Shakespearean Communities: An Interview with Peter Holland

Hello and welcome to the fifth

installment of the University of

Pittsburgh Humanities podcast, a

series devoted to exploring the

humanities, their intersections with

other disciplines, and their value

in the public world.

I'm Dan Kubis, assistant director of

the Humanities Center at Pitt.

My guest today is Peter Holland, the

McMeel Family Chair in Shakespeare

Studies at the University of Notre

Dame.

I see one of my responsibilities

as an educator within the university

and a humanities educator within the

university of giving people a

kind of habit and

a need.

I need to go

to theater regularly.

I need to watch movies regularly.

I need, beyond my own areas

of direct interest, to go to art

galleries regularly and to listen

to symphony orchestras regularly.

And without that, I get a kind of

withdrawal symptom in which

I need the experience of blowing

my mind through encountering

that kind of art experience

somewhere somehow.

Professor Holland is one of the

leading critics of Shakespeare and

Performance and is published on

Shakespeare in a wide variety of

formats, including scholarly

journals, books, dictionary

entries, and theater programs.

He's also edited several of

Shakespeare's plays in print and

online and was recently named one

of the general editors of the Arden

Shakespeare, widely regarded as the

most prestigious critical edition of

Shakespeare's works. In

his decades of writing about

Shakespeare and the theater,

Professor Holland has been rightly

praised for bringing an open mind to

performances and attempting to

appreciate them on their own terms,

no matter how big or small, where

they're performed, or how well-known

the actors are.

He takes a similar approach to the

way that Shakespeare circulates in

global culture and to new and

creative appropriations of

Shakespeare's plays.

In his visit to Bibb, he delivered a

lecture on recent books like The Two

Gentlemen of Lebowski and William

Shakespeare's Star Wars,

in which fans of the two films have

rewritten them in Shakespearean

language, complete with references

to Shakespeare's plays. In

all of his work, readers gain an

appreciation for how much fun

Shakespeare in the theater can be, a

lesson that Professor Holland

learned while going to the theater

with his parents as a child.

I began by asking him about these

early experiences and whether

Shakespeare stood out for him as

something special when he was young.

Yes, I think the two things go

together for

many people, particularly in the US.

Shakespeare may be the only live

theater they see, and their

experience of Shakespeare is of

something rather grand and high

cultural and probably rather

difficult.

And what the heck am I going to make

of this strange language that nobody

surely ever spoke?

And if they did, perhaps not for

a thousand years or something.

But for me, I was watching

Shakespeare. I was watching brand

new plays at the Royal Court Theater

in London.

I was going to experimental things.

Whatever my parents wanted to go to,

we went to.

And so I didn't think that there was

something different and special

about going to Shakespeare, except

it usually wasn't in London and

involved just a drive to

Stratford-upon-Avon and the picnic

on the way, which was, of course,

fun.

And this was long before I started

reading Shakespeare.

So it was watching before reading.

And not just because I was young,

but because I wasn't really

interested in reading.

I started reading Shakespeare in

school. That's where everybody

started reading.

But I started also at home listening

to Shakespeare.

One of the few LPs we had - remember

LPs? You know what we called them

before we called them vinyl - was

of Laurence Olivier doing speeches

from Hamlet and Henry V.

What infinite heart's ease must

kings neglect, that private men

and joy.

And I played them and played them

and played them.

And what have kings, that private's

have not too, save ceremony?

And what art thou, thou idle

ceremony, that suffer'st more of

mortal griefs than do thy

worshippers?

And I can still do large chunks of

Henry V in Olivier's voice.

And if I have a drink too

many at parties, I have been known

to do so.

And I also used to watch

the Olivier Shakespeare films, which

would show once a year at a

movie theater in the middle of

London. And I would go up on the bus

and catch Richard III and Hamlet and

Henry V. And I loved them

until it was about an excitement

and a pleasure in it all.

One of the things I feel very

strongly about is that we usually

start children on Shakespeare

too late.

My daughter went to her first

Shakespeare production when she was

about three and a half.

It was Midsummer Night's Dream,

a professional company visiting

Cambridge, and she knew the

actor who played Theseus

in it.

And we acted out the story with

Lego figures before we went.

So she knew what the narrative was.

And at the very end of the play,

when Puck speaks the epilogue,

and he says, "Give me your hands, if

we be friends, and Robin shall

restore amends." She reached out.

She heard the words, "Give me your

hands." And so she reached out.

We went backstage afterwards

to see the company.

And I told the actor, and he said,

"If only I'd seen her." He'd jumped

down from the stage to take her

hand. I mean, what a gift to an

actor to have a small child.

But for her, she was

still listening.

And it's not because she's

extraordinarily bright, even though,

of course, as a parent, I think so.

It's because for her, there was no

strangeness in the language.

Now what we usually do is we tell

kids that Shakespeare is difficult,

and then we say, "You're going to

have to work hard to understand it."

Now, when you're small,

you live in a world in which a

lot of the language that adults

speak is incomprehensible to you.

What mom and dad say to each other

isn't stuff you really quite kind of

get. When you watch TV, you

get some of it. You don't get other

bits of it unless it's kid's TV.

So watching Shakespeare is no

odder than your normal experience.

There isn't this sense that you've

been told this is going to be

impossible, you know?

You wouldn't understand it, but

it's easy.

So my belief is

the earlier you start children

on the experience of Shakespeare and

of the fun of watching Shakespeare

and the fact that there will be bits

of it that they will find boring and

bits that they will find thrilling

that will stay with them forever.

That's when it becomes something

that's part of the fabric of your

life.

Yeah.

One of the things that was

interesting to me in

reading through your

work, your work as an academic, is

that it seemed to me that

when I look back, you didn't start

reading, writing on Shakespeare.

You started on restoration comedy.

And your first book, The Ornament of

Action, it seemed to me like

you may have been-- you can tell me

if this is a proper

reading of your motives for

the argument you make in that book.

It seemed like you were trying to

bring that awareness

of the importance of live theater

into academic discussion at that

time. So that you're saying the way

the plays live in the world

is through their performance.

It's one of the ways they live in

the world. I'm not suggesting for a

moment it's the only way they live

in the world, but

it is the world for which they were

designed.

So even given the strong

argument that Lukas Erne has

been making over the last few years,

that Shakespeare was what he calls a

literary dramatist, somebody who did

want his plays published, who was

writing to be read as

well. And I'm not quite convinced by

his argument, but there's no

question that the major source of

Shakespeare's income

was, of course, from the theater

company as a sharer in the company,

a profit share.

And he wrote plays that he wanted to

be profitable, so that he increased

his income.

It's not a kind of

let me starve in a [garish?], and my

art will be consumed in

generations to come.

It's how do we get

not just bums on seats but people

standing in the yard wanting

to see these plays?

And if that works, then there's

a reason to write them.

Now that seems to me to

be the only context

that makes primary sense for

understanding the motive for

writing.

And Shakespeare always wrote with

a particular company in mind.

Playwrights now, I mean, student

playwrights write plays that may

have two actors in them or

75 actors in them.

The 75 actor shows never quite get

on. The two actors shows might do.

Shakespeare knew the members of his

company, and he shaped

parts for them.

There's some brilliant work that was

done a few years ago by Scott

Macmillan, wonderful academic, died

far too young.

And what Scott explored was

the work of the boy actors.

Boys, of course, played the women

in Shakespeare's companies.

There were no professional actresses

in England at this time.

In spite of Shakespeare in Love,

there was no law against

women being on stage.

It just wasn't the practice.

So what

Scott explored in that work

was the way in which we can see how

there must have been particular boys

who became better and better, and

Shakespeare wrote more and more

adventurous roles for them.

And then perhaps they

grew too old, and boys played

women's roles up until their late

teens. We're not talking about

pre-teen children.

But then eventually migrated many of

them to adult roles and male roles.

And so,

we watched Shakespeare interacting

with a particular boy.

He's brilliant. I could do this,

and he'd be able to work with it.

Or the clown Will Kempe leaves

the company, and Shakespeare starts

to write a different kind of fool

role because Robert Armin, who joins

the company, is a different kind of

actor. Over and

over again, what you have is a

direct interaction between the

playwright and the process of

production.

Not, "I think I'll write a play, and

I wonder who will buy it."

I'm going to write this play for

these actors in this

theater, which is my theater,

the company of which I am a part.

That changes the whole way you

write.

And one kind of feeds on the other.

Entirely.

There's a lovely book,

a comic novel called No Bed for

Bacon by Caryl Brahms and S.J.

Simon, in which

the actors and the company keep

making suggestions to Shakespeare

about-- the clown comes up and says,

"I've got this idea for a routine.

I'll be a grave digger." And

Burbage, Richard Burbage, the great

actor of the company, says, "I want

to play a Great Dane." And

bit by bit, you realize that what

they're offering Shakespeare is

Hamlet.

That's not, of course, how it

happened.

But I like the idea that this is a

continual process of collaboration.

And one of the things that seems to

me absolutely central

to the experience of watching

theater and of making theater

and of writing for theater is

that it is unquestionably

collaborative as a process.

A historian may

write academic work

by exploring archives

and writing.

A theater artist makes

theater by working with other

people.

It is not a solo piece

of work.

This reminds me of you talking about

your interest in writing

Shakespeare's entry for the Oxford

Dictionary of National Biography,

which is that your excitement

about writing that came from how

much time you would get to spend

talking about Shakespeare's impact

historically, rather than writing

about focusing on just the years

of his life.

Absolutely. I mean, I have no

interest in being the author of

yet another book-length biography of

Shakespeare.

That's not to disparage the

wonderful work by people like Lois

Potter and Jim Shapiro and so on in

the last few years who have written

great Shakespeare biographies,

each of which has taught me much

that I wanted to know about

Shakespeare's life and contacts and

the worlds in which he lived.

But I'm much more interested

in impact, consequence,

reception, consumption,

whatever we want to use for that

whole process in which Shakespeare

endlessly gets remade.

One of the things my students often

do when they're writing about

Shakespeare is they want to talk

about Shakespeare as

a universal figure.

That's that's the adjective that

comes up again and again.

Universal.

And when I talk to them about it,

what they think it means

is that Shakespeare is a kind of

constant.

It's a bit like pi. Pi

is 3.14 or

3.1412 or 3.14159, and

then on until you've memorized

however many thousands of

consecutive digits people are

bothered with or computed trillions

now.

But the notion is this is still the

same thing. As if Shakespeare

is always everywhere the same.

I tell them as

firmly and politely as I can.

This is not true.

The great thing about Shakespeare

is, as Keats recognized,

that he's the chameleon.

He takes on different coloring

according to where the work is being

made, written

about, consumed, read, seen,

whatever it may be.

And in each place, we

make our own new Shakespeare.

That is the one that's appropriate

for us.

When I think of

a wonderful movie like Omkara,

made by Vishal

Bhardwaj, an Indian film director,

it's a spin-off of Othello.

It is unquestionably

an Indian film.

This is not a film that makes

sense in any other

socio-political cultural context.

We imagine

that somehow being

Anglophone Westerners

that the real Shakespeare

is the English or the American

Shakespeare. And indeed, most

American Shakespeare actors have a

giant chip on their shoulder about

their kind of inevitable

inferiority because they don't speak

and receive pronunciation.

But what we really have is

the most extraordinary opportunity

with Shakespeare endlessly to

rethink and remake and

make relevant to us

and to learn what is relevant

to there, then, where,

wherever it may be.

My students endlessly use a word I

really don't like.

Relatable.

Shakespeare is so relatable.

Relatable means it's about

me.

I try to explain to them

sometimes Shakespeare isn't about me

or you.

It's about another culture at

another time.

And that's what matters.

And the contact between

our current culture,

whoever's current culture, and

Shakespeare's texts, is

the thing were

interesting things happen.

Yes. So that

a performance, whether it's trapped

on DVD or

whatever, doesn't exist

as an object to be consumed

the same everywhere.

It is specific to the act of making

it.

One of my favorite

Shakespeare films is a wonderful

version of Hamlet made by Grigori

Kozintsev in Russia in 1964.

The film title is, of course, not

Hamlet, but Gamlet because Russian

doesn't have an H.

So he becomes [foreign] Gamlet,

which, of course, will always sound

immediately Russian.

And this is a film made under

Sovietism,

and it's about the power

of the state.

And it was made in 1964, the

quadricentennial of Shakespeare's

birth, as Soviet

films' contribution to

the celebration of Shakespeare.

But it's also a deeply subversive

film, which is about a surveillance

political culture.

And you are

a filmmaker working

under and in a culture

of Soviet surveillance.

This is a message film.

Yes, this is a highly politicized

film. It's not saying that in

Denmark things were

like that, or in England

in 1603 things

were like that. It's saying this is

Russia in 1964.

Your reference to the political

film being produced there

reminds me of one

of the things that I read when

you were writing about Coriolanus.

You edited the Coriolanus

text for the Arden third--

Arden third series. Yep.

We're just starting to plan Arden

fourth series.

That's right. You're one of the general editors.

I'm one of the general editors.

It's a project which will take about

25 to 30 years, which

means the likelihood I will see the

end of it is pretty remote.

And it's the first project I've

taken on with that kind of awareness

that it's going to go on well beyond

me.

Well, this is the-- the first volume

of that won't come out until 2020,

so--

Oh, I think 2023,

2025.

We haven't even commissioned a

single volume yet.

We're still in planning.

Well, I did want to ask you about

that, too. About your thoughts about

that. But thinking about

Coriolanus, I was interested

in your interest

in that because you write about

the fact that a certain production

of Gunter Gross's play

talking about, and it was The

Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising,

right?

Yep.

Is his performance that you saw and

that had an impact on you and

allowed you to see Coriolanus as

a really highly political film?

And I wonder if that's one of the

reasons why-- I mean, you mentioned

the fact that I think Napoleon

stopped the production in France at

a certain point because he felt that

the portrayal of Coriolanus was

reflecting on him.

Coriolanus is a text which

is the epitome of that malleability

of Shakespeare, and often that comes

through adaptation.

So the first two major

adaptations of the play, one in

the late 17th century, one in the

early 18th century.

One is called The Ingratitude

of the Commonwealth.

And it's perfectly clear, as you

look at that title, this is about

the way in which the Roman state

doesn't admire and accommodate

the sheer oddity of this weird

figure, Gnaeus Marcius Coriolanus.

And the other adaptation is called

The Invader of His Own Country.

Well, it's clear that that does not

approve of what Coriolanus

is doing. So the

two versions in effect, one

Whig, one Tory. I mean, these are

different political readings of the

same narrative.

And it is perfectly practicable to

play the Shakespeare play without

adapting it to mean one

or another version.

That's part of that kind of

chameleon, malleable quality

of Shakespeare.

That we can remake, meaning

according to what is most

appropriate for the intervention we

want that to make.

It's not that we

have to uncover a truth

and that truth is then a constant

fixed entity, but rather we

have the opportunity to enjoy

the rethinking and to make

the political act of theater.

And theater is normally a

political act. I mean, I don't mean

by that that it's conventional party

politics of the state, but

that it is engaged with how people

interact.

And every time you present

a view of how people interact,

you are making a political

statement, be it about desire

or gender or sexual orientation

or age or family, whatever

it may be. Our comments on those

are political statements.

And Shakespeare is the ideal space

for it.

So that one of the demands I make

of any production,

and for me it's an entirely fair

demand to make, is

what is it that you want to say

through this production?

And if the answer is, I just want

people to have a good time,

perhaps you're not getting far

enough into what this play can offer

you.

I don't mean that therefore, I

live in hope of seeing the perfect

Shakespeare production.

The whole point is that each one is

imperfect and there's another one

coming along later.

Thinking about Shakespeare's

career, I'm also interested in

asking you about Richard III.

In particular, because this, for me,

in your entry

about Shakespeare in the

dictionary, that

play stood out to me as something

that you'd seem like you were

writing about it as a kind of a

turning point for Shakespeare.

And I have this one line that

stood out to me.

You write that it was as if at

this moment, Shakespeare unlocks the

vast potential of dramatic character

and of the blank verse form for the

first time.

That seemed to be a tremendous--

well, like you thought this was a

tremendous moment in his

development.

Because what

intrigues me is that

when Richard awakens

from the nightmare of the visitation

of the ghost on the night before

Bosworth,

he speaks

in a way that nobody on

the stage had ever spoken before.

It's fragmented.

He gets through six

tiny sentences in about three

lines.

And it's as if

what we think of as the normal

coherence of how

speech is constructed in Shakespeare

blows apart.

And he discovers he can do something

entirely different that

he's never done before and nobody

has ever done before.

And for me, it's an absolutely

magical moment.

Is there a murderer here?

No. Yes.

I am. I love myself. But why? For any good that I myself have done unto

myself? O no, alack, I rather hate myself for hateful deeds committed by

myself. I am a villain.

I don't mean that the previous four

and a half acts of Richard III aren't

worth reading.

They're great.

But even during that period

of length of

text, he doesn't get

this to happen.

Something is possible at that

moment, and

I don't think he ever quite does the

same thing again.

But when you discover

that you can do this, you also

discover you can do other things.

One of the things about blank verse

is that in Shakespeare's hands,

it becomes the most

astonishingly flexible form,

and it increases in flexibility

throughout his career.

So it's not that blank verse is a

constriction like, "Oh, I've got to

have a line that goes [inaudible]." And

that's what people think blank verse

is. It's an iambic

pentameter. It's five iambs.

Dee-dum, dee-dum.

And you ask people to give you an

example of an iambic pentameter,

and they say, "To be,

or not to be, that

is the quest--."

Oh, there's another syllable.

It's a feminine ending.

It's an 11-syllable line.

It's not "is the question."

And it's not what--you can't

collapse it.

Shakespeare is playing games with

what the rhythms are like.

Turning them upside down and inside

out. So though there's that

fundamental pulse, which

is iambic, the number of

iambs doesn't have to be all that

high.

Ian McKellen has always argued that,

in fact, the fundamental rhythm

is really like a heartbeat.

Tu-tum, tu-tum, tu-tum.

When he makes his first appearance

as Richard - we're back to Richard

III again - in the film version

of Richard III that he wrote the

screenplay for, directed by Richard

Loncraine.

We first see him-- there's a tank

breaks through a brick wall, and

Richard comes in wearing a gas mask.

And he's breathing through the gas

mask.

And he wants it to be the rhythm of

blank verse.

It's a kind of joke.

We also, and I don't know whether

McKellen would really realized it

when he was creating this moment.

We also hear it as Darth Vader, and

Richard III is suddenly a character

out of Star Wars.

It's perfect.

And it's exactly that kind

of pop cultural appropriation

that happens whether you want

it or not.

Actually thinking of Richard, then

Duke of Gloucester, as a kind of

Darth Vader figure.

I'll buy that any time.

Well, it's very fitting too with

your talk yesterday and you talking

about the way that Star Wars and

Shakespeare have interacted in

recent text.

Very much so.

And particularly the work that Ian

Doescher has been doing called

William Shakespeare's Star Wars,

in which he's rewritten

the screenplays into

his version of Shakespearean blank

verse.

Yeah.

Well, so I want to ask you about the

Arden project.

That just started in earlier this

year in 2015.

And as you said, massive

project.

One of the first things that

you and the other general editors

will do, according to the

publishers, will be to think

about what a collection

of Shakespeare should look like for

the 21st century, and in

particular, online.

And so I wonder, what are some of

the first-- how do you begin?

What are some of the first questions

you ask?

Well, I am, of course, bound by a

confidentiality agreement not to say

anything in detail.

But the plain fact is

that the

great Shakespeare editions

of the

individual play series, which is a

completely separate kind of project

from editing the complete works.

The

individual play series-- there

have really been in recent years

three competing

versions at the highest scholarly

level, the Oxford edition, the

Cambridge Edition, and the Arden

Edition.

Those three series

now virtually complete each of

them

or began work at roughly the same

time.

There's been a delay

before we now move on to the Arden

fourth series, and

something has changed.

And the most obvious thing that has

changed is we

can now conceive of an Arden play

edition that is born digital.

What does what is born digital going

to make possible?

Well, I don't quite know.

And that's not just because I'm not

allowed to say. We

haven't got a clear

plan.

But we do know that while

there will be print editions as

well, there

will also be something conceived

from the start as

a digital edition.

Now that's a challenge, not

least because, of course, digital

platforms will change during

the life of the publication of the

project, but it

obviously makes possible different

kinds of availability of materials.

So one of the things

that we've always recognized about