My name is Tiffany Stern, I teach English at University College Oxford, I teach 16th to 18th century literature.
But what I specialise in is Shakespeare and the theatre of his time and also the theatre 16th to 18th century.
But I'm completely fascinated by Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, so that's particularly what I write about.
SP2 -And your research in this field? My research in the field is a mixture of research into the theatre and research into the book.
And I also edit quite a lot and editing helps me think through a number of those questions.
What I'm currently writing about are snacks that you could buy in the theatre throughout performances.
And these are apples and pears and nuts and beer and wine.
And I'm interested in Shakespeare putting on these amazing plays in front of an audience who are always a bit ready to be diverted by an apple.
And I'm looking at ways Shakespeare must have had for dealing with this.
And in particular, I'm thinking, here is a great writer, but he's also a shareholder in his theatre and he does want his theatre to be an exciting,
bustling trading place because that's good in terms of money, but it's a bit bad in terms of his plays.
And so that's what I'm thinking through currently this very instant.
I'm also at present thinking about fairgrounds in Shakespeare's time and what Shakespeare
Theatre may have borrowed from puppets and sort of low culture performing monkeys,
that kind of thing. I'm very excited by context and by the nitty gritty and by those things which might seem incidental,
I think turn out to be quite crucial to Shakespeare's theatre. Can you give us an example?
Oh, yes. So, for instance, there's a moment in Romeo and Juliet,
Romeo's friends can't find him and the hunting ground for him and they start saying stuff that sounds a bit weird.
They're asking where he is and they say he hears nothing.
He speaks nothing. He says nothing which to that effect. And then they say the ape is dead.
And it's all really weird. Just sort of what are they saying?
And when you look into it, what they're doing is they're going through a form of the patter that you went through with a performing monkey.
What you did with a performing monkey was he had a performing monkey and then you would mention something really bad.
But to those times, like the pope or the Spaniard or the Turk or something they really hated and your monkey would play dead.
And then you go, oh, he does nothing. He's he doesn't move. Oh, no, my monkey's dead.
Oh, I wish. Oh, if only Queen Elizabeth were here, then your monkey would spring to life.
And what Romeo's friends are doing is they're pretending they're going through this ritual and they're
pretending that Romeo is a dead monkey and then they're pretending that a wonderful word can bring him to life.
And they think the word Rosalind can do that because they think Rosalind is his girlfriend.
He's now actually in love with Juliet. So what's interesting to me is that's a whole bit of monkey patter.
It's directly from kind of fairgrounds, but it's actually quite deep.
It's to do with can names bring about life or death.
And it's Prolexic, which is to say, it hints at what's to come, actually bad things to come, but through a medium of humour.
But you need to understand low culture to know that. And that's one of the things that's interesting to me at present.
So how would you say that studying the theatrical space, which is something else.
Yeah. Enhance our understanding of texts.
We know Shakespeare in book form looks a bit like Milton in book form, you know, but a book looks like another book.
It looks like your bedside novel. But of course, what Shakespeare was writing was not originally something for anyone to sit around and read.
He wasn't writing a book. He was writing a play and he was writing a play for a particular named Space and for particular named actors whom he knew.
So I think what's exciting to me is to think about the actual context for which Shakespeare was writing.
And when you do that, when you sort of make a play three dimensional, get it off the page.
For one thing, you understand it better.
And for another, you can get back some of the thrill and excitement of the occasion for which Shakespeare was writing.
And I feel particularly with Shakespeare, once he's in a book and he's weighted down with footnotes, he's still really good.
But, you know, you can lose the sense that he's tremendously good fun or terrifying and that
the atmosphere of seeing him was thrilling and dreadful and extraordinary.
And you'd come out exhausted and exhilarated from a trip to the theatre.
I sort of like to get that back. So you definitely support avant garde productions of Shakespeare.
For example, Macbeth stayed home with the RAF, with each other that well, you know,
I'm completely conflicted about those because as I work on the theatre of Shakespeare's time, I'm tremendously.
And how Shakespeare's stage was divided, that it had its own little heaven and its own little [INAUDIBLE].
And so when you said the words heaven and [INAUDIBLE], those had a kind of extra textural meaning.
I'm interested in where the pillars were and how they became part of productions.
I'm interested in the doors of entrance.
So being interested in all of those things makes me conflicted about modern productions, because on one level, I don't like them.
They're not dealing with any of that stuff.
But on another level they are maybe the best way these days we can get back at the atmosphere from those days.
So we might be losing the stuff but gaining the atmosphere.
And that makes me kind of like them a lot while simultaneously being annoyed if that's possible.
And it's like, you know, so before theatres existed often plays tough place outdoors, sort of out the back of cars.
And so you want to ask, did plays bring about theatres or did the theatrical space bring about plays?
Oh, gosh. Well, that's an absolute chicken and egg question. It's very hard to know.
All I can say is, particularly in England, it's better acting in a covid space than an uncovered space.
I mean, I think if you watch kids, they play act the whole time.
Acting is very natural and instinctive to us. A lot of jobs, mine, including included, involve quite a lot of acting.
So I think everyone will always have acted. I suspect quite a lot of our theatre came out of things like the church.
You have the church. So there's biblical stories are again a little dead texturally, but you enact them and they're extraordinary.
And so I don't know which brought what about. But as soon as you start ranking acting, you've got some actors better than others.
You want to see those ones and you want to see those ones in the best space possible and enervated space where the rest of you can stand,
can stand around and so forth. So that's a question, the answer to which is hidden in the mists of time.
But what I do think is everyone acts and the question which is levelled that the humanity.
Yes. Why should we still study Shakespeare? Why should we.
It's a difficult one, actually, and there are a number of answers. For one thing, Shakespeare is part of our culture, part of our heritage.
He's important to us as thinkers in a way he's important to our Englishness is important to people who speak English.
He has helped shape our language. We should understand him the way we should understand our histories for nothing.
Shakespeare still helps us think about knotty issues.
Shakespeare talks lyrically, sometimes with extraordinary beauty,
so that you're captivated and sometimes angrily but always compellingly about philosophical issues we think about today.
He talks about should one consider suicide? Should one consider murder?
What is love? And he talks about the great questions that we all think about.
And he doesn't give us answers, but he gives us extraordinary ways of thinking through those personal issues.
So I think he has a personal meaning for everyone. And I think he's philosophically rich and his poetically, lyrically rich.
And so for me, Shakespeare is maybe in verbal terms, perhaps what some very fine music is to you know, he's like Bach or something.
You want to hear it again and again. You get different things out of it.
So here's I think for all these reasons, important for me.
But I do also think he's important for now. He doesn't actually really date.
His language is dated, but his thought, his questions are permanent ones.
And I think that's why people still like and put on productions and set them in Iraq or whatever, that these help us think through current issues.
So you think that the universality of the questions is the reason stood the test?
Yes, I think the universality of the questions, but also the way he posed them.
I think it's that extraordinary mixture of philosophical depth and and poetically and linguistically rich and extraordinary language.
I think, you know, his vocabulary was enormous.
He created quite a lot of the language in which we talk and not only quite a lot of the language in which we talk,
but he therefore created quite a lot of the ways in which we think Shakespeare, for instance, unlike us,
most of us, we tend to think in fact, we do think within the vocabulary we have,
we think in words that we know Shakespeare regularly thought beyond words and then created a word to captivate that thought that he had had.
He therefore gave us a much richer and wider language in which to think.
And and that's just one of the things he, incidentally, did. What an extraordinary man.
And you know how lucky we are to be able to see him on stage and read him and think about him.
It would be difficult to do what he did then to do so. It would be extraordinarily difficult.
It was useful for him that he was around at a time when language was expanding and needed to expand.
But nevertheless, he was a very extraordinary person.
And I think it's pointless second guessing what he would be today, but I think today he would still be extraordinary.
An amazing. So we're talking about your country.
Yes, the. Yeah, so, yeah, how would you say that Elizabethan theatre is the.
Today and how the experience to. The theatre was different.
I mean, what's interesting is we're starting to build again the kinds of theatres we had in Shakespeare's time,
the same movement that brought about the reconstructed Globe Theatre and is bringing back reconstructed Blackfriars.
This is all this theatre. Shakespeare had.
But that movement is also bringing back the kind of stage which they had, which is called a thrust stage, and it thrusts out into the audience.
You've got audience all around it. And that's a much more dynamic theatre than the theatre we have had for the last three hundred or so years,
which has been a proscenium theatre where you've got a sort of picture stage which is beautifully lit and you're away from it.
You're outside it, looking at this amazing picture with acting going on and you're sitting in the dark
and there's that lighted thing and you can see how that turns into television.
That becomes the lighted screen in your room, but you don't interact with it.
It's lovely. It's a gorgeous thing, but it doesn't really involve you.
And I think what's exciting about Shakespeare's stage, but also any thrust stage we get back is that it's amongst you.
It's happening in the middle of you.
And if you're as well lit as the actors and they were in Shakespeare's time and again in some of these reconstructed theatres,
then you can make eye contact with the actor and, you know, the actor is looking at to you.
And when the actor chooses to address something to you, that's thrilling.
That's extraordinary. And I love that kind of participatory side of theatre.
So I think that's one thing that was true of Shakespeare's theatre and that we're getting back today.
I think one of the differences, one of the things we haven't quite got back is to do with the atmosphere of the theatre.
When you hear about audiences in Shakespeare's time, they would leave the theatre weeping, laughing, needing to have sex.
They'd leave the theatre filled with emotions. And we're still a bit ritualistic about the theatre.
Our theatre is very middle class. We might dress a bit nicely. We we clap whether we like it or not.
We clap carefully at the end and then we fill out. And the theatre was not like that.
It was vigorous. It was a bit crazy. It was cross-class and people vigorously loved it or hated it and hold fruit at it.
And so I think the atmosphere was a bit more like a football game or something like that.
People cared, they felt emotions. They were excited or upset by what the player, what the actors did.
They were unruly, a bit ungovernable. And that's why your play had to be good.
If your audience doesn't like your play, not only will they throw things at the actors, but they could start tearing the seats up and things.
They were dreadful, those audiences, if they were annoyed. And we don't necessarily want to get that back.
Exactly, but I would be thrilled to see a theatre that was a little crazier and a little less polite than the theatre we have now,
because it seems that in every media report it is becoming more participatory.
Yes, TV shows are just writing. Yes, writing and text.
Yes, yes, yes, yes. Theatre seems to be the only one that's seen.
It has got a bit left behind. It has, although there are some cities that are setting up tweet seats and things like that.
But theatre has got a bit left behind, I think, because it has become so middle class.
And I don't actually know when precisely that happened. And in England, it needn't be a financial thing.
You can go to the theatre quite cheaply. You can go to the theatre for the same sum of money often so you can go to the cinema.
So I don't quite know why theatre has become the preserve of a certain set of people, often middle class, often on the older side.
And it needs to do something to win back youth and it needs somehow to tap into that aggression and vigour and thrilling,
exciting this that that it that it used to have. And I'm not a director, so and I do go to the theatre.
I love it, but I feel a bit sorry for theatre now. It's sort of dated in the way that other entertainments have.
I don't quite know why that's happened.
And I think amongst other things, maybe studying Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre could help people get back to what that amazing,
tightrope walking, thrilling, extraordinary theatrical event once was.
You could go back and see which plane would you like to see?
Oh, my, can I only go back once? I'd like to see all of them, you know, because I don't know whether I'd like to see one of the big ones.
I mean, you've got to want to know what Hamlet what was the first performance of Hamlet like Lear.
But at the same time, someone who's interested in theatrical trickery.
I'd like to see Jupiter coming down on the back of an eagle. They must have sort of dressed up somewhere like an eagle.
You know, I'd like to see that. That's in simple and I'd like to see the disappearing banquet in The Tempest is a magic trick.
So I'd like to see those sort of theatrical details.
But actually, maybe I'll stick with King Lear because it's so beautiful and moving and extraordinary play.
And it's also got a bit that I'm just fascinated by. And this is a bit where Gloucester is told that he's climbing up a steep hill, but he isn't.
He's blind, so he doesn't know. He's being told he's climbing up the steep hill and he can't really feel it.
But he's blind and he's full of despair.
And when he gets to what he thinks is the top of the cliffs of Dover, he jumps off it and he thinks he's committing suicide.
But he was never climbing up the cliff and he doesn't jump off. Now, that is very moving.
But how do you stage it on a flat stage where you see someone walking along and then they just do a little jump in the air?
How is it horrifying rather than say funny or is it funny?
I mean, what is it in the bleakest, most horrible way? Would you just laugh hysterically, that kind of thing?
I'm very interested because it's to do with staging and it's also to do with interpretation.
And I just love to know. And somehow you think.
Something very valuable. Yes, I certainly do.
We can always learn from the past, and it's not as though the past is better, if the past was better, we'd still be doing it.
I think we can learn about the past from the past. I think we can learn new ways to think about the future from the past.
I think we shouldn't lose our connexion with where we we came from.
And I think the theatre in particular, because that was the age of the theatre and this is sort of the age of the film.
So I think if we want to get back some of the figure and excitement of the theatre,
I think we can get it back a little bit through understanding where it resided in the past and trying to recreate that.
So I don't think we should go back in the past. I think the future should always be the future,
but we should always learn from the best of what we've done and then apply it
to now and see what amazing synergy comes from the mixture of now and then.