Miss The Start, Miss The End

SHAKESPEARE’S DELETED SCENES*

Whenever you go to see a Shakespeare play being performed, there is always one question lurking in the back of your mind as the lights dim and the curtains open. Which bits will they cut? Because they usually do. There is usually something missing.

Not that there is anything wrong with cutting Shakespeare, of course. Every director has to decide – or discover, through a process of rehearsal and preview – whether every part of the script justifies its inclusion. And, invariably, not every bit will. The director may cut for numerous reasons; because a scene slows the play down, because it is painfully unfunny, because it gets in the way of the willing suspension of disbelief. For instance, if you go to see Henry VI Part I it might be missing Talbot flirting with the Countess of Auvergne, because it slows things down, or Joan of Arc summoning ‘fiends’ from the underworld, because it’s a bit weird for things to suddenly get supernatural in Act 5 of an otherwise ‘realistic’ history play. Or, if you go to see The Taming of the Shrew, it might be missing the lengthy prologue with Sly because it seems to be setting up a ‘framing device’, setting up the action as a play within a play, that isn’t reprised at the end so seems a bit pointless in retrospect. Or, if you go to see Love’s Labour’s Lost, the director might cut some of the stuff with the academics discussing anagrams, because they are not complete sadists.

Usually, of course, the more famous a play is, the less inclined directors are to tamper with the text. There are, after all, school parties to consider. So if you go to see Romeo and Juliet it’s likely that most of it will be intact (though they might cut some of Mercutio’s longer speeches) because the audience will be answering questions later. That said, if you go to see Macbeth it’s unlikely to include the bit where the witches break into a showtune and summon Hecate; for years directors have looked for excuses for cutting this silly digression, as it’s hard enough to get the audience to accept a play with witches and ghosts without including a tap-dancing goddess of the underworld as well. Fortunately scholars have now proved that that bit was interposed by someone else, probably Middleton, meaning directors have a cast-iron get-out for not including it.

A director may also cut to change the emphasis of a play – giving less time to supporting characters to emphasize the leads – or for clarity of action or motivation. Any director putting on Hamlet, for example, as to decide at what point Hamlet actually decides to become pro-active and seek revenge on the King (when he decides 'to be' and take arms against his sea of troubles). Because, in the text as written, his motivation is a little muddy, to say the least (indeed, some would say that is the whole point). Is it when he sees the King pray? Is it when he sees the Norwegian army marching over the hill and is strangely put in mind of eggshells? Is it when he ponders mortality with the skull of Yorick? Or a director may – perversely, because directors are often perverse – decide to increase ambiguity by removing speeches where a character explains their motivation. If it’s already clear enough why a character is doing a thing, do we need to hear them explain their reasoning in laborious detail? Back in Shakespeare’s day, people did, but not so much now. Modern Shakespearean actors are highly skilled in getting across the meaning of a line irrespective of what actual words they might be saying!

Hamlet is one of the few, possibly the only – I can’t be bothered to look it up – instances of us being given an insight on how Shakespeare’s plays were cut during his time, as we have the ‘bad folio’ version probably based on prompt sheets, probably those of the actor who played Marcellus. We know his plays were cut because in Romeo and Juliet there’s a line in the opening spiel reassuring the audience that it will all be over in two hours’ time, but there’s no way the full play can be performed in that time. (Maybe they cut the opening spiel?) When it comes to Hamlet, I’d quite like to see a version based on the ‘bad quarto’, as in some areas it makes more sense (it has the ‘to be or not to be’ bit earlier on and Gertrude realizes the King is a bad ‘un).

This is just the beginning of a long, long history of the plays being cut for performance. Nahum Tate did his own version of King Lear with a happy ending. Davenent and Dryden did their best to make a tolerable version of The Tempest, and then Davenent, in his madness, decided that what Macbeth really needed was more showtunes. Henry V had its funny bits excised to make it into a proper tragedy. Charles Johnson did a ‘mash-up’ of the comedies. Garrick cut the bit with the gravediggers from Hamlet and Bowdler famously bowdlerized the plays (but not for performance, for family readers). The idea that the plays should be performed as written – that the text was sacrosanct – only came along in the early 18th century.

Another area where the plays are usually cut is in the cinema. Partly, obviously, because films tend to have shorter running times. They may also have less physically captive audiences. And films are primarily a visual medium – there’s a Hitchcock quote somewhere about, ‘Once you’ve written the script, you add the dialogue’ – and if a play is to work in that medium it needs to be adapted to an extent. Do we need the dialogue establishing that these two characters are standing on a battlement if we can actually see the battlement? That sort of thing.

And so it is very rare for a film to give you the full text. Ken Branagh basically stuck to the script with Henry V, even including the mind-numbing stuff in French, and then perversely – I did warn you about directors – decided to do a version of Hamlet which combined both the good folio and quarto versions in a way which defied both logic and the risk of deep vein thrombosis. I mean, it’s very good, but it’s not the play Shakespeare wrote, it’s like having a version with all the deleted scenes from two different versions reinstated. But by the time he got to Love’s Labour’s Lost he basically came to the very sensible conclusion that the less of the play he used, the better.

Television has a better record of doing ‘uncut’ versions of the play, because the audiences are in the comfort of their own homes and, certainly in the early days, television was a fairly theatrical medium – plays being rehearsed and then performed live or ‘as live’ – but with the added bonus that the cameras could get in close so the actors could give smaller, more nuanced, more filmic performances, and the occasional perverse director could decide that a monologue would be better done as a pre-recorded voice-over while the actor mugged away staring into space doing ‘thinking it over’ acting.

So, up until the 1980s at least, television versions of the plays tend to have very few cuts. Indeed, that was one of the raisons d'être of the BBC’s run of not-quite-but-nearly-all the Shakespeares in the late 1970s and nearly 1980s. At last, the plays as they were written, unabridged. Well, nearly... they didn’t include Sly’s prologue for The Taming of the Shrew, they cut Act 3 Scene 10 of Anthony and Cleopatra, and by the time they got to Cymbeline they were basically skipping whole chunks of the script in order to get it over with before the pubs shut. (This is not counting the innumerable cut lines from the Henry VI plays, Richard III and others).

Anyway, this got me thinking – what is the rarest Shakespeare scene? Which scene is most often deleted? Which scene is almost always not included in performances of the plays? I have a vague memory that one of the play texts features a pointless scene about a character buying a goat or a horse but getting tricked, as some sort of obscure topical joke. Maybe that is it, but I’m not sure which play it was - because if I were to look for it, it wouldn't be there...

* This is not an article about stuff deleted by Shakespeare during the writing process, though, of course, we do know a little about that because Love’s Labour’s Lost has a transcription error and accidentally includes two versions of the same scene.

Lovers (Live A Little Longer)

Ooh, it’s been almost a month since my last blog. Well, I’ve been busy, writing things, script-editing things, moving house, plus occasionally looking after the little chap. And messing about on twitter. I may have even read a couple of books. It’s been ‘all go’.

Anyway. I have two things out now! A book and an audio. Audio first.

It’s Exodus, the second instalment in the 4-part Survivors box set released by Big Finish. The series is probably best described as a companion piece to the original 1975 BBC TV series. It’s not a remake, or a continuation, it’s what-was-happening-to-some-other-characters-over-the-hill. But with characters from the BBC TV series turning up as well. So it’s an expansion of that series, but entirely accessible to anyone who has never seen that series. The premise is simple. A superbug wipes out a huge percentage of the human race in a matter of days; what happens to the people who are left?

Exodus is set in the immediate aftermath of the plague. It’s one of the things that bugs me with other post-apocalyptic stories that they tend to skip this bit; usually by having a viewpoint character get rendered unconscious only to wake up ’28 Days Later’ or whenever (The Day of the Triffids does it, The Walking Dead does it, even The Last Train did it, yes, I went there, I mentioned The Last Train). When it’s the immediate aftermath which, in many ways, is the most dramatic moment. It’s when civilisation is falling apart and when the survivors are first coming to terms with what has happened, when they’re still in a state of shock, or denial. It’s when the world from ‘before’ the plague is still present all around them, so you have that jarring, eerie discomfiture.

That’s what excited me about this story. And that it’s near the beginning of the series, so you don’t know who will live and who will die, where the characters are still be established. Writing it was a real step outside my comfort zone, partly because the subject matter is so uncomfortable, so unrelentingly grim and serious, but also because the way the story was told; often in writing you write several steps removed from reality, in a world where nobody goes to the toilet, nobody forgets what they went into the kitchen for, and where everybody is on top form, but with Survivors that wouldn’t work. The whole point of the premise is to be as realistic as possible, to tell the story in as naturalistic, straightforwardand honest a way as possible. Without the writer intruding by drawing attention to themselves, to let the characters tell the story. Because Survivors is such a powerful, gut-grabbing idea, it doesn’t need narrative tricks to maintain interest.

It’s turned out incredibly well. The director, sound designer and cast have taken what I wrote and amplified it, made it even more emotionally affecting, more shocking, more tense. Which is lovely, because it makes me look good. I’m particularly pleased with Louise Jameson’s performance as Jackie Burchall, a character I created specifically for her. She does a stunning job (as expected). But the whole cast are very strong, everything gels, and so far the series seems to have gone down exceptionally well. People are saying it’s one of the best things Big Finish have ever done. Wow.

So please, rush and out buy it, it’s available from here. I think there’s going to be a second series.

The book out now is an odd little thing. Doctor Who: The Shakespeare Notebooks. It’s a humour book designed for fans of both Doctor Who and Shakespeare. Well, it hasn’t been done before! It’s written by James Goss, Julian Richards, Justin Richards, Matthew Sweet and me, with additional material by William Shakespeare.

I found the process of writing it fun but arduous; I made a rod for my own back by deciding that my ‘pastiches’ of Shakespeare would be written in iambic pentameter blank verse (except for low-status characters  in verse, and a few rhyming couplets). Which meant that I was not just checking the number of syllables but the stresses of every word; whenever in doubt, checking it against a searchable online index of Shakespeare to see where he had placed the same word in blank verse in order to see where the stresses went, and to check that the word was one in his vocabulary. So a meticulous, time-consuming task, but a rewarding one. I’m not claiming my attempts at blank verse are prefect (they wouldn’t sound authentically Shakespearean if they were, he knew better than to be beholden to rules) but I gave it a damn good go.

So please, rush out and buy it, if only to find all the bits I got wrong. My bits are some missing scenes from Macbeth, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern-style, which recasts it as a Troughton historical; Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending in the style of a Steven Moffat season finale (everyone lives!); A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Sontarans on Vortis; and Shakespeare’s rough notes for The Tempest.  All beautifully illustrated by Mike Collins.

You can read the first 30-odd pages at the Random House website. As another taster, here’s part of the new Romeo and Juliet:

Act V, Scene III – Capulet tomb in the Verona churchyard

Romeo has discovered Juliet lying on an altar in the tomb He reaches for the vial of poison. Doctor, Amy, Rory appear from behind the altar.

DOCTOR:

Romeo, stop!  Don’t drink the poison’d brew!

For if thou dost thou shalt regret the deed

As long as thou shalt live; which won’t be long

But that is not the point. The point is this;

Thy Juliet is not dead yet; she lives!

ROMEO:

I see no breath, her cheeks are pale, her lips

Are cold as stone. My love is dead, so taunt

Me not; I am resolv’d to die. But wait.

Who are you that dares violate the tomb

Of Capulet? And what is this blue box

That is not of this place?

AMY:

                                    We will explain

That later on.

RORY:

                        Just put that vial down.

You heard the Doctor’s words. Your Juliet

Just counterfeits death’s signs. She slumbers deep

But will soon wake to find you here. And would

You wish she found you dead at her bed-side?

As consequence of feigned death? What would

She do in such a state of discontent?

ROMEO:

I dare not think.

AMY:

                         She would do something rash

Like take your dagger and do herself in.

DOCTOR:

And would not that be a grave tragedy?

ROMEO:

A tragedy forg’d of a grave misdeed,

Within a grave itself is grave indeed.

We Are Detective

This month sees the release of my latest Jago & Litefoot story The Monstrous Menagerie. I’ve given it a listen, just to check it over, you understand, and it’s marvellous. Steven Miller is very, very good as Arthur Conan Doyle and Brian Protheroe is wonderful as... well, that would be telling. I spent the whole of the recording trying to work out what I’d seen him in, only when I got home did I realise he was Edward IV in the BBC Shakespeares, as well as being a folk-pop legend! Blimey.

Beyond saying that the story is wonderful, and that you should all rush out and buy it, it’s hard to think of anything else to say to it, as I’ve already gone through all that in the CD inlay notes, in an interview in the latest issue of Vortex and in an interview in the latest issue of DWM. There’s only so many times one can say the same thing. But the finished article seems to have gone down fairly well so far, and I’m very proud of it, what else is there to say?

So instead, here’s an excerpt of the script. It’s from near the beginning but obviously you shouldn't read it if you want every second of the play un-spoiler-ed.

ARTHUR:

The name’s Arthur. Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle.

LITEFOOT:

Conan Doyle!?

JAGO:

As in the Sherlock Holmes Conan Doyle?

ARTHUR:

The one and the same.

JAGO:

I say! That’s a turn up for the books!

LITEFOOT:

How extraordinary. Doctor Doyle, may I just say how much I’ve enjoyed all your stories.

JAGO:

Me too. Particularly loved A Study In Scarlet. Ripping stuff. Can’t get enough of Mister Holmes!

ARTHUR:

Well, that’s very flattering, though of course Holmes is behind me now.

LITEFOOT:

He is?

ARTHUR:

You are aware of my other literary endeavours? The White Company? The Refugees? Micah Clarke?

LITEFOOT:

Oh yes, of course. I own a copy of every single one.

JAGO:

Yes, got the lot.

LITEFOOT:

And have very much enjoyed reading them, of course.

ARTHUR:

Really? You’ve read Micah Clarke? Both of you?

JAGO:

Oh yes, real page-turner. Couldn’t put it down.

ARTHUR:

So who would you say was your favourite character?

JAGO:

What?

ARTHUR:

From my novel, Micah Clarke. Who would you say was the character that appealed to you most?

JAGO:

(STRUGGLING) Well, I suppose, out of all of them, out of all the characters in Micah Clarke, my favourite character would have to be... Micah Clarke herself.

LITEFOOT:

Himself.

JAGO:

Himself.

ARTHUR:

(HEAVY SARCASM) It’s a pleasure to meet two such devoted followers of my work.

So if you haven’t already done so, order the box set now!

The Girl Of My Best Friend

At long last, a brand new entry in my ‘Shakespearewatch’!

THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN

Yes, it’s getting pretty obscure. So obscure, in fact, that the BBC didn’t mount a production of this play as part of their late-70s/early-80s Bardathon. Why? Well, because depending on where you sit on the fence, it may or may not count as part of the Shakespeare canon. It’s easy enough to include the plays from the first Folio, as they’re all by Shakespeare, pretty much (and it’s easy to remove the odd bits that were added by other parties) but TNK is a collaboration, and hence falls into the murky area of being not-quite-Shakespeare. But the BBC produced the other John Fletcher collaboration, H8, as well as Per, the collaboration with George Wilkins which contains far less Shakespeare material than TNK, so it’s hard to discern the rationale that meant this play, along with E3 and STM, should be omitted. The play has also not been filmed by anyone else or had any stage productions released on DVD to my knowledge.

So instead I’ve had to resort to reading the text, courtesy of The Arden Shakespeare (which is lovely, except for the strange occasions where the typeface mysteriously changes and where the line-number attributions are out). I did see the play performed a couple of years ago, at the Brockley Jack, but that production omitted the whole first act, so I’m not sure that counts as having seen it properly (the irony is that the first act is the part of the play with the most Shakespeare material). So for me this was a little voyage of discovery as well as a chance to tick off an outstanding box.

The play is based on a story by Chaucer, The Knight’s Tale. I’ve never really got on with Chaucer, partly because of the language - it’s either impenetrable and presented with wacky old-style spellings and typography, or presented as a modern translation which feels inauthentic, like cheating. But it’s a childishly simple story, so you don’t need to know Chaucer to get it. In adapting the story Shakespeare and Fletcher seem to have found they didn’t have enough material for a full-length play and so they added a subplot with more songs and a dance number. This subplot, concerning the Jailer’s daughter (they don’t seem to have bothered giving her a name) barely connects to the main plot at all, and could be excised from the play without difficulty. Maybe the Brockley Jack production could have done that instead of cutting the first act, but the thing is, the subplot with the Jailer’s daughter is probably more interesting than the a-plot about the Kinsmen.

This plot can essentially be boiled down to the eternal dilemma of ‘bros before hoes’; whether one should be more loyal to one’s male best friend or to ones favourite gardening implement. I’ll describe it in basic terms as I go along. What’s interesting, I think, is that the a-plot with the Kinsmen goes out of its way to make it clear it’s set in ancient Athens, with lots of mentions of Greek gods and myths, whereas the b-plot with the Jailer’s daughter might as well be set in the present day, as it features a Morris Dance (!) and comes across as a mish-mash of ideas previously seen in other Shakespeare plays, particularly TS, MND and Ham. And yet it seems that the b-plot is largely the work of John Fletcher aping Shakespeare, while Shakespeare handled the ancient Greek stuff. I’ll also point out the attribution as I go along, bearing in mind it’s an imprecise art where no two academics agree, because it can be hard to tell the difference between Shakespeare, Shakespeare as rewritten by Fletcher, Fletcher deliberately writing in a Shakespearean manner, and Fletcher (whose style is not that far removed from Shakespeare’s anyway; certainly not as much as George Wilkins).

The one general impression I got from reading the play was that it would be an ideal play to put on at the new Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Partly because, like DM which I saw back in February, it’s one of the few plays we definitely know was staged at (and probably written for) the Blackfriars Theatre (the basis for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse). But also because the playhouse would be able to overcome many of the play’s shortcomings; the jailer’s daughter being lost in the forest could be made genuinely creepy and make her imaginary creatures seem plausible; the theatre would lend itself to the various special effects of the Act 5 temple scene; and even the off-stage tournament at the end could be made to seem climactic if presented in near-darkness as a sequence of sound effects (Emilia’s speech in Act 5 Scene 3 20-29 makes it clear the tournament is taking place at night). So I hope they do it, though they’ll probably do Tem first.

Here’s a fact for you. TNK contains the first known use of the word ‘unfriended’ (though Shakespeare had previously used ‘unfriend’ in KL).

During the course of reading the annotations I also discovered that the word to ‘cozen’ (meaning to deceive) derives from the custom of fraudsters to pose as long-lost cousins, and that ‘bonfire’ doesn’t derive from ‘bon-fire’, but from ‘bone-fire’ i.e. a funeral pyre. Quite interesting.

Anyway, here’s a quick run-through, with my thoughts as they occur.

Prologue (Fletch)

A guy comes on stage to say they hope they do justice to Chaucer and don’t cause him to spin in his grave.

Act 1

Scene 1 (Shakey)

After a quick song, three Queens come to Athens to petition King Theseus to take revenge on King Creon of Thebes, who has killed their three husbands. Theseus is due to get married to Hippolyta but decides to postpone the nuptials and declare war, after being entreated on behalf of womankind by Hippolyta and her sister Emilia.

- This scene is one of two that contains a lot of Chaucer, long, flowery descriptions of the dead kings, and goes on a bit.

 Scene 2 (Shakey)

King Creon’s two nephews, Palamon and Arcite, are keen to leave Thebes. They’re not keen on their uncle, but when a messenger rushes in warning of King Theseus’ approaching army they decide that honour dictates they must fight to defend Thebes.

- Contains long discussion about nature of honour and duty of allegiance to someone you consider a tyrant.

Scene 3 (Shakey)

Hippolyta is missing Theseus while he’s away. Pirithous, Theseus’ best mate and old army buddy, is missing him too. This prompts Emilia to remember her best friend Flavina; she remembers playing with her when they were both eleven years old, before Flavina tragically died. Emilia doesn’t think she could ever love a man as much as she loved Flavina.

- Now, this could be taken as being a bit homoerotic, a bit hot-schoolgirl-lesbian-action, except for the fact that the play makes it clear both girls were prepubescent (‘beginning to swell about the blossom’) and that their friendship was a schoolgirl crush with no physical/sexual dimension (unless you search for double entendre on the word ‘enjoy’). But nevertheless Emilia does conclude that the love between ‘maid and maid’ is, to her, more powerful than the love between a chap and a woman.

Scene 4 (Shakey rewritten by Fletch?)

The battle’s over and Theseus has won. Palamon and Arcite are brought in on ‘hearses’; they’ve both shown great bravery during the battle and now have life-threatening injuries. Having admired their derring-dos, Theseus decides they should both be nursed back to health, in prison, back home in Athens.

- Rather surprisingly, Theseus seems to have now forgotten his postponed marriage to Hippolyta.

Scene 5 (Shakey rewritten by Fletch?)

The three Queens have a bit of a sing-song about their dead husbands.

Act 2

Scene 1 (Shakey)

The jailer and his daughter discuss their prisoners, Arcite and Palamon, who seem delighted to be incarcerated in each other’s company.

- Although the daughter makes it clear she finds both of them attractive, it’s odd that this scene doesn’t set up or mention her love for Palamon specifically.

Scene 2 (Fletch)

In the prison, Arcite and Palamon have a chat about how they’re better off out of it, or at least, better off not being in Thebes and better off being in each other’s company where they can be ‘one another’s wife’. They are best buddies – until they spot Emilia in the garden. Palamon claims dibs as he saw her first. Arcite calls double dibs because he likes her more. But I love her as a goddess! But I love her as a woman! They decide, should they ever get free, to fight over Emilia to the death. Then the jailer turns up to take Arcite away. Arcite is banished from Athens. This news irks Palamon as he thinks this means Arcite will go to Thebes and raise an army to get Emilia, Troy-style.

- The whole ‘we’re best mates’ bit is so over-the-top, and goes on for so long, I detect a sense of it taking the piss slightly, that Arcite and Palamon are trying to live up to a (Chivalric?) ideal of what bros should be. Certainly this seems to be the case bearing in mind how quickly their friendship dissolves at the sight of a babe. 

Scene 3 (Fletch)

Arcite is wandering around in the woods outside Athens (yes, the same wood as MND) when he comes across a load of bumpkins preparing to perform a Morris dance for the Duke. They mention some games that are taking place in Athens, and Arcite decides to return to Athens to compete, as he’s a bit of a sporty type and bound to win.

Scene 4 (Fletch)

The jailer’s daughter wanders alone in the woods. She’s in love with Palamon, desperate to shag him (‘What pushes are we wenches driven to when fifteen once has found us!’ i.e. girls go mad once they are fifteen) and decides to release him from her father’s prison.

- It’s an odd dramatic choice that we get this bit of action covered in two soliloquies from the daughter (here and in scene 6) rather than getting to see her actually release Palamon; the result being that there isn’t a single scene in the play where Palamon and the daughter have any sort of interaction beyond her watching him through a window in Act 2 Scene 1.

 Scene 5 (Fletch)

Arcite has disguised himself as a bumpkin and competed in the games and won. Theseus meets him at the award-giving ceremony. Emilia takes a shine to Arcite. Having seen Arcite demonstrate his great horsemanship, Pirithous decides he should become Emilia’s horse-boy. Arcite kisses Emilia’s hand - looks like his plan is paying off! Then he is invited to go out hunting with the family the next day.

Scene 6 (Fletch)

The jailer’s daughter has released Palamon and left him in the woods while she went to fetch a file and some food. She isn’t sure that he loves her – he hasn’t shown her much gratitude – but she is convinced they will become lovers and run away together.

Act 3

Scene 1 (Shakey)

The next morning, Arcite becomes separated from Theseus et al while they’re out on the hunt. Alone in the woods, he talks to himself about how lucky he is to be in close contact with Emilia, little realising he is being overheard by Palamon, lurking in a bush! Palamon emerges, none too pleased about what he’s heard, and challenges him to a duel to the death. Arcite hears a hunting horn and hurries away, promising to return with food, water and cutting equipment. 

Scene 2 (Fletch)

The jailer’s daughter returns to the woods for a third scene where she does nothing but talk to herself. She finds that Palamon isn’t where she left him and assumes that he has been eaten by a wolf (as he couldn’t walk far without his chains making a noise, which would attract wolves). She also suddenly realises that her father will be blamed for Palamon’s escape and will be put to death, thanks to her. 

- Basically any actress has her work cut out with this scene, making leaps to wild conclusions seem plausible whilst also giving the first hints of a descent into madness.

Scene 3 (Fletch)

Arcite returns to Palamon with food, water and cutting equipment. Palamon challenges him to a duel to the death over Emilia. Arcite tries to change the subject to various girls they have known (in the shagging sense) but Palamon is gagging for a duel. Problem is, they don’t have any swords. Wait here, says Arcite, I’ll just go and fetch some.

- This scene implies that they have both fathered illegitimate children, which sits a little oddly with their protestations of/aspirations to honour in the rest o the play. But they may just be drunkenly boasting.

Scene 4 (Fletch)

Yet another scene with the jailer’s daughter wandering in the woods on her own talking to herself. It’s now got dark and she’s hearing and seeing things, her imagination running wild as she loses her sanity.

- Her train-of-thought nonsense and (elsewhere) uncharacteristic lewdness and I-know-a-secret-business strongly recalling Ophelia in Ham.

Scene 5 (Fletch)

A pompous Schoolmaster gathers together the bumpkins from earlier (along with their wives) to prepare their dance for King Theseus and Hippolyta. They are surprised by the arrival of the jailer’s daughter looking literally like she has been dragged through a hedge backwards and singing a sea-shanty. Theseus and Hippolyta turn up and the Schoolmaster ambushes them with a Morris dance. 

- The Schoolmaster’s speech to Theseus and Hippolyta strongly recalls Quince’s prologue to the same in MND. It’s making essentially the same jokes – a country bumpkin attempting to appear clever by delivering a poetic recital but making himself look ridiculous with his forced rhymes, alliteration, leaden adherence to a metre and getting his vocabulary and classical allusions wrong. (Where MND has ‘dainty duck’, this has ‘dainty duke’ – it’s practically a tribute!). It also reminded me of Holofernes’ show in LLL and the various examples of ‘bad’ poetry in many of the comedies. But apparently it’s all Fletcher pastiching Shakespeare rather than Shakespeare.

- There is some confusion/debate about whether the jailer’s daughter joins in with the Morris dance in some capacity, as she goes off-stage with the bumpkins but it isn’t clear whether she comes back onstage with them when they return for the dance. I think she shouldn’t.

Scene 6 (Fletch)

Meanwhile, Arcite returns to Palamon with some swords and armour. They have a chat while they help each other put their armour on, and exchange compliments on each others’ valour. They have a short fight but before either of them can do any damage they hear hunting horns and the sound of hooves. Arcite realises it’s Theseus and co. He recommends Palamon should hide but Palamon doesn’t want to. Theseus arrives and condemns them for fighting in his kingdom, which is a capital offence. Palamon tells Theseus everything; that Arcite is the exiled prisoner, that he escaped from the jail, everything. They both make it clear that they’re in love with Emilia. She begs Theseus not to have them executed merely banished, as she doesn’t want them killed for her sake. But Arcite and Palamon both say they’d rather die than be forced to live without her. Theseus then asks Emilia to choose between them but she can’t, so Theseus decides to defer the decision, and tells Arcite and Palamon to come back in three months with three knights each, when they’ll have a contest to see who gets to marry Emilia and who has to die. 

- The contest is a bizarre kind of Gladiators thing where you have to try to touch a ‘pyramid’ (i.e. an obelisk) while preventing your opponent from doing so.

- Theseus and co are continuing their hunt, having resumed it after the Morris dance.

Act 4

Scene 1 (Fletch)

The jailer is informed that he’s been pardoned by Theseus. That’s the good news. The bad news is that his daughter has gone insane. Her ‘wooer’ – another character without a proper name – reports that he saw her standing in a pond, clutching some flowers, singing to herself, Ophelia-style. And she’d have drowned Ophelia-style too, if he hadn’t dragged her out in time. The daughter is then brought on, rambling about Palamon – who she now believes, in her madness, to be alive. She’s mentally all at sea, and her father and her wooer play along, leading her away as though they’re all on a boat.

- This scene mentions Pelops, a mythic character who’d not heard before, but who seems to have been a prototype Cyberman/Frankenstein’smonster. Cool!

Scene 2 (Shakey rewritten by Fletch?)

Emilia looks at portraits of Palamon and Arcite, and just can’t decide between them. A gentleman enters to inform her that it’s now several months later and Palamon and Arcite have returned for their duel, bringing three knights each. A messenger and Pirithous then launch into three mind-numbingly tedious descriptions of three of the knights, who are terribly butch.

 - This is the second occasion where the text contains a lot of Chaucer and is consequently dull.

Scene 3 (Fletch)

The jailer has called a doctor to treat his daughter. The daughter rambles like she’s Mad Tom in KL or something. As she is still convinced Palamon lives and is in love with her, the doctor suggests that her ‘wooer’ should dress up as Palamon and spend time with her as though he is Palamon, to use ‘falsehood’ to cure the falsehood of her insanity. 

- Oddly, this whole scene is in prose despite featuring a high-status character. Maybe it was an early draft or written in a rush?

Act 5

Scene 1 (first minute or so by Fletch, rest by Shakey)

Arcite and Palamon (along with their knights) each pray to Diana in her temple in Athens. After they’re done, Emilia enters and prays too.

- A scene seemingly designed to show off the special effects of the theatre, with supernatural music, the sound of thunder and battle, doves appearing out of thin air, and a magic tree rising up through the floor.

Scene 2 (Fletch)

The doctor has dressed the jailer’s daughter’s wooer up as Palamon. She seems to have been taken in by the deception and believes him to be Palamon. The doctor tells him to keep up the pretence, even if it means sleeping with her. ‘Wahey!’ says the wooer. ‘Whoa there!’, says the jailer. The daughter – who is still in a state of delusion – is then led away by wooer so that he can shag some sense into her. Then a messenger then in to tell them that the pyramid-off between Palamon and Arcite has started.

- The dodgy sexual politics recalls TS and TGV along with the ‘bed tricks’ of MM and AW (though in those cases it was a woman tricking her husband/fiancée into sleeping with her, whereas this is more in the rape-by-any-other-name The Boat that Rocked vein. A comedy all about DJs forcing themselves onto underage girls in the 1960s. What could possibly go wrong? It also brings to mind the end of Double Falsehood where Violante remains in love with Henriquez after he has raped her (and where he falls in love with her in the process). So if (as I believe) Double Falsehood is derived from Cardenio (the third, lost, Shakespeare/Fletcher collaboration) then we’re not exactly missing a masterpiece. Indeed, TNK also shares its problem of attempting to adapt a story to a play by stretching it out and adding an unrelated subplot, resulting in a play thin on incident and where the most interesting bits are the sections added by the authors.

Scene 3 (Shakey)

Rather than us getting to see the Arcite vs Palamon contest, we stay with Emilia as she listens to it from a distance (this is back in the woods, and in near darkness). She can’t bear to see two (or rather, eight) fellas fighting over her in the name of love. She hears various sound effects and eventually a messenger rushes in to tell her that Palamon has won, no, my mistake, it’s Arcite. Emilia decides this is good news, as she liked Arcite (she also liked Palamon, so it would’ve been good news either way). Theseus enters with Arcite and presents Emilia to him (‘Your prize’). Almost as an afterthought, he orders his men to have Palamon and his three knights put to death (it wasn’t a duel to the death, you see, just a game of touch-the-pyramid).

- As mentioned earlier, the decision to put the contest off-stage is odd, even anticlimactic after it’s long build-up, though I expect theatrical productions get around this problem by just sticking it on stage anyway. What’s also strange is the transition from this scene to the next, as they occur in the same location but scene 4 is approximately an hour later. Which makes me wonder whether we’re missing a scene with the jailer and his daughter in which it is established that she has been ‘cured’ (this is mentioned briefly in scene 4, but in a very perfunctory way bearing in mind how much of the play has been dedicated to the daughter). So maybe we’re missing a Fletch scene at this point? 

Scene 4 (Shakey)

Palamon is led on with his knights in preparation for their execution. The jailer pops by to inform Palamon that his (the jailer’s) daughter is cured and due to be married. Having never shown the slightest interest in the daughter before, not even having mentioned her, Palamon is pleased at this news. The executioner raises his axe and then, of course, a messenger rushes in telling him to stop. Pirithous enters with some good and bad news. The good news is that Palamon and his knights no longer have to be executed. The bad news is that this is because Arcite has just been fatally injured whilst horse-riding. Yes, all those lines about Arcite’s horsemanship were all a clever set-up! So now Emilia can marry Palamon and honour is satisfied. Arcite is brought on and tells Palamon he can have Emilia with his blessing. Palamon muses how awful it is when a babe comes between two bros and leads to one of those bros dying; ‘That we should things desire which do cost us the loss of our desire’ i.e. how bad it is that falling in love with Emilia has led to a situation where he wishes he wasn’t in love with Emilia. Theseus shrugs and says ‘that’s life’, Diana the god moves in mysterious ways, and says they’ll all cheer up once Palamon and Emilia are married.

- Pirithous’ description of Arcite’s death is rather lovely, probably the best bit of writing in the play, with the horse being startled by sparks created by its own hooves on the cobbles, and a dramatic description of Arcite struggling to regain control over the animal before it falls on top of him.

Epilogue (Fletch)

One of the cast comes on stage to apologise about the ending.

- Genuinely, I think this is what happens, as he addresses the audience with ‘No man smile? Then it goes hard, I see.’ He then begs the audience to be nice, bearing in mind their previous good work, or the company will go out of business and not be able to put on better plays in future.

So there you go. Not a great play, but its shortcomings are due to its source material not having enough incident to sustain a play, and due to odd decisions in the adaption (i.e. favouring some dull bits and putting the exciting bits off-stage). It all feels a bit drawn-out, except for the end, which is abrupt. The most interesting stuff in it is the stuff regarding the jailer’s daughter, who is by far the most interesting character in the play, but it seems we have Fletcher to thank for that, not Chaucer or Shakespeare (although, as I’ve mentioned, she is basically a dumbed-down copy of Ophelia, like Falstaff in MW is a dumbed-down version of the Falstaff of 1H4.)

And there we are. I’ve done all of Shakespeare. At last. Hooray.

What’s that? More? I hear you crying out for more?

Oh, all right. I’ll do Sir Thomas More too.