The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  In the Cambridge performance-history edition of Romeo and Juliet, I came across something Peter Brook said about his controversial 1947 stage version, produced when Brook was just twenty-one at Stratford-on-Avon’s Memorial Theatre:

  “What I have attempted is to break away from the popular conception of Romeo and Juliet as a pretty-pretty sentimental love story and to get back to the violence, the passion and the excitement of the stinking crowds, the feud, the intrigues. To recapture the poetry and the beauty that arise from the Veronese sewer, and to which the story of the two lovers is merely incidental.”

  The two lovers are not incidental to Luhrmann, but, as in many productions, his Mercutio, here Harold Perrineau, steals the show, and watching him while writing this chapter suggested for the first time a connection I’d never made before. I’d always been fascinated not just by Mercutio but by the Mercutio type in Shakespeare, the fast-talking, mercurial, mad, bad and dangerous-to-know character. Someone, I think it was Dryden, wondered if Shakespeare had to kill Mercutio off in the midst of R&J or Mercutio might have (metaphorically) killed him, killed Shakespeare, somehow eclipsed him at least. Doom haunts the other Mercutio types in Shakespeare like Hotspur, Cassius, Hamlet, Edmund, Iago. But something more emerges from Luhrmann’s Mercutio: Mercutio as Marlowe.

  Part of it of course is the way Luhrmann casts and costumes Mercutio for the “Queen Mab” speech: in a two-piece sequined drag-queen discoball skirt and top.

  But first let me say the surprising thing about Luhrmann’s film is that he doesn’t rewrite Shakespeare. If you read along with the text while seeing the film (not the ideal first way to experience it) you see that Luhrmann has cut, often drastically, but that his actors are all speaking Shakespeare’s words. Not, as in some current adaptations such as the lamentable O (the high-school basketball team Othello), speaking high-school-equivalent words.

  Not all the verse-speaking is the best I’ve ever heard, I’ll concede. Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes don’t have the flawless verbal command of the couple in the BBC R&J, even that of Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey in the Zeffirelli version. But they do have something (especially the effortlessly radiant Claire Danes) the BBC couple lack (and Olivia Hussey has): an almost deliquescent romantic charisma. And by the time one meets them one is so charged up by Luhrmann’s opening, their blushing restraint is a welcome contrast.

  Another stunning thing Luhrmann does is with that great speech about spells in Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio’s “Queen Mab” speech, the dizzying, delirious ode to the mischievous-verging-on-malicious muse of dreams. Since dreams are such a central preoccupation of Shakespeare, since Mercutio’s Mab speech is such a signature Shakespearean tour de force, a defining actor’s moment—especially since Mercutio and the Mercutio type seem such a recurrent fascination for Shakespeare—one wonders where this comes from, this fast-talking wit whose verbal facility whips itself into a dangerous, near self-destructive madness. One finally fatal to him. Anything that does something to illuminate Mercutio and Mab is as rare and exhilarating as Mercutio himself and I have to give credit to Luhrmann’s film for the suggestion that one can find mad self-destructive, word-drunk, sword-struck Christopher Marlowe in Mercutio.

  Shakespeare’s relationship to his predecessor, the murdered genius Marlowe, is a much and bitterly debated one. When it was asked whether Shakespeare had to kill Mercutio or he would have been killed by him, the same might be said of Marlowe. Not that Shakespeare had him killed but that had he not died the Shakespearean might not have escaped the shadow of the Marlovian.

  Somehow Marlowe’s spirit seems to haunt this version. Luhrmann cannot be accused of lack of boldness: in addition to cross-dressing his Mercutio, a black (cross-racial you might say) actor, in a disco-queen outfit, he gives him a silvery acrylic Afro, heavy lipstick beneath his mustache, and has Mercutio accompany his famous declaration to Romeo, “You have been with Queen Mab,” by extracting, from a silver snuff box, a pill with an arrow-struck heart on it: a love drug.

  The other thing, among many other things actually, that Luhrmann’s R+J does, perhaps the most controversial, is to restage the ending. One perceptive thing the actor Henry Goodman said in the talk I attended is that the point of seeing and reading Shakespeare is not to find out what to think, but what to think about. And restaging the end of R+J in a way possible only on film gives one a lot to think about.

  A FINAL GLANCE?

  Staging the conclusion of Romeo and Juliet is one of the famous conundrums for Shakespearean directors, Trevor Nunn had told me. Nunn brilliantly expressed the comic impossibilities implicit in the tragic denouement in the demented road show Romeo put on by the Crummles Theatrical Troupe in the RSC’s amazing nine-hour-long Nicholas Nickleby. It’s a production that reminds us in many ways how preoccupied Dickens was with Shakespeare (not just in Nickleby either). There is in Nickleby, for instance, a parodic version of a Shakespearean textual scholar who has an idiosyncratic scheme for restoring the lost truths of Shakespeare by repunctuating it so that, for example, the “To be or not to be” soliloquy would be pronounced:

  To be or not to be that?

  Is the question, whether ’tis

  Nobler in mind… [etc.]

  But the tour de force of Dickens’s serio-comic commentary on Shakespeare in Nickleby is the Crummles’ madly hammy Romeo. It’s Dickens’s Pyramus and Thisby–type parody of Romeo and Juliet. The moment of pure genius, in particular, is the “revision” of the tragic ending.

  The always thought-provoking scholar Peter Holland begins his introduction to the Pelican edition of R&J by taking note of the tradition, dating back to Garrick, of rewriting the final scene to give Romeo and Juliet a moment together of conscious communion as they lie side by side in the Capulet tomb before their misbegotten mutual deaths.

  As you’ll recall, the plan was for Juliet to take a potion that would mimic death to avoid being married to her father’s choice, Count Paris (since she’s already been secretly married to Romeo). While the seemingly dead Juliet is installed on a bier in the Capulet “monument,” Friar Lawrence (who secretly married her to Romeo and provided the potion for Juliet) is to send word of Juliet’s fake death to Romeo, who’s been banished to Mantua (for killing Tybalt). Of course the Friar’s messenger doesn’t reach Romeo with word of the false-death-inducing potion. Instead a servant from Verona who’s not in on the scheme (Romeo rescuing the “dead” Juliet when she comes to life) reaches Romeo first and tells Romeo that Juliet is dead, as in really dead. A stricken Romeo then buys poison from a seedy apothecary, races off to Verona and breaks into the Capulet monument with the intention of killing himself by his dead lover’s side. He sees what he thinks is a dead Juliet (still under the spell of the potion), voices a farewell to her (apparently) lifeless, actually comatose, body, then takes the poison, killing himself. (If they weren’t endowed with tragic weight by the way the two lovers have stirred us in the first four acts these complications might be comic—a funereal French farce.)

  Meanwhile the well-intentioned but bumbling Friar Lawrence arrives just as Juliet awakes from the potion’s spell; they see Romeo’s dead body, Friar Lawrence flees the oncoming Watch, Juliet stabs herself in order to join Romeo in death. It has always vexed actors that Romeo and Juliet never speak to each other in this scene, never have a final love-duet so to speak, in the tomb, and recurrently some of them have sought to remedy Shakespeare’s supposed neglect by rewriting the scene to provide one.

  “At the climax of David Garrick’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet first performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on November 29, 1748,” Peter Holland writes, “Juliet wakes up in the tomb before Friar Lawrence arrives, but also, much more significantly, before Romeo has died. Romeo, forgetting for the moment that he has already taken the poison and is dying, is in raptures: ‘She speaks, she lives! And we shall still be blessed!’ For a brief moment the lovers’ passion seems able to conquer the threat of impending death. But the poison has ta
ken hold and Romeo, explaining to Juliet what has happened, cannot resist its power and dies.”

  Holland argues that, however misguided one might think it, it’s a significant recurrent impulse because it highlights Shakespeare’s conscious decision not to give the lovers a final mutually aware moment of farewell.

  Garrick even claimed it was “injudicious” of Shakespeare to have omitted “this addition to the catastrophe.” And Baz Luhrmann revives the Garrick tradition in a subtle way, Holland notes: Luhrmann’s “Juliet wakes just a few seconds too late and sees Romeo take the poison though she cannot prevent it. Appalled, the lovers have to share the recognition that nothing can be done, that Romeo will die and that Juliet must watch him die.” In other words they don’t speak, but they share a final unspoken communion.

  Does this deepen the tragedy? Does it prefigure the ambiguous suggestion of a final communion between Lear and Cordelia in the Folio version of Lear? Luhrmann, it should be noted, in his thrillingly illuminated tomb scene, doesn’t invent dialogue the way Garrick did. He invents a silent communion that the text doesn’t rule out. Just one shared conscious glance between the star-crossed lovers before they, each in their own way, succumb to their chosen form of suicide. (Luhrmann’s Juliet, seeing Romeo die, then shoots herself.) But it’s a solution to the “problem” that has bothered actors and directors for centuries, one that only really could have worked on film. A stage representation of the silent shared glances is unlikely to communicate much beyond the footlights, but with filmed close-ups Luhrmann can give us what so many stagers of R&J have longed for.

  Not everyone approves of this choice of course. Holland argues that in withholding such a moment, “the scene as Shakespeare wrote it is one of a desolate series of gaps and mistakes. As such it [the lack of a final moment of living communion between the lovers] brings to an apt conclusion the gaps and errors that have impelled it into being, one more part of the play’s exploration of the tragedy of incompletion.” I’d suggest that while Garrick’s version violates that “tragedy of incompletion,” Luhrmann’s mute mutual exchanged gaze of loss and horror could be said to have illuminated rather than contradicted Holland’s vision of Shakespeare’s “tragedy of incompletion.”

  In this context you must forgive me for digressing, but I can’t resist quoting from Trevor Nunn’s staging of the Crummles Theatrical Troupe’s R&J in Nicholas Nickleby. It’s a hilarious—and brilliantly savvy—reductio ad absurdum of the alterations that Holland criticizes: just about everybody wakes up from death. Romeo (Nicholas as played by the brilliant Roger Rees, who in this loving comic mockery of the play is somehow better than most deadly serious Romeos I’ve seen) is the first to awake.

  Juliet cries out when she sees his prostrate body, the cup of poison dangling from his grasp.

  “Romeo dead!”

  Rees as Romeo suddenly bolts up and cries, “Hold! Hold! I live!” in his most stentorian mock-theatrical, mock-nineteenth-century, melodramatic, grandiose Shakespearean style. As he proclaims in Crummles-invented dialogue:

  The potent poison coursed through my veins—

  A dizziness that I mistook for the numb torpor

  That doth presage death. But in an instant

  It hath passed!

  Suddenly it crosses his mind that the Juliet who cried out to him and woke him up was the Juliet he thought was dead, a death that had caused him to take the poison in the first place:

  “What? Juliet?!” he exclaims.

  “Romeo, thou starts!” she cries out. “I am not dead for I too drank a draft/That had the same benign effect.”

  Suddenly Count Paris (but recently stabbed to death by Romeo in a duel, at least in Shakespeare’s “original” version) awakes! What appeared to be a sword through the heart, he tells us, was but a glancing blow that “did for a moment give appearance of death.”

  Then to compound the comic resurrections and reversals of R&J, who but Mercutio should appear all hale and hardy, revealing that he too, though apparently fatally stabbed in his duel with Tybalt, had been taken away by Benvolio and cured by “surgeons of great renown.” For good measure, to compound the echt-Shakespearean reversals, Benvolio then reveals that “he” has all along been a woman disguised in men’s garb. All the risen dead and un-cross-dressed then join together in song.

  Yes, I laughed—probably as hard as I’d ever laughed in my life—but I’ve come to think of it, like Luhrmann’s version, as a kind of commentary, an exegesis of that final moment.

  But the brilliance of it, and the brilliance of Luhrmann’s far more sophisticated, subtle, troubling and perhaps even more deeply tragic glance of mutual communion between the dying lovers, is that it presses on the nerve, the node of an original highly consequential Shakespearean decision: the decision to withhold completion, withhold a Liebestod duet. Violating or elaborating on Shakespeare’s decision highlights it in a way we might not notice otherwise. And nobody has violated it so stylishly, no one has highlighted that original decision more shrewdly and beautifully, than Luhrmann’s film.

  It’s not the play, it’s a filmed adaptation. One could say the best in this kind are but shadows, or the best in this kind are but flickers. But like the best in this kind, it doesn’t tell us what to think, but what to think about.

  WELLES AND OLIVIER: RIVAL OTHELLOS

  One last thing: I want you to watch Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles act and direct dueling Othellos. Of all the many pleasures the great Shakespeare films afford, one of the rarest is that of comparing at close range the visions of great actor/directors as they make the same play into different films, different works of art.

  Such an opportunity to compare is rare, but it’s there. It’s there in the Welles and Olivier films of Othello, which are easily available from video stores, amazon.com, or Shakespeare-on-film mail order specialist “Poor Yorick” (www.bardcentral.com).

  It’s an opportunity which only became available i 1997, when Welles’s 1952 Othello was unearthed from a warehouse with a damaged soundtrack and remastered to the point where, while rough in places, it could take its place in the canon—of both Shakespeare and Welles.

  An exciting aspect of the reemergence of Welles’s film is that it makes comparison with Olivier’s 1965 version possible. This is Olivier in the film version—and with the cast—of the famous stage production Steven Berkoff raved about as breathtaking, life-changing.

  Comparing the two—both Welles and Olivier at the height of their powers (though Welles’s version was, like Chimes at Midnight, not made at the height of his fortunes)—offers some of the excitement, the meta-drama one can find in comparing the Quarto and Folio versions of Hamlet and Lear side by side.

  The resonance of the contrasting choices in each version deepens one’s sense of what the other one is doing or not doing, makes one reflect on the question of which choice is more “Shakespearean”—that recurrent question for scholars, directors and actors.

  Welles’s restored 1952 version is an expressionist nightmare. Olivier’s controversial radical blackface version is more traditional in form, more of a film of a stage play than a film per se.

  Nonetheless: Olivier! Welles! Othello! Absolutely thrilling. I loved watching both versions in succession, act by act, moment by moment. They critique and illuminate each other as performances, as genres. As visions of tragedy.

  Welles’s film is in black and white, but it is a creation of shadows. There is so much focus on barred shadows, constricting passages, twisting stairways, dank basements and precarious parapets that one almost comes to think Othello is a victim not so much of Iago, of jealousy, of his inner demons, but of architecture.

  And in fact I think that is Welles’s metaphoric vision: Othello as victim of the moral architecture of a universe of shadows that deceives, traps, imprisons and tortures noble souls. The shadowy enclosures, confusingly constructed interiors of archways, latticework, barred apertures, grim sweating stone walls, low ceilings and the characteristic cages of
light and shadows, embody Welles’s vision of a prison universe. Or one might say, a penitential universe of shadows. Alternately one could argue all that architecture was an externalization of Welles’s vision of the baroque interior architecture of human nature.

  Olivier’s Othello is filmed in color but obsessive about black and white, as in the blindingly bright-white garments he wears, obviously designed to heighten the contrast with the blackness of his heavily caked blacked-up skin.

  This is perhaps the deepest variation. In Welles’s version, shadow and darkness are the fabric of the world; for Olivier we lose that sense but are forced almost at knifepoint to face our feelings about blackness. In curious, unexpected ways both press upon the racial question in a way that Laurence Fishburne’s excellent 1995 filmed Othello (with Kenneth Branagh as Iago) doesn’t—or does so in a different way—because Fishburne is black.

  The white actors’ Othellos, the differing masks of blackness they offer the world, emphasize that Shakespeare’s Othello, Welles’s and Olivier’s Othellos, were about white conceptions—and misconceptions—about blackness, more problematic than anything that could be impersonated with makeup. Racism after all is a problem of whites, one that makeup, however thorough, reveals rather than conceals.

  Watching Olivier and then Welles; Welles, then Olivier, you suddenly find yourself wondering whether Shakespeare saw Othello in terms of shadows or starkly contrasting black and white—and the different implications of the two visions.