So experts think Shakespeare often wrote with a hangover? That explains some of the clumsiest lines in English literature, writes John Sutherland
Thus spake the Bard's great contemporary, Ben Jonson: "I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penn'd) hee never blotted out line. My answer hath beene, would he had blotted a thousand. Which the Players thought a malevolent speech."
The loyal theatricals have turned. Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of the Globe Theatre in London, has finally said the unsayable. Malevolently. There are "Monday morning" lines in Shakespeare's masterpieces. They are the verse equivalent of the Friday afternoon lemons that used to roll off the production line at the car factory.
Sir Peter Hall, the founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, suggests that the Bard's bad-line days were the result of his being blotto the night before (as, often enough, was Ben Jonson - sometimes they had to bring him home in a wheelbarrow). Or, more charitably, it may have been the pressure of deadlines - writing plays was a crazy-hurry line of work.
The proposition that not all Shakespeare is Shakespeare-great was put forward by Frank Kermode in his recent book on the Bard's language. Kermode came out and said what most audiences secretly think: a lot of Shakespeare is impossible to understand.
Following Dromgoole and Hall's allegations, "Crap Shakespeare" will probably be a fashionable parlour game over the next few weeks. What, it will be mischievously asked, are your candidates for the worst lines in England's best plays? It won't be the hardest of games. Crap lines can be found in even the most revered places. When, for example, pondering whether to be or not to be, Hamlet fantasises about "taking arms against a sea of troubles", what does Shakespeare expect us to see in our mind's eye? Some mad idiot firing a blunderbuss into the waves from the end of the pier? The richest hunting ground for crap lines is the "Scottish play", a dramatic work which is so terrifying to actors that they will go to almost any lengths to avoid playing in it. (Think of Peter O'Toole - has his reputation as a classic Shakespearean actor ever recovered from that disastrous 1980 production at the Old Vic?)
It's not just the witches, although all that "double, double, toil and trouble" stuff is pretty blotworthy. Apart from Macbeth's soliloquies, the porter's half-pissed prose and Lady Macbeth's mad musings, the play is, to borrow a mixed metaphor, a veritable sea of crap.
What actor, for example, can utter, without an inward shudder, King Duncan's opening line: "What bloody man is that?" Duncan, in the play, has just come across a soldier horribly wounded in the civil war that is tearing his country apart. A certain urgency would seem to be in order.
If you were a young actor given his big chance with Macduff, and you wanted to catch the critic's notice in the front row, would you really want to leap on stage, claymore in hand, with the line "Turn, hell-hound, turn"? I have heard audiences yowl with uncontrollable mirth at that ejaculation. Another career-killer.
There is also, at this point in the tragedy, a feebleness in the plotting, which does incline one to the suspicion that the playwright was drinking too deeply of mine host's finest ale in the Tabard the night before.
You will remember the great plot twist. No man "of woman born" can kill Macbeth. How does he know? The witches (is this for real?) have told him so. Lay on, Macduff. And how is the villain confounded? "Know that Macduff," our good guy says, "was from his mother's womb untimely ripped." Collapse of hell-hound. Heads on poles. Happy times for Scotland.
But what, the audience will wonder as they file out of the theatre, does "untimely ripped" actually mean? A Caesarean? Premature delivery? Was the Macduff foetus removed at the point of conception and, by the advanced technology of 15th-century alchemy, brought to term in a test tube? Even in medieval Scotland, surely, you are still "born of woman" even if you did pop out, or were pulled out, a month or two early? There is a quality of "who gives a toss?" in the play which, sadly, bears out Dromgoole's heresy. Homer sometimes nods. And Shakespeare occasionally suffers from dramatist's droop.