Bard Times

By Eve Zibart
Friday, January 5, 2007

In the beginning was the Bard. . . .And the words were the Bard's, and the words were good.

So good, in fact, that there were far more quotations from Shakespeare in the original Bartlett's Quotations than from the Bible, and he still provides the largest block. Shakespeare -- however he came to be so eloquent -- has so permeated the English language that it's almost impossible to get through the day without hearing, if not uttering, some fragment or other: to be, or not to be; all the world's a stage; the play's the thing; get thee to a nunnery; double, double toil and trouble; not wisely but too well; lay on, Macduff; my kingdom for a horse!; for ever and a day; if music be the food of love, play on; we are such stuff as dreams are made on; to the manner born; out, damned spot!; sink or swim; what's in a name?; alas, poor Yorick!; friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow; that inner Beltway favorite, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers"; and especially at this time of year, "O, that this too too solid flesh would melt."

The words are so powerful, so wide-ranging that they immediately fired countless other authors (and plagiarists), composers and librettists, dancers, painters, poets and filmmakers to interpret, reconceive, parody or elaborate on them. And so perhaps it is only fitting that in this capital of rhetoric and drama -- which is also home to a full-scale model of the Globe Theatre -- the arts community should band together to showcase not only Shakespeare's canonical works but also offshoots, tributes, contemporary cultural works and comedies.

Beginning Saturday, with a staged reading of "Twelfth Night" -- on what is, appropriately, Twelfth Night -- and for the next six months, more than 60 organizations, ballet and modern dance troupes, orchestras and vocal groups, academic and literary foundations, museums and theater companies, will offer more than 100 shows and lectures, many of them free. The Shakespeare in Washington festival, conceived by Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser and curated by Michael Kahn, artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company, has offerings to lure the wary, delight the adept, illuminate the obscure and even enchant the children.

Histories, farces, jazz singers, a cappella chamber singers, actors speaking Hebrew or Tlingit, actors staying silent, lecturers, lawyers (apparently unfazed by the Bard's threat), improv classes, bag lunches, art exhibits, antique costumes . . . and who can resist a "Hamlet" performed by tiny ninja puppets? Good grief, sweet prince!

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For five centuries -- scholars estimate the plays and poems were written between 1589 or '90 and 1612 -- Shakespeare's works have remained the touchstone of Western literature, and they have lost none of their appeal, even in the video age.

Consider -- just briefly -- those famous star-crossed lovers: "Romeo and Juliet" became the gang war "West Side Story" of the 1950s; in the flower-child '60s, it was Zeffirelli's romantic teenage "Romeo and Juliet," and the story returned to the gang war scene in 1996 for Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo & Juliet." Tune into satellite radio and you can hear Bruce Springsteen, Dire Straits, Steve Forbert, Elvis Costello, Michael Penn, Tom Waits, Blue Oyster Cult and Paul Kelly, among many others, cite the young lovers. The ballets of three great composers, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Berlioz, will be heard during the festival.

"The Tempest" launched the sci-fi classic film "Forbidden Planet" (and the "Star Trek" episode "Requiem for Methuselah"); "Falstaff" begot Orson Welles's "Chimes at Midnight" (showing at the AFI Silver Theatre as part of the festival); "The Taming of the Shrew" sparked Cole Porter's rollicking, exuberant postwar "Kiss Me, Kate" (being staged by the Washington Savoyards) and the 1999 teen-angst comedy "10 Things I Hate About You." "My Own Private Idaho" (also screening) owes a debt to "Henry IV." This summer's Shakespeare Free for All at Carter Barron Amphitheatre will be a restaging of Kahn's acclaimed 2006 take on "Love's Labor's Lost," set in the India of the psychedelic '60s, with the King of Navarre as a maharishi-like guru and the three nobles as members of a rock band (get it?). Even Elvis Presley paraphrased "As You Like It" in "Are You Lonesome Tonight?": "You know, someone said the world's a stage / And each must play his part."

If imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, Shakespeare will be blushing into eternity. "Macbeth" has turned Japanese (Akira Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood," screening at AFI); rowdy, bawdy and loud (Eugene Ionesco's "Macbett"); liberal Democratic (the off-Broadway Vietnam War-era "MacBird"); and even speechless (Synetic Theater's dance and music production for the festival).

Richard III has been fascist (Ian McKellen, whose "Richard III" is screening at AFI), gay (Richard Dreyfuss in the spoofy play-within-a-play in "The Goodbye Girl") and an East L.A. gangster ("The Street King"). "The Comedy of Errors" inspired Rodgers and Hart's "The Boys From Syracuse," then got an off-Broadway hip-hop rhythm in "The Bombitty of Errors." "Hair" composer Galt MacDermot gave "Two Gentlemen of Verona" the rock musical treatment. (Poor Hamlet suffered it, too, but "Rockabye Hamlet" fortunately tanked.) "A Midsummer Night's Dream" begot Henry Purcell's operetta "The Fairy Queen" and Mendelssohn's ballet score -- all of which will be performed in the coming months -- as well as Woody Allen's "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy."

Even in his adopted home town, Shakespeare's appeal seems endless. One of the most popular London attractions is the Royal Shakespeare Company -- one of whose stagings of "Midsummer" became a legendary all-star 1968 film starring Diana Rigg, Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, David Warner, Ian Holm and Ian Richardson -- but another is the Reduced Shakespeare Company, which notoriously and affectionately rips through the Bard's plays in less than two hours.

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."