The Shakespeare Project

As with The Playlist, the rules are simple: one track for every production, so long as it captures something of the essence of the play (or production).

All’s well that ends well: Shakespeare’s Romances as restoratives

This essay was first published online at thespellofwakinghours in December 2013.

Thou met’st with things dying,
I with things newborn.

Old Shepherd, The Winter’s Tale (III.3)

I.

Of the four genres that Shakespeare’s plays can be broken into, it is the final group that is perhaps the most maligned and misunderstood. Yet it is this very same group that perhaps holds the keys to unlocking the humanism at the heart of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. These four plays, the ‘Romances’ – comprising Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest – are generally believed to have been written between 1608 and 1612. When viewed together, they form a valediction to one of the most consistently human and moving bodies of work in the modern-English literature canon, and are characterised by their almost fairytale-like plots and structures, and almost-absurdly contrived turns of events that carry them from one incredible scene to the next. Read as a progressive series of Chinese boxes, this quartet (or quintet, as I shall suggest) forms a coda to the plays, poems and sonnets that have come before them. There is a restoration of balance at their heart, a distinct sense of regaining an inherent aesthetic equilibrium, one that sets out to right wrongs; like Prospero at the conclusion of The Tempest, they seem to be asking readers and audiences alike, “As you from crimes would pardon’d be, Let your indulgence set me free.”

Why Shakespeare

The glib answer is, of course, ‘Why not?’

But the proper, longer – real – answer goes a little something like this.

Four hundred and fifty years ago, a boy was born in Stratford Upon Avon, the son of a glove maker and wool merchant. He studied a little Latin (and less Greek) at the local grammar school, and discovered the power of storytelling, the joy in making things up and sharing them. After marrying and becoming a father to a daughter, Susannah, he disappears from history for about a decade – what he was doing or where he went no one really knows. Theories abound, but they’re just stories when it boils down to it, his very stock in trade. We can only guess, but we know what happened next.

He wrote plays, sonnets, poems. He loved and learnt, listened; lived. Within the wooden O of the great Globe itself, he created kingdoms for a stage, had outcasts to act and monarchs to behold his swelling scenes. He captured the soul of the age in such a way no one before or since has ever come close.

He wrote before dictionaries in their strictest sense were a dream, though books of words were being compiled in their own respective manners. He created words as he needed them, and we still use them. Spellings were erratic at the best of times, because there was no accepted way of spelling any one single word. Spellings were influenced by accent, dialect, speaker and the ear of the person writing it down, hence the reason his name is spelt diversely in various records.

Every other contender for the authorship theory falls flat on their face when you realise that Shakespeare wrote for a group of actors – the Chamberlain’s (and then King’s) Men – and every role was specifically tailored to an individual’s talents. There are no small roles, the old adage goes, only small actors, and for Shakespeare’s troupe, there was no such thing as a small actor. Forget unimaginative theories like the necessity for him to have been learned at university, a soldier, a merchant, a Moor, a braggart, a thief, a king; forget the need to have travelled to the continent and further abroad: he had every bit of knowledge he could ever want at his finger tips, the most powerful repository for every scrap of recollection he could ever collect. He had two ears and an incredible memory, and learnt at a young age to listen, to savour details, to remember and save and scrounge scraps wherever you could find them. He listened, and in doing so, created worlds from words.

He was a genius, but only insofar that geniuses are merely a focussing lens for a collective group of dreamers, thinkers and practitioners. Each role was tailored to a specific actor because they created their role from the ground up, everyone making scenes from scratch, while Shakespeare beautified them, clarified their dramatic arc and rhythm.

He wrote for a blank stage, devoid of any decisive elements of set, yet his worlds are as rich as Breughel’s or Hogarth’s. He used words words words to create his pictures, and if you can’t imagine them, then perhaps it’s not his fault.

He wrote before dramaturgy was a thing, before there was any modern – let alone post-modern – way of seeing theatre. We may see holes in his characterisations, his plots perhaps seem implausible, and his endings often leave us feeling confounded, but that is because we are looking at his plays four hundred and fifty years later. After four hundred and fifty years of dramaturgical thinking, as ways of thinking about dramatic forms and principles have changed and evolved.

He did not write roles for exclusively male actors. Some of his greatest roles are his Cleopatra and his Lady Macbeth, who both make their male foils look rather weak in comparison. His Rosalind is a joy, while his Juliet is naïvely worldly. He was writing in a time when women were not allowed on stage. It wasn’t so much that there was a law explicitly forbidding it (that had, in time, been lifted); it was just the convention. Boy-apprentices played female roles, while the share-holding members of the troupe played the other meatier roles.

Four hundred and fifty years ago, there was no such thing as racially prejudiced casting, or gender-biased casting. There were simply a group of actors in a troupe – typically white men – and roles were created for them. There is nothing in the world stopping gender- and racially-blind casting from being implemented across the globe today in every production. Nothing, except perceived ‘convention’, absurdly-ingrained tradition, and small-minded didacticism.

Shakespeare wrote humans, not characters. He understood human psychology better than perhaps any dramatist or writer before or since. He understood jealousy, love, madness, sickness, health, youth, old age, beauty, truth, deceit; humans. Us.

Shakespeare is bulletproof, foolproof, idiot-proof; indestructible. You can cut up his works, rearrange them, bowdlerise them to buggery and back; you can adapt them, conflate them, transpose them, savagely edit them down, but they still bounce back. In the eighteenth century, English theatre adapted (or Bowdlerised) every Shakespeare play they could lay their hands on to fit their accepted conventions of dramatic form: tragedies were rewritten to have happier endings, comedies were conflated and edited, histories were sidelined, and the great tragic roles were reprised time and time again by the same actors, well into their old age. What we are doing to Shakespeare now is nothing new. We can edit and adapt his plays until our heart is content, but we have to remember it is not new. Shakespeare did it himself.

‘Shakespeare’ is not a brand name; his is not an icon synonymous with, nor a byword for, quality. Each play needs to be renegotiated and tackled head-on with every new production, with every passing day. ‘Shakespeare,’ as a catch-all term for his collected works, cannot be left on a shelf or revered on a pedestal otherwise he and it will become stale, a museum piece; his importance will not be reasserted.

Like the other great masters of Western culture, be it in art, literature, science, music, history, there is a reason why they are the masters. No one before or since has done what Shakespeare did in such a short space of time. No one. In just twenty-odd years, Shakespeare wrote thirty-seven plays, one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, and several poems (and that’s just what we are certain of).

Like it or not, Shakespeare is responsible for much of the dramatic ancestry which informs our contemporary theatre practices today. He changed the way we think about characters, about plots, about stories; about cause and effect, about motivations, scenes, dramatic arcs, beats and moments. He gave actors advice and mercilessly parodied his own contemporaries, and he never shirked away from challenging the status quo, though he was always careful to do it at one or two removes, often in a place calling itself Rome.

Why Shakespeare, you’ll ask me. Because he was human, I’ll answer. Because he understood what it is to be human, what it is to be mankind in all of our crazy, passionate, fluctuating, contradictory and compulsive moods. He understood what motivates us, what rash deeds we may do when we let our instinct overtake our senses. He understands us, because he was one of us. He lived four hundred-odd years ago, yet he understands us better than we sometimes do ourselves.

Why Shakespeare, you’ll ask.

Because he was Will.

And where there’s a Will, there is always a way.

Cardenio, or A Lost Play Found?

Poster for the RSC's 2011 production of
'Cardenio: Shakespeare's Lost Play Reimagined'

There’s a satirical news story going around the internet at the moment that the lost play Cardenio has been found, printed, in the personal collection of a recently deceased English Lord. The ‘holy grail’ of literature, [The History of] Cardenio is a play written in 1612-13 by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, and dramatises an episode in Cervantes’ Don Quixote. The story has appeared numerous times over the past fortnight, yet the reportage doesn’t change. At least seventeen days too late to be an April Fool’s hoax, I wouldn't doubt if the story is in fact an elaborate kind of meta-hoax designed to celebrate Shakespeare’s four-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday.

Finding Cardenio is akin to discovering Father Christmas doesn’t exist, or that the grass isn’t in fact greener on the other side of the hill. I love the idea of Shakespeare collaborating on a play adapted from Don Quixote; I’d love to know what Shakespeare thought of Cervantes’ story – I’d like to think he was rather quite taken with it, if a little apprehensive, but delighted with its erroneous knight, his portly squire and their wide travails across the length and breadth of Spain.

Part of my fascination with the story of Cardenio, as written by Shakespeare and Fletcher, comes from not knowing the play, from not having the Jacobean play-text to hand; comes from not being certain of its contents, composition or plot, apart from its entries in the Stationer’s register, court records for the Christmas period of 1612-13, and the accounts kept by John Heminges for the King’s Men. While we do have a seventeenth century adaptation of the play, published as Double Falsehood, or the Distrest Lovers, the fact we don’t have the original is all the more reason to dream, to conjecture, to rhapsody and to imagine. Sometimes it’s best not to have all the answers; sometimes it’s better to not know everything; sometimes the world is a richer place for muses of fire that transcend the heavens of invention…

The Winter’s Tale

Bell Shakespeare, 2014

Photo by Michele Mossop for Bell Shakespeare.

Read more.

Cymbeline

NIDA, 2013

Image by Catherine Steele.

Set upon a series of tiered white planes, this Cymbeline foregrounded Shakespeare’s jagged and uncompromising prose, his torturously fractured speech-rhythms and borderline incomprehensible plot. Not because the actors, all second-year acting students, were anything less than superb, but simply because it is such a strange play. The actors carried the play with aplomb, making the lines that extra bit clearer, doing their utmost in their beautifully designed and tailored jackets and dresses and skirts to make the play as believable, as real, as possible. One of his Romances, Cymbeline’s ending – another classic revelatory ‘wonder-upon-wonder’ scene – can seem rather awkward and implausible on the page. Here, under the direction of Tom Wright, the scene – indeed, the production – was measured, carefully timed and beautifully judged; what could have fallen over itself became moving, and the grace with which it was played fed reversely back through the previous two-and-a-bit hours, leaving us drained, ours brain fizzing as we tried to make sense of the whole crazy mad tale.

Pericles

Bell Shakespeare, 2009

Photo by Wendy McDougall for Bell Shakespeare.

Wearing its collaboration with percussion group TaikOz on its sleeve, John Bell’s production of Pericles was a whirl of colour and rhythm, full of the ebb and flow or the ocean, bound within a dream of a Japanese fable. From old Gower’s couplet-rhymed prologue and interludes to the raucous and unsettling humour of the brothel scene, to its wonder-upon-wonder conclusion, Julie Lynch’s costumes and set were drenched with an oceanic aesthetic, crowned by the haunting shipwreck scene. If memory serves, this was the first Bell Shakespeare production I saw and still that shipwreck haunts me. It was so simple, so poetic, so visually compelling and clever that you couldn’t help but watch in awe. And while I might not remember much else of the production, I have no doubt the image of Marcus Graham’s Pericles drowning will stay with me for a long time yet.