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Relationships, Residence and the Individual
A Rural Panamanian Community
Stephen Gudeman
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eBook - ePub
Relationships, Residence and the Individual
A Rural Panamanian Community
Stephen Gudeman
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About This Book
Representing a departure from traditional studies of social organisation, the book asserts that a kinship system is best understood as a system of concepts rather than as a set of empirical relationships. Three aspects of life in the Panamanian community of Los Boquerones are described
First published in 1976.
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Romeo and Juliet
Assembly Hall, Edinburgh
1st September 1952
1st September 1952
Old Vic Theatre
15th September 1952
15th September 1952
CHORUS
SAMPSON
GREGORY
ABRAHAM
BALTHASAR
TYBALT
BENVOLIO
MONTAGUE
LADY MONTAGUE
CAPULET
LADY CAPULET
ESCALUS, Prince of Verona
MERCUTIO
PARIS
ROMEO
PETER
NURSE
JULIET
OLD CAPULET
FRIAR LAURENCE
APOTHECARY
FRIAR JOHN
PAGE TO PARIS
WILLIAM DEVLIN
WOLFE MORRIS
GEORGE MURCELL
HUGH DAVID
JOHN BRESLIN
LAURENCE PAYNE
WILLIAM SQUIRE
RUPERT HARVEY
DAPHNE HEARD
JOHN PHILLIPS
YVONNE COULETTE
WILLIAM DEVLIN
PETER FINCH
JOHN WARNER
ALAN BADEL
NEWTON BLICK
ATHENE SEYLER
CLAIRE BLOOM
ROBERT WELLES
LEWIS CASSON
WOLFE MORRIS
ROBERT WELLES
ALAN DOBIE
OFFICERS, CITIZENS, SERVANTS, MUSICIANS AND LADIES:
JOHN BRESLIN, HUGH DAVID, CHURTON FAIRMAN, BERNARD KILBY, JAMES MAXWELL, DONALD PICKERING, DOUGLAS RAIN, DENIS RAYMOND, LLOYD RECKORD, BRUCE SHARMAN, ERIC THOMPSON, BARBARA GRIMES, PHYLLIDA LAW, ANDREE MELLY.
Sets and Costumes by Roger Furse.
Music composed by Clifton Parker.
Music composed by Clifton Parker.
[Photograph: Houston Rogers, London
[Photograph: Houston Rogers, London
[Photograph: Houston Rogers, London
Romeo and Juliet
LIKE Loves Labourâs Lost this is a young play, written when the playwright was between twenty-five and thirty. Chronologically, it is considered by Sir Edmund Chambers to be later than Loves Labourâs Lost and earlier than A Midsummer Nightâs Dream. As an early play it displays a certain weakness, characteristic of this lyrical period of the poetâs lifeâhis irresistible urge to concern himself with puns and conceits of language. This punning and word-play can be an embarrassment to us to-day, who have lost the humour and the ear for such matters, more especially so when the young word-spinnerâs ebullience allows it to burst forth in tragic passages, such as the play on the word âAyâ in Julietâs outburst of grief, and in the passage between Peter and the musicians. In general, however, such outbursts of word-music can be accepted by us and woven into the lyrical framework of the tragedy; for the first important point to remember about Romeo and Juliet is that it is a lyrical play.
To point the importance that word-music plays in Romeo and Juliet, we have only to look at the moon-drenched duet of the balcony meeting, the torchlight aria of the Queen Mab speech, the dawn cadenza of the farewell scene, the ghost sonata of Julietâs potion speech, and Romeoâs final swan-song in the tomb:
âHow oft when men are at the point of death
Have they been merry! Which their keepers call
A lightening before death: O how may I
Call this a lightening? O my love! my wife!
Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty:
Thou art not conquerâd; beautyâs ensign yet
Is crimson in thy Hps and in thy cheeks,
And deathâs pale flag is not advanced there.â
Such passages of word-music are, if you like, a play upon words, a mixture of metaphors, a conceit of imageryâbut they are also word-magic, spun by a master weaver of language; by a playwright who knew how words, when used with inspiration, charged with emotion and shot through with lyrical magic, can produce the same effect as can the sound of viols, hautboys and all the consort of heavenly instruments that hale menâs souls out of their bodies.
To reconcile this elaboration of language with the tragic content of Romeo and Juliet, we must first recognize that this musical language is a part of the play, as important as is the score of an opera. To try to damp down die lyrical effect produced by the word-music is to destroy the magic of the play.
There are other signs of youthful workmanship; notably the lengthy winding up of the plot in the last scene. This we will deal with drastically, for we must bear in mind that our audience lack the endurance which must have characterized the spectators of the Globe, and three and a half hours on a hard bench in the Assembly Hall, Edinburgh, is not conducive to successful entertainment. We must, therefore, pledge ourselves not to exceed the Chorusâs statement, âthe two-hoursâ passage of our stageââan exaggeration by any standards of speedâby more than one hour, no matter what the sacrifices may mean. To keep the play within its time limit, let us bear in mind that modem acting has developed a tendency to stress effects of tension by using elaborate pauses. Such pauses can, of course, be enormously effective in Shakespeareâs plays as in others, but in so far as they destroy or break the flow of words, which makes the music of the play, they are harmful. The effect of speed in the delivery of Shakespeareâs linesâthe speaking of lines âtrippingly on the tongueââis too often neglected, because it is hard to master; John Gielgud is a notable exception to this. When used in the right places, speed is of considerable importance. We are too apt to linger over our parts, savouring their meaning at the expense of the movement of the play. In studying the play, we must pay particular attention to pace and tempo generally, for it is by the correct use of tempo, be it slow or fast, that the word-music is controlled.
Now for the play itself and its treatment. It is called in the First Quarto, âAn excellent conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Julietâ, but we would do well to study the Prologue to the play for a further insight into what the playwright had in mind.
âTwo households, both alike in dignity,
(In fair Verona, where we lay our scene)
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured, piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parentsâ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-marked love,
And the continuance of their parentsâ rage,
Which, but their childrenâs end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hoursâ passage of our stage.â
I would ask you to consider for a moment certain key passages of this Prologue: first, âTwo households, both alike in dignity ⌠from ancient grudge break to new mutiny.â
We are in Verona in the fifteenth century. Perhaps Verona is a little like London in the last years of the sixteenth century; these matters of location and period are supremely unimportant to the placeless and timeless flight of Shakespeareâs imagination. Though his scenes be laid in Greece, Rome or Egypt, his period be pre-historic or fifteenth century, yet the life that is breathed into his characters is drawn from the living, contemporary existence of his own age. That is the strength of his characterization.
We are, then, in Shakespeareâs Verona, sun-baked with a heat that makes men quick to strike âbeing movedâ. The sort of drenching heat in which gallants and their minions lounge the street, idly exchanging quips, as they sprawl against comer-posts, mocking at passers-by, especially if they happen to be ancient ladies coquetting behind their fans. The sort of heat that breeds mischief and flies. In this proud city-state of Verona live the two great families of Montague and Capulet, proud of their nobility, jealous of their prerogatives, marrying their daughters and sons with careful attention to the wealth and stability of their houses. Between these two clans exists a bitter and continual blood-feud, the origin of which is unexplained and is for our purposes unimportant. It springs from the inevitable rivalry of two households, neither of which can bear to be outdone in precedence or wealth by the other. This rivalry, fanned by the sort of swordsman-braggart that each family cultivates, set in the quarrelsome heat of the piazzas of Verona and framed by the code of honour of a duelling age, when to study the changing fashions of swordsmanship and to draw blood are the necessary stigmata of manhood, is bound to present a serious problem to the upholders of law and order. In this struggle for family power, not only the noble members of the households are affected, but the quarrel lies no less deeply between the serving men. Sampson and Gregory deliberately set upon Abraham and Balthasar in the first scene of the play when they see Tybalt approaching, knowing that this will draw the commendations of their fire-eating lord.
No matter what severity the energy and civic sense of the ruling prince may display, it appears impossible, short of a general purge, to extirpate the evils of these constantly recurring brawls, which cause such damage to the citizens and bring such shame on the city. This is Verona, not unlike London within the living memory of Shakespeare and his contemporaries where the great noble houses still remembered their wounds from the Wars of the Roses and where, even in Shakespeareâs day, the citizens could be alarmed by the call of âAn Essexâ or âA Leicesterâ.
Let us again return to our Prologue: âFrom forth the fatal loins of these two foes, a pair of star-crossed lovers take their life ⌠The fearful passage of their death-marked love âŚâ These latter words raise the question of the part that destiny plays in this tragedy. In most of the great Shakespeare tragedies, particularly in the more mature worksâLear, Timon, Othello and Antonyâfate, as it is understood by the Greek dramatists, plays no important part in the punishment or purgation of the heroes and heroines. Even in Macbeth and Hamlet it is the sin, or the will, of the leading characters, rather than the prophecies of Witches or the invocation of a Ghost, that bring about the tragedy. Shakespeare seems to have rejected any thought of predestination and, although he lays great store by supernatural warnings, he does not accept the philosophy of intervention by Divine power to order menâs actions. Man creates his own destiny and as he sows, so must he reap. Lear and Timon, Macbeth and his wife, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Coriolanus, Othello, the Richards, all meet the ends that they themselves have prepared by their temperaments and deedsâbe it their jealousy, their pride, their folly or their weakness. But here, in this first major tragedy that Shakespeare wrote, we find in âthe fatal passage of their death-marked loveâ an inevitable destiny surrounding the two lovers. Antony and Cleopatra were also involved in such a death-marked love, but Antony and Cleopatra were mature, experienced lovers; moreover, their union was by manâs standards immoral, and, therefore, in the eyes of the audience, punishable. Romeo and Juliet are childrenâthe one scarcely a man, the other a mere girl of fourteen. Their love is essentially pure and indeed in its social implication of uniting the two rival families, a thing to be desired by Christian principles. It may be argued that their love was âtoo rash, too unadvisâd, too suddenâ, but the audience, which is the judge of the playâs morality, will inevitably side with these young people. Moreover, their union is encouraged by older and wiser people in the persons of the Nurse and the Friar.
But yet we would be wrong to jump to the conclusion that in this single instance the playwright has been untrue to his belief in manâs ultimate power to control his destiny, and to conclude that fate has intervened to strike down these young people in the same way as it does in the novels of Thomas Hardy or in the early Greek tragedies. The guilty parties are present in this as in all Shakespeareâs plays, though they are not the so-called principal characters. The motivators of this âexcellent conceited tragedieâ are neither Romeo and Juliet nor fate, but the âtwo households both alike in dignityâ, with which words the Prologue opens the play. The Capulets and Montagues are the cause of their childrenâs death-marked love. It is their family quarrel, their stupid pride, their mistaken sense of honour which causes the âmisadventured, piteous overthrowsâ of the star-crossed lovers.
Now in this, as in all things concerned with the treatment of the play, we must preserve a sense of balance. It does not mean, as I believe Bernard Shaw is reported to have said to a young producer who was preparing a production of the play, that the only thing that matters is the fights. ...