“God help the wicked”: Searching for redemption in Shakespeare

The biggest cultural juggernaut at the moment is the film of the Broadway musical Wicked (maybe you saw some ads for it). Based on Gregory Maguire’s novel, Wicked re-tells the familiar story of The Wizard of Oz from the perspective of the original story’s villain, the Wicked Witch of the West. In both L. Frank Baum’s novel (published in 1900, a first edition of which is on exhibit at the Folger) and the iconic 1939 film, the unnamed Witch is, like Richard III, “rudely stamped,” distinguished by a physical abnormality (a hag with a single eye as powerful as a telescope in the novel; green skin in the film) that identifies her as different and, to some people’s thinking, dangerous.

In the musical, the Wicked Witch is given the name Elphaba—which Maguire formed by saying aloud L. Frank Baum’s three initials—and her green skin marks her as an outcast from the moment she’s born. Just as Queen Margaret describes Richard III as a “bottled spider” and “poisonous bunch-backed toad,” a matriarchal figure in Wicked publicly proclaims Elphaba as “evil,” adding that “her green skin is but an outward manifestorium [sic] of her twisted nature. This distortion! This repulsion! This wicked witch!” In fact, in Wicked’s opening number, book writer Winnie Holtzman and composer/lyricist Stephen Schwartz specifically re-purpose Malvolio’s famous line from Twelfth Night to ask, “Are people born wicked? Or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?”

What a fundamentally Shakespearean theme! And what a fascinating opportunity to explore how the shift of a narrative’s perspective can offer answers to such questions as: Who deserves redemption? And is forgiveness always possible? The Macbeths are driven to murder and regicide by “vaulting ambition”—as well as, not coincidentally, the encouragement of three “wicked” witches. Othello is driven mad by jealousy and achieves a measure of redemption by killing himself after murdering Desdemona, but Iago, whose own jealousy drove him to betray Othello, is merely arrested and taken away. We’re told that the “censure” and “torture” of Iago will be “enforce[d]” by Cassio, but because we typically don’t see it in performance, it’s hugely unsatisfying. In order for me to feel a sense of justice prevailing, I need to see horrible actions punished or characters doing the work to redeem themselves, like Prince Hal, who, over the course of both parts of Henry IV, makes up for his youthful profligacy by pledging himself to his father and taking his place on the battlefield and the throne.

From a literary standpoint, of course, we’re taught that many of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes achieve redemption through a last-minute realization of their failures, giving us the opportunity to sympathize with them despite the carnage they’ve left in their wake. King Lear is the classic example, and while I accept that he comes to understand the destruction he’s caused, it’s hard for me to sympathize with him since his epiphany comes far too late to prevent the loss of his kingdom and his daughters. Same with Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, whose insane jealousy leads to the death of one child, the abandonment of another, and the banishment of his wife Hermione (who mysteriously becomes a statue for sixteen years). It would take a very special actor to make me forgive Leontes the way I think Shakespeare wants me to.

But it is possible. As my friend, actor and Shakespeare coach Elizabeth Dennehy, reminds me, “Really good actors can make you feel compassion for villains, because you see the life they had before they were ostracized and marginalized.” She cites the 2018 Independent Shakespeare Company production of Titus Andronicus as an example, in which she saw Evan Lewis Smith bring a rogue’s charm to Aaron’s painful past that made the audience, if not sympathize with, at least understand some of the circumstances that made him the villainous character he is.

But more than casting, the task of eliciting audience sympathy begins with the writing,  and which character’s perspective is driving the story. The key word in Elizabeth’s description, I think, is villain. Shakespeare created so many memorable scoundrels whose misdeeds we cheer with as much gusto as we celebrate their comeuppance. Richard III, for example, is both his story’s tragic hero and the main villain, and his character’s resolution works for me in every way. We see how a lifetime of ill-treatment has warped him, and when he’s visited by the ghosts of his victims on the night before the final battle, we see that epiphany give him the moment of realization of what he’s done—and his death on the battlefield gives us the catharsis of seeing a monster receive the punishment he deserves.

And speaking of monsters, for the third year in a row, I’m playing Ebenezer Scrooge, another character who’s both the hero and villain of his own story (and who also prompted a previous essay about the degree to which Shakespeare haunts Charles Dickens’s holiday classic). A Christmas Carol is a fantastical fable, in which you see a Shakespearean arc of abandonment and pain leading Scrooge on a redemptive journey that allows him to look back with clarity, look around with compassion, and look ahead with foresight. We feel for Scrooge, and while the ghosts are just the most visible parts of this fantasy, the greatest pull on our heartstrings might be imagining selfish, narrow-minded people in the real world similarly transformed.

I realize the justice I seek in the stories I consume isn’t always possible, but I cling to the notion expressed by the wise Miss Prism in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, who observed, “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means” (thanks to Benjamin Dreyer for quoting that line this week in his most excellent Substack). Another definition of Fiction might be striving to create the world we want out of the world we have, which might also be a good definition of Art in general. And maybe a good motto for Life as well.