The Hindu Business Line : Shakespeare, ‘the most prolific writer of movies’

If your interest in the Bard has been aroused after seeing Big B in The Last Lear, which is targeted by the activists, perhaps it should whet your curiosity to know what Ben Crystal writes about the Bard in Shakespeare on Toast ( www.iconbooks.co.uk ): that “playing King Lear has been described as being similar to climbing Everest.”

The book opens with line 306 in Act 5, Scene 3 of the play: ‘Never, never, never, never, never.’ This is one of the most stunning lines, says Crystal. “The sudden shift from iambic pentameter to trochaic nearly always brings a staggering shift in emotion with it, whether the line is whispered, gets louder as it progresses, is shouted, or – well the options are endless…” he extols.

Although the first film of a Shakespeare play (King Lear) was made way back in 1899, it’s probably Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 movie Romeo + Juliet that has done more in recent times than anything else to make Shakespeare more of a household name, the book postulates.

“This writer from a small Warwickshire town four centuries ago is far and away the most prolific writer of movies: in 2005 alone, there were sixteen films made of his plays.” As of June 2008, there were 707 films to his name!

Crystal is not too happy that Shakespeare has become classed as high art – as literature – and “ignored in a cocktail of panic and preoccupation that he’ll be too much hard work or just plain dull.” He didn’t start out that way, clarifies the book. “His plays were originally the tools of actors; only much later were they books to read rather than plays to perform.”

The author urges you to read Shakespeare’s poetry “like following the clues in a Sherlock Holmes novel, or reading The Da Vinci Code.” Nearly 95 per cent of the words the Bard uses are what we know and use every day, cheers Crystal.

He exhorts you to visualise the Elizabethan audience Shakespeare that catered to, in an age without the Internet, films, television, magazines, and everything else we have at our fingertips.

Don’t forget that theatres in Shakespeare’s time were ‘a tough place to hold an audience’s attention.’ They were rowdy, drunken places, and were used only in broad daylight, Crystal describes. Magical and fantastical worlds were created in “these raucous, wooden spaces, filled with beer sellers and prostitutes, lords and commoners…”

Yet, “They were an audience that would love fabulous, exotic worlds being weaved before them, worlds they’d never experience, people wearing clothes they’d never wear, saying things they themselves would perhaps never get to say.”

The words, said aloud and spoken with feeling, conjured fantasies and images, ships and storms, houses and forests out of the air and into the greedy minds of the audience, the author narrates.

Considering that the audience then was noisy, and the theatre pillars obstructed the view, seeing what was happening on the stage was not as important as hearing what was being said, he reasons.

Costumes cost a lot of money then, Crystal finds, from the diary of the theatre manager Philip Henslowe (c. 1550-1616). For instance, the manager had bought ‘a black velvet cloak with sleeps embroidered all with silver and gold’ for more than 20 pounds. “That would be equivalent to 2,692 pounds today, or 1,642 Elizabethan loaves of bread, or more than a third of the price Shakespeare paid for the finest house in Stratford…”

The book wraps with a chapter titled ‘checklist’ with some research on scenes where characters are mentioned as entering but they nothing. For example, in Act 1, Scene 4 of King Lear, though ‘Lear and Knights’ enter, the latter don’t have much to say, but get sent off to run errands and fetch people. “But their presence is a demonstration of Lear’s ruling power, as king,” Crystal infers.

Interestingly, by Act 3, Scene 1, the power is transformed. “Kent meets a Gentleman on the moor. Lear is howling at the storm, and the Gentleman asks who follows the king. Kent’s reply is ‘None but the Fool,’” the author paraphrases. “A king without followers is no longer king, merely a madman shouting at the wind.”

Enjoyable read.

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