“What do you mean?” he said. “I haven’t been reading Shakespeare in the original?” I took out my copy of Andrews’s Everyman edition of Hamlet and handed it to him. He looked it over for some time and then got up and dug out his copy of Harold Jenkins’s Arden edition of Hamlet, and started comparing passages.
“I can’t believe this,” he finally said. “I feel cheated”—cheated out of an authentic Shakespearean experience by modernization and conventionalizing of spelling and capitalization.
So where does that leave us? Frankly it convinced me that in my next round of rereading Shakespeare I’d do it in the original spelling editions.* In the original tongue of flame, so to speak, before the “transposition.”
That is of course in addition to reading it aloud in the Hall-Edelstein line-structure method. Originalist arguments can make great demands. And offer great rewards.
* Named after Thomas Pavier, whose unauthorized edition was halted by an injunction from Shakespeare’s company, but who may by his transgression have inspired compilation of the 1623 Folio, which preserved from oblivion half of Shakespeare’s plays, the ones that exist only in Folio versions.
* And why not in this book? It was not an easy decision, but since it’s not an edition of the plays, but a book that cites passages, I thought the interest in making the quotations more accessible to more readers outweighed the alternative. That it was better to familiarize readers before presuming to de-familiarize them with the passages in question. But I would encourage readers to seek out unmodernized editions for their next rereading of the plays.
Chapter Nine
Dueling Shylocks
Olivier, Goodman, Berkoff, Pacino, Mostel: Whose is more “authentic”?
If the debates over how to speak it, how to spell it, are highly fraught, sometimes bitter, the debates over how to act it, how to feel it, what emotion to depict in the character, what emotions to induce in the audience, are even deeper and more long-standing.
I was struck by a remarkable quote on this issue from Samuel Johnson, who asked a radical question about acting. To the modern ear Johnson can sometimes come across as a stuffy fussbudget, or perhaps he is most often quoted by stuffy fussbudgets, but his responses to Shakespeare are often uniquely valuable both because of his extraordinary intelligence and because of the moment he was situated in time in respect to Shakespeare: some one hundred fifty years after Shakespeare died.
The distance made it possible for the first time to begin to see the magnitude of the achievement for the bottomless phenomenon it was. As if until that time, Shakespeare’s closeness had obscured, overwhelmed any chance of seeing it with any perspective. The way an astronaut floating in space close to the surface of the moon sees less of the surface than an astronomer with a telescope 200,000 miles away.
In any case one of the radical things Samuel Johnson said about Shakespearean acting was cited in a TLS essay by the scholar Paula Byrne, reviewing several books about eighteenth-century Shakespearean acting. It was in the eighteenth century that arguments about Shakespearean acting had begun to appear in other literature, from Fielding’s Tom Jones to Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.
In each of the latter works the arguments centered around the revolution in Shakespearean acting effected by David Garrick, and what was seen as his radical naturalism back then.
Byrne cites Garrick’s first biographer, who said, “Mr. Garrick shone forth like a theatrical Newton … he banished ranting, bombast and grimace, and restored nature, ease, simplicity and genuine humor.”
Byrne portrays Garrick almost as an anticipation of Strasbergian Method acting: “Garrick worked on the principle of emotional identification with the part, though not all of his friends supported his approach …”
Here she cites that jolting, radical Samuel Johnson remark about acting and “authentic” emotion:
“Johnson challenged the actor John Kemble, ‘Are you sir, one of those enthusiasts who believe yourself transformed into the very character you represent?’ When Kemble answered in the negative Johnson concurred: ‘The thing is impossible. And if Garrick really believed himself to be that monster, Richard III, he deserved to be hanged every time he performed it’ ” (italics mine).
An amazing statement about a certain kind of acting. Johnson disparages it, but raises the possibility that to play Richard III’s evil one must become as evil as the character (and deserve punishment for having effected such a transformation—or transposition, one might say). Does an actor who plays Shakespearean evil risk his soul whatever method he uses? Is such success a Faustian bargain as Johnson implies?*
But if the actor does not attempt to risk becoming the evil being Shakespeare originally conceived, or gives us a denatured, distanced simulacrum, is he denying us that original, unbearable intensity?
These were some questions raised by my encounter with the actor Steven Berkoff, by witnessing his embodiments of Shakespearean evil. Particularly his reversion to what might be called an Originalist Shylock.
I’d heard a couple of misleading things about Steven Berkoff before he came to New York City’s Public Theater with his one-man show Shakespeare’s Villains. I knew vaguely he was a British actor-director, considered an outsider and some kind of avant-garde critic of establishment Shakespeare.
Misleading.
And then there was a remark Gary Taylor made to me about Berkoff’s Hamlet. Recall, I’d asked Taylor, co-editor of The Oxford Shakespeare, a notoriously cantankerous and hard-to-please fellow, what was the most impressive performance of Hamlet he’d ever seen. “Steven Berkoff’s,” he said, without hesitation. “It sounds kind of wild and crazy when you describe it though,” he added, “because for instance, in the closet scene, his Hamlet fucks Gertrude.”
Also misleading. Well, as we’ll see, partly misleading.
But I think what’s most misleading about Berkoff, sixty-four when I met him, is the avant-garde label. True, he likes to say that most contemporary directors and players of Shakespeare are still “working with a telescope” while what he does is “comparable to the electron microscope.”
But I think the best way to look at Berkoff is not as an avant-gardiste but as a kind of flamboyant throwback: a throwback to an earlier, more grandiose age of Shakespearean players, the age of Garrick and Kean, and Edwin and John Wilkes Booth. An era in which Shakespearean actors—when they weren’t assassinating presidents—were slaying audiences. An era when grand, operatic, gestural histrionics caused weeping, wailing, fainting and frenzy. When Shakespearean actors did to audiences what rock stars—and demagogues like Hitler—did.
I bring up Hitler again because Berkoff, a Jew, actually played Hitler—in the 1990s miniseries War and Remembrance. He has supported his Shakespearean barnstorming with lucrative film villain roles in Bond movies, Rambo and Attila (he was the Hun). I mention Hitler because in his one-man show on Shakespeare’s villains Berkoff attempts to find in those fictional figures a hierarchy of evil, and an etiology of evil that, he believes, casts light on historical figures such as Hitler.
Berkoff’s one-man show consists of Berkoff tearing into some of the juiciest, most operatically villainous moments in Shakespeare, giving us Iago, Macbeth and Richard III (along with some less obvious but villainous aspects of Hamlet and Oberon), combined with a running commentary that is part essay on evil, part actor’s memoir and part stand-up patter. It’s a thought-provoking entertainment, but what’s most revelatory about it, I believe, is the way it’s a kind of throwback.
The very form of it, for instance: There’s a venerable tradition of British Shakespearean actors touring the colonies, so to speak, giving one-man shows, wowing the yokels with some best bits from the Bard. Mark Twain satirized it in Huck Finn. John Gielgud earned some well-deserved plaudits and paydays touring with his Ages of Man one-man show of Shakespearean high points. You could think of Berkoff’s one-man show as The Rages of Man.
But rage is a usefully polysemous word in this context. Bec
ause Berkoff’s show harks back to the days of a different kind of actor, a different kind of acting, when Shakespeare was, literally, all the rage. Not merely respected and revered as he is now, but wildly, deliriously mesmerizing. You read accounts of the grand old histrionic figures of the Shakespearean stage and repeatedly, inevitably, they speak of women fainting and men weeping, of the histrionics on stage provoking a histrionic, virtually hysterical response in the audiences.
It’s a style of acting most modern Shakespeareans have abandoned, virtually fled from, in order to seek the subtleties and the subtexts in a more “naturalistic” manner. But Shakespeare wasn’t always a naturalist. After all, he wrote in iambic pentameter, not prose, for the most part, and even his prose is heightened, not prosaic. And watching Berkoff one wonders if there’s something that’s been lost, something missing in even the very best of contemporary players: the pure relish for the grand gestural moment, the operatic passion that made Shakespeare the rage, rather than just a sage.
Berkoff’s impassioned embodiments of Shakespearean evil are often electrifying in that old-fashioned throwback way. He endows his personations with a disturbing power, far more profound than Berkoff’s intellectual explanation of evil, which relies a bit too much to my mind, on social worker victimology: people like Richard III turn bad because they “don’t get enough love” or, in Shylock’s case, they’re “cut off from community.” If only it were that simple. If only Berkoff’s own malevolent Shylock were so easily explained away.
But I’ve sometimes found, in talking to talented actors, that they need an intellectual rationale to hang on to in order to liberate—give them permission to unleash—performances that strike chords far deeper than the abstract rationales. And when I say Berkoff’s histrionic style is a throwback, I mean that as a compliment. Not throwback in the sense of antiquated, but throwback in the sense that you feel hurled back in time to a kind of experience whose raw power made original Shakespeare the rage. Closer to what it was like to be present when larger-than-life acting sensations like Burbage, Garrick and Kean stalked the stage.
In fact when we met at his hotel in Gramercy Park to talk about Shakespeare and acting, Berkoff told me a remarkably emblematic story about the histrionic tradition: the story of the sword.
It was in the context of a lengthy denunciation of what Berkoff contends is the dull, pedestrian quality of almost all Shakespeare since Olivier. Olivier was his idol. Watching Olivier’s Shakespearean films changed his life, Berkoff told me. It was Olivier who introduced him to a transformative level of Shakespearean experience, “supernatural” as opposed to naturalistic acting.
“Because he,” meaning Olivier, “is the great one. He carries the sword. Do you know the story of the sword?”
At the time I didn’t know the story of the sword.
It’s a story that begins with Byron and Edmund Kean, one of the great Shakespearean actors of the early nineteenth century. Coleridge famously remarked that watching Kean act was “like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.”
“Kean!” Berkoff exclaims. “He was our greatest, our patron saint of the theater. He is the true tiger of the theater. So great—even by reputation, people would faint. Even Byron apparently, in the box one night when Kean was playing, I think it might have been Othello, and Byron is a quite tough guy you know. He’s a poet but he’s tough and he’s seen it all, and he got so excited he actually passed out watching. He passed out like people did when they saw Olivier.” He sighs. “And he was—he got so excited as he”—Berkoff sighs even more violently, almost suggesting he too will pass out in a violent fit at just the thought of it: “God! Kean! His voice and his projection, it was—frightening! Byron thought he was so unbelievable that he had a sword made. He had a sword inscribed to Kean. And Kean was very flattered because he was a little bit feeling inferior to these educated poets, you know, Oxford-trained and cultivated. Kean tried to learn, to teach himself Latin. It was very moving.…”
There is perhaps a bit of self-identification here with Kean. Berkoff too was self-educated, the product of the mean streets of East London’s Jewish slum. He does not share in the Oxbridge background of the main line of Royal Shakespeare Company types in the United Kingdom. He dropped out of school at fifteen and sometimes betrays a touching insecurity about his lack of Latin—like Kean, indeed like Shakespeare, who was mocked for having “small Latin and lesse Greeke.” But he’s touchingly intoxicated with the history of Shakespearean acting.
To return to the story of the sword: “Then Kean died. The sword was auctioned off and then got into the hands of a dealer. And one day Gielgud in 1935, I think, was playing Hamlet. Someone managed, a dealer, to come backstage and brought the sword and said, ‘This is the most amazing performance I have ever seen on any stage anywhere in my life,’ and presented him with Kean’s sword. He said, ‘You must keep this sword, John.’ So John was thrilled and he kept the sword for about fifteen years. Then one day Gielgud went to see Olivier playing Richard III and he says”—Berkoff does a beautiful Gielgud imitation, urgent, faint and musical: ‘I can’t—I can’t carry the sword! This is impossible. This man is mad, wonderful, exotic. Really I would feel guilty to have the sword in my cupboard. I’ll give it to Larry. I don’t give a damn, I’m done with it.’
“So Gielgud goes to Larry and says, ‘Please take this as my respect for your wonderful performance.’ And Larry said, ‘Well John, are you sure you want to give it to me because it’s …’ ‘Well, we should pass it on, Larry. If you see somebody, somebody fantastic, something moves you, let’s pass this wonderful thing on, because it comes from Byron to Kean to me. I don’t think I really deserved it, but it came to me. But you, Larry—wonderful, wonderful performance. Take it, take it, Larry.’
“ ‘Thank you very much, John, John, it’s beautiful and thank you, darling.’ ”
Berkoff has shifted from playing Gielgud to playing Olivier.
“Olivier took the sword and then he keeps the sword and he’s thinking, ‘Oh shit, who should I give it to?’ See? And he goes to the theaters and he thinks, ‘This one? Burton? Hmmmm, no, no, no. Scofield? Yes, he’s pretty good, pretty good. Alec McCowan? Excellent, excellent, um, no one really.’ And then he’s dying and Joan [Olivier’s wife Joan Plowright] is saying ‘Larry, what about the sword, the sword?’ ‘Well, uh, I haven’t seen anybody really that I felt like giving it to’—This is what I’m imagining now.” Berkoff says, “But in the end he didn’t give it to anybody. They were not good enough. He knew his standard and he wanted someone that would thrill him and he never gave the sword.…”
I was fascinated by Berkoff’s rhapsodic account of Olivier because he’s an actor who’s become so much a cliché for acting “greatness” that one forgets, if one has not seen him, the force of that greatness. Berkoff can’t forget Olivier was a force, a power that changed his life. One he first experienced when he was an acting student with little interest in Shakespeare until he saw Olivier on film.
“I was never into Shakespeare at all as a youth,” he told me. “I didn’t know anything about Shakespeare. Only when I started drama school—I had a limited education and when I went to an evening class for working men and women, they said, ‘You have to audition you know, Shakespeare.’ So I suddenly started looking and reading and studying Shakespeare. But I didn’t have any kind of, you know, revelatory experience really, except when I started watching Olivier’s films.
“I watched his Richard, his Hamlet, and his Othello and I thought they were unbelievable. I thought they were almost like something transcendental. I found his performances beyond human. I thought they were something of such an extraordinary power it made me feel that acting could be one of the world’s great arts, greater than anything.
“It was that experience, seeing him and wanting to be him in a way, like Muhammad Ali wanted to be like Joe Louis. Olivier was my mentor, my master, I became obsessed with Olivier, totally obsessed, and I felt that his daring—what he did w
as to take the craft into a kind of an almost supernatural realm, a ferocity, an energy that I thought was just kind of quite incredible.”
Did you know him? I asked Berkoff.
“No, no, I met him once or twice but didn’t know him. I wanted to know him. I worshiped him, I dreamed of him. I was obsessed by him and I started to model myself on him. Then one day I was acting and I suddenly heard his voice coming out of my mouth and I thought, this is terrible! I’ve got to get rid of him! He possessed me like a dybbuk and I became very, very, very close, in a sense, in my spirit. And then one or two reviews mentioned me in the same breath, as if to say, ‘Like Olivier, he tried to do this,’ and I was terribly thrilled to get such a review.”
“What was that for?”
“I think it was when I did Macbeth on the radio. But that daring, Olivier’s physical daring, I got closer to him … Then for many years I’d been trying to get back to the [Royal] National Theatre [the prestigious South Bank venue founded by Olivier and Sir Peter Hall] and I thought if Olivier was there I should be there because he would appreciate me.”
The Shakespeare Wars Page 36