Can
You Do That to Shakespeare?
In
the Raspberry Hills Library English Book Circle the question has often been
raised of how much we can accept things done to the classics. Can Robert Downey
Jr. and Jude Law really do that to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson? Can Laurie R. King really have a feisty young
Marry Russell marry an aging
Holmes? Can Jean Rhys really tell
Bertha’s story of how she went mad and ended up in Rochester’s attic?
Views
often differ sharply in our friendly group.
“No!” say some. “Yes!” say
others.
This
discussion slides easily into Shakespeare.
Can Caliban really be played by a twitchy grunge Goth behaving like a
speed freak? Can Richard III really be a Hitler-like charmer in the 30’s? Can Romeo and Juliet really live in a machine
gun mafia run disco Catholic Miami? Can Othello really be played by a short
skinny white girl? Can Twelfth Night
really be set in a tire factory with a 60’s pop soundtrack? Can Love’s
Labour’s Lost really be a Hollywood
30’s song and dance musical? Can Hamlet really
be about a cyber-techno-capitalist corporation battle?
Well,
yes. Obviously. All of these have been
done. You’ve seen some of them. I’ve
seen all of them. Some people have hated them.
I am one of those who loved these productions, or at least found them
interesting.
The
question is not really should it be allowed to do this kind of spin-off on
Shakespeare, but how can it not be. If all we had to look at was four hundred
years worth of people standing around a stage in Renaissance or Roman clothes
reciting the plays, Shakespeare would now be one of those old poets like
Spenser that only literature majors bother to read. Instead, everybody in the world knows
Shakespeare (only a small exaggeration, don’t you think?)
Admittedly
the productions that got me addicted to Shakespeare were quite straightforward
adaptations: Branagh’s Henry V, a simple performance at the
Roundhouse in London of Henry IV, Part
Two, Branagh’s Hamlet (well, that
was set in the 1800’s for some reason but
that was hardly noticeable). However some of the radically changed concepts of
several of the performances mentioned above have really fired that addiction.
What
Shakespeare wrote is so big, so deep, so complex, so significant to so many
people and eras in the past four hundred years and probably the next four
hundred years that there is no way that his plays can’t be brilliant no matter
what’s done to them. Or if not brilliant or even successful, at least the
experimentation enriches the canon immeasurably. And we must remember,
Shakespeare’s plays themselves were mostly spin-offs of earlier works.
So
I say spin-off away! I’m waiting for a
sci-fi intergalactic Macbeth. Or a Comedy
of Errors set in apartheid South Africa of the 50’s. Or why not Sherlock Holmes and his young wife
Mary Russell incorporated into Richard
III to find out if he’s really guilty of killing those kids? Or Jane Eyre
deciding that Mr. Rochester is an old fogey and running off with Hamlet, thus
saving his life (maybe that’s already happened; I haven’t read all of Jasper
Fforde yet).
So
don’t be so nervous, all you skeptics of spin-offs! Shakespeare can take it! Shakespeare thrives
in any interpretive environment in which inspired creativity rules.
