. . . . . . .
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.

(Prologue 1.8-14,23)

Second, here are a few sentences (which may or may not represent Shakespeare’s own views) from Hamlet’s longish lecture to the players:

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trip pingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines.... O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings.... And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them, for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary question of the play be then to be considered. That’s villainous and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it. (3.2.1—47)

Finally, we can quote again from the passage cited earlier in this introduction, concerning the boy actors who played the female roles. Cleopatra imagines with horror a theatrical version of her activities with Antony:

The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels: Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I’ th’ posture of a whore.

(5.2.216-21)

It is impossible to know how much weight to put on such - passages—perhaps Shakespeare was just being modest about his theater’s abilities—but it is easy enough to think that he was unhappy with some aspects of Elizabethan production. Probably no production can fully satisfy a playwright, and for that matter, few productions can fully satisfy us; we regret this or that cut, this or that way of costuming the play, this or that bit of business.

One’s first thought may be this: Why don’t they just do “authentic” Shakespeare, “straight” Shakespeare, the play as Shakespeare wrote it? But as we read the plays—words written to be performed—it sometimes becomes clear that we do not know how to perform them. For instance, in Antony and Cleopatra Antony, the Roman general who has succumbed to Cleopatra and to Egyptian ways, says, “The nobleness of life / Is to do thus” (1.1.36-37). But what is “thus”? Does Antony at this point embrace Cleopatra? Does he embrace and kiss her? (There are, by the way, very few scenes of kissing on Shakespeare’s stage, possibly because boys played the female roles.) Or does he make a sweeping gesture, indicating the Egyptian way of life?

This is not an isolated example; the plays are filled with lines that call for gestures, but we are not sure what the gestures should be. Interpretation is inevitable. Consider a passage in Hamlet. In 3.1, Polonius persuades his daughter, Ophelia, to talk to Hamlet while Polonius and Claudius eavesdrop. The two men conceal themselves, and Hamlet encounters Ophelia. At 3.1.131 Hamlet suddenly says to her, “Where’s your father?” Why does Hamlet, apparently out of nowhere—they have not been talking about Polonius—ask this question? Is this an example of the “antic disposition” (fantastic behavior) that Hamlet earlier (1.5.172) had told Horatio and others—including us—he would display? That is, is the question about the whereabouts of her father a seemingly irrational one, like his earlier question (3.1.103) to Ophelia, “Ha, ha! Are you honest?” Or, on the other hand, has Hamlet (as in many productions) suddenly glimpsed Polonius’s foot protruding from beneath a drapery at the rear? That is, does Hamlet ask the question because he has suddenly seen something suspicious and now is testing Ophelia? (By the way, in productions that do give Hamlet a physical cue, it is almost always Polonius rather than Claudius who provides the clue. This itself is an act of interpretation on the part of the director.) Or (a third possibility) does Hamlet get a clue from Ophelia, who inadvertently betrays the spies by nervously glancing at their place of hiding? This is the interpretation used in the BBC television version, where Ophelia glances in fear toward the hiding place just after Hamlet says “Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?” (121-22). Hamlet, realizing that he is being observed, glances here and there before he asks “Where’s your father?” The question thus is a climax to what he has been doing while speaking the preceding lines. Or (a fourth interpretation) does Hamlet suddenly, without the aid of any clue whatsoever, intuitively (insightfully, mysteriously, wonderfully), sense that someone is spying? Directors must decide, of course—and so must readers.

Recall, too, the preceding discussion of the texts of the plays, which argued that the texts—though they seem to be before us in permanent black on white—are unstable. The Signet text of Hamlet, which draws on the Second Quarto (1604) and the First Folio (1623) is considerably longer than any version staged in Shakespeare’s time. Our version, even if spoken very briskly and played without any intermission, would take close to four hours, far beyond “the two hours’ traffic of our stage” mentioned in the Prologue to Romeo and Juliet. (There are a few contemporary references to the duration of a play, but none mentions more than three hours.) Of Shakespeare’s plays, only The Comedy of Errors, Macbeth, and The Tempest can be done in less than three hours without cutting. And even if we take a play that exists only in a short text, Macbeth, we cannot claim that we are experiencing the very play that Shakespeare conceived, partly because some of the Witches’ songs almost surely are non-Shakespearean additions, and partly because we are not willing to watch the play performed without an intermission and with boys in the female roles.

Further, as the earlier discussion of costumes mentioned, the plays apparently were given chiefly in contemporary, that is, in Elizabethan dress. If today we give them in the costumes that Shakespeare probably saw, the plays seem not contemporary but curiously dated. Yet if we use our own dress, we find lines of dialogue that are at odds with what we see; we may feel that the language, so clearly not our own, is inappropriate coming out of people in today’s dress.