We had a panel called, "What Makes Shakespeare So Great?" That also happens to be our mission statement. We had several Shakespeare type people on the panel. Somewhere early on in the planning stages it occurred to me that if we only have a panel full of Shakespeare type people what we'll get is a bunch of someone saying something and then everyone else in the room nodding and smiling and then someone else saying something and everyone else in the room nodding and smiling. Not a very interesting panel. So I decided to ask my friend Gwydion Suilebhan to join the panel. For those of you who don't know Gwydion, he is a local playwright and blogger and all around theatre thinker. And he is a dear friend of mine (my second child is named Henry Gwydion Kilpatrick).
I asked Gwydion to join the panel because I knew he had a healthy respect and appreciation for Shakespeare but that he wouldn't always share the same opinion as everyone else in the room. For one thing, as a living playwright, he is one of those crazy charlatans who believes we do too much Shakespeare in this country to the exclusion of new playwrights who are alive and trying to make a living doing this. We've all been passed over for a job. Try being passed over time and again in favor of a dude who's been dead for 400 years. Probably starts to get old.
I asked Gwydion to join our panel telling him that I was worried about a panel with a room full of people nodding and smiling.
Gwydion immediately and excitedly agreed. But until we were in the moment I never thought about the flip side of that coin... I was asking my good friend to be the person who steps into a room full of nodding and smiling people and MAKE THEM STOP NODDING AND SMILING. And my dear, brave friend looked into that sea of nodding and smiling faces and damn it, he made them stop. As one the nodding ended and a room full of eyes focused their energy on the guy who had the audacity to say that the time is approaching when we will have to start translating Shakespeare for performance. For those of you who are not Shakespeare nerds, let me tell you... that is not a very popular opinion. I don't think I agree with Gwydion, but not for the reasons everyone else in the room vehemently and vocally disagreed with him, but boy do I admire the courage it must have taken to look out at those happy people and really piss them off. Thank you, Gwydion. And I'm sorry.Gwydion eloquently stated his case and I will do a very poor job of trying to state it here because I haven't thought about it much other than to angrily dismiss the notion when it's come up before. But, I'll give it a try. Our language is a living language, more than almost any other language on the planet. It's constantly changing and adapting. The language being spoken 1,000 years ago is almost unrecognizable to us now and our language will be almost unrecognizable to English speakers 1,000 years from now, if any still exist. Shakespeare has already become difficult for people to understand on first reading and will only become more so until eventually we will need to find another poetic genius to step in and translate them for us. That's it in a nutshell. Gwydion, if I mangled it, I apologize.
And the arguments started flying at him. If the audience doesn't understand what's happening, that's the actor's fault, not Shakespeare's. 99% of the words we find in Shakespeare are still in use today. Yes, we have to translate Chaucer, but that was literally a different language. And many others that I have forgotten.
But I think I would use a different argument. It is undeniable that Shakespeare is difficult for us to understand. I've been reading Shakespeare closely for about 20 years now, not nearly as long as some of the people in the room, but still a pretty long time. I would call myself a savvy consumer of Shakespeare. Even so, I don't immediately understand every word as I read it. And when I'm watching it my understanding drops even further. If the acting is bad, the stuff is damn near incomprehensible.
I would argue that is not so much because the language has changed since Shakespeare died. It has, but I don't think that's why we have difficulty understanding it. I think we have difficulty understanding it because it's poetry. There was poetry written last year that I don't understand without hours of careful reading. This is the dense language of imagery. These plays are not written in the way that we communicate with each other today, and I would argue that they weren't written in the way people communicated with each other in Shakespeare's day. This is a master wordsmith intentionally packing every single line with as much imagery and intelligence and emotion that he could possibly muster. There is just too much there. If you can read Whitman and understand every word on the page without ever backing up, I take my hat off to you. I can't. It takes work. And when you're sitting in an audience listening to it, you don't have time to do that work in the moment without missing what's coming next.
I haven't really thought about this issue before because my reaction was so immediate and visceral that I didn't give it a chance to fester. I'm sure I'll be thinking about it much more in the coming days (because this is what Shakespeare nerds do). But I will say that we don't always understand everything that's being said on the Shakespearean stage. We just don't. We never will. But that's what makes it so great. If it wasn't so dense and full of nuance and beauty we would have stopped performing it hundreds of years ago. We don't always understand it. And I'm okay with that.
