When people get all fired up about Shakespearean authorship debates, they tend to center around a few basic questions: Which plays did he write? Did he write all of his plays? Did he co-write some of his plays with other authors and, if so, who were they. Implicit in some of these questions is a kind of hegemony. In other words, the “pure” Shakespeare plays (if such things exist) are more important, better or take precedence over the ones who have been sullied by other author’s hands (even if their work is good).

As with all Shakespearean criticism, debates about his poetry get far less ink than his plays. A recent article notes the exclusion of a poem entitled “A Lover’s Complaint” from a new and supposedly comprehensive edition of The Bard’s writings. The critic was further outraged at the inclusion of two other poems whose authorship he found questionable.

In the midst of many line-specific arguments about “A Lover’s Complaint,” the author raises the question of how to tell the difference between bad Shakespeare and other Elizabethan writing that is merely an ineffective imitation of his style. His defense of “Complaint” is that it is deliberately bad as a kind of parody (he cites a particularly odd use of the word “balls”—no, it’s not what you think—as an example of the piece’s comically deliberate misuse of imagery and metaphor). Regardless of who wrote “A Lover’s Complaint,” I walked away from this article wondering if we have to justify The Bard’s missteps in order to preserve his reputation. Maybe he did like to lampoon poor writing, but perhaps we’re just uncomfortable with the idea of someone we’ve heralded as a genius missing the mark.

The title of this post may seem a bit strange…I mean, good grief!  After everything I’ve written thus far as to the importance of sticking to the text, why would I even entertain the possibility that the text might be less than critical to the staging of Shakespeare?

This topic occurred to me as I began packing for our upcoming vacation to Hawaii (courtesy of my very kind mother-in-law - Everyone should be blessed with a mother-in-law like her!). I considered all of the physical necessities for myself, my husband, and my two young kids. I made my list and checked it several times. But then I thought about the most important item any bookworm must consider when preparing for long flights and time sitting around on a beach drinking pina coladas…What book(s) will I bring?!?

This is critical - this could make or break a great vacation!  So I decided on The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse, which I’m finishing up for teaching my British Literature class.  A hilarious read, it will keep me chuckling on the plane!  I also chose Master of Verona, which I have already read once, but want to read again as there is so much detail to the story, I want to really get my head around the plot and the characters.

However, because rehearsals for our Shrew production start when I get back from Hawaii, I know I also need to take my script and my Arden copy of the play so that I can be 110% ready to work with my cast next week.  I know I’ve said it before, but it’s really important for a director to choose a play that he/she likes…A LOT!  You will be reading, reading, and re-reading that script over and over again before opening night even gets close, so it really needs to be a play that you will enjoy that much!  Choosing Shrew was a good thing for me as I love reading it over and over - I notice new things with every read, just like I did with Much Ado last summer.

So, why is it important that a director be that familiar with the script?  Isn’t it good enough to know the plot, the characters, and the basic storyline?  Although I’ve never directed a non-Shakespearean play, I would suspect that regardless of the play you’re directing, the answer to that question is a resounding, “NO!”  First of all, when you’re dealing with Shakespeare, you have to start with the text…all of the clues to acting Shakespeare are in the words he wrote.  It’s really a miraculous thing - once you set kids to figuring out what all of the words mean - the classical allusions and the 16th-century hunting, clothing, and culinary terms, just to name a few - they start to figure out where their character is coming from and what he or she is feeling and thinking. Even starting with the meaning of a character’s name can be very helpful to the students. For last year’s production, I was able to find a list of what some of the Much Ado characters’ names mean. Two of the most telling were the meanings of Borachio and Claudio. Borachio, partying friend of Don John, means “drunkard,” and Claudio, whose personal hang-ups cause all sorts of misery for his bride-to-be, means “crippled.” In Shrew, Bianca means “white,” which is important to the story as it is Bianca who appears to be pure and perfect to all of her suitors - it is only later that we discover that she might not be the submissive little angel Lucentio thought he was getting!

Knowing your play…sticking to the best possible edition you can find (I HIGHLY recommend the Arden editions, as well as checking with a First Folio facsimile for punctuation and capitalization questions)…helping your cast learn what the words, phrases, and idioms mean…all of this will help you create an amazing production that your audience can understand. Remember that if your actors don’t know what they’re saying - if they’re only memorizing words and phrases that are meaningless to them - there is no way your audience will have a clue as to what’s going on.  That would be a shame not only for your audience, but also for your cast.  Help them stage a successful, fun Shakespearean play - help them understand the words - help them stick to the text!

We live in a Smackdown world. Awards shows, blogs and critical essays are often dedicated to deciding which things, people or ideas are better than the next. Shakespeare has certainly been the subject of much debate, particularly from those who believe that his mega-fame has come at the expense of the reputations and explorations of other contemporary and non-contemporary artists. For some, Will is always seated at a table for one.

The latest compare-athon pits Shakespeare versus the poet John Milton. This examination is book-length and features extended passages of Milton (most famous for Paradise Lost) that make up nearly half the book. The author of the book asserts that Milton is a far superior poet in terms of his subject matter, tone, and technique. The reviewer took a decidedly different bent, noting the impact of length upon audiences’ perception of them.

The reviewer noted that Shakespeare is immensely quotable. You can get a good bon mot from him in two sentences or less. Milton is a different story. His written may not be any less intricate or accomplished, but it comes in more complicated packaging. He might need half a page to get an idea totally off the runway. That’s not a bad thing, but it might give one reason why he hasn’t enjoyed the historical and literary acclaim that the modestly educated man from Stratford has. Maybe if he’d been more pithily poetic, Milton wouldn’t have ended up the same way Paradise did.

Aaahhh, teenagers!  How I love and adore working with the little pains in the…Okay, you all have to know by now that I’m kidding!  Yes, they do try my patience now and again, but I couldn’t ask for a better job!

What on earth prompted that?  Tonight is our first read-through of The Taming of the Shrew and I have to admit that I’m pretty excited about it!  I’ve been looking forward to starting this production ever since last year’s Much Ado finished up!  Again, though, I forget that not everyone is as insane as I am about all of this…even my actors who have other commitments and lives beyond the stage!  Several of our kids are involved in soccer right now; a few run track at the local high school; and many of our kids have afterschool/evening jobs.  I understand that they are busy little bees and that spring semester seems to be even busier than fall!  So there are some kids who will be late coming tonight - that’s okay, I understand.

One of my actors, though, came in and said he would be about an hour late.  I asked if he had to work because he does put in a lot of hours at the restaurant where he’s employed.  He sheepishly admitted that no, he was instead going to go target shooting with some friends.  Target shooting?  Shooting guns?  “Yeah, we get to fire automatic weapons today!”  Okay…you’re going to miss half the read-through because you get to go shoot guns at targets?!?  Hmmm…

After much discussion and explaining to him that that was not an acceptable excuse for missing half of a read-through, he agreed that he probably could have scheduled his “ostentatious display of force” for another time (great line from John Wayne, by the way!).  As he was so sheepish and willing to admit that this was a poor choice on his part, I said that he could be a little bit late, but not a full hour.  I believe he told me I was awesome, or something along those lines. :)

I love it when a teenager will admit that they made a choice that wasn’t one of their best and then will do what it takes to make things right.  I know these kids all have lives outside of school and outside of drama, but their willingness to be here warms my heart - especially when they would really rather be shooting guns at innocent paper targets!

So, now that a couple of days have passed since our first read-through, how did it go?  Very well!  A great deal of pizza was consumed; there was much laughing and giggling, which indicates that a good time was had by all; and we made it through the first two acts.  I was especially pleased that no one sounded completely “clueless” as they read their parts.  Everyone sounded as if they had at least done a cursory read-through on their own, which shows me that they are taking this seriously.  Their commitment to this project just makes me so proud, and I’m so excited to get to do this again!

You’ll have to bear with me this week…My daughter just turned 11, and so my focus is, of course, on her!  But in thinking about this blog and my daughter, it occurred to me that I had a few things to say about children and Shakespeare.

Scott wrote a recent post - http://www.enotes.com/blogs/shakespeare/2008-03/kinder-bard-en/ - which discussed an article about exposing children to Shakespeare at the age of 4.  I agree completely with this premise.  Why not get kids interested in these wonderful stories while they’re still young enough to love fairy tales?  Why can’t they understand The Tempest if they can understand “Rapunzel”?  And language experts say that the younger a child, the easier it is for them to learn a new language.  Now, far be it from me to say that Shakespeare is another language!!  But I know it presents difficulties to some people when they are first trying to handle the Elizabethan poetry, and so if it works better for little kids whose brains still have all those wonderful firing synapses, then why not go for it?

I started the Shakespeare Festival at our school because I figured out that getting Shakespeare “off the page and onto the stage” is critical to students’ enjoyment and understanding of these plays.  People scoff when I say that I added Hamlet to our 7th grade reading list.  Of course it’s a bit of a stretch, but it’s nothing they can’t handle, particularly when we get up and starting reading aloud and acting out the story.  Last semester I worked with a group of students who ranged in age from 5 to 15 on a scene from The Tempest.  This exercise that I did came from a great book called Teaching Shakespeare, by Rex Gibson.  In it he suggested using Ariel’s story of the shipwreck and dividing lines amongst all of the kids, except Prospero, who is a single actor/reader.  So I took one of my older girls and gave her Prospero’s lines, and then divided Ariel’s lines among the rest of the kids.  The lines were divided, too, so they were manageable for younger kids.  Our littlest boy had a line with four words, and then we just worked on up to more and longer lines for the oldest kids.  They had so much fun with this - We even added sound effects so that there were ocean/surf crashing noises in the background while Ariel is telling his story, as well as thunder bolts at “Jove’s lighting, the precursors O’th’ dreadful thunderclaps”!  This was a great experience that led several of the kids to ask me, “When can we do more of this?”  In addition, they really wanted to know the entire story of The Tempest, which gave me the opportunity to do more teaching and sharing of Shakespeare.

Another great way to get younger kids involved in the plays is by having them be extras.  Our Much Ado last summer included the masked ball scene in Act II, complete with a choreographed 16th century Italian court dance!  It was SO neat to see these actors (yes, even the teenage boys!) get into this and want to learn these dance steps to bring even more dimension and life to our production.  Altogether we had 20 dancers - five groups of four dancers each - and the majority of them were extras - younger kids without lines in the play but who really wanted to be involved in the production in some capacity.  My daughter was one of these, as well as the Noble Lady who sings at Hero’s tomb in Act V (yes, I just had to mention my cute kid again!)!

So what exactly is the point to this post, other than to talk about my adorable birthday girl?  I want to encourage all teachers out there - elementary and secondary, public and private schools, and homeschoolers - to not be afraid to tackle the Bard and bring him to life with whatever group of kids you get to teach.  It never ceases to amaze me how much kids can do when they’re encouraged and loved through the process!

If Shakespeare was a poet first, why do we remember him more as a dramatist? This is the question posed in a recent article about Shakespearean scholar. For this writer, it seems that far too much attention has been paid to Shakespeare’s career as a dramatist while not enough writing has been devoted to his poetry. For this writer, Shakespeare started out as a poet first and later found his way into theatre. Additionally, he points out that Shakespeare had a poetic career beyond the Sonnets. Two of Shakespeare’s most famous and masterful poetic works are Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. While both works have received significant attention in literary circles, they don’t receive the same attention as King Lear.

If this assertion is true, why don’t both of his efforts receive equal attention? One issue may be accessibility. For those who regularly read poetry for study and/or enjoyment, this isn’t a problem, but how many people read poetry for leisure? Has poetry inadvertently become a victim of educational classism? In other words, is poetry something only studied by wealthy intellectuals?
Forum may have also played a role in the shaping of Shakespeare’s reputation. Theatre’s role as popular entertainment (both in Shakespeare’s time and especially in the 1800’s) has ensured that his plays reach a wide audience. His poetry, unfortunately, has not enjoyed the same level of exposure. Yet, there is one other factor that arguably is the biggest contributor to the disparity at hand. Shakespeare’s dramatic writing has always been celebrated and analyzed for its poetic quality. In essence, audiences and readers have been getting two forms in one. Shakespeare didn’t stop writing poetry; he simply incorporated it into new forms. In doing so, he may have cast a shadow over his earlier, equally important work.