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.