Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard (8 page)

Forever remaining debatable is the influence of the monarchs on Shakespeare’s writing, though, as I’ve said, it seems Elizabeth was influential in the arrival (around 1597) of
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, and, as we’ll see later, it would be hard to see how the ascension of the Scots King James VI to the English throne in 1603 isn’t somehow reflected in
Macbeth
(written around 1605).

It’s thought that some lines from
Hamlet
(around 1601) were removed from an early quarto – either by Shakespeare or the Master of the Revels (who licensed and censored the plays) – to avoid offending Anne of Denmark, James’s queen. The Office of the Master of the Revels’ aim was to keep the monarch amused and not offended, and their mandate was censorship, not suppression. It’s possible to see evidence of the Master of the Revels’ censoring in the manuscript of
Sir Thomas More
, a play thought to have been written in part by Shakespeare.

Of course, Shakespeare’s Richard III is an invention to some extent, just as his Henry V and Macbeth characters are. They’ll have been based on the original kings, but end up as an amalgamation of characters and stories that
Shakespeare would have heard, letting his instincts as a dramatist choose the right bits to make the best heroes and villains.

The side effect of this skilful dramatic manipulation is the power Shakespeare was unwittingly wielding: establishing a great, fictional image who becomes far better-known than the real historical figure. That’s quite some power.

Not only are the characters fascinating, the journeys they go on are equally powerful. In the very first scene of
Titus Andronicus
, the returning general Titus sacrifices the captured Goth Queen’s son, and then, in a fit of anger, kills one of his own sons. Later in the play, his daughter is raped, her hands and tongue cut off. By the end of the first half, all but one of Titus’ sons is killed. He then finds a way to get revenge, in a brilliantly bloody way, culminating in the Goth Queen feasting on a pie, baked by Titus, made of her sons’ flesh and bones. It’s a terrific journey for a character.

Hamlet, probably the most famous of all Shakespeare’s characters, is mourning his father’s death. A ghost appears, claiming to be the spirit of his father, also claiming that Hamlet’s uncle Claudius, who has recently married Hamlet’s mother, murdered him. Should Hamlet believe the ghost and take his revenge? Or, as was thought at the time, could the ghost be the devil in disguise, trying to tempt him to evil?

These are massive, extraordinarily complex characters, and there are hundreds more. For every one of these characters, someone from every different culture in every country in the world brings a fresh interpretation to the part, creating the play anew, because no matter where they are or what Shakespeare’s characters go through, what Shakespeare did with them was to explore what it is to be human.

He tied the head to the heart, not just writing kings or clowns or drunken knights, but thinking, feeling humans, cutting their chests open on stage and sharing with the audience the turmoil, the passion, and the heartache that’s whirling around inside them.

With Shakespeare’s characters, it is always the heart that lights the fire, that sparks the brain, that makes them speak.

It leaves the characters open to endless interpretation, and keeps the plays alive and kicking.

Scene 5

Venice, Verona, Vienna

S
itting in one of Elizabethan London’s many taverns, Shakespeare would have overheard stories of far-off lands while he got drunk. Chatting to sailors and travellers, hearing of Venice, and a bridge called the Rialto where all the trading was done, perhaps got him to thinking that it might be a good setting for a play.

Some think that because there’s no evidence of Shakespeare travelling – yet his plays are set all over Europe – someone else must have written them. It’s much more convincing, some think, that Christopher Marlowe faked his own murder, travelled around the world and sent the plays back, letting ‘Shakespeare’ take the credit for them.

But Shakespeare’s knowledge of geography is famously inaccurate. He refers to places as being close neighbours when in fact they’re nowhere near each other. He writes, not as if he’s visited these distant, great cities, but as if he read about them, or had them described to him.

There’s no talk of canals in
The Merchant of Venice
, but he does mention the Rialto bridge a number of times. Until I visited the city, I had no real idea of exactly how many canals there are. Of course, I knew there were canals
there, but I hadn’t quite appreciated the scale of the place. I saw a map of 17th-century Venice, and the only landmark amid a labyrinth of canals and buildings was the impressively grand Rialto bridge. If there’s one thing you remember, you remember the Rialto.

Imagine Shakespeare, looking for inspiration to write a new play, meeting a traveller in a tavern, and the traveller says: ‘So there’s this beautiful city, canals and little bridges everywhere, but there’s this one bridge called the Rialto, a bit like our London Bridge but not as big, where all the trading is done, and the money-lenders meet there every day …’

He set his plays in
his
concept of Italy, France, Egypt – as well as all over Britain – in places that a great deal of his audience would probably never visit. He could show them worlds they’d never go to.

In some respects, then, painting an accurate picture wasn’t as important as painting a vivid one. An average Elizabethan might not have visited Venice, or Egypt, but they might have heard of the Rialto, the pyramids and the River Nile, and have fixed ideas of what they’d be like if they did see them.

Shakespeare grew up in Warwickshire, very near the Forest of Arden, yet happily, in
As You Like It
, he has one of his characters savaged by a lion in the forest. Lions in England? He knew there weren’t such things there, but
Warwickshire was a few days’ horse-ride from London. Stretch the truth a little to make the story a lot more exciting …

Shakespeare wasn’t trying to write a documentary with perfect images of these places, he was writing studies of the heart and soul; and using his and his audience’s ideas of them as backdrops.

They could visit these places in their mind while watching his plays. His writing and their imagination took them there. First class.

Scene 6

The mind of a 21st-century fellow

To be, or not to be – that is the question …

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players …

A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse.

E
ven someone who claims not to know anything about Shakespeare has probably heard at least one of these quotes. They’re a few of the most famous lines Shakespeare wrote. They stick with you when you hear them, and they do that for a couple of very good reasons.

They’re written in a type of poetry which has the same rhythm as natural English speech (I’ll deal with this particular type of poetry in detail later). A consequence of writing in this rhythm is that it’s easy to remember – a particularly useful thing for busy actors with little or no rehearsal time.

They’re also pretty darned cool quotes. The ideas that Shakespeare conveyed within this tight framework of poetry are
huge
. Someone once said Shakespeare wrote every thought that has ever been thunk. Thought. I don’t
know if that’s categorically true, but all too often I’ve known people try to put into words a moment or a sentiment from life and then discover that Shakespeare got there first and expressed the same thought more succinctly and articulately. His writing spoke to queens and it spoke to commoners, and, staggeringly, it still speaks to us some 400 years later.

But then some things don’t change. Every day, people find themselves questioning their own mortality, their place in the world in relation to everyone else, finding themselves in situations where in that moment they would give up everything they own for something they don’t have.
To be, or not to be … All the world’s a stage … A horse, a horse
…

Shakespeare endures. I’ve seen a Brazilian production of
Romeo and Juliet
that made me sob, a Slovakian production of
The Merry Wives of Windsor
that had me rolling in the aisles, and a Japanese
Pericles
that was one of the most heartbreaking pieces of theatre I’ve ever seen, despite knowing no Portuguese, Slovakian or Japanese.

The American actor Orson Welles once said: ‘Shakespeare speaks to everyone.’ His plays are set all over the world, and yet most could be set anywhere, in any country. He doesn’t just write about what it is to be English, he writes about what it is to be human, and that opens his writing up to the world.

There are parts of Shakespeare that we’re beginning to
lose touch with, that we have to work at: certain aspects of the language (which we’ll look at in Act 3) and some of the cultural references – the context – need a little getting to grips with.

Looking at these things, and taking ourselves out of the mindset of the 21st century, will help us understand (perhaps even, dare I say it, laugh at) some of those 400-yearold jokes …

Scene 7

Walford, home of the God of Love

S
hakespeare’s inventiveness (remember the 1,700 new words he coined), his ability to play with language and his poetic skill are some of the greatest innovations the English language has ever seen. But that doesn’t get round the fact that many people struggle with his writing.

So here’s the thing: if Shakespeare found himself practically forced to write to earn a living, and the stage, the setting – everything – helped him create such a vividly dramatic world, why did he write in what many people now think of as an ‘awkward and incomprehensible’ way?
O for a muse of fire
and whatnot?

Many people think they talked like that in Elizabethan England on a day-to-day basis, and to be honest, for a while I thought they did too. I was really rather surprised (and a little disappointed) to find that although the way people talk in Shakespeare’s plays was
similar
to how Elizabethans spoke, it would have been rare for your average Elizabethan to speak in such a flowery way.

So if we find Shakespeare’s language a bit unusual, and
the audience that went to see his plays would have found it a bit unfamiliar too, why on earth
did
he write like that?

The answer is surprisingly straightforward: by heightening his language he made it more dramatic. It’s too easy to forget that his language is not of the book, but of the theatre and of the stage …

Back on the stage in the Elizabethan theatre, watching Elizabethan actors acting out situations we’d never live in, looking wonderful, speaking in this slightly unusual way – and everything so different from ‘us’. Would they ever speak like us?

Well maybe, because sometimes in all the madness we need to hear something reassuringly familiar, to let us know Everything Is Okay. And, it must be remembered, this is supposed to be entertaining, a story is being told, so common speech will help everyone pick up the plot if they get lost.