As a rule, I keep my distance from live performances of a Shakespeare play because I seldom enjoy the experience and regularly find it misleading. This has not always been the case. A few versions, notably the lucid Scofield Coriolanus at Stratford in 1962, are still vivid in my brain. What has happened? Somewhere along the way, I've lost patience and lost interest in playgoing. Am I alone? I remember sitting in some theater or other in the way back when, when, glancing left and right in my row, I could not help noting that a significant cadre of my fellow spectators were not engrossed in the performance but were nodding off, and that others in my vicinity were clearly bored, drifting passively toward sweet sleep.
This is a phenomenon that I had never encountered at a baseball game where everyone is alert and engaged. Anything but silent and sometimes raucous?
So why were all these numb Shakespeare spectators sitting as still as stones?
And why was I among them, inasmuch as I too, let me confess, was bored by the performance. I was not, as I yearned to be, lost in the words or engaged by the action. While I wasn't sleeping, except possibly for a second or two here and there, I was treading mental water, so to speak. Not exactly hypnotized, but certainly not transfixed. And I was in this state of inattention even though I knew the words that the actors were saying as well or better than they knew them themselves. Eventually, in the course of time, I came to admit to myself that to attend a Shakespeare play was not for pleasure but rather to honor an eminence, to pay dues to a cultural icon, to participate in a ritual of cultural hegemony -- and that I had paid good money in order to worship at the shrine of Shakespeare and to lend my support to what has long been labelled "Shakespeare idolatry." This revelation, or apercu, or insight made me unhappy as I am not by nature given to reverence. To try to bend my will to admire on-stage oratory felt inauthentic, contrary to myself as I knew myself.
Yet I am an unabashed, unapologetic lover of Shakespeare. Not of the theater, but of the book. When I sit myself down to read one of Shakespeare's most excellent plays, the experience can be and often is utterly transcendent.
It is reading that unlocks the play; puts me in touch with true genius.There's something about the one-on-one concentration that you can give to a book in your very own hands in your very own chair that you can't give to a performance, where you're crammed into your space and have lost to your neighbor the battle for the arm rest. You're distracted by the inevitable snuffles and sneezes of your fellows and by the too-clever sets and costumes and lighting and artifice -- all of which interferes with your grasp of what is most important about poetic drama -- the words. But at home, I'm dazzled by the poetry and I am transported with aesthetic bliss (however defined). I'm moved to tears and laughter and also admiration.
He's endlessly fascinating, this Shakespeare guy, and intelligent, and a poet like none other.
It's all I need; a comfortable posture for my ancient limbs, a bit of silence, a book -- and I'm in awe.
Performances, in my opinion, erect a barrier to understanding and obscure rather than illuminate the plays. It's necessarily so, because directors and actors interpret the play. It's their job; it's what they do. Interpret. And every interpretation, no matter how skillful, is an obstacle.
A reader is less constrained and can keep his mind open. No one, no thing, to mediate between the eyes and the page.
Performances are especially hazardous when directors deliberately attempt to make a play relevant or in accord, somehow, with the zeitgeist of the decade. Clever catchpenny novelties do nothing for me. Why must plays be set anywhere but where Shakespeare intended them? Any effort to update a play, or make it "contemporary" or "feminist" or "anti-fascist" or "anti-colonial" or whatever, produces only distraction and distortion. Which is why the long history of Shakespeare on stage is a woeful history of addled misinterpretation. Nahum Tate's notorious King Lear of 1681, in which Edgar and Cordelia embrace at the end and Lear is pensioned off is ludicrous, but not more absurd than last year's Queen Lear.
Query: if I'm so disdainful of live performances, how is it that I'm so fond of Shakespeare on film.
But that's a subject for another day.