Don’t read Shakespeare through our modern lens.
Understand the theatrical conventions of Shakespeare’s day, and you understand Shakespeare.
One wouldn’t use Stanislavsky’s method acting to perform a play by Bertolt Brecht or Anton Artaud, and it just as quickly falls flat with Shakespeare.
Those in the know cringe when those adapting Shakespeare believe all they need is to put guns in the actors’ hands and use jaunty camera movements (à la Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet) in order to make it modern.
Yes, I agree with Peter Brook (whose The Empty Space is one of the best works on theatrical philosophy ever committed to paper) that Shakespeare productions today need to reflect the times of their performance. But that doesn’t mean naturalistic method acting to convey great orations in iambic pentameter. The poster pinup for method acting, Marlon Brando, knew that when he played Mark Antony in Mankiewicz’s 1953 film version of Julius Caesar. And he gave an electrifying true-blood thespian performance that stood out like a radiant jewel in an otherwise lacklustre production.
What Shakespeare productions need today are performances replete with their original stage conventions. The result would be a confusing, disorienting, but ultimately energising, authentic, and, by coming full circle, an original performance – one that perfectly suits our times of COVID anxiety.
When the theatres come back into business in 2021, there’s room for flourishing genius if only a few maverick thinkers and directors return to the original ways of performing Shakespeare.
What would that look like?
Well, for starters, Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists wrote their plays for an auditorium in which the audience members could see one another as clearly as they could see the events unfolding on the stage.
Light would remain constant during the performance. There was no lights-going-down moment. I love that moment in theatre. The lights go down, the curtain rises, and a hush falls upon the audience like an awed blanket. But there was no such moment in Shakespeare’s time. Dramatists would use natural or artificial light and it would remain constant throughout. Unless, of course, the sun disappeared behind a cloud. At which point, the theatrical crew would carry torches to the stage to ensure the play remained well lit.
For us, one figure fails to see another because the stage is dark (or nearly dark); for them, one figure failed to see another and therefore the stage was assumed to be dark. Dessen; ‘Elizabethan Audiences and the Open Stage: Recovering Lost Conventions
This means the audience really had to use their imagination.
If the scene took place at night, the actors, as was written on the page, would let the audience know. It didn’t matter that the sun was high over head and everything on stage was crystal clear. Illumination or not, the stage was dark in the audience’s mind.
Modern productions have some spectacular set designs. I find myself marvelling at the intricacies of a perfectly reconstructed house interior, sometimes losing myself so completely in the design that I lose the plot of what’s happening on stage. But this too was not so in Shakespeare’s time.
A garden onstage became a garden not because the scene designers had filled the stage with flowers, but because the actors, following what was written on the page, told the spectators that they were in a garden. And in that very same place, a mere moment later, that same scene would transform into a shipwreck with a fire-breathing monster making its way through the wreckage. Then two armies would fly in, a military hoard of thousands represented by four actors with swords.
Now ye shal have three Ladies walke to gather flowers, and then we must beleeve the stage to be a Garden. By and by, we heare newes of shipwracke in the same place, and then wee are to blame if we accept it not for a Rock. Upon the backe of that, comes out a hidious Monster, with fire and smoke, and then the miserable beholders are bounde to take it for a Cave. While in the meantime two Armies flye in, represented with foure swords and bucklers, and then what harde heart will not receive it for a pitched fielde? Sidney; ‘An Apologie for Poetrie’
This is not academic posturing and theorising. Look to the texts of the time and you’ll find countless examples of writers, thinkers, and theatre-lovers commenting upon these conventions. Even a century after Shakespeare’s death, we have Samuel Johnson drawing our attention to such conventions. Why? Because it influences how we read and perform Shakespeare.
the spectators are always in their senses and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players (Johnson’s preface to 1765 edition of Shakespeare’s plays)
When you’re reading a Shakespearean play (which is the second best choice of consumption, inferior to watching a performance live), you may become dismayed and disillusioned with his genius because it doesn’t seem real enough. Don’t try to imagine the scene as though it were a Hollywood movie.
When you’re playing Shakespeare’s plays in your mind, see them like a play. See a stage. See actors. See costumes. See the other spectators by your side.
Time and again, Shakespeare’s characters will consciously point out the theatrical stage conventions of the time. Look at Prospero’s final speech in The Tempest:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-cappd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
We could talk for hours about how the shaman-like creator-type wizard of Prospero is really Shakespeare the writer in disguise. But just look at that reference to the globe. The character is talking about the earth, but you’d better believe that the spectators watching The Tempest in the Globe Theatre would have taken a good look around the theatre – one moment using their imaginations to paint the scenes unfolding on the stage, the next having the fabric of the stage ripped away from them.
The curtain going down and the lights going up were created by words enunciated on the stage.
This is Prospero saying the play is over. It’s now time to leave these little fantasy behind.
This is not a one-off either. Hamlet does a similar thing in drawing attention to the stage:
it goes heavily with my disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a
sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave
o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth
nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.
One of my favourite, and in my opinion most striking, displays of how Shakespeare uses words to build his stage scenery comes in King Lear when Edgar leads the blind Gloucester up a huge hill. Except it’s not a hill. He’s only pretending. And stagings of this scene always look ridiculous. They’re supposed to look ridiculous. But they would be exactly the same staging in Shakespeare’s time even if the hill were supposed to be real. And in that context it wouldn’t look ridiculous.
Here Shakespeare is self-consciously poking fun at the stage conventions.
In fact, next time you read King Lear, next time you read Othello too, read these great plays as though Shakespeare were challenging you personally to question what you see, hear, feel, believe.
Glou. When shall I climb to th’ top of that same hill?
Edg. You do climb up it now. Look how we labor.
Glou. Methinks the ground is even.
Edg. Horrible steep. Hark, do you hear the sea?
[…]
Edg. Come on, sir, here’s the place; stand still. How fearful
And dizzy ‘tis, to cast one’s eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles. Half way down
Hangs one that gathers sampire, dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.
The fishermen that [walk] upon the beach
Appear like mice
Audiences in Shakespeare’s time were more adept at what the poet Coleridge called the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’. This means that the audience acknowledge that the events are not real, but they trust and faithfully give their imaginations over to the play.
This is the same for readers of poetry and novels. They make a deal with the writer: I’m going to use my imagination to see everything you want me to, and I’ll give you some leeway with this, and you just make sure you tell me a damn good story.
We’ve lost this ability in our age of Netflix Originals, booming soundtracks, and CGI that we cannot distinguish from reality. Today’s entertainment makes no demands on us as readers, watchers, consumers. It has turned us lazy and passive. And the time is ripe for a return to the stage conventions of Shakespeare’s day.
Imagine a production today that really asks us to suspend our disbelief, rather than a half-hearted attempt at actually making us see the unseeable.
I saw one production of Henry V that tried its best to really make the audience believe a vivid display of the Battle of Agincourt. But you can never faithfully represent such a scene, unless you’re Peter Jackson with a Lord of the Rings sized budget, and any attempt to do so is bound to fall flat.
Wouldn’t it be better to strip it all bare and genuinely plea with the audience to do their best to furnish the scene themselves? That is, in fact, how it was originally written. Check out the prologue to Henry V:
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
[…] Can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
[…]
Turning th’ accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass
[…]
Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who, Prologue-like, your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.
Now check out Shakespeare cashing in that request when he needs it:
Work, work your thoughts, and therein see a siege’
‘eche out our performance with your mind
(Henry V; III)
So here’s my request for you, the excited reader of Shakespeare:
See the stage. See yourself in the auditorium. See your own imagination at work.
And here’s my request for you, the ambitious producer or director of Shakespeare:
Demand more of your audience. Strip your production budget to the bone. Lean into the words.