Shakespeare in General

Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare. We meet again.

I have a hard time reading Shakespeare as literature. I think of Shakespeare from an actor's perspective - how his plays are meant to be performed. This is probably largely because most of the experience I've had with Shakespeare has been as an actor.

When I was sixteen, I was accepted into the Southwest Shakespeare Company's summer conservatory. It was the first year they had ever accepted anyone who wasn't college-age. This isn't indicative of my great talent so much as their desperation for bodies, but and it was all Shakespeare, all the time. It was a six-week, twelve credit crash course. Many of the teachers and affiliates referred to it as "Shakespeare Boot Camp," and they weren't exaggerating. We had classes from 8am to 6pm devoted to grammar, diction, movement, and performance, and it was all centered around the Bard.

That same summer, I was given the opportunity to play Helena in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The director chose to set the play in Haiti, and rather than the traditional interpretation, we interpreted the fairies as voodoo loa, and Oberon and Titania as voodoo deities.

The year after that, I was accepted into the New York Conservatory of Dramatic Arts summer program. It was somewhat less Shakespeare-intensive, but I did have a class devoted exclusively to Shakespearean diction. We spent the entire summer workshopping monologues until we could perform them with perfect diction.

Later that year, I was cast as Ophelia in a production of Hamlet. That was probably my favorite part in any play I've ever been involved in. I especially enjoyed Act V, Scene 1 where they bring in Ophelia's dead body. The man playing Laertes kept protesting that he didn't want to hug "creepy dead Cassie."

One of the fun things about Shakespeare, at least from an acting standpoint, is the complete lack of stage directions. Shakespeare indicates when people enter, when they exit, and when a bear chases them offstage. Other than that, directors and actors are free to move how they see fit. Some people see the lack of stage directions as frustrating or confining, but I find it very liberating. Shakespeare's writing, even his tragedies, are generally pretty whimsical. There is a freedom and an energy of purpose behind everything that he wrote. As such, performances should be vibrant with emotion and intent. Shakespeare shouldn't be stuffy or dry or boring or monotonous, because it wasn't written that way.