This is number 116 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
…UNLESS YOU’RE SHAKESPEARE.
I’ve just returned from a refreshing and inspiring theatre tour to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario. I saw six shows while I was there. Three were among the Shakespearean greats, including one I’d never seen in production before. The latter was The Winter’s Tale, the most famous was Macbeth, and the funniest was As You Like It.
It is a Shakespeare Festival, but the other three shows I saw were by other playwrights: Sense and Sensibility, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and Forgiveness. In addition to being good theatre, there was something to be learned from each of the shows.
I was impressed first of all by The Winter’s Tale, a play that vacillated between being a horrendous tragedy and a ridiculous comedy. I’d read the script a couple of years ago when writing the Photo Finish series of books, but all I remembered was the most famous stage direction of all time: Exit pursued by a bear.
In this series of books, Nate Hart and his girlfriends acquire property in Stratford where he becomes a popular photographer among the actresses there. I did a lot of research on the plays produced at the Festival during the years 1969-1976, keeping the season the same, but putting in my own staging and inventing the actors, directors, and technical people. Suffice it to say that I read a lot of plays and play synopses during the writing of those books.
For three acts in The Winter’s Tale, Leontes, King of Sicily, proceeds to destroy his family, his friendships, and his kingdom through petty and foundless jealousy, causing his closest advisor to flee, causing the deaths of his son and his wife, and ordering his infant daughter abandoned to wild animals on a distant hillside. At the peak of the action with all things set in motion, he receives a message from the Oracle of Delphi declaring his wife innocent and Leontes a tyrant. He repents, but it is too late. All is lost.
The final two acts are a pastoral comedy in which the infant daughter, rescued by a shepherd, has grown to a beautiful young woman and falls in love with a young man who just happens to be the son of Polixenes, the king Leontes accused of adultery with his wife.
Through comic trials, the Prince and Princess are revealed and their wedding is celebrated. But none of that is shown. Instead, three soldiers appear with the play’s clown to tell about how the princess was revealed to be Leontes’ daughter, how Polixenes arrived and was reunited with his former friend, how the couple was married, and how the shepherd and his son were rewarded.
A clear case of telling, not showing!
I showed considerably more in the books of the Photo Finish series! They are available as individual eBooks or a collection at ZBookStore.
In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, a similar situation occurs. Just before the denouement, the mysteriously transformed elder brother who has been hunting his youngest brother (to kill him) arrives to tell the disguised Rosalind that as he was sleeping, a lion attacked him. His younger brother—who had every right to hate his older brother—could have left him to die, but instead attacked and subdued the lion, rescuing the older brother, but being severely injured. Now the older brother is in the younger brother’s debt and is carrying out his errand, during which he also falls in love with the disguised Duke’s daughter, Celia.
To simplify matters further, the middle brother, heretofore absent, shows up in the Forest of Arden to tell that the evil Duke, bent on hunting down the exiled Duchess, encountered a monk in the forest and was converted from his evil ways, abdicating his throne to his sister and forgiving all those who had been exiled.
Clearly, there was just too much to wrap up for Shakespeare to handle it in the last act.
I’m reminded of an old movie about F. Scott Fitzgerald—I believe it was F. Scott Fitzgerald and ‘The Last of the Belles.’ In the scene I am thinking of, Fitzgerald is going over his movie script with a movie mogul (again, I think it was Sam Goldwyn), when Goldwyn asks him, pointing at the script,
“What are they doing?”
“They are talking,” Fitzgerald responds.
“But what are they doing?”
“Talking.”
“Doing! What are they doing?” Goldwyn says in frustration.
The obvious intent was to point out that two talking heads on the movie screen were boring, no matter what they were saying. In the movie business there needed to be movement. They needed to be doing something. In Fitzgerald’s lexicon, ‘talking’ was ‘doing.’ His books have a lot of dialog.
The only movie I ever saw that successfully portrayed people talking without doing something else was Woody Allen’s Interiors. The movie was a critical success, but sadly was not popular. By its successful use of dialog, though, it truly highlights the problem many authors have with telling instead of showing.
In many works, authors take the shortcut of having a character tell the story on behalf of the author. Sometimes that works and sometimes it is simply putting narrative in the mouth of a character.
What the author might narrate with a simple sentence like, “A three-car pile-up on I-5 delayed Sylvia by half an hour,” is turned into an ‘exciting’ scene:
Sylvia burst through the door and fell into Ryan’s arms, sobbing.
“It was terrible!” she gasped. “Right ahead of me, a car cut into the left lane right ahead of a truck carrying cement blocks. The truck driver lost control and the truck rolled to the right, dumping his load of blocks onto a car next to him!”
“How terrible!” Ryan said. “Are you okay?”
“Shaken. Just seeing those poor people lying beside the road. I barely managed to squeak by when the dust settled. Traffic was stopped before and after the roll-over. I just gave my name to the driver and took the next exit.”
“What can I do to help you?”
“I need a drink!”
Did this particularly add anything to the narration? As far as the story goes, did it make a difference? She was half an hour late. But this does expose more of the character of the two main actors. We get a glimpse of Ryan’s care, and of Sylvia’s self-absorption as she left the scene of the accident.
It is up to the author now to make this meaningful rather than just a substitute for a fourteen-word narrative.
This may not have been an exciting discussion and you might still not know the difference between showing and telling, but it was a realization that occurred to me as I was watching Shakespeare navigate between the two. Now it is time to get back to writing.