December 2016 – Aunty Muriel's Blog

In this post, I examine three reviews and question the assumptions that are brought to bear in order to ascertain whether or not the performance reviewed is considered ‘good’ or not.

Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett perform live in Atlantic City

Review 1 from Billboard by Joe Lynch

This review is of a concert in Atlantic City featuring Lady Gaga, one of the highest-earning artists of the 21st century, and Tony Bennett, veteran performer and founder of the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts. Perhaps Bennett’s presence on stage rendered inevitable the type of review produced, but this piece is steeped in nostalgia. The review radiates a certainty that popular music and its performance used to be of a higher quality than it is now, claiming that ‘concerts grounded in musical talent’ are ‘rare’ these days. Lynch’s piece focuses on the rapport between the two performers, the enthusiasm of the crowd and Lady Gaga’s solo performance of La Vie en Rose. Lynch’s emphasis on the ‘astonished’ reaction of the audience to the latter has as its subtext the suggestion that today’s singers lack the talent to sing the old songs; Bennett – one of the old-time singers – is described in hyperbolic terms as still having ‘one of the greatest voices on the planet’. The review ends with details of what Lady Gaga did after the show and the attempts of her fans to obtain photographs, which is a testament to the cult surrounding this popular figure and our increasing fixation with celebrities and celebrity status.

lady-gaga-tony-bennett-new-jersey-atlantic-city-july-2015-billboard-650x650 The performance, therefore, is a ‘good’ one because it evoked past times. It is compared with present-day concerts in order to voice an unfavourable opinion of the modern-day lack of rapport between artists sharing a stage, and the concert is evaluated through the rapport between the performers involved, the audience reaction and the quality of the vocal performances. The material performed is listed without comment, with the implication that its superior standard is a given. The performance is treated as entertainment, with (for example) its descriptions of the banter between the performers, but the music performed clearly has a status approaching that of high art due in part to its continuing appeal and existing longevity.

Faustus by Christopher Marlowe

Review 2 from The Telegraph by Dominic Cavendish

This reviewer describes Marlowe’s text as an ‘epic 1594 tragedy’ and considers this production a ‘modish’ version. Cavendish writes for The Daily Telegraph, a very conservative publication, so it is perhaps not surprising that this word (‘modish’) should sum up his entire attitude to the performance. Cavendish describes the production as ‘borderline forgettable’ in its original 2013 version and opines that this 2016 revival ‘verges on being totally incomprehensible in this dismally conceived rehash’. The reason for this animosity would appear to be that Acts 3 and 4 are deleted ‘on the grounds that audiences don’t relate to this less accomplished (and likely not sole-authored) central section’. Cavendish describes what is put in place of these acts, but he does not evaluate further; he comments instead on Kit Harrington’s celebrity status and suggests that his fans may feel ‘bamboozled’ (although it is not clear why this should be so). The rewrite is ‘hip but slack’, to which Cavendish adds the apparently unqualified comment that ‘the emphasis is on de-anchoring the original text from its customary moorings’. In the wider context of the review, I assume this latter comment to be a negative evaluation. Cavendish seems determined to rate the production on the level of a B-movie in his use of the simile ‘like staring apparitions from a low-rent zombie flick’. On Harrington’s delivery, Cavendish comments that he is ‘competent and clear but hardly a match for Marlowe’s mighty line, lacking sufficient fervour and meaningful interiority’. I’m not quite sure what this means, or what sort of delivery would satisfy Cavendish’s expectations.

2523194b-jon-snow-arts-large_trans_nvbqzqnjv4bqqvzuuqpflyliwib6ntmjwfsvwez_ven7c6bhu2jjnt8 The performance, therefore, is rated ‘bad’ because the original text was altered, ostensibly to meet the requirements of a 21st century audience. It is compared with B-movies and Game of Thrones, both examples of popular entertainment, and the set is likened to Willesden Junction. The performance is rated in comparison with the original text and analysed in terms of its departure from it. Overall, this production is firmly categorised as entertainment in comparison with the original text which is high art. Cavendish clearly considers the show to be the cheapest kind of entertainment – a star vehicle with gratuitous sex scenes – to titillate an audience who would struggle with anything more demanding. The reviewer demonstrates a solidly reactionary response and an unwillingness to examine any potential interest raised by this particular interpretation.

The Taming of the Shrew at The Globe Theatre

Review 3 from Londonist by Savannah Whaley

The Taming of the Shrew is a notoriously difficult play to stage for a modern audience. The BBC series Shakespeare Re-Told addressed the play’s issues by rewriting Katherine (Shirley Henderson) as an MP, and later the PM, so although she eventually bends to the will of Rufus Sewell’s eccentric Petruchio (whom she genuinely comes to love), she does so from a position of the most powerful person in the country. In 1978 Michael Bogdanov produced a feminist Shrew, with a Katherine finally destroyed by a patriarchal society; Bogdanov argued that this reading is inherent in the play, claiming that Shakespeare asks for ‘an egalitarian society of equal rights and opportunity’ (Dollimore & Sinfield, 1994: 197). Whaley is not so generous to Shakespeare, although she does conclude her review with a comment that identifies inequality as one of the themes of the play. The production is set in 1916 Ireland around the time of the Easter Rising and thus takes as its context an occasion when women were once again denied the same rights accorded to men. This decision, states the reviewer, is ‘impossible to ignore’.

taming_of_shrew_second-309-jpg_captioned_3 The performance, with its clear message and unmistakably feminist agenda, is considered to be good, in spite of a negative comment relating to the first half of the show. It is compared to other productions less brutal; Whaley describes Katherine as being beaten onstage and suggests that this abuse is ‘generally left off’, but such physical abuse is surely an addition on the part of this particular director and does not feature in the text itself. The performance is evaluated through the way in which it addresses the abuse of women and their unequal status in society in its chosen 1916 context. Finally, this production is treated as high art, and moreover, as art that is important because it seeks to educate and to highlight a societal problem.

Reference: Dollimore, J. and Sinfield, A. (Eds.) (1994) Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism. 2nd ed. Manchester University Press: Manchester.

In an online discussion of the subject of Felicia Hemans’ place in the literary canon, Jonathan Mulrooney comments that ’Hemans was incredibly popular in her day, and she wrote some fine poetry; students need to know about it. But even if we could imagine a world in which the methods of exegisis [sic] that value Wordsworth over Hemans and those that value Hemans over Wordsworth had equal power, would we really want to live there? I honestly am not sure’ (Romantic Circles, 1997). Mulrooney imagines a world in which all forms of critical discourse are equally valid, thereby rendering useless any attempt to distinguish the ‘good’ writers from the ‘bad’. According to this line of reasoning, the existence of a literary canon can therefore be justified: at best, a canon celebrates that which is worthy of study and closes the floodgates against a deluge of mediocrity. At worst, however, a canon can be used as a tool of oppression, excluding from educational syllabi those whom the canon’s overseers do not wish to be read. Traditionally, this darker side of the canon has eclipsed female writers (such as Hemans), writers from different races, LGBT writers, and so on.

(c) The Wordsworth Trust; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation — William Wordsworth; supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

Nevertheless, it would be disingenuous to claim that canons are static: this is not true. Canons are subject to constant revision, as is evident in the case of both Felicia Hemans and William Wordsworth. Wordsworth is indeed a canonical writer, but opinion has shifted since the Victorian era as to which of his works should be read, and (for example) The Prelude has replaced The Excursion. Hemans, on the other hand, was a prolific and widely-read writer during her lifetime, but her entry in the Dictionary of National Biography describes how she was cast aside by the modernist movement and left unread until a shift in critical attitudes in the second half of the twentieth century led to a resurgence of interest in her work. Feminist and historicist critics argue that Hemans is an important ‘critic of conventions such as patriotism and female self-sacrifice’ (ODNB, 2008) and that her place in the canon should be assured.

There is an argument, however, that the inclusion in the canon of previously excluded writers because their work touches on a contemporary concern amounts to being intellectually dishonest, but Alan Liu counter-argues that the line drawn between ‘good’ poetry and poetry ‘valued for historical, political, [or] gender’ reasons is absolutely artificial. He suggests that ideas about the values of poetical form are inextricably intertwined with whatever happens to be the accepted prevailing notions of ‘universal’ or ‘timeless’, but these same notions are themselves so complicated and culturally imbued that we can only examine them through the discourse of formal criticism (Romantic Circles, 1997). This being the case, we are still in the world feared by Mulrooney, where no existing critical apparatus can reliably differentiate between good and bad poetry.

Chuck Rzepka appears to offer a solution in the form of traditional poetics (although oddly enough, he simultaneously denies that this kind of analysis has any interest for today’s critics). Rzepka claims to value poets who use ‘pitch, accent, rhythmic and metrical variation, figure (of speech or of thought), image, stanza, form, genre, tradition, persona, allusion…besides…invention, characterization, plot, [and] dialogue’. Naturally, as Rzepka makes clear, the presence alone of such devices can hardly constitute an adequate test for ‘good’ poetry: what counts is ‘how well they are used and to what effect’ (Romantic Circles, 1997). How we are to measure the use and effectiveness of poetic devices, however, remains a mystery with which canon revisionists are constantly employed.

Some of the points explored above can be exemplified by a comparison of Hemans’ ‘Indian Woman’s Death-Song’ with Wordsworth’s ‘The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman’. Both poems represent the final lament of a native American Indian woman, but the ‘complaint’ (in the poetic sense) of Wordsworth’s character, abandoned in a cold, silent and comfortless landscape, has otherwise little in common with Hemans’ wild, watery and noisy swansong. Death is imminent for both women, but the nature of these deaths differs according to the landscape in which each woman is placed: Hemans invokes the drama of a broad river in a thick forest as the canoe containing the woman and her (female) child approaches a cataract, whilst Wordsworth’s solitary figure lies prone beside the frozen ashes of a dead fire, her (male) child having been taken along with the woman’s erstwhile travelling companions. The variance in thematic presentation reflects the differing agendas of each poet. Hemans writes a female character who welcomes death in the face of her husband’s desertion and ingratitude, taking her tiny daughter with her so that she might be spared a similar fate. Writing in an age in which a previously unprecedented number of female readers were constantly exposed to an ideal of womanhood which, in Havelock Ellis’ phrase, was ‘a cross between an angel and an idiot’ (Cunningham, 1989: 96), Hemans creates a female character who actively seeks her own demise as a means of rejecting in her turn the masculine world which has rejected her. She issues impatient imperatives to the river, commanding it to ‘roll on!’, and even her hair waves in joyous anthropomorphic triumph. Wordsworth, however, uses the scenario of the dying woman to attempt an artistic portrayal of conflicting internal voices at a moment of crisis. Stephen Bidlake argues convincingly for the merits of Wordsworth’s poem with reference to a framework of Bakhtinian dialogism, in which the woman ‘participate[s] in the dynamism of real speech situations’ (1982: 188). As she considers her predicament and questions events which have led to her impending death, ‘a second voice is heard in the “hidden dialog” that emerges in those words which contain a tacit reference to an alternate viewpoint, such as the anticipation of an unvoiced objection or the implication of an unasked question’ (1982: 189). Bidlake’s ingenious and imaginative reading is in one sense a kind of ‘authoring’ of Wordsworth’s poem: through his critical response, Bidlake uses Bakhtin’s work to express that which Wordsworth arguably does not. Scholarship such as this can breathe life into literary works, but if, for example, such scholarship is vital to the work’s continued presence in anthologies, then the role played by critical writing in canon formation and revision must be carefully examined. Every choice must be questioned if the canon is to be a useful instrument rather than an oppressive one.

List of references

Bidlake, S. (1982) ‘Hidden Dialog’ in ‘The Mad Mother’ and ‘The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman’. The Wordsworth Circle 13(4): 188-193.

Cunningham, G. (1989) The nineteenth-century novel. In: M. Lynne-Davies, ed., Bloomsbury Guide to English Literature. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd., 93-112.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (2008) Felicia Hemans. [Online] May 2008. Available from: http://www.oxforddnb.com/index/12/101012888/ [Accessed: 23 December 2016]

Romantic Circles. (1997) Reading Hemans, Aesthetics, and the Canon: An Online Discussion. [Online] July 1997. Available from http://www.rc.umd.edu/pedagogies/usingRC/hemans.html [Accessed: 23 December 2016]

The poems discussed in this post can be found via the following links:

William Wordsworth: The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman

Felicia Hemans: Indian Woman’s Death-Song