Act One
SHAKSPER YOUR BFF1
Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em.
(Twelfth Night)
Who He Was, What He Did, and What That Means for Us Actors
Given how much he has been lauded, studied, criticized, and analyzed over the centuries it might be argued that knowing as little as we do about the man named William Shakespeare is, well, outrageous. It may even be just as fantastic when you learn that one of the things that we have been able to document about him is that his surname, during and after his lifetime, was spelled some 80 different ways, ranging from “Shappere” to “Shaxberd.”
What we seem to be reasonably sure of is that he was born to John Shakespeare and Mary Arden and was baptized at Holy Trinity Church on April 26, 1564 in Stratford-on-Avon, England. April 23 is the day accepted as his birthday and this is the day we celebrate. We do know that in 1583 at the age of 18 he quickly married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway and his first child, Susanna, was born six months later. The twins Hamnet and Judith (1585), named after two of Shakespeare's friends, followed. Sadly, Hamnet died in 1596. One of the things that we don't know is what happened to young Will from the years 1583 to 1592, often referred to as the “Lost Years,” though he did seem to have gotten busy writing in 1593 with the publication of the epic poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. He spent most of his working life in London while his family remained in Stratford, which has led to speculation that his marriage was not happy, but he did support them long distance and visited them from time to time, at least once a year. Otherwise there are no surviving letters or records, by either of them or by people who would have known them, to fully indicate what the couple's relationship was like. By 1598 he was at work in earnest with the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later renamed the King's Men in favor of King James I after Queen Elizabeth's death). We cannot be absolutely certain what his first play was, but scholars, using historical events alluded to in the plays, records of performances, possible publication dates, and when the plays finally appeared first in print, suggest that it may have been Henry VI, Part 2, probably written between 1589 and 1590 and perhaps first performed at the Rose Theatre in London. By the time the company built the famous Globe Theatre in 1599 the young man who was eventually dubbed the “Bard of Avon” was well on his way. The Globe burned to the ground in 1613 but was rebuilt in 1614. Shakespeare appears to have retired a wealthy landowner to his home called New Place in Stratford, and lived there until his death in 1616.
Today we pretty much accept that William Shakespeare wrote the plays for which he is given credit. Over the centuries of course there have been rampant theories that in fact he did not write them, the argument being that one man of such relatively humble grammar school education who never attended university could not possibly have had such grasp of the human condition, let alone language (even though part of his primary schooling would have included Latin grammar). A wide variety of people have been proposed as the true writer of the plays, including Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, rival Christopher Marlowe (who died in a tavern brawl in 1593), Edward de Vere the Earl of Oxford, Roger Manners the 5th Earl of Rutland, the Countess of Pembroke Mary Sidney Herbert, and even—believe it or not—Queen Elizabeth I, and this is not the full list.
For myself I don't really care if he wrote them or not. I am simply grateful that these toweringly transcendent plays, which had to be culled together seven years after Shakespeare's death by his friends John Hemminge and Henry Condell for inclusion into the First Folio, survive and exist for us to enjoy today. That is all that I care about.
I assure you that this section is not intended to make a Shakespeare scholar of you; college libraries and now the internet are chock full of massive tomes on the life and work of William Shakespeare for you to peruse if you so desire. In fact my own hunch is that even the Bard himself, who seems to have never overseen publication of his own plays in his lifetime, wouldn't spend his time doing that himself. What we are about here is getting you on your feet as quickly as possible to start acting him. But toward that end, a bit of context and information can be instructive. It might help you even more to accept the possibility that acting Shakespeare is out of the ordinary, is fantastic, and is, well, outrageous …
Shakespeare's Theatre
To act Shakespeare it is useful if you study how theatre was done in Shakespeare's day. You do this for clues on how the times might have influenced the way he wrote and how that would have affected the way his actors interpreted what he wrote. You do not do this so that you can do Shakespeare “exactly as he would have done it”; that would be impossible. For one thing the theatre venues of today dwarf those available to Shakespeare in size, scope, variety, and technology. Theatrical performance in his time was vastly different, one of the big differences being—and you know this already—that the great women's roles, Beatrice, Rosalind, Juliet, Lady Macbeth, et al.—were played by young men and pre-pubescent boys. So, going in you realize that full replication is not what you are after. But you can trust that in this history you will unearth tidbits that will inform what he wrote, and this insight will inform your performance as well, so that you can at least approach the spirit of what he was trying to do.
So you knuckle down, and you start digging.
The Elizabethan Stage
How about the stage on which you would actually be performing? Well, a theater such as the Globe would be in a hexagonally shaped, three-story building with a great hole in the roof (the “Wooden O” spoken of by the Chorus in Henry V). Inside there would be seating for as many as two thousand and perhaps even three thousand people. Along the sides would be tiered galleries and balconies where the rich and the powerful would sit, paying nearly two pennies for this privilege. There would also be seating on the floor before the stage, but space immediately in front of the stage, up close, called the pit, was where the poor would stand and view the play for the price of a single penny (approximately 10 percent of a day laborer's pay). They would stand on the ground close to the stage edge, so they would come to be called, of course, “groundlings,” as well as “penny stinkers,” because of poor personal hygiene associated with their low social status. The stage itself, some 5 feet high, would jut forward in nearly a three-quarter thrust and the actors would make entrances through curtained doors to the left, center, and right (known as the “discovery place”). These doors led to the tiring house backstage where the actors could change costume. We can only estimate but the Globe stage dimensions might have ranged from 20 feet wide by 15 feet deep to 45 feet to 30 feet, either way a vast space for actors to traverse. There would be a trap door in the floor center stage and above the stage rose a balcony supported on pillars which would also have a trap. In Figure 1 you can see a 1596 drawing of a performance in progress at the Swan Theatre, which will give you an idea of how the Globe was configured.
Figure 1 The Swan Theatre, circa 1596. Arnoldus Buchelius (1565–1641), after a drawing of Johannes de Witt (1566–1622).
This type of stage would be your “setting,” no matter what kind of play you were performing. Today we can boast lavish theatrical scenery that can be flown in from intricate fly systems, changing the scene as many times as a play requires, but not in Shakespeare's time. His bare stage would have to represent everywhere his players had to travel, from the Forest of Arden to a league outside of Athens to the countryside in Scotland or England or Agincourt, and more. It would also signify the senate of Julius Caesar and the ominous Bohemian desert where Antigonus met his fate at the hands of a bear in The Winter's Tale.
There were no playbills or programs as we know them now, but leaflets might be handed out to announce the performance that day. The company might also hoist a flag high atop the theater to make the announcement as well, with the flag's color indicating what type of play it was going to be: black for tragedy, white for comedy, and red for history. A trumpet would sound to alert everyone that the performance was about to begin. Inside the theater placards would be placed at the side of the stage to introduce a scene. If the scene called for furniture, chairs, benches, or beds might be carried on here and there but this would be the only visible stage furniture the audience would be able to see with their eyes during the performance, and sometimes in hasty exits even these pieces might be just left behind on the stage as the next scene was going on. To help the spectators further “see it,” Shakespeare naturally would describe his settings in detail in the text: how it should look and smell and even how the wind would blow for Lear or the sea storm rage to shipwreck Viola in Twelfth Night or Prospero's foes in The Tempest.
The plays would have been performed on this bare stage in the afternoon during the summer months, possibly two o'clock, making indoor lighting, which they did not have anyway, unnecessary. This was also referred to as “universal lighting,” which allowed the actors to see the audience as well as the audience to see the actors, the genesis of the presentational, Elizabethan style of acting so suited to Shakespeare's plays. Indoor lighting by candle was reserved for the eventual indoor buildings during the winter. The audience would be situated above you, in front of you, and on both sides of you. The actors had to speak up to them and down to them and on both sides to them, and of course there was no front curtain. This made it necessary for all of the scenes in Shakespeare's plays to end with the actors simply walking off or being carried off if the characters had been mortally injured or otherwise slain. Also, because of the large deep stage Shakespeare's actors played on, great energy was required to move about quickly from one side of the stage to the other so that you could present the play to as many people as possible. Actors might even have occasion to enter from the aisles, having to elbow their way past the unruly clientele to get back up onto the stage; there was no need to pretend that the audience “wasn't there.” You would never be hiding from the audience the fact that everyone in the galleries and on the ground was there to see a play, witnessing performers as they quickly “strutted their hour” upon those boards.
Shakespeare's Audience
Shakespeare's audience included the poor and the illiterate as well as the rich and the powerful. The poor viewed the plays from the ground. Much farther back, higher up in galleries, sat the very rich, privileged, and powerful. The exception to this was Queen Elizabeth, who could not be seen to be mingling among commoners; the Lord Chamberlain's Men came to perform for her at Greenwich and Whitehall, and later the King's Men played in front of King James I at Hampton Court. Imagine if your performances could expect the president of the United States to be in attendance. Huddled in that same public audience would be a cross-section of the entire population, more than half of whom would have not been able to read or write. For entertainment fare, Elizabethans would have been accustomed to attending such spectacles as public beheadings, cock-fighting and bear-baiting (this last was a particular favorite of Queen Elizabeth). They would have been used to making constant noise and commotion during the course of the show, pushing and shoving during the play, and would have freely tossed objects at the actors on stage (the term “egg on your face” comes to mind, as it has been suggested that unruly playgoers might have thrown them, among other things, at actors to express their displeasure with a performance). Sometimes a special admission price would have allowed wealthy patrons to sit on the very edge of the stage itself, and because they were often there to be seen as well as see the play distraction for the audience and actors alike was caused. This would demand that actors speak ever more clearly, directly to them, for the audience had no written reference to refer to. Thus it becomes that the playing of Shakespeare is earthy and gritty, not just aesthetic; you are not in a parlor/salon of the French Restoration pronouncing witty poetic rhymes for amusement as you play badminton among a few private friends. For Shakespeare's audience, considering that the most horrific events of the day could be looked on as routine pastime, this increased the appetite for more “realistic” depictions of carnage in the more violent plays of his canon (such as Titus Andronicus, which was popular for this very reason), leading to the use of such things as pig's blood and entrails, sheep's lungs, heart, and liver, all to help make the grisly moments more “believable.” (Of course this desire for such shocking realism has remained very much a part of live theatre throughout the centuries, a twentieth-century example being the David Rabe play Streamers, in which an actor wore a blood-pack vest underneath his shirt so that the audience could see blood spurt from his wounds as a soldier stabbed him on stage.) This made it necessary to perform Shakespeare's plays with (almost literally) the very blood and guts of life, even while speaking words fraught with the beauty and universality no writer had ever infused into them before.
Going to the theater was as much of a sporting event to the Elizabethans as UFC fighting, WWE Wresting, and the National Football League is to us in the New Millennium. Afford Shakespeare's text the weight it rightly deserves, to be sure, but remember that you are also telling a story to mass onlookers as varied in social strata as our own vast teeming cities. Suppose, for instance, that of a night in the Metropolitan Opera House at the Lincoln Center in New York City you could spy both the homeless as well as the rich, right alongside each other? Both of them viewing well-known stories handed down from legend and popular culture for generations, as homespun and down to earth as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or The Three Little Pigs.
The Actor's Task
If that may be, then all is well. Come, sit down, every mother's son, and rehearse your parts. Pyramus, you begin: when you have spoken your speech, enter into that brake: and so everyone according to his cue.
(Peter Quince, A Midsummer Night's Dream)
As an actor with a theatrical troupe of the day you would have probably gotten up at dawn, had a paltry breakfast consisting of perhaps porridge and cheese (think of coffee and a bagel in our time), and then you would rush to the Globe. If in fact you were a member of one of the theatre troupes licensed by sponsorship at the time (such as the Lord Chamberlain's Men, for example, patronized by the Lord Chamberlain of Queen Elizabeth), you would have been very lucky. Otherwise you would have had to scrounge from hand to mouth by performing in countryside taverns, inns, or on the back of wagon-wheel stages of the time, while generally keeping yourself scarce lest you were caught without papers by the officials, who looked down upon actors as vagrants and ne'er-do-wells. But as a “part player” with a company, you could have expected to bring in a daily wage of about a shilling a day. This was not as much as the main player wage of two shillings a day, but it was pay. Eventually, if you became famous and in demand—such as Richard Burbage, Will Kempe, Edward Alleyn, et al.—you might have become a stakeholder (business partner) in the Globe and this would have made you wealthy indeed.
Figure 2Will Kempe (right), from the cover of Nine Daie's Wonder, circa 1600.
At the Globe there would not have been a stage manager in the sense that we have come to know them. Instead there would have been a theater manager, often called a prompter, who would have had all of the “cue” scripts in his possession after they had been approved by the Master of Revels (a court official with the power to choose and censor plays for performance). This prompter would have been charged with handing you your “part.” Before the performance you would also read over the platt (perhaps a version of the word plot), a piece of paper nailed to the wall backstage listing the order of scenes, entrances and exits, dances and fights during the performance (our call board). Listed here you would also find out whether or not you would be called upon to rise up from the trap in the stage floor below to signify Beelzebub, or Hecate, or the gravedigger, or if you would have to lower yourself from the trap in the balcony above the stage in order to play God or an angel, or Ariel, or Puck. The entire society of people who made theatre happen in Shakespeare's time understood this and embraced it as the way plays were performed. Think of it: as an actor in the company all you had to be concerned with was getting your lines down and saying them out loud when your cue came. Imagine that!
All Women's Roles Played by Boys
In Shakespeare's time the women's parts were of course played by young boys and men. You know this already. There are varying reasons for this, much of the thought generally being that the theatre profession was just too lascivious and immoral a vocation for women of good character to participate in—even though women did apparently appear in masques and pageants of the time. Women did not finally act on the English stage until after Charles II reopened London theaters with the Restoration of 1660. The first documented performance was by Margaret Hughes (1630–1719), playing the role of Desdemona in Othello. But before that, the roles went to boys who were apprenticed to the acting troupe and provided with room, board, and an allowance. These “boy players” would be taken under the wing of elder actors in the company to be trained and most of them grew to male roles as their voices changed. Though the Elizabethan audience was fond of plot twists that entailed disguise, the actor-changing-costume-quickly side of me can't help but theorize that these twists might have been employed by Shakespeare out of a desire to give a bit of relief to his female-playing actors by establishing the amazing conceit of young men playing women who disguise themselves as men. We see this in his plays As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Twelfth Night, and Cymbeline. But no matter how well some of these young men were able to pretend to be women—and there were a few who became quite famous and adept at it, one being Alexander Cooke (died 1613), famously thought to have created many of Shakespeare's heroines—what you as an actor can take from this fact is that the performance style of the day, beyond culture and social mores of the time, first last and always, was meant to be non-realistic. This is no small consideration in the acting of Shakespeare's plays, even though women's roles are now played by women and even though Shakespeare himself would not have categorized his work as realistic or non-realistic (realism as a genre did not become part of dramatic literature until the nineteenth century). Shakespeare simply wrote for the people of his time in the form that dramatists employed at the time. There were unfortunate hazards to boys playing the women's roles, however. The white make-up used to portray women was lead-based and poisonous, causing many of the young men to contract skin disease and some to even die of lead poisoning. But just as much as the audience did, even actors themselves had to make the leap of faith to accept the stage convention of males as females, and this recognition further brings home the nature of the material you are working on. This conceit includes the fact that you are telling a story by speaking poetry: a reality “heightened” by necessity to help your acting reach the kind of heights required to be seen and understood in the vast open theater houses for which Shakespeare wrote.
Scrolls, No Scripts!
A theatre company such as the King's Men or Lord Chamberlain's Men might produce as many as 11 plays in two weeks' time. This was in an attempt to make more money by turning over plays as rapidly as possible and beating other companies to the punch for the paying audience. As such, there was very little time for rehearsal. In some extreme cases actors might not have gotten their part until the play was already in progress, and some did not even get scripts at all—their few lines were whispered to them by a prompter backstage just before they were to say them. This came to be called “cue acting,” which eventually gave way to cue “scripting,” in which the actor is only given their own lines.
Today we call them sides, the term we use for musical scores and scripts rented out by such publishers as Music Theatre International, the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, and Tams-Witmark, but in Shakespeare's day they would have been called scrolls—small, rolled-up sheets of parchment paper attached to a stick of wood on which his actors would have been distributed their parts. (This practice we trace to the origin of actors referring to their parts as “roles.”) Today publishers of musical scores and librettos divvy them out in these small portions to protect intellectual property and copyright. In Shakespeare's time such laws did not exist; upon completion of his play Shakespeare (as all Elizabethan playwrights) would have sold his script to the owner of the theatre troupe. Bits and pieces of popular scripts were routinely stolen, recopied and recycled, then remounted under another author's name. (Some brazen souls even wrote Shakespeare's name on their stolen play-scraps to pass themselves off as him; this in turn may account for the many different spellings of his last name.) Therefore the company manager could better keep tabs on owning his property—Hamlet, let us say—if the number of “cue” script copies was kept to the absolute minimum. For that matter it was very expensive to reproduce copies of plays in Shakespeare's time. William Caxton introduced the printing press to England in 1476, but the process was still painstaking and slow even a hundred years later because the type was set using small letters in block form that could get mislaid or even run out of supply. This might also be one of the reasons it was so time-consuming and maddening when Shakespeare's colleagues got together to put all of his plays into publication in the First Folio, and what accounts for the thousands of errors, misspellings, and punctuation confusion among all of the editions over the centuries. (Although I suppose this might argue even more evidence of the greatness of Shakespeare's plays. Their universality and beauty was still able to survive, even with the mistakes of well-intentioned editors who survived him!)
But when you think about it, why would it be necessary to have a full copy of the text anyway? You were not going to read over the entire play later to study it for historical or literary value. You would not be going over it to try to divine the theme or the spine of the piece, nor would you be trying to discover the super-objective of your character or your objective in each individual scene. Any obstacles that might be in your character's way would be self-evident in the words you were reading, and those same words would even be telling you how to speak the lines.
As an actor what you would be doing, then, at this first hasty reading, would be trying as quickly as possible to just memorize your part. This makes it clearer than ever that Shakespeare's plays were written to be performed, not studied or analyzed. Study and analysis came long after he was gone!
So each actor was handed a scroll that contained only their role, consisting of the last two or three words spoken by the previous character before their first line of dialogue. This is how your entire part would have been laid out, and large or small, short or long, this scroll would tell you what and how to say the words you had been given; they would tell you where you were, who you were, what circumstances you had been placed in, and exactly what you were feeling at the moment. Handy, don't you think? This would enable the play to unfold right before your eyes, just as it would before the audience.
Below is my admittedly humble attempt to replicate a possible cue script. You are playing Oberon:
Enter, from one side, OBERON, with his train; from the other, TITANIA, with hers.
OBERON
Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.
TITANIA
__________________________ bed and company.
OBERON
Tarry, rash wanton: am not I thy lord?
TITANIA
___________________________ joy and prosperity.
OBERON
How canst thou thus for shame, Titania,
Glance at my credit with Hippolyta,
Knowing I know thy love to Theseus?
Didst thou not lead him through the glimmering night
From Perigenia, whom he ravished?
And make him with fair AEgle break his faith,
With Ariadne and Antiopa?
TITANIA
___________________________________ parents and original.
OBERON
Do you amend it then; it lies in you:
Why should Titania cross her Oberon?
I do but beg a little changeling boy,
To be my henchman.
TITANIA
________________________________ part with him.
OBERON
How long within this wood intend you stay?
TITANIA
_________________________________ spare your haunts.
OBERON
Give me that boy, and I will go with thee.
TITANIA
_________________________________ I longer stay.
Exit TITANIA with her train.
Next is an example of the same scene, playing Titania:
Enter, from one side, OBERON, with his train; from the other, TITANIA, with hers.
OBERON
___________________________________ moonlight, proud
Titania.
TITANIA
What, jealous Oberon! Fairies, skip hence:
I have forsworn his bed and company.
OBERON
___________________________________ I thy lord?
TITANIA
Then I must be thy lady: but I know
When thou hast stolen away from fairy land,
And in the shape of Corin sat all day,
Playing on pipes of corn and versing love
To amorous Phillida. Why art thou here,
Come from the farthest Steppe of India?
But that, forsooth, the bouncing Amazon,
Your buskin'd mistress and your warrior love,
To Theseus must be wedded, and you come
To give their bed joy and prosperity.
OBERON
_____________________________ Ariadne and Antiopa?
TITANIA
These are the forgeries of jealousy:
And never, since the middle summer's spring,
Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead,
By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
Or in the beached margent of the sea,
To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,
But with thy brawls thou hast disturb'd our sport.
Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which falling in the land
Have every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents:
The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard;
The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;
The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green
For lack of tread are undistinguishable:
The human mortals want their winter here;
No night is now with hymn or carol blest:
Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound:
And thorough this distemperature we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Far in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set: the spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which:
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original.
OBERON
________________________________ be my henchman.
TITANIA
Set your heart at rest:
The fairy land buys not the child of me.
His mother was a votaress of my order:
And, in the spiced Indian air, by night,
Full often hath she gossip'd by my side,
And sat with me on Neptune's yellow sands,
Marking the embarked traders on the flood,
When we have laugh'd to see the sails conceive
And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind;
Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait
Following,—her womb then rich with my young squire,—
Would imitate, and sail upon the land,
To fetch me trifles, and return again,
As from a voyage, rich with merchandise.
But she, being mortal, of that boy did die;
And for her sake do I rear up her boy,
And for her sake I will not part with him.
OBERON
_______________________________ intend you stay?
TITANIA
Perchance till after Theseus' wedding-day.
If you will patiently dance in our round
And see our moonlight revels, go with us;
If not, shun me, and I will spare your haunts.
OBERON
_____________________________________ go with thee.
TITANIA
Not for thy fairy kingdom. Fairies, away!
We shall chide downright, if I longer stay.
Exit TITANIA with her train.
When playing a role, just think of how truly alive and energized your performance could become; suppose you truly had no idea of what the other character was going to say until they said it? Suppose you had to hang upon their every word, listening intently, either from the wings or waiting on stage as they spoke, waiting for those last three words to cue you? Being forced to play the scene this way will certainly compel you to listen with hypersensitivity; you will have to because you do not know how long the speech will last before you speak. Sometimes inexperienced actors “drop out” if they do not have many (or any) lines in a scene in which they must remain on stage while other characters are speaking; and admittedly it can be a challenge—as well as energy-draining—to keep listening, to stay in the scene. Working with a script such as this can certainly help with this challenge. Does not this almost compare to being in the midst of a Meisner exercise, genuinely listening and acting only when the moment demands it, using material produced long before Sanford Meisner2 was even born? No longer will you be listening for just a “cue” alone, you will be genuinely hearing a conversation for the first time. This is also why actors were tasked to memorize their words as quickly as possible, for a performance might have happened that very afternoon. Further—and this is the point—scripts laid out this way makes analysis of the words, incomplete anyway because you don't have a complete script, folly. Shakespeare has already infused the meaning into the poetic meter (we'll talk more about this later). All you had to do was say it.
Now to acting on a thrust stage. Because of being surrounded by spectators on three sides, you will not be playing to the kind of “fourth wall” box-set configuration as you would play to in a proscenium theater. This reality is a good acting note even if you are performing on a stage that has a “fourth” wall; the sensorial understanding that someone is always watching you, particularly from behind, fosters in the mind of the actor the vital theatrical convention of sharing the play with the audience. In the theatre for which Shakespeare wrote you are telling a story as well as living a story, and this will further demand that you play the house, which will mean delivering the story to each and every person. Think of the Boy or Girl Scouts sitting around a campfire telling ghost stories. They desire to build suspense in the hearts of their young listeners as they look into the fire-lit eyes of amazed Scouts around them, checking to see if they are being drawn into the tale, trying to paint a picture for everyone listening so that when the fateful moment in the story comes they might jump out of their seats. On a much grander scale, Shakespeare's plays are trying to do the same thing. Even as Titus Andronicus is sinking into madness bred out of despair, he is recounting his every feeling and thought directly to the audience. Shakespeare's plays are stories being told very much like radio dramas were before the advent of television. His audience knew they were going to hear a play every bit as much as see a play. Your vocal instrument would have had to be sturdy in an attempt to make sure the audience—especially since they could get so unruly—could hear and understand you, but also because your desire to tell that story would have raised the required energy level even more.
Again: everything the audience had to know to enjoy the play—to hear the play—would have been placed in the mouths of actors speaking directly to them. This cannot be said often enough to the modern-day actor struggling to make sense of Shakespearean text. The way you make sense of it is to get up on your feet and speak it aloud (oops, I said it again), as if performing for more than a thousand people during an afternoon at two o'clock. The two o'clock hour is also instructive; it would have been at this time of day that you were supposed to believe that soldiers on the watch during the dead of night were frightened by a ghost in the opening scene of Hamlet. How would the audience be able to accept that it was so dark? Because Shakespeare engaged their imagination with the words. His words would have never been more vital during an afternoon hour when every play was at the mercy of the elements, whether blinding sun or torrential rain streaming through the open roof. What Samuel Taylor Coleridge would later call “the willing suspension of disbelief” just might have begun with Shakespeare's words.
Shaksper's “Outrageous” Plays
The great dramatic works that have stood the test of time involve plots that on their face can be thought outrageous in at least some way. There I go, harping on this outrageous thing again. But think about it: Sophocles of course started it all, setting the bar very high with Oedipus Rex, in which the hero learns that he has killed his father and married his mother. Outrageous, don't you think? This continues in our great dramatic literature today; from two hobos seemingly waiting for a friend who never appears in Waiting for Godot, to a down-trodden salesman named Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman who faces tragedy because he had the “phony dream” that all it took to make it big in American society was to be “well liked.” Arguably it can even be found when Felix Unger moves in with Oscar Madison in Neil Simon's The Odd Couple and Nellie Forbush struggles to overcome racism for love of Emile De Becque in South Pacific.
Taking stories from legend and mythology that came before him, William Shakespeare fashioned a body of work that speaks to this outrageous situation caused by love for all time, and of course he infused this into his delightful comedies as well. Here, in what is generally accepted to be the order of their completion and the categories in which they have been ascribed, are Shakespeare's plays and a listing of just how unconventional his stories can get. For an example, how's this: Shakespeare wrote 13 comedies3, and only one of them takes place in England!
I do not provide these synopses to let you off the hook from reading the plays—rather, I hope that discovering something of what happens in them will make you want to read them even more, and, better yet, pick up each text and start speaking the words aloud. The following plot listings can never replace what you will learn once you start reading the greatest playwright the world has ever known. This includes when he wasn't writing at his best, or, even, when he had help …
One other quick mention: six of these works I refer to as “problem plays.” Don't let it worry you. Over the centuries a few scholarly folks have had questions when in their view some of the plots did not get wrapped up as tidily as others. English critic Frederick Samuel Boas chose three of them in 1896: All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida. Three others, The Winter's Tale, Timon of Athens, and The Merchant of Venice, were added to the list years later. Suffice it to say that for an actor's purposes, a “problem play” is simply going to be when a comedy doesn't seem to end all that happily and a question of marriage or social justice is not as clear by play's end as you might think it would be. I assure you it won't interfere with your acting choices one bit. My guess is that these questions might even add a little extra juice to your search for the fantastic, the unexpected, and the out of the ordinary—that is to say, for the outrageous.
The Comedies
1589
THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
Two sets of twins, one set rich and privileged (Antipholus of Ephesus and Antipholus of Syracuse) and the other set poor and brought up to serve them (Dromio of Ephesus and Dromio of Syracuse), are paired together and separated at birth. After much confusion and mistaken identity in which Ephesus's wife mistakes Syracuse as her husband and Syracuse woos Ephesus's wife's sister (are you not getting confused already?), the adult Dromios are at last introduced to one another and the Antipholi are reunited with their father and mother (who had become a nun), just in time to save the life of the father, sentenced to death because he is a Syracusan merchant who broke the law by entering the city of Ephesus. You are of course treated to a happy ending.
1593:
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW
Baptista Minola of Padua must marry off his eldest daughter before his youngest can be wed. Bianca, the youngest, is wooed by three suitors: Hortensio, Gremio, and Lucentio (who disguises himself as a tutor so that he can be close enough to Bianca to pursue her in private). Lucentio's manservant Tranio disguises himself as his master to thwart the other two suitors. Petruchio of Verona, with an eye on the very large dowry, woos the elder Katherina (called Kate the “Curst”) by killing her with “kindness” (which consists of sleep deprivation, starvation, and what amounts to what today we might consider mental cruelty), eventually winning her over. By play's end, though, the story suggests to us that it might actually be the (seemingly) demure baby sister Bianca who will ultimately give her husband the most trouble by being a “hellcat,” not Katherina. Having been “tamed” and speaking of course for women of the sixteenth century, in the final scene Kate delivers a long diatribe in which she orders women to be submissive to their husbands. Admittedly, this speech can sometimes be problematic for contemporary actresses even to this day. Perhaps that is why this moment is so often played to the audience with a wink and a nod.
THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA
Valentine confesses to his friend Proteus that he and Silvia plan to elope, but Proteus has secretly fallen in love with Silvia. Julia, Proteus's former love, leaves Verona for Milan in disguise as a boy named Sebastian, trying to find Proteus. Proteus sends his pageboy Sebastian (Julia) with a ring to Silvia in exchange for a picture of herself in further proof of his love. Silvia seeks out Proteus in Milan and is captured by outlaws; Proteus rescues her; he and Valentine quarrel and are reconciled. Julia, who has followed, misunderstands their reconciliation and faints; Proteus sees the ring he gave her and as soon as her true identity is revealed his love for her is returned. Valentine is reunited with Julia and Proteus with Silvia and to conclude this confusing fantastic plot there is a Shakespearean double wedding.
LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST
King Ferdinand and his three best buddies swear a vow to devote themselves to three years of strict scholarship and study, during which time they will not have anything to do with women. As it happens the Princess of France appears with her three best maidens, to discuss matters of state with the king. Berowne, one of the king's friends, falls in love with Rosaline, one of the Princess's ladies, and secretly sends her a letter. At the same time his three brethren including the king have all been smitten by the Princess's other maidens and realize how futile it was to eschew the company of women. At a masked ball they disguise themselves as Russians as a joke but wind up wooing the wrong women. All is revealed happily until news is received of the death of the Princess's father, the King of France. The Princess and her ladies must refuse marriage to their beloved men until a year of mourning for the departed king has passed.
1595:
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM
Two sets of lovers flee to the woods outside of Athens, one to escape the law and the other to pursue them. At the same time in that very forest a group of “rude mechanicals” are rehearsing a play to honor Duke Theseus on his wedding to Queen Hippolyta. Along the way both lovers and mechanicals are set upon by the mischievous fairy Puck (a.k.a. Robin Goodfellow), servant to Oberon, king of the fairies. Puck charms the young lovers into falling in love with each other, transforms Nick Bottom, the leader of the mechanicals, into an ass (donkey, and play on the word “Bottom,” get it?) just in time for the Fairy Queen Titania to fall in love with him at first sight (as Oberon, out of vengeance because she has denied him a changeling child, has devised). However, all is made magically well by the by play's end, and one of the funniest comic interludes in the history of theatre—the play-within-the-play Pyramus and Thisbe—delights both actors and audience alike. A famous theme is found in the line “The course of true love never did run smooth.”
1596
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
A persecuted Jewish money lender seeks revenge upon a businessman who owes him money by proposing to cut out his heart, earning a “pound of flesh” for the debt. The day is saved, however, when the rich maiden Portia (who is betrothed to the debtor's best friend) and her lady in waiting, both fantastically dressed as men, show up in court to plead the case for the debtor. Shylock is defeated and forced to become a Christian. Last of the original problem plays, the question of whether or not this play is fundamentally anti-Semitic rages to this day, though this notion is contradicted by the fact that the “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech is one of the most moving pleas for religious tolerance in Shakespeare.
1598
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
Two witty acquaintances, Benedick and Beatrice, renowned for trading sarcastic and biting barbs at one another, are tricked by friends into believing that they are actually in love with each other. They then save the marriage of Claudio and Hero by convincing the young groom his bride-to-be is dead (out of grief over being falsely accused of adultery, which Claudio was tricked into believing by the conniving Don John, bastard brother of Don Pedro, Prince of Aragon). Claudio is told that his false accusation can be sponged if he marries her “twin”—the very same young virgin Hero whom he had cast aside earlier in the play. All ends happily, of course, and there is another Shakespearean double wedding. The “ass” Constable of the Watch Dogberry (perhaps originally played by Will Kempe) is another comedic gem introduced by William Shakespeare.
1599
TWELFTH NIGHT
Viola, a high-born young lady—who happens to have a twin brother—is shipwrecked in Illyria, believing her brother lost at sea. She dresses up as a boy and begins work for Duke Orsino, whom she falls in love with. Thinking Viola is a good young male servant he sends her to woo local beauty Olivia on his behalf. Olivia has been in mourning for her father's death but the young “man” (the shipwrecked beauty Viola in disguise) wins her heart. As it happens, Viola's twin brother Sebastian appears in Illyria, and, since he is (as an actual man) the spitting image of his disguised sister, much confusion ensues over the young woman and her brother, but all problems are solved with the young woman matched to her duke and her twin brother with the mourning maiden. The puritan, stuck-up Malvolio, servant to Olivia, is yet another great Shakespearean comic creation.
AS YOU LIKE IT
To escape death at the hands of her evil uncle, a young maiden named Rosalind dresses as a boy and flees to the woods of Arden with her lifelong friend and companion Celia, herself in disguise. It so happens Rosalind runs into the strapping young man Orlando whom she fell in love with back at court, who himself is fleeing death at the hands of his evil brother Oliver. Along the way the young disguised woman is pursued by Phebe, a local lovesick country girl, but everybody ends up with their rightful mate once her true identity is revealed and her best friend is smitten and betrothed to Orlando's previously evil brother Oliver, who has turned over a new leaf. You can imagine that a double wedding is in the offing. The melancholy Jaques speaks the “seven ages of man” speech, rightfully one of the most lauded in all of Shakespeare. And Rosalind poses this famous question: “Why then, can one desire too much of a good thing?”
THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR
It is believed that Queen Elizabeth convinced Shakespeare to write this play in order to bring back Falstaff after killing him off in Henry V. This totally fluffy romp involves the massively fat Sir John wooing two women of the town behind their husbands' backs. The two merry wives Mistress Ford and Mistress Page actually are wise to the rotund knight's tricks and exert their joyous vengeance upon him for the entire play, in one instance whisking him out of the house away from the wildly jealous Master Ford in a laundry basket that gets dumped into the Thames. By the end all is forgiven, of course, and everyone enjoys a cup of sack together.
1601
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA
Achilles is preventing the Greek army from battle with the Trojans because he refuses to fight and will only listen to his friend, Patroclus. The Priestess Cassandra prophesies destruction from war with the Greeks but is ignored. Troilus is no longer interested in war, having met and sworn his love to Cressida, as her father joins the Greek side. Pandarus had arranged for the two of them to meet and they spend the night together, vowing eternal faithfulness. Hector is set to take on any Greek in man-to-man combat and “brainless” Ajax is chosen but the eventual battle is inconclusive. Against her will, Cressida is sent by her father back to the Greek camp, where she is wooed by Diomedes. Thinking that she will never see Troilus again, she returns Diomedes' affections by bestowing Troilus's own love tokens upon Diomedes. Certain that he has lost Cressida's love, Troilus returns to fight against the Greeks, his brother Hector is slain in battle by Achilles' soldiers, and Troilus laments the loss of the woman to whom he had sworn everlasting love, Cressida. On Boas's list Troilus is the first of the problem plays.
1602
ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL
Helena is a young maiden of the lower class who happens to possess power to heal the sick. She also has fallen in love with the soldier Bertram, who will have nothing to do with her. Helena heals the ailing King of France and, because the king has promised her whatever she wishes for doing so, grants her the hand of Bertram in marriage. Bertram is forced to obey his king and marries her, but out of spite he then goes off to war before their marriage can be consummated. After much machination Helena is brought to Bertram's bed in disguise as the prostitute he thinks he is sleeping with. Their union is consummated and when the ruse is revealed at play's end, inexplicably, Bertram pledges love for Helena, whom he has shunned for the previous five acts. Number one on Boas's list. Talk about a “problem” play!
1604
MEASURE FOR MEASURE
Isabella is bent upon being a nun. Angelo has been handed the rule of the realm by Duke Vincentio while he leaves the country on business. Strict laws prevent sex before marriage; as it happens, Isabella's brother is guilty of violating this law and is sentenced to death. However, Angelo, in power, has the authority to pardon him, so Isabella goes to Angelo to plead for her brother's life. What she does not know is that Angelo is a secret, lust-filled cad himself, and he will only grant Isabella's brother clemency if she agrees to have sex with him. She refuses, and tries to reconcile her brother to impending death. Duke Angelo, all this time, has been secretly suspicious that Angelo is not as pious as he has claimed, and the duke has dressed himself up as a monk to keep an eye on the blackguard Angelo. Claudio does not die, of course; he is given pardon and will be married to the young lady he had relations with. With a twist at the end of the play that makes one's head spin, the duke reveals himself and then turns around and proposes marriage to Isabella—remember she was so devoted to God that she was willing to condemn her own brother to death. Will she agree to marry the duke? Shakespeare has given her no answer in words at the end of the play. Some might consider this a “problem.”
The Histories
1590
HENRY VI, PART 2
The kingdom of England is in chaos, with warring factions vying for power and position. The king's arranged marriage to Margaret provides no dowry, the Earls of Warwick and Salisbury are convinced that Richard Plantagenet (father to the eventual King Richard III) has a rightful claim to the English throne, and the worthy Duke of Gloucester's wife Eleanor is arrested as a traitor and then banished after being duped into trying to get a witch to summon demons. Richard raises an army against King Henry; Richard's forces win victory and King Henry flees. Then the plot really thickens.
HENRY VI, PART 3
Richard Plantagenet is sitting on King Henry's throne, supported by the Earl of Warwick. The king begs for the throne back, vowing to bequeath the kingship to Richard after his death. Margaret, Queen to King Henry, raises an army when she hears of this. York's sons Edward and the future Richard the Third insist their father assume the throne and fight. They lose and Edward's head is set on a pike at the gates of York. The sons continue to fight and eventually prevail, and Edward of York is crowned King Edward IV; the deposed King Henry is sent to the Tower of London. More plotting, scheming, and arranged marriage ensues, leading to King Henry being returned to the throne, then deposed again by Edward and tossed back into the Tower, where he is eventually murdered by Richard of Gloucester. This confusing trilogy concludes, setting in motion the plot of the play Richard the III.
1591
HENRY VI, PART 1
This play begins the War of the Roses trilogy with the choosing of red or white roses by the warring houses of Lancaster or York to identify each side. We are introduced to Richard, Duke of York (the future Richard III), and a highly Anglicized (one-sided) portrayal of Joan of Arc (called “La Pucelle” in the play) and the kingdom of England changes hands through war and strife without a resolution to this first part. If you try to figure out why Henry VI, Part 1 appeared after the first two parts it will make you dizzy; just accept that the first two came, were successful, and then finally Part 1 was offered up as a prequel. Is your head spinning at this?
1592
RICHARD III
The hunchbacked, deformed Duke of Gloucester plots to kill all of his enemies—including his relatives—in order to become king of England. He woos and wins the hand of Lady Anne, even though it was he who killed her father (King Henry VI) and her husband (Edward the elder Prince of Wales), delivering one of the most fantastical proclamations of love in all of Shakespeare, at the very foot of Edward's coffin. Others who meet death at the hands of Richard are his own brother George, Duke of Clarence, the young Edward, Prince of Wales, and Richard, Duke of York (boys whom he had killed in the Tower of London), Lords Rivers, Grey, Hastings, and Buckingham (who serves him loyally until Richard turns on him). You might already know his most famous speech: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”
1595
RICHARD II
King Richard II banishes both Henry Bolingbroke (the future King Henry IV) and Duke of Norfolk to settle a dispute between them. John of Gaunt (Richard's uncle and Bolingbroke's father) dies and King Richard takes his lands. An army is raised against him and the returned Bolingbroke takes him back from Wales to London, where Bolingbroke usurps the crown and sends Richard to the Tower of London. Bolingbroke becomes king amid great strife and turmoil, leading him to cry out loud for escape from the imprisoned Richard. Thinking they are acting on the king's orders, soldiers go to the Tower and kill the deposed King Richard, cursing the reign of Henry IV and setting in motion the series of plays that follow.
1596
KING JOHN
John shakily assumes the throne after the death of his brother Richard the Lionheart. King Phillip of France insists the crown be given to John's nephew, Arthur. King John tries to smooth things over by an arranged marriage but is excommunicated by the Pope. After a battle Arthur is captured by the king's army. King John tries to have Arthur murdered. The young boy Arthur convinces his would-be murderer to spare his life but the child falls to his death trying to escape. Bloody war between the Dauphin and English forces ensues with no resolution. King John, perhaps poisoned, dies.
1597
HENRY IV, PART 1
Henry IV's troubled reign as King of England continues but the real plot of this play is: 1) the reconciliation (in my mind not unlike Biff Loman to Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman) between King Henry and his wayward prodigal son Prince Hal; and 2) the introduction of one of Shakespeare's most beloved characters, Sir John Falstaff. War is declared on the king by forces led by Henry Percy and his son, called Hotspur. Shakespeare continues his expert fast-and-loose play with history and contrives to set up a kind of “high noon”-type battle between the two disparate sons, Hal and Hotspur, with Hal winning permanent glory by killing the assumed better fighter Hotspur on the field of battle at Shrewsbury. (In history, however, it is not actually known how Hotspur died, and in any event Hotspur was actually 23 years older in age than Prince Hal and two years older than King Henry IV himself.) But the audience's love of country embodied by heroic Prince Hal and love of the scheming, lying, fat, and cowardly Sir John Falstaff is also established forever.
HENRY IV, PART 2
It is three years after the events of Henry IV, Part 1. Prince Hal seems to have reverted back to his old carousing with Sir John Falstaff, at the Boar's Head Inn. The ailing King Henry calls all officers to war. Unfortunately this includes the ever-conniving, larcenous Falstaff, who instead of recruiting soldiers as he has been charged, cheats Justice Shallow out of his money and allows his would-be soldiers to buy their way out of service. At this same time, Prince Hal has already begun to distance himself from Sir John. After a final reconciliation with his son, King Henry IV dies. At play's end the young Prince Hal becomes Henry V, and displaying royal maturity he has not shown before, he renounces his old bad influence Sir John Falstaff, who feebly tries to laugh off the repudiation.
1598
HENRY V
This is a romanticized recounting of the brief reign of England's King Henry V. Points of history, chronology, and facts are fictionalized for dramatic effect. What is also notable is, through a tremendously moving prose speech by a grieving Mistress Quickly, the recounting of the last days and death of Sir John Falstaff. The young actor Laurence Olivier, who makes a brilliant film of this play in 1944, uses the St. Crispin's Day speech to rouse British troops against Hitler during World War II. Perhaps, understandably, this is why his film of the play has been called the “best propaganda film ever made.”
1613
HENRY VIII
It is generally accepted that Shakespeare collaborated on this play with John Fletcher. You know the history: Henry VIII falls in love with Ann Bullen [sic], a lady-in-waiting at court. Though he has been married to Queen Katherine for 20 years he decides that the marriage is incest because she is the widow of his dead brother. The king goes to Cardinal Wolsey for advice but Wolsey is widely hated in the kingdom and cannot support the king's plea for a divorce, and instead sends the question to the Pope. However, because he is so despised and plotted against, Wolsey loses what favor he had possessed with the king, who now sees Wolsey as standing in the way of the divorce. Wolsey has asked the Pope to postpone a decision, but the king goes ahead with the divorce and remarriage. After delivering the most memorable speech in the play—and certainly among the best speeches of Shakespeare's canon, the “So farewell to the little good you bear me” speech in Act III, Scene 2—Wolsey dies, followed soon after by Katherine. You know what happens. Anne Bullen, before she herself is accused of treason and then executed, delivers a daughter who will one day become Queen Elizabeth. Cranmer is given a speech by Shakespeare which seems to glorify the reign of Elizabeth: “She shall be, to the happiness of England / An aged princess …”
The Tragedies
1593
TITUS ANDRONICUS
A great Roman general's family tragedy is set in motion after he returns triumphant to Rome having defeated the Goths and captured their Queen Tamora along with her sons and followers. For trying to prevent an arranged marriage between Titus's only daughter Lavinia and ruler Saturninus, Titus's eldest son is banished and his youngest son is killed by Titus's own hand. The virginal Lavinia is kidnapped and raped by Tamora's sons, who cut out her tongue so that she cannot say who did it, and cut off her hands so that she cannot write their names. The evil sons arrange to trap two more of Titus's sons and frame them for the murder of Lavinia's husband-to-be. Titus is duped by Aaron the Moor into chopping off his own hand, thinking it will win clemency for his condemned sons, but this fails and they are executed anyway by ruler Saturninus. Titus gets even, though, by slitting the throats of Tamora's two boys, baking their bodies into a pie and forcing her to eat it. As I have said, this was one of Shakespeare's most popular plays during his lifetime.
1594
ROMEO AND JULIET
Two teenagers, who happen to be from families that are sworn enemies, meet at a party and fall into everlasting love. They are married in secret. After a brawl during which relatives of the Prince of Verona as well as the Capulets have been killed (not to mention his own friend Mercutio), the young husband is banished from the city. The young wife, in a jam because her father has ordered her into an arranged marriage, rushes for help to the friar who had married them in secret; thinking that it will help he gives her a potion which will cause her to seem dead, thus getting her out of the marriage. The friar tries unsuccessfully to get word to the young man that his wife is not dead and will wake from the potion. The young husband, thinking she is really dead, kills himself in her tomb. She wakes just as the potion wears off, only to find him dead; she kills herself with his dagger. Though this is too late, all of this brings their warring parents together in peace. The play is of course chock-full of famous speeches, including “What light through yonder window breaks,” “Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,” and “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”
JULIUS CAESAR
Loosely retold from Plutarch, the fall of Julius Caesar is chronicled through his death at the hands of conspirators led by the noble Brutus, who is later undone by Marc Antony. Caesar's fall is foretold by a Soothsayer begging him to “beware the ides of March.” In addition, Brutus's fall is foreshadowed by the appearance of the ghost of the murdered Caesar. Suicide and death ensues for both Brutus and the “lean and hungry” looking Cassius, and all of the conspirators. Famous speeches include “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!” And who does not know what the mortally stabbed Caesar is asking of his old friend when he whispers, “Et tu, Brute?”
1600
HAMLET
“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” when the good King Hamlet is murdered by his evil brother Claudius. The ghost of the king appears to his namesake son, and the young prince's course of confusion and fear, resolve and revenge begins. He puts on a play to prove the guilt of his uncle, accidentally kills Polonius (the father of his lady love Ophelia) thinking that he has caught Claudius listening in on his private accusation with his mother Gertrude. Hamlet is finally goaded into a duel with Laertes, son of the dead Polonius and brother to Ophelia (who drowned herself in madness out of grief over the death of her father). Claudius and Laertes plot Hamlet's death at the sword contest by both dipping the tip of Laertes' foil in deadly poison and poisoning a cup of wine meant for Hamlet at the contest. Sadly, his mother Gertrude drinks from it, dies, and Hamlet and Laertes are both mortally wounded by the poisoned blade. But at least Hamlet gets his vengeance upon Claudius by forcing him to drink the poisoned wine that is left before he stabs him. Suggested to be about both existentialism and the Oedipus complex, few doubt that Hamlet is the greatest of Shakespeare's plays, and very likely the greatest ever written.
1604
OTHELLO
Because Desdemona's handmaiden Emilia does not reveal that she found her lady's lost handkerchief and gave it to her husband Iago, Desdemona is murdered in her bed by her husband, the great general Othello, a blackamoor leading the army in Venice. Othello has been duped—amazingly—by his second in command Iago into believing that she has committed adultery with his lieutenant, Michael Cassio. One of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies, perhaps the greatest question in dramatic literature is: why was Othello the Moor of Venice so gullible?
1605
TIMON OF ATHENS
A man who is foolish enough to lavish all of his wealth upon his friends, thinking that they will come to his rescue when he is in need, is cruelly disappointed, so he then decides to renounce all of mankind, donning filthy sackcloth and hiding himself in a distant cave. To this difficult play's further ruin, no real female love interests exist in the story save for two prostitutes, which I have a “problem” with. But even so, there are still a few fine Shakespearean speeches to listen to.
KING LEAR
The King of England turns his crown and power over to his three daughters, out of a desire “to shake all cares and business from our age; / Conferring them on younger strengths, while we / Unburthen'd crawl toward death.” His youngest daughter, whom he loved the most, is the most honest and cannot force herself to compliment him just for political gain; he disowns her and turns the kingdom over to his two elder daughters, who, of course, hate him and immediately plot his downfall. Setting in motion one of the most extensive subplots in Shakespeare, along the way one of his trusted advisors Gloucester is duped by his bastard son Edmund into thinking his favorite legitimate son Edgar has betrayed him, and he is then blinded by evil daughter Goneril's husband and henchmen and cast into the wilderness (one of the most harrowing scenes you will see on stage). Edgar, on the run for fear of death at his father's hand, pretends to be mad and becomes “Poor Tom,” also in the wilderness. In this same wood the newly mad Lear, driven insane by his children, runs into them both. His favorite daughter Cordelia returns with an army and they rescue Lear, only to be captured by Goneril and Regan's army. The Fool mysteriously disappears in Act III. In prison Lear's beloved daughter is murdered and he enters carrying her, uttering his “Howl, howl, howl, howl!” speech (don't forget to check out the exercise in Act Two of the book). When he laments “My fool is hanged,” he is actually referring to Cordelia. (This is one of the reasons the two roles are sometimes doubled.) Lear dies after. During the play some famous lines Shakespeare introduces to us include “Nothing will come of nothing” and “How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!”
1606
MACBETH
Three witches (also “weird” or “wayward” sisters) appear to Macbeth after he has won a great battle and tell him that he will become King of Scotland. But they also tell his partner Banquo that he will be the father of a great line of kings, which leads to Macbeth and Lady Macbeth's long course of murder which begins with the both of them stabbing King Duncan upstairs in their house. The blood spilled on their hands is never able to be washed off. Soon King Macbeth can no longer sleep, and he is visited by the ghost of Banquo, whom he had killed. Lady Macbeth goes mad and dies and Macbeth is killed by Macduff because Macduff, as prophesied by the weird sisters, was born by cesarean section. Among the famous lines: “Unsex me here,” “Screw your courage to the sticking place and we'll not fail,” and “Thou are the best o' the cutthroats!”
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
In middle age, Mark Antony and Queen Cleopatra are in the midst of a tempestuous affair. News of the death of Antony's wife Fulvia causes him to return to Rome, as Pompey is plotting war. To cement the Roman alliance, Antony agrees to marry Octavius Caesar's sister, Octavia. All know this will not end Antony's affair with Cleopatra. War with Pompey is avoided but then the truce is broken and Octavius Caesar defeats Pompey. Soon it is feared that Octavius will go to war against Antony because of his continuing affair with Cleopatra. Both men raise armies and commence war. Against better judgment Antony allows Cleopatra to command a warship at sea and Antony's forces lose the battle when Cleopatra's ship flees, leaving them vulnerable. Antony is distraught with Cleopatra, but this changes after she sends false word that she has killed herself. Antony, out of grief, falls on his own sword, killing himself. Cleopatra is captured by invading Octavius, but before he can parade her through Rome as a prisoner she is helped by her handmaidens to kill herself with the bite of an asp. In his one conciliation Octavius Caesar has Antony buried next to his Cleopatra. Enobarbus, Antony's lieutenant, has a famous speech before his own suicide.
1608
CORIOLANUS
The great Roman warrior Caius Martius Coriolanus defeats the Volscians and is given a hero's welcome when he returns to Rome. His name is put forward for the position of consul, but he must plead to the plebeians for their votes, something the proud Coriolanus finds distasteful but agrees to do. The common people first grant him their votes but then change their minds, which enrages Coriolanus, who condemns the government of Rome. He is declared a traitor and forced into exile. To exact revenge Coriolanus offers his services to the Volscian army, to its leader Tulus Aufidius, whom he had defeated earlier. The Volscian army is on the brink of war with Rome. Only his mother Volumnia's pleading convinces Coriolanus to relent from attacking Rome. He does finally relent and returns to Antium, but Aufidius accuses Coriolanus of treason, and Coriolanus is assassinated.
The Romances
1607
PERICLES
Pericles, Prince of Tyre, discovers that King Antiochus and his daughter, whose hand in marriage Pericles had competed for, are engaged in incest. King Antiochus marks Pericles for death, causing him to flee. Pericles' ship to Pentopolis capsizes, with Pericles being the only survivor. While there he meets and falls in love with Thaisa, daughter of Simonides, marrying her. With Antiochus' death Pericles is able to return to Tyre with his now pregnant wife Thaisa. During passage Thaisa gives birth to a girl, whom Pericles names Marina. But Thaisa seems to die in the process and Pericles, grieving, seals Thaisa's body in a watertight coffin and buries her at sea. The coffin eventually floats to Ephesus, where Thaisa is revived by Cerimon. Fearing that her husband has been lost at sea, Thaisa commits herself to a life as a nun. In the meantime Pericles has given Marina over to be raised by the governor of Tarsus and his wife, Dionyza. As happens in The Winter's Tale, 16 years pass. Marina grows to a beautiful woman but is the object of Dionyza's jealousy. Dionyza plots to kill the young woman. She is taken away by ship, but before she can be killed she is kidnapped by pirates. Cleon builds a monument to her. Pericles visits Tarsus and upon seeing the monument he is overtaken with grief. The pirates have sold Marina to a brothel in Mytilene, but she is set free by Lysimachus, that state's governor. Pericles makes his way to Mytilene and finds his daughter, speaking to her without realizing who she is. When he finally does recognize her he rejoices at their reunion, Lysimachus proposes marriage to Marina and Pericles is told in a dream that he must journey to Ephesus. He takes Marina with him and there they meet Thaisa, now a head priestess, and the family is happily back together again.
1609
THE WINTER'S TALE
Consumed by jealousy, Leontes, King of Sicilia, is convinced that his pregnant wife Hermione has been unfaithful to him with his old friend Polixenes, King of Bohemia. Bent on revenge, he orders his loyal servant Camillo to poison Polixenes. Camillo instead warns Polixenes and they flee Sicilia. Leontes is convinced that his wife's unborn child is illegitimate and throws her into prison. In the meantime his young son, by her, dies. When Hermione's baby, a girl, is born Leontes orders the infant be taken to the wilderness and left there to die. The Oracle at Delphi proclaims that both Polixenes and Hermione are innocent of infidelity. Hermione collapses over the death of her son and is spirited away by her loyal handmaiden Paulina, and is soon believed dead herself. Hermione's baby was left on the coast of Bohemia by Antigonus, Paulina's husband, who is eaten by a bear. A Shepherd finds the infant and raises her, giving the child the name Perdita. Sixteen years pass. Perdita has grown to a beautiful young woman and Prince Florizel, son of Polixenes, sees her and falls in love. Leontes has changed after all this time and has been grieving over his believed deceased wife. Paulina has just completed a statue of Hermione to honor her memory and she invites the entire court, Leontes and Polixenes and young betrothed lovers, to attend the unveiling. At the unveiling the statue of Hermione comes to life, and Leontes and she are reunited at play's end. The middle of Act III, Scene 2 contains the famous editor-added stage direction, “Exit, pursued by a bear.” Always categorized as a romance, years after it first appeared scholars chose to dub it a “problem play” as well.
1610
CYMBELINE
Good King Cymbeline has married a disagreeable woman as his queen. Cymbeline has arranged for his daughter Imogen to marry the queen's son Cloten, but Imogen defies her father and marries the low-born but worthy Posthumus. An angry Cymbeline banishes Posthumus, but not before giving his young wife Imogen a bracelet; she in turn gives him a diamond ring which he vows to wear faithfully. The evil Iachimo convinces Posthumus to wager the ring against his wife's fidelity, but when Iachimo goes to Britain in the hope of seducing Imogen he is unsuccessful. While Imogen is asleep Iachimo steals the precious bracelet from her and shows it to Posthumus, convincing him that his wife has been unfaithful. Enraged, Posthumus orders his manservant Pisanio to kill Imogen. Instead, because he believes Imogen to be innocent, Pisanio disguises her as a page and helps her flee from the court. What ensues is the introduction of two grown sons of Cymbeline, living in secret for 20 years. The evil Cloten appears at the dwelling of the two sons disguised as Posthumus and in a battle with one of the sons is beheaded. Imogen takes a potion meant to be poisonous (from the scheming queen) but it only stupefies her thanks to the virtuous physician Cornelius rendering it harmless. The brothers think Imogen dead and take her to the woods, placing her body next to Cloten's headless body, spreading flowers about them. Imogen awakes thinking (because of the familiar clothing) that her husband Posthumus is dead. After many comedic romantic twists and turns, Iachimo confesses his foul deeds, mistaken identities are revealed and the lovers reunited.
1611
THE TEMPEST
A deposed Duke of Milan, Prospero, after many years in exile on a desolate island, has the chance to exact revenge against his brother Antonio, King Alonso and members of their party by using his magical mystical powers to cause a shipwreck. His enemies are cast onto the island, in the hands of Prospero. Also cast upon the isle is the strapping handsome young Ferdinand, son of King Alonso who fears his son has perished at sea. Prospero's daughter Miranda has never seen a man save for her father on the island and immediately falls in love with Ferdinand. He in turn falls for her. While this is going on, the bitter part-man-part-fish Caliban tries to get back at his master Prospero by aligning with the clowns Trinculo and Stephano. (Caliban has been his slave since Prospero vanquished the evil witch Sycorax, an action that also set free his other “good” slave, Ariel.) Their comedic machinations fail, Prospero forgives the old enemies who deposed him, and Ferdinand and Miranda are betrothed. The play is notable for its belief that it was Shakespeare's last solo play, with passages especially at the end that suggest a master playwright “drowning his book.” Famous lines include “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
1613
THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN
Not always considered as part of the canon, this play is also believed to have been written with the collaboration of John Fletcher. Probably taken from Chaucer's Knight's Tale, the two title characters are Palamon and Arcite, who have been captured fighting for Thebes against Athens. In prison the two men are attracted to Emilia, the sister of Hippolyta, wife of Theseus. They both vow to woo her even though they have previously vowed eternal friendship. Eventually Arcite is exiled from Athens and Palamon is left in jail. Once free, Arcite disguises himself as a peasant to keep an eye on Emilia. At the same time the jailer's daughter has fallen in love with Palamon. She helps him to escape, hiding him in a forest nearby. Arcite discovers him there and again they fight over Emilia, deciding to duel that night. But before they can duel Theseus encounters them. He condemns them to death but both Emilia and Hippolyta convince him to banish them instead. The two noble kinsmen refuse, however, so Theseus demands that Emilia choose between them, with whoever loses the duel being put to death. When Emilia cannot decide which one she chooses Theseus declares the matter will be decided by combat in one month, both men vying for Emilia's hand, the loser to be executed. Because of her unrequited love for Palamon the jailer's daughter has gone mad. Theseus pardons the deranged daughter and her father for allowing him to escape. Thinking his scheme will restore her sanity, a doctor gets the man to whom she's engaged to pretend to be Palamon. Arcite defeats Palamon in the contest, but before he can be executed a messenger arrives bringing news that Arcite has been mortally wounded in a horse-riding accident. Before he dies, Arcite gives Emilia's hand to Palamon.
* * *
The sources of Shakespeare's plays are extensive, and include Plutarch's Lives (from which he derived material for his “Roman” plays Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens) and Ovid's Metamorphoses, which helped him put together Titus Andronicus and A Midsummer Night's Dream. For historical plays he referred to Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, among others. He also took material from Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron for such plays as All's Well That Ends Well, Cymbeline, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, a poem by Arthur Brooke, appears to have inspired Romeo and Juliet.
With the exception of King Edward III (1595), Sir Thomas More (1603), Cardenio (1613–14, with John Fletcher), and the recently discovered Double Falsehood (deemed in 2010 to be reliably taken from lost Shakespeare manuscripts and adapted by Lewis Theobald in 1727), these plays represent what we can fairly acknowledge to be Shakespeare's canon. It is notable that, of the accepted 37, only Love's Labour's Lost and The Tempest contain plots created totally by Shakespeare himself.
But the fact that he didn't make up his own stories is, putting it mildly, beside the point. We will of course never know how the original source material would have stood the test of time, but we can certainly judge the resulting plays that came from his pen.
Which would you rather read?
Summary: What This Means for Your Acting
Okay. You have a bit of background on Shakespeare's life and how theatre was done in his lifetime. For the actor trying to bring these great roles to life in an art form devoted first to entertainment and only later to critical conjecture, in the beginning stages of your rehearsal I urge you to simply say the words aloud, and you will be more than halfway there in being faithful to what we can surmise he originally intended. And, at least in the beginning, I really do mean say them; please don't fall into the trap of Shakespearean acting. Your ultimate goal is to present to the audience a believable human being in unbelievable situations who just happens to speak poetry as their native tongue. An actor cannot play a theory, nor is it reliable to attempt subtext, whether it is there or not; an actor can only do something to get something, and through the unfolding of the story it is left to the audience to figure out what possible theme might be subliminally there. All the actor ever need do is play the play.
After you have found the outrageous possibilities in your work (I hope by considering the exercises in Act Two), it will admittedly be necessary to study to help you play the role. Shakespeare will present you with age-old language and culture his actors did not have to wade through. It will be perfectly all right—and it is no contradiction—to use what editors have given you (such as the footnotes at the bottom of the page or thumbing through copies of SparkNotes or No Fear Shakespeare). All I ask is that you jump up on your feet and try his words on for size before you do that. Think of it this way: 400 years from now an actor picking up a play by Neil LaBute or Suzan-Lori Parks will have to do research on them, too.
Consider this “research” process as enrichment, based on the words and the situations in a text you are already familiar with. It must not hamper in any way your human intuition or impulse, and the excitement and joy you experience—and thereby help us to experience!—when you simply say his words.
So, to answer the question of what you have read so far means for your acting, I offer the following summary:
1. Shakespeare's plays were meant to be performed, not merely read.
2.Shakespeare's words contain everything the audience—and you—need to know.
3.Shakespeare's plays are non-realistic but you must play them as real to you.
4.You are telling the story at the same time you are living in the story.
5.No “fourth wall” means you must always be alive on stage.
6.You must share the play with the entire audience.
7.Cue scripts help you to really listen, stay alert, and to be in the moment.
8.Play Shakespeare's words first, and then you may use research his actors didn't have.
Shakespeare has given you more to say and do than any other playwright that has ever lived. That is why I call him an actor's best friend forever. But to make all of this highfalutin stuff even simpler consider this: you are telling a story to someone you care about. What do you do to make sure they understand?
_______________
Notes
1 Best friend forever!
2 Sanford Meisner (1905–1997) was an American actor and acting teacher who established what is now known as the Meisner Technique, based on the “Reality of Doing” facilitated by his famous Repetition Exercise.
3 The Tempest was listed in the First Folio of 1623 as a comedy. Because of its elements of tragicomedy, combining buffoonish characters with dark themes of revenge against public figures while at the same time ending happily, since the Renaissance it has been more referred to by scholars as a romance.