Bard Times

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.