During the Institute, participants will meet daily at nine in the morning for a half hour during which the project director makes announcements, participants raise any difficulties they have encountered, and both parties find solutions. At nine-thirty each morning the visiting scholar will make a presentation about original staging to the participants. That presentation may be a lecture, a discussion, or a workshop. Actors will be present to help with any necessary demonstrations, and visiting scholars will also have available aids such as DVD players, PowerPoint, and overhead projectors.
After a ninety-minute break for lunch, participants will reconvene in rehearsal sessions with the actors. These sessions will begin with a thirty-minute warm-up designed to invigorate the participants and the actors, to increase focus, and to lower inhibitions. After the warm-ups, we will divide into eight directorates of three participants each. Each directorate will be responsible for cutting, casting, preparing sides and a prompt copy, and then acting and directing one eighth of Antony and Cleopatra. Four of those directorates will go into the first of two ninety-minute rehearsal sessions with the actors, and the remaining twelve participants will observe or work at the library. At the end of the first rehearsal session, there will be a thirty-minute break, and then the observers will go in to action as directorates. Visiting scholars will also sit in on the rehearsal sessions. All rehearsal sessions will take place in one of four spaces, one of which will be the main stage of the Blackfriars and another of which will be the Globe II stage mock-up (the other two spaces will be taped off to duplicate its dimensions). Rehearsal spaces will be rotated so that all participants will have an opportunity to work in the Blackfriars and the “Globe” every other day.
At five in the afternoon, we will break for supper, and in the evening participants will attend the regularly scheduled Blackfriars productions. Those productions will serve not only as the basis for discussion the next morning but also as a foil to whatever production decisions each directorate is making.
One of the most successful facets of the last two Institutes was a “mini-symposium” in which each of the participants presented an eight-minute paper on some aspect of the work he or she has done and on how he or she plans to pursue that work after the Institute. These presentations can range from the formal to the informal, but a surprising number of them have led on to publication. Because the entire Institute will be in Staunton participants can work steadily on their research throughout the time in order to prepare for that paper in the final week. This year an entire morning of responses will follow the “mini-symposium” Final Presentation. On the final Friday in Staunton, the eight directorates will stage their sections from Antony and Cleopatra in sequence in a public performance on the Blackfriars stage, thus presenting an entire production of one Shakespeare's most challenging plays. A full discussion and analysis, led by Professors Armstrong, Cohen, and Menzer, of the play will follow, and we will begin posing questions about different staging at the Globe.
We will spend the first day introducing the participants to the theatre and explaining the Institute. We will be dividing them into their directorates and giving them their daily schedules. We will also discuss ways of speaking the language of professional actors that differ from normal professor- student discourse. That evening, Mary Baldwin College will host a banquet for the participants. On Tuesday, we will begin to deal with the editing of the text, not only in Antony and Cleopatra but in shorter Shakespeare scripts such as Q1 of Hamlet and the short quarto of Henry V. The participants will meet the actors for their first project work. Starting on Wednesday Tiffany Stern will be lecturing in the mornings on early modern rehearsal practices and staging, the subjects of her two books and the week’s assigned reading, and in the afternoons she will work with the actors and participants to apply what they have learned as they rehearse. In the evenings during this first week, participants will also be seeing the ASC productions of Measure for Measure, King Lear, and Twelfth Night. The week will end with a Fourth of July party at the home of the director.
We will begin the week with a visit to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, under the supervision of Paul Menzer, once managing editor of Shakespeare Quarterly and an employee of the Folger. Richard Kuhta and the staff will greet us and show us primary sources of interest to the project. On Tuesday morning, Professor Menzer will first look with participants at the work on the editing of scripts with a particular eye to the goal of two-hour traffic of the stage for Antony and Cleopatra. In the afternoon, Professor Menzer, whose doctoral work was at the University of Virginia, will help participants with their orientation at the University of Virginia’s Alderman Library in Charlottesville, VA (40 minutes from Staunton). There they will research various questions of early modern theatrical practice related to the composition of the plays. On Wednesday, Professor Menzer will lecture on the collaborative process between early modern playwrights and the actors and observe the participants with the ASC actors in rehearsal in the afternoon. On Thursday morning, Stephen Booth will speak on Twelfth Night and the audience, the subject of the last half of his book Precious Nonsense. Rehearsal work will continue in the afternoons. On Friday, Professor Booth will lecture on acting and on early modern doubling, a subject on which he is the leading authority. Rehearsals will take place as usual in the afternoon. We will encourage participants to use the Alderman Library over the weekend.
On Monday Professor Cohen will lead a morning session on teaching and his text will be his book ShakeFear and How to Cure It. The afternoon will be devoted to library research. By this time the Institute’s scholars should have from Professor Stern a strong handle on their rehearsal techniques and from Professor Menzer a high level of comfort with the scripts they have prepared. Professor Booth’s ideas on doubling and on audience, because they stress the essential duality of performance and the elasticity of audience response should have (always have had) a liberating effect on the deliberations of each “directorate.” On Tuesday Alan Dessen will begin his work with the participants on recovering Shakespeare’s theatrical vocabulary (the title of his assigned book on the subject) and on understanding
early modern stage directions. That material will feed each day of the third week into rehearsal work, as the participants and the actors get their scenes up.
As on the previous Monday, Professor Cohen will lead a morning session on teaching, this time a discussion of the methods recommended in Milla Riggio’s book, Teaching Shakespeare Through Performance. Monday afternoon will again be an opportunity for the scholars to use the Alderman Library for researching their mini-symposium papers. On Tuesday Professor Roslyn Knutson, whose books on the business of early modern theatre are the week’s assignment, will look at matters of properties and costume, in effect bringing to the work of the directorates an understanding of the visual offerings of early modern theatres. She will continue that work on Wednesday and Thursday, and her presentation will include having the scholars “produce” on short notice scenes from the Henslowe repertory. She will also be observing the work of the directorates in afternoon rehearsals. On Friday, Professor Jeremy Lopez, whose book on theatrical conventions in early modern England is already the standard, will help enlarge the scholars’ sense of the dynamic between audience and performance.
Because of the two large events – the mini-symposium and the final production – scholars will have no reading assignments for this week. Monday morning of the final week will begin with a continuation of Professor Lopez’s work on convention. Scholars who are still looking at material from the Alderman for their symposium papers will have one more afternoon to do so. Tuesday morning we will hold our “mini-symposium” during which each scholar has eight minutes to present an idea that has come out of the research and the process. Tuesday afternoon the rehearsals continue. On Wednesday morning, Alan Armstrong and Paul Menzer will act as respondents to the presentations from the day before and the twelve visiting scholars from “the other troupe” will also contribute their thoughts. Thursday morning Professor Armstrong, who works as a dramaturg for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, will put original practices in the context of modern staging. In the afternoon, the dress rehearsals for each directorate will take place on the Blackfriars stage. Friday, the last day of the Institute, is of course the grand finale, at which the big event is the NEH participants’ production of Antony and Cleopatra. This production will be open to the public and vigorously advertised. Our expectation is that this special matinee will have nearly a full house, and we will record the performance for our archives. After lunch, Professors Armstrong, Cohen, and Menzer will respond to the play and lead a discussion of its implications and its discoveries. The Institute will then close with a party at the director’s house.