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ABSTRACT
What I explore in what follows is a theory of why my job has become more difficult in recent years – not impossible, and in some ways more rewarding because of new challenges, but simply more demanding. Why have I found myself with unprecedented vigilance upholding certain virtues of Shakespeare before a student cohort reflexively suspicious of those virtues? Why has there seemed to be, more than ever before, a barrier to the kinds of interpersonal generosity that Shakespeare’s plays demand of an actor? Why are my students so afraid to engage in the Shakespearean fundamental of investing in those with whom you may be in conflict? Why do my students, ever humane and ever eager to learn as always, instinctively say ‘no’ when Shakespeare’s characters always seem to say ‘yes’? At the core of this theory is my contention that the partisanship and rancour that have come to define present-day American political conflict risk forcing their toxic ethos even upon the performance of Shakespearean conflict. What to do, then, when my approach to performance is focused squarely on getting young citizen-actors to commit to a Shakespearean habit of calling-in rather than calling-out?
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Bennett, Jessica. ‘What If Instead of Calling People Out, We Called Them In?’. November 19, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/style/loretta-ross-smith-college-cancel-culture.html.
2 My department is unique in that it offers training in a vast variety of such techniques, from American psychological realism to Eastern European physical-based approaches to non-Western traditions.
3 Act 3, Scene 3 of Romeo and Juliet is a notorious emotional trap for the actor playing Romeo. Whenever I work on this scene, I advise the actor that he must earn Romeo’s eventual hair-tearing tantrum by attempting to persuade the contrarian friar that banishment is indeed ‘torture and not mercy.’ Getting the friar to agree to that is still an intention worth playing.
4 Crook, Clive. ‘Republicans and the Politics of No’. February 7, 2010. https://www.ft.com/content/3d90c0f8-140b-11df-8847-00144feab49a.
5 Abramowitz, Alan and Steven Webster. ‘“Negative Partisanship” Explains Everything’. September/October 2017. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/05/negative-partisanship-explains-everything-215534/.
6 Finkel, Eli J., Christopher A. Bail, Mina Cikara, Peter H. Ditto, Shanto Iyengar, Samara Klar, Lilliana Mason, et al. ‘Political Sectarianism in America’. Science 370, no. 6516 (2020): 533–36. science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6516/533.
7 Teaching in the theater program at New York University, I can safely say that the politics of our community is virtually homogeneous.
8 Whitesides, John. ‘Under Fire, Obama Clarifies Small-Town Remarks’. Reuters, Thomson Reuters, 12 April 2008. www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-politics/under-fire-obama-clarifies-small-town-remarks-idUSN1116676020080412.
9 Reilly, Katie. ‘Hillary Clinton Transcript: “Basket of Deplorables” Comment’. Time, September 10, 2016, time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorables-transcript/.
10 After Obama’s comments were made public, he endured widespread criticism, with one political opponent claiming at the time, ‘I was taken aback by the demeaning remarks Senator Obama made about people in small-town America. His remarks are elitist and out of touch.’ Perhaps this was John McCain or Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney? It was Hillary Clinton.
11 Indeed, as a branding executive with a lust for the limelight who long had his eye on the presidency and who has changed party affiliation five times in the past thirty years as he tested the political waters, he understands the base emotions that can shape modern public opinion.
12 Harris, John F. ‘Donald Trump Is the Perfect Leader of the Worst Generation’. Politico, January 14, 2021. www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/01/14/trump-leader-worst-generation-459244.
13 Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616, David Scott Kastan, Ann Thompson, and G. R. Proudfoot. The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works. Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1998. 1235.
14 Note, by the way, how many times Silvia says some form of ‘yes’ to Proteus when she very easily could have said ‘no’: ‘You have your wish’; ‘Say that she be’; ‘And so suppose am I’; ‘Go to thy lady’s grave and call hers thence.’
15 My understanding of this aspect of Shakespeare’s education is based on Joel B. Altman’s The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.