The Shakespeare Wars Read online

  And it includes as well certain techniques of Shakespearean film—however anachronistic it might seem to view film as an Originalist mode. Peter Hall, for instance, spoke of the way Shakespeare’s original, virtually bare-stage theater spaces at the Globe and Blackfriars allowed—in their very bareness, blankness and lack of cumbersome scenery and sets that had to be shunted off and on—the lightning-like “cinematic” jump cuts that Shakespeare built into his dramas, ones that would take you in an instant from Caesar’s Tiber to Cleopatra’s Nile.

  But this sequence on origins really ought to begin with that night with Peter Hall, with that original table-pounding, grape-and-adrenaline-fueled tirade.

  “THE NAKED SHAKESPEARE”

  Though the subject of verse-speaking has “got his adrenaline going,” he says, Hall hardly seemed the sort to need any artificial boost in adrenaline levels. Then past seventy, he was still a whirling dervish of theatrical fecundity and Falstaffian appetite. He’d just flown in from Denver, where he’d directed his massive ten-play, ten-and-a-half-hour Greek-myth marathon known as Tantalus, written by his longtime RSC collaborator John Barton. The two of them had made the RSC famous in the early sixties with another kind of marathon—their epic staging of Shakespeare’s history plays under the rubric The Wars of the Roses.

  And after a casting session for Troilus and Cressida here, he would fly to L.A. to direct Romeo and Juliet at the Ahmanson Theatre, after which he returns to New York to rehearse Troilus for an April opening at the Theater for a New Audience.

  Jeffrey Horowitz, artistic director of TNA, had asked me if I’d like to appear on a panel about Troilus with Sir Peter and others, and so I ended up joining the two of them to discuss the play over dinner at a cozy Hudson Street place called the Greenhouse.

  Troilus, of course, is perhaps the most bitter play Shakespeare wrote. For centuries, it had been a minority taste because it’s so vicious and dark, but really, who in our time could not love a play that ends with a dying pimp wishing his venereal diseases upon the audience?

  It’s a play so relentlessly caustic and corrosive, so bleak and melancholy, it’s almost as if it were written not in ink but in black bile. But it’s fun, too, to see all the piety that Western culture has lavished upon mythic, Homeric warrior-heroes such as Achilles and Agamemnon lampooned as wickedly and savagely as Shakespeare does in Troilus. One way to think of Troilus is not merely as a satiric revision of Chaucer’s lovely Troilus and Criseyde, but as Shakespeare’s disillusioned and hostile rewrite of the romanticism ofRomeo and Juliet, played by a cast of fools and degenerates from Homer.

  As Sir Peter summed up its unappetizing cast of characters that evening: “Troilus is in many respects a fool, Cressida a manipulative tart, Ulysses a very scheming, amoral politician; Pandarus is a pimp; Agamemnon’s a fool; Ajax is a dope; Achilles is a narcissistic, irresponsible queen. I mean, one could go on. You know, if you asked a Broadway producer whether we should do this, he’d say no. He’d say—”

  “Where’s the love?”

  He laughs. “Pandarus—I mean, please, that last speech …”

  Pandarus’ final speech: it takes place after Troilus has been betrayed by Cressida, after the one unblemished hero in the play, Hector, is killed and mutilated on the field before Troy, and Troilus takes out his rage at Cressida’s betrayal by striking Pandarus. End of play. At which point Pandarus steps forward—much as Puck does at the end of the Dream. But not with a humble plea, rather with a curse. Pandarus steps forward from the world of Troy, the world of the play, and turns upon the audience and addresses them directly, addresses them as if they were fellow pimps:

  “O traders and bawds, how earnestly are you set a-work, and how ill requited! Why should our endeavor be so lov’d and the performance so loath’d?”

  After some further abuse, again addressing the audience as fellow pimps, he foretells his own death:

  Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade,

  Some two months hence my will shall here be made.

  It should be now, but that my fear is this,

  Some galled goose of Winchester would hiss.

  Winchester was a precinct that permitted prostitution; “a galled goose” is a whore covered with venereal sores—sweet, no? Then the final vicious couplet:

  Till then I’ll sweat and seek about for eases,

  And at that time bequeath you my diseases.

  I asked Sir Peter for a reaction to a question Shakespearean biographers have been debating about Troilus: “Do you think Troilus reflects some sort of Shakespearean nervous breakdown into a kind of utter, bitter bleakness, or is it the play when the mask drops and the bleakness that was always there in Shakespeare makes itself apparent?”

  “I think that’s the reality, yes,” he says, meaning the latter. “I think it’s the reality. I think he wrote two plays with an absolute, arrogant indifference to the public or whether the public liked them or understood them. And one is Troilus and the other is Hamlet. I mean, Hamlet lasts four hours fifteen minutes. And he didn’t care a fuck. ‘Really,’ he said, ‘this is what I want to write.’ And with Troilus—”

  “He gave Pandarus that last speech, wishing venereal disease on the audience.”

  “Oh, amazing,” he says. “I mean, that is a man who hates his audience. Really.”

  “So this is the naked Shakespeare, do you think?”

  “I think it is the naked Shakespeare, yes. Because there’s something of the same note in Timon of Athens. But there’s nothing bleaker, I think, in the whole canon than Troilus. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries couldn’t abide the play. I mean, the Enlightenment—[Troilus] reduces the whole of human life to lechery and war, and the Victorians were shocked out of their minds by it.”

  The naked Shakespeare: Perhaps we’ll never know if this Shakespeare, the Shakespeare of Troilus, is a more true and authentic Shakespeare—the “original” Shakespeare—than the one of Romeo and Juliet or As You Like It, or just another mask.

  But there is a way, Sir Peter believes, to get closer to the language in which that nakedness is clothed. If dreams are “the royal road to the unconscious,” as Freud maintained, then verse-speaking, line structure—those “Poel principles” Sir Peter devoutly believes in and crusades for, the ones that he believes return us to origins, Shakespeare’s original intention for speaking and staging his work, the ones that “get his adrenaline going”—are the royal road to Shakespeare’s soul. In any case, it was the Royal Shakespeare Company’s royal road from its founding in 1959, for the fifteen years Sir Peter presided over it, a period that revolutionized Shakespearean staging until he left to take over the Royal National Theatre from Laurence Olivier.

  And it all comes down to those Poel principles, he says.

  THE STATIONMASTER’S SON

  The Poel principles: “Only fifty actors who know the Poel principles?” I asked.

  “And about a half-dozen directors, and that’s it,” he said. “The actors are all avid for it; directors aren’t. Directors tend to pretend to know about verse when they don’t.”

  William Poel (1852–1934) sought to replace the leaden pace of plays originally played on bare stages with rapid, fluid scene changes. Poel and his disciples, such as Harley Granville-Barker, and supporters such as George Bernard Shaw sought to restore what they believed made Shakespearean staging so unique—those fluid lightning-like scene changes that anticipated cinema. (Many of the first printed texts of Shakespeare’s plays are almost completely without act and scene divisions, just entrances and exits—implying that the action should be continuous—or at least not formally, laboriously, divided up.)

  Even more important, Poel sought to restore what he believed to be the way Shakespeare was originally spoken, “trippingly on the tongue,” as Hamlet tells the Players, rapidly but in a way that preserved the pentameter rhythm and the “line structure.”

  Enter Peter Hall. He was born in 1930, the son of a railway station-master, something
I find fascinating for someone who is famous for wanting to make the verse run on time, so to speak; to make it follow a rhythm he might have become attuned to from the iambic beat of the steam-engine pistons, or the click-clack of the tracks. (The celebrated Shakespearean voice coach Patsy Rodenburg compares the iambic beat to the heartbeat—the lub/DUP, lub/DUP.) It turns out that his father’s occupation was crucial to his finding his calling in Shakespeare, he tells me: a free rail pass permitted him to travel to London at an early age to see a lot of theater, but his life changed when he was twelve years old and saw John Gielgud’s legendary Hamlet.

  The transformative moment occurred in Cambridge. “I saw Gielgud play Hamlet in 1942 when I was twelve, and that was what fixed me. I saw Olivier play Richard III and Ralph [Richardson] play Falstaff; Peggy Ashcroft.” He still prefers Gielgud’s Hamlet over Olivier’s more famous film performance, he says: “The problem with Olivier’s Hamlet on film is that [the way he played the prince] he would have killed Claudius very quickly. He’s too direct. There’s this forty-year-old man who would obviously kill anybody.”

  And Gielgud?

  “Oh, tortured, tortured. But I never—I mean, I was friends with them both and I worked with them both later, but I never took the view they were opposite poles. They’re much more like each other than they gave out.” An emotional iambic—complementary elements, with different stresses, but the same heartbeat.

  And Ralph Richardson’s Falstaff?

  “Oh, probably the best performance I’ve ever seen. He was great, great—greatest actor I’ve ever seen.”

  Charged up by these electrifying performances, Hall went to Cambridge as an undergraduate in order to learn how to direct Shakespeare. There he encountered two major literary figures who influenced the way he’d do it: F. R. Leavis, who inculcated an attentiveness to the text, to close reading; and George Rylands, a disciple of William Poel whom Hall met as a member of the influential Cambridge Marlowe Society.

  “It [the Marlowe Society] was started in 1907, the idea being to speak Shakespeare as Poel taught it and bring Shakespeare back to the clarity Poel preached. George Rylands, by the time I got there, which was forty years later, was the don in charge and he taught all of us—John Barton, Trevor Nunn, Jonathan Miller, Richard Eyre—the principles of Poel’s verse-speaking.” It is a stunning list, those Poel disciples, some of the greatest Shakespearean directors of the past century.

  There are two chief elements to the Poel principles of verse-speaking, and Peter Hall is known far and wide for the first one, for what some have called “iambic fundamentalism,” his stress on respecting the five-beat da-DUM, da-DUM meter in speaking Shakespearean verse. And he hasn’t retreated from that one bit, even if it’s responsible for a reported esthetic rift with his collaborator John Barton, who has dared to depart from Hall’s strict fundamentalism with his emphasis not on the pause but on the antithesis—the way Shakespeare builds “speech structure,” you might say, upon the foundation of oppositional pairs such as—at its most basic—“To be or not to be.”

  But during dinner Hall’s emphasis was less on the internal iambic stresses of the line and more on the second element in Poel’s verse-speaking dictates: the line-ending pause that defines and preserves what he calls “line structure”: the integrity of the single line of Shakespearean verse as an esthetic unity. It’s all about the pause at the end, regardless of whether the line is “enjambed”—that is, when the sense or “natural progression” of a sentence or clause runs around the end of a line.

  The principles of line structure “are very simple,” Hall told me that evening: “You breathe on the end of a line; you never breathe in the middle. You think of it as a whole line, not as a series of words. You find where the meter makes your accent, which is usually alliterative.” He’s speaking of “accent” as opposed to “stress”—not the five stressed syllables in the ten-syllable iambic line. By accent he means those words in a line which receive a special stress.

  To illustrate, he intones Antonio’s famous opening line from The Merchant of Venice: “In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.”

  “ ‘Sooth’ and ‘sad’ are the accented words,” he says. As I understand Hall, such dictates are not designed to regiment reading in a metrical strait-jacket, but to allow the internal dynamics counterpoised within the line to emerge, to allow the relationships between sound, stress and sense implicit in the ordering to blossom, to allow notes to merge as chords rather than jangle in discord. Indeed, Hall prefers to refer to the Shakespearean text as “the score” or the “scoring” (he’s directed numerous operas as well), and it’s only proper verse-speaking that, he believes, can unlock the musical potential in each line of the score.

  “You can’t appreciate Mozart if you play the wrong notes or the wrong tempo; you’ve got to start by getting that bit right.”

  And a delicate pause at the end of each line is essential to line structure. In his recent book Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players, Hall refines the reference so it’s no longer a “pause” but “a tiny sense break (not a stop).” A more delicate, elegant interval than a naked “pause” suggests.

  Hall recited the opening lines of Troilus and Cressida as an example:

  In Troy, there lies the scene. From isles of Greece [pause]

  The princes orgulous, their high blood chaf’d, [pause]

  Have to the port of Athens sent their ships … [pause]

  “Now if you run on around the line ends, you don’t understand it.”

  EXPOSED BY THE MASK

  The trouble in reconstructing the original form of Shakespearean acting, the original form of Shakespearean anything, is the tragic historical pause, really a gap: the closing of the theaters in 1642 by order of the Puritan Parliament (which thought the playhouse Satan’s playground), a gap that lasts some two decades until the Restoration relaxed the ban.

  Up till the 1640s most of those who played Shakespeare could do so with the living memory of how it was played and spoken in Shakespeare’s own lifetime, often by Shakespeare’s own company of players.

  By the 1660s anyone who saw Hamlet when it was first performed in 1601 or so would likely be in his eighties at least; there were very few actors whose careers spanned the gap and almost none from Shakespeare’s time. (I suppose you could imagine one of the boy actors who played women in Shakespeare’s company tutoring an actor in the 1660s.)

  I’ve mentioned the conjecture about an “Unbroken Chain of Hamlets”—the theory that at least one actor who saw the first Hamlet, Richard Burbage, then played Hamlet and was then seen playing Hamlet by another actor, who was then seen playing Hamlet by a person who would have seen the person who saw Burbage etc., etc., down through the centuries to John Gielgud and then finally to Laurence Olivier who made a movie which could be seen forever by anyone. The implication—that knowledge or witness of playing Hamlet, traces of Shakespeare’s original Hamlet, have somehow been preserved to this day—is hard to sustain. Indeed some might say earlier is not necessarily better, that there might even be improvements, if one isn’t a purist or doesn’t believe that Richard Burbage must have done it definitively for all time.

  Thus “Originalism” in the strictest sense is a pretty shaky theory on which to found any conclusions on how Hamlet was or should be played, alas, and very little description of “original” acting styles and direction has survived from Shakespeare’s time anyway.

  More is known about the Shakespearean stage, in particular its absence of scenery, its relative bareness (based on a single surviving contemporary sketch of the Globe stage, most believe there were just two pillars on either side of the stage, two doors in the rear, and a smaller “second story” for balcony scenes and the like). A stage like this served as a blank screen on which the audience was invited to project its own imaginative (filmic one might say) background for the action and characters.

  As for how to speak Shakespeare, we do have Hamlet’s famous advice to the Players, but even if we ma
ke the risky assumption that this is the “naked Shakespeare” speaking through his character, rather than an expression of that character’s character, so to speak, it doesn’t tell us everything. Or it gives license for a number of variant styles that can claim they’re following Hamlet’s dicta. “Suit the action to the words,” for instance, is a coat of many colors that could cover any number of emotional colorations and gestures.

  But since it is the locus classicus for all Originalist attempts to reconstruct the naked Shakespeare, it is worth reprinting in full Hamlet’s advice to the Players:

  Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc’d it to you, trippingly on the tongue, but if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently, for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise. I would have such a fellow whipt for o’erdoing Termagant [a stock character in crude Punch and Judy type shows], it out-Herods Herod [a stock villain in medieval mystery plays], pray you avoid it.

  The tenor of Hamlet’s speech argues for naturalism, as we’d call it, against melodramatizing. And yet it must be recalled that earlier in the play when Hamlet asks the Players for a “taste of your quality” when they first arrive at Elsinore, the speech he specifies he most wants to hear is one of the most purple-passaged tear-jerkers anyone can imagine—the one about the murder of Troy’s King Priam and the maddened grief of Hecuba his wife. And yet Hamlet seems to admire this “dream of passion,” indeed he has it memorized and begins it himself, and later admits to envy the Player’s ability to drive himself to tears with his own hyperbolic passion. “What’s Hecuba to him?” Hamlet marvels. Is the fact that Hamlet is unmoved a critique of Hamlet (his comparative numbness) or the lines (their melodramatizing)?