One of the (many) things I wasn't prepared for
when I first got to University was the way that certain bits of my vocabulary,
bits that I thought of as neutral, would be audible class markers to the other
students. I don't mean geographical tags like "pop" that stood out to
the soda-drinking inhabitants of Milwaukee, where I went to school. I mean
the unrecognized linguistic legacy of the poor-rural-Tennessee branch of the
family that we didn't really talk about, and most of whom I had never
met. That legacy lingered in words like "whopperjawed"—words
that I quickly learned to hear differently and refine out of my speech. Ridicule is an efficient teacher.
That refinement has since become one way of
measuring the distance between my family and me, which I think is why the word
whopperjawed floated into my head as I was listening to the longer speeches
in Flesh & Bone. In particular, I was struck by how
seamlessly Elliot Warren, who both wrote the play and plays Terrence, in
writing and delivery is able to interpellate the language and cadence of
renaissance drama into a contemporary vocabulary laden with
class-markers. He does this in a way that is utterly unlike Shakespeare,
whose language the play freely and frequently borrows (everything from Hamlet’s
meant-to-be-spotted “What a piece of work is a man,” the line with which the
play opens, to reinflected obscure family-tree imagery from Richard II in the
penultimate scene to epithets like “outpours of uberly bloated tongue” that
seem like they should be Shakespeare
but aren’t—not to mention the infinite variety of the play’s profanity).
Instead, he does at least three formal things that give his language the feel
of Shakespeare’s language while refusing the neat use of speech to indicate
class.
The first and most audible way in which Warren’s
language differs is in his utter refusal to follow the “blank verse for the
aristos and prose for the plebes, unless you’re trying to make some sort of
clever point” rule that serves as a rough maxim for the Renaissance. Everyone
here is a plebe, but more importantly, Terrence’s speeches consistently drop
into and out of blank verse mid-speech rather than using it in a sustained way,
which allows him to emphasize those sentences and also to lay a familiar and
lyrical cadence over the beats of Cockney English. This is sustained and
frequent enough that I was somewhat surprised to see that the big speeches
aren’t printed in verse in the play text. It’s not only Terrence that does
this— “an almighty strain did invade his nut” is one example from Kel. But it’s
Terrence's speeches that do so most frequently, and of the five company members,
Elliot seems the most capable of finding the point where the cadence of blank
verse can be barely heard, keeping
this side of the line between modern- and archaic-sounding. (This danger of the
play’s language is that the effect tips into the ridiculous the moment Terrence
sounds more like Laurence Olivier than a Cockney—in this particular
performance, I don’t think that ever happened.)
The second builds upon this first: these are the
sentences that either open with a blank verse line and then subside into a
different meter or syllable count, or that open with the characters own
language but then slip into an identifiable quote from Shakespeare. An example
that combines the two is Jamal’s “I swear to god make noise some more, I’ll
bust your jaw and let slip the dogs of war.”
Finally, the third is internal rhyme (also
present in those lines of Jamal’s: “more”/”war”) which, while uncommon in
Shakespeare is used in a way that evokes a more contemporary genre—the dub
poetry of Black British artists like Linton Kwesi Johnson. This creates a
tension in which two of the most distinct-sounding British poetic traditions
are simultaneously present in the play’s speech.* By leaving that tension
unresolved or in a state of suspension in the language itself, it becomes the
task of the actors and the audience to hear both simultaneously.
Ultimately, the effect is, if not mimetic, then
believable. That distinction is precisely the one that elevates speeches in
verse in Renaissance drama, but here, the speech is insistently working class.
This is transformative—it affords new possibility for a class-inflected accent
that has been parodied so often and so brutally that those parodies have nearly
subsumed it, at least in art though, and I think this is the point, not in
life. The formal elements I’ve described makes it possible to once again stage
the Cockney as representative of universal human experiences and values without
slipping into bathos.
The play
emphasizes that even in the face of grinding economic hardship class mobility
can be performed but not actually attained through speech (as Kel demonstrates
in scene 2) and code switching (Reiss in scene 3). I don’t think it’s a mistake
that this happens in a play about family. To reassert the value of Cockney
speech and “Cockney” lives might be to ease the distance caused by educational
disparities—a desirable effect for a playwright from Stepney, or a background
like my own.
______
*Do I have feelings about a white playwright adopting formal elements of Dub poetry? Hooboy do I ever, but not in a coherent way. (Yet.)
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