Theatre : Effects of shortening the plays of Shakespeare

Good old Will has been out of copyright for a very long time, which means that anyone can take a pair of scissors to his stage work and reissue it with impunity. It’s been going on since the Restoration. The motives of editors and rehashers are many and varied. Yet overall, Shakespeare is revered. Bardolatry, Bernard Shaw called its excesses.

As for cutting his plays, well, consider how lucky we are to have reproducible Shakespeare plays at all. In the great man’s day it was a strange notion to have plays from the common stage published for the benefit of future generations. Plays were for experiencing, by a largely illiterate audience, not for studying off the page. As far as the commoners’ playwrights were concerned, their work was ephemeral. For example, scholars have tried in vain to find any copies of plays by known authors such as Henry Chettle or Tom Watson: the plays just weren’t preserved. The picture is complicated by the common practice of writing in teams. Elizabethan playwriting evidently was somewhat akin to churning out scripts for an insatiable TV series. It must have been messy to work out who owned what.

Shakespeare apparently took no pains to publish texts of his plays and make it easy for rival companies to profit by playing them. Their eventual publication was thanks to two of his fellow actors, Condell and Hemmings, whose compilation of 36 works appeared seven years after Shakespeare’s death. Nobody knows whether Shakespeare would have given his approval to those particular versions, or preferred them to be revised, rewritten, or binned.

Anyway, we have the versions we have, and successive generations of actors have had to make them work.

So we come to the incredible liberties taken by previous generations. Before he became godlike, Shakespeare’s works were blithely adapted by well-intentioned men of the theatre, to suit the fashions of the 17th and 18th centuries. Most notoriously, ‘King Lear’ was given a happy ending in 1681, and Richard III mangled by Colley Cibber. By the nineteenth century Shakespeare had been made suitable for the nursery by Charles and Mary Lamb and rendered fit for female consumption by Thomas Bowdler.

In our own dumbed-down time, while Shakespeare’s classical sources of inspiration (timeless stories but oh-so-many syllables) are left gathering dust in libraries, his own works no longer seem – as they did to Milton – sweet, wild, warblings, but World Heritage Art, there to be plundered for ideas and recycled as popular culture.

Shakespeare may be idolised but he is not encased like a museum statue. Many ‘accessible’ treatments have been explored, for admirable reasons. For example the ‘Shakespeare 4 Kidz’ productions (beloved of many a primary school teacher), sell out at theatres all over Britain. These are are seen as introductions to the bard for the iPod generation and owe nothing to the high-minded Lambs! Other, distinctive adaptations stand on their own merits (Verdi’s ‘Otello’ in opera, Bernstein’s ‘West Side Story’ in musical theatre, Kurosawa’s ‘Throne of Blood’ in cinema, etc.
Meanwhile, plays proudly captioned ‘By William Shakespeare’ that cheerfully omit whole chunks of the Folio text appear all over the world, cut and shaped in myriad ways to suit the playing space, the audience, the cast , and innumerable other practical reasons, not to mention the vision and skill of the guy in charge of the scissors. Theatre is a living thing, and also a practical business.

Learn more about this author, Beverley Davies.