Part 1. Shakespeare’s Multiple Texts: - PowerPoint Presentation

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?