ABSTRACT
From the start, Guthrie’s ostensibly casual, even careless attitude to Shakespearian verse was, in actuality, the product of a profoundly musical sensibility, whereby, as Quayle put it, ‘he regarded a play as a musical score: its changes of pace, its modifications, its climaxes, crescendos and decrescendos’ (Rossi 1977: 19). And, as far as Love’s Labour’s Lost was concerned, it was a method that earned the praise of no less an authority than the editor of the New Cambridge Shakespeare, John Dover Wilson, who came to see Guthrie’s revival of the second production at the Old Vic four years later and wrote that ‘I went, I saw, I was completely conquered . . . Mr Guthrie not only gave me a new play, the existence of which I had never suspected . . . but he set me at a fresh standpoint of understanding and appreciation from which the whole of Shakespearian comedy might be reviewed in a new light’ (Wilson 1962: 64). In a seeming vindication of Guthrie’s fast and loose treatment of the verbal text, Wilson found that the production ‘revealed it as a first-rate comedy of the pattern kind – so full of fun, of permanent wit, of brilliant and entrancing situation, that you hardly noticed the faded jesting and allusion, as you sat spell-bound and drank it all in’ (1962: 64). Between them, Quayle and Wilson find in this early production the essence of Guthrie’s method: rooted in a fundamentally musical, operatic sensibility, it was throughout his directorial career defined by his readiness to subordinate characterisation and verbal detail to the demands of narrative and to the imperatives of the play’s larger design, or, as Wilson puts it, its pattern. Although none of these, least of all Guthrie, would have been likely to describe it as such, this understanding of the Shakespearian text as a spatial and temporal entity was thoroughly modernist. As we shall see, it was an understanding that would eventually inform not only a production style but also the architectural poetics of the post-war Shakespearian stage.
