Josh Harris, C’07, as Hamlet addresses “poor Yorick.” Photo by Woodrow Blettel
Student performances transform a teacher-scholar’s view of the Bard, and of the Sewanee campus
By Pamela Royston Macfie
During the examination period closing the 2006 Easter semester, I managed to see four new Shakespeare productions. Two of those productions moved me to laughter, engaging me with the comic anarchies that shape A Midsummer Night's Dream; two confronted me with Hamlet's dreadful grief. The productions did not require my travel to London or New York. They unfolded on the University Domain. The productions represented the culmination of my students' work in two classes focused on Shakespeare.
I have been requiring Sewanee students to perform scenes from Shakespeare for 10 years now. The idea, however, did not originate with me. In 1995, as the Advent semester approached its wintry close, a small embassy of students enrolled in "Shakespeare before 1601" asked if their class might perform several scenes from the first play that we had studied. The performances, the students told me, would not be an extracurricular endeavor; they would take the place of a traditional final exam.
I did not easily grant my students the opportunity to open a play's meaning to an audience. Dedicated to the scrutiny of Elizabethan and Jacobean conventions, I was unwilling to authorize a performance that might pursue contemporary camp at the expense of Shakespearean tone. If the Royal Shakespeare Company had concluded A Midsummer Night's Dream with a high-kicking chorus line (a visual allusion to the film The Full Monty), how could I trust my students to resist modern reference over Renaissance nuance? What if they subjected to parody those lines, speeches, and settings that I was convinced should compel wonder or awe? What if they unintentionally ... or willfully ... produced tragedy as comedy? Somehow, in spite of these hesitations, I surrendered to my students' petition, initiating a run of performance-based examinations that have transformed my appreciation of Shakespeare. Those examinations have occurred in many surprising places: the attic of Convocation Hall (a richer setting 10 years ago when it stored costumes for the theatre department), the paths of Abbo's Alley, and the chapter room of the ATO house.
I have rarely been disappointed with my students' work as they translate Shakespeare from page to stage. Crowning a semester-long interrogation of Shakespeare's language, most performances stand as apt incarnations of Shakespeare's words. The short essays that my students author in conjunction with their performances confirm this happy effect. In three to five pages, they defend their theatrical intentions with critical reference to the plays. Some essays have disclosed how a set takes inspiration from a particular image (Caliban's isle that is "full of noises"). Others have connected a performance's emphatic physicality to a symptom suffered by a character (Leontes' "tremor cordis" or Lear's compunction that his hand "smells of mortality"). One justified turning dialogue into song by demonstrating how the language informing Act V of The Merchant of Venice aspires to the harmony of heaven's circling spheres.
I have not anticipated every performance with confident ease. The plans behind certain scenes have, in fact, racked me with anxiety. One of the freshmen scenes staged this May had me worrying about everything from the stormy weather (which seemed more appropriate to Lear than A Midsummer Night's Dream) to the possibility that the scene's intent might be unintelligible. These students set the rude mechanicals' rehearsal of Dream's play-within-the-play on the wooden pirate ship that stands in the children's playground in Elliott Park. Pirates as aspiring, yet inept players, as "hempen homespuns," I asked? Yes, the students replied, noting that Shakespeare refers to pirates in several of his more fantastical plays, including Antony and Cleopatra, Pericles, and Twelfth Night. More importantly, they continued, a struggle for control of the ship's wheel could concretize the struggle for artistic mastery that animates the scene. Throughout this swashbuckling production, Peter Quince, the joiner who should direct the thespian crew, and Bottom the weaver, whose ambition trumps Quince at every turn, thrust one another from the wheel, spinning it with wild abandon, while their cohorts scrambled above and below the decks, producing from portholes and rigging a lantern, thornbush, and other key props.
A Midsummer Night's Dream often inspires unexpected sets. One year, on a snowy December night, a group staged Bottom's transformation into an ass-headed monster in the University Cemetery; their goal was to emphasize the terror in Quince's words: "Oh, monstrous! Oh, strange! We are haunted." Last fall, another group performed the final scene from Dream involving the rude mechanicals: the complete play-within-the-play. They staged this scene in a re-creation of the theatre set used in the self-parodying television show Mystery Science Theatre 3000. In this show, three characters that have been taken hostage are forced to watch cheaply made science fiction films; "to ease the anguish of [their] torturing hour," the hostages offer a running commentary on the films' most extraordinary flaws. In A Midsummer Night's Theatre 3000, Shakespeare's aristocratic Athenians similarly responded to the film screened before their unbelieving eyes. This grainy video featured any number of shots that should have been edited out. As Pyramus and Thisbe meet at "Ninny's tomb" (a cardboard tablet propped against one of the University Cemetery's walls), cars pass through the scene; actors who should have been off-stage appear at the edge of the frame; a poorly sized costume is adjusted by a hand that suddenly appears out of nowhere, canceling verisimilitude altogether. The video exposed the mechanicals' complete ineptitude. Together, though, the video and the on-stage audience's commentary affirmed that even the most rudimentary theatrical offering can anticipate and forge a connection with its audience; in a feat of perfect timing, the mechanicals addressed their critics directly from the film.
Several performances from A Midsummer Night's Dream have persuaded me that the play yields more than "the silliest stuff that ever I heard." In December 2002, students staged the scene in which Titania's fairies sing their mistress to sleep in the candlelit interior of All Saints' Chapel. Meeting the audience at the narthex, the director, one of several members of the University Choir, led us to the front of the nave, which remained decorated with the greens of Lessons and Carols. A circle of votive candles defined Titania's bower. There, the Fairy Queen, in soaring soprano voice, commanded her retinue to sing; there, her fairy attendants circled slowly about her, banishing all creatures that might disturb their mistress with a spell unfolded in Gregorian chant. The experience was as moving as any I have had in the theatre.
Two scenes staged from Hamlet this spring similarly impressed me with their near-professional quality: Ophelia's mad scene, set on the precipitous brow at Piney Point, and the gravediggers' scene, set in Guerry Garth. Each of these venues afforded their players a natural theatre. At Piney Point, a rock platform situated at the brink of a 100-foot drop to the forest floor confronted actors and audience alike with what director William Weber called "the apt proximity of doom." In Guerry Garth, the stone portico practically elevated a meditative Hamlet above the gravediggers' irreverent words and labors. Each of these scenes was enormously ambitious. The student playing Ophelia researched and performed those Jacobean melodies that might endow Ophelia's songs with poignancy. The gravediggers mastered Cockney accents in order to signal their low social status; in their performance, modern adaptation guaranteed an engaging vigor. Each scene, true to the complexities of Shakespeare's full text, explored the connections between "mirth" and "funeral"; each gestured to the play's tragic close.
The most compelling achievement of each group of players staging Hamlet derived from their symbolic use of space. At the opening of the gravediggers' scene, Hamlet speaks from a position (and in a language) of abstracted elevation, while the clowns below casually unearth skulls. By the scene's end, however, Hamlet is sitting at the edge of the stage, extending himself into the grave into which he unceremoniously tosses Yorick's skull. The scene at Piney Point also concluded with a symbolic descent. Using a two-foot wide crevice in the sandstone outcropping that formed their stage, these players orchestrated a number of surprising entrances and exits. The messenger who reports the rabble's clamor that Laertes shall be king leaps onstage out of the crevice, in which he had been fully obscured, and Laertes follows the messenger in a second "hugger-mugger" rush. Ophelia steps into the crevice, which seems to swallow her alive as she speaks her final lines: "God ha' mercy on his soul! / And of all Christian souls, I pray God. God b' wi' you." Following Ophelia, Gertrude also strides into the void. By the scene's conclusion, according to the director's purposeful work, every character who will die later in the play has made his or her final exit by descending into the cleft that Laertes, with ominous gesture, identifies as "the profoundest pit."
I am convinced that my students scrutinize the details of Shakespeare's texts more intentionally in this theatrical assignment than they could in a fully traditional final examination. It is impossible to stage a scene with any modicum of success without understanding its tenor and rhetoric. To acquire this understanding students must talk together, outside of class, about every detail in the text. Expectations regarding the scenes' integrity and credibility run high, as do expectations regarding the word-perfect pronunciation of each line. Over the years, a spirit of healthy competition has emerged among the several groups within a class and even between different classes in the college. Some students have told me that the greatest tribute to a scene in which they have taken part is not the comment penned in ink or offered in words immediately after the performance. It is a later report, aired at Stirling’s or in night study, that I have recalled and discussed their performance in a subsequent semester. Recently, I have asked several former players to preside over such discussions themselves.
Near the close of The Tempest, Prospero speaks in deeply elegiac terms about the ways in which theatre is a fleeting experience, an "insubstantial pageant faded, / [that] leave[s] not a rack behind." Prospero's words haunt my imagination. Yet my students' performances would seem to qualify these words’ authority. Year after year, long after their revels have ended, my students' performances live on. Entering All Saints' Chapel, wandering Abbo's Alley, or hiking to Piney Point, I discover that my students' scenes glimmer back into view. Close to 100 performances have turned Sewanee into a Shakespearean memory theatre, a place whose sites prompt me to recall, and reinterpret, whole speeches — from fairies' spells and witches' incantations to lovers' laments and gravediggers' jests. Certain places on the campus and in the green-world embracing it are saturated with memories of my students' translations of Shakespeare. Shakespeare's works are in turn similarly saturated, and for this I am deeply grateful.
Pamela Royston Macfie, Samuel R. Williamson Distinguished University Professor, has taught courses in Shakespeare and the Renaissance in the English department since 1984.
