30 Great Myths about Shakespeare Read Free Page B

in 1990, Karl James's Snug removed his mask and came forward to the onstage audience of newlyweds on the line “Then know that I as Snug the joiner am” (5.1.221). He proceeded to distribute his business card; with three weddings he was clearly anticipating a lot of home improvements. This piece of stage business perfectly complemented the line it accompanied: both worked together to break the theatrical illusion.
    Modernizing need not always take us into the here-and-now. The 1930s has proved a congenial home for Shakespeare productions, as in Ian McKellen's Richard III (filmed by director Richard Loncraine), for example, which paralleled Richard's growing tyranny with the rise of fascism. Two Gentlemen of Verona is a comedy that seems firmly set in its own time, the product of a period that believed that male friendship was more important than heterosexual love (see Myth 10). In the last act this results in several (to us) un-psychologically motivated volte-faces, and the reduction of one of the heroines to an object, tossed between men like a pass-the-parcel prize. When David Thacker directed the play at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1991, he set it in the Cole Porter/Gershwins/Irving Berlin/Rogers and Hart world of the 1920s and 1930s—not the real world but the world of the Hollywood musical. In so doing, he replaced one set of cardboard conventions with another—but this time, conventions we understand and accept.
    Thus, there are no ideological reasons not to stage Shakespeare's plays in modern dress. There may, however, be some logical reasons not to do so. Not all the plays can leave the Elizabethan period. The Taming of the Shrew is based on a sine qua non of Renaissance domestic life: that a wife owes obedience to her husband. The 1950s is therefore probably the latest period to which one can transpose this play. In 1978 Michael Bogdanov set the play in the present and its Katherine, Paola Dionisotti, registered her discomfort: “I kept wondering why I just didn't get up and go”; from the 1960s onwards, the barriers to Katherine's liberty had come down so the 1978 setting made no sense. (Dionisotti again: “The point is that she can't . Kate can't get up and go.” 4 ) Recent productions which set the play in the present have avoided this problem by making obvious the plot's status as a play-within-the-play (the taming of the shrew is the plot of a play put on by traveling players for a deluded drunken tinker). This calls attention to the fact that all the characters in the plot are actually playing roles (the submissive wife being just another role). By removing the play from the realm of domestic reality, productions remove the problem of the characters' actions and attitudes (problems for our world, if not for Shakespeare's).
    Similar concerns apply to updates of Much Ado About Nothing . The sticking point in modern-dress productions comes in Act 5 when Hero passively accepts in marriage the man who has hastily and untrustingly rejected her at the altar in Act 4. When Nicholas Hytner directed the play (National Theatre, 2007), he created a Hero with attitude (an embryonic Beatrice) who had to be convinced of Claudio's genuine repentance before she would consent to the wedding going ahead. This was achieved by the economic addition of Hero as eavesdropper in Act 5, scene 3. She witnessed a sackclothed Claudio read the epitaph for his dead (as he thinks) bride and prostrate himself on her grave—whereupon she signaled permission to her father and the friar to proceed with Shakespeare's plot. When the BBC Shakespeare Retold updated Much Ado in 2005 to a contemporary newsroom setting (Bea and Ben the news anchors, Claude on the sports desk, Hero the weathercaster), everything worked except a career-girl Hero taking back Claude at the end. (So the BBC gave us the following dialogue: Claude . But when you've had some time, maybe you would think about carrying on where we left off? Hero . What get married to