‘Ottawa’ Is Shakespeare Due for a Shakeup?
Be honest: How much of this speech, from Act I of Shakespeare’s dark comedy All’s Well That Ends Well, do you understand?
O, will you eat no grapes, my royal fox?
Yes, but you will my noble grapes, an if
My royal fox could reach them: I have seen a medicine
That’s able to breathe life into a stone,
Quicken a rock, and make you dance canary
With spritely fire and motion; whose simple touch,
Is powerful to araise King Pepin, nay,
To give great Charlemain a pen in’s hand,
And write to her a love-line.
Though his reputation as the be-all and end-all of English playwrights has barely budged an inch in the four centuries since his death, “the vast majority” of Shakespeare’s words soar over audiences’ heads, said Holger Syme, a University of Toronto English professor and Shakespeare expert.
It’s a bit of a dirty little secret among theatregoers: For some “really strange” reason, people seem reluctant to admit Shakespeare is difficult, he said.
And, in the words of linguist John MacWhorter, even modest attempts to translate the Bard into modern English are seen as “sacrilege” to many literary and theatre types.
That may be changing: Some envelope-pushing productions are willing to be called blasphemous by the purists.
Take the traditional summer Shakespeare in Toronto’s High Park. In what Syme calls their most “radical” and “experimental,” season in years, Canadian Stage is presenting, on alternate nights, a compact, 100-minute Hamlet (Benedict Cumberbatch’s version clocks in at 271), and a wild, gender-bending rendition of All’s Well That Ends Well where the word “slut” replaces “knave.”
In the latter play, the clown Lavatch, recast as a sultry nightclub singer, delivers explanatory monologues in modern English.
Audience member Chloe Wilson said she understood about 70 per cent of All’s Well, though some puns and jokes escaped her. “I really liked it,” she said. “For the most part, just from the context of what’s happening, I find I can follow it pretty well.”
Her friend Doug Tynes copped to taking in only about 40 per cent. “It’s like a different language,” he said.
At the heart of the debate about how to make Shakespeare intelligible to people like Doug, Syme said, is the question of what kind of confusion is good, and what’s just, well, confusing.
After all, he said, people didn’t speak in verse in the 1600s. Shakespeare was dense and hard to understand then, too — just for a different reason. It’s why the Bard often repeated the same statement two different ways,
“Bouncing back and forth between being lost and understanding is really quite central to how Shakespeare works … except if you’re not bouncing back,” Syme said.
He has his students pore over the plays’ full text and footnotes, but in performance it’s “ridiculous” to refuse to tweak words that make no sense to a modern audience, he said.
(In the passage above, for example, “quicken” doesn’t mean “speed up.” In Shakespeare’s time, it meant “bring to life.”)
He added that it’s an impossible burden to place on actors “to make sure people understand every word.”
The words aren’t where the magic comes from, explained Frank Cox-O’Connell, who stars as Hamlet in High Park.
“Plays are stories. They’re not precious texts that we need to be deciphering word-by-word,” he said. “We want to make the audience believe I’m really thinking this, and I’m really going through it in real time. That’s the energy of a live performance.”
Nicky Guadagni, who plays Polonious in Hamlet and the countess in All’s Well, said audience confusion is painfully obvious in a bright outdoor park, miming a slack-jawed expression.
So, she explained, early in All’s Well’s run, lines like “To Paris!” and “to Rousillon!” were added to show where the action was.
Birgit Duarte, who directed Hamlet, took a similar approach: She remixed the script from its most “timeless,” parts: “The family dynamics we all still recognize: generational conflicts, grieving a parent, the quarterlife crisis,” she said.
She said it was totally unlike her experience as a director at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival: home of beautiful, expensive, epic plays that barely stray from the text or the period aesthetic.
Syme recently watched a subpar but faithful Macbeth in England, a play he’s been teaching for 12 years.
“I was struggling to make sense of speeches I know quite well,” Syme said. “I’m sure some people are so immersed in the language that they never trip up. But I find that hard to imagine.”
He said the theatre world needs to confront the “persistent myth” that if you’re human, you’ll understand Shakespeare’s transcendent words.
Otherwise, he said, “I’m worried about Shakespeare. It risks becoming a sort of museum: You go because that’s what you do as an educated person.”
“That’s not how theatre works. It’s supposed to do something to you.”
Test thy skills
It’s hard for even the most literary theatregoer to follow a Shakespeare play. Some words, circa 1600, meant the exact opposite of how we understand them today. Take these lines from Hamlet:
“I’ll make a ghost of he who lets me.”
Lets, in this sense, actually means “prevents.”
“Here’s fine revolution, and we had the trick to see’t.”
And, here, means “if,” not “in addition to.”