THE AUTHOR.

Like Dracula, produced by the Public Theatre in 1999, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare [abridged], is a play of multiple authorship—in this case a quartet of creators: Adam Long, Daniel Singer, Jess Winfield, and, last but certainly not least, William Shakespeare.

The first three authors began performing “abridged” versions of literary classics “as a pass-the-hat act at Renaissance Faires in California in the early 1980s.”  They were not so much playwrights as improvisational performers in the manner of commedia dell’ arte, or, closer to home, Chicago’s Second City troupe—and they called themselves “The Reduced Shakespeare Company.”  That name, which intentionally appropriates the famous initials of England’s Royal Shakespeare Company, RSC, has stuck, and the group, with various changes in membership, has gone on to create “abridged” versions of the history of America, The Bible, and the Encyclopedia Britannica.

But its first and greatest success remains The Complete Works . . ., which was initially developed in various informal venues in California beginning around 1985, and then exported to the world-famous Edinburgh Festival, where it appeared in 1987.   After success in Scotland, the play was produced in London in 1992, in New York in 1995, and again in London, this time on England’s equivalent of Broadway, the West End, in 1996.  It was still running there in the spring of 2000.

As for Shakespeare himself, the details of his life are famously scarce.  Born in 1564, he died in 1616, leaving behind some 37 plays, 154 sonnets, and a sheaf of narrative poems.  Apart from those accomplishments—disputed by some—we know that he was raised in the little market town of Stratford, that his mother was from a Catholic family (an important fact in those early years of English Protestantism), that his father was a prosperous merchant, that he married an older woman, Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children, including a son, Hamnet, who died at age 11.  We also know that by 1592, when he was 28, he was famous enough as an actor and playwright in London to be publicly attacked in a scurrilous pamphlet by Robert Greene, himself a dramatist.  And finally, we know that after a successful career he was able to buy himself a very good piece of property in his home town, to acquire the coat of arms of a gentleman, and to retire to the country, where he died, many say, on his birthday—April 23—at the age of 52.

More important than the facts of Shakespeare’s life for an understanding of The Complete Works . . .  is his posthumous biography as a cultural icon, since it is by making fun of Shakespeare—the most sacred cow in the barn of English literature—that Long, Singer, and Winfield score their comic points.

Shakespeare apparently took no pains during his life to see to the publication of his works for the stage.  Scholars assume that Shakespeare, like most of his contemporaries, held the writing of plays in fairly low esteem—much as we look at, say, scriptwriting for television sitcoms or soap operas.  These are ways to make a comfortable living but not a literary reputation.  He probably had higher regard for his sonnets and narrative poems, since these were works worthy of a gentleman, untainted by commercial ambitions.  Thus, it was not until seven years after his death, in 1623, that a group of Shakespeare’s actor friends put together the first “complete works” in what we now call The First Folio.

And that was that.  For the next fifty years Shakespeare’s plays and reputation gathered dust.  Cromwell and the Puritans came to power, the staging of plays was banned for the next two decades, the Globe Theater was demolished, and the world in which Shakespeare lived and wrote ceased to exist.  

How, then, was Shakespeare rescued from the obscurity that followed his death, becoming the literary eminence that he is today?  That process didn’t begin until well into the Restoration.  We might pinpoint the date at 1668, the year John Dryden wrote An Essay of Dramatic Poesy.  This elegant discussion among a group of young gentlemen about the relative merits of various schools of dramatic writing turns ultimately into a nationalistic showdown between advocates of the fancy-pants French neo-classical tradition and defenders of the down-to-earth English.  The climax comes when Dryden’s obvious mouthpiece produces, as evidence of the superiority of England, the fact of Shakespeare, who is then canonized as “the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul.”  Take that, Frenchie!  Shakespeare as the chief glory of English, even of world culture had been born.

One of the things The Restoration restored was theater, which had been banned by the Puritans. Revivals of Shakespeare’s plays came to be produced more frequently on the newly reopened stages of the realm—albeit in versions that the Bard himself might have scoffed at.  King Lear, for example, was given a happy ending, with Cordelia joyfully restored to her loving dad.  But no matter.  The point is that Shakespeare was becoming the yardstick by which all other playwrights were measured.  Great literary figures like Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson devoted themselves to editing and commenting on “the complete works,” the latter declaring in the preface to his edition of the plays that “Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in unexhaustable plenty.” 

Meanwhile, actors were testing the limits of their skill by taking on the great roles—Garrick’s Hamlet, or Macklin’s Shylock became bywords for Shakespearean excellence.  In New York in 1849, fans of the American Shakespearean actor, Edwin Forrest, rioted outside a theater on Astor Place to protest the presence of his English rival, William Macready, appearing as Macbeth.  Twenty-two people were killed in this outburst of Shakespeare hooliganism.  

To name a famous English actor of the twentieth century is to name someone who made his reputation playing Shakespeare: Gielgud, Olivier, Richardson, Guinness, Burton.  Or her reputation: Judith Anderson, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Irene Worth, Diana Rigg, Helen Mirren.

With the arrival of the movies, a new world opened for Shakespearean conquest.  Between 1895 and 1927—the era of silent film—hundreds of film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays appeared on the screens of Europe and America.  So powerful was Shakespeare’s reputation, so exalted his status, that moviemakers scrambled to claim him even without his words.  And as the movies learned to speak, film stars rushed to prove themselves by leaping the great hurdle of Shakespeare: Mickey Rooney and James Cagney in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Marlon Brando in Julius Caesar, Elizabeth Taylor in The Taming of the Shrew, Mel Gibson in Hamlet.

These days, Shakespeare seems to be everywhere on the silver screen, with productions of Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Love’s Labours Lost, all within the past ten years. And, of course, Shakespeare’s imaginary love life earned him an Academy Award in 1998.  Even movieland worships the Bard.

Which is exactly why something like The Complete Works . . .  had to happen.  The irreverence that prompted Duchamp to paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa expresses a fundamental human need to make fun of sacred cows.  As Ben Brantley of The New York Times said in reviewing The Complete Works, this play “embodies one of comedy’s most essential impulses: the adolescent urge to take a baseball bat to the culturally revered.”

THE SETTING.

According to the script, “The set consists of a low-budget representation of an Elizabethan theater in the fashion of Shakespeare’s Globe . . . Stage right there is a ‘Masterpiece Theater’ style narrator’s set, which prominently features a book: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.”  The term “low-budget” is key to understanding what the setting for this play is about.  The authors want us to be aware of the intentionally vulgar nature of the universe they are about to create for us, the comic shabbiness of everything that will follow.  In truth, however, the low-budget Globe isn’t really the setting for The Complete Works . . . in the way that, say, the expensively-furnished Victorian parlor of the Tesman household is the setting for Hedda Gabler.  In the latter, the playwright specifies an imaginary milieu that is crucial to the action of the play, one that provides its necessary environment.  In The Complete Works . . . , by contrast, the indispensable environment is the theater in which it is being played.  The authors place the actors on the stage and nowhere else—not in some imaginary Athenian forest, or Roman war camp, or Danish castle.  This is especially evident when we see the many instances of interaction between actors and audience that are written into the script, in particular one elaborate passage in which all the spectators in the auditorium are asked to play various parts of Ophelia’s confused psyche.  There is no missing fourth wall in this production, no withdrawal of the actors into another fictive world.  Instead, they play to and with the crowd in the shared setting that is the theater.

PLOT.

There is no plot in the sense of conventional narrative development.   In discussing this play, we need to think of the term plot as Aristotle did, defining it as “the arrangement of the incidents.”   Thus, one thing happens after another in this work, but the succession does not add up to a story.  It adds up, instead, to the completion of an insane task: condensing Shakespeare’s 37 plays into a ninety minute performance.  This ludicrous undertaking is introduced by a passage of pseudo-scholarship in the manner of Alastair Cook on Masterpiece Theater, with one of the three scholar-buffoons mixing up his note cards on Shakespeare’s life with his jottings on Hitler and consequently describing the Bard of Avon as the man who started World War II.  Eventually the scholars—who will also perform the 37 plays—change into mock-Elizabethan costumes—tights with high-top sneakers—and the fun begins.

Their first target is Romeo and Juliet.  Before launching into their version, they remind us that it would be “impossible to portray all the roles . . . with just three actors.”  They also have to confront the fact that they are all males, and thus they will not only have to find a way to fill all the roles in all the plays with only themselves, but also all the women will have to be played by men.  These two facts—the insane challenge of quick-change performance, and the undergraduate goofiness of drag acting—provide much of the play’s slapstick hilarity.

Disposing of Romeo and Juliet in about ten minutes, they really begin to pick up the pace with Shakespeare’s early, and very grisly, tragedy, Titus Andronicus, a play involving human butchery and cannibalism.  Given its culinary subject matter, they decide to treat it as a cooking show in the style of Julia Child.  The host, Titus, has had his hand hacked off at the behest of his enemy, Tamora.  His daughter, Lavinia, the hostess, has had both hands severed and her tongue cut out, also thanks to Tamora.  The show is called “Roman Meals,” and the dish being prepared for us is a stew made of the butchered remains of the sons of—who else?—Tamora.

From this five minute vignette, we move to a rap version of Othello, then a breathless condensation of Shakespeare’s sixteen comedies into two pages, followed by a one-minute Macbeth in comic Scottish accents, leading to a similarly abbreviated Julius Caesar, which segues into a one-line version of Antony and Cleopatra, then an abbreviated Troilus and Cressida featuring a battery-powered Godzilla, and, nearly wrapping up the first act, a compacted revision of all of Shakespeare’s history plays staged as a football game, with the crown of England as the ball.  King Lear is ejected from the game because, being a fictional character, he is ineligible.

At this point in the action, the three performers stop to reckon up their achievements.  Have they in fact pulled off a miracle and zipped through all 37 of the complete works before intermission?  As they tick off the plays they have crammed into the first act, however, they realize there has been a major omission: the most famous play in the English language, and Shakespeare’s masterpiece, Hamlet.  One of the actors, appalled at the idea of attacking this “really serious, hard-core play,” declares that the “football game left me emotionally and physically drained, and I just don’t think that I could do it justice.”  To which his fellow player responds, “We don’t have to do it justice.  We just have to do it.”  At which point, the objecting actor leaves the stage, eventually to bolt the theater in dread at the prospect of “doing”—however raggedly—the Shakespeare play of Shakespeare plays.  With this defection, Act One comes to an end, leading to an intermission during which, we are told, efforts will be made to capture the recalcitrant player and return him to the stage.

Act Two finally arrives, but neither the reluctant actor, nor the fellow player sent to retrieve him, has returned to the theater.  Which presents an opportunity for the third abridger to offer the audience his reduced version of Shakespeare’s 154 Sonnets, a body of lyric poetry he has boiled down to a three-by-five index card.  Before the audience can finish taking turns reading the compressed Sonnets, however, back come the missing actors, and the dreaded encounter with Hamlet—over the unyielding objections of the escapee—begins.

As we might expect, the approach to the text is eccentric.  The Ghost of Hamlet’s father, for example, is represented by a dangling sweatsock with a happy face drawn on it, while the play-within-the-play is performed by sock puppets.  Most extraordinary is the passage in which members of the audience are divided into Ophelia’s ego, id, and superego, their responses orchestrated into a chorus of waving arms, racing bodies, and howling incantations, all culminating in a stupendous scream of anguish wrenched from a random patron who has been chosen to play Hamlet’s unfortunate girl friend.  When the players finally gallop their way through the final lines of the play, they realize that they still have a “few minutes left.”  So they decide to do it again, only faster.  That second performance lasts less than two minutes.  In fact so swift is it that they still have time to spare, so they decide to do it yet again, this time backwards beginning with Hamlet’s final words: “Silence is rest the.  Thee follow I.”  And so on.  This final feat of condensation—and inversion—takes about 90 seconds, which is, perhaps, the ultimate abridgement in the history of the stage.

THE CHARACTERS.

Just as there is no conventional plot in The Compleat Works . . ., neither are there conventional characters.  The published text uses the names of the authors—Adam, David, and Jess—to designate who plays which Shakespearean role at what moment in the performance.  Adam winds up playing all the female roles and becomes the rebel who refuses to do Hamlet.  But he is the only one of the three performers to have such a distinct identity.  David and Jess are seemingly interchangeable.  Thus, the “characters” in the play will depend largely on what actors are cast for any given production.  Character, in other words, does not precede performance, but rather grows directly out of it—a variation on extentialism.

The authors do provide what might be considered a note on the “characters,” in the guise of advice on staging:

The show was developed through improvisation, and is predicated on the conceit that these three guys are making the whole thing up as they go along, getting by on blind enthusiasm and boundless energy wherever they lack talent or any real clue about Shakespeare’s work.  It’s important that the actors be genuinely surprised by each line, each action, and each turn of events. . . . The actors should respond honestly to the audience’s performance, and their own, rather than stick blindly to the written text. ​

Thus, in general terms, these three players are paradigmatic comic figures: dumb, serious, and indefatigable, determined to accomplish their ridiculous task, and ludicrously pleased with themselves despite their deep foolishness.   ​

THE THEMES.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines “travesty” as, “An exaggerated or grotesque imitation with intent to ridicule . . .”  “Burlesque” it defines as “A literary or dramatic work that makes a subject appear ridiculous. . . . Any ludicrous or mocking imitation.”  The appetite for travesty and burlesque goes back as far as we can see in western culture.  Following the performances of Aeschylus and Sophocles, for example, the Greeks would settle back for a satyr play, a bawdy show that often comprised a mocking reenactment of the action of the preceding tragedy, with Hercules or Agamemnon reduced to a roaring buffoon.  And long-standing cultural institutions have been—and continue to be—dedicated to travesty and burlesque: the medieval Feast of Fools, Mardi Gras, the varsity show on campuses throughout the land.

The Complete Works . . . participates in this tradition, and like its predecessors, it exhibits an energizing ambivalence toward the object of its ridicule.  On the one hand, we are invited to consider the downright silliness of many of Shakespeare’s comic plots, or the preposterous violence of Titus Andronicus, or the confusing hurlyburly of the history plays.  And yet the whole venture is predicated on Shakespeare’s greatness, on his enduring power to provoke and delight.  

The Complete Works . . .  pulls Shakespeare into the world of contemporary pop-culture, and vice-versa.  It contains references to Hitchcock’s Psycho, to The Beatles, to “the artist formerly known as Prince,” to rap music, and so on.  It also reminds us of modern fads in Shakespeare scholarship and production, mocking not only the Bard, but those who would “deconstruct” him.  In other words, it shows us that Shakespeare is a kind of sponge, that he can soak up rock ‘n roll and the movies, that he can absorb whatever ridiculous ideas and interpretations we impose on him.  Ultimately, it’s the rest of us who look silly next to Shakespeare, a point brilliantly made in the middle of the second act slice-and-dice of Hamlet.  Just as the players are telling us that they will have to skip the really long speeches and just move it along, one of them demurs, saying there is one speech by Hamlet that he wouldn’t mind doing.  He then proceeds to recite the “What a piece of work is man” solo—completely straight.  At that moment we realize why we are in the theater: because Shakespeare was there first and his voice is everywhere.  In The Complete Works . . . we hear it through the filter of farce, but we still hear it.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION.

1. Do you ever make fun of people or things you love?

2. If you do, why do you do it?

3. When somebody mentions “Shakespeare,” what do you think of?

4. In Shakespeare’s theater, all the female roles were played by young men, and nobody thought it was funny.  In this play, all the female roles are also done by a man, causing people to laugh.  Why the difference?

5. Why is seeing human actions in accelerated motion usually funny?

6. Do any of the plays of Shakespeare remind you of contemporary t.v. shows?

7. Do you think Shakespeare would have like this play?