A new production of Othello foregrounds what the play’s earliest audiences recognized: the psychological costs of war.
Producers and directors have made efforts in recent years to capture what it must have felt like to see Shakespeare’s plays in his own day: original pronunciation and costuming, playhouses built to resemble the open-air Globe. But there are other, less palpable features of playgoing back then, including the collective experience of the recent war and pandemic. Shakespeare understood what spoke to his times; he knew, too, that those who warily returned to the reopened Globe to see his new play would have recognized the trauma at the core of Othello’s tragedy.
The current politically-driven suppression of theater productions in high schools has a grim historical precedent.
It should come as no surprise, then, that in the Educational Theater Association’s most recent survey, 85 percent of American theater teachers expressed concern about censorship. Even Shakespeare is at risk: In Florida, new laws led to the restriction of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to grades 10 through 12 and “Romeo and Juliet” could not be taught in full to avoid falling afoul of legislation targeting “sexual conduct.” Kill off young people’s exposure to theater, and you kill off a generation of playgoers, along with the empathy and camaraderie (already in short supply) that is intrinsic to theater.
In this episode of the Read Smart podcast, host Razia Iqbal will be speaking to James Shapiro, who won the prize in 2006 with 1599: A Year i
James Shapiro: I realized I knew almost nothing that I needed to know about a playwright who was so engaged with the social and the economic and the political crises of his time. And it set me in motion.
I’ll give one tiny bit from Hamlet simply because it comes to mind. And that is the opening scene when men are preparing against invasion.
And it’s a scene often enough cut in productions of the play. But if you were in England in 1599, in the summer of 1599, anticipating another Spanish armada landing on the shores, an opening scene in which men are standing guard against invasion would have been extremely, extremely real and vivid. So, yes, that is not set in England. The play is set in Scandinavia in a different time as well.
But that’s the kind of thing that Shakespeare would do to give an edge to his plays
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James Shapiro: When Shakespeare came to London, there was a play called Hamlet on the boards, and we hear traces of it as late as 1596, when the play’s being performed and this play is now lost. They call it the murder Hamlet or earlier Hamlet.
And you can imagine Shakespeare as a young actor watching this play. Maybe he’s standing as a messenger in his first role. And we don’t know. Thinking, I can do something with this. This play is stale. It’s past sell by date. Why don’t I put into Hamlet‘s mouth soliloquies, long speeches in which he reveals what he’s thinking and how he’s thinking.
And you can start to see Shakespeare, who didn’t really like creating plots. He liked doing court renovations on somebody else’s story that needed fixing up. And he had a brilliant facility for how to transform a work that had been popular and make it ever more so. And it’s extraordinary what he does.
On this episode of the Baillie Gifford Prize podcast, Read Smart, the prize’s 25th-anniversary “winner of winners,” James Shapiro, talks to
Razia Iqbal: What would you say to those people who argue that Shakespeare is the ultimate dead white male in the context of those arguments about the canon?
James Shapiro: After our conversation, I’m going to take the number one train downtown to the public theatre, where I’m working with a mostly African American cast on a production of Hamlet set in the American South in 2021. And that company, those actors, that director Kenny Leon, a major Broadway director, see Shakespeare as a way of expressing the cultural issues that matter most to Black people in America today.
So if you want to get rid of Shakespeare as a dead white man, you know, you’re not only have to argue with conservative politicians who fetishize Shakespeare, but with practicing artists who find his work a tremendous vehicle for expressing issues that might not otherwise be initially expressed.
