Shakespeare, Plagiarist?

A page from the George

 North manuscript that

starts the poem about

Jack Cade. The last stanza

lists terms for dogs,

which Shakespeare used

in King Lear and Macbeth.

(New York Times)

In a field as deeply explored as textual studies of William Shakespeare's work, it might seem as there were little more to be said. But if you think that, you would be wrong, as independent scholar Dennis McCarthy demonstrated in conjunction with Professor Emerita June Schlueter of Lafayette College. In the forthcoming "A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels” by George North: A Newly Uncovered Manuscript Source for Shakespeare’s Plays (D.S. Brewer, an imprint of Boydell & Brewer, with the British Library), out next week, they discuss how they used WCopyfind software, which English, composition and other faculty members sometimes employ to find out whether students have committed plagiarism, to discover that the source of at least 11 of Shakespeare's plays, including several of his most famous, such as King Lear, Richard III, Henry V, and one of my favorites, the verbal and dramatic masterpiece Macbeth, was the eponymous tome by the obscure writer George North.

According to Michael Blanding's New York Times report, McCarthy does not believe that Shakespeare actually plagiarized North's unpublished work, which he somehow acquired, but as was the case with other sources of his borrowings, North's text served as a crucial guide and source, down to words deployed in the exact same order, but repurposed in style and often, it seems, meaning.  A self-taught Shakespearean and magazine journalist, McCarthy was inspired both by the idea of evolutionary development, which he had already written about, and practically by former ETH Zurich Professor Sir Brian Vickers' use of similar software in 2009 to establish that Shakespeare had co-written Edward III. McCarthy began sussing out the sources of Shakespeare's work, and followed that led him to George North's volume. Next, the Times notes

To make sure North and Shakespeare weren’t using common sources, Mr. McCarthy ran phrases through the database Early English Books Online, which contains 17 million pages from nearly every work published in English between 1473 and 1700. He found that almost no other works contained the same words in passages of the same length. Some words are especially rare; “trundle-tail” appears in only one other work before 1623.

In the past, some scholars have identified sources for Shakespeare from a few unique words. In 1977, for example, Kenneth Muir made the case that Shakespeare used a particular translation of a book of Latin stories for “The Merchant of Venice” based on the word “insculpt.” In recent years, however, it’s become rare to identify new sources for Shakespeare. “The field has been picked over so carefully,” [former University of Chicago Professor David] Bevington said.

I would add that back in 2013, I blogged about Saul Frampton's assertion that the Renaissance scholar and translation John Florio not only edited Shakespeare's works, but enriched them linguistically, adding to the Bard of Avon's already rich trove of innovative language. I found his argument quite convincing, and when I have taught the foundational course in literary studies, it is one of the essays I share and discuss with students.

Before Florio got to Shakespeare, though, Shakespeare was gleaning all kinds of gems from North, and polishing them up, McCarthy and Schlueter will suggest in their study. In the Times article, McCarthy points out how North's preface contains a unique series of terms, many familiar to us today--"proportion," "glass," "feature," "fair," etc.--to urge those who seem themselves as unattractive instead to create an inner beauty, against the stamp of nature; as it turns out, Shakespeare uses the exact set of words, in the same order, to make a different statement in the opening soliloquy of one of his unforgettable villains, the hunchbacked and unloved Richard III. What McCarthy and Schlueter divined was that this is not a one-off case; Shakespeare repeatedly not only borrowed exact terms from North, but also employed in similar series and scenes, as well as similar figures from history.

For example, in Macbeth, Shakespeare has his protagonist declaim,

"Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men;
As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,
Shoughs, water-rugs and demi-wolves, are clept
All by the name of dogs (Macbeth, III, 1)

In King Lear, Edgar says:

Tom will throw his head at them. Avaunt, you curs!
Be thy mouth or black or white,
Tooth that poisons if it bite;
Mastiff, grey-hound, mongrel grim,
Hound or spaniel, brach or lym,
Or bobtail tike or trundle-tail,
Tom will make them weep and wail:
For, with throwing thus my head,
Dogs leap the hatch, and all are fled. (King Lear, III, 6)

This list, McCarthy and Schlueter argue, is almost a mirror of North's text, with the ultra-rare "trundle-tail" a term appearing only in the source text, Shakespeare's play and one other early 17th century text. The playwright spins these borrowings out into something memorable in both plays. In another example, the reference to Merlin's speech in King Lear diverges from any previously known prophecy by the wizard, yet McCarthy and Schlueter found a version of Merlin's speech in North's text, and that it not only influenced what Shakespeare later wrote, but also the figure of the "Fool," who delivers it.

In Henry V, McCarthy finds many correspondences, as Quartzy demonstrates in the following chart:

 

According to reports, including one in Atlas Obscura, scholars have praised McCarthy and Schlueter's work, and it suggests that digital humanities scholars and students looking at texts might do well to utilize all the software at hand, including a tool often used to catch potential miscreants, to learn even more about the roots of key works of the past. Mr. McCarthy, it appears, certain intends to do so. His book hits bookshelves this Friday, February 16.

Chatting with Mark Sussman at the Creative Independent

Recently I chatted with writer Mark Sussman for a short feature that has now posted at The Creative Independent, under the title "Writing from the Inside Out." It was such an honor to be invited to participate on the site, which aims to be "a growing resource of emotional and practical guidance for creative people," and features short interviews with an impressive array of creative people across the artistic spectrum, including Hilton Als, Björk, Taja Cheek, Scott Esposito, Shepard Fairey, Diamanda Galás, Roxane Gay, Nikki Giovanni, Jonathan Gonzalez, Rickie Lee Jones, Isaac Julien, Joseph Legaspi, Carmen Maria Machado, Aparna Nancherla, Morgan Parker, Brontez Parnell, Paul Sepuya, Prageeta Sharma, Danez Smith, Michael Stipe, and many others.

The site's first conversation, after its launch note, was with the incomparable Eileen Miles, and the one that posted right before mine engaged Mrs. Smith, a "philanthropist, tone poet, and the world's most unlikely guitar hero." My conversation with Mark, which took place via Skype, even spilled over the alotted time limit, I think, so he could include only a few key portions of it appear on the site. As always I tried not to cover ground that I had in other public conversations, though some of that is unavoidable. One other aspect of the exchange was the light editing; the transcript is very casual, and close to how it was recorded, so what we said is what the readers get. Mark also shared a few of the excerpts that didn't make to the TCI website on his personal blog.

Here are some thoughts about translation, why new translators for extensively or well-translated texts are needed from time to time, and more specifically, some thoughts about translators of Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry. The bolded statement is Mark's, the response is mine:

One of my teachers once said the text in the original language stays the same, but we always need updated translations. And we’re always getting new translations of old texts. Why is that?
Because I think, with each new translation, you bring a different perspective to it. Often, of course, what happens with new translations is they re-situate the work for a new context. I think of a writer that’s so beloved and has been translated by different people in so many different ways, like Rainer Rilke. Two people whose translations of Rilke I think are really great are William Gass and Steven Mitchell. I believe Gass’s precedes Mitchell’s. You know, William Gass was an extraordinary writer in English. But he was also a profoundly philosophical writer. And he, of course, spoke German. He had training in German. So his translations have a certain kind of philosophical sensibility, like he’s capturing something in Rilke, I think, that most translators probably wouldn’t.

With Steven Mitchell, you have a translator who has an extraordinary ear [and] an extraordinary eye and his desire is to give you a Rilke that, on the one hand is as approximate as possible, but also doesn’t lose any of Rilke’s strangeness. If you go back and forth between those two translations, and of course, many lesser translations, you really start to get a sense, if you don’t speak German, of what Rilke might be like. And that, I think, can be really great.

But at times updated translations can just be terrible. If you’re translating the work of a poet, particularly a poet who is also an extraordinary prose writer, you want to retain that poetry, so you want to err on the side of the lyrical that might not be as exact, as opposed to the exact that is not so lyrical, because [otherwise] you lose what is essential to that writer.

Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben
Mohammed Anoun, Moorish
Ambassador to Queen
Elizabeth I (1600), Anonymous
painter.

And here's one snippet from the excerpt, where we discuss William Shakespeare's Othello, which we both love and have taught:

There’s this amazing portrait of an ambassador, I guess, from one of the North African countries that would have existed then, it wasn’t Morocco. There’s this amazing portrait of this ambassador, and it’s unclear whether Shakespeare would have ever seen that particular picture, but imagery of that kind circulated about Northern Africa and the Middle East, and of course Africa itself. There was also a moment where, in his transposition of the story from Britain to Venice, he’s picking a very similar society. A maritime society, but also a society that you could say gives him a little bit more leeway, but, like Britain, [one that] is very much engaged in mercantilism. So there are all of these parallels between the Britain of his day and the fictional Venice.

But the fascinating thing that most people usually don’t talk about is that, in Shakespeare’s time, he would see Black people walking through the streets of London. They may have been working in the theater, or they may have been working on the docks. This is also the moment where slavery is getting going. So you have all of these things happening in the background, and as you pointed out, they all feed into the play.

I think it’s very interesting that in the play, you have these moments of slippage. One of the things the students always ask is, “What is a Moor?” This is what the dictionary says a Moor is. And then, when you read through it and you see how, in fact, it’s not even so much about Moorishness Africanness. It really is about Blackness. When you think about all of those insults that come out of Iago’s mouth or the horror that Desdemona’s father feels about this. He’s a warrior, he’s just like this big “black ram.” So you see that. Shakespeare was kind of working through multiple things at once, which makes the tragedy that much more powerful. So when Joyce Carol Oates makes the statement, I was just sort of like, “What are you doing? You’re smart enough to know, you’re not making any sense.” You know? I don’t know. I don’t know.

Do read the rest of both interviews if you can.

Who Edited Shakespeare?

William Shakespeare

As every writer knows, there is nothing like a great editor. Even for the most talented among us. Including William Shakespeare. Debates continue about who exactly Shakespeare was, and whether or not he or someone else wrote his plays and poems. I stand on the side of those who attribute most of the words and work to the Bard of Avon--and the actors who were involved in performing and shaping his plays as a result--and not any of the other people whose names have been bandied about as the actual authors. But a question still remains: when William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, also known as the First Folio, appeared in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death, someone, or several people, had to have edited it, and the given what we know about the two figures whose names are attached to it, John Hemminges and Henry Condell, it's unlikely that they had the knowledge, time or dedication to do so. So who edited Shakespeare?

Here's where an attentive eye and close reading, and the possibilities enabled by the digital humanities come into play. In The Guardian, author Saul Frampton guides us through his argument, eventually to be a book, that a certain John Florio (1553-1625) probably unknown to all but the most assiduous scholars of the English Renaissance and literary world, not only was the likely editor of Shakespeare's First Folio, but in some cases revised and rewrote Shakespeare's plays. Not being a Shakespearean scholar, Frampton's argument sounds like a big deal to me, but perhaps it is old knowledge among people in that field. (I checked, and it turns out that there have been arguments that Florio's father, Michelangelo Florio, wrote Shakespeare's plays, or that Florio may have written them completely by himself; his role as editor has been less discussed.) What Frampton recounts, and how he goes about his argument, I continue to find utterly persuasive and enthralling.

John Florio

The short is that Frampton, like many a scholar and reader before him, compared the First Folio with some of the extant quartos of Shakespeare's plays, and noticed differences between them, chiefly in terms of form standardization in the later compendium, but especially in terms of linguistic differences. I recall enough from my study of Shakespeare to remember this particular argument, which I also recall leading to discussions of whether Shakespeare, the players, some other very learned figure or some combo of all of the preceding wrote the plays or not. Digitization of the quartos, however, makes such comparisons much easier. What digitization has also made easier is comparison to other works during the same period, and the occurrence and frequency of certain words in Shakespeare's oeuvre as well as in the work of his contemporaries. What Frampton has found--if I am reading the article right, and this is his finding, or his synthesis of others' findings--is that a number of words that appear in the Folio do not appear elsewhere in Shakespeare's work, but they do appear, with great frequency in the writings of John Florio, who very well may have been figured, in various ways, in several of Shakespeare's works.

Who was Florio? Born in England eleven years before Shakespeare, and the son of an Italian Protestant immigrant (of Jewish religious ancestry) who fled back to Italy during the brief Catholic Restoration under Queen Mary I, Florio returned to his native country in the 1570s and made his mark, Frampton says, as a scholar, lexicographer and translator. His books included several landmark language treatises, First Fruits of 1578 and Second Fruits of 1591, a 1590 edited version of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, and his career-making translations, the Essays of Montaigne in 1603 and Bocaccio's Decameron in 1620, as well as two major English-Italian dictionaries. His prodigiousness extends to the level of language itself: third only to Chaucer and Shakespeare, Florio, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is the source of 1,224 first usages in written English, including such still-used words as "judicious," "management," "transcription," "masturbation" and "fucker." Yes, "management"!

Moreover, he had links to Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, the First Folio's printers, who each had printed several of his works. The First Folio's dedicatees, William and Philip Herbert, also had links to Florio all the way back to his father's era. Frampton points out that Florio, given his learned and literary background, deep knowledge of publishing, and links to both men, was an obvious choice as editor. He also knew William Shakespeare as well, and what's unclear to Frampton is whether the two men had beef, and whether Shakespeare was not mocking Florio in several of his characters, including not just Osric in Hamlet, but in Malvolio and Shylock (because, as I noted, Florio's father had Jewish ancestors). Frampton adds that scholar Jonathan Bate argues that the infamous "Dark Lady" of one-third of Shakespeare's sonnets may have been Florio's wife. By the time Shakespeare died, Florio was sailing through economically constrained straits, having not received a promised pension, and editing Shakespeare and further strengthening ties to the wealthy Herberts would have been to his advantage in more ways than one.

But this sounds like so much fascinating but circumstantial speculation. Where Frampton really begins to prove his supposition is when he goes to the texts themselves, and begins pointing out how the linguistically inventive Florio's diction and terms, found in his own texts, start to pop in the Folio versions of texts where it had not existed in the older quarto versions or anywhere else in Shakespeare's or even his major peers' works. Let me quote him directly:

If we look at Hamlet, for instance, we notice that the editor of the Folio introduces a number of unusual words to the text. Thus in Act 1 scene 5, Hamlet instructs his sinews to bear him "swiftly up" to revenge. The Folio changes the quarto's "swiftly" to "stiffely", a word never used elsewhere by Shakespeare but familiar to Florio, who uses it four times. In Act 5 scene 2, "breed" is changed to "beauy" (bevy), again a word never used elsewhere by Shakespeare but which Florio uses three times. And the same can be said of a number of unusual additions to the play – words such as "pratlings", "checking", "detecting", "quicknesse", "diddest", "daintier", "hurling" and "roaming". In Act 2 scene 2, Polonius tells how Hamlet was "repell'd" (rejected) by Ophelia. The Folio changes "repell'd" to "repulsed", the latter a familiar word now, but one never used elsewhere by Shakespeare, or Marlowe or Jonson. But such a substitution would occur naturally to Florio, who uses "repulsed" four times, defining the Italian Ripulso as "repulsed, repelled".

This pattern continues throughout the Folio, in Henry V, where the word "demonstrated" in the quarto version becomes "demonstrative" in the Folio, a word that not only Shakespeare, but neither Marlowe or Jonson used either, but which Florio used 20 times in his own work; or in Henry IV, Part One, the quarto's "intemperance" becomes the Folio's "intemperature," again a word Shakespeare (or Marlowe or Jonson) never used anywhere else, but which Florio uses in his work. Another strange coincidence involves the statement in Henry IV, Part Two, that the King entered "on the Tarras," which Frampton notes Shakespeare have never used before nor ever again anywhere in his work, but which appears 13 times in Florio's translation of The Decameron. The pattern continues in other Folio plays, both in terms of changes that favor Florio's lexicon, as well as rare words--"longly," "mothy," "queasines"--that appear not infrequently in Florio's writings, as well as some that appear only there, such as "enfoldings" and "swaruer" ("swarver"?).

There are also instances where the editor expands and supplements Shakespeare's language, plumping it out rhetorically, making inferences more obvious, as in King Lear, where Frampton shows someone at work drawing out Shakespeare's thought(s), creating not just amplitude but a richer and more emphatic statement (the words in italics are the Folio additions), as in this statement by Gloucester, in Act 1, Sc. 2:

In Cities, mutinies, Countries, discord; in Pallaces, Treason; and the Bond crack'd, 'twixt Sonne and Father. This villaine of mine comes vnder the prediction; there's Son against Father, the King fals from byas of Nature, there's Father against Childe. We haue seene the best of our time. Machinations, hollownesse, treacherie, and all ruinous disorders follow vs disquietly to our Graues. Find out this Villain, Edmond, it shall lose thee nothing …

The original version relies on blank verse, as well as several rhetorical devices, including rhyme, parallelism and hysteron proteron, and the extreme concision of asyndeton and ellipsis to convey Gloucester's quick insight. The Folio editor, however, creates prose, adds, repeats and clarifies what must be worked at in the quarto original, giving himself away, Frampton notes, by some of the words that, as I have said before, appear nowhere else in Shakespeare but do pop up in Florio's own work. Frampton's insight may also explain the fact that Gonzalo's vision in The Tempest has long been known to have been lifted straight out of Florio's own translation of Montaigne's essay "Of Cannibals", but the borrowing was thought to have been Shakespeare's. It very well now might be viewed as Florio having added his own work, which is to say, his and Montaigne's, to that of the master dramatist.

Then there is Frampton's query, which also is explosive assertion: that Florio may have removed or edited a reference to himself in Hamlet, but also might have done so with other Shakespearean plays as well. This leads Frampton to note that given how little we know--and lacking the kinds of powerful search tools now available many generations of Shakespearean scholars, though they have discussed Florio in various ways, appear to have overlooked the profound role he played--it may remain unclear just how extensive a role he played not just in editing, but writing and rewriting Shakespeare's "ragged written copy." Alongside this, there might have been particular motivations for Florio's effort: in addition to having the lines of a character, the clown Feste, correct the grammar and spelling in a letter he quotes that was written about Malvolio, the putative stand-in for Florio, a letter he neither heard read aloud nor repeated. In the play, however, Malvolio gets the last word(s), and, Frampton implies, they very well may have been Florio's guiding point: "Ile be reueng'd on the whole packe of you."

I often say I plan to read works I blog about, and I do try to do so whenever I can, but I can assure any reader here that as soon as I can get my hands on Frampton's study, I will. Until then, here's to Shakespeare, Florio, Frampton, dramaturgy, scholarship, literary study, reading, the digital humanities, and linguistic invention!

Photos from This Winter & Spring II

Some photos from events I never got around to blogging. Enjoy!

Phillis Levin, at the "John Donne, Re-Done" reading
and discussion at the New York Public Library

Levin, Timothy Donnelly, Helen Cespedes,
Heather Dubrow, and Jay Barksdale, at "John
Donne, Redone" at NYPL

Poet, scholar and thinker extraordinaire
Fred Moten at the Segue Series, Zinc Bar

The one and only Tonya Foster, reading
at the Segue Series, Zinc Bar

Drawing by Anthony Gonzales,
Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art
Basement Gallery, Erotic Art Fair

Two artists, Erotic Art Fair
(Anthony Gonzales, at right)

Hallway, Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art,
Basement Gallery, Erotic Art Fair

Some of the art on display, Erotic
Art Fair, Leslie Lohman Museum

Some of the cast members, Royal Shakespeare Company's
performance of Julius Caesar at Brooklyn Academy of Music

Cabinet display, Nayland Blake, "What Wong Wreng,"
Matthew Marks Gallery

Standing behind one of Nayland
Blake's sculptures, Matthew Marks Gallery

One of the displays, Nayland Blake's
"What Wont Wreng," Matthew Marks Gallery

Jean-Michel Basquiat show,
Gagosian Gallery (h/t to Mr. Reggie H!)
(photos were prohibited, so....)

At the Basquiat show, Gagosian Gallery

Artist and professor Nick Cave, with one of his
dancers, at his HEARD•NY performance,
Grand Central Terminal

HEARD•NY performance,
Grand Central Terminal

Gary Simmons installation, Metro Pictures

Gary Simmons paintings and installation,
Metro Pictures

Gary Simmons installation, Metro Pictures

Gary Simmons installation, Metro Pictures

Gary Simmons installation, Metro Pictures

Detail, Gary Simmons installation,
Metro Pictures

Self-Portrait with Gary Simmons installation,
Metro Pictures

Thomas Adès's The Tempest @ the Met

Thomas Adès The Tempest

Irony, or perhaps, uncanniness. Which is the apter characterization to invoke when noting that on a chilly but precipitation-free night the weekend before Tropical Storm Sandy, a real-world tempest, tore through the region, I went with a friend to see British composer Thomas Adès (1971-) conduct the Metropolitan Opera's performance, the New York premiere, of his second opera, The Tempest (2004)? The real tempest did foreclose any possibility of my writing a positive review of the piece right after seeing it, but it has not diminished my enthusiastic appraisal of Adès's mastery of and in this form. The opera, running about two hours and 40 or so minutes and a co-production that premiered at the Festival d'Opéra de Québec in July, is easily the best new work of its kind I have heard in many years, and in its richness and inventiveness of orchestral writing and assured dramatic and sonic presentation of the opera's core story, cements the composer's status as one of the chief contemporary heirs to Benjamin Britten, Britain's greatest modern operatic composer and one of the finest in the history of European art music.

The Metropolitan Opera House, before the curtain rose

The Tempest, William Shakespeare's final play (1610-1611) and a staple of high school and college literature courses, is a strange, disturbing and beguiling work, perhaps a comedy in the oldest sense of the word, which has attracted many an interpreter and adaptor, among them composers, before. It has innate dramatic potential, its vivid, clear plot turning on revenge and romance, as well as the supernatural. It includes characters, like the magus Prospero, the deposed Duke of Milan; his daughter Miranda; the native servant Caliban; and the members of the intrigue-ridden, shipwrecked Milan court, including Prospero's duplicitous brother, Antonio; Alonso, the King of Naples; Naples' son, Ferdinand; and those Shakespearean staples, the fools, in this case the drunken butler Stefano and the jester, Trinculo. Any combination of these characters would make for an interesting operatic scenario, but Adès maintains them all, winnowing their interactions down for the purposes of the opera's momentum, and its music. What also is clear to any reader of the play is its wealth of ideas and themes, among them familial relationships and the nature and effects of power, the role and effects of art (especially if the latter is viewed as a kind of magic), parental love and domesticity, and, as Adès astutely brings to the fore, colonialism, which, as critic Paul Gilroy noted, speaking of the "Black Atlantic," is the corollary of Modernity, and which, as Sylvia Wynter among others noted, makes possible the very problematic conceptualizations of "man" and the "human" as we know them.

Audrey Luna as Ariel, at the opera's beginning
(Sarah Krulwich/New York Times)

One of the reasons Adès succeeds with his operatic version is because he is willing to do two things: compress the play into a manageable shape that retains nearly all of its key elements, and two, step away from Shakespeare's extraordinary language in favor of a more score-friendly libretto, by Meredith Oakes, which benefits his music even as the libretto itself falls short.  Rather than strictly follow the play's baggy act-by-act progression, Adès pares, writing three acts and seldom using exposition to explain or backtrack, so that the drama itself, which sharpens into view, rushes forward along with the music. Another reason The Tempest works so well is that Adès more severely etches the contours of each character, giving the opera a much more current feel. Prospero rages, in vengeance and intoxication, at least at first, with his power; Miranda is not just a defiant child but a feminist; the drunk and jester are really buffoonish; only Caliban has been softened and made more audience-friendly.  For my friend, who plays music and can read scores with ease but who confessed knowledge with English and American literature, especially Shakespeare, I had to explain a bit about what was going on at first, but by the second act he had figured figured out what Prospero was up to, who Ferdinand was and why his courtship of Miranda was so problematic, what Caliban's role was, and how the court of Naples ended up on the island. There is still a bit of description in the libretto, but between the visual imagery production chief Robert Lepage employs, vividly evoking the La Scala Opera House as well as the remote island where first Prospero and Miranda, and later, by Prospero's "art," the Neapolitan court find themselves grounded, and the clarity of roles and the music's own powers at narration, the story itself proves no hurdle.

Alan Oke as Caliban, emerging from the prompter's box
(Sarah Krulwich/New York Times)

My knowledge of musicological terminology is limited, so I will say only a little about the score itself. From what I could make out, Adès's idiom is tonal, but shot through with dissonances, especially in the first act, and richly textured so that it sounds anything but sweet or obvious, and very contemporary while also not breaking the ear. There is an enchantingly lyrical duet between Miranda and Ferdinand, and, my friend noted to me, a quintet passacaglia at the end of the third and final act, when Prospero blesses the coupling of his daughter and the King's son, releases Ariel, and agrees to return to Milan and forsake his powers. Adès associates each main character with a particular orchestral motif, though not as obviously, to my ear, as Richard Wagner, but enough such that a sense of continuity and recognitions develops. One that I was able to note was Antonio's, which struck me as bombastic, fittingly enough, for a character who betrays his brother for power, a title and monetary gain. Adès also sets the vocal line of Ariel (Audrey Luna), the enslaved water-spirit, at the upper-most reaches of a coloratura soprano's range, forcing the singer to produce near screech-like vocalizations that were akin to tuning into a frequency from another planet, in the best way. That Luna not only pulls off the singing but does so while climbing and hovering through the air (when her body double isn't doing so) makes her one of the performance's treasures. Especially strong are Simon Keenleyside, who debuted as Prospero in 2004 and reprises it here; Isabel Leonard, in a mezzo-soprano range, as Miranda; and Alan Oke as Caliban, dressed by Lepage as something truly monstrous, out of Where the Wild Things Are, but whose aching celebration of his matrimony (for it was his mother, Sycorax, buried under the sands, whom Shakespeare recalls), and his failed attempts to befriend and help Prospero break one's heart.

Audrey Lima as Ariel
(Sarah Krulwich/New York Times)

The libretto, however, was the opera's main--and only, as far as I could see it--flaw. I am not a libretto-mane and certainly, Oakes could hardly compete with Shakespeare under the best of circumstances, but her use of rhyming couplets with sometimes questionable prosody and slant rhymes became wearisome after a fashion. Perhaps I was already more attuned to the poetic rhythms than many listeners, but I found myself not only being able to predict what the concluding rhyme-word of each pair of sentences might be, but also having to block them out at times because they assumed an almost metronomic effect that was nowhere evident in Adès multilayered score. In some cases, such as Ariel's famous poem, the compression worked for the music's sake, but Shakespeare's own verse--and in the play, Ariel sings in verse--might have proved the better choice, not just to break up the monotony of the couplets, but because of the beauty of the playwright's language. I thought this might have been an option in several other places as well, such as at the play's end, where Prospero reverts to verse, of an exquisite sort, to declare the loss of his powers, and beg mercy of a power higher than himself: "As you from crimes would pardon'd be, / Let your indulgence set me free."

The cast taking its curtain call, with Adès at the center

Yet even taking the libretto into account, the opera marks a major success. I hope it returns, and if so, I will proselytize to get people to see it. I am no big fan of pre-20th century opera, and many other operaphiles I have come across cannot bear 20th and 21st century repertoire, but this is one opera I think quite a few people might enjoy. Adès, I also hope, will find the time and support to write another one before too long!