Never Meant to Be Read

by Atlanta screenwriter, actor, and filmmaker, Madison Hatfield

Photo by Matt Riches on Unsplash

At Decatur High School in 2004, reading Romeo and Juliet was a cornerstone of the 9th grade English syllabus. There must have been some line of thinking during curricular development that because Romeo and Juliet were 14 years old in the play that a bunch of 14 year olds trapped at their desks would find the story of young love, killing cousins, and undelivered letters…relatable? You, reader, may have guessed (since you are reading an essay I’ve written decades past the time when such things were required) that I was a nerd who loved the play. But getting through it as a class was unquestionably a slog. And I will always remember, on a particularly frustrating day full of groaning and complaints, what my teacher told us:

“Shakespeare was never meant to be read.”

It was meant to be performed—by actors in costumes, reciting revolutionary verse for a sea of groundlings teeming on the theater floor and the nobility in the good seats up high. The fact that we can, hundreds of years on, read Shakespeare at all is a bit of a miracle. The creation of the first folio (a saga I learned about through a play called The Book Of Will—written by Georgia-born playwright Lauren Gunderson—that I also recommend you see and not read) was a frantic cobbling together of actors’ lines in the wake of Shakespeare’s death. There were no full manuscripts of plays; they had to be Frankensteined together from scribbled sides and people’s memories. One result of these valiant efforts is millions of students—through the ages and all over the world—reading Shakespeare’s words and complaining about it. Because my teacher was right: certain words are not meant to be read at all.

As a screenwriter, I am also in the business of writing work that is never meant to be read. And at least Shakespeare’s scripts are largely poetry and look like it. Screenwriting is a rigid and objectively ugly way of formatting language, bogged down by seemingly random rules and conventions. Your story and dialogue are constantly interrupted by necessary notes to future directors, cinematographers, actors, costumers, set designers. All good writing sparks our emotions and imaginations, but scriptwriting in particular is an attempt to manipulate the reader’s brain into envisioning a totally different art form. The “real” art form. A finished script— an enormous task that can take years to draft and revise and perfect—is, in a screenwriter’s ideal world, only the beginning. And most people who experience that story in the future (if such a future even exists) will never read that script at all.

There is therefore an inherent sadness in scriptwriting. The writing of a novelist, poet, or essayist reaches its audience in its final form. They experience it exactly as the writer did. For me, the people I consider my audience will never lay eyes on my pages at all. And that creates a distance between me and them that at best feels strange and at worst leaves me feeling invisible and isolated. When I write a movie script, I know that the people the audience will connect to will be the actors. I know the person people will celebrate will be the director. Maybe that’s why I learned to do both of those jobs, too. But for the majority of screenwriters, their work begins and ends on 100 or so meticulously crafted pages that will never be available for public consumption. That is the lonely side of scriptwriting.

But a script is also an invitation for collaboration. It is a plea for those directors, cinematographers, actors, costumers, and set designers to come together and finish what the screenplay started. When I write a script, I am manifesting a community. A community that coalesces around my story and transforms it from words on a page into a work that can finally be shared with the audience I always intended. This is what keeps me coming back again and again to this inflexible, isolating, unfinishable form. When all goes according to plan, I DO get to connect with my audience. And I also get an extra step that novelists and poets and essayists don’t: a creative family to bring my words to life before we present it—together—to the world.

The creation of Shakespeare’s first folio was catalyzed by his death, so he never saw his work printed and bound and shared with the masses. We can’t know how he would have felt to see that, or how he would feel to know how many people continue to read his plays for school, for research, for pleasure. But if Shakespeare is anything like me (and this is my essay so I WILL be saying that he is, thank you), I am confident that he would feel immense joy at how many theatrical productions of his work there have been, how many filmed adaptations there are, how many new works based on his plays have been crafted through the centuries. If he is dismayed when his words are being shoved down the throats of unwilling teens, perhaps he is delighted in equal measure when those same classes are dragged—just as mine was— to a local theater to watch the play they’re reading on its feet. Perhaps he skips the classes and the lectures but his spirit shows up in the theaters where the groaning and complaining finally stops, where a new community of artists has brought his words to life, and where we all experience his writing as it was intended. Perhaps his same spirit is baked into all of us scriptwriters: we sacrifice an audience on the page for the magic of an art form that can—that MUST—exist beyond us.

Perhaps this writing you will never read connects people better than anything else.

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Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

Madison Hatfield is a screenwriter, actor, and filmmaker born and based in Atlanta, GA. Her latest short film I Could Dom is on the festival circuit now and has played at several Oscar-qualifying festivals including Austin Film Festival and Palm Springs ShortFest. She and frequent collaborator Jono Mitchell are currently writing a feature film adaptation of the YA novel The Sky Blues for Walden Media. As an actor, she has appeared on several shows including Atlanta (FX), Chicago Med (NBC), and The Other Black Girl (Hulu). She is proudly represented by The Gotham Group as a writer and director and Stewart Talent as a performer. Learn more at www.madisonhatfield.com.