Known for his contemporary takes on Shakespeare, Aotearoa theatre director and scholar David Lawrence believes the Bard’s intentions have been long compromised by being organised into the genres of comedy, history and tragedy.
Instead, in his book Shakespeare’s Tropes, Lawrence covers the 41 plays in the order they were written, “to be read as if you were binge-watching them on Netflix”. He makes comparisons between Shakespeare and The Sopranos, The Simpsons and Star Wars along the way.
Photo: supplied
David Lawrence was the artistic director of The Bacchanals and head of research and associate artistic director of the Pop-up Globe.
The book became a project Lawrence turned to as a way of dealing with his own personal upheaval during the pandemic - from live theatre vanishing as a result of Covid-19 to his mother's death.
"(The book) came out during a very difficult period so it was great to have something joyous to focus on for a few hours each day.
"I had a rotten 2020 in that the pandemic sort of meant the end of any semblance of a career thus far, because when you're in a business that requires the mass congregation of people ... Trying to stage theatre with huge audiences during a time of plague is not ideal."
The Pop-Up Globe had planned to tour internationally after several successful seasons in Auckland but ended up shuttering entirely and filing for bankruptcy in 2021.
"Thinking that I had 18 months of work in Australia and North America ahead, I instead had what's been, well, three years sitting in the living room."
"My mother was dying through 2020, and that was sort of the catalyst for the book in a way, although I wasn't aware of it at the time. The book is sort of bookended by the deaths of my parents."
Lawrence first discovered Hamlet at 15 after his father's death.
"It was Shakespeare that got me through my father's death when I was a teenager, sort of philosophically and psychologically, and 30 years after that, Shakespeare sort of helping me practically through mum's death in giving me something to think about each day besides my grief."
The Pop-Up Globe ran for several seasons in Auckland and toured the country. Photo: Supplied
With Shakespeare's Tropes, Lawrence wanted to keep Shakespeare relevant to the modern day, just as the Pop-Up Globe's performances did.
"Shakespeare's about real people and real emotions and ambitions and foibles and follies and passions and desires, rather than highbrow culture, in a way. And that's what's led me to always think about the plays as pop culture, rather than high culture."
Lawrence takes a chronological look at the Bard's plays from the early historical plays to the later works like The Tempest.
"I think the plays are connected to each other. Not in the fashion where Shakespeare intended you to start with the first play ... the ideas that he introduces in his early plays evolve into new variants of those ideas.
"As an artist he was always coming back to the same motifs, the same characters, the same scenarios and looking at how can I do these better?"
It is hard to make a firm timeline of Shakespeare's plays, and much about his actual life remains a bit uncertain. Lawrence had to make his own interpretations.
"About half the canon, it's circumstantial guesswork. ... My guesswork is based on well, how does that play relate to the other plays thematically, how does that play relate to the plays around it? Could that suggest that Othello actually comes between Hamlet and Twelfth Night, rather than after?"
A fight scene from a pop-up Globe production choreographed by Alexander James Holloway Photo: New Zealand Stage Combat School
The First Folio published in 1623 divided Shakespeare's plays up by genres - comedies, tragedies and histories - and that is generally how they have been classified ever since by scholars.
"We always think of Othello in its relationship to Hamlet and King Lear and the Scottish play. We don't think about it in terms of the plays composed closest to it and how those might have influenced it. We think about it as a tragedy.
"The histories we think of in their historical order as king, not in the order that Shakespeare composed it."
Shakespeare's son Hamnet died in 1596 and his own father not long afterwards, events which scholars pick as being a factor in the writing of Hamlet.
"For me, when my way into the plays is through grief and suffering, and when my reasons for doing theatre have always been about trying to turn pain and grief into something worthwhile ... I can't help but read the personal in the professional."
Shakespeare's Tropes also dips into the Beatles, The Simpsons and even the cult rock band The Mountain Goats led by John Darnielle.
"Shakespeare, for me, is the sort of consuming be-all and end-all of theatre, that everything in western theatrical history, at least, culminates in Shakespeare and leaps off whether it's a reaction for or a reaction against Shakespeare.
"I would say the same with pop music, that everything culminates in the Beatles. Everything up until the 1960s culminates in the Beatles, and what the Beatles were doing in the 1960s was very similar to what Shakespeare and his company were doing in the 1590s in terms of revolutionising the profession and industry that they were a part of.
"And you could say shows like The Sopranos and The Simpsons have done the same things in terms of modern television."
Lawrence follows the recurring patterns in Shakespeare's plays.
"Part of the way this book functions is like a TV episode guide from the '80s and '90s where there are cataloging lists of familiar things to look out for.
"Some of them occur only two or three times in plays written in close groups together and there are others like say, fathers and daughters and the dead coming back to life and treacherous brothers that begin in the very earliest plays and follow through and evolve and distill right until the very last plays."
Could Shakespeare have imagined that people would still be reading his work centuries later?
"No, I think he was just trying to pay the rent and meet deadlines," Lawrence said.
"Theatre, everything culminates in opening night, whether you are ready for it to or not.
He was "working in a high pressure commercial environment, but at the same time, producing great art within that. Same as the Beatles, trying to meet two major record release deadlines each year."
More information about Shakespeare's Tropes by David Lawrence here.
