Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the article “What Light Through Yonder Windows Breaks?” by Stephen Greenblatt, which appeared in Civilization (©1995 by L.O.C. Associates, L. P.). The CD-ROMs referred to in this passage are discs that, when inserted into a computer, provided the user with multimedia information on a given subjects.

Shakespeare on CD-ROM is potentially the most important thing to happen to the texts of Shakespeare’s plays since the 18th century, when they were first given the serious scholarly attention reserved for cultural treasures. It is important to understand why the innovations represented by these CDs—the BBC Shakespeare Series’s Romeo and Juliet and Voyager’s Macbeth—are so significant.

What exactly is a printed play by Shakespeare? Where it was once thought that Shakespeare’s plays sprang from his noble brow in definitive and final form, it is now widely recognized that many of them were repeatedly revised. Some of these early alterations were likely made by the theater company to adapt a play to a particular occasion, others by a collaborator, others for the government censors, still others by the printer, but many of the most significant changes seem to bear the mark of Shakespeare himself. For example, there are two striking distinct versions of King Lear, three of Hamlet and two of Romeo and Juliet. The point is not simply that Shakespeare had second or third thoughts but rather that he apparently regarded his plays as open and unfinished; he intended them to be repeatedly performed, and this meant that they would be continually cut, revised or even radically reconceived according to the ideas of the players and the demands of the public. The words were not meant to remain ton the page. They were destined for the beauty and mutability of the human voice.

Nevertheless, even today most editors silently stitch together the different versions of Hamlet or King Lear in an attempt to present the “final” version Shakespeare supposedly meant to leave behind. These printed editions also hide or at least de-emphasize the presentation of the play on stage.

The CD-ROM is a radical departure. The words of the play appear on the screen, synchronized with a complete audio performance. It has long been possible to read the text of the play while listening to a recorded version, but now it is wonderfully easy to locate particular scenes and instantly hear them, to go back and listen again, and to stop and look at the glasses keyed to difficult words and phrases. Each CD includes video clips of some of the most famous scenes, so that the pleasure of listening and reading can be supplemented with glimpses of a full production.

These video clips are at once among the most promising and the most frustrating aspects of the current technology. The quality of both the sound and the visual effects is mediocre ,and, to make matters worse, in the BBC’s Romeo and Juliet the actors on the video are not the same as the actors reading the words. The dubbing is inevitably imperfect, and it is disconcerting to hear Albert Finney’s unmistakable voice as Romeo coming from Patrick Ryecart’s mouth. Still, there is considerable pleasure in the brief glimpses of performance, a pleasure quite distinct from watching the play on stage or film, since it is here linked so intimately and effortlessly with the words on the screen.

Let me be clear: These Shakespeare CDs are not principally interesting as performances. Rather, they are remarkable because they change our experience of what it is to read a play, insistently recalling for us that the words were meant for our ears as well as our eyes. Texts on CD-ROM have, in effect, recovered something of the magic that books possessed in the late Middle Ages, when they were still rare enough to seem slightly eerie, as if whey were haunted by spirits.

One stunning moment on the Romeo and Juliet CD-ROM is a brief audio clip of an interview with the actress Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, who had played Juliet in 1924. The interviewer asks her to recite some lines from the balcony scene, and after a brief demurral, she begins to speak the enchanting lines in a lush style completely different from Claire Bloom’s quietly restrained rendition. For a minute or so we get a glimpse of what the technology can do. If a stage performance at its best makes us experience a certain inevitability, leading us to think of the actors’ interpretation of the play, “This must be so,” then a CD-ROM has the power to make us think, “it could be so different.” We could compare three or four radically different performances of the same scene, just as we could for the first time easily compare differences in the text. In one version of Juliet’s death scene, for example, she stabs herself with a dagger and says, “There rest.” In another version she says. “There rust.”