Rice: I had Jupiter as a god of war, which of course he is. We had him in an army uniform. I don’t think we have any connection to the Roman gods anymore, and only very faint ones to Greek gods. However, I love the notion of gods with a small “g.” In many ways theater is all about three levels of communication. There’s one’s relationship with oneself, one’s relationship to the people onstage with you and the audience, and the relationship to the “superstructure” of life. That’s where the gods come in. You have those times in life where you just wish somebody would come and help. It’s like looking for a fantasy dad. It’s not even your own dad you want, you need a Super-dad to come and tell you it’s all right and what to do. That’s how I wanted Jupiter to be, although he is a little harsh and judgmental! As I said earlier, in some ways war can be a positive force in fairy tales, in that it makes people grow up and see the world in a broader picture. What I wanted to do with the gods was to say, look, this destroys lives on every level. He looked magnificent, my god/dad, and I had him flying, so used quite old-fashioned godlike imagery.
10. Emma Rice’s production, 2006. Image shows Hayley Carmichael, Carl Grose, and Craig Johnson. The Welsh scenes “were the hardest in the whole show … I didn’t want these scenes to be in a cave, I didn’t feel that had any resonance for us. I wanted to create a world that was challenging and recognizable … [We] managed to create an edgy environment, with old mattresses and spray cans.”
Many critics have remarked on the difficulty of Shakespeare’s late style in general, and on Cymbeline in particular. How did you and your actors find the language of the play? Is it more difficult than that of earlier Shakespeare plays, and could this be a reason for its relative unpopularity?
Cooke: Much of the play’s language is convoluted and we did edit some of the subclauses from the lengthy sentences of the opening scene where the characters are speaking in a courtly code. It’s as if everyone is nervous about being overheard and potentially incriminated. The Queen is at the height of her corrupt power as the play opens, so there is a strong dramatic reason for the courtiers to be speaking in such an indirect way. However, given how much exposition there is as the play opens, the indirect language felt like a significant obstacle for the audience which we dealt with by making a few small cuts. With the rest of the play, we spent a lot of time making sure that all the actors knew exactly what every word meant. Then we worked on inhabiting each word and getting the flow and forward thinking of the very long sentences. The language in the play is self-feeding and hyperbolic. An idea can be set up at the start of the speech and can snowball through many lines and many, seemingly diversionary subclauses. However, by and large, when you commit to the subclauses, as with many of the idiosyncrasies of the play, it works.
Rice: I’ve said this before, and I’m not ashamed about it, but I find some Shakespeare almost impossible to understand. Obviously some plays are easier than others, but they’re all really difficult. Cymbeline is almost impenetrable at times. When we first tried to read it at Kneehigh, we felt the terrible weight of the text and it almost destroyed our process. So I did what I always do, which is to push through until I can tell the story. Then I leave the text behind for as long as possible. By really understanding what the story is and what it means to me, and then making that structure work, then, and only then, do I feed the text back in. At that point I use only what we need to make the story work. I was fairly irreverent with the text, because I didn’t think it stood up in the modern world. I don’t mean as a play, because I’m not an expert, I mean as a story. I’m a storyteller and the story structure of Cymbeline is very complicated. I always try and retain a childlike state when making work. That doesn’t mean that the work becomes simplified—it absolutely shouldn’t—but it should be simple. I think Einstein said “work should be as simple as possible and no simpler,” and that’s a really good mantra for Shakespeare. People should be able to understand it, otherwise what are we saying?
Famously people say that the first scene in Cymbeline is one of the worst scenes in Shakespeare, and yet I bloody love it! It’s a fairly ropey piece of work: he doesn’t even give them names, it’s just Gentleman 1 and Gentleman 2 and then we never see them again. They come on and one says “You’ll never guess what” and the other says “What?” and then they basically give us the plot up to that point. It’s really crude, but it is such a relief! In this production I wanted to give that person a name and a character, so I created a woman called Joan who was returning home (another homecoming!) after being in the Costa del Sol for thirty years. We did this because we had to work out why this character didn’t have a clue what was going on! I had the idea of somebody returning, full of life, and realizing what an awful state the nation was in. The critics found that very challenging, but I know that any young people who came to see that show were relieved that they were helped to know what was going on.
Critics have been divided over the last act; some have been troubled by the way it re-narrates plot at great length, and at times evinces—horror of horrors—laughter from its audience, while others have conversely described the virtuosity of Shakespeare’s dramatic management in Cymbeline, and the skill with which the plot threads reconvene at the end. Do you see Shakespearean senility or Shakespearean magic at work in this play?
Cooke: I think it’s magic. All of the late plays, and Cymbeline is the most extreme example, have moments of self-conscious theatricality. If you think of the bear in The Winter’s Tale, or Thaisa coming back to life in Pericles, it’s as if Shakespeare is daring the audience not to accept what’s being presented. That playful quality of testing theatricality is a feature of the final scene of Cymbeline and, by contrast, it deepens the authentic emotion of the discoveries and reunions. The contradiction in the play between truth and artificiality is part of its pleasure and it’s why the play frequently works very well in performance, even if it seems improbable on the page. The golden rule of performing this play is to commit one hundred percent to the reality of the situation, to perform it without comment. The slightest wink at the audience would be fatal. We were playful with aspects of our production, the costume especially, but we believed in and honored the scenes themselves at all times.
Rice: I just cut all of the recapping! I think that you have to make theater for the audience that is going to see it. We’re now so used to films and television, to very fast-paced and visual storytelling, we don’t want or need unnecessary reinforcement. We’re a modern audience and we want to get to the next feeling, the next idea.
As for senility or magic, I think he was just a little lazy. It’s a messy piece of work. That doesn’t mean there isn’t magic there, and there may be a little senility also, but it is certainly lazy. Whoever Shakespeare was, he could write great structure and great plays, and this isn’t one. Now, don’t get me wrong—I love that! There’s no beauty in perfection! It’s lovely to think, “I’m going to pick up the baton.” That’s how I see it. I see it as a relay race for storytellers: I’m going to take the baton and see what I can do with it.
The final reconciliations were one of the things that I was most proud of in this production, and in terms of the fairy-tale structure, I didn’t find it awkward at all. The metaphor was beautiful. I put everybody to bed at the end of the show and dropped a patchwork banner saying “good night.” What I was really saying was that no matter what troubles you go through and what dark places you go to, you can find a home. It doesn’t mean it’s all going to be okay, it just means there is a home, even if it’s not the home you thought it was going to be. I loved the end. It was very beautiful that all of those disconnected stories came together. That certainly liberated some of the magic that I think Shakespeare created for Cymbeline, we just gave it a little help!
SHAKESPEARE’S CAREER IN THE THEATER
BEGINNINGS
William Shakespeare was an extraordinarily intelligent man who was born and died in an ordinary market town in the English Midlands. He liv
ed an uneventful life in an eventful age. Born in April 1564, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glove maker who was prominent on the town council until he fell into financial difficulties. Young William was educated at the local grammar in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where he gained a thorough grounding in the Latin language, the art of rhetoric, and classical poetry. He married Ann Hathaway and had three children (Susanna, then the twins Hamnet and Judith) before his twenty-first birthday: an exceptionally young age for the period. We do not know how he supported his family in the mid-1580s.
Like many clever country boys, he moved to the city in order to make his way in the world. Like many creative people, he found a career in the entertainment business. Public playhouses and professional full-time acting companies reliant on the market for their income were born in Shakespeare’s childhood. When he arrived in London as a man, sometime in the late 1580s, a new phenomenon was in the making: the actor who is so successful that he becomes a “star.” The word did not exist in its modern sense, but the pattern is recognizable: audiences went to the theater not so much to see a particular show as to witness the comedian Richard Tarlton or the dramatic actor Edward Alleyn.
Shakespeare was an actor before he was a writer. It appears not to have been long before he realized that he was never going to grow into a great comedian like Tarlton or a great tragedian like Alleyn. Instead, he found a role within his company as the man who patched up old plays, breathing new life, new dramatic twists, into tired repertory pieces. He paid close attention to the work of the university-educated dramatists who were writing history plays and tragedies for the public stage in a style more ambitious, sweeping, and poetically grand than anything which had been seen before. But he may also have noted that what his friend and rival Ben Jonson would call “Marlowe’s mighty line” sometimes faltered in the mode of comedy. Going to university, as Christopher Marlowe did, was all well and good for honing the arts of rhetorical elaboration and classical allusion, but it could lead to a loss of the common touch. To stay close to a large segment of the potential audience for public theater, it was necessary to write for clowns as well as kings and to intersperse the flights of poetry with the humor of the tavern, the privy, and the brothel: Shakespeare was the first to establish himself early in his career as an equal master of tragedy, comedy, and history. He realized that theater could be the medium to make the national past available to a wider audience than the elite who could afford to read large history books: his signature early works include not only the classical tragedy Titus Andronicus but also the sequence of English historical plays on the Wars of the Roses.
He also invented a new role for himself, that of in-house company dramatist. Where his peers and predecessors had to sell their plays to the theater managers on a poorly paid piecework basis, Shakespeare took a percentage of the box-office income. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men constituted themselves in 1594 as a joint stock company, with the profits being distributed among the core actors who had invested as sharers. Shakespeare acted himself—he appears in the cast lists of some of Ben Jonson’s plays as well as the list of actors’ names at the beginning of his own collected works—but his principal duty was to write two or three plays a year for the company. By holding shares, he was effectively earning himself a royalty on his work, something no author had ever done before in England. When the Lord Chamberlain’s Men collected their fee for performance at court in the Christmas season of 1594, three of them went along to the Treasurer of the Chamber: not just Richard Burbage the tragedian and Will Kempe the clown, but also Shakespeare the scriptwriter. That was something new.
The next four years were the golden period in Shakespeare’s career, though overshadowed by the death of his only son, Hamnet, aged eleven, in 1596. In his early thirties and in full command of both his poetic and his theatrical medium, he perfected his art of comedy, while also developing his tragic and historical writing in new ways. In 1598, Francis Meres, a Cambridge University graduate with his finger on the pulse of the London literary world, praised Shakespeare for his excellence across the genres:
As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love Labours Lost, his Love Labours Won, his Midsummer Night Dream and his Merchant of Venice: for tragedy his Richard the 2, Richard the 3, Henry the 4, King John, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and Juliet.
For Meres, as for the many writers who praised the “honey-flowing vein” of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, narrative poems written when the theaters were closed due to plague in 1593–94, Shakespeare was marked above all by his linguistic skill, by the gift of turning elegant poetic phrases.
PLAYHOUSES
Elizabethan playhouses were “thrust” or “one-room” theaters. To understand Shakespeare’s original theatrical life, we have to forget about the indoor theater of later times, with its proscenium arch and curtain that would be opened at the beginning and closed at the end of each act. In the proscenium arch theater, stage and auditorium are effectively two separate rooms: the audience looks from one world into another as if through the imaginary “fourth wall” framed by the proscenium. The picture-frame stage, together with the elaborate scenic effects and backdrops beyond it, created the illusion of a self-contained world—especially once nineteenth-century developments in the control of artificial lighting meant that the auditorium could be darkened and the spectators made to focus on the lighted stage. Shakespeare, by contrast, wrote for a bare platform stage with a standing audience gathered around it in a courtyard in full daylight. The audience were always conscious of themselves and their fellow spectators, and they shared the same “room” as the actors. A sense of immediate presence and the creation of rapport with the audience were all-important. The actor could not afford to imagine he was in a closed world, with silent witnesses dutifully observing him from the darkness.
Shakespeare’s theatrical career began at the Rose Theatre in Southwark. The stage was wide and shallow, trapezoid in shape, like a lozenge. This design had a great deal of potential for the theatrical equivalent of cinematic split-screen effects, whereby one group of characters would enter at the door at one end of the tiring-house wall at the back of the stage and another group through the door at the other end, thus creating two rival tableaux. Many of the battle-heavy and faction-filled plays that premiered at the Rose have scenes of just this sort.
At the rear of the Rose stage, there were three capacious exits, each over ten feet wide. Unfortunately, the very limited excavation of a fragmentary portion of the original Globe site, in 1989, revealed nothing about the stage. The first Globe was built in 1599 with similar proportions to those of another theater, the Fortune, albeit that the former was polygonal and looked circular, whereas the latter was rectangular. The building contract for the Fortune survives and allows us to infer that the stage of the Globe was probably substantially wider than it was deep (perhaps forty-three feet wide and twenty-seven feet deep). It may well have been tapered at the front, like that of the Rose.
The capacity of the Globe was said to have been enormous, perhaps in excess of three thousand. It has been conjectured that about eight hundred people may have stood in the yard, with two thousand or more in the three layers of covered galleries. The other “public” playhouses were also of large capacity, whereas the indoor Blackfriars theater that Shakespeare’s company began using in 1608—the former refectory of a monastery—had overall internal dimensions of a mere forty-six by sixty feet. It would have made for a much more intimate theatrical experience and had a much smaller capacity, probably of about six hundred people. Since they paid at least sixpence a head, the Blackfriars attracted a more select or “private” audience. The atmosphere would have been closer to that of an indoor performance before the court in the Whitehall Palace or at Richmond. That Shakespeare always wrote for indoor production at cou
rt as well as outdoor performance in the public theater should make us cautious about inferring, as some scholars have, that the opportunity provided by the intimacy of the Blackfriars led to a significant change toward a “chamber” style in his last plays—which, besides, were performed at both the Globe and the Blackfriars. After the occupation of the Blackfriars a five-act structure seems to have become more important to Shakespeare. That was because of artificial lighting: there were musical interludes between the acts, while the candles were trimmed and replaced. Again, though, something similar must have been necessary for indoor court performances throughout his career.
Front of house there were the “gatherers” who collected the money from audience members: a penny to stand in the open-air yard, another penny for a place in the covered galleries, sixpence for the prominent “lord’s rooms” to the side of the stage. In the indoor “private” theaters, gallants from the audience who fancied making themselves part of the spectacle sat on stools on the edge of the stage itself. Scholars debate as to how widespread this practice was in the public theaters such as the Globe. Once the audience were in place and the money counted, the gatherers were available to be extras onstage. That is one reason why battles and crowd scenes often come later rather than early in Shakespeare’s plays. There was no formal prohibition upon performance by women, and there certainly were women among the gatherers, so it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that female crowd members were played by females.
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