order that these bodies
High on a stage be placed to the view,
And let me speak to th’yet unknowing world,
How these things came about.
In the First Quarto he says:
Content your selves, I’ll show to all, the ground,
The first beginning of this Tragedy:
Let there a scaffold be reared up in the market place,
And let the State of the world be there.
The first references a theatre in a room, the second a stage more improvised and temporary. This act, setting up a stage in the market place, is a description of how touring companies operated – the booth-stage mode – which we had adapted for our small-scale touring.
According with our knowledge of how touring plays were cut, there is an emphasis on story and on action in the First Quarto. There is a cruder, bolder energy. Claudius is more of a villain, less of a politician. He and others are drawn in primary colours; swathes of philosophical musing are excised; complex plot junctures barged through. There are melodramatic flourishes. At the end of Claudius’s prayer for redemption in versions two and three, he says: ‘My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: / Words without thoughts never to heaven go.’ In the Bad Quarto, he appends the line ‘No king on earth is safe if God’s his foe’, which we added, thus turning a couplet naughtily into a triplet. It’s easy to imagine the last line being intoned with a fierce glare to awe the groundlings in the market place.
Many are dismissive of this sort of writing. It has to be said that there is some outright rubbish in this text. Where Hamlet’s most famous line runs, in the other texts, ‘To be, or not to be: that is the question’, in the First Quarto it fairly bathetically concludes: ‘To be or not to be: ay, there’s the point’. Some people have tried to justify the directness of even this line, which is taking revisionism too far. It’s just bad, too casual to support its appropriate weight of feeling. But there are glories in the First Quarto which contradict the theory that Shakespeare had nothing to do with it. At the end of the ‘Speak the speech. . .’ instruction to the Players, there is a passage to the comedians that contains some of Shakespeare’s finest writing about comedy and about acting:
HAMLET Let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them. And then you have some again, that keeps one suit of jests, as a man is known by one suit of apparel, and, gentlemen, quotes his jests down in their tables, before they come to the play, as thus, ‘Cannot you stay till I eat my porridge?’ and, ‘You owe me a quarters wages’, and ‘Your beer is sour’, and blabbering with his lips, and thus – when God knows, the warm Clown cannot make a jest unless by chance, as the blind man catches a hare: Masters, tell him of it. . .
This is a prescription against catchphrase comedy. The ‘suit of jests’ are comedians’ stock gags, as senseless and as imperishable as those of the old radio comics, done with a set intonation and probably a facial contortion to boot. For centuries, these have tickled the audience within an inch of their lives, regardless of context or character, and driven authors to distraction. It’s not hard to imagine Shakespeare’s teeth-grinding rage when the Chekhovian delicacy of Twelfth Night is interrupted by a cry of ‘Cannot you stay till I eat my porridge?’ Or if the realpolitik tensions of Julius Caesar are broken by the clown camply intoning ‘Your beer is sour’.
Hamlet tells them to avoid such nonsense, to stay in the play itself and stay alive to the moment, and then he delivers his zinger: ‘the warm clown cannot make a jest unless by chance, as the blind man catches a hare’. This is an apt description of the greatest comedians at work, their ceaseless quest to be in the zone, the hot place of creativity. Or of an actor like Mark Rylance. Two of Mark’s great credos are ‘stay in the room and stay in the moment’, alive to the possibilities of any creative interaction with the other people in the room – the audience. ‘As a blind man catches a hare’ is a peerless description of the actor’s or any artist’s twitching, attuned sensitivity to the movement of the world around him, and his or her sudden ability to seize the full potential in the air. To say this stuff has nothing to do with Shakespeare doesn’t add up, yet this material appears nowhere else but in the First Quarto.
Yet, though the energy of that version, and its swift way with storytelling, informed the structure of our text, 95 per cent of its detail came from the other two editions. In the second and third versions, the sense is clearer, the music more assured and the characterisation more delicate and quicksilver. There are differences between the two later texts. Many have seen and argued a deliberate replanning done by Shakespeare, James Shapiro in 1599 most persuasively. But it is always hard to juxtapose Shakespeare and planning. The blind man can plan to catch a hare, but will finally rely on instinct. Shakespeare’s pen scratched fast over the page, unslowed by heavy intentions or an excess of planning. We have little idea what played in front of his audiences, probably a beautiful muddle of author’s intentions, actors’ enhancement, actors’ destruction, and the text floating uneasily between them all.
* * *
So a text that is not really a single text, but a bulging and receding interweaving of three different texts, crumbled a little by actors’ egos and uncertainties, scumbled a lot by printers’ eccentricities, and further distorted by the editorial conjecture of 400 years of textual study. Conjecture which has delved into every nook and cranny, with both scalpels and sledgehammers, knocking out chunks of speech here, excising wayward commas there. Further transformed by the tidal changes of intellectual fashion, which have reconfigured it radically in performance and often in print. Yet still somehow a text solid and upstanding, and if not perfect, then why not all the better for that?
A Shakespeare text is not a fixed, definite entity; it is something liberally scarred by time, its bashed and beaten surface allowing you to touch a stippled combination of both it and what has been done to it by history. Similar to a wall built by centuries, collapsed and then rebuilt, finished and then started over again, some of its personality lurching angrily here, some fading shyly over there. How much more satisfying to the touch is that than an achieved and uniform surface?
| 38 Costa Rica, San José Teatro Espressivo | 23 August 2014 |
| 39 Jamaica, Kingston Little Theatre | 26 August |
| 40 Haiti, Port-au-Prince Karibe Hotel Hall | 28 August |
| 41 Dominican Republic, Santo Domingo Teatro Nacional Eduardo Brito | 30 August |
| 42 Antigua and Barbuda, Antigua Nelson’s Dockyard | 2 September |
| 43 St Kitts and Nevis, Charlestown Nevis Performing Arts Centre | 4 September |
| 44 Dominica, Roseau Arawak House of Culture | 7 September |
| 45 St Lucia, Gros Islet Gaiety on Rodney Bay | 9 September |
| 46 Barbados, Bridgetown Barbados Museum | 11 September |
