Item 1: There is No Subtext in Shakespeare

The more you study the words for clues on how to act his plays, the more likely it will be that you might one day be moved to ask yourself, “Is there subtext in Shakespeare?” You may even have marvelous friendly arguments about this subject; the idea that, in the end, substantively, in the plays of William Shakespeare there is no presence of subtext. In speaking about this with your friends you will tussle over just what is the motivation driving Iago, or Edmund the Bastard in King Lear, or Don John the Bastard in Much Ado About Nothing, or Richard III gleefully toppling all of his enemies, even Mistress Page and Mistress Ford conniving to get even with Sir John Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Soon, after so much good-natured sparring, you will probably discover what was getting between you in the first place; it is entirely possible you were arguing over semantics. The more you talk the more it becomes clear that you did not necessarily disagree with your friends; in fact you were actually speaking and agreeing upon the same things. You were saying toe-may-toes while they were saying toe-mah-toes. So, gratefully, you arrive at a definition of the context of what you were proposing, and it becomes possible for you and your friends to finally agree on at least a few points:

1. Shakespeare's characters tell willful lies to other characters.

2. Shakespeare's characters deliberately hold back vital information from other characters knowing full well that to do so will create confusion and perhaps distress in the heart of the hearer.

3. Shakespeare's characters address their fellow characters with ulterior motives meant to bring about harm or joy to the hearer (as the lying plotting friends help Beatrice and Benedick fall in love with one another or Iago duping Rodrigo, Cassio, and Othello).

4. But, at the same time, Shakespeare's characters will tell you in the audience exactly what they are about to do before they do it. At every turn, whether aside, monologue, or soliloquy, they express their true thoughts to you.

I suppose there are some of you who might claim this qualifies as subtext. I say that it qualifies as guile, and what's more, guile that is not hidden or secret, but that which is actively sought out to be shared with someone—and not just you in the audience—at the earliest opportunity. Merriam Webster states that guile is “the use of clever and usually dishonest methods to achieve something.” It is deceitful, it is cunning, it is calculating. But it is not subtext because they do not keep from the audience the fact that they are being dishonest. They do not even keep it from themselves, for even if ostensibly they are speaking directly to the audience they are ruminating out loud when they happen to be alone. However, if you choose to call the above subtext I can't stop you.

On the other hand, it might be that some of you are speaking of subtext as we have come to know it in the American acting tradition: more complex and weighty, a hidden agenda that is implied by a character but not necessarily stated by that character in the dialogue; you might be saying that it must be rooted out of the events of the play because it is believed that somehow, somewhere, it is locked in the heart of the character even though it is never actually spoken by that character!

In this case I insist we are speaking of apples and oranges because we are talking about play structures as different as night and day. Our modern-day subtext is based on what, over time, we have evolved it to mean from the work of Konstantin Stanislavsky—information in a play that is inherently buried in some “other where” (as Shakespeare might call it) than in the text. We had help getting to this notion, of course, with the work of the “well-made play” by Henrik Ibsen, modern drama by Anton Chekhov, naturalism by August Strindberg, and later when it was further realized by Lillian Hellman and Lanford Wilson and many others in contemporary drama. Also don't forget that famed acting teacher Lee Strasberg did his bit with his own deconstruction of Stanislavsky, which led to Strasberg's reimagining of the Russian director's work eventually being called “The Method.” I get all of that. I agree that, in the above examples of how plays have come to be written during the last 400-plus years, this iteration of subtext is alive and well and ripe for the digging.

But, by now certainly, you know that Shakespeare's characters—as well as those created by the playwrights of his time—are written differently. His people say what they mean and they mean what they say. The character may be consciously keeping something from another character or even lying to them, but they do not hold this close to their vest; they tell you that they have just done so and that they will continue to do so and then they tell you why. Nothing is hidden from you. Their motive for doing what they do is spoken to you “in private,” when they are alone on stage or they choose to turn to you in an aside. Shakespeare's characters tell the listeners what they are about to do. In addition to spouting poetry that soared farther above the heights than any other dramatist ever had before him or since him, Shakespeare's plays also, at face value, are stories being told by the actors.

Storytellers today might occasionally get cute by keeping little tidbits of information from their audience as a means of building suspense for some great “surprise ending” to their tales for dramatic effect, but Shakespeare's characters do not do this. His plays are constructed so that the characters can feel deeply and wail at their own tragedy or joy in their happiness at the same time they are telling you what will happen next. Subtext as we theatrical types have come to know it centuries later is different from these plays in no small part because of the production wherewithal Shakespeare had and did not have. I remind you again his plays were performed at two o'clock each afternoon on a wooden stage with a hole in the roof in front of as many as 3000 people. Shakespeare had no newspapers, no radio, no television, no internet, few available books, and no spectator sport more otherwise lofty than bear-baiting or hanging. The one arguable exception was in the case of costumes, regulated by the English Sumptuary Law of 1574 (The Statutes of Revels).¹ Through this law, actors were able to have expensive ornate costumes while at the same time possessing precious few props. In text, not only did a character's desires have to be made clear but also a vivid picture had to be painted of the time of day, the dark of night, the sound of cannons and the thunder of horses' hooves and the height of love and depth of hate and much more. The Elizabethans had for family entertainment stories that had been handed down from legend over generations, and—most important of all—because of this they had reverence for the spoken word. This society must have certainly inspired the term “hear a play,” and going to the theatre was for them what going to movies and rock concerts and sporting events is for us. In telling stories (presenting plays) in the Elizabethan tradition it would have been anathema for a character to hold back from their audience; if it exists, Shakespeare's only “subtext” consisted of that which is hidden from character to character, but even then he lets you in on it.

Now, admittedly, this does have a limit: once his villainous characters have done their deed he will then silence them from speaking directly to the audience for the rest of the play. It may be he did this because his villains needed to become less your confidant and more of a bad guy soon to be dead, so he would no longer allow them to get all chummy by speaking directly to you. Some of the instances he does this is in the case of Richard III, Edmund the Bastard in King Lear, and Iago. After more than two hours' traffic on the stage they suddenly seem to clam up. For the better part of the play these villains establish a nice little folksy relationship with the audience, then suddenly—poof! You are cut off from their private confessions, not long before they are given their just desserts.

Item 2: There is Never a “Fourth Wall”

The “Fourth Wall,” that black abyss into which actors look to open themselves up to the audience on a proscenium stage, is about presentation, establishing a conceit and accepted reality which the acting company wants to keep behind a curtain or at least disguised from the eye of the audience lest the ability to believe in the play would be irreparably damaged. You might say it is about keeping hidden. Shakespeare's plays had no “Fourth Wall” because they were never performed on a proscenium stage in his lifetime, and this had a lot to do with how he wrote and how his plays were presented. But no such desire to hide is present in Shakespearean performance, and you must remember all of this as you attempt his words today; you must consider yourself always on display, always seen even if you cannot see the audience, always visible in body as well as voice, always observed when not even speaking. Film acting—which so many young actors are drawn to today—did not exist and would not have even been a dream. Your presentation must therefore be alive and observed, as nakedly exposed. Every character you play must feel this way and this must infuse their very words. You must accept the notion that you will always be showing “back” to someone, and not just because the stage would have been configured into the shape of a thrust; you must realize that you are always listening, alert, alive, “in the scene,” “in the moment,” and the “back” you turn to them must be active, as well—I am serious—the muscles of your shoulder blades and spine pulsing with your every utterance and discovery as a Shakespearean character. Never forget this as you speak aloud the stories being told by William Shakespeare, even if you are acting on a stage that has a fourth wall.

Item 3: Size is About More than Being Big and Loud

Now, you live in the twenty-first century. You have all the technological, educational, and cultural benefits William Shakespeare did not. You might not get the chance to perform him outdoors in an amphitheater or on the boards of the Globe or even indoors theater at the Blackfriars; you will probably work on a normal proscenium stage or indoor thrust stage or in-the-round black box; you will benefit from indoor lighting, safe from the unreliable elements of rain or snow or cold; you will have electrical stage lighting to aid you as you speak about the dark of night or the bright of day or even the torrent of rain. In the auditorium the lights will go out to help your audience along with the “willing suspension of disbelief” that they are traveling somewhere far away for the next two or three hours. You have all of these things as helpmeets. The one thing necessary to add to your performance will be size, but this size is about more than just being big and loud, and in most cases it won't be about those things at all.

Shakespeare's world and culture demanded that his plays be performed a certain way but it is the genius of his themes and language that catapulted them past the footlights. In other words, yes, if you spoke before a few thousand people who could all see you it would have been necessary to speak loudly and clearly enough for them to hear you—but what made them listen and what engaged them is what Shakespeare chose to infuse into his words, his choices of poetry or prose and his decision to break the rules of both, and his brilliant creation of words and phrases to express himself. Shakespeare's words possess size because of the weight of his themes as well as his genius, and your performance must be driven by those themes. You are not speaking words from a television situation comedy or episodic drama—though many of these are in their own way brilliant and far-reaching. Shakespeare plays are not film scripts; they are theatrical blueprints, and the size required of them, both physical as well as thematic, will work whether the venue is a 2000 seat theater or a 150-seat black box space, because this size is not about being loud—though you sometimes may need to be—it is about being clear and understood by the hearer, and that comes from making his words your own. Whatever the venue, Shakespeare must be heard clearly in order to be understood because the visual clues we gain from movies today are not there—they are drawn in broad strokes by the words. This is another reason why the question of subtext in Shakespeare is not a certain one; the structure of his plays is about telling you a story; how can you visualize his tale if he is willfully keeping something from you? Young actors desirous of being “real” try too often to whisper and mumble text that was never meant to be whispered or mumbled, even at its softest.

Item 4: Play What the Scene is Doing—Not Just What the Words Mean

Sometimes actors work so hard at “making sense” of the Shakespeare text they are working on they forget that the scene must also be about simple human relationships. I have seen this happen in many Shakespeare productions, but one that stands out in my mind is what I witnessed once in a production of Macbeth in Act IV, Scene 3, the long scene between Macduff, Malcolm, and Ross. If you're not careful this scene becomes an exhausting rhetorical debate on how to govern a kingdom—a debate at a podium, mind you; not a human struggle fraught with conflict. In all, 158 lines are spoken, with the very brief entrance and exit of the Doctor, before Ross even enters with what will be bad news; this should be a clue to the actor that a conversation of some considerable import is going on. But what is going on, and what, once the actor understands the meaning of the words, is the scene about? What can we say that the scene is doing? And don't think that I am getting all “subtextually” about it. Listen to the words Shakespeare begins the scene with, spoken by Malcolm:

Let us seek out some desolate shade, and there

Weep our sad bosoms empty.

Take these words literally, for what they mean on their face. Think of what has happened, and it is from the text: Macduff and Malcolm are on the run. Malcolm is running because he thinks he'll be blamed for his father Duncan's murder, and Macduff is running because he's afraid that Macbeth's long knives might be pointed at him. They both are on the run. They do not have the time to stop in a private patch of the countryside for an intellectual conversation; they are desperately making their way toward England, where there are armed forces sympathetic to their cause. They are stopping to weep their “sad bosoms empty.” Actors in rehearsal can ask themselves how many days they have traveled, how many nights they have missed sleep, how many nightmares Malcolm has had about the horrific murder of his father, how many images of abandoned wife and babes have kept Macduff awake. It can be asked, how much water do they have? How much food? Are their horses fresh? Are they on foot? What does Macduff think of Malcolm? Perhaps he blames the kid for the king's death, or maybe he looks down on Malcolm for running away? In the scene it also comes up that Malcolm is a virgin; could he be jealous of Macduff because the older man has had sex before? Does he look down on Macduff for abandoning his beautiful wife and children?

These questions are fair game for actors rehearsing the scene for performance, and they are all rooted in the text. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that the scene wants to be contentious, an argument, always on the brink of a knock-down drag-out fight. Any theatre company “putting on a show” for an audience can rightfully want what is going to be most active for their paying customers. Perhaps the two men are close to drawing weapons—or better yet, have drawn weapons—just as Ross enters. Many words are spoken in the text before Macduff finds out about his family's slaughter; playing the scene should not be a demonstration of how much sense the actors can make of the text; rather, in speaking that text the actors should make it clear how reasonable men are driven to unreasonable actions because of war; and of course I would ask that you substitute “unreasonable” for outrageous. One man is guilt-ridden over being a coward (Macduff) and the younger man (Malcolm) is guilty of being exposed as a mere boy who cannot even make love to a woman, let alone rule a kingdom or mastermind a coup against his own father. During the scene accusations ought to be made, the two of them must fly off the handle; they must come close to saying things to one another that cannot be taken back—all because of the personal turmoil and guilt coursing through them. They do not need to like one another—at least not yet; it is often in the midst of the most spiteful disagreement that men are able to grudgingly respect one another and become friends. Suppose, for the sake of theatricality, Macduff is on the verge of cutting Malcolm's throat but stops short because he finally sees some hope in the young man—and it is then that Ross enters and Macduff is told of the horror visited upon his deserted household?

And even then; after that moment of unspeakable grief, why not have them go after one another again with blood in their eyes? This time because Malcolm has chided Macduff to “Dispute it like a man!” How about that? This kid still wet behind the ears telling Macduff how to grieve for his newly murdered wife and babies? Would not that cause a reasonable man, a warrior, to go after someone with the intent to kill? Ross can be forced to separate them! Then, catching their breath, Macduff can realize that his quarrel is actually with Macbeth and not Malcolm nor Ross. Macduff finally is able to collect himself—his anger as well as tears are able to subside—and he can see clearly that the three of them are actually allies and they must continue on to England, where they can finish raising their army.

Yes, I have just gone through scene choices that a director might use to liven up a slow-moving reading of the scene (cuts can be made, but you can't cut the entire scene). I admit that. But I challenge that the interpretation is inspired by the words and action of the scene. Is not this a much more interesting take on the scene than what it can become when actors approaching Shakespeare's text sometimes fall prey to—making “sense” of the text? The text is still made ample sense of, the words still clear, even more so because the audience is helped to understand what is going on viscerally between these two men.

Use the outrageous situation caused by love the characters have been placed in, and play the even more outrageous words and made-up words the playwright has given you. But remember the meaning of these words is always active, not scholarly. Scholars have made Shakespeare scholarly, not the man himself.

Item 5: Antithesis is Fighting for an Answer by Comparing Opposites

Play the antithesis of the speech. This is how Shakespeare was able to create characters of depth and humanity with the words. By balancing imagery between opposites, hot and cold, white and black, day and night, etc., he was able to present human beings who actually did not have all the answers, who questioned their very existence, who were not certain of what even they themselves held to be absolute truth because there was no absolute truth. When you see Shakespeare make these comparisons in the text, play them extra hard because you can bet the character is asking for an answer out loud to a question that has troubled fallible human beings for all time. Have you ever left someone after yelling at them, saying, “Why did I do that? That's not like me!” We flawed race of people are constantly doing the opposite of what we intend to do, going against what we proclaim ourselves assured of, even being guilty of behaving like we don't believe we are capable of behaving. Shakespeare is constantly comparing opposites, even in joyous frivolous moments, such as when Theseus says of the Pyramus and Thisbe play, “That is hot ice and wondrous strange snow.” He also does this when a character speaks of love and hate in the same sentence. Setting the word against the word to help the audience gain context is perhaps Shakespeare's greatest tool, and it will enrich your performance as well.

Item 6: Don't Report, Make a Discovery!

I am forever astounded that, when I ask a young acting student what he or she wants in the scene, they will say, “To get information.”

What is just as tricky is the Shakespearean speech, usually long, which appears at first glance to be merely about reporting information or providing exposition.

Exposition must not be played like exposition.

The long descriptive speeches—such as Friar Laurence's page-long “I will be brief” final speech from Act V, Scene 3 in Romeo and Juliet—are not about reporting what has happened, even though on the face of it that may be what they are doing. At the end of the friar's long confession he offers up his “old life” to be sacrificed to “severest law.” The friar is not recounting what he witnessed and the part he played in it; he is giving a confession, as for absolution, for sins he committed against God and the state. Such monologues should be active, driven, aggressive battles to win certainty and comfort in the life of the speaker. This is also true of messenger and servant characters, given short shrift by having to wait so long off stage and required to perform yeoman's duty when back on. Of these the best, most challenging example I can think of—and it is from my own distant past stage experience—is Seyton in Macbeth, who must come on stage after a long absence and say to the Scottish king, “The queen, my lord, is dead.” Is he reporting to the king that his wife is dead? Yes. Must it be much more than that? Absolutely.

Item 7: Leave Your Hands Alone

I recently saw a production of Titus Andronicus in which the role of Aaron the Moor was cast with a small man. No problem there; I have seen many performers small in stature deliver performances that were large of size indeed. What was unfortunate was in the costuming Aaron had been saddled with—a cloak that had long sleeves necessary to hold up from sliding down over his hands. In movement this forced the actor, perhaps feeling that he had to try to keep the cuffs from drooping, into constantly bending his elbows with his open palms upward. For me this caused the evil Moor to lose all of his power, defiance, and strength. Humor me on this one. The open, palm-up posture, when done constantly, caused the actor to stoop a lot and at best made Aaron into a conniving trickster behind the scenes; perhaps malevolent, but not the evil, albeit beautiful specimen of a man who has charmed and illicitly impregnated Tamora, Queen of the Goths. “Palms up” presents to us a physicality that is a begging, explaining kind of energy; it is not as strong as simply standing with hands at one's sides, as if to say, “Go ahead; give me your best shot. I can take it and still cut your throat.” It is not as strong as Paul Robeson's Othello pronouncing, “I must be found …”

Item 8: Speak a Soliloquy as if Your Life Depended upon It—Because It Does

A soliloquy is spoken when the character is alone, but it must not be solemn or contemplative, even if the tone of it is solemn and contemplative. The greatest soliloquy of all, of course, is “To be, or not to be.” Hamlet's thinking out loud is a battle—indeed, think of it as a battle!—with the daunting forces we humans must face down here on earth weighed against “The undiscover'd country from whose bourn / No traveller returns.” Yes, it is asking questions about whether or not suicide is a way out of a life fraught with sorrow and strife—and by the end of it the answer is a dubious “No.” But though the decision by speech's end is to choose life, there is little reassurance. You could believe that the actor might well be exhausted by the end of it because he has been through hell struggling to decide, fighting for an answer to a question that is far out of his reach. This is why soliloquies should be spoken outside of you rather than to you. Speaking to yourself has the pitfall of holding back from the audience, the sense of keeping private when the style of the play demands that you do otherwise. Speaking outside of you is open, forthcoming, presentational, engaging the audience in such a way that causes you to in effect beg them for the answer to your problems. The speech can then be active, rather than passive. All Shakespeare must be active, even when a character is just sitting down talking to themselves.

Item 9: Pretty Speeches are About Blood and Guts

Near the end of Act II, Scene 1 of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Oberon, King of Fairies, speaks a monologue to his dutiful servant Puck. The speech is filled with beautiful imagery—“I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, / Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, / Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, / With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine”—but the actor should avoid getting too precious with the language, too fond of the sound of their own melodic voice. Speeches with lovely images naturally must share those images with the audience, but that is only half of the Shakespearean actor's job. Such speeches come about out of need driven by love, either requited or unrequited, and this need must be the driving force that propels the monologue—even if the character is a nonhuman fairy. Before Oberon's pretty speech is over he tells us that he will use the purple flower brought to him by Puck to get even with his unruly wife Titania, seeking to fill her with “hateful fantasies.” This speech, like so much of Shakespeare, is multilayered, is not just about what seems to be on the surface, not just about beauty and not just about love but about so much more, such as anger at his wife for crossing him. Finding this will keep the actor from giving in to a “pretty”—but ultimately boring—set speech.

Item 10: Paint the Picture!

Because Shakespeare's characters tell the story of the play as they are living the story, they philosophize about every state of their lives; birth, life, beauty, and even as they are at the point of death. The best known of these is Jaques, in his “seven ages of man” speech, where he details every single moment of the aging process even to the moment of death when we are “sans everything.” As I have said this great detail is to help the actor build to great heights of despair or joy, but it is more than Shakespeare giving his actors a helping hand at playing emotion. It is also to sufficiently engage the audience so that the play can, as the Chorus in Henry V says, “on your imaginary forces work.” In contemporary theatre Shakespeare's script, in a pinch, can be edited for time (audiences of today have shorter attention spans, being busy with so much more to do than Elizabethan audiences did) because he goes into this great detail and then later repeats himself again and again, just to make certain his paying customers get it. But that is not the only reason for this; he also did it because Elizabethans loved it. Think of yourself around that campfire hearing ghost stories: do you not love to hear every grisly detail, every chilling touch, every gagging moment of the tale, to help you enjoy it better by engaging the mind's eye of your imagination? Here is Claudio, brother to novitiate Isabella in Measure for Measure, describing, in more graphic detail than even Hamlet, what it is to die:

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;

To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;

This sensible warm motion to become

A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit

To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside

In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;

To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,

And blown with restless violence round about

The pendent world; or to be worse than worst

Of those that lawless and incertain thought

Imagine howling: 'tis too horrible!

The weariest and most loathed worldly life

That age, ache, penury and imprisonment

Can lay on nature is a paradise

To what we fear of death.

Though it is gruesome to hear, is it not delicious to hear it?

Item 11: Shakespeare is Too Big for Film

I recently saw a pretty fair TV version of Richard III. The production acquitted itself well, and I did enjoy it. But I was not in for very long before I realized that what I was seeing was not Shakespeare, actually; the cuts to the text were massive—they had to be, certainly—and I was often aware of how the director chose to replace that text with video images and pictures as if to “say” what those glorious, missing words meant (but said better). What I saw was, ultimately, a nice and interesting sticky note of R III, which piqued my interest and my ear sufficiently to go back and read over the full text again. It made me want to see the show on stage; the way, of course, it was written to be done in the first place. I then thought of the question of Shakespeare on film, and while there are some fine productions—Kenneth Branagh's Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, and As You Like It, Ian McKellen's Richard III (adapted from his stage tour I saw years ago at the Brooklyn Academic of Music), Baz Luhrmann's inspired Romeo + Juliet, even Al Pacino's worthy Merchant of Venice—I felt that the scope and length and breadth of a Shakespeare play (a work, like all theatre, so fueled and propelled by first the spoken word and then our imaginative ears to hear that word) is ultimately too big to be captured on celluloid; that film, and all the ways that film can “open up” locations, weather, and even pan up close to see tears of emotion on the actor's cheek, actually limits and tamps down the enormous experience of seeing and hearing his work on the “confined” space of a theatrical stage. How ironic that a medium—film—that ostensibly can take the story to its greatest heights actually shrinks down the experience, and through drastic editing of words in favor of (insufficient) pictures to purportedly replace them, robbing the audience of that precious ability to imagine, from the poetry just spoken to them, what all of Shakespeare's stories look like, without being told by a manufactured picture that cannot possibly match the one they are able to draw in their own minds …

Item 12: All Shakespearean Characters are Philosophers and Poets

Even if speaking the most homespun of prose, all of Shakespeare's characters are, in the end, philosophers and poets. Their language is heightened by soaring images, phrases, and made-up words which they both live by in their daily lives as well as employ when necessary for effect. No matter how genuinely you have been able to make sense of the text so that the words become your “own,” you are still speaking aloud what is meant to take your listener as well as yourself to a great, lofty place (Nick Bottom after he wakes in A Midsummer Night's Dream: “I have had a most rare vision”), so that even the seeming humdrum becomes evidence of a supreme life force greater than yourself. It must also be admitted, as well, that as a Shakespearean character you have indeed been placed in an outrageous situation, and it has been caused by love.