Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, does it. Likewise, Peter Quince, carpenter of Athens. They write for actors. And writing for actors, they tell us something about how the playwright who’s written them writes for actors.

1

Near the beginning of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a couple of elders consider a son's future. It's recently been observed that ‘Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits’ (1.1.2). Now, having heard ‘sad talk’ from Antonio's brother on the subject of his nephew, Proteus, the servant Panthino reports to this master what he's heard:

The uncle's complaint is that ‘living dully … at home’ doesn't just ‘sluggardize’ (1.1.7) a young man's ‘wits’; it stores up ‘great impeachment to his age / In having known no travel in his youth’ (1.3.15–16).

This conversation, or a version of it, must have been the constant chatter up and down England in Shakespeare's youth, as fathers, not only ‘elites’ (like Antonio) but tradesmen, like John Shakespeare, aimed to secure employment for their sons to set them up for life. Given his evident ambitions for his son, it was surely a conversation Henry Field, a man of very ‘slender reputation’, had, and perhaps with John Shakespeare. They were near enough neighbours in the market town of Stratford-upon-Avon, the Shakespeares living at the Rother Market end of Henley Street, the Fields, down towards the river along Bridge Street; their houses three minutes walk from each other. They worked in parallel trades, Field a tanner, employed in the heavy leather industry that dealt in cattle hides, an insalubrious process that required hides to be soaked in an infusion of bird droppings and dog dung or stale beer and urine then layered and steeped in a pit for a year in an oak bark solution, while Shakespeare was employed at the lighter end of the trade, a whittawer. Tawing sheep and goat hides with alum and oil, he was preparing skins for use in his main business, the highly skilled craft of glove making (Cherry 1991, p. 295).

Of apes and art

How did he do it? A working-class lad from a modest provincial market town (population 1,500) two days’ ride (or ten days’ walk) from London and from the public, purpose-built playhouses that only in his adolescence were being built in the metropolis (the Theatre, 1576; the Rose, 1587), establishing a brand new cultural industry, the one that would occupy his adult life: how did the boy from Stratford-upon-Avon become the playwright who wrote King Lear? Hamlet? Twelfth Night? Measure for Measure? Troilus and Cressida? The Winter's Tale? The eight plays of the double history tetralogy, Richard II to Richard III by way of the three parts of Henry VI, the two parts of Henry IV and the life of the ‘mirror of all Christian kings’, Henry V?

January 6, 2011. I begin, in film mode, with a reverse shot. Last year’s performance survey opened in long shot, with a view from a bridge. I was ankle-deep in snow on the old tramway bridge where it crosses the Avon, looking at another bridge, one distantly under construction three naked storeys up, bleak in the freezing winds that turned its exposed concrete blue. That bridge was connecting the nearly completed, newly rebuilt Royal Shakespeare Theatre to an eight-storey observation platform towering over it. A year later, my fancied camera shot reversed, I’m on the finished walkway bridge, standing behind steel and sheet glass looking down at a Narnia-esque winter townscape laid out like some children’s board game devised by C. S. Lewis. From here, even in the gloom that passes for daylight in England in January, I see the shape of the Malvern Hills and, beyond them, I imagine Wales.

So, I muse. Who'd have put money on it? It’s finished. Actually finished! The project that took three years and cost £112.8 million: the RST has reopened ‘on time, on budget’ (a phrase in the RSC’s PR lexicon that keeps popping up like a yahoo window) and in time to celebrate the company’s 50th anniversary.

Of course, it won’t officially reopen until March when the Queen makes a visit (which will also remember the charter Peter Hall secured in 1961, ironically establishing, it was said at the time, that the ‘royal’ in the company’s new name meant that the RSC ‘virtually belongs to the nation’). And for most of us it won’t really reopen until the inaugural production of the season hits the stage in April. But in fact, the theatre’s doors have been open to the public front of house since the end of November for tours and demonstrations and to run all the tests that license a building for performance (including the one involving a cast of 1000 locals simulating a full-scale evacuation of a capacity audience).

6 January 2010. Snow in Stratford-upon-Avon. Thick snow. Snow such as hasn't been seen for thirty years. Drifts down Sheep Street. Black ice along Waterside. The town in grey gloom and muffled silence except for the hooting of boys from Shakespeare's grammar school, let out from classes early to get home before the next ice age sets in, pelting snowballs at each other, setting off mini-avalanches from snow-laden bare-branched chestnut trees in the Bancroft Gardens. I’m positioned on the tramway footbridge, looking across the frozen boat basin at a white wilderness towards the construction project I reported on two years ago (Shakespeare Survey 62). I’m taking stock. Then, I described the site of the demolished Royal Shakespeare Theatre as a rubble-strewn wasteland that put me in mind of post-war Warsaw. Now I’m looking at something like present-day Bruges, where twenty-first century architecture must fit a conservation agenda in a medieval town substantially invented in the 1900s with neo-Gothic in-fills, extensions and retro-renovations. I’m looking at pastiche and can't decide whether it represents a triumph of best-of-British provincial conservatism or a world-class failure of nerve. Left, beyond the snow-plastered construction hoardings, the ‘new’ riverside elevation is brand spanking old, restored to Elizabeth Scott's 1932 design, complete with metal-frame windows built to original specifications. Looking that way, I’m in the past. Looking right, though, towards the town-side, there's the future, ultra-modernity, an attention-seeking brick and glass observation tower, set slightly ‘off’ the main building, thrusting up higher than the theatre's new fly tower, with multi-level connecting corridors still open to the weather where workmen in yellow waterproofs are busy. (On a day like today, I muse, construction is a ‘dreadful trade’, worse than gathering samphire.) And between these two, facing me, the new RST's front façade is an architectural cut-and-paste job. The preserved ground floor and two storeys of Scott's foyer and dress circle are topped with a final half storey lifting the roof line, a postmodern flourish in glass, steel and brick. It's an odd cap on a matronly head – as though my twenty-something daughters had talked fifty-something me into an Amy Winehouse quiff.

New Year's Day, 2008. Under a louring sky, Stratford-upon-Avon woke up to find (nine months after it officially closed) 'The Greatest Dramatist', 'The Essential Year', the RSC's 'Complete Works Festival' still somehow staggering on, not least in company press releases reluctant to kick the 'essential year's' addictive publicity habits. More bingeing was promised: a 'Once in a lifetime opportunity to see Shakespeare's complete History Cycle performed by one ensemble company of actors' (on the matter of the 'ensemble company', more anon). Reading that, some spectators may have felt a weary sense of déjà vu. Four of these eight histories had already been revived once, in 2006, recycled from original productions back in 2000, to pass muster as RSC Artistic Director Michael Boyd's contribution to the 'Complete Works Festival'. Now, just when these veteran campaigners might have been thought honourably discharged and demobbed, here they were again, hauled back into active service, re-rehearsed one more time, and shoved up the front line of the new year's offerings. (It was, by the way, the prospect of taking up this 'once in a lifetime opportunity' that finally killed off Survey's last reviewer - see Shakespeare Survey 61.) But what I chiefly remember of New Year's Day was taking a late morning walk on the south bank of the Avon to shake off the last of the hangover - and being instantly sobered up by the sight that hit me, a sight you couldn't see on the town side of the river, where it was hidden behind a long stretch of hoardings plastered with giant-sized full-colour blow-ups of recent RSC 'greats' (Harriet Walter as Cleopatra, Chuk Iwuji as Henry VI).

For the past few years, as “prep” for their first Shakespeare seminar, I've set my undergraduates the opening two pages of a play I'm pretty certain they won't know, Henry VI Part I, reproduced from Hinman's facsimile of the First Folio. Their assignment: to answer what sounds like a simple enough question, “Where does a play begin?” Showing up for class a couple of days later, however, they know they've been stung. “Which play?” they now ask. “The play read? Or the play performed? And who are 'we' - early moderns or postmoderns?” There's a different beginning to a play, they observe, if “we” are picking up a book or taking a seat in the stalls - or, neo-Elizabethans, standing in the yard of the London Globe. One brave student offers Bedford's opening speech as the beginning - perhaps the standard place to start as a reader. But another student points out that Bedford has to get on stage before he starts talking. So the play has to begin with an entrance - like the stage direction says: “Enter the Funerall of King Henry the Fift.” But before that, someone else observes, “There's a music cue: 'Dead march.' The play begins with sound.” Then even that beginning recedes under pressure from another student's rhetorical musing, “Wouldn't you know what play you were going to? Wouldn't the play begin when you went to The Comedy of Errors, not King Lear?” (Or Henry VI not Henry V: what a world of narrative difference stands in that single digit.) Of course: spectators anticipate a different experience when they - notional Elizabethans - pay their penny for “The Tragedie of Othello the Moore of Venice” as against “The Famous History of the Life of Henry the Eight.” We do too, Shakespeare's latest spectators, for whom, besides, the play undoubtedly (also) begins with the great heap of what we already know (from school, adaptations and remakes, advertising, greeting cards, tabloid newspaper headlines, pop songs, the very air we breathe) about, say, a play called Romeo and Juliet before we see it, even for the first time. Can we offload our cultural baggage, think our way back to the Shakespeare play as premiere?

Cinema is a 'looking' medium that writes its texts in visual language, and cinema has always been interested in looking at women. My account of Shakespeare’s women on film wants to signal this interest from the beginning by remembering Bogart’s 'Here’s lookin' at you kid' in Casablanca, not just because that line, which cues the film’s repeated instances of lingering focus on Bergman’s face, defines a whole genre of cinematic looking, but also because it has achieved epigrammatic status independent of the film. It’s become a slogan for much wider cultural habits that may have originated in films like Casablanca but now circulate in culture at large, reproducing cinema’s looking practices in real life. The movies, in short, have taught us how to look at each other. To see how cinema has looked at Shakespeare’s women, I want to begin with an instance of subversive looking: a wink, the one Mary Pickford’s Kate aims sideways out of the frame at the end of The Taming of the Shrew, caught, in the next shot, by her sullen sister Bianca, whom it instantly transforms into a smiling conspirator. That wink rewrites Shakespeare’s ending. But more importantly, it inserts into this Shrew a way of looking that is going to signify for the future of Shakespeare’s women on film. Pickford’s 1929 Shrew, directed by Sam Taylor, was the first 'talkie' Shakespeare, a production gamble she financed with both her money and celebrity as 'America’s Sweetheart': she was the most famous and highly paid face in the world and half of an internationally recognised 'star couple'.

When L. C. Knights, prepped by F. R. Leavis, innocently dropped his question on an unsuspecting audience at a meeting of the Shakespeare Association in 1932, ‘How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?’, he didn’t expect an answer. He expected a revolution. Comically self-deprecating, thirty years later he recalled the occasion, remembering himself as ‘a comparatively young man, dissatisfied with the prevailing academic approach to Shakespeare’, specifically, Bradley-ite ‘character’ criticism, the kind of criticism that observed the discrepancy between Lady Macbeth’s Act 1 assertion, ‘I have given suck and know / How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me’(1.7.54–5), Macbeth’s traumatized meditation on his childlessness in Act 3 (3.1.60–73), and Macduff’s desolate cry in Act 4, ‘He has no children’(4.3.217) and, worried by apparent inconsistencies, tried to account for the Macbeths’ missing babies. Impatient with Bradley and his acolytes, Knights was ‘excited by the glimpses I had obtained of new and it seemed more rewarding approaches’ – modernist criticism, a criticism framed by Eliot and Wilson Knight that read Shakespeare’s plays as dramatic poems, ‘imaginative constructions mediated through the poetry’, a criticism that found useful analogies with music, looking for leitmotivs and themes rather than motives and character-development, attempting to account for the complex structures of Shakespeare’s verse and to find the plays’ meanings in what Wilson Knight termed ‘the logic of imaginative correspondence’ rather than the ‘logic of plot’. For young Lionel Knights this was bracing stuff.

That was the unmistakably Northern-voiced soundbite Barrie Rutter gave the London critic who travelled to Yorkshire in June 1992 to preview the inaugural production of his new company, Northern Broadsides, named, pointedly, to deliver what it promised in performance: 'verbal attack'. Voices like Rutter's have never been cast as Shakespeare's royals, at least not at the Royal Shakespeare and National Theatres; hence his audacious (some said barmy) decision to declare theatrical UDI, to set up a company where he and his working-class Northern accent would be entitled to play the hunchback king. As things turned out, however, when it came to the performance, Rutter's Richard sounded different even before he opened his mouth. It was his footfall that produced the play's original bizarre acoustic, an uneven, slurred silence broken by a percussive clomp as he limped the full length of his impromptu stage, a concrete-floored boatshed on Hull marina. On his good foot Rutter was wearing a shoe; on the gammy twisted one, the sort of wooden clog every spinner or weaver in the north of England wore in the mills a couple generations back and fishworkers on Hull docks, Rutter's father among them, still did in the 1960s - the sort of clog that functioned not just as industrial footwear but class apparatus and cultural marker.

Twenty lines in to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when ‘merriments’, ‘mirth’ and ‘pomp’ have been ordered up to close off and reconcile with sportive ‘triumph’ the memory of the ‘injuries’ inflicted in the pre-history of the play by ‘triumph’ of a martial kind, Egeus comes crashing in upon Theseus’s pre-marital tête-à-tête, fuming, spluttering, ‘Full of vexation . . . with complaint / Against my child, my daughter Hermia’ (1.1.22–3). Stubborn Hermia has dug her heels in, is refusing to marry her father’s choice. She has eyes only for Lysander. Retaliating, the child-changed father demands ‘the ancient privilege of Athens’, to ‘dispose’ of what is ‘mine’ ‘either to this gentleman’ (Demetrius) ‘Or to her death, according to our law’ (41–4). ‘What say you, Hermia?’ asks Theseus (46). She answers: ‘I would my father look’d but with my eyes’ (56). But Theseus counters: ‘Rather your eyes must with his judgment look’ (57). That exchange, in a nutshell, formulates the impasse this most optically challenged (and challenging) Shakespeare play is going to explore, setting up a contest of looking strategies that the Dream is never to reconcile, only, finally, to finesse.