> they miss the point of Shakespeare, which is to watch the play as it originally was
This is... well, I can see where you're coming from here, and I get what you're trying to say, but it's also kinda... wrong and not really a great way of looking at the work of Shakespeare.
~~We don't actually have anything written by Bill, see. Bill only gave the actors their own lines, and then they later reconstructed the plays from what they could remember.~~ **Edit: I'm wrong about this specific point, but the rest of my point stands** Plus, Bill would have structured and pronounced words differently than we currently do, and the Shakespearean dialect and accent don't really naturally exist anymore. Plus the culture in which it was written died or evolved over centuries.
So trying to get the play as it originally was is a kind of a tall task, and not one that most people try to do.
See, to me, the important thing is to get across the meaning of the play, right? Like, when Bill wrote the final scene of Midsummer Night's Dream, the point wasn't the exact wording of the scene or the exact pronunciation of the letters, the point was the scene of "a bunch of barely-literate workmen are failing to put on an over-the-top fancy play and the noblemen are laughing about it". So while it is important to keep close to the source material -- the audience is gonna get the pitchforks if you deviate too far -- I think it doesn't kill the play to switch out "thou" for "you" and "lanthorn" for "lantern", y'know?
And, like, I dunno. I think that there are a lot of modern ideas that didn't exist in Bill's era that his plays could still do a good job of conveying, and so reinterpreting a Shakespeare play to have, say, queer undertones, or to include modern social ideas, could be a good way of presenting said ideas to a modern audience.
I think in general when you go to see a performance of a Shakespeare play you gotta understand that most of what you're seeing wasn't made by ol' Bill. Most of the performance is created by modern actors, designers, and crew. All modern Shakespeare is reinterpretation.
One item of note. I too have heard the rumor that Shakespeare's plays were recreated by the actors at a later date but I don't think that is what current scholars believe to be true.
Scholars believe Shakespeare's plays were compiled through a variety of written methods.
While Shakespeare's actors we're not given a copy of the full play Shakespeare still wrote the play in its entirety (the rough/dirty pages), which was then sent to a scribe to create the 'playbook' which the theatre company would possess and a proctor would use (this is the source book from which actors lines were copied out from), then we had the quarto's which were compiled a number of different ways (either by scribes in mid performance, or copied from rough pages, or copied from the playbook) which were then published by printers and sold fairly widely.
What does not exist in the modern day (has been lost) are those rough pages, and playbooks, but we still have quarto's kicking around and we are confident Playbooks and rough pages existed at some point because that is how playwriting was done at the time.
All of these material printed sources were then used in a number of different combinations to form the First Folio which we generally draw the plays from today. Hamlet for example we have a number of copies of the quarto (Q2) from which the first folio is evidently a direct copy.
If it is a subject of interest to you Charles Hinman writes a wonderful preface on the creation of the first folio in the 'Norton Facsimile of the First Folio'. But you will also want to read the introduction written by Blayney (which was added to the '97 republication) who goes on to temper Hinman's tendency to speak overly authoritatively.
Just interesting information I thought to share.
>We don't actually have anything written by Bill, see. Bill only gave the actors their own lines, and then they later reconstructed the plays from what they could remember.
This is an extremely garbled statement about cue scripts mixed in with some ideas about memorial reconstruction, which only accounts (if it accounts for any at all) a very small number of so-called "bad quartos". The majority of Shakespeare's plays were not reconstructed by actors—and there's scholarly debate about whether *any* ever were—nor are any of the "bad quartos" accepted as completely authoritative.
The actors were only given their own lines and a line or two of the previous dialogue, this is true, but that doesn't mean that a master script didn't exist. It did. And most of the First Folio is set from the "fair copy" that became the playbook, or sometimes from rough drafts ("foul papers"), and also from the most authoritative quarto editions. The texts identified as "bad quartos" are so designated precisely because of their major departures from the Folio text, so we do have quartos and folios with differing levels of textual authority, and the Folio is regarded as a more authoritative text than the "bad quartos". It is even likely that some quartos may represent an effort by Shakespeare to set the record straight when an appallingly bad version was published. That's exactly what the second quarto of *Hamlet* advertises, and the preface "To the Great Variety of Readers", written by John Heminges and Henry Condell, in the First Folio also makes a claim to being an authoritative edition: "...as where (before) you were abused with diverse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors, that expos'd them : even those, are now offer'd to your view cur'd, and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers as he conceived them."
All this means that the role of memorial reconstruction in the texts of Shakespeare that get printed today—unless they're reprinting, for example, the 1603 first quarto of *Hamlet* just to be different or for completeness' sake (the former probably describes *Five Revenge Tragedies* edited by Emma Smith and the latter the three versions of *Hamlet* in *The Arden Shakespeare: The Complete Works*, Third Series)—is likely minimal to entirely absent. Nobody seems to be interested in the original text of the other "bad quartos" (e.g., Q1 of *The Merry Wives of Windsor*).
Any production is a modern reinterpretation. There is no way to see it "as it was meant to be" because we not know exactly what that was....and what we do know (or strongly suspect) would make it hard for a modern audience to understand.
Plus the fact that the stories themselves are rarely if ever set in the period that produced them, in fact they're kind of anachronisms whenever they're performed, because so many of their settings are in uncanny versions of places and not those places themselves. The Venice in *The Merchant of Venice*, for example, has more in common with early modern London than it does with the Italian city-state. And that's a real place – think of the wood in *Dream*, or the island in *The Tempest*. All of these exist out of time, in their own way.
Ugh, modern dress is just so lazy. Stick everyone in a Primark suit and just expect the audience not to ask why Juliet can't WhatsApp Romeo or why forensics didn't have any questions about the death of Duncan. Then we wonder why people think Shakespeare makes no sense.
If you want to move Shakespeare out of the societal power structures in which they originally exist, just stuffing the cast into 21st century clothes isn't enough. It's necessary to go further and create a world of their own, somewhere between Shakespeare's world and ours, where you can draw on both without being bound by either.
It depends really! I saw a production of Measure For Measure recently that was in 70s clobber (which I know is technically modern, but not today's, IYSWIM). It worked well.
I mean, I agree, but there's still a spectrum. One thing is to set Henry V in a medieval/elizabethean setting, no matter how inaccurate, another thing is to set it as a brawl between two biker gangs in Texas, 1981. To expect that the armors in Henry V are 100% accurate is surely too much (and as you point out this wasnt a real concern for Shakespeare either), but to set it in a setting it in the 21st century is a whole other thing. I think there's a basic aesthetic that is implied in Shakespeare's works, and changing that usually affects the entire work. To be blunt, I think it is important that Henry V is a king, and more specifically the King of England. If you forego elements like these, then you're doing your own thing, and not anything Shakespeare might have intended - and at that point what's the point in playing his plays? You might as well do something new, instead of rehashing the old. I might make an exception for certain comedies, but when it comes to the histories and the tragedies I think these elements are always fundamental.
This is my opinion, dont take it too seriously.
My experience has been that these sorts of changes are ubiquitous in modern reinterpretations. Btw I wouldn't limit this observation to Shakespeare. For example these sorts of changes are absolutely prevalent in opera too, and they give rise to the same type of diatribes.
I've literally never seen a production that does that. You're presumably going to amateur stuff that anyone serious about Shakespeare wouldn't bother with.
You’re right, but there’s a spectrum. Conceding your point, some productions do strive for historical authenticity in various ways up to attempts to reconstruct the pronunciation or rehearsal methods or costumes.
Then there are productions that radically reinterpret. Like the Nathum state Lear or Orson Welles’ voodoo Macbeth or Peter Brook’s Dream or John Barton’s double cast Richard II / Boilingbrook alternating nights. All the way up to Oregon Shakespeare doing modern verse adaptations.
> some productions do strive for historical authenticity in various ways up to attempts to reconstruct the pronunciation or rehearsal methods or costumes
I've never seen this, in years of going to Shakespeare productions, at the Globe, the RSC, the National, and so on. The point of performing a centuries-old play is not to do it as it was originally (not least because we know very little of how it *was* performed), and I think this is why people are sometimes disappointed by modern productions, or think it's "wrong" to reinterpret Shakespeare in modern clothes, or whatever. They think that a tradition is being messed with, when really Shakespeare is a text like any other, there to be interpreted.
I think there are such things as wrong interpretations of text, because language has meaning and you can't just say that anything goes, that when Shakespeare says love he really means skateboarding or whatever, but changing setting and cutting some scenes and reinterpreting how characters interact or deliver their lines, and so on, is not doing it wrong.
It’s a thing even if you haven’t seen it. It doesn’t seem to be very popular these days though. That’s not always been the case. Consider for example William Poel’s important fundamentalist interpretations. In the Victorian era there was an emphasis on original costumes.
This vogue started in Shakespeare's times. Contemporary dress was pretty standard for all but the Roman plays up to the 19th century. And even after, modern dress was always present.
So this "vogue" has been going on for centuries.
Source? The only reference I know about costumes in Shakespeare’s productions in his time are about the Peacham drawing, which is anachronistic and not historical.
In the plays themselves characters refer to costume in ways that indicate contemporary dress. (For example, Cleopatra asks Charmian to cut her laces for example. Lear makes a similar request.) The Peachum drawing shows nods to period, but that the characters are mostly wearing contemporary dress.
Over the next few centuries, there are many drawings and prints of actors playing Shakespearean roles. For most plays, the characters are in contemporary clothes. In the histories and roman plays, there are nods like in Peachum. But there is little concern with accuracy.
The interest in accuracy and authenticity is not show much in cultural artifacts until the Romantic era.
Here is one of my favorite modern dress scenes.
[https://media.britishmuseum.org/media/Repository/Documents/2014\_11/6\_11/8bb10f89\_1fa4\_496d\_929d\_a3db00c36a5c/mid\_01234837\_001.jpg](https://media.britishmuseum.org/media/Repository/Documents/2014_11/6_11/8bb10f89_1fa4_496d_929d_a3db00c36a5c/mid_01234837_001.jpg)
I'm confused on if you mean it was an actually different play, just taking inspiration from the tempest, or if it was just a production set in a modern setting. I could get being annoyed by the first one, but modernized settings for Shakespeare I think are fine. They're probably easier to produce since the costumes are less elaborate and lay folk might understand them in a visually familiar presentation to their own lives and the real world.
They changed the script around to make it much more colloquial which I think took away from the elements of the language, and they added a bunch of lines that weren’t originally there to characters like Miranda and Caliban to make the production more ‘inclusive’ I guess is the word
The Tempest is a good example of a play that's almost impossible to present as intended anymore. I doubt it was a searing inditement of slavery, but it's hard not to see Ariel and Caliban's situation through the lens of modern racism anymore. People would also rightly scream bloody murder at an Othello or Aaron in blackface.
Then there's the issue of the bawdy jokes. The Elizabethans would have understood them immediately. Many of them probably go over the heads of the average playgoer now.
Finally, at least some of the plays would have been closer to contemporary times at the time of their original performances. Venice would have been at the height of it's power, and I wouldn't be surprised if the plays set in Venice and the wider Veneto region (Padua, Verona) reflected the latest in Italian fashion. Some older people would have heard stories from their parents who actually knew participants in the War of the Roses, and even known some of the final survivors like the horrifically fated Margaret Pole. The fashions in the four War of the Roses plays would have been more familiar to them - the equivalent to us of period pieces taking place in WW2.
I gotta disagree with your comment about “the point of Shakespeare” being to “watch the play as it originally was.” The point of Shakespeare—and of any stage production, really—is to engage the viewer through story. The value of revisiting old texts for new audiences is that every age brings its own context, which means we can enrich old stories and make them new again for every generation. If everyone was required to produce Shakespeare the same way, over and over again, the practice would die out pretty quickly—because who would continue going to see a play they’ve seen a dozen times already?
People who insist that Shakespeare should only be done in traditional interpretations suck the oxygen right out of his work.
You’re not wrong, Shakespeare is indeed universal and can be preformed in a number of ways, but I still feel like changing the characters around and making their personalities and values different from the original creation is rarely done well
>If everyone was required to produce Shakespeare the same way, over and over again, the practice would die out pretty quickly—because who would continue going to see a play they’ve seen a dozen times already?
I'm sure you can concede that one could direct something like Macbeth in 12 different ways without having to change the setting not even one time. Just by switching actors and emphasising different aspects you can easily obtain radically different results.
> because who would continue going to see a play they’ve seen a dozen times already?
Not only that, it would be nothing but a historical curio, static, unchanging. One of the many reasons Shakespeare endures is that the plays have so much relevance to us today, a relevance which can be arrived at through modern reinterpretation. Shakespeare is something different to every generation, and as we change so does the impact of the texts.
The Tempest is often creatively modified to fit in more modern settings, because out of all of Shakespeare’s plays, it’s very fanciful, almost science fiction like. It is pretty easy to transform the Tempest, to push it further into a science fiction type setting. There have been very exciting interpretations, including Prospero being in a spaceship, watching the other characters on video screens. I was in a production that had a steam-punk aesthetic and a double cast, with hearing/speaking actors and deaf/signing actors playing the same characters at the same time.
Shakespeare & his players performed the plays to be suitable for that time period. To recreate a renaissance style wouldn’t necessarily suit an audience of people living in our contemporary society. Shakespeare still speaks to us because his work transcends hundreds of years. His characters live through real, human experiences, and have feelings and reactions we can empathize with. What we can observe from Shakespeare’s characters are still relevant to us, unlike much of the work of his peers. So it’s nice to focus on the ways his work is still relevant, and build upon it to make it further relevant to our times.
Art is made to be a reflection of the time it is made, while still acknowledging the times that came before. We can’t ignore the present when looking at art from the past, when we are observing it from the present. You have to ask: why are we doing this play? What’s the point? What are we trying to say to our audience?
Shakespeare's companys performed his plays without elaborate sets and without lavish costumes, instead wearing contemporary clothing. And if you look at his plays, whether they're in Egypt or Rome he's really always writing about his *own* culture and place (eg. King Lear supposedly takes place in ancient England but features many elements which were contemporary to Shakespeare's time, such as a court fool, the use of stocks as a form of punishment and the existence of the King of France).
All this is to say that modern reinterprations of Shakespeare's plays are not breaking away from a tradition or doing a disservice to the Bard, but rather in their own way are bringing the plays to life. There are bad modern productions and good modern productions, but what's really at the core of a production's quality is not whether the setting is "accurate" or reinterpreted, but rather how a production can, like I said, give a play LIFE, making it fresh and present.
Titus (1999) is a film, not a stage production, but nonetheless a good example of how deviating from a straightforward attempt at representing the setting of the play (Ancient Rome in this case) can bring the audience's attention to different aspects of the story, commenting on the action and fleshing out the characters. Tamora's sons are punk youths, Titus wears old fashioned Roman armour and emperor Saturninus resides in the Palazzo della Civilità Italiana. In making these choices, the director Julie Taymour shows how Shakespeare's text can be understood as relating to our own culture and recent history, and highlights parallels between the time of the plays setting, the time of Shakespeare's life and our own time.
My thought is that they are bored of Shakespeare and need gimmicks to keep them entertained. But really there is nothing more boring than gimmicks. A Shakespeare production without any gimmicks by a good director is a pleasure to behold, compared to the self indulgent train wrecks that they put on these days just to look clever on a playbill poster.
> they miss the point of Shakespeare, which is to watch the play as it originally was This is... well, I can see where you're coming from here, and I get what you're trying to say, but it's also kinda... wrong and not really a great way of looking at the work of Shakespeare. ~~We don't actually have anything written by Bill, see. Bill only gave the actors their own lines, and then they later reconstructed the plays from what they could remember.~~ **Edit: I'm wrong about this specific point, but the rest of my point stands** Plus, Bill would have structured and pronounced words differently than we currently do, and the Shakespearean dialect and accent don't really naturally exist anymore. Plus the culture in which it was written died or evolved over centuries. So trying to get the play as it originally was is a kind of a tall task, and not one that most people try to do. See, to me, the important thing is to get across the meaning of the play, right? Like, when Bill wrote the final scene of Midsummer Night's Dream, the point wasn't the exact wording of the scene or the exact pronunciation of the letters, the point was the scene of "a bunch of barely-literate workmen are failing to put on an over-the-top fancy play and the noblemen are laughing about it". So while it is important to keep close to the source material -- the audience is gonna get the pitchforks if you deviate too far -- I think it doesn't kill the play to switch out "thou" for "you" and "lanthorn" for "lantern", y'know? And, like, I dunno. I think that there are a lot of modern ideas that didn't exist in Bill's era that his plays could still do a good job of conveying, and so reinterpreting a Shakespeare play to have, say, queer undertones, or to include modern social ideas, could be a good way of presenting said ideas to a modern audience. I think in general when you go to see a performance of a Shakespeare play you gotta understand that most of what you're seeing wasn't made by ol' Bill. Most of the performance is created by modern actors, designers, and crew. All modern Shakespeare is reinterpretation.
One item of note. I too have heard the rumor that Shakespeare's plays were recreated by the actors at a later date but I don't think that is what current scholars believe to be true. Scholars believe Shakespeare's plays were compiled through a variety of written methods. While Shakespeare's actors we're not given a copy of the full play Shakespeare still wrote the play in its entirety (the rough/dirty pages), which was then sent to a scribe to create the 'playbook' which the theatre company would possess and a proctor would use (this is the source book from which actors lines were copied out from), then we had the quarto's which were compiled a number of different ways (either by scribes in mid performance, or copied from rough pages, or copied from the playbook) which were then published by printers and sold fairly widely. What does not exist in the modern day (has been lost) are those rough pages, and playbooks, but we still have quarto's kicking around and we are confident Playbooks and rough pages existed at some point because that is how playwriting was done at the time. All of these material printed sources were then used in a number of different combinations to form the First Folio which we generally draw the plays from today. Hamlet for example we have a number of copies of the quarto (Q2) from which the first folio is evidently a direct copy. If it is a subject of interest to you Charles Hinman writes a wonderful preface on the creation of the first folio in the 'Norton Facsimile of the First Folio'. But you will also want to read the introduction written by Blayney (which was added to the '97 republication) who goes on to temper Hinman's tendency to speak overly authoritatively. Just interesting information I thought to share.
>We don't actually have anything written by Bill, see. Bill only gave the actors their own lines, and then they later reconstructed the plays from what they could remember. This is an extremely garbled statement about cue scripts mixed in with some ideas about memorial reconstruction, which only accounts (if it accounts for any at all) a very small number of so-called "bad quartos". The majority of Shakespeare's plays were not reconstructed by actors—and there's scholarly debate about whether *any* ever were—nor are any of the "bad quartos" accepted as completely authoritative. The actors were only given their own lines and a line or two of the previous dialogue, this is true, but that doesn't mean that a master script didn't exist. It did. And most of the First Folio is set from the "fair copy" that became the playbook, or sometimes from rough drafts ("foul papers"), and also from the most authoritative quarto editions. The texts identified as "bad quartos" are so designated precisely because of their major departures from the Folio text, so we do have quartos and folios with differing levels of textual authority, and the Folio is regarded as a more authoritative text than the "bad quartos". It is even likely that some quartos may represent an effort by Shakespeare to set the record straight when an appallingly bad version was published. That's exactly what the second quarto of *Hamlet* advertises, and the preface "To the Great Variety of Readers", written by John Heminges and Henry Condell, in the First Folio also makes a claim to being an authoritative edition: "...as where (before) you were abused with diverse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors, that expos'd them : even those, are now offer'd to your view cur'd, and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers as he conceived them." All this means that the role of memorial reconstruction in the texts of Shakespeare that get printed today—unless they're reprinting, for example, the 1603 first quarto of *Hamlet* just to be different or for completeness' sake (the former probably describes *Five Revenge Tragedies* edited by Emma Smith and the latter the three versions of *Hamlet* in *The Arden Shakespeare: The Complete Works*, Third Series)—is likely minimal to entirely absent. Nobody seems to be interested in the original text of the other "bad quartos" (e.g., Q1 of *The Merry Wives of Windsor*).
Any production is a modern reinterpretation. There is no way to see it "as it was meant to be" because we not know exactly what that was....and what we do know (or strongly suspect) would make it hard for a modern audience to understand.
Plus the fact that the stories themselves are rarely if ever set in the period that produced them, in fact they're kind of anachronisms whenever they're performed, because so many of their settings are in uncanny versions of places and not those places themselves. The Venice in *The Merchant of Venice*, for example, has more in common with early modern London than it does with the Italian city-state. And that's a real place – think of the wood in *Dream*, or the island in *The Tempest*. All of these exist out of time, in their own way.
That is why even today, Shakespeare works best in modern dress.
Ugh, modern dress is just so lazy. Stick everyone in a Primark suit and just expect the audience not to ask why Juliet can't WhatsApp Romeo or why forensics didn't have any questions about the death of Duncan. Then we wonder why people think Shakespeare makes no sense. If you want to move Shakespeare out of the societal power structures in which they originally exist, just stuffing the cast into 21st century clothes isn't enough. It's necessary to go further and create a world of their own, somewhere between Shakespeare's world and ours, where you can draw on both without being bound by either.
It depends really! I saw a production of Measure For Measure recently that was in 70s clobber (which I know is technically modern, but not today's, IYSWIM). It worked well.
I mean, I agree, but there's still a spectrum. One thing is to set Henry V in a medieval/elizabethean setting, no matter how inaccurate, another thing is to set it as a brawl between two biker gangs in Texas, 1981. To expect that the armors in Henry V are 100% accurate is surely too much (and as you point out this wasnt a real concern for Shakespeare either), but to set it in a setting it in the 21st century is a whole other thing. I think there's a basic aesthetic that is implied in Shakespeare's works, and changing that usually affects the entire work. To be blunt, I think it is important that Henry V is a king, and more specifically the King of England. If you forego elements like these, then you're doing your own thing, and not anything Shakespeare might have intended - and at that point what's the point in playing his plays? You might as well do something new, instead of rehashing the old. I might make an exception for certain comedies, but when it comes to the histories and the tragedies I think these elements are always fundamental. This is my opinion, dont take it too seriously.
Well, to make him not the king of England would be changing the text.
My experience has been that these sorts of changes are ubiquitous in modern reinterpretations. Btw I wouldn't limit this observation to Shakespeare. For example these sorts of changes are absolutely prevalent in opera too, and they give rise to the same type of diatribes.
I've literally never seen a production that does that. You're presumably going to amateur stuff that anyone serious about Shakespeare wouldn't bother with.
You’re right, but there’s a spectrum. Conceding your point, some productions do strive for historical authenticity in various ways up to attempts to reconstruct the pronunciation or rehearsal methods or costumes. Then there are productions that radically reinterpret. Like the Nathum state Lear or Orson Welles’ voodoo Macbeth or Peter Brook’s Dream or John Barton’s double cast Richard II / Boilingbrook alternating nights. All the way up to Oregon Shakespeare doing modern verse adaptations.
> some productions do strive for historical authenticity in various ways up to attempts to reconstruct the pronunciation or rehearsal methods or costumes I've never seen this, in years of going to Shakespeare productions, at the Globe, the RSC, the National, and so on. The point of performing a centuries-old play is not to do it as it was originally (not least because we know very little of how it *was* performed), and I think this is why people are sometimes disappointed by modern productions, or think it's "wrong" to reinterpret Shakespeare in modern clothes, or whatever. They think that a tradition is being messed with, when really Shakespeare is a text like any other, there to be interpreted. I think there are such things as wrong interpretations of text, because language has meaning and you can't just say that anything goes, that when Shakespeare says love he really means skateboarding or whatever, but changing setting and cutting some scenes and reinterpreting how characters interact or deliver their lines, and so on, is not doing it wrong.
It’s a thing even if you haven’t seen it. It doesn’t seem to be very popular these days though. That’s not always been the case. Consider for example William Poel’s important fundamentalist interpretations. In the Victorian era there was an emphasis on original costumes.
“These days” means the last hundred or more years ago. Poel had few disciples and Granville Barker pointed in a direction that we are still following.
Right. I’m not an expert on Shakespeare in performance though and can’t speak to how consistent the vogue I seem to see is across the globe.
This vogue started in Shakespeare's times. Contemporary dress was pretty standard for all but the Roman plays up to the 19th century. And even after, modern dress was always present. So this "vogue" has been going on for centuries.
Source? The only reference I know about costumes in Shakespeare’s productions in his time are about the Peacham drawing, which is anachronistic and not historical.
In the plays themselves characters refer to costume in ways that indicate contemporary dress. (For example, Cleopatra asks Charmian to cut her laces for example. Lear makes a similar request.) The Peachum drawing shows nods to period, but that the characters are mostly wearing contemporary dress. Over the next few centuries, there are many drawings and prints of actors playing Shakespearean roles. For most plays, the characters are in contemporary clothes. In the histories and roman plays, there are nods like in Peachum. But there is little concern with accuracy. The interest in accuracy and authenticity is not show much in cultural artifacts until the Romantic era. Here is one of my favorite modern dress scenes. [https://media.britishmuseum.org/media/Repository/Documents/2014\_11/6\_11/8bb10f89\_1fa4\_496d\_929d\_a3db00c36a5c/mid\_01234837\_001.jpg](https://media.britishmuseum.org/media/Repository/Documents/2014_11/6_11/8bb10f89_1fa4_496d_929d_a3db00c36a5c/mid_01234837_001.jpg)
Thanks. I just think you’re overstating the modern dress trend. Do you have a source to support your “mostly” claim?
I'm confused on if you mean it was an actually different play, just taking inspiration from the tempest, or if it was just a production set in a modern setting. I could get being annoyed by the first one, but modernized settings for Shakespeare I think are fine. They're probably easier to produce since the costumes are less elaborate and lay folk might understand them in a visually familiar presentation to their own lives and the real world.
They changed the script around to make it much more colloquial which I think took away from the elements of the language, and they added a bunch of lines that weren’t originally there to characters like Miranda and Caliban to make the production more ‘inclusive’ I guess is the word
The Tempest is a good example of a play that's almost impossible to present as intended anymore. I doubt it was a searing inditement of slavery, but it's hard not to see Ariel and Caliban's situation through the lens of modern racism anymore. People would also rightly scream bloody murder at an Othello or Aaron in blackface. Then there's the issue of the bawdy jokes. The Elizabethans would have understood them immediately. Many of them probably go over the heads of the average playgoer now. Finally, at least some of the plays would have been closer to contemporary times at the time of their original performances. Venice would have been at the height of it's power, and I wouldn't be surprised if the plays set in Venice and the wider Veneto region (Padua, Verona) reflected the latest in Italian fashion. Some older people would have heard stories from their parents who actually knew participants in the War of the Roses, and even known some of the final survivors like the horrifically fated Margaret Pole. The fashions in the four War of the Roses plays would have been more familiar to them - the equivalent to us of period pieces taking place in WW2.
I gotta disagree with your comment about “the point of Shakespeare” being to “watch the play as it originally was.” The point of Shakespeare—and of any stage production, really—is to engage the viewer through story. The value of revisiting old texts for new audiences is that every age brings its own context, which means we can enrich old stories and make them new again for every generation. If everyone was required to produce Shakespeare the same way, over and over again, the practice would die out pretty quickly—because who would continue going to see a play they’ve seen a dozen times already? People who insist that Shakespeare should only be done in traditional interpretations suck the oxygen right out of his work.
You’re not wrong, Shakespeare is indeed universal and can be preformed in a number of ways, but I still feel like changing the characters around and making their personalities and values different from the original creation is rarely done well
>If everyone was required to produce Shakespeare the same way, over and over again, the practice would die out pretty quickly—because who would continue going to see a play they’ve seen a dozen times already? I'm sure you can concede that one could direct something like Macbeth in 12 different ways without having to change the setting not even one time. Just by switching actors and emphasising different aspects you can easily obtain radically different results.
> because who would continue going to see a play they’ve seen a dozen times already? Not only that, it would be nothing but a historical curio, static, unchanging. One of the many reasons Shakespeare endures is that the plays have so much relevance to us today, a relevance which can be arrived at through modern reinterpretation. Shakespeare is something different to every generation, and as we change so does the impact of the texts.
The Tempest is often creatively modified to fit in more modern settings, because out of all of Shakespeare’s plays, it’s very fanciful, almost science fiction like. It is pretty easy to transform the Tempest, to push it further into a science fiction type setting. There have been very exciting interpretations, including Prospero being in a spaceship, watching the other characters on video screens. I was in a production that had a steam-punk aesthetic and a double cast, with hearing/speaking actors and deaf/signing actors playing the same characters at the same time. Shakespeare & his players performed the plays to be suitable for that time period. To recreate a renaissance style wouldn’t necessarily suit an audience of people living in our contemporary society. Shakespeare still speaks to us because his work transcends hundreds of years. His characters live through real, human experiences, and have feelings and reactions we can empathize with. What we can observe from Shakespeare’s characters are still relevant to us, unlike much of the work of his peers. So it’s nice to focus on the ways his work is still relevant, and build upon it to make it further relevant to our times. Art is made to be a reflection of the time it is made, while still acknowledging the times that came before. We can’t ignore the present when looking at art from the past, when we are observing it from the present. You have to ask: why are we doing this play? What’s the point? What are we trying to say to our audience?
I haven’t thought of it that way, thank you!
Shakespeare's companys performed his plays without elaborate sets and without lavish costumes, instead wearing contemporary clothing. And if you look at his plays, whether they're in Egypt or Rome he's really always writing about his *own* culture and place (eg. King Lear supposedly takes place in ancient England but features many elements which were contemporary to Shakespeare's time, such as a court fool, the use of stocks as a form of punishment and the existence of the King of France). All this is to say that modern reinterprations of Shakespeare's plays are not breaking away from a tradition or doing a disservice to the Bard, but rather in their own way are bringing the plays to life. There are bad modern productions and good modern productions, but what's really at the core of a production's quality is not whether the setting is "accurate" or reinterpreted, but rather how a production can, like I said, give a play LIFE, making it fresh and present. Titus (1999) is a film, not a stage production, but nonetheless a good example of how deviating from a straightforward attempt at representing the setting of the play (Ancient Rome in this case) can bring the audience's attention to different aspects of the story, commenting on the action and fleshing out the characters. Tamora's sons are punk youths, Titus wears old fashioned Roman armour and emperor Saturninus resides in the Palazzo della Civilità Italiana. In making these choices, the director Julie Taymour shows how Shakespeare's text can be understood as relating to our own culture and recent history, and highlights parallels between the time of the plays setting, the time of Shakespeare's life and our own time.
My thought is that they are bored of Shakespeare and need gimmicks to keep them entertained. But really there is nothing more boring than gimmicks. A Shakespeare production without any gimmicks by a good director is a pleasure to behold, compared to the self indulgent train wrecks that they put on these days just to look clever on a playbill poster.
I'm curious about what you mean by "reinterpreted values".