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I spent Saturday afternoon in the park with a picnic, a play, a smidgin of rain, and approixmately eighteen people, almost all of whom were previously strangers to me. We read A Midsummer Night's Dream, with parts of costumes and props and improvised acting, music, and dancing. It was a rather impressive production under the circumstances, organized by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mirrorshard, with some might fine actors participating. I have no idea when I last was involved in any way other than audience in theater; possibly my brief stint as dramaturge when an undergraduate? In this, I played a minor fairy, which gave me more time to watch the rest of it, a cohort to loiter with, and also the fun of having a role in the dance.
Which is how C. came to ask me about Shakespeare, and I come to give you the question on his behalf: Why Shakespeare? "Genius" alone never explains much of anything; PR makes all the difference. What are the major historiographic developments which made his work, in particular, the subject of such modern renown?
mirrorshard, with some might fine actors participating. I have no idea when I last was involved in any way other than audience in theater; possibly my brief stint as dramaturge when an undergraduate? In this, I played a minor fairy, which gave me more time to watch the rest of it, a cohort to loiter with, and also the fun of having a role in the dance.Which is how C. came to ask me about Shakespeare, and I come to give you the question on his behalf: Why Shakespeare? "Genius" alone never explains much of anything; PR makes all the difference. What are the major historiographic developments which made his work, in particular, the subject of such modern renown?
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The metamorphosis seems to have happened gradually - the publication of the First Folio, seven years after his death added to his intellectual respectability. He was very much regarded as a "natural" poet, without much technical skill
(
Warbling his native woodnotes wild
as Milton said in Lycidas.)
After the Restoration his plays were mined for usable bits, rejigged to suit modern tastes. Possibly the most important steps were the work of early editors like Rowe, Theobald and Pope, who had varying degrees of reverence for the text, but talked up its importance like nobody's business! Certainly by about 130 years after Shakespeare's death he was firmly at the heart of the canon, though often in forms we would shudder at now, like Nahum Tate's
Dr Johnson wrote about Shakespeare at length and his friend Garrick put on a bicentenary bash in Stratford (only five years late!) which established a tourist trade and a hagiographical approach. He proved useful source material to the Sturm und Drang movement, and was remade by the Romantics in their own image. And so on...
There are several good books on the subject - I much enjoyed Jack Lynch's
Bardolatry is a weird phenomenon, and his very chameleon nature is at the core of it, I think - look how
Your playreading sounds lovely. I adore that play, almost know it by heart, so many times have I taught it.
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They're also useful because to a large extent they are historiography - you can trace immense fault lines through British literature & history with them, and forwards from them. Obviously, you can say the same for other plays, but few have had the same forward influence.
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(And to be honest, I couldn't think of anything strongly pertinent that
Oh, one thing does occur to me though - it's partly because Shakespeare's own life is interestingly storyable. He's the uneducated country boy made inexplicably good, in contrast to Beaumont & Fletcher and Jonson. One of my favourite alt-histories is "what if Marlowe never got stabbed up" - we'd be talking about "Sweet sly Kit, the secret-agent playwright, master of tragic passion and bawdy humours".
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But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there's Morris dancing and they treat Hamlet like a kissing book. The Nashville Shakespeare scene is pretty good, although I hear there is scandal afoot since the woman who has spearheaded Shakespeare in the park and on local stages is sick of doing Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummernight's Dream and instead wants to work through the back catalogue of the plays for which no one raises their hands when the Reduced Shakespeare Company asks the audience which ones they've seen.
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I think it may be partly a patriotic thing. Shakespeare is frequently held up on the 17th century for his natural, native, innate wit, the English man o' war matched against the cumbrous Spanish gallion of Jonson's classical learning. Milton, Dryden and Aubrey all talk of him in that way, more or less. And then there was the patronage of William Davenant, head of the Duke's company (one of two licenced at the Restoration), and godson of the bard himself. Davenant's mother kept an Oxford inn where Shakespeare stopped off on his trips between London and Oxford, and there were even rumours that Davenant was WS's natural son. I think he may have had a hand in keeping Shakespeare's works on the stage.
Added to which WS did produce a decent number of plays in all genres, which made him a good all-round bet.
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