Was P. G. Wodehouse squeamish about sex?

We don’t mean this in a negative way, but the fact can’t be avoided: the Master wasn’t comfortable with sex. Not once in dozens of comic novels and hundreds of short stories with romantic plots, does any P. G. Wodehouse character indulge in the carnal passions, on-stage or off.  Considering that sex is probably the subject of more jokes than anything else, it’s almost astonishing how well Wodehouse got by as a comic writer without it.

Wodehouse wasn’t prudish in other respects. Bertie Wooster and his pals at the Drones Club drink themselves silly, commit petty burglaries, fritter money away at racetracks and casinos, resort to blackmail at the drop of a hat, and concoct hilarious frauds. And as the twentieth century wore on and the rules against explicit language in literature relaxed, so, in a modest way, did Wodehouse’s vocabulary. An occasional “hell” and “damn” sometimes crept in, and in The Mating Season (1950) a Wodehouse character refers to someone as a “bitch”. (The word jars when you read it; perhaps feeling that for once he’d struck a sour note, Wodehouse never used it again.)

But for all the romances that blossom and flourish in Wodehouse’s stories, no Wodehouse characters ever appear in bed with one another. None are ever seen (as in Viagra commercials) heading for the bedroom with amorous intentions. One finds no evidence that any Wodehouse character even thinks about sex.

In fact, Bertie Wooster — the Wodehouse character in whom the mindset of the author can best be discerned — becomes nervous when conversation merely threatens to have anything to do with sex:

“Oh, Bertie [said Madeleine Bassett], you remind me of Rudel.”
The name was new to me. “Rudel?”
“He lived in the Middle Ages. He was a great poet. And he fell in love with the wife of the Lord of Tripoli.”
I stirred uneasily. I hoped she was going to keep it clean.

(The Code of the Woosters, ch. III.)

Nor are Wodehouse characters comfortable with nudity. The closest Wodehouse ever comes to portraying sensuality — not that it comes close at all — is his occasional use of nude portraits as Macguffins in his elaborate plots. But the fate of the nude painting in his story “Jeeves Makes an Omelette” is characteristic: it so disgusts one character that it destroys his appetite, and Bertie ends up cutting it into small pieces and throwing them into the fire. In one of his last books (written when Wodehouse was 89 years old), one of the characters gets the idea that he wants a Renoir-like portrait of a woman, but ends up announcing, “I don’t want the damned thing. And it beats me how I ever got the idea I did. It makes me sick to look at it.” The telling American title of his novel was No Nudes is Good Nudes.

In his later years, when four-letter words and explicit love scenes became commonplace in bestsellers, Wodehouse complained of “smutty” books. Curiously, though, the ribaldry in Shakespeare’s plays — and Shakespeare was Wodehouse’s constant companion — apparently never bothered him. Shakespeare seems to have been obsessed with human reproduction; it’s the theme of a number of sonnets, and in his plays too characters are urged to marry and beget children, as Viola (Cesario) does to Olivia in Twelfth Night (Act I, scene 5):

Lady, you are the cruell’st she alive,
If you will lead these graces to the grave
And leave the world no copy.

But the very idea of reproduction was embarrassing to Bertie Wooster, as in this passage from Jeeves, in which Bertie’s Aunt Agatha is haranguing him about finding a wife:

“It is young men like you, Bertie, who make the person with the future of the race at heart despair. You do nothing but waste your time on frivolous pleasures. You are simply an anti-social animal, a drone. Bertie, it is imperative that you marry.”

“But, dash it all . . .”

“Yes! You should be breeding children to . . .”

“No, really, I say, please!” I said, blushing richly. Aunt Agatha belongs to two or three of these women’s clubs, and she keeps forgetting she isn’t in the smoking room.

In story after story, Bertie Wooster manages to escape the terrors of matrimony.

Wodehouse was already 42 years old and had been married for nine years when he published Jeeves (his first masterpiece) in 1923. He and his wife Ethel never had children, and may never have tried; Wodehouse’s biographer Robert McCrum refers to him as “sexless” (he may have been sterile or impotent as a result of adolescent illness) and reports that and and Ethel always occupied separate bedrooms. Did Wodehouse think of himself as a drone? That would explain a lot.

What P. G. Wodehouse learned from Macbeth

Reading P. G. Wodehouse would be a joy even if his stories didn’t have more poetic allusions than the stars in the sky. On the latest of our many passes through The Code of the Woosters — perhaps the very best of the Jeeves and Wooster novels — we started taking inventory.

Wodehouse starts with a bit of Keats on the very first page, as Jeeves tells Bertie Wooster, “There is a fog, sir. If you will recollect, we are now in Autumn — season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” A few pages later, Sir Watkyn Bassett, a country magistrate who has it in for Bertie, assures Roderick Spode that time in prison won’t prevent a man from “rising on stepping-stones of his dead self to higher things.” That’s from Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.”

Bertie Wooster doesn’t know as much poetry as his friends, so his allusions are often accidental, as when he tells Madeline Bassett what he thinks of Gussie Fink-Nottle’s diffident personality,

Bertie: A sensitive plant, what?
The Bassett: Exactly. You know your Shelley, Bertie.
Bertie: Oh, am I?

(The poet Shelley wrote “The Sensitive Plant.”) A Robert Browning allusion also goes over Bertie’s head. As he and Bertie arrive at Totleigh Towers, where trouble lurks, Jeeves pronounces, “Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” Bertie tells us, “what he meant I hadn’t an earthly.”

Robert Browning

There’s more Browning farther along in the story, as Madeline Bassett explains to Bertie why he reminds her of the hero of “Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli.” Wodehouse tosses in Longfellow, too: “I Shot an Arrow into the Air” and “The Wreck of the Hesperus” both get nods.

Like Emsworth, Bertie sometimes has trouble remembering where phrases came from. Explaining to Jeeves why Stephanie Byng is the most dangerous young woman he’s ever had to deal with, he asks, “Who was the chap lo whose name led all the rest — the bird with the angel?” “Abou ben Adhem, sir,” Jeeves reminds him. The poem was Leigh Hunt’s “Abou Ben Adhem.”

P. G. Wodehouse must have read a good deal of Rudyard Kipling in his youth

But for all his fuzziness, nearly everything reminds Bertie of something out of a poem; he tells his readers: “And then out of the night that covered me, black as the pit from pole to pole, there shone a tiny gleam of hope. I thought of Jeeves.” Somewhere, Bertie had heard someone read William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus”! Later, in low spirits, Bertie tells Jeeves, “You see before you, Jeeves, a toad beneath the harrow.” The reference was to Kipling’s “Pagett, M.P.”

And Wodehouse calls on Browning again to help close out The Code of the Woosters. His problems all neatly sorted, Bertie says, “This is the end of a perfect day, Jeeves. What’s that thing of yours about larks?” Jeeves has Browning’s lines from “Pippa Passes” on the tip of his tongue.

Those are the ones we spotted; no doubt there were more. In this one short novel Wodehouse also mentions A Tale of Two Cities, Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter,” Reginald Heber’s hymn “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” (“Totleigh Towers might be a place where Man was vile, but undoubtedly every prospect pleased”), Robert Louis Stevenson’s story “The Cargo of Champagne,” and Gerald Fairlie’s now-forgotten 1929 novel The Muster of the Vultures (tracking that one down was no easy task!)

But of all the poets, a reader of Wodehouse is far more likely to run across Shakespeare than anyone else. In The Code of the Woosters alone, Wodehouse invokes King Lear, Macbeth, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Hamlet (three different references to lines in the “To be or not to be” soliloquy). Wodehouse even has Gussie Fink-Nottle quote Matthew Arnold’s sonnet entitled “Shakespeare.” (Calling Bertie Wooster a “muddle-headed ass” for forgetting to bring him a book, Gussie comments sarcastically, “Others abide our question, thou art free.”)

Of course, Bertie himself rarely knows what’s Shakespeare and what isn’t. In The Code of the Woosters he misattributes Sonnet 33 to his valet:

I remember Jeeves saying to me once, apropos of how you can never tell what the weather’s going to do, that full many a glorious morning had he seen flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye and then turn into a rather nasty afternoon.

And like so many people, Bertie thinks things come from Shakespeare that don’t:

Bertie: You don’t mean you have an idea?
Jeeves: Yes, sir.
Bertie: But you told me just now you hadn’t.
Jeeves: Yes, sir. But since then have been giving the matter some thought, and am now in a position to say “Eureka!”
Bertie: Say what?
Jeeves: Eureka, sir. Like Archimedes.
Bertie: Did he say Eureka? I thought it was Shakespeare.

A scene from Macbeth by the nineteenth-century British painter George Cattermole, who also illustrated Dickens

More often than not, the Shakespeare that Wodehouse pulls out of his hat is Macbeth — surely the Shakespeare play he knew best. In fact, seeing the Scottish play at the Stratford Festival (Stratford, Ontario) a couple of weeks ago (see this post), we found that we weren’t fully feeling the terror and tragedy because so many of the play’s best lines reminded us of what Wodehouse had done with them. When Lady Macbeth shooed Macbeth’s dinner guests away with “Stand not upon the order of your going,” for instance, we couldn’t help hearing Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia using the line to tell Bertie to make himself scarce.

In Macbeth, Banquo shakes his gory locks at Macbeth’s grand feast twice, then disappears for good. In the collected works of P. G. Wodehouse, Banquo materializes so often that he’s practically a regular. We think, though we’re not sure, that Banquo’s first appearance in Wodehouse was in his 1914 short story “The Man, the Maid, and the Miasma” (in The Man Upstairs). Our favorite sighting of Banquo, though, was in the 1950 short story “The Shadow Passes” (in Nothing Serious):

I don’t know if you ever came across a play of Shakespeare’s called Macbeth? If you did, you may remember this bird Macbeth bumps off another bird named Banquo and gives a big dinner to celebrate, and picture his embarrassment when about the first of the gay throng to turn up is Banquo’s ghost, all merry and bright, covered in blood. It gave him a pretty nasty start, Shakespeare does not attempt to conceal.

And Macbeth has what must have been Wodehouse’s favorite line from Shakespeare — he used it in one story after another. Early in the play, Lady Macbeth loses patience with her husband for hesitating to murder his royal guest and eggs him on to the crime:

Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem’st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem?
Letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would,”
Like the poor cat i’ the adage.

Macbeth, Act I, Scene 7. In The Code of the Woosters, Bertie Wooster has almost exactly the same problem as Macbeth: his Aunt Dahlia is insisting that he steal a cow-creamer from his host’s collection at Totleigh Towers. Like Macbeth, Bertie can’t steel himself to the crime:

Bertie: That is the problem which is torturing me, Jeeves. I can’t make up my mind. You remember that fellow you’ve mentioned to me once or twice, who let something wait upon something? You know who I mean — the cat chap.
Jeeves: Macbeth, sir, a character in a play of that name by the late William Shakespeare. He was described as letting ‘I dare not” wait upon ‘I would,’ like the poor cat i’ th’ adage.
Bertie: Well, that’s how it is with me. I wabble, and I vacillate — if that’s the word?
Jeeves: Perfectly correct, sir.

Not for the first or last time, Bertie Wooster was in the same pickle as Macbeth: a strong-willed woman was demanding that he do something he knew he shouldn’t. What better to fall back on than Macbeth?

See this post for Emsworth’s decidedly mixed feelings about this year’s Macbeth at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.

Although Wodehouse clearly drew a good deal from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (see this Emsworth post), one doesn’t find direct allusions to Wilde’s plays in Wodehouse’s stories (only to Wilde’s serious novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Then again, why would one comic writer allude to another?

Chekhov’s The Three Sisters at the Stratford Festival

Irina (Dalal Badr), Olga (Irene Poole), and Masha (Lucy Peacock)

We’ve seen Kelli Fox in The Three Sisters twice now. In 2003 she was the oldest sister, Olga, in a production at the Shaw Festival directed by Jackie Maxwell; in the current show at the Stratford Festival she plays Natasha, Olga’s sister-in-law and nemesis. Kelli Fox is one of the two best reasons to see the Stratford show; the other is Lucy Peacock, who gives (pardon the cliche) a simmering performance as the second sister, Masha. Both stand out in an excellent production of what is, of course, one of the world’s great plays.

The half dozen or so Chekhov plays we have seen have fallen into two distinct camps. Some directors assume that each character must be played as if in the throes of terminal depression. When, as often happens in Chekhov plays, the Russians don’t seem to be listening to each other’s remarks, these directors call for long, awkward silences. Where an actor has a longer speech, she is instructed to step forward and intone it as if in a trance. As P. G. Wodehouse observed (through Bertie Wooster) in Jeeves in the Offing, this brand of Chekhov can be trying:

I knew Chekhov’s Seagull. My Aunt Agatha had once made me take her son Thos to a performance or it at the Old Vic, and what with the strain of trying to follow the cockeyed goings-on of characters called Zarietchnaya and Medvienko and having to be constantly on the alert to prevent Thos making a sneak for the great open spaces, my suffering had been intense.

Irene Poole as Olga

That notion of Chekhov works no better for Emsworth than it did for Bertie Wooster. Fortunately, the current production of The Three Sisters at Stratford, like the one directed by Jackie Maxwell in 2003, falls into the second camp, with directors who understand that Chekhov’s characters brim with vitality and exhibit a wide range of intensely human emotions, strengths, and weaknesses.  This show is not a theatrical tone poem in a minor key; it’s about people like us that we can care about.

Masha (Lucy Peacock) is, sadly, married to a good man whom she neither respects nor loves

The Three Sisters is the story of the Prozorov family: three well-educated sisters and a brother who grew up in Moscow but find themselves stranded in a small Russian village, a military outpost, a year after the death of their father. The three women — Olga (Irene Poole), Masha (Lucy Peacock), and Irina (Dalal Badr), all in their twenties — want nothing more than to leave this cultural wasteland, return to Moscow, and rejoin a social circle with people who know about literature and music. They have pinned their hopes on their brother Andrei, a violinist and a scholar with aspirations of teaching in Moscow at the university.

Unfortunately, the passionate Masha is already married to a man she does not love (Peter Hutt). As she explains to Vershinin, the only officer in their acquaintance with any cultural advantages,

I was married when I was eighteen, and I was afraid of my husband because he was a teacher, and I had only just left school. In those days I thought him an awfully learned, clever, and important person. And now it is not the same, unfortunately . . . .

Andrei (Gordon S. Miller) foolishly marries a woman who comes to disgust him

And the sisters’ hopes of returning to Moscow with their brother Andrei (Gordon S. Miller) receive a blow when he develops an unfortunate attachment to Natasha (Kelli Fox), an ill-bred woman of the village. By the second act (nine months after the first), Andrei has become a husband and father, has begun a career as a petty bureaucrat, and is gambling away the small family fortune. By the final act (three years later), he knows that marrying Natasha was a colossal blunder. As he confesses to Doctor Chebutykin (James Blendick), who boards with the Prozorovs,

There is something in her that makes her no better than some petty, snake-like creature. She is not a human being. She seems to me so vulgar that I can’t account for my loving her or, anyway, having loved her.

Natasha is like the camel in the proverb who pokes his nose into a tent and ends up displacing everyone else.  (Kelli Fox gives us this dreadful termagant to the hilt.)  She bullies and shocks her sisters-in-law with her vulgarity, selfishness, and petty cruelty; in the end she drives them away from their home. Olga’s only consolation, as she reconciles herself to a provincial life as a old maid schoolmistress, is that she is able to rescue the family’s 80-year-old nanny and servant, Anfisa (Joyce Campion), to whom Natasha has been shockingly brutal. Masha and Irina have no choice but to settle for marriages to men they do not love.

The naked plot of The Three Sisters, which is much richer than three paragraphs can convey, would suggest that the play is nothing but a gloomy, metaphorical portrayal by Chekhov of all the self-inflicted wounds that were keeping Russia from advancing to modernity.  But these characters joke and tease, sing and dance, flirt and misbehave, scheme and dream.  The joy of life spills forth in every scene. 

Emsworth has three daughters of his own, presently almost exactly the same age as Chekhov’s three sisters, and was delighted to see that Chekhov was aware of how birth order influences the temperaments and personalities of siblings.  (Did we notice this when we saw the play six years ago?  We don’t remember.)  We had little difficulty in matching the salient traits of our three daughters with those of Olga, Masha, and Irina.

Other posts from Emsworth about shows in the Stratford Festival’s 2009 season:

The Scottish play, set in Africa! Shakespeare’s Macbeth at this post.

Classic French drama: Jean Racine’s Phèdre at this post.

The hilarious musical comedy A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at this post

The Ben Jonson play Bartholomew Fair (see this post)

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (see this post)

The folly of suggesting that Shakespeare should be “translated” for modern audiences (see this post)

The marvelous quarrels in Julius Caesar and The Importance of Being Earnest (see this post)

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (see this post)

What P. G. Wodehouse owes to Oscar Wilde (see this post)

The musical West Side Story (see this post)

Ways of the Heart at the Shaw Festival (a review)

Patrick McManus was superb in Family Affair and even better in Ways and Means

Some folks saw all four of the Noël Coward shows at the Shaw Festival in a single day.  We spread Tonight at 8:30 out over two and half months, which gave us time to think (and blog) about what we’d seen. Now we’re done, having caught Ways of the Heart in the Courthouse Theater last Sunday evening.  These three one-acts may not be the best of the series, but they’re still indispensable.

But first, a protest against what we had to go through just to get into Canada in the first place. We left Rochester in plenty of time to reach Niagara-on-the-Lake by 6:00 or so and have dinner at the Epicurean before the 8:00 p.m. show. But cars were lined up at the Lewiston/Queenston border crossing for two miles, and we had to sit in line for the better part of two hours (our time with the customs inspector took all of 30 seconds). And what about the environment?  Our car’s computer said that we wasted nearly a gallon of gas idling in line; the SUVs all around us must have burned even more. We got to our show, without dinner, with only minutes to spare.

We saw recently that the Canadian government gave the Shaw Festival and the Stratford Festival several million dollars to promote tourism. Don’t they realize that nothing discourages spontaneous visits to Ontario more than the tedious, unpredictable delays at the border? Why didn’t they put a little extra “tourism” money into adding more booths at the border crossing and hiring more inspectors? We bet tourism would pick up by 100 percent if the province of Ontario could advertise that there’d never be more than a five minute wait at the border.

Back to the show: Ways of the Heart is at the Courthouse Theatre, where there’s a radically different dynamic between actors and audience. When you’re witnessing painful marital scenes like those in The Astonished Heart (the first and longest of the three plays in this show) from a vantage point eight feet away from the actors, you feel like a voyeur.

The Astonished Heart is one of two plays in Tonight at 8:30 that gives an embryo-to-grave sketch of an illicit romance. The first, in the Shaw Festival show titled Brief Encounters, was Still Life (see this post), in which an affair starts innocently; the lovers attract the audience’s sympathy because of their fundamental decency.

Claire Jullien

The lovers in The Astonished Heart are of a different sort. Here the affair starts when a jaded woman on the prowl, Leonora Vail (Claire Jullien), deliberately sets out to seduce an old school friend’s husband. Her target, Chris Faber (David Jansen), is a tightly wound, self-satisfied psychiatrist who turns out to be spectacularly ill-equipped for a relationship that he can’t control.  (Still Life involves an affair with a doctor, too.)  There’s no tenderness in their love affair, nor do we have much sympathy for the injured wife, Barbara (Laurie Paton), who faces the collapse of her marriage with almost pathological coolness.

We especially loved Laurie Paton as Lavinia Featherways in Family Affair

After intermission comes Family Affair, an intensely entertaining, offbeat satire of the way people behave when they’re not really sorry someone has died. The ten members of the Featherways family stand around their drawing room in extravagantly gothic mourning clothes (the play is set in the mid-1800s; the scene lacks only a raven) doing their best to mourn the passing of their father, whose Victorian portrait hangs over the mantle.

We hope the Shaw Festival has bigger roles for Michael Ball in 2010

But they can keep up their long faces only so long.  One after the other, the Featherways admit to themselves and to each other that the old man was a dissolute skinflint and that his death came as a relief. Patrick McManus and Laurie Paton are in rare form as Jasper and Lavinia Featherways, but Michael Ball (still our favorite Shaw Festival actor) steals the show as Burrows, the Featherways’ decrepit, conveniently deaf butler.

David Jansen

The final play, Ways and Means, was, we must say, the weakest of the ten one-act plays we saw, even though its setting and plot are straight out of P. G. Wodehouse. The main problem, we thought, is that David Jansen plays what is supposed to be a comic role with the same sour, joyless affect that he used in The Astonished Heart earlier in the show. It’s also the way he’s currently playing the alcoholic James Tyrone in A Moon for the Misbegotten (see our review) and the way he played the shattered Horace Gibbens last year in The Little Foxes (see our review).  One approach doesn’t fit all.

Ways and Means takes place in a guest bedroom at the French Riviera estate of Olive Lloyd-Ransome (Lisa Codrington), where socialites Toby and Stella Cartwright (Jansen and Claire Jullien again) have overstayed their welcome. The Cartwrights live by their charm and wits, but now they’re broke; they’ve lost what little money they had at the casino and at the bridge table and don’t even have enough to leave town.

They brainstorm for ways to raise money: Have Stella’s maid hock a necklace?  Corral someone who owes them money? Borrow from their hostess? A solution comes in the middle of the night when an ex-valet-turned-burglar, Stevens (Patrick McManus again), invades their bedroom.

At our performance, the opening scenes between Stella and Toby got no audience reaction.  Was this due, we wondered, to 75- year-old material that no longer packs any comic punches?  Unemployed social parasites like the Cartwrights were natural objects of ridicule in the twenties and thirties (Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster and his fellow drones are the classic examples), but they’re not a familiar species anymore. At one point Stella says to Toby, “It seems a pity that you can’t turn your devastating wit to a more commercial advantage — you should write a gossip column.”  Toby responds, “I haven’t got a title.”  This must have been a surefire laugh line in 1935 when destitute dukes and duchesses wrote gossip columns for the London papers. But nobody laughed last Sunday evening in Niagara-on-the-Lake.

But even more of a problem than dated material, we thought, was David Jansen’s inability to deliver comic lines with comic effect. Moments after Patrick McManus came on stage as the burglar Stevens, the play came to life and our audience suddenly realized that Ways and Means was a comedy, not a drama. Did Coward’s play abruptly change its mood with Stevens’s entrance (to some extent it did, we think, though we hesitate to suggest that Coward wrote anything with a flaw), or did McManus bring comic skills that Jansen lacks? We would have liked to have seen Blair Williams, a talented comic actor who was director of this show, playing Jansen’s roles.

August 18, 2009: We see that the New York Times has noticed that the Shaw is doing  Tonight at 8:30 (see this post), although the writer mostly talks about the history of these one-act plays and doesn’t say much about these performances.

Emsworth reviews of other Shaw Festival productions in 2009:

John Osborne’s The Entertainer (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Play, Orchestra, Play (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Star Chamber (see this post)
Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Brief Encounters (see this post)
Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten (see this post)

A pox on Shakespeare in “translation”

Perhaps high schoolers should simply be issued Little Golden Book editions of Romeo and Juliet

The latest bad idea is that Shakespeare needs to be “translated” for the benefit of bored schoolchildren who can’t make sense of 16th-century English. Reading about this recently gave us a slow burn. Emsworth has put a lot of time into learning to read and understand Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida; now we read Shakespeare as easy as rolling off a log. But what was it all for, if this push for Shakespeare in “translation” catches on?

So we were relieved to see that Antoni Cimolino, boss of bosses at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, is stoutly against it. (See this article.) Relieved, but not surprised: as a classical actor, Mr. Cimolino has a lot more invested in the “original” Shakespeare than we do. Having him on the right side of the issue should guarantee that we’ll be able to hear the immortal and original (if sometimes impenetrable) language of Shakespeare in Stratford, Ontario, for at least a few more years.

What might Shakespeare in translation be like? Well, a fellow named Kent Richmond, who teaches English at some college in Long Beach, California, is already at it. He’s selling “verse translations” of King Lear and several other plays for your Kindle (also in paperback) (here’s his website), and he’s put a little of his new and improved Macbeth online.

Here’s some of it.  Macbeth, Act II, Scene 2. Macbeth has just heard Duncan’s death knell. Spurred on by his loving but bloodthirsty wife, he has gone off in the night to dispatch Duncan to the next world. Back in her chambers, Lady Macbeth wonders aloud how the murder is going. First, Shakespeare’s original:

MACBETH
[Within] Who’s there? what, ho!
LADY MACBETH
Alack, I am afraid they have awaked,
And ’tis not done. The attempt and not the deed
Confounds us. Hark! I laid their daggers ready;
He could not miss ‘em. Had he not resembled
My father as he slept, I had done’t.

(These, we trust, are the lines we’ll hear later this summer in Stratford, where by coincidence Macbeth is on the playbill along with Julius Caesar and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.)  But here is Mr. Richmond’s “verse translation”:

MACBETH
[from beyond the door] Who’s there?—What’s that?

LADY MACBETH
Oh, no! I am afraid they’ve woken up
And it’s not done. Attempt without the deed
Will wreck us.—Listen!—I laid out their daggers.
He couldn’t miss them.—Had he not resembled
My father as he slept, I would have done it.

See how much better it can be said?  We don’t.  Mr. Richmond apparently thinks that the meaning of the phrase “What ho!” has become obscure over the centuries.  But P. G. Wodehouse, master of 20th-century colloquial English, clearly didn’t think so; in stories written from 1920 to 1965, his character Bertie Wooster  said “What ho!” all the time.

And who, really, would fail to understand Lady Macbeth when she says, “Alack, I am afraid they have awaked/And ’tis not done”? And what sort of person would want to banish “alack” from our vocabulary?  It’s a pearl of a word!  And who wants to pay good money to see Macbeth and hear Lady Macbeth say “Oh, no!”

And does Mr. Richmond really think that audiences will understand “Attempt without the deed/Will wreck us” any easier than Shakespeare’s original?

We have a few more questions. First, isn’t Shakespeare suspiciously popular for a playwright that audiences don’t “get”? Know how many theater companies exist mainly to put on the works of Shakespeare? Nearly 200 of them in the United States alone! (They’re listed here on playshakespeare.com.) Why try to fix something that ain’t broke?

Here’s another: When did Shakespeare suddenly become so hard to understand? Standard English really hasn’t changed much for nearly two hundred years. No one literate enough to read Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982) comfortably will have any trouble with Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford (1851).  Pride and Prejudice (1813) is read and loved more than ever.  If kids today have more trouble making sense of Hamlet than they did 100 years ago, the reason is not that the American language is changing, but that the kids aren’t being given the intellectual challenges that might prepare them for Hamlet.

John McWhorter

One of our favorite thinkers, the usually sound John McWhorter, has unfortunately come out on the wrong side of this. In an article in The New Republic (here it is), McWhorter says that we’re so far away from Shakespeare’s time that “we cannot understand what the man is saying.” Understanding Shakespeare, he says, “has become too much of a challenge to expect of anyone but specialists.”  But he makes his case, in part, by quoting an  article in an 1898 issue of The Atlantic in which someone complained about a puzzling passage in Hamlet.  We say: if it’s been a problem that long, it’s one we can live with.

True, we’ve sat through Shakespeare performances ourselves (even at Stratford) where, for a minute or so, we didn’t understand what the actors were talking about.  But more often than not the problem lies with inexperienced actors who (a) don’t seem to fully understand their lines and (b) merely speak the words without giving the audience the inflections, the pauses, the gestures that communicate meaning where mere words don’t.

When Shakespeare is acted well, one hardly notices obsolete words and phrases. Several years ago at Stratford, when the late William Hutt appeared in The Tempest, Prospero was no harder to understand than Walter Cronkite delivering the evening news.   We can almost say the same of this year’s Julius Caesar at Stratford (see this Emsworth review), so well acted that we don’t think there was a single line we didn’t understand.

Why would anyone want to settle for Shakespeare filtered through someone else’s sensibilities? We don’t love the Shakespeare plays for their plots, but for the beauty and power of the language and for the playwright’s insights into human nature. But Shakespeare’s language, by definition, won’t survive a translation (you saw what happened to Macbeth!). And the insights won’t be the same either; language and ideas are too closely connected. We won’t have Shakespeare unalloyed anymore. No matter how beautifully a “verse translation” of Shakespeare turns out, there will be too much of the translator and not enough of Shakespeare.

Other posts from Emsworth about shows in the Stratford Festival’s 2009 season:

The musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (see this post)

The Ben Jonson play Bartholomew Fair (see this post)

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (see this post)

The marvelous quarrels in Julius Caesar and The Importance of Being Earnest (see this post)

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (see this post)

What P. G. Wodehouse owes to Oscar Wilde (see this post)

The musical West Side Story (see this post)

What P. G. Wodehouse owes to Oscar Wilde

Wilde

Seeing The Importance of Being Earnest at the Shaw Festival in 2004 persuaded us that P. G. Wodehouse had no greater literary influence than Oscar Wilde. How very like Wodehouse’s idle young men in spats were Algernon Moncrieff and Jack Worthing (as played by David Leyshon and Evan Buliung)! How very like the manner of Jeeves was the deadpan sarcasm of Algernon’s manservant Lane (as played by Robert Benson)! How very much like Bertie Wooster’s dragon aunts was Algernon’s aunt, Lady Bracknell!

Wodehouse

And how much do Wodehouse plots owe to The Importance of Being Earnest?  In how many Wodehouse stories do young men and women make their way into English country houses posing as tutors or gardeners or friends of friends so they can pursue forbidden romances or purloin prize pigs or play detective? Of course Wilde’s play is a story of imposters too. When he is in London, Jack adopts the identity of a fictitious brother named “Ernest” so that he can live the life of a libertine in the city (as Ernest) without tarnishing his respectable reputation back home in the country. And when Algernon wants to meet Jack’s pretty ward Cecily Cardew (who like so many Wodehouse young women cannot marry without her guardian’s permission), he goes to the country house where she is staying, posing as Jack’s much talked-about but never-seen brother “Ernest”.

Wodehouse was only an impressionable 14 years old when The Importance of Being Earnest premiered in 1895, and we think it must have influenced him powerfully.  If you took out of Wodehouse all the foppish young men, imposters, domestic blackmail, dragon aunts, butlers, and young women who need permission from guardians to marry — that is, the characters, the plot, and the comic elements of Wilde’s play — there wouldn’t be much Wodehouse left on our library shelves.

It’s easy to identify the writers who were dear to Wodehouse’s heart; his novels and stories have thousands of quotations and allusions to Keats, Tennyson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and especially Shakespeare. Nowhere, however, is Wodehouse’s delight in Oscar Wilde so transparent as in his 1952 novel Pigs Have Wings.

Galahad Threepwood in one of Wodehouse's later, lesser novels

There is, first, Lord Emsworth’s brother Gally. The now middle-aged Galahad Threepwood (a recurring Wodehouse character) has spent his life carousing in nightclubs and chasing barmaids, just as he did in the 1890s when he was a young man. (Galahad’s character is the antithesis of that of the pure knight of the Arthurian legends.) Remarkably, however, Gally’s decades of fast living have had no impact on his health or his perennially youthful appearance — no more than they did, Wodehouse gleefully tells us in Pigs Have Wings, on Dorian Gray.

Ivan Albright's alarming 1943 painting of Dorian Gray is at the Art Institute of Chicago

The chief imposter in Pigs Have Wings is the butler’s niece Maudie, formerly a barmaid, now co-proprietor of a detective agency. Gally engages her to come incognito to Blandings Castle to help foil what Gally fears to be a plot to either steal or nobble Lord Emsworth’s prize-winning fat pig — and he insists that she pose as “Mrs. Bunbury,” an old friend of one of the guests.

Brian Bedford will take the part of Lady Bracknell at the Stratford Festival in 2009

Wodehouse’s choice of “Bunbury” for Maudie is, we think, the most explicit homage to Oscar Wilde in all of Wodehouse.  The reference, of course, is to opening scene of The Importance of Being Earnest , when we learn that for some time Algernon has pretended to have a friend in the country named Bunbury whom Algernon must frequently visit because of Bunbury’s alleged ill health. Whenever Algernon wants to escape London because of inconvenient social obligations, he pleads that his friend “Bunbury” needs him and flees town.

We have tickets to see The Importance of Being Earnest again next month in Ontario, this time at the Stratford Festival. Stratford stalwart Brian Bedford will be directing and playing Lady Bracknell (in drag), but the roles of Algernon and Jack will be played by two actors that we’ve seen most often in years past at the Shaw Festival, Mike Shara and Ben Carlson.

June 2009: We liked Bedford’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest. See this post.

October 2009. We weren’t altogether satisfied with the Stratford Festival’s 2009 Macbeth, but it did remind us how Wodehouse borrowed the most famous lines in Shakespeare’s play and turned them on their heads in his comic stories. See this post.

Jeeves at Christmastime

It is our habit to re-read a favorite Christmas story around Christmastime each year — aloud if anyone will listen, silently if they won’t. Often as not, it’s A Christmas Carol, which never gets old. Sometimes it’s one of Dickens’s lesser Christmas tales, sometimes O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi.” This Christmas Eve, we fell merrily back on P.G. Wodehouse’s only Christmas tale, “Jeeves and the Yule-Tide Spirit.”

We don’t suppose Wodehouse has much of a reputation as a Christmas author. Dickens does, in good part because of his affectionate account of the Cratchit family’s Christmas dinner party and the shenanigans under the mistletoe at the Wardles’ (Pickwick Papers, chapter 28) . But Bertie Wooster passes lightly over the details of the Christmas bash at Skeldings, the country home of Lady Wickham:

It being Christmas Eve, there was, as I had foreseen, a good deal of revelry and what not; so that it wasn’t till past one that I got to my room.

On with the story, Wodehouse must have thought.

Norman Rockwell's Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim

Both Wodehouse and Dickens give us their characters waking up with their servants on Christmas morning. From “Jeeves and the Yule-Tide Spirit,” a passage that reminded us of Scrooge waking up after his night with the ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Future:

I could have sworn I hadn’t so much as dozed off for even a minute; but apparently I had. For the curtains were drawn back and daylight was coming in through the window, and there was Jeeves with a cup of tea on a tray.

“Merry Christmas, sir!”

And from Pickwick Papers, chapter 30:

“Well, Sam,” said Mr. Pickwick as that favoured servitor entered his bed-chamber with his warm water, on the morning of Christmas Day, “still frosty?”

“Water in the wash-hand basin’s a mask o’ ice, Sir,” responded Sam.

“Severe weather, Sam,” observed Mr. Pickwick.

“Fine time for them as is well wropped up, as the Polar Bear said to himself ven he was practising his skating,” replied Mr. Weller.

P. G. Wodehouse

We candidly admit that the theme of Wodehouse’s story is not actually one of peace on earth and good-will to men, like A Christmas Carol and the passages from Pickwick. “Jeeves and the Yule-Tide Spirit” is, instead, an account of Bertie Wooster’s ill-advised infatuation with the red-headed Roberta Wickham and Bertie’s plan to revenge himself on his friend Tuppy Glossop for a practical joke.

And it’s one of the most hilarious stories Wodehouse ever wrote — in fact, one of the funniest things anyone ever wrote. Jeeves has some of his best lines, especially when he’s advising his master against an alliance with Roberta Wickham:

“I would always hesitate to recommend as a life’s companion a young lady with such a vivid shade of red hair.”

Good cheer on Christmas Eve!

Free speech at the Speakers Corner (P. G. Wodehouse on offensive speech)

When we visited London for the first time two years ago, Emsworth did not want to leave without visiting Kensington Gardens and the adjacent Hyde Park. I wanted to see Kensington Gardens because James Barrie, author of Peter Pan, had frequented its gardens and ponds (like Round Pond, shown above) from his home just north of the park. (Read Emsworth’s review of a recent Barrie biography at this post.) And I wanted to visit the Speakers Corner at Hyde Park on a Sunday morning.

In all Christendom there is no finer symbol of freedom of speech than the Speakers Corner. Since the 1870s, socialists, radical priests, Muslim extremists, and crackpots of all varieties have been coming to this patch of grass to exercise their lungs for the benefit of anyone who will listen.

And so a Sunday morning in May found us gawking rudely at perhaps half a dozen such speakers, all standing on their soapboxes telling little groups of Londoners and tourists what was wrong with the world and how to fix it. In our quest for local color (or “colour”, as the Brits quaintly would have it), we got our money’s worth at the Speakers Corner.

One fellow, a tireless talker, stood over a Socialist Party banner, looking just as a socialist ought to look, preaching to a dozen listeners that Britain had fallen abjectly short of achieving true socialism. Subsequent research by Emsworth identified him as Danny Lambert, a perennial candidate for local public office.

Another man in colorful attire seemed to be speaking on behalf of an Islamic group of some kind. He was explaining that the United States was in Iraq solely because Americans hate the Muslim religion and because the United States government is controlled by the Jews (not by “Jews”, but “the Jews”, if you catch the distinction).

Yet another speaker was readily identifiable as a professional leftist. He was enthusiastically slandering George W. Bush and the United States, while holding up Hugo Chavez’s thuggish regime in Venezuela as a model for the world to follow. We knew his type, adept at following marching orders and sticking to talking points. In the seventies, when we did time at an upstate New York university campus, his leftist counterparts were giving exactly the same speeches, except that it was Castro instead of Chavez. In the sixties, it was Mao, in the eighties, it was Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas.

Yet why should I try to describe the Speakers Corner at Hyde Park, when no one can improve on P. G. Wodehouse’s description in his short story “Comrade Bingo,” from The Inimitable Jeeves? The story begins, as Bertie Wooster tells it,

in the Park — at the Marble Arch end — where weird birds of every description collect on Sunday afternoons and stand on soap-boxes and make speeches.

On the edge of the mob farthest away from me a gang of top-hatted chappies were starting an open-air missionary service; nearer at hand an atheist was letting himself go with a good deal of vim, though handicapped a bit by having no roof to his mouth; while in front of me there stood a little group of serious thinkers with a banner labelled “Heralds of the Red Dawn.”

Not much has changed at the Speakers Corner since Wodehouse published “Comrade Bingo” in The Strand in 1922.

But we still have with us the question of how to deal with highly offensive speech. In Canada, as I noted sourly in an earlier post, the government has installed speech police in the form of “human rights tribunals,” with authority to punish people who offend the sensibilities of religious and ethnic groups.

The Wodehouse approach is better. In Wodehouse’s story, one of the Heralds of the Red Dawn begins to berate Bertie Wooster and his aristocratic companion, Lord Bittlesham, with hilarious invective. But instead of complaining that there are no laws against such diatribes, Lord Bittlesham simply turns his back:

“Come away, Mr. Wooster,” he said. “I am the last man to oppose the right of free speech, but I refuse to listen to this vulgar abuse any longer.”

Wodehouse was to politics as a eunuch is to sex, but his policy concerning offensive hate groups and authoritarian figures cannot be improved upon. When he did not ignore them (as did his character Lord Bittlesham), he mocked them without mercy. The closest Wodehouse ever got to a political theme was the creation of Roderick Spode, a nemesis of Bertie Wooster in several stories, most memorably in Wodehouse’s masterpiece The Code of the Woosters, written during the second World War.

In the 1920s, Wodehouse surely ran across characters like the Heralds of the Red Dawn in “Comrade Bingo,” foolishly infatuated with Russian socialism. In the 1930s, Wodehouse must have been appalled to see so many Englandmen attracted to Hitler’s national socialism. One such misguided person was Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, upon whom Wodehouse’s Roderick Spode is modeled. Spode is a outlandish figure with a Hitler moustache who loves to hear his own voice, makes his sycophantic followers wear black shorts, and dreams of becoming Dictator.

No amount of laws against fascist ideology could have damaged the cause of fascism more effectively than the sort of mockery and ridicule that Wodehouse brought to bear on Roderick Spode. The thought police ought to take a lesson from Wodehouse.

“What a curse these social distinctions are. They ought to be abolished. I remember saying that to Karl Marx once, and he thought there might be an idea for a book in it.”

– P. G. Wodehouse, in his novel Quick Service