Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard (5 page)

Scene 7

A soap opera set

M
any of Shakespeare’s plays are based on famous stories that most Elizabethans already knew – and they would have enjoyed the retelling of these familiar stories immensely. They would have enjoyed Shakespeare’s presentation of the fall of Troy (in
Troilus and Cressida
) much as we do when a film is made of a famous story well known to us, like
Titanic
(1997).

But, just like when we go to the cinema, it’s doubtful the Elizabethans would have felt the need to watch the play again, or analyse its deeper meaning because they didn’t understand bits of it. Now, go to see a film by the brilliant but somewhat surrealist film-director David Lynch and your brain might try to sneak out of your ear if you try to work out the plot.

Shakespeare was essentially providing the Elizabethans with their daily soap opera, and would you ever sit down with a script of
EastEnders, Coronation Street, Neighbours
or
Days of Our Lives
, and analyse the deeper meaning? Try to work out whether or not Pat really does love Frank, or whether Scott really was faithful to Charlene? (I’m showing my age with these plotlines, but you get the idea …)

No, if there’s something you missed, or you don’t understand the scripts, you watch the omnibus at the week end. But what’s not to understand? It’s well known, at least on
EastEnders
and
Corrie
, that the storylines over the years are essentially the same, they just feature different families, who all gather in the same pub (saving the producers money on locations). It’s love and hate and sex and death and betrayal and friendship and lies and abuse. Shakespeare’s the same.

It wouldn’t be true to say that because the Elizabethans didn’t have to work at Shakespeare, we don’t have to either. Even ignoring the poetry angle, there’s still 400 years of cultural divide separating us. But he’s a lot closer to us than we might think.

There’s not, if you start to think about it, that much difference between the plot of an episode of ’
Enders
and the plot of, say,
Macbeth
. Love, hate. Sex, death. Betrayal, friend ship.

We know that life, though –
real
life – no matter what the papers or the soap operas say, doesn’t go from murder to betrayal to death to murder again, a bit of incest, and finish up with a spot more murder before tea.

Life, for most of us, is fairly normal. Most of us (luckily) don’t have to deal with such huge matters every day. Soap operas, though, pile on these kinds of terrible life-changing events, one on top of the other, to keep us watching. The makers want to keep us involved, to heighten the drama as
much as possible and make sure there’s a cliff-hanger at the end of every episode to make us tune in next week.

This kind of writing has been going on for centuries: Charles Dickens wrote the chapters of his novels for a monthly magazine, so his stories are usually very long (the longer the story, the more issues to write for) and they often have a cliff-hanger at the end of each chapter. Keep reading. Buy more. Keep writing. Earn more.

The thriller writer Ken Follett follows the same theory – making sure there’s a mini-drama, or ‘story turn’, as he calls it, every five pages or so:

There is a rule which says that the story should turn about every four to six pages. A story turn is anything that changes the basic dramatic situation. You can’t go longer than about six pages without a story turn, otherwise the reader will get bored. Although that is a rule that people have invented in modern times about best-sellers … in Dickens it’s the same
.

Ken Follett

For the most part (hopefully), none of us will have experienced even a small amount of the pain and suffering we see taking place in these dramas. But there’ll be
something
in it,
some
part of it that will touch some part of us, to make us say ‘Yes, I’ve been there, yes, I’ve felt that.’

Shakespeare and soap operas

Sounds unlikely … But in 2001 a survey commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company asked members of the public what were the modern equivalents to Shakespeare’s history plays.
Coronation Street
and
EastEnders
came out on top of the list. And in August 2006 an edition of the TV magazine
Radio Times
proclaimed ‘Why the soaps owe it all to Shakespeare!’

Kate Harwood, an executive producer on
EastEnders
, said: ‘All drama nowadays owes something to Shakespeare.’ She believes Shakespeare is responsible for the ‘extraordinary, heart-stopping sense of moment’ that soap operas try to have at the end of every episode, right before the music kicks in, ‘when the story all hangs in the air, ripe with potential’.

If writers portrayed life as it really was, with all its silences and normal events – like the TV show
Big Brother Live
– we’d die of boredom (or exhaustion). Moreover, if we daily experienced what the characters in
EastEnders
go through, the LAST thing we’d want to do is watch someone go through the exact same thing.

But an idea of it, or something close to what we’ve been through, is comforting. It’s good to know that there are people out there going through similar circumstances to us, that we’re not alone in our problems, in our pain, in our happiness. Or, for that matter, to put it another way,

It easeth some, though none it ever cured

To think their dolour others have endured.

A favourite quote of mine, from one of Shakespeare’s poems,
The Rape of Lucrece
(lines 1581–2. ‘Dolour’ means
grief
, or
sorrow
).

In intense situations in real life, most people don’t swear every second word, break down and cry every two minutes; they don’t have heart-breaking monologues. Most people pause and stutter and forget what they’re saying.

But that isn’t
dramatic
. That’s normal. And why pay a penny to go stand in the mud and see three hours of people being
normal
to each other? Even modern plays that claim to be showing ‘real life’ are still giving a dramatic version of normality.

Similar to soap opera plot lines, Shakespeare’s stories are far more dramatic than real life; and they would have been quite unlike anything an average Elizabethan audience might experience. But they would always find
something
in the plays to relate to.

Shakespeare is famous for putting the familiar next to the unfamiliar – the betrayal of a father next to the betrayal of a king. His stories manage to stay real and human, while at the same time exploring the very extremes of life, and the lengths humans will go to to get what they want. Very rarely do you find Shakespeare’s characters doing ‘regular’ things; he didn’t seem to be very interested in so-called ‘kitchen-sink’ drama. The characters were often ordinary
folk, but the situations they found themselves in were usually quite extraordinary.

More often than not in drama, people want to see life and situations they’ll
never
experience, either because it’s harsher than real life (like
EastEnders
) or it looks at a more unobtainable style of life – like
Friends
, or
The OC
– aspirational drama that makes us want to experience what the characters are going through, if only for a moment.

We want to see what it’s like to fall in love with your best friend’s girlfriend. We want to know what it’s like when all your friends are using you, and then, when you need them the most, they turn their back on you. We want to hear what it feels like to kill the person you love more than the world, and then try to live with the consequences.

We want, in other words, to see
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Timon of Athens
, and
Othello
.

Acts and Scenes

Shakespeare’s plays are now all divided up using the same convention, although they weren’t all separated this way in the First Folio. It’s thought that the plays which are divided into separate Acts were originally performed indoors, giving interval time for the chandeliers to be lowered and the candles replaced, and those without divisions were performed in daylight, and so needed no forced break.

But all modern editions are based on the classical Latin system of writing plays that Shakespeare would have studied at school: there are always five Acts, and in his plays, each Act has anything from one to fifteen Scenes.

Over the years they’ve been referred to in different ways, and depending on which edition of the plays you go to, you’ll come across a variety of conventions:

Act 2

Curtain Up

Scene 1

Mars, 23rd century

T
he Elizabethans watching one of Shakespeare’s plays would be relatively unaccustomed to seeing pictures or images – save perhaps a sign outside a tavern, a portrait or tapestry.

In our time, unless you make an incredible effort, it’s impossible to turn a corner without seeing a photograph or the printed word – our streets and homes are littered with them. But very few Elizabethans would have been able to afford the equivalent distractions for their homes – tapestries, sculptures, woodcuttings or paintings – and as only 20 per cent of them could read, few might discover the images printed in books.

Our love for images has become insatiable, and in our media-rich 21st-century world we’re quite used to seeing people dressed up, pretending to be someone they’re not. Our ability to believe in something fictional – our suspension of disbelief – has been working well since childhood, thanks to the marvels of TV and film.

From the age of four, we all know that everyone on screen is pretending; that the spaceship is a model, that the
dinosaur is CGI. And we love the double-think; the mental game we play with ourselves, wondering how they do it, while at the same time feeling a quickening of the pulse and a tightening of the throat as the tension mounts
.

playwright Mark Ravenhill, writing in
The Guardian
, November 2006

The greatest effort is made (and millions of dollars are spent) to bring the unbelievable before our eyes – all is provided for us, either on screen and the internet, or with painted backdrops, from the canals of Venice to life on Mars in the 23rd century. Elizabethans would have had to imagine the magician Prospero’s island in
The Tempest
. We can digitally create one that we know is fake, but are willing to believe in anyway (as long as it meets our increasingly high standards). The point is that while our suspension of disbelief is working well, our imaginations have become lazy. Unless we’re reading a novel, our imaginations might as well be surgically removed these days. But who needs to read the book, when the film comes out next year?

To help our increasingly busy minds, most theatres and cinemas drop the lights when the show starts. In theatres this really is a relatively recent phenomenon – about 200 years ago, the audiences in indoor theatres would be as well lit as the actors. But now, for the most part, we sit in a
dark room, and the only source of light – and so the only real focus – is the play or film.

Perhaps this is more useful to a modern audience, as the forced focus makes it easier to forget our knowledge of celebrity casting and computer-generated images, and lets us slip into the fabricated world more quickly; but a glance at a fire exit light or a ring of a mobile phone will bring us out of it just as rapidly.

Visit the Globe today, where the actors and audience are equally lit, where helicopters regularly fly overhead, and it can be hard to forget the modern world. But then why go to the theatre and imagine a boat sailing across a sea, when we can go to the cinema and see it ‘for real’?

Lazy imaginations make producing 400-year-old plays that much harder, because who, in this day and age, is afraid of witches any more?

We’re a tougher, more critical audience to win over, needing better tricks and more believable effects to dupe us.

Believable?

During the American Civil War (1861–65) a soldier watching a performance of
Othello
was so taken in by the actor playing the dishonest Iago that he stood up from his seat, drew his pistol and shot the actor dead.

So without the internet, films, television, magazines, and everything else we have at our fingertips available to them, Shakespeare’s audience had an exceptionally open and hungry imagination. They were an audience that would love fabulous, exotic worlds being weaved before them, worlds they’d never experience, people wearing clothes they’d never wear, saying things they themselves would perhaps never get to say.