Richard III and the Modernizing of Shakespeare

Richard III and the Modernizing of Shakespeare BRIAN PARKER • THE PROBLEMS OF MODERNIZING ARE PERENNIAL, and the basic arguments, pro and con, so well known that to repeat them is like entering a nightmare in which one tries to explain the difference between red and blue. l The audience beats one with white sticks, and one deserves it. Instead, I should like to suggest certain areas of agreement which may allow us to see these problems as a dialectic, not a deadlock. One is that we all now acknowledge that drama exists properly only in performance, not as something which is merely read; and, though drama may include permanent and continuing truths, the actual performance is necessarily - and quite properly - ephemeral. When the curtain falls, the show is over; and no repetition will be quite like it again. Secondly, I think we must admit that there is no such thing as performing a play "straight." This demand is the opposite heresy from the demand for topicality. In its extreme form, it is really only a sophistication of the romantic argument that it is better to read plays (to put them on, as it were, in the "theatre of the mind") than to see the limitations of even the best performance. This was Charles Lamb's opinion about King Lear. But, as John Russell Brown amongst others has pointed out, there are many different ways of saying almost every line (Hal's "I do. I will" to Falstaff, for instance, or Lear's own "Never, never, never, never, never"); and the actor's choice of reading will always depend on his understanding of the line's context; which, in turn, will not infrequently involve his interpretation of the whole play. Readers may happily hold in suspension several possibilities at once, but performance always requires an existential choice - in a word, it requires interpretation. Lastly, a third principle which seems common sense (though I have heard it denied): such interpretation is bound to be modern, strained through the sensibilities of actors, directors, designers, and audience which, willy nilly, have been set 321 322 BRIAN PARKER "programmed," if you like - by the conditions of modern experience. We cannot, even if we would, recapture the state of mind of an Elizabethan. No amount of antiquarian accuracy of costume, staging, rhetorical gesture, Warwickshire pronunciation, or exegetical footnotes can create an Elizabethan performance. And this for the simple reason that the audience - that essential, but too often neglected, element in theatrical experience - is inescapably modern. Even to approximate the nature of an Elizabethan audience you would have to fill the theatre· with an equal number of Renaissance scholars and the most ignorant rustics still available. Failing this, you get the snobbery of so-called "Museum Theatre," where the minor pleasure of condescending to great artists from our position of historical advantage has replaced the true aesthetic reaction which is only possible between equals, when the work of art is recognized as directly and personally relevant. Both sides of the argument accept these points, I think; and, once the opposite extremes of modishness and pedantry are abandoned, the question reveals itself as involving principles which go far beyond the problem of stage interpretation alone. It involves, for instance, our attitude to time, what we believe tbe relation of past to present to be: whether we regard history cyclically as a pOintless repetition of disasters, as Jan Kott seems to do, or linearly, with Hegel, as a continuum in which continuity and change are involved in a dialectic. And beyond even this, I suggest, is involved our theory of epistemology, of how the subjective mind relates to external experience at all and particularly to the "otherness" of another's thought - of how the imagination works. It is necessary, said Matthew Arnold in his essay On the Modern Element in Literature, "to know how others stand, that we may know how we ourselves stand"; or, in Coleridge's famous formula for The Lyrical Ballads, the strange must be made familiar and the familiar strange. All imagination is an exercise in relativity, of seeing things from at least two points of view. The subjective relevance and the objective pastness of...