Shakespeare

Shakespeare is the best way for actors to learn their craft. Conversely, Shakespeare can be the worst way for actors to be introduced to theatre. The determining factor is the director.

A director who understands Shakespeare becomes a keystone of knowledge to his actors; he is able to connect the actors’ heartstrings to the text and the story embedded therein. Actors with a fine director cannot fail when performing Shakespeare.

Shakespearean text is not difficult to understand, but there are several obstacles between Shakespeare and his modern audience. The following are some of the reasons that many people feel animosity towards Shakespeare:

1) Public schools no longer train students (or even expose students) to the concept of rhetoric.

Shakespeare wrote entirely in rhetoric. Actors who have been trained in modern public schools approach his work as they would modern drama, and fail miserably in performance. Rhetorical work is actually easier than non-rhetorical work for an actor to perform, but only when it is approached as rhetorical work.

2) Shakespeare wrote in blank verse, which makes modern audiences recoil from its poetic appearance.

It is no longer popular or common to love or understand formal poetry. The soul of poetry today is expressed in song; young people don’t realize that their favorite lyrics are actually free-verse or loose-form poetry. Intellectual snobs in the last century have so alienated the common people from the beautiful use of written words that, for all intents and purposes, mainstream poetry is dead. The fact that blank verse looks like formal poetry means that the average person’s brain shuts down before a single word is read.

3) Shakespeare is not often produced for the right reasons.

Theatre companies with any kind of repute are simply expected to perform his work. Neither the producers or directors are usually much interested in the work; they would rather be doing something “new” and “vital.” As any artist knows, art that is made for the wrong reasons will never be good art. At best, it will be a low-grade average. Most Shakespeare in performance is a low-grade average.

4) Shakespeare is always cut for performance.

Because the people cutting the play (usually the director or an artistic director) have no background in rhetoric or poetic construction, they destroy the internal structure of the play. In almost every case, the play given to the actors to perform is no longer a play; it is a pastiche of awkward scenes that have very little to do with each other, let alone with the play from which they were taken.

5) Shakespeare is usually produced as though he was an unusually dirty playwright.

The soul of Shakespeare’s work is inescapably moral. Because Shakespeare wrote many immoral and vulgar characters, many silly people assume that he himself was immoral. A truly vulgar playwright is incapable of reproducing his own bad qualities in a play, let alone of writing truly moral and honorable characters. All of Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines are unusually moral, God-fearing, and virtuous people. When they are played as if they were not, the bottom of the play falls out and the audience is offended. To put it plainly: Shakespeare had all the sex scenes happen off stage because he was a good playwright who understood that romantic love goes hand in hand with a respect and reverence for sexuality.

You may notice that all of Shakespeare’s immoral or vulgar characters end badly; their choices inevitably catch up with them. The difference between a Shakespearean tragedy and comedy is that in a comedy, the immoral characters make relatively small bad choices which are finally resolved with consequences devolving only on themselves, while in a tragedy, the immoral characters make such catastrophically big bad choices that the consequences spill over into a lot of other characters’ lives, ending usually in death. So called “problem plays” involve choices that are stupid, but are not the result of deliberate evil.

6) Shakespearean comedies are produced as though they were callow melodramas written to appease popular demand.

Shakespeare’s comedies are about good people who make good choices and are attracted to other good people; these fundamentally good people fall in love, overcome bad communication and bad habits, and get married. There is so much good happening on stage that everyone, particularly the audience, is overcome with good humor.

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