Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

My wife and I spent the weekend watching two pieces of history. One unfolding, one already folded into folios more times than creases might allow. Separated as they are by hundreds of years, one a streaming dramatic retelling, the other a dramatic reality, they share more similarities than those distances impart.

That reality I speak of is of course the war that the United States and Israel have launched against Iran for any of the hollow rationales the administration keeps trying to fill in. The retelling is the two-season BBC series encompassing William Shakespeare’s history plays spanning the reigns of Richard II, through a collection Henrys, an Edward, and ending with Richard III called The Hollow Crown. 

The title of the series is taken from a soliloquy from Richard II that always felt apt as preamble for what was to come through the period of history those plays encompass, as it has throughout human history, both before and after that bloody era.

From Richard II

…for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear’d and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humor’d thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!

The plays and our current Middle East maelstrom demonstrate the folly of humans in what we call war, civil and otherwise, and the allegiances we are taught to assign to countries, kings, and presidents. They also demonstrate the collective capacity to forget that these humans we bow down to, willingly or no, are no more or less flawed than those they govern. Even as some become monsters or others reveal that they always have been.

Shakespeare had the benefit of over 100 years distance from the events he was dramatizing before he embarked on writing the first tetralogy, (Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III, and Richard the Third,) and a few years later completing the second (Richard II, Henry IV parts 1 and 2 and Henry V.) Although taken as two parts of a whole in terms of history, the two tetralogies were written out of historical sequence with the latter years chronicled before the former.

Obviously, today we don’t have the benefit of perspective that distance and the passage of time can lend as current news swoops in like flocks of drones. In truth, we really shouldn’t need it. The only thing that really changes are the players and history’s progression of weaponry and technology that they wield. Even the rhetoric doesn’t change much.

From Henry V

Take pity of your town and of your people
Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command,
Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
O’erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
Of heady murder, spoil, and villainy.
If not, why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Desire the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters,
Your fathers taken by the silver beards
And their most reverend heads dashed to the walls,
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
Do break the clouds

These are the things men say when they choose to go to war, whether they may have good reason or not. If reason itself does exist in those moments. Once you descend down that path, it becomes an increasingly greater challenge to swallow the bluster and reverse course. Honor demands, they always say, and more than not leaves its corpse on the field.

Although you have to admit, Shakespeare’s poetry, even for those not used to scanning Shakespeare, is easier on the ear than anything spewing out of the mouths of Trump, Hegseth or any of the other current day blowhards and courtiers.

Regardless of whether the war councils happen in throne rooms, camp tents, or a makeshift Mar-A-Lago SCIF, it doesn’t take much imagining to see the similarities between modern day cabinet members, and long dead peers and archbishops. The costumes may be different, but the egos, hubris and fear remain the same. The fear isn’t always as much of the opponent, but of the leader’s capricious power against those who think differently and raise their heads to speak their minds. Civilization may have advanced to the point in most regions that we don’t cut off heads at a whim, but legs and livelihoods can swiftly be cut off with a Twitter/Truth Social post.

One of the things that struck me most about the production of The Hollow Crown, was the intimacy that filming allows. The series features a cast of superstars including Patrick Stewart, Judi Dench, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Simon Russell Beale, Ben Whishaw, David Suchet, Hugh Bonneville, Michelle Dockery, and Sophie Okonedo among a host of others it would be tough to assemble to speak those speeches on a stage. They do so with intimacy and nuance than larger, more open venues allow without amplification.

I’ve seen each of these plays live on stage multiple times. In fact, one of the signature live theatre viewing experiences of my life was attending the English Shakespeare Company’s The Wars of the Roses at the Chicago International Theatre Festival in 1988 that presented all of the plays over the course of three days.

Both that live version and this made for TV version made cuts in the text for various reasons including length. The three parts of Henry VI are condensed into two, with the TV version omitting Jack Cade’s rebellion, and Henry V bypassing the slaying of the children managing the baggage train are examples. But both gave you the essentials of the same story.

The live stage version certainly brought grandeur and spectacle to the event. The parade of the various reigns of kings proceeded through history adorned in Renaissance costumes with weapons of the period for Richard II evolving to more contemporary clothing and weapons for Richard III, before quickly devolving to the final battle between that Richard and Richmond in full battle armor, then flashing forward again, presenting Richmond’s final speech as a press conference broadcast on TV.

The TV version suffers a bit compared to current day streaming spectacles given the obvious budget and technology constraints of the time of its filming in 2012 through 2016. Amazing how 10-15 years can make more of a difference in our storytelling techniques than hundreds of years does in how we continue to rerun the actions of those stories in real life.

But the streaming version does hold up extraordinarily well and offers new insights, due to the intimacy that the camera allows. Using the camera to focus on Shakespeare’s moments of inner thoughts in soliloquies dissects those character kings and queens in ways modern day lickspittle journalists only wish they could access. Even though Shakespeare’s words describing those thoughts are his, they have the ring of more truth than the many we hear and see through these days, certainly in moments of chaos.

And there’s the rub. In moments that strain the hearts and souls of nations, we yearn for anything approaching a morsel of truth amongst all the banquets of rhetoric we’re served. Shakespeare’s fictionalized histories, though not accurate in detail or some necessary facts, reveal the more important and enduring truths, doubts, and fears that all men and women harbor beneath the armor they don for battle as they command us to follow.

Whether watching The Bishop of Canterbury recite the litany of lineage that gives King Henry V the right to invade France, or Secretary of State Marco Rubio breathlessly trying to spin together the strands of stories this administration has spewed out as justification for our current war, the comparisons favor neither, yet reveal the time worn folly of both. And you can’t walk away from comparing the falsehoods, conniving, and deteriorating health of Falstaff to those of Donald Trump.

History catalogs facts and the myths manufactured around them. Drama reveals the humanity of those behind the history. I have said more times than I can count that Shakespeare is the greatest chronicler of the human condition and the ways we relate one to another. There isn’t a human to human interaction that he doesn’t reveal in his characters, even those who have no character.

We like to ignore, or conveniently forget that it’s all been written before. Watching our current myth makers trying to rewrite history as it happens moment to moment, it’s no wonder we yearn for any small slice of humanity to help us make sense of it all.

I’m guessing the dramatists who will reveal that to us haven’t been born yet.

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.