Some American directors, as reported by my students, make the actors annotate Shakespeare’s blank verse, so that they know they are playing poetry. I am highly skeptical and even disapproving of this practice, except for actors who already have prior training in poetry or Latin, where meter is parsed. It may be profitable in England, where poetry has streamed in an unbroken line since Chaucer, but I fail to see how concern about the blank verse can do anything but disorient and unnerve American actors. The power of language in Shakespeare’s plays resides more in variation than in regularity. There is a robust physicality and even muscularity in his speeches, which can be as jagged and syncopated as jazz. Indeed, I recommend that actors playing Shakespeare should look to music for inspiration. Some of Shakespeare’s voices are lilting, melodious, or flutelike; others are relentlessly hammering and percussive; still others are rough, insolent, and zigzagging, like a bebop saxophone. To avoid monotonously “reciting” lines, the actor could borrow musical techniques such as dynamics (soft/loud) or modulations in tempo, including overt hesitations—following the way people in real life pause and grope for words. The actor must appear to be thinking, an impression aided by lively eye movements.
Where sensitivity to poetry is required, however, is for Shakespeare’s all-pervasive imagery. As literary critics noted long ago, each Shakespeare play can be regarded as an extended poem with its own set of emblematic images, whose recurrence produces a chiming effect that works subliminally on the audience. Examples are the four elements of earth, air, water, and fire in Antony and Cleopatra; the master metaphor of the “garden” in Hamlet, with its attendant adjectives like “green” and “rank” (meaning rotten or malodorous); and the chillingly ubiquitous “nothing” in King Lear—a blank zero prefiguring the wasteland of modernist alienation. The production dramaturge should assist the actors in rehearsal in identifying these key words, which are sometimes the emotional or conceptual heart of a speech. They are always universals that transcend time and place. Although postmodernists myopically deny that universals exist, these basic terms of human experience animate all great art and give it global reach. Whenever a key word occurs in a given Shakespeare speech, the actor might consider subtly highlighting it, so that it hangs or floats over the audience, who through their own life record of pain and pleasure gain a moment of clarity and access into the play’s deepest themes. It may be helpful for the dramaturge to present one or two of Shakespeare’s sonnets in workshop to demonstrate the evocative power of concise imagery. Best for this purpose is certainly Sonnet 73 (“That time of year thou mayst in me behold”), with its vivid metaphors of tree, sun, and fire.
In Shakespeare’s plays, quality of language equals quality of character. There is a stable, centered simplicity and nobility to the speech of his admirable, ethical characters. For example, here are the faithful Cordelia’s virtually first words in King Lear: “Love, and be silent” (I.i.53).1 This economical aside, with its enduring spiritual resonance, comes as a refreshing contrast to the glib, sycophantish babble that we have just heard from her treacherous sisters, Goneril and Regan. Improvisational eloquence under conditions of high stress proves substance and courage, as in Mark Antony’s passionate oration over the corpse of Julius Caesar in the mobbed Roman Forum or Othello’s defense at a midnight Venetian war council of his secret marriage to the young Desdemona, a mesmerizing speech whose journey through fabulous memory defuses the menacing atmosphere.
Syntax (sentence structure) is a primary indicator of mental health or psychological coherence in Shakespeare. The actor must be alert to syntactical obstructions or fractures which signal confusion, anxiety, or imminent breakdown. Claudius’ first speech in Hamlet, for example, is disrupted and contorted by guilt as he tries to refer to Gertrude, the wife he took from the brother he murdered: the subject, verb, and direct object of his sentence are cleft apart and strewn dismembered over seven lines. Hamlet’s brooding first soliloquy also degenerates from philosophical heights to syntactical chaos as he is compulsively flooded with lurid pictures of his mother’s allegedly bestial sex life. When the villainous Richard III wakes up from troubled dreams before the climactic battle at Bosworth Field, where he will be defeated and killed, his speech heaves and lurches into sputtering fragments, sharply contrasting with the calm, steady, resolute address to the troops delivered by his opponent, the Earl of Richmond and future Henry VII, founder of the House of Tudor that will produce Elizabeth I. But sometimes complicated or serpentine syntax in Shakespeare arises from public rather than private ills, as in Horatio’s opaque review in tortured legalese of the festering dispute with Norway that threatens war with Denmark.
ACTION
Shakespeare’s bursts of action, alternating with passages of reflection and character development, seem perfectly normal to modern audiences schooled on war movies and TV crime dramas. But for a prolonged period, Shakespeare’s violence, along with his trafficking in shock and horror, damaged his reputation in France, where elite taste was formed by Racine’s neoclassic tragedies in the seventeenth century. In ancient Greek tragedy, action was reported by messenger speeches but never shown, even when traumatic events, such as Jocasta’s suicide and Oedipus’ self-blinding, have just occurred in a bedchamber on the other side of the palace doors. A cool, contemplative, philosophical distance, embodied in choral commentaries, was considered essential. Brutal business in Shakespeare, such as Hamlet stabbing Polonius through a tapestry in the Queen’s bedroom or the Duke of Cornwall stomping out the pinioned Gloucester’s eyes in King Lear, struck French critics as crude and vulgar.
High-impact physical expressiveness is a crucial component of Shakespeare’s aesthetic, a masculine choreography that was sometimes neglected in sedate and tony productions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Standards changed for both actors and audiences with the arrival of social realist theater in the 1930s, whose raw, proletarian style inspired the Actors Studio in New York and the “kitchen-sink” school of postwar London. Today, action is so accepted and expected that a required course in stage combat may be built into the theater curriculum (as at the University of the Arts, where women actors too must take it). Once identified with stunt work, action has risen in prestige over the past forty years because of the global influence of Asian martial arts movies. Explosions of action in Shakespeare are sometimes spiritually purgative, releasing the accumulated tensions of the play: this cathartic effect can be seen in the finales of both Hamlet and Macbeth, where the protagonists escape from their doubt and fear through bravura swordplay, thus atoning for their errors and defiantly recovering their heroic stature before death.
American actors have a natural facility for action, as was observed with admiration by European audiences even during the silent film era. In the United States, posture and deportment are more relaxed, and sports have a higher cultural status than they do in Great Britain, where most literati still profess disdain for them. Thanks to their spontaneity and playfulness, American actors are also good at farce, buffoonery, and slapstick—one reason for the huge popularity of pratfalling comedian Jerry Lewis in reserved France. Where this may pose a minor problem for Shakespeare productions is in drunk scenes, such as that between Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night or between Caliban and Stephano in The Tempest. Characters reeling around onstage elicit such delighted and uproarious audience response (perhaps from relief at finding something recognizable amid Shakespeare’s demanding language) that American actors may be tempted to overdo the clowning and selfishly play to the gallery.
Other aspects of Shakespeare’s staging can be classified as action, which governs the disposition of the body. Because the Globe had no curtain, Shakespeare devised ingenious ways of getting the actors on and off stage (more evidence that the plays were not closet dramas composed in a nobleman’s library). Daringly, he starts scenes and whole plays in the middle of conversations: two actors stroll onstage while talk
ing in normal tones, forcing the audience to hush itself in order to overhear. Shakespeare expects the audience to make rapid intuitive judgments based on characters’ manner and body language. For example, Antony and Cleopatra opens with a Roman, Philo, disparaging Antony as a sex-addled “fool” and the dark-skinned Cleopatra as a lustful “gypsy” and whore (I.i.10–13). But this cynical view is immediately contradicted by the movingly poetic endearments exchanged by the two fond lovers as they arrive from the opposite direction.
King Lear too opens with characters entering mid-conversation: the Earls of Gloucester and Kent are sharing worrisome political rumors when the subject takes a personal and indiscreet turn. Each production of Lear must decide how much, if any, of this humiliating talk is heard by Gloucester’s bastard son, the embittered and soon malevolent Edmund. Some show of over-familiar, leaning-in body language seems implied in Gloucester’s lines, as he tastelessly boasts to Kent about the “good sport” had with a nameless pretty wench at Edmund’s accidental conception. Kent’s discomfort at this coarse sniggering is blatant, as he vainly tries to restore a dignified tone. Ideally, the audience should probably read the body language of Gloucester and Kent exactly as Edmund is reading it: Gloucester’s bumptious insensitivity met by Kent’s embarrassed unease. Before we have even heard Edmund speak, therefore, we already have a clue about the formation of his sociopathic character, hardened by routine discrimination and abuse—a prime example of Shakespeare’s prescient anticipation of modern social psychology.
Body language is similarly cued in the scene on the castle ramparts where Hamlet, trying to follow his father’s ghost, is being physically held back by Horatio and Marcellus, who fear the ghost may be a demon. Presumably drawing his sword, Hamlet threatens to kill anyone who stands in his way. This agitated scene superbly demonstrates Shakespeare’s great gift for staging. What the audience sees are two men rushing forward and then being thrown backward, beyond the sweeping circle made by Hamlet’s sword as it is pulled from its scabbard. It is a visually stunning, nearly geometrical effect that could have been designed only by a man with many years of practical experience in live theater.
Another example of implicit body language is the scene where Ophelia, obeying her pompous father’s command, returns Hamlet’s gifts and love letters. The mere sight of her beauty rescues Hamlet from one of his most despairing soliloquies, and he addresses her with tender respect and hope for forgiveness: “Nymph, in thy orisons / Be all my sins remembered” (III.i.95–96). No matter how many times one has read or seen the play, it is hard to resist a fantasy of Hamlet and Ophelia’s reconciliation at this moment. But it is not to be: Ophelia dutifully plows ahead on her father’s agenda, and Hamlet reacts with pain and anger: “No no, / I never gave you aught” (III.i.95–96). His change of mood is so extreme that some physical recoil is surely signaled, even perhaps an abrupt jump backward. At some point in this harrowingly escalating scene, where Hamlet correctly guesses that Ophelia has become a tool of her father and that he is being spied upon, the precious mementoes probably fall to the floor between them, a symbol of their shattered romance and a foreshadowing of Ophelia’s pitiful ruin.
POLITICS
The contemporary actor’s search for motivation in a Shakespeare role is complicated by alien elements in the Renaissance world-view. Politically, Shakespeare was not a populist or democrat but a monarchist who believed that government was best led by a wise, strong ruler. The crown is a near-mystical symbol in his plays, which feature sporadic suspicions of the fickle mob. Freedom is the watchword of modern democracies, but Shakespeare’s guiding principle was order. Lingering in popular memory were the thirty years of civil war that England had endured a century before. For both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, hierarchy or “degree” in the political realm mirrored the perfection of God’s cosmic master plan. A king, it was thought, ruled by divine right. Although Shakespeare himself may have tended toward the agnostic, there is a trace of that religious premise in his plays in the difficulties encountered by usurping kings like Macbeth or Claudius in asserting and maintaining authority. Kingship is conferred but also learned, as when Prince Hal matures into Henry V by abandoning his youthful hedonism and severing ties with the carousing Falstaff.
Nationalism, customarily portrayed today as a crucible of war, imperialism, and xenophobia, is a positive value in Shakespeare. Nation-states had emerged in the Middle Ages as a consolidation of dukedoms, an administrative streamlining that, at its best, expanded trade, advanced knowledge, and reduced provincialism. This progressive movement of history is the major theme of King Lear, where Lear’s foolish choice to divide his kingdom (which he does not possess but holds in trust) plunges it backward toward chaos and barbarism, reducing the king himself to a nomad battered by the elements. Unless they know European history well, most American actors rarely notice the nationalistic motifs in Shakespeare. In Lear, for example, the invasion of Britain by France—even though it promises rescue by the forces of good (Cordelia is now queen of France)—creates patriotic conflicts for a British audience that Americans will not feel. Similarly, even a small detail such as Hamlet being dispatched to England to collect overdue tribute for Denmark would stir a flicker of atavistic indignation in British hearts. Nationalism resoundingly recurs in a different context at the finale of Hamlet, where the stage is scattered with royal corpses. The bracingly vigorous entrance of Fortinbras marks the occupation of Denmark by a foreign power. With the self-destruction of its ruling class, Denmark has lost its autonomy and become a subject state of Norway.
Hierarchy also structures family and gender relations in Shakespeare. Fathers were law-givers, and children were expected to obey. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s audience would have sided with Juliet’s parents, who had the right to make marital decisions for a fourteen-year-old girl. The play’s power resides precisely in Shakespeare’s success in shifting the audience from its default position through the captivating lyricism of Romeo and Juliet’s love. Because of our own reflex bias toward romantic free choice, it’s important that a contemporary production not side so completely with the lovers as to warp the play: Juliet’s hot-tempered father should not be portrayed as a pasteboard ogre, nor should the aristocratic Paris, his sound choice for Juliet, seem like a callow prig. In The Tempest, Prospero displays a sometimes disturbing control over his daughter Miranda and her suitor Ferdinand: he puts Miranda to sleep and freezes Ferdinand in place, like a statue. This problematic manipulation of consciousness is partially ameliorated by Prospero’s status as a magician whose secret arts parallel Shakespeare’s spellbinding power over an audience.
Shakespeare is repeatedly critical of rigid, uncomprehending fathers. One of the haunting mysteries of his plays is how often he deletes the mothers of his young heroines, who are left undefended against the errors of obtuse fathers. Miranda has thrived in her widowed father’s watchful nurture, but Cordelia, Desdemona, and Ophelia suffer severely from the absence of a mother’s sympathetic counsel and intervention. Ophelia, torn between her proper deference to her father and her love for Hamlet, tries to do the right thing and ends up destroying her own and Hamlet’s lives. Shakespeare worsens Ophelia’s plight by sending her brother off to university in Paris and oddly even denying her a female confidante, like Juliet’s jovial nurse or Desdemona’s worldly-wise maid servant, Emilia. This terrible isolation, compounded by her father’s death at Hamlet’s hands, intensifies the emotional pressure on Ophelia and makes comprehensible her descent into delusion and madness, which Shakespeare pointedly contrasts with Hamlet’s passing episodic depressions. A contemporary actor playing Ophelia must strike a delicate balance in portraying her tragedy without excess sentimentality. She is not simply a frail flower or hapless victim of rank injustice. Her father, Polonius, is arrogant and at times stupid—ignoring her hurt and need for comforting and callously broadcasting her secrets as mere data to whisk to the king—but he is solidly within his r
ights to determine Ophelia’s affairs and protect her chastity. Ophelia makes a considered ethical choice, a courageous decision to renounce the man she loves.
The divergence of cultural assumptions between the Renaissance and today is nowhere clearer than in regard to marriage, which is glorified in Shakespeare’s plays as a symbol of spiritual harmony and social order. His comedies sometimes end in a stampede of mass marriages, blessed by heaven and destined for fertile procreation. Marriage in our own time has lost much of its uniqueness and high value, partly because women now have access to jobs outside the home and can support themselves. Weddings remain popular as theatrical extravaganzas, but marriage has shrunk to just another lifestyle option, and the divorce rate has soared. Shakespeare’s generation of poets, including John Donne and Edmund Spenser, was instrumental in the valorization of marriage, which had once primarily been an economic contract negotiated between a father and a prospective son-in-law. Medieval love poetry was addressed to a mistress or a distant, unattainable idol, not a wife.
Provocations Page 23