Friday, July 25, 2003

Learning to Like Shakespeare

On Wednesday I saw the opening performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this year’s offering in the University of Notre Dame’s Summer Shakespeare series. To avoid any unnecessary suspense, let me say now that the beautiful, funny, and moving production ended with a well-deserved standing ovation. A few hundred of us had a wonderful evening. Perhaps you will look in on one of the eight remaining performances yourself.

I remember the first time I was able to enjoy Shakespeare. It was a college production of one of his comedies, and oddly, I began to notice that some actors playing the minor parts were absolutely terrible. Sure, they knew their cues and their bits of dialogue, but I could tell by the lockstep way they spoke bah-boom bah-boom bah-boom bah-boom bah-boom bah-boom bah-boom that they didn’t know what the words meant. They hadn’t taken the time to understand the emotion in their own lines. But the other actors could really hear the ideas and the emotions in Shakespeare’s language, and what they heard I could hear too. As a result, for the first time, Shakespeare’s characters came alive for me.

Of course the audience always makes a vital contribution. Shakespeare wrote great battle scenes and staged them in his little wooden theater, the Globe. He knew how much depended on the audience’s imagination. He says so himself, or, rather, the actor does who speaks the opening lines of Henry V. First he wishes for something far grander than their modest stage: “O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention! / A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, / And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! / Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, / Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels / (Leash’d in, like hounds) should famine, sword, and fire / Crouch for employment.” Once you’ve been able to imagine those three evil and eager hounds leashed tight beside King Harry, you’re engaged with the play and its powerful leading man.

That Shakespeare troop called Actors from the London Stage base their whole approach to his plays on their faith in the audience’s imagination. When they come to Notre Dame a couple of times each year, they bring only a handful of actors, just a hint of costuming, the most minimal props, and they perform on a nearly bare stage. But when the troop gave us Much Ado About Nothing last fall, audience members saw Beatrice craning her neck to look over the hedge as she snooped on her friends in the garden who wanted her to overhear them mischievously gossiping that Benedick loved her. That playful scene changed her life forever. And of course there was no hedge, no lovely garden, except in our minds.

Even the youngest fans can learn to engage their imaginations with Shakespeare’s words. Last weekend several acting groups from local schools performed scenes from about a dozen of the plays in a two-day event called ShakeScenes. Most of the actors were high schoolers, but students from Muessel Elementary School put on a ghostly scene from Macbeth, and other younger actors made up the cast of the Sagwa Valley Home Learners troup that launched us into Henry V.

A girl perhaps 11 years old came down the center aisle saying those lines about Harry and his cruel hounds of war. When she reached the front, she turned and invited us to imagine that the stage contained the two warring kingdoms. Where we saw one man, she asked us to see a thousand. She pointed to imaginary tall fortresses of England and France on opposite sides of the small stage as she said these lines: “Suppose within the girdle of these [theater] walls / Are now confin’d two mighty monarchies, / Whose high, upreared, and abutting fronts / The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder. / Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them / Printing their proud hoofs i’ th’ receiving earth; / For ‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings, / Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times, / Turning th’ accomplishment of many years / Into an hour-glass.” And in that hour I saw the horses stamping, I saw the battlements and the mighty armies, I heard King Harry speak. I was able to imagine Shakespeare’s passionate words, and it was a pleasure to see these youngest actors learning to do so as well.

Broadcast by Ken Smith on July 25, 2003
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