The Philosopher and the Magician

Having spent years of my life teaching Shakespeare to students who want to know what all the fuss is about, I have often referred myself to the following comment by Ludwig Wittgenstein:

“ The reason I cannot understand Shakespeare is that I want to find symmetry in all this asymmetry.” 

(Culture and Value, p.86)

I say ‘referred myself’ because I could hardly have further confused the students by referring them to the quote. For them it had to be the works themselves, or the particular play we were studying, that I would take them through and make some attempt to convey the effect of all that asymmetry and the elusive appeal that has enticed generations of readers – as well as playgoers – over the centuries. In spite of my understanding - and to some extent subscribing to - the modern view that ‘the play’s the thing’ and what happens on stage is what is important, I also have a personal empathy with those like Charles Lamb who  suggested that a play like King Lear can only really achieve its full effect when played on the stage of the mind. Or Hazlitt, who said of the same play that "All that we can say must fall far short of the subject, or even what we ourselves conceive of it."

Those students, if they were being prepared for external examinations, had to be taken through the themes, figurative language, dramatic ironies, character studies etc, which would enable them to pass the examination. But even where this was completely successful, I still felt that many of them still did not ‘get’ Shakespeare. Where I was teaching for internal assessment I had more freedom to design a programme of study that got closer to what I felt was really needed. We could study imaginative reality, the intuitive rightness of Shakepeare’s presentation of fictional events grabbed from any source available, the language which was by turns rough and unsophisticated, highly poetic, deeply grounded in the soil of Britain even when the setting is elsewhere. But, to get back to Wittgenstein, he was surely right when he described the corpus of work as a dream:

“A dream is all wrong ….. and yet at the same time it is completely right ….. If Shakespeare is great, as he is said to be, then it must be possible to say of him : it’s all wrong, things aren’t like that – and at the same time it’s quite right according to a law of its own.” 

(Culture and Value, p.83)

And that’s just it. He sets his own terms and performs the mystery of making it all work. Wittgenstein goes a bit further than this and justifies his ‘dream’ comment by saying that the plays “create their own language and world [which] is completely unrealistic”. But if this is a dream, it is one that we are all drawn into. Or, in the case of those that don’t ‘get’ it, not drawn into. But, like actual dreams,  it is a dream that interrogates reality rather than attempts to escape from it. Shakespeare casts a spell to which some are immune. But I would not for the world be among them. That scene at the end of The Tempest where Prospero casts his staff and his book into the waters is much more than a metaphorical farewell to the playwright’s craft. It really is a renunciation of magic.

Derek Jarmarn's 'The Tempest'

Having got used to the technical innovations of digital film and, more recently, 3D effects, it was a salutary experience to attend a film club showing of Derek Jarman’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest shot in 16mm on a low budget in 1979. The pictured flickered at times and in one section flecks appeared to be spattered down the screen. The soundtrack volume was slightly uneven and at one point was overlaid with a clicking noise. It was a bit like listening to an old 78rpm record. But in spite of all this, the magical atmosphere was deeper than is often the case with slick digital special effects.

The film is set in a crumbling mansion rather than on an island. Heathcote Williams appears rather young as Prospero, though his dishevelled and rather seedy look makes him rather more like a castaway than the usual dignified Duke of Milan. Toyah Willcox as a wilful teenage Miranda giggles at Caliban’s sexual gestures and looks as if she can’t wait to get hold of Ferdinand. Jarman adopted a minimalist approach to the text: whole speeches are cut down to a couple of lines and many of the play’s rhetorical flourishes reduced to low-key exchanges or soliloquies delivered as voice-overs to e.g. Prospero turning over the pages of a book displaying magical symbols or Miranda riding provocatively on a rocking-horse. Jack Birkett as Caliban breaks raw eggs into his mouth and is graphically shown being suckled by a grotesque Sycorax. Karl Johnson’s Ariel is grudging and petulant and seems to sneak away while Prospero is sleeping at the end rather than being amicably released.

But Jarman’s outrageous pièce de résistance is the camp adaptation of the masque scene as a troupe of sailor boys dancing a hornpipe culminating in a punning, bluesy rendition of ‘Stormy Weather’ (see clip) by Elisabeth Welch, presumably as Juno and Ceres in one (though, in the cast list, simply described as ’a goddess’).

With such an idiosyncratic approach to the play it may not have been wholly inappropriate to watch it in its grainy analogue version in which the colours seemed almost painted on and the actors appeared, in some ways, to be playing out their allotted parts in a masque that constitutes the whole film, moving around the set like “spirits … [in an] … insubstantial pageant”. We are, indeed, “such stuff as dreams are made on”. If nothing else, the film certainly underlines that assertion.

Toyah Willcox as Miranda