Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard (7 page)

If they didn’t rehearse, then they didn’t have a director – though we’ll see how Shakespeare managed to direct them himself through the lines he gave them, in Act 5.

T
HE
C
OSTUMES

Let’s recap for a moment.

We have the plays, being spoken in an uncluttered (because of the lack of set) but rather unique space. There’s a fair degree of distraction, with the crowd talking and jeering, which means there’s not a great deal to help us into this imagined world. Still, all our imaginative energy is focused on this raised platform, and on these actors telling us a story.

Keeping our distracted minds on the stage and on the story would have been tricky for any actor, but they would have had a little help: one thing we know for sure is that a great deal of money was spent on their costumes.

How much did a costume cost?

Thanks to the diary of the theatre manager Philip Henslowe (
c
. 1550–1616), we have an idea of how much money was put towards the costumes.

He notes that he bought ‘a black velvet cloak with sleeves embroidered all with silver and gold’ for £20 10s 6d.

That would be equivalent to £2,692 today, or 1,642 Elizabethan loaves of bread, or more than a third of the price Shakespeare paid for the finest house in Stratford …

So actors dress in the most fantastic costumes money can buy to look fabulous, give the audience something pretty
to look at, and, after all, show they’re playing a character: if the actors were to dress the same way as ordinary folk, how would we know when they were being
them
, and when they were being the character – like a murderer? If I’m wandering down an Elizabethan backstreet after I’ve seen the play
Macbeth
, and I see the actor who played the Second Murderer walking towards me and he’s wearing the same clothes as he was on stage, does that mean he’s actually a killer, and I should turn and walk the other way in case he kills me?

Or, turn the tables: an actor who played the villain leaves the theatre still in his costume, and is attacked by a mob who wanted the hero to win. It wouldn’t be too hard to imagine, especially after hearing the 19th-century anecdote of the soldier shooting the actor playing Iago. My friend from
Dream Team
experienced something akin to that inability to separate truth from fiction, and the media practically encourages it – soap opera actors feature on the cover of TV magazines, and underneath their pictures the headlines usually refer to them using their character names rather than their real names, further blurring the line between real life and drama.

The unspoken rule even today is never to leave the theatre with your costume and your make-up on. It’s considered unlucky to do so.

A slightly more practical and obvious danger to the
Elizabethan actors would be the wrath of a theatre manager like Philip Henslowe, who heavily fined his actors if they were late or if their costumes were damaged and needed repair. The vast expense of the costumes meant that they’d be especially careful not to walk the streets wearing them, in case they got torn or dirtied.

Costumes they wore, and cheap they were not. They were certainly beautiful, crafted with care, and were an important ingredient in creating a spectacle, keeping this magical bubble of the play’s world from bursting.

T
HE
J
IG

Then, at the end of a performance, just as the world had been so carefully created, the breaking of the spell was just as considered.

At the end of every show, whether it was a comedy or a tragedy, there would be a dance, or jig. The jig is a brilliantly simple device and the modern Globe uses it in its productions. The idea is that if everyone gets up and starts dancing merrily together – hero and villain, dead man and live man – then everything
must
be okay, so go home safe and happy. Whatever magic, fantasy, terrible torment, vicious ness or frivolity had been witnessed, is now well and truly over.

More emphatic than a simple bow or curtsy, the jig is a
celebratory affirmation of the story that has been told and the emotional journey the actors and audience have shared, and a fantastic release of tension.

It’s bloody good fun too.

Scene 3

A galaxy far, far away

T
ake an incredible space, fill it with an audience with hungry imaginations, and you need great stories too.

A neuro-psychologist friend of mine told me that he thinks
Othello
is the greatest study of jealousy ever made, better than any research or medical paper he’d come across. Many people think
Romeo and Juliet
is the most romantic tale ever told.
Titus Andronicus
is definitely one of the bloodiest plays I’ve ever seen, and
King Lear
is easily one of the most heartbreaking.

But the stories Shakespeare told need putting into context a little.

He was telling stories before Dickens. Before Hemingway, Joyce, Twain, Austen, the Brontë sisters, the Brothers Grimm, and Milton’s
Paradise Lost
.

This boggles me a little bit. What did he have to inspire him?

We, telling stories in the 21st century, can look back admiringly over the last few hundred years at the stories that have been conjured up for us. We have stories we’ve known since childhood, like
Little Red Riding Hood
and
Rapunzel
, and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales of
The
Ugly Duckling
and
The Princess and The Pea
. Then we had the work from all these other great authors to read (or I suppose, in recent times, to see the film versions of) when we were growing up. So when it comes to writing these days, new authors have so much to inspire them.

None of these tales existed when Shakespeare was writing. He had such very different stories available to him. As ever, we’ll never know exactly what he read, but it seems clear that he was familiar with historical sources like Raphael Holinshed’s
Chronicles
, and Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch. The Latin authors Ovid and Horace, and Aesop’s
Fables
, would have been around too. Not to forget the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, Dante’s
Inferno
, and Chaucer’s
Troilus and Criseyde
and
The Canterbury Tales
.

Many of the books that were around to influence Shakespeare are almost out of our memory, yet the stories he dreamt up will be familiar to us, because they’ve influenced the writers who follow him. Before Robinson Crusoe was stuck on his island, Prospero the magician was shipwrecked. Before Pip’s Great Expectations, there were tales of Pericles’ life and love. Long before Superman and the Incredible Hulk, Hercules and Achilles walked the earth.

Shakespeare wrote about cruel kings, famous battles, love lost and won, children losing parents, parents losing children – universal themes that are so pervasive, so
intrinsically known to us all that they can still work when they’re adapted for TV and film. Whether a play is set in Elizabethan times or in an American high school (Tim Blake Nelson’s 2001 adaptation of
Othello, O
, is a good example of the latter), the stories are both so general and so specific that they can handle almost any reworking. (Though they may not technically be Shakespeare any more, as the poetry is often first to go in these reworkings.)

Most of the original ideas were not Shakespeare’s creations. Rewriting old stories was common practice, and he certainly wasn’t the only one in his time who wrote new versions of classics. He was by no means alone in retelling the story of
Romeo and Juliet
, or
Troilus and Cressida
, or the
Reign of Henry V
. The Elizabethans would have known the stories that Shakespeare used as the basis for his plays. Copies of some of the originals have survived, so we know, for instance, that
Hamlet
was part-inspired by the 13thcentury
Life of Amleth
. Originality was not the prerequisite for being a popular writer – the Elizabethans wanted the stories they’d heard since childhood, of evil kings and fated lovers, told and retold over and over.

We’re very similar in that respect, and it still happens a lot today. The film
Star Wars
(1977) is based on a bunch of different old Japanese stories. Classic films are remade constantly (whether for better or worse). Many of the soap operas on TV have been running so long they often use
plot lines from their own old episodes.

So if everyone was doing it back then (and writers are still doing it), why were Shakespeare’s plays more popular? Why have his endured, and no one seems to have come close to topple his success? Why haven’t the plays of one of his contemporaries like Henry Chettle (c. 1560–1607) been turned into films? Why have just a few of his contemporaries found only relative fame, like John Webster (c. 1580–1632)? If his audience knew the stories so well, what made them go to see Shakespeare’s plays more than anyone else’s?

It ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it …

Scene 4

A room full of character

M
any people hold that the main reason why Shakespeare has become so universally thought of as just plain brilliant is because of the characters he wrote. It wouldn’t be
my
first reason (which we’re coming to), but without doubt, he had a way of creating memorable and pretty fantastic characters that make most other writers’ creations seem amateur.

In
Henry IV Parts 1
and
2
, he wrote a character called Falstaff – a drunken, cowardly buffoon of a knight, who had become friends with the young Prince Hal. His relationship with Hal is beautifully tragic; and the scrapes Falstaff gets into are incredibly funny. Falstaff dies in
Henry V
, but the story goes that Queen Elizabeth I was such a fan of the character that she asked Shakespeare to bring him back and write another play with him in. And so he did, and so we have the romp that is
The Merry Wives of Windsor
.

A similar thing happened to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, when he killed off his great detective character Sherlock Holmes. There was a public outcry, and he had to bring him back. Philip Pullman, author of the
His Dark Materials
trilogy, published a novella in 2008 called
Once
Upon a Time in the North
, which precedes the events of the
Dark Materials
and features two of the favourite characters who’d been killed off in the original stories. It happens with soap operas too, with Bobby in
Dallas
, Harold in
Neighbours
, and Dirty Den in
EastEnders
all being brought back ‘from the dead’, usually with an ‘amnesiac’ storyline or a wave of hocus-pocus writing.

While his characters are often great, Shakespeare is not the man to go to for a history lesson. Not an accurate one, anyway.

The Richard III Society was founded in 1924 because there was a growing group of people who were upset that Shakespeare had misrepresented King Richard III; claiming that he was a good king, and not an evil, murderous tyrant. Shakespeare based his play
Richard III
on Thomas More’s
History of Richard III
, but the Society argues that More biased his account, including giving Richard a hunchback and making him appear more evil than he actually was. Their argument follows that More’s rewriting of history meant that the monarch of the time, Henry VII (who deposed Richard), had a stronger claim to the throne.

Whether Richard III actually was a good person in real life is up for discussion. What cannot be disputed is that a troubled, evil tyrant-with-a-hunch makes a more dramatic, intriguing character to watch in the theatre. Troubled-tyrant-with-a-hunch rather than good person, every time.

Keeping good company …

We’re unlikely to ever know the specifics of their relationships, but Shakespeare’s company of players (known as
The Lord Chamberlain’s Men
in the reign of Elizabeth I, and
The King’s Men
in the reign of James I) was one of the two leading theatre companies in London in the late 16th/early 17th centuries. Having the reigning monarch as patron to your company – and indeed, then having that patronage continued by the new monarch – was a very worthy, useful and honourable position to be in.