Shakespeare Magazine ~ Fall 2002

Shakespeare
Volume 6, Issue 3
FALL 2002

HOW I SPENT MY
SHAKESPEARE
SUMMER
VACATION

The Wooden O Symposium
Wisconsin teacher Gary Baughn passes up the lure of Las Vegas to attend the Utah Shakespearean Festival's three-day conference.

Shakespeare: Text and Theatre Conference
Karen Fulop leaves Ohio, giving in to her yearning to go to Stratford-upon-Avon, and attends the Royal Shakespeare Company's seminar.

The Philips Exeter Shakespeare Conference
Carnie Burns travels to Maine to take on the role of a student for a week-long conference.

The Folger Library's Teaching Shakespeare Institute
Los Angeles teacher Heather Kooiman spends four weeks in Washington, DC at an NEH Institute.

Shakespeare and the Rose Playhouse Institute
Mimi Paquette goes to Lenox, Massachusetts to participate in Shakespeare and Company's four-week Institute.

Acting with the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival
Actors Matt Wallace and Tina Jo Hagens play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in two productions in Louisville's Central Park.

Shakespeare Magazine ~ Volume 6, Issue 3
Melinda Pfundsein as Audrey and Michael David Edwards
as Touchstone frolic in the Utah Shakespearean Festival's
As You Like It. Photo by Karl Hugh.

FEATURE ARTICLE
Cue One Macbeth
Graham Holderness explores a performance of Macbeth described in Simon Forman's 1611 journal and reconstructs Duncan's murder.

"'Rewriting' Shakespeare has gradually become a mainstream educational activity, extending from the earlier age ranges into secondary schools. Where schools are compelled to teach Shakespeare, 'rewriting' facilitates a creative negotiation with the compulsion....

So the question for us today in not whether, but how, to rewrite Shakespeare. Re-writing is a transaction between an ancient document and a modern agenda. Often it is the contemporary issue that seems uppermost, as the plays are re-focused towards modern social problems. But this is only one side of the exchange. Too often contemporary reworkings are powered too strongly by a kind of cultural embarrassment that seeks to define modernity by estranging the past, like a 'Shakespeare rap' that does little justice either to rap or to Shakespeare.

I want to suggest another approach to rewriting as a historical activity that pays more attention to documentary evidence and to the cultural conditions that initially produced the plays. If an early modern printed text is nothing more or less than a 'snapshot' of a play-process that might have been (and sometimes was) captured in any number of different variations, then it becomes legitimate to play with such texts to explore some of those manifold possibilities."

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