The New York Shakespeare Festival Approach to Shakespeare

GERALD FREEDMAN: I've been doing Shakespeare for over 50 years, and there's been a great sea change. When I first came into the business of doing Shakespeare in New York City, we were under the spell of the Old Vic, the English Old Vic, both in their way of speaking and their way of production. And we, I think, were a little self-conscious about our dealing with Shakespeare. When I came into the business, great stars like Maurice Evans, Judith Anderson, Helen Hayes, even the Lunts, were doing Shakespeare on Broadway, inside, in theaters, and they were kind of matinee, very polite, kind of performances which more or less was, I think, the prevailing style, if you will, at that time.

I like to think that once we, the New York Shakespeare Festival Theater, got going, we did outdoor theater. We began to change it. When I say change it, I mean make it more American in feeling. Partly out of—we didn't have a great tradition, continuity tradition, and partly because we were making it in our own image. Anyway we at the New York Shakespeare Festival were trying to combine the inner life of the kind of Stanislavski approach to acting with the verse speaking. It took us a lot of time to get the two things together. Not consciously, but I mean, from critical analysis of what we were doing, into a very vigorous Shakespeare style that was very American, I think very Elizabethan, as it turned out.

And actually I think we influenced the English way of doing it. It's been reciprocal. I once had a talk with Anthony Hopkins who said that we'd met somewhere mid-Atlantic. They borrowed things from us, I mean the idea of an inner life to invest the verse with more truth, and we learned how to speak better and use the verse, which is also character.