A Festival of Theses: The Sequel

It’s hard to believe, but it’s that time again. Yesterday, I found myself attending the Spring 2011 Thesis Festival at the Blackfriars Playhouse. Thirteen Mary Baldwin MLitt/MFA students were on hand to share their Shakespearean (and non-Shakespearean) discoveries, but, this time, instead of dead leaves crunching underfoot and the smell of various pumpkin-flavored beverages in the air, forsythia and daffodils were blooming and t-shirts outnumbered turtlenecks. The sense of scholarly excitement was the same, however, as students and professors and the curious public (like yours truly) gathered to hear what these graduate students had to say.

There was a glut of information at this spring’s Festival for someone of a history bent, such as myself. Before the day even began, my inner medievalist was already excited to see Shakespeare’s Chaucer, presented by Matthew Carter and featuring the illustrious authors themselves (in the forms of Kimberly Maurice and Maria Hart, admittedly). This examination of “source studies” looked at Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde as one of the inspirations for Shakespeare’s own Troilus and Cressida, while studying the different historical contexts out of which each sprung. England of Chaucer’s day was embroiled in the Hundred Years War with France and beset by plague, while Shakespeare was writing for “God fearing Englishmen who love a fight.” This, Carter theorized, caused Chaucer to focus on the romantic while Shakespeare embraced the military aspects of the story. Yet Carter pointed out that both works, frequently regarded in a strictly literary light, should also be appreciated as performance pieces, since that was the intention of their respective authors.

Another presentation with a medieval component was Maxim Overton’s The Pyrotechnique Story: Commanding Devils, Dragons, the Natural, and the Celestial, which looked at how the introduction of gunpowder to England in the late Middle Ages came to play a critical role on the early modern stage. Overton called the printing press and gunpowder the two most significant introductions to early modern England, and the two both played a role in the theatrical world. Unlike regular fire, which in earlier, medieval productions was often associated with heavenly figures, gunpowder and fireworks in an early modern show routinely symbolized devils and other evil characters. Overton even theorized that the dragon seen on the title page of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus was a firework-powered property -- the same, in fact, used for an earlier play by Robert Greene on notorious “pyromancer” Roger Bacon.

Faustus and the possible firework-spouting dragon.

At the opposite end of the historical spectrum, Katy Mulvaney, in “They Won’t be Troubling Shakespeare but They’ll Do”: Contemporary Playwrights Writing for Shakespeare’s Globe, spoke about some more modern plays which have been performed at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, specifically Peter Oswald’s The Storm and Jack Shepherd’s Holding Fire! Mulvaney looked at how these contemporary shows play with early modern staging conventions (demonstrated by volunteer actors staggering about in supposed blindness on the brightly lit stage in a send-up of universal lighting) and also how the playwrights can harness anachronistic uses of the Globe space unheard of to Shakespeare and his fellows. Yet Mulvaney drew an intriguing link to early modern performances in the form of audience interaction. Modern theatre at the Globe may revive the feel of the more rambunctious, participatory audience of Shakespeare’s day through new techniques for involving audience members directly in a show. Mulvaney echoed this concept in her own presentation by calling on volunteers from the audience and planting actors throughout the playhouse. In this way, even contemporary productions at the new Globe are retaining the spirit of the Elizabethan theatrical experience.

I also enjoyed tremendously Mediated Dramaturgy: Using Technology to Improve Different Forms of Dramaturgy, by Paul Rycik, on the potential uses of media in dramaturgy (yet more on education and the digital world – what seems to be a running theme through my blog contributions), and The Physics of Contranymy: Indefinition, Sublim(inal)ity, and Play, by Zachary Brown, which, once I finally wrapped my brain around the topic, was a fascinating study of the repercussions of differences between the written and spoken word and the possible subconscious effect on this wordplay on an audience. As before, for a more in depth look at each of the thirteen presentations, check out the ASC Education liveblogs of Session 1, Session 2, and Session 3. Also as before, I had a great time at this event and would heartily encourage anybody and everybody with a glimmer of interest in Shakespeare, Marlowe, Middleton (any Elizabethan playwright), history, literature, fireworks (literal and rhetorical), or theatre (early modern or just plain modern) to come out to one of these festivals. Let’s put it this way: you could be a Lady Gaga fan, and there would have been something entertaining for you yesterday.

Natalie A.

Happened Upon Discoveries: Other People Who“Do It With The Lights On” (Even in 1917!)

The American Shakespeare Center has been ‘doing it with the lights on’ at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia since 2001. For ten years, this small theatre on Market Street has brought the staging conditions of Shakespeare productions and his contemporaries to life in a beautiful re-creation of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Playhouse (the world’s only re-creation, in fact). As many of the preshow speeches dictate, the use of universal lighting creates a unique environment for audiences and actors in which “they can see you, you can see them and you can all see each other.” This essentially avant-garde brand of theatre is attributed to the loyalty the American Shakespeare Center has on early modern practices. The playhouses in Shakespeare’s period would have been lit by either sunlight or candlelight, neither of which could have been dimmed or altered for the purpose of the production. This knowledge allows the American Shakespeare Center to support academically their choice to keep the lights at the same level throughout each and every production. Living, studying, and working in this community has altered my conception of theatre forever. I was an English major whose only exposure to live Shakespeare performances was at Public Theatre’s Shakespeare in the Park in New York City. After eight months here now, I can’t really imagine seeing Shakespeare in the dark ever again. To be honest, I don’t know if I would enjoy theatre as much if the actors couldn’t see, talk to, and engage with me as an audience member. Theatre here is a continual conversation with the audience, and I cannot really imagine being shut out of that conversation ever again (although I still would like to see the Broadway Addams Family.)

To clarify my seeming divergence, the reason I have brought up our universal lighting practices and the American Shakespeare Center preshow is that universal lighting seemed to me as a characteristic of early modern theatre that common practice had abandoned until the American Shakespeare Center and places like it brought the conversation back into the light and the audience back into the play. Can we really believe that after proscenium arches and footlights the audiences was always in the dark? Can we as theatre audiences accept that the conversation just stopped until 2001 in Staunton, Virginia? Or rather, in 1988 when Dr. Ralph Alan Cohen and Jim Warren founded Shenandoah Shakespeare Express (the theatre company that would eventually become the American Shakespeare Center)? I am sure lights-on productions happened throughout those few hundred years of interim. This assurance turned into a hypothesis, and I started reading about the historical evolution of theatre and theatre audiences. I picked up a book of that same title, Theatre Audiences by Susan Bennett, and found one section that was of particular interest to me. In the section entitled “Historical Approaches to Theatre” she breaks down the evolution of theatre in terms of audience throughout history:

“A history of audiences in the theatre demonstrates, of course, a changing status. Medieval and sixteenth century audiences did not enjoy the power of the Greek audiences, but nevertheless still functioned in an active role. There was flexibility in the relationship between the stage and audience worlds which afforded, in different ways, the participation of those audiences as actors in the drama. With the establishment of private theatres in the seventeenth century, however, there is a move towards separation of fictional stage world and audience, and with the beginnings of passivity and more elitist audience came codes and conventions of behavior. In terms of English theater, audiences became increasingly passive and increasingly bourgeois. With the exception of the first forty years of the nineteenth century-when the working-class audience created noisy disturbances and occasional riots in the pits- this is a steady progression to a peak in the second half of the nineteenth century. After 1850, with the pits replaced by stalls, theatre design ensured the more sedate behavior of audiences, and the footlights first installed in the seventeenth century private playhouses had become a literal barrier, which separated the audience and the stage. As Michael Booth puts it, ‘After 1850 behavior improved, and complaints were eventually made, not of uproar in the pit and gallery, but of stolid indifference in the stalls.’ In the last hundred years, none the less, there have been many challenges and disruptions of the codes and conventions which demand passivity.”

After reading this breakdown, I realized that the evolution of theatre over the past hundred years was designed to make everyone behave and follow the rules of social conduct. With the lights off, your options are limited. Your choices are either to pay attention to what’s in the light, to make out with your date, or to fall asleep. Limiting the choices of the audience removed the conversational element the Blackfriars has completely from the plays. Susan Bennett goes on to mention the consequence of proscenium theatre: passive audiences. I thought of theatre productions where passivity in the audience was actively combated against. In the Blackfriars Playhouse, actors talk directly to audience members. They present questioning lines as questions and wait for responses. The actors even physically interact with audience members. This practice destroys the comfort zone that would traditionally foster a passive audience. I can recall numerous productions where this frees audience members, and pulls them further into the world of the play. I can also recall multiple instances where audience members are unsure of how to act. The American Shakespeare Center breaks three hundred years of theatre behavior rules, and they expect their audiences to forget the rules they were raised in and to see an early modern play without concerns for the code of etiquette. Audience members are invited to sit on stage, to answer the actors, and to look wherever they please. They can even get up and get a drink at the bar whenever they would like to. The American Shakespeare Center actors create the world of the play for the audience and then invite them to live in it fully instead of just observing a show.

As I continued reading Susan Bennett’s Theatre Audiences I came across the phenomenon in the twentieth century. Productions started dissolve the convention of the fourth wall and to shock audiences out of the stasis of passive observation. Throughout the fascinating list of avant-garde early twentieth century production style, I came across one that hit close to home. Susan Bennett explains the theatre style of Meyerhold’s production of Lermentov’s Masquerade, a production in Russia in 1917 that kept the lights on in the theatre throughout the production. I shared this exciting bit of information with my boyfriend, a former theatre professor and current Masters Student from New York who perked up at the mention of Meyerhold. I will fully admit I did not know who this man was. I was simply excited that people other than the American Shakespeare Center and early modern England had “done it with the lights on.” I proceeded to Google, as any good scholar would. I found that Meyerhold had worked in Russia and eventually took over for Constantin Stanislavski as director his theatre. For those of you who did not go to acting school, as I did not, Stanislavski is a big name in the acting world. He essentially invented the method of acting that directly opposed the Western method acting movement of the time:

Meyerhold's acting technique had fundamental principles at odds with the American method actor's conception. Where method acting melded the character with the actor's own personal memories to create the character’s internal motivation, Meyerhold connected psychological and physiological processes and focused on learning gestures and movements as a way of expressing emotion outwardly. Following Stanislavski's lead, he argued that the emotional state of an actor was inextricably linked to his physical state (and vice versa), and that one could call up emotions in performance by practicing and assuming poses, gestures, and movements. He developed a number of body expressions that his actors would use to portray specific emotions and characters. (Although Stanislavski inspired method acting, he was also at odds with it, because like Meyerhold, his approach was psychophysical).

From my reading and various discussions with actors I have gleaned that Stanislavski was instrumental in the evolution of acting as it exists today. Meyerhold was essentially his legacy in the world of Russian theatre and is now the link between their revolutionary production style and American Shakespeare Center’s choices to “do it with the lights on.” According to The Russian Theatre Under the Revolution by Oliver M. Sayler written in 1920, Meyerhold made many of the same choices in production as the American Shakespeare Center makes now. “In performance, it was sheer joy,--the joy of the theatre as theatre. You face Meyerhold's stage with no illusion that it is not a stage. Of course it is a stage! Why pretend it isn't? There it is, under the full lights of the auditorium, curtain removed and apron extended twenty feet beyond the proscenium arch. It's a play you shall see, a play, you who love the theatre for its own sake! No cross-section of life here, no attempt to copy life! No illusion here, to be shattered by the slightest mishap or by a prosaic streak in the spectator's make-up. It's a play you shall see, and you'll know it all the time, for you'll play, too, whether you realize it or not. The audience is always an essential factor in the production of drama.”

I was excited to make this discovery and to share it with all of you. I hope you find it as interesting as I did. I think that it is always nice to realize your world is far larger and more influenced than you originally thought. While the American Shakespeare Center is not the first modern theatre to keep the lights on the audience and to invite everyone into the world of the play, the ASC is in good company.

(K.A. Lenz)

Actor-Scholar Council 3/4/11

Last Friday’s council focused on 3 Henry VI, which opened last week. Actors in attendance included Tyler, Ben, Sarah, Greg, and Alli. The ASC is working its way through Shakespeare’s two tetrologies of history plays, doing a play from the War of the Roses each Renaissance season and play from the Henriad each fall season. Dr. Menzer, who led the council in Dr. Ralph’s absence, said that it has become fashionable among theatre companies to do the whole set of history plays in one season or festival. The Royal Shakespeare Company has done this twice in the past decade. I’m glad the ASC isn’t doing that, because I don’t think I could sit through eight two and a half hour plays.

The only character who appears in all four plays of this tetrology (the three parts of Henry VI and then Richard III) is Margaret, played by Sarah Fallon. Sarah feels the Margaret in Richard III (which the ASC will perform in the 2012 Renaissance season) is hard to understand unless a person has seen the Henry VI plays. Carrying the character through the tetrology proves difficult, partly because a year separates the staging of each play. Also, a lot of Margaret’s story in the first two parts revolves around Suffolk, who is killed at the end of Part 2. Instead of focusing on him, Margaret must now focus on her son Ned.

Greg, who previously played Suffolk, now plays the titular character. King Henry, he thinks, differs in this play from in the others. He sees the king as someone who never wanted for power or kingship and must try in vain to explain to those around him, who seek just that, that other things have greater import, such as stopping all the killing. Greg calls Henry a “good king, in the wrong play.”

Ben, who plays Richard Duke of Gloucester (later to be Richard III), also played the former duke of Gloucester, Humphrey, in parts 1 and 2. This correlation gives him a lot to draw on, especially in the contrast between the two. Humphrey always tried to do right (and gets killed for it—which explains why Richard at first thinks Gloucester too ominous a dukedom to accept), while Richard does only wrong. Ben argues that Richard only becomes so bloodthirsty after Clifford brutally kills his father and little brother. Before that, he focused on getting the crown for his father, York. With them dead, he feels free to be vicious. Viewers of last year’s Part 2 will remember that the seeds of viciousness were visible when Richard impaled Somerset on his sword and hoisted him over his head.

One part of rehearsing that makes history plays unique among the ASC show: they have tech rehearsals. All the fighting, sound cues, and stage directions make them more complicated. Henry VI Part 3 has over 70 sound cues, all of which are done live by actors. They have almost no down time backstage and must work hard to bring it all together. This show even included blood, mostly in the scene of Clifford’s death. The actor playing Clifford really wanted the blood, and the scene comes just before intermission, which gives the stage managers a chance to clean up the blood. The actors would have loved more gore, but technical, costume, and time constraints prevented it. Time constraints also prevented them from having a big celebration at the end of the play, when Edward gets crowned and everyone thinks the War of the Roses ends. While this leaves the ending more open to the violence of Richard III, the actors wish they could have ended with a jig.

The actors talked about the importance of heart and emoting in making the play work. By emoting, they keep from going into what Dr. Menzer calls “historical pronouncements,” or from making a blatantly allegorical scene seem overbearing. The actors need to find out how the action relates to their characters personally, and the audience will feel their emotion. The audience may not follow all the complicated family ties, but they understand the concepts, like family or civil war. If each actor knows how he or she feels and has a firm internal grasp on the character’s history and family, that will be enough.

Today’s podcast also featured a discussion of comedy in Henry VI Part 3, some hilarious banter from Dr. Menzer, and Greg’s fascinating extended conceit about . . . toast? So be sure to listen to the council’s podcast, available soon on the website.

Forgotten Folios and Private Portraits

As I was watching Antiques Roadshow the other night (yes, that is correct, I watch Antiques Roadshow), much to my surprise, amongst the Federalist furniture and Tiffany lamps, there unexpectedly appeared a partial first folio of Shakespeare’s plays. True, this was not the entire folio as it was first published by Shakespeare’s colleagues Heminges and Condell in 1623, of which some 219 are known to still exist of the original printing of approximately 750. Instead, this one had been re-bound sometime in the nineteenth century and contained only the complete first and third parts of Henry VI (the latter of which you may, coincidentally, see currently on the Blackfriars stage). Still, these two plays along, along with the remaining individual pages from several other plays, were valued at $40,000 to $50,000. ‘Swounds! See for yourself.

Now, of course, all first folios were at one point “privately owned.” Yet to see an original printing of Shakespeare’s work, partial or otherwise, appear from the dusty depths of someone’s attic was a shock. The idea of artifacts directly relating to the celebrated Shakespeare not all being appropriately stowed in various libraries or museums was one I, at least, had never before considered. A quick internet search of various auction houses and newspaper articles reveals, however, that pieces of Shakespeare are still out there to be had – if, that is, you have a cool couple million or so to spare. And, additionally, new items are coming to light fairly regularly, each one often changing or challenging the contemporary view of that elusive figure, William Shakespeare.

An interesting study of how the remaining first folios have changed hands and increased in value over time may be seen by following the path of those belonging to one Dr. Rosenbach. Rosenbach, an American antique book collector, purchased two in 1922, one for £8,600, the highest amount for a first folio ever paid up to that time. Previously, the same folio had sold in 1864 to a British baroness for £716. Rosenbach later sold his entire collection, which by then totaled 73 folios and quartos, to a Swiss banker for over one million dollars, as this Time article from 1952, entitled “Goodbye, Shakespeare,” explains. On an interesting side note: in the past, Rosenbach had purchased yet another first folio for Harry Widener, an American businessman who then inconveniently perished in the Titanic disaster. Widener’s private collection was subsequently donated to Harvard, where it, folio included, became available to the public. You may still see it there today.

New York Times headline from 1922

Almost sixty years later, folios are still floating around out there, continuing to grow in value. In 2006, a first folio sold at Sotheby’s in London for £2.8 million. As recently as December 2010, another one went up for auction, again at Sotheby’s. This copy sold for £1.5 million. Both sold to private collectors.

A Sotheby's employee handles a copy of Shakespeare's complete first folio

One form of Shakespearean material culture which continues to shake up the scholarly world whenever it emerges from private ownership is portraiture. The current exhibition at The Morgan Library and Museum in New York City, entitled “The Changing Face of William Shakespeare,” focuses on this very subject. The exhibit includes a portrait which, in 2009, was revealed to the world as a candidate for the only likeness for which Shakespeare may have sat in his lifetime. Believed to have been painted in 1610, when Shakespeare was 46, the image had hung for centuries in a house in Ireland belonging to the Cobbe family, and it wasn’t until its owner happened to spy a similar work at the National Portrait Gallery in Britain that a connection was made. Naturally, much controversy has arisen over the authenticity of the portrait. The subject’s elaborate dress and youthful appearance led many scholars to believe it was not Shakespeare but a gentleman by the name of Sir Thomas Overbury. The two sides of the argument are laid out in these two articles:

The New York Times VS. The London Times

The Cobbe portrait – the true face of Shakespeare?

So, is this dashing figure indeed Shakespeare? What new portraits might come to light down the road? Are there yet more unknown folios waiting to be discovered, tucked away in crowded bookshelves or hidden in the bottoms of boxes? Next to Shakespeare’s long lost, super secret diary? Well, maybe that’s wishful thinking. Then again, maybe I need to go home and clean out my basement…

Natalie A.

PS. For a more in-depth exploration of the first folio and its history, the Folger Shakespeare Library, in Washington, DC (which also owns about a third of those still in existence), provides an interactive online copy for your perusing pleasure.