Shakespeare Outdoors

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Folger Shakespeare Library

Arts

4.8 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2015

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"Under the greenwood tree / Who loves to lie with me / And turn his merry note / Unto the sweet bird’s throat, / Come hither, come hither, come hither. / Here shall he see / No enemy / But winter and rough weather." (As You Like It, 2.5.1-8) Pack the picnic basket. Grab a blanket. Don't forget the bug spray. Shakespeare under the stars is a long-standing tradition in America—and elsewhere in the English-speaking world and beyond. Rebecca Sheir, host of our Shakespeare Unlimited series, talks with scholars and theater artists about the social and cultural forces that came together to create outdoor Shakepeare festivals. (Hint: The tradition starts a lot sooner than you might think!) Among those featured in this podcast: - Libby Appel is former Artistic Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. - Charlotte Canning is a professor in the theater and dance department of the University of Texas at Austin. - Michael Dobson is director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham in England. - Frank Hildy is a professor of theater at the University of Maryland. - Scott Kaiser is the head of voice and text at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. ----------------------- From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. Produced for the Folger Shakespeare Library by Richard Paul; Garland Scott, associate producer. Edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. We had help gathering material for this Shakespeare Unlimited episode from Esther French. Thanks to Nick Moorbath at Evolution Studios in Oxford England and Eddie Wallace at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The music was composed and arranged by Lenny Williams.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I'm Michael Whitmore,
0:05.3	the Folgers director. This podcast is called Under the Greenwood Tree. There are things in our modern
0:12.1	world that seem always to have been around, the Jefferson Memorial, the interstate highway system,
0:17.8	or the income tax. Of course, we know there was a time when these things did
0:22.1	not exist, but trying to imagine the world without them seems almost impossible. The subject
0:28.3	of this podcast is like that, too. It is a look at the tradition of staging Shakespeare outdoors.
0:35.0	We take for granted the hundreds of outdoor Shakespeare festivals here in North America and elsewhere in the English-speaking world.
0:41.3	In this podcast, we take a look at how they came to exist in their current form.
0:46.3	Our narrator is Rebecca Shear.
0:49.3	Michael Dobson is director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham in England.
0:55.0	In 2005, he had an idea.
0:57.0	He decided to take a map of England and put a pink dot everywhere there was an outdoor Shakespeare venue.
1:04.0	When he got finished, he says you'd be forgiven if you thought the map had broken out with a case of the measles.
1:09.0	You really do have to run away into the mountains, ideally well into Scotland,
1:14.6	if you want to be more than about 20 miles from an outdoor Shakespeare performance.
1:18.6	No one's ever bothered to try the same experiment with a US map,
1:22.6	but the outcome would probably be the same.
1:25.6	We love Shakespeare outdoors, in forests, in band shells, in mock-ups of Shakespeare's Globe.
1:31.3	In a way, it's no mystery why.
1:34.3	Outdoor theater goes back at least as far as the Greeks and Romans,
1:38.3	and they did it that way for the same reason Shakespeare often did
1:41.3	1500 years later.
	...

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