“Women on top”: is that what it boils down to? There are certainly some very strong female parts …
Shipman: Shakespeare’s plays are full of strong female characters. In his comedies, they are often more savvy and realistic than their male counterparts. The princess and her ladies are portrayed as rather sophisticated, witty, and somewhat worldly. Their repartee is both as biting and as well played as the men’s. They are brought back to reality by Marcadé’s news, but it is clear to me that their response to the gentlemen’s final proposals would have been similar had they not received the tragic news. Although they too become enamored with the young men and fully enjoy the “chase,” they are convinced that all the pleasurable love sport was no more than that—sport. It is ironic that the would-be scholars in search of living life through idealizing Reason are completely unreasonable in their expectations of love and commitment at the end of the play. The women know better, as women often do … or do they?
In Shakespeare’s writing of the script, he sometimes referred (in the speech headings) to Holofernes simply as “Pedant” and Don Armado as “Braggart”: does that suggest that the comic characters are simply “types”? One way of playing this kind of comic role is with a sort of Jonsonian monomania—find the “humor,” the quirk, and milk it for all it’s worth. Or should all the characters be somehow “rounded”?
Hands: Despite his friendship with Ben Jonson, there is rarely anything Jonsonian in Shakespeare’s writing. Jonson’s characters don’t change—the situation does. Shakespeare’s characters, on the other hand, constantly develop. Holofernes and Don Armado—whether called “Pedant” or “Braggart”—are different people by the end of the play.
Shipman: Part of the fun of these stock-type characters is their illusions of themselves. The Pedant and the Curate fancy themselves possessed of “great learning.” Don Armado cherishes the illusion that he is an accomplished swordsman and soldier, and that he is an intimate of the king. Costard is a classic clown. These are givens in the script. However, for my taste, three-dimensional characters are always more involving. We absolutely worked to achieve this in our production. We might look at almost all of the characters in this play as “types.” More central to the telling of the story, I think, is the acknowledgment and exploration of the many masks and self-delusions that abound. Just about everyone is operating under some illusion about him- or herself veiled in hidden agenda, masked, disguised—giving an impression perhaps, but born of self-delusion. Berowne realizes the king’s enterprise is a gamble, but goes ahead anyway—he hides behind the illusion of wit. The princess hides behind the illusion of her own power, wit, and importance. Navarre and his followers seek the illusion of fame/eternal life. Boyet finds his illusion of worth in his manipulations of the courtships and his biting wit. The French ladies delude themselves in their blind attraction to unready partners. They become lost in a game that they wish were not a game and they perhaps hope will have a surprise ending. Moth masks his disdain for his master and lives dishonestly, as he gives the illusion that he is wise and a “truth teller.” Jaquenetta is the only person physically altered by the experience, or is she simply creating the illusion that Don Armado is the father of her child? How could the most impotent of characters be the one real begetter in this play, which is the epitome of a false pregnancy? Love’s Labour’s Lost is dream/illusion versus realty—the ultimate reality being death.
What did you do with the pageant of the Nine Worthies? Structurally, and with its onstage audience, there are resemblances to “Pyramus and Thisbe” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But it’s tougher to get the audience into this one, not least since not many of them will know anything about the Worthies.
Hands: The pageant of the Nine Worthies reveals not only the unworthiness of the performers, but unworthiness within the aristocratic audience commenting upon them. It is a typical Shakespearean tribute to his chosen profession and a reminder to the young aristocrats that generosity is learned not born.
Shipman: Is it important that an audience know the mythology behind “Pyramus and Thisbe” in order for them to enjoy the Mechanicals’ rendition of their story? Is it not the silly and lovable clowns who make us laugh at their vain attempts at putting on a play of their own devising? In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the Nine Worthies pageant never quite gets off the ground for it is a device that provides a playground of wit for the onstage audience. What is most important, I believe, is that the “Worthies” be as ridiculously costumed and portrayed as possible and that their performance be as broad and yet sincere as it can be. Their function is to be the object of the playful (and often acerbic) derision of the men as they show off their witty repartee. We used the central hexagonal platform as the Worthies’ stage, with the onlookers seated or standing at the outer edges of the play area. The pageant played “in the round,” just as our play did. Although I cut some of the lines and with them some of the more obscure references, the scene was left virtually intact. As we worked on it, we discovered that this scene needs to be simply staged, to move quickly, and that rhythm is of the essence. The interplay between the courtiers and the clowns and the rapid-fire exchanges must be precisely timed. As I worked on it, I began to wonder whether the numerous interruptions that the presenters of the pageant undergo might even be a foreshadowing of the “interruption” that ultimately ends the play.
Monsieur Marcadé, messenger of death. He changes the tone, doesn’t he? How harsh was your ending?
Hands: “The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo”—but not cruel. The lovers are all young and a holiday romance needs testing in the real world before it can be built upon. Love’s Labour’s Lost has a wistful ending—they must all wait a year. For their labors to be won would require more testing, more suffering, more learning. In the same way that we have Twelfth Night (or What You Will) might we not once have had Loves Labour’s Won (or As You Like It)?
Shipman: Monsieur Marcadé brings with him the harsh realities of the outside world. Life and death happen and the seeming love (as each of the ladies points out in her own way) is, at the moment, of the twofold variety—head and loins, but lacking the final ingredient of the heart. There has not been time for threefold love to develop. The women are all too well aware of this from the start, but might have been swept away if not for Marcadé and his news. I think the darkness of the ending is intended. In our production, Marcadé was the last character to leave the stage, a looker-on of the characters and the audience. The lovers were not without hope for the future, but it was not a certainty either that they would be reunited after a year’s time. When we listen to the song of the Owl and the Cuckoo that ends the play and recognize the necessity of the separation of the couples, we realize that this ending is not at all arbitrary or out of sync with the rest of the play. Reality is harsh after the illusions of the ideal so easily attained.
APPROACHING LOVE’S LABOUR’S: REFLECTIONS BY GREGORY DORAN
Gregory Doran, born in 1958, studied at Bristol University and the Bristol Old Vic theater school. He began his career as an actor, before becoming associate director at the Nottingham Playhouse. He played some minor roles in the RSC ensemble before directing for the company, first as a freelance, then as associate and subsequently chief associate director. His productions, several of which have starred his partner Antony Sher, are characterized by extreme intelligence and lucidity. He has made a particular mark with several of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays and the revival of works by his Elizabethan and Jacobean contemporaries. He directed Love’s Labour’s Lost for the RSC in 2008, with David Tennant in the role of Berowne.
Sometimes the difficulty of directing Shakespeare on the stage is to match the thrill of reading him on the page. In a play like Macbeth it is hard to capture in production that hurtling pace, the intense sense of danger and darkness, the contaminating touch of evil. With a play like Love’s Labour’s Lost the challenge is precisely opposite.
The play on the page can
seem almost impossibly impenetrable in places. You sometimes feel as if you are simply not being let in on the joke; as if there are a number of real people being satirized, of whom you know nothing, and therefore don’t understand the references. This may of course be the case. Scholars have suggested a great variety of specific individual people who may or may not be the butt of the humor in the play. I find the theories all fascinating. Is Armado really Walter Raleigh? Is Holofernes meant to be John Florio, the translator of Montaigne? Is the entry of the lovers dressed as Muscovites a satirical reference to the arrival of the Russian embassy in London to woo Lady Mary Hastings on behalf of the Czar, Ivan the Terrible? The theories are all intriguing but in the end don’t really help the actors achieve their performances.
The play’s big challenge is the language. These are young people who delight in oracy, the desire to express yourself through language. They prize verbal dexterity, they enjoy scintillating banter. Holofernes and Sir Nathaniel are absurdly impressed by their own pretentious cleverness, whereas Costard has a natural gift of the gab, and when he and Moth get together they burst into what seems to me to be the equivalent of Elizabethan rap, which leaves the poseur, Don Armado, with his deliciously mangled eloquence, speechless. Getting the actors to appreciate and relish the thrill of those verbal tennis matches is the most important work in rehearsal.
John Barton says it’s a great actors’ play, and he’s right. It’s a great company play with lots of appetizing roles. If you have a good cast most of your work is done. It doesn’t seem to me that the work of the director on this particular play is interpretative. It’s really very straightforward. It doesn’t want to be overdesigned, or have too much concept applied to it (as Adrian Noble says, it doesn’t need concept in the Teutonic sense with a capital K and an umlaut). And yet to pitch the playfulness of the piece, to allow it to rise with lightness and air, takes a lot of work. As any master chef will tell you, a soufflé is one of the hardest dishes to bake.
Like Hamlet and Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost features a play within a play. As the professional actors arrive at Elsinore to present The Mousetrap, and the rude mechanicals offer their amateur efforts with Pyramus and Thisbe for the wedding celebrations of Duke Theseus and Hippolyta, so in this play the pretentious pageant of the Nine Worthies is provided for the royal party by the scholars. These reminders to the audience of the process of theater making, and the different levels of reality and artifice, can be fascinating to compare and contrast. Of course, the procession of the Nine Worthies gets very short shrift in this play and as the play collapses the action is interrupted by events.
There isn’t a great deal of significant plot, so the audience needs to be content to sit back comfortably and bask in the sheer fun of being in the company of these leisurely people. I think the initial vow of chastity and then the endless love games need to be lightly but sincerely played, so that when the real world of responsibility and duty strides into the play with the black clad Marcadé at the end, you have a genuine feeling of caring for these young folk. The silliness and the game playing must stop and some real commitment must be engaged in order for lasting relationships to be earned and won.
And it seems to me that the play delivers to the audience at the end a benediction, similar to the arrival of the fairies to bless the house in the last moments of The Dream: as the scholars and Armado redeem themselves with the dialogue between Spring and Winter maintained by the Owl and the Cuckoo. It gives the action some sort of placing within the diurnal round of the seasons, and though autumn has come to this summer play, and winter will follow, spring will most surely come again.
Gregory Doran
*voms: theater term for openings, doors, or passages through which stage entrances are made (from Latin vomitorium).
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 that 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, age 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 was always conscious of themselves and their fellow spectators, and 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.
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