The Book Of Will (A Noise Within 2023 Production) Theatre Review

production photo by Craig Schwartz

This year marks the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of what is arguably the single most important book in human history, what we refer to as the First Folio, Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. And so it is the perfect time to see a performance of Lauren Gunderson’s The Book Of Will, a play that not only celebrates the people who dedicated themselves to the book’s production, but in a larger sense celebrates the theatre itself. And no, one does not have to be a Shakespeare scholar, or even a big fan, to enjoy the new production of the play put on by the good folks at A Noise Within in Pasadena. Sure, a familiarity with Shakespeare’s works and biography help, but is far from necessary to appreciate the performance.

This production stars Jeremy Rabb as Henry Condell and Geoff Elliott as John Heminges, the two men from Shakespeare’s theatre company who worked to put together the First Folio as a way to preserve their friend’s great works. Both of these actors have tremendous talent. Jeremy Rabb was wonderful as Lafeu in last year’s production of All’s Well That Ends Well, and gave a brilliant performance as Roderigo in the 2019 production of Othello. Geoff Elliott gave us a fantastic King Lear in 2017, and was incredibly moving as Caliban in the 2014 production of The Tempest. Both deliver excellent performances here. The rest of the cast, each actor playing multiple roles, is also quite strong, something that is expected from this company.

The play begins in 1619, three years after the death of William Shakespeare, and opens in the middle of a performance of Hamlet. We are treated to just a bit of that play’s most famous soliloquy, but it is clear that the company putting on that play is using the bad quarto, for Hamlet says, “To be or not to be, ay, there’s the point.” So right away the importance of collecting William Shakespeare’s actual words is planted in the audience’s mind. That actor, by the way, is played by Kelvin Morales, who was delightful as Puck in the Independent Shakespeare Company’s 2018 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and delivers another good performance here. From the theatre, the action shifts to a tap house, where Condell, Heminges and Richard Burbage (Frederick Stuart) have gathered to drink and to discuss the mess they just witnessed on the stage. The scene is quite funny, and the rapport among the three is perfect. Frederick Stuart, by the way, was fantastic as Don Pedro in this year’s production of Much Ado About Nothing, and as Leontes in the 2020 production of The Winter’s Tale. And as Richard Burbage, he is endearing, lovable, and hilarious. He also has to prove his own talent as an actor, since Richard Burbage was the most famous actor of his day, most of Shakespeare’s great leads having been written for him, and Frederick Stuart does just that when he performs a brief but powerful medley of those parts to prove a point to the younger actor. It’s a moment that had the audience cheering.

But as funny as the scene is, there is also great heartache among the three at having witnessed one of their friend’s greatest works being destroyed, and knowing that they are all now growing older and will be unable to keep the work alive themselves. Though John Heminges’ daughter Alice (Nicole Javier) is there to remind them that none of them is Lear yet, a nice touch. But we get the sense of three men who see their world changing, and not for the better, something that most people can relate to, I believe. They do not, however, give in to despair. And much of their strength comes from the women in their lives, who play important, and largely unsung, roles in their successes. In addition to Nicole Javier as Alice, this production features Deborah Strang as Rebecca Heminges, John’s wife, and Trisha Miller as Elizabeth Condell, Henry’s wife. Deborah Strang was phenomenal as Paulina in the 2020 production of The Winter’s Tale, and Trisha Miller gave one of the best performances of Goneril I’ve ever seen. Again, there is a whole lot of talent in this company. And the characters of the wives provide the play with one of its most touching scenes, when the stage is split into two locations, Henry and Elizabeth stage left, John and Rebecca stage right, an intimate scene that makes these people are the more real to us. Trisha Miller also plays the role of Emilia Bassano Lanier, the woman many believe to be the Dark Lady of the sonnets, but who was also a creative force of her own.

The role of Ben Jonson was initially played by Chuma Gault, but last night was performed by Alex Morris. The material with Ben Jonson is particularly hilarious, playing on what is known of that writer and his connection to Shakespeare. Morris really nails the comedy, but is also simultaneously moving when he confesses having stayed up reading all of Shakespeare’s work. Also delivering a funny, yet earnest performance is Kasey Mahaffy as Ralph Crane, known as “Shakespeare’s first editor.” Mahaffy is noted for his comic ability, playing Trinculo in The Tempest, Rosencrantz in Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, and Garry in the 2019 production of Noises Off (in that last, he was absolutely outstanding). And the character who provides the most hope for the future is Isaac Jaggard (Stanley Andrew Jackson), son of William Jaggard, who printed the First Folio. Stanley Andrew Jackson (who did a wonderful job earlier this year as Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing) gives the role the right amount of heart and enthusiasm, and really connects the past with the future.

While you don’t need to have a lot of knowledge about Shakespeare to enjoy the play, there are some jokes you might not fully appreciate without it. For example, there is a running joke about Pericles being Henry Condell’s favorite of Shakespeare’s plays, while the others don’t seem to recall it. As they attempt to gather as much of Shakespeare’s work together as possible, Condell is particularly eager to find that one. Pericles, as it turns out, is the one of the thirty-seven plays that was not included in the First Folio, and knowing that makes the first mention of it all the more funny. There is also a joke on Love’s Labour’s Won, a play that was mentioned in the earliest praise of Shakespeare’s work, but one for which we have no text whatsoever (I am not alone in believing it to be another title for The Taming Of The Shrew rather than a lost work, but the joke here plays on it being a lost work). But again, the play is a delight, and is quite effective even for those without extensive knowledge of Shakespeare’s work. Though the play takes place over the course of four years, it moves at a fast pace, and does not stop to indicate that time has passed. And while it is quite funny, it is also fascinating, and the audience finds itself rooting for these characters. I imagine I wasn’t the only one who got a bit of a thrill when the pages of the First Folio were shown hanging, as on a clothes line. I felt the excitement that those present must have felt when their efforts were finally paying off. And when Anne Hathaway Shakespeare (Deborah Strang) opens the finished book and sees the picture of her husband, it is one of the most emotionally satisfying and exciting moments I’ve experienced in the theatre.

This production of The Book Of Will was directed by Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and Geoff Elliott, and runs through June 4th. Visit the theatre’s website for the complete schedule. There is one fifteen-minute intermission. A Noise Within is located at 3352 E. Foothill Blvd. in Pasadena, California. Free parking is located at the Sierra Madre Villa Metro Parking Structure.

Shakespeare Study: More Miscellaneous Books

Shakespeare is a serious passion of mine, and I imagine this study will go on the rest of my life. When I am able, I pick up books related to his works. Also, I often receive them as gifts, which always makes me happy. Here are notes on the books I’ve read recently.

All The Sonnets Of Shakespeare edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells – This book contains not only the 154 sonnets published in 1609, but all the sonnets within Shakespeare’s plays. The sonnets are arranged in the order in which they were written, at least as far as it is known. That means they do not have the usual numbers assigned to them, though those numbers are included at the bottom of each page for reference. The book’s introduction gets into the sonnets contained within Shakespeare’s plays before then turning to the 154 sonnets. The editors write: “Part of the originality of Shakespeare’s Sonnets lies in the fact that it is not a sequence; it is a collection, or an anthology. But it contains within it mini-sequences and pairs of sonnets which are revealing of what Shakespeare wanted to write about. We do not know who was responsible for the 1609 order, but since whoever it was knew the poems well, we have no objection to believing it was Shakespeare himself” (p. 17). Each sonnet is presented on its own page, with notes afterward, including the number originally assigned to it, as I mentioned. And sometimes in the notes, connections are drawn between certain sonnets and certain plays, in similar uses of language. For example, in a note regarding Sonnet No. 14, we get this note: “But…derive (cf Love’s Labour’s Lost 4.3.326: ‘From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive’)” (p. 139). This book was published in 2020. My copy is from the third printing, in 2021.

William Shakespeare’s Strange Case Of Doctor Jekyll And Mister Hyde by Ian Doescher – Ian Doescher has adapted many screenplays and stories to fit in with the work of Shakespeare. The story is divided into five acts and presented in iambic pentameter. And, as usual, there are references to lines from some of Shakespeare’s plays. For example, he has the doctor say, “We should have found the lady a grave lass” (p. 14), a nod to Mercutio’s “Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.” The character Gabriel Utterson directly quotes Hamlet, saying, “Eat of the fish that fed of that worm” (p. 18). Doescher refers to Hamlet several times in this book. Poole says, “O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown” (p. 37), directly quoting Ophelia. Jekyll says, “Reliev’d of all the thousand nat’ral shocks – /The whips and scorns of time that all do bear” (p. 42), nodding to two separate lines in Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy. Doctor Lanyon quotes Gertrude, saying “More matter, with less art” (p. 67). And Poole later uses Hamlet’s final line, or a slight variation on it, saying, “The rest was silence” (p. 88). Ian Doescher also playfully refers to a few other horror movies in one speech by Inspector Newcomen, including Halloween, Friday The 13th and A Nightmare On Elm Street. This book was published in 2022.

Monty Python, Shakespeare And English Renaissance Drama by Darl Larsen – This book combines two things that I’m passionate about – Shakespeare and Monty Python. Darl Larsen finds some common elements, such as how both have entered the common language, and that descriptive words exist for both: “Shakespearean” and “Pythonesque.” And both Shakespeare and Monty Python broke the fourth wall. Larsen also gets into how Monty Python used Shakespeare’s work, writing: “From hospital wards for overwrought Shakespearean actors to the first performance of Measure For Measure underwater, from Shakespeare doing the dishes to Hamlet on a psychiatrist’s couch, the Bard was appropriated by Python, but this appropriation wasn’t limited to textural concerns. We shall see later that Python revived and revised much surrounding this ‘icon of western culture,’ including, but not limited to, his writing-to-type technique, the Renaissance’s and Shakespeare’s use of men in women’s roles, his penchant for historical anachronisms and violation of the dramatic unities, his pointed verbal jousting, his relegation to otherness of any language other than English, etc.” (p. 16). Larsen writes: “As the Knights approach Camelot, its beauty is praised, and Patsy mumbles, ‘It’s only a model.’ He is quickly ‘shushed’ by other characters. This seems an echo of the Chorus offering the unreality of the ‘unworthy scaffold’ that is the stage and set for Henry V: ‘Can this cockpit hold/The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram’/Within this wooden O the very casques/That did affright the air at Agincourt?’ (1.1.10-14). The sentiment is the same: acknowledgment of the artifice of the production, of the representation of historical material” (pages 69-69). Darl Larsen offers some interesting thoughts on the effect of Falstaff on Henry V, particularly with respect to the Chorus. He writes, “It seems apparent that the specter of Falstaff – the character out of history who drew attention to the artifice of the production of history – made Shakespeare extremely self-conscious of the limitations of the stage in recreating or reproducing historical episodes” (p. 108). The book also brings Ben Jonson into the mix, with Larsen writing, “He viewed his plays as meriting careful study, while Shakespeare and Python often seemed to almost go out of their way to simply entertain. Considering the venues of Shakespeare and Python as opposed to Jonson – the more public forum versus, often, the insulation of the court – this elevation of entertainment over instruction by both Python and Shakespeare isn’t surprising” (p. 43). And it is crazy to learn that the fart line in Holy Grail is a variation on a line from one of Jonson’s plays. Seriously. Larsen writes, “In The Alchemist, Jonson’s second line seems almost an answer: ‘Thy worst. I fart at thee’ (1.1.2), which becomes an insult adapted to the screen in Monty Python’s Holy Grail” (p. 48). Back to Shakespeare, Larsen writes: “Like Shakespeare’s work, Python’s sketches and scripts are meant to be performed, realized visually, and not read as poetry or literature. If anything, Python attacked the notion of effete intellectualism in favor of experience” (p. 155). This book was published in 2003.

Upstart Crow: The Scripts by Ben Elton – Upstart Crow is one of my favorite recent television programs, and the folks responsible for it certainly know their Shakespeare. This book contains the scripts from the first two seasons, with footnotes just like the various editions of Shakespeare’s plays. I love the joke about, and explanation of, the word “wherefore” in the first episode, and there is a humorous footnote about that as well. And Anne says: “Although, if I was being really picky, Romeo’s just his Christian name, isn’t it? And that’s not the issue. It’s his surname that’s the problem” (p. 7). And in the footnote, it says, “No scholar has ever sought fit to point out this obvious howler.” In the second episode, Will is mentioning some ideas he has for plays: “‘Seventeen Gentlemen Of Verona’. That needs trimming” (p. 41). Ben Elton must really dislike Harold Pinter’s work, for he takes several jabs at him in the footnotes, such as this: “The arts establishment deliberately favours the obscure and boring over the robust and popular because they think it makes them look clever. Hence Harold Pinter getting a Nobel Prize for literature. I mean, seriously” (p. 92). Here is another example: “Theatres in Shakespeare’s time and indeed for long after were thought to be places where the pursuit of every vice was more important than the actual play being presented. Anyone who’s sat through a Pinter play might well have wished that the tradition had not died out” (p. 330). I love the note about the word “hanged”: “The correct grammar would, of course, be ‘hanged for murder’. Shakespeare deniers will seize upon this slip as proof of their insane conspiracy theories arguing that someone who says ‘hung’ instead of ‘hanged’ couldn’t possibly have written Hamlet” (p. 129). In the final episode of the first season, Gabrielle Glaister makes a special appearance as Kate, a character she had also played in the second season of Blackadder. This is the footnote: “Scholars have speculated that evidence of this very ‘Bob’ can be found in another historical source, the venerable Blackadder Chronicles, an ancient but fragmented family history which came to light in the 1980s. Whether this Judge Bob is indeed the same person who was briefly in a cross-dressing, trans-inquisitive relationship with Edmund Blackadder during the mid-sixteenth century will always remain a point of speculation” (p. 176). In the second episode of the second season, Burbage comments that at least one thing in Richard The Third is a lie. Will replies, “I prefer the phrase ‘alternative fact’” (p. 214). The footnote reads: “Many scholars over the years have marvelled at how Shakespeare’s works speak to each new generation with equal force, that his political and philosophical vision can illuminate any age. Here, for instance, Shakespeare satirizes Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway almost four hundred years before she was born” (9p. 214). This book was published in 2018.

The Tragedy Of Othello The Moor Of Venice by William Shakespeare – This edition is from The Pelican Shakespeare series, and was edited by Gerald Eades Bentley. In the section titled “Shakespeare And His Stage,” when mentioning that early list of Shakespeare’s plays that includes “Love labors won,” a parenthetical note reads, “Taming of the Shrew?” That was always my thought as well, that Love’s Labour’s Won was actually The Taming Of The Shrew. In the introduction, Gerald Eades Bentley writes: “To the same end Shakespeare has minimized the number of characters in this play. Not only is the cast of Othello smaller than those of the other three tragedies – it has half to two-thirds the number of characters – but in it the secondary characters, Brabantio, Cassio, Roderigo, and Emilia, are undeveloped save for their relations to the plotting of Iago or the downfall of Othello and Desdemona” (p. 16). And: “Othello differs again from the usual Shakespearean pattern in the extent to which the power of evil is concentrated in one figure. The conflict of good and evil in an ostensibly Christian world was always a basic element in Elizabethan tragedies, and Shakespeare’s presentation of the conflict is everywhere more subtle and complex than that of any of his contemporaries, but in the other Shakespearean tragedies the evil is more dispersed through various characters or even, as in King Lear, through the entire world of the play. Here the inherent weaknesses of Desdemona and Othello are made fatal through the maneuvering of Iago” (p. 17). Also in the introduction, Gerald Eades Bentley asks, “Can Othello’s assured mastery of threatening situations be so unshakable as it has seemed in the two big dramatic scenes of the act if he is so naïve in his Judgment of Iago?” (p. 20). At the end of the introduction, he writes: “This is the tragedy, then, of another deluded mortal who destroys what he loves best, so that his own death is only an appropriate corollary. King Lear and Coriolanus and Brutus do likewise, but they destroy themselves in a context of troubled kingdoms and empires, while the little world of Othello’s tragedy is his own marriage and his false friend, ‘honest Iago’” (pages 24-25). This book was first published in 1958. The copy I read was from the 1965 printing.

Shakespeare Reference in Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu

John Updike's book on Ted Williams, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu, contains one Shakespeare reference. Updike writes, "Throughout the late forties, the Red Sox were the best paper team in baseball, yet they had little three-dimensional to show for it, and if this was a tragedy, Williams was Hamlet" (p. 10). This book was published in 2010, a special publication of The Library of America. But its main piece was first published in The New Yorker on October 20, 1960, and parts of the second piece were published in 1986 and 2002.

Shakespeare Reference in The Greatest Game

Richard Bradley's book about that fateful game in 1978 (the Bucky Fuckin' Dent game), The Greatest Game: The Day That Bucky, Yaz, Reggie, Pudge, And Company Played The Most Memorable Game In Baseball's Most Intense Rivalry, contains a reference to Hamlet. The reference comes in something that Yankees backup catcher Cliff Johnson is quoted as saying: "I feel it in my heart of hearts that he basically had a good heart" (p. 177). The phrase of "heart of hearts" comes from Act III Scene ii, when Hamlet says: "Give me that man/That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him/In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart,/As I do thee." Cliff Johnson, by the way, is talking about Billy Martin.

This book was originally published in 2008, the hardcover title being The Greatest Game: The Yankees, The Red Sox, And The Playoff Of '78. The trade paperback edition was published in February 2009.

Shakespeare Reference in The Kommandant's Girl

Pam Jenoff's novel The Kommandant's Girl contains a reference to Shakespeare. Jenoff writes, "I led him to the literature section, where he settled upon a volume of Shakespeare's comedies" (p. 13).

The Kommandant's Girl was published in 2007.