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Shakespeare's Authentic Performance Texts: The Case for Staging from the First Folio, by Graham Watts
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When we pick up a copy of a Shakespeare play, we assume that we hold in our hands an original record of his writing. We don't. Present-day printings are an editor's often subjective version of the script. Around 25 percent of any Shakespeare play will have been altered, and this creates an enormous amount of confusion. The only authentic edition of Shakespeare's works is the First Folio, published by his friends and colleagues in 1623. This volume makes the case for printing and staging the plays as set in the First Folio, which preserved actor cues that helped players understand and perform their roles. The practices of modern editors are critiqued. Also included are sections on analyzing and acting the text, how a complex character can be created using the First Folio, and a director's approach to rehearsing Shakespeare with various exercises for both professional and student actors. In conclusion, all of the findings are applied to Measure for Measure.
- Sales Rank: #2673790 in Books
- Published on: 2015-01-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.90" h x .70" w x 6.90" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 260 pages
About the Author
London based Graham Watts has directed 28 professional Shakespeare productions in the United States, the UK, and Europe.
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
"Now, Sir, What Is Your Text?"
By Lars Kaaber
Graham Watts’ case for staging Shakespeare’s plays directly from the First Folio is a ground-breaking, brilliant book and an absolute must for any Shakespeare student. Watts presents the case as follows: centuries of Shakespeare scholars have sought to help the Bard by amending various ‘errors’ in our only primary source of the plays, the Folio, and have done so from the best of intentions and on the assumption that the Folio was compiled in haste by Shakespeare’s friends and colleagues Heminges and Condell in 1623, then thrown into further confusion by the messy compositors at Jaggard’s printing house. Since then, editors all the way from the early endeavours of Rowe, Pope, and Theobald in the 18th century have altered the original text as it reached us, and later editors have proceeded to edit the editions of their predecessors and strayed still further away. The original Folio is never presented on the stage. In other words: what we perform today is the work, not of Shakespeare, but of Rowe & Co.
Based on thorough studies, Watts’ suggestion is that we simply trust The Folio. Ad fontes. We might have thought of that 300 years ago, for Watts’ suggestions are all sound and leave performers with a multitude of acting cues that vary decidedly from what is by now received tradition.
One may ask why such a book comes as late as it does, since we have always had the true Folio before us. The answer is surprisingly straightforward: Watts is a theatre director, a man who has tackled the task of actually producing Shakespeare on the stage, and such are rarely found in the ranks and files of Shakespeare research – very rarely in fact. Most scholars treat the text (and Watts is likely to be right: the garbled text!) as literature and tend to view stage presentations as the discount version of the real deal – or they conclude, with the proverbial response to a film version of a novel: ‘I prefer the book.’ In the battle between Shakespeare on the stage and Shakespeare on the page, the latter category almost always runs off with the academic laurels.
This is what Watts convincingly opposes. He points out that the original Folio text of the plays quite often takes on an entirely different meaning and inspires an altogether different performance than in the ‘amended’ editions we have taken for true gold. “Shakespeare’s Authentic Performance Texts” is full of revelations and is, moreover, written with humour and in a language aimed at explaining matters rather than impressing scholars. This makes it suited for a wide range of readers.
No praise can be exaggerated for such a publication.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Compelling Case for the First Folio
By J. E. Ryan
In Shakespeare’s Authentic Performance Texts: The Case for Staging from the First Folio, Graham Watts turns an experienced director’s eye on Shakespeare texts, particularly the First Folio, and on Shakespeare performance. Watts is extremely knowledgeable not only about the many texts, ranging from the earliest quartos through the various folios on up to modern editions, but also about the historical context and conditions of the early printings. (One of the pleasures of reading the book is coming across interesting nuggets about, say, the printer William Jaggard continuing to proofread while sickened with syphilis.) Emphasizing that Shakespeare was an actor, Watts tests editorial changes to the First Folio by one overriding measure: Is it playable? Does it enrich rather than constrict the actor’s options? He makes a compelling case for a closer adherence to the Folio, (which was, after all, ushered into print by Shakespeare’s colleagues of twenty years), and demonstrates that the folio is both an aid to the actor and an amplification of interpretive possibilities.
The book’s first four revelatory chapters are devoted to a detailed examination of modern editions as they depart from the First Folio. Throughout, Watts refers to modern editors as “editors/adaptors” because the changes they make to the folio are so extensive. In the most interesting chapter Watts demonstrates how useful the features usually smoothed out of the Folio text can be to actors and directors. Apparently unimportant details of italic type, capitalization, “mislineation,” and spelling are all shown to be valuable clues to an enriched performance.
Once Watts has established the value of the folio, he turns to performance issues. After considering briefly some fundamentals of acting, Watts demonstrates by means of Iago the creation of character as a succession of roles, emphasizing the immediacy of the actor’s task, that it is “in the moment” that character is realized. He then addresses in “Ambiguity” the wide range of choices moment to moment that the folio text offers an actor; he examines in great detail an episode between Gower and Fluellen in Henry V in which each few lines of text has up to four pages of commentary. In the penultimate chapter Watts provides some exercises he uses as a director and finally caps the book with an analysis of the actor’s many choices in playing the main characters in Measure for Measure.
This is emphatically a director’s take on Shakespeare. Its aim is not a rigorous academic analysis. In fact, Watts often chides academics, saying, for example, that they use the word “problem” of Measure for Measure “because the text causes them problems when trying to locate a central ‘meaning’—a pretty fruitless task in such a ….deliberately ambiguous play.” “Faculty thinking,” as Watts calls it, takes actors out of their bodies, where they should be, and into their heads. Instead Watts wants to “free actors from the yoke of Shakespeare’s editors and encourage them to make their own selections based on the folio,” and he devotes most of his interest to the creation of character on stage, in each case floating speculative back stories, imagining post-play narratives and in general playing with the play, without attempting to find or fix a “central meaning.” In large and small matters, Watts chooses the option that in his estimation plays better, that allows the actor a greater range of possibilities. For example, he prefers the Folio’s “crying” over the Quarto’s “coining,”—that is, counterfeiting coins stamped with the King’s image, which is the more usual editorial choice—in the following quote of Lear’s: “No, they cannot touch me for crying/coining. I am the King himself.” “’Crying,’” Watts comments, “gives the actor… an action whereas ‘coining’ relies on the audience having an in-depth knowledge of Jacobean history.” While there may be disagreement about some of Watts’s readings, overall he provides an exacting and revealing look at the folio and a fascinating range of acting and staging possibilities.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
how printed Shakespeare texts have changed
By willis fireball
A great survey of how printed Shakespeare texts have changed in the last 400 years, this book presents the case for using (or at least consulting) the original plays as printed in the 1623 First Folio. This is especially meant for directors and actors who need to bring the characters to life, but any reasonably hardcore Shakespeare fan will find plenty in these new pages. There have been such extensive changes to the texts through the centuries that things have inevitably been lost. Mr. Watts presents the extensive downside of this situation. From his vast experience directing Shakespeare in a variety of places, and from his familiarity with the texts of the plays (quartos and folios to modern editions), he discusses the significance of the original word choice, spelling, capitalization, punctuation, prose/poetry, meter, characters, and context. Hundreds of text examples from the entire canon (and even the non-Folio poems) demonstrate changes from the First Folio. It's a lot to digest, and of course it's not the easiest language, but Mr. Watts is very readable, at times even pleasantly cheeky.
Mr. Watts doesn't delve into questions of authorship of the plays or authenticity of the folio texts; he merely argues that the First Folio, prepared by the actors Heminge and Condell who acted the plays, is an invaluable resource for producing the plays as they were originally performed.
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