The bard has been quoted, “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” Well, I must’ve been extremely wise back in the day because I felt the fool reading all those assigned Shakespearean works. Didn’t understand the language even though it was supposed to be English. As a consequence, meaning and nuance escaped me. To say I hated the assignments would be a mild understatement.
I sat in class, nauseated by the professor waxing eloquent over the words of Will, lost in confusion of language wondering only how I could manage a passing grade. By the nodding heads of my classmates, I was not alone.
“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” to quote Will again. Now that one is clear, but perhaps it is the experience of years that makes it so. But my thinking in regard to Shakespeare remained jaded by those dull academic experiences.
But “All the worlds a stage” claims Will and by God he is correct. To see his works performed by a competent stage company is to clarify, to lend meaning to his works. His plays were meant for the stage and to see them come alive yields the context necessary for understanding.
Happy and I have had the experience for two years in a row at Shakespeare on the Sound in Rowayton, CT. True to the Shakespearean approach, the performance is held yearly in an outside theater nestled in a natural bowl on an inlet of the sound. The audience is seated on blankets in the midst of the performance space where actors exit, enter and deliver lines through designated aisles. There is a stage or maybe more than one as was the case with the presentation of Macbeth last year. Five in all methinks for Macbeth with the main action centering on a firepit in the center. This year’s, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was confined to a single stage, backed up to the sound with characters once again exiting and entering through the audience.
Shakespeare on the Sound is an annual event occurring in June and well worth taking in even as a destination event. I mentioned a “competent cast” above and this repertory company pulls from talent largely trained in theater and certainly experienced in the arts. Julliard, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Yale University School of Theater Studies, Columbia and Brown/Trinity are a few of the schools represented by this cast. Acting
credits are pages long. “Competent cast” is an understatement for this company.
That appellation was tested when a brief shower called a halt to the production. Talk about upsetting the flow, the sequence. But the shower passed, the stage was wiped down and the show picked up almost as though it were a paused CD. No bobbled lines, no hesitations and most importantly not loss in intensity of the moment. Now that’s professional.
But I come back to Will’s two quotes above: “All the world’s a stage”, and “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” Witnessing the dramas unfold 
before me, putting those stilted words I came to hate so much in the context an actual play, the meaning of the work came alive and for the first time comprehensible. Rest assured that my “bad thinking” has been converted to “good thinking” about the works of the bard. I expect yours will be too, if you have the opportunity of attending a performance of Shakespeare on the Sound.
Credit photos to Wendy Allen
Verba Mea 