Notes from the Shakespeare-Industrial Complex

by Akiva Fox

In a recent essay for The Thread, Adam Sobsey asked, “Is Shakespeare bad for theater?” That hit home for me, because for several years, I worked in the belly of the Shakespeare-Industrial Complex.

The productions I worked on were very watchable. We spent a lot of money on them, and the acting and directing were at an advanced level, so the productions certainly looked and sounded good. But by far my favorite pastime was walking around the lobby undercover during intermission and listening to conversations. A representative (and verbatim) comment: “I really like it—I don’t understand any of the words, but I like it!” Can your heart be both warmed and frozen at the same time? That did it for me.

I heard this sentiment over and over, in one form or another, spoken and implied. When people were asked what they liked about a particular play, they would name some timeless theme—often a fantastically vague one, like “leadership,” or one based on misunderstandings of basic facts about the play. And I thought, why would someone say they liked something they did not understand? Was this a naked emperor scenario, or had they actually convinced themselves that it was an awfully snappy invisible jacket?

We don’t like to say this too loud, but a lot of the language in Shakespeare’s plays puts up a wall of incomprehension by virtue of its age alone. Languages change over time. They change in ten years, let alone four hundred. Archaic pronouns form immediate roadblocks, even if you know what they mean. Archaic words too, especially colloquial usages. Sitcoms of today will not wear well in 2430. Topical references (of which Shakespeare wisely includes fewer than the shameless Ben Jonson) wear worst of all. I don’t think Shakespeare intended any of these aspects to block communication—if anything, these were the easy way in, for the people of his time.

But I do think he wanted his word choices to challenge simple communication, much as our modern poetic-minded playwrights try to. Shakespeare invented new words out of familiar roots to articulate ideas not easily articulated. He chose shocking and unexpected images to make familiar ideas seem bizarre again. Good writers shock the brain out of expectation; make it follow them home. They warp things from normal to new, and crack a few heads in the process.

Basic comprehension is a bigger problem than we like to admit in the playing of Shakespeare, which also muddles up the parts we aren’t supposed to fully comprehend. Most productions do not help the work of basic comprehension. The Peter Hall/John Barton school of verse-speaking that has ruled the last 50 years of performance, despite the positive effects of its renewed focus on the language, can have a disastrous side effect—it consciously or unconsciously tells actors that if they speak the language correctly, the sense will come through. Two mortal sins in that: it presupposes a correct way of speaking the language (which kills all hope of the language sounding human), and it leads to sung lines, as though the performers were simultaneously in poetry readings at separate bookstores. By absolving the actors from the work of comprehension, you make it even harder on the audience.

And if the audience professes liking Shakespeare’s plays whether they understand the language or not, what’s the practical incentive to help them understand? If people stood up in the middle of productions of Shakespeare and said, “I’m sorry, I don’t have the slightest clue what anyone is saying,” that would change things. If they stormed out at halftime (the fate of many a poetic new play) and did not buy tickets the next time this “Shakespeare” guy was produced, that would sure as hell change things.

***

I contend that most Shakespeare is badly done because people will buy tickets whether it’s good or not. Sobsey railed against the phrase “doing Shakespeare.” I think the offending word there isn’t “doing,” but “Shakespeare”—as a genre, not a name. Only when Shakespeare becomes a genre, rather than a writer, does he become other pernicious things: good for you, important, a rite of passage, respectable, “immortal.” The way Shakespeare is produced today reminds me of church (says the Rabbi’s son). Often, you go to church because you are supposed to, or because your parents and grandparents do. Church does not have to move you, it only has to be attended; if it moves you by chance, it does so by cultural association rather than by content. It goes through the motions because the motions have always had to be gone through.

What are these strange rituals? They seem consequential. You feel better for having gone, but not for anything that actually took place there. Audiences like Shakespeare because they genuinely believe they should, not because most of what they see makes them feel like they do. As long as they keep coming whenever the name Shakespeare is invoked, why should people who put on the plays bother doing the kind of rigorous work they would do on a new play?

Shakespeare the man is essentially irrelevant to the discussion, but Shakespeare the writer is overlooked with shocking frequency, and at our peril. He was, like every great writer, a person who used language in unexpected ways to show other human beings themselves in all their inexplicable fullness. He was not a god; he was not perfect; he was not a genre; he was a writer who strung words together around the time Modern English was coalescing. He was in the right place at the right time. Had he been born in our time, like poor Mac Wellman, he might have fallen on deaf ears. Shakespeare was lucky and good, which is what all geniuses seem to be. The danger of undue reverence is that it leads to vagueness, generality, and every other fatal enemy of art. We tend to think it’s enough to say the words in the right order. Any other playwright, directed and acted the way we approach Shakespeare’s work, would have his work savaged by every critic within scribbling distance.

The best experiences I’ve had with Shakespeare have mostly been blips: the times when, in reading one of his plays, a now-hoary phrase will leap back into strangeness and remind you who’s boss; or when an actor’s reading will slap you around with a word you forgot was there. But without the incentive to do the basic work you’d do on any play, most productions turn into highly-acclaimed seas of tranquility. It always helps me to remember what the scripts originally looked like, and how they were rehearsed: an actor received all his lines, with only the last word from the previous actor to cue him, and then he got one rehearsal (or no rehearsal at all) before opening day. I’ve seen companies try to replicate this style, and if it’s messy, it’s also pretty damn electrifying. It does remind you, though, how little listening and reacting actually goes on in most productions of the plays. Most call to mind Lawrence Welk—familiar tunes repeated so that we may all agree that this is how they went, and remember when they went that way. It makes it hard to recall that the original tune was about the time that girl cheated on you, or that guy who killed his brother and had to keep it a secret.

When Sobsey calls for a moratorium on bad Shakespeare, I think, “Good luck policing that one.” The distinction between good and bad productions of Shakespeare, to me, has never been about what the actors or sets are wearing; it’s about whether those are humans up there duking it out. Set it on the moon, but play the language and incident moment-to-moment and with specificity, and I will be on that moon with you. Set it in London in1601, but generalize everything into a mass of intention, and I will be off researching retirement homes on said moon. But the latter’s easier to get away with.

Mostly, I’m afraid, I hear the “Shakespeare laugh” or the “Shakespeare sigh” from audiences—the sounds by which we mutually convince ourselves that we totally just got what they said, as we hope that no one notices that we didn’t actually get it. And it’s not our fault—as a culture, we inadvertently decided on this together, and then assumed it had always been this way. Shakespeare became high culture, and thus a genre, and thus general, and thus bad theater because we (with the help of lots of time, and many accidents) made him that. See Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow, and the mountain of books about “how Shakespeare became Shakespeare” for the full story, or wait until I get my act together and put this all into one cranky book.

It’s an unwitting cultural paralysis. Milton’s writing about the same phenomenon only 50 years after Shakespeare, when he says that he “make[s] us marble, with too much conceiving.” We can tell ourselves that we produce Shakespeare so much because his words are eternal, or because we love him more than ponies and rainbows, but the truth is that we mostly produce him because we have all heard that he is important. We don’t go to see Shakespeare the writer performed, we go to see Shakespeare the genre done. Many productions get away with the latter, because many audiences can’t or don’t want to see the former. But I know in my soul that they are not the same—the guy who wrote Hamlet knew that being and seeming are not the same, and you had sure as hell better figure out how to tell the difference, because most of the world can’t.

***

A few years back, Dan VanHoozer, Emily Hill, and I (now better known as Haymaker) got together with some friends and picked up Hamlet. We saw a play that had been sitting at the bottom of the cultural sea for centuries, gathering detritus until the shape of the thing itself was totally obscured by what had built up around it. This was a play I had loved at 15, before I knew that everybody else had heard of it too. It had seemed radical and weird and unsavory, and then the wave of respectability had ripped it out of my hand and carried it far away. And I wanted that first reading back. So instead of ignoring the cultural buildup, we looked it right in its filthy face. We identified every last cultural problem we saw, and addressed each head-on.

People came to Hamlet because they knew it was famous? We called our production The Christmas Show. People recognized the famous lines to the point where they became meaningless? We cut all the famous lines. People thought they knew the nunnery scene, the closet scene, the praying scene, the graveyard scene? We asked what was really, actually going on in those scenes, and put that onstage in all its ugliness and surprising specificity. People thought they knew what Hamlet looked like? We cast a whiny pipsqueak/metalhead. People thought Claudius was the villain? We cast a guy who looked like most Hamlets, blond and warm. People thought Shakespeare should make you comfortable? We kept them mostly on their feet, and dragged them out into the freezing cold for a scene or two.

We even put Death in the play. Dan played him in a Tigers cap, like an especially malevolent Magnum, P.I. Above all, we came back to the words, trying to speak them as specifically as possible. We didn’t try to make things make sense; we tried to say them like an improbably articulate human would. We tried to make it radical again. It kind of almost worked, too. But maybe it’s too late. I wish I could be shocked when Cordelia doesn’t make it—what a ballsy and maddening and vital way to end a play! I wish I could hear jealousy described as a “green-eyed monster that doth mock the meat it feeds on” and remember what jealousy felt like and realize what an insanely original and right way that is to describe it. I want to be 15 again for that (and not for any other part of being 15), but I understand that genie is not easily rebottled.

Shakespeare isn’t bad for theater, but the way we produce most Shakespeare is corrosively bad for theater. I just wish we’d be honest with ourselves about why we produce him—to sell tickets, to gain cultural capital—and how that adversely affects the productions. Because until we acknowledge that the last four hundred years happened, we have no shot at producing these plays as plays.

Akiva Fox

Akiva Fox worked as Literary Associate at the Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington, D.C. for six years. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from the American Repertory Theater Institute. He is currently one of the three artistic directors of Durham-based performance company Haymaker. Visit www.gohaymaker.com for more information—and to test the propositions made here by Adam and Akiva for yourself, check out Duke Performances’ presentations of Fiasco Theater’s Cymbeline in February.