Shakespeare: A Complete Introduction

The empty space

Some modern scholarship has challenged the primacy of traditional literary textual criticism as the dominant interpretative authority of Shakespeare in performance. The actor Sam Wanamaker’s recreation of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London (1997), and the performances that have been staged there, have awakened a further understanding that we cannot comprehend the plays, even historically, from the printed text alone. Critics have noted how the environment of the theatre itself affects the performance and the variety of ways in which the actors at those early performances may have delivered the lines.

Shakespeare references the physical theatre of performance in many of the plays and in doing so perhaps assists in the redefinition of some of our perspectives. An awareness of this theatrical self-consciousness pushes us further to consider the historically and culturally specific contexts within which the plays are performed generally. Theatre director Peter Brook’s seminal work The Empty Space (first published in 1968) directed our attention to the very effect of the playing space as part of the language of the drama, influencing both contemporary performance and the critical evaluation of Shakespeare.

‘…the early modern playhouse seems to have repeatedly been used as a way of interpreting and heightening the words and, sometimes, as a way of querying or undercutting them. Against this, Shakespeare’s calls for imagination need to be reconceptualized. True, there are moments when Shakespeare wants not to be constrained either by the overarching metaphors of his stage, or its crude realism. But a look at the way he locates a poet’s imagination in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (5.1.12–17) shows just how fundamentally organized it was by and around the stage…Imagination seems, for Shakespeare, to be scarcely distinguishable from its theatrical home and ultimately located there.’

Stern, T. (2014: 31–2), ‘“This Wide and Universal Theatre”: The Theatre as Prop in Shakespeare’s Metadrama’, in Karim-Cooper, F. and Stern, T., Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance. London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare

You may recall that earlier I noted how in Hamlet the often-quoted speech ‘I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth…’ (2.2.297–8) worked in the theatre by reference to the stage canopy, the sky and the bad breath of the audience around the thrust stage. Similarly, in the passage from A Midsummer Night’s Dream referred to by Tiffany Stern above, the point is that the environment of Shakespeare’s stage as a physical image is designed not only to complement his words, ‘The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,/Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;’ (5.1.12–13), but to embody the dramatic poet creating his art in the theatre, ‘And as imagination bodies forth/The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen/Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name’ (5.1.14–17).

Artistry and the theatrical experience

The overt presence of the dramatist’s artistry, as a poet and as a writer for the theatre in which his plays are being performed, is a hallmark of Shakespeare’s drama. It is never far away from his writing. It is exemplified in one of his last plays, The Tempest (4.1.146–58), but is found throughout his career. His self-referencing of theatre art, is, therefore, an important element of the plays in which it is found. It is an example of what is termed ‘metatheatre’ in action. It works as part of the ‘sign system’ of a play or, indeed, a poem. In the Sonnets, Shakespeare consciously refers to the fact that he is writing a poem that will last for generations to come. But in theatre his language, within this environment, provides something more than words. It is the theatrical experience itself, beyond just the specific playhouse for which Shakespeare was writing, but looking also to playhouses of the future that will interpret and present these plays according to their own age, culture, ideology and circumstances.

‘Shakespeare’s drama bears out better than the work of any other author the truth of Shelley’s belief that the poet “not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present”.’

Ryan, K. (2001), ‘Shakespeare and the Future’ (quoting Reiman, D.H. and Powers, S.B. [eds] [1977: 482–3], Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. New York: W.W. Norton), in Cartmell, D. and Scott, M. (2001: 192), Talking Shakespeare. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Acting style

The idea that there was a uniform acting style in the Elizabethan theatre has been challenged in recent years by, for example, Paul Manzer, as a textually devised concept. He notes that historically Shakespeare’s actors were literally given their parts as rolls, ‘Parts were made of strips of paper that were then joined top-to-tail and rolled around a wooden baton, requiring motion. A “roll” takes its name from the action it demands in its use. You “read” a book, but you “roll” a roll’ (Menzer, P. [2014: 164], ‘Character Acting’, in Karim Cooper, F. and Stern, T., Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance). The claim is that the dramatic character’s part was given to the actor along with his cues as one long joined roll, and that this – naturally confined – produced a homogeneity of role for that actor, obscuring the wider context of the play as a complete action. This in turn would have affected the way in which an actor approached and performed the part as a contribution to the play as a whole. Some actors would, no doubt, have bought a complete text, once published, but this was not their modus operandi in the day-to-day performance of the play, although there is no hard evidence to suggest that they did not have a general grasp of the play as a whole. Indeed, as a dramatist who also acted in his and other dramatist’s plays, Shakespeare would certainly have had an outline of the larger context of the play.

Just as with literary criticism, so with performance criticism: we find ourselves confronted by a variety of theoretical models and concepts. Some of the valid issues raised, however, can still leave questions unanswered. There is no evidence, for example, that the actors disappeared during the rehearsals of the play or that they were not briefed in one way or another about the context of the play as a whole and the location of their role within it. So we have to take care that we do not impose conjectural models on an historical process of which we do not have an undisputed model. We have to weigh one conjecture against another or even amalgamate ideas to imagine how the plays were first performed. John Drakakis, in an unpublished note to me, comments, ‘I think that the best we can say is that the acting was more stylized though some of the realistic dialogue departed from this model occasionally.’

Spotlight

Modern Shakespearean performance, however, relies usually on the ‘book’; this contains the text of the play as a whole, infused by textually based interpretation. So the actor Simon Russell Beale has referred to acting as ‘three-dimensional literary criticism’. In Hamlet, Shakespeare famously tells his actors, in the scene where Hamlet instructs the players, not to be over-flamboyant in gesture, and with some exceptions – Launce and his dog or perhaps the Porter’s scene in Macbeth – he appears to show an irritation with the clowns’ extempore interpolations for comic effect.

In tragedy this may unbalance the overall conception that the dramatist may have had in mind. Indeed, speculation holds that this is what may have led to the argument with Will Kempe and his subsequent departure from the company. However, in the original 1600 text of Much Ado About Nothing explicit reference is made to the actor Will Kempe who played the role of Dogberry, suggesting that, even in scripting the Clown’s part, Shakespeare had a particular actor and his distinctive style of acting in mind.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as we have seen, Shakespeare may ridicule amateur acting or indeed the acting of a rival company. For example, the Mechanicals’ rehearsal in Act 1, Scene 2 parodies a humorous description of the ways in which various roles might be played. Bottom’s imitation of ‘Ercles’ vein, a tyrant’s vein’ (1.2.26–38) may be a warm satiric jibe at Shakespeare’s competitor company the Admiral’s Men and their principal actor Edward Alleyn (1566–1626), with whom some of Shakespeare’s colleagues – Kempe, Pope, Heminges, Phillips and maybe Shakespeare himself – had once acted, and as such is another ‘in-joke’ of the theatre which no doubt would have been understood and appreciated by his audiences.

Film and television

Today the complexity of interpretative styles becomes more taxing through film and television. It is useful to compare, for example, a recording of the 2011 production of Much Ado About Nothing at the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe in London with the 1993 film version made by Kenneth Branagh. The Dogberry and Verges scenes in the latter, to my mind, just do not work at all. In fact, they are somewhat embarrassing when set against the clever cinematic portrayal of the main narrative by Branagh. But even the new Globe version, purporting to offer some kind of imitation of how these scenes might have originally been performed, is similarly disappointing. In both, there appears too great an externality of acting imposed on the scenes rather than an interpretation confident that the comic lines can work effectively. One mantra might be that, instead of trying to make the lines funny, we should allow them to be funny!

Key idea

The actor’s belief in the dramatic power of the script is not always essential but it certainly helps in creating successful productions, even though the script may have been adapted for a particular theatre. ‘Metatheatre’ works when there is confidence in it as part of the whole rather than something extraneous to the whole. It is both exterior to and intrinsic to the play’s design. I sometimes wonder whether in performance we should trust Shakespeare a little more. He was a professional. He knew what he was doing.

Film and, indeed, modern technology, however, add a further dimension to the study of Shakespeare. Modern media have generated a criticism and history of their own in which Shakespeare becomes located. (See, for example, Cartmell, D. [2000], Interpreting Shakespeare on Screen. Basingstoke: Macmillan, for an incisive balanced discussion of Shakespeare on film in relation to gender, sexuality, race and nationalism as well as references to film history itself, and also see the work of Graham Holderness [2003], Visual Shakespeare Essays in Film and Television. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press.)

Spotlight

With film there is always the opportunity and the temptation to take what is implied even on the stage and making it sexually or violently explicit, to the point where it adds gratuitously to the work itself. You may decide for yourself if this is so in, for example, Ralph Fiennes’ 2010 film version of Coriolanus with its violently graphic and bloody contemporary depiction of modern war, or Justin Kurzel’s graphically violent Macbeth (2015), with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. Compare these productions, however, with the nationalism displayed by Laurence Olivier’s Henry V made in 1944 as an avowed contribution to the war effort, which, as Cartmell notes, ‘appropriates Shakespeare in order to glorify war in a morale-boosting exercise’ (p. 95), and we see how interpretation becomes a record not of the play but of the ideologically motivated investments imposed on it.

Kenneth Branagh’s cinematic film version of Henry V (1989) deliberately takes a different approach from Olivier’s version, paying ‘homage to its predecessor while seemingly recovering the history for a 1980s audience’ (Cartmell: 101). It also grew out of a new awareness and an increasingly graphic depiction on screen of the realities of warfare. But it would be misleading to think that performance-related criticism is a phenomenon of the late twentieth or early twenty-first centuries. Critics since Shakespeare have consistently referred to the plays in performance and actors themselves have written through the centuries about the plays, but in the early decades of the twentieth century detailed performance-led studies began to appear, with the work of directors such as Harley Granville-Barker’s Prefaces to Shakespeare and G. Wilson-Knight’s Principles of Shakespearian Production, later published as Shakespearian Production.

The multi-conscious apprehension of the audience

In 1944 S. L. Bethell, in Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition, referred to what we realize to be the multi-conscious apprehension of the audience. Spectators at a play are not only aware of the performance action but of their surroundings. This includes the type of theatre – open air, proscenium-arched, thrust stage, large, small, intimate – and whether it is hot or cold. If in the open air is it going to rain, or is the sun too hot? Are they standing or sitting? Are the seats comfortable or hard? They are also conscious of other things; will the play end in time for me to catch the last train or bus? Did I lock the car?

It goes further than this, since the spectators will also bring their own receptivity: their differences in attitude, gender, ideologies, education, class, problems, perplexities, desires and wishes. There will also be concerns regarding those around them – local or visitors, talking, whispering, laughing, coughing or silent; restless or engaged; bored or concentrating. All of these and other audience issues have an effect on an individual’s perception of what is happening on stage and can have a communal effect within the theatre about which the actors become aware. They might see an individual who distracts them, in a positive or a negative way, or discern an atmosphere, for example, of encouragement or frustration with the performance. Communication in a live performance is a highly complex matter and every performance is consequently unique.

Recreating the Shakespearean stage

In 1894 William Poel founded the Elizabethan Stage Society, in which he attempted to recreate the staging of Elizabethan plays within the context of what he considered to be something approaching the original Shakespearean theatre. Poel was reacting against the lavish stage productions of the late nineteenth century and was looking forward, perhaps, to the re-creation of Shakespeare’s Globe in London, just over a hundred years later (1997) by Sam Wanamaker. Wanamaker drew on the rich tradition of twentieth-century research and scholarship in the construction of the theatres of Shakespeare’s day and the manner of performance. In this the actor Mark Rylance, as the first artistic director of the new Shakespeare’s Globe, had a major influence, not only on our understanding of how the plays might have originally been performed but how they could still be effective within that performance tradition.

Acting traditions cited earlier – Stanislavskian and Brechtian – nevertheless have had, and still retain, a strong influence. They are not the only interpretative ways of staging Shakespeare, as Rylance, for example, has demonstrated, but understanding something about them will enable you to locate productions you may see or interpretations you read. Let us begin with the Russian director Stanislavsky.

STANISLAVSKY

At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, the Moscow-based director Constantin Stanislavsky (1863–1938) developed a realistic form of acting, ostensibly to deal with the naturalistic plays of the Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov. This was later developed by Lee Strasberg (1901–82) at the Actors’ Studio in New York into what is known as ‘method acting’. It influenced a range of theatre and later film actors of the twentieth century such as Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger.

Theatrical realism, in Stanislavsky’s system, depended on what he termed ‘emotion memory’. Through a range of exercises and rehearsal techniques in realistic settings, the actor has to find within his/her emotional memory an affinity with the part he/she is acting, so that a relationship develops between the role and the actor and they almost become one. This technique works well within a style in which verbal language is not the only (or indeed the primary) means of communication. Indeed, as the late John Russell Brown demonstrated in Shakespeare in Performance (1969), Stanislavsky’s technique explored those areas of experience that exist underneath the text, and that various non-verbal means of communication, such as gesture, body language and paralinguistic expression (such as stutters), seek to present to an audience.

Key idea

The phrase ‘they almost become one’ is important, since Stanislavsky stressed that the actors should never totally lose a consciousness of their true identities as actors on a stage, but should speak in their own self as the person in the role.

‘When a real artist is speaking the soliloquy “To be or not to be”, is he merely putting before us the thoughts of the author and executing the business indicated by his director? No, he puts into his lines much of his own conception of life.

‘Such an artist is not speaking in the person of an imaginary Hamlet. He speaks in his own right as one placed in the circumstances created by the play. The thoughts, feelings, conceptions, reasoning of the author are transformed into his own. And it is not his sole purpose to render the lines so that they shall be understood. For him it is necessary that the spectators feel his inner relationship to what he is saying. They must follow his own creative will and desires. Here the motive forces of his psychic life are united in action and interdependent. This combined power is of utmost importance to us actors and we should be gravely mistaken not to use it for our practical ends.’

Stanislavsky, C. (1937: 248–9), An Actor Prepares. London: Geoffrey Bles

Stanislavsky’s views might have been an anathema to traditional literary critics, but he was actually taking the ‘realism’ found in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century character criticism to a logical conclusion on the stage. But Stanislavsky’s ‘realism’ was questioned from the start. Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), made famous by Stanislavsky’s realistic productions of his plays, complained that the director ruined them by turning what he had written as comedies into naturalistic tragedies. He disliked Stanislavsky having frogs croaking or the sound of trains passing in some productions. He pointed to paintings. If you take a portrait of a person created by a great artist and cut out the nose and insert a real one, he commented, you would have realism but not art. Indeed, you would have ruined the painting!

Stanislavsky’s influence on RSC productions of Shakespeare in the late twentieth century was marked, but subject to similar criticism as those made by Chekhov, as Janice Wardle’s discussion of John Barton’s influential 1969 production of Twelfth Night makes apparent:

‘Barton’s application of Stanislavskian-based techniques led him to implant detailed character analysis within accepted anthropological structures, derived from Frye and Barber, which had primarily displayed the social, and not the individual’s function in comedy. Arguably, tensions would inevitably result and, as in the case of Stanislavsky’s exploration of Chekhov’s individual trapped within a limiting social system, the prevailing mood would be melancholic.’

Wardle, J. (2001: 116), ‘Twelfth Night: “One face, one voice, one habit and two persons!”’, in Cartmell, D. and Scott, M., Talking Shakespeare. Basingstoke: Palgrave

BRECHT AND EPIC THEATRE

One of Stanislavsky’s main actors, Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940), left the company and developed an expressionist form of acting at a time when Russia was experiencing its communist revolution and its aftermath. Art was becoming more politicized and Meyerhold’s theatre became constructivist with an explicitly political dimension, later developed by the German communist director Erwin Piscator (1893–1966).

Meyerhold and Piscator heralded the development in Germany of what became known as Epic Theatre – a term first used by Piscator – or the theatre of alienation. This was developed by Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), who drew a distinction between Dramatic Theatre in a realistic tradition and the episodic approach of Epic Theatre. The first exploited the emotional impact of drama on stage, which, as we will see later, evolves from the early Greek drama and its range and purpose as defined by Aristotle in the Poetics. By contrast, Epic Theatre exposed the mechanisms, theatrical and political, through which drama was constructed, thereby recontextualizing performance and exposing the flaws in the Aristotelian conception of drama. This was a theatre that downplayed bourgeois notions of ‘emotion’ by appealing to a more analytical frame of mind. Brecht regarded the Elizabethan theatre as instructive in its meta-dramatic disclosures of its own practical methodologies, but he was also influenced heavily by the stylized plays of the Japanese Noh theatre tradition. From this, radical political interpretations and readings of Shakespeare’s plays were to evolve. So, for example, Brecht rejects in his poem ‘On Shakespeare’s Play Hamlet’ (c.1940) the romantic and realistic interpretations of the Prince and his ‘tragedy’ Hamlet. Such interpretations do not challenge the spectators but rather confirm their own bourgeois prejudices. For Brecht, Shakespeare’s plays needed to be performed as dialectical in the context of the anti-bourgeois philosophy.

‘Here is the body, puffy and inert

Where we can trace the virus of the mind.

How lost he seems among his steel-clad kind

This introspective sponger in a shirt!

Till they bring drums to wake him up again

As Fortinbras and all the fools he’s found

March off to win that little patch of ground

Which is not tomb enough…to hide the slain.

…

So we can nod when the last Act is done

And they pronounce that he was of the stuff

To prove most royally, had he been put on.’

Brecht, B., ‘On Shakespeare’s Play Hamlet’, c.1940 (1959), quoted in Willett, J. (1977, p/b ed: 120–21), The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht. London: Eyre Methuen

Key idea

In considering Shakespeare, the performances and the construction of the plays in general, Brecht holds that realistic Dramatic Theatre implicates the audience in the action of the plot, whereas Epic Theatre, by concentrating on narrative, allows the spectators to be observers of the action, distancing them to encourage an intellectual engagement with the issues of the play rather than in an uncritical acceptance of its conclusion. The Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, ‘alienation’ or ‘A-effect’, was designed to produce this distance from the action as a means of helping the audience to take a critical view of what was being represented on stage. This debate between Dramatic Theatre and Epic Theatre continues to have an influence on how we perceive Shakespeare today.

We will consider the Brechtian approach in more detail in Chapter 16, as it informs or coincides with the radical literary critical readings of Shakespeare that gradually emerged through the twentieth century, to the point of challenging, for example, conventional Aristotelian views of ‘tragedy’ rooted in classical theatre and adopted by the Christian and humanist traditions. But, before doing so, having planted the thought in your mind, let us continue our journey with an examination of some further Shakespearean comedies which in both criticism and production tend to spark significant critical debate: Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice.