I am not always honest when people ask about my favorite writer. It comes up fairly often, as I listen to eight audiobooks a month for work. Shakespeare is, in fact, my favorite writer and has been since I was a teenager, but most people are referring to books when they ask, so I give my answer couched in their expectations. However, it has always been the Bard for me.
Like most people, my first encounter was in high school with “Romeo and Juliet.” I was lucky enough to see the movie by Franco Zeffirelli and it rocked my world. It still remains my favorite film version of the play. I took a class about Shakespeare, so we read and watched several of his plays, though the romance of “Romeo and Juliet” and the gore of Roman Polanski’s film version of “Macbeth” are what I have best retained for both imagery and language.
The love affair never ended. I have seen some of the plays so many times I can recite the dialogue along with the actors, a bad habit that drives my daughter crazy. But those words—how can one not speak them aloud? And there’s the rub. Often Shakespeare’s plays are simply assigned reading, but one cannot do the material justice when it is not read aloud, because a play is not a static thing: it should not be internalized or intellectualized; it should be read aloud, shared, discussed.
Which brings us to one of my favorite locations in the Berkshires: Shakespeare & Company. I recently attended its fundraising gala and was charmed, as I always am, but the space—I love the round building housing the stage, and the campus is well-kept and has plenty of green space.
Shake & Co., as the locals call it, has always been innovative. The plays are sometimes set in more modern eras, the language sometimes modified. It is a great way to keep younger audiences interested. At the gala, which honored local resident Academy Award-winning special effects wizard Douglas Trumbull, a 3D presentation was included with a selection of Shakespeare’s scenes. Children acted snippets of plays, Yehuda Hanani played the cello because, of course, he does. Most interesting to me was watching Obie Award-winning actor John Douglas Thompson perform a scene from “Julius Caesar” as Brutus.
Thompson has a silky, deep voice and a charismatic presence one associates with the powerful male characters in the Bard’s plays. My ears pricked up when I heard him speak and promised myself to watch him in “Coriolanus” later this season. That particular tragedy is not often performed and helps round out a season with the more upbeat comedies “Twelfth Night,” “The Taming of the Shrew” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”
There are, as always, non-Shakespearean plays also being performed this summer—“The Children” and “Top Dog/Underdog”—but my heart will always belong to that dramatist from Avon. And why wouldn’t it? The secret to his plays’ popularity rests not just with the beautiful language and innovative vocabulary, but also his ability to touch on true and often nearly palpable emotion. Complex ideas about the human condition are laid out for all of us to digest. Whether it be unrequited love, greed, depression, ambition, obedience, anger, grief, lust or mirth, Shakespeare could connect with his audience because what he wrote about, regardless of the grandeur of the settings, was very basic. He wrote about us. And he wrote for us. There were just as many bawdy bon mots thrown out for the groundlings in the pit as lofty ideals for the more refined amongst the viewers.
In “As You Like It,” Shakespeare showed remarkable prescience when he wrote “all the world’s a stage” because, in fact, all the word did become his stage, with his language influencing and changing the way we have spoken for centuries.
One can’t escape the influence these plays have had on us, knowingly or not. His language is our language. Most of us have quoted the plays or poems at one time or another, even if we thought we were using a common phrase. Ever said someone was a “green-eyed monster” or has “seen better days” or been on a “wild goose chase?” Bet you never realized you were reaching back over 400 years to grab those phrases.
For a complete list of events unfolding at Shakespeare & Company, see the Berkshire Edge calendar.
