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 455th
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 31st
year.
The theater will
celebrate Shakespeare’s 455th 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 20th or 21st 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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