ArtsLink: Happy 456th Birthday William Shakespeare
By Jason Young on April 23, 2020 from A&E Blog
William Shakespeare turns 456 years old today.
I am a professed Bardolator, which is one who idolizes Shakespeare. This term was coined by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. Shakespeare has been referred to as “The Bard” since the eighteenth century. However, the important part of that nickname is not “bard” because a lot of people could be described as bards: It means a poet or storyteller; sometimes it is in reference to a singer of ballads. But in terms of Shakespeare, people don’t think of him as “a bard” but rather as “THE Bard.” In our current Twitter world one could choose to reference him with the “GOAT” hashtag. Ironically, Shaw created this term in mockery. He was not one of Shakespeare’s biggest fans and didn’t understand why people seemed to worship him and his work. I wear the title proudly.
However, in a way, I can see Shaw’s point. While I do think Shakespeare is certainly the greatest playwright of his time, and many times after that, there are some scholars and practitioners who treat his work with a level of reverence that can even turn me off a little. While his use of language is illustrious and his stories compelling and universal, Shakespeare wrote a lot of “fart jokes.” It is my theory that if he emerged from a Bill & Ted-like time machine today he might be amazed and maybe even a little appalled at the pedestal he has been placed upon in our modernity.
I converted to Bardolatry a little later in life. Coming out of high school into college, I was primarily interested in musical theatre. My peers and professors at Fairmont State were slowly opening my eyes to the value of straight plays when the American Shakespeare Center came to campus. Until that point I had only ever experienced what a lot of people have only experienced, bad and boring Shakespeare. It’s terribly unfortunate that so many students in classrooms across our state are forced to read Shakespeare but are never provided the opportunity to see Shakespeare. Upon this fact, I am quite certain Shakespeare would be quite upset.
Shakespeare was a playwright, not an author. There is a difference: Short stories, novels, fiction, these genres are meant to be read. Plays, however, are meant to be seen; they are meant to be experienced. Shakespeare wrote plays that he intended for people to watch live, sharing the same air as the actors. It was his job, and he didn’t get paid unless his plays were produced. To think that, in the name of education, his canon has been reduced to words on a page is really quite unfair to his brilliance.
The American Shakespeare Center, founded by my now good friend Jim Warren, specializes in producing Shakespeare’s plays under “Shakespeare’s staging conditions” or the way Shakespeare’s audiences would have experienced the shows. The most jarring departure from contemporary theatre production practices is how the ASC got their tag line, “We do it with the lights on.” Shakespeare’s Globe was an open air venue, so when the ASC came to FSU, they set the stage lights to a general wash and left the house lights up, illuminating the audience.
It was an at-first awkward but eventually captivating way to experience a play. Suddenly the reactions of the audience to the action of the play became part of the production. ASC actors are trained and directed to engage and interact with the audience on a deeper level then I had ever seen before. That effort encapsulated what I love so much about live performance, its transient nature. The actors may do this show a hundred times, but when you combine their performances with this once-in-a-lifetime audience, what we will create and experience together will never be duplicated.
Unfortunately, right now, that is what the world is missing. These types of singular experiential moments happen at the theater; they happen at sporting events in arenas and coliseums, at concerts in venues large and small, in houses of worship, in classrooms, and also at special ceremonies like graduations. In reality, these are all the same: It’s all theatre. Shakespeare understood that: “All the world’s a stage…”
But right now our stages are empty.
Quarantine is another thing that Shakespeare understood. He lived most of his life during the plague-era in Europe. In fact just a few months after he was born in April 1564, the bubonic plague swept across England and killed almost 25% of the people in his hometown of Stratford upon Avon. During his professional career, the plague ravaged London in 1592, 1603, 1606, and again in 1609. Whenever plague deaths exceeded thirty per week, all of the playhouses in London were forced to close.
Most famously, during one of his periods of quarantine, Shakespeare is believed to have pinned one of his masterpieces, King Lear. He also references the plague and plague-like symptoms in several plays. The one most of us are likely to recognize, because almost all of us had to read it in school, is Romeo & Juliet. This is the only time that the plague is part of the action of one of Shakespeare’s plays.
Try to remember high school English class from your freshman year. For some of us that is longer ago than others. Friar Lawrence hatches a plan for Juliet to pretend to die. Part of that plan includes a letter sent from the Friar to a banishèd Romeo in Mantua. However, that letter does not reach Romeo because the messenger is forced into quarantine before he can complete the delivery.
The theatre world in West Virginia has been forced into quarantine, and there are a lot of messages left undelivered. Productions have been stopped mid-run. Festivals and competitions have been canceled. And perhaps worst of all, plays, including one I was directing for our Shakespeare troupe The Rustic Mechanicals, were canceled mid-rehearsal. Robbing artists and audiences alike of so many transient experiences.
However, on this most celebrated of theatrical days, on Billy’s Birthday, I find it inappropriate to focus on the empty playhouses. Let’s keep dreaming about the amazing gatherings we have ahead of us. That’s what Shakespeare certainly did. His shows were shut down several times, but he kept writing because part of his genius was his ability to understand humanity. In this case it was humanity’s need for community. Community is found in gathering. Gatherings happen in a theater; therefore, humanity needs theater.
Happy Birthday, Billy Shakes!
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