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PARTISAN REVIEW
Int.:
Were you particularly fond of reading Shakespeare as a dramatist?
Williams:
I began
to
read him when I was a child. My grandfather had
all of Shakespeare's works and I read them all by the time I was ten,
and my favorite was
Titus Andronicus
where the queen of the Goths
eats two children; they're baked in a pie and she eats them. I liked
that. So as a child of ten, I was interested in blood and guts
Shakespeare. I don 't lhink I was yet impressed by the great writings
or poems.
Int.:
Yes, that play is supposed to be his least mature work.
Williams:
Some people say that he didn't even write it. It's ridiculous.
Have you ever read the goddamn thing? It's the most ridiculous
thing. Now , my friend Professor Oliver Evans saw that play and said
it was a masterpiece, so I read it over again, well now, I could see it
could be presented as a masterpiece, you know, if you are willing to
accept all this Gothic horror, you know, but it seemed to me also the
theater of the ridiculous.
Int.:
And the theater of the absurd.
Williams:
Yeah, on paper it seemed that way because of the Gothic
elements in it; the boys raped Lavinia and cut her tongue out and cut
off her hands so she could neither speak nor write the accusation
against them. And the father kills Lavinia because she's been raped,
after she witnessed the Queen of the Goths, Tamora, eating her sons
baked in a pie; well it's one of the most ridiculous plays ever written.
Int.:
The interesting thing about
Titus
is Aaron, the Moor who has a
baby with the queen. Aaron takes the Black baby with him and he
says, "This is my child and I will very probably die with this child."
And the son of the queen runs in and says to him, "You have, villain,
undone our motherl"
Williams:
"You have undone our motherl"
Int.:
And Aaron says, " I beg your pardon, I have done thy mother."
Williams:
Oh no! That's Shakespeare-that humor is Shakespeare.
That's pure Shakespeare!
Int.:
And that comes to be, of course, the model for
Othello.
Williams:
Yeah,
Othello
is Shakespeare's greatest play, in my opinion,
don't you think so? The dynamics of that play are so believable, so
intense and the language is so beautiful-that and
Macbeth.
I prefer
it to
Hamlet,
although the language of
Hamlet
is superb and the
soliloquies are matchless, still I do not understand
Hamlet,
really. I
think the closet scene, the scene between Hamlet and his mother,
Gertrude, may be the greatest scene Shakespeare ever wrote, but still
as a whole, I don't dig it-psychologically I can't groove on it. What
happens at the end of all this dueling, and the poison and all that? It
