This post is just a little bit about Shakespeare in general because right now Love's Labour's Lost is in that suspension time in the story where you're just waiting for the end (I'm at the beginning of the fifth act). I have no thoughts on it right now. And Othello is right at the beginning so I have nothing cohesive to say about it yet. But look forward to the day that I do, right?
All righty then. First of all I would like to bring up something that was mentioned in class about the first and last performances of a live production being different. And even a Matinee or Dress Rehearsal is very different because the director might choose to add to or take away certain aspects of it because of the audience's reaction. And the actors change and grow accordingly as well, getting more comfortable with their character and trying different peculiarities out to see which ones the audience will react to. So my question is this: did Shakespeare edit his written versions of his plays after a performance because of the reaction of an audience? Was his work ever really "finished" or did he perhaps keep working on and improving his plays the more he learned about theater and people's reactions to his productions? I also wonder if there were different versions of the plays, perhaps, for different audiences or specific venues where they were performed. I often think of that time of history as simpler than nowadays but really people were just as complicated as they are today it's just hard to see them that way because history doesn't read like a story written in a journal. It gives us the cold hard facts that were gathered from several different sources. So I wonder.......
That's the thing about theatre - it is very much alive and changing and evolving. I don't think it's even possible for a play to be performed the same way twice, and I think there's always a sense of artistic discontentment. I don't know whether Shakespeare continually revamped or revised his plays, but it wouldn't surprise me, especially if he was onsite during productions. It's pretty common on modern film sets for the writers to be constantly tweaking things in order to better accomodate the actors and make things sound more natural. If Shakespeare was involved in any of the productions of his own work, I'd be somewhat surprised if he just left things as they were written.
ReplyDeleteI love that you said it can't be performed the same way twice. That is something that I've always pondered about. It's like the question: if a tree falls in the forest and no one's there to hear it does it still make a sound? This seems like the same thing, because we don't usually go to more than one performance of a production but would it have been better if we had gone a different night? Either way, our perception of the play comes from the single time we saw it.
ReplyDelete