Greatest Shakespeare speeches in performance

Posted on June 24, 2011 by Sylvia Morris
 
 

Alan Howard as Coriolanus

When I put up my list of top ten Shakespeare speeches I promised a second set of speeches which I associate with a particular performance.

 

 My list provided a great subject for discussion during a long walk when my husband reminded me of some of the great actors I’ve missed out, including Michael Pennington, David Tennant, Tony Sher, Patrick Stewart, Harriet Walter, John Woodvine, Penny Downie, Ian McKellen. I’ve been lucky enough to see and hear many brilliant performances on stage – I might have to do a third list!

 

If you want to read the whole speech there’s a link to the scene, taken from MIT’s online text. Only one is available to listen to online, but see the end for advice if you would like to listen to recordings of the performances.

 

1. Hamlet, Act 2 Scene 2, Simon Russell Beale

What a piece of work is a man!

I mentioned this one in my earlier post. The speech is often performed out of context but Beale performed it stunningly as part of the play for the National Theatre. This is a studio recording of a different speech but gives a flavour of Beale’s performance.

 

2. Richard II, Act 1 Scene 3, David Suchet

O, who can hold a fire in his hand

I vividly remember this speech from the 1980 RST production in which David Suchet played Bolingbroke. It is specifically about the pain of banishment, but speaks of any kind of separation or loss.

 

 3. Henry VIII, Act 2 Scene 4, Jane Lapotaire 

Sir, I desire you do me right and justice

Jane Lapotaire’s controlled anguish as the Queen was wonderful in the RSC’s 1996 Swan Theatre production. The speech is on The Essential Shakespeare live Encore 4.

 

4. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 2 Scene 1, John Carlisle 

I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows

One of Shakespeare’s most famous speeches, quite rightly. John Carlisle has a wonderfully rich and poetic voice perfectly suited to this sumptuous speech, performed at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in 1989.

 

5. Coriolanus, Act 3 Scene 3,  Alan Howard

You common cry of curs!

Alan Howard made this part his own, playing it for the RSC in Stratford, London and on European tour in 1977-78 before recording it for the BBC’s TV production. His performance is too big for the small screen, but it’s a good recording of this definitive performance.

 

6. Richard II, Act 5 Scene 5, John Heffernan

I have been studying how I may compare

John Heffernan played the title role at Bristol’s Tobacco Factory in 2011. The intimate stage with the audience on all sides left the actor vulnerably alone on stage to deliver this final soliloquy.

 

7. The Tempest, Act 5 Scene 1, Derek Jacobi

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves

The actor, playing Prospero in 1982 used nothing but the power of his voice to dominate the huge space of the RST, starting quietly and building to a crescendo.  On The Essential Shakespeare live.

 

8. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 2 Scene 1, Juliet Stevenson

These are the forgeries of jealousy

Juliet Stevenson’s wonderfully lyrical voice was perfect when she played Titania for the RSC in 1981.

 

9. Cymbeline, Act 2 Scene 2, Anton Lesser

The crickets sing…

The presence of Anton Lesser on any cast list is always a guarantee of quality. Here he plays the villain of the play, Iachimo, for the RSC’s production at the Swan Theatre in 2003. In this night-time scene he spies on the heroine while she sleeps. On The Essential Shakespeare live Encore

 

10. The Comedy of Errors, Act 2 Scene 1, Judi Dench 

 His company must do his minions grace

Judi Dench gave a perfectly judged performance as Adriana for the RSC in 1976. In this scene she was a figure of both comedy and tragedy as she spoke of losing the love of her husband. The scene on YouTube is from the TV recording – not the same speech but similar enough to give the idea.

  

Notes on availability:

RSC performances from 1982 are available to view on video at the Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive, and the National Theatre’s Hamlet should be available at the National Theatre’s archives. Three recordings are on the RSC’s CDs The Essential Shakespeare live and The Essential Shakespeare live Encore, selections made from the recordings at the British Library’s Sound Archive, where they can be listened to.

 

There are lots of great recordings on YouTube. I specially recommend the South Bank Special – Word of Mouth, a masterclass in speaking Shakespeare’s verse with John Barton, Trevor Nunn and Terry Hands. 

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Macbeth: what happens next?

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Jonny Phillips as Siward and soldiers in Dunsinane. Photo by Simon Annand, from www.rsc.org.uk

So what does happen after the end of Macbeth? For Shakespeare, needing a politically-acceptable conclusion, the answer was straightforward, Malcolm filling the vacuum left by the death of the tyrant and his queen.  David Greig, in his new play Dunsinane, has a different set of ideas about war. Here, Lady Macbeth (Gruach) and her son are still alive and the invading English army is checked by warring Scottish clans. It isn’t long before the invaders themselves are under attack. It’s a parable of all those wars in which Western forces have intervened in another country, and the uncomfortable truth that in real life the curtain doesn’t come down just because one side declares the war to be over.

 Greig joins a long tradition of artists using, or appropriating, Shakespeare for their own purpose in music, art and literature. Famous examples of work which has become renowned in its own right include Millais’ painting of Ophelia, Prokofiev’s ballet music for Romeo and Juliet and Verdi’s opera Falstaff.

 The great Shakespeare scholar David Bevington, in a recent lecture about Hamlet in Stratford, commented on how often artists have represented scenes which Shakespeare only described, such as the death of Ophelia. One of my favourite spinoffs from Shakespeare’s play is Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.  Art is never exactly about what it seems on the surface, and this play starts off as a hilarious inside-out version of Hamlet, “where every exit [is] an entrance somewhere else”, but is saved from being just a clever confection by the many references to the differences between life and art and the inevitability of death.

 Where Stoppard’s play is confined within the action of Hamlet, Greig’s play quickly moves away from the familiar like the famous scene at Birnam Wood. This isn’t to say there aren’t moments where we are reminded of Shakespeare. The opening figure of the young and inexperienced soldier boy speaks simply and openly to us as does the boy in Henry V, who becomes a victim of battle.

 While the play includes the frustrations of the good leader, Siward, trying to make peace, the heart of the play is in the story of the ordinary soldiers. Greig makes them inarticulate figures, swearing and endlessly complaining of the cold and wet. There are moments when a few soldiers, dressed in their soiled crosses of St George, stand to address the audience directly. The stillness of these moments reminded me of a scene in the production of T S Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, performed by the RSC in the same Swan Theatre in 1993. The four drunken knights who have murdered the saintly Becket turn into polished twentieth-century politicians addressing the audience with elegant speeches about political expediency and the regrettable need for violence in the search for social justice.

 Like Shakespeare and T S Eliot, David Greig too has made his point about politicians in a play which is likely to have resonance far into the future.

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream: lost in the forest

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Arthur Rackham's illustration of the meeting of Oberon and Titania

It’s the longest day of the year, a time when our ancestors believed the supernatural came particularly close to the human. So where does Shakespeare set his play where, on Midsummer night, the world as we know it gets turned upside down?  In a forest, of course!

 Forests are secretive and mysterious, full of unexplained sounds and shadows, and many writers have conjured up a sense of unease combined with nostalgia by using a forest setting, from the wonderfully-imagined living forests of Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings cycle to Kipling’s poem The Way Through the Woods   read here by Andrew Motion.  

Woodlands were still common in Shakespeare’s England, though the Forest of Arden itself was already in decline. For Shakespeare woods have a whole series of symbolic meanings. They can be places of unlawful and horrific violence: the rape of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus and the near-rape of Silvia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona take place in forests. They can also be places of refuge: in a parallel with the legends of Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest, woodland provides a secular sanctuary for those on the run from the scheming life of the court, such as Valentine in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and the banished Duke in As You Like It.

The forest in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is different from this pastoral vision because it’s dominated by the supernatural. Here the imagination runs riot:

     … in the night, imagining some fear,

How often is a bush supposed a bear

It’s a place of confusion, where people lose their minds and even their identities. Certainties are turned on their heads. Hermia, abandoned by her lover Lysander voices this paradox:

Since night you loved me; yet since night you left me

For all this, by the end of the play all the arguments have been resolved. The four lovers are paired up and married. Bottom has been turned back into a man and the mechanicals have performed their play. The frostiness between the Theseus and Hippolyta has evaporated and Oberon and Titania are strong in amity. People come out of the forest changed for the better, and as this is only a play I don’t think we should get too hung up on the fact that this has been achieved through witchcraft.

Keith Thomas, in his book Religion and the Decline of Magic, suggests that especially in rural areas, belief in fairies was still common well into the seventeenth century. Fairies were “a dwarf race of mischievous but fundamentally friendly temperament” who nevertheless might steal human babies and replace them with changeling children. One of Titania’s fairies describes Puck, also known as Robin Goodfellow, a traditional figure of English folklore:

Are not you he

That frights the maidens of the villagery,

Skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern,

And bootless make the breathless huswife churn,

And sometime make the drink to bear no barm,

Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?

Superstitions were associated with Catholicism, and it’s hardly surprising that these lingered: in the thirty years before Shakespeare’s birth people in England had been forced to change their religion between Catholic and Protestant three times. A growing interest in scientific discoveries about the world also contributed to a loss of belief in old-fashioned traditions.

A walk though an ancient woodland is still a magical experience where we can feel the echo of the past, not just on the longest day.

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Shakespeare’s fathers: nature or nurture?

Posted on June 19, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

The ghost of Hamlet's father (Christopher Good) and Hamlet (Sam West) in the RSC's 2001 production of Hamlet

It’s Father’s Day in the UK today, and the prime minister, David Cameron, is taking the opportunity to have a go at fathers who fail to take financial or emotional responsibility for their families.

There are children growing up …who will never know the love of a father. And we know, too, the consequences of that. When fathers aren’t there for their kids, those children are more likely to live in poverty, fail at school, end up in prison and be unemployed later in life.

Shakespeare’s fathers wouldn’t come off too well if judged by David Cameron’s standards. In The Winter’s Tale Leontes refuses to take any responsibility for his new-born baby, abandoning it to a distant place “where chance may nurse or end it”, and King Lear banishes his favourite daughter when she stands up to him. The ghost of Hamlet’s father gives his son the awful responsibility of revenging his murder.

Many of Shakespeare’s plays are both political dramas about the ruling classes and stories about family breakdown caused by domineering mothers, stroppy adolescents or the heavy hand of absent fathers. Shakespeare mined his sources for stories about families, often disfunctional ones and one of the reasons for Shakespeare’s enduring popularity is that audiences have always been able to recognise the tensions of their own family lives regardless of social class.  

Where, then, do we find ideal fathers in Shakespeare’s plays? My top dad is actually not a real dad at all, but a surrogate father. Twenty years before the action of Cymbeline begins Belarius, stole the king’s two sons in revenge for his own banishment, and raises them as his own children. He’s a romantic, moralising, hermit-like figure, but a responsible father to the two princes.

In his introduction to the Arden edition J M Nosworthy says the boys are “lyrical Arcadian figures uttering gentle unrealities”, but they are more complicated than this suggests. Belarius suggests that nature is more important than nurture in making the boys what they are:

Thou divine Nature; thou thyself thou blazon’st

In these two princely boys; they are as gentle

As zephyrs blowing below the violet,

Not wagging his sweet head; and yet, as rough

(Their royal blood enchaf’d) as the rud’st wind

That by the top doth take the mountain pine

And make him stoop to th’vale. ‘Tis wonder

That an invisible instinct should frame them

To royalty unlearn’d, honour untaught,

Civility not seen from other, valour

That wildly grows in them, but yields a crop

As if it had been sow’d.

There’s a strong element of fairy-tale fantasy in Cymbeline which may account for this romantic view. In David Cameron’s reckoning though, Belarius, as hands-on father, would deserve the credit for how the boys turn out.

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Shakespeare’s Avon, Act 4: river of life

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

The avon with boats moored on its banks looking towards Holy Trinity Church

The River Avon has always been of central importance to the town of Stratford and the area surrounding it. In Shakespeare’s day, it was an important artery for trade and a source of power (the mill is mentioned in the Domesday Book), but the river also marked an imprecise boundary between two different kinds of countryside. To the north was the well-wooded Forest of Arden, already in decline but still different from the open rolling farmland of the Feldon land to the south. Each type of land would have produced different agricultural goods for exchange in Stratford’s markets. In Shakespeare’s play, King Lear grants his eldest daughters a third of his kingdom:

Of all these bounds, even from this line to this,

With shadowy forests and with champains rich’d,

With plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads,

We make thee lady.

 The river would also have been a magnet for children to swim and play in, and to observe the wildlife. You don’t have to look far in Shakespeare’s plays for evidence of these activities.

 Nowadays the river is used entirely for recreation, but even this has its commercial side: you can take a boat trip, hire a rowing boat, or even have dinner on a converted narrow boat. The river links two major sites of Shakespeare importance, the Royal Shakespeare Theatres and Holy Trinity Church.

 Among all this the river and its banks are full of life. People walk their dogs, ride bikes, jog, fish, play football, or just stroll. Within a hundred yards of the water there are restaurants, hotels, pubs, car parks, and ice cream vans. In only a little over a mile of its length, four bridges cross the Avon, two carrying traffic and two footbridges.

Mute swan with its cygnets among the water lilies near Lucy's Mill

 Yet somehow the river still has a rural feel, helped by the green expanse of the recreation ground opposite the theatres. Walk away from the town in either direction for a few minutes and you find yourself in the countryside. Here the river is calmer, and wildlife has the chance to find quiet pockets to live and breed. It’s surprising how much flourishes here so close to such a busy area.

 The cygnets in the photograph are part of a family of swans living near Lucy’s Mill, as are some coot chicks, and there’s another family of swans further up river. Nearer to the centre of town are a few moorhen chicks living cheek by jowl with large numbers of other birds including Canada geese.

 In or near to the river I’ve seen quite a range of birds, insects and mammals, most of which are listed at the end of the post. I already mentioned Shakespeare’s interest in wildlife, and Bottom’s song in A Midsummer Night’s Dream includes just a few of the common birds still to be seen here, complete with country names:

The ousel cock (1) so black of hue,

With orange-tawny bill,

The throstle (2) with his note so true,

The wren with little quill.

The finch, the sparrow and the lark,

The plainsong cuckoo grey,

Whose note full many a man doth mark,

And dares not answer “Nay”.

 1. Blackbird

2. Thrush

 The Avon’s a fragile environment, but an important one, both for the wellbeing of today’s inhabitants and for the heritage of Shakespeare’s town.

A list for wildlife-lovers. On the river: Mute swan, mallard, Canada goose, greylag goose, heron, little grebe, great crested grebe, moorhen, coots, kingfisher. On the banks: song thrush, mistle thrush, starling, robin, wren, blackbird, pigeon, cuckoo, dunnock, swallow, treecreeper, blue tit, great tit, green woodpecker, jackdaw, reed bunting, sedge warbler, whitethroat, goldfinch, greenfinch. Dragonflies, butterflies and squirrels are often seen. Otters are rumoured to pass through and maybe one day I’ll see one!

When the river partially froze last winter we saw kestrel, tufted duck, pochard, black-headed gull and lesser black-backed gull.

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Reading in Shakespeare’s England

Posted on June 13, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Townend in the village of Troutbeck, the home of the Browne family

While on holiday in the English Lake District earlier this year I visited Townend, an old farmhouse in the village of Troutbeck, now in the care of the National Trust.

 It’s a rare survivor, a house lived in by the same family from the sixteenth until the mid-twentieth century, and is full of character. The thing that really intrigued me about the house, though, was the collection of books which are still contained there. One of the nineteenth-century owners made bookshelves in the house to hold the books, and a room called the Library is on limited view. It’s surprising enough that a farmhouse should contain a Library at all, but this collection is truly remarkable, and  “perhaps the oldest surviving yeoman’s library in England”.

 Not only do the books still exist, but the family were such careful keepers of records that many of the documents listing their purchases are also still in existence. The chief book collectors lived at the end of the 1600s and the first half of the 1700s. From inventories we know that there were at least 400 books in the house in 1750, and we also know what they were.

 The Browne family were living in Troutbeck in 1525, and the central part of the current house probably dates back to the early 1600s. It’s likely that a few books were being bought by that first Browne who died in 1559. The earliest book in the collection dates back to 1555. The books cover quite a range of subjects: practical handbooks on agriculture and household management, law, and entertainment in the form of chapbooks, ballads and plays. Among the books acquired in the early 1700s are copies of Rowe’s edition of Shakespeare and several plays dated 1734. Gervase Marham’s 1648 guide to animal husbandry, brewing, cooking and beekeeping is among them. There is evidence in the records that books were borrowed by family and friends.

 The National Trust’s Libraries Curator, Mark Purcell, sent me a copy of his article,  Books and Readers in Eighteenth-Century Westmorland: the Brownes of Townend, in which he comments that the size and extent of this Library “ is all a far cry from the traditional view of the Lakeland as a district both financially and culturally impoverished, where books were few and far between”. 

 Troutbeck is still remote. It’s several miles from the nearest town, in a deep and isolated valley which would have been difficult to reach in the sixteenth century. Now fully catalogued, the extent of this Library has taken experts by surprise, and has implications for students of Shakespeare and the cultural history of the period. There are those who question the literacy of Shakespeare’s family and other townsfolk, but Stratford had easy links to major towns, and educational opportunities at the well-regarded grammar school. If the inhabitants of Troutbeck were able to read and enjoy books it stands to reason that the people of Stratford, Wilmcote and Shottery could have done the same.

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Shakespeare’s Avon, Act 3: David Garrick’s Jubilee

Posted on June 11, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

The Jubilee pavilion on the banks of the River Avon, 1769

The story of Stratford’s rise from being a typical market town into an international tourist destination is often said to start in 1769 when the greatest actor of the day, David Garrick, put on a three-day celebration of Shakespeare. The fact that this happened in Stratford, not London, raised more than a few eyebrows. Garrick had originally been invited to dedicate a statue of Shakespeare for the niche on the new Town Hall. A true showman, he decided to use the opportunity to mount an entertainment on a grand scale in which he would take the starring role.

 The new Town Hall was elegant, but not large enough for the kind of show Garrick had in mind. The temporary wooden amphitheatre that he built was designed to seat 1000 with a stage large enough for 100 performers. It was built, as you can see from the picture, near to the River Avon, much too near as it turned out.

Garrick’s Ode was the centrepiece of the whole festival, with musical accompaniment written by the composer Thomas Arne and performed by the entire orchestra and chorus from Drury Lane Theatre London. In Stratford it was received enthusiastically by an audience reported to be 2000 strong despite the torrential rain. The Jubilee itself was not the success Garrick had hoped for, but all was not lost because he took advantage of the interest it raised among the fashionable in London.

Detail of the engraving showing David Garrick speaking the Ode to Shakespeare

He wrote a play, The Jubilee, dramatising the events of the three days. He was able to include the procession of characters from Shakespeare’s plays which had been rained off in Stratford as well as the declaration of the Ode itself. According to Vanessa Cunningham’s book Shakespeare and Garrick the script indicates entrances for 320 individuals, three horses and one dog. This spectacular entertainment was performed 153 times between 1769 and 1776, a record for any London production.

 It isn’t quite true that there was no tourist industry in Stratford before the Garrick Jubilee. There is evidence of people visiting places known to Shakespeare right back into the seventeenth century. The Jubilee strengthened the association of the town with Shakespeare and planted the seed of the idea of a prolonged festival in Stratford, eventually culminating in the building of a permanent theatre as a memorial to Shakespeare to which audiences would come from all round the world.

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More Ophelia contenders: Jane Shaxspere v. Katherine Hamlet and Margaret Clopton

Posted on June 9, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Painting of Ophelia by John Waterhouse

Over the last couple of days Shakespeare’s inspiration for the death of Ophelia in Hamlet has provoked a surprising amount of media coverage. University of Oxford lecturer Dr Steven Gunn has been researching records of inquests at the National Archives, and has found a record of the drowning of a girl called Jane Shaxspere. Because they share similar surnames it is speculated that Jane was probably a relative of William’s. The record has added appeal because the girl was picking summer flowers when she fell into the pond where she died. 

It’s not quite so clear-cut. The event took place in 1569 when Shakespeare was only five, and the girl who died two and a half. It happened twenty miles from Stratford, and there isn’t any evidence that she was related to the Stratford Shakespeares (it was quite a common name at the time).

By coincidence I wrote a post for this blog on 31 May which looked at another possible source for the death of Ophelia, the case of Katherine Hamlet. I hadn’t realised until I recently revisited the work of Edgar Fripp that this case is so well documented, and contemporary with Shakespeare. Fripp includes a report of the detailed questions asked by the coroner in another possible suicide, which he assumes also to have been asked in the Katherine Hamlet case. They are remarkably reminiscent of the Gravediggers’ discussions in Hamlet.

 One of the comments to my blog now suggests another candidate for Ophelia, Margaret Clopton. The same age as Shakespeare, she lived at Clopton House, a grand residence on the outskirts of Stratford. The story is that she drowned in a spring or well at the house, but there’s no documentary evidence to support it. Deaths by drowning seem to have been fairly common.

 Many of the printed sources used by Shakespeare have been positively identified, but little is known about where, if anywhere, he found the details which litter his plays. Ultimately the sources are irrelevant to the appreciation of Shakespeare’s work, but it’s hard to ignore these snippets that Shakespeare, like a magpie, could have picked up wherever he found them.

 We’ll never know for certain, but in the contest for the likely source for the death of Ophelia, Katherine Hamlet still gets my vote!

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Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man in glass

Posted on June 9, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

The baby, from the Seven Ages of Man

Glass is the most mysterious of substances, translucent yet intensely colourful, hard but fragile and easily broken. A friend has just celebrated the first firing of her new glass kiln, and over the weekend a group of us crowded into her garden workshop to admire the little squares of fused glass, each one a different pattern and combination of colours.

Coloured glass has been used to make pictures for hundreds of years, and Shakespeare and his plays are among the most popular of secular subjects.

Jaques famous speech from As You Like It on the passage of life into seven different ages, has probably been illustrated more than any other. It begins:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. 

I became interested in representations of this speech following an enquiry put to me a few years ago. One of the most striking pieces of decoration in the original 1879 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, and a miraculous survivor of the 1926 fire, is the series of windows alongside the staircase leading up to what are now the circles in the Swan Theatre. These windows were installed between 1881 and 1887, but the name of the designer and manufacturer is not recorded. Many people visiting for an evening performance don’t even notice them because they are best appreciated on a sunny day.

“The lover, sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad made to his mistress’ eyebrow”

The enquiry related to the windows of the Seven Ages of Man which are recorded to have been in the Royal Exchange Inn, West Bromwich, around 1850, to which a music hall was added in 1855. During the 1880s a Mr Rainbow was appointed manager.

The windows had long been removed by the time the pub was demolished in 1967 and the enquirer was interested in the idea that these might be the same windows, reused at the Memorial Theatre. The fact that nothing has ever been discovered about the Theatre’s windows fuelled the interest. Charles Flower, who largely paid for the building of the Memorial Theatre, was a brewer who would have had many connections in the brewing trade, and a Mr Rainbow was for many years as the manager of the Theatre. Was it possible that it was the same windows?

Disappointingly for the enquirier, the description of the windows from the Inn aren’t a perfect match for those in the Theatre, and thinking about it, it seems unlikely that Mr Flower would have wanted to use second-hand windows from a public house in his new and prestigious theatre. Nevertheless it serves as a reminder of what a popular subject this speech is, and not just for theatres.

There are many representations of the speech in glass. The best-known is that at the Folger Shakespeare Library,  Washington DC, commissioned for the building in 1932. Other examples are the chapel at Oundle School in Northamptonshire, created  by Hugh Easton in 1950,  Southwark Cathedral, London,  by Christopher Well in 1954, the State Library of New South Wales, Australia, by Arthur Benfield installed in 1940, Fort Lincoln Cemetery, Maryland dating from the 1920s or 1930s and Torbay Methodist Church, Devon made by Peter Tysoe in the 1970s .

My friend presented me with one of the pieces of glass from her first firing. This now sits in my window, a square of rich, glowing blue and red, a beautiful example of this most magical of materials.

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Shakespearian stars 2: Paul Scofield as King Lear

Posted on June 7, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Alec McCowen as the Fool, Paul Scofield as King Lear, RST 1962. Photo from the Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive

In 2004 The Daily Telegraph published a survey in which RSC actors voted for the greatest Shakespeare performance in history. It wasn’t exactly a scientific poll, but the result was clear, and not unexpected.

The winner was Paul Scofield in King Lear. The result undoubtedly depended on the fact that this performance had first been seen on stage between 1962 and 1964, then repeated in a film version released in 1971, and that the director of both stage and screen versions was the legendary Peter Brook.

 Paul Scofield became a professional actor young: he was spotted working at the Birmingham Repertory Company by the even younger Peter Brook and they, with Barry Jackson, came to Stratford in 1946. Scofield established himself as a star playing Pericles and Henry V and soon moved on to a series of major roles in Stratford including Hamlet, Bassanio, Macbeth and Mercutio.

 A close contemporary of Richard Burton, who shot to fame with his performance as Henry V in 1951 (number 1 in this series), Scofield was a completely different character, and had a very different career. Although he had film successes, notably in A Man for All Seasons (also based on a stage play), he never pursued a major Hollywood career and kept out of the public eye. In later years he added weight to two Shakespeare films playing the King of France in Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V and the Ghost of Hamlet’s father in the Mel Gibson film of Hamlet.

 Like Burton, he had a distinctive voice. Just as Burton’s lyrical and heroic delivery was perfect for Henry V’s rousing speeches, Scofield’s gravelly voice found its perfect setting in the harshness of Brook’s King Lear. The Daily Telegraph review of the stage production commented on his “unsentimental, awesome, rasping delivery” and the depiction of a “society only one degree removed from savagery”. The Times commented on his “grating low tones, the powerful air of authority”.

 It was quickly recognised that Brook’s production had uncovered new depths in the play, and Scofield’s acting had a universal quality. Milton Shulman wrote “His England is Anywhere and his Lear is Everyman”.

 The production’s success, with hundreds of performances over three years including a tour taking in Berlin, Moscow and New York, gave Scofield the chance to refine his performance. Between this tour and making the film of King Lear he played the saintly Thomas More on stage and screen, but there’s no sign of More’s human warmth in his portrayal of Lear.

 Maybe the film should be seen as an alternative interpretation of Shakespeare’s play rather than a straightforward version of it. It’s certainly eccentric. Scofield’s performance is often extremely subdued and the film takes every opportunity for close-ups of his craggy features. However the original reviews of the onstage performance seem to indicate that this was still in essence the performance we can see on film. There are lots of clips from it on YouTube, and I’ve chosen the scene where Lear’s two eldest daughters humiliate their father by refusing to accommodate his entourage of attendant knights.

 Scofield died in 2008 at the age of 86, leaving behind him many recordings of his screen and radio work. It’s the film of King Lear, though, with its echo of the stage production, that enabled this performance to be voted the greatest in history.

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Posted in Plays and Poems, Shakespeare on Stage | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments