The play's the thing: Shakespeare as literature

99% of performances of Shakespeare are bunk. Read the stuff.

anyway he said an interesting thing: WS wz writing just 50 years after theatre began AT ALL

Isn't it true that the "original texts" that were compiled to create what we now think of as the definitive Shakespeare texts, actually were completely absent or nearly absent stage directions and indications re. performance? B/c in some sense I think Shakespeare scholars over the centuries have contributed to making his work more like literature.

Or this could all be hash and we could be addressing that crucial question posed by Matt Groening (when he was funny): "Shakespeare: was he four women?"

Also the movies.

X-post.

Well Shakespeare is more a tradition than a person in modern studies -- it's even likely that what we regard currently as William Shakespeare's plays were in fact written as collaborative efforts among more than one person. So I'm perfectly at ease with scholars having a heavy hand in forming his corpus -- especially so in academia because so much of Shakespeare studies is made up of criticism already.

Sure, there is virtue in just reading plays, but it's a very different kind of reading than other literature given that a great deal of the interpretation/presentation of a scene isn't in the text itself. This is as true for Shakespeare as it is for Christopher Durang or Neil Simon or whomever.

Ultimately the stuff is dramatic literature, which is a different beast than other literature to be sure.

I disagree that the nature of Shakespeare is in hearing the poetry any more than the true nature of Mamet is in hearing his hyper-realistic cadences and four-letter words.

I also disagree that a single person reading a play as text has necessarily fewer interpretive viewpoints. In fact, I'd go so far as to say there are more potential viewpoints. One of the things a director is doing in directing a play is forcing it into one viewpoint. (That is, unless the director is purposely trying to show more than one viewpoint... one of those "understanding the rules to be able to break them successfully" things that'd merit a new thread or just not discussing at all for simplicity's sake.) The astute reader of dramatic literature is going to be able to see how multiple readings are possible, and really reading it as dramatic literature requires being able to see that sort of thing. In other words, to read dramatic literature as its own genre separate from plays as performances, you're basically obliging yourself to understand how it allows multiple directors to stage multiple performances of the same text and tell potentially different stories.

I think the most fun to be had with Shakespeare's plays (as opposed to any of his non-dramatic writings) when simply reading them is to do it in an [albeit often suspect] historical context. Specific passages that are [thought to be] references to the times, scenes that have been [supposedly] modified to accommodate some kind of law regarding what could be done or said on stage at the time... that sort of stuff. The stuff that may or may not have anything to do with interpretation but often opens up interesting takes on the story.

I'm not saying just reading Romeo and Juliet to get the idea of what happens in the story is bunk, and I'm not saying that reading it and having an internal (single) interpretation for it is bunk. I'm saying that there's a lot more to reading dramatic literature by definition.

(It's also interesting to observe the differences between playwrights with regard to how much they force one interpretation over another in the actual writing.)

(And worth noting is that the vast majority of plays we read are not as they were written. Shakespeare's plays have often been culled from several sources to create what we are led to believe is the text he sat down and wrote, and modern plays when published in books almost always exist as a transcript of the original performance with edits from the playwright and/or director at the time the work was first staged. Modern published plays also often contain more stage directions than the originals, and the stage directions are included specifically to make the thing easier to read. Which just goes to show you that a special kind of reading is necessary for dramatic literature, and that it's one that The Man doesn't think we're up to.)

(And please, before anyone starts... if I made any kind of reference to Derrida in here, I swear on all that is holy that it was unintentional. Also, the author of this post wishes to note that any unintentional reference to Derrida in this post is not meant to be interpreted as an unconscious or de facto reference to Derrida, and any non-reference to Derrida is not meant to be interpreted as an unconscious or de facto reference to Derrida. The entire preceding sentence should also stand if the reader replaces any or all occurences of "Derrida" with the word "Shakespeare.")

My problem with most modern Shakespeare performances is that the line-readings are so stilted and unnatural-sounding. It's sad that most of the supposedly great Shakespearean actors - Burbage, Kean, Booth - are lost to us forever. The one totally successful Shakespearean film I've seen is Welles's Chimes at Midnight: aside from its value as a film, everyone sounds like they've grown up speaking the language, and the numerous necessary changes to the text work as a subtle and interesting commentary on the Henry plays, not a dumbing-down of them.

As far as I know (and I'm no Shakespeare scholar) the dominant non-nutty one is that Shakespear wrote them, but they were distributed as separate scripts to actors... No script was the complete script. They were all lines for one actor with his cues. So they had to be reconstructed later from multiple scripts and memory, etc.

What's even sadder than shitty unnatural line readings is when somebody like Branagh (who can read Shakespeare lines without sounding stilted when he wants to) takes a terrifically funny monologue in Much Ado About Nothing and completely glosses it over with a sight-gag involving a folding chair. I mean come on! Are we as an audience supposed to laugh at the antics of the chair or be insulted that we've been assumed incapable of getting the humor in the lines because we don't speak Elizabethan English.

Also, amateurist, hip hip for Welles' Othello. I've not seen the version of Hamlet you mention though.

I agree about Branagh: he's an excellent actor but he ought to get someone else to direct him. Watching that Much Ado monologue in eighth grade, incidentally, was the first time I remember "getting" Shakespeare.

Dromio of Syracuse's rant about the fat cook who thinks she's his wife in Comedy of Errors is absolutely hysterical even though there are arguably a few terms in it that are no longer stuff a modern audience would immediately recognize. But context makes them pretty obvious, and I can't imagine a sight gag like Branagh's folding chair would be necessary at all.

It looks like this thread has been kinda derailed from its original intent, but I'd still like to add that anyone who casts Keanu in a Shakespeare adaptation is already suspect before they use a folding chair gag.

For comedy, you can't beat the two great cross-dressing farces (As You Like It/Twelfth Night: always get those two mixed up) and the Falstaff scenes of Henry IV, tinged as they are with melancholy.

Also the first bit with Ajax and the runt was funny.

restricting shakespeare to text only is a species of embalming, protecting an art ideal against the silly ravages of the present (= an admission that the artwork is more fragile and weaker than the protector is declaring):

m.wood's point was i think that the project of elizabethan theatre was in a major sense — in those involved's heads at least — still new and fantastically exciting, with many alleys untrod: unlike theatre today, say (haha david hare) it attracted the ultra-hip-and-smart and the dare-all-fear-nothing

Relevant scholars are as close to a consensus as you'll ever find that Elizabethan directors deplored the use of folding chairs in sight gags.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/scourge-relatability

If Twitter is a place in which a user may be rewarded for exposing his most stupid self, Ira Glass put the medium to good use this week, when, after watching John Lithgow appear as King Lear at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, he tweeted his response: “Shakespeare sucks.” Glass admired Lithgow’s performance but thought the play flawed. “No stakes, not relatable,” he wrote. Later, he tweeted that the productions of “Richard III” and “Twelfth Night” in which he had seen Mark Rylance perform last winter had affected him similarly: “fantastic acting, surprisingly funny, but Shakespeare is not relatable, unemotional.”

lol

What was remarkable about Glass’s tweet wasn’t so much his judgment of Shakespeare’s merit but the fact that the Bard of Public Radio expressed himself like a resentful millennial filling out a teacher evaluation.

otm this is very much a students-shall-be-catered-to key word in teaching evaluations

Of course it makes sense for Glass to hold up the vague notion of “relatability” as a measure of a theatrical work’s quality. He is, after all, a documentarian, and his perspective on other kinds of representational art is probably influenced by the brand of representation on which he has built a career. As an American theatregoer, perhaps he expects to see real people when he goes to the theatre, just as he gets to see images of people pretending to be real people when he goes to the movies. Theatre is a broad church, and there’s room for realism in it, of course; there’s even room for documentarians. But by and large, for most of its history, theatre (Western or otherwise) has not been especially good at (or especially interested in) portraying real people. Shakespeare certainly wasn’t. His characters are both bigger and smaller than life – they exist alongside the everyday; they intersect with real life from time to time (and where those intersections fall may change from period to period, from performance to performance, from audience member to audience member). But an intersection is not the same as a relation, and the sympathy that the term “relatable” implies would be a massively limited response to these figures: if Lear simply makes you cry (or worse, makes you cry because you recognize yourself in him), you’re missing the point.

http://www.dispositio.net/archives/1963

this is very much a students-shall-be-catered-to key word in teaching evaluations

OTM

“fantastic acting, surprisingly funny, but Shakespeare is not relatable, unemotional.”

Wonder what he means by unemotional

People in Shakespeare plays do tend to talk to themselves about their emotions in a very knowing way, rather than try to explain their emotions, frustratedly, to other people? Is this what he's reading as 'unemotional'?

Didn't know who Ira Glass was but "Shakespeare sucks/can't relate" was just what I heard while browsing a 2nd hand shop last week. These two people were obviously on a date by the way they talked about their tastes.

Later on one of them was talking looking for a Salman Rushdie book, browsing and trying to find it, they couldn't remember the name of it..