In the jargon of our time, the word “relevant” has taken on a polemical connotation. In the cultural hagglings between those who idolize the present and themselves in it and those whose egos are coerced by tradition into modesty, relevance is almost always the line on which the battle is fixed. The relevantists indeed believe that art is long, life short, and accommodation between the two often not worth the trouble unless some vivid parallel or analogy can be struck between their own notion of the contemporary world and the art that preceded it. This doctrine may at first seem excessively self-centered, but it is really in principle harmless. If the mind expounding it is generous, then, in spite of itself, very little of past thought and passion will be alien to it. It is only when one hears of Dante’s failing to meet the standards set by post-pubescent identity crises or of Plato’s induction into the Third-World movement, that the relevantist doctrine seems absurdly narrow.
Shakespeare, as one of the first principles of our culture, is, and has always been, a relevantist’s target. While he has hardly ever been accused of having a diminished significance for the ages that succeeded him, his fate has always been, nonetheless, tied to fashion. In a lifetime of theater-going, one can see his works done in manners which will include The Tempest as a study in the effects of imperialism, Romeo and Juliet as a mirror for race relations and the generation gap, Hamlet played by a woman in a production designed to point out the decadence of the class system, and, several times at least, a Julius Caesar that will hint broadly at contemporary political analogues. Also, though this follows less from the philosophy of relevance than from theatrical expediency, it is safe to say that no matter how many times one sees a particular play by Shakespeare, one will never hear the same text twice. To be sure, this has more than a little to do with the vagaries of Elizabethan transcription, but it is equally true that emendations are often made by directors confounded by a sub-plot or seduced by an aesthetic that disallows some part of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy or diction.
Only a Bard fanatic would argue that no liberties should be taken with any of our first poet’s plays. However, Shakespeare-tampering is a dangerous enterprise, and one should be aware that, like Coleridge, who could not believe Shakespeare capable of writing something so imagistically rude as the Porter’s scene in Macbeth, one risks exposing the limits of one’s age rather than the limits of Shakespeare’s genius through excessive editing or tendentiously timely interpretations of his plays.
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Joseph Papp, who started the Shakespeare Festival in Central Park and who has since gone on to found the Public Theater and the Mobile Theater in a laudable effort to bring live drama to a larger audience than ordinary commercial channels can reach, is a loving relevantist where Shakespeare is concerned. On the one hand, he is not afraid to gut the text completely, as he did a few years ago with Hamlet, and in the name of contemporaneity to refurbish plots and poetry with items he believes will stir the imagination of the public he wishes to reach. But he does this, as he has said on many occasions, not because time has dulled the poet’s vitality, but because, to him, Shakespeare is the most contemporary and relevant of all past dramatists, and therefore can easily accommodate modern dress, manners, and attitudes. A nice diplomatic piece of propitiation, perhaps, but I honestly believe from what I’ve seen of Mr. Papp’s work that he believes Shakespeare to be an artist of such universality that nothing, from the most phlegmatic performance to the most perversely antic interpretation, can fatally injure him. Apart from the idolatry in this notion, there is something seriously wrong with its logic, for if Shakespeare is a dramatist of such contemporary spirit, then what need is there for all the outward adjustments? Why add to perfection?
But then logic has never been much esteemed in the theater, and what Mr. Papp probably means when he says Shakespeare is contemporary is something like the following: Shakespeare is unquestionably a great artist and the emotions he depicts are common to us all; however, in order to make it evident to a random audience of today that it and Shakespeare share common ground, it is necessary that the audience not be discomforted by too much linguistic complexity or too little theatrical activity.
And if the above argument is not readily accepted, then, as all defenders of a modernized Shakespeare do, Mr. Papp, I’m certain, would remind us that Shakespeare’s own company, when putting on his plays, showed something less than a reverence for historical accuracy. Didn’t Roman emperors and pre-Norman kings walk about the boards dressed anachronistically in doublets, jerkins, and compintanks? One might say that the tradition of modernized Shakespeare began with the updating Shakespeare himself did.
The argument, of course, can never be resolved. All one can say is that the burden of proof must lie with those who would interpret Shakespeare to their advantage. W. H. Auden once counted it a misfortune that, because of Shakespeare’s position in our literature, we encounter him first either in the study or the schoolroom, and therefore we are not guileless spectators when we first see him acted on the stage. On the other hand, given the incomprehensibility of so many Shakespeare productions, it might be an equal misfortune to come to them unattended by any solitary preparation. In the end, there will always be two Shakespeares: the leisurely one of the reading room, where each thought and image can be mused upon and where all partakes of the wonder of pure imagination, and the theatrical one, where for the incarnation of imagined deeds and characters one sometimes must pay the price of seeing imagination made all too finite. These two Shakespeares are never coextensive, but one hopes as one goes forth each time to the theater that they will prove complementary.
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About Two Gentlemen of Verona, a production which the program notes tell us Mr. Papp “joyfully” presents, it is nice to say that, despite all the reservations I have about the way he has offered us Shakespeare in the past, this time he seems to have hit upon a happy compromise between his mission to involve his audience and his desire to edify it. By removing at least three-quarters of the text, adding music by Gait MacDermot, the composer of Hair, allowing the vernacular of the multi-national and multi-racial cast to slip in and out of the dialogue, and announcing flatly that this production is “based” on a play by William Shakespeare, Papp puts himself beyond criticism in terms of strict Shakespearean theater and is free to be as relevant as he wants. The result may not be an unqualified success, but it is a wonderfully spirited presentation that, for all its absurdities, catches at times the essence of Shakespeare’s rougher comic moments. The acting, with one notable exception, is clumsy and obvious, the music is a commonplace pastiche of pop styles, and Mel Shapiro’s direction proves that he hasn’t yet learned the difference between a good comic gimmick and one that, although it elicits a giggle or two, isn’t worth all the trouble it demands—I am thinking of the bicycle Valentine rides that is festooned with baroque gold-leaf and the absurd voice Thurio employs throughout the play. And yet, in the end, one cannot help but share in Papp’s joy over this mixture of modern manners and 16th-century comedy. There is something affecting about seeing love’s excesses subjected to both Renaissance and rock sportiveness, and there is extra pleasure in the notion that we are still close enough to these passions to make fun of them on our own terms.
I should point out here that the fact that Proteus and Julia are played by Puerto Rican actors, and that Valentine and Silvia have black representatives on stage, is used to good comic advantage, with the former often punctuating their more involved speeches with some Latin pungency and the latter bringing their passions down to earth via an occasional warm street idiom or two. However, Silvia’s being black did produce some oddities, as when Proteus praises her beauty by saying: “And Silvia—witness heaven that made her fair!—Shows Julia but a swarthy Ethiope”; or when Valentine anticipates his creator by quoting a sonnet he had not yet written and, brooding over his love for Silvia, speaks, “My love is as a fever, longing still/For that which longer nurseth the disease;/Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill./ The uncertain sickly appetite to please.” Although Valentine goes on for several more lines he does not finish the sonnet, but those who know it do, and the last couplet—“For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,/ Who art as black as hell, as dark as night”—creates an odd image to be floating in an audience’s mind while watching a comedy with a black heroine.
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A hodgepodge? Certainly. Simpleminded? That too. But Two Gentlemen of Verona succeeds in bringing out laughter, sometimes in ways that Shakespeare intended, sometimes at the difficulties his and our worlds have in coming to a theatrical understanding, and sometimes at those of us who think that Shakespeare has been left to our safekeeping and that without continuous vigilance the vulgar will lay hold of him and change him into a likeness of themselves.
Besides the laughter, Two Gentlemen of Verona has the exception to my general feeling about the acting to recommend it. Raul Julia in the role of Proteus gives the only performance in the play that easily bridges both worlds depicted in it. He is both cool and outlandish, creating his comedy with expansive ease and understatement, making Proteus an intelligent fool and a lovable traitor. Moreover, he was the only actor on stage who seemed to catch and enjoy the wit in those lines of Shakespeare the adaptor allowed to remain, and thus was able to preserve, within a riot of low comic styles, a moment or two of elegant humor.
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Far removed from relevance of any sort is Roman Polanski’s film version of Macbeth. I had intended to spend most of my allotted space discussing this film, but that was until I saw it. If one is interested in seeing several studies of Scottish mists, a dozen panoramas of moors and mountains, a castle or two, and every form of butchery of which the sword, mace, crossbow, and knife are capable, then one will find this a bountiful presentation. If, on the other hand, one has some curiosity about the play that occasioned all this artful photography, one had best stay at home. For somehow the play has vanished from Polanski’s and Kenneth Tynan’s version of Macbeth, and by vanished I don’t mean that a successful transition has been made from the fixed limits of the theater to the larger boundaries of film. Nor do I mean that Polanski and Tynan have been overzealous in trimming the text. It is not so much what was done that is at fault as what was left undone. Certainly Polanski might have taken time out from working on his sanguinary tableaux to try to coax something like a performance from his principal actors, something that aspired to more than a clear and dutiful reading of their lines. Of course, since this was a film, I suppose everyone was being especially careful to guard against any theatrical flamboyance creeping into the frames and destroying their carefully researched realism. However, by having Lord and Lady Macbeth scurrying around endless castle corridors, their minds buzzing with voice-over monologues broken only by an occasional exchange of conspiratorial whispers, our film-makers have given up the concise articulations of tragedy and substituted for them little more than long, disjointed whinings.
Also, though I am no votary of the étonne-moi aesthetic, I do expect to be surprised by something in a new production of Shakespeare. It is indeed seldom that one is not astonished, pleasantly or otherwise, by the interpretation of a scene or an actor’s way of coloring a line when one of Shakespeare’s major works is done, and it is this astonishment that keeps us coming back again and again to learn from the theater. In this film, however, with the exception of a nice twist to Banquo’s murder scene, and a dubiously fatalistic reading of Lady Macbeth’s lines, “We fail?/But screw your courage to the sticking-place./And we’ll not fail,” which seems inconsistent with her feverish, unrealistic visions of future glory, there is nothing that the actor or director gives one that the most literal-minded student of the play, buttressed by a budget of several million dollars, could not devise.
Several million dollars! It is appalling to think of so much being spent to produce such a stale version of Macbeth’s undoing. I think how long such a sum could keep Mr. Papp and his relevance in good spirits, how many more Two Gentlemen of Veronas he could give us. I think of this not without mixed feelings, of course, but at least Papp has never been able to obliterate Shakespeare completely. Perhaps it takes millions of dollars to do this, so that, in the end, it is better to constrain Shakespeare productions with small budgets in order to insure that there will at least be the virtue of modesty in their failures.
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