The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Hamlet’s advice to the Players seems almost overdone in its animus toward over-emoting, “tearing a passion to tatters.” There is a disdain for the multitude (“the groundlings … are capable of nothing”), for common humanity, that could be taken as condescension. It makes one wonder whether one can confidently say that Hamlet’s words faithfully reproduce Shakespeare’s own attitude or whether they might instead mock the sort who sneer that a truly good play is “caviar to the general”—too rich for common taste. On the other hand one could believe him to be reacting judiciously to the over-purpling of the passage.

  What was Shakespeare’s own attitude? Ever since that maddening gap, when the theaters were closed, theories about “original” Shakespearean speech are largely conjectures based less on evidence than on the temperament and projection of the theorist.

  Acting styles have tended to alter in an iambic rhythm. The Restoration productions of Shakespeare were often ridiculously altered (the most famous example being Nahum Tate’s Lear, which has a happy ending—Cordelia rescued to marry Edgar at the end) and were said to have featured a high-flown poesy-like style of recitation, a style eclipsed by the riveting naturalism of David Garrick, the first post-Restoration Shakespearean “star.” Whose style was succeeded by the hyperemotionalism of Edmund Kean, famous for causing Lord Byron to swoon into a dead faint at his production of Othello. Variations on Kean’s stagy but mesmeric expressionist style that “tore a passion to tatters” were the ideal until the advent of the Poel disciples, who sought restoration of Hamlet’s more naturalistic advice to the Players. And recently, in certain respects, Shakespeare-on-film also paradoxically permitted a return to a more modest, reinvigorated naturalism.

  Actually “formalism” or “neoclassicism” is a better word for what Hall and Barton reinvigorated at the RSC. (Hall called his Troilus “neo-classical.”) At the time Hall was called upon to form the company in Stratford in 1959, Shakespearean acting was wavering between the poles of Olivier’s staccato expressionism and Gielgud’s refined and melodic intellectualism.

  But Poel’s vision offered something to Hall deeper than these mood swings. The focus on Poel principles, on the “integrity of the line structure,” had its own intrinsic esthetic reward to Hall. It made Shakespeare work, he felt, in a way that Hall could hear—and learn from, get deeper into.

  “I remember, about 1961 or ’62,” he told me, “in the old rehearsal room at Stratford, suddenly knowing that I knew, and that I would always know, what the line structure was when I heard a Shakespearean speech. Just from listening. And that’s because I had done so many years of it that it was ingrained in me, and I remember it clicked and I thought, ‘Christ!’ And the consequence is I can hardly watch most Shakespeare, because it irritates me when it’s not used. It does have an effect on you. It’s like learning music.”

  The integrity of line structure: it must be maintained even when a single line of five beats is split between two characters. Particularly then.

  Hall cites an example from Twelfth Night, a key line shared between Olivia and Viola. Disguised as the male page Cesario, Viola has come to Olivia on behalf of her patron Orlando, to woo Olivia on Orlando’s behalf. Olivia has refused to respond to Orlando, but does respond to the male impersonator intermediary Viola, who tells Olivia how he/she would woo Olivia if it were him/her and not his/her lord, Orlando, doing the wooing. How she would be relentless:

  VIOLA/CESARIO: … O, you should not rest

  Between the elements of air and earth

  But you should pity me!

  OLIVIA: You might do much.

  “Read it as one line—‘But you should pity me!’ ‘You might do much’—and it’s beautiful. She’s in love! But if you do it with a pause between the two half lines, you lose fifteen to twenty seconds. You lose everything! I’ve done this for forty years, and if you do it right it always, always works! So many productions take much too long because actors are inserting unnecessary heavy pauses and sighs when it should move along lightly, like Mozart.”

  Agree or disagree—and I’m not sure a lovelorn pause there doesn’t work as well—you must give the man credit. He really, urgently cares about this. With all his achievements, all his laurels, his knighthood, you sense that Sir Peter feels deeply embattled, fighting what might be a losing battle on a question whose stakes are immensely high: recovering, rescuing from obfuscation the naked Shakespeare—or at least the most fully embodied Shakespeare. Releasing, unleashing, uncoupling from the line structure the full power, depth and musicality of an artist who is inexorably slipping further and further and further from our grasp across the abyss of centuries.

  Hall spoke of attending a conference on verse-speaking sponsored by the Royal National Theatre the previous year, 1999, in which it was generally agreed that we are perhaps the last generation for whom Shakespearean speech will be immediately intelligible at all—as opposed to intelligible only through the kind of half-translation often used to render Chaucer’s Middle English. That precarious intelligibility is what makes the disappearing art of verse-speaking even more vital to preserve, since he believes the One True Way is known now to but fifty actors and a half-dozen directors.

  It may sound fanatical, and it should be said that many scholars and directors dissent from the Poel principles or the strictness with which Hall applies them. But I know I’ve profited immensely from Peter Hall’s method. I know I found exposure to the Royal Shakespeare Company verse-speaking style transformative when I first experienced it at Stratford, when I saw, back-to-back, two amazing RSC productions: Trevor Nunn’s Hamlet and Peter Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  Nothing prepared me for the astonishing offhand clarity of the verse-speaking. It wasn’t conspicuously emoted; it was expressed as if the actors were thinking it up for the first time. It was like experiencing Shakespeare for the first time. After Hall and Nunn left, the sparkling clarity of the verse-speaking has been maintained at a high level by their longtime associate Cicely Berry.

  I loved talking about Troilus with Sir Peter. It’s a play that I’ve found more and more depths to each time I reread it. It’s a play he’s been wanting to do again for nearly four decades, he told me, ever since he did it at Stratford in 1962, in a run that derived an added antiwar frisson when it coincided with the Cuban missile crisis.

  But it’s more than an antiwar play, he suggests: “It’s a play about lust in all its forms”—warlike lust for blood, the lust for power, as well as plain old lechery and the war between the sexes.

  One of the things that occurred to me while rereading Troilus this time was that there was a deeper connection between Peter Hall’s verse-speaking obsession and a preoccupation close to the heart of this particular play.

  Consider that most famous and controversial speech in the play, Ulysses’ praise of “degree,” the one whose image of self-devouring is so crucial to the Hand D debate. Consider the way the speech at one point describes degree and order with a musical metaphor:

  Take but degree away, untune that string,

  And hark what discord follows.

  Reading the degree speech this time, it struck me (I’m sure it’s occurred to others) how it was as much a meditation on order and structure in art as it was on politics and statecraft.

  The invocation in the degree speech, to “Insisture … proportion … [the] line of order,” could be Peter Hall insisting upon the importance of metrical regularity and ordered line structure. (“Insisture” carries connotations of persistence and regularity.)

  That these are esthetic as much as political preoccupations is signaled by the central metaphor in the degree speech, which comes from music: “Take but degree away, untune that string,/And hark what discord follows.”

  The pentameter-ending pause and the line structure it preserves, Hall insists, are not repressive and confining, but can be expressive and liberating. The way (to use an anachronism) the sense of formal containment of one of Pope’s rhyming couplets all
ows it to resonate—ring with precision, ring in tune—within its expansive two-line architecture. The way the grace of the ballet depends on the base of rhythmic structure from which the balletic leaps, the graceful spins and pirouettes take off. The way much improvisation in jazz arises not from nothing, not from noise, but from a melodic or rhythmic base. “Untune that string,” the degree speech concludes, on an apocalyptic note, and “the bounded waters” of the earth will overflow “and make a sop of all this solid globe”—return it to the formless mud that preceded creation. The iambic line is like a “bounded water” whose boundedness—that pause—gives resonance and definition to its waves and tides, its riptides and undertows, whose complex interactions are so characteristic of what we call “Shakespearean.”

  There’s an ambiguous reference to masks in the “degree” speech* that reminded me of a conversation I had about Peter Hall with a somewhat embittered Shakespearean actor (Steven Berkoff) who complained—without having seen it—about Peter Hall’s use of masks in his ten-part Tantalus epic. Of course, almost all classical Greek drama was played with masks, but Berkoff argued, in a very actor-centric way, that Sir Peter’s use of masks would deprive the actors of their identities, their gratifying audience recognition, their chance to make individual impressions, their chance to be stars. Instead it made the director (Sir Peter) the star.

  But in fact, by all accounts, Hall used a different kind of mask in Tantalus—not traditional rigid masks that obscured the facial expressions of the actors, but flexible masks that clung to the contours of the features and gave an expressive structure to the face, one they could play up or play against, heightening and complexifying the drama of their utterances.

  The masks were analogous, in a way, to Hall’s notion of line structure and “iambic fundamentalism”: line structure is a kind of esthetic mask, a structure, a fundamental (in the musical sense) that heightens expressiveness by playing up the tension between form and feeling within each line, tensions that would slacken, lose their riptides and overtones if lines were run around willy-nilly without the defining pause, or moment of poise, at the end.

  An expressiveness that is “Exposed by the Mask”—to use the ironic title Hall gave to the recently published version of the Clark Lectures he delivered at Cambridge, the place he first encountered the Poel principles.

  But this is a rather academic defense of line structure. I came across a rather more playful and seductive one later on in Troilus. A Shakespearean defense of line structure. It’s at the heart of one of the most controversial moments in the play. Troilus and Cressida’s Romeo and Juliet–like rendezvous has been interrupted: she is told she must be taken from Troy and from Troilus to join her father in the Greek camp. Unlike Romeo, Troilus doesn’t put up much of a fight, and unlike Juliet, Cressida doesn’t try to remain faithful ’til death.

  Instead, when she gets to the Greek camp, she exchanges repartee and kisses with the Greek generals who greet her; soon she’ll become the concubine of one of them.

  Here’s how Ulysses characterizes Cressida’s initial flirtatious behavior:

  There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip,

  Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out

  At every joint and motive of her body.

  So ostensibly it’s about seductive behavior by a woman—but couldn’t it also be seen as evoking the seductive power of language? There’s “language in her eye,” “her foot speaks.” And perhaps that last phrase, “her foot speaks,” suggests that it’s about a particular kind of language, poetic language—whose unit is the line made up of iambic “feet,” the technical term for a da-DUM unit of iambic pentameter. It could suggest an analogy between the way a woman deploys the “line structure” of her body (“every joint and motive”) and the way the body of a poem deploys the line structure of verse: each releases “wanton spirits,” seductive energy. It could suggest one of those moments in which Shakespeare’s language can be felt expressing pleasure in its own art. The seductiveness of language and the language of seductiveness in those lines about Cressida subvert Ulysses’ official disapproval of her behavior. It suggests that both he and Shakespeare are really on her side, seduced by Cressida’s poetry in motion—her lines—almost against their will.

  How then explain what Sir Peter called Shakespeare’s hostile attitude toward sex in some of those bleak, middle-period, “nervous breakdown” plays?

  “I believe he was betrayed very badly,” he said over dinner. “And I believe he tried to hate sex. And I believe he couldn’t.”

  It’s the very dynamic that seems to be going on in Ulysses’ description of Cressida’s “wanton spirits.” He tries to condemn her, but he can’t. The seductiveness of “line structure”—in every sense of the phrase—is just impossible to resist.

  THE EDELSTEIN VARIATION ON THE HALL PAUSE

  While I took much away from my exposure to Peter Hall’s impassioned pleas for iambic fundamentalism, it wasn’t until a couple of months later that it clicked for me in the same way it “clicked” for Peter Hall in a rehearsal room in Stratford. It clicked for me in a rehearsal room on Thirteenth Street in New York City, in a Shakespeare-speaking workshop conducted by Barry Edelstein, artistic director of the Classic Stage Company.

  Edelstein had founded the CSC after studying Shakespeare at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, teaching seven years at the Juilliard School and directing a number of productions for Joe Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival. He’s considered, along with Brian Kulick and Karen Coonrod, to be one of the rising stars among American Shakespearean directors, and this workshop was attended mainly by actors who wanted to get deeper into Shakespearean verse-speaking. I felt fortunate to be invited but could not have expected the way Edelstein’s interpretation of Hall’s line structure suddenly made it leap into focus for me—and changed the way I read and spoke Shakespeare. Edelstein had studied with Hall and with the RSC’s Cicely Berry, but he’d developed his own rationale for that all-important pause that defined Hall’s line structure.

  I asked Edelstein how he came up with his interpretation of Hall’s stricture on structure. “Barton and Hall had codified the traditions, but when I was studying in England,” he told me, “I had an old friend, Robert Clare, who was an actor in the theater who had assisted Peter Hall on the late plays [The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest], and he had become a Shakespeare teacher and he took me through what Hall was doing. And then when I got back to New York I started directing and started teaching, and I basically reshuffled and straightened out in my mind what was going on and it’s just evolved over years working with students and directors to what you saw in that workshop. And it was my own reading and experimenting and having to explain it to young drama students.”

  “What puzzles me,” I said, “is that your notion makes so much sense of what Hall was doing. Why wouldn’t Hall himself, in the course of his long tirade on the pause, have mentioned this interpretation of it, which makes so much more than technical esthetic sense out of line structure? It is from him, isn’t it?”

  “Well, no, that’s my interpretation of the source of its power,” Edelstein said.

  Perhaps it’s past time to disclose what Edelstein has done to explain and energize Hall’s neoclassical notion of line structure, how Edelstein explains that all-important pause.

  Up until then I had what I think was an imperfect, only partial understanding of Hall’s line structure. I’ve made the anachronistic analogy to Alexander Pope’s eighteenth-century rhymed couplets, each of which created a self-contained crystalline world of echoes, resonances, reverberations contained in the mirrored, jewel box–like interior of the two-line couplet. An interior that was dazzling and fiery and yet (and only because) self-contained. As I’d understood Peter Hall before Edelstein’s workshop, the ten-syllable pentameter line was its own self-contained jewel box whose containment, whose internal dynamic, depends on the esthetic closure given it by that final pause for breath.


  There’s another more explicitly Shakespearean analogy one can make: the restrictive form of the Sonnets—a delimited architecture of fourteen lines, a formal rhyme scheme concluding with a couplet, an architecture whose formality defines and contains the pulsating language within. As a devotee of close reading, Hall’s line-structure-punctuated-by-a-pause had a particular appeal to me because in effect it made each line a single poem to be read closely. Not that this was the only way to read Shakespeare’s lines but that it revealed just how much was going on in each one that might otherwise be overlooked.

  But Edelstein had a (literally) breathtaking interpretation of that pause. A more dynamic than static sense of the line’s structure. He saw the pause as the moment the actor, as the character, takes to think up the next line. Needless to say, actors don’t really think up the next line on the spot, but Edelstein asks them to act as if the pause was the moment they did. A deceptively simple concept, a kind of imitation of spontaneity if such a thing is possible, or Hall might say a recognition of the apparent inevitability of what comes next. But one that gives a kind of dramatic momentum and freshness, an illusion of both spontaneity and inevitability, to what follows. As if it were being thought up for the first time, but—as it’s revealed in that dramatic pause, a pause for thought, a pause for invention—as if it’s the only possible thing that could be said.