Will the Real Shakespeare Please Stand Up

Riffs on Shakespeare: There Reigns Love
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

"The expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action ... " So begins the most powerful anti-love poem or, more clinically, anti-sex poem in the English language. So also begins There Reigns Love, a one-man show in which Simon Callow charts a path through Shakespeare's Sonnets, attaching them to a speculative account of the author's social and emotional biography.

Callow starts by enunciating that opening proposition clearly, almost primly. Then he warms up, pursuing the poem's argument against passion with considerable passion -- intellectual passion --of his own.

Suddenly, there's a complete break in mood, and he starts chatting to us, very charmingly and informally, in his own words. He talks about the autobiographical connotations that have habitually been read into the Sonnets, and advances a particular theory about them, one adumbrated by English scholar and psychoanalyst, John Padel.

The idea, briefly, is that the Sonnets were initially commissioned by the Countess of Pembroke, one of the most culturally inclined of Elizabethan noblewomen, to persuade her recalcitrant 17-year-old son, William Herbert (the mysterious "Mr. W. H." of the Sonnets' dedication) to marry and beget an heir. The first 17 poems in the published sequence were written in this vein, on the occasion of the earl's 17th birthday.

The subsequent Sonnets were published in jumbled order, to throw identity-hunters off the scent; Padel has reordered them so that they tell the story he wants them to tell. Meeting the young man, like a portrait painter taking the measure of the subject he's been hired to immortalize, Shakespeare became infatuated, and the tone of the poems more urgent and anguished.

Eventually a three-way relationship -- not necessarily consummated on all sides -- developed between W. H., W. S. and the poet's mistress, the eternally mysterious "Dark Lady" who, confronted by one admirer as literary go-between for another, might have uttered the 17th-century equivalent of "speak for yourself, dear John." Or, in this case, dear Will. Whichever Will it was.

Callow advances this thesis with great persuasiveness, occasionally interrupting himself to admit, disarmingly, that there may not be a word of truth in it. It certainly seems suspiciously neat, and also simplistic in its attempts to detect a one-on-one correspondence between poet and poems. But it does give an actor something to act.

Act it, under the direction of Michael Langham, Callow does. He doesn't impersonate and he doesn't dress up, but he's playing the man, or an idea of him. Still, biographical theories apart, the material is recalcitrant. These are packed, thick poems; Callow doesn't do all 154 of them, but even two or three in succession can be a strain on an audience's concentration.

Although written by a great dramatist, their impulse is not dramatic, at least not cumulatively. Even the knottiest of Shakespeare's theatrical verse (some of the jealousy speeches in The Winter's Tale, for instance) is easier for an actor and audience to navigate; it's part of a clear story and there's usually another character at the receiving end. It's meant to be caught on the wing.

The Sonnets, like most non-dramatic poetry, are meant to be pondered at leisure. In Callow's performance, the pattern set in that opening aria is repeated: a forceful introduction followed by a conscientious attempt to negotiate the images and make the thought lucid. There isn't too much energy left over to convey emotion.

At least there wasn't on opening night, which was plainly under-rehearsed. Lighting cues went wrong, including one apparently meant to signify a pause before the end, but which the audience took to be the end. Callow, having acknowledged an ovation, had to add "there's a bit more" and then do an encore, which he did with considerable grace.

If he was nervous, it didn't show at that moment. But nerves were probably the reason why some of the Sonnets arrived several lines short of their official fourteen; the most celebrated of all, "shall I compare thee to a summer's day," arrived at its sublimely boastful conclusion (the poet is praising his own art, rather than his subject's beauty) by express train, bypassing some of the more picturesque stops along the way.

Romantic ardour is hard to convey when you're trying simultaneously to hack a path through thickets of metaphor and metaphysic. Callow is best when required to be bitter and baffled.

The beginning of the second half finds his imagined Shakespeare going on a long bus ride across England: A rather literal reading of some repeated images of travel and tiredness (and rather too literally staged), but one that Callow manages to tie to his hero's feelings of being used, and hating it, while unable to stop loving the users.

"Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this pow'rful rhyme:" but in this account the power, and the transcendence of time, reside jealousy and frustration rather than love: Not that those feelings are ever easy to disentangle for anyone.

Here I did feel that I was hearing a man, a clever and suffering one. Was that man Shakespeare? Somehow it's hard to credit -- as I think it would be of any performance or any choice of writings.

The most self-referential image in the Sonnets is supposedly the one about the speaker's going here and there and making himself a motley to the view: Shakespeare apologizing for his career as an actor (and a touring actor at that). Looking at those words now in cold print, I find it hard to see them that way. They look more like another blind alley: the opaque mocking us by looking transparent.

I don't remember how Callow spoke them or even, to be honest, if he spoke them at all, but if he left them out I think his instincts were sound. The most apparently autobiographical lines could easily be the most misleading.

The Sonnets are largely a record of torment, and they continue to torment us. We approach these poems, written in the first person and without speech-headings, hoping that here at last will be Shakespeare speaking for himself. And what we find is just another character.