Tony Howard

A flash banner.

Tony Howard (Senior Lectuer, Warwick University), author of Women as Hamlet (CUP, 2007) discusses his choices in conversation with Claire Daniel, a research intern working in the Globe Education department.

Tony Howard

1) Kott, Jan: Shakespeare: Our Contemporary (London, Methuen & Co.,1964)

Background: Polish theatre critic (1914-2001), whose work came into prominence during the thaw in the Communist regime in the 1950's and early 1960's

Kott was crystallising what has always been true - the fact that we don't just come to Shakespeare because he is great, eternal, and takes us back into the past, but because he is always reflecting the present. This found its way into the best work of the RSC and the National, and it's continued ever since.

2) Kosintsev, Gregori: Shakespeare, Time and Conscience (Dobson Books Ltd.,1967)

Background: Russian filmmaker from the 1920's to 1970's - director of prominent films of Shakespeare plays such as Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1969).

He shows us the creative process which goes into a production of Shakespeare...he showed us how creative we must be if we're to stage or film Shakespeare. And the words, if you'll let them, will kick-start your imagination.

3) Frye, Northrop: A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (Columbia University Press, 1965)*

Background: Prolific Canadian critic (1897-1985).

In Frye's book, Shakespeare is a philosopher, telling us things that unconsciously we know about ourselves but need literature to remind us of. It’s a short book, it’s delightful to read and it’s inspiring.

4) Barton, Anne: Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London, Chatto & Windus, 1962)

Background: Author and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge - author of Essays, Mainly Shakespeare (1994)

Anne Barton traces Shakespeare's evolution of the idea that living's acting and our world's a stage. She shows with great finesse and clarity that it's always there, from the earliest Histories to The Tempest... I’d recommend anybody who's dipping into Shakespeare for the first time to look at it.

5) Wilson Knight, G.: The Wheel of Fire (london, Methuen & Co., 1930)

Background: Outspoken English writer and critic (1897-1985) - author of The Imperial Theme (1931) and The Crown of Life (1946),

In his chapter, “The Othello Music", Wilson Knight argued that Othello is a poet... preyed on by Iago, who is prose...[W]e can hear music dying, as the voice of the poet turns to raging insanity. This is typical of the way that he'd see a play as one great poetic organism.

6) Tynan, Kenneth: Various works

Background: Flamboyant English theatre critic, theatre executive and author (1927-1980) - author of Curtains (1961) and Show People: Profiles in Entertainment (1979).

Theatre is the place where we come to see ourselves on stage. Sometimes that's a wonderful, reassuring thing, but sometimes it's disturbing because we see things about ourselves we'd rather not know. Hamlet called theatre the mirror up to nature, and Tynan agreed. He stressed that theatre is the public art, and therefore the most important.

7) Granville-Barker, Harley: Prefaces to Shakespeare (London, Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd.,1933)

Background: British producer, playwright, and critic - author of the plays such as The Voysey Inheritance (1905) and Waste (1907).

The Prefaces have gone in and out of print with regularity: every 15 years they're rediscovered as the most brilliant introduction to Shakespeare's writing from a theatrical point of view. They're beautiful guide-books. They also show you that you don’t have to be mystified by Shakespeare. If you see them as scripts to be performed, then the clarity and subtlety go hand in hand. I would say that everybody who works in Shakespeare today owes their jobs to Harley Granville-Barker.

(Please note titles 1, 2 and 5 are currently out of print)

What sparked your initial interest in Shakespeare as a child?

In 1964, when I was at school, it was the year of 'The Shakespeare Quatercentenary', the four-hundredth anniversary of his birth. Around that time there were two great serials on BBC television based on the Histories. One was called An Age of Kings and one was The Wars of the Roses. These ran across the schedules like soap-operas and were fantastically involving and exciting. At the same time, as I was beginning to study Shakespeare at school, I went to London and saw Laurence Olivier’s Othello at the Old Vic, which was an amazing experience. Those two things, having Shakespeare piped into the house, and going out and having the thrill of live performance, are what really got me involved. On t.v. we saw the plays' intense realism, in the theatre Olivier was larger than life, and in their ways they were equally true. My path to Shakespeare has always been through performance.

Do you find that you think that Shakespeare runs the risk of being sidelined in the modern age?

Not at all. The writers around at his time have been, like Marlowe and Jonson, and that's a pity. But Shakespeare’s part of the way we think, and the way we talk, and we can’t get away from Shakespeare.

That’s interesting as one of your chosen books, Shakespeare Our Contemporary by Jan Kott, firmly locates Shakespeare in the present. How did this book inspire you?

Shakespeare Our Contemporary certainly was inspirational, and it had a profound effect on British theatre and on thinking about Shakespeare.

Jan Kott was a Polish critic. In the 1950’s and 60’s there was a political thaw in Communist Poland, and the theatre became the place where people could talk about truth and freedom. Kott wrote a series of semi-academic articles to do with Shakespeare and performance, many of which were reviews of Polish productions where plays like Macbeth and Richard III became a coded vehicle for talking about freedom, repression and national identity. This became the core of Shakespeare Our Contemporary.

Kott's book was translated into French, which is where the director Peter Brook came across it. He was so impressed that when he directed Paul Scofield in King Lear at Stratford in 1962, he introduced people involved in the production to the book, and in particular to a brilliant essay 'King Lear or Endgame'. Arguing that Shakespeare’s politics are our politics - and that the questions of tyranny, cruelty, surveillance and injustice Shakespeare discusses still trouble the modern world - Kott also looked at the philosophical side of the plays. It seemed to him that if Samuel Beckett, in his play Endgame (1957), was saying that we live in an Absurdist universe with no meaning and no God, Shakespeare had already shown this in King Lear. The essay on Lear and Endgame became the starting point for Brook's great production, which was also filmed, and led to Kott's book being translated into English.

Shakespeare our Contemporary became amazingly controversial, really divisive. There were those who dismissed Kott as some obscure East European who was distorting Shakespeare (he stressed, for instance, that there is a great deal of cruelty, nightmarish elements, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream). But on the other hand, led by theatre people like Brook, many believed Kott was crystallising what has always been true - the fact that we don't just come to Shakespeare because he is great, eternal, and takes us back into the past, but because he is always reflecting the present. This found its way into the best work of the RSC and the National, and it's continued ever since. Certainly all the teaching or talking about Shakespeare that I've ever done has always been based on the assumption that while we read Shakespeare to find out about the past, the true reason for using him is because, uniquely, he reflects the present and tells us about ourselves.

This scholarly and theatrical division of opinion is interesting with regard to rebuilding the Globe, which also created a divide between the two communities.

I was one of those who were a little sceptical to begin with about the idea of the Globe, because I thought that while you can re-create the Globe architecture, you couldn't re-create the Globe audience. And so perhaps there would be something too scholastic about it. However, the moment I first went to see The Two Gentlemen of Verona in the pilot year, which was in modern dress, and I saw the audience immediately begin to take part and respond, I realised that the Globe was not a space where you would be carried back into the 16th century. The Globe is a space where the audience recognise each other; they meet each other and they become an active part in the event. That's how, miraculously, the Globe has become the most contemporary theatre in London, because the audience rule.

Could you tell me about the second book you’ve listed; Gregori Kosintsev's Shakespeare, Time and Conscience?

This was also about discovering that Shakespeare doesn't belong on the shelf, but in performance and in the lifeblood of society. Kosintsev was one of the great pioneer filmmakers in Russia in the 1920’s and he continued to make films until he died in the early 1970’s.

During the last stage of his career, Kosintsev focused on the classics, predominately Shakespeare; he directed Hamlet and King Lear. Shakespeare, Time and Conscience is a set of essays which he wrote at various times. Kosintsev staged Hamlet in the theatre right after Stalin died - Stalin hated Hamlet because he recognised it as a play about a police state, a play about himself, so he effectively banned it. The moment Stalin died, Kosintsev staged a production because, finally, he could talk about repression.

The production was very successful and he obtained backing from the Russian government in the sixties to film Hamlet; this is one of the greatest Shakespeare films and still stands up beautifully; it’s epic in scope yet very moving in its focus on individuals. Well, Shakespeare, Time and Conscience shows an artist coming back again and again to Hamlet, and my favourite section is his on-location diary. He shows us the creative process which goes into a production of Shakespeare.

For example Kozintsev writes that he's at a loss with ‘To be or not to be’. It’s the most famous speech in the world, the most famous piece of philosophy in any piece of writing for the stage, and he just didn’t know how to do it. So he gives us a list of things he tried out. He tried, for instance, giving Hamlet the speech while he was walking through a seaside town down narrow streets. He kept coming up against brick walls - trying to follow a line of thought, only to discover that the thought led nowhere, so that Hamlet can’t move forward, has to go back. Another idea was to place Hamlet in a burning forest, another was to put him on a ship - the ship would be swaying and the rhythm of its movement would reflect the rhythm of the verse.

In the end, he chose none of those. Hamlet just meditated by the sea with rocks and clouds. You could say that the Soliloquy defeated Kosintsev, but what mattered wasn't his final solution, it was the fact that he showed us how creative we must be if we're to stage or film Shakespeare. And the words, if you'll let them, will kick-start your imagination.

Northrop Frye: A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance is the next book you have chosen. Could you tell us a bit about the reason why?

Northrop Frye was a Canadian critic. He was very influential when I was at University. He felt that all writers, at all times, use literature to explore the fundamental - the 'archetypal' - questions of life, so he’d write as much about the Bible as he would about, say, Dickens.

In A Natural Perspective, Frye examined Shakespeare’s comedies, especially the last plays, and argued that they embody a myth. He pointed out that most Shakespearian comedy is about our dissatisfaction - with the city, with the repressions of family life and social life, with the fact that we’re all held back by the older generation (or feel we are), until we grow older and then it's our turn psychologically to feel menaced by the young. Frye shows that Shakespeare shows people going on a journey - a journey to escape, a journey to discover themselves as they trek through the forests or the woods, or across fields or seas; and in that sense for Frye there is something life-affirming about the very structure of Shakespearian comedy.

In Frye's book, Shakespeare is a philosopher, telling us things that unconsciously we know about ourselves but need literature to remind us of. It’s a short book, it’s delightful to read and it’s inspiring.

The journey made by the character of Hamlet is fascinating in terms of your study of women as Hamlet. To many people, it is such a sacred play, that women's interpretation of this journey has been very contentious and problematic for a lot of people.

Yes. I think that the question of Hamlet is: to what extent is it a tragedy? Of course, you may say that it’s obviously a tragedy because Hamlet dies, everyone is wiped out and it’s a terrible story of waste; but you can also call it a drama of self-discovery - Hamlet is set this terrible task, and though the cost is awful he actually achieves what had to be done. In my book I call it a process of individuation, a young person achieving maturity.

That’s why Hamlet is so extraordinary to play and has been deeply important for so many of those who've played it. I've been writing about women in the role - over the centuries hundreds of eminent actresses have acted it, often brilliantly, and their achievements need to be recovered and honoured - but anyone who plays Hamlet goes on a journey of their own. It's about whoever plays the part.

When Mark Rylance played Hamlet at Stratford in 1989, famously, he was in pyjamas and his Prince was very close to madness in his terrible loneliness. When he did it on the Globe stage in 2000, although he didn’t change his interpretation very much, he now played it to the audience, so that even though he was very isolated from the other characters, in a strange way he was with us. That's the miracle of Hamlet, it's about being helpless but at the same time discovering so much, feeling so much, thinking so much for the audience. When you say it’s a sacred part, I think Northrop Frye would say it's become almost a sacred play, that there's something almost ritualistic about staging this play, all of us going together on this dark journey.

I'd like to ask you now about Shakespeare and The Idea of the Play by Anne Barton and how it inspired you.

It's a beautiful book. Anne Barton has a piece in the latest Around the Globe [the Globe Theatre's quarterly magazine] exploring Love's Labours Lost, and there she articulates what her book is about - the fact that Shakespeare was a playwright who happened to be an actor, and as such he was so fascinated by the nature of illusion and pretence that he made theatre a kaleidoscopic metaphor for human experience.

Anne Barton traces Shakespeare's evolution of the idea that living's acting and our world's a stage. She shows with great finesse and clarity that it's always there, from the earliest Histories to The Tempest. And she opened up a whole area by believing that scholars and performers could share the same space, that they had a vast amount of knowledge and experience to give each other. Her book helped shape the way that Shakespeare's been taught in this country from the universities to the schools. I’d recommend anybody who's dipping into Shakespeare for the first time to look at it.

G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire is the next book on your list. Could you tell me why?

Wilson Knight made his mark in the 1930's. He was an extraordinary man with some rather peculiar beliefs (he calls Claudius the hero of Hamlet, for example, and Hamlet the villain), but he passionately set out to show that Shakespeare was a poet - a poet who explored dynamic new sets of images in every play.

In his chapter, 'The Othello Music', Wilson Knight argued that Othello is a poet - a romantic whose eloquence radiates idealism and love - but that he's preyed on by Iago, who is prose. His speech is all cynicism and destruction. Wilson Knight says that in Othello we can hear music dying, as the voice of the poet turns to raging insanity. This is typical of the way that he'd see a play as one great poetic organism, and it encouraged me to feel that as we read Shakespeare, we all have the right to dig, to find the images and feel part of the creative process.

You’ve also listed the works of Kenneth Tynan as inspirational, would you like to talk about them?

Yes. Kenneth Tynan published a rehearsal log of Olivier's Othello, but it's his work as a journalist and reviewer that's most important. Two of his collections, Theatre Writings and Profiles have come out again recently.

In the 1950's, Tynan wrote for the Observer and The Evening Standard and terrified the theatre establishment. He backed the Royal Court, writers like John Osborne and the 'angry young men', as well as Berthold Brecht and Samuel Beckett, and he mocked the West End. He was the wittiest critic; he could destroy a career in a single column if he wanted to, and he often did.

However, he was also an idealist and truly believed that theatre mattered. When Olivier became Artistic Director of the National in 1963, he asked Tynan to be Literary Manager in charge of many aspects of the theatre. The relationship between Tynan and Olivier was very stormy, Tynan was nearly sacked several times as he wanted to put on deeply controversial plays; but he ensured that the National was looking out for new work, such as Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967).

But above all, Tynan wrote brilliantly. He was the finest front-line reporter of what happens on a stage that Britain's ever known, summing up a performance with an unforgettable phrase. It's a talent few reviewers understand now. Tynan gives you a sense of the importance of the theatre event, and he was remorseless when he felt writers or producers were wasting their opportunity to show life truthfully. Tynan died quite young, but his books are like a time machine that will take you back into the theatre of the fifties and the sixties. It will be telling you that theatre's joyful but it's not escapism. Theatre is the place where we come to see ourselves on stage. Sometimes that's a wonderful, reassuring thing, but sometimes it's disturbing because we see things about ourselves we'd rather not know. Hamlet called theatre the mirror up to nature, and Tynan agreed. He stressed that theatre is the public art, and therefore the most important.

Could you tell me a bit about Harley Granville-Barker's book, Prefaces to Shakespeare?

We're back at the source now. Several of the writers I've discussed were revolutionary in their time, but really we could do without any of them if we have Harley Granville-Barker.

Granville-Barker was at the heart of the Edwardian theatre. He was a playwright, a director and an actor. He was very close to George Bernard Shaw, and around 1910 he was working at the Royal Court Theatre establishing a new serious drama. He was responsible, more than any other single person, for the idea of a National Theatre in this country; he campaigned for it for years and we probably wouldn’t have one were it not for Granville-Barker.

Around 1912, he began a series of Shakespeare productions which completely revolutionised Shakespearean theatre. He directed The Winter's Tale, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night. The most famous was A Midsummer Night's Dream, which included strange golden fairies played by adults who looked like they'd stepped out of mechanical clocks. They were gold and bronze and moved like figures from ancient temples, and they were set against beautiful Greek lovers who were, in turn, set against the Mechanicals, Bottom and co., who came out of English folk-dance. The Lion, for instance, in the Pyramus and Thisbe play, was like a hobby horse. Granville-Barker took these three radically different cultures and stuck them together, and crucially, he left out romantic lighting and woodland scenery, and stripped the stage down to its basics, getting back to the Shakespearian simplicity. These three productions changed Shakespearian staging forever.

He gave up working in the theatre, but he wrote a series of books from the director's point of view called Prefaces to Shakespeare. He analysed the shape of the narrative, the way key scenes are constructed, and the function of each role. As a fellow-dramatist and actor he blended all the approaches to Shakespeare you could imagine, to expose the craftsmanship.

The Prefaces have gone in and out of print with regularity: every 15 years they're rediscovered as the most brilliant introduction to Shakespeare's writing from a theatrical point of view. They're beautiful guide-books. They also show you that you don’t have to be mystified by Shakespeare. If you see them as scripts to be performed, then the clarity and subtlety go hand in hand. I would say that everybody who works in Shakespeare today owes their jobs to Harley Granville-Barker.

And finally, in light of the discoveries you made in your recent work, do you think it would be interesting to have a female Hamlet on the Globe stage?

The Globe has experimented with all-female companies. This shed particularly fascinating light on The Taming of the Shrew, but I would be more interested to see a production there that shook up gender by surrounding a female Hamlet with an all-male cast. An all-male cast as in Shakespeare's day. In a situation like that, of course we know she's not a man; but then Hamlet in turn knows that he isn't the man who was born to kill Claudius, that he isn't the man who was born to take revenge. Hamlet is someone in an unnatural position trying to be what he isn’t, and to have an actress adding one more layer to that, transforming herself before our eyes, would be thrilling.

The first performer I discussed in my book was Angela Winkler, who won the Best German Actress award for her Hamlet in the year 2000. Her director Peter Zadek, who had directed the play before, said that in our time, at the turn of the Millennium, it needs to be a woman who asks the questions Hamlet deals with. He struck a chord there. I think we're all learning to re-think what gender and identity are, and what they mean for different cultures. An actress playing Hamlet at the Globe, I think, would register that the world and its peoples are all changing.

Interview by Claire Daniel, research intern at the Globe.

Tony Howard's Biography

Building Your Library

In the future we hope to be able to offer you the opportunity of being able to purchase the 'Volumes that I prize' through our online bookshop.

Back to top