To investigate what happens when there aren’t many stage directions to guide us as we read a play, we will look at two extracts also addressed in the unit on speeches, namely the bit from King Lear and the bit from Hamlet, both of which rely to a perhaps surprising extent not just on what is being said but what happens on stage too.
There aren’t many stage directions in plays by Shakespeare, and we cannot always trust the ones that are there, for a number of reasons. For one, it may be that Shakespeare didn’t think to write them down, because he would give oral instructions to the players, or he didn’t feel it was necessary. Second, it may be that somewhere in the process between Shakespeare writing things down in manuscript and the plays being printed, the stage directions may have gone missing (for example because the printer and the actors received different versions of the playtext). Many of the stage directions we find in modern editions of Shakespeare plays are actually educated guesswork on behalf of the editors. The same goes for act and scene divisions, which are often missing as well.
In the two examples we looked at, one features a conversation between two people (King Lear), and the other a monologue or soliloquy by one person (Hamlet). In the first example, there is no stage direction to indicate that a person is appearing on the stage, and no indication whether he is privy to the conversation that goes on. In the second example, there are several indications that Hamlet’s speech is overheard by others, but we are not sure exactly by whom and how they construe what is being said. The big question is whether Hamlet knows that he is not alone – whether he is performing a performance inside the performance or not.
Both scenes contain enough flexibility in the way they may be staged and performed to allow for very different interpretations and, hence, very different versions of the play being created on the stage. This means that different stagings of plays by Shakespeare could have very different emphases and might become, in the most radical cases, almost like different plays, whereas the Beckett play we looked at has much less room for interpretation. Let us look at the snippet from King Lear:
King Lear
KENT Is not this your son, my lord?
GLOUCESTER His breeding, sir, hath been at my charge. I have so often blushed to acknowledge him that now I am brazed to’t.
KENT I cannot conceive you.
GLOUCESTER Sir, this young fellow’s mother could, whereupon she grew round-wombed, and had, indeed, sir, a son for her cradle ere she had a husband for her bed. Do you smell a fault?
KENT I cannot wish the fault undone, the issue of it being so proper.
GLOUCESTER But I have a son, sir, by order of law, some year elder than this …
(1.1.1-18)
For a detailed run-through of this piece of dialogue, please look to the speech unit. The question here is whether Edmund, the son, can hear the conversation between his father (Gloucester) and Kent, and whether he has picked up that he is his father’s least favourite child. Later in the play, we learn that Edmund is very much aware of this fact, and that the evil deeds he performs come out of jealousy towards his older, legitimate brother.
On one level, it doesn’t matter whether he hears the conversation or not. The audience learns from this conversation that Gloucester is slightly ashamed of Edmund, and we learn later that he feels a lot of resentment towards his father and brother. The question for a director is whether they should use this opportunity to drive the point home, and if so, how that can be achieved.
Four possible approaches to performing this scene seem to present themselves:
- Edmund stands alone or walks past a considerable distance from the two speakers. He doesn’t hear their conversation or notice the glances they send his way.
- Edmund notices their body language, but does not hear their conversation. Subtle acting skill would be needed to express that he understands what they are talking about and that he does not like it. Kent and Gloucester must not notice his reaction.
- Edmund overhears their conversation. Subtle acting skill would be needed to express that he hears what they are talking about and that he does not like it. Kent and Gloucester must not notice his reaction.
- Edmund overhears their conversation and becomes visibly shocked and angry (as if hearing it for the first time), but manages to hide it from Kent and Gloucester. Only the audience notices his reaction.
We are not here to learn how to direct a theatre play, and ultimately it doesn’t matter here and now which of these approaches are chosen, or if some other way of doing it presents itself (for example, Edmund could show no reaction at all until Kent and Gloucester leave the stage, and then show with a facial expression or bodily gesture what his feelings are). What matters for our purposes is the awareness of two things: A) that direction, blocking and acting make all these things possible in many plays, and B) these things might deeply affect the meaning of a play.
This is one of the reasons that relating to theatre plays in print is so difficult. No piece of writing is in possession of a meaning that is completely fixed and uniform. Often you will find that a poem or a novel changes when you reread it. But in the case of a theatre play, an added complication is that the meaning relies on the potential involvement of other interpretive agents. For you to witness a theatre play is to engage in a reading of a reading. This is something to keep in mind whilst reading a play in print. A further example from Shakespeare might strenghten this point.
Hamlet
In the scene from Hamlet, the protagonist may or may not be aware that he is being watched as he performs his famous ‘to be or not to be’ monologue. In the vicinty are three other people (Claudius and Polonius are hiding behind and arras and Ophelia is somewhere close as well), and according to Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor’s footnote from their 2006 edition,
it is clear in all three texts [i.e. surviving versions from the early 17th century] that they remain within earshot – and that the most famous of all soliloquies is not, strictly speaking, a soliloquy at all: three other characters are present, although Hamlet speaks as if he is alone. Derek Jacobi [a famous Shakespeare actor] aroused considerable controversy by speaking the speech directly to Ophelia in Tony Robertson’s production at the London Old Vic in 1977; Jonathan Pryce did the same at the Royal Court in 1980.
Here is a small part of the scene:
POLONIUS
I hear him coming – withdraw my lord.
[King and Polonius hide behind an arras.]
HAMLET
To be, or not to be – that is the question;
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them; to die: to sleep –
No more …
One of the great unaswered questions about this play is whether Hamlet is pretending to be mad, or whether he is an actual mad person who is also pretending to be mad. The way in this speech is performed will say a lot about the attitudes of one particular staging of the play towards that question, but it might not perhaps resolve it. As we read or watch the play it is easy to feel like only a truly mad person would be able to feign madness with so much panache and consistency. In any case: if Hamlet knows that he is being watched and if he performs this speech, ‘at’ Ophelia, as it were, he will seem much more in control of the situation, and much more likely to be pretending to be mad. If he has no idea that he is being watched, it might seem more likely that he is seriously contemplating suicide.
Again, we see that what happens on stage shapes the meaning of the words. This in itself might be stating the obvious, but it is not so obvious when we are merely reading a play – and it does require some mental vigilance to always keep in mind the dual nature of a play – as something that is both reading matter and performance matter, both static in the form of ink on paper and dynamic in the form of stage action.