On Directing Shakespeare

by Kirk Woodward

[On 21 September 2009, I posted “Staging Shakespeare” on Rick On Theater;  it discusses various suggestions and recommendations concerning directing William Shakespeare’s plays, based on the advice of some of the West’s most esteemed directors of classic theater.  My friend Kirk Woodward, an accomplished director himself—and a student of theater history—takes a different tack on the way to approach a Shakespearean script in the modern theater. 

[Based on his recent reading of Ronald Watkins’s 1950 book On Producing Shakespeare, Kirk discusses the implications of considering the Elizabethan theater space for which Shakespeare wrote his plays.  Watkins’s—and Kirk’s—premise is that since Shakespeare was himself an actor, he would have been very cognizant of the stage and other attributes of theaters like the Globe, where he and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, his acting troupe, worked, and incorporated that familiarity when he wrote.  I’ll let Kirk explain the rest of this interesting and useful idea.  ~Rick]

Two years ago I directed a production of As You Like It by William Shakespeare (1564-1616) in the sanctuary of the Episcopal Church of St. James in Montclair, New Jersey. I wanted to give a feeling of the flow of the play as its first audiences might have experienced it, so the principal playing area was an open space with pews on three sides; a secondary playing area was the steps and platform behind the open space, commonly if not correctly called “the altar;” and a third, minor playing area, was the center aisle running through the middle of the audience.

We did achieve a fairly smooth flow between scenes, but I realize now how far I was from Shakespearian practice, as demonstrated in a terrific book called On Producing Shakespeare (1950) by Ronald Watkins (1904-2001), an English director and educator. I first read about Watkins’ book in a chapter of a book I have recommended before in this blog, In Search of Theater by Eric Bentley (b. 1916). In his chapter in that book titled “Doing Shakespeare Wrong,” Bentley writes, “. . . modern scholarship has shown that Elizabethan staging was a good deal less abstract than was previously supposed; Ronald Watkins’ fascinating book Producing Shakespeare [sic] bristles with illustrations of this fact.”  [For Kirk’s references to Bentley’s book, see “Eric Bentley – An Appreciation,” 4 December 2012 on ROT, and “Eric Bentley on Bernard Shaw,” 3 December 2015.]

It certainly does, and a great deal more than that. Watkins’ thesis is that one cannot understand the dramatic nature of Shakespeare’s plays without understanding the physical theater(s) for which they were written. When I say “the dramatic nature” I mean understanding the plays as plays on the stage.

I recall that years ago, at Washington and Lee University, I took one of the best courses I’ve ever attended, a class on a number of Shakespeare’s plays taught by the outstanding poet Dabney Stuart (b. 1937). At the outset of the class, Stuart told us that he intended to approach the plays as though they were poems, fully realizing, he said, that there were other important ways to examine the plays, but he intended to approach them through a focus on imagery rather than on plot.

I realize in retrospect how careful Stuart’s articulation of his purpose was, and he brilliantly illuminated for us the way patterns of images resonate through Shakespeare’s plays.

Watkins performs a similar function for the plays as pieces to be staged, and leaves a strong conviction that anyone claiming that Shakespeare’s plays are best understood when read is missing a significant part of the essence of those plays.

One of the virtues of On Producing Shakespeare is that Watkins doesn’t overstate his case. Not that he isn’t excited about what he has learned – his excitement is almost palpable, making the book a delight to read despite its sometimes technical nature. Watkins tells us that

I propped a picture [of how the Globe Theater was laid out] before me… and, with a reproduction of the first Folio text, re-read most of the plays in chronological order of composition . . . and saw them taking shape in the Elizabethan playhouse. Since then more than twenty of the plays have been produced in such conditions at Harrow: and, in spite of the technical inexperience of school-boy actors, it is no exaggeration to say that for many in the audiences Shakespeare’s intentions have again and again been seen for the first time. There is nothing surprising in this: for the method of “production” has been constant and, one might say, fool-proof. After creating the essential conditions of his theatre, we have asked “What did the Chamberlain’s men do? Why did Shakespeare write it like this? What is his intention in this or that speech? In such-and-such a sequence?” And the rest followed: we found always that he had faced the problem before us, and solved it by means of his stagecraft, developed to meet the needs of his particular theatre.

One can feel the thrill of discovery in Watkins’ words, and he devoted the later part of his long career to bringing his discovery to audiences wherever he could. He was also a strong proponent of the reconstruction of the Globe Theater in London that opened in 1997, where my family a few years after that stood (as “groundlings!”) for a three and a half hour long production of Hamlet.

But, as I said, Watkins doesn’t overstate his case. He recognizes that a great deal of what he says is conjectural; but, he establishes, it is also logical.

As opposed to the three playing areas described above for my production of As You Like It, the Globe had (depending on how one counts) some seven major playing areas, plus permanent features like doors, windows, columns, trapdoors, and painted skies, that could all serve multiple functions. As a result, a major function of a director would be to decide which area or areas was appropriate for each scene of a play, and work out the sequence of areas for the entire play.

(The British have traditionally referred to what we call a “director” as a “producer,” so the title of Watkins’ book, if it had been published first in the United States, would have been On Directing Shakespeare. Because Watkins doesn’t know who actually “produced” – directed – Shakespeare’s plays, he calls that person “the book-keeper,” that is, the one who holds and uses the master script. In that way Watkins doesn’t have to be more specific about just who that person was for a particular play – something that we don’t know.)

Watkins goes into great detail to show the advantage of approaching Shakespeare’s plays from the point of view of how in the Globe they were staged. Here is a sample of how this works:

There is, in 3 Henry VI [Henry VI, Part 3], an elaborate scene in the course of which no fewer than five “armies” appear on the Platform. Warwick the King-Maker stands with the Mayor upon the Walls of Coventry (on the Tarras), awaiting reinforcements; he is especially anxious that the duke of Clarence, lately become his son-in-law, should arrive in time. His drum is expected from the direction of Southam (let us say from the actors’ left). Instead, a drum is heard from the right, and through the right-hand door march King Edward, Gloucester,  and Soundiers. Edward and Gloucester are having the better of the ensuing parley, when from the left-hand door Enter Oxford, with Drumme and Colours. The newcomers are immediately admitted into the city: that is to say, they march through the gates, set in the Study above. . . . [The “Study” refers to a curtained or open alcove on the second level of the stage building.] It will be noticed that there is nothing awkward on this Platform about the convention of the cross-stage wrangle.

Watkins demonstrates that although existing “prompt-books” may not be the best guides to the texts of the plays – sometimes they appear to be reconstructions of dialogue from memory, sometimes they are severely edited – they still can be useful for containing important information about the original staging of the plays. Stage directions, actor names, even errors and mispronunciations can help us visualize how the stage was used.

Watkins challenges our ideas of the “simplicity” of Shakespeare’s original stagings. Shakespeare’s stage “pictures” could be more complex than we ordinarily imagine. The Tempest, for example, gives us a scene of a ship fighting for its life in a deadly storm.  Because the Globe Theatre had so many playing areas, the ship’s captain (for example) could appear on the third, and highest, level of the stage; the crew on the middle level; the passengers on the lowest, platform area; and other passengers coming onto the “deck” from the trapdoor, or either of the side doors. Add some ropes and perhaps a ladder or two, and the stage picture becomes rich and detailed.

Watkins also points out that Shakespeare’s stage has a “depth” to it that is difficult to achieve in our “picture box” stages. “The result,” he writes,

is that the Globe stage not only is a little deeper than most modern stages, but also seems (which is more important) very much deeper. . . . The most immediate and obvious effect of the ground-plan of the Globe is the real sense of distance, not only across the Platform, but also between the forward (down-stage) and backward (up-stage) positions, making one group seem close to us in the audience, another remote. . . . The impression of near and far, of perspective, makes lively sense of many scenes which are in danger of awkwardness on our picture stage.

One more example of this occurs

in the scene of the murder of Clarence in Richard III. Here there is a long and deliberately comic exchange between the two murderers – played presumably by two of the company’s comic gang, who otherwise have little employment in this play – while their unwitting victim lies asleep. The incongruity of this vaudeville-turn, intervening between Clarence’s eloquent and tragic nightmare and his unavailing pleading and murder, is an almost insoluble problem for the modern producer [director]. The difficulty hardly exists if Clarence sleeps remotely in the Study, while the comedians play their ghoulish comedy at the front of the Platform. The sudden change of mood when Clarence wakes and advances on to the platform seems then a natural transition and the tragedy is even heightened by the contrast.

Watkins also points out that the arrangement of Shakespeare’s stage makes it possible for scenes to take place in indeterminate locations when desired. “The opportunities of this unlocalized platform were quite early on appreciated by Shakespeare,” he writes, “both in the speed with which its locality could be changed, and also in the fact that it could lose all sense of being anywhere.” Watkins does not feel that the configuration of the Globe defined how Shakespeare wrote his plays; he feels that Shakespeare used that configuration for his own purposes, just as he used poetry, rhetoric, and so on. 

Two other implications of Watkins’ analysis occur to me. One is the absolute idiocy of any notion that the plays we call Shakespeare’s were written by anyone but a working actor – as Shakespeare was. Aside from the fact that none of the others proposed as authors of the plays fit the required timelines well, there is no chance that Lord Such-and-Such would ever in the remotest realm of possibility have written plays so closely linked to the Globe Theatre and the actors within it as Shakespeare’s plays are.

The other implication is that the configuration of the Globe Theatre offers a solution to the director’s nightmare posed by the last scenes of many of Shakespeare’s comedies, such as As You Like It, where pair after pair of couples stand around waiting to be linked and married. If those couples are placed in multiple playing areas, on different levels, on different parts of the stage, they make a pleasing picture, instead of merely forming a line or a crowd.

There are numerous other insights in this fascinating book, but it leaves me with the ultimate conclusion that if we don’t consider the physical theater in which Shakespeare worked, we are leaving out of consideration a major aspect of his work, as though we were to describe a human being by talking only about the person’s head.

I don’t know if I follow Watkins completely in his second conclusion – that the best way today to stage a play by Shakespeare is to stage it in the same kind of theater for which he wrote it. That may be so; I don’t know, and since there aren’t many stages built in the same configuration as the Globe, it would be difficult to achieve, even if every director wanted to do it.

But I certainly agree that an understanding of the conditions in which the plays were originally staged can help a director enormously in figuring out how to stage them. And a knowledge of the configuration of the Globe, and of how it can be used, can significantly illuminate an encounter with Shakespeare’s plays, whether that encounter is through staging them or reading them.

[In another article I posted on ROT, “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theater” (9 May 2012), I explain a concept Williams first publicly discusses in 1945, something he called “plastic theater.”  I won’t recap this concept here—curious ROTters should link onto that 2012 post to learn more—but I will point out that what Watkins is talking about above is the Elizabethan version of Williams’s 20th-century proposal.  According to Kirk, Watkins is implying in his contention that William Shakespeare wrote his plays with the staging in mind, even tailored them for the stage and technology he had at hand.  That’s the very definition of what Williams meant by plastic theater. 

[What Williams wanted, which he labeled plastic theater, was for playwrights to take command of the staging of their scripts by writing them with the staging—set, lights, blocking, special effects, music, sound, and as-yet undeveloped techniques—incorporated in the texts instead of leaving that part of the production up to a director and a team of designers who will illustrate the playwright’s words according to their own lights.  Of course, the stage arts that were available to William Shakespeare were different from those familiar to Tennessee Williams, but Watkins seems to be saying that Shakespeare was employing plastic theater 300 years before Williams proposed it.]