The Jew of Malta

I hadn't planned on seeing Red Bull Theater's reading of The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe, but when my friend Susan told me she had an extra ticket, how could I resist?

Matthew Rauch starred as Barabas, the titular character who might have influenced not just William Shakespeare's Shylock, but also a slew of villains from Aaron the Moor to Richard III to Iago.

Like Shylock, Barabas is a victim of unfair treatment, but his quest for revenge goes outside the bounds of what can be considered reasonable. At the beginning of the play he is stripped of all his possessions by Ferneze, the Governor of Malta. Ferneze was played in the reading by Derek Smith, who gave a memorable performance as Lodovico in Red Bull's previous production of the John Webster tragedy The White Devil.

While Barabas and Ferenze give unflattering depictions of leaders of the Jewish and Christian worlds, the Islamic world is represented by Selim-Calymath, the son of the Ottoman Emperor. While Marlowe doesn't make any of these leaders come off very well, I found Calymath to be the least odious, at least as portrayed by Jason Bowen, who was excellent a couple of years ago in Lynn Nottage's Crumbs from the Table of Joy.

By far, however, the most sympathetic character is Barabas's daughter Abigail, played by Priyanka Kedia. Her father first forces her to become a nun so that she can retrieve a treasure hidden in a convent, then makes her the center of a love triangle that kills two young men, including Ferneze's son Don Lodowick, played by Samuel Adams. Distraught, Abigail converts to Christianity so she can enter a convent for real, earning the scorn of her father.

Barabas's partner in crime (who later foolishly betrays him) is a slave from Thrace named Ithamore. Steven Boyer, who is perhaps best known for playing an emotionally disturbed teenager with a penchant for puppetry in the Robert Askins play Hand to God, was delightfully evil in the reading as Ithamore.

The play, which had its first recorded performance in 1592, is famous for its use of a cauldron in which the protagonist is boiled alive. Philip Henslowe's prop list for the Lord Admiral's Men listed a cauldron that was likely used in the play's premiere and subsequent revivals.

Red Bull is not slated to revive the play in a full production anytime soon, but they will be presenting a new adaptation of Molière's The Imaginary Invalid beginning this May. It's on my list of things to see!

BARS 2024

I’ve been in the United Kingdom for the 2024 conference of the British Association for Romantic Studies in Glasgow.

 

The conference kicked off on Tuesday with a talk by Michelle Levy on women writers and publishing. Though we often think of authors in the 18th and 19th centuries as selling their copyrights outright, Levy noted that this often was not the case. She gave particular attention to the poet Phillis Wheatley, who appears to have received half of the print run of her poems to sell herself for her own profit.

 

Next, I chaired a panel on Faustian Romanticism. Three speakers addressed how the Faust dramas of Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe influenced British Romantic writers. Martin Potter discussed Faustian elements in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, while also addressing the E.T.A. Hoffmann short story “The Sandman.” Liz Wan talked about how William Godwin’s novel St. Leon could be read as a Faust story, and Maddy Potter addressed Faustian elements in both John Polidori’s The Vampyre and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer.

 

Later in the afternoon, I went to a panel on P.B. Shelley, since multiple speakers were scheduled to address Shelley’s play The Cenci, with which I have a particular interest. Anna Mercer compared the play to Mary Shelley’s novel Valperga, which also features a Beatrice who suffers a horrible fate. She mentioned that Mary Shelley even quoted from her husband’s play in her journal long after he had died. Nora Crook later went into detail about the various manuscripts that the Shelleys might have had access to that discussed the story of Beatrice Cenci. She also drew parallels between the play and G.E. Lessing’s Emilia Galotti.

 

The final panel I attended on Tuesday was on remediating the supernatural. Natalie Tal Harries mentioned that Walter Scott collected books on witchcraft and demonology and justified his use of superstition in a note on his poem The Lady of the Lake. Orianne Smith also discussed Scott, focusing on his novel Guy Mannering, a book from which Sarah Siddons often performed readings after her retirement from the stage. The character of Meg Merrilies in the book became a favorite in stage adaptations of the novel. Haya Alwehaib spoke last, comparing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with The Arabian Nights. We then headed over to Glasgow City Chambers for a drinks reception in a beautiful setting.

 

Wednesday there was a plenary roundtable with Elizabeth Edwards, Craig Lamont, and Tim Fulford. My big activity for the day, though was chairing a session on Romanticism’s legacies in fantasy literature. Will Sherwood talked about William Blake’s influence on J.R.R. Tolkien, noting that while most people focus on how Tolkien’s work as a medievalist influenced his fiction, he was greatly influenced by Romantic writers as well. Annise Rogers discussed the Romantic legacy in Ben Aaronovitch’s fantasy series The Rivers of London. Jason Whittaker then spoke on the influence William Blake had on Glasgow’s own Alasdair Gray, who like Blake was both a writer and a visual artists. That evening, the conference banquet was held at Òran Mór, a restaurant in a former church that is graced by murals designed by Gray.

 

My own paper was scheduled for Thursday. I began the day at a panel on the Gothic. Samiha Begum discussed Ann Radcliffe, a writer who appears as a character in my own play The Mysteries of the Castle of the Monk of Falconara. Radcliffe, who was influenced by the paintings of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa, was propelled to fame with her novel The Romance of the Forest and received 500 pounds for her next book, The Mysteries of Udolpho at a time at which the average royalty payment for a novel was only 80 pounds. Interestingly enough, gossip recorded by Anna Seward held that Radcliffe had written Joanna Baillie’s anonymously published Plays on the Passions. I was also interested to hear Jakob Lipski speak on the 1803 historical novel Thaddeus of Warsaw and Laura Eastlake discuss links between vampires and volcanos.

 

In my completely neutral, unbiased, unprejudiced opinion, however, my panel was the best. It began with Bethan Elliott discussing the plays of Baillie (not Radcliffe). She quoted from an 1804 letter Baillie wrote to fellow dramatist William Sotheby. Though Sotheby (who had not had the success on stage that Baillie achieved) urged her to focus on “reading” plays rather than “acting” plays, Baillie held that the qualities that make a play good for acting also make it good for reading. Baillie was not snobbish about how her plays were performed, either, and in 1810 wrote to Walter Scott about being pleased that one of her plays had been performed at a fair. The one play Baillie wrote that she did not think was fit for performance was The Martyr, but that was because of its religious subject matter, not because she didn’t deem it an “actable” piece.

 

My paper was on J.H. Amherst’s play The Death of Christophe King of Hayti. Its depiction of armed women was naturally interesting to the third panelist, Sarah Burdett, who has written extensively on that subject. Her paper was on stage adaptations actresses had written of the poems of Walter Scott. Sarah Smith, who was a favorite of Scott’s, wrote adaptations of both The Lay of the Last Minstrel and The Lady of the Lake performed at the Crow Street Theatre in Dublin. Eliza Macauley, an actress who had a difficult relationship with the Crow Street Theatre, wrote an adaptation of Scott’s Marmion that took a character who only appears in a single Canto of the poem and made her the center of the adapted drama.

 

On Friday, conference delegates could opt for a trip to New Lanark and the Falls of Clyde, which provided some very dramatic landscapes. All in all, it was a wonderful conference!

Webster's Siblings

John Webster loved portraying disturbing sibling relationships in his plays. His first tragedy, The White Devil, is notable in that the beautiful adulteress Vittoria (the titular White Devil of the piece) is aided in her crimes by her brother Flamineo.

When all their plans go sour, Flamineo even proposes a suicide pact with his sister, suggesting she shoot him with a pistol and then kill herself. Vittoria dutifully shoots her brother, but not herself, only to be surprised when Flamineo rises from the ground, announcing he had not loaded the pistols he gave her.
 
This darkly comic twist turns tragic, though, when the enemies of the sister and brother arrive to dispatch them. Vittoria goes bravely to her death, and Flamineo quickly forgives her betrayal of him, remarking “Thou’rt a noble sister: / I love thee now.” United in life by their sinful actions, they unite in death, as Vittoria’s stoic resolve helps reconcile Flamineo to his fate.
 
The siblings in Webster’s next play, TheDuchess of Malfi, instead are at odds from the very beginning. In the first scene, the title character’s twin brother Ferdinand places a spy in the duchess’s household. He also sternly warns his sister, who is recently widowed, that she shouldn’t remarry. “They are most luxurious / Will wed twice,” he tells her, though he appears to be most concerned with losing her inheritance should she have children with a second husband.

Ferdinand schemes together with his elder brother, the Cardinal of Aragon, who also seeks to prevent their sister from marrying. The cardinal’s moralizing about the lusts of women is contradicted by the fact that he keeps a mistress himself. When the still youthful countess arranges a secret marriage to her steward, the play portrays it as the most natural thing in the world, and the murderous obsessions of the brothers with their sister’s sex life appear sick and perhaps even quasi-incestuous.

After completing The Duchess of Malfi, Webster wrote a third tragedy, The Guise, which sadly has been lost. Presumably, the play was about recent French history, so it might have resembled Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris. Fashions were changing, though, and tragicomedy was on the rise. Webster’s fourth and final solo play (he also had written and would continue to write numerous collaborative works) was one such tragicomedy, The Devil’s Law Case.

Like The White Devil and the Duchess of Malfi, the tragicomedy The Devil’s Law Case features siblings with a problematic relationship. Romelio, the villain of the piece, might have a name that resembles Romeo, but unlike Shakespeare’s hero, Romelio simply wants to use love and marriage to advance his own material ends. His sister Jolenta (whose name echoes Juliet) is courted by two different men, the noble Contarino and the valiant Ercole. However, Romelio can’t even fathom that they could be interested in her for love.

Romelio disparages Contarino in the opening scene, declaring: “He makes his colour / Of visiting us so often, to sell land, / And thinks, if he can gain my sister’s love, / To recover the treble value.” Other characters can recognize Contarino’s honest motives, but being a villain himself, Romelio can only see villainy in other men. He arranges for Jolenta to marry Ercole instead, though she clearly returns Contarino’s affections.

In the second act, the two rivals for Jolenta’s love quarrel and fight a duel, both receiving grievous injuries. Ercole appears to die, and Contarino, on the verge of death, writes his will, naming Jolenta his heir. Learning this, Romelio resolves to kill Contarino before he can recover, hoping to secure the inheritance for himself. As in The Duchess of Malfi, a scheming brother is more concerned with his sister’s property than her happiness.
 
Romelio’s villainy goes even further though, since he has gotten a nun pregnant, and is hoping to pass off his bastard as Jolenta’s child by Ercole. That way, Jolenta will receive not just Contarino’s estate, but through her child, Ercole’s estate as well. Though he badgers Jolenta into cooperating at first, she ultimately flees from him, attempting to escape to Rome together with the poor nun her brother got knocked up.
 
Because this is a tragicomedy, Ercole turns out to still be alive, and Contarino recovers from his wounds (ironically, because of Romelio’s assassination attempt). Romelio’s villainy is so great, though, that his own mother files a law suit claiming (falsely) that she cheated on her husband. This could get Romelio declared a bastard, ensuring that all inheritances stay with Jolenta.

That isn’t necessary in the end, and order and justice are restored in the fifth act. Still, if this is how Webster portrays siblings in his plays, one hopes he was an only child!

The Rival Queens

Nathaniel Lee's Restoration-era tragedy The Rival Queens tells the story of the death of Alexander the Great through the lens of the women in his life.

Wait... Alexander the Great... and women? Well, yes. Many of the stories about Alexander that circulated in early modern Europe linked him to various women he was alleged to have loved.

For instance, in Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus the Emperor asks to see the paramour of Alexander. This paramour is presumably Thais, a courtesan who allegedly convinced the conqueror to burn the famed palace of Persepolis.

While Thais is name-checked in The Rival Queens, the play focuses instead on Roxana, his first wife, and Statira, a Persian princess he married as part of a plan to unify Greek and Persian civilizations. When the play opens, Statira is distraught because Alexander had promised her he would never bed Roxana again, but he seems to have broken that promise. Statira's opening lines show her in a conventional state of grief:

               Give me a knife, a draught of poison, flames!

               Swell, heart, break, break, thou stubborn thing!

               Now, by the sacred fire, I'll not be held!

               Why do ye wish me life, yet stifle me

               For want of air? pray give me leave to walk.

When Alexander hears how upset Statira is, he blames his hook-up with Roxana on beer goggles, claiming she seduced him while he was drunk. He professes his undying love for Statira and asks her mother and sister to help him win her back again. If he cannot, he vows to renounce his empire and live out the remainder of his life in the countryside, forsaking worldly glory.

The third act introduces Statira's rival queen, Roxana. She is determined to not have to share Alexander, and proclaims:

               Roxana and Statira, they are names

               That must forever jar; eternal discord,

               Fury, revenge, disdain, and indignation

               Tear my swoll'n breast, make way for fire and tempest.

Well, that's just fine with Alexander, who doesn't want anything to do with Roxana anymore, anyway. Celebrating his reconciliation with Statira, he invites his faithful soldiers to a feast. It is at that feast that a group of conspirators plans to poison Alexander, and they attempt to gain the aid of Roxana. Instead of helping them slay her lover, she resolves to murder her rival.

That murder occurs in the play's climactic fifth act. The two rival queens meet, and Roxana kills Statira while Alexander himself is also dying of poison. And what of Hephestion, the notorious male lover of Alexander? Well, he appears in the play, but as a suitor for the hand of Statira's sister. Lee also banishes Hephestion from the fifth act of the play, having his death merely reported.

The emphasis on the female characters might be linked to the fact that they were played by... well... women. The play's epilogue threatens to return boy actors to the stage in women's roles if the audience does not leave the professional female actresses alone. Lee wrote The Rival Queens sometime around 1676 or 1677, so women on the professional English stage were still a relatively new phenomenon. Perhaps, then, it should be unsurprising that a Restoration-era tragedy about Alexander focused on his relationships with women.

Faust 2.0

Last night I saw the Mabou Mines production of Faust 2.0 at 122 Community Center, formerly known as P.S. 122.

P.S. 122 first became a performance space in 1980, taking over the former home of Public School 122. It was always a dirty, dingy building where you could see magnificent theatre. I remember catching a great production of Bertolt Brecht's Saint Joan of the Stockyards there with a huge cast of young, fully committed actors.

A few years ago, the whole building was shut down to be extensively remodeled. Last night, I walked into the box office, which is now around the side of the building and fully handicapped accessible, rather than up the steep steps I remembered from before the renovation. The place was so... clean! Not a speck of dust or dirt to be seen.

The second part of Goethe's Faust is a notoriously difficult text, but this adaptation by Matthew Maguire ambitiously tries to pack as much of it into a brief time span as it can. The first scenes in the show are actually from the first part of Faust, where Mephistopheles makes a bet with God and then forms his pact with the melancholy Doctor Faust.

In the traditional version of the story, as told by Christopher Marlowe, Faust is given unlimited knowledge and power for 24 years, after which time he must surrender his body and soul to the devil. Goethe changes the bargain to Faust agreeing to give himself up if he ever lies down in inaction. As he says in the David Luke translation:

               If ever to the moment I shall say:
               Beautiful moment, do not pass away!
               Then you may forge your chains to bind me,
               Then I will put my life behind me,
               Then let them hear my death-knell toll,
               Then from your labours you'll be free,
               The clock may stop, the clock-hands fall,
               And time come to an end for me!

In German, the phrase that is supposed to bring about Faust's damnation is "Verweile doch, du bist so schön!" Literally it means "Stay there! You are so beautiful!" Maguire renders this as something like, "Stop, linger there a while." It might not be the most exact translation, but it captures the spirit, and is better than Walter Kaufmann's overly poetic "Abide, you are so fair" which has become something of a standard version.

After setting up the situation, Faust 2.0 launches into the second part of Goethe's massive dramatic poem. The first act of Faust Part Two deals with Faust and the Emperor, who is of course the Holy Roman Emperor of a Christian Europe, but in the Mabou Mines production, director Sharon Ann Fogarty portrays him as a classical ruler of the Roman Empire. He is played campily by Greg Mehrten, who appears on video screen. Most of the cast, in fact, appears only on screen, lending the production an air of artificiality that corresponds with the self-consciousness of the second part of Goethe's epic drama.

Faust 2.0 basically skips over the second act of Goethe, eliminating the Homunculus and the classically inspired Walpurgisnacht. Instead, we go to the magnificent third act where Faust brings back Helen of Troy, played here by Angelina Impellizzeri. She and Faust have a son, Euphorion, played by 7th grader Oliver Medlin. Goethe probably meant Euphorion to be based upon Lord Byron, whose youthful spirit flamed out in an early death, and the boy's destruction weighs heavily on his parents. Helen sinks down into Hades, and Faust (played rather feelingly in this moment by Benton Greene) becomes distraught.

After the death of his son, Faust turns to war, aiding the emperor in a battle against his rival, and then in the final act to attempting to improve the world by driving back the sea. At last achieving something he deems worth doing, Faust utters the forbidden phrase and dies. Paul Kandel, who plays Mephistopheles, is wonderful as he gloats over the fallen Faust, but he doesn't have the last laugh, as readers of Goethe know.

It isn't every day you get to see a production of Faust Part Two, so if you're interested in this modern reimagining, be sure to get your tickets.

Back from England

I'm back now from England, where I was visiting my sister for the holidays, but also got a chance to see some great theatre.

On Boxing Day, I went ice skating at Canary Wharf, and in the evening we had tickets to see Hadestown at the National Theatre. Unfortunately, the intimate show got a little lost in the larger space of the Olivier Theatre, though it was still nice to hear the music again live.

As I previously wrote, I visited the Foundling Museum the following day, where there was a small exhibit on the actress Kitty Clive. They also had on display a famous cartoon lampooning John Philip Kemble and the Old Price Riots. Portraying Kemble as "King John" it makes reference to an old nursery rhyme, stating:

        This is the Manager full of scorn,
        who rais'd the price to the people forlorn.
        & employed the Thief-taker shaven & shorn,
        that took John Bull with his buglehorn,
        who hissed the Cat engaged to squall,
        to the poor in the pigeon holes, over the Boxes.
        let to the Great that visit the House that Jack Built.

The House named in the rhyme is Covent Garden, which Kemble rebuilt at great expense, then raising the prices of tickets to recoup his investment. When protests broke out inside the theatre, Kemble hired thugs to enforce decorum, but that apparently didn't stop crowds from hissing the opera singer Angelica Catalani, the Cat in the poem.

Friday, we took the train out to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Timon of Athens. The play was done quite well, but I was mostly excited to see the hometown of William Shakespeare. I hadn't been to Stratford since the 1990s, and while I got to see Shakespeare's grave at Holy Trinity Church then, I missed seeing the Bard's birthplace. This time, the birthplace was at the top of my list of things to see. It was decked out for the holidays and quite a sight to see, as was Holy Trinity at night. I wandered about the graveyard, much to my sister's consternation, but it was incredibly picturesque.

We spent the night in Stratford, and in the morning visited the site of New Place. The house, which was once the grandest in Town, was bought by Shakespeare after he became successful, but its owner in the 18th century burned it down out of spite. So what is there to see now? Beautiful, beautiful gardens. Though New Place no longer looks like it did in Shakespeare's day, it is well worth seeing. It's also right near the Chaucer's Head Book Shop, where I picked up a couple of choice finds, and while you're in the neighborhood, make sure to also check out the Guild Chapel.

A little further away is Hall's Croft, where Shakespeare's daughter Susanna lived with her husband, the doctor John Hall. The building is remarkably well preserved, and also has a nice garden. It also had (appropriately enough) an exhibit on period medicine. Though Shakespeare never lived in the house, he was likely a frequent visitor. Walking around, you still get a sense of the type of atmosphere that surrounded Shakespeare in Stratford.

We had to get back to London for Sunday, though, when we had tickets to see Christopher Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Seeing the show by candlelight was a real treat. The following day (New Year's Eve) I visited the Tate Britain, where they had on display a portrait of Mary Ann Yates in Arthur Murphy's play The Orphan of China, itself a reworking of a zaju play by Ji Junxiang.

After welcoming in the New Year, we visited Kensington Palace, which had on display costumes from the recent film The Favourite. After touring the palace, we went to the Victoria and Albert Museum, where I of course had to see the theatre collection. They had on view the Royal Patent which Charles II gave to Thomas Killigrew in 1662. That patent gave Killigrew a near monopoly on theatre produced in London, though he still had to compete with William Davenant, who had a similar patent.

I spent most of the following day in Greenwich, where (among other things) I toured the Queen's House, designed by Inigo Jones, who also designed masques during the Jacobean era. That night, we had tickets to see Danai Gurira's play The Convert at the Young Vic. I enjoyed the play thoroughly. However, the Young Vic is located dangerously across the street from The Bookshop Theatre, where I picked up a few more books to load down my luggage for the return trip.

The next day there was a trip to Pollock's Toy Shop, where I picked up the colored prints to make a toy theatre of Oliver Twist. I already have a modern toy theatre of another Charles Dickens novel, Great Expectations, but that is a modern design. These prints are facsimiles of actually 19th-century designs. When I will actually have time to build a toy theatre with them remains to be seen, but I'm glad I have them.

My final day in London was spent on another Dickensian errand: visiting the newly rediscovered portrait of the author at Philip Mould & Co. While on my way there, what did I pass but the site of the house where the actress Nell Gwyn once lived!

So it was a trip with many theatrical connections. It's good to be back, however, and now I need to settle in and do some writing. Happy New Year!

Faustus by Candlelight

I just got back from seeing Christopher Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus performed by candlelight at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in London.

The production has certain parallels with the version of Timon of Athens I saw on Friday in Stratford-upon-Avon, in that both took male-heavy plays and recast not just the leads but a number of the principal roles as women.

Jocelyn Jee Esien plays a quite feminine Faustus in this production. Is that Miss Faustus or Mrs. Faustus? Ahem, that's Doctor Faustus to you! Playing the role in a full dress and jewelry--and surrounded by books--Esien is 100% woman and 100% intellectual.

She summons up Pauline McLynn as Mephistopheles. Dressed in red and with flaming red hair, she wears a combination of an Elizabethan dress and tight-fitting trousers. This Mephistopheles has no problem pushing back at Faustus, and Esien's Faustus openly mocks her in return.

Wagner is played by Mandi Symonds, who also doubles as the Old Man (changed to an Old Woman) at the end of the play. Hers is a comparatively serious Wagner compared to some of the ones I have seen in the past. However, we don't get to see Wagner conjure demons in imitation of Faustus, or gain a comic follower of his (err... her) own.

Doctor Faustus has both an A and B text, but this version seems to hew more to the B text published in 1616. Personally, I tend to favor the A text, but this production does a good job of taking some of the goofier scenes from the B text and performing them with class. (I just hope no one had to sell their soul to do it!)

Defense of Poesy

I've always admired the poetry of Sir Philip Sidney, though his great work of literary and dramatic criticism, The Defense of Poesy, still makes him sound to me like a bit of a wet blanket.

Sidney wrote the essay around 1579, so it was before most of the great works of the Elizabethan era had been composed. Shakespeare's plays were still a good ten years off at the time, and even Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd hadn't begun to pen dramas.

The one English play Sidney singles out as worthy is Gorboduc by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville. That play, which was first performed in 1561 and later published in 1565, bears remarkable resemblances to the later King Lear by Shakespeare. Both involve the division of the Kingdom of Britain by an elderly monarch amongst his children, and both feature a Duke of Albany and a Duke of Cornwall.

What Norton and Sackville did that was truly innovative was introduce the use of blank verse to English drama. By writing the play in unrhymed iambic pentameter, they set a precedent used by most later Elizabethan dramas. Sidney called Gorboduc "full of stately speeches and well-sounding phrases, climbing to the height of Seneca's style." Still, he claimed it was "faulty both in place and time" since "the stage should always represent but one place" and "but one day" at the most.

Sidney's railings against improbability seem to be answered with a Bronx cheer from Shakespeare's play The Winter's Tale. Sidney objects to plays "where you shall have Asia of the one side, and Afric of the other, and so many other under-kingdoms, that the player, when he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is." The Winter's Tale begins with two lords discussing the kingdoms of Bohemia and Sicilia, and when the action moves from Sicilia to the sea coast of (the notoriously landlocked) Bohemia, Antigonus declares "Thou art perfect, then, our ship hath touched upon / The deserts of Bohemia?"

Offending against the unity of time is an even worse offense for Sidney. He complains how in English plays "ordinary it is that two young princes fall in love; after many traverses she is got with child, delivered of a fair boy, he is lost, groweth a man, falleth in love, and is ready to get another child,--and all this in two hours' space." Well, yes, that sounds like The Winter's Tale, too! The child born in Act II is shown getting engaged to be married in Act IV. As if to thumb his nose at critics like Sidney, Shakespeare has the character of Time come forth as a chorus at the beginning of Act IV to beg, "Impute it not a crime / To me or my swift passage that I slide / O'er sixteen years."

Sidney did consider that a crime, but fortunately Shakespeare did not. And if you want to see how his very un-Sidneyan play turned out, you're in luck. Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey will be performing The Winter's Tale beginning next week!