s plays. His name was Cangrande della Scala, but he was also known as the Greyhound of Verona. Revered as almost a God in his own lifetime, the man took Verona to its highest height, just before its worst fall.
Tall and handsome, with a smile famous for its joy and perfect set of teeth, he was successful in everything he did – warrior, lover, reveler, patron of the arts. Under his rule Verona was a hub of commercial and artistic growth. It was also hated and feared by its neighbors. Venice conspired against Cangrande, as did popes and emperors. He waged an almost-unceasing war with nearby Padua for twenty years, finally winning through benevolence, not battle.
Cangrande’s life fascinated me as much as any play I’d ever read. Because he reminded me of someone, a rogue I had fallen in love with the first time I played him. The ties between Shakespeare and Dante were growing.
Soon I was reading about Dante himself – his wit, his loves, his politics, his exile, his family. It was then that it happened – one of those moments you hear writers talk about, where a character steps off the page and introduces himself as the lead.
Pietro Alighieri, also known as Pietro di Dante. Barely eighteen when my story starts, he came upon the scene and knocked down all my plans, which is very unlike him because he’s a good guy. A really good guy, the kind of guy I’d want to play if I didn’t enjoy scoundrels so much. Raised in his father’s ever-growing shadow, he was a prospectless second son until the death of his elder brother elevated him to heir.
With no particular skill in anything, just great heart and determination, he gave the book its voice. For the sake of my narrative I move away from Pietro now and again, but Pietro’s experience is ours, and we can watch in his growth, feel pride in his achievements, and share his disillusionments.
But there was another element missing. If the idea for the feud was going to become the subplot, a crucial but subdued backdrop, where was my plot? What was my spine? The book seemed to be writing itself, everything falling into place, and still I didn’t know what Pietro’s goal was.
All good actors, when they are lost, return to the text. That goes for directors and, it seems, writers. I sat down and once again poured through the story of the star-cross’d lovers.
Then it came, the answer. In my mind, the Bard of Avon chuckled as he met Dante’s son and gave him his raison d’etre. I had come full circle, the best of all possible worlds.
Mercutio. Of course, Mercutio. Referred to as both a cousin to the Prince, and ‘the Prince’s near ally,’ Mercutio was in some way tied to the della Scala family. The pivotal figure of Romeo & Juliet would be only a newborn babe when my story began. We couldn’t follow him, not from the outset – following the adventures of a toddler in fourteenth century Italy is not what I call exciting. But following the trials and tribulations of his protector, young Pietro Alighieri – that had promise!
All at once it was Mercutio’s story. The possibility of creating from Shakespeare’s text and real history the tale of this marvelously troubled young man was just too tempting. I could explain the darkness in the Queen Mab speech, from his disdain of love and his homoerotic tendencies to his fear of war drums and his foul images of childbirth. Shakespeare’s Mercutio has a wealth of possibility, and if I could tap even a little of it, I had the makings of a great story.
Moreover, bringing it back to Shakespeare led me to look at the phrase ‘star-cross’d,’ which carries elements of both prophecy and futility. Looking closely, Mercutio is the agent of the stars, because his death is what leads the young lovers to their fate. So Mercutio is a tool of the heavens.
Dante uses prophecy often. The Inferno begins with a retooling of an ancient one regarding the mythical Greyhound, a man who will save Italy and take it into another age. I knew from my reading that scholars have often speculated that Dante was referring to Cangrande – but what if he meant someone else?
Here I was faced with a decision – can I bring the prophecies of Shakespeare and Dante together, roll them together, and slap them on a defenseless child still in his crib? Am I that cruel?
Turns out I am. Researching astrology and numerology, I came up with a prophetic doom revolving around Dante’s Greyhound that all my characters could struggle against, in vain. With the advantage of hindsight, I can say that the ‘new age of man’ alluded to in the Greyhound prophecy was the Renaissance.
The stars aligned, the story poured out. A year for the first draft, then six months for the next, and the next. Once into the thick of it, I started seeing connections with the Bard's other Italian plays. Characters and events from The Taming of the Shrew are actually mentioned in R&J, so Kate and Petruchio make cameo appearances. There are characters from Two Gentlemen of Verona, of course, but others as well – Shylock, Don Pedro of Aragon and his nasty bastard brother. The Duke from Measure for Measure (also an Escalus) is mentioned in passing. And what Italian story can miss references to Caesar and Cleopatra? I even manage a thinly veiled Mac reference. The original idea of the Montague/Capulet feud blossomed into a panoramic story about Shakespeare’s characters living in Dante’s world.
It's a world I look forward to sharing.
The production of R&J that I directed came and went as shows do. Throughout the following year, however, I was unable to leave the idea of the origin of the feud behind. The play was done, but my research continued. I’d waded shin-deep into the history of Verona; now I completely submerged myself.
It was during that year I discovered some interesting facts. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, the time the tale of the star-cross’d lovers supposedly took place, important people were visiting Verona. Dante, the father of Renaissance literature. Giotto, the father of Renaissance painting. Petrarch, the poet who technically started the Renaissance by finding Cicero’s letters there. In a very real sense the Renaissance began, not in Florence as I’d assumed, but in Verona.
I cracked open earlier versions of the play, the short stories (some not so short) that were Shakespeare’s sources, and then back further to his sources’ sources. Luigi da Porto pinpoints a four year period wherein the tale is supposed to take place – during the reign of one Bartolomeo della Scala, sometime between 1300 and 1304.
Della Scala? Shakespeare’s Prince of Verona is named Escalus, a Latinized version of della Scala. But the name was ringing another bell. I went back and found that Dante had dedicated the third canticle of his Divine Comedy, ‘Paradiso,’ to Bartolomeo’s little brother, Cangrande della Scala.
Cangrande. It didn’t mean much to me at the time. But it would.
As I was running around doing historical research, I was also pleasure-reading. I am a glutton for well-written historical fiction. Bernard Cornwell, Patrick O’Brian, Colleen McCullough’s ‘Masters of Rome’ series, all of it. At the time, though, at the suggestion of my future wife, I was reading Dorothy Dunnett.
Dunnett is to me the pinnacle of the genre. She is the only author who consistently makes me feel stupid – not always a good quality in a writer, but I can’t fault her for it. Her writing is smart and densely layered. You have to earn Dunnett, want Dunnett, especially the first hundred or so pages. But once you’re in her world, there’s no going back. She weaves a tapestry so fine, so richly detailed, so at the core of human experience, that her books are each a treasure. It was Dorothy Dunnett more than any other writer who showed me that a book can be intelligent, dark, witty, gruesome, and exciting all at once. Her death was a heart-breaking loss to literature.
But back in early 2000 I hadn’t yet completed even the first of her series of historical novels. I wasn’t fully able to enjoy The Lymond Chronicles because Dante and the rest of the Verona cast kept getting in my way. So I laid her books aside and started to write.
It was going to be short, more a novella than anything. Two friends in love with the same woman have a falling out over her. Simple, sweet, it would get the idea out of my system.
Frustration followed. The first couple attempts I couldn’t find the voice. I was obsessed with the notion of the feud, which at that time was the core of my book. But it simply wasn’t enough. While the origin of the Capulet/Montague feud fascinated me, it was the backdrop – the della Scalas, Giotto, Dante – that kept leaping to the fore.
Early in 1999 I was directing Romeo & Juliet at the Ann Arbor Civic Theatre (a great space that to my everlasting regret has since become a church). It was my fourth or fifth encounter with the play, but my first as director.
Getting ready to direct Shakespeare for the first time became an event. I read and re-read the script, watched other productions, even visited Verona as a lark – not that Shakespeare ever went there, but for the past hundred years or so the city has become, at least partially, an industry town for the play.
As an actor, you focus on your role and leave the overall play to the director. But as a novice director, I was forced to explore the play as a whole for the first time since Mr. Tobin’s ninth grade English class. I looked at all the questions, including the perennial ‘What caused the feud?’
The cause is never actually mentioned in the play, and it’s not vital to either an actor’s or audience’s understanding of the show. At the top of Act One, the ‘ancient grudge’ is already an established fact. But still, I pondered it for a time, then set it aside for more immediate concerns.
Today when I direct, cutting a script is my least favorite chore. Back then it was murder – what to take out, what to keep? In Shakespeare there are many seeming repetitions, but it was impossible not to hear each one in my head as the best expression of a certain thought.
At last I made it to the final scene – Paris is slain, Romeo and Juliet are both dead, we’re firmly into the denouement. It was then that a line jumped out at me. Capulet and his wife find their daughter's bleeding body. Romeo’s father, Lord Montague, enters to tomb, and the Prince addresses him: ‘Come, Montague, for thou art early up / To see thy son and heir now early down.’
Montague replies:
Alas, my liege, my wife is dead tonight;
Grief of my son’s exile hath stopped her breath.
What further woe conspires against my age?
These lines baffled me. Realize, I’d been looking at the show for days thinking about actors entering and exiting, who I could double-cast and so forth. I clearly didn’t need Lady Montague for the final scene – her husband just told us she’s dead. I flipped back to find her last scene. She’s listed as entering in Act Three, Scene Four, when Mercutio and Tybalt both buy it – but she’s strangely quiet in that scene. Lord Capulet, too, but at least people talk to him. No one addresses Romeo’s mom, even when her son is banished. In fact, looking at it harder, Lady Montague hasn't been heard from since Act One, Scene One, in which she uttered a mere two lines!
So this was my quandary – do I cut Montague’s lines at the end of the show? Why not? Here we are, the play is basically over. We’ve just watched the two romantic leads die pitiably, and young, kind, noble Paris just croaked it as well. Why do we care if some woman we barely remember is dead?
But it continued to bother me. There had to be a reason she was dead.
Of course, in Shakespeare’s day, there was a very good reason. The actor who played Lady Montague was probably needed in another role – the exigencies of the stage.
Even realizing this, I couldn't let go of the line. My wife is dead tonight. The rules of dramatic structure nagged at me. An off-stage death like that is supposed to be symbolic. But of what? Clueless, I left the line in, hoping my actors could figure it out.
In the event, they didn’t have to. I was going about my business later that week when it hit me – the feud! The thing that gets closure at the end of the show is the feud! Montague and Capulet bury the hatchet. ‘Brother Montague,’ Capulet calls him. They're even going to build statues to honor their dead kids.
Could Lady Montague’s death be symbolic of the end of the feud? The only way that could work would be –
If she were the cause of the feud.
I remember a heart-stopping moment as the idea formed – a love triangle a generation earlier, between the parents! Romeo’s mother, engaged to a young Capulet, runs off with a young Montague instead. That’s certainly cause for a feud, especially if young Capulet and Montague were friends. Best friends, childhood friends, torn apart by their love for a woman. A feud, born of love, dies with love.
This explains so much in the play – Lord Capulet, Juliet's doting father, suddenly threatening to kill her for refusing to marry the man he’s chosen for her. He tells her to ‘hang, beg, starve, die in the streets’ – this from a man who has called her ‘the hopeful lady of my earth.’ His fury seems to come out of nowhere and is brutally excessive. But if his own bride-to-be had jilted him and run off with his best friend instead, of course Juliet’s similar behavior would press his buttons.
This notion also goes on to inform much of Capulet's relationship with his wife – a younger wife, we know from the script, not well content in her match, married to a man who thinks she is ‘marred.’ It hints, in turn, at her relationship with Tybalt. In fact, the behavior of both families is wonderfully colored by this single, simple idea. Romeo’s mom jilted Juliet’s dad.
Oddly enough, all this doesn’t affect the actual performance of the show overmuch. It’s fun for the actors to play, and there are moments when it can be very clear, but the play stands, as it always has, on its action and language. The backstory ends up being superfluous.
But it was an idea that had its hooks in me and wouldn’t let go.
- DB
I always hated Shakespeare.
They made me read him. In junior high, it was Julius Caesar. In high school, first it was Romeo & Juliet, which was cool only because we wasted a week watching the movie – the Zefferelli, not the DeCaprio version. The next year it was Henry IV Part One, to which I said ‘you’ve got to be kidding’ and scraped through the test by listening to class discussions.
The Bard of Avon and I were not friendly. So how did I happen to write a novel exploring his works?
It started my senior year in high school, when I had a choice between a reading-Shakespeare and an acting-Shakespeare class. I’d already done a lot of acting by then, so it was a no-brainer. As it happened, the teachers of the course had chosen Romeo & Juliet to do that year, mainly because they had a Juliet in mind. I remembered from the film that Mercutio was the best part in the show, and after auditioning against the rest of the class, I landed the part.
It was somewhere in the middle of rehearsals when everything clicked. The teachers of those other classes had been holding out on me all these years. You don’t read Shakespeare – you perform him! It’s not literature to be scanned, but language to be spoken by real, living, breathing people. Playing one of his characters, I discovered that Shakespeare had crafted the best expression of what it is to be alive.
Thus started my love affair with the Bard of Avon. High school led to community theatre and college shows, then professional outdoor Shakespeare productions. Today I am a Shakespearean actor, something I would never have believed a dozen years ago. I’ve performed over 30 full productions of a dozen of his plays, including the leads in Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, Edward III, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet. I’ve played on stages like Chicago Shakespeare Theatre and The Goodman, prodded by world-famous directors beside actors the caliber of Mike Nussbaum and Stacey Keach.
So Shakespeare gave me a career. Then he did me one better and introduced me to my wife. Jan and I met playing Kate and Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, giving us banter material for the rest of our lives.
And then, as if all that were not enough, Shakespeare got me to write a book.
Once again it starts with Romeo & Juliet. I’ve long been of the opinion that directors miss the point of the show. I like to compare it to the premiere of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in 1937. Before the film was released, it was called ‘Disney’s Folly.’ Who was going to sit through a feature-length cartoon? Insanity! But grown men and women left the premiere of the film crying, the critics went nuts with praise, every song became a top 10 hit, and theatre owners were forced to change seat-covers after every showing because of kids wetting themselves in terror. No one had ever seen anything like it.
That’s what I think Romeo & Juliet was for the mid-1590s. It’s not a Tragedy. It bears no resemblance to Hamlet or Othello or the Scottish Play. It’s something much worse – a Comedy that goes wrong. The horror lies in the fact that first the play makes us laugh, then pulls the rug out, leaving us all confused and bewildered.
I expressed my views a few times, and suddenly found myself approached to direct the show. Warily, I accepted. It was my first time directing Shakespeare. I read old versions of the play and Shakespeare’s source materials. I poured through the whole text in a way I’d never done as an actor. Poking around for lines to cut, I found something.
I found a cause for the feud.
I may not be the first ever to see it, but I’ve certainly never heard it anywhere else. It’s oblique, and doesn’t really affect the action of the play, but nevertheless, once the idea got hold of me I couldn’t let it go.
Thus a book was born.
It was going to be a short book, romantic and sad, just to get the idea out of my system. So I started to do a little research, mostly about Verona – the history, the culture. I discovered some facts. At the time the tale of the star-cross’d lovers supposedly took place, a few interesting people were in Verona. Dante, the father of Renaissance literature. Giotto, the father of Renaissance painting. Petrarch, the poet who technically started the Renaissance by finding Cicero’s letters. So, in a very real sense, the Renaissance began in Verona at the start of the fourteenth century.
I then settled in to read Dante’s Divine Comedy, something I would have bet money against at any other point in my life. I won’t say it was easy – it wasn’t the great revelation Shakespeare was – but it did give me the landscape of the time. And halfway through Purgatorio Dante knocked my socks off by mentioning a feud between the Capelletti and the Montecchi. Capulet and Montagues, anyone?
Yet, in both the histories and Dante’s work, one man’s name kept cropping up. A man who stood above all his peers, outshone the luminaries of his day. Giotto’s patron, Dante’s friend. A man fit to be a tragic hero of one of Shakespeare's plays. His name was Cangrande della Scala, but he was also known as the Greyhound, the Master of Verona.
The feud became a mere backdrop to a larger tale, revolving around this incredible man. Because he reminded me of someone, a rogue I had fallen in love with the first time I played him. A character I’ve been asked to perform more times than any other. In the play, it is said that Mercutio is both a cousin to the Prince, and “the Prince’s near ally.” The Prince in the play is named Escaulus, the Latin version of della Scala. Cangrande was related, somehow, to Mercutio, my favorite role.
So it came full circle. The real people of Dante’s time met the characters of Shakespeare’s plays, allowing me to explore one of the most enigmatic characters the Bard ever wrote.
* * * *
I read somewhere that when Alan Alda met Donald Sutherland, he simply took the other man’s hand and said, “Thank you for my life.” If Shakespeare were alive today, I’m sure that’s what I’d have to say.
But I'd start by telling him how I'd always hated him.
- DB
