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Shakespeare - Man of the MilleniumDateline: 10th January, 1999 Listeners to Radio 4's Today programme have voted William Shakespeare "Man of the Millenium". It was actually "British Man of the Millenium", but, nonetheless, that's quite a compliment to the good old Bard of Avon. I confess I'm a little surprised. Whilst I yield to no one in my admiration for Shakespeare's plays, I have to wonder at his being placed above, for instance, Isaac Newton. And what about Harvey, who discovered the circulation of the blood? I would have thought he has had more impact on our lives than Will. Strange, isn't it? that so many people place a dramatist (or perhaps we should say, a literary) figure above scientists, medical researchers, the statemen who created our democracy, and others whose work and discoveries have made our lives what they are today, who have stopped the life of man being, in Locke's memorable words, "Nasty, brutish and short". But, then again, perhaps the voters were looking a bit more deeply. Here's a man who lived four hundred years ago, basically a jobbing playwright and actor, but his work is still being performed today, not just in the country of his birth, and not just throughout the English-speaking world, but all over the world. I doubt whether anyone has ever done a count, but I suspect that there are more performances of Shakespeare's plays in a year all over the world, than of the work of any other dramatist. In fact, I'd venture a guess that there are more performances of his plays than of any three other playwrights put together. Why? That's the big question, of course: why are there so many performances of Shakespeare's plays? What is their appeal? The language is outdated, at times even obscure. There are many references which are totally meaningless to us today, unless we are steeped in the study of his period. Even then there are some that escape us completely. And at times there are things in the plays - such as the anti-semitism of The Merchant of Venice - which we find totally obnoxious. Shakespeare, Our Contemporary In a marvellous article on the Gigaplex site, Richard Stayton attacks the concept that Shakespeare is our contemporary, at least in the sense that it has been interpreted by many directors: My Shakespeare is not Peter Brook's circus version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I confess that I felt uncomfortable with McKellen's Richard. I know the play inside out, and when things were missed out, or happened out of order, it stopped me in my tracks. I came out of the cinema feeling very deflated and unhappy. But then I talked to others who had seen it - people who were by no stretch of the imagination Shakespeare fans - and they had enjoyed it and are now much more open to his plays. The same must be said of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet. As a teacher I have to say that that film is the best thing to happen to Shakespeare for God knows how long. To have kids bringing a video of a Shakespeare play into school and asking to play it in class is nothing short of gob-smacking! And then, of course, there was Michael Bogdanov's Shakespeare on the Estate, which updated Macbeth to deal with drug trafficking on a Birmingham housing estate and used both professional actors and people from the estate. Shown on BBC2 in April 1997, it again enthused an awful lot of people about Shakespeare. Michael Bogdanov Bogdanov has a lot to say about making Shakespeare accessible to modern day audiences. In my interview with him in April of last year (which he asked me to remove from the site as being now out-of-date), he said, I think that the major institutions, the National, the BBC and the RSC, have propagated a vision of Shakespeare of a conservative icon, basically - a cultural, literary icon that I don't think the plays are anything to do with. I think the plays are political and there's a lot of subversion in Shakespeare which has gone by the board and been overlooked by academics and practitioners alike, desiring to prove that he's part of a cultural establishment. That's basically in order to protect their own areas, and I think he's much more radical than that.The he goes on to say, I think that if there is a way of popularising Shakespeare, or at least of making him more popular than he is at present, it is via film, where there are fewer preconceived ideas of the way the pieces should be presented. The audiences have fewer preconceptions, and a film like Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet has done more for the case of Shakespeare than almost anything in the last 25 years. I wouldn't say the same for Branagh, for although he's reached large audiences, they're basically just traditional Shakespeare on film. Nothing innovative. My Shakespeare The thing about Stayton's "My Shakespeare...", and about my feelings regarding McKellen's film, is that they are conservative reactions. We know Shakespeare, and have done for a long time. We like Branagh's Henry V because it's in the traditional style and we worry about the McKellen Richard because it isn't. We have a picture of what a Shakespeare production should be in our minds and we are uncomfortable with anything outside of it. We tend to feel that what we like is the real Shakespeare. But of course it isn't! We probably wouldn't like the original productions: the Tudor costumes would grate (No way did Julius Caesar dress that way!); we'd be uncomfortable with the style of acting; and we certainly wouldn't be keen on the length of the performance. I recently watched the 1968 Zefferelli Romeo and Juliet again and, to be honest, was a little disappointed, mainly because the style of acting was really rather dated. When I first saw it - in 1968 - I was bowled over by it, but now.... And is there anyone who doesn't feel that Olivier's Richard III is just a tad melodramatic? Stayton says in his essay: The hip, with it, chic, cool thing to do with Shakespeare is to make his work ACCESSIBLE... not by speaking the lines clearly, or elucidating a plot simply, or addressing profound philosophical discourse in a conversational style. We make Shakespeare accessible by costuming him in today's fashions, or making him a screenwriter obedient to a director's fantasies.and much of this makes sense, but he is wrong in condemning "today's fashions" and "making him a sceenwriter" etc., for there is nothing wrong with either of these two things, as long as they remain true to the text. If we don't want Shakespeare to die, or to become the preserve of a narrow elite, then we must reinterpret him in modern day terms. We live in a visual society. Kids today are more visually sophisticated than at any previous time. On the other hand, they are less verbally-orientated: TV has replaced the book as the filler of children's imaginations. If we want Shakespeare to survive to be the next millenium's "Man of the Millenium", we're going to have to use the techniques of the visual age to make him accessible. I'm afraid my Shakespeare is not the Shakespeare for today: Ian McKellen's and Baz Luhrmann's are. Articles Indices: |
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