three questions for the world:

In conjunction with the 50th episode of the Chop Bard podcast,we are attempting to take the nations/worlds ‘Shakespearean’ temperature, as it were, by posing three questions to educators, artists, any anyone whose business or interest it is to deal with Shakespeare.

By doing this, we hope to get a clear picture of just how Shakespeare is doing in our culture, and provide some kind of commonality for those of us who need to see his works thrive.

  1. What is your favorite thing about Shakespeare’s plays?

  2. In your experience, what is the biggest obstacle preventing more people from enjoy Shakespeare?

  3. What is the most valuable thing Shakespeare has to offer us?


If you wish to participate, please answer the above questions, as briefly, or in depth as you wish, and send them to chopbard@gmail.com.




Danielle Byron
  1. How they can be reimagined by generation after generation.
    To quote MacBeth - "And yet an eighth appears, holding a mirror in which I see many more." Shakespeare is smiling at us and pointing to them as his.

  2. The geek factor

  3. We are not alone in the human experience.

Tracey Stewart
  1. The language. I love getting drunk on the words. I love reading the words: they reach across centuries to move hearts and minds. I love speaking the words - they feel exactly right in my mouth. I love hearing the words - they belong on the tongue and in the air.

  2. Intimidation: Shakespeare needs a better agent. Even after some truly great films and some performances by popular actors, my impression is that too many people hear "Shakespeare" and flinch because of (not an original thought here) a bad experience in school. They don't understand every word on the page or out of an actor's mouth, they aren't willing to/don't have the time or the patience to take the time to look past the fardles and bodkins to see why the plays have endured for over 400 years. Which is where Chop Bard comes in.

  3. Again, not the most original thought, but: insight. People haven't changed in
    400 years.
    And, no less importantly, entertainment: Shakespeare was many things, but high on that list is master of plot and pacing and character. He really was just that good.

Dawn Rochelle Tucker, Director of Education, Southwest Shakespeare Company
  1. I have never been able to answer this question....None of them holds all his genius, they each hold a piece. I can, however, tell you my least favorite: Henry VIII. I think Shakespeare wrote very little of it in fact.

  2. As literature: Rhetoric. In production: passion.

  3. Language as a complex and ever changing art form.

Carla Delgado
  1. Seeing/Reading them time and time again doesn't get old there is something new to discover and my perception of the play changes as I get older. Not that I didn't enjoy them before but now I enjoy them differently.

  2. For me it is the language first, for non natives it can be a real block. Having to check up words a lot can affect the enjoyment of the plays. One other obstacle is the "aura" around the plays like with classical music. You don't need to have a degree, to be a literary buff, to enjoy Shakespeare; it was done for the masses in its day after all.

  3. An intemporal window to the human condition.

Jennifer Bailey
  1. My favorite thing about Shakespeare's plays is that the characters are written with enough depth and complexity that we can see ourselves in them. Each time I return to a play, as I have changed and experienced so much since last encountering it, I find something new in each character and am newly touched by their stories.

  2. The biggest obstacle preventing people from enjoying Shakespeare is the way that it is taught in school. It is treated as high culture, something that belongs to scholars and intellectuals, when it is specifically designed to appeal to everyone and defy distinctions between high and low art. Also, students are introduced to analyzing the play before they really get to experience and digest it. I enjoy literary analysis, but to do these plays any justice you have to live with the characters for the course of the story and - even better - feel the words on your own tongue and let them become a part of you first, before you try to pull it into a more abstract, intellectual kind of framework. It's like showing kids a banquet and then making them stand back and talk about the food instead of eating it.

  3. Shakespeare offers us a kind of deep compassion for the pains and absurdities of life, encountered in so many ways by so many different and distinct characters that it feels like a medium through which we are encouraged to feel a kind of fellowship with one another in our suffering and in our happiness. It makes us more reflect on, and become more sympathetic to, what it feels like to be human.

Jackie R.
  1. My favorite thing about Shakespeare are the characters. No matter how minor, each (named) character has his or her own personality-and each can be played in MANY different ways. All the characters can be identified with, and even the villains are relatable.

  2. I think it's the language that puts most people off Shakespeare. I once had a friend say, "How do you even understand that stuff?" The differences between our English and that of Shakespeare's are very different, for all that he invented many of the most common phrases and words we use. In schools, he's dreaded because the students think of Shakespeare as a whole new language, one as difficult to learn as Japanese or Russian.

  3. The most valuable thing I've found in Shakespeare is the insight into human nature. To borrow a phrase from the Doctor Who Shakespeare episode, "He's the most human human." He understands both the joy and the pain of existence and channels that into the plays and the characters. The grief of King Lear, the hatred of Iago, the young love of Romeo and Juliet, the melancholy of Hamlet-and those are just the tragedies! Shakespeare has a line for every occasion and a character for every personality. In watching the plays, you can empathize with everyone, even Claudius, even Malvolio, even Caliban. No man was ever as versed in human nature so well as the Bard. It is why his work is hailed, 400 years later, as the greatest of the great.

G.Robin Smith (complete answers in episode 50)
  1. The Depth. No matter how much you dig, there is always more.

  2. Pretention. The idea of, “don’t worry about understanding it”, that it’s just something we have to go through, and put up with it. Shakespeare is accessible; we just think that it is not.

  3. Perspective. The fact that he is accessible, and we can read him and realize “someone else is seeing my pain, what I’m going through.” It shows we’re all part of the same humanity. When you read Shakespeare, you're not reading history so much as you're reading the blueprint of the human experience.