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Happy Birthday, Will!Dateline: 11th April, 1999 So - next week the Bard of Avon will be 435 years old. These last twelve months have been good to him: Radio 4 listeners voted him "Man of the Millenium" and a (fictionalised) film, Shakespeare in Love, about him did pretty damned well at the Oscars. And, as usual, there were productions of his plays going on all over the world, from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in his home town to a bar in a rather scary part of New York (I saw the Shrew in a bar in Hell's Kitchen in 1998 - and most impressive it was, too!). For this sort of thing to happen to a modern, blockbuster author would seem highly unlikely, but to a man who has been dead for almost 400 years....! It really is quite incredible just what a hold Shakespeare has on the world of theatre: there is not a single playwright from Britain or anywhere else in the world, from the ancient Greeks right through to the modern day, who has the same kind of popularity. But not with everyone! Oh no: there have been some dissenting voices across the years: Shakespeare's name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down. He has no invention as to stories, none whatever. He took all his plots from old novels, and threw their stories into a dramatic shape, at as little expense of thought as you or I could turn his plays back again into prose tales. Well! Perhaps we should reply with Shakespeare's own words: You are not worth the dust which the rude wind blows in your face!(That's from Lear, by the way.) I have a certain amount of sympathy with Dickens - after all, Shakespeare is not meant to be read but to be performed - but the arrogance of GBS never fails to amaze me. He is, I believe, one of the more minor talents of the century, writing agit-prop rather than real theatre, and his detailed character descriptions and stage directions seem to me to exhibit a contempt for the idea of theatre as a collaborative art. He should have written novels! The comment of Voltaire doesn't surprise me. It is, perhaps, a bit extreme, but French theatre took such a different path that a rejection of Shakespeare was inevitable. French classical theatre - specifically Racine and Corneille - followed the Aristotelian doctrine of the Three Unities (one is tempted to use the word "slavishly"), so the very broad canvas of Shakespeare would appear anathema right through until the eighteenth century. The Three Unities were the Unity of Time (the events of the play must take place within what we now call "real time", the time that the play lasted), the Unity of Place (a stage could only represent one place, so the action had to happen in that one place) and the Unity of Action (no sub-plots). No French playwright could have written, as Shakespeare did in the prologue to Henry V, ........Can this cockpit hold It was really the advent of Romanticism that changed the French attitude, so Voltaire's comment is hardly a shock! Some time ago I became involved in a discussion - argument! - in one of the newsgroups about that old perennial, the British musical. One of the arguments thrown at me by my opponents was an accusation that it depends on spectacle, as if, somehow, that is a condemnation. (that bloody helicopter in Miss Saigon!) I countered this by mentioning Verdi and Wagner, to no avail. I could (except that I didn't think of it till a while after!) have equally well mentioned Shakespeare, for his work is certainly on an epic scale and would certainly have been spectacular in terms of the staging of his time. In fact, if we must look for antecedents (That's my academic training of more than thirty years ago coming out!), I would suggest that Shakespeare probably owes more to Homer and Virgil than he does to Aeschylus - or Aristotle! It is, I submit, that epic quality, with its complexities, sub-plots and wide time-span, that makes Shakespeare so great and so attractive to a modern audience. And he is attractive to modern audiences: witness the number of productions, witness the success of Branagh's films, and of Lurhman's and Zefferelli's Romeo and Juliet. It wouldn't surprise me if he isn't the man of the next millenium too! Articles Indices: |
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