ARTicles vol. 3 i.2b: Directing Dido

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, when the Prince hires a company of touring actors to play at Elsinore, he tests their skill by asking their leading man to audition, to recite a speech – one that Hamlet says he loves and has never forgotten seeing performed in his youth. The speech that the Player King then recites is clearly meant to be Shakespeare’s homage to the extraordinary eye-witness account of the savagery of the Trojan War with which Aeneas dismays the guests at Dido’s banquet in the second act of Marlowe’s play. So Shakespeare saw it, and loved it; but how can I, over four hundred years later, with almost no historical information about how and for whom this strange play came to be written, find a way into its mixture of almost-operatic poetry with black comedy, of great beauty with violent cruelty? Of course, my passion for the play means I can only be subjective about it, not objective; but while rehearsing it, I have tried to pay attention to some of the hints about its author’s imagination that it hides in its details. For instance; most of the play is very closely adapted (sometimes line by line) from Virgil’s Aeneid, but in two very significant places, Marlowe departs entirely from his source. The opening scene, showing us Jupiter, King of Heaven, making a fool of himself over his new boyfriend, is Marlowe’s invention. It does two things; it importantly reminds the audience that anyone – not just Dido – can fall prey to Cupid’s arrows in the course of the evening. It also tells us something about where Marlowe’s vision of what theatre could or should be came from. The Blackfriar’s Theatre, where it was probably performed, housed a company of boy-actors, many of them skilled stage-transvestites, and was close to the wrong-side-of-the-river red-light district of Elizabethan London. “Ganymede” was a slang term used for a young male prostitute; by putting Ganymede on the first page of his first play, Marlowe announced that his is a theatre in which desire, danger, eroticism, vulgarity and transgression are always inexplicably linked. That’s why in our staging his gods and goddesses, for all their elegant inhumanity, seem to have acquired their costumes somewhere between the brothel and the dressing-up box; and why they are of both genders, and no gender. The second place where Marlowe departs from his source is in the vividly imagined details of Aeneas’ famously violent, reportage-style account of the fall of Troy. What had Marlowe seen, that made his writing of this particular passage so vivid? Some historians have speculated that he may have met survivors of the appalling anti-Huguenot St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris in 1572. Whatever its source, Marlowe clearly wanted, in this, the play’s echoing central statement of havoc at its bloodiest, to make his poetry as brutal as journalism. Our staging tries to honor that. Lastly, I have tried to remember that the Londoner who wrote this play was a young man of twenty-one. Yes, Dido, in her fierce self-possession, is probably an oblique portrait of Queen Elizabeth 1st. But she is also the intimate creation of a poet who must have known at first hand what it feels like to experience the distinctive vertigo of losing first your body, then your heart and then your mind to a man. Twenty-one; astonishing. –Neil Bartlett