By Eva Trieger
SAN DIEGO -A full house gathered in Balboa Park to monitor a conversation between Shakespeare scholars Barry Edelstein and James Shapiro, last Wednesday evening. Edelstein, the Old Globe’s Artistic Director walked over from the set of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to welcome Shapiro a friend of more than 20 years standing who collaborated on The Merchant of Venice in New York.
The Center for Jewish Culture teamed up with the Old Globe to bring this event to the public, which is most fitting, as Edelstein explained that Shakespeare is so widely performed expressly because it is in the public domain. Directors need not acquire costly copyrights for these productions. This also explains why so many directors take liberties with storylines and feel free to enhance or downplay characters’ traits.
Shapiro, renowned literary giant, is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He has authored many books on Shakespeare including Shakespeare and the Jews, thereby stealing Edelstein’s title of his “forthcoming memoir.” Shapiro has been awarded fellowships and was most recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Sheepishly admitting that he hated Shakespeare in high school, Shapiro told of his love of watching productions in college. During the 1970s, as a theater-goer he traveled to London to see plays and found “Shakespeare a visceral pleasure.” He share, with rapt listeners that he yearned to create a good or great product. He felt that as an academic, he was out of the “charmed circle” and this served as Shapiro’s catalyst to make the Bard accessible to everyone.
Adding to his enthusiasm, Shapiro reported that he saw that Shakespeare’s plays were universally embraced. He spoke of productions spanning the globe, including Brazil and Korea. This led to Shapiro’s passion for working with actors and directors. He sought to demystify Shakespeare so that the Bard’s works could be popularized. Shapiro said that an active translation was what was most needed. While he tried to get into the heads of these new found cohorts he realized that while they could drink eight pints of Guinness stout it wasn’t for nice Jewish boys like him!
Edelstein also shared that the social and cultural history of a people makes the writing applicable to all cultures as proven when 37 companies came to San Diego each with its own Shakespearean interpretation. The Artistic Director pondered aloud, that an Inuit production might have Macbeth saying, “Is this a snowflake I see before me?”
The two discussed the very notion of the timelessness of Shakespeare’s work. Yes, admittedly the play may have been penned in 1606, but audiences should anticipate that a director has an agenda and therefore he may “miss half the time” if it doesn’t jive with the viewer’s comprehension and expectation.
The duo shared little known facts about past actors in Shakespeare’s plays. The audience learned the Ulysses S. Grant performed in Othello, Dwight Eisenhower took to the stage in The Merchant of Venice and in the Pacific Theater, in the wake of WWII, an all GI cast portrayed the well known romantic, dramatic and tragic roles created by Shakespeare.
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Trieger is a freelance writer who specializes in coverage of the arts. She may be contacted via eva.trieger@sdjewishworld.com