Stephen Purcell

Shakespeare and audience in practice

Prologue PART I: INTRODUCTION 1. I, Malvolio and its Audiences: A Case Study PART II: IN THEORY 2. Making Sense of the Stage 3. Agency, Community and Modern Theatre Practice PART III: IN PRACTICE 4. Controlling the Audience? 5. Framing the Stage 6. Playing with the Audience 7. Immersion and Embodiment 8. Constructing the Audience PART IV: DEBATE AND PROVOCATION 9. Pocket Henry V: A Collaborative Debate Reading list

“That's not Shakespeare”: Policing the boundaries of “Shakespeare” in reviews

Newspaper reviews will often debate a productions claim to the name “Shakespeare”, generally whenever that production is perceived to have departed too far from Shakespearean authority. This article questions the authority assigned by mainstream theatre reviewers to the Shakespearean text, and examines the role played by these reviewers in negotiating the scope and enforcing the boundaries of contemporary Shakespearean performance. Particular attention is paid to Théâtre de Complicites The Winters Tale (1992), Vesturports Romeo and Juliet (2003) and Kneehigh Theatres Cymbeline (2006).

Editing for Performance or Documenting Performance?: Exploring the Relationship Between Early Modern Text and Clowning

The complexity of the relationship between writing and performance on the early modern stage is particularly evident in its scenes of clowning. A performance tradition that relied upon a combination of scripted and unscripted speech, clowning resists documentation in printed form: indeed, printing turns it into something else entirely. As Richard Preiss has noted in his recent book on early modern clowning,

‘A Play Extempore’: Interpolation, Improvisation, and Unofficial Speech

Thus former US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld somewhat disingenuously (mis)quoted Hamlet in order to lend his equivocation the weight of Shakespeare’s moral and cultural authority. Indeed, it is common practice for writers and speechmakers to resort to Shakespearean quotation as a means of bolstering their arguments; ‘as Shakespeare said’ is second only to biblical quotation as a rhetorical touchstone for affirmations of continuity with traditional moral values. The Complete Works of Shakespeare and the Bible: the two sources guaranteed to top the list of contributors to any good dictionary of quotations;1 the two books which ‘castaways’ on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs are assumed to want with them on their desert island as a matter of course. Shakespeare is cited as scripture just as one might quote the gospel: such adages as ‘The better part of valour is discretion’ (1 Henry IV, 5.4.118–19), ‘Poor and content is rich, and rich enough’ (Othello, 3.3.176), ‘Neither a borrower or a lender be’ (Hamlet, 1.3.75) and ‘to thine own self be true’ (Hamlet, 1.3.78) are examples which might readily spring to mind. Books compiling and sometimes analysing such nuggets of Shakespeare’s ‘wisdom’ are widely available (Peter Dawkins’ Wisdom of Shakespeare series, published in association with Shakespeare’s Globe and with forewords by Mark Rylance, is one which appears to have had a significant effect on practice at the Globe).2

‘It’s like a Shakespeare play!’: Parodic Appropriations of Shakespeare

The practice of adapting, parodying, and otherwise appropriating Shakespeare is so incalculably widespread that this chapter on it must inevitably be selective in the extreme, and confine itself to one very specific aspect of the subject. The two quotations heading the chapter will, I hope, give some indication as to where this focus will lie. Both are extracts from mainstream adaptations of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline staged in Britain in 2007 — by the theatre companies Cheek by Jowl and Kneehigh respectively. Both extracts are largely composed of newly written, non-Shakespearean dialogue (the only exception being the words ‘For me, my ransom’s death’ in the Cheek by Jowl script). It is the difference in attitude displayed by the two towards their shared source which will concern us here. Where Cheek by Jowl’s adaptation does its best to hide its disjunction from Shakespeare’s script with deliberate use of archaic language and pseudo-Shakespearean asides, Kneehigh’s playfully advertises the chasm separating it from its seventeenth-century forebear, making irreverent and mocking use of Shakespeare’s play. In this respect, the attitudes of the adaptations towards their original might run parallel to the model of assimilative and disjunctive anachronisms laid out in Chapter 2.

Shakespeare, Space, and the ‘Popular’

Peter Brook’s seminal pronouncement in the opening lines of The Empty Space has provoked reams of commentary, to which I do not wish to add at any great length. I quote it simply to point out that it reflects a general assumption about theatre space which is more often than not taken for granted: that prior to its inhabitation by a performance, a theatre space may be empty. Try putting Brook’s exercise into practice, however, and one finds it almost impossible to get started; the spaces available are not empty, but littered rehearsal spaces or decorated halls, busy classrooms, or inhospitable fields. Brook’s ‘empty’ space is, crucially, an imaginary one.

Shakespeare’s Popular Audience: Reconstructions and Deconstructions

On Saturday, 25 March 2006, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a documentary entitled Lenny and Will, in which the comedian Lenny Henry explored his own fascination with, and intimidation by, Shakespearean performance, interviewing such theatrical illuminati as Sir Peter Hall, Dame Judi Dench, and Sir Trevor Nunn. Henry wrote a short piece on the broadcast for the same week’s Radio Times; in a neat symbol of the documentary’s characterisation of a clash between highbrow (Shakespearean theatre) and lowbrow (Henry the working-class comic), the article was accompanied by a photograph of a perplexed-looking Henry staring at a bust of Shakespeare. The quotation above is from that article, and I begin this chapter with it because it encapsulates some of the assumptions and aspirations which underpin many of the ‘popular Shakespeares’ considered in this chapter.

Text and Metatext: Shakespeare and Anachronism

I open this chapter with passages from two recent retellings of the Robin Hood legend to illustrate two very different kinds of anachronism, both of which are common in popular narratives, but which have, in many respects, entirely opposite effects.