On her left breast
A mole, cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops
I’th’bottom of a cowslip.
(Cymbeline, 2.2.37–9)
Suddenly and surreally, Shakespeare takes us into a country meadow to look closely at the inside of a wild flower, even at the point at which the villain Giacomo is gazing and grazing most intently on his victim. Innogen remains asleep. It was midnight (2.2.2), but by the end of the speech, we hear the clock strike three; Giacomo has been visually raping Innogen for three hours. His transgression makes him feel as though he is in eternal damnation: ‘hell is here’ (2.2.50). Although he has not committed actual rape in the legal sense, he has proved himself to be a virtual Tarquin in deed. But unlike Tarquin, Giacomo has not been able to satisfy the reality of his lust. Instead, he climbs back into the trunk – burning with unfulfilled desire – and shuts the lid.
All of these acts of transgression illustrate major points of conflict and tension in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. He wants to make the danger and awfulness of the situations as real as possible by opening up the imaginary, criminal mind to us.
MAKING FORGIVENESS
Shakespeare is a great writer about forgiveness. As much as he dramatises forgiveness, there are characters who refuse it, as well as those who are unable to give it. Malvolio seems set never to forgive those who have gulled him. His final line is the haunting, bitter and pathetic ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you’ (Twelfth Night, or What you Will, 5.1.374). The Tempest can be read as being all about the magician Prospero’s calling together a reunion of the Neapolitan court in order to forgive them for usurping him twelve years earlier. But Antonio, who took the Dukedom from him (and who earlier says ‘I feel not / This deity in my bosom’ 2.1.282–3), remains stonily silent in the face of being forgiven (5.1.132–6), a silence that achieves its maximum effect only in live performance.
Forgiveness (which should be not be confused with either ‘pardon’ or ‘mercy’) shines most impressively in The Winter’s Tale. This late play encompasses destructive jealousy, the betrayal of friendship, attempted murder, the intervention of divine justice, the death of a young prince and his mother the Queen, a bear coming onto the stage to chase away and eat a courtier (‘Exit, pursued by a bear’ 3.3.57), a pastoral world in which we see a new love recreated, and the reunion of a royal family. And Time. Sixteen years pass between the end of act three and the beginning of act four, when the personification of Time itself appears on stage to tell us what has been happening. All the actors who appear in both parts of the play must look and behave sixteen years older in acts four and five. The Winter’s Tale, as its title suggests, is partly about how human beings survive coldness and suffering and arrive at the coming of spring and new life.
But Queen Hermione is not really dead. She only appeared to have died of shock on hearing about the death of her son, Prince Mamillius (3.2.141–52). For sixteen years her husband, King Leontes, whose jealousy led to his condemning her, has been in mourning, racked with guilt. Believing their new daughter to be begotten by his friend, King Polixenes, Leontes had the baby sent away sixteen years ago. Hermione has been hidden and looked after by Paulina. In act five, the lost Princess Perdita returns to meet the father she has never known, along with her husband-tobe, Prince Florizel (the son of Polixenes).
In the final moments, Paulina presents a statue of the dead Queen to King Leontes, King Polixenes, Princess Perdita, Prince Florizel, their courtiers and friends. Everyone is captivated with the artistry of the statue and astonished at how lifelike it appears. Paulina says she can make it move:
PAULINA It is required
You do awake your faith. Then all stand still.
Or those that think it is unlawful business
I am about, let them depart.
LEONTES Proceed.
No foot shall stir.
PAULINA Music; awake her; strike!
Music
(To Hermione) ’Tis time. Descend. Be stone no more.
Approach.
Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come,
I’ll fill your grave up. Stir. Nay, come away.
Bequeath to death your numbness, for from him
Dear life redeems you.
(The Winter’s Tale, 5.2.94–103)
And then the statue comes to life. Our ‘faith’ that Paulina has asked us to awake is answered. In the context of the story, the moment and the music that we hear are truly magical. If we did not know the play, the coming to life of the statue would be as great a miracle for us as for the characters watching it on stage. Shakespeare’s coup de théâtre achieves its impact partly through the actress playing Hermione having to remain totally still for around 85 lines (about five minutes of stage time). This physical challenge seems almost unachievable by any actor, and yet this is what Shakespeare demands. Paulina’s words, ‘I’ll fill your grave up. Stir. Nay, come away’ convey a profound strangeness.
Husband and wife are reunited after sixteen years. Leontes reaches out to Hermione in amazement and says ‘O, she’s warm!’ (5.2.109). The touch he has longed for is given back to him and the first thing he notices is the shock of her flesh and blood reality. The emotions of both husband and wife are too powerful for Shakespeare to put into words. Instead, we hear the observations of two onlookers – ‘She embraces him’, ‘She hangs about his neck’ – as Shakespeare dramatises what it means for two human beings to start to experience forgiveness. And then a daughter, who was supposed dead, is given back to her mother, who blesses her, Hermione’s only words in the scene. Husband and wife may still have a lot of talking to do, but a possibility of reconciliation and mutual forgiveness has been opened up, and the effect on the audience can be deeply moving.
I well recall Gregory Doran’s 1998 production for The Royal Shakespeare Company. As the actors came on to the stage for their curtain call, a woman sitting next to me turned to me with tears in her eyes and said, ‘She was alive for sixteen years and nobody knew.’ A little while later, as the theatre was emptying, I saw a friend and Shakespeare scholar staggering up the aisle with tears in his eyes, too. He grabbed my arm and said: ‘You can keep your Hamlets, you can keep your Othellos; give me The Winter’s Tale any day.’ For many people, it is genuinely the most moving of all of Shakespeare’s works.
It is worth noting that in Shakespeare’s source story the Leontes figure, Pandosto, kills himself and no reunion or forgiveness occurs. Although Shakespeare’s emotional and artistic visions are entirely different, forgiveness comes at a cost. Prince Mamillius and the courtier Antigonus (who was eaten by the bear) remain dead. Leontes’s mention of ‘this wide gap of time’ in the play’s penultimate line acknowledges the pain as well as the love that he has caused and experienced. But he is forgiven. And that is the wonder of this wintry play.
* * *
Attempting to convey the power of Shakespeare is an endless task. He is never afraid to address the worst and the best of human experiences and to ask the big questions. When King Lear carries on to the stage his dead daughter Cordelia he asks:
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all?
(The Tragedy of King Lear, 5.3.282–3)
The vocabulary Shakespeare uses in moments of extreme emotion is often straightforward, and sometimes, as here, entirely monosyllabic. By this point in a production we have witnessed Lear’s suffering for over three hours. That we should now arrive at this apparently simple articulation makes it one of the most powerful questions about the nature of human existence ever asked.
To hold a copy of Shakespeare’s Complete Works is to have an apparently endless illustration of the joys and pains of human life, our brightest and darkest imaginings. Our reading, however powerful, is always open to change, challenge and surprise by the ways we may encounter Shakespeare in performance.
5
ENCOUNTERING SHAKESPEARE
When performed live Shakespeare’s work
of art erupts before us. We are struck by many lively and immediate components: music, song, plays within plays, pageants and processions, duels (and, in As You Like It, a wrestling match), armies, battles, swords and suits of armour, stage blood, gunshots, severed heads, corpses littering the stage (a headless one in Cymbeline), crowds pressing against each other in ancient Rome, the silent observers in a scene, how the actors move, the mood that they bring on or take off the stage with them, the effect of their voices, facial movements and gestures, the visual seduction of costumes and lighting, and staging effects (many of which are quite extreme, for example, Titus Andronicus cutting off his own hand and Gloucester’s eyes being gouged out in King Lear). We hear laughter, sometimes in unexpected places, and become sensitive to the reactions of other audience members.
We should ask ourselves whether the text has been abridged, expanded or manipulated in ways that affect interpretation. Are there any cross-gendered casting choices or meaningful doublings of roles, such as Cordelia and the Fool in King Lear, or Theseus and Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream? What age are the characters being played and what difference does this make (for example, an older Beatrice and Benedick or Romeo and Juliet)? The ways in which people are killed or wounded tell their own stories about their characterisation and relationships. Do any of the actors establish memorable connections with the audience, for example, by addressing one or more individuals directly, or even through physical contact? Is there an interval and how does this affect the tempo of the play? And, importantly, where is the play set? In a recognisable social world? Are we in the present or the past, and, if so, when and why? Or is the whole play set somewhere more abstract and absurd? Shakespeare can often thrive on having no heavily visual design and (perhaps ideally) can sometimes work best – especially outdoors – with no set at all.
All of these factors and possibilities are invisible to us until we attend a live performance. Together, they provide the beginnings of a checklist of things to look out for when we watch Shakespeare. It might be the first time we have seen a particular play, or it might be a play we already know well. Whatever knowledge or experience we have, it is worth reminding ourselves that each production is its own adaptation of the text. Shakespeare’s words in whatever edition we read them are only the starting point for a director and company of actors to produce a new work of art in its own right: the production itself. The more theatre we see, the more productions of the same play we can weigh against each other, the more critically aware we become.
Are, for instance, all the characters we expect to see actually present in a production? If I were to see a production of Hamlet that cut the character of the Norwegian Prince Fortinbras (a choice made by Laurence Olivier for his influential 1948 film version) it would be immediately clear that the director had chosen to emphasise a particular narrative trajectory which has excluded important aspects of how Shakespeare told the story. There might be practical reasons for doing without Fortinbras. Hamlet, which can sometimes be around four hours long, becomes much shorter. But to lose Fortinbras is also to make the story introverted; without him the play can only be about the Danish royal family and their attendant neuroses. ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ (1.4.67) signals that Hamlet, a state-of-the-nation play, is a political drama, not only a familial one. The reason why the soldiers are on the battlements when the play starts is that they are keeping watch for a threatened Norwegian invasion. Like Hamlet and, later in the play, Laertes, Fortinbras is seeking revenge for his father: three dead fathers, three angry sons. No Fortinbras means that King Claudius needs no foreign policy. Without a Fortinbras there would be no need for Hamlet to speak the impressive soliloquy (from the second quarto version) that begins ‘How all occasions do inform against me’ (Additional Passages, 4.4.23). He has just seen Fortinbras arrive in Denmark (on his way to conquer Poland) and shares his wretched feelings about having been unable to achieve any revenge so far, takes stock of his situation, and meditates on the futility of armed combat. A production with no Fortinbras usually ends elegiacally with Horatio mourning his dead friend with the lines:
Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
(5.2.311–12)
But what of the alternative? Shakespeare wants us to see the young Prince Fortinbras enter. We have heard of him intermittently and seen him briefly. Now he comes to restore order, view the dead bodies, and take up the crown of Denmark for himself. A production at this point will look ahead to what his new monarchy might be like. Is he tyrannical? Does he remind us of any well-known political leader? Does he enter heroically, like a golden boy, who comes to rescue Denmark from corruption and decadence? He is there to bring new life to the state, but what will that mean to Denmark under Fortinbras? In one production I know of, the first thing Fortinbras did was to have Horatio taken out and shot, ensuring that there would be no one left to tell a competing historical narrative. As a dramatic presence in Hamlet, Fortinbras forces us to think politically. So whether he is present or not makes an enormous difference to the overall tone and story of the play. But that is a difference that can only strike us when we see the play performed.
At the same time, we should resist being tricked into thinking that we are ever having the play presented to us as Shakespeare himself intended it. The fact that the production before us, for example, might have been designed to be acted in Elizabethan or Jacobean costume makes it no more ‘Shakespearian’. We are twenty-first-century people. A doublet and hose takes us no closer to Shakespeare’s play or dramatic meaning than a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. The international theatre director Michael Bogdanov, who has devoted much of his career to Shakespeare, always insists that the plays are performed in modern dress. He believes that ‘if, for one moment, and one moment only, a point of contact and identification is made in the present, then the play immediately becomes a play of our time. That is why Shakespeare has been called the greatest living dramatist, and Hamlet the enduring piece of contemporary theatre.’21 Hamlet himself expresses similar sentiments about the players who arrive at Elsinore when he calls them ‘the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time’ (2.2.527–28) and says that the purpose of playing is ‘to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’ (3.2.22–4).
The decision to stage Shakespeare in modern dress is one way for a production to invite the audience to think afresh. Theatre is a place for debate and a highly interpretative director who presents the play through his or her own political lens can often produce the most engaging Shakespeare. A production is not for all time, only for its own time. Those which set the play in the past, or in an undefined, generic version of the past, are every bit as political as modern-dress Shakespeare. The problem is that they can often feel as though they are not concerned with politics at all, which is precisely part of their political effect. If our encounter with Shakespeare on the stage is primarily about a pretty and romantic story in gorgeous costumes, we risk not being encouraged to think, and might leave the theatre having tasted little more than a sweet-tasting sedative. But whatever the period in which a production is set, what matters most is how well the story is told, whether we believe what the actors are saying, what it is we are invited to think about, why a particular production is taking place now, and why it is as it is. One of the greatest compliments that can be paid to a production is the comment I hear from time to time when leaving the theatre along the lines of, ‘they must have modernised the language because I understood every word of that’. What this kind of appraisal indicates is that the actors have so understood and absorbed Shakespeare’s language that they have been able to render it comprehensible to modern ears.
It is important to talk about the theatre productions we see because interaction and opinion are the lifeblood of the art form. Theatre is a sociable expression of culture, calling upon our responses, hoping
to etch experiences in our individual and collective memories. In engaging with theatre history we might encounter different records of performance: photographs, programmes, an annotated script of the production on which the cuts and cues have been marked (the prompt book), and archive video and sound recordings. But it is through the theatre review that we often most vividly discover what a production was like, its performances, interpretative choices, and whether it was insightful or not. But reviews will only ever be as good as the person who writes them, and that is a large and subjectively inflected variable.
None of us can see all the productions that might take our fancy, so I usually want a review to be descriptive about what particular actors did, or to describe any significant cultural or political responses. Usually, the most helpful reviews are produced by writers who know the play well and have seen other productions of it. Engaging with a plurality of responses to the same production often yields insights that would be missed if we read only the opinions of a select few, or our own favourite theatre critic.
It matters what we say about the productions we see, but it matters most that we actually do talk about what we see or, better still, produce our own record of the event. Some people have found the following questions helpful as a way of reflecting on the Shakespeare we see in performance:
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