Introduction: curiosity, chronology and conjecture
This is my twelfth year of teaching now, and in every one of those years I have taught a Shakespeare play. The plays that I’ve taught (Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Richard III, Henry IV Part One, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merchant of Venice) I obviously know very well, and I’m pretty familiar with a number of the other “greatest hits” of Shakespeare, having read them, studied them at university, seen them on stage or seen film versions of them. But I still feel that there are great swathes of his work that I don’t know so I thought when I had the chance I would remedy that situation.
I’m currently on long service leave, so I guess that chance is now.
The first question was how to remedy the situation. As well as many individual editions of the plays I have a collected works and even a facsimile edition of the First Folio.
But Shakespeare wrote his plays to be performed rather than read, so watching him seems preferable to reading. As great as it would be to see theatre productions of all of the plays, most of them just aren’t performed at all, so filmed versions seemed the only option. While there have been some great film productions of the better known plays (I own seven different versions of Hamlet on DVD), again most of the less well-known plays have been neglected.
Luckily, Cedric Messina, a producer at the BBC, had the ambitious idea in 1975 to film the entire Shakespeare canon. It took a few years to get the finance together and complete the planning, but filming began in early 1978 and the first play, Romeo and Juliet, was broadcast in December of that year. Messina produced twelve of the plays himself before being replaced in 1980 by the polymath Jonathan Miller (who moved on after two years to return to medical research). Miller was replaced by Shaun Sutton who took the series through to its end in 1985, when Titus Andronicus was screened. The BBC put out a box set of The Shakespeare Collection on DVD a few years ago, and I got myself a copy of it.
Are these the best film versions available of the plays? Almost certainly not in many cases. According to Susan Wills, “That we have the televised Shakespeare series at all is entirely due to Messina; that we have the series we have and not perhaps a better, more exciting one is also in large part due to Messina.” The plays were filmed in the studio rather than on location, and had limited budgets, so they look very “stagey” and less impressive than, say, Kenneth Branagh’s sumptious film of Hamlet. But the series had some innovative directors and, even more importantly, some marvellous actors who could bring the lines to life. These inluded Michael Hordern as King Lear and Prospero, Helen Mirren as Rosalind in As You Like It and Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Jon Finch (best known for playing the title role in Roman Polanski’s film version of Macbeth) as King Henry in Parts One and Two, Derek Jacobi as Hamlet and Richard II, Nicol Williamson as Macbeth, Anthony Hopkins as Othello, Alan Rickman as Tybalt and John Gielgud as the chorus in Romeo and Juliet, and Jonathan Pryce as Timon in Timon of Athens. There was also some “stunt casting” such as John Cleese as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew and The Who’s Roger Daltrey as Dromio in The Comedy of Errors.
There are 37 plays included in the BBC’s “Complete Dramatic Works” of William Shakespeare, but current scholarship suggests that there are three more plays to which Shakespeare made substantial contributions: Edward III (c. 1592), Sir Thomas More (c. 1595) and The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613). These three plays are now usually included in editions of Shakespeare’s complete works, but at the time the BBC series was made were considered to be “apocrypha.” In addition, Shakespeare is known to have written at least two more plays — Love’s Labour’s Won (c. 1595) and Cardenio (1612) — for which no texts survive. My goal to watch all of Shakespeare’s works won’t be achieved, then, but these 37 plays will get me pretty close.
Okay, so I’ve got these 37 Shakespeare plays to watch but what order should I watch them in? The box set came with them in alphabetical order, but this doesn’t strike me as a particularly meaningful way to watch them. I could watch them in the order in which they were filmed and broadcast, but this too seems to be a largely arbitrary ordering. I decided, then, to watch the plays chronologically, in the order that Shakespeare wrote them and they were originally produced. This provides me with a way to sense the development Shakespeare as a playwright, from his apprentice works when he was just starting to make a name for himself in the Elizabethan world through to his more mature works when he had become the most famous playwright of his age. Of course, given our limited knowledge of the time and of Shakespeare’s life the chronological order of the plays is a matter of some conjecture.
There is strong evidence to locate certain of the plays in time. For example, Thomas Platter, a Swiss physician and traveller who journeyed to France, Spain, Flanders and England, records in his diary on 21 September 1599,“I went with my party across the water; in the straw-thatched house we saw the tragedy of the first Emperor Julius Caesar, very pleasingly performed, with approximately fifteen characters.” This is almost certainly a reference to Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar being performed in the newly constructed Globe Theatre.
The timing of other plays is far more speculative, relying largely on stylistic evidence or what are taken to be allusions to historical events which must therefore predate the writing of the plays. There are therefore a number of different chronologies of the plays. Fortunately, there is an excellent Wikipedia page on the chronology of the plays and I will be following the order of the plays from there. That chronology is taken from The Oxford Shakespeare (edited by Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett and William Montgomery in 1986, with a second edition in 2005). As the Wikipedia page says, “none of the major chronologies has any real authority over any of the others,” so this is to some degree an arbitrary choice, but Stanley Wells is certainly one of the world’s preeminent Shakespeare scholars.
Here I am, then: ready to go. First up is one of Shakespeare’s less well-known plays, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and I’ll be writing about that in my next post.
