The Two Gentlemen of Verona Read online

  7. David Thacker's 1991 RSC production with Richard Moore as Lance with Woolley the dog as Crab: "Richard Moore gave I think one of his favorite performances playing Lance and we were blessed with a wonderful dog, Woolley ... Woolley and Richard were so popular and made such a strong impression that there was even a cartoon in The Times of the two of them."

  Same-sex friendships seem stronger and more satisfying than heterosexual love in this play; did you see homoeroticism and male bonding as in conflict with romance, and how did you play it?

  Thacker: Our belief when we were working on the play was that these young men had hugely strong feelings for each other, but I don't think any of us felt that those would have been consummated sexually or, indeed, repressed homoerotically. We all believed when we were working on the play that it was fundamentally to do with heterosexual love but with men who were very close and loved each other very powerfully. The conflict that arises between them is more powerful because of the strength of their love. But I don't think we ever saw it as homoerotic.

  Hall: No. You have to understand that Elizabethans didn't categorize sexuality in the way that we do. We always make the terrible mistake of imposing our notions of sexuality onto sixteenth-century England. The idea of love was very highly evolved in Elizabethan society, whether it was physical love or spiritual love. A relationship between two men could be seen to embody the highest form of spiritual love. It doesn't have to engender something physical and it certainly doesn't necessarily have to make a comment on the particular sexuality of the person. Shakespeare writes about love in all its forms, but doesn't reduce it to being about sexuality. Running all the way through his plays he challenges conservative notions of sexuality: show me somebody who loves a woman and I will show that same man loving a man. I think I have always approached his work like that. I directed Two Gentlemen of Verona back in 1998 and I remember feeling that you're dealing with different kinds of love. It's to do with being true to somebody as much as it is to do with something physical. It becomes something physical in the last scene, and I remember us looking closely at the book of courtly love, looking at pictures by Hilliard, trying to get under the skin of the whole culture of courtly love at the time, so that we didn't reduce it to contemporary terms and miss what was really going on.

  For modern audiences (and perhaps for early modern ones too), there's a difficult moment in Act 5 when Valentine calmly offers his beloved Silvia to his friend, her would-be rapist, Proteus; how did your production understand and deal with this moment?

  Thacker: For a lot of people the play hinges on the attempted rape and the nature of redemption and forgiveness. I was incredibly fortunate to have a really exceptional young company of actors. The central quartet of the actors were Finbar Lynch and Hugh Bonneville, both of whom have become major actors now, and Saskia Reeves and Clare Holman, both of whom were young, very talented actors and ever since have had distinguished careers. So I had four brilliant young actors at the heart of it and they all bought into it being a play about redemption and forgiveness. So many of Shakespeare's plays--and certainly his mature and brilliant plays in later life, culminating in The Winter's Tale--are about redemption and forgiveness and being prepared to actually accept an apology when it is truly meant. I think we all believed that Valentine's forgiveness of Proteus was absolutely credible and, for me, the actors demonstrated that to be true, irrespective of how it might read on the page.

  I still believe very powerfully that is what Shakespeare was intending to achieve. Although he would have done it much more effectively later in his life, nevertheless it is very moving and very powerful, not least because of its innocence. It is a play written by a young person about young people and it is very powerful because of that.

  Hall: When you go out into the wasteland you discover the truth; you leave the confines of court society and strip away all artifice, and you come down to the truth of your feelings and how you really are. When we rehearsed it we made sure that we didn't play it faster than the actors could feel it, and it explained itself in performance. If you play it very quickly and just drive through it, it all seems glib and suddenly the play means nothing. Clearly that is not Shakespeare's intention, so you have to invest as deeply as you can in what happens in the wasteland to both of them and not play it too quickly--not just the lines, but the space between the lines--so when we arrived at that moment it felt very natural for what it was. The question is rather like asking how do you do The Taming of the Shrew? How does Kate capitulate in the last scene? If you haven't got the rest of the play right, you can't do that scene. That is particularly true of Shakespeare. Act 5 of Shakespeare is like a set of dominoes going down: if they haven't hit each other just right in the preceding four acts, you find yourself having completely misarticulated what he was intending. If you set off on the wrong track then the further you travel, the further away you find yourself from where you need to be. So when you get to Act 5 in Two Gents you are suddenly in the woods and that moment seems ridiculous, or you get to Act 5 of The Taming of the Shrew and Kate's capitulation seems ridiculous. But I do believe that if you have got the play right, then those moments explain themselves and I like to think ours did.

  Music has often featured prominently in productions, perhaps to cover for the play's perceived weaknesses; were you tempted by this strategy?

  Thacker: See answer to question two.

  Hall: We did use music, some recorded and some live, but it wasn't a musical. When Proteus serenaded Silvia he hired the best tenor he could find, so it wasn't actually him singing. I imagine he got someone from the local opera company and paid them a lot of money, which gave us an excuse to get a rather wonderful singer to play that moment for him.

  The Outlaws always seem very genteel (our edition has a stage direction "Outlaws confer privately" which seems to sum them up), and Valentine an especially unlikely captain of an outlaw band; how realistically did you treat your Outlaws?

  Thacker: We treated them reasonably realistically. The challenge was more making them credible within this musical genre that we'd segued into at that moment in the show. When Silvia was running away the rising of both lyrics and melody in "Do You Love Me As I Love You" is the thing that remains powerfully in my memory for that moment. So I think we downplayed the Outlaws a bit.

  Shakespeare reputedly disliked dogs and W. C. Fields famously recommended never working with children or animals; how did you find directing a dog?

  Thacker: We had a charity gala event for hearing dogs for the deaf that was attended by Princess Anne. I sat next to Princess Anne during the performance and she didn't really say much until we got to the point in the action when Lance used to press Crab's bottom down to make him sit. Immediately he would always stand up and it would get a laugh every night. At that point, she turned to me and said "Lurchers won't sit!" That was her main comment on the show until the end, when she was very sweet and polite. He was a lovely dog and he got on so well with Richard. In fact the owners of the dog became very good friends of Richard. Richard handled Woolley brilliantly and so, far from it being a problem, it was a massive bonus for the production. I think all of us look back on the production with an enormous fondness for Woolley and admiration for the way the two of them worked together.

  Hall: The dog was wonderful. On the first preview he walked on and looked out at the audience and then turned his back and lay down, which brought the house down. Mark Hadfield, who was playing Lance, had a high old time after that. Once Ben Ormerod, the lighting designer, and I had got the lighting just right so that the dog wasn't being dazzled he would sit and look at the audience. He was this big wonderful mangy Irish wolfhound crossbreed, which I think he has to be, and he was brilliant. The wonderful thing about Crab is that it's not just about the dog: it's about the dog and Lance. If Lance is on the money, which Mark Hadfield was, then if the dog does something you can use it, and if the dog does nothing you can use it. But you have to not fight what the dog does. When Crab's und
erstudy went on a couple of times we did have a few problems because he was a slightly small yappy thing, and every time Dominic Rowan, who was playing Proteus, went close to him he yapped wildly. After a couple of shows Dominic realized this and used it to great comic effect.

  8. Edward Hall's 1998 RSC production in the Swan with Mark Hadfield as Lance and Cassie as Crab: "this big wonderful mangy Irish wolfhound crossbreed, which I think he has to be, and he was brilliant. The wonderful thing about Crab is that it's not just about the dog: it's about the dog and Lance. If Lance is on the money, which Mark Hadfield was, then if the dog does something you can use it, and if the dog does nothing you can use it."

  *"Hush Puppies" is the brand name for a type of casual brown suede shoe with a basset hound as its logo.

  SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER

  IN THE THEATER

  BEGINNINGS

  William Shakespeare was an extraordinarily intelligent man who was born and died in an ordinary market town in the English Midlands. He lived an uneventful life in an eventful age. Born in April 1564, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glove maker who was prominent on the town council until he fell into financial difficulties. Young William was educated at the local grammar in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where he gained a thorough grounding in the Latin language, the art of rhetoric and classical poetry. He married Ann Hathaway and had three children (Susanna, then the twins Hamnet and Judith) before his twenty-first birthday: an exceptionally young age for the period. We do not know how he supported his family in the mid-1580s.

  Like many clever country boys, he moved to the city in order to make his way in the world. Like many creative people, he found a career in the entertainment business. Public playhouses and professional full-time acting companies reliant on the market for their income were born in Shakespeare's childhood. When he arrived in London as a man, sometime in the late 1580s, a new phenomenon was in the making: the actor who is so successful that he becomes a "star." The word did not exist in its modern sense, but the pattern is recognizable: audiences went to the theater not so much to see a particular show as to witness the comedian Richard Tarlton or the dramatic actor Edward Alleyn.

  Shakespeare was an actor before he was a writer. It appears not to have been long before he realized that he was never going to grow into a great comedian like Tarlton or a great tragedian like Alleyn. Instead, he found a role within his company as the man who patched up old plays, breathing new life, new dramatic twists, into tired repertory pieces. He paid close attention to the work of the university-educated dramatists who were writing history plays and tragedies for the public stage in a style more ambitious, sweeping, and poetically grand than anything that had been seen before. But he may also have noted that what his friend and rival Ben Jonson would call "Marlowe's mighty line" sometimes faltered in the mode of comedy. Going to university, as Christopher Marlowe did, was all well and good for honing the arts of rhetorical elaboration and classical allusion, but it could lead to a loss of the common touch. To stay close to a large segment of the potential audience for public theater, it was necessary to write for clowns as well as kings and to intersperse the flights of poetry with the humor of the tavern, the privy, and the brothel: Shakespeare was the first to establish himself early in his career as an equal master of tragedy, comedy, and history. He realized that theater could be the medium to make the national past available to a wider audience than the elite who could afford to read large history books: his signature early works include not only the classical tragedy Titus Andronicus but also the sequence of English historical plays on the Wars of the Roses.

  He also invented a new role for himself, that of in-house company dramatist. Where his peers and predecessors had to sell their plays to the theater managers on a poorly paid piecework basis, Shakespeare took a percentage of the box-office income. The Lord Chamberlain's Men constituted themselves in 1594 as a joint stock company, with the profits being distributed among the core actors who had invested as sharers. Shakespeare acted himself--he appears in the cast lists of some of Ben Jonson's plays as well as the list of actors' names at the beginning of his own collected works--but his principal duty was to write two or three plays a year for the company. By holding shares, he was effectively earning himself a royalty on his work, something no author had ever done before in England. When the Lord Chamberlain's Men collected their fee for performance at court in the Christmas season of 1594, three of them went along to the Treasurer of the Chamber: not just Richard Burbage the tragedian and Will Kempe the clown, but also Shakespeare the scriptwriter. That was something new.

  The next four years were the golden period in Shakespeare's career, though overshadowed by the death of his only son, Hamnet, age eleven, in 1596. In his early thirties and in full command of both his poetic and his theatrical medium, he perfected his art of comedy, while also developing his tragic and historical writing in new ways. In 1598, Francis Meres, a Cambridge University graduate with his finger on the pulse of the London literary world, praised Shakespeare for his excellence across the genres:

  As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love Labours Lost, his Love Labours Won, his Midsummer Night Dream and his Merchant of Venice: for tragedy his Richard the 2, Richard the 3, Henry the 4, King John, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and Juliet.

  For Meres, as for the many writers who praised the "honey-flowing vein" of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, narrative poems written when the theaters were closed due to plague in 1593-94, Shakespeare was marked above all by his linguistic skill, by the gift of turning elegant poetic phrases.

  PLAYHOUSES

  Elizabethan playhouses were "thrust" or "one-room" theaters. To understand Shakespeare's original theatrical life, we have to forget about the indoor theater of later times, with its proscenium arch and curtain that would be opened at the beginning and closed at the end of each act. In the proscenium arch theater, stage and auditorium are effectively two separate rooms: the audience looks from one world into another as if through the imaginary "fourth wall" framed by the proscenium. The picture-frame stage, together with the elaborate scenic effects and backdrops beyond it, created the illusion of a self-contained world--especially once nineteenth-century developments in the control of artificial lighting meant that the auditorium could be darkened and the spectators made to focus on the lighted stage. Shakespeare, by contrast, wrote for a bare platform stage with a standing audience gathered around it in a courtyard in full daylight. The audience were always conscious of themselves and their fellow spectators, and they shared the same "room" as the actors. A sense of immediate presence and the creation of rapport with the audience were all-important. The actor could not afford to imagine he was in a closed world, with silent witnesses dutifully observing him from the darkness.

  Shakespeare's theatrical career began at the Rose Theatre in Southwark. The stage was wide and shallow, trapezoid in shape, like a lozenge. This design had a great deal of potential for the theatrical equivalent of cinematic split-screen effects, whereby one group of characters would enter at the door at one end of the tiring-house wall at the back of the stage and another group through the door at the other end, thus creating two rival tableaux. Many of the battle-heavy and faction-filled plays that premiered at the Rose have scenes of just this sort.

  At the rear of the Rose stage, there were three capacious exits, each over ten feet wide. Unfortunately, the very limited excavation of a fragmentary portion of the original Globe site, in 1989, revealed nothing about the stage. The first Globe was built in 1599 with similar proportions to those of another theater, the Fortune, albeit that the former was polygonal and looked circular, whereas the latter was rectangular. The building contract for the Fortune survives and allows us to infer that the stage of the Globe was probably substantially wider than it was deep (perhaps for
ty-three feet wide and twenty-seven feet deep). It may well have been tapered at the front, like that of the Rose.

  The capacity of the Globe was said to have been enormous, perhaps in excess of three thousand. It has been conjectured that about eight hundred people may have stood in the yard, with two thousand or more in the three layers of covered galleries. The other "public" playhouses were also of large capacity, whereas the indoor Blackfriars theater that Shakespeare's company began using in 1608--the former refectory of a monastery--had overall internal dimensions of a mere forty-six by sixty feet. It would have made for a much more intimate theatrical experience and had a much smaller capacity, probably of about six hundred people. Since they paid at least sixpence a head, the Blackfriars attracted a more select or "private" audience. The atmosphere would have been closer to that of an indoor performance before the court in the Whitehall Palace or at Richmond. That Shakespeare always wrote for indoor production at court as well as outdoor performance in the public theater should make us cautious about inferring, as some scholars have, that the opportunity provided by the intimacy of the Blackfriars led to a significant change toward a "chamber" style in his last plays--which, besides, were performed at both the Globe and the Blackfriars. After the occupation of the Blackfriars a five-act structure seems to have become more important to Shakespeare. That was because of artificial lighting: there were musical interludes between the acts, while the candles were trimmed and replaced. Again, though, something similar must have been necessary for indoor court performances throughout his career.