"A man may write of love, and not be in love"

There have been many thoughts rattling around in my brain since SAA (Shakespeare Association of America) 2010. Some of them finally coalesced into something perhaps coherent after attending James Shapiro’s lecture at the Folger this past Friday. Shapiro was lecturing on his new book, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? I was already part way through the book, as I was able to pick up an advanced reader copy at SAA.

Despite the second part of the title, Shapiro isn’t actually interested in who. He’s interested in why and when. Why people believe in different authorship theories, and when it came to be that people started to believe that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays ascribed to him, as this wasn’t questioned until after 1850. So it’s a more recent phenomenon.

Shapiro points out that every non-Stratfordian argument is based on an autobiographical reading of the plays and poems. So and so had this happen in his life which is just like what happens in that play, etc. This frustrates Shapiro because it a specifically modern notion of authorship – literature as self-exploration. Early modern writing was not autobiographical, and therefore it is ridiculous to try and find clues about who Shakespeare was in his plays.

Shapiro made me and the rest of the audience laugh when he said that this view always made him think about an Elizabethan School of Writing. Kit Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Thomas Kyd are sitting in a classroom. The teacher asks, “What have you got for us this week, Kit?” Marlowe responds, “Oh it’s this play called Tamburlaine about this Scythian shepherd who conquers the world.” “Hmm,” says the teacher, “Are you from Scythia? Ever been there? Know any shepherds?” Shapiro’s point is that literature does not have to be “Write What You Know.”

Shapiro quoted the 1593 poem Licia to illustrate this point: "A man may write of love, and not be in love, as well as of husbandry, and not go to plough, or of witches and be none."

One other point I found interested was Shapiro characterizing Shakespeare as a man of “unparalleled imagination.” He said that even though he wrote his thesis on Marlowe, he got bored pretty quickly. And yet, after teaching Shakespeare for years, he doesn’t think he’ll ever get bored with Shakespeare.


I was left thinking a lot about acting. How? Well there seemed to be a question coming up in a lot of the seminars I attended at SAA this year. Sometimes this question was asked outright, but sometimes it just seemed to be underlying what was said. It seemed to have a part in three seminars. Two that I observed: "Shakespeare and Theatrical Reconstructions" (much about the Globe and the Blackfriars Playhouse) and "Emotional Realism on the Stage", and of course the one I participated in: "Shakespeare and Systems of Rehearsal". In my seminar in fact, I was actually asked this question, and I’m not sure at that point I gave a very clear answer, because I didn’t have one until now. The question was How does studying Shakespeare and the early modern theatrical conditions help an actor today? Or even, does it at all? Is there a point to learning about this history? My answer was yes it helps, but I didn’t really have a complete answer to how it helps. But now I have two thoughts about it. The first is more something to throw out there, and a thought that I wished had been fully formulated during the conference so I could have brought it up during the Emotional Realism seminar:

A lot of the criticism and talk seems to have a Shakespeare vs. Stanislavsky feel, and I don’t think the two are incompatible or diametrically opposed. In fact, I’m curious about ways they connect. Is there a link between Patrick Tucker’s work with the Original Shakespeare Company and emotional realism/emotional memory? Tucker, in his book Secrets of Acting Shakespeare, argues that Shakespeare would put the actor in the same situation as the character in order to give the actor a shorthand for performance. This was necessary due to the lack of rehearsal, and the fact that actors were not given the full script to study (just cue scripts with only their lines on it). One specific example Tucker gives is Isabella in Measure for Measure. The actor playing Isabella would have had a script that ended with her (his) last line, so the actor would not know that the Duke was going to propose marriage. So when the Duke did propose marriage this actor would have been surprised and confused, and therefore, according to Tucker, Isabella was supposed to be surprised and confused. Presumably, this would only really work the first time an actor encountered a text. So the next time, the actor would use the memory of that first time and know how to play the scene? If Tucker’s theory is correct, is this not a sort of early modern version of emotional memory? Or is Tucker’s theory flawed because he is looking at it from a modern conception of acting?

My second thought was a more specific answer to the question of How does studying Shakespeare’s theatre help a modern actor? and it came to me while listening to Shapiro speak. Just like modern writers are taught to “write what you know”, so to are modern actors taught to use themselves in performance. I remember one actor friend telling me the motto of a prominent American acting school was “you are enough.” It seems to me that for writers to learn that writing was not always a self-exploration only opens the door for more possibilities, just as it would for actors to learn that there was performance before and beyond Stanisklavsky’s (or Strasberg's) methods. Shakespeare was a writer of “unparalleled imagination” and other writers can learn from that. So to can it help actors to learn that acting wasn’t always about looking on the inside, that they can also strive to be performers of “unparalleled imagination.” If a man may write of love, and not be in love, so too should a man be able to act in love, without ever having been in love. In one of the seminars someone quoted someone else, "Acting doesn't get better, it gets different." Learning about former/other notions of acting and personality can only give a modern actor more ideas, approaches, tools.

This also ties into a paper session I attended, "Shakespeare and the Extended Mind". There were three papers and they had to do with changing notions of cognition and how that is dramatized. Today we understand cognition neurologically. In the early modern period they thought that cognition was humoral. This obviously affects the way playwright wrote then versus how they wrote now. Then emotions were felt, expressed through the whole body. Today we understand them as occurring in the brain. An actor absolutely needs to understand conditions like this in order to understand how to approach an early modern text and an early modern character.