Whenever you go to see a Shakespeare play being performed, there is always one question lurking in the back of your mind as the lights dim and the curtains open. Which bits will they cut? Because they usually do. There is usually something missing.
Not that there is anything wrong with cutting Shakespeare, of course. Every director has to decide – or discover, through a process of rehearsal and preview – whether every part of the script justifies its inclusion. And, invariably, not every bit will. The director may cut for numerous reasons; because a scene slows the play down, because it is painfully unfunny, because it gets in the way of the willing suspension of disbelief. For instance, if you go to see Henry VI Part I it might be missing Talbot flirting with the Countess of Auvergne, because it slows things down, or Joan of Arc summoning ‘fiends’ from the underworld, because it’s a bit weird for things to suddenly get supernatural in Act 5 of an otherwise ‘realistic’ history play. Or, if you go to see The Taming of the Shrew, it might be missing the lengthy prologue with Sly because it seems to be setting up a ‘framing device’, setting up the action as a play within a play, that isn’t reprised at the end so seems a bit pointless in retrospect. Or, if you go to see Love’s Labour’s Lost, the director might cut some of the stuff with the academics discussing anagrams, because they are not complete sadists.
Usually, of course, the more famous a play is, the less inclined directors are to tamper with the text. There are, after all, school parties to consider. So if you go to see Romeo and Juliet it’s likely that most of it will be intact (though they might cut some of Mercutio’s longer speeches) because the audience will be answering questions later. That said, if you go to see Macbeth it’s unlikely to include the bit where the witches break into a showtune and summon Hecate; for years directors have looked for excuses for cutting this silly digression, as it’s hard enough to get the audience to accept a play with witches and ghosts without including a tap-dancing goddess of the underworld as well. Fortunately scholars have now proved that that bit was interposed by someone else, probably Middleton, meaning directors have a cast-iron get-out for not including it.
A director may also cut to change the emphasis of a play – giving less time to supporting characters to emphasize the leads – or for clarity of action or motivation. Any director putting on Hamlet, for example, as to decide at what point Hamlet actually decides to become pro-active and seek revenge on the King (when he decides 'to be' and take arms against his sea of troubles). Because, in the text as written, his motivation is a little muddy, to say the least (indeed, some would say that is the whole point). Is it when he sees the King pray? Is it when he sees the Norwegian army marching over the hill and is strangely put in mind of eggshells? Is it when he ponders mortality with the skull of Yorick? Or a director may – perversely, because directors are often perverse – decide to increase ambiguity by removing speeches where a character explains their motivation. If it’s already clear enough why a character is doing a thing, do we need to hear them explain their reasoning in laborious detail? Back in Shakespeare’s day, people did, but not so much now. Modern Shakespearean actors are highly skilled in getting across the meaning of a line irrespective of what actual words they might be saying!
Hamlet is one of the few, possibly the only – I can’t be bothered to look it up – instances of us being given an insight on how Shakespeare’s plays were cut during his time, as we have the ‘bad folio’ version probably based on prompt sheets, probably those of the actor who played Marcellus. We know his plays were cut because in Romeo and Juliet there’s a line in the opening spiel reassuring the audience that it will all be over in two hours’ time, but there’s no way the full play can be performed in that time. (Maybe they cut the opening spiel?) When it comes to Hamlet, I’d quite like to see a version based on the ‘bad quarto’, as in some areas it makes more sense (it has the ‘to be or not to be’ bit earlier on and Gertrude realizes the King is a bad ‘un).
This is just the beginning of a long, long history of the plays being cut for performance. Nahum Tate did his own version of King Lear with a happy ending. Davenent and Dryden did their best to make a tolerable version of The Tempest, and then Davenent, in his madness, decided that what Macbeth really needed was more showtunes. Henry V had its funny bits excised to make it into a proper tragedy. Charles Johnson did a ‘mash-up’ of the comedies. Garrick cut the bit with the gravediggers from Hamlet and Bowdler famously bowdlerized the plays (but not for performance, for family readers). The idea that the plays should be performed as written – that the text was sacrosanct – only came along in the early 18th century.
Another area where the plays are usually cut is in the cinema. Partly, obviously, because films tend to have shorter running times. They may also have less physically captive audiences. And films are primarily a visual medium – there’s a Hitchcock quote somewhere about, ‘Once you’ve written the script, you add the dialogue’ – and if a play is to work in that medium it needs to be adapted to an extent. Do we need the dialogue establishing that these two characters are standing on a battlement if we can actually see the battlement? That sort of thing.
And so it is very rare for a film to give you the full text. Ken Branagh basically stuck to the script with Henry V, even including the mind-numbing stuff in French, and then perversely – I did warn you about directors – decided to do a version of Hamlet which combined both the good folio and quarto versions in a way which defied both logic and the risk of deep vein thrombosis. I mean, it’s very good, but it’s not the play Shakespeare wrote, it’s like having a version with all the deleted scenes from two different versions reinstated. But by the time he got to Love’s Labour’s Lost he basically came to the very sensible conclusion that the less of the play he used, the better.
Television has a better record of doing ‘uncut’ versions of the play, because the audiences are in the comfort of their own homes and, certainly in the early days, television was a fairly theatrical medium – plays being rehearsed and then performed live or ‘as live’ – but with the added bonus that the cameras could get in close so the actors could give smaller, more nuanced, more filmic performances, and the occasional perverse director could decide that a monologue would be better done as a pre-recorded voice-over while the actor mugged away staring into space doing ‘thinking it over’ acting.
So, up until the 1980s at least, television versions of the plays tend to have very few cuts. Indeed, that was one of the raisons d'être of the BBC’s run of not-quite-but-nearly-all the Shakespeares in the late 1970s and nearly 1980s. At last, the plays as they were written, unabridged. Well, nearly... they didn’t include Sly’s prologue for The Taming of the Shrew, they cut Act 3 Scene 10 of Anthony and Cleopatra, and by the time they got to Cymbeline they were basically skipping whole chunks of the script in order to get it over with before the pubs shut. (This is not counting the innumerable cut lines from the Henry VI plays, Richard III and others).
Anyway, this got me thinking – what is the rarest Shakespeare
scene? Which scene is most often deleted? Which scene is almost always not
included in performances of the plays? I have a vague memory that one of the
play texts features a pointless scene about a character buying a goat or a
horse but getting tricked, as some sort of obscure topical joke. Maybe that is
it, but I’m not sure which play it was - because if I were to look for it, it wouldn't be there...
* This is not an article about stuff deleted by Shakespeare during the writing process, though, of course, we do know a little about that because Love’s Labour’s Lost has a transcription error and accidentally includes two versions of the same scene.
