Another Sonnet App
May 21, 2013 § Leave a Comment
After my posting yesterday, an astute reader brought my attention to this story from the New York Times about the release of another Sonnet app.
It is free, so I downloaded it last night and gave it a listen. There is not that much in place yet, as the series is just beginning. Only two of the 154 sonnets were up and running last night. This app is nowhere near as sophisticated as the Touch Press app – containing no notes or even texts. It appears to be just a series of short films.
The great strength of this project is that it is performed by Americans in undisguised American dialects. While I love the Touch Press app, it is relentlessly Anglocentric. One of the startling things about Ben Crystal’s original pronunciation performances on it, which I mentioned were my favorites, is how unBritish they sound. American students rarely get to hear good Shakespeare in their own dialects, although many of them (especially Southern ones) are actually closer to an authentic sound. This new app looks like it might champion the verse without resorting to “The King’s English.”
Celebrating the Sonnets
May 20, 2013 § 1 Comment
Today (May 20) is the anniversary of the date in 1609 when Shakespeare’s sonnets were first published – probably without his cooperation or approval. They remain the most enigmatic part of his output. That he did not intend them for the general public is quite understandable if the prevailing wisdom about them is correct. At least in the order we have received them they read as if telling the story of a middle-aged man getting caught up in a love triangle with a younger male lover and a “dark” mistress, while struggling for professional recognition and patronage in competition with a rival poet. They seem so personal, even autobiographical, that they are appear to be our closest link to Shakespeare, himself.
Of course, scholars have reminded us for some time that the autobiographic assumption is a very dangerous one. There is no direct evidence for it, and it would be uncharacteristic of Shakespeare (and, indeed, of most of his contemporaries) to seek to reveal himself in such a manner. He is, after all, the master of disappearing into his characters. With that caveat, I confess I am among those inclined to read and re-read them because I cannot image how anyone could be so precisely revelatory without having experienced the expressed emotions directly.
To celebrate the day, here is a favorite rendering of Sonnet 29 (from YouTube.)
My preferred tool for studying the sonnets is Touch Press’ Sonnets for the iPad. (I have no connection or financial interest in this product. I just like it, so I have supplied the link to their home page.) This wonderful app allows you to watch a reading of a sonnet by a top British actor, while simultaneously consulting the text in modern typeface or viewing a facsimile page from the 1609 edition. My favorite performances are Ben Crystal’s original pronunciation renderings, the sound of which is very illuminating, but there are many other outstanding performances from such luminaries as Stephen Fry, Patrick Stewart and Fiona Shaw.
There are not one, but two, sets of marvelous notes included – the first from the Arden edition and the second from the controversial, infuriating, endlessly-fascinating Don Paterson. I find myself returning to this app with regularity for both enlightenment and entertainment.
Shakespearean Silences and Ambiguous Endings
September 16, 2012 § 11 Comments
In graduate school during the early 80s I stage-managed a production of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure that exploited the now notorious silence of Isabella in the face of the Duke’s proposal of marriage at the end of the play in what was then a novel way.
The director (Jack Clay) allowed the actress playing Isabella to either accept or reject the offer nightly at her own whim. Two entirely different endings employing elaborate stagings – one that suggested a return to the nunnery and the other preparation for a wedding – using alternative lighting cues, separate blocking, and even different supporting characters, were prepared. It was my duty nightly to coordinate with Isabella (via a secretive signal delivered from the stage about five minutes from the last lines of the show) and then get the entire technical crew and waiting cast prepared to execute the chosen ending, which was not divulged to the Duke or other onstage characters in advance. The dramatic tension was quite real as they awaited her decision.
Thus did I learn in a stunningly concrete way how ambiguous such endings are. Before the advent of computer boards, the five minutes of mad scrambling to warn a supporting cast and repatch a new set of lighting cues for the nights on which she rejected the Duke remind me that very different readings are possible even if they are unconventional.
Since those days the exploration of alternative readings of female silences in the ending of Shakespearean drama has become commonplace in criticism, and even in production – although rarely in the performance-by-performance mode Clay’s production employed.
Convention is very powerful, however. Thirty years later, I was still not prepared when viewing a recent production of Othello* directed by Steve Bologna for a radical re-reading of the ending of the play which explored male, specifically Iago’s, silence. In the text, after his capture Othello stabs him in revenge, but Iago tells us he is merely wounded. “I bleed, sir, but not killed.” A dozen or so lines later, lest we miss that his silence is intentional, the playwright give him this last line: “Demand me nothing. What you know you know./From this time forth I never will speak word.”
This production marched through the 70 lines of the play following Iago’s speech orthodoxly, including Othello’s death, up to and including the final instruction that the Lord Governor may “censure this hellish villain” when and as he pleases. The stage cleared leaving Iago alone with his two (sadistic-looking) guards.
To my surprise, he calmly rose and removed from his pocket a small volume of Machiavelli that he had carried (and frequently referenced) throughout the night. Opening it, in what was surely intended to be read metaphorically as well as literally, we saw that the middle of the book had been hollowed out and was now stuffed with gold coins from which he coolly bribed his guards – who took their money and departed, leaving him a free man. He began to walk away, but after a brief pause, he turned back and crossed to the bed where the bodies of Emilia, Desdemona and Othello had been covered with a large crimson sheet. The actor playing Iago picked up the corner of the covering, and wrapped himself luxuriously in it as he fully exited, slowly revealing the hideously distorted corpses left behind beginning to stiffen with rigor mortis.
This was a modern-dress production that suggested the warfare in the play is an analogy for current class warfare, with more than a little suspicion that the disproportional ill effects on a younger generation are intentional. (It is probably worth noting that the recent economic crisis has hit California, and particularly its higher education systems, especially hard.) With a grim pessimism, the last image implied that contemporary Machiavellians are “winning,” ruthlessly stripping everything (even life) from women and ethnic “others,” and getting away with it.
My intent is neither to defend nor attack this reading, but to remember that most Shakespearean plays have endings with less closure than is conventionally believed. (I’m no exception. So strongly did I believe that Iago dies, I had to recheck my handy Norton to be sure that no textual manipulation was involved. I’ve certainly never seen another production that did not at least imply his imminent execution.)
My take-away: Much as I love Shakespeare’s words, interpreting his silences is still also a fascinating, and rewarding, exercise.
*Disclaimer: Although I had no direct connection with this production, it was a thesis project at the university where I now teach. My comments are meant to capture the intellectual stimulation of the specific reading of Iago’s silence without implying critical judgment about the production in any manner.
“Just say the words:” subtext in Shakespeare
August 25, 2012 § 2 Comments
This startling statement is one of the first dramaturgical corrections I ever received about early modern performance, and one that I have heard often since. It is also one that infuriates my acting colleagues, appalled at the instruction to “just say the words.” Some time ago, on a forum with both literary and theatrical scholars as members, I attempted to explain why both sides of this debate were partially correct, and what each side was trying to communicate. Requests for this short piece of “translation” have continued to pop up over the years from people who remembered reading it but could not find it again. For those intrigued by the subject, here it is again in slightly modified form:
Shakespeare and Subtext
Theories of subtext date from the Russian schools of acting at the turn of the century, especially relating to training about how to perform Chekhov. Scattered throughout his major plays are scenes where the text (i.e.,. the dialogue) is at odds with other non-verbal (i.e.,. subtextual) aspects of the scene. A simple example might be the scene near the end of Three Sisters where Tusenbach holds a very trivial conversation with his fiancé Irina about coffee and a few items on his desk. The scene is utterly incomprehensible if you don’t know that Tusenbach is on his way to fight a duel that he suspects (correctly, as it turns out) he will not survive. This fact is never mentioned in the scene, and no reference is ever made to the reason that Tusenbach utters such banalities instead of telling his love goodbye, perhaps forever. We are left to conclude from his behavior and manner of delivery that his words have very little to do with the main plot interest at that moment. Commonly, we read into his psychology that he is unwilling or unable to utter the words out loud because he is unable to face his coming death.
As an acting teacher I have to help students learn to do something rather sophisticated and difficult when they face this kind of material, which is make the plot point clear by undercutting the dialogue and filling in with much “behavior.” To fail to do so in Chekhov is to render the play meaningless. In this usage, subtext doesn’t mean that the actor is feeling some parallel emotion or motivation for the speech. It doesn’t even mean that the actor is feeling something different than words are expressing. Characters do this throughout Shakespeare, as when Juliet pretends to agree with the Nurse about dumping the exiled Romeo in favor of Paris, or more subtly when Hermione delivers her moving trial speech in Winter’s Tale.
Sub-text (in the sense that it I am proposing, which is how it is used in actor training) means that there is an essential plot point in the scene that is not directly expressed or referenced in the dialogue. Audience members must infer this plot point by interpreting the non-verbal behaviors of the actors, even at times when their words explicitly contradict the underlying point. This dramatic technique is very common in Twentieth Century drama, and learning to play these behaviors is an essential acting skill.
The problem is that this skill has also proven useful in cases where there is no underlying plot point, but the text is minimal or banal (like, for example, much daytime soap opera writing for television). Some actors are now used to “filling in” with interesting bits of their own invention on almost all occasions.
The firm pronouncement that there is no subtext in Shakespeare pops up occasionally, almost always in connection with trying to put a stop to the indiscriminate use of this modernist acting technique in early-modern drama. “All you need to do,” actors are told, “is say the words.” To suggest that Shakespeare’s characters ALWAYS say exactly what they mean with no irony or sarcasm or intent to deceive is ludicrous. To suggest that actors do not need to feel and perform the inner lives of the characters is theatrically ignorant. It is sound advice to the inexperienced actor, however, to say the plot lines of the scenes are rarely, if ever, rendered totally below the level of dialogue in early modern drama. When the text is strong, invented subtext is unnecessary.
Shakespeare’s characters have inner lives, and occasionally they say something different from what we know they think. Playing both is important. The advice to avoid sub-text in pre-modern literature really just means, “don’t muck up the plot with invented stuff.”
Scansion for Beginners
August 22, 2012 § 4 Comments
There is a very funny video, “Stuff People at a Shakespeare Festival Say” going around, created by Great River Shakespeare Festival. Tabard jokes figure prominently in the beginning, but at around three minutes the scansion jokes pour forth. Of course I laughed, but it got me thinking again about how unfortunate it is that there are so few resources available to those really wanting to learn about scanning poetic meter and applying it on stage.
After many years of frustration at this situation while teaching classes on acting Shakespeare, I decided to take matters into my own hands and create a guide for my students – The Down and Dirty Guide to Scanning Verse. My friend, Edward Isser found room for it on a server at The College of the Holy Cross as part of a teacher’s guide for a larger project, for which I am very grateful. These days it gets a lot of hits because the Internet Public Library (http://www.ipl.org/) provided a link from its Shakespeare resources.
Because the basic rules are simple and easy to master, I thought I’d repost a link here also, to encourage the curious to give it a go. Happy scanning!
A Beginning
July 14, 2012 § Leave a Comment
I don’t know exactly when I became a Shakespeare geek. I can’t recall a specific life-changing moment like some of my friends who saw an indelible performance or fell in love with a perfect passage in English class. But I DOknow when I first realized that it had happened.
It was fall 1978, and I was browsing in a local independent bookstore. (Back then such things still existed.) My eyes fell on A.L. Rowse’s just released, three-volume annotated Shakespeare.
I was entranced. It was something I just felt I HADto have. Compared to any book I had ever purchased it was stunningly expensive, far beyond my means as a student. Still, just leafing through it seemed a revelation on every heavily illustrated and annotated page. How was I going to become an actor and a director without it?
For weeks I was too embarrassed to mention it to my parents, even though persuading them to buy it for me seemed my only practical option. One afternoon while shopping with my mother I somehow concocted a plausible excuse for stopping by the bookstore and (hinting broadly) showed it to her. I wasn’t asking for it, mind you. Just showing off my erudition as a theater major. As casually as possible I lectured my mom on all the reasons this boxed set stood head and shoulders above the cheap editions nearby. The clincher, in my opinion, was that the author didn’t just discuss the plays as literature, although he did plenty of that also. His notes were littered with references to actors, designers and productions. He illuminated the plays in performance!
I knew nothing then of Rowse’s idiosyncrasies, or critical debates. All I knew was that I lived about as far away from live theater as a human could, and yet four hundred years of production history were suddenly available to me – if only I could somehow save up enough money to purchase Rowse’s edition. My mother was not fooled for an instant, I now realize, but she played it with a poker face. This was not the scale of purchase our family made, least of all for something as impractical as books, she said, and left it at that.
On Christmas morning that year, although it was far more extravagant than a usual present in my home, the set was waiting under the tree. Having been taken in by my mother’s act, I was both surprised and thrilled. It was a great gift. Thirty-five years later, I still have it. I still consult it regularly. In the end it was, hands down, the most practical gift I ever received.
The excitement I felt when I first encountered my Rowse is the excitement I still feel when I think about, talk about, see, and most of all teach Shakespeare. My interest is still in how the page and the stage relate to each other. I’ve been incredibly lucky in my life to pursue this discussion in extraordinary forums. In the early ’90s I was able to study with the brilliant Lois Potter in an NEH seminar at the Folger Library, and toward the end of the decade had the opportunity to participate in another seminar led by Alan Dessen and Shakespeare Santa Cruz’s founder, Audrey Stanley.
This blog is a continuation of those conversations, and of the excitement I felt when I discovered the richly illustrated Shakespeare volumes so long ago. It is a manifestation of my Bard-based nerdiness. I don’t when I became a Shakespeare geek but I know I still am one.
Welcome to my blog.