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Shakespeare live: reproducing Shakespeare at the ‘new’ Globe Theatre

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 19; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0950236042000329636

1470-1308

Catherine Silverstone,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements My thanks are due to the British Academy, Jaq Bessell, Eugene Giddens, Margaret Healy, Mark Houlahan, Michelle Keown, Lindsey Moore, Judith Pryor, Carol Chillington Rutter, the anonymous reader for Textual Practice and the Globe Library. I am also grateful to participants in the 2004 Shakespeare Association of America seminar on cross-dressing in contemporary performances of Shakespeare, especially Barbara Hodgdon, Elizabeth Klett, Skip Shand and Philippa Sheppard. All Globe Research Bulletins are available at the Globe Library. These Bulletins are in the process of being posted on the Globe's website at http://www.shakespeares-globe.org/navigation/frameset.htm; this site supersedes the now inactive Globe Research website which was hosted by the University of Reading. Notes 1. Pauline Kiernan, ‘Findings from the Globe Opening Season: Henry V ’, Research Bulletin 2, March 1998, p. 5. The basic requirements for these original practices performances are: an all-male cast, cuts to speed performance time, several interval-free performances, doubling of parts, extensive historical costume work, authentic weapons including swords and crossbows, authentic music, experiments with jigs, stage management as close to the Elizabethans as possible within the confines of modern safety standards, use of stage traps, the lords' and music rooms in the balcony, a cannon and ticket prices set at rough equivalents to Elizabethan playhouse prices (Research Bulletin 2, pp. 5–8). 2. Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 3. 3. See for example Andrew Gurr, ‘Thinking about the new Globe’, The European English Messenger, 4.1 (1995), pp. 9–11, and Robert Clark, ‘The new Globe rises’, The European English Messenger, 4.1 (1995), pp. 12–13. 4. See for example Graham Holderness and Carol Banks, ‘“True Original Copies”’, The European English Messenger, 6.1 (1997), pp. 20–5, and John Drakakis, ‘Theatre, ideology and institution: Shakespeare and the roadsweepers’, The Shakespeare Myth, ed. Graham Holderness (Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: St Martin's Press, 1988), pp. 24–41. 5. For an excellent example of recent criticism on the Globe, which situates the project in relation to theme parks, living-history restorations and intercultural Shakespeare, see W.B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. pp. 79–116, 148–68. 6. Gurr, ‘Shakespeare's Globe: a history of reconstructions and some reasons for trying’, Shakespeare's Globe Rebuilt, ed. J.R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 46. 7. The first Globe was reconstructed in 1599 from the timbers of the Theatre and burned down in 1613 as a result of cannon fire during a performance of Henry VIII. This theatre was rebuilt as the tiled-roof New Globe Theatre in 1614. Following the close of the theatres in 1642 the New Globe was subsequently demolished in 1644. 8. Christian Camargo, interview with Kiernan, Research Bulletin 2, p. 40. 9. Henry V at the Globe, dir. Steve Ruggi, Channel 4, videocassette, 15 June 1997. 10. Kiernan, Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe, Early Modern Literature in History Series (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's Press, 1999), p. 99. 11. Mark Rylance, qtd in Barry Day, This Wooden ‘0’: Shakespeare's Globe Reborn (London: Oberon, 1996), p. 22. 12. Kristin Linklater, Freeing Shakespeare's Voice: The Actor's Guide to Talking the Text (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992), pp. 196, 195. 13. Kiernan, Staging, p. 119, and Camargo, qtd in Kiernan, Staging, p. 153. 14. Richard Olivier, qtd in Kiernan, Staging, p. 143. 15. Shakespeare's Globe Exhibition and Theatre Tour, pamphlet (London: Planart Reproduction, [2001]), n. pag. 16. Shakespeare's Globe Exhibition and Theatre Tour, n. pag. 17. Joseph Roach, ‘History, memory, necrophilia’, The Ends of Performance, ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 23. 18. Roach, ‘History, memory, necrophilia’, pp. 26–7. 19. Jenny Tiramani, interview, programme, Henry V, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, London, 1997, n. pag. 20. Kiernan, Staging, pp. 86–7. 21. Kiernan, Staging, pp. 102–3. 22. For discussions of early modern acting see for example, Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 95–103, and Michael Hattaway, Elizabethan Popular Theatre: Plays in Performance (London: Routledge, 1982), esp. pp. 50–6, 72–9. 23. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 2nd edn. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 141–64. I am also indebted to work by W. B. Worthen, Joseph Roach and Richard Schechner on the relationship between ‘origin’ and performance. See Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force, esp. pp. 64–5, 99; Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), esp. pp. 1–4; and Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), esp. pp. 35–7. 24. Female characters are sometimes played to comic effect as actors highlight the tension between the male body and voice and the female character in the manner of drag or a pantomime dame, such as the minor female roles in the partially cross-dressed production of Thomas Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1997) and the role of the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet (2004). However, the major trend in the original practices productions is for the male actors to be ‘believable’ as female characters; this is exemplified by Cockerell's preparation for Katherine. 25. See Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London: Routledge, 1993), esp. pp. 12–16. 26. Toby Cockerell, interview with Kiernan, Research Bulletin 2, p. 22. 27. Kiernan, Staging, p. 55. 28. Gurr, ‘Staging at the Globe’, Mulryne and Shewring, pp. 165–6. 29. The Taming of the Shrew (2003), Richard III (2003) and Much Ado About Nothing (2004) were played as original practices productions, but with all-female casts. In his programme note for Richard III Michael Dobson notes the phenomenon of all-female performances in the 1660s and 1670s (‘To the Men Women, to the Women Men’, programme, Richard III, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, London, 2003, pp. 14–15). The Globe may thus be seen to use academic expertise in its promotional material to claim a degree of chronologically displaced historical ‘authenticity’ for its all-female productions. While it is beyond the scope of this article, the all-female productions, like instances of colour-blind casting at the Globe, invite further consideration. 30. Paul Nelsen, ‘Oaths and oracles: will the Globe spin on an axis of “authenticity”?’ Shakespeare Bulletin, 13.3 (1995), p. 31. 31. Elin Diamond, Introduction, Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Diamond (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 1. 32. Robert Hewison, rev. of Antony and Cleopatra, dir. Giles Block, Sunday Times, 8 August 1999, rpt. in Theatre Record, 31 August 1999, p. 1005. 33. Alastair Macaulay, rev. of Antony and Cleopatra, Financial Times, 3 August 1999, rpt. in Theatre Record, 31 August 1999, p. 1000. 34. Block, interview with Jaq Bessell, ‘Actor interviews 2000: Red and White companies’, Research Bulletin 18, p. 13. 35. Nicholas de Jongh, ‘Vivid and raw tale of royal love’, rev. of Edward II, dir. Timothy Walker, Evening Standard, 1 August 2003, p. 30, and Susannah Clapp, rev. of Edward II, Observer, 3 August 2003, p. 13. 36. See for example Kiernan, Staging, p. 55. 37. Anon. qtd in Rylance, ‘The power and passion of Kabuki private view’, Daily Telegraph, 26 May 2001, p. 7. 38. David Schalkwyk, ‘From the globe to globalisation: Shakespeare and Disney in the postmodern world’, Journal of Literary Studies, 15.1–2 (1999), p. 45. Schalkwyk's emphasis. My analysis of the audience and its interplay with the actors extends, via a discussion of complicity, coercion and resistance, issues raised by Worthen in Shakespeare and the Force, esp. pp. 98–102, 107–10. 39. Kiernan, Research Bulletin 2, p. 42. 40. Chantal Miller-Schütz, ‘Findings from the Globe Prologue Season 1996’, document held at the Globe Library, p. 5. 41. Shakespeare's Globe Theatre: The Celtic Season, pamphlet (London: Graphic Thought Facility, 2001), p. 19. 42. Kiernan, Staging, p. 21. 43. Liam Hourican, interview with Bessell, ‘Interviews with the Red Company: The 1999 Season’, Research Bulletin 14a, [Feb. 2000], p. 29. Hourican's emphasis. 44. Benedict Nightingale, ‘Send out the clowns at the Globe’, The Times, 3 August 1998, p. 16. Interviewed after the 2000 season, actor Steven Alvey suggests that the audience response of booing seems to have stopped, contending ‘that generally audiences seem to have grown up a bit with the Globe’. See Alvey, interview with Bessell, Research Bulletin 18, p. 7. 45. These audience observations are made from Julius Caesar, dir. Rylance, face-on camera, videocassette, 7pm, 21 Sept. 1999, held at the Globe Library, and are supplemented by Bessell's interview with actor Liam Hourican in Research Bulletin 14a, pp. 28–9. 46. Bessell attributes this intention to Rylance, ‘The 1999 Globe Season: The Red Company Julius Caesar’, Research Bulletin 15, Feb. 2000, p. 22. Bessell's emphasis. 47. Hourican, Research Bulletin 14a, p. 29. 48. Jasper Britton, interview with Bessell, Research Bulletin 18, p. 19. 49. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 2.