Susannah Carson is an American author, editor, and academic. She received her Ph.D. from Yale, after earning graduate degrees at Paris III, La Sorbonne-Nouvelle and Lyon II, L'Université des Lumières. Her work has appeared in scholarly publications, newspapers, and magazines, and she has edited two volumes of literary essays: A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Authors on Why We Read Jane Austen and Living with Shakespeare: Essays by Writers, Actors, and Directors.
Plays and films are essentially the same, yes? They're both linear stories told through acting. The stage is live 3-D; film is captured 2-D; and you should be able to bottle a play in a film or release a film onto the stage with hardly a blip of transition. But the truth is that some plays don't work in film: Think back to school, when your excitement at getting to watch the film of a play you'd been reading in class quickly turned to heavy-lidded boredom. Perhaps the "film" was a simple recording of a live play. Perhaps it was a recording of a Shakespeare play. If you've had anything similar in your past, then you'll be aware that making a successful film out of Shakespeare is no mean trick. And so we ask: why do some of Shakespeare's plays work in film?
In my attempt at an answer, I first want to go back to Renaissance England, when the theatres were open-air, rollicking, and rowdy scenes with the actors trying their best to draw attention. They did this with exaggerated expressions, grand gestures, and roaring voices; the playwrights helped them out – in terms of memorization, projection, and interest – by giving them ba-bum ba-bum rhythms, strong rhymes, explosive consonants and round vowels, and characters with rather straightforward motives and desires.
Enter Shakespeare. At the beginning, he had the same theatres, audiences, actors – and solutions, especially in the earlier plays (Titus Andronicus, Richard III, even Love's Labour's Lost). And then, as Harold Bloom has observed, Shakespeare evolved in relation to himself; and from his own early, more externalized and squared-off style of writing, he created a more richly layered and yet fiercer language, increasingly in prose – this allowed not just for internalized character, but for the character to grow as a person through the very process of saying what it was he had to say. Complex stuff. And stunningly beautiful, too.
Did what Angus Fletcher calls this "new Shakespearean music" still make it to the back row? I'm sure Richard Burbage and William Kempe could have done it, but I'm not sure they would have had to go to their stentorian registers. Indeed, if they had, it would have gotten in the way of what Shakespeare made possible in his writing. Because, you see, the problem is that the louder you try to speak, the less natural it sounds. Language gets distorted out of its meaning.
We've all experienced it before. "Would you please pass the salt?" "What's that?" "Would you PLEASE pass the SALT?" "Ho there! Well, no need to get testy about it." But you weren't getting testy, you were just trying to get a string of words strung from point you to point colocutor. Speaking more naturalistically allows you to focus less on the context of the communication (saltàhere) and more on the manner in which it is said: more on the relation between the people in the conversation, or on the relation of a character to the person he or she wants to become in a soliloquy.
"That's more than we know." Replies the soldier Michael Williams to the disguised Henry V, who's seeking assurance that the cause of the upcoming battle is just.
"Oh, that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek," pines Romeo below Juliet's window.
"Put out the light, and then put out the light," says Othello: the low rhythms of the lines contribute to the inevitability of his murder of Desdemona.
Now, imagine shouting those lines out to the back row of a boisterous theatre. It's not just that they're quiet lines, but that they pack worlds of meaning inside them. And to appreciate the subtleties of these otherwise rather simple lines, you can't sit back and let the meaning hit you. You have to sit up, lean forward, and go find the meaning for yourself. So did the actors have to shout as loudly in later Shakespeare as they did during the earlier years? Perhaps. But my imagination has the audiences shushing up, elbowing each other to be quiet. This wasn't just another play. This was a Shakespeare. And everybody knew that there was some damned fine wordage in there, and that you'd miss out on it if you weren't listening in. And then after the outdoor theatres of the Theatre and the Globe, there was the indoor Blackfriars, which meant less need to project, and more chance to turn words – I don't want to say naturalistically, and I don't want to say lyrically – with a Shakespearean preciseness of capturing the human spirit.
So instead of the actors having to attract the audience, now the audience has to come to the actors with their attention. This was perhaps the great reversal in Western dramatic art. After Shakespeare, it was up to us to go find the story, and not the other way around.
Check back later this week for more from Susannah Carson.
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