Six New Shakespeare Works?

Dr John Casson, an independent researcher and psychotherapist, claims to have discovered Shakespeare's first published poem, the Phaeton sonnet, his first comedy, Mucedorus, and his first tragedies, Locrine and Arden of Faversham. He also explores the plays Thomas of Woodstock and A Yorkshire Tragedy, and claims to prove that a 'lost play' called Cardenio is a genuine work by Shakespeare and fellow playwright John Fletcher. Casson publishes his findings in his new book, Enter Pursued by a Bear. Read more about it here.

Will, Is It Really You?

Canada's Stratford Festival Posts 2.6m Deficit

The Stratford Shakespeare Festival is appealing to government for financial support to help it through the recession. The Stratford, Ont., festival revealed that it had suffered a $2.6-million deficit in 2008 despite a program featuring Christopher Plummer in George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. The loss last year was the company’s first since a three-year streak from 1991 to ’93. Attendance dropped by 4% to 534,000 in 2008. Though sales to Canadians were up by 2%, many Americans skipped Stratford, tipping the company into the red and forcing it to reach into its $5.6-million stability fund, which was set up for weathering recessions. Though some will remember a Stratford season that included Caesar and Cleopatra, a Hughie / Krapp’s Last Tape double bill and The Music Man, others will recall the collapse of a triumvirate of co-artistic directors last March. Marti Maraden and Don Shipley resigned before the season had even started, leaving Des McAnuff standing alone.

Shakespeare Hall of Fame

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust's visitor centre at Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire is creating an all-time Shakespeare Hall of Fame. Thirteen names in total will grace the walls, and you may be surprised who is included and who was left out. Certain individuals seem obvious: Ben Jonson, David Garrick, Laurence Olivier, Sam Wanamaker and Patrick Stewart. Other names might surprise, but certainly fit the bill, like Charles Dickens, Akira Kurosawa, Paul Robeson and Kenneth Branagh. Only two women were chosen: Ellen Terry and Judi Dench. Notable omissions include Helen Mirren, Simon Russell Beale and Edmund Kean. But the biggest travesty of all is the inclusion of Leonardo DiCaprio. Wait, what? Yes, you read that correctly. The Hollywood star who made a mediocre turn, at best, as Romeo in the over-the-top Baz Lurhmann film is one of the chosen few. No doubt it’s all about publicity, but seriously? There has got to be someone else. If you added them all up, you’ll notice that’s only 12. There is an online vote for the 13th slot. Click here to cast your ballet for people like Peter Brook, Sarah Bernhardt or John Gielgud (and maybe write in how DiCaprio should be removed).

Shakespeare's First Theatre Unearthed

The theater where The Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet likely debuted and where William Shakespeare himself may have trodden the boards has likely been discovered in east London, archaeologists at the Museum of London said Wednesday. The possible foundations of what is known as simply, The Theatre, were unearthed by builders excavating the site (a vacant garage) for another structure. Museum archaeologists were called to the location to make sure nothing was destroyed, and had a eureka moment.

"We were there, scratching our heads, looking into the trenches, thinking, 'this could be it,'" said Jo Lyon, a senior archaeologist at the museum. "So we did some more research, and then we found the angled walls. And we all went, 'Oh my gosh, this should be it.' "

Other theaters of similar vintage also have angled walls, so the discovery was significant. Archaeologists also had known for a long time there was a high probability for The Theatre to be on this particular site. But there are no maps that show its location, no images to show what it might have looked like, and only a vague description of it.

The possible discovery of The Theatre, built in 1576 and where Shakespeare's troupe performed in the 1590s, could complete the set of open-air theaters where the Bard's plays were staged. The Rose theater's location was discovered in 1989 in Bankside, just south of the River Thames in central London, and the Globe theater is nearby. A replica of the Globe was built on a site close to the original and opened in 1997. Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, only moved into The Theatre in the 1590s. Until then, they had been performing at the Rose, but a shake up in the London theater scene necessitated the move, said Martin Wiggins, a fellow at the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham.

And in 1597, a dispute with the landlord forced the company to move again, Wiggins said. They didn't own the ground The Theatre was built on, but the company did own the material it was built with, so they simply dismantled the entire theater and moved it south across the River Thames, where it was rebuilt and renamed the Globe. But The Theatre's foundations remained in east London, and that's what archaeologists believe they have found. Other works that would have been performed during the period Shakespeare's company were at The Theatre would have included Henry IV,Richard II, King John, and The Merry Wives of Windsor," Wiggins said. Lyon said it's unlikely The Theatre's complete foundations will ever be fully excavated, but her team intends to examine them further. Fittingly, a new theater is being built on the site, ensuring the foundations below are protected.

The Art of Surprise

Below you will find an excerpt of a lecture by Steve Vineburg, which was originally delivered on September 18, 2006, as part of the "Last Lecture" series hosted at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. Professor Vineburg is a noted theatre and film critic. Click here for the full lecture.

"The art I love most dearly emerges from an acknowledgement that we’re none of us pure of either mind or heart. It’s the art of mixed tones—buffoonery mixed with regret, as in Mozart’s Figaro; comic absurdity mixed with heartache, as in Chekhov’s stories; salvation that appears improbably out of despair, as in Shakespeare’s King Lear, or when all hope is lost, as in The Winter’s Tale.

Yeats said that art is forgiveness for sin. I think what he meant was that art has to be generous. It’s always easy for us to look down from a great height on the characters in a work of fiction or a movie or a play and pass judgment on them—especially since most of the fiction we read and the plays we attend and, God knows, the movies we see give us points for doing just that. But just as “the rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance,” to quote Prospero in The Tempest, so it’s more difficult, more challenging and far more rewarding to see the humanity in a character who commits the kind of offenses that we may hope we wouldn’t commit but in truth know ourselves to be fully capable of. If we embrace these characters—Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, whose addiction to morphine puts her out of the emotional reach of her husband and her sons, or Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, whose terror of death drives her into the arms of teenage boys (“The opposite is desire. So how could you wonder? How could you possibly wonder?”)—we embrace them wholeheartedly, with a kind of moral depth that allows us to transcend the conventional and the small-minded."

Shakespeare and Character Workshops with British Director Pia Furtado

The Internationalists launch their educational workshop series with British Director Pia Furtado. Pia will be teaching two intensives, the first a Shakespeare delivery workshop, and the second a character creation workshop. Pia currently works at the Royal Shakespeare Company and has assisted, trained and been resident at theatres including Royal Court, Young Writer’s Program, Young Vic and Lincoln Center Directors Lab. Visit our website for more info.

Shaking Up Shakespeare: The Actor and The Audience
Saturday, May 3, 2008
10:00am-6:00pm
TACT Studio, 900 Broadway, Suite 905 (at 20th Street)
Limit: 18
$75
Click here to purchase tickets.

Led by British director Pia Furtado, currently working at the Royal Shakespeare Company, this workshop will impart some valuable techniques in helping you unlock your Shakespearian delivery, through a series of exercises focusing on voice and verse. In the morning, you will look at the practicalities of tackling Verse, Prose, Monologues and Dialogue through the style of individualised text work that would be undertaken in a rehearsal process. In the afternoon you will concentrate on how the work translates in performance, particularly playing with the relationship constructed between the actor and the audience; experimenting with both Stanislavskian ‘fourth wall’ delivery and ‘direct address’ audience engagement. Please wear comfortable clothing and bring a piece of memorized verse to this session. (8-10 lines of Iambic verse. Also bring a hard copy of the text or email it to us so we can make copies.)

Creating Character: A Short in a Night
Monday, May 5, 2008
6:00pm-10:00pm
Location: Theatre Row Studios, Studio #1, 411 W. 41st St, (bet. 9th and Dyer)
Limit: 14
$50
Click here to purchase tickets.

Three dimensional characters and unique voices are important ingredients in great drama, and we all know that a beautifully-crafted character is an actor's dream. This workshop, led by British director Pia Furtado, will be spent exploring the nature of character. You will write a short piece in a night, using discoveries made through a series of writing exercises. We will dissect elements that constitute character and re-construct these building blocks to give life to original characters: imagined and observed. We will give voice to them through a series of free-flow writing exercises and by the end of the evening, should have performable playlets!

Simultaneous Shakespeare

From the UK Guardian, a short article about 35 simultaneous productions of Shakespeare plays being performed around the globe to commemorate his 444th birthday on April 23rd.