The Bard Blender

I retyped what I was going to type yesterday before my computer crashed... (bad Caliban... no island snacks for you!)

For my thesis I was have been reading a lot of domestic tragedies. One, which I read that I enjoyed a lot but which doesn't work for my thesis, is The Vow Breaker.  The blot of which is that a Woman (Anne) vows to marry one man (Bateman) who is young but poor and her father convinces her to marry another man (German) who is old and rich.  When Bateman discovers her betrayal, he is struck with grief and kills himself.  After which she is haunted by his ghost.  She ultimately is drive to her own death by the ghost so that she can be with her true husband (Bateman).

After the young Bateman kills himself his father finds the body.  The father (Old Bateman) delivers a large amount of lines over his dead son's body.  Most interesting for me at least is a reference to Niobe:

i'le weepe alone
Till Niobe like my teares convert to stone.

The story of Niobe is found is the 6th book of the Metamorphoses. She makes fun of the mother of Artemis and Apollo because She (Niobe) has more children.  For this Artemis and Apollo kill her fourteen children leaving her to weep, until, unmoving, she becomes stone.  So, the reference is clear.  Its use here however is not.  What here is "Niobe like"?  Old Bateman has just lost his child, presumably the only one he has.  In this respect he is the one like Niobe and like Niobe he plans to stay unchanging in his grief for his son.  Yet, he says "my tears convert to stone."  So in that sense, his tears are like Niobe.  Yet, her tears did not turn to stone.  She herself did and her tears continued to flow (which is how she became a mountain top with tears forming a river down the side of it.  Either way his invocation of Niobe is problematic.  He cannot become like Niobe because he is not in a play where he can actually turn to stone.  The best he can do is (which he does) is stay by a portrait of his son, so that he is always mourning.  Though in a way his tears do harden his heart and he become unwilling to accept a response of grief from Anne.  

I feel like old Bateman's grief is likened to Niobe's.  Yet he seems to make Niobe more noble by the comparison.  Her children's deaths were her own fault.  Bateman's death was for loss of love. 

Tomorrow: Titus Andornicus

I finished a reader response on The Late Lancashire Witches.  So I'm rewarding myself with a post before getting back to my work.

Doubling, the act of one actor playing more than one part, has really intrigued me of late. 

M told me a few weeks ago about a production of Cymbeline she once saw where Posthumous and Cloten were doubled.  Not having seen it I can't tell for sure but I believe that this doubling would, being that there is no physical difference between the characters, serve to intensify the social differences between them.  This also produces some interesting punning in regard to the body scene.  Imogen says she knows this to be her lords leg.  I wonder though if this would also say anything about class barriers and whether that was intended or not. 

Friday night, during my Friday night Shakespeare movie night, we watched Pericles, Prince of Tyre.  And about a third of the way in, I realized that there was an interesting chance to double.  What if Antiochus and his daughter and Simonides and Taissa were doubled?  Antiochus with his incestuous relationship to his daughter contrasts so completely the "good" Simonides that such a doubling would, similar to the Cymbeline doubling, accentuate the moral differences.  However, it may have the reverse effect if done a certain way, because of the playful nature in Simonides, causing the audience to see him as similar to Antiochus. That could really be freaky. 

Because of how easily these comparisons are, I wonder how many more doubles could be used to make thought provoking comparisons.