Sándor Hevesi’s experimental staging of Shakespeare in the 1910s

Today, with major archaeological discoveries in Southwark, Marvin Carlson’s study on the semiotics of theater architecture, and insights from the reconstructed (New) Globe, it is increasingly clear that Shakespeare’s “plays were written for the space in which they were to be performed: and that therefore to understand Shakespeare, one should understand his playhouses” (Stern 21). Sándor Hevesi, one of the most important yet still somewhat overlooked figures in early-twentieth-century Hungarian theater, was among the first to recognize that Shakespeare’s plays did not naturally suit the proscenium stage. A critic-turned-director and dramaturg, he recognized that it was the architecture of nineteenth-century European theaters that necessitated the radical editorial and dramaturgical interventions, often infamously substantial textual cuts, characteristic of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Shakespearean productions. This recognition fueled his devoted explorations into the workings of the Shakespeare stage. In Hevesi’s time, little was known about the original dimensions and staging conditions of Elizabethan playhouses. In a 2023 paper, I argued that by 1923, through his staging of The Taming of the Shrew, Hevesi believed he had discovered the real Shakespeare. This paper explores the starting point of that journey to assess the significance of Hevesi’s anticipatory ideas.