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The Merry Wives of Windsor in 1986, the Company Moved to Its Seven-Story Home on Navy Pier in 1999

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The Merry Wives of Windsor in 1986, the Company Moved to Its Seven-Story Home on Navy Pier in 1999 the merry wivesof windsor TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface 1 Art That Lives 2 Bard’s Bio 2 The First Folio 3 Shakespeare’s England 4 The Renaissance Theater 5 Barbara Gaines Criss Henderson Courtyard-style Theater 6 Artistic Director Executive Director Timelines 8 Shakespeare’s Chicago Shakespeare Theater is Chicago’s professional theater dedicated to the works of William Shakespeare. Founded as Shakespeare Repertory The Merry Wives of Windsor in 1986, the company moved to its seven-story home on Navy Pier in 1999. Dramatis Personae 10 In its Elizabethan-style courtyard theater, 500 seats on three levels wrap The Story 11 around a deep thrust stage—with only nine rows separating the farthest Act-by-Act Synopsis 11 seat from the stage. Chicago Shakespeare also features a flexible 180-seat Something Borrowed, Something New black box studio theater, a Teacher Resource Center, and a Shakespeare Shakespeare’s Sources 13 specialty bookstall. What's in a Name? Unpacking Comedy 14 Now in its twenty-seventh season, the Theater has produced nearly the en- From the Inside Out: A Look into tire Shakespeare canon: All’s Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, Windsor 15 As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Cymbeline, Hamlet, Henry IV Parts 1 Windsor's (and England's) Women 15 and 2, Henry V, Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3, Henry VIII, Julius Caesar, King John, King Lear, Love’s Labor’s Lost, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, The Scholars’ Perspectives Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night’s A Local Habitation and a Name 18 Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Pericles, Richard II, Richard III, Windsor Washing 19 Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Timon of Ath- ens, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The 20th Century Looks Back 20 The Two Noble Kinsmen and The Winter’s Tale. Chicago Shakespeare The- A Play Comes to Life ater was the 2008 recipient of the Regional Theatre Tony Award. Chicago’s Jeff Awards year after year have honored the Theater, including repeated The Merry Wives of Windsor awards for Best Production and Best Director, the two highest honors in in Performance 24 Chicago theater. A Conversation with the Director 26 Since Chicago Shakespeare’s founding, its programming for young audiences Classroom Activities and Resources has been an essential element in the realization of its mission. Team Shake- speare supports education in our schools, where Shakespeare is part of every Before You Read the Play 29 required curriculum. As a theater within a multicultural city, we are committed As You Read the Play 36 to bringing Shakespeare to a young and diverse audience of 40,000 students After Reading the Play 52 each year. Team Shakespeare’s programming includes free teacher workshops, The Performance: Preparing student matinees of main stage shows, post-performance discussions, compre- and Reflecting 57 hensive teacher handbooks, and an abridged, original production each year of Exploring the Merrily Desperate one of the “curriculum plays.” Team Shakespeare offers a region-wide forum for Housewives of Windsor through a new vision and enthusiasm for teaching Shakespeare in our schools. In 2012, Sitcom Lens 63 the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, honored that vision with Theater Warm-ups 67 the prestigious Shakespeare Steward Award. The 2013-14 Season offers a Techno Shakespeare 73 student matinee series for three of Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s full-length Suggested Readings 77 productions: in the fall semester, Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand; and in the spring, Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V. Also this spring, a 75-minute abridged version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream will be performed at the Theater on Navy Pier and will tour to schools and theaters ACKNOWLEDGMENTS across the region. We hope that you and your students will enjoy our work—and This Teacher Handbook grew out of a team effort of teachers Shakespeare’s creative genius brought to life on stage. past and present, Chicago Shakespeare Theater artists, interns, educators, and scholars. Interns Rebecca Dumain, Samuel Evola and Julie Strassel revised a previous edition of The Merry Wives Marilyn J Halperin Director of Education of Windsor handbook for this production. Chicago Shakespeare Jason Harrington Education Outreach Manager Theater gratefully acknowledges the groundbreaking and indelible Molly Topper Learning Programs Manager work of Dr. Rex Gibson and the Cambridge School Shakespeare Series, and The Folger Shakespeare Institute, whose contribu- tions to the field of teaching have helped shape our own work through the years. ©2013, Chicago Shakespeare Theater There is more life and reality in the first act ofThe Merry Wives of Windsor alone than in all German literature. —LETTER FROM ENGELS TO MARX, 10 DECEMBER 1873 written by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE directed by BARBARA GAINES hen Falstaff blusters into Windsor, his suitcase filled with schemes and scandal, two housewives rise to the occasion. In the generally wtranquil and overwhelmingly normal Windsor countryside, husbands Photos by Bill Burlingham by Photos banter with bravado, children romp in carefree abandon, and wives—well, they take care of the rest. Adrift and off-kilter, Sir John Falstaff’s an alien in this world of Windsor, where family life is treasured, traditions honored, and morality immovably fixed. The battle that unfolds grows into a riotous romp—bringing the witty and witless, the pious and irreverent, the innocent and jaded—all into collision. As they seek to settle this conundrum, the townsfolk wrestle with their community’s most fundamental questions, offering a hilarious take on neighborly relations. ✪ ART THAT LIVES HOW CAN YOU HELP US GIVE YOU rama is a living art. It is written to be performed live before a group THE BEST PERFORMANCE WE CAN? Dof people who form an audience ✪ Please, no talking during the performance It dis- and together experience a play. Cave tracts the actors as well as the people sitting nearby. paintings depicting men disguised as animals reveal that since ancient ✪ Respond naturally to our play Emotions are part of times, impersonation and imitation drama. We hope that you'll laugh, cry and even gasp— have served humans in their efforts to but as a natural response to the story, and not in order express themselves and to communicate. The drama of west- to distract attention from the stage. ern civilization has its roots in the ancient Greeks’ religious ritu- als and observances. ✪ Please leave all “noisemakers”—food, gum, cell phones, iPods, etc.—back at school or on the bus Until the Renaissance, when Shakespeare wrote, drama In a quiet theater, wrappers and munching are heard by was closely tied to religious beliefs and practice. Drama not all, the actors included. only depicts human communication, it is human communi- cation. In theater, unlike television or film, there is a two-way ✪ No photographs of any kind, please Flashbulbs can communication that occurs between the actors and their make the actors lose their focus and can be dangerous. audience. The audience hears and sees the actors, and the Digital cameras, along with all other kinds of recording actors hear and see the audience. We are used to thinking devices, are prohibited, as is text-messaging. about the actors’ roles in a play, but may find it strange to imagine ourselves, the audience, playing an important role in this living art. Because the art lives, each production is guaranteed to be different, depending in part upon an audi- BARD’S BIO ence’s response. Live drama is the sharing of human ex- he exact date of William Shake- perience, intensely and immediately, in the theater, which speare’s birth is not known, but momentarily becomes our universe. This baptism, traditionally three days after a child’s birth, was record- A live theater production depends upon its audience. The ed on April 26, 1564. His father John best performances depend upon the best actors—and the Shakespeare was a tanner, glover, best audiences. When the actors sense a responsive, in- grain dealer and prominent town of- terested audience, their work is at its best—full of animation ficial of the thriving market town of and energy. When the actors sense disinterest, they too are Stratford-upon-Avon. His mother Mary Arden was the daugh- distracted and the play they create is less interesting. One ter of a prosperous, educated farmer. Though the records are actor described the experience of live performance as a sto- lost, Shakespeare undoubtedly attended Stratford’s grammar ry told by the actors and audience together. In this sense, school, where he would have acquired some knowledge of you are also a storyteller in the experience of live theater. Latin and Greek and the classical writers. There is no record We hope you’ll enjoy your role—and will help us to give you that Shakespeare acquired a university education of any kind. a dramatic experience that you’ll always remember. Some skeptical scholars have raised doubts about whether [Theatrical performance] is essentially a sociable, com- Shakespeare, due to his relatively average level of education munal affair. This is important. To resist this is, I think, and humble origins, could have possibly written what has to ruin one of the very important parts of the theatrical long been considered the best verse drama composed in the experience. Let the play and let the fact that temporarily English language. But not until 1769, 150 years after Shake- you are not your private self, but a member of a closely speare’s death, did these theories arise—and, to all appear- fused group, make it easy for the performance to ’take you out of yourself.’ This, I suggest, is the object of go- ances, Shakespeare’s contemporaries and immediate succes- ing to a play… to be taken out of yourself, out of your sors never seemed to question whether William Shakespeare ordinary life, away from the ordinary world of everyday.
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