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Notes -
I went to see a local production of The Merry Wives of Windsor last week, twice. After the first time, I immediately knew I wanted to go back and watch it again, so my wife and I got tickets for another show and took my mother two days later! It was truly fantastic, a wonderful production, with actors who absolutely exuded charisma and interpretations of the setting that were beautiful and brilliant, life and joy affirming comedy. They did a mid-century modern setting: Falstaff was a down-on-his-luck fat-Elvis, his band were a bunch of greasers, Fenton was a jock, Slender a preppy doofus, Slender's uncle a southern sheriff. And it got me thinking:
Has every Shakespeare play more or less remained in production within a generation, such that we are watching an unbroken chain of transmission from producer-to-producer, or have some of them gone moribund and been revived from scratch?
Obviously, the producers and directors of this play had seen it before, if not in person in some filmed version. The stage directions, the character interpretations, the delivery of the lines, are partly derivative, surely, of other productions. When the Welsh preacher talks about pretty Anne Parson's "great gifts" and gestures to indicate breasts, or he and the uncle ask Slender whether he can please the girl and make lascivious motions to indicate sex, that is a particular interpretation of the language, not natural necessarily to the text, and I found myself wondering if that kind of thing is mostly passed down, or invented whole cloth at some later. Particularly for the canonical English writer in Shakespeare.
Are we watching a interpretation of the play that is based on productions earlier this century which have been recorded, which themselves were influenced by earlier productions, in a direct line more or less to the Globe? Or to when? Surely, even before recordings, most times some individual at the theatrical company would have seen an earlier production of Wives and been able to offer that experience as a basis for interpretation, and in that earlier production someone would have seen an even earlier production, how far back do we think that went? To Victorian times? To Shakespeare himself?
Since 1660, it was probably performed enough that most theater aficionados would have had occasion to see at least one Shakespeare play performed at least once in their lifetimes. Why 1660? Aside from the irregularity after his death, Cromwell's Puritan dictatorship (10-20 years or so of no theater) actually was pretty effective at shutting down plays until the monarchy's restoration, including Shakespeare. It's also worth nothing that for at least one time period afterward, Shakespearean plays were often performed having been in many cases rewritten or adapted to change some key aspects. For example, there was one era (see: Restoration Comedy) where many of them were given happy endings, which as you may imagine required extensive changes in some cases (like King Lear or Macbeth). Also, you mentioned some of the vulgar jokes the plays contained, this also waxed and waned according to the times. Immediately after the restoration, a lot of theater got very bawdy very quickly, and so afterward there was a bit of a push to field plays that were more socially beneficial or preaching good behavior, and that extended to Shakespearean performance as well (see: Sentimental Comedy). Furthermore there were a few eras where the tragedies were a little, uh, too heavy and others where the comedy wasn't "in style" - so sometimes this meant Shakespeare wasn't performed as often, and other times this meant they would significantly change the jokes. Even beyond this, you have to remember there was still some aspects of theater that, in a pan-European sense, developed differently. Shakespeare wasn't always super duper popular beyond England, though he did get some common play-time (forgive the pun). And within England, there was a long time where "official" plays were only legally allowed to be put on in two or three specific places. This necessarily cut down on the number of Shakespeare that would be even possible to stage, and certainly the less-popular Shakespeare might not show up at all. The typical count is what, like 30+ plays? Every play having been performed at least once within a 50-60 year span might have been possible, but I doubt it. Some of those "least popular" plays are like, actually pretty unpopular, and I imagine that the frequency diminishes pretty fast going backwards in time.
Source: currently taking a history of modern theater course (it's filling a GE requirement). If you have some specific questions I'd be happy to ask my professor for you! We haven't gotten quite that far yet, but I'd imagine the "unbroken chain" is a much more modern thing. Reconstruction of what the originals might have been like wasn't undertaken for at least a century, and was also informed by our historical understanding.
To illustrate the point: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Farce_of_Sodom,_or_The_Quintessence_of_Debauchery
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Some have always been less popular or have had peaks and troughs of popularity, but it is interesting that he has pretty much been consistently popular since he wrote them. There was never really a major lull in production, certainly not between 1650 and today.
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