Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard (2 page)

Scene 1

Hollywood

H
ere’s a thing: Shakespeare is partly responsible for the film career of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Schwarzenegger got his first part in an American film (
Hercules in New York
) because Joe Weider, his friend and promoter, convinced the film’s producers that Arnie had been a great Shakespearian actor in Austria, which, of course, he hadn’t.

As it turns out, Weider’s claim didn’t end up being so far from the truth: in 1993, in the film
The Last Action Hero
, the world’s biggest fan of the world’s best action hero imagines Schwarzenegger as a
Terminator
-style Hamlet. The boy is watching Laurence Olivier in the 1948
Hamlet
: Hamlet is about to kill Claudius – but hesitates, ponders the situation. ‘Don’t talk. Just do it!’ the boy mutters at the screen. Suddenly, the muscle-bound Schwarzenegger has replaced Olivier:

H
AMLET
: Hey Claudius? You killed my father … [
He picks Claudius up
] Big mistake! [
He throws Claudius through a stained-glass window; Claudius’ body falls down a cliff
]

N
ARRATOR
: Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, and Hamlet is taking out the trash! [
Multiple shots of Hamlet fighting and killing guards. He slices through a curtain with his sword to reveal Polonius standing behind it. Polonius pushes Hamlet’s sword aside
]

P
OLONIUS
: [
smiling
] Stay thy hand, fair prince.

H
AMLET
: Who said I’m fair? [
He shoots Polonius with an Uzi. Multiple shots of Hamlet walking through Elsinore castle, shooting soldiers with his Uzi
]

N
ARRATOR
: No one is going to tell this sweet prince good night.

H
AMLET
: [
cigar in his mouth
] To be or not to be? [
taking out his lighter
] Not to be. [
lights his cigar, castle explodes
]

Schwarzenegger as Hamlet? Surprising, perhaps, but Shakespeare really does seem to get everywhere in this modern life. Slightly less surprising might be Shakespeare’s part in the budding career of the young Sir John Gielgud, who became one of the most acclaimed Shakespearian actors of the 20th century.

Gielgud’s first job as a professional actor was as a spear-carrier in a 1921 production of
Henry V
. One of the smallest parts in a play, a spear-carrier usually has very few lines (if any), and as the name suggests, the part requires the actor to stand still at the back of the stage, holding a spear/sword/
bowl of fruit, look pretty, and bow. Not to be discouraged by his measly one line, the young actor continued acting, and eight years later Gielgud performed what many people say was the greatest Hamlet ever.

Hamlet is considered to be the most sought-after and the most elusive role for actors, and the play remains the most produced of Shakespeare’s works; countless productions, interpretations and re-interpretations have been dreamt up, trying to nail down The Definitive Hamlet. Schwarzenegger’s, though, is the only one to have thrown Claudius out of a window.

Talk about character assassination.

Scene 2

A present-day street

S
hakespeare invented the word
assassination
, a Bard-fact that will always boggle my mind. The word
assassin
has an 8th-century Arabic origin, but
assassination
is all Shakespeare.

Even-handed, far-off, hot-blooded, schooldays, well-respected
are Shakespeare’s too, as are
useful, moonbeam
and
subcontract
. If not for William S, we would be without
laughing yourself into stitches, setting your teeth on edge, not sleeping a wink, being cruel only to be kind
, and
playing fast and loose
, all adding to what turns out to be a very long list. In total, he introduced around 1,700 words and a horde of well-known phrases that we still use today.

Most of us would be happy if we added just one word to the language, never mind well over a thousand that last over 400 years.

Think (or Google)
assassination
and JFK comes up. Then, most likely, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and Julius Caesar. Their assassins are just as infamous: John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, Brutus et al. Not to mention Guy Fawkes, one of the best-known (although failed) assassins, who attempted to blow up King James I
and Parliament in November 1605.

Shortly after Fawkes’ botched effort, Shakespeare wrote
Macbeth
, partly, some think, in response to the civil unrest of the time.
Macbeth
is also the play in which he coined the word
assassination
.

Now, in the early 21st century, Shakespeare really is everywhere.

Elvis quotes him in his No. 1 hit ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ His plays are performed everywhere in countless languages. There have been productions using actors from all over the planet in the virtual computer world,
Second Life
. At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2007 (which runs for only 22 days) there were over 30 productions, either of his plays or that used his plays as a starting point. And he’s not just in theatres, of course.

Although the first film of a Shakespeare play (
King Lear
) was made way back in 1899, it’s probably Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 movie
Romeo + Juliet
that has done more in recent times than anything else to make Shakespeare more of a household name.

With 725 films to his name in March 2009, this writer from a small Warwickshire town four centuries ago is far and away the most prolific writer of movies: in 2005 alone, there were sixteen films made of his plays (never mind the thousands of fridge magnets, mugs and soft toys of his likeness).

The only writers with more screen credits to their names aren’t writers of movies, but writers of soap operas. It’s become a bit of a cliché to say it, but it’s still true: if Shakespeare were alive today he’d be writing for the soaps rather than the movies or the theatre.

But more on that later.

Scene 3

A library

D
espite this fame and apparent worldwide success, there’s something about Shakespeare that makes him inaccessible to many people. It seems that

The upshot of all this is that Shakespeare is often dumbed down and made ‘accessible’ by diluting, translating or rewriting his plays into modern English to try to draw people to his work. Either that or he’s ignored in a cocktail of panic and preconception that he’ll be too much hard work or just plain dull.

But Shakespeare is the man who made people believe there was an island owned by a magician (in
The Tempest
) and that statues could come to life by the power of love (in
The Winter’s Tale
).

He’s only Literature-with-a-capital-L until you put him back into context as an Elizabethan writer, not a 21stcentury idol. Then, once you discover the key to it all, reading Shakespeare’s poetry is a bit like following the clues in a Sherlock Holmes novel, or reading
The Da Vinci Code
: when you discover that he wrote his directions to his actors into the poetry, and work out how to decipher them, it all makes a lot more sense.

As for the words, well, admittedly, some of the words he uses might not have been in general use for a few hundred years, but a rather cooperative 95 per cent are words we know and use every day.

Hold that thought for a second: only 5 per cent of
all
the different words in
all
of Shakespeare’s plays will give you a hard time. That means there’s more contextual knowledge needed to watch an episode of the American
political TV drama series
The West Wing
than there is to get through one of Shakespeare’s plays.

The problem is, many give up by the time they get to the words. Successfully vault the Long Jump of Literature, stumble over the Pit of Poetry, take a quick look at the
actual words
he used, and the slightly odd spellings slam the final nail in the coffin. Whichever play has been briefly picked up is left once more to gather dust.

This isn’t the way it has to be.

I’m going to show you how to read the instruction manual that is a Shakespeare play, because that’s what they all are. Manuals, written by Shakespeare, for his actors, on how to perform great stories. It’s the method that got me into the plays, and if it worked for me, who once wouldn’t be seen dead near a production of Shakespeare, it’ll work for you.

The key to it all is Theatre: both the space he wrote for and the event that the people were paying to see.

Scene 4

Stratford-upon-Avon

C
ontext is
everything
, because no one knows who Shakespeare (the man) really was. Some of the very few absolute facts about the man himself that we know for definite are that

Add to that a few details of property we know he owned, of legal issues he was involved in, and half a dozen signatures. And that’s all we’ve got. But no manuscripts – with the exception of a small part of a play,
Sir Thomas More
, thought to be written by Shakespeare – no notes, or diaries.
Nothing of consequence, in fact, that gives any indication as to what kind of man he was. Except his writing.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as far as we’re concerned. It doesn’t matter who Shakespeare might have been, because who he was isn’t as important to us as
when
he was and
what
he did. But because so little about the man has been discovered, his life has become a bit of an enigma. And this seems to make people doubt that he wrote the plays.

This is not a rare thing. Almost nothing is known about the legendary blues guitarist and singer Robert Johnson (1911–38). Many consider him to be the king of the Delta blues singers, yet there are only two photos of him in existence, almost nothing is known about his early life, there are varying stories surrounding his death (the most popular being that his whisky was poisoned by a jealous juke joint owner, who’d caught Johnson flirting with his wife), and there are three different ideas about where he’s buried. All we really have to go on are the 29 songs and a handful of alternative takes that he recorded. But he was so good, a legend has developed around him that he wasn’t able to play the guitar until he went to a crossroads at midnight and the devil tuned his guitar for him. Not happy with the idea that he could naturally be that talented, people developed a magical reason for his talent. Just like Shakespeare.