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What’s ‘Shakespeare’s Dreams and Nightmares’
about?
This entertainment depicts Shakespeare’s life intermingling with his plays. The
emotional journey ranges from the light humour of early comedies to the
torment of the tragedies and the political questioning of the Roman plays. All
are linked by dreams, such as Christopher Sly’s dream of being a lord (in The
Taming of the Shrew), Calpurnia’s dream of foreboding about Caesar’s
assassination, Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking nightmare or Bottom’s midsummer
night dream of innocent bliss. Woven through these are the dreams and
nightmares of Shakespeare’s own life – theatrical success and courtly patronage,
the death of his son, political turmoil and finally the return to Stratford. As a
relief from tragedy, Hamlet gets mixed up with Much Ado About Nothing and
Measure for Measure so that Constables Dogberry and Elbow can have a go at
solving the murder in Elsinore.
The story is framed by Shakespeare’s friend and fellow-actor John Heminge,
beginning with how they met and became actors together in the turbulent days
when England was threatened by the Spanish Armada. Key events are factual,
whilst the relationship is imagined. Heminge himself had, historically, a crucial
part to play in the story. If he and Henry Condell hadn’t collected and published
the plays seven years after Shakespeare’s death (as the First Folio), eighteen of
them would have been lost. No manuscripts survive – few complete manuscripts
were ever produced - and only half the plays had been printed in separate
editions. We would have had no Julius Caesar, no Twelfth Night, no Macbeth and
fifteen other plays. Introducing the collection, Heminge and Condell say that
they took it upon themselves to do the job, though they worked from his
manuscripts. They call them his ‘orphans’. They don’t mention his surviving wife
and daughters.
There is no sign in Shakespeare’s will or anywhere else that he had planned the
collection, or done anything to preserve his plays. It is not certain that the
edition was at his request or with the consent of his family. It is even possible
that it was against his wishes. Technically the plays belonged to the acting
company, not him, though he was a major shareholder in it. It may be that
illness took him by surprise, leaving him no time or inclination to think about his
literary legacy. Or perhaps he wanted no more to do with them. Some of his last
plays are bitter, others suggest renunciation and waning powers. We embroider
on the possibly withdrawn mood of his last years and the dilemma this would
have presented to his admiring friends and colleagues.
The little else that is known about John Heminge is intriguing, and forms the
framework for our story. He married Rebecca, the young widow of another actor
who was killed in a fight in 1587. They had many children. Intriguingly, he was
also a grocer. Acting was never a secure occupation, and many professionals
must have had a second string to their bow. Grocery was a recognised and wellorganised profession at the time. There is a play of the period which satirises
grocers – Francis Beaumont’s ‘The Knight of the Burning Pestle’. It’s thought
likely that Heminge played a considerable role in the finances and management
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of the acting companies. We have a sense of what is probably his own voice in
the preface to the First Folio, with its mixture of obligatory flattery to the
nobles, admiration for Shakespeare’s works and forthright injunction to the
readers, ‘Whatever you do, buy (the book)!’
It would have been wonderful to see Shakespeare’s emergence, growth and
decline through Heminge’s eyes – and that’s what we have imagined in this play.
Will is sketched very lightly, necessarily outshone by his own creations. Heminge
sees him through the practicalities of the business. We guess that Will was an
insomniac: it’s remarkable how many of the plays – and a few sonnets - refer not
only to dreams and nightmares but to the precious and elusive value of a good
night’s sleep. Macbeth, who ‘murders sleep’, is only one of the more extreme
examples.
We take some small liberties with the texts to enable our excerpts to be
sufficiently self-explanatory. Some rearrangement of lines within the scene, or
importing a few lines from another scene, mostly does the job. A few male
characters have been changed to female. The offence to the text is no more
than is done in many stage and film productions. For light relief, however, we
give Constables Dogberry and Elbow free rein to interrogate Hamlet and his
mother.
Our main invention is the notion that Shakespeare was reluctant to have many of
the plays published. His later plays can be seen as reflecting attitudes of
increasing despair over humanity, possibly alleviated - or confirmed – by the
magical solutions found in some of the last plays, and the famous renunciation
by Prospero in The Tempest, relinquishing his powers and declaring that life
itself is a dream. The postulate of our story is that at the end Shakespeare felt
towards his works as Kafka did when he demanded that his friend Max Brod
should burn them after his death – an injunction which Brod wrestled with and
finally – to our great benefit – decided it was his greater moral duty to defy.
Heminge and Condell would undoubtedly have made the same judgement if they
had found themselves in a similar quandary. Perhaps they did.
The play was developed with the Rattle’n’Roll Players, a small theatre troupe
based in East Berkshire. We were founded at the beginning of 2015, with an
initial emphasis on Shakespeare. Our first production, Shakespeare Rattle’n’Roll,
about his treatment of gender, monarchy and war, was launched at Windsor
Fringe Festival in 2015, in the Harte and Garter Hotel – reputedly the site of the
Garter Inn where The Merry Wives of Windsor is set. We tour mostly in the Home
Counties and London but increasingly also further afield. Audiences say that our
thematic approach makes Shakespeare accessible in a new way – or even, for
some people, for the first time. ‘Shakespeare’s Dreams and Nightmares’ is
continuing in repertory whilst we also develop new material, not necessarily
limited to Shakespeare. The play is available for reading or production by other
groups or companies by arrangement.
[email protected]
April 2017