Image above: Shakespeare’s First Folio – British Library
400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of William Shakespeare’s First Folio in 1623 – the first collected edition of his plays.
Shakespeare is thought to have written around 37 plays in all. Before two of his friends, fellow actors John Heminge and Henry Condell put together this collection seven years after his death, only about half of them had been printed.
The rest, including Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Macbeth, Julius Caesar and The Tempest had not, and might never have survived had they not been included in this First Folio collection of 36 plays.
Heminge and Condell both appear in a list of the ‘Principall Actors’ who performed in Shakespeare’s plays, alongside Richard Burbage, Will Kemp and Shakespeare himself, so they knew the works intimately, and, most importantly, from the point of view of an actor.
They painstakingly put together the best versions of the plays using manuscripts, prompt books, working drafts and ‘good quartos’, faithful copies rather than pirated editions, printed in small size. They also divided up the work into comedies, tragedies and histories, which has shaped the way we see Shakespeare’s plays ever since.
The result was a large and expensive book which was seen as a prestige item at the time. Now it is the most expensive work of literature in existence. Of the 750 or so that were printed, only 233 are known to have survived. A copy was sold at Christie’s in 2020 for $9,978,000.
Image above: Christine Ozanne and Patrick Tucker
It’s all in the text
Christine Ozanne and Patrick Tucker, an actor and director respectively, who live in Chiswick, have made the First Folio their lifelong study. They want 2023 to be the year we recognise Shakespeare’s genius for directing as well as writing. He was, after all, an actor himself.
They say all you need to direct one of his plays is in that First Folio. If you pay attention to the layout of the text – where there is a full line and where there is a half line, the punctuation, the use of capitals, you have all the instructions you need for the actors.
In subsequent versions of the collected works of Shakespeare the layout has been changed, the text bunched up to lose half lines.
“Where Shakespeare put in a half line, it was a direction to the actor to take a pause” says Patrick.
He gives as an example the exchange between Morocco and Portia in The Merchant of Venice where Morocco opens the gold box. In the First Folio the text is laid out like this:
Lies all within. Deliver me the key :
Here doe I choose, and thrive as I may.
Por. There take it Prince, and if my forme lye there
Then I am yours.
Mor. O hell! what have we here, a carrion death,
Within whose emptie eye there is a written scroule ;
Ile reade the writing.
All that glisters is not gold
The direction inherent in the layout of the text. There is a pause indicated by the half line where Morocco unlocks the casket, no need for direction.
“There is always enough time to change costume in folio versions” says Patrick, and enough time for actors to do whatever it is they are supposed to be doing, before they speak the next line.
Similarly, says Christine, Shakespeare’s use of initial capitals in the middle of a line indicated which words he wanted to emphasize. In Portia’s famous speech to Shylock asking him to show mercy, the word mercy is not capitalised once, whereas words such as Monarch, Crowne, Scepter, Majestie and Justice are.
“Portia was using those elements which would make sense to the court.”
In the First Folio John Heminge and Henry Condell used initial capitals for the first letter of the first word in lines of verse, to distinguish it from prose, where the inital letter of the first word is not capitalised. As subsequent editions of Shakespeare’s plays have been produced, his use of capitals have been edited out.
Patrick and Christine feel the interpretation of Shakespeare’s plays has been too long in the hands of editors and academics and needs to be rightfully restored to actors.
Image above: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hermia and Helena (Susie Lindeman & Greta Scacchi), Sydney, 1996, Original Shakespeare Company
The Original Shakespeare Company
Christine and Patrick met in 1965 when they were both in the original touring production of Oliver! Patrick was the technical assistant stage manager while Christine was in the chorus. (The other assistant stage manager was one Cameron Macintosh).
Christine had studied at RADA, a contemporary of Siân Phillips and Susannah York, while Patrick had done a Physics degree, but spent most of his time at university involved in theatre productions. Having gone on to study theatre postgrad in Boston, he got a job at the RSC.
It was working with the actor Ian Richardson (best known for his portrayal of Francis Urquhart in the 1990s BBC TV drama House of Cards) which sparked his interest in the First Folio. The RSC had a copy, kept under lock and key and rarely taken out, but Richardson actually used it.
“Whenever I have a problem, I find the punctuation helps me” he told Patrick.
Image above: The Comedie of Errors, Officers, Ross-on-Wye, 1997, Original Shakespeare Company
Using the text – “nothing more, nothing less”
They were working together on a famous production of Richard II with two actors playing the king. Patrick was tasked with taking the production to New York and making sure both Richard Pascoe and Ian Richardson got good reviews (they did). While there, he picked up a facsimile of the First Folio for $35.
Patrick travelled the States teaching Shakespeare, and on a flight to Kentucky to direct Romeo and Juliet he decided to try an experiment.
“I thought: ‘What would happen if you actually did the play the way it was written – nothing more, nothing less?
“We did it and it went stunningly well.”
Image above: Twelfth Night, Viola and Sebastian (Sarah Finch & Heather Tracy), Jordan, 1998, Original Shakespeare Company
From there was born the Original Shakespeare Company, a troupe which he and Christine set up together to produce Shakespeare plays in exactly that way.
Famous alumni include Hollywood actor Greta Scacchi (White Mischief 1987, Presumed Innocent 1990, Shattered 1991, The Player, 1992), Nicholas Day (National Theatre, RSC, TV: Minder, New Tricks, Midsummer Murders, Foyle’s War) and Carolyn Jones, best know for her role as Morticia Addams in The Addams Family, 1963.
Their first productions were of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merchant of Venice, performed over a weekend at a Shakespeare festival in Neuss, in Germany in 1993.
Image: Romeo and Juliet, Mourning (Adrian O’Donnell, Christine Ozanne, Nicholas Day, Carolyn Jones, Sarah Howe), Jordan, 2000, Original Shakespeare Company
Seeing the text from the point of view of an actor
The troupe performed all round the world, in Canada, Australia, Jordan. All in all they went on tour 28 times, their last production Romeo and Juliet in 2000. They tried to stay as faithfully as they could to Shakespeare’s way of working.
“In Shakespeare’s day the company always performed six different plays a week, not repeating a play for weeks at a time. The actors would learn their lines in the morning and perform them in the afternoon.
“When the Earl of Essex was plotting his rebellion he wanted them to do Richard II. He gave them money to put on a production, so they put it on the next day.”
In his long and varied career, Patrick has produced a lot of television drama, including Brookside.
“I directed 100 episodes of Brookside and have had actors come into work having learnt the wrong script. I’ve given them the right script for that day and they’ve memorised it and been able to perform it in 30 seconds, but by the end of the day they’ve forgotten it.
“That’s how Shakespearean actors did it.”
Image above: Patrick Tucker with a cue script
“Don’t act Shakespeare, let Shakespeare act you”
A contemporary account of life in A Mad World My Masters, which describes the morning routine makes reference to actors learning their lines at seven in the morning.
‘It is now the seventh houre, and Time begins to set the world hard to worke: The Milke-maides in their Dayry to their Butter and their Cheese, the Ploughman to their Ploughes and their Harrows in the field … the Poet to make Verses: the Player, to conne his part.’
Christine and Patrick were not quite as brutal. They gave their actors a couple of weeks to learn their lines, but gave them their parts in cue script form – a scroll with just their own lines and the couple of words preceding, which was their cue.
Patrick’s direction was very light touch:
“Actors are so inventive. It’s an actor’s job to theatricalise the text. I teach them how to find the clues in Shakespeare’s text and it is up to the actor what they do with it.
“I always told my actors ‘Don’t act Shakespeare, let Shakespeare act you’.”
Image above: King John, Queen Eleanor and Arthur (Judith Paris & Louise Doherty), Globe, 1998, Original Shakespeare Company
They do not hold with rehearsals. Patrick was on the original committee organising the building of the Globe theatre on the South bank, which opened in 1997 with Mark Rylance as the first artistic director.
Patrick fell out with the rest of the committee. Although the building is as faithful a copy of the original Globe theatre as they could make it, they were not prepared to extend that thinking to the direction of the plays.
After the Original Shakespeare Company had put on three plays there, “Mark Rylance banned us” says Patrick. “He said the audience is laughing at you, not with you.”
Christine and Patrick’s way of producing Shakespeare is controversial. That bruising exchange with Mark Rylance is now 20 years ago, but their views are still considered “out there.”
They feel academics have hi-jacked Shakespeare. Actors should have control of the interpretation and the First Folio is all they need to produce a Shakespeare play in the way it was intended.
Interestingly their niece, Professor Tiffany Stern is Professor of Shakespeare and early modern drama at the Shakespeare Institute, part of the University of Birmingham, which has made for some interesting discussions over the Sunday roast.
She told The Chiswick Calendar she herself had been deeply influenced by Christine and Patrick’s work and she has students whose doctorates have relied on it too.
“What they brilliantly did was to bring the whole way actors receive parts to the fore. That is fabulous.”
Where she and other academics part company with them is their “blind adherence to the folio.”
There is only one remaining scrap of manuscript which is thought to be in Shakespeare’s hand, part of a text about Sir Thomas More by a group of authors. This, she says, has barely any punctuation, and some “extremely creative” spellings.
I put it to her that they were not sure that scrap of manuscript is Shakespeare’s own work.
Academics deal in the balance of probabilities, she told me. They use phrases such as “thought to be”, “is likely to be” and “is considered”. No, they cannot be certain, but it took over a year for the First Folio to be printed and it is possible to see the influence on the nine different printers’ styles in the spelling, she says.
Analysis of the text leads them to believe the punctuation and spelling has more to do with the transcribers and printers than it does to Shakespeare himself, or even to John Heminge and Henry Condell.
It is Christine and Patrick’s certainty which has allowed academics to dismiss their views, says Tiffany, but there are more academics who agree with them then perhaps they realise. She certainly considers their work to be “important and inspiring.”
Image above: Cymbeline, Lord and audience, Globe, 1999, Original Shakespeare Company
Christine and Patrick have co-authored several books together on the techniques of acting and direction and how to produce Shakespeare. They are hoping to find a publisher for their most recent work on how to understand Shakespeare’s direction.
Christine Ozanne and Patrick Tucker have co-written The Actor’s Survival Handbook; Patrick is the author of Secrets of Screen Directing – the tricks of the trade. He was staff director on Brookside for Channel 4 from 1986-88, Director of Studies at the Drama Studio London, 1983-89 and was a member of the Artistic Directorate / Advisory Council of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre. Christine has also written her memoir: The Tome of the Unknown Actor.
Read more stories on The Chiswick Calendar
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