"MASTER PIECES"
Mark Rylance, Master of Play for Julius Caesar, talks to Heather Neill
This year, each production at the Globe is co-directed by a Master of Verse and a Master of Play. in the case of Julius Caesar, Giles Block is working with Mark Rylance with the specific intention of focusing on ‘eloquence’, defined by Mark as ‘speaking with force, fluency, and appropriateness to move the emotions and affect the reason’.
"What I am looking for as the Master of Play is a relationship between the play and the audience which leaves room for their imagination, space for them to be creative. I hope that they will continue the debate afterwards. There is no ideal interpretation. Our work is to give the impression that the story is happening now, to try to capture the spontaneous quality of the piece. I have chosen this play because of what it says about us today, just as Shakespeare was presenting Plutarch’s story in his day. It’s almost certain that the play opened at the Globe on Midsummer day in 1599. That year the Order of the Bishops included an injunction that ‘noe English historyes be printed excepte they bee allowed by some of her maiesties privie Counsell’, and Shakespeare turned to Roman history to tell the story of an assassinated leader in which the assassins die on the very swords they use to commit the murder. In other words, if you choose violence to correct injustice, violence will redound on you. But, behind the mask of a story which would be ethically pleasing to Elizabeth, he draws parallels between the queen and Julius Caesar.
Elizabeth was growing more dictatorial, refusing to listen to Parliament or name an heir, despite her age. She was hated for failing to introduce the new, more accurate Gregorian calendar (to replace that of Julius Caesar) which meant that Britain’s religious festival days were out of synch with those of the rest of Europe. When the Tribunes come out and say in the first scene of Julius Caesar ‘Is this a holiday?’ there might well have been confusion among the audience as to whether it was or not. There must have been many men in London – there was definitely one, the Earl of Essex – who, although they loved Elizabeth, felt something had to be done. Caesar’s first words in the play refer to his wife’s barrenness and the possibility of a cure – thus introducing immediately the forbidden subject of the leader’s heir.
Remarks about what people were wearing in the play provide some useful clues. When the conspirators arrive in Brutus’ orchard they are muffled in hats and cloaks; after the murder of Caesar, they dip their arms up to the elbows in blood, which would be difficult in Elizabethan dress. When there is talk of sedition which we know will be punished, Shakespeare felt safe in putting the conspirators in contemporary dress; in less palatable scenes it was useful to distance events, to make it clear that the killing of a leader suspected of over-ambition was taking place in Ancient Rome.
As our production is an experiment in original practices, we too have adopted a mixture of Roman and Elizabethan costumes, but that, of course, was modern when Shakespeare was writing, so our plebeians wear clothes much like the groundlings.
We know from the traveller Thomas Platter’s account of the production of Julius Caesar he saw at the Globe in September 1599 that there were only 15 in the cast, which wouldn’t provide much of a crowd, so, as then, our audience will join the Roman citizens. The play continually provokes the audience to join in, to take part, by presenting them with images they will recognise. Casca speaks of meeting a lion against the Capitol; at this time there were lions in the Tower of London, reputedly founded by Julius Caesar, just down-river from the Globe. In the disturbance after Antony’s oration, one of the plebeians is said to ‘pluck down benches’ – that is so ‘Globe’, the audience was surrounded by hundreds of benches.
The death of Cinna the poet is a horrifying dramatisation of the difficulty of containing violence. That must have been very familiar to the original audience and continues to be close to our experience. We still ask the same questions in world politics: when do you justify assassination? How do you tell a tyrant from a just leader? How do you distinguish jealous political murderers from heroic restorers of order? How are we governed and how do we govern ourselves in 1999?".
from the theatre programme of Shakespeare’s Globe’s production of "Julius Caesar", 1999.