Day 3: Shakespeare!

Our third day in London was basically all Shakespeare all of the time. The last time I brought students to London in March 2103, we had a tour of Shakespeare's Globe, but we couldn't see anything because the season hadn't started yet. Since then, the company has opened the Wanamaker Theatre, which emulates the indoor experience at Blackfriars. All performances in the winter months now happen in a smaller, indoor theatre lit by candlelight.

We started the day with a tour and workshop, where we had a chance to actually get on stage, speak text, look at into the audience, and experience what it's like to be an actor on stage at The Globe. Then we moved into a workshop space, and our facilitator Mary took the group through a series of exercises that examined the plot and characters of Cymbeline, the play we saw later that afternoon. The exercises focused primarily on understanding what makes up a romance, the genre of the play Cymbeline. It focused on Shakespeare's technique as a storyteller with this particular genre rather than simply on the text of the play, and that choice made a significant difference in our experience of the play in performance.  When we got to the outlandish circumstances of Act V, when all of the coincidences and twists of fate need to be explained and revealed to Cymbeline, I felt more apt to accept them, rather than scoff at them and think of the play as problematic. It was a great lesson for me as a teacher of Shakespeare.

I personally had an amazing time watching the performance of the play, and the space is intimate enough that I could see my students enjoying the play as well. It was a great experience, one that I won't forget, and I hope to return there in the future to see more productions by candlelight.

The students of DGHS London Theatre as Art Form inside Shakespeare's Globe.

Colin, one of the students, getting costumed as Ophelia from Hamlet.

Colin fully costumed as Ophelia, minus his blue Converse.

Members of the class on stage at The Globe, right after making a grand entrance through the upstage double doors, from the tiring room.

Standing onstage at The Globe with our workshop facilitator, Mary (green skirt).

The ceiling over top of the thrust stage at The Globe.

Artists I admire: Shakespeare

Last evening in my Shakespeare class, I had one of those humbling reminder moments that tend to happen when I least expect it.

For people who know me, this week's entry is a no-brainer. I love Shakespeare's plays, I've been teaching courses about the plays for years, and I've directed a number of youth theatre productions of the plays.

Four of my students presented scenes from Measure for Measure last evening, which is my favorite comedy. I've directed it with young people, I've got a passage from it tattooed on my arm, and I love the darkness of it.

The humbling part came when I watched two actors play a scene between Angelo and Isabella, when Angelo first announces that Isabella can save her brother Claudio from death if she agrees to have sex with him. The actor playing Angelo made very bold choices, and she helped me to see something about this character who is described as having blood as cold as ice. The request for Isabella to have sex with him does not come easy, and that's where the comedy lies.  It's the character's internal wrestling match with even posing the question that brings out why an Elizabethan/Jacobean audience might have laughed, and why we should too.  The actors took the note, explored this notion, and gave one of the most memorable workshops of a scene in my time teaching this class. Truly enlightening. They taught me something about the play and these characters.

Because Shakespeare managed to create plays and characters that seem to be bottomless in possibilities for exploration and discovery, I'm citing him as the artist I admire this week.

Thinking about the 3 Ps with Shakespeare

Often times, when I'm tackling a long speech coming from a single character in a play by Shakespeare, considering the three Ps can help me to discern the meaning and the purpose of the speech. The three Ps refer to public discourse, private discourse, and personal discourse.

Public discourse refers to words that characters speak that can be heard by everyone in their presence. This kind of discourse occurs in a scene with more than one person, and a character tends to want everyone to hear what's being said.

Private discourse happens with one other character or a small group of characters and usually includes important information that only those characters can know in that moment. Private discourse can take many forms: declaring love, sharing a secret, hatching a murderous plot, etc. And private discourse can happen between a character and the audience, as Shakespeare's characters often take the audience into their confidence, making them privy to information that other characters onstage do not know.

Personal discourse happens when characters speak to themselves in a reflective way. Important personal discoveries can occur in these moments, and these can lead to changes in a characters actions and intentions. Personal discourse can happen when characters are alone or in the presence of others. Think: that moment when someone is talking to you and your mind wanders to something else and you speak that something else aloud but the someone can't hear you. 

Identifying which kind of discourse a character uses in a speech helps me to unlock the character's intentions based on the text. Also, by noticing if the character switches back and forth between these different kinds of discourse, I can more easily track the character's state of mind in a particularly dense piece of text.