Playing Shakespeare

Back in 1984 a British television series called Playing Shakespeare, hosted by John Barton of the Royal Shakespeare Company, aired in a few American cities and made its way onto VHS (some local libraries have it). The companion book by Barton (with a foreword by Trevor Nunn) was reissued by Anchor Books in 2001. But only now is the series available on DVD, just issued last month by Athena Learning.

The series features all the usual suspects from that era in the RSC: Ian McKellan, Patrick Stewart, Judi Dench, David Suchet, Peggy Ashcroft, Ben Kingsley, and so on. Yes, that generation of Shakespearean actors, but what Barton and they achieve in these shows is still utterly relevant in the classroom. Take the episode where David Suchet and Patrick Stewart trade takes on Shylock, Suchet playing him as Jewish, with a bit of eu veh, and Stewart playing him as less Jewish than simply greedy. There is also a marvelous scene where Barton steers Judi Dench (as Viola in Twelfth Night) line-by-line through the speech hiding her love from a self-absorbed Orsino.

Yes, these shows tend to reinforce the notion that Shakespeare must be played with an English–especially an “expensive”–accent, and they tend to emphasize formal over cultural issues in performance. But they manage what is often hardest to achieve in the academic, text-centered classroom: simultaneously showing Shakespeare’s malleability and the constant, guiding motion of his language.