1965 — Fornicate Sicilian Style!

Abstract

The encouragement to ‘Fornicate Sicilian style!’ reflects the irreverent mood and vitality of the production of Much Ado staged by Franco Zeffirelli at the National Theatre. The message was the text of a telegram sent by John Dexter to the company for the opening on 16 February, 1965. The critics found the treatment highly controversial. On the one hand it was both hailed as stimulating, imaginative and hugely enjoyable, with matchless joie de vivre and on the other it was condemned as a flagrant distortion of the text: ‘the most unintelligent production of Shakespeare I have ever seen’ (Robert Speaight, ’Shakespeare in Britain’, Shakespeare Quarterly XVI, 1965 p. 313). It was influential, largely in a negative way since many subsequent productions reacted to its liberal reading by preferring a more traditional interpretation. An initial cause of controversy was Robert Graves’ re-working of the text. In The Sunday Times (14 February 1965) he explained that he had been commissioned to produce a stage version of Much Ado About Nothing that ‘the ordinary intelligent theatre audience could follow without assistance’. He employed a process he called ‘re-Shakespeareanising Shakespeare’ and about three hundred of his changes were adopted. For example Borachio’s lines:

Being entertained for a perfumer, as I was smoking a musty room, comes me the Prince and Claudio, hand in hand, in sad conference.

(I iii 54–6)

became:

As I was employed in perfuming a musty room in the palace, along comes the Prince and Claudio in earnest conference.