Instead of silly disputes over his identity, we should be spending Tuesday's anniversary considering his work
The plays are the thing ... Jonathan Slinger as Hamlet, with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford this spring. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Tuesday is Shakespeare's birthday, and there's no shortage of Bard news in the UK media.
James McElvoy's Macbeth, a hot ticket, is playing in London. Adrian Lester's Othello is about to open at the National Theatre. There are any number of Hamlets in the pipeline. And two academics – the very distinguished Professor Stanley Wells and Dr Paul Edmondson – have decided (unwisely, in my view) to take on the so-called anti-Stratfordians in a volume entitled Shakespeare Beyond Doubt.
The conspiracy theories surrounding the "authorship question" are so bonkers, and the people questioning Shakespeare are – to put it politely – so eccentric, it beats me why Wells and Edmundson felt the need to engage with this matter. Professional exasperation no doubt. It's understandable, but I wish they had not given this question serious attention.
Just because Hollywood made a dreadful, and dreadfully stupid, film (Anonymous), and a West Coast campus (Concordia, in Portland, Oregon) together with an English university (Brunel) have decided to offer coursework in the authorship question, does not, in my view, reqire a considered response from good scholars. As Gore Vidal said in another context: you can handle shit with a kid glove. It still remains shit, but the glove doesn't get any glove-ier.
It's a relief to turn from this nonsense to the real world of Shakespeare production described and analysed by a director who has dedicated his life to the theatre, who knows the work intimately, and whose Shakespeare productions have now acquired the status of holy writ.
I'm talking about Peter Brook, who has just published an exquisite little volume of reflections on Shakespeare, The Quality of Mercy.
Brook is now in his 80s. This is a collection of picked-up pieces, from the last two decades of his work. He asks "Who wrote Shakespeare ?" And then answers himself by exploring the experience of putting on the great plays – King Lear, The Tempest, Measure for Measure – from the inside out, in a series of enthralling commentaries. He also elevates the debate to a higher level when he writes, "the (Shakespeare) question is out of date. Whatever the label, it is the quality of the living experience that concerns us today. Nothing else. For this, we have to recognise the millions of forms that tumbled out of this treasure chest called Shakespeare."
This short, modest and brilliant book does more than many more grandiose tomes to renew the reader's fascination with the plays, and the theatre-goer's wonder at the extraordinary and diverse sensations locked up inside the First Folio. It should be required reading at all universities and drama clubs.
James McElvoy's Macbeth, a hot ticket, is playing in London. Adrian Lester's Othello is about to open at the National Theatre. There are any number of Hamlets in the pipeline. And two academics – the very distinguished Professor Stanley Wells and Dr Paul Edmondson – have decided (unwisely, in my view) to take on the so-called anti-Stratfordians in a volume entitled Shakespeare Beyond Doubt.
The conspiracy theories surrounding the "authorship question" are so bonkers, and the people questioning Shakespeare are – to put it politely – so eccentric, it beats me why Wells and Edmundson felt the need to engage with this matter. Professional exasperation no doubt. It's understandable, but I wish they had not given this question serious attention.
Just because Hollywood made a dreadful, and dreadfully stupid, film (Anonymous), and a West Coast campus (Concordia, in Portland, Oregon) together with an English university (Brunel) have decided to offer coursework in the authorship question, does not, in my view, reqire a considered response from good scholars. As Gore Vidal said in another context: you can handle shit with a kid glove. It still remains shit, but the glove doesn't get any glove-ier.
It's a relief to turn from this nonsense to the real world of Shakespeare production described and analysed by a director who has dedicated his life to the theatre, who knows the work intimately, and whose Shakespeare productions have now acquired the status of holy writ.
I'm talking about Peter Brook, who has just published an exquisite little volume of reflections on Shakespeare, The Quality of Mercy.
Brook is now in his 80s. This is a collection of picked-up pieces, from the last two decades of his work. He asks "Who wrote Shakespeare ?" And then answers himself by exploring the experience of putting on the great plays – King Lear, The Tempest, Measure for Measure – from the inside out, in a series of enthralling commentaries. He also elevates the debate to a higher level when he writes, "the (Shakespeare) question is out of date. Whatever the label, it is the quality of the living experience that concerns us today. Nothing else. For this, we have to recognise the millions of forms that tumbled out of this treasure chest called Shakespeare."
This short, modest and brilliant book does more than many more grandiose tomes to renew the reader's fascination with the plays, and the theatre-goer's wonder at the extraordinary and diverse sensations locked up inside the First Folio. It should be required reading at all universities and drama clubs.
No comments:
Post a Comment