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January Shakespeare on stage: a consideration of the dramatic context by Dr Joana Soliva Issue 8 When students call a Shakespeare play a ‘poem’ or a ‘novel’, they’re not simply making a silly mistake; they’re highlighting a more serious problem caused by studying drama in a classroom setting. Classroom work involves reading the play, discussing the language features, considering interpretations and looking for ways in which the contexts influence the writing and the reception of the text. The text remains a printed text when, in fact, it is the most dynamic form of literature, embodied and physical, powerfully remade in every new space and by every new actor. The physical dimension of plays is sometimes described in stage directions. Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams give detailed and specific instructions about the intended performance of their modern tragedies. Shakespeare, by contrast, gives virtually nothing, making it very difficult for A-level students to consider the dramatic context (the performance context) without reading secondary material. Metatheatrical references Shakespeare himself never seemed to forget about the dramatic context of his plays. His work is peppered with references to the theatrical experience, often as a metaphor for life and reality: All the world’s a stage (As You Like It, II vii) Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. (The Tempest, IV i) Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. (Macbeth, V v) Perhaps this was the inevitable result of being an actor and part of a syndicate which owned shares in a successful playhouse where his company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later called the King’s Men), were exclusively based. Many of his plays were bespoke creations for performance at the Globe theatre, a huge outdoor amphitheatre-style space. When the acting company acquired the Blackfriars Theatre, a smaller indoor space, he wrote in the expectation that his plays would be performed at both these locations, depending on the season. It could be more than this, however, as such metatheatrical references foreground the fictional nature of the audience’s experience and blur the lines between the play and reality. Hamlet, with its extremely self-conscious tragic hero, is full of such moments: I have of late – but wherefore I know not – lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire – why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. (Hamlet, II ii) Many critics feel this description of Hamlet’s feelings could have been acted to refer specifically to the physical features of the Globe theatre, making the audience share directly in the experience and crossing the line between art and reality. So, if Shakespeare and his audience were so keenly aware of the dramatic context, the physical dimension of the plays, how come we mostly ignore it when we’re studying his work? The answer may lie in a general decline in theatregoing in our modern culture. Even when we do attend plays, however, the experience is considerably different from that in Elizabethan and Jacobean times. Task: Consider the genre of tragedy. If Shakespeare blurs the line between the play and reality, what implications does that have for the impact of the tragedy on its audience? The physical space of the theatre At the Globe, plays were usually performed in the afternoon, in full daylight and, ideally, good weather. Night-time scenes were, therefore, dependent on the imagination of the audience. The witches’ scenes in Macbeth, the late-night revelry in Othello, the terrifying night-time visits of Hamlet’s father’s ghost, all these were suggested by the skills of both the actors and the audience. Intense soliloquising by tortured souls was watched with a clear view of a sea of faces on the other side of the jutting ‘apron stage’. Even in the candlelit indoor theatres, the presence of the audience was constantly evident. Not only this, but the audiences weren’t generally as quiet and restrained as modern audiences. The crowds at the outdoor playhouses, of up to 3000 people, might shout out, jeer, cheer, or start talking to each other. Working in these conditions must have been a demanding job and writing to capture the attention of a very diverse audience must have been a challenge. It might be useful to remember the nature of Shakespeare’s original audiences when we’re considering interpretations of the texts. Some of the audience were high-ranking, well-educated and even literary figures of the day, sitting in the tiered seats and in private boxes. Many were the ‘groundlings’ (sometimes known as ‘stinkards’), paying a penny to enter, standing to watch in the ‘pit’ around the stage, illiterate but far from insensitive to the effects of Shakespeare’s language. Men and women of all ages flocked to the theatre. The audience was representative of Shakespeare’s contemporary society, a heterogeneous group who would receive the plays in a broad spectrum of ways. One might argue that Shakespeare exploited this, in making his language syntactically ambiguous and polysemic (‘I am not what I am’). His work resists the single, authoritative interpretation, and the dramatic form furthermore enables him very effectively to conceal his own opinions and attitudes, instead exploring the issues of his plays by means of a number of characters’ perspectives. He is sometimes interpreted as offering radical and transgressive ideas, challenging social norms and the dominant ideologies of his time. If he did this, he had to be careful, as the Master of Revels had the power to censor and even prohibit plays from being acted. There were plenty of people in Shakespeare’s time who attacked the theatres for promoting debauchery and destabilising social rules, not to mention spreading disease and plagues. Task: Consider the tragedy you have studied. How do different characters demonstrate different perspectives on a single issue? Conventions of drama Dramatic form, something we should be paying attention to in addressing Assessment Objective 2, is closely connected with the text's dramatic context. The technique of using soliloquies and asides is a good example – this was a convention of dramatic texts. The audience understood this was a way for them to gain access to the interior experience of a character: • Hamlet reveals his confusion, guilt, self-doubt and agonised paralysis in the face of horror • Othello’s first soliloquy, in Act III, demonstrates the pain of uncertainty • Macbeth’s ‘vaulting ambition’ is clearly implied in his first aside. However, the nature of the apron stage was such that these soliloquies actively involved the audience. They even made the audience accomplices (compare this with the effects achieved by Browning in the poetic form of the dramatic monologue), creating a close relationship between the audience and a character who is increasingly isolated from others in the play: • Macbeth speaks of his bloodthirsty plans and his ruthless desire for power and the audience is drawn to collude with him • Iago, whose soliloquies have drawn the audience towards him from the first act, straddles the fictional boundaries of the play, speaking as if the audience are in Venice and Cyprus and as if they already share his view and condone his actions. In this way, Shakespeare exploits the dramatic context that he knew would exist for his plays, testing the audience’s sympathy for ‘evil’ characters and creating a morally ambiguous world for his audience to explore. Just as the audience recognised and understood the conventions of soliloquies, they also appreciated the aural effects. Shakespeare’s plays are sometimes January described as ‘verse’ and indeed share many features with poetry. Blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) was a convention for dramatic texts, often associated with high-ranking characters, while prose was spoken by lower-class characters. Merely identifying this feature will not gain much reward at A-level. Look, rather, for the effects achieved, especially if Shakespeare ‘breaks the rules’, such as the: • use of dangerous-sounding trochaic rhythms in the witches’ speeches in Macbeth • impassioned outbursts of Othello • riddling talk of Hamlet, descending perhaps into madness. led to the destruction of the entire playhouse in 1613), staged battles and copious amounts of fake blood. His audience were much more sensitive to phonological devices than modern audiences are, especially a reading audience. They would have immediately recognised the connections made by using verbal echoes, the sense of finality or completeness achieved by using rhyming couplets and the implications of wordplay. All actors were male, with the senior actors taking single main parts, lesser actors taking multiple parts, and boys used for female parts. Again, this may make us pause in our interpretations of Shakespeare’s presentation of women such as Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, Ophelia and so on. There is a gender imbalance in the ‘dramatis personae’ of every Shakespeare play, but this must reflect the fact he was writing for his own company. He knew exactly who would be playing every part he created and he knew there were only two or three people to take the female parts. This doesn’t alter the nature of those select characters, of course, and we can still examine the limitations of Desdemona from a feminist perspective if we wish. Task: Choose an important soliloquy from the tragedy you have studied. Write a close analysis of it, considering the different approaches discussed above. Acting styles and challenges The actors working with Shakespeare’s texts were surrounded on all sides by the audience, in some performances, indeed, they were even on the stage itself. These actors might not have attempted realism in the way that modern actors do, but they did use their voices, their postures, gestures and positioning on the stage to convey the action. They worked with minimal scenery and few props, such as swords, letters, crowns, skulls, flowers and so on. In Macbeth, the witches provided a special spectacle, being represented on stage during a time of increasing hysteria about witchcraft (the play was possibly commissioned for James I, the Royal Witch-Hunter). The witches may have flown away at the end of the first scene, using stage machinery, and probably disappeared by means of a trapdoor in the stage in the third scene. For the audience, however, the very presence of the witches might have been unsettling. This fear might have been magnified in Act IV scene i as an incantation is performed, with the danger that this may have become reality. Task: Consider a production of your play that you have seen (either in the theatre or on film). Choose one short scene and consider the choices the director and actors have made. How have the director and actors influenced the audience’s interpretation of the scene? In Othello, the bed which dominates the ending of the play would have been the only large object on the stage, focussing attention on it as a symbolic as well as realistic object. Similarly, the handkerchief would acquire disproportionate significance on a stage stripped of other material distractions. On the other hand, the sheer spectacle of characters such as Othello, played in great finery by the white celebrity actor Richard Burbage, must have distracted the audience somewhat from the weightier issues of the play. Audiences were known to enjoy seeing the costumes worn by the actors as well as the opportunity to view rich members of the audience in their sumptuous attire. Other spectacular elements included the firing of cannons (with rather terrifying results as one stray shot Drawing of the Blackfriars Theatre by J H Farrar January Manipulating the audience Sometimes, it seems that Shakespeare wants his audiences to reflect on their own role in creating the meanings of his plays. Among his repertoire of dramatic devices are plays within plays, dumbshows, masques and countless scenes where characters eavesdrop or spy on other characters: • Iago maliciously engineers a scene between Cassio and Bianca which seals Desdemona’s fate. He watches this scene with Othello and the audience can understand how ‘occular proof’ is really a matter of interpretation and prejudice. • Hamlet produces a dumbshow intended to ‘catch the conscience of the king’, wherein we watch Hamlet watching Claudius, who in turn is watching a reconstruction of his own evil act, the murder of old Hamlet. The audience sees the power of art to reflect and comment on reality, as the King makes a futile attempt to escape the truth. In summary, the theatrical spaces of the Elizabethan and Jacobean times promoted a strong awareness of the plays as artificial and temporary constructs. They also foregrounded the degree to which audiences participated in the creation of meanings. Shakespeare wrote for these conditions, answering a huge demand for entertainment of this kind. He managed brilliantly to entertain, of course, but he also used his work to explore some enduringly thorny issues. The dramatic context particularly prompted a consideration of the relationship between the actors and the audience, and between art and reality. The famous sketch of the Swan Theatre in 1596. Find out more: • It’s astonishing what you will learn from marking out a space like the stage of the original Globe – somewhere in the region of 43 feet by 27 feet – and trying out a few scenes • Visit the reconstructed Globe in London – ideally, attend a play there in summer • Cambridge University hosts a couple of interesting, animated, interactive pages on the Globe at http://aspirations.english.cam.ac.uk/converse/gcse/shakespeare.acds • Aimed at A-level students, the free resources at ‘crossref-it’ contain notes on the staging of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama: http://crossref-it.info/articles/150/Elizabethan-and-Jacobean-theatre-design • Read Andrew Gurr’s The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3rd edition, 1992) Copyright © 2010 AQA and its licensors. All rights reserved. Version 1.0 The Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) is a company limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales (company number 3644723) and a registered charity (registered charity number 1073334). Registered address: AQA, Devas Street, Manchester M15 6EX.