Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard

by Ben Crystal

  The unspoken rule even today is never to leave the theatre with your costume and your make-up on. It’s considered unlucky to do so.

  A slightly more practical and obvious danger to the Elizabethan actors would be the wrath of a theatre manager like Philip Henslowe, who heavily fined his actors if they were late or if their costumes were damaged and needed repair. The vast expense of the costumes meant that they’d be especially careful not to walk the streets wearing them, in case they got torn or dirtied.

  Costumes they wore, and cheap they were not. They were certainly beautiful, crafted with care, and were an important ingredient in creating a spectacle, keeping this magical bubble of the play’s world from bursting.

  THE JIG

  Then, at the end of a performance, just as the world had been so carefully created, the breaking of the spell was just as considered.

  At the end of every show, whether it was a comedy or a tragedy, there would be a dance, or jig. The jig is a brilliantly simple device and the modern Globe uses it in its productions. The idea is that if everyone gets up and starts dancing merrily together – hero and villain, dead man and live man – then everything must be okay, so go home safe and happy. Whatever magic, fantasy, terrible torment, vicious ness or frivolity had been witnessed, is now well and truly over.

  More emphatic than a simple bow or curtsy, the jig is a celebratory affirmation of the story that has been told and the emotional journey the actors and audience have shared, and a fantastic release of tension.

  It’s bloody good fun too.

  Scene 3

  A galaxy far, far away

  Take an incredible space, fill it with an audience with hungry imaginations, and you need great stories too.

  A neuro-psychologist friend of mine told me that he thinks Othello is the greatest study of jealousy ever made, better than any research or medical paper he’d come across. Many people think Romeo and Juliet is the most romantic tale ever told. Titus Andronicus is definitely one of the bloodiest plays I’ve ever seen, and King Lear is easily one of the most heartbreaking.

  But the stories Shakespeare told need putting into context a little.

  He was telling stories before Dickens. Before Hemingway, Joyce, Twain, Austen, the Brontë sisters, the Brothers Grimm, and Milton’s Paradise Lost.

  This boggles me a little bit. What did he have to inspire him?

  We, telling stories in the 21st century, can look back admiringly over the last few hundred years at the stories that have been conjured up for us. We have stories we’ve known since childhood, like Little Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel, and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales of The Ugly Duckling and The Princess and The Pea. Then we had the work from all these other great authors to read (or I suppose, in recent times, to see the film versions of) when we were growing up. So when it comes to writing these days, new authors have so much to inspire them.

  None of these tales existed when Shakespeare was writing. He had such very different stories available to him. As ever, we’ll never know exactly what he read, but it seems clear that he was familiar with historical sources like Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, and Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch. The Latin authors Ovid and Horace, and Aesop’s Fables, would have been around too. Not to forget the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, Dante’s Inferno, and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales.

  Many of the books that were around to influence Shakespeare are almost out of our memory, yet the stories he dreamt up will be familiar to us, because they’ve influenced the writers who follow him. Before Robinson Crusoe was stuck on his island, Prospero the magician was shipwrecked. Before Pip’s Great Expectations, there were tales of Pericles’ life and love. Long before Superman and the Incredible Hulk, Hercules and Achilles walked the earth.

  Shakespeare wrote about cruel kings, famous battles, love lost and won, children losing parents, parents losing children – universal themes that are so pervasive, so intrinsically known to us all that they can still work when they’re adapted for TV and film. Whether a play is set in Elizabethan times or in an American high school (Tim Blake Nelson’s 2001 adaptation of Othello, O, is a good example of the latter), the stories are both so general and so specific that they can handle almost any reworking. (Though they may not technically be Shakespeare any more, as the poetry is often first to go in these reworkings.)

  Most of the original ideas were not Shakespeare’s creations. Rewriting old stories was common practice, and he certainly wasn’t the only one in his time who wrote new versions of classics. He was by no means alone in retelling the story of Romeo and Juliet, or Troilus and Cressida, or the Reign of Henry V. The Elizabethans would have known the stories that Shakespeare used as the basis for his plays. Copies of some of the originals have survived, so we know, for instance, that Hamlet was part-inspired by the 13thcentury Life of Amleth. Originality was not the prerequisite for being a popular writer – the Elizabethans wanted the stories they’d heard since childhood, of evil kings and fated lovers, told and retold over and over.

  We’re very similar in that respect, and it still happens a lot today. The film Star Wars (1977) is based on a bunch of different old Japanese stories. Classic films are remade constantly (whether for better or worse). Many of the soap operas on TV have been running so long they often use plot lines from their own old episodes.

  So if everyone was doing it back then (and writers are still doing it), why were Shakespeare’s plays more popular? Why have his endured, and no one seems to have come close to topple his success? Why haven’t the plays of one of his contemporaries like Henry Chettle (c. 1560–1607) been turned into films? Why have just a few of his contemporaries found only relative fame, like John Webster (c. 1580–1632)? If his audience knew the stories so well, what made them go to see Shakespeare’s plays more than anyone else’s?

  It ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it …

  Scene 4

  A room full of character

  Many people hold that the main reason why Shakespeare has become so universally thought of as just plain brilliant is because of the characters he wrote. It wouldn’t be my first reason (which we’re coming to), but without doubt, he had a way of creating memorable and pretty fantastic characters that make most other writers’ creations seem amateur.

  In Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, he wrote a character called Falstaff – a drunken, cowardly buffoon of a knight, who had become friends with the young Prince Hal. His relationship with Hal is beautifully tragic; and the scrapes Falstaff gets into are incredibly funny. Falstaff dies in Henry V, but the story goes that Queen Elizabeth I was such a fan of the character that she asked Shakespeare to bring him back and write another play with him in. And so he did, and so we have the romp that is The Merry Wives of Windsor.

  A similar thing happened to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, when he killed off his great detective character Sherlock Holmes. There was a public outcry, and he had to bring him back. Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, published a novella in 2008 called Once Upon a Time in the North, which precedes the events of the Dark Materials and features two of the favourite characters who’d been killed off in the original stories. It happens with soap operas too, with Bobby in Dallas, Harold in Neighbours, and Dirty Den in EastEnders all being brought back ‘from the dead’, usually with an ‘amnesiac’ storyline or a wave of hocus-pocus writing.

  While his characters are often great, Shakespeare is not the man to go to for a history lesson. Not an accurate one, anyway.

  The Richard III Society was founded in 1924 because there was a growing group of people who were upset that Shakespeare had misrepresented King Richard III; claiming that he was a good king, and not an evil, murderous tyrant. Shakespeare based his play Richard III on Thomas More’s History of Richard III, but the Society argues that More biased his account, including giving Richard a hunchback and making him appear more evil than he actually was. Their argument follows that More’s rewri
ting of history meant that the monarch of the time, Henry VII (who deposed Richard), had a stronger claim to the throne.

  Whether Richard III actually was a good person in real life is up for discussion. What cannot be disputed is that a troubled, evil tyrant-with-a-hunch makes a more dramatic, intriguing character to watch in the theatre. Troubled-tyrant-with-a-hunch rather than good person, every time.

  * * *

  Keeping good company …

  We’re unlikely to ever know the specifics of their relationships, but Shakespeare’s company of players (known as The Lord Chamberlain’s Men in the reign of Elizabeth I, and The King’s Men in the reign of James I) was one of the two leading theatre companies in London in the late 16th/early 17th centuries. Having the reigning monarch as patron to your company – and indeed, then having that patronage continued by the new monarch – was a very worthy, useful and honourable position to be in.

  Forever remaining debatable is the influence of the monarchs on Shakespeare’s writing, though, as I’ve said, it seems Elizabeth was influential in the arrival (around 1597) of The Merry Wives of Windsor, and, as we’ll see later, it would be hard to see how the ascension of the Scots King James VI to the English throne in 1603 isn’t somehow reflected in Macbeth (written around 1605).

  It’s thought that some lines from Hamlet (around 1601) were removed from an early quarto – either by Shakespeare or the Master of the Revels (who licensed and censored the plays) – to avoid offending Anne of Denmark, James’s queen. The Office of the Master of the Revels’ aim was to keep the monarch amused and not offended, and their mandate was censorship, not suppression. It’s possible to see evidence of the Master of the Revels’ censoring in the manuscript of Sir Thomas More, a play thought to have been written in part by Shakespeare.

  * * *

  Of course, Shakespeare’s Richard III is an invention to some extent, just as his Henry V and Macbeth characters are. They’ll have been based on the original kings, but end up as an amalgamation of characters and stories that Shakespeare would have heard, letting his instincts as a dramatist choose the right bits to make the best heroes and villains.

  The side effect of this skilful dramatic manipulation is the power Shakespeare was unwittingly wielding: establishing a great, fictional image who becomes far better-known than the real historical figure. That’s quite some power.

  Not only are the characters fascinating, the journeys they go on are equally powerful. In the very first scene of Titus Andronicus, the returning general Titus sacrifices the captured Goth Queen’s son, and then, in a fit of anger, kills one of his own sons. Later in the play, his daughter is raped, her hands and tongue cut off. By the end of the first half, all but one of Titus’ sons is killed. He then finds a way to get revenge, in a brilliantly bloody way, culminating in the Goth Queen feasting on a pie, baked by Titus, made of her sons’ flesh and bones. It’s a terrific journey for a character.

  Hamlet, probably the most famous of all Shakespeare’s characters, is mourning his father’s death. A ghost appears, claiming to be the spirit of his father, also claiming that Hamlet’s uncle Claudius, who has recently married Hamlet’s mother, murdered him. Should Hamlet believe the ghost and take his revenge? Or, as was thought at the time, could the ghost be the devil in disguise, trying to tempt him to evil?

  These are massive, extraordinarily complex characters, and there are hundreds more. For every one of these characters, someone from every different culture in every country in the world brings a fresh interpretation to the part, creating the play anew, because no matter where they are or what Shakespeare’s characters go through, what Shakespeare did with them was to explore what it is to be human.

  He tied the head to the heart, not just writing kings or clowns or drunken knights, but thinking, feeling humans, cutting their chests open on stage and sharing with the audience the turmoil, the passion, and the heartache that’s whirling around inside them.

  With Shakespeare’s characters, it is always the heart that lights the fire, that sparks the brain, that makes them speak.

  It leaves the characters open to endless interpretation, and keeps the plays alive and kicking.

  Scene 5

  Venice, Verona, Vienna

  Sitting in one of Elizabethan London’s many taverns, Shakespeare would have overheard stories of far-off lands while he got drunk. Chatting to sailors and travellers, hearing of Venice, and a bridge called the Rialto where all the trading was done, perhaps got him to thinking that it might be a good setting for a play.

  Some think that because there’s no evidence of Shakespeare travelling – yet his plays are set all over Europe – someone else must have written them. It’s much more convincing, some think, that Christopher Marlowe faked his own murder, travelled around the world and sent the plays back, letting ‘Shakespeare’ take the credit for them.

  But Shakespeare’s knowledge of geography is famously inaccurate. He refers to places as being close neighbours when in fact they’re nowhere near each other. He writes, not as if he’s visited these distant, great cities, but as if he read about them, or had them described to him.

  There’s no talk of canals in The Merchant of Venice, but he does mention the Rialto bridge a number of times. Until I visited the city, I had no real idea of exactly how many canals there are. Of course, I knew there were canals there, but I hadn’t quite appreciated the scale of the place. I saw a map of 17th-century Venice, and the only landmark amid a labyrinth of canals and buildings was the impressively grand Rialto bridge. If there’s one thing you remember, you remember the Rialto.

  Imagine Shakespeare, looking for inspiration to write a new play, meeting a traveller in a tavern, and the traveller says: ‘So there’s this beautiful city, canals and little bridges everywhere, but there’s this one bridge called the Rialto, a bit like our London Bridge but not as big, where all the trading is done, and the money-lenders meet there every day …’

  He set his plays in his concept of Italy, France, Egypt – as well as all over Britain – in places that a great deal of his audience would probably never visit. He could show them worlds they’d never go to.

  In some respects, then, painting an accurate picture wasn’t as important as painting a vivid one. An average Elizabethan might not have visited Venice, or Egypt, but they might have heard of the Rialto, the pyramids and the River Nile, and have fixed ideas of what they’d be like if they did see them.

  Shakespeare grew up in Warwickshire, very near the Forest of Arden, yet happily, in As You Like It, he has one of his characters savaged by a lion in the forest. Lions in England? He knew there weren’t such things there, but Warwickshire was a few days’ horse-ride from London. Stretch the truth a little to make the story a lot more exciting …

  Shakespeare wasn’t trying to write a documentary with perfect images of these places, he was writing studies of the heart and soul; and using his and his audience’s ideas of them as backdrops.

  They could visit these places in their mind while watching his plays. His writing and their imagination took them there. First class.

  Scene 6

  The mind of a 21st-century fellow

  To be, or not to be – that is the question …

  All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players …

  A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse.

  Even someone who claims not to know anything about Shakespeare has probably heard at least one of these quotes. They’re a few of the most famous lines Shakespeare wrote. They stick with you when you hear them, and they do that for a couple of very good reasons.

  They’re written in a type of poetry which has the same rhythm as natural English speech (I’ll deal with this particular type of poetry in detail later). A consequence of writing in this rhythm is that it’s easy to remember – a particularly useful thing for busy actors with little or no rehearsal time.

  They’re also pretty darned cool quotes. The ideas that Shakespeare conveyed within this ti
ght framework of poetry are huge. Someone once said Shakespeare wrote every thought that has ever been thunk. Thought. I don’t know if that’s categorically true, but all too often I’ve known people try to put into words a moment or a sentiment from life and then discover that Shakespeare got there first and expressed the same thought more succinctly and articulately. His writing spoke to queens and it spoke to commoners, and, staggeringly, it still speaks to us some 400 years later.

  But then some things don’t change. Every day, people find themselves questioning their own mortality, their place in the world in relation to everyone else, finding themselves in situations where in that moment they would give up everything they own for something they don’t have. To be, or not to be … All the world’s a stage … A horse, a horse …

  Shakespeare endures. I’ve seen a Brazilian production of Romeo and Juliet that made me sob, a Slovakian production of The Merry Wives of Windsor that had me rolling in the aisles, and a Japanese Pericles that was one of the most heartbreaking pieces of theatre I’ve ever seen, despite knowing no Portuguese, Slovakian or Japanese.

  The American actor Orson Welles once said: ‘Shakespeare speaks to everyone.’ His plays are set all over the world, and yet most could be set anywhere, in any country. He doesn’t just write about what it is to be English, he writes about what it is to be human, and that opens his writing up to the world.