The State We’re In (Part Two)
November 2011
The Royal Shakespeare Company has pulled down its Jam Factory in Stratford and replaced it with a spanking new auditorium which backs onto the ever-popular Swan, and could be mistaken for it. Some of us had briefly railed against the old theatre’s destruction, though it was fairly clear that something had to be done about it, if only for safety’s sake. The redevelopment of the site has cost £112 million, and includes, as well as better working conditions for all, new foyers and restaurants, a big new merchandising outlet with tube maps whose stations are named after Shakespearian characters, and a somewhat forbidding 118-foot tower, to the top of which, at a cost of £2.50, visitors can travel by lift and get a good view of Stratford-upon-Avon. The tower also houses the theatre’s public stairways, which can thus be maintained at the tourists’ cost.
It was ever thus: in one way and another, merchandising and art in Stratford have rubbed gently against each other since the aptly named Thomas Sharpe started selling ‘genuine’ bits of Shakespeare’s mulberry tree to visitors in the 1750s. David Garrick, wearing a pair of gloves supposedly owned by the great man, presented his Jubilee for a rain-sodden weekend in 1769, establishing the town’s tourist credentials and reciting an Ode of his own devising about Shakespeare: however, not a word by the playwright himself was spoken. In 1773 the eccentric bibliophile and editor George Steevens was recalling (somehow) that Shakespeare loved a certain earthen half-pint mug from which he took draughts of ale on Saturday afternoons. The only surprise about this is that nobody seems to be claiming ownership of it now.
Echoing the Globe and the Blackfriars of long ago, the new theatre has a thrust stage with audience on three sides. The side seats run back to meet the surviving stone proscenium of the old theatre; there are some metres of depth behind this arch, but that area will be difficult to use since it is at a right angle to the view of most people at the sides. The space is impressive, not very flexible, potent and just like the Swan. No, it’s bigger, with 1,040 seats where the Swan has 430 and the old theatre had about 1,300: the most distant of them is 15 metres away from the stage, a fraction of what it was before. The philosophy is clear: only thrust stages such as this or the Swan will do for Shakespeare – or indeed anything else the RSC choose to do for the next few generations, from Restoration comedy to Lucy Prebble, that is thought too big for the Other Place up the road. Some see this as right and proper, some as a pity. I don’t know how it will feel to play on the new stage – early reports are mixed – but it is certainly impossible for an actor to step out of the wings of the Swan without getting a warm blast of history, a sure and sudden knowledge of what it would have been like to start a performance on a Jacobean stage.
At the unveiling ceremony for the new theatre everyone was thinking their own thoughts; sponsors loudly reassuring themselves (especially about the acoustics, though they hadn’t yet been tried); actors and directors sniffing at it like cats entering a new room and wondering, wondering; set designers thinking they might be out of a job; instinctive rebels finding it not funky enough or sufficiently like Peter Brook’s Bouffes du Nord in Paris. Or whatever. The best moment was when Antony Sher stood alone on the stage and did Prospero’s speech of farewell from The Tempest, with simplicity, passion and grace. It might have seemed an odd choice, a farewell speech to open a theatre, but it’s a piece that gets done at Shakespeare celebrations. It dissolved all the arguments, proving that in the end all that matters is that an actor unencumbered by anything but the text and able to command attention with eyes and voice will always bring Shakespeare to life. No, ‘bring’ implies effort: Shakespeare leaps out of such an actor like a salmon. And of course it would have been the same wherever he was, in a football stadium or in your sitting room.
So the new theatre bears assertive witness to the current passion for thrust stages, which certainly bring the audience into closer contact with the players – some of them, some of the time. It will serve very well for plays which open with some Chorus figure striding on and inviting us to use our imagination, but it will be tricky to do a scene – in a gentlemen’s club say, or an old folks’ home – in which people are randomly sitting around and don’t feel much like moving. For almost anywhere you stand on such a platform, some spectators cannot see your face; if a proscenium presents traditional visibility problems, then the thrust multiplies them by three. Staging has to be extremely careful, indeed pedantic: where you stand in relation to your colleague is critical, since the two of you must ideally be in line with one of the diagonal downstage exit corridors, and any variation in your position or theirs obstructs some member of the public’s view. The rule when you’re not on such a diagonal is to keep moving, keep changing the angle, even if the play doesn’t need or benefit from it: stillness has to be very selective. There is a science to all this, but since it is determined by the architecture not the play, it is not a very creative one. But then you could say that was ever the case; and certainly the added intimacy justifies a lot.
The argument also runs that you can hear the actors better. Not so: thrust stages take far more vocal energy than is generally imagined. If the actor has his back to the audience, as indeed he always partly has, he has to send his lines over his head, somewhat in the manner of a soccer player doing an overhead kick. This has led some senior members of the profession to fret about whether young performers, minimally trained in the classics and mistaking the audience’s proximity for intimacy, will be able to speak strongly and clearly enough. Leaving aside the Oedipal snobbery of this – patronage of one end of the profession by the other is only a way of reminding them that we’re still here – it’s not so much of a problem. What’s to fear? Today’s young actors, who, whatever you may have been told, have an aspiration for classical work identical with ours, are an inspiring group – passionately engaged, resourceful, extremely talented and hard-working – in whose hands the future can confidently be left. Those of them who go to Stratford will overcome any difficulties they find because they have no choice: £112 million is unlikely to be spent more than once in a lifetime, so this is, for the moment, emphatically it. Not even the baby born today will see a Shakespeare play in Stratford except on a thrust stage or, once it reopens, the small room of The Other Place.
At the National Theatre in London Rory Kinnear has been having a deserved triumph as Hamlet. Every phrase that comes out of his mouth has been considered; he speaks as if Shakespearian verse is his natural means; his control of the house is complete. There is no actorly flourish, no vibrato. And he’s been doing it in a theatre they said such a thing couldn’t be done in: the Olivier, our own 1,160-seat indoor Epidaurus without its magic acoustic.
Much of Kinnear’s career has been closely associated with the National, in which he has played each auditorium; no doubt he will now go into the Cottesloe again and concentrate the energy necessary for the Olivier into a whisper. This is a really important interchange for a modern stage actor. When an experienced player works in a small space, behind the performance, available but used sparingly, is the banked-up knowledge and power learned in the big ones. You know it’s there, withheld till it’s needed. Likewise, some of the credit for the current good health of our theatre is due to the fact that many of its actors have by now done a lot of film work: this is very good for a classical performer, concentrating the attention and taking the wind out of any rhetorical habit. If you spend months in front of a camera which ruthlessly picks up every half-truth or unclear emotion, you will certainly return to the theatre stronger in artistic authority – not to mention prestige and credibility with a non-theatre audience.
At the same time Shakespeare has himself become feasible for cinema investment and – even in its current philistine phase – for television. This has much to do with Baz Luhrmann’s brilliant William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet and the Shakespeare films of Kenneth Branagh, Olivier’s successor in this field. The RSC’s recent Hamlet with David Tennant transferred without effort from stage to television and achieved high viewing figures. Its modernism was a relief: the presence of CCTV cameras all over the Court of Elsinore neatly obviated the necessity for Claudius and Polonius to be forever hunching behind curtains to eavesdrop, and, obeying a hoary old tradition, inadvertently wiggling the curtain at a certain moment so that Hamlet might see he is being observed as he talks to Ophelia. Trevor Nunn’s filmed Macbeth from 1978 has been followed by Rupert Goold’s of 2010 – also a brilliant treatment, but significantly different, in that whereas the first removed literal context and drew you deep into the characters’ minds, the latter set the play in a field hospital and resolved its second half into an impermeable image of totalitarian rule – Stalin, Pol Pot, Mugabe. There will be a big audience for such a version, intrigued and attracted to the play as never before. There will also be those who believe that the treatment closes it down, neutralising Shakespeare’s diabolical trick of giving the devil more than his due – in this case making you feel sympathy for the Macbeths even in their brutal decline. For one audience the sight of Lady Macbeth dead on a hospital trolley and Macbeth throwing the sheet back over her face in ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ connects them potently with the Shakespeare who creates contemporary images: another will always remember Ian McKellen saying to Judi Dench after the banquet ‘We are yet but young in deed’ and the peculiarly sympathetic jolt it gave to the heart.
So obviously, if Shakespeare believed, like Juliet’s Nurse, that ‘death’s the end of all’, he couldn’t have been more wrong. Like stubborn roots, the plays have survived, despite the sense of conspiracy between the man, apparently in permanent flight from being known, and fate, many times almost granting him his wish. Mortality was first defied when the 1613 fire at the Globe failed to spread to where all the playscripts were kept, thus depriving Shakespeare of lasting anonymity. Then the far-sighted Heminges and Condell denied him it again: incensed by the ‘injurious imposters’ who had published bootleg versions of the plays, they presented them all, in the Folio of 1623, ‘cured and perfect in their limbs’. Around half the canon would not have survived if they hadn’t, including Macbeth, Twelfth Night and The Tempest, since they hadn’t been published separately. We may marvel at the pitifully abbreviated forms in which the plays then leaked out for the best part of a century – The Gravemakers (Hamlet Act Five Scene One only), The Bouncing Knight (a bit of Henry IV Part One) and The Merry Conceited Humours of Bottom the Weaver – but they kept the engine ticking over. The fact that David Garrick too was a wicked editor of the texts – Romeo and Juliet get a touching brief reunion and Laertes and Horatio survive to run Denmark – is less important than the gesture of respect symbolised by his Jubilee. William Macready and Samuel Phelps as actor-managers restored the primacy of the full texts in the Victorian period, though they were themselves upstaged as actors by the clearly extraordinary Edmund Kean, who made you feel, according to Coleridge, that you were reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.
All these actors worked in big, demonstrative proscenium theatres. If it wasn’t for the radical William Poel in England in the late 1890s and Ben Iden Payne in the US doing fluent, text-faithful versions of the plays on replicas of the Globe stage (an idea more showily developed by Harley Granville Barker in his Savoy season just before the first War), we might have gone on assuming that the bombast and pictorialism we associate with Henry Irving’s Lyceum or Beerbohm Tree’s Her Majesty’s was Shakespeare’s natural manner. Then there was Lilian Baylis’s Old Vic, John Gielgud, Olivier’s wartime seasons at the New Theatre, the founding of the RSC, and all that followed. 2012 will see London’s strangely named Cultural Olympiad (it sounds like a trial of physical strength) featuring live Shakespeare all over the place: he is the man we still turn to when celebrating ourselves. Already you can see him in every shape and size: making money in the West End of London in the hands of commercial stars who started their careers in the classics; in arenas and rooms, conceptualised to within an inch of his life; or simplicity itself in the open air in Regent’s Park or in recreations of the Globe in Tokyo, the gardens of the Villa Borghese in Rome, or on its original site in Southwark. The latter theatre promises all thirty-seven plays in thirty-seven different languages for next year, and the RSC a World Shakespeare Festival along similar lines.
So whether he likes it or not, we continue to do Shakespeare proud. We drag him into our world – or in my case cart him around in a suitcase – wondering what he would think of the global recession, the Arab Spring, the London riots, of Fukushima, of the internet: he’d have had plenty to say about them, but it would all be concealed in a play set in Illyria. Shakespeare books keep bucketing out each year, their focus increasingly biographical and human, as if well-researched minutiae – a signature on a document here, a brush with the law there – were a better way of getting close than the texts and his contemporaries’ adulation. Gratifyingly, practice rather than literary criticism is regarded as the norm, pretty much. I doubt if it would have been possible, when I began working, for me to write books about Shakespeare and expect them to be read by scholars; but now the academics have come over, and the old intellectual suspicion of spit and sawdust has almost completely evaporated. In academe, an actor is more likely to be quizzed about a certain gesture done in a production twenty years ago than lectured about feminine endings or the ur-Hamlet. One professor admitted to me that he devoutly touched an RSC poster hanging framed on the wall on his way into work each morning. I was particularly glad to hear which one it was that he chose.
Such are the consolations and the cues for hope as we, and more essential services, struggle financially with the kind of violent pruning you wouldn’t do to the sturdiest rose tree. At the time of writing, arts organisations in the UK are attempting to recover from a savage round of cuts forced on the Arts Council by a government who sometimes give the impression of moving though an alphabetical list of national enterprises to hack them down in turn – C for Culture, E for Education, H for Health, P for Pensions. The language applied is in my memory uniquely cynical: the word ‘progressive’ is often used in a sense exactly opposite to its meaning, and the catchphrase ‘We’re all in it together’ is likewise diametrically opposed to the obvious truth. The worst thing we can do in the arts is to bleat or even remotely to suggest that we are a special case or comparable in importance to the Health Service or Education: it takes very little to turn the British public against ‘whingeing luvvies’. There are many ways of falling on your sword, and one is for high-profile practitioners to denounce the government as fools and philistines. They may be knaves but they are not fools and perhaps not philistines: they are conducting an ideological battle with a high degree of cunning and mendacity. They know the argument about the arts as an investment but it doesn’t mean enough to them; they also have a sneaking regard for arts campaigning at its best since we tend to use language well, to see an argument in the round, and we are plausible – so we’re in with half a chance. By far the most intelligent responses so far have been those that ask (tongue moving to cheek) for confirmation that the money we sacrifice now will be restored to us when the government has successfully balanced its books.
By the time this book is published, this will be old news, but it is safe to assume that many smaller organisations will be going to the wall, while the Royal Opera House, with its unique ability to raise private funding, will be continuing to pay its executive vast salaries partly out of the public purse. When Menenius proposed the allegory of the body in Coriolanus, whereby the stomach (the body politic) is kept healthy by its capillary system (the people), he was trying to pull a conservative fast one. However, even he would have blanched at the current Prime Minister’s direct attack on the Civil Service, his own most immediate capillary system. Perhaps the idea, with a slight adjustment, could be interpreted more genially: there are all sorts of stomachs and many feeds. Certainly our artistic health will rapidly decline if it ceases to be fed by the many small companies that nourish the talent that will one day run the National Theatre. Good old Shakespeare: a simple metaphor with many uses.
In his beautiful memoir of his family My Father’s Fortune, Michael Frayn talks about the half-lovable, half-embarrassing locutions of his father. ‘Hotchamachacha,’ he’d cry, to hint at a mysterious secret, to his family’s bafflement. Well, my father used to call Shakespeare Wobbledagger, and did so as a matter of paternal joshing with the same relish as he wilfully mispronounced rock ’n’ roll as if there were one apostrophe only, after the letter ‘n’, and it was thus pronounced rocknerroll rather than rockuhnroll. It drove me crazy. But like Frayn Senior he was only exercising the privilege of translation into his own language, just as the Russians used to render Shakespeare’s name by yoking together the Russian words for ‘shake’ and ‘spear’.
Fathers are cunning creatures, and mine was a lawyer to boot. I assumed he was also trying to annoy me when he said that he detested Twelfth Night above all plays. Actually it was a love-test: he was making me defend a pro-Shakespeare position I had embraced somewhat hysterically. And even then I understood his feeling about Twelfth Night quite well: if you’ve a mind to, you can find as many chronic irritations in it as in most of the plays. For one thing, the fact that once found, a good joke is sure to be repeated. In Act Three Andrew Aguecheek has a very funny coward’s duel with Viola/Cesario. Then he mistakenly pursues Viola’s twin Sebastian, challenges him as well, and gets beaten up. The only purpose of this second duel is so that Olivia shall hear the disturbance, enter and come face to face with Sebastian and fall in love with him. Also, it’s not funny – Sebastian is highly capable of looking after himself, the mechanism is obvious and the harmless Aguecheek ends up with a broken head.
I have to admit that the fun people have in Shakespeare is usually at someone else’s expense. This same Act Four of Twelfth Night was enough to provoke my then nine-year-old granddaughter, already incensed by the cruelty of Malvolio’s being eavesdropped on as he finds Olivia’s supposed letter, to distress at Aguecheek’s misfortune; then to outrage that Olivia should so easily switch her affections from Cesario, whom she now sees is Viola, to the twin brother Sebastian. According to her, Olivia was guided only by how the twins looked, not the kind of people they were inside. It was the sort of response that makes one hopeful not only for the theatre but for the future of the world.
And apart from Twelfth Night, what about Shakespeare’s interminable Act Fours in general, when the accelerating action stops either for plot conveniences or for a series of parleys before the battle? Or the dirty jokes, so often about that great comedy in life, the Sexually Transmitted Disease? Here, Shakespeare approaches the infantile humour of Mozart, wandering off into innuendo (a word he would have made a good innuendo from) at the slightest provocation. Even when the joke is clean, he will over-explain. The Gravedigger, apparently not knowing who he’s speaking to, refers to Hamlet as being
mad, and sent into England.
HAMLET: Ay, marry, why was he sent into England?
GRAVEDIGGER: Why, because he was mad; he shall recover his wits there; or if he do not, ’tis no great matter there.
A good laugh, with a classic build to the punchline. But then Hamlet has an uncharacteristic fit of obtuseness, so the whole thing has to be explained:
HAMLET: Why?
GRAVEDIGGER: ’Twill not be seen in him there; there the men are as mad as he
– and there goes the laugh, rolling gently away like tumbleweed, Hamlet reduced to a feed and the audience treated like idiots. Other good sources of comedy are race, national stereotypes and gender. The heroine of The Merchant of Venice shudders at the thought of being married to a black man; much of the fun for Katherine in Henry V is that she pronounces English words so that they sound dirty. Mercutio’s stream of filth directed at the Nurse is meant to be funny but is quite offensive.
And more seriously, what about Hamlet’s madness, the central fraud in a great play? All the characters talk about it; he himself promises a performance of it after meeting the Ghost; but, apart from a handful of grotesqueries, he talks nothing but searing good sense at all times. The court is intelligent: do they think Hamlet’s snidery about them is a form of insanity? I think not: Claudius, Polonius, Gertrude and the rest speak in the same way as Hamlet, only less well and guided by different priorities. And this is in a play in which Shakespeare got to the truth of real madness with Ophelia, who is moving exactly to the degree that her confusion is punctured by moments of clear, heartbroken vision.
And what about that question that won’t quite go away – the Macbeths’ children? The lack of them is crucial to the matter of succession in the play: but Lady Macbeth says she has been a mother and would have refused to suckle her baby if she had known the father would go back on his word as Macbeth has done. There’s no further information, but whoever is playing Macbeth is surely going to have to react to this in one way or another. Perhaps it’s a surprise – a child before she knew him or a painful memory of a dead one of their own – but he can’t just do nothing, and a few lines later he admiringly urges her to ‘bring forth men-children only’. It all sounds like a Shakespearian slip to me.
The plays’ openings are very variable in quality. Why make conventional use of an introductory Chorus in Romeo and Juliet to tell you, for some reason, the story’s outcome? Or, in The Taming of the Shrew, to do a tiresome two-scene Induction in which a drunken tinker is persuaded he is really a Lord and settles down to watch the play – a framing device suggesting the show itself might not be interesting enough? And there are a handful of stinkers: it’s almost impossible to get your bearings at the start of Cymbeline, where the sixty-five lines of confusing backstory –
Howsoe’er ’tis strange…
Yet it is true, sir
– are as labyrinthine as the play’s denouements at the other end.
The same with the endings. Every beautiful modulation such as Love’s Labour’s Lost or A Midsummer Night’s Dream is balanced by a Merry Wives or a Coriolanus, when you feel Shakespeare hurriedly donning his overcoat:
AUFIDIUS: Though in this city he
Hath widow’d and unchilded many a one,
Yet he shall have a noble memory.
Assist.
Others close with remorse or threats of punishment quickly pronounced, whereupon everyone is bidden inside for more talk of this and that, since at that time they had to get off a stage lit by daylight without technical help. The unseemly haste sometimes starts ten minutes or so before the end, as if a warning bell were ringing. The wicked Duke Frederick’s conversion in As You Like It is ridiculous; and so is Much Ado’s limp coda in which it’s announced that the wicked Don John has been captured in flight and Benedick promises to ‘devise… brave punishments’ for him – the only result of which is to remind us of a character we’d happily forgotten. Throughout Shakespeare there are bits of plot forever overlooked, contradictory information, blithe authorial incompleteness.
My rallies with my provocateur father certainly left me with a healthy dash of scepticism about sweet William to go with all the other feelings. On the other hand, I tell him (rising to my feet in defence), don’t talk to me about Hamlet. For one thing, it has one of the greatest opening scenes ever written (though it’s not often played very well). Shakespeare has a real gift for this when he tries – the caught breath, the panicky interruptions, the terror of any movement in the surrounding dark. Elsewhere, he will thrust you into the action in mid-dialogue as one character tries to shut another up –
Cease to persuade, my loving Proteus
– says one gentleman of Verona, intent on travelling, to the other;
Sir Hugh, persuade me not
– says Shallow, determined to prosecute Falstaff at the start of The Merry Wives;
Tush, never tell me
– says the offended Roderigo, determined to have no more of Iago’s blandishments. In each case you are in the action in a moment, in the middle of an argument, finding out about the characters on the hoof.
And then there are all the great moments. His madness may be a bit of a problem, but Shakespeare also sensed that Hamlet would be infinitely moving if, suspecting that the climactic duel is rigged, his main thought would be to shelter his friend Horatio from the possibility rather than to cancel the entertainment:
If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come… Let be.
And what about Beatrice running ‘like a lapwing’ close to the ground to eavesdrop, or Rosalind’s irresistible blend of passion and humour:
O coz coz coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love! But it cannot be sounded; my affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal…
Or Shakespeare’s sense with Ulysses in Troilus that a skilled politician can be a master of beautiful metaphor as well. Or his knowledge that Richard II would surely need to call for a mirror during his deposition – not to admire himself but to check his identity now that he is neither king nor commoner, halfway between God and the assassin’s knife. How did he see beyond the racial stereotype for Shylock (and, I admit, then shorten his vision again for the standard stage Jew, Tubal, in the same play)? When Charmian kills herself in Antony and Cleopatra, moments after Cleopatra, she says just as she dies:
Ah, soldier!
What does she mean? It’s a brilliant mystery. Perhaps she sees the blurred figure of the soldier in attendance, and it suddenly reminds her of Antony, whose death has led to hers and her mistress’s? What special knowledge lies behind Edgar’s last speech in Lear? What about the dramatic effrontery of a Gravedigger joking about a skull with a Prince in disguise and the skull turning out to be the Prince’s old friend’s and the grave his lover’s? Or a man falling forward from his knees to the ground thinking he’s plunged headlong onto Dover Beach? Or another wearing yellow stockings and cross-garters instead of butler’s livery? And haven’t you sometimes felt a line of verse, from almost any character, arching away like a great elegant bridge over your half-achieved ideas and unexpressed feelings: a bridge that, now you see it, you always knew was there, simple and complete?
Then what about the buoyancy and good humour, the sheer neighbourliness of some of the jokes?What kind of inspired flourish, in Henry IV Part Two, not only brings the figure of Rumour onto the stage, but has him ‘painted with tongues’? How is Shakespeare able to think so symphonically that he can construct hypnotic set pieces the length of a scene, its subject turning and turning in the light, theme growing out of theme? Take Act Two Scene Four of Twelfth Night, when Feste’s singing creates a confrontation between Orsino and Viola/Cesario that almost blows the play’s main secret (disguise), and set it beside Act Two Scene Seven of As You Like It, in the course of which Jaques does the Seven Ages of Man, another bitter song is sung and Orlando is shown unexpected kindness by the Banished Duke. In both, you see breathtaking stratifications of character and mood, their waves folding and tumbling over each other. And why, to sum up personally, whenever I’ve been offered a Shakespeare part that’s been on my wishlist, have I walked the floor all night talking to myself, suddenly alive with ideas about an old play strangely eloquent in the twenty-first century? Or why, in playing it, does my head buzz throughout with memories, comparisons, parallels, random emotions and thoughts, none of which I can remember when I’m through? The other day someone suggested a certain line of poetry might be by Shakespeare but I knew it wasn’t because I’d have recognised something about it if it was, something to do with its swoop and surge, its simultaneous abandon and intellectual aptness.
Also, you use Wobbledagger every day, for one thing when you criticise someone: quite useful for a barrister. Shakespeare saw that the best kind of invective is onomatopoeic as much as accurate – so Kent in King Lear calls Oswald:
A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats, a base, proud, shallow, beggarly three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted stocking knave, a lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson glass-gazing, super-serviceable, finical rogue, one trunkinherited slave, one that would be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch.
This is Shakespeare as Lewis Carroll: he would surely have loved the Jabberwocky. In fact most of his best comedy lies not in the situations, which amount to a small handful (mistaken identity leading the field), but in this rolling thunder of language itself, its fantastic twists and foibles. Together with Chaucer, he invented much of it himself. Why? Because English wasn’t good enough for him yet, simply wouldn’t go as far as he could. Mining esoteric words was not enough – he made a lot up, to our continuing amazement. If I said to an acting colleague:
O Lord, it’s horrid, I’ve slept not one wink. It’s all Greek to me. The naked truth is that I always get short shrift from that lonely well-read critic, knitting his brows with green-eyed jealousy, that stony-hearted villain, that bloody-minded blinking idiot; he sets my teeth on edge. I wish he was as dead as a doornail: I’m a laughing stock. The game is up, vanished into thin air, at one fell swoop. I want fair play, that’s the long and the short of it.
– and they answered:
What the dickens? If the truth were known, he laughed himself into stitches. You’re more sinned against than sinning; but to give the devil his due he’s writing more in sorrow than in anger, and we’re all flesh and blood. He’s not the devil incarnate; tut tut, don’t get in a pickle.
– whereupon I signed off:
By Jove, cold comfort. I suspect foul play. But be that as it may, it’s all one to me.
– we’d have been using, apart from the little links, only words and phrases invented by Shakespeare.
He might be surprised by this but I doubt if he’d be impressed. He seems to have been so uninterested in posterity that he didn’t hesitate to incorporate the day’s news into a scene if he thought he could get a laugh from it. And then, presumably, take it out again. In the trade we view such moments with a mixture of interest and dismay. Though he retreated into classical alibis on big matters, Shakespeare’s references to small current events are unabashed. When in Twelfth Night, Fabian warns Andrew Aguecheek that unless he takes care he will
hang like an icicle on a Dutchman’s beard
– the reference is to the recently reported hardships of William Barents’s expedition to the Arctic: we don’t understand it but its exuberance is such that we wouldn’t want to cut it. Barely concealed too is the sour comment, boldly put into the mouth of Hamlet, on the boy players (‘little eyases’) who were occupying the Blackfriars Theatre when Shakespeare’s company should have been there; also the Danish Gravedigger in the same play sending his mate to get him a drink at the pub near to the Globe Theatre (‘get thee to Yaughan’). It’s an odd effect. If, as happened in the last World Cup, a goalkeeper’s error cost England victory against the USA, there it would be, in a story set in Ancient Rome perhaps:
Thou art as fickle, sure
As are the nerveless hands of England’s guard.
Sure enough, in 2410 some future Professor Stanley Wells will feel the penny drop – wasn’t there a big football tournament that year…? And not only that, but wasn’t the name of the erring goalie, Robert Green, the same as that of the man who attacked the ‘upstart crow’ Shakespeare when he first arrived in London in 1592?
Brian Friel once wrote a play, Afterplay, in which two Chekhov characters, Andrei from Three Sisters and Sonia from Uncle Vanya, meet twenty years later in a Moscow café. Then again, an eminent Shakespearian of my acquaintance used to play a game on honeymoon with his new bride, also a distinguished expert in the field. They would say, perhaps at any hour of the day or night: What would happen if, say, Mercutio met Cleopatra? What would they talk about? Or if Juliet bumped into Launcelot Gobbo? Or Falstaff had to spend the evening with Titus Andronicus?
The Chekhov characters of course would have a good deal in common: since the author died, the large fact of the Russian Revolution had formed a portal for any number of people, fictional or real, to go jostling through together. The equivalent doorway in Shakespeare is not an historical event but the peculiar nature of the writer himself, the kinship which, for all his fabulous range, he allows his characters to share. If the Helena of All’s Well met her namesake from the Dream the talk would surely be of stalking tactics; Hamlet would declare that ‘the readiness’ and Edgar that ‘ripeness’ was ‘all’. I once idly sketched out a scene, all in Shakespeare’s lines, in which three of his great braggarts – Parolles in All’s Well, Pistol in Henry IV and Henry V and Lucio in Measure for Measure – met in a bar. There would be an immediate and skilful battle to avoid standing the drinks (‘base is the slave that pays’); Pistol would chase a passing strumpet (‘I will discharge upon her with two bullets’), then pick a fight with Parolles and fall downstairs while Parolles and Lucio agreed on his epitaph:
LUCIO: A very superficial, ignorant, unweighing fellow.
PAROLLES: In his sleep he does little harm, save to his bedclothes about him; but they know his conditions and lay him in straw.
Though it has a high element of silliness, there was something instructive in this. None of my three braggarts – Shakespearian virtuosi washed in sourer currents – are in the sources Shakespeare used for their plays; and interestingly, all three operate in stories in which the authority figures are hard to like. In the end they no doubt deserve their various fates, but you feel a little sorry for them. Lucio is made to marry a whore, largely for being impertinent to the disguised Duke. Parolles is captured by his fellow soldiers, infuriated by his boastfulness; pretending to be Russian enemies they extract crucial military secrets from him with no trouble at all, and he ends the play seeing he doesn’t add up to much as a man. Pistol too overplays his hand by making fun of a Welshman on St David’s Day; Fluellen beats him into eating a raw leek. See how Shakespeare takes leave of two of them:
PAROLLES: Yet am I thankful; if my heart were great,
’Twould burst at this. Captain I’ll be no more;
But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft
As captain shall; simply the thing I am
Shall make me live…
Rust, sword! Cool, blushes! and Parolles, live
Safest in shame! Being fool’d, by foolery thrive!
There’s place and means for every man alive.
PISTOL: Doth Fortune play the huswife with me now?
News have I that my Nell is dead i’ the spital
Of malady of France;
And there my rendezvous is quite cut off.
Old I do wax, and from my weary limbs
Honour is cudgell’d. Well, bawd I’ll turn,
And something lean to cutpurse of quick hand.
To England will I steal, and there I’ll steal;
And patches will I get unto these scars
And swear I got them in the Gallia wars.
The same rhythms, the same defiance, the same lack of self-pity: they sound like cousins. But then so in a way do all Shakespeare’s people, whether they operate in the pub, the blasted heath or the exotic East. Diverse as he was, all his characters share his gifts and his blood group; either all or none of them speak for him.
The idea of meeting Shakespeare seems something like meeting God, but more humorous. Meanwhile, we remain tantalised, infernally curious about him – as if anything new we learned about its author could leave us any the wiser about Antony and Cleopatra. It is certainly quite hard to understand a writer so self-effacing, to whom the autobiographical assumptions we generally make about artists are so inapplicable. We end up poking around in his back yard, like the man who plundered Bob Dylan’s garbage in the hope of finding clues to Highway 61 Revisited. The occasional, probably apocryphal story of Shakespeare in his daily world is welcome and endearing: his quiet refusal to join a group, but also the trick he supposedly pulled on Richard Burbage by intercepting a billetdoux from a female admirer of Burbage’s Richard III one afternoon. He took advantage of it himself, afterwards calling from the lady’s window to the late-arriving Burbage that, after all, William the Conqueror preceded Richard III. I like to think he did a good imitation of Burbage’s Hunchback to pull this trick, and so wasn’t such a bad actor.
Anyway, I do know what he was like. Last year I worked on a performed version of the Sonnets with Peter Brook. Forgiven for playing fast and loose with the plays, you can still be ticked off by biographers for reading too much into these poems, for thinking they are any more than another Shakespearian fiction. But they’re written in the first person and nobody else speaks; a rival who turns up at one point is established as another professional writer; the running cast list of three remains unchanged throughout a cycle perhaps written across twenty years – curious. The poet must surely have been some version of Shakespeare: dark and obsessive, awkwardly intelligent even when he’d prefer not to be, and a bit sorry for himself; begging for ordinary love, feeling denied of it, finding it wasn’t what he expected, wanting to be free of it, being momentarily reassured, separated from himself as well as more himself because of it, resigned to its helplessness. And life being short, he will sometimes have gazed in dismay from his bed like Philip Larkin in Aubade –
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare
– and heard a single blackbird begin the dawn chorus with the same relief as Marcellus feels on hearing the cock crow in Hamlet. I fancy Shakespeare then jumps out of bed, straps on his sword, steps out onto Bankside and goes to work. Moving through the crowd, I can hear the timbre of his voice and note his body language: how fast he tends to walk, his turns of phrase and characteristic moues, and I can sense whether his smile is sudden or slow, what sort of thing makes him laugh and in what way.
That’s my fiction, telling you more about me than Shakespeare perhaps. What we do know is that everyone was shorter then, with bad teeth, in constant danger of plague, and you might not always recognise the spoken language as English. Shakespeare had grown up in a market town where everyone knew their neighbour’s business, where you could be placed in the stocks for being disrespectful about an official, where you couldn’t have guests from elsewhere without the Mayor agreeing, where woolly caps had to be worn on a Sunday. Now he is a Londoner, and invisible if he wants to be, in the third largest city in Europe and perhaps the most hectic; where everyone kisses on greeting and on taking leave, as we are now learning to do again. Half of the population are under twenty. If a beggar returns to the city after being expelled he can be executed. The severed heads, tongues and hands that Shakespeare initially put into his plays (until he found he could do it better in words) were no surprise to crowds used to watching public mutilations and executions. It was all like the London of Shakespeare in Love but filthier, smelly, degraded and verminous; however, to judge from the Rose Theatre discoveries and still more from the sensational Cheapside Hoard unearthed in 1912, the jewellery and ornaments, watches and scent bottles that emerged from this swamp were, like the poetry of Shakespeare, of an unparalleled delicacy and beauty.
The difficulty of writing a concluding chapter to a book about Shakespeare is that the book refuses to close: you make your report and hope not to change your mind before publication. The subject is so especially volatile that all sorts of new ideas continually arise; in the practice too, you quite regularly change your opinion about how to handle the verse, about modern or traditional dress, and have routine periods of doubt as to whether he really was that good. For instance, I’ve changed my mind about Hamlet. I used to think that anyone of sufficient expertise could play it, that it adapted to the individual actor as Gielgud said it did; but now I believe it needs a particular kind of performer, one who justifies Ophelia’s description of him, one with the rare gift for being simultaneously one of us and an archetype. Such an actor can readily combine the two kinds of twenty-first-century Hamlet – the sardonic ironist you can appreciate from a distance, cleverer and sharper and more impossibly fluent than ourselves; and the highly approachable one, whose character you can define only by saying that it’s not unlike your own and yes, you would do and say much as he does.
It’s also in the nature of the theatre that the beliefs you have held for years can be blown away in a couple of hours. Marianne Elliott’s brilliant production set in Cuba at last reconciled me completely to Much Ado. Earlier in this book I wrote about The Tempest, and I stand by what I said, certainly: it is indeed what I think you encounter as you face up to the play. But Declan Donnellan’s recent production was done with the Russian actors he has been working with from time to time for some years. It is riotously and dexterously funny (who would have thought you’d look forward to Stephano’s and Trinculo’s next appearance?); much of its comedy is, as befits the play, very wet; Prospero is a bitter fellow with nothing of the magus about him, though when he finally dons his double-breasted suit to return to Milan (Moscow) he suddenly looks the most impressive mafioso on the stage. There are a number of Ariels, including one who plays each of the logs carried around by Ferdinand. The whole enterprise is suffused with a palpable affection between director and cast; Russian inventiveness (which can be infinite) is given the gentlest Western discipline. And best of all perhaps, when the company finally leave the island, Miranda briefly races back and embraces Caliban, the creature who wanted to rape her; for in the end she has more in common with him than with the suits she is leaving with, who will neutralise her natural impulses as quickly as the Christians absorb the Jewish Jessica in The Merchant of Venice. I never once thought about Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage, the Bermudas, all the symbolism and masque: the play, a free-standing act of the imagination, reinvented itself in front of me. I haven’t changed my chapter: for one thing the Russians, working easily in Boris Pasternak’s translation, don’t have to worry about how to speak the sometimes archaic verse. But I might write differently about it next time.
In ways like this, Shakespeare just keeps on rolling, as he will long after us. He brings us together, with each other and ourselves. I used to think this about him. Now I think that. Soon I will think otherwise. Then I die. That’s the state I’m in. Renault and Levi have used him to advertise new cars and 501 jeans. Billboard images of Juliet are constantly asking wherefore Romeo art, perhaps thinking they’re referring to his whereabouts. Guests on Desert Island Discs are given the complete works to take with them whether they like it or not. His words have been coopted by politicians of every complexion – a desperate measure, since he never expresses an opinion of his own. The M40 motorway announces Warwickshire as Shakespeare’s County: television and the newspapers quote from him, knowingly or not, most days.
He also remains, despite the financial plight of Eastern Europe, an attractive sponsorship option, so Hungary has a thriving international Shakespeare Festival, as does Craiova in Romania, while the British Council in Bucharest found it worth their while last year to bring me to a remote town in the north of the country to do a week of workshops on Hamlet. I don’t know if this says something wonderful about the world or something stupid. Next month Sweet William goes to Stockholm, and I wonder what surprises that will bring. I shan’t need the surtitles in Sweden though, and I think the billboards will be right, unlike the ones at another European venue which announced the show as Noble Shakespeare with William Pennington.
I’ve heard this noble Shakespeare described as not a writer but a landscape, part of most people’s lives. Not so: to most people his words must seem as irrelevant as those of some visiting statesman. We say he’s universal, but really that’s a figure of speech: to a large part of the world he is as unlikely as a square meal. We say he is the great humanist, but he isn’t really that either: injustice is rampant in the plays and dozens of characters go to undeserved deaths for theatrical effect without a trace of authorial regret. But in any community with the leisure or determination to clear a space in its midst for storytelling, Shakespeare, an ordinary man and not really an intellectual, reminds us of what matters and what doesn’t. We still don’t know a single one of his opinions, but we often quote from him without realising we’re doing it, to make our own more persuasive. And he makes us all talented – there are moments when we can feel ourselves on the brink, just the brink, of seeing what he saw as he pounded the fields to Charlecote, weaved his way along Bankside or looked up from his desk in Stratford to see the mulberry tree he had planted in his garden at New Place. It seems that wherever you are, Shakespeare is very good for the health, and not just the individual health. To read him to yourself or think about him alone is certainly one of life’s enrichments. But ideally, it’s only a preparation for an increasingly unlikely civic act. You have to go out if you can, arrive somewhere at a certain time, negotiate a little with your fellow citizens, and become part of the process whereby a hundred, five hundred, a thousand people of completely different sensibilities, experiences of life and senses of humour become that singular organism, an audience, all held on the same breath as Hamlet approaches the praying Claudius with his sword upraised or as young Flute as Thisbe finds his form. On a good night you leave the high music and astonishing simplicities, the insinuation, protest and reconciliation, in an exhilarated state – alive, hugely entertained, ready for more healthy argument, more tolerant, less easily deceived: and maybe ready to go home and, like me all those years ago, pull out a copy of Macbeth and try out a couple of speeches. And as for me, you know what I feel by now: this is a man who’s got in everywhere in my life. Which is perhaps what Victor Hugo meant when he said:
He strides over proprieties, he overthrows Aristotle… He does not keep Lent. He overflows like vegetation, like germination, like light, like flame.
Or as the great movie producer Sam Goldwyn once put it, no less eloquently:
Fantastic! And it was all written with a feather!
Michael Pennington’s solo show Sweet William: My Life with Shakespeare is available on DVD
‘The incomparable Michael Pennington has done Sweet William proud.’ Quentin Letts, Daily Mail
‘In his brilliant one-man show Michael Pennington combines his performance skills with textual scholarship and practical knowledge to give us as well rounded a portrait of Shakespeare as you could hope for.’ Michael Billington, Guardian
‘A large spirited salute to Shakespeare’s “unprecedented, ungovernable talent” by a major actor… grace and incisiveness… such a delight.’ Benedict Nightingale, The Times
‘You are mesmerised… He is steeped in Shakespearian knowledge, and he shares it with you with the modest generosity of a drinking partner. If I wasn’t already a Shakespeare junkie, Pennington would have made me one.’ John Peter, Sunday Times
The multi-region DVD is available from the National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company bookshops, and from Amazon.