Here in Stratford-upon-Avon there is just no escaping him.
Shakespeare tat.
Shakespeare, not as Bard, but how the mighty have fallen, as a brand.
And there is always more to come.
Next year, brace yourself for the great man's 400th anniversary.
Shakespeare has been such a towering figure for
so long he has all but eclipsed the other great playwrights of his age.
And so, for this, my edition of Artsnight,
I want to ask this question:
What about all the other extraordinary, witty,
talented risk-taking dramatists of the Renaissance stage?
What about Marlowe, Webster, Ford, Middleton, Johnson?
Men who didn't necessarily think like William Shakespeare, who were
less transfixed by kings and queens and hierarchy, more interested in
the day-to-day lives of the English around them, and therefore were
writing the soap operas of Elizabethan and Jacobean stage.
Sex romps, domestic tragedies.
If, in some parallel universe where the great figure of
the Bard had somehow vaporised, and we saw our own past through their
eyes, how different would it feel?
Right now, the RSC and Shakespeare's Globe in London are reviving some
of these other playwrights at a festival of Not Shakespeare,
because the Bard was never alone.
We are used to the idea of Los Angeles as the place where film
is being developed now.
Think that London was exactly the same when theatre began to
get underway on the South Bank.
All sorts of dramatists from all over,
creating a new style of writing.
One playwright, born 20 years after Shakespeare, mostly forgotten
by history and being rediscovered right now, is John Ford.
John Ford is one of the most underestimated
playwrights of the age.
He was born in Devon, a bit younger than Shakespeare, and he specialised
in intense psychological thrillers on subjects like adultery, incest,
and witchcraft.
For John Ford, the great motivator in human life is the sex drive.
And for centuries he was written off as a bit melodramatic,
a bit too much.
But now a group of actors, directors and academics are
determined to bring John Ford back to the modern stage.
Shakespeare's Globe is dedicating a whole season to this virtually
unknown playwright.
Today actors are gathering in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse to
start rehearsals on Ford's bizarre tragicomedy, The Queen.
Could we have all the guys in the first scene on.
Ford was writing during the reign of Charles I, an age of courtly
decadence, and in the theatre of extravagance and sensationalism.
The poison of a flatterer's tongue, is a thousand times more deadly
than the twinges of a rope.
Fie!
Do you rail on your friends thus?
The theatre's profanity and edgy realism would prompt
the Puritans to close them down altogether a decade later.
Save for one play, Tis Pity She's A Whore, Ford's work
has never come back into fashion.
Until now.
At The Globe, the actors are getting a crash course in Ford.
They are mounting five of his plays in as many days.
And they have just six hours from first readthrough to stepping out on
the stage for a live performance.
Apparently it's the way it used to be done quite a lot.
You got the script on the day in Shakespeare and John Ford's day.
Things were quite impulsive and straight up rather than
considered, over four or five weeks like we do nowadays.
Come in.
Stay, execution.
It is Her Majesty's pleasure.
The Queen is the tale of a woman-hating rebel,
condemned to death for plotting to kill the Queen.
Strangely, she falls in love with him just before his
execution, pardons and marries him.
You are sorry for your late desperate rudeness, are you not?
I am not sorry.
Nay more, will not be sorry.
Know from me, I hate your sex.
It's a darkly humorous play that speaks to Ford's most unusual mind.
Ford is a dramatist whose very interested in mental health,
if you like, in modern terms.
He's very sympathetic to people who have odd, unusual mental conditions.
You have characters who are melancholy, who have weird
delusions, peculiar sexual tastes.
And this is not seen as something that one looks at
and shudders, but rather that one as an audience tries to understand.
Meanwhile, in Stratford, the Royal Shakespeare Company is
staging Ford's Love's Sacrifice, in the first known public
performance in 400 years.
A tale of jealousy, betrayal and bitter revenge, it tells the
story of a rich duke whose wife and best friend fall for each other.
It's classic Ford - sex, yes.
Gore, you bet.
But also real psychological insight.
If anybody has ever felt love or jealousy or ambition, then they are
there, depicted in Love's Sacrifice.
I think John Ford is a really interesting playwright.
His obsession with the extremities of human psychology, Tis Pity She's
A Whore is a play about incest.
Here is a play about excessive jealousy.
Ford's genius lies in his characters,
such as the clownish nobleman, Mauruccio, played by Matthew Kelly.
This fantastic coat, look at this.
It looks like my mam's lounge curtains, this.
It probably could be, actually.
Isn't that fabulous?
You don't think my bum looks big in this, do you?
Kelly's character is a comic fool, related somehow to
Shakespeare's Malvolio, Ford gives him real complexity and heart.
He's a big, daft nelly, really.
I don't know why they picked me!
But I'm digging very deep for that, obviously.
But I did understand that part.
And actually, strangely, he is the silliest man in it on the surface,
but in actual fact he turns out to be the most moral and is the only
one to actually have a happy ending.
I don't want to spoil it for anybody else, but it gets pretty
intense and pretty tragic.
Back at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, six hours
after the first readthrough, the audience is arriving for the
performance of Ford's The Queen.
She goes upstairs.
But the actors are far from ready.
Let him come back on.
Come back on.
They are still rehearsing the final act.
We are going now?!
We are live in five seconds.
Thank you.
It is madness, obviously.
You could say it is incompetence, or you could say it's managed manic
nonsense.
Given that we have five hours to rehearse a 21,000 word play with 15
characters, that's just the way that it works.
APPLAUSE.
Rascal, cannibal, that feedest on men's flesh.
Pray, pray heartily gentleman.
As I live, and by this hand now...
LAUGHTER.
Queen, here quaffed my blood like wine.
Alas, poor man.
APPLAUSE.
So what do the audience make of John Ford's The Queen?
It was a bit Pythonesque in a way, the way the language just cantered
along, and yet sometimes it kind of horrifies you by doing things
it's not supposed to do.
You feel Shakespeare would be more proper.
It was good it was completely unpolished.
It's nice to see them something quite raw.
Some of the comic performances were fantastic.
They don't really fit into modern ideas
of psychological consistency, they veer in all sorts of directions.
I enjoyed it hugely, but I still think it's a very odd play.
So, Ford, with his emphasis on sex and extreme emotional conditions is
very different from Shakespeare.
Ben Johnson, a much bigger figure, focuses his attention
on satirising society as a whole.
A chippy, rough edged, intellectually brilliant,
working-class Londoner, Johnson assaulted the nouveau riche.
Anger thrums through his plays and coloured his private life.
A soldier, he narrowly escaped hanging for killing a man in a duel.
In his day, Jonson's sharp edged writing was adored.
He was the first playwright to publish
his collective works and he was buried here at Westminster Abbey.
The great mystery about Ben Jonson is why he's not better known today.
In his lifetime he was just as famous as Shakespeare,
if not more so.
His gritty, urban satires are saturated with the language
of the street and revel in the ordinary lives of common people.
A lifelong fan is Sir Trevor Nunn, the celebrated director,
whose production of Jonson's Volpone, opens here at the Royal
Shakespeare Company in Stratford.
Sir Trevor Nunn, best known as a great Shakespearean
director, and for blockbuster musicals like Cats, once ran the
RSC, and back in 1986 he was pivotal in creating The Swan Theatre.
Its special job is not Shakespeare, to put on plays
by other Renaissance dramatists, and it's at The Swan that he is now
returning with Jonson's Volpone.
I met Sir Trevor in the airy rehearsal room above its stage to
talk about the remarkable Ben.
A London boy coming from quite a poor background,
the language he uses is the language of the London streets.
I would say Jonson's language is an extraordinary mixture
of two extremes.
He was brought up by a stepfather who was a bricklayer
to whom he became apprenticed.
And then a kind of miracle happened in Jonson's life.
He managed to get a place, I suppose some sort of scholarship
place, at the Westminster School.
And he did a great deal of classics, and that never left him.
And therefore, in every Jonson play, there is a
huge amount of classical allusion.
And yet, it is combined with street slang.
A lot of Jonson's language is even more
conversational than Shakespeare.
And a very, very different character as well.
As we have alluded to, almost slightly chippy, perhaps,
about his background.
Very, very proud of his learning.
Confrontational.
I'm sure Jonson was a handful.
I'm sure that he could be abrasive.
And some of the anger, the accusatory anger in his plays, was
drawn from his personal life, or tipped over into his personal life.
Anger is central to Volpone, a dark satire about
a wealthy man who is obsessed with gold, and wants to get even richer.
Good morning to the day, and next, my gold.
Hail the world's soul, and mine.
Volpone comes up with a scam to con his rich and equally
greedy clients out of more money by feigning his own death.
Probably Ben Jonson's best-known play, and an absolute cracker,
what is it about Volpone that particularly attracts you now?
I think Jonson wrote that play as a confrontational piece.
I think he wanted to be addressing his audience direct
on the subject of greed.
And as we all well know, the subject of greed is not just still with us,
it's even more present than ever.
And it's extraordinary how much of the language seems still to
relate to the crises that make front-page news at the moment.
Because this is a play in which everybody is parasitical
on everybody else.
Yes, but he's already a very wealthy man.
And the people who he's tricking, are all of them very wealthy.
So it isn't about, how do I come by a bit of money in this life?
It's about, I must have more.
And therefore I must have more than other people.
I must have the most.
Jonson was, yes, exaggerating, yes, placing believable people
in exaggerated, comedic situations, but with a real intention of getting
people to think in a way that says, "We need to change this, don't we?"
So enormously ambitious, in fact.
Yeah, he's definitely a social reformer, and in Volpone vastly so.
He's writing about greed and a sense of contemporary London.
And this is early capitalist London,
just as we now have late capitalist London, in some respects.
Very late. Very late, yes.
Sir Trevor Nunn, thank you very much indeed. A pleasure.
So, again, nothing like most of Shakespeare,
Jonson's plays satirised the moneyed classes of the day.
Other Renaissance dramatists concentrated their work
on a different group - women.
One of the joys of Renaissance plays
is that they are brimming with fantastic female parts -
young women, old woman, good women, bad women -
and the likes of Ford and Webster went even further
than Shakespeare in taking the tragic heroine
and thrusting her to the forefront of their dramas.
By the early 17th century, playwrights such as John Webster
were even giving women the title role.
So we are forced to express our violent passions
in riddles and in dreams...
Here, Gemma Arterton is seen playing the Duchess of Malfi
as unassertive and sexually confident heroine.
as an assertive and
Here, upon your lips, I sign your Quietus est.
In a recent RSC production of Webster's The White Devil,
set in modern times, the lead role is a feisty woman
arrested for murdering her husband after conducting an illicit affair.
I scorn to hold my life at yours, or any man's entreaty, sir!
I think what we see in the Jacobean repertory
is the role of female characters becoming much more prominent.
They are women who are expressing their will,
expressing their desires, their sexual desires,
how they want to live, who they want to live with,
trying to break out of the sort of patriarchal structures
that are telling them how to live their lives.
And unfortunately, in the tragedies,
it always ends up that they end up paying for it.
And in Ford's Love Sacrificed, the lead female gets her comeuppance
for falling in love with her husband's best friend
and ends up murdered by her spouse in cold blood.
In the face of death, she remains defiant and unrepentant.
The actor Catrin Stewart, best known for her work in Doctor Who,
has relished playing this 17th century role,
a woman who is nobody's sidekick.
There's this amazing scene with the Duke, her husband, at the end,
which I love performing, because it's so modern,
the language is so easy and free,
and she just completely puts him down and provokes him.
And she says, "Thank heaven he was so slow as not to wrong sheets,
for as I live, the fault was his, not mine."
And then that drives him wild, and it's really quite powerful
to perform every night, I love doing it.
She has this feistiness and strength that is able to just put him down
like that, I mean, it's amazing,
and the thought changes and all these different tactics she uses.
And he does eventually kill her because she has provoked in so much,
and she's willing to die for the man she loves.
The role of women in Renaissance theatre
is the subject of a special workshop at the San Wanamaker Playhouse,
the Globe's replica Jacobean theatre.
The very first theatres were open to the air,
but in the 1600s indoor playhouses like this opened across London -
an innovation that helped bring more women into the audience
and female roles to the stage.
Indoor theatres are smaller than big outdoor theatres,
they are seen as more socially exclusive.
Perhaps in a way they are seen as safer,
they are in more kind of posh districts of town.
And so you have a greater proportion of women going,
women going in couples, women going with their husbands,
women going, essentially, unaccompanied
other than by a servant to the theatre.
And playwrights respond by providing stories for them.
But what we have to remember is that during theatre's first flowering,
the female roles on stage were never played by women.
In the 1620s and '30s, female roles in all plays,
both indoor and out, were taken by boys or young men.
It's sort of somewhere between 12 and 22,
so we're talking early teenage into adolescent and young man.
Women never performed on the commercial London stage
for reasons of propriety and just history, really,
until right up until the 1640s.
I think dramatists were using the idea of cross-dress performance
as a potential source of interest.
It can be funny, it can be sexy, it can be erotic.
There can be all sorts of layers of interest
packed into the idea that a female role is played by a boy.
The Globe education team wants to explore
how the audience experiences a scene
when a boy actor plays the lead female role, compared to a woman.
Fie, what's all this? One of your eyes is bloodshot!
Female actor Beth Park takes to the stage first
in Webster's The Duchess Of Malfi.
'Twas my wedding ring,
and I did vow never to part with it but to my second husband.
In this scene, the Duchess is seen in a position of power,
controlling her servant, Antonio, who she wants to marry.
You have made me stark blind. How?
There is a saucy and ambitious devil is dancing in this circle.
Remove him.
Fie! Fie, what's all this?
Next up, 15-year-old guy Amos performs the same extract.
'Twas my wedding ring, and I did vow never to part with it...
..but to my second husband.
You have parted with it now. Yes, to help your eyesight.
APPLAUSE
The dominance of him in the beginning was much higher than hers.
I would say the main difference is body language,
and I'd say, as a woman,
the way you hold your body and the way you move your body,
it's very hard to replicate that as a boy or a man.
I kind of disagree on the body language, because I think
even the way you're standing now... LAUGHTER
..the costume you're wearing is making you move in a certain
and actually I found that convincing.
It really emphasised the theatricality of the scene,
of theatre, and it didn't matter to me that you're not a woman,
I didn't hold that against you!
And I was absolutely convinced by the role you were playing,
even while I was able to remember that you're not a woman.
Many of Webster's female characters
are driven by the spirit of rebellion,
and rebellion is at the heart of my final example tonight
of not Shakespeare.
Christopher Marlowe
is known as the playwright that Shakespeare learned from,
and also for his mighty line,
unrhymed but strongly rhythmical verse,
of a kind picked up by Shakespeare in every single one of his plays.
But what is often underestimated
is the difference between the two as characters.
Christopher Marlowe was a natural rebel,
simply an angrier, pricklier character than Shakespeare.
And I think the key to his work
lies in his extraordinary and bizarre life,
an odder tale than any you would ever see on the Elizabethan stage.
The eldest son of a shoemaker from Canterbury,
who went on to grammar school,
and, unlike Shakespeare, university at Cambridge,
Marlowe was a dark and difficult man.
A natural outsider, he was a spy,
almost certainly gay, and probably an atheist.
His plays, including Doctor Faustus, about the man who sells his soul
to the devil for infinite knowledge,
were wildly popular but often trod a dangerous line on religion.
To understand Marlowe's world and his plays,
you have to start backwards with a story of his death
here in east London at the age of just 29.
Did Marlowe pay a terrible price for his subversive writing?
On the 30th of May, 1593, Marlowe was here at Deptford Strand,
which was then a grimy and busy maritime port.
He spent the afternoon in a lodging house near here,
talking and drinking with three other men,
and then a couple of hours later, he was dead,
killed by a dagger thrust through the brain above the right eye.
The inquest put this down to a drunken brawl,
but many people think there was rather more to it than that.
Just before his death, we know that Marlowe had been arrested
and placed under government surveillance.
He was in trouble because papers had come to light
suggesting he was expanding extremely dangerous religious views.
suggesting he was expounding
The most damning of them, the so-called Baines note,
accused Marlowe of being a propagandist for extreme atheism.
Now, at a time when the entire society and state
depended on a religious consensus, this was tantamount to treason.
And so, many people believe that,
far from this being an unfortunate brawl,
in fact Marlowe was the target
of a cold-blooded political assassination.
Just down the road in the local churchyard,
Marlowe is buried in an unmarked grave.
Or is he?
Now, there is a theory
that Marlowe isn't buried anywhere round here at all,
because his death was faked,
that it was a fix by his powerful spying friends
who wanted to save his skin and their own,
and so they arranged for him to flee to the Continent.
Today, a plaque commemorates the playwright.
Whilst we may never know the truth about his death,
one thing is clear -
Marlowe was seen as a dangerous religious rebel.
And he wasn't afraid to take big risks in his writing either.
His play The Jew Of Malta
crackles with religious and political intrigue.
On stage at the RSC this summer,
it's a tragic farce about a Jew called Barabas
who has his wealth forcibly removed by the Christians,
so Barabas sets out to reap bloody revenge,
training his servant accomplices
in the art and mentality of retribution.
First be thou void of these affections,
compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear.
Be moved at nothing, see thou pity none,
but to thyself smile when the Christians moan.
Brave master!
I talked to the director of the RSC production
of The Jew Of Malta, Justin Audibert.
Barabas, The Jew Of Malta, is in some sense, of course the villain,
but he's quite an attractive villain, and people argue
that he has some kind of relationship to Marlowe himself.
Like Marlowe, he's a person that is really, really clever,
really, really intelligent,
and really, really good at dealing with people.
And he's frustrated by the society he's in, because he's an outsider.
I would say that Marlowe sees himself,
a really talented guy with this high education,
but the only kind of ways he can make money
is by kind of indulging in, like,
activities that are on the outside of society -
spying, counterfeiting money and writing plays.
And also probably he was gay, the famous comment about,
"He is a fool who does not love tobacco and boys."
Absolutely. An outsider in every possible way.
An outsider in every possible sense, and Barabas is kind of
his phantasma, his revenge, his way of getting back at society.
And, of course, this is a play,
although it is directed in some respects against Jews and Judaism,
it is really against religion of all kind,
and this, in many respects, seems to be a play
which is toying with the idea of atheism.
It's not absolutely explicit, but it's involving the audience
in that kind of complicity, quite a dangerous thing to be doing.
One of the most radical things you could possibly be doing.
I suppose, if you were looking for a 21st century equivalent,
it would be making some kind of piece of work
that suggested joining Isis was a good idea.
It was that radical an idea.
There are people, of course, who think that Marlowe escaped
and isn't buried here, but went abroad
and re-emerged as William Shakespeare.
What do you make of that?
If he did, he had an awful great playwriting transplant,
because having worked on the plays of both of them,
they are completely different in tone, in quality,
in the themes that they are interested in.
It feels to me that Marlowe has a kind of anarchistic spirit.
His plays are about big ideas, they are often
about a kind of outsider of sorts railing against the system,
and he's interested in the kind of...
slightly more in the shades of grey of political endeavour.
The mystery of Marlowe's death may never be solved,
but his plays endure.
And so, against the odds, do a whole clutch of great writers
who have only one misfortune - that they are not Shakespeare.
And I'm going to leave you with 15-year-old Guy Amos
playing The White Devil.
Here he is in John Webster's play as Isabella,
desperate to regain her husband's love.
Doth not my absence from you now two months merit one kiss?
I do not use to kiss.
If that will dispossess your jealousy, I'll swear to it.
Oh, my loved lord, I do not come to chide.
My jealousy!
You are as welcome to these longing arms, as I to you a virgin.
Oh, your breath!
Out upon physic and...
something sweetmeats, the plague is in them!
You have oft, for these two lips, neglected cassia
or the natural sweets of the spring violet.
They are not yet much withered.