Shakespeare Right Now!

Welcome!

It shouldn't be as difficult as it has been to enjoy plays by the world's foremost dramatist. I hope you'll find as much pleasure in reading the works offered here as I have—and that you'll want to read more of them!

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Nots untied
In developing narrations, I have tried to be faithful to Shakespeare the playwright and actor—and that does not call for mindless devotion to sections of text in which his wording was obviously mangled by its early printers.

It does not require retention of words whose meanings have long since changed, especially when others that Shakespeare might have used are readily accessible to us. Nor does it demand displaying his speeches as poems, rather than as we hear them—in paragraphs, sentences, and phrases.

It does not mean retaining seventeenth-century punctuation, regardless of how each of several copyists and compositors decided to apply it.

In changing a passage, usually by reordering words to construct a contextually meaningful substitute for a textual crux, I do not contend that the new stuff is what Shakespeare wrote, or even what he intended. I do argue that he, as a man of the theater, would find a patch preferable to an interruption.

Displaying masterpieces
Think of the Mona Lisa. Can you picture what its frame looks like?

The painting, now behind bulletproof glass at the Louvre in Paris, actually has two frames: the one that shows is a Renaissance piece into which the panel was placed in 2004; the other, from the 1950s, is made of wood that prevents warping which could be caused by changes in humidity.

My intention is that narrative framing of Shakespeare’s speeches provide similar presentation services, unobtrusively complementing the work while lending support—and some protection from distortion and damage by idiots.

Presence
If Shakespeare’s shade is hovering now, he’s likely with performing actors, not editors, publishing houses’ paid professors.

The playwright apparently had no interest in editing off-the-boards scripts. He must have found excitement when creating plays, given the inspiration the writing exhibits, his proclivity for discursive exploration, and his ability to amplify; and he may well have made notes—character sketches, plot outlines, then staging-based changes recorded for the acting company’s prompt books. But there was no money for him in making literary revisions. Pen-and-ink preparation of manuscripts for printing would have been tedious—and correcting pieces already in print irksome, given even the legitimate quartos’ high content of error. His time would be spent much more profitably on composition.

The most likely locale for a preternatural visit today would be the auditorium of a high school where there’s little funding for distracting scenery or costumes, less time for moody Method introspection, and no tolerance at all for the weird political and sexual distortion that afflicts many professional productions, and turns some into freak shows.

Young volunteer actors, holding up dog-eared paperbacks not yet corrupted by novelty-seeking sellers of the latest hardbound tomes, simply find their masking-tape marks, listen and watch for cues, and speak their yellow-highlighted lines as clearly as they can.

I like to think of him there, whispering to them.

Casting options doubled
I believe the contributions of female performers would please Shakespeare; his company’s boys must have done very well with their roles, but surely a girl and woman can make Juliet and Viola live for us in ways that exceed technique.

Today’s audiences, though, accustomed to television-caliber thrills, may be disappointed when, in Two Gentlemen of Verona, two strong, vivacious young women—one of them jilted by a young man, the other being stalked by him—first meet: no catfight, no lesbian kiss, only understanding and tears.

The big book
My feelings about the First Folio are strong, but bifurcated.
I love seeing Shakespeare’s plays in the form that his fellow actors and their audiences would have recognized; I hate seeing the sloppy work the printers did while typesetting some of his words.

Had the Folio not been published, eighteen of the plays would have been lost to us; if they had been better printed, some that are effectively lost to most today would enjoy wide popularity.

It’s exciting to be surprised by Folio speeches that—despite the medium’s crabbed type and some cramped pages, and the effects of considerable time’s passage since the original pages were pulled from the press—deliver now a thrill of audacious authenticity, connecting us instantly, personally—perfectly—with the character and the author. But it’s depressing to see how many segments of garbled text were left scattered through the book.

Charlton Hinman’s efforts to find, and reproduce in the W.W. Norton facsimile, the best examples of pages from many Folio copies was admirable, as was the thinking that’s been devoted during many years to unscrambling and deciphering mysterious wordings. But academics’ allegiance to the text found in poor printing, rather than the context in brilliant writing, has led to “research” so plenitudinous that any genuinely helpful information it might contain is buried at birth.

A Fresh Look

For about ten years I’ve been working on a set of 37 novels.

I did have a head start. The plays of William Shakespeare provided some helpful stuff: plot, characterization, dialogue—and genius. The speeches in my pieces are those of the Globe edition (1864) of the plays. Its two editors made wise choices, I think, from among earlier versions’ handling of the text: modernizing spelling and punctuation, correcting obvious typographical errors, and emending some problematic words and passages. Taking those steps a little further, I’ve added narration.

I know, I know: those scripts have been doing just fine without being novelized. And the digital information-processing business was completely comfortable without personal computers—until Steve Wozniak’s brilliant new combination of widely-available parts in 1976 afforded geeks usable functions in the Apple I, and Steve Jobs’ determination to create an insanely great digital appliance for the rest of us brought the genuinely revolutionary Macintosh computer to market—in 1984.

There’s certainly something Orwellian about the Shakespeare industry today: a few high-priests’ scriptures of scholarship, written for experts, are foisted onto newbies: students read an “introduction” that cites numerous works they haven’t read, grouses about a play’s alleged shortcomings, and—worst of all—reveals way too much of what happens in it. The blasé establishment editors seem almost to be trying to ruin a first-time reader’s experience. Either way, they do so often; too many of us never read another Shakespeare play after we’re out of school, preferring to avoid another ordeal of sufficient rigorous round-trip travel between line-split speeches, glosses, and footnotes to cause motion sickness.

A while back I decided to read, simply for pleasure, a Shakespearean drama I had studied in college, and again in grad school. Despite my familiarity with it, I found the going tedious—sometimes annoying. For example, at the point where Hamlet’s college friend is trying to convince him that he has seen the king’s ghost, the prince asks if he’s sure who it was. Horatio replies, “Oh, yes, my lord; he wore his beaver up.” When the play was first performed, the audience was well aware that beaver was a term for a piece of armor; don’t you think that Shakespeare, were he directing actors today, would just change beaver to visor—another word in common use since the 13th century?

Don’t blame teachers. They must use some kind of text; and they’ll encourage anything that might engage pupils: DVDs of films ranging from Laurence Olivier’s to Baz Luhrmann’s; the local high school’s production of Twelfth Night; texts in modern idiom—even graphic novels. But as their classes pore over the latest manga rendering, educators may well worry that Shakespeare’s lines are getting short shrift.

I have nothing against plays, but surely most of today’s general readers would be much more comfortable having the guidance and explanations of a narrator whose all-knowing commentary provides the kind of immediate clarity that directors and actors, with their lighting, costuming, scenery and props, facial expressions, body language and gestures, bring to the stage.

It seems to me that a reader ought to be able to enjoy experiencing Hamlet as much as a playgoer or movie-theater patron—without needless interruptions and impediments. That’s why I set out to develop a way to facilitate that—a presentation, as it were, in writing.

I don’t suppose anyone will agree with everything in my versions of the plays. While modifications in an ephemeral production would go unnoticed by all but acute academicians, in the persistent presence of written work they’re certain to stimulate objections—ironically, if the call is for fidelity to printers’ slipshod typesetting instead of respect for Shakespeare’s dramatic writing.

But I can live with any dissent. In fact, I think would be a good thing: each reader who “screens” one of my versions as a personal vision can consider what might be done differently—maybe better.