Shakespeare Magazine ~ Summer 2001

Shakespeare
Volume 5, Issue 2
SUMMER 2001

Shakespeare
in Performance &
the Classroom

The Children's Midsummer Night's Dream
Mark Thornton Burnett reviews Christine Edzard's new film, which shows us Shakespeare's play through young eyes.

True Grit Shakespeare: The Utah Company That Won the Tony
Nancy Goodwin visits the sandstone hills of Utah and discovers one of the most vibrant Shakespeare theatres in the country.

"Shakespeare Teaches" Teachers
Andrea Parmegiani tells how he came to use performance techniques in the classroom.

Teaching Shakespeare and Leadership to Ninth-Graders
Stephen Armstrong finds a winning combination.

The Famous Box-Set Assignment
Michael Tolaydo shares the secrets of one of the most successful Shakespeare lessons of all time.

"List, list, O, list": A Review of The Shakespeare Book of Lists
Janet Field-Pickering reviews Michael LoMonico's new compendium.

Shakespeare Magazine ~ Volume 5, Issue 2
Jonathan Croy, Josef Hansen, and John Beale in Shakespeare & Co.'s
production of The Compleat Wrks of Wllm. Shakspr (abridged).

FEATURE STORY

The Universal Shakespeare?
Jeanne Addison Roberts argues that at times the playwright includes the whole world in his vision, and at times he writes for a very small audience--himself.

In reading, watching, and teaching Shakespeare, it seems to me important to recognize and acknowledge that he is not universal--at least not in any simple way. Global Shakespeare was intrinsically implicated in the original Globe Theatre. His language, his characters, his manipulations of plot, his great scenes are so powerful that they often seduce us into complacently assuming that he is for all time. But Shakespeare was inevitably the product of a specific fifty-year period of English history four hundred years in the past. He reflects a hierarchical social system ruled on patriarchal principles with an absolute ruler at the top and rude mechanicals at the bottom, with an insular outlook that made foreigners chiefly objects of humor, and with a mystique that valued women primarily as objects of matrimony and instruments of legitimate procreation. To insist pedantically on Shakespeare's universality is to risk reinforcing the notion that politics and power are about men, that the only happy end for women is marriage, and that minorities are losers.

BROADSHEET
"Words, Words, Words": 80 Troublesome Words Used in the Plays--an excerpt from The Shakespeare Book of Lists.

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