It’s generally agreed that Shakespeare, if he were alive today, would wish to write for TV. But what exactly? Drama commissioners might feel his stage work hadn’t shown enough interest in the police procedural, except for a few comic cops in much ado about nothing.
But seeing as 14 of his 37 plays have English or Scottish monarchs as their main characters – from the oft-performed King Lear and Macbeth to the rarely seen Cymbeline – perhaps the obvious modern commission for him would be The Crown. But even Shakespeare – a very free fictionaliser of English history – might be surprised at some of the factual liberties taken by Peter Morgan.
Of the scripts that Shakespeare wrote in his time, the ones that most neatly fit TV are those that belong to genres familiar in the medium – thrillers and family dramas. And one of the greatest of each will be screened by the BBC this spring. Most of BBC Two’s peak-time this Saturday is given to Andrew Scott in Hamlet, a recording of the version that Robert Icke directed at the Almeida last year. In May, the BBC will show a new TV version of King Lear, with Sir Anthony Hopkins in the title role. He leads a cast that includes Emma Thompson and Emily Watson as two of the king’s spurned daughters, and Jim Broadbent as the eye-popping Earl of Gloucester.
The recurrent obstacle is how to make verse drama, written more than four centuries ago, fit into the TV stream of cop shows, soap opera, reality TV and news bulletins. In this respect, Icke’s Hamlet transfers especially well to the medium, because the director’s theatrical conceit was to stage it in the style of a Scandi-noir crime drama: off stage developments were reported in rolling TV news reports that recalled Borgen or The Killing. Independently, the new King Lear has also gone for modern-dress, although in an alternative historical setting – Hopkins’ Lear is a military dictator of England – which should sit happily alongside the line of dystopian TV led by The Handmaid’s Tale and The Man in the High Castle.
But although Shakespeare has always seemed a natural collaborator for the BBC – the UK’s national broadcaster, England’s national poet – their relationship has often been strained. In 1978, it began a BBC Television Shakespeare project, bringing all 37 plays to screen over seven years. Ominously, the production supposed to begin the run – Much Ado About Nothing, with Penelope Keith and Michael York – was declared unfit for broadcast by BBC bosses, in circumstances that remain mysterious, but seem to have related to the clarity of the language for international audiences. Romeo and Juliet was substituted, with Much Ado About Nothing not represented until six years later, in the final season, by a new version starring Cherie Lunghi and Robert Lindsay. So many BBC managers’ blood pressure was raised or pensions threatened by the troubled project that Shakespeare was subsequently often seen as dangerous material for TV. Even so, the current BBC director general, Tony Hall, whose core strategy has been to revisit glories from the past is reported also to have contemplated a new BBC TV Shakespeare.
Shakespeare has maintained a frequent TV presence in recent years. Sixteen of the plays have been screened in the past decade, seven of them in BBC2’s The Hollow Crown which started in 2013 and presented the two Richard and six Henry plays as a mini-series about power-seeking, which made an interesting adjunct to The Crown, and also Game of Thrones. In 2005, the BBC more contentiously abandoned the original language to present, on BBC One, modernised versions of four plays, with Peter Moffat re-imagining Macbeth as restaurant unrest between Scottish super-chefs. Sally Wainwright, meanwhile, relocated The Taming of the Shrew to Westminster politics. However, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, shown on BBC One in 2016, condensed by Russell T Davies – and now the Hamlet and King Lear – seem to represent a return to the original verse.
And, despite the historical difficulties, TV Shakespeare has some advantages over theatre. As The Hollow Crown has demonstrated, the camera offers an easy solution to the problem in the history plays of working out who among the throng of nobles with county surnames is whom: the camera can unobtrusively pick out Essex when Wessex refers to him, or vice versa. Due to the vocal and physical demands of the role, Lear is rarely played on stage by an actor who is the septuagenerian-plus that the text specifies the character to be. Laurence Olivier, at 76, and weakened by numerous serious illnesses, could never have attempted the role in theatre, but was able, with sensitive filming schedules, to record a performance at the ITV Granada studios, screened by Channel 4 in 1983, in which he displayed a poignant frailty that would have been unsustainable live.
The new BBC King Lear also has theatrically impossible personnel. Anthony Hopkins has not appeared on stage for many years, citing boredom with the repetition of theatrical runs; so BBC and co-producers Amazon (America remaining a key market for TV Shakespeare) have been able to present a Lear that would not have been plausible for the RSC or National. (Although Hopkins did play the part at the latter venue, in 1986, when, in his 40s, probably too young.)
There are also debits in the switch between media, principally that Shakespeare poses a scheduling problem. Most of the plays have to be significantly cut or rushed to get them much under three hours, which wipes out most of an evening: the Hamlet fills BBC Two from 9pm to 12.15am on Saturday and Sunday. Theatre audiences are allowed breaks – Icke’s Hamlet, at the Almeida and in London’s West End, had two intervals – but TV screenings usually demand unbroken attention.
While freeze and replay technology permit viewers to consume at their own pace, I’d like to see more innovations of shape in televised Shakespeare. What about, for example, the five acts of Hamlet or King Lear stripped from Monday to Friday in 30-40 minute instalments? Because, if the Stratford dramatist were writing for TV today, it seems unlikely that he would still choose to structure his plays in 180-240-minute chunks.
Sometimes, Shakespeare has uncredited influence on TV shows. Dallas was originally pitched by creator David Jacobs as “Romeo and Juliet in the oil fields”, with the feuding Ewing and Barnes clans as Texan versions of Shakespeare’s Montagues and Capulets. Vince Gilligan, show-runner of Breaking Bad, has acknowledged that the concept was partly based on Macbeth: in particular, the realisation of both central characters that “blood will have blood”, with one act of violence inevitably necessitating others. But, as the new Hamlet and King Lear show, Shakespeare was, without knowing it, writing for television four centuries ago.
The five best Shakespeares on TV
The Taming of the Shrew (1980)
Director Jonathan Miller’s inspired casting of Shakespearean novice John Cleese as Petruchio, the man unable to cope with a proto-feminist, made this a highlight of the uneven BBC Television Shakespeare.
Television can give a memory and afterlife to the transient art form of theatre, and this made-for-TV version provides a permanent reminder of why Laurence Olivier became one of the most revered figures in theatre. A superlative supporting cast includes John Hurt as Fool.
At a time when British theatre claimed to be short of black actors capable of playing the Moor of Venice, Trevor Nunn cannily cast the opera singer Willard White in an RSC production, with Ian McKellen a sensuously villainous Iago, that the BBC blessedly preserved for posterity.
David Nicholls’s script for the updated Shakespeare season brilliantly re-imagined Beatrice and Benedick as warring TV co-presenters, played by Sarah Parish and Damien Lewis, with Billie Piper as the weathercaster caught between them.
The Hollow Crown: Richard III (2016)
Benedict Cumberbatch was deservedly Bafta-nominated for his performance as the crookback king. Crucially, the actor constructed a screen performance – delivering dialogue and soliloquies intimately – rather than stage-acting in front of cameras.