Riffs on Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Universe (Her Infinite Variety)
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

Despite its grandiose title, Shakespeare's Universe (Her Infinite Variety) is a modest affair. It's an anthology piece, performed in a tent just outside the Stratford Festival Theatre in the late afternoon, allowing really gluttonous patrons to take it in between a matinee and an evening show.

Its particular focus is the lives of Elizabethan women, which seems to cut the Shakespearean universe down by at least half, but is certainly a big enough subject to be going on with. Some of it must derive from the research that Peter Hinton, the show's author and director, conducted into this subject as part of his Ark Project at the National Arts Centre. It must also have been intended to dovetail with Hinton's current Stratford production of The Taming of the Shrew. "The Shrew" is one of the four "character" types, as the 16th century might have called them -- "stereotypes" as we probably would -- represented by the four female performers in the cast. The others are The Moll, The Witch and The Maid. There are also two males who are labelled The Puritan and The Poet, the latter a rather amorphous figure who serves as a repository for any masculine attitudes that aren't downright repugnant.

The material is mainly drawn from sermons, pamphlets, verses and diatribes of the period, as well as from plays. The resultant script is divided, rather coyly, into five acts, with linking material, presumably by Hinton himself, outlining themes and citing sources. It's shared out between the performers, with some awkward results. Actors are seldom good at playing the impersonal narrator, and a lot of over-colouring, forced jollity and general skittishness goes on here; it made me appreciate all the more the natural charm of Simon Callow's chats to the audience in his “Sonnets” show. Shakespeare's Universe is of course largely an educational exercise, designed to supply background to what's happening on the Festival's main stages, but I wish that it could have gone beyond the ingratiating techniques on which schools' theatre -- or even Adult Ed theatre -- is prone to fall back.

We make the acquaintance of Swetnam the Woman Hater, a polemicist notorious enough in his time to have had a play named after him. Matthew MacFadzean delivers his pronouncements with appropriate vigour and vinegar, but it seems a bit obvious, when he likens the experience of dealing with women to being "stung by wasps," to have the rest of the cast swatting themselves. Similarly, the mention in passing of Sir Walter Raleigh has all concerned miming the action of dropping cloaks into puddles.

It seems a bit unfair to bring in John Knox's First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. Misogynistic it undoubtedly was; all the same it was aimed at very specific females, those on and around the Scottish throne, rather than the sex in general. On the other hand, it's sobering to be informed that the lot of Englishwomen materially worsened after the Protestant closure of the nunneries deprived the unmarrying of a refuge. And a detailed description of the treatment of scolds dispels any illusion that the ducking-stool (also featured in Hinton's Shrew production) was a harmless prank; it was in fact a prolonged torture session.

The best portions of the show, however -- the ones that give the actors something into which to sink their teeth - are the extended scenes from plays. Shakespeare himself gets only fleeting participation in his universe, though the fragments we hear are resonant. There is a scene from Henry Porter's The Two Angry Women of Abingdon, a play I've always wanted to see staged, though admittedly more for its farcical confusions than for this expository episode in which Dayna Tekatch's Maid (in the virginal rather than the domestic sense) stands up to the father who wants to marry her off. Thinly written by the highest standards of the period, this still comes off spirited and informative.

Better still are excerpts from two plays I have seen and know to work, and that work again here. In The Fair Maid of the West, Laura Condlln's daredevil Moll is harassed by a would-be gallant, beats him up while wearing male attire and shames him with the revelation (he's a good sport about it). In The Witch of Edmonton, Karen Robinson, earlier the least comfortable of the narrators, thoroughly redeems herself as a woman whose age and poverty get her branded as a sorceress and, in sheer desperation, gives herself to the devil in the cuddly likeness of a dog. Few plays of the time give a more persuasive picture of what ordinary life must have been like. By the way, despite their titles, neither of these last two plays would gain from being re-set in contemporary Alberta. Both should be revived though; they're part of the real context that the Stratford Shakespeare Festival should be exploring. If Shakespeare's Universe paves the way to exploring such plays, it will have done a good thing. And I can think of nobody better than Hinton to direct them.