As I believe I’ve said before, I don’t know what I would have done last summer if it hadn’t been for the plethora of outstanding books out there on directing plays, especially those that are specifically about directing Shakespearean plays.  Ultimately, I would have been up a creek without the proverbial paddle as I would not have had a clue where to start, how to continue, nor how to finish up a production.  One of the most important aspects of any play is blocking, and prior to reading said books, the term “blocking” only had something to do with felt-making or other textile arts, in the back of my very fuzzy memory banks!

The kind of blocking that a director has to be concerned about is the movement and positioning of actors on the stage that will facilitate the performance of the play (thanks, Wikipedia, for that definition!). Sometimes, as one is watching a play, it may seem that the actors are just moving where it feels natural, or where the mood strikes them at the time. Nope…Just about everything you see on stage has already been choreographed by the director and rehearsed that way by the actors. The goal is to have it look as natural as possible - as if they are just doing it on the spur of the moment.

One thing I learned in my Shakespeare-directing books is that you don’t necessarily want to create the blocking too early in the rehearsal process. Because of the importance of your cast understanding the language so they can communicate that understanding to the audience, you want to wait until they really know what they’re saying so that they can help figure out the blocking along the way…and they can understand why you might not want a certain character to be downstage during a key moment when that character would naturally be lurking somewhere else.  The beauty of directing and acting Shakespeare is that Will was an actor, before he ever wrote any plays, and so when he did take up the quill, he knew what to have the actors say in their lines in order to ”facilitate the performance of the play” - blocking!

One book in particular that I’ve been re-reading for ideas and suggestions is Mastering Shakespeare: An Acting Class in Seven Scenes, by Scott Kaiser.  In this book, Mr. Kaiser (or Mr. Kay) teaches seven different important aspects of acting Shakespeare to a fictional class of actors.  The book is written like a play, with dialogue between the students and the teacher.  This approach makes the book an interesting read, as well as incredibly helpful to anyone preparing to act or direct Shakespeare.  The one aspect that I’m particularly interested in right now is the idea of the speech measure, or the chunk of text that communicates a single idea to the audience.  It can be as brief as “O!” or as long as “How art thou out of breath when thou hast breath/To say to me that thou art out of breath”?  This particular concept is super important for actors to be aware of as they need to make sure each speech measure is clear to the audience before continuing on to the next…and successful blocking can help the actors do just that!

Last year, I felt like one of our best scenes in Much Ado was Act III, scene 2, specifically the part where Don John is telling Claudio that Hero has been unfaithful to him.  One of the reasons this was such an effective scene was the fact that we blocked Claudio actually punching Don John when he is told that Hero is “every man’s Hero.”  But even before that very cool bit of blocking (that my actors figured out on their own…awesome!), Don John managed to convey a great deal of information to the audience through his clear speech measures.  I had people come to me afterward and say, “I totally got what he was saying with, ‘I know not that, when he knows what I know.’”  It was because our Don John didn’t rush through his words, or the ideas being conveyed, just to get the dialogue finished.  And recent rehearsals have shown that this same actor (Gremio this time around) is doing this, seemingly naturally as I haven’t mentioned this idea since our initial read-throughs.

Funny how I just realized that I keep talking about text issues - speech measures, meaning - but the post is supposed to be about blocking.  I just can’t help but talk about the text - It’s so important for understanding Shakespeare that it has to go hand in hand with anything else you do!  Otherwise you can have a ton of great blocking…and an audience who doesn’t have a clue what’s going on!  Not good!!

For some very funny theater definitions - especially the ones for “blocking” and “blocking rehearsal” - check the link below - Enjoy!

http://www.communitytheater.org/humor/dictionary.htm

After writing my last post, it occurred to me that I have a wealth of knowledge to share with people who are interested in staging Shakespeare…but 99% of it is on my bookshelves! I only learned as much as I did last year from the great books that I managed to find, usually from Amazon.com. So this post will simply be a list of the best books I found - ones that I would recommend you invest in for your drama department:

Teaching Shakespeare, Rex Gibson
**Shakespeare’s Words, David Crystal & Ben Crystal
Instant Shakespeare, Louis Fantasia
A Shakespearean Actor Prepares, Adrian Brine & Michael York
Teaching Shakespeare, Peter Reynolds
**The DK Essential Shakespeare Handbook, Leslie Dunton-Downer & Alan Riding
Secrets of Acting Shakespeare: The Original Approach, Patrick Tucker
Mastering Shakespeare: An Acting Class in Seven Scenes, Scott Kaiser
**The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Amateur Theatricals, John Kenrick
Stage Costume: Step-By-Step, Mary T. Kidd
**Costume Construction, Katherine Evans-Strand
Discovering Shakespeare’s Meaning: An Introduction to the Study of Shakespeare, Leah Scragg
Playing Shakespeare: An Actor’s Guide, John Barton
**Will Power: How to Act Shakespeare in 21 Days, John Basil
Freeing Shakespeare’s Voice: The Actor’s Guide to Talking the Text, Kristin Linklater
**Play Director’s Survival Kit, James and Wanda Rodgers
**Clues to Acting Shakespeare, Wesley Van Tassel

If I could only choose certain ones from the list, I would definitely make sure I had the ones marked with **. These have been positively indispensable in figuring out how to direct Shakespeare, and a couple of them (especially those by Rodgers and Kenrick) are great resources for any drama department to have on hand.

An important aspect of putting together a quality theater production is the attitude and cooperation of the cast members. Think of it like a sports team. Winning a game will not only come about because each individual player is good at the sport, or spends countless hours practicing whatever skills they need to have in that particular sport. Team sports require that each member of the team contributes to the end goal and that they work as a…well, as a team! In my opinion, theater is no different - the cast has to work together as a team, almost as a family, but the problem is that sometimes egos and separate agendas, having nothing to do with the common good, can get in the way (in both sports and theater, I’m sure!).

It’s best to start rehearsals with some kind of an activity, rather than diving right into the work of the rehearsal. An example that I plan to try this year is a dodge ball type of activity, but rather than hitting one another with the balls, you instead bounce the ball to a fellow cast member, giving your character’s name at the same time. It would sound something like, “Petruchio!” “Grumio!” “A Pedant!” “Bianca!”, and my goal for them would be to go as quickly as possible through the entire group. Once each person has given his/her character name, I will switch it - now they have to give the character name of the person to whom they are bouncing the ball! Recognizing each person’s character name is going to be very important by the time we perform - They can’t think of each other as “John playing Hamlet,” but instead as “Hamlet!” (By the second or third week of rehearsals, I will even try to stop calling the actors by their real names - I start referring to them by their character names, and that’s about the time I start requiring them to call me “Mistress of All Things Shakespearean” or “Goddess Director” - JUST KIDDING!!!)

A really good warm-up exercise for projection is called “Kick the Box,” or as in the pictures above, “Smack the Ball!” The actor has to choose one of his/her lines from the play, and the key to this exercise is to really think about the last word of the line. As in the example above, where my daughter is serving the volleyball, she was given the line from Julius Caesar, “Cowards die many times before their deaths.” Now, if an actor gives that line and runs out of steam by the time they reach the end of the line, the audience will have missed the meaning of the line…”Cowards die many times…” Huh?? For the audience to understand Shakespeare, the actor has to project his way all the way through the end of the line, so the goal of this exercise is to have the actor kick a box, or serve a ball, or punch something exactly on the last syllable of the line (or the first syllable of the last word, if it’s a multisyllabic word). Doing this over and over again will help train the actor to save air for the end of his lines, and also remind the muscles of the body that emphasis has to continue throughout the entire line. By the way, this exercise came from a fabulous book called Clues to Acting Shakespeare by Wesley Van Tassel - I highly recommend buying yourself a copy if you plan to do any Shakespearean acting in your drama department!

Another great book to add to your collection is called King of Shadows by Susan Cooper. This is a youth fiction book about a young boy in an all-boy acting troupe, preparing to play A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe Theatre in London. It gives some neat insight to what a theatre troupe is really like, both in the present and in Shakespeare’s time, including some theatre games at the beginning of the story. A great read!

It just occurred to me that there are bound to be loads of theater games websites and ideas on the Internet, and lo and behold, after doing a search, here is a great link I just found - http://www.creativedrama.com/theatre.htm - filled with all kinds of games, from warm-up exercises to group cohesion builders to improvisation skills. Whatever games you choose - from ones you get out of a book, or from the Internet, or ones that you make up on your own - be sure that they are serving a purpose, and that ultimately, you are helping to build that sense of family that your cast needs to create a wonderful production! And please share any good ones that you know - I’d love to have more to add to my summer!

Postmodern Essays on Love, Sex, and Marriage in Shakespeare is a mouthful of a title, which is appropriate given the topics it tackles. This new collection of essays seeks to examine the romantic relationships conjured by Will from Stratford. Some of the articles look at conventions of dating and marriage in Shakespeare’s time and how they did and did not manifest themselves in Shakespeare’s plays. Others take a more theoretical approach in an attempt to gauge audience reception and understanding both then and now. It’s definitely heady stuff, but for Shakespeare buffs it would make a perfect beach read. After all, the book is celebrating (and dissecting) one of the things for which Shakespeare is most famous: his evocation of love.

One of the examples featured in the book is Measure for Measure, a play about women placed in impossible positions by their romantic entanglements with men. Juliet (not the one who goes all crazy over Romeo) gets pregnant by Claudio, resulting in his death sentence for fornication. Isabella is given the choice to surrender her virtue (and her plans to become a nun) in order to save Claudio’s life. Finally, Mariana, pretends to be Isabella so that her union with Angelo will force him to marry her. For each of these women, their relationships (whether desired or not) are defined along legal lines. Their need to negotiate their circumstances speaks volumes about the options available to women when Shakespeare was writing. Books like Love, Sex and Marriage… force us to look more closely at the serious roots of seemingly lightweight romantic entanglements.

In a recent review of Good Night Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), the critic wondered why people are still writing about Shakespeare’s plays. After all, it has been almost four hundred years since Will headed off to the undiscovered country. The critic raises a good point: will we ever reach a saturation point in our fascination with Shakespeare? Consider this: if you going onto a retail site like Amazon.com and search under the “Books” category for Shakespeare, you get over one hundred and thirty thousand results. Admittedly, there will be duplicate items or updated editions that pad that number, however, if you removed one third or even one half of the entries, it is still a staggering amount of text.

So, what the heck is everyone talking about? If Shakespeare only wrote thirty-five to forty plays (depending on which ones you do or do not include), then how could there be an average of three thousand books out there for every play written? Certainly, there is a lot of similar ground being covered. Anthologies abound because some use folio texts, others use quarto texts, while still others combine elements from both to create an “ideal” text. A whole other group is concerned with the man himself, though writing a biography based on the limited amount of documentation available is tricky business. Ultimately it is the analysis of the plays that takes up the bulk of this bibliography. While I cannot imagine slogging through all of them (particularly given the inevitable overlapping), it is easy to see why people write them. While the volume of analysis may seem overwhelming and redundant, the complexity of the plays themselves makes them compelling research subjects.

A recent item featuring the new book Shakespeare Unbound noted that critics often try to draw parallels between Shakespeare and his character Prospero from The Tempest. The temptation is understandable. After all, The Tempest was most likely one of his last plays, so it is easy to read the text as the work of an older man. In addition, its lead character, Prospero, has the ability to create and manipulate the world around him. Just as Shakespeare had the power to control his characters actions, Prospero manipulates the lives of those around him. Furthermore, the final monologue of the play (spoken by Prospero) is often interpreted as a kind of valedictory speech. In it, some see Shakespeare saying goodbye to the glory days of his theatrical pursuits in London as he prepared to retreat to Stratford-Upon-Avon for what would be the last three years of his life.

Italian director Giorgio Strehler translated this notion to the stage in his late 1970’s production of the play. At the end of that production, Prospero broke his magic staff and the entire set broke apart around him—only to reassemble itself moments later. The idea of Shakespeare as Prospero is relatable to this idea of Prospero as God (or at least a kind of magical Master of Ceremonies).

Looking for Shakespeare between the lines of his characters’ words is fun, but it is hard to make justifiable conclusions based on this approach. One of the primary drawbacks is the potential to only look for the good. It is certainly possible hypothesize that The Bard shared the youthful ardor of his romantic heroes, but how would his acolytes feel if he was more like the diabolically manipulative Iago? If Shakespeare was a terrible person (or even just so-so), would we want to know?

Move over Christopher Marlowe; back up Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford; step off Francis Bacon. There’s a new sheriff in town, and he’s laying his own claim to some of Shakespeare’s plays. It is none other than Shakespeare’s contemporary and fellow playwright, Thomas Middleton. Your reaction to this news might be a maelstrom of emotions, asking yourself, “What does this mean for Shakespeare’s reputation?”; “How are the Oxfordians going to rebut this?”; and, most importantly, “Who the hell is Thomas Middleton?”

If you’re an aficionado of Jacobean drama, his name will not be a complete mystery to you; still, even for the faithful, Middleton’s best-known plays—The Revenger’s Tragedy, Women Beware Women, and The Changeling—rarely show up in multi-period anthologies or production. Nevertheless, Middleton did make an important contribution to English drama and, if you believe the evidence, a significant part of that contribution was the refining of some of Shakespeare’s plays. A new two-book set of Middleton’s plays takes the theory a step further, including two of Shakespeare’s plays. Many have speculated that Measure for Measure and Macbeth were partially written by Middleton and new textual analysis asserts that as much as ten percent of the plays may be his work. The relatively early publication of Shakespeare’s collected works (which appeared just seven years after his death) has long eclipsed Middleton’s potential contribution. This new collection seeks to re-stake Middleton’s claim as part of the Shakespearean canon.

In a recent blog, I mentioned the publication of Filthy Shakespeare, a delightful tome of all the dirty words The Bard ever wrote. In a review of the book, the reviewer joked about the racy content by asking, “Should we ban Shakespeare?” He was clearly joking, but given the contentious debates over what is “appropriate” and “decent,” is this so far-fetched? Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye have sparked intense debates because of the use of language in them. In some cases, the books have been banned from schools’ curricula. Celebrated filmmaker Ken Burns recently had to remove four expletives from his WWII documentary The War for some PBS affiliates.

Is it possible that Shakespeare has been immune to these kinds of critiques because those who might be offended simply do not get the jokes? I am not suggesting that only dumb people are offended by controversial material and images. Indeed, the fact that Shakespeare is so heavily footnoted is evidence that most of us would not get the jokes without a little help. Now that Filthy Shakespeare has been published, has Will’s cover been blown? Will people take umbrage at the pseudo-incest in Hamlet, the attempted whoring of a nun in Measure for Measure, or the witchcraft in Macbeth? It may sound implausible, but it is a slippery slope. Few would group Shakespeare, Salinger or Twain with the likes of Howard Stern or Larry Flynt. Yet, in different ways (okay, reallllly different ways), they all test our idea of what freedom of expression should be.

Language is arguably one of the first things that comes to mind when you think of Shakespeare–how beautiful it is; how intricate the verse and meter; and especially how clever and erudite it is. Language is so important, in fact, that it is cause for many to doubt Shakespeare’s authorship. After all, how could such lofty words flow from the pen of a poorly educated kid from the country?

This endless reverence makes Pauline Kiernan’s new book, Filthy Shakespeare, all the more fun. Instead of analyzing the deep poetic beauty of the Bard’s pentameter, she instead has created a compendium of everything naughty and scatalogical in his plays. For all of their majesty, the plays are loaded with lowbrow humor. Romeo and Juliet stands out as a prime example, with lots of tacky, boys-will-be-boys horseplay. Yet, knocking Shakespeare down from his pedestal is neither the goal of this book nor the reason it is important. Instead, it reminds us of the unique challenge Shakespeare faced: writing plays that appealed to all audiences. While references to great literature and Greek mythology may have appealed to the well-read (or at least allowed them to pat themselves on the back for being so smart), the bathroom and sexual humor spoke to everyone. In a sense, what was most base about the plays was ironically what united its audiences.

Germaine Greer caused quite a stir in England last week by bashing the late Princess Diana while promoting her new book on Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway. Aside from questioning the late princess’ intellectual capabilities, Greer also cast her in a villainous light for carrying on with married men. These shocking statements (which, wouldn’t you know it, make for great publicity) also dovetail with some equally surprising comments about our beloved Bard. According to Greer, Shakespeare died of syphilis after battling it for many years. Furthermore, it was his “angel” (Greer’s word) Hathaway, who is responsible for Shakespeare’s lasting reputation because she paid for the First Folio.

Since the princess’ passing was only ten years ago (as of the end of this month), Greer’s barbs at her are likely to raise more ire than what she has to say about a playwright who’s been gone for nearly four centuries. Still, in both cases, I’m struck by the polarizing terminology she used. For a feminist writer, it seems surprising that her categorization of people should reek of the virgin-whore dichotomy. For Greer, Princess Diana was revered as a kind of virgin, yet in real life was a duplicitous whore. Anne Hathaway was a virgin/”angel” bestowing her magnanimous blessings on Shakespeare who, as it turns out, was a syphillis-ridden whore. Maybe Shakespeare didn’t write his plays; maybe he wasn’t a nice guy; maybe he was a philanderer and a lousy husband. Maybe. In a different light, maybe Greer’s comments (aside from being opportunistic and tacky) indicate a larger dichotomy: the need to build up and tear down pillars of all aspects of society. While the truth may lie somewhere in the middle, perhaps there will be always be two schools of thought on Shakespeare. One will revere him as a god of literature, while the other will despise him as a talentless hack. And a slut.