This Weekend: Much Ado About Shakespeare

"The man that has no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treason, stratagems, and spoils, The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted: mark the music."
--Lorenzo, The Merchant of Venice

For further information visit: www.concordshakespeare.org

  FRIDAY EVENING:

"... water cools not love."
--Sonnet 154

7:00 - 9:00:  Opening Presentations & Conversation: Concord Free Public Library

I. Celebrating 400 years of 'SHAKES-SPEARES SONNETS' (1609) & Songs in Royal English Style!

* 'Hark, hark the lark', from Cymbeline   * Sonnet 65: 'Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea'  * 'Full fathom five': Ariel's song from The Tempest  * Sonnet 116: 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds'  * Launcelot Gobbo's monologue, from The Merchant of Venice  * 'Puck's dance', from Preludes Book 1 by Debussy

John Anderson, Trained in Speech & Drama at the Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland
Maren Stott, Eurythmist & Co-Director of the Eurythmy Training, Stourbridge, UK
Alan Stott, Pianist & Co-Director of the Eurythmy Training, Stourbridge, UK

Eurythmy is a performing art, which reveals the language of movement: "visible speech" and "visible singing."

II. Margaret's Wars, passages depicting successive stages of Margaret's career throughout the three Henry VI's and Richard III, as she takes on the archetypal roles of virgin, wife, mother, and crone, wise old woman.

Lida McGirr, Actress, Director, Playwright, Lover of the Bard.
 
SATURDAY  MORNING

"Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world
 world draw thy breath in pain to tell my story . . . ."
--Hamlet - 5.2: 350

Note: Saturday & Sunday's events are held at the Masonic Temple
on Monument Square in Concord Center, next door to the Colonial Inn

9:00 -10:30: Presentation & Conversation: An Uncommon Noble Tells All

Oxord's Seventeenth Earl talks with Lady Mary (Sydney) Wroth in 1604 about his life and what
he feared would be forgotten about himself, his queen, his family, his writings and his times.

Joseph Lippincott Eldredge, Architect, Author, Editor, Critic, Poet, Student of Shake-speare Authorship.

10:30 - 11:00:  Break

11:00-12:30: Presentation & Conversation: "Who Are You?"

Over the years the traditional identification of "William Shakespeare" with a gentleman from Stratford-upon-Avon has been extensively questioned.  Often the work draws upon intensely personal details of the writer and those about him, a potential source of embarrassment if the writer's identity were revealed.  Such could well be the case for the most prominent alternate identity of "William Shakespeare" - Edward de Vere. 
 
Richard Desper, retired scientist and independent scholar on the Shakespeare Authorship Question

12:30 - 2:30:  Lunch in Concord

SATURDAY AFTERNOON

"Sweets to the Sweet."
--Hamlet Act V, Scene 1

2:30 - 4:00: Presentation & Conversation: Shakespeare's Women: Why Do They Have to Die?"

In Hamlet, King Lear and Othello we witness the moving, tragic deaths of Ophelia, Cordelia, and Desdemona. Why do these young women have to die and the heroes outlive them in each play? Is there an inspirational archetype, which can increase our understanding of these events?

Robert Horner (Yale B.A.) has taught high school English and theatre for many years. He resides in the City of Brotherly Love and lectures on American literature and esoteric studies, as well as on the work of the Bard.

4:00-4:30: Break  

4:30-6:00: Performance & Conversation: Shakespeare's Treason
The True Story of King Henry IX, Last of the Tudors. A One-Man Show that dramatizes the veritable tale of the sonnets, beginning in 1601 with the Earl of Southampton's death sentence for seeking to overthrow the government, followed by his imprisonment in the Tower of London, until the death of Queen Elizabeth and succession of King James.
Hank Whittemore, Broadway Actor and Award-Winning Author and Screen Writer.

6:00-8:00: Dinner

SATURDAY  EVENING

 "All the world's a stage,_ And all the men and women merely players."
Jaques, As You Like It

8:00: Evening Fest & Open Stage into the Wee Hours: Music, Merriment, Verse, & Good Spirits


Friends and lovers of Shakespeare are invited step up and present their favorite sonnets, speeches, melodies, scenes from the plays, and related gems in celebration of the 400th anniversary of blessed bard's Genius.

SUNDAY MORNING

The purest treasure mortal times afford, is spotless reputation:
That away, Men are but gilded loam and painted clay.
--Thomas Mowbray, Richard II


9:00 - 10:30: Presentation & Conversation: Richard II:  The Art and the Politics

Richard II gives us an opportunity to experience Shakespeare's awareness of what is at work in political intrigue in a form that can only compel awe at the play's combination of insight into
humanity and dramatic and poetic mastery.  Characters act upon suspicions or impulses aroused by what has been said and done by other characters in ways that, with no clear or intentional villain in sight, bear massive historical consequences for the destiny of the English people.

Charles Boyle, Author, Actor, and Director

Bill Boyle, Shakespeare Scholar, former Editor, "Shakespeare Matters", and Trustee, Shakespeare Oxford Society

John Stirling Walker is a poet and librettist whose collaboration with San Francisco composer David Conte has resulted in a number of choral-instrumental and stageworks.  As a co-founder of the Institute for Hypostatic Science and its related Brotherhood Project, he works to further the interests of the anthroposophical movement founded by Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925.)

10:30 - 11:00: Break

11:00 - 12:30: Presentation & Conversation: "Shakespeare: The Monetary Backdrop"

The virtually unrecognized thread of monetary history and the economic ferment of the Elizabethan era provide a backdrop against which the works and world of the celebrated English bard were played out. This culture-forging canon of literary masterpieces sounds with a moral timbre that is not merely utilitarian, but allegorical; altogether a temporal tale of the gods. Is this the elixir the canon holds for this "post-modern" era, soon to metamorphose (dare I "prophesy") into a post-commercial age?

Richard Kotlarz, Inquirer of the Economic/Social Order, especially as related to money, Minneapolis, Minnesota

12:30 - 2:30: Lunch in Concord

SUNDAY AFTERNOON

We are such stuff_ as dreams are made on;
And our little life _is rounded with a sleep.
--Prospero, The Tempest

2:30 - 5:00: Presentations, Performances & Conversation:

I. Three Shakespeare Songs by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

David Conte asserts that Ralph Vaughan Williams's "Three Shakespeare Songs" represent a supreme achievement in the repertoire of twentieth-century choral composition. Moreover, the songs brilliantly fulfill the original pedagogical purpose: to provide a challenging and grateful work for choral singers, using texts of the highest literary and spiritual quality.  David Conte will illuminate how the unique character, color and structure of Shakespeare's language inform one composer's musical choices regarding melody, harmony, rhythm and meter, and form as expressed in these songs.

David Conte, Professor of Composition, San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Recent performances and commissions include: a piece composed from President Obama's victory speech and performed at the inauguration; "Homecoming" in honor of the 40th Anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., performed by Chanticleer at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City; and "Lincoln" commissioned for Concord's Bicentennial Celebration of Lincoln's birth.

II. Shakespeare in a Tarnhelm
 
The "tarnhelm" was the golden helmet in Wagner's Ring Cycle that allowed its wearer to assume any form or even become invisible; so it has been for several centuries with composers doning an inter-pretive tarnhelm to twist some of the great works of Shakespeare to assume a new form - along the way, some were so changed as to become nearly invisible. Luedloff explores the evolution of Shake-speare's work through the operatic form, including masterworks and rarely-performed and unknown works. Is the Shakespearean text illuminated or obscured by the element of song? How do character arcs differ in the transition to the operatic form? Discussion will include anecdotes of hits and misses throughout the centuries as composers try their hand at adapting the work of the Bard of Avon.

Brian Luedloff is Assistant Professor of Music and Director of Opera Theatre for the University of Northern Colorado.  He has directed operas across the country and served on the staging staff of San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago and Houston Grand Opera, among others. He received his MFA in Directing from Boston University where he held a Directing Fellowship in the School of Theatre Arts and taught and directed in the Opera Institute."

This multi-faceted extraganza is sponsored by Debra's Natural Gourmet, Middlesex School, Nashoba-Brooks School, Dee Funeral Home, Barrett & Company, Verizon Wireless Explosion, Concord Provisions, Emerson Consulting Group, Inc., Concord Computer Consulting, Bank of America Country-Wide Home Loans, Concord Outfitters, Albright Art & Craft, Cambridge Savings Bank, Middlesex Savings Bank, Lex Insurance, Concord Funeral Home, Concord Optical, J.W. Adams Construction, Inc., Concord Toy Shop, Anonymous Donors. In Kind Contributors: Concord Free Public Library, Nashoba Brook Bakery, Crosby's Marketplace, Concord Bookshop, Budgeting Printing.

Images: Courtesy of Clipart.com