Then followed Death of a Salesman, and Hotel Paradiso, which might not be familiar to most of my readers. Somewhere along the line was Waiting for Godot, so skillfully translated that it was years before I learned that it was in fact a translation.
When I first saw Godot I was just a kid, I’d say something like 15 or 16, and I took most of the play at face value though it was obvious that there was more going on than appeared on the surface. Then I sent out for it on Netflix: Becket on Film, and watched it again.
It would seem that the staging I had seen as a youth was just the first act, or perhaps I had gone to sleep between acts. For those who haven’t seen this play, here is an abbreviated synopsis:
Two gentlemen, who appear to be vagabonds, are seen in a wilderness spot by the edge of a trail. They talk to each other, and we learn that they have fallen on hard times, that they’re so strung out that they hardly remember what they were doing yesterday. Evidently they’re waiting for someone named Godot, who has promised to aid them.
They fall to bickering among themselves, picking at each other, until they’re interrupted by a man who staggers by, burdened with a number of boxes and paraphernalia, and tied to a rope. Presently, around the bend, at the other end of the rope, appears a well-dressed man, who imperiously calls out instructions to the burdened man (who appears to be his servant, or slave), and our two friends watch all this with curiosity and some alarm.
The grand gentleman greets them with joy, and makes his servant stop, bring him a stool, and so forth, until one of the two friends challenges him, demanding to know why he treats his servant so harshly. The conversation gets pretty crazy, until the two friends are persuaded to leave the slave alone. After a while, the grand gentleman (Pozzo) and his slave (Lucky) exit the stage, going on their way. Night falls, and our friends are told, by a messenger, that Godot cannot keep his appointment, but will visit the following day.
That is sufficient for the moment, to talk about what my reactions to the first act were. I must, someday, read what others have said about the play, and possibly what Mr Becket himself might have said, though I suspect he hasn’t said a great deal. The important thing about a play is that it should speak for itself; if it needs a great deal of commentary and notes, one suspects that it wasn’t an entirely successful piece of theater.
I realize that the play is allegorical, in some sense, and theological in some sense also. The early years of the 20th century (and the last years of the 19th) seem to have been ones where people were still struggling to deal with the extent to which Christianity had influenced their idea-world. They battled the impediments to expressing their beliefs and feelings imposed by a vocabulary that was still firmly in the grip of Christian concepts. Today, we have almost the opposite problem (or the same problem in a more acute form): most people are not familiar with the more sophisticated Christian concepts, despite being surrounded by amateur theologians who flood the airwaves and the media. With few exceptions, people out there are unburdened with the more sophisticated philosophical ideas of a generation that had to attempt to reconcile Evolution and the Bible; modern Fundamentalists are more at the speed of Just Saying No.To know more precisely where Becket was going with his idea one would first of all have to watch the whole play ---which I did not, to my shame; and one would have to be familiar with more of Becket’s plays than just this one. It appears, on the surface, that Becket is ready to indict religion (or at least Christianity) with being a stumbling-block to clear thinking and decisive action. Or it may be that there is no moral, as such, but that there is an attempt to distil human behavior and human relationships away from the clutter of normal existence and circumstances, to showcase the crassness of certain things, and the beauty of other things. The dialogue goes round and round almost in circles, but keeps you listening, despite the awkwardness in having been translated from French into English.
Godot is most certainly a play that can be brought to life by good actors, though it probably spurs on even ordinary performers to outshine themselves. The actors in the movie were beyond merely excellent, my favorite being Pozzo. Pozzo is a plum role for anyone who is larger than life, domineering and obsequious in alternation.
The questions that arise are: (1) What is Shakespeare trying to convey in this play, if anything? (2) What makes this play ---and Shakespeare’s plays generally--- special?
I think the overriding motivations for Shakespeare’s plays were economic. He is first and foremost wanting to entertain and attract an audience; to my mind any moral or message is entirely secondary. On the other hand, whatever things were preoccupying the man at the moment when the play was being written could be expected to creep into the play in one way or another. But we can only speculate (in the absence of diaries or contemporary reports that post-modern critics delight in using to deconstruct art of any sort), and it seems that Hamlet’s preoccupation with death has to be taken in the context of the entire plot of the play, and the means the playwright uses to make the drama plausible, and to heighten the intensity of the action. Mel Gibson (in the commentary) speculates that Shakespeare was dealing with his own personal demons, which emerged in Hamlet’s soliloquy. This is something that is impossible to refute, equally difficult to support. Artists of Shakespeare’s day ---now I'm speculating--- were not the self-absorbed people that present-day artists often are; they were working-class stiffs, barely better off than laborers, and probably did not have the leisure to contemplate their navels, or engage in speculation of the horrors of life after death. That was left to philosophers and theologians and monks, and for bishops to squeeze in between their love-affairs. So Mel Gibson is probably a lot more worried about the hereafter than Shakespeare was at any given time. But Shakespeare perhaps vividly remembered his thoughts concerning suicide from his younger, more passionate days, and channeled them, as most good writers do. (I’m merely arguing that we cannot conclude that Shakespeare was concerned about death while he was writing Hamlet, something that probably does not matter very much.)
As to (2), I think that the older generation of playwrights were successful essentially because of their sheer eloquence. There is a clever variation in voice from character to character, even if it all sounds like Shakespeare to our uneducated ears, and even the most crass idiot speaks eloquently through Shakespeare’s pen. It was stunning, to sit through the play, and hear not just a mere half-dozen but a score of quotations that have come down to us, all from this one play, from "Neither a borrower nor a lender be," to ... "Frailty, thy name is Woman!" The Simpsons has a tough act to follow.
The famous line "Get thee to a nunnery!" is said by Hamlet to Ophelia, in a moment of disgust. On one hand, he is anxious to present himself as mentally disturbed to her (realizing that she is the instrument of her father, whom Hamlet suspects of spying). On the other hand, he alternates between his passion for her, which is real, and his disgust with womankind, as falling short of his ideals in a human being. (Hamlet is a college boy, on hiatus from his school in Germany.) Hamlet, throughout the play, grows steadily more misogynistic, and one wonders whether the play gives Shakespeare an opportunity to relieve his own misogynistic frustrations, but then one is falling into the same trap into which Mel Gibson has fallen: attributing the attitudes of Shakespeare's characters to the playwright himself.
It all comes down to the question: why do literary folks engage in their activity? Is it an economic thing only, or is there some self-expression that refuses to be bottled up? Does the author want to lay bear his soul, or is all this passion mere artifice, "Acting!" as Master Thespian Jon Lovitz from Saturday Night Live insists? Is there a didactic motive? Are these playwrights trying to make a point about contemporary events and characters? The fact that the plays have stood the test of time is a testament to their universal appeal, but we can't deny that there may have been additional piquancy to their stories depending on whatever was going on at the time.
[To be continued]
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