Richard III and the Modernizing of Shakespeare

Abstract

THE PROBLEMS OF MODERNIZING ARE PERENNIAL, and the basic arguments, pro and con, so well known that to repeat them is like entering a nightmare in which one tries to explain the difference between red and blue. l The audience beats one with white sticks, and one deserves it. Instead, I should like to suggest certain areas of agreement which may allow us to see these problems as a dialectic, not a deadlock. One is that we all now acknowledge that drama exists properly only in performance, not as something which is merely read; and, though drama may include permanent and continuing truths, the actual performance is necessarily — and quite properly — ephemeral. When the curtain falls, the show is over; and no repetition will be quite like it again. Secondly, I think we must admit that there is no such thing as performing a play "straight." This demand is the opposite heresy from the demand for topicality. In its extreme form, it is really only a sophistication of the romantic argument that it is better to read plays (to put them on, as it were, in the "theatre of the mind") than to see the limitations of even the best performance. This was Charles Lamb's opinion about King Lear. But, as John Russell Brown amongst others has pointed out, there are many different ways of saying almost every line (Hal's "I do. I will" to Falstaff, for instance, or Lear's own "Never, never, never, never, never"); and the actor's choice of reading will always depend on his understanding of the line's context; which, in turn, will not infrequently involve his interpretation of the whole play. Readers may happily hold in suspension several possibilities at once, but performance always requires an existential choice — in a word, it requires interpretation. Lastly, a third principle which seems common sense (though I have heard it denied): such interpretation is bound to be modern, strained through the sensibilities of actors, directors, designers, and audience which, willy nilly, have been set — "programmed," if you like — by the conditions of modern experience.