30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (5 page)

Is it therefore natural that we should do so? After all, in 1590 Elizabethan dress was modern dress. A logic of equivalence might dictate that today we should costume Shakespeare's plays in contemporary dress. Indeed, some very successful productions have done so. In 2004 Trevor Nunn directed Ben Whishaw as Hamlet for generation Y. A teenage student, wearing jeans and a beanie, this Hamlet contemplated suicide while staring at his bottle of prescription anti-depressants. Gertrude (Imogen Stubbs) was that new discovery of the 1990s, a Yummy Mummy. Ophelia, dressed in her school uniform, danced alone in her bedroom with her iPod and earphones (thus motivating Hamlet's later misogynist jibe, directed against all her sex, “You
jig
” (3.1.147; Whishaw's emphasis).

Both Rory Kinnear's Hamlet (2010) and David Tennant's (2008) were placed in similarly effective modern-dress settings. When Ophelia appeared (in the Tennant
Hamlet
) in her mad scene wearing only her underwear—an innocent floral cotton starter-bra and mini-shorts—the social impropriety and personal vulnerability of her uncontrolled behavior was conveyed more powerfully than a bawdy song alone could. A teenager talking (or singing) about sex does not shock us today or invite our concern; a teenager appearing in public in underwear does (Gertrude compassionately covered Ophelia with her pashmina). In the Kinnear
Hamlet
Claudius's spy-state was conveyed by besuited officials with clipboards and walkie-talkies exchanging information and receiving instructions. Similarly, when Romeo climbs the orchard walls of the Capulet estate in
Romeo and Juliet
, it is hard for us to appreciate the danger he runs in entering enemy territory. Banks of CCTV security monitors and patrol-guards with Alsatian dogs, as in Baz Luhrmann's film
Romeo + Juliet
, set the scene and create the atmosphere in ways we instantly comprehend. Today we understand the social statements made by modern dress when we no longer know how to “read” the sartorial status of codpieces.

Modern stage business is a logical extension of modern costume. In
Midsummer Night's Dream
, Snug the joiner identifies himself to the onstage audience (lest they fear that he really is the lion he plays). When Kenneth Branagh directed the play in 1990, Karl James's Snug removed his mask and came forward to the onstage audience of newlyweds on the line “Then know that I as Snug the joiner am” (5.1.221). He proceeded to distribute his business card; with three weddings he was clearly anticipating a lot of home improvements. This piece of stage business perfectly complemented the line it accompanied: both worked together to break the theatrical illusion.

Modernizing need not always take us into the here-and-now. The 1930s has proved a congenial home for Shakespeare productions, as in Ian McKellen's
Richard III
(filmed by director Richard Loncraine), for example, which paralleled Richard's growing tyranny with the rise of fascism.
Two Gentlemen of Verona
is a comedy that seems firmly set in its own time, the product of a period that believed that male friendship was more important than heterosexual love (see Myth 10). In the last act this results in several (to us) un-psychologically motivated volte-faces, and the reduction of one of the heroines to an object, tossed between men like a pass-the-parcel prize. When David Thacker directed the play at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1991, he set it in the Cole Porter/Gershwins/Irving Berlin/Rogers and Hart world of the 1920s and 1930s—not the real world but the world of the Hollywood musical. In so doing, he replaced one set of cardboard conventions with another—but this time, conventions we understand and accept.

Thus, there are no
ideological
reasons not to stage Shakespeare's plays in modern dress. There may, however, be some
logical
reasons not to do so. Not all the plays can leave the Elizabethan period.
The Taming of the Shrew
is based on a
sine qua non
of Renaissance domestic life: that a wife owes obedience to her husband. The 1950s is therefore probably the latest period to which one can transpose this play. In 1978 Michael Bogdanov set the play in the present and its Katherine, Paola Dionisotti, registered her discomfort: “I kept wondering why I just didn't get up and go”; from the 1960s onwards, the barriers to Katherine's liberty had come down so the 1978 setting made no sense. (Dionisotti again: “The point is that she
can't
. Kate can't get up and go.”
⁴
) Recent productions which set the play in the present have avoided this problem by making obvious the plot's status as a play-within-the-play (the taming of the shrew is the plot of a play put on by traveling players for a deluded drunken tinker). This calls attention to the fact that all the characters in the plot are actually playing roles (the submissive wife being just another role). By removing the play from the realm of domestic reality, productions remove the problem of the characters' actions and attitudes (problems for our world, if not for Shakespeare's).

Similar concerns apply to updates of
Much Ado About Nothing
. The sticking point in modern-dress productions comes in Act 5 when Hero passively accepts in marriage the man who has hastily and untrustingly rejected her at the altar in Act 4. When Nicholas Hytner directed the play (National Theatre, 2007), he created a Hero with attitude (an embryonic Beatrice) who had to be convinced of Claudio's genuine repentance before she would consent to the wedding going ahead. This was achieved by the economic addition of Hero as eavesdropper in Act 5, scene 3. She witnessed a sackclothed Claudio read the epitaph for his dead (as he thinks) bride and prostrate himself on her grave—whereupon she signaled permission to her father and the friar to proceed with Shakespeare's plot. When the BBC
Shakespeare Retold
updated
Much Ado
in 2005 to a contemporary newsroom setting (Bea and Ben the news anchors, Claude on the sports desk, Hero the weathercaster), everything worked
except
a career-girl Hero taking back Claude at the end. (So the BBC gave us the following dialogue:
Claude
. But when you've had some time, maybe you would think about carrying on where we left off?
Hero
. What get married to you? Never in a million years.
Claude
. OK, maybe not in the short term, but …). The fact that the stage production had to add something at this stage to indicate a psychological repentance for Claudio and to motivate Hero's acceptance of him, and that the television production had to adapt it, indicates the difficulty that this plot moment causes when removed from its 1600 setting.

Shakespeare's political and historical plays often update very successfully, perhaps because transposing periods is already built into them. Elizabethan dramatists were prevented from writing about contemporary politics; the consequences of doing so were dire (Jonson was imprisoned for co-writing the comical satire the
Isle of Dogs
because the inclusion of a character with a Scottish accent was deemed disrespectful to England's royal neighbor (soon to be England's king) James VI). When Jonson published his Roman tragedy
Sejanus
(1603), it had copious marginalia showing his source material in Tacitus. Scholars see this as yet another example of Jonson's self-conscious advertising of his scholarly credentials. It may also be evidence of his instinct for self-protection. “Look,” the notes proclaim, “I'm not stimulating political foment: all I'm doing is translating Tacitus.”

The Elizabethans had no newspapers with a letters-to-the-editor page in which to express their political opinions. (They were not supposed to have political opinions: the state had those for them.) Elizabethan drama was the journalism of its day. And like any other kind of writing in a non-democratic state, it was censored. (All plays had to be officially approved prior to performance.) So the easiest way to write about contemporary politics—in fact, the
only
way to write about contemporary politics—was to write about history—until that, too, was censored, along with satire and other dangerous forms, in the Bishops' Ban of 1599.

Shakespeare had no permitted way of talking about a republic—unless he wrote about republican Rome. He had no permitted way of talking about government or monarchy—unless he wrote plays like
Julius Caesar
(which debates prospective tyranny) or
Macbeth
(which depicts a tyrant) or
Measure for Measure
(which begins with “Of government the properties to unfold …” as the duke hands over power to his deputy) or
Henry V
(which depicts a rhetorically skilled monarch using ethically dubious means—the invasion of a foreign country—for a nationalistic end).
Henry V
comes into its own at times of foreign invasions. Olivier's positive view of Henry (achieved only by extensive strategic cutting of Shakespeare's text) was an important contribution to the Allied war effort in 1944, and Olivier was seconded from Fleet Air Arm duties for this different war work. In 1986, shortly after the Falklands war (1982), Michael Bogdanov directed Henry's army as a crowd of football hooligans, going to war with tuneless football chants and an offensive jingoistic banner (“Fuck the frogs”) whose style reflected similarly offensive headlines from one of the UK's tabloid newspapers. These tabloid headlines had themselves made headlines in the broadsheets as the offending newspaper's non-readers debated the appropriate attitudes with which to go to war. The gentlemanly attitude and tone of Bogdanov's French scenes—one of them staged as an Impressionist painting—could not have provided a greater contrast. Olivier's modernized production was pro-English, Bogdanov's was critical of the English (it was, as one critic observed, the first production in which you actually wanted the French to win). But in both cases, Shakespeare's politics were contemporary.

Shakespeare's plays were, for Shakespeare as for his audience, dramas debating contemporary issues of crucial importance: the status of women, the role of marriage, the responsibilities of the monarch, the duties of citizens, the dangers of civil war, the ethics of foreign invasion. Whether we clothe the actors in modern dress or Elizabethan costume makes little difference; we cannot disguise the plays' contemporary applicability. After all, that is why we still perform them.

Notes

¹
 Ben Jonson,
The Alchemist
, ed. Richard Harp (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2001).

²
 R.A. Foakes,
Illustrations of the English Stage 1580–1642
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985), p. 48.

³
 Gabriel Egan, “Theatre in London,” in Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin (eds.),
Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 20–32 (p. 28).

⁴
 Carol Rutter,
Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare's Women Today
(London: The Women's Press, 1988), p. 3.

Enter any bookshop today and you will notice that Shakespeare has an entire section to himself. Every year editions of individual Shakespeare plays or of the Complete Works proliferate in a highly competitive (and lucrative) publishing market. Although, unlike a novelist, the dramatist's destination is performance not print, for today's dramatists publication is a highly desirable end-product, a confirmation of theatrical presence and literary prestige. The two are related: drama is literature. This was not yet the case in Shakespeare's England, although it may be that the period bears witness to the process whereby one was developing into the other. Thus, thinking about Shakespeare's plays in print involves thinking about literary identity, the concepts of career and canon, and what it meant to be an “author.” All these were new issues for anyone writing drama in the late sixteenth century.

England did not have professional dramatists (or drama) before the sixteenth century. Medieval drama was amateur. The mysteries (the noun “mystery” means “trade”) were short biblical plays forming part of a long cycle, staged annually by trade guilds. (For a wonderful modern take on the medieval process, see Anthony Minghella's play,
Two Planks and a Passion
.) Non-biblical morality plays and interludes toured, but the players were not professionals as we understand the term. They were attached to a lord's household, and they toured when he did not need them; the tour both enhanced his cultural prestige and saved him their living expenses. But in-house entertainment was not always dependent on a resident company. In the early sixteenth century, Henry Medwall's play
Fulgens and Lucres
was performed as an after-dinner entertainment by members of Henry VIII's household at Hampton Court. The first secular comedies, the mid-century
Ralph Roister Doister
and
Gammer Gurton's Needle
, were written, respectively, for schoolboys and for university students to play.

It was 1576 before London had its first purpose-built playhouse, The Theatre, built by James Burbage on the north side of the River Thames in Finsbury Fields, Shoreditch (today it's on the Islington–EC1 border). It was followed within a year by the Curtain Theatre, in the same location, and then, on the south side of the river, the Rose in Southwark, in 1587. With permanent playhouses came professional players, in large companies (a minimum of twelve, sometimes as many as twenty) under the nominal patronage of a lord: Worcester's Men, Derby's Men, Sussex's Men, the Chamberlain's Men. With daily performances (except during Lent or when plague closed the theaters) opportunities arose for writers to provide over forty different plays per year (this figure from Henslowe's Diary refers to the period 27 December 1593 to 26 December 1594; see Myth 17). But the concept of the dramatist as a respectable profession was not yet in place. Marlowe was described as a “poet and a filthy playmaker”: playwriting has a disparaging adjective; poetry does not.

The concept of the literary career,
soi-disant
, at this time was poetic, and often based on the model of the classical writer Virgil. Young men circulated poetry at court; it was read by their friends, not published. Or rather, it was published (made public: the literal meaning of “publish”) in manuscript circulation. This was true lower down the social scale too. Some of Shakespeare's sonnets were evidently in circulation by 1598 when Francis Meres praised Shakespeare as a new Ovid: “witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared sonnets among his private friends, &c.”
¹
Venus and Adonis
and
Lucrece
were in print by this time, but the sonnets were not; Meres could only have known them in manuscript.