In Our Time - Shakespeare's Work

Episode Date: May 11, 2000

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the work of William Shakespeare. He was nominated as the Man of the last Millennium and he steps into this one - on film, on stage, in academia, in schools, in private passions, probably in song and dance as well - every bit as briskly as he did in 1600. He's been called our greatest living playwright. We are told he taught us how to be modern. That he is the true Bible of our times. We are also told that his work is irrelevant to a massive percentage of the population, sandbanked by critics, neutered by establishments and, above all, embalmed in a cargo of language increasingly out of reach and ken of those who might heave him up the next century. William Shakespeare 'was not of an age, but for all time' according to Ben Johnson. That was in the seventeenth century and it's a claim that has often been repeated since, but is it really true? Is what we see in theatre and increasingly at the cinema the work of a playwright whose works live on, or are we merely watching historical reconstructions - museum pieces - with any contemporary meaning obscured by the reverence we pay to the author? And if Shakespeare is for all time, what is it about him that makes him so eternally special?With Professor Sir Frank Kermode, literary critic and author of Shakespeare's Language; Michael Bogdanov, theatre, television, opera and film director and a founder member of the English Shakespeare Company; Germaine Greer, Professor of English and Comparative Studies, Warwick University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. William Shakespeare was not of an age but for all time, according to Ben Johnson. That was in the 17th century and succlaimed that's often been repeated since.

But is it really true today? Here's what we see in the theatre and increasingly at the cinema the work of a playwright whose work lives on, or are we merely watching historical reconstructions, even museum pieces, with any contemporary meaning obscured by the reverence we pay to the author? And if Shakespeare's for all time, what is it about him that makes him so eternally special?

With me to discuss Shakespeare in our time is Professor Frank Commode, recently described by John Sutherland as Britain's most distinguished living critic. He just brought out a masterly book, Shakespeare's language, which I thought was riveting. Also with us is the theatre director Michael Bogdanov, who's to give a lecture called Shakespeare is Dead at the Royal Festival Hall next week,

Anne Germain Greer, Professor of English and Comparative Studies at Warwick University. Frank Amode, one of the things you say in your book, which I enjoyed enormously, was around 1600, Shakespeare as a poet changed because of the theatre. Shakespeare's language as a poet changed because of theatre.

Could we start by you developing that a little? Yes, I think the idea is not... entirely new, is that in the earlier plays, there is a kind of rhetorical quality which really belongs to the printed page rather than to the stage. And that as time went by, particularly as he saw possibilities of showing people in the act of thought, painful, anxious thought, you've got a new kind of language, far more resonant, far less explicit and sometimes very much more difficult. so that the audience itself had had to be prepared for this development, this change in the quality of what people said. No longer were they just laying out an idea or a scheme and embellishing it, but they're actually like people who have got something terribly serious to think about

and are thinking about it there and then on the stage. You start off with Titus in your book. You start up with the Titus, the man speaking to her for three, minutes while she's got no hands and her tongue's been cut out and she's been raped and him sort of describing what we see in front of us for three minutes. But also these repetitions is it called anaphora that you described? Yes. Well, there are all sorts of rhetorical tricks. And the passage of is where the girl's uncle actually comes upon her with her hands cut off and her tongue pulled out and has about 45 lines comparing her to a locked tree, a fountain and all the rest of her.

so that clearly nobody thought, perhaps she should go and try and help her, I'll do something for her, because everybody was perfectly happy with this, a pretty set of verses saying, but of course she can't speak, so she can't tell them. Obviously you can't tell me what's wrong with her because she can't say anything. The sheer implausibility of it is not relevant in the context of drama at that time because it's much more like a poem than like a play. So actually, by responding to needs of drama at that time,

as he saw it, that response is one of the things is that intensified and made more dense Shakespeare's poetry. That's right, I think so, yes. So the reason for picking 1600 as the turning point is not to say that the plays before 1600 are all inferior, because that's not so. But because this new kind of intensity, really came in with Hamlet.

The soliloquia, Shakespeare used it, quite unlike any other soliloquy, he discovered that it was possible to represent somebody thinking on the stage, as if he was in some dreadful moral situation and he had to talk his way or persuade himself what to do in it.

The speech of the king in Hamlet, for example, where he's contemplating his own guilt wondering whether he can keep the rewards of his offence and yet be pardoned for his offence and deciding, of course, that he can't, but deciding that question with a new kind, with a language of a new sort of intensity. We'll come back to that a moment.

Germainre, do you find this intensity of language, this denseness, something that you agree with? Because I've read that you've said that you think the language is simple. It's the meaning that's. difficult. Would you like to come alongside or respond to? Well, it depends. I mean, when I was listening to Frank talking about what happens in Hamlet, it seems to me

there's something a bit more complicated going on, because I would say the first time you get that contrast between highly figured language and the real heroic blank verse of Shakespeare is in Romeo and Juliet. And it's Juliet who does it. Everybody around her speaks in rhyming couplets, even in sonnets. Her mother speaks to her in a sonnet, a hideous sonnet, a sort of spoof sonnet in a way, and an obscene sonnet as it happens. And that is also Shakespeare's most obscene play.

So you've got all this highly figured language, which is, you know, the bawdy hand of the dial is even now upon the prick of noon. Oh, please, I just ask the time, you know. And then you've got Juliet, this 14-year-old, we get told a thousand times that she's 14 years old. We all know what that means to be 14, I think. And it wasn't that much different in that sense then.

she was very young in everybody's estimation. And we had this language of strong passion and a disordered imagination as the child goes straight down this kind of solipsistic path to nowhere with this dork Romeo who also speaks in figured language and she has to claim to shut up otherwise he's going to wreck the play, you know, swear not by the moon, etc.

So I think that this opposition is something that Shakespeare was very well aware of. He, after all made up the new language of the theatre. Other people didn't speak it until he did. And the other thing is important to remember is that people loved all that figured speech. It's like opera.

You don't want them to suddenly start, you know, talking the language of real feeling in opera because you understand the game as being played. Now, the thing that I always say to my six-formers, when I talk to them about Shakespeare, when they already think they're jaded and fed up with Shakespeare, is that they have to listen to the way they talk in real life. We don't speak prose in real life.

We speak an intensely sedent. and extraordinarily mysterious language, which has got to be interpreted with a great deal of other assistance. I usually give them the example of people passing each other in the street and saying, All right! And the answer, what's the answer? All right. What on earth are they saying?

They're saying, I'm all right, I'm in a hurry, don't talk to me now, I hope you're fine. That's what is all packed into that word. And that when you speak normally, your voice is governed. The way you speak, if you're not like me talking like an academic to a micro, but normally the way you speak is governed by the way you feel, by your heartbeat, by your breath length, that you are actually speaking a rhythmic and figured language of intense suggestivity. If you then look at Shakespeare's language, it's not a question of hard words and it's not a question of purple effects. There are, if you're Polonius, of course, but that's the whole point about Polonius,

is incapable of talking directly to anyone. then you'll see that you understand as much and as little of what Shakespearean characters say as you do of what your mother said to you this morning or what your mate said to you in the playground that it's this openness, this strange partiality that Shakespeare's language needs men that can breathe and eyes that can see. It's only as alive as the registration. mechanisms of human beings. And he didn't think he was for all time, I don't think.

He knew that he was only for as long as men breathed and eyes sore and black ink shone on a page and so on. Much more modest than Ben Johnson in every way. Michael Buckdowne, you've directed Shakespeare in many ways, and you did a film which I thought was a notable film, Shakespeare on this date. You won a deservedly won a big prize for that. But you, from what I've read of a previous lecture, you, you're hammering away at the way Shakespeare is received,

the way Shakespeare is regarded the way Shakespeare is ignored by 90-odd percent of the population. Do you think that the language stands in the way, to be very blunt, do you think that the language stands in the way, in your opinion, from your experience, of many people enjoying the plays? Yes, I do, and I think that the education system has been at fault and still is at fault for surrounding the language and the plays and the stories in particular with an aura of mystery. The problem is that where you make Shakespeare compulsory

and you teach him in certain ways to answer examination questions, it means that you start to negate the very fundamental thing that the man was about, which is as a working playwright. And I think that far from there being a change in 1600, I think it was a maturing of a playwright over a period of 25 years who started off as a swashbuckler and used all kinds of dramatic devices in the raw, including language that he kept repeating and ideas just in case people didn't understand them

and gradually honed his craft and his way of telling his stories to a point when you reach the tempest right at the end when it's like a mosaic and every word is very, very carefully placed and you take one word out and the thing falls apart. So the key to Shakespeare has always been for me, live performance, and not treating the audience as if they already know the stories. I mean, Shakespeare, when he put the plays on, was putting them on with a bunch of actors

who were also contributing, improvising and changing, and even after his death, you know, writing different bits to put into the folio from false memory or whatever, he was working with a live audience, live material, telling stories that a lot of them had never heard before and had to actually put them across in a way that people could follow. So while I accept the fact that the audience wouldn't have understood possibly everything that was being said on stage,

their points of reference and their cultural frame was much more equipped to deal with the plays than we are today. And as long as you treat Shakespeare as literature and something on the page instead of something on the stage, I don't believe that the plays will last in any form. In 50 years, 100 years time, with the rate words are dropping out of the English language and being struck out of the Oxford English Dictionary,

the plays will be the province, of academics. I mean, it's an elitist affair in that respect, and that's why I welcome films like Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet because they awaken the consciousness of young kids who have brought up on Spielberg and arcades

and Nintendo and need some other frame of reference in order to work with the stories. I thought that was a terrific film too, but one has to face up the fact that he used 40% of Romeo and Julia. But how much more important, Melvin, is that he didn't

change what he used. And that was amazing. I thought he didn't change it. It was very helpful for the kids to realise that Shakespeare rights rat. How much do you think that? Just a second. Sorry, sorry. I know that. And we talk about that. Okay. And it is nevertheless true that he used 40% of the text. And that, so I want to ask whether that's for you, Michael, as sort of, as it were in your terms, a way forward to say, look, we'll just take the highlights, the best bits, and that's the way to get it over. Well, I'll return to you with a similar question. I'm not asking a question.

How much do you think was cut from Olivia's Hamlet, for example? Oh, a massive amount. Yes, which became, if you like, a benchmark of thinking on Hamlet for about 30 years. I mean, it put thinking back on Hamlet, basically, because he managed to strip it of all the politics. Fultiman Cornelius, Fortimbras, Rosencrantz, Gilson, all went. And yet, people look at that film and say, that did Shakespeare a service. Now, I would say the same for Baz Luhrmann's Roman Juliet,

and you don't do Romeo and Juliet on stage, usually, without cutting about 25%. So once you look at it like that, actually, the amount that Lerman used increases, and he's also using the cinematic technique of visuals to actually say what Shakespeare sometimes used repetitive language to describe. In other words, you repeat things in order to make sure the audience are there

with the story or you repeat them to make sure they've got the idea and the image. Well, as an experienced director, you must have had to recognize it sometimes that there are parts of the later plays anyway where the audience is catching the drift rather than actually understanding what's being said. And I believe that must have been true even in 1600 or say Tiber Cario Lainas. There are passages in Carlyanus who nobody understands and nobody can have understood. They're not all due to textual corruption. They are just due to this tremendous overuse of rhetorical force that comes over Shakespeare.

Michael McDonough, when you come to direct, soliloquist, for instance, let's start there, do you think you're dealing with an antique form or do you think you're... I have to try and make that contact with the audience, and I think that the Elizabethan's made with the audience. That doesn't mean to say you necessarily are a... appealing to them directly and asking them questions because I think those soliloquies were a two-way process. I think it was a debate with the audience,

and I think it's inconceivable that when questions were asked in those soliloquies of the audience, he who knows better how to tame a shrew or who calls me villain, just that, uh, is something that would have opened up a debate. Those kind of moments, of course, are lost to us in the midst of theatrical history. But that kind of debate that was opened up originally,

I think has to continue in any modern form. But we believe in a kind of naturalistic approach. So therefore, people go into themselves in soliloquies. And the rhetorical approach to the audience that you often see in contemporary production strikes a false note a lot of the time because really you have to go with the conventions of theatre that exist in the day. And that's why I believe that the only way of making Shakespeare live is to actually be modern about him. What do you mean by being modern about him, my own? Treat the material as organic living material.

You need to chuck it away if it doesn't think it work? Absolutely. To substitute it if you don't think of work? Yes, I mean, if in fact there are really key words to a passage that would be unlocked by the changing of one word, let's say 10 lines can be unlocked with one key word. I see no reason why that can't be done. It's a process of developing theatre in a form that will make it live.

Now, you can put it in a box and you can do the plays uncut, you can do Hamlet at five and a half hours without belting through it as Peter Hall's productions do just to prove you can do it uncut and give it time and give it the pace that it needs but the audience won't sit through for five and a half hours it's for academics and for purists so if you want to actually do a play

that gets people home to the last buses and they don't leave Swansea at quarter past ten because they can't get home to the interlands then you need to find a way of doing these plays that retains, if you like, the integrity of the language, the story, the dynamic, because I believe they're like arrows. I think he goes straight to the heart with the stories, and you have to distill that story,

and anything that is a superfluous meandering you can take away as long as you don't destroy that dynamic. But if you, if the life of the... I agree with that, actually. Well, I don't quite... It doesn't live in the present. It doesn't live at all. Well, except that if we're talking about Shakespeare's plays,

life of the places in the language, And you're talking about, we've talked about cutting before, and that's a different position, and that has worked. You work very well with Olivier, worked very well with Baselow and so on. But if you're talking about changing the language, is this not really on the way to using Shakespeare as a peg to hang another play on? But in Frank's book, he points out that editors have already made choices about the words that you actually use to say those lines.

Any one of the plays, you could take maybe a couple of hundred words, and you have a different choice with various editors. And so it's circumstrived to start with. What am I going to do? Am I going to do the folio version? Am I going to do the first quarter, the second quarter, the third quarter? But that's one thing. And using a completely different word saying, you know, F off, as it were,

which is not Shakespeareing at all, which is not in any of the folios and what sort of thing, is the sort of thing which does come up. I mean, Shakespeare in the estate, which I thought, Shakespeare on the state. the estate, which I thought was a terrific documentary, but it was great. You took Shakespeare to a state in Birmingham, people who had never heard of here before, did parts of Shakespeare, and he had a real dynamism. It was a terrific piece of work, all the way through.

Words were flying around there that were very 20th century. Now, what are we talking about? Are we talking about Shakespeare, again, about using it as a peg? The way that I was able to unlock the ideas and the story, for those people who had no interest in Shakespeare whatsoever. Some couldn't read. Had never heard of any of the plays. Romeo and Juliet may be.

The only way was to take the passages, explain what they meant, and get them, to work them back dramatically in their own way and their own language. There was one boy who said he wanted to try the part of Romeo in the original, and he did, and he started as nothing, and he made a fair fist of it by the end.

Others wanted to rewrite it and to make it live for them in their context and in their way. A number of those kids have carried on. They stopped sort of breaking shot windows and shooting up and started sort of taking a few things seriously in their lives. And so theatre in that respect can be therapeutic. I'm not saying that Shakespeare is necessarily the vehicle for that, but that was the effect of that documentary.

Okay, Germain Groh. I listened to that with interest because, of course, King Lear is the worst case. because actually two plays cobbled together and it probably makes more sense to do one or the other but then you lose some of the best bits whichever way you decide and no one can bring themselves so in the end we do this huge inclusive

and rather disturbing play but I think in the end I have no problem with people building on Shakespeare's text in order to understand it but it's curious because I want to ask what is it that they're understanding

because ultimately dramatically dramatic language is not expository language. It's not explanatory. It's not narrative. It doesn't get understood. You can't paraphrase it. In the end, you come back to that precise emotional coloring that even the tortuousness of the language brings with it. Oh, that this two-two, salid flesh should melt,

salid, solid, in the end, it doesn't matter because you know what he's saying. What he's saying is that he wishes he could slip out of his genetic garment at that point, and so would I if I was the heir to the throne of Denmark at that moment in time. I think it's fine for the kids to build on the numinousness and suggestiveness of the language, but in the end they will come back to the charm as originally uttered by Shakespeare, because everything they've got out of it is still in it. When you expound something, explain something, my students used to complain, oh, you know, you're breaking it all up, you're destroying it.

And I say, no, look, it's still there. In black ink, it is still shining bright. Go back, use it, learn it. It's like all incantations. In the end, you have to learn them without knowing exactly what they mean. And there are sonnets of Shakespeare's that I learn something about every day. And in fact, there are bits of King Lear that I'm only going to understand as I grow older. and as I see my mother, for example, embarking on that same journey of personality disintegration, these are common experiences. What Shakespeare gives them is this grandeur, this mystery, and that's really where the sublime comes in.

Something is only sublime if you don't quite understand it. If you've actually got it all tickety-boo and you've got it all well compartmented and it's all done and dusted, then it's not sublime anymore. You have missed it. It's not, that Shakespeare survives because, of his ultimate ungraspability. Prankhamo, do you think that there's something about the heritage, excuse me, the Shakespeare heritage industry,

including the academic heritage industry of Shakespeare, which takes it away from the plays, and which takes the plays, therefore, away from the largest possible audience? Well, I hate the enemies of Shakespeare, people who refuse to treat him as a kind of human author, who either make him part of the heritage industry, the Stratford side. I say it's always a great misfortune

you have to go through Stratford in order to get to the theatre. But that aspect is deplorable. The other modern Shakespearean scholarship, as I said in the book, doesn't interest me very much because it's not interested in the language with the ink on the paper that Germain was talking about. What I think is, as I listen to this discussion, is what a huge responsibility the director has

because it's he who is going to make the choice as to what is present, what is modern, and what can be discarded. You would accept that. Absolutely. But, of course, you see, I mean, other countries are much bolder with their treatment of Shakespeare, and therefore much more radical and most of the time much more exciting because Shakespeare in translation isn't archaic when equivalents are found, in translation. It's usually in a modern sense.

Nobody tries to translate Shakespeare in Spain, well, some do, I suppose, into 16th century Spanish with the archaic words in play. So while the rhythms are often observed in the, for example, in Germany, the 12-syllable line of Gertrand Schiller is often used, and the same in France. Nevertheless, the language is much more modern and therefore much more accessible. And people are able to respond to the play is much more immediately.

than English audiences and the heritage industries is very responsible for putting a gloss on Shakespeare, a conservative gloss making him an icon that is actually unassailable from underneath in many ways. But would you favour a wholesale updating of the language of the place for performance? There is no reason why one shouldn't do that. There's no reason why one shouldn't perform him for 10,000 people or for 10 people, or in plush surroundings or rough surroundings.

It's just different. But if you want to find a way of opening up the play, for young audiences who basically are turned off at a very, very early age, even if they are taken to plays or even if they have to read the plays. The only way you would be able to do it is by finding some point of reference to their own lives and making them own the material. If they don't do that, own the material from the beginning, then they are never, ever really going to enjoy them as pieces of theatre

instead of pieces of literature. Hence the success of Romeo and Julian. All down to hormones. Absolutely, because most of the other films of recent... Actually, I never saw such a good reading of Lady Capuletus Baz Luhrman. He didn't leave all her words in, but the character, that extremely neurotic and fine-drawn, narcissistic, useless, emotionalist thing is absolutely right. And usually she's played just as an old woman, which is wrong. She's 28. I'm leaving aside the criticisms of the piece.

He never took his audience for granted. All the time there were hints right the way through of where we were, who the character. were, a number plate would have Verona on it. In other words, he didn't actually patronise his audience by assuming that they knew the story. You see, but I don't think you have to worry about the language either. Kids have, you would think, nothing in common with King Lear. When I talk to Sixth Forms all the time about King Lear,

now they may not know what a fitchew is until they've actually looked it up. It doesn't hurt them to know what a fitchew is. I mean, if it's rap talk, you know, they learn rap new words every day. Learning more words is actually enriching you. It's giving you a bigger stall to lug around. with you. I'd be very happy if the word fit you came back into circulation and meant

a particular kind of trail bike or something that made me very happy. I think that's, it really isn't a problem because the language is only archaic as long as it's not spoken. The key to it all is familiarity in the end and it's easy

to remember. I mean there's the inbuilt mnemonic in Shakespeare. Once you do your Shakespeare play at school, you may find it dreadfully tedious but you can also relive it, and it will keep on coming back to you, and you'll begin to understand the iceberg that each word is. You'll begin to understand the

submerged bit. I don't think you have to water it down. They always pick what I thought to be the easier plays, don't they? Julius Caesar. Which is a great mistake. It teaches people to despise Shakespeare. What they want to do is set very difficult plays like Carlyolanus

and Tyman Lathens, I think, so that they know they're up against something. Do you think that there's, that Shakespeare will continue in a popular form only through cinema, Frank? I dare say, I regard these things as allusions to Shakespeare rather than the plays themselves, and as such, I think

the Olivia film is very fine, and I dare say the Lawman film is too. Well, we learnt Olivier Shakespeare off by heart when I was 12, but that also meant that we did performances of the whole play, where we played them in Olivia-ish sort of ways, and then we began to realise that actually Olivier

had plundered coleridge for one bit and Bradley for another bit and really the whole thing didn't make any sense at all. But the play survived. The whole point is the plays will always survive. Even a very astigmatic director, even someone doing an ego trip at Shakespeare's expense, it'll all be gone. The cloud-like rack will fade and the text will still be there. Michael, Bernanf has challenged that future, Ben.

You think that, I think that now, I guess that Frank might think that, but you don't think that is necessarily true that whatever happens Shakespeare will survive, do you? Well, yes, he will survive, but he will survive in a very rarefied form. I don't believe that the plays will be accessible to a large order. I don't believe they are now. I believe that he's not a popular writer as such. He's forced to be shown to a lot of people who are taken to the plays.

In other words, young people. By the Baslead, yes. But there is very little Shakespeare production that you can see in this country at the professional level, not compared with Germany or America, for example. And with regard to film, the problem is that a lot of the films that have come out recently have only reinforced a lot of people's prejudices. They've reached a wider audience, but they're basically reworking old ideas, old conservative ideas out on screen.

Thank you. We'll have to end up. Thank you all very much, and thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.