Ruminations on 1623

January is the month of my birth. This year, for no particular reason, it has occasioned some reflections about my family history. The first American Wallings arrived on this continent in 1623 at Plymouth Colony, which today is the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts. They were Ralph and Margaret Wallen (a variant spelling in a time before spelling became more standardized). They embarked from London, probably at the port of Southhampton. I don’t know whether they traveled first class or steerage. My bet would be on steerage, as we seem always to have been a working class family. Two ships from England arrived that summer at New Plymouth, as the Plymouth Colony was then known: the Anne and the Little James. The Anne, which arrived in July, carried the Wallens.

The year 1623 was eventful—but, then, isn’t that true of all years. Back in England, King James I sat on the throne, some twenty years into his reign with a couple more to go before his death in 1625. William Shakespeare had died seven years earlier, in 1616, but 1623 was the year that Martin Droeshout’s engraved portrait (above) of the playwright appeared on the First Folio, published in November that year and containing thirty-six plays, half of which had not previously been published. Shakespeare’s widow, Anne Hathaway, had died on August 6, scarcely three months earlier.

On the continent of Europe, active artists included Bernini and Caravaggio in Italy; Rembrandt, Rubens, and Anthony Van Dyke in the Netherlands; and Velázquez and El Greco in Spain. The Renaissance had given way to the Baroque period, and the Dutch Golden Age was in full swing. Europe also was in the midst of the Thirty Years War (1618-48), although England remained largely on the periphery.

Matters were not without interest in the New World. In November of 1623 a fire destroyed several buildings at Plymouth Colony. This disaster, however, did not deter the colonists from celebrating the settlement’s actual “first” Thanksgiving. The First Thanksgiving of legend, of course, occurred in 1621, almost a year after the Mayflower landed, bringing the first settlers. However, that event would not have been known as “Thanksgiving” to them. It was more properly a simple harvest festival, celebrated by the 53 surviving colonists and some 90 members of the Wampanoag tribe of Chief Massasoit. The first Thanksgiving known as such happened in 1623, in response to the good news of the arrival of additional colonists and supplies, namely on the Anne and the Little James. I imagine that Ralph and Joyce Wallen took part in the celebration.

Ralph and Joyce had married in 1620. By the time they arrived in Plymouth Colony, Ralph was thirty-three and Joyce was twenty-eight. Four years later, in 1627, the first of my direct forebears to be born on North American soil, arrived. He was named Thomas, the first of several of my American ancestors to bear that name. Unfortunately, he was still a teenager when he was orphaned, as Joyce died in 1643. Ralph preceded her in death by a decade, succumbing in 1633, at the age of forty-three.

Thomas would live on to marry twice, to move to Providence, Rhode Island, and to pursue the family’s nomadic tradition, which has continued to my own time. While I reflect in my natal month that life has been an interesting journey on a personal level, I am conscious that the journey of my family over the course of at least the past four centuries has been even more interesting. My genealogical investigations to date have barely scratched the surface. There’s an implicit New Year’s resolution in that.

Cat's Condition

The recent Indiana University Theater production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof did not disappoint, as I feared it would. I was concerned that it might pale against the memory of a London production some ten years ago that starred Brendan Frazer and Ned Beatty in the roles of Brick and Big Daddy. It did not. It was well acted and admirably staged.

What struck me instead was how commonplace and less fraught the two central dramatic themes—cancer and homosexuality—have become since the play was first performed in 1955. Mendacity is the catchword. Everyone is lying. Big Daddy has been lied to about his aggressive cancer, which will soon kill him. Brick is lying about his relationship with Skipper, a “pure” friendship that nowadays can only be seen as latently, if not overtly, gay. But Brick’s lie is as much for himself as for the family, and his own mendacity drives him to drink.

Tennessee Williams (1911-1963) achieved recognition as a playwright after years of toiling in obscurity. His star finally rose with the 1944 play, The Glass Menagerie. He was at his best in the 1940s and 1950s. Williams’ genre is Southern tragedy. His plots tend to be Shakespearean in character. In Cat the king is dying. Big Daddy’s plantation empire is at stake. Rival brothers and their rapacious wives have gathered for the end that everyone except the king knows is coming. Big Daddy has been kept in the dark by the family’s treacherous secrecy and his own self-delusion. Big Daddy is lying to himself as much as Brick is lying to himself about their respective conditions.

But the conditions have lost the punch they had half a century ago. Cancer, while potentially devastating, is no longer spoken of in whispers. In Cat it is regarded as an automatic death sentence, which it usually was in the 1950s. Similarly, Brick’s homosexuality, whether he ever acted on it or not, is a dirty secret, one that has driven him into alcoholism—and drove his “friend” Skipper to suicide. Of course, homophobia and guilt still drive people to suicide today; the cyberbullying and gay teen suicide statistics are appalling. But being gay—or having homosexual thoughts—are no longer discussed only in whispers. More than a dozen U.S. states and several counties allow gay marriage. The world has changed. Mendacity regarding cancer and homosexuality is no longer the norm, no longer the stuff of great drama.

Williams’ Cat is well crafted, a classic perhaps, but no longer contemporary. The larger issues of the dying king and the lies people tell to delude themselves and others are as timeless as they are in Shakespeare. But the twin vehicles of Williams’ drama—cancer and homosexuality—throw the play into the class of historical drama. They are horse-and-buggy themes in a hybrid electric era. That said, it is no less watchable. Cat still offers an evening of compelling drama.

Time for Shakespeare

It seems to be obligatory to set Shakespeare’s plays in some period other than Shakespeare’s own. I don’t object to this strategy; it’s been going on for decades if not centuries. But I do occasionally find the results of juxtaposing the playwright’s poetic 16th-century cadences with modern settings curious, though often curiously compelling.

Recently the Indiana University production of Richard III set the action in the ambience of competing motorcycle gangs. (One thinks immediately of West Side Story, the Leonard Bernstein musical that retells Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet through rival street gangs.) In this case the choice seemed cued by some analytical remarks by author Josephine Tey, helpfully included in the program notes:

For thirty years, over this green uncrowded land, the Wars of the Roses had been fought. But it had been more of a blood feud than a war. A Montague and Capulet affair; of no great concern to the average Englishman…. It was a small concentrated war; almost a private party.

Biker leathers with clan emblems and embroidered roses—now universally called Tudor roses—fit the notion of internecine strife, white rose versus red rose. A modernist and timely touch was the addition of “fact-checking,” a nod to the current presidential election season in which the usual political falsities are revealed by various fact-checking organizations. In this instance a television screen flashed periodic historical corrections that played against Shakespeare’s Tudor-slanted take on events. Shakespeare’s histories, in particular those of times and figures most immediate to his own era, were propagandistic, designed to conform to the views of Elizabeth I, who, like her father Henry VIII, was not a monarch to be crossed without mortal peril.

All in all, I found the biker motif added rather than detracted from the essence of the play. The darkness worked for this dark, brutal, bloody drama in a way similar, but in stark contrast, to the IU production of The Taming of the Shrew this past July. That staging set Shakespeare’s boisterous romantic comedy in a South Beach, Florida, sort of place, which also worked well: a light-hearted play set in a light-filled locale.

Scandalous Behavior

Two performances this past week called vividly to mind the perpetual theatrical theme of scandalous behavior. People behaving in ways contrary to accepted norms of society—usually in a sexual context—is a staple plot device of both comedy and tragedy. This week it was comedy, with scandalous behavior in the enchanted woods in Midsummer Night’s Dream and scandalous behavior among the aristocracy in Der Rosenkavalier.

The Indiana University production of Shakespeare’s enduring comedy, Midsummer Night’s Dream, was set in a 1934 Hollywood movie studio. Oberon, the king of the fairies, swung in on a grapevine with a finer set of chiseled abs than Johnny Weissmuller could ever boast of. One couldn’t help being disappointed when he later appeared fully clothed. Three sets of lovers—intermingling while enchanted—essentially behave both badly and scandalously (a fine distinction): Oberon and his queen Titania (whom Oberon enchants and causes to fall in love with an ass), Hermia and Demetrius (whom Hermia does not love, to the consternation of her father Egeus), and Lysander and Helena (who are thrown together mistakenly by Oberon’s jester Puck).

It’s a confusing plot, of course, following the standard devices of disguises, enchantments, and mistaken identities, all familiar in Shakespearean comedies. Ultimately, it all boils down to love and sex, generally of a scandalous nature. In the end Lysander and Hermia unite, true love winning out. Demetrius claims Helena as a newly rediscovered true love, and Oberon reunites happily with his queen, Titania. All’s well that ends well—but that’s another play.

Der Rosenkavalier, by Richard Strauss, was a highlight of the Indiana University opera season. Those unfamiliar with the opera might well have wondered at two women in bed at the opening curtain. One woman, however, is a man—well, a boy. The role of Octavian traditionally is played by a mezzo soprano, which even though Octavian is supposed to be seventeen is a stretch. But Strauss was inordinately fond of sopranos, and so he managed to populate this opera with several.

An openly lesbian plot would have been too avant garde in 1911, when the opera premiered in Dresden. (A little girl-on-girl apparently went down well.) Opening with the much older (and of course married) Marschallin, Princess Marie Thérèse, cavorting in bed with her seventeen-year-old lover was scandalous behavior enough. There’s bad behavior, though scandalous as well, from the lecherous Baron Ochs, who schemes to marry the nubile, and much younger, Sophie. The Baron avers that scandalous behavior is what sets an aristocrat apart from the common herd.

When the lovestruck Octavian is reluctantly set free by the Marschallin, with the comment that he’ll turn to someone younger sooner or later, he promptly does. With Sophie and Octavian it’s love at first sight. A good deal of comedic mischief follows, involving Octavian disguised as a servant girl—a girl playing a boy playing a girl, shades of Victor Victoria! Octavian’s servant girl persona, “Mariandell,” entices Ochs to an illicit rendezvous, where the Baron is exposed as the rogue he is. With the Marschallin’s blessing, and Sophie’s father’s, Octavian and Sophie are united in the end.

Ah, scandalous behavior! It’s almost as good on stage as it is in the newspapers.