The Merry Wives of Windsor (26 page)

RK:
We set that scene on Halloween, so all the children were dressed in fancy dress costumes. Mistress Quickly was a great big fairy and the children were all little ghosts and witches and fairies. The ghost costumes worked very well for the boys who had to go off and marry, and, like everything else in the production, it had a real rationale behind it: those children could absolutely have been doing that on an evening during the period in which we set the play. And by wonderful circumstance our Press Night in Stratford was on Halloween, so it all worked out very happily.

Simon Callow
was born and brought up in London before going on to Queen’s University, Belfast, and subsequently attending the Drama Centre London. In the early 1970s he joined the Gay Sweatshop theater company and later went on to work with the Joint Stock theater company. He played Mozart in the Royal National Theatre’s original production of Peter Shaffer’s
Amadeus
(1979) and starred as Tom Chance in the Channel 4 situation comedy
Chance in a Million
. Simon was nominated for a BAFTA for his role as Gareth in Mike Newell’s
Four Weddings and a Funeral
(1994). Recent acting credits include Pozzo in the revival of Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot
(2009). A distinguished director and writer, his directing credits include
My Fair Lady
in 1992,
Les Enfants du Paradis
for the RSC in 1995, and Stephen Oliver’s
Cantabile
in 1996. His
Being an Actor
(1984) is a partly autobiographical reflection on his chosen profession, and
Love Is Where It Falls
(2007) on his relationship with the theatrical agent Peggy Ramsay. He has written biographies of Oscar Wilde, Charles Laughton, and Orson Welles and also specialized in one-man shows, including
The Mystery of Charles Dickens
by Peter Ackroyd and
Shakespeare: The Man from Stratford
by Jonathan Bate (2010). Here Simon
discusses the experience of playing Falstaff in Gregory Doran’s RSC 2006–07 musical version of
The Merry Wives of Windsor
.

Does it matter that Shakespeare’s original audience would already have met Falstaff, Justice Shallow, and others in
Henry IV
,
but that many members of a modern audience will not have done so?

Well, of course it would have been delightful for the actor playing Falstaff at the very first performance of
Merry Wives
, that wave of delighted recognition, but after that, once word had got around, it wouldn’t have made much difference. By now, Falstaff is part of the collective unconscious, and whether people have seen
Henry IV
or not, they have a sense of who Falstaff is. I suspect that you’re right, and that most theatergoers start by seeing
Merry Wives
, so that they have the extraordinary experience of finding when they come to the history plays that a somewhat beaten-down and marginalized character is in fact one of infinite scope.

And for you as an actor, who has also played Falstaff in a version of the
Henry IV
plays: was that helpful, or a positive hindrance? Did you think of him as the same character or did you start from scratch?

Having heard all my life that
Merry Wives
was a rather shabby spinoff, and having indeed repeated that opinion in the two little books I wrote about
Henry IV
, I was immensely excited to discover that the character is absolutely himself, simply in reduced circumstances. The history plays take place against a backdrop of war, love, life, and death;
Merry Wives
is, famously, entirely domestic and bourgeois in its world. But Falstaff himself is still Falstaff, and given half a chance, he emerges as the semi-pagan fallen monarch that we know from the other plays. Once he gets into Windsor Great Park, he is in glorious form, but already after he’s been tipped into the Thames, his epic self-awareness of the absurdity of him—him!—being drowned, his emergence like an overweight Neptune, with (in our production) fishes popping out of his pants and seaweed up his nostrils, a pantheistic figure—if not actually Pan himself—is fully worthy of the other plays.

The Merry Wives of Windsor
has been called Shakespeare’s most middle class and suburban play. Was it important to you that he is
Sir
John Falstaff, whereas the Fords and the Pages are merely
Master
and
Mistress?

It’s important to
him:
part of the hilarity of the play is the incongruity of him finding himself among
these
people. The ongoing joke is that of a con man who complains about the quality of the people whom he is reduced to conning.

What is driving Falstaff in this play: is he really in love (the premise of the action, if we believe the old story that Queen Elizabeth asked for a play about Falstaff in love)? Or in lust? Or led primarily by the sheer pleasure of the chase and the outrageous schemes and disguises?

I think it’s a ruthless commercial consideration. He notes of both Mistress Page and Mistress Ford that they control their husbands’ purses; “they shall be exchequers to me,” he says. The chase is an inconvenience to him; it is his poverty that drives him on.

Does it make a difference that this is almost entirely a prose role (in a prose play)? Is there something distinctive about creating a Shakespearean role without the element of iambic pentameter?

Falstaff is almost entirely a prose role in all three plays. It is the greatest prose Shakespeare ever wrote. There are more prose roles in the canon than people seem to think. When I did
As You Like It
, I was praised by a number of critics for my handling of the verse, but Orlando has virtually none, nor does Sir T. Belch [in
Twelfth Night
]. Prose gives you a certain rhythmic freedom, which gives rise to all sorts of possibilities, but with verse you have the chance of creating a kind of spell. I always feel that the underlying iambic throb is like the distant sound of a ship’s engine, or, indeed, the pulse of the mother’s heart as the fetus nestles inside her. Prose can be incantatory, but it also offers fantastic possibilities for building huge irregular shapes of language which create constant surprise in a way which is harder in verse.

In purely practical terms, was this an uncomfortable role? The quick changes, the confinement in a laundry basket …

A nightmare. Both times I’ve played Falstaff, I elected to play him vast in girth. Everybody in the play finds it irresistible to comment on his bulk, and it is ironic to me that now, in the early twenty-first century, when people are getting fatter and fatter, when obesity is getting
more and more of a problem, a tradition has grown up of playing Falstaff as just having a bit of a tum. I believe passionately that Falstaff has to be monumentally fat, an enormity in nature in the most literal sense. He’s become a natural phenomenon, like a hillside or a whale or Orson Welles. So I wore huge padding. One of the curious things about wearing huge padding is that, however light it may in reality be, one feels enormously heavy, and even the journey back to the dressing room used to take an eternity. Being chased around by fairies in Windsor Great Park was almost terminally exhausting.

8.
Simon Callow as Falstaff: “an enormity of nature,” “extremely hot and itchy” in full padding, wig, beard, and mustache.

As well as padding, I wore a wig, a beard, and a mustache. All of this is extremely hot, and very itchy. I’m also horribly claustrophobic, so being locked in a laundry basket is no pleasure to me whatever. Then, still spitting out bits of laundry with gallons of sweat sloshing around inside the padding, to be dressed up as Alice Ford’s maid’s aunt from Brainford, Mother Prat—what one does for one’s art!

William Shakespeare was an extraordinarily intelligent man who was born and died in an ordinary market town in the English Midlands. He lived an uneventful life in an eventful age. Born in April 1564, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glove maker who was prominent on the town council until he fell into financial difficulties. Young William was educated at the local grammar in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where he gained a thorough grounding in the Latin language, the art of rhetoric, and classical poetry. He married Ann Hathaway and had three children (Susanna, then the twins Hamnet and Judith) before his twenty-first birthday: an exceptionally young age for the period. We do not know how he supported his family in the mid-1580s.

Like many clever country boys, he moved to the city in order to make his way in the world. Like many creative people, he found a career in the entertainment business. Public playhouses and professional full-time acting companies reliant on the market for their income were born in Shakespeare’s childhood. When he arrived in London as a man, sometime in the late 1580s, a new phenomenon was in the making: the actor who is so successful that he becomes a “star.” The word did not exist in its modern sense, but the pattern is recognizable: audiences went to the theater not so much to see a particular show as to witness the comedian Richard Tarlton or the dramatic actor Edward Alleyn.

Shakespeare was an actor before he was a writer. It appears not to have been long before he realized that he was never going to grow into a great comedian like Tarlton or a great tragedian like Alleyn. Instead, he found a role within his company as the man who patched up old plays, breathing new life, new dramatic twists, into
tired repertory pieces. He paid close attention to the work of the university-educated dramatists who were writing history plays and tragedies for the public stage in a style more ambitious, sweeping, and poetically grand than anything that had been seen before. But he may also have noted that what his friend and rival Ben Jonson would call “Marlowe’s mighty line” sometimes faltered in the mode of comedy. Going to university, as Christopher Marlowe did, was all well and good for honing the arts of rhetorical elaboration and classical allusion, but it could lead to a loss of the common touch. To stay close to a large segment of the potential audience for public theater, it was necessary to write for clowns as well as kings and to intersperse the flights of poetry with the humor of the tavern, the privy, and the brothel: Shakespeare was the first to establish himself early in his career as an equal master of tragedy, comedy, and history. He realized that theater could be the medium to make the national past available to a wider audience than the elite who could afford to read large history books: his signature early works include not only the classical tragedy
Titus Andronicus
but also the sequence of English historical plays on the Wars of the Roses.

He also invented a new role for himself, that of in-house company dramatist. Where his peers and predecessors had to sell their plays to the theater managers on a poorly paid piecework basis, Shakespeare took a percentage of the box-office income. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men constituted themselves in 1594 as a joint stock company, with the profits being distributed among the core actors who had invested as sharers. Shakespeare acted himself—he appears in the cast lists of some of Ben Jonson’s plays as well as the list of actors’ names at the beginning of his own collected works—but his principal duty was to write two or three plays a year for the company. By holding shares, he was effectively earning himself a royalty on his work, something no author had ever done before in England. When the Lord Chamberlain’s Men collected their fee for performance at court in the Christmas season of 1594, three of them went along to the Treasurer of the Chamber: not just Richard Burbage the tragedian and Will Kempe the clown, but also Shakespeare the scriptwriter. That was something new.

The next four years were the golden period in Shakespeare’s
career, though overshadowed by the death of his only son, Hamnet, aged eleven, in 1596. In his early thirties and in full command of both his poetic and his theatrical medium, he perfected his art of comedy, while also developing his tragic and historical writing in new ways. In 1598, Francis Meres, a Cambridge University graduate with his finger on the pulse of the London literary world, praised Shakespeare for his excellence across the genres: