ASC is building on its successful 1995 Institute (Center for Renaissance and Shakespearean Staging) and the 2002 and 2004 summer Institutes (Shakespeare's Playhouses Inside and Out) that were all able to take advantage of Shakespeare’s playhouses. We are, however, making three major alterations in the program.
1. Because we will have the Globe II footprint and mockup stage available, we are doing all five weeks of the Institute in Staunton. This change is both a concession to the cost of the London portion of the program (the dollar has weakened enormously against the pound since 2002) and a response to the overwhelming sense of the evaluations that working directly with the Equity actors at the Blackfriars was the most illuminating part of the Institute for our scholars (the Globe actors are not similarly available) and that the Staunton and London portions of the Institute seemed somewhat disparate.
3. We are making the process of working with the actors accord more with the rehearsal practices described by Tiffany Stern in her seminal book Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, and rather than having the scholars produce eight disparate scenes from different plays we will have them use their textual studies to put together an entire play.
We have chosen Antony and Cleopatra for a variety of reasons supportive of the mission of the Institute. As A.C. Bradley pointed out almost 100 years ago, Antony and Cleopatra defies our concepts of genre: from a Roman point of view and in the Western tradition, the play is a tragedy about a man who gave “all for love.” But even as Dryden, who used that title for his version of the play, understood, the play leaves an audience with an unexpected exhilaration, a sense of exultation that kept Bradley from including the play in his great work Shakespearean Tragedy. This generic ambiguity lends itself perfectly
to an Institute exploring stage choices and their impact on the text and purposefully interrogating the concept of genre. The play, moreover, is a kaleidoscope of scenes – 42 altogether, fifteen more than any other play by Shakespeare – which move from setting to setting and will give participants an opportunity to examine early modern practices with regard to scene changes. How does the text, through its language and its embedded stage directions and through such choreographic elements as the number of characters in a scene and their activities, move the audience from place to place? These are issues deeply at the heart of work of five of our Visiting Scholars and central to the concerns of our actors and directors. Finally, Antony and Cleopatra, perhaps more than any other of Shakespeare’s plays, has the greatest multicultural sweep. It is a play in which the West and the East collide, in which the values of Europe and North Africa compete, and in which categories from those of race to gender get deconstructed.