Bard Times

Shakespeare has inspired philosophers from Friedrich Nietzsche (who concluded that his favorite author was really Sir Francis Bacon, one of the most highly touted candidates for the "real" Will) to feminist Virginia Woolf, who famously argued that if Shakespeare had an even more gifted sister, she could not have succeeded because "a woman must have money and a room of her own" to write. James Joyce delivered a dozen lectures on Shakespeare in Trieste, Italy (and drafted a chapter for "Ulysses" in which Stephen Daedalus explicates "Hamlet"). The material is so rich and irresistible that some of our greatest modern-day authors are still picking away at it, supplying back stories and love stories of all sorts: Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead" (Studio Theatre, May 16-June 13) may have started it, or his hilarious "Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth," but his "Shakespeare in Love" probably takes the popular crown. John Updike recast "Hamlet" as "Gertrude and Claudius," and Jane Smiley at least saluted "King Lear" in "A Thousand Acres." The titles of Robert Frost's "Out, Out --," William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury," Mark Helprin's "Winter's Tale," Sting's "Nothing Like the Sun," Stephen Ambrose's "Band of Brothers," Ray Bradbury's "Something Wicked This Way Comes" and Richard Matheson's "What Dreams May Come" are all quotations. (So is the BBC's popular "To the Manor Born," although only punningly.)

None of that even brushes the scores of great ballets (Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet," whose pas de deux was immortalized by Dame Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, will be performed by the Kirov Ballet this month), operas (Verdi's searing "Macbeth" and his final comic "Falstaff," both among the festival offerings) or poetic metaphors derived from Shakespeare's works.

The Folger Shakespeare Library, the original home of the Shakespeare Theatre Company, is one of Washington's best-kept secrets. Not only does it contain the Globe Theatre model, but the library also has a First Folio (the name given to the first published collections of his "Comedies, Tragedies, & Histories," released in 1623) on permanent display, opened to the title page. In fact, the library owns one of the largest collection of First Folios: 79, about a third of those in existence. It also has a copy of a Geneva Bible that once belonged to Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, another of Shakespeare's contemporaries who has been put forward as the real Bard, with some passages marked that may or may not echo biblical allusions in Shakespeare's works -- not that such quotations would be strange in those days.

(The long-running, sometimes good-humored and often acrimonious debate over the real authorship of the plays and sonnets goes back to Shakespeare's own day. Advocates for other candidates, citing Shakespeare's lack of education and breeding, have variously championed Christopher Marlowe and the Earls of Derby and Rutland as well as Bacon and Oxford. The dark horse is Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, sister of poet Philip Sidney, which would have tickled Virginia Woolf.)

Sometimes Shakespeare could be a curse. "Macbeth" was considered so unlucky for actors -- early productions, legendarily including the very first, were said to be plagued by fatal illness, accidents and even deaths from swordplay and perhaps real witches' displeasure -- that many didn't like to mention it by name, referring to it as "the Scottish play" or the "Scottish business." If the real name is used in a theater, superstition requires the speaker to leave the room, spin around three times, spit over the shoulder and knock to reenter.

Edwin Booth, considered the handsomest man of his day (his career ranged from 1841 to 1891), was as stereotyped as Hamlet as Bela Lugosi was Dracula. His career is the subject of "Haunted Prince: The Ghosts of Edwin Booth," a one-man show taken from his letters and performances by Gary Sloan at the National Portrait Gallery.

(Here's a piece of Shakespearean trivia with Washington connections: The only time all three Booth brothers acted together, it was in "Julius Caesar" -- and it was John Wilkes Booth who, as Marc Antony, turned the crowd against the assassins. "Sic semper tyrannis," indeed. Even more poignant, perhaps, Edwin Booth once saved Abraham Lincoln's young son Robert from being run over by a train.)

And lest we forget, Shakespeare also wrote 154 sonnets, not only restructuring the form from its Petrarchan forerunner to end with a dramatic couplet but inspiring one of literature's great fun mysteries: Was Will's "Dark Lady" really a "Fair Youth"?

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The Shakespeare in Washington festival schedule is so extensive that only highlights can be reproduced here; the full calendar is available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/shakespeare and at http://www.shakespeareinwashington.org/. If even the selection seems overwhelming, try using it like a college catalogue and pick an area of concentration. (The free lectures and art exhibits alone would keep you busy.)

For instance: Duke Ellington fans can hear Mercedes Ellington, co-creator of "Play On!," a version of "Twelfth Night," discuss her grandfather's Shakespeare-inspired "Such Sweet Thunder" May 15 at the Folger; and then hear the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra perform it in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall on May 20. Dame Cleo Laine and Sir John Dankworth perform selections from her 1964 album "Shakespeare and All That Jazz" in the center's Concert Hall on Feb. 18. (Shakespeare-themed music from every century is so richly represented in this festival we can't even begin to count it.)

"Hamlet" will be declaimed in English (the Shakespeare Theatre, June 5-July 29), in Hebrew (Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv at Signature Theatre, March 6-11) and in silence (Synetic Theater, May 31-June 17) -- quite a change for that serial soliloquist.

Three film versions of "Othello," ranging over 50 years, are screening in a mini-fest at the National Gallery of Art between Friday and Jan. 13; American Ballet Theatre is performing Lar Lubovitch's staging Jan. 11-14 at the Kennedy Center; the Washington Concert Opera is performing Rossini's 1816 bel canto "Otello" at Lisner Auditorium on April 29; and in case you've lost the thread, the Olney Theatre Center for the Arts is featuring the original play April 26-28.

Looking for kid-friendly possibilities? How about condensed versions of "Macbeth" (March 14-15) and "The Comedy of Errors" (April 14-15) at Kennedy Center's Family Theater; the Washington Ballet's "7 X 7: Shakespeare," seven seven-minute-long premieres based on the Bard, May 1-20 at the company's England Studio Theater; the annual Secondary School Shakespeare Festival at the Folger Theatre on March 5-8 and 12-14; the annual Shakespeare Birthday Open House at the Folger Shakespeare Library on April 29; and those Tiny Ninja Theater puppets re-creating "Hamlet" and "The Sonnets" June 11-14 at the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage? (On the other hand, no one younger than 18 will be admitted to the "Shakespeare Undressed" screenings and panel discussion April 25 at the University of Maryland.)

Argumentative, are we? How about Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy presiding over the "Trial of Hamlet," in an audience-participatory performance with the Shakespeare Theatre's Kahn selecting a jury from the audience (March 15 in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater)?

Looking for star power? Derek Jacobi and Lynn Redgrave join the Folger Consort's "The Fairy Queen" (April 13-15 at the Folger Library and April 15 at the Music Center at Strathmore). Roger Rees mixes "historical, hysterical and histrionic" comments on the Bard from both expected and unexpected sources (Stevie Wonder?) in "What You Will: An Evening By and About the Bard" at the Folger Theatre on March 30 and April 1.

Eve Zibart's father and 11 friends met once a month to read Shakespeare plays aloud; at 13, she directed a group of third- and fourth-grade campers in a production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream."