You say there is only one way for Shakespeare to be performed, in setting at least.
That lame qualification - "in setting at least" - shows how ridiculous your claim is. I think
Julius Caesar should be set in Ancient Rome, for instance. Does this mean I think there is "only one way" of performing
Julius Caesar? Obviously not, since there are indefinitely many ways of performing the play within this broad requirement.
You disregard any justification, artistic or intellectual, in favor of a dogmatic and restrictive view that serves no purpose other than to restrict performances in the name of some fictional "historical accuracy".
There's a lot wrong with your claim here. For a start, I'm not really very interested in historical accuracy. I don't care if a staging of Julius Caesar
accurately depicts Ancient Rome; so long as it depicts Ancient Rome somehow.
And I don't see how you're saying I'm
disregarding any justification for setting a particular play in the wrong era. It's more that I'm saying that setting a play in the wrong era
requires justification - the default should always be to set the work in the time and place Shakespeare set it. The further one moves from this, the stronger the justification is required - and setting one of his plays in the present day requires the strongest justification of all. Basically, I demand that you provide me with reasons - damned good ones - if you're going to dress Julius Caesar in a tuxedo. Nobody has, to my knowledge, ever provided any remptely good reasons for doing this. The arguments I've seen advanced for updating particular plays, or the plays in general, have always been woeful, but if you think you have a good argument, go ahead and tell me what it is.
I didn't mean to imply that
any change or update to the setting is wrong - but I do think that any
radical change or update is very, very,
likely to be wrong. The more we monkey with the setting, the more likely it is that we are making a mistake.
I can't comment specifically on performances I haven't seen, of course. Was Laurence Olivier wrong "to stage
Coriolanus in such a way that invoked [presumably you mean
evoked…?] the rule and death of Mussolini"? Well, it depends. Did he stage the play merely so us to make the audience notice parallels between Coriolanus and Mussolini (or Coriolanus and Italian partisans, or whatever the idea was)? If so, that might well have worked out well. Did he actually
set the play, not in Ancient Rome, but in 20th-Century Italy? If so, this was almost certainly a stupid decision on his part. I have to say "almost certainly" only because I wasn't there and I suppose anything is possible.
...Shakespeare cared more about character, story, and the beauty of dialogue than he did about the exact setting. He was a dramatist, not a historian. Thus, there shouldn't be a problem with staging one of his plays in a setting not identical to the one he has drawn from.
We're both just speculating about what Shakespeare cared about, and I don't know exactly what his priorities were. But I think it's likely he cared
to some extent about setting. We know he was an Italiophile, and liked setting plays in Italy, for instance. We also know that he at most once in his career (with The Merry Wives of Windsor) set a play in contemporary England - like many artists, he probably wanted to transport his audiences to other times and places. He was, as you say a dramatist, not a historian; so his interest in setting was doubtless motivated by dramatic concerns.
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10 years ago
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Spleen
10 years ago
But what mistakes would there be? That's the main fallacy with your argument: you don't offer any concrete evidence as to WHY it's wrong, you just say "it's wrong"...
I think the case made against modernising is pretty obvious: too obvious to need stating. The main points are:
(1) "No change" should always be the
default position in staging the work of a playwright believed to be at least competent, from which departures require justification. This doesn't mean that changes should never be made; it doesn't even mean that we should ever stage a work with perfect 100% fidelity. It just means that any particular suggested change should be made for a reason, and the larger the change, the stronger the reason required. We should trust that Shakespeare set a story in Ancient Rome for a reason, and not move it somewhere else unless we're particularly sure of our own reason for doing so. (In short, the burden of proof rests not with me but with Ralph Fiennes, Joss Whedon, or whoever's suggesting the change.)
(2) Shakespeare's plays are never kitchen sink dramas but evocative melodramas. Am exotic setting is part of the attractiveness of the package. (I'm aware his is merely a reason not to choose a mundane present-day setting; it's not a reason not to change the setting at all. But this makes intuitive sense. Intuitively, setting Romeo and Juliet on Mars is less sensible than setting it in old Verona, but not quite as bone-headed as setting it in present-day Detroit.)
(3) Because Shakespeare wrote with particular settings in mind, there are both lines of dialogue and plot developments that don't make sense in other settings (particularly modern settings, several hundred years later). Characters persistently refer to such things as swords and bodkins and the current war between England and France - references that simply sound ludicrous when transposed to an era where England and France have been at peace for nearly two centuries, nobody uses swords, and nobody really knows what a bodkin is. And many plot developments suddenly make no sense when transplanted radically either. "Why doesn't Romeo simply
text Juliet?" is a question that will occur to anyone watching a version of the story apparently set in 2014.
The last point means that modernisations of Shakespeare are generally either far too radical, or not radical enough. It's the
combination of fidelity to the dialogue, while completely ignoring the stage directions, that leads to embarrassing absurdities. But good modernisations of Shakespeare certainly exist.
West Side Story is one. Bernstein and Sondheim changed the setting; in changing the setting, they took hold of every plot point or reference to antiquated technology that no longer made sense, and changed those too; in the end, they came up with a completely re-imagined, new work that lived and breathed on its own terms. Nothing wrong with that.
What of Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet" The time period is 19th-century, and the exteriors were shot at England's Blenheim Palace (though it is set in Denmark). Is that equally stupid, or is it close enough to the past to get a pass?
It's not
equally stupid as a present day setting, but that doesn't make it a good idea. On the whole I'd say it "gets a pass". Branagh makes the new setting work, I think, but just barely.
Of course, most of these modernisations work on some level (on stage, anyway - not so much on screen) because Shakespeare is still Shakespeare, the language is still powerful, and if the performances are good enough we're always going to forgive the costumes looking ridiculous. A terrible staging of Shakespeare can still work, as can a terrible performance of Beethoven's fifth. But still, we shouldn't stage or perform terribly if we can help it.
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