“DEAD ON MY LIFE,” cries the princess in Love’s Labour’s Lost.
In an instant, her world changes and, if the line is well performed, so does
ours. Performing lines such as this, the actor experiences a kind of
vertiginous rush.
Like a matador, Shakespeare flashes the vulnerable against the dangerous. The
effect is heady and precipitous. Broken down, this is classic juxtaposition,
but in performance it is something more visceral, that can only really be
experienced out loud, at full tilt.
Michael Boyd, the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company,
encourages us to read aloud in his foreword to Jonathan Bate and Eric
Rasmussen’s new William Shakespeare: Complete Works(commissioned
by the RSC to celebrate its year of performing all of the plays — some in
language far from Shakespeare’s).
He is right, because the roots of the language lie in its sound. Shakespeare’s
towering achievement was to transform ordinary speech into poetry that
sounded like ordinary speech.
In performance, the actor can make the audience’s hearts beat faster by a
combination of rhythm and sense. The language releases different meanings
depending on the speaker, his preoccupations, his imagination, his politics,
the pace, the context, the balance of the performance.
The excitement lies between what might be normal and what is at stake. Rhythm
is the key to the unconscious, affecting actor and audience, both caught in
the disjoint between chaotic feeling and formal speech.
No writer demands so much from the actor — to deliver such sophisticated
thought under such duress for so long — as Shakespeare. The discovery of
character comes from this rhythmical disjoint and it takes a physical
understanding of the part to find it. Actors, therefore, can often solve
what academics cannot.
This language, in its pirouetting flamboyance, is oral, on the cusp of
literature. New meanings occur in the very sound of the words, so silent
analysis and the actual action of muscle and tone often reveal different
conclusions. Take Lear’s famous line: “Never, never, never, never, never!”
It is entirely up to the actor to find the heart of that pure emotion and
its success will depend on the balance of the whole performance being right.
The variation is astonishing — the fractured modern speech of two murderers
sharing a line of verse: Macbeth: When?
Lady Macbeth: Now Macbeth: As I descended? Lady Macbeth: Ay; the easy flow of
the large mind in Rosalind’s long prose sentences: No, No, Orlando, men are
April when they woo December when they wed, maids are May when it is May but
the sky changes when they are wives; or the intense intelligence in the
irony of Cleopatra’s: “Dost thou not see my baby at my breast That sucks the
nurse to sleep?” are all played in states of emergency with the emotional
target built into the line. It is a balancing act that asks much of the
actor’s elasticity, alertness and practice.
Early on in the process, however, the actor meets the text on the page.
Generations of editors and scholars have helped to nourish this often
daunting meeting with explanations and alternatives.
There is a moment in the rehearsal room when the actor lays down the text,
having swallowed the part, and starts to “fit the action to the word, the
word to the action”. In a way the actor and director pick up where the
editor left off, and editing continues into the rehearsal process — no
longer the editing of words, but of meaning and the space between the words
and the scenes.
Actors like to come to Shakespeare with the joy of a postmodern freedom to
know that we can do what we like with the texts — and they with us — so that
a polarisation between scholarship and the theatre can remain. Theory and
analysis can inhibit those trying to recover the immediacy and relevance of
the plays through performance.
Bate’s modern fluency and imagination have made him the star mediator between
these positions. He has named the preoccupations that we have mapped on to
the plays and become the Baptist to Shakespeare for our time, paving the way
for a new understanding for the “texting” generation. He now joins the line
of those who have climbed the Eiger of editing.
This compendium has a complicated beginning. Shakespeare sold off his
manuscripts to his theatre, who published cheap copies for readers in folded
papers called “quartos”. But he may also have revised his work, so we shall
never know whether the line in the first quarto of Hamlet — “To be
or not to be, ay, that is the point” — was his first intent or a bastardised
copy.
By the time that Shakespeare died at the age of 52, 18 of his plays were
extant in various versions, and another 18 were not published at all. In
1594 he had joined with John Hemmings and Henry Cundell to form a theatre
company, The Chamberlain’s Men (later the King’s Men), and it was to these
colleagues that the task fell, some seven years after his death, of
gathering together the published and unpublished writings. The company
compared the rough pirated and rewritten quartos with the manuscripts and
theatre prompt books to formulate the first “Folio”. This was a consensus,
containing almost the complete works, apart from Pericles and the
poems.
They started with The Tempest, his last play, and continued with the
Histories (in real-life order, rather than chronology of writing). Bate,
Rasmussen and their team have kept this order as the basis for their
modernised volume, the production of which involved some 15 years of
man-hours.
They make some gentle, if remarkable, intrusions, not least reverting Imogen’s
name in Cymbelineto “Innigen”, which was not in the First Folio.
How this will play out is a matter of time.
In my experience, we have enjoyed changes in the editing world. At the RSC,
for years we used the Arden Shakespeare, a comprehensive glossary
with alternative readings and often the quarto scenes printed in full at the
bottom of the page. Then came the Penguin and Oxford series, also based on
composite versions.
Bate praises the tenacity of his predecessors, but suggests that the nearer we
get to the Folio, the nearer we are to the plays as performed by the
Elizabethans.
What we see on the page is a clear upgrade. Capital letters have been removed
from nouns, “e”s taken off the end of words, spellings modernised and a
glossary added of words that our century feels a need to have explained.
There will always be a compromise between a text for reading and a template
for performance. The needs of actor, reader and academic vary — explanations
useful for readers sometimes do not correlate. For example the word “rare”
is glossed as “unusual”. But this does not evoke what Shakespeare might mean
by “rare” which, even in its sound, has more precious overtones.
The actor’s job is to play the multiple meanings. Obscurity gives way to
clarity after a hunt for sense, rather than by explanation. Actors like to
hunt in the nooks and crannies of ambiguity. The peculiar hard-to-pronounce
misspellings are part of the patina of experience. Actors need to be
reminded that we must reach back to a more innocent time, when words carried
a dynamic weight and not just colloquial meaning.
Bate also includes eccentric stage directions, such as “indicates Lucentio and
winks at him” which may orientate the reader or student, but carry the dead
hand of old-fashioned production values.
However, these texts remanifest themselves for each generation, possessing the
miraculous capacity to be reinterpreted and to reinterpret us. The striking
of a line at an accurate angle makes us hear the anvil of the human heart.
Reading Shakespeare plugs one into the phenomenon that Shakespeare himself
could never have expected. He sounds a gong that has reverberated down the
centuries; we vibrate with it and pass it on.
This doorstop of a book is a triumphant addition to our times. I understand
that for the predictive texting generation “book” can mean “cool”. To them I
say: This is a “book” book.
RSC WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE COMPLETE WORKS
edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen Macmillan, £30; 2,486pp
£27 (free p&p) 0870 1608080 timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
Birthday boy
Our best guess at Shakespeare’s date of birth is April 23, 1564 — three days
before his recorded baptism. His birthday was first celebrated in 1824 with
a procession through Stratford-upon-Avon.
This year celebrations in Stratford run until April 30, and include street
theatre, dancing and lectures. Details from shakespeare.org or 01789 415536.
Shakespeare’s Globe in London SE1 is hosting a mini festival from April 21-23,
the highlight of which will be a Venetian-style masked procession through
Southwark. Visit shakespeares-globe.org or call 020-7902 1400
