By Jonathan Holmes
Merely Players? marks a groundbreaking departure in Shakespeare reviews by means of giving direct voice to the Shakespearean performer. It attracts on 3 centuries worthy of actors' written reflections on taking part in Shakespeare and brings jointly the twin worlds of functionality and academia, offering a different source for the scholar and theatre-lover alike.
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Additional info for Merely Players?: Actors' Accounts of Performing Shakespeare
Example text
Physical and verbal hints of Armin’s performances within the text are picked up on and psychologised by the actors, rather than seen as the vaguest of indications of a possible historical playing style. Hutchings also has in common with Tennant an interest in accents. Interestingly, both actors made the choice not to play the role in RP, but to revert to their native accents—Dorset and Aberdeen respectively. 51 This brings the characterisation closer to the ‘personality role’ that most actors identify the fool as belonging to, but it also raises the issue of class, as accents on the traditional Shakespearan stage almost always carry connotations of lower-class status and/or humour, often limiting casting choices.
This Jew is fascinating because of his exoticism and because of his displacement to the appropriately othered location of Tunis. Over a century later, Antony Sher played a Shylock remarkably similar to the Jew of Irving’s ‘picturesque’ encounter. A Levantine, dressed in the garb of a Turkish peddler, his accent was thick, toying with caricature. 141 Consequently his Shylock evoked not just Jews but other ‘semitic peoples: Arabs, Palestinians, Iranians’, with deliberate overtones of clichés of Middle Eastern terrorism.
Working from an admittedly disadvantageous start—he describes his initial view of the Friar as ‘a bumbling, boring old twerp who gets it all wrong and screws up everybody’s lives’41—he eventually comes to believe, echoing Ralph Bashford, that the play should be renamed ‘The tragedy of the Good Brother’. Instrumental in this fittingly Damascene conversion is Glover’s recourse to the authority of the Word, of which he remarks that, when in doubt, ‘with Shakespeare I go to the First Folio. ’42 What is interesting here is that, despite apparently dismissing the Folio’s definitive status, Glover still retains a theological frame for his remarks, a tendency reinforced by his confessed reliance on advice from Patrick Tucker of the Original Shakespeare Company.