The Merchant of Las Vegas

Two or three weeks ago I went over to Stratford to hear Patrick Stewart talk about playing Shylock.  In many respects the discussion was general, partly because he is coming to the role this year for the fifth time, but also because the current production, which had its press night earlier this week, has been shrouded in mystery and the director, Rupert Goold, was very keen that the overall concept of the production shouldn't get out too soon.  As you can imagine that set all of us off trying to find out what we were going to be watching and it wasn't long before someone managed to discover that shock horror the central setting was a casino in Las Vegas.  I'll pause while you all recoil in dismay.

Certainly, all the members of my two Shakespeare classes took several deep breaths before letting me know in no uncertain terms what they thought of the idea.  I have to admit that I wasn't exactly cheering from the gallery myself, although I could see certain similarities between the financial situations explored in the play and the careless way in which money is won and lost in the world of the multimillion Las Vegas gambler.  However, on Monday one of class went to see a preview and the following morning I got an e-mail quite simply raving about it, saying it was the best production of the play she had ever seen and that once she'd got used to the idea she thought the concept was sheer brilliance.

So, it was with a great deal of interest that I went over to Stratford on Wednesday to hear Rupert Goold talk about the play and explain why he'd taken the decision not only to set it in America, but also to play it in American accents.  Of course, there is the argument that East Coast American vowels are closer to those of the Elizabethans than are current English ones and that such a decision makes the speech more authentic, but what was more interesting was what he had to say about the stress patterns involved and how the American speech rhythms emphasise the verse forms far more than the British rhythms do.  I have to admit that I hadn't thought about that before, but once he demonstrated it was easy to see what he was talking about, especially where there is some form of antithesis being evoked.  Try doing 'to be or not to be' in an American accent and you'll see what I mean.  Goold also cited other highly successful productions of the play that have been set in very specific places.  There was one situated in Weimar Germany and another located in the time and location of the early Rothschilds.  In siting the play in the gambling capital of the world he has been able to emphasise the risks that both our own society and that of many of Shakespeare's contemporaries have been prepared to take with money - often, it should be said, with other people's money.

And of course, there is that other great financial parallel - rising inflation and its social consequences.  In medieval England prices had remained pretty much stable for three hundred years, but in the sixteenth century inflation was rampant and by the time this play was written the cost of living had doubled in a matter of years.  Lacking twenty-four hour news programmes to analyse the situation for them, the English were understandably annoyed (actually they would probably have been even more annoyed if they had had twenty-four hour analysis) and their answer was all too often to blame the problem on the foreigners coming into the country, who were, as they saw it, taking their jobs and their wages.  If you think the cry of 'British jobs for British workers' is a twenty-first century slogan, think again.  In the early 1590s the pamphleteers were doing great business raising feelings against Flemish workers in London in just the same way as voices are raised about EU immigration today.  It's easy to see both where the impulse behind the Shylock situation came from and its modern day parallels.

By the time Goold had got this far, and with Val's ringing endorsements in my ear, I was beginning to be won over and the next point he made tipped the scales completely in his favour.  He noted that this is a play that has no character in it that you can actually like and this is the first time that I have come across someone else who has the same problems that I do with Portia.  Now, I know that Portia gets a raw deal from her father.  In this production the whole business with the caskets is turned into a game show.  Choose the right box and get the beautiful girl - and, of course, the money that goes with her!  That's a production choice which seems to me to sum up the whole situation nicely.  However, her bad luck in the matter of fathers can't hide the fact that Portia is as ardent a racist as any of them.  Look at the trial scene closely some time.  She knows Shylock's name and yet she refers to him all the time as 'Jew', you can hear the contempt not simply for the individual, but for his entire race, and it is Portia who, having 'deprived' Shylock of his pound of flesh, suddenly ratchets proceedings up a notch with her 'Tarry Jew, the law hath yet another hold on you'.  She is enjoying this.  There were whispers of discontent in the audience on Wednesday at this point, but I was silently cheering.  I have always avoided directing The Merchant not because of Shylock and the antisemitic issues, but because I have never known what to do with Portia or, perhaps it would be truer to say, because I have never had the courage to play her as I have wanted to and has Goold clearly has taken the risk of doing.

So, all in all this looks set fair to be a very interesting theatrical experience indeed.  Press night was Thursday and the only review I've seen was very positive.  Unfortunately, I'm not seeing it until August, so it will be sometime before I can come back and report here on what I find.  If anyone else is going sooner then I would be fascinated to hear what you think.  

Sir Thomas More ~ By Just About Every Jacobethan Writer Going.

I went over to Stratford last week to hear John Jowett, one of the Professors at the Shakespeare Institute, talk about his new edition of the Jacobethan play Sir Thomas More.  Jacobethan because in this instance the most recent dating evidence suggests that while it was originally written around 1599 in Elizabeth's reign, it was then completely revised in 1604 after James had come to the throne.

For all sorts of technical reasons (such as there are large chunks of the original version missing!) it is the revised text that John has been working with.  And anyway, it is the revised text that is the really interesting one.  There is evidence in it of the hands (quite literally, the only existing copy is a hand-written manuscript) of at least four playwrights we can identify, plus A N Other whom we cannot, but who is probably not a recognised playwright, who is coyly know as Hand C.  And of course, the truly remarkable fact is that one of those playwrights is William Shakespeare.

Have you worked out what that means?  The manuscript is hand-written.  Shakespeare's scenes are in his own hand.  He touched those very pages.  Which is more than you or I can do, because this treasure of English Literature is stored in the British Library never to be seen by the likes of you or me and even if you're the likes of John, you only get to see a bit of it at a time and you definitely don't get to touch it at all. John likened working with it to being in the presence of a holy relic.  Oh yes!

As far as I can gather the story goes something like this.  The play must have been commissioned by one of the Elizabethan theatre companies.  We don't have any evidence as to which one it was, although there is no reference to it in Henslowe's diaries so it most likely wasn't The Admiral's Men.  It was probably written in the first instance by Anthony Munday, one of those contemporaries of Shakespeare you don't come across very often.  However, like all plays at this time, before it could be played or printed it had to be licensed by The Master of the Revels, the Sixteenth Century equivalent of the modern day censure.

From what evidence we have Sir Edmund Tilney was good at his job.  He doesn't appear to have taken the red pencil to scripts willy-nilly.  He would ask for a couple of lines to be altered rather than cutting whole scenes.  So, there must have been real problems with this text for him to have demanded the wholesale re-write that appears to have taken place.

Leave out the insurrection wholly and the cause thereof, he writes at the beginning of the copy that was sent to him, and begin with Sir Thomas More at the Mayor's sessions, with a report afterwards of his good service done being Sheriff of London upon a mutiny against the Lombards - only a short report, and not otherwise, at your own perils.

Sections of the play were parcelled out to different writers, possibly by Hand C, whoever he may have been.  Those people who are really good at this sort of thing can detect the work of Henry Chettle, Thomas Haywood, Thomas Dekker and, of course, William Shakespeare.  They appear to have worked independently of each other, which causes problems when you try and put the whole thing together, problems that Hand C seems to have tried to eliminate by adding his own occasional links.  The whole thing must have been a nightmare to edit and it would take someone of John's patience and scholarship to come anywhere near a satisfactory text.

His edition has just been published by Arden and I for one am going to put a weekend aside as soon as possible to get really into all the intricacies of the play and its history.  I am also going to try and access the on-line facsimile of the manuscript, although at the moment I'm having difficulty locating it.  I want to see Shakespeare's hand for myself.

Eureka!  I found it, or at least part of it.  You can access a 'pop-up' of one of the pages Shakespeare wrote here

and get access to a facsimile of parts of the manuscript in an edition prepared in 1911 by W W Greg here.  

You can actually download the Greg edition onto your Kindle, but if you do be prepared for the fact that the images of the original manuscript give a whole new meaning to the word illegible!

Macbeth ~ Royal Shakespeare Company

The new RSC season has started and all is once again well with my world.  I am never completely happy unless I have a parcel of theatre tickets sitting in my bureau waiting to be used and if they are tickets for the theatres in Stratford well then all the better.  I started off this season's theatregoing last Saturday with a visit to the new Main House to see Macbeth.

Those of you who read my piece last week about Michael Boyd's current production of Macbeth for the Royal Shakespeare Company will recall that I was concerned that this performance might not hold together as a coherent whole, given that Boyd had said he was only playing the Shakespearian elements of the text and cutting out the passages by Thomas Middleton.  Well, I needn't have worried, the production is one of the best I've seen of this play and certainly hangs together as well as Macbeth ever can.  This is in part because, despite what he said, Boyd has still left in certain lines from the Middleton scenes.

Thus, we still have the prophecies that set the whole play in motion.  After all, if no one tells Macbeth that he is destined to be King then we might as well all head for the bar before curtain up and stay there.  But, there are no witches.  Instead Boyd gives us three ghostly children, a direct result of his production some years ago of a dramatised version of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw.  Talking about this Boyd said that he had found those children more scary than any representation of the witches that he had ever seen and more appropriate as an image of terror for a modern audience.  And I would have to say that I agree with him, especially as those children then become the MacDuff babes who are later brutally slaughtered.  Believe me, no one was tempted to laugh.

And, we still have some of the Porter's lines, although they are assigned to Seyton and there is no indication of the Porter in the programme.  At first glance it might appear that these lines are kept just as an opportunity to remind the audience that this play was initially performed only months after the failed gunpowder plot and indeed we all came away having had the lesson that you should never return to a firework once lit hammered forcefully home.  However, there is a far more important reason why Boyd has to keep some of the Porter's speech and that is because he needs retain the reference to the equivocator.

There is a really interesting article in the programme by James Shapiro, one of our leading Shakespearian scholars, about the nature of equivocation and the way in which the use of the word changed as a result of the activities of Father Henry Garnet, the foremost Jesuit in England and a man who instructed Catholics how to mislead the authorities not by lying, but by evading the truth.  Garnet was hanged, disembowelled and cut into pieces on May 2nd 1606, the year in which this play was written and so the concept of equivocation would have been very much in the minds of that first audience.  As Shapiro says:

Before this time the word 'equivocation' had only been used by English writers to describe what happened when a word could be understood in more than one way, when its meaning was ambiguous or uncertain.  There was no sense of equivocating as deliberately misleading others in  sinister way or...of using a mixed proposition to express one part of a man's mind, and retain another.


That was not the case after Garnet's activities became well known.

Equivocation is at the heart of this production.  Macbeth tells only part of what has occurred in his letter to Lady Macbeth and they both then equivocate with their guests.  Macduff's wife tells her young son partial truths and Malcolm equivocates with the Thane of Fife himself.  Who is telling the truth? Who dares to tell the truth?  The other aspect of Jacobean England that is forceable brought home, especially through the set, is the fact that the country is still riven by the religious 'civil wars' of the Tudor period.  For the past sixty years it has been unsafe for one faction or another to make known their religious allegiance and who knew who could be trusted and who could not.  Neighbour could turn on neighbour, brother on brother.  The need for equivocation was something Shakespeare's audience would have understood only too well.

As far as it is possible, I thought Jonathan Slinger and Aislin McGuckin handled the main roles well.  I'm not certain that there is ever enough in the early part of the play to account for Macbeth's turn from loyal follower to traitorous renegade.  Those first scenes are appallingly underwritten and my own belief is that we don't have the full Shakespeare text.  I suspect that when the Middleton additions were tacked on it was to bring coherence to a version that had been cut down to fit the 'two hour traffic of our stage'.  Remember that they had to be off stage by five (by-laws were by-laws even in Shakespeare's day) and all the great tragedies would have had to be cut substantially to fit in with this requirement.  Luckily, we have managed to retain the complete Hamlet, Othello and (with certain caveats) Lear, but Macbeth, I think, is another matter.  Slinger came through the early scenes as well as any actor I've seen other than Ian McKellen and McGurkin's descent into madness was well defined.  I also liked the very bluff MacDuff of Aidan Kelly; I would have trusted him with my life any day of the week.

So, all in all, a success, which is more than you can say for most productions of Macbeth.  It's had very good press reviews as well, so if you live within reach of Stratford and feel you might want to see it, I would book quickly.  I think this may be one of those shows where tickets are hard to come by.

Making Connections ~ The Other

A librarian friend of mine is convinced that books talk to each other because she so often finds that a subject she has been reading about in one will then find echoes in whatever volume she picks up next.  Well, I certainly wouldn't want to disagree with her.  In fact, one of the reasons that I first took up blogging was precisely because I wanted somewhere that I could explore those connections as and when they arose, although then, as now, I was interested in connections across all disciplines rather than just in books.  My weekend decision to do a bit of weeding and try and get back to reading for more than just escapism prompted me to think about that early resolve again and so this is going to be the first of what I hope will be a series of posts about making connections and the 'added value' such thematic 'echoes' can bring to the enjoyment of a book, a play, a piece of music or a work of art.

Over the past few weeks I've gone back to some of my earliest dramatic roots and have been re-reading the Greek Tragedies.  One of the issues that has come up time and again has been the problems that the 5th Century BCE Athenians so obviously had with anyone who was in some way 'other'.  You might have thought that this would be predictably with someone who was foreign, but far more often it was  with someone who was female.  Pity then poor Medea, who being both foreign and female was on a hiding to nothing before she ever set foot in Greece.  OK, so what she did, killing not only her rival for Jason's love but also the children she, herself, had borne him, was perhaps not the ideal way to endear herself to the populous, but nevertheless she just didn't stand a chance. 

What happens to Medea, especially the way she is set aside by Jason when he wants to take another wife, and the attitude expressed towards her, epitomises the often expressed regret of the Greek male that women had to exist at all.  In a strictly patriarchal society and one which saw women as inferior beings, it was a source of great concern to the men of Athens that it was unavoidable that they had to consort with women in order to perpetuate their family through the production of a male heir.  You get the feeling that if it hadn't been blasphemy to say so they would have told Zeus he'd got it wrong somewhere.  All babies should spring fully formed out of their father's heads as Zeus's own child, Athena did - except, of course, such children should always be male.  They might be able to get rid of a foreigner, but the dreaded woman they had to keep about them.  

Coincidently (or not, as the case of the whispering books may be) I've also been doing a lot of work on The Taming of the Shrew this past few weeks.  It's proving quite a frustrating play to study, mainly because wherever you look for academic discussion you find only two subjects being given any great attention, the relationship between The Taming of the Shrew and The Taming of a Shrew and the question of how you interpret what happens to Kate in that final scene, where it seems she capitulates completely to Petruchio's mastery.  I might come back to the first of those issues at some point because I think the answer to why there are two very different but clearly related plays probably accounts, to some extent at least, for the disappointment brought about by the second, however, the interesting aspect of my study in relation to this particular set of connections was the extract I came across from Jack Holland's A Brief History of Misogyny printed in the programme for an RSC production of the play.

For men, women are the original 'Other' - the 'not you'...woman presents a...complex problem for those who designated her as 'the Other'.  She is 'the Other' that cannot be excluded.  Racists can avoid interaction with the despised group.  But intercourse with women is in the end unavoidable, even for misogynists...intimacy with her is as unavoidable as it is essential.  The very maintenance of human life and society depend upon it.

And there we have it again, this idea that there are some instances of 'otherhood' that you can avoid, but the 'otherhood' of gender is inescapable.  I'm not certain, by the way, that this is a particularly helpful approach towards understanding what is going on in either A Shrew or The Shrew as texts, but clearly there was one RSC director who thought that it might provide a way of approaching the play when it came to trying to make sense of it on the stage.

Then along came instance the third, Julia Spencer-Fleming's second book in her Clare Ferguson series, A Fountain Filled With Blood.  Spencer-Fleming is one of those crime writers whose works I shall not be throwing into the compost bin.  Not only is this second book definitely better than the first, but she is also a writer who offers you subjects that require some serious thinking on the part of the reader, demanding that they consider their own position in relation to whatever issue she has chosen to raise.  I suspect the fact that Clare is an Episcopalian Priest is not purely coincidental.

In this book the people who have been assaulted, and in one instance killed, are all homosexual.  Clare is convinced that this is not a coincidence and that the fact that they are hate crimes should be made public.  Russ Van Alstyne, the local Police Chief, disagrees, arguing that to do so could cause unnecessary panic.  However, eventually he admits to Clare that this may not have been his only reason for refusing to publicise the sexuality of the victims.

"I guess I'm afraid that, deep down, all my reasons for not issuing a general warning or going to the press with the gay-bashing idea are because of ... who the victims were.  Because I don't, you know, feel comfortable around gay guys."

"Bur Dr. Dvorak was - is - a friend of yours.  That doesn't make any sense."

"We were friends at work.  I knew who he was and what he was, but it never impinged on our relationship.  He never talked about Paul, just like I never talked about my wife.  The fact that he was gay was like having a friend at work who's Jewish, or vegetarian.  You know about it, but you don't have to think about it, because what you do together never intersects with that other part of the person's life."

Here then is the other side of 'otherness', the 'other' you can pretend doesn't worry you because you can avoid ever having to face what marks that person out as different.  (Or for that matter, what marks you out as different.  Difference works both ways, although we rarely manage to recognise the fact.)

It makes you think, doesn't it?  How many prejudices do we deny simply because we've never been put into a position where we've had to intersect or interact with the people who embody them?  If we found ourselves in Russ's position could we be that honest?  Unless I hie me to a nunnery, I have to acknowledge the gender 'other', but other 'others'?  I'm not so sure.

Middleton's Macbeth.

I spent an interesting evening on Monday listening to Michael Boyd, the Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, talk about his new production of Macbeth.  I haven't yet seen this on stage but what he had to say has certainly whetted my appetite for a play that I wouldn't say is normally one of my favourites.  I have only ever seen it brought off successfully once and then in the very small and intimate space of 'The Other Place'.  For me it's a play that doesn't work in the vast regions of a thousand seater theatre.

Aside: I should ask myself seriously at some point why that is.  After all it was written for The Globe which probably took an audience of three thousand. But that's a discussion for another day.  

To come back to Boyd's production.  What has me particularly intrigued is that apparently he is only playing the Shakespeare text and that is a very bold move indeed.

You do realise, don't you, that Macbeth as we know it (I am trying very hard to avoid the Star Trek joke here, especially with Patrick Stewart in the company this season) is only partially by Shakespeare.  What we have is almost certainly a version for the stage cut and embellished by Thomas Middleton.  If you decide to play only the Shakespearian bits then you lose not only the Porter, but also the Witches and Hecate too.  For some people I know that means the very bits that wake them up.

These passages are, however, parts of the Folio text that can be very hard to bring off.  Antony Sher and Greg Doran in their book Woza Shakespeare make the point that in a society that has no real concept of witches in a way which has an immediate, daily impact, it is almost impossible to invest the characters with the terror that they would have inspired in an audience that believed implicitly in the potency of such figures.  Too often, in the modern British theatre, they simply get the production off to a bad start by being laughed at.  The Porter normally fares better because by that stage in the play you're desperate for anything that offers a bit of light relief.  But, how do you give him the relevance that he had at the time?  His speech is a bit like Koko's 'little list' in The Mikado.  If you want it to have the effect it had when it was first produced, you have to update the references.  Most productions would change the script at this point, although I've never before come across a director bold enough to cut the scene completely.

I have to say that this has me really itching to see this production.  However, I do have a caveat.  Will it hold together now?  I suspect, and of course I have no way of knowing, that we have lost a good deal of what Shakespeare actually wrote when he first put quill to parchment over Macbeth.  Think how short it is compared to the other tragedies.  I've seen an almost uncut version played without an interval in little over two and a half hours.  Try doing that with Othello or Hamlet.  We only have the Folio version of Macbeth.  There are no Quartos published before the 'official' 1623 First Folio.  In other words, we don't have the original Shakespeare Macbeth, only the version 'prepared' by Middleton for a stage that expected a play to be around the two hour mark.  Now, Middleton knew his job.  He has given us a script that works.  He was, after all, a damn good playwright himself.  But if you start to adapt an adaptation are you going to be left with a text that has an inner coherence?

Well, time will tell.  I'm seeing the production within the next couple of weeks and you can be sure I will have something to say about it.  I hope it will be good.

How Much Bottom Space Do You Need?

Ah well, the hay fever season is here again and this is clearly going to be a bad year. So, until my little blue miracle pills begin to kick in, my posts may be a bit on the short side, as too much working with a screen tends to start my eyes watering with a vengeance. I did, however want to share with you the beautiful architectural designs that you can see to your left. These are going to be used as the basis for the Globe Theatre Company's new indoor theatre intended to mirror Blackfriars, the winter home of Shakespeare's Company from 1608 onwards.

The designs were discovered in Worcester College Oxford and probably date from around 1660. I was privileged to be at a seminar last week where Professor Andrew Gurr, the leading scholar in the study of Shakespeare's theatres, company and audiences, presented these to us and talked about what we could learn from them about the theatres of the time. One of the most interesting points he made was that these theatres were clearly designed for listening rather than seeing. As a result, the best seats in the house were those over the stage, on the stage itself, and in the side boxes; exactly the opposite of what you would expect today. In exploring this in greater detail in order to work out what the audience capacity would be, they have come to the interesting conclusion that if you were a Lord you were allowed 2' 6'' bottom space, if you were a Lady you got 2', but if you were like me, a mere pleb, then you had to squeeze yourself into a paltry 18". As someone I was telling yesterday remarked, "Just like travelling by plane then". There are somethings about human nature that simply never change.

Annie

This Year 'Don Quixote'?

I'm still working my way slowly though Susan Hill's book of reading delights, Howards End is on the Landing, and this morning, curled up in one of my favourite coffee shops, I came across her piece about the books with which we form a special relationship despite the fact that they have been standing unread on our shelves for decades at the very least.

They become known in a strange way, perhaps because we have read a lot about them, or they are books that are part of our overall heritage. I think I know a lot about 'Don Quixote'. I do know a lot about 'Don Quixote'. I have just never read it. I doubt if I ever will. But I know what people mean when they talk about tilting at windmills; I recognise a drawing of Quixote and Sancha Panza. I believe Cervantes to be a great European writer. Why do I believe that? What possible grounds do I have for believing it? Other people's opinions, the fact that it has an honourable and permanent place in the canon? So, 'Don Quixote' has an honourable, permanent place on my shelves. It would be wrong to get rid of it.

I feel exactly the same about Don Quixote. I too have a copy and, like Susan Hill, I have never read it. Nevertheless, this doesn't stop me from being convinced that I know what the novel is about. After all, I did once, long ago, see a stage version at the National starring Paul Scofield. That has to count for something, surely?

Well, two people who we know did read the book were William Shakespeare and the up and coming star of the King's Men, John Fletcher. I don't know about you, but I always find it astounding that Shakespeare and Cervantes lived at the same time, however, that is, in fact, the case. Indeed, they died on the very same day, April 23rd 1616.

Cervantes published the first part of Don Quixote in 1605 and the first English translation, by Thomas Shelton, hit the book stalls outside St Pauls in the early Summer of 1612, just in time for Shakespeare to pick up a copy and decide that one of the stories it contained would be ideal fodder for his Christmas production for the company he had been part of since its foundation in 1594. By this time most of his work was being done in collaboration with the young Fletcher and this was no exception. The play, Cardenio, was written, the music composed by Robert Johnson, who also worked with them on The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII, and the whole entertainment presented at court over the Christmas period 1612.

What, you've never heard of a Shakespeare play called Cardenio? Ah, well there's the rub. We've lost it. Careless, I know, but nevertheless, a fact. What we do have is a bowdlerised version from the eighteenth century by one Lewis Theobald called Double Falsehood which he claimed was based on the Shakespeare and Fletcher original, but if he had the three copies he said he did they almost certainly went up in flames in the Drury Lane fire of 1809. Please, don't ask me to say any more, it's just too painful. If it's any sort of consolation, what does still exist is the music for that first production and you can see it, I believe, in the Bodleian Library.

Recently, however, there has been considerable interest in both the Theobald play and in attempts to use it as a basis from which to reconstruct the original Cardenio. There was an Arden edition of Double Falsehood published last year and there have been two university attempts, one here in the UK and one in New Zealand, to stage a version of what scholars have thought might be something like the original of 1612. Now, we have the first professional production opening at the Swan Theatre in Stratford next month. As you can imagine, this has caused considerable interest, not to say controversy, and I can't wait to see how Greg Doran (a director, for whom I have the greatest respect) has set about rebuilding a script from very little original material. Fortunately, there are going to be several opportunities during the coming months to talk with him about the process, including an afternoon workshop in June that I've managed to wangle myself a place on.

There is no way that what we are going to see on stage this summer can possibly be thought of as a reliable reconstruction of the performance King James and his court saw during those seventeenth century Christmas festivities. Theobald must have completely gutted the original. For instance, there is no subplot in Double Falsehood and I am reliably informed, by someone who definitely knows, that there is only one play from that period which doesn't have at least one subplot and often more. Shakespeare certainly always liked an extra line of plot development knocking around. Nevertheless, if even just a few lines are reliably by Shakespeare that has to be worth something.

And now, I have to decide whether I am going to celebrate this event by making this the year in which I change my relationship to the Don. Is this going to be the year when I finally take my copy down from the shelf and actually read it? Maybe, we'll see.


Annie

A Hal By Any Other Name

Much to my surprise, I found myself having a good old grump this morning at my dear friend, Thomas C Foster.  However, you won't be surprised to hear that it was his chapter When in Doubt, It's from Shakespeare, that was causing the grumping.  There are a couple of factual inaccuracies in there and that really annoys me.  I'm sure none of us is perfect when it comes to making sure that our blogs are 100 percent accurate and completely free from typos.  But then we aren't asking someone to pay for the pleasure of reading our words of wisdom, nor have we set ourselves up as some sort of authority. In a published work of non-fiction such inaccuracies worry me because they automatically call into question all those facts I didn't know before I started reading and have happily been assuming to be true. For the record, it was Prokofiev who composed the ballet Romeo and Juliet and not even a newly pious Prince Hal is hard-hearted enough to hang Sir John Falstaff (nor foolish enough, I would imagine the audience would have lynched him). Rather the old knight made a finer end, and went away an it had been any christom child.  It is Bardolph who is condemned to death for robbing a church while the army is in France.  

Having said that, the main point that Foster is making in this section remains valid, namely that it is not unusual to find a more recent text reworking or in some way referencing a Shakespeare play and that recognising the relationship will often lead to a greater appreciation of the referencing work.  

One of the examples he gives is Athol Fugard's play Master Harold... and the Boys, making the point that the young man, Master Harold, is a modern day equivalent of Prince Hal, loafing around with the black workers when he ought to be readying himself to take over his father's business.  Eventually 'Hally', like Hal, is forced to take not only a position of responsibility but also a political disregard for those whose company he has previously enjoyed.

I have to admit that when I saw this play at The National Theatre in London, I didn't make the connection. However, in my defence, the performance I saw was so memorable in other ways that I think I can be forgiven. I must have seen it in the early eighties and the play (which was initially banned in South Africa) had caused a stir among right wing groups because it questioned apartheid.  About half an hour in two members of the audience (I'm doing my best to be polite here!) stood up and made their objections to black actors appearing on an English stage, in a play which had the audacity to suggest that black people might have the same rights as white, very clearly heard.  Everyone else, actors, audience, staff, froze......for a moment, just a moment, and then the audience members closest to the protestors stood up and without a word formed a ring around them and made it impossible for them to do anything other than walk out of the theatre.  The 'guard of honour' then came back, sat down and the play continued as if nothing untoward had happened.  It was English sang-froid (if that isn't some sort of linguistic disjunct) at its very best, but you will understand that it did mean that I had things on my mind that afternoon other than looking for Shakespearian parallels. 

I've always enjoyed Fugard's work, The Road to Mecca is my favourite, and so I'm sorry if I haven't done Master Harold full justice.  I shall have to go back and re-read it, although, of course, that won't be as potent as actually seeing it on stage.  One thing I will be looking out for is any way in which it makes me re-assess the Henry IV plays because I think these Shakespearian referencings can often prompt new insights into the original works as well, but that is the subject of another post altogether.

Recalling Shakespeare

On Monday I went to see a dear friend who is in the process of moving house.  It's a difficult situation because she has lived in the same rather isolated cottage for the past sixty-three years and she is a hoarder.  As you might imagine, given the length of time she's been in her home, she is having to move because of health problems and she is going into much smaller accommodation.  It isn't easy for her, either emotionally or physically.  

I went over on Monday specifically because she wanted me to  have her collection of programmes from the theatre visits she'd made to Stratford over the years to use with the Shakespeare groups I teach.  While I'd seen many of the same productions myself, I don't have the space to be a hoarder and so I haven't kept any but the more recent programmes myself.  I've often regretted this, but a small house is a small house and that's all there is to it.

As you might imagine, I've had the most wonderful time over the past few days going through these programmes and recalling some of the marvellous productions I've had the privilege of seeing since I first started going to Stratford in the early 1960s. They include, for example, the programme for the very first professional Shakespeare I saw, Peter Hall's 1962 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream with Judi Dench as Titania, Diana Rigg as Helena and, I notice, the novelist, Margaret Drabble, tucked away among the fairies.  I knew she had wanted to be an actress, but I hadn't realised I'd been there to see her early attempts.

It is, though, the even earlier programmes that really make you catch your breath and turn green with envy. Here, for example, is the 1959 production of Othello with Sam Wanamaker as Iago and Paul Robeson as The Moor.  What wouldn't I have given to see that.  Or the Cymbeline from two years earlier with Peggy Ashcroft as Imogen and, hidden deep among the Lords, Ladies, Servants and Guards, an as yet unheard of, Eileen Atkins.  And what about a production of Dr Faustus just after the war, in 1947, with Robert Harris as the eponymous scholar and Paul Scofield as the evil Mephistophilis? 

The piece de resistance, however, has to be the 1951 programme for Henry IV Pt I.  The cast list reads like a theatrical who's who of the period; Harry Andrews as King Henry, Anthony Quayle as Falstaff, Michael Redgrave as Hotspur, Hugh Griffiths as Owen Glendower and, of course, Richard Burton as Prince Hal.  I am not old enough to remember Burton as anything other than a film actor.  How I wish I could have seen that production.  The Henry IVs are among my favourite plays anyway, but with a cast like that.......

I'm so sorry for my friend that she has had to give away programmes that are reminders of so many happy memories, but I know she is pleased that they are going to be put to good use and when I talk to her about the memories they have recalled for me as well, we are at least going to have food for hours and hours of theatrical discussion.

Love is my Sin

I've just come in from Stratford, where I've been to The Swan to see Natasha Parry and Michael Pennington in Love is my Sin, a piece devised and directed by Parry's husband, Peter Brook, and based on a selection of Shakespeare's sonnets.

I'll write at some later point, perhaps, about what I think of the newly refurbished RSC theatre, especially as I haven't yet been into the reconstructed Main House. As far as I can see pretty much all they've done in The Swan is reupholster the seats. And thank goodness they haven't messed it about in anyway because as a space for live theatre it was pretty much perfect as it was.

Shakespeare's plays haven't yet made a reappearance in either the Main House or The Swan. Wisely, the management have chosen to stage a number of smaller events to get the theatres up and running and thereby give themselves a chance to iron out any teething problems. And, when they do introduce full length plays they will be productions moved over from last season's repertoire in The Courtyard rather than anything new.

So, what I've been to see today was a travelling show that took thirty-one of Shakespeare's sonnets and used them to create the story of a love affair between two people no longer in the prime of youth but still more than capable of all the intensity of feeling that goes with loving someone and for one reason or another being uncertain of the reciprocity of the emotion. I have to say that it was one of the most beautiful and touching pieces of theatre I've ever experienced.

The sonnets were split into four groups: Devouring Time, Separation, Jealousy and Time Defied. Brook says of his selection:

At first, Shakespeare evokes a shared tranquility, but little by little the pains of love appear: there is separation, then infidelity and treachery which lead to a disgust of the body and flesh. But in a final phase, Shakespeare affirms the reality of a love that can transcend all barriers that is even more powerful than age or death.


For love can conquer time.

For the most part, the sonnets selected were not the better known ones, but they led up to probably the most famous of them all, number 116,

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Parry and Pennington are both brilliant actors, but even so I think the two facts that hit me most forcibly would have been apparent had that not been the case. The first was something that should perhaps have been obvious, namely that these texts were composed by a man who wrote for the voice and who wrote to tell a story. At no point did it appear that we were listening to poetry. These could all have been speeches being made one character to another in any of Shakespeare's plays.

The second feature that was brought home to me, even though, again, it was something I shouldn't have needed reinforcing, was how close iambic pentameter is to natural English speech patterns. If you hadn't been aware that on the page these words were laid out as fourteen lines of ten syllables each you would never have guessed. And this just makes the works all the more miraculous, because it infuses them with a truth that transcends the structure and takes on a life of its own.

One other factor that was interesting in respect of my Titus Andronicus studies was the use the Brook made of music. I've spent the last couple of days researching his 1955 production of the play and apparently one of the things that made it so effective was his use of sound, often very minimal, often discordant and unexpected. He did exactly the same here, including at one point having the single musician use the bellows of a piano accordion to echo the sighs of lost love. It always seems miraculous to me when you can feel events reaching to each other across boundaries of space or time or culture and this was one such occasion.

Annie

Shakespeare and the King James Bible

Over the last three mornings the BBC have been broadcasting a series of programmes commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of the King James Bible. We are no longer supposed to refer to it as the Authorised Version as apparently officially it never was, authorised that is.

The story of how the King James Version came about is fascinating in itself but far to long and complex for a single post. However, listening to the discussions over the last few days I've been reminded of a lecture we had last term from a scholar who has been working on the text in preparation for this year's celebrations. He came to speak to us on the subject Did Shakespeare Have a Hand in the King James Bible.

Of course, there has always been speculation. When you look at the published works of the people who were responsible for the translation it is hard to understand how the beautiful language which is the hallmark of the text ever came about. Indeed, it is all the more remarkable when you remember that the work was given over to a committee. This group gets to work on these books, that group on those! When I think of some of the committees on which I've served the wonder is that they ever came up with a text at all, let alone one that has inspired artists, composers and writers ever since. And, let us not forget that Shakespeare was King James own personal playwright. He was the company writer for the King's Men and while James didn't exactly pay his wages pleasing the monarch was definitely the way to go.

But, speculation is not evidence and much as it would make a wonderful story to be able to say that the bard was involved the general thought is that it would be just that, a wonderful story. However, our speaker did say that he had got a little excited, enough to wonder perhaps if one of the translators wasn't an ardent playgoer paying tribute to his hero, when he discovered that the forty-sixth word from the beginning of Psalm 46 was shake and the forty-sixth word from the end was spear. Shakespeare, of course, was himself forty-six when the King James Bible was published.

Alas, even that much of a link was denied him when he went back to earlier translations and discovered that the words shake and spear have always been rattling around somewhere near the beginning and the end of that particular psalm. And we all know what would happen if we were to leave a monkey alone with a typewriter for long enough, don't we?

Nevertheless, the mystery of the magnificent language contained in the 1611 Bible remains and it would be nice to think that all the scholarly attention that is bound to be given to the text over the course of the year might come some way towards explaining it.


Annie

Thoughts on Macbeth

Even though today is officially a bank holiday in the UK, I really felt that the time had come to get back into my normal workaday routine. What with the snow and Christmas it has been far too long since I last did any real study or preparation for my upcoming teaching commitments. So, bearing in mind the fact that I still have three sessions to take on Titus Andronicus, I spent the morning finishing Greg Doran and Antony Sher's account of the production they staged of that play, with the Market Theatre of Johannesburg, in 1995, Woza Shakespeare.

Once they'd got the play up and running there was the opportunity to go and watch other productions being staged or rehearsed in the Johannesburg district including Umabatha, the Zulu Macbeth. Sher writes:

I'm on the edge of my seat from the word go, when a tiny figure dashes from the back of the vast, open stage, kneeling at the front, muttering and shivering, and then sneezes. She is one of the witches and the sneeze is a ritual in Zulu witchcraft...Seeing the play done in this context, in a society with a real relationship to witchcraft - like Shakespeare's society - makes me realise why ninety-nine per cent of modern British Macbeth's fail.

And, reading what Sher has to say about this production made me realise why, when the publicity handouts came last week for next season's repertoire at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, my heart fell at the announcement of yet another Macbeth. In all my years of theatre going I have only once seen a production that completely stopped me in my tracks and I have seen several that have been so awful that the only remedy was to laugh.

The worst of these was perhaps twenty or twenty-five years ago and starred an actor so famous both on stage and in Hollywood that were I to name him I could guarantee that you would all know to whom I was referring. Given just how terrible his performance was I'm not going to do that. It would have been bad enough had it just been the lead who was so appalling, but it wasn't. If the entire cast had been replaced by a pack of Daleks they could not possibly have been more wooden and disjointed, in speech and movement both. And the props! Suffice it to say that when Macduff held up Macbeth head in the final scene the entire audience collapsed in gales of laughter. It was embarrassing.

The only Macbeth I've seen that really worked was the RSC's production with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench which was originally staged in the company's small theatre, The Other Place, when it was still housed in an old hut with a corrugated iron roof. (You tried to avoid performances when it was raining and those of us who knew the town well never went on a Tuesday when the local church had bell-ringing practice!). This production has been immortalised on DVD, so you may have seen it, but you had to experience it actually in the space for which it was devised to really appreciate the intensity of the original concept. The audience formed the outer ring of concentric circles, the actors were the middle ring and performing space was at the heart of the action. Played without an interval, the evil invoked grew in that inner arena and was trapped and intensified by the people around it. It was one of the most mesmerising theatrical experiences I've ever known.

Between those two extremes I must have seen at least a dozen other productions none of which have been particularly satisfactory and so I have to say that I'm not exactly leaping up and down with excitement at the thought of yet another foray into this most difficult of plays. I notice that the publicity handout doesn't say who is going to play Macbeth. I wonder, is this because of the company's policy of emphasising the ensemble nature of their work? Or is it, perhaps, that they haven't yet succeeded in persuading any actor that he wants to take the risk?


Annie

Returning to Titus

The snow we've had here in the English Midlands has played havoc with our Shakespeare classes and so until something else comes up to bring the two groups back into line I'm going to have to find ways of juggling different topics and the preparation that has to go into putting together the material for what have turned out to be two very different sets of students. At the moment that means that I have to revise the input for the thematic session on Titus Andronicus for the more philosophical group, while putting together the data on the same play's performance history for the set with the more literary and theatrical backgrounds.

Diving back into a text like Titus is never a particularly easy thing to do, the more so when the work we've already done has convinced most of us that rather than being so over the top as to be unbelievable the play is actually one that has striking relevance to the world in which we live; a world where violence and revenge are common place to far too many people. So, I've chosen to take the 'easy' way out and started up again by beginning Woza Shakespeare, Greg Doran and Antony Sher's account of the production they did with the Market Theatre in Johannesburg just after South Africa's first free elections.

Many years ago now, I bought Antony Sher's Richard III book, The Year of the King, as a present for a friend and then had to get another copy to give to him, having dipped into the original and discovered that there was no way I was ever going to be able to live without it. This account of the staging of an equally dark play is, if anything, even more gripping, in part because it has insights from two very different people, but also because inevitably there are tremendous personal reverberations for Sher, coming home for the first time to a new regime in South Africa just as Titus is returning to a new regime in Rome. Already it's clear that the book is going to be concerned as much with the damage that has been done to the country and its people as it is with the play, especially in the realm of violence and what personal experience has meant many of the actors concerned accept as normal.

But, that doesn't mean that there aren't insights into the text as well and this morning I found myself arguing fiercely against one of the cuts that they had decided to make in the notoriously difficult first act.

It's generally accepted these days that the first act was most likely written not by Shakespeare but by George Peele. Of course, this is very useful for scholars, who can now breathe a sigh of relief and stop trying to defend the Bard's reputation. However, if you're trying to the stage the play, who actually wrote the damn thing doesn't really matter a hoot, you've still got to find a way of putting all its twists and turns in front of an audience. The best production I've ever seen (Deborah Warner's for the RSC) played the text without a single cut, but Doran and Sher decided not to go down that route and one of the things to go was Titus's killing of his son, Martius. Their reasoning was that this makes Titus appear mad too early  and doesn't give the actor playing him anywhere to go in the later scenes.

The more I think about this the more uneasy I feel. For me it is essential that we are made aware of just what Titus is prepared to do for the state if we are to understand the enormity of what he feels when he realises that the very institution he has fought for has not only turned against him but was never worth defending in the first place. I also think that it is a signal to the audience that in terms that most of us would understand, at least, his mind is already unbalanced. It prepares us for the storm that is to come when he has to face what happens to the rest of his family at the hands (sorry, no pun intended) of the very regime for which he has sacrificed so much.

For me this is the beauty of a discursive book like this. I can argue away with it for hours and then I can put the argument in the hands of the groups I'm working with. I shall be really interested to see what those with psychology backgrounds think about the way in which Titus behaves and whether they think the Sher/Doran cut justified. What I do know is that the discussion will be lively and I shall come away from it with even more food for thought and more material for further debate.


Annie