VERONA BEACH: ISSUES IN PRESENTING SHAKESPEARE



Aristotle’s science is inaccurate; although still of significance insofar as it gave rise to the method that enabled it to be superseded.   Aristotle’s Politics, however, can still be studied with profit, while his theory of tragedy is as relevant as anything that has been thought up about the subject since. 

            Another example of the unevenness with which the legacy of the past has come down to us can be seen if – leaving Shakespeare to one side for the moment – we reconsider A Clockwork Orange: both book (1961) and film (1971).

           Here we have a paradox: a work from the past that is set in a time which is still in the future.   A Clockwork Orange is, in fact,  supposedly set in 2018.   Since we, in 2013, are closer to that time than either the 60’s Burgess or the 70’s Kubrick, we are in a better position than they to see how far both of them got it wrong, particularly with electronics.   Let us focus, for a moment, on the film.  Ethnic minority – the term is never mentioned because the concept does not really exist – means ‘Irish’.  2018, but the cars are those of the 1960s.    There are no CDs, no personal computers, no interactive whiteboards: we are shown cassette tapes, typewriters and chalk. There are no speed cameras, no security cameras, no infra-red burglar alarms in wealthy homes and – above all – no mobile phones.  These last two absences have a direct influence on the plot that renders it incredible to modern consciousness. It is inconceivable, by our standards, that Alex would gain entry to the health farm as easily as he does; or that his ruse for entering a house would be his need to use the telephone. 

          If you treat A Clockwork Orange as a serious attempt to predict the future, then it is worthless.  If you treat it as a warning to its own time about how certain trends from the 1950s might develop if they were left unchecked, then the focus is back to the social milieu in which the work emerged.   This applies to those other futurist works Brave New World and 1984, no less than to Orange. In each case, the supposed setting is a red herring. The significant date is when these books were written: for their own age is what they are really about.

          If the two Oranges tell us nothing valuable about 2018, they do tell us a lot about the period in which they were produced: and what that decade did, and did not, feel angst about.  Overwhelmingly, A Clockwork Orange (either genre) is about a) rebellious youth culture (exacerbated perhaps in the later version by the 1968 Paris riots) and b) the Cold War, with the fear that the Russians might win.  Culturally, this might be no bad thing: the Russian-influenced argot in which Alex narrates is not unattractive in its way.  The danger lies – and not in any vulgar nationalistic sense – in the political sphere: the prospect of the western totalitarian state.  A corrupt and brutal police force, political prisoners, Pavlovian conditioning in a westernized form: Burgess dreaded above all else that Skinner’s behaviourist theories might be given their political head.  The identity theft in the book is more terrifying than anything that has actually emerged to date, but it has nothing to do with electronic fraud.  And global warming, global terrorism, Islamic resurgence, mass immigration: these seem not to have been anticipated – at least, they are not touched on –  at all. 

            And  these perceptions from the past – these insights, and these blind spots – are fascinating because they help us to understand with greater clarity the actual future that has occurred for us: some of it happening, perhaps,  precisely because our predecessors didn’t see it coming. 

           But to praise any work of literature purely for its historical interest is to damn it with faint praise.  If it is to live, it must say something about what it means to be human

in any age.   The generation gap, and inadequate parents; the nature of the good society, and the best way of dealing with criminals; forgiveness and revenge, free will, the origin of evil: these are issues that each era needs to define anew for itself; and, in respect of  provoking thought about them, both versions of Orange are as relevant as if they had been  produced yesterday.

 

As Chaucer’s Friar, says, “This is a long preamble to a tale.”  But, hopefully, a preamble rather than a ramble, for I feel that this key duality about literature – of its own time, and for all time –  is pertinent  to the issue of staging Shakespeare.

When the BBC Series began in 1978, the philosophy  – under the influence of co-funders Time-Life – was for traditional interpretations with appropriate Shakespearean period costumes and sets.  That is actually less simple than it initially sounds.  For how traditional do you want to be?  Rush lighting and candles?  The peanut gallery?   The original punctuation and spelling?  It’s a bit like renovating a cottage built before the era of electricity or modern plumbing.  What about the cooker?  Or the light fittings?  Or the toilets?  How much authenticity do you want? 

Most of us would probably say that sympathetic compromise is necessary: both for the house, and for Shakespeare. Most of us would probably feel that Julius Caesar works better if presented in some sort of toga-like attire, rather than in the Elizabethan puffed sleeves, ruffs etc that, as far as we can tell, were worn for the first productions.  Most of us – I know I would – would probably prefer to have female roles played by women rather than boys: even if  that means missing out, in the comedies, on  the extra dimension of a boy playing a girl who is playing a boy.  If you still want that sort of multiple identity, you can get it with Jean Genet

A refinement, as the series progressed, was to source sets and costumes from great paintings of the era in which the play was set; but even that must have been less straightforward than it might seem at first.  How reliable are paintings?  Rembrandt and Rubens, for example, depicted stories from the past with figures dressed in the clothes of the artists’ own day.  And do you need such precision anyway; won’t a general impression suffice?  This is a play, after all, not a documentary about fashion or furniture.  The Shakespeare productions that for me have worked best have usually tended towards the timeless.  Branagh’s Much Ado, for example, seems to me to do the thing beautifully: costumes and setting are neither ancient nor modern, and they blend past and present into a seamless whole.  Besides, deciding the actual era or location of at least some of Shakespeare plays is not that clear cut.

Shakespeare himself is often cavalier about time and place:  With his comedies, he typically takes a plot – usually from Italy – starts off in the original setting, and then moves it, in everything but name, to Elizabethan England.  A Midsummer Night’s Dream may be ostensibly set in “a wood near Athens” and the main characters may hail from ancient Greece, but the sub-plot is set in the English countryside with unmistakably- English vegetation and yokels.  Ditto Dogberry and Verges in Much Ado.   And the difficulty is not confined to the comedies. When Mercutio ridicules new continental fencing fashions in Romeo and Juliet, he is talking as an English gallant, not as an Italian.  Where are we: Verona or London?  And when is Macbeth set?  It’s a medieval story, but the witches are Renaissance: their ability to manipulate nature – science was being born in Shakesepeare’s lifetime – characterises them quite as much as their ability to tell the future.   

On the other hand, you can’t say Shakespeare simply ignores his sources: especially when he is dealing with facts rather than fiction.  His reading of Plutarch and Holinshed is evident in his concern to give the Roman and history plays appropriate contexts and characters; even when he has to make changes for dramatic effect, or when he puts anachronisms like ‘doublet’ and ‘clock’ into Julius Caesar.   Othello is rooted in the reality of the conflict between the Venetian and Ottoman empires.  Without the historical reality of that situation, Othello the depicted character would have no role.   (Othello as representative of an ethnic minority of one is, indisputably, a different matter: but you don’t need the apparatus of the Venetian Republic to explore that issue).

For Elizabethans, classical Greece and Rome must have been sharply distinguished from their own age.  For us, Shakespeare writing in the past about something even further back in the past is like looking through the wrong end of an historical telescope:  for most of us, our understanding of Elizabethan England is almost as blurred as our understanding of Greece and Rome.  The past, with  Shakespeare,  is like the  future with Anthony Burgess.  You do not go to Burgess if you want to know about the Twenty-First Century, but you do go to him if you want to experience the flavour of the 1950s.  You don’t go to Shakespeare to find out about the ancient Romans, but you do go to him to experience how the world looked to the Elizabethans /Jacobeans..   And you go to either of them to find out about the human condition.

 

What I am arguing, simply, is that a work of literature has a dual identity: what it says about its own time, and what it says about being human in any age.  And I would argue that you cannot have the one without the other. 

Some directors of Shakespeare – what I would call the Timeless Themes School – would not agree with me.  In the extreme form of this view, Shakespeare is so universal that you can take any one of his plays, and set it in any place and time you like.  The timeless themes will show forth, and the historical deadweight, so viewed, will simply drop away.   Others arise at the same position by a different route: hatred of the past, and the desire either to rewrite it, or obliterate it altogether, but to somehow retain an unhistorical Shakespeare in the process.

There is a generosity of spirit underlying a lot of this: the wish to make the essence of the work accessible to as large an audience as possible.  The trouble is, Shakespeare isn’t simply one of us: in a lot of ways he, and his time, were different.   And, for as long as you’re going to keep to the original text, the  deadweight – if you insist on killing it rather than letting it co-exist and show you the long road we have travelled since the Renaissance – still hangs on in there and keeps resurfacing like an inconvenient corpse.

Try reversing the process, to test the validity of the general principle.  Let’s set Look Back in Anger in Shakespearean times.  Angry young men in ruffs.  Jimmy Porter in a doublet, ranting about yobs in the back row wrecking the – non-existent – Saturday-night cinema experience for him.  Kitchen-sink drama without the kitchen sink: hot running water not yet having been invented. 

Or try, as some have done, to impose modern sexual attitudes, nudity etc  on Jane Austen.  But Jane Austen’s society was different from ours.  On a purely pragmatic level, sexual behaviour will not be the same in a society in which you have the pill and ready abortion to regulate unwanted pregnancy, as it will be in a society in which, to get the same result, you have to rely on restraint and public opinion.

 Let us return to Shakespeare and the present; or to whatever other age we’ve decided to place him in.  Twelfth Night, for instance, in an Edwardian setting.  Well, it makes a change from Renaissance Illyria.  Yes, Edwardian costume is nice, but it tends to give rise to Edwardian expectations – insofar as we have them – and for those to whom the Edwardian Age is almost as remote as the Elizabethan or the Classical, the new location in time, in all probability, simply confuses things.  As long as you stick to the original wording, the play tells us as much about the Edwardian era as Anthony Burgess does about the technological reality of 2018.  What about Puritanism, for instance?  Puritanism, by Edwardian times, had deteriorated into prudery about sex; that mindset wouldn’t have taken a dinghy onto the Serpentine, never mind crossing the Atlantic.  But Elizabethan Puritanism was bone-crunching stuff: purifying church doctrine; pressing for the abolition of cockfighting and bearbaiting, or of non-biblical Papist religious traditions; dubious – probably – about the potential Catholic concepts inherent in the play’s title; paving the way for the fervour of faith and politics that would lead to victory in civil war.  Why would an Edwardian Fabian complain about bearbaiting, or an Edwardian Sir Toby lament the potential fate of cakes and ale when these were long since gone in any case? Olivia might plausibly detest yellow as a colour, but why would she hate cross-gartering as a fashion?  She’d never have seen it. 

If you really want to show that Shakespearean and Edwardian concerns are the same, then re-write the thing in Edwardian.  Make Olivia detest spotted bow ties, or yellow waistcoats or whatever; turn Malvolio into a butler prissy about nudity, but with a penchant for naughty naughty French photographs at the end of Brighton Pier.  Have Fabian as a libertine fearing a return to Victorian values.  Etc.  Better still, if you really want insight into the Edwardian age why not go direct to the actual literature of the period, and get it straight from the horse’s mouth? 

 

The most successful Shakespeare-in-our-time approach, and the one that has reached the widest audience within the genre, has been Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

I am aware that this film has been a great success, and I personally know people who love it and have been deeply moved by it.  Whether they have all been moved by  the Shakespeare in it is another matter:  what some of them have enjoyed most is a transvestite Mercutio in pink, or Romeo making faces through a fish tank, or the song from the black choirboy when the two young lovers are married.   Verona  Beach, nonetheless,  is a great concept for showing how certain issues in Romeo and Juliet recur in modern times.  Unfortunately, the film keeps unimpeachably to the original text and finds, by default, that a lot of Romeo and Juliet  does not recur.  Times have changed; and if you stick to the original you have to pirouette like Tybalt in a gunfight to get yourself out of the subsequent difficulties.

An acquaintance once complained to Tolkien about the archaic language spoken by Theoden in The Lord of the Rings.  Tolkien immediately and effortlessly transposed a sample speech into modern idiom, and thus illustrated the absurdity: a character who thinks the way Theoden does simply wouldn’t have spoken like that. (Saruman, interestingly enough, speaks in a totally different register and could pass, unmodified,  for a modern politician).

  The reverse problem to that of Theoden occurs when you use archaic language in a modern setting.  I am used to having to suspend disbelief in Shakespeare: that Angelo, for instance, in Measure for Measure could spend a night with Mariana, his former lover, and not realise who she was.   (Apart from any other identifying clues, in his obsession with the supposed Isabella he’d have wanted to get a look at her and would have lit a candle).  Or that a young woman can put on male clothes and instantly become unrecognisable: despite her voice, skin texture, and bulges in the wrong places. I could just about cope with a Prologue in the form of a television newsreader, but I still balk, after repeated viewings to correct myself, at Romeo’s father leaning out of the window of a limousine and spouting off in Elizabethan.  The incongruity between the visual and the verbal in the film simply makes me laugh in the wrong places.  Perhaps I  have no soul.  On the other hand, I love the language of the play, and know a lot of it by heart..  Despite this, or because of it, I’d far rather that Old Montague spoke in modern English, or returned to the Elizabethan era where his words and his attitudes belong.

In one of the Hornblower books, a member of the marine band is facing court martial for refusing to play a particular note.  In fact, there is a misprint in the music, and he has identified it.  Hornblower is tone deaf and wouldn’t notice anyway, and the sergeant is all about obeying orders: right or wrong.  But the boy’s sensitivity to sound is such that he would rather face punishment than compromise himself.  Bits of Verona Beach jar with me in the same way.  I don’t care who ridicules me for it; there are discords between sight and sound in this film with which I can never come to terms.    

Then there are the sheer strategic difficulties you are bound to get when you take the situation of one age and transpose it wholesale into another.  A sword fight allows for suitable preamble, with suitable taunts during the action.. A gunfight doesn’t; you’d be dead before you could get the words out.  So we have extended posturing for the sake of it.  Keep to the original words, and there’s a real problem when your naked weapon is a gun  The film does, actually, get round this ingeniously by turning ‘Sword’ into a manufacturer’s label, and keeps to the stabbing of  Mercutio by having him fall onto broken glass.

Still, get rid of one problem, and another is immediately rearing its ugly historical head.  Why bury Juliet so fast?  Why not stick her body in a freezer; except  she’d wake up probably, before you did so: and assuming that a modern autopsy hadn’t immediately established  that she wasn’t dead in the first place.

Why the big deal about getting a message to Romeo?  Why not ring him on his mobile, even if Shakespeare doesn’t mention it, or at least leave a message on his home answer phone?  It’s as implausible as Alex’s non-mobile-phone forced entry in A Clockwork Orange.  That is why the film has to locate Romeo in some remote caravan park and stay vague about time periods, except it must be before the latest round of modern communications. 

Then there are the cultural problems.  Can Juliet get leave to go to shrift?  Why on earth would she need permission in this day and age: assuming this day and age would know what ‘Shrift’ is in the first place?  Why do the kids need their parents  to decide who they  marry: can’t they work that sort of thing out for themselves?  Why get married anyway?  And, if you do, why bother with a church?  When is this – Shakespeare’s time, or something?  And what’s a modern girl of her age doing with a nurse? 

Belief systems. “Mercutio’s soul is but a little way above our heads.”   Who’s he kidding, with such a literalistic view of a three-decker universe in an era of television screens and Jacuzzis?  Hasn’t he read his Bultmann?    The only thing above their heads would be the actual historical context, or a  police helicopter.   And why is it so bad to be called a villain or a minstrel?  Isn’t one of those something to do with chocolate?

The biggest problem is with Friar Lawrence.  Whenever Romeo and Juliet is supposed to have happened, in Shakespeare’s day it was still legitimate for a friar to mix up medicines.  In Italy, anyway: in England he’d probably have been on the run.  Nowadays, it’s the preserve of pharmaceutical companies: Friar L wouldn’t be allowed to, and if he were he couldn’t afford the research costs.  Or the legal costs when some dissatisfied client sued him.  In Verona Beach, to keep to the spirit of the original, and to retain his association with plants, he’s an implied pot grower and smoker.  That violates the character.  Samuel Butler observed that St Paul does not condemn tobacco: but only because he didn’t know about it.  The original Friar Lawrence, had he known about cannabis, would probably have added it to his opposed kings speech  (or should we say opposed presidents, prime minsters or whatever: there not being that many kings around these days to oppose each other).  Use this plant right and you get the valuable fabric hemp.  Use it wrong and you get… And so on.   

When I said I knew of people who loved the film, they have generally been adults with an awareness of – and often in reaction against – the sort of traditional interpretations envisaged by Time-Life.   A teacher friend of mine showed the film to a group of teenagers of below-average ability – the sort of audience who presumably would have the way paved for them into Shakespeare by an interpretation of this type –  and found the response interesting,  The boys were generally negative:  “ Why they talking like that?”  They’d rather have had Gangs of New York, where the violence was more clear cut, and the language was easier to follow.  The girls liked it, but would rather have had their Di Caprio as he was in Titanic.  Could they see that one next…?

Their response confirmed me in what I’ve suspected all along.  If you want to introduce a willing audience to Shakespeare – an unwilling one won’t respond under any guise – you’re probably best off with something like John Bowen’s 1973 Heil Caesar, which gives an excellent updating without incongruities of language and setting.  Having got a sense of who’s who and what’s what in terms of plot and theme, you can go back, or on, to Julius Caesar for some informed comparison.

 

My intention in this essay has been to dissent from the view that you can divorce Shakespeare’s work from its historical context .  And why do you need to?   The ways in which Shakespeare is different from us are as important – and can be an interesting – as the ways in which he is the same.  Too often, I have found one of those productions – Romeo as a goo gooing alien, or whatever – in which the location in space and/or time bears no relation to the text to be merely patronising in its assumption that I am unable to work out the timeless themes for myself.  The setting has often told me nothing beyond where the director probably spent his or her last holiday.  

“The past is another country: they do things differently there.”  My own theory about literary response is that if literature is to have any value we should expand ourselves to meet the work in question, rather than contract the work to meet us.  An imaginative  encounter with a work from another time or place is like going abroad.  See how another culture does things, and you can have your consciousness enlarged.  But if you want to visit Greece so that you can watch Eastenders, play bingo and eat fish and chips will the experience have any value for you?  You might just as well stay at home. 

Jan Kott wrote the book Shakespeare our Contemporary, but he made Shakespeare into our contemporary or rather, Kott’s, only by turning him into an existentialist.  Kott himself is no longer our strict contemporary; and, who cares about existentialism these days, except as an historical curiosity?  In any case, Kott’s title is only half the picture.   Shakespeare may be our contemporary, but he is also our ancestor.  You are not the same as your parents; although you came from them.  Some of the issues you encounter in growing up are the same as theirs, but they had problems you don’t have, and your brave new world has complexities of which their society knew nothing.

 Let it be with Shakespeare as with our parents.  Let us find the similarities, but let us also, not ignore the differences: and in comparing their experiences with ours, let us come to a deeper understanding of the processes that have made us what we are.