Today, April 23, is William Shakespeare’s birthday. Shakespeare wrote the world’s most famous play, which has inspired everything from Maggie O’Farrell’s “Hamnet” to Disney’s “Lion King.” Among other masterpieces, he also wrote “King Lear,” which inspired Jane Smiley’s “A Thousand Acres” and Akira Kurosawa’s “Ran.”
But before any of those adaptations were the plays themselves — written documents that predate even the performance of them. And starting May 6, Prof. Phil Weinstein wants to share them with us. He’ll be giving a series of talks, “Shakespearean Explorations,” at the Tisbury library; participants will read two of the best-known plays over the period of a few weeks, while guided by his thoughts and insights.
“It’s just that I think they’re the best thing ever written and I want to get back to them,” he says. He notes that almost everyone is exposed to Shakespeare during their school years, and might later encounter the stories on stage or screen, “but I suspect very few of them have read any recently, and he’s hard to read. I think people want to read it — they think, ‘Y’know, I should know this guy’s work’ — but they’re a little resistant to do it on their own. I hope this will be a pleasure for them.”
Weinstein will begin the first session by “just opening up how different [reading a play] is from reading novels, how things operate differently.” He’ll also present some historical context: the great age of Elizabeth and Jacobean theater, which is “an almost magical period of 40 years — and then it’s gone.”
Weinstein’s undergraduate thesis was on Shakespearean and French tragedy, and he was especially drawn to the Bard’s work: “I felt then that there’s nothing better — English has never been used with greater power and suggestiveness.” But he ended up studying fiction in graduate school at Harvard, and went on to a respected four-decade academic career at Swarthmore, rarely dipping into the Shakespeare canon: “I’m in my mid-80s and I want to see what it looks like now; I want to go back to what I think of as the top, and see what experience I’ll have reading him. But in addition to that, I think it’s viable [to do it with others].”
Weinstein realizes this could be a tall order. “I mention trepidation because, as an English professor, this is the most written-on, daunting writer. Blank verse is such a powerful but overfilled medium, and most of my audience probably doesn’t read poetry.”
But from long experience, he knows how to hold his audience’s attention, even if it’s never been on this subject before. On May 6, the evening will focus on the first three acts of “Hamlet”: “I’ll spend 45 minutes or an hour talking about ‘Hamlet.’ I ask people to read through and think about it with me.” Then there will be half an hour for questions and answers; his goal is to convey a sense of how much is going on. For the second meeting, two weeks later (May 20), he’ll expect everyone to have read the whole play for a similar discussion and talkback, which will focus more on the coherence of the story. Weinstein will repeat this process with “King Lear” on June 3 and 17. He’s been rereading both plays and jotting down notes, because “you never master it.”
In discussing “Hamlet,” Weinstein will spend some time on the soliloquies, and how they’re used in the play. Soliloquies are a specific kind of monologue, addressed less to another character and more to the audience or oneself. (One example: “To be or not to be, that is the question.”)
The first line uttered in “Hamlet” is a question — “Who’s there?” — and Weinstock feels this questioning of identity is foundational to the whole play. “I will try to open up that first scene, and discuss what I think is happening. Who’s there? Who keeps coming back? Who is someone? Who are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?”
The focus throughout will be on the text itself, rather than how it might work on the stage. Weinstock mentions a project associated with “Othello,” another Shakespeare masterpiece: The same scenes were filmed repeatedly “just to show how infinite the scenes are, depending on who’s putting it on. The point is that it’s reinvented every time it’s put on.”
The text itself, however, remains consistent, and speaks to the ages. If you’d like to have it speak to you, join Professor Weinstock on his “Shakespearean Explorations.”
For more information, please contact the library at vhpl_programs@clamsnet.org or 508-696-4211.