Here and There

[“Here and There” is a title I’ve used over the years, most recently three years ago, for reflections on various experiences of Shakespeare in my own life. –JWM]

When my wife Ellen and I moved to an independent living apartment in a retirement community, we were asked to provide a brief biographical background sheet as a way of introducing ourselves to our new neighbors at Watermark in Southbury, CT. We moved to our new home on March 18, 2020, just a day or two before the pandemic lockdown was imposed on all Americans. Our short background piece mentioned that for many years I had taught Shakespeare and also served as co-editor of this journal. On the rare occasions over the past year when we actually had a chance to talk with them, several neighbors expressed the hope that there would be some kind of Shakespeare presentation after the lockdown.

Ellen, who has also taught Shakespeare, both in high school and in college, and I agreed that we would target Shakespeare’s birthday this year for some kind of presentation on Shakespeare. And so it was that we put together a four-week “course” billed as a brief introduction to Shakespeare’s life and works, with the first installment on Friday, April 23, which this year was the Bard’s 457^th birthday.

We were able to advertise our course with a special display on the shelf next to the door of our apartment, which happens to be opposite an elevator, so many people see it. The shelf is meant as a kind of supplementary mailbox for the one in the mail room downstairs, but residents frequently decorate the space with interesting displays—at Christmas time, Watermark awards a prize to the most imaginative holiday shelf.  Shakespeare was featured on our shelf for four weeks, with a variety of materials available to us as life-long Shakespeareans, including the boxes for the DVDs we showed along the way.

The class on April 23^rd included a brief introduction to Shakespeare, with basic information about his life and works. We then showed Shakespeare in Love, the wonderful 1999 Academy Award winner for Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, etc. The film is a very effective introduction to Shakespeare’s world, especially for people with little background on the playwright. The first “class” ended with servings of a birthday cake that said “Happy Birthday, Will” on top.

In planning this course, we decided that the first and fourth sessions would feature films designed to provide our neighbors with some sense of Shakespeare’s life, as a young man and as a retired citizen of Stratford. In the fourth session, we showed Kenneth Branagh’s 2018 film All Is True. We promoted the showing with a line from the DVD box: “In 1613, William Shakespeare retired. He still had one last story to tell—his own.”

In the second session, we showed the Shakespeare’s Globe film of its 2013 production of Twelfth Night, which featured, with hilarious results, an all-male cast led by Mark Rylance as the Countess Olivia and Stephen Fry as Malvolio. Our students saw the play much as its first audiences saw it.

For the third session, we planned to show the RSC’s film of its 1974 production of Antony and Cleopatra, featuring Richard Johnson and Janet Suzman in the title roles, a production I was lucky enough to see at the Aldwych Theatre in London in the summer of ’74. But we had to change our plans when we realized that we could not show all of Twelfth Night in one session—far too much for newcomers to absorb. So we used the first hour of the third session to finish the comedy and the remaining 90 minutes of session three to read and discuss four of Shakespeare’s sonnets. One of the four, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” (18), is presented in Shakespeare in Love as part of Shakespeare’s wooing of the heroine, and we see her reading the text of the sonnet; another of the four we studied was “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” (29), because it is recited from memory twice in the film All is True, first by Will (Kenneth Branagh), then by the Earl of Southampton (Ian McKellen). Some reviewers, including me in an earlier issue of Shakespeare Newsletter, judged that scene the highpoint of the film: one commentator noted that Branagh and McKellen each recited the sonnet beautifully, yet each handled it in his own way.

What did we do about Antony and Cleopatra? We focused on it in the first hour of the last class. We had chosen it as the right tragedy, about mature love, to show as a complement to Romeo and Juliet, a tragedy of young love, which the students had seen big chunks of in Shakespeare in Love. We could also point out that, if R&J is a tragedy of fate, A&C is a more classic tragedy of tragic flaws. In the hour we had for discussing it, we focused on the opening scenes with their superbly lyrical poetry and on the closing scenes, again graced with what Coleridge called Shakespeare’s “happy valiancy of style,” a lyricism unique to this play.

After the fourth session, we concluded that the short course had been successful to the extent that it alerted twenty or so of our neighbors to the genius of Shakespeare. We were surprised to learn that some of them had not read even one Shakespeare play in high school. When I was in high school back in the ’60s, we read one Shakespeare play a year. Several of our neighbors were especially attracted to the sonnets, and reported reading some of them after we looked at several in class.

How will we follow up on this brief introduction to Shakespeare? Probably with several sets of films, offered in three-week sequences spaced across the entire academic year 2021-2022; one sequence would look at comedy, another at tragedy, a third at history. It’s probably not too early to start brainstorming about which examples of the various genres we will discuss.