Interview with Missy Dunaway, the artist behind The Birds of Shakespeare
Shakespeare and birds? Anyone who knows me knows that this ticks all my boxes. I discovered Missy Dunaway’s work through the Folger Shakespeare Library and after a couple hours drooling over her paintings, I reached out to her to ask if she’d be willing to do an interview for Brief Candle.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned while doing this project? Either about birds or about Shakespeare, or if you wanna cheat, both.
I am constantly surprised by how much Shakespeare and Elizabethans knew about birds. I believe it’s generally accepted that Shakespeare knew a thing or two about nature, given his bountiful references to plants. But he wouldn’t make many of these references if his audience didn’t understand them. The folklore around birds was robust, and many myths reflect natural avian behaviors. Nature was mixed in with human life more than today, and people were well acquainted with birds.
For example, I have a flock of chickens, and ever since becoming a chicken owner, I have defended them as kind, intelligent birds. Their reputation for being mean, stupid, and cowardly seems so unfounded. I was pleased to learn that our colloquial term of “chick” to describe a cute young woman is derived from “chicken,” which was a term of endearment in Elizabethan England. This is illustrated by Macduff’s tragic line, "What, all my pretty chickens and their dam / At one fell swoop?” after learning his family has been murdered (Macbeth, 4.3.257). Chickens were part of ordinary households and were like family pets. The fact that “chicken” was a compliment is a small reminder that Shakespeare and his audience lived side-by-side with birds and had a lot of respect for them.
If you were going to cast a bird in a Shakespeare role, who would you cast as whom and why? A brown thrasher as Hamlet? A vulture as Falstaff? A goose as Edmund?
I can’t help but think of Falstaff since you mentioned him. He has such an exaggerated personality it would be easy to caricaturize him as a bird. “Cormorant” is synonymous with gluttony and greed— two words that sum up Falstaff well. Cormorants were also symbols of evil. I know Falstaff is a beloved buffoon to many, but ever since reading “food for powder” when describing his pitiful soldiers, I have viewed him as despicable (Henry IV Part 1, 4.2.66). Physically, he may resemble a male turkey, but personality-wise, I think a cormorant is the best fit.
What is your process like as an artist? Are you disciplined and organized? Or flighty and whimsical? How do you get from blank canvas to beautiful turkeys?
I suppose it’s no surprise that I am disciplined and organized, considering how I’ve approached my Birds of Shakespeare project. I have a checklist of birds that I work through, and I schedule two species per month throughout the year. I research a bird the first week of the month; the second week, I paint it. I study the next bird in the third week; in the fourth week, I paint it. And so on. My life is measured in birds.
The blank canvas (or watercolor paper, in my case) is a daunting sight. I get past it as quickly as possible. Each painting features a garland border filled with objects that provide natural science facts about the species and allude to its symbolic significance. All illustrations of feathers, eggs, and nests are carefully measured and rendered at life-size, and eggs are numbered in average clutch size. I use life models whenever possible, which allows me to lay them on paper to try out variations. When I have a version I like, I photograph it. That photograph acts as my compositional sketch. I map major proportions in pencil and then reach for the paintbrush. I always work big to small, simple to complex.
What’s your favorite Shakespearean bird line?
I have yet to encounter a bird quote that entertains me as much as Mistress Page’s line, “Well, I will find you twenty / lascivious turtles ere one chaste man” (The Merry Wives of Windsor 2.1.80). To clarify, she is referring to turtle doves, but whether the subject is reptilian or avian, the image is really funny.
Thanks to Missy for doing this silly interview. If you want to see more of her work, you can find her at missydunaway.com or birdsofshakespeare.com. Her book is called The Traveling Artist and her Instagram is @missydunaway
A Review of Shakespeare’s Double Plays by Brett Gamboa
Rather than underline or notate my books, I take pictures with my phone of good quotes that I encounter while reading. As a result, Shakespeare’s Double Plays took me almost twice as long as it should have because I had to stop every other page to take a picture of a brilliant bit of text (usually to send to one of my Shakespeare friends). My camera roll for the month I spent reading it looks like this (irrelevant pictures blacked out):
So…it’s safe to say that I enjoyed this book.
Ostensibly, Shakespeare’s Double Plays is about the practice of doubling, but in order to make his points about doubling, Gamboa begins the book by making some wider points about — for lack of a better word — metatheatricality.
Gamboa certainly isn’t the first to make the argument that realistic illusion or the concept of a “fourth wall” are foreign to Shakespeare, but he not only makes that argument more clearly and more thoroughly than any other scholar I’ve read, he makes it in service of pushing the boundaries of reality/fiction further than I regularly see them pushed in production. As an example of how permeable Shakespeare intended the barrier to be between actor/character and fiction/reality, Gamboa cites two productions of Hamlet in which the actors playing Polonius “forgot” their lines during act 2, scene 1 when Polonius says
And then, sir, does 'a this- 'a does- What was I about to say? By the mass, I was about to say something! Where did I leave?
Gamboa’s theory is that Polonius isn’t having a “senior moment” here, but rather that Shakespeare wrote this moment to make it seem like the actor is forgetting his lines in order to draw the audience into the play. In the same way that the crowd at a stock car race never pays more attention than when it seems like there might be a crash, an audience at a play is never more invested in the success of a production than when they think it might fall apart.
The rest of the book flows from this basic premise: that Shakespeare was not just indifferent to realistic theatrical illusion, but actively worked against it, and one of the ways in which he dragged the real world into the fiction was through doubling. By having the same actor play multiple parts, Shakespeare could pile narratives on top of each other. Lear takes on additional meanings if a production not only has the same actor play Cordelia and the Fool, but if it finds ways to acknowledge that the same actor who was mocked with “nothing will become of nothing” in 1.1 returns that mockery with “can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?” in 1.4
Gamboa’s prose is clean and precise, academic but only ever in the service of clarity. Often reading scholarship, it feels like the author is using more words than needed to obscure their lack of a clear thesis. Gamboa never uses jargon unless it is necessary to make the point he’s working toward.
Shakespeare’s Double Plays is meticulously researched and, for me at least, convincingly dispels a lot of commonly-held ideas about casting and staging in Shakespeare’s time. Gamboa demonstrates that any Shakespeare play can be performed by a cast of 12 without any cuts and provides a lot of historical evidence that not only were small casts and quick changes common, but that — and this is the double-edged sword of this book — adult men (and not just teenage boys) played female parts in Shakespeare’s plays.
My only major criticism of the book is the double-edged sword mentioned above: that an inordinate amount of time is spent dispelling the myth that only young boys played female parts in Shakespeare’s plays.
I understand why it was necessary — Gamboa’s historical arguments for smaller casts with more doubling simply do not work if the female parts had to be played by young boys who were incapable of playing adult men as well — and he certainly convinced me, but there were times when he ended up on the wrong side of the line that divides thorough from tedious.
“Young boys played the women” has been Shakespearean orthodoxy for so long that Gamboa clearly felt he had to bring out his big guns to prove that wasn’t the case. He cites court cases about apprenticeships, contemporary accounts of audience members, theatrical satire, as well as close readings of the plays themselves to make the case that Rosalind, Beatrice, and Margaret of Anjou were played by men and not boy apprentices.
Again, I understand why it was necessary, and he makes a great case, but it was the only part of the book that I felt was written solely for scholars and not for general theatre practitioners.
The rest of the book, however, should be required reading — along with My Life with the Shakespeare Cult, but that’s another review for another newsletter — for anyone who produces Shakespeare. While not everything from Shakespeare’s theatre should be reproduced — all-male productions are just as uninteresting to me now as they were 15 years ago — it really is remarkable how often attempts at “original practices” end up making Shakespeare productions better and more engaging.
I have some other minor quibbles; some of the doublings he suggests seem like a stretch to me, but overall the book makes its major points clearly and convincingly, and it was a joy to read.
I will end my rave review with one of the many quotes I photographed, and one which I think is representative of the book as whole:
For all their bumbling, Shakespeare’s ‘rude mechanicals’ provide a useful analogue when thinking about Shakespeare’s playwriting practice. Quince ‘fits’ his play to actors comfortable portraying supernatural...and inanimate…beings; they are adult males who play women…they are keen to double…while hoping that the representations will not appear too life-like. The mechanicals don’t worry about spectators seeing through the character to the actor; rather, they invite it. That Shakespeare would allow this — would allow an audience at a play to watch an onstage audience in which the actors all admit that they are actors — favours a playwright for whom tacitly admitting the fiction and destabilizing the narrative frame through incongruous casting and frequent doubling would be an inviting, rather than a worrying, prospect.
Good Tickle Brain by Mya Gosling
My dear friend Mya who publishes the Shakespearean stick figure webcomic Good Tickle Brain has given me permission to use some of my favorites from her archive. To properly inaugurate my Shakespeare newsletter, here is a crossover comic about Star Trek, the thing that initially sparked my interest in Shakespeare.
If you want to know Mya’s reasoning for her crew picks, you can read them on the original post here.
What Shakespeare Company has the Best 2023 Season?
If you ask me, The American Shakespeare Center has the best 2023 season. As You Like It, Hamlet, Coriolanus, AND Measure for Measure?? Come the fuck on! It’s like they planned this season specifically to make me regret moving away from Virginia.
Whose 2023 season are you excited about? Feel free to reply and tell me if you think anyone can top the ASC this year.