by Alexi SargeantCall me an apologist for Shakespeare. Reading and performing the works of the Bard has been such an important part of my life that I am excited to spread the joy of Shakespeare to others. Whether veteran actors or newcomers to the stage, we can all gain something

unique from the characters and words of the great playwright.

There is nothing quite like creating, as a company, a new and unique version of one of Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, tragedies, or romances. To set out with such a goal is to engage in a conversation across time and space about all of the themes Shakespeare so loved to explore: love, death, honor, suffering, freedom, authority, and the human struggle for transcendence. If you have not yet taken your place in this conversation, dear reader, now is the time.

For the Fun of ItMy first experience with performing Shakespeare came when I was in elementary school, where I participated in a homeschool group’s productions of As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Taming of the Shrew. These were large and elaborate productions that were acted by students but adult-directed. Though this group first sparked my interest in the Bard, it was in high school that my passion for Shakespeare truly ignited, thanks to the student-run ShakesPEER Group. The shows this group put on were entirely student-directed; the participants had to rise to the challenges of reading and staging Shakespeare without adult teachers or directors.

I played Benedick in the ShakesPEER Group’s inaugural produc-tion, Much Ado About Nothing, and went on to act in Twelfth Night,

Othello, and The Merry Wives of Windsor before directing The Merchant of Venice and Macbeth. None of these shows was exempt from casting kerfuffles, onstage mishaps, or unfortunately timed blizzards, but every play is, in my mind, a success story about what students can do with teamwork and dedication.

Also during high school, I had the privilege of attending the American Shakespeare Center Theatre Camp (ASCTC) in Staunton, Virginia, where I got to perform on the reconstructed Blackfriars stage, just like the American Shakespeare Center’s resident troupe. Watching and acting in shows on that stage was a revelation. The ASC uses many of Shakespeare’s original staging practices, includ-ing universal lighting, which allows the actors to see and interact with the audience. When audience members see actors delivering lines straight to them—and occasionally find themselves pulled onto the stage—it creates a theater experience that is far more engaged than passive. Learning from the ASC’s actors is a great and important part of the camp, but many lessons come from the stage itself, and from watching one’s fellow campers light up with the joy of Shakespeare.

What I learned at the Blackfriars has been of great value in my theatrical endeavors in college. Here at Yale, I have watched the fun of Shakespeare take over a whole campus. This spring is the semester of Shakespeare

The attendees of ASCTC get pumped for their performance.

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at Yale, a multi-venue celebration of the university’s Shakespearean resources. I have seen Yale’s copies of the First Folio and the Shakespeare-inspired paintings of Edward Austen Abbey. Best of all, I have par-ticipated in several Shakespeare pro-ductions, including directing a show called The Deadly Seven, for which I pulled scenes from seven different

Shakespeare plays to create a showcase themed around the seven deadly sins. The inimitable fat knight Sir John Falstaff gave voice to Gluttony, and also acted as an emcee for the whole show, spinning the “Wheel of Sin” to determine the order in which scenes would be performed. All in all, it was a great experience not only of using a wide variety of Shakespearean scenes to explore a theme of significant human interest, but also of bringing some of Shakespeare’s greatest characters (the languorous Cleopatra, the voluminous Falstaff, the envious Richard III, and the wrathful Queen Margaret) together in a single production. The fun of Shakespeare is partly in his works’ intrinsic excitement and partly in what you make of it.

Words, Words, WordsOne of the most common misconceptions about Shakespeare is that he wrote in Old English. This is not true, because Old English is the language

of Beowulf—Shakespeare wrote in Early Modern English. But, if you look at it another way, it is we who speak “Old English.” After all, the English we speak has been kicking around for centuries, with its words’ meanings and spellings slowly being locked down by dictionaries and textbooks.

When Shakespeare worked, his language was Young English: messy, unstandardized, absorbing new words from many sources, bursting at the seams with possibilities. Shakespeare was writing in a language that was just coming into its own as a vehicle for serious literature. This linguistic exuber-ance shows in the plays, where Shakespeare coins new words by expanding and combining existing roots: from the Arabic “assassin” comes Macbeth’s “assassination;” from two English words comes As You Like It’s “lackluster;” and from a root and a suffix comes Henry VI, Part 3’s “remorseless.”

In some ways, the fact that these coinages of Shakespeare have become so widely used gives us an advantage over Shakespeare’s initial audience. We come to a Shakespeare play already in possession of his words, while audiences at the Globe came in search of new words that the stage would introduce them to. Even when we do find words that we are unfamiliar with in Shakespeare, such as “orgulous” in Troilus and Cressida, they are fun to say. Reading lists of Shakespearean insults is always a popular acting game partly for the pleasure of tasting juicy phrases such as “you froward and unable worms.” Sometimes, merely pronouncing these evocative words is enough to help clarify their mean-ing: “gallimaufry” sounds like a strange jumble, which is exactly what it means.

Shakespeare is always experimenting and playing around with language, and is aware enough to poke fun at himself for doing so. Dogberry, the comedic constable from Much Ado About Nothing, famously mangles language with such unintentional malapropisms as “vigitant” (meaning “vigilant”) and “dissem-bly” (for “assembly”). In Love’s Labour’s Lost, two characters—the “fantastical Spaniard” Don Adriano and the pedantic schoolmaster Holofernes—speak in bombastic style because they are so in love with the sound of their own voices. Upon first meeting, they exchange a flurry of highfalutin talk, prompting the clownish Costard to play along with the fancy-sounding but meaningless “honorifcabilitudinitatibus.” Observing this, the page Moth quips, “They have been at a great feast of language, and stolen the scraps.”

Shakespeare’s works themselves are “a great feast of language.” We,

For The Deadly Seven, Alexi pulled together scenes representing the seven deadly sins from different Shakespeare plays. Here, Sir John Falstaff (played by Wilfredo Ramos) sits in front of the “Wheel of Sin.”

A compilation of many of the posters Alexi made for the ShakesPEER Group

Alexi as Cassio and Meg Rumsey-Lasersohn as Desdemona in the ShakesPEER Group’s performance of Othello.

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ResouRces for exploring shakespeare

Shakespeare’s plays are in the public domain, so you can perform any Shakespeare play absolutely for free. Full, searchable copies of the plays are available online at opensourceshakespeare.com and playshakespeare.com.

To find the meanings of unusual Shakespearean vocabulary (“orgulous,” my example from the article, actually means “proud”), I recommend the Folger Library’s editions of Shakespeare for their excellent facing-page explanatory notes. See www.folger.edu/template.cfm?cid=526 for more information.

The best companion to Shakespeare is the DK Essential Shakespeare Handbook, with its invaluable act-by-act synopses, character line counts, and contextual informa-tion for every play.

For those who want to seriously establish their Shakespeare geek credentials, see the comprehensive, two-volume Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary by Alexander Schmidt.

—Alexi Sargeant

Shakespeare’s heirs, have no need to steal scraps from the feast, because it has been lavishly laid out before us.

Make It YoursBen Jonson, Shakespeare’s fellow playwright and friendly rival, wrote in the preface to the First Folio, published after Shakespeare’s death, that Shakespeare was “not of an age, but for all time!” Jonson’s words have been borne out, as Shakespeare has been produced for centuries, in myriad languages and every performance space imaginable. Shakespeare’s characters some-times predict this, such as when, after the assassination scene in Julius Caesar, Cassius says, “How many ages hence/ shall this our lofty scene be acted over/ in states unborn and accents yet unknown!” Yet just as Cassius has no way of knowing that these prophesied reenactments will portray him as a villain, Shakespeare certainly could not have predicted the wide-ranging array of reinterpretations his work would undergo.

Sometimes, these re-settings fail. Michael Almereyda’s 2000 film version of Hamlet, starring Ethan Hawke, tries to make the play contemporary by setting it in modern-day New York, yet instantly dates it by having Hamlet deliver his “to be or not to be” speech in a Blockbuster—remember those? On the other hand, Richard Loncraine’s 1995 Richard III, starring Ian McKellan, created a 1930s fascist version of Britain that illuminated the political dimension of the play. Personally, I am ambivalent about re-setting Shakespeare. I performed in a hilarious tropical Comedy of Errors and I directed Macbeth as an Edgar Allan Poe-inspired Victorian nightmare, but I can also think of examples of re-setting becoming gimmicky or overbearing. The worst is when a director imposes some strange vision on a play because he or she does not trust the text itself.

Whatever the setting, the characters and their language should remain paramount. After all, Shakespeare’s scripts call for little in the way of sets and special effects. Part of what makes his plays perfect for amateur productions is the way they lend themselves

to minimalism. If you’re staging one of Shakespeare’s plays, don’t worry about an elaborate setting; just try to understand the text as much as possible. Treat the text as the blueprint for a play that you are constructing. Your materials can be the skills and experiences of your cast and crew. Have jugglers juggle; have people who play instruments perform a musical pre-show. Is someone in the cast an origami expert? Have that person fold a gorgeous crown out of nice paper, as it will be much better looking than a cheap plastic crown and much less expensive than a metal one. Above all, use the resources you have to tell the story of the play and bring to life the words of the Bard.

I f you’ve felt the slightest tug of curiosity or thrill of theatri-cal possibility while reading this article, I encourage you to

explore that impulse: start speaking Shakespeare’s text, putting his characters on their feet. If this article inspires you to gather some friends and read The Winter’s Tale out loud, I will consider it a success. If it inspires you to find some collaborators and put on Twelfth Night, I will consider it a triumph.

There is no reason not to give Shakespeare a try. If you cannot find a Shakespeare group in your school or community, go ahead and start one. I guarantee you will not be disappointed to spend some time with the works and world of William Shakespeare. No other literary adventure is as excitingly interactive, and no other dramatic material is as endlessly rewarding.

Alexi Sargeant is a freshman at Yale and a potential english and/or theatre studies major. his hobbies include graphic design and swing dancing, and his favorite author is, unsurprisingly, William shakespeare.

Alexi plays the role of Shakespeare on the Blackfriars stage.

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