Garry Wills - Verdis Shakespeare: Men of the Theater

Table of Contents

ALSO BY GARRY WILLS

Outside Looking In
Bomb Power
Martials Epigrams
What the Gospels Meant
Head and Heart
What Paul Meant
What Jesus Meant
The Rosary
Why I Am a Catholic
Saint Augustines Confessions (Translation)
Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit
Saint Augustine (A Penguin Lives Biography)
Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America

INTRODUCTION

Comparative Dramaturgies

Verdi adored Shakespeare. Besides the three operas he took from him, he considered (though briefly) doing a Tempest or Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet (B 1.450). He considered for a very long time, and came near to creating, an opera from his favorite play, King Lear. Verdi was the first Italian composer who worked hard to get back to Shakespeares authentic text.

Verdi could not read Englishthough his wife, who helped him, couldbut he carefully compared the best recent translations (some made by his friends or acquaintances). He had not been to England when he composed Macbeth, but he had acquired, from friends like Andrea Maffei, solid information on the way Macbeth was staged in the country of its origin (M 27). For Macbeth, he cut the play down to opera size himself, creating a prose synopsis for his librettist, Francesco Maria Piave, to versify. He was dissatisfied with Piaves work, correcting it, adding suggestions, above all trimming it. He wanted no waste words. He insisted to Piave, Poche parole! Poche parole! Poche parole! (Cut the words! Cut the words! Cut the words!) (M 10). Finally, in his exasperation with Piave, he had his scholar friend Andrea Maffei, an expert translator, correct portions of the libretto (M 69). Verdi worked himself so deeply into Shakespeares mind that, in revising Macbeth for a Paris premiere, he took the gem of this performanceLady Macbeths aria La luce languedirectly from Shakespeare, in collaboration with his wife: Verdi himself actually wrote the text for this arianot only the detailed prose version he first sent to [his librettist] Piave on 15 December, but the verses themselves, to which the librettists made only a few minor changes (L1.xx).

Most of the many operas made from Shakespeares plays are failures. Loose adaptations have been more successfulovertures, fantasias (like Tchaikovskys Romeo and Juliet), incidental music (like Mendelssohns for A Midsummer Nights Dream), variations (like Berliozs Beatrice and Benedict). The rare success of a complete Shakespearean operalike Benjamin Brittens A Midsummer Nights Dreamis a one-off for its composer. Verdi is the only composer who created three solid masterpieces from Shakespeare plays. They not only succeeded at the time of their premieres but have grown over the years, standing out even from Verdis own impressive line of great works. The last twoOtello and Falstaffare arguably the greatest things he ever wrote. He composed more operas from Schillers plays (four) than from Shakespeares, and some of the Schiller works are very impressiveespecially Don Carlos. But none towers above his Shakespeare operas.

Verdi, across time and language barriers, obviously felt a great affinity with the dramatic ideals of his Elizabethan predecessorand with good reason. The two men worked in theater conditions with many similarities. Both were supplying performances on a heavy schedule, to audiences with a voracious appetite for what they wrote. In a career of little over twenty years, Shakespeare turned out thirty-eight plays (along with some collaborations). Verdi had a longer career, of fifty-four yearsbut with a sixteen-year inactive period between Aida and Otelloin which he created twenty-seven operas (along with important revisions). These men were producing two major theatrical works a year during their most intense times, and were engaged in other poetic or musical compositions, as well as managerial and directorial work along the way. Shakespeare was composing narrative poems and sonnets. Verdi was composing religious and ceremonial and chamber music. Some of their contemporaries were even more prolific, especially Rossini in Verdis young years. The pace of the professional life was unlike anything we see today, when a single play is kept in performance for long runs:

We can only be stunned at the memory powers of the actors on such a schedule. The opera houses of Verdis time were just as bustling with new works and crowded seasons.

Shakespeare and Verdi were creative volcanoes. But mainly they were men of the theater, engaged in the companies they worked with, active at each stage of the production of the plays and operas that filled their lives, Shakespeare as an actor in his own and other mens plays, Verdi as a vocal coach and director of his works. Theirs was a hands-on life of the stage, not a remote life of the study.

Those who doubt that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare are working, usually, from a false and modern premise. They are thinking of the modern playwright, a full-time literary fellow who writes a drama and then tries to find people who will put it onan agent to shop it around, a producer to put up the money, a theater as its venue, a director, actors, designers of sets and costumes, musicians and dancers if the play calls for them, and so on. Sometimes a successful playwright sets up an arrangement with a particular company (Eugene ONeill and the Provincetown Players) or director (Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan), but the process still begins with the writer creating his script, before elements are fitted around it, depending on things like which directors or actors are available for and desirous of doing the play. Producers complain that it is almost impossible to assemble the ideal cast for all the roles as the author envisioned them in his isolated act of creation. The modern writer owns the play by copyright and can publish it on his or her own, whether produced or not. None of these things was true of dramatic production in Shakespeares time.

Then, the process began with the actors. They chose the playwright, not vice versa. They owned the play, to publish it or withhold it from publication. Each troupe had limited resourcesoften, nine to twelve adult actors (all male), and far fewer boy actors (sometimes as few as two). A Swiss traveler in 1599 saw about fifteen players handle the forty-five speaking parts in Julius Caesar