Not of an Age, But for All Time
April 22, 2016
Tomorrow, April 23, will mark 400 years since the death of English playwright William Shakespeare in 1616. To commemorate the day, World Book asked Professor David Bevington, a Shakespearean scholar at the University of Chicago, to share some of his thoughts on how productions of Shakespeare have changed over the last 400 years.
The 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare seems a good time to reflect on how his wonderful plays have fared on stage over the centuries. In Shakespeare’s own day, his productions were highly professional and very successful. From 1594 to 1603, Shakespeare belonged to an acting company known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, so named because technically and legally, they were “servants” of the lord chamberlain, an influential member of Queen Elizabeth I’s government. In practice, their status as his “men” gave the company the license they needed to perform publicly, at first at a building called The Theatre just north of London’s city walls.
Plays in London were subject to strict laws, because attending them was thought to lead to the spread of plague as well as immorality. Outside of London’s city limits, actors were not subject to London’s regulations and to Puritan mistrust of dramatic activity. The company also acted at The Curtain, a new building of a similar type near The Theater. When the actors encountered difficulty with their landlord in 1599, they moved to a location on the south side of the River Thames, across from the city of London. In this new open-air theater, the Globe, they performed As You Like It, Hamlet, Henry V, and the great plays that followed in Shakespeare’s writing career, including Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. Toward the end of this period, the company also performed indoors in the Blackfriars Theater, close to Saint Paul’s Cathedral.
The Globe playhouse was a polygonal structure enclosing an arena of some 70 feet (21 meters) in diameter, with galleries for seated audiences on most sides and a platform stage that measured approximately 43 feet (13 meters) across and 27 feet (8 meters) deep. To the rear were two doors leading into the actors’ attiring space (dressing rooms) backstage. Probably between these doors was a “discovery space” that was useful for scenes of concealment and eavesdropping. Over this back wall was a gallery where actors could appear “above” and where spectators sometimes sat as well. Surrounding the stage on three sides was “the yard,” where spectators could stand and watch the play without having to pay for seats. The audience was of mixed social status, from the well-to-do to apprentices and workmen who might stand in the yard. Over the stage was a small roof sheltering the actors from the weather. The building was otherwise open to the sky. Performances in the afternoons depended on natural light for illumination. Lighting effects were impractical. The actors could mime nighttime, as in the opening of Hamlet, by their gestures and apprehensive whispers. Audiences were thus able to see and hear everything.
Scenery was essentially non-existent, though chairs and other furniture might sparingly be brought on stage as needed. The acting environment was accordingly swift and flexible. Actors quickly came on stage in a new scene as the performers of the previous scene exited. Well-designed costumes enabled playgoers to understand a scene’s location by what the actors wore and what they said. The audience was invited to join with the actors to create an illusion through costuming, gesture, and a willingness to picture in their minds what they were asked to imagine: a field of battle, a sea voyage, a room in a courtly palace, a family home, a forest. “Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts,” says the Chorus of Henry V. “Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them / Printing their proud hoofs i’th’ receiving earth.”
Shakespeare was thus able to rely on his spectators’ imaginations to enact the marvelous stories he chose to dramatize. As Duke Theseus explains in Act 5 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, theatrical imagination “bodies forth / The forms of things unknown.” The dramatist turns his ideas and dreams into shapes, giving “to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.” Shakespeare was and is a dramatist of the imagination. He was materially assisted in this artistic enterprise by his theater, one that provided the actors an open and flexible stage where they could enact any location and bridge any gap of time.
After Shakespeare’s death in 1616, many of his plays continued in repertory down to the time of the closing of the theaters by a Puritan Parliament in 1642. During the years of the English Civil War, fragments of plays were occasionally secretly performed, but otherwise England was officially without dramatic entertainment from 1642 until the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660.
King Charles II, son of the executed Charles I, returned to England from France in 1660 with an intent to turn back the clock to days of indulgent pleasure. Two theaters were licensed for performance, one (the Duke of York’s Men) under the management of William Davenant and the other (the King’s Company) entrusted to Thomas Killigrew, soon at a new theater building in Drury Lane. Shakespeare’s plays were popular and often performed in these years, though generally in adapted form. Romeo and Juliet sometimes alternated between a tragical version with the deaths of the protagonists (leading characters) and on other days, a tragicomic version in which the lovers managed to survive. Thomas Otway, in his play Caius Marius (1679), adapted the play to a neoclassical tale of star-crossed lovers set in ancient Rome. William Davenant’s The Law Against Lovers (1662) combined Much Ado About Nothing with Measure for Measure by making Beatrice of the first play a ward of Lord Angelo in the second, and Benedick his brother. Twelfth Night was transformed into an adaptation by Charles Burnaby called Love Betrayed, or the Agreeable Disappointment (1703), centering on Malvolio, in which all the characters were renamed and only 58 lines of Shakespeare’s text were retained. Perhaps most famously, Nahum Tate’s History of King Lear (1681) introduced a happy ending in which Cordelia was reunited with her royal father and with Edgar, her partner in the play’s love story. Presumably Tate did this in response to the insistence of popular audiences, for whom the death of Cordelia in Shakespeare’s version violated the age’s ideas of what was right and proper. The Tate version held the stage until well past the year 1800.
Only in the Restoration period did women appear in English theater. Before then, boys played the parts of such characters as Juliet and Lady Macbeth. The theater was considered unsuitably sinful for female players, but the court of King Charles II changed all that. Nell Gwynn, one of the first actresses to appear on stage, was a mistress of the king himself. Leading members of the court had their stage mistresses as well. From that time onward, women were increasingly a center of interest for new, middle-class audiences who were fascinated by the tragic death of Desdemona in Othello, the mad scenes of Ophelia in Hamlet, and the sleepwalking of Lady Macbeth. Operatic versions by Giuseppe Verdi added to the glamour and excitement. Such actresses as Peg Woffington, Susannah Cibber, Helen Faucit, Sarah Siddons, Charlotte Cushman, Lily Langtry, Ada Rehan, Ellen Terry, and Sarah Bernhardt were justly famous.
The years from 1800 to 1899 featured large and expensive productions of Shakespeare’s plays staged in theater buildings increasingly designed to hold thousands of spectators. Productions by David Garrick, Edmund Kean, John Philip Kemble, William Charles Macready, and Henry Irving, among others, featured elaborate sets built to look as natural as possible for showing the Battle of Agincourt in Henry V, the Roman Forum in Julius Caesar, or the court of Henry VIII in the history play named for him. Gothic windows, battlements, moonlit scenes at night, and the like were manufactured with new technologies and especially with artificial lighting. Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s Twelfth Night in 1901 featured a terrace for Countess Olivia’s house with real grass, fountains, pathways, and staircases in the style of an Italian garden. Tree’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream provided live rabbits scurrying across the stage.
A notable feature of productions of Shakespeare from 1900 until today is that they have turned their back, by and large, on the massive sets and scenery of previous centuries, returning in effect to the open and flexible stage of Shakespeare’s own day. William Poel pioneered experiments for his Elizabethan Stage Society in the early twentieth century. Barry Jackson staged a quick-paced Twelfth Night on an apron stage at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1913. Glen Byam Shaw’s set for Romeo and Juliet at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1947 consisted of a partly abstract and geometrical arrangement of concentric circles. Peter Brook’s concept for a Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1970 found disillusionment in a play traditionally peopled by cute little fairies with gossamer wings. Brook chose for his set a white box, with the actors as circus performers sometimes on swings and Bottom the Weaver as a circus clown with large shoes. Visible in such productions was a response to a twentieth-century world of political revolution, world war, and existential philosophical despair. Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, on stage and on screen (1948), explored Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic interpretation of Hamlet as suffering an Oedipal crisis. Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet (1964) resonated to disturbing visions of Soviet concentration camps under Joseph Stalin. The same play proved to be a powerful vehicle for dissident playwrights in Egypt protesting authoritarian rule under Gamal Abed Nasser. Cheek by Jowl’s production of As You Like It in 1991 employed an all-male cast as a means of exploring themes of gender, identity, and power on a stage that was essentially devoid of realistic scenery. Akiro Kurosawa’s films Throne of Blood (1957) and Ran (1965) offer devastating interpretations of Macbeth and King Lear as seen from the perspective of Japanese warlord history. Productions of Othello have witnessed a sea-change in racial casting. The role of Othello, once the property of white actors in blackface such as Macready and Kean, shifted to enactments by such black actors as Ira Aldridge and Paul Robeson. It has shifted again in the modern world, where casting is either racially neutral or more pointedly tries out every possible variation in the performances of Othello and Iago.
This experimentation, even if sometimes overdone, has given to Shakespearean theater the freshness and immediacy that it justly deserves and needs. The result is what we see today: a thriving theatrical enterprise of imagination that gives continual new insight to an amazing body of work by a fruitful combination of irreverence and lasting admiration.
Many events are being held around the world to commemorate this event. See also