The Shakespearean Stage…

…constantly keep returning to basics where Sh is concerned. And utterly basic to getting Shakespeare is by experiencing him in the theatre. As stated recently by Helen Mirren, our newest celluloid Prospera.

Helen understands her medium, in that what was performed and edited into the film The Tempest by Julie Taymor, will remain to the test of time more than any play can ever do in a theatre.

But she’s right though. First see a good production of any of his plays with actors fluent in delivering the language and the poetry it contains. And if you don’t know the story? A Winter’s Tale could make you weep at the resurrection scene.

An actor should be able to fill a theatre with sound or silence whilst telling his tale. The narrative has to be good too. But which Sh play should be your first play?

Ours was 12th Night in Bolton with Tom Courtenay as Malvolio.

So ignore the conspiracists, critics and theorists until you have seen his plays acted onstage. That said theatre is not as thick on the ground as when I started.

And X box beats black box any night of the week.

Plus we’ve seen some appalling Sh acting onstage. We think it safe to assume Sh has as many readers, who have no need of players to adorn their own imaginations.

Sh liked to look at the world as a stage. Jacques 7 ages of man speech in AYLI illustrates it:

‘All the world’s a stage. And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

And in his time women were portrayed in England by men.

But we believe he knew women would one day fill his roles. As they did in France, Italy and Spain in his own time. Did he ever think his plays would one day be reverse cross-dressed?

Sh was a man who became a product of the theatre world of Jacobethan England. His only cultural meaning had a theatre base for over 150 years after his death.

When conditions were ripe for his ascension to cultural signifier to happen did he become a catalyst for literary theory.

The first scholars fought over whether the extant quarto forms needed editing or the Folios pruning before collecting them for a new edition of Sh works.

And each new edition brought some brief biographical details. No one had interviewed his family when they had the chance. And the Oxfordians were yet to be born centuries later.

The Theatre proper started in 1576 when Shakespeare was a young ‘un. The common man was at the centre of its rise. A penny entrance to see a tale of horror or wonder.

The Theatre just before it died in 1642, was most influential in Court, and basically a Royalist pusuit.

When they re-opened in 1664 Theatres immediately reversed the old order. The ones who paid the least were now furthest from the stage, and those who paid most, closest to it.

So the question remains hanging in every conspiracy theory. What do you do with Willm Shakspere smack dab in the middle? How do you explain him away? What is his role? Is he doing it willingly?

Was the theatre of his day so corrupt, that they sold out a member of their company, a professed friend and fellow, for his and their 30 pieces of silver?

Or was he really the witty mellifluous Natural they say he was? Other non-actors confirm our claim that others saw him as no one other than who he was.

He retired, he died, his works were collected into Folios one, two three and four. and the ascension began.

That his biography is so far away from the content of his works depends on what you think is so uncommonly brilliant about them. Not a line we love in Shakespeare needs a noble mind to have written it, for we to weep at it.

The historical and anecdotal evidence we have, and we all know: it ain’t much, all points to the actor in the middle.

But for pure sensation and rock and rolliness the Oxford theory will win converts.

The illiterate bumpkin can barely write his own name. And therefore cannot be Shakespeare. He lacks the worldliness, the ease and cares of power.

Oxford milked his life into 36 plays. His family life and fortunes a total mess. But posterity will sort it out.

None of the plays can therefore be collaborations. Sh career shows he may have collaborated in the periods when we might expect it.

As a journeyman playwright and poet, and again towards the end of his career as he worked his way to eventually maybe stopping this keeping up the pretense for the sake of England and Literature and St George too.

Retiring to his illiterate daughters and shrewish wife’s temerities. Visited by his mates Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton both of whom, celebrated playwright and poet, must have known and been complicit in any plot, fictional or factional.

No way Jose or Hose b, this could be he, they say. Look at his biography with these specially tinted glasses that let you see the emporer is wearing no clothes. And his nekkidness ain’t pretty, but you must see with open eyes the truth.

You have to accept that his works were written a lot earlier. Which conflicts with dating them for your average Historian, who usually has no axe to grind in this issue.

And of course it runs contrary to the orthodox dating and chronology, which accepts that Sh was as much a Jacobean playwright as an Elizabethan one.

And if not Oxford was awfully prescient about the details of Jacobean news. Of course these could have been added in by unknown hands. But not Shakespeare of Stratford, no. Never!

We watched the King’s Speech last night and we wonder at Geoffrey’s marvelous performance of the common man done good without a certificate or diploma to his name.

And we eagerly anticipate Anonymous. Mark Rylance plays Henry Condell. Sh bribes Oxford so he can build the Globe. It’s a tale of self-sacrifice on everyone’s part perhaps.

Mark is seen rhapsodysing most eloquently on what the authorship question means to him. And if anyone is expert in the playing of these works it is he. His passion for the craft is strong.

Here is a blog post by Holger Syme dealing with Mark’s pour oot.

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