Why I am writing this blog
Of course the only sensible reason for writing a blog
that practically nobody will ever read must be therapeutic. And it is. The main
reason is that I missed the experience of writing after I had been writing for
a year, continually, and by this discovered what the meaning of happiness is
for me. And writing a diary is a poor substitute for it, whereas writing a blog
might be really interesting. Not only because there won’t be any boring things
in it I don’t really care about, (like: my life?), but because what I have just
written is not quite true. I might have two “potential” readers already: the
person who gave me the idea of writing a blog, and the person who showed me how
to do it. (Well, be it their comfort: I won’t write too much, or rather too
often. Certainly it won’t be a weekly blog or something like that because you
can only do so much reading of the kind I am interested in.) In any case it is
an exciting and, as yet, disconcerting alternative to writing a diary because
it gets “published”. Which means there is always the possibility that somebody
MIGHT read it, and you don’t know who this person is. And of course there is an
“unrealistic” reason for writing this blog as well: to find out if there are other
people like me. People that have a similar kind of experience about reading, or
Shakespeare, or both.
What this blog will be about
I called my blog “Reading Shakespeare” because it will
be about reading, in the first place, and a lot of it will be about reading
Shakespeare which has become a first-rate experience for me during the last one
and a half years. (In fact it became kind of a life-saving experience when
there was suddenly nothing to write about anymore.) It is NOT a blog about
Shakespeare, which would be the most superfluous thing I can imagine. And not
least because I don’t know anything about Shakespeare, apart from general
things that everybody knows, or maybe some odd bits I remember from uni
twenty-five to thirty years ago. And I have no intention to change this. I
might even say I don’t care about “Shakespeare” at all, and I shall explain
why, giving an example: I just heard a German stage director say on a
“talk-show” that Shakespeare had no children BECAUSE he was gay. Well, serves me
right for watching German television, but this might have been the stupidest
thing I have ever heard anybody say about Shakespeare. Apart from the fact that
there are probably three children accounted for, but I might be misinformed
there. (And this certainly DOESN’T prove that Shakespeare WASN’T gay!) Hard to
tell anyway about somebody in whose case there is strong evidence that he never
existed … Just an example of the kind of bullshit you have to wade through if
you want to find reliable information about Shakespeare. And what use is the
information that Shakespeare was gay, or that he had three children, or that he
never existed, to understand “his” work better. Exactly none at all, at least
for me. Of course there is a historical context of this work, and it would be
useful to have a comprehensive knowledge of it, as well as to understand all
the strange words I still don’t understand. But what I am interested in, and
like to do more than anything in the world, is an entirely different kind of
“research”. In the department of serious human occupations it might come
closest to what writers and directors do when they undertake to adapt a work of
literature for the screen. Or what actors do when they are doing their
“research” on a complex character that is unlike what we see in the ordinary
kind of “mainstream” film or tv series. (Which explains my obsession with
actors that had always been there, but that I came to understand and “use” only
recently.)
My favourite example for the kind of process I have in
mind has to do with Shakespeare as well, but it will take a lot of explaining
and will be kind of long, I am afraid. It is about Richard Armitage playing the
dwarf Thorin Oakenshield in the “Hobbit” trilogy. Which is a stellar
achievement in “understanding” dwarves – but, although many people might have
noticed how great the acting is, only few (and probably not even the actor
himself!) would have noticed THAT. I did, because I had become an “expert” on
Tolkien’s “dwarves” (to be distinguished from “dwarfs” in a “real world” or
fairy-tale context!) during the preceding twelve years. Largely unknown to
myself, and mainly by reading the “Sagas of the Icelanders” which are from the
same historical context Tolkien “took” his dwarves “from”. And I had been fascinated
by the “Tolkien” films from the beginning, mostly because the characters in
these films are so incredibly “believable” and, at the same time, so much
“more” than I had expected them to be that they are the main reason, in my
opinion, why Middle-earth “feels” like a real world. I had noticed this in the
“Lord of the Rings” films, but watching “The Hobbit” I became aware for the
first time how much “larger than life” you have to make these characters to
make them “work” in that way. Of course it is a joint effort, and the make-up
and clothing departments might bear as much responsibility for the outcome as
the actors. In case of the characters that are closest to the characters in the
books - like Gandalf, Galadriel, or Bilbo Baggins - it appears like fifty
percent of the work is done already, and you get the impression that they would
have “felt right” even if the acting hadn’t been that exceptional. But in all
three cases it was, so it is hard to tell. Whereas Richard Armitage started
with a big “handicap” as one of the two dwarves “they” could never make look
like dwarves. Or rather they wouldn’t when they realized they didn’t want to
destroy these faces. The other dwarf that didn’t look like a dwarf was Aidan
Turner as Kili, in fact the two actors cast as dwarves who have “classically”
beautiful features. And it appears to have been impossible to get anything
positively “dwarvish” out of them. Whereas people with “great” but not
classically beautiful faces, like Ken Stott or Graham McTavish, could easily be
made into very beautiful dwarves just by adding a big nose and a beard! - The
difference in the case of Richard Armitage and Aidan Turner is that Kili
doesn’t “feel” like a dwarf for one minute of all the three films, whereas
Thorin IS a dwarf the moment he steps through the door of Bag-end at the
beginning of “An Unexpected Journey”. And I think this is even the moment when
the great hidden world of the dwarves, with all their stubborn pride, their
beautiful achievements and tragic history, enters the scene “for real”. This is
exactly where you see what difference the acting makes! – And I think Richard
Armitage was very aware of the “handicap” and knew that it was HIS job to make
Thorin feel a lot older and much more “dwarvish” than he looked. The first step
was probably to “build” a voice that was really extraordinary and obviously
took some time and a lot of work, and before he “had” that voice he didn’t feel
very comfortable “being” Thorin. It reminded me of what Ray Winstone (probably
my absolute favourite actor before Hollywood “got” him) said in an interview
about playing Henry VIII. Unlike Richard Armitage he isn’t THAT keen on talking
about his work, and, being asked what had been his worst experience playing
Henry VIII, answered briefly: “The first fifteen days”. Ouch! I thought. That
would have been the first fifteen days of SHOOTING! Before he really “had” his
character. And I suppose Richard Armitage’s “first fifteen days” were rather
longer. But in both cases it might have been one of the reasons why the result
turned out so extraordinary. I cannot go into detail about Thorin, but there were three tiny moments in the first
film that utterly convinced me. Where I thought: That’s it. I have been
RIGHT!!! I have known all this time how dwarves think and feel, and I have been
right. And where I first realized that I had gone a long way myself already,
finding the dwarves. Looking for the dead dwarves from Moria in “The Lord of
the Rings”, the appendix, the “Silmarillion”, and, finally, the “Sagas of the
Icelanders”, only my efforts couldn’t come to fruition until I finally SAW
Thorin Oakenshield in “An Unexpected Journey”. And realized that our conception
of what a dwarf is was a hundred percent identical. Although the journey there
was probably very different. Of course there were some texts both of us would
have read, as “The Hobbit” and the appendix to “The Lord of the Rings”. But to
bring the dwarves completely “to life”, find their human (or rather “dwarvish”)
content, something that would bring them closer to our own “experience”, both
of us obviously needed something else still. In my case it was the “Sagas of
the Icelanders” which are actually about real people living in Iceland in the
early Middle-ages. And there is just this kind of human content, personal
drama, and interesting predicaments that make you feel close to these
characters from an archaic context similar to the one of Tolkien’s dwarves. In
the case of Richard Armitage the world he “went to” investigating Thorin was
obviously Shakespeare’s. Which I didn’t understand at all at the time but do
now, partly, having read Shakespeare continually for one year and a half.
Because if you are looking for human content of the “non-bullshit” kind there
is certainly no better place to be. And in particular for an actor who needs
some kind of “reference” to imagine a strange character like a dwarf and play
him. Because, unlike some of the other of Tolkien’s “alien” characters, a dwarf
didn’t really “exist” before he played him. (No offence to John Rhys-Davies who
made a very beautiful and impressive dwarf as Gimli, but, as to the “dwarvish
content”, they got it dead wrong!)
Great! I hadn’t even realized what a stellar example
this is before I wrote it down. Not only because it is about actors, dwarves,
Shakespeare, and the “Sagas of the Icelanders”, which might be everything I
became obsessed with in the last ten years or so. (With the possible exception
of Jane Austen, but it was impossible to fit her in there! And there won’t be
much more about dwarves, I promise!) And not even because it proves that, in
times of need, you’ll find what you are looking for in “Shakespeare”, but
because it is such a great example that what these people do we admire for
their extraordinary work is partly something we all do occasionally, or even
quite often, mostly unknown to us. And it is called READING. And, for me, it
consists in using MY OWN imagination and experience to get at the things I care
about – in a film, a book, the story an actor is telling about his character,
and, not least, my own thoughts, feelings and reactions doing this. And one of
the most important things is even not to KNOW too much – in particular: not to
think that I know ANYTHING already because, in this case, I am reading only what
I already know. And that’s boring. That’s the reason why I don’t read five
hundred page novels stuffed with detail I don’t care about and things about
people I already know but Shakespeare where I get a surprise at almost every
turn I take.
And, what my beautiful example shows as well: we don’t
need a lot of “information” about a certain text to understand what we are
reading because there is always a lot of content there already. Biographical of
course, but, more important, other stories we have read, other characters we
have “been” in our imagination, other worlds we have discovered. There is
always “treasure”, you just have to find it. And this will probably be the next
part of my blog: how I found treasure “in Shakespeare” for the first time.
