Troilus and Cressida had been one of the few Shakespeare plays I had not read yet, so I set down and read it this week. I can’t say that the play impressed me nearly as much as others. The dialogue seems forced with long passages that I have trouble imagining played on stage. And the film version I rented from Netflix this weekend certainly didn’t help prove to me that the play was doable on stage. The film, an old BBC version, like all those old BBC versions, felt much more like a filmed reading where the readers wear costumes, than a real stage performance or film. I won’t say that the play couldn’t be done well on stage, because I have seen an exceptional performance of Timon of Athens in Stratford, Ontario three years ago, another play that seemed to me as it would be very clumsy on stage. The actor playing Timon, though, found movement and meaning in those lines that I entirely missed while reading it – so I’ll not say that Troilus and Cressida couldn’t be done well on stage, only that I don’t see it from my initial readings of the play.
I chose to read Troilus and Cressida at this time because it uses the word emulation more times (four) than any other Shakespearean play and I wanted to have a better understanding of the context of these uses in order to better understand how Shakespeare thought and wrote of emulation and imitation in his plays. I think I’ll wait to comment on that, though, in a later post.
What really interests me in this moment after reading goes back to the issue of this play in performance and in print. Lasser alludes to the play’s print history in the introduction to his book, discussing how its original early modern publishers altered the play’s opening in order to make it appeal to his “readers” – readers who prefered something not sullied by the stage. Lasser presents some ideas about Shakespeare’s text that really complicate that classic question about Virginia Woolf asks whether or not Shakespeare is best seen in performance or read in the book. Students and others love to point out that Shakespeare wrote for the stage and not to be read, which is quite true. At the same time, though, the texts of Shakespeare we have were published for a reading audience and with their tastes in mind. Those publishers wrote for a very different type of audience, as Lasser points out, than those who saw Shakespeare’s works performed at the Globe.
And Troilus and Cressida is a good example of such a play that complicates that. It was performed on stage, but the version we have in print was one certainly meant for a “reading” audience and its preface disdains the theater and its “clapper-clawing” playgoers. It certainly is filled with amazing, though wordy, poetic passages that pack a real punch. Even if I don’t see it working on stage, I certainly can feel its poetry when I take the time with it that only reading can offer me. This is definitely a play that complicates whether or not Shakespeare is best seen live in performance or savored over time in reading.
October 24, 2007 at 2:48 pm
A mentor of mine has defended teaching Shakespeare primarily through reading (as opposed to performance) on the grounds that seeing a performance tends to fix an interpretation in the mind of the viewer, whereas reading keeps open the possibility of many interpretations since the reader is aware of having to construct mentally an image of the drama.
October 27, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Joe,
I wish you had seen _Troilus and Cressida_ at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, for proof that it can work on stage. I went with Grace, her husband, and some of her Shakespeare students last spring. As you probably know, many of the BBC films are pretty statis and their treatment of Shakespeare is mostly conservative. (I just rewatched act 1 of the BBC _Othello_, which is in my opinion not Anthony Hopkins’ finest hour.) I’ve read a little bit about the philosophy of the BBC directors. For one thing, there was allegedly this idea at least among some people involved that they should do Shakespeare more or less straight, with all the lines intact, for this collection was planned all along as an affordable resource that would find its way to countless high schools and colleges. The problem is, even a production that doesn’t try to “interpret” Shakespeare in daring directions can’t help but being an interpretation anyway, and thus faulted if it’s not a compelling enough one.
October 28, 2007 at 2:14 pm
I think the BBC likely meant their early productions to be useful in the classroom, and in some ways they are successful. Their films present (almost) every line in order, thus making their presentation much more closely resemble a reading of the play than a creatively involved performance. In some ways this is good. They have proved excellent in my recent readings, because I have been able to re-read the plays in the same moment that I watch the performance. I feel strongly that when students (and myself) read Shakespeare, it can oftentimes be useful and fun to follow along with a CD recording, or in this case, to a BBC film. In this way, they are useful.
In terms of presentation, though, they are lacking. Their performances are dry and likely do not reflect any genuine performance either from Shakespeare’s age, or from our own, at least not any performance that the average person would be particularly interested in seeing for entertainment purposes – myself included. They have their place, but if one judges them on their merit as a performance, they most certainly fail.