Notes 1 Popular Shakespeares 1. Readers might take a look at Graham Holderness’s excellent Cultural Shakespeare: Essays in the Shakespeare Myth (2001) for insightful analyses of some of the various cultural uses to which the name ‘Shakespeare’ is put. 2. Would be, and indeed is. I direct the reader towards, for example, Levine (1991) and Bristol (1990, 1996). 3. This is certainly the argument put forward by Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Here, Bourdieu distinguishes between the ‘pure gaze’ associated with high art, which looks in an abstract manner for the access the artwork provides to ‘universal truths’, and the ‘popular aesthetic’, which approaches the artwork in a manner no different from other areas of everyday life (1984: 4). In his attempt to define popular theatre, David Mayer similarly constructs a binary opposition between the ‘aesthetic’ and the ‘popular’ (1977: 257–77). 4. Alan Sinfield suggests that within two years, Peter Hall’s desire to appeal to a ‘popular’ audience became ‘refocused entirely in terms of the “the young” and particularly those in higher education’ (Sinfield 2000: 179). 5. ‘Talking Theatre’, The Tempest: Mark Rylance, Shakespeare’s Globe, 31 August 2005. 6. See Bennett (1990: 163–4); Elam (2005: 86–7); Ubersfeld (1981: 306). 7. S. L. Bethell (1977: 29) and Peter Davison (1982a: 1–11) put forward similar arguments. 8. Ronald Knowles makes a similar argument (1998: 36–60). For a more detailed discussion of Shakespeare and Carnival, see Bristol 1985. 9. In a book on stand-up comedians, Oliver Double writes of a similar ‘per- sonality spectrum’ from ‘character comedians’ to the ‘naked human being’ (2005: 73–6). Double notes that ‘the concept of a continuous spectrum from character to naked self, however, does not really capture the subtle inter- weaving of truth and fiction in the onstage identities of stand-up comedians’ (2005: 77). 10. Indeed, Weimann himself has described Brecht as ‘a fundamental inspira- tion’ for his theory (Guntner et al. 1989: 231). 11. This could, it should be noted, be a misrepresentation of Brook. His com- ments on Shakespeare’s plays frequently tread an ambiguous line between, on the one hand, claims for his universality, and on the other, suggestions of a potential for reinvention. His comments on Hamlet might be an example: Hamlet is inexhaustible, limitless. Each decade brings with it new explana- tions, fresh interpretations. Yet Hamlet remains intact, a fascinating enigma. Hamlet is like a crystal ball, ever rotating. At each instant, it turns a new facet towards us and suddenly we seem to see the whole play more clearly. (Brook 2001) 225 226 Notes 2 Text and Metatext: Shakespeare and Anachronism 1. One might compare S. L. Bethell’s analysis: ‘Shakespeare, then, in the ortho- dox line of Tudor political philosophy, brings history into active relationship with contemporary life; he does not immerse himself in the past, but con- templates the past in the light of his own times’ (1977: 51). On anachronism, Bethell comments: ‘The co-presence of such contrasting elements renders doubly impossible any illusion of actuality; once again, the audience must necessarily remain critically alert, whilst at the same time the historical element gives current significance to an historical situation’ (1977: 49). 2. This is not, it should be noted, to make a claim for a continuous tradition of anachronism in popular culture: anachronism in medieval and Renaissance drama was a product of that era’s evolving concept of history, and made use of the tension between popular oral histories and official written ones. Rackin highlights the importance of the growing number of printed histories which emerged during the Renaissance – when histories were disseminated orally, anachronisms had been far more common (Rackin 1991: 234). 3. Virgidemiarum II, Liber I, Satire iii, 1597 (cited Gurr 2002: 219–20). 4. The Defence of Poesie, 1595 (The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat, Cambridge, 1912, 3: 39). 5. Wilkinson, T. (1790) Memoirs of His Own Life, York, 4: 111 (cited Fisher 2003: 63). 6. Self-described ‘iambic fundamentalist’ Peter Hall, for example, argues: These are difficult times for the classical actor because there is little technical consistency. I have worked in a theatre where the director before me urged the actors to run on from one line to the next, speak the text like prose, and to take breaths whenever they felt like it. He wanted them, he said, to be ‘real’. They were; but they weren’t comprehensible. (2003: 11) 7. This story is related more fully in Maher 1992: 41. Conkie records that when Rylance’s Hamlet asked the same questions at the Globe in 2000, he deliberately solicited audience responses, repeating the question until it was answered. He apparently received both negative and affirmative answers, alter- ing his playing of the speech which followed accordingly (Conkie 2006: 38). 8. A different version of the same article also appeared in the Old Vic pro- gramme for Richard II under the heading, ‘Shakespeare Our Contemporary’. 9. Wesker levels a similar charge at Trevor Nunn’s 1999 production in an open letter on his website (Wesker 1999). 3 ‘A Play Extempore’: Interpolation, Improvisation, and Unofficial Speech 1. See, for example, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (1961, 13th edn., London: Macmillan) or The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1979, 3rd edn., OUP). 2. I. C. Media Productions, The Wisdom of Shakespeare in As You Like It (1998), The Wisdom of Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice (1998), The Wisdom of Notes 227 Shakespeare in Julius Caesar (1999), The Wisdom of Shakespeare in The Tempest (2000), and The Wisdom of Shakespeare in Twelfth Night (2002). For Dawkins’ influence on Rylance’s practice, see Peterson 2005. 3. This process is detailed in, for example, Taylor (1990), Levine (1991), Lanier (2002: 21–49), and Henderson (2007). 4. See K. M. Lea’s discussion of this in Italian Popular Comedy (1934), New York: Russell & Russell, vol. II, 381. 5. The scenes featuring these characters are most accurately rendered; see Davies 2001: 179. 6. Wiles’s version omits the line ‘and, my coate wants a cullison’, so I have rein- stated it, following the pattern of Wiles’s punctuation for the other lines. 7. Duthie objects to this theory on the grounds that ‘allowing a Shakespearean cancellation here, he has nevertheless retained part of the attack upon the clown – he has retained the complaint about improvisation’ (1941: 235). 8. To back up this point, Davison quotes Cleopatra, who feared that ‘the quick comedians / Extemporally will stage us’ (Anthony and Cleopatra, 5.2.212–3). As we saw in Chapter 2, however, the latter passage, much like the Hamlet speech, can be understood as a disjunctive anachronism: in other words, as a deliberate joke. 9. In a sequence reminiscent of Malvolio’s gulling, Tarlton conveys one of his drunken fellow actors to a jail; upon waking, the drunkard is teased with moans ‘that one so young should come to so shamefull a death as hanging’ (Halliwell 1844: 31). Tarlton also deceives a madman who wishes to cut off his head (1844: 32); he gets out of paying an innkeeper at Sandwich by giving the impression that he is a Catholic priest (1844: 36–7). Very often, like Touchstone’s escapades in the Forest of Arden, Tarlton’s adventures take the form of the worldly entertainer from the city deceiving simple country folk: in ‘How Tarlton frightened a country fellow’, for example, Tarlton terrifies a ‘simple country fellow in an alehouse’ with an accusation of trea- son (Halliwell 1844:17); in another anecdote, he wriggles out of marrying a ‘country wench’ very reminiscent of As You Like It’s Audrey (1844: 33). Tarlton also becomes a Falstaff-like gull figure himself, being led into a trap, for example, by the promise of sex (1844: 39). 10. To support this claim, Rackin cites Sir Philip Sidney’s remark in The Defence of Poesy that ‘verse far exceeds prose in the knitting up of the memory’ (1991: 238). 11. More official than it has any reason to be, one might argue, given the dis- puted authority of many of the texts. 12. Gary Taylor relates an anecdote of a scene improvised by comedians John Monteith and Suzanne Rand ‘as if written by Shakespeare’: The result was screamingly funny, but I did not hear a single quotation from Shakespeare; his style was suggested, instead, by acrobatic contortions of grammar, the occasional ‘alas,’ odd ‘doth,’ and frequent ‘thee,’ incongruous mixtures of orotund polysyllables and street slang, and a singsong approxi- mation of blank verse. (1999: 203) 13. Actors from Campbell’s continuing collaborators The Sticking Place formed Shall We Shog?’s London team. The Newcastle team are otherwise known as 228 Notes The Suggestibles, an improvisation troupe who perform together regularly in their home town. The Liverpool team, meanwhile, were the winners of an event called Farting Around in Disguises which took place under Campbell’s direction at the Liverpool Everyman in 2004; their team was called The Cottonwool Sandwiches. Shall We Shog? also featured much the same line- up of teams as Clash of the Frightened, a similar (though not Shakespeare- themed) event staged by Campbell in Liverpool in January 2005. 14. In an article for the New Statesman on the subject (which was, it should be noted, written following a radio discussion presented by Campbell), Michael Coveney quotes a ‘nub’ attributed to the early twentieth-century actor-manager Donald Wolfit: List, I sense a nubbing in far glens, where minnows swoop the pikey deep which is unpiked less pikey be, cross-bolted in their crispy muffs and choose the trammelled way.