It has long been convention for those directing Shakespeare productions to selectively remove ostensibly extraneous passages (or entire speeches) in the interest of getting audiences out of the theatre or multiplex in under two and a half hours.
This custom strikes me as absurd. What right do we have to edit the greatest writer ever, especially when we base our opinions on biased scholarship or personal whim? We wouldn’t dare edit out the “boring bits” in Beckett, or decide that certain speeches in Chekhov aren’t really that crucial to the plot. So why do we excise from Shakespeare with impunity?
A sloppy edit of a Shakespeare play is an insult to his craft-it’s basically saying that ol’ Billy just tossed in a hodgepodge of quotables for future audiences to pick and choose from. Productions of these “shopping-cart Hamlets,” having been worked over by overzealous editors, disrespect the meticulously constructed piece of art that is a Shakespeare play. Yes, there are debates over Folio vs. Quarto editions and who made what revision when and under whose authority, but cuts in modern scripts often go far beyond changing “the” to “a” or quibbling over scene numbers.
Take for example the acclaimed production of Hamlet staged earlier this year at Hart House, which chose to honour the original in setting and style, and was by and large a very solid work of theatre. Yet among other revisions, director Andrea Wasserman inexplicably chose to remove a key speech by Horatio at the very end of the play (“So shall you hear of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts…”), a speech that subtly undercuts the sense of moral relief we feel after the death of the evil king and the restoration of order in the kingdom. To cut a speech so crucial to the play’s central meaning just because the audience might get antsy during the drawn-out second half does a disservice to Shakespeare and to those who have thoughtfully studied his canon.
Since the time of King James, Shakespeare’s plays (and Marlowe’s, and Jonson’s) have undergone selective revision by various directors, and I’m not suggesting that the texts should be treated as sacrosanct in every performance. Plainspoken adaptations for young audiences can be wonderfully successful and inspire a life-long love of the material. And of course the text will change if the play (or movie) is set in outer space or the old West.
But our theatre culture has hopefully matured beyond the mindset of 17th century revisionists like Nahum Tate, who felt that King Lear would have been a much better play had everyone lived at the end, and subsequently re-wrote it that way. If one’s aim is to perform a stage version of Shakespeare that remains true to the setting, costume, and characterization of the original (making it look and feel as though ol’ Bill himself could hop on stage and act in it), then the text also must be left alone.
We owe it to Shakespeare to perform his plays in their entirety, no matter how long. King Lear is not The Wedding Planner-there is no fluff that can be cut for commercial breaks without being missed later. That kind of cavalier editing must be stopped by respectable theatre companies. Otherwise, we run the risk of new audiences only ever getting to know “Shakespeare lite”-scaled-down versions of the plays that might work on TV, but fail as organic works of drama.
