The Impact of Original Practice On Shakespearean Criticism

      by Cynthia Bowers, PhD
Dept. of English
Kennesaw State University

We might begin with a question: when did Shakespearean theatrical practice diverge from Shakespearean scholarly criticism?  Or perhaps we might ask: when did “scholarly criticism” of Shakespeare begin?

            To answer the first question, we need to look a bit at the history of Shakespearean theatrical practice.  And to do that, we must consider changes Shakespeare made himself in his dramaturgy over the course of his career.  For example, the sparse sets and limited stage machinery required in the early history plays stands in stark contrast to the imaginative spectacle in a play like Cymbeline or The Tempest.  Shakespeare changed to adapt to the demands of his by now very diverse audience.  His increased use of spectacle was meant to compete with court entertainments, especially the highly staged masques of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones.

            Shakespeare retired from the stage in about 1613 and died in 1616.  The theatres were closed in 1642 by the Puritans and remained closed for the duration of the English Civil War, and not reopened until 1660 when the monarchy was restored.  Restoration dramaturgy is significantly different than Tudor/Stuart staging, and there are 2 reasons for this: first is the influence of French theatrical practice which impressed itself upon English sensibilities (after all, the court remained in exile in France throughout the war); the second is the ascendancy of neo-classicism (another borrowing from the French).  Put simply: tastes changed and with it audience expectations.  Also, the shape of theatres changed.  The hexagonal open-air venues common in the 1590s were replaced by court-shaped indoor halls and proscenium arches like those used in the royal courts and in the continental theatres.
            The Restoration and the 18th century really witness the emergence of the professional scholarly critic, though often the critics were avid play-goers.  And Shakespeare does NOT fare well under their neo-classical gaze.  Interestingly, because the nature of acting companies and actors themselves changed, the “problems” the critics observed were often “corrected” by actors on the stage.  For example, critics like Dryden complained that Shakespeare “‘neither understood correct plotting nor that which they call the decorum of the stage’.  Had Shakespeare lived in the Restoration, Dryden believed, he would doubtless have written ‘more correctly’ under the influence of a language that had become more ‘courtly’ and a wit that had grown more ‘refined.’ . . . Dryden regretted that Shakespeare had been forced to write in ‘ignorant’ times and for audiences who ‘knew no better’” (Bev. xcvi).

            Alexander Pope’s edition of Shakespeare’s plays of 1725 freely “corrected” the plotting errors, freely “improving” Shakespeare’s language, “rewriting lines and excising those parts he considered vulgar, in order to rescue Shakespeare from the barbaric circumstances of his Elizabethan milieu” (Bev. xcvi).

            Theatrical practitioners were complicit in their treatment of the plays and adapted them to suit the needs of presentation acting styles, the shape of their theatres, the organization of their companies, the demands of their affluent audiences, and the advances of their technology.  Because of the emergence of the actor-manager, only plays with large roles for the central protagonist were produced–Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet.  Because of the introduction of actresses to play women’s roles, leading women demanded roles suited to their talents–Portia, Desdemona, Lady Macbeth.
            Furthermore the plays were seldom produced as written, one of the biggest complaints being the plays’ failure to provide “poetic justice”–the punishment of the wicked and the rewarding of the virtuous.  The most spectacular rewriting of a play in this period is Nahum Tate’s King Lear which has a happy ending in which Cordelia survives and marries Edgar but only after being nearly ravished by Edmund as she wanders in the same storm that afflicts her father.  Gone too is the Fool since his presence is contrary to the demand that tragedy remain pure of comic scenes (though with a rewritten happy ending that hardly makes sense).  There are other examples of “improvements”: a new double plot in The Tempest in which Miranda has a sister, Dorinda, who falls in love with Hippolito, a young man Prospero brought with him from Milan but hid in a cave.  Caliban also has a sister and Ariel a fellow spirit named Milcha–all in the name of neo-classical balance and symmetry. There are many other examples.  What is truly phenomenal is that these versions of the plays held the stage until the 1840s!  William Poel can be credited as the first restorer–including playing in smaller, more intimate venues than great theatres like Covent Garden or the Lyceum.  Playing fully restored texts did not become common practice until the early 20th century. “Original practice” did not survive because it was not at all valued.

            Given these practices, one wonders exactly which texts Shakespeare scholarly critics actually observed and whether or not they approved of the changes made to the texts in the theatre.  In the 18th century, the great age of English neo-classicism, the most common fault found in Shakespeare is his naturalism.  He is the “poet of nature” to Dr. Samuel Johnson, who gives his “readers” a “faithful mirror of manners and life” (Bev. xcvi).  In the Romantic period, an age that values naturalism, Shakespeare’s plays gained more approval, mainly for their spontaneity and enthusiasm.  Romantic critics focused on character not plot, and so the plays’ dramaturgy was often neglected.  In fact, most of the Romantic critics (Coleridge, Hazlitt, Lamb, de Quincey) “consistently refused to see him as a man of the theatre [but instead saw him as a poet and philosopher].  Lamb wrote, ‘It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage than those of almost any other dramatist whatever.’   Hazlitt similarly observed: ‘We do not like to see our author’s plays acted, and least of all, Hamlet.  There is no play that suffers so much in being transferred to the stage.’” (Bev. xcvii).  Some of their views may be attributable to the state of 19th century British theatre which fell into a kind of decay. 

            The Romantics’ attitudes and the practices of the 18th and 19th century stage explain how and why theatrical practice and scholarly criticism diverged: they were quite literally not on the same page!!  It appears that both the theatrical and the critical desire to return to what Shakespeare actually wrote begins in the early 20th century, and the value of “Original Practice” begins to be recognized.  The early Historicist critics became less interested in character and in a naive biographical interpretation of the plays, and began to inquire into and recover evidence of Shakespeare’s theatrical milieu.  E. E. Stoll, writing in the 19-teens and 1930s, argued, finally, that the play is “an artifice arising out of its historical milieu.  Its conventions are implicit agreements between playwright and spectator.  They alter with time, and a modern reader who is ignorant of Elizabethan conventions is all too apt to be misled by his own post-Romantic preconceptions” (Bev. xcix).  Note “reader” and “his.”  Other historicists followed with studies of Shakespeare’s audiences (A. C. Harbage), Shakespeare’s stage practices, and the profession of playwright (E. K. Chambers and G. E. Bentley), and the organization of Tudor/Stuart acting companies (T. W. Baldwin).  And finally, finally, in this period we have theatrical practitioners themselves researching and publishing on stage practice, such as Harley Granville-Barker’s “Prefaces to Shakespeare.”  We could also include here the work of Anne Barton, John Barton, Peter Hall, Terry Hands, and others who have written on Shakespearean production.  Investigations into Shakespeare’s world continue today and form an entirely new “school” of scholarly criticism.  The trend in criticism is, in fact, much like Original Practice–to try to recover and then to relearn the texts by studying their theatrical, practical, political, historical origins. 

            Of course some 20th century criticism has been as “fanciful” as some 20th century productions, especially efforts to “update” the plays by giving them anachronistic settings: Troilus and Cressida in the American Civil War or Measure for Measure produced in a cabaret.  These efforts, like some contemporary criticism (feminism, new historicism, psychological criticism) do nothing to harm the plays; instead they are efforts to demonstrate the plays’ flexibility, or as David Bevington puts it: “His texts are so extraordinarily responsive that new questions put to them–about the changing role of women, about cynicism in the political process, about the protean near-indeterminacy of meaning in language–evoke insights that are hard to duplicate in other literary texts.  Shakespeare does not seem out of date” (Bev. cvii).  Shakespeare seems, as Jan Kott famously noted, our contemporary.

            But we need also to remember that he is most emphatically NOT our contemporary.  I sometimes fear that efforts to find in the plays our own concerns will prove ultimately futile–we cannot erase the 400 intervening years between his time and our own.  That is why I believe Original Practice is important to both theatre and criticism.  It is important to scholarship because it strips away some of the critical myopia and elitism by asking scholars to look at the plays in their original contexts.  In so doing, it helps to focus our attention on what Shakespeare and his contemporaries were actually doing, partially obscuring the “aesthetic” judgments and tastes of previous centuries.  It is important to the theatre by demanding more interpretive honesty, focusing more on words than spectacle, more on engagement than “artistic” distance, frankly, more on entertainment than “art.”  Finally, though, I think Original Practice is especially important because of what it has done for students and audiences: Shakespeare is removed from the rarified atmosphere of the study and the library, brought down from the inaccessible pedestal upon which many scholars (and actors) had placed him for too many centuries.  Rather than seeing Shakespeare’s plays as “high art” unavailable to ordinary people, we can now see him and his language as a part of our own culture, and see ways in which his works have influenced so many aspects of our lives.  And we can see that the study, performance, and observance of his works is, well, PLAY–fun, and not painful.
            The rebuilding of the Globe in London and the building of the Blackfriars in Virginia provide living laboratories for the study of both critical and theatrical dimensions of the plays.  Happily, criticism and practice seem to be more thoroughly engaged than perhaps at any other time.  This is most likely due to the training and education practitioners themselves bring to their performance and to the deflation of critical elitism also brought about by more egalitarian educational opportunities.  Simply put: the more we know about what we do, the more we understand our interdependence, the more we can learn.
            As we have seen, each age has interpreted the Bard to suit its own tastes and agenda.  This includes both theatrical “re-handling” and critical ignominy.  The fate of plays unable to adapt to prevailing theatrical and/or critical theories was critical and/or theatrical failure: if the play did not “fit” preconceived ideas, there was obviously something wrong with the play.  Original Practice helps us to know better. 

To contact Dr. Bowers please email cbowers@kennesaw.edu