This Week: It’s Greek to me…

What kind of madman would write a play that requires the audience
to read a dozen books in advance? Come as you are; you’ll be fine.”
-Tom Stoppard

If you are reading this website, you probably already know that Shakespeare is for everyone. You may know that he wrote plays that sold tickets to illiterate peasants and to educated nobles. You have seen that the language doesn’t need changing, the plays don’t need dumbing down: any fourth grader can understand Shakespeare done well - no preparation required.

Not everyone has taken that leap. What do you say to those who think that Shakespeare is only for the elite? Or to those who fear they would be bored? This summer at GRSF, we have two great comedies: while we may spend an entire evening debating the placement of a colon, you needn’t be such a nerd. If we’ve done our work (and we have), you need only listen. In that spirit, here is what you don’t need to know to laugh away a summer’s evening at GRSF:

You don’t need to know that many of the characters in Love’s Labour’s Lost were based on actual people familiar to Shakespeare’s audience. We can still recognize them by type: the clever boy, the braggart warrior, the pompous teacher, the bumbling country parson. Whereas it’s interesting to know that Queen Elizabeth entertained a group of Russian visitors in her court, your enjoyment of Love’s Labour’s does not hinge on familiarity with that historical event. And whereas Don Adriano de Armado, the name of the fantastical Spaniard haunting the court of the King of Navarre in Love’s Labour’s, tips its satirical hat to the spectacular and unexpected defeat by the English Navy of the Spanish Armada, you don’t have to be a student of British Naval History to enjoy the outrageous character Shakespeare created. You don’t even have to speak Latin to “get” Love’s Labour’s.

You also don’t need to know what a Ciceroan oration is. It’s true that Berowne delivers one before intermission, but what’s important is that he’s smart enough to put together some of the most beautiful ideas expressed about love into a compelling rhetorical form. You don’t need to be familiar with sonnets, though much of the play unfolds in sonnet form: you just need to let the language dance across the stage. Listen for the rhymes - but most of all, enjoy them!

Similarly, in The Tempest, you don’t need to know about Colonialism or slavery to comprehend the story. Some people hold that these are central themes in Shakespeare’s play; we don’t, but even if we did you wouldn’t need to know much about them to have a rich and satisfying experience in the theatre. Likewise, you don’t need to know about paternalistic societies in which fathers subvert their daughters. Whereas there certainly were over-protective, chauvinistic dads in Shakespeare’s time just as there are in our own, we don’t think this is what the play is about. Nor, for that matter, do you need to know much about sorcery (another popular notion about The Tempest’s thematic underpinnings).

Shakespeare grows, changes, transforms. Of course, when we study the plays, we come to a deeper understanding of the ideas, the themes, the overwhelming humanity of these great works. But we must always remember (at least those of us performing the plays must) that originally, Shakespeare was writing for people who didn’t read, didn’t write, and who were experiencing these stories for the first time. That’s how we approach them at the Great River Shakespeare Festival. For the first time. As if they were brand new. And that’s how we’d like you to listen to them.

The best way to understand these plays is to lean forward and listen in that active way not required of most television viewing but of which we’re all capable. You don’t need to know much in advance; Shakespeare usually drops all the breadcrumbs of comprehension and enjoyment in the first two scenes of his stories. After that, you’re off and running.

As Mark Twain once said, “Shakespeare wrote for the people. We’re the people. Let’s listen!”

The GRSF Staff

Don’t believe we spend and evening on a colon? Watch Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry’s hilarious take on acting Shakespeare.