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Thoughts on Shakespeare’s Accessibility

Posted by DCA Theater on August 18, 2009 in July-December 2009 Season, INCUBATOR Series: Promethean Theatre Ensemble

by Derek Jarvis, co-director of A Month of Development

A few months ago, I was having dinner with a relative who is in the publishing business.  He is an avid fan of language in general, from prose to poetry, and had spent several years studying English literature before going into the publishing industry.  During dinner, our conversation turned to Shakespeare.  With my theatre background, I argued that Shakespeare was best consumed in performance, as that was what it was created to be.  His argument was that Shakespeare could only be fully appreciated as literature, as there are so many archaic references that the audience won’t understand everything that is said without footnotes and a glossary.

This made me think.  Obviously, all performances do not do justice to Shakespeare’s text.  Quite a few fail to capture his words and tell the story, but what is it that the successful productions do to convey the message without sacrificing the text itself?  Adapting the play to modern times and dialects just avoids performing the original text rather than making it accessible.  Performers can also just cut out those references, but that does nothing to make it more accessible either.

For my portion of A Month in Development, I will be experimenting with how to make Shakespeare as accessible as possible to an audience.  Utilizing different styles of performance, I hope to find ways to make even the obscure references a clear part of the story.  Shakespeare is meant to be seen, not read.  Now I just have to prove it.