Ghost of Hamlet, rendering by Susan E. Mickey, 2019 table of contents Preface 1 Barbara Gaines Living Art: Creating Community in the Playhouse 2 Artistic Director Bard’s Bio 3 Carl and Marilynn Thoma Chair The First Folio 3 Shakespeare’s England 5 Criss Henderson The English Renaissance Theater 6 Executive Director Courtyard-Style Theater 8 Timeline 9 Chicago Shakespeare Theater is Chicago’s professional theater dedicated to the works of William Shakespeare. Founded as Shakespeare shakespeare's hamlet Repertory in 1986, the company moved to its seven-story home on Navy Dramatis Personae 11 Pier in 1999. In its Elizabethan-style courtyard theater, 500 seats on three The Story 12 levels wrap around a deep thrust stage—with only nine rows separating the Act by Act Synopsis 12 farthest seat from the stage. Chicago Shakespeare also features a flexible S omething Borrowed, Something New: 180-seat black box studio theater, a Teacher Resource Center, and a Shakespeare’s Sources 14 Shakespeare specialty bookstall. In 2017, a new, innovative performance Shakespeare’s Original Hamlets 15 venue, The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare, expands CST's campus to Shakespeare, Tragedy, and Us 17 include three theaters. The year-round, flexible venue can be configured Hamlet and the Revenge Tragedy 19 in a variety of shapes and sizes with audience capacities ranging from 150 to 850, defining the audience–artist relationship to best serve each scholars' perspectives production. Now in its thirty-second season, the Theater has produced Who’s There? 21 nearly the entire Shakespeare canon: All’s Well That Ends Well, Antony Between the Lines 22 and Cleopatra, As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Cymbeline, Edward What the Critics and Artists Say 23 III, Hamlet, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Henry V, Henry VI Parts 1, 2, and 3, Henry VIII, Julius Caesar, King John, King Lear, Love’s Labor’s Lost, a play comes to life Macbeth, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet in Performance 33 Othello, Pericles, Richard II, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of Conversation with the Director 38 the Shrew, The Tempest, Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and The classroom activities Winter’s Tale. Chicago Shakespeare Theater was the 2008 recipient of and resources the Regional Theatre Tony Award. Chicago’s Jeff Awards year after year Before You Read the Play 41 have honored the Theater, including repeated awards for Best Production As You Read the Play 52 and Best Director, the two highest honors in Chicago theater. Since After You Read the Play 87 Chicago Shakespeare’s founding, its programming for young audiences The Performance: Preparing and Reflecting 94 has been an essential element in the realization of its mission. Team Classroom Warm-ups and Community Builders 101 Shakespeare supports education in our schools, where Shakespeare is Teaching Hamlet with Film 107 part of every required curriculum. As a theater within a multicultural city, Techno-Shakespeare 112 we are committed to bringing Shakespeare to life for tens of thousands Suggested Readings 117 of middle and high school students each year. Team Shakespeare’s programming includes free teacher workshops, student matinees of main This Teacher Handbook grew out of a team effort of stage shows, post-performance discussions, comprehensive teacher teachers past and present, Chicago Shakespeare handbooks, and an abridged, original production each year of one of the Theater artists, interns, educators, and scholars “curriculum plays.” Team Shakespeare offers a region-wide forum for new Jessica Bonnem, an English teacher from Smyrna, GA, vision and enthusiasm for teaching Shakespeare in our schools. In 2012 created the content for this handbook as an Education the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, honored that vision Intern in summer 2018 Chicago Shakespeare Theater with the prestigious Shakespeare Steward Award. The 2018-19 Season gratefully acknowledges the groundbreaking and offers student matinees for two of Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s indelible work of Dr Rex Gibson and the Cambridge full-length productions: in the winter, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer School Shakespeare Series, whose contributions to the field of teaching have helped shape our own work Night’s Dream directed by Joe Dowling, and in the spring, Shakespeare’s through the years Hamlet directed by Artistic Director Barbara Gaines. Also this winter, a 75-minute abridged version of Macbeth will be performed at the Theater on Navy Pier and will tour to schools across the region. We hope that you Marilyn J. Halperin Director of Education and your students will enjoy our work—and Shakespeare’s creative genius Ray and Judy McCaskey Chair Jason Harrington Education Outreach Manager brought to life on stage. Sara B.T. Thiel Public Humanities Manager Molly Truglia Learning Programs Manager ©2019, Chicago Shakespeare Theater hamletwritten by william shakespeare | directed by barbara gaines The world’s most famous drama of murder and revenge? Hamlet, hands down, every time. A king is murdered. His assassin—and his brother—Claudius, sits on Denmark’s throne and sleeps in the queen’s bed. The old king’s restless ghost walks upon the castle battlements, commanding his son, Hamlet, to avenge his death. And Ophelia, Hamlet’s love, thrusts his letters and gifts at him, no longer desired. As his known world is turned upside down, Hamlet is ensnared by the politics of the royal court and the prisons of his own mind. Lies, suspicion, and revenge permeate the land. Something is, indeed, rotten in the state of Denmark. Set design by Scott Adam Davis and projection design by Mike Tutaj for CST's 2019 production of Hamlet. introduction How can you help us give you the Living Art, best performance we can? l Please, no talking during the performance. It Creating distracts the actors as well as the people sitting nearby. Community l Respond naturally to our play. Emotions are part of drama. We hope that you'll laugh, cry, and even gasp— [Theatrical performance] is essentially a but as a natural response to the story, and not in order sociable, communal affair. This is important. to distract attention from the stage. To resist this is, I think, to ruin one of the very l Please leave all “noisemakers”—food, gum, cell important parts of the theatrical experience. Let phones, iPods, etc.—back at school or on the bus. In a the play and let the fact that temporarily you are quiet theater, wrappers, munching—and even a phone’s vibration—are heard by all, the actors included. not your private self, but a member of a closely fused group, make it easy for the performance l No photographs of any kind, please. Flashbulbs to ‘take you out of yourself.’ This, I suggest, is can make the actors lose their focus and can be dangerous. Digital cameras, along with all other kinds of the object of going to a play…to be taken out of recording devices, are prohibited, as is text-messaging. yourself, out of your ordinary life, away from the ordinary world of everyday. —TYRONE GUTHRIE, 1962 You know Sir Patrick Stewart from Star Trek: The Next Generation—but Stewart spent most of his illustrious s a living art, a play is performed for a group of career on stage. He said once that most “audiences don't people who gather and, at each performance, understand how essential they are to the experience, and create a unique and singular audience, experiencing what an impact they can have on it.” Theater can’t exist Aa story together as a community—just as you will soon at without an audience. Actor Cristina Panfilio, who played Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Drama not only tells stories Helena in Chicago Shakespeare’s recent production of about human communication, it is human communication. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, explained to students at a Different from television or film, theater creates a two-way performance: “I never find myself until the audience shows communication between the actors and their audience. You up.” Film and Broadway actor Jason Robards once said, are not simply on the receiving end of this communication: “An audience is really another performer in the play.” We the audience is also a participant. Here at Chicago are used to thinking about the actors’ roles in a play, but Shakespeare Theater, you become part of the story. may find it strange to imagine ourselves, the audience, playing a role—and a leading one, at that. During Shakespeare’s time, playhouses were gathering places for Londoners from all walks of life to experience a Because theater is art that lives and breathes, each story, together. Because most of Shakespeare’s plays were performance is guaranteed to be unique—because each written to be performed outdoors in daylight, the actors and audience and what it brings is unique. The success of a the audience could see each other. The audience was part live performance depends upon its audience and their of the performance—they didn’t sit in a darkened theater honest responses. When an audience is unengaged, the as they typically do today. In Chicago Shakespeare’s story is less dynamic and compelling. And when the actors Courtyard Theater, the actors and their audience are so experience a responsive, interested audience, their work close together that the actors can see almost everyone is at its best—full of animation and energy. We hope you’ll in the audience—and they can hear everyone. Sitting this enjoy your role as a member of this storytelling community— close to the stage and actors, the audience becomes part and will help us create a dramatic experience that you’ll of the world of the play.