A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance: From the Restoration to the Twenty-First Century [1st ed.] 9781108625838

Citation preview

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

Elements in Shakespeare Performance Series Editor: W. B. Worthen Barnard College

Schoch

This short history of Shakespeare in global performance – from the reopening of London theatres upon the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 to our present multicultural day – provides a comprehensive overview of Shakespeare’s theatrical afterlife and introduces categories of analysis and understanding to make that afterlife intellectually meaningful. Written for both the advanced student and the practicing scholar, this work enables readers to situate themselves historically in the broad field of Shakespeare performance studies and equips them with analytical tools and conceptual frameworks for making their own contributions to the field.

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance From the Restoration to the Twenty-First Century

Shakepeare Performance ISSN 2516-0117 (online) ISSN 2516-0109 (print) Cover image © Alberto Seveso

Richard Schoch

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

Elements in Shakespeare Performance edited by

W. B. Worthen Barnard College

A SHORT HISTORY OF SHAKESPEARE IN PERFORMANCE From the Restoration to the Twenty-First Century Richard Schoch Queen’s University Belfast

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108714440 DOI: 10.1017/9781108625838 © Richard Schoch 2021 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2021 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-108-71444-0 Paperback ISSN 2516-0117 (online) ISSN 2516-0109 (print) Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance From the Restoration to the Twenty-First Century Elements in Shakespeare Performance DOI:10.1017/9781108625838 First published online: April 2021

Richard Schoch Queen’s University Belfast Author for correspondence: Richard Schoch, [email protected]

Abstract: This short history of Shakespeare in global performance – from the reopening of London theatres upon the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 to our present multicultural day – provides a comprehensive overview of Shakespeare’s theatrical afterlife and introduces categories of analysis and understanding to make that afterlife intellectually meaningful. Written for both the advanced student and the practicing scholar, this work enables readers to situate themselves historically in the broad field of Shakespeare performance studies and equips them with analytical tools and conceptual frameworks for making their own contributions to the field. KEYWORDS: shakespeare, theatre, performance, drama

© Richard Schoch 2021 ISBNs: 9781108714440 (PB), 9781108625838 (OC) ISSNs: 2516-0117 (online), 2516-0109 (print) Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

Contents

1

Introduction

1

2

Shakespeare in the Restoration

8

3

‘Old Shakespeare’s Ghost’

15

4

Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century

20

5

Shakespeare the Victorian

40

6

Modern Shakespeare

56

7

Shakespeare’s Voices, Shakespeare’s Spaces

74

8

Global Shakespeare

81

Bibliography

90

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

1

1 Introduction It’s not unusual for those who read, watch, or stage Shakespeare’s plays to assume that they exist in only two historical moments: ‘then’ and ‘now’. ‘Then’ is Shakespeare’s lifetime – 1564 to 1616 – when his plays were written and originally performed and when Richard Burbage first spoke ‘To be or not to be’ from the stage of the Globe Theatre on London’s Bankside. ‘Now’ is the ever-advancing present, whether for an undergraduate student taking a Shakespeare class, tourists visiting Stratford-upon-Avon to see the latest production by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), or the artistic team planning next year’s season at the Australian Shakespeare Company in Melbourne. The idea that Shakespeare exists simultaneously in ‘then’ and ‘now’ was first expressed by Ben Jonson in his commendatory verse prefacing the 1623 First Folio, the first published collection of Shakespeare’s plays, in which he declared that the playwright was both ‘soule of the age’ and ‘not of an age, but for all time’. A brief seven years after Shakespeare’s death, Jonson imagined both a past and a future for his late friend and rival poet. Time has proved Jonson right. The belief that Shakespeare belongs both to his time and to our time has been the most enduringly powerful belief in the history of his theatrical and literary afterlife. Without that belief, ‘Shakespeare’ the cultural icon recognized the world over would not exist; and in all probability, neither would the text you are now reading. Yet Jonson’s words also reveal something else: the confident assertion that Shakespeare will be continuously relevant – for all time – and not just relevant to the immediate here and now. A perpetually relevant Shakespeare – a fixed longitudinal presence – immediately creates a history, because every experience turns into a memory and every today becomes a yesterday. These stockpiled memories and accumulated yesterdays – not of any single person but of peoples and cultures collectively – make up the history of how Shakespeare has been understood, valued, adapted, argued over, rejected, and even denounced down the centuries and around the world. Occupying the middle zone between the distant ‘then’ of early modern England and the always fugitive ‘now’ of our own direct experience, this history is nothing other than the complex and multivoiced record of what Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

2

Shakespeare Performance

Shakespeare has meant in various times and in various places to various sorts of people. Nowhere has this history unfolded more vigorously than upon the living stage, the ‘unworthy scaffold’ (as Shakespeare described his own outdoor theatre in the famous prologue to Henry V) whose business is the creation of brave new worlds. This history is richly diverse, embracing Sarah Siddons’ unnerving performance of Lady Macbeth in the late eighteenth century when she performed the sleepwalking scene with her eyes open and so expressing the magnified power of the actor’s slightest movement or gesture; the Hindu Theatre of Calcutta, whose inaugural production in December 1841 included scenes from Julius Caesar; and the birth of ‘modern dress’ Shakespeare in Barry Jackson’s production of Cymbeline at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in England in 1923, in which characters dressed like the audience to make a very old play, as Jackson put it, relevant to ‘the man [sic] in the street’. This Element will attempt to encompass that strange eventful history, trying to make it intelligible and meaningful to a variety of readers, from working scholars wanting to situate themselves in a dynamic research field to students who might never have had occasion to think about how previous generations staged Shakespeare or how other cultures do so now. Yet I hope that all readers might agree that the history of Shakespeare in performance is fascinating because it is both familiar and foreign. It’s familiar because the plays and the characters feel close to us. We know what happens: Romeo and Juliet die, Richard II loses his crown, and a disguised Portia wins in the courtroom. Thus, we inevitably bring a good deal of pertinent knowledge to any investigation of Shakespeare performance history. In one performance of his 1838 production of The Winter’s Tale, William Charles Macready (1793–1873), playing Leontes, suddenly kissed and caressed the hair of Helena Faucit (1817–1898), playing Hermione, in the famous scene in Act 5 when Hermione’s statue comes to life. So startled was the young actress that Macready whispered to her, ‘Don’t be frightened my child! don’t be frightened!’ From a distance of nearly two centuries that precise moment in performance still seems fresh and vivid. We easily picture it in our minds.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

3

And yet we can struggle to understand or appreciate other aspects of this same history, because people in the past didn’t always think and act like us. Despite our knowledge of the plays, Shakespeare performance history can resist or confound us. In 1662, Sir William Davenant (1606–1668) combined parts of Much Ado about Nothing and Measure for Measure into one play, which he titled The Law Against Lovers. His conflation of two strongly different works now seems odd or even wrongheaded: How does the merry banter between Benedick and Beatrice align with Angelo’s brute sexual manipulation of Isabella? Davenant, who helped to restore the English stage after its long closure during Puritan rule, was the most pivotal figure in Restoration theatre. Founder of the Duke’s Company, he produced plays that he believed would succeed at the box office. So, he must have had good reason to write his first Shakespeare adaptation, however bizarre it seems to us. The Law Against Lovers certainly pleased the famous diarist Samuel Pepys, who, after seeing a performance, called it ‘a good play and well performed’. In pondering such strange episodes in Shakespeare performance history – strange, that is, from our perspective – we must always remember that people in the past created performances that made sense to them, just as today we create performances that make sense to us. Familiar or foreign, does this history matter? Does it matter to the twenty-first century that, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Anglo-French actor Charles Fechter (1824–1879) (shown in Figure 1) took London by storm when he played Hamlet as a friendly blond-haired Danish prince? It mattered to audiences at the time. The 1861 production ran for an astonishing 115 consecutive nights when other theatres performed two or three different plays each week to attract audiences. Spectators who arrived night after night at the Princess’s Theatre on Oxford Street wanted to see a new sort of Shakespearean tragic hero, neither the brooding aristocratic Hamlet embodied by the haughty tragedian John Philip Kemble (1757–1823) at the beginning of the century nor the sedate bourgeois Hamlet conveyed by Macready and Charles Kean (1811–1868) in the 1840s and 1850s. Suddenly, here was a ‘thoroughly human Hamlet’, as a leading London newspaper put it. When Fechter’s Hamlet put his arm around his childhood friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, perched on a gravestone, sat on the

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

4

Shakespeare Performance

Figure 1 Charles Fechter as Hamlet, Princess’s Theatre, London, photograph, c. 1861. The actor’s pose and garb may seem artificial to us today but, in its time, Fechter’s performance was praised for revealing Hamlet’s humanity. Reproduced courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, Downloadedunder from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, 21 Apr 2021 at License. 09:59:02, subject a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0onInternational to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

5

ground with the lowly comical gravediggers, and almost kissed Yorick’s freshly unearthed skull – startling behavior, never before seen by an English audience – many felt that the greatest role in the Shakespearean repertoire had new life breathed into it at the very moment when it was in danger of expiring. Today we might assume that every Hamlet will be similarly colloquial, familiar, and down to earth – a prince, yes, but with the common touch. No one, however, assumed any such thing when Fechter dared to play the role that way, two and a half centuries after Shakespeare created the part. Indeed, it was Fechter’s fresh performance – and that of his American contemporary Edwin Booth (1839–1893) – that cemented the popular image of an approachable Hamlet. Consciously or not, that image has influenced performances ever since, including Ben Kingsley’s (1943–) emotionally vulnerable Hamlet for the RSC in 1975, Ben Wishaw’s (1980–) lovable waif-like Prince of Denmark at London’s Old Vic Theatre in 2004, and the RSC’s 2008 production in which David Tennant (1971–) casually wrapped himself up in a wooly cap, scruffy parka, and burly orange sweater. Think also of Ethan Hawke’s (1970–) techno-geek tragic hero in Michael Almereyda’s low-budget film Hamlet (2000). It is indisputable that many modern interpretations of Hamlet owe something – not everything, but something – to the legacy first bequeathed by the little-remembered actor Charles Fechter during the reign of Queen Victoria. But do theatre artists and audiences today recognize that legacy’s existence and its power over them? The example of Fechter’s Hamlet illustrates the most fundamental truth about Shakespeare on the stage: No performance is created in isolation and no performance can be understood in isolation. Rather, every performance of Shakespeare responds (affirmatively or critically, explicitly or implicitly) to past performances; expresses the values and sensibilities of its own time; and declares the arrival of new ways of doing Shakespeare. In other words, every performance occupies simultaneously the past, the present, and the future. It can, however, be difficult to see beyond the present. Yet that is precisely the reason for knowing about the past. Only by studying history can we understand how things change; can we identify the causes

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

6

Shakespeare Performance

of change; and can we realize what has not changed. Without a grasp of history, we cannot understand how the present became the present. And if we do not understand the present, then we will not understand the future that it creates, the future we ourselves are creating right now. The need to understand the future is a very good reason to study the past. If the history of Shakespeare on the stage teaches anything, it teaches that no single production can ever be definitive because every such production possesses meaning only within its own context. When it comes to Shakespeare performance history, there are always dual contexts: synchronic and diachronic. Synchronically, we can study any performance of Shakespeare in terms of the other kinds of plays or performances that an audience could have seen – and many times did see – around the same time. Thus, Henry Irving’s first attempt at playing Macbeth in 1875 was criticized for being too much like his performances in Victorian melodrama, an entirely different theatrical genre. Today, we might interpret Judi Dench’s (1934–) performance as Paulina in Kenneth Branagh’s (1960–) production of The Winter’s Tale (2015) in light of her screen roles in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) or Shakespeare in Love (1998). Diachronically, we can study any performance of Shakespeare in terms of the stage history of a particular play or character: how it has been performed over decades or even centuries. This long temporal frame of reference was second nature for earlier generations of theatregoers, who instinctively compared every new production of, say, Othello or Antony and Cleopatra to the standard set by earlier productions. Actors in previous centuries willingly exemplified different genealogies of performance conventions – the Garrick ‘religion’, the Kemble ‘school’ – that invited normative comparisons with legendary predecessors. For many performers, to act well was to act like the great stars of yesterday. Of course, conventions could be overturned, as when Edmund Kean reinvented the roles of Shylock, Richard III, and Coriolanus for the Romantic age. Indeed, without such iconoclastic performances the living theatre risks becoming a petrified version of itself. Either way, the key point of reference was always historical: How did earlier generations of actors play the same part? Were they similar to us or were they different from us?

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

7

These two lenses through which we can look at Shakespeare in performance – synchronic and diachronic – give us a powerful dynamic that opens up multiple avenues for interpreting and understanding those performances. Within the terms of that critical perspective, it’s not so helpful to judge whether a past performance was ‘good’ or ‘bad’. What’s helpful – indeed, what’s essential – is to comprehend the forces and values that created a past performance. Accordingly, this text will not recite a time-honored roll call of famous actors and directors who have interpreted Shakespeare over the past 350 years. It will, rather, convey various themes and conceptual frames for better understanding the manifold history of Shakespeare in performance. In articulating themes and critical frameworks, chronology sometimes helps and sometimes hinders. The first half of this text is arranged chronologically, because the material being discussed is largely confined to key events and key figures in British and North American theatre history between 1660 and 1900. The second half, which considers Shakespeare in performance from a global perspective in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, forsakes chronology for an explicitly thematic and topical approach, given the vast amount of material that could be discussed. As you read this text, I encourage you to focus less on the specific performances being discussed and more on the issues of wider and lasting relevance (e.g., textual fidelity, acting style, Bardolatry, interculturalism) that those performances put into play. These discussions should be regarded less as retrospective than as prospective invitations for readers to continue their own analyses and investigations of Shakespeare in performance. Ultimately, this Element seeks not to end discussion but to stimulate it. For students and scholars alike, this work aims to encourage certain habits of mind for encountering ‘Shakespeare after Shakespeare’, whether by reading and studying the plays, watching them in performance, or bringing them to life on the stage. The foremost habit of mind that this Element encourages is the historicist imperative: to make sense of past performances on their own terms and not on our terms; to understand past performances in light of the values and desires of the artists who created them and the audiences who witnessed them. The most vital work that a performance historian can undertake – particularly a historian of Shakespeare on the stage, where the documentary record is so long and

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

8

Shakespeare Performance

so varied – is to analyze why a given performance was created in a particular way, at a particular time, in a particular place, and for a particular audience: What cultural need did that performance respond to? What difference did it make in the wider world? What influence did it have on theatre artists? Consider this example. Theatre historians in recent years have argued that the insistence on archaeologically correct scenery, costumes, and properties in Victorian revivals of Shakespeare – whether the fancies of The Tempest or the facts of King John – was not spectacle run wild but rather an opportunity for popular theatre to become a vehicle for historical consciousness, itself a broader movement within Victorian visual and material culture. Sets and costumes derived from original sources – the portrait of Richard II in Westminster Abbey, an eyewitness account of Henry V’s victory at Agincourt, the tomb effigy of King John in Worcester Cathedral – turned the stage into a living history book. This new argument overturned a long-standing scholarly consensus that the Victorian era was an embarrassing chapter in Shakespeare performance history, partly by exposing that such consensus was itself based on presentist values (‘today is superior to yesterday’) and partly by taking seriously what Victorian theatre artists themselves took seriously: the power of the stage to educate a mass metropolitan audience. To make this sort of argument – and not instinctively to dismiss a previous era’s theatrical choices as quaint, absurd, or unenlightened – is to focus on the dynamic efficacy of past performances.

2 Shakespeare in the Restoration On September 2, 1642, at the beginning of the English Civil War, Parliament issued a temporary edict declaring that ‘publike Sports doe not well agree with publike Calamities’. ‘Sports’, as the word was then used, meant pastimes or leisure pursuits generally. Without question, theatres were then a popular destination for Londoners in search of entertainment. But, for the ruling Puritans, playhouses were an open invitation to crime, intrigue, and immorality. And so, beginning in 1642, all public theatres were shut down by force of law. Acting companies like the King’s Men – Shakespeare’s own company – effectively disbanded or went underground (or sometimes to continental Europe) because it was now illegal to stage

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

9

a play. From time to time, actors tried to stage clandestine performances in the surviving disused London theatres, such as the Red Bull on St. John Street. These furtive performances never lasted long because the military promptly raided the premises. The closure of the theatres lasted for eighteen years, during the period of Puritan rule known as the Interregnum: the interval between kings. With the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660 came the official restoration of the theatre, which first returned to life in 1659 when the royalist victory was inevitable. After nearly a generation of suppression – though not total extinction – the London theatre became once more an important part of the city’s cultural life. Taking a deeply personal interest in the newly reconstituted theatrical profession, the newly crowned king quickly issued exclusive licenses (‘patents’) for two new theatre companies: the Duke’s Company, led by Sir William Davenant, and the King’s Company, led by Thomas Killigrew (1612–1683). These two companies remained rivals until 1682, when the financial difficulties of the King’s Company forced them to merge for a period. Davenant and Killigrew were both courtiers – they joined the king when he had been forced into exile in Europe – which tells us that the Restoration stage was much more closely identified with the court and with a socially elite audience than the commercial theatre had been in Shakespeare’s time. Because theatrical activity had been prohibited for nearly twenty years, few new plays were immediately available. By necessity, the patent companies turned to the pre-1642 classics of John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare. Reprising the convention that each acting company owned an exclusive repertoire – the Admiral’s Men performed Christopher Marlowe’s plays but not Shakespeare’s – Davenant and Killigrew divided the ‘Old Stock Plays’ between them. Killigrew, because his company included older actors who had performed before the Civil War, declared the King’s Company to be the lawful heir to the pre-1642 King’s Men, the company in which Shakespeare was sharer, actor, and playwright. Having the upper hand in negotiations, Killigrew acquired for his troupe most of the plays belonging to the old King’s Men, leaving Davenant and his company of younger actors with just nine of Shakespeare’s plays – although their share of the repertoire

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

10

Shakespeare Performance

included Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Tempest. Interestingly, in the tussle between the companies for the right to perform the pre-Restoration repertoire, the tragicomedies of Beaumont and Fletcher were regarded as more desirable on the whole than Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, and histories. Initially, the two theatres staged Shakespeare’s plays mostly unaltered; and, while Othello, Henry IV, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Hamlet were successful, other plays fared less well. In 1662, Samuel Pepys was deeply disappointed by a performance of Romeo and Juliet as written by Shakespeare: ‘the play of itself the worst that ever I heard in my life’. His distaste for an unrevised A Midsummer Night’s Dream was even more pronounced: ‘the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life’. He much preferred strong adaptations of Shakespeare’s original plays, particularly Davenant’s adaptation of Macbeth (1664) and Davenant and John Dryden’s (1631–1700) inventive reworking of The Tempest (1667), both first performed at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Pepys was, of course, just a single spectator. But his negative verdict on ‘pure’ Shakespearean drama tells us something important about the changed environment of Restoration theatrical culture: In order to succeed in the commercial theatre, Shakespeare’s plays often needed to be vigorously rewritten, sometimes to emphasize political topicalities, sometimes to satisfy a neoclassical preference for less ornate language and more symmetrical plotlines, and sometimes to delight the audience with songs, instrumental music, and dance. Davenant and his company members believed that Shakespeare’s plays belonged more to the theatre of their own time – here and now – than they belonged to Shakespeare’s own theatre – there and then. Thus, the title page of Davenant’s version of Macbeth (shown in Figure 2) boasted that the text included ‘the Alterations, Amendments, Additions, and New Songs’ that made the play so popular with Restoration audiences. Indeed, in the long history of Shakespeare on the stage, the belief that his plays should be performed as originally written is the exception not the rule. For Restoration audiences, Richard III was repackaged as a politically pointed tragicomedy: the rise and fall of a failed (Commonwealth) tyrant. Macduff and Lady Macduff watch the witches sing and dance in a scene that

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

11

Figure 2 Title page, William Davenant’s adaptation of Macbeth (1674). Davenant’s semi-operatic version of Shakespeare’s tragedy was first performed at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1664 with Thomas Betterton in the title role. The absence of Davenant’s name from the title page reminds us that Restoration versions of Shakespeare were regarded as proper and necessary enhancements – not illegitimate distortions – of the original plays. Reproduced courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, under a Creative Commons AttributionShareAlike 4.0 International License. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

12

Shakespeare Performance

has no parallel in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. And the most popular Restoration adaptation of Shakespeare – The Tempest – took advantage of women finally being allowed to perform on the English stage by creating three new female roles: Caliban’s sister Sycorax, Miranda’s sister Dorinda, and Ariel’s female companion Milcha. Less than a third of Shakespeare’s original text survived in the Dryden–Davenant version of The Tempest but Restoration audiences flocked to see it. The play itself was regularly performed until 1838, when Macready decided to perform Shakespeare’s original version instead. The 2018 sold-out revival of Davenant’s Macbeth at the Folger Theatre in Washington, DC – part of ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’, a research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK, and for which I was Principal Investigator – demonstrated for a contemporary audience something of the vitality and dynamism that made Restoration Shakespeare so popular in its time. Figure 3 shows the witches’ first song (‘Speak, Sister, speak’) in the Folger production, in which they ‘rejoice when good kings bleed’ (Davenant, Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 5). The first appearance of actresses on the Restoration stage – a change that strongly influenced how old plays were adapted and how new plays were written – is just one of the innovations that define Restoration theatre. Charles II and his court had been in exile on the continent, where they were exposed to new ways of making theatre. Playhouses were covered interior structures, women’s roles were played by women, and the proscenium stage was filled with painted, movable, and spectacular scenery that could depict whatever setting was required – a palace, a city square, a forest – and shift quickly from one extravagant stage vista to another. Scenic splendor and the integration of music and drama had featured in lavish court masques staged in Whitehall Palace for James I and Charles I, with poetry by Ben Jonson and scenery by Inigo Jones. Such costly entertainments had a tiny, elite audience and were not staged in the public playhouses of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. But, at last, all these changes – some from the continent, some from a native tradition of court performances – were made to the public stage in London during the Restoration, reflecting not just the king’s personal aesthetic but also a wider change in sensibility about the theatre. Designed by Sir Christopher Wren, the Dorset Garden Theatre

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

13

Figure 3 In this scene from Folger Theatre’s production of Davenant’s Macbeth (2018, dir. Robert Richmond), the three witches (Emily Noël, Rachel Montgomery, Ethan Watermeier) sing ‘we rejoice when good kings bleed’ as they stand over the bloodied corpse of good King Duncan (Louis Butelli). Set design by Tony Cisek and costume design by Mariah Hale. Photograph by Brittany Diliberto. This production was part of the research project ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’ (2017–2020), funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and led by Richard Schoch (Queen’s University Belfast) and Amanda Eubanks Winkler (Syracuse University). Reproduced courtesy of Folger Theatre, Washington, DC and the research project ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’, led by Queen’s University Belfast. (Figure 4) – home to the Duke’s Company after they moved from Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1671 – became the Restoration playhouse most associated with spectacular production values. Performance culture had been heavily Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

14

Shakespeare Performance

Figure 4 Dorset Garden Theatre, London. Designed by Sir Christopher Wren, Dorset Garden Theatre became the home of the Duke’s Company in 1671, following their move from Lincoln’s Inn Fields. By this time, Betterton was in charge of the patent company after Davenant’s death three years earlier. Reproduced courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

suppressed for a generation, but now the English theatre was back and with a vengeance. Restoration Shakespeare was part of a broader celebration of the theatre by the theatre itself, a rejoicing in the wondrous possibilities of the intermedial Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

15

stage. Figure 5, the frontispiece to Hamlet in Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 edition of Shakespeare’s plays, shows the ‘closet scene’ (Act 3, Scene 4) when Hamlet once again sees his father’s ghost. Although the image refers to no particular stage production, it nonetheless offers a reliable generic sense of what Restoration actors wore (in this instance, contemporary formal dress), how they gestured (broadly), how they were illuminated (candlelight), and how the acting space was arranged (proscenium style, with scenery). Under Davenant’s leadership, the Duke’s Company gained a singular reputation for pioneering theatrical innovation. Impelled, perhaps, by a nagging feeling that the rival company had the pick of Shakespeare’s best plays, Davenant staked his reputation not just on rewriting Shakespeare but also on transforming the capabilities of the stage. Beginning in the early 1660s, the Duke’s Company introduced movable scenery and placed an unapologetic emphasis on music and dance. The backstage machines at the company’s new theatre in Dorset Garden enabled even greater spectacular effects. These changes were popular with audiences, inspiring both satire and imitation from the King’s Company. John Downes (died c. 1712), the long-serving prompter for the Duke’s Company, recalled in Roscius Anglicanus (1708) – his eyewitness history of the Restoration stage – that the Dryden–Davenant version of The Tempest was ‘perform’d . . . so admirably well, that not any succeeding Opera got more money’. He was equally enamored of the same company’s production of Davenant’s version of Macbeth, praising not just the ‘new Scenes, Machines’ but also ‘all the Singing and Dancing in it’. Pepys, too, remembered especially the music, exalting it as a ‘strange perfection’ in a ‘deep tragedy’. The odd phrase ‘strange perfection’ expresses a profound shift in how Restoration audiences understood Shakespeare: To make his plays ‘perfect’ – that is, most fully and most truly themselves – the full resources of the stage were required, from backstage ropes to onstage orchestras, singers, and dancers. It was a brave new theatrical world.

3 ‘Old Shakespeare’s Ghost’ Ever since the late nineteenth century, when the first comprehensive histories of Shakespeare in performance were written, scholars have

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

16

Shakespeare Performance

Figure 5 The frontispiece to Hamlet in Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 edition of Shakespeare’s plays shows the closet scene (Act 3, Scene 4), with Hamlet, Gertrude, and the ghost of Old Hamlet. Although the image refers to no particular performance – the tradition that it depicts Betterton in the title role is unsubstantiated – it nonetheless captures a plausible stage moment: Hamlet, startled by the ghost’s sudden appearance, knocks over a chair. Reproduced courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, under a Creative Attribution-ShareAlikeIP 4.0 International License. DownloadedCommons from https://www.cambridge.org/core. address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

17

regarded the eighteen-year gap between the closure of London theatres by the Puritans in 1642 and their reopening upon the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 as an absolute dividing line. Everything before 1642 belonged to an era in which Shakespeare, although he died in 1616, could still be regarded as a ‘contemporary’ playwright. After 1660, Shakespeare slipped back into the recent past; no longer contemporary, he was, instead, an immediate predecessor. In some ways it makes sense to claim that 1660 marks the beginning of Shakespeare as a ‘historical’ figure, most obviously because he had been dead for nearly half a century, his theatre company had been disbanded, the Globe no longer existed, and his plays had not been publicly performed in England for eighteen years. Moreover, and as elaborated in the preceding section, much about Restoration theatre was new: women’s roles were played by women, not by boys; new indoor proscenium theatres in London’s commercial West End replaced amphitheatre-style playhouses just north of the City of London (the Fortune) and on the south bank of the Thames (the Globe and the Rose); spectacular movable scenery, previously seen only in performances at court, was now used in public theatres; and Shakespeare’s texts were often radically adapted for performance. Yet in other ways 1660 marked a time of theatrical continuity. Just as the monarchy had been restored, so, too, was the theatrical profession reassembled and theatre as a leisure activity returned to public life. Theatre artists at the time, including some who had worked in London theatres in the 1630s and early 1640s, felt that, essentially, they were reviving traditions that dated back to Shakespeare’s time. Thus, no sooner did the theatres reopen in 1660 than the actor and manager William Beeston (1606?–1682) – who as a young man worked alongside his father, Christopher, in running the Cockpit and Red Bull theatres – reestablished his acting troupe, ‘Beeston’s Boys’. Michael Mohun (1616?– 1684), a popular boy actor before the Civil War, continued to perform at the Restoration, remaining a member of the King’s Company (whose very name deliberately invoked an earlier time) until the late 1670s. The Master of the Revels, Sir Henry Herbert (1595–1673), responsible for licensing and censoring plays at the Restoration, had discharged those

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

18

Shakespeare Performance

responsibilities for twenty years prior to the closure of the theatres and began doing so in the year when the First Folio was published. Most important of all was the repertoire: The plays performed during the Restoration, particularly at the beginning, were mainly older ones, although they were frequently and freely adapted. When the theatres reopened in 1660, many old familiar faces were seen once more and accustomed voices heard once again. In a literal way, the Restoration theatre ‘restored’ some of the people, the plays, and the practices of the pre–Civil War theatre. So maybe we should draw a different dividing line. The moment, impossible to date precisely, when Shakespeare withdrew into the past rather than lingered on in an extended present was not the Restoration but sometime closer to 1700. A significant marker for this change occurred in 1709, when Nicholas Rowe’s (1674–1718) theatrical prologue for a farewell performance by the veteran actor Thomas Betterton (c. 1635–1710) warned that, if the audience withheld its approval, ‘Old SHAKESPEARE’S Ghost’ would rise up in anger. Here, Shakespeare was likened to the ghost of Hamlet’s father: a patriarchal authority figure but someone who was dead and thus existed only as a ghost. Figure 6 depicts Betterton as Hamlet, a role that he played throughout his long career. Admittedly, all attempts to divide the past into discrete periods (‘Elizabethan’, ‘Restoration’, ‘Georgian’) or to focus only on singular events (the great actor David Garrick’s stage debut in 1741, the first Japaneselanguage production of Shakespeare in 1885, or the founding of the RSC in 1961) are misleading, because they turn complexity into simplicity and because they emphasize change over continuity. Yet such a focus is impossible to avoid, so habituated have we become to understanding the past through chronological narrative and pivotal turning points. Drawing the dividing line at 1700 rather than at 1660 – if such a line need be drawn – doesn’t settle the matter but rather opens it up. And yet there is something decisive about 1700, the year when the celebrity actor-manager Colley Cibber (1671–1757) published his Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

19

Figure 6 Thomas Betterton as Hamlet, c. 1670s. The drawing captures not only the gentlemanly elegance of Betterton the tragedian – the fullbottomed periwig, the formal suit, the artfully turned-out leg – but also the expressive gestural language of Restoration acting. Reproduced courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

20

Shakespeare Performance

adaptation of Richard III. Although Cibber’s version of the play was written at the end of the period when such alterations were popular, it was the longest-lived of all, regularly performed well into the Victorian age. Actor-managers otherwise committed to performing the original texts could not resist a star vehicle that included fewer than 800 lines written by Shakespeare, dispensed with the role of Queen Margaret, and incorporated material from other plays. For more than 150 years it was Cibber’s Richard III that audiences enjoyed in the theatre, with Shakespeare’s version regarded as a text better read than performed. Remnants of the script from 1700 can, astonishingly, be heard in Laurence Olivier’s 1956 film version, and the familiar tag lines ‘Richard’s himself again’ and ‘Off with his head’ issued from Cibber’s pen, not Shakespeare’s. Cibber’s Richard III is now rarely performed and all but unknown outside the small world of Shakespeare scholarship. But the prominence it once held in the British theatrical world, and held for long years, reminds us that the history of Shakespeare on the stage is not merely a chronicle of which plays were performed, when and where, and by whom. Rather, it is a history of our ever-changing relationship with Shakespeare: what we see in the plays, what we expect to get out of them, what we believe we can do with them.

4 Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century When Cibber rewrote Richard III he was a member of the United Company at Drury Lane Theatre in London, which he later jointly managed from 1710 to 1733. The rival ‘splinter’ company formed by Thomas Betterton in 1695 first performed in Lincoln’s Inn Fields (the original theatre for the Duke’s Company in the 1660s) and then moved to Covent Garden in 1720. Together, the two patent companies enjoyed an exclusive right to perform all scripted drama in London, with the sole exception of the smaller Haymarket Theatre, which in 1766 was granted a license to stage plays in the summer, when the other two theatres closed. Reinforced by the Licensing Act of 1737, this monopoly remained in force until 1843, meaning that ‘legitimate’ performances of Shakespeare in eighteenth-century

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

21

London – the London of Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Johnson – were restricted to just three theatres, only two of which were open for most of the year. Smaller theatres outside London’s West End were equally attracted to performing Shakespeare but had to circumvent the restrictions placed upon them. Thus, the so-called ‘minor’ theatres, particularly toward the end of the eighteenth century, performed Shakespeare as pantomime, puppet show, ‘equestrian’ drama (Richard III on horseback was a favorite), and melodrama, the last involving snippets of dialogue performed between songs and over musical accompaniment. Apart from their inventiveness, the mere existence of these largely nonverbal productions – in which few words from the script were actually spoken – tells us just how popular Shakespeare was with socially diverse audiences at a range of theatrical establishments, from Astley’s amphitheatre circus on the unfashionable south side of the River Thames to the vast proscenium stages of Covent Garden and Drury Lane in the commercial West End. Perhaps because he was himself an actor, Shakespeare understood that while powerful theatrical moments usually require good acting, they do not always require words. When reading a play, it’s easy to forget all the silent actions that Shakespeare created: Shylock vengefully whetting his knife in the courtroom, Macbeth looking with astonished fear at Banquo’s ghost, or Isabella saying nothing after the Duke announces that he will marry her. Powerfully revealing of character, these episodes take a split second to register on the page but can take several minutes to unfold on the stage, a reminder that reading a script with an awareness of theatrical possibility is an enriching experience because it expands the dimensions in which a play operates. When actors invent stage business – as when Simon Russell Beale’s (1961–) Ariel spat into the face of Alec McCowen’s (1925–2017) Prospero in the RSC’s 1993 production of The Tempest – they are not distorting Shakespeare’s original play but continuing the tradition that Shakespeare helped to establish. Whatever is vital in the plays cannot be reduced to language alone, which also explains the popularity of Shakespeare in translation and Shakespeare in silent film. While the legal restrictions imposed upon the eighteenth-century theatre created a cottage industry in virtually wordless productions of Shakespeare

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

22

Shakespeare Performance

at London’s ‘minor’ theatres, the larger patent theatres were at the same time rediscovering the importance of Shakespeare’s own words. The greatest change that eighteenth-century audiences witnessed was the gradual restoration of the original texts (although still heavily cut and rearranged for performance) and the disappearance from the stage of the Shakespeare adaptations that had been popular since the Restoration. This desire to restore the dramatist’s words owed much to the publication of scholarly editions of Shakespeare’s plays, beginning with Nicholas Rowe’s six-volume edition in 1709 and continuing throughout the century, with important editions prepared by Pope (1725), William Warburton (1747), Johnson (1765), and Edmond Malone (1790). Unlike the four Folio editions that were printed between 1623 and 1685, eighteenthcentury Shakespeare editions commented upon the text, updated spelling and punctuation, explained obscure terms, and attempted to reconcile variant or originally misprinted passages. In other words, they looked very much like the modern Shakespeare editions used by scholars and students today. An authoritative version of Shakespeare’s texts naturally created the expectation that such texts – and only such texts – would be used for performance. ‘King Lear is an admirable Tragedy . . . as Shakespeare wrote it’, the critic Joseph Addison observed in The Spectator at the beginning of the century, ‘but as it is reformed [for the stage] . . . has lost half its Beauty’. He was referring to Nahum Tate’s 1681 version of Shakespeare’s tragedy, in which the Fool is eliminated but Lear and Cordelia survive. By the end of the eighteenth century, theatrical producers largely endorsed Addison’s belief that Shakespeare’s plays no longer needed to be rewritten for performance, although The Tempest was a major exception. The playwright’s words were often cut, and sometimes aggressively so; but words or scenes written by others were not generally added wholesale to his scripts. Ironically, the major exception to this rule was the actor-manager and playwright David Garrick (1717–1779), who dedicated his extraordinarily successful career to promoting Shakespeare as the supreme symbol of national culture. Garrick, the single most important figure in eighteenthcentury Shakespeare, made his London debut at Goodman’s Fields in 1741, playing Richard III (in Cibber’s version, naturally). Within six years he

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

23

rose to the top of his profession, running Drury Lane Theatre. Like Charles Macklin (1690–1797), his Irish-born mentor, Garrick was hailed for the ‘naturalistic’ style of his acting, a term that must always be put into context because each generation of theatre audiences has a different idea of what ‘acting naturally’ means. In the mid-eighteenth century it meant representing the successive and sometimes overlapping emotions felt by a character throughout the play. Through gesture, pose, and facial expression, Garrick thrilled audiences with his embodiment of emotional truth. After seeing Garrick play Hamlet, the German tourist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg memorably described the moment (depicted in Figure 7) when the prince first sees his father’s ghost: ‘His [Garrick’s] whole demeanour is so expressive of terror that it made my flesh creep.’ Lichtenberg’s eyewitness account identified the measure of success for Shakespearean acting in the eighteenth century: the actor must become a living illustration of a recognizable emotion, which then elicits a corresponding reaction from the spectator. For spectators highly attuned to sentiment, what mattered in a performance was the quick, bold, and convincing depiction of feelings. In Garrick those spectators hailed a virtuoso who could embody the many passions of Shakespeare’s characters, from Hamlet’s frozen terror to Macbeth’s deranged ambition, and from Romeo’s sweet ardor to Richard III’s evil cunning. James Boswell wept openly at the poignant frailty of the great actor’s Lear, an experience so pleasurable that he returned for more. Today, we would probably be unmoved by Garrick’s acting, finding it static and ponderous; but that says more about us than it does about him and the loyal audience that he attracted. Despite Garrick’s energetic genius as a performer, it was his management of Drury Lane from 1747 to 1776 that made him the leading stage interpreter of England’s national poet. It would be hard to think of a theatrical personality in any age more influential than Garrick in forming popular attitudes toward Shakespeare (attitudes that continue to the present day, not least through Shakespeare’s central place in the undergraduate English curriculum). Although Drury Lane’s manager took pride in introducing to a London audience the enhanced scenic and lighting effects used in French theatres, his lasting contribution was not in staging methods. Rather, Garrick’s innovation was to promote an idea of

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

24

Shakespeare Performance

Figure 7 David Garrick as Hamlet (Act 1 Scene 4), seeing his father’s ghost, c. 1760s. In this well-known image, Garrick performs the classic ‘start’, an expression of alarmed surprise: leaning backwards, knees bent, weight resting on the back leg, both arms outstretched in a defensive posture, and vigilant eyes (accompanied by raised eyebrows) looking straight ahead. Compare Garrick’s costume and stance with Betterton’s Hamlet, as shown in Figure 6. Reproduced courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

25

Shakespeare: that he embodied the superiority of English culture, particularly when contrasted with the tyranny of neoclassical rules in the literary and theatrical culture of England’s main rival, France. Shakespeare the great national poet was his country’s triumphant answer to Homer and Virgil, the cultural expression of its growing worldwide economic and colonial power. Shakespeare became a synonym for Englishness itself, the very substance and image of national identity. Garrick created ‘Bardolatry’ – the formal worship of Shakespeare, a phenomenon that requires believers, rituals, and pilgrimage sites – when in 1769 he organized the Stratford Jubilee, a three-day celebration of Shakespeare that put the dramatist’s hometown forever on the tourist map. The Jubilee left Garrick saddled with debts totaling £2,000, an immense sum that he quickly recouped with the proceeds of his hugely popular play The Jubilee, a version of the rained-out pageant of Shakespearean characters that was supposed to have taken place in Stratford-upon-Avon. If Shakespeare represented the best of English culture – ‘a kind of established religion’, as the playwright Arthur Murphy (1727–1805) put it in 1753 – then it followed that a theatre like Drury Lane, in possession of a royal patent, and thus in some sense a quasi-national theatre, would devote itself to performing the greatest plays of the nation’s greatest cultural figure. Just as it seemed right that Westminster Abbey boasted a statue of Shakespeare (sculpted by Peter Scheemakers in 1740 and placed in Poets’ Corner, where it remains), it seemed right that Drury Lane would become a patriotic temple to Shakespeare’s genius, a status achieved through Garrick’s own genius for profitable self-promotion. That not a single line from a single Shakespeare play was performed during the Stratford Jubilee reveals something important: that reverence for Shakespeare’s text has never been a necessary part of reverence for Shakespeare as a cultural icon. Garrick regularly staged adaptations of Shakespeare, most of which were his own and in which he regularly took the leading role. Never a commanding tragic hero, but highly gifted in comedy, Garrick avoided magisterial roles like Coriolanus or Othello and much preferred to play Romeo and Benedick, roles that emphasized private and domestic relationships. In rewriting Shakespearean tragedy, Garrick eliminated the gravediggers in Hamlet – audiences disliked the production

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

26

Shakespeare Performance

because it cut one of their favorite scenes – but retained the scene from Thomas Otway’s (1652–1685) version of Romeo and Juliet in which the heroine briefly awakens in her tomb before Romeo dies, a moment of pathos that Shakespeare inexplicably forgot to write. He condensed A Midsummer Night’s Dream into a fairy story with songs but only once attempted to stage the entire play. The surviving Drury Lane promptbook from that 1763 production (an extract from which is shown in Figure 8) reveals that textual cuts and musical interpolations were still deemed necessary. In similar fashion, Garrick omitted the first three acts of The Winter’s Tale, and then introduced the truncated play (renamed Florizel and Perdita) with a prologue swearing his deep loyalty to the dramatist: ‘’Tis my chief Wish, my Joy, my only Plan, ⁄ To lose no Drop of that immortal man’. Yet Garrick did spill many precious drops, perhaps recognizing better than anyone that a truly immortal Shakespeare would outlive everyone who rewrote his plays. We are passing, but Shakespeare is immortal. Samuel Johnson’s 1765 edition of the plays fully underscored the point: No matter how drastically Shakespeare’s works were reshaped for performance, the full original text was always available; and available in ever more useful scholarly editions. The seeming hypocrisy of Garrick’s adaptations – the actor professed to worship Shakespeare but then rewrote the plays – did not pass unnoticed. Theophilus Cibber (1703–1758), son of Colley Cibber, and Garrick’s rival in the theatrical world, attacked him for desecrating the great national poet. The irony is that the younger Cibber’s attack turned on the very principle that Garrick himself championed: Shakespeare was sacred, and thus deserved his countrymen’s loyalty. It was a tribute to the success of Garrick’s evangelical mission on Shakespeare’s behalf that his loudest critics had quietly embraced the Bardolatrous values that he urged upon them. When theatre critics today bemoan that a ‘concept’ director has failed to respect the integrity of Shakespeare’s text, they demonstrate just how fully they, too, have internalized the values that Garrick first preached more than two and a half centuries ago. As Shakespeare’s cultural authority expanded, so did the size of the theatres where his plays were staged. Because the performance of Shakespeare was restricted to the patent theatres, and because London’s

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

27

Figure 8 Promptbook for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Drury Lane Theatre, London, November 1763. Staged while Garrick was touring Europe (there was no part for him in the play) the production was the theatre’s sole attempt to stage the whole play during Garrick’s tenure as actor-manager. As this extract shows, full-length Shakespeare required musical interpolations and significant textual cuts to make it suitable in performance for an eighteenth-century audience. Reproduced courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

28

Shakespeare Performance

population continued to grow, both Drury Lane and Covent Garden needed to be enlarged. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, each theatre accommodated nearly 4,000 spectators, about seven times the number that filled a Restoration playhouse. After being rebuilt by Henry Holland in 1794, Drury Lane (see Figure 9) became a cavernous and multitiered performance space that put a gulf between actor and audience, even though it retained such traditional features as doors on either side of the stage and adjacent private boxes. In a practice that continued well into the twentieth century, audiences were separated by social class into architecturally separate parts of the auditorium, each with a different ticket price (and sometimes different doors for entering and exiting the theatre). To adopt a rough classification: the most expensive seats were the private boxes occupied by aristocrats and the wealthy; the cheapest seats were in the uppermost galleries, where clerks, apprentices, sailors, and household servants would sit; while the workaday middle and professional classes, a broad grouping that encompassed everyone from shopkeepers to lawyers and doctors, occupied the lower gallery or crowded on benches in the pit. Because the candle-lit auditorium remained illuminated throughout the performance, the audience remained conscious of itself as the audience: a social community gathered together. Watching a performance in the darkened auditorium of a proscenium stage, which did not become the norm in English theatres until the late nineteenth century, can be socially alienating because it denies the audience a communal identity. Indeed, spectators are reduced to passive individual observers of what transpires on the other side of the footlights, so to speak. This separation between actor and audience – between the offstage and onstage worlds – was alien to Shakespeare’s theatre and to his dramatic art. An awareness of the audience is written deeply into Shakespeare’s plays, whether through prologues and epilogues, soliloquies, or songs. The Chorus in Henry V explicitly reminds the audience of its vital role in creating the performance. The battle between the English and the French at Agincourt cannot be recreated onstage unless the audience releases its ‘imaginary forces’. Together with the actors and the playwright, the spectators are responsible for conjuring up the world of the play. Without their consent and active participation – ‘For ’tis your thoughts that now

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

29

Figure 9 Drury Lane Theatre, London, as seen from the back of the stalls. Rebuilt in 1794, Drury Lane accommodated nearly 4,000 spectators. Although the new theatre retained a substantial amount of space downstage of the proscenium arch – including side doors and private boxes right up against the stage – in no way could this theatre be called intimate. It was a colossus, built for a vast audience and massive stage spectacle. Reproduced courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. must deck our kings’, the Chorus urges the audience – the performance cannot exist. That message is conveyed again and again by Shakespeare’s plays; and for 300 years everyone in the theatre understood and observed it. But after Richard Wagner darkened the auditorium at Bayreuth for the 1876 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

30

Shakespeare Performance

premiere of his Ring cycle – a precedent followed by the late Victorian actor-manager Henry Irving (1838–1905) at the Lyceum Theatre in London – the traditional power of the audience as co-creator of the performance began to erode. A theatre audience in the eighteenth century, however, was still very much visible, to the actors and to itself. Indeed, the theatre – along with coffeehouses, churches, and parks – was one of the few places where a variety of social orders congregated. If you wanted to remark upon major events of the day, the Georgian theatre was a good place to do so because you could reach many different sorts of people all at once. The growing awareness that a theatre audience was a microcosm of the nation itself led naturally to politically and socially aware productions of Shakespeare. Although not wholly unprecedented (Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare were often driven by political topicality, especially around the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis), this was still a major change in how audiences ‘read’ performances, a change that still applies today. Beyond intrinsic enjoyment of the production itself – the play, the acting, the music, the scenery, and the costumes – audiences became skilled in making links between the illusionistic onstage world and the real world of their own lived experience. Politically resonant productions of Shakespeare characterized the career of the famed actor John Philip Kemble, who took the helm at Drury Lane in 1788, less than a decade after Garrick’s death. In 1802 he moved to Covent Garden and remained there until his retirement in 1823. Kemble’s view of Shakespeare was fundamentally conservative, such that he played characters like Prospero in The Tempest and the Duke in Measure for Measure as benign paternal rulers, an interpretation that reinforced their authority but downplayed their evident moral failings. By contrast, modern productions have frequently reversed the equation, with Prospero portrayed as a colonial oppressor and the Duke as a misogynistic autocrat. Yet it was Coriolanus that best captured Shakespeare’s political dynamism in the age of European revolutions, because the play grappled with the explosive tension between a ruling elite and a discontented populace. It was easy to read the events dramatized in Shakespeare’s Roman play as a distant

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

31

mirror of the political turmoil reported in newspapers every week. As the literary and theatrical critic William Hazlitt shrewdly observed in his Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817), anyone reading Coriolanus ‘may save himself the trouble of reading Burke’s Reflections, or Paine’s Rights of Man, or the Debates in both Houses of Parliament since the French Revolution or our own’. Antagonistic images of the solitary patrician and the plebeian mob were the political flashpoints in seemingly every production of Coriolanus staged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Kemble’s 1789 Drury Lane revival premiered five months before the fall of the Bastille in Paris – the shocking beginning of the French Revolution – and was quickly withdrawn, not performed again until 1792. While stage crowds at the time were seen as potentially revolutionary, what is most fascinating about Kemble’s production is the ambiguity of its politics. For some observers, the crowd scenes fueled domestic fears that a continental-style revolution would take place in England. Yet for others, the firm way that Kemble’s Coriolanus controlled the mutinous plebeians reassured audiences that the streets of London were safe from mob violence. The opposite interpretations that spectators drew from the same production remind us that the meaning of Shakespeare in performance is likely to be plural, not singular, because the meaning depends upon the expectations and values of audiences who are never monolithic communities. Part of what enhanced the political dimension of Kemble’s productions of Shakespeare was the actor’s own demeanor. Kemble perfectly embodied the neoclassic ideal of a detached tragic hero, vividly captured in Sir Thomas Lawrence’s 1801 portrait of him as a brooding forlorn Hamlet with eyes turned upward, oblivious to the viewer’s presence (Figure 10). His sister, the celebrated actress Sarah Siddons (1755–1831), was similarly immortalized on Sir Joshua Reynolds’ canvas as the regal Tragic Muse (Figure 11). The actor gravitated toward the grand heroic parts like Brutus and Coriolanus that Garrick had carefully avoided, while steering clear of comic roles like Benedick and Petruchio, in which his predecessor had excelled. Siddons’ high reputation rested upon her interpretations of Lady Macbeth, Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, and Queen Katharine in Henry VIII. The great comic and romantic actress at the time was Dorothy

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

32

Shakespeare Performance

Figure 10 John Philip Kemble as a moody Prince Hamlet in Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portrait from 1801. Clothed almost entirely in mournful black – from his plumed hat down to his beribboned shoes – Kemble was a grand tragedian who lent an air of haughty dignity to every role he played. Reproduced courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

33

Figure 11 Sir Joshua Reynolds painted the actress Sarah Siddons, Kemble’s sister and sometimes his leading lady, as the Tragic Muse. Like her brother John, Siddons combined passionate expression with cool detachment, as if the audience witnessed but did not share in her performance. Reproduced under the Open Content Program of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

34

Shakespeare Performance

Jordan, who enjoyed particular success in ‘breeches’ roles – Viola in Twelfth Night, Rosalind in As You Like It – where she played a woman playing a young man, and thus was dressed (as shown in Figure 12) in stockings, knee breeches, and a tight-fitting tunic that suggestively displayed the actual feminine figure underneath the masculine costume. There are many reasons why a certain play becomes popular at a certain time, and one of those reasons has always been the desire of performers to play certain roles. It was altogether fitting that Siddons played Hermione – in the final scene, a memorial statue of the dead queen comes magically to life – because both she and her brother recreated in performance the poses, gestures, and facial expressions that they found in classical statuary. Their goal was to find the perfect physical image to illustrate their character’s chief emotions or, to use their term, ‘ruling passions’. At this endeavor they were hugely successful, and the actor William Charles Macready, who witnessed Kemble’s final performances, likened them to a Rembrandt painting come alive. In a further link between theatre and the visual arts, Kemble studied Nicolas Poussin’s seventeenth-century baroque painting of Coriolanus to inspire his own interpretation of the role and also to suggest how groups of characters might be arranged pictorially on the Drury Lane stage. Such borrowing from other artistic forms reminds us that stage productions of Shakespeare have both drawn inspiration from and inspired other art forms for centuries, a trend that accelerated in the Victorian era and has never really slowed down. In recent years, productions have incorporated the sources of their borrowings into the performance itself, as when the avant-garde Wooster Group, in its 2012 co-production with the RSC of Troilus and Cressida, hung its trademark video monitors above the stage. The monitors showed narrative films (with sound muted) acted by members of the Arctic Inuit tribe, whose indigenous costumes and traditions were adapted by the New York–based acting ensemble in playing the besieged Trojans. (RSC actors played the avenging Greeks.) Though the technology was modern, the idea behind it was old: that productions of Shakespeare’s plays are enriched when influenced by different artistic forms. The nature of that influence varies over time, and the Wooster Group’s whooping and

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

35

Figure 12 Dorothy Jordan as a cross-dressed Viola masquerading as the pageboy Cesario in Twelfth Night. The contrast with remote tragedy queens like Siddons could not be stronger: Jordan’s playful expression and deliberately displayed physique gesture knowingly toward the audience, not away from it. Reproduced courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

36

Shakespeare Performance

shouting would have appalled Kemble and Siddons, whose equally compelling stage presence rested upon their stately immobility, in which the characters they portrayed kept their intensely felt emotions in check. Kemble and Siddons did not offer the only model for acting Shakespearean in the Romantic age, because the opening decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the unequaled stage phenomenon that was Edmund Kean (1787–1833). Hazlitt declared, not approvingly, that Kean the radical actor destroyed ‘the Kemble religion’ when he made his London debut in 1814 in a novel sympathetic interpretation of Shylock. Kean’s success as an actor lay in his inventive mastery of the ‘point’: the isolated action, gesture, or movement performed by the actor at emotionally pivotal moments in a play. Figure 13 reveals the actor’s expressive and agile physicality, as Kean’s Shylock bends low to the courtroom floor to whet his knife, all the while keeping his gaze fixed on his prey Antonio. Samuel Taylor Coleridge captured something of the intensity of Kean’s acting when he famously declared, after watching Kean perform, that ‘to see him act, is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning’. It wasn’t that Kean fell into a lull between the play’s high points but rather that his audience was hyperalert to moments when the emotional stakes ran highest; moments when the performance became so intense that it fleetingly stood out from itself, like a landscape brilliantly illuminated for the instant of a lightning flash. To cite two examples, both controversial in their time: Kean’s Richard III drew his battle plan on the ground with the point of his sword and his Hamlet reclined on the floor during the performance of ‘The Mousetrap’. These were precisely the kind of nonheroic, almost idiosyncratic, stage actions that Kemble would never have adopted. Kemble’s Hamlet gazed upward but Kean’s stayed close to the ground. Audiences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries knew the ‘points’ in each Shakespeare play in the repertoire because they went to the theatre frequently, the stage then being as popular as movies and television are today. Over a lifetime of theatregoing, audience members accumulated deep knowledge of how Shakespeare’s plays had been interpreted and performed. And so, they were well equipped to judge each fresh generation of actors by how well they executed the canonical ‘points’. That actors

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

37

Figure 13 Edmund Kean as Shylock. He made his London debut in the role at Drury Lane in January 1814. Kean’s humane interpretation of the character elicited an unusually strong response from the audience, making him a theatrical star overnight. A few years earlier, when acting with him in the provinces, Siddons dismissed the newcomer: ‘too little of him to make a great actor’. Reproduced courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

38

Shakespeare Performance

might ignore the ‘points’ was for a long time all but inconceivable, so rooted had that mimetic tradition become. Today, it is the fairly rare audience member who can attend a performance of, say, Macbeth – one of Shakespeare’s most frequently performed plays – and compare it to five other productions of the play that she has seen. For less popular works, audiences might be lucky to see them just once, unless they habitually attend Shakespeare festivals or see everything produced by the RSC in Stratford, Shakespeare’s Globe in London, or the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC. Indeed, a selling point of the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival – held in venues throughout the UK – was not just that theatre companies from around the world would be involved but that all the plays would be performed – a reminder that it is now much easier to read all of Shakespeare than to see all of Shakespeare. Things were different in the age of Kemble, Siddons, and Kean, when actors competed not just with their peers but, even more importantly, with great actors of the past whose performances lived on in memory, legend, gossip, biography, and portraiture. True, the repertoire was limited even then – Troilus and Cressida, Pericles, and Love’s Labour’s Lost were utterly unknown to Georgian and Romantic audiences – but the plays in the established repertoire were for the most past performed regularly. When Edmund Kean played Macbeth in 1815 he was compared to John Philip Kemble who acted the same part in 1785, who was compared to David Garrick in 1768, who was compared to James Quin in 1718, who was compared to Thomas Betterton in 1663, who, fantastically, was compared – in John Downes’ Roscius Anglicanus (1708) – to Richard Burbage, who created the role that Shakespeare had written for him. Five degrees of separation between Edmund Kean and William Shakespeare. Of course, only Burbage performed Shakespeare’s version of Macbeth; all the others, from Betterton onward, performed an adaptation. Yet the absence of textual fidelity only underlines the importance of theatrical fidelity. This sense of deep continuity in acting depended not just upon knowledge and memories acquired over many years but also upon the belief that actors, even when separated by many years, and even when not speaking exactly the same words, might, nevertheless, share much in common.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

39

But they don’t share everything in common; otherwise, the theatre would never change. Hence, the concomitant awareness of how and when theatrical continuity was ruptured – and by whom – was an equally significant aspect of audience expectations and responses. Edmund Kean was the chief iconoclastic actor of the Romantic era, and not just because he differed so strongly from John Philip Kemble in temperament and appearance. There was, in fact, a political dimension to both acting styles. In 1820, three years after Kemble’s retirement, the younger tragedian offered a new interpretation of Coriolanus. Forsaking the memory of Kemble’s haughty patrician, Kean gave his Drury Lane audience something new: a plebeian tragic hero. Hazlitt, with the memory of the 1819 Peterloo Massacre still fresh in his mind – when the British cavalry charged into a crowd of 60,000 demanding democratic reform – affirmed in his review of Coriolanus (London Magazine, January 1820) that Kean’s acting ‘is not of the patrician order; he is one of the people, and what might be termed a radical performer’. Kean’s embodiment of a plebeian Coriolanus – ‘one of the people’ – marked a significant change in the play’s stage history (apart from the history of its textual adaptation) because it enabled audiences to view the stage crowd as the play’s central, galvanizing force. Such an interpretation had not previously been possible, mainly because Kemble’s arrogant Coriolanus dominated the production throughout. There was simply no room in his interpretation for the people to have a voice. Kean changed all that by the sheer force of his acting. The play itself was by and large the same; it was the new way of performing Shakespeare’s play that enabled the citizenry of Rome to become a fully fledged character. Whether that hitherto unacknowledged character inclined more toward democracy or anarchy was a matter of critical dispute; but it was beyond dispute that the people assembled onstage took the leading role. Edmund Kean achieved many things but securing a legacy was not among them. The almost clichéd epitome of Romantic genius, he was a prodigious talent driven to moral and physical self-destruction. By the end of his brief career, Kean had suffered the dual indignities of a collapse in popular support – audiences booed him off the stage as punishment for his adulterous affairs – and the collapse of his own

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

40

Shakespeare Performance

body – the harsh result of years of alcohol abuse. Unlike Garrick and Kemble before him, Kean never managed a London theatre, an artistic and financial responsibility for which he was wholly unsuited. In consequence, his legacy was not the continuing life of a theatre company or the publication of acting editions of various Shakespeare plays. The least imitated actor of his time, Kean was the inscrutable wanderer whose appeal lay in his very inscrutability. He smashed the idols of an earlier faith yet did nothing to replace them. His astounding but idiosyncratic career reminds us to be careful about telling the history of Shakespeare on the stage as a history mainly of change and upheaval. Because sometimes, as was the case with Edmund Kean, change does not replace the status quo but only temporarily disrupts it.

5 Shakespeare the Victorian While a devotion to Shakespeare did not always predict box-office success, no legitimate theatre in the nineteenth century could establish a solid reputation without it. To imagine a Victorian theatre without Shakespeare is to imagine a theatre no longer English, a proposition that reflects just how successful the eighteenth century had been in making Shakespeare the symbol of English cultural supremacy. In the United States, the attachment to Shakespeare was then – as so often now – owing to the playwright’s prestige value. On both sides of the Atlantic, most nineteenth-century theatrical celebrities were attracted to performing Shakespeare, including actresses like Ellen Kean (1805–1880), Helena Faucit, and Ellen Terry (1847–1928) and actors not principally known as long-term theatrical managers, such as Charles Fechter and the Americans Edwin Booth and Richard Mansfield (1857–1907). But it was the talent and the drive of London actor-managers – William Charles Macready, Samuel Phelps (1804–1878), Charles Kean, Henry Irving, and Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1852–1917) – that made Shakespeare in the Victorian age both popular and socially respectable. These star actors turned to Shakespeare partly to play great roles, partly to educate their audiences in history and morality, and partly to win respectability for themselves as gentlemen proprietors of worthy cultural establishments.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

41

The Victorian actor-manager was the sole figure responsible for mounting a theatrical production (in which he took the leading role) and running an artistic business, in charge of everyone from the corps de ballet to the boxoffice staff. A major fault line in the history of Shakespeare in the theatre has been the concentration of power in the hands of a single person, for which the modern artistic director remains the principal example. The idea that a single individual took responsibility for the vision of a theatrical production – indeed, the idea that a theatrical production had a vision – began to emerge in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Thus, we cannot understand Shakespeare’s place on the Victorian stage without first understanding the contributions, innovations, and obsessions of the great actor-managers who, by mythologizing Shakespeare, also mythologized themselves. During his brief managerial career at Covent Garden (1837–1839) and Drury Lane (1841–1843), Macready was renowned for a noble but failed effort to establish a theatre where Shakespearean drama would be produced with appropriate reverence. Achieving that worthy distinction entailed not only restoring the integrity of Shakespeare’s texts – Macready brought back the role of the Fool in King Lear and discarded Cibber’s Richard III – but also staging his plays with increased attention to historical accuracy in sets and costumes, attracting royal patronage, and expelling prostitutes from the theatre – pursuits and concerns that lasted throughout the century. Within a decade of the passage of the Theatres Regulation Act of 1843, which permitted any licensed theatre in London to perform scripted drama – and thus ended the monopoly of the patent theatres that dated back to 1660 – Samuel Phelps at Sadler’s Wells and Charles Kean at the Princess’s Theatre embarked upon a memorable series of Shakespeare revivals. During his lengthy managerial tenure (1844–1862), Phelps was lauded for endearing a local suburban audience to legitimate drama, ensemble acting, ambition in performing nearly the entire Shakespeare canon (thirty-one plays), and ingenuity in making do with a paucity of stage resources. Whether because of the financial constraints imposed by managing a theatre with modest box-office potential, the supposedly less refined tastes of a suburban north London audience, or his own allegiance to textual purity, Phelps left

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

42

Shakespeare Performance

lavish revivals of Shakespeare to his West End counterpart, Charles Kean, son of legendary actor Edmund Kean. In only nine seasons (1850–1859) as manager of the Princess’s Theatre, the younger Kean recreated the medieval and Tudor England of Shakespeare’s history plays, Periclean Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and seventeenth-century Italy in The Merchant of Venice. Actor turned antiquary, Kean ‘rummaged out old books’, ‘turned over old prints’, and ‘brushed the dirt off old music’, as a newspaper critic in 1855 observed, in preparing revivals of Shakespeare. Kean’s antiquarian spectacles were celebrated – and censured – for their sets, costumes, and properties of unprecedented historical precision; adherence to the description of events in the works of prominent historians; reenactment of events not dramatized by Shakespeare; historical essays in the playbills; and the publication of quasiacademic editions of the plays. Kean interpolated into his production of Henry V (1859) a spectacular musical tableau – with hundreds of stage extras – depicting Henry’s triumphal return to London after the victory at Agincourt, a moment not dramatized in Shakespeare’s play. Night after night, it stopped the show. The ‘present age demands that all dramatic representations must of necessity be accompanied by a certain selection of scenery, dresses, and music’, Kean argued in a playbill manifesto, and ‘truth in these matters is preferable to inaccuracy’. True to his principles, the actor-manager collaborated with historians and antiquarians so that the resulting stage costumes (see Figure 14) were based upon correct historical precedent. So insistent was Kean upon authentic stage accessories that his detractors at the comic magazine Punch dubbed him not the ‘upholder’ of Shakespeare but the ‘Upholsterer’. Yet to Kean’s relatively modest playhouse on Oxford Street came some of the leading figures of the mid-nineteenth century: Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (and their children); Lord Palmerston, then prime minister; and the writers Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, and Hans Christian Andersen. Kean’s retirement from the Princess’s Theatre in 1859 marked the beginning of a twenty-year gap in memorable London productions of Shakespeare, an interregnum relieved only by Fechter’s Hamlet (1861, 1864) and Squire and Marie Bancroft’s The Merchant of Venice (1875), the

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

43

Figure 14 Costume sketches for Charles Kean’s production of Richard II, Princess’s Theatre, London, 1857. The ‘prince of theatrical antiquaries’, Kean went to enormous lengths to ensure that the costumes even of minor characters were historically accurate, thus making the entire stage ensemble a history book come to life. Reproduced courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core License. terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. International https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

44

Shakespeare Performance

latter a commercial failure but memorable for E. W. Godwin’s picturesque scenery and Ellen Terry’s winning comeback performance as Portia. Not until Henry Irving’s famed management of the Lyceum Theatre (1878–1902) was Shakespeare fully restored to the London stage. In Ellen Terry, Irving found his perfect acting partner. Their mutual friend Oscar Wilde dubbed her ‘Our Lady of the Lyceum’, a sobriquet nicely capturing the semi-religious reverence accorded to both the actress (Figure 15) and the temple of dramatic arts where she fulfilled the role of high priestess. Irving, the Lyceum’s high priest, inherited from Charles Kean not simply a repertoire of Shakespeare and polite melodrama but also a taste for spectacle, as evidenced in extravagant productions of Coriolanus, Henry VIII, King Lear, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado about Nothing, and Romeo and Juliet. Aided by the use of built scenery (earlier productions had relied mostly on painted canvas flats and backdrops), Irving presented convincing historical illusions in three dimensions. The wedding scene in his production of Much Ado about Nothing (1882), for example, took place in a recreated Sicilian cathedral complete with wrought iron gates and real columns thirty feet high supporting an ornamental roof, none of which Shakespeare specified in his play. The ironic zenith of Victorian delight in realistic stage effects was Beerbohm Tree’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Her Majesty’s Theatre in 1900. The bucolic setting was perfected not through monumental scenery but through live rabbits hopping around the stage. All this time, Shakespeare continued to be staged in theatres throughout Britain and Ireland. Charles Calvert’s (1828–1879) lavish productions at the Theatre Royal, Manchester in the 1850s and 1860s rivaled anything seen in London. When Calvert crossed the Atlantic in 1875 to stage Henry V in New York he was continuing a tradition, not establishing it: Shakespeare had been performed professionally in America ever since a company of twelve English actors led by the brothers William and Lewis Hallam sailed into Yorktown harbor in the colony of Virginia in 1752. Prominent English performers such as George Frederick Cooke (1756–1812), the elder Kean, Charles Kemble Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

45

Figure 15 Ellen Terry as Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, Lyceum Theatre, London, c. 1882. With Irving as Benedick, the Lyceum production was hugely successful. Beatrice was one of Terry’s favorite roles, giving her ample opportunity to display her comic skills – as captured in this photograph by the flick of her head and the insouciant flourish of her overskirt. Reproduced courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. (1775–1854), his daughter Fanny Kemble (1809–1883), and Macready all undertook successful American tours in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

46

Shakespeare Performance

But it was not until Edwin Forrest (1806–1872) and Charlotte Cushman (1816–1876) took the stage that America claimed its first homegrown theatrical stars. Both of them defied conventional gender stereotypes. In her long career, Cushman played Shakespearean roles as diverse as Viola and Lady Macbeth; but she was particularly acclaimed for her performance in male roles, including Cardinal Wolsey and Hamlet. Indeed, her greatest part was Romeo (Figure 16), which she sometimes played opposite her sister Susan as Juliet. Cushman, who was romantically involved with women in an age before the term ‘lesbian’ existed, found in Romeo – and in the respectability of the Shakespearean dramatic canon – a role that allowed her to perform in public her love for another woman. Edwin Forrest, a robustly muscular performer, who possessed some of the elder Kean’s dynamism, incited controversies over masculinity: first by comparison with the subdued dignity of Macready, his foreign contender, and then with the young Edwin Booth, his challenger on native soil. Forrest, who had a voice, it was said, like Niagara Falls, embodied the proverbial roughness of American culture: a brute power that was either its trademark virtue or the sign of its inferiority in the face of perceived British sophistication. In 1836, John Forster, a Macready sympathizer, condemned Forrest’s acting – ‘hideous looks and features, ear-splitting shouts’ – in blatantly nationalistic terms. The American tragedian’s ‘ideas of heroism’, Forster sneered in the Examiner, ‘appear to have been gathered among the wilds of his native country’. So intense was the rivalry between Forrest and Macready that their simultaneous appearance as Macbeth in two different New York theatres in 1849 incited the Astor Place Riot, which led to deadly violence in the streets. Despite Forrest’s celebrity, it was the more genteel Booth, scion of a legendary theatrical dynasty – his brother, the actor John Wilkes Booth (1838–1865), assassinated Lincoln – who set the standard for Shakespearean acting in America’s Gilded Age. Famously, he played Hamlet for 100 consecutive nights at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York during

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

47

Figure 16 Charlotte Cushman as Romeo, c. 1870. Cushman, who during her long career played more than two-dozen male roles, was a pioneer in the performativity of gender and sexuality. Reproduced under the Open Content Program of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

48

Shakespeare Performance

the season of 1864/5, and thus inaugurated in America the ‘long run’ of a Shakespeare play. The greatest theatrical star of his time, Booth (depicted in Figure 17) traveled endlessly across America, bringing Shakespeare to towns large and small, wherever the new transcontinental railroad could take him. He also traveled to London, where in 1881 he appeared alongside Irving and Terry in a revival of Othello at the Lyceum, with the two actors alternating the roles of Othello and Iago. The animosity that divided Forrest and Macready – and the friendship that united Booth and Irving – tells us that Shakespeare played a contradictory dual role in the cultural politics of nineteenth-century America. As violently expressed in the Astor Place Riot, Shakespeare could stand for a fealty toward British culture that some saw as retrograde, neocolonialist, and downright treasonable. Shakespeare, in such a view, was the tyranny from which America had fought to be set free. Yet, as symbolized by Forrest, Shakespeare could also stand for a proudly native approach to culture, one that repudiated the British example but retained the genius of Shakespeare, a genius that transcended mere nationality. For Americans, then, Shakespeare was either the despised past or the liberated future. In 1833 the novelist James Fenimore Cooper hailed Shakespeare as ‘the great author of America’ while four decades later the poet Walt Whitman denounced the English playwright as ‘poisonous to the idea of pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood of the democracy’. Debates about whether Shakespeare can be considered ‘American’ – genuinely native, not imported – have never stopped. In 1985 the controversial director Peter Sellars (1957–) chose Henry IV, Part 1 for the inaugural production of the (short-lived) American National Theatre at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, because, he claimed, Shakespeare was America’s national playwright – a rationale that some observers found persuasive and others found merely expedient. But, at the end of the nineteenth century, the matter of who owned Shakespeare felt settled. Booth and Irving’s joint appearance in Othello – a prelude to Irving’s eight highly successful American tours, which took him Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

Figure 17 Edwin Booth as Iago, 1870. Even when playing a villain, Booth could not help but bring a gentle civility to the role. This studio-posed photograph, consisting of two nearly identical images mounted next to each other, was meant to be viewed through a stereoscope, which gave the illusion of three dimensions. The circulation of stereographed images of Booth attests to his wide popularity, even just five years after his brother John Wilkes assassinated Lincoln. Reproduced under the Open Content Program of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

50

Shakespeare Performance

and Ellen Terry not just to New York City but to smaller cities like Nashville, Cleveland, and St. Louis – symbolized a new harmony between American and British actors. Times had changed so much that, while on tour in Philadelphia, Irving was presented with Forrest’s watch. The gift was less an emblem of reconciliation than a redrawing of the battle lines. In this latest iteration of the culture wars, the now reconciled enemies Britain and America fought on the same side in the name of Anglo-Saxon superiority. The blatantly imperialist discourse that surrounded Irving’s popular tours – at many public ceremonies in his honor, the actor referred to ‘the world-wide sphere of Shakespeare’s influence’ – confirmed that the great weapon in the arsenal of English-speaking peoples, though a weapon directed against vague unnamed foes, was Shakespeare himself. This Anglophone union set the stage for the most distinctive feature of Shakespeare in performance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: its global and intercultural outlook. Ambitious and egotistical actor-managers who staked their reputations upon revivals of Shakespeare were begging to be ridiculed. The burlesque backlash – the comic attack upon the pious pretensions of great Shakespeareans – was not long in coming. From its origins in the Restoration with Thomas Duffett’s The Mock-Tempest (1674) – a bawdy lampoon of Thomas Shadwell’s semi-operatic version of The Tempest staged with extravagant spectacle by Betterton and the Duke’s Company at Dorset Garden – through to the Reduced Shakespeare Company – founded in 1981, the group performs all of Shakespeare’s plays in a manic ninety minutes – theatrical burlesque has long been a powerful weapon in the critique of ‘legitimate’ Shakespearean culture by a seemingly ‘illegitimate’ popular culture. But never was theatrical burlesque more powerful, more widespread, or more appealing than in the nineteenth century. From John Poole’s Hamlet Travestie (1810) to W. S. Gilbert’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (1891), Shakespeare burlesques in Britain and the United States were a vibrant yet controversial form of popular performance: vibrant because of their exuberant humor; controversial because they imperiled Shakespeare’s iconic status. Plays like Francis Talfourd’s Shylock; or, The Merchant of Venice Preserved (1849) and Macbeth Somewhat Removed from the Text of

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

51

Shakespeare (1853) ridiculed what the Westminster Review termed the ‘respectable humbug’ – the polite lie – of Bardolatry. A false piety sometimes attached to Shakespeare worship, and through comedy such hypocrisy was exposed and held up to ridicule. The most acclaimed burlesque actor of the nineteenth century was Frederick Robson (1821–1864), whose strangely compelling performance of burlesque Shylock (Figure 18) was praised for the ‘undercurrent of passion’ beneath its ‘apparently reckless drollery’. Victorian Shakespeare burlesques also satirized lavish pictorial effects, not least because they were themselves produced on a shoestring. Performances at smaller theatres mocked the establishment theatre’s obsession with historically correct scenes, costumes, and properties. While Shakespeare’s English and Roman chronicle plays were an obvious place to start, his tragedies, comedies, and romances were all treated as opportunities for historical instruction, even when the plays themselves were set in no discernable time. Thus, in the early 1840s Macready commissioned medieval and Renaissance costumes for possible productions of Romeo and Juliet and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Charles Kean, in 1857, played Prospero in The Tempest as a seventeenth-century Polish wizard – an identity not licensed by Shakespeare and yet in sympathy with the play’s magical aura – in a long black gown adorned with cabalistic characters. The Renaissance costumes for Irving’s The Merchant of Venice (1879) were inspired by the paintings of Titian and Veronese. The theatre’s commitment to historical accuracy was not fussy antiquarian pedantry but the badge of modernity. To prefer anachronistic performances of Shakespeare, as the Morning Post argued in the 1850s, was to prefer ‘the semaphore to the electric telegraph’ or ‘the stage-coach to the locomotive’. Critics of pictorial Shakespeare, however vocal, were out of step with prevailing theatrical taste. Through historical spectacle, major West End theatres in the Victorian age used Shakespeare’s plays to educate a mass metropolitan audience and thereby acquire respectability for themselves as agents of moral and social improvement. Such achievements – and the desire to achieve them – were inconceivable in the Restoration and Georgian theatre.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

52

Shakespeare Performance

Figure 18 Frederick Robson as burlesque Shylock in Francis Talfourd’s Shylock; or, The Merchant of Venice Preserved, Olympic Theatre, London, 1853. Robson – the stage clown with a hint of tragedy – was admired for his ability to suspend an audience ‘midway between terror and laughter as he performed some weirdly grotesque dance’. Reproduced courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, under a Creative Commons DownloadedAttribution-ShareAlike from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, 4.0 International License. on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

53

From a dramatic perspective, the principal argument in favor of elaborate pictorial effects was that, although Shakespeare wanted pictorialism, his theatre lacked the resources to achieve it. Victorians read the Chorus’s prologue in Henry V – which, as mentioned earlier, called the Globe Theatre an ‘unworthy scaffold’ – not merely as Shakespeare’s apology for the limitations of his theatre but as a clear instruction to future generations to produce his plays with every possible scenic advantage. Shakespeare’s genius, hindered by the primitive technology of his time, so the argument ran, could be liberated on the nineteenth-century stage. The ‘machinist’ and the ‘scene-painter’ were Shakespeare’s rightful ‘ministers and interpreters’, one newspaper decreed in 1858 – responsibilities usually shouldered by actors – because the poet himself ‘would desire to be represented before a nineteenth-century audience with all the means and appliances which art, learning and science of the nineteenth century can furnish’. Today we may disagree with that assessment, but most Victorian theatregoers believed that the Elizabethan bare stage was antiShakespearean precisely because it perpetuated the most regrettable deficiencies of the Elizabethan playhouse, the ones that needed to be overcome not reinstated. Only at the end of the century, after William Poel (1852– 1934) founded the Elizabethan Stage Society, did audiences see Shakespeare returned to a bare platform stage with curtains and screens. The current popularity of replica early modern playhouses – the culmination of Poel’s dream to restore Shakespeare’s plays to the open stage upon which they were first performed – would mystify most Victorian and Edwardian audiences, who wanted their Shakespeare performed on a modern stage, in a modern manner, and with every advantage that modern technology could provide. Visually extravagant revivals of Shakespeare began to fall out of favor in the early twentieth century, but they have not disappeared. The modern taste for spectacular Shakespeare has very little to do, however, with Victorian aesthetics and much more to do with the need to attract audiences who have been fed a steady diet of visual, kinetic, and sonic extravagance in television, movies, and blockbuster musicals. In the 1980s and 1990s, the RSC embarked upon a series of visually lavish productions of Shakespeare on the assumption, warranted or not, that audiences would

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

54

Shakespeare Performance

expect in productions of Shakespeare the same immersive spectacle that they enjoyed in productions of Cats and Les Misérables. Not coincidentally, the director of those musicals was Trevor Nunn (1940–), the RSC’s then artistic director. In the National Theatre’s 1994 production of Pericles (whose director, Phyllida Lloyd [1957–], went on to stage Mamma Mia! in the West End and on Broadway, and then directed the 2008 blockbuster film version), an inner revolve on the massive circular stage of the Olivier Theatre rose up at a steep angle to become a ship whirled and tossed on stormy seas. This stunning theatrical effect took a few times to get right, leading to a cancelled preview performance (a rarity for the National Theatre) that irritated London critics. Victorian critics might have been equally irritated, but also more forgiving, because they would have believed that Shakespeare deserved the greatest and most astonishing scenery that the theatre could produce. To provide anything less was disrespectful. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Shakespeare productions began to disown their long-standing commitment to pictorialism, spectacle, and historical accuracy. The end of pictorial Shakespeare in the theatre was clearly in sight when a review of Tree’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1900) – the one with live rabbits – declared that the production ‘reached what may, until science brings about new possibilities, be regarded as the limits of the conceivable’. Scientific ‘new possibilities’ were not long in coming; but they were cinematic, not theatrical. Cinema was the real successor to nineteenth-century Shakespeare because it, too, depicted an ever-changing series of pictures but on a scale unimaginable in the theatre. The birth of Shakespeare on film was well timed because the stage seemed only too grateful to remand spectacle to the protective custody of the cinema. In so doing, the theatre freed itself to revitalize Shakespeare’s plays through the new modernist aesthetic of the abstract and the symbolic. Modernism was the alternative to Victorian spectacular Shakespeare, but not its opposite. The director-designer Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966), who began his career as a junior actor in Irving’s company at the Lyceum – and whose mother was Ellen Terry – used light and scenery not to represent exact sites but to create evocative symbolic environments in which the plays

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

55

unfolded. Just as progressive painters of the time argued for pure pictorialism – an image without a referent – Craig created abstract performance spaces out of line, color, rhythm, and light. He directed only two productions of Shakespeare. The first was Much Ado about Nothing, staged in London in 1903. More famous was his collaboration with the pioneering Russian director Constantin Stanislavski (1863–1938), the inventor of psychological realism in acting, on a production of Hamlet at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1912. Craig’s productions referred to nothing but themselves and their theatrical potential. Indeed, his conceit for Hamlet, expressed through movable screens that altered the size and shape of the acting area from one scene to the next, was that the entire play unfolded in Hamlet’s mind. In this instance, theory exceeded practice: Against Craig’s wishes, the screens were moved behind a drop curtain instead of directly in front of the audience. But no longer was it necessary – as it had been for Charles Kean fifty years earlier – that a genuinely eleventh-century design appear on Macbeth’s kilt. No longer was it necessary that Macbeth wear a kilt. Continued in productions staged by Max Reinhardt (1873–1943) at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin (1905–1930) and Harley Granville-Barker (1877–1946) at the Savoy Theatre in London (1912–1914), theatrical modernism, released from the obligation to represent particular places or times, captured the poetic essence of Shakespeare’s plays: what they meant, deep down, far beneath the surface layers of history and geography. Yet every beginning is also a continuation. For all their differences, Victorian spectacle and twentieth-century modernism had this much in common: a belief that the vitality of a performance lay in the conscious arrangement of theatrical space to create a distinctive milieu. Irving used mammoth columns and wrought iron gates for the wedding scene in Much Ado about Nothing while Craig created the same dramatic space two decades later through a plain backdrop of folded gray curtains and a lone crucifix hung above a simple altar. Polar opposites in appearance, both productions succeeded in creating a total and aesthetically unified onstage environment. In a more personal unity, both productions starred Ellen Terry as Beatrice. For the first production she was Irving’s longtime stage partner; for the second, she was the director’s mother.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

56

Shakespeare Performance

Pioneering directors like Craig in Britain and Reinhardt in Germany inspired subsequent generations of directors to experiment with how complex meanings can be released through symbolic and deceptively minimalist stage spaces. Among Reinhardt’s collaborators was the Viennese scenographer Alfred Roller (1864–1935), whose austere modernist design for Coriolanus – the antithesis of Victorian decorative clutter – is shown in Figure 19. Consciously or not, all productions of Shakespeare that return the stage to its elemental purity, stripping away ornament and décor, leaving only an empty space, look back to a way of thinking about theatrical possibilities that began at the dawn of the twentieth century.

6 Modern Shakespeare Thus far this Element has adopted a largely chronological approach, because the material under consideration – roughly, from 1660 to 1900 – was more or less restricted to Great Britain and North America, to key theatrical figures who advanced or transformed Shakespeare in performance, and to productions in which even the most imaginative stage designs were constrained by the architectural limits of the traditional proscenium theatre and by the technological limits of having to create theatre without (for the most part) electricity and mechanization. Yet for performances of Shakespeare in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the material at hand becomes much more profuse: not just because of more complex stage technology but also because ‘Shakespeare’ became a truly global icon – sometimes affirmed, sometimes contested – resulting in theatrical appropriations of his plays in divergent aesthetic formats and in multicultural and intercultural settings. Accordingly, the remainder of this text will be organized thematically and topically rather than chronologically. This shift in approach is further warranted because this text’s goal (as I explained at the outset) is not to provide a factual survey of Shakespeare in performance but rather to present frameworks of analysis and understanding that make Shakespeare’s theatrical afterlife intelligible and meaningful. And so, in the pages ahead you will find discussions of such diverse but revelatory topics as the role of the modern stage director; the function of Shakespeare’s text in creating a performance;

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

Figure 19 Alfred Roller, set design, Coriolanus, Vienna, 1921. Roller’s design has the extravagant scale associated with the grand tradition of Victorian and Edwardian scenography, but the look is distinctively modern: the play of line and geometric shape rather than precise geographical or historical referentiality. Reproduced courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, under a Creative Commons AttributionShareAlike 4.0 International License.

translations and Anglophone adaptations; changes in visual style and scenic environments; Shakespeare theatre companies and Shakespeare festivals; questions of gender dynamics and inclusivity in performance; changes in acting style; outdoor Shakespeare; immersive Shakespeare; and – by way of both conclusion and overture – global, multicultural, and intercultural Shakespeare. The first play in the First Folio opens not with dialogue but with a stage direction: ‘A tempestuous noise of Thunder and Lightning heard: Enter a ShipDownloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

58

Shakespeare Performance

master, and a Boteswaine’. The opening scene in The Tempest reminds us that Shakespeare wrote into his plays a sense of performance, and so we cannot fully understand them unless we grapple with their possibilities on the stage. But who is responsible for creating those possibilities? Shakespeare’s own theatre predated by several centuries the existence of the modern stage director. Yet even at the Globe, in the early seventeenth century, somebody decided which sounds effects to use, how loud they should be, when to use them, and for how long. That somebody in the first production of The Tempest controlled the thunder and the lightning tells us that the rise of the stage director was not a response to a need for someone to make decisions about a production, because decision-making was part of the process right from the beginning. Rather, the rise of the director was a response to a new idea about what a stage performance ought to accomplish. What was this new idea? Anticipated in Irving’s holistically designed productions of Macbeth and Much Ado about Nothing at the Lyceum and in the Meininger Company’s intricately staged crowd scenes in plays like Julius Caesar, both in the late nineteenth century, the idea was that the vision of a single controlling figure should determine the work of the entire artistic team: not just actors but scene designers, property masters, lighting technicians, choreographers, and composers. The director’s total conceptual and executive authority, fully expressed originally by Craig, is what made modern Shakespeare modern; and it remains the chief legacy of Shakespeare on the twentieth-century stage. Over the past century, the power entrusted to the director has revealed itself in three main ways: a profane – not a sacrosanct – approach to Shakespeare’s text; attention to the visual aspects of performance; and the creation of theatre companies whose core mission is to produce Shakespeare. Many directors have come to regard Shakespeare’s text less as the stable ‘blueprint’ for performance and more as one element among many within a performance, alongside music, scenery, costumes, and lighting. It’s no longer axiomatic that the production serves the text but instead that the text serves the production; or rather, it serves the idea or concept that the production wants to realize. Historically, this way of thinking looks back to Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare and even to

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

59

Victorian Shakespeare parodies, both of which treated the original plays as malleable. But its manifestation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries arises from the more radical proposition that the text derives from the performance and not the other way around. This is not a question of chronology, because normally the words are written first and then spoken on stage by actors. Rather, it is a question of understanding that within the words themselves there already exists a notion of performance, a notion that in part determined what the words would be. If you begin a play with a stage direction about a shipwreck – as begins The Tempest – then your opening dialogue is likely going to be about that shipwreck and not about something else. There are many ideas of performance that can influence a Shakespeare text. For example, productions mounted by the American Shakespeare Center (founded in 1988 as the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express) that use the First Folio text as their script are fulfilling a vision just as much as Calixto Bieito’s (1963–) 2012 ‘collage’ production Forests, whose text was created from outdoor scenes in As You Like It, Macbeth, and King Lear. In the first example, productions are committed to an idea of Shakespearean authenticity, grounded in the belief that if actors use the script from the earliest collected edition of the plays and if they employ early modern rehearsal techniques, then they will gain privileged access to the play’s meaning. By contrast, the goal of the experimental Catalan director was to take his audience on an odyssey through landscapes hellish and serene, the textual pastiche inspired by different Shakespeare plays. Bieito destroyed Shakespeare in order to remake him. Despite obvious differences, both productions treat Shakespeare’s text as a starting point not a fixed point. The same impetus to reject Shakespeare as merely a ‘found object’ features in the work of the German stage director Thomas Ostermeier (1968–), a resident director at Berlin’s famous Schaubühne. In the late 1990s he began to reinvigorate the classical repertoire by injecting it with the violent realism of ‘In-yer-face’ British drama, a contemporary genre he knew well from having directed Sarah Kane’s Crave and Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking. Thus, when Ostermeier directed Hamlet (2008) in a much-acclaimed production that toured internationally, he visualized the play’s obsession with death and decay (‘something

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

60

Shakespeare Performance

is rotten’) through an elemental stage environment. Prince Hamlet, so often pigeonholed as cerebral and detached, got down-and-dirty on the mud-strewn stage and began to eat the muck surrounding him. Hamlet wore a fat-suit and encouraged the audience to sing a rap song with him. But he never held Yorick’s skull in his hands, thus depriving audiences of a moment they had come to expect – a moment that in our collective mind can stand metonymically (along with ‘To be or not to be’) for the play as a whole. Yet Ostermeier’s switch – give audiences a new Hamlet, deny them a familiar Hamlet – is wholly consistent with his view that ‘every generation writes its own Shakespeare’. Ostermeier’s insistence that performance is always an act of conscious rewriting is true not just in the literal sense of translation or adaptation – although his own productions use both – but in a deeper hermeneutical sense: To perform Shakespeare is to ‘communicate with a text from another epoch and every Zeitgeist communicates with it in a different way’. Yesterday’s Zeitgeist required that Hamlet pick up Yorick’s skull. Today requires a different Hamlet. Tomorrow’s Hamlet will be different in yet another way. There is no choice but to rewrite Hamlet over and over again. That is what it means to be making theatre in your own time and in your own culture. In a totalizing act of literal reinscription, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon has decided that all of Shakespeare’s plays need to be rewritten for a contemporary audience. In 2015 the Festival announced plans to ‘translate’ every Shakespeare play into contemporary English. Over the next three years, the ‘Play On’ project commissioned thirty-six playwrights (each paired with a dramaturg) to produce modern renderings of the entire Shakespeare dramatic canon. The adapters are themselves diverse – more than half are women, more than half are people of color – as part of the Festival’s desire to bring new voices and fresh perspectives to their work. These new renderings are meant to be companion pieces, not replacements; the Festival plans to keep producing plays in Shakespeare’s original words, even as its adaptations prove successful: Migdalia Cruz’s ‘translation’ of Macbeth was staged by both the AfricanAmerican Shakespeare Company of San Francisco and the Actors’ Shakespeare Project in Boston in their 2018/19 season. Indeed, between

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

61

2015 and 2019 the ‘Play On’ project collaborated with more than a thousand theatre artists on nearly a hundred events ranging from readings to full productions, which in turn led to the creation of Play On Shakespeare, a new company dedicated to enhancing ‘the understanding of Shakespeare’s plays in performance’. When the Play On project was announced, the Festival’s then director of literary development and dramaturgy, Lue Morgan Douthit, admitted in an interview that she ‘can’t understand all of [the plays] all the time’. If the Festival’s own dramaturg – an expert reader of Shakespeare – can’t always understand the plays, then it’s a safe bet that some audience members can’t always understand them either. Anecdotally, and from our own experience, we know this is true. As the Festival’s former artistic director Bill Rauch (1962–) put it, ‘We are provid[ing] more access to Shakespeare’s work . . . We are inviting artists and audiences to have a deeper relationship with the nuance and specificity embedded in each text, which is sometimes lost or buried as language shifts in meaning over time.’ The Festival’s decision to rewrite Shakespeare sparked approval and outrage. Approval, because what’s the point of staging the plays if they’re incomprehensible? Shakespeare ‘wins’ when his plays are adapted to make them intelligible to actors and audiences. Outrage, because the genius of Shakespeare resides in his sacred words. Shakespeare ‘loses’ when his original texts are violated. The arguments pro and con essentially come down to these two positions. But the people taking those respective positions might surprise you. Many scholars have no problem with anyone rewriting Shakespeare, because they know that there is no authentic text for, say, Othello or The Merchant of Venice that has come down to us intact and unchanged from the moment when Shakespeare finished writing it. Indeed, the very idea of solo authorship in the early modern theatre is itself anachronistic. And yet plenty of theatre companies today are wary of productions that stray too far from what subscription audiences regard as the ‘correct’ version of Shakespeare, a text to be protected and not assaulted. Because of its central position in the Shakespeare repertoire, the text of Hamlet has been ‘deconstructed’ in performance many times. In Roberts Falls’ (1954–) 1985 production at the Wisdom Bridge Theatre in Chicago, Aidan Quinn (1959–) played the Prince of Denmark as a rebel without

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

62

Shakespeare Performance

a cause, who instead of speaking the line ‘To be or not to be’, picked up a can of spray paint and scrawled it letter-by-letter onto the stage wall. This bold unexpected gesture was meant to convey Hamlet’s frustration, graffiti being the expressive form of choice for troubled youth. But in a reminder that every stage action contains layers of meaning, the spray-painted soliloquy also served as a meta-theatrical comment on the play’s classic status. By not delivering the immortal line, Quinn signaled that ‘To be or not to be’ had been uttered so many times by so many actors that it was no longer possible to speak it in a fresh way. Hamlet – and Hamlet – were exhausted. What could be done? Imaginatively blending stage with page, the actor turned a line that the audience hears into a line that the audience reads. The stage wall itself became a fragmentary text of Hamlet, turning the entire performance into an open book. All this happened silently, except for the rattling noise of the can of white spray paint as each letter in each word of Shakespeare’s immortal line materialized on the wall, squiggle by squiggle. This production also reminds us that even when performances of Shakespeare manipulate or depart from the text, they are always in a relationship to it – a relationship that molds the very substance of the performance itself. On a more elaborate scale is Heiner Müller’s (1929–1995) Hamlet, first performed in East Berlin in 1990. The entire production lasted seven-and -a-half hours, in which Müller’s translation of Shakespeare’s tragedy was interrupted by passages from his Hamletmachine, which he called ‘the shrunken head of the Hamlet tragedy’ – an apt image for what the directordramatist regarded as the mummified survival of a once vibrant tradition that somehow still holds talismanic power over us. An autistic Hamlet was surrounded by television monitors, incapable of effecting change in the corrupt kingdom of Denmark, the dramatic circumstance alluding to the East German communist state that (like the Berlin Wall) collapsed while the production was in rehearsal. Many pertinent themes come together in Müller’s dense production – Shakespeare’s eroded canonical status, subversive political commentary, emphasis on the visual over the spoken – but what unites them all is that they are made possible because the text itself is interrogated. The dramatic text becomes a way not of representing characters in a plot

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

63

but of asking questions: What can Hamlet, the classic of all classics, mean today? What is the relationship of German-speaking people to Shakespeare? What can a lone individual hope to accomplish in the face of larger power structures? Is theatre still theatre when film and video operate from the stage? Only by tearing the text apart can such questions be addressed. That Müller also designed his production reminds us of the second dominant feature of director-led reinterpretations of Shakespeare: their emphasis on the visual. Though now commonplace, ‘modern dress’ Shakespeare was revolutionary in its day and was for many years rejected by such leading actors as Laurence Olivier (1907–1989) and John Gielgud (1904–2000), who preferred the vaguely Renaissance ‘tights and tunic’ approach. In the 1760s, Garrick acted Hamlet in a fashionable French velvet suit of the day, but that ‘modern’ choice was mostly about ensuring that the star actor dressed like a star. The Victorians, obsessed with historical correctness, insisted upon costumes from the period in which the play’s events took place. Not until the 1920s, beginning with Barry Jackson’s productions in Birmingham and London, did actors wear costumes that made them look like the audience, in an attempt to underscore the relevance of Shakespeare’s plays. A popular alternative to both modern and Renaissance dress is to locate the production in a ‘third’ historical setting – somewhere between Shakespeare’s time and ours – whose period atmosphere can bring out some otherwise hidden aspect of the play. Thus, the RSC’s Coriolanus (1994) was set during the French Revolution, a time when violent street mobs were a daily reality, and thus a mirror of the political events dramatized in Shakespeare’s Roman history play. Similarly, the same company’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (1985) was set nostalgically in the 1950s, an era whose fixed gender stereotypes and rampant consumerism made Shakespeare’s domestic comedy – the only play he wrote set in the England that he knew – more bitingly real. What mattered in these productions were not its period flourishes, whether tricorn hats or beauty parlors, to say nothing of the Ford automobile and movie camera that Jackson put on stage in his 1928 production of The Taming of the Shrew. What mattered was the idea that made all those

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

64

Shakespeare Performance

choices desirable and defensible: that a Shakespeare play should feel as vital to its audience as if it were a new play, and not a cherished classic that could be politely ignored precisely because it was a classic. The desire to make Shakespeare ‘new’ explains many choices made by directors and designers ever since, from Michael Kahn’s (1937–) 1969 anti-war version of Henry V for the American Shakespeare Festival in which the French soldiers wore modified hockey uniforms to Peter Sellars’ student staging of King Lear at Harvard in the late 1970s, in which Lear, played by the diminutive director himself, entered in a Cadillac. Changes in the visual style of Shakespeare in performance have never been uniform. Three major productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the second half of the twentieth century offer a case in point. The young Peter Hall’s (1930–2017) 1959 production for the Stratford-upon-Avon Festival (precursor to the RSC) was set in an Elizabethan country house that was transformed into a woodland setting. Though the staging was scenically modest, Hall was evidently attached to the idea that a production of Shakespeare ought to be filled with Shakespeareanlooking things. Barely a decade later, Peter Brook (1925–) completely altered our understanding of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with his famous ‘white cube’ production for the RSC. Disavowing the period stuffiness of Hall’s Elizabethan country estate, Brook transformed the stage into a brilliantly lit white box, the three-dimensional theatrical equivalent of the painter’s blank canvas. That space would be populated and colorfully decorated, but it began, nonetheless, with the elemental void of the artistic process: out of nothing, a world is created. Brook’s vision owed something to the German director and playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), who revolted against bourgeois theatrical illusionism by laying bare the mechanics of the stage itself; but mainly it was indebted to Brook’s own influential idea that the theatre is truly an ‘empty space’. In London, two decades later, the French-Canadian director Robert Lepage (1957–) converted the epic Olivier stage at the National Theatre into a mud-fringed pool. In its slithered murkiness, Lepage’s set was the opposite of Brook’s pristine white cube; but its own primordial character ironically echoed the earlier production’s basic purity. Something elemental

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

65

was the touchstone for both productions. In a revealing observation, Lepage, fully aware that his unusual aesthetic divided audiences – some critics complained that he made a beautiful play ugly – spoke of the ‘permission’ that Shakespeare had granted him to stage an iconic play in an iconoclastic manner. Lepage understood that the ‘open’ nature of Shakespeare’s plays was an invitation not to approach them literally – indeed, there is nothing literal about a play in which a man wakes up with an ass’s head in place of his own – but to let them spark his imagination. In the director’s view, it wasn’t that we needed to be set free from Shakespeare so much as Shakespeare could set us free: because more than those of any other writer, his plays demand strong creative and imaginative responses. It is telling that English is Lepage’s second language, which means that he was already released from the burden of dutifully honoring a ‘national’ playwright. Lepage’s cultural, linguistic, and geographical distance from Shakespeare was for him an asset; it freed him to accept what he felt was an invitation from Shakespeare’s plays to bring his own response to them. No director of Shakespeare – indeed, no stage director of any kind – works in isolation, as if the choices they make for a particular production have nothing to do with their own existing body of work, their desire to engage an audience, and the larger institutional environment that funds and validates their work. These multiple demands, which are brought to bear any time a director conceives a Shakespeare production, do not always coincide or resolve themselves harmoniously. The personal vision of contemporary directors can easily conflict with the priorities imposed by the institution where they work – particularly when the director is also the artistic director and thus accountable to a governing body. Such conflict marked the brief tenure of Emma Rice (1967–) as artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe from 2016 to 2018. From its founding in the 1990s, the Globe has privileged certain production values – shared lighting, absence of acoustic technology, open platform stage – because of their presumed closeness to Elizabethan theatrical practice, thus fulfilling the institution’s core mission to perform Shakespeare in an ‘authentic’ space and in (to one degree or another) an ‘authentic’ style. Rice, who made her name as joint

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

66

Shakespeare Performance

leader of the pioneering touring company Kneehigh, was not known for her devotion to Shakespeare. Prior to her appointment at the Globe, she had directed only one Shakespeare play – Cymbeline (2006) at the RSC – likened Shakespeare to ‘medicine’, and freely admitted that she didn’t always understand the plays. But she was known, and widely praised, for her inclusive, experimental, and strongly visual approach to performance-making. The populist verve that made Kneehigh’s productions so successful made Rice’s brief tenure at the Globe so controversial. Her first production, a red-neon disco-beat version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2016), set the terms of the ensuing debate: audiences were thrilled, critics were divided, and traditionalists were infuriated by the sound-and-light show, the topical references, and the interpolation of text and song not by Shakespeare. (It bears acknowledging that Restoration versions of Shakespeare featured those same production elements, and so in that sense Rice’s innovations were part of theatrical tradition, not a deviation from it.) The controversy over Rice’s artistic leadership was played out openly in the press and behind closed doors at the Globe, whose governing board eventually forced her out. Publicly explaining its decision to oust Rice after just two years, the board contended that her ‘predominant use of contemporary sound and lighting technology’ was inconsistent with the Globe’s founding commitment to exploring ‘the conditions within which Shakespeare and his contemporaries worked’. In a later statement, Rice argued that the deeper conflict that led to her departure – much criticized within the British theatrical world – was that the Globe’s board did not ‘trust’ her and failed to give her the ‘artistic freedom’ to realize the vision that made her a provocative and potentially transformative artistic director. In the press and within the theatrical profession, much reaction focused on gender: Why was the first woman named to lead the Globe the only one of its leaders forced out? Why was a woman with a strong artistic vision criticized for it? What are the gender biases that dictate access to power and authority in the performing arts? In addition to Shakespeare’s Globe, this Element references various organizations – the RSC, the National Theatre, and the World Shakespeare Festival – that have been responsible for commissioning and producing many different performances of Shakespeare. Others could be

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

67

named: the New York Shakespeare Festival (long beloved by New Yorkers for its performances in Central Park), the Shakespeare Theatre (Washington, DC), the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (Ashland, Oregon), the Stratford Festival (Ontario, Canada), the replica Globe theatres in Tokyo, San Diego, and the German town of Schwäbisch Hall. In the United States and Canada alone, more than 200 theatre companies and festivals regularly produce Shakespeare. Although professional acting companies have performed in purposebuilt theatres since Shakespeare’s time, the idea of a quasi-permanent artistic institution devoted to producing Shakespeare’s plays did not exist until the twentieth century. Hints of it arose in the late Victorian era, when the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre opened in Stratford in 1879; but several more decades passed before the idea was fully realized. The existence of ‘institutional Shakespeare’ has been largely the consequence of two developments: the power of the stage director and the cultural value placed upon Shakespeare and his works. Predictably, the movement began in Britain, the country where Shakespeare’s cultural authority has always been greatest. To oversimplify somewhat, the companies that developed in Stratford and at the Old Vic in London in the years following the First World War were the forerunners of the RSC and the National Theatre, both of which continue to flourish and both of which represent ‘official’ state-subsidized Shakespeare. As exemplified by these two companies, it has become standard practice for a nonprofit institutional theatre to be led by an artistic director (usually a stage director, not an actor) who wields significant power over season planning, casting, selection of designers and other artistic personnel, and budgets. Some of the most highly regarded directors of Shakespeare in the second half of the twentieth century – Peter Hall, Trevor Nunn, Adrian Noble (1950–), Nicholas Hytner (1956–), and Gregory Doran (1958–) – have run one or both of these companies. The power exercised by an artistic director over a theatrical institution expresses on a grander scale the power exercised by a director over an individual production. One way, then, to tell the story of Shakespeare on the stage over the past century is through ever more centralized power structures – and the resistance they have engendered. Victorian actor-managers

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

68

Shakespeare Performance

exercised near-tyrannical control over their theatres; but they were running businesses, not public institutions whose broad civic-minded missions were partly dictated by public funding bodies. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the Lyceum Theatre under Henry Irving’s leadership was responsible for making a profit, and it did. It was not, however, responsible for introducing British children to Shakespeare, in the way that the RSC today is required to do as a condition for receiving taxpayers’ money. Garrick, as much as he promoted Shakespeare, was more interested in promoting himself, and he would not have understood the idea of running a theatre dedicated to anything but the advancement of his own celebrity. In Elizabethan England, the theatre had only just become a profession – barely tolerated, vigilantly regulated, and banished to the outskirts of the City of London. Shakespeare and his contemporaries understood that acting companies needed public figures to serve as their patrons; but the idea of a permanent state-sponsored theatre with a social conscience was unthinkable. The unthinkable for Shakespeare is the normal for us. So much so that we only notice the power structures of theatrical organizations when they are challenged or violated. Sometimes these changes, such as the ‘collectivist’ theatres of the 1960s and 1970s, which operated as leaderless ensembles, formed part of the broad social movement away from authoritarian structures that took hold in Europe after the 1968 riots and in the United States during the controversies of the Vietnam War. That counter-culture ethos survives today in the work of companies like the Wooster Group (founded 1980) and Mabou Mines (founded 1970). Changes can also derive from the production itself, as with the deliberate choice to perform on a bare stage with minimal scenery, a choice that shifts authority away from the director and the designers and toward the acting ensemble. A mainstream example is the 1974 opening at the RSC of ‘The Other Place’, a corrugated metal shack formerly used to store scenery. The space – at the time, the company’s sole alternative to its 1,500-seat proscenium stage – opened as a theatre with Buzz Goodbody’s (1946–1975) production of King Lear, retitled simply Lear to emphasize the newness and informality of the undertaking. (The original Other Place closed in 2006, but a new version opened in 2016.) The audience was unusually close

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

69

to the actors and the stage was (for the RSC) unusually lacking in scenery and ornament. It was as if Shakespeare had previously been played by a full orchestra but was now played by a string quartet. More than a touch of nostalgia inhabited such productions, which turned on the assumption that only by ridding the stage of clutter and banishing authority figures from the rehearsal room could a play’s meaning be released. Whether that presumption is warranted continues to be debated, but those who have created ‘alternative’ performances of Shakespeare have generally done so with a wider purpose in mind. Sometimes that purpose is to reach new audiences, as when companies like Cheek by Jowl (founded in 1981) and Northern Broadsides (founded in 1992) tour Britain, challenging the preconception that ‘good’ Shakespeare is found only in Stratford or London. In the United States, groups like Shakespeare Now! perform in primary and secondary schools. More audaciously, Shakespeare has been performed in the violent favelas (shantytowns) of Brazil, pioneered by troupes like AfroReggae (founded in 1992), where the cast is drawn from teenage gang members. Whatever their inspiration or their format, these different approaches remind us that there are many ways to perform Shakespeare, and that as much as we might applaud the existence of a theatre dedicated to celebrating Shakespeare’s plays, there are inherent risks in making Shakespeare too bureaucratic, too official, and too remote. To put their own mark on productions of Shakespeare, modern directors frequently attempt to make them relevant to contemporary political issues. When topical meanings emerge from a performance of Shakespeare, three preconditions have been met: a crisis is felt in the society at large; the artistic ensemble makes the connection between onstage and offstage worlds; and the audience senses that connection in the performance. Of course, those conditions could apply to the production of any play, and not just in our own times. When performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men on the eve of the Essex Rebellion in 1601, Richard II – a play about a weak king forced from the throne and killed – was seen by the conspirators as a not so veiled commentary on the aging Queen Elizabeth. But why have Shakespeare’s plays in particular been so regularly used to comment on contemporary politics? Even if we accept that the plays themselves are not partisan – scholars vehemently

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

70

Shakespeare Performance

debate this point, arguing that Shakespeare both supports and undermines the Tudor idea of kingship – it is beyond question that the plays themselves – in the events depicted, themes articulated, and characters realized – provide material ripe for political interpretation. Shakespeare’s plays deal powerfully with ambition (Macbeth), corruption (Hamlet), the wisdom (or ignorance) of the crowd (Coriolanus, Julius Caesar), the stability of the nation state (all the English chronicle plays, from Richard II to Henry VIII), and geopolitics (Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest), to cite just a few instances. More broadly, what ensures that Shakespeare’s plays are politically resonant in different times and in different cultures is the playwright’s unique ability to present fascinating characters and intriguing plots in the context of perennially relevant societal conflicts: chaos and order, the legitimacy and illegitimacy of governments, the self and society, and the suppression of the weak by the strong. Ulysses’ famous speech from Troilus and Cressida on ‘degree, priority and place’ makes the point powerfully: In Shakespeare’s plays, the microcosm and the macrocosm are present simultaneously. This rare combination of the local and the global explains why Shakespeare’s plays so often yield the uncanny sensation of having been ‘ripped from the headlines’. Yet the political resonance of his plays in performance has never been straightforward. Troilus and Cressida, for example, a text deeply skeptical of wartime heroism, was not revived in performance (apart from John Dryden’s Restoration adaptation) until 1907, 300 years after it was first acted. In the last few decades, however, that same play, ignored for so many years, has proved immensely appealing in the United States, Britain, and Germany because of its perceived anti-war message. Beginning in the late Victorian era, it gradually became conventional – though it seemed daring at first – to portray Shylock sympathetically, a view that the tragic fact of the Holocaust has only reinforced in contemporary theatre. The character may be vengeful, but he is equally the victim of institutionalized antiSemitic prejudice. And yet in Nazi Germany, The Merchant of Venice was staged with the opposite intent: to portray the stereotypical evils of the Jewish people as confirmed and unequivocal truth. Hamlet was regularly performed in Eastern Europe during the Cold War not because audiences in Bucharest and Prague were interested in the personal

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

71

tragedy of its melancholy hero (the dominant Anglo-American interpretation) but because staging a play that revolves around surveillance, interrogation, and murderous plots was an effective way to express indirect opposition to totalitarian regimes and their compulsion to monitor the daily comings and goings of the citizenry. More recently, the Romany company Pralipe staged Romeo and Juliet in Macedonia. The play was set in Bosnia, with Juliet a Muslim and Romeo a Christian. Contradicting Shakespeare’s pacifist ending, when the two rival families unite in shared grief, this production closed with gunfire and the sorrowful promise of yet more violence. In racially segregated societies, any production of Othello will be sharply political by its very nature. In Janet Suzman’s (1939–) production at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg in 1987 during the South African apartheid era, white policemen searched the black actor John Kani (1943–), who played Othello, while on his way to rehearsal. These are just some of the ways in which productions of Shakespearean drama acquire new and deeper relevance when they intersect with contemporary concerns, thus making an old play feel new and urgently relevant. Just as an entire production can resonate with societal issues, so can an individual actor’s interpretation of a role. The challenges that actors face in interpreting a Shakespeare role are inseparable from the challenges they confront in society at large. Nowhere has this been expressed more powerfully than in the work of actresses: How do they perform pre-feminist roles in a feminist (or even post-feminist) society? How do they honor the character that Shakespeare wrote without also honoring the patriarchal structure of Shakespeare’s world? Because, as Harriet Walter (1950–) recently told her fellow Shakespearean actresses: ‘He never meant you to play the part.’ A flashpoint for this issue has been the role of Kate in The Taming of the Shrew. Historically, the play had been performed as the socialization (‘taming’) of an unruly woman (‘shrew’) through such tactics as starvation and humiliation. Quite some time has passed since that openly chauvinistic reading was plausible, and the issue now often seems to be whether Kate’s final speech – ‘I am ashamed that women are so simple’ – can be delivered in a way that does not make the character – or the actress – an agent of misogyny. Because misogyny is built into the structure of the play as a whole, we cannot read Kate’s speech as disconnected from the actions

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

72

Shakespeare Performance

that precede it. But in performance, this closing moment stands out, fairly or not, as something like the production’s verdict on what we now regard as an anti-feminist dramatic narrative. In other words, this moment in the performance carries a heavy resonance that did not exist in Shakespeare’s time, or for centuries afterward. For us, however, that resonance is inescapable. Performers who have played Kate have come up with different solutions to the problems now posed by Shakespeare’s text. One imaginative choice – because it expands, rather than narrows, our appreciation of the play – has been to recast the relationship between Petruchio and Kate, such that they come to realize that they are both forced to play gender roles. Thus, Kate’s final speech can be delivered as a ‘performance’ of obedience whereby she and Petruchio give the appearance of being a proper couple – dutiful wife, sovereign husband – yet all the while the audience knows that, underneath, Kate is not as obedient as her public words suggest and that she and her husband have come to regard each other as equals, not as ruler and ruled. In recent years, Measure for Measure – typically regarded as a ‘difficult’ play, neither tragedy nor comedy – has become topical in its dramatization of a world where the institutionalized power of privileged men enables them to exploit and sexually abuse women without fear of repercussion. Thus, Angelo’s matter-of-fact insistence that he will spare the life of Isabella’s imprisoned brother Claudio only if she – a virgin and a religious novice – submits to him sexually. Isabella’s pained awareness that she has no recourse – ‘To whom should I complain? / Did I tell this, Who would believe me?’ – resonates deeply with our own society as it struggles to admit to itself that masculine privilege by its very nature ensures that victimization of women will not be recognized, let alone ended. Indeed, those victims who courageously complain are soon victimized all over again, punished simply for speaking out. Josie Rourke’s (1976–) production of Measure for Measure at the Donmar Warehouse in 2018 revealed the ideological structures that lead to sexual and emotional abuse of the disempowered by telling Shakespeare’s story twice: In the production’s first half, Isabella pleads with Angelo to spare her brother; but in the second half, the tables are turned, with Isabella holding the power and Angelo now the supplicant. By making Measure for Measure feel strange or unfamiliar to audiences, Rourke forced us to

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

73

confront the usually invisible operation of ideology. No longer can we attribute immoral behavior to isolated corrupt individuals (the dubious ‘bad apple’ theory). Rather, we must acknowledge that individual immorality is but the logical and inevitable consequence of collective structures of oppression and deceit. Bad behavior will not stop until structural change occurs. In many ways, Measure for Measure is the ultimate ‘Me Too’ play. Cheek by Jowl’s 1991 all-male version of As You Like It offers another example of what happens when a Shakespeare play is performed in light of a contemporary understanding of gender. The opening scene of the actors changing into female and male costumes made the point that gender is a performance for all of us – however we understand own gender identity – and not a fixed or given essence. Invariably, such nuanced interpretations come down to specific choices made by actors – vocal inflections, movements, gestures, touches, glances – rather than any directorial conceit. For audiences, the credibility of a production sometimes rests almost entirely on the credibility of the acting, a reminder that in the age of high-concept, high-budget, and high-tech Shakespeare, one actor speaking to another can still be theatrically powerful. The idea that masculinity is as much a social construction as femininity remains but one instance of how the meaning of a Shakespeare play is not embedded within it, waiting to be discovered like buried treasure, but rather is produced in the encounter between artists and audiences. It is helpful to think of meaning not as a noun – an object to be apprehended – but as a verb – an action to be undertaken. One could point to many other instances, which often relate to questions of class, race, and sexuality, such as the convention beginning in the 1970s for African-American actors to play Caliban in The Tempest, so that the play’s colonial perspective is connected to America’s own history of slavery and racial oppression. Similarly, productions of Twelfth Night now commonly use Viola’s cross-dressed disguise as Cesario to explore themes of homoeroticism. The fact that Viola was originally played by a boy actor – so that a boy played a woman who played a boy – only makes more intense the play’s knotted sexual energies. Whatever the example, the general point is that Shakespeare’s plays have become richer over the centuries not because we find them transparent but because we find them opaque. The plays are all the more appealing precisely

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

74

Shakespeare Performance

because they resist us, having been written 400 years ago in a society very unlike ours. More and more, we are not letting the play speak for itself – in some cases, what it says is objectionable – but we are finding ways for us to speak with and through the play. To that extent, contemporary performances of Shakespeare are performances of our relationship with Shakespeare, a relationship that comes with its share of problems but remains one that we somehow cannot quit.

7 Shakespeare’s Voices, Shakespeare’s Spaces Perhaps the greatest change among Shakespearean actors over the past century has been the death of the grand tradition of eloquent and aristocratic stage personalities – Olivier and Gielgud in Britain, and in the United States, John Barrymore (1882–1942) and Helen Hayes (1900–1993), to cite just a few leading figures – whose exalted demeanor was itself a reflection of Shakespeare’s exalted cultural status. The demise of this grand tradition, itself a remnant of the Victorian ‘star’ system, has made possible the emergence of many different ways of acting Shakespeare. In 1987, at Britain’s National Theatre, Anthony Hopkins (1937–) and Judi Dench (1934–) played Mark Antony and Cleopatra as middle-aged bourgeois lovers, an interpretation – and casting choice – deliberately lacking the heroic charisma that thrilled an earlier generation, when Olivier and Vivien Leigh played those same parts. In 1999 Mark Rylance (1960–) acted the great Egyptian queen in an all-male production at the Globe, a winning performance that combined something old – the Elizabethan convention of men playing women – with something new – it incited a timely debate about whether such ‘cross casting’ unfairly denied actresses a chance to play Shakespeare’s best parts, given that in his plays male characters far outnumber female ones. The Globe’s current artistic director, the actress Michelle Terry (1979–), has made diversity in multiple dimensions – gender, race, and disability – a hallmark of her leadership, promising that acting roles will be split fiftyfifty between women and men. Terry is making good on her promise: The Globe’s twelve-member ensemble that performed Hamlet and As You Like It in 2018 was split evenly between women and men, including a South

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

75

Asian male (Shubham Saraf) playing Ophelia and a deaf Asian actress (Nadia Nadarajah) playing Celia. One sign that gender equity remains an elusive goal in ‘classical’ theatre is that Terry’s decision to cast herself as Hamlet sparked some debate, despite the fact that a woman first played Hamlet in the nineteenth century: Charlotte Cushman in Washington, DC in 1861 and Sarah Bernhardt’s Frenchlanguage performance in London and Stratford-upon-Avon in 1899. Moreover, Terry herself was not new to cross-gender performance, having acted Henry V at the Regent’s Park open-air summer theatre in 2016. Those who were dismayed that Terry played Hamlet were perhaps likewise dismayed that a woman in power actually used her power to achieve her goals. The most curious part of Michael Billington’s Guardian review of the 2018 Globe ensemble is that while he praises a male director like Nicholas Hytner for having an ‘inspirational vision’, he dismisses Terry’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion in performance-making as being no vision at all: ‘I’m not convinced it provides a pattern for the future.’ The 2018 summer season was not Nadia Nadarajah’s first appearance at the Globe. She had played the Princess of France in Love’s Labour’s Lost (2012) and Titania and Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2014), both productions performed largely in British Sign Language by actors from Deafinitely Theatre. The composition of the audience was mixed – some spectators were deaf, some hearing – but the response was uniformly positive. The emergence of sign-language theatre companies, apart from being important testaments to inclusivity in the theatrical profession, reminds us that all actors communicate through a language of ‘signs’. Some signs are gestural, some kinetic, some visual, and some aural. Speech is just one sign among many. Though speech is routinely privileged in text-based theatre, it is by no means essential or even necessary for creating performances, even performances of Shakespeare. Silent film versions of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet prove the same point. Challenges to the theatrical supremacy of speech can help us to think in more complex ways about the signifying capacity of theatrical speech. Voice has never been culturally or ideologically neutral; rather, it is itself a site of regulation, diversity, and even controversy. The surviving wax cylinder recordings of late Victorian and Edwardian actors suggest that they might

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

76

Shakespeare Performance

have delivered Shakespeare’s verse in a ponderous, almost chanting manner. Those heavy mannerisms gradually disappeared, but for much of the twentieth century actors like Gielgud and Peggy Ashcroft (1907–1991) were prized for their melodious enunciation of the verse. Audiences and critics who now lament a decline in the art of verse speaking are often lamenting the disappearance of actors who (regardless of nationality) speak with upper-class British accents reminiscent of bygone years and regretting the prevalence of actors who speak with their own local accents, whether from Scotland, Yorkshire, the Bronx, or Mumbai. Much of the criticism directed at the RSC’s 2012 ‘Bollywood’ production of Much Ado about Nothing was that Indian-born actors spoke with Indian accents, as if that sound of cultural and racial authenticity were somehow a disservice to the play. When Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino (both disciples of ‘method acting’) played Shylock on Broadway, it was each actor’s rough way of speaking – remote from the dreamy lyricism of Gielgud or Ian McKellen – that added to the compelling grittiness of their interpretation. The question here is not about the ‘correct’ way to speak Shakespeare – on what basis could any such correctness be postulated? – but about becoming aware of the different values that we habitually (but often silently) attach to different ways of speaking. Just as the actor’s signifying language creates meaning, so too does the space into which those signs are projected. Today, hundreds of thousands of tourists and audience members each year visit the replica Globe Theatre in London, which opened in 1996 under Mark Rylance’s direction. The theatre was the culmination of decades of artistic planning and political armtwisting undertaken by the American actor Sam Wanamaker (1919–1993), who died shortly before its completion. Wanamaker’s achievement is lasting and substantial. No other post-Renaissance site of Shakespeare in performance has been so consequential for how Shakespeare is performed, studied, and taught. But perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the replica Globe is that for 300 years it never occurred to anyone to build it. Beginning in the Restoration, professional productions of Shakespeare were almost always staged in indoor proscenium theatres, a continentalinspired alternative to the amphitheatre-style Elizabethan playhouse. Over time, the acting space was confined to the area behind the proscenium arch, so

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

77

that a fixed architectural barrier separated actors from audiences. For a theatre devoted to pictorialism – as was the case in the Restoration, Georgian, and Victorian eras – this was a very good arrangement, modeled on looking at pictures hung on walls and encased within frames. Spatial division between actor and audience was unknown to Shakespeare, whose plays were mostly performed in daylight in open-air playhouses whose stages thrust into the audience, which surrounded it on three sides. Even in indoor theatres like the Blackfriars, performers and audience members were never far apart. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that anyone took seriously the idea that it would be valuable to perform Shakespeare’s plays in something approximating the building and the space for which they were written. The first significant attempt to explore this proposition was (as mentioned in Section 5) undertaken by William Poel, who staged the First (‘bad’) Quarto of Hamlet in St. George’s Hall, London, in 1881, using a platform stage hung with red curtains but otherwise devoid of scenery. Poel’s effort was more an experiment than a wholesale attempt to recreate Shakespeare’s theatre. Only in the twentieth century were fully functioning replica Elizabethan theatres constructed, 350 years after the fact. The vogue for building Elizabethan stages first took hold in the United States and Canada, countries that had strong traditions of open-air event spaces (known in the United States as ‘chautauquas’) and regional theatre companies for whom new performance spaces were built. The 1934 Chicago World’s Fair featured a replica Globe Theatre, while more permanent structures included the ‘indoor’ Elizabethan stage at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, built in 1932 (Figure 20); the Oregon Shakespeare Festival Theatre, an Elizabethan stage situated within a ‘chautauqua’ shell, finished in 1949; and the Elizabethan thrust stage commissioned by Tyrone Guthrie in the 1950s for the Stratford Festival Theatre in Ontario, Canada. The taste for period ‘look’ extended to other elements of the theatregoer’s experience. A 1963 program for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (Figure 21) depicts a beer-swilling Sir John Falstaff not as a part played by an actor in that season’s production of The Merry Wives of Windsor but as an authentic person from the past, thus giving a Shakespearean dramatic character an independent historical reality that it never possessed. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

78

Shakespeare Performance

Figure 20 Theatre at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, c. 1934. Although originally intended for readings and recitals, the Folger’s indoor theatre has been the site of fully staged professional productions since 1970. Despite its strong period look, the space is historically inaccurate because it combines an outdoor Elizabethan stage with an indoor Jacobean auditorium. Although no theatre in Shakespeare’s time looked like this, audiences and tourists continue to find it resonant and compelling. Reproduced courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. By contrast, when the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre was built in Stratford in the 1930s, its inspiration was not the open-air Elizabethan stage but the dark motion picture ‘palaces’ then at the height of their popularity. Apart from the replica Globe in London, there have been only a few instances in Great Britain – such as the Pit in the Barbican Centre and

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

79

Figure 21 Program cover, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland, Oregon, 1963. Note that the Festival is presenting ‘Shakespeare’ – the man, the playwright, the cultural icon – and not any particular play or season of plays. Here, the selling point is Bardolatry itself. Reproduced courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

80

Shakespeare Performance

the Other Place at Stratford, both initially commissioned by the RSC – when theatre companies tried to capture repeatedly something of the open and intimate space where Shakespeare’s plays were first performed. The modern use of an open stage for playing Shakespeare is much more than an exercise in antiquarian pedantry, nostalgia, or a hopelessly misguided effort to recreate in our own day the exact performance conditions of Shakespeare’s time. (This did not, however, prevent actors in the Globe’s 1997 production of Henry V from wearing historically authentic undergarments.) Rather, the open stage honors the basic truth that Shakespeare wrote his plays to be performed in a particular kind of space, with a particular awareness of where his audience stood or sat, and with his own acting company (their talents, their limitations, their preferences) in mind. Under the rubric of ‘Original Practices’ – and its successor term, ‘original processes’ – artists and scholars have joined forces in recent years to explore whether familiarity with the rehearsal techniques, acting spaces, and scenic possibilities of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage (to the extent we can know them) might help us to better appreciate plays from that period. At its best, the investigation of ‘Original Practices’ is like actresses grappling with the role of Kate: an occasion to acknowledge that the plays were not written for us, but that if they are going to mean anything to us, that meaning will arise from an encounter between the play’s original circumstances and the demands we now place upon it. The contemporary appeal of ‘immersive’ performance – one that removes physical barriers between actors and spectators and deliberately places (‘immerses’) spectators within the performance event – can claim ironic sympathy with the desire of ‘Original Practices’ to have more intimate contact with audiences. Of course, the differences are significant: Spaces like the Globe are purpose-built, highly normative regarding both style and repertoire, and are driven by a desire to recover or replicate the mise-en-scène of a past epoch. By contrast, immersive performances – like Sleep No More (London 2003, New York 2011), a wildly successful retelling of Macbeth staged by the British theatre ensemble Punchdrunk – often take place in sitespecific venues, manipulate a dramatic text in devising a larger performance event, and revel in the unpredictable immediacy of the audience’s experience. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

81

As staged in the ‘McKittrick Hotel’ (warehouses transformed into a 1930s film noir interior), Sleep No More gives spectators the freedom to create their own journey, choosing which tableau or episode to stop and witness – or which ‘resident’ to follow – as they wander from room to room, up and down the structure’s multiple floors. Audience members are given white masks to wear (thus marking themselves as hotel ‘guests’), are taken by elevator to random floors, and then encouraged to explore. Beyond that, there are no instructions. Should one linger in the King James Sanitarium (complete with beds and bathtubs) on the top floor, visit the Macduff family apartment on the third floor, or enter the ground floor ballroom? At some point, ‘guests’ will randomly encounter characters from Macbeth: Malcolm (now a film noir detective) running up the stairs, Lady Macbeth washing Duncan’s blood from Macbeth’s naked body in the bathroom of their hotel suite, or the interpolated Mrs. Danvers from Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rebecca concocting a poison to kill Lady Macduff. Each performance lasts three hours but each character (or hotel ‘resident’) works on a one-hour loop, which gives the whole event a recursive rather than a linear feel. Sleep No More doesn’t so much move ahead as it keeps returning to where it started, retracing the same arc over and over again, just as spectators might find themselves repeatedly ending up in the same room. But that’s the point: There is no one correct experience for everyone to get through. Rather, there is only the pastiche and intertextual experience that you as an individual assemble for yourself.

8 Global Shakespeare Some native English speakers are surprised to learn that Shakespeare is the most frequently performed playwright in the world, with productions staged everywhere from Caracas to Cape Town and from Budapest to Beijing – and most often in translation, from Swahili to Serbian. The fact of Shakespeare’s global presence might seem to ratify for the twenty-first century his traditional status as a universal genius, an artistic force of nature capable of speaking to everyone everywhere. In the far-reaching history of Shakespeare in performance, Cassius’ prophecy in Julius Caesar has proved correct: ‘How many ages

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

82

Shakespeare Performance

hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over / In states unborn and accents yet unknown!’ But the situation is more complicated than simply taking for granted Shakespeare’s worldwide and transhistorical significance. Performances of Shakespeare outside the Anglophone world are not blandly global – in the way that businesses like Starbucks and McDonald’s are the same everywhere – but insistently local and often intercultural. Shakespeare in New York is not the same as Shakespeare in New Delhi. The first consequential desire to embrace Shakespeare outside Britain and North America occurred in Germany 200 years ago. Because Shakespeare’s plays were not beholden to French neoclassical precepts, they provided a useful model for writers like Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) who aspired to create a national theatre and a national literature that might unify Germanspeaking peoples for whom the Holy Roman Empire did not feel like a homeland. ‘Unser Shakespeare’ (‘our Shakespeare’), as the German Romantics called the English playwright, was deliberately appropriated in the spirit of democratic nationalism. Germany’s commitment to Shakespeare ever since has never waned, with important twentiethcentury productions staged by companies like the Berliner Ensemble (founded by Brecht in 1949) and directors like Peter Stein (1937–). Although it led the way for much of the rest of continental Europe, the German example is atypical from a global perspective because Shakespeare in Europe was not an entirely foreign currency but rather part of the broad humanistic tradition that forms the secular cornerstone of European art and culture. When Shakespeare moves beyond Western nations, matters become more fundamentally diverse: because Shakespeare must then be transformed and accommodated into different cultures, ones that already possess their own traditions of drama and performance. Sometimes, as with Shakespeare in India – or Kenya or South Africa – those acts of cultural transfer are freighted with the legacy of British imperialism, a legacy that has not always played out according to a simple binary divide between the ruler and the ruled. In India, Shakespeare was not rejected as the imported culture of the foreign oppressor but integrated into heterogeneous local performance

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

83

traditions even during the colonial era. Similarly, the meaning of South African playwright Welcome Msomi’s (1941–2020) Umbatha – a Zulu adaptation of Macbeth, which toured the world in the 1970s – arose from his country’s colonial history but could not be explained entirely by that history. That Nelson Mandela encouraged a revival of the spectacular production in the 1990s speaks eloquently to how it reflected the rebirth of South Africa after the long painful years of apartheid, just as in Macbeth the kingdom of Scotland emerges free from its own horrific past. On a continent whose history since the end of the colonial era has all too often been marked by unstable governments led by a succession of military strongmen, the Shakespeare plays most popular in performance have been Macbeth and Julius Caesar – plays about coups d’état, the corrupting force of power, the danger of unchecked ambition, and the suppression of the people’s voice. Yet in countries like Japan, whose encounter with Shakespeare has not been shaped by a colonial past, a liberating interculturalism has flourished. Especially since the opening of the Tokyo Globe in 1988, Japanese productions of Shakespeare have gained worldwide prominence not just in attracting international artists and audiences to Tokyo but also through overseas tours. The absence of a colonial ‘anxiety of influence’ has meant that auteur directors like Yukio Ninagawa (1935–2016) were free to experiment with a culturally eclectic Shakespeare, mixing Western traditions with indigenous ones like Noh and Kabuki. Ninagawa’s 1995 production of Hamlet combined ancient Samurai life with modern Western clothing and physical mannerisms, a coupling that had the intriguing effect of distancing the play for Eastern and Western audiences alike, both of which found something unfamiliar in the production. That was precisely the director’s intent, because he believed that audiences everywhere had become too comfortable in their appreciation of Shakespeare. Ninagawa, who called himself a ‘listener’ to foreign cultures, modeled a distinctively intercultural stance in that his artistry existed inside and outside his own culture. As these few examples from Africa and Asia confirm, ‘foreign Shakespeare’ is not one story with one direction but many stories with many directions. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

84

Shakespeare Performance

The central fact of Shakespeare’s global popularity is that in nonAnglophone countries his plays are mainly performed in translation. The same sometimes occurs in predominantly Anglophone countries, as with Maori Shakespeare in New Zealand or Shakespeare in French in Québec or Shakespeare in Spanish in Los Angeles. English speakers instinctively regard Shakespeare in translation as a potential problem: What we appreciate in Shakespeare is his language – after all, most of his plots and main characters are borrowed – so when the language is gone, isn’t Shakespeare gone too? The question is not easily answered. In a literal sense, an essential component of Shakespeare’s art – his words – is indeed lost in the process of linguistic and cultural translation. Yet something is also gained in the process because Shakespeare in translation usually sounds ‘new’, as if the play were written yesterday. Only infrequently have such translations recreated the now archaic quality of Elizabethan English for the sensible reason that the whole point of performing Shakespeare in another language is that his plays possess contemporary relevance. In many English-language productions, everything we see looks new but everything we hear sounds old. With Shakespeare in translation, everything is always new, including the script itself. The built-in immediacy of translations can mean that foreign performances of Shakespeare, despite what they sacrifice linguistically, possess the advantage of making Shakespeare our contemporary. Directors in Britain and North America often struggle to find ways to make the witches in Macbeth dramatically plausible; but in the Nigerian playwright Wale Ogunyemi’s (1939–2001) adaptation of the Scottish tragedy in 1968, the witches adopted local Yoruba traditions of ritual and rhythmic dialogue. For a Nigerian audience, the three witches felt exactly like the ones that Macbeth encountered – supernatural and otherworldly but also real and scarily prophetic – an effect that the play requires but which is now very difficult to achieve in English-language productions in Western theatres. In the Anglophone world there’s no need to justify performing Shakespeare because Shakespeare defines the dominant culture. By contrast, countries where Shakespeare is not part of the cultural patrimony must

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

85

choose to read and perform his plays. They must find a reason to value what British and North American audiences can easily take for granted. This does not mean that all foreign productions of Shakespeare are memorable or insightful; but it does mean that they arise from a perspective that is sometimes lacking in English-language productions. One consequence of Shakespeare in translation has been the importance of a production’s visual aspects. Because there is less reverence toward the words (which are, strictly speaking, no longer Shakespeare’s) more opportunities arise for the mise-en-scène to contribute to the production’s meaning. Indeed, some of the most visually imaginative stagings of Shakespeare in the past few decades have been the work of nonAnglophone directors. In France, Ariane Mnouchkine’s (1939–) production of Richard II for her company Théâtre du Soleil in 1981 used Asian techniques of mask and formalized movement derived from Noh, Kabuki, Kathakali, and Peking Opera to evoke the intricate rituals of a medieval English court more interested in its own all-consuming pomp than in the grinding agenda of state politics. Some critics found her production aesthetically rich but also blatantly imperialist, treating Asian performance traditions as mere ornaments – used, moreover, to make a negative judgment within the production – for an essentially Western interpretation of the play. Using similar imagination, Ninagawa’s 1994 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream featured a Kyoto stone garden (replacing Shakespeare’s green world) and two actors playing Puck as acrobats from the Beijing Opera. In a more culturally complex example, Ninagawa set his 1987 production of The Tempest on the tiny island of Sado, where in the fifteenth century the Shogun banished Zeami, the founder of Noh theatre. An illuminating choice, it connected Japanese performance history with Shakespeare’s play, itself about a famous man exiled to a remote island for political reasons. Indeed, Ninagawa staged The Tempest as the rehearsal of a Noh drama, in which the director, a Zeami-like figure, gradually assumed the role of Prospero, who himself directs Ferdinand and Miranda’s wedding masque (a play-within-the-play), thus allusively merging two performance cultures. It’s a sign of how important the visual Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

86

Shakespeare Performance

aspect of this production was that Ninagawa agreed to direct the play before he had ever read it. That Ninagawa’s Noh-inspired version of The Tempest was first seen not in Japan but at the Edinburgh International Festival tells us something about its resolutely intercultural character. It is true that Shakespeare’s plays have many times been the instrument of colonialist and neocolonialist agendas, but so have other major Western texts. The more revealing observation is that Shakespeare’s plays have become, perhaps more than any other literary or dramatic works, a vehicle for the dialectic of interculturalism. Like our own future, the future of Shakespeare will be intercultural. Not just multicultural; not just a dense collocation of variegated identities; but actively and creatively intercultural, the continuing and transformative encounter – the ‘inter’ – between different traditions, customs, and practices. This encounter will be driven as much by the force of globalization as by artistic curiosity. The 2012 London Olympics inaugurated a new movement in global and intercultural Shakespeare, in which Shakespeare’s Globe in London, then under Dominic Dromgoole’s leadership, played a pivotal role. As part of the wider Cultural Olympiad, the Globe organized a six-week theatre festival – Globe to Globe – in which all of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays would be performed but each in a different language and each production presented by a different international theatre company. In the spring and early summer of 2012, London audiences (themselves both a local and a global community) could see a Maori Troilus and Cressida, The Merry Wives of Windsor in Swahili, and Richard II performed by the Palestinian theatre company Ashtar. It was the greatest concentration of international Shakespeare that the world has ever seen, a global initiative unlikely to be surpassed. In planning this formidable event, the Globe was aware of the festival’s conservative ideology: the commodification of Shakespeare in blockbuster cultural events marketed to tourists, the unwitting revival of a British imperial mindset that fetishizes ‘exotic’ foreign cultures, and the suppression of diversity by the imposed ‘Globe way’ (their own term) of presentational Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

87

acting on a platform stage. And yet, simultaneously, the Globe committed itself to an ethical outreach, making a concerted effort to include theatre groups working ‘underground and in war zones’. The Festival was perhaps the quintessential recognition that ‘global Shakespeare’, like all myths, contains both darkness and light. Reigning over this infinite variety was the London Olympics and Paralympics, whose opening ceremonies celebrated Shakespeare’s plays as Britain’s gift to the world, a gift that was then returned a hundredfold. It was a remarkable sight to watch Kenneth Branagh (1960–) and Ian McKellen (1939–) declaim passages from The Tempest before an audience of athletes representing more than 200 nations on a site just six miles from where those same words were first spoken on a stage. Branagh, improbably dressed as the Victorian industrialist Isambard Kingdom Brunel, recited Caliban’s speech ‘Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises’. The deliberate incongruity of that moment in director Danny Boyle’s (1956–) staging made less for a self-congratulatory hymn to Shakespeare (as would have been the case if Branagh had delivered John of Gaunt’s now clichéd ‘sceptred isle’ speech from Richard II) than a public apology for Britain’s destruction of its natural resources in the name of economic progress and a hopeful resolve to ‘give delight and hurt not’. Two years later, the Globe embarked upon an event with the opposite trajectory: from London to the world. Dromgoole directed a company of twelve actors in a ‘portable’ production of Hamlet that toured the world, spanning seven continents and reaching a staggering 197 countries. The troupe set out on April 23, 2014 – the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth – and returned to the Globe for its final performances on April 23, 2016 – the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. Hamlet played to a quarter of a million people in more than 200 venues, from barns to palaces and from an amphitheatre to the seaside. It was perhaps the first truly planetary tour of a single Shakespeare play. Dromgoole’s published account of this marathon event – Hamlet: Globe to Globe: 193,000 Miles, 197 Countries, One Play (2017) – offered the Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

88

Shakespeare Performance

conventional universalist and unifying features so often attributed to Shakespeare: ‘Hamlet is one of those rare documents that can be said to have brought the world closer together.’ Moreover, he declared that Hamlet was magically transhistorical: ‘Each person who watches or hears it is telescoped back to the moment in 1601 when an audience in the Globe first heard [it].’ (Does that include spectators who have never heard of the original Globe? What about those do not know that the play was first performed in or around 1601? What kind of experience do they have?) The creators of this globally touring Hamlet positioned it as the event that makes the world flat, all of us existing on the same wide horizon of Bardolatrous understanding. Shakespeare is how we know ourselves and Shakespeare is how we know others. Yet we must not be so naïve about the ‘brave new world’ – that very line was spoken during the 2012 Paralympics opening ceremony – of intercultural Shakespeare. Intercultural performance is hard work for both artists and audiences because it requires knowledge of and true respect for multiple traditions. Beyond that, it requires an imaginative openness to how those traditions might exist in fruitful dialogue. Above all, intercultural performance must be ethically conscious on both sides, with neither culture treating the other as a set of decontextualized aesthetic practices that can be instrumentalized for one’s own purposes, a treasure trove to be plundered at will, or an occasion for virtue signaling on social media. Uprooting another culture’s traditions and blindly transplanting them into our own – or vice versa – risks reinstating a vague universality that first absorbs, then commodifies, and finally destroys all forms of difference. If events like the Globe to Globe festival or the worldwide tour of Hamlet end up perpetuating the utopian myth that all cultural differences will collapse in the harmonious and universal meeting ground known as ‘Shakespeare’, then they will have failed us and they will have failed Shakespeare. In the intercultural world of the twenty-first century, Shakespeare is destined to be no longer the revered object of culture – the ‘what’ that we read on the page and watch in the theatre – but to become the medium of culture itself – the ‘how’ by which cultures represent themselves to themselves and to the world beyond. We are no longer performing the plays but

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

89

performing ourselves with and through them. The question is not what the plays mean but where they can take us and where we can take them. Aye, there’s the rub. Which is another way of saying, although for a radically different set of reasons than Ben Jonson had in mind in 1623, that Shakespeare is, indeed, ‘for all time’.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

Bibliography Aebischer, Pascale. Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Aebischer, Pascale, Susanne Greenhalgh, and Laurie E. Osborne, eds. Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Theatre Broadcast Experience. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2018. Barclay, Bill, and David Lindley, eds. Shakespeare, Music and Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Barnden, Sally. Still Shakespeare and the Photography of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Bate, Jonathan, ed. Romantics on Shakespeare. London: Penguin Books, 1992. Bate, Jonathan, and Russell Jackson, eds. Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Beauman, Sally. The Royal Shakespeare Company: A History of Ten Decades. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Bennett, Susan. Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past. London: Routledge, 1996. Bennett, Susan, and Christie Carson, eds. Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Berry, Ralph. On Directing Shakespeare: Interviews with Contemporary Directors. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989. Bharucha, Rustom. ‘Foreign Asia/Foreign Shakespeare: Dissenting Notes on New Asian Interculturality, Postcoloniality, and Recolonization’. Theatre Journal 56.1 (2004): 1–28. Brown, John Russell. New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience and Asia. New York: Routledge, 1999. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

Bibliography

91

Bulman, James C., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Shakespeare Re-dressed: Cross-gender Casting in Contemporary Performance. Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008. Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance. London: Routledge, 1996. Calvo, Clara, and Coppélia Kahn, eds. Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Carson, Christie, and Farah Karim-Cooper, eds. Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Cartelli, Thomas. Reenacting Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath: The Intermedial Turn and Turn to Embodiment. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations. London: Routledge, 1999. Cox, John F., ed. Much Ado about Nothing: Shakespeare in Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Cunningham, Vanessa. Shakespeare and Garrick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Desmet, Christy, and Robert Sawyer, eds. Shakespeare and Appropriation. London: Routledge, 1999. Dobson, Michael. The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Downer, Alan S. The Eminent Tragedian: William Charles Macready. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. Dromgoole, Dominic. Hamlet: Globe to Globe: Two Years, 190,000 Miles, 197 Countries, One Play. New York: Grove Press, 2017. Dymkowski, Christine, ed. The Tempest: Shakespeare in Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

92

Bibliography

Dymkowski, Christine, and Christie Carson, eds. Shakespeare in Stages: New Theatre Histories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Escolme, Bridget. Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage: Passion’s Slaves. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2014. Shakespeare and Costume in Practice. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self. London: Routledge, 2005. Eubanks Winkler, Amanda, and Richard Schoch, Shakespeare in the Theatre: Sir William Davenant and the Duke’s Company. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2021. Fischlin, Daniel, and Mark Fortier, eds. Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology. London: Routledge, 2000. Foulkes, Richard. Performing Shakespeare in the Age of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Foulkes, Richard, ed. Henry Irving: A Re-evaluation of the Pre-eminent Victorian Actor-manager. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Shakespeare and the Victorian Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Golder, John, and Richard Madelaine, eds. O Brave New World: Two Centuries of Shakespeare in Australia. Sydney: Currency Press, 2001. Gregor, Keith. Shakespeare in the Spanish Theatre: 1772 to the Present. London: Continuum, 2010. Griffiths, Trevor, ed. A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Shakespeare in Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Hampton-Reeves, Stuart, and Bridget Escolme, eds. Shakespeare and the Making of Theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Hapgood, Robert, Hamlet: Shakespeare in Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Hartley, Andrew James. Julius Caesar: Shakespeare in Performance. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

Bibliography

93

Herold, Niels. Prison Shakespeare and the Purpose of Performance: Repentance Rituals and the Early Modern. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Hill, Errol. Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984. Hodgdon, Barbara. Ghostly Fragments: Essays on Shakespeare and Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. Shakespeare, Performance and the Archive. New York: Routledge, 2016. Hodgdon, Barbara, and W. B. Worthen, eds. A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Holland, Peter. English Shakespeares: Shakespeare on the English Stage in the 1990s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Holland, Peter, ed. Shakespeare, Memory, Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Hortmann, Wilhelm. Shakespeare on the German Stage: The Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Huang, Alexa, and Elizabeth Rivlin, eds. Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Huang, Alexander C. Y. Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Hughes, Alan. Henry Irving, Shakespearean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Kahan, Jeffrey. Cult of Kean. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. Kahan, Jeffrey, ed. Shakespeare Imitations, Parodies and Forgeries, 1750–1850. London: Routledge, 2004. Karim-Cooper, Farah, and Tiffany Stern, eds. Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Kennedy, Dennis. Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of TwentiethCentury Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

94

Bibliography

Kennedy, Dennis, ed. Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Kennedy, Dennis, and Li Lan Yong, eds. Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2009. Kishi, Tetsuo, and Graham Bradshaw, eds. Shakespeare in Japan. London: Continuum, 2005. Lanier, Douglas. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Lindfors, Bernth. Ira Aldridge. 2 vols. Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2011–2015. Loehlin, James. Henry V: Shakespeare in Performance. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Loehlin, James, ed. Romeo and Juliet: Shakespeare in Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Madelaine, Richard, ed. Anthony and Cleopatra: Shakespeare in Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Marshall, Cynthia, ed. As You Like It: Shakespeare in Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Marshall, Gail. Shakespeare and Victorian Women. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Marshall, Gail, ed. Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Marshall, Gail, and Adrian Poole, eds. Victorian Shakespeare. 2 vols. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Massai, Sonia. Shakespeare’s Accents: Voicing Identity in Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Massai, Sonia, ed. World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance. London: Routledge, 2006. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

Bibliography

95

Mazer, Cary. Shakespeare Refashioned: Elizabethan Plays on Edwardian Stages. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1981. McDonald, Russ. Look to the Lady: Sarah Siddons, Ellen Terry, and Judi Dench on the Shakespearean Stage. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Menzer, Paul. Anecdotal Shakespeare: A New Performance History. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2015. Shakespeare in the Theatre: The American Shakespeare Center. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2017. Menzer, Paul, ed. Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2006. Merchant, Moelwyn. Shakespeare and the Artist. London: Oxford University Press, 1959. Mills, John A. Hamlet on Stage: The Great Tradition. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985. Murray, Barbara A. Restoration Shakespeare: Viewing the Voice. Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001. Odell, G. C. D. Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving. 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920. O’Malley, Evelyn. Weathering Shakespeare: Audiences and Open-Air Performance. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Oya, Reiko. Representing Shakespearean Tragedy: Garrick, the Kembles, and Kean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pemble, John. Shakespeare Goes to Paris: How the Bard Conquered France. London: Hambledon and London, 2005. Poole, Adrian. Shakespeare and the Victorians. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2004. Poole, Adrian, and Peter Holland, eds. Great Shakespeareans. 18 vols. London: Bloomsbury, 2010–2015. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

96

Bibliography

Prescott, Paul. Reviewing Shakespeare: Journalism and Performance from the Eighteenth Century to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Prescott, Paul, and Erin Sullivan, eds. Shakespeare on the Global Stage: Performance and Festivity in the Olympic Year. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2015. Rawlings, Peter, ed. Americans on Shakespeare, 1776–1914. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999. Ripley, John. Coriolanus on Stage in England and America, 1609–1994. Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998. Julius Caesar on Stage in England and America, 1599–1973. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Ritchie, Fiona. Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Ritchie, Fiona and Peter Sabor, eds. Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Rosenberg, Marvin. The Masks of Hamlet. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992. The Masks of Macbeth. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. The Masks of Othello. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961. Rutter, Carol Chillington. Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage. London: Routledge, 2001. Salgãdo, Gãmini. Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare: First Hand Accounts of Performances, 1590–1890. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1975. Sasayama, Takashi, Ronnie Mulryne, and Margaret Shewring, eds. Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Schafer, Elizabeth. Ms-directing Shakespeare: Women Direct Shakespeare. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

Bibliography

97

Schalkwyk, David. Hamlet’s Dream: The Robben Island Shakespeare. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2013. Schoch, Richard. Not Shakespeare: Bardolatry and Burlesque in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Shakespeare’s Victorian Stage: Performing History in the Theatre of Charles Kean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Writing the History of the British Stage, 1660–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Schoch, Richard, ed. Great Shakespeareans: Macready, Booth, Terry, Irving. London: Continuum, 2011. Shattuck, Charles H. Shakespeare on the American Stage: From the Hallams to Edwin Booth. Washington, DC: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976. Shaughnessy, Robert. As You Like It: Shakespeare in Performance. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. The Shakespeare Effect: A History of Twentieth-Century Performance. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Shaughnessy, Robert, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Sheen, Erica, and Isabel Karremann, eds. Shakespeare in Cold War Europe: Conflict, Commemoration, Celebration. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Sillars, Stuart. Illustrated Shakespeare, 1709–1875. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic, 1720–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Shakespeare and the Victorians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Shakespeare and the Visual Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Shakespeare, Time and the Victorians: A Pictorial Exploration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

98

Bibliography

Silverstone, Catherine. Shakespeare, Trauma and Contemporary Performance. New York: Routledge, 2011. Speaight, Robert. Shakespeare on the Stage: An Illustrated history of Shakespearian Performance. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. Sprague, A. C. Shakespearian Players and Performances. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953. Styan, J. L. The Shakespeare Revolution: Criticism and Performance in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Thakur, Vikram Singh. Shakespeare and Indian Theatre: The Politics of Performance. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Tosh, Will. Playing Indoors: Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2018. Trewin, J. C. Shakespeare on the English Stage, 1900–1964. London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1964. Wells, Stanley. Great Shakespeare Actors: Burbage to Branagh. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Wells, Stanley, ed. Nineteenth-Century Shakespeare Burlesques. 5 vols. London: Diploma Press, 1977. Shakespeare in the Theatre: An Anthology of Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Wells, Stanley, and Sarah Stanton, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Werner, Sarah. Shakespeare and Feminist Performance: Ideology on Stage. London: Routledge, 2001. Williams, Gary. Our Moonlight Revels: ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ on the English-Speaking Stage, 1662–1970. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995. Williams, Simon. Shakespeare on the German Stage, 1586–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

Bibliography

99

Woo, Celestine. Romantic Actors and Bardolatry: Performing Shakespeare from Garrick to Kean. New York: Peter Lange, 2008. Worthen, W. B. Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Shakespeare Performance Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Zdeneˇk Strˇíbrný. Shakespeare in Eastern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

Acknowledgements Figure 3 is reproduced courtesy of Folger Theatre, Washington, DC and the research project ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’, led by Queen’s University Belfast. Figures 11, 16, and 17 are reproduced under the Open Content Program of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. All other figures are reproduced courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The author would like to thank W. B. Worthen, the series editor, for suggesting that I might possess the audacity (and perhaps the knowledge) required to write a tiny book on a large topic. Emily Hockley at Cambridge University Press has been unfailingly supportive. My thanks are also due to eagle-eyed copyeditor Linsey Hague and to the anonymous reader of the draft manuscript for offering helpful comments and suggestions for revision, all of which I have adopted. Lastly, I enthusiastically applaud the Folger Shakespeare Library (where much of my research was undertaken) and the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing digital images of their collection items to be published without the burden of permission fees.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

Shakespeare Performance W. B. Worthen Barnard College

W. B. Worthen is Alice Brady Pels Professor in the Arts, and Chair of the Theatre Department at Barnard College. He is also co-chair of the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at Columbia University, where he is Professor of English and Comparative Literature.

ADVISORY BOARD

Pascale Aebischer, University of Exeter Todd Landon Barnes, Ramapo College of New Jersey Susan Bennett, University of Calgary Gina Bloom, University of California, Davis Rustom Bharucha, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi Bridget Escolme, Queen Mary University of London Alan Galey, University of Toronto Douglas Lanier, University of New Hampshire

Sonia Massai, King’s College London Julia Reinhard, Lupton University of California, Irvine Peter W. Marx, University of Köln Alfredo Michel Modenessi, National Autonomous University of Mexico Robert Shaughnessy, Guildford School of Acting, University of Surrey Ayanna Thompson George, Washington University Yong Li–Lan, National University of Singapore

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

ABOUT

THE

SERIES

Shakespeare Performance is a dynamic collection in a field that is both always emerging and always evanescent. Responding to the global range of Shakespeare performance today, the series launches provocative, urgent criticism for researchers, graduate students and practitioners. Publishing scholarship with a direct bearing on the contemporary contexts of Shakespeare performance, it considers specific performances, material and social practices, ideological and cultural frameworks, emerging and significant artists and performance histories.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

Shakespeare Performance ELEMENTS IN THE SERIES Haunting History Onstage Regina Buccola Stoicism as Performance in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ Donovan Sherman Shakespearean Charity: Neoliberalism and Redemptive Performance Todd Landon Barnes About Shakespeare: Bodies, Spaces and Texts Robert Shaughnessy Shakespeare, Blackface and Race: Different Perspectives Coen Heijes Performing Early Modern Drama Beyond Shakespeare: Edward’s Boys Harry McCarthy Shakespearean Futures: Casting the Bodies of Tomorrow on Shakespeare’s Stages Today Amy Cook Robert Lepage’s Intercultural Encounters Christie Carson A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance: From the Restoration to the Twenty-First Century Richard Schoch A full series listing is available at: www.cambridge.org/ESPF

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 138.199.39.208, on 21 Apr 2021 at 09:59:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108625838