Shakeshafte and Other Plays

SHAKESHAFTE & OTHER PLAYS

Copyright ©

2021

Rowan Williams. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Slant Books, P.O. Box

60295

, Seattle, WA

98160

.

Slant Books

P.O. Box

60295

Seattle, WA

98160

www.slantbooks.com

hardcover isbn: 978-1-63982-103-7

paperback isbn: 978-1-63982-102-0

ebook isbn: 978-1-63982-104-4

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Williams, Rowan

Title: Shakeshafte & other plays. / Rowan Williams.

Description: Seattle, WA: Slant,

2021

.

Identifiers: ISBN

978

-

1

-

63982

-

103

-

7

(hardcover) | ISBN

978

-

1

-

63982

-

102

-

0

(paperback) | ISBN

978

-

1

-

63982

-

104

-

4

(ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William,

1564

-

1616

-- Drama | Campion, Edmund, -- Saint, --

1540

-

1581

| Lazarus, -- of Bethany, Saint -- Fiction.

Classification: PR

6123

.I

43293

S

5

2021

. (paperback) | PR

6123

.I

43293

S

5

2021

. (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number:

2021946665

.

NOTE: Written permission is required for live performance of any sort. This includes readings, cuttings, scenes, and excerpts. For amateur and professional performances, contact: Permissions, Slant Books, P.O. Box

60295

, Seattle, WA

98160

.

Foreword

ONE LOOKS BACK at the writings of Rowan Williams, formerly the Archbishop of Canterbury (

2002

–

2012

), with amazement and gratitude. He’s a compulsively readable and persuasive theologian and Christian apologist, one whose early work was strongly influenced by the bracing mysticism of Eastern Orthodoxy (his doctoral research being a study of the Russian theologian Vladimir Nikolayevich Lossky). Among his most arresting works in a theological vein are The Wound of Knowledge (

1979

), a survey of Christian spirituality from the New Testament through St. John of the Cross, and Silence and Honey Cakes (

2003

), a splendid reading of the desert monastics of the fourth century, who wrote movingly about finding Christ in community. But this scarcely begins to tell the story of Williams as a theologian – a journey that, to a degree, culminates in Christ the Heart of Creation (

2018

), a beautifully argued meditation on how over two millennia Christians have engaged with the paradoxes of the Christ figure and the relations between God and creation itself.

Williams is also a gifted poet and literary critic, prolific in both genres. His poems reflect his deep reading in poetry, in history, his love of art and music, and his alertness to landscapes (especially the Welsh landscape of his childhood), where nature and spirit live in easy correspondence. His evocative and sensuous language offers a rich experience. And as a literary critic, especially in his luminous studies of Dostoevsky (

2008

) and C. S. Lewis (

2012

), he’s an astute, responsive, and helpful reader – always at the service of the text, which he inhabits with an almost uncanny ability to lose himself in a writer’s world, with an enduring interest in metaphor itself as the heart of communication – a topic he explored in tantalizing detail in his Gifford Lectures, published as The Edge of Words (2014

).

All of which brings us to Shakespeare, the subject of his first play in Shakeshafte and Other Plays. In his youth, Williams entertained visions of the stage, acting in several plays. In a

2014

interview with The Guardian, he revealed his abiding love of the Bard, calling The Winter’s Tale one of the most linguistically dense, emotionally demanding, and spiritually rich of all the plays. He said that he found the long-standing arguments about Shakespeare’s Roman Catholic leanings of more than passing interest:

Shakespeare knows exactly where he does, and doesn’t, want to go, in matters of church and state. He deliberately puts some of his plays right outside the Christian, Tudor/Jacobean framework. For instance, King Lear takes place in a pre-Christian Britain. Again, some people argue that Cymbeline is about a rupture with Rome, leading to a reconciliation. I think Shakespeare did have a recusant Catholic background. My own hunch is that he didn’t go to church much.

In this same interview he refers to the first play in this collection, Shakeshafte.

Here he imagines a dialogue between young Will and the legendary Jesuit martyr, Edmund Campion. We know they both stayed at the same house in Lancashire, he says. I found this a wonderful idea to play with: what might a Jesuit martyr and Shakespeare have said to each other?

This play is more than simply an imaginary conversation between two major figures. It’s a striking portrait of Catholic life in Elizabethan England, when a secret papist might be exposed, leading to partial hanging, castration, disembowelment, and beheading – the hideous fate that actually befell Campion in

1581

. The actual details of these executions terrified all Catholics in Elizabeth’s time, and this potential fate gives a sharp edge of anxiety to the drama that unfolds in Shakeshafte during the winter of

1580

and the summer of

1581

.

The play’s setting is an opulent manor house in Lancashire, home of the wealthy Catholic Alexander Hoghton, who apparently left a bit of money to a young man called Will Shakeshafte. In Williams’s drama, this man is Shakespeare himself, who by tradition once worked for a Catholic family in Lancashire as a young man. (The evidence that Shakespeare may have had Roman associations is compelling, although some scholars disagree with the notion. In any case, Williams calls this a fantasia, a kind of what if play.) The lost years of Shakespeare are, of course, an inviting gap in history, and Williams rushes into this space with relish, giving us a wise and witty young man who more than holds his own with his elders, including the mystery man who shifts about the countryside under various names, here as Edward Hastings, a priest who belongs to the Company, which refers to the Society of Jesus, the Jesuit order.

The play, which includes a dalliance with a local lass for young Will, is provocative and entertaining, the language expressively idiomatic, the discourse bracing. In one key passage in Scene VII, for example, Will talks with Hoghton and Hastings, setting out his views of religion, which aren’t exactly a model of orthodox rhetoric. For Christ’s sake, Will! You’re not turning Lutheran, exclaims Alex. Here Will responds at his best: I’m not turning anything, sir. I want to know the playbook’s there, in Rome or wherever. Perhaps it’s only what someone else did, what someone else said, hundreds of years ago, when they were on their own on a stage and there were no playbooks. And – you know spiders? They spin it out of themselves, don’t they; they get it out of the bowels and…. He’s interrupted by Hastings, who says: What’s in those bowels, though? You know your catechism. What’s in any of us except lies and tales and images of who we are, that we set up and worship?

Shakeshafte is a densely woven fabric, a play that seems utterly plausible and tantalizing as well. And it plays well against The Flat Roof of the World, another full-length play about a writer, although the social context of this play, and its dreamlike setting, could not be more different. David Jones, its subject, has none of Will’s easy way with words. He’s occasionally halting and inarticulate, at other times as eloquent as we find him in his poems.

Jones was, indeed, one of the major modernist poets of Britain, best known for In Parenthesis (

1937

), a long poem (with an admixture of prose) set during the Great War, in which Jones fought for five years – a survivor of the trenches who suffered for many decades from post-traumatic stress syndrome or shell shock, as it was called then. Perhaps his worst time was the disastrous battle at Mametz Wood in the summer of

1916

, recalled by Jones in Williams’s play: Sounds odd, bloody great explosions going off all the time, all around, but there, inside the fog, in the dawn, walking forward as if you were on cushions, walking on air, walking on the flat roof of the world.

This riveting play draws a small circle around Jones, who lived an increasingly isolated life in his later years, never well enough to follow through with marriage, barely able to function in the world. In addition to his poetry, he was a major artist, especially known for his watercolors. Soon after the war, he was drawn (as a Catholic convert) to Eric Gill, a sculptor and typeface designer associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement. Gill was a Catholic himself, and a very strange man who wrote about his sexual adventures in his diary. These included incestuous relations with his two eldest daughters – the second of whom, Petra, was briefly engaged to David Jones, who was later attracted to a vivid young actor and athlete, Valerie Wynne-Williams.

As Williams puts this cast of characters before us, the conflicts arise. Gill wants Jones to do something more serious, as an artist, than mere watercolors. What do you think you’re making when you paint one of these? he asks the mortified Jones. It’s just…wallpaper for some capitalist collections; it’s not a thing with a purpose. As Jones struggles in his halting relations with Petra and Valerie, he tries to make sense of a senseless world. His memories endlessly return to the trench, much as one’s tongue returns to a cavity or sore in the mouth. It all comes back to that, though, doesn’t it? he says to Petra in Scene IV. A man hung up in public, dying. Don’t get me wrong, don’t think I’m getting a Christ-complex. It’s just that I suppose he hangs up there because that’s where we all are, one way or another. Dying, surviving. Waiting.

Williams is, at core, a Christian playwright, interested in questions of sacrifice, even self-sacrifice. He shows not the slightest fear in approaching the oddities of Gill, the torment of his daughter, or the frustrations of Valerie, who says in rejecting him for another man: If you’d really wanted me – if you’d really wanted me and – well, I’d have…. Oh, Christ, I don’t know.

The Flat Roof of the World is rooted in Jones’s poetry – the title itself comes from In Parenthesis. And it has all the brokenness, splintered idealism, and desperate grip on the physical and spiritual realities that one associates with this poet. And yet the play is dreamlike, as characters step in and out of time, the conflicts in the poet’s life coalescing in powerful clusters of confrontation and engagement. A kind of imaginative smoke seems to swirl around their legs as they lift their heads above the clouds. The total