by Kirk Woodward
[Kirk
Woodward’s newest contribution to Rick On Theater is a speculation; Kirk’s going to guess at
how William Shakespeare, undoubtedly the greatest playwright in the English
language and, arguably, in the theater world, came up with the text of As
You Like It (which Kirk happens to be
directing right now). This speculation
is intended to be an attempt to illuminate how some writers compose their works
(regular ROTters will know that
Kirk’s also a playwright himself).
[First,
let me cop to something: Kirk’s very description of the structure of AYLI demonstrates why it’s just not one of my favorite Shakespeare
plays. Though Kirk’s always liked it—which suggests he knows it
pretty well—I’ve never been fond of it (or Shakespeare’s other “pastoral”
play, A Midsummer
Night’s Dream). That said, I think this is a terrific
examination of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy—or, at least, one possible account of
it. In any case, Kirk makes a good argument for the writing process he
presents.
[Kirk’s
written for ROT on
the subject of Shakespeare several times before. “Kirk
Woodward’s King Lear
Journal,” posted on 4 June 2010, and “Directing
Twelfth Night for Children,” 16 and 19 December 2010, are
accounts of productions Kirk staged in 1969 and 1972, respectively; and “Frank
Kermode On Shakespeare’s Language,” 26 January 2016, and “Asimov’s Shakespeare,”
6 April 2016 ,are pieces based on his readings of a couple of reference works
he found particularly useful: Frank Kermode’s Shakespeare’s Language (2000) and Asimov’s Guide to
Shakespeare by Isaac Asimov (1970). “Evaluating A Director,” 1 March 2017, concerns
Shakespeare in the sense that it’s an account of the auditioning process
through which Kirk went to get the gig directing the production of As You
Like It on which he’s currently engaged. Perhaps another pertinent post for this article
is Kirk’s “How To Write A Play,” 18 February 2016 , which is self-explanatory, I
imagine. ~Rick]
William
Shakespeare has left few clues about his life, to the extent that some people
claim he did not write the plays attributed to him, but was the “beard” or
front man for another writer. I’m not one of the people who think so, but it’s
true that we’re missing a great deal of basic information we’d love to have
about him.
For
example, we don’t have his actual date of birth; the traditional date (April
23, 1564) is based partly on romantic speculation (he died on another April 23,
in 1616), and partly on a deduction from the date of his baptism (April 26,
1564).
We
don’t know for sure where he went to school, assuming he did (which certainly
seems likely). We have only guesses about what his marriage to Anne Hathaway
(1555 or 1556-1623) was like. We don’t know anything at all about what he did
between 1585 and 1592, a gap that has been filled by a number of conceivably fanciful
tales.
We
know very little of his career in the theater in London, although we know he
had one, and we don’t know how thoroughly he retired from theater, if at all,
or what he did at home once he went there, or how he died. We have a few
samples of handwriting, a will, a grave, some remarks by others – that’s about
it.
Oh,
and we have his plays – there’s some argument, of course, about how many he
wrote and/or co-wrote – and the Sonnets, plus two long poems. It’s difficult
for any writer who’s not the merest hack to disguise his entire self within that much creative output. A modern day parallel
might be the singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, who reveals a great deal of his
emotional life in his songs. On the other hand, Dylan is so secretive about his
private life that he might as well be,
well, Shakespeare.
Dylan’s
songs, of course, are lyric, meaning that more often than not they express the
thought or feeling of a “speaker,” whether that “speaker” is actually Dylan or
someone else, either real or imagined. It is easy to imagine, at least, that we
are hearing Dylan’s real feelings in his songs.
Shakespeare’s
plays, on the other hand, are dramatic, meaning that the thoughts and feelings
within them are assigned to characters, and those characters may or may not
reflect Shakespeare’s own personality.
Figuring
out what Shakespeare was “really” like is an exercise carried out in literally
hundreds, if not thousands of books. Those numbers demonstrate how uncertain
the venture is. Still, the effort is practically irresistible, as I’ve
discovered recently while directing a production of As You Like It (AYLI),
a comedy by Shakespeare written, perhaps, in 1599, and first published in the
First Folio of 1623.
I
can’t say that I’ve discovered any truths about Shakespeare’s “real” (or “everyday”?)
self, but I do believe there are some interesting observations to be made about
Shakespeare’s writing process, if we
are willing to grant three assumptions. I freely admit that there’s no way to
verify any of these assumptions. I’m making them for the sake of discussion.
The
first assumption is that the text of the play as found in the First Folio is
the text as Shakespeare wrote it, or at least very close. The question of what
corrections, emendations, and plain old mistakes have crept into the printed
versions of Shakespeare’s plays is a major one, especially when multiple versions
of a play exist, as is the case with Hamlet.
However, that doesn’t apply to AYLI,
which makes its first appearance in the first published collection of
Shakespeare’s plays.
The
second assumption is that the plot of AYLI
is what Shakespeare wanted it to be, and not simply a repetition of his source
material. I believe this is a reasonable assumption. Wikipedia’s summary of Shakespeare’s sources makes it clear that he
did not simply borrow an entire plot for AYLI,
using it whole:
The direct and immediate source of As You Like It is Thomas Lodge‘s Rosalynde, Euphues Golden Legacie, written 1586-7 and first published in 1590. Lodge’s story is based upon “The Tale of Gamelyn,” wrongly attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer and sometimes printed among his Canterbury Tales. Although it was first printed in 1721, ”Gamelyin” must have existed in manuscript form in Shakespeare’s time. It is doubtful that Shakespeare had read it, but Lodge must have built his pastoral romance on the foundation of “Gamelyin,” giving it a pastoral setting and the artificial sentimental vein, much in fashion at the time. The tale provided the intertwined plots, and suggested all the characters except Touchstone and Jaques.
Some have suggested two other minor debts. The first is Michael Drayton‘s Poly-Olbion, a poetic description of England, but there is no evidence that the poem was written before As You Like It. The second suggested source is The Historie of Orlando Furioso by Robert Greene, acted about 1592.
I have not read Rosalynde, but I have read enough
summaries of it to see that Shakespeare did significant work on the plot. All
in all I believe we can make the assumption that the plot of AYLI is the result of his own decision,
not because of his source.
The
third assumption I want to make is that Shakespeare wrote the play more or less
from start to finish, with few if any corrections and revisions, and that when
he was finished with it, he turned it in. Obviously I can’t prove this, but
there is no doubt that around the time the play was written, Shakespeare was a
busy man.
Figuring
out when Shakespeare wrote particular plays is another knotty scholastic
problem, but it appears that within a year or so before and after the
composition of AYLI, he
also wrote Henry IV Part 2, Much Ado
About Nothing, Henry V, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night. That is heavy lifting for any writer.
Additionally,
there’s the title of the play, As You
Like It. Bernard Shaw cited it frequently, suggesting that Shakespeare
meant it to say, “You wanted it, so here it is.” I feel that Shaw pushes that
point too far. However, there’s no question it’s suggestive.
If
we accept my three assumptions, which I feel are reasonable if by no means
certain, and then look at the play, we see – possibly – an interesting picture
of a writer in the process of working.
The
setting of the play is France. However, absolutely nothing is made of this
except for some character names. The play “feels” consistently English, right
down to the name of the Forest of Arden (perhaps originally the Forest of Ardennes?).
Even before the play begins, then, we have an element of the story that’s not
even acknowledged, much less used in the play.
The
first scene of the play sets up a conflict between brothers – Orlando, the
younger, and Oliver, the older and very unsympathetic – that quickly devolves
into a physical fight. When Orlando
leaves, Oliver enlists the aid of a wrestler to kill Orlando in a forthcoming
wrestling match.
We
then see Rosalind and her close friend Celia. They are presented fully and
sympathetically and that treatment continues throughout the play, whenever they
appear, with sprightly and clever dialogue, some of the most entertaining that
Shakespeare ever wrote.
Their
conversation is interrupted by a character, a courtier, named Le Beau. As best
as I can tell, Le Beau is intended when we first see him to be a supercilious
sort, a fop, something like Osric in Hamlet.
Duke
Frederick, a usurper, then appears, and at first it’s hard to see anything
wrong with him – he is anxious that the younger wrestler (Orlando, as it
happens) not get hurt, which is commendable. After the match, which Orlando
wins, Frederick starts to congratulate him, but realizes that Orlando is the
son of one of his enemies, and he then snubs him.
Before
the wrestling match, Orlando has seen, and fallen in love with, Rosalind. He
now asks Le Beau who she is, and Le Beau answers him not only
straightforwardly, but sympathetically. Le Beau in fact criticizes Duke
Frederick, and warns Orlando that he is probably in danger.
My
impression of this encounter is that, having set Le Beau up to be one sort of
person, Shakespeare now finds he needs him to be someone else – instead of a
vacuous insect, to be a man of real character. So Shakespeare, not bothering to
go back and revise our first look at Le Beau, essentially turns him into a new
person.
Duke Frederick now banishes Rosalind from the court, and Duke Frederick’s daughter Celia decides to go with her – Rosalind’s father, the overthrown Duke, is now living in the forest, like Robin Hood. At this point the plot is not only realistic but potentially threatening
– the forest presumably is a dangerous place, Duke Frederick is a wild cannon,
and Orlando also clearly may be in trouble.
We
then see the banished Duke in the forest. However, what follows is not danger
but comedy, as we hear about the funny things one of the Duke’s people, Jaques,
has said about a deer he saw in the woods. The play appears to be lightening
up. We can certainly feel that it will be a comedy.
But
the next two scenes work the other way – Duke Frederick sends troops to find
and capture Rosalind and Celia, and Adam, Orlando’s servant, warns Orlando that
he had better escape from the Duke’s castle while he can.
The
relation of these events to the previous comic scene are not faults in the
play, of course – Shakespeare is fully entitled to juxtapose different kinds of
scenes next to each other, and he does, throughout his whole career in fact, to
brilliant effect.
Nevertheless,
the first time we saw Adam, he seemed to be a conventional old servant. Oddly,
now, when he warns Orlando of danger, he turns into a comic character, a sort
of Foster Brooks (for those who remember him),
verbose and somewhat muddled:
The enemy of all your graces lives:
Your brother – no, no brother; yet the son –
Yet not the son, I will not call him son
Of him I was about to call your father…
Again
we see Shakespeare adding traits to a character as he needs them. In this case,
I would say, he wants to keep the tone of the play from becoming too serious, so
he uses Adam for that purpose. Adam talks a great
deal (there are some indications that Shakespeare played the role!).
Shakespeare
now takes us back into the forest, where Rosalind and Celia meet a shepherd and
decide to buy a property from a character the shepherd describes:
My master is of a churlish disposition,
And little recks to find the way to heaven
By doing deeds of hospitality.
This
churlish character, who sounds potentially interesting, will be referred to
once more in the play, but will never appear. It is fairly unusual for a
character in a play to be introduced and then dropped in this fashion. My
feeling is that perhaps there was an intention to bring him on stage – but that
that didn’t work out, perhaps because it wasn’t necessary.
The
next scene is a song. It has no plot function at all – I wrote in my script, “Why
is this here?” This is not the last song Shakespeare will introduce in this
play without much reason for it to exist. (Some have called AYLI “Shakespeare’s musical,” presumably
like a musical of pre-Oklahoma!
vintage.)
Orlando
now bursts into the banished Duke’s camp, demanding food for the starving Adam
and himself. The Duke is friendly and convinces Orlando to bring Adam to him,
so he can be fed. After Orlando leaves, the Duke remarks to Jaques that “Thou
seest we are not all alone unhappy,” to which Jaques replies with the famous “Seven
Ages of Man” speech. (The scene ends with another song, incidentally.)
Clearly,
then, Shakespeare is doing some fine writing in this play. But I hope the
description of the story so far has made it clear that the work to this point
is uneven. Shakespeare appears to be meeting the needs of the moment without a
great deal of concentration on the plot (cf. that first, oddly inserted song)
or consistency of character. One gets the feeling – at least I do – of a writer
forging ahead in the task of creating a play, not tossing it off, but also not
sweating the details.
The
next scene finds Duke Frederick, who has now become thoroughly brutal,
terrorizing Orlando’s brother to the point where the following brilliant
dialogue would fit just as well in one of the history plays:
DUKE FREDERICK:
Your lands and all things that you dost call
yours
Worth seizure do we seize into our hands,
Till you canst quit you by your brother’s
mouth
Of what we think against you.
OLIVER:
O that your highness knew my heart in this!
I never loved my brother in my life.
DUKE FREDERICK:
More villain you.
The
preparation has at this point been made for something like the following: Duke
Frederick will assemble an army, invade the forest, and attempt to capture
Rosalind and Celia. The banished Duke, with Orlando as his second in command,
will oppose Frederick, and after appropriate ups and downs, will defeat him.
This,
I feel, is a reasonable expectation in view of the story so far. Frederick will
lose; but the struggle will be fierce. We have already seen a good bit of
violence in the play – brother fighting brother, the wrestling match, death
threats, a Duke increasingly savage. Watch out!
What
now? Well, Rosalind is in the forest, dressed as a man called Ganymede, and
Orlando is in the forest, in love with the Rosalind he thinks he left behind,
so Shakespeare brings them together again.
As
is well known, in Shakespeare’s time women did not perform on stage; female
roles were played by men. So Rosalind’s male appearance is easy to establish,
and we don’t need to fret that Orlando certainly ought to recognize her. (It
appears that they had both lived in the same castle!)
I
don’t consider this one of the marks of inconsistent or unconsidered plot
development in this play. Shakespeare often uses this same device, for example
in Twelfth Night, and it is basically
a “convention,” an established way of doing things, in his plays. However,
there will be another example of non-recognition later that is more extreme.
While
Rosalind and Orlando are working out their relationship – Rosalind offers to “cure”
Orlando of his love by pretending to be, well, Rosalind, and Orlando accepts –
Shakespeare introduces not one but two other pairs of lovers.
Their
existence in the play is not unreasonable – I’d say that the major theme of the
play is the nature of love. But the characters are given a great deal of stage
time, and not much happens in that time except that they talk.
As
a director, I can state that the best way to stage these scenes is to have very
fine performers playing them. Otherwise they are likely to strike the audience
as “dead time.”
One
reluctantly feels that Shakespeare, with not a lot of plot in hand and not a
lot of energy for complications, felt at this point that
he had to write something. The
dialogue in these scenes isn’t “bad.” It’s not priceless either, and the plot
points are easy to grasp – the audience, one suspects, “gets the message” long
before the scenes are finished.
I
should add that along the way there is also a substantial amount of comic
dialogue (in prose), most of it in scenes featuring Touchstone the clown.
Shakespeare appears to have had a fine actor (Will Kempe) available to play
this kind of role, and no doubt it was easy to create lines for Kempe like the
following:
Of a certain knight that swore by his honour
they were good pancakes and swore by his honour the mustard was naught: now I’ll stand to it, the pancakes were naught and the mustard was good, and yet was not the knight forsworn.
This
kind of thing may have been hilarious in context and as performed by Will
Kempe. It is difficult for us today not to stare at it with a cold eye, and in
fact I cut that particular speech from our production, along with some other “comic”
dialogue, because I was unable to think of any way to make it intelligible. (It
brings to mind the parody “Shakespearian” comic speech in the British comedy
revue of the 1960’s, Beyond the Fringe:
“I’m from Lancaster, and that’s to say for good shoe leather!”)
I
have neglected to keep mentioning the songs in the play, but I should point out
one (“What shall he have that kill’d the deer?”) that occurs because
Shakespeare, clearly bored by the requirements of plot by this time, needs to
separate two scenes between Rosalind and Celia. In order to indicate that time
passes, people come out, sing a song, and leave. This is not, in anybody’s
book, brilliant play construction.
Finally,
late in Act IV, Shakespeare begins to feel the need to bring his story to a
conclusion. You will recall my speculation above that Duke Frederick will come
into the forest with an army. This is not exactly
what happens.
Instead,
Oliver, Orlando’s vile brother, appears with a story of having rescued Orlando
from a lion, and while telling the story, falls in love with Celia. He is a
thoroughly redeemed – in fact, completely transformed – character.
Orlando,
frustrated that his brother has found his true love while he can’t find his,
tells “Rosalind” (Rosalind) that he can’t pretend any more, whereupon Rosalind
promises to straighten everything out.
After
another unmotivated song, the main characters of the play gather to see what
Rosalind can do. The Duke and Orlando have a mystifying conversation in which we
learn that the Duke has failed to recognize his own daughter:
I do remember in this shepherd boy
Some lively touches of my daughter’s favour.
This
is carrying Shakespearian disguise pretty far; but never mind, because there
are more wonders ahead.
Suddenly
more music – honestly, it almost is a
musical – plays, and Hymen, the goddess of marriage, appears and sings a song,
introducing Rosalind as, well, Rosalind.
I
have been asked in rehearsal what in the world Hymen is doing there – there are
no other mythological characters in the play – and all I can guess is that perhaps
that she wandered in from a Masque (a courtly form of entertainment often
featuring mythological characters).
Then
– in a stupendous feat of dramaturgy – a new, previously unseen character
appears. He is Jaques de Bois, Orlando’s middle brother, and if you have been
paying attention you will note that he shares a first name with another
character in the play – the Jaques of the “Seven Ages of Man” speech, a
character invented by Shakespeare, not in the source material.
In
other words, at this point Shakespeare brings in a new character and doesn’t even bother to think up a new
name for him.
Jaques
de Bois, in a nod to my notion of where the plot might have gone, reports (we
don’t see this happen) that Duke Frederick did indeed lead an army into the
forest, but that he met “an old religious man,” perhaps a monk, and was
converted! He will now be a monk himself, and he is giving the banished Duke
back his dukedom. Ta da!
It’s
certainly a happy ending. Frankly, though, I get even greater pleasure from the
glimpse that I am convinced the play provides, of a writer too busy to rewrite,
who makes decisions as he goes along without worrying too much about them, and
who nevertheless produces a lovely, if definitely curious, play.
One
reads that some critics consider AYLI
a masterpiece, while others consider it deeply flawed. Surely the answer is not
an “either/or” matter. Who says it has to be perfect? It is lovely. And fun. And a little odd.
I
am delighted that AYLI is a play with
its strengths and curiosities both on display for us – not, for example, a
powerful machine of a drama like Othello,
where every detail packs a punch.
Sometimes
the majesty of Shakespeare’s achievement feels like it’s too much for us to
take in. On the other hand, here is a holiday of a play, written, without a lot
of stress, to delight us, and also perhaps to get us to scratch our heads once
or twice. In it, I am convinced, we get
to see the author at work.
Not
every play has to be a masterpiece in order to be a treasure. As You Like It is definitely the way I
like it.
[Among
the things in William Shakespeare’s bio about which we don’t
know the truth is his religious affiliation. (Much is made of this
in Will, the fictionalized bio series about
the Bard on TNT.) Some biographers posit that he was a Catholic—perhaps
a secret Catholic—while others assert he was a true Anglican. I believe
there’s little or no evidence to support either contention. (Will is far from a great show, but, like the 1998
film Shakespeare in Love, it’s a good example of how we fill in the
gaps in what we know about the playwright with imagined—and often far-fetched—history.)
[Guessing
how Shakespeare wrote As You Like
It with
so little evidence—based solely on reasoning—reminds me of two acts of
imagination. One’s an old cartoon, maybe from the New Yorker, maybe Playboy.
A man dressed in skins is lolling on a beach, noodling with some stones.
In the last panel, he gets up and walks away and we see what he’s left behind
is Stonehenge: he was a giant and all the theories we’ve made through
the centuries to explain how Stonehenge was built the way it was are
just wrong!
[The
other thing is Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia in
which Lord Byron scholars, doing research in an old English country house
where the poet is supposed to have stayed, are putting together their
interpretation of evidence about Byron and a hermit who lived on the grounds
150 years earlier. Their logical conclusions turn out to have been all
wrong—as we learn because the play takes place alternately in the present and
in the 1800’s
[Like
most Stoppard plays, Arcadia plays with language and perception
(many of his plays, starting with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, are about how we know what we know—or think we know)
and has a puzzle at its center. A little like Artist Descending a Staircase (1972/1989), Arcadia also
plays with time—in the sense of how a story is told. Artist is told backwards and Arcadia is
told in two time periods alternately (like James Michener’s 1965 novel, The Source). So while characters in the present are piecing
together clues about an event in the past, we see that past event unfolding in
intervening scenes.
[The
present-day characters draw a logical conclusion about the unrecorded
historical happening, but the characters of the past didn’t actually behave out
of reason; sometimes they just did things on a whim—like that giant
playing with rocks on a beach in the cartoon. No logic in the world could
predict a giant playing “pick-up-rocks”! Just like no one can reason out
why Shakespeare, who my undergrad director and theater teacher used to say was
just a hack—and sometimes he simply had to churn out product, wrote a
scene or inserted a song into a play just because he felt like it at the moment
or didn’t take the time to come up with a better idea.]
On Sunday afternoon, 10 September, I went out to Upper Montclair, New Jersey, to see Kirk's mounting of 'As You Like It' for the Saint James Players. Besides being just a joy to watch, the production is a remarkable demonstration of what Kirk discusses above. Of course, he directed the play based on the same perceptions as those by which he analyzed it, but they work so well, including his cutting of Shakespeare's text (the SJP production runs about 2 1⁄4 hours, plus an intermission) that you have to assume he got his thoughts on the play right.
ReplyDeleteI was most impressed with an invention of Kirk's to deal with some of the windier passages in a theatrical way: he created the Hawthorne Troupe, a "troupe within the troupe," sort of an ad hoc version of the Players in 'Hamlet.' They enacted in pantomime all the off-stage events that someone describes later so that we don't just sit and hear a long, expository monologue. In addition to being excellently performed, it was an inspired idea--especially for an audience that included lots of children from the community as well as some adults who probably aren't habitual Shakespeare devotees.
Secondly, Kirk cast a group of little children (dressed in sort of "Robin Hood" drag) as the Children's Cirque to perform the several songs the director describes above as "unmotivated." Now, who could resist that gimmick? And it perfectly obliterated the problem of the song interludes being unconnected to the play--because they no longer had to be. It was just what Shakespeare probably intended the songs to be--audience-pleasing diversions.
All this prompts a comment I'd like to make in support of community theater. That sort of amateur show is often disparaged, especially by theater pros or so-called sophisticated theatergoers used to Broadway-type fare, but it has an important role--and when well done with this in mind, like the SJP's work, is a top-flight cultural asset.
The audience for 'AYLI' at the Saint James Church--including those children I mentioned--not only got to see a terrific rendition of a Shakespeare classic, a well-conceived and well-staged theatrical experience, but the participants (not just the actors, but the crew and staff as well)--those who aren't already theater addicts--got a glimpse of how plays are put together, a taste of the satisfaction of making a production and showing it to others, and the pleasure of having expressed themselves artistically. (Knowing Kirk as well as I do--and I have worked with him some myself--I know this troupe got the best example of this kind of collaboration they could possibly have found.)
I kept thinking of the little boy in front of me, probably about 6 or 7, as well as the children on stage: they all will have had an experience they'll never forget. (I still remember seeing my first Shakespeare play, also by a community group, sometime when I was in elementary school in Washington. It was 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.')
As I've written on this blog before ("Degrading the Arts," 13 August 2009): this is how we develop audiences who love theater all their lives and communities and citizens who want to support the arts for all of us.
~Rick