American actors playing Shakespeare...?

[JustAsking]

...Seriously, I need to get you, Mr. Jason_Els, and Bbucko alone in a private booth in the Russian Tea Room for an afternoon. Just Asking is welcome, too. There's so much to dish about. And Calboner can come, too.

Oh yes, that would be famous. However to be in the presence of so much erudition, I think my head would a-splode.

 

[jason_els]

A play is much more than a work of words. It is costumes, sets, lighting, actions and reactions from other players, makeup, voice, and the actors themselves. If English teachers want to teach Shakespeare then I think the best way to do it, short of attending a performance, is to show a teleplay.

I think it's unfair to divorce an artist from his or her medium and frankly, playwrights are the only artists we do this to. No wonder they so often drink themselves to death! A great or even good actor can add nuance to the words to convey far more than they say on the page and a proper director can elicit subtext not immediately apparent in the script itself. Certainly the script is the foundation, but it is not the whole work as imagined by the artist.

Plays are precious things because they are performed live by living people, immediate and tangible in three dimensions. A good play draws the audience in closer to the performer than any other medium I can think of and it's that intimacy which plays need to truly communicate their artistry. There are differences in how plays are performed live and how they are done in film and TV because the acting and directing styles are necessarily different. In the same way, the script of a film no more communicates what appears on the silver screen than what a script of a play communicates what appears on stage.

 

[Bbucko]

Seriously, I need to get you, Mr. Jason_Els, and Bbucko alone in a private booth in the Russian Tea Room for an afternoon. Just Asking is welcome, too. There's so much to dish about. And Calboner can come, too.

Color me there :biggrin1:

 

[jason_els]

You'll be happy to know I'm partial to osetra and not beluga.

 

[Calboner]

A play is much more than a work of words. It is costumes, sets, lighting, actions and reactions from other players, makeup, voice, and the actors themselves.

If you believe what you say, then you must also hold that Shakespeare's plays are lost to us, for all the original "costumes, sets, lighting, actions and reactions from other players, makeup, voice, and the actors themselves" perished hundreds of years ago. All that have survived are the bodies of words -- which are what people other than you commonly call "plays."

It follows from your view that if Shakespeare had said, upon setting down his pen, "I have written a play," he would have been speaking falsely, since what is written is, on your view, not a play, but only part of one. On your view, anyone who says, "I am reading a play" is speaking falsely, for the same reason.

Your view has such transparently absurd consequences that I doubt that you even mean what you say.

If English teachers want to teach Shakespeare then I think the best way to do it, short of attending a performance, is to show a teleplay.

They should "teach the plays" by having the students watch performances and not read the plays? That would be a fine way to raise a generation of illiterates -- people to whom the writings of Shakespeare would be as silent and meaningless as the pages of Mozart's scores are to non-musicians; people who would know of Shakespeare only what was in this or that performance, and not what was in the play that Shakespeare wrote; people who claim to know Shakespeare but who have never read him, and, in all likelihood, would have no interest in ever doing so. That is not "teaching Shakespeare's plays," Jason, and certainly not teaching people to read Shakespeare's plays; that is teaching people to watch performances of Shakespeare's plays -- and making them as passive and powerless as most people today are in relation to music.

I think it's unfair to divorce an artist from his or her medium and frankly, playwrights are the only artists we do this to. No wonder they so often drink themselves to death! A great or even good actor can add nuance to the words to convey far more than they say on the page and a proper director can elicit subtext not immediately apparent in the script itself. Certainly the script is the foundation, but it is not the whole work as imagined by the artist.

There is no "divorce"! Unless the playwright happens also to be a director or an actor (as Shakespeare was, but we are talking about him in his capacity of playwright), he has ABSOLUTELY NO PART in what becomes of his writings on stage. He writes the words to be spoken, the stage directions, and so forth; beyond that, unless he happens to have a part in a production, the play is out of his hands. It is ridiculous to say that what the performers do with what he has written is his medium. It's their medium! That is why we call them performers and him a writer.

An actor can add all sorts of things, good or bad, to what the playwright has written. The writer may like them or dislike them, but they are the actor's work, not the writer's. Actors can miss things, too, or be able to make something of one detail only at the expense of neglecting another. That is one reason why one has to read the play to know what is in the play.

I don't understand why anyone would want to defend such a perverse position. Nobody is denying that plays are, in general, written to be performed, or that to appreciate a well-written play you have to see it performed -- at least, I am not denying any such thing. But you are denying that to appreciate a well-written play, one has to read it. To justify this bizarre denial, you make the even more bizarre claim that the playwright's medium is the performance that he does not create or control rather than the text that he does create and control.

I can understand how some people might advance a bizarre idea just for the thrill of provoking others to defend common sense, but I would not expect anything so frivolous of you, Jason.

 

[D_Gunther Snotpole]

But you are denying that to appreciate a well-written play, one has to read it.

Is it so unreasonable to make this denial?
It's not a claim (well, I haven't read Jason's posts) that reading can't contribute to an appreciation ... it's a claim, as I read your statement, that a rather full appreciation should be available from a good performance.
And I find that tenable, even though I personally would like to also read a play.

 

[CUBE]

I can't imagine where you obtained your numerous degrees from,Mr Disney perhaps?! but I think you would qualify for a refund.You clearly don't have any knowledge of the English spoken during Shakespeare's time, it definately did'nt any way resemble the American accent.Which,by the way has its phonetic roots in the (old) Suffolk accent.Pleased to imform you. P.S. Mr Cage speaks very highly of you,I believe.....!

dude, i wasn't serious.

 

[CUBE]

I feel the same way, me some too, wow! (Unless Ben Johnson and Christopher Marlowe really did try to pull one over everyone's eyes by creating Shakespeare just so they could get away with writing more than we realize and stay ahead of the law at the time.


It is interesting to follow Marlowe and this idea. Makes a good topic. Marlowe must have been an interesting person to know. He was in to so man areas of society. Would be nice to believe he did indeed make it to Italy after all

 

[jason_els]

If you believe what you say, then you must also hold that Shakespeare's plays are lost to us, for all the original "costumes, sets, lighting, actions and reactions from other players, makeup, voice, and the actors themselves" perished hundreds of years ago. All that have survived are the bodies of words -- which are what people other than you commonly call "plays."

That's not the nature of the beast. The words are only part of the total work. For a playwright to see his work in full fruition, it has to be performed. Otherwise it's merely words on paper. One of the great joys of theater is that it can be performed and reinterpreted through the years. We still perform Euripides and Aristophanes and they've been dead far longer. Through performance we can discover new interpretations and through those, meaning that's perhaps relevant to us. That's the play speaking to us. Plays are not dead words on paper but living breathing entities which require performance to be seen and experienced as intended by the playwright.

Every artist is confronted by the moment that he has to let his work go on to live in the world without him. It's the nature of art to be seen and judged by others long after the artist himself is dead.

It follows from your view that if Shakespeare had said, upon setting down his pen, "I have written a play," he would have been speaking falsely, since what is written is, on your view, not a play, but only part of one. On your view, anyone who says, "I am reading a play" is speaking falsely, for the same reason.

Your view has such transparently absurd consequences that I doubt that you even mean what you say.

If he was a thespian at all (and he was), he would have said, "I have written a script for a play," because a play is not the script. It is the action of performance which makes the script into a play. Without performance, a script is just stilted prose which may make little sense and reads rather poorly, "exit pursued by bear," being the most ridiculous thing to read yet makes sense when seen on stage and is actually quite funny. Do you think actors bring nothing to the characters they portray? That directors have no vision? That every performer is locked into reciting lines like talking mannequins for fear of not interpreting the playwright as intended? Of course not. There will be bad performances and good performances. That's part of the risk in being an artist who is dependent upon other artists to make a work complete.

They should "teach the plays" by having the students watch performances and not read the plays? That would be a fine way to raise a generation of illiterates -- people to whom the writings of Shakespeare would be as silent and meaningless as the pages of Mozart's scores are to non-musicians; people who would know of Shakespeare only what was in this or that performance, and not what was in the play that Shakespeare wrote; people who claim to know Shakespeare but who have never read him, and, in all likelihood, would have no interest in ever doing so. That is not "teaching Shakespeare's plays," Jason, and certainly not teaching people to read Shakespeare's plays; that is teaching people to watch performances of Shakespeare's plays -- and making them as passive and powerless as most people today are in relation to music.

It's a fine way to raise a generation illiterate in stagecraft and performing arts. Out of the hundreds of texts a student might read, only a few will be plays and yes, of those, they should be seen because that's how the playwright intended them to be appreciated by his audience. Otherwise why bother performing at all? Why not just hand out scripts to the audience? Why not just write a novella? How is it powerless and passive to watch a play any more than it is to read a book? I argue that it's actually less so. A reader can't interact with a book or a script while audiences can and do interact with the performers even if it's just through applause or laughs or crying or booing and hissing. Actors get great energy from enthusiastic audiences. I see nothing passive in being a member of an audience in a play. In fact, it's one of the more thrilling ways to experience the arts. The language of English is fortunate to be enshrined in prose, poetry, and play. Each has its purpose and function and we should respect that because each communicates our language to us in different ways that we, hoping to be literate, need to understand and appreciate.

To know of Shakespeare only through performance is no sad thing at all because that is what he intended. A good English teacher would (and should) collaborate with a theater teacher to perhaps teach students how to watch plays and interpret what is being said; good performances and bad performances. If you're literate in the arts then distinguishing between them isn't all that terribly difficult and I see nothing wrong with being educated in the appreciation of stagecraft and performance because it is an art form as vital to us as the printed word. I argue that any English teacher who believes Shakespeare's plays can be appreciated entirely on the printed page is robbing the student of an opportunity to experience not only the work as it was intended to be presented by Shakespeare himself, but of the richness of the theater.

We do not read the same way we hear and see. To reduce a play to merely a script is to lose the essence of the work.

There is no "divorce"! Unless the playwright happens also to be a director or an actor (as Shakespeare was, but we are talking about him in his capacity of playwright), he has ABSOLUTELY NO PART in what becomes of his writings on stage. He writes the words to be spoken, the stage directions, and so forth; beyond that, unless he happens to have a part in a production, the play is out of his hands. It is ridiculous to say that what the performers do with what he has written is his medium. It's their medium! That is why we call them performers and him a writer.

No, it's why we use the unique term, "playwright," as in, "shipwright." The playwright is an architect who relies upon the technical and artistic skills of others to fulfill a vision. The play is supposed to be out of his hands unless he chooses to direct or act as well. Even then there is no guarantee that a good playwright makes a good director or actor. If a playwright cannot tolerate such a loss of control then he should get out of stage altogether. A fine actor can read a role and perform it as the director intends. A fine director can envision a play in any number of ways, sometimes as the playwright envisions, sometimes not. That's the nature of the medium. Some performances will be good, others bad, and some productions will be acclaimed and others will be closed in one night. That's the nature of the medium. Books don't have that problem which is probably why so many people write the things and so few bother to become playwrights. Learning discernment and connoisseurship in the arts is part of becoming literate in culture and that applies to every single medium. English teachers are wonderful at teaching this when it comes to the printed words of prose and poetry, and generally miserable at it when attempting to teach plays because they frequently fail to appreciate the need of a performance to fulfill the artistic vision of the playwright. For some reason they believe that if it's on a printed page then that's all there is to it when certainly it is not, at least when it comes to plays.

 

[jason_els]

An actor can add all sorts of things, good or bad, to what the playwright has written. The writer may like them or dislike them, but they are the actor's work, not the writer's. Actors can miss things, too, or be able to make something of one detail only at the expense of neglecting another. That is one reason why one has to read the play to know what is in the play.

A good performance can convey far more to an audience member than the mere presence of words on the page. Actors bring life to the words in the way the director intends. Great actors can influence the work of the director, but ultimately the director's vision is the one we see. If a director says, "play it this way," then that's what an actor does. Reading a play to understand it is absurd as if everyone who attends each play needs to read the script to understand what's happening. Clearly that's not the case as millions of theatrical audiences would happily attest. Maybe some people will get some things, others miss important points completely, and some directors will emphasize some points over others, but that's the nature of any artistic work, books included. That's why being literate in the arts is important and why we need to encourage students to experience plays as they were intended to be experienced.

I don't understand why anyone would want to defend such a perverse position. Nobody is denying that plays are, in general, written to be performed, or that to appreciate a well-written play you have to see it performed -- at least, I am not denying any such thing. But you are denying that to appreciate a well-written play, one has to read it. To justify this bizarre denial, you make the even more bizarre claim that the playwright's medium is the performance that he does not create or control rather than the text that he does create and control.

Is it any more bizarre to say a painter's medium is a canvas or a composer's medium is an orchestra? You're confining plays to a page, imagining them to be fixed in stone, perverted by any performance over which the playwright has no control when that has never been the case and never will be. A playwright creates a play knowing full well that it's (he hopes) going to be performed. If the playwright is living, sometimes he will be consulted on how the play will be performed, sometimes not. Music composers run into the same issue. Little Mary Lou is not going to crank out Adagio in D Minor on her cello the way YoYo Ma will nor will she (presumably) have an understanding or depth of feeling for the music that he would even if she is just as technically proficient. These are the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to which performance arts are heir to and playwrights have to accept it just as any other composer or choreographer or performance artist must. Plays are not hermetic because they are collaborative in their nature.

I can understand how some people might advance a bizarre idea just for the thrill of provoking others to defend common sense, but I would not expect anything so frivolous of you, Jason.

Are you sure you're not my third form English teacher? :tongue:

I don't find it bizarre at all. I find it entirely logical and respectful toward the artist's intent. What I find bizarre is that you seem terribly worried that performance of a play somehow twists it into something incomprehensible, that only by reading it can we get value from it or that only by reading it can we comprehend the playwright's true intent when I don't think that's possible at all. All of us, whether we read the script of Henry III on a page or see it on stage, are going to make our own interpretations of what it is we are experiencing. I believe that it is truer to the intent and the work of the artist to experience the work in the way in which the artist intended. Part of that work will be done by others, part of it will be the work of the playwright himself and that is how the playwright intended it to be.

Have some faith in the skill of the people who will create the work of the playwright on the stage. A play is a collaborative work which only sees its true form when presented alive, on stage, with (we hope) brilliant actors, incisive, creative, directors and highly skilled technicians. That is the medium, not the printed page and a playwright knows that when creating the work and so writes to that purpose. As far as a playwright is concerned, the script is just for the artists in the theater.

 

[jason_els]

As an example:

We know that Lady Macbeth enters the scene while sleepwalking and that the doctor and her lady in waiting are listening to her:

LADY MACBETH: Out, damned spot! Out, I say! One–two—
why then ’tis time to do't. Hell is murky. Fie, my lord, fie!
A soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it,
when none can call our power to account? Yet who would
have thought the old man to have had so much blood in
him?

But how does she say this? Is she laughing? Is she frightened? Is she so dreamy as to be mumbling? We do not know and cannot know because plays give so little direction of emotion or intent of the moment. It is only when the entire play is read that we might understand the nature of the characters, their personalities, and their motivations. It's an act of retrospective recollection when read. In performance, this is not so. The actress here must convey via her demeanor and manner of speech what the character is thinking and why she is acting the way she is even if we don't know and can't tell while reading the script itself. This is why performance is essential. We need actors and directors to know what is going to happen in order to create the senses of emotion, time, foreshadowing, and motivation. Without these things, which are not present in the script, we're reading blindly.

Here's the scene, well performed, with all that the script is missing.

 

[cdarro]

Has anyone here attended the Shakespearean festival in Stratford, Ontario? I was there for 2 days about 12 years ago. You could tell fairly easily who were the British actors and who were North American. British actors for the most part do a better job on American accents than vice-versa. Anyone remember Kevin Costner and Christian Slater in "Prince of Thieves"? Ugh.

 

[superbot]

Oh dear!.... I think we might be able to forgive the odd dodgy American accent rather than listen to any more,dare I say, overly pretentious theorizing that the Bard seems to bring out in the 'chattering classes'...Naming no names of course!?!...

 

[B_Artful Dodger]

I say go 4 it. Anything thats going to spread some intelligent thought or inspire people to read some literature is a good thing. Shakey would surely approve :biggrin:

 

[Calboner]

Jason, your replies combine so many straw-man attacks, red herrings, and non-sequiturs that I have to conclude that I would be wasting my time trying to engage you in further disputation on this topic.

 

[D_Gunther Snotpole]

Jason, your replies combine so many straw-man attacks, red herrings, and non-sequiturs that I have to conclude that I would be wasting my time trying to engage you in further disputation on this topic.

But how many people can really get a sense of line readings and so forth from reading a play?
A director, an actor, a playwright, perhaps a few critics, and some of the more versatile literate types might ... but most people?
Calboner, I think you have too generous a sense of the average person's capacity to read a play and construct, in the imagination, a sense of what it might all mean on the stage.

 

[Calboner]

But how many people can really get a sense of line readings and so forth from reading a play?
A director, an actor, a playwright, perhaps a few critics, and some of the more versatile literate types might ... but most people?
Calboner, I think you have too generous a sense of the average person's capacity to read a play and construct, in the imagination, a sense of what it might all mean on the stage.

I have said it before, but I will say it again:

I am not denying that people benefit in their appreciation of plays by seeing them performed. Jason is denying that there is any point in reading plays.

My point is that if you can't read the play, then you don't know the play; that teaching people the plays means teaching them how to read them. That may involve their seeing the plays performed. But the point is that they learn to read the plays.

 

[Sergeant_Torpedo]

Reading a play is what actors and directors do. We go to "see" a play; in the 16th and 17th centuries the audience went to "hear" a play. Shakspearean plays were performed during the author's lifetime as far away as theatres in the Baltic ports, and performed in English. Debate is good but never let it obfuscate the performance.

 

[Drifterwood]

You mean Bush and Rumsfeld weren't playing Shakespeare?

 

[Calboner]

You mean Bush and Rumsfeld weren't playing Shakespeare?

Perhaps you were thinking of The Bush Tragedy by Jacob Weisberg, with George H. W. Bush as Henry IV and George W. Bush as Prince Hal?