New World Shakespeare: Contemporary Theatre from a Classical Master

  Part of Hamlet’s tragedy is that he knows what play he’s in. An expert of theatrical convention and an avid student of the dramatic arts, Hamlet—the would-be playwright and actor—is keenly aware of how this is all going to end, particularly if he sets the plot in motion. But Hamlet is actually a lover of life, even in his current state of melancholy. He doesn’t want to die. If Hamlet were in Othello’s play and vice versa, things might have ended up differently for both of them. The delay Hamlet creates is part of his vast knowledge and brilliant mind, but he is also too cognizant to see his story ending any other way. Just as Hamlet suspected the plot against him set to be carried out by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he almost definitely suspects that Claudius will make an attempt again. He goes into the final act with calm, steady resolve, partially because of what he doesn’t know, but partially because he knows more than any of us. Hamlet’s mind is too great for this world and ...

  Montaigne advised us not to bother to prepare for dying, because we would know well enough how to do it when the time came. Pragmatically, that is Hamlet's stance. Silence is the salient aspect of what is coming for all of us, and Hamlet has been anything but a silent protagonist. What can the world do with a silent Hamlet? For Hamlet, silence is annihilation. Hamlet's wake, his name, has not been wounded but wondrous: Ibsen and Chekhov, Pirandello and Beckett have rewritten him, and so have the novelists Goethe, Scott, Dickens, Melville, and Joyce. Playwrights and novelists will be compelled to continue revising Hamlet, for reasons that I suspect have more to do with our horror of our own consciousness confronting annihilation than with our individual addictions to guilt and to grief. What matters most about Hamlet is his genius, which is for consciousness itself. He is aware that his inner self perpetually augments, and that he must go on overhearing an ever-burgeoning self...

Hamlet probably was acted at the Globe during 1600, but it was for Shakespeare a highly volatile text, and in 1601 he seems to have expanded its ironic commentary on the War of the Theaters that he had with his rival/friend Ben Jonson. And yet even this Poets' War is only a portion of the maelstrom that constitutes the sequence that goes from Act II, Scene ii, line 315, through Act III, Scene ii, line 288. For almost a thousand lines, a fourth of the play, Shakespeare cuts a gap into his representation of reality, or imitation of an action. The Globe's audiences, on afternoons in 1601, evidently were sophisticated enough to accept an art that capriciously abandons the illusions of stage representation and then picks them up again. This freedom to forsake our legitimate expectations is central to Hamlet (and to Hamlet). I will elaborate upon Shakespeare's elliptical art, which I do not find illuminated by the term "metatheater." Hegel memorably said that Shakespea...

  In 2012, a group of artists came together to create New World Shakespeare Company, a theater troupe dedicated to bringing the bard's work to life in fresh and innovative ways to make classic theater just as relevant and evocative in our modern world as it was in the days of William Shakespeare. The first NWSC production was Romeo & Juliet, featuring two women in the titular roles, which set the stage for a decade of diversity and acceptance of all people. In the 13 ensuing years, New World Shakespeare Company has become a refuge for actors who might not otherwise get their big moment on stage or voices that might not otherwise be heard. New World has fostered creativity, cultivated talent, and carved a path for people from all walks to rediscover anew that Shakespeare is for everyone.