30 Great Myths about Shakespeare Read Free Page A

drawing of characters from Titus Andronicus shows the Elizabethans' eclectic approach to historical costume.
    Reproduced by permission of the Marquess of Bath, Longleat House, Warminster, Wiltshire, Great Britain.
    If Elizabethan costumes mixed the contemporary and the historical, so too did props and language. A clock strikes anachronistically in Julius Caesar , and the wakeful Brutus, inhabitant of a scroll culture, sees “the leaf turned down / Where I left reading” (4.2.324–5). Gloucester, resident in Lear's ancient Britain, makes a joke about spectacles, first known in medieval Italy. The medieval Hamlet attends a university (Wittenberg) not founded until 1502; in the Trojan war setting of Troilus and Cressida Hector quotes Aristotle, who lived and wrote many centuries after Hector (rather as the Fool in King Lear acknowledges, “This prophecy Merlin shall make; for I live before his time” [3.2.95–6]). Aristotle was standard academic reading in Shakespeare's day, just as clocks and books and spectacles were familiar objects. Shakespeare's plays are rooted in the present. If Shakespeare wrote about only one city—London (see Myth 14)—it was always contemporary London.
    This is most obvious in the comedies. The Comedy of Errors changes the recognizably Roman slaves of its Plautine source to the more familiar Elizabeth servants. Elizabethan marriage conventions are very much to the fore in Midsummer Night's Dream , The Taming of the Shrew , and Much Ado about Nothing . In the comic-tragic world of Romeo and Juliet , Juliet leads the life of a typical cloistered wealthy Elizabethan daughter. It was natural for the Elizabethans to stage these plays in Elizabethan dress.
    Is it therefore natural that we should do so? After all, in 1590 Elizabethan dress was modern dress. A logic of equivalence might dictate that today we should costume Shakespeare's plays in contemporary dress. Indeed, some very successful productions have done so. In 2004 Trevor Nunn directed Ben Whishaw as Hamlet for generation Y. A teenage student, wearing jeans and a beanie, this Hamlet contemplated suicide while staring at his bottle of prescription anti-depressants. Gertrude (Imogen Stubbs) was that new discovery of the 1990s, a Yummy Mummy. Ophelia, dressed in her school uniform, danced alone in her bedroom with her iPod and earphones (thus motivating Hamlet's later misogynist jibe, directed against all her sex, “You jig ” (3.1.147; Whishaw's emphasis).
    Both Rory Kinnear's Hamlet (2010) and David Tennant's (2008) were placed in similarly effective modern-dress settings. When Ophelia appeared (in the Tennant Hamlet ) in her mad scene wearing only her underwear—an innocent floral cotton starter-bra and mini-shorts—the social impropriety and personal vulnerability of her uncontrolled behavior was conveyed more powerfully than a bawdy song alone could. A teenager talking (or singing) about sex does not shock us today or invite our concern; a teenager appearing in public in underwear does (Gertrude compassionately covered Ophelia with her pashmina). In the Kinnear Hamlet Claudius's spy-state was conveyed by besuited officials with clipboards and walkie-talkies exchanging information and receiving instructions. Similarly, when Romeo climbs the orchard walls of the Capulet estate in Romeo and Juliet , it is hard for us to appreciate the danger he runs in entering enemy territory. Banks of CCTV security monitors and patrol-guards with Alsatian dogs, as in Baz Luhrmann's film Romeo + Juliet , set the scene and create the atmosphere in ways we instantly comprehend. Today we understand the social statements made by modern dress when we no longer know how to “read” the sartorial status of codpieces.
    Modern stage business is a logical extension of modern costume. In Midsummer Night's Dream , Snug the joiner identifies himself to the onstage audience (lest they fear that he really is the lion he plays). When Kenneth Branagh directed the play