1
The producer should be aware of the play’s metaphysical core; that is, of its wholeness. He must not consider Hamlet and Macbeth as merely good stories with occasional ‘dramatic situations’; no modern producer would blunder like that with a Galsworthy play. Close intellectual interpretation must come first, and interpretation involves numerous subtleties.1 But the closest attention to details, unless also vitalized by a sense of some unifying idea, will prove fruitless. Macbeth must be seen first as a conflict of life-forces and death-forces; and not until this, or some other general principle of similar status, is grasped, can surface details find their proper places. I have heard Othello called a poetic melodrama without modern meaning or any universal reference. That is the current academic view of it; certainly it is usually produced as such. But it is utterly wrong. The theme of Othello is as human and universal as can be. Desdemona is the eternal principle of romantic value; Iago, the insistent demon of denial. Othello, like each of us, is caught between these. Iago is devilishly clever, Desdemona, divinely beautiful. Not only is Othello’s story not irrelevant to us: we slay Desdemona half a dozen times most days of our life. Within the human action of any great play eternal conflicts are displayed.
The producer must not deduce his business from the play’s surface. He must make a leap to the inward meaning and use the play’s surface as expression; we must not start where Shakespeare left off, but rather start with Shakespeare and go with him. Though seemingly irrational, this is a process of universal application. My own interpretations aim to obey this law. They are, in a sense, re-creations, not translations; and they are this because they uncover some central and unifying idea, giving it next a new structure in interpretation. Interpretation will always be a development in a new medium of some central idea of wholeness in the original, grasp of that central idea forcing a vital re-creation. It is the same with production. You must make a leap into the abstract in order to realize the concrete; that unwinding from one roll into another to which I have before referred is not so simple as it at first appears. There is something about the human mind that necessitates this zigzag leap in all endeavour. We must abstract. In our attention to the widest issues of life, we always abstract. Science, philosophy, history—all are abstractions. Abstraction conditions all conscious action. The best way to regain full concrete perception of particulars is the religious way; to make the one grand abstraction and leap of intuition and name it ‘God’ before seeing everything as expressions of God. That is why the religious attitude is finally more concrete than others, why it touches the actual as they do not; why the account of the creation in Genesis, by putting it all on to God, is the best account of creation that we have. Enlightened abstraction is half-way to concrete understanding. So the producer who hopes for any solid and concrete result shirks at his peril the effort of intellectual abstraction.
He has to get the play from the text on to the living stage. It is rather like moving a delicate piece of furniture or machinery. Carry it bodily across and bits will be broken. It must be carefully taken to pieces and rebuilt. The producer should be able to hold the play in jig-saw bits in his mind, to sort them all out, to build with them and re-create the whole from understanding of its nature. Such understanding gives him full powers to cut, adapt, even on rare occasions transpose, according to circumstances; he has to consider his stage, his company, his audience. The feeling that cutting is sacrilegious derives from a false reasoning. The producer’s business is not translation but re-creation. It is however true that nothing more swiftly and irrevocably gives a producer away than unenlightened cutting or iniquitous transpositions and additions. You must by thought and intimate acquaintance acquire the right to do these things. I have seen a production where Ophelia’s description of Hamlet’s mysterious insanity and newly-dishevelled appearance was cut, presumably so that the hero might, as in every Hamlet I have seen, walk about in a particularly spruce and attractive black suit during the middle action. The Merchant of Venice often starts with merry-making, despite Shakespeare’s contrast of Venice with Belmont in point of tragedy and the emphasized melancholy of Antonio’s first speech.
We cannot properly produce a play without some sense of it as a whole. But we often find actor or producer saying: ‘That is a good and profound idea, but it is not dramatic’: whereas a good idea concerning a great play must be dramatic; otherwise it is a bad idea and not a good one. Probably the good idea relates to the play as a whole, and may thus be incompatible with some easy but irrelevant dramatic thrill. The immediate and transient dramatic effect is not everything. I have known an actor very naturally proud of gaining a round of applause after a long speech within a scene, but had the action been truly holding its audience applause would have been impossible. To conclude a scene on a powerful climax may miss a subtler and more Shakespearian effect of anti-climax. Getting applause is a psychological trick; certain gestures, certain climaxes, certain ways of drawing the curtains to tempt fresh claps from a desultory audience, all call it down. But let the producer beware lest, like Samson at Gaza, he pull the whole palace of art crashing to destruction on his own and his company’s heads. A touring company used to bring down the curtain on the murder scene in Macbeth with a crowd of actors waving swords and shouting, ‘Well contented!’ There was great applause. Then up came the curtain, the swords of the encouraged company waved and flashed again, and renewed volumes rolled out, ‘Well contented! We-ell con-ten-ted!’ Thunderous applause. Then all over again, as long as the audience would clap. I suppose this must be called a successful dramatic climax. But anything farther from the play’s meaning at this point could scarcely be imagined. You would think that they were all pleased, Macduff included, at Duncan’s murder. What was called for was, of course, a sullen murmur from a few, and only a few, of the crowd. Or if this makes an undesirable conclusion, then let the producer cut the final speech, and finish with Banquo’s words, and the crowd’s ‘So all!’ This is, I fear, an example of what the theatre too often means by the word ‘dramatic’.
Thinking not of individual moments but of the whole play, the producer will study to make the grouping and action continually reflect, not the passing incident only, but its relation to the whole. The whole play should often seem implicit in the particular moment. Such a technique may be almost forced, as at the first entry of Antony and Cleopatra, but even this is sometimes distorted, with no play of pageantry or dignified centrality for the two protagonists. The quality of the significant moment, continual in Shakespeare, can often be greatly forwarded by careful arrangement. We must also look to bring out implicit significances where the text at first sight gives us little help. Usually we find fertile instances in the text deliberately killed in production. Romeo’s ‘O, I am fortune’s fool’ has been given no particular emphasis and drowned in other noises; and Macduff’s ‘Wherefore did you so?’ spoken without challenge in either position or utterance. At every moment the production itself should seem to be aware of the whole play.1
Production should embody the quality of the text in other ways also. Shakespeare’s writing varies widely from pure colloquialism to poetic dignity. Othello provides an excellent example. Othello’s meeting with Desdemona at Cyprus is a moment of high romantic fervour and the poetry swells out with symbolic suggestions of a particular kind. The use of guns here is most important. We see the happy warrior, victorious over man and tempestuous seas, stepping from hard warrior-triumph to the peace of a radiant love. This follows a dialogue of pure colloquialism between Iago and Desdemona. A change must be apparent. Othello’s entry will be rich in glamour, probably central and raised, the general effect a tableau. Nevertheless in a recent London production Othello and Desdemona met in what looked like an interior, with no implied suggestion in the action of any war-like excitement or thunderous triumph, no thought of battlements frowning over a tempestuous sea. There was no crowd pageantry—which we can get with quite a few actors—and no interpretation of the peculiar quality of the scene. The protagonists met as two lovers might meet anywhere. Nor was there anything particularly striking in Othello’s dress to suggest the magnificent warrior. In King Lear the middle scenes are highly fantastic. How often do we find this madness extravaganza given sensitive projection in grouping, action, and speech? This, the heart of the play, is a world rocking at its foundations. Naked Tom must not sit up to a table with Kent, the Fool, and Lear as though they were all having a comfortable evening meal.
Today we have two main varieties of failure. We have the production that gives Shakespeare as strong melodrama, unfortunately over-cumbered with archaic poeticisms but nevertheless with enough story and interesting situations to make it worth doing. This type gives us no sense of any extra levels of meaning, and we receive no feeling of the art-form as an organic whole. Recently I saw such a production of Romeo and Juliet. It was highly praised. Its technique was slick and finished and perfectly timed. The acting was good. But there were no undercurrents of significance. It was smooth melodrama, not poetic tragedy. We had no suggestion of tableaux in the meetings of the Houses; the fights were random sword-clinkings drowning words, street-brawls, no more; music for some reason inappropriately blurred Mercutio’s descriptions of Tybalt; the Prince, representative of civic authority, wore a helmet; the Apothecary scene was given hurriedly as no more than a necessary action link; and the final scene was arranged incorrectly with the tombs down-stage. Almost every scene ended in a black-out. What complaints I have against all this will be clearer later. For the moment, I suggest merely that this was a typical modern production, excellent, professional, and mechanical. The sets were a succession of separately pleasing and tasteful scenes, not over-realistic, but bound together by no permanence. The time-stream of event was given with smart unvaried pace; but no deeper suggestions, no spatialized and spiritual architecture, took shape before the inward eye1. In the whole production I detected only one really creative stroke. I was told by a friend, Professor Gilbert Norwood, that one performance was exquisite, but he left me to discover which. I selected the one he meant. Tybalt I found impressive, original, significant, though I could not tell why. Professor Norwood had the reason: the part was performed (by Mr. Orson Welles) with deliberate feline suggestion in make-up and action. The result was remarkable. Observe (i) that this was gained by developing something already in Shakespeare, the association of the name Tybalt with cats being pointed in the text; and (ii) that such significances can, as Mr. T. S. Eliot has said of poetry, communicate before they are understood. I did not myself get the point, but recognized, and in some sense appreciated, the significance. Similarly, in my own productions, I do not expect an audience to be conscious of all the issues raised in my own mind during rehearsal. All one asks of an audience is imaginative receptivity; but we must ask more of our producers—the producer must have ideas.
Must have ideas. And yet these too can be disastrous. Which brings us to the second type of failure: the would-be ‘symbolical’ production, which saddles Shakespeare with elaborations that do not properly relate to the play. I have heard of the Weird Sisters being brought on at the end of Macbeth, or maybe only flashed in silhouette on the scene. This is quite wrong. The poetic atmosphere of Macbeth changes towards the close. Murk, nightmare and confusion are replaced by daylight, purpose and colour. Macbeth has woken up. The prophecies are revealed as having natural fulfilments. The supernatural has melted: Macbeth has supped full with horrors and direness no more frights him. There is here no place for the Weird Sisters. Recently I saw a well-acted and skilfully produced Hamlet. The whole was melodious and enjoyable, harmonious to ear and eye alike. Visually I received impressions of an almost Oriental splendour. The lighting was subtle and subdued, a Celtic twilight brooding over the action, quite alien to the stark intellectual quality of the play. There was some cleverly disciplined crowd-work: the company was especially good at circular crowd-swirls, interthreading into a vortex and unwinding very prettily. But all this was not very useful for Hamlet. After the play had unsettled the King, the courtiers and ladies circled for a while like the blessed spirits in Dante’s Paradise; ladies clustered over the dead Queen at the finish like Dante’s ecclesiastical Rose; and the King died on a glorious pirouette. Such circlings are scarcely suited to Hamlet, which expresses something more angular, enigmatic, out of joint like a broken arm.
I have known The Merchant of Venice seriously mishandled. It was a very ‘original’ production. That, today, means, I fear, that all sorts of queer and wrong things happened that bore no relation to the text. The caskets, which should be dominating and solid, were painted on an arras falling down the side of a higher stage-level. Not distinguishing them, one felt hot during Morocco’s speech, suspecting a mistake. Finally he produced the caskets’ contents from the wall: I still don’t know how. When Bassanio’s turn came there was not even the wall. He stood fingering the keys and speaking. ‘This time’, I thought, ‘something has gone wrong.’ But the higher level slowly rose during his speech, and by the time Bassanio was ready the caskets, or pictures of them, were in place. None of this illuminates the text and much of it will distract and often conflict with words spoken. During Bassanio’s speech in the first scene describing Portia to Antonio the stage behind the speakers slowly opened, and Portia was supposed to rise—actually the machinery went wrong—sitting on Belmont: the words did not need that sort of pointing. But here is something we can accept: the Cauldron scene in Macbeth has been done with voices off and Macbeth tossing restlessly on a couch. That is far from an ideal arrangement, but it at least preserves the spirit of the play and relates to the numerous nightmare references in the text.
I follow these preliminary and general remarks with more exact argument. This I present under certain separate headings related to the thoughts of my first chapter.
2. MAINLY TEMPORAL AND AURAL
The Shakespearian play is composed of a time-sequence of sounds. The sounds—words and additional effects—are, as it were, given. The producer has to make them live, express them in human action and stage-arrangements and machinery of various kinds, and give them an appropriate setting. Nevertheless, it is well to remember that the sounds come first. Nothing must smother or distort them.
Shakespearian speech demands close and subtle attention, and its satisfactory rendering is so difficult that we may safely call it, on the whole, impossible. That need not prevent us from doing our best. The main principle already laid down for production applies to speaking in particular. We must capture the underlying experience of the words and then, living in the thought and emotion, let the words give them poetic expression. An actor with a good voice may well think that he has only to give varied vocal embodiment to fine rhetoric, side-tracking the intellectual content. He may think that the poet has done all that for him, and that all he has to do is to build from the poetic result. But it will not do. He must get at the experience behind the words, suffer each swift change of thought, actually see, or aim at seeing, the phantasmagoria of imagery, till each phrase is variously and delicately tinted from within by the blood-essence of a felt significance. A beautiful and melodious voice may become a danger; each note and curve, however exquisite, unless closely related to and disciplined by the inward significances, may result in a collection of graceful corpses, perfumed with death.
Often today we hear a stagey ring. If analysed, we shall probably find that this staginess reduces to a series of emphases out of accord with the meaning; especially a tendency to strike a ringing anvil-blow on some not particularly emphatic monosyllable at a line’s end, a fault which often seems to attack actors with exceptionally beautiful voices.
I offer some examples of the subtlety Shakespearian verse demands of an actor. In a mood of despair Hamlet thinks how he
… can say nothing. No, not for a king
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damn’d defeat was made.
(II. ii. 604)
I suggest that he speaks in a black mood, but rising out from it comes the thought of his father, and the quality of the phrase ‘most dear life’ should be reflected in the light of the eye, the flicker of a smile, for a fraction of time before the mood recloses on ‘damned’. If this were ordinary talk, such a physical change would within one mood be impossible, but the poetry reveals qualities of thought, not tricks of behaviour. It is highly complex, exposing hidden dimensions of human experience. But we must never get too far from the appearances of ordinary speech. Consider Hamlet’s lines to his mother:
Look here, upon this picture and on this,
The counterfeit presentment of two brothers.
See, what a grace was seated on this brow:
Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself,
An eye like Mars to threaten and command,
A station like the herald Mercury
New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill.
A combination and a form indeed
Where every god did seem to set his seal
To give the world assurance of a man.
(III. iv. 53)
This is my reading. The first line is colloquial; the second meditative. The third rises to a more rhetorical timbre. Next the specific quality of each god is vocally reflected: glory for Hyperion, awe for Jupiter, militaristic resonance for Mars with reverberations on the word ‘command’, and then a pure lyricism, a trilling ascent, for the next line’s imagistic grace and thin vowels—‘like’, ‘Mercury’, ‘lighted’, ‘kissing’, ‘hill’, and the numerous ‘e’ sounds.1 It does no harm to dwell on the ‘kissing’ for an instant, poised there in mid-flight. Then we drop back to matter-of-fact colloquialism for the last lines. The little unit has a poetic rise, meridian, and fall. We must aim vocally to capture these rhythms already deep-bedded in the meaning and embodied in the poetic expression.
All this demands intellectual study. We cannot get a speech properly across without understanding and living it. And yet unfortunately the understanding it and living it will not necessarily get it across. There is the hard physical technique of clear utterance, breath-control, and so on; and in concentrating on these we may lose all the rest.
A stagey ring is bad and an academic sing-song worse. The wrong sort of colloquialism is perhaps worst of all: some people who have no sense of metre split up the verse unforgivably; or point the meaning of each simplest word as if talking to a child or a foreigner. I have also heard an actress whose diction was so perfect and voice so clear that I became conscious only of diction and clarity, forgetting the play; just as a too melodious voice, unless rigidly controlled by meaning, acts as a soporific. We must avoid too much of any good thing. The safest investment is constant and significant variation, using deeper notes for the appropriate thoughts and images. Shakespeare’s temporal sequences, whether of speech or scenes or the fortunes of his people, continually move in waves. These waves of voice must be closely related to colloquial variation and meaning; and yet again there are times when a single intensity on one pitch gives more power than any degree of colloquialism. I seem to remember Violet Vanbrugh getting some such effect in Lady Macbeth’s invocation to evil in Beerbohm Tree’s production in 1911, and I have never heard it done so well since. Incidentally, the Weird Sisters almost always fail by using too raucous and naturalistically varied an utterance, whereas surely they do better with a wailing note like the whining of a wintry wind.
Possibilities are legion. Sudden colloquialism may be a stab of lightning across poetic sublimity; or vice versa. Each outlines, vitalizes, the other. There is variation in pace to be considered. Today speed is the danger. The modern actor often skips through the verse with a deadly facility. One feels he is not living the experiences behind the words.
I think one should sometimes definitely pause on a grand and glowing phrase, as though to cauterize the minds of the audience with its white-hot iron. In Othello’s jealousy the lines are too often given as any old stream of fury to express a psychological state of ungoverned savagery. Rather the implied psychological state is there as rough scaffolding on which to erect the carven edifice of great poetry. Living the supposed actual experience is not enough: you must live the poetic experience. It is clear that poetry does not just express psychological behaviour. See how illogically Cleopatra keeps pouring blank verse at the messenger whilst impatient for his news: dramatic poetry is mainly concerned with expression of deep and complicated inward—or outward—experiences in terms of a most subtle intellectual technique. So, though the actor must, according to his conception, himself in part live Othello’s supposed fury, he is to make of it a result very different. His technique is to be as subtle and assured as the poetry. We have all seen Othello look like a big black man in a rage and Macbeth at his play’s conclusion like a wild and haggard criminal run to earth. Just what they are: and yet, are not. The actor should feel something of that, but not look it, or sound it. There is a repose and dignity necessary to the essential meaning of all art: ‘In the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.’ The emotional limits of pure naturalism are quickly reached, and we get shouts and ranting that signify nothing, whereas a close artistic control from the first with definite self-imposed limits has an infinite reserve of power. This is a principle of universal truth and applies to any art; and, for that matter, to life itself. And then again in any art there is a control and dignity and classic grace that is the primrose way to death: which is also true of life in general. The ideal producer will know all this, and have actors, if he is lucky, who can put it into practice.
What the actor has to do is somehow to get the blood-pulse and rhythmic beat of the living lines, and also the wider wavelengths of each verse paragraph, each surging and dying movement (see pp. 276–82); or the play’s gathering to one great moment of tragic dignity, such as that crest which we have noticed in the story of Richard II; and then the cadences, the solemnity, the aftermaths of peace. The necessary control we are considering is one with the point we made in discussing Richard. Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists are not to be regarded as weak failures curiously gifted with oratorical power. Rather they are voices giving outward show to a more inward quality; expressing the victory that is always bursting defeat like a bird from an eggshell; revealing that greater world, that unruffled peace built of turbulence, the extra-dimensional music.
We cannot do full vocal justice to Shakespearian verse, but we can avoid crass blunders. This infinitely subtle correspondence to each fleeting thought and delicate emotion need hardly ever be accompanied by gasps, groans, and sobs. I have seen a six-foot Romeo lie on the stage making awful sob-sounds:
Wert thou as young as I, Juliet thy love,
An hour but married, Tybalt murderèd,
Doting like me, and like me banishèd,
Then might’st thou speak, then might’st thou tear thy hair,
And fall upon the ground, as I do now,
Taking the measure of an unmade grave.
(III. iii. 64)
The maximum of rhetorical power should be put into the fling and abandon of such a speech, but never for an instant should emotion overspill the cup of poetic control. Too often we find simultaneously a fear of rhetorical abandon and a desire for crude expression in sobs and gasps. Romeo should not be a big baby here, but a terrific poetic force. Let the torrential flow gather up and crash over musically. The bodily fall should be itself melodious, matching the fall of the line, while the voice correspondingly descends the scale; and after the grand swaying cadences of the last two lines Romeo must lie still and silent. The emotion should come through the words and action, not in extempore animal sounds of the actor’s invention.
In stabbing himself Antony need not gasp or grunt: it makes you think that something has gone wrong and he is really hurt.
Beside and beyond the words we must consider off-stage sound-effects. These are frequent and of great importance: their neglect or slurring is probably the most outstanding defect in modern Shakespearian production. I refer to trumpets, alarums, drums, cannon, tolling bells, and, above all, the thunder-tempests and music. On these two latter, as I have argued at length, the Shakespearian world revolves: they, and all kindred effects, must be employed exactly and powerfully. Nothing must take precedence over them. If no other reasons existed, elaborate and detailed realistic sets would have to be ruled out for their rival and hostile appeal. Off-stage sounds have a valuable quality of mystery and universality that certain types of visual realism will hopelessly mar. They work most powerfully from a restrained and simplified setting.
Too often we find no intelligent emphasis on these sounds. Often they are wrongly used. Over the radio I have heard the Ghost’s entry in Hamlet accompanied by music. This is seriously un-Shakespearian. Music in Shakespeare is always optimistically charged and deliberately contrasted with such civic and cosmic disorders as Horatio compares the Ghost to. The Ghost, you may suggest, should then enter to thunder, like the Weird Sisters. Yet Shakespeare gives no hint of this. The elemental setting is neither one thing nor the other. It is a cloudy night, ‘bitter cold’, with stars but only ‘glimpses of the moon’. Indeed, we never know quite how to take this Ghost: is he a spirit blessed or goblin damned? It is the problem of the play. The portentous figure is morally and aesthetically enigmatic: hence his enigmatic elemental setting. If we want a sound-effect here we must devise, or search in the text for, something in between, such as wind or surf.
This may all seem super-subtle. Besides, you can perhaps argue that this radio-music was evilly toned, like that barbaric music to which the torture-procession passes in Flecker’s Hassan. In Hassan however the sensuously pleasing is throughout blended with the horrible after a fashion quite un-Shakespearian. Shakespeare, unlike Marlowe and Ben Jonson, refuses to allow sensuous delight to associate directly with evil: his negations are conflicts, never—or hardly ever—harmonies. They thus have appropriate effects of battle-alarums and thunder.
I have heard Juliet’s potion speech ruined by the introduction of intermittent thunder. Shakespeare, one feels, would have directed thunder had he wanted it. However, it is a correct Shakespearian effect. Why is thunder here fatal?
Thunder does not accompany purely individual and personal psychic conflicts. Such are often enough compared in simile and metaphor to tempests and thunder; but that is all. In Julius Caesar and Macbeth the thunder accompanies a wholesale disorder, a vision of almost cosmic, certainly of civil, conflict. Though this may be related, as I have shown elsewhere, directly to the protagonist’s own inward disorder, yet that disorder is not, on the stage, accompanied by audible thunder. Brutus meditates in his orchard, Macbeth and his wife murder Duncan, in silence: the poetry speaks of whizzing exhalations or tells us that the night has been unruly, but there are no stage sounds. The quality of these two scenes is pre-eminently one of hushed tensity. Lear certainly stands alone, or almost alone, addressing an actual thunder-tempest, and thunder previously blends with his determination to go mad rather than weep, and intermittently accompanies the cracking of his reason later. But, first, Lear and his setting are peculiarly blended and both peculiarly cosmic: the tempest relates to Goneril, Regan and Cornwall and their cruelty also; indeed, to the whole conception of conflict within creation on a wide scale. And, second, the outstanding and memorable effect of these moments is due to their exceptional daring: it is probably this that does most to make us feel Lear himself as a cosmic force. Fearful supernatural beings, the minatory Jupiter in Cymbeline, Ariel and his ‘ministers of fate’ in The Tempest, the Weird Sisters and their Apparitions in Macbeth, all may have thunder. But a ghost never does. A ghost is to be considered less than a human being, but a divine or wholly supernatural figure is by way of being a universal force. So thunder is never domestic. Even for Othello’s jealousy it would be grossly out of place; the nearest approach is the wind heard by Desdemona in her willow-song scene; for Juliet’s mental conflict in extreme and pathetic loneliness it is quite impossible. You cannot help feeling that Lady Capulet ought to hear it and come to see what Juliet is thinking about so to upset Verona’s summer weather. It is easy to see why thunder is never used in Hamlet, so eminently a psychological play, and why the use of ear-splitting cracks, together with a black-out, at the entrance of the Ghost in the Closet scene, where Hamlet alone sees it, may be particularly distressing. We feel sure that the Queen must have noticed something. The question of an audience’s acceptance of a stage person’s apparent insensitivity was curiously raised when I did Hamlet in Toronto. Hamlet with drawn sword soliloquizes over the praying King. The sheathing of my sword was audible, and it seemed that the King should have heard it. No one worried about the words. The convention of soliloquy and asides is embedded in theatrical tradition, but we have far less latitude with non-verbal sounds, with the occasional exception of music.
Actual stage thunder is always cosmic, and has dramatically communal rather than psychological and domestic reverberations. Besides, thunder is from above, a ghost from below.
The opposing Shakespearian effect of music is, on the contrary, more closely related to individual persons. Often enough music significantly accompanies a general social harmony: as at the first entrance of Caesar, the Danish March in Hamlet, the music at the feasting of Duncan, though there is none at the later feast attended by Banquo’s Ghost; the feasts given by Timon, and that in Antony and Cleopatra. But the subtler music incidents in Shakespeare are more inwardly conceived. At the end of Richard II, in the Welsh scene in 1 Henry IV and the tavern-scene in 2 Henry IV, the Brutus and Lucius incident in Julius Caesar, Ophelia’s and Desdemona’s songs, Lear’s reunion with Cordelia, the mysterious ‘hautboys’ in Antony and Cleopatra, and the recurrent reunions after resurrection in the Final Plays, music suggests either some spiritual harmony related to an individual or the love of two individuals; or some universal and mystic peace touched by the protagonist, such as ‘the music of the spheres’ in Pericles and the solemn music of Queen Katharine’s paradise-vision in Henry VIII. Hermione is resurrected to music in The Winter’s Tale. Continually elsewhere music is directly related to love, as in The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night. Certainly it may tend to fill the whole action of the earlier Romances at times; but that is because these are saturated with romantic love, and may be considered dream-projections of inward longing. The Final Plays, including The Tempest and Ariel’s music, are more realistically conceived, more authentic records of spiritual victory; and their resurrection music demands careful elaboration.1
Our continual disregard of Shakespeare’s technique in this matter is seen in the persistent ignoring of stage-directions in the Macbeth Cauldron scene. The three Apparitions form a precise miniature of the whole play’s dramatic conflict. Appropriately, they rise from the cauldron to thunder. They are followed shortly by the line of kings. These, being creative and harmonious visions hostile to the evil, the Weird Sisters are loth to show. Macbeth insists. The cauldron vanishes and the kings, who do not rise from the cauldron, pass to the music of hautboys, like the hautboys of the mystic music in Antony and Cleopatra. Modern productions hardly ever leave us clear as to what is happening in this scene.
I cannot over-stress the importance of all these and other kindred sounds. The bell that invites Macbeth to crime, let it not tinkle, but ring ominously. The knocking at the gate too often suggests rather an irritable postman than a fateful summons. The effects in Hamlet of kettle-drums, trumpets, and cannon are most important. They come first shortly before the Ghost’s entry; then once at Hamlet’s first hit in the duel; and again at the close. At both the beginning and the end of the play they are associated with the King’s drinking to Hamlet. The main action is framed by these sounds. The trumpets in Measure for Measure and King Lear should sound a universal judgement call. As for fights and alarums and shouts—as in Coriolanus—they all need careful attention and elaborate orchestration. A Shakespearian tragedy normally ends with fighting. The inward conflict finds expression and resolution in militaristic and open opposition. Much of the producer’s difficulty here, due to swords being no longer associated in the communal mind with actual danger, can be surmounted by careful sound-effects. A not too closely-defined suggestion of modern warfare might help.
All sound-effects must be carefully interspaced and orchestrated with the words. Neither must interrupt the other: without a pure sequence, you get no waves, no rhythms; and without rhythms, no variation and definition. Stage thunder is usually either pitifully weak or, if strong, it drowns the speeches. There is no reason why the tempest in King Lear (III. ii) should not be positively thunderous. The kind of thing I mean you may hear excellently done in musical oratorios which are often far more dramatic than the average Shakespearian production. You should feel that the theatre is coming down. Then let it dwindle, and over it rise Lear’s words:
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
More peals of thunder,1 again curving down as Lear continues:
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires …
Especially we need fine reverberations before ‘Rumble thy bellyful …’2. The thunder is an actor in the play, and the thunder-master must know his cues. Where we have given only a stage-direction at the start, the producer must work out appropriate moments in the dialogue for himself and they must be properly planned. A usual fallacy supposes that words are effectively spoken through sounds such as thunder, shouts as at Laertes’ rebellious entry in Hamlet, or music. A far finer effect is gained by interweaving, the one dying away as the other comes over; comes over, not through; so that we have rhythmic waves, significant undulations. A highly lyrical passage of spoken verse is not improved by music. Where music accompanies dialogue, as in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice, great care is needed that no words be lost. The music can die away almost inaudibly, then rise and hold the stage alone, leading up to, shall we say, Orsino’s: ‘How dost thou like this tune?’ In King Lear the continual directions of ‘storm still’1 hint at such a technique of intermittent sounds. We need not wait always for actual directions: we can follow their spirit without limiting ourselves to the letter. But the speeches must get across. However loud the hurly-burly, as in the street brawl in Romeo and Juliet, we need never drown the words.
The producer should not allow conflicting centres of interest to hold the stage simultaneously. In 2 Henry IV the subtle comedy of Shallow’s words has been ruined by the ragamuffin recruits searching their tatters for fleas. How could subtlety get a hearing with fleas as a rival attraction? I have seen the Gravedigger fidget with his grave and skulls during Hamlet’s Yorick speech: such an important, almost formal, speech should rather be deliberately worked up to, and given every chance to get over. Stage business should always either help the words or be given an interspaced opportunity on its own. A Shakespearian play is a temporal sequence rising and falling; let one centre of interest subside and another come up elsewhere, one melt into the other, like waves. We want gentle, continuous variation and undulation, rather than a bubbling saucepan.
The play must flow continuously. A Shakespearian play is crammed with significant action and continual movement, and these must be allowed to express themselves unhampered. Waits between scenes hurt the sequence and disrupt the curves. Scenes are not necessarily units at all. Often we can run two together; drawing a traverse behind actors moving down-stage may facilitate progress. But do not end scenes with a black-out. A black-out has no curves of nature about it and is utterly non-significant. A Shakespearian play moves in waves of sound and rhythmic surges. We want nothing too sudden. A black-out decapitates rather than rounds off the action, whereas slow or fast curtains, or a steady lowering of lights, have gradation and significance. The general method will resolve itself into some kind of a permanent set for big scenes played alternately with short front-scenes that allow for the moving of furniture behind. Shakespeare obviously wrote the plays on such a plan: they fall naturally into this arrangement. Do not let the act divisions, which may well be un-Shakespearian, hamper your plans; nor the scene descriptions ‘Before Gloucester’s castle’ or ‘Another part of the street’: these are late additions. We must not regard the front-scenes as less important than the others. Usually they are most important. Alternate short flashes of opposing armies are often best done as front-scenes. There is no looseness of construction in these. The battle-scenes in Antony and Cleopatra are no faultier technically than similar short views on a film and to our film-trained eyes they should be strongly dramatic. The whole play should, like a film, move smartly, but not without variation, significant pauses, tableau effects. All the wider movements should rise and fall rhythmically, especially the play’s close.
Intervals are necessary. Two usually work well. But they should be chosen to divide the play into significant movements, waves of action: see the divisions of Henry VIII, Othello and Hamlet in the productions described below. King Lear might be divided so that the tempest-scenes constitute a central unit. In tragedy we find that our central scenes tend to present conflict, followed by a temporary insecurity and lack of power in the protagonist, whereas the final movement rises to the tragic sacrifice with more assurance and dignity.
One last point. If the play is to be divided into three movements, what use of music, if any, is proper before each? Music as an overture risks clashing with music, or the significant absence of music, during the action. There can be no final rule. Twelfth Night or A Midsummer Night’s Dream clearly allow us more musical latitude than Hamlet. I think that most Shakespearian tragedies are far better with a reserved use of trumpets or a low roll of drums, at the beginning and end of any one division. Sound-effects being so delicately and precisely used in Shakespeare, we must beware of introducing any that do not tone with the whole; or thinking that we can easily fill up an ugly gap in the continuity of the action with music or sounds that are not helpful, when a little thought or rearrangement might obviate the necessity altogether.
3. MAINLY VISUAL AND SPATIAL
The time-sequence of a Shakespearian play generates a mental area; its motion creates mass; from the flux and rhythm is built solidity. This I have called the play’s ‘spatial’ nature, meaning its massed unity of imagery, symbols, persons, its colour. All these in any work of great poetry will have a solidity and richness beyond that given by lesser sorts of writing. The mind feels the play both as a time-sequence and as a spatial mass. There is however a difference. In actual fact the play is a time-sequence every time you read it, but its spatial quality is only mental or metaphoric. The time-sequence is as temporal as any sequence can be, but the spatial quality is not spatial in the sense that a garden is spatial. Moreover, this spatial quality depends on and varies according to the recipient’s receptivity: the sequence, as a sequence, does not. Now the production of a play gives it the spatial and visual actuality that before was indecisive. From which I deduce this most important principle: the visual and spatial effects of production should primarily subserve the play’s emotional quality and poetic colour. They will solidify the spiritual, make real that dimension of profound and solid significance that great poetry possesses. Thus the visual side of production will be concerned with the play’s more significant, universal, and poetic qualities. It will be characterized by dignity, solidity, and permanence.
We proceed to apply this principle in turn to costumes; properties; lighting; and stage-settings.
Wherever possible costumes should illustrate and point the play’s meanings. I have seen the Prince’s entry in Romeo and Juliet after the fight in the middle action spoilt seriously by his standing bare-headed when all the others wore hats. I have also seen the part ruined by the wearing of an Homeric horse-hair helmet. The Prince symbolizes a very simple quality: civic dignity and civic power. He is most unwarlike, not any too good even in his own office as a disciplinarian, and utterly opposed to all armed wrang-lings. He wields the power of civil authority. To make him walk the streets in a military helmet is as bad as sending him out hatless. Indeed, far worse. This is a very simple instance of how part of an elaborate production can fail through inattention to meaning. I feel sure that the costumes were all perfect as to period: our care is too often misplaced. In Romeo and Juliet the opposing houses should wear distinct liveries; and the Greeks and Trojans in Troilus and Cressida should be distinguished with regard to the differing qualities of the two parties. Once in a production of Antony and Cleopatra Cleopatra and her two girls wore Renaissance costumes and the rest, Egyptians and Romans alike, proper period dress of the ancient world. Whatever the reason and authority for this there is a damning objection. Cleopatra and her world should suggest the sensuous as opposed to Octavia’s chastity: Octavia must therefore be heavily robed, but Cleopatra, her girls and her slaves will contrast in sinuous part-nakedness even with the Roman men, still more with Octavia. To have Cleopatra muffled up and the Romans bare-armed and bare-legged gets the contrast utterly wrong. Dress is always important. Watch the elaborate care with which Cleopatra calls for her regal robe when dressing herself for death; and let this grand and supernal chastity—‘Husband, I come’—contrast with her earlier appearance. See Pericles, reunited with Marina, how he calls for new clothes after his long night of despair. Where some violent effect of nakedness is needed, as for Edgar and Timon, it must be significant. I have twice seen a neat slip of a loin-cloth on a spotless body make Edgar look exactly like a young man going for a swim. Timon’s prophetic rags, slight though they be, should fall with Hebraic and minatory implications. The worst and most ubiquitous error in production occurs in Hamlet. During the middle action he should look disintegrated, mad, pathetic and fearful all at once, or in turns (Pictures 3–6). Usually there is no change to speak of from his first appearance, in spite of Ophelia’s words, thus adding distortion to complexity.
Considerations of period should normally give way to considerations of significance. The ideal will be a blend of some appropriate period—Much Ado about Nothing might go well in eighteenth-century dress—and interpretative meaning. We must be suspicious of any attempt to ‘get back to the Elizabethans’: the ideal production today will be essentially a modern production. If we feel that modern dress is not, except as an interesting and fertile experiment, finally suitable, that will be because Shakespearian costuming must be at some remove from the ordinary to help realize universal significances that are not outwardly apparent in modern life. Shakespeare usually removes his action from England; he is to be contrasted with such a realist as the Ben Jonson of Bartholomew Fair. Costumes should assist the heroic quality of poetic drama. They may be right in terms of some reasonable period and yet fail disastrously. I have watched a young actor in the final scene of Marlowe’s Faustus struggling against an impossible Elizabethan costume: a short cloak pushed out behind by the sword he was unnecessarily wearing: a costume with none of the lines of dignity needed for so tremendous and difficult a scene. Indeed, I have never felt quite happy about Elizabethan clothes for Shakespearian tragedy: most earlier periods of fashion appear to me preferable. A blend of modernistic freedom and correct period would often be, perhaps, best, since Shakespeare usually touches the geographic and historic quality of the period he writes of: in Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, the Roman plays. The question of dignity raises that of richness. Costuming should be ‘rich, not gaudy’: not solely because Shakespeare’s poetic people are lords and kings, but because the quality of their feelings and actions is rich and grand, and our visual effects are to body forth this essential poetry. Of course, Shakespeare’s choice of aristocratic persons is closely related to his sense of poetic sublimity: this however raises questions which we must put aside for the present.1
If dresses must be rich and dignified, it is equally important that all stage objects should appear weighty and solid. As far as possible they should always be what they represent. They should look important, and any not vitally involved in the action should as a rule be avoided. A throne on a dais, state chairs, tables, divans are all easy. But sometimes smaller objects do not receive proper attention. The three caskets in The Merchant of Venice are of rooted significance and should be dominating and solid-looking. The quality of importance conveyed by a stage object varies according to its apparent solidity and weight. Any smaller properties, such as the present or presents Ophelia returns to Hamlet, should be used significantly. Hamlet can look at them as he says, ‘I did love you once’. That makes them seem rich and important. Just as apparent richness and weight has spiritual force, so any spiritual impregnation loads an object with visual richness. The action should be continually impregnating stage objects with significance. Crowns in Shakespeare are often important: Lear’s crown of flowers, Cassius’ wreath, Cleopatra’s diadem, Queen Katharine’s garland of immortality, all have variously toned symbolic power, and must look worthy of it. Everything and every person about the stage should look important, real, and solid; we must be able to weigh them with the eye. We shall argue presently that this demands a fairly simple and preferably dark background.
Many producers love scenic alterations. Their aim however must be wrong, since the continually and subtly changing quality of the Shakespearian stream of event and emotion could never be given a correspondingly appropriate succession of changes in set. You may suggest that modern methods of lighting provide exactly such an infinitely variable means to atmospheric effect: which brings us to my peculiar bête noire.1
Modern lighting is wonderful, but I oppose the electrician’s claim to be properly more than a minor assistance to Shakespearian production. Today elaborate lighting tends to replace elaborate settings, and the one heresy is as dangerous as the other. The old-style realism reduced poetic drama to the level of our normal waking consciousness; modern lighting drags it lower to a sub-human world of twilit dream.
When I first was able to use a proper theatre for my productions I was amazed to find with what ease glorious effects could be obtained. A word to the electrician and the sky-sheet looks mystic and fearsome and any figure in front becomes a grim silhouette; another, and you have a blazing June day; another, and a blushing sunset. All admirable. Better than poetry, easier, immediate, faultless. But why do Shakespeare at all? Listen to Horatio’s words:
But look, the morn in russet mantle clad
Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill.
(Hamlet, I. i. 166)
What is the point of it all? Surely this: to have certain significances driven into the mind through the poetic and verbal intelligence. That, we must suppose, is our aim and hope in attending to Shakespeare; and presumably it does us good. Now, whatever be the truth of a stage sunset, one thing is clear: any producer can have it switched on, and any audience can appreciate it, whereas not one actor in a hundred can with full vocal intelligence and richness and perfect accompanying gesture speak those two simple lines exactly as we want them spoken, and not one spectator in a thousand can fully appreciate them. Surely its facility outlines the frivolity of too much reliance on lighting. Nor can we have rich light-appeals together with other more concrete effects. The moment we begin to rely on lighting as a primary aid to significance, the actors begin to dissolve, gesture and facial expression lose value, words are blurred: and, if all this were not so, the human mind, incorrigibly flirtatious in matters of visual appeal, would swiftly prostitute its attention. I once saw the moonlight and music scene of The Merchant of Venice beautifully arranged with cardboard marbled fountains and silhouette trees and a delicate play of moonlight on Lorenzo and Jessica. It was exquisite; I was visually intoxicated. But I did not listen to the actors. Why, in any case, attempt to spoil these exquisite sonatas of coloured light with Shakespeare’s heavy and laborious language? Let us have separate shows.
The light-expert paradoxically deals largely in darkness. He prefers a darkened stage, where he may the more effectively drop his pools of brilliance. You see a figure walking in twilight suddenly catch a steely ray from the wings, ‘stick fiery off indeed’ as he says an important speech, then turn, and with a couple of steps he is blacked-out, dissolved. Recently in the scene where Othello comes before the Duke I watched him stand in half-darkness saying quite important lines that accordingly lost power. Before the Duke’s table was a pool of light. I thought, ‘When the time for his big speech comes he will have to walk up those steps and get into that light’; and he did. Nowadays instead of a level blend and diffusion we often have harshly distinct colours from the wings. We see Polixenes in The Winter’s Tale take a warm red from one wing, turn and catch a green from the other. It is a pretty dream-world. The dawn blushes in Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, or trees in A Midsummer Night’s Dream shiver against a moonlight that all but shames the moon.
We buy it all at a price. The actors become dream figures, invisibility clouds expression. Grouping becomes meaningless: if we clearly see only the chief figures, their positional relation to the rest is blurred or lost; and also the relation of every one to the stage itself, especially its centre. The sides of the stage become negative, with no clear-cut conventional limits. Solidity melts into fantasy, reality into dream. Nor is lighting so capable of subtlety as is usually supposed. It can certainly tint areas prettily; but Shakespeare’s finer subtleties involve the interplay of persons. Lighting is crassly mechanical compared with the finesse of vocal or facial expression, the lift of an eyebrow, a touch of sarcasm in the voice, the twitching of a finger. Can a mechanical beam single out for emphasis minute significances comparable to these? Often a subsidiary person should register in such ways. While the light expert rules production, the actor can take things easy, and usually does.
Even if we wish to express darkness and mystery it should be done mainly in terms of visual positives. Ghost scenes are no exceptions. What makes the Ghost in Hamlet dramatically convincing? A green light? Or the expression on Marcellus’ face, the gesture of Bernardo, Horatio’s words:
What art thou that usurp’st this time of night,
Together with that fair and warlike form
In which the majesty of buried Denmark
Did sometimes march? By heaven, I charge thee, speak!
(I. i. 46)
I have never yet seen a performance of Hamlet where the actors facing the Ghost were properly visible. The Ghost himself I have known to wear an electric light in his helmet, which he switches off under his cloak when he is to vanish; I have seen him appear as a floating phosphorescence in mid-air, over an otherwise darkened stage; or stalk as a silhouette against a violet sky. Every time the trickery was pretty enough. Every time the chief actors had to speak in darkness. It got across satisfactorily, as such things always do. But did Shakespeare get across? Did the art of the actor stand any chance of showing the possibility of a greater effect which has power not just to please with a transient titillation, but rather to transfix the listener and crucify him to an unforgettable experience? It may be hard to reach that; it is not impossible.
Light variations can be unobtrusively used and then they may be most helpful. But they must remain subordinate. For a night scene just a very little lowering of the lights and a slight dimming towards the wings gives all the hint you want. Or you can always start with the lights down and bring them up gradually before the first words are spoken. You can always quite easily play on your blues and greens for night-time, use your contrasts of amber and steel, warm up with reds when necessary, while keeping a properly diffused light, without ever blurring the expression of an actor’s face, and the full stage normally quite visible, without allowing the audience to think about the lighting at all. All this is easy and effective: there is no technical difficulty. The error is this: the modern light-expert is regarding poetic drama as a dream-like fantasy instead of as a revelation of an extra dimension of waking life. He is aiming at the wrong thing.1
And now for the settings. The actors and all stage objects must not be dissolved into their background; they should rather stand out firmly. Action is often most powerful in front of a plain black curtain: black always shows up costumes and the actors’ faces to fine effect. However, a fairly dark neutral colour that takes various lights with differing results is possibly best for general purposes. Imitation white stone or plaster, often used, does not throw out the face and figure so well: clearly the face, which is of primary importance, cannot contrast with it. The street-scenes in Romeo and Juliet often suffer in this way. Too much stage sky is bad, and should not normally form a background for any lengthy and important speech: Antony’s funeral oration can be seriously weakened by having the speaker’s head melted into a bright sky. The actor’s face and figure must stand out powerfully and significantly: too often he, and any objects about the stage, are weighed in the eye’s balances and found wanting. The sense of richness given by heavy curtains is often valuable. Once at a performance of King Lear I received no sense of solidity until the actors took their calls at the end in front of a plain heavy curtain. The costumes leapt up into a rich and lively significance. It was the most real moment in the play.
The setting can be simple, provided that it looks rich and dignified. It need not be definitely localized; and yet few people can totally disillusion their minds of nineteenth-century realism. Antony’s speech is, certainly, supposed to occur in the Roman Forum; the fights in Romeo and Juliet happen in a street; Desdemona is murdered in her bedroom. But many scenes are indeterminate. Sometimes the locality appears to shift during a dialogue. Certainly because Othello addresses ‘yond marble heaven’ in the temptation-scene of Othello that is no authority for labelling the whole scene ‘The Garden of the Castle’. Hamlet apostrophizes the firmament from what we thought was an interior, and later points out clouds to Polonius from the place where the play has just been performed. It does not follow that the middle action of Hamlet takes place mainly out of doors, nor that we have to build or visualize a window. The Elizabethan theatre was, it is true, open to the sky: but let the modern actor point up at any time during the action, and the audience will accept the gesture provided that the set does not present too meticulously realistic and detailed an interior. The scene headings in many modern Shakespearian texts are late additions. It is foolish to list scene localities on the programme: they really mean nothing. The Shakespearian play is a continuous stream of action, thought and emotion, revealing psychic rather than topographical panoramas.
Usually it is best to have a more or less permanent full set interspaced with front-scenes. These latter are not necessarily the less important. Where we have a particularly fine set-speech or any difficult incident or words that we want at all costs driven into our audience’s minds, they are best thrown forward. Such are: Ophelia’s description of Hamlet’s changed appearance, the Queen’s account of Ophelia’s death, Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech which loses much of its power if given from a full setting; Buckingham’s farewell in Henry VIII, the Welsh Captain’s dialogue with Salisbury in Richard II, Othello’s description of the magical properties of the handkerchief. These are not soliloquies. Soliloquies are often best in a big set where the actor can people the stage with his thoughts and movements. They should not be given direct to the audience; though, when supported by listeners on the stage, a long speech often can and should be so given. Prince Hal’s ‘I know you all …’ is clearly best done in the same set as was recently filled by his companions. Hamlet’s long soliloquy can effectively use the full stage. But the front-scenes I have indicated fall naturally into such arrangement, and their peculiar quality is enhanced by it: I conclude that they were originally so conceived and planned. Where we have short flashes of opposing armies in turn, as in Antony and Cleopatra and the Histories, use of the front-cloth is inevitable and powerful, giving a vivid sense of conflict. Recently I saw such action played from opposite corners of a fairly realistic full setting, and the fault was obvious.
Anything like painted realistic scenery for the full sets is inappropriate. It pretends to be what it is not in a peculiarly annoying and unconvincing way that makes its pretence the more to be deprecated the nearer it approaches success. The first time you see what looked like a solid pillar tremble in the breeze, your faith is ruined; and on the most important point. Your dimensional faith is at stake; and I am arguing that the third space dimension of solidity on the stage corresponds to the extra dimension of psychic reality unveiled, or created, by poetry; so that, if the seemingly solid pillar is suddenly seen to be flat, poetic drama becomes not a revelation but a deception. Today there is a peculiarly annoying trick of using painted curtains for front-scenes, with houses and streets falling in folds. This is not studied symbolism, but slovenly realism. Everything on the stage should seem to be doing well what it tries to do, and such a curtain is doing its job of representing a street horribly badly. A well-graced and richly-robed actor speaking solid and rich blank verse in front of a painted back-drop meagrely representing a house appears, or should appear, devastatingly incongruous. Besides, two utterly different conventions clash. Such attempts pin the action and words to an exactitude and local reference alien to their nature. A street picture, whether full set or curtain, across the stage forcibly relates itself second by second to the words spoken in front of it, which may have nothing whatsoever to do with streets, and probably involve issues far more important. A fairly plain background is important not only in itself, but in that it allows all things said and done and all objects placed in front of it to be in turn exactly and precisely themselves, and not something else: for everything on the stage is modified by its relations to other visible objects. An action played before a plain curtain, or an object so placed, is seen not in terms of some partial context, but sub specie aeternitatis. That is why, to the trained eye, things in front of a plain black, or other reasonably dark, curtain are at once so deeply significant.
A certain dignity and richness of setting is needed for all plays aiming at any kind of intellectual importance or spiritual profundity. Recently I saw Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars done with very cheap-looking realistic slum scenes. Walls trembled, colours were non-significant: all cardboard and paper in the worst traditions of the last century. It was utterly wrong. A degree of solidity, formalism, and rich though simple colouring is needed even here: just as, however low the character an actor represents, there are certain ugly because non-significant postures and movements to be avoided. Especially in Shakespeare the spatial element of production has a precise and particular duty: to subserve the rich quality and complex inward significances of Shakespeare’s text; to help body forth the concrete nature of poetic, that is of real as opposed to realistic, drama; something more, not less, solid and dimensional than what you find in lesser plays.
Then, you will say, we should arrange some elaborately symbolical modernistic set? But such settings are generally designed by artists not deeply and lovingly versed in Shakespeare’s peculiar symbolisms. They are often angular, with cubes and steps and tiers and levels out of all proportion to the action; whereas a Shakespearian play is normally composed rather of rhythm, curvature, and gradation. Indeed, whatever sort of artistic setting we have, there is danger the moment it becomes an art-form in itself. A stage set should not make a pretty picture of its own. The empty stage should look formal and pleasing, but should seem to be waiting for the action to complete it: it should not hold definite significance in itself. If you do work out an elaborated and exactly appropriate set such as that I describe later for Macbeth, it should so depend throughout on the action for its meaning that, until you see the play performed, it looks grand, possibly, but certainly incomplete.
There is so much meaning in Shakespeare’s text that if you load the eye with a new type of independent visual significance, even though it have a parallel correspondence to the play’s quality, the mind cannot take it all in. This is what happens. At first the visual details dominate the attention and you don’t get the play, the eye always being a more restful medium than the intelligence; then after a while you take the set for granted, see it no more, and watch the action only. The first part of the performance is ruined, the second not improved. Moreover, it is likely that such an elaborate set will not properly fulfil its function of throwing up the figures and especially the faces of the actors. The designer will have been thinking of other things. The only kind of elaborately planned set that is possible would be one that is all the time reacting closely on the text, one that so interlocks with rather than runs parallel to the action and words that the audience is continually being forced by it, not to neglect them, but to attend with new interest and understanding.
What, then, must we aim at? Something formal, pleasing, dignified. This will be fairly permanent. A plain curtain set disclosing a central platform and steps makes a good start. We can use a sky-sheet very often to good effect. We can break the back curtains with a couple of flats. For a peculiarly spiritual and metaphysical, as opposed to a historical, play, a couple of tall white cubes are sometimes helpful; it is wonderful what you can do by rearranging them and showing different edges. King Lear needs a more irregular suggestion; Twelfth Night can use a definitely formal garden wall and flowers. The main principle of solidity, some degree of formalism, and permanence, holds good; infinite variations can be invented according to the play and the occasion. For any tragedy, some underlining of centrality is nearly always important: our central steps, for example, and small platform. This helps to universalize the action. But a word of warning is necessary here: I have seen Cleopatra and her girls on a big stage high on a raised level above tiers of steps. This was a permanent set for the early Egyptian scenes. The empty lower level was widely illuminated. She seemed lost in vast spaces. A figure too high up after a while loses dignity and significance, especially if her position is not referred to any persons below. Her chair should, I felt, have been below the steps: visual importance being closely related to weight, or the sense of it.
Because our main plan involves formalism and permanence, we shall often deliberately avoid what seems at first a necessary touch of realism. Juliet’s balcony and window will not be too realistically convincing, but rather solidly and plainly formal. As for Desdemona’s bed, the more like a bed it is the less suggestion we can get of an altar. Universal as well as particular issues are involved. Permanence is in itself important: if we cut the big scenes too definitely into a street, Juliet’s balcony, the Friar’s cell, a bedroom, a tomb, we have separate bits of a story in place of a single dramatic statement. Often we find a hopeless succession of unrelated types of setting: plain, symbolical, and realistically painted front curtains; plain formal sets, symbolical-realistic sets; all sorts, in fact, with absolutely no unity of impact. There must be some noble permanence, reflecting the play’s quality of wholeness, giving a sense of the end implicit in the start, and helping to build the final stillness of great drama that should crown and surround and interpenetrate the action. Nor will a permanent arch in one convention and a succession of changing realistic pictures in another seen through it be of value, since we end by believing neither in the arch nor in the pictures. Any such elaborate and detailed variations should be seen in front of, not behind and through, the enduring and enclosing whole; and this fortunately tends to preclude picture scenery. The spatial quality of the whole play must dominate in the permanent set, details of the story and changes of properties, which should be varied sufficiently to avoid monotony, significantly taking their place within and before it. The two are not finally distinct and it is because there are usually in Shakespeare certain recurrent, almost static, themes, leading colours of the play’s patterned area, that an ideal set might be possible, as I have suggested, where certain symbolic permanences were solidified on a more elaborate scale, to blend variously with and at the same time brood over the action.
4. ON STAGE CONVENTION
The play’s time-sequence generates a mental space-area, which in turn enriches the sequence, and so on infinitely. The more you know of the end the more significant the beginning, and vice versa. This oscillating reciprocity throws up the space-time quality of the result. The mind is expanded to a rich and complex apprehension; in terms of an art-form simultaneously fluid and solid it somehow focuses the universal in the particular and the infinite in the finite.
This is done, as I have already demonstrated, by use of conventions, especially conventional limits. Now whereas the literary play is limited mainly in time, so that we may not allow reasonings as to what happens before and after the action to disturb our view, the theatre works within a spatial convention as well, whose limits, conventionally accepted, open vistas of universal meaning. All that is necessary is the one acceptance. It is the same with the compressing line units in poetry, and with an actor’s speaking: control holds infinite resources. The stage limits are accordingly themselves important. Kill or fog the limits and you tend to blur all grand suggestion in terms of those limits. That is why pools of light and areas of darkness are, normally, bad: we receive no sense of a marked-out area. The audience need not see the whole stage clearly all the time, but they should be visually aware of it. They should feel a significant right or left, up-stage and down, especially a significant centre; and there should be a certain grand permanence limiting the whole. Only so can universal meanings get across. Supposing central steps are made to look too definitely like palace stairs: an actor standing on them no longer commands the universe; he is half-way between his bedroom and the front door. Therefore a too realistic wall or house corner are not good: we feel there are more houses outside the wings, or perhaps a gate farther along the wall. Within our limits we have our world: outside them not houses or gates, but either (i) nothing or (ii) infinity, though under this second heading I should have to include vague suggestion of any particular quality; as when, at a certain point in the action, one side of the stage is impregnated with associations of a particular person and his significance. We must be willing to use the whole stage frankly as a conventionally accepted medium. Often the producer tries to pretend that things are not happening in a theatre, whereas everyone knows that they are, and it is just this that gives him his chance, for this knowledge is to be used and not fought against. Work in full recognition of the convention and you can pack the universe into your theatre.
Conventionally limited, the stage becomes a magic area where every action and position is deeply significant. What is our real reason for producing Shakespeare at all? To hear the words? You could have those by sitting at home and reading. Elaborate visual effects of light and set? I have tried to kill that fallacy. No. Neither the spatial nor the temporal in abstraction reaches the play’s essential quality, which exists in mental space-time; and the vitality of any production depends on its power to project this space-time, solid-fluid, quality in terms of significant action. This principle, which includes both words and use of properties, involves too continually varied significance in movement and grouping, which in turn depends largely on a properly conventionalized stage area. The result will be a fusing together, a reintegration, of the play’s two elements, temporal and spatial, particular and universal, to build a proper re-creation.
All poses and gestures should, in any straight poetic part, be picturesque and dignified.1 The actor should normally look grand and heroic. Every movement should be significant. A stage fall should be rhythmic, not sudden. Recently I have twice noticed in professional productions a fall done in one sudden, straight, slanting, and signal-like motion, with the body left lying like a log, the feet together and straight. There is no natural gradation in that. A sway and a half-turn is more graceful; and the body should arrange itself in a picturesque position. Nor is it only a question of pleasing appearance: the sudden straight fall is quite negative and you hardly believe in it. A dying man must deliberately act his dying, which involves at least two movements. Similarly, a log-like body does not look so significantly dead as one with limbs more artistically deployed. Gestures also must be melodic, not angular, and normally not too fast or significance is lost. Wide and graceful gestures and picturesque positions generally are demanded not by any considerations of period, as is sometimes supposed, but to establish again the extra dimension of poetic drama (see pp. 236–40, 279–80).
At every moment the producer must have regard to the stage group. He should be continually at work to make grouping significant. I give a few simple instances. Three persons alone on the stage look bad if equidistant. Whether or not they are in a straight line, the equidistance itself leaves them in non-significant relation, whereas one facing two placed together is powerful, since you then get opposition, which implies conflict, and therefore drama. Even though the persons be friendly, this holds; for conversation is itself a sort of conflict. Certainly if you get a quarrel, as with Brutus and Cassius, the opponents must face each other strongly and use the whole stage. Such considerations are important: the formality of grouping at every instant should be significant. In grouping a big informal crowd addressed by a central figure upstage you must deploy your actors, not in diagonal lines sloping towards the central figure, but rather in small serried ranks parallel to the audience, close against the wing curtains; the ranks getting more central as you work up-stage. Entrances of important people should be given careful ceremonial, the stage filling from both sides to avoid a procession. These are only a few basic ideas: but the grouping should be employed all the time with additional subtlety to express the varying meanings of situation and action.
Each part of the stage has its own significance. Exits should not be chancy matters. Within a scene one side of the stage may quickly get charged with a certain association. You can spoil Mark Antony’s entrance after Caesar’s murder by making him come in from a conspirator-impregnated side. A conventionally accepted stage is always alive with potential meaning. In watching a student performance of Berkeley Square (by John L. Balderstone and J. C. Squire) I was recently struck by the possibilities of stage convention. The lovers part tragically across the centuries, the hero leaving the eighteenth for the twentieth. The girl stood with an Isis-symbol, a cross surmounted by a circle, while her lover, facing her, backed into the curtained wings. The lights were well up. The situation was allowed to play itself and the effect overpowering: the stage wings became vistas of time; time was, for the moment, spatial. By using and welcoming the stage convention we can do things impossible otherwise. How often is the central madness extravaganza of King Lear properly done? Only an elaborated use of significant action and grouping can properly join with the words and thunder to build its towering fantasticality. The stage limits may create profound significance beyond themselves. See how Shakespeare uses the stage in Macbeth; how Macbeth’s exit for the murder off takes him from the visible world into infinities of horror. Here we touch the reason why noises off so often hold infinite reverberations.
Suppose the Weird Sisters in the first scene of Macbeth are to vanish. A black-out does nothing: but suppose they act the vanishing. Say they speak their words in a still group centre, one standing, another kneeling close, the third kneeling on the other side farther off. They employ appropriately significant, melodic, and clearly visible gestures, such as the hand dropping from the wrist with forefinger pointing down: and how much more effective that is in realizing the supernaturally evil than darkness and green lights. At the close, the group is broken. A twirl and a turn, proper gestures, the words pitched on the note of a whining wind, and the side figures go into different wings, the centre one exits centre. We gain not only the effect of the three parting from each other, but also make a solid group dissolve, melt into air; the action helps to realize the idea of vanishing. It is all done by positive visual suggestion in terms of the convention, with rhythm, gradation and significance. How does this compare with the usual black-out? Or suppose Hamlet is to speak his long soliloquy dramatizing his own inactivity. How is essential inaction to be put across by significant action? I describe my solution later.
Half the errors of modern Shakespearian production are due to misunderstanding of the nature of stage convention. Nowhere is this clearer than with ghosts. Producers are usually weak on Hamlet, but are worse with Macbeth. Banquo’s ghostly entrance at the feast I have seen represented with a magic-lantern projection on to Macbeth’s cushion, or as a sliding panel up the back of his throne. I have seen Banquo get unobtrusively in place with his back to the audience and then show himself by turning his blood-bolter’d face, and afterwards scamper out at the wings with his head down, whilst the other actors crowd around holding out their cloaks. Or I have seen the Ghost represented by Macbeth’s own shadow cast on the wall, symbolizing the subjectivity of his fear, though I did not get the point at the time. But, after all, what has all this, except perhaps the last, to do with Shakespeare? Or with drama in general?
Behind these tricks is the desire to make the supernatural convincing. The producer completely ignores that willing suspension of disbelief that is his right. In terms of stage convention he has to do certain very difficult things; instead, he wastes his time labouring to replace that convention by something quite superfluous that no one wants. For suppose you did convince the audience that you had a real ghost on the stage, they would only be frightened and leave the theatre. You may call this an absurd objection. Well, say you arrange matters so that the audience knows that the Ghost only seems to appear from nowhere and vanish. Then for the rest of the scene the audience are wondering how it was done and whispering theories to each other, the dramatic tension quite killed. What of a method than which nothing can be more disastrous than perfect success? We should always want our audience to see how effects are accomplished: if this spoils the effect, it is nearly certain to be a bad one. Moreover, the whole point and horror of a ghost in real life is that it looks just like a living person except, I am told, that its movement makes no sound. It does not appear in a green light. Nor does it slide up the back of your chair. As usual, poetic drama turns out to be fundamentally more real than realism: Shakespeare’s ghosts come in and go out, like all respectable stage persons, by the stage entrances. If grouping and good acting, by the ghost and still more by those who see it, do not make it convincing, nothing will; and if you want to suggest the infinite, as when a supernatural being vanishes, nothing will do it so well as the skilful use of the wings of a conventionally limited stage; since such a stage suggests the world, and its limits can always be used as frontiers of infinity.
The same principle of conventional acceptance applies to fights. They should be as dramatically powerful as possible, but not just a series of random sword-clinkings and vagabond noise. Often the best effects are attained by suggestion rather than actual blows: a weapon raised and held for a moment above a shrinking opponent in the middle of a mêlée may be extremely effective. Othello has to strike Desdemona: if just before the blow he looks as though he is going to make it and just after both look as though it has been made, the blow will be dramatically convincing. An audience is very kind and sensible where conventional belief is demanded, but utterly heartless the moment you try to deceive them. That, in nine cases out of ten, is why they laugh at the wrong time.
The whole performance should be constricted by a set convention which gives it infinite freedom. The stage becomes a world. For a grand ceremonial it should be filled broadly to the down-stage wings. A small stage thus used with a few actors gives a greater impression of size and numbers than a large stage full of actors less carefully placed, with a yard or so left unfilled at the sides. Opposing armies across a front-scene can give a grand impression if well spaced out, as when Brutus and Cassius confront Octavius and Antony. You do not need a vast army. In a full set four or five well-deployed figures can be arranged to lead the eye towards the wings, widening out and forcing the imagination to construct an infinite proportional expansion beyond the recognized limits; whereas a crowd of thousands in an out-of-doors pageant may well look meagre.
Today we have slight sense of the universal. Our typical plays are pieces of life torn from their context in the whole. But a Shakespearian play is not: it and its stage traffic in universality. Its kings should appear as kings of the whole world; its heroes, as mankind; its happy-ending romance becomes a dream of paradise; its tragedy, solemnizing the principle of sacrifice, touches ritual.
5
Whatever be our views about the theatre, it is clear that Shakespeare cannot be popular on the stage while we clog his plays by unsuitable methods. What is uniquely Shakespeare’s own is finally his one hope of popularity on or off the stage. The best sort of performance, and by far the hardest to create, would make the play look as though it had produced itself. With care we must exclude all false short cuts to an outward appearance of elaboration, whilst aiming instead to exploit the inner core and centrality of the drama. But never must the production appear laboured or inhumanly intellectualized. The more graceful effects of poetic gesture should be shot through and varied, like Shakespeare’s poetry, by touches of pure naturalism. Sets and properties must be so devised that they lend themselves easily to the action, and blend into the various supposed localities of the performance. There is no point in having Desdemona’s bed central and looking like an altar, unless it also is very clearly known to be her bed. Shakespeare touches universality continually, but it is always the intensely human that he universalizes. I hope none of my remarks appear to argue that Shakespeare is a writer of classic formality: I stress most the elements most in danger of neglect. Shakespeare’s art shows a unique blend of classic dignity and romantic naturalism. This we forget at our peril. The Court scene in The Merchant of Venice has been played with dummied figures and masked faces sitting in a row: I cannot see Shakespeare’s humanism in a masked face. Too often so-called ‘symbolic’ effects sit on a Shakespearian play like a monkey on a war-horse. Those I emphasize are rather the combing of its mane, the glint of steel on its hoof, the caparison to drape its flank. So we shall lead it out for some great actor, some new Garrick, Kean, Henry Irving or Forbes-Robertson, to bestride as never before was possible. Shakespeare’s symbolic effects expand but never oppose nature; his world is no dream world, but a newly-wakened world; his is an inclusive transcendentalism. Therefore all our symbolisms must be warmly human; intensely real, though not realistic; drawn from, not imposed on, the action.
More: if the production is to live, the producer himself must build and create during rehearsal; even sometimes take suggestions from his cast; must use the varied interplay of personality at his disposal to the full. Every true performance, amateur or professional or mixed, is partly a communal creation. The producer must have final control over every detail, but he should use it with reserve. He should not work from an unalterable plan. Who ever painted a picture or wrote a novel in that way? So much depends on the actual personalities of the cast. In my own experience the best points often develop from an accident, some one else’s good suggestion, or the necessities of a particular stage. Limitations are usually capable of exploitation. Every true artist knows this. Shakespeare knew it. Art is not a luxuriating of fancy, but a bending of opposition and inertia to the creative will.
1 For example at Macbeth, IV. iii. 186, Ross addresses Macduff:
Your eye in Scotland
Would create soldiers, make our women fight…
It is his way of breaking the news while simultaneously preparing revenge-thoughts as an antidote. ‘Create’ and ‘women’ refer respectively to Macduff’s children and wife. His eye fixes Macduff as he speaks, meaningfully. The obvious mistake is to speak these lines to Malcolm.
1 This quality my pictures are intended, in photographic terms, to project. The reservation is needed since some Pictures (1, 9, 29, 30) do not correspond to any actual stage moment.
1 Perhaps unjust: the soft colours created an atmospheric unity that stands the test of memory [1949]. Yes; and certainly the swift treatment suited so narrative a drama. My comments were one-sided. [1963]
1 Compare Vernon’s speech in 1 Henry IV, IV. i. 97–110. Observe its ‘bird’ and ‘Mercury’ images, and the way lightness of action is conveyed by light vowel sounds: estriages, wind, glittering, images, spirit, cuisses, thighs, etc. Contrast with this these lines from Hotspur’s answer:
Come, let me taste my horse,
Who is to bear me like a thunderbolt
Against the bosom of the Prince of Wales:
Harry to Harry shall, hot horse to horse,
Meet and ne’er part till one drop down a corse.
The difference between the ‘characters’ of Hotspur and Prince Hal is here a matter of vowel-sounds.
1 Useful technical information on Shakespeare’s music is given by Miss Cécile de Banke, Shakespearean Stage Production (1954).
1 I doubt if I was following the exact sequence of wind, lightning and thunder correctly here: see p. 279 below. The general principle is not affected. [1963]
2 Observe the harsh guttural consonants in Lear’s first speech: crack your cheeks, cataracts and hurricanoes, thought-executing, vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, thick rotundity, ingrateful man. There is a subtle contrast in the sounds of his second speech, striking a more reserved note of pathos. There is a succession of long vowels in Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy: Sleep, heartache, dream, pause. The thought interrupts them for a while. Then again: weary life, bourn, returns. Here is a compact contrast within two lines:
When Richard, with his eye brimful of tears,
Then check’d and rated by Northumberland …
(2 Henry IV, III. i. 67)
The speaking should follow hints such as these as far as possible.
1 Such sound-directions will be found in the Folio, and are to be distinguished from the scene-directions added by later commentators. Original directions will generally be either (i) aural or (ii) ceremonial; later additions generally scenic.
1 In The Tempest careful attention should be given to Prospero’s mantle and, in contrast, to his ducal robes. His appearance towards the close as prince, indicating the assumption of temporal rule by wisdom, must be suitably striking. [1963]
1 For Mr. Edward Gordon Craig’s claim to have devised a satisfactory method of kaleidoscopic changes, see p. 218 below.
1 Later experience has tempted me to adventure farther into spectacular lighting for certain scenes; especially broad effects of whitish light and shadow from the wings. My objection to any emphatic use of blues and greens remains. [1949]
1 In my own experience practising before a looking-glass can be very depressing. You cannot see yourself in any particular action, since you see your own eyes, which are necessarily diverted from taking part in that action, and the whole result is at once dislocated. By arranging the glass so that your head is cut out of vision you can, however, get a fairly good idea of your poses, gestures, and turns.