If you were to ask the question of Shakespeare’s plays do they tell us about what really happened in England, or Venice, or Rome, or wherever they’re situated, you’d probably respond no, they’re not designed to do that. As someone once said: ‘Shakespeare’s plays we’ve found are about us, not what really happened – we don’t go to them for that.’ It puts me in mind of something that’s spoken about elsewhere on the website about the four gospels and myth: ‘myth asks the question “what does it mean for us?” Rather than only ever ask, “what really happened back then?”’ Perhaps that’s why we might speak of a mythic dimension in both the gospels and in Shakespeare’s plays – they’re about us!
Something of the way in which Shakespeare’s plays get to be about us is alluded to in Jonathan Bate’s book The Genius of Shakespeare. Bate takes seriously the words from a W.H. Auden poem – which he quotes – about how poetry works its magic: ‘The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.’ He goes on to say: ‘What I mean by Shakespeare is not just a life that lasted from 1564 to 1616, but a body of words and stage images which live because they were originally Shakespeare’s modifications of the words and stage images of his predecessors and because they have subsequently been modified again and again in the guts of successive generations of the living.’ The phrase, ‘a body of words and stage images’ and talk of being modified in the guts is a striking way of getting at what’s going on here; there’s some sort of embodiment that’s happening – the words and stage images are modified and, to take it a step further, we’re modified in the process: transformation is at the heart of it. You saw this sort of gutsy modification, this body of words and stage images being re-created, variously and wonderfully, in the 2012 Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre ‘Globe to Globe’celebration of Shakespeare from round the world: 37 plays were performed by 37 different companies in 32 different languages. That’s a lot of modification in the guts of the living.
It’s this sort of modification in the guts that re-creates, in performance, the body of words and stage images that is the text and in doing so it may even create a temporary community which could be understood, metaphorically, as a body. Though perhaps any talk of a body being re-created – as in the liturgical drama of ancient Athens and the English Mystery Plays – is better put aside and we simply have to accept that what theatre might do in the 21st century is offer us insights, or images for individual consumption. This is a little different from the 4 Mysteries sense of things, where ‘body is a source of meaning … a generative image … not simply a metaphor’, but, ironically, the project is based in a recognition that theatre may be able to show us what this body looks like. And, as we say elsewhere about performing the gospels, it’s not that there’s an existing body which is simply modified, but that it’s re-created in performance. It’s a reminder that perhaps the process of performing Shakespeare is even more dynamic than Bate suggests.
Talk of a body of words and stage images being modified in the guts of the living – and even of a body being re-created in the process – is a reminder that this process is rather like eating and that if you were to ask me how do we begin to re-create such a body and find ourselves in it, I would say by eating. That may seem a little strange, or too basic perhaps, but, as Peter Schumann the founder of The Bread and Puppet Theater once said: ‘for a long time theatre has been separated from the stomach.’ (Where this is the case we may say that it’s disembodied – quite literally gutless.)
In one way or another it seems theatre is a place of feeding and being fed – a feeding without food suggested one writer – where hunger is a pre-requisite and eating is the way in. David Cole in his 1992 book Acting as Reading spoke of eating as being at the root of theatre – a theatre he describes at one point as, ‘recovering the lost physical of reading as eating.’ (In great depth the book ‘seeks to map the relation between three activities: acting, which recovers eating as the “lost” physical of reading’.) I like to think that Schumann’s insistence on there being bread to eat at his performances – as a reminder he went on to say, ‘of the sacrament of eating’- gets at something of what’s happening in Shakespeare. Somehow or other his plays allow for more ‘modification in the guts’ than many another writer, ensuring that where this sort of gutsy transformation occurs – of words, stage images and us – some sort of body is re-created and this is central to his work. Indeed, according to Erik Ehn, it’s central to the work of the theatre: ‘theatre is about our being together and seeing how we can give of ourselves.’ Like myth and sacrament it’s communal to the core.
Elsewhere on the site we use the word myth to speak of this sort of re-creation. When we speak of the gospels as creation myths it’s a way of suggesting how we become part of him; a way of getting at how Jesus is transformed into us, resulting in the creation of what we call a ‘he/we’. Myth is a way of describing the creation of this ‘he/we’, the body that is central to the 4 Mysteries Project. Clearly the body being spoken of here is a little different to Shakespeare’s transformed body of words and stage images, but, I like to think, for all the differences the process of transformation is analogous.
To explore this a little further: the talk of bodies, guts, eating, transformation – myth too – brings to mind the phrase ‘sacramental theatricality’, used by one writer to speak of Sarah Beckwith’s writing about the medieval Mystery plays and Shakespeare. Again, I like to think something like this is alluded to in the words of Bate and Schumann and that such a phrase is another way of speaking of the re-creation of a body: another way of speaking of the mythic dimension in both Shakespeare and in Schumann’s work. And I wonder whether this phrase with its roots in the Mystery plays, but re-appearing transformed – modified in the guts – in Shakespeare’s work, is better able to articulate this re-creation than say a Harold Bloom with his talk of a secular scripture and Shakespeare inventing us, or Ted Hughes proposing that Shakespeare had created a myth of his own, or Stephen Greenblatt suggesting we’re assigned the task of keeping alive the life stories of Shakespeare’s characters, interesting as each of them is.
Of course this sort of talk may run counter to our sense that Shakespeare is, thankfully, a no-go zone religiously. Whatever about the more recent work of scholars on sacramental poetics and performance in Shakespeare et al, a lot of us tend to agree that the word sacrament like the word religion is too confining and we’re grateful that the Elizabethan playwrights had to keep them off stage in order that we might think of Shakespeare as the opposite of what they seem to imply. Perhaps this is why we have Bloom’s book Shakespeare: The Invention of Us, and why, when we speak of Shakespeare and myth, it’s a way of suggesting his work might be seen as a living alternative – ‘a real myth of the culture himself’ -to those other myths of transformation enacted in sacrament and religion (let alone in theatre!)
However, as Peter Schumann reminds us, talk of sacrament and the sacramental is not just religious speak. In the mid 20th century the poet and artist David Jones broadened out the discussion a little by suggesting that, ‘the nature of man demands the sacramental. If he’s denied the deep and real, he’ll fall for the trivial, even the ersatz.’ While in 2007 the art critic Robert Nelson published a book entitled, The Spirit of Secular Art: A History of the Sacramental Roots of Contemporary Artistic Values. Jones was a Catholic, Nelson is not a ‘believer’, but both are agreed that, like eating, this is human stuff we’re talking about. It’s for this reason that, to take it a little further, another writer can speak of sacraments as, ‘the revelation of the humanity of God.’ Not so much an object as an action, indeed symbolizing actions, so that, ‘symbolising activity is about weaving and re-weaving human relationships’ and the symbolic becomes ‘the milieu in which the “real” happens for us’- which is what you get in the Mystery plays, and, modified in the guts of the living, in the plays of Shakespeare. At which point, across the body of his work, we may begin to speak of a mythic Shakespeare, but differently to so much other talk around Shakespeare and myth, because here the mythic emerges from and has its origins in a body of words and stage images modified in the guts of the living: it describes this process of transformation, this re-creation of a body, which embodied on a stage is the myth of Shakespeare at work; and it’s what the phrase ‘sacramental theatricality’ is getting at. It’s another way of speaking of this event. It becomes clearer I think that what lies at the heart of any sacramental vision of the world – transformation of us and the world – lies at the heart of Shakespeare’s work, as it does with myth. The 4 Mysteries Project is looking to find a theatrical language that enables us to speak of this.
Again, elsewhere on the website we say the mythic refers to the fact that Jesus’ life doesn’t end with his death, instead it ends with us – and the gospels tell of this happening, this re-creation of a body that is ongoing. So too, in Shakespeare’s plays, the mythic refers to the fact that his life doesn’t end with his death, but, differently and in interesting ways, it ends with us – and performances of the plays seek to tell of this re-creation of ‘a body of words and stage images’ happening ‘again and again in the guts of successive generations of the living.’ It’s why a Bread and Puppet performer once said of the stories of Jesus they performed each year, that, ‘ … everybody is in the stories.’ And why another writer concluded a review of Julie Taymor’s 2013 production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream in this way: ‘This is theater by everyone, for everyone.’ The modifying in the guts goes on, and where it does, we’re fed – but only if we have a stomach for it.