All the world's a stage for Shakespeare, but we no longer understand him
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Version 0 of 1. Nicholas Hytner, director of the National Theatre, has admitted what most of us know but are too proud to say. Shakespeare on stage can be confusing. It's something that exercised one of our cleverest critics, Frank Kermode. And he was part of a tradition of critics – Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, AC Bradley – who believed that full understanding could only be achieved via the page, not the stage. Kermode published his last major work, Shakespeare's Language, in 2000, 10 years before his death. A lot of Shakespeare, he said, was difficult to the point of verging on incomprehensibility. At least, when one encountered the stuff fresh through the ear in the theatre. You could usually tease out the meaning if you had studied the text beforehand. But if you were exposed for the first time to those lines in the theatre even the sharpest mind floundered. It wasn't that Shakespeare was writing gobbledygook but that in his last years he had effectively left stage-language behind and was writing difficult poetry: something that could only, comprehensibly, be read. Kermode did not include all Shakespeare. Early and middle period Shakespeare was, by and large, accessible in the theatre. And even some of the later works. Macbeth, for example, is a very easy play for unknowledgeable audiences to take on board (perhaps because it wasn't written by Shakespeare: OUP nowadays attribute it to Thomas Middleton). But test yourself with the opening speech in the last and darkest of the comedies, Measure for Measure. Read it at the speed of speech, close your eyes, and summarise what Duke Vincentio is saying: <blockquote>Of government the properties to unfold,<br />Would seem in me to affect speech and discourse;<br />Since I am put to know that your own science<br />Exceeds, in that, the lists of all advice<br />My strength can give you: then no more remains,<br />But that to your sufficiency as your Worth is able,<br />And let them work.<br /></blockquote> It's like eating brazils without nut-crackers. Take another line, one of the more famous, from Ulysses' cunning wheedling of Achilles in Troilus and Cressida (a veritable bagful of brazils): <blockquote>Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,<br />Wherein he puts alms for oblivion.</blockquote> The problem here is not that one can't make sense of it, but that it takes a minute or two to picture those two personified abstractions – time and oblivion – and then work out the business with the wallet and the alms and that what Ulysses is saying is "no one remembers what you once did". But by the time you've cracked it, and chewed the kernel, you've missed the next line (another tough nut): <blockquote>A great-sized monster of ingratitudes<br /></blockquote> You can't keep up with it. So were those audiences attending first nights four centuries ago completely flummoxed? No, they probably weren't. They were different from us, who take in most of our data visually, from page or screen. Their sense organs were differently trained. Elizabethans and Jacobeans were obliged, by the so-called recusancy laws, to attend church. Much of the service would be mumbo-jumbo or same-old, same-old. But the long sermons, which for preachers were star turns, were Sunday entertainment for the congregation. We would think differently. Imagine having to listen to an hour-long thought for the day (the only sermon most of us get). Enough to make you sign up as a devil worshipper. The fact was the Elizabethans and Jacobeans were much better listeners than we are. That, I suspect, was what gave them a privileged relationship with the great writer of their age that we, alas, can never enjoy. But none of them, of course, had the printed works. That's our privilege. Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning. |