Thursday Thoughts

(excerpt from “Performance Approaches to Shakespeare”, p. 10)

It must be stated – learning Shakespeare and learning about Shakespeare are two distinctly different practices. From my point of view, the former focuses on performance as Shakespeare intended, and the other emphasizes more of a literary, research function. One is more helpful for learning in the classroom and performance in the rehearsal space, and the other for study just as stories, not scripts – the written vs. the spoken word. Academic study reads the text, but typically does not hear it. The reading of a Shakespeare play and the performance of it are two distinctly different things. “A director’s relationship to Shakespearian scholarship…is very different from an academic’s. For the academic, theories, suppositions, and speculations are ends in themselves…But a director is looking for what in the theatre are called ‘playable values’ – that is, ideas capable of being translated into concrete dramatic terms. ‘Playable values’ are not always consistent with literary values.” (quote from “Reconstructing Shakespeare, or Harlotry in Bardology” by Charles Marowitz)