Episode 27: William Shakespeare

Hamlet, Romeo a Julie, Sen noci svatojánské, Mnoho povyku pro nic, Macbeth, Othello a mnoho dalších. Divadelní hry, jejichž jména známe všichni. Co ale víme o jejich autorovi? V dalším z rozhovorů s Američankou Carmen, která pracuje v PR oddělení Skotské národní opery, si povídáme  o největším anglickém velikánovi, Williamu Shakespearovi, jehož jméno se stalo synonymem pro anglofonní kulturu. O jeho dětství, raném životě, manželce a dětech, stěhování do Londýna, kdy o něm po dobu šesti let prakticky nic nevíme. O tom, proč jsou jeho hry stále aktuální, pro jaké obecenstvo vlastně psal a proč i dnes někteří historikové pochybují, jestli takto propracovaná tvorba opravdu mohla vzejít z pera muže z malého městečka Stratford-upon-Avon, jehož otec se živil jako rukavičkář a ochutnavač piva. Nebo třeba o tom, že jeho originální podpis se dochoval především díky právním dokumentům, protože krom psaní her se velmi rád i soudil.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:11

Thank you very much for saying hello to this guest, carmen Pedok.

Speaker 2 0:41

Hi Carmen, how's it going? Hi, pavlina, it's good, it's nice to be back. Hi, carmen, how's it going? Hi, pavlina, it's good, it's nice to be back. Yes, amazing. So we could hear your lovely voice on episodes 7 and 24. So you come from the US, you live in Scotland, you work for the Scottish National Opera, yes, so we talked about all of that before right, and today we're going to be talking about something connected to all of that.

Speaker 3 1:10

I guess it is. Yeah, if it wasn't for studying theatre, I wouldn't end up in the UK, so I guess it's all working. Yeah, I guess everything's kind of connected in my life.

Speaker 2 1:15

It's all just a perfect circle. And so you are a huge theatre geek and nerd in a good way, in the best possible way.

Speaker 3 1:24

In a good and a bad way. I won't say it's just a good way.

Speaker 2 1:28

Okay, and so today? So last time we spoke about theater and you gave us an amazing insight, and today we're going to be talking about the most important man I would say maybe the epitome of the Anglophone culture and that's William Shakespeare. And so he is one of the men of your life. I would say, maybe your husband is the number one. Could this guy be the number two? Yeah, I think so. Okay, and so my first question would be so what first sparked your interest in studying Shakespeare's world and works?

Speaker 3 2:02

So I was seven years old and I was doing a theater class for small children and the, the instructor, um, decided to adapt a midsummer night's dream into like a half hour play for kids between the age of five and ten to put, perform or something like that. Um and the, the her version of a midsummer night's dream was basically just the mechanicals plot, where they're putting on their play within a play, plus the character of puck who comes in and comments on the action. It does cut out. It cuts out like every other plot. If anyone knows a midsummer night's dream, you'll know I'm leaving out a lot of detail there, but that's what that was for seven year olds.

Speaker 3 2:42

So that's what we did, and I think my mum and probably some other parents in the group were very skeptical that this was going to work and I'm not saying it was like it wasn't theatrical magic, that's for sure. But it got a bunch of kids interested in Shakespeare, including myself, and I was like, oh, this is cool. And then started watching kind of films based on Shakespeare and going to see local Shakespeare plays and I was still about eight or nine and then kind of when I hit the teenage years, that's when I moved into his tragedies, which you know is great for teenage angst. So yeah, it's kind of just been a really long process and I think even and I've kind of from those, I guess, early acting classes I've kept doing theater and community theater and ended up studying drama at bachelor's level at university. So you can say it kind of all started there for me.

Speaker 2 3:30

Oh, how fun. Well, I have to tell you. So I did a theater class in my high school and we did a play Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. But in that play he never comes by Samuel Beckett. But in that play he never comes. But in our play he did come and he was an old, blind man and that was me and they killed me on stage. My little sister was petrified. My little sister was petrified because she was just so scared. So that was my initiation, like theater initiation.

Speaker 3 4:07

I'm glad I had a better time than your sister.

Speaker 2 4:09

Yeah, for sure. And so so back to William Shakespeare. Sorry, yes, so he did not come from a noble family. So do we know how his upbringing and education actually influenced his writing style and themes?

Speaker 3 4:24

So Shakespeare was born into kind of what we'd call like a merchant class family. He wasn't like deprived or super impoverished, but he wasn't titled, he didn't have like noble connections. He was in kind of a regional town, not London or kind of one of the palaces or courts. But the education he got as a young boy would have covered English history. It would have covered Latin and Greek and the classic histories as well. And you do actually see a lot of that stuff informing his plays, because he writes all the history plays about kings from Richard II all the way up through Henry VIII, and he writes about Anthony and Cleopatra, julius Caesar, and then he has those kind of classical allusions and myths informing kind of his other stories.

Speaker 3 5:14

And so I think there are people who think that the person we know as William Shakespeare didn't exist. They think that the glove maker's son from Stratford-upon-Avon didn't have the education to write his plays. And I think I don't know, I think that's nonsense. I think that it really shows a lack of imagination in people saying only the really rich and educated could have access to this work and knew how to talk about it. So yeah, I think I don't know if I can say I can say we can say like, oh, his education covered all this stuff and therefore it's not hard to believe that he knew all this, all the things that he was writing about.

Speaker 3 5:54

And also he moved to London around 1590, um, when he was in his 20s. And then when he moved to London, he would have been exposed to more people, more cultures, more stories. So yeah, I know that's kind of not super answering your question. I'm not sure how I can say that his education or upbringing directly influenced. It wasn't like he was writing plays about himself, like a lot of modern authors writing books based on their life. I don't think he really did that. He really he drew on bigger stories, but it's not out of the realm of possibility that he wrote these plays. I think it's really fair to say that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare and like there's no other person who could have written Shakespeare?

Speaker 2 6:37

Yeah, because that was one of my next questions, because there are still these unresolved questions surrounding his identity. If yeah, as you say, if Shakespeare actually was Shakespeare or if there was someone else actually writing those plays. So what's your opinion on that?

Speaker 3 6:54

I 100% think Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. I don't think there's any question about that. I think I can see where questions arise. Obviously we don't have as many written records of people's lives from hundreds of years ago as we do now, and also understandings of copyright was very different, so Shakespeare wouldn't have, like he did, publish his plays, but there weren't all the piracy protections, weren't in place. There are actually pirated versions of Shakespeare's plays that we have on record, that people would write down in the theater and then try to sell as their own. Oh, wow, yeah, so there's. Yeah. So I think, since there's not kind of that clear paper trail and clear historical trail, that does leave the window open, but I think it comes down to kind of a snobbishness from people just thinking that commoners can't write stories that endure over hundreds and hundreds of years.

Speaker 2 7:52

Interesting, and so what do we know about his personal life? You already mentioned he was a glove maker's son. I think he father also was a beer taster.

Speaker 3 8:01

Yeah, he was. I think he was a bit of a drunk. From what? We know about him. Yeah, a bit of a tough character. So we know, I think Shakespeare was one of many children and we know he had a grammar school education. We know he married a woman named Anne Hathaway when he was 18 and Anne was, I believe, 26. She was older than him and she was pregnant by the time they got married, so it may have been a bit of a rushed affair.

Speaker 2 8:27

A shotgun wedding.

Speaker 3 8:29

Yeah, and a few years after that Shakespeare went to London to kind of, I guess, seek his fortune. And we actually there's a period in his life for about five or six years that Shakespeare scholars sometimes refer to as like a dark period, because we actually don't really know what he was up to during this time. There weren't that many existing written records that show where he was. So we assume he was in London kind of working odd jobs and finding his feet in theater, but we don't know, we don't know for sure. And he kept Anne Hathaway out in Stratford. She never joined him in London, but they had three children in total. They had their first daughter and then twins. First daughter was named Susanna and the twins were named Hamnet and Judith. And Hamnet died through some illness not long before Shakespeare adapted a Danish story into Hamlet. But Hamlet is the only. His version is the only version that uses a name similar to his son's. They all have Danish names in the old stories, which is just quite interesting. I guess maybe he was kind of affected by his son's death.

Speaker 3 9:33

And yeah, then he he took up with a couple of theater companies in London. One of them built the Globe Theater, which was south of the main London city because you couldn't have theaters in London. They were considered very immoral. All sorts of riffraff came, you know, not a place you would take well-behaved ladies or anyone you wanted to make a good impression on. And then there were also court theaters which were much more exclusive and much more expensive to get tickets at, and those were indoors and lit by candlelight and scholars sometimes debate which plays were written for which theater, based on kind of the scenes that they have in them.

Speaker 3 10:09

If some of them have bigger crowd scenes or clown scenes, they're like oh, this might appeal to a mass audience, this must have been written for the Globe. And then maybe some more, some smaller plays with some kind of chamber sequences or pageants. They're like this probably was written for the taste of the court. So it's all kind of piecing things together and then there are records from when plays were first performed and also kind of coming back to whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.

Speaker 3 10:36

I think one thing that a lot of playwrights did in kind of the early modern era which isn't really acknowledged or not really it's starting to be more and more acknowledged but it's not really done now is there was a lot of kind of unofficial collaboration. So we know plays like the Two Noble Kinsmen was Shakespeare and a co-author, but there are actually kind of looking at more and more plays. People are thinking more of them like measure for measure, like the first kind of his initial Henry VI trilogy were done with co-authors and he may have co-authored some other plays by other playwrights as well, and so I think there's also a bit of a culture of collaboration that I think when people want their name in lights they don't really want to go for.

Speaker 2 11:20

Yeah, but I mean, that happens now as well, right, like with songwriting, with movie writing.

Speaker 3 11:26

Oh, it absolutely does. I think it's just a bit more official now. We don't need to pore over historical documents to try to figure out who wrote which scene and which play.

Speaker 2 11:34

And so how could we describe his writing style?

Speaker 3 11:38

That's a really good question, thank you. Within Shakespeare, you see, within his plays, at least his dramatic works, he was working within kind of the early modern English theatre and they often had sections in verse and sections in prose. And the verse that Shakespeare used was typically iambic pentameter, which meant that each line had 10 syllables and the second syllable in each pair was the stressed one. So it was also seen in his sonnets. So, like sonnet 18, shall I compare thee to a summer's day has that poetic rhythm that you get in a lot of Shakespeare's speeches, and he did.

Speaker 3 12:24

When he's writing in verse verse he does play with this a little bit. Sometimes he'll end with an unstressed syllable um, sometimes that can be a sign that the character is questioning, um, or uncertain, like to be or not to be? That is the question ends on a unstressed syllable. So people are like, oh, is that hinting at Hamlet's mental state? And then prose writing is not structured, it's kind of just the way we're talking now. There's no line breaks, it's very conversational, and this is often reserved for more informal scenes, for lower class characters. You'd never catch a king speaking in prose. His kings always speak in verse and, like in the Henry IV plays. Prince Hal will switch between the tavern scenes where he's speaking in prose, and then when he's at court he speaks in verse, and it's kind of him switching between the two worlds.

Speaker 2 13:14

And so the blank verse. Yeah, so blank verse. Is that what you just talked about? It is yeah, so that's the that's verse, and blank verse, so blank verse is that what you just talked about?

Speaker 3 13:20

It is yeah, so that's verse. And blank verse, I believe, means it just doesn't rhyme. So every line doesn't have to rhyme. Now, shakespeare did use rhymes. He often ends scenes with a rhyming, with two lines that rhyme, and that's a signal to the audience that something else is going to happen now. Because they didn't have big elaborate sets on those stages, you had to kind of write in the cues as to when one scene was ending and another scene was going to begin that sounds so like difficult and intricate what's happening now, but I suppose people were kind of like used to it I think they, they were in the, in the mode of it, and I think I think when you see a good shakespeare production, production that understands how the scenes are set up, it almost just, it just kind of makes sense.

Speaker 2 14:04

Yeah, and so his works or his work has been enjoyed over the centuries by many, many generations. So which is your favorite tragedy and favorite comedy and what makes them still relevant and so timeless?

Shakespeare's Influence in Global Culture

Speaker 3 14:19

So my favorite tragedy has always been King Lear and my favorite comedy switches a bit more often but I usually settle on Much Ado About Nothing. I think King Lear is just a horrible, terrifying piece of literature and everything falls apart in it. There's very little redeeming characters or qualities by the end of it, but I think it's just a really. It's a kind of a monumental testament to broken families, broken societies, everyone out for themselves, and there is like a glimmer of hope right at the end. So it's not just like the worst, but I just I just find that piece really captivating and Much Ado About Nothing is just really lovely. It's got some depth and darkness in it, but I just love the fact that you're spending the whole play just trying to make two people who say they hate each other fall in love.

Speaker 3 15:09

I think that's a. That's a perennial rom-com trope. You see that so much today and I mean I think that's kind of why Shakespeare is so done well today, because because he really taps in, he's a crowd pleaser. He taps into tropes and character types and stories that we love and we always retell. I mean he was adapting work and literature and poems and plays that came before him and then we just keep adapting them as well, like without Shakespeare we wouldn't have 10 Things I Hate About you.

Speaker 2 15:40

Yeah, and so how did his place actually reflect the norms and values of his time?

Speaker 3 15:49

Oh, that's a really good question. I mean I'm speaking as, like, a Shakespeare fan, not a scholar, so I'm sure someone has done like a great piece on this. That will be that I'm gonna have to seek out. But I think it was interesting because Shakespeare was writing at a time when kind of England was on top of the world. They just come out of the kind of uncertainty of Mary the first reign, where she tried to take England from Henry the eighth protestantism back to Catholicism. And then when Elizabeth I came on the throne kind of as she was re-established her dad's Protestant order, she also kind of she had Sir Walter Scott exploring the world and defeating the Spanish Armada. I think England kind of felt. And then colonialism was kind of opening up trade routes around the Americas and the Far East and it was a time where there's a lot of kind of buzz of possibility and obviously that led to a lot of really bad things happening in world history as well.

Speaker 3 16:48

But I think Shakespeare was writing for a very, very proud country kind of on top of the world, and I think that's reflected especially in his history plays. He's always thinking about how the plays will make the current monarch look good and look legitimate. I don't think that means he shies away from difficult themes or characters. There is a whole saga about Richard II as about a king who gets deposed. Someone who wanted to get Elizabeth I off the throne used that play as a symbol of revolt, which isn't Shakespeare's fault. I mean, everyone can interpret their plays differently, but I don't think he was always like the king's right, the king's the best. But yeah, he was aware who was paying his bills at the end of the day and who kind of protected him from being thrown in the Tower of London.

Speaker 2 17:37

And, interestingly, his female characters. You know they're often very strong and very complex. So who is your favorite Shakespearean heroine and what makes her compelling?

Speaker 3 17:51

They are really good characters. I know there's a lot of feminist scholarship about maybe, why Shakespeare isn't 100% progressive. I mean, he's not. He's a man who lived in the 1500s. He's got his sexist and racist hang-ups, but I do think his women are really compelling.

Speaker 3 18:10

I would go with Rosalind from as you Like it probably as my favorite female character. She's just very smart, very in charge and not saying like she's like a girl boss, she just knows like she sees some opportunities, she sees a man that she likes, she sees her position in court kind of going downhill and she's just like cool, I'm going to move to the woods and disguise myself as a man and we'll figure it out and I'll make my own way in the world until then. And of course she, you know she ends up with her dad back on the throne and she's married to the love of her life and she gets it all, but it's all kind of through her own making. And the scenes where she's flirting with Orlando, the man she loves, dressed as a man, pretending to be a woman, it's just, it's wonderful, it's very, very silly but also slightly subversive.

Speaker 2 19:00

And so you know, his influence extends far beyond the English speaking world. So why do you think that you know his work resonates so much in different cultures and languages too? In Prague, actually, every summer, we have this whole Shakespeare festival at the Prague Castle, which is beautiful, amazing. Yeah, it's outdoors, it's really stunning. So you know, and it's Prague, we have nothing to do with Shakespeare, like there's no connection between Shakespeare and Prague. So why do you think that is?

Speaker 3 19:29

So I mean, I think a lot of people in English speaking countries make a really big deal about Shakespeare needing to be performed in the original language and I think, yeah, I think that's a bit yeah because, everyone's like oh, it's about the words, and I see that, and obviously Shakespeare knew words brilliantly and he was very inventive with them.

Shakespeare's Influence on International Culture

Speaker 3 19:51

But I think it's the fact that he writes just, he knows how to dramatically pace a story and he makes interesting characters that you get really invested in. And he was adapting works that came from Italy, that came from France, that came from Scandinavia. He wasn't just saying this is all English all the time. So I think it makes sense that people then take his works and go. I want to put it in my country and my world. One of my favourite Shakespeare films is Throne of Blood by Akira Kurosawa, which is a Japanese samurai adaptation of Macbeth. So he takes it out of Scotland. He's, you know, it has none of the whole prophecy about the new kings of Scotland in it. It's just a great Macbeth film set in Japan. It's all translated and I think, yeah, I think it's absolutely brilliant.

Speaker 2 20:41

Yeah, well, sorry, no, go on. No, I just wanted to show you something, because this is a coincidence, like obviously listeners can't see it, but I have to show you two books that I have right here. So these two books, you see, they're like massive, oh my goodness, yeah. You see they're like massive, oh my goodness, yeah. And so they are by a Czech translator. His name is Martin Hilski and he is wonderful. He is, I think he's over 80. I think he just celebrated 80 years old and he is the official quote unquote translator of Shakespeare to Czech, and he's done a brilliant work. So I understand what you say, but at the same time, I have to say that there are people who do it so brilliantly that should be cherished.

Speaker 3 21:25

I absolutely agree and I am very limited in my languages outside of English, unfortunately, so I can't really comment on how people have translated words. But I know Pasternak did wonderful translations into Russian for Russian films in the 1960s and of course, in my, in my opera world. Giuseppe Verdi wrote many operas, I think three operas based on Shakespeare's plays, and they're all in Italian because he was writing for Italian audiences. But he was very much like we're going we'll go to the source material, we'll translate it exactly into Italian. Like we'll go to the source material, we'll translate it exactly into Italian and then we'll figure out how it works in an opera setting. So yeah, it can absolutely be done and maybe even gets better. Yeah, maybe.

Speaker 2 22:12

And so what are some interesting fun facts about William Shakespeare that maybe not that many people know about fun facts about William Shakespeare that maybe not that many people know about.

Speaker 3 22:25

So we have his signature mainly from court documents where he was suing people. He really liked to sue people over anything and everything. So if he didn't yeah, if he wasn't so litigious, we wouldn't really know what his signature looked like. So that's fun, and so a lot of times we think of, like Shakespeare's classic plays. Like you say, in Prague they're performed every summer At the Royal Shakespeare Company in the UK and the American Shakespeare Center in the US. Their core repertoire is very much based around well, it's all based around his plays and we think like, oh, every five years we'll see a Hamlet or something.

Speaker 3 22:57

But in Shakespeare, shakespeare's time, it was very unusual for his plays to get a second outing. They would often just be written, performed for a few weeks and then that was. That was kind of it during his lifetime. Like he didn't, he was never writing for something that was going to pay his bills for the rest of his life, and that's why he wrote so much, because the audiences demanded new entertainment. The only play we have a record of being performed kind of multiple times throughout his life is Titus Andronicus, which was his first tragedy, and it is a slasher, it is. Everyone dies, everyone is killed in horrible ways on stage. There's cannibalism, there's like mutilation, it's like a Saw movie but Shakespeare, and I think it's just really funny that people were like we want to see Titus Andronicus again, and so that's what he had to keep putting on.

Speaker 2 23:51

People, they never cease to shock you. Yeah, and so actually now, I think we mentioned this once, but he wore an earring right.

Speaker 3 24:03

We have an earring in a famous portrait, we assume that's correct. I mean, the guy painting it could have added it for dramatic effect, but let's say that Shakespeare wore an earring. I think that's a much better thing.

Speaker 2 24:15

Yeah, I think I read that it was not that uncommon. Yeah, I think, sir Walter Rale, better thing. I think I read that it was not that uncommon.

Speaker 3 24:19

Yeah, I think Sir Walter Raleigh might have also had an earring. I think it might have been a big fashion accessory back in the time.

Speaker 2 24:25

And so obviously you go to the theater very often. Maybe I don't know anyone else who would go to the theater as often as you do, so would you recommend seeing a play in. Because you already mentioned the Globe Shakespeare Theater in London, so would you recommend seeing a play in. Because you already mentioned the Globe Shakespeare Theatre in London, so would you recommend seeing a Shakespeare play in the Globe today.

Speaker 3 24:43

Absolutely. The Globe was rebuilt, was like recreated in the late 20th century I think. It opened in 1997 by like a guy who was really passionate about Shakespeare and he wanted to bring kind of an original creation of one of his original theaters to London and I. So I've talked a little bit about people being snobs about Shakespeare's upbringing and people being snobs about Shakespeare's original language. I'm going to be a snob about the way Shakespeare is performed very quickly.

Speaker 3 25:16

I I think that Shakespeare really is best in original performance settings, because Shakespeare wrote for these large wooden circular theaters that house a few hundred people and there's no amplification, there are no lights, but he wrote in a way that people, when they use their voice correctly, they can be heard at all sides of this theater. There's naturally really good acoustics and you don't really need kind of staging tricks. Now there were some staging tricks, like he had a trap door in the stage and a trap door kind of above the stage where like gods could descend or devils could come up. So I'm not saying like it was really low tech, it was very high tech for the time. But I think Shakespeare really loses something when it's in a tradition, when what we would consider a traditional theater with blackout lights and spotlights and microphones. I don't think it sounds the same, I don't think it has the same energy or pace.

Speaker 3 26:18

So I think if anyone has a chance to see Shakespeare at the Globe or at one of the recreations of Shakespeare's indoor theatres which they actually now have at the Globe, which is small indoor wood panelling, candlelight I think you should absolutely go, take that opportunity. And also, shakespeare writes a lot of asides and a lot of addresses to the audience and I think when you're playing in a theater where the audience is in darkness and there's like light only on the stage, you just have a guy talking to nothing, whereas if you have it in the Globe, where there's always lights and now of course, like the Globe, has floodlights for when it performs at night, because otherwise you can't see anything but traditionally it would have only had afternoon performances and the audience would see the actors, the actors would see the audience, the audience could see each other. And I think when Shakespeare's characters then talk to the side or talk to the audience just makes it more fun and the actors can pick on the audience as well. So yeah, I would wholly recommend seeing like original format Shakespeare, if anyone gets the chance.

Speaker 2 27:18

Oh, beautiful, okay. And one last question that just came to mind. So I don't know if you've been, but I've been to Verona, in Italy, where supposedly, yeah, romeo and Juliet took place and it's, it's bewitching, it's fascinating that there is still well, it's obviously not the house, but it's. You know. People say it's the house where she lived and there's the balcony, and they're like you know, there's so many tourists coming to see it, you know. So I just find it so crazy I mean, I went to see it, but I find it so crazy that, you know, he made it up and now it's there and people still go and see it. Like, you know, what do you think of that?

Speaker 3 27:59

It's wild. Yeah, I've never been to Verona, I haven't seen it. I read a really good book last year called Searching for Juliet. It was a book about Juliet and how we understand her in pop culture, from Shakespeare's play through the present day. It had a big chapter about the Verona balcony and like the tomb and they've all just made it a massive tourist attraction and I think it. I mean, I think it's kind of bizarre that we as a society have latched on to this story of two teenagers who fall in love and die and, like the star-crossed lovers and like Romeo and Juliet, have become synonymous with true love. Really, it's like a teenage fling that doesn't really have a chance to go anywhere else because their families are terrible. Yeah, I don't know if I have much to observe on it. I was just reading the chapter going like, oh my God, and so I kind of I would like to go to Verona someday and maybe I'll understand it then.

Speaker 2 28:54

Yeah, maybe. Well, you can write your own name and your husband's name on on one of the walls and it's allowed to do that. I have to do that now. Now you do okay, carmen, thank you so much for, yeah, telling us just maybe like one percent of all your knowledge more than one percent of my knowledge, but like one percent of all shakespeare knowledge.

Speaker 3 29:13

Less than one percent, yeah well, thank you so much.

Speaker 2 29:16

Thanks so much for having me and thank you to everyone who's listened to this episode as well. And I'll see you next time. Bye.