Staging Shakespeare

JOE DOWLING: I think Shakespeare says it best when he says, you know, "speak the speech, I pray you, trippingly on the tongue," and asks and begs the players to play it as he wrote it. I think there is no trick to Shakespearean production other than to actually listen to the text and to play the play with an honesty and a directness. Shakespeare—there's a certain kind of illusion that you have to trick up Shakespeare to make him relevant. Shakespeare's genius is like the great geniuses of musicians, composers such as Mozart or Beethoven. You don't have to trick them up to actually create the genius; contemporary audiences see the genius.

There's nothing in the contemporary world that I can think of that Shakespeare didn't write about. But I think it is part of a universal understanding that the issues that he raised, whether it's issues of power, of family discord, or issues of aging and of young love, or of indecision in one's chosen course of action, whatever that is, it's part of our lives, our daily lives.

And so, about four years ago Jane Smiley wrote a piece in the New York Times which was, struck me as being, so accurate when she said, "he's the wisest one of all, he's the wisest we have, and we must consult with him about how we're going to move forward into the future." I'm paraphrasing her, but the sense was that here in the turn into the new millennium, the turn into the new century, we still have to go back to this man who identified, at a time in history, he identified so much about our common humanity. So much about civil discourse, so much about politics, so much about philosophy, psychology, so many different areas of human existence.

Shakespeare was there before Freud. He was there before so many other thinkers and so that's why he's in the fabric of American civil discourse, because he is the one on whom we can rely to give us some answers when we look for some reassurance as to how to proceed into the future.