How did Shakespeare...

[Arpy]

I just saw an old interview with Patrick Stewart during his time at the Royal Shakespeare Company in which he said basically, as it's often said, that there is no one best way to do, or there is no original version of Shakespeare, and that's (part of) its brilliance.

Well then, how does a writer accomplish this? How does one create a story without having a original version of it in his own head, a specific angle he's pushing for?

Or is it that it is a matter of interpretation by the actors/director/etc, and Shakespeare actually is no different from Sophocles or Asimov or any other writer?

 

[Harvey]

With theatre, film, radio, television, new media, etc. the written word is only part of the equation. Its not a novel or short story that begins and end with written prose. And, with Shakespeare and the like, there's no record of the 'original.'

 

[ancientone51]

Since Shakespeare wrote most of his stuff based upon older stories and even scripts, his originality lies in his written word.

The first thing any good actor learns is that every line of dialogue ever written can be read at LEAST as many different was as there are words in the line.

The true joy is the interpretation on the part of the audience. And that gives the actors the ability to try every way to Sunday to do the play.

What Shakespeare has provided us is a body of work that can readily be interpreted so very many ways.

That what keeps it wonderful.

ps If someone will cast me as Maria in "Twelfth Night" I'll have pulled off that hat trick!

 

[DonIago]

How about as Maria in "West Side Story"?

 

[ancientone51]

^ That's sweet, but I'm way too old for that role. Make Krupke a gal and I might get away with it.

 

[Australis]

I'm sure I read that Shakespeare took some stories from the likes of Marlowe and another playwright of the day I can't quite remember, and did his version, much like remakes of films today.

Just found on Wikipedia, All's Well That Ends Well was based on a tale froim the Decameron that Big S probably read in translation.

And this:

It is unknown exactly when A Midsummer Night's Dream was written or first performed, but on the basis of topical references and an allusion to Edmund Spenser for an aristocratic wedding (numerous such weddings took place in 1596), while others suggest that it was written for the Queen to celebrate the feast day of St. John. No concrete evidence exists to support either theory. In any case, it would have been performed at The Theatre and, later, The Globe in London.


Some features of the plot and characters can be traced to elements of earlier mythologically based literature; for example, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe is told in Ovid's Metamorphosis and the transformation of Bottom into an ass is descended fromApuleus's The Golden Ass. Lysander was also an ancient Greek warlord while Theseus and Hippolyta were respectively the Duke of Athens and Queen of the Amazons. In addition, Shakespeare could have been working on Romeo and Juliet at about the same time that he wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream, and it is possible to see Pyramus and Thisbe as a comic reworking of the tragic play. A further, seldom noted source is The Knight's Tale in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of only three plays in Shakespeare's canon — the other two being The Tempest and Love's Labour Lost — for which there is no known source for the main plot

I'd add that the Wikipedia entry for the Tempest has a very long paragraph on sources for the story.

There y'go. Doesn't mean Big S is unoriginal at all. As others have said, we're still performing his plays today, while Marlowe, an innovator in some ways,. not so much.

 

[Christopher]

Well then, how does a writer accomplish this? How does one create a story without having a original version of it in his own head, a specific angle he's pushing for?

Or is it that it is a matter of interpretation by the actors/director/etc, and Shakespeare actually is no different from Sophocles or Asimov or any other writer?

It's what Harvey said. Shakespeare was a playwright working for a theatrical company. He was just one contributor to a collaborative process. The script of a play is just the blueprint; it's the director, the performers, and the crew who create the complete work. (I heard an expression recently: Film is a director's medium, television is a writer's medium, and theater is an actor's medium.)

But to some degree it's true of all fiction, regardless of the medium. The writer may have a particular interpretation or view of the story, but every reader brings something different to it, something from themselves. Sometimes it's startling how different the story people read can be from the story you wrote.

 

[barnaclelapse]

With theatre, film, radio, television, new media, etc. the written word is only part of the equation. Its not a novel or short story that begins and end with written prose. And, with Shakespeare and the like, there's no record of the 'original.'

Exactly. I think Stewart was referring to the performance side of things, although I could certainly be completely misreading that.

 

[Kegg]

There y'go. Doesn't mean Big S is unoriginal at all. As others have said, we're still performing his plays today, while Marlowe, an innovator in some ways,. not so much.

Bah. Marlowe's more to my taste anyway. However, I don't recall reading anything about Shakespeare stealing from Marlowe, and Marlowe himself was not an original writer. His plays, like Shakespeare's, tend to have literary or historical precedent - Doctor Faustus was based on the Faustbuch (i.e. the myth of Faust), Tamburlaine the Great is based on Timur the Lame, The Massacre at Paris really happened, and so on.

This was more of the norm than an exception. A popular model for European theatre was of course the plays of ancient Greece and Rome; and the Grecian and Roman tragedies were almost invariably based on myths and in a handful of exceptions, real events, while the Menandrian comedy form touted (and aggressively followed in The Comedy of Errors) is one very dependent on formula.

 

[Christopher]

^Yes. The idea that a story should be entirely original is, historically, a fairly recent innovation. The reason novels were called that was because they were "novel" stories, new tales rather than retold ones, and that was itself a novelty worth calling attention to at the time. Most of human literature, drama, and art over the millennia has been based on retellings of myth, legend, and history.

It's as I always say -- originality isn't in where your story comes from, but in where you go with it.