Notes on Artistry from Jonathan Miller, TV Director for BBC's Shakespeare Seasons 3-4
A long Wikipedia excerpt
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I am doing a project where I’m trying to read and watch a lot more Shakespeare. I stumbled upon a full seven-season run of all his plays produced by the BBC from 1978-1985. They are so far great, on their own, but there is some very different tones and production to different episodes.
Curious about this, I decided to read the Wikipedia article about them. Apparently, the series started off with a guy named Cedric Messina who had very “realist” ideas about how the series should be produced. But his versions were not very popular with the fans or critics. So he was replaced in Season 3 with Jonathan Miller.
In the Wikipedia article, Miller had such interesting things to say about art and audience, I wanted to excerpt that entire part of the article below. If you click here it will take you to the section of Wikipedia article in question, or I have excerpted the whole thing below, footnote links and all:
Seasons 3 and 4 (Jonathan Miller, producer)
During Messina's tenure as producer, as per the financiers' restrictions, the adaptations tended to be conservative, but when Jonathan Miller took over at the start of season three, he completely revamped things. On a superficial level, for example, he instituted a new title sequence and replaced William Walton's theme music with a newly composed piece by Stephen Oliver. Miller's changes went much deeper, however. Whereas Messina had favoured a realism-based approach, which worked to simplify the texts for audiences unfamiliar with Shakespeare, Miller was against any kind of aesthetic or intellectual dilution. Messina's theory was based on his many years of experience in television, and according to Martin Wiggins, it was exactly Miller's lack of such experience that led to his aesthetic overhaul of the show; Miller came from
outside the BBC's tradition of painstaking research and accurate historical verisimilitude [...] Messina's approach had treated the plays in realistic terms as events which had once taken place and which could be literally represented on screen. Miller saw them as products of a creative imagination, artefacts in their own right to be realised in production using the visual and conceptual materials of their period. This led to a major reappraisal of the original production guidelines.[38]
Susan Willis makes a similar point; "instead of doing what the BBC usually did, Miller saw the series as a means of examining the limits of televised drama, of seeing what the medium could do; it was an imaginative, creative venture."[63] Miller was in many ways the polar opposite of Messina;
if the Messina productions were predominantly set in the historical periods referred to, Miller's were insistently Renaissance in dress and attitude. If television was supposed to be based on realism, Miller took the productions straight into the visual arts of the period. If most earlier productions had been visually filmic, Miller emphasized the theatrical. If the previous interpretations were basically solid and straightforward, Miller encouraged stronger, sharper renditions, cutting across the grain, vivid and not always mainstream.[73]
Miller himself stated "I think it's very unwise to try to represent on the television screen something which Shakespeare did not have in his mind's eye when he wrote those lines. You have to find some counterpart of the unfurnished stage that Shakespeare wrote for without, in fact, necessarily reproducing a version of the Globe theatre. Because there's no way in which you can do that [...] What details you do introduce must remind the audience of the sixteenth century imagination."[74] For Miller, the best way to do this was by using the work of famous artists as visual inspiration and reference points;
it's the director's job, quite apart from working with actors and getting subtle and energetic performances out of them, to act as the chairman of a history faculty and of an art-history faculty. Here was a writer who was immersed in the themes and notions of his time. The only way in which you can unlock that imagination is to immerse yourself in the themes in which he was immersed. And the only way you can do that is by looking at the pictures which reflect the visual world of which he was a part and to acquaint yourself with the political and social issues with which he was preoccupied – trying, in some way, to identify yourself with the world which was his.[74]
On this subject, Susan Willis writes
Miller had a vision of Shakespeare as an Elizabethan/Jacobean playwright, as a man of his time in social, historical, and philosophical outlook. The productions Miller himself directed reflect this belief most clearly of course, but he also evoked such an awareness in the other directors. If there was not to be a single stylistic "signature" to the plays under Miller's producership, there was more nearly an attitudinal one. Everything was reflexive for the Renaissance artist, Miller felt, most especially historical references, and so Antony of Rome, Cleopatra of Egypt and both Timon and Theseus of Athens take on a familiar late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century manner and look.[75]
As this indicates, Miller adopted a visual and design policy of sets and costumes inspired by great paintings of the era in which the plays were written, although the style was dominated by the post-Shakespearean 17th century artists Vermeer and Rembrandt. In this sense, "art provides not just a look in Miller's productions; it provided a mode of being, a redolence of the air breathed in that world, an intellectual climate in addition to a physical space."[76] This policy allowed other directors to stamp more of their own aesthetic credo on the productions than had been possible under Messina. According to Miller himself,
when the BBC started to imagine [the] series, there was a notion of an 'authentic' Shakespeare: something that should be tampered with as little as possible, so that one could present to an innocent audience Shakespeare as it might have been before the over-imaginative director arrived on the scene. I think this was a misconception: the hypothetical version which they saw as being authentic was actually something remembered from thirty years before; and in itself presumably widely divergent from what was performed at the inaugural production four hundred years ago. I thought it was much better to acknowledge the open-ended creativity of any Shakespeare production, since there is no way of returning to an authentic Globe Theatre version [...] There are all sorts of unforeseeable meanings which might attach to the play, simply by virtue of the fact that it has survived into a period with which the author was not acquainted, and is therefore able to strike chords in the imagination of a modern audience which could not have been struck in an audience when it was first performed [...] the people who actually inaugurated the series seemed conspicuously unacquainted with what had happened to Shakespeare, didn't know the academic work, and actually had an old-fashioned show-biz hostility to the academic world [...] I was limited nonetheless by certain contractual requirements which had been established before I came on the scene with the American sponsors: there are however all sorts of ways of skinning that kind of cat, and even with the requirement that I had to set things in so-called traditional costume, there were liberties which they could not foresee, and which I was able to take.[77]
Speaking more directly, Elijah Moshinsky assessed Miller's contribution to the series by arguing that "it was only Miller's appointment that pulled the series out of its artistic nosedive."[78] Speaking of the US restrictions, Miller stated "the brief was "no monkey-tricks" – but I think monkey-tricks is at least 50 percent of what interesting directing is about [...] The fact is that monkey-tricks are only monkey-tricks when they don't work. A monkey-trick that comes off is a stroke of genius. If you start out with a quite comprehensive self-denying ordinance of "no monkey-tricks," then you really are very much shackled."[79] Similarly, speaking after he had stepped aside as producer at the end of the fourth season, Miller stated "I did what I wanted to do [...] The sponsors insisted that it was a traditional thing, that it didn't disturb people by bizarre setting. And I said, okay, fine, but, I'll disturb them with bizarre interpretations."[80] Miller was not interested in stage tradition; he did not create a heroic Antony, a farcical Shrew or a sluttish Cressida. His Othello had little to do with race and his Lear was more of a family man than a regal titan. Miller himself spoke of his dislike for "canonical performances," stating "I think there is a conspiracy in the theatre to perpetuate certain prototypes in the belief that they contain the secret truth of the characters in question. This collusion between actors and directors is broken only by successful innovation which interrupts the prevailing mode."[81]
The first episode shot under Miller's producership was Antony & Cleopatra (although the first to air would be The Taming of the Shrew), and it was in this episode, which he also directed, where he introduced his design policies, as he set about "permeating the design with the Renaissance view of the ancient world, for he observed that the Renaissance saw the classical world in terms of itself, with a contemporary rather than an archaeological awareness; they treated classical subjects but always dressed them anachronistically in Renaissance garments."[76]
However, although there was definitely a new sense of aesthetic freedom with Miller as producer, this freedom could not be pushed too far. For example, when he hired Michael Bogdanov to direct Timon of Athens, Bogdanov proposed an Oriental themed modern-dress production. The financiers refused to sanction the idea, and Miller had to insist Bogdanov remain within the aesthetic guidelines. This led to Bogdanov quitting, and Miller himself taking over as director.[82] One aspect of Messina's producership which Miller did reproduce was the tendency not to get too involved in the actual shooting of the productions which he was not directing. After appointing a director and choosing a cast, he would make suggestions and be on hand to answer questions, but his belief was that "the job of the producer is to make conditions as favourable and friendly as they possibly can be, so that [the directors'] imagination is given the best possible chance to work."[79]
There is so much to mine from this wonky story of different approaches to adapting Shakespeare, but what I love the most is what I believe Miller is kind of saying, which is that any work of art is at it’s heart imaginative, so to try to recreate or perform it as a work of realism is to miss the point. The most realistic thing you can do is try to recreate what the artist might have imagined, but even then, the artist might have imagined new things had they known their art would out-survive them and their original audience.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this or Shakespeare in general, especially if you’ve seen the BBC productions.