Our study of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus.

Frances, our president, has led the last two meetings in a study of Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus. Here she gives us her thoughts on the experience.

To watch a performance of Dr. Faustus is to be absorbed in the characters of Faustus and Mephistophilis and their struggle, and to be entertained by the comic scenes, dazzled by the displays of magical powers and the pageantry of the mimes and masques, and almost overwhelmed by the horror of the finale.

Reading the play, however, gives me another perspective. I focus more fully on the language, and reading the play is to experience a giddying sense of whirling through time and space. We traverse the globe and its surrounds in the references to lands from the Americas to the Orient, from the Antarctic to Lapland; to the sun, moon and stars, and all the layers of the firmament; and to the ocean depths. We see or hear of people from the ancient past – actual or mythical – and personages contemporary with Faustus, including ruling princes and claimants to the Papacy, side by side with clowns and peasants.

There is an impression of watching through a marvellous lens.  At times we can focus minutely on the one man, Faustus, in his study, but then the vision widens: to Wittenberg, to Germany, to Europe, to the entire (known) world, as Faustus flies across it with Mephistophilis. 

Visions of great figures from the past expand our sense of passing time, but Time, in another way, is always before us in the knowledge that Faustus has a specified number of years to live.  We see those twenty-four years passing almost unnoticed, filled with vain and shallow displays of magical trickery, and then suddenly we are at the final hour; the inexorable ticking and chiming of the clock marks the arrival of the pre-determined and inevitable doom.

The extraordinary power of the language evokes vivid images, from the depths of hell to the limits of the universe, often achieved through the striking juxtaposition of everyday colloquialisms with sophisticated poetic techniques.

Here are some of my favourite phrases and images, which illustrate the immense sweep of Marlowe’s vision throughout the telling of this epic struggle.

His waxen wings did mount above his reach,

And melting, heavens conspired his overthrow.

… fly to India for gold,

Ransack the ocean for orient pearl…

Now that the gloomy shadow of the night….

….Leaps from th’Antarctic world unto the sky

And dims the welkin with her pitchy breath…

Be it to make the moon drop from her sphere

Or the ocean to overwhelm the world.

Had I as many souls as there be stars …

Learned Faustus …

 Did mount him up to scale Olympus’ top,

Where…

He views the clouds, the planets and the stars,

The tropics, zones and quarters of the sky,

From the bright circle of the horned moon

Even to the height of Primum Mobile.

... the restless course

That time doth run with calm and silent foot.

… the topless towers of Ilium …

… fairer than the evening’s air,

Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.

Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,

That time may cease, and midnight never come.

The stars move still; time runs; the clock will strike …

See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!

… such a dreadful night was never seen

Since first the world’s creation did begin.

And after the horror of Faustus’ end, there is the pathos of the Chorus’s moving commentary:

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight.

Although the play derives from Christian teachings, there is a wider spectrum attained by the frequent references to the Greek and Latin classics:

Be thou on earth as Jove is in the sky

And more frequented for this mystery

Than heretofore the Delphian oracle.

Were she as chaste as was Penelope,

As wise as Saba, or as beautiful

As was bright Lucifer before his fall.

Have not I made blind Homer sing to me

Of Alexander’s love and Oenon’s death?

You shall behold that peerless dame of Greece,

No otherwise for pomp and majesty

Than when Sir Paris crossed the seas with her

And brought the spoils to rich Dardania.

An added pleasure for me, as a modern-day reader, is the constant  memory of other literary references.  Milton, Marvell, Byron, Yeats and Auden are some whose lines echo and chime with Marlowe’s images.  The fall of Lucifer in “Paradise Lost”:

…. Him (Lucifer) the Almighty Power

Hurled headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky

With hideous ruin and combustion down

To bottomless perdition, there to dwell

In adamantine chains and penal fire …

Marvell:   But at my back I always hear

Time’s winged chariot hurrying near…

Byron:   She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies …

Yeats: And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Auden: ... and the expensive, delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky …

There must be thousands more such quotations which any single phrase might conjure, for each reader, and one could ponder indefinitely on the mutual influences which are at work on our great writers.

Jean-Paul Laurens (1838–1921) Dr Fausto: oil on canvas, 

Rio Grande do Sul Museum of Art, Porto Alegre, Brazil

And now for something a little different...

So far this year we've read and studied just one play - The Comedy of Errors, which was great fun. We read it over the May and June meetings. When we met in July, we had our first guest speaker for the year, Grant Malcolm, well-known around Perth for his productions of the bard's works - notably for the GRADS company at the University of Western Australia.

Only a few months ago, Grant directed Love's Labours Lost for this company. He shared some of his modus operandi with us - how he chooses plays and what factors come into play in doing so, and he also spoke of the difficulties of presenting Shakespeare in countries where English is not the native tongue. He was once involved in directing a translation of Love's Labours Lost in Afghanistan, and his experiences were both entertaining and thought-provoking, leading to a discusssion of the difficulties inherent in adapting any work of art for another medium, language or culture.

Next month we are going to essay a non-Shakespearean work, Dr Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. Contemporary with Shakespeare, Marlow died tragically young, yet he had already influenced other playwrights of the day, including Shakespeare.

The Perth Shakeseare Club's original mission statement, created over eight decades ago, mentions the study and possible production of plays by other authors, so although this venture into Marlowe's oeuvre is a new experience for the current membership, it is not a new one for the club. Sadly, I will not be in town for our next meeting on 19 August, but I'll look forward to hearing the second half of the play read at our September meeting.

Dining with Shakespeare

Today's post is by Richard, who researched Shakespearean food for a 'show and tell' type session we had a couple of months ago. I get hungry just reading about it!

In the late sixteenth/early seventeenth century, culinary customs were quite remarkably divided between rich and poor, as are those of today. In the houses of the well-to-do, servants prepared the food in separate areas (sometimes at great distance from the dining halls). The kitchens had great brick ovens and fireplaces where meat, fish and poultry were cooked over coals by spit-roasting, boiling, smoking, frying or baking.

Fresh food was purchased from dedicated livestock, poultry, fish and vegetable markets on a more-or-less daily basis. Fire shovels, barrels and tubs were kept in a pantry, there was a buttery (storage area for wines and provisions), wet and dry larders, a spicery, a mealhouse for grain, a sieving or boiling house, and coals were stored in a squillerie with brass pots and pans, pewter vessels, herbs, covered dishes and a court cupboard.)

Meat was usually beef, coney (rabbit), kid, lamb, mutton, pork, veal, and venison. Common dishes were meat pie, sausage, and sheep’s feet.

Methods of preserving fresh meat were by salting, vinegar soaking (with verjuice), saucing, spicing, or by burying for one or two days after wrapping in cloth. Spices, known as “good powders” included aniseed, bay leaf, cinnamon, clove, cubeb (a Java berry tasting like allspice), fennel, ground ginger, mace, nutmeg and pepper. Some of these were introduced as a result of the voyages of Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh.

Fish was consumed widely by poorer folk living near waterways and coastal areas, especially during the long winters when meat was scarce. It included conger eel, gurner, haddock, herring, lamprey (a type of eel), pilchard, mackerel, pike, salmon, sturgeon, tench and whiting;  crustaceans such as cockle, crab, lobster, mussel  and shrimp were also widely enjoyed. 

Poultry included bittern, blackbird, brant (wild goose), crane, dove, duck, dunbird (wild duck), fowl (chicken), goose, knot(sandpiper), lark, mallard, olicet, partridge, peewit, pelican, plover, quail, sheldrake, sparrow, swan , teal, turkey and widgeon (duck.)

Vegetables were most widely consumed by the less well-off in country areas. Much of what was used either grew wild or was home-produced. Artichoke, asparagus, bean, beetroot, cabbage, carrot, cucumber, gourd, horseradish, lettuce, melon, olive, pea, pumpkin, rape (canola) and skirret (water parsnip) were commonplace.  There was much use of herbs such as borage, chervil, clary(sage), cowslip, and sowthistle, plus greens, which included the leaves of avens, borage, dandelion, dittany and hyssop (both mints), laver (purple seaweed) orach (red and green), pellitory (climbing nettle), purslane (pinkish fleshy stems), rocket, rose hip (fruit of the rose) and St John’s wort (brown stalks, narrow leaves). Root plants like ginger and galingale (a kind of sedge with aromatic rhizomes) were also popular.

Fruit was mainly consumed fresh by the common people, again in country areas - apricot, blaunderelle (apple), bullace (wild damson plum), cherry, cornel, currant, gooseberry, grape, lemon, medlar apple, mulberry, peach, pear, raspberry and strawberry.

It must be stressed that the common folk in towns and cities, more so than those in the country, had a constant battle in getting enough of any sort of food to survive, hence the high mortality rate at an early age.

Mainly used by the well-to-do were garlic, leek, onion and tomato (the last-named introduced with corn, potato and yam following New World voyages by Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh, along with corn and the addiction of smoking. It took some time for these to gain popularity.)

There was also extensive use of eggs and of bread – made from wheat for the gentry; made from acorns, barley, lentils, oats and rye for the common folk. Sugar and honey were less used by the poor, who generally had a healthier diet if they got enough to eat, because they ate more vegetables and herbs and the less starchy breads. 

Dietary deficiency, combined with almost all desserts and fruit being cooked in pies, led to the upper classes lacking in vitamin C and consequently, they suffered from myriad skin diseases, scurvy, rickets and bad teeth. It even became acceptable to have black teeth in society, with the very fashionable even exaggerating (don’t laugh!) their blackened appearance cosmetically!

Desserts were mainly the indulgences of the upper classes –cakes (banbury, lemon, shrewsbury and  violet),  comfit (sugar coated seeds), custard, eringo (thistle), flan, fruit mince pie,  gingerbread, marchpane (marzipan), puddings (almond, green, quaking and rice ), sillibub, sucket (candied peel), and sugar bread. (Fruit pudding usually accompanied roast beef, long before Yorkshire pudding was devised.) All these sweetenings contributed to rapidly deteriorating teeth.

Food colouring was effected with alkanet (bright red dye from roots), pulverised sandalwood (it coloured the food dark red) soaked spinach (green), and turnsale, which produced a purple dye. A thickening agent was almond milk, obtained by steeping almonds in milk, broth or wine. Another was ambergris, the grey substance produced by whales and centuries later, used in the production of perfumes. 

Beverages – mainly ale, beer, buttermilk, milk and water for the hoi polloi; spirits, stepony (raisin wine), whey and wine made from dandelion and berry such as blackberry and elderberry for the gentry. 

Tea and coffee became known in England only in the seventeenth century.

Culinary offerings included:

Beef, collared

Black pudding

Blackbird, baked

Broth

Bullock’s Neck

Calf’s head with oysters

Capon boiled with oysters

Carp Pie

Chicken Pie

Duck, boiled

Eggs, fricassee of

Flounder, boiled

Gammon Pie

Goose blood pudding

Goose, baked

Haggis

Hen with oysters

Lamprey Pie

Larks, baked

Liver Pudding

Lobsters

Mutton, boiled

Partridge, boiled

Pig Pie

Pig, roasted

Pigeon Pie

Pike with oysters

Potato Pie

Rabbit, boiled

Red Deer Pie

Shellfish

Shrimp Pie

Swan, baked

Trout, stewed

Turkey, baked

Veal Fillet

Veal, roasted

Venison, roasted 

When entertaining, the tables of the well-to-do groaned under the many dishes, often decorated with crane, peacock and swan feathers, (the cooked birds arranged on platters with their heads still attached) candles and flowers. There were drinking vessels of pewter, gold, silver, horn, leather, glass and earthenware. The only table utensil was a personal knife – diners then used their fingers to convey food to their mouths. It would be many years before the table manners of today became de rigueur. Such doyennes of early twentieth-century etiquette as Emily Post would have been absolutely horrified at the goings-on at table in Shakespearean times. The proliferation of cutlery and crockery to the point of confusion at modern banquets is probably the result!

Comedy

Starting this Saturday, we shall devote two of our monthly meetings to a reading of The Comedy of Errors. (The usual place - the State Library of Western Australia - and the usual time - 2.00pm.) All are welcome, so come and check us out if you think you might like to join the Club, or if you're a visitor to Perth and would like to meet fellow lovers of the Bard and his works.

Our playleaders are Frances and Rachel, and I'm reading Dromio of Ephesus - yippee! As a sixty-nine year old female I wouldn't pass the physical to perform this role, but the beauty of our club's readings is that anyone of either gender or from any of the seven ages (well, the last five of them, anyway!) can play any part.

Shakespeare WA did a great version of this play as part of their Shakespeare in the Park Season this year. You can read my review on Artshub.

World-wide celebrations!

Traditionally, Shakespeare’s birthday is celebrated on St George’s day, 23 April. We know he was baptised on 26 April, and given that many baptisms took place three days after birth, we may well be right. Besides, Shakespeare died on 23 April so celebrating his birth and death on the same day tidies things up!

We of the Perth Shakespeare Club had a very pleasant little birthday party last Saturday, when we shared research into what life was like in Shakespeare’s time. I hope to turn at least some of the contributions into blog posts over the next couple of months.

Bloggers from all over the world are celebrating this week with special blog posts for the Bard’s birthday, so we joined in by asking members of the Perth Shakespeare Club to contribute a sentence or two on why they love Shakespeare.

Frances, our president, sets the ball rolling.

Frances: I joined the Shakespeare Club to ensure that each year, at the very least, I read two or three plays right through. Then came the pleasures of the language, the characters, the plots, the themes, followed soon by the realisation that any given scene, or single speech, could lead to considerations of myth, folk lore, philosophy, social history, exploration, and how the plays could all come alive in performance -- an endless chain of fascinating ideas. But it always comes back to language -- that is the real joy: the glorious use of the English language.

And here’s what a few other members have to say!

Elaine: I love Shakespeare because his words are for all times and for all seasons.

June: Shakespeare's birthday is a time to remember him for the legacy he left to the world. Full of fun and intrigue, love and hate, his plays and sonnets still touch the imagination and bring history to life. Happy Birthday William!

Rachel: I love Shakespeare because he connects me to a continuing culture, and also because he doesn't tell us what to think – he tells us what to think about!

Rae: I enjoy Shakespeare because his works are relevant to the present day world.

Richard: My first exposure to Shakespeare was via Julius Caesar in school at age fourteen, and nearly sixty years later, my enthusiasm hasn't waned.

Roy: I like Shakespeare for his characterisations. ‘Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them’. Who else could write those words!

Satima: I love Shakespeare because of his deep understanding of human nature and his ability to depict it with all its highs and lows. He enriched our language, our culture and our souls.

Turab: I love Shakespeare because if his ability to express in words the whole range of human emotions.

Thanks to the contributors!

To read more celebratory blogs, go to www.HappyBirthdayShakespeare.com where the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has a list of links to blogs by Shakespeare fans world-wide.

By the way, did you know you can download a copy of Shakespeare’s will (wherein he makes the famous bequest of his ‘second-best bed’ to his wife) at http://nationalarchives.gov.uk/dol/images/examples/pdfs/shakespeare.pdf

Shakespeare's birthday!

This month's meeting (usual place, usual time - see the column at left!) will be a social gathering to celebrate the Bard's birthday. All welcome!

Film review: Coriolanus (2011 - The Weinstein Co)

Our president, Frances Dharmalingam, recently saw this film, which stars Ralph Fiennes, Gerard Butler and Brian Cox. Fiennes was also the producer: the screenplay was adapted by John Logan.

This filmed verion of Coriolanus could be cited as a perfect refutation of frequently-expressed doubts about using Shakespearean language in a modern setting. Although the script had been rigorously cut, what dialogue remained was original text (as insisted upon by Ralph Fiennes) and it worked. The delivery was entirely 21st century in style, the speakers unfettered by any unnecessary reverence for iambic pentameter, and, despite the occasional archaism of vocabulary or usage, expressed timelessly the thoughts and feelings of characters who could have existed in ancient Rome, Elizabethan England, or present-day Belgrade.

It was one of the finest modernizations of a Shakespeare play I have seen, with clever use of technology to further the action – TV broadcasts and Skype in place of clunky “messengers” up-dating the news.

The leading roles were perfectly cast – Coriolanus frozen in his arrogance, Menenius the fatherly figure Coriolanus so obviously needed but didn’t recognise, the two duplicitous tribunes Sicinius and Brutus – and of course Volumnia. What an impressive portrayal! This mother had dominated and moulded her son, and lived out her own ambitions through him. The only major character about whom I had any reservations was Aufidius. His darker, less trustworthy qualities became apparent only at the very last moment.

The crowds were huge and the director achieved a nice balance between the formless, threatening mass of the people and the individual rabble rousers who led the fickle sway of opinion. The scenes of civil unrest and the war episodes displayed the advantage of film over theatre. Where the latter would have to rely on conventional symbols – a few banners, suggestions of crowd action with Noises Off – the film showed us from endlessly varied angles the absolute reality of riots and battles in the 21st century. Of course the weapons were horrifyingly efficient, but the violence of war was as it has always been since before the days of gunfire, while in the house-to-house Search and Destroy missions there were echoes of ageless hand-to-hand combat, and at one point in the early rioting the police moved against the crowd with shields interlocked, suggestive of the old Roman “tortoise” formation. So for me the uncompromisingly modern interpretation had layers of timelessness, just as the psychology of the characters would have been true in any century.

Although the play does not, in so many words, give details of Coriolanus’s upbringing, the film established the separation between his family and the common folk. Shots of dilapidated buildings, stagnant puddles, piles of refuse and graffiti in the city contrasted with the elegant luxury of his family home, set in a quiet shady garden. Volumnia with her daughter-in-law and grandson, and then with Coriolanus himself, showed her strongly ambitious dominance, and when he capitulated to her pleas to spare Rome one could feel the unbearable tension and the final collapse, when Coriolanus knew that this could lead only to disaster. 'Oh mother, mother, What have you done?' summarised his apprehension of doom. Through the whole film, his facial expressions were extraordinarily limited, and yet he conveyed fierce intensity of feeling. Although never in any way a likeable character, he evoked (from me, anyway) sympathy as he moved inevitably to his fate, unable to change. A particularly memorable moment also was Coriolanus’s response to his sentence of exile. 'There is a world elsewhere' was spoken with all the contempt he had expressed to the citizens and yet it was coloured by a wrenching sense of loss, which made all the more believable his decision eventually to join Rome’s enemies.

This was a superb film in which the direction and the acting combined to bring to vivid life a fascinating play.