Playtexts and Performance Texts Part 2 Shakespeares Beginnings Snug Have you the lions part written Pray you if it be give it me for I am slow of study Quince You may do it extempore for it is nothing but roaring ID: 681079
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Slide1
Part 1.Shakespeare’s Multiple Texts:Playtexts and Performance Texts Part 2.Shakespeare’s BeginningsSlide2
Snug: Have you the lion’s part written? Pray you, if it be, give it me; for I am slow of study.
Quince: You may do it extempore*, for it is nothing but roaring
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
1.2.62-65
*
extempore
: Latin, literally ‘out of the moment’, off the cuff, improvised, what actors call ‘business’ or ‘performance’Slide3
Multiple Texts 1:The Playtext = the words, the book, what was written, published, transmitted to us, now appearing in many editions
Learn to be diplomatic about the
playtext
and its authority. Demystify the idea of
‘the author’:
cf. the unfixed or unstable text in
Hamlet
and
A Midsummer Night’s
Dream
and the notion of impromptu play in
Henry IV:
Hamlet (to the Player): Can you play
The Murder of
Gonzago
? …
We’ll
ha’t
tomorrow
night. You could for need study a speech of some dozen lines, or sixteen lines, which
I would set down and insert
in’t
, could you not?
2.2.474-477
Starveling: I believe we must leave the killing out, when all is done.
Bottom: Not a whit; I have a device to make all well. Write me a prologue…
3.1.14-16
Early modern playwriting is (always) an act of collaboration that belongs first to the playhouse: Shakespeare the playwright is first Shakespeare the actor writing for a (known) company of actors
Writing for publication: ‘Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies Published according to
the True Original Copies’ = the First Folio, 1623 (published seven years after Shakespeare’ death in 1616).
Comprises 36 plays: 18 never before published; 18 others previously published during Shakespeare’s lifetime in cheap quarto editions. Two plays (
Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen
) now attributed to Shakespeare do not appear in the Folio.
See multiple published versions of some plays: viz.
Hamlet
(the ‘bad’ Quarto 1603; the ‘good’ Quarto 1604/5;
Folio (1623);
Romeo and Juliet; King Lear; Othello
Slide4
Multiple Text 2:The Performance Text = the play that didn’t get written down (except for some few, very few, original stage directions) Caution: original vs. [interpolated] stage
directions
Think:
Hamlet
without the words
The parallel text to the
playtext
that
embodies,
presents and
presents
the words
Reading to recuperate performance
text: learning to read every line of Shakespeare as if
it were
a stage direction.
Until you’ve factored in performance, until you’ve read the performance text that
enacts the
playtext
, you haven’t read ‘the play’.
Elements of performance: costume, properties (‘stuff’), gesture, entrances/exits, spectacle, movement, music/singing, dance/choreography, fight arrangement, ‘above’, ‘below’, ‘’behind’, silence
.
Be alert to:
Yorick’s
skull, Ophelia’s memory flowers, Bottom’s ass’s head, Falstaff’s corpulence,
Hotspur’s map, the (male) body beneath the figure of Helen whom
Mephistophilis
presents ‘passing over’ the stage in
Dr. Faustus
, the mutilation of Lavinia
troping
(for the father) the body of Rome that produces bodies baked in a pie and
cannibalised
(by the mother) at the end.
Cf
:
Enter the
Funerall
of King Henry the Fifth
Enter Ghost
Enter Titus like a Cook
They dance
They fight
Dies
Read the theatre. Signs = Significance
Slide5
Multiple Text 3:Production Text = the play that belongs to subsequent performance;
the cultural text set free to perform a staggering range of
political, aesthetic, commercial work on a global stage
Henry IV
@ RSC in 2015
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
directed by Peter Brook (1970)
Romeo and Juliet
by Franco
Zeffirelli
(1968),
by Baz
Luhrmann (1996)
Titus Andronicus
in the Swan directed by Deborah Warner,
1987 or at
the RST
directed by Blanche McIntyre 2017.
Paapa
Essiedu
as Hamlet 2016
(vs.
Olivier, Gielgud, Jacobi,
Pennington, Howard,
Branagh
, Russell Beale,
Peake
)
Shakespeare Now
Shakespeare as New Writer
Shakespeare Adapted
Shakespeare Translated
Shakespeare on film
Slide6
Play v. Performance Text: A demonstration
[Chorus] Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona where we lay our scene
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-
cross’d
lovers take their life;
Whose
misadventur’d
pietous
overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-
mark’d
love,
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, naught could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage:
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.Slide7
Opening sequence Romeo and Juliet Franco Zeffirelli 1968 Leonard Whiting, OliviaHusey, Michael York, John McHenryBaz Luhrmann 1996 Claire Danes, Leonardo
Di
Caprio
, Harold PerrineauSlide8
Part 2. Shakespeare’s (and Marlowe’s) BeginningsNeil Bartlett (on directing Twelfth Night) ‘The whole play: it’s in the opening line: “If music be the food of love, play on”.’Hamlet:
Bernardo: Who’s there?
Francisco: Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.
Titus:
Saturninus
:
Noble patricians, patrons of my right, Defend the justice of my cause with arms.Dream: Theseus: Now fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour
Draws on apace; four happy days bring in Another moon: but…Henry IV:
King Henry: So shaken as we are, so wan with care,
Find we a time for
frighted
peace to pant…
Tamburlaine:
Chorus
:
From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits
And such conceits as
clownage
keeps in pay … high astounding terms…
Mycetes
: Brother
Cosroe
, I find myself aggrieved,
Yet insufficient to express the same,
For it requires a great and
thund’ring
speech …
Dr
Faustus:
Not marching now in fields of
Trasimene
... / And this the man that in his study sits.
Slide9
Opening scenes:1. Begin before the words: performance text precedes playtext, with ‘Enter…’ (Enter who? Enter how? Enter where?) 2. Set a story in motion: story in words (Shakespeare working as the poet), story in action (Shakespeare working as the playwright).3. Throw images at the spectator:
in the film extracts, the
images
were
visual; but when the play starts talking, the images that assault our senses are verbal, spoken.
4. Rarely start at the narrative beginning of a story (what happened first, what happened before): mostly they tell the story out of sequence, requiring the audience to make sense of things as they patch the story together, accumulatively and / or retrospectively. The order of entrance into the story is crucial: cf.
Hamlet, Dream.
Then: sequence of opening scene: cf.
Dream.
5. Present bodies – but frequently withhold identities. (When do we hear names
?) 6
. Always begin with an event. Something happens. Something spectacular. Or something merely quotidian. An election. A wedding announcement. Two soldiers on sentry duty. A child playing. Then something else happens. INTERRUPTION. Enter a Ghost. A
furious father. A messenger. A Lord. Enter – the past. Interruption changes direction, re-routes the story, opens new matter.
Things escalate. Cf. opening
of
R
omeo and Juliet:
a couple of servants swaggering, chuntering, interrupted by servants from rival household, interrupted by adolescent masters producing a street brawl that has all of Verona rioting, including patriarchs, capped by the appearance of the Prince. Slide10
7. At the beginning, Shakespeare-the-poet introduces a language for the play, specific to this play; a lexicon; the way this play will talk: a particular discourse speaking the concerns of the play, an imaginative system. He lays down imagery like explosives in a minefield that are going to detonate across the rest of the play or like magnets pulling more and more meanings together. Language for Shakespeare is a saturated sign system. See: ‘moon’, ‘eyes’, ‘changed’ in
Dream;
‘king’, ‘father’, ‘figure’, ‘thing’ in
Hamlet;
‘household’, ‘civil’, ‘fatal’, ’star-
cross’d
’ in
R
omeo and Juliet
.
Imagery that releases the concerns of the play; imagery that contains the concerns of the play. Zeffirelli and Luhrmann’s openings: visual anthologies.
8. Writes an acoustic: a sound system. (‘Now fair Hippolyta …’ vs. ‘I’ll pheeze you in faith’). Versions of iambic pentameter; prose.9. Writes a syntax/rhetoric: a way of putting sentences together across lines (cf.
Dream,
‘Now … but’). No two plays talk the same.
-- Imperatives -- Rolling metaphors
-- Interrogatives -- Analogy
--
Performatives
-- Antithesis: binary thinking
-- Enumeration -- Compression
10. Traffics in anachronism: THEN is always NOW. THERE is always HERE.
11. Opening scenes work by deferral: what next?
w
ho next? Cf. late entrances (
Lavinia
, Helena) or non-entrances: where’s Hal? Hamlet?