Equivocation
We saw Equivocation at the Seattle Rep on Thanksgiving Eve. I wanted to like it more than I did. But at least now I can tell you, unequivocally – the King is hiding inside, and you’re free to take him off my hands – off all of our hands. It’s long past time to think power without the king.
I am highly sympathetic with Bill Cain’s project here. In Equivocation he revives the many topical and political resonances of Shakespeare’s plays for a 21st century audience unfamiliar with the period, rescuing them from the discredit that the “authorship question” people – who use them to argue someone more highly born and politically connected than Shakespeare must have written the plays – and the “royal flattery” people – who say Shakespeare used them to flatter King James, patron of his company The King’s Men – have brought upon them. Cain even takes aim at the New Historicism (now getting pretty old itself…) by putting its central tenet – 
that Shakespeare had the knack of seeming to everyone to be on their side, and not the other (“there is no end of subversion – only not for us”) – in Robert Cecil’s mouth, and making it the putative reason why Cecil and James choose Shag (Cain’s moniker for Shakespeare) for the task of penning a propagandistic account of the Gunpowder Plot.
Indeed, despite my own extensive background in these matters, even I came away with new things to chew on. I suppose I must once have heard that Polonius in Hamlet parodies the late William Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s chief advisor, but if so I had forgotten the allusion and never completely appreciated it. Cain also has Garnet the Father of equivocation provide Shag and us with a very illustrative example (how to answer traitors who come to door to capture and kill the rightful king you are hiding, which I myself allude to in the first paragraph), and has great fun with another allusion that makes a lot of sense – that William Cecil’s son Robert is parodied in Richard III – as well as a couple that seem intriguing but don’t quite wash – that if King James is flattered in Banquo, Cecil’s nihilism is parodied in Macbeth. He even makes up some cockamamie story that Cecil can’t stand the word “tomorrow” – and tomorrow, and tomorrow…
The Polonius / William Cecil parody got me thinking even more later – the way it might actually work (since as Robert Cecil points out here, why make fun of an advisor several years deceased?) is that that makes Laertes Robert Cecil, Hamlet Essex – and King James Claudius: “Is thy Union here? Follow my mother,” as noted in my Jude Law, Hamlet post. But that’s a longer story left untold at the untimely end of my academic career that I’ll have to defer till yet another day.
In the upshot I didn’t like Equivocation as much as I’d hoped. First off – it’s a bit of a mess. The play’s all over the place:
- Shag receives absolution from one Gunpowder Plotter, and gives absolution to another
- Hamlet, Richard III, Lear, Macbeth, and the Romances are all discussed, alluded to, excerpted
- Cain regurgitates his favorite bits from the best Shakespeare lectures he’s ever heard
- he puts Macbeth (mainly) through the cuisinart to create his own Gunpowder Plot play (Write Like Shakespeare might have helped)
- Hamnet and Judith are both in it
- Cain’s fond of scenes with manly men making theater together between brawls to show just how manly they are
- James isn’t just gay – Shag actually interrupts him in bed with another man (Buckingham?)
And Cain’s odd way of praising the bard with feigned damnation – seemingly as a way to counter any skepticism of his genius among the audience, and to stick it to the above-mentioned New Historicists – grated me, particularly when, summed up, it only amounted to another brand of bardolatry.
I think boiled down, the main line of plot development lost amid this mess is, basically:
- Shag discovers that Cecil and James set up the whole Gunpowder Plot for propaganda purposes
- he sympathizes with the plotters and pities their horrible executions – so much so he even intervenes at the end in Garnet’s
- he pens a play that would expose it all and get the entire company killed – especially since they are to perform it for James first
- the company makes a collective decision to do Macbeth instead
- Shag nevertheless does manage to get some of the zingers planned for the lost Gunpowder Plot play into Macbeth
- and gets the chance to confront Cecil about all this
- but none of it matters – James delights in plausible deniability
- ironically Cecil’s line outlasts everyone else’s and bears no hereditary guilt today
- Shag performs the penance Garnet assigns him, lets go of his lost son Hamnet and reconciles with Hamnet’s twin Judith
- Judith wrote the romances – well, they were stories Shag overheard when she lamented his abandonment of her – and that’s what Shakespeare wrote that had the most mass appeal (even if in Cain’s view they are crap plays with none of this high class political intrigue going on)
In the end, this fantasy of Shakespeare directly confronting and being manipulated by Cecil and James is almost as bad as what the authorship question people do: Shakespeare’s actual audience that came to the Globe is unimportant – a bunch of plebs who preferred Pericles (can you believe it) to Macbeth – compared to the high and mighty of Shakespeare’s day and their power struggles. Central to this fantasy is Cain’s notion of a long personal feud between Shakespeare and Cecil (dating all the way back to Richard III): to counter the authorship people, Cain proposes that Shakespeare had a place of his own at the table of the great, however begrudgingly secured.
And it also ignores there is all kinds of political intrigue going on in the Romances – though not something that played out in dramatic personal scenes between Shakespeare, the king, and his highest councilor.
Rather it’s directed where it could have an effect some 30 years later in overthrowing James’ heir Charles – at the political unconscious of its mass audience, pitting humane fantasy against propagandistic ideology to convince a nation maybe they didn’t need a king after all, that maybe Parliament alone was enough, and they had the right to execute that king for his crimes against them. He wasn’t God’s anointed after all…
But again, that’s a longer story for another day – part of which I’ve already told, though in an academic manner that seems curiously foreign to me now. Maybe I’ll find the time to tell a more compelling version of it someday – perhaps in a more tightly constructed and deeply considered play than even this one proved to be, alas.
Or maybe I could just give Bill Cain some advice on his next one. Couldn’t hurt – and I’m way too busy making a more conventional living, and too lacking in connections to the theater industry, to write and produce a play myself. Just drop me a comment, Bill, if you’d like to chat. Maybe you’d be interested in the Pericles project I could never get Bart Sher to consider.
Hi Prospero,
sorry for changing the topic but there was no easier way to contact you.
Judging from your nickname you might be interested to learn that your island has become a virtual environment in which the players can visit, explore and experience places and events from Shakespeare`s “The Tempest”… All you need in order to play Shakespeare is the First Person Shooter “Far Cry” and this modification:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/stefan-khler
Greetings from Germany and have a nice day,
Stefan from “Projekt A.R.I.E.L.” (ARTificial Research In Electronical Live)
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Way cool Stefan. I’ll have to get that game and give it a try.
And start a more appropriate page to track such innovations here. Yours will be the first listed.
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‘We saw Equivocation at the Seattle Rep the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. I wanted to like it more than I did. But at least now I can tell you, unequivocally – the King is hiding inside, and you’re free to take him off my hands – off all of our hands. It’s long past time to think power without the king.
I am highly sympathetic with Bill Cain’s project here. In Equivocation he revives the many topical and political resonances of Shakespeare’s plays for a 21st century audience unfamiliar with the period, rescuing them from the discredit that the “authorship question” people…”
P– first, lovely site, which I just discovered as a result of the fact that google picked up your comment on the authorship question.
I too enjoyed Equivocation, when I saw it in Ashland last summer. Although though the history on which it is based is essentially fictional, the script is powerful and the acting in the performance I witness was superlative. Its ironic, however, that you use phrases like “‘authorship question’ people” to speak of some of the most distinguished literary and humanistic minds of the last two hundred years of English speaking culture.
Your readers deserve to be apprised that, contrary to your implication, we do not have leprosy, and we actually know some things that you don’t.
I invite them to visit some internet sites that might allow them to formulate a more nuanced and informed opinion about why the authorship question exists, why its not going to go away, and why anyone with a rational mind is going to sooner or later have to come to terms with the evidence generated by the Oxfordians:
http://www.shake-speares-bible.com
http://www.briefchronicles.com
http://www.shakespearefellowship.org
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I didn’t mean to imply you all had leprosy, Roger – just that you form a kind of party or faction (although you do sometimes resemble pod people). And I agree that those of us interested in the many references Shakespeare’s plays make to their contemporary political context owe the Oxfordians et al a great debt of gratitude. Your passionate conviction that Shakespeare must be someone else has spurred you on to uncover a great deal of evidence that would otherwise lie hidden.
But as with most evidence, there are more ways than one to interpret it. I’m just trying to speak up for one that hasn’t been given quite so much attention.
And when it comes right down to it – I think our own prejudices always color our interpretation, and push us toward conclusions that reinforce our more deeply held beliefs – especially on matters like this, where it’s hardly possible to reproduce the experiment and apply a truly scientific method. Certainly my own desire to believe that radical, democratic political change could again arise from grassroots action colors my interpretations of this period – even if the Obama administration has so far been proving just the opposite. I look for evidence of what I’d like to see happen now happening then.
And so other people desire the best English poet of all time to be more nobly born than he seems to have been, and others wish to see flattering one’s betters to achieve success as something that even Shakespeare was not above, and still others like Bill Cain want Shakespeare to be Shakespeare – as long as he’s a closet Catholic.
It’s kind of like Pascal’s wager. But there’s always an anti-Pascal wager to counter it .
Confidentially, my own favorite answer to the authorship question is that I myself am Shakespeare – or rather, that Shakespeare was my Elizabethan incarnation – and that our lineage includes James Joyce, Thoreau, Jane Austen, Jesus (in his human character – I can’t speak for the divine), the woman who composed Homer’s Odyssey, and Moses, and consists of men and women of much more talent than their relatively humble origins and disdain for the prevailing social and political hierarchy typically allow them scope, so that not always does the world take much note of me:
Hence if anyone alive today knows what Shakespeare probably intended when he wrote a play or poem, it’s gonna be me. And I couldn’t care a fig for anyone who thinks my Shakespeare incarnation too low born and uneducated to write my own work:
Another theory is that I am destined to become Shakespeare after the singularity happens, when we humans who finally become immortal discover that history goes backwards as well as forwards, and that Shakespeare will never exist unless I travel back in time and pretend to be him. As I said in the incarnation that wrote Ulysses, “He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.” So it’s no wonder there is very little documentary evidence of his existence – I was incognito, and didn’t want to leave much of a paper trail.
Or was that the plot of a Star Trek episode?
Those interested in such questions would do well to check out the links Roger provides, though I’d advise retaining a healthy skepticism until you find yourselves truly convinced – or even better, come up with a new theory to account for the evidence yourself. If you do come up a new theory – please post it here. I’ll be checking the links out too, to challenge or validate my own conclusions – which are always provisional, and may change after I consider something I didn’t know before.
Thanks for the pointers, Roger.
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