*What Ho!* Amanda Jernigan
DROG (DaveÕs
Records of Guelph), 2002.
The Williams:
Blake William
Howard, Richard William Gregory, S. Willy-Nilly Sponge, Lewis William
Melville,
Dave William
Clark, Hannah William Zbitnew
Music is a collaborative art form, and Lewis Melville is a
musician well-practiced in the art of collaboration. He is cofounder of DaveÕs
Records of Guelph (DROG), a
collective which has as its motto
the notion that at the heart of all good music is friendship, community and
cooperation. He has himself collaborated in performance with the likes of the
Skydiggers, the Rheostatics, the Grievous Angels, Pat Temple, and the High Lonesome
Players. In recent years, he has been the moving force behind a series of
compilation albums (*Work Songs*, *Truck Songs*, *Music for Peace*, and *60
Second Songs*) which have brought together hundreds of musicians, in support of
organizations like Doctors Without Borders and the International Red Cross.
With this latest DROG release, however, Melville was in for a different sort of
collaboration. The roster of musicians includes expected names ÒBlake Howard, Richard Gregory, and
Dave Clark, for instance (all of whom have been involved with other DROG productions)
÷ along with Scott Cameron, S. Spongeâ and Hannah Zbitnew. But thereÕs a silent
partner on the album, a collaborator of a different stripe: the poet,
playwright, and literary legend William Shakespeare.
The album is called *What Ho!* The ensemble calls itself The Williams. The album is billed as
the great plays of Shakespeare reconstructed as postmodern popular songs.
When you choose to collaborate with Shakespeare, you have some
obvious advantages. First of all, heÕs dead. This means that he canÕt squabble
about rights or about artistic intent, nor can he get in the way of a far-out
but nonetheless brilliant interpretation. Secondly, he is, artistically
speaking, a jack of all trades, a master of all genres, giving you enormous
flexibility in terms of what sort of piece you select.
Finally, when you
sign on Shakespeare, you are arguably signing on the best lyricist the English
language has seen.
But a collaboration with Shakespeare has its disadvantages, too.
First of all, heÕs dead so you canÕt ask him what he meant by something, or
could he maybe add another line or two to round out the soliloquy in act three.
Secondly, heÕs a jack-of-all-trades which is also to say heÕs a shape-shifter,
a generic chameleon, difficult to follow and almost impossible to pin down.
Thirdly, he is arguably the best lyricist the English language has seen which
means youÕre under a hell of a lot of pressure.
On *What Ho!*, the Williams do an admirable job of taking up the
best that Shakespeare has to offer, while avoiding most of the possible slings
and arrows. The headline on the album cover initially made me nervous: the
great plays of Shakespeare reconstructed as postmodern popular songs.â I
thought I detected a flippancy there that would benefit neither Shakespeare nor
postmodern pop. But I was wrong. There is a self-consciousness in that title an
awareness that the album follows in a long and not always glorious tradition.
WeÕve already seen in recent years the great plays of Shakespeare reconstructed
as postmodern popular films (think Baz LuhrmannÕs *Romeo and Juliet*, John
MaddenÕs *Shakespeare in Love*). WeÕve seen them reconstructed as postmodern
popular plays Timothy FindleyÕs *Elizabeth Rex*, Anne-Marie MacDonaldÕs *Good
Night Desdemona [Good Morning Juliet]*) and as postmodern popular novels (John
Updikeâs *Gertrude and Claudius*). By tipping their hats to this parade of
postmoderns, the Williams clear the way for their own fresh take. The first
step towards making original work (as Shakespeare might have told you) is
acknowledging that it has all been done before.
Shakespeare was a master of borrowing. Nearly every play has its
precedent, in myth, in history, or in art. But Shakespeare knew how to take a
borrowed plot and make it his own in the writing. A re-interpreter of
Shakespeare must recognize this. What makes Shakespeare Shakespeare is not plot
- itâs language. Miss this, and you miss the point entirely. (That was my
problem with Luhrmannâs *Romeo and Juliet*. Luhrmann is working so hard to
convey the drama of the plot through quick camera cuts and fight choreography
that he seems to forget that drama lies in the language, too. He seldom gives
the words a chance to do their work.) On the other hand, if you cleave too much
to the text, you squeeze out the theatre. (Iâm thinking here of a number of old
televised productions I had inflicted on me in high school English class.)
Working with ShakespeareÕs language is a little like bullfighting: play it too
safe and the crowd doesnÕt like it, too risky and you get gored.
ItÕs in this tricky language-dance that the Williams excel. They
know how to use ShakespeareÕs language to the hilt, how to make us hear it, in all its iambic weight but they
arenÕt cowed by it. The arenÕt afraid to challenge it, to shake it up a little.
IÕll take the opening track on *What Ho!*, ÒThe CharmÕs Wound UpÓ, as an
example. The song takes its text from *Macbeth*, act three, scene one, a
meeting of the three weird sistersâ on the heath:
First Witch:
Where hast thou been, sister?
Second Witch:
Killing swine.
Third Witch:
Sister, where thou?
First Witch: A
sailor's wife had chestnuts in her lap,
And mounch'd, and
mounch'd, and mounch'd. 'Give me!'
quoth I.
Aroint thee,
witch!' the rump-fed ronyon cries.
Her husband's to
Aleppo gone, master o' thâ Tiger:
But in a sieve
I'll thither sail,
And like a rat
without a tail,
IÕll do, I'll do,
and I'll do.
Second Witch:
I'll give thee a wind.
First Witch:
Thâart kind.
Third Witch: And
I another.
First Witch: I
myself have all the other,
And the very
ports they blow,
All the quarters
that they know
I' thâ shipman's
card.
I'll drain him
dry as hay:
Sleep shall
neither night nor day
Hang upon his
penthouse lid;
He shall live a
man forbid;
Weary
sev'nnights, nine times nine,
Shall he dwindle,
peak, and pine;
Though his bark
cannot be lost,
Yet it shall be
tempest-tossâd.
Look what I have.
Second Witch:
Show me, show me.
First Witch: Here
I have a pilot's thumb,
Wrack'd as
homeward he did come. [Drum within.]
Third Witch: A
drum, a drum!
Macbeth doth
come.
All: The weird
sisters, hand in hand,
Posters of the
sea and land,
Thus do go,
about, about,
Thrice to thine,
and thrice to mine,
And thrice again,
to make up nine.
Peace, the
charm's wound up.
HereÕs what the
Williamsâ Richard Gregory does with the passage. First, he takes an excerpt,
beginning with ÒÉ myself have all the other Ò, spoken by the First Witch, and
running through to ÒÉ it shall be tempest-tossÕd.Ó The lifting of this passage means that the song starts with
a line that is clearly a response to previous speech. ÒAll the otherÒ *whats*?
we think. The line is eerie out of context. This beginning in mid-speech also
gives us the sense that we are entering a world in progress ÷ one that has
already been imagined whole cloth. Which, in fact, we are, insofar as we are
entering the world of the play. Gregory then takes the twelve-line excerpt and
divides it into three four-line stanzas:
ÓI myself have
all the other,
And the very
ports they blow,
All the quarters
that they know
I' thâ shipman's
card.
I'll drain him
dry as hay:
Sleep shall
neither night nor day
Hang upon his
penthouse lid;
He shall live a
man forbid;
Weary
sev'nnights, nine times nine,
Shall he dwindle,
peak, and pine;
Though his bark
cannot be lost,
Yet it shall be
tempest-tossâd.
This breakdown of
the speech allows Gregory to distribute musical emphasis amongst the lines. The
last line in each stanza lingers into the chorus, rings in our ears. To find
the chorus, Gregory goes to the end of the witchesâ sub-scene. He takes ÒThe
CharmÕs Wound UpÓâ and repeats it, interleaving it with the verses, thus giving
the phrase its full incantatory weight and making us feel charmed indeed.
For another example, IÕll look at track six, the Williamsâ
treatment of Sonnet 66. Here, Scott Cameron quotes Shakespeare verbatim. It is
not textual manipulation but musical manipulation that reinvents the piece. The
words to sonnet ÷ and song ÷ are as follows.
Tir'd with all
these, for restful death I cry:
As to behold
desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing
trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith
unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honor
shamefully misplac'd,
And maiden virtue
rudely strumpeted,
And right
perfection wrongfully disgrac'd,
And strength by
limping sway disabled,
And art made
tongue-tied by authority,
And folly
(doctor-like) controlling skill,
And simple truth
miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good
attending captain ill:
Tir'd with all
these, from these would I be gone,
Save that to die,
I leave my love alone.
Twelve desperate
lines, concluding with the reassurance of a couplet: one long sentence that
climbs ÒAndÓâ over ÒAndÓâ to the colon, then rests on the denouement, ÒTirâd
with all these, from these would I be gone / Save that to die, I leave my love
alone.Ó But the Williams donÕt end
there. The Captain-Beefheart-style grind with which theyÕve paired the text
gives way to a wailing instrumental, which in turn defers to a
landscape-after-storm type fade that goes on, and on and then in turn gives way to a soft but frantic whistle, a
series of chirps like interplanetary feedback, the final caveat of a delicate
cymbal struck, and a long, low moan. All ofwhich implies that life is not quite
so *abab* as a sonnet would have us think. Just as Shakespeare takes an extant
plot and embroiders it with language, the Williams take an extant text and
embroider it with music.
This sort of intelligent interaction with the text is
characteristic of the songs on *What Ho!* While some of the songs stick close
to Shakespeare, like those IÕve dealt with above, others range widely, bringing
to bear on the plays other sources, ranging from JFKâs inaugural address to
Haitian voodoo to a 16th century pamphlet by Sir Thomas Knight. The Williams
donÕt confine themselves to any one approach. They go at some texts directly;
they go at others on a tack. Always, they retain the kind of imaginative
freedom with which Shakespeare approached his own sources.
After Shakespeare died, Ben Jonson wrote: ÒI loved the man and do
honour his memory on this side of idolatry.Ó The Williams might sign their names to that and I suspect
that William would approve.
All quotations
from Shakespeare are taken from *The
Riverside
Shakespeare*, Second Edition (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin,
1997).