Brush Up Your Shakespeare

It is fitting that St. George’s Day, England’s national day, should coincide with the birthday of William Shakespeare, Britain’s greatest cultural icon. Despite his surviving works’ totalling fewer than a million words – making the whole kit and caboodle only three-quarters the length of Proust’s tome – they are the pillars of the language and the canon. People the world over read, perform, watch and listen to Shakespeare’s works every day. The World Shakespeare Festival was the crown jewel in last year’s Cultural Olympiad, which brought together polyglot performers and technicians from around the globe (pun intended) to celebrate the “Greatest Show on Earth” with a comprehensive programme of the greatestshows on earth. No other national culture can boast in a single writer the breadth of Shakespeare’s imagination. No other oeuvre contains such seeming-infinite variety. How does one begin to celebrate the birthday of such a figure?

New York, typically, is going all out. Yesterday I was lucky enough to attend the finals of the English-Speaking Union’s National Shakespeare Competition at Lincoln Center. The English-Speaking Union’s annual nationwide search for high-school Streeps and Pacinos in the making is a fantastic example of how the words of the Bard are being kept alive across the US. In 59 local branches from Providence to Palm Springs and Toledo to Tucson, 16,000 high-school students competed to reach the semi-finals here in New York. 59 performers became 10, and I was privileged to see those finalists perform a selection of sonnets and speeches from plays as varied as King John, Measure for Measure, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Antony and Cleopatra. The standard was extremely high, and the enthusiasm of the performers for bringing Shakespeare’s language to life inspiring. Our Consul General, Danny Lopez, presented certificates to all the participants and spoke of the significant contribution Shakespeare had made to world culture, not least to Hollywood – without the Bard, argued the Consul General, there would be no West Side Story, no Lion King… and no Gnomeo and Juliet. New York Times Company CEO Mark Thompson was also on hand to recall his childhood in Stratford-upon-Avon (with its dry-cleaning store “Out, out, damn spot”…) and to read a proclamation from the desk of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who declared it William Shakespeare Day in recognition of the significance of the competition. First-prize winner Xavier Pacheco, who proved a splendidly rakish Benedick, was granted a well-earned place in a summer school at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.

Today, at the Bandshell in Central Park, is the third annual Sonnet Slam, a lively presentation of the complete cycle of Shakespeare’s 14-liners. 154 performers will gather and recite the poems as a kind of thanksgiving offering, as well as a splendid poetic gift to park-goers enjoying this fine spring day. You will be able to catch Deputy Consul General Nick Astbury in a performance of Sonnet 70 if you watch carefully! In a related project, the New York Shakespeare Exchange is filming all the sonnets over the next year, with a cast that includes Joanna Gleason and Chris Sarandon, after successfully raising nearly $50,000 on Kickstarter.

One of the performers at today’s Sonnet Slam is Adjoa Andoh, a British actress currently featuring in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Julius Caesar at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (and a judge in the National Shakespeare Competition finals yesterday). It’s the eighth time the RSC has performed at BAM in the last 40-odd years (the most recent production being Sir Ian McKellen’s now legendary King Lear in 2007), and it’s a thrillingly contemporary take on the old Roman tragedy, set in present-day Africa. New York, of course, has a great tradition of innovative Shakespearean productions dating back to the 19^th century and including Orson Welles’ own Caesar in the 1930s, set in a modern fascist state. The fecundity of Shakespeare’s language and the universality of the plays’ situations prepare the ground for such reinterpretations and ensure that they will be performed for centuries to come.

And what better gift than longevity on one’s 449^th birthday?