Music Credit: “Renewal” written and composed by Doug and Judy Smith. Michael Whitmore: People make this writer their own when they tell their own stories. They often turn to Shakespeare’s characters. If you’re a young person in love, you’re Juliet and you’re going to have that moment on the balcony. If you are an untested leader, you’re Prince Hal and you’re going to face your Agincourt or if you’re an outsider you’re Othello and you’re going to have to face your Iago. Those are the stories that we use to try to tell our own stories and I just-- I think it’s amazing that anybody could have their work adapted so widely. <music> Jo Reed: That was the director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Michael Witmore. And this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. 400 years ago on April 23, 1616, William Shakespeare died. Yet, his poetry and plays remain vibrant, instructive, and transformative. People have spent careers trying to unpack how and why this is so. The miracle of a glover’s son who had such insight into the human heart-- it’s love, ambition, fear, and hope-- and could present their complexities in metaphoric and rhythmic language that illuminated even as it astounded. And not so incidentally, Shakespeare also knew a thing or two about plots and what makes a play work. Indeed, William Shakespeare remains the most produced playwright in North America and across the country, people are marking the 400th anniversary of his death with tributes to his work and influence. Leading the nation-wide celebration is Washington DC’s Folger Shakespeare Library. Home to the world's largest Shakespeare collection, the Folger is a world class research center as well as a great theater that produces three of Shakespeare’s play each year. The Folger is marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death with a year-long series of programs, called The Wonder of Will. On Saturday, April 23, the director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Michael Witmore, welcomed a host of people to the Folger to share their own stories of encounters with Shakespeare. The speakers included Chair of the NEA, Jane Chu, the actor Kal Penn, and Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. So when I sat down with Michael Witmore at the Folger to talk about Shakespeare, I knew exactly where to start. Jo Reed: You know this Saturday when so many people came to the Folger and spoke about what their Shakespeare story was I was very curious about what your Shakespeare story is. When and how did you fall in love with Shakespeare? Michael Witmore: That’s a great question. So I actually did not like Shakespeare the first time I encountered Shakespeare-- that was in junior high. But it took a great senior high school English teacher named Neil Murphy who taught at Acton-Boxborough Public High School where I went-- and I studied Othello when I was a senior in high school and that play I found so challenging and so interesting. I think the question that I had after I read it was, “It seems like everyone someday is going to run into their own Iago, the person who can tell them the lies that they’re going to have a hard time resisting.” And I found that play so troubling because the question you’re left with after it is, “How do you resist? How do you turn that person off?” And Othello fails to do that, and the play shows in a very powerful way how hard it would be to do that. And so there I was 17 or 18 and here was the first really big question a piece of literature had put in front of me and it opened a door for me, it opened a line of questioning, and from then on I was not only interested in Othello but in Shakespeare. Jo Reed: Tell me how Shakespeare was seen in his own time. Michael Witmore: Well, Shakespeare was known in his own time. When he arrives in London and starts writing plays and publishing sonnets, people take notice, and we know that not only because people are putting his name on plays when they’re published, including plays that he didn’t write-- so they think this is a name to sell books with-- but also because people in the margins of books and in their notebooks remarked that there was this man, William Shakespeare, who was in London and he was having success as both a writer of poems and a writer of plays. So that would be my first reaction, is that not only did they know him but they thought of him as being very good at what he does. And by the time that he died-- about seven years after he died, two of his friends created the first folio of Shakespeare’s works and that was published in 1623, it contained 36 of his plays, and in the opening pages of that book Ben Jonson, who was one of his competitors and friends, remarks on just how talented and powerful Shakespeare was as a writer-- that he was for all time, and that this book was a monument; the plays themselves were a testament to his power as a writer. And so I think that tells us also that people admired him so that’s the second thing I would say, and then the third thing I would say is that people were sometimes jealous of him. There’s a remark toward the end of the sixteenth century about Shakespeare being an upstart crow who’s beautified himself with our feathers and the writer is someone who went to university and says, “Who’s this man from Warwickshire who rolls into London and starts putting on-- writing these shows and succeeding on the stage?” And so, that was more of a complaint but I think it tells us that people were keeping track of Shakespeare sometimes and sometimes were irritated that he was such a success. Jo Reed: Tell me about his world. I think of it as a world where perhaps many people didn’t read but nonetheless it was still a world that was in love with words. Michael Witmore: I think that’s right. I think one of the reasons why I find Shakespeare’s world so interesting is that it was a world that was struggling with some of the same things that we struggle with. So Shakespeare lived in a world where the printing press was already established and there were printers who sold books. Had he been born a century earlier we might not be talking about him. It mattered that a really talented person like this was alive when the printing press could preserve his words and then fling them far away, but the arrival of print was a media revolution that was so consequential for this period-- now people could put their ideas down and circulate them. You think about that, which is a media revolution at least as consequential as our digital media revolution today. We also have religious conflict, the culture wars of Shakespeare’s time where wars around whether you were Catholic or whether you were some version of Protestant, and in Shakespeare’s lifetime Protestantism was the official religion of the land and you could be fined for not showing up at church services. So religious conflict is another one. It was an urbanizing society. There was something going on in the provinces called enclosure where landowners would essentially encircle their lands with fences and then start to graze animals on those lands and that displaced people who had worked the land for subsistence farming. Those people came to cities like London and so when Shakespeare is around in London there’s a huge influx of people coming from all over the country and they may not have professions yet-- so those people are arriving. You’re also getting trade with the European continent and there’s also movement across the Atlantic so the world in which Shakespeare lived was transitioning from a feudal society where people worked the land and had certain rights because they were on the land to what we would now call a mercantile society where people made their money because of what they did with their hands, how they bought, how they sold, and the professional theater was part of that world. So now you’ve got lots of people from all over the place coming to the urban center, you’ve got contact with other countries because of trade, you’ve got the printing press which is circulating knowledge and information, and you’ve got religious conflict. That is really a rich field for theater and Shakespeare was a pioneer in a new institution that we now call professional theater. Instead of performing religious plays or plays from the Bible during religious festivals and holidays, you now go to a special part of London on the South Bank and you pay money so that someone can entertain you with a story that’s not necessarily from the Bible; it’s about other people, it might even be your contemporary world, a story about people in London. So Shakespeare’s world I would say is a world that is undergoing the kinds of big changes and conflicts that we ourselves struggle with today whether it’s religious conflict which we’re seeing in the presidential election, technological change and globalization. Those were the very forces that Shakespeare was just glimpsing on the horizon and he puts those forces and those situations into his plays, so one of the things you could say about Shakespeare and his world is that before we knew what to call it, Shakespeare was writing about the modern world, a world that had some of those same forces moving it and changing it, that we still struggle with today. Jo Reed: Can you take us into the Globe Theatre and here we are-- we’re witnessing a play. Pick a play, any play, one of Shakespeare’s obviously. What is it like there? Michael Witmore: Well, we’re very curious of what it must have been like. It’s an outdoor theater with an open roof. You’re going to pay for the quality of your seat. If you don’t have a lot of money, you can stand with the groundlings in-- near the stage on the-- literally on the ground. Your feet will probably be crunching across hazelnut shells and oyster shells because we know from the archeological evidence that that’s what they were selling as refreshment; they would also be selling beer. There would be people singing these songs outside the theater and during the play you’re going to be an active part of the audience. We believe that this was a very interactive art form. People would yell things at the performers. One of the things that we know happened was that at the end of a particular play-- let’s say we’ve just gone and seen Hamlet-- the clown or one of the comic actors would come out at the end of the performance and do something called the jig. Now the jig could be a song, it could be some dancing, but it often involved people yelling things at the performers and then the performer has to come up with a clever, witty answer and kind of outsmart the crowd. So you might yell out, “Well, why does the dog bark at night?” and then the clown has to say something devastatingly funny to whatever you’ve called out-- so we know there was some competition between the audience and the actors, and that was probably good. It led to great comic writing but it also meant that people could really give it to the people on stage and the actors could give it right back. There’s still more to learn about what theater and the theatrical art form was like in this period. And work in collections like ours-- we have the largest Shakespeare collection in the world-- has allowed scholars to say more about just what kind of experience that must have been. Jo Reed: I do want to talk about Shakespeare in America but since you brought up the collection here, the Folger Shakespeare Library is truly unique because it’s an extraordinary research center. You do conservation here, you have educational programs, concerts, and you have a fabulous theater that actually presents the plays. Michael Witmore: Yeah. Well, we were created as an institution dedicated to the public that would take the greatest collection for Shakespeare and one of the largest collections of Renaissance literature and manuscripts and use it so that we can continue this conversation with Shakespeare and his age. So the first Elizabethan theater in North America is part of our building and it’s a beautiful, rough example of a two-column stage. It has a little bit of an inn-yard look. It allows people to get a sense and a feel for what it must have been like in those original performance conditions. We do three Shakespeare plays a year and what is special about our theater is that it’s so intimate-- it’s a small indoor theater. It doesn’t have the open skies like the Globe, which is another fascinating place to see a play, but what happens is that you start to feel that the actors are playing for you personally and you can hear their voices; you can hear them breathing. And that’s part of this immersive, interactive art form which is the theater, but what’s special I think about us is that we have the ability, because we have all of the sources literally downstairs and we have a community that’s been studying those sources for 80 years. Jo Reed: How have Americans made Shakespeare our own? Michael Witmore: In the nineteenth century, Americans looked to Shakespeare for words to describe their feelings or even just speeches that they could practice and rehearse because Shakespeare wasn’t a high art form in the nineteenth century. You could see short Shakespeare speeches in vaudeville shows. Shakespeare was also unfortunately part of blackface and minstrel shows and Shakespeare was part of so much of American popular culture in the nineteenth century, and that meant that almost everybody knew Shakespeare or recognized a character. And the result of that I think was that Americans looked to Shakespeare to say things or to think about things that they might not have been able to think about with their nearest neighbors or with people who were family. It’s a bit like having an uncle that you can talk something over with and that’s a bit different from your parents or your siblings. And the fact that Shakespeare wasn’t born here was probably an advantage so we could take him and different communities could use Shakespeare for different things. But one way to look at it is that Shakespeare was born in England, he was then adopted by Americans, and he was turned over to the world as more of a world citizen, a writer who could be adopted by almost anyone. And I find it interesting now-- there are more Shakespeare films made in Bollywood than there are in the United States and the UK combined. So different cultures, different art forms, different languages-- Shakespeare is adopted and adapted to all of these different cultural forms and communities. Jo Reed: My friend said her grandmother was 16 before she realized Shakespeare didn’t write in Yiddish. Michael Witmore: Yeah. Who knew? Jo Reed: Who knew? Michael Witmore: He was such a great Yiddish writer. Jo Reed: <laughs> Exactly. Michael Witmore: It’s like the Germans saying that Shakespeare is much better in the original German. People make this writer their own. When they tell their own stories they often turn to Shakespeare’s characters. If you’re a young person in love, you’re Juliet, you know, and you’re going to have that moment on the balcony. If you are an untested leader, you’re Prince Hal and you’re going to face your Agincourt or as I said at the beginning if you’re an outsider you’re Othello and you’re going to have to face your Iago. Those are the stories that we use to try to tell our own stories and I just-- I think it’s amazing that anybody could have their work adapted so widely for so long. Jo Reed: Has he ever fallen out of favor? Michael Witmore: Well, he must have fallen out of favor in the middle of the seventeenth century. Several decades after he died, there was a Puritan revolution in England and during the civil war and the professional theaters were closed down so there’s a period of no Shakespeare or at least performed Shakespeare. But then people start to adapt his plays again when the civil war is over and in fact some of the performances-- the audience wanted to see the endings changed. So there’s a version of “King Lear” that ends with Cordelia waking up and that was the reigning version of the-- on the stage for quite a while. So again, people are taking up Shakespeare’s plays and doing things with them. And then if you think about 2016, the fact that people have celebrated Shakespeare all across North America. I mean it’s funny but it’s the-- probably the largest celebration of a British cultural figure in the history of the republic. Jo Reed: I think you spoke quite eloquently about why Shakespeare is still relevant to us today but the poetry that he uses-- Tony Kushner said, “The greatest poet in the English language is the greatest playwright in the English language.” Michael Witmore: Yeah. Sometimes when I’m asked about Shakespeare and why-- what makes him great-- in a way you can’t say because it’s like lightning struck four times in one place. Not only is he incredibly canny about people, not only is he great at spotting the human story in anything from a battle to a bedroom argument, but he’s a dazzling user of the English language and the fact that he wrote in verse, in poetry, means that it’s part song. And I find that interesting because children who are natural mimics and they love song and they love rhyming have a way into Shakespeare because he writes in poetry. And sometimes you may not know exactly what Shakespeare means, but the fact that he’s put it into a verse form means it’s going to stick in your ear a little longer, and when people ask me, “Is it a good idea to modernize Shakespeare’s words and is that a dangerous thing?” well, no, it’s not dangerous, you’re not going to do any damage to Shakespeare, but if you just think about it you go to a Shakespeare play in the original language-- let’s say you only get 30 percent of the words; that 30 percent is fantastic and it’s going to make you want to know the other 70 percent. And what we find is that if you have that experience with this art form, poetry and theater early on in your life and that experience is a good one, it opens the door to a lifelong interest in poetry, the arts and the humanities. And I think it really helps that Shakespeare in addition to being a demanding and difficult writer was also an inspired writer and a very musical writer and he used stress and verse and pauses to create drama and we love that in a writer and that’s one of the things that makes him stick around. Jo Reed: Well, as we’re talking about that because we’re marking the 400^th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and the Folger is having a year of special programming around this called The Wonder of Will, which I think is a great title, and the jewel in that crown is the first folio going to every state in the union. You told us a little bit about the first folio. Tell us its significance and its importance. Michael Witmore: Sure. The first folio was published seven years after Shakespeare died in 1623 by two of his friends, people who performed with him, and this book contains 36 plays by Shakespeare, 18 of which had never been published before. That means that the first folio is most likely the only source that we’ll ever have for just a little under half of Shakespeare’s plays, plays like Macbeth and Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale. It is an iconic book that is a conduit for this amazing writer’s art form but it’s also a book that people have studied for centuries. Every one of them is unique. That’s because when they printed it, they corrected the pages but then they didn’t throw out the uncorrected pages so when the booksellers went to put together their books they mixed correct and non-correct pages and that was one of the reasons why the Folgers collected this book. They realized that scholars would want to know what the final version of these plays ought to be and so that’s one of the things that was figured out here at the Folger with the benefit of 82 copies of the first folio and that is by far the largest amount that’s possessed by any institution. We realized that because we have those books and many of them are in really terrific condition that we would be able to send a copy of the first folio to all 50 states and 2 territories, and so we started planning for that four or five years ago, and this year the folio is going to over 30 states that have never seen a first folio. It was in Florida. It’s going to New Orleans where they’re going to have a jazz funeral for Shakespeare. It’s going to Duluth where the Indy rock band Low is going to do a special concert for the first folio-- they’re going to show two black-and-white films and Low is going to play the music. It’s been out west and the book is open to the “To be or not to be” speech. That speech is being translated into the Lakota tribal language which has over ten different ways, I’m told, of saying the phrase “To be.” And so what we’re seeing is every community where the book goes there’s a different response to it and I think what people are responding to is it is amazing to come face to face with the real thing, the book that brought us Shakespeare, and to have that open to this iconic speech has really had an effect on people. We’re still waiting. We’re only a couple of months into the tour but it’s been really moving to see how many communities have celebrated the arrival of the book. Jo Reed: Okay. Can I just ask a very practical question? How do you transport this? Michael Witmore: <laughs> That is probably the most complicated part of the tour. So we designed the case that the book appears in in the institutions and we had to check out the environmental conditions and the security for those institutions and then we needed to come up with a transportation plan and specially designed travel cases. Who the courier would be, who would physically carry the book. So that’s been a real adventure for us. Jo Reed: Do you prefer him on the page or on the stage? And I know you’re at the Folger so you don’t have to make these decisions, which is really kind of charming. <overlapping conversation> Michael Witmore: That’s such a-- <laughs> exactly right. I don’t have to decide. Jo Reed: Or does it depend on the play? Michael Witmore: It would depend on the play. I would probably rather read King Lear— Jo Reed: I was just going to say that’s the one I’d rather-- Michael Witmore: --and that’s a famous one that has been said to be better experienced in your imagination but the comic farces are much better to see on stage, The Comedy of Errors. I do think he wrote for the stage and he wrote for an audience and it means a lot to be with other people. You think of the ends of his comedies where there’s some form of reconciliation or some obstacle to a deep connection between people has been removed and there’s a sense of connection that you get when the characters finally turn to each other and say, “It’s me. I’m Viola” or-- and then if you’re with other people who are having the same experience at the same time-- and it’s something I love about live theater-- it’s something that Shakespeare understood about live theater is that when you go to see a play it’s like stepping on a ship with other people. Okay, you’re on that ship with those people for two hours and there’s a feeling of community and excitement that you’re there at the same time that other people are there and that it’s all happening. I think that makes theatrical performances just magical. Jo Reed: And finally back to my first question where you spoke about having a teacher who really opened up Othello for you. If you were going to say to somebody who was approaching Shakespeare for the first time or even somebody who was teaching Shakespeare for the first time, how would you advise them to open the play up? You know, people can be scared. Michael Witmore: Well, of course they’re scared because it’s a language that’s dense; it’s difficult. The way to get around that is to start early and to get up on your feet and start performing. We have been teaching teachers of Shakespeare for decades doing what we call performance-based or language-based teaching. What that means is that you and your friends get out of your seats and you start performing a scene. And that’s important because some of the things you learn about the language, you learn by looking someone else in the eye and realizing oh, she’s saying this because this other person who’s right in front of them said this other thing and there are some real benefits to that. I think one of the things that you learn by performing it as well as reading it is that you learn to recognize how other people are feeling from their facial expressions, from what they say, and that’s something you can’t do on social media. You don’t get that immediate reaction; you don’t learn how to read someone else emotionally based on what’s passing across their face. And so I think that Shakespeare wanted us to have that extra layer of experience, the human connection, and so I would say, “Jump in. Start speaking the speeches yourself and then try to figure out with someone else, with you, looking at each other, what is he saying here and why is this-- what’s this person’s point of view. That’s always the first way in.” Jo Reed: Well, Michael Witmore, thank you so much. I really appreciate you giving me your time. Michael Witmore: It’s a pleasure. Jo Reed: Thank you. <music> That was the director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Michael Witmore. To find out more about The Wonder of Will or the many online resources the Folger has to offer, go to folger.edu. You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog, or follow us at @NEAarts on Twitter. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.