Shakespeare for Everyone

JOE DOWLING: When we did a tour of Midsummer Night's Dream in the region, here in the region in Minnesota, and around our region, at the end of a performance in one of the small towns in our region, a young woman was in her 40s, she was sitting there and she was weeping. Weeping, weeping, weeping.

Now Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy, so you hope that people are not going to go out crying from it, if only from laughter, but this woman was weeping and her husband was trying to console her and our tour director, Beth Burns, went up to her and said "Can I help you, is there something I can do for you?" And she said, "I just want my high school English teacher to be here, because I want him to know that I'm not too stupid to understand Shakespeare."

And you know, that's the thing. People who fear it, or think it is only part of the academy, or only part of the elitist sort of highbrow, get a real surprise when Bottom comes on in a donkey's head, or when Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Toby Belch fool Malvolio into wearing yellow stockings, or the great clowns of Shakespeare demonstrate a kind of vaudevillian sense of humor or some of the songs. Or you get the amazing sequences in As You Like It where Rosalind and Orlando play boy and girl or boy and boy. I mean all those areas which are part of popular entertainment are included in Shakespeare. And people get a surprise when they realize, "By golly, this is not something that's only to be taught at school."