Shakespearean Theatre

Posted by Jem Bloomfield

Shakespeare wrote plays, we are continually reminded by critics and teachers – he did not write “excerpts”, or “speeches” or poems which happen to have the names of characters in the margins. There’s a general consensus at the moment that Shakespeare should be regarded as a man of the theatre, involved in the staging, producing and acting of his plays, rather than a solitary genius toiling in a garret for the benefit of posterity.



This is surely a Good Thing – if we didn’t pay attention to his works as drama, we’d miss important aspects of certain scenes. The mot obvious example is silent characters – Antonio at the end of Twelfth Night, or Isabella at the end of Measure For Measure, who disappear from the page as soon as they stop speaking, but can have a huge influence on an audience by what a director chooses to do with their silent presence.



It hasn’t always been this way, though. The Romantics tended to see Shakespeare as a poet rather than a dramatist, who had written for the stage but could best be appreciated in the study, away from the noise and inconvenience of audiences and actors. (And since Coleridge was a major editor of Shakespeare, this view held some sway.) Though it seems a bit presumptuous to hoik the Bard out of his natural milieu like this, it must be admitted that he wrote very complex, multi-layered poetry in highly-wrought language at times, which might (oh heresy) be best appreciated by sitting down and reading it thoughtfully...

Posted by Jem Bloomfield

Studying Shakespeare at school is an escapable fact for many of us. (Indeed, in Britain it is a required part of the course for anyone taking English in secondary school.) Teaching the work of this one Renaissance playwright to those without a general knowledge of his contemporaries, sources or even the language he wrote in can seem like a fairly eccentric way of educating young people. It’s no wonder that so many in later life say that they were put off the Bard by drudging line by line through a set text, and then regurgitating a few ideas onto an exam paper.



Leaving aside the issue of whether or not Shakespeare was a transcendent genius, and possibly the greatest playwright who ever lived, is school the right place to teach him? With only limited teaching time, and an increasing emphasis on “relevance”, the obvious solution seems to be to drop this apparently anomalous, if brilliant, Elizabethan and concentrate more time on contemporary fiction or nineteenth-century poetry.



However, there are good arguments for keeping Shakespeare on the curriculum. The insistence on a narrow idea of “relevance” has been criticised by some, including the novelist Zadie Smith, as patronising – it assumes that students can only relate to their own immediate experiences, and are incapable of dealing with the larger emotional and speculative issues to be found in Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet. Why should they be capable of dealing with the parallel worlds of X-Men, Snoop Dogg, Lord of the Rings and The Bourne Identity, but not Shakespeare? Of course Shakespeare can be tricky, and requires a different approach at times (for tips on getting to grips with him, see Studying a Shakespeare Play), but there’s no reason to suppose he is beyond the reach of any student.



And if the time saved from Shakespeare was spent on later English literature, there’s a good chance students would end up running back to Shakespeare for explanations and references. Dickens, Keats, Trollope and Woolf, taking some examples almost at random, all refer to and engage with Shakespeare in different ways. Their work is full of echoes from Shakespeare, resonances which would be inaudible to students who weren’t familiar with Will’s own tone. Like it or not, Shakespeare is interwoven with much of the English literature canon, and disentangling him hastily would surely hinder students instead of helping them.

Posted by Jem Bloomfield

There has been a long-standing controversy over the authorship of the works attributed to Shakespeare, though it might be better to call it a series of conspiracy theories. Unlike other authorship controversies, such as the debate as to whether Cyril Torneur or Thomas Marston wrote The Revenger’s Tragedy, the Shakespeare question is not a straightforward choice between two contenders. The suggested authors have ranged from other playwrights (Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe) to courtiers (The Earls of Oxford and Essex) and even to the essayist and cryptographer Francis Bacon.



However, from one point of view, the whole controversy is rather pointless. It would certainly be interesting to find out that someone else had written the plays and poems under Shakespeare’s name. It would throw an interesting light on Francis Bacon’s character, for example, to know that he moonlighted as a dramatist. Likewise it would be interesting to compare Jonson’s and Shakespeare’s works side-by-side if it turned out they were written by the same man. but it wouldn’t drastically affect our current view of the works themselves.



This is because so little of our view of Shakespeare is coloured by his biography – no-one seriously tries to interpret the Forest of Arden in As You Like It through the rumours that Shakespeare may have been a poacher. Even on important matters, such as Shakespeare’s education, contemporary sources can take second place to analysis of the works – Ben Jonson’s dictum that Shakespeare had “little Latin and less Greek” has been firmly revised by scholarly work on his classical influences, such as Jonathan Bates’ very readable study Shakespeare and Ovid.



“Shakespeare” is less a person to us than a collection of plays with a recognisable face on the front. Even if we discovered that Kit Marlowe had written the plays, they were still performed at The Globe, and our knowledge of contemporary theatre practice would still be the main influence on our readings of them. The conspiracy theories will no doubt continue, but it is tempting to ask: who cares who wrote Shakespeare?

Posted by Jem Bloomfield

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.

Posted by Jem Bloomfield

Stephen Orgel asked a very good question at the beginning of his book Impersonations – how on earth did they get away with boys playing the female roles in Shakespeare? It’s usually dismissed as simply “convention”, some sort of cultural blindspot which we simply accept and move on to thinking about the female character being portrayed. We aren’t distracted by the fact that the orchestra at the symphony are in evening dress, or worried by the rock band going off the stage when they haven’t played the song the crowd are yelling for – hang on, they’re coming back again...



But dismissing the encore or the dinner jacket as “conventions” misses the point – these may be invisible to the audience, but they say extremely interesting things about the place those performances have in our culture. Why does going to the symphony involve pretending that we’re in all nineteenth century Europe? Why do the crowd have to prove their love for the band by cajoling them back to play the encore everyone knows is coming?



An interest in gender, costume and pretence is obvious in plays such as Twelfth Night and As You Like It – a woman fancies a girl in boy’s clothes, and ends up marrying his twin brother? A girl dressed as a page who pretends she is pretending to be a woman so the man she loves can pretend to make amorous speeches to her?



The so-called “conventions” are a vital part of Shakespearean theatre. I’m certainly not saying we should go back to producing everything in historically “authentic” ways – for a start, our culture doesn’t see women or boys in the same way as Shakespeare’s did - but it blunts our understanding of the plays to write off staging conditions as mere technical “conventions.”

Posted by Jem Bloomfield

I’m sure the question has flitted through the mind of most people sitting through a performance of a Shakespeare comedy at sometime in their life – whether as reluctant participant in a school trip, matinee-going theatre stalwart or despairing director. Is this stuff actually any good?

There’s no argument about Shakespeare’s tragedies. They’re powerful, loud, rather archaic, spoken in ritualised language which makes for good speeches, and about people doing extraordinarily vile things to each other, usually for the sake of power or love. All that fits perfectly with our gut feeling as to what tragedy should be.

But do the comedies work as comedies? In many performances of Shakespeare comedies, the laughs tend to be a little forced – either dry chuckles at a piece of word-play we’ve had explained to us by an Arden edition, or relieved guffaws at the kind of man-falling-over-a-dog slapstick which we would scorn if it appeared in Frasier or Family Guy. Is there possibly a problem here – that in taking the plays too serious as Shakespeare, we stop ourselves responding to them instinctively as comedies?

There are ways round this in production. Crazy Shakespeare, done at high speed, with ludicrous props like baguettes, skate-boards and rubber chickens, can usually get the audience in a good mood, if only for the sheer irreverence and the stupidity of anyone trying to do iambic pentameter in a chest wig and flares. Romantic Shakespeare (such as Trevor Nunn’s film of Twelfth Night) plays it thoughtfully, bringing out the slight melancholy in the works, rather than chasing laughs which might have been there in the late 1500s, but can’t be recovered. Rom-com Shakespeare slots the Bard into a framework we’re comfortable with (such as Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing, with its surprisingly high quota of skin) and leaves us feeling warm and fuzzy rather than hilarious.

Whatever the truth might be, it’s surely a question audiences and actor have to ask, if we’re ever to enjoy these plays in the way they were intended.