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Notes -
I went to see a local production of The Merry Wives of Windsor last week, twice. After the first time, I immediately knew I wanted to go back and watch it again, so my wife and I got tickets for another show and took my mother two days later! It was truly fantastic, a wonderful production, with actors who absolutely exuded charisma and interpretations of the setting that were beautiful and brilliant, life and joy affirming comedy. They did a mid-century modern setting: Falstaff was a down-on-his-luck fat-Elvis, his band were a bunch of greasers, Fenton was a jock, Slender a preppy doofus, Slender's uncle a southern sheriff. And it got me thinking:
Has every Shakespeare play more or less remained in production within a generation, such that we are watching an unbroken chain of transmission from producer-to-producer, or have some of them gone moribund and been revived from scratch?
Obviously, the producers and directors of this play had seen it before, if not in person in some filmed version. The stage directions, the character interpretations, the delivery of the lines, are partly derivative, surely, of other productions. When the Welsh preacher talks about pretty Anne Parson's "great gifts" and gestures to indicate breasts, or he and the uncle ask Slender whether he can please the girl and make lascivious motions to indicate sex, that is a particular interpretation of the language, not natural necessarily to the text, and I found myself wondering if that kind of thing is mostly passed down, or invented whole cloth at some later. Particularly for the canonical English writer in Shakespeare.
Are we watching a interpretation of the play that is based on productions earlier this century which have been recorded, which themselves were influenced by earlier productions, in a direct line more or less to the Globe? Or to when? Surely, even before recordings, most times some individual at the theatrical company would have seen an earlier production of Wives and been able to offer that experience as a basis for interpretation, and in that earlier production someone would have seen an even earlier production, how far back do we think that went? To Victorian times? To Shakespeare himself?
Some have always been less popular or have had peaks and troughs of popularity, but it is interesting that he has pretty much been consistently popular since he wrote them. There was never really a major lull in production, certainly not between 1650 and today.
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