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Shakespearean Themes
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15187 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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4 / 1989 |
5,226 Words |
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Sam Schoenbaum
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"If making many books there is no end"--so pronounced the sage Koheleth in Ecclesiastes (12:12), one of the Wisdom Books of the Old Testament--"and much study is a weariness of flesh." I remember the late F.P. Wilson, the much-revered Merton Professor of English at Oxford University, once remarking that someone trying to read everything written on Hamlet would have no time to read anything else--including Hamlet. I expect that that indeed may be the case. For more than a decade now, Rupin Desai, a professor of English at the University of New Delhi, has been publishing Hamlet Studies, billed--no doubt correctly--as "the first journal devoted exclusively to a single literary work": a biannual compendium of articles, notes, book reviews, and reports on stage productions of the tragedy. Professor Marvin Rosenberg of the University of California at Berkeley is now bringing to completion his Masks study of the stage history of Hamlet, the successor to his already published books on King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth. This one is to occupy two volumes. As the sage said, of the making of books there is no end. Nor is there ever likely to be.
Yet we can all do our bit: In this article I will have sufficient compassion for the historian to dwell no further on Hamlet, although it is fair to forewarn readers that the play will be alluded to. Here I will zero in on three plays: Julius Caesar, As You Like It (both of which have been abundantly performed and studied in the classroom), and Antony and Cleopatira, which has been less familiar to spectator and nonspecialist readers. I have chosen these plays because of their rich theatrical resonances and because, self-centered wretch that I am, they are among my own favorites. Antony and Cleopatra is now in process of being rediscovered on the stage and in criticism, if such a thing is possible for one of Shakespeare's major tragedies--a phenomenon that just goes to show, to vary an old chestnut, that the more things change, the more likely they are to be different.
Shakespearian Playhouses
The Shakespeare industry is of course a relatively recent phenomenon. The plays were originally both items to be devoured in sixpenny quarto editions--sometimes with the author's name acknowledged on the title page, sometimes not--or better yet, to be seen at the Theatre, the Globe, or another Bankside amphi-theater, or (after 1609) at the Blackfriars, a more intimate enclosed house in the heart of the metropolis. The London playhouses were the wonder of the Continent, duly commented on by foreign visitors. Thus, the German merchant Samuel Kiechel, touching down in the capital in 1594, noted that "there are some peculiar houses, which are so made as sometimes to have about three galleries over one another inasmuch as a great number of people always enter to see such an entertainment." Two years later, a native, the antiquary William Lambarde, noted that "such as go to Paris Garden [where the Swan playhouse was situated], the Bel Savage [an inn used as a playhouse], or [the] Theatre to behold bear-baiting, interludes, or fence play, can account of any pleasant spectacle, [if] they first pay one penny at the gate, another at the entry of the scaffold, and the third for a quiet standing."
The first record of what is in all probability Shakespeare's Julius Caesar occurs in 1599 in the travel book of a Swiss physician visiting London. "On the 21st of September, after dinner, at about two o'clock," wrote Thomas Platter of Basel, "I went with my party across the water; in the straw-thatched
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