Jaques, the melancholy courtier in the Duke Senior’s entourage of As You Like It, has been called the most enigmatic character in Shakespeare. As Glenn Havlan, the actor playing Jaques in Marin Shakespeare’s production of As You Like It, explains, “Jaques is even more enigmatic than Hamlet.” Glenn and I sat down one evening a couple of…
Sunday night was Closing Night for Marin Shakespeare’s 2014 production of As You Like It. I was there with about a dozen friends and students. Part of my responsibility as dramaturg, I have decided, is to bring as many people to the shows as I can, especially those who have never attended a Shakespeare play. I…
Banquo asks this of the Three Witches at the beginning of Macbeth: “If you can look into the seeds of time, And say which grain will grow and which will not, then speak to me . . .” (1.3.152) If today we were to run into Weird Sisters, say in the parking lot of Whole Foods,…
“The Arden Forest is like all Shakespeare forests, except that it is possibly more amazing, as if it contained, repeated or foretold them all. Shakespearean forests are real and enchanted, tragic and grotesque; pathetic and lyrical scenes are performed in them . . . The Forest of Arden [is] the most English of all Shakespearean…
Before we spend time in the green and pleasant place that is the Forest of Arden in As You Like It, I – like Jaques, perversely insisting on the bitter in the midst of sweet – would like to make a case for the literary forest as a study in chiaroscuro, a place where shade contrasts…
Touchstone: “For here we have no temple but the wood, no assembly but horn-beasts.” (3.3.40-41) On Tuesday, June 10, the Marin Shakespeare Company held the first rehearsal for its 25th Anniversary production of As You Like It. All the rehearsals, I’m learning, have a kind of magic to them, but I especially like the first.…
“Desert” is a shortened form of “deserted,” that is, uninhabited. But history suggests that a completely uninhabited island is like a vacuum, a “gap in nature,” as Shakespeare says elsewhere, that is, a natural impossibility. The action of The Tempest is confined to an unnamed “desert island” (2.1.35) somewhere in the Mediterranean. The shipwrecked character who calls…
This Fall the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. held an exhibit of a single printed copy of the Complete Works of Shakespeare. The Folger’s world-renowned collection includes 79 copies of the First Folio, the 1623 edition of Shakespeare’s Collected Works. You might expect this exhibition to have displayed a rare Folio – one with…
Cathleen Sheehan is a writer, lecturer and teacher who teaches Shakespeare and Advanced Shakespeare (among other courses) at the Urban School in San Francisco. She has served as a dramaturg for Marin Shakespeare for the past four years, and also as a dramaturg for California Shakespeare Theater. She holds an AB and MA in English…
