Shakespeare is read in school more than he is watched and performed (in the average high school education anyway; obviously in a theatre program there is more performance of it). Through my limited experiences with others that have been put through similar educational structures it is a nearly useless way to work, only nearly because it usually makes a difference seeing Shakespeare performed after having read it. When I was in Grade Eleven, my drama teacher brought in some members of a Stratford (Ontario) acting company to talk about performing Shakespeare. The type of acting they described was one that almost matched the way actors would perform in silent movies. There is a base assumption that the audience does not understand the words and depends on nearly over-the-top melodrama to bring clarity to the plot. This is tragic because the text is so witty and full of the things that truly make the work brilliant but lacks the action that makes the performance so thrilling. It’s a vicious cycle as the text lacks the action and the action can lack the wit. The only educational model I have experienced that teaches Shakespeare effectively is the process of performing a play. Not the easy way, which is asking the English class to read it aloud and improvise actions throughout, but to actually go through the process of pulling together the entirety of a production.
I performed onstage and worked backstage frequently between 2008 and 2013. I saw and participated in shows of incredibly varying qualities. I played Hamlet, Puck, Romeo, Egeon and several nobodies following more important characters about. The intimacy by which I came to know my roles was dependent on my understanding of the language I was reading. Understanding the language I was reading involved an active reading process that is in turn entirely dependent on the cliché “acting is reacting.” It is easier to understand a scene if you have acted it out as best as possible having already read it and knowing what is to come from the other characters. That performance is not one that needs to happen publically. If you have never tried enacting a whole scene by yourself it comes highly recommended by me.
On paper it was also easy to accept Shakespeare as a poet. It’s evident in the way he wrote, often having used poetic forms and techniques like rhyming or sonnets to add fluidity to the dialogue. Obviously his constantly discussed and frequently misunderstood iambic pentameter is categorized there as well. Not so much punctuation though. That has been added retrospectively and can be found changed in various editions and printings of his work. This poetic writing maintains a good sound when said aloud but really only sounds like wonderful speech. The careful organization of the words can only be seen on the page itself. It can be induced that a monologue written without the division into lines of poetry is written in iambic pentameter, but the division makes it clear that it was carefully coordinated.
So when I say that Shakespeare is written to be performed I mean that it is written to be understood not only by the watching (though it could be; he wrote for both royalty and the public, after all) and not only by the reading (though it could be, because poetry can be appreciated that way), it is about a mediation between the two. The production company understands Shakespeare better than all because the words have been re-written into their mind.
All this reminds me of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s essay The Screenplay as “a Structure that wants to be Another Structure.” He describes the screenplay under the specific context of its autonomy as a written work, or the moment it becomes that. What he quickly emphasizes is that it cannot be viewed without the acknowledgment of the potential of a cinematic work following it. This is important, he claims, because without that potential the reading methodology is one that takes on conventions of the screenplay but is ultimately just another literary work, alongside the potential, it remains a screenplay. This translates very easily to several different languages. It translates to Shakespeare’s scripts, and really, all others that are written for performance. It translates to musical notation; a series of dots, lines, fanciful squiggles that are all intended to stand in for melodic noise. There is the artist’s sketchbook and the printmaker’s matrix, both on their way to becoming the image that will perform as the artwork. Of course there is also lyrics. The images of musical notation and sketches both can be categorized in a space where they really aren’t confused with another thing. They are contextualized within themselves and even though they can be looked at as works of interest, their place in relation to the final work is usually obvious. Lyrics can be mistaken for poetry. There are lyrics that give clues to what they are with notes like “chorus” or “repeat chorus” scattered as guides for those following along but the format without any notes becomes difficult to distinguish from poetry. What really changes in all of this is the reading methodology and interpretation. When a student is handed Shakespeare and told to read it without the potential for it to exist as a performance, it is read not as a script or stage directions, but as a novel that lacks just about everything that is not dialogue. The consequence of this is a change in genre, or interpreted form; if it is not read as a performance it is not a performance but performs a whole other categorization of writing. Another categorization of writing by its reading leads inevitably to another kind of interpretation. A director running a production with actors and a stage in mind will read a script very differently than a high school student with a grade in mind.
I chose Shakespeare for a specific reason that is not the usual “universal message” that is emphasized and used an excuse to avoid moving on to other more interesting and relatable writers in school. Shakespeare is important as an example here because his scripts for the stage can be treated, without changing a single word, as a screenplay. A novel adaptation requires the act of adapting, which is re-writing, which is overtly re-iterating; it’s something new, but a script does not require that. Duchamp’s art coefficient is larger than he presupposed, which initially was that the audience is important enough within a work of art that they determine its meaning and that the artist must accept that. It is larger because the audience* also determines the format by which they are reading. It’s fairly common to hear throughout classes at Emily Carr, a student saying they will view a painting from a “sculptural perspective” or instead of sculptural one, as a print, or as a drawing, as a moment in history, as a performance, as a sociological study (that would never get approved by a research ethics board) or any other “standpoint” (from which to stand and point). Going back to performance this leaves three pieces of interpretation: the work, which attempts to control the genre of the text; the reader-performer, which creates a performance from the text; an audience-performer who watches the reader perform the text. The latter two can sometime be one and the same. I emphasize the text for two reasons: because of Roland Barthes, who separates work and text: work being the way text may appear. Secondly, because at all points there are two subjects co-existing via mediation. Aaron Peck, in the exhibition catalogue North and West, writes about Jeff Wall’s use of the city of Vancouver as a character that makes recognizable appearances throughout his work but never really as an absolute Vancouver, and mentions it all in reference Robert Bresson describing an actor as two people at once: the person he is playing and themself. In the case of the three roles I have outlined in performance there is always (at the minimum) a dual viewing of a work of text in play.
This is all where metaphor lives, in the self-contained cycles of meaning and interpretation and meaning again. Metaphor, however beautiful, dull or horrifying, is not momentum: momentum is the place of action and movement towards something entirely new.
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*Perhaps it’s important to note, because I often forget, that audience connotes a large group, when it could as easily be a single person.
the gift and the grain 