The Playʼs the Thing: A Multi-text Approach to Acting Shakespeare

Abstract

There is no one, true definitive version of Shakespeareʼs plays. Shakespeare wrote his work to be performed live rather than to be read. When his plays were ultimately set down in writing, they were often cobbled together from multiple sources (some sources more reliable than others). Because we cannot trust that any one particular written account of Shakespeareʼs plays are the exact version that Shakespeare gave to his actors, there is ambiguity and variation among the texts. Without a single authoritative text, Shakespeareʼs editors have the power, through their own research and choices, to drastically sculpt and alter the meaning of his plays. The word and punctuation choices made by the editor, and even the visual layout that editorsʼ choose, can have enormous ramifications in the world of the actor. Whole scenes, soliloquies and even characterizations can be profoundly affected by editorial choices. If there is no one definitive written text of Macbeth, should not the actor playing Macbeth investigate different editorial choices to create the most exciting Macbeth that he can? If there is no authoritative text of Othello, how can the actor playing Desdemona know that she is making the most compelling choices possible? This paper investigates a muti-text approach to teaching and acting Shakespeare. We will identify a method for working with multiple editions of Shakespeare texts by comparing and contrasting the following texts: The Riverside Shakespeare, The Arden Shakespeare, The Bevington Shakespeare, and The Oxford Complete Works. We will use scenes from the plays Othello and Macbeth as launching points to see the profound differences in the edited plays, and to learn how these differences can lead to incredible artistic conversations and discoveries for both students and professional actors. There is no one, true, definitive version of Shakespeareʼs plays. If there is no single authoritative version of his plays, to limit the actor to working from only one edited version of the text of a Shakespeare play is to limit myriad acting possibilities and potentials for storytelling.