Shakespeare in San Diego--The Twelfth Season

Abstract

E San Diego Shakespeare Festival has now completed its twelfth season. National is, of course, merely typical California hyperbole. But it is, nevertheless, unfortunate. Though I am accustomed to our local habits, it irritated me and kept me away until a friend persuaded me to go. My delay I nbw regret, for the Festival is indeed excellent. Beginning June 27, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, and Richard III were produced in that order in the Globe Theatre in Balboa Park, built, if I remember correctly, during the San Diego Exposition to house hour-long versions of Shakespeare in a replica of the Globe Theatre. The theater must approximate the original Globe in size, though it seats only about four hundred people and is covered. The stage resembles other attempts to reconstruct that for which Shakespeare wrote, though it is without a musicians' gallery on the third level. It occupies a considerably smaller proportion of the house than John C. Adams, at least, assigns to the original stage and seems cramped, especially for scenes of pageantry. But it gives the spectator a quite adequate idea of how Shakespeare's plays must first have been produced, and what is even more important, it facilitates outstanding productions. I shall discuss the three plays in what happens to be the order in which Shakespeare wrote them, since it also seems to me their order of excellence. What I say about Richard III must be discounted because I saw the play on Saturday evening after Douglas Watson, the Richard, had played a very successful Antonio in the afternoon. It took me a few minutes, in fact, to convert Shylock into Edward IV, Nerissa into Lady Anne, Portia into Queen Elizabeth, and so on. The same problem must have confronted Elizabethan spectators, and interested me extremely, since I noticed a similar carry-over from Twelfth Night to The Merchant of Venice even after an interval of a week and a half. It certainly is no reflection upon the actors, but it probably does result from the close contact between audience and players. I have never had the same experience at Ashland, where distances are much greater than in the new or the real Old Globe. If my experience is at all typical, it has important implications for the student of Elizabethan drama. It certainly affects the present discussion, because, if I judge Richard III harshly, I am inevitably comparing it with a Merchant that I regarded as excellent and a Twelfth Night that was superlative. I am also neglecting the probable effect of sheer fatigue. Shakespeare, I am sure, meant to divide our attention between Richard's evil virtu and God's providence in using that evil to punish the guilty and unite