Shakespeare productions are sometimes criticised for not being "authentic" enough, but there are basic problems with this idea in practice.
One of the main criticisms I heard from a group of students coming back from a performance of Othello at The Globe was about the costuming. It was, they complained, “not authentic”. It sounds a fairly straightforward criticism, and “authenticity” is a word often bandied about when Shakespeare’s being discussed, but it’s a tricky idea to apply to costumes.
It would be easy to argue that authenticity is a value for museums, and that The Globe is a working theatre and not a historical re-enactment society. (It would also be interesting to explore how far authenticity should go – do the designs simply need to be the same as Elizabethan actors would have worn? Must the fabrics be the same? Must the material have been spun, woven and sewn using the same techniques? But that way madness lies. As well as unpleasant chafing...)
“Authenticity” also presumably means you’re trying to produce the same experience for the audience as the original Londoners had about the turn of the seventeenth century. But what was natural and conventional for them can be noticeable and difficult for us – even if the staging is an exact replica (which will never be possible, as we don’t have complete information) the effect on the audience will be completely different.
The other major problem is that Shakespeare himself was “inauthentic”. The plays contain some famous historical inaccuracies - Gloucester mentions spectacles in Ancient Britain during King Lear, and a gang of dripping wet shipwrecked sailors appear in landlocked Bohemia during A Winter’s Tale. Costuming seems to have been similarly free and easy: the sketch by Henry Peacham of a production of Titus Andronicus has Titus in a Romanesque toga, Tamora in a dress, two guards in Tudor armour with halberds and Aaron in what looks like a compromise between a Roman tunic and big Elizabethan sleeves.
An “authentic” production would have to decide where its loyalties lay – to Tudor England, to the Italy, Ancient Rome and Athens of the plays, or to the Globe stage, with its own apparently erratic fashion sense. Acting companies have always made their own costuming decisions based on their vision of the play’s world – from the lavish spectacles of nineteenth century illusionist Shakespeare to William Poel’s first attempts at Elizabethanism. The trouble with “authenticity” is that productions in Shakespeare’s time seem to have been a lot less strict and scrupulous than some of today’s audiences would like.
