By Stuart Mitchner

Now what is love, I pray thee tell?
It is that fountain and that well
Where pleasure and repentance dwell.

—Sir Walter Raleigh

(may i touch said he how much said she a lot said he)

—e.e. cummings

Raleigh’s poem “A Description of Love” begins and ends Pleasure and Repentance (Pergamon 1976), the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Lighthearted Look at Love” created and compiled by former RSC Director Terry Hands. The subject of acting and actors, love and lovers brings to mind Sunday night’s Academy Awards, where Morgan Freeman delivered a memorial tribute to Gene Hackman (“Our community lost a giant, I lost a dear friend”) and four Oscars went to Sean Baker’s Anora, a zany throwback to the screwball comedy romances of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

My favorite Hackman film is Arthur Penn’s extraordinary neo-noir Night Moves (1975), which features one of his strongest performances as the driven, benighted, very human private eye Harry Moseley. At the moment, however, I’m remembering him as Harry Caul sitting alone in the wreckage of his room playing tenor sax at the end of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974).

Casting Choices

Pleasure and Repentance originated as a “training script” designed by Hands (1941-2020) for members of the Royal Shakespeare Academy “to address specific needs of each performer.” Three players, two men, a woman, and a musician eventually delivered readings in schools, libraries, and other venues up and down the United Kingdom as part of the RSC’s outreach program.

Among the book’s nine sections, ranging from “Children” to “Last Confession,” is one headed “Frustration” that includes lyrics to the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” and the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood,” along with a passage from Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer mystery I the Jury that I can imagine Hackman reading in his prime, what with lines like “I felt like reaching out and squeezing her to pieces.”

Inspired by the idea of Hackman as Hammer and the news that the Motion Picture Academy will begin offering an Oscar for the Best Casting in 2026, I’m choosing my own cast of readers for Pleasure and Repentance. For the female reader, I’d go with Ruth Wilson, who played Jane Eyre before she took on Alice Morgan, the charming psychopath from Neil Cross’s series Luther. As a back-up I’d add the great Kate Bush, who sings “Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy” in her breakthrough hit “Wuthering Heights.”

The singer/guitarist included in Hands’s original company would accompany the reading of the lyrics to “Satisfaction” — but not by one of the male readers, in spite of Mick Jagger, whose swashbuckling image rules over the cover of Pleasure and Repentance. Hands prefers that the female reader recite the Rolling Stones’ pounding celebration of frustration. He also wants the lyric delivered against expectations, “simply, evenly and seriously” and “not affected by the music,” while being read to “the basic beat” laid down by the musician. Between my female readers, Wilson, rather than a professional singer like Bush, would presumably be the best choice.

As for casting the two male readers, one described as older and wiser, the other younger and more adventurous, I’d choose Jared Harris, who plays Claudius in the shipboard Hamlet currently docked at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford; my choice for the other reader would be Ben Whishaw, who played the lead in Hamlet (2004), Richard II (2012) and John Keats in Jane Campion’s film Bright Star (2009), which makes him a natural reader for the love letter from Keats to Fanny Brawne recited in the “Young Love” sequence.

Not So Lighthearted

According to the cues provided by Hands, the reader is told to keep in mind that Keats “died young and knew that death was always close,” thus the reading should “reflect the urgent savouring of sensation — before it is too late.” The reader (my choice Whishaw) is instructed to rise from his seat “in excitement” to deliver the lines “I have no limit now to my love” and “love is my religion — I could die for that, I could die for you,” and, finally, “My love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you.” At this point “a lighthearted look at love” begins to seem like a somewhat misguided subtitle.

The Back Cover

The comely, dimpled, pregnant female, quill in hand, on the back cover of Pleasure and Repentance is meant to represent Sarah Johnson, the author of a “Letter to Her Lover”: “This is to tell you that after all our sport and fun, I am like to pay for it, for I am with child …. therefore dear Charles come ashore and let us be married to save my virtue; and if you have no money, I will pawn my new stays and sell my new smocks you gave me, and that will pay the parson, and find us a dinner.” She goes on to tell him “don’t be afraid for want of a ring, for I have stole my sister Nan’s, and the nasty toad shall never have it no more; for she tells about that I am going to have a bastard.”

Meanwhile I have been unable to find any information about the author and her (or his) dates. All that Hands tells his reader (my Wilson) is that a “fast breathless delivery is helpful and the accent of almost any sea port. London and Bristol work well. Cardiff gets a bit sing-song.”

“The Most Sordid Poem”

Hands’s cues are more playful than I may have suggested. For “Perils of the Dance” by William Prynne (“it issues only from the inbred pravity, vanity, wantonness, incontinency, pride, profaneness, or madness of men’s depraved natures”), Hands suggests “It may not be amiss in performance to sweat and squeak somewhat,” and for the anonymous “Prayer to St. Catherine,” the woman “should be about 150 years old.” For the translation of Jacques Prevert’s “I Am as I Am,” which either Wilson or Bush could do wonders with, Hands admits, “Difficult to do in England. The poem and the woman are French. Needs innocence and knowledge, speed and simplicity. Think of Edith Piaf and hope for the best.”

All in all, Hands keeps the readings lightheartedly lively, with male/female interplay from The Merchant of Venice, Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, and, by far the most fun, e.e. cummings’s he/she frolic “may i feel said he,” which Hands calls “perhaps the most sordid poem in the anthology” and suggests “should be taken fast.” As if there were any other way to read it (I’m streaming all nine stanzas into a single paragraph); my version would be a duet between Ben Whishaw and Ruth Wilson:

“(may i touch said he how much said she a lot said he) and why not said she”; “(let’s go said he not too far said she what’s too far said he where you are said she)”; “(tiptop said he don’t stop said she oh no said he) go slow said she” and finally, as he and she pant toward a Hollywood happy ending — “you’re divine!said he (you are Mine said she).”

Screwball Comedies

Reading cummings recalls the joy of discovering his poetry in my late teens while reminding me of the pleasure of watching Rufus Sewell and Keri Russell taunt, wrestle, curse, and nurse each other in the recent series The Diplomat, which in turn reminded me of vintage predecessors like Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in 1937’s The Awful Truth (which won a Best Director Oscar for Leo McCarey), and Robert Montgomery and Carole Lombard in Alfred Hitchcock’s uproarious battle of the sexes, Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941), a film Hitchcock says he made as a favor to Lombard and “never understood” (“I just filmed the screenplay”).

My wife and I watched Flow while the Oscars were on. It would take an entire column to do justice to that work of genius and the stunningly suggestive contrast it makes to what went on at the Dolby Theatre (not to mention what went on at the White House last week). Flow won the Oscar for animated film for Gints Zilbalodis, the first Latvian so honored.

“Take the Vantage”

I’ll let Sir Walter Raleigh have the last word, as he does in Pleasure and Repentance, which I snapped up at last year’s Bryn Mawr-Wellesley (BMW) book sale and have been saving for the right occasion, which is, it turns out, to preview the upcoming sale. In Raleigh’s “Description of Love,” the man says love is “a pretty kind of sporting fray…a thing that will soon away,” to which the woman says “Then take the vantage, while you may.”

The same could be said to anyone interested in the BMW event, which begins with a preview at 10 a.m. Wednesday, March 12 (admission $32); all other days, March 13 to 16 (box day), are free. Tickets may be purchased on the Annual Sale page at bmandwbooks.com, which provides detailed information. The Stuart Country Day School is at 1200 Stuart Road.