Strutting and Fretting:
Staging Meaning in Shakespeare’s "Famous Bits"
by Andrew James Hartley (State University of West Georgia)
with John Ammerman as Macbeth
Video digitized by Tom Beggs
The purpose of this paper is threefold.
First, I want to demonstrate the way that the on-line journal presents certain
opportunities formerly unknown to literary scholarship. Second, I will use this
new medium to facilitate a piece of performance criticism centered on one of
Shakespeare’s best known speeches, tackling in particular how an actor deals
with the speech’s very familiarity. Third, I hope to show the usefulness of
performance criticism as a critical and pedagogical tool.
Both in the theatre and in the
classroom, Shakespeare’s cultural cachet is a double-edged sword. As the front
runner of an increasingly suspect-looking collection of "Great
Authors," students and playgoers, whether they choose to embrace him or
repudiate him, tend to assume that they know what he’s about. This does not
equate to understanding him, of course, as most would freely confess, and many
college students have had just enough experience of Shakespeare in high school
to loath his works and all his empty promises. Others flock to him (in the
schoolroom and the theatre) convinced that exposure to the Bard will somehow
augment or demonstrate their own cultural sophistication. Both positions, of
course, have healthy elements to them, skepticism about his power to be all he
is touted to be on the one hand, and a willingness to respond to the assumed
quality of his works on the other. Both, however, can easily fall prey to the
tendency to read Shakespeare’s cultural status rather than his words. With that
status being continually rewritten through, for example, movies that popularize
his works (Romeo + Juliet) or whimsical assumptions about the author
himself (Shakespeare in Love), it is virtually impossible for anyone to
consider the words of the plays themselves without our judgment being affected
by what we know (or think we know) about Shakespeare’s place in literary,
educational and cultural history.
Nowhere is this more true than in what I
am rather glibly calling the "Great Speeches" and "Famous
Bits." The passion for identifying and memorizing those soliloquies or
monologues ("To be or not to be," "All the world’s a
stage," "Neither a borrower nor a lender be" etc.) is perhaps
less common than it was earlier this century, but this tendency to
"anthologize" the speeches, as it were, to take them not as the
utterances of a character in a play but as the universally applicable
philosophical pronouncements of an author whose literary and cultural standing
is beyond question, remains with us. This is, of course, problematic,
particularly in cases where the identity of the dramatic character should
affect the way audiences and readers construct meaning; "All the world’s a
stage," for example, comes from a character whose wry misanthropy is
subjected to critical scrutiny and ridicule by other characters throughout the
play. Hamlet’s Polonius ("Neither a borrower nor a lender be . . .
; To thine own self be true," etc.) is deeply problematic, and on stage he
is frequently presented as a self-interested, duplicitous and social-climbing
windbag. Nonetheless, the very familiarity and supposed profundity of lines
tends to make them float free of whatever character says them, making them
abstract and oddly authorial.
One would assume that on stage, in the
actual moment of performance, with the person of the actor giving
dramatic context to the words, the problem would vanish, all that high-culture
insight being laid bare as the illogical musings of a dubious dramatic persona.
Intriguingly, however, it does not. Nowhere is the extent of Shakespeare’s
iconic status clearer than in the present day theatre and it is that status
which draws a large percentage of the audience. It should not be a surprise
then to find, as often happens when a particularly famous passage comes up in
performance, that the audience is nodding sagely to itself, smiling at the
familiarity of the lines, nudging their neighbors or (and I have often observed
this) mouthing the words silently (but often conspicuously) along with the
actor.
This spontaneous audience participation
is an odd phenomenon, often obviously a performance of cultural sophistication
for the benefit of those around (and not all that spontaneous), at other times
simply a kind of nostalgia: a half-forgotten part of oneself suddenly reawoken
by the magically familiar words. It is akin to those who seem to laugh loudly
at Shakespearean puns, either to demonstrate to their friends that they get
it, or out of surprised delight that Shakespeare can actually be funny. In
either case, the audience member who joins in sotto voice with
"whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer" is merely enacting an
extreme form of something many of the audience experience. The audience member
who whispers the speech to himself (and often this takes place not during the
speech but in the freer environment of the intermission bar or the post-show
parking lot) is simply serving as a mouthpiece for many of his or her peers who
recognize in the familiarity of the words a general sense of undisputed
profundity such as they were once taught and which lingers like some cultural
ghost from the past, a past no less personal because it is shared with others.
The audience member’s response (be it boredom, or pleasure, or a vague sense of
seriousness) thus has less to do with the play than with the idiosyncratic
cultural memory triggered by the familiarity of the lines. The specifically
dramatic moment which contextualizes the speech, even the content of the speech
itself, becomes secondary to this species of (positive or negative) cultural
nostalgia.
In dramatic terms this might be called
an alienation effect since it ruptures the fictive reality of the play and
foregrounds the artifice of the whole, but it does not do so in the Brechtian
sense, actually drawing attention to the medium. Rather, the effect is to reify
the words as a kind of cultural litany outside, even in spite of, the dramatic
context, and (generally, I suspect) to sentimentally bind audience members
together in their sense of cultural superiority. The words, because of their
culturally and educationally privileged status, cease to communicate as words
normally do and instead create a shared, but not scrutinized, sense of nebulous
value. The audience member who actually speaks the words is breaking the
rules, but only because his or her performance is clumsy and potentially
intimidating to those who are less familiar with the speech (but familiar
enough to know that they should know it). In short, this curiously un-Brechtian
alienation effect absorbs the audience into a celebration of shared cultural
values. It also kills the play as play dead.
One of the reasons for the superstition
shrouding Macbeth in the theatre must originate in this problem. Few
plays are taught more than Macbeth in schools and colleges, and still
fewer enjoy the "Scottish play’s" frequent incarnations on stage. Of
Shakespeare’s characters only Hamlet, perhaps, skull in hand, has a stronger
hold on the popular imagination than Macbeth extracting half-truths from the
weird sisters or following the air-drawn dagger to Duncan. Moreover, the words
of the play themselves, though often syntactically convoluted and ambiguous to
the point of impenetrability, have a special place in classrooms and,
inevitably, in the larger and resultant culture, from the doggerel verse of
"double, double toil and trouble" (which, ironically, may not even be
Shakespearean) to Lady Macbeth’s much lampooned "out damn spot!"
Nowhere, however, is Shakespeare’s cultural weight felt more than in the
"Tomorrow" speech.
The fact that it can be named in such
cursory shorthand is testimony enough to its omnipresence, as is the way its
phrases crop up in other literary titles from both high (Faulkner’s The
Sound and the Fury) and low (Alastair McClean’s The Way to Dusty Death)
culture. The speech is widely read as plumbing the poet’s existential depths,
positing a view of human life which is unredeemed and unredeemable, a view as
dark and barren as anything in King Lear. My purpose here is not to
attack such a reading, but to ask how actors, audiences and students (in the
broadest sense) are to keep that reading (or any other, for that matter) fresh
when we have become so numbed to its content by its very familiarity.
In what follows I do not intend to
champion one performance over another, since all have their strengths and, no
doubt, their shortcomings. All are potentially valid approaches depending on
the larger shape of the production and the design of the actor. Indeed, I have
found that comparison of such broadly similar but differently nuanced
performances intensely rewarding in the classroom, if only to reinscribe the
flexibility of the explicitly dramatic text: that Shakespeare read as poetry
alone misses a vast and crucial aspect of how the plays were designed to create
meaning in a specifically theatrical context. Close analysis of the different
performances leads students to a greater scrutiny of the words themselves as
well as to an analysis of their own aesthetic assumptions about different kinds
of acting. That said, I do want to consider the three performances specifically
in terms of the question I have been outlining above. The fact that Shakespeare
is a known cultural quantity and that drama is necessarily repetitive
(performing "iteration" in the Derridean sense) is unavoidable, and I
do not intend to suggest that newness in the Stanislavskian sense is the goal
of (or even attainable by) a given actor. But there is a special dynamism and
vitality intrinsic to the theatrical experience which is stifled if the plays
turn into nothing more than exercises in cultural nostalgia (a version of Peter
Brook’s "deadly theatre"). How then, knowing the cultural baggage
which Shakespeare and his audience bring to the stage, do we enact "the
famous bits"?
I have used the same actor (John
Ammerman who played Macbeth in the Georgia Shakespeare Festival production in
October 1998 [directed by John Briggs]), costume and lighting in each case so
as to introduce as few disparate and distracting elements as possible (though I
did tighten the camera angle in the second version to aid the equally tightly
focussed performance). The three versions contain certain elements in common,
at least in part because Mr. Ammerman had been living with his performance for
several weeks, and the variations thus tend to be subtle but telling. Indeed, I
suspect they are telling because they are subtle, because they do not utterly
revision the way that the speech could look or sound. Shakespeare, like most
drama, is astonishingly flexible and can accommodate wildly different
approaches without "violating" the original, but if we are to compare
performances in detail, some common ground needs to exist. What is interesting
to me, and extremely useful in the classroom, is how extensively alterations in
an actor’s approach to a speech, even given a fairly consistent idea of what
that text means to the actor, come to shape not simply the form of the utterance
but its content. Meaning, in short, is constructed not by the words on the
page, but by their radical mediation through the communion of actor, director
and audience, all of whom bring crucial factors to the interpretation of the
Shakespearean "original."
This performance of the speech enacts
what, for my purposes, I will call the "traditional" reading. The
actor is static and speaks the lines in balanced, measured tones, hitting the
alliterative consonants ("petty pace," "a tale told" etc.)
but keeping the potential for rhetorical flourish firmly in check. It is
conversational only in pace and is conscious, albeit subtly, of the poetry’s
lyrical form. The whole is a kind of understated declamation, a highly public
oration presenting a preconceived philosophy which belongs, it seems, to the
author. There is no attempt at recall here. The lines flow smoothly and
regularly, and though there is a grim surety to the utterance there is
otherwise no particular emotion. Indeed, the static body and modulated, sonorous
voice (particularly on "recorded time") suggests that Macbeth the man
has vanished, absorbed by the anthologized SHAKESPEARE. This, I would argue, is
a performance that facilitates, even expects, the kind of audience
participation I have been describing above. Indeed, it seems shaped by the same
cultural assumptions, in that the character is virtually effaced by the
somewhat predictable format of the performance. There is no psyche here, but
this is not in deference to the recent historicist criticism that contends that
Elizabethan/Jacobean drama does not contain psyche in the sense that we expect
it in modern drama. Rather, character has given way to the "set
piece," the insertion of an abstract profundity which steps out of the
play as play, entering a realm where the play has become a vehicle for the
cultural notion of Shakespearean Wisdom. If the audience joins in they are
merely enacting the same assumption that fuels the performance, one in which
theatrical context is subordinated to a larger (and vaguer) cultural resonance.
This is, in many senses, the direct
opposite of the previous version since it holds onto character at all costs. In
place of Version 1’s distanced existentialist nihilism, the immediate and
personal context of the speech takes center stage. It is personal and intimate.
The actor searches for the words as if he is thinking them for the first time
("all our… yesterdays," "a walking…shadow"),
struggling to find ideas and articulation simultaneously. It is a smaller
speech, and the tighter camera angle (though admittedly a factor independent of
the actor himself) seems to confirm the sense that this approach is tailor-made
for a much smaller theatre, even for television or film. In these subtly
different media, the audience’s sense of connection with the specific
"humanity" of the character is most clearly reinforced, even created.
Here, Macbeth is not declaiming philosophy, but wrestling with the
earth-shattering consequences of his wife’s death, and the performance thus
seems to build on the intensity of that spousal relationship: an intensity
which is frequently forgotten by this moment in the play. In other words, this
is the most twentieth century or Stanislaskian reading, one which ignores the
character discontinuity observed by historicist critics, instead seeing the
Scottish King as a thinking, feeling, and continuous psyche. The strength of
the reading is, of course, its intimate familiarity, its regrounding the play
and its utterances in the minds of the characters which people it, and with
whom the audience is likely to connect. Rather than being invited to admire the
verse-form and profundity of the text as we were in version 1, celebrating its
very familiarity in our cultured ears, we are called upon to empathize with the
individual called Macbeth, a man whose actions have steadily alienated us since
the death of Banquo. Here we see the painfully human consequences of those
actions, the emptiness of his achievements and the way that an immediate and
personal sense of loss can color his (and therefore our) entire view of the
world and life itself.
For most theatregoers today (partly
because we tend to be primarily TV and film watchers), this last version is
probably the most unexpected, even jarring. Of the three it is the largest, the
most theatrical and, more to the point, theatrical in a fashion which is not
the standard in these Method Acting days. Here Mr. Ammerman draws most directly
on his knowledge of nineteenth century theatrical conventions, using them to
inform both his body and his voice. Right from the sigh which heralds the
speech, Ammerman clearly grounds the utterance not in abstract philosophy but
in a character’s response to a specific situation: the death of his wife. This
is not, however, the naturalized psyche of Version 2, feeling for the words to
express what pre-exists them. The individual called Macbeth is here a
theatrical character whose thoughts and feelings are real but staged for our
interpretation and empathy. What Macbeth as a character (as opposed to simply a
person) experiences is translated in terms of a carefully controlled
theatricality.
The performance is strikingly slow and
the words are almost sung, so much does the actor use the full range of his
voice to fill the vowels ("and tomorrow and tomorrow")
and make even fuller use of the alliterative and assonant consonants
("petty pace," "struts and frets") than in version 1. The
assonant vowels, particularly in their repetitions ("from day to day")
are drawn out, enacting the wearisome passage of time which is the subject of
the speech in the very utterance itself. The whole is given a measured
musicality through carefully modulated pitch variance, noticeably on the second
"out" of "out, out brief candle" and the plunge into the
guttural "signifying . . . nothing."
The actor’s body is more mobile in this
version and again, I would argue, the result is to create a kind of middle
ground between the two previous versions in terms of the recognizable humanity
of the character (neither effaced by the author nor alive as someone we might
meet in twentieth century reality) but one which is fundamentally different
from either of them. First, the bodily movement helps to strip the speech of
that declamatory, philosophical mode of version 1. simply by physicalizing the
speaker and thus emphasizing the sense of the words as the speech of a
character, not the intoned wisdom of the poet-author. On the other hand, of
course, this same mobility embodies the speech’s content, staging the mood of
the character in ways that the second version’s more stripped-down naturalism
does not. What we have here, I think, is a performance which, unlike the other
two, acknowledges and runs with the sense that the speaker is "Macbeth,"
not Shakespeare, but is acutely aware that "Macbeth" is a
specifically theatrical entity, not a real person.
The lines are not given as realist
speech because they are not realist speech; they are the kind of utterance
which can emerge only from the transformative interaction of a potentially real
situation (the rumination on mortality resultant from the death of a loved one)
with the ordering and aesthetisicing power of a specifically dramatic and
poetic art. Like the iambic pentameter of the verse itself which resembles
ordinary speech but is pointedly not (and never was) ordinary speech, thought,
feeling and utterance are at a pointed remove from conventional reality. We are
not simply holding the mirror up to nature here and seeing the way the world
is, we are mediating that world through the distancing, beautifying, enabling
and, above all, transforming gauze of theatre.
The performance, moreover, recognizes
and exploits the speech’s explicitly metadramatic quality in more than its
echoes of performances past: the lines themselves draw deliberate attention to
the voice and body of the actor in ways of which Shakespeare was especially
fond. As with Hamlet’s lines on "this majestic roof, fretted with golden
fire" (2.2.302) and the Chorus in Henry V asking pardon for the
"brawl ridiculous" (4.0. 50) which is offered in place of Agincourt,
Macbeth’s metaphor of the actor strutting and fretting his hour upon the stage
foregrounds, quite unnecessarily in terms of the bare content of the speech,
the artifice central to theatrical art. There is no attempt to pass this off as
unmediated reality: this is drama, and on some crucially important level, the
existential profundity articulated by the character, however true it may seem,
is merely part of a fiction. The underscoring of that fiction’s own unreality
is reminiscent of the jarring way that Cleopatra draws attention to the
original all-male conditions of her own stage representation when she bewails
the fact that some "squeaking Cleopatra" will "boy" her greatness
before the masses (5.2.220). Within the stage fiction, Macbeth is a thinking,
feeling person whose thoughts come from within a version of a psyche, but the
author reveals that fiction as fiction in the same way he reminds the
audience that the Cleopatra they are watching really is only a boy. This
undermining of fictive reality in Macbeth’s case thus takes the character’s
existentialism a step further. The play itself, and thus the speech itself,
signifies nothing. But does this framing of the character’s nihilistic
utterance within a problematized fiction cancel the meaning of that utterance,
or does the double negative simply intensify the sense of purposeless
emptiness? Macbeth is doubly right as character and as the poor player who
gives him voice.
The alternative, of course, is to say
that Shakespeare walks the risky tightrope of assuming that the "poor
player" who has his declamatory hour is not giving the speech. If
the role was originally performed by Richard Burbage, for example, an actor who
had significant staying power for Shakespeare’s company, then is there not an
almost jocular shifting of emphasis from the player who does the lines to one
or more who pointedly do not because they are inferior? Whoever delivers the
lines, it seems to me, regardless of their bravado at least risks raising the
question of whether what they are seeing is the poor here-today, gone-tomorrow
player. Whatever the audience verdict, the meaning of the speech,
something crucially bound up with the way the audience react to it in
performance, as opposed to the meaning of the lines on paper, is
necessarily being affected by something which the author draws attention to in
the lines but is finally outside the lines themselves: namely the actor
himself. Once again we are reminded that Shakespeare’s words are only a
beginning and their transformation into theatrical meaning, in his own period
and ours, is mediated through and radically affected by specifically
non-textual elements, the actor in particular.
Whatever else is true of version 3, it
is the performance which most clearly derails audience expectations and,
particularly in its pacing and in its utilization of the actor’s vocal range,
it seems to anticipate and prevent the kind of audience participation, either
audibly or merely mentally, which takes place when the audience recognizes one
of those "Great Speeches." The pause before the last word
"nothing," for example, had audience members straining with
astonished anticipation. The first time I heard Mr. Ammerman perform the last
line I momentarily wondered if, banking on the familiarity of the speech, he
had decided to render that final nothing even more resonantly by not saying it
at all. When the word came, however, as with all the preceding lines, I was struck
by how much the familiarity of the whole had been deconstructed for me as an
audience member. In short, I was being forced to listen to the speech afresh
even as I was being reminded of the piece’s theatrical history, the lines being
both fresh and clearly rooted in the necessary iterative nature of drama.
Thus the final aspect of the speech’s
conscious theatricality becomes clear. One of the many things which makes the
audience of a Shakespeare play different today from its Renaissance counterpart
is the four centuries of cultural accumulation which has collected around
Shakespeare’s works, and his most quoted passages in particular. Version 3
tackles this critical accumulation, accepts, confronts and unsettles it, as
opposed to replicating it (Version 1) or sidestepping it with the semblance of
psychology (Version 2). It prevents the familiarity of the lines from making
their content comforting as only the familiar can, particularly if our
consciousness of their familiarity rewards us with a sense of cultural
sophistication as it tends to here. Instead, the words demand our attention,
and do so in a way reinforcing them as the thoughts of a character who seems
perhaps on the edge of recognizing (as Renaissance tragic heroes often seem to
be) that they are only characters in a larger fiction. The existential content
of the lines thus gets its final impetus, there being no greater statement of
futility than the acknowledgement that one, like an actor destined to live only
momentarily in the public eye and to spend that time mouthing lines penned by
another, is finally impotent in the face of one’s own life. Macbeth, who
misreads the prophesies of the weird sisters as confirming his invulnerability
and only gradually realizes that his attempts to control even his own future
are fundamentally vain, is exposed as the actor playing him, a man whose
semblance of power is illusory, and even the illusion is sustained only by
powers beyond himself (the playwright, the goodwill of the audience etc.). The
sound and fury of his lines, like theatre itself, signifies something, but only
if the audience allows it to do so. The actor can only persuade that audience
to stop remembering and, instead, to listen.
Lastly, it should be said, of course,
that what this study demonstrates most compellingly is the fluidity not just of
the stage and the approach of an actor to a given speech, but of the way
audiences discern meaning. Much of what I have suggested here as readings of
the three versions is arguable and different watchers will respond differently.
This fact does not subvert the point of my study, however, and it is one of the
unique strengths of this new technological medium that I can present the
performances themselves as well as my readings of them precisely, so that a
reader can evaluate my arguments equally precisely, rather than taking for
granted observations on performances he or she has not seen. Traditional
performance criticism (i.e. that which is purely textual in nature) is less
amenable to this specificity of argument and counter-argument.
As I have said, objections to my
readings do not undermine the larger goal of this study and, in one sense,
prove my point, illustrating the power of such an approach in both the
classroom and scholarship. The words of a dramatic text are, in semiotic terms,
a beginning, not an end. They are the basis of how meaning is formed, but they
constitute only one of many factors in determining how an individual audience
member finally understands and evaluates the play. Despite the many
discontinuities between Shakespeare’s period and our own, this interpretive
onus, one which is placed on not just the author/director and actors but upon
the audience itself, is common in one way or another to theatre in both
periods. The audience watches, listens and discerns (or fails to discern)
meaning, be that meaning recognized as an idea, a response to an aesthetic
moment or an emotional pull. Consciously or otherwise, "accurately"
or otherwise (i.e. in accord with what the words actually say or the way a
typical audience might be expected to empathize, sympathize etc.) and whether
or not we recognize the fact that we have done so, it is the audience which
constructs meaning in the moment of performance. Our culture and Shakespeare’s
are separated by 400 years and the kinds of meanings that the respective
audiences of those cultures perceive in their respective Macbeths may be
fundamentally different, as may be the means of creating and deciphering those
meanings, but the communicative structure which is central to theatre is
broadly the same. The semiotic exchange which takes place in performance is not
as easily pigeon-holed as its paper copy, though it is finally, as Keir Elam
suggests, at least as important as a text from which meaning is "read."
Shakespeare, as a dramatic poet, lives primarily on the stage, however
much the meaning of his words is complicated and destabilized by the mechanisms
of performance.
This is not to say, of course, that
there are no wrong answers to what Shakespeare means, only that the nature of
theatre dictates that there is more than one right answer, both in an actor’s
approach to a speech and in an audience’s response to that performance. We can
(and I think must) be prepared to analyze and justify the interpretive choices
made by actors, directors, audiences, scholars and teachers. If we cannot, then
our reading, or performance, or evaluative opinion, however full of sound and
fury, signifies precious little.
