All The Devils Are Here: How Shake Speare Invented The Villain by Patrick Page

Abstract

Reviewed by: All The Devils Are Here: How Shake Speare Invented The Villainby Patrick Page Patrick Midgley ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE: HOW SHAKE SPEARE INVENTED THE VILLAIN. Adapted from the works of William Shakespeare. Written and performed by Patrick Page. Film direction by Alan Paul. Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington, D.C. 04 9, 2021. After his first monologue in All the Devils Are Here, Patrick Page—one of America's most esteemed and experienced Shakespearean actors—dropped character, looked directly at the camera and introduced not another scene, but a thesis statement. The goal of this digitally recorded, one-man performance, he explained, was more than to perform a sequence of polished speeches from Shakespeare's most notorious evildoers: Page wanted to know if and how Shakespeare's exploration of villainy made him "a more humane writer." While initially jarring, Page's easygoing personal commentary alongside soaring performances of material from Shakespeare's plays made for a captivating performance-as-researchproject that capitalized on the constraints of pandemic performance. With an equally erudite and entertaining tone, Page cataloged the motif of "villainy" across Shakespeare's career. At the same time, with brilliant performances seemingly plucked from his previous productions, Page single-handedly provided the thrill of a fully realized, in-person production. And while Page's foundational arguments and performance style are likely familiar to many Shakespearean scholars and practitioners, All the Devils Are Herenevertheless emerged as an original, captivating, and deeply informed transformation of case studies into characters. Page progressed in chronological order through Shakespeare's career, portraying his fascination with villains in three distinct eras. In the first, from Shakespeare's earliest attempts at playwriting through the plague and the subsequent sonnets (1589–94), Page presented Shakespeare as the "upstart crow," selfconsciously mimicking and responding to his contemporaries—in particular, Christopher Marlowe, whose thundering verse inspired Shakespeare to write more natural language and nuanced antagonists. This early section was dominated by Page's muscular and magnetic portrayal of Richard III. In the second era, from Henry IV, Part 1through Hamlet(1594–1604), Page suggested that Shakespeare's understanding of evil deepened as his villains began to grapple with their consciences. Here, Page focused primarily on Shylock and, surprisingly, Falstaff. Both characters, Page argued, challenged Shakespeare's earlier, easier conceptions of villainy. After concluding a scene from The Merchant of Venice(1596) in which Page played multiple roles, he claimed that while the play was written for and, at times, pandered to an openly anti-Semitic audience, Shakespeare also invited that same audience to put themselves in Shylock's shoes. Page's argument regarding Falstaff stumbled slightly. Frequently termed a villain throughout Henry IV, Falstaff, it is true, is a symbol of human vice. But he is simultaneously an embodiment of joie de vivre, something Page neglects to mention. Falstaff always defies classification, something that Page was forced to admit following his brilliant portrayal of the fat knight in Boarshead Tavern: "Perhaps it's not Falstaff we should fear," he wryly suggested, begging the familiar question of Hal's villainy. Page argued that in the third era, including Othello, Macbeth, and The Tempest(1605–11), Shakespeare crawled into the psyches of his most sociopathic and willfully evil characters: Iago and Macbeth. Here, Page's digressions lacked some of the depth of the previous sections and relied more upon contemporary comparisons than historical analyses. Before he performed a scene from Othello, for example, Page revealed that while preparing to play Iago, he read Martha Stout's 2006 book The Sociopath Next Door, which argued that 4 percent of people are unable to feel remorse. The inference that Iago classifies as such a sociopath, while edifying, still felt shallow next to what Coleridge described as Iago's "motiveless malignity." And is not a "sociopath" different from a "villain?" Nevertheless, the relative lack of new insight into Iago's psyche was not really a failure: rather, it underscored Shakespeare's perpetual elusiveness and upheld Page's talent for uncovering character through performance. It is ultimately within Page's portrayals of Iago and Macbeth, not his descriptions of them, that he finally confronted their limitless depths. Page concluded by...