Trevor Nunn, David Suchet, and Sonnet 138

In a televised "master class" from 1979, these two great talents lead us through a guided tour of one of the late, great sonnets - #138 - in the process limning the braided density of meaning that is typical of the sonnets (and the plays) in general.  A hat tip to my friend Debbie for digging this up!

Sonnet 138

When my love swears that she is made of truth, 
I do believe her though I know she lies, 
That she might think me some untutored youth, 
Unlearned in the world's false subtleties. 
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young, 
Although she knows my days are past the best, 
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue: 
On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed: 
But wherefore says she not she is unjust? 
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O! love's best habit is in seeming trust, 
And age in love, loves not to have years told: 
    Therefore I lie with her, and she with me, 
    And in our faults by lies we flattered be.

Is The Merchant of Venice now a tool of the Israel lobby?

Shylock prepares to take his pound of flesh in Habima's Merchant of Venice.

That's the intriguing question that Boston's own Ian Thal raises (I think unconsciously) in a post on the new Clyde Fitch Report, in which he details the recent protests in London over a production of The Merchant of Venice (in Hebrew) by Habima, Israel's national theatre, at the ongoing "Globe to Globe Festival." (From the photo above, btw, the production looks to have been a bravely complex and gripping affair, with a shockingly dark view of Shylock.)

Various British theatrical eminences (including Mark Rylance and Emma Thompson) signed letters deploring Habima's appearances at the festival, and due to threats and fears of violence, high security was required at the performances - but protest still found its way into the theatre, as Ian details:

Though the most vocal protestors were kept out, Habima’s performances were repeatedly disrupted by anti-Israeli activists, who were photographed waving Palestinian flags, and unfurling banners with anti-Israeli slogans, only to be escorted out by security. Reports describe a group standing silently with their mouths covered by either tape or adhesive bandages apparently in protest of the “censorship” of the more disruptive activists. Several sources [reported] that during the trial scene in Act IV, a protester shouted “hath not a Palestinian eyes?”echoing signs seen outside the theatre as well as demonstrating a lack of knowledge of the original text (Shylock’s famous “Hath not a Jew eyes…” speech is from Act III, Scene 3.)

Now Ian - a reader and frequent commenter on the Hub Review - is, I think you could say, a staunch supporter of Israel.  My own view of Israel is more complicated only in regards to its treatment of the Palestinians - many of whom, I know, are bent on Israel's destruction, but whose rights to a viable state are nonetheless not so easily ignored.


So to Ian, the ruckus in Britain over Habima's appearance was pure "hooliganism," and evidence of a rising tide of anti-Semitism there (and elsewhere in the world).  This claim is not easily refuted (not that I'm going to try); undoubtedly legitimate Palestinian claims have long served, and perhaps will forever serve, as a cover for unreasoning hatred of Jews and the Jewish state.  An awareness of that issue is essential to any understanding of our current situation, and complicates everything else I have to say.

But still a sense of this latest, extremely ironic twist in the fraught history of The Merchant of Venice haunts me somehow.  Could this reifying document of the oppression of the Jews really be converted into a tool for the oppression of the Palestinians?  It's an argument allied to the controversial theme of Caryl Churchill's "Seven Jewish Children" (which Ian has also denounced as a "blood libel"), which posits that awareness of the Holocaust has unconsciously served as a justification for Israel's inhumanity to the oppressed Arabs under its control (and who, if granted full citizenship, would quickly render Israel's Jews a minority in their own homeland).

Christian revelers attack Shylock in Habima's Merchant of Venice.

There are few issues more controversial than these - and it's striking that Shakespeare, some four hundred years on, should still be operative in this political crucible in a way that no living American playwright is (even though American power is utterly bound up with Israeli policy). It's also, I think, somewhat curious that we should have seen so many recent productions of Merchant - all of them emphasizing Shylock's victimization and our complicity in it - at a time when Israel's moral standing, and its political and military aggressiveness, are becoming more and more controversial.  Has The Merchant of Venice, which once served as cultural cover for the likes of the Vatican, Henry Ford, and other anti-Semitic potentates, now been subtly reverse-co-opted by the Israel lobby, and its apologists in the academy and press?  This is the case that at least some protestors in London have made - that Shakespeare's portrait of Jewish powerlessness is no longer an appropriate artistic response to political reality in the Middle East - and it, too, is not so easily refuted.

And how will the future production history of Merchant accommodate this bizarre new turn in its political meaning?  How many more re-interpretations can this play bear?   I've really no idea; so what can I say but, "Stay tuned!"?

Yes, I know, I know, this dumb white chick hates Shakespeare

Emer O'Toole, hirsute Shakespearean critic.

Everyone can stop sending me this link.  I cannot change what dumb white chicks think!  (Can anyone?)  This particular one, Emer O'Toole (above; she's best known in the UK for hairy pit advocacy) is getting her Ph.D. at the University of London, and you'd almost think she'd been punched out by a machine somewhere, she parrots the official line of her numbskull academic mentors with so little deviation from the mean.

Yes, for the record, after seeing a production at the (ongoing) World Shakespeare Festival, Emer has decided that The Comedy of Errors is not "a good play," indeed it's actually "a cadaver" (and she seems to think that Shakespeare, not Plautus, came up with the plot).  What's more, somehow she imagines her errors regarding Comedy mean that Shakespeare isn't "universal," at all, as so many misguided people claim. Indeed, Emer huffs about that supposed canard, "Universal my toe."

Now I suppose this assertion may be technically true, as Emer and her lower digits clearly don't "get" the Bard at all.  Indeed, they declare that he's "full of classism, sexism, racism and defunct social mores," and cite the usual evidence for this philistine crapola, "The Evil Jew," and "The Shaming of the Vagina Bearer," as O'Toole re-names the two plays in which Shakespeare openly trades in the prejudices of his day.  (That he transcends these attitudes over and over again elsewhere in the canon doesn't seem to have occurred to Emer or any of her digits, upper or lower.)

What's more, the reason so many people cling to the illusion of Shakespearean "universality," Emer asserts, is that they've been brainwashed by "colonialism." "Taught in schools and performed under the proscenium arches built where the British conquered, universal Shakespeare was both a beacon of the greatness of European civilisation and a gateway into that greatness – to know the bard was to be civilised. True story," she declares. Hence in our misbegotten opinions regarding Shakespeare we've all been seduced by the desire to pretend that "our culture is just a tad superior after all."

Wow, I guess that's why I just love kippers for breakfast - because the British do, and I've been brainwashed by their occupation of large swaths of Africa and Asia almost two centuries ago!

Only wait a minute - I think kippers are disgusting! Golly, what happened to me, Emer?  How did only part of my brain get rinsed by colonialism?

And btw, how were the Russians and the Germans brainwashed?  I mean, I don't think the British invaded and occupied them.  And what about Giuseppe Verdi?  He was attempting to convince his fellow Italians that British culture was superior when he penned Macbeth, Otello and Falstaff?  (And let's not talk about Boris Pasternak!)

And . . . hmmm . . . how do you explain the fact that I only slowly appreciated Shakespeare's greatness?  That my bardolatry only kicked in after exposure to truly great productions - that, in fact, I was never really convinced of Shakespeare's greatness by being force-fed him in the classroom at all?

See this is why I'm so passionate about the constant performance of the Bard, even though most productions of Shakespeare are terrible, frankly.  Nevertheless, I believe the only way into the Shakespearean mystery is in the playhouse - and you usually unlock the door to his riches only by accident.  The resonances, the intelligence, the seemingly bottomless depth - these cannot be explained to you, they have to occur to you, you have to discover them for yourself; somehow your subconscious decodes the secret password in performance, and then you're in.  The process is, in fact, the opposite of the kind of pedagogy that has hypnotized Emer and her ilk.

And once you're in, you can never get out, nor can you pretend that other authors who are far more politically correct could ever compete with the Bard.  I simply could never convince myself that Shakespeare was less than a transcendent genius, because almost everyone else seems thin by comparison.  What's more, I don't care if he shared the prejudices of his day, or even had some of his own.  I mean seriously - is Emer O'Toole fucking kidding?  She yanks this author out of his own life and times - ignoring his separation from a wife he probably no longer loved, and who may even have had children he doubted were his own, and then pretends he didn't live in a country where being Jewish was literally illegal - and where playwrights were sometimes jailed, tortured, or even killed - and then proceeds to cluck and wag the finger, and essentially self-fellate her academic ego.  Ugh!

What's more - although this may be a little too complicated for Emer to grasp - people who love Shakespeare generally do not believe that wives should be submissive to their husbands, or that Jews should be forcibly converted.  Just as we don't wander around in doublet and hose.  In fact - stranger still! - our love of Shakespeare generally maps to the opposite of these attitudes.  But how can that be, if Emer's theories are correct?

But of course they're not correct. Shakespeare's "universality" does not lie in the defunct social mores he has outlived (and that bug Emer), nor does reverence for his legacy mean his fans yearn for those mores to return.  Indeed, it's rather obvious that it's the subversive aspects of Shakespeare that have kept the canon relevant, not the superficial stuff that made it popular - and that kept its author out of prison, and alive.  For let's be honest - if Emer had had to face the kind of penalties Shakespeare would have been subject to for making the kind of political statements she today professes, she never would have gone as far as the Bard, methinks.

And let's be honest about another contradiction embedded in Emer's critique of "cultural imperialism."  She imagines that Shakespeare is oppressive - but compared to what, exactly?  What other "world culture" is superior in terms of human rights to the British tradition (fraught as its history may be)?  Does Emer feel the Bard is more sexist than, say, Indian culture?  Or Chinese culture?  Or African culture?

I guess I'm confused here.  Is Emer looking for more plays about the forced circumcision of girls, or maybe the murder of female babies?   Sorry, but give me The Taming of the Shrew any day.

Welcome to the frathouse: Propeller's Comedy of Errors.

First the good news: the Propeller Theatre Company's touring productions of Comedy of Errors and Richard III (currently playing in rep at the Huntington) are the most brazenly inventive productions of the Bard I've seen in some time (and maybe ever).  Propeller, under the direction of Edward (son of Peter) Hall, boasts a huge ensemble with talent and energy to burn; and if the actors don't always have the most precise diction around, they compensate with musical chops and a refreshingly gonzo attitude.  With the Propellants (sorry) you never feel - as you do far too often today in productions of the Bard - that you're watching a stretched acting corps, or that political correctness, or any other stripe of high-mindedness, has crimped or curtailed the action; indeed, the Propellants openly revel in aiming their Shakespeare at the kind of Gen-Y groundlings who might otherwise be hanging at The Hangover II.

But before you pop those champagne corks over a post-modern masterpiece, ponder that neither of these pop editions of Comedy and Richard actually do their sources justice. (Comedy is by far the stronger of the two, although Richard has its fascinations.) No doubt the print reviewers will sing the praises of both  - and not without some cause; they're probably the strongest "big" Shakespeare we've seen in these parts in months, if not years (overall they're more impressive than the recent F. Murray Abraham Merchant of Venice).  Still, the success of Propeller's clever "updates" of the Bard via multiplex tropes and attitudes only deepens the critical paradox these productions present, and represent.

But let's back up a bit.  A major twentieth-century critical project - from the first "modern dress" Shakespeare productions through Peter Brook's "theatre of cruelty" to the early conceptual seasons of the A.R.T. - was rescuing the Bard from the distortions of earlier ages.  In previous centuries, sentimentalism had bent Shakespeare to its will, and adaptations and interventions were often the order of the day (even King Lear was re-written with a happy ending, by the notorious Nahum Tate).  But modern reformists hoped to scrape the saccharine detritus of some three centuries away from the Shakespearean tradition, and start fresh with a more authentic version of the Bard, one we could recognize, as Jan Kott famously put it, as "our contemporary."

But making Shakespeare our contemporary often has the downside of down-sizing him; because, face it, he's bigger than we are (although that's not what millennial narcissists like to hear).  Indeed, the greatest Shakespearean interpretations, I'd argue, should surprise our own society with fresh insights about itself.  But few of our critics or academics are interested in holding up an unflattering mirror to their customers; instead, our cultural consensus is happy to pound a contemporary template onto the Bard.  Which is exactly what Nahum Tate used to do.

Dugal Bryce-Lockhart locks lips with Robert Hands.

Thus while Propeller seems to spin a brilliant web of transgression in its knockabout aesthetic, you also get the feeling that all the edgy shenanigans are very comfortably mainstream - and somehow reductive.  The company leans on violence as almost the be-all (if not the end-all) of its aesthetic - the brutality is relentless in Comedy of Errors, which at least is sourced in physical farce; but even when Shakespeare leaves the rough stuff off-stage (as he does throughout Richard III), the Propellants drag it on anyway, with escalating scenes of torture-porn that might have been lifted from Saw or Hostel (the first act closes with a dismemberment by chainsaw - and we're only halfway through).  Of course you could make the critical pitch that in Comedy (at least), the Propellants are simply shining a harsh light on Shakespeare's own theatre of cruelty; but by the time old Crookback literally chews off Lady Anne's finger in Richard III, we realize that all the mayhem is really due to Propeller's monomania rather than any predilection of the Bard's.

And then there's the question of the troupe's famous same-sex casting - which I hoped might throw some welcome light on the Elizabethan practice of casting boys in women's roles. But no such luck, really - the Propellants color within the comfortable lines of drag queenery for the most part, at least in Comedy (above); the issue of verisimilitude - which we sense must have figured in Elizabethan practice (otherwise why cast boys?) - never raises its head (be-wigged or otherwise). Thus the question of how, exactly, a boy ever played Rosalind (or Cleopatra!) remains as mysterious after a double dose of  Propeller as it did before.  (Indeed, after watching Comedy, I realized just how shocking a cast of men and boys in a Shakespeare play would be today - talk about shaking up modern sensibilities!)  And as the "straighter" playing of the women in Richard III yielded fewer dramatic dividends than the drag schtick in Comedy, I'm wondering how far the Propeller aesthetic can really go when it comes to the canon; without some serious twists in their approach, I'd say they're limited to the histories and the early comedies.

But what's oddest about their same-sex casting, at least in Comedy of Errors, is how it re-inforces, rather than subverts, issues of gender and identity.  In fact I don't think I've ever seen quite as butch a production of Comedy as the Propellants offer here. Not only is violence the lingua franca of the piece (even the nuns brandish riding crops!), but all the "women" are costumed in uniform mini-skirts and hooker heels (see abbess at top) that hint at porn-derived gender roles. By the time someone has run across the stage naked with a sparkler up his bum (at right), and the local cop has been anally violated with his night stick, you realize we're deep in the frathouse (the whole thing even takes place in some frat-style south-of-the-border luau) where everyone is bound to the rigid codes of masculine dominance, desire and disgust that you often find there, but which have little to do with Shakespeare.

Of course all this only makes the Propellants seem up-to-the-minute, doesn't it. We live in an age of feminists who are suspicious of the feminine, so it's no surprise they're suspicious of Shakespeare, too, who is always suggesting that men should act more like women, but rarely that women should act more like men. Thus, weirdly enough, Hall manages to sell the Propellants' sexism as a critique of Shakespeare rather than a reflection of contemporary attitudes.

Still, you have to admit - fratboys are funny in short bursts, and there's no denying much of Comedy is cruelly hilarious. And there was some great drag acting on hand from Robert Hands (above left) as the piece's put-upon wife, Adriana (Quick grad-student thesis topic: Adriana as Shakespeare's only portrait of Anne Hathaway, with himself as an internally-doubled model for Antipholus: discuss!). I also got a kick out of the wittily self-conscious turn from David Newman (before he started with the num-chucks) as Adriana's more conventional sister. Whenever these two were onstage, Comedy played as a smarter version of the Gold Dust Orphans. Alas, as the identical twins in their lives, Dugald Bruce-Lockhart and Sam Swainsbury seemed more superficial (if no less theatrically savvy), and their slick, disco-dud sleaziness grew old before the show was over. Meanwhile director Hall never really differentiated their personalities, or their differing relationships with their twin servants (features which are quite clear in the text).

Indeed, not much that intrigues us today about The Comedy of Errors seems to have been top-of-mind for Hall. For if, as I argued recently, Cymbeline recapitulates the canon, then Comedy all but predicts it. Twins, shipwrecks, double identities, threatened executions, fears of adultery, flights of love poetry, even a last-minute family re-union - they're all there in embryo in The Comedy of Errors, which is studded with hard little thematic buds that would later flower in plays as disparate as The Taming of the Shrew and Pericles.

It would be difficult to suggest those later dramatic riches, I admit, in a production that also aimed for the funnybone - but still, that litany of plays (and modes) suggests there's far more tonal modulation to be found in Comedy than Edward Hall seems to have sought. So even as I laughed (and I often did), I sensed that something essential was always missing from the mix - much as I did in Richard III; but those are thoughts I'll explore more fully in the second part of this double review.

Our most interesting living composer takes on the world's greatest playwright.

To my mind, Thomas Adès is the most interesting composer alive, the young talent I'm most certain will find a place in the standard repertoire.  Yet perversely enough, we've heard little of him in Boston; instead, we've been listening to the latest from Carter and Birtwistle (two accomplished elder statesmen of modernism whom I don't find particularly compelling), or pretending that Schoenberg is still shocking. Yes, Opera Boston performed Powder Her Face a few years back, and I vaguely recall the BSO playing the great Asyla and the intriguing Living Toys sometime around the millennium.

But in the meantime, the "savior of British music" (as Adès was once known) has all but taken the rest of the world by storm - and found an American home not in Boston or New York, but L.A. (where he has enjoyed a special relationship with the L.A. Philharmonic for several years). Major operas and commissions have flowed from him, he's been showered with awards, all while building a distinguished recorded catalog as a pianist (he also conducts). It's wrong at this point to describe the 40-year-old composer as "the next big thing." He IS the big thing.

So his arrival on the podium of Symphony Hall last weekend was long overdue. Still, he played to plenty of empty seats. Remember what I said the other day about Boston still being a hick town? Well, that goes double for the BSO crowd.

But Adès himself didn't seem to mind - he seemed thrilled to have finally arrived in America’s greatest concert hall; and at any rate, he had bent his intellectual energy on a program that teased out deep cultural issues in a way that BSO programs rarely do these days. Part of the concert was devoted to his violin concerto Concentric Paths, a small wonder in its own right. But the majority of the program was focused on Shakespeare's The Tempest - in particular the musical response to the Bard's last masterpiece by Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, and, yes, Adès himself.

Now Shakespeare posits a strange conundrum for composers, I think. He has always attracted them - and yet have any of them, even the greatest, fully understood him, or been able to express what truly sets him apart from other dramatists? It's a puzzling, and troubling question (and one that, amusingly enough, classical music aficionados rarely seem to be aware exists; they naïvely imagine their art is the most profound one around). But even a masterpiece like Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream (wonderful as it is) only conjures the atmosphere of Shakespeare's play, not the depth or contradictions of its text. The irony is that (as the Hub Review has long contended) part of what makes Shakespeare's dramatic thought so complex is that it's structured musically (my guess is that Monteverdi and the madrigal posited the model for Shakespeare's contrapuntal intellectual structures). And yet oddly enough, the classical musical tradition can't seem to match the achievement of the dramatist it probably inspired.

Verdi, for instance, can give us a chillingly grand Iago, but can't really convey the sense (as Shakespeare does) of the conceptual inexplicability of evil. Likewise Mendelssohn expertly conjures the rich fancy of Midsummer, but when it comes to its last-act parody of its own means - or even the opposed musings of the lunatic, the lover, and the poet - Mendelssohn is helpless. But then music is rarely good at deconstructing its own meaning (it's only good at deconstructing other music) - so how could a composer approach the probing self-critique that's central to plays like Hamlet and Henry V?

It was unsurprising, then, that the first two Shakespearean offerings of the evening were essentially variants on scene-painting (which Adès led competently, but not brilliantly). Tchaikovsky concentrated on a soaring love-theme, as if The Tempest were merely a later variant of Romeo and Juliet. Sibelius, meanwhile, was most inspired by the script’s eponymous sea-storm, and created a heaving, crashing soundscape of startling verisimilitude. This was better than the Tchaikovsky, but it was still essentially movie-music – more thematically intriguing was the surprising vigor and rusticity of Sibelius’s music for Ariel and the clowns.

But only Adès seemed to engage with the actual ideas of the play. The Tempest, of course, is not merely a highly rarefied fairy tale; it is a probing, and utterly sober, meditation on the “problem” of power and freedom – neither of which, in Shakespeare’s mind, is an unalloyed good. And you could feel this moral and emotional tension latent in much of the music from Adès’s celebrated 2004 opera (which has yet to play Boston, but which is now widely regarded as the greatest recent achievement in the form).

Indeed, there was a literal tension between high and low in the songs for Ariel, Prospero, Miranda and Ferdinand that the composer had chosen to showcase, as well as a sense of mournful unresolvability, which captured much of the intellectual mood of late Shakespeare. I should mention that Adès did not work directly from Shakespeare’s text – he commissioned a libretto by Meredith Oakes, which simplifies the play, and emphasizes the roles of Ferdinand and Miranda. That may sound dismaying, but I was surprised to discover that Oakes had preserved Shakespeare’s underlying themes even in her own variations on his text – in her Tempest, Prospero confronts in his child’s romance yet another conundrum of power, love, and freedom.

Much has been made of the vocal writing for Ariel in the opera – almost all the sprite’s songs float up around high E – that’s at the very top of the “Queen of the Night” aria, for ready reference. It’s almost impossible for a soprano to actually vocalize consonants up there, so quite a bit of Ariel’s songs came off as a kind of abstracted sonar, which only Prospero could comprehend. But this, too – although it violates the sense of prettiness we expect of Ariel - is much in line with Shakespeare’s text, which stresses always that this spirit isn’t human, sounds like a kind of sweet buzzing to everyone but Prospero, and is always yearning to escape to the freedom of, in Oakes’s text, “higher spheres.” (You can’t get much higher than high E.)

And luckily the BSO had soprano Hila Plitmann on hand to superbly carry off these high-altitude acrobatics (she even did so with something like the sweet lightness we’d expect of Ariel). Meanwhile Christopher Maltman made a grounded, commanding Prospero, and Kate Royal a gorgeously thoughtful Miranda. I only had doubts about Toby Spence’s Ferdinand, who didn’t seem quite ardent enough to hold his own in this amazing company.

The other major work by in Adès on offer was his 2005 violin concerto Concentric Paths, a hypnotic piece in three movements which paralleled, appropriately enough, his writing for Ariel. Once again, a “vocal” violin line orbited at the top of the instrument’s range (essayed dazzlingly by Anthony Marwood, for whom the piece was written), while, in later movements, the rest of the orchestra sighed heavily below. What’s fascinating about Concentric Paths is the sense that its tonality is unstable in a curiously post-postmodern way, spiraling through key signatures yet seemingly drawn toward some sort of gravitational tonal center – what you might call a “strange attractor” if you were speaking in terms of chaos theory (which I think in a way Adès is). The audience appeared mystified by this eerily attractive gambit – despite the clean authority of the performance (the composer's conducting came alive for his own stuff).  They slowly warmed, however, to the vocal marvels of The Tempest (there were many singers in the audience, as the concert was a freebie for Tanglewood Festival Chorus members). Let’s hope that Boston only grows more and more familiar in future with this amazing talent.

Shakespeare on YooTube

George II, Henry V, and William the Conqueror.

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

That's a line from Henry VI, not Henry V, so the folks at the Federalist Society didn't have to say it at their Shakespearean fête for Andrew Card and John Yoo last Tuesday at the Cutler Majestic, which was titled "Shakespeare's Henry V and the Law and War."

But they might have kept it in mind, as it suggests the author they revere didn't return the favor. But then the Federalists also never seemed to consider whether Shakespeare, though able to parse an argument with the precision of Oliver Wendell Holmes, could really be interpreted through, or even constrained to, the prism of jurisprudence. Indeed, you got the sense as the evening proceeded that it had never occurred to these august professionals that Henry V might instead be holding a prism up to them.

But then the Federalist Society seems confused about a lot of things these days. It was founded in the Reagan years to provide cover for trendy "isms" like "originalism" and "libertarianism" - which have since come up a cropper in the reality-based community. Bush v. Gore and Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission revealed "originalism" as a transparent sham, and the recent financial crisis shredded the pretensions of libertarianism. But shorn of its intellectual pretexts, the Federalist Society still soldiers on, just like nothing's wrong, as a kind of Slytherin-style neocon frat for the likes of Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, John G. Roberts, and Clarence Thomas.

I know - that's quite a rogues' gallery, and when you consider the Federalists think of themselves as disciples of James Madison, you kind of throw up in your mouth a little. But like a lot of people, I've got a jones for evil as an aesthetic, particularly intellectual evil; I get a kind of sleazy thrill whenever I'm in close proximity to articulate apologists for atrocity. Indeed, my guest list for the perfect dinner party would probably include the likes of John Yoo, Henry Kissinger, and Pope Benedict.

So I had to be at the Federalist show. I knew their claim that Shakespeare could serve as a source for some sort of debate over war crimes was preposterous, but the evening promised not just Andrew Card, Dubya's chief of staff, but also John Yoo, Mr. Mistoffelees himself, the legal mind behind Guantánamo and so much more, in the flesh. And I don't think I was alone in finding him an irresistible draw. The Federalists themselves seemed startled at the size of the crowd their event attracted; they've been doing these Shakespearean shindigs for years, but had never scored a hit like this one. But they had some inkling as to the reason for their sudden popularity; cannily, they kept their star under wraps for a big reveal late in the show.

So - what's Yoo like in person?

Well, anyone hoping for the thick atmosphere of jovial, self-satisfied evil that steams off Henry Kissinger was bound to be disappointed. Yoo isn't particularly charismatic, although he's a coolly accomplished charmer, and knows when to be self-deprecating, even self-effacing. Indeed, he's oddly blank, if intriguingly sleek, with a sense of the agile versatility one expects in a digital utensil from Apple; in short, not so much Old Scratch as Old Scratch's iPad.

And he did prove quite the serviceable villain, as Edgar might have said, during the Bush administration's strange, eventful history; Yoo crafted secret memos justifying detention, extradition, and torture of "enemy combatants," as well as the arguments behind what amounted to our modern surveillance state. His stated excuse for these assaults on the Constitution and Geneva Conventions was a novel legal gambit, largely of his own devising, called "The Theory of the Unitary Executive." This "theory" essentially placed the President above any check or balance, or indeed above any constraint or law whatsoever, in time of "war" (a state which the President could declare himself), and its intellectual shelf life was short once it had been fully revealed. Indeed, when pressed, Yoo was forced to admit his theory gave the President the power to bury people alive and crush the testicles of innocent children.

Now to my mind, bending Shakespeare to the service of this kind of thinking is an atrocity in its own right. But I was still game, in a sporting kind of way, to entertain a little sympathy for the devil, largely because the Federalists had enlisted a few libruls to speak on its panel and act in its drastically abridged version of Henry V. I didn't even mind that director Steven Maler had tailored his text to avoid too deeply discomfiting his guests of honor. After all, I figured, if you're going to get Goering and Goebbels to your production of The Merchant of Venice, you've got to play Shylock a certain way.

Of the performance itself, let no more be said; there's a popular impression that lawyers are akin to actors, but based on this experience, I'd say that may be a delusion. Fans of bipartisanship can take heart, though, in the fact that the Democratic actors were just as bad as the Republican ones. Here and there hints of actual personality flickered in the readings of J.W. Carney, Jr. , and Patti B. Saris. And there was one exception to the general rule: Kerry Murphy Healey brought real wit to the role of Katherine in the play's charming final scene, and this seemed to loosen up Jay B. Stephens - who had clearly been cast as Henry because of his resemblance to Dubya - who began to have a little fun, too. The legalese of the period was spoken clearly, that's for sure - and there was a kind of meta-wit in some sequences that may have been unintentional, but was nonetheless striking; the opening scenes, for instance, in which the archbishops and advisors dream up convoluted rationales for Henry's invasion, are usually played as satire; here they were delivered with naive earnestness. After all, this is what lawyers know; it's what they do.

Of course no one in the audience expected a viable theatrical performance here; but did the intellectual performance have to be so mediocre, too? Because it turned out there was really nothing to be said for Mr. Yoo's "theories" and memos, either. Or at least Yoo didn't really say much of anything in their defense. Of course by now his "unitary executive" snow job is widely scorned, and his memos have been repudiated by the executive branch and invalidated by the Supreme Court. The party's over, and to his partial credit, you could tell he knew it; he didn't bother with any kind of coherent justification for his conduct or his career. Now and then he attempted to put over the half-baked idea that the Bush administration was pursuing a moral policy - that somehow, unfortunately, affronted normal moral sensibilities; this was a transparently self-defeating ploy. More often, Yoo deftly dodged and parried like the clever Harvard grad he is, citing (as shady neocons tend to do) the malfeasances of liberal icons like Lincoln and FDR (and, of course, "Obama the First") to distract us from his lack of coherence.

His attempts to link his situation to Henry V were likewise unconvincing. Yoo tried to claim that Henry was unconstrained by "international law" - even though he'd just heard a long first act in which Henry solicited permission for his invasion from the Church, the international institution which was basically the UN of its day. Yoo likewise stumbled in his insistence that Henry was pursuing a moral rather than a legal case for war. That, of course, is what Henry says. But is that what Shakespeare says? Few scholars would agree; indeed, when Henry insists to his men (while disguised) that the king's cause is just and his quarrel honorable, he gets the unvarnished reply "That's more than we know." But seemingly John Yoo knows more than Shakespeare.


Fantasy vs. reality: George II as he was, and how his fans still see him.

But then again, how could Yoo defend the "theory of the unitary executive"? It amounts to "The President can do whatever he wants, because of, you know, terrorism and stuff." It's so dumb it makes your head hurt. But panelist Andrew Card (there were several former Bush appointees onstage) seemed unaware of its stupidity; he monotonously insisted that 9/11 "changed everything," although how (or why) this should be so, he couldn't explain; he seemed to imagine that the fact that he (and his whole incompetent administration) had been stunned by 9/11 meant that it counted as some sort of transformative moral and legal event. I suppose Card could be forgiven his moral tunnel vision; after all, it was he who tried to rouse Bush from his absorption in My Pet Goat (above) with the admonition "America is under attack!" (It famously took the President seven minutes to respond, and I don't think he then cried, "Once more into the breach, dear friends!"; "Once more into Air Force One, dear friends!" was probably more like it.)

But the central problem with Card's view, of course, is that however shocking the attack on the World Trade Center was, terrorism had existed long before 9/11; it existed in FDR's and Lincoln's day, and in James Madison's day; it existed in Shakespeare's day. The Constitution was devised in times of terrorism, and the consensus regarding its interpretation was achieved in times of terrorism. There was no need for Yoo's theory, and, in fact, claims that the abuses it unleashed protected us from various acts of terrorism have fallen apart under serious scrutiny.

The other neocon panelist on view - Bernard J. Dobski, of Assumption College in Worcester - was if anything less impressive, placidly babbling in a convoluted manner about just war theory, and proclaiming that Henry V "founded the modern British state." (Uh-huh. Quick, cue the War of the Roses!) But then the sole invited librul, Suffolk's brilliant Michael Avery, briefly turned everything around with a calm diatribe that left Yoo and Card's house of cards in ruins; by the time he was done, their flimsy arguments littered the field like the French at Agincourt. I think even if I weren't in agreement with Avery's politics, I'd have been impressed by his devastating competence - and the Federalists were, too; you could watch the color drain from their faces as he spoke (and the audience cheered, myself included).

For a moment, it looked like a real debate might begin, as the mask of courtesy dropped (I confess at that point I was hissing Yoo), even as the Federalists begged for "civility." But really - how do you remain civil with someone who argues for crushing children's testicles? ("So glad you could come!") Nevertheless, order was restored, and the faintly ghoulish garden party ground on.

Little that was enlightening ensued - although I do want to say a few more things about the very pretext of the evening, which everyone onstage seemed to think was a valid one. It was, after all, a kind of reprise of a famous debate in D.C. in 2004, and by now the Beltway identification of George II with Henry V has probably achieved the status of conventional wisdom.

But what is this wisdom based on? There are parallels, yes, between Harry and Dubya in terms of biography - both led wasted youths, both followed in their failed fathers' footsteps, both led foreign wars of dubious justification. But the idea that Henry V the play justifies, or even illuminates, the actions of the Bush administration is patently untenable. Indeed, on a point-by-point basis, there's almost no correspondence between the actions of Shakespeare's Henry V and our George II. Harry, of course, led his troops into battle personally (while Dubya's never seen combat) - and though Shakespeare dramatizes his underlings attempting to manipulate him, we never feel that Harry is out of touch, or in a bubble. Likewise Harry makes no claims to his nation that prove untrue - even Shakespeare would never have been able to hang onto audience sympathy through a scene like that - and of course there's no secretive vice presidential figure with an agenda of his own on the scene, indeed no one with power or connections to rival Harry's. In short, there's no Lord Cheney in Henry V. And while Harry makes plenty of ethically questionable decisions - he threatens townspeople with rape, and executes prisoners - these actions all occur on the fly, in the thick of battle. In short, they have obvious "sunset clauses," and however they complicate our view of Harry, to interpret them as a basis for jurisprudence is patently absurd.

Which brings me to a deeper problem with the Federalists' conceit: Shakespeare with the human bits cut out has no real meaning. Director Maler edited most everything (like the death of Falstaff) that couldn't be crushed a little into a legalistic brief; as a result, this Henry V lasted only about an hour. To be fair, Maler left in events like Henry's execution of his old drinking buddy Bardolph, but these were stripped of their thematic salience - in a word, that the war had made Harry inhuman. As a result, the sense that Shakespeare was mounting a complicated critique of his hero, that he was deconstructing his barnburner even as its flames grew brighter, was completely lost. But then Shakespeare's basic method would of course be a mystery to the legal mind: no contract could ever operate like Shakespeare's texts, which are often structured to point to at least two contradictory conclusions at the same time. This, of course, is central to his greatness; but it's also what makes his style the antithesis of legalism. You can't "debate" his competing perspectives; they can't be synthesized; they're embedded within each other.

Perhaps as a result of this peculiar form of literary blindness, the Federalists turned Henry V precisely on its head. I got the impression that they had the idea that somehow Shakespeare meant for Harry's military success to demonstrate the propriety of his various ethical lapses, that the Bard, and even God, agreed with his cause. But instead, Harry's crimes and misdemeanors are clearly meant to complicate and undermine, and perhaps even overthrow, our impression of his heroism. Make no mistake, the St. Crispin's Day and Harfleur speeches are the best pieces of battle propaganda ever written, combining as they do both masculine competition and community in flights of unparalleled poetry. Yet while their rhetoric rallies the grunts on the ground, it doesn't really connect to them; when Harry claims to his troops that their sacrifices will "gentle" their condition - that is, make them gentlemen - we and they know he doesn't mean it; it's just bullshit, only bullshit at a pitch that only Shakespeare could achieve. Don't get me wrong, it's stirring stuff - that's why it's neocon catnip; it's just not a brief for the War on Terror. And Shakespeare would have scorned the idea that it was, and would have laughed at the claim that his genius could possibly be in consonance with big, dumb, Jeff-Jacoby-style slogans (yes, the neocon mouthpiece was onstage, too) like "God is on our side!" or "The ends justify the means!" That kind of thing belongs in the cable series Band of Brothers - a show that the panelists seemed far more familiar with than Henry V. Maybe the Federalists should stick to a script from HBO next time.

A new play by Shakespeare?

The Arden Shakespeare has just published Double Falsehood, or the Distrest Lovers, and with that single stroke a Shakespearean outlier has edged its way into the canon. Kind of. The script's claim to "canonicality" should become even stronger next summer, when the Royal Shakespeare Company produces it for the first time in eons.

Of course to be accurate, Double Falsehood would have to be termed a play by William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, and somebody named Lewis Theobald, the producer who first mounted the text in London in 1727, explaining he had adapted it from three separate manuscripts of a play called The History of Cardenio. We know from contemporary accounts that a lost play of that name by Shakespeare (and his seeming protégé, Fletcher), based on a famous episode from Don Quixote, was performed in London in 1613.

Theobald's script was a success back in 1727, but was soon ridiculed (by Alexander Pope, among others) as hackery, and probably a fake (Theobald refused to publish his supposed sources). Now the Arden has decided otherwise, largely based on the research of editor Brean Hammond, a professor at the University of Nottingham, who claims that Shakespeare's hand can be seen "in Acts One and Two, and part of Act Three." Hmmmm. The proof of this kind of thing, it seems to me, is in the playing. Could one of our university theatres consider The Double Falsehood for a production soon, as the RSC has? Or will we have to rely on one of our fringe theatres to take on the challenge? Only a year or two ago, the ART produced its own dreadful update of Cardenio, penned by Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt and avant-garde playwright Charles L. Mee. Somehow that misadventure seemed to sum up the problem with our academic theatres - we can't get them to do the real thing, instead they offer up their own house version of it. Perhaps with a little nudge from the Arden Shakespeare, that situation could change in the case of Double Falsehood.

The triumph of "Love"

I simply don't have time this morning for a full review of Handel and Haydn's "Zest for Love" program, which repeats on Sunday, but I felt I had to write a few lines to try to persuade anyone who might be on the fence, or who hasn't yet thought of this as a potential Valentine's Day treat, to by all means go. The concert is another musical "salon" from this always-experimenting company, though not everything in it is strictly musical: there are also spoken texts, all from Shakespeare, delivered by actors from the Huntington Theatre. The musical program, assembled by conductor Laurence Cummings, is mostly madrigals (and mostly Monteverdi, with Shakespeare at left), but also features two wonderful instrumental obscurities: a passionate Quarta sonata from Dario Castello - marked by fierce bowing from violinists Christina Day Martinson and Susanna Ogata - and an absolutely gorgeous Ciaconna from Tarquino Merula. The Shakespeare readings, subtly directed by Peter DuBois in an unexpected fit of maturity, were often superb - actor Lee Aaron Rosen in particular impressed (even more than he did in All My Sons); this performer could have great Shakespeare in him, given the chance. The H&H singers, particularly Teresa Wakim and Lydia Brotherton, were in fine form, and while diction was at times a bit blurry, the musical balance was usually exquisite. Perhaps most importantly, the evening's theme - "love," of course - was hardly given the swoony treatment one might expect on Valentine's Day; indeed, this counts as one of the deepest statements on that hallowed emotion I've heard in some time. The juxtaposition of Shakespeare's verse and Monteverdi's madrigals even opened a new window for me onto the Bard - but more on that later. For right now, just go. Tickets for the Sunday afternoon performance at Sanders Theatre are available here.

The moft excellent comedie and tragical romance of the Two Gentlemen of Lebowski

Shakespeare abides; and of course the Dude abides. Therefore it was only a matter of time before they abided together. And indeed this is a moft excellent comedie and tragical romance, by one Adam Bertocci. Hat tip to Geoff!