Producing a Shakespeare play can be a daunting prospect. The combined pressure of the reputation of the “greatest playwright in history” and hundreds of previous productions can make a prospective Shakepeare director despair of ever coming up with a new angle on a tried and tested masterpiece.
Ironically, this burden on the director can be lightened by one of the weaknesses of Shakespeare texts: their stage directions. Because Shakespeare himself never proof-read his plays for publication, the texts we work from have been put together from individual actors’ parts, remembered lines, working drafts and pirated playtexts. Any stage directions are likely to have been added by a later editor, rather than the Bard, though they could reflect the movements of an early production.
This uncertainty over which stage directions are authentic paradoxically allows the director more artistic freedom in producing their personal vision of a Shakespeare play. When Peter Brook put characters in hammocks slung from the ceiling in his 1963 Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Kenneth Branagh delivered his lines as Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing (1993) whilst dancing through a fountain, they were exploiting this indeterminacy to good effect. Far from being a problem, the lack of authoritative stage directions contributes to the flexibility of Shakespeare’s plays, allowing them to be reimagined by successive generations.
Even if they did not originate with Shakespeare himself, some of the stage directions which have been passed down through the texts are positively intriguing. Shakespearean scholars have puzzled over the direction in Act III, Scene 3 of A Winter’s Tale
Antigonus: This is the chase
I am gone forever.
Exit pursued by a bear.
Some critics have argued that the “bear” was obviously another actor in a bear suit – though this would surely have added a tinge of pantomime comedy to what is supposed to be a very serious death-scene. Historical research into the original Globe Theatre shows that it was also used for the Elizabethan sport of bear-baiting, so there could have been real bears kept on the site. On the other hand, how could a real bear be persuaded to chase an actor across the stage and return to its cage afterwards? The old theatrical adage “never work with children or animals” would surely apply to an irritated brown bear! We may never know what that enigmatic bear in the margin really was.
Sometimes stage directions can show a definite touch of wit, a joke never intended to be heard by the audience, but still visible to the reader. A darkly comic moment occurs in Act III, Scene 1 of the revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus, when a messenger enters to tell Titus of the execution of his sons, with the topsy-turvy stage direction:
Enter a messenger with two heads and a hand.
Sources: William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Wells, Taylor, Jowett, Montgomery (2005); The Empty Space, Peter Brook (1968)
