What I Love about Shakespeare: Stage

I was a student at Northwestern University in the late 1970s, and disco was at its peak.  I loved what Alec R. Costandinos did: an uptempo rendition of Romeo and Juliet, as only that era could produce.  Much of the album was disco instrumental, but I found myself particularly drawn to two passages.  I searched our student bookstore for the play, and learned that these passages were exactly the opening sonnets for Act I and Act II.  I bought the plays, I enrolled in Shakespeare, and the rest is history.  It's been an enduring love affair since.

This week I talk about the three main things I find so compelling about Shakespeare.

Schubert Theater, in Chicago

It is very special to watch drama on stage.  It is as if fictional characters become real before our very eyes, the artifice of the setting notwithstanding.  I am privileged, too, to have watched Shakespeare in different countries: from the US (Chicago), to England (London) and UAE (Dubai).  Which I wrote about in Theaters Where I Have Seen Shakespeare.  Some say, his historic masterpieces were meant to be performed, rather than read, and I say, of course.  In this respect, the director and cast have every license to exercise their creativity in interpreting, acting and staging the play.  That in and of itself, if done well, is an enjoyment.  Moreover, since I am writing my own play, Shakespeare helps me conceptualize what I want to write and visualize how I want to stage it.

What I Love about Shakespeare: Poetry

I was a student at Northwestern University in the late 1970s, and disco was at its peak.  I loved what Alec R. Costandinos did: an uptempo rendition of Romeo and Juliet, as only that era could produce.  Much of the album was disco instrumental, but I found myself particularly drawn to two passages.  I searched our student bookstore for the play, and learned that these passages were exactly the opening sonnets for Act I and Act II.  I bought the plays, I enrolled in Shakespeare, and the rest is history.  It's been an enduring love affair since.

This week I talk about the three main things I find so compelling about Shakespeare.

mystery

In What poetry is... to me, I mentioned three things: music, brevity and mystery.  Shakespeare adds a fourth: form and meter.  I cut my teeth on iambic pentameter from him.  I have a bent toward poetic thought and spirit, so his plays spoke to me because it was poetry.  The hundreds of poems I have written now are predominantly in metered poetry, and I taught myself how to write in a range of forms:  from the Shakespearean (English) sonnet as a springboard, to the Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet, to the villanelle and sestina, and even ballade.

What I Love about Shakespeare: Psychology

I was a student at Northwestern University in the late 1970s, and disco was at its peak.  I loved what Alec R. Costandinos did: an uptempo rendition of Romeo and Juliet, as only that era could produce.  Much of the album was disco instrumental, but I found myself particularly drawn to two passages.  I searched our student bookstore for the play, and learned that these passages were exactly the opening sonnets for Act I and Act II.  I bought the plays, I enrolled in Shakespeare, and the rest is history.  It's been an enduring love affair since.

This week I talk about the three main things I find so compelling about Shakespeare.

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My specialty as a management consultant is leadership assessment.  Our process was well thought through and well practiced.  It plunged into whatever stuff our client executives and managers were made of.  As I wound down my one feedback and coaching session, an executive related that he felt undressed by the intense process.  Such an intimate look, such an unvarnished glance, such pointed accuracy.  His revelation was calm and grateful, though perhaps there was a note of resentment there, too.  I simply listened, and in short order he said our session helped him to get dressed again.  I smiled.

Whether it's King Lear, Othello, Macbeth or so many more, that's exactly what Shakespeare does to the psychology of the larger than life, truer than life kings, queens, princes and courtiers.  He works his magic on the characters, then strips them of their trappings, conceit and glib.  We know what Lear was reduced to at the end, howling in pain with his dead beloved Cordelia.  We know how the undoing of the proud, battle-tested and honorable Othello happened.  We know how the eviscerating Lady Macbeth succumbs to her guilt and the stress. The psychological grasp Shakespeare owned rivaled that of psychologists.

Robin Williams Unleashes Genius on Shakespeare

When I picked up my daughter Eva from an August afternoon with a friend, she asked "Dad, did you hear about Robin Williams?"  "No, I didn't."  He had just died, apparently from suicide.  I was quietly stunned.  The man was such a natural comedic genius.  I'm sure his acts were carefully prepared, but what we saw on stage or in interviews were so spontaneous as to seem purely improvised.  In Robin Williams (1951-2014) Performs Unknown Shakespeare Play in 1970s Standup Routine, for example, we see his genius unleashed on Shakespeare to an utterly delighted audience, like me:  Look, the moon like a testicle hangs low in the sky (rf. Romeo and Juliet)! 

The Fateful Story of the First Folio

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From Shakespeare to Sappho: Read the stories behind three artifacts of genius tells a great story about the First Folio.  Published in 1623, just seven years after Shakespeare died, it collected his 36 plays, half of which had never been published before.  It was given to the Bodleian Library at Oxford in 1624, but in 1664 the Library sold the First Folio.  After all, they had the Third Folio, and found no need to keep an old book.

The famous edition had virtually disappeared, apparently, until an Oxford student popped up with it in 1905.  An anonymous collector offered to buy it for £3000 (equivalent to $531,000 in 2014 valuation), but the owners gave the Library a chance to raise funds in Kickstarter style, long before there was Kickstarter.  In the end, the Library undid its foolish act of 1664, and that collector (Henry Clay Folger) came to house the largest collection of First Folios in the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Shakespeare Unbound Performs and Discusses

I love what ABC Splash and Bell Shakespeare, the national repertory of Australia, have arrived at:  Shakespeare Unbound.  First they enact 12 scenes from 6 major plays: Romeo and Juliet, Tempest, Julius Caesar, Othello, Hamlet and Macbeth, and second deliver them online for students to access freely.  Third the director and cast give behind-the-scenes talks and unpack the meanings of the plays.  A modern day audience ought to see Shakespeare performed, then hear about the plays from the repertory itself, and, I hope, have a chance to discuss them openly.  Shakespeare Unbound is on the ABC Splash website, and the Melbourne Herald Sun offers To be or not to be online is the question as ABC Splash and Bell Shakespeare take the bard to the net for students with Shakespeare Unbound.  I very much trust that with better understanding on what is going comes greater enjoyment of the plays.

Hamlet and the Tragic World of Elsinore

The setting for William Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' can be viewed and interpreted in many ways. In this short film, director Richard Eyre, designer Vicki Mortimer and author Colin Bell discuss some of the ways the space in which 'Hamlet' exists has been brought to life on the stage of the National Theatre.

As I listen to this discussion, I get the visual of Elsinore as four walls and the feeling of it all closing in ever so gradually on Hamlet.  More than just a haunting experience, it must've been a maddening one as well.  He loses his beloved father, he witnesses his mother's overly quick remarriage to his uncle, frightfully he encounters his beloved father, he suspects his uncle to be the murderer.  The more I think about it, the more I see Shakespeare layering his play with sheets after sheets of tragedy. So, without a doubt, the director and his or her crew must manifest such layering via stage design, lighting and props.   

Othello and the Tragedy of Racial Discrimination

This short film offers reflections on the impact of performances of 'Othello' by Ira Aldridge, Paul Robeson and Willard White. Professors Carol Chillington Rutter and Tony Howard offer commentary, alongside Adrian Lester who discusses playing Ira Aldridge in 'Red Velvet'.

In this bit on Othello's Racial Identity, by Philip Butcher, there is such scholarly effort to clarify precisely what the proud general was.  But I think ironically that effort clouds the very fact of racism in Shakespeare's time, all the way to the present day views and staging of the play.  Whether or not Shakespeare meant Moor to mean Moroccan in origin specifically, his play is an outright discrimination against Othello based on his skin color.  The more Iago works his evil on him, the less Othello's royal lineage can save him.  It must've been more than a little courageous for Black actors like Aldridge, then, to play him and subject himself to vicious racism and manipulation.