Shakespeare Shakespeare on Theatre

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78850-009-8
Verlag: Nick Hern Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 232 Seiten

Reihe: ... On Theatre

A unique collection of Shakespeare's every reflection on the theatre, offering fascinating insights into the man, his work, and the world of the Jacobean stage. Shakespeare was a man of the theatre to his core, so it is no surprise that he repeatedly contemplated the nuts and bolts of his craft in his plays and poems. Shakespeare scholar Nick de Somogyi here draws together all the cherishable set pieces - including 'All the world's a stage,' Hamlet's encounters with the Players, and Bottom's amateur theatricals - along with many other oblique but no less revealing glances, and further insights into theatre practice by Shakespeare's contemporaries and rivals. De Somogyi's informed commentary takes us through the entire process of a play's theatrical production, from its casting and auditions, via rehearsals, costumes, and props, to its premiere and audience reception. Shakespeare on Theatre eavesdrops on the urgently whispered noises-off in the 'tiring-house' and inhales the heady aroma of the Globe's first audiences.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was an English poet and playwright of some renown.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Shakespeare, William

Leseproben

Introduction

1 ACTOR. Gods of the theater, smile on us.

2 ACTOR. You who sit up there, stern in judgment, Smile on us.

1 ACTOR. You who look down on actors—

BOTH. And who doesn’t?

Stephen Sondheim (1974)

Whatever else he was or wasn’t – and bookshelves groan with contending theories – William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was a working man of the theatre to his core. If, to quote the maxim he perfected, ‘All the world’s a stage… And one man in his time plays many parts’, then the world of the theatre in which he lived and worked supplied him with a lifetime of roles. The stage-struck boy, watching in wonder the outlandish spectacle of touring productions. The young father drawn to the amateur dramatics of local maygames and revels. Then, talent-spotted by a later touring troupe, the industrious jobbing actor, hitching his fortunes to the grinding wagon of provincial rep, and learning the tricks of this gradually lucrative trade. Next, in step with his growing confidence as an actor, his precociously impressive skills as a textual fixer for the increasingly creaky melodramas of the repertoire – an improviser of verse and plot no less impressive than the showier repartee of the company Clown. In time, of course, the Londoner, and – after sharing the modern duties of dramaturg, prompter, and ASM – another new title to go with his burgeoning success as a junior co-author: ‘upstart’. Despite being disparaged by the Oxbridge élite in 1592 as a provincial jack of all trades, ‘as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best’ of them, Shakespeare’s parts proliferated: bestselling love-poet (1593); founder-member, with the actor Richard Burbage and the clown Will Kemp, of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (1594); published – and publicized – playwright (1598); shareholder and artistic director at the Globe theatre (1599); ‘the best and chiefest of our modern writers’ (1601); principal dramatist of the King’s Men, and celebrity box-office gold (1603); financial and artistic investor in the Blackfriars theatre (1609); senior co-author, mentor, and consultant (1613–14); and eventually, after a lifetime spent in a profession legally defined as little better than that of ‘rogues and vagabonds’, the part he may have cherished most, the one with which he described himself in his will (1616): ‘gentleman’. But when, in 1602, an officer at the College of Heralds expressed doubt over Shakespeare’s right to his coat of arms, the condescending term he used probably in fact best defines the man’s lifelong rank, profession, or occupation: ‘Shakespear ye Player’.

Shakespeare was a ‘player’ in nearly all the definitions available in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) – ‘gambler’, ‘competitive contestant’, ‘professional (as opposed to gentleman)’, ‘financial speculator’, ‘sexually successful individual’, ‘respected, or influential person’ – but chiefly, of course, in the specifically theatrical sense that enabled all the others throughout his lifetime: ‘A person who acts a character on the stage; a dramatic performer, an actor.’ From the late 1580s to the early 1610s, Shakespeare’s life was regulated by the demands made on him as a ‘dramatic performer’. His calendar years were divided into theatrical seasons, themselves irregularly organized (by politics or plague) between London’s playhouses, its various aristocratic households, and the slog of provincial touring. The odd month or so was presumably snatched back home in Stratford, but his London weeks were determined by an exhausting schedule of all-but daily performance, whether for public profit at the theatre, or private reward at court. The diary of his London days was principally governed by the demands of the public theatres in which he worked – the Theater, the Curtain, the Rose, and the Globe – where, open to the skies, performances largely depended on daylight, the three hours or so of their typical duration therefore starting at around two o’clock in the afternoon. (The candle-light of the indoor Blackfriars theatre was later to extend the available playing time, for a richer clientele, into dark winter afternoons and evenings.)

The rival public theatres seem to have competed for their trade by presenting a different, often new, play every day (while regularly rotating performances of the staple favourites) – a schedule that must have dictated a punishing régime for its actors. With his afternoons devoted to performance, Shakespeare’s mornings must often have involved group rehearsals on the unattended stage – sorting out a new play’s blocking, for example, rehearsing its duels, dances, battles, and special effects, or else simply refreshing the collective memory of an earlier production required for its revival that afternoon. Days were long, and those evenings that were free from the demands of private performance at court or elsewhere would presumably have been as much taken up with the constant grind of learning lines – and in Shakespeare’s case writing and revising them – as the riotous boozing and wenching of popular imagination. Playing was – as it has always been – extremely hard work.

Modern playwrights have increasingly taken to donating (or selling) their working papers to the world’s great libraries, where future scholars may pore over the drafts, rewrites, notes, bills, invoices, and practical correspondence relating to the day-to-day business of making theatre. As it happens, the greatest precedent for such a bequest precisely dates from a few months after Shakespeare’s death, when the charitable foundation established at Dulwich by Burbage’s great rival, the actor Edward Alleyn, first began its work. To this day, the busy transactions of an Elizabethan theatre (the Rose), recorded in the so-called ‘Diary’ of its manager (Alleyn’s father-in-law) Philip Henslowe, together with a rich mass of manuscript correspondence, remains secure in the archives of Dulwich College. The nearest Shakespeare ever came to bequeathing the ‘dedicated words which writers use / Of their fair subject’ (Sonnet 82), however, was the deposit at Oxford’s Bodleian Library of a copy of the 1623 First Folio, the posthumously collected edition of his plays prepared by two of his ‘fellows’, John Heminge and Henry Condell.

In the absence, therefore, of any private, backstage commentary by the world’s foremost playwright – and unlike the other inaugural title in this series, Chekhov on Theatre – this anthology of Shakespeare on Theatre necessarily depends on the public, published nature of his surviving works. Those works, furthermore, seem almost perversely to have steered away from any direct depiction of the London theatre-land in which they were first written and performed. Unlike the many colleagues with whom he worked, collaborated, or quarrelled – Jonson, Marston, and Middleton spring immediately to mind – Shakespeare seems to have winced from dramatizing the daily business of his life too closely. At the same time, the am-dram tantrums of the ‘mechanicals’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), the notably incompetent pageant that concludes Love’s Labour’s Lost (1595), and the troupes of strolling players that transform the stages of The Taming of the Shrew (1592) and Hamlet (1600–1), for example, cannot but reflect insights into his own profession. Necessarily oblique though such extended glimpses are, however, it does not take very long for a reader or performer of his plays to realize how often his characters ‘talk shop’ by incorporating the technical vocabulary of the stage – the nuts, bolts, and nitty-gritty of their actor–author’s craft. Whether in the relish with which Richard of Gloucester raids the props-basket, the impatience Othello barks at a premature prompt, or the anxious interpretation Bassanio places on an appreciative audience, Shakespeare drew repeated inspiration from the daily circumstances of his working life, almost as if unbidden to his mind.

That inspiration was further assisted by the deeply felt and widespread contemporary notion that each of our individual human lives comprises but a brief cameo appearance in (what Ralegh called) ‘this stage-play world’. Shakespeare’s variant of that phrase – ‘All the world’s a stage’ – has become a commonplace of modern quotation, but the premise it summarized was everywhere in the culture that gave rise to it. The theatrical sense of life, from the trumpeting of its ‘crying’ entrance to its inevitable exit – ‘curtains’, as we still say – profoundly influenced the way it was conducted, from the highest spectacle of monarchy to the daily squalid display of public execution. (The two extremes of this commonplace were to be shockingly conflated in 1649, when Charles I was beheaded outside the building originally designed as an indoor theatre for his father.) At a time when the complex hierarchy of ‘sumptuary law’ minutely regulated who was allowed to wear what, when, and why – and when theatre companies routinely spent more on lavish costumes for...