"What Ish My Nation?"

On the radio last week, I heard a couple of interviews with native Michiganders who had lately experienced both an increase in the frequency of racial slurs hurled in their direction, and a subtle change in the nature of those slurs. Both interviewees were men of South Asian descent -- brown men, presumably -- and while neither was a stranger to casual ethnic insults, both noted that the newer expressions of hostility were more threateningly edged. In short, unfriendly strangers now feel empowered to threaten deportation. One interviewee said, more or less, "Now, instead of 'Go back where you came from', it's, 'You're going back where you came from!" The man added, "That pisses me off, because I came from here."

Listening to these accounts gave me new insight into a puzzling interchange between soldiers in what is perhaps Shakespeare's most famous war play, Henry V, set during the latter years of the Hundred Years' War. In one scene, as the British storm the French town of Harfleur, officers of their invading army quarrel behind the lines about how best to participate in the action. These men, significantly, are not what J. D. Vance might call "heritage English." Fluellen is Welsh, Jaimy's a Scot, and Macmorris is an Irishman. But they're all English subjects, fiercely loyal to the king (himself a Welshman), and committed -- more committed, it seems, than some native English soldiers whom we meet in the next act -- to retaking the portion of France they believe is England's by ancestral right. When Fluellen, the Welshman, says to Irish Macmorris, "I think ... there is not many of your nation--," Macmorris angrily interrupts him with "Of my nation? What ish my nation? Ish a villain and a bastard and a knave and a rascal. What ish my nation? Who talks of my nation?"

Scholars, directors, and actors commonly interpret Macmorris's outburst as, in Barbara Mowat's words, "an expression of outrage that Fluellen might be about to slur the Irish."* I think they're wrong. Macmorris is reacting -- possibly over-reacting -- to Fluellen's implication that his "nation" is something other than the one for which he is fighting. He wants it understood that his nation is England (or Britain, although this name of national collective identity would not be in common use for more than a century after this scene was written). To grasp Macmorris's meaning, we must overlook (as Shakespeare did) the often unwelcome colonialist imposition of English identity on Ireland (and, to a lesser degree, on Scotland and Wales), as well as the dubious morality of the late-medieval English campaign against France which is the play's main action. For this scene of British unity, Shakespeare has not only deliberately chosen soldiers from what were, in his time, England's provinces, but made them officers. They may  be proud of their geographical heritage (Fluellen certainly is), but they're even prouder that they're Britons, fighting together. Whatever we think of their war, we should grant them the national identity they rightfully claim. Their accents mark their place of origin (and let's overlook Shakespeare's sad mistake, repeated centuries later by George Bernard Shaw, of trying to write regional accents into lines rather than just telling actors to speak like Cockneys, or Irishmen, or whatever). These soldiers' Scottishness, Welshness, or Irishness does not prevent their inclusion in the British commonwealth. Macmorris wants that fact respected.

In the case of the Michiganders I heard on the radio, the deportation threats, implying that the U.S. is not these citizens' "nation," have even less ground than Fluellen's suspicion (if that's what it is) of Irish Macmorris. In fact, those contemporary threats and insults have no ground at all. It's ugly to threaten anyone in this way, but it's particularly ludicrous to suggest that Asian (or African, or Latin) heritage precludes Americanness. As all but the ignorant know, if you were born in one of the fifty states, or are naturalized, the U.S. is your "nation." I'm not in favor of British imperialism, but I would count the Henry V scene as Shakespeare's argument against hypocrites such as J. D. Vance with his puzzling and offensive concept of "heritage" American-ness. Vance has suggested that someone whose ancestors (say) fought in the Civil War (even if they fought against the U.S.?) is more worthy of citizenship than other Americans. (Nation of immigrants, anyone? And where does this concept leave Vance's own children? That's a head-scratcher.) Four hundred years ago, Shakespeare knew that a "nation" could be wider and wilder than its insular definers. In this election season, we should all take that fact to heart.

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*Mowat, Barbara, ed., Henry V, by William Shakespeare (NY: Folger, 1995), nn 125-27, p. 94.

The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter

"Stellar historical fiction imbued with a rich sense of place."

-- Alida Becker, New York Times Book Review, 2/9/25

At the age of sixty-one, Judith Shakespeare, a midwife-apothecary and the twin of the long dead Hamnet, must flee provincial Stratford on horseback to avoid arrest for witchcraft. Her traveling companions are a zealous Puritan woman and a child who have been displaced by civil war -- the bloody seventeenth-century strife between Royalists and Roundheads. Judith is also leaving her marriage, which has foundered since the wrenching loss of two adults sons of plague.

The sequel to the author's My Father Had a Daughter, a tale of Judith in her youth, The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter revisits this character for the ages -- Shakespeare's sharp-tongued, witty youngest child, no less feisty in her maturity. Four hundred years after Judith's death, Grace Tiffany brings her back onto center stage. Judith's new tale offers profound insights -- into friendship, motherhood, marriage, religious extremism, and war -- that remain resoundingly true today.

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Spanish language edition

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A Review of a SHREW

It was a production of The Taming of the Shrew. It was in a major city, produced by a major acting company. And it was bad. But why? Or, rather, how?

It wasn't the amateurish level of the players, for which one makes allowances at a student production. (I can't truly call the actors "amateurs," since the tickets cost money that somebody got. They were, however, students.) It wasn't the standard substitution of contemporary music and dance moves for real or faux Elizabethan ones. That's usually fun. I can't even blame the actors, though most of them didn't understand half of what they were saying. Clearly they were held hostage to the director's "concept": her inexplicable conviction that twenty-first-century audiences would go mad if invited to experience the comedy Shakespeare actually wrote.

You may wonder why I'm not naming this director, the company in question, or even the location of the performance, let alone the names of the actors. I'm refraining from doing so in order to protect those young hostages. I don't think any of it was their fault. I will say only that this production was put on by pupils of the "training academy" of a significant Shakespeare company in one of the largest American towns. More should have been expected of them. More should have been given them.

There are of course the mundane objections (which I'd let slip if the whole production hadn't been so fundamentally wrong). Young actors, particularly American ones, seem generally to be told not to swallow their consonants, especially those at the ends of words. An understandable admonition, perhaps, but since it leads to an unnatural sounding pronunciation which bestows undue emphasis on the final sound, the result is a far cry from speech spoken "trippingly on the tongue" (or, as these actors might have said, "trippingly on the tonGGG"). A bit of care might also have been taken to guide the actors in suiting the action to the word, as Hamlet also prescribes, since the production featured numerous speeches which, though energetically delivered, were completely nonsensical because said without some intonation, facial expression, or physical action that might have clarified their opaque Elizabethan meaning. So many lines were cut that I cannot fathom why the director chose to retain the full speech of the servant Biondello (here "Biondella," but I'll get to that in a minute) describing the various afflictions suffered by main character Petruchio's servant's horse. The animal is "rayed with the yellows, past cure of the fives, stark spoiled with the staggers, begnawn with the bots, swayed in the back and shoulder-shotten, near-legged before" -- and that's less than a sixth of it. The audience was tortured and bludgeoned with these and like terms, spoken -- or bellowed -- without any accompanying gestures to illustrate their import. (The audience knew they were supposed to laugh, so, good-naturedly, they did, but I, spoiled by too many skillful Shakespeare performances, am just the kind of ungenerous playgoer Shakespeare hated, so I just sat there gaping in annoyed disbelief.) This -- saying lines whose meanings, because they were mysterious to the actor, could not be made clear to the audience -- was the pattern throughout the play. Another small example: when the witty servant Grumio observes the old pantaloon Gremio coming to woo young Bianca, he says sarcastically, or is supposed to say, in an aside to the audience, "A proper stripling, and an amorous." Sarcastically, mind you! Amorous old Gremio is far from a "stripling," though he's foolishly acting like one. There's no reason for Grumio (sorry, Grumia) to yell out this line joyfully for all on stage to hear, as though it were a straightforward and truthful description of the shaky old man now entering the stage. (I don't like the ageism, either, but that's not the performance issue at hand.) These players -- billed as incipient professionals in a major company -- really might have been better schooled in 1.) what their lines meant and 2.) why their characters were saying them.

Alright. That's curmudgeonly enough. These are garden-variety flaws for students learning to perform Shakespeare. The heart of the objection here is what was done to a play which has attained a curious status: because it concerns a man "taming" a woman, many twenty-first-century directors can't stand it, yet they feel compelled to stage it. Maybe to punish it. And because they fail to recognize that the comedy, in its original form without radical alterations, contains the critique of "wife-taming" they are seeking, some of them butcher it beyond recognition without substituting any compensatory coherence. I've seen this done before, but, as I say above, I have never witnessed a bigger on-stage mess than this one. At least, not under the heading of The Taming of the Shrew. 

First of all: you can't critique patriarchy unless you include a patriarchy. But the patriarchy disappears when most of the major characters have their gender changed to female. Baptista, father of two marriageable girls, here became Baptista, mother of two marriageable girls. Lucentio, who falls in love with one of the daughters, becomes Lucentia, who falls in love with one of the daughters. Bianca returns Lucentia's love, which is interesting, but creates new problems in coherence. The mother, who strictly controls access to her daughters, adheres to an archaic system of social rules by which the girls must be continually supervised, and are destined for marriage and childbearing rather than any sort of work or social independence -- the condition of father Baptista's household in the original play -- and one would think that, given these traditions, she or her like-minded neighbors might evidence some dismay at discovering, in the end, that the daughter has eloped with a woman. But no! Gay marriage is apparently legal in the town of Padua, despite its otherwise hidebound customs, and lesbian couplings cause no one to blink an eye. With no authoritative husband, does this mean marriage relationships are equal? Again, no! In the last scene, Lucentia mysteriously assumes the right to order Bianca to obey her in some petty command, and Bianca's refusal is treated by other characters as a woeful upending of the marital hierarchy. All this makes sense if Bianca's married to a man. In this production, I don't know what it was supposed to mean.

What about sister Kate? Well. Petruchio's maleness was retained (although the character was made to have inherited an estate from his mother rather than his father, in this Amazonian Italy). But -- absent the patriarchy -- nothing in the play could explain how or why he assumed the right to "tame" his bride. Nor did he succeed in the slightest (contrary to the original comedy's plot), because Kate simply went along with all his directives, turning the commands into shared projects. She didn't want to leave her wedding reception, but Petruchio did not cart her off, quoting Old Testament laws which classify the wife as chattel. Instead, Kate and Petruchio shared the speech, claiming each other as property, then joined hands and left together. As for their struggles in Petruchio's household, wherein Petruchio withholds food from his wife until she begins to behave politely, no, again. Here the servants ganged up on them both, starving them into some kind of submission, the nature of which was unclear. It was Kate and Petruchio versus his household staff, another bonding exercise for the pair. The play's final scene was gibberish. Instead of launching into her famous and spirited defense of wifely submission -- a speech that can be played with irony, or as a move in a fascinating power-game whose rules only Kate and Petruchio are beginning to figure out -- Kate began by reciting some of Polonius' lines from Hamlet. This oddity was followed, again, by a shared version of a speech which was meant to belong to one of them alone, with the two finally pledging obedience to each other. (How does that work?)

Okay. I'm not in favor of wife-taming. But I do prefer that supposedly world-class Shakespeare enterprises honor the plays they undertake to perform. To honor a play means, at the very least, to understand it. 

The Taming of the Shrew is a play about social and domestic roles. It cleverly dramatizes the ways such roles are forced upon unwilling players -- it begins with an induction (cut by this company) in which a boy servant is compelled to pretend to be an obedient wife -- and the fascinating ways social players may circumvent the restrictions imposed by their parts, finding power where they can. Servants turn the tables on masters; wives turn the tables on husbands. The ludic theme is strong. Domestic and civic life is in many ways a game, and imagination comes into play as subjects learn how to use clever language to win. The Taming of the Shrew does not need to be rewritten in order for this theme to be driven home.

Let this post be a plea to let the comedy make its own argument! At least, give audiences something to argue about! Don't let them leave thinking they just saw something Shakespearean, but having no idea what it was.

Although it goes against my nature, let me close by saying something nice. The best actor in the production was the one who played the Traveling Pedant, a stranger coerced into pretending to be Lucentio/a's mother (again, changed from father) so as (falsely) to witness and approve Lucentia's and Bianca's marriage. This was a player who not only knew the meaning of his lines, but who remembered he was on stage even when he wasn't speaking. His subtle glee at being asked to dress and act like a wealthy matron was hilariously evident as, subtly practicing his role, he privately tried on voguish, exaggerated "feminine" gestures and facial expressions which delighted both him and the audience. In this case, the re-gendering paid off. It was a bright spot in the chaos. I hope to see him in a future Shakespeare production -- directed by someone else!

 

 "Shakespeare, Shaken and Stirred," at Lily Books Aug. 7

 The British podcast "Not Just the Tudors" features this interview about The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter. Tune in for a discussion of the Shakespeares, Oliver Cromwell, civil war, and witches.

https://shows.acast.com/not-just-the-tudors/episodes/shakespeares-daughter-judith?fbclid=IwY2xjawIz6AhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHWaIb94zdYVnaptzWjCxY19wHPxxqy-4QiCcjdhi30BFv1O-Auch1W2TYg_aem_3HSacoJQDutlMzUq4dXSyA 

A New Novel about Shakespeare's Daughter

All the men of the Shakespeare family died, and most of them died young. Shakespeare himself was only what I consider middle-aged when he breathed his last, in 1616, at 52 -- a late-summer chicken if not a spring one. By then he'd lost his father, his younger brother, and his only son. Neither of his two male grandsons, yet to be born, would see a twenty-fifth year. As for the women, Shakespeare's wife Anne and his elder daughter Susanna both died at age 66, in 1623 and 1649 respectively. Yet there was one Shakespeare child who lived on, from the Elizabethan Age through the Stuart era to the time of Cromwell and the Interregnum, through plagues and witchcraft trials, through the premature deaths of her children and the turmoils and upheavals of the English Civil War, into the first years of the Restoration.

This was Shakespeare's youngest daughter, Judith, who died in 1662 at the age of 77.

You may recall Judith. If you read my 2003 novel My Father Had a Daughter, you know her fictionalized tale -- her grief for a lost twin and her teenage rebellion against her Midlands country life, her flight south to Elizabethan London, the ambitious subterfuge by which she maneuvers her way onto the Globe playhouse stage. This was a Judith imagined and predicated on the slim details of her life conveyed through civil records concerning the Shakespeares. That tale ended with the death of Shakespeare, and Judith's marriage, in 1616.

But Judith didn't. As noted, she lived on, a witness to such staggering transformations both in personal and public life that they call for a continuation of her story.

So I wrote one.

The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter: The Continuing Adventures of Judith Shakespeare was released in book and audio form on February 4, 2025. Too late for Christmas, but in plenty of time for summer reading! If you liked Judith as a young woman, see what you think of her crusty 61-year-old self. Her herbalist skills have grown, and her contempt for pointless social rules hasn't changed, but now that England has turned upside-down, she's a battlefield surgeon with a whole war-torn realm to ride around in. Which she does, all in search of a thing -- perhaps a person -- she long ago lost.

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How Not To Teach Shakespeare to Kids

A friend of mind recently shared with me a children's Shakespeare book, a kind of modern Lambs' "Tales from Shakespeare" which condenses the plots of fifteen Shakespeare plays into easily digestible 5-6-page segments. Entitled "Shakespeare's Stories," the book is beautifully illustrated by an artist named Koa Lhe, and the tales, "retold" by a British reviser, are engagingly written. The problem, my friend and I agreed, is that the plots aren't exactly Shakespeare's. And why are they not? Well. It turns out that "sweet William" is actually kind of a scary William, and young children must be protected from contact with certain types of Elizabethan stage villainy.

This is gently explained in the prologue, which instructs children that those involved in the adaptation project have "skipped over some parts of the tales, but have left all the key story elements in place. If something in one of the stories worries you," they advise, "show that story to a trusted grownup and have a chat about it." Also, "if you find any of them too scary, you can just turn the page and choose a different one." When I reflect back on my childhood, during which my siblings and friends and I exulted in macabre tales of horrifying violence, I wonder whom exactly this adapter is worrying about. "They wrap you up in a bloody sheet, and dig you down about six feet deep! The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, they crawl in your belly and out your snout!" We used to sing that a lot. One of our favorite stories was Poe's "The Telltale Heart," in which, of course, the protagonist goes crazy and kills an old man for no reason, and buries him under the floorboards, but then can't escape the imagined sound of his heartbeat: boom Boom! boom BOOM! I haven't noticed any major recoil from fictive violence in subsequent generations, though much attention has been transferred from books and movies to video games. I don't think it's easy to shock or scare kids with stories. But it is pretty easy to scare parents who think delight in tales of violence, or in the macabre, is not innate, but imposed by some imperfect culture from without. So I think it's the parents for whom these revised tales -- and their introduction -- are written.

These are parents who may think a summary of "Hamlet" that omits Ophelia's suicide is one which still leaves "all the key story elements in place." (Laertes is gone, too, which makes it Claudius' job to duel Hamlet at the end -- an unusual move for a king, especially one several decades older than his adversary.) The courtesan is missing from The Comedy of Errors, a decision our New Victorian (or Puritan) editor made in accordance with that of the Actually Victorian Lambs.* This new children's book's "King Lear" omits the Gloucester plot, presumably because it includes the tearing out of eyeballs, though this part would have interested ten-year-olds. "The Merchant of Venice" was included, but, apart from illustrations which have Shylock in strangely Eastern-looking garb in contrast to the other European characters, there's no suggestion of religious prejudice, or of a Jewish daughter who steals money from her father to elope with a Christian. Shylock simply tries to cash in (or flesh in) on Antonio's "pound of flesh" because he inexplicably doesn't like him: not because Antonio spits on him in the marketplace, calls him misbeliever and cutthroat dog, and foots him as he'd spurn a stranger cur over the threshold, and certainly not because Antonio and his friends have helped Shylock's daughter flee with a Christian after robbing him. Some moneylenders are just like that, I guess. Neither my friend nor I could see the gain in hiding from youthful readers the fact that ethnic and religious prejudice leads to serious social conflict -- in effect, in obscuring the major theme of this play.

But the summary that most provoked our amusement was this collection's version of "Othello." Nowhere is Othello's blackness mentioned as a factor in Desdemona's father's abhorrence of his and Desdemona's union, or of Othello's susceptibility to Iago's predatory behavior. (In the play Iago is able to provoke Othello's unwarranted suspicion of Desdemona by convincing him that as an outsider to European culture, he can't really understand what white women are up to.) "As if my daughter could love someone like you," Brabantio says to Othello, but doesn't explain what he means by "like you." As in the "Merchant of Venice" chapter, it's left to the pictures to tell that story. Le's illustrations -- which, again, are lovely -- show a very black Othello standing next to a white-skinned, red-haired Desdemona. What's potentially confusing about this is not just that the text feared to mention what the pictures did show, but that illustrations for all the other plays indiscriminately feature characters of color among white characters, all getting along just fine. "Much Ado about Nothing"'s old Leonato, who is black, is very happy to marry off his very white daughter to a black Claudio. "As You Like It"'s Celia is black, and her cousin Rosalind is white. "Twelfth Night"'s Viola is black, Olivia is white, and Orsino is white; no marriage problems here, just some gender confusion, which is quickly sorted out -- as it isn't, exactly, in the play, where in the fifth act Orsino is still fantasizing that Viola is male, though perhaps it's understandable that the revisers didn't want to get into that subtlety. What's more difficult to comprehend is how child readers are suposed to intuit, from pictures, that color differences don't matter in Shakespeare (they do), but also intuit, from "Othello"'s illustrations, that racial bigotry can tear families apart. What Shakespeare is on offer here?

Yet I partly digress. The most amazing part of this book's adaptation of the Othello story comes at the end of the six-page summary. In the play, the jealous Iago ends up killing his wife Emilia in revenge for her revealing his treachery. Two husbands kill two wives, acts of violence facilitated by the tendency of both women simply to obey their men, even when the husbands are dictatorial and crazy. Iago, master-perpetrator of the deaths of women, is dragged off in act five to be tortured, showing no hint of remorse. But here's how our adaptation ends:

"You beastly man!" Emilia cried. "You would have broken up my best friend's marriage to advance your career? See what you have done. Your wretched plots have killed my friend. All for a promotion! I no longer want to be your wife. I'm leaving." .... Iago was ashamed of himself for having set such tragic events in motion. He resigned from the army, and he never made the mistake of not respecting a woman again.

Wow. That play was simpler than I thought.

I suppose we should be grateful that the current penchant for revising older works to make them more culturally sensitive will probably not succeed in destroying the originals. My understanding is that "classic" versions of Roald Dahl books are still being published, along with the new versions that mitigate greedy Augustus Gloop and the Oompa Loompas. Hopefully Shakespeare will also survive his improvements by enlightened adapters like the one behind "Shakespeare's Stories." But any kids who grow up reading this book are in for a shock when they get to a college literature class -- if they still want to take one!

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*Mary Lamb died a decade after Victoria's accession; William Lamb a few years before it.