"Sweet Airs That Give Delight"
Shakespeare During COVID-19
“Sweet Airs That Give Delight”
Over the past weeks, we have tried to think creatively about how to share our delight in our community Shakespeare play, Much Ado About Nothing. We have considered how to send off our students into the summer, celebrating the words and ideas from Shakespeare that give us such joy during our annual Shakespeare Festival.
A few questions we have wrestled with:
How can we relate and share delight while we are apart?
How can we bring stories to life when we can't "perform" them?
Due to social distancing, theatres and artists are facing the same challenges. And they are rising to the occasion, not by dwelling on what we've lost but seeking out new ways create.
Sir Patrick Stewart is setting one example by reading "A Sonnet A Day" during social distancing, turning a limitation into an opportunity to read and dwell on Shakespeare's entire canon of sonnets in sequence! Take a moment to listen to Sir Patrick read Sonnet 54 from his recording on May 13.
Indeed, Shakespeare's own works of art place special emphasis on hearing words rather than seeing acting. A Midsummer's Night Dream (most recently performed by our current 7th graders) provides an example where hearing words is directly privileged over seeing acting in Shakespeare's world. When referring to the play prepared by Bottom and the rude mechanicals, Duke Theseus says, "I will hear that play./ For never anything can be amiss/ When simpleness and duty tender it." In The Tempest, Caliban gives a stirring ode to the transformative soundscape of his island home which is so powerful that the sounds transport him between dream and reality.
The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again. And then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.
While we dearly miss the chance to see our students act, we have not lost the possibility of hearing them breathe life into Shakespeare's words and make them their own.
So we invite you - students and parents alike - to fill the world with "sweet airs that give delight" by bringing our dramatic readings of Much Ado to life.
We are offering three evenings for you to read and/or listen to the play as families beginning next Tuesday. Encourage your children to sign up to read, and sign up for a part yourself! Anyone under 100 and over 10 years of age is welcome to read a role and all others are welcome to join the call to "hear that play."
Families can access the sign up in our Ambleside Notes.