Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard

by Ben Crystal

  The Elizabethans would watch and listen to a play in the theatre, and then leave it behind at the end of the afternoon. It’s easy for us to get hold of a copy of one of the plays. But if you were an Elizabethan lucky enough to have had an education and had learnt to read, the play-texts, already scarce in quantity, would have been relatively expensive.

  After Shakespeare died, the publication of the First Folio meant that his plays were more readily available than ever before. So, suppose you could read, and you could spare the equivalent of 44 loaves of bread and afford the book, you might well buy the Folio and read the plays to remind yourself of the performance you saw, as we would buy a copy of a film we like.

  * * *

  How much bread is Shakespeare worth?

  When the Collected Works was printed in 1623, the book would have been stitched together, but not normally bound (it wouldn’t have had a leather cover). An unbound copy would have cost around 15 shillings, and you could get a bound copy for £1.

  But, good question, how expensive was that in Shakespeare’s time?

  Somebody once worked out that the average cost of one of these books is equivalent to the price of 44 Elizabethan loaves of bread.

  Using the same measure, we can see how the price goes up over the years. It became more and more valuable as Shakespeare became more and more popular, and had risen to the equivalent of 105 loaves in 1756; then a big jump to 900 by the 1790s, most likely due to David Garrick’s revival of Shakespeare with his annual festival of Shakespeare; 5,000 loaves in the 1850s – and 96,000 by the beginning of the 20th century.

  Today, the figures are astronomical. An edition of the Folio sold at auction for over $6 million in 2001. The cheapest loaf in my local supermarket is 20 pence. That’s (approximately) 17 million loaves for a copy of the original edition today, against 44 loaves in the early 1600s.

  * * *

  But would an Elizabethan have analysed the plays as we do now? (It’s highly unlikely – would you analyse an episode of a soap opera?) They would have accepted them much more at face value, and we can learn a great deal by looking at Shakespeare’s plays with more of an Elizabethan head on our shoulders.

  The way we’re used to receiving the plays, in classrooms and practically under a microscope, couldn’t be further away from their experience.

  * * *

  A few Shakespeare-coined phrases, still very much in use today …

  all that glitters is not gold ‘All that glisters is not gold/Often have you heard that told’ – The Merchant of Venice, Act 2, Scene 7, line 65

  as dead as a door nail ‘If I do not leave you all as dead as a doornail, I pray god I may never eat grass more’ – Henry VI Part 2, Act 4, Scene 10, line 38

  blinking idiot ‘What’s here? The portrait of a blinking idiot’ – The Merchant of Venice, Act 2, Scene 9, line 54

  fair play ‘O. ’tis fair play’ – Troilus and Cressida, Act 5, Scene 3, line 43

  into thin air ‘These our actors,/As I foretold you, were all spirits, and/Are melted into air, into thin air’ – The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1, line 150

  set teeth on edge ‘I had rather hear a … a dry wheel grate on the axle-tree,/And that would set my teeth nothing on edge/Nothing so much as mincing poetry’ – Henry IV Part 1, Act 3, Scene 1, line 127

  slept a wink ‘Since I received command to do this business I have not slept one wink’ – Cymbeline, Act 3, Scene 4, line 99

  to thine own self be true ‘This above all: to thine own self be true’ – Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3, line 78

  tower of strength ‘the King’s name is a tower of strength’ – Richard III, Act 5, Scene 3, line 12

  too much of a good thing ‘Can one desire too much of a good thing?’ – As You Like It, Act 4, Scene 1, lines 112–13

  * * *

  Scene 6

  A classroom

  The last 200 years have seen Shakespeare go from being a largely forgotten Elizabethan poet to being voted Man of the Millennium (admittedly by a poll consisting solely of BBC Radio 4 listeners, but still …). He’s the most referenced, the most cross-referenced, the most analysed, the most written about, the most performed and the best-known man to grace the planet, religious figures aside.

  And with that fame has come a respect, a trend to deify him, to make his plays sacrosanct. The six official commandments of Shakespeare:

  You Cannot Change Any Of The Words

  He Must Not Be Translated

  He Must Be Performed A Certain Way

  He Must Be Spoken A Certain Way

  He Must Be Spoken Of In A Certain Way

  We Will Celebrate His Birthday As If He Were Royalty

  Alright, I just made those up. But you’d be surprised how many people deem every word absolute truth. And he’s just a playwright. Or is he now a literary messiah?

  I know now why I used to hate Shakespeare so much. It was this kind of ‘holier than thou’ opinion, compounded with the approach to teaching Shakespeare that is still prevalent: sitting down, reading or writing about the plays, or speaking them out loud without really knowing what it is that you’re saying … It takes them so completely out of context. It’s like trying to appreciate the fun of driving a car or flying a plane by reading the engine’s instruction manual.

  My Gran tells me her Shakespeare classes were like that in her day, and 60 years on, she still doesn’t understand Shakespeare. Who can blame her? But when you do see Shakespeare on stage and acted, something changes.

  You read Shakespeare in school and you think it’s rather boring as a rule. It’s a lot of words … But when you take the parts and act it … then you begin to realise how interesting it is. And you realise how natural it is and how real. It doesn’t seem like that when you read it.

  June Brown, who plays EastEnders’ Dot Cotton

  Of course Shakespeare will seem out of reach when his plays are presented so clearly out of context. It’s stating the obvious, but too many people forget that at the end of the day, Shakespeare was just a man. He ate, he drank, he had sex, he laughed, he pissed, he cried, he woke up hungover, he wrote, he ran out of ideas.

  You might have seen the film Shakespeare in Love (1998). One of the greatest, smallest details in that film was that Joseph Fiennes (playing Will Shakespeare) had ink-stained, dirty fingernails. Using a feather quill and ink all the time would make that happen. That little detail spoke volumes to me. If Shakespeare got dirty, then he was human. If he was human, and not just some genius literary figure, then I can relate to him, and give his writing a chance.

  It’s unlikely that when he wrote, he sat down and thought: ‘Today, I shall write a masterpiece so great that in 400 years’ time they shall hang laurels around statues of me, and actors shall queue up to play my characters.’ Possible, I admit, but unlikely.

  He would have done what we all do. Panicked when he ran out of money. Rewrote old pieces in new ways. It was his job, but he had theatre in his blood too, and I think he had to write because it burned within him; there was a fiery passion for writing, combined with an earthy basic human need to earn money to live.

  I want to be clear: he was a genius. But part of the problem with the label ‘genius’ is that it’s unobtainable to anyone that isn’t one. How can we normal folk relate to a genius? It’s a hard concept to grapple with, and it gives rise to doubt and suspicion. William Shakespeare can’t have written all those wonderful plays. He doesn’t have the ‘right’ background or education. It must have been someone else writing them.

  But he was human, and real, and bloody clever. Just like Einstein – who drank, partied, wore shabby clothes and worried about wars – was human. And Shakespeare didn’t write so that 379 years after his death people would be preserving his works in vacuum-sealed bags and I’d be sitting in an exam hall trying to explain the existentialist viewpoint in his plays.

  It comes down to this: if he didn’t write good plays, he wouldn’t earn any money. If he didn’t earn any money, he wouldn’t be
able to support the wife and kids back in Stratford. He’d be put in the debtors’ prison, and probably die a very horrible, cold death.

  That’s quite an incentive to do well.

  So he wrote plays because there was a solid need for them; less that he sought fame, more that they were a real source of cash.

  Much like the soap opera writers of today.

  The Elizabethan stage fulfilled some of the same functions that soaps do today … the things that Shakespeare achieved are what script editors and storyliners on the soaps are also trying to achieve.

  Michael Boyd, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company

  Scene 7

  A soap opera set

  Many of Shakespeare’s plays are based on famous stories that most Elizabethans already knew – and they would have enjoyed the retelling of these familiar stories immensely. They would have enjoyed Shakespeare’s presentation of the fall of Troy (in Troilus and Cressida) much as we do when a film is made of a famous story well known to us, like Titanic (1997).

  But, just like when we go to the cinema, it’s doubtful the Elizabethans would have felt the need to watch the play again, or analyse its deeper meaning because they didn’t understand bits of it. Now, go to see a film by the brilliant but somewhat surrealist film-director David Lynch and your brain might try to sneak out of your ear if you try to work out the plot.

  Shakespeare was essentially providing the Elizabethans with their daily soap opera, and would you ever sit down with a script of EastEnders, Coronation Street, Neighbours or Days of Our Lives, and analyse the deeper meaning? Try to work out whether or not Pat really does love Frank, or whether Scott really was faithful to Charlene? (I’m showing my age with these plotlines, but you get the idea …)

  No, if there’s something you missed, or you don’t understand the scripts, you watch the omnibus at the week end. But what’s not to understand? It’s well known, at least on EastEnders and Corrie, that the storylines over the years are essentially the same, they just feature different families, who all gather in the same pub (saving the producers money on locations). It’s love and hate and sex and death and betrayal and friendship and lies and abuse. Shakespeare’s the same.

  It wouldn’t be true to say that because the Elizabethans didn’t have to work at Shakespeare, we don’t have to either. Even ignoring the poetry angle, there’s still 400 years of cultural divide separating us. But he’s a lot closer to us than we might think.

  There’s not, if you start to think about it, that much difference between the plot of an episode of ’Enders and the plot of, say, Macbeth. Love, hate. Sex, death. Betrayal, friend ship.

  We know that life, though – real life – no matter what the papers or the soap operas say, doesn’t go from murder to betrayal to death to murder again, a bit of incest, and finish up with a spot more murder before tea.

  Life, for most of us, is fairly normal. Most of us (luckily) don’t have to deal with such huge matters every day. Soap operas, though, pile on these kinds of terrible life-changing events, one on top of the other, to keep us watching. The makers want to keep us involved, to heighten the drama as much as possible and make sure there’s a cliff-hanger at the end of every episode to make us tune in next week.

  This kind of writing has been going on for centuries: Charles Dickens wrote the chapters of his novels for a monthly magazine, so his stories are usually very long (the longer the story, the more issues to write for) and they often have a cliff-hanger at the end of each chapter. Keep reading. Buy more. Keep writing. Earn more.

  The thriller writer Ken Follett follows the same theory – making sure there’s a mini-drama, or ‘story turn’, as he calls it, every five pages or so:

  There is a rule which says that the story should turn about every four to six pages. A story turn is anything that changes the basic dramatic situation. You can’t go longer than about six pages without a story turn, otherwise the reader will get bored. Although that is a rule that people have invented in modern times about best-sellers … in Dickens it’s the same.

  Ken Follett

  For the most part (hopefully), none of us will have experienced even a small amount of the pain and suffering we see taking place in these dramas. But there’ll be something in it, some part of it that will touch some part of us, to make us say ‘Yes, I’ve been there, yes, I’ve felt that.’

  * * *

  Shakespeare and soap operas

  Sounds unlikely … But in 2001 a survey commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company asked members of the public what were the modern equivalents to Shakespeare’s history plays. Coronation Street and EastEnders came out on top of the list. And in August 2006 an edition of the TV magazine Radio Times proclaimed ‘Why the soaps owe it all to Shakespeare!’

  Kate Harwood, an executive producer on EastEnders, said: ‘All drama nowadays owes something to Shakespeare.’ She believes Shakespeare is responsible for the ‘extraordinary, heart-stopping sense of moment’ that soap operas try to have at the end of every episode, right before the music kicks in, ‘when the story all hangs in the air, ripe with potential’.

  * * *

  If writers portrayed life as it really was, with all its silences and normal events – like the TV show Big Brother Live – we’d die of boredom (or exhaustion). Moreover, if we daily experienced what the characters in EastEnders go through, the LAST thing we’d want to do is watch someone go through the exact same thing.

  But an idea of it, or something close to what we’ve been through, is comforting. It’s good to know that there are people out there going through similar circumstances to us, that we’re not alone in our problems, in our pain, in our happiness. Or, for that matter, to put it another way,

  It easeth some, though none it ever cured

  To think their dolour others have endured.

  A favourite quote of mine, from one of Shakespeare’s poems, The Rape of Lucrece (lines 1581–2. ‘Dolour’ means grief, or sorrow).

  In intense situations in real life, most people don’t swear every second word, break down and cry every two minutes; they don’t have heart-breaking monologues. Most people pause and stutter and forget what they’re saying.

  But that isn’t dramatic. That’s normal. And why pay a penny to go stand in the mud and see three hours of people being normal to each other? Even modern plays that claim to be showing ‘real life’ are still giving a dramatic version of normality.

  Similar to soap opera plot lines, Shakespeare’s stories are far more dramatic than real life; and they would have been quite unlike anything an average Elizabethan audience might experience. But they would always find something in the plays to relate to.

  Shakespeare is famous for putting the familiar next to the unfamiliar – the betrayal of a father next to the betrayal of a king. His stories manage to stay real and human, while at the same time exploring the very extremes of life, and the lengths humans will go to to get what they want. Very rarely do you find Shakespeare’s characters doing ‘regular’ things; he didn’t seem to be very interested in so-called ‘kitchen-sink’ drama. The characters were often ordinary folk, but the situations they found themselves in were usually quite extraordinary.

  More often than not in drama, people want to see life and situations they’ll never experience, either because it’s harsher than real life (like EastEnders) or it looks at a more unobtainable style of life – like Friends, or The OC – aspirational drama that makes us want to experience what the characters are going through, if only for a moment.

  We want to see what it’s like to fall in love with your best friend’s girlfriend. We want to know what it’s like when all your friends are using you, and then, when you need them the most, they turn their back on you. We want to hear what it feels like to kill the person you love more than the world, and then try to live with the consequences.

  We want, in other words, to see The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Timon of Athens, and Othello.

  * * *

  A
cts and Scenes

  Shakespeare’s plays are now all divided up using the same convention, although they weren’t all separated this way in the First Folio. It’s thought that the plays which are divided into separate Acts were originally performed indoors, giving interval time for the chandeliers to be lowered and the candles replaced, and those without divisions were performed in daylight, and so needed no forced break.

  But all modern editions are based on the classical Latin system of writing plays that Shakespeare would have studied at school: there are always five Acts, and in his plays, each Act has anything from one to fifteen Scenes.

  Over the years they’ve been referred to in different ways, and depending on which edition of the plays you go to, you’ll come across a variety of conventions:

  Latin was used in the First Folio – Actus Primus, Scoena Prima for Act 1, Scene 1, and the lines were not numbered.

  Editions from the 20th century added line numbers every five or ten lines to the side of the text, to make it easier to reference particular parts. Many would also name the Acts and Scenes using Roman numerals. So Romeo and Juliet IV.iii.58 would take you to Act 4, Scene 3, line 58.

  People use Roman numerals less and less nowadays, preferring a more concise RJ 4.3.58. There are too many differing abbreviations of the play-names to list them all, like Rom or RJ for Romeo and Juliet, but fortunately most are fairly straightforward.

  * * *

  Act 2

  Curtain Up

  Scene 1

  Mars, 23rd century

  The Elizabethans watching one of Shakespeare’s plays would be relatively unaccustomed to seeing pictures or images – save perhaps a sign outside a tavern, a portrait or tapestry.