Category Archives: Blog Post

Blackfriars Conference 2013–Keynote: Peter Holland’s A Critic and a Gentleman: Publishing Performance

Hi again! Sarah Martin here to liveblog the first Keynote Address of the Seventh Blackfriars Conference: Peter Holland’s A Critic and a Gentleman: Publishing Performance.

Peter Holland, Associate Dean for the Arts and McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies at the University of Notre Dame is, as Dr. Cohen said in his introduction, “a great get” in terms of a Keynote speaker. Professor Holland began his presentation with the images of the title pages of two different editions of Hamlet: one the early modern title page with a record of the first performance and the second, an edition inspired by the Michael Grandage production of Hamlet at the Donmar Warehouse which starred actor Jude Law. Professor Holland explained that the reader of the 1676 edition thought he was getting “all of Hamlet“–the play as written and the play as performed, but the edition neglects to state that it is also heavily revised while the Grandage edition has been significantly shortened.

Professor Holland pointed out that, for the type of souvenir playtext exemplified by Grandage’s edition to be published in time for audience members to buy it, the text must be fixed in print well before the production actually begins performances. While an audience may believe that they are buying a true “performance text”, there is inevitable variation between the text in codex and the words spoken onstage.

Professor Holland discussed the role of what he called, “the theatrical edition” and asked what the intended use of such an edition is.  He explained that theatres always produce several editions–rehearsals scripts and so on that are not necessarily intended for publication, but are the material products of the theatre itself.

Professor Holland the discussed the role of the actor as critic and the censor as author. The “gentleman” in Professor Holland’s address is Francis Gentleman, who chose which moments of Shakespeare’s plays he thought ought to be included in editions and which should be omitted. Gentleman, Professor Holland argues, provides the “first performance commentary” on Shakespeare’s plays.  Professor Holland argues that such performance commentary is a “companion to the theatre” and no more. The Bell’s Editions (influenced by Gentleman and actor David Garrick) sold better than other scholarly editions in the eighteenth century. This, Professor Holland, argues has set the precedent for subsequent editions which include illustrations of performance and other theatrical or actor-centric images.  These images, however, are not necessarily representative of the plays in performance, but are of actors placed in suggested settings (such as an actress portrayed standing in the countryside) that are the product of editors rather than the actual performance history of the plays.

Professor Holland  argues that extensive performance commentary can actually be a hindrance to performance as it, “implies a right way of performing the play, not a range of possibilities”. Professor Holland argues that, while such extensive performance commentary shows impressive scholarship, it does not provide meaning. Professor Holland’s discussion of the Samuel French Acting Editions was particularly interesting and amusing to the audience as he compared the staging diagrams present in the editions to “IKEA self-assembly”. Such editions, Professor Holland argued, make the play no longer Shakespeare’s, but rather the product of the publishing house. Professor Holland’s Keynote Address, which explored the relationship between performance and the printed text, presented in a theatre that seeks to do just that, was the perfect start to the Blackfriars Conference.

Blackfriars Conference 2013–Dr. Ralph Alan Cohen’s Welcome to the Seventh Blackfriars Conference

Hi Everyone! Sarah Martin here to liveblog Dr. Ralph Alan Cohen’s Welcome to the Seventh Blackfriars Conference.

Dr. Cohen took to the stage in a packed Blackfriars Playhouse to welcome everyone to the Seventh Blackfriars Conference and began this celebration of early modern drama with, as he said, “the only somber moment” of the conference when he took a moment to recognize the memory Blackfriars Playhouse architect: Tom McLaughlin who died in 2012. Dr. Cohen then recognized several people who made this conference possible including the team who read through over three-hundred abstracts before introducing OCS Artistic Director Jim Warren who gave a brief history of the OCS and Blackfriars Playhouse. After Mr. Warren thanked the attendees for their contribution to Shakespeare scholarship, Dr. Cohen introduced OCS Managing Director Amy Wratchford and incoming OCS Board President Mary McDermott. Dr. Cohen also introduced Staunton’s mayor, Lacy B. King. Mayor King gave a brief history of how the OCS has impacted and enlivened our small, picturesque city.  Dr. Cohen also recognized this Conference’s patron, George Walton Williams IV and introduced the Director of  Mary Baldwin College’s Shakespeare & Performance M.Litt/MFA program, Dr. Paul Menzer.

The focus of Dr. Cohen’s Welcome was on community, both the local community of Staunton and the community of OCS employees and volunteers who are responsible for the success of the OCS and this week’s Conference. Dr. Cohen welcomed all of the OCS employees to the Blackfriars stage for a special moment during which each employee introduced him or herself to the Conference attendees. OCS Director of Education Sarah Enloe  then took the stage to explain some of the Conference logistics before introducing the hallmark of the Blackfriars Conference: the bear. Bears (or grad students dressed as bears) will come onstage to stop any presentation that goes over time. This fun practice is, of course, inspired by the famous stage direction in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, “Exit, pursued by a bear”.  Ms. Enloe, apparently, went over her allotted time because one of the bears entered and grabbed her paper before exiting. And so it begins…

Wake-up Workshop: “A Certain Text”

Good morning and welcome to the first session of the 2013 Blackfriars Conference. My name is Ashley Pierce, and I will be live blogging the first session, a Wake-up Workshop “A certain text” with Natalia Razak that took place Tuesday October 23rd 8:00 to 8:45 AM. This is the first ever Wake-up Workshop with the American Shakespeare Center and Blackfriars Conference, as part of the education program within the OCS, dealing this morning with scansion. This is a means to showcase what the education program brings to schools.

Razak invited 11 of this morning’s gathering to join her on stage, asking them to sit upon the gallant stools located on the stage. She had the volunteers each take a syllable from Shakespeare’s line “To be or not to be; that is the question…” from Hamlet. Coupling up the volunteers into pairs, she had the person to the right of each pair sit down while the second person stood, to emphasis the iambic pentameter. She then had the group go through the line, saying their syllable to show the stressed and unstressed syllables. Then moving the topic onto the feminine endings, she asked the group what this could infer on the line. Some answers were, disoriented, questioning, hesitation, weak, etc, with Razak adding that she did not think she “has cracked the feminine ending.” The next step was to do this same exercise, with the quarto version of this same text, “To be or not to be; ay there’s the point…” Going through the same process, this time highlighting the trochaic stresses, Razak noted that this makes it a discovery. She then asked the group to try this again without stressing the “ay” to see if it is more an internal shift, making Hamlet more of a thinker, showing how this experiment/exercise can teach as well as play with Shakespeare’s text. The workshop then moved into a speech of Biron’s from Love’s Labour’s Lost. Razak gave the attendees a copy of this speech and had them each read a line, in a “read around.”

Razak then talked about how the OCS actors will scan and paraphrase their lines before the first rehearsal to help put everyone on the same page, so the director knows what the actors think and can see if it is what they are thinking as well. This is to ensure that the actors know exactly what they are saying and to make sure the audience knows as well. Razak then asked the attendees to locate a pen, asking them to take a couple of moments and paraphrase the line they had previously read. Due to time constraints, she then asked if anyone had a paraphrase they were proud of or had a difficult time with that the group could explore; unfortunately not everyone could read what they discovered. One attendee mentioned that “time” was a hard word to paraphrase, saying that she came up with chronology, Cronus, hours. Showing that some words were difficult to find a new word for since it was so tied into our common language. Razak then moved forward to look at mid-line breaks, caesuras, with the group, to trouble why a character would pause in the middle of a line. She asked how this feels when reading and hearing this harsh break in the line, as well as talked about how this effects the breath control of the actor speaking the line.

As an attendee said when you have to take a breath it takes the person out of a thinking place and moving them into a feeling place. Attendees left this workshop with this thought to ponder as they moved on to the next session of the day.

Introducing the BFC13 Blogging Team

As we did in 2011, OCS Education will be live-blogging the Blackfriars Conference in its entirety. Every Plenary, Staging, and Colloquy Session, as well as lunch meet-ups and assorted other events, will have a devoted post here on the blog, updated in real-time, so that those of you who can’t join us in Staunton next week will still be able to follow along with the proceedings. I am pleased and proud to introduce the following individuals who will be helping me to document the 7th Blackfriars Conference in all its glory:

Whitney Egbert
 Whitney has been a theatre actor for 20 years.  She has been based in NYC for 4 years, adding work in the midwest and east coast to her west coast beginnings.  She has been the Managing Director for The Shakespeare Forum in NYC for the past year. She has been a teaching artist with Shakesperience Productions, Inc., Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, The Shakespeare Forum, South Dakota Shakespeare Festival, and LaGuardia Community College.  Theatre credits include: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost (The Shakespeare Forum); As You Like It (South Dakota Shakespeare Festival); Platonov (Columbia Stages); Romeo and Juliet (Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival); Much Ado About Nothing, Othello (Hip to Hip Theatre); Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar (Shakesperience Productions); Fat Pig, It’s A Wonderful Life: A Radio Play (Salem Repertory). B.A.: University of Portland. www.whitneyjegbert.com

Nora Manca
 Nora Manca is a 2nd year MLitt student working on her thesis on Shakespeare as an Other. She was the founding artistic director of Storefront Shakespeare in Chicago.  After graduating Nora plans to establish a new professional Shakespeare theater company, probably in New Orleans.  

Sarah Martin
 Sarah Martin is a second year M.Litt student at Mary Baldwin College. She is originally from Florida and holds a BA in Theatre from Florida State University.

Ashley Pierce
 Ashley Pierce is a current student in her second year at Mary Baldwin Colleges Shakespeare and Performance program. Holding a B.A. from Florida Southern College and a A.A. from Northampton Community College both in Theatre Arts Performance, her background is primarily in performance. As an actor, direction, costume designer, stage manager and much more, she had a firm understanding of play performance from original concept to opening nights. 

Charlene Smith
 Charlene V. Smith is an actor and director from Washington, DC and co-founder of Brave Spirits Theatre. She has a BA in English and theatre from the College of William and Mary and studied at the London Dramatic Academy. She is currently in her final year of the MLitt/MFA program in Shakespeare and Performance at Mary Baldwin College.

Clare Von Rueden
 Clare Von Rueden graduated from Ave Maria University with a degree in literature.  The majority of her stage work has been centered in violin performance, but she has been helping with plays since high school. Her love of Shakespeare began with a love of literature, and some of her first Shakespeare memories come from reading Shakespeare out loud with a group of friends in high school, and having lengthy conversations about Shakespeare with her sister. She is currently a second year in the Shakespeare and Performance program at Mary Baldwin College.

Molly Zeigler
Molly Zeigler is a post-bac student with the Shakespeare and Performance program. Her major areas of focus include Shakespearean dramaturgy, directing, and theatre history. Molly received her MA in Shakespearean Studies from the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. From Buffalo, New York, she is happy to be back this side of the pond and she’s excited about studying with another world-class institution. Molly is the proud Mom of eight year old Isabel and she looks forward to sharing her passion with family, friends, and future students.

Those of us on Twitter will also be making quick updates there, so follow #BFC13 for those tidbits. Check out the schedule of events on the OCS website, and come back here starting at 8am, Wednesday, October 23rd for all of our real-time updates.

Teaching Shakespeare on the Road: OCS Education Residency at Roanoke College

The American Shakespeare Center has a unique Educational Residency program that brings our education artists and workshops to high school and college campuses. In the last two years, we have completed weeklong residencies at high schools in Kansas and Ohio. Last week, we were at Roanoke College in Salem, VA for our first-ever college residency.

After a whirlwind summer of directing the 2013 sessions of the OCS Theatre Camp, I was curious about what it would be like to spend a week working with older, college-aged students, guiding them through nearly half a semester’s worth of workshop materials. Daniel Kennedy and Andrew Goldwasser, two OCS actors, made up the rest of our residency team. Daniel is a long-time OCS actor and is a former director for the OCS Theatre Camp. Andrew is a veteran of our touring troupe, and he will return to the Blackfriars Playhouse for our upcoming holiday season.

In the weeks leading up to the residency, I worked with our contact at the college to arrange our trip; we distributed fliers to promote the residency during the touring troupe’s production of Othello at Roanoke College, and our campus coordinator scheduled us to visit 3 classes throughout the week. In total, I planned 13 workshops, and Sarah and Cass taught 6 additional workshops for a weekend teacher seminar. In addition to the workshops, we scheduled multiple rehearsals for the students to have individual coaching on selected scenes and monologues from Shakespeare’s plays.

We arrived in Salem just past noon on Monday, in time to take a brief tour of the performing arts building and other campus facilities. The campus reminded me of Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, but without the hills. Roanoke College is small, with only 2,000 undergraduate students. 10 students are enrolled as theatre majors, but several students from other departments take acting classes to fulfill their elective requirements. We visited the acting class first, and I led an introductory workshop on the basic building blocks of Shakespeare’s text: iambic pentameter, scansion, verse, and prose. None of the students in the acting class that we visited had ever performed in a Shakespeare play, and the material was completely new to them.

As the week passed, I noticed our students engaging with their texts in the cafeteria before workshops, diligently and carefully marking the stressed and unstressed beats in their scripts. One student that I worked with found paraphrasing in the OCS style to be especially helpful as she prepared to play Imogen, a character in Cymbeline.

Daniel and Andrew led workshops in rhetoric, clowning, stage combat, music, and acting choices. During one of the acting classes, the students had the opportunity to direct us as we played the first scene of Richard III . Using their newly-learned skills for identifying embedded stage directions, character and relationship clues, and the various forms of asides, the students directed us through the opening scene. Twice during the week, we met with an English class and explored embedded stage directions in the party scene (1.5) of Romeo and Juliet, and I led them in a discussion about the textual variants in the play and their effect on character development, staging, and other production choices.

On the final Friday in-class performance, there was excitement in the air. The students were nervous, even in our informal setting; we spent the week in a small black-box studio with warm honey-toned wood floors, soft lighting, and mix-matched chairs and small sofas collected through the years and re-purposed from old set pieces. We created a makeshift Elizabethan stage with the chairs surrounding the playing space on three sides.

Their performances began. We saw the brash and rude struggle between Katherina and Bianca in the Taming of the Shrew, followed by the frightful and foreshadowing scene between COCSa and Cassius on the stormy evening before Caesar’s murder; Imogen scorned Iachimo after his vile attempt to plant seeds of jealousy in her heart; Ophelia’s haunting songs gave way to the street brawl between Mercutio and Tybalt; Antony mourned over Caesar’s body; Viola evaded pursuit by Olivia in the garden while attempting to maintain her composure, even as Olivia exposed her heart to a servant who could never requite her love. The students’ scene showcase was a testament to the work that can be accomplished with only a few hours’ rehearsal and a careful analysis of the performance clues that Shakespeare provides in the text of his plays.

In our final wrap-up session following their scene showcase, I asked the students for their feedback and to help us brainstorm ways of making the residency program better. If we came back to Roanoke College, what would they like to do differently or the same? The program technical director suggested that we come back for several weeks or even a whole semester to direct a play rehearsal process from start to finish. The students enthusiastically agreed. I noted that this model was certainly something we could consider doing for them in the future. Our residency program is flexible, and currently our longest program offering is three weeks. Other students said that they would love to plan a trip to the Blackfriars Playhouse, and they all arrived at the consensus that they would commit to participating in another residency if given the opportunity. I was touched and warmed by their responses. Just as much as we would love to go back to Roanoke, we also wanted to provide advice to help them beyond the classroom. We encouraged the students to keep in touch with us throughout the year, and I encouraged several of them to inquire about our year-round internship opportunities.

Neither we nor our campus host and coordinator anticipated just how enthusiastically the students would respond to our presence and to the work we accomplished together in just a few days. The students were eager to absorb all they could from our workshops, and many of them stayed for several hours late into the evenings to work with us individually. Students re-arranged other commitments to attend our classes, and others came even when they probably needed that free time to study for other exams and tests; but Shakespeare is fun, and Shakespeare brings people together.

I’ve been fortunate to see other young students bond and create lasting friendships through collaboration and their collective pursuit to learn more about Shakespeare and the theatre of his time. This experience showed me that even in a small theatre program struggling with low enrollment, Shakespeare empowers students by giving them all the tools they need to create theatre that is engaging, inspiring, and community-building. I look forward to sharing similar experiences at other schools and campuses.

Kim Newton
Director of College Prep Programs

New Matter and Infinite Variety

There have been a spate of articles lately questioning the continual worth of Shakespeare. It’s a media trend that comes around every once in a while, and I suspect the most recent fad for it is related in some way to the UK’s ongoing debate about how much Shakespeare to include in the curriculum. We understand the argument on this side of the pond, too, where Shakespeare, and the humanities in general, are frequent targets for those who believe that STEM subjects are the only ones with intrinsic value. Today’s entry into the conversation is “Is there anything new to say about Shakespeare?” from Michael Reisz at Times Higher Education, an article examining Shakespeare’s role in critical theory throughout the ages, wondering if scholarship has simply exhausted itself on this topic — if we’ve tapped out Shakespeare’s reserves. The article considers several different viewpoints, academic and practical, both from the ivory tower and from the trenches, and it got me thinking: my instinctive reaction to that question, “Is there anything new to say about Shakespeare?” is “Yes, absolutely, and furthermore there will never stop being new things to say about Shakespeare.” But how do I back that up?

Because it’s true: there is a lot of scholarship out there, and it’s been accumulating for a long time. As Reisz’s article points out, a lot of it is outdated, or repetitive, or erroneous, or simply out-of-fashion, yet still, there it all sits, a looming Golgotha of the supposed wisdom of our forefathers and our peers. And, despite being a scholar of Shakespeare, in possession of an advanced degree on the topic, and someone who does devote most of my waking hours to his plays, I am all too aware that the scholarship can, itself, intimidate and put people off the subject. The sheer weight of all that analysis can feel oppressive, impossible to negotiate around — which is why, at the OCS, we put so much emphasis on exploration of the plays themselves. Dramaturgy and critical theory are great tools, but they should be a means, not an end. The scholarship should be there to help, not to terrify.

Perhaps it’s because I’m an educator more than a scholar, really. My focus is primarily on getting students to find things to love in Shakespeare, only secondarily on making my own contributions to the miasma of scholarship (and even when I make the attempt, as I’ll be doing at the upcoming Blackfriars Conference, it’s still with an eye towards improving accessibility). I’m more interested in a student’s personal background than I am in the history of a certain type of critical theory. I can find new ways of hearing Shakespeare’s words by listening to what high school students, without knowing new-historicism from a hole in the ground, deliver and discuss monologues that have personal meaning for them. And I can watch Dr. Ralph, who’s been teaching Shakespeare for forty years, become overwhelmed with glee at finding something new in a passage he’s visited a hundred times.

When will you have learned everything there is to learn from Shakespeare? When you have scanned every line, analyzed every rhetorical device, played every part. And then done it again. When you’ve done it at a different age, in a different location, in front of different audiences who are feeding different emotions back to you. When you’ve done it as a different gender. When you’ve done it as a member of a different race. When you’ve done it as a member of a different economic class. When you’ve done it in a different political climate. When you’ve done it in a prison, in a school cafeteria, in an open field. When you’ve experienced the words of his lovers immediately after having your own heart broken, and immediately before getting married. When you’ve experienced the cares and concerns of his parental figures as a rebellious teenager, as a new parent yourself, while celebrating, while grieving.

My point here is that Shakespeare will never stop having new things to teach us, because we bring ourselves to Shakespeare. As there will always be new people, there will always be new Shakespeare — and no one person is ever going to experience absolutely everything his plays have to offer, though we can (and should) listen to and learn from each others’ experiences. So too do our societal, cultural, and political conditions cast a different reflection on the plays: Julius Caesar plays far differently now than in 1813 or 1613; who knows what it will have to say for us in another twenty, fifty, hundred years? There is no amount of scholarship that can account for all the variables which humanity has to offer.

A way of examining Shakespeare might grow stale, a particular production might be uninspired, but — well, Shakespeare has something to say about that, too. The fault is not in our stars but in ourselves. Someone who hasn’t found something new in Shakespeare — if not new to the world, then at least new to an individual experience — just isn’t trying hard enough, or perhaps just isn’t open enough to the possibility of discovery, in art or in himself. Remove the prescription of Shakespeare as medicinal tonic, which I think so much scholarship can engender in the casual participant or new student, and you get back to joy of what his words help us find in ourselves. All the mountains of literature written about Shakespeare’s plays do nothing to diminish the brilliant flame of a teenage girl discovering for the first time that Beatrice is speaking her language and her heart. I rather think the latter is more beautiful and more valuable than anything you’ll find on JSTOR.

So yes, Virginia, there is something new in Shakespeare — but I can’t tell you what it is, what it might be for you, whoever you are, wherever you come from. I sure hope you’ll find it and tell me about it, though.

Wandering through Wordles, Part the Third

Those of you who have been following the Education blog for some time are by now familiar with our work on Wordles. We use these word clouds primarily to introduce to students the idea that Shakespeare’s vocabulary is not what can make reading Shakespeare difficult. It helps to eliminate some of the fear, to look at all the words set out in this way, and to notice that there are very few, if any, unfamiliar words. Most of those which are strange will either be names or places, or else are fairly easy to figure out the meaning of once restored to their context. We include this as part of our Basics section in OCS Study Guides, and we can use it as a bridge into discussing rhetoric (ie, the order the words come in — usually what can make a passage difficult, and usually something that conveys character information). But, as I’ve discussed before on this blog, I’ve also discovered that distilling scenes into Wordles can reveal other information as well, about how Shakespeare is directing the audience’s focus, what information he chooses to share or to conceal, how he sets a mood, what topics are important for that scene.

I’m in the process of creating a blended Study Guide for both the Henry IVs and The Merry Wives of Windsor, and while building the Wordles for those plays, I noticed something that I haven’t been able to get over. Take a look at the Wordle for the first 100- lines of Henry IV, Part 1:

1H4-100Wordle

The two largest words, repeated most frequently, are “news” and “now”. Closer examination of the text shows that those most prominent words gets repeated four times — not, actually, a whole lot, which tells me that there isn’t a lot of repetition in the first 100 lines of the play. (And what does that, in turn, tell us about the verbal choices made by King Henry and Westmoreland?). A lot of the other oft-used words are names of people involved in the battles — but, considering the low degree of repetition overall, just getting said twice can increase a word’s prominence, as is the case with “Douglas” and “Mordake”. What information is Shakespeare giving us about the energy of this first scene? To me, it bespeaks a sense of urgency — but somewhat unfocused urgency. Henry isn’t just dealing with one problem here; he’s dealing with several all at once. As I can see by this Wordle, he’s having issues with Earls. He’s having issues with his son. He’s having issues with Scotland. These are all news, and they are all immediate issues he needs to solve.

So, that was interesting enough on its own, but then I did the Wordle for Henry IV, Part 2:

2H4-100Wordle

There, again, the largest word is “news”, and here, there is a higher frequency of repetition: “news” occurs seven times in the first 100 lines. The speaker for the first 40 lines is an anthropomorphic representation, not a historical character — and it makes sense that Rumour would have its mind on news, news, news. That fixation carries through the first scene as well, and many of the other repeated words reflect the characters’ concerns: Northumberland is waiting for word of what happened at Shrewsbury, of which Harry prevailed, of who will come home, of how the rebellion fared.

I asked Sarah what she thought would be the largest words for the first 100 lines of Henry IV, Part 1, and her guess was something like mine would have been: king, Henry/Harry, England. That would seem reasonable. Those are, after all, the major concerns of Shakespeare’s English histories. Take a look at the Wordles for the first 100 lines of Henry V and Richard III:

H5Wordle-NEW

R3Wordle-NEW

So what is it about the Henry IVs that makes them different? How is the energy different at the top of the play, how does that trickle through the following scenes, and, most importantly, what good can any of that do an actor? These are the questions we’re asking teachers and students to consider when they begin examining the language of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, and we hope it will lead to fruitful exploration.

“You must translate; ’tis fit we understand.”

Sarah works with students during a Little Academe.

Sarah works with students during a Little Academe.

As ever, I find myself wrestling with “Shakespeare in Translation.”  I have been invited, as part of the Shakespeare Theatre Association Executive Board, to travel to Brazil for 10 days next month to serve as an adviser on a reconstructed Globe that the Instituto Gandarela is looking to build.  Never mind that this is a trip to Brazil (!!!) or that I will get to work with the amazing Peter McCurdy, the builder behind Shakespeare’s Globe and their new indoor playhouse, The Wanamaker (and a good friend to the OCS). As I prepare for this trip, I am wondering how to get past our condemnation of “No Fear Shakespeare”-style translations (as so eloquently argued by our friends at the Folger Shakespeare Library) yet fight the good fight for Shakespeare in other languages.

Word has it (how I wish I could personally confirm) that the productions at Shakespeare’s Globe in London last summer as part of the Globe to Globe celebration were stunning and amazing explorations of theatrical production.  I have personally, and to my delight, had the opportunity to see Der Brudermord, a German translation of Hamlet directed by Christine Schmidle at the Blackfriars Playhouse.  The play was fun, and I didn’t have too much trouble following the story, despite it being in German (full disclosure: I am familiar with the English version).  I thought the experience brought me closer to what German audiences seeing the play in English in the 17th century may have experienced, but I didn’t note any particularly stirring phrases or textual expertise that stirred me to embrace the play as I did when I saw Hamlet performed for the first time by Khris Lewin on our stage.  At that performance, the “nunnery” rang in my ears, the “rant” struck my senses, the players “did not saw the air too much,” and I knew why.

My original training, in Theatre Arts, should provide a clear answer to my questions about these translated productions.  Good theatre, good productions, good performances should satisfy the quandary. But, since immersing myself in the performance of Shakespeare here, I find that I cannot break those things from the text. From the words. From the arrangement of the words to form verse, to shape rhetorical figures, and to provide clues like embedded stage directions.  Our practice is so engaged with the methods we think Shakespeare and his actors engaged with (see Tiffany Stern’s Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, see the American Shakespeare Center’s Actors’ Renaissance Season podcasts, see our current education workshops list), that I don’t know where to begin with the question.  But I would love to start a conversation. Are you an ESL/ELL student who loves (or, for that matter, hates) Shakespeare? Are you fluent in language other than English and have read (or written) translations? Are you a professor in Japan or Taiwan (as some of our Conference attendees are) who is working with students? What are you focused on when you discuss or play with Shakespeare? Do you find that Shakespeare has an influence on Portuguese? Or French? Can you recommend a place for those of us engaged in building a Global network of Shakespeare theatres (including education departments) to go to find a common thread for exploration with our foreign language students and audiences?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts and, working with Cass and Kimberly and our fabulous interns, to finding ways to make the work with do with all of our students deeply engaging and illuminating.

–Sarah

NKSC13 in Maps

As the No Kidding Shakespeare Camp trip to London was, in many ways, primarily a walking tour of some of the city’s best Shakespeare-related destinations, I thought it might be worthwhile to chart all of our itineraries through Google Maps. Cartography has always interested me, and somehow seeing each day’s journey plotted out on the map helps me to realize just how much ground we covered. Give or take a block or so, here’s where we went during our week abroad (click on any map to expand it to its full size):

Saturday:
Most of our number came in on mini-cabs, likely following this route:

Saturday1

Some of us, however, took the Underground (which, when you’re on your way in from Heathrow, begins above-ground, letting you see some of London’s suburbs). The Piccadilly Line’s Russell Square station is just a couple of blocks from Byng Place, where we were staying.

Saturday2

Saturday evening, after we got settled into our apartments and had the chance for a quick catnap, we had our first tour of the neighborhood, culminating in dinner at Busaba, a Thai restaurant. Starting at Byng Place, we saw Russell Square and Bedford Square, passing by the Montague St entrance to the British Museum. We passed through Bloomsbury into the theatre district, getting a glimpse of the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane on our way down to Covent Garden. From there, we wandered down to Trafalgar, past the National Gallery. We would have walked the full circuit back up to Busaba then, but the weather turned decidedly English by the time we hit Trafalgar, and then a closure on the Northern Line forced us to cab it rather than take the Tube.

Saturday3Saturday4

Saturday5Saturday6

Walking Distance: 2.3 miles, plus some extra yardage as we circumnavigated Covent Garden Market a bit.

Sunday:
 Sunday was our day of Museums. We started off in the morning by heading down towards Cheapside. Our stroll to the Tube took us through Russell Square Garden again, and then through a charming lane called Sicilian Avenue. Once off at the St. Paul’s station, we got a glimpse of the great cathedral and of St. Mary-le-Bow, then visited Postman’s Park before hitting the London Museum. After that, we took the Underground back up towards home base and walked to the British Museum.

Sunday1 Sunday2
 Sunday3

After lunch, we hopped back on the Underground and took the Piccadilly all the way down to South Kensington, just a short walk from the Victoria and Albert Museum. Dr. Ralph gave an excellent presentation as part of ShaLT, a series on Shakespeare’s London Theatres. Afterwards, we dashed across the river to the Globe for an evening performance of Macbeth.

Sunday4 Sunday5

Walking Distance: 4.4 miles (not counting perambulations inside Museums or any side excursions taken during lunch or after the show).

Monday:
Monday began with a walking tour of Shoreditch, led by archaeologist and author Julian Bowsher. We hit the major sites of the early years of London’s theatrical culture: the excavation sites of the Theatre and the Curtain, as well as touring some of the other intersections and city gates that would have been familiar to Shakespeare as he began his career in that neighborhood. After a meal in Bishopsgate, we walked through Smithfield Market, site of Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Faire, and then to St. Bartholomew the Great (Dr. Ralph’s favorite church in the city). After that, it was back to St. Paul’s (to go inside this time), and from thence to the National Portrait Gallery for a guided tour through Elizabethan and Jacobean history with Mary Baldwin College’s Mary Hill Cole. That evening, our group split up to explore London, with many taking advantage of the city’s wonderful culinary and theatrical opportunities.

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Walking distance:  5.5 miles (whew!)

Tuesday:
On Tuesday, we were up early to catch a train from Paddington Station out to Oxford. After a tour of Christ Church College and Cathedral, we had lunch in the vicinity of the Covered Market before heading to University College for a tour and a chat with Dr. Tiffany Stern. By late afternoon, the weather had turned from the morning’s dreary downpour to cool, breezy sunshine — perfect for punting, so we headed down towards the Isis for some aquatic recreation. To celebrate our triumph afterwards, we hit the Turf Tavern, reputed to be the oldest tavern in Oxford, dating to the reign of Richard II. Some chose to head back to London after the pub, while others stayed to explore until it was time to catch the last train.

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And now, an example of why I love Google Maps so much: Having difficulty finding an address for our punting location to add to the map, I decided to zoom in, switch to satellite view, and scroll along the river — and lo and behold, I found the very punts we used to conquer the river!

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Walking distance: 3.9 miles (plus unknown distance punted)

Wednesday:
Wednesday morning began with a tour of the Blackfriars District, passing by Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the Inns of Court, where the playing companies sometimes staged shows, and which would have been the origin for many of the gallants attending shows at the Blackfriars Theatre. We visited Playhouse Yard, the former location of the Blackfriars priory and, eventually, the predecessor to our Playhouse, then crossed the river again for a tour of the Globe with Director of Education Patrick Spottiswoode and the matinee of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After the show, our campers had the evening free. Many met at the Anchor for a drink and some post-show discussion, before breaking up for further exploration. Ralph, Sarah, and I walked back by way of the National Theatre and Waterloo Bridge before finding dinner in the vicinity of Leicester Square.

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 Wednesday2

Walking distance: 3.5 miles (plus whatever routes, walking, Underground, or cabbing, that our participants took during our evening off — for Ralph, Sarah, and I, for example, that meant another 2+ miles on our feet before catching the Tube at Leicester Square)

Thursday:
 We took a bit of a slower start on Thursday, both to allow folk to rest up from previous days’ journeys, but also to allow the intrepid to go out in search of more theatre tickets, many of which are available at discount rates early in the morning. After convening mid-morning, we headed to Middle Temple Hall, one of Tom McLaughlin’s primary inspirations for the interior of the Blackfriars Playhouse. After a tour, we enjoyed an excellent lunch in the hall, then headed across the Thames, back to the Globe, where Peter McCurdy treated us to a lecture about the building of the Globe and the Wanamaker, and where director and actor Nick Hutchison led us in a great workshop on cue scripts and clues for performance in Shakespeare’s texts.

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Walking distance: a mere 2 miles! (plus whatever folk did on their own at night)

Friday:
On our final full day in London, we explored Southwark, the district south of the river which became a center of theatrical culture. We began with a tour of the ruins of the Rose Theatre, preserved underneath a modern building, then we walked through the district to Southwark Cathedral and the ruins of Winchester Palace. For lunch, we hit the George, an old tavern with a yard which may have seen performances of early modern plays.

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Then our group had the afternoon free to revisit favorite locations or to discover new delights. For me, this meant heading to Sir John Soane’s Museum, a truly charming collection of art and antiquities, then heading back to the British Museum to hit some of the rooms I missed the first time around (and to do a little souvenir shopping) — another 1.6 miles.

Friday2Friday3

In the evening, we had cocktails at Ralph’s apartment on Bedford Place before heading to the Haymarket Theatre for One Man, Two Guv’nors, a new play based on The Servant of Two Masters. After dinner, it was just around the corner to Mint Leaf for a final banquet.

Friday4

Walking distance: 2.1 miles in the morning, variant paths in the afternoon, then another 1.1 in the evening

Saturday, many of us headed back to Heathrow, while the rest took themselves to King’s Cross Station and points north.

Total Walking Distance: 24.7 miles for the week — and that only counts our official trips, not any of the independent evening journeys. What’s fOCSinating about this for me is to remember that, until fairly recently in history, walking was the primary method of transportation for most people. Few could afford horses and carriages, and even if you had them, they weren’t always practical inside the City of London, with its narrow streets crowded by stalls and pedestrians. If you didn’t want to brave London Bridge, you could hire a ferry to get across the Thames, but through most of the districts we toured, people four hundred years ago would have walked nearly the same paths. Though many of the sights have changed, thanks to the 1666 Great Fire and to a few centuries’ worth of building, rebuilding, and reconstruction, many of them remain remarkably similar. If you’re interested in seeing pictures to accompany those 50,000 footsteps, check out the NKSC13 album on Facebook.

“If’t be summer news, smile to’t before”

Accolades for OCSTC 13 Session 1 CampersWhoever dubbed this time of year “the lazy days of summer” sure didn’t work for OCS Education. We’re much more about “the very Midsummer madness”. Perhaps most prominently, this is the time when we host the annual OCS Theatre Camps for high school students. We’re in the  middle of Session 2 now, with students deep into work on The Taming of the Shrew, Richard II, and Ben Jonson’s Volpone. Their final performances are on Sunday, August 4th. Though it can sometimes feel like the camps dwarf all other activity during the summer, they are far from the extent of OCS Education’s aestival programming — and this year, we seem to have more going on than ever before.

Since 2010, we have also held a summer camp for adults, the No Kidding Shakespeare Camp. This summer, we’re taking the show on the road and heading to London for a week exploring Shakespeare’s old haunts. Several friends of the OCS, including MBC Professor Mary Hill Cole, archaeologist Julian Bowsher, eminent Oxford scholar Dr. Tiffany Stern, Globe Education Director Patrick Spottiswoode, craftsman Peter McCurdy, and director and actor Nick Hutchison, are graciously sharing their time and expertise with the group. Our travels will take us to many important London monuments, as well as some lesser-known gems, including: the Bloomsbury and Covent Garden districts, the Globe, the new Wanamaker Theatre, Shoreditch, St. Bartholomew’s, St. Paul’s, the National Portrait Gallery, several of the colleges of Oxford, the Blackfriars District, Guildhall, the Inns of Court, Southwark Cathedral, the Museum of London, the British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, where Ralph is delivering a lecture on the early modern Blackfriars Theatre and our Blackfriars Playhouse as part of the “Shakespearean London Theatres” series. We’ll see A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth at the Globe and One Man, Two Guv’nors at the Haymarket. We’ll also be exploring London’s culinary delights, from traditional pubs to Thai and curries. It hardly seems possible with all of those scheduled wonders, but we’ll also all have some time to explore the city on our own. (I’m hoping to catch a musical in the West End on one of our free nights, since, as I’ve confessed before, musical theatre is another of my great loves). Since I’m something of a photo-hound, I’m sure I will return with many, many pictures of our adventures, so look for those on Facebook and in an upcoming blog post, and if you follow me on Twitter (@OCS_Cass), I’ll be posting real-time updates with hashtag #NKSC13.

Summer is also a great time for Educator Resources. In 2011, we began hosting Summer Seminars in addition to our already-established school-year programs, and two weeks ago, we hosted the 2013 Summer Special Teacher Seminar, welcoming teachers from Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Michigan. This seminar was a “Class to Cast” special, focusing on methods of producing a Shakespeare play in the classroom or as an after-school activity. We covered everything from cutting and doubling to audition techniques, from tablework to blocking and embedded stage directions, from marketing to music. You can hear the playlist we built for The Comedy of Errors on Spotify, and the Study Guide we used is available on Lulu. Here are just a few of the comments we received from teachers who attended this seminar:

  • “This was the best and most useful workshop I have ever taken.” — Martin Jacobs, Lincoln High School, Ypsilanti MI
  • “I would love to attend Class to Cast again. I feel comfortable with Shakespeare as an English teacher, but I knew very little about directing. This seminar gave me a good sense of the overall process of putting on a show, including things like stage management and marketing, which, as an English teacher, I probably would have overlooked. I learn something new and understand my prior knowledge even better every time I come to a seminar, so I would definitely come back. … Most of my other professional development experiences have been full of generalities without actionable suggestions. I can see direct applications of the techniques from this seminar, such as scansion, reading from cue scripts, and cutting the text, to my classroom.” — anonymous
  • “AMAZINGLY helpful! I would recommend this (and have!) and will be returning.” — Jeffrey Cole, Director of Education, Henley Street Theatre/Richmond Shakespeare
  • “I am used to attending seminars that are presented in a strictly academic manner. This seminar called upon me to participate fully, heart, mind, and , body in exciting ways. … I would not hesitate to recommend the seminar to a high school drama or English teacher. My first thought at the end of each day was that I didn’t want it to end. My first thought at the completion of the seminar was, “When can I take another OCS seminar?” The instructors were extraordinarily knowledgeable, creative, and articulate. Now, I understand why so many of the people taking the seminar return again and again.” — Barbara Johnson, Drama Instructor, Faith Christian School
  • “I will be back for sure! This was an AWESOME workshop! … Cass and Sarah were exceptional hosts and provided a wide-reaching program that really helped to capture and address some of my hesitance with approaching Shakespeare. With greater confidence, I plan to embrace the Bard this upcoming fall!” — anonymous

We were thrilled to welcome so many enthusiastic educators, and we thank them for being willing to step outside of their comfort zones for a few days. Best of luck to them as they take on the challenge of directing in their schools! And we hope to see everyone back for future seminars.

Summer is also, as Sarah noted back in June, high tide for our flow of interns. Our offices are teeming over with eager students, working on a variety of different projects. Just this week, we welcomed Ellington, a rising senior at Oberlin University, who will be working on media and technology for us. Jess, who will be with us through the fall, is preparing dramaturgy packets for the upcoming Actors’ Renaissance Season. Emily has joined the World’s Mine Oyster troupe, preparing materials for The Merry Wives of Windsor as well as helping with their workshop prep. Self-described “jack of all trades” intern Sadie is helping out with Hospitality, Development, and the Box Office, and Sara has delved into our archives. To keep up with our fabulous interns and their research, following the OCS Interns’  Blog.

So, once the summer ends, do things slow down at all? Not in the least. As soon as schools are back in session, we begin welcoming groups for tours, workshops, and Little Academes, as well as starting our regular Student Matinee schedule and the Blackfriars Lecture Series. Our Fall Teacher Seminar is October 4-6th, focusing on Romeo and Juliet and All’s Well That Ends Well. And, of course, the 7th Blackfriars Conference occurs at the end of October. Acceptance letters for plenary papers and colloquy sessions will go out next week, and then we set to work finalizing the schedule, arranging banquets, preparing entertainment, printing programs and nametags, arranging catering, and shepherding all the other miscellany that go into making the Blackfriars Conference a unique and valuable experience for all of the scholars and practitioners who attend. Like the OCS’s Artistic Department, performing shows 52 weeks a year, OCS Education is truly a year-round institution, and we hope that you’ll come to the Blackfriars Playhouse soon — or talk to about bringing our Education Artists to you, wherever you are.