Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard (4 page)

If this little book hadn’t been published in 1623, we would have lost eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays – including
The Tempest, The Comedy of Errors, Macbeth
and
Twelfth Night
– and, as the other eighteen were only scattered about in quarto, we might have lost them too (this count excludes the three plays that have been acknowledged in recent times as being written, at least in part, by Shakespeare:
Cymbeline, Edward III
, and
The Two Noble Kinsmen
).

Of the thousands of plays written over those times, only 230 are still in existence: 39 of them – 17 per cent – are Shakespeare’s.

Henry Condell and John Hemmings had acted and worked with Shakespeare during much of his writing career, and they got together after Shakespeare died to set the record straight. Too many versions of his plays had been printed full of mistakes by rival theatre companies trying to steal Shakespeare’s plays. There were quarto editions without Shakespeare’s name on them, editions of
Hamlet
missing chunks of the text … The new folio edition would address all that.

The (bad) First Quarto of
Hamlet
…

This was written in 1603, probably from memory, and we should be thankful that Shakespeare’s most famous speech didn’t survive only in this incarnation:

To be, or not to be, I [ay] there’s the point,

To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:

No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary [marry] there it goes,

For in that dreame of death, when wee awake,

And borne before an euerlasting iudge,

From whence no passenger euer retur’nd,

The vndiscovered country, at whose sight

The happy smile, and the accursed damn’d …

As opposed to the version known and loved by all:

To be, or not to be – that is the question;

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep –

No more, and by a sleep to say we end

The heartache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to. ’Tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep –

To sleep – perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub …

There are three known editions of
Hamlet
– the First Quarto of 1603, the Second Quarto of 1604, and the Folio version. Other editions were published, but these are considered to be amalgamations of the first three. The First Quarto wasn’t discovered until 1823, and while being shorter than the other two, it does include an entire scene and many interesting stage directions that the others don’t have. When the editors of the First Folio came to
Hamlet
, it looks as if they used a combination of manuscript and Second Quarto. With so many versions, each so different from the other, determining the ‘authentic’ text of
Hamlet
, as Shakespeare intended, has proved somewhat difficult.

So now, thank goodness, we have the plays. We’re able to watch and read them over and over and over. Not only can we read or see them performed as much as we like, we have the luxury of being able to come to them with over 200 years of study behind us.

I say 200 years rather than 400, because after the Puritan movement took Shakespeare and many other writers out of the common eye, he didn’t really became popular again until the late 18th century, largely thanks to the actor David Garrick and his Stratford-upon-Avon festival – but more on this in Act 5. Still, 200 years of study is an awful lot, and by standing on the shoulders of giants, the depth of analysis we can now put Shakespeare’s plays under is limitless.

But because we hold Shakespeare in such regard – as high art and important Literature – and scrutinise his plays so intensely, we forget that reading them is simply not the way they would have originally been received.

The Elizabethans would watch and listen to a play in the theatre, and then leave it behind at the end of the afternoon. It’s easy for us to get hold of a copy of one of the plays. But if you were an Elizabethan lucky enough to have had an education and had learnt to read, the play-texts, already scarce in quantity, would have been relatively expensive.

After Shakespeare died, the publication of the First
Folio meant that his plays were more readily available than ever before. So, suppose you could read, and you
could
spare the equivalent of 44 loaves of bread and afford the book, you might well buy the Folio and read the plays to remind yourself of the performance you saw, as we would buy a copy of a film we like.

How much bread is Shakespeare worth?

When the
Collected Works
was printed in 1623, the book would have been stitched together, but not normally bound (it wouldn’t have had a leather cover). An unbound copy would have cost around 15 shillings, and you could get a bound copy for £1.

But, good question, how expensive was that in Shakespeare’s time?

Somebody once worked out that the average cost of one of these books is equivalent to the price of 44 Elizabethan loaves of bread.

Using the same measure, we can see how the price goes up over the years. It became more and more valuable as Shakespeare became more and more popular, and had risen to the equivalent of 105 loaves in 1756; then a big jump to 900 by the 1790s, most likely due to David Garrick’s revival of Shakespeare with his annual festival of Shakespeare; 5,000 loaves in the 1850s – and 96,000 by the beginning of the 20th century.

Today, the figures are astronomical. An edition of the Folio sold at auction for over $6 million in 2001. The cheapest loaf in my local supermarket is 20 pence. That’s (approximately) 17 million loaves for a copy of the original edition today, against 44 loaves in the early 1600s.

But would an Elizabethan have analysed the plays as we do now? (It’s highly unlikely – would you analyse an episode of a soap opera?) They would have accepted them much more at face value, and we can learn a great deal by looking at Shakespeare’s plays with more of an Elizabethan head on our shoulders.

The way we’re used to receiving the plays, in classrooms and practically under a microscope, couldn’t be further away from their experience.

A few Shakespeare-coined phrases, still very much in use today …

all that glitters is not gold
‘All that glisters is not gold/Often have you heard that told’ –
The Merchant of Venice
, Act 2, Scene 7, line 65

as dead as a door nail
‘If I do not leave you all as dead as a doornail, I pray god I may never eat grass more’ –
Henry VI Part 2
, Act 4, Scene 10, line 38

blinking idiot
‘What’s here? The portrait of a blinking idiot’ –
The Merchant of Venice
, Act 2, Scene 9, line 54

fair play
‘O. ’tis fair play’ –
Troilus and Cressida
, Act 5, Scene 3, line 43

into thin air
‘These our actors,/As I foretold you, were all spirits, and/Are melted into air, into thin air’ –
The Tempest
, Act 4, Scene 1, line 150

set teeth on edge
‘I had rather hear a … a dry wheel grate on the axle-tree,/And that would set my teeth nothing on edge/Nothing so much as mincing poetry’ –
Henry IV Part 1
, Act 3, Scene 1, line 127

slept a wink
‘Since I received command to do this business I have not slept one wink’ –
Cymbeline
, Act 3, Scene 4, line 99

to thine own self be true
‘This above all: to thine own self be true’ –
Hamlet
, Act 1, Scene 3, line 78

tower of strength
‘the King’s name is a tower of strength’ –
Richard III
, Act 5, Scene 3, line 12

too much of a good thing
‘Can one desire too much of a good thing?’ –
As You Like It
, Act 4, Scene 1, lines 112–13

Scene 6

A classroom

T
he last 200 years have seen Shakespeare go from being a largely forgotten Elizabethan poet to being voted Man of the Millennium (admittedly by a poll consisting solely of BBC Radio 4 listeners, but still …). He’s the most referenced, the most cross-referenced, the most analysed, the most written about, the most performed and the best-known man to grace the planet, religious figures aside.

And with that fame has come a respect, a trend to deify him, to make his plays sacrosanct. The six official commandments of Shakespeare:

You Cannot Change Any Of The Words

He Must Not Be Translated

He Must Be Performed A Certain Way

He Must Be Spoken A Certain Way

He Must Be Spoken Of In A Certain Way

We Will Celebrate His Birthday As If He Were Royalty

Alright, I just made those up. But you’d be surprised how many people deem every word absolute truth. And he’s just a playwright. Or is he now a literary messiah?

I know now why I used to hate Shakespeare so much. It was this kind of ‘holier than thou’ opinion, compounded with the approach to teaching Shakespeare that is still prevalent: sitting down, reading or writing about the plays, or speaking them out loud without really knowing what it is that you’re saying … It takes them so completely out of context. It’s like trying to appreciate the fun of driving a car or flying a plane by reading the engine’s instruction manual.

My Gran tells me her Shakespeare classes were like that in her day, and 60 years on, she still doesn’t understand Shakespeare. Who can blame her? But when you do see Shakespeare on stage and acted, something changes.

You read Shakespeare in school and you think it’s rather boring as a rule. It’s a lot of words … But when you take the parts and act it … then you begin to realise how interesting it is. And you realise how natural it is and how real. It doesn’t seem like that when you read it
.

June Brown, who plays
EastEnders
’ Dot Cotton

Of
course
Shakespeare will seem out of reach when his plays are presented so clearly out of context. It’s stating the obvious, but too many people forget that at the end of the day, Shakespeare was just a man. He ate, he drank, he had sex, he laughed, he pissed, he cried, he woke up hungover, he wrote, he ran out of ideas.

You might have seen the film
Shakespeare in Love
(1998). One of the greatest, smallest details in that film was that Joseph Fiennes (playing Will Shakespeare) had ink-stained, dirty fingernails. Using a feather quill and ink all the time would make that happen. That little detail spoke volumes to me. If Shakespeare got dirty, then he was human. If he was human, and not just some genius literary figure, then I can relate to him, and give his writing a chance.

It’s unlikely that when he wrote, he sat down and thought: ‘Today, I shall write a masterpiece so great that in 400 years’ time they shall hang laurels around statues of me, and actors shall queue up to play my characters.’ Possible, I admit, but unlikely.

He would have done what we all do. Panicked when he ran out of money. Rewrote old pieces in new ways. It was his job, but he had theatre in his blood too, and I think he
had
to write because it burned within him; there was a fiery passion for writing, combined with an earthy basic human need to earn money to live.

I want to be clear: he was a genius. But part of the problem with the label ‘genius’ is that it’s unobtainable to anyone that isn’t one. How can we normal folk relate to a genius? It’s a hard concept to grapple with, and it gives rise to doubt and suspicion. William Shakespeare
can’t
have written all those wonderful plays. He doesn’t have the
‘right’ background or education. It
must
have been someone else writing them.

But he was human, and real, and bloody clever. Just like Einstein – who drank, partied, wore shabby clothes and worried about wars – was human. And Shakespeare didn’t write so that 379 years after his death people would be preserving his works in vacuum-sealed bags and I’d be sitting in an exam hall trying to explain the existentialist viewpoint in his plays.

It comes down to this: if he didn’t write good plays, he wouldn’t earn any money. If he didn’t earn any money, he wouldn’t be able to support the wife and kids back in Stratford. He’d be put in the debtors’ prison, and probably die a very horrible, cold death.

That’s quite an incentive to do well.

So he wrote plays because there was a solid need for them; less that he sought fame, more that they were a real source of cash.

Much like the soap opera writers of today.

The Elizabethan stage fulfilled some of the same functions that soaps do today … the things that Shakespeare achieved are what script editors and storyliners on the soaps are also trying to achieve
.

Michael Boyd, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company