1
I shall next describe some actual examples. First, I outline the development of Orsino in Twelfth Night, a part which I have had the opportunity of playing1; next, I refer shortly to my productions of Romeo and Juliet, Henry VIII, Othello, Hamlet, and King Lear. I use the initials C, R, and L, for ‘centre’, ‘right’ and ‘left’. Stage right is the audience’s left. Up-stage is away from the audience, down-stage towards them.
Hart House Theatre in Toronto has a good fore-stage which suits Shakespeare well and serves to make the change from auditorium to stage gradual and convincing. We ought perhaps before this to have discussed the kind of stage best suited to Shakespeare. However, what we do on our stage is more important than the type of stage we use: often we have no choice. A blend of modernism and fore-stage seems best, such as you have at the Stratford (England) Theatre. I am not myself in favour of an Elizabethan theatre: to incorporate certain Elizabethan principles with our own seems healthier.2
2
Orsino in TWELFTH NIGHT
The current stage misconception that Orsino is a dull part is a symptom of our false valuations concerning dramatic poetry. Difficult it may be, but not dull. It is subtler than the part of Sir Toby. Orsino starts as a romantic lover, with a fiercely passionate nature dominated by Olivia. At his second appearance his words ‘Who saw Cesario, ho?’ following Valentine’s remarks about Viola’s advancement, already suggest a new emotional direction. Next, he describes how he has opened his soul to the supposed boy. He talks of his ‘passion’ when Cesario (i.e. Viola) reminds him of it, only next moment to revert at length to Cesario’s suitability as a messenger. This he develops, promising big rewards. Watch how fond he is getting of Cesario. Soon we find them together listening to sentimental music. Orsino is now happier being sentimental over Olivia with the boy beside him than he would be if his suit were accepted. Notice with what new and contrasted cheeriness he enters: ‘Good-morrow, friends’. See how he looks forward to a feast of sentiment and song with Cesario. Last night it relieved ‘his passion much’: we can well believe it. He calls Cesario to his chair, and talks of the day when he too shall love, enjoying the thought. At the words ‘the constant image of the creature that is belov’d’ his eyes can rest on Viola: the action points the quality of the whole scene. Orsino is unconsciously revealing to us a love he has not yet recognized. He asks how Cesario likes the music. ‘It gives a very echo to the seat where love is thron’d.’ Orsino, delighted, inquires if the boy has himself yet loved, and an exquisite dialogue of cross-purposes ensues: Orsino enjoys associating Cesario with love. The psychology is subtle and delicate. And somehow, listening to Cesario’s replies, in a new and finer consciousness, he wistfully speaks the truth of his violent masculine passion for Olivia:
For, boy, however we do praise ourselves,
Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,
More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn
Than women’s are.
To which Cesario replies: ‘I think it well, my lord.’ Watch the contrast in this scene of female sincerity, marked by Viola’s short replies, and male flamboyance. Feste arrives. Orsino tells Cesario to mark the song, which he describes. It is ‘old and plain’, not light and flashy: a significant contrast between the two sorts of love outlined in this scene. So together they listen to Feste, Viola deeply in love with Orsino, Orsino not yet aware that he is already deeply in love with Cesario. He has an arm round the boy, holds his hand, listening to the love-poignancies of Feste’s wavering melody, Olivia all but forgotten; for it is a nameless Love only that rules, Cesario by his side. As from a dream, where the touch of Cesario plays a part, Orsino wakes; but I think Feste has to come and stand in front to remind him, coughs perhaps, and receives his payment. We need not fear comedy. Why does Feste get so many tips? Other Shakespearian fools do not. Feste, compact of music and wit, distils the quintessence of the romantic comedies and is the presiding genius of Twelfth Night. His habit of getting money out of everyone increases his dramatic dignity: he is using them.
So Orsino and Cesario have to be recalled from the paradise wherein the undulations of music still hold their minds. Orsino is irritable. He tells them all to go.
Again he is alone with Cesario. His Olivia-passion, the cheating lure that vulture-like has fixed its beak in his consciousness, has returned. It rises almost as an undesired duty. Lust is a very conscious experience. The mind projects before itself an image not profoundly desired by the unconscious self and therefore finally unsatisfying; and next pursues it almost as a duty. A. C. Bradley has noted that Macbeth seems to kill Duncan as a ‘duty’; and I have elsewhere noticed the element of lust in the play. Certainly Orsino is tormented by carnal passion. If he in deep thought crosses the stage before ‘Once more, Cesario’, we can get the change well underlined by action. His love for Olivia, he says, owes nothing to her wealth: it is purely her face and body he desires, or words to that effect. There is no thought of anything deeper. At Cesario’s objections to his insistence—how maternal Viola is compared with Orsino’s almost adolescent unreason—and the apt reference to some woman whose love might with a like hopelessness be set on him, Orsino scoffs at woman’s love, saying that no woman could sustain so powerful a passion. His words, in his changed consciousness, contradict the spirit of his earlier admission of masculine inconstancy. He is irritable, angry, in that confusion where the baffled mind struggles to unify and objectify its conflicting levels of consciousness.
Viola helps him. She tells of her supposed sister’s love, and for the first time in this scene lets herself go:
My father had a daughter lov’d a man …
Orsino grows interested. He returns to his chair. She is kneeling by him. They are again almost in their old positions. Again he takes her hand. The accents of true love melt the mirage of his eye-lust for Olivia. ‘She never told her love …’ Orsino is again rapt in Cesario. But Viola has gone too far, and draws away, tears welling to her eyes. Turning from him, quickly she speaks: ‘Sir, shall I to this lady?’ Orsino is baffled: both at the boy and at himself. Then he remembers his part of dramatic lover, recalls how he loves Olivia, and speaks perfunctorily:
Ay, that’s the theme.
To her in haste; give her this jewel. Say
My love can give no place, bide no denay.
His mind is not in the glib words. Cesario goes out. If during the action some small object, a rose for example, can be impregnated with Cesario-associations and left lying about, Orsino can now stand watching Cesario’s exit, then pick it up, look anxious, and, ending with a gesture of worry, go out deeply thoughtful.
In the last scene, where Orsino is rejected by Olivia, his threat to slaughter Cesario does not conflict with my reading. His Olivia-lust is a mad hunger (I. i. 3, 22; II. iv. 102), and, when it dominates, all-powerful:
But this, your minion, whom I know you love,
And whom, by heaven, I swear I tender dearly,
Him will I tear out of that cruel eye
Where he sits crowned in his master’s spite.
Come, boy, with me; my thoughts are ripe in mischief.
I’ll sacrifice the lamb that I do love
To spite a raven’s heart within a dove.
The italicized words should be spoken with an expression of inward conflict. Orsino recognizes the act as one of mad ‘mischief’: he is spiting himself as well as everyone else. Observe, too, that there may be some jealousy of Olivia’s share in Cesario’s affections. Anyway he is thwarted on every side and mad with rage. When he knows the truth and Cesario turns out to be a girl, he should look as though scales of blindness have fallen from his eyes.1 Paradise is found at his elbow and has been there all the time, could he have known it:
Boy, thou hast said to me a thousand times
Thou never would’st love woman like to me.
Orsino speaks the final couplet: Viola is to be ‘Orsino’s mistress and his fancy’s queen’. It is a lovely ending. It is not a patched-up conclusion. From the very start this ending is prepared. Orsino, like Benedick, the chief persons in Measure for Measure, and Shakespeare’s greater tragic figures, is shown on a voyage of self-discovery. He sloughs off the false and is forced by the action to self-recognition. He should not be presented as a sentimental young man, but rather as a barbaric prince, somewhat oriental, of a passionate and violent nature. His name is significant.
3
ROMEO AND JULIET
Hart House Theatre, Toronto; 1932
Our working out of the first fight appeared to me interesting. It is important to get the contrast of the two houses and their retainers branded into the audience’s mind, and this cannot be done if the words are lost. The servants start brawling, but as soon as they cross weapons Benvolio enters. They pause at his words; or he beats down their swords. Tybalt’s entry draws Benvolio’s attention; they speak and start to fight, the servants supporting them on either side, not actually crossing weapons, but shouting ‘Down with the Capulets’ or ‘Montagues’. Two officers enter, using staves to push back the fighters. Capulet enters from down R. His appearance helps the officers to check the noise and most of the action: his words should get an exact hearing. Then Montague enters down L. They face each other across the fore-stage, each with his lady restraining him. The tableau is important. When they fall on each other there starts a general mêlée. The two officers use action that suggests that they are restraining Capulet and Montague; one between them, one outside Montague, to avoid too stiff an artificiality. There are more shouts, and weapons cross. There is more noise than ever before, thunderous.
For an instant you get a vivid picture: on each side one of the servants sinks to his knee, an arm shielding his turned head from an opponent holding an uplifted weapon. These are up-stage of Capulet and Montague and their wives, and partly obscured. What is wanted is a definitely significant picture to build the effect subconsciously. There is a great noise just before the Prince’s entry. Notice how the entrances are built up: servants, gentlemen, lords, and the Prince, in order. He enters on a platform up C and speaks from its steps; the noise dwindles, then rises. The fighting has stopped. He carves a way down centre, the officers pushing people aside. There are still murmurs. He is right down on the words ‘Throw your mistemper’d weapons to the ground’. There is complete silence. A pause. Then, ‘And hear the sentence of your moved prince’. He turns—the deliberate throwing away of stage presence by a turn up-stage underlines his absolute authority—and walks up C, followed by the officers. Standing on the steps he speaks the rest, officers either side, the whole group, who have had time to get to new positions, listening: many have their backs half-turned to the audience, giving emphasis to the Prince’s importance.
Done like this, not a single line need be lost; there has been hardly any actual fighting, but the impression of a fight is strong. We realize the fight by an undulating succession, increasing waves, curving down after the Prince’s entrance; the usual Shakespearian movement. Such variation is far more effective than one undifferentiated mass of noise, since without variation there is no significance. Shouts and murmurs in waves are more humanly effective than weapons banging. Usually the words are quite lost; people in odd corners of the stage clink swords in pairs, with no effect of two separate parties, nor any real effect of a fight, which cannot be got by just imitating fighting. The Prince comes on as likely as not from one side instead of appearing high and central. We must use our conventional stage and get significant pictures from our groupings. There is usually no centrality about the set: it is just ‘a street in Verona’ and looks like one: nothing has been done to spatialize the play’s inward centrality, and without such interpretation the production is dead. The various entrances are all important: there is a patterned formality about them which must be not only preserved but emphasized.
Romeo and Juliet presents a love union in contrast to family hostility and civil disorder: the contrast is clearly a variation of the music-tempest opposition throughout Shakespeare. The prologue correctly describes the play. Romeo and Juliet is more than a love story, since not only is the lovers’ story related to these outward disturbances, but their deaths prove sacrificially creative. The play has an exact and intricate pattern. These wider issues must not be slurred.
In this production we used no sky-sheet, only black drapes with steps and a platform disclosed centre. On the central platform we arranged variously two white blocks, made to appear like solid rectangular cubes, over six feet long with a cross-section about eighteen inches square. For the street scenes one stood perpendicular, the other lay horizontal and diagonally towards the audience, both with corners and edges showing as much as possible. They gave the touch we wanted of rectangular irregularity suggesting city streets and buildings. For the Capulets’ dance they became pillars, and were useful for Juliet’s tomb. They appeared in all the full-set scenes, giving a helpful impression of permanence. The Friar Laurence incidents and smaller Capulet scenes were done before plain curtains. Juliet’s potion speech is most effective with a minimum of furniture: we had one couch in front of a black curtain. Romeo’s parting with Juliet we arranged poorly with Romeo going off on one side and a plain back curtain. I have seen it done better by the Ottawa Drama League, Romeo disappearing over a central balcony against a sky background. In most professional performances these inward and emotional scenes are hampered by alien effects. If Romeo ties a rope to Juliet’s bed to help him down, and she throws it after him, it is all very convincing but disconcerting. Such action has no depth of inward significance at all, and therefore fights against the words, besides making us too conscious of windows, beds, dressing-tables, hair-brushes, and so on.
In the central fight scene Mercutio and Benvolio must really start in ill-humour with each other. It is a hot day. They are bored and quarrel irritably about each other’s aptitude to quarrel. The humour of the situation should be unconscious on their part. They are shown in a mood that makes Mercutio’s later actions reasonable. An interesting point arose in Romeo’s attack on Tybalt. In contrast to the earlier Mercutio-Tybalt duel, Romeo rushes on Tybalt in a blind frenzy, disarms him with a sword and stabs him with a dagger. At the dress rehearsal I found that I had no time or space to draw the dagger: I just pushed at him with my hand, his body obscuring the action. Though I clearly could not have drawn the dagger, no one observed anything wrong, and we did it that way each night, without losing the effect. In this scene, when the Prince arrives, he is better not speaking from the centre steps. He has done that once. It is better to have him down centre, in the middle of the general distress, as it were; drawn down from his authority by this disastrous civil disorder that has ended in his own kinsman’s death. So he stands, surrounded by figures pleading for forgiveness or vengeance, Lady Capulet kneeling over Tybalt. He is a symbol of Verona, torn, distracted by internal conflict.
Romeo grows during the play. First he is a love-sick boy,1 next an ardent and successful lover; next, a hero suffering for support of his friend. In his ‘banishèd’ scene with Friar Laurence his emotion is violent, and must be given with rhetorical force and abandon. He must on no account sob like a big baby: he so often does. This is the sort of situation that only poetic drama can properly tackle and we must let it do so. At his re-entrance into the action in the Mantua scene he should show a new maturity and manly dignity: the wearing of a cloak and top-boots, a small but effective touch, strikes the right note. His soliloquy recounting his wondrous dream must be given every chance: this is all clearly to be done on the fore-stage. The dream curiously forecasts Antony and Cleopatra, touching a sense of love’s victory beyond death. Compare Romeo’s ‘… that I reviv’d, and was an emperor’ and Cleopatra’s ‘I dream’d there was an emperor Antony’.
Romeo’s hearing of Juliet’s death is best taken with a terrible quiet and a mad glint in the eye giving a new depth to contrast with his earlier abandon. His description of the Apothecary is very important, and should be done slowly. New worlds are swimming into his ken. Tragic experience now for the first time opens his eyes to suffering and impoverished humanity: Lear’s purgatory is forecast. He recalls having seen the Apothecary; partly because he needs him and partly because his consciousness is tuned in to such things, unnoticed before. Shakespeare uses the Apothecary to strike the required tragic note. Watch how Romeo’s values are reversed during his conversation with the man: the world’s gold becomes poison, life a sickness. Even so, beyond pleasure himself, he takes a selfless pleasure in the other’s advantage: ‘Farewell; buy good and get thyself in flesh’. This is the first purely selfless thought he has uttered: Juliet’s death has made a Christian of him. All this must be stressed and done simply: we must not spoil it by attempts to photograph Mantua.
When Romeo next enters before the tomb with Balthasar his heavy step and set looks must express his deadly intensity and rigid course. He warns his servant from impeding his almost maniac determination. He gives him gold and says farewell kindly, again kind with an all but inhuman and last-moment charity, like Timon with Flavius. In these latter scenes Romeo should certainly wear a heavy cloak: it gives him the extra power and presence that he needs. We are in the world of Othello, King Lear and Timon of Athens. Alone on the stage he turns and walks up towards the tomb, a figure of tragic destiny. It is a tragic ascent.
The last scene of Romeo and Juliet is nearly always arranged badly. The full set usually shows the interior of the vault. For much of the scene this at first sight appears to have certain advantages; for the end it is weak and for the beginning ruinous. Romeo has to enter far up-stage beyond a grating, he and Balthasar two distant silhouettes. His first speeches are thrown away: instead the picturesque adventure fills the eye with tawdry enjoyment. At the entry of Capulet, Montague, and the Prince it is not very helpful to have the final group within the tomb. The final speeches are better spoken from outside it, from the outside world, overlooking the lovers’ tragedy, yet looking up to it nevertheless as to a sacrifice. The Prince’s reference to the sun’s overclouding comes better this way than if they were already engulfed underground; though this is a minor point.
The tomb should, then, be up-centre and raised. Romeo entered, in our production, down L on the fore-stage: this throws the intensity of his first speeches down close to the audience. As he walks up to Juliet, he is, as it were, climbing, not descending. The mattock-business of the opening of the tomb we did simply by suggestion—though Romeo had an actual mattock—and the drawing of a curtain: a little extra realism could be arranged, if wanted. The middle action is equally good this way, and the final group better. The whole scene acts itself. It might have been written for such an arrangement, and as a matter of fact was. However, we nowadays see it done differently, all to get a pretty effect of gratings and silhouette figures against a night sky and perhaps a twinkling star: disjointing the body of the drama and pushing it out of shape.
The conclusion should be stately and ceremonious, with no hurry, though the Friar’s speech will be condensed by cutting. We cut also from Juliet’s potion speech to Romeo’s Mantua scene. For a production done under un-professional conditions it is safest to cut freely and if possible find a large cut that does not tangle the pattern, generally in the latter half. We had no music, unavoidably; but certain simple sound-effects at act beginnings might have been profitably devised.
4
HENRY VIII
Hart House Theatre, Toronto; 1934 (see p. 23)
Henry VIII is a massive play. It is a fitting, one might say the only fitting, culmination of Shakespeare’s work. The play was given in three acts. Each movement we preluded with music suggesting, for Act I, tragedy; for Act II, a quality pre-eminently martial and kingly; for Act III, a joyful solemnity. Certain other scenes were given a few bars appropriate to what followed. I tried to play on a recurrent king-theme motif. The saturating Christian quality of the play was reflected into anthems and hymns.
As for sets, we used mainly an up-stage central platform and steps between black curtains. On the platform was a table and chair, and behind small red curtains disclosing a stained-glass window. This appeared to blend neatly a permanent and ecclesiastical formalism with historical realism. In front we used thrones, chairs, tables. Once we had the red curtains closed and a heavy lighted candelabra on the platform, for the scene where the King hears of the birth of his child. For the Queen’s trial the central platform was filled with standing lords and a bench of bishops below on the steps; the Cardinals’ thrones were up L to LC and the King’s R. Down L was the Queen’s chair. This arrangement distinguished between the King’s and Cardinals’ authority, and gave the Queen an important cross to a good position between the King and Cardinals for her long speeches. Buckingham’s farewell speech was spoken, necessarily I think, on the fore-stage.
Three scenes are worth describing in some detail. The first is that (III. ii) where the King discovers Wolsey’s duplicity and leaves him to the merciless baiting of hostile lords. My arrangement illustrates what I mean by ‘significant action’.
The set shows a chair and table on the platform in the up-stage central alcove, and another chair and table down R. Throughout the scene we use the platform as peculiarly Wolsey’s, its centrality and height relating to the here dominating matter of his high position; the right of the stage belongs to the King. Off-stage L is imagined as Wolsey’s world, off-stage R as the King’s.
The four lords are discovered discussing their grievances and rumours of Wolsey’s impending disgrace. Seeing him coming L they draw down L on the fore-stage. Wolsey crosses R, dismisses Cromwell, who goes out L, and sits at the table down R soliloquizing. Appropriately he sits in the chair later to be used by the King as he plans how to rule the King’s affairs. Wolsey next goes up C to the other chair and gets busy with his papers; the movement toning with his unrestful state of mind. The King enters R with an attendant lord, sits by the table down R, and addresses the four lords who have advanced. Two of them go to awake Wolsey’s attention to the King’s presence, and then go R.
Wolsey comes down C. He faces the seated King and three standing lords R, who are grouped like a tribunal; the two other lords are L. He is, as it were, surrounded by cold hostility on both sides as he receives the King’s anger. All but Wolsey exit R, the two lords L passing behind him up-stage, leaving him high and dry, so to speak, as he comes down looking at the papers that have ruined him, given by the King.
Wolsey, alone, first sits R, sees the whole disastrous situation, and in despair rises and retires up towards the alcove, standing on the steps, back turned. The lords, the Lord Chamberlain, Norfolk, Suffolk and Surrey, re-enter from the King’s side R. The Lord Chamberlain and Norfolk get L of Wolsey and demand as from the King his seal of office. Wolsey, who has come down the steps C with great dignity, refuses, then turns to re-ascend. Their words bring him down again. For a while he maintains this central position, the lords taunting and insulting him, two on either side. Surrey, particularly fiery, has moved from R across Suffolk to RC. From there he makes a particularly insulting remark about Wolsey’s supposed amours and then turns away upstage R, the line lending itself to just this movement of disgust. He is joined there by Suffolk, who walks up, R of the table. Wolsey with great dignity crosses down R to the table on the line: ‘How much, methinks, I could despise this man.…’ This movement suggests his yet intact outward confidence, since he goes deliberately to the side—the King’s side—from which the insult came; yet suggests subtly his need of chair or table as support. Observe that he has given up his central position. The placing now is: Wolsey standing by the table R, slightly more central than the two lords Surrey and Suffolk behind him up-stage R; and Norfolk and the Lord Chamberlain L. The Lord Chamberlain stands well away, aside from it all, to mark his more sympathetic and kindly nature. Now the other three lords volley a succession of charges at Wolsey. Surrey and Suffolk come down centre from up-stage R, coming from behind Wolsey, each on his first words in a semicircular movement ranging themselves with Norfolk in a diagonal line. The accumulative nature of their accusations is underlined by one following the other; and the coming round from behind gives a touch of meanness to their bullying attack. At one particularly crushing charge Wolsey sinks in the chair. Wolsey’s central dignity is gone; he sits crushed on the King’s side of the stage where he was recently planning England’s future; and the lords are now one combined force bearing down on him from one side and shutting him off from both the platform and his own world L. One of them might ascend the first step. Finally the lords exit R as before, passing up-stage of Wolsey. Anything slightly undignified in their thus trooping off in single file tones with their bullying behaviour. Surrey makes a final expression of scorn as he passes; the Lord Chamberlain, the last to go, hesitates, looks sorry and baffled, and passes out.
Wolsey is left alone again. His soliloquy is spoken in the chair. Cromwell enters L, and gives his news turned away down L. At ‘That’s news indeed’ Wolsey stands, only to sit again at ‘There was the weight that pull’d me down’. At his assertion of loyalty Cromwell falls kneeling by Wolsey’s chair. Wolsey speaks sitting, his hand on Cromwell’s shoulder, but rises on the line ‘Say, Wolsey that once trod the ways of glory’, Cromwell still kneeling. At ‘Prithee, lead me in’ Cromwell rises. They go up C. At the words ‘Farewell the hopes of court’ Wolsey turns and looks towards the empty chair R. At ‘My hopes in Heaven do dwell’ Wolsey and Cromwell are C, backs to the audience, Wolsey looking up toward the stained-glass windows. The scene then closes.
We next notice the scene (IV. ii) where Queen Katharine has a vision of Paradise. This, Shakespeare’s last play, shares with the others of his final period a strong religious and mystical quality, here for the first time explicitly Christian.
The sick Queen is discovered in a chair RC with two girls and her gentleman Griffeth. The lights are slightly dimmed, with a predominance of red to create a sunset effect. Griffeth speaks his description of Wolsey’s end. The Queen asks for music. Griffeth makes a gesture down L and withdraws there with the two girls, as solemn piano music starts. As soon as the now sleeping Queen is quite alone violins are audible coming over the solemn music which dies down. Faint voices are heard, singing an Easter Alleluia hymn. The voices and violins gather power as three white-robed figures enter from either side. The lights gradually come up. The six, themselves silent, execute a complicated dance, and curtsey to the Queen in pairs. At the climax, when the lights and singing are at their height, they offer her the garland of immortality. The lights are now a white blaze on the snowy figures. The Queen holds out her hands. Then the figures depart, voices and violins growing softer and lights dimming down to their original strength and colour. Finally the solemn bars from the piano come up again and all is as it started. The Queen calls, Griffeth and the girls go to her, having seen and heard nothing.
We amplified Shakespeare’s directions to the extent of varying the music, but the effect was essentially true to them. The use of lights was unorthodox: a sleep-vision is nearly always done in queer lights. I chose the opposite, showing off the vision against waking life as daylight against dream. Whether or not we believe in any paradise it is clearly the producer’s business to make such scenes convincing; and a paradise of green or blue lights is not attractive (Picture 10).
The whole last movement is optimistic, towering up to the final crest of prophecy. In the earlier parts we had tragedy heavily toned with the religious consolation of Buckingham’s and Wolsey’s last speeches. Our third act is happier. In Queen Katharine’s vision we face the radiance of eternity; in the coronation of Anne Bullen and the christening of Elizabeth we face rather a radiance temporal and earthly. To point a unity here I used the same Easter hymn for Katharine’s vision and Elizabeth’s christening procession. Easter associations are appropriate to both resurrection and birth. If it were objected that the hymn was a Protestant affair out of period, we could argue that the play significantly contrasts Cranmer and the Cardinals. In this last act Cranmer becomes most important: the three tragic persons were excessively proud and fell; Cranmer is excessively humble and rises. We have three processions in the play: first, Buckingham’s execution; second, Anne Bullen’s coronation; third, the christening. The first two went across the fore-stage, rather similarly, to help stress their comparison and contrast as noticed by one of the choric gentlemen in the text. Our last procession gained a new dimension of importance by coming up on to the stage through the auditorium.
For our final scene the Lord Chamberlain is addressing the two porters on the fore-stage before a plain curtain. Then from the back of the auditorium the joyful pealing of church bells breaks out, and the procession appears singing the Easter hymn. As it reaches the fore-stage the curtain opens, discovering the full set with a few persons grouped on both sides. The Duchess with the child Elizabeth under a canopy goes up the steps C with Cranmer; the rest of the procession goes mostly L, but some R. This leaves empty spaces R. The Lord Chamberlain speaks his formal salutation down L. Next there are trumpets and the King’s guard enters R; and then the King with more lords and preceded by two heralds walks up C to a few bars of the king motif. Notice that the empty spaces are now being filled. The deliberate and gradual filling of such spaces in a scene of pageantry is effective. We gain a sense of mass by watching the building piece by piece, and one of plan and purpose that lends the whole significance. In this instance we have seen the Alleluia procession arrive, leaving Cranmer and the child in the centre; and, as the waiting gaps in stage grouping, which give us a sense of something lacking, are filled at the King’s entry, we watch royalism complement religion. The interplay of Church and State is vital in Henry VIII. So now the King ascends the steps, stands opposite Cranmer, and kisses the child; and then starts to descend, taking Cranmer’s hand. But Cranmer holds back after coming down one step and asks leave to speak. This gets the King a step lower than Cranmer, who remains high and central for his prophecy, the culmination of the whole play and, indeed, Shakespeare’s last word to the world.
Additional Note, 1963
Buckingham’s farewell on the way to execution in Henry VIII (II. i) is among Shakespeare’s most remarkable long speeches. It is patterned on the deposition scene in Richard II (p. 32); both show humility giving way to anger. This is my reading:
A great and loved nobleman, Buckingham is attended by a crowd of sympathizers. He forgives his enemies and accusers, imitating Christ, and means to maintain this high state. Lovell’s interruption should be regarded as a painful, because specific, test, but after a pause Buckingham recovers himself and assumes a yet more spectacular, though now slightly artificial, pose of universal forgiveness.
When Vaux refers to his lordly status there follows a yet more severe test, touching Buckingham’s pride. He is projected into the Timon world of bitterness at betrayal and ingratitude, and the stifled passions within him are released, as he denounces his enemies. Fingering by chance a cross that he is wearing he realizes how far he has fallen from the Christ-like state he had aimed at. He is silent. Then, struck with remorse, he asks for his followers’ prayers.
In this speech of Shakespeare’s last play the long line of his tragic heroes is brought to the bar of Christianity, and found wanting. If the overtones and variations here indicated are preserved, the scene is among the most dramatically moving in Shakespeare. A more detailed examination of it is given in The Crown of Life, 274–8.
5
OTHELLO
Hart House Theatre, Toronto; 1934
We divided the play into three movements; one leading up to Cassio’s dismissal; the second composed only of the big temptation scene; the third, the rest of the play. That is, the hatching of Iago’s plot; the success of it; the result of it.
The early scenes were done simply, but a difficulty arose at the change from the Duke’s council-chamber to Cyprus. There was furniture to be moved. The gap was filled by an interesting expedient. We want something here to indicate and help realize the change in locality; and the tempestuous voyage of Othello and the rest is of great importance and needs underlining. Its symbolic force is this: Othello and Desdemona conquer adversity. They arrive safe over hostile and tempestuous seas. The Turks are drowned and Othello when rejoining Desdemona is shown victorious in both war and love. All this contrasts with the more fatal spiritual tempest to be raised later in Othello’s mind by Iago. So we arranged a miniature orchestra of sounds, using a wind-machine, a surf-machine, a thunder-sheet, a big drum, and a bugle. All lights are down. Waves of elemental conflict crash in the darkness, and through them comes a faint strangled bugle; again, waves of sound booming and thundering, dying and rising, a crescendo of fury; but next the bugle comes strong and clear over the tempestuous waves, suggesting the victory of man over hostile nature. These sounds last quite a while and are very loud. Meanwhile the curtains have been drawn, and the lights go up on Cyprus.
On the central platform there is a plain balcony against a darkened sky-sheet, where men are watching the waves. Montano strides about anxiously below. The lights are still a little dimmed. News arrives by hurrying messengers. All is warlike preparation and bustle. Intermittent wind and surf still sound. A messenger tells of the Turkish disaster and of the arrival of Cassio’s ship. It is growing lighter. Cassio enters L, thronged by citizens. He wears armour and a helmet. Cries of ‘A sail, a sail!’ are heard. Soon—not directly—after, guns thunder a salute. Cassio’s arrival was not so heralded beforehand. A messenger goes off to inquire of this new arrival, while Cassio tells of Othello’s marriage, emphasizing Desdemona’s excellence. The messenger returns, saying that it is she who has arrived. Cassio in figurative language imagines her divine prerogative of safety against tempests. He prays for Othello, speaking of him as of a god coming to breathe life-fire into the Cypriots. The glamorous situation is being built, heaped up, one entry on another. The lights are well raised. Desdemona, Emilia, and Iago enter from the centre platform, and descend the steps, holding their raised position for a second or two while the crowded stage kneels at Cassio’s command and Cassio speaks his welcome. Watch Desdemona descend, immortal beauty untouched by storm. The lights are bright on her. No more wind and surf is audible: the tempest is being crushed by human excellence. Now again, in quick succession, cries of ‘A sail, a sail!’ and guns. Cassio was unannounced by such effects; for Desdemona they were separated by a few lines; now they come both at once. While they go for the news, Desdemona talks playfully to Iago: an exquisite contrast and delicate irony. She is gay and colloquial. A divine domesticity breathes from her. A trumpet sounds: our third entry has this additional ceremony, by contrast rising over the others. ‘The Moor—I know his trumpet!’ Cheers sound off. Desdemona runs to the steps. Attended by soldiers Othello appears up-centre on the platform, with steel breastplate and tall Viking helmet, and stands amid a din of welcome from the now packed stage, an arm raised both in recognition and to command silence. There is next utter quiet. He starts to come down, and holds out his arms as Desdemona steps up to his embrace. Notice that she, no ‘moth of peace’, goes up to meet him, up to his glamorous world, he does not descend all the way. ‘O my fair warrior!’ The light falls brilliant on them, central.
The scene progresses in waves, like the first scene in Romeo and Juliet, each entry more striking than the last. Consider the skilful technique by which normal time is telescoped to make such a swift-gathering crescendo of dramatic effect, depending as it does on the arrival of several ships, possible. My arrangement brings out only what is already in Shakespeare. The poetry here is highly decorative and richly inflated with universal significance. As Othello and Desdemona kiss, Iago, down L, mutters: ‘O you are well tun’d now …’ It is a great scene: but its grand artistry can be slaughtered by inconsiderate production.
After Othello’s exit we had Bianca give an inviting eye to Cassio, who reciprocates her interest; and shortly after introduced a dance for her and two others. My reasons were: (i) the part of Bianca needs building up, and it is as well to let the audience know who and what she is or her later entry loses force; (ii) in this way we help to illuminate the part of Cassio, his attractiveness and moral laxity; and (iii) it all serves to create a sensuous suggestion, in tone with the change in locality, that helps the later action.
The Herald announces the general holiday on the fore-stage. Then the curtain discovers our recent full set, now with a table and benches L. Montano, Iago, and others are lounging about. The dance starts, given by Bianca and two girls. It is a southern riotous affair with tambourines. Bianca follows with a solo turn, very colourful and sensuous. All this lends point to Othello’s warning to Cassio—they enter down R after the dance is over—about over-stepping the limits of merry-making. Cassio’s drunkenness follows more easily. When Othello enters after the fight we can get a good effect by letting him stalk about in dead silence. Seeing Bianca solicitous for Cassio, holding on to him perhaps, he gives her a stony and puritanical stare, as though his high morality is doubly shocked by scenting sexual in addition to imbibitory vice. These are the kind of additions I defend: unless they seem to be doing quite a lot of useful things at the same time, they are probably unsafe.
We come now to the important middle act, where we find some interesting examples of significant action. The set shows the steps and central platform between dark curtains. Over the balcony is thrown a rich purple cloth. The sky is bright behind. On the main stage we have two light-grey seats by a table with a golden tasselled cloth R, a little up-stage, and a colourous divan L. On the table are papers, ink, and pens. Up to now Othello has dressed in European style; from now onwards he wears an oriental costume; a purple gown with, in this scene, a loose gold and red robe over it.
Desdemona, Emilia and Cassio are discovered talking. Just before Cassio’s exit R Othello and Iago enter on the fore-stage down L. This entry with Iago tends to impregnate stage-left with suggestion of Iago and render it slightly hostile to Desdemona, who will throughout exit and re-enter R. Othello hears Desdemona’s solicitations, sits at the table R on the inside, more central, chair, and there succumbs to her caresses and gives in. The ladies exit R. Iago crosses up R above Othello, gazing after them. He is now beyond the table, R. Othello is signing papers. The action of this long scene will show us Iago driving Othello from upstage R to down L. The table suggests the civilized Europeanized Othello; the divan L something of oriental passion. Iago will exit and re-enter L.
At Iago’s first words Othello continues with his papers. Afterwards he puts them down. Iago sits R on the outside chair far R at ‘My lord, you know I love you’. Othello stands at ‘By heaven, I’ll know thy thoughts’; Iago stands and draws back. Othello’s ‘Ha!’ is uttered as he strides suddenly C; a significant move according to my plan. Iago follows close up with ‘Beware, my lord, of jealousy’. Othello is C or RC at ‘O misery’; then, recovering, turns to Iago, and speaks his reassurance; lays his hand on his shoulder, crosses below the table to the far seat R, sits down, and restarts on his papers. This long walk indicates a strong recovery; yet the fact that he has gone too far and finds that he now has to regather his papers for his new position at the wrong chair reflects the excess and uncertainty of his assurance. Iago now comes up close, kneeling on the other more central chair—the one Othello first occupied—and continues, Othello glancing sideways nervously as though afraid of having his confidence blasted by an awkward truth. Quickly he is standing again, Iago also, solicitous. Othello, now very perturbed, asks to be left alone. Iago goes out L. Othello with steady deliberation crosses to the divan and stands by it as he considers his wife’s possible unfaithfulness. Up to now Othello has been comparatively subdued in word and action compared with what is to follow. Notice the acute psychology by which terrible news is shown as not having its full effect at the start: it has to work in the constitution. Iago’s lines on ‘dangerous conceits’ suggest as much. Othello’s soliloquy is meditative. His mind is numbed, the full pain not yet felt.
Desdemona re-enters on the platform up RC with Emilia; there is the short conversation and the dropping of the handkerchief. Othello and Desdemona go out up RC. Othello can stop, study Desdemona’s face, and then go out alone, she wondering at it. Emilia, left alone, picks up the handkerchief. Iago returns and gets it from her. Dismissing her, he goes down L for his soliloquy about dangerous conceits. He watches Othello stride back across the platform C, and speaks his ‘mandragora’ lines, standing in the position, down L, where he is finally to drive Othello. He waits, his back half-turned to the audience, mesmerizing, drawing Othello, who now re-enters C descending the steps. ‘Ha! ha! False to me?’ Iago gets up-stage, L of Othello, on ‘How now, General, no more of that’. Othello should already show a great increase in passion: a few minutes off the stage can often be allowed to correspond to hours.
Othello speaks his first words ‘Avaunt, begone …’ from the steps, with great, though controlled, intensity; then crosses Iago to LC on the words ‘What sense had I …’ He has come a little down-stage, and maintains the position for ‘O now forever …’ facing diagonally L away from Iago. During his next violent speeches he turns on Iago C, his wrath rising, and attacks him, throwing him to the ground close to the table; then walks back L and paces down-stage, then up, distractedly, on ‘I think my wife be honest and think she is not’. He is violently agitated. This section of the scene is using mainly the left of the stage as the first part of it used the right. Iago is driving Othello down-stage, and to the left. At ‘Death and damnation!’ Othello sinks on the couch: the first time he has actually touched it. Iago draws close, telling him of Cassio’s supposed dream. Othello is projected by this down C. The movements are getting more violent and rapid in succession. Iago quickly follows up on his L and drives in the final nail with his words about the handkerchief. This finishes Othello. He crosses to the down L corner. ‘Now do I see ’tis true …’ He blows his love to the winds and invokes hell-vengeance.
The scene was rounded off by Othello striding back to the steps RC on ‘Blood, blood, blood!’ Iago follows to LC. Both pray to the marbled heaven of the sky-sheet. Othello crosses Iago L as he asks him to go with him ‘aside’ and find ‘swift means of death’ for Desdemona; then stops; turns; and puts his hand on Iago’s shoulder: ‘Now art thou my lieutenant.’ Iago kneels as the curtains close. Othello’s cross shows that they are to exit L; that is, away from Desdemona to the Iago-world. Iago’s kneeling gives a useful touch of Mephistophelean servitude.
For this crucial scene we have used the whole stage, squeezing out every drop of its potential significance as a conventional area: for the first half, the right; for the second, the left; and for Othello’s middle exit and entrance, the centre. Iago’s positions are often up-stage of Othello, but he keeps drawing level. Othello does most of the moving, impelled by the words of an outwardly passive Iago. I considered the possibility of keeping Othello central and Iago weaving spiders’ webs round him; which would mean Othello moving at first violently and far, then less and less. It has points, and justification in the play’s imagery, but it would be less effective. Othello would have to become more still as his language became more violent and this is illogical, or at the least extremely difficult. Also it might seem too definitely part of a studied scheme. Iago is on the whole a calm force behind a violent and active Othello: and that is what my arrangement reflected. We have the change in Othello spatially embodied: up R to down L. Movements should never appear artificial, but should grow naturally from the producer’s spontaneous visualization and during rehearsal. There are none here that are not dramatically of a very obvious sort, but they are used significantly. Such a blend is exactly what we want. The audience need not be aware conceptually of the intellectual plan, which should work rather as an unnoticed auxiliary.
The handkerchief is Iago’s conclusive point, its importance being underlined by our central down-stage position and Othello’s vivid cross to the down L corner. Our third act starts with the scene where Othello demands the handkerchief from Desdemona. Its peculiar quality and importance necessitate a plain fore-stage arrangement. Every word must be driven in and the attention concentrated.
In poetic drama the action often crystallizes into some thing or person suggesting the universal or supernatural. Such are, in Shakespeare, the Ghost in Hamlet, the Weird Sisters and their Apparitions in Macbeth, the vigorous and elemental tempest in King Lear, the squadrons of blood-drizzling soldiers above Rome in Julius Caesar, the mysterious music in Antony and Cleopatra. These are powers which bind the action, about which the action clusters; or which at an especially poignant moment help to crystallize and universalize it. It may be a nature-force, or a god-force, or a magical force. Or it may dominate and all but fill the whole action, like the spirit of war in Journey’s End, or the orchard of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
What is Shakespeare to do in Othello? We have seen (p. 54) that thunder and tempest is not a suitable accompaniment for domestic tragedy, and Shakespeare consequently here edges his tempest in differently, making it for once contrast with rather than accompany the later conflict by means of the stormy voyage to Cyprus. That however is over now. What can take over as a universalizing symbol? Shakespeare chooses an eminently domestic article and saturates it in a supernatural significance, so that it becomes a symbol of domestic sanctity. It serves to bind and focus the action: Othello, Desdemona, Emilia, Iago, Cassio, and Bianca all possess it in turn.1
The lines are spoken with frightening yet controlled intensity. Othello’s mind is above his passion. He enters with feline grace and slippered softness. From now on he wears his long, straight, purple gown, the coloured robe discarded. He holds Desdemona’s hand, finding it moist. At ‘ ’Tis a good hand’ he studies it, like a palmist: the action prepares for what follows. Desdemona cannot produce the handkerchief. Othello describes how it was given to his mother by an Egyptian charmer who ‘could almost read the thoughts of people’, as a security against losing her husband’s love. Desdemona is frightened. Othello’s words gather intensity:
’Tis true: there’s magic in the web of it:
A sibyl that had number’d in the world
The sun to course two hundred compasses,
In her prophetic fury sew’d the work.
The worms were hallow’d that did breed the silk;
And it was dyed in mummy which the skilful
Conserv’d of maidens’ hearts.
Such speeches are lost on a modern audience in a furniture-cluttered stage. Throughout until his exit Othello should neither rage, nor appear pathetic: his words are the channel of a terrible and irrevocable fate, and stern control and reserve in their utterance, like a channel’s limits, gives them force and direction. Othello becomes here a terrific force. The powers of the handkerchief are being in the same speech described and proved. So Desdemona, staggered, murmurs: ‘Sure, there’s some wonder in this handkerchief.’ She has already seen its powers in operation.1 After Othello’s exit, Emilia uses his behaviour to justify her cynical remarks spoken just before his entrance: Shakespeare does his best to forestall criticism as to her later silence. From now on the handkerchief dominates the action. It is not too much to say that Othello kills Desdemona not for an act of physical unfaithfulness, but for parting with the handkerchief.2 For that is an act suggesting the desecration of a universal sanctity.
We grouped the next few scenes together against a green curtain half-pulled to reveal a black curtain background C, with a single chair in the opening. The chair proved very useful. Othello is discovered beside and slightly in front of it facing down-stage, Iago one knee on the chair towards him, instilling verbal poison. The tableau compresses a miniature of the play’s meaning. You see Othello’s mind thinking away on its own, Iago preying on it. Othello’s words should be wanderingly half-delirious, not passionate and violent: the usual view of Othello as, to borrow Bottom’s phrase (A Midsummer Night’s Dream I. ii. 32) ‘a part to tear a cat in’ is off the point. His expression here should be one of extreme intellectual agony. His mind is shown in pieces. See how Iago keeps bringing back his attention to the handkerchief and the reiterated part it plays in his delirium just before he falls. It is Iago’s main instrument of torture.
The chair was useful for Othello to sink in after witnessing Cassio’s meeting with Bianca and the handkerchief business between them; and later for Desdemona, and Roderigo. But first we get Lodovico’s entry. We had a tall actor in the part: at this point, where he strikes Desdemona, it is helpful for Othello to lose some of his former dignity. Lodovico comes in as a challenge to his high position, informing him of his recall and Cassio’s advancement. Fate is assisting Iago1 to torment Othello, whose words to Lodovico ‘Cassio shall have my place’ and ‘You are welcome, Sir, to Cyprus’ hold a bitterly ironic note. This last speech to Lodovico is on the border of insanity, and the final ‘Goats and monkeys!’ not shouted, but laughed, with a demonic, dry laugh. We cut Othello’s next interview with Desdemona, arranging for her to re-enter with Emilia. She sits on the chair and later kneels to Iago. She does not touch him, nor he her. The effect on Iago is left by Shakespeare unregistered. To follow Shakespeare, let Iago turn up-stage after Desdemona’s exit and stand with his back to the audience. Iago must not be shown as positively callous of her pathetic position, nor as deeply moved by it. He speaks courteously enough to her. It is just outside his inhuman attention. I do not think that the producer should commit himself: hence my arrangement.
Roderigo next sits in the chair, ludicrously dignified, at ‘What I protest intendment of doing’. Seeing this new self-assertion, Iago plays on his pride and suggests ‘removing’ Cassio. Roderigo rises and advances nervously towards Iago at ‘How do you mean, removing of him?’ Next he retreats behind and up-stage of the chair, sliding his hand tremblingly along its back, as though to put it between himself and Iago, on ‘And that you would have me do?’ The use of this single chair for occasions of such varying quality since Othello and Iago were first discovered there helped to bind and knit the play at a point where its action is, comparatively, limp. There is intentionally less grandeur of action here: we just watch Othello slipping. His dignity is temporarily gone.
It returns, however, in the last scene. No protagonist of Shakespearian tragedy attains a richer dignity at his end: it is almost formalistic, statuesque. This quality must be preserved. We had Desdemona’s bed central between dark curtains, above the steps. We were offered a real old-style bed, but it looked uncomfortable and self-conscious up there, and we did better with a built-up arrangement of simple blocks, laying a rich purple covering over the sheets. The results held suggestion of both bed and altar. We want some such formality. The candle tones with it, while the more universal moon and star references contrast and blend with the candle. Throughout the scene those gems of poetry referring to stars, the moon, the world ‘of one entire and perfect chrysolite’ should be given with measured and underlined emphasis. Othello can catch the same beam from the wings for the stars and moon: though this is not really necessary. Observe the reiterated references to the handkerchief, both before and after Desdemona’s death. Just as the handkerchief caused the final overthrow of Othello’s love, so not until Cassio’s explanation does Othello recognize the depth of his folly. The explanation is withheld till the last possible moment; then it is decisive. Thought of the handkerchief dominates the situation.
An interesting point arose at Othello’s attack on Iago. If that synchronizes with Montano’s trying to stop Othello, and Iago’s stabbing of Emilia, while Gratiano is drawing near ready to hold her afterwards, you get the whole stage scrambling round Emilia like a football scrum. So we had Emilia down LC, Iago down L, and Gratiano close by. Othello is up-stage on the steps at their right end. He stands there, towering, for ‘Are there no stones …’; and at ‘Precious villain!’ charges directly down-stage so that he faces Iago across the stage with his weapon drawn, Montano outside him, R, catching his uplifted arm. Coming directly downstage often gives a more powerful effect of approaching a person on the other side than going diagonally towards him. Besides, the instant’s tableau across the stage was effective. Notice, by the way, Shakespeare’s usual trick of showing his people greater than you or they had guessed in his use here of Emilia.
When playing Othello I felt convinced that there is nothing in him particularly primitive or of negroid savagery. He is not to be confused with O’Neill’s magnificent study in The Emperor Jones. Othello’s pain is largely an intellectual pain at the ruin of a romantic faith. There are certainly moments of barbaric fury, others of neurotic disgust, and some of delirium; but nothing of a sub-human and jungle violence. At the last he attains a serenity, killing Desdemona as a sacred duty. The Renaissance poet idealizes human love in the Provençal romantic tradition of modern literature: Othello, Desdemona, and Iago are Man, the Divine, and the Devil. That a Moor should be the protagonist in a play of this type is not strange. I have read that the romance-cult came to the Provençal troubadours and thence to Petrarch and Dante through the Moorish civilization in Spain. Shakespeare has a habit of getting significant colourings right, as when Richard III continually swears by St. Paul, who according to one tradition was deformed. Iago is in the poetry explicitly associated with the Devil, but only in somewhat the same sense that Bosola is implicitly a sort of devil; in a typically Renaissance and humanist play, where the divine is approached through the human, the Devil logically must be human too. This may help to explain the almost absurdly villainous persons in Elizabethan drama, the universal essences of the Mystery plays recurring in human form. Macbeth provides an interesting contrast.
The producer must have some sense of these more universal suggestions. The symbolic effects I have emphasized in my arrangement are all in the poetry: Iago knows that he is in league with hell-forces and often says so, while Desdemona is equated imagistically with divinity. But the moment such thoughts are allowed to interfere with the expressly domestic and human qualities of the drama, there is disaster. We neglect either aspect at our peril: we must realize both. There can be alternations in emphasis, but no mutual exclusion, for in our feeling for the whole there should be no distinction.
Additional Note, 1963
A difficulty arises regarding Othello’s appearance. Is he to be negroid or semitic? I have always, with regard to the high degree of civilization reached by the Moors at a time when the southern Africans were less advanced, tended to see Othello as semitic; and this is the usual way he is represented. He has, however, had a notable representative in Paul Robeson; we have the Shakespearian phrase ‘thick-lips’ (I. i. 66) as evidence; and in Poetry and the Physical Voice (157) Mr. Francis Berry has convincingly related the peculiar quality of Othello’s poetry to the orotundity of African speech.
Whatever we decide, we must respond to both his nobility and his sensitivity. A good Shakespearian pointer is the sketch of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice; though Mr. Berry rightly observes that the first orotundity of his speaking is not maintained. Two noble Moors in our dramatic tradition may also be adduced: Zanga in Edward Young’s The Revenge and the superlatively noble hero of Browning’s Luria, whose respect to European civilization and will to its service matches Othello’s final speech.
Othello invades his tidy world as an unknown quality. He is unpredictable. It is not simply a matter of the soldier up against domesticity. In Essays in Criticism (IX, 4; Oct. 1959; 358) Mr. Laurence Lerner groups Brabantio’s charge that Othello has been using black magic with Othello’s own statement on the handkerchief to suggest a derogatory reading of Othello’s primitive nature. Instead, I should suggest that Brabantio’s accusation helps to build in our minds a sense of Othello’s mystery; he, as a person, houses in this domestic play categories of the supernatural elsewhere carried by symbolism or persons of more than human powers.
Once we accept this mysterious quality as a key, much of the play’s difficulty disappears. If he be an African negro, then all the wizardry of black Africa is in his blood, collaborating, through the handkerchief, with Egyptian arts. He exists at the point where others accuse him of satanic practices, but we respond to the ‘prophetic fury’ of the ‘sibyl’ (III. iv. 71–3) who wove the handkerchief. He is imaginatively a composite of the Moorish, the negroid and—by association—the Egyptian, as baffling to commentators as he is disturbing to Venice.
Othello subscribes to Christianity, but after a fall to ugliness and dementia he presses on and through to a poetic sublimity entirely his own, with its own lonely valuations in terms of which he is for a while justified. His final admission of Christian and Venetian values does not detract from it. His speech on his service to Venice may be read rather as a Shakespearian conclusion in anti-climax following the climax of ‘It is the cause’ and his other marvellous words.
Othello has a mysterious stature beyond anyone or anything in his context.
HAMLET
Rudolf Steiner Hall, London; 19351
Production here should stress (i) the death atmosphere of the play; (ii) the balanced opposition of the King and Hamlet, not shirking the good or evil in either; (iii) Hamlet’s change of appearance; and (iv) sound-effects. Much of the play is indecisive and enigmatic: this quality must be preserved. We find death-forces paradoxically allied with moral good, and life-forces with evil. The dominant sound-effects touch neither music nor tempest, but are set between: there is a particular sequence peculiar to this play of drums, trumpets, and cannon. It is as though Shakespeare’s own axes of reference in the imaginative world are here themselves suspect. The Ghost, the sound-effects, the King, Hamlet himself, the final duel, indeed the whole play, are strangely both clear and precise in one sense but extremely baffling in another.
We used curtains with no sky-sheet but a repeated set of dais, thrones, chair, inset central platform, and steps. Often we had a semi-front scene made by drawing a curtain half-way on one side, yet spacing the action up to a curtain behind on the other: which both enabled us to keep the throne-dais on the stage throughout and also suggested the play’s see-saw enigmatic quality, close-twined more than once with ‘policy’ and deceit, clarity and uncertainty mixed.
ACT I
We start with the traditional twelve beats, lights down. The curtain is half drawn, and we discover Francisco on guard in the deep half of the stage R. There is a sound of whining wind not too loud, repeated during the early part of the scene at appropriate intervals.1 There is a bench L. The lights are a little dimmed, toning to a suggestion of blues and greens on the deep area R where the Ghost will appear. Marcellus, Horatio, and Bernardo, who have all entered L (no one but the Ghost enters or exits R), are L, Bernardo sitting on the bench. At ‘Peace, break thee off …’ the Ghost enters C from behind the curtain: the entering from the same side of the stage, only farther up, as persons already on it, is often effective when one party is to be for a second or so unaware of the other. The Ghost comes down R, facing across at the others. Horatio, between Marcellus and Bernardo, addresses it without moving, to contrast with his action at its next entrance: the contrast suits his words and is important. The Ghost goes out down R. On its re-entrance down R, Horatio, now bolder, crosses C past Marcellus and addresses it. As it turns up-stage, Horatio crosses it R, swinging round with his back to the audience and calling to Marcellus to stop it. Marcellus attacks it, moving diagonally up-stage across the curtain edge C, while the Ghost goes off LC behind the curtain. Their words ‘’Tis here’, ‘’Tis here’, ‘’Tis gone’, are variously spoken about the stage, helping to disembody the Ghost. The Ghost should give no appearance of hurry: a deliberate and dignified turn and pause before finally disappearing helps the impression of its invulnerability. You should see Marcellus miss it; and also clearly see it go off. The rest of this scene is easy. The dawn lines are spoken down L. Horatio and Marcellus go out L, leaving Bernardo on guard.
Curtains are drawn and the seat removed while an elaborate flourish sounds, and immediately afterwards the full Court set is disclosed: carpeted steps and platform C; two thrones on a dais L; Hamlet’s chair R. The King and Queen are C descending the steps, everyone, including Hamlet, who stands by his chair, bowing. Hamlet wears a rich dress of black and white. In this production the King spoke his lines about drinking and cannons down C, and went off with most of the others L: but perhaps they should have been spoken up-stage on the steps with a corresponding exit. The lines are so very important. At the general exit Hamlet bows again: it is essential throughout the play to show that the King is King. If he is taller than Hamlet1 and generally made to seem more dominating in appearance, the play is assisted. Every Shakespearian king has to be understood on two levels: (i) as a man and (ii) as a king. Generally the interweaving and contrasted implications of these two views are vital to the plot.
Hamlet helps to impregnate the thrones by indicating them during his soliloquy at appropriate phrases, visualizing the King and Queen. On their entry he draws Horatio and the two officers down-stage, while the curtain is pulled behind them. His hearing of their news is best concentrated as a front-scene. Observe Horatio’s delicate aspersions on the courage of the other two: here and both before and after this occasion, in the first and second Ghost scene, there is a running series of more or less good-natured hostility, sarcasm and contradiction between the scholar and soldiers. The soldiers have had to call in a scholar to deal with a supernatural fear. We tried to give a touch of this hostility, but I doubt if it registered; it was too difficult to stress heavily. After Hamlet’s exit the action continues with Laertes and Ophelia. In this scene Ophelia can show a sense of humour with Laertes and a note of sullenness at ‘I shall obey’ to Polonius: we don’t want her too much of a weakling.
We return to our half-curtain set. Lights change for the Ghost scene; this time without the bench L. The wind is heard again. The flourish and cannon off are done as from a distance blending into mystery. Hamlet, Horatio, and Marcellus all show a momentary start, their nerves on edge: ‘What does this mean, my lord?’ Hamlet laughs bitterly and explains. This flourish and cannon come shortly before the Ghost’s entrance, which follows the sooner through our cutting Hamlet’s long speech and also throws forward to similar effects in the last scene. Its peculiar significance is enhanced by delicately relating it to the Ghost from the start (and see p. 118 below). Like the whining wind, the bugle and cannon strike a balance between music and tempest suiting the enigmatic nature of the Ghost.
The Ghost enters this time down R. Hamlet crosses C, leaving Horatio and Marcellus L, and addresses it. His speech is subtly varied. We start with awe, amaze, love (in the word ‘father’): then a pause, awaiting an answer. ‘O answer me!’ Now agony, pathos (‘quietly inurned’), and another pause after ‘cerements’. Now almost hysteria, a mind distraught, violent. The Ghost beckons. Hamlet half turns back, indecisive, at ‘It will not speak: then will I follow it’; is more determined at ‘It waves me forth again; I’ll follow it’; and is violently so at ‘It waves me still. Go on, I’ll follow thee’. He breaks from Horatio and Marcellus at ‘Unhand me, gentlemen’, throwing them back far L and springing R himself, drawing his sword: ‘By heaven, I’ll make a ghost of him that lets [i.e. hinders] me!’ The Ghost has been moving up while making his successive gestures, and is now RC, Hamlet down R. Hamlet has broken from the world of his companions to join that of the Ghost: his struggle with Horatio and Marcellus is important and must be clearly seen, and his breaking from them R must make a new picture. Hamlet now goes up R far into the up-stage Ghost area, and says, ‘Go on, I’ll follow thee’, the new emphasis on ‘thee’ marking Hamlet’s sense of allegiance to the Ghost. Both exit L behind the half-drawn curtain.
The drawing of the half-curtain reveals the throne dais as a plain platform without the throne against the curtains L. There is wind again, or surf, louder than before. The lights show a predominance of blue, but the whole stage is clearly visible. The Ghost LC near or on the dais, perhaps resting one foot on it, addresses Hamlet C. Hamlet sinks with a moan as his mother’s sin is described. Saying farewell, the Ghost comes down holding out his arms, and Hamlet totters towards the embrace of death. The Ghost ascends the platform and disappears through the curtains, leaving Hamlet with his head clasped in his hands. Left alone Hamlet addresses the stars, earth, and hell. He reiterates the command to ‘remember’, looking L and building the platform into a Ghost symbol. Whilst declaring his renunciation of past trivialities he tears off his rich cloak and leaves it, almost as an offering, on the platform: if it has metal or glass sequins it should glisten there tellingly. ‘So, Uncle, there you are’ is spoken carelessly with an emphatic ‘you’; but, ‘Now to my word—it is adieu, adieu, remember me’ is done solemnly, looking L. The contrast is significant. Horatio and Marcellus enter R. Hamlet twice on appropriate words wards them off from the dais platform as they eagerly question him, thus further impregnating it with Ghost significance. At the first subterranean ‘Swear’ he takes them from RC down C; and at the second and third towards the dais platform. The Ghost is breaking down Hamlet’s reluctance to initiate them. I have no clearer idea in mind, but this is the only arrangement so far as I know that has ever given any point to these strange, enigmatic, but important movements. Hamlet stands with one foot on the Ghost platform, high priest of the occasion, while the others kneel before it and swear on his sword hilt. He looks L at ‘Rest, rest, perturbed spirit’. The rest is easy: they go out R, Hamlet breaking away on his ‘The time is out of joint’, and falling back weakly into their arms just before the exit.
In this scene I would point to the use made of the throneless platform and the cloak: objects thus loaded with meaning can be most powerful. The cloak is left there to the end, the wind rises over an otherwise empty stage, and the curtain closes. A roll of drums concludes Act I.
ACT II
The act starts with a roll of drums. Polonius is discovered L in front of a plain curtain, Ophelia entering through it C, looking over her shoulder and showing fear. Her description of Hamlet’s terrifying experience must be given intense narrative concentration. She is to act her words, as the text implies.
The Court set is disclosed with a table by Hamlet’s chair R. The King and Queen speak with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and after with Polonius. Polonius is then alone. Hamlet enters L and walks slowly across to his area R and sits in his chair.
His dress is now a plain black tunic—earlier he wore black and white—unlaced; the traditional open white shirt; disarranged hair; a soiled white rag tied in his belt, hanging limply; and his right arm through a black torn and tattered cloak not fixed to the other shoulder so that it drags on the ground behind. In preparing my earlier (1933) Toronto production I had found no disorder of a normal costume of any use: it either looked neat from the front or as though I had dressed carelessly. It must be done, like everything else that is important, by some positive and significant addition. That is how I came to use the white rag and tattered cloak. Hamlet can pick up the loose train and throw it over his left arm to look tidy; curled round his feet it makes him a king of grief; holding his arms out, tatters falling, he looks fantastic; alone, he can sometimes remove it altogether. His appearance now must contrast strongly with that in Act I: he must seem disintegrated, gone-to-pieces, the glamour and light of life have left him.
He talks to Polonius sarcastically from his corner R and then greets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern happily, walking C, and perhaps arranging his cloak sanely, throwing the loose end over his arm. They say that ‘the world’s grown honest’. He laughs merrily for his ‘then is doomsday near’; then reality weighs back on him suddenly: ‘But your news is not true’ is spoken bitterly. Thereafter he is suspicious and bitter, his cloak trails, he moves about near his chair. We find a similar rhythm in his first meeting with Horatio: first, spontaneous pleasure, then—‘I pray thee, do not mock me …’ Everything is sooner or later related to his own obsession. It happens again with the Players; and with Ophelia. At the Players’ entry he is happy and thoroughly excited at the prospect of a ‘passionate speech’. But the words ‘moblèd queen’ he repeats, referring them to his mother, and again the light is extinguished. The Players go; he gets rid of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. ‘Ay so, God be wi’ ye’ is spoken with irritation. He puts the manuscript of the play on the table and throws off his cloak. ‘Now I am alone …’ This soliloquy demands close attention.
Hamlet’s chair is R, and from that corner his more bitter speeches have been delivered. The two thrones are L: they suggest the world ranged against him. His more subjective fears come from his own side, R. He starts the soliloquy standing near his chair. At ‘What’s Hecuba to him …’ his irritation is marked by a determined advance down C. Soon this fails in disgust, and he retreats R, falling hopelessly in his chair at ‘Yet I, a dull and muddy-mettled rascal …’ At ‘Who calls me villain?’ still sitting, he looks R as at an unseen enemy of his own imagination. Then he rises with new virulence and marches LC facing the thrones for ‘this slave’s offal’. Next a left turn up-stage to the steps C marks a failure, which is followed immediately with a recovery, another left turn, so that he speaks the words ‘bloody, bawdy villain’ over his left shoulder, again looking at the thrones: this gives an impression of scorn that can be helped by not greatly stressing the words. Careless disgust is wanted: Hamlet’s failure is not cowardice so much as mental inability to find a working basis for even a hostile relation to his surroundings. His speech gathers power at ‘Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain’. The rhyme can be given a touch of mad humour. He sways, drawing a dagger, then leaps down-stage at ‘Vengeance’, attacking the King’s throne, the up-stage one of the two. His attack is cut short, dagger in mid-air, by his critical judgement that now throws him into more disgust, as he sinks on the dais beneath the throne, defeated again by circumstance. The dagger held in mid-air seems a more controlled and precise effect than a series of hysterical stabs at the throne. He rises at ‘About, my brain’, goes to the table R, picks up the manuscript, throws his cloak over his shoulder and walks down L while the curtain is half-drawn behind his new position, leaving the chair and table R still visible. This pulling of the curtain whilst Hamlet walks round it gives an impression of stealthy movement from one room to another, along corridors, which suits his plotting lines.
If you trace out these movements on a diagram you will see how they aim to express futility and inaction in terms of stage action, zigzags being the obvious solution. The half-drawing of the curtain suggests a new line of action, but an indirect one, away from the thrones: which is apt. It also leaves our set ready for the ‘nunnery’ scene.
Ophelia is left sitting in the chair R with the spies behind the half-drawn curtain. The lights are dimmed a little for this scene of mental twilight. Hamlet enters L. It is a mistake to let Ophelia go off during the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy. She, a creature of beauty and young life, is in Hamlet’s mind to be contrasted with his own death-obsession. You therefore want them both as a visible contrast during the lines. There might even be more light on her than on him. When Hamlet advances, he can first kneel, but rise and retreat at ‘I never gave you aught’. He speaks these early speeches gently, with an occasional touch of bitterness and perhaps of fun, too; as he catalogues his faults he could be almost playful, and she might smile, and we feel that he may succumb after all to her old appeal. A touch of flirtation helps. He dallies with her hand or hair. Eventually he turns at ‘Go thy ways to a nunnery’, spoken lovingly. Now there is just a faint sound of the Ghost-wind. It raises in Hamlet the demon of mistrust. You see it in his eyes. ‘Where’s your father?’ She shows guilt, and lies. He steps back in horror against the curtain and registers that he has felt the presence of spies. His final speeches are done on the borderland of insanity, but not with shouting. ‘It hath made me mad’ should come in a tense, agonized whisper. Controlled insanity is the line to take, and a very difficult one.
The full set is used for the Play scene. Hamlet and Horatio are discovered on the steps C, and then come down. At the King’s entry, done formally from C and down the steps to elaborate flourishes, Hamlet gets in front of the thrones, blocking his way. The King pauses. Hamlet laughs devilishly. ‘How fares our cousin Hamlet?’ Hamlet’s answer is as fantastically and luridly given as possible. This picture captures and compresses the essence of our middle action: we don’t get enough of such significant tableaux in the average production. The tall and thriving King at the head of his train in full ceremony finds himself faced by the less imposing figure of Hamlet that mocks his painted glory. Contrasted with Hamlet’s forced humility when they last met in Act I, it shows how the pretence, or partial truth, of madness gives Hamlet a freedom impossible before.
1, 2. Romeo and Juliet, Toronto 1939 (p. 13); Romeo (pp. 86 note, 216); Juliet, Grace Irwin
3, 4, 5, 6. Hamlet, Toronto 1933 (p. 23; for the variations, pp. 44, 105–21)
7. Antony and Cleopatra, Toronto 1937 (pp. 13, 164, note). The death of Antony: Antony, Edward Roberts; Cleopatra, Betty Markham; Charmian, Patricia Murphy; Iras, Valentine Bartow; Dercetas, William Shelden; Eros. Robert Anderson
8. Antony and Cleopatra, Toronto 1937 (pp. 13, 164 note). The death of Cleopatra: Cleopatra Betty Markham. Dolabella Norman Maclean. Octavius Caesar Fred Mann
Henry VIII, Toronto 1934 (pp. 23, 164 note)
9. The Duke of Buckingham
10. Queen Katharine’s vision of Paradise (pp. 91–2): Queen Katharine, Frances Rostance
11. Macbeth, Brownlow Card’s producion, Toronto 1938 (pp. 134, 173; notes) showing the incident described on p. 134 note: Banquo, Armand Gardner; Fleance, Nancy Ann Fetherstone. Macbeth watching
12. Macbeth, Toronto 1938 (pp. 134, 283, notes)
13. The Tempest, Toronto 1938 (pp. 13, 274): Ariel, Josephine Koenig
14. King Lear, Toronto 1935 (p. 23): Kent, Lyndon Smith; Edgar (pp. 46, 163–6), Robin Godfrey
15. The Tempest, Toronto 1938 (pp. 13, 274): Caliban (for the colouring, p. 164)
16. Antony and Cleopatra, experimental scenes preliminary to the production, Toronto 1937 (p. 13): the Messenger (p. 164 and note)
17. Timon of Athens, Toronto 1940 (pp. 13, 172–3; 173 notes). Timon and his guests in the first Feast scene
18. Timon of Athens, Toronto 1940: Creditor’s servants, led by Caphis, attacking Timon: Caphis, John Hayes
19. Timon of Athens, Toronto 1940. Timon disrobing (for the action, pp. 168, 177–8)
20. Timon in the wilds (for the artistic effect, pp. 164–8)
21. Timon of Athens, Leeds 1948 (pp. 15, 172–4). The first Feast scene: Apemantus, Michael Bampton; Flavius, Richard Gendall; Alcibiades (without a beard), end of table, Trevor Lennam
22. Timon of Athens, Leeds 1948: Timon and the Bandits, ‘The Moon’s an arrant thief’ (p. 183): Bandits, Stuart Shaw and John Fricker
23, 24. Beerbohm Tree as Malvolio and as Othello (pp. 207, 21). Reproduced from coloured portraitures by Charles A. Buchel (Malvolio, from a souvenir booklet; Othello, originally designed for a poster; see pp. 17–18).
25. Beerbohm Trees production of Julius Caesar: the Forum scene (pp. 209, 229, 232). Tree as Mark Antony
26. Othello, Leeds 1955 (p. 15). At Cyprus: Iago, Richard Coe; Cassio, George Smyth; Desdemona, Ann Buckle
27. Othello attacking Iago
28. Othello’s last speech
29. King Lear, Leeds 1951 (p. 15): Cordelia, Louie Eickhoff; Regan, Diana Holmes; Goneril, Doreen Harrington
30. The Merchant of Vanice, Leeds 1960 (pp. 15, 188): Shylock (the beard thickend in reproduction)
31. Macbeth, University of Ein-Shams, Cairo 1963, Denendra P. Varma’s production (pp. 18, 295 note): the Weird Sisters
32. Wilson Knight as Timon. Photo: C. Sauerbrei
During the play, done up C on the platform, Hamlet sits on the ground by Ophelia R watching the King, who steadies himself with a drink. ‘Have you heard the argument? Is there no offence in’t?’ is best spoken to Polonius, L. Hamlet immediately rises, and goes C, telling the King ‘they do but jest, poison in jest—no offence i’ the world’, with ironical reference to the King’s easy conscience. Hamlet goes up-stage, one foot on the steps RC indicating Lucianus, and drawing his sword at ‘The croaking raven doth bellow for revenge’. This can be ranted. On the decisive words ‘He poisons him i’ the garden …’ he walks diagonally down L to the King, speaking not too loud and carelessly fingering his sword with both hands. I sometimes held the point poised towards the King: I do not know how it looked from the front. When the King rises the words of Ophelia, Hamlet and Polonius must all be heard, while the King holds for a second his rigid position, standing. This is a powerful and precise effect, better than a general hurly-burly. The King dashes out. Hamlet, alone with Horatio, is triumphant. His calling for music reflects a psychological release and a new sense of freedom in action. He is king of the situation. His words to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are done sharply, they come like the crack of a whip, especially the ‘recorder’ pieces. Horatio is the last to leave Hamlet; he goes up to him as though realizing the crucial nature of this moment in his story; Hamlet clasps his hand and puts him aside. What follows he must do alone. Soliloquizing, his thoughts are first violent with revenge-images of blood; then, his eye catching the thrones, he recalls his coming interview with his mother; the two thoughts coalesce and he prays that he may not confuse the issue and use ‘daggers’ on her. During this speech the lights, which have been varied appropriately before, during, and after the play, are toned with red.
The King’s prayer follows in a front-scene. The King should really enlist the audience’s sympathy here. Hamlet enters C, speaks his lines without any white-washing of their horror, and then recalls his mother: she seems more important to him than the King. All this must be going very quickly.
Now to the Queen’s closet. The mid-stage curtain is drawn across the stage and obscures throne and steps. There is a chair and table L and a couch R. Polonius hides up C. The Queen arranges herself with dignity in the chair L and Hamlet enters R. Their first words go swift. The Queen rises. Hamlet draws his sword. She cries for help, thinking that he means to murder her. Hamlet kills Polonius. The Queen screams and crosses far down R. Hamlet draws the curtain and the body falls: it should be visible during the scene. Hamlet, L, lays his cloak, which was thrown over his shoulder, on the table, and his sword beside it. Pointing to the couch R he tells the Queen to sit down. She approaches from her far position, mesmerized by his determination. At the word-picture of his father he comes close, sitting or kneeling on the couch: both pictures are, I think, best regarded as mental. As the speech grows in violence Hamlet draws away C. At ‘O shame, where is thy blush?’ he turns down L, speaking rhetorically. What started as a righteous lecture has become introverted rhetoric. It grows worse. ‘Nay, but to live …’ is spoken right away from the Queen: Hamlet is overcome by his own nausea. He grows pathological. He is close to the table L fingering the sword. Nausea turns to insane hysterics. ‘A murderer and a villain …’ It comes in spasms, jerks. The King stole the crown from a shelf and ‘put it in his pocket’. Maniac laughter. He now has the sword. At ‘a king of shreds and patches’ he charges across the stage R at the Queen, whose head in her hands sobbing is turned from him. In mid-volley, about to stab, he stops; drops the sword; slowly turns left facing the audience and with utterly changed voice says the words: ‘Save me and hover o’er me with your wings …’ He turns farther, is being drawn left by the Ghost, who has entered behind him, L. Notice that Hamlet is aware of the Ghost before seeing him physically; and how his prayer is used to refer partly at least to his attack on his mother. This is a good example of a way by which supernature can, without any play on lights, be presented in direct and positive dramatic action. Polonius’s body should be up-stage LC. Then the Ghost’s entrance L can be related to it: the first shedding of blood since the Ghost’s command brings the death-figure again on the stage. Having turned completely to the Ghost, Hamlet with bended head addresses him again. The Queen comes up to him, and both face L.
At the Ghost’s exit L and Hamlet’s words, ‘My father in his habit as he liv’d!’ the Queen shows anger and sits in the chair L, remarking on Hamlet’s madness. Her defence is roused; she is a woman who hides unpleasant things from herself and is angry if forced to face them; and Hamlet’s reference to his father troubles her. This chair L, which she used at the start, is her position of self-assertion; the couch, of humility. Hamlet tells her to confess herself to Heaven and leads her R as though to go off. Passing the couch, however, she sinks suddenly on it, sobbing. Hamlet stands C, baffled and distressed, and asks that his virtue be forgiven. Repeated ‘good-nights’ reflect his indecision. Turning to Polonius he expresses repentance. The weeping Queen is on one side, Polonius dead on the other: he looks at them in turn. He sinks by the Queen, his head on her knees: ‘I must be cruel only to be kind.’ Next, fearful of this weakness, he draws back from her and utters voluble sarcasm. His phrase ‘mad in craft’ should be so spoken that you doubt it. The strain is telling on him. As he refers to his going to England, and talks of outwitting his enemies, his eye glints with insane cunning: it is best done close up to the Queen. Hamlet’s expression suddenly changes for ‘This man shall set me packing’. Solemnly he regards Polonius and comments on the body. He kneels by it, says ‘good-night’ for the last time, and the curtains close.
There follows a short front-scene. The King sends for Hamlet, who is brought in between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as a prisoner. At this moment we should certainly feel that the King is a force of order,1 Hamlet a danger. Continually we need to get some such contrast: the King is a finely material, Hamlet a darkly spiritual, force. So the fine-robed King now faces Hamlet, who with a hideous and unabashed assurance reminds him how a painted outside can veil an inward corruption, and all kings are merely meat fatted for death-worms. Hamlet’s words are spoken with a Feste’s jest-accent, to deepen their horror. Arrested, guards either side, guilty of murder, Hamlet bears a charmed life; he knows it; so does the King. All now hinges on England. ‘For England!’ Hamlet speaks the words with a devilish smile. The significance of this voyage is enigmatic; Hamlet’s expression must help make it so.
The act ends with the King’s speech, ‘Do it, England’, and a roll of drums.
ACT III
We preluded the third movement with a few muted trumpet notes to tone with Ophelia’s mad scene. The Hamlet-Fortinbras incident had to go. For the mad scene looped curtains would do well, but we had no time to arrange this and used a plain background. I have in The Imperial Theme shown how, after Hamlet has been revealed as a dangerous force, opposing values of life-excellence are sublimated: we are made aware of Fortinbras’ soldiership, Ophelia’s pathetic madness caused by Hamlet’s act, the King’s admirable courage and regal dignity, and Laertes’ manly determination. To dress Ophelia in black seems to me therefore wrong: hers is a pretty, flowery and colourful insanity. The King’s remarks during Ophelia’s madness should appear sympathetic, springing from a kind heart. The Laertes riot should be big waves of shouting. Finally the King leads Laertes off and reappears with him immediately for a front-scene. The plot should show the King in a new light. Hitherto only the very subtlest suggestions of an essentially villainous nature, if that, should have been apparent: a spectator viewing the play for the first time should never be quite sure, in spite of the Play scene and the King’s two soliloquies, whether Hamlet’s view has full justification. But now the plot thickens. The Queen’s description of Ophelia’s death is best done before a plain curtain, but a gentlewoman, perhaps two, should enter with her. To bring in Ophelia’s body on a bier borne by four hooded figures appears to me gratuitously weak. Attempts at enriching Shakespeare by additional action are often ill-chosen.
For various reasons we cut the Second Gravedigger. This is an unusual but satisfactory cut. The scene opens with our half-drawn curtain, the Gravedigger singing in the grave up R, Hamlet and Horatio entering down L. The lights are suggestive of evening, with sunset red. Hamlet is more assured, dignified, and controlled. His journey to England may be taken to mark a spiritual or psychological advance.1 He voyages through to a new serenity. The change was suggested by his wearing new and colourful clothes, reddish-purple tunic, and a cloak of the same colour; a colour suggesting dignity and spiritual authority, and also toning with the Graveyard scene. He also has a small greyish beard and white streaks line his hair, marking an increase of age that assists the suggestion of spiritual advance and also has some justification in the text; compare the sense we receive of Romeo’s advance to manhood and Macbeth’s to old age. ‘How long hast thou been a grave-maker’ should be curiously spoken with a dwelling emphasis on ‘grave’: Hamlet is so interested in graves, skulls, death, and all that concerns them. For the speech on Yorick’s skull he is L of the grave, but R of Horatio, the centre of a small group. At Toronto we had a platform leading up to the grave. First Hamlet addressed the Gravedigger with one foot on this level, but later advanced to take Yorick’s skull, high and central, Horatio moving to Hamlet’s first position to make a formal group for what is an apex of imaginative intensity. The Yorick lines should be taken slow; the whole scene up to this should go smoothly, and its emotional quality be allowed to luxuriate at leisure. The stillness of eternity should brood over it.
This stillness is next violently disturbed. The funeral procession enters to a tolling bell. After the struggle with Laertes Hamlet is between Laertes C and the grave R. The King LC restrains Laertes. Hamlet’s ranting speech is spoken in controlled fury and cynical abandon, a bitter self-critical rhetoric. ‘I’ll rant as well as thou’ means to suggest that Hamlet’s strangeness derives from his possession of more, not less, feeling than others. Laertes is by comparison a child in emotional experience. Hamlet’s love was ‘forty thousand’ times his. We might have Laertes in mourning here, getting a happy contrast to Hamlet’s brighter clothes; as though Laertes has crossed the threshold into the state Hamlet has come through. Hamlet is a giant in spiritual stature:
Let Hercules himself do what he may,
The cat will mew, and dog will have his day.
‘Cat’ is spoken to Laertes, his grief a mewing only; ‘dog’ as Hamlet passes opposite and pauses in front of the King. This reference is not usually brought out in production. The King’s phrase ‘living monument’ refers to Hamlet’s projected death, and must be spoken with meaning.
Hamlet and Horatio re-enter for a front-scene. Hamlet’s ‘Providence’ speech ending with ‘the readiness is all’ witnesses his new acceptance and serenity. After Osric’s exit the King enters L with Laertes. Hamlet, now polite, bows to the King, takes Laertes’ hand, speaks courteously. The play is highly formal and ceremonial, both here and during the fight. Hamlet calls for the foils. The curtains are pulled revealing the Court set, without Hamlet’s chair.
The King and Queen take their places. The King describes the drums, flourish, and cannon that shall sound when he drinks to celebrate Hamlet’s success.1 This speech throws back to his similar speech in Act I where these sounds were to accompany the King’s celebration of Hamlet’s willingness to stay in Denmark (I. ii. 121–128). Hamlet is involved in both. In both instances the sounds serve as a warning to Hamlet: first, in the way I have already described, making Hamlet and Horatio start nervously on the platform before the Ghost’s entry; and now in a way I shall indicate. Hamlet and Laertes salute the King, the salute marking Hamlet’s new and formal respect. The courtiers, all but Osric, are grouped up R. Laertes and Osric are L, Hamlet and Horatio down R; the King and Queen on the thrones and one Gentleman, looking after the cups, up L. At Hamlet’s first hit the King drinks and sends an attendant across to Hamlet with the cup. Meanwhile the drums, followed by the trumpet, are sounding. Just as Hamlet is about to take the cup, the cannon go off ominously. His mind changes: ‘I’ll play this bout first; set it by awhile’. This is the warning referred to just now. I have no explicit interpretation, but this is the sort of enigmatic but precise effect that characterizes Hamlet throughout, and it comes straight from the text: I was not aware of it till it happened in performance. Hamlet scores another hit. The Queen comes across to him with her napkin and then takes the cup from the attendant, who has stood RC since Hamlet told him to ‘set it by’. This gets the Queen well away from the King, who can be talking to Laertes, when she starts to drink. Notice Hamlet’s polite ‘good madam’: his behaviour suits his new clothes. The King, too late to prevent the Queen drinking, goes up C in great anxiety. Hamlet, hurt, registers to Horatio; then gets Laertes’ weapon, drives him down L, and wounds him. The Queen falls.
The duel is very important, and should be as striking and powerful as possible. It holds the see-saw indecisive Hamlet-quality, enigmatic yet precise. It balances the whole play: a hair’s weight will turn the scales. Laertes is poised against Hamlet, healthy normality against neurotic genius. It must be breathlessly exciting, assisted by attentive watchers. Hamlet once attacks Laertes and runs past him, so that they have changed positions; then he works back. The more variety the better, using the whole stage. The fight condenses the drama. As Hamlet becomes almost evil, is anyway a channel for evil so that the King’s crime may be rammed back on him, his ‘poison’d chalice’ actually commended to his own lips (Macbeth, I. vii. 11–12; Hamlet, V. ii. 340), so Hamlet, wounded by Laertes’ treachery, gets the poisoned rapier to return the blow. Whatever the opposing forces do to Hamlet comes back on them. On the voyage to England he changes the commands and hoists his adversaries with their own petard. The King sends him away, but the seas cast him back. It is a curiously reiterated rhythm; the fight sums it up in sharp, significant action.
The King in terror has gone up C on to the steps. Hamlet gets RC ordering the doors, imagined up L, to be locked. The crowd R prevents the King escaping there. He is hemmed in. As Hamlet rushes to kill him he descends, bravely meeting his end, perhaps trying the king-divinity assurance again. Horatio comes between the crowd and the steps, holding up one hand as though warding them off from what is a necessary act. The gesture may sound weak, but is nevertheless dramatically powerful and significant. It provides a reason for the crowd’s failure to stop Hamlet; it is in tune with the part played by Horatio; and together with the altar-like platform and steps it lends the deed an almost ritualistic suggestion which tones with the formality of the last scene and Shakespearian tragedy in general. The position need not be held long. Osric moves C, then R. Laertes lies dying down L, the Queen lies at the foot of her throne against the dais L. The King totters down the steps as Hamlet puts the cup to his mouth, again almost a ritualistic and ceremonious touch, and then falls, lying against the steps. Hamlet and Horatio struggle for the cup C; then Hamlet, supported by Horatio, ascends the throne. All the dead or dying are now grouped in a diagonal line from C to down L, variation being preserved by their positions: Laertes flat, the Queen against the low dais, the King against the central steps, Hamlet sitting on the throne. Hamlet has three times walked down from up C to the King’s throne: once when attacking it during his soliloquy; once while terrorizing the King during the play; and now. Here we may see the advantage of a permanent set for recurring big scenes: we can play on cross-sections of meaning which have a valuable, if only subconscious, effect.
Horatio kneels by Hamlet LC. Distant drums beat a steady march. Hamlet inquires their meaning, and hears that it is Fortinbras come victorious from Poland. In prophesying and blessing Fortinbras’ accession Hamlet sits up, his eye alight with fervour. All his dying speeches are taken happily, on the brink of ‘felicity’. He falls back dead. Horatio speaks. The march comes up again, this time near, rapidly nearing; very close, insistent, victorious. ‘Why does the drum come hither?’ The addition of some noises off, the grounding of arms and military commands (‘Stand!’—‘Pass the word along!’—‘Stand!’) helps to project Fortinbras like a winged arrow on to the stage.1 He should be young, fair, and have a rich voice, wearing a Viking helmet, Mercurially winged, and fine armour. He enters R, the crowd makes way for him, and he stands in front of them facing the line of dead.
The group here is important. It is often complained that the end of Hamlet is absurd, the stage so cluttered with dead. But death is throughout our dominant theme. Hear Fortinbras’ words:
O proud death,
What feast is toward in thine eternal cell,
That thou so many princes at a shot
So bloodily hast struck?
The dead are in a single group L. We must, as so often in Shakespeare, make a special point of the very thing we feared. There is another advantage. Where should Hamlet die? Is not the throne, giving him a formalized and victorious dignity his rather indecisive course has scarcely warranted, inappropriate? But if he lies on the ground Fortinbras’ final honouring of him to the exclusion of the King is visually and dramatically absurd. Our group solves all difficulties. Hamlet is now King; but king only among the dead. He rises over the group of corpses. The place next in honour is held by the King himself, central, on the steps. This position preserves a correct balance, and prevents Hamlet’s new ascendancy being too dominant: to the last we must preserve our see-saw indecisiveness. Fortinbras does not however face the King, and Horatio’s central position tends to lead the eye to Hamlet.
Horatio has risen to meet Fortinbras, in his own person linking the two worlds, of death and life: we may remember how he, the scholar, was called in by soldiers to deal with the Ghost at the start. Horatio on the steps offers a general explanation, and then returns among the dead, kneeling by Hamlet’s chair, praying. Fortinbras speaks his final speech. At ‘Go, bid the soldiers shoot’ he draws his sword and holds it steadily at the salute. Horatio is still kneeling. The drums start, a long roll; the trumpets swell out in an elaborate call, a sort of last post, sinking and rising, trumpet and rolling drums together, a vast roll of sound, waves rolling on and up. Then one cannon; a pause, in silence; then a second. The curtain is drawn, the group still, Fortinbras at the salute, sharing with Hamlet and the King the honours of the stage; Fortinbras, strong-armed, with the material strength of Claudius and the spiritual strength of Hamlet, a white light on him, the new hope for Denmark.1
There is no need to carry the bodies off. My arrangement preserves the spirit of Shakespeare’s conclusion. The two final cannon sum up the dualistic nature of the play, and together with the other similar effect in this scene throw back to the flourish and cannon before the Ghost’s first entry to Hamlet, thus giving an inevitability and implied necessity to the conclusion, a kind of ‘consummatum est’, helped also by our use of a permanent set.
7
KING LEAR
Hart House Theatre, Toronto; 1935
I describe shortly my arrangement of the middle action. After their repeated unkindness Lear confronts his daughters as a pathetic figure. He seems to be breaking under their flint-hearted behaviour. Here realistic touches are called for in the acting of Lear, in voice and gesture. The play is throughout unique in its blend of homely realism and cosmic grandeur. He is an old man in distress. He prays that the heavens may save him from the shame of tears, asking for ‘noble anger’. The prayer is answered. He will not ‘weep’. He grows swiftly in stature. This is the turning-point in his story. Ascending the central steps his poise and gestures assume a grand manner he has not touched before as he flings defiance at his daughters. ‘O fool—I shall go mad’. He preserves his manhood, but at a terrific cost. Low thunder—there is authority of stage-direction for it—accompanies this, the end of our first long movement. We are prepared for our middle action.
In our first act-division we used against our black curtains two white blocks a little over a man’s height. In the first scene they were together, central, suggesting order and government. We used them for the stocks scene as pillars on either side to suggest, vaguely, a courtyard. For our middle action something more is needed. The scene is, superficially, a wild heath; and, psychologically, a sort of eruption. The poetry shows subterranean forces in volcanic burst and leaping flickers of lunacy devil-dancing about titanic and heroic passion. Something of vast and awful psychic significance is upthrust. The inward world is now our stage and we are to explore fantastic territories. I have a book which warns the actor that King Lear shows the breaking of a strong man and leaves it at that. But he is only broken, as a man, as an eggshell breaks to disclose new action, new strength of grander, beyond human, stature. Something about our stage is needed (i) to break the monotony of plain curtains, (ii) to suggest rugged country, and (iii) to solidify the spiritual content of our middle action. So we had constructed two other white elements, larger than our rectangular blocks, well above a man’s life-size in height and breadth, showing irregular edges and slants whichever way they were placed. These were put vertically, and our former blocks laid flat, diagonally, down-stage on either side: the old tidy world fallen and shattered, and central the grand ruggedness upward towering. The use, for the first time, of four symbolic elements on the stage together provided the sense of a new richness in imaginative content that was needed. Such elements should be understood not as directly representing spatial facts but as a kind of visual grammar referring to deeper significances, though they are at the same time not altogether independent of the supposed scene, here one of rugged country. Of course, had the two ‘icebergs’ been too much like real blocks in shape and colour, their psychological meanings would have been lost and their relation to the other blocks destroyed. The use of a ramp in place of central steps leading to a platform C and the tone of the sky-sheet disclosed C between curtains helped to give a sense of desolation in wide open spaces. The draping of the curtain at one side of this central opening in a curved downward sweep inwards helped to build an impression of harmonious irregularity.
The four elements and the ramp we used variously for our main scenes during the rest of the play, without too great a positional stress on the rugged pair after the middle action. But not until the last scene of the play are the two rectangular blocks found together and upright, as at the play’s beginning, only now placed at one side and sharing honour of position with the others.
Our thunder was alternated carefully with the words. Such sounds must come in at the right time, and only then, the cues properly prepared. Sounds must not form a vague running accompaniment to words: we must aim at rhythmic alternation. This is why some people thought our thunder more effective than is usual in the theatre, where rival noises are too often left to fight things out as best they may. After hesitation I succumbed to a reserved use of lightning: what there is should always be held for a fraction of a second, too sudden a flash being mechanical and artistically non-significant. Our lights were kept fairly strong always, precluding certain tableau-effects but preserving other more important effects of acting.
I offer an example of interpretative action. The Fool counters Lear’s breaking mind with witticisms, trying to resolve by humour the tugging dualism that otherwise wrenches open the abysms of insanity. This is why his wit concentrates on the subject of Lear’s pain, and not away from it. In their first tempest scene Lear goes out hand-in-hand with the Fool, who is singing his ‘wind and rain’ song as they exit. In the next, Lear meets mad Tom, and leaves the fool for the madman. Both were played, with variation in the position of the elements, around the centre ramp. Tom is mainly central, but moves freely right and left during his big speeches, returning to the ramp in the centre. Action must underline an opposition between the Fool and Tom. We must see the Fool’s repeated fear whenever Tom comes near him, and also his painful loneliness at Lear’s desertion. Lear’s interest in Tom is necessarily crucial. When they go out Lear and Tom are together, Tom muttering his ‘child Rowland’ verse, this exit making a close replica of the former, only on the other side of the stage. The Fool follows, a pathetic lonely figure. The similar yet contrasted conclusions to these two scenes underline the relation of Tom to the Fool with reference to Lear.
On the strength of reports from people who saw the play I believe that such a presentation of the middle action proves the conventional attitude to the acting of King Lear unsound. If Lear’s apostrophe to the elements is acted in dim lights, or in front of a picture of the English countryside, and interrupted all along by thunder, even the greatest actor is helpless; done after the fashion I have suggested the problems are at most not much harder than those in Othello. It must be remembered however that the technique of grouping, gesture and voice should harmonize with the setting. Before the middle action Lear is an old man; during it, though with recurrent reminders of age and pathos, almost a cosmic force. Here you can employ a more extravagant use of gesture and need worry less about age in the voice. Such contrasts in the patterning and development of the poet’s plan should be reflected, as far as possible, in the technique of presentation.
The ramp lent itself to a slow winding purgatorial climbing effect when Edgar leads Gloucester off, and to the Lear and Cordelia conclusion. Compare my arrangement of the last scene in Romeo and Juliet and contrast my Macbeth arrangement, described later, with its suggestions of descent, especially on the two occasions when Macbeth meets the Weird Sisters.
Additional Note, 1963
When we were doing King Lear at Leeds in 1951 Dr. Louie Eickhoff, who was playing Cordelia, objected to my making the mad king begin to recognize Gloucester as though after an effort (‘I know thee well enough …’ IV. vi. 182). Instead, he should first fail to recognize him, but, when the time comes for it, with the discontinuity of madness, recognize him quite easily and obviously.
1 On two occasions. One was a production by the late E. A. Dale of Toronto, to whose work for the Shakespeare Society I would here pay tribute; as also to that of Major James Annand, Mr. Raymond Card, and Mr. Leonard Parker. [1963]
2 I feel, however, that I ought to quote this relevant passage from an article by Mr. T. R. Barnes in Scrutiny (IV, iii; December 1935) on the Maddermarket Theatre, Norwich (which I have not yet seen): ‘It is very difficult to describe in words the effect of all this in practice; but it is quite unlike the ordinary theatre. The actors do not appear to be in a brilliantly lit box, but seem more three-dimensional and more natural than they do on other stages. The settings form, as it were, a screen in front of which they perform. But in spite of this intimacy and naturalness, the actors (as they should) seem to inhabit a world of their own. The separation between play and audience is created by light, rather than by the structure of the theatre. One can look at the picture without being perpetually reminded of the frame. One gets an impression of height and space which is almost always lacking in the box stage, however painstaking the scenery is; the picture is higher than it is wide—a shape which is more dramatic (if one may speak of a dramatic shape); on stages, for example, like that of the Festival Theatre [i.e. at Cambridge], which is longer than it is wide, you get the effect of a frieze, which is narrative, not dramatic.’ [This footnote appeared in the 1936 edition, but was excluded from the 1949 Penguin edition. Compare p. 294 below.)
1 Shakespeare’s sonnets describe a man’s love for a boy, such as Antonio’s for Bassanio and the other Antonio’s for Sebastian. The Antonio-Sebastian drama is a miniature Othello, and most powerful. To what-extent may we relate the boys-who-turn-out-to-be-girls in the romantic plays to Sonnet xx? Or other such plots in Elizabethan drama to a general tendency towards such attachments? [Since first composing this note, I have expanded its thought in Christ and Nietzsche, The Mutual Flame, and elsewhere; 1963.]
1 His youth should be emphasized by make-up. Picture 1, which was taken during the 1939 production of Romeo and Juliet (p. 13 above), shows highlights on the face and a broadened mouth making a ‘character’ creation quite different from my own appearance.
1 Byron observed the ethnological exactitude of Shakespeare’s symbol, noting that ‘the handkerchief is the strongest proof of love, not only among the Moors, but all Eastern nations’ (Thomas Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron; 1824).
1 I owe this vital reading of Desdemona’s remark to an article by J. Middleton Murry incorporated into his Shakespeare, 1936 (XIV; ‘Desdemona’s Handkerchief’).
2 Pope had the point. See The Rape of the Lock, V, 105–6.
1 This is usual in Shakespeare. Events are as important as psychology. Shakespeare’s heroes do not altogether carve out their own course. Fateful circumstance does half the work, pressing them to evil in Macbeth or to nobility in Antony and Cleopatra. Here fate is ironical.
1 I had previously done Hamlet in Toronto in 1933.
1 Wind is a natural ghost-effect. Compare the wind-ghost association in Claudio’s death-speech; in Tennyson’s lines on Gawain in The Passing of Arthur; and at the end of Hassan. Compare the impression of ‘cold’ in Hassan with reference to ghosts and Hamlet’s remark: ‘The air bites shrewdly: it is very cold’. There is a certain communal store of imaginative impressions possessing a logic of their own throughout literature that has not yet been studied.
[Since composing this note I have learned that there is a spiritualist basis for these associations; 1963.]
1 The King was played by Mr. Clement McCallin; Ophelia by Miss Ida Gilbert.
1 See III. iii. 7–23. I might well have quoted this passage to support my view of the King in former essays.
1 Compare Stavrogin’s voyage into the far north in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed as interpreted by J. Middleton Murry (Fyodor Dosfoevsky, 1923 edn,; 160).
1 The last big production I saw let the cannon off during this speech, as well as later. Great care had been taken over many inessentials of sets and lights; but the things that matter are so often slurred or muddled.
1 William Poel’s arrangement of off-stage sounds for Fortinbras’ entry was similar, and mine may indirectly derive from him (see Robert Speaight, William Poel and the Elizabethan Revival, 1954; 52).
1 My comment may be attributing to Fortinbras a spiritual status for which the text gives us no evidence. The producer will nevertheless do well to believe it. [1963]
