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"A Prologue Armed"
In Theatre for a New Audience's 2001 production of Troilus and Cressida, the audience absorbs considerable information about the tone of this play, and Hall’s staging of it, as they settle into their places, turn off their cell phones, unwrap their sweets, and survey the pre-set stage. There they find a ghastly pair of decaying corpses leaning together, two coupling skeletons, and discarded armor scattered about the sand pit that makes up the playing space before them. Before the lights fade a figure appears from upstage right whose dirt-smeared body and torn clothing fit him perfectly for this tableau. The figure cradles another pile of human remains in his arms as he walks slowly into the sand pit, sucking on a cigarette. He drops his burden on the carrion pile, carefully puts his cigarette out in the sand, and pulls from the front of his ragged pants a tattered paperback copy of the Arden Shakespeare (Third Edition) Troilus and Cressida. Clearly reading (in fact from the large printed letters of a crib sheet within), he begins: "Eternal reader, you have here a new play, never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar, and yet passing full of the palm comical."
What
he reads was never intended to be performed. It is a note from the publisher of
the play’s first printing to his hoped-for readers (or, at least, potential buyers),
trying to interest them in the play precisely because it was, as he says, "never
staled with the stage" or applauded by "the palms of the vulgar." The play’s lack
of popular success is presented not as artistic failure but indeed as the mark
of the play’s distinction, its appeal only to more sophisticated tastes than the
popular theater normally attracted. The "Epistle," addressed by "A never writer,
to an ever reader" appears in the "second state" of the play’s 1609 quarto edition.
Shakespeare certainly did not write it, and its inclusion here in the performed
text of the play is rare, if not unprecedented.
But the unexpected speech in Hall’s production is effective and made to work with the play’s central concerns. Having first complimented the theater audience on their refined taste (the same tactic as the early bookseller), the figure (Andrew Weems) then takes up the dilapidated "armored" jacket that sits in a jumble on the stage, and dons the battered helmet that suggests late nineteenth-century Prussia. The house and stage lights blink out, leaving him lit by the three follow spots, in a comical mock-heroic pose. "In Troy there lies the scene…," he portentously intones, speaking the lines of the prologue that normally begins the play. When he comes to the line , "And hither am I come / A Prologue armed…," he lifts a small knife aloft, further undercutting the high flown martial rhetoric of the opening speech to follow (and perhaps also the pretensions of Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson, who has "an Armed Prologue" entering hastily, in armour" at the beginning of The Poetaster).
Though the spoken "Prologue" was a common convention on Elizabethan stage, it apparently went out of fashion about the time Troilus was written and did not return to favor for a decade or so. Only six of Shakespeare’s plays display the feature and two of them, the Prologues in Pericles and Henry VIII, each play itself a self-conscious look back to earlier literary forms, are commonly attributed to his collaborators. The original 1609 quarto text of Troilus and Cressida did not include the "Prologue" ? there the play opens with Troilus’ first line: "Call here my varlet; I’ll unarm again.". In the 1623 Folio, the "Prologue" appears on the page preceding the play’s title. Whether the play was usually performed with the "Prologue," or whether it was written only for a revival of the play, or indeed whether it was ever performed in Shakespeare’s time is unknown. But the "Prologue" is now considered part of the play itself, and productions normally begin with mono-syllabic iambic pentameter: "In Troy there lies the scene. "From isles of Greece . . ."
No "character" is named as the speaker of the "Prologue" in the printed text. Indeed the prologue-speaker is in essence a character in his own right, but inevitably the lines would be delivered by an actor also playing another part. In Hall’s production, Andrew Weems speaks the lines, but not as an independent character to be discarded before he takes on his primary role in the play, but already in character as Thersites, the cynical commentator on the play’s action throughout. Assigning the "Prologue" to Thersites was Peter Hall’s decision as director, and one that shapes the play that followed.
Not all productions use the "Prologue" as Hall did. Indeed many do not use it all. John Dryden cut Shakespeare’s "Prologue" from his Restoration adaptation of 1679 (which is in fact the only certainly known performed version of the play in England before the twentieth century) and replaced it with one of his own, spoken by the great actor Thomas Betterton. Betterton appeared on the stage as Shakespeare’s ghost, introducing "this my rough-drawn play," which the Restoration poet had touched up to suit a more sophisticated age. Dryden’s dramatic action commenced in the Greek camp, allowing Betterton three pages to change into his lead role as Troilus.
Modern productions have handled the "Prologue" in a variety of ways. Sometimes Pandarus delivers it and is then conveniently on-stage for Troilus' opening line. Jonathan Miller, for his BBC version, opted for a disembodied voice-over. No credit is given but the voice seems to be that of his Pandarus, Charles Gray. Jatinder Verma made an intriguing, if obscure, choice for his 1993 Manchester staging. He replaced the published prologue with a reading of Queen Elizabeth’s 1601 proclamation expelling all blackamoors from England.
In the mouth of
a less questionable spokesman than Andrew Weems’ disreputable Thersites, the words
of the "Prologue" might have passed as boilerplate dramatic preface, setting the
scene much in the tradition of the monologue that opens Romeo and Juliet.
Hall’s decision to have this ragged jester deliver it in TFANA’s Troilus lends
the play a darkly comic and ambivalent air. "In Troy there lies the scene,"
quiets the crowd and tells them where they are to imagine they have been transported.
The rare and flowery Latinism in the second line, "The princes orgulous, their
high blood chafed," colors the scene. "Orgulous," an obscure word meaning "proud"
and never again used by Shakespeare, immediately distances the audience from the
events described. The great matter of the Trojan war is set out in elegant language
that only seems to make the action glorious: