Skip to main content
Loading Explore guides…
Shakespearean Comedy · Acedra
Home
Explore
Literature
Shakespearean Comedy
Sign in to save
Chat
If YouTube asks you to sign in, open the video on YouTube.
Watch on YouTube
Reload player
Transcript
77 segments
Copy
Hide video
0:05
When does the action of Shakespeare’s comedies happen, and when should it appear to be happening in performance? My interest in realism today is largely focussed on these questions of time – always a pertinent matter around a playwright recognized even by contemporaries to be not of an age, but for all time, and one so confident in his ability to deal with time dramatically that in The Winter’s Tale he is even prepared to write dialogue for Time himself.
0:37
In what follows I am going to focus on two particular plays, Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing, partly because in fifty years of watching Shakespeare’s comedies these are the only two I have never seen staged in modern dress, and I am curious as to why that should be the case I am going to start by stating the obvious, as a convenient platform from which to move on over the rest of this talk to stating the even more obvious.
1:08
First generalization, then: Shakespeare’s comedies are utterly unlike the scripts which succeeded them after the proscenium-arch stage made realist sitcom the norm in Anglophone comedy, from the 1660s onwards. In the present-day theatrical repertory Shakespearean comedy belongs in a category of its own, and it may in performance require special handling of a kind unsuitable for comedies written more recently.
1:38
It would be very surprising, for instance, if this picture of what remains Sally Jacobs’ most famous stage design were surmounted by the words ‘RSC in The Importance of Being Earnest.’ For all the paradox, whimsy and irony of its script, Wilde’s masterpiece, like the Feydeau farces and Chekhovian tragicomedies with which it is contemporary, assumes a stage which will offer a mechanical simulation of secular reality.
2:11
Hence this programme for its first performance specifies that the play’s action is to be realized on life-sized 3-D representations of, for instance, ‘the Garden at the Manor House, Woolton,’ and ‘the Morning Room at the Manor House, Woolton.’ Just as significantly, and in just as un-Shakespearean a fashion, the programme also specifies exactly when the play’s action is to appear to be taking place: ‘Time – The Present’,
2:42
that is, 1895, and the calendar at Woolton Hall hasn’t either moved on or been erased through all this play’s many, many revivals ever since. But even if you can’t obviously stage Wildean comedy on a stage made for Shakespeare, it appears that you can stage Shakespearean comedy on a stage made for Wilde. This, for instance, looks suspiciously like the morning room at the Manor House, Woolton, and this looks like Gwendolen and Cecily receiving a visit from a couple of random friends in
3:20
the Garden at the Manor House, Woolton. After one of the final matinees of this show, I had arranged to meet one of these performers at the stage door, on Suffolk Street -- -- and here she is; this is Lisa Dillon, or, as those of us who knew her work before she turned professional and changed her name still think of her, Lisa Stawiarski. Here I was reminded that this show was even mounted on an authentically Wildean stage.
4:03
The last of the three playhouses in which those large and expensive country-house sets were assembled was the Theatre Royal in the Haymarket, where An Ideal Husband was premiered, just before Earnest opened at the nearby St James’s. But whatever the date of the architecture and the designs at the Haymarket, the script in which Lisa was appearing wasn’t by Wilde but by Shakespeare, since here we were at Christopher Luscombe’s interlinked RSC productions of Love’s Labour’s
4:36
Lost and Much Ado About Nothing. These opened in Stratford in 2014, transferred thereafter to Chichester, and were last seen in London in spring 2017. There are connections between Wilde and Love’s Labour’s Lost – most obviously, Wilde’s borrowing of one of the play’s motifs for The Importance of Being Earnest, when he has Jack arrive at Woolton Hall during the second act in full mourning, so that we know his errand even before he announces it himself.
5:09
This echoes the Princess of France’s realization at the end of her play that the similarly-clad Mercadé has come to give her the news of her father’s death before he actually says so: except that in Wilde, of course, not only is the play nowhere near over, but we know both that the dear departed, Jack’s brother Ernest, is wholly fictitious, and that Algernon has beaten Jack to Woolton and has already been passing himself off as Ernest for much of the act so far.
5:39
Luscombe’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, though, unlike his current, explicitly Wildean production of Twelfth Night, was interested not in 1895 but in a date two decades later. Like several preceding directors of Love’s Labour’s Lost (notably Ian Judge and Trevor Nunn), Luscombe set his production very specifically in the summer of 1914, but like fewer directors of Much Ado he set his at Christmas in 1918, double-casting his leads across the two plays
6:14
so that Benedick’s post-war wooing of Beatrice seemed like the sequel to Berowne’s pre-war courtship of Rosaline. As the quotations on the poster and the productions’ long itinerary suggest, this was a very successful theatrical venture, and it gave a great deal of pleasure to its audiences, not to mention gainful employment to a deserving team of carpenters, props-buyers, costume-makers, lighting technicians, assistant stage managers and, I should perhaps blush to confess, mercenary
6:47
hack writers of programme notes. Luscombe’s productions, setting the plays in specific, recognisable time-periods which are neither Shakespeare’s nor ours, belong to a category of Shakespearean revivals which only became mainstream in the mid- to late twentieth century. In Shakespeare’s own time most plays seem to have been given in a sort of enhanced, dressing-up-box version of contemporary clothing, and, with the addition of a few recognizable
7:18
historical markers here and there for specific kings, and the advent of smarter togas for Romans and the survival of obsolete Elizabethan motley for fools, that remained the norm for costuming Shakespeare well into the eighteenth century. But then, to abbreviate an argument made at more length elsewhere by among others Nicola Watson, Walter Scott and J.R. Planché happened, and suddenly it was as if a law had been introduced recommending
7:48
the death penalty for any actor-manager found guilty of anachronism. In the nineteenth century, Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies were to be performed strictly as if the action were taking place in the time of their characters, often on large sets representing specific castles at specific times. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, similarly, because set in and near ancient Athens, demanded ancient Greek costumes, and massive sets depicting Athens (this one was designed by the Grieves
8:33
brothers, for Charles Kean’s production of 1856). Apart from the similarly classical and hence tunic-clad Comedy of Errors, however, the other comedies were to be costumed as if taking place in Shakespeare’s own lifetime, so in clothes a bit like this: Or, indeed these: This is Charles and Mary Kean as Benedick and Beatrice: by their time the ‘Once upon a time’ of Shakespearean comedy had given place to ‘Once upon a time that was definitely 1598.’
9:15
Objecting that modern audiences did not know how to read the conventions of Elizabethan dress, which for them carried all sorts of unhelpful connotations about Merrie Englande and morris dancing, and that anyway Shakespeare hadn’t written his plays as fancy-dress museum pieces and wasn’t nearly as keen on morris dancing as some people made out, directors such as Barry Jackson were already experimenting with a return to modern dress in the 1920s and 1930s.
9:43
A third way between Elizabethanism and modern dress, though -- the practice of setting the plays at some recognizable point between the Renaissance and our own time -- has only caught on since the second world war. It was pioneered, indeed, by two figures who subsequently moved on to recommend instead the empty space and the open stage. In 1946 Peter Brook, hired by Barry Jackson when he was still only twenty, directed this
10:25
Love’ s Labour’s Lost in what was then the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (that’s Paul Scofield as Don Armado; and the figure in the front on the right is Donald Sinden as Dumaine). The clothes remained vaguely Elizabethan, but they hinted at commedia dell’arte and the harlequinade, so that combined with the rococo details of the set and the autumnal yellows of the lighting they seemed to place the play’s action in an eighteenth-century fête galante from a Watteau painting.
10:59
Tyrone Guthrie followed this lead to somewhere much nearer the present in 1953, when he directed All’s Well That Ends Well in Stratford, Ontario as if it were by Shaw or Chekhov, an experiment he repeated in the other Stratford six years later. In their crinolines, veils and lorgnettes, Edith Evans, Zoe Caldwell, Angela Baddeley and the rest made the script of a sour Elizabethan fairytale seem to be happening to a cast of Edwardians.
11:36
These productions were very consciously taken as models by subsequent directors. In 1981, for instance, Trevor Nunn made what was in some important respects a remake of Guthrie’s All’s Well, this time with Peggy Ashcroft as the Countess and Harriet Walter as Helena. By 1981 this ploy of dressing Shakespeare in an alternative set of heritage costumes had even spread to the more avant-garde fringes of the non-professional sector:
12:16
This was Wendy Williams’ production of As You Like It on Brownsea Island, dressed to resemble a picnic from Three Men In A Boat, and hence placing that pink and white striped blazer on the dubious guitarist co-opted into the show that summer from the ranks of a local surf revival band. I should stress here that I myself have no objection on principle to this sort of one-play-on-the-elaborately-realistic-set-of-another approach to Shakespeare.
12:59
Even though I am nowadays very proud to be associated with Flute Theatre, whose low-budget minimalism can conjure the whole of Twelfth Night from a single acoustic guitar, and who can give you Hamlet using only six actors, a sofa, a box of photographs and the skull of a dog, I still cherish the memory of Nunn’s All’s Well, and indeed I display a copy of its poster on the wall outside my office as an implicit warning to any students or
13:28
indeed colleagues who may be tempted to speak of it with disrespect. It is important to recognize, though, as I shall show, that the use of non-modern, non-Elizabethan realistic period settings does very different things when imposed on different Shakespearean comedies: as with general polemics in favour of original practices or of modern dress, there are always caveats and exceptions to be made. But there is a very familiar critique that is often made about any production in this
14:02
period-specific mode, and I may as well outline it here before setting out to qualify it, particularly in connection with the stage histories of Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado, over the remainder of this lecture. Essentially, objectors to pros-arch revivals of Shakespearean comedy in which the costumes and the designs all match, so that they tie the plays’ action to a precise social milieu in a specific place at a single historical moment, tend to complain that such revivals
14:33
impose post-Renaissance limits on Shakespeare’s imagination, dragging his scripts into our own stunted and utilitarian industrialized world in a manner complicit with one of received academic cultural history’s favourite narratives of general decline. That narrative, most influentially outlined in Eric Auerbach’s masterpiece Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), is that of the fall into realism.
15:08
Auerbach’s chronological account of Western literature looks primarily at the long transition from epic to the novel, and it sees, mainly, a combination of disenchantment and downward mobility. In the beginning, classical poets and religious visionaries gave us the gods, and then epic heroes; then their medieval successors gave us kings, and knights errant; and then Cervantes happened, so that the chivalric romance dwindled into the realist novel, and the feudal Sir
15:42
Launcelot was supplanted by the bourgeois Sir Charles Grandison. Auerbach only takes the story as far into the modern and as far down the social scale as Emma Bovary and Mrs Ramsay, but you can see where it is going: next stop Leopold Bloom, and before you know where you are elite literary fiction will be treating us to the adventures of addicted Scottish drop-outs in Welsh’s Trainspotting. Auerbach has comparatively little to say about drama – starting, appropriately, with a
16:14
medieval Fall play, La Mystere d’Adam, and finishing with the fall of Schiller’s middle-class heroine Luise Miller – but he does touch on Shakespeare, who appears primarily as an anti-heroic colleague of Cervantes. The Shakespeare plays Auerbach singles out for discussion are, accordingly and perhaps misleadingly, Henry IV parts 1 and 2 – free of supernatural characters, set at particular non-imaginary locations in Shakespeare’s own homeland, and featuring the nearest the
16:46
canon ever gets to specifying a year, when the king mentions (not quite accurately) that it is now fourteen hundred years since the Crucifixion. For Auerbach, in short, Shakespeare is less the last of the ancients than the first of the moderns, and this view hasn’t suited those for whom the whole point of the Shakespeare canon is that it gives us imaginative access to an unfallen, still numinous, hand-crafted pre-industrial world, in which pictures of Troy still looked like much like pictures
17:17
of Camelot, and for which history hadn’t yet dwindled to a series of date-stamped landmarks in what Benedict Anderson would call the universal empty secular railway time of modern nationalism. For those invested in Shakespeare as a non-realist, the 1590s are liable to be remembered not as the crucible of secular historical drama-documentary but as a time when theatre audiences were still prepared to believe in ghosts and witches and fairies, and when theatre architects hadn’t
17:51
been distracted by fancy lighting and perspective scenery into forgetting that the space under the actors’ feet was Hell and the space above their heads was Heaven. The most important early proponent of this view was Wilde’s contemporary William Poel, of the English Stage Society, who thought that in order to stage Shakespeare’s plays properly we needed to abandon all the machinery of realism and get back to something approximating the conditions and practices of the Elizabethan playhouse.
18:26
This photograph depicts Poel’s production of Measure for Measure at the Royalty Theatre in 1893. As you can see, instead of commissioning a fussy, expensive, antiquarian set complete with matching costumes all distractingly and irrelevantly obsessed with a particular time period, Poel commissioned a fussy, expensive, antiquarian set complete with matching costumes all distractingly and irrelevantly obsessed with a particular time period.
18:56
The central problem of living in an era that has a different sense of historicity than did Shakespeare’s is not so much solved here as slightly and anxiously relocated. This is not only ‘once upon a time that was definitely 1603’ but ‘once upon a time that was definitely 1603, as said as if it were still 1603.’ The anachronistic taboo against anachronism which Poel merely extended from costumes to staging has if anything been extended still further by some of Poel’s more recent disciples,
19:34
in places like Southwark and Staunton, Virginia, for whom antiquarian pseudo-Elizabethan stage-sets like this have simply expanded to become entire antiquarian pseudo-Elizabethan theatres. Which for some of the plays, and with some directors and performers, work very well, I hasten to add, even given that it has so far proved technically impossible to supply genuine Elizabethan playgoers to fill the pastiche Elizabethan benches: but for some
20:05
of the plays this approach has definitely been counterproductive, as I shall show. First, though, how well does the view of Shakespearean comedy as irreconcileable with the illusionist stage actually fit either the canon of Shakespearean comedy or our dominant account of the illusionist stage? Among these plays, certainly, A Midsummer Night’s Dream isn’t exactly bourgeois realism in embryo – hence in part Brook’s decision to park a white box of circus tricks
20:40
in front of the stage space which might otherwise have simulated a real palace and a real forest – and nor is The Tempest. But in fact, despite Brook, these are two of the plays which, over time, the proscenium arch has liked best, and we forget at our peril that even if in the late nineteenth century perspective sets and illusionist scenery came to be associated with middle-class realism, they were invented to bring us the gods.
21:14
The specimens of picture-stage theatre which Shakespeare himself had the chance to hear of or see dealt not in minute present-day social observation but in divine spectacle. One of the most important early perspective auditoriums built in England for spoken drama rather than for a court masque was this one, designed by Inigo Jones and others when James I and his court visited the hall of Christ Church, Oxford, in 1605. The stage, to the left, was at the High Table end of the hall.
21:56
(If you want to carry on with that narrative of cultural decline, I might mention that the sole great non-realist performance I ever saw at this venue was given by Gary Glitter). As you can see from the eye sketched in at point H, this auditorium had proper sightlines, just like a real theatre. The figures who came down this temporary structure’s pioneering raked acting area, in between large triangular scenery pieces which could be turned in mid-performance to change locations, were
22:52
mainly nymphs, shepherds, satyrs and Olympians, in Latin plays including Alba and Vertumnus and in Samuel Daniel’s Arcadia Reformed, later retitled The Queen’s Arcadia. (A performance of this latter play will be given in that very hall at Christ Church on September 15th by a team from Shakespeare’s Globe, complete with a lecture by Dr Elizabeth Sandis of the Shakespeare Institute; book now while tickets remain).
23:22
If any of Shakespeare’s plays look disappointingly short on gods and fairies, it may be because they are too far from the pictorial mode as Shakespeare understood it rather than too near it: and so far from being the scenes which the proscenium arch couldn’t cope with, it was Shakespeare’s representations of the supernatural which the new indoor theatres of the later seventeenth century found most congenial, turning, in particular, Dream and The Tempest into spectacular semi-operas.
23:54
(That’s the frontispiece to Rowe’s 1709 edition of The Tempest, which illustrates how the play’s rewritten opening looked on Rowe’s stage rather than Shakespeare’s, and the title page of the Purcell-scored The Fairy Queen.) The subsequent rise of ballet only made it more possible to stage fairies, rather than less, and this lovely piece of scenery and choreography, again from Charles Kean’s 1856 Dream, could easily have been recycled in other, non-Shakespearean shows, especially at Christmas.
24:35
To this day, British proscenium arch theatres earn much of their annual income from showing their audiences fairies, ghosts and spectacular transformations, in pantomimes – shows which, as I’ve argued elsewhere, descend in part from the early eighteenth century’s annual revivals of that Restoration version of The Tempest over the Christmas season. ( Oh yes they do). Tinkerbell always was a version of Ariel, and whether Tinkerbell and Ariel and Puck
25:09
are staged on a mock-Tudor open platform in the same light as the audience or in a darkened red-plush Theatre Royal, if you don’t believe in fairies, boys and girls, they will both die. The problems and opportunities posed for modern stage interpreters even by the conveniently fairy-free Much Ado and Love’s Labour’s Lost, it seems to me, don’t arise because they are non-realist sorts of play that nowadays get performed on anachronistically realist stages.
25:41
I’m going to deal with the plays in Folio order, because I think that approaches which often only compound the problems encountered by modern revivals of Much Ado –even though it is much the more popular and often-revived of the two – can provide ideal solutions for Love’s Labour’s Lost. I hope a quick survey of characteristic designs for Much Ado, especially around the question of when its action is supposed to be taking place, will make the first part of this point for me.
26:13
David Garrick would be one of the last actors ever to play Benedick in modern dress. Benedick and his reluctant challenge to Claudio made plenty of sense in the mid-1700s, a time when a gentleman’s everyday outfit might still include a sword as a matter of course. Over the ensuing century, though, things changed. By Macready’s time, Renaissance comedies demanded Renaissance mise-en-scene, and, like it or not, Macready’s Benedict had to wear those tights, however painful they may look.
26:59
Cut to a century and a half later, though, and the problem which these costumes are trying to solve is a different one entirely. As a tightly-constructed, secular, realistic-looking play about a well-nigh arranged marriage which takes place in a culture for which pre-marital sex is a killing matter, Much Ado was still, in Garrick’s time, painfully topical. You could imagine people dressed like members of Garrick’s audience sharing the attitudes
27:29
expressed by Claudio and Leonato, which meant that you didn’t need to set the play either long ago, or far away, or both. But from the mid-twentieth century onwards, the play was liable to become not just costume drama but safe, escapist costume drama, the story of problems which are no longer ours – as in the case of Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation, modern in its casting, but safely if vaguely period in its mise-en-scene.
28:13
John Barton’s brilliant production of 1976 – remembered above all for Judi Dench’s combination of verve and pathos, and for Donald Sinden’s at once, suave, crusty and at times paranoid Benedick – solved this in part by setting the play among young subalterns and their older colleagues in the British Raj; people whose uniforms still included dress swords which one could just imagine might still be used in private.
28:41
Here one could believe in the Hero plot, while not quite feeling exempt from it: in 1976 this empire setting seemed historically distant, but, uncomfortably, not distant enough. Reverting thereafter to the Macready tactic of setting the play in some approximation of Shakespeare’s own period, by contrast, has produced much cosier results, as for the RSC in 1996 and the National in 2007. The surprise Barton had achieved with his nineteenth-century colonial setting, furthermore,
29:35
had largely worn off by the time Cheek by Jowl recycled it in 1998, by which time The Jewel in the Crown had made those Raj uniforms the stuff of middlebrow television. In 2002 Greg Doran returned the play to its specified location of Sicily but to the historic fascist Sicily of the 1930s, which again produced an effect of the safely picturesque rather than the urgent. In 2005 Josie O’Rourke set the play among 19th century officers again, just for old times’ sake,
30:23
and the following year Marianne Elliott, presumably in what was by now a positively desperate search for a setting which would really hit a local, contemporary nerve for her Stratford audiences, placed hers in pre-revolutionary Cuba. (This was in fact a very timely production, but only in so far as its endless displays of the tango and the rumba chimed nicely with the recent inauguration of a popular BBC1 television show called Strictly Come Dancing).
31:04
The nearest any recent British stage production has come to giving us a modern dress Much Ado was O’Rourke’s second production, in London in 2011, and that one was marked as not being a specimen of anxious present-day realism by being placed very specifically in a lost archaeological era of undiluted kitsch, when dinosaurs stalked the earth and from which nothing that survives could possibly be taken seriously, namely the early 1980s.
31:37
To see why stage directors haven’t given us Much Ado in modern dress you have only to look at Joss Whedon’s 2012 film, which I have always found borderline unintelligible: a film which just leaves me wondering: who and where are all these awful indistinguishable people who make their staff wear uniforms and can somehow spend all day drinking wine in each other’s houses? and why do they go on about marriage but never mention divorce? and what is this problem they have over Hero?
32:12
It’s true that when the RSC staged the play in the same year they didn’t go for very long ago either, but they did go for quite far away, placing the action in a best exotic marigold modern India of incompetent family servants and honour killings. But it remained a play about other people’s problems, not those of its audience. For all the plot’s violence, Luscombe’s 1918 country house setting just brought things comfortably home to Downton Abbey: a milieu in which we can still expect
32:49
there to be liveried servants, and can still believe that the virginity of an heiress might be something over which gentlemen might fight to the death. The recurrent problem with Much Ado is that most of what once made its contents dangerous and serious and worth laughing about now looks like just one more aspect of its harmless period charm. Staging it on a big pros arch set that simulates the social world of 1598 instead of that of
33:16
1918 or whenever just substitutes one mode of period charm for another, and for my money putting on Much Ado in an entire playhouse that simulates a few of the playing conditions of 1598 into the bargain helps even less. I say this with feeling, having seen not one but two productions of Much Ado double-cast with Love’s Labour’s Lost in 2017, the second at the replica Blackfriars playhouse in Virginia. I have never seen a Much Ado during which I have been so conscious, and so sorry, that
33:51
this is a Shakespeare play whose script actually includes the words ‘hey nonny nonny.’ This show was folksy, it was big, it was cutest Renaissance Fayre with a ‘Y’ in town, it was one long ye olde-doublet-and-hose punchline, and whatever this production thought the play’s problem was, I was very glad it wasn’t mine. But somehow the Love’s Labour’s Lost – same actors, same space, same absence of set, many of the same outfits – was lovely; the same eagerly-faked Tudor mise-en-scene that made
35:03
Much Ado look irrelevant somehow only made Love’s Labour’s Lost more entrancing and more telling. If anything resembling nostalgia only sabotages Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labour’s Lost, in my experience, is instead thoroughly hospitable to it, and I want to conclude this evening by suggesting why it should be that time behaves quite differently not just in but around performances of Love’s Labour’s Lost.
35:32
I admit that I am perhaps still biased in favour of this play by having seen an exceptional production of it at an impressionable age, but bear with me. John Barton first directed Love’s Labour’s Lost for the RSC in 1965, in a production which sought to look as Elizabethan as possible: he dressed the men like figures from exquisite Hilliard miniatures, but had some difficulty in persuading the women to adopt authentically
35:59
Elizabethan hairstyles, which fitted the governing aesthetics for such things in 1965 much less comfortably. (In the rehearsal photo, that’s Charles Thomas, who played Berowne, and Janet Suzman, who was Rosaline; above left Janet is seen with the Princess of France, Glenda Jackson). In 1978 Barton got the chance to direct the play again. Ralph Koltai’s set should have misfired completely – a realistically simulated corner
36:33
of an Elizabethan park, in a pros-arch theatre, with real boughs and leaves! How vulgar, how naff! – and shouldn’t the costumes have been a write-off as well? Here are a sample: as you can see, it’s the usual Tudor look, tastefully adapted to suggest monastic academic seclusion, autumn weather, and good colour co-ordination. The overall effect ought to have been somewhere on the edge of mere merrie Englishe cliché,
37:00
but it wasn’t, and in fact if you want me to cry remembering how good it was, nothing could be easier. I queued for a student standby for one of its matinees at the Aldwych; and thirty years later I finally got to thank John Barton for it in detail during his 80th birthday party. I remember him saying that much as he had enjoyed working with the 1965 cast, this 1978 production was, of all the RSC shows he had ever directed, the one for which he got the highest proportion of the actors he wanted.
37:35
Here are Richard Griffiths as the King of Navarre, Michael Pennington as Berowne, and Ian Charleson as Longaville – three men who could move weightlessly across a stage as if propelled by the grace of the verse alone – and offstage were the likes of Michael Hordern as Don Armado, David Suchet as Nathaniel, and Alan Rickman as Boyet. Meanwhile the women included Jane Lapotaire as Rosaline, Carmen du Sautoy as the Princess,
38:06
Sheridan Fitzgerald as Maria, and of all people Ruby Wax – I’m not dreaming this, honestly – Ruby Wax as an entirely convincing and indeed rather touching Jaquenetta. So how come an Elizabethan-look Much Ado is usually at best mildly affecting, while an Elizabethanizing Love’s Labour’s Lost can be positively sublime? I think we have to go back to the origins of this play to work out why. If Much Ado is a play which has only accidentally turned into a historical document of other
38:40
times, Love’s Labour’s Lost is a play which deliberately sought to transform the historic into the nostalgic from its outset – a play which indeed thematises that process. While Much Ado used to be timely but ceased to be by sheer historical accident, when written Love’s Labour’s Lost flirted deliberately and riskily with topicality but opted deliberately for the mythic, determined not just to dance to the music of time but to show that it was not confined to anything currently in the charts.
39:11
There is an immense critical literature on the historical events alluded to in this play, on why Shakespeare touches on them at all, and on what effect, if any, this has had on the play’s popularity and influence: much of it has been written by obsessives and conspiracy theorists, and I am very happy that I only have about three minutes here in which to summarize the entire matter. In brief: once upon a time there really was a King of Navarre, and there really were some
39:41
courtiers called Berowne, Longaville, and Dumaine, and the King really was interested in humanist learning, and he knew some important teachers; and this King of Navarre actually did marry a Princess of France. This ought to have constituted a happier ending than the suspended proposal with which we are left by the play, but unfortunately, immediately after the real-life wedding, many of the guests who had sat on the groom’s side, together with hundreds of their allies, were slaughtered
40:12
in the streets of Paris. This, then, is the scene which various incidental details of Love’s Labours Lost ought to be asking us to imagine, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, a key event in the pan-European wars of religion which overshadowed Shakespeare’s entire lifetime. The plot-premise of Love’s Labour’s Lost ought at very least to have reminded those of its audience up to speed with the details of French politics of the real-life embassy
40:40
to the King of Navarre made by his estranged wife and mother-in-law in 1578 to discuss the future of Aquitaine; and the fact that the King of Navarre in the play breaks an oath would surely have reminded many more that the real-life King of Navarre, by now Henri IV of France, had in 1593 broken a rather more serious oath when he renounced his Protestantism in order to secure his power, on the grounds that Paris was worth a Mass . The play with
41:16
which to double-cast this one really ought not to be Much Ado About Nothing at all, but a play by Shakespeare’s closest contemporary, Christopher Marlowe. It might be rather piquant to see the same Dumaine writing love poetry one night, and the next suggesting that he should take some archers to the bridges over the Seine and finish off those Protestants already driven into the river. But it would also, miraculously, be irrelevant, because this entire aspect of Love’s Labour’s
41:46
Lost turns out to be a sort of poignant tease. Marlowe’s play definitely happens in France in 1572: Love’s Labour’s Lost happens in a France that never was, in a year that never was. The courtly, leisured interlude the play asks us to imagine isn’t just a happy peacetime before the Massacre; nor does the play work solely because it imagines a France in which there seems to be only the scholarship and poetry of the Renaissance and none of the discord and bloodshed of the Reformation.
42:20
Its historical allusions serve instead deliberately to remind us of realities outside the play which we too are for the time being escaping into its sonnets and charades. We already know this idyll is inauthentic and fragile, even before the news of the offstage death of the Princess’s father reminds us that soon the play will be over and we will have to go back to being mortal, and ourselves. The world depicted in Love’s Labour’s Lost may contain pedants and constables rather
42:55
than satyrs, but it is recognizable as a province of Greek myth just the same, its entire non-plot a replaying of that other Fall myth by which death intrudes into Arcadia, consciously superimposed on the real merely historical world of cruelty and discord. As the modern performance history of Love’s Labour’s Lost demonstrates, furthermore, in place of a Renaissance France found only in the play’s parallel and better universe other shorthands for lost idylls will do very nicely.
43:30
The connotations of easy cultural stereotype which bedevil Much Ado only assist this play, whether those invoked by the always-already-merrie-English mock-Tudor of the Globe in Dominic Dromgoole’s production of 2007, or the equally leafy mock-Tudor favoured by Gregory Doran in 2008 Or the eve-of-war Zuleika Dobson Oxford offered by Ian Judge in 1993. Or the very similar eve-of-world-war-one setting of Trevor Nunn’s production at the National in 2002.
44:09
Or, to return to where we started, to that summer 1914, importance of thinking you are being earnest country house favoured by Christopher Luscombe. Time is an urgent matter in Much Ado, but with its passage that play’s very realism has become a curse, helping history to get the better of it. Love’s Labour’s Lost was all about trying to sidestep history from the start, and it turns out that there are still any number of ways, realist or not, in which the Shakespearean
44:44
theatre can take us to Arcadia, some of them even using a proscenium arch. The sad, nostalgic truth, though, is that we still don’t get to stay there, and I close on a note of sheer realism: he may be dressed like Jack Worthing or like Hamlet, he may belong to 1914 or to 1572 or 1978, but at the end of act five Mercadé will still be waiting for us.
Here to help you learn
Sign in to keep a private conversation with your course tutor.
Ask me anything about the material…
Sign in to chat