When teachers’ workshops in Ashland or Stratford discuss the plays they see produced by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival or the RSC, they are frequently talking about production designs and ideas foreign to the conditions for which Shakespeare wrote. Such discussions can provide profitable perspectives on character and theme in the plays, but they can also lead away from, not toward, the study of Shakespeare’s stagecraft and the way his language is tied to its setting and to the actors performing it.
The Blackfriars Playhouse, opened in September 2001 in Staunton, Virginia, is a recreation of the indoor playhouse that Shakespeare and his partners acquired in 1596 and in which they played regularly after 1607. Designed by architect Tom McLaughlin with the advice of Andrew Gurr, Jon Greenfield, Walter Hodges, and Peter McCurdy (chief builder of Shakespeare’s Globe), it recreates in size and material that original space. With the theatre at Drottningholm, Sweden, the Blackfriars is one of only two theatres in the world universally lighted, as Shakespeare’s indoor plays were lighted, by chandeliers. The Blackfriars Playhouse is the home of the American Shakespeare Center, whose mission since 1988 has been to use original staging practices to recover an understanding and enjoyment of Shakespeare’s plays. Two troupes perform all year in repertory under the artistic direction of Jim Warren.
In the coming year, under the supervision of Peter McCurdy, who built Sam Wanamaker’s Globe in London, we will establish a footprint for Globe II and construct a temporary stage with a trap door, a balcony, and a frons scena that includes two stage doors and one “discovery space.” That stage will replicate the size of the Globe II stage (for which we have dimensions from the Fortune contract) and give our participants not only a working space to explore the differences between playing indoors and out, but also a sense of sharing in the planning for a major new theatre.
For scholars, the benefits of understanding the plays of Shakespeare by rehearsing and studying with actors and by working on these two stages are literally everywhere and are everywhere literary. Simply put, a grasp of the physical place of Shakespeare’s plays has as much significance to understanding a Shakespeare scene as, for example, the knowledge of the shape of a baseball diamond has to an understanding of the game; and until the completion of the Globe and the Blackfriars, it was as if Shakespeareans had been considering baseball as played on a basketball court. That is, where and how Renaissance actors and playwrights worked has staging implications that inevitably inform our comprehension of the text. When directors and actors work through the practical and physical problems of staging a play, they have an unparalleled educational opportunity to study these issues and to be “inside” the plays. Consider the value of that opportunity in the very environments the playwright imagined as he wrote. The aim of this proposal is to give this opportunity—this laboratory for the study of English Renaissance plays—to all scholars.
For three decades the interest in performance studies and performance-based pedagogy has been growing among Shakespeareans. The days of thinking about Shakespeare entirely as poet and only rarely as playwright are over. Generally, teachers of Shakespeare now accept the validity of approaching Shakespeare through performance, and many of them have developed ways of doing so. But even larger numbers of teachers would like to try performance approaches in class but do not feel they have the training. This Institute gives them a chance to work with professional actors and develop the kind of
confidence and experience required to make performance approaches feasible in class. For these teachers the unique opportunity of working with a company of professional actors opens that pedagogical door.
This Institute provides both. Other teacher workshops find ways of making Shakespeareans more comfortable with performance pedagogy, but two things in particular set “Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, The Stage, and The Classroom” apart as a training ground and laboratory. Working through a play with actors on the kinds of stages for which the play was designed brings into focus a nexus of connected issues and makes possible an extraordinary kind of discussion about the works.
A scholar who can see in his or her mind’s eye the same spaces that the playwright envisioned reads and teaches differently. An instructor who can see in his or her mind’s eye architecturally grounded possibilities for the staging of the play can translate that knowledge to a classroom of students who are
The first resource is the presence of professional actors who are wholly at the disposal of the participants and prepared to be tolerant and helpful. Teachers, unaccustomed to directing, to seeing quickly the physical and vocal choices in a theatrical text, and to showing players those choices, will not turn easily from simply reading the text in class to the habit of demonstrating it with the help of students. The resource of helpful and practiced actors – veteran actors of Shakespeare and actors wholly familiar with the Blackfriars stage – offers the training to encourage that transition. Teachers learn how to elicit discussion by the choices inherent in the direction, order, and manner of an entrance or an exit—moments that do not require any vocal acting from their students. Teachers learn such techniques as “feeding in” in which students can be directed and “act” without books in the hand by having “feeders” behind them—readers on book feeding them the necessary lines in a whisper. Teachers also learn how to give helpful instructions to their “players,” and how to limit those instructions to the most revealing choices. In short, the Institute helps make its participants comfortable taking the text off the page and putting it quickly and entertainingly before the class in its theatrical form.
The second resource for teachers is the experience of the buildings themselves. Just as the experience of being in an English churchyard makes it easier to teach Grey’s Elegy or having been to a bullfight helps a teacher bring The Sun Also Rises to life for students, seeing clearly in the mind’s eye the space of these plays gives to the teacher of Shakespeare the clear focus of an inner sight that makes the imagined world of the work “present” to his or her students. Shakespeare imagined his plays performed in real places—places with knowable dimensions, places with knowable entrances, places with audiences in knowable configurations—and teachers from this Institute, having worked in those places, bring an
immediacy into the classroom with their inner sight. Participants will have practiced turning their classrooms into mini-Globes and mini-Blackfriars.