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For a
guy who has been dead for nearly 400 years, it's pretty amazing
that Shakespeare is still cranking out the hits. And I'm not
talking about great productions of his classic plays. I'm
not talking about recently discovered "lost manuscripts."
I'm talking brand-spanking-new plays.
That's
what John Reed has cooked up in All the World's a Grave,
a new tragedy by William Shakespeare. With all the cleverness
of Touchstone and the mischievousness of Puck, Reed has boldly
reimagined the Bard by cutting, pasting, puzzling, and rearranging
Shakespeare's own words and characters into an entirely new
play.
At the
play's opening, Hamlet, the prince of Bohemia, has waged an
unjust war to win Juliet from her father, King Lear. Back
in Bohemia, meanwhile, Hamlet's mother kills the king and
marries her lover, Macbeth, who ascends to the throne. The
king's ghost visits Hamlet and haunts Macbeth, even as Hamlet's
sidekick, Iago, takes advantage of the prince's distraught
condition by exacting revenge on his rival, Romeo, one of
Hamlet's generals.
The play
obviously borrows heavily from Hamlet, Othello,
Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and King Lear,
with a heavy dose of Henry V thrown in for good measure.
Anyone who has read any of those plays knows that things don't
turn out well for the main characters, so it won't come as
a surprise that things don't turn out well for any of them
in All the World's a Grave, either. In fact, borrowing
from all those sources as it does, the new Shakespeare play
could be a handbook on personal calamity.
If it
all sounds a bit much, it is—but according to Reed, that's
kind of the point. "[I]t is precisely because Shakespeare's
plays were monsters assembled from other monsters that a fresh
monstrosity can be assembled from Shakespeare," he writes
in his afterward. "And, because of Shakespeare's use of stock
players and storylines, a new Shakespearian narrative is equally
possible."
The resulting
story is both familiar and fresh, and the characters are energized
and enlightened. Reed's juxtaposition allows him to give added
depth and dimension to characters. For instance, in Othello,
Iago is a deliciously evil character, but he revels in a pretty
unmotivated brand of evil. In All the World's a Grave,
Iago has been victimized by war, and because he's damaged
goods, he has a stronger rationale behind his manipulations
and machinations. Such added depth enhances, rather than dilutes,
the original character (a comparison that can be fairly made
only if a reader is familiar with Othello).
Reed
borrows heavily from the Shakespeare canon to populate the
new play with dialogue. Shakespeare fans can expect classics,
like Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy and Lady Macbeth's
"Out, damned spot!" lament. But they will have particular
fun catching all the familiar lines that come in surprising
contexts. It's not Juliet, for instance, who cries "O Romeo,
Romeo! Wherefore art thou, oh Romeo?" (For really hardcore
fans, Reed provides online annotations to his play that show
"the provenance of the words.")
While
it helps to be a familiar with Shakespeare to appreciate All
the World's a Grave, readers don't have to be aficionados.
A simple appreciation of Shakespeare's language will do. After
all, its the beauty is what makes his plays stand the test
of time, and Reed makes a conscious effort to preserve that.
"[T]he words," Reed says, "continually reassert their brilliance."
"When
thou dost ask me blessing," Lear says to Juliet, his estranged
daughter, "I'll kneel down,/And ask of thee forgiveness; so
we'll live,/And pray, and sing, and tell old tales and laugh…."
She is, by that point in the play, dead, which imbues Lear's
words with heartbreaking irony. That Shakespeare's words can
do that 400 years later speaks to their power.
"Oh,
for a muse of fire," Shakespeare once wrote. Reed has tapped
into that muse and produced a re-envisioned Shakespeare that
proves to be both provocative, substantial, and entertaining.
(November,
2008)
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