William Shakespeare and his plays

[discojoe]

Richard III: EIE

[JWC3]

Puck = ? I have no idea, but I feel like this one is important.

[DirectorAbbie]

This is a great idea. I'll bookmark it and participate later.

[Quote Unquote]

Mercutio was an ILE

"The name Mercutio was present in Shakespeare's sources for Romeo and Juliet, however his character was not well-established, and he was even presented as a romantic rival for Juliet.[1] Mercutio's name is related to the word "mercurial," meaning, "having an unpredictable and fast changing mood," an accurate description of Mercutio's personality. The word "mercurial" itself derives from the ancient Roman messenger god Mercury (Hermes)."

Tell me, in what theoretical world do you live? Hermes, the god of intellect, the symbol of the soul and reason, the messenger of the gods (the element the rules matter and connects with the divine, in one word: spirit), the soulful one, the ethereal, wise, powerful, the creator of culture, Thoth in Egyptian mythology, the one who is full of trickery and fun, the one who rules mood and temper, who the fuck would think that all these characteristics would exist in a lead type. This can only be connected to . And Mercutio does embodies the archetype of Hermes, of a Enneagram 7, not an 8 like types.

Mercutio is full of honor.

"Mercutio is apt to make long, drawn out speeches (the most famous of which is the Queen Mab speech)"

Doesn't it obviously point out at ILE?

"and is generally thought to be reckless, a jester, and a free spirit."

again.

"Due to his reckless and flamboyant personality"

7777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777

"Mercutio is the instigator of many fights with his rather mean spirited humor, and often insults Tybalt Capulet, a renowned swordsman."

Look at the ILEs on this forum, they are the instigator of fights here. Mercutio's provocations in Romeo and Juliet are always of intellectual nature, they have nothing to do with the survival instinct and ego imposition of SLEs. Compare Discojoe and me, who is the one who initiates most fights here? who is the one who creates most of the polemics here? Discojoe always say stupid crap, but never initates idealist conflects, they are usually started by infantiles. In two days I've made more noise than Discojoe in his entire life.

"It is Mercutio's temper that leads to Tybalts death, and Romeos banishment and the tragedy that follows."

These life turmoils are more common among strong ILEs than SLEs. Richard Wagner's life - who was indeed a Creative-ILE - was an exact match of what ILEs strong idealism can engender. His life was full of ups and downs only due strong idealism in regard of art, politics, philosphy, you name it.

"He is not a Montague nor a Capulet, but his friends are Montagues, likely due to the fact that he cannot stand Tybalt of the Capulets. Mercutio is one of the few in Verona with the ability to freely float around both houses."

Mercutio is more fond of the masculine house, Montague. This is again a symbolical allusion of Hermes, who was the only god with full access to both the underworld and to the Olympus. Hermes represents the spirit that rules the matter, and can be afflicted by the pains of matter (Capulet house : underworld) but always will be of pure Olympian Nature and more fond of the light and truth (Masculine house of Montague : Olympus). By using the word "float" in this exert of the wikipedia article, my Ne immediately uses its allegorical functioning. I can't help connecting it to the Styx river of the underworld. Romeo and Juliet is by quite of some extent, an allegoric story.

"Due to his quick wit and flamboyant, affable personality, Mercutio is one of Shakespeare's most popular characters."

This is also more an ILE thing than SLE. Many ILEs are that knid of person who you can never ignore, you'll either hate them or love them, because of the much more idealistic and universal approach and activism ILEs have, they fight for ideals. SLEs are mostly concerned about themselves and their particularity. SLEs are hated because of defending too much their egos, adn imposing it on others. By their lack of concern toward humanity. SLEs are hated because they are so readily to defend their own egoistical position, so they bother only those are a menace to their egoism. ILEs bother everyone by their high universal ideals (of course, there is a scale of evolution regarding ILEs. There are those who are weaker and not so bold. More strong types will be those are more psychologically structured and solid. Socionics doesn't give any tool for measuring this hierarchy within a single type. But enneagram does, it's called integration. Very integrated 7s are more coherent with this reckless idealist description of ILEs I gave).

Ponder about Mercutio, do you see him more as an idealist or as an egoist? Draw your own conclusions.

Regarding Shakespeare works, It indeed has a lot of Fe, from what I can remember. BUT, most surely, his stories and the essential meaning drawn by his works are not of his own source. It's clear to me that it has two layers. First: A shallow layer full of embellishment, expression, emotions, feelings and deeply symbolic, that are the form, the shape, the mold, are the sculptured figure. This was made by Shakespeare himself. And a second Layer: Allegoric, abstract, meaningful, prophetical, linguistic, interpretative, drawing many abstract essences and implications. For those who don't know it, Symbolism and Allegory are by no means the same thing. Allegory is more powerful and abstract, symbolism is more direct and material. There are no abstract symbols, in the same extent as there are no material allegories. An allegory is the process by which you use abstract concepts for representing other abstract concepts. Symbols are material representation of the material. Allegories (), in the most valuable symbolic works, always complete symbols by abstract implication (Ne is all about implication). This deeper allegoric layer in Shakespeare's works were not made by him, they are a non-Shakespearean substratum external to him. This substratum is totally allegoric (Ne) and are well known allegories used since the dawn of civilization, since Babylon, I can assure you. They are the marble on which Shakespeare used his tools for shaping his work ("Fe +Ni" on "Ne + Ti"). They were a part of his artistic inspiration. That's why, when you read Shakespeare, you can see he weakened the value and the strength of the allegoric concepts, by overly focusing on the shallow surface, by giving too much form and taking too much attention to superficiality. That's why when you read purely allegoric works, like most of the bible, you can have much deeper insights of significance and abstract completion, but in the other hand they are too shapeless. when you read Shakespeare, it's undeniable how much of the allegoric strength was lost, how most of the significance was downplayed. Significance is also not Ni related, since significance is 100% abstraction.

You can compare Shakespeare with Cervantes or Homer, who were, maybe, some of the most important sources for Shakespeare. Cervantes and Homer wer surely Ne lead types, their work was not symbolic, neither emotional but only abstract, intellectual and allegoric. But in most of the time I dedicate myself to read Shakespeare than Cervantes or Dostoievsky (who are my favorites), because Shakespeare is more superficial, I relax more reading it, it's not a really meditative and philosophical kind of art. I can turn off my brain when I read the bard of Stratford-upon-Avon. His work is sweeter and much less prophetical.

Sometimes, I fear, that in a less intellectual environment like our current world, Shakespeare would have made vain art, and would not direct himself through these Allegoric works of heritage.

[JWC3]

The origin of the world Shit most likely was Ship High in Transit, that doesn't mean I'm referring to sailing when I use it.

Language evolves and the origin of a word has little to do with it's present and intended meaning.

The word Dude, came from Dud, as in "Nice Duds! (Clothes)" That doesn't mean when I say "What's up dude?" I'm making any sort of inference about the clothes of the person I'm referring to.

[silverchris9]

@Weird pseudo-latin name,
Despite the fact that what you said was a mashup of rambling nonsense and I would prefer if you would not post in this thread, ILE is actually a viable typing for Mercutio, lol, largely on the evidence of the Queen Mab speech. I would have to actually do some work proving that he is Se-leading, not Ne-leading. But certainly, as played in the Baz Luhrman movie, he is by no means ILE. As played in the Zefferelli movie, he might be, I dunno. Shrug.

[HERO]

King Lear (Act One, Scene Two) — GLOUCESTER: These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects. Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide, in cities mutinies, in countries discord, in palaces treason, and the bond cracked ’twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the prediction—there’s son against father. The king falls from bias of nature—there’s father against child. We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves. Find out this villain, Edmund. It shall lose thee nothing. Do it carefully.—And the noble and true-hearted Kent banished, his offense honesty! 'Tis strange, strange.

Exit GLOUCESTER

EDMUND: This is the excellent foppery of the world that when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting-on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the dragon’s tail and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. Fut, I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvcR2wNpvQU

http://nfs.sparknotes.com/lear/page_34.html

http://nfs.sparknotes.com/lear/page_36.html


http://nfs.sparknotes.com/hamlet/page_50.html

- from Hamlet (Act 1, Scene 4):

HAMLET:

The king doth wake tonight and takes his rouse,
Keeps wassail and the swaggering upspring reels,
And, as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,
The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out
The triumph of his pledge.

HORATIO:

Is it a custom?

HAMLET:

Ay, marry, is ’t.
But to my mind, though I am native here
And to the manner born, it is a custom
More honored in the breach than the observance.
This heavy-headed revel east and west
Makes us traduced and taxed of other nations.
They clepe us drunkards and with swinish phrase
Soil our addition. And indeed it takes
From our achievements, though performed at height,
The pith and marrow of our attribute.
So oft it chances in particular men
That for some vicious mole of nature in them—
As in their birth (wherein they are not guilty,
Since nature cannot choose his origin),
By the o'ergrowth of some complexion,
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,
Or by some habit that too much o'erleavens
The form of plausive manners—that these men,
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,
Being nature’s livery or fortune’s star,
Their virtues else (be they as pure as grace,
As infinite as man may undergo)
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault. The dram of evil
Doth all the noble substance of a doubt
To his own scandal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGEd2azjs9I

http://nfs.sparknotes.com/hamlet/page_52.html


- From Living With Shakespeare: Essays by Writers, Actors, and Directors; pages 36-44 (“Teaching Shakespeare to Actors” by Camille Paglia):

POLITICS

The contemporary actor’s search for motivation in a Shakespeare role is complicated by alien elements in the Renaissance worldview. Politically, Shakespeare was not a populist or democrat but a monarchist who believed that government was best led by a wise, strong ruler. The crown is a near-mystical symbol in his plays, which feature sporadic suspicions of the fickle mob. Freedom is the watchword of modern democracies, but Shakespeare’s guiding principle was order. Lingering in popular memory were the thirty years of civil war that England had endured a century before. For both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, hierarchy or “degree” in the political realm mirrored the perfection of God’s cosmic master plan. A king, it was thought, ruled by divine right. Although Shakespeare himself may have tended toward the agnostic, there is a trace of that religious premise in his plays in the difficulties encountered by usurping kings like Macbeth or Claudius in asserting and maintaining authority. Kingship is conferred but also learned, as when Prince Hal matures into Henry V by abandoning his youthful hedonism and severing ties with the carousing Falstaff.

Nationalism, customarily portrayed today as a crucible of war, imperialism, and xenophobia, is a positive value in Shakespeare. Nation-states had emerged in the Middle Ages as a consolidation of dukedoms, an administrative streamlining that, at its best, expanded trade, advanced knowledge, and reduced provincialism. This progressive movement of history is the major theme of King Lear, where Lear’s foolish choice to divide his kingdom (which he does not possess but holds in trust) plunges it backward toward chaos and barbarism, reducing the king himself to a nomad battered by the elements. Unless they know European history well, most American actors rarely notice the nationalistic motifs in Shakespeare. In Lear, for example, the invasion of Britain by France – even though it promises rescue by the forces of good (Cordelia is now the queen of France) – creates patriotic conflicts for a British audience that Americans will not feel. Similarly, even a small detail such as Hamlet’s being dispatched to England to collect overdue tribute for Denmark would stir a flicker of atavistic indignation in British hearts. Nationalism resoundingly recurs in a different context at the finale of Hamlet, where the stage is scattered with royal corpses. The bracingly vigorous entrance of Fortinbras marks the occupation of Denmark by a foreign power. With the self-destruction of its ruling class, Denmark has lost its autonomy and become a subject state of Norway.

Hierarchy also structures family and gender relations in Shakespeare. Fathers were law-givers, and children were expected to obey. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s audience would have sided with Juliet’s parents, who had the right to make marital decisions for a fourteen-year-old girl. The play’s power resides precisely in Shakespeare’s success in shifting the audience from its default position through the captivating lyricism of Romeo and Juliet’s love. Because of our own reflex bias toward romantic free choice, it’s important that a contemporary production not side so completely with the lovers as to warp the play: Juliet’s hot-tempered father should not be portrayed as a pasteboard ogre, nor should the aristocratic Paris, his sound choice for Juliet, seem like a callow prig. In The Tempest, Prospero displays a sometimes disturbing control over his daughter Miranda and her suitor Ferdinand: he puts Miranda to sleep and freezes Ferdinand in place, like a statue. This problematic manipulation of consciousness is partially ameliorated by Prospero’s status as a magician whose secret arts parallel Shakespeare’s spellbinding power over an audience.

Shakespeare is repeatedly critical of rigid, uncomprehending fathers. One of the haunting mysteries of his plays is how often he deletes the mothers of his young heroines, who are left undefended against the errors of obtuse fathers. Miranda has thrived in her widowed father’s watchful nurture, but Cordelia, Desdemona, and Ophelia suffer severely from the absence of a mother’s sympathetic counsel and intervention. Ophelia, torn between her proper deference to her father and her love for Hamlet, tries to do the right thing and ends up destroying her own and Hamlet’s lives. Shakespeare worsens Ophelia’s plight by sending her brother off to university in Paris and oddly even denying her a female confidante, like Juliet’s jovial nurse or Desdemona’s worldly-wise maidservant, Emilia. This terrible isolation, compounded by her father’s death at Hamlet’s hands, intensifies the emotional pressure on Ophelia and makes comprehensible her descent into delusion and madness, which Shakespeare pointedly contrasts with Hamlet’s passing episodic depressions. A contemporary actor playing Ophelia must strike a delicate balance in portraying her tragedy without excess sentimentality. She is not simply a frail flower or hapless victim of rank injustice. Her father, Polonius, is arrogant and at times stupid—ignoring her hurt and need for comforting and callously broadcasting her secrets as mere data to whisk to the king—but he is solidly within his rights to determine Ophelia’s affairs and protect her chastity. Ophelia makes a considered ethical choice, a courageous decision to renounce the man she loves.

The divergence of cultural assumptions between the Renaissance and today is nowhere clearer than in regard to marriage, which is glorified in Shakespeare’s plays as a symbol of spiritual harmony and social order. His comedies sometimes end in a stampede of mass marriages, blessed by heaven and destined for fertile procreation. Marriage in our own time has lost much of its uniqueness and high value, partly because women now have access to jobs outside the home and can support themselves. Weddings remain popular as theatrical extravaganzas, but marriage has shrunk to just another lifestyle option, and the divorce rate has soared. Shakespeare’s generation of poets, including John Donne and Edmund Spenser, was instrumental in the valorization of marriage, which had once primarily been an economic contract negotiated between a father and a prospective son-in-law. Medieval love poetry was addressed to a mistress or a distant, unattainable idol, not a wife.

The strong tilt toward marriage in Shakespeare’s plays creates interpretive problems for contemporary actors. In As You Like It, for example, the witty and boldly enterprising Rosalind, who spends most of the play disguised as a boy, instantly falls in love with Orlando, an amiable lunk who seems nowhere near her level. He is athletic and sweet but slightly slow, like Joey (played by Matt LeBlanc) on the long-running hit TV show Friends. Rosalind’s infatuation with Orlando exemplifies Shakespeare’s favorite theme of the quirky madness of love, but it must not seem as if she is adopting and schooling a large, goofy dog. Her ritual divestment of her male garb before her wedding restores the Renaissance gender code and magically generates an approving apparition of Hymen, the guardian spirit of marriage. Rosalind’s inseparable friendship with her cousin Celia is one of the few places in Shakespeare’s plays where any trace of homosexuality can arguably be detected. (Another is Antonio’s quick attachment and unusual generosity to Sebastian in a subplot of Twelfth Night.) Although his celebrated contemporary Christopher Marlowe wrote openly about a gay king in Edward II, Shakespeare’s plays are overwhelmingly committed to heterosexual love. In his private life, Shakespeare was evidently split: his love Sonnets are directed to a forceful, dusky-skinned woman and a well-born, aimless, beautiful young man.

Shakespeare is very sensitive to the dignity of women. Sexually degrading remarks about women in his plays are automatically symptomatic of a twisted, corrupted character or of a temporary state of mental disease, as experienced by Hamlet and Lear in their darkest moments. Nevertheless, modern productions of The Taming of the Shrew must struggle with the issue of misogyny. The play has long been the focus of feminist ire, with only the dissident Germaine Greer, a Shakespeare scholar among her other public roles, willing to stoutly defend it. The bad-tempered and violent Kate the shrew (a sharp-toothed mole) cows her inept father and breathes fire at any man who crosses her. It is possible to interpret Kate’s hostility as a frustrated product of her entrapment in a world lacking any outlet for women’s talents and pent-up energies except marriage. Petruchio, who frankly admits his motive for marrying is mercenary (he’s on the hunt for the fattest dowry), breaks down Kate’s rebellious personality by treatment that today would be classified as spousal abuse—denying her food and sleep, letting her wallow in the mud, and generally humiliating her. The actress playing Kate is confronted at the finale with one of the thorniest challenges in the Shakespeare canon: a long public speech where she declares that women are “soft and weak” and must “serve, love and obey” their husbands (5.1.176-177). After the rollicking humor of the play, modern productions are reluctant to end on a sour note, so the speech is now performed as if it is overtly satirical—whether that is true to Shakespeare’s original conception or not.

The dramatis personae of Shakespeare’s plays are always a mix of social classes. Because of Britain’s still-entrenched class system, with its sometimes cash-poor but highly visible landed aristocracy, British actors have little trouble in playing Shakespeare’s upper-class roles. In the United States, in contrast, status is conferred solely by wealth, celebrity, or transient political power. Furthermore, since the 1960s, American authority figures, from politicians, ministers, and bankers to parents and teachers, have gradually adopted a less formal, remote, and dictatorial style. Young people today will often startlingly say that one or both of their parents are their “best friends.” Dress codes have also relaxed with the spread of sportswear, sneakers, and proletarian blue jeans, even marketed by a mandarin heiress, Gloria Vanderbilt. It is now hard to appreciate why John F. Kennedy caused a sensation by not wearing a hat at his presidential inauguration in 1961.

Because of these broad social changes, American actors coming to Shakespeare have few or no direct models of hierarchical authority and class assertion. The audience must clearly perceive the class differences among Shakespeare’s characters. Working-class women, for example, would paradoxically take up more space on stage than their upper-class counterparts: their movements are physically freer and their clothing looser, because designed for labor. Upper-class posture is reserved and contained, as if housed in an invisible bubble. Actors with prior training in classical ballet, which descends from the elegant seventeenth-century court, or continental equitation (called English riding in the United States) have a distinct advantage here. Even among young British women actors winning parts these days in productions of Shakespeare, Jane Austen, or Oscar Wilde, there is an irksome trend for mannish arm-swinging, which originated among the new sportswomen of the 1920s who took up golf and tennis. Until World War I, respectable ladies kept their elbows close to their bodies and their hands clasped gracefully above the waist or otherwise occupied with their skirts or some object like a fine handkerchief—an accessory crucial to the plot of Othello. Nor did ladies flash their teeth or grin like Huckleberry Finn, another anachronism currently epidemic in period roles.

Manners are not superficial trivialities but the choreography of social class. Manners both define and limit character and must therefore be represented in the actor’s process. Without attention to class distinctions and stratification, important plot elements in Shakespeare will be blurred or missed altogether. In King Lear, for example, it is a violation of propriety for Goneril, who is the duchess of Albany, to be confiding private matters about her father and sister to her steward, Oswald. In Twelfth Night, the countess Olivia is too flirtatious with the duke’s page, Cesario (Viola in drag), just as her own steward, Malvolio, is later too presumptuously forward with her. On the other hand, Shakespeare presents as evidence of Prince Hamlet’s refreshing lack of snobbery his gracious affability to the visiting troupe of players as well as his easy cordiality with the gravedigger at work in the churchyard. Precedence and rank are pivotal in the banquet scene where Lady Macbeth, trying to divert notice from her husband’s hysteria at Banquo’s bloody ghost (which only he can see), abruptly orders everyone to leave: “Stand not upon the order of your going, / But go at once” (3.4.137-138). The ugly lack of ceremony in this chaotic mass exit represents the breakdown of social cohesion in a Scotland ruled by a criminal.

Witty banter, the signature sound of the upper-class comedy of manners, comes easily to British actors, whose culture is oriented toward verbal panache, from Oxbridge debating societies to Question Time in the House of Commons, with its scathing sallies met by laughter and applause. American actors today are overexposed to snark, the dominant style in TV comedy. With its snidy ironic put-downs, snark lacks the arch, competitive rhythm, like that of fencing, which has always characterized the thrusts, parries, and repartee of great high comedy. For help with Shakespeare’s witty dialogue, I recommend to my theater students such classic film comedies as The Philadelphia Story, All About Eve, and The Importance of Being Earnest (the 1952 version directed by Anthony Asquith), which show how epigrammatic lines can be crisply shaped, timed, and delivered. The Mid-Atlantic accent (midway between American and British) once heard among scions of prominent, affluent families such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Katharine Hepburn, used to be taught to actors in theater school. It was perfect for high comedy but became too affected and artificial over time. However, Sigourney Weaver, playing an imperious Wall Street stockbroker in Working Girl, shows how that elite accent can be subtly modified for use by American actors playing upper-class roles.


…


Shakespeare’s plays famously survive transfer into any locale and time period. They have been set, for example, in medieval Japan, Nazi Germany, a space colony, and a suburban high school. But this amazing flexibility does not necessarily give infinite latitude to high-concept directors. In The Goodbye Girl, Richard Dreyfuss hilariously plays an earnest young actor struggling with a narcissistic Off-Off-Broadway director who sees Richard III as a flaming queer. Radical experiments with Shakespeare make sense in Britain, where new angles on the fatiguingly familiar are welcomed. But in the United States, live professional productions of Shakespeare are so rare that, like it or not, they are thrust into an educational role. Actors of Shakespeare are exponents and defenders of a high culture that is steadily disappearing.

Because of the dominance of the Method in theater training here, American actors seeking their own “truth” are sometimes impatient with the technical refinements in which British actors, with their gift for understatement, are so skilled. Rehearsal is central to the Method actor as a laboratory where the ensemble merges through self-exploration. American culture, from Puritan diaries and Walt Whitman to Jackson Pollock and Norman Mailer, has always excelled in autobiography. But which is more important—the actor or the play? Shakespeare’s plays are a world patrimony ultimately belonging to the audience, who deserve to see them with their historical distance and strangeness respected. The actor as spiritual quester is an archetype of our time. But when it comes to Shakespeare, the actor’s mission may require abandoning the self rather than finding it.





- pages 28-36 (“Teaching Shakespeare to Actors” by Camille Paglia):

LANGUAGE

Confronted with students of widely varied academic backgrounds, a teacher must break through the sometimes paralyzing reverence that surrounds Shakespeare in the United States. His often archaic vocabulary, encrusted with editorial footnotes, can be intimidating, especially to young actors working out dialogue. Thus one must stress that Shakespeare was writing at the dawn of modern English, when the language was still in flux. He was making up words and usages as he went along, so successfully that many of them ended up in dictionaries, when those were first codified in the eighteenth century. What this suggests is that much of Shakespeare’s audience too may have had only a dim idea of what was happening on stage. His actors conveyed thought and emotion through tone, rhythm, and gesture. It was a period that valued virtuoso shows of verbal facility for their own sake; characters in Shakespeare are sometimes seized by torrents of words so urgent and turbulent that the speaker seems possessed. Furthermore, Shakespeare often engineers lively and at times comic effects by bouncing plain, blunt Anglo-Saxon monosyllables off the fancy polysyllabic vocabulary, derived from Greek and Latin, that had been brought to Britain by the Norman conquest.

Some American directors, as reported by my students, make the actors annotate Shakespeare’s blank verse, so that they know they are playing poetry. I am highly skeptical and even disapproving of this practice, except for actors who already have prior training in poetry or Latin, where meter is parsed. It may be profitable in England, where poetry has streamed in an unbroken line since Chaucer, but I fail to see how concern about the blank verse can do anything but disorient and unnerve American actors. The power of language in Shakespeare’s plays resides more in variation than in regularity. There is a robust physicality and even muscularity in his speeches, which can be as jagged and syncopated as jazz. Indeed, I recommend that actors playing Shakespeare look to music for inspiration. Some of Shakespeare’s voices are lilting, melodious, or flutelike; others are relentlessly hammering and percussive; still others are rough, insolent, and zigzagging, like a bebop saxophone. To avoid monotonously “reciting” lines, the actor could borrow musical techniques such as dynamics (soft/loud) or modulations in tempo, including overt hesitations—following the way people in real life pause and grope for words. The actor must appear to be thinking, an impression aided by lively eye movements.

Where sensitivity to poetry is required, however, is for Shakespeare’s all-pervasive imagery. As literary critics noted long ago, each Shakespeare play can be regarded as an extended poem with its own set of emblematic images, whose recurrence produces a chiming effect that works subliminally on the audience. Examples are the four elements of earth, air, water, and fire in Anthony and Cleopatra; the master metaphor of the “garden” in Hamlet, with its attendant adjectives like “green” and “rank” (meaning rotten or malodorous); and the chillingly ubiquitous “nothing” in King Lear—a blank zero prefiguring the wasteland of modernist alienation. The production dramaturge should assist the actors in rehearshal in identifying these key words, which are sometimes the emotional or conceptual heart of a speech. They are always universals that transcend time and place. Although postmodernists myopically deny that universals exist, these basic terms of human experience animate all great art and give it global reach. Whenever a key word occurs in a given Shakespeare speech, the actor might consider subtly highlighting it, so that it hangs or floats over the audience, who through their own life record of pain and pleasure gain a moment of clarity and access into the play’s deepest themes. It may be helpful for the dramaturge to present one or two of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in workshop to demonstrate the evocative power of concise imagery. Best for this purpose is certainly Sonnet 73 (“That time of year thou mayst in me behold”), with its vivid metaphors of tree, sun, and fire.

In Shakespeare’s plays, quality of language equals quality of character. There is a stable, centered simplicity and nobility to the speech of his admirable, ethical characters. For example, here are the faithful Cordelia’s virtually first words in King Lear: “Love and be silent” (1.1.53). This economical aside, with its enduring spiritual resonance, comes as a refreshing contrast to the glib, sycophantish babble that we have just heard from her treacherous sisters, Goneril and Regan. Improvisational eloquence under conditions of high stress proves substance and courage, as in Mark Antony’s passionate oration over the corpse of Julius Caesar in the mobbed Roman Forum or Othello’s defense at a midnight Venetian war council of his secret marriage to the young Desdemona, a mesmerizing speech whose journey through fabulous memory defuses the menacing atmosphere.

Syntax (sentence structure) is a primary indicator of mental health or psychological coherence in Shakespeare. The actor must be alert to syntactical obstructions or fractures which signal confusion, anxiety, or imminent breakdown. Claudius’s first speech in Hamlet, for example, is disrupted and contorted by guilt as he tries to refer to Gertrude, the wife he took from the brother he murdered: the subject, verb, and direct object of his sentence are cleft apart and strewn dismembered over seven lines. Hamlet’s brooding first soliloquy also degenerates from philosophical heights to syntactical chaos as he is compulsively flooded with lurid pictures of his mother’s allegedly bestial sex life. When the villainous Richard III wakes up from troubled dreams before the climactic battle at Bosworth Field, where he will be defeated and killed, his speech heaves and lurches into sputtering fragments, sharply contrasting with the calm, steady, resolute address to the troops delivered by his opponent, the Earl of Richmond and future Henry VII, founder of the House of Tudor that will produce Elizabeth I. But sometimes complicated or serpentine syntax in Shakespeare arises from public rather than private ills, as in Horatio’s opaque review in tortured legalese of the festering dispute with Norway that threatens war with Denmark.


ACTION

Shakespeare’s bursts of action, alternating with passages of reflection and character development, seem perfectly normal to modern audiences schooled on war movies and TV crime dramas. But for a prolonged period, Shakespeare’s violence, along with his trafficking in shock and horror, damaged his reputation in France, where elite taste was formed by Racine’s neo-classic tragedies in the seventeenth century. In ancient Greek tragedy, action was reported by messenger speeches but never shown, even when traumatic events, such as Jocasta’s suicide and Oedipus’s self-blinding, have just occurred in a bedchamber on the other side of the palace doors. A cool, contemplative, philosophical distance, embodied in choral commentaries, was considered essential. Brutal business in Shakespeare, such as Hamlet stabbing Polonius through a tapestry in the Queen’s bedroom or the Duke of Cornwall stomping out the pinioned Gloucester’s eyes in King Lear, struck French critics as crude and vulgar.

High-impact physical expressiveness is a crucial component of Shakespeare’s aesthetic, a masculine choreography that was sometimes neglected in sedate and tony productions of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries. Standards changed for both actors and audiences with the arrival of social realist theater in the 1930s; its raw, proletarian style inspired the Actors Studio in New York and the “kitchen-sink” school of postwar London. Today, action is so accepted and expected that a required course in stage combat may be built into the theater curriculum (as at the University of the Arts, where women actors too must take it). Once identified with stunt works, action has risen in prestige over the past forty years because of the global influence of Asian martial arts movies. Explosions of action in Shakespeare are sometimes spiritually purgative, releasing the accumulated tensions of the play: this cathartic effect can be seen in the finales of both Hamlet and Macbeth, where the protagonists escape from their doubt and fear through bravura swordplay, thus atoning for their errors and defiantly recovering their heroic stature before death.

American actors have a natural facility for action, as was observed with admiration by European audiences even during the silent film era. In the United States, posture and deportment are more relaxed, and sports have a higher cultural status than they do in Great Britain, where most literati still profess disdain for them. Thanks to their spontaneity and playfulness, American actors are also good at farce, buffoonery, and slapstick—one reason for the huge popularity of pratfalling comedian Jerry Lewis in reserved France. Where this may pose a minor problem for Shakespeare productions is in drunk scenes, such as that between Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night or between Caliban and Stephano in The Tempest. Characters reeling around on stage elicit such delighted and uproarious audience response (perhaps from relief at finding something recognizable amid Shakespeare’s demanding language) that American actors may be tempted to overdo the clowning and selfishly play to the gallery.

Other aspects of Shakespeare’s staging can be classified as action, which governs the disposition of the body. Because the Globe had no curtain, Shakespeare devised ingenious ways of getting the actors on and off stage (more evidence that the plays were not closet dramas composed in a nobleman’s library). Daringly, he starts scenes and whole plays in the middle of conversations: two actors stroll onstage while talking in normal tones, forcing the audience to hush itself in order to overhear. Shakespeare expects the audience to make rapid intuitive judgments based on characters’ manner and body language. For example, Antony and Cleopatra opens with a Roman, Philo, disparaging Antony as a sex-addled “fool” and the dark-skinned Cleopatra as a lustful “gyspy” and whore (1.1.10-13). But this cynical view is immediately contradicted by the movingly poetic endearments exchanged by the two fond lovers as they arrive from the opposite direction.

King Lear too opens with characters entering midconversation: the Earls of Gloucester and Kent are sharing worrisome political rumors when the subject takes a personal and indiscreet turn. Each production of Lear must decide how much, if any, of this humiliating talk is heard by Gloucester’s bastard son, the embittered and soon malevolent Edmund. Some show of overfamiliar, leaning-in body language seems implied in Gloucester’s lines, as he tastelessly boasts to Kent about the ‘good sport’ had with a nameless pretty wench at Edmund’s accidental conception. Kent’s discomfort at this coarse s******ing is blatant, as he vainly tries to restore a dignified tone. Ideally, the audience should probably read the body language of Gloucester and Kent exactly as Edmund is reading it: Gloucester’s bumptious insensitivity met by Kent’s embarrassed unease. Before we have even heard Edmund speak, therefore, we already have a clue about the formation of his sociopathic character, hardened by routine discrimination and abuse – a prime example of Shakespeare’s prescient anticipation of modern social psychology.

Body language is similarly cued in the scene on the castle ramparts where Hamlet, trying to follow his father’s ghost, is being physically held back by Horatio and Marcellus, who fear the ghost may be a demon. Presumably drawing his sword, Hamlet threatens to kill anyone who stands in his way. This agitated scene superbly demonstrates Shakespeare’s great gift for staging. What the audience sees are two men rushing forward and then being thrown backward, beyond the sweeping circle made by Hamlet’s sword as it is pulled from its scabbard. It is a visually stunning, nearly geometrical effect that could have been designed only by a man with many years of practical experience in live theater.

Another example of implicit body language is the scene where Ophelia, obeying her pompous father’s command, returns Hamlet’s gifts and love letters. The mere sight of her beauty rescues Hamlet from one of his most despairing soliloquies, and he addresses her with tender respect and hope for forgiveness: “Nymph, in thy orisons / Be all my sins remembered” (3.1.95-96). No matter how many times one has read or seen the play, it is hard to resist a fantasy of Hamlet and Ophelia’s reconciliation at this moment. But it is not to be: Ophelia dutifully plows ahead on her father’s agenda, and Hamlet reacts with pain and anger: “No, no: I never gave you aught” (3.1.103). His change of mood is so extreme that some physical recoil is surely signaled, even perhaps an abrupt jump backward. At some point in this harrowingly escalating scene, where Hamlet correctly guesses that Ophelia has become a tool of her father and that he is being spied upon, the precious mementos probably fall to the floor between them, a symbol of their shattered romance and a foreshadowing of Ophelia’s pitiful ruin.


- pages 26-8 (“Teaching Shakespeare to Actors” by Camille Paglia):

Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays? An actor. No aristocrat, such as Sir Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford, could have produced these nearly forty plays, which show such intimate knowledge of the demands and dynamics of ensemble performance. When Shakespeare was active in London, the theater was borderline disreputable, denounced from the pulpit by Puritan preachers. Because of issues of public hygiene and crowd control, municipal authorities eventually forced the theaters outside the city limits—to the South Bank of the Thames, where Shakespeare’s company built the Globe Theatre. While aristocrats attended plays and even sponsored theater companies, they could never have inhabited and learned from that brash underworld, from its cramped, ramshackle back stages to the volatile streets and seedy inns and taverns. Shakespeare was a popular entertainer who knew how to work a crowd. His daring shifts in tone, juxtaposing comedy with tragedy; his deft weaving of a main plot with multiple subplots; his restless oscillation from talk to action to song and dance: this fast pace and variety-show format were the tricks of a veteran actor adept at seizing the attention of the chattering groundlings who milled around the jutting stage of open-air theaters.

My approach to teaching Shakespeare departs from the norm because most of my four decades as a classroom teacher have been spent at art schools—first Bennington College and then the Philadelphia College of Performing Ars, which became the University of the Arts after a merger with its neighbor, the Philadelphia College of Art. Many of my students have been theater majors, some already with a professional résumé. In the United States, Shakespeare is usually taught as a reading experience, but my Shakespeare course is closer to a practicum, even though students neither recite nor perform in it. I approach the plays from a production angle, with stress on the range of interpretive choices available to an actor in each speech or scene. More academically structured universities have often offered Shakespeare as a large lecture course breaking out into weekly seminars led by graduate students. Students would be generally expected to read a play a week, thus sampling a third of the Shakespeare canon over one semester. That forced-march syllabus may be useful for English majors, but it does not work for actors, who must engage with the text on a far more concrete level. In guiding actors through Shakespeare, the teacher operates like an auto mechanic, taking an engine apart and showing how it goes back together again. Each internal function and connection must be grasped tangibly, as a sensory datum and not just a mental construct. Thus five Shakespeare plays have proved to be more than enough in my course, and it is still a struggle to cover them adequately. My goal is to give the actors a portable system for engaging with any of the plays, should they have the good fortune to encounter them in their careers. After two opening lecture classes, where I survey the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance in art, science, economics, and politics, I turn to sequential line-by-line analysis of the plays, which occupies the rest of the semester.

Though they may have read one or several Shakespeare plays in high school, most young American actors basically come to Shakespeare cold. He is an import, trailing arty clouds of glory.









King Lear (Act One, Scene Two) — GLOUCESTER: These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects. Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide, in cities mutinies, in countries discord, in palaces treason, and the bond cracked ’twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the prediction—there’s son against father. The king falls from bias of nature—there’s father against child. We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves. Find out this villain, Edmund. It shall lose thee nothing. Do it carefully.—And the noble and true-hearted Kent banished, his offense honesty! 'Tis strange, strange.

Exit GLOUCESTER

EDMUND: This is the excellent foppery of the world that when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting-on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the dragon’s tail and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. Fut, I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvcR2wNpvQU

http://nfs.sparknotes.com/lear/page_34.html

http://nfs.sparknotes.com/lear/page_36.html


http://nfs.sparknotes.com/hamlet/page_50.html

- from Hamlet (Act 1, Scene 4):

HAMLET:

The king doth wake tonight and takes his rouse,
Keeps wassail and the swaggering upspring reels,
And, as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,
The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out
The triumph of his pledge.

HORATIO:

Is it a custom?

HAMLET:

Ay, marry, is ’t.
But to my mind, though I am native here
And to the manner born, it is a custom
More honored in the breach than the observance.
This heavy-headed revel east and west
Makes us traduced and taxed of other nations.
They clepe us drunkards and with swinish phrase
Soil our addition. And indeed it takes
From our achievements, though performed at height,
The pith and marrow of our attribute.
So oft it chances in particular men
That for some vicious mole of nature in them—
As in their birth (wherein they are not guilty,
Since nature cannot choose his origin),
By the o'ergrowth of some complexion,
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,
Or by some habit that too much o'erleavens
The form of plausive manners—that these men,
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,
Being nature’s livery or fortune’s star,
Their virtues else (be they as pure as grace,
As infinite as man may undergo)
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault. The dram of evil
Doth all the noble substance of a doubt
To his own scandal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGEd2azjs9I

http://nfs.sparknotes.com/hamlet/page_52.html


- From Living With Shakespeare: Essays by Writers, Actors, and Directors; pages 36-44 (“Teaching Shakespeare to Actors” by Camille Paglia):

POLITICS

The contemporary actor’s search for motivation in a Shakespeare role is complicated by alien elements in the Renaissance worldview. Politically, Shakespeare was not a populist or democrat but a monarchist who believed that government was best led by a wise, strong ruler. The crown is a near-mystical symbol in his plays, which feature sporadic suspicions of the fickle mob. Freedom is the watchword of modern democracies, but Shakespeare’s guiding principle was order. Lingering in popular memory were the thirty years of civil war that England had endured a century before. For both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, hierarchy or “degree” in the political realm mirrored the perfection of God’s cosmic master plan. A king, it was thought, ruled by divine right. Although Shakespeare himself may have tended toward the agnostic, there is a trace of that religious premise in his plays in the difficulties encountered by usurping kings like Macbeth or Claudius in asserting and maintaining authority. Kingship is conferred but also learned, as when Prince Hal matures into Henry V by abandoning his youthful hedonism and severing ties with the carousing Falstaff.

Nationalism, customarily portrayed today as a crucible of war, imperialism, and xenophobia, is a positive value in Shakespeare. Nation-states had emerged in the Middle Ages as a consolidation of dukedoms, an administrative streamlining that, at its best, expanded trade, advanced knowledge, and reduced provincialism. This progressive movement of history is the major theme of King Lear, where Lear’s foolish choice to divide his kingdom (which he does not possess but holds in trust) plunges it backward toward chaos and barbarism, reducing the king himself to a nomad battered by the elements. Unless they know European history well, most American actors rarely notice the nationalistic motifs in Shakespeare. In Lear, for example, the invasion of Britain by France – even though it promises rescue by the forces of good (Cordelia is now the queen of France) – creates patriotic conflicts for a British audience that Americans will not feel. Similarly, even a small detail such as Hamlet’s being dispatched to England to collect overdue tribute for Denmark would stir a flicker of atavistic indignation in British hearts. Nationalism resoundingly recurs in a different context at the finale of Hamlet, where the stage is scattered with royal corpses. The bracingly vigorous entrance of Fortinbras marks the occupation of Denmark by a foreign power. With the self-destruction of its ruling class, Denmark has lost its autonomy and become a subject state of Norway.

Hierarchy also structures family and gender relations in Shakespeare. Fathers were law-givers, and children were expected to obey. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s audience would have sided with Juliet’s parents, who had the right to make marital decisions for a fourteen-year-old girl. The play’s power resides precisely in Shakespeare’s success in shifting the audience from its default position through the captivating lyricism of Romeo and Juliet’s love. Because of our own reflex bias toward romantic free choice, it’s important that a contemporary production not side so completely with the lovers as to warp the play: Juliet’s hot-tempered father should not be portrayed as a pasteboard ogre, nor should the aristocratic Paris, his sound choice for Juliet, seem like a callow prig. In The Tempest, Prospero displays a sometimes disturbing control over his daughter Miranda and her suitor Ferdinand: he puts Miranda to sleep and freezes Ferdinand in place, like a statue. This problematic manipulation of consciousness is partially ameliorated by Prospero’s status as a magician whose secret arts parallel Shakespeare’s spellbinding power over an audience.

Shakespeare is repeatedly critical of rigid, uncomprehending fathers. One of the haunting mysteries of his plays is how often he deletes the mothers of his young heroines, who are left undefended against the errors of obtuse fathers. Miranda has thrived in her widowed father’s watchful nurture, but Cordelia, Desdemona, and Ophelia suffer severely from the absence of a mother’s sympathetic counsel and intervention. Ophelia, torn between her proper deference to her father and her love for Hamlet, tries to do the right thing and ends up destroying her own and Hamlet’s lives. Shakespeare worsens Ophelia’s plight by sending her brother off to university in Paris and oddly even denying her a female confidante, like Juliet’s jovial nurse or Desdemona’s worldly-wise maidservant, Emilia. This terrible isolation, compounded by her father’s death at Hamlet’s hands, intensifies the emotional pressure on Ophelia and makes comprehensible her descent into delusion and madness, which Shakespeare pointedly contrasts with Hamlet’s passing episodic depressions. A contemporary actor playing Ophelia must strike a delicate balance in portraying her tragedy without excess sentimentality. She is not simply a frail flower or hapless victim of rank injustice. Her father, Polonius, is arrogant and at times stupid—ignoring her hurt and need for comforting and callously broadcasting her secrets as mere data to whisk to the king—but he is solidly within his rights to determine Ophelia’s affairs and protect her chastity. Ophelia makes a considered ethical choice, a courageous decision to renounce the man she loves.

The divergence of cultural assumptions between the Renaissance and today is nowhere clearer than in regard to marriage, which is glorified in Shakespeare’s plays as a symbol of spiritual harmony and social order. His comedies sometimes end in a stampede of mass marriages, blessed by heaven and destined for fertile procreation. Marriage in our own time has lost much of its uniqueness and high value, partly because women now have access to jobs outside the home and can support themselves. Weddings remain popular as theatrical extravaganzas, but marriage has shrunk to just another lifestyle option, and the divorce rate has soared. Shakespeare’s generation of poets, including John Donne and Edmund Spenser, was instrumental in the valorization of marriage, which had once primarily been an economic contract negotiated between a father and a prospective son-in-law. Medieval love poetry was addressed to a mistress or a distant, unattainable idol, not a wife.

The strong tilt toward marriage in Shakespeare’s plays creates interpretive problems for contemporary actors. In As You Like It, for example, the witty and boldly enterprising Rosalind, who spends most of the play disguised as a boy, instantly falls in love with Orlando, an amiable lunk who seems nowhere near her level. He is athletic and sweet but slightly slow, like Joey (played by Matt LeBlanc) on the long-running hit TV show Friends. Rosalind’s infatuation with Orlando exemplifies Shakespeare’s favorite theme of the quirky madness of love, but it must not seem as if she is adopting and schooling a large, goofy dog. Her ritual divestment of her male garb before her wedding restores the Renaissance gender code and magically generates an approving apparition of Hymen, the guardian spirit of marriage. Rosalind’s inseparable friendship with her cousin Celia is one of the few places in Shakespeare’s plays where any trace of homosexuality can arguably be detected. (Another is Antonio’s quick attachment and unusual generosity to Sebastian in a subplot of Twelfth Night.) Although his celebrated contemporary Christopher Marlowe wrote openly about a gay king in Edward II, Shakespeare’s plays are overwhelmingly committed to heterosexual love. In his private life, Shakespeare was evidently split: his love Sonnets are directed to a forceful, dusky-skinned woman and a well-born, aimless, beautiful young man.

Shakespeare is very sensitive to the dignity of women. Sexually degrading remarks about women in his plays are automatically symptomatic of a twisted, corrupted character or of a temporary state of mental disease, as experienced by Hamlet and Lear in their darkest moments. Nevertheless, modern productions of The Taming of the Shrew must struggle with the issue of misogyny. The play has long been the focus of feminist ire, with only the dissident Germaine Greer, a Shakespeare scholar among her other public roles, willing to stoutly defend it. The bad-tempered and violent Kate the shrew (a sharp-toothed mole) cows her inept father and breathes fire at any man who crosses her. It is possible to interpret Kate’s hostility as a frustrated product of her entrapment in a world lacking any outlet for women’s talents and pent-up energies except marriage. Petruchio, who frankly admits his motive for marrying is mercenary (he’s on the hunt for the fattest dowry), breaks down Kate’s rebellious personality by treatment that today would be classified as spousal abuse—denying her food and sleep, letting her wallow in the mud, and generally humiliating her. The actress playing Kate is confronted at the finale with one of the thorniest challenges in the Shakespeare canon: a long public speech where she declares that women are “soft and weak” and must “serve, love and obey” their husbands (5.1.176-177). After the rollicking humor of the play, modern productions are reluctant to end on a sour note, so the speech is now performed as if it is overtly satirical—whether that is true to Shakespeare’s original conception or not.

The dramatis personae of Shakespeare’s plays are always a mix of social classes. Because of Britain’s still-entrenched class system, with its sometimes cash-poor but highly visible landed aristocracy, British actors have little trouble in playing Shakespeare’s upper-class roles. In the United States, in contrast, status is conferred solely by wealth, celebrity, or transient political power. Furthermore, since the 1960s, American authority figures, from politicians, ministers, and bankers to parents and teachers, have gradually adopted a less formal, remote, and dictatorial style. Young people today will often startlingly say that one or both of their parents are their “best friends.” Dress codes have also relaxed with the spread of sportswear, sneakers, and proletarian blue jeans, even marketed by a mandarin heiress, Gloria Vanderbilt. It is now hard to appreciate why John F. Kennedy caused a sensation by not wearing a hat at his presidential inauguration in 1961.

Because of these broad social changes, American actors coming to Shakespeare have few or no direct models of hierarchical authority and class assertion. The audience must clearly perceive the class differences among Shakespeare’s characters. Working-class women, for example, would paradoxically take up more space on stage than their upper-class counterparts: their movements are physically freer and their clothing looser, because designed for labor. Upper-class posture is reserved and contained, as if housed in an invisible bubble. Actors with prior training in classical ballet, which descends from the elegant seventeenth-century court, or continental equitation (called English riding in the United States) have a distinct advantage here. Even among young British women actors winning parts these days in productions of Shakespeare, Jane Austen, or Oscar Wilde, there is an irksome trend for mannish arm-swinging, which originated among the new sportswomen of the 1920s who took up golf and tennis. Until World War I, respectable ladies kept their elbows close to their bodies and their hands clasped gracefully above the waist or otherwise occupied with their skirts or some object like a fine handkerchief—an accessory crucial to the plot of Othello. Nor did ladies flash their teeth or grin like Huckleberry Finn, another anachronism currently epidemic in period roles.

Manners are not superficial trivialities but the choreography of social class. Manners both define and limit character and must therefore be represented in the actor’s process. Without attention to class distinctions and stratification, important plot elements in Shakespeare will be blurred or missed altogether. In King Lear, for example, it is a violation of propriety for Goneril, who is the duchess of Albany, to be confiding private matters about her father and sister to her steward, Oswald. In Twelfth Night, the countess Olivia is too flirtatious with the duke’s page, Cesario (Viola in drag), just as her own steward, Malvolio, is later too presumptuously forward with her. On the other hand, Shakespeare presents as evidence of Prince Hamlet’s refreshing lack of snobbery his gracious affability to the visiting troupe of players as well as his easy cordiality with the gravedigger at work in the churchyard. Precedence and rank are pivotal in the banquet scene where Lady Macbeth, trying to divert notice from her husband’s hysteria at Banquo’s bloody ghost (which only he can see), abruptly orders everyone to leave: “Stand not upon the order of your going, / But go at once” (3.4.137-138). The ugly lack of ceremony in this chaotic mass exit represents the breakdown of social cohesion in a Scotland ruled by a criminal.

Witty banter, the signature sound of the upper-class comedy of manners, comes easily to British actors, whose culture is oriented toward verbal panache, from Oxbridge debating societies to Question Time in the House of Commons, with its scathing sallies met by laughter and applause. American actors today are overexposed to snark, the dominant style in TV comedy. With its snidy ironic put-downs, snark lacks the arch, competitive rhythm, like that of fencing, which has always characterized the thrusts, parries, and repartee of great high comedy. For help with Shakespeare’s witty dialogue, I recommend to my theater students such classic film comedies as The Philadelphia Story, All About Eve, and The Importance of Being Earnest (the 1952 version directed by Anthony Asquith), which show how epigrammatic lines can be crisply shaped, timed, and delivered. The Mid-Atlantic accent (midway between American and British) once heard among scions of prominent, affluent families such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Katharine Hepburn, used to be taught to actors in theater school. It was perfect for high comedy but became too affected and artificial over time. However, Sigourney Weaver, playing an imperious Wall Street stockbroker in Working Girl, shows how that elite accent can be subtly modified for use by American actors playing upper-class roles.


…


Shakespeare’s plays famously survive transfer into any locale and time period. They have been set, for example, in medieval Japan, Nazi Germany, a space colony, and a suburban high school. But this amazing flexibility does not necessarily give infinite latitude to high-concept directors. In The Goodbye Girl, Richard Dreyfuss hilariously plays an earnest young actor struggling with a narcissistic Off-Off-Broadway director who sees Richard III as a flaming queer. Radical experiments with Shakespeare make sense in Britain, where new angles on the fatiguingly familiar are welcomed. But in the United States, live professional productions of Shakespeare are so rare that, like it or not, they are thrust into an educational role. Actors of Shakespeare are exponents and defenders of a high culture that is steadily disappearing.

Because of the dominance of the Method in theater training here, American actors seeking their own “truth” are sometimes impatient with the technical refinements in which British actors, with their gift for understatement, are so skilled. Rehearsal is central to the Method actor as a laboratory where the ensemble merges through self-exploration. American culture, from Puritan diaries and Walt Whitman to Jackson Pollock and Norman Mailer, has always excelled in autobiography. But which is more important—the actor or the play? Shakespeare’s plays are a world patrimony ultimately belonging to the audience, who deserve to see them with their historical distance and strangeness respected. The actor as spiritual quester is an archetype of our time. But when it comes to Shakespeare, the actor’s mission may require abandoning the self rather than finding it.





- pages 28-36 (“Teaching Shakespeare to Actors” by Camille Paglia):

LANGUAGE

Confronted with students of widely varied academic backgrounds, a teacher must break through the sometimes paralyzing reverence that surrounds Shakespeare in the United States. His often archaic vocabulary, encrusted with editorial footnotes, can be intimidating, especially to young actors working out dialogue. Thus one must stress that Shakespeare was writing at the dawn of modern English, when the language was still in flux. He was making up words and usages as he went along, so successfully that many of them ended up in dictionaries, when those were first codified in the eighteenth century. What this suggests is that much of Shakespeare’s audience too may have had only a dim idea of what was happening on stage. His actors conveyed thought and emotion through tone, rhythm, and gesture. It was a period that valued virtuoso shows of verbal facility for their own sake; characters in Shakespeare are sometimes seized by torrents of words so urgent and turbulent that the speaker seems possessed. Furthermore, Shakespeare often engineers lively and at times comic effects by bouncing plain, blunt Anglo-Saxon monosyllables off the fancy polysyllabic vocabulary, derived from Greek and Latin, that had been brought to Britain by the Norman conquest.

Some American directors, as reported by my students, make the actors annotate Shakespeare’s blank verse, so that they know they are playing poetry. I am highly skeptical and even disapproving of this practice, except for actors who already have prior training in poetry or Latin, where meter is parsed. It may be profitable in England, where poetry has streamed in an unbroken line since Chaucer, but I fail to see how concern about the blank verse can do anything but disorient and unnerve American actors. The power of language in Shakespeare’s plays resides more in variation than in regularity. There is a robust physicality and even muscularity in his speeches, which can be as jagged and syncopated as jazz. Indeed, I recommend that actors playing Shakespeare look to music for inspiration. Some of Shakespeare’s voices are lilting, melodious, or flutelike; others are relentlessly hammering and percussive; still others are rough, insolent, and zigzagging, like a bebop saxophone. To avoid monotonously “reciting” lines, the actor could borrow musical techniques such as dynamics (soft/loud) or modulations in tempo, including overt hesitations—following the way people in real life pause and grope for words. The actor must appear to be thinking, an impression aided by lively eye movements.

Where sensitivity to poetry is required, however, is for Shakespeare’s all-pervasive imagery. As literary critics noted long ago, each Shakespeare play can be regarded as an extended poem with its own set of emblematic images, whose recurrence produces a chiming effect that works subliminally on the audience. Examples are the four elements of earth, air, water, and fire in Anthony and Cleopatra; the master metaphor of the “garden” in Hamlet, with its attendant adjectives like “green” and “rank” (meaning rotten or malodorous); and the chillingly ubiquitous “nothing” in King Lear—a blank zero prefiguring the wasteland of modernist alienation. The production dramaturge should assist the actors in rehearshal in identifying these key words, which are sometimes the emotional or conceptual heart of a speech. They are always universals that transcend time and place. Although postmodernists myopically deny that universals exist, these basic terms of human experience animate all great art and give it global reach. Whenever a key word occurs in a given Shakespeare speech, the actor might consider subtly highlighting it, so that it hangs or floats over the audience, who through their own life record of pain and pleasure gain a moment of clarity and access into the play’s deepest themes. It may be helpful for the dramaturge to present one or two of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in workshop to demonstrate the evocative power of concise imagery. Best for this purpose is certainly Sonnet 73 (“That time of year thou mayst in me behold”), with its vivid metaphors of tree, sun, and fire.

In Shakespeare’s plays, quality of language equals quality of character. There is a stable, centered simplicity and nobility to the speech of his admirable, ethical characters. For example, here are the faithful Cordelia’s virtually first words in King Lear: “Love and be silent” (1.1.53). This economical aside, with its enduring spiritual resonance, comes as a refreshing contrast to the glib, sycophantish babble that we have just heard from her treacherous sisters, Goneril and Regan. Improvisational eloquence under conditions of high stress proves substance and courage, as in Mark Antony’s passionate oration over the corpse of Julius Caesar in the mobbed Roman Forum or Othello’s defense at a midnight Venetian war council of his secret marriage to the young Desdemona, a mesmerizing speech whose journey through fabulous memory defuses the menacing atmosphere.

Syntax (sentence structure) is a primary indicator of mental health or psychological coherence in Shakespeare. The actor must be alert to syntactical obstructions or fractures which signal confusion, anxiety, or imminent breakdown. Claudius’s first speech in Hamlet, for example, is disrupted and contorted by guilt as he tries to refer to Gertrude, the wife he took from the brother he murdered: the subject, verb, and direct object of his sentence are cleft apart and strewn dismembered over seven lines. Hamlet’s brooding first soliloquy also degenerates from philosophical heights to syntactical chaos as he is compulsively flooded with lurid pictures of his mother’s allegedly bestial sex life. When the villainous Richard III wakes up from troubled dreams before the climactic battle at Bosworth Field, where he will be defeated and killed, his speech heaves and lurches into sputtering fragments, sharply contrasting with the calm, steady, resolute address to the troops delivered by his opponent, the Earl of Richmond and future Henry VII, founder of the House of Tudor that will produce Elizabeth I. But sometimes complicated or serpentine syntax in Shakespeare arises from public rather than private ills, as in Horatio’s opaque review in tortured legalese of the festering dispute with Norway that threatens war with Denmark.


ACTION

Shakespeare’s bursts of action, alternating with passages of reflection and character development, seem perfectly normal to modern audiences schooled on war movies and TV crime dramas. But for a prolonged period, Shakespeare’s violence, along with his trafficking in shock and horror, damaged his reputation in France, where elite taste was formed by Racine’s neo-classic tragedies in the seventeenth century. In ancient Greek tragedy, action was reported by messenger speeches but never shown, even when traumatic events, such as Jocasta’s suicide and Oedipus’s self-blinding, have just occurred in a bedchamber on the other side of the palace doors. A cool, contemplative, philosophical distance, embodied in choral commentaries, was considered essential. Brutal business in Shakespeare, such as Hamlet stabbing Polonius through a tapestry in the Queen’s bedroom or the Duke of Cornwall stomping out the pinioned Gloucester’s eyes in King Lear, struck French critics as crude and vulgar.

High-impact physical expressiveness is a crucial component of Shakespeare’s aesthetic, a masculine choreography that was sometimes neglected in sedate and tony productions of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries. Standards changed for both actors and audiences with the arrival of social realist theater in the 1930s; its raw, proletarian style inspired the Actors Studio in New York and the “kitchen-sink” school of postwar London. Today, action is so accepted and expected that a required course in stage combat may be built into the theater curriculum (as at the University of the Arts, where women actors too must take it). Once identified with stunt works, action has risen in prestige over the past forty years because of the global influence of Asian martial arts movies. Explosions of action in Shakespeare are sometimes spiritually purgative, releasing the accumulated tensions of the play: this cathartic effect can be seen in the finales of both Hamlet and Macbeth, where the protagonists escape from their doubt and fear through bravura swordplay, thus atoning for their errors and defiantly recovering their heroic stature before death.

American actors have a natural facility for action, as was observed with admiration by European audiences even during the silent film era. In the United States, posture and deportment are more relaxed, and sports have a higher cultural status than they do in Great Britain, where most literati still profess disdain for them. Thanks to their spontaneity and playfulness, American actors are also good at farce, buffoonery, and slapstick—one reason for the huge popularity of pratfalling comedian Jerry Lewis in reserved France. Where this may pose a minor problem for Shakespeare productions is in drunk scenes, such as that between Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night or between Caliban and Stephano in The Tempest. Characters reeling around on stage elicit such delighted and uproarious audience response (perhaps from relief at finding something recognizable amid Shakespeare’s demanding language) that American actors may be tempted to overdo the clowning and selfishly play to the gallery.

Other aspects of Shakespeare’s staging can be classified as action, which governs the disposition of the body. Because the Globe had no curtain, Shakespeare devised ingenious ways of getting the actors on and off stage (more evidence that the plays were not closet dramas composed in a nobleman’s library). Daringly, he starts scenes and whole plays in the middle of conversations: two actors stroll onstage while talking in normal tones, forcing the audience to hush itself in order to overhear. Shakespeare expects the audience to make rapid intuitive judgments based on characters’ manner and body language. For example, Antony and Cleopatra opens with a Roman, Philo, disparaging Antony as a sex-addled “fool” and the dark-skinned Cleopatra as a lustful “gyspy” and whore (1.1.10-13). But this cynical view is immediately contradicted by the movingly poetic endearments exchanged by the two fond lovers as they arrive from the opposite direction.

King Lear too opens with characters entering midconversation: the Earls of Gloucester and Kent are sharing worrisome political rumors when the subject takes a personal and indiscreet turn. Each production of Lear must decide how much, if any, of this humiliating talk is heard by Gloucester’s bastard son, the embittered and soon malevolent Edmund. Some show of overfamiliar, leaning-in body language seems implied in Gloucester’s lines, as he tastelessly boasts to Kent about the ‘good sport’ had with a nameless pretty wench at Edmund’s accidental conception. Kent’s discomfort at this coarse s******ing is blatant, as he vainly tries to restore a dignified tone. Ideally, the audience should probably read the body language of Gloucester and Kent exactly as Edmund is reading it: Gloucester’s bumptious insensitivity met by Kent’s embarrassed unease. Before we have even heard Edmund speak, therefore, we already have a clue about the formation of his sociopathic character, hardened by routine discrimination and abuse – a prime example of Shakespeare’s prescient anticipation of modern social psychology.

Body language is similarly cued in the scene on the castle ramparts where Hamlet, trying to follow his father’s ghost, is being physically held back by Horatio and Marcellus, who fear the ghost may be a demon. Presumably drawing his sword, Hamlet threatens to kill anyone who stands in his way. This agitated scene superbly demonstrates Shakespeare’s great gift for staging. What the audience sees are two men rushing forward and then being thrown backward, beyond the sweeping circle made by Hamlet’s sword as it is pulled from its scabbard. It is a visually stunning, nearly geometrical effect that could have been designed only by a man with many years of practical experience in live theater.

Another example of implicit body language is the scene where Ophelia, obeying her pompous father’s command, returns Hamlet’s gifts and love letters. The mere sight of her beauty rescues Hamlet from one of his most despairing soliloquies, and he addresses her with tender respect and hope for forgiveness: “Nymph, in thy orisons / Be all my sins remembered” (3.1.95-96). No matter how many times one has read or seen the play, it is hard to resist a fantasy of Hamlet and Ophelia’s reconciliation at this moment. But it is not to be: Ophelia dutifully plows ahead on her father’s agenda, and Hamlet reacts with pain and anger: “No, no: I never gave you aught” (3.1.103). His change of mood is so extreme that some physical recoil is surely signaled, even perhaps an abrupt jump backward. At some point in this harrowingly escalating scene, where Hamlet correctly guesses that Ophelia has become a tool of her father and that he is being spied upon, the precious mementos probably fall to the floor between them, a symbol of their shattered romance and a foreshadowing of Ophelia’s pitiful ruin.


- pages 26-8 (“Teaching Shakespeare to Actors” by Camille Paglia):

Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays? An actor. No aristocrat, such as Sir Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford, could have produced these nearly forty plays, which show such intimate knowledge of the demands and dynamics of ensemble performance. When Shakespeare was active in London, the theater was borderline disreputable, denounced from the pulpit by Puritan preachers. Because of issues of public hygiene and crowd control, municipal authorities eventually forced the theaters outside the city limits—to the South Bank of the Thames, where Shakespeare’s company built the Globe Theatre. While aristocrats attended plays and even sponsored theater companies, they could never have inhabited and learned from that brash underworld, from its cramped, ramshackle back stages to the volatile streets and seedy inns and taverns. Shakespeare was a popular entertainer who knew how to work a crowd. His daring shifts in tone, juxtaposing comedy with tragedy; his deft weaving of a main plot with multiple subplots; his restless oscillation from talk to action to song and dance: this fast pace and variety-show format were the tricks of a veteran actor adept at seizing the attention of the chattering groundlings who milled around the jutting stage of open-air theaters.

My approach to teaching Shakespeare departs from the norm because most of my four decades as a classroom teacher have been spent at art schools—first Bennington College and then the Philadelphia College of Performing Ars, which became the University of the Arts after a merger with its neighbor, the Philadelphia College of Art. Many of my students have been theater majors, some already with a professional résumé. In the United States, Shakespeare is usually taught as a reading experience, but my Shakespeare course is closer to a practicum, even though students neither recite nor perform in it. I approach the plays from a production angle, with stress on the range of interpretive choices available to an actor in each speech or scene. More academically structured universities have often offered Shakespeare as a large lecture course breaking out into weekly seminars led by graduate students. Students would be generally expected to read a play a week, thus sampling a third of the Shakespeare canon over one semester. That forced-march syllabus may be useful for English majors, but it does not work for actors, who must engage with the text on a far more concrete level. In guiding actors through Shakespeare, the teacher operates like an auto mechanic, taking an engine apart and showing how it goes back together again. Each internal function and connection must be grasped tangibly, as a sensory datum and not just a mental construct. Thus five Shakespeare plays have proved to be more than enough in my course, and it is still a struggle to cover them adequately. My goal is to give the actors a portable system for engaging with any of the plays, should they have the good fortune to encounter them in their careers. After two opening lecture classes, where I survey the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance in art, science, economics, and politics, I turn to sequential line-by-line analysis of the plays, which occupies the rest of the semester.

Though they may have read one or several Shakespeare plays in high school, most young American actors basically come to Shakespeare cold. He is an import, trailing arty clouds of glory.

[Gilly]

Iago: C-EIE

[Gilly]

Beatrice: D-SLE
Benedick: D-EIE

[silverchris9]

Beatrice: D-SLE
Benedick: D-EIE

Arguments? Not saying I disagree, just haven't read the play in a while.

[Gilly]

Hotspur: D-SLE