Local (Alternative) Shakespeare

The Shakespeare festival season is upon us. Always fun, and often revealing of who Shakespeare is in the popular imagination. The town I’ve lived in for two years is, by all measures, stuffed with Boston-area academics, many of them historians. So when I saw the notice for a 400th Anniversary celebration of the publication of the Sonnets this weekend, I was more than curious. Then I read the program.

The weekend-long series of talks and performances is being held at the local public library and the town’s Masonic Temple, and features spoken word performances by some British eurythmists. No, not followers of Annie Lenox; eurythmy is a performance style emphasizing “visible speech” and “visible singing." Next is a presentation is which the Earl of Oxford speaks with Lady Mary Wroth in 1604 about his life and fears that his family and writings will be forgotten, followed by another presentation on de Vere’s private life as Shakespeare. Another presentation will investigate (and dramatize) the “moving, tragic deaths of Ophelia, Cordelia, and Desdemona,” asking why they have to die? That night participants are invited to drink and present (in whichever order, I imagine) their favorite bits at an open stage.

Those conscious the next morning are in for some sobering esoterica: a one-man show titled “The True Story of King Henry IX, Last of the Tudors,” which “dramatizes the veritable tale of the sonnets” by following the Earl of Southampton’s political fortunes. Then a presentation on politics in Richard II led by an Oxfordian and an anthroposophist. Hmmm ... Last, a talk for our times on Shakespeare and monetary history, arguing that “this culture-forging canon of literary masterpieces sounds with a moral timbre that is not merely utilitarian, but allegorical: altogether a temporal tale of the gods. Is this the elixir it holds for this ‘post-modern” era, soon to metamorphose (dare I ‘prophesy’) into a post-commercial age?” A post-recession Shakespeare? Heady stuff.

A sedate, almost orthodox afternoon of Ralph Vaughan Williams settings and Wagnerian adaptations wraps it up.

Unfortunately, I seem to be traveling this weekend.

Carnivalesque 52

Carnivalesque 52 is now up at Gilbert Mabbott.

Playing Shakespeare

Back in 1984 a British television series called Playing Shakespeare, hosted by John Barton of the Royal Shakespeare Company, aired in a few American cities and made its way onto VHS (some local libraries have it). The companion book by Barton (with a foreword by Trevor Nunn) was reissued by Anchor Books in 2001. But only now is the series available on DVD, just issued last month by Athena Learning.

The series features all the usual suspects from that era in the RSC: Ian McKellan, Patrick Stewart, Judi Dench, David Suchet, Peggy Ashcroft, Ben Kingsley, and so on. Yes, that generation of Shakespearean actors, but what Barton and they achieve in these shows is still utterly relevant in the classroom. Take the episode where David Suchet and Patrick Stewart trade takes on Shylock, Suchet playing him as Jewish, with a bit of eu veh, and Stewart playing him as less Jewish than simply greedy. There is also a marvelous scene where Barton steers Judi Dench (as Viola in Twelfth Night) line-by-line through the speech hiding her love from a self-absorbed Orsino.

Yes, these shows tend to reinforce the notion that Shakespeare must be played with an English–especially an “expensive”–accent, and they tend to emphasize formal over cultural issues in performance. But they manage what is often hardest to achieve in the academic, text-centered classroom: simultaneously showing Shakespeare’s malleability and the constant, guiding motion of his language.