Rescripting 101

In my last entry, I mentioned my rescripting work, but I didn’t go into any detail about it. It’s difficult to describe at this stage, because it tends to evolve organically out of each play that I work on. But I can talk about my general philosophy of rescripting, and then offer one or two examples that have come up so far.

The word “rescripting” comes from Alan C. Dessen’s excellent book “Rescripting Shakespeare : the text, the director, and modern productions” (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Using plentiful examples, Dessen describes all the things which modern directors inevitably do when producing a Shakespeare play: they cut, they paste, they modernize words, they rearrange verse, they add or delete characters, they insert intermissions, they streamline scenes. Some directors, like Charles Marowitz, do even more than this, and totally transform the plays; but even the most conservative productions of Shakespeare do some of this work.

My philosophy comes from two beliefs about Shakespeare, and they are both leaps of faith: first, I believe that Will purposefully over-wrote his scripts, and knew that they would be cut during rehearsals and performances. Of course, Will was around for the first performances of his plays (in many cases, he was acting in them), so he had more say in what was chopped and what was left in. But even now, I believe that producing a script in its entirety (especially a long and complex script, like Lear) is a disservice to the playwright.

My second article of faith is that Shakespeare wanted his audiences to understand his plays. All playwrights want the same thing: they want to tell a good story, one that keeps their audiences rivetted from start to finish. Shakespeare enjoyed poetry and wordplay, but those techniques existed to serve the story, not to distract from it. Therefore, if Will’s words get in the way of his stories, I think it is in the play’s best interest to find ways to clarify and streamline the text. Even if that means cutting or replacing words and phrases. It’s what Shakespeare would have wanted.

These tenets might be controversial in a university classroom, but they are pretty much standard in the theatre, as Dessen’s book demonstrates. The amount of rescripting varies, of course. A play like Midsummer Night’s Dream doesn’t need much trimming, and its language is still pretty accessible. Lear is a different matter. Some of its language is clear, but some is hopelessly archaic and convoluted. Plus Lear has an additional pitfall for directors: some of its language (like a lot of the Fool’s lines) may not be meant to be understood. In such cases, the meaninglessness is part of the story.

So there’s a lot to consider. When I encounter a line like Kent’s “Let it fall rather, though the fork invade...”, I have no hesitation about changing the word “fork” to “point”, because “fork” no longer suggests an arrowhead to us, and is needlessly confusing at a moment when the audience needs to understand the characters’ intentions. But when the Fool asks Lear, “If a man’s brains were in’s heels, were’t not in danger of kibes?” I am loath to change or cut the line, even though my audience may not know what “kibes” are. It’s a moment when Lear himself is trying to puzzle out the Fool’s meaning, and the play can afford to slow down long enough to let the audience puzzle as well.

Another example, from when Lear is cursing Goneril:

Into her womb convey sterility;
Dry up in her the organs of increase,
And from her derogate body never spring
A babe to honour her! If she must teem,
Create her child of spleen, that it may live
And be a thwart disnatured torment to her.

Here, I would change “derogate” (probably to “unnatural”, since that’s what it means). It’s confusing and besides the point. But two lines later, Lear says “child of spleen,” which I would probably keep, even though “spleen” doesn’t mean what it once did. Why? Because it is the point, and because he goes on to describe exactly what he means over the next ten lines or so. I might change “thwart”, just because it isn’t generally an adjective, and so its placement makes the line sound awkward; but I’d keep “disnatured”, because again, Lear is about to give examples of what a “disnatured” child is like.

As I write all this out, it sounds pretty arbitrary, and it is. A director may also adjust text once he knows his what his actors are capable of, tweaking lines if an actor has trouble unpacking them, or restoring complex verbiage if an actor proves up to the challenge. The result, in any case, is a unique version of the play—a new adaptation for every production.

Cordelia's Plight

Yesternight I started rescripting the play—nothing fancy for the moment, mostly just nips and cuts to keep things moving. I got halfway through Act 1 Scene 1—the good old “love test”—and I stopped short. I was looking at Cordelia’s response to Lear (after “Nothing, my lord”):

Good my lord,
You have begot me, bred me, loved me; I
Return those duties back as are right fit,
Obey you, love you, and most honour you.
Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty.
Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters,
(To love my father all.)

I’ll get to the parentheses in a moment. When reading it, two things struck me. First: the unexpected question after the fourth line (“Why have my sisters husbands...?”). Abrupt topic shifts like that usually indicate heightened emotions (which make sense here), and subtexts breaking forth into words. What’s the subtext? That Cordelia resents her sisters? Or that she resents their marriages, because she knows they are loveless?

The second odd thing was the line, “That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry...” My plight? My Arden says “plight” here means “pledge” (ie. promise of marriage). But that still sounds weird—his hand must take her promise? And what’s with the must in there? There are two lords waiting just outside who can’t wait to marry her. Nobody’s being forced to do anything they don’t want to, and yet there is a desperate, constrained sense in the words “must” and “plight.”

Enter my Revelation: Someone is being forced. Not only is Cordelia being forced to take part in this barbaric ceremony, but she will very soon be forced to marry either France or Burgundy. She doesn’t have a choice. These marriages are all arranged by Lear. Look at Lear’s language, when he turns to Cordelia a few lines earlier:

Now, our joy,
Although our last and least, to whose young love
The vines of France and milk of Burgundy
Strive to be interess’d...

“Interess” means “lay claim to,” but the image (when joined with “vines”) is of interweaving, surrounding, and capturing Cordelia. This is the point of the ceremony: not for Lear to give away his lands or titles—that’s all formality. The purpose is to marry Cordelia off.

And she doesn’t want to do it. She clams up because it’s the only way to escape the trap Lear has set for her—the same trap King Leir invented in the earlier play. The last line of her indignant speech only appears in the Quarto version of Lear. The later Folio version (which Shakespeare probably revised himself) omits this line, despite its dramatic punch. Without it, Cordelia’s rebellion comes in to focus:

Haply, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty.
Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters.

That is: I’m not going to play your game, Dad. I’m going to marry for love, not politics. So there.

What About Kent?

Kent seems like a logical character to look at next. He is second in line to receive Lear’s wrath. His urgent objections to Lear’s censure of his daughter resonate so strongly with us, we are left with the image of the level-headed Earl for the rest of the play, even when Kent effectively becomes a different character. He is the voice of reason in the play; of all the madmen in the play, his “madness” is the most obviously faked.

I think something important happens when Lear’s rage shifts from Cordelia to Kent. The fight between father and daughter was hopelessly entangled in politics right from the start, but I think Lear was trying to keep it intimate, family-focused. As such, Kent’s intercession is more than rudeness. It represents, to Lear, a branch of the political world suddenly piercing the bubble of family. Kent is telling Lear that he is wrong to banish Cordelia (which he obviously is). But he’s also saying, “This isn’t just about you, old man.”

He says, “See better, Lear, and let me still remain / The true blank of thine eye.” This could just apply to Cordelia (and Lear’s poor judgment), but “See better” can just as readily apply to the lords and attendants who surround them, stunned by the proceedings. And what does it mean that Kent is “the true blank” of Lear’s eye? Does “blank” mean target, as Samuel Johnson tells us? The image is of an eye suddenly struck blind, gone white with cataracts.

When Kent becomes Caius in Act Two, he becomes violent and rash, attacking Oswald and getting himself locked in the stocks. This doesn’t seem like Kentish behaviour, so we assume he is trying to make some sort of point, presumably to Lear (who still hasn’t learned to see better). What can Kent teach Lear through these incidents? That suffering is everywhere? That even the King’s servants are not invulnerable? These seem like heavy-handed lessons, and what’s worse, they don’t connect to Cordelia (who, though outside the action by this time, is being defended in absentia by the Fool).

Maybe the “true blank of thine eye” is what Kent is trying to abolish. He wants Lear to recognize him – that is, to see through his disguise and come to understand that he is loyal to his monarch, even now. “My life I never held but as a pawn / To wage against thine enemies.” Why else would he be such a boisterous, attention-getting servant? He wants to make Lear’s gaze fix on his eyes, and he wants Lear to listen to him long enough to see reason and undo the terrible mistakes he’s made.

What About Cordelia?

Cordelia is a puzzler. It’s easy to imagine her as the victim, and her forgiveness of her father in the latter half of the play, closely followed by her violent death, makes her seem martyr-like, or even Christlike. But look at it another way, and suddenly it’s Cordelia herself, with her obstinance and defiance in 1.1, who causes all the trouble in the play. If the first great character question in King Lear is “Why does Lear enact the love test?” the second question follows on its heels: “Why does Cordelia refuse to play?”

There’s another oddity about Cordelia’s behaviour, which R.A. Foakes points out in the introduction to the Arden Lear: “Once Lear is awakened, Cordelia addresses him only as king, not as father, and her aim is to restore him to a throne he keeps reminding her he no longer wants.” Why so formal? Has she truly forgiven him for his words and actions? And why does she want him back on the throne so badly? This is how she describes the French invasion:

O dear father,
It is thy business that I go about;
Therefore great France
My mourning and important tears hath pitied.
No blown ambition doth our arms incite,
But love, dear love, and our aged father’s right.

For Lear’s sake, she has convinced the King of France to lend her an army (and she’s in command of it, apparently, since France himself is nowhere to be seen). But what right does Lear have to rule in Britain? Didn’t he give up that right in 1.1? Is Cordelia trying to turn back time?

It reminds me of a similar case of denial in 5.3. After father and daughter have been captured by the British army, Lear famously fantasizes about the two of them living happily “like birds i’the cage.” Maybe these sorts of delusions are a family trait, something that Lear and Cordelia both share. In 1.1, Cordelia shatters Lear’s fantasy of a happy and harmonious family; and later, Lear returns the favour by ending Cordelia’s fantasy of leading an army and conquering Britain.

Once again, I don’t feel as though “delusions of grandeur” is really an adequate motivation for a character like Cordelia. But it’s more interesting than “martyr complex,” at the very least.

Blocking: "Nothing, my lord."

Thinking about the love test some more last night after writing the previous entry, I was struck by the visual asymmetry of the scene. Goneril and Regan both have husbands, and it makes sense to place them in pairs, so that the audience can start to associate Goneril with Albany and Regan with Cornwall (I still get them mixed up). But what about Cordelia? The odd one out.

As a mental challenge, I tried to envision a means of staging it symmetrically. I came up with a sort of a diamond shape, with Lear upstage centre, on his throne, G&A stage right, R&C stage left, and Cordelia...well, she’d have to go downstage centre, then, wouldn’t she, but facing up towards Lear. She’d have to kneel so we could see him. Most likely, they would all kneel until called upon to speak (some attendants might precede them to lay cushions or rugs down for them—pageantry is good).

Placing Cordelia downstage centre means two things. First, when she wants to whisper her asides to the audience, all she needs to do is literally look over her shoulder. The audience becomes her confidante, and sees the scene from her perspective. Second, when she stands up to speak her simple, earth-shattering line, “Nothing, my lord,” her back would be to the audience (ie. we would see nothing of her face)...but it would also mean that, depending on where you are sitting, your site line to Lear would also be blocked—Lear obliterated, made into a blindspot. Made into nothing by those three little words.

From there, I imagine the formality would break apart, Lear would get out of his throne, and things would start to move more naturally around the stage. But for the love test itself...yeah, that configuration just might work.

What About Lear?

NOTE: Because I know that some of the actors who read this site may eventually audition for my Lear, I want to point out that all of my speculations about characters are arbitrary and unfixed. I’m not making hard and fast choices about my production, and I certainly don’t want to take actorial choices out of your hands. I’d rather be proven wrong than right anyhow, and the best way to prove me wrong is to come out and audition.

So: What’s the deal with Lear?

The best place to start is at the beginning, since that’s where nearly everything goes to Hell. More than any other tragedy, this play seems to hinge upon a single action—Lear’s “love test,” demanding that his daughters publicly declare their love for him in exchange for lands and titles. Once it’s done, there’s no going back; the die is cast.

Therefore the key to understanding both Lear the character and Lear the play must lie in that action, that decision. Why does he do it? To modern eyes (and to level-headed characters like Kent) it seems like a pretty stupid thing to do. If not the test, then certainly Lear’s attitude towards Cordelia (who fails the test, or just refuses to participate) strikes us as rash and reprehensible—behaviour unbecoming to any man, much less a father and a king.

But it is not enough to simply call Lear rash (although he is). We need a better explanation, since so much of what follows depends upon his choice. Audiences want an explanation; and the actor playing Lear needs an explanation.

(Well, I guess it might be possible to play this scene as though the love test simply occurred to Lear spontaneously, right at that instant. But he says it is his “darker purpose,” as though he’s been harbouring this secret for awhile. And Kent and Gloucester’s lines right at the top of 1.1 also suggest that the King has something up his sleeve concerning “the division of the kingdoms.”)

As usual, Shakespeare tantalizes us with shreds and patches of psychology, but staunchly refuses to provide a definite explanation for Lear’s act. This omission is even more glaring if one reads the anonymous play that Lear is based upon (King Leir, it’s called—you can download it here if you’re interested). In that version, we get a whole scene of set-up. Leir, we learn, is a recent widower (Actor’s Note 1: grief clouds his judgment), and he confesses to his councilmembers that he can’t decide how to allocate his lands because he has no male heir (Actor’s Note 2: Leir resents his daughters for being female). His advisors suggest marrying off all three of the daughters, but Leir points out that Cordella, his youngest daughter, refuses to hook up (Actor’s Note 3: Cordella is already showing signs of resistance). Then he concocts the love test as a trap for Cordella:

Euen as she doth protest she loues me best,
Ile say, Then, daughter, graunt me one request,
To shew thou louest me as thy sisters doe,
Accept a husband, whom my selfe will woo.
This sayd, she cannot well deny my sute,
Although (poore soule) her sences will be mute:
Then will I tryumph in my policy,
And match her with a King of Brittany.

This might still seem rather cruel to our eyes, but at least it’s a plan. And more importantly, this Leir shows us plenty of motivations for implementing the test, and for banishing Cordella when she mucks it up. You could try to adopt one or all of these actors’ notes when playing Shakespeare’s Lear, and probably find support and justification for them by combing through the text. But Shakespeare doesn’t foreground Lear’s motivations for us—he deliberately makes the love test sudden, puzzling, and therefore harsh.

And so he should. That is, after all, what everyone on stage besides Lear is feeling. It may even be what Lear himself ends up feeling—I rather like the idea that he starts to recognize the inherent folly in the situation, but is too stubborn to back down (he is king, after all). But it doesn’t help the feeling that the whole test (and, in consequence, the whole play) is just a random accident, as casual and meaningless as a Freudian slip or a misplaced prop. I’m reminded of the dead fly in the printer at the start of Brazil, a catalyst for an absurd fantasia of epic proportions.

Lear may be fantastical at times, but I refuse to believe that it’s inherently absurd. That old king needs something from his daughters—needs to hear that he is loved by them—and he bribes and punishes them accordingly. I don’t know why he needs this so badly—Shakespeare obviously didn’t want us to know, at least not at first—but it’s a real human need that leads to real human actions...and real human suffering.

Intentions, Intentions

Back from Banff. I had a good time and heard many interesting ideas bandied about. Sadly, however, no one had anything to say about Lear, specifically. It seems the hottest Shakespeare plays for academics these days are All’s Well That Ends Well, The Winter’s Tale, and the ever-popular histories, especially Henry IV and V.

One of the most intriguing presentations, however, was about The Tempest. David Scott Kastan, a prof from Columbia University in New York City, gave a plenary speech entitled “Is The Tempest a New World Play?: Presentism, Historicism, and the Ethics of Criticism.” That’s a lot of “isms,” I know, but this is the same scholar who wrote “Shakespeare After Theory,” so his ideas aren’t that inaccessible. He was essentially drawing a distinction between scholars who attempt to read The Tempest as it would have been read in the Renaissance (“historicists”) and scholars who read the play through a contemporary filter of some sort (“presentists”)—post-colonialism is the most common example, although feminism and Freudian analysis crop up often too.

I’m oversimplifying to an absurd degree here, but essentially Kastan argued that we owe it to the literature we study to at least give historicism a try before we start applying all our own agendas to the text. It’s a somewhat controversial stance, because over the last 20 or 30 years most scholars have come to the conclusion that we simply can’t read for intention—that is, we are too far away in time to have a prayer of knowing what Shakespeare wanted us to get out of his plays, and so we have to acknowledge our own readerly biases, and view the plays accordingly.

What do I think? I think the argument is valuable in an academic context, but it’s moot in the theatre for two reasons. First, a group of actors (and designers, and crew etc.) can’t afford to follow one single “intention,” even if it happens to be the right one (ie. Shakespeare’s). It would make the play static and uninteresting. Theatre thrives because of its many voices and perspectives—at least one of which is historical (the author’s, I mean), but many of which are contemporary, and in many different ways.

Second, I could try to do a production that reflects Shakespeare’s intention with the text at every turn, but the audience would contemporize it through their own receptions. This experiment is ongoing at the New Globe Theatre in London, where Shakespeare’s plays are routinely done with ultra-traditional costumes and staging practices in an environment that strives to recreate the original theatrical circumstances as closely as possible. But guess what? The people who attend those plays are twenty-first century tourists and theatre fans. They dress like modern folks, they talk like modern folks, and you can be sure that they react to those plays like modern folks. They’re presentists, and even if you stuff them in a historicist box and seal it with a big historicist bow, they will still be in the Now.

Does this mean we shouldn’t try to ascertain Shakespeare’s intentions from his plays? Here’s my answer to that (ridiculously oversimplified again, but hey—this is a blog): Shakespeare had one intention for all of his plays, and one alone: he wanted them to be performed. Every time they were staged in the Old Globe, every time they’re staged in the New Globe, and every time they’re staged anywhere else, they’re different. He knew that. All he wanted was to see them done. So when we produce new versions (and even adaptations) of his plays for “presentist” audiences...we’re still serving his intentions. Everybody wins.

Okay, that’s it for theory for awhile, I promise. Next up, some rudimentary ruminations about characters, starting with...oh, let’s say...Lear, perhaps?

National Lampoon's Academic Vacation!

This weekend, I am heading to Banff to participate in the Pacific Northwest Renaissance Society's annual Interdisciplinary Renaissance Conference. Lots of stuffy academics trading yarns about dead white authors...and I’ll be one of them! (A stuffy academic, that is, not a dead white author). I’m presenting a paper on The Two Noble Kinsmen of all things.

I don’t have the schedule of events yet, but obviously, if anyone is presenting on anything even remotely connected to Lear, I’ll be there. I may just encounter of the academinc print-centric tunnel-vision that has thus far kept scholarly ideas a world apart from my theatric tasks...but you never know. There might even be a few actors or directors kicking around.

Later!

Counting the Crew

I’ve set up a date, three weeks down the road, for all the “executive artists” of Walterdale’s next season—directors, production managers, stage managers, and assistants—to meet and settle on matters of scheduling and so forth (I actually call them “Superfriends” in an effort to deflate some of the pomposity of “executive artists”). This means I need to find a stage manager, at least, and maybe one or two more head designers.

To that end, I got Jaclyn to lend me a copy of the “Production Manager’s Bible.” It lists a typical crew complement for a Walterdale show. Over the next six months, I (and Jaclyn) will have to find people to perform the following offstage roles:

Stage Manager
Assistant Stage Manager
Assistant Production Manager
Set Designer
Props Designer
Costume Designer
Make-Up and Hair Designer
Assistants to the Designers
Fight Coach
Dialect Coach
Choreographer
Vocal Coach
Musicians
Master Builder
Builders (4-6)
Painters (4-6)
Props Master/Builder
Sound Operator
Lighting Operator
Wardrobe (Laundry and Ironing Assistants)

From the scale of theatre I’m coming from, this seems like a colossal list. I’m used to working with a stage manager and maybe one or two designers. Assistants and volunteers are luxuries I’m not accustomed to. It’s inspiring and gratifying (I already feel grateful even though none of them have even done anything yet), but I shall have to ensure that their valuable time is put to good use.