Playing with Voices
Rowan Williams’s collection of three plays delves into the voices of artists and the purpose of art—before turning to Author of all voices.
By Mark Clemens
Although the three plays collected in Shakeshafte—a new volume from the theologian, preacher, critic, poet, former archbishop, and now dramatist Rowan Williams—were written and produced separately over the course of a decade, they read like they were always meant to sit side by side. Each play concerns art, and suffering, and asks a common question: What does truth sound like? The title play concocts an encounter between the teenage Shakespeare and the Jesuit missionary Edmund Campion, shortly before the latter is captured and executed by agents of Queen Elizabeth. Young Will is as quick-witted as we expect, impatient with his lightning mind for not taking in the world faster. He is ravenous for experience and, like many bright young people, mistakes it for understanding when he gets it. “He wants to stand there and stand here and look out of your eyes and mine,” says an exasperated lover. Campion, older and worldlier, is aloof, scrupulous with his words, impassioned only when he needs to be. Both have a knack for metaphor, and for turning other people’s words to their own ends.
Naturally, when they meet they speak in images—of voices, scripts, music, mirrors (one of the play’s slightly too-clever references to Hamlet, The Tempest, and Lear). Each expands on the other’s pictures until they are beaten so thin as to be indistinguishable from the truths they stand for, or perhaps make new truths altogether. Williams is dusting off the old comparison between art (especially drama) and religion (especially Catholicism)—what they give to and especially take from their participants: the playwright’s all-consuming eye is not unlike the confessor’s ear. In return, each discipline provides us images to think with, tools with which to build or repair the house of faith or… or whatever it is art does (the play’s best answer is that it is a vehicle for knowledge of self and others—again, like confession).
Mercifully, Shakeshafte is not an “origin story”—Williams is not interested in the chain of events and influences that made the glover’s son into the Bard, and never suggests he can somehow account for or explain the plays. In fact, Shakeshafte is not really about Shakespeare at all: it is a drama of ideas, using some famous figures as shorthand for the human tendencies Williams wishes to pit against each other. This is perhaps why the character Will feels plucked from a much later, post-Romantic era, with very different ideas about art and the self than his Elizabethan contemporaries or indeed the real Shakespeare: “You can—see words out there,” he says, sounding more like a Tom Stoppard character than an early modern, “all the different ways you could make sense of the world, nothing fixed, and you in the middle of it.” The artistic fervor that can match Campion’s religious one has to be imported from another age.
The play is in part an exploration of an anti-utilitarian view of language: the symbol that can be understood by another is in imminent danger of becoming useful.
In The Flat Roof of the World, we find another artist born into the wrong age, the poet and painter David Jones. Where Williams’ Shakespeare is ahead of his time and constantly seeking to burrow into other minds, David is born too late and always lost in his own head, whether in his capacious knowledge of Arthurian myth or his shattering experiences in the Great War, which his thoughts helplessly circle like a drain. He is a perfectly passive hero, buffeted by his memories, his failures, his lusts, unable even to boil water for tea (Valerie, the young woman with whom he shares a relationship that never quite rises to romance, has to buy him a kettle). Williams implies David has prevented himself from knowing about the sexual abuse his erstwhile fiancé Petra Gill suffered at the hands of her father, his mentor Eric Gill. At the play’s totalizing moment, David lies down on the couch.
Like Shakeshafte’s Will, Jones lives in a world where nothing is fixed—for the artist as a young man, this is an exciting challenge, but for lonely David on the far side of middle age, it is mostly frightening. “It’s like being adrift without sails and mast and oars and the fog closing in,” he tells Valerie, “like being alone in the wood again.” Nothing is fixed in his art, either, given his favored medium of watercolor. Its edgeless haze and slurry of colors allow for a layering of disparate ideas: “You look at something and then you see something else showing through or creeping through at the edge.” Or as Valerie puts it, “there’s a hell of a lot going on.” She finds value in it too (“All those bloody beautiful little birds”), but it is ultimately opaque to her, as it is to Eric Gill and nearly everyone else in David’s life. David is in turn disheartened by Eric’s insistence that art for art’s sake is masturbatory, that it must have a use—or, as he might put it with cod-Thomist hauteur, a telos. The play is in part an exploration of an anti-utilitarian view of language: the symbol that can be understood by another is in imminent danger of becoming useful; the purest aesthetic is necessarily the most private, and it seals its creator off from the world.
All along Williams suggests the truth might be best perceived in negative space—in silence.
Williams is largely of Jones’s tribe. In the presence of what he perceives to be mysteries—particularly suffering and sacrifice—he is deferential to a fault, pulling back from fully exploring these themes lest he risk diminishing them. In Flat Roof, for example, Petra (at least, the Petra in David’s head, which is all we ever see) appears to have faced down her abusive past and faded into an unremarkable middle class life, while David, unable to function outside his war memories, makes something striking from them (“there’s Auden or Eliot or some brilliant bugger saying you have the most sophisticated modernist sensibility in Britain and you can only say these stupid self-pitying things”). There are deep questions here—about whether trauma can ever have a telos, about the forms resilience might take—but Williams stops shy of asking them, so mindful is he that there are no definitive answers. To his credit, Williams is aware of the shortcomings of this strategy: both Shakeshafte and Flat Roof deal with abuse—a situation where knowledge creates an obligation to act, where mere contemplation is a grave moral failure. Yet these plays contain very little action, even psychological action—none of their protagonists change. Instead we simply watch the world drip through their filters.
“Bearing witness” is the hifalutin way put it, and one of Williams’ characters calls it exactly that. But it is only in Lazarus, the final play in the collection, that he finds a theme and story that demands stunned, contemplative witness from the audience, the kind of silence engendered by the presence of that whereof we cannot speak. In this brief, minimalist work, three characters (identified only as “voices”) wrestle with the events of the eleventh chapter of John’s gospel, the raising of Lazarus. Here we are justified in passive witness to the suffering of Lazarus and his sisters precisely because Christ acts—though it is noteworthy that even He first pauses to reflect and philosophize, and to weep. Then again, that resurrection is not really action, not to Him who is the Resurrection and the Life. It is what He does, what He is, spilling over into His creation. “I’m what’s left,” is one voice’s paraphrase, “whatever’s alive underneath it all.” Having suggested the smallest glimpse of that unbearable bedrock truth, the play gets out of its own way and ends quickly and without ceremony.
Shakespeare and Jones, moderns both, see truth or its nearest equivalent as a tangle, a cacophony of voices or superimposed pictures. The traditionalists Campion and Gill speak of harmony and form, separate parts woven into unity. All along Williams suggests the truth might be best perceived in negative space—in silence. By turns they compel us, and by turns they are refuted, complicated, or mocked. In Lazarus a fourth option appears, truth not as dissonance, concord, or silence, but a solo voice that weeps and then, flat and hoarse, bids: come forth.
Mark Clemens is the winner of the 2018 Bodley Head/FT Essay Prize. He lives outside Chicago.
Shakeshafte & Other Plays was published by Slant Books on December 7, 2021. Fare Forward thanks them for their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy on their website here.
