It was going on four years ago that, casting about for a name for the blog I had decided to start so that I might make the option of engaging with my Doctor Who rants voluntary rather than inescapable, I settled on Jane Shakespeare. ‘Shakespeare’ is, natch, my favourite writer, which seemed appropriate for a blog that was sure to be devoted to vital and pressing literary journalism and not at all discussions of which fictional characters I’d most like to bang, and ‘Jane’ had a pleasantly anonymous feel to it, making it suitable for my sophisticated and mysterious alter ego.
I shall allow you a moment to finish mirthfully wiping your eyes.
‘Jane’ is also, of course, a reference to my favourite novelist and, as such, she has already been made the subject of a celebratory post. Shakespeare, though, not so much. There were my reviews of The Hollow Crown, which remains to this day my post with the highest hit count, teaching me the valuable lesson that if you want traffic to your blog, include pictures of Tom Hiddleston in a sauna (I’d love it if there was just an insatiable hunger for over-enthusiastic dissection of televised Shakespeare but I am, occasionally, a realist). I’ve started Shakespeare-centric posts a couple of times – my top ten characters, the five greatest performances I’ve seen, and so on and so forth. Shakespeare has featured in several other posts. But for one reason or another, having his own has never quite happened. Until now. The man turns 450 this year and by god, I’m going to acknowledge it.
Let’s be clear: much of the 450 celebrations are tourism. Shakespeare the ‘national poet’ is an export, a cartoon guy in a ruff with a bald head and maybe he’s like holding a skull or something because that’s from one of the plays right? No snobbery or denigration is intended here (well, not much) because Stratford as a town basically runs off of Shakespeare tourism, despite the irony that he spent much of his life trying to objectively not be in Stratford. Shakespeare also gets caught up in nationalism debates a lot – when Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (essentially a treatise on the whole notion of Englishness) was in the theatres, one of the most frequent name-drops in reviews was Shakespeare, with the play being received as a kind of mixture of Henry V and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (like, so many feelings about that but the margin being too narrow for my purposes etc etc). Keats has a right old fanboy squee about the “Chief Poet!” and his work: “The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit” (but I can’t stay mad at Keats for long, bless him). It’s natural, in a way – there is no more famous writer in the English language, no other playwright who has their own company, their own theatre, their own place on every syllabus at every age. Shakespeare is inextricably part of the make-up, the DNA of Britain – if you don’t believe me, then Hugh Grant says it in Love Actually too (but frankly I’m quite offended that you believe Hugh Grant over me, especially in Love Actually).
But. But. But. That is not a good enough reason to make such a song and dance about it. Of course it isn’t. Tradition on its own never is. And tradition is not why every single person ever should be acquainted with Shakespeare in some way. Because I do believe that, I really do. The first thing to say here is that I’m not saying it should be compulsory in schools (although I think it already is). Schools, for the most part, make kids hate Shakespeare. And no wonder. I get bored reading it sometimes and he is my very favourite playwright ever. But it should be seen and it should be heard and it should be spoken and it should be talked about. That’s what he wrote it for – entertainment. To make people laugh and cry and throw up in their mouths a little bit (Titus Andronicus). It’s silly enough to make stupid jokes and high school comedy adaptations of (not an insult, 10 Things I Hate About You was perhaps the peak of artistic endeavour in the early 2000s), and it’s serious enough to bring hope and solace to those in need (personal experience applies but also the Robben Island Bible and so many, many other instances). I like arguing, and most Shakespeare plays could be argued about forever. It’s a natural partnership, you might say.
But one of the most common complaints I hear about Shakespeare is that he’s irrelevant. Who cares what a Dead White Guy has to say about stuff four hundred odd years ago? And yes, it bothers me sometimes that as both a feminist and a literary person, my favourite writers are pretty much all of the Dead White Male persuasion (notable exceptions included). I couldn’t say why but early on in my education, Shakespeare, Keats and Austen formed a triumvirate that retains its empire over my heart to this day. One thing they have in common is that they’re all writers who are passionately misunderstood by their most passionate fans.* Allow me to put on my hipster glasses for a moment. Keats is thrillingly romantic but he’s first and foremost Romantic, in a small, angry, dying man kind of way. Austen gives her characters happy endings but I wouldn’t have wanted to sit next to her at a dinner party (actually I totes would, if only because I’d feel more out of the line of fire there than opposite her, and we could bitch behind our fans). Shakespeare...yeah. I say Shakespeare is misunderstood by his fans, because I think to some extent he’s misunderstood by everybody. Misunderstood isn’t even the right word really – ungraspable would be a better adjective, or unknowable, or subversive. Contemporary accounts of the man himself are rare, and those that exist aren’t always reliable, but they all seem to say the same thing: a quiet man, an observer. From his will, we know he wasn’t especially generous – not so much the second best bed furore, but the fact that his bequeathments to the Stratford poor are negligible compared to what other writers of similar financial status left behind. Then there’s also the fact that, as mentioned, he skipped town to London pretty quickly after his shotgun marriage to Anne Hathaway (although again, debate continues over how loving or unloving this marriage was).
From very little evidence and completely unscientific instinct, the picture painted seems to me more writer than man, someone not entirely engaged in the business of living his own life and much more concerned with recording others. But he was a man, and that – I think – is where we go so wrong. Milton, as a young poet, wrote a sonnet about reading Shakespeare and being helplessly paralysed in the wake of it – what would be the point of writing, when you knew you would never be as good? And that was from the guy who wrote Paradise Lost. But Shakespeare was just a man, and he was a lucky one – he lived at a time when theatre was the dominant form of entertainment, and a form of entertainment that was about hearing, about language, which he was, y’know, pretty good at. The vocabulary of English as a whole was rapidly expanding, he lived through the turn of a century and a crisis of succession, not to mention the aftermath of a hundred or so years of religious wrangling, and the end of a dynasty. It’s all so much more complicated than I can ever fully explain, but something shifted during Shakespeare’s lifetime, and he was the right man in the right place at the right time. Jonson famously wrote that he was “not of an age but for all time” – true, but it’s the first bit that we tend to forget about. He was completely of his age, and it was the age that he happened to belong to that allowed him to be ‘of all time’.
All this means – confusingly, as someone who obviously loves Shakespeare a lot – that I think we could stand to knock him off the pedestal a little. Sometimes as a director I get asked why I keep doing Shakespeare plays (of the eleven full length plays I have directed, seven are Shakespeare plays, and that’s not counting workshops) and the answer is always the same: within the Complete Works is every story I could ever want to tell. I believe that it is directors, rather than writers, who are the descendants of storytellers, travelling bards – we don’t make up our own stories, but we take ones that already exist and embellish, alter, bring elements in and out of focus. Basically, if a play has too many stage directions, I go “nope” and get out the Complete Works again because those plays are robust. They withstand a lot of loving dicking about. Age shall not wither them etc. They don’t endure because Shakespeare is some mysterious dude up on a monument, but because they’re low down and dirty plays, quick and living and breathing and painful. Bad Shakespeare happens when people approach with too much reverence – of course, it also happens when people approach without actually having a single clue about the play they’re doing, which is kind of the opposite end of the spectrum. But at least those disasters tend to be fascinating car crashes that you can’t look away from – the greatest sin, born of too much veneration, is to make it boring. You can do kind of anything with these plays. I’m not saying every idea is gold but theoretically, you can.
And to purists who insist that Shakespeare should be performed in tights and ruffs, or have all male casts because ‘original practice’ (yet curiously displaying a casual disregard for ‘original practice’ in, oh, every other area of the production, Propellor, I mean you and your huge amount of Arts Council funding**), to you I say this: he’s been dead for four hundred years. He doesn’t care. In fact, what with the way Renaissance playwrights rewrote each others’ work to keep it up to date, he’d probably just shrug and be all, “Whatevs, forsooth” if you told him you were relocating A Midsummer Night’s Dream to a secondary school and replacing the fairy music with Miley Cyrus.*** And while ‘original practice’ is actually very interesting and can provide hugely valuable insights into the way the plays work (for example, knowing that The Winter’s Tale was written for the Blackfriars indoor theatre tells you a lot about why the pacing of it is so much statelier and more intimate than, say, Henry V which is a Globe play and involves lots of rushing about to cover all the entrances and exits), that doesn’t mean we have to slavishly reproduce those practices for an audience that has changed a lot in the four intervening centuries. The fact is, these plays can and do adapt beautifully because they are about people, and people do not change all that much, whether they are in medieval Verona or 1920s Berlin or present day Afghanistan (also Will was not exactly historically accurate himself, cf chiming clocks in Ancient Rome). Furthermore, it is people who are going to see your play, and you have a duty to share your story with them because selfish theatre that doesn’t care about its audience is just no good to anyone, and I could be doing stuff with your funding.
The exception to all of this is that I am an absolute devotee to understanding iambic pentameter and verse – but Picasso did not jump straight in with the eyes on the sides of heads, he learnt how to draw from life first. It astonishes me the number of Shakespeare productions I see where the director has jumped straight to the concept and ignored the fundamentals of actually speaking the goddamn script – and that, really, is what makes a great production. One of the best I’ve seen was Thea Sharrock’s As You Like It at the Globe. I don’t even like As You Like It (ha). Plus, it was in period dress. But every single moment was clear and golden and the play just swept you along and Rosalind was a sexy butch lesbian type and Orlando looked like a goddamn rock star and Celia and Oliver**** were real, proper characters, and gah, my heart. Verse is also something that I hear a lot of uncertainty about. I won’t lie, it takes some getting used to, and there are rules to it that take some time to learn – but once you do, it unlocks a whole new, extraordinary level of meaning and, from a dramatic point of view, basically tells you how to do the play. Another young director once said to me that she would find Shakespeare too difficult to direct because it was this unbreachable, alien fortress of a thing– I wanted to shout, “No! I’m a fraud! It’s so easy! It’s the easiest thing in the world! The director of every Shakespeare play is Shakespeare! You just have to learn how to listen!” But I did not. But I wish I had. Because you should know that understanding it has absolutely nothing to do with schooling and everything to do with listening and instinct. Anyway.
In the end, the point I wish to make is this. To end where I began, the episode of Doctor Who that has Shakespeare in it describes him as “the most human human”. I can’t really get much closer than that. He is the least Dead, White or Male of any of the DWMs I know and love – his perspective, that quiet, observer’s perspective, is always that of the outsider. His plays are full of people trying to get in, always excluded from something, no matter what their social status. His characters are creatures of want, of desire, and their happiness is predicated on getting that thing – I’m not sure Hamlet is a tragedy, and I’m not sure All’s Well That Ends Well is a comedy (ok, well, it’s definitely not a comedy, but I’m not going to get into why ‘problem play’ is too easy a cop-out now). He takes the part of the dispossessed, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free – there is compassion and sorrow running through and through the veins of Shakespeare, not least in the plays that take place in crappy universes where everything is terrible always (King Lear, Troilus and Cressida). That’s why he’s relevant, that’s why he goes on. Not always, of course, there are areas that are hugely problematic – Coriolanus’ whole “give political power to the poor? That is ridiculous” stance, the minefield that is the gender politics of The Taming of the Shrew*****, the casual racism of The Merchant of Venice’s deceptively awesome heroine Portia, and so on and so forth forever. But that’s part of the deal. That’s the package of being human, and no production will ever make a definitive discovery on any of this.
I want to direct Shakespeare because, as I said, travelling storyteller. There is not just one Hamlet to tell, there are as many Hamlets as there are actors. I have at least three different ways of doing King Lear, and everything I’ve already directed only makes me want to do it again. It will never stop being new to me, which is exciting and beneficently humbling. With other writers I may direct one of their plays and feel it has been exorcised from me – with Shakespeare it’s just a Zen matter of waiting for the wheel to come full circle, and feeling out when the time is right for a particular story in a particular way. I am sceptical of the books and talks and teachers who say, “The thing you need to know about Richard III is...” because if you are a sufficiently good storyteller, I believe that in the end the only manual you need is the text itself. By being you, an individual reading it at your place in your time, it becomes a new play again – perhaps this is true of any good writer, but it is Shakespeare, who finds time for every walk of life and every strain of feeling, who lends himself to it most.
And just to prove that I learn from past experience:
You’re welcome.
*Also in this category: Byron. I’m told that Byron conventions are full of men who think they are Byron, and women who want to go back in time and sleep with Byron, to which I say, ladies, please. Think of the syphilis. Yes, he was a rake and a cad and a brooding, wandering, tortured soul but he was also an absolutely on the ball, incisive and keenly-minded genius and his greatest work is basically a sex tour of Europe, in rhyme.
**I do know Propeller are not in any way purists, and I really enjoy their productions but also I cannot really get on board with the idea of a company being funded to take jobs away from women, especially when there are so few in the first place.
***Not actually being facetious, I would probably enjoy this production a lot.
****Massively helped by Oliver being played by Jamie Parker, who can get it. More Jamie Parker doing Shakespeare, for it is what the people want.
*****I will never stop saying this: it is not a sparky tale of two social misfits playing a sexy sex game, it is a tale of a woman being systematically abused until she gives up her desire to speak her own thoughts, at which point she is rewarded with the opportunity to speak her husband’s thoughts. However, 10 Things I Hate About You will never not be excellent, so maybe let’s all just watch that instead.
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