2 Dismemberment and display
It is useful to read Shakespeare’s plays as he wrote them rather than as they have been preserved, or perhaps “embalmed” would be more accurate.
Shakespeare’s earliest years in London are forever murky, but his format for writing scripts, that is, how he actually wrote his plays down word-for-word, is not; and it would not change thereafter. He most often wrote his characters’ lines of ten “beats” or syllables, often with a pattern of emphasis but usually without rhyme (called “blank verse”) although he also wrote in prose. Actors wove these lines into scenes ending in “warning” terminal-cue couplets which alert the ear to a scene change. Shakespeare’s scenes quickly became more complex and fluid than those of his contemporaries, perhaps originally accommodating a small, private stage/theater at Titchfield but also more truly reflective of the subconscious as the audience-mind imagined the show.
Vital to remember is that the scene is the largest unit of any Shakespearean show, flowing directly into the scene following. There are no “acts” or interruptions or breaks in the plays unless music or other features deliberately bridge deliberately-constructed intervals.1 The original shows run about two hours, scenes leading to scenes like beads on a necklace or pearls on a single strand if recorded in print, but rolling irresistibly forward like the fluid episodes of a collective, inescapable audience-dream when acted.
Presenting or, even worse, reading a Shakespeare play in the typical five-act format of the last 300 years is like presenting an exquisite, five-panel screen painting by exhibiting each panel individually in separate, glass-topped museum tables: exactly the same painting is present but dismembered, its soul and integrity fragmented to conceptual invisibility by good intentions. The shows on stage run without interruption, like movies or radio plays, when performed as intended, but even “on the boards,” that is in actual, live performances, the disarticulation is usually present, “intermissions” added to accommodate bladders and alcohol sales. A “real” Shakespeare play is just as seamless, and as utterly inescapable, as a dream... good, bad, pleasant, or horrific. In its original state, this is not theatre for the squeamish or the timid; there is no escape except by abandoning the performance entirely, that is, by leaving the show in mid-performance and “waking” from the play/dream by exiting the theater.
Sometimes living this experience is funny, sometimes devastating, sometimes inconclusive and troubling, but once involved there is no interruption until the final moment’s exit. This “willing suspension of disbelief ” only happens in art and when the mind dreams; the first is sought but the second can only be suffered. Shakespeare’s original dreams coil about the mind and are inescapable induced experiences.
Shakespeare’s remaining original shows preserved in the First Folio were all dissected like chickens, boxed up, and frozen thus in 1709 and they have so remained on display ever since.2 This was a completely well-intentioned editorial act by Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718), himself a dramatist and Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom for the last three years of his life. Rowe’s was the first edition of Shakespeare to section the plays into separately introduced Scenes, and then to group the scenes into separate Acts. He was also the first to stipulate specific locations/settings for scenes, and the first editor to attempt an objective biography of Shakespeare along with the shows.3 Rowe’s motives were sincere but his physical dissection of the plays and artificial grouping of scenes would be an unintended catastrophe. From Nicholas Rowe’s time to the present, almost exactly 300 years, his and subsequent editions veil a critical component of Shakespeare’s great “Invention”: his successful replication of a dream-state in scene structure and sequencing, a state which in turn opened infinite, effortless access to the subconscious. That is the doorknob to the passageway leading to the modern Western worldview. As an accident of history, this most important single act in his invention of the modern mind was, within less than a century of Shakespeare’s death, shrouded by the reverential protective packaging of the superimposed five-act format, and there it has remained, frosty and revered ever since.
The effects of this simple accident are easy to see.
In the nine-scene twins A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, ignoring the forced imposition of acts is proportionally less difficult than ignoring the clumsy structures created when acts are imposed on more complex sequences such those in Romeo and Juliet. As an uninterrupted dream-sequence of scenes, the play is fluid, disturbing, compelling, and eventually emotionally devastating no matter how many internal productions or live performances one has experienced.
The artificial imposition of acts makes the show awkward and halting, deflating tension and easing the terrible gravitational force created by a remorseless “scenes only” script of the play:
(percentages rounded to nearest whole number)
Figure 2: Brunelleschi Diagram of Romeo and Juliet (artificial form)2
Figure 3: Restored Romeo and Juliet (as written and played)(Original) Brunelleschi Diagram of Romeo and Juliet
Performed without artificial interruption the plays are like boa constrictors tightening about the mind. There is no time to stop, reflect, or regain the perspective of an observer when one is sealed inside the ever-moving world of the unstoppable play.
There are more than historical and production reasons to remove the act separations. Shakespeare is the “hinge” between the former world of certainty and the subsequent one of uncertainty. Part of his universal appeal in Western societies is that his shows capture, as nothing else has since, the inescapable personal struggle to sort out certainty from uncertainty in the forum of the individual mind, especially as the conflict is argued by the incessant self-conversation of the internal soliloquy. Absolutes exist, in this new world, but they are always suspect; certainty can be perceived but it can also be illusory. There is nowhere firm to stand.
