Pericles

by William Shakespeare

  DC: What’s interesting is that Gower’s version of events isn’t quite borne out by the scenes. He’s a propagandist, putting forward a particular and partial reading of the story and guiding the audience to make moral judgments on the characters. Shakespeare frequently explores, to quote from All’s Well That Ends Well, how “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.” If what Shakespeare is interested in exploring are those gray areas, then Gower is a hard-line medieval moralist. Because our production had started in Africa, Gower was the village storyteller, telling the story retrospectively. It really worked well, with Joseph Mydell as a hard-line, didactic, possibly quite Christian, African man to whom the notions of good and bad are very clear and distinct. He was clearly disapproving of some of the characters, and that gave the play an interesting texture, inviting the audience to make a choice about who to believe.

  PLAYING MARINA: LAURA REES

  Laura Rees trained at the Academy Drama School and the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, where she was the recipient of the Prudence Emilyn-Jones Prize for Movement, Dance and Ballet along with multiple student acting awards. She graduated in 2001, and subsequent stage roles have included Gerd in Adrian Noble’s 2003 production of Ibsen’s Brand for the RSC, alongside Ralph Fiennes in the lead role; Ophelia in Yukio Ninagawa’s 2004 production of Hamlet; and Viola in Philip Franks’ production of Twelfth Night at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 2007. She worked at the Globe Theatre in 2005 playing Marina in Kathryn Hunter’s production of Pericles, which she discusses here, returning the following year to play Lavinia in Lucy Bailey’s Titus Andronicus (for which she was nominated for the Ian Charleson Award) and Luciana in Christopher Luscombe’s production of The Comedy of Errors. She has worked extensively in television and radio, and has appeared in several films, including Richard Curtis’ Love Actually (2003). She is also currently an active member of the London artistic collective the Factory Theatre Company.

  Clearly this question might seem pointlessly reductive, but what is the play broadly “about” in your view (if, say, Macbeth is “about” murder and its consequences, or Othello is “about” jealousy and deception)? Or can we not answer the question in this way?

  LR: I find it difficult to pinpoint a central theme in Pericles. It seems to be about a man’s journey through life and its unpredictable twists and turns. The triumph of good over evil: virtue versus vice: loss, reunion.

  It’s now largely believed that George Wilkins wrote the first two acts of the play, with Shakespeare taking over for the final three. Were you aware of the join, or does the play work as a coherent whole?

  LR: I remember people talking a lot about this. As far as playing Marina was concerned, the character is not born in the first half of the play so I was lucky and only had the really great stuff to say! There does seem to be a change in style from Act 2 to 3; but I still think the play works in its entirety. What starts as a kind of fable—“To sing a song that old was sung”—shifts into a much more emotional level in Act 3 with the great storm, the birth of Marina and supposed death of Thaisa; and the language matches this.

  Many audiences have found Pericles utterly charming, with a strong capacity to move. Could you perhaps share your views on the nature of the play’s emotional power? How did your audiences react?

  LR: The audience has the chance to go with a man on his journey through life. They meet him when he is young. They relive extraordinary events with him. They see him find happiness only to have it snatched almost immediately away. They meet his daughter, who in turn faces tremendous suffering through no fault of her own. She eventually finds her way to him when he needs her most and they are reunited in arguably the most beautiful scene ever! It’s a rollercoaster ride with a very happy ending. I remember wonder and joy radiating around the Globe every time we performed those final scenes of the play.

  What was Marina like as a character to you? How did you go about playing her?

  LR: Marina has many talents. She sings, dances, sews, and weaves. She is a “goodly creature”: an innocent. It was important to me that I didn’t get caught in the trap of “playing” goodly or innocent so I worked hard at extracting her other qualities. In the first week of rehearsals our director, Kathryn Hunter, initiated a series of improvisations for us to better get to know our characters and the various worlds they inhabit. One was of Marina’s tenth birthday party (she is fourteen when we first meet her in the play) and we discovered what her relationships were like with her guardians Cleon and Dionyza and their daughter Philoten, and the reasons behind their growing resentment toward Marina. Another improvisation gave me my relationship with the nurse, Lychorida, over whose grave Marina weeps when we first meet her in the play.

  8. Globe 2005, directed by Kathryn Hunter, with Laura Rees as Marina and Patrice Naiambana as Gower: “Marina has many talents. She sings, dances, sews, and weaves. She is a ‘goodly creature’; an innocent.”

  I did a lot of research into prostitution and abduction, which included reading I Choose to Live by Sabinne Dardeene. Sabinne was kidnapped in Belgium aged twelve and spent three months in captivity with a pedophile. I wanted to understand as best I could what it might feel like to be snatched and sold into prostitution, as Marina is in the play. Despite the terrifying situations she finds herself in, Marina is able to see the best in people. To the man who is sent to kill her—“You have a gentle heart”—and to the man about to rape her she asks, “If you were born to honour, show it now.” She shows people a mirror and demands that they do not ignore their own image. My job as an actor, through rehearsal and right until the last performance, is to develop how this person moves, thinks, and speaks; and how that changes through the course of the play.

  How does she fare against some of the other more famous heroines in Shakespeare? Is it an undervalued role?

  LR: My concerns about playing a sweet, innocent, two-dimensional role were unfounded. Marina experiences grief, her attempted murder, kidnapping, abuse, freedom, and a reunion with both her parents from whom she was separated at birth. Throughout this trajectory she remains completely unselfish, continues to look outward and enable those who come into contact with her to heal themselves. I cannot think of another Shakespearean heroine who is able to do this. She is completely unique. Undervalued? Perhaps. Possibly because this play is not as widely known as, for example, Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet.

  How old is Marina supposed to be? Pericles says that Cleon tried to murder her at “fourteen years.” Did you see much more time as having elapsed between that and the Mytilene scenes? Did you try to convey a childlike quality in your body language, for example?

  LR: Marina is fourteen when Leonine is hired to kill her. I think everything happens pretty quickly after that and if there is a significant passage of time it takes place once Marina has escaped the dangers of the brothel and gained employment “amongst honest women.” I wanted to avoid worrying about playing “age” too much, and although Marina seems very wise at times in what she says, she also retains the inquisitiveness of a child in asking “why?” so often. Kathryn and I worked on Marina’s physicality with an improvisation where I took myself physically through the stages of the story. It began with all the freedom of play, expansiveness, without inhibition. As Marina was faced with more grief and trauma she slowly closed off her body until she was finally curled up into a tight ball. Continuing through the story into the reunion scene, Marina returns to her expansiveness but with the added burden of her experiences, more stature, and probably more age.

  Her two big set pieces are the brothel scene with Lysimachus and the reunion scene. What were they like to play, and what were their principal challenges, starting with the brothel scene?

  LR: Up until her meeting with Lysimachus, Marina has somehow managed to cling on to her chastity. Men that arrive to take it from her leave soon after vowing to “hear the vestals sing” or “do anything … that is virtuous.” What could she possibly be doing or saying
to achieve this? For me, the principal challenge of this scene in the brothel was managing a balance between fear and control. Marina turns each of Lysimachus’ questions round on him, as if she has no idea what it is he could be after; but below the surface she sees the horror descending all around her and she is very frightened and very alone. It was an emotional scene to play and had to remain completely real in order for it to work. I remember one performance pleading to the gods to “set me free from this unhallowed place, / Though they did change me to the meanest bird / That flies i’th’purer air!” at which moment an extremely scruffy pigeon that had been wandering about on the corner of the stage took flight and circled once around the auditorium of the Globe until escaping into the night sky. About 1,500 people gasped as one.

  And the reunion? It’s proved time and again to be an extremely moving moment for audiences. What were your experiences of playing it?

  LR: I found the less “baggage” I brought to the reunion scene with Pericles the better. It plays as a perfectly formed piece of music, and as long as the notes were sung one by one, without strain or overindulgence, the audience is effortlessly carried along to its miraculous climax. Of course, it takes a great deal for Marina to talk to this stranger of her past; she has not confided in anyone until this point, and the scene has a subtle incestuous undertone where Pericles is attracted to a young girl that so closely resembles his wife; but ultimately I found the playing of it extremely pure, with a feeling of astonishing inevitability without my character having an inkling of what was coming.

  What about the reunion scene with Thaisa—another emotionally draining moment?

  LR: Shakespeare gives Marina only one line when she is reunited with her mother. It is impossible to contain her joy and there is nothing left but to return to her mother’s arms. It is not an accident that she otherwise remains silent and I remember feeling like Marina was able to float through the final scene, experiencing a mixture of infinite awe and undeniable ecstasy. Not a bad feeling to take home!

  SHAKESPEARE’S CAREER

  IN THE THEATER

  BEGINNINGS

  William Shakespeare was an extraordinarily intelligent man who was born and died in an ordinary market town in the English Midlands. He lived an uneventful life in an eventful age. Born in April 1564, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glove maker who was prominent on the town council until he fell into financial difficulties. Young William was educated at the local grammar in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where he gained a thorough grounding in the Latin language, the art of rhetoric, and classical poetry. He married Ann Hathaway and had three children (Susanna, then the twins Hamnet and Judith) before his twenty-first birthday: an exceptionally young age for the period. We do not know how he supported his family in the mid-1580s.

  Like many clever country boys, he moved to the city in order to make his way in the world. Like many creative people, he found a career in the entertainment business. Public playhouses and professional full-time acting companies reliant on the market for their income were born in Shakespeare’s childhood. When he arrived in London as a man, sometime in the late 1580s, a new phenomenon was in the making: the actor who is so successful that he becomes a “star.” The word did not exist in its modern sense, but the pattern is recognizable: audiences went to the theater not so much to see a particular show as to witness the comedian Richard Tarlton or the dramatic actor Edward Alleyn.

  Shakespeare was an actor before he was a writer. It appears not to have been long before he realized that he was never going to grow into a great comedian like Tarlton or a great tragedian like Alleyn. Instead, he found a role within his company as the man who patched up old plays, breathing new life, new dramatic twists, into tired repertory pieces. He paid close attention to the work of the university-educated dramatists who were writing history plays and tragedies for the public stage in a style more ambitious, sweeping, and poetically grand than anything which had been seen before. But he may also have noted that what his friend and rival Ben Jonson would call “Marlowe’s mighty line” sometimes faltered in the mode of comedy. Going to university, as Christopher Marlowe did, was all well and good for honing the arts of rhetorical elaboration and classical allusion, but it could lead to a loss of the common touch. To stay close to a large segment of the potential audience for public theater, it was necessary to write for clowns as well as kings and to intersperse the flights of poetry with the humor of the tavern, the privy, and the brothel: Shakespeare was the first to establish himself early in his career as an equal master of tragedy, comedy, and history. He realized that theater could be the medium to make the national past available to a wider audience than the elite who could afford to read large history books: his signature early works include not only the classical tragedy Titus Andronicus but also the sequence of English historical plays on the Wars of the Roses.

  He also invented a new role for himself, that of in-house company dramatist. Where his peers and predecessors had to sell their plays to the theater managers on a poorly paid piecework basis, Shakespeare took a percentage of the box-office income. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men constituted themselves in 1594 as a joint stock company, with the profits being distributed among the core actors who had invested as sharers. Shakespeare acted himself—he appears in the cast lists of some of Ben Jonson’s plays as well as the list of actors’ names at the beginning of his own collected works—but his principal duty was to write two or three plays a year for the company. By holding shares, he was effectively earning himself a royalty on his work, something no author had ever done before in England. When the Lord Chamberlain’s Men collected their fee for performance at court in the Christmas season of 1594, three of them went along to the Treasurer of the Chamber: not just Richard Burbage the tragedian and Will Kempe the clown, but also Shakespeare the scriptwriter. That was something new.

  The next four years were the golden period in Shakespeare’s career, though overshadowed by the death of his only son, Hamnet, aged eleven, in 1596. In his early thirties and in full command of both his poetic and his theatrical medium, he perfected his art of comedy, while also developing his tragic and historical writing in new ways. In 1598, Francis Meres, a Cambridge University graduate with his finger on the pulse of the London literary world, praised Shakespeare for his excellence across the genres:

  As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love Labours Lost, his Love Labours Won, his Midsummer Night Dream and his Merchant of Venice: for tragedy his Richard the 2, Richard the 3, Henry the 4, King John, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and Juliet.

  For Meres, as for the many writers who praised the “honey-flowing vein” of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, narrative poems written when the theaters were closed due to plague in 1593–94, Shakespeare was marked above all by his linguistic skill, by the gift of turning elegant poetic phrases.

  PLAYHOUSES

  Elizabethan playhouses were “thrust” or “one-room” theaters. To understand Shakespeare’s original theatrical life, we have to forget about the indoor theater of later times, with its proscenium arch and curtain that would be opened at the beginning and closed at the end of each act. In the proscenium arch theater, stage and auditorium are effectively two separate rooms: the audience looks from one world into another as if through the imaginary “fourth wall” framed by the proscenium. The picture-frame stage, together with the elaborate scenic effects and backdrops beyond it, created the illusion of a self-contained world—especially once nineteenth-century developments in the control of artificial lighting meant that the auditorium could be darkened and the spectators made to focus on the lighted stage. Shakespeare, by contrast, wrote for a bare platform stage with a standing audience gathered around it in a courtyard in full daylight. The audience were always conscious of themselves and their fellow spectators, a
nd they shared the same “room” as the actors. A sense of immediate presence and the creation of rapport with the audience were all-important. The actor could not afford to imagine he was in a closed world, with silent witnesses dutifully observing him from the darkness.

  Shakespeare’s theatrical career began at the Rose Theatre in Southwark. The stage was wide and shallow, trapezoid in shape, like a lozenge. This design had a great deal of potential for the theatrical equivalent of cinematic split-screen effects, whereby one group of characters would enter at the door at one end of the tiring-house wall at the back of the stage and another group through the door at the other end, thus creating two rival tableaux. Many of the battle-heavy and faction-filled plays that premiered at the Rose have scenes of just this sort.

  At the rear of the Rose stage, there were three capacious exits, each over ten feet wide. Unfortunately, the very limited excavation of a fragmentary portion of the original Globe site, in 1989, revealed nothing about the stage. The first Globe was built in 1599 with similar proportions to those of another theater, the Fortune, albeit that the former was polygonal and looked circular, whereas the latter was rectangular. The building contract for the Fortune survives and allows us to infer that the stage of the Globe was probably substantially wider than it was deep (perhaps forty-three feet wide and twenty-seven feet deep). It may well have been tapered at the front, like that of the Rose.