Welcome to our program! In recent weeks we've followed up on our invitation to students to meet with us and help to plan the program. These are some plans we've made so far. We welcome your comments and further suggestions!

First of all, we've asked for opinions and have decided that the program should aim less at breadth of coverage, and more at depth. We'd rather spend more time on the `best' of Shakespeare's plays than try to get through all of them superficially. But we've hit on a way to provide coverage: We'll ask everyone to read two plays that are not on the list that everyone else is reading, so they can tell us about them when they're relevant to seminars.

Second, we've decided we're more interested in Shakespeare's plays themselves than in Shakespeare's England. We'll study enough of his history and culture to understand how his theater functioned, but we will not try to undertake an historical survey of his life and times. "The play's the thing."

In the same vein, we're interested in the plays more than in scholarly criticism of them. We will indeed pay attention to what literary critics have to say, but this is a program on Shakespeare, not on criticism. Tentatively, our plan is to order a few copies of editions of the texts which are accompanied by critical articles. On each play, someone in each seminar will serve as a `scout,' reading the articles and spotting the ones which will truly help us in our interpretation of the plays.

Third, we've decided that just reading the plays isn't enough. We want to be more deeply involved in their thought, feeling, and language by hearing them on audiotapes, seeing them as films, and attending as many performances as possible. We want to compare different films and performances to see what different directors and actors are able to accomplish. We can do this with, for example, film versions of Hamlet and Othello.

Students expressed lots of interest in attending the Ashland Shakespeare Festival, and we'll work on arranging this. The problem is that our program occurs during the `off' season, when the festival is still open but not as many plays are performed on any given weekend. We'll try to find a place in the schedule where we can see as much of Shakespeare as possible in a weekend.

We're asking the Library to order a complete set of BBC (British Broadcasting Company) tapes of the plays. We're embarrassed that Evergreen doesn't have this already!

We've become interested in adaptations of Shakespeare - the way they've been done, and the way we might try adapting them ourselves in modern dialects. We aren't interested in faddish or satirical adaptations (Timon of Athens as Timon the Mobster), but in serious and `loyal' ones - for example, Kurosawa's adaptations of Macbeth and Lear to Japanese cinema.

Finally, we want everyone to become deeply involved in active projects that bring the plays to life. We are not going to try to stage a play, but we want everyone to have a try at reading parts, making the words sound `real,' getting inside the character. As one student with acting experience put it, "You have to know it better to perform it than to write a paper: you have to know why and how the words are coming out of the character."

Some of our ideas for these projects:

• paraphrasing;
• oral interpretation - getting your voice into the lines, and the lines into your voice;
• performance of scenes;
• adaptations - changing, for example, Lear's abdication into retirement or divorce;
• literary essays on individual plays and on comparisons between plays;
• interpretive panels, discussing issues in a play, for example interpretations, different readings and their ramifications, criteria for evaluation;
• a 'sonnet-of-the-week' time, to read and understand the rich language of Shakespeare's sonnets.

THESE ARE OUR PLANS, SO FAR!

WELCOME TO "SIX MONTHS WITH SHAKESPEARE"!

Rudy Martin                                                              Kirk Thompson

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