A Shakespeare Lecture

I attended an interesting lecture the other night sponsored by the Philadelphia Shakespeare Theater called What Shakespeare Watched. It was an excellent exploration of the theater and the dramatic forms active before Shakespeare began his epic career. It is almost certain that the plays performed during this era (essentially several centuries leading up to the 1590’s) would have informed and shaped Shakespeare’s works. Of course, as we have seen before, we have no direct evidence that Shakespeare saw these plays, or any plays for that matter, but it seems logical, especially when you see how elements from these plays found their way into the plays of the Bard.

The lecture proved out that there is nothing new under the sun in that our favorite Bard most certainly absorbed and used, sometimes in entirety, the ideas of many of those that came before him. The genius of it, of course, is that he absorbed it and then extended it into something cool, different, and exciting (so I guess I should say there’s nothing entirely new under the sun). He took the ball and ran with it, so to speak, but that ball had to be there to take. That pretty much captures what the talk was about.

The entertaining and highly-informed lecturer (so important, by the way, this entertaining and informed duality in the sometimes stodgy and exclusive academic space that can be Shakespeare) started out with a survey of the drama in the centuries prior to Shakespeare’s day. There were three main types of plays during this period: Religious, Folk, and something known as “Interludes” (see below).

The religious plays are typically subdivided into three groups: Mystery plays (dramatic episodes from the Bible), Miracle plays (more Bible stuff, mainly episodes from the lives of the Saints), and Morality plays (where allegory was used to teach a lesson, such as the medieval Everyman play, as a familiar example). The folk plays are the second main type. These were more dancing celebrations than dramas (the lecturer likened them to modern day “flash mobs” or, even better for her Philadelphia audience, the Mummers) and were informal, improvised things where the action was the main focus, at the expense of plot or character development.

Finally, there were Interludes, the most interesting category (in my humblest of opinions), in that in these we start to see something approaching modern drama. Performed at court and in aristocratic houses, these were “interludes” performed in between courses of a long meal (hence the name). They focused on entertainment using many of the same devices and constructs seen in later drama, for example, scenes based on mistaken identity, lots of sexual innuendo, and a devilish character known as the “Vice” that causes heaps of trouble and mayhem (though often in a non-threatening, comic way).

So, you can see the variety in place, the diversity, an active and vibrant culture of theater, all within view of Shakespeare’s most inquisitive eye. Watching all these different plays must have added greatly to the deep, fomenting caldron of Shakespeare’s developing creative genius. This cauldron was set to boil over in the coming years of course, with drama markedly different and intense, yet still based on and harkening back to, in a very real way, these dramatic seeds planted and cultivated in earlier years.

The lecturer described all this and then, in a great show-don’t-tell way (it’s always better that way, right?), scenes from some of these protean plays were presented live, using real live actors, enabling us to see, first hand, specific scenes from specific plays that may have shaped Shakespeare’s artistic mind. My favorite example was the play Gallathea, by John Lyly, a play containing many obvious and typical Shakespearean hallmarks. For example, Gallathea includes themes of the forest retreat (see As You Like It), gender ambiguity (see Twelfth Night), and magic as a matter of course (see A Midsummer Night’s Dream). This is all familiar stuff in the Shakespeare universe.

You have to love the ending to Gallathea too (spoiler alert), an ending that has the god Neptune fixing the “problem” of two women in love by giving one of them a sex change, right there, on the spot, using his god magic. Man/woman, problem solved. As you may imagine, much confusion ensues from this, which is the point I guess. It’s a kind of funny scene (especially when the parents of the newly-minted son start complaining about the lost inheritance of the now not-so-oldest son in the family) but, for Shakespeare, this type of contrivance would be a definite nonstarter. Instead, through the best sort of poetry, he might first disguise theses characters in a cross-gender way, and then switch them back (but only for one character perhaps), and then switch them back again, after having them all fall in love. Standard Bard moves. More layers, more art.