Into the Light

Marc Castle's new play Into the Light (which I'm directing) opens tonight, so get your tickets while you can!

In addition to writing the play, Marc Castle is starring as Sol, a newly departed soul who arrives in the hereafter only to find that none of the people waiting for him there are the ones he expected. Marc's previous plays have been done at EST, the Neighborhood Playhouse, and La Mama. In another age, he toured as a child actor in the first national company of the musical Camelot. He later wrote about it in his one-man show One Brief Shining Moment.

Acting opposite Marc is Terri Campion, who also wrote My Girl, one of the one-acts going up together with Into the Light. She's perhaps best known for her novel, Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, but she also has a long list of acting credits, including Hetty in Alice Gerstenberg's Overtones at Metropolitan Playhouse and Clytemnestra in Euripides's Iphigenia in Aulis with Greeks & Company.

Ralph Pachoda appears in the play as Jake, an old acquaintance of Sol's. Ralph is a regular at ARTC's weekly developmental workshop, but he also has had a long career as a classical actor. He appeared Off-Broadway as Creon opposite James Earl Jones in Oedipus by Sophocles. He also did a national tour of Lanford Wilson's Talley's Folly with Maryanne Plunkett.

Rounding out the cast is Jeannie Dalton, who plays Sol's mother Goldie. She's a brilliant comic actress who has played everything from Dunyasha in Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard to Raina in Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man to Puck in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream to Fanny in Eric Overmyer's On the Verge to Elmire in Moliere's Tartuffe. 

After tonight, we have only three more performances as part of the Two by Four festival playing at HB Studio's 124 Bank Street Theater. We're on again tomorrow, January 24th at 7pm, Sunday the 25th at 3pm, and then our final performance is on Tuesday the 27th at 7pm. I hope to see you there!

Kean, Dumas, Sartre

Edmund Kean has been called the greatest actor of the Romantic era, perhaps even the greatest actor of all time. (Kean wouldn't disagree with that.) However, his genius also attracted other geniuses, and he became the subject of a play by Alexandre Dumas that was later adapted for the 20th-century stage by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Dumas's play Kean is a comedy, while the actual Kean's life was more of a tragedy. (Like Molière, he collapsed onstage and subsequently died.) The play premiered in 1836--just three years after Kean's death--at the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris. No mention of the actor's famous death is made in the piece, as Dumas's play ends happily. It originally starred Frédérick Lemaître in the title role. Lemaître was a highly respected performer, and would go on to originate another title role in Victor Hugo's play Ruy Blas.

The play opens at a society soirée attended by the Danish ambassador and his wife, Elena, who is rumored to be in love with Edmund Kean. The fact is Kean had many lovers, but I'm not familiar with his ever being linked with the wife of a Danish ambassador. It hardly matters, since the scene is an excuse for Kean to at first decline an invitation to the party, and then show up and make a brilliant speech, entreating Elena to read aloud a letter. He then quietly asks her to flip the letter over and read the other side, which is an invitation to a private assignation with him.

Act II takes place in Kean's chambers. (In Sartre's adaptation, it's explicitly his dressing room at the theatre.) Dumas's stage directions state: "Au lever du rideau, le théâtre présente toutes les traces d’une orgie." (As the curtain rises, the theatre presents all the signs of an orgy.) A woman arrives in disguise, but it's not Elena, rather another woman, Anna, who wants to learn acting from Kean.

The third act takes place at the tavern of Peter Patt, which is called the Black Horse in Sartre's adaptation. This might be based on the Coal Hole, a pub Kean frequented with the members of his infamous Wolves Club. Kean agrees to act the role of Romeo at a benefit for a performer down on his luck. Kean was considered weak in that part, so Sartre changed it to Othello.

The performance is a disaster and causes a scandal which Kean is only extricated from by Anna. The French versions of Kean's life--both Dumas's and Sartre's--are historically inaccurate and leave out his wife Mary and son Charles. Still, they are a great deal of fun.

The Imaginary Invalid

Molière's final play, The Imaginary Invalid, is difficult to perform as written. Prior to last night, the only time I'd seen the piece on stage was in a creative re-imagining by Mabou Mines.

One of the biggest challenges of the play is that its plot-based scenes alternate with balletic musical sequences in the pastoral style. How on earth do you stage those interludes, especially when love-lorn shepherds no longer have the cultural power they used to enjoy?

The solution playwright Jeffrey Hatcher came up with for the adaptation Red Bull Theater Company now has playing at New World Stages is kind of brilliant. The play's characters end up singing some of the most stereotypically French songs ever composed with re-written lyrics all about sheep.

This goofiness is right at home on Beowulf Borritt's ridiculously fanciful set. The result is not exactly Molière, but very much in the comic spirit of the original play. Molière famously collapsed on stage while playing the hypochondriac lead Argan, later dying without receiving last rites, thanks to the controversy surrounding his earlier play Tartuffe. In the current production, the leading role goes to Mark Linn-Baker. (Who, unlike Molière, will hopefully outlive the run of the show!)

In many ways, though, the best role in the play is Argan's maid, Toinette. Red Bull's production features the tremendously talented Sarah Stiles as the put-upon servant who understands things far more clearly than her master. Stiles, best known for her performance as Jessica in Hand to God, finds comic gold in a messed-up medical system, as does Arnie Burton, who plays not one but three different doctors, each with their own unique quirks.

Argan's daughter Angélique was originally played by Molière's wife, Armande Béjart. Emilie Kouatchou, most famous as the final Christine in The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway, takes on that role in the current production. (When Kouatchou sings re-written Phantom lyrics to extoll the virtues of sheep, those in on the joke go into hysterics.) Equally hilarious in this production is Angélique's stepmother Béline, played by Emily Swallow (whom you will not recognize as the Armorer on The Mandalorian).

The show, directed by Red Bull's artistic director, Jesse Berger, is only playing through June 29th, so see it while you can!

Versailles Impromptu

After the critical reception of his comedy The School for Wives, the French dramatist Molière wrote two one-act defenses of himself, The Critique of School for Wives and The Versailles Impromptu, the latter of which shows the playwright's own company attempting to rehearse a play for the king.

Molière, who originated the role of Arnolphe in The School for Wives, appears as himself, attempting to wrangle a troupe of actors into finishing the rehearsal on time. He is annoyed by a group of busybodies who constantly interrupt the rehearsal. The one-act comedy shows not just the rehearsal, but a play-within-the-play, in which characters discuss Molière's work, much as they had in The Critique of School for Wives. Silly characters speculate on who is being attacked in Molière's plays, while sensible ones take his comedies for being mere fictions.

To say all of this is a bit meta is perhaps an understatement. Molière had only recently married Armande Béjart, a young actress who had also appeared as Élise in The Critique of School for Wives. She appeared on stage as herself in The Versailles Impromptu, berating her husband (playing himself), who had also written the play. When he calls her names in exasperation, she remarks quite reasonably, "you wouldn’t have said that to me a year and a half ago" while he was still courting her. Though Molière wrote the play, he appears to give his wife the better argument.

Also appearing in the play is Mademoiselle Du Parc, an actress known more for her tragic portrayals than her comedy. When Molière tells her she is to play an affected young lady, she responds (presumably in an affected manner) "How could that be, when there’s nobody in the world less affected than I am?" I imagine that Du Parc was in on the joke, even if it was at her expense. Historically, she thrived as a part of Molière's company, though she later left (at the instigation of the tragic dramatist Jean Racine) to join a rival company at the Hôtel de Bourgogne.

The whole play is filled with in jokes. Most of the major actors in Molière's company make appearances as exaggerated versions of themselves, including Catherine de Brie, who originated the role of Agnès in The School for Wives, and Brécourt, who was the original Alain. We probably don't get half the jokes today, but it's still fun to read the play and envision what one of Molière's rehearsals was really like. I imagine they were quite dramatic, even if not quite as outrageous as the one in the play!

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!

The Bourgeois Gentleman

We don't know exactly when the French playwright Moliere was born, but he was baptized on the 15th of January, 1622.

Of course, Moliere was his stage name, so he was baptized Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, not Moliere. In honor of the anniversary of his baptismal day today, I read his play Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, which is generally translated as The Bourgeois Gentleman.

The play premiered in 1670, at which point Moliere was already famous for writing The Blunderer, Sganarelle, and The School for Wives, and infamous for writing Tartuffe, Don Juan, and a scandalous adaptation of Amphitryon. This time, however, he would flatter the court of Louis XIV and make fun of the rising middle class.

Moliere himself played the titular character, Monsieur Jourdain, who is merely bourgeois, but has pretensions of being a gentleman. He receives lessons from a music master, a dancing master, a fencing master, and a philosophy master. Though Moliere was a magnificent poet, the play is mostly written in prose. This leads to a comic moment, when Jourdain famously exclaims: "On my conscience, I have spoken prose above these forty years, without knowing anything of the matter...."

Armande Bejart, who was married to Moliere, played Jourdain's daughter Lucile. As often happens in Moliere's plays, the protagonist's daughter is in love with one man, but he wants to marry her off to someone else. In this case, the social climbing Jourdain fixates on the idea of marrying his daughter to a son of the Ottoman Emperor. The year before, an Ottoman ambassador had refused to bow before the king, creating quite a scandal, so the play's aristocratic audiences probably enjoyed the idea of making fun of the Turks as well.

In the play, Lucile's lover dresses up as a Turk and pretends to be the son of the Ottoman Emperor. There's a lot of goofy fake Turkish, as he and his servant fool Jourdain into thinking that they're actually from the court of the Ottomans. The plan works, and all ends happily.

The composer Jean-Baptiste Lully composed music for the piece. The score survives, and what I've heard of it sounds fun. I'd love to see a production someday using the original music!

Kleist's Amphitryon

The Roman playwright Plautus turned the story of Hercules's conception by Jupiter into a comedy, but the mingling of gods and heroes in a comedic form must have seemed odd to contemporary audiences, since the play's prologue refers to the drama as a "tragicomedy"--the first known use of that term.

Since that time, numerous other dramatists have adapted Plautus's play, perhaps most famously Moliere, but Moliere's version was taken even further by the German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist. In his Amphitryon, Kleist kept Moliere's introduction of a wife for the servant character Sosa. (She is named Cleanthis in Moliere's text and Charis in Kleist's version.) However, Kleist also added a philosophic complexity lacking in both Plautus and Moliere.

According to myth, the god Jupiter took on the form of the Theban general Amphitryon while he was on a military campaign. Jupiter then slept with Amphitryon's wife Alcmena, conceiving on that night the great hero Hercules. Yes, there are consent issues here, but this is resolved in Plautus's version of the story by the fact that Jupiter is--you know--a god. In the court of Louis XIV, belief in pagan deities couldn't excuse Jupiter's deceptive sexual practices, which meant that some critics interpreted Moliere's play as a satire on the king's numerous affairs.

Instead of drawing attention to the dubious sexual practices of the powerful, Kleist focused on issues of identity that are raised by the story. When Jupiter appears with Alcmena in the first act, he tells her that he is an Olympian who descended to earth as a "sacrifice to love." But when he tries to tell her the truth, she doesn't understand him. Rather, she trusts her eyes, which tell her he is her husband. Jupiter asks her to cherish him as her true beloved, and not merely as her legal spouse. Alcmena responds that he is both, but the god presses on, saying to her:

     Alcmena dearest, what I feel for you

     Outsoars, you see, as far as to the sun,

     What any husband owes you. Disaccustom

     Yourself, beloved, to your spouse,

     Make a distinction between me and him.

Though she doesn't quite understand what the god means, Alcmena does agree to cherish the night she has just spent with him above what Jupiter calls the "humdrum days of further married life." When he leaves, Alcmena declares that he must be drunk, but then so is she. Presumably, her drunkenness is not from alcohol, but the intoxication of having loved a deity.

The play's second act goes into further detail about the nature of love between mortals and gods. After a tense confrontation between Alcmena and the real Amphitryon--who has been out in the field of battle, and has no memory of the sweet encounter she believes to have been with him--poor Alcmena is about at her wit's end. Jupiter returns, once again in the disguise of her husband, and attempts to comfort her. Though Alcmena has been loving Jupiter in the guise of Amphitryon, the god contends that in her religious devotions, she has always loved Amphitryon in the guise of Jupiter. He asks her:

     Who is it that you pray to at his altar?

     Is it to him up there above the clouds?

     Can your engrossed mind ever comprehend him?

     Or can your feelings, in their wonted nest

     There spread their pinions in such flight? And is

     It not Amphitryon, your beloved, always,

     Before whom you bow to the dust?

Alcmena protests that she cannot pray to "white marble walls" but must envision someone's features when she prays to Jupiter. The god accepts that she must have someone to picture when worshiping a deity, but gets her to promise that she will only envision the man who took her on the previous night. In a further promise, Alcmena swears to stay beside him and cling to him as a god, even if Amphitryon should appear before her.

This is precisely what happens in the third act. The general returns again, and meets Alcmena in the company of Jupiter. Since both Amphitryon and Jupiter appear identical, the assembled citizens ask Alcmena to declare which one is her true husband. She chooses Jupiter, who has been standing beside her. This sends the general into a fit, but when Jupiter reveals himself, he proclaims a divine blessing, saying:

     Let your black woe and care be now dispelled,

     And open up your heart to triumph.

     What you, in me, did to yourself, will not

     Harm you before my everlasting nature.

     If you find your reward amid my fault,

     Then I hail you in friendly words, and leave you.

     Your fame shall henceforth find, as my world finds,

     Its boundaries and limits in the stars.

The awe Alcmena feels before such infinite majesty goes beyond words. The last line she has (which is also the last line of the play) is simply: "Ach!" Kleist's reverence for Jupiter is not found in his pagan source, which gives the last line to Amphitryon. Instead of crying out with inexpressible emotion, the general in Plautus's play simply asks the audience for applause.

What we get in Kleist's version is not paganism as it was, but rather paganism filtered through German Romanticism. While Plautus saw the myth of Amphitryon as an opportunity to get laughs, Kleist viewed it as a window into the sublime.

The Busie Body

Susanna Centlivre was one of the most famous British dramatists of the early eighteenth century. She wrote nineteen plays, but today her reputation rest on only three of them, The Busie Body, The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret, and A Bold Stroke for a Wife.

Of those three, The Busie Body was the most popular throughout the eighteenth century. The piece borrows freely from Molière's The Bungler as well as John Dryden's adaptation of that play, Sir Martin Mar-all. Centlivre added much of her own humor, however, as can be seen in this exchange from Act I:

Charles: My Lady Wrinkle, Sir, why she has but one Eye.

Sir Francis: Then she'll see but half your Extravagance, Sir.

The plot is as ridiculous as most eighteenth-century comedies. Charles is in love with the beautiful Isabenda, but her father, Sir Jealous Traffick, is obsessed with all things Spanish, and is determined to marry her off to a Spanish husband. Meanwhile, Charles's father Sir Francis is set upon marrying his pretty little ward, Miranda, and getting his hands on her thirty-thousand-pound inheritance.

Miranda is in love with Charles's friend, Sir George Airy, though she pretends to dote on her guardian in order to humor him. Into this web of affections walks Marplot, a well-meaning but bungling gentleman who seems to mangle everything he touches. "Lord, Lord, how little Curiosity some People have," Marplot says, adding just in case we didn't get the title's reference: "Now my chief Pleasure lies in knowing every Body's Business."

Just as Hamlet must by indirections find directions out, Miranda must sometimes say the opposite of what she means in order to get what she wants. In Act III, she connives a way to make Marplot unwittingly set up a tryst with her lover, Sir George, saying, "advise him to keep from the Garden Gate on the left Hand; for if he dares to saunter there, about the Hour of Eight, as he used to do, he shall be saluted with a Pistol or a Blunderbuss." George has never met her at this gate, but now he knows not only which gate to find her at, but also at which hour to come!

Poor Marplot never catches on, and when Miranda later hides George behind a chimney-board, pretending she is keeping a pet monkey, the busy-body announces that he's a crack monkey trainer. Marplot later complains he never could have guessed Miranda was engaging in a deception. "Who cou'd divine your Meaning, when you talk'd of a Blunderbuss, who thought of a Rendevous?" he asks, "and when you talk'd of a Monkey, who the Devil dreamt of Sir George?" Miranda replies that this just proves he has no knowledge of women, since he "can't reconcile Contradictions."

The fifth act shows the young people at last outmaneuvering parents and guardians. George dresses as a Spaniard to hoodwink Sir Jealous, and Miranda uses the promise to marry Sir Francis to get control over her estate and a license to marry George. What makes the play stand out, however, is not the mechanisms of its plot, but the insights of its heroine, Miranda. In the last act, she reflects:

Now to avoid the Impertinence and Roguery of an old Man, I have thrown my self into the Extravagance of a young one; if he shou'd despise, slight or use me ill, there's no Remedy from a Husband, but the Grave; and that's a terrible Sanctuary to one of my Age and Constitution.

The brief soliloquy isn't enough to spoil the mood of the play's silly ending, but it does provide some depth lacking in other plays of the period. Perhaps this is what helped The Busie Body to become one of the top comedies of the eighteenth century.

Herr Tartüff

Molière's comedy Tartuffe has produced numerous adaptations, but perhaps few as original as F.W. Murnau's silent film Herr Tartüff.

Murnau is one of those directors who has always fascinated me. After serving in the German army during the First World War, he made the terrifying horror film Nosferatu, based on Bram Stoker's Dracula. He later filmed the innovative comedy The Last Laugh as well as his re-imagining of Tartuffe, before adapting for film what is probably an even more famous play, Goethe's Faust.

Herr Tartüff really is a reimagining, as it departs significantly from Molière's play. The film uses a framing device in which an old man is being slowly poisoned by his housekeeper. The old man's grandson comes for a visit, but gets thrown out for being a good-for-nothing actor. Being an actor, however, he is able to disguise himself and visit the house with a traveling cinema. He then shows a film based on Tartuffe and exposes the housekeeper's hypocrisy.

Because the silent film can't use Molière's witty dialogue, it has to find other ways to tell the story. I was mainly watching to see the scene in Act IV of the play where Orgon hides under a table while the hypocrite Tartuffe tries to seduce his wife. In the film, Orgon hides behind a curtain, and just when the hypocrite is about to make his move, he sees the husband's face in a reflection. Immediately, he resumes his pious act, and Orgon becomes more convinced of his friend's saintliness than ever before.

That just stretches the action out longer, though, as the film has another scene that takes place that night, where Orgon's wife Elmire goes even further with Herr Tartüff, this time in a room that contains a bed! The faithful maid Dorine forces Orgon to watch through a keyhole, though, and the impostor is unmasked.

Lil Dagover, who played the heroine in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, takes on the part of Elmire, and is stunning in the role. If you're interested, you can watch the whole film here.

The Original Tartuffe

 Moliere's classic attack on religious hypocrisy, Tartuffe, originally premiered as a three-act play on May 12, 1664. The playwright's enemies were not impressed.

Immediately, the very people Moliere had criticized began to attack the play. The original script is now lost, so we don't know how much this early version resembles the text we have today. What we do know is that after it was performed at the Palace of Versailles, it was immediately condemned.

Tartuffe criticizes people who pretend to be pious, but actually are just after sex, money, and power. Religious conservatives urged King Louis XIV to ban the play, which he did, though he added that he did not doubt the good intentions of the author. Undeterred, Moliere not only revised the piece but actually expanded it into five acts.

This new version of the play premiered in November at the Chateau de Raincy outside of Paris. The King seems to have encouraged Moliere in his revising of the play, and in 1665 he even extended his patronage directly to Moliere's company. This did not stop calls to ban the piece, though, and the writer struggled to mount productions, often as private performances due to the extreme hostility toward the piece.

While Moliere was concerned with the social conditions surrounding the play, he was also concerned with providing a vehicle for the actors of his company, and they seem to have each left a mark on the piece. The writer himself played Orgon, the obsessed dupe who cares about nothing so much as his pseudo-holy  houseguest Tartuffe. Philibert Gassot, known by the stage name of Du Croisy, played the title character.

Armande Bejart, who was by then known as Mademoiselle Moliere, played Orgon's wife, Elmire, while Madeleine Bejart played the sassy maid, Dorine. Madeleine had co-founded the Illustre Theatre troupe with Moliere in 1643. Though the two were romantically involved on and off in the past, Moliere had ended up marrying Armande. And while Armande was supposedly the younger sister of Madeleine, in actuality she was her illegitimate daughter. (No, not by Moliere, though his enemies later insinuated this.)

With a cast like that, one can imagine some offstage drama rivaling what occurred onstage!

Pod Theatre

In New York City, theatre remains banned, including outdoor theatre, which appears to be the least likely form of live drama to spread COVID. In New Jersey, though, things are a bit different.

Next month, the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey will be putting on productions outside in Florham Park. The plan is to keep the audience members not just away from the actors, but away from each other, with family groups seated in different "pods" spread out across the lawn.

"That simply means that we will be creating circles on the ground in which you will have your own eight foot circle of space, six feet from every other circle," Artistic Director Bonnie Monte said in a statement. Audience members will have to wear masks, and reservations are required. 

STNJ's productions are scheduled to open at the end of this week. Some performances are already sold out, but according to their website, viewings have been added from August 7th through August 16th. Audience members are encouraged to bring blankets or very low-lying beach chairs. If you have a higher lawn chair, the theatre will put you in a pod in the back.

Two different productions will be offered. The first, Verily, Madly Thine is a collection of different scenes (mostly by Shakespeare) that show how crazy people can get when they fall in love. The scenes are directed by AC Horton, who compiled the piece for last year's "Shrewd Mechanicals" tour. If you saw it last year, though, STNJ promises the production has been expanded to include some new material.

The second offering will be a double-bill of Molière's The Love Doctor and Edna St. Vincent Millay's Aria Da Capo, both directed by Monte. While I'm not familiar with the first piece, Aria Da Capo is a beautiful one-act play written in the wake of the First World War. It's disturbingly relevant today, and what is more, it requires fairly little interaction between performers, which might make it an ideal play for the COVID era.

Each show lasts about an hour. The pieces alternate each night, and tickets are $20. You can reserve your seat... and pod... by calling the box office at 973-408-5600. The box office is open between 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m., Monday through Friday.

The biggest problem with the Florham Park venue is that it is not particularly accessible by public transportation. In the past, I've taken the train out to see STNJ productions in Madison, but being carless, I'll have to pass on this one.

If you do have your own car, though, I hope you'll head out to support a theatre company that is resuming live performance, and in the safest manner possible.

The Decameron

Like a number of people enduring the quarantine of the present plague, I've been working my way through reading The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. I knew that the book's hundred tales had made a profound impact on literature in general, but I hadn't realized how important they were to the theater.

The framing device of The Decameron concerns seven women and three men who flee Florence during the Black Death. Outside of the city, with little else to do, they begin telling stories. Each of them tells a story on the first day, and over the course of ten days, they recite a total of one hundred stories, ten stories for each teller.

A woman named Pampinea gets the storytelling rolling by challenging everyone on the first day to tell a tale about whatever pleases them best. Panfilo tells the first story, about a scoundrel who is thought a saint, and then Neifile tells a tale about the debauchery in the Pope's court in Rome. It is the third tale, told by Filomena, however, that caught my attention, since it relates the same story as Ephraim Lessing's Nathan the Wise.

In Boccaccio's version, the story is set in Alexandria, rather than Jerusalem, but the general idea is the same as in Lessing's play. Saladin, the Sultan who ruled the Islamic world during the twelfth century, is looking to borrow money from a wealthy Jewish merchant. Testing him, Saladin asks which religion is truly authentic: Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. Knowing that there is no safe way to answer with any of these three, the merchant comes up with a parable to tell that gets him out of the predicament.

Lessing's version makes Saladin more sympathetic, and uses the merchant's parable as a general plea for religious tolerance. Still, many of the elements of the play are present in the tale Filomena delivers in The Decameron. This story is not the only one, however, that later provided fodder for drama. On the second day, Filomena challenges everyone to tell a story about someone who after suffering many misfortunes, finds unexpected happiness. Hmm... that sounds like a Shakespearean Romance.

And in fact, Filomena's own tale on the second day provided much of the plot for William Shakespeare's Cymbeline. Shakespeare did not necessarily read The Decameron directly, since some details in the play aren't in the original, but do appear in a Dutch version of the story called Frederyke of Jennen. The outline of the plot is still there, though. A man foolishly makes a wager on his wife's chastity, and then a villain hides in a trunk that gets carried into the lady's room. Creeping out at night, he examines the room, takes a ring of hers, and examines an unusual mark on her breast. Proof positive that he vanquished her virtue!

Of course, that's not how the story ends, either in Boccaccio or in Shakespeare. After hearing what sounds like incontrovertible proof of his wife's infidelity, the husband orders a servant to kill her. The servant doesn't have the heart to commit the deed, and instead of murdering her, he gives her a set of male clothes so she can escape unseen and reports the murder to her husband. In the climax of the tale, the lady reveals herself to her husband and exposes the villain. Shakespeare's innovation was to combine the tale with the legend of a British king who appears in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, along with some events from the anonymous Elizabethan play Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune.

Filomena's tale on the third day contains some wonderful humor as she describes a woman getting a friar to unknowingly arrange trysts between herself and her lover. Molière incorporated elements of the tale in his play The School for Husbands. The ninth story of the third day is given by Neifile, and it provides the ultimate source of Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well. Again, the Bard appears to have used an intermediary source, probably William Painter's Palace of Pleasure. Shakespeare also seems to have invented the role of the braggart coward Parolles, which is arguably the best role in the play.

On the fourth day, the stories concern those whose love ended unhappily, but these tales did not provide the inspiration for Romeo and Juliet. Instead, Filomena's tale became the basis of the poem "Isabella, or the Pot of Basil" by John Keats. The fourth tale of the fifth day also apparently provided material for Lope de Vega's play The Nightingale of Seville, though I haven't read that one.

Other dramatists who have retold tales from The Decameron include Thomas Middleton, Apostolo Zeno, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Perhaps during our present quarantine, Boccaccio will inspire more plays. Now if we could only open the theaters to let them be performed....

Colley Cibber

"Though every poet-laureat must be expected to attract a considerable portion of envy, few have been so severely handled as this ingenious man," said one biographer of the actor and dramatist Colley Cibber.

Cibber was born in London on November 6, 1671, the son of the sculptor Caius Cibber and Jane Cibber, whose maiden name--Colley--provided the given name for their first child. The parents sent the boy to grammar school at The King's School,Grantham, in Lincolnshire. The school continues in operation to this day, and includes Isaac Newton among its alumni.

Originally, Cibber prepared to enter university, intending on a career in the church, but all that changed with the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Cibber joined the service of the Earl of Devonshire in taking up arms in favor of the invading William of Orange, whose forces drove out King James II. Fortunately, this occurred without blood being spilled, but the political turmoil disrupted young Cibber's studies, and he looked about for something else to do.

By his own account Cibber had felt an early inclination for the stage, so he took a position as an actor with a meager salary of ten shillings a week. On the recommendation of the playwright William Congreve, Cibber performed the part of Lord Touchwood, in Congreve's The Double Dealer. Later, also on the playwright's recommendation, he played the role of Fondlewife in Congreve's The Old Bachelor.

When Cibber wrote his first play, Love's Last Shift, he also performed in it as the character Sir Novelty Fashion, gaining a reputation for himself of playing fops. The play shows the reformation of a rake named Loveless by a good woman, but it has been largely overshadowed by a sequel written by John Vanbrugh called The Relapse. In the sequel, Loveless goes back to his old rakish ways. Cibber seems not to have minded, as he appeared in Vanbrugh's play, reprising his role of Sir Novelty Fashion, who in the sequel has bought the title of "Lord Foppington."

As I previously wrote about in this blog, Cibber rewrote William Shakespeare's Richard III in 1699, appearing in the title role himself. The production was not a success, but Cibber's adaptation went on to become popular in the eighteenth century, essentially replacing the original play in the repertoire. Most people consider Cibber's best play to be The Careless Husband, which he wrote in 1704, but he apparently made more money off of an adaptation of Moliere's play Tartuffe called The Nonjuror, which won the approval of King George I and a royal present of 200 pounds.

After the success of The Nonjuror in 1717, Cibber's star continued to rise, and in 1730 King George II named him poet laureate. The government approved of his anti-Catholic sentiments, but the Catholic poet Alexander Pope was unimpressed. Even before Cibber was named poet laureate, Pope began composing The Dunciad making fun of inferior poets, with Cibber as the foremost of the Dunces. In one particularly brutal passage, Pope quipped:

                         In merry old England it once was a rule,

                         The King had his Poet, and also his Fool:

                         But now we're so frugal, I'd have you to know it,

                         That Cibber can serve both for Fool and for Poet.

Even after Cibber officially quit the stage, he still made occasional performances, for instance acting in Papal Tyranny in the Reign of King John based of the KingJohn of Shakespeare. Cibber lived well into his 80s, dying in December of 1757.