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Illuminating Shakespeare Through Performance 1997-2008 J. M 1 Illuminating Shakespeare Through Performance 1997-2008 J. M. Boxall Royal Holloway College PhD 2 Declaration of Academic Integrity I, Jocelyn Mary Boxall, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others this is always clearly stated. Jocelyn Mary Boxall Date 3 Abstract. The twenty-first century has seen a marked change in approaches to understanding Shakespeare’s texts through literary and theatrical criticism and also performance. This thesis argues that performances of Shakespeare in Britain between 1997 and 2008 staged by Shakespeare’s Globe, the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company enabled audiences to have increased physical and intellectual access to the plays and that as a result literary and theatrical critical readings of the texts became more productively complicated. It is argued that this increased access came as a response to political initiatives to democratise culture in Britain. It was also partly the result of transferring staging practices used in more intimate theatrical spaces to main house environments where they were developed further. By analysing particular scenes from Titus Andronicus, Love’s Labour’s Lost, King Henry V and King Lear in case studies of the plays observed in the theatrical spaces and conditions in which they were encountered in performance, it is possible to demonstrate that production practices during this time gave new dimensions to the plays and deepened our understanding of their processes and textual meanings. The identification of these processes and their uses extends our knowledge of Shakespeare’s work as a dramatist. Discussion of the plays is enriched through a combined consideration of (a) the methods used to analyse the difficulties emerging from their staged performance, and (b) the problems identified by literary and theatrical accounts of the texts. These difficulties and problems include apparent structural inconsistencies in the texts, the purposes of character interaction and the diverse nature of audience reception in the particular spatial and temporal conditions 4 in which the plays are encountered. It is argued that by conducting a multi- perspectival analytical approach and recognising the subsequent beneficial complications more detail about Shakespeare’s meaning-making processes can be revealed. 5 Illuminating Shakespeare Through Performance 1997-2008 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 6 Chapter One. Introduction 7 Chapter Two. Towards a Methodology 33 Chapter Three. Setting the Spatial and Critical Scene 52 Chapter Four. Titus Andronicus. ‘Ha ha ha !’ (3.1.263) 88 Chapter Five. Love’s Labour’s Lost. A ‘curious-knotted garden’ (1.1. 239) 136 Chapter Six. King Henry V. The ‘lovely bully’ (4.1.46) 186 Chapter Seven. King Lear. ‘Set me where you stand.’ (4.6.24) 233 Chapter Eight. Conclusion 281 Appendix A 303 Appendix B 306 Bibliography 308 6 Acknowledgements I should like to acknowledge with gratitude the support and encouragement of Dr Christie Carson, Professor Kiernan Ryan and Professor Ewan Fernie during the research and preparation of this thesis. I am grateful to the archivists at Shakespeare’s Globe, the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Archive at the Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive in Stratford- upon-Avon for their help. I should like to thank the practitioners who made the plays and playing spaces discussed here. I am indebted to my family. 7 Chapter One. Introduction. The potential for interdisciplinary analysis to illuminate the dramaturgy of Shakespeare’s plays was already being debated in the final decade of the twentieth century. As Robert Weimann observes: The recent interest in a new model of Shakespeare criticism raises a host of practical and theoretical questions, among which the relationship between the representation of textual ‘meaning’ and the circumstances of performing practice appears to be quite central.1 These questions coincided with particular political conditions in Britain at that time. The decline of Conservative power, which began in 19902 and continued until New Labour’s landslide victory in May 1997, had far-reaching consequences for political, cultural, social and economic life in Britain. When Tony Blair became Prime Minister he developed a premier-style leadership for the new millennium. Blairite approaches to government included the advancement of egalitarian policies of inclusion. These policies affected not only the ideologies and practices of the main theatrical institutions3 where Shakespeare performance was encountered by its audience, but also the ways in which the meanings of plays were communicated, considered and evaluated inside and outside the playhouse. 1 Robert Weimann, ‘Performing at the Frontiers of Representation: Epilogue and Post-Scriptural Future in Shakespeare’s Plays’, in The Arts of Performance in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Drama, Essays for George Hunter, ed. by Murray Biggs, Philip Edwards, Inga-Stina Ewbank and Eugene M. Waith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), pp. 96-129 (p. 96). 2 Margaret Thatcher served as Conservative Prime Minister from 4 May 1979 until 28 November 1990. She was succeeded by John Major, whose leadership was contested in 1995. He remained in office until 19 June 1997. 3 The political, cultural and economic timeframe under discussion marked the transition from a thirteen year period of Conservative government, which had observed a rise in high quality, small- scale production for a limited and relatively wealthy audience, to just over a decade of New Labour in power which transformed larger theatrical institutions using a mixed economic policy to stimulate fiscal growth through tourist revenue and devolved subsidy away from London to reinvigorate regional theatres. A more detailed discussion of these policies is provided later in Chapter One on p. 15. 8 The focus of this study is an analysis of what happened to Shakespearean production in New Labour Britain between 1997 and 2008. It investigates whether the dramaturgic processes presented in a range of Shakespeare’s plays performed during this period can be illuminated in further detail as a result of ideological and institutional change that affected theatre practice. In order to explore this question, selected scenes from performances of two different productions of four plays, Titus Andronicus, Love’s Labour’s Lost, King Henry V and King Lear, staged by the main institutional providers of Shakespeare’s work in Britain are compared in separate case studies. The original contribution of the research lies is the development and application of a methodology to investigate the plays which draws on different aspects of literary and theatrical critical accounts of the texts, pre-production work, performance and spectatorship and reflects on the political and institutional climate in which the plays were staged in order to identify the productive problems that emerge. The aim of the case studies is to demonstrate the benefits of an investigative method which integrates each of these analytical approaches more closely for the purpose of exploring the links between the audience and the processes by which it makes meaning out of its encounter with the plays in the contexts and conditions of performance. The plays considered here span Shakespeare’s work as a playwright during the 1590s and early 1600s. Each text offers identifiable approaches to the uses of the playhouse space and audience interaction which provide a useful basis for comparison. Shared thematic links between texts include broken relationships and the imbalance of power in patriarchal hierarchies. They offer commentaries on the effects of political power on the individual which was a key focus of Blair’s government. King Henry V and King Lear are well-known, popular plays. Titus 9 Andronicus and Love’s Labour’s Lost have been produced less often, partly because they offer particular challenges to modern directors and audiences in terms of staging and reception, but both plays were performed relatively frequently during this period. The discussion of the texts is therefore shaped by these factors to demonstrate how elements of the plays’ dramaturgic features were developed over time. The research presented here is aimed at all readers of Shakespeare’s texts, whether they are considering the plays from literary or theatrical critical perspectives in order to learn more about Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, whether they are reading the text for meaning in performance or, preferably, exercising a combination of these analytical methods. Theatrical performance combines spontaneity with meticulous preparation. Its strength lies in its transience. Practitioners and audiences make a mutual commitment to sharing responsibility for creating the performance in the playhouse; a power which is constantly re-negotiated and remains unstable. Much of the impact of theatrical practice is linked with specific moments in performance which are custom-built for very particular temporal and spatial conditions and destined to vanish as the production concludes. Ironically, the impact of performance is the very aspect which extends the life of the text through the demand for repeated production. Analysis of the construction of dramatic episodes within scenes in performance is of interest to the overall discussions of the plays because they are often the moments which create literary or theatrical debate over time. Sourcing information about them remains
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