I wanted to challenge:
The mono-cultural merry England of some narratives and the mythos of a genius isolated from external influence or context.
The text attempted:
A politically complex biographic portrait of William Shakespeare via a poetic mode of writing that would be accesible to modern audiences but would also appear credible as the speech of Shakespeare and his colleagues.
It required research into:
- Historical records of the immediate politics of Stratford and London;
- Biographical research into his family;
- Suppositions gleaned from textual analyses;
- Examination of the power politics of patronage;
- Events at court and nationally;
- Examination of the canon of works which describe the times;
- Writings of his contemporaries;
- Examination of Shakespeare’s own textual sources;
- Recent political and personal readings of his text and historical analyses of the influences of his plays.
A press statement from 2015:
The enormous legacy of his work means Shakespeare has become a mythical character. The play tries to get closer to the man, using clues in his work and theories from academic research. He lived through extraordinary times when life could be brutally cut short from plague, street violence or losing favour with the monarch - he survived through an ability to be a chameleon. I know Shakespeare's plays as an actor, director and academic and wanted to bring these threads together. I worked with writer and editor Anne Dixey to tighten the storytelling.
The cult of celebrity is dominant in today's society but it skims the nuances of a life. This is about a frail, old man, about to meet his maker, looking back over his passions and sins and the people who shaped him…
Research Aim:
To create a biographic one-man play of Shakespeare's life which employs poetic enquiry to suggest some possible insights into his character.
Shakespeare as Idea
A postmodern use of Shakespeare as a cipher or image is repeated in several plays that feature him (click here for a list of plays). I had no interest in this as an explicit literary device but realised that this slightly deconstructed Shakespeare is what we are in many ways left with; a signifier detached from specific meanings and freighted heavily with the cultural freight of 400 years.
There is something elusive in nature of Shakespeare as a figure divorced from us through time. Within his own age, he seems an anonymous figure absent from court at key points, avoiding tax, a journeyman, later a gentleman who falsified or at least, to quote Jonson added mustard to his pedigree, a farmer, a householder, a money lender, a writer, an actor, a man at court, and a poet, possible family man, possible adulterer, lover and one who understood the depths and nuances of human psychology.
To assimilate these characters required commitment to specific tropes but with awareness of the deconstructionist nature of the post modern renderings. I came to the conclusion that in dark times where agency was limited and life could be cut short, as evidenced by the imprisonment, execution and torture of some of his colleagues, Shakespeare survived by laying low and being all things to all men. He is similarly hidden in his plays. The press release (left) describes this.
Shakespeare as Multitude
The multivocality of one character and the possibility for him to be many things to many people developed a performance style where Shakespeare plays all the characters and speaks to himself at different ages.
This creates an unsteady game with the idea of a consistant identity. Sometimes he seems to be acting, sometimes he is present here and now, and sometimes really believes he is somewhere else, leading the audience to question truth at any given moment.
The concept of multivocality above, enabled a device where I could play a host of characters and also deconstruct and juxtapose a variety of contradictions inherent in his percieved identit(ies).
Patriarchal if not misogynistic elements of Elizabethan culture are deeply embedded within the works and life stories of Shakespeare. I worked closely with Journalist Anne Dixey and Director Lucyna Rossa to help explore how notions of patriarchy and examples of misogynist tropes might be treated for the female gaze without sanitisation or censorship; this involved questioning and re reading of passages but also a process of organisation of the staging in such a way that an implied female witness was always present.
Other plays about Shakespeare
I compiled a list of plays featuring William Shakespeare as a character (click here). I thought the model I was looking for might be Jonathan Bate's The Man From Stratford (2010), a one man performance presented by Simon Callow. The Guardian described it this way:
'If this was billed as a lecture rather than a play, Callow might just get away with it, but this reductive rent-a-quote approach simply treats the writer as a 17th-century celebrity and makes for sturdy and dull theatre.'
I wanted to dramatise and embody Shakespeare rather than describe him. Also, I wanted the milieu of his world to become part of the fabric of the piece and not merely part of the exposition. This in conjunction with a year of study of papers, lectures and biographies led me to see that the closest works to my intent were Edward Bond's Bingo and Whelan's The Herbal Bed. Both influences were identified by Professor Gordon McMullan (reviews).
Bond was the only playwright in the list to engage with the complex property and land politics of Stratford and Whelan worked well with domestic drama. Neither, though, comitted to representing Shakespeare with a clear, embodied personality, although Bingo presents him as a non-committal presence.
I wanted to combine the biographic work and descriptions of London and work in The Man From Stratford with the domestic and personal politics embedded in The Herbal Bed with a consciousness of the material politics of Bond. I was also interested in a spiritual and poetic element that I feel none of the plays in the list really approached.