{"id":6100,"date":"2022-08-03T13:43:31","date_gmt":"2022-08-03T13:43:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=6100"},"modified":"2022-08-03T13:48:44","modified_gmt":"2022-08-03T13:48:44","slug":"playing-with-voices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2022\/08\/03\/playing-with-voices\/","title":{"rendered":"Playing with Voices"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Playing with Voices<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Rowan Williams\u2019s collection of three plays delves into the voices of artists and the purpose of art\u2014before turning to Author of all voices.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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By Mark Clemens
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Although the three plays collected in Shakeshafte<\/em>\u2014a new volume from the theologian, preacher, critic, poet, former archbishop, and now dramatist Rowan Williams\u2014were 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. \u201cHe wants to stand there and<\/em> stand here and look out of your eyes and mine,\u201d 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\u2019s words to their own ends.<\/p>

Naturally, when they meet they speak in images\u2014of voices, scripts, music, mirrors (one of the play\u2019s slightly too-clever references to Hamlet<\/em>, The Tempest<\/em>, and Lear<\/em>). Each expands on the other\u2019s 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)\u2014what they give to and especially take from<\/em> their participants: the playwright\u2019s all-consuming eye is not unlike the confessor\u2019s ear. In return, each discipline provides us images to think with<\/em>, tools with which to build or repair the house of faith or\u2026 or whatever it is art does (the play\u2019s best answer is that it is a vehicle for knowledge of self and others\u2014again, like confession).<\/p>

Mercifully, Shakeshafte<\/em> is not an “origin story”\u2014Williams is not interested in the chain of events and influences that made the glover\u2019s son into the Bard, and never suggests he can somehow account for or explain the plays. In fact, Shakeshafte<\/em> 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: \u201cYou can\u2014see words out there,\u201d he says, sounding more like a Tom Stoppard character than an early modern, \u201call the different ways you could make sense of the world, nothing fixed, and you in the middle of it.\u201d The artistic fervor that can match Campion’s religious one has to be imported from another age.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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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.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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In The Flat Roof of the World<\/em>, we find another artist born into the wrong age, the poet and painter David Jones. Where Williams\u2019 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 fianc\u00e9 Petra Gill suffered at the hands of her father, his mentor Eric Gill. At the play\u2019s totalizing moment, David lies down on the couch.<\/p>

Like Shakeshafte<\/em>\u2019s Will, Jones lives in a world where nothing is fixed\u2014for 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. \u201cIt\u2019s like being adrift without sails and mast and oars and the fog closing in,\u201d he tells Valerie, \u201clike being alone in the wood again.\u201d 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: \u201cYou look at something and then you see something else showing through or creeping through at the edge.\u201d Or as Valerie puts it, \u201cthere\u2019s a hell of a lot going on.\u201d She finds value in it too (\u201cAll those bloody<\/em> beautiful little birds\u201d), but it is ultimately opaque to her, as it is to Eric Gill and nearly everyone else in David\u2019s life. David is in turn disheartened by Eric\u2019s insistence that art for art\u2019s sake is masturbatory, that it must have a use\u2014or, as he might put it with cod-Thomist hauteur, a telos<\/em>. 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.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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All along Williams suggests the truth might be best perceived in negative space\u2014in silence.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Williams is largely of Jones\u2019s tribe. In the presence of what he perceives to be mysteries\u2014particularly suffering and sacrifice\u2014he is deferential to a fault, pulling back from fully exploring these themes lest he risk diminishing them. In Flat Roof<\/em>, for example, Petra (at least, the Petra in David\u2019s 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 (\u201cthere\u2019s 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\u201d). There are deep questions here\u2014about whether trauma can ever have a telos<\/em>, about the forms resilience might take\u2014but 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<\/em> and Flat Roof<\/em> deal with abuse\u2014a 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\u2014none of their protagonists change. Instead we simply watch the world drip through their filters.<\/p>

\u201cBearing witness\u201d is the hifalutin way put it, and one of Williams\u2019 characters calls it exactly that. But it is only in Lazarus<\/em>, 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 \u201cvoices\u201d) wrestle with the events of the eleventh chapter of John\u2019s gospel, the raising of Lazarus. Here we are justified in passive witness to the suffering of Lazarus and his sisters precisely because Christ acts\u2014though 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<\/em> Resurrection and the<\/em> Life. It is what He does, what He is<\/em>, spilling over into His creation. \u201cI\u2019m what\u2019s left,\u201d is one voice\u2019s paraphrase, \u201cwhatever\u2019s alive underneath it all.\u201d Having suggested the smallest glimpse of that unbearable bedrock truth, the play gets out of its own way and ends quickly and without ceremony.<\/p>

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\u2014in silence. By turns they compel us, and by turns they are refuted, complicated, or mocked. In Lazarus<\/em> 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<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Mark Clemens<\/strong> is the winner of the 2018 Bodley Head\/FT Essay Prize. He lives outside Chicago.<\/em><\/p>

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Shakeshafte & Other Plays <\/strong>was published by Slant Books on December 7, 2021. <\/em>Fare Forward thanks them for their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy on their website here<\/a>.<\/em>
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Rowan Williams\u2019s collection of three plays delves into the voices of artists and the purpose of art\u2014before turning to Author of all voices. 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