Stanislavsky’s influence on RSC productions of Shakespeare in the late twentieth century was marked, but subject to similar criticism as those made by Chekhov, as Janice Wardle’s discussion of John Barton’s influential 1969 production of Twelfth Night makes apparent:
‘Barton’s application of Stanislavskian-based techniques led him to implant detailed character analysis within accepted anthropological structures, derived from Frye and Barber, which had primarily displayed the social, and not the individual’s function in comedy. Arguably, tensions would inevitably result and, as in the case of Stanislavsky’s exploration of Chekhov’s individual trapped within a limiting social system, the prevailing mood would be melancholic.’
Wardle, J. (2001: 116), ‘Twelfth Night: “One face, one voice, one habit and two persons!”’, in Cartmell, D. and Scott, M., Talking Shakespeare. Basingstoke: Palgrave
BRECHT AND EPIC THEATRE
One of Stanislavsky’s main actors, Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940), left the company and developed an expressionist form of acting at a time when Russia was experiencing its communist revolution and its aftermath. Art was becoming more politicized and Meyerhold’s theatre became constructivist with an explicitly political dimension, later developed by the German communist director Erwin Piscator (1893–1966).
Meyerhold and Piscator heralded the development in Germany of what became known as Epic Theatre – a term first used by Piscator – or the theatre of alienation. This was developed by Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), who drew a distinction between Dramatic Theatre in a realistic tradition and the episodic approach of Epic Theatre. The first exploited the emotional impact of drama on stage, which, as we will see later, evolves from the early Greek drama and its range and purpose as defined by Aristotle in the Poetics. By contrast, Epic Theatre exposed the mechanisms, theatrical and political, through which drama was constructed, thereby recontextualizing performance and exposing the flaws in the Aristotelian conception of drama. This was a theatre that downplayed bourgeois notions of ‘emotion’ by appealing to a more analytical frame of mind. Brecht regarded the Elizabethan theatre as instructive in its meta-dramatic disclosures of its own practical methodologies, but he was also influenced heavily by the stylized plays of the Japanese Noh theatre tradition. From this, radical political interpretations and readings of Shakespeare’s plays were to evolve. So, for example, Brecht rejects in his poem ‘On Shakespeare’s Play Hamlet’ (c.1940) the romantic and realistic interpretations of the Prince and his ‘tragedy’ Hamlet. Such interpretations do not challenge the spectators but rather confirm their own bourgeois prejudices. For Brecht, Shakespeare’s plays needed to be performed as dialectical in the context of the anti-bourgeois philosophy.
‘Here is the body, puffy and inert
Where we can trace the virus of the mind.
How lost he seems among his steel-clad kind
This introspective sponger in a shirt!
Till they bring drums to wake him up again
As Fortinbras and all the fools he’s found
March off to win that little patch of ground
Which is not tomb enough…to hide the slain.
…
So we can nod when the last Act is done
And they pronounce that he was of the stuff
To prove most royally, had he been put on.’
Brecht, B., ‘On Shakespeare’s Play Hamlet’, c.1940 (1959), quoted in Willett, J. (1977, p/b ed: 120–21), The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht. London: Eyre Methuen
Key idea
In considering Shakespeare, the performances and the construction of the plays in general, Brecht holds that realistic Dramatic Theatre implicates the audience in the action of the plot, whereas Epic Theatre, by concentrating on narrative, allows the spectators to be observers of the action, distancing them to encourage an intellectual engagement with the issues of the play rather than in an uncritical acceptance of its conclusion. The Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, ‘alienation’ or ‘A-effect’, was designed to produce this distance from the action as a means of helping the audience to take a critical view of what was being represented on stage. This debate between Dramatic Theatre and Epic Theatre continues to have an influence on how we perceive Shakespeare today.
We will consider the Brechtian approach in more detail in Chapter 16, as it informs or coincides with the radical literary critical readings of Shakespeare that gradually emerged through the twentieth century, to the point of challenging, for example, conventional Aristotelian views of ‘tragedy’ rooted in classical theatre and adopted by the Christian and humanist traditions. But, before doing so, having planted the thought in your mind, let us continue our journey with an examination of some further Shakespearean comedies which in both criticism and production tend to spark significant critical debate: Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice.
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Much Ado About Nothing (1598–9) and The Taming of the Shrew (1589–92?)
In this chapter we will look at two further comedies that raise certain challenges for the audience. These two plays are comedies about love but they differ from the romantic comedies so far considered. They explicitly raise social issues, testing the audience’s reactions and sensibilities, and they employ different perspectives from those we have so far examined. They are not being considered in their probable chronological order of composition because I want to introduce you first to the concept of structural confrontation and alienation, as contained in Much Ado About Nothing, before discussing the social and gender issues raised in The Taming of the Shrew.
Spotlight
In the romantic comedies, the dramatist presents various levels of reality. Through the range of his plays across genres, Shakespeare appears to suggest a variety of perceptions:
1 The perceived reality around us in nature and society, including political reality
2 A reality that can be created in our imaginations in order to make sense of the first: fairies, transformations, sexual fantasies, grotesque or harmonious experiences, heroic, desolate or discordant elements and endings
3 A suggested or speculated reality of something beyond death that can only be the subject of contemplation, even though ghosts may appear from the grave to give an assurance of its validity – as Hamlet says to his friend, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ (Hamlet, 2.1.174–5).
We’ll explore the third speculative reality described above in the later discussion of the tragedies but it is always useful in considering the comedies to keep your mind open to the reflective nature of the issues being raised in one genre compared with other genres. We have seen, for example, that Twelfth Night is haunted by images, songs and references to death and was written at around the same time as Hamlet.
Much Ado About Nothing does not exactly follow the traditional structure of the Shakespearean romance comedies, although some important elements of that structure, including death, or a threat of death, are important ingredients within it. These, however, make their appearance at the centre of the narrative rather than the beginning, although in Much Ado About Nothing the soldiers are returning from a victorious war, and the threat of death is now over with ‘few of any sort, and none of name’ having been killed (1.1.7). We learn from Leonato that the bastard Don John has been ‘reconciled to the Prince your brother’ (1.1.149), although as he replies with what could be curt politeness, as a man ‘not of many words’, we might have our suspicions about him.
Shakespeare appears to be experimenting again with dramatic structure, as he had done with Romeo and Juliet, where comedy moves into tragedy. In Much Ado About Nothing, the comedy takes a potentially serious turn but this is temporary and tragedy is ultimately averted, allowing the play to end harmoniously, although the potential for the tragic does not disappear entirely from the audience’s minds. In this, Much Ado About Nothing points towards plays such as Measure for Measure (1604), which critics in the past te
rmed a ‘problem play’, Othello (1604), where the ‘love’ interest is demeaned, and The Winter’s Tale (1611), variously categorized as a ‘romance’ or a ‘last play’, and which combines elements of Much Ado and Othello in order to produce a hybrid genre, which some term a ‘tragicomedy’.
The Taming of the Shrew, although the date of it is uncertain, is an earlier play than Much Ado About Nothing but it raises social issues that are equally if not more confrontational, certainly for a modern audience, in its exposure and possible exploitation of gender issues. It may help you by linking it to the ensuing chapter on The Merchant of Venice and the controversies that play has generated. With these three plays Shakespearean criticism follows Shakespeare into some challenging political and social territory.
‘Shakespeare did not choose one of the several patterns in common use, but modified and supplemented whatever he borrowed. And having once pleased his audience, he was not content to repeat a single pattern but continued to modify his basic structure, adding or rejecting certain elements, and sometimes rejecting one for a time only to return to it later.’
Brown, J.R. (1968: 27), Shakespeare and His Comedies. London: Methuen
Much Ado About Nothing
Much Ado About Nothing was written sometime before 1600 when its first publication in quarto noted that it had been ‘sundry times publicly acted’. There is speculation, as there is about As You Like It, that it may be the ‘lost play’ Love’s Labour’s Won, as the RSC surprisingly and disingenuously described it in their 2015 production. The case, however, remains unproven.
As mentioned in Chapter 7, Much Ado About Nothing as a title has an affinity with What You Will (Twelfth Night) and As You Like It, in being designed to appeal through sexual innuendo and suggestion. The title Much Ado About Nothing can also point to a great deal of fuss about issues that prove to be of no lasting consequence. That, indeed, is what the play appears, on one level, to proclaim since, despite all the machinations that occur, in the end all is reconciled through the exposure of Don John’s deception. The sexual quibble on the word ‘nothing’ that some critics have pointed to suggests a much more bawdy meaning, which indicates that, contrary to its manifest meaning, this play is about an issue central to Elizabethan patriarchal culture.
NOTHING OR NOTING
This critical line also leads to a consideration that the play contains various instances of characters ‘noting’ the perceived actions of others and making judgements thereby. It has been suggested that Elizabethan pronounced the words ‘noting’ and ‘nothing’ in the same way. Or it may be allowing a parallel with the ‘notes’ of music, leading us to regard it as being like a musical composition. The title of a play, of course, like the opening scenes, is important in setting the tone of what is to follow.
Deborah Cartmell gives an instructive insight on how the opening sequence of Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 film version draws on artistic symbols and cinematic history to reinforce the work’s sexual force.
‘In the first half of the film Beatrice is frequently seen with fruit in her hand, underlining her ripeness. The sexuality of the opening sequence is hard to miss: the men arrive on horseback, charging into the women’s domain in deliberate imitation of The Magnificent Seven (1960; directed by John Sturges); this is followed with the parties rushing to the bathhouse, stripping off and washing, culminating in the men thrusting towards the women in a phallic “V” formation. In the opening moments of the film we move from the words of the song “Sigh no more” represented as a page of text, to Beatrice’s voice speaking the words (significantly prefacing the film with her knowledge that “men are deceivers ever”…).’
Cartmell, D. (2000: 50), Interpreting Shakespeare on Screen. Basingstoke: Macmillan
‘WHAT IF?’
Like Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing is a comedy that also explores the ‘what if?’ of a story, just as it appears that Shakespeare explored ‘what if?’ in placing the early part of Romeo and Juliet in a comic vein that was to be reversed. The ‘what if?’ question can prompt different courses of action to take place or to be suggested, which appear to take the play beyond an easy or harmonious encounter with comedy. This combination of tones allows the seriousness underlying the comedy to be foregrounded.
Don John and Don Pedro
At the heart of this play is a deceit by Don Pedro’s bastard brother, Don John, which leads to another deception, the supposed death of Hero, and an invitation to revenge which, if accepted, will lead to a ‘further death’ – Claudio’s by Benedick. This is demanded by Hero’s cousin Beatrice, with whom Benedick has been engineered into thinking that he is in love. Don John’s malign deceit has a parallel benign and intentionally benevolent one: Don Pedro’s deceit of Benedick and Beatrice to get them to recognize their love for each other and to persuade them to marry. It could be argued that Don Pedro’s deception is framed as legitimate while Don John’s deceit, like himself, is illegitimate and that the play works through the mirror image of the one with the other, based on historically accepted Renaissance social cultural attitudes about legitimacy and illegitimacy.
CHALLENGING CONVENTION
Much Ado About Nothing unfolds as a critique of male conduct within a particular social structure that, though different from our own, still has modern resonance. In this, the play may be seen to challenge some aspects of its generic allegiance to the romance genre. Shakespeare moves away somewhat from his usual formula for romance, gently challenging some audience expectations while nevertheless maintaining dramatic integrity.
In the early seventeenth century, through the work particularly of the French man of letters Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), an understanding of male cultural attitudes in relation to sexual dominance was beginning to be gained and the dramatists of the period began to expose its various perspectives within their drama; see, for example, John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan (1603–4). The idea of a different sexual morality pertaining to men and women – men even in marriage being able to be promiscuous but women, in and before marriage, expected to remain chaste and faithful in accordance with patriarchal social convention – came under satiric scrutiny.
In his essay on sexual attitudes and conventions, ‘Upon Some Verses of Virgil’, Montaigne wrote, ‘…Women are not altogether in the wrong, when they refuse the rules of life prescribed to the World, forsomuch as only men have established them without their consent’ (pp. 77–8), and he concluded with the statement: ‘I say, that both male and female, are cast in one same moulde; instruction and custome excepted, there is no great difference between them’ (p. 128). His essays, published variously in 1580 and in a complete edition in 1595, were not translated into English until 1603 by John Florio, after Much Ado About Nothing was published. Florio, however, was the tutor of the Earl of Southampton and someone possibly known to Shakespeare. Whether this is so or not, Shakespeare deals in the play with issues that were probably circulating during the late 1590s, prior to Florio’s translation. (Quotations come from the Everyman edition, 1910, of the Florio translation of Montaigne’s Essays, Vol. 3, 1965. Lechworth: J. M. Dent, Everyman’s Library.)
Shakespeare, Marston, Jonson, Middleton and other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists were at the beginning of a long movement that brought about a gradual re-evaluation of sexual conduct and the exposure of patriarchal social conventions. It is too easy, from a twenty-first-century viewpoint, to become focused exclusively on a debate prompted by the evil of Don John because of our modern understanding of gender roles, expecting more from the play than it presents.
You might like to note further that Shakespeare is drawing on certain dramatic conventions in the play. The character Don John, for example, is to an extent a bridge between the stock Vice figure who leads mankind astray in the old medieval morality plays and the more rounded complex characters found in some of Shakespeare’s later plays. In Othello, for example, Iago’s possible ‘motiveless malignity’, as we will see later, is what is considered by some to
destroy the tragic protagonist, Othello. In Much Ado About Nothing, Don John (1.3.25f.) declares that he would rather be a ‘canker in a hedge than a rose’ in his brother’s ‘grace’ and continues by proclaiming that it cannot be said that he is a ‘flattering honest man’. Iago in the later Othello is portrayed as the supposedly ‘honest’ man who wreaks havoc on all with whom he comes into contact. Don John continues, ‘…I have decreed not to sing in my cage. If I had my mouth I would bite; if I had my liberty I would do my liking: in the meantime, let me be that I am, and seek not to alter me’ (1.3.25–34).
Don John’s wish to ‘be that I am’ is taken a step further by Iago’s single-minded, almost blasphemous statement, ‘I am not what I am’ (Othello, 1.1.64), while the image of singing in a cage is given great poignancy towards the tragic end of King Lear, where the captured Lear says to the defeated Cordelia, ‘Come, let’s away to prison;/We two alone will sing like birds i’the cage./When thou dost ask me blessing I’ll kneel down/And ask of thee forgiveness’ (5.3.8–11).
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