Why We “Mess” with Shakespeare

Preparing a Shakespeare script for production is more complicated than people might think. True, one could walk into a bookstore, select a copy of the play, head to the theatre and begin rehearsals. However, many theatres choose a far more complex but insightful process in crafting a performance version of a Shakespeare play. Some directors and dramaturgs consider various editions of a play and ultimately mix and match these versions to create the script for their production. In some ways, this may seem sacrilegious. Why mess with a genius writer’s work? Yet, this practice predates contemporary Shakespearean performance.

There is a distinct history of “messing” with Shakespeare’s text for the purposes of performance (or publication). As Lauren Gunderson’s The Book of Will dramatizes later in the season, after their friend and colleague William Shakespeare died, John Heminges and Henry Condell sorted through “foul papers” (or rough drafts), manuscripts with annotations and Quartos (published versions of plays as performed during Shakespeare’s lifetime) to assemble together all of his plays into one book. This first published collection became known as the First Folio.

Over the years, numerous artists have taken it upon themselves to “fix” Shakespeare’s plays when they deemed it necessary for their productions. One of the most notorious was Nahum Tate’s The History of King Lear in 1681, which omitted characters such as the Fool and added a romance between Cordelia and Edgar.

At the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare’s plays aren’t “fixed,” but dramaturgs work with a director and/or with each other to create the scripts performed onstage. The goal is to create the clearest text so that the base is there to create a clear performance. Often that means cutting lines or using different texts. Numerous factors are taken into account when preparing a script for performance at OSF. I was the dramaturg on the 2014 production of The Comedy of Errors, which was set in the Harlem Renaissance. Director Kent Gash and I contemplated choices such as how long the performance should run, which places might need to be reimagined because of the directorial concept, the artistic team’s individual preferences for certain versions of the play (such as the Folio and edited Shakespeare collections like the Arden and the Cambridge) and the antiquated jokes and colloquialisms in order to assemble that production’s script.

For this season’s production of Henry V, production dramaturgs Amrita Ramanan and Alan Armstrong discussed equally complex production ideas to create the performance text. Ramanan and Armstrong shared some of that process in an interview.

Martine Green-Rogers: What was the process for putting together the script for Henry V?

Alan Armstrong: Our script is basically a cut version of the Folio-based Arden Shakespeare (Third Series) Henry V. The driving force in shaping our script was the vision of director Rosa Joshi, who completed a first pass through the Arden text in May 2017, just before her first meeting with Amrita and me, in June. Rosa’s trimming of the Arden text created a fast, muscular version of the Henry V story. One of our jobs as dramaturgs throughout the rehearsal process has been to make sure that we haven’t removed anything needed to tell the story clearly. 

Amrita Ramanan: To add to that, our director said that our goal is to marry Shakespeare with the 21st century—she has such a lovely reverence for Shakespeare and understands the relevance of Shakespeare now. I don’t know if our readership knows this, but one of the beautiful things about OSF is the workshop process that some of our texts go through prior to the first rehearsal. We took that script we created during the summer to a workshop with all of the actors in September to hear them wrestle with that text and give us feedback. Then we continued to cut the script. In that way, we feel that the process we embraced modeled Shakespeare’s in that we made a script in response to the way the actors embodied the language.

MGR: What were the advantages and disadvantages of the versions you consulted to come up with the final version?

AA: Fundamentally, the version of Henry V we’re using is the Folio text. (In the course of script-cutting, background research, annotating/glossing the script, we consulted—as always—the many distinct scholarly and performance editions of the play—New Cambridge, Oxford, Riverside, Folger, Pelican, RSC, Penguin, etc.) Nearly all scholarly editions of the play use the 1623 Folio for their control text, so Quarto/Folio differences didn’t fundamentally enter into our process at the front end. The Quarto version printed in 1600 appears to be a transcript of the play, possibly adapted for performance, made partly from memory by actors. If Rosa had elected to put on the Quarto version at OSF in 2018, audiences would not see or hear any of the six speeches by the Chorus, Henry’s “Once more unto the breach” speech at Harfleur, or the French camp scene before Agincourt. None of these are in the Quarto. 

MGR: How do you think the version you came up with helps with narrative and storytelling in performance? 

AR: Our director wanted to keep a spirit of urgency within the text. I think the lean but meaty cut that we created responds to this. She desired a text that emphasized the cost of war—especially in connection to the Battle of Agincourt. She also wanted us to keep in mind questions such as “which characters are the main driving force of this play?” but then also think about the treatment of the Chorus and support how they evoke the story, support the imagination of the play and both create and disrupt the scene while connecting to the audience.

AA: It was helpful for us to think about the two different, original ways of telling Shakespeare’s story of Henry the Fifth, represented by the Quarto and Folio. Rosa, cutting the script for our cast of 12, had to think about efficiently covering a much larger number of roles—mostly by doubling them, but we did cut the Irish captain Jamy, as the Quarto does. 

In the Oxford Shakespeare series, Gary Taylor’s Henry V—the most notable Quarto-influenced edition of the play—adopts some of the Quarto features that Rosa thought about but ultimately rejected. Historically, the French Dauphin was not present at the Battle of Agincourt, and the Quarto respects that history by replacing the Folio’s Dauphin with another French lord, Bourbon, in the scenes leading to the battle at Agincourt. But we thought the Folio told the stronger story, of the boastful Dauphin getting his due humiliation at Agincourt for having insulted Henry earlier with his gift of tennis balls.

Later, in the workshop and rehearsal stages of our process, some variant Quarto readings have turned out to be useful. For example, one day in rehearsal, after Dan Molina, who plays Henry, was wrestling with these cumbersome Folio lines:

You know how apt our love was to accord
To furnish him with all appertinents
Belonging to his honour . . .

Amrita and I checked to see if the Quarto was any less clumsy and found this much clearer version, which (after getting Rosa’s and Dan’s approval) we’ve substituted:

You know how apt we were to grace him in all things
Belonging to his honour . . .

Text work never stops. We do find places where our cuts have made it harder for our audience to follow the story; we just put back a Henry line at the top of Act One, Scene 2 that names the character who will enter shortly, so that audiences know they’re seeing the Archbishop of Canterbury, who isn’t otherwise addressed by name. It’s easy to miss those things because we’re always seeing the speech prefixes on the script page—but the audience doesn’t.

And our smart, expert actors are always working on our script, too. Dan Molina has been making intelligent suggestions for additional cuts and line restorations to highlight the character he’s shaping. And early on in rehearsal, Michele Mais, who plays Hostess Quickly, asked to get back a couple of slightly bawdy lines that conclude her description of Falstaff’s dead body in Act Two: “and so upward and upward, and all was as cold as any stone.” She was right—Hostess Quickly knows best—and now you’ll hear her say those words in our play.

Henry V, which completes the journey of Prince Hal that started last season with Henry IV, Parts One and Two and features many of the same cast members, plays in the Thomas Theatre through October 27. Tickets and information available at www.osfashland.org