WHAT IS SHAKESPEARE? CHAPTER ONE

In case one wanted to get an idea of what my book is like and what it’s up to, this is how it begins.

What is Shakespeare?

The question in this particular form occurred to me not very long ago. Certainly, we have who is Shakespeare, to the answer of which question there will always be great uncertainty. That might be some pleasure to him were he able to cast his eye about the world as it has come to be since 1623 and see the inadequate attempts to find out who any famous person is. He would see, as we all can, that the Famous Folk, by and large, are light years away from being understood, which makes them pretty much like the people in one’s family, and, of course, your very own self. Understanding others, like self-knowledge, is still not in a rising market. Maybe Shakespeare is lucky. There being so little known about him, he is safe from prying eyes. He will never have to endure being quizzed by some television personality, though, now that I think about it, he might find it oddly entertaining.

There is who. Then there is what, which aims directly at the plays themselves. It is a much better question. What is Shakespeare? Answer that and you are halfway to knowing how to do it.

When we talk about doing Shakespeare, or going to see Shakespeare, or reading Shakespeare, what are we talking about? It’s not the plots of the plays exactly, or exclusively; except for Love’s Labour’s Lost, he essentially got them all from other sources. Nor is it the characters in the plays, though how he chose or presented them tells us something about him. Still, anybody could use the same characters, as Dryden pretty much did in his play about Antony and Cleopatra, All for Love. No, it’s something else.

Shakespeare is what he says, and how he says it. That’s it, really. It’s why he is, and I reckon will always be, the world’s most famous, most read, most loved dramatist. He says the things that we need to hear, and he says them in a way that we cannot forget, ways that make them part of us, part of the world we want to live in. It is true that, if you can hear the words being spoken, you are pretty much able to enjoy even the worst or most outrageous production; and outrageous attempts at Shakespeare are manifestly on the rise. Living, as we do, in the Age of the Director — not the actor — dime a dozen “conceptions,” which tend to draw attention to the director and not the play, abound.

The problem, in all fairness, is not a new one. Henry Irving and Beerbohm Tree, for example, loaded their productions with enough scenery to sink a battleship. It’s what you did. They were countered by William Poel, who, at the end of the nineteenth century, re-introduced the Elizabethan stage, a masterpiece of inventive spatial simplicity. (More about that later.) Do we adorn and “explain” Shakespeare, or do we simply give him room and let him speak for himself?

You see, Shakespeare is essentially an auditory experience. It is a thing to be heard, first, last, and always. It is for that reason that the visual aspect of a Shakespeare play in production demands extraordinary taste, discretion, and an intimate knowledge of the text itself. What, if anything, apart from skillful actors, does Shakespeare need?

I am quick to remark at this point that, in addition to being an actor, I am also a union costume designer. I like, my eyes like, a handsome set and good clothes. That being said, however, I have never seen a production of a Shakespeare play in which, at some point, however briefly, ear and eye were not at war. The ear hears this, the eye sees that, and Shakespeare is the loser.

Always the ear must come first and that, of course, means that Shakespeare is meant for actors. The very best directors of Shakespeare know that. There aren’t many of them, and most of them have been doing it often enough and long enough to understand the primary place of the actor. In my personal experience, Iden Payne, Alan Fletcher, Michael Kahn, Bill Alexander, Ron Daniels, and the late Garland Wright come to mind.

Establishing that what he says is one aspect of what Shakespeare is, consider the second, and certainly the most important aspect, how he says it. That, of course, is poetry. Pause for a moment, and take that in.

Trying to see just what poetry is, how and why it arises from the human heart and mind, what its effect is meant to be, what need it fulfills — this is the most important part of an actor’s education in knowing how to act the plays of Shakespeare. It is the most important and the least noticed.

The job for an actor, what he or she will have to be able to do, is a two-in-one thing, as I indicated at the outset. On the one hand, it has to sound like some of the greatest poetry in the English language; on the other, it has to sound like a human being talking. At the same time. I’ve been at it for sixty years, and every time I pick up one of the plays again, I start all over. It’s got to sound like the poetry that it undoubtedly is, and it’s got to ring true, be honest, in a day-to-day way.

Poetry exists, for most people, in a kind of never-never land. It is either fancy talk engaged in by people who live in ivory towers, who never perspire, who spend their days dreaming alone in a sort of medieval way; or it is something intensely, ferociously even, PERSONAL — and, often, LOUD. Both are seen as being so profoundly intimate to the poet that you can’t really judge either as to quality. Still, I have to feel that, looked at and studied respectfully, the value, the authenticity of a poem can be assessed. Indeed, there are actually only two kinds of poetry. Just as Duke Ellington said there are only two kinds of music, good music and bad music, so it is with poetry: good poetry and bad poetry.

Further, the quality of poetry, like the quality of anything in the arts, exists in the poem, as it does in the music, the painting, the sculpture, the novel, and not in the eye of the beholder, the reader, or the ear of the listener. I am aware that this is a controversial subject; I am simply staking out my position. Let us say a poem has the real music, the real thing. If you hear it you are fortunate, if you do not you are unfortunate. If you call something a poem that isn’t, well — you are wrong.

To be clear however: something written in verse, patterned or free, may be effective, even profoundly effective, without being poetry, but one must not be confused with the other.

It is of pivotal importance to my whole argument here that there is such a thing as True Poetry. It has everything to do with the essential effect of Shakespeare’s plays.

The reason that poetry, true poetry, affects us is that it is more honest language than that to which we are accustomed. In teaching actors, I have often asked this question: Do you believe that, in ordinary terms, in conversation, you are deeply honest? Mostly, when a person hears that question and feels the answer will be respectfully regarded, the answer is, “No.” Being honest isn’t easy. Really, it is a lifetime study, and almost an art form in its own right. Being honest about yourself and what you feel requires thought and study. It also requires a degree of interest on the part of the person to whom you are speaking and that is rare, at best. So, we get by.

But, sometimes, there are moments in which we feel it is incumbent upon us to be true, to be honest, to be sure that the next words out of your mouth are words that you mean, that you can swear by. In those moments, often, words tend to be monosyllabic, with a ring of authenticity about them. Phrasing may be clumsy, but pleasingly original. Poetry is in the offing.