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Mr. Morrison was formerly Dean of the School of Drama at North Carolina School of the Arts. He was Artistic Director of the North Carolina Shakespeare Festival for ten years and has directed in many regional theatres in this country including the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, the Meadow Brook Theatre in Michigan, the Alley Theatre in Houston, the Denver Center Theatre Company, and the Theatre by the Sea in New Hampshire. His recent production of The Importance of Being Earnest had a record breaking run at the Dallas Theatre Center and was extended for a further week as a result of its popularity. As You Like It, which he directed for the State Theatre in Sweden this year, received the maximum five stars from the national critics. For the past two years Morrison has directed the Utah Shakespearean Festival including the 1991 production of Hamlet.

As a teacher and director he has worked extensively in many countries including Jamaica, Malta, Australia, the U.S.S.R., and the People's Republic of China. He is director of the World Theatre Training Institute (a consortium of ten major actor conservatories around the world) and was recently awarded The Jacques d'Honneur in Paris for his work in International Theatre.

Makes Seven for the Los Angeles Theatre Center, My Sister in This House at American Stage Theatre, Uncle Vanya at Theatre 6470, The Taming of the Shrew for the California Shakespeare Festival, Better Living for the Matrix Theatre in Los Angeles, Measure for Measure at the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, Hunting Cockroaches for the Seattle Repertory Theatre, Intimate Friends at Theatre Off Jackson, Statistics, Red Teens, and Pardon Me, Your Android is Broken for the Pioneer Square Theatre, The Rivals for the Summer Repertory Theatre, and I'm Not Rappaport for the Portland Repertory Theatre.

For two years, Shannon served as the Associate Producing Director of L.A. Theatre Works and the Coordinating Director of the The Play's the Thing, an annual program of eighteen new plays for National Public Radio (in Los Angeles.) For this series, she directed numerous plays for the radio, including her musical adaptation of Pericles, with some of America's most distinguished actors.

Shannon received an MFA in Directing from the University of Washington and is a member in good standing of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, British Actors Equity, Women in Theatre, and American Theatre in Higher Education.

Egeon is unaware that his son, Antipholus, and the servant, Dromio, have also arrived in Ephesus, the home of the other twin son and servant, also known as Antipholus and Dromio. The result of this bizarre coincidence is a series of mistaken identities, or "errors," as the two Antipholuses and the two Dromios are repeatedly mistaken for one another. Adriana, the wife of the Ephesian Antipholus, her sister Luciana, a courtesan, an abbess, several merchants and even an exorcist are caught in the ensuing frenzy before everything is straightened out. When the two sets of twins are reunited, the Duke absolves Egeon of his crime and the family celebrates their reunion with a joyous feast.

The practice of drawing on other plots does not mean that Shakespeare merely reworked a few hackneyed stories for his own purposes. He introduced a number of important changes to his version which strengthened the play's major themes. For example, the enveloping story of the father's plight emphasizes the theme of family bonds, while the introduction of another love interest in the character of Luciana celebrates the idea of the transforming power of love.

Shakespeare also changed the location of the story from Epidamnum to Ephesus. This locale is significant, for an Elizabethan audience would have identified Ephesus through St. Paul's "Epistle to the Ephesians" as a place of sorcery and witchcraft. St. Paul's letter also examines the duties of a wife in Christian marriage, a source of dissension between Adriana and her husband.

Although some believe that The Comedy of Errors may have been Shakespeare's first play, due to its shortness and lack of complexity, many scholars now propose a composition date of between 1592 and 1594. This would place the play after the three history plays of Henry VI and probably after Richard III as well.

Its first recorded performance, as part of the Christmas revels at Gray's Inn on December 28, 1594, ended in a near riot due to the boisterous response of an overcrowded audience. Although it was revived ten years later at Whitehall, it appears that it was not performed again until 1716.

Since that time there have been numerous noteworthy productions and adaptations of the play, including several different musical versions. The most famous of these is undoubtedly the 1938 Rodgers and Hart musical, The Boys From Syracuse, which introduced such classic songs as "Falling in Love With Love," and "This Can't Be Love."

More recent stagings have included a television version by the BBC featuring Roger Daltry of the rock band The Who as Dromio, and the 1987 Lincoln Center production featuring the Flying Karamazov Brothers as juggling twins. The basic plot also suggested the recent hit movie Big Business starring Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin.

Director Peggy Shannon has selected Italy between the wars as the setting for the 1991 Colorado Shakespeare Festival production of The Comedy of Errors. This choice reinforces the humor of Shakespeare's work, for the boisterousness of the Italian heritage lends itself well to the play's rowdy good fun.

Although the farcical elements of the play are emphasized through the use of physical comedy, there is also a strong focus on the humanity of the characters. Though many may be eccentric, each is fairly recognizable and has a strong sense of style. This concept is reinforced by the costumes which use striking combinations of contrasting patterns to create a zany, vivid individuality for each character.

To emphasize the idea that the play takes place in a very real and logical world, much of the action centers around the town square, which features an outdoor cafe where people mingle to eat, drink, and listen to accordion music as they observe the teeming life around them. The surrounding courtyard, where everything always seems to be under construction, evokes the warmth and liveliness of Northern Italy, with its brick and stone structures and intimate balconies.

Douglas Gordy, Dramaturg, The Comedy of Errors

Returning to the country home where he lives with his ward Cecily Cardew and her governess Miss Prism, John finds that Algernon has also arrived and has presented himself as the nonexistent brother, Ernest. Algernon falls madly in love with the beautiful Cecily. She has long been enthralled with her guardian's fictional brother, Ernest, and wholeheartedly returns Algernon's affection. Problems arise when Gwendolyn, thinking herself engaged to Ernest, arrives at the country home and is informed of Ernest's engagement to Cecily. Chaos erupts with the arrival of Lady Bracknell, who is determined to save her daughter from marriage.

As luck would have it, John discovers that he is really Algernon's older brother and was actually named Ernest at birth. Through John's discovery of his true identity, all problems are solved and the play ends with the two couples in a joyous embrace.

Earnest is Wilde's most perfect attempt to fence with Victorian mores. Wilde uses his wit like a sword to slash through rules of etiquette, to poke fun at the aristocracy and academia, and to thrust forward his own philosophy as a committed aesthete (one who finds truth and meaning only in beauty).

"You cut life to pieces with your epigrams," exclaims one of Wilde's characters in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. However, Wilde never makes a direct stab in Earnest. By emphasizing the absurdity of the characters' situation he maintains a comic tone. As is typical of farce, the characters have attitudes, reactions, and customs which defy reason. Indeed, the improbability of this farce provides the necessary distance for the audience to laugh at the situation. This quality explains why the play enjoyed such success with the elite crowd who attended its first performance. Although Wilde was "biting the hand which fed him," Earnest bites in a gentle, playful way, always retaining a joyful quality while avoiding both cynicism and sentimentality.

A major theme in Earnest is John Worthing's search for his own identity. John inquires, "Lady Bracknell, I hate to seem inquisitive, but would you kindly inform me who I am?" Both John and Algernon are dandies who seek to escape the restrictive moral mask of Victorian etiquette and be true to their own impulses. The audience cheers their playful schemes as they artfully dodge the conventions of the day. Wilde admires those with the courage to follow their impulses because they have thrown off the shackles of an imposed identity. He proclaims that "disobedience is the first step in the growth of a man or a nation."

Wilde's work would, perhaps, have been more appreciated during the reign of Charles II, when witty repartee was the hallmark of Restoration comedies, than during the repressive Victorian era in which he wrote. He utilizes some of the same themes as Restoration comedy and his play is clearly within the tradition of comedy of manners. This type of play is usually focused on an elite social group which relies more on wit and intellectual repartee than on emotional depth or complexity. Gwendolyn states that "in matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing." She is explaining one of Wilde's fundamental beliefs. He does not advocate insincerity, but rather the idea that the aim of art, as well as life, is to seek beauty. Sincerity without style, without a sense of the beautiful, is undesirable. Wilde often ruminated that Nature should copy Art, not vice versa. "Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art." Wilde celebrates artificiality (Art over Nature) because in beauty one finds a truth that is infinitely more intriguing and pleasurable than fact. In order to distance the viewers from their own narrow view of truth, Wilde has turned the real world on its head and "treat(s) all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality."

Wilde's particular style of wit uses epigrams (a terse, satirical saying) to attack perceptions of fixed truth. He would often substitute key words in a sentence to produce its opposite meaning. For example, "I hear her hair has turned quite gold from grief," "Divorces are made in heaven," "The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man," "It is simply washing one's clean linen in public," "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling."

Wilde's deliberate manipulation of epigrams challenged the conventional values and expectations of the period. He created a world which wages war on ordinary speech and mundane everyday life. Farce is the perfect medium for this battle since it uses exaggerated life situations to make its point. By changing the key word of a "moral" tag, Wilde turns the phrase and the sentiment in upon itself, exposing middle class assumptions and biases. In fact, he deliberately distorts expectations by allowing the characters' unexpected thoughts, attitudes and reactions to expose the hypocrisy of social convention. Sense and nonsense, fantasy and reason, triviality and seriousness are jumbled together, forcing new perspectives and offering new possibilities.

Wilde's satire jabbed at a world which disdainfully and harshly judged his life. In the end, however, he was destroyed by his foe, Victorian society. Earnest was the last play Wilde wrote before he went to prison on a charge of sexual misconduct. It was, in fact, during the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest and at Wilde's height of fame as a playwright (he had two West End hits in London running simultaneously) that a sequence of events occurred which would bring about his public disgrace. He was accused of having an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas by the Marquess of Queensberry, Douglas' powerful and influential father. Queensberry tried to break into the opening performance of Earnest to publicly humiliate Wilde. He was denied entrance to the theatre, but following the huge success of the opening night he plotted other means to bring about Oscar's downfall. Wilde parried the charge of sexual impropriety in three separate trials but without success. He was publicly disgraced, defeated and sentenced to two years in prison. Wilde ultimately triumphed, however, since his wit has outlived both Victorian mores and his enemies. His legacy continues to challenge our expectations and entertain us. His sparkling epigrams still prick contemporary perceptions of truth and convention. Through The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde continues to poke fun at those who take life too seriously and become far too earnest!

John Shillington, Dramaturg The Importance of Being Earnest

During the early hours of the same morning Caesar has been awakened by his wife Calphurnia, who has dreamed of Caesar's murder. She begs Caesar not to "stir forth;" however, Caesar ignores her warning and proceeds to the Capital.

Once Caesar is alone with the conspirators, death comes quickly. Mark Antony, Caesar's ally, arrives on the scene, but Brutus persuades the others that Antony's life should be spared. It is then decided among Antony, Brutus, and the others that preparations will be made for Caesar's funeral, with speeches given by Brutus and Antony. As they leave for the market place Antony receives word that Octavius, Caesar's son, is coming to Rome.

In the market place Brutus and Antony speak to the assembled citizenry. Brutus defends the assassination by claiming that Caesar's ambition would have eventually ruined Rome. After Brutus departs, Antony turns the opinion of the crowd against the conspirators, calling for vengeance for Caesar. The conspirators are forced to flee for their lives and form a rebel army to combat Antony, Octavius, and Lepidus, who are recognized as co-rulers after Caesar's death.

Having been forced into the countryside outside Rome, the rebel army struggles to prepare for battle as tension mounts between the leaders, Cassius and Brutus. Tactical mistakes by Brutus and Cassius allow Antony's army to gain the upper hand and, fearing that he may be captured, Cassius takes his own life. With half of its leadership gone, the rebel army loses its strength. In a final gesture of despair, Brutus also commits suicide.

The main characters, though drawn from Plutarch's stories, are also altered. For example, some of Caesar's less admirable characteristics, such as his conceit and dynastic ambition, are emphasized. On the other hand, Brutus is treated more sympathetically as a result of the emphasis on his philosophic nature and admirable personal life. The envy and insecurity of Cassius is masterfully drawn, as is Antony's opportunism and his love for Caesar. Thus, in Julius Caesar we see Shakespeare utilizing and transforming historical material to make an exciting stage drama.

A quick glance at the course of world history reveals many examples of ambitious men and their subsequent assassinations. The 1991 production of Julius Caesar at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival will focus on the timelessness of Caesar's death and the issues raised by the assassination of a man in power. Brutus loves Caesar but he loves Rome more, and is forced to make the difficult decision to destroy a potential tyrant in order to save Rome. The chaos which follows this act eventually destroys Brutus. Therefore, one of the central issues in this production is the power of the "irreversible act," and the relentless momentum of events and circumstances which follow Caesar's death.

Central to this production concept are images drawn from the text: power, destruction, and the inability to escape the results of an irreversible act. This production uses visual icons and images to vivify the play's events and, instead of reproducing history, explores the deeper issues and the "modern myth" of power and destruction. Like many instances in history, the murder of Caesar was an irreversible act. Caesar's blood stains not only his assassins' hands, but the entire city of Rome, which is forever changed.

Stephen Earnest, Dramaturg, Julius Caesar

Fans of the PBS Mystery series will remember Robinson as the white-suited archvillain A. F. Barber in the recent Campion story, The Mystery, Mile. Other major roles in television series include Edward VII, The Day of the Tryffids, Oppenheimer, and The Treachery Game (Movie of the Week). His roles in feature films include Julia, Superman 1, and Silver Bears. On stage, he has acted in the West End of London under the direction of Tony Richardson in Luther, Nigel Patrick in The Gazebo, Peter Brook in The Power and the Glory, and Jose Ferrer in I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running. With the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, he has played Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream and leading roles in The Good Woman of Setzuan, The Country Wife, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Robinson has directed numerous productions at acting conservatories throughout Great Britain and the United States and has given theatre workshops at the Eugene O'Neill Center in Connecticut and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Pasadena. He has been Artist-in-Residence at the University of California's campuses at San Diego and Riverside and a faculty member at the University of Southern California.

In the early 1590's, William Shakespeare wrote The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, his first blockbuster hit. Chroniclers Edward Hall, Raphael Holinshed, and Sir Thomas More, Shakespeare's presumed sources, deliberately distorted their accounts of Richard so as to augment public empathy and support for the reigning Tudor monarchs. Shakespeare, blending fact, fiction, and rumor, molded his Richard III into an exciting political figure.

In the first scene of the play, Richard announces in a soliloquy his plan to be king. With his elder brother, King Edward IV, dying, Richard hires two murderers to kill the rightful heir, their brother George, Duke of Clarence. When the king dies, Richard becomes "Lord Protector" of the new heirs, the king's young sons. Anxious to "protect" his own interests, Uncle Richard imprisons them in the tower.

Aided by the Duke of Buckingham, a powerful political ally, Richard executes the family of the late king's wife, Queen Elizabeth, who naturally would prefer to see her son on the throne. To further discredit his brother, Richard circulates rumors that the previous king and his sons are illegitimate. To increase public support for his own claim to the crown, Richard enacts shows of humility, devotion, kindness, and other virtues which recommend him to the citizenry, and especially to the Lord Mayor and aldermen of London.

Finally, having staged the offer himself, Richard accepts the "golden yoke of sovereignty." Unjustifiably convinced that his position is threatened, he "terminates" the princes in the tower, poisons his wife, Lady Anne, and arranges to marry Princess Elizabeth, daughter of the former king, Edward IV. Even Buckingham, without whom he would not have secured the crown, is executed, so paranoid has Richard become.

Eventually, Richard's real enemies combine forces to overthrow him. Thus, despite a torrent of plots, a web of intrigue, and a long and infamous trail of blood, his reign is over after only two years.

Shakespeare's audience knew the story of Richard III. The Wars of the Roses (1453-1497) between the Yorkists, whose badge was the white rose, and the Lancasters, traditionally identified by the red rose, resulted in some the most brutal battles in English history.

This split in the royal family occurred in the fourteenth century with the sons of King Edward III, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and Edmund Langley, Duke of York. Marriages and intermarriages arranged among their descendants erupted in war as relatives killed and imprisoned one another in dispute over the crown.

The civil war in Richard III was initiated by Richard's father, Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, against King Henry VI of the House of Lancaster. King Henry VI, married to Margaret of Anjou, entrusted his administration to inept personal friends. Richard of York sought to alleviate the ensuing problems. Moreover, he could lay stronger claim to the crown than the reigning king. A series of battles followed. Richard was, in fact, placed in power in 1454 and 1455-1456, due to Henry VI's bouts of insanity. Queen Margaret, determined that her son succeed his father, vehemently opposed the Duke. He was killed by her army at Wakefield in 1460. The dispute was then taken up by Duke Richard's son, Edward IV, assisted by Richard of Gloucester, later Richard III. Edward IV's victory at Tewkesbury at last secured the crown for the House of York.

The marriage of the Earl of Richmond and Princess Elizabeth, announced at the end of Richard III, brings peace and unity once again to the Houses of Lancaster and York.

Like the historical Richard, Shakespeare's Richard is also legendary. It has been a coveted role for actors through the centuries. The theatrical Richard plainly states that he is "misshapen" and "determined to prove a villain." Conventional interpretations of the role were satirized in the comic film The Goodbye Girl, in which an actor, played by Richard Dreyfuss, portrays an outlandishly deformed Richard. In most productions, the moral and physical deformity of Richard is played at the expense, or exclusion, of the quick wit and charm with which Shakespeare endows him.

Laurence Olivier is the exception to the rule. Olivier, who also starred in The Jazz Singer with Neil Diamond, was one of the finest English actors of the twentieth century. He created one of the most renowned Richards of all time, a performance preserved in the film Richard III. He described Shakespeare's character as "the hero, the villain, and the ironic comedian." It was this complexity of the character that most appealed to him.

The CSF production renders a similar depiction of Richard as a character who is both tenacious and contemptible in his determination to rule. It emphasizes the political intrigue of Richard's exploits, and allows the drama's human and poetic qualities to develop naturally.

The production opens with a dream-like prologue to set the stage. Voice-over narration is compiled from historical source material. Characters and dramatic action are selected from Henry VI, part 3, one of a trilogy of Shakespeare's history plays which dramatizes events immediately preceding Richard's story.

The set design is non-specific in time and place, but the costumes and set pieces convey the medieval world. Two "magic" walls, designed by William Forrester, are constructed on the circular festival stage. Mysteriously they glide into various positions, following the curvature of the floor. In this way "new" settings are quickly defined so that the production's fast pace and mounting suspense flow without interruption. Anne Thaxter Watson's costumes of simple lines and "bold blocks of color" are designed to help the audience identify the political and familial factions on stage.

Barb Matson, Dramaturg, Richard III
Robert Robinson, Director, Richard III

Makes Seven for the Los Angeles Theatre Center, My Sister in This House at American Stage Theatre, Uncle Vanya at Theatre 6470, The Taming of the Shrew for the California Shakespeare Festival, Better Living for the Matrix Theatre in Los Angeles, Measure for Measure at the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, Hunting Cockroaches for the Seattle Repertory Theatre, Intimate Friends at Theatre Off Jackson, Statistics, Red Teens, and Pardon Me, Your Android is Broken for the Pioneer Square Theatre, The Rivals for the Summer Repertory Theatre, and I'm Not Rappaport for the Portland Repertory Theatre.

For two years, Shannon served as the Associate Producing Director of L.A. Theatre Works and the Coordinating Director of the The Play's the Thing, an annual program of eighteen new plays for National Public Radio (in Los Angeles.) For this series, she directed numerous plays for the radio, including her musical adaptation of Pericles, with some of America's most distinguished actors.

Shannon received an MFA in Directing from the University of Washington and is a member in good standing of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, British Actors Equity, Women in Theatre, and American Theatre in Higher Education.

At the same time, Gloucester, Lear's trusted counselor, has been deceived by his bastard son, Edmund, who has plotted to turn Gloucester against his legitimate son, Edgar. Edgar flees for his life, disguising himself as a madman named "Old Tom."

Once in power, Regan and Goneril work to strip Lear of control. They treat their father with such coldhearted meanness that Lear refuses to remain with them. Having nowhere to go, Lear and his Fool are caught outdoors in a tumultuous storm where they meet the disguised Edgar and Kent, who is also disguised as a peasant servant.

Spurred on by Edmund's plot to banish Gloucester, Regan and her husband, Cornwall, blind Gloucester and send him out to "smell his way to Dover." In his wanderings, Gloucester meets Lear, recognizes his voice and tells him of the wrongdoing of Regan and Goneril. Lear and Cordelia reunite and, together with Kent's forces, battle the combined armies of Edmund, Regan and Goneril.

The most important source was an old chronicle play, The True Chronicle History of King Leir, which had been published in 1605. No one knows for certain who wrote Leir. While there is great debate on the extent to which Shakespeare echoes the thought and expression of Leir, what remains without doubt is Shakespeare's very different ending of the play. In Leir the King is reinstated to the throne and Cordelia lives. Shakespeare's Lear is the only version of the story in which Cordelia is murdered and Lear dies. This ending was so unpopular that from 1681 to 1838 the play was performed using an adaptation that included love scenes between Cordelia and Edgar as well as the Leir happy ending. Some adaptations cut the Fool entirely.

The subplot of Gloucester and his sons has no historical connection with the Lear story, and is borrowed from the story of the Paphlagonian King in Sidney's Arcadia (1590) who is betrayed by one son and saved by another.

In Lear the family mirrors the ordered hierarchy of a public society. The analogy between the king and his subjects and the father and his children is clear. As a king, Lear struggles with relinquishing control of his kingdom to his heirs. As a father, Lear resists giving up his role as parent who commands and dictates the lives of his children. At the beginning of Lear we see the inherently destructive control- motivated elements of Lear's choices as both the king and father. Lear hastily divides his kingdom between his daughters rather than simply allowing the laws of inheritance to prevail. The division of the kingdom depends on the daughters professing absolute love for their father. From this moment in Lear we see Lear's error in judgment. Guided by control rather than reason, the once fine king contributes to the downfall of his family and his kingdom. Lear allows himself to believe the superficial flattery of Regan and Goneril simply because they have played his game. Cordelia's honesty and true love for Lear is overlooked.

Recurring themes emerge in the play: human beings as wild beasts, madness and reason, and the idea that "clothes do not make the man." The 133 separate references to sixty-four different animals in King Lear is designed partly to show man's place in the Chain of Being, and to illustrate the sub- human aspects of human nature. The Chain of Being represented an Elizabethan belief in the order of the universe. The chain consisted of six links: God, Angels, Man, Sensitive (animals), Vegitive (plants), and Inanimate (rocks). When one part of the chain was disturbed, order turned into chaos. When Lear divides his kingdom, he goes against the natural order, causing chaos which presents itself in the form of the hateful children Regan, Goneril and Edmund. Each acts with unmitigated cruelty toward their parents, becoming more and more like beasts.

The double paradox of reason in madness, and madness in reason, underscores the entire play. When Lear appears sane, he cannot distinguish between Cordelia and her wicked sisters. He must acquire wisdom by going mad. It is only through being stripped of the trappings of royalty, when Lear appears to be nothing more than a "madman" in the raw elements of nature, that he learns about humanity.

Shakespeare uses clothing to represent appearance in exploring the theme of appearance versus reality: how one presents him/herself to the world compared to what he/she truly is. This is illustrated in the Colorado Shakespeare Festival production by the stripping away of Lear's symbols of power. At the beginning of the play we see Lear in lavish royal clothing of rich fabric adorned with fur. This clothing represents power, wealth and position. Lear's world is one of reason, order and honor. His appearance and speech display the secure confidence of royalty. He is impervious to emotion and spiritually blind.

Soon Lear's secure world begins to crumble. His royal garments are stripped away and replaced by simple wrappings of earth-toned burlap. As Lear's royal clothing falls away, he becomes more vulnerable and self-aware. Through enduring nakedness in the harsh elements of nature, unprotected by his kingly garb and public status, Lear is exposed to his true, private, "animal" self. Lear is an almost naked animal in a stark world that can offer him no protection from the elements of nature, or from confronting his true self. The "madman" Lear emerges. Like the Fool, Lear's "mad" words offer an honest, clear, heartfelt insight and respect for humanity.

Similarly, Gloucester is spiritually blind before he loses his eyes, unable to tell the difference between a good son and a bad son. When Gloucester can see, he is all too willing to accept Edmund's false proof of Edgar's plot to overthrow him. Once blinded, Gloucester undergoes a transformation which parallels Lear's. Forced to dig into his soul, Gloucester almost immediately "sees" his mistake in relying on Edmund. Through his "madness", he joins Lear in a clearer understanding of the nature of good and evil in his family.

Bloom, Harold, Ed. Major Literary Characters: King Lear. New York: Chelsea House, 1992.

Elton, William R. King Lear and the Gods. San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1968.

Lusardi, James P., and June Schlueter. Reading Shakespeare in Performance: King Lear. London: Associated University Press, 1991.

Muir, Kenneth, and Stanley Wells, Eds. Aspects of King Lear. London: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Ray, Robert H., Ed. Approaches to Teaching King Lear. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1986.

Reibetanz, John. The Lear World: A Study of King Lear in its Dramatic Context. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977.

Urkowitz, Steven. Shakespeare's Revision of King Lear. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Pericles flees to the famine-ridden kingdom of Tarsus and is welcomed as the country's savior by its Governor, Cleon, and his wife, Dionyza. Pericles sets off to sea again and is shipwrecked at Pentapolis where King Simonides, ruler of Pentapolis, is holding a tournament for his daughter Thaisa's hand. Pericles wins the tournament and marries Thaisa. Time passes, and Pericles and the now pregnant Thaisa, embark for Tyre. They are caught in a great storm, however, in which Thaisa gives birth to a daughter, but dies in labor. Thaisa is buried at sea, and fearing that the child will not survive the long voyage, Pericles returns to Taursus and places his daughter, named Marina, in the care of Cleon and Dionyza. Thaisa's burial chest washes ashore at Ephesus, where Lord Cerimon revives her with his magical powers. Because she never expects to see Pericles again, Thaisa retreats to Diana's sacred temple.

Meanwhile in Tarsus, Marina has grown into such a beautiful young woman, that she overshadows Cleon and Dionyza's own daughter. Dionyza becomes jealous and plots with her attendant, Leonine, to have Marina killed. Just as Leonine is about to murder Marina, a group of pirates kidnap her and take her to Mytilene, where she is sold to a brothel. Her virtue and grace help her escape the brothel, and earn her living as an honest woman.

When Pericles returns to Tarsus to fetch Marina, he hears of her death, and once again sets off to sea. Beset by yet another storm, Pericles' ship docks at Mytilene, where he is greeted by its Governor, Lysimachus. Lysimachus learns of Pericles' grief and suggests that Marina's charms might cure his sorrow. Marina is left alone with Pericles, and in telling the story of her sad history, their relationship is revealed. Pericles is suddenly lulled to sleep by heavenly music, and Diana appears to him in a dream, telling him to go to her temple in Ephesus. At the temple altar, Pericles identifies himself and recounts the story of Marina's birth and adventures. Thaisa recognizes him, and they are united. With the marriage of Marina and Lysimachus, the story is completed, and Gower bids the audience farewell.

Pericles, c. 495-429 BC, ruled Athens from about 460 to 429, a Golden Age in the history of Athenian culture and military supremacy. Pericles is associated with significant advancements in Greek government, architecture and the arts. He implemented major democratic reforms and started the public building program which produced the Parthenon. The great Greek dramatists--Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides--were all writing during his reign. Pericles initiated the Peloponnesian War in 431 and died of the plague two years later, never to know that the war resulted in the decline in Athenian society, following Athen's disastrous defeat in Sicily in 413.

Although Shakespeare's character bears little resemblance to the historical Pericles, Shakespeare incorporates a major philosophy of Greek society and Greek tragedy into the play-- that of Fate. The Greeks believed that man could not control his own existence, his own destiny. Life was a series of misfortunes, of suffering, which a person had to accept. Pericles' life is a journey of tremendous suffering, a journey of events he can not control. He, like the protagonist in a Greek tragedy, also accepts his fate passively. Early on in the play, after Pericles' ship is wrecked off the coast of Tarsus, he proclaims that he must submit to the forces of nature. Later Pericles compares himself to a tennis ball on a "vast tennis court." Pericles is played upon as fortune sees fit. Pericles suffers because of what happens to him, not because of his own behavior. He is acted upon, rather than controlling the action. Fate continues to dictate events in his life throughout the rest of the play.

There is also another "fate" convention used in Greek tragedy which Shakespeare incorporates into the play--the deus ex machina. The deus ex machina is a god or goddess introduced at the end of the play who decides its final outcome. The god or goddess usually provides a happy solution to an impossible situation and thus brings an end to the protagonist's suffering. In Pericles, Diana is the deus ex machina. In a dream, the goddess, Diana, commands Pericles to go to her temple in Ephesus. He travels there, and in retelling his life of misfortune is reunited with his wife, Thaisa.

Pericles is the first of Shakespeare's main characters to not openly challenge fate, a theme Shakespeare continues to explore in his final three plays: Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. In these last plays, one sees Shakespeare coming to grips with his own mortality. The major characters all undergo enormous suffering, yet the plays end happily. In the end, Shakespeare seems to suggest that man has the strength to withstand life's trials. Providence always remains in balance. Good ultimately triumphs over evil.

Shakespeare lived and wrote during the European Renaissance, a transition period between the middle ages and modern times which began in fourteenth-century Italy and lasted into the seventeenth century. The Renaissance was marked by a "rebirth" of interest in classical architecture, arts and literature. Elizabethans were fascinated with Greek and Roman cultures, exotic societies quite unlike that of seventeenth-century England. Therefore, it is not surprising that Pericles was extremely popular during Shakespeare's time.

Venetian and French ambassadors to England attended a performance of Pericles sometime in 1607 or early 1608, and according to the Quarto published in 1609, it was acted "sundry times" by the King's Men at the Globe. Contemporary references suggest that huge crowds attended the production. George Wilkins, an English author and dramatist active between 1603 and 1608, capitalized on the play's popularity by publishing his novel, The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre, in the same year.

The Cholmeley Players, a travelling company, performed the work in Yorkshire in 1610, and records show two other notable productions before the closing of the theatres by Cromwell in 1641. Visiting French dignitaries were entertained by an elaborate two-part production of Pericles, which included an intermission banquet, at Whitehall in 1619. The play was produced at least once at the Globe between 1625 and 1631, judging by Ben Jonson's complaints in Ode to Himselfe, which suggests that people were flocking to "some mouldy tale, like Pericles" rather than attending his more serious works.

Critics and producers during the 18th and 19th centuries regarded it as a poor play lacking in interesting characters and original thought. The action was too improbable to be dramatically effective as suggested by an editor of the period: "Pericles is little more than a string of adventures so numerous, so inartificially crowded together, and so far removed from probability . . . ." After the Restoration, the play was not produced again for nearly 80 years until George Lillo, a British dramatist best known for his play George Barnwell, staged a most un-Shakespearean-like adaptation entitled Marina at Covent Garden in 1738. Typical of the eighteenth- century attitude, Lillo felt he could do more justice to Shakespeare by rewriting the text. He added several scenes and completely removed the roles of Cleon and Cerimon while basing his three-act adaptation solely on Acts IV and V of Pericles.

Victorian attitudes of the nineteenth century were even more critical of the play. The brothel scenes enraged public's moral sense. Audiences could not even relate favorably to the character of Marina. The only notable nineteenth-century production was a revival by Samuel Phelps, a British actor and producer, at Sadler's Wells in 1854. The play ran for several weeks, and like most Phelps' productions, it was quite spectacular. The set designer and machinist reproduced the rolling billows, whistling wind and tossing of the ship. The elaborate costumes, dances and banquets created a realistic Eastern flavor. Unfortunately, Gower was cut completely and the brothel scenes were condensed and heavily censored-- "disinfected of its impurities" as one reviewer put it--to accommodate Victorian tastes. Pericles was staged only three other times before World War I: two of them in Germany, at Munich in 1882 and 1904, and a reportedly unsuccessful production in Stratford in 1900 with John Coleman playing Pericles.

But history is cyclical, and Pericles has gained in popularity since the 1920's. Robert Atkins produced the first textually unaltered modern staging of Pericles at the Old Vic in 1921. Two successful productions with Paul Scofield and Daphne Slater were produced at Stratford in 1947 and in London in 1950. An equally impressive production at Stratford in 1958 featured Richard Johnson as Pericles and Geraldine McEwan as Marina, who, according to a reviewer, "made the recognition as poignantly beautiful as the Lear-Cordelia scene."

The last decade has also seen a number of notable American productions. Most recently, Pericles was produced at the New York Shakespeare Festival (1991) with Campbell Scott in the title role. In reaction to the play's renewed popularity, one critic alluded to "the remarkable manner in which this tale of long ago and the far away induces in the . . . spectator a semi- hypnotic state in which everything is experienced as in a dream."

Cahn, Victor L. Shakespeare The Playwright. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1991.

Knight, G. Wilson. The Crown of Life. London: Oxford University Press, 1947.

Kramm, Maggi. "The Hero Nobody Knows." American Theatre 9 (June 1992): 10-17.

Marsh, D.R.C. The Recurring Miracle: A Study of Cymbeline and the Last Plays. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962.

Peterson, Douglas L. Time, Tide, and Tempest: A Study of Shakespeare's Romances. San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1973.

By divine providence, Prospero and Miranda are delivered to an island peopled by spirits and monsters. The mystical knowledge Prospero discovers in his books allows him to quickly subjugate the denizens of the island and he comes to rule them as their lord and master. Twelve years pass, during which time Prospero and Miranda have no contact with the outside world.

By chance, a ship bearing all of Prospero's old enemies ventures within range of his new magic, awakening his old desire for revenge. He raises a tempest which drives their ship to the island and leaves them separated and stranded. Prospero, as magical lord of the island, holds their fate in his hands and must choose between forgiveness and revenge.

While most of Shakespeare's works can be traced to specific historical sources or antecedents, The Tempest has been described as a marriage between a sailor and a mermaid. On the sailoring side, the setting of The Tempest was probably suggested to Shakespeare by an actual shipwreck and recovery that occurred very shortly before the play's first staging in 1611. On July 25, 1609, the Sea- Adventure, one of a fleet of nine ships bound from England to John Smith's Virginia colony, was separated from the rest of the fleet by an unusual storm and was lost at sea. On board were Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Summers, the leaders of the expedition. Their ship did not go down, as was presumed, but was driven onto the shoals of an island in the Bermudas. All of the passengers survived the wreck, and in the ensuing weeks and months they were able to salvage sufficient stores and fittings from the ship to eventually re-embark. In May of 1610, the survivors of the Sea-Adventure appeared in the Virginia colony with a miraculous tale of shipwreck and survival on a hospitable island, which they described as a kind of paradise. By the end of the year their story was the talk of England.

In addition to suggesting a setting for the play, the New World offered Shakespeare a ready made character in the person of Caliban. As a character, Caliban represents the Elizabethan conception of a New World savage. He is not evil, but he is ignorant, base, and amoral. Driven by his passions and his appetites, he has no recourse to reason and must be "civilized" by a more advanced master for his own sake.

Like a mermaid, the sources for the story of The Tempest are harder to trace and capture. Certain motifs or ideas, such as those found in the wood carrying scene between Miranda and Ferdinand, are drawn from the oldest oral traditions of folklore around the world, making it impossible to credit them to a specific author. Critics who cite Virgil's Aeneid as a major source for The Tempest point to Shakespeare's scene between the two young lovers as a refiguring or retelling of the scene in which Aeneas builds Carthage after his time in the cave with Dido. While there are certain similarities in the basic structure of the two scenes, there are enough differences to indicate that Shakespeare's scene does not rely on Virgil's writing, but that the two authors share a common source which predates both works. Our own Paul Bunyan stories may very well be traced back to the same mythic archetype that Shakespeare and Virgil drew on. It is a story of progress; of clearing the land to make room for something new. At the same time, the image of wood carrying suggests the idea of creating something new out of something old, of imposing order on chaos, and of discovering, through he faculty of the imagination, the usefulness of the things we already have and know. In writing The Tempest, Shakespeare was able to marry the historical sailor to the fantastical mermaid and, out of their union, create something beautiful and new.

The Tempest is a challenging play to stage for a variety of reasons. First, there is the fact that the story is ending as the play begins. Prospero's withdrawal into the world of his books, the loss of his dukedom to his scheming brother, Antonio, and his discovery of magic and subsequent conquest of the island all precede the opening of the play. As a result, Shakespeare must devote a large section of the early dialogue between Prospero and Miranda to exposition, which is always challenging for a director to stage no matter how beautifully it is written. Second, the play contains a great deal of spectacle and magic, beginning with a tempest at sea and including a magically created masque in which a banquet is catered by spirits and goddesses! Finally, The Tempest lacks many of the elements of dramatic conflict that drive most of Shakespeare's plays. Prospero is such a power on the island that his foes are virtually unable to oppose his will. Caliban and his scheming companions are more comical than dangerous. Even the lovers, Ferdinand and Miranda, find little real opposition to their romance. As a result, the play is not driven forward by dramatic conflict; it is drawn forward by an exploration of the dramatic theme of choice between the opposing forces of confinement and release.

The relationship between confinement and release in The Tempest is not static, but reciprocal. The two forces don't merely balance each other, they constantly give way to each other in a circular dance that draws the play forward. In Milan, Prospero has the freedom accorded to a ruler, but he feels confined by his political responsibilities. His books are a source of escape, releasing him into a world of the imagination that is not accountable to political realities. When Antonio usurps Prospero's position and title, Prospero is released from his worldly responsibilities, but he is physically confined on a small island. On the island, Prospero discovers a source of magic power in his books and that power allows him to subjugate the native spirits and savages to his will so that he and Miranda can thrive and prosper. The magic that Prospero discovers carries with it a responsibility; the responsibility to use it wisely. Having conquered the native islanders, Prospero must now rule them as he refused to rule in Milan when he was Duke. Prospero discovers that only by embracing the confining aspects of responsibility can he be released from them, and, by the end of the play, he is ready to return to Milan to take up both the role and the responsibilities of Duke (albeit with an eye towards retirement in the not too distant future). Confinement gives way to release, which leads to confinement, and the play is drawn forward in their wake.

In the CSF production of The Tempest, Prospero's magic is a magic that extends not in space, but in time. Like Merlin, who lived backwards through time, Prospero has been to the future and he brings it back with him to shape his 17th century island. When Prospero is confined to the island, his magic releases him into the future, but the use of his magic binds him more tightly to the confinement of the island. Only by surrendering his magic can Prospero be released from its constraints; that is the nature of reciprocity. In binding the natives with his magic, Prospero is bound to them in turn. Only by freeing them can Prospero find freedom himself. Both the stage and the staging of this production are shaped by this reciprocal dynamic of confinement and release. The circular stage is both an island and a magic circle. The two ramps that embrace the space both enclose it and extend it outward and upward. Prospero begins and ends the play in front of his cell, but the time between sees him transformed from captive, to jailer, to free man. It is this transforming power of the cyclical journey from confinement to release, and the role of choice in the journey, that lies at he heart of the CSF production of The Tempest.

Evans, Blakemore. An Early "Tale from Shakespeare": The Tempest. Harvard Library Bulletin, Fall 1988, p 381.

Langley, T.R. "Shakespeare: Dream and Tempest". The Cambridge Quarterly, 1991, p 118.

Manlove, C. N. The Gap in Shakespeare: The Motif of Division from "Richard II" to "The Tempest". Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1981.

Nuttall, A.D. Two Concepts of Allegory. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967.

Potter, Lois. "A Brave New Tempest". Shakespeare Quarterly, Winter 1992, p 450.

Schmidgall, Gary. Shakespeare and the Courtly Aesthetic. Berkeley: U of C Press, 1981.

Still, Colin. Shakespeare's Mystery Play: A Study of The Tempest. London: Cecil Palmer, 1921.

Sir Hugh, the Welsh parson, embarks on a plot to marry Shallow's nephew, Slender, to Anne Page. He dispatches a note to Mistress Quickly, the local matchmaker, instructing her to speak to Anne on Slender's behalf. Two more suitors enlist Mistress Quickly's aid; Quickly's master, Dr. Caius, and Fenton, a penniless but noble youth who has captured Anne's heart. The pursuit of Anne is not without its complications. Slender is Master Page's choice, Dr. Caius is Mistress Page's, and Fenton is Anne's.

Dr. Caius, meanwhile, intercepts the note from Sir Hugh conveying Slender's love to Anne. Anxious to preserve his honor, he challenges Sir Hugh to a duel. The Host of the Garter Inn prevents this duel by misdirecting the participants.

Mistresses Page and Ford, meanwhile, have compared the identical letters they have received from Falstaff. Bemused and appalled at Falstaff's audacity, and repelled at the size of his girth, they declare revenge upon the unsuspecting knight. They will agree to a tryst, encourage his attentions, and precipitate his eventual humiliation.

Ford, pricked to suspicion and jealousy by Pistol and Nym, disguises himself as Master Brook and hires Falstaff to woo Mistress Ford on his behalf. He hopes to catch Mistress Ford in flagrante delicto. Twice the Mistresses Page and Ford humiliate Falstaff, and Ford is exposed as a jealous, rampaging fool.

The merry wives confess their pranks on Falstaff to their husbands. All agree that Falstaff deserves further punishment; in Windsor Park, near Hernes Oak, Falstaff is to disguise himself as the legendary Herne the Hunter, complete with furry pelt and enormous horns on his head. There he is confronted by the entire population of Windsor, and Falstaff collapses in confusion and terror, his humiliation complete.

Each of the Pages depends on the darkness, disguises and noise for Slender or Dr. Cause to elope with Anne. Anne elopes instead with Fenton. Falstaff repents, the Pages relent, Anne gets her man, and all join in the general revelry. And "Brook," of course, takes advantage of the auspicious occasion to "lie with Mistress Ford."

Its first American productions were in Philadelphia in 1770, and in New York in 1773. It has been popular during the 20th century around the world, and during the 1980's it received several productions in America as well as in Finland, Canada, Britain, Sweden, Germany, Australia and China.

At least nine musical adaptations of The Merry Wives of Windsor exist. Among them are Giuseppe Verdi's opera Falstaff, Otto Nicolai's opera Merry Wives of Windsor, and Vaughn Williams' opera Sir John in Love. At least six versions of the play have been recorded on film, three by the BBC, two by American companies and one in Germany. Orson Welles also adapted material from The Merry Wives of Windsor for his play Chimes at Midnight and its film version, Falstaff.

The Merry Wives of Windsor was popular at the time of writing for a variety of reasons. First, it revived the very popular character of Sir John Falstaff from the Henry IV plays. Second, it stands out as unique in Shakespeare's canon as his only "English" comedy; it is set entirely in England, rather than in Italy, France, Athens or some other ancient or exotic locale. The immediacy of the action is constantly reiterated in references to such familiar places as Windsor Castle, Datchet Mead, Frogmore and Herne's Oak. Moreover, it is Shakespeare's only comedy to deal exclusively with middle- class citizens; an innkeeper, a parson, a country justice, a doctor.

This bourgeois milieu is sustained by the language. The play is almost entirely in prose vernacular, with verse appearing only in the wooing scene and in the fairy masque in Act V. Thus, the play and the playwright give a respectful nod, not only to Elizabeth I, but to the burgeoning middle class whose rise to power she had overseen.

The Merry Wives of Windsor remains popular today because it is a play about revenge revolving around the conventional theme of "the biter bit;" the author of the hoax finds himself tricked in return. There are at least eleven revenge plots going on, to which the audience is privy but some characters are not. This gives the audience a decided advantage as the plot unfolds and each revenge is worked out. Furthermore, the characters of the play are highly individualized versions of long-established types running from the Greek comedy,to the Italian commedia dell'arte, through English popular comedy, to the contemporary television sit-com. The jealous husband, the blustering soldier, the impecunious parasite, the foolish pedant, the garrulous go-between and the bumpkin country cousin are all represented.

The Merry Wives of Windsor appeals to audiences of all ages because of its robust comedy. Some scholars describe it as pure farce. Its incidents are funny and aggressive, occasionally uproarious and violent, and the play benefits from bustling action and broad treatment. Funnier and even more gratifying is the gap perceived by the audience between what the characters know and what is actually happening, the delightful irony with which the audience at once sympathizes with, and feels superior to, the character who is being duped.

Finally, the play has a romantic core and a benevolent conclusion, for in the midst of the plotting and hoaxing are Fenton and Anne Page, who thwart her parents' plans and steal away to be married. Innocence and young love triumph, as do common sense and middle class moral values, as Falstaff is forgiven and accepted into the community.

The central theme of the major plot of The Merry Wives of Windsor is spoken by Page at the end of Act V: "That which cannot be eschewed must be embraced." The "thing" which cannot be eschewed or avoided is the "natural order of things" as evidence by the peace and harmony of the village of Windsor. Director Tom Markus remarks that the play proposes that "people are happiest when they live in accordance with the common-sense laws of nature, particularly when those laws are echoed in the civic laws and mores of the society."

Falstaff is an outsider who comes to Windsor from the court in London, and presumes to disrupt the social fabric of this complacent, bourgeois society by outsmarting the men and seducing the women. It is necessary that the society, in the persons of Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, educate or correct the interloper so he may fit in, so that he may brought "home [to] laugh and sport o'er . by the country fire," so that the natural order of domesticity and its implied creative process may prevail. Falstaff learns that money is not as important as friends.

The second plot underscores the first. The true lovers, Anne and Fenton, outwit the parents. Nature prevails, the inappropriate suitors are defeated, and Master and Mistress Page are thwarted in their attempts to manipulate the natural course of love. Fenton, like Falstaff, an outsider by virtue of his class and urban origins, learns that money is not as important as true love.

These themes are underscored in this production by setting the action in Tudor England. This location is its natural home and the source of familiar iconography. The Merry Wives of Windsor is middle class, rural, domestic, warm and forgiving, and its themes are grounded in the laws of nature which are the source of civic order and the rules of appropriate behavior.

These qualities are reflected in the setting and costumesof this production. The costumes of the citizens of Windsor are simple in line and fabric, warm and autumnal in color. The outsiders, Fenton and Falstaff (and his cohorts), are made obvious by the alien, more urban look of their clothing. However all of the costumes exaggerate the universal qualities of each character so that the type is easily recognizable.

The setting has the qualities of a story-book, for more than any of Shakespeare's plays The Merry Wives of Windsor has the feel of a folk-tale, with its rural origins, cautionary structure, mock-mystical fleecing of the scapegoat, and homely moral. The set presents a Tudor village as it might be represented in a picture-book, not in its entirety or in three- dimensions, but in line, color and two dimensions suggesting the architecture of the period. The set pieces are cut-outs in natural organic shapes, 3/4 life size to further suggest a storybook, and painted or drawn as if by hand, to represent the natural textures of wood, stone and thatch. The overall effect is warm, civilized, simple and benign, a place where all strangers are welcome provided they play be the rules.

Green, William. Shakespeare's "Merry Wives of Windsor. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1962.

Hibberd, G.R., ed The Merry Wives of Windsor. London: Penguin Books, 1973.

Oliver, H.J., ed. The Merry Wives of Windsor. London: Routledge, 1971.

Stoll, Elmer Edgar. Falstaff. Philadelphia: Folcroft Press, Inc., 1914.

The wrestling match, held at Duke Frederick's court, is viewed by his daughter, Celia, and niece, Rosalind. Rosalind's father is Duke Senior, the rightful ruler, yet his younger brother Frederick has usurped his position and banished him and his attending lords to the Forest of Arden. Surprisingly, Orlando wins the match and is rewarded with a chain by Rosalind. Although now in love, Orlando is forced to flee to Arden with his brother's servant Adam. Rosalind is also forced to flee when she is banished by Frederick. Disguised as a boy, Rosalind takes on the name Ganymede and escapes with Celia (now called Aliena) and the court fool, Touchstone. Together they enter the Forest of Arden.

In Arden, Duke Senior and his men have established a gentle, pastoral "court." Among their company is the comically misanthropic Jaques. Into their midst arrives Orlando ready to fight for food. He tells them his story and is openly accepted into the Duke's company. Touchstone, Rosalind and Celia (masquerading as brother and sister) have also arrived in Arden and overhear Silvius, a young shepherd, declare to Corin, an older shepherd, his love for the disdainful Phebe. Empathizing with Silvius' unrequited love, Rosalind and party join up with these comic rustics. Meanwhile, back at court, an angry Duke Frederick sends Oliver de Boys into the forest to find his daughter and capture Orlando.

The freedoms of the forest engender amorous affections all around. Orlando is caught posting love poems to Rosalind on the trees of Arden. Posing as Ganymede, Rosalind promises to cure Orlando of his lovesickness; he is to woo the young "boy" as if he were Rosalind. Meanwhile, Touchstone falls in love with Audrey, a country wench. To make matters more complicated, Phebe falls in love with Ganymede. As love weaves a web of increasing complexity, Oliver enters the forest only to be saved from the hungry jaws of a lioness by his brother Orlando. When Oliver relates this story to Ganymede and company, revealing to them a napkin stained with Orlando's blood, the young "boy" faints.

In the wake of this turn of events, Oliver falls in love with and proposes to the disguised Celia. Together they plan to live in Arden as shepherds. Ganymede promises that, at the same time, Orlando shall marry Rosalind, and Silvius and Phebe will be satisfied. On the marriage day, Rosalind reveals herself, taking Orlando in marriage and persuading Phebe to accept Silvius. Touchstone marries Audrey. Venturing into the forest to confront his brother, Duke Frederick encounters a religious hermit. As the story concludes, Frederick renounces his throne, restores his banished brother and, with Jaques, spiritually retires from the world.

In As You Like It the evolution of feminine identity within a controlling patriarchal system of power informs both setting and characterization. The first scene of the play is set in an orchard--a controlled forest. The distinctions between the French Court and the Forest of Arden in this staging are few. Duke Frederick's Court is indeed controlling and restrictive, especially if you are a woman; yet the Forest of Arden is not so different. As Jeanne Addison Roberts notes in The Shakespearean Wild: Geography, Genus and Gender:

"The urban invaders, both male and female, actually plunder and usurp the forest. Duke Senior and Jaques bemoan the plight of the slaughtered deer while enjoying the benefits of the hunt. And other forest denizens, the snake and the lion (both identified as female), are frightened away or killed. Rosalind and Celia colonize the shepherd's cottage coveted by Silvius,...Touchstone seduces Audrey away from her country prospects, and Jaques assumes the right to the empty cave at the end of the play...(48)."

The central architectural image of Duke Frederick's Court in this summer's production is the cool geometry of a glass enclosed arboretum. The Forest of Arden has literally been walled out. But as the play progresses, the glass walls are penetrated and soon the forest, inspired by the polymorphic paintings of Georgia O'Keefe, breaks through. The theatrical space is no longer static and restrictive. In this production space evolves into something active and dynamic--a psychological landscape that creates dramatic action and reflects the inner dynamics of the characters themselves.

It is within this dynamic space that both Rosalind and Celia develop into women. In the Court these two are inexperienced girls, yet as the comic action moves forward, they are forced to take on disguises and discover what it means to be a woman. Rosalind derives her power from her masculine disguise, and much of her humor is actually antifeminine. It is Celia who actually makes the first step into adult heterosexual womanhood. Angry over Rosalind's boorish behavior as Ganymede, Celia berates her friend and declares her independence:

"You have simply misused our sex in your love- prate. We must have your doublet and hose plucked over your head, and show the world what the bird hath done to her own nest" (IV: i, 191-194).

Celia, tired of childish games, dispenses with the farcical charade. Indeed, it is Celia's declaration of love for Oliver which forces Rosalind to dispose of her comic, masculine disguise and choose her role as woman and wife.

Shakespeare's As You Like It is a complicated debate on the relationship between love, power and identity. It provokes disparate often controversial arguments and original and inventive productions. At its center is Shakespeare's Rosalind, one of the most engaging women in the entire canon.

Two critical interpretations of Rosalind suggest the polemical extremes of Shakespearean scholarship. Comparing her to Hamlet, critic Harold Bloom sees Rosalind as the supreme representation of the possibilities of human personality. He writes, "We rejoice in her because no other figure in Western literature, not even in Shakespeare, is at once so accomplished in wit, and so little interested in the power that great wit can bring if properly exercised" (5). Neo-feminist Camille Paglia disagrees. Exploring what she labels an unnoticed theme in the play, Rosalind's attraction to the macho extremes she ascribes to in her masculine disguise, Paglia writes, "Rosalind as Ganymede pretends to be a rakish lady-killer and, at her assumption of that sexual persona, actually becomes one. A superb language of arrogant command suddenly flows from her...She is all sex and power" (203). Such critical disagreements are not uncommon, for As You Like It is both a gentle, pastoral comedy of love, and a dark and sexually ambiguous comment on gender construction and patriarchal control.

Shakespeare himself delighted in contradiction and dialectical opposition of character and theme. In As You Like It he wallows in the conflict of opposites; pitting nature against civilization, masculinity against femininity, idealism against cynicism, youth against age, child against parent, time against timelessness and love against hate. Even the comic structure of his play belies its content. In the end the characters choose to renounce the Forest of Arden and return to the social restraints of the real world, yet this ending does not provide adequate resolution. The conflicts at play are merely assuaged, not fully resolved.

Successful productions of the play have sought to enact this complexity on the stage without losing its strong comic core. The first modern production, according to Shakespearean scholar Sylvan Barnet, occurred in 1919 when Nigel Playfair staged his interpretation at Stratford as inspired by the radical aesthetics of the Ballet Russes. This show was bright, lively and musical, infuriating many critics. Following Playfair, however, subsequent stagings began to explore the text's darker edges. Michael Elliott's 1961 production at Stratford explored the seasonal changes within the text, setting the early Arden scenes in a winter atmosphere. Theatre-goers at a 1966 production at the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis found the play to be set in the somber aftermath of the American Civil War. Another similar example was a San Diego production in 1976 set among the displaced North American Indians in colonial French Canada. Barnet writes, "perhaps we can now generalize, and say that from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, As You Like It was sometimes seen not chiefly as a happy pastoral play but as a Chekhovian play, or even something much darker" (244).

While productions grew darker and more experimental, As You Like It still managed to attract some of the strongest actresses to ever grace the stage. Dame Edith Evans successfully played Rosalind in Esme Church's 1936 rococo production at the Old Vic in London. At 24 years of age, Vanessa Redgrave leapt onto the Stratford stage barefoot and denim-capped to accolades of the highest caliber. In Michael Elliott's 1961 production, Redgrave was inelegant, brusque, engagingly aggressive and boyish. Her performance opened new doors to young actresses and is still fondly remembered today as one of the greatest Rosalinds of all time.

In Adrian Noble's 1985 modern dress production at Stratford, Jungian psychology and contemporary, postmodern theory informed Noble's visual motifs and metaphors. As Rosalind, stage and film actress Juliet Stephenson (Truly, Madly, Deeply) explored the character's contemporary resonance. In an interview she explains the play to be "a vital exploration of gender, the male and female within us all." According to Stephenson, "Rosalind is very released when her masculine aspect is allowed release" (qt. in Gay 76).

Finally, two idiosyncratic productions explored the changing nature of contemporary Shakespearean staging. Clifford Williams' 1966 production at the National Theatre and Declan Donellan's 1991 staging (which toured New York City this past fall) were both distinguished by all male casts. Neither production was presented as camp novelty, nor were they a recreation of an Elizabethan convention, using adolescent boys in the female roles. In fact, both productions found their inspiration in contemporary dramatic theory.

The motivation for Williams' production was Jan Kott's essay "Shakespeare's Bitter Arcadia" in his Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964). Writing about As You Like It and the conventions of Shakespeare's Elizabethan theatre, Kott noted a boy actor "disguised as a girl plays a girl disguised as a boy. Everything is real and unreal, false and genuine at the same time. And we cannot tell on which side of the looking glass we have found ourselves. As if everything were mere reflection" (270).This all-male production worked, because at the heart of Williams' vision was the desire to explore more clearly Shakespeare's debate on identity, love and power. By alienating his audience from any kind of heterosexual infatuation, Williams was able to explore an interior truth--the spiritual dialectics of gender and sexuality.

Declan Donellan's staging was not as much about sexual ambiguity as it was a comic meditation on the metamorphosis of performance itself. This production celebrated the roles human beings play everyday. Donellan's first images were stark. Michael Gardiner, the actor who played Jaques, spoke the first line of his famous "All the world's a stage" speech and abruptly smeared another actor's cheek with mud. With that gesture, a blank white stage, inhabited by a group of men dressed in black tuxedo pants, was transformed into a pulsing, spontaneous world. Inspired by the metatheatric theories of postmodernism, Donellan created a memorable, stage picture of metamorphosis that defined the elemental magic at the root of all theatre.

Bloom, Harold ed. Major Literary Characters: Rosalind. New York: Chelsea, 1992.

Gay, Penny. As She Likes It: Shakespeare's Unruly Women. London: Routledge, 1994.

Kott, Jan. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Trans. Boleslaw Taborski. New York: Norton, 1964.

Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Roberts, Jeanne Addison. The Shakespearean Wild: Geography, Genus and Gender. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1991.

Shakespeare, William. The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare: As You Like It. Agnes Latham ed. London: Routledge, 1975.

When the Romans reach Corioli and engage in battle, the soldiers run away in fear. Disgusted with his troops, Marcius engages the opposition single-handedly and carries the day. Cominius, the general in command of the Roman host, bestows on the victorious warrior a noble steed, the garland of honor and a new name; Caius Marcius Coriolanus.

Coriolanus returns to Rome in triumph and is put forward as a candidate for the position of consul. But before becoming consul he is required to present himself to the people and win their endorsement. Reluctantly he does so; but just as he is about to be made consul, Sicinius and Brutus, two of the newly elected tribunes, goad him into losing his temper and insulting the people. Instead of being proclaimed consul, he is proclaimed a traitor and the people demand Coriolanus be banished from Rome.

Coriolanus bids a bitter farewell to his wife, his mother and his few faithful supporters and leaves Rome. He joins the army of his former enemy, Tullus Aufidius, and returns to seek revenge. His friends and supporters try to persuade Coriolanus to spare Rome but he is determined to burn the city. In the play's climax, Coriolanus' confrontations with his mother and with Aufidius resolve his fate and the fate of Rome.

The setting for Coriolanus centers around a public street in Rome. This is not the Rome of Hollywood or Julius Caesar, but an earlier Rome which is, in the words of Director Symons, "feeling its way into its destiny." The people and the rulers are working out the nature of their relationship, the concept of tribunes elected from the common people is brand new, and a certain primitiveness is still evident. The bulk of the play's action occurs in public places, and Coriolanus does not, himself, indulge in quiet introspection. Instead, the focus is on the interaction between the citizenry and the leaders, a motif which will be emphasized in the Colorado Shakespeare Festival production.

Scene Designer Randy McMullen has centered his design around a public street leading to a large city gate. Here, in the public arena, Coriolanus will unfold. In addition, McMullen and Symons have elected to border the acting area with a raised "gallery" where actors will, themselves, watch the action in progress. In this way the actors will function as both performers and audience, watching the story unfold while at times participating in it.

The performance style which Symons plans to adopt in Coriolanus is a presentational one which allows the audience to engage emotionally with the play while continuing to analyze intellectually the implications of the story. Coriolanus is a man who finds himself in a situation where his accustomed role in society is no longer politically correct. As he tries to find a way to adapt to this situation, his every action is seen by the public, embodied by actors both on stage and observing from the side-lines. Thus, audience members will not only be watching a play, they will watch people watch a play.

Finally, the over-riding goal of this production is to tell the story of Coriolanus . It is here, in the telling of the story, that the issues raised come to life. Was Coriolanus a hero who was unappreciated or a man too arrogant to succeed? Are the qualities that make for a great military leader incompatible with the qualities required of a politician? How much must a leader cater to the whims and tastes of the public? These are among the questions raised in this 388-year-old play, based on events which occurred nearly 2500 years ago, and they are questions which our production aims to resonate in this summer of 1995.

Over the centuries there has been considerable scholarly attention given to the nature of this, the last of Shakespeare's tragedies. The play has at times been characterized as a political struggle between the patricians and the plebians, the haves and the have-nots, and, indeed, this conflict is central to the play. In opposition to this view, however, is the opinion that the political conflict is merely background for a study of the character of Coriolanus; a great man warped and ruined from childhood by a dominating mother. Neither of these extreme views is satisfactory when the play is considered as a part of the entire canon. It then becomes clear that in Coriolanus, as in his other plays, Shakespeare is more interested in personal journeys than in ideas, and the person whose journey is most engaging is Coriolanus, himself.

But what is the nature of this man, Coriolanus? Here Shakespeare leaves many clues but no clear answers. In many instances he epitomizes the sin of pride, yet in others he shrinks from praise and leaves the room rather than hear stories of his own valor.

Coriolanus does not suffer fools gladly, and is often blunt and impatient. He verbally abuses the plebians of Rome, insulting and ridiculing them. He heaps scorn on his frightened soldiers saying, "You souls of geese, that bear the shapes of men, how have you run from slaves that apes would beat!" Yet, as harsh as he seems, he does not ask his men to do more than he does himself. His fault lies in his expectation that every man's defiance of death should equal his own.

At times Coriolanus behaves like an intemperate adolescent who has yet to reach emotional adulthood. He is manipulated by his mother, Volumnia, who, after many years of practice, can say just the right thing to make him comply with her wishes. She begs him to be more temperate in his speech with the plebians and to seek their forgiveness in order to become consul. He argues that he cannot compromise his beliefs and be false to his own nature. His integrity, however, is perceived as stubborn willfulness. Volumnia vehemently argues with him, then treats him like a disobedient child, turning coldly away, saying, "At thy choice then. To beg of thee, it is my more dishonour than thou of them." Coriolanus immediately submits to her will. He approaches the marketplace, determined to be ruled by sense and not by anger, but the tribunes know his weaknesses better than he does, himself. Soon they have roused him into angry insults again, all thoughts of political pacification gone.

But it would be inaccurate to say that the character of Coriolanus can be described simply as a case of arrested development. In many instances he shows great courage and strength. He is motivated by strong rules of personal chivalry. He is too honest to be a good politician, unable to lie to the masses in order to curry favor. While circumstances decide loyalties for Coriolanus, as long as those circumstances are constant, so is his loyalty.

An important turning point in the character of Coriolanus occurs off-stage. After his banishment from Rome, Coriolanus appears at the home of Tullus and offers to lead the revolt against the capitol. What happened in the intervening time is unknown, but it is clear that a change has taken place. The man has become a machine, filled with inhuman resolve to exact his revenge. During the time since he was expelled from Rome, Coriolanus has come to believe that he was betrayed, not by the plebians alone but but the patricians as well. Now the whole city has failed him and his fierce pride will exact a terrible retribution. He joins the fight against Rome and this time the Volscian soldiers follow him as a god.

Coriolanus's revenge on Rome is not, however, simply a childish tantrum in extremis. His personal sense of honor makes it impossible for him to forgive what he perceives as betrayal and treachery. To do so would contradict the strict code of conduct which has been his strength in the past. He can only do so when his mother, once again, manipulates him in the way that only she can. It wounds him greatly that both in Rome and in Antium he is renounced as a traitor.

In the final speech of the play, Aufidius speaks of the noble memory the people will hold of Coriolanus, and truly there is something noble about a person who selflessly and uncompromisingly adheres to a code of conduct, however misguided it is. Coriolanus seeks glory, not power, and so inspires many to follow. It can be said that the story of Coriolanus is a classical example of the unforgivable sin of hubris. In this case, however, it was not the gods but the people whom he offended.

Hamlet's behavior causes the court to doubt his sanity. The Lord Chamberlain, Polonius, advances the theory that Hamlet is suffering from lovesickness for his daughter, Ophelia. However, the King suspects that Hamlet has become a danger to him, and engages two old friends of the Prince, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to spy on him.

Time passes, and Hamlet berates himself for failing to act. He begins to doubt the ghost's accusations against Claudius. A company of players arrives at Elsinore, and the Prince plans to use them "to catch the conscience of the King." They enact The Murder of Gonzago, in which a King is poisoned and the murderer takes both crown and wife. Claudius' reaction to the play convinces Hamlet that he must kill the King. Gertrude summons Hamlet to her chamber. They argue violently, and Hamlet impulsively kills Polonius, who is eavesdropping behind a curtain.

Claudius banishes Hamlet to England, accompanied by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are unaware that the sealed instructions they carry are orders for Hamlet's execution. Hamlet escapes on the sea journey, and replaces his death warrant with a forgery condemning Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to death.

In Elsinore, Ophelia has gone mad and her brother Laertes confronts Claudius demanding revenge for the murder of their father, Polonius. When news arrives of Hamlet's escape and return to Denmark, Claudius and Laertes plot to have Laertes challenge Hamlet to a fencing match. Laertes will poison the tip of his sword and Claudius will ready a poison drink for the Prince.

Upon his return to Denmark, Hamlet comes upon the funeral party of Ophelia, who has drowned.

In the bloody final scene, Hamlet and Laertes are mortally wounded by the poisoned rapier while fencing, Gertrude drinks from the poisoned cup and is killed, and Hamlet takes his revenge on Claudius. The Prince exhorts his friend Horatio to tell his story, then dies.

The evidence suggests that Shakespeare's Hamlet was written and produced about 1600, at roughly the midpoint of his playwriting career. Hamlet is not mentioned by Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia, which lists Shakespeare's plays and was published in 1598. In July of 1602, Hamlet was entered in the Stationer's Register. References within the plays allow us to reasonably place Hamlet after Julius Caesar, which was playing in 1599, but before The Merry Wives of Windsor, which was registered in January of 1602. The reference in Hamlet to the boy players seems to place it in 1601, although some scholars believe that this reference was added subsequent to the original production.

The earliest published version of Shakespeare's most famous play is the First Quarto of 1603. It is considered a "bad quarto," authorized neither by the author nor his company. It was probably penned from memory by a minor actor. The Second Quarto of 1604 is a "good quarto." In 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death, two actors from his company published the first complete collection of his plays. This First Folio version of Hamlet was the preferred one for most of the play's life. It does not differ greatly from the Second Quarto, which recently has become considered the more reliable text.

The 1995 production of Hamlet at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival takes advantage of the openness of Shakespeare's text. Letting the greatness and profundity of Shakespeare's play speak for itself, this production emphasizes the narrative action of the play. Shakespeare wrote a popular and intense revenge tragedy. This great masterpiece of suspense is a thriller, albeit a thriller which resonates with such questions as: what motivates human behavior? What constitutes a noble life? Is there a God who cares about us? What meaning does our existence have, ending, as it inevitably does, in the grave? And, finally, why should one live at all?

The production is set in Denmark in Shakespeare's time. The costumes and properties suggest renaissance court life in 16th-century Europe. The castle at Elsinore itself is a character in the play, a vast evil labyrinth that is a tangible and forceful presence. It is a dark island in the prison which is Denmark. The setting is very solid upstage but seems to disappear as it moves toward the audience. Elsinore is a place of mystery, at the boundary of the known world. Beyond is only darkness.

Shakespeare did not personally see to the publication of his plays. He wrote them to be staged by his own company, with a keen eye on the box-office. There is little doubt that this gripping and violent revenge tragedy was successful with the audiences of its own day. The author would no doubt be astonished to find that Hamlet is probably the most widely discussed single work of art ever produced by one person. The meaning of the play as a whole has been assayed, its relationship to the Elizabethan world has been discussed, and much has been written about the characters of Claudius, Gertrude, Ophelia, Polonius, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hamlet is in many ways an "open text," and in it Shakespeare has given us many fascinating puzzles.

The bulk of the discussion focuses on the unusual character of the play's hero. The play raises key questions about the Prince of Denmark, but it provides no explicit answers to these questions. These include the verity of Hamlet's madness, the motivation for his cruelty toward Ophelia, his ruthless treatment of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and the central mystery of the play: why does Hamlet delay in carrying out his revenge? The simplest response is that the delay is necessary to make a play. If Hamlet acted decisively, not only would we be robbed of the play's suspense, but we would all go home from the theatre rather earlier than we would wish. Those who hold this view correctly maintain that the play was intended to be entertaining rather than profound. However, this opinion fails to account for the fact that its author pointedly has his hero excoriate himself for his lack of action in his famous soliloquys. Shakespeare's play, perhaps in spite of his intentions, is profound.

If the Prince wants to avenge his father, what stands in his way? Are his chief obstacles external, or do they reside within his own character? Is Hamlet by nature indecisive, cowardly, or both?

The romantic view is the most popular: the Prince of Denmark is a highly sensitive and delicate idealist who is not up to the rudeness of the world around him or the meanness of his task. His idealism is destroyed by the evil he faces. The loss of his ideals enables him to carry out his bloody task, but at the cost of his own life.

Hamlet has been psychoanalyzed as though he were a real person. Some modern psychologists have determined that the Prince is a victim of the Oedipal conflict. Another view rests upon the Elizabethan notion of psychology which holds that a healthy person enjoys a balance between the four humours: blood, choler, phlegm, and melancholy. Hamlet is overcome by melancholy. His mental disease causes a disruptive struggle between his passion and his reason, which leads to his inertia.

There are those who hold that Hamlet's obstacles are external, and that the chief obstacle is Claudius. In this view the play is an objective tragedy rather than a subjective tragedy. In other words, the Prince is at war with his uncle rather than with himself. The King proves a worthy adversary indeed, and gives Hamlet little opportunity to attack him.

Others hold that Hamlet is a true hero precisely because his reason holds his passion in check. The arguments against violence, revenge, and especially regicide are powerful, and in Hamlet's mind are arrayed only against his passion (his hatred of his uncle and of his mother's incestuous marriage) and the doubtful word of a ghost. The apparition could indeed be the spirit of Hamlet's father on a righteous mission. On the other hand, an evil spirit can assume any disguise. The ghost could be the devil himself. Additionally, in this view, Hamlet understands that he is the true King of Denmark and that he must execute public justice. His mission is to right a great wrong done to his country, rather than to avenge a private hurt. He thus behaves rightly by deciding to act only after obtaining independent evidence against Claudius, evidence which is witnessed by the entire court.

There is no single right answer to any of the challenges posed by Shakespeare's play. Over the 400 years of its life, theatre-goers, academics, philosophers, actors, and poets have all offered their own views of Hamlet, a text which is open to an enormous variety of interpretations. Part of our continuing fascination with this play resides in its possibilities.

At the castle they are greeted by Claudius and Gertrude who tell them of Hamlet's "transformation" and their wish that the two attend him and find the cause. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern play a game of questions with each other to prepare for the task but when they encounter Hamlet they become frustrated by his answers.

With Rosencrantz and Guildenstern looking on, Hamlet commands the Player to perform a play, The Murder of Gonzago, "to catch the conscience of the King." Gertrude enters and questions them about their conversation with Hamlet and they report his interest in the players. Claudius tells them to encourage him in that pursuit.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern watch the tragedian's dress rehearsal for the dumbshow from The Murder of Gonzago. The play now includes two spies who are executed in the final scene.

Claudius tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that Polonius has been slain by Hamlet. He orders them to bring Hamlet and the body of Polonius to the chapel. They encounter Hamlet but he escapes, dragging the dead body with him. When Hamlet is found again, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are ordered by Claudius to accompany him on a ship bound for England and to deliver a letter to the English king. On board, they discover the letter orders Hamlet's death.

When pirates attack the ship, Hamlet escapes. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern discover that Claudius' letter has been switched by Hamlet. The letter that should have brought them favor now orders their deaths. As they contemplate their situation, the action switches to Denmark where an ambassador brings the news that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.

For the CSF production, director Gavin Cameron-Webb takes his cue from the study of quantum mechanics, a favorite subject for Stoppard. In this approach to physics, the idea of cause and effect is mitigated, things merely "happen." This negates the basis for what we consider to be "natural laws" but also gives rise to infinite possibilities and highlights Stoppard's sense of play. These qualities are realized in this production by violating natural laws on stage. Probability is the first to fall (the coin toss) followed by others, such as time and gravity. In this production, what goes up might not come down.

In addition, this production has a symbiotic relationship with the CSF outdoor production of Hamlet. The setting is a warped reflection of the Hamlet set and the actors who portray Rosencrantz and Guildenstern reprise their roles, this time at center stage. These crossovers add an exciting extra dimension for audiences who attend both productions. For them, this Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is truly a play within a play within a play.

Like many of Shakespeare's plays, Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a play about the offstage world of two minor characters from Hamlet, defies categorization. Is the play a farce, an absurdist or existential work, a play of ideas, a comedy of manners, or straightforward Shakespearean parody? Although Stoppard himself acknowledges a debt to such absurdist playwrights as Beckett, Ionesco, and even the poet T.S. Eliot in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, he continues to resist labels. Though Stoppard admits that the play can be interpreted in existential terms, he chooses to characterize it as "the perfect marriage between the play of ideas and farce or perhaps even high comedy." This definition is strangely equivocal coming from a former drama critic.

Most critics have been drawn to the play's absurdist tendencies. Often the connection to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot is used as a means of classifying the piece as belonging to the genre of the Theatre of the Absurd, a phrase coined by Martin Esslin to classify plays that express the senselessness of the human condition and the failure of rational thought to deal with this disturbing reality. This kinship is more than cosmetic and less than total. Indeed, both Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Beckett's clowns share some common elements. They seem trapped in worlds in which they are manipulated by unknown rules, teetering on the brink of a void of meaning. Both sets of characters share a preoccupation with death and are presented with facts that do not enlighten experience, but seem only to question the validity of experience itself. Yet Stoppard's approach has more to do with entertainment than with the total nullification of life experience which Beckett's plays sometimes imply. It is Stoppard's enormous wit, intelligence, and sense of play that separates this piece from the grimness found in other absurdist works. In fact, many critics have condemned Stoppard for not taking the serious issues quite so seriously.

Stoppard's work belongs to a strange theatrical genus which rides the fence of all definitions, combining elements of each while retaining certain defining characteristics. His plays are highly self-referential, intertextual (depending upon references to other plays for meaning), and present a comical view of the world. Attempts to impose a single meaning on the play correspond to the dilemma of the characters at the beginning of the play--seeing only one side of a coin.

Perhaps a more valid means of discussing the play is to examine the implications of its dialectical nature. Stoppard seems to place his characters on a metaphorical chess board, letting them propose questions and counter-questions without providing definitive answers. However, unlike Shakespeare, we can gain further insight into the play from the playwright himself:

What there is, is a series of conflicting statements made by conflicting characters, and they tend to play a sort of infinite leapfrog. You know, an argument, a refutation, then a rebuttal of the refutation, then a counter-rebuttal, so that there is never any point in this intellectual leap-frog at which I feel that is the speech to stop it on, that is the last word. (Stoppard 6-7)

In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, there is always another side to the coin. Some of the conflicting views include art verses pornography, free will verses predestination, and observation verses participation. By flipping the coin, the play moves forward. As the Player proclaims:

"We keep to our usual stuff, more or less, only inside out. We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else."

For the title characters, the action of the play becomes a kind of Escher print, entrances leading to other entrances, with an always-incomplete understanding of the implications of what went on before. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are romantics in an anti-romantic play, striving for reality in a world of illusion, provided with a role but without an action. Sadly, even their roles are in question. In Hamlet, the confusion surrounding the names of these "attendant lords" is essentially an oddly out-of-place gag concerning their interchangability and insignificance. But as Stoppard moves these minor characters to center stage, their namelessness becomes a critique of identity. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not mistakenly identified because they are indistinguishable from one another. Their identities are in question because they are dictated by others. This suspicion is so extensive that they can hardly keep track of their names themselves.

If a definition of genre is demanded, perhaps the most applicable would be what Normand Berlin calls "theatre of criticism." According to Berlin, Stoppard allows the audience to function as critics during the play rather than afterward. By transplanting characters from a play we already know, one which has become a part of our common mythology, Stoppard enlarges our perspective. We can see beyond the limited view of the characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and critique their situation in the context of our own lives and even the theatrical enterprise itself. We can see both heads and tails.

Bigsby, C.W.E. Tom Stoppard. London: Longman Group, Ltd., 1976.

Londre, Felicia H. Tom Stoppard. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co.,1981.

Stoppard, Tom. "Ambushes for the Audience: Toward a High Comedy of Ideas." Interview. Theatre Quarterly 4 (May-July 1974): 3-17.

While Don Pedro playfully sets his matchmaking ruse into motion, Don John and his henchmen, Borachio and Conrade, devise a scheme to stop Claudio and Hero's wedding. Don John convinces Claudio that his fiance is disloyal and arranges for him to witness her unfaithfulness. Deceived by a staged betrayal, Claudio resolves to disgrace Hero. At the nuptial ceremony the next day, Claudio publicly accuses Hero of being unchaste. Although Hero protests her innocence, she is overwhelmed by the accusation. Don Pedro, Don John and Claudio storm out of the church leaving Hero wronged, her family dishonored and bewildered. Believing the girl guiltless, a member of the local clergy counsels Leonato to have faith in his daughter and offers a plan to prove her innocence. After the others leave the church, Benedick admits his love to Beatrice and asks her to let him show his devotion. Enraged by her cousin's treatment, Beatrice implores Benedick to avenge Hero. Benedick, torn between love and friendship, challenges Claudio to a duel.

The three plots in this comedy are centered on questions of what it means to love and be loved, and the difficulty of communicating these emotions. Therefore, language is of great importance to the play's action.

In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare establishes two very distinct uses of language. On one hand, it's a tool for polite social interaction; on the other, it's a plaything that people manipulate for their own enjoyment. The characters in this play are often differentiated by these two uses of language. For instance, Hero and Claudio conduct their romance according to the prescribed rituals of courtly behavior. Although both characters reveal themselves as witty and clever in the company of heir friends, they resort to the formalities of lyrical courtship when speaking to each other. The ceremonious courtship of these young lovers is parodied by Beatrice and Benedick, who subvert the rigidity of courtly love in their spirited and engaging battles of wit. Throughout the play, Beatrice and Benedick banter and exchange insults when it's obvious to everyone they are romantically drawn to one another.

Both couples use language to mask emotion and guard themselves against confusion of the heart. Despite their verbal mastery, though, each is eventually duped by language. Beatrice and Benedick are led to confess their true feelings for one another only after they hear" their friends talking about them, and Hero and Claudio's relation-ship is almost destroyed after Claudio is led astray by a false report. As the unreliability of language brings one couple together, it seriously threatens the wellbeing of the other.

In these two romances, Shakespeare shows us how the malleable nature of language can easily lead to the confusion of purpose and identity. The dual nature of language, its playfulness and its dangerousness, is explored in these two romances, and also in the character of Dogberry. in a play that emphasizes the importance of language and communication, there is something wonderfully touching and pathetic about a man such as Dogberry, who cannot form even the simplest of proper sentences. By trying to mimic the speech and manner of his social superiors, he creates his own impenetrable language of non words and malapropisms. Although Dogberry eventually provides the evidence that brings about the play's resolution, he's also responsible for withholding the vital information that could have prevented the crisis from occur-ring in the first place. It's precisely this difficulty in communicating with others that causes the "nothing" about which the characters make much ado."

Ultimately, Much Ado About Nothing celebrates the triumph of true love over false report. As the characters struggle against the harmful consequence; of hearsay and rumor, they learn language is an untrustworthy gauge of human emotion-that they must trust their hearts -in order to find truth and happiness in love. This movement toward truth and understanding can be seen in Beatrice and Benedick's last exchange. Beatrice attempts to toast her groom with one last insult as the two lovers profess their devotion to one another. Benedick interrupts her final jest with a kiss: "Peace! I will stop your mouth." As Benedick's loving kiss stops Beatrice's caustic remark, the characters rejoice in a final dance, having learned that action, not words, is a more faithful pledge of love, truth and devotion.

Uninvited and in disguise, Romeo, heir to the Montagues, and a band of boisterous friends crash the banquet. Romeo and Juliet fall in love with each other at first sight, learning each others' identity only after they have parted. Evading the friends who wish to taunt him, Romeo scales the walls of the Capulet orchard and overhears Juliet's profession of her love for him. Romeo reveals himself, and the lovers exchange numerous vows of devotion. They are married secretly the next afternoon by Friar Lawrence, who hopes the union will end the feuding between their two families.

After the ceremony, Romeo joins his companions, who are quarreling with Capulet's nephew, Tybalt. Having recognized Romeo at the previous night's festivities, Tybalt challenges him to a duel. When Romeo refuses, his friend Mercutio takes up the challenge and is mortally wounded. In an agony of grief, Romeo slays Tybalt, Juliet's kinsman, and is then banished by the prince.

Knowing nothing of Juliet's secret marriage and believing she weeps immoderately for Tybalt's death, Lord Capulet insists she marry Paris. Unwilling to betray her true love, Juliet feigns acceptance of her father's plan and then takes a potion, given her by Friar Lawrence, that makes her appear to be dead.

A letter explaining the Friar's plan is delayed, and Romeo believes his love is truly dead when news arrives of her funeral. Armed with deadly poison, he makes his way to Juliet's tomb, vowing never to leave his beloved's side.

Romeo and Juliet is filled with astronomical allusions, making the heavens a palpable and undeniable presence. Traditionally, the movement of the night sky has signified the inexorable passage of time, the stars moving ever forward in their seeming orbits about the poles.

Shakespeare exploits this sense of inevitable, forward momentum through his myriad references to the heavens, and then magnifies the apparent onslaught of time by radically compressing the story's own timeline. His immediate source, Arthur Brooke's epic poem, allots a full nine months for Romeo and Juliet to meet, woo, wed and die. Shakespeare, however, covers the same territory in a mere five days. Romeo and Juliet are subjected to the everincreasing press of time, and this urgency, rather than their immaturity, drives the lovers to their untimely deaths.

From the very beginning, images of the heavens and their effect on Shakespeare's earthbound characters are pronounced. Capulet invites Paris to an "old accustomed feast," where he may behold "earthtreading stars that make dark heaven light." Romeo sees Juliet at this banquet and falls into the first of several reveries in which he compares her to the sun, moon, stars and finally an angel. Even the party itself reinforces the idea of a forwardmoving cosmos, since the act of dancing functioned as a Renaissance metaphor for the order and progression of the heavens. Repeatedly, characters make references to celestial bodies and their rapidity of movement, figuring the torrent of time that sweeps those in its path toward their destinies.

Periodically, Romeo and Juliet try to evade this celestial onslaught. As with every attempt to escape the stars' driving force, their hesitation is overwhelmed almost immediately and the lovers are once again swept up by the torrent of fastmoving passion. Stumbling across Juliet on her balcony, Romeo muses upon her beauty, proclaiming: "Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven, having some business, do entreat her eyes to twinkle in their spheres till they return. What if her eyes were there, they in her head?" Once again the stars become earthbound, bringing their fixed patterns and inexorable momentum with them. Juliet apparently senses this press of time, calling their sudden vows of love "too rash, too unadvis'd, too sudden." These misgivings are quickly overcome, however, by Romeo's arduous protestations of devotion, and the progress of the heavens and their love continues apace.

Romeo's and Juliet's marriage, the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt, the lovers' wedding night and subsequent parting, and Capulet's decision to many Juliet to Paris all follow with lightning speed. Running out of time and in desperation, Juliet agrees to Friar Lawrence's drastic plan. When she feigns repentance for her refusal to marry Paris, Capulet is so overjoyed that he moves the wedding up by yet another day. Human agents take over for the heavens in moving the clock forward, and the lost time undermines the lovers' last chances for happiness. The letter fails to reach Romeo in time. Juliet awakens moments too late, and is forced to act when she hears the night watchman approaching, plunging the dagger into her breast after the briefest of goodbyes. Indeed, only after the lovers have tragically ended their desperate race against time does the cosmos relent, when "the sun for sorrow will not show his head".

Humanity plays its part in forwarding the celestial timeline, and any assertions of individual will or hesitation are necessarily carried before the press of time. Try as they may, Romeo and Juliet cannot escape the play's astral momentum. They choose to love one another, yet arguably not at the &antic pace set for them. Friar Lawrence intervenes with one solution after another, yet each time his plans are thwarted by unforeseen events. This complex relationship between choice and destiny, frequently identified as the central paradox of the play, reveals Shakespeare's craftsmanship as an artist as well as his sensitivity to the political climate of his day, where Protestants and Catholics were warring with each other over this very issue. Indeed, the exercise of individual will against external forces remains a compelling issue for us today, even if those meddling forces have become more social than celestial.

As Brian Gibbons notes, "Romeo and Juliet is a drama in which speed is the medium of fate." The heavenly bodies and their fatal momentum have fallen to earth, sweeping Romeo, Juliet and all the Friar's plans into a torrent that must end in tragedy. The lightning speed of these events allows us to pity rather than judge the lovers, and to appreciate the prophetic irony of Friar Lawrence's warning: 'Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast." Herein lies the pathos and the greatness of this play: Romeo and Juliet have no choice but to run.

Troilus, the youngest son of King Priam, is enamored with the Trojan woman, Cressida. Through her Uncle Pandarus, Troilus arranges a tryst with Cressida. Meanwhile, to relieve the monotony of the stalemate, Troilus' older brother Hector challenges the Greeks to find a champion who will fight him in single combat. Thersites, a "scurvy, railing knave," assails everyone he encounters-both Greek and Trojan alike. In the Greek camp there is great dissension. Achilles, the great Greek warrior, is dissatisfied with his commanders and refuses to obey orders, preferring to stay in his tent with his friend Patroclus. To teach Achilles a lesson, his superiors plan to have Ajax, a junior commander, replace him and take up Hector's challenge.

Troilus and Cressida meet for their rendezvous and swear everlasting love. However, after one brief night together, Cressida is taken away from Troilus and' sent to the Greek camp in exchange for a Trojan prisoner. Despite her vows to Troilus, she quickly accepts the attentions of Diomedes, a young Greek officer.

Ajax meets Hector's challenge. After a friendly match, they go to a feast with Achilles, who insults Hector. When the war is resumed, Hector and Troilus go into battle. Hector is deter-mined to avenge his honor by killing Achilles; Troilus, disillusioned by Cressida's faithlessness, vows to kill Diomedes. When Achilles kills Hector, Troilus is left alive, unavenged and embittered, scorning the go between Pandarus, whose vitriol concludes the play.

The play's structure relies on a series of juxtapositions. Shakespeare depicts an ideal and then immediately undercuts the sanctity of that ideal by showing us how word and deed do not always agree. For example, in the opening of Troilus and Cressida, Thersites announces the play is about impassioned heroism, but in the first scene we discover Troilus has no interest in fighting whatsoever: "Call here my varlet, I'll unarm again." At the end of the same scene, Troilus contradicts himself when he tells Aeneas he's ready to "join the sport abroad" and the two leave to do battle. Is Troilus really motivated to fight now, or is he only trying to appear valiant?

In Act 2, Hector argues for an end to the Trojan War because Helen is not a worthy prize. However, by the end of the scene he has changed his mind: "I incline to you in resolution to keep Helen still." After having argued for a truce and then resigning himself to war, Hector reveals he has already sent a message to the Greeks, challenging one of their men to a duel. Was his original appeal to end the war just empty rhetoric? Does he sense the futility of stemming the tide of war? Has his appetite for bloodshed waned, or is it increasing?

One, of the play's most memorable speeches that has sparked endless debate occurs in Act 1. Ulysses' speech on Degree sums up what many believe to be the Elizabethan worldview. Ulysses warns anarchy will prevail if hierarchical authority is undermined. Nevertheless, he contradicts himself only a few lines later when, in consultation with Nestor, he makes plans to belittle Achilles by glorifying Ajax-a man less qualified and of lower rank than Achilles. What does Shakespeare want us to think about Ulysses? Does he really value a system based on loyalty to a hierarchical order? Or is his loyalty open to question? The irony of Cressida's faithlessness reverberates throughout the play. After spending one night of bliss with Troilus and pledging her fidelity, she's whisked away to the Greek camp and within a few moments is seen kissing all the Greek soldiers. How does Shakespeare want us to read her betrayal? Is it a calculated response to impossible circumstances or the fickleness of infatuation?

With this "problem play," Shakespeare tackles the murky waters of an uncertain, ambiguous world: how to reconcile the ideal and the real; word and deed; virtue and vice. The play speaks to our minds and engages our hearts. Nonetheless, it's more than just a It problem play." It's a modem play. Troilus and Cressida exhibits an existential outlook-an attitude that may surprise and challenge us, and ultimately reveal to us that our own sensibility, after two world wars and countless wars in between, is not so very different after all.

However, just as they are preparing to entertain Dorimene, Cleonte and his scheming servant Covielle make plans of their own. Together, the two prepare an outlandish and fantastic strategy designed to trick Jourdain into allowing the young lovers to marry.

First performed in 1670, Moliére's play has since gained the distinction of being a primary example of the genre known as the comedy-ballet. This particular theatrical genre was created by Moliere himself in collaboration with court composer Jean Baptiste Lully, and it consists of a blend of music, song, dance, spectacle, fantasy and comedy organized to illustrate a unified dramatic idea.

In The Would-Be Gentleman, Moliere uses all these elements to explore the humorous consequences that can occur when Jourdain's irrational desire is taken to its most unexpected extremes.

The title of The Would-Be Gentleman, however, suggests an impossibility. In 17th-century France, members of the nobility were traditionally considered to be socially, economically and morally superior to all other classes. By the middle of the century, however, the majority of French wealth was in the hands of the growing middle class, and the aristocracy had become virtually impoverished. This situation allowed for a considerable degree of social mobility where previously there had been none. Accordingly, Jourdain longs to ascend the social ladder, despite the fact that it is impossible for him to ever attain the title "gentleman," which was confer-red only upon those who were born into a noble family.

Jourdain is blind to the impossibility of achieving his desire because he is overwhelmingly attracted to his ideal of what the aristocracy should be. For him, the nobility represents beauty, quality, refinement, elegance, dignity and romance-all things he cannot experience in his own home, where his wife nags at him for his foolish behavior and his servants laugh at him to his face. Throughout the play, however, Moliere constantly challenges his audiences to question whether or not Jourdain's idealistic view of the aristocracy coincides with reality, and whether or not these values can be purchased.

In The Would-Be Gentleman we can recognize many elements that characterize our own society today, such as voracious consumerism and the potential and promise of social mobility. Monsieur Jourdain is convinced if he can acquire all the things a man of good taste would have in his possession, he'll instantly obtain the status of gentleman. While Jourdain is clearly the primary target of laughter in this comedy, truly no one is spared. Ultimately, through his characters' desires for social approbation, Moliére pokes fun at both the middle class, who dream of social ascendancy at all costs, and the impoverished nobility, whose outward appearance of dignity thinly conceals a core of dishonesty, desperation and manipulation.

Antipholus of Syracuse arrives in the Moroccan city with his servant, Dromio. The travelers are taken for their twins, who live in Marrakesh. The local twins are also master and servant, and have the same names as their visiting brothers. Wife of the resident Antipholus, Adriana demands that Antipholus of Syracuse join her for dinner, leaving her husband and his Dromio out in the street. Once inside, the Syracusan Dromio rejects Nell’s advances while his master falls for Adriana’s sister, Luciana.

Antipholus of Syracuse decides to remain in this enchanted place after Angelo presents him with a gold necklace intended for his brother. When the Moroccan Antipholus refuses to pay for the chain, a scuffle ensues: he is arrested, accused of madness by his courtesan, exorcised by Dr. Pinch and hauled away with his Dromio. Adriana, spotting Antipholus of Syracuse, calls for the capture of her escaped “husband” who flees with his Dromio to the safety of a priory. As the Abbess emerges from the building with those she sheltered, the Duke arrives prepared to execute sentence on Egeon.

While most of us struggle with or boldly assert a sense of individuality, identical twins rarely see themselves as independent entities. There is an inexplicable bond between twins, an intimacy they enjoy, a oneness that can span space and time. Even when separated early in life, as the Antipholi and the Dromios are in The Comedy of Errors, twins can grow up with uncanny similarities. One study in Minnesota reunited separated twins, many for the first time, and revealed some amazing concurrences. Jim Lewis and Jim Springer had been separated when a month old. Both were raised in Ohio and were named Jim by their respective families. Both had been twice married, the first time to a Linda, the second time to a woman named Betty. Both named their oldest son James Allan. Both men vacationed at the same St. Petersburg beach every year. Both drove Chevies, chain-smoked Salem cigarettes, drank Miller Lite beer and were avid woodworkers. The resemblances were as stunning for set after set of separated twins, a phenomenon examined in Peter Watson’s book Twins.

If one of the twins is lost at birth, the surviving twin may grow up with an inexplicable sense of the most profound loss. It is a state unknown to non-twins, but Shakespeare intuitively captures the loss of self that lone twins experience. New to Marrakesh after a long search for his brother, Antipolus of Syracuse says: “So I, to find a mother and a brother, in quest of them, unhappy, lose myself” and considers the impossibility of his task as being like a drop of water trying to find another specific drop in the ocean. Finding oneself, one’s true self, is often the subject of Shakespeare’s comedies, but it is especially so for the twins in The Comedy of Errors, where finding oneself is not just a matter of self-knowledge but also a completion of self, a union, at last a wholeness.

Shakespeare borrows his basic plot from The Menaechmi, written by a Roman, Plautus, in the second century BC. To this, he adds a second set of twins, doubling the fun and highlighting questions of personal identity. In the rural England of Shakespeare’s forefathers, one was what one’s parents had been, fixed to a particular geographic location and bound by law or custom to a particular lord. As feudalism dissolved in the Tudor and Stuart eras, this system of personal definition unraveled. Identity became more fluid and mobile, no longer bound to place or caste or moniker. Egeon describes his sons in their infancy, saying “the one so like the other as could not be distinguished but by names.” Even so, we come to know each twin as quite different from his sibling. The sprightly Dromio of Marrakesh is fluent and clever in his command of language. His simpler brother is more dependent on puns and well-worn proverbs. The former is promised to the hefty Nell while the latter finds her frightening. Egeon’s sons also display different tendencies in love. Antipholus of Marrakesh is married to the fiery Adriana.

His sibling prefers gentle Luciana whom he woos with an eloquence not displayed by her brother-in-law. Enmeshed in the same confusions as his twin, this visitor becomes dismayed and despondent. His brother is more robust, showing a willingness to break down doors to set things right in his world. Shakespeare invites us to look beyond the surface aspects of name and appearance to find the twins’ individual identities in their differences.

While adding these complexities to the original plot of The Menaechmi, Shakespeare tempers Plautus’ coarse humor. Minimizing the importance of the courtesan, the Bard molds an entertainment for the entire family. His text is also laced with references to the Bible, which had become more widely available than ever before.

The play struck chords in Shakespeare’s England, a country in the midst of expansion and upheaval. Antipholus’ and Dromio’s questioning of identity in a strange land resembles the colonial search for a new identity in a quickly changing world. Four hundred years later we hear echoes of our own search for redefinition and self-discovery.

The King’s ally Hotspur (a nickname for Harry Percy) arrives, having taken several Scottish rebels prisoner, but refuses to surrender them to the King. In turn, the King offends Hotspur by refusing to ransom his kinsman, Mortimer, because Mortimer has married the daughter of Welsh rebel Owen Glendower. The Percy Family, influential in bringing Henry IV to the throne, turns against him and becomes a military partner with Glendower’s Welsh raiders and Douglas’s Scottish forces.

Falstaff leads the highway robbery of men carrying the King’s money. Disguised, Hal and Poins dupe Falstaff, thieving from him the freshly-stolen booty. But the impending war ends the revels and the tavern crowd is called into action. Hal promises his father that he will reform his behavior, pledging to destroy his rival Hotspur.

As the rebel forces mobilize, Hotspur and Mortimer pause from their preparations to bid a tender farewell to their wives. The rebel cause is weakened by the absence of Hotspur’s father, the Earl of Northumberland, and his army. The King’s final offer to negotiate peace is rejected and the play concludes with a ferocious battle between the loyal and rebel forces.

For Shakespeare’s audience stability was also tenuous. True, by the time he wrote his stirring chronicle history plays Elizabeth was established in her reign. But only at cost. First she had to cope with the threat posed by Mary and her Catholic allies. Then, early in the 1590s, she had to deal with an armed rebellion led by her former favorite, the Earl of Essex. His execution was exemplary, but not singular. Indeed, throughout her reign Elizabeth was constantly forced to wield the iron hand in the velvet glove, and often imposed deadly force against traitors and rebels. As a consequence a well-founded fear of potential political, religious and social chaos was a constant in the Elizabethan consciousness.

Little wonder, then, that Londoners thronged to see chronicle history plays. Drums and banners, stirring rhetoric and ferocious armed combat, strongly drawn heroes and villains, and historic events brought to life certainly made for thrilling entertainment. But perhaps more importantly, chronicle history plays proclaimed a powerful and reassuring message: The center will hold.

Of course this triumphalist theme buttressed the Tudor monarchy and in that sense could be termed propaganda. However, these plays repeatedly demonstrated the self-defeating flaws inherent in the motives and abilities of those who sought to overthrow established order. They also offered powerful examplars of that order, kings and princes whose weaknesses were complexly human but whose strengths were undeniable. This dymanic core of human interactions enlivens the political message, and the chronicle history play becomes much more than propaganda. At its best it provides a potently human antidote to the underlying anxiety of the age.

Perhaps this helps explain the enduring power of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One and Henry IV, Part Two, and why they resonate so strongly for the contemporary American audience. Individually and as a linked sequence they present us with a vivid theatrical representation of the ever present dangers posed by self-righteousness, irrationality and licentiousness. Masks for selfishness, these powerful threats to the balanced center, to lex publica, are here represented by Renaissance figures. It takes little imagination, however, to see their counterparts in our own society, nor to see the potential damage they might inflict.

Consider two rebels, Worcester and Archbishop Scroop. Both take absolutist positions, the one based on political principles, the other on religious grounds. Unwilling to accept any accomodation or compromise, they are motivated only by a selfish desire for power, in spite of their protestations to the contrary. Shakespeare ensures that we see them as the narrow partisans they are by contrasting them with King Henry, a man who holds power firmly but is also racked with conscience for his overthrow of Richard II and desperate over his seemingly dissolute son. No such feelings sway Worcester and Scroop, convinced only of their righteousness as they drive the country to war, not unlike some dangerous leaders in our own times.

Look too at Hotspur, Douglas, and Glendower, men appealing in their singularity but frightening in their inability to behave rationally. All emotion and impulse, constantly flaring into rage, they bring brute force into the civilized arena. We need not look too far afield to see their like.

And Falstaff, perhaps the most dangerous of all. For the tides of politics and war will deal with the Worcesters, Scroops, and Hotspurs. But Falstaff, leader of the forces of license and libido, is hugely attractive and harder to extirpate. Grossly given to carnal pleasures he is committed entirely to the pleasure principle, and employs the strength and wits of a man to satisfy the appetites of the child. As he has Prince Hal in his thrall at the beginning of Henry IV, Part One, Falstaff must be seen as the greatest threat to the kingdom, the rot within.

Shakespeare makes Hal’s development and eventual break from Falstaff the major action in these two plays. Political ideologues, religious zealots, and passionate wild men can be contained. But there is no future if the young are corrupted by amorality. For us, as for the Elizabethan audience, the tension holds till the end of Henry IV, Part Two when Hal rejects Falstaff. Only then do we see the promise fulfilled, only then are our fears set aside.

Henry IV was a usurper by the laws of primogeniture (the medieval custom by which land and title went to the first born son in order to keep a family’s wealth intact). Child of the fourth son of King Edward III, he took the crown from Richard II, first born in a line of first borns. The rebels in Henry IV are claiming the throne for other descendents of Edward III, derived from his third son (see genealogical chart). So how could Henry V, son of a usurper, become one of the most popular kings in English history?

Stories of Prince Hal keeping wild company and later reforming date from his own time. Shakespeare transformed this anecdotal evidence into the epic tale of a prince torn between his real father, the king of the title, and a symbolic one, Falstaff. As Hal journeys from petty thief to hero and king, the country is fighting its way out of feudalism and the dark ages. Hal is the spiritual body of a country also struggling to define itself against the powerful forces of history.

Henry IV, Parts One and Two are unique plays about civil war because they contain so much comedy. Falstaff rules over a court of his own at the tavern, a court where drinking, prostitutes and tall tales are the protocol. For Hal, a boy in his late teens, Falstaff is irresistible. The old man offers him beer, camaraderie and the warm affection his father cannot spare as head of state. The character of Falstaff comes from a line of comic vice characters in medieval morality plays but he is more lovable than his predecessors, his influence harder to reject.

Hal understands that Falstaff is temptation. From the outset of the saga, he promises to throw off “this loose behavior.” He knows that he will have to play his part as Prince of Wales. Still, until he ascends the throne, the teen remains balanced cautiously between Falstaff and his less-present father.

The real Henry V was so popular that he offered fealty (the sworn support of regional dukedoms) before his coronation--an act unprecedented at the time. Shakespeare’s Hal becomes a popular leader because of his ability to empathize with commoners, knights and kings. His friendships up and down the social register create sympathies with a variety of dramatic characters. In the prince’s travels through society, the audience witnesses the effect of war on loving families and common people.

The Henry IV plays are a veritable tower of Babel, jumping from the rough slang of the tavern scenes, to a Welsh wife lovingly singing her husband to sleep, to the official language of the court. In most scenes, Hal is the link, the one character capable of traveling between these many worlds within one country. As he tells Poins, “I am so good a proficient in one quarter of an hour that I can drink with any tinker in his own language during my life.”

Shakespeare presents the audience with a cross-section of English society, not just the egos and ambitions of a king. By allowing Bardolph, Pistol and Falstaff to speak in their own language, he makes them men we have laughed with in a tavern, not just props in an adrenaline-filled combat scene or bodies sacrified to civil war.

Even the enemy rebels are humanized in the plays. They have a legitimate point of contention and, watching their tender farewells to wives and daughters, the audience is not allowed to demonize them. Because neither cause is incontrovertibly “right” the audience is left with a question: How justified is the civil war?

As always with Shakespeare, the meaning of a play cannot be reduced to simple moral judgment. The casualties of Henry IV, Parts One and Two--the lives and the friendships--are natural consequences of the growth to maturity that Hal and England both experience. It takes courage to grow in this way; we look to stories of great heroes and catastrophic wars for inspiration. Hal dares to realize his potential and, as we shall see in Henry V, that of his nation. What’s the harm, in the end? As Shallow, the country worker too poor to buy himself out of army conscription, observes, “A man can die but once. We owe God a death.”

Sidebar 1: Falstaff and the Tavern World

In Elizabethan England, taverns were the social center for a population of vagrants, thieves and poor day laborers. In the mid 1500s, changes to the way ale was brewed made it better tasting with a longer shelf life. Low start-up costs meant alehouses were a blossoming cottage industry as barns became bars. Taverns were home to unlicensed gambling, prostitution and the sale of stolen goods. Nowadays we consider our suburbs havens of green lawns and security, but not so in renaissance England. A short boat ride across the Thames took one from London to Southwark where Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre stood among bear-baiting arenas and cock-fighting pits; the trip was like a vacation from the law. Theatres were an inseparable part of the tavern culture. Some taphouses had a small stage and many theatre owners also owned brothels. Patrons gambled and professional prostitutes sold their wares during the show, and the pit was a workplace for cutpurses. Although Hal’s favorite tavern is located in London, it embodies the licentious life outside the city walls. Through Falstaff, Bardolph and Gadshill, Shakespeare gave the audience a place in the play they were watching, a place beside kings.

Sidebar 2 Henry IV: The Invisible King

By the time the Henry IV of history claimed the throne, he had been on one pilgrimage to the holy land, had led a crusade to East Prussia and had earned a reputation for being generous, musical and educated. So where is this charismatic Lancastrian in the plays? Instead of presenting us with a romantic hero, Shakespeare draws on the struggle Henry IV faced throughout his reign--to be accepted as the legitimate King. Henry IV’s troubled reign is part of Shakespeare’s examination of kingship in the Lancaster saga. He is the transitional link between the weak Richard II and his heroic son, Henry V. Through Henry IV Shakespeare also explores the performative nature of leadership. Henry aims for a rarified and holy image as king: “By being seldom seen, I could not stir but, like a comet, I was wondered at.” The real Henry may have had a reason for hiding his face: he suffered from eczema so severe that his contemporaries thought it leprosy, a divine punishment for usurping Richard’s throne. In the plays, the King’s public image is more scarred than his face. However worthy a leader Henry may have been, Shakespeare presents him as one who hides behind decoys on the battlefield, conceals himself from his followers and is surprisingly absent from the stage.

Disguised again, Hal and Poins start another ruse to fool Falstaff, but the game is interrupted by the call to war. As a knight, Falstaff is required to raise a battalion. Unfortunately, the only recruits he can find are rough country journeymen desperate not to fight.

At the rebel camp, the Archbishop of York announces that Northumberland has withdrawn his army to retire in Scotland. Broken by this news, the rebels accept the chance to negotiate peace offered by Hal’s younger brother, Prince John. As soon as the rebel armies are dispersed, John arrests the King’s enemies for treason, ending the internal threat against Henry IV.

The rebellion broken, the King has a greater concern--he is dying. He meets privately with Hal, and father and son at last reconcile. With the passing of Henry IV, Henry V is given a triumphant coronation, heralding a new era of healing and peace within the country.

For Shakespeare’s audience stability was also tenuous. True, by the time he wrote his stirring chronicle history plays Elizabeth was established in her reign. But only at cost. First she had to cope with the threat posed by Mary and her Catholic allies. Then, early in the 1590s, she had to deal with an armed rebellion led by her former favorite, the Earl of Essex. His execution was exemplary, but not singular. Indeed, throughout her reign Elizabeth was constantly forced to wield the iron hand in the velvet glove, and often imposed deadly force against traitors and rebels. As a consequence a well-founded fear of potential political, religious and social chaos was a constant in the Elizabethan consciousness.

Little wonder, then, that Londoners thronged to see chronicle history plays. Drums and banners, stirring rhetoric and ferocious armed combat, strongly drawn heroes and villains, and historic events brought to life certainly made for thrilling entertainment. But perhaps more importantly, chronicle history plays proclaimed a powerful and reassuring message: The center will hold.

Of course this triumphalist theme buttressed the Tudor monarchy and in that sense could be termed propaganda. However, these plays repeatedly demonstrated the self-defeating flaws inherent in the motives and abilities of those who sought to overthrow established order. They also offered powerful examplars of that order, kings and princes whose weaknesses were complexly human but whose strengths were undeniable. This dymanic core of human interactions enlivens the political message, and the chronicle history play becomes much more than propaganda. At its best it provides a potently human antidote to the underlying anxiety of the age.

Perhaps this helps explain the enduring power of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One and Henry IV, Part Two, and why they resonate so strongly for the contemporary American audience. Individually and as a linked sequence they present us with a vivid theatrical representation of the ever present dangers posed by self-righteousness, irrationality and licentiousness. Masks for selfishness, these powerful threats to the balanced center, to lex publica, are here represented by Renaissance figures. It takes little imagination, however, to see their counterparts in our own society, nor to see the potential damage they might inflict.

Consider two rebels, Worcester and Archbishop Scroop. Both take absolutist positions, the one based on political principles, the other on religious grounds. Unwilling to accept any accomodation or compromise, they are motivated only by a selfish desire for power, in spite of their protestations to the contrary. Shakespeare ensures that we see them as the narrow partisans they are by contrasting them with King Henry, a man who holds power firmly but is also racked with conscience for his overthrow of Richard II and desperate over his seemingly dissolute son. No such feelings sway Worcester and Scroop, convinced only of their righteousness as they drive the country to war, not unlike some dangerous leaders in our own times.

Look too at Hotspur, Douglas, and Glendower, men appealing in their singularity but frightening in their inability to behave rationally. All emotion and impulse, constantly flaring into rage, they bring brute force into the civilized arena. We need not look too far afield to see their like.

And Falstaff, perhaps the most dangerous of all. For the tides of politics and war will deal with the Worcesters, Scroops, and Hotspurs. But Falstaff, leader of the forces of license and libido, is hugely attractive and harder to extirpate. Grossly given to carnal pleasures he is committed entirely to the pleasure principle, and employs the strength and wits of a man to satisfy the appetites of the child. As he has Prince Hal in his thrall at the beginning of Henry IV, Part One, Falstaff must be seen as the greatest threat to the kingdom, the rot within.

Shakespeare makes Hal’s development and eventual break from Falstaff the major action in these two plays. Political ideologues, religious zealots, and passionate wild men can be contained. But there is no future if the young are corrupted by amorality. For us, as for the Elizabethan audience, the tension holds till the end of Henry IV, Part Two when Hal rejects Falstaff. Only then do we see the promise fulfilled, only then are our fears set aside.

Henry IV was a usurper by the laws of primogeniture (the medieval custom by which land and title went to the first born son in order to keep a family’s wealth intact). Child of the fourth son of King Edward III, he took the crown from Richard II, first born in a line of first borns. The rebels in Henry IV are claiming the throne for other descendents of Edward III, derived from his third son (see genealogical chart). So how could Henry V, son of a usurper, become one of the most popular kings in English history?

Stories of Prince Hal keeping wild company and later reforming date from his own time. Shakespeare transformed this anecdotal evidence into the epic tale of a prince torn between his real father, the king of the title, and a symbolic one, Falstaff. As Hal journeys from petty thief to hero and king, the country is fighting its way out of feudalism and the dark ages. Hal is the spiritual body of a country also struggling to define itself against the powerful forces of history.

Henry IV, Parts One and Two are unique plays about civil war because they contain so much comedy. Falstaff rules over a court of his own at the tavern, a court where drinking, prostitutes and tall tales are the protocol. For Hal, a boy in his late teens, Falstaff is irresistible. The old man offers him beer, camaraderie and the warm affection his father cannot spare as head of state. The character of Falstaff comes from a line of comic vice characters in medieval morality plays but he is more lovable than his predecessors, his influence harder to reject.

Hal understands that Falstaff is temptation. From the outset of the saga, he promises to throw off “this loose behavior.” He knows that he will have to play his part as Prince of Wales. Still, until he ascends the throne, the teen remains balanced cautiously between Falstaff and his less-present father.

The real Henry V was so popular that he offered fealty (the sworn support of regional dukedoms) before his coronation--an act unprecedented at the time. Shakespeare’s Hal becomes a popular leader because of his ability to empathize with commoners, knights and kings. His friendships up and down the social register create sympathies with a variety of dramatic characters. In the prince’s travels through society, the audience witnesses the effect of war on loving families and common people.

The Henry IV plays are a veritable tower of Babel, jumping from the rough slang of the tavern scenes, to a Welsh wife lovingly singing her husband to sleep, to the official language of the court. In most scenes, Hal is the link, the one character capable of traveling between these many worlds within one country. As he tells Poins, “I am so good a proficient in one quarter of an hour that I can drink with any tinker in his own language during my life.”

Shakespeare presents the audience with a cross-section of English society, not just the egos and ambitions of a king. By allowing Bardolph, Pistol and Falstaff to speak in their own language, he makes them men we have laughed with in a tavern, not just props in an adrenaline-filled combat scene or bodies sacrified to civil war.

Even the enemy rebels are humanized in the plays. They have a legitimate point of contention and, watching their tender farewells to wives and daughters, the audience is not allowed to demonize them. Because neither cause is incontrovertibly “right” the audience is left with a question: How justified is the civil war?

As always with Shakespeare, the meaning of a play cannot be reduced to simple moral judgment. The casualties of Henry IV, Parts One and Two--the lives and the friendships--are natural consequences of the growth to maturity that Hal and England both experience. It takes courage to grow in this way; we look to stories of great heroes and catastrophic wars for inspiration. Hal dares to realize his potential and, as we shall see in Henry V, that of his nation. What’s the harm, in the end? As Shallow, the country worker too poor to buy himself out of army conscription, observes, “A man can die but once. We owe God a death.”

Sidebar 1: Falstaff and the Tavern World

In Elizabethan England, taverns were the social center for a population of vagrants, thieves and poor day laborers. In the mid 1500s, changes to the way ale was brewed made it better tasting with a longer shelf life. Low start-up costs meant alehouses were a blossoming cottage industry as barns became bars. Taverns were home to unlicensed gambling, prostitution and the sale of stolen goods. Nowadays we consider our suburbs havens of green lawns and security, but not so in renaissance England. A short boat ride across the Thames took one from London to Southwark where Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre stood among bear-baiting arenas and cock-fighting pits; the trip was like a vacation from the law. Theatres were an inseparable part of the tavern culture. Some taphouses had a small stage and many theatre owners also owned brothels. Patrons gambled and professional prostitutes sold their wares during the show, and the pit was a workplace for cutpurses. Although Hal’s favorite tavern is located in London, it embodies the licentious life outside the city walls. Through Falstaff, Bardolph and Gadshill, Shakespeare gave the audience a place in the play they were watching, a place beside kings.

Sidebar 2 Henry IV: The Invisible King

By the time the Henry IV of history claimed the throne, he had been on one pilgrimage to the holy land, had led a crusade to East Prussia and had earned a reputation for being generous, musical and educated. So where is this charismatic Lancastrian in the plays? Instead of presenting us with a romantic hero, Shakespeare draws on the struggle Henry IV faced throughout his reign--to be accepted as the legitimate King. Henry IV’s troubled reign is part of Shakespeare’s examination of kingship in the Lancaster saga. He is the transitional link between the weak Richard II and his heroic son, Henry V. Through Henry IV Shakespeare also explores the performative nature of leadership. Henry aims for a rarified and holy image as king: “By being seldom seen, I could not stir but, like a comet, I was wondered at.” The real Henry may have had a reason for hiding his face: he suffered from eczema so severe that his contemporaries thought it leprosy, a divine punishment for usurping Richard’s throne. In the plays, the King’s public image is more scarred than his face. However worthy a leader Henry may have been, Shakespeare presents him as one who hides behind decoys on the battlefield, conceals himself from his followers and is surprisingly absent from the stage.

Meanwhile, young Anne Page has attracted the amorous attentions of Doctor Caius, Slender and Fenton. She wants to wed the latter but her mother favors Caius and her father Slender. Each suitor hires Mistress Quickly to advance his cause for matrimony. Caius challenges Hugh Evans, one of Slender’s supporters, to a duel but the Host leads the antagonists astray until they are reconciled.

Mistress Ford lures Falstaff to her home where, just as he is pressing his charms, Mistress Page bursts in with the news of Master Ford’s approach. Frightened, the fat seducer hides and is indecorously disposed of. The women entice the gullible Falstaff to return again with similar result: Master Ford enters in a rage and the bumbling wooer escapes at the expense of his pride and comfort.

The Mistresses finally inform their husbands of Falstaff’s lechery and together they hatch a plot to teach him a lesson that collides with the Pages’ attempts to marry off Anne and her scheme to elope with Fenton.

The place and time evoked for me was San Francisco circa 1852, a few years after gold was discovered in California in 1848. The physical world of San Francisco in the years following “gold fever” included deserted ships rotting at anchor in the Bay, tent homes along the hills and constant landfilling to claim territory from the sea. Opportunities of this period brought wealth to merchants with the foresight to become provisioners to would-be miners, introduced tens of thousands of foreign nationals to California, and produced lawless taverns housing down-on-their-luck “49ers.” Circa 1852 the Fords and Pages embody the well-to-do merchant class, the Doctor, Parson and the Justice represent the foreigners and opportunists, and Falstaff and his cronies move from being Shakespeare’s socially-reduced “knights” to penniless 49ers who are left without means of passage home. The social atmosphere and actions producing guileless, though at times borderline disastrous, fun at one another’s expense suggested to me that Shakespeare’s Merry Wives’ world had a “sister” period in the mid-1850s California Gold Rush.

One aspect of Merry Wives that I find distinctly different from other Shakespeare texts is that the “merry wives” are the puppeteers of the action. They make fools of the men at almost every turn. While in other of Shakespeare’s plays women and men go head-to-head, in no other text do women drive the action so completely. Even Falstaff, the “wit,” is out-witted by two women who seek to prove that they can be merry as well as virtuous. Interestingly, women of this production’s period forged their own “gold rush” by being extraordinarily direct about personal ambitions. Some were direct enough to take out newspaper ads that read curiously like contemporary personal ads, complete with details as to what favors will be given to share in a mining claim producing X amount of gold per week. Western women of this American period were also extremely liberal and self-sufficient in their merrymaking, as were the miners often starved for female attention. In short, open and playful expressions of lust, ambition and community frolic characterize both Shakespeare's time and 1852 California.

In this unique version of Merry Wives I trust that the comic results of Falstaff’s love-schemes, the wives’ playful vengeance, and the clashing ignorance and laughable intellect of all of the characters will produce a happy evening for you.

Shakespeare wrote Merry Wives of Windsor around 1600 at the request of Queen Elizabeth who wanted to see Falstaff in love. This character was popular at the time, having appeared previously in the Henry IV plays as the irreverent master of a rollicking tavern world. The Falstaff of Merry Wives, however, is different. Rather than the joke-maker, he is continually the butt of everyone’s jokes, the catalyst that triggers the play’s humor.

An “out-of-towner” down on his luck, Falstaff conceives a plan to get his hands on some much needed cash at the expense of two local couples, the Pages and the Fords. He contrives to woo the women and gain access to their husbands’ purses, thereby setting the main plot in motion. However, he quickly finds himself at the mercy of his own scheme. His faithful followers, Pistol and Nym, less than reputable individuals themselves, refuse to be parties to his “base humor” and betray him to the potential cuckolds. Deserted by his cronies, Falstaff faces the witty Mistresses’ plans for teaching him a lesson alone. They employ the town busybody, Mistress Quickly, to twice entice him into viciously humorous scenarios planned at his expense. In addition, he is duped into thinking he has an ally in the disguised and jealous Master Ford. And he proves to be gullible yet a third time when he is drawn into the joke of the final scene of the play.

Falstaff’s deluded sense of himself as a trickster and a lover causes him continually to fall victim to others’ plots. An aging man who by his own admission is “in the waist two yards about,” he fancies himself to be quite a romantic catch. Broke and without allies, he seems destined foolishly to continue to be putty in the hands of the clever wives. The result is a play in which the women have the upper hand. Mistresses Page and Ford are more amused than appalled by the idea of being seduced by a fat lover “well-nigh worn to pieces” with age, and it is with an eye toward “entertainment” that they turn the tables on him. Woe to the man who ever tries to seduce them again! No match for these virtuous yet fun-loving women, the would-be seducer learns the painful lesson that he cannot control the people of middle class Windsor as he could the rowdies of his carefree tavern days.

The wives and provincial Windsor prove resolute in the face of the conniving trickster from out of town. This Falstaff lacks the control and assurance he is so well known for in the Henry IV plays. Merry Wives is a comedy replete with farcical elements fashioned at the expense of his physical comfort. From beginning to end, Falstaff proves to be a clumsy, silly figure hopelessly caught up in the alien, witty world of Windsor.

In Arden, where Jaques savors his melancholy, the banished Duke prepares a banquet. Orlando interrupts, demanding food for his old servant Adam, and the Duke invites them to join in the meal. Meanwhile, Rosalind and her company settle down to lives as shepherds when Celia discovers Orlando's love letters to Rosalind posted on trees. Rosalind (as Ganymede) agrees to "cure" Orlando of his love by having him woo her. A shepherdess, Phebe, falls for the disguised Rosalind while being pursued by the shepherd Silvius. Touchstone falls in love with Audrey the Goat-herder and has trouble waiting for a minister to marry them.

Oliver, ordered by the Duke to find Orlando, is saved by his brother, repents his former jealousy, and falls for Celia. In love with Orlando, pursued by Phebe, and trying to relinquish her role as a man, Rosalind conspires with a surprise visitor to show what love truly means.