30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (11 page)

With its large props and descending chairs, the Elizabethan stage was an intensely visual space. Chariots are a spectacular feature in both George Peele's
Battle of Alcazar
and Christopher Marlowe's
Tamburlaine
, written within a year of each other. We must not underestimate the dramatic effect of such items on a small stage. When the Rose theater on the south bank of the Thames was excavated in 1989, it turned out to have a small, lozenge-shaped stage: the stage was 37′ 6″ wide at the back, tapering to 24′ 9″ at the front, and 15′ 6″ at its deepest (subsequent Elizabethan rebuilding work moved the stage further north but did not much alter its size). When Tamburlaine in his chariot has an eighteen-line speech of ambitious visions—“still climbing after knowledge infinite, / And always moving as the restless spheres” (2.7.12–29)—he speaks the Neoplatonic language of upward movement to divinity. However, the only possible movement for his chariot on the small Rose stage is circular. The stage picture undercuts the verbal effect: we hear the language of endless ascent but what we see is a character going nowhere. Thus, props help establish the setting but, unlike a backcloth, they can also be thematically integrated into the play's meaning (see Myth 27).

It is often said jokingly that the prologue to
Henry V
shows Shakespeare wishing that someone would invent Hollywood film: “Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them” (Prologue 26; see Myth 26). The Chorus to Act 4 apologizes that “we shall much disgrace, / With four or five most vile and ragged foils, / Right ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous, / The name of Agincourt” (4.0.49–52). But in the theater you only apologize for your most reliable effects. Shakespeare clearly had complete confidence in his language's ability to suggest cavalries and his actors' ability to turn four or five weapons into an epic battle.

Shakespeare's plays are interested in the visual effects and scene-setting that can be created by actors' bodies, especially processions and procedures. An unusually lengthy and detailed stage direction at the opening of
Titus Andronicus
indicates what the stage should look like (we reproduce the direction as it appears in the quarto):

Sound Drums and Trumpets, and then enter two of
Titus
sonnes, and then two men bearing a Coffin covered with black
,
then two other sonnes, then
Titus Andronicus,
and then
Tamora
the Queene of Gothes and her two sonnes
Chiron
and
Demetrius, [actually three sons, including Alarbus]
with
Aron
the More, and others as many as can be, then set downe the Coffin, and
Titus
speakes
.

The scene begins with ceremonial sounds (“Drums and Trumpets”). The processional order is precisely choreographed with a series of “then”s, a marker of temporal sequence functioning simultaneously as a spatial marker. Action is specified: “then set downe the Coffin.” Only then do we get speech. Shakespeare is very focused on the stage picture.
1 Henry VI
, a few years earlier, opens with a ceremonial funeral procession interrupted by a succession of three messengers rushing onstage to deliver increasingly bad news about lost French territory. Both these examples are from opening scenes—scenes that indicate location by establishing occasion (a funeral in
Henry VI
, a triumph in
Titus
) and mood (formal in both).

This is not just true of opening scenes. Kneeling structures an entire scene in
Richard II
when the Duchess of York, on her knees, begs the newly crowned Henry IV to forgive her traitorous son, Aumerle; her husband, the Duke of York, also on his knees, begs Henry to punish the traitor. Both refuse to rise until Henry has granted their wish. (In fact, it is not clear that they ever do rise to their feet. Sheldon Zitner suggests we should import a stage direction from Sheridan's
The Critic
:
Exit kneeling
.
²
) Shakespeare does not just write speeches; he writes stage pictures. And in
Titus
,
1 Henry VI
, and
Richard II
the stage pictures are created not by scenery but by actors' bodies.

Modern productions provide many examples of the spectacular visual effects that can be achieved by the actor's body. Barry Kyle's production of
Two Noble Kinsmen
opened Stratford's Swan Theatre in 1987. Imogen Stubbs played the Jailer's daughter and in her first mad scene she entered from rear stage right in a handstand; she walked on her hands across the long diagonal to front stage left, singing a mad song. It was not just a memorable image but one that expressed the upside-down, topsy-turvy world view of the madwoman more succinctly than any “special effect” could have done. On stage, the actor's body
is
a special effect. Marlowe uses actors' bodies in a similarly imaginative way in
Dr Faustus
when Mephistopheles transforms two of the clowns into an ape and a dog. The transformation is effected by the actors' talents at animal imitation.

But Shakespeare has another scene-setting tactic at his disposal: language. He often begins a scene with a discussion of location. (This is one of the reasons his plays transfer so well to radio.) “What country, friends, is this?” asks the shipwrecked Viola in
Twelfth Night
. “This is Illyria, lady,” responds the sea captain, orienting both Viola and the audience (1.2.1–2). At this stage we do not know who Viola is, nor who the captain is, nor have we been given a name for either. But we know one thing: where we are. “What sport shall we devise here in this garden / To drive away the heavy thought of care” asks the Queen in
Richard II
, 3.4.1. “Well, this is the forest of Ardenne” says Rosalind in
As You Like It
(2.4.13). The line both sets the tone (“huh” might be an accurate paraphrase; she is not yet impressed. Or perhaps the tone is one of exploratory wonder?) and sets the scene.

We see the same throughout
A Midsummer Night's Dream
. “Here's a marvellous convenient place for our rehearsal” says Peter Quince at the start of Act 3. “This green plot shall be our stage, this hawthorn brake our tiring-house” (3.1.2–4). The line is not just an economic way of setting the scene but part of a play-long joke in which Shakespeare contrasts his artistry in creating scenes with the literal approach of the mechanicals. In their playlet the mechanicals can see no way to indicate that a scene takes place at night except by bringing in moonshine (quite literally: they use an actor to play the man in the moon), or that there is an impediment to the lovers meeting except by bringing in a physical wall. When the mechanicals meet to rehearse, Shakespeare extends the joke: the green plot that Quince indicates for use as a stage is actually a bare stage that he has first imagined as a green plot; the hawthorn brake that he presses into use as a tiring-house is actually a tiring-house that the audience and actors are imagining is a hawthorn brake. Even this early in his career, then, Shakespeare is showing his audiences alternatives to literal stage representation; not for him a backcloth representing “the city of Rome” or “a wood outside Athens.” The Victorian and Edwardian spectacles of directors such as Herbert Beerbohm Tree would have been his worst nightmare. Beerbohm Tree's 1900 production of
Midsummer Night's Dream
showed the moon rising over the Acropolis, presented an entire
corps de ballet
of fairies in tutus sitting on ascending mushrooms, and had live bunnies hopping across the stage. He staged the pastoral of
The Winter's Tale
with a woodland glade, a shepherd's cottage, and a babbling brook; his
Tempest
opened with a replica Elizabethan ship and a realistic storm; his
Merchant of Venice
recreated a Renaissance Venetian ghetto. To create further realism where Shakespeare had unaccountably omitted it, he added the staging of the Magna Carta to
King John
and the coronation of Anne Bullen to
Henry VIII
. This is Shakespeare as directed by Peter Quince.

Notes

¹
 Alan Dessen,
Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); id.,
Recovering Shakespeare's Theatrical Vocabulary
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

²
 Shelden P. Zitner, “Aumerle's Conspiracy,”
Studies in English Literature
, 14 (1974), pp. 239–57.

Surely this one is a no-brainer. A story such as
King Lear
, in which a king is rejected by his daughters, loses his power, and descends into madness and then death must be counted more serious than one about the farcical confusions ensuing when two sets of twins converge on the same city (
The Comedy of Errors
) and one of them almost sleeps with the other's wife. The playwright George Bernard Shaw denounced Shakespeare's comedies as commercial “potboilers which he frankly called
As You Like It
,
Much Ado About Nothing
, and
What You Will
[the alternative title for
Twelfth Night
].”
¹
According to Shaw, then, the very titles of the comedies betray their intrinsic superficiality. And it's not only
Shakespeare
's tragedies that are assumed to be more serious than his comedies, but the two genres themselves. The nature of tragedy is part of one of the foundational documents of Western culture—Aristotle's fourth-century BC treatise
Poetics
, which states that “tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude.” No such ur-text of comic theory exists, although Umberto Eco's medieval whodunit
The Name of the Rose
turns on the existence of Aristotle's lost tract on comedy, which Eco imagines as a document feared by the church because it gave philosophical backing to comedy's anti-authoritarian impulses. George Puttenham, writing a manual for would-be poets called
The Arte of English Poesie
(1589), evaluated the differences between comedy and tragedy in terms that collapse literary, social, and stylistic categories. According to Puttenham, comedies deal with “common behaviours … of private persons, and such as were the meaner sort of men,” whereas tragic writers “meddled not with so base matters: for they set forth the doleful falls of infortunate & afflicted Princes.”
²
Comedy's “base matter” and its socially inferior protagonists compare unfavorably with the regal and “doleful” tragedy.

There is no doubt that Shakespeare's tragedies embrace weighty philosophical, personal, and political themes.
Macbeth
, for example, circles incessantly around issues of guilt and of manliness as it repeatedly poses questions about who or what is in charge of our actions. Is Macbeth driven by his own “vaulting ambition” (1.7.27), or by the goading encouragement of his wife, or by the “supernatural soliciting” (1.3.129) of the Weird Sisters? In dramatic form Shakespeare is presenting significant philosophical debates about agency associated elsewhere with the writings of Machiavelli and Hobbes. In
Julius Caesar
, as in
Richard II
and
Richard III
, the question is the nature of good rule, and this insistent political issue swirls around Shakespeare's tragedies. It is not simply because they have further to fall that tragic characters are princes and emperors, but because their actions combine the public and private, and their sphere of influence is the polis rather than the household. Tragedy, wrote the Elizabethan courtier-poet Sir Philip Sidney, “openeth the greatest wounds and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue,” and “maketh kings fear to be tyrants and tyrants manifest their tyrannical humours.”
³
It's a picture of tragedy that sees it intimately involved in anatomizing court corruption, imagined as the ulcer beneath the skin or rich clothing—a role akin, perhaps, to satire. Hamlet's play “The Mousetrap” would fit Sidney's definition admirably.

We tend now to value tragedies not because they depict great men—Aristotle prescribed that a tragedy must concern “one who is highly renowned and prosperous”—but rather because they show us more universal experiences (see Myth 29). That Hamlet is a prince is downplayed in most modern productions, which often show him, as in Rory Kinnear's portrayal at the National Theatre directed by Nicholas Hytner in 2010, dressed in a studenty hoody rather than a princely doublet (see Myth 3). Rather, his appeal is as a man struggling with grief at the death of his father, and with his own place in a familial and social structure after that life-changing event. Similarly, that Lear is a king seems irrelevant compared with his role as father and as a man losing his powers as he ages: the politics of the union of the kingdoms and the parable of the dangers of national division which spoke to King James's unionist aspirations when the play was first performed have lost their edge. Again, the relationship between husband and wife in
Macbeth
seems important to us in psychological terms and the “barren sceptre” (3.1.63) that haunts their marriage is freighted more with emotional than political and dynastic resonance. Shakespeare's tragedies occupy particular life-stages and achieve a wider significance through the echoes of his characters' experiences, if not their social situation, in his audiences.

That Shakespeare's tragedies obviously address serious and significant themes in public and private life need not mean that his comedies are correspondingly insubstantial: Shaw's dismissal of the comedies as vacuously populist needs some modification. The later twentieth century has taught us that comedy and its physiological response, laughter, are neither neutral nor benign, but expressive of violent and dominating energies. Unacceptable, aggressive, or sexual desires are sublimated in telling jokes, Freud asserts in
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
(1905). Consider the wood in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
to which the lovers escape from the repression of Athenian life: like the joke itself, this space offers a release which is both comic and terrifying. Performances often double the repressed Athenian rulers Theseus and Hippolyta with their fairy counterparts Oberon and Titania, making the passionate dispute in the woodland world which disrupts the “mazèd world” (2.1.113) into the expressive obverse—perhaps the unconscious—of Theseus's winning his Amazonian bride “doing thee injuries” (1.1.17). Dark, dangerous desires can be rehearsed in the frightening freedom of the wood: dreams, as Hermia finds when in sleep “methought a serpent ate my heart away, / And you sat smiling at his cruel prey” (2.2.155–6), are full of what Shakespeare's contemporary Thomas Nashe called “the terrors of the night”: Nashe proposes that there is “no such figure of the first chaos whereout the world was extraught [extracted] as our dreams in the night. In them all states, all sexes, all places are confounded, and meet together.”
⁴
An influential book by the Polish theater director Jan Kott described
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, often considered an innocent, rustic depiction of a fairy world and a play particularly suitable for children, as Shakespeare's “most truthful, brutal and violent play” in which sexual desire is violently dehumanized in the interchangeability of the lovers and the animal transformation of Bottom; Kott's vision lay behind Peter Brook's landmark production of the play at Stratford-upon-Avon, which stripped the conventional rustic frou-frou from the staging and set the play on swinging trapezes in a white-painted box.
⁵