Here is a personal note.
I went to a Broadway play Wednesday at matinee. While driving in the car a few weeks ago, I heard someone on the radio raving about Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and she couldn’t contain her enthusiasm. I impetuously ordered tickets. When the bill came, I wondered if I had made a mistake. Why was I seeing this play? I had seen it before at least twice. Why see it again?
The woman on the radio warned that theater-goers should arrive at least half an hour to watch the performers dress on stage. We got there at exactly 1:30 and enjoyed every minute of it, watching skilled dressers change actors into men and women of the sixteenth century, in some cases, hand-stitching the outfit on the actor. By the way, the entire cast consisted of male actors, as they did in Shakespeare’s time. This added to the irony of a man pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man.
Then came the play, and it was a delight and a revelation. It was staged as if it were in Shakespeare’s time. The music, the singing, the clothing, the scenery, the great candlelabra–lit as we watched–everything was just right. A program note said that every piece of clothing was hand made, hand stitched, made as it had been hundreds of years ago.
The setting, the staging, the bantering with audience members seated in stalls on the stage made it feel that we had been transported back in time to the original production.
And the acting was wonderful. The audience roared with laughter. When the play was over, the actors got round after round of standing ovations.
As I watched the play, I felt I had never seen it before. It was magnificent. I understood every word (well, almost every word). The actors performed with wit, humor, and intelligence.
And I was reminded why Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English language. His plays are contemporary, even when they are performed in the style and fashion of his day.
If you are anywhere near New York City, give yourself a great treat and get tickets for this delightful, memorable production. It is playing in repertory with Richard III, and I can’t wait to see it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The play sounds wonderful! Those who live in New York City, London, and other theatrical hot spots are truly fortunate.
But maybe your time would have been better spent reading a contextless excerpt of a work of non-fiction, like a detective, and then answering some multiple-choice questions.
(Sarcasm!)
Maybe you live near one of these theatrical hotspots: Staunton, Virginia (Blackfriars Theater), Chicago, Illinois (Chicago Shakespeare Theater), Atlanta, Georgia (Shakespeare Tavern), Ashland, Oregon (Oregon Shakespeare Festival), Bloomington, Illinois (Illinois Shakespeare Festival), San Diego, California (Old Globe Theatre)… The list goes on. I’ve attended terrific productions in all of these places. Not as elaborate as this Royal Shakespeare production, but well worth seeing.
I urge anyone living within a few hundred miles of Staunton, Virginia, to check out the American Shakespeare Center website and plan a trip there as soon as possible. The Blackfriars Theater puts on more Shakespeare per year than any theater in the world, along with plays by Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, and many others. They’re getting ready for their Actors’ Renaissance Season, during which the actors put up five plays in a matter of a few weeks and perform them in repertory. The way they do it is hard to describe in a few sentences. Let’s just say there’s a lot of music and fun involved. http://www.americanshakespearecenter.com/v.php?pg=1
ASC is a center for education, too. As far as I know, their lessons aren’t aligned with the Common Core, and I hope they never are.
The Blackfriars Theater productions are, indeed, wonderful. I highly recommend them!
Please don’t forget Cedar City, Utah, and the Utah Shakespeare Festival. I LOVE that place! And the plays there were every bit as good as the one I saw in Stratford-Upon-Avon.
What I love about Shakespeare is that every time I see a play, even the same one, I learn something new about the human condition. I once saw a production of Julius Caesar (at USF) where the actors wore modern business clothing. It was right before the 2004 presidential election and made it all so relevant.
Thanks for the recommendation. Cedar City is on my list, but I haven’t had a chance to visit. Maybe this year!
My top five Shakespeare destinations in North America so far: Staunton, Chicago, Stratford (Ontario), San Diego, and Ashland, more or less in that order. I’m guessing Cedar City will crack the top five. (Planning to combine playgoing and hiking on the same trip.)
Footnote: Stratford deserves its legendary status. But check out Chicago Shakespeare for spectacular production values and Blackfriars Theater in Staunton for intimate setting, original practices, great music, and comic genius.
I grew up in Ontario. Went on many school field trips to Stratford to see plays. Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet. One of the highlights of high school, for me.
Check out this series of books for young children called Shakespeare Can Be Fun. Shakespeare’s plays rewritten by Lois Burdette and her 2nd grade students in Stratford Ontario.
I have seen this three times. Magnificent.
Great review! I was lucky enough to see this production in London on the last day of its run at the Apollo Theatre. You’re going to love Richard III, too. Mark Rylance was great as Olivia, but he’s even better as Richard.
Great review, Diane! What a delight!
But please “Analyze how the author’s choices concerning how to structure specific parts of the text (e.g., the choice of where to begin or end the story, the choice to provide a comedic or tragic resolution) contribute to its overall structure and meaning as well as its aesthetic impact”–CC$$.E>A-Literacy.RL.11-12.5.
After all, that’s what’s important about Twelfth Night.
It was truly “the magic of the theater” — a classic in its embodiment of elegant simplicity. The music from the gallery (unamplified), the stage lit by a hundred candles, the male actors playing women with their stylized movements, like Japanese Noh theater — or a Medieval morality play (in the case of Richard III). The minimalist sets — a heavy oak table that could be dismantled to serve as a wall, the linens and velvets of the costumes. It was a beautiful, simple, sumptuous, intimate, and timeless setting for Shakespeare’s poetry and song.
Sounds superlative. As you probably know Shakespeare is considered one of the great psychologists or at least one of those who understood and worked with a “human” understanding. YES and that is at least one reason why he is still so very relevant today. YEARS ago when we had a Latin teacher in our school she made the observation that people were people, today much the same as in Roman days. I once mentioned this to our school board and was greeted with whimsical looks, maybe even smirks. Nuff Sed.
In his excellent Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom makes the point that most authors create, at most, two or three full, robust characters in a lifetime and that Willie created perhaps forty of them.
And don’t give me any of that crap about Willie’s plays having been written by Edward De Vere (17th Earl of Oxford) or any other nobleman or contemporary playwright. Shakespeare’s plays had to have been written by someone who came up from from the middle class and who experienced, intimately, the full spectrum of social registers, and when one turns from his work to that of any of his contemporaries, the language goes dead and the stylistic signatures–wonderful cascades of metaphor in a few short lines, for example–just aren’t there.
BTW, kids should see a LOT of Shakespeare and should themselves perform a lot of bits and pieces from Shakespeare long before they try to made to read this work on their own. And please use real editions of the plays, not the bowdlerized crap editions that appear in the literature anthologies from the big ed book publishers–e.g., Romeo and Juliet with a third of the lines cut from it (I’m not kidding–a third of the lines cut). You veteran teachers reading this blog don’t have to be told this, but I figure that there are some newbies here too.
“A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is….” (Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, V 343) [quoted in a letter to the NYRB]
Wonderful, Harold. Thanks for sharing that! The same idea, from William Blake:
“Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?
Or wilt thou go ask the Mole”
–Thel’s Motto, from The Book of Thel
and here:
Does not the eagle score the earth & despise the treasures beneath>
But the mole knoweth what is there, & the worm shall tell it thee.
Each of us, eagle, mole, Homo ignorans has a certain cognitive and perceptual apparatus. These differ across species. In each case, our case included, the apparatus limits what we can be perceived and thought about–it determines what access the organism has to what is really going on and translates some limited aspects an unknowable reality into a particular interface that is the world as perceived. Hamlet was absolutely right when he said,
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
The great contemporary student of this is Donald Hoffman, the quantum physicist turned cognitive psychologist and student of perception.
Just as the icon of the trash can that you see on your computer screen is not the reality behind it, so our perceptions are not the reality that gives rise to them. Those perceptions form an interface created by our cognitive operating system, but they are not the reality behind the interface.
Thanks for this. It’s always astonished me that so many people who SPEAK ENGLISH don’t go to the bother of learning to love Shakespeare. What I would give to read Pushkin in Russian or Rumi in Farsi or Moliere in French! But we speak English and we have the greatest poet of them all. So lucky for us. Such a waste to neglect him. Glad you indulged.
Ah, Rumi!
Imra’ ul Qays
Imra’u ‘l-Qays, king of the Arabs,
was very handsome and a poet full of love songs.
Women loved him desperately. Everyone loved him,
but there came one night an experience
that changed him completely.
He left his kingdom and his family.
He put on dervish robes and wandered
from one weather, one landscape, to another.
Love dissolved his king-self and led him to Tabuk,
where he worked for a time making bricks.
Someone told the king of Tabuk about Imra’u ‘l-Qays,
and that king came to visit him at night.
“King of the Arabs, handsome Joseph of this age,
ruler of two empires, one composed of territories,
and the other of the beauty of women,
if you would consent to stay with me, I would be honored.
You abandon kingdoms, because you want more than kingdoms.”
The king of Tabuk went on like this,
praising Imra’u ‘l-Qays and talking theology and philosophy.
Imra’u ‘l-Qays kept silent. Then suddenly
he leaned and whispered something in the second king’s ear,
and that second king became a wild wanderer too.
They walked out of town hand in hand,
no royal belts, no thrones.
This is what love does and continues to do.
It tastes like honey to adults and milk to children.
Love is the last thirty-pound bale.
When you load it on, the boat tips over.
So they wandered around China
like birds pecking at bits of grain.
They rarely spoke
because of the dangerous
seriousness of the secret they knew.
That love-secret spoken pleasantly, or irritation,
severs a hundred thousand heads in one swing.
A love-lion grazes in the soul’s pasture,
while the scimitar of this secret approaches.
It’s a killing better than any living.
All that world-power wants, really, is this weakness.
So these kings talk in low tones, and carefully.
Only God knows what they say.
They use unsayable words. Bird language.
But some people have imitated them,
learned a few birdcalls, and gotten prestigious.
We’re quoting Twelfth Night in NJ this afternoon: “And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges” (V.i.376-377).
Diane’s comment: “The actors performed with wit, humor, and intelligence.”
What a shame that we can’t say the same for teachers, since there is no place for wit, humor, or intelligence in schools.
What a shame that our children do not have experiences of joy in their connections to literature and learning, instead of reading about it in isolation on a worksheet and learning to hate it.
Exactly. The Common Core is a recipe for instilling hatred of literature, for skipping over the essential experience of it and getting to the formal analysis that will be on the test.
We read Emerson’s “Brahma” because he had something to say about the nature of God, and what he has to say is mind-blowingly interesting (and provocative). We don’t read it to find out what rhetorical techniques he used in stanza 3.
The CC$$ in ELA encourage the kind of terrible teaching of literature that skips over the literary experience!!!
When we read a literary work well, we fall down the rabbit hole, cross through the wardrobe, into the world of the work, and there we have an experience, and that experience is what has meaning. In other words, literary works, to a large extent, “mean” in a special kind of way–in the way that experience does.
Our teaching needs to help kids to learn how to take those trips into works; it needs to train imaginations. This is what Billy Collins was saying, here:
Introduction to Poetry
Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
The literature standards [sic] of the CC$$ in ELA are a recipe for the sort of teaching that ties the poem to a chair. God help us. Kids taught in that way will never give a rat’s tush about reading.
Our teaching needs to help kids to learn how to take those trips into works; it needs to train imaginations AND SENSITIVITIES.
The formal analysis is an afterthought. And it should grow organically out of the soil of the engagement with, the enthrallment by, the work that has been nurtured by the teacher. It must happen because kids want to know more about that amazing thing that they just experienced.
I’ve had people with Masters degrees in English from Harvard working for me who could not write a couplet in iambic pentameter because they had developed no ear whatsoever for the rhythms of language, had been victims of terrible teaching that did not develop those sensitivities, the sort of teaching that ticks of a bullet list of formal skills, in which the work is not a vehicle for communication by an author to a reader but is reduced to a mere occasion for the application of one of those CC$$ skills.
Let me revise that, we read Emerson’s “Brahma” because we will have an experience in the world of that poem in the course of which we will entertain some mind-bending notions about God, not because we’re just dying to make a list of the rhetorical techniques used in the poem.
The 9th grade English teachers at my school spend the entire month of May every year doing Romeo and Juliet. The kids learn lines from various scenes, find costuming, learn fight sequences, and then finally perform the scenes to the delight of the entire school and parents. Even kids who refuse to work at any other time are thrilled participants.
This year, the ELA Common Core test is 250 minutes long and will take approximately two weeks in May to complete. Will Romeo and Juliet have to be cut? I hope not, but sadly, probably it will. There goes a 20 year tradition and something the kids remember for years to come.
Ah, Diane, so good you remind us of creative intelligence and that you are treating yourself to such delights. It takes the edge off, doesn’t it, to be reminded of the joy in life. It’s good to rest ones soul from time to time. As my friend Nettie says, you can’t take care of others if you don’t take care of yourself. And we, in northern Westchester, are so looking forward to the 16th—-even if Greg Ball decided he had to hold his own forum on the same night, showing us all, exactly where he stands on CC$$, and whose pocket he is in. BTW, when superintendents and others notified him of Diane’s forum, he suggested maybe she should cancel and attend his!!!!!
Remember Woody Allen’s character in MANHATTAN (1979)?
“Why is life worth living? It’s a very good question. Um… Well, There are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. uh… Like what… okay… um… For me, uh… ooh… I would say… what, Groucho Marx, to name one thing… uh… um… and Willie Mays… and um… the 2nd movement of the Jupiter Symphony… and um… Louis Armstrong, recording of Potato Head Blues… um… Swedish movies, naturally… Sentimental Education by Flaubert… uh… Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra… um… those incredible Apples and Pears by Cezanne… uh… the crabs at Sam Wo’s… uh… Tracy’s face…”
Among my moments: I saw and heard Andrés Segovia, the master classical guitarist, perform in Philadelphia, live, and shortly thereafter I saw Tom Stoppard’s ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD—in London!—in 1978.
Joy of learning, joy of teaching—that’s part of the joy of living. And part of why so many are struggling so hard for a “better education for all.”
Diane, many thanks for sharing this with us.
😎
“Don’t give me any of your poetry: give me statistics”, Robert McNamara, during the Vietnam War. (We know how that went.)
Yup. Another total fool who worshiped his data.
Very interesting if you get a chance …
http://www.theatreofeternalvalues.com/theatre/index.php
They come to New York sometimes…
Last time they did in New York
“Eternity in an Hour”
William Blake’s story in his own words – Visionary imagery, passionate music, deep human drama.
A 75 minute multi-media spectacular using original live music, dance and drama with moving visual projection, ‘Eternity in an Hour’ is ideal for families and schools audiences.
‘A theatrical smorgasbord of dancing, singing and storytelling wonderfully presented in an entertaining package’ New York Theater Review
TEV is a magical space where emerging talent and seasoned professionals can hone their craft and unlock new creative energies. Our aim is to develop and perform radiant theatre that reaches the heart and opens the mind. Over time our shared human history and creative process have evolved into a common vocabulary – an aesthetic based on spiritual consciousness, collaboration and community .
“Such is the motivating power of an artist. They are the loveliest flowers of the creation, the sweetest dreams of the Creator, and the dearest parts of the human society. Perhaps they do not know how they are loved, worshipped and followed by their spectators…”
Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, extract from Souvenir – India, 1961)
“Theoretically, the actor ought to be more sound in mind and body than other people, since he learns to understand the psychological problems of human beings when putting his own passions, his loves, fears, and rages to work in the service of the characters he plays. He will learn to face himself, to hide nothing from himself — and to do so takes an insatiable curiosity about the human condition.”
Uta Hagen
A holy theatre not only presents the invisible but also offers conditions that make its perception possible.”
Peter Brook (The Empty Space)
“When crowds of people enthusiastically cheer and applaud you, you must constantly carry in your consciousness the awareness that the people are not enthusiastic about your person — which is only an empty garment — but about the Divine who has manifested itself through your earthly instrument.”
Karen Leslie Lyttle, HB Studio, New York
“What we now want is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the Earth and the elimination of egoism and pride. Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment.”
Nikola Tesla 1919
This looks really intriguing, Preeti, Thanks for sharing it.
A little Blake:
“The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert, that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.
“Isaiah answer’d, I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing”
and this:
””When the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea?” O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.””
and this:
“How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?”
and this:
“A man carried a monkey around for a shew, & because he was a little wiser than the monkey, grew vain, and conciev’d himself as much wiser than seven men.”
and this, from Blake, I think of when I think of the state of educational publishing today:
“I was in a Printing house in Hell & saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.”
Oh,lucky you!! I read a review of this recently and if it made any sense and I wasn’t busy teaching I would fly out from the west coast to see it. Enjoy Richard III!
I do a Shakespeare play with my eight graders every year. When I say we “do” a play, we learn and perform the play as a professional production. The whole community comes to see the play in the evening. It’s hard work but one of the highlights of my year. This year we’re doing “Macbeth” but we also do “Twelfth Night”, “The Tempest”, and “Much Ado About Nothing”.
we learn and perform the play as a professional production.
awesome