Sketches on Shakespeare

In my youth, I purchased two mighty strong hardback books of William Shakespeare. They were his complete works; volume one consisted of many of his plays, all of his plays in fact and the second volume consisted of his poems, including his sonnets, aside to this, there were one hundred pages of notes from his plays, almost entirely. I was in my later teenage years and had stumbled upon them and stumbled on other books too, which were, as I remember correctly, of the grandest quality. I did not know the other authors at the time, some of which were the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the works of Henrik Ibsen, Robert Browning and Oscar Wilde. The man, in fact, that sold me the books was a rarity, and it is sad to say, but true, people like him do not exist anymore; yet it is the case the man may still be living, but even so, men like that are a dying breed and may never be seen again on our shores.

I still recall my first encounter with this man. I stumbled on his outside stall, moseying around, thinking how silly and frivolous my life was. I was cold as it was one of those days in England; days we no longer have. I was cold; my nose as I was told more than once, was glowing red as were my hands. The man greeted me with his black untrimmed beard and his woolly hat which I never saw him without, with a cup of coffee in his hands. I told him I was looking for some books. He asked me is it for study, I replied it was not for study, but merely because I wished to read something and he put some of the books my way and I took them away. This was my first acquaintance with Shakespeare outside of school.

I have always had remarkable eyesight, which is just as well as the writing in these two books were smaller than one would think possible. I had no trouble with the writing in any case. I was living at home with my parents then and was for a good while after that as a matter of fact. I took the books to my room but I could always hear voices downstairs, so I would put on the radio and read the books as the music played. I first looked at the two books, smiling to myself, giggling even as though I had just been given all the money in the world. I opened volume one, then put it down and opened the other volume. I smelt both editions. It was his comedies, Shakespeare’s that is of course, that I started to read first. I can even remember the first play; and according to this edition, it was the first comedy he wrote, which was Love’s Labour’s Lost, but this is false I later learned.

Several years later, after reading these two hardback books of Shakespeare, I was not remaining idle on my bed or outside on the doorstep as my parents smoked cigarettes incessantly and talked about the most trivial nonsense; I was in there, on the cold kitchen floor, sitting on the washing up bowl, reading the plays; whilst walking wherever I was walking I would read them, but by this time I had other books, other editions, small ones that were able to fit in the pocket; I was no longer idle, which I preferred to be in any case, if, so I am told, reading Shakespeare is remaining idle, but enough of this, for I was in college, studying drama, not theoretical drama but the practice of the art of acting. It was here that I saw people who knew Shakespeare and there was lots of chatter about it, much of it dismissively.

‘Bald Ric,’ was a man I met there, who was some ten years older than all the other students on the course and was older even than his teacher. His name was Richard but as such things happen nicknames are required for strange and peculiar people, and ‘bald Ric’, was one such person. When I first saw the man, with his shiny bald pate and his large green eyes that forever stared, blinking his eyes as if they were exploding bombs and every time this silly man, for that is what he was, blinked his eyes, we thought he had gone to sleep! He had not of course. The man had no depth to him, he had neither courage nor bravery; he would never take a risk, in acting or otherwise. I found this out in one of the classes I did with the man. I did only one class a week with him. In this class, which was part of our A levels, we were required to perform a monologue from a piece of dramatic literature. He was largely known as an idiot, but I talked to the man and even liked him as he was interesting and spoke with passion in various subjects, but Shakespeare was not one of them.

In this class we were both coming to, which was every Wednesday afternoon for three hours, he had decided, he told me, to perform a monologue from the playwright, Willy Russell. I had never heard of the writer, but as soon as I had, I made it my business to borrow his plays from the library and read them and having done so, I was as impressed with his writing as I was with bald Ric being a man of great genius. Ric, as I usually called him, was not only not a man of genius, he could barely memorise a sentence without him bumbling around. One, also, had never seen such nerves before. It is no understatement to say he was not born to act. You could see his legs visibly shaking, his voice breaking. It was, tragically, worse than that; he could not create a character no matter how much study. He merely spoke words as if he read them from a card. He could not even, as tragic as it is, memorise a speech in Blood Brothers, which is a miserable little play by this frivolous playwright. I chose to dramatise Dr Stockmann from Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. When I told the peculiar fellow about my choice, which I thought was a great play, as I do now, he scrunched up his face, proclaiming, in his high-pitched squeaky voice, which is more suited to the playground than the theatre, that the play is’ too much’ for him. It translated, indeed, that he did not wish to tackle any text which may require any skill in acting or that he did not care for the social plays.

Sometime after that, I learnt he was not fanatical with his Shakespeare as I was and with Ibsen and Shaw and other dramatists. He was, as I soon learnt, infatuated by a comedy duo who went by the name of Laurel and Hardy. He would talk about the two men as if they were Shakespeare reincarnated! He attended many of their conventions dressed up with a bowler hat, which he brought into the studio where we studied in the college. Great laughter fell by all those present and further ridicule lay prominent in the air for everybody to touch and feel, as the poor man, albeit his own doing, was in the room and indeed out of it. I would, because I was not then and am not now, an unpleasant and unkindly fellow, not seek to ridicule the man whatever manner it came in, so I sought to humour him and him likewise me. During one of our many discussions, which, to be candid and plain, fell into total farce, he told me in the most explicit terms that his duo, which he admired stated loud and clearly, were the two greatest actors ever to have existed, not just in their lifetime, and the generations following it, but of all time!

I asked this peculiar and maverick of a man what is an actor composed of; what are the components. It seemed, when I asked him this, like I was asking a small infant the complexities of Hegelism. He looked at me, laughing all the while, bumbling and stuttering like he does, almost foaming at the mouth in the process. He gave some answer, which was inadequate and what the answer was exactly I cannot altogether remember, but it was, I am certain about, something like this: ‘to act well and convince the audience of your performance.’ After the man said as much, I gave a sort of smile. He must have, after that, asked me what I believed an actor was composed of and the like and I told him, in no uncertain terms, an actor is somebody who is trained in the art of acting. The art of acting is, if I recall correctly, the ability of the performer involved, to play roles, to dive into the skin of another and act in such a manner that is unrecognisable; their speech, actions, gait, behaviours, the way they, stare, think, muse, and so on. I recall him, too, after this interview, telling me this duo, were the greatest actors of all time, who played nobody but themselves, who never acted as such; rather, they played themselves and entertained many millions of people; for, it is true, I said to the man, they are entertainers, nothing more, nothing less. He then told me, when the discussion turned to Shakespeare, they were in a production of one of his plays; when I asked which, he said The Comedy of Errors.

The comic duo, of course, never were in a Shakespeare production; this was sheer and utter nonsense by the man who displayed excessive trivialities, possibly even in his sleep. What he referred to, however, was a film, a feature-length motion picture, the pair were in, in which the duo had twins, and there was, ultimately, confusion, which led to it being a comedy. That was as far as it went. By using the theme, mistaken identity, namely twins, that makes it, said the befuddled man, a Shakespeare production. He never did shake off his peculiarities even; one would think, in fact, he was born with such things and no doubt will take them to the grave with him.

The Comedy of Errors, if I remember correctly, was the second play I read by Shakespeare. The bard it is true, which very few authors can achieve, paints pictures with his words, and once the plays are devoured by the way of the eyes; I was in any case, taken on a magical journey, full of intriguing and wonderful characters. The play is truly funny, in most places, and we see it is written by a master craftsman, who still, has not yet achieved his full potential; not even close in fact, but it is true, any author would take this play for their own and cherish it for aeons and aeons, and even after death.

The play, like almost all the plays of Shakespeare, with the rare exceptions, both comedies, of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, are not his own creations. It is well known he borrowed the stories and the characters, albeit he improved on them and introduced others; this play is no exception to the rule. Plautus’ The Brothers Menaechmus is the play Shakespeare drew his source from, which, according to Hazlitt, is

not an improvement on it

I first met ‘bald Ric,’ in my first year of study. He had been there one year already. It was unfortunate for him, well, perhaps it wasn’t, but ought to be laboured, the sympathy ought to be given to the rest of his class, which there were only nine members. What I refer to here is the performance, dramatic performance, they were to give, referred to only as, ‘the end of year performance.’ This performance, which was, as I remember it well, performed for three nights; and for three nights, with various people, different people attended, for nobody attended the three performances, unless they had some duty to perform, or were paid for their time. The misfortune for the rest of Ric’s colleagues is that he was to play a part in this play, and not a small part, it is true to say. The man whose knees shook as he said a word from any play or any words he was required to learn by memory a part in the play, not a small part, but the part of Nick Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The first thing, which is of primary importance, is that Ric not only could not act for the life of him, he, also, to add insult to injury, was not funny in the slightest. If a man or woman, if she or he practiced the art of sadism long enough, abused him and stated, in no uncertain terms, without warning, if he could not make them laugh, or say something amusing; humorous, they would lay him down and stick a hot poker up his rectum, he would, no question, fail in his task. Nick Bottom, if people needed reminding, is a humorous fellow in the play, and Ric, with his bald pate and wobbly knees and the gait of a drunkard, could not, for the life of him, even make a child laugh, even a baby. I, in the evenings, such as was my dedication, would stay behind and watch the rehearsals, and see Ric make as ass of himself. He spoke his lines; there was no clarity; the truth of the matter is nobody heard him. I talked to people I knew, friends who also watched the rehearsals, well, in fact, one friend, who himself was strange, peculiar, but not in such a befuddling way. He did, however, tell more lies than Nozdryov, the most ridiculous and blatant fabricator in all fiction, from Gogol’s epic, Dead Souls. He was a man, however, who lamented the very presence of Ric.

This man, Antoni, was a man of great ambitions, who was more than adequate at debates but was no match for me, was well-read on the classics and knew Shakespeare well. We could spot a bad player, by their gait, their mannerisms and the like, and Ric, when on the stage, whenever that may be, on every occasion portrayed his own mannerisms as he seemed incapable of doing another’s. We both feared, as did others, this would be an event best forgotten. That is without mentioning the other colleagues of Ric’s, of the girls in the class, certainly, to epic proportions, could not act. The young men could perform comedy but not verse, so, much to the dismay of myself and Antoni; but, I should say, it had no bearing on me, for the tutor decided, as his students were so abominable with the business of acting, to edit the play, which we both wrangled over. I told him, in plain English, that I thought he was the most idiotic man I had set eyes upon; it did not bode well for me.

I told the man the play is not King Lear, Hamlet or even The Merchant of Venice or The Tempest, he knew that well of course. The tutor, who was to be my tutor the following year, was called Alan and was highly regarded as a teacher and educator. We continued to have disagreements about such things about how the plays of Shakespeare ought to be performed and so on. The man, if the plain truth ought to be told, did not like me. He believed Shakespeare ought to be modernised so more people can understand his plays, but, I was against this and told him as much. He blocked me from attending the rehearsals, with Antoni too; so the two of us, sometimes joined by others, but often the two of us, frequented the pub together and discussed the issues of the world and such things.

I will not here, nor anywhere, discuss the three performances of the play I saw all those years ago. Not only was the play cut up like a butcher cuts his meat; it was, too, performed in modern dress, without any of the actors speaking verse, which represented a pantomime or something worse perhaps. It just leaves me to say Alan, the following year, chose not to select a classic play, but a modern play, and from a class of only seven, I was given a minor role. It suffices to say, to end on this, the lead, the man who was, and still is, so it has been reported, a contemptible character, did not return to lessons after a break, so the role was given to another.

It was, of course, much earlier when I first read the play. It was, as I recall, the third play I read of Shakespeare’s which followed immediately after the last play discussed. The great American actor, director and performance artist, Orson Welles, asserted with some clarity and authority, on many occasions in fact that he was against the modern age and romanticised about the past, as, so he claimed, Shakespeare did. Mr Welles must be congratulated here when he says this as it is clear to me, and to others, that in this play certainly, but in many others, perhaps As You Like It and Twelfth Night are good examples, that is the idea in the plays that runs throughout them, of escaping from the modern world and entering another as it is, perhaps, too ghastly for us to endure and accept. Welles also said the villains in Shakespeare, the wicked and nefarious ones, were all, ‘over there.’ The villains, one supposes, are not villains Shakespeare paints in a play such as this but villains that inhabited Shakespeare’s modern world, which was, no doubt, far less barbarous than the modern times of today. As Hazlitt says,

In the MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM alone, we should imagine, there is more sweetness and beauty of description than in the whole range of French poetry put together.

The play is one of Shakespeare’s more adored and cherished plays by people of all ages. The reason, no doubt, is because there is nothing in the play a child cannot or should not hear. There are tenfold other such reasons too. The play, in effect, is a dream or resembles one, a fairy tale, full of wonderful and fascinating characters. Every great fairy tale has a king, queen, princess or Duke, perhaps all four. I must clarify here, the usage of king and queen. A king or queen in the real world, in Shakespeare’s day certainly was very different from the fairy tale. In reality, they are known to torture, murder and imprison their enemies and even their friends, using mass terror and other awful things to consolidate their power.

Queen Mary, for example, only died six years before the birth of Shakespeare. When a person acquires the name ‘bloody Mary,’ people are inclined to panic, feel mild concern at the very least. Three hundred protestants were burnt at the stake for heresy, hundreds were forced into exile, and her half-sister, Queen Elizabeth, religious heretics underwent the same treatment, and so it goes. In the play, presently being discussed, however, it is another world entirely. We, the reader of the play, as we proceed with the unfolding action, want to remain here in this majestical world and wish to remove ourselves from the world which we now inhabit, until it is time to depart once more; it is, also, the same with the performance, but a word of warning about Shakespeare’s comedies in performance, more particularly A midsummer’s Night’s Dream. His comedies and this play especially, are seldom, if ever, performed to any standard, in Shakespeare’s home country certainly. One ought to read the play and create, in their minds the performance but, it is the case, in the world today, few do this, for if they did, their disappointment would be inevitable of such a base performance and the bastardising of the text.