Shakespeare on Toast E-Book

Ben Crystal

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 283

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Actor, producer and director Ben Crystal revisits his acclaimed book on Shakespeare for the 400th anniversary of his death, updating and adding three new chapters. Shakespeare on Toast knocks the stuffing from the staid old myth of the Bard, revealing the man and his plays for what they really are: modern, thrilling, uplifting drama. The bright words and colourful characters of the greatest hack writer are brought brilliantly to life, sweeping cobwebs from the Bard – his language, his life, his world, his sounds, his craft. Crystal reveals man and work as relevant, accessible and alive – and, astonishingly, finds Shakespeare's own voice amid the poetry. Whether you're studying Shakespeare for the first time or you've never set foot near one of his plays but have always wanted to, this book smashes down the walls that have been built up around this untouchable literary figure. Told in five fascinating Acts, this is quick, easy and good for you. Just like beans on toast.

Leseprobe

Praise for Shakespeare on Toast

‘Ben Crystal’s witty and engaging book is a relaxed, user-friendly reminder that enjoying Shakespeare should be as easy as breathing.’ Dominic Dromgoole, Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe

‘A brilliantly enjoyable, light-hearted look at Shakespeare which dispels the myths and makes him accessible to all. I love it!’ Judi Dench

‘Ben Crystal’s excellent book is an ideal way to gain an understanding of why Shakespeare is so brilliant and so enjoyable.’ Sir Richard Eyre

‘A masterclass for modern beginners and old hands alike.’ The Times

‘Humorous, unpretentious and fascinating.’ Independent on Sunday

‘A tasty snack with genius … Having Crystal as a companion through the stickier parts of Hamlet and Macbeth is like going to the theatre with an intelligent friend … Crystal tries his damnedest as an actor, scholar and Shakespeare’s biggest fan to demystify the Bard for doubting 21st-century theatre-phobics.’ Katy Guest, Independent

‘There are gems of close reading and theatrically focused attention throughout … Crystal ends up admirably succeeding in his ambition to provide a toolbox for getting to grips with Shakespeare’s plays.’ Steven Poole, Guardian

‘Remarkable … This book should be read.’ Sydney Morning Herald

‘Ben Crystal is the Jamie Oliver of Shakespeare.’ BBC Radio 5

‘An exhilarating and impassioned introduction to Shakespeare’s plays.’ Shakespeare Bookshop Newsletter

‘A succulent slice of the Bard … Crystal wears his erudition lightly … Enormously enjoyable!’ Good Book Guide

‘Fascinating and wide-reaching.’ Linguist

‘Ben Crystal is a “restaurateur” par excellence for serving up a seemingly simple snack that actually has enough complexity to delight a gourmet.’ Times Educational Supplement

‘Insightful blasts of textual analysis’ Times Literary Supplement

‘An excellent introductory text.’ Glasgow Herald

‘Shakespeare on Toast is reassuring and appealing … you’ll want all your Shakespeare-resistant friends to read it.’ Around The Globe

‘Fascinating … Ben’s knowledge comes across naturally and without pretension. He brings the understanding of an actor together with the analysis of an academic and it works.’ National Association for the Teaching of English, Classroom magazine

‘Fun and fascinating … English staff would be delighted with Crystal’s practical suggestions to help the reader in deciphering and appreciating Shakespeare’s works as they stand rather than “in translation”.’ School Librarian

‘Could Ben Crystal be the Simon Schama of literature? Crystal succeeds in providing a pacey, informative and accessible “manual” to Shakespeare.’ inthenews.co.uk

‘An enthusiast bursts the bubble of Shakespeare elitism, opening its doors to all … This should be required reading for actors, anyone doing English Literature at school or university. Highly recommended.’ civilian-reader.blogspot.com

Extract from The Last Action Hero © 1993 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All rights reserved. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures.

Extract from Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit © 2005 Aardman Animations Ltd. All rights reserved.

Lyrics from ‘Shakespeare’ reproduced by kind permission of Akala and Illa State Records.

Parts of Act 5, Scene 10 were adapted from a piece in The Independent.

Every effort has been made to seek permission to reproduce other copyright material.

Drawing on page 48 by Jim Alexander Graph on page 215 by Nick Halliday Graph on page 250 © Emma Pallant

BEN CRYSTAL

SHAKESPEARE ON TOAST

GETTING A TASTE FOR THE BARD

This revised and expanded edition published in the UK in 2016 by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

Previously published in the UK in 2008 by Icon Books Ltd

Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA or their agents

Distributed in the UK, Europe and Asia by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road, Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW

Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West, 1700 Fourth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710

Distributed in Canada by Publishers Group Canada, 76 Stafford Street, Unit 300, Toronto, Ontario M6J 2S1

Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd, PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest, NSW 2065

Distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball, Office B4, The District, 41 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock 7925

ISBN: 978-178578-030-1

Text copyright © 2008, 2016 Ben Crystal The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset in Minion by Marie Doherty

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

Contents

Prologue

Act 1 Setting the Scene

Act 2 Curtain Up

Act 3 Listen Carefully

Act 4 Catch the Rhythm

Act 5 Enjoy the Play

Epilogue

Props

Supporting Artists

Stage Management

Index

About the author

Ben Crystal was the co-writer of Shakespeare’s Words (Penguin, 2002) and The Shakespeare Miscellany (Penguin, 2005) with his father David Crystal. His first solo book, Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard (Icon, 2008) was shortlisted for the 2010 Educational Writer of the Year Award. Springboard Shakespeare, a series of introductions for Arden Shakespeare/Bloomsbury, was published in 2013 and An Illustrated Dictionary of Shakespeare was published in April 2015 with OUP (writing again with his father).

In 2011 Ben performed Hamlet in Original Pronunciation, and in 2012 he was the curator and creative director on a CD of Shakespeare in Original Pronunciation for the British Library.

He is the artistic director of Passion in Practice and its Shakespeare Ensemble. Together they have performed staged readings of Macbeth, Henry V and Dr Faustus at the Wanamaker Playhouse, Shakespeare’s Globe, and produced minimal rehearsal, cue-script rehearsed, sold-out limited runs of these plays in full production at a Wanamaker-like loft in London. In 2015, they performed Pericles in OP at Daniel Harding’s Interplay Festival. Pericles was raised in three days, underscored by Max Richter’s Four Seasons: Recomposed, played live by the Trondheim Soloists with violinist Daniel Hope.

@bencrystal / @passionpracticebencrystal.com / passioninpactice.com

Prologue

Never, never, never, never, never.

King Lear, Act 5, Scene 3, line 306

That quote is one of the most stunning lines in Shakespeare, and after reading this book you’ll be able to give a number of very good reasons why this is true.

But first and foremost: this book is not a number of things.

This book is not a particularly ‘actorly’ book, full of stories of acting Shakespeare. There are plenty of other books out there full of fabulous anecdotes about acting Shakespeare.

Nor is this really a scholarly book, full of incredibly complicated analyses of themes that may (or may not) be in Shakespeare’s plays. There are plenty of academic books already out there too.

When I wrote this book, I looked around to see if anyone else had already done a similar thing, and while there are plenty of quite tricky, advanced books on Shakespeare, and plenty of ‘Shakespeare Made Easy’-type books, there didn’t seem to be one that tried to make Shakespeare’s plays accessible without dumbing them down.

There were also dozens of ‘Introductions to Shakespeare’ available. I couldn’t find a single one that shows the reader how to make Shakespeare their own; that once read, has given them the ability to go to any Shakespeare play and feel comfortable reading or watching it.

This book is certainly not the only way into Shakespeare.

But it is quick, easy, straightforward, and good for you.

Just like beans on toast.

Ben Crystal London, November 2015

Act 1

Setting the Scene

Scene 1

Hollywood

Here’s a thing: Shakespeare is partly responsible for the film career of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Schwarzenegger got his first part in an American film (Hercules in New York, 1970) because Joe Weider, his friend and promoter, convinced the film’s producers that Arnie had been a great Shakespearian actor in Austria, which, of course, he hadn’t.

As it turns out, Weider’s claim didn’t end up being so far from the truth: in 1993, in the film The Last Action Hero, a young boy – the world’s biggest fan of the world’s best action hero – imagines Schwarzenegger as a Terminator-style Hamlet. The boy is watching Laurence Olivier in the 1948 film Hamlet: Hamlet is about to kill his murderous uncle Claudius – but hesitates, ponders the situation. ‘Don’t talk. Just do it!’ the boy mutters at the screen. Suddenly, the muscle-bound Schwarzenegger has replaced Olivier:

HAMLET: Hey Claudius? You killed my father … [He picks Claudius up] Big mistake! [He throws Claudius through a stained-glass window; Claudius’ body falls down a cliff]

NARRATOR: Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, and Hamlet is taking out the trash! [Multiple shots of Hamlet fighting and killing guards. He slices through a curtain with his sword to reveal the king’s advisor Polonius standing behind it. Polonius pushes Hamlet’s sword aside]

POLONIUS: [smiling] Stay thy hand, fair prince.

HAMLET: Who said I’m fair? [He shoots Polonius with an Uzi. Multiple shots of Hamlet walking through Elsinore castle, shooting soldiers with his Uzi]

NARRATOR: No one is going to tell this sweet prince good night.

HAMLET: [cigar in his mouth] To be or not to be? [taking out his lighter] Not to be. [lights his cigar, castle explodes]

Schwarzenegger as Hamlet? Surprising, perhaps, but Shakespeare really does seem to get everywhere in this modern life. Slightly less surprising might be Shakespeare’s part in the budding career of the young Sir John Gielgud, who became one of the most acclaimed Shakespearian actors of the 20th century.

Gielgud’s first job as a professional actor was as a spear-carrier in a 1921 production of Henry V. One of the smallest parts in a play, a spear-carrier usually has very few lines (if any), and as the name suggests, the part requires the actor to stand still at the back of the stage, holding a spear/sword/bowl of fruit, look pretty, and bow. Not to be discouraged by his measly one line, the young actor continued acting, and eight years later Gielgud performed what many people say was the greatest Hamlet ever.

Hamlet is considered to be the most sought-after and the most elusive role for actors, and the play remains the most produced of Shakespeare’s works; countless productions, interpretations and re-interpretations have been dreamt up, trying to nail down The Definitive Hamlet. Schwarzenegger’s, though, is the only one to have thrown Claudius out of a window.

Talk about character assassination.

Scene 2

A present-day street

Shakespeare invented the word assassination, a Bard-fact that will always boggle my mind. The word assassin has an 8th-century Arabic origin, but assassination is all Shakespeare.

Even-handed, far-off, hot-blooded, schooldays, well-respected are Shakespeare’s too, as are useful, moonbeam and subcontract. If not for William S, we would be without laughing yourself into stitches, setting your teeth on edge, not sleeping a wink, being cruel only to be kind, and playing fast and loose, all adding to what turns out to be a very long list. In total, he introduced around 1,700 words and a horde of well-known phrases that we still use today.

Most of us would be happy if we added just one word to the language, never mind well over a thousand that last over 400 years.

Think (or Google) assassination and JFK comes up. Then, most likely, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and Julius Caesar. Their assassins are just as infamous: John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, Brutus et al. Not to mention Guy Fawkes, one of the best-known (although failed) assassins, who attempted to blow up King James I and Parliament in November 1605.

Shortly after Fawkes’ botched effort, Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, partly, some think, in response to the civil unrest of the time. And it’s also the play in which he coined the word assassination.

Now, in the early 21st century, Shakespeare really is everywhere.

Elvis quotes him in his No. 1 hit ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ His plays are performed everywhere in countless languages. There have been productions using actors from all over the planet in the virtual computer world, Second Life. At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2015 (which runs for only 22 days) there were dozens and dozens of productions, either of his plays or that used his plays as a starting point. And he’s not just in theatres, of course.

Although the first film of a Shakespeare play (King Lear) was made way back in 1899, it’s probably Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 movie Romeo + Juliet that has done more in recent times than anything else to make Shakespeare more of a household name.

With 1,105 films to his name in November 2015, this writer from a small Warwickshire town four centuries ago is far and away the most prolific writer of movies: in 2015 alone, there were 42 films made of his plays (never mind the thousands of fridge magnets, mugs and soft toys of his likeness).

The only writers with more screen credits to their names aren’t writers of movies, but writers of soap operas. It’s become a bit of a cliché to say it, but it’s still true: if Shakespeare were alive today he’d be writing for the soaps rather than the movies or the theatre.

But more on that later.

Scene 3

A library

Despite this fame and apparent worldwide success, there’s something about Shakespeare that makes him feel inaccessible to many people. It seems that

Shakespeare has become classed as high art – as literature. He didn’t start out that way. His plays were originally the tools of actors; only much later were they books to read rather than plays to perform, as 80 per cent of his audience hadn’t learnt to read. Literature with a capital L has claimed him, and that acclaim has caused modern Shakespeare audiences either to revere or to hate him, neither of which are Good Things.Shakespeare often appears cumbersome because it looks like he wrote in Olde English, which can make his plays seem to be full of unfamiliar words.Shakespeare writes in poetry a fair amount of the time, and the very idea of ‘poetry’ puts a lot of people off. Not only that, but he uses a style of poetry that can be daunting just to look at.

The upshot of all this is that Shakespeare is often dumbed down and made ‘accessible’ by diluting, translating or rewriting his plays into modern English to try to draw people to his work. Either that or he’s ignored in a cocktail of panic and preconception that he’ll be too much hard work or just plain dull.

But Shakespeare is the man who made people believe there was an island owned by a magician (in The Tempest) and that statues could come to life by the power of love (in The Winter’s Tale).

He’s only Literature-with-a-capital-L until you put him back into context as an Elizabethan writer, not a 21st-century idol. Then, once you discover the key to it all, reading Shakespeare’s poetry is a bit like following the clues in a Sherlock Holmes novel, or reading The Da Vinci Code: when you discover that he wrote his directions to his actors into the poetry, and work out how to decipher them, it all makes a lot more sense.

As for the words, well, admittedly, some of the words he uses might not have been in general use for a few hundred years, but a rather cooperative 95 per cent are words we know and use every day.

Hold that thought for a second: only 5 per cent of all the different words in all of Shakespeare’s plays will give you a hard time. That means there’s more contextual knowledge needed to watch an episode of the American political TV drama series The West Wing than there is to get through one of Shakespeare’s plays.

The problem is, many give up by the time they get to the words. Successfully vault the Long Jump of Literature, stumble over the Pit of Poetry, take a quick look at the actual words he used, and the slightly odd spellings slam the final nail in the coffin. Whichever play has been briefly picked up is left once more to gather dust.

This isn’t the way it has to be.

I’m going to show you how to read the instruction manual that is a Shakespeare play, because that’s what they all are. Manuals, written by Shakespeare, for his actors, on how to perform great stories. It’s the method that got me into the plays, and if it worked for me, who once wouldn’t be seen dead near a production of Shakespeare, it’ll work for you.

The key to it all is Theatre: both the space he wrote for and the event that the people were paying to see.

Directing the stage

When reading, or interpreting Shakespeare for the stage, we only have his words. Everything else is left open and the only tool we really have is our imagination, which has to work hard to understand a series of coded instructions.

One of the best ways I’ve heard it put, no one other than a master chef should be able to look at a recipe and tell you what a dish will taste like. No one other than a master conductor should be able to look at all the black dots of a full Mozart score and hum the confluence of musical parts to you. No one other than Shakespeare’s actors were meant to read the separate parts that comprise a play.

Too often our first introduction to Shakespeare is being handed the printed play, the full score, rather than letting us hear it being played. As they say, they’re called Plays not Reads.

Take a look at any first Act of any Shakespeare play, any one will do. Look at the page, at what Will has given us – he hasn’t given us much: Act, Scene, entrance of characters, names and then speeches:

KING LEAR Actus primus, scoena prima

[Enter Kent, Gloucester, and Edmond.]

KENT I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.

GLOUCESTER It did always seem so to us …

No stage directions, no mention of character age, or background. Contrast that with, say, Act 1 of Arthur Miller’s plays, where stage direction or character background can take up over two pages:

THE CRUCIBLE

ACT ONE (An Overture)

A small upper bedroom in the home of REVEREND SAMUEL PARRIS, Salem, Massachusetts, in the spring of the year 1692.

There is a narrow window at the left. Through its leaded panes the morning sunlight streams. A candle still burns near the bed …

The scene-setting goes on for another seven or eight lines – then Miller gives us four pages of historical setting, then some stage directions for the actor playing Parris, and THEN the dialogue begins …

It’s a relief it doesn’t happen in Hamlet.

Hamlet is 33 years old, he has a beard, dressed in black. He likes going for walks in graveyards, and spent time while studying as an amateur theatrical …

Although they aren’t as explicitly laid out as Miller’s, there are just as many stage directions in Shakespeare’s plays as there are entrances into the Labyrinth (1986).

Worm: It’s full of openings, just you ain’t seeing them … Things aren’t always what they seem, so you can’t take anything for granted.

Scene 4

Stratford-upon-Avon

Context – what he wrote and when he wrote it – is everything, because no one knows who Shakespeare (the man) really was. Some of the very few absolute facts about the man himself that we know for definite are that

There was once a man called William Shakespeare.He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon.He married Anne Hathaway, a woman at least seven years older than him, from his home town of Stratford-upon-Avon; they had three children together.He is buried in Stratford-upon-Avon.A number of really quite wonderful plays have been written under this name.

Add to that a few details of property we know he owned, of legal issues he was involved in, and half a dozen signatures. And that’s all we’ve got. But no manuscripts – with the exception of a small part of a play, Sir Thomas More, thought to be written by Shakespeare – no notes, or diaries. Nothing of consequence, in fact, that gives any indication as to what kind of man he was. Except his plays and poems.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as far as we’re concerned. It doesn’t matter who Shakespeare might have been, because who he was isn’t as important to us as when he was and what he did. But because so little about the man has been discovered, his life has become a bit of an enigma. And this seems to make people doubt that he wrote the plays.

This is not a rare thing. Almost nothing is known about the legendary blues guitarist and singer Robert Johnson (1911–38). Many consider him to be the king of the Delta blues singers, yet there are only two photos of him in existence, almost nothing is known about his early life, there are varying stories surrounding his death (the most popular being that his whisky was poisoned by a jealous juke-joint owner, who’d caught Johnson flirting with his wife), and there are three different ideas about where he’s buried. All we really have to go on are the 29 songs and a handful of alternative takes that he recorded. But he was so good, a legend has developed around him that he wasn’t able to play the blues until he went to a crossroads at midnight and the devil tuned his guitar for him. Not happy with the idea that he could naturally be that talented, people developed a magical reason for his talent. Just like Shakespeare.

Because the plays are held in such high regard, it’s natural that we want to reveal the man behind them. So a lot of people have spent a lot of time trying to divine the man from his work, to find out who he was and what made him tick, in order to shed more light on the plays.

A number of authorities on Shakespeare alive today think Shakespeare’s plays were written by ‘someone else’. There’s a comfort to be had from the idea that the mind behind greatness is regal, or rich – or better, a group of people. The contenders for authorship include Queen Elizabeth I, the playwright Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Oxford, and Sir Francis Bacon. A couple of these contenders were categorically dead while Shakespeare was still writing, but I’m really not going to get into all that.

I’d say there’s a greater deal of comfort to be had from the idea that normal people can be geniuses. Can a desk clerk called Albert possibly be the father of the theory of relativity? Or a non-university-educated son of a glover be the world’s greatest playwright? Surely not. That would make these people human, take the sheen off the lustre of their greatness, and stop them from being accessible only to the great and the good.

Not surprisingly then, one of the most frequent questions I get asked when people discover I’m into Shakespeare is: Who do you think really wrote the plays? My answer is always the same:

I don’t care who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays.

There are 39 plays and 154 sonnets ascribed to someone called Shakespeare. I’d be the first to admit that some of the writing isn’t so hot, but most of it is absolutely jaw-droppingly, groundbreakingly breathtaking, I mean really, really quite brilliant, and the plays are what bake my cake, not so much the man and his life.

With 39 known plays and a collection of sonnets, Shakespeare may not be the most prolific Elizabethan writer (Thomas Heywood, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s, claimed to have a hand in over 200 works), but his plays were loved then, and 400 years on, whoever he was, he is now generally considered to be the greatest writer of the English language.

Beyond that, most of everything else ‘known’ about him is speculation, so I’m not going to discuss whether his birth and death dates are actually the same, where he might have gone during his ‘lost’ years, where he lived in London, whether or not he ate toast, and whether he was Catholic or Protestant, gay or straight. No one knows any of these things about him for sure, and we probably never will, but there are plenty of fascinating books out there that try to guess.

If some part of Shakespeare’s life is relevant, I’ll mention it, but I say again, a good solid part of Shakespeare’s life is a mystery to us. With the smattering of signatures and legal papers that we have, we actually know more about him than we do about many of his contemporaries, but that still isn’t very much to go on. Perhaps 90 per cent of his life is shrouded in mystery.

See, I just used the word ‘perhaps’. So much of this man is guesswork.

So instead, I’m going to concentrate on what Elizabethan life was like, what it would have been like going to the theatre in Shakespeare’s time, how different an experience it would have been compared to our time, why Shakespeare wrote in poetry, and exactly why all of that is so very important if you want to break open his plays.

Scene 5

An Elizabethan theatre

While we may not know much about the man, we know quite a lot about the time he wrote in, and the plays themselves:

Incredibly, virtually every word he wrote was penned over the course of twenty years, from about 1590 to 1610, during which time there were some huge changes in Elizabethan society.Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne until 1603, then King James VI of Scotland succeeded her. Plays written in her reign are usually referred to as Elizabethan, and Jacobean in James’ reign.Going to the theatre in Shakespeare’s time was a very different experience from going to the theatre nowadays; it was probably more like a modern football match. We know from diaries of visitors to London that the theatres were rowdy, drunken places, so …… there was no ‘theatre etiquette’ that made the audience sit or stand still quietly. That air of formality developed only in the last couple of hundred years.In Shakespeare’s time, rarely would a play be repeated – only if a play did really well would you have the luxury of being able to see it twice – as there was usually a new play on every day. That never happens now …… but even if a play was repeated, if you’d seen it once would you want to pay to see it again (see the box on page 21)?Consequently, as you might imagine, the demand for new plays was huge. Everyone would be trying to write them, much like everyone in Hollywood has written a screenplay. Thirty-nine of Shakespeare’s plays have survived the last four centuries – more might well have been lost to time – but that still means he must have been writing at least a couple of new plays every year. (Compare that to modern playwrights, who might write and get a new play produced perhaps once every two years or so.)

The plague (or the Black Death, to give its more ‘fun’ title) hit London many times during Shakespeare’s life. When it hit, the playhouses and theatres were closed – the disease was so contagious and the audiences were packed in so tightly that the theatres would have been a real breeding ground for the plague to spread – and the demand for new plays disappeared overnight.

With the theatres closed, the theatre companies and the playwrights were out of work, and needing money (imagine the hordes of TV writers looking for work if TV was banned for two years …).

How much did it cost to go to the theatre in Elizabethan times?

A typical wage in 1594 was 8 old pence a day; in Shakespeare’s Globe you had the choice of several places to watch and hear a play.

For a penny, you could stand in the yard around the stage, as a ‘groundling’.For twopence, you could sit on a wooden seat in a covered gallery set out in a semi-circle around the yard. There were three tiers of galleries.For another penny, you could hire a cushion to make the seats a little more comfortable (despite the fleas).For sixpence, you could sit in the Lords’ Gallery – seats placed at either side of the balcony at the back of the stage, which meant you were facing the audience, and looking down on the play from behind. Like the boxes of modern theatres, it was more for people who wanted to be seen rather than see.

Sunlit, rowdy, drunken, elaborately built places for the most part, the playhouses would have been a popular destination – a circular, hemmed-in, almost secret world away from the rest of the city – but more on this in Act 2 …

Theatre companies could make money by selling a printer manuscripts of the plays they’d performed, but printing was still a relatively new thing. William Caxton had brought the printing press to England only a hundred years beforehand, and the process was still fairly complicated. A page of text would be set using letter blocks, and it wasn’t unknown for the printer to run out of blocks or space, so spellings would vary depending on how many e’s he had to hand, as well as how much space was left on the page. Once set, the page would be pressed, then the blocks would be broken up and used to make another page. It would have been a loooong process.

Copyright law was a little different back then, and it worked like this: once a playwright had finished writing, he’d sell his play (and its copyright) to the theatre company for performance. The theatre company could then make money by selling the play to the printer, but the playwright wouldn’t see a single penny of that sale. Likewise, any money the printer made from sales of copies of that play would never be seen by the theatre company or the playwright.

In times of plague, with the theatres shut, selling plays to a printer was often a theatre company’s only way of making money. Playwrights, however, were left with the option of either trying to print unused manuscripts of their own, or writing poetry. Or, unthinkable though it might be, getting a proper job.

Selling unused manuscripts would have been hard – selling copies of plays that had been performed was hard enough – as there just wasn’t the demand. Paper was expensive, 80 per cent of Elizabethans couldn’t read, and, after all, plays were written to be performed, not read.

The lack of demand, the loss of the copyright, and the fact that more fame and money would come from performance, meant that even during plague epidemics, writers in Elizabethan times weren’t interested in having their plays printed – if there isn’t any money in it, what’s the point?

Change of hands

Shakespeare seems to have been no different. During the plague years of 1593–94, when work and money would have been scarce to non-existent, a couple of his plays were published in quarto (see box on page 26), but it appears that he spent most of his time concentrating on writing, rather than publishing.

In 1599, he became a shareholder of the newly built Globe Theatre, and so would have received 10 per cent of any profits the theatre made, including any monies from printing plays. There would have been bills to pay from the building of the new Globe too, but still no major printing of his works took place while he was alive.

Ben Jonson was the first playwright who took an interest in printing his own plays, and supervised the publication of his Works in 1616. Eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays were published in the paperback-equivalent quarto (mostly unofficially) during his lifetime. Indeed, some of these quartos are thought to have been undertaken by rival companies, half-remembered scribblings from having watched the play and then printing the results. They’re often referred to as ‘bad quartos’, and they certainly vary greatly in quality. There’s no record of Shakespeare being involved in their printing.

For most of us, 400 years on, our first meeting with Shakespeare is in a book and on a page, which is ironic, as all evidence points towards the fact that this would be far from the way Elizabethan audiences would have received them – and more to the point, given that he didn’t seem to want them printed, far from the way Shakespeare would have intended them to be received.

I like the idea that Shakespeare wasn’t interested in having his plays printed. It makes sense. Don’t read my plays, come and see them! Nowadays we get caught up reading the plays and not watching them so much.

The result of this apparent printing reticence, though, is that we nearly lost half of them to history. Original single publications of Shakespeare’s plays (called ‘quartos’) are incredibly rare, and no one (yet) has discovered a treasure chest of original manuscripts that Shakespeare locked away for safe-keeping.

Half of Shakespeare’s plays, like many of those of his contemporaries, might have disappeared entirely were it not for two of his actors who took it upon themselves to bring all his works together and print them. Seven years after Shakespeare died, they published a book called the First Folio – which became one of the most important books printed in theatre, literary, and linguistic history.

If this little book hadn’t been published in 1623, we would have lost eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays – including The Tempest, The Comedy of Errors, Macbeth and Twelfth Night – and, as the other eighteen were only scattered about in quarto, we might have lost them too (this count excludes the three plays that have been acknowledged in recent times as being written, at least in part, by Shakespeare: Cymbeline, Edward III, and The Two Noble Kinsmen).

Folio or quarto?

A play would be printed on paper, which at the time was very expensive to make. To save money, a piece of paper would be either

folded into quarters – these editions were known as quartos and were much cheaper to produce (like a modern paperback), and therefore to buy, as you’d get eight pages from one piece;or folded in half – these editions were known as folios and were more expensive, as you’d have only four sides to print on.