Looking for Shakespeare
Shakespeare is appropriated by educators and others to serve their own purposes (Allen, 1991, p. 42–43), whether they be to teach the heritage of English literature, to perpetuate the examinations system, the Shakespeare industry and its Bardolatry, or, in this case, to promote adolescent response. The perspective from which Looking for Shakespeare begins is that of an inquiry into the layers of personal meaning in the play: Shakespeare’s “open text” challenges participants to reassess and transform their perceptions and their worldview (Allen, 1991, p. 45). A four–week intensive theatre workshop for adolescents which began at New York University in 1999, the program was conceived for inner–city adolescents who may not have had any theatre background to get to know and to perform a Shakespeare play. We adopted an integrated arts approach, employing improvisation, role play, visual art, creative writing, movement and music to explore and illuminate the text.
A Midsummer Night's (Different) Dream(s): The Royal Shakespeare Company's 1972 Tour of Eastern Europe
Sitting between the First Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs and a Vice-President of the Council of State for Cultural and Socialist Education in the official box at the Opera House for the gala première of the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of “A Midsummer Night's Dream” on 23 October and watching those adroit fairies prepare Bottom for his night of love with Titania, I began to get an uneasy feeling that things were not going well as I observed their consternation and embarrassment at the erotic miming before us. This impression was confirmed by their almost monosyllabic comments at my reception during the interval. “Très intéressant” said Gliga, but then words failed him; “très piquant” said [Ion] Blad—a more apposite comment on the scene than perhaps intended, but even this faint praise clearly left other thoughts unexpressed. . . . However, on the following day my Cultural Attaché and later the manager of the Company were called to a 2 1/2-hour meeting with ARIA, the Romanian State impresarios, to hear their “suggestions” for the modification of the “Phallic Bottom” episode; but the manager insisted that he had no power to alter Peter Brook's masterpiece in any way at all and this particular scene in fact remained unaltered during the remainder of the run.—D. R. Ashe On 31 October 1972, Derick Rosslyn Ashe, the British ambassador to Romania, sent this strictly confidential report to J. L. Bullard, the head of the East European and Soviet Department at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London. His report was written a few days after the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) had completed its tour in Romania, which took place from 22 to 28 October 1972. Although Peter Brook's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream had originally premiered on 27 August 1970 at Stratford-upon-Avon, the British Council chose it for a tour of Eastern Europe in 1972, and the company played it in Belgrade, Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia, Zagreb, and Warsaw.
The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
The enormously energetic working-class reading cultures occupying the core of Jonathan Rose’s magnificent study grew up from rather unpromising roots. For long periods, reading, like publishing, could be a dangerous business. In the sixteenth century, Thomas Cranmer had ‘proposed to confiscate heretical texts and prosecute bible readers’; and, as Rose informs us, ‘at least twenty people were burned for discussing heresy between 1539 to 1546’. We can see where Cranmer was coming from: just like Carlo Ginzburg’s Mennochio the Miller, in The Cheese and the Worms (Routledge & Kegan Paul; London, 1980), those who could read might develop critical, political views or levelling tendencies. Robert Darnton’s Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (W.W. Norton; New York and London, 1995) shows that the authorities, fully in awe of the power of the word, worked themselves into frenzies about books, burning dummy tomes and imprisoning booksellers. In these early times, publishing and reading might have carried a health warning.