Shakespeare triumphs over time and place -- April 25, 2019 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Visiting America in the 1830s, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville discovered William Shakespeare in the unlikeliest of places.

“There is hardly a pioneer’s hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare,” de Tocqueville wrote in “Democracy in America.” "I remember that I read the feudal drama of `Henry V’ for the first time in a log cabin.”

Shakespeare would have celebrated his 455^th birthday this month, and people around the world ate cake.

Shakespeare was born around April 23, 1564, and left the earth 52 years, 38 plays and 154 sonnets later, also on April 23 – in 1616.

That we still read, argue over and perform his plays is remarkable for many reasons, not least because the First Folio of his plays wasn’t published until seven years after his death.

American settlers carried only two volumes on their travels west: a Bible and Shakespeare. What better company for their long, lonely journey?

Poet Walt Whitman, critical of Shakespeare as antithetical to the “pride and dignity of the common people,” ultimately came around and acknowledged his debt to the Bard.

“If I had not stood before those poems with uncover’d head, fully aware of their colossal grandeur and beauty of form and spirit, I could not have written `Leaves of Grass,’” Whitman wrote.

How much of our contemporary, throwaway culture will survive 400 years?

In our time of disposable tweets, we’re fortunate and grateful Shakespeare is alive and vibrant in towns and cities coast to coast.

I saw a rollicking performance of “The Comedy of Errors” last Saturday at one of my favorite venues for Shakespeare, the Blackfriars Playhouse at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton.

The performance was hilarious and totally engaging. Do yourself a favor and catch a play at this treasure of a theater, now in its 31^st year.

The theater will celebrate Shakespeare’s 455^th with a free, family-friendly party this Sunday afternoon.

On Broadway, the acclaimed actor Glenda Jackson is playing King Lear. 

Jackson at 82 is proof there are second – and third -- acts in life. The winner of two Academy Awards, she spent more than two decades as a member of Parliament before returning to the stage.

She, who first performed Shakespeare in 1965, also played Lear in 2016 at the Old Vic theater in London. She told The New York Times he “is the most contemporary dramatist in the world today.”

Shakespeare asks three questions, she said: “Who are we? What are we? Why are we? No one’s come up with sufficiently satisfying answers.”

The Times praised her “powerful and deeply perceptive performance” and said the play “has never felt more vibrantly responsive to the moment, to a crisis in global leadership.”

We wonder whose birthdays future moderns will celebrate. Will Shakespeare still be No. 1 in 2419? Will people in that age know any of our 20^th or 21^st century politicians, authors, composers or video game developers?

Don’t scoff. A new video game called “Play the Knave” uses virtual reality to perform scenes from Shakespeare. Players control avatars through motion capture cameras and speak lines of the play karaoke style. The game has not been released to the public yet, but teachers are already using it.

The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington invited the game’s co-developer, Gina Bloom, an English professor at the University of California, Davis, to give the Shakespeare Birthday lecture last Monday.

In the game, “The Tempest,” Shakespeare’s dramatization of the 1609 shipwreck on the magical island of Bermuda of the Sea Venture, an English ship bound for the Jamestown colony, presents the spirit Ariel as a digital avatar.

So, Shakespeare is constantly adapting and being adapted to new audiences.

The National Endowment for the Arts expanded its Shakespeare in American Communities program to provide grants to theater companies to bring Shakespeare to juvenile justice facilities.

“Evidence has shown that these programs provide positive rehabilitative outcomes and prevention for youth involved in the juvenile justice system,” Mary Anne Carter, acting chairman of the endowment, said. Shakespeare can even help reduce recidivism rates, she said.

Shakespeare truly was, as Ben Jonson wrote in his tribute: “not of an age but for all time.” And for all places.

©2019 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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`Hie thee hither': Shakespeare's best onstage, not on the page -- April 26, 2018 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Poet Ben Jonson wrote in his tribute to William Shakespeare: “He was not of an age but for all time!”

Lucky guess.   

More than 400 years later, we’re still reading, watching and arguing over Shakespeare. Most of us are, anyway.

High school students continue to struggle over the Bard, thanks to the Common Core standards, but most major universities long ago dropped the requirement that English majors take even a single Shakespeare course.

Two years ago, students at the University of Pennsylvania removed a large portrait of Shakespeare from the English Department and replaced it first with a picture of Audre Lorde, an African American writer, feminist and civil rights activist, and later with a collage of 88 writers and filmmakers.

Last June, a production of “Julius Caesar” in New York’s Central Park became a conservative cause célèbre when Caesar was depicted as a Trumpian with blond hair and a red tie, “whose bloody stabbing is seen as offensive and inappropriate to some who have seen it,” The New York Times reported. 

Defenders countered the tragedy shows the consequences of violence and its disastrous effects.

Shakespeare was born in April 1564, so before the month slips away, let’s give him props. Bob Dylan did. 

When the great Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, he asked Patti Smith to deliver his speech at the awards ceremony in Stockholm. Here's an excerpt:

I was out on the road when I received this surprising news, and it took me more than a few minutes to properly process it. I began to think about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure.

I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn't have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read.

When he was writing Hamlet, I'm sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: "Who're the right actors for these roles?" "How should this be staged?" "Do I really want to set this in Denmark?"

His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. "Is the financing in place?" "Are there enough good seats for my patrons?" "Where am I going to get a human skull?" I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare's mind was the question "Is this literature?"

Leave it to Dylan to imagine Shakespeare not as highfalutin artiste but a playwright juggling his words and picky details. Dylan has it right, of course. Shakespeare’s plays are meant for the stage, not the page.

I know this after seeing three Shakespeare plays in two weeks. It was the first time, but won’t be the last, I sorta-binge-watched the Bard.

First was “Romeo and Juliet” at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, a good warmup for the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, where “Macbeth” played one evening and “The Taming of the Shrew” the next afternoon.

Shakespeare’s themes generally are timeless, though modern sensibilities do prickle occasionally. Juliet’s marrying at age 13 is disturbing, and so is Taming’s last scene when Kate, starved and sleep-deprived into submission, says: “Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, thy head, thy sovereign . . .”

Despite such quibbles, I enjoyed the plays immensely.

There’s hardly a better place for Shakespeare than the 300-seat Blackfriars Theater at the ASC. Opened in 2001, it’s a recreation of the Jacobean playhouse in London’s Blackfriars neighborhood. Blackfriars was the indoor theater where Shakespeare put on his plays, the Globe his outdoor venue.

The ASC’s repertory company delivers three or four well-staged productions a week. The versatile actors also dance, sing and play instruments in acoustic musical performances before the shows and during intermission.

“We do it with the lights on,” the theater brags, because Shakespeare produced his plays in what’s called universal light. That means the audience and actors not only can see each other but also interact. You don’t need to understand every archaic word to follow and enjoy the plays.

It’s improbable to find a first-class Shakespeare theater in a small town in the heart of the Shenandoah Valley, but like Shakespeare’s work, it’s an enchanting experience.

Take a cue from Lady Macbeth and “hie thee hither” to see Shakespeare onstage.

©2018 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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