Shakespeare in Hopscotch Mode: "Cimbelino" by William Shakespeare, António Pires (Stage Director), Teatro do Bairro, and Act for All School

(Entrance's front door to the theatre)

I've just got home from having seen Cymbeline. This is the first time I’ve watched this play (either on stage or on screen) and It’s just very fresh in my mind because I’d also just read it. There are some outstanding performances: Carolina Crespo as Imogen is outstanding and her relationship with José Pimentão as Posthumus is the emotional and beating heart of this production. Iacomo’s “comic” interjections and intonations were also very funny. Yes, there were ideas in abundance and some didn't come off so well (the action around the battle scene in particular lost itself more than a little in visual symbolism). Nevertheless, this is a production well worth seeing - it's also encouraging to see the significant number of actors in the company this year that are just coming out of this particular acting school – “Act for all School” (only Adriano Luz as Cymbeline and Rita Loureiro as the Queen, João Araújo, João Barbosa, and Ricardo Aibéo are professional actors). This production has given an invigorating another feel to the celebrations of the 400 years of Shakespeare’s demise.

This staging was a "showcase of Shakespeare's plays," where one can recognize Romeo and Juliet, Othello and some other of his works. According to the stage director, António Pires, he wanted to play to interact with the memories of the viewers - fetching references to paintings, but also with the songs that populate our imagination, as well as with fairy tales, and popular tradition.

The decisive factor for me to have enjoyed it (it’s not one my favourite plays), was the space where the stage was set, at the Carmo convent ruins; making the action of the play outdoors, allowed the natural “colours” (the play was performed at night), the black sky, and the ruins very much a part of the text.

I'm glad that they made the effort to stage this rather obscure play; many of these plays have many hidden gems. While the "Cymbeline" plot is contrived, I enjoyed it for combining themes and characters that were obviously borrowed from his other works. In this version of "Cymbeline," I had shades of “Othello” (Iacomo as Iago), “King Lear” (Cymbeline betrayed by his wife and step-son), “The Merchant of Venice” (Imagen disguised as a male youth), etc. As one of his late plays, it was both a tribute and a clever parody of Shakespeare’s own canon.

The original Elizabethan text was shown on the front wall of the ruins at the same time the actors were saying their lines. It was the first I saw something like this in a Shakespearean staged play in Portugal (it’s quite common in our Opera houses). I loved it! For my particular type of brain it was a treat. Listening to the text with one part of my Portuguese brain, and at the same time reading the text on the wall with the English part of my brain, produced a very weird but nevertheless very rewarding experience. Henrique Braga’s rendering is the translation I’d have liked to be able to do. It‘s not Shakespeare, but it’s not supposed to be. I’ve always maintained that Shakespeare in a foreign language is not Shakespeare, merely a rendering of the original text into another language. Shakespeare’s peculiarity lies in his words, i.e., in the power and beauty of his phrases in English. Yes, Shakespeare says stuff, some of it rather good, and quite interesting, but the real genius lies in the how, not the what. Considering the amount of text that Shakespeare 'reworked' (let's not forget that Shakespeare was, in effect, writing 'early-modernised' versions of old stuff, and I don't mean this in any way pejoratively), any translation of Shakespeare runs the very real risk of fulfilling Plato's criticism of poetry itself. This is ironic considering we're discussing poetry, but if anything is close to the ideal form of poetry, it's Shakespeare. I ought to go all Shakespearian at this juncture, but my memory deserts me. You can no more translate Shakespeare than you can Schiller or Celan. 

(The beginning of the play)

It is great that other people other than the English love Shakespeare, but the magic is in the unique construction of the words and phrases he used in his prose and blank verse, as delicately crafted as the finest sculpture and in many ways more important than the more obvious theatrical devices of plot and characterisation. He was not a mere storyteller and no translation - even into modern Portuguese, no less - can hope to capture his achievement. It can still make for damned fine theatre, but it is not Shakespeare. Of course the "profound and poetic use of the English language "gets lost in translation", and can only to a certain degree be replaced by a profound and poetic use of the Portuguese (or any other) language, if it is a good translation. So you have an advantage if you are able to enjoy Shakespeare in the original Elizabethan English. But there obviously remains enough of Shakespeare in any good translation, that he can fascinate people all over the world. What you translate of course changes the culture you translate into, but the act of translation also forces you to sometimes stretch, sometimes re-invent the possibilities of our target language. In as much as Vasco Graça Moura, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and earlier translations did just that, they created a whole new Portuguese poetic idiom, "all ours" indeed. (Which modern translators find it hard to emancipate themselves from, by the way; but there are many excellent "poetic" modern versions.) All but four of his plays borrow plots from other sources, likewise with characters. One could rewrite the plays substituting modern English for the Elizabethan original, but that would be another form of rendering. I’m a die-hard Shakespearean. This means the Englishness of his plays must be kept at all costs. On the other hand, this does not mean I’m going to stop seeing Shakespeare’s plays in other languages, namely in Portuguese. I just know it’s going to be a different experience altogether. The level of fruition is just going to be on another plane of analysis. Kudos to Henrique Braga’s rendering of the Elizabethan text into Portuguese. I still feel the essence of Shakespeare's language evades translation even if the meaning is captured. From basic things like the rhythm of "To be, or not to be" compared with "Ser ou Não Ser", to the countless words Shakespeare invented for his own purposes, for me there's just no substitute for the originals. I think for a Portuguese reader moderately equipped with English, the effort required to read Shakespeare in the original is akin to the effort a native English speaker makes to understand Chaucer. In both instances it's possible with a bit of work, if you're really into it, as I am.

(One of the Gothic pillars on the right side of the theatre)

On a side note, it was only by watching this play that something about the 5^th act crystallised in my mind. How was Shakespeare able to interweave strands of narrative elements drawn from Boccaccio, French medieval romance, Holinshed and various other sources? There are people saying Shakespeare was not an original writer. Bah! Everything was drawn together with mind-boggling skill. Producing a coherent work of art from an array of reworked source material is a complex business; it's just not as simple as saying that Shakespeare didn't write his own stories, and therefore the language is everything. Things are not as simple as that.

NB: Play seen live at a packed Carmo convent ruins in Lisbon, on the 9^th of August 2016.

A Good Year for Shakespeare but an Awful One for England: “1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear” by James Shapiro

Published 2015.

“Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven.”

In Macbeth, “1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear” by James Shapiro

In the last 2 years I've been thinking a lot about Shakespeare. One of the things that always bothers me is this: "If all of Shakespeare's works and words somehow disappeared from the Earth today (due to a Bard-targeting virus or something), it would be as if his works still existed."

I'll try not to be snarky, but please read this in your nicest teacher's voice.

The answer to the conundrum is yes. He'd still exist because his words exist in everything we have.

By contrast, if Nicholas Sparks were to disappear tomorrow, along with all his books and the movies directly made from his books, future generations would never know he existed. His influence on humanity, culture, and history has been, let's say, minimal.

On the other hand, Shakespeare's works could be reconstructed from the evidence left behind.

Meloves a good Gedankenexperiment. Imagine we could identify authors so influential that if every copy of their work disappeared from the face of the earth, their literary contributions would remain essentially intact because their innovations and ideas were reflected a hundred times over in other lesser works from other writers. Because my mind is on Shakespeare lately, he's the classic example to think of.

Get rid of "Hamlet", "Lear", "Macbeth" and the stories have still been told and retold over and over. The characters are never quite the same, the language never quite as eloquent, specific plot points evolve over time, but the essence of the tale is embedded in our literary culture so thoroughly that the loss of the original at this point would leave behind a perfect impression like a fossilized shell immortalized in stone.

Out of curiosity I searched IMDB to know whether there were any Shakespeare movies in the making as we speak. I was quite surprised with the result:

Shapiro’s book belongs to this trend of “re-writing” Shakespeare, at least of our perception of him.

Shapiro’s “theories” as usual abound. I must say, however, the only theory I found rather far-fetched was the one where Lear is based on the Leir play. There are other key moments when a connection between an "historical event" and Shakespeare's work is satisfying but rather unlikely unfortunately.

I’ve read somewhere that some authors take it for granted that Shakespeare wrote Lear after reading Leir, but it's entirely possible, as other editors have suggested, that the idea was gestating as early as 1603, and took Holinshed as its primary source. Some have even suggested, based on close reading and verbal resonances, that it was actually Leir that borrowed from Lear. I've read too many theories spun out of whole cloth to be entirely comfortable with verbal resonances alone as evidence. It's because of this that I prefer to take as literal an approach as possible rather than take as true a historical claim based upon suggestions that could be interpreted in more than one way.

We do not know too much that is definite about Shakespeare, and I often think those who try to provide more "definite information" rely as much upon their imagination as upon indubitable evidence, not to mention a willing suspension of disbelief. Sometime it's not easy for readers of Shapiro's book to determine when assumption becomes assertion.

I really don't want to be a spoilsport. As a scholastic approach it's highly readable. It enhanced and enriched, in many ways, my appreciation of Lear and Macbeth. Forget about Fassbender's movie. If after reading Shapiro's take on "Macbeth" (“his take on the origins of the word “equivocation” is quite masterful: it’s a whole new world of “equivocation”, and the disturbing concept of “the fiend that lies like truth”), "Lear" and "Antony and Cleopatra" you're not inspired to read this three great plays again and thereby to liberate their author from the chains of speculative biography, Shapiro’s valiant attempt to re-create that mysterious year will not have been justified. Shapiro’s take on the time in the reign of King James I is something worth reading, pulling us in with a fresh perspective on Shakespeare’s works that has rarely, if ever, been considered before. Greenblatt’s “Hamlet in Purgatory” comes a close second. Shapiro chose to make it more personal, while Greenblatt went for the playwright's dramas, and drew larger cultural concerns over them, rather than presuming personal influence.

NB: Incidentally, for those of you more in tune with what’s happening in the world of Shakespeareana in this day and age now, the chapter exploring the link between “equivocation” and “Macbeth” is not something really new when it comes to Shapiro. In 2012 he did a 3 episode TV Series at the BBC where one of the shows was entitled “equivocation”. This series, all by itself, is a “must”, namely because it’s easy to make a comparison between the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods in terms of the Shakespeare plays. 1606 is commonly regarded as a pivot year “connecting” this change in Shakespeare.