Pentimento, Palimpsest, can I have a word?
“Palimpsest” (according to the American Heritage dictionary I received for Christmas when I was 12 years old) means the following:
“A written document, typically on vellum or parchment, that has been written upon several times, often with remnants of earlier, imperfectly erased writing still visible, remnants of this kind being a major source for the recovery of lost literary works of classical antiquity.”
The same dictionary has no definition for “pentimento”, so I went to the internet, which told me it is defined as “the presence or emergence of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been changed and painted over.”
Both words sort of mean the intrusion of an earlier work into the current one. Sort of. But is there a similar word for theater?
I have reflected on this recently as I have watched two performances of Shakespeare – the Ralph Fiennes/Indira Varma production of MACBETH in Washington, D.C. last month, and a performance of TWELFTH NIGHT by the Axis Theater Company earlier this weekend. I’ve wondered if there was a word for the theatrical déjà vu one experiences during a new production of a play you have seen numerous times before. I went to TWELFTH NIGHT knowing I had seen the play several times, most notably the “star-studded” production at Shakespeare in the Park (Michelle Pfeiffer, Jeff Goldblum, Gregory Hines, John Amos) decades ago, but, as often happens now, during the performance, glimpses of other productions emerged from my memory.
There was a production where all the characters were dressed in swinging 60’s attire, and the “hey nonny nonny” had a British Invasion feel; another one at one of those mildewy Village theaters – maybe the Pearl Rep? — which long ago lost its lease but which featured a particularly fine “make me a willow cabin at your gate” speech by an actress I’ve otherwise entirely forgotten.
So is there a word for this?
And never mind MACBETH. Save one prominent Lincoln Center production which I did not complete, most of the productions of MACBETH I’ve seen have been cobbled-together second-floor or church basement productions, all overshadowed by the first MACBETH I ever saw. I saw it six times because I was working at my first job in the outside world, as an usher in the local repertory theater when I was fifteen years old. We were also reading MACBETH in my Shakespeare: Tragedy class (yes, there was also Shakespeare: Comedy) and MacBeth himself was kind enough to visit our class and tell us that the curse of the Scottish Play was real, that there had been a fire at the theater that had destroyed all the costumes.
MACBETH is a good play for high school; it has themes and witches and birds, a tragic flaw and an inevitability. And it is short – too short, some say. Earlier this spring, I saw MACBETH: AN UNDOING at Theater for a New Audience, which presents (sort of) MACBETH from Lady M’s point of view, gender-flips the madness and produces so much blood (and I was sitting so close) that I could at one point hear it dripping from a slain character onto the stage floor.
At the talkback afterwards, the playwright and the Lady M floated out the concept that the MACBETH we know is a heavily edited one. So much occurs offstage. Lady M scolds MacBeth “had I so sworn as you have” when we have never seen him swear to anything.
In the production I saw in D.C., Ralph Fiennes was excellent, as excellent as Kenneth Branagh when I saw him in HAMLET in Stratford-upon-Avon. I am floating out MY theory that these two, roughly contemporaries, were raised on Monty Python and FAWLTY TOWERS and found a weird, cruel humor in their dark stories that made their characters seem strangely familiar.
HAMLET, now. It is for that play that I need the word – the word like palimpsest or pentimento. I have seen so many productions of it that I can only reproach myself for not keeping better records. My obsession with HAMLET is a subject for another time. But in the meantime, I would like a word.
Masked
The Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park production of The Merry Wives of Windsor was cancelled on July 21 and 22 because a production member had tested positive for the coronavirus. The Friday performance was cancelled, according to The New York Times, “to support the artistic and logistical efforts required to restart performances.” What that meant to us at the Delacorte Theater on Saturday night was that audience would watch a performance which called upon the resources of six understudies. The associate artistic director warned us this from the stage. Some of the actors may call for a line. Some may be holding a script. But New York is back, amirite? Live theater! Woo! The show must go on! Woo-hoo.
Six understudies in a cast of fifteen, but the show must go on. Woo-hoo indeed. The boisterous production, set in a merry community in a Harlem, with prominent Black Lives Matter graffiti and the script vigorously updated, was nonstop energy and fun. I knew nothing of the play beyond the fact that it recycled characters like Falstaff, Mistress Quickly and other tavern denizens from The Henriad, due to popular demand among Elizabethan audiences to see those characters onstage again, and that it was a farce.
I don’t own a copy of the play, except in my tiny-fonted Complete Works, and it was one of the handful of plays outstanding on my bucket list to see every play performed live before I die.
I looked through my books. Tina Packer, in Women of Will, mentions it only in passing, as does Marjorie Garber in Shakespeare and Modern Culture. Auden in his Lectures on Shakespeare calls it “a very dull play indeed,” adding that its only use, as far as he was concerned, was that it inspired Verdi’s opera Falstaff. “I have nothing to say about Shakespeare’s play,” he told him class, “so let’s hear Verdi.” He then played a dropped a needle onto a record of Verdi’s Falstaff and listened to it along with his students.
I am enthralled by the mere existence of Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare, so bear with me: they are a collection of the notes taken by the students, and by Auden himself, at his class on Shakespeare which took place at the New School in 1946. No formal manuscripts of the lectures exist, and the book Lectures on Shakespeare was reconstructed from all the notes editor Arthur Kirsch was able to get his hands on, from Auden and from Kirsch’s dedicated combing through archives as well as his general cry for help, to which so many former students responded.
At the New School, Auden covered the plays in chronological order, and the class was reported to be tremendously popular, with tickets sold at the door to those not matriculating. He sometimes spoke to classes as large as 500. I loved the idea of Auden lecturing to a Greenwich Village crowd, bobby-socked and footloose, fueled by caffeine and ideology, bristling with impatience to get on with a life interrupted and devastated by war. Auden spoke to a class partly comprised of former soldiers attending the New School on the GI Bill. I loved this idea so much that I began a chapter of an unfinished companion novel to my novel Censorettes in which two of my characters, newly wed, are living in on Commerce Street in the West Village, brimming with appetite for their education, their part-time jobs and their new marriage. One Friday night, the wife meets her husband, just returned from a lecture he has given at the Naval Academy on wartime maneuvers. She finds him at the former West Village speakeasy Chumley’s already sharing a drink with Auden. “Auden was famously fond of a sailor,” the wife observes.
This unfinished piece of writing bore similar theme to this particular production of Merry Wives – the famished embrace of culture, the sympathetic crowd, the theater – after a long denial of it. From the energetic call-and-response of the pre-show drummer to the exuberant climatic masked ball, which was five times more crackling than any masked ball I have ever seen in a Shakespeare production, this production was two hours of embracing joy.
“More crackling than any masked ball,” might seem like faint praise, but you must remember (pray you love, remember) that Shakespeare is replete with masked balls – they are in at least Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado About Nothing, and the coy posturing of a hand raising an eye mask to the face never convinced me that characters who had known one another since childhood would suddenly be beguiled by this thin piece of fabric and fancy.
We all know what masks are now We all know what masks are for. But onstage at the Delacorte, they meant no danger at all.
Elizabeth Bales Frank 
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