It is standing-room-only in the Charles E. Young Grand Salon of Kerckhoff Hall. The audience of students dressed in shorts and sandals, men in suits, families with children and ladies outfitted for an evening of theater is quiet, rapt, as Arthur, the young Duke of Brittany, beseeches Hubert, an adviser to the King, to spare him a horrible fate:
“Will you put out mine eyes?
These eyes that never did nor never shall
So much as frown on you.”
His pleas are heartbreaking. The crowd holds its breath.
The play is King John, among William Shakespeare’s least-known works. One member of the audience has come all the way from North Carolina just to see the rarely performed history (her goal is to see every one of Shakespeare’s works performed live before her 30th birthday). For their part, the players — members of the UCLA Shakespeare Reading and Performing Group, almost all of them non-actors — are glad that the show went off without a hitch.
“There were a few technical things I would have done differently,” says director Blake Middleton after the show. “But I think it’s a damn good play, and no one ever does it. It’s kind of an underdog.”
So it goes in Westwood-upon-Avon, where nearly 390 years after his death The Bard is indeed alive and well.
Whether it’s on small stages around campus with the 10-year-old Shakespeare Reading and Performing Group — an ever-changing collection of students, staff and alumni from diverse, mostly non-theater backgrounds (Middleton is a biomedical researcher), who share a passion for the works of William Shakespeare — or in classrooms with leading Shakespeare scholars or in performance spaces in the theater department or in symposia, tours or lectures, UCLA these days is rich in Elizabethan spirit.
Why is it still so important to focus the spotlight on a 439-year-old English poet and playwright? What is it about Shakespeare that drives such continuing ardor?
The answer depends to some extent on whom you ask. In Shakespeare’s plays, Visiting Professor of Theater Milan Dragicevich ’79 finds “fantastic feasts of language” that, when combined with his simple, powerful stories, “have never been re-created.” For Professor of English Stephen Dickey, it is because “Shakespeare is the central figure in Western aesthetic culture … the coin of the realm. Even people who don’t know Shakespeare know Shakespeare.”
A.R. Braunmuller didn’t start out to be one of the world’s most renowned Shakespeare scholars (among numerous other books and articles, he is co-editor of two exhaustive volumes of Shakespeare’s complete works, The New Cambridge Shakespeare and The Complete Pelican Shakespeare). When he entered Stanford as an undergraduate, his goal was to become an aeronautical engineer. But the intercession of “an inspiring Shakespeare teacher” changed the course of his life, and Braunmuller ended up completing his university education with a dissertation on the works of Shakespeare’s contemporary, the poet and playwright George Chapman, and a Ph.D. in English from Yale.
The bookshelves lining the walls of his Rolfe Hall office attest to his passion and brim with hundreds of editions of Shakespeare — copies of individual plays published by Arden, Norton, Folger, Oxford, and the Riverside, Cambridge and Pelican complete editions. Slipped in amongst them are volumes by the likes of English dramatist Christopher Marlowe, satirist John Marston and, of course, Chapman.
One might wonder what there is fresh to say about Shakespeare, but Braunmuller is quick to point out that there’s always room for new interpretation.
“The introductions and annotations in the first Pelican edition [published in 1957] came from another era, when scholars didn’t talk, for instance, about sex, politics or gender issues,” he says. “These [editors] were fuddy-duddy white guys.”
Now, half of the plays in the Pelican are edited by women, and, says Braunmuller, Shakespeare scholarship has changed over the years to become “much more conscious of performance,” and to give more attention to “the structure, architecture and various staging possibilities of the plays — as well as the historical context of Shakespeare’s work.” In newer editions of Shakespeare’s plays, Braunmuller notes, readers may find discussions of a certain actor’s performance or interpretations of a character. This makes perfect sense, since one thing that virtually all Shakespeare scholars agree upon is that his works were meant to be seen, not read.
To illustrate this point, Braunmuller and fellow English Professor Jonathan Post — Braunmuller calls him his “co-agitator” — go beyond the usual reading aloud of scenes in their classrooms to host 80 students on an annual monthlong sojourn to Stratford-upon-Avon. There, they study up to eight plays by day, attend performances of those same plays by night and talk Shakespeare with actors of the Royal Shakespeare Company, directors, technicians and even voice coaches. A side trip to London takes them to the replica of the Old Globe Theater, where they see yet another play. The class is open through UCLA’s Summer Sessions and usually is made up predominantly of undergraduates.
Other programs involve connections to the broader community. Each year, for example, the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies hosts a one-day symposium that focuses on a Shakespeare play. The symposia are open to the public, but they’re produced mostly for the benefit of Los Angeles–area high school teachers, providing for them an opportunity to discuss with university experts and their peers the issues inherent in trying to teach teenagers Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet or Julius Caesar.
They also hear about the most current Shakespeare scholarship. Scholarship they bring back to their classrooms. In May, the teachers tackled Othello. They heard lectures by Richard Harp of the University of Nevada on “Word Meanings in Othello,” UCLA English Professor Debora Shuger on “Othello and English Renaissance Islam” and English Professor Stephen Dickey on “Ocular Proofs: Othello on Screen,” during which he showed clips from several filmed interpretations of the tragedy.
Dickey teaches the two upper-division Shakespeare classes that all UCLA English majors are required to take. In the classroom, he stresses the performance angle by asking students to “imagine the plays happening on a stage in front of an audience,” instead of reading them as fiction. “Shakespeare was the most experimental playwright, the most radical playwright of his time,” Dickey says. “The problem is that he’s canonical now, so people can’t see that.”
So Dickey has come up with another way to get students thinking about Shakespeare, by illuminating the plays through an “almost Brechtian alienation effect” — also known as “movie night.” Each year Dickey produces the “Shakespeare Offshoot Film Festival,” during which he shows five films that are based, adapted, plagiarized or otherwise connected to Shakespeare’s work — but are not Shakespeare. This year’s films included Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa’s reimagining of Macbeth set in feudal Japan; a 1947 Hollywood film noir, A Double Life, in which Ronald Colman plays a bad actor playing Othello; and McLintock!, a “terrifying” version of The Taming of the Shrew set in the wild West, starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara.
Dickey, who swears he doesn’t even like movies, says “the films are enjoyable to watch, but [watching them] is essentially a pretext for the group to think about the plays they’re based on.”
Rafe Esquith ’81 engages in similar discussions with his students: “Henry IV is about a young man trying to live honorably in a dishonorable world. Who wouldn’t relate to that?” But unlike Dickey’s students, Esquith’s are 10 and 11 years old. A UCLA School of Education alum, Esquith has taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District for 20 years, all but two of them at Hobart Boulevard Elementary.
Ninety-two percent of the pupils at Hobart come from families with incomes below the poverty line, and 100 percent of them speak English as a second language. But in Esquith’s class, language is not a barrier to performing a full-length Shakespeare play each year. They call themselves the Hobart Shakespeareans, and their work has made fans of folks as diverse as Oprah Winfrey, who honored Esquith and the Shakespeareans with her “Use Your Life Award” in 2001, and British actor Ian McKellen, who rearranged his shooting schedule as Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings trilogy in order to fly from New Zealand to Los Angeles to see the group’s performance of King Lear.
Author of the recently published There Are No Shortcuts (Pantheon, 2003), Esquith credits his father with instilling a love of Shakespeare in him while he was still a toddler. “My father would read the plays to me during my youngest years, and I loved them. I didn’t understand everything, but it didn’t matter. I thought they were great. I literally knew who Hamlet was before I knew who Goldilocks was.”
His already evident zeal was only heightened when he studied Shakespeare at UCLA with Senior Lecturer David Rodes — “a wonderful teacher who showed me that Shakespeare wasn’t so serious a pastime.”
Esquith, whose endless energy and love of teaching has made him a star in the K–12 education community, says that his philosophy is simple: “A good teacher must bring to the classroom what he loves. I say to teachers, if you love gardening, then garden in class. The students will see your enthusiasm. I just happen to love Shakespeare.”
The Hobart Shakespeareans will perform Hamlet this summer, and, in doing so, they’ll come to understand more about the beauty of the English language than most native speakers do.
“Imagine you live in a world where everyone’s agreed to say something in the most exquisite way possible,” says Dragicevich. That is the world of Shakespeare.
Dragicevich teaches acting, but not the kind that most modern theater students expect. Instead of the methods of Stanislavsky or Strasberg, he teaches students to approach the classics with a classical sensibility.
Hoping to “bridge the 400-year generation gap” between today’s young actors and the way Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be performed, Dragicevich teaches “the lost art of rhetoric — persuasion through the spoken word.”
“There are super-charged verbal tools embedded in Shakespeare’s texts,” he says, leaning forward in his chair, “like in the opening of Richard III: ‘Now is the winter of our discontent … made glorious summer by this sun of York.’ He’s talking about war versus peace, and Shakespeare has given the actor the rhetorical tools, but so many actors just rush through it. You have to stretch ‘winter’ away from ‘summer’ — making a distinction between the two.”
In an odd mirroring of Dickey, Dragicevich and his students focus entirely on the text, “not even worrying about the meaning” of the play. Instead, “by figuring out how the phrase is said literally, verbally — what kind of cadences and rhythms are used, what is a short flurry of words, or what is drawn out — the actor will find what that might say about the character.”
The results? “Visceral, powerful, dynamic” performances and classical theater that’s “alive … so vibrant that you’re just absorbed by it.”
What has made UCLA a hot spot for Shakespeare scholarship at every level? It would be impossible without access to great resources for research. In addition to the tremendous wealth of material in UCLA’s own Young Research Library, the university’s proximity to such rare-book treasure troves as the Getty, the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and the Huntington Library has been a magnet, drawing some of the top Shakespeare scholars to UCLA, says Braunmuller.
The work that’s done with those resources extends beyond traditional interpretation. In Shakespeare Jungle Fever (Stanford University Press, 2000), English Professor Arthur L. Little Jr., for example, looks at the intersection of race, sex and imperialism in Elizabethan England through readings of Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and Titus Andronicus.
And there are others at UCLA who have found ways to incorporate Shakespeare into their lives. Like art historian David Kunzle who, after finishing a particularly grueling piece of scholarship in his own field, decided he “needed a change” and, at age 61, auditioned for a Shakespeare play. He was cast, and four years later has become a go-to guy for local Shakespeare companies looking for a particularly regal king or duke or royal adviser.
Or Liisa Spink ’03. A double major in English and genetics, she went on the Stratford-upon-Avon tour last year with Braunmuller and Post and was so inspired that on the plane home that she and a friend starting writing ideas down on the air-sickness bags for their own production of Much Ado About Nothing. Back in Westwood, she founded Shakespeare UCLA, a student group supported by ASUCLA and the Center for Student Programming. Her version of the play — set on the UCLA campus with Hero played as a Bruin cheerleader and Benedick and Claudio as Bruin football stars — ran for three nights before sold-out audiences. The villains, she says with a laugh, were USC players.
Though Spink has graduated, Shakespeare UCLA will live on, side by side with Shakespeare Reading and Performance, the Shakespeare Offshoot Film Festival and all the other Shakespeare groups, classes and events on campus.
It’s true what they say: Where there’s a Will, there’s a way.