Writing Privacy

I recently led a class on Shakespeare for Leicester University’s International Office to a class of exchange students – my first university teaching role for two years. The class was built around a combination I have discussed before, Shakespeare in Love, and the 2009 Hamlet (feat. David Tennant), which gave me an opportunity to reignite my flame for film, play and performance respectively.

Shakespeare’s London

For a group of international visitors romanced by fashion and retail in today’s metropolis, the opening of Shakespeare in Love sets a gripping picture of Elizabethan London: debts, torture, the plague (and its impact on theatre), illiteracy, cobbled streets, chamber-pots, preachers…

Being factually perfect is not important. It needs to be convincing and visually memorable, and that’s what the film delivers well. Humour helps, of course. It starts with a theatre manager’s boots in the fire for his debts.

Fennyman: “Where will you find… sixteen pounds, five shillings and ninepence… including interest, in three weeks?”
Henslowe: “I have a wonderful new play!”
Fennyman: “Put them back in”
Henslowe: “It’s a comedy!”
Fennyman: “Cut off his nose.”
Henslowe: “It’s a new comedy by William Shakespeare!”
Fennyman: “… and his ears”

It’s also well documented in the film that theatre was a powerful social occasion, where the presence of royalty itself became internal theatre. The first half of the class was an enjoyable spell of identifying differences in the capital of ‘1593’.

Hamlet

Tackling Hamlet in 45 minutes is thankless, not least for a group weak in English. But with the visitors off to watch a performance in Stratford-upon-Avon at the weekend, a snippet from each act might give them a start.

• Act I. The ghost’s declaration of murder to Hamlet, and his call for revenge.
• Act II. Polonius’ interference leads to a surveillance operation.
• Act III. Claudius confesses in prayer, and Hamlet cannot exact his revenge.
• Act IV. Claudius and attendants interrogate Hamlet about Polonius’ body.
• Act V. Hamlet and Laertes fight in Ophelia’s grave.

Gregory Doran’s 2009 cinematic interpretation is wonderfully clever, not least for the layers of private observation at play.

For example, in Act II, a CCTV camera zooms in on Hamlet as he is ‘tested’ for madness. The line ‘where is your father?’ delivered as Tennant investigates the device implies that Hamlet knows he is being watched. That, in turn, offers a good explanation as to why he becomes a trickster himself.

As a side-show of revenge, Hamlet, setting up a play for royal entertainment to ‘capture the conscience of the King’, secretly films Claudius with a hand-held camera, savouring the reaction of the guilty rogue.

It is an adaptation that works so well in a multi-visual culture.

The director of Shakespeare in Love, John Madden, spoke about his film having one foot in the 16th century, and one in the late 20th. This adaptation of Hamlet feels like it has a stronger foot in the 21st century than the one it casts back, and benefits enormously from it.

Leonardo Da Vinci commented in his Paragone that painting had superiority over writing because the visual – unlike language – was universally recognisable. This class was an attempt to bring to life something about Shakespeare that is inherently understandable.

In the Renaissance, the same stages hosted comedy and tragedy. There was a greater reliance on words to deliver the setting. Despite the opportunities that cinema can provide today, it all starts with the author’s world. That is why Shakespeare continues to mean something, even to those not proficient in English.

My enthusiasm abounded for charming and willing participants. We created groups with names that others had to hail with actions. They were collectively fans of Harry Potter. My gadgetry became magic. Everyone laughs.

I play the fool well; it just remains to be seen whether or not I emerge as one behind the costume.

But that a joy past joy calls out on me,
It were a grief so brief to part with thee.
Farewell.