Shakespeare verses the actor

My first Shakespeare encounter came in the fall of sixth grade.  My English teacher took the class to see the play King Lear, a tragedy detailing a king’s internal downfall and dissolve.  Until that point, Shakespeare remained an esoteric topic discussed by only the most educated and capable, and I had no intention of fighting my way into a group of the elite.  However, I realized people actually paid to see these plays so it must be at least decent.  
All excitement I had for the play instantly vanished when I saw a picture of Shakespeare's famous, prodigious forehead gleaming between the wisps of his ugly brown hair.  His facial expression suggested an unbalanced blend of pretentiousness and competence, but there was no escaping one fact: the man was ugly.  

One could imagine how exponentially my excitement grew when I found out the play would be performed solely by one actress.  I couldn't bare it.  She played the king, his three daughters, and about three other prominent noblemen.  However, ten minutes into the play, the actress seemed to morph into seven distinct characters with distinct personalities.  The striking part about it was the actress’s ineptitude in attempting to seamlessly switch between the characters.  In fact, the production of the play seemed mediocre at best, yet I was easily able distinguish every single character.  The capacity to distinguish stemmed from Shakespeare's unmatched ability to create such expressive, diacritic characters.  For example, Shakespeare's depiction of Iago in the play Othello is that of a ruthless sociopath who poisons people and their relationships for petty revenge and self gain.  The intentions of each Shakespearean character surface through the temperament and dialog of the characters themselves so clearly visual aids aren't even necessary.  Without being visually capable of separating each character (God help that poor actress), one could tell who the actress was playing simply by her actions and the words she spoke.  The moral of this Shakespearean experience is that essentially Shakespeare creates a world of his own through his creation of each individual character through dialog and screenplay, not the actor's imitation of it.  While good acting obviously enhances the quality of a Shakespearean play, I would argue the depth and meaning lies within each individual character's intentions through his or her words and actions.  Variations of Shakespearean plays come and go but each play's true meaning remains with the screenplay Shakespeare wrote.    

Et tu, Brute?

This class in some ways is the completion of a full circle for me and my Regis English career.  The first text that really intrigued me freshman year was 'Julius Caesar,' which I read in Mr. Quinn's English class.  It was the first encounter I had ever had with reading plays, and it did not disappoint.  To this day one of the highlights of freshman English was Mr. Quinn's rendition of Antony's funeral oration.  "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears."  Of course no fellow student in that class would have had the confidence to perform such a feat as reading with emotion like Mr. Quinn did in his best Brando-esque impression; for, after all, we were freshmen.  I think it's safe to say, however, that most of this class, as seniors, now has the nerve to perform such a daunting task as letting passion fill the vocal chords.  This is very fortunate, for, since I have learned since first reading 'Julius Caesar,' Shakespeare is without a doubt meant to be performed.  Language, wordplay, feeling, these are all lost when Shakespeare's words are simply read in a monotone voice while sitting in a desk.  Mark Antony's funeral oration, in my opinion the most powerful piece of rhetoric in the entire play, certainly would not have affected the mood of the mob if he had dictated it in a boring fashion.  These lines are dripping with raw feeling and that must always be remembered.  Even though the feeling in Antony's voice was a faked feeling, it makes no difference.  Charlton Heston sounded pretty convincing to me in his rendition of the oration, and I know for a fact that he wasn't the person of Mark Antony.  Similarly, Antony, in the world existing as we imagine the plot in our minds, nonetheless sways the crowd, directly because of the passion with which we have to assume he invoked in his speech.  This is why Shakespeare caught me. Without seeing one of his plays performed, it really requires a rather large invitation for the imagination to work double-time.

The Legend Continues

My first exposure to the writings of Shakespeare, unfortunately, left an unimpressed taste. It was Julius Caesar, a play that I thought failed to live up to the expectations I had of the legendary playwright, actor, and poet. The language was tedious and simply hard to follow. However, I ditched my dull impression of Shakespeare when reading his tragedy Othello last year. It was definitely worth the read: Othello grabbed my attention from the start and gradually increased it by the time we finished the tragedy. I was particularly struck by the level of acceptance of the servile roles that the two main female characters, Desdemona and Emilia, undertook. Desdemona explicitly defines her submissive role to Othello when she asserts that “I am obedient” (3.3.99); likewise, Emilia demonstrates her servile job when she remarks “I nothing but to please his fantasy” (3.3.343). Shakespeare's language here evidently demonstrates that his plays from roughly 400 years ago still have relevance to today's society.

However, I still have yet to see a live Shakespeare performance of any of his plays. As discussed briefly in last class, I think it is very crucial to remember that these plays were not meant to be read and analyzed, but to be watched and performed. I look forward to comparing my experiences with reading and watching a live performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream. 

Shakespeare in Action

A monologue by delivered by Kenneth Branagh in the 1995 rendition of "Othello".

          All my life I've heard of Shakespeare and his plays.  From an early age I knew the main plot to Romeo and Juliet without having to pick up the book.  Last year, we were required to read Othello, my second Shakespeare play at the time.  I remember thinking of the language as tedious and excessively elaborate.  The plot, is of course ingenious and tragic, but seemed, to me at least, hindered by the inefficient communication between the reader and the play's language.  All this changed when our teacher showed us the movie's rendition of a monologue.  When reading the monologue, it takes several attempts to fully grasp the meaning behind the page long paragraphs, but when watching and listening to the monologue I automatically understood everything.  Obviously Shakespeare is meant to be acted out, but I never fully experienced the full power of Shakespeare's work until I saw it acted out.

Balancing Distance and Understanding

           The one thing I cannot stand as a reader is an easily predictable plot. Too often do stories follow the same format- a conflict gradually builds up and becomes more and more tense, with the author dropping hints as to how this conflict will reach its peak, and then be resolved. The most common way authors make their story too predictable is by giving their characters too much transparency, as this allows these characters' decisions to be too obviously foreseen. In other words, the author makes his characters too understandable. A good story is always a tad mysterious, as some distance should exist between the reader and characters to prevent an overly transparent and predictable tale. William Shakespeare found a particularly great balance for presenting characters to his audience- allowing them to be somewhat understandable but also slightly distant. Last year, while reading Othello, I found that although I understood some essential qualities of Iago (namely his insecurity, love of manipulating others, and jealousy), Shakespeare still kept Iago slightly mysterious.  

        Iago's actions weren't obviously foreshadowed or predictable, though we, as an audience, were aware of his basic scheme to drive Othello mad with jealousy. To me, however, the most intriguing aspect about the way Shakespeare presents Iago is that Shakespeare never presents the audience with the root cause of Iago's horrendous deeds. We often debated last year in class just what fueled Iago- perhaps an inner evil or deep insecurity, but we never concluded on one reason. This inability to truly understand Iago captivated me and only made me view the play with more awe and admiration for the characterizations presented. Shakespeare's phenomenal ability to give us what we need to know about a character but still keep that character distant is what brought me to this class.

Here's To New Beginnings

Whilst I had been introduced—rather pathetically, I might add—to Shakespeare in grammar school, I hadn’t been properly immersed into the plethora of Shakespearian literature until last year. It was precisely this lack of experience that prompted me to write off Shakespeare until that point as an esoteric anachronism, someone who’s work became as much of an antiquity as the outdoor theatres which promulgated his plays among the proletariat class in Victorian England. Ironically, we read A Midsummer Night’s Dream in my 8th grade English class, but the uninspiring environment made the play yet another stochastic lull in my grammar school experience. The only recollection that I have of reading the play during that year was taking a pedantic and petty exam wherein I was required to identify the characters associated with well over 30 quotes from the play. Needless to say, it wasn’t a fun time: from that point on, I heuristically associated Shakespeare with that very exam. Largely because of this entirely unintellectual introduction, my false preconceptions of Shakespeare were bolstered unimaginably.

Luckily, this would all change. My ignorance quickly disintegrated while reading and analyzing Othello and the sonnets during my Junior year. Notably, my most momentous change in attitude came when our class listened the musician Rufus Wainwright’s breathtaking performance of Sonnet 29. In addition to the novelty of listening to the sonnet performed as a musical arrangement, Wainwright’s personalization of the sonnet brought it to an entirely new dimension. What was an anachronism incarnated in front of us: the prose of an Englishman from the 16th and 17th centuries suddenly took the form of the raw emotion of a 21st century opera performer. To me, that reverberation through time was living proof of the timelessness of Shakespeare’s literature. Upon further investigation, it turns out that Wainwright isn’t the only one to deliver a modern interpretation. For instance, yearly Shakespeare "Sonnet Slams" in Central Park—not quite like a rap battle—offer a venue for performers to give their own interpretations of various sonnets in public. While I don’t envision any heavy metal bands performing Sonnet 29 anytime soon, such contemporary reverberations of Shakespeare’s literature show that it is very much alive. It took some time, but I’m ebullient that my sour heuristics have been shattered.

The Ghost of Guilt

In nearly all of his plays, Shakespeare masterfully displays the interior conflict of the central characters with shrewd use of language.  In my experience, the character of Macbeth in Shakespeare's Macbeth proves no different.  In one particular scene, Macbeth, recently named king, hosts a banquet for a myriad of notable figures; the new ruler's attitude at first resembles hospitality as he mentions to his wife, "Ourself will mingle with society / And play the humble host" (3.4.4-5).  Moments later, the murderers that Macbeth had hired to kill Banquo arrive.  After the murderers reveal that they have killed Banquo, but not Fleace, Macbeth makes an aside, "Then comes my fit again.  I had else been perfect, [...] But now I am cabined, cribbled, confined, bound in / To saucy doubts and fears" (3.4.23, 26-27).  Externally, Macbeth epitomizes self-confidence; internally, however, the tragic protagonist battles insecurity--caused by guilt.  Shakespeare, by using this language, creates a tension between these two versions of Macbeth.  This helps the reader, or viewer, note the contrast between the appearance of Macbeth and the character's inner reality.  Furthermore, Macbeth's guilt and mental insecurity fill to the brim; they become so intense that he can no longer appear normal physically.  He sees the ghost of Banquo appear at the banquet table while no one else can.  He speaks directly to the ghost, in plain sight of others, saying, "Thou canst not say I did it.  Never shake / thy gory locks at me" (3.4.61-62).

One interpretation of Banquo's Ghost at the Banquet

Ross, one of the guests, remarks "Gentlemen, rise.  His Highness is not well" (3.4.63).  Clearly, Macbeth's guilt has eaten away at his conscience; he can no longer suppress it and it causes his public appearance to change drastically.

While I appreciated reading this vital moment in Macbeth, I found that I enjoyed watching in class even more.  At first, Macbeth addresses the crowd with a friendliness that seems unbreakable.  Yet, right after he receives word that Fleance has escaped, his facial expression changes almost instantly.  In this one moment, the fear and guilt of Macbeth reaches the surface.  He manages to collect himself for a few moments, but when he sees Banquo's ghost at the table, he becomes visibly anxious once again. This moment inspired, in me, a love of Shakespeare.  A scene that seems quite simple can adopt a new complexity when analyzed by a group or by a director.