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 Chicago Shakespeare Theater is Chicago’s professional theater dedicated Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to the works of William Shakespeare. Founded as Shakespeare Repertory 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 Shakespeare’s Sources . 13 black box studio theater, a Teacher Resource Center, and a Shakespeare Timeline: The Revolution . 16 specialty bookstall. Treason in the House of Tudor . 17 Brutus and the Republic . 18 Now in its twenty-sixth season, the Theater has produced nearly the entire Shakespeare canon: All’s Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, As Scholars’ Perspectives You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Cymbeline, Hamlet, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Henry V, Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3, Julius Caesar, King John, King In States Unborn. 21 Lear, Love’s Labor’s Lost, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Love, Particular and General . 22 Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Politics as Usual . 23 Ado About Nothing, Othello, Pericles, Richard II, Richard III, Romeo and What the Critics Say. 25 Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Two Noble A Play Comes to Life Kinsmen, and The Winter’s Tale. Chicago Shakespeare Theater was the Julius Caesar in performance . 33 2008 recipient of the Regional Theatre Tony Award. Chicago’s Jeff Awards A Conversation with the Director . 37 year after year have honored the Theater, including repeated awards for Best A Conversation with Production and Best Director, the two highest honors in Chicago theater. the Fight Choreographer . 40 Since Chicago Shakespeare’s founding, its programming for young audi- Strategies for Using Film ences has been an essential element in the realization of its mission. Team to Teach Shakespeare. 42 Shakespeare supports education in our schools, where Shakespeare is part of every required curriculum. As a theater within a multicultural city, we are Classroom Activities committed to bringing Shakespeare to a young and ethnically diverse au- Before You Read the Play . 48 dience of 40,000 students each year. Team Shakespeare’s programming As You Read the Play . 52 includes free teacher workshops, student matinees of main stage shows, After You Read the Play. 70 post-performance discussions, comprehensive teacher handbooks, and Preparing for the Performance . 74 an abridged, original production each year of one of the “curriculum plays.” Back in the Classroom . 76 Team Shakespeare offers a region-wide forum for new vision and enthusi- Warm-Ups. 78 asm for teaching Shakespeare in our schools. This year, the Folger Shake- Suggested Readings . 83 speare Library in Washington, DC, honored that vision with the prestigious Techno Shakespeare . 86 Shakespeare Steward Award. The 2012-2013 Season offers a student matinee series for three of Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s full-length pro- ductions: in the winter, The School for Lies, a new adaptation by David Ives of Molière’s The Misanthrope; and in the spring, Shakespeare’s Julius ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Caesar and Henry VIII. Also this winter, a 75-minute abridged version of This Teacher Handbook grew out of a team effort of teachers Romeo and Juliet will be performed at the Theater on Navy Pier and will past and present, Chicago Shakespeare Theater artists, interns, tour to schools and theaters across the region. We hope that you and your educators, and scholars. Intern Mariana Green revised and up- students will enjoy our work—and Shakespeare’s creative genius brought to dated a previous edition of this Julius Caesar handbook for this life on stage. ✪ production. Chicago Shakespeare Theater gratefully acknowl- edges the groundbreaking and indelible work of Dr. Rex Gibson and the Cambridge School Shakespeare Series, and The Folger Marilyn J. Halperin Director of Education Shakespeare Institute, whose contributions to the field of teach- Jason Harrington Education Outreach Manager ing have helped shape our own work through the years. Molly Topper Learning Programs Manager Lydia Dreyer, Mariana Green Education Interns ©2013, Chicago Shakespeare Theater written by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE directed by JONATHAN MUNBY ulius Caesar, written 400 years ago about people liv- ing 2,000 years ago, has the danger of seeming very far away. Of having very little similarity to us. Of be- ing about things we don’t think about much. But its words sound too familiar and don’t go away. “Freedom! Liberty! Tyranny is dead!"—we’ve heard them all as we watch pictures flash across the television screen. Shakespeare shows us power: power that some have, that others fear—and want—and that a mass of people searching for a hero has given away. We ought to rec- ognize in Shakespeare’s Rome some of the most difficult questions we con- front living in our own politically divi- sive world. ✪ ART THAT LIVES How can you help us give you rma is a living art. It is written the best performance we can? to be performed live before Da group of people who form ✪ Please no talking during the performance. It dis- an audience and together experience tracts the actors as well as the people sitting nearby. a play. Cave paintings depicting men disguised as animals reveal that since ✪ Respond naturally to our play. Emotions are part ancient times, impersonation and imi- of drama. We hope that you’ll laugh, cry and even tation have served humans in their ef- gasp—but as a natural response to the story, and not forts to express themselves and to communicate. The drama in order to distract attention from the stage. of western civilization has its roots in the ancient Greeks’ reli- gious rituals 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 was closely tied to religious beliefs and practice. Drama not by 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 communication that occurs between the actors and their can make the actors lose their focus and can be dan- audience. The audience hears and sees the actors, and the gerous. Digital cameras, along with all other kinds of actors hear and see the audience. We are used to thinking recording 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 perience, intensely and immediately, in the theater, which Shakespeare’s birth is not momentarily becomes our universe. Tknown, but his baptism, tradi- tionally three days after a child’s birth, A live theater production depends upon its audience. The was recorded on April 26, 1564. His best performances depend upon the best actors—and the father John Shakespeare was a tan- best audiences. When the actors sense a responsive, in- ner, glover, grain dealer and promi- terested audience, their work is at its best—full of animation nent town official of the thriving mar- and energy. When the actors sense disinterest, they too are ket town of Stratford-upon-Avon. His mother Mary Arden was distracted and the play they create is less interesting. One the daughter of a prosperous, educated farmer. Though the actor described the experience of live performance as a sto- records are lost, Shakespeare undoubtedly attended Strat- ry told by the actors and audience together. In this sense, ford’s grammar school, where he would have acquired some you are also a storyteller in the experience of live theater. knowledge of Latin and Greek and the classical writers. There We hope you’ll enjoy your role—and will help us to give you is no record that Shakespeare acquired a university educa- a dramatic experience that you’ll always remember. tion of any kind. Some skeptical scholars have raised doubts [Theatrical performance] is essentially a sociable, communal af- about whether Shakespeare, due to his relatively average level fair. This is important. To resist this is, I think, to ruin one of the of education and humble origins, could have possibly written very important parts of the theatrical experience. Let the play what has long been considered the best verse drama com- and let the fact that temporarily you are not your private self, but posed in the English language. But not until 1769, 150 years a member of a closely fused group, make it easy for the perfor- after Shakespeare’s death, did these theories arise—and, to all mance to ’take you out of yourself.’ This, I suggest, is the object of going to a play… to be taken out of yourself, out of your ordi- appearances, Shakespeare’s contemporaries and immediate nary life, away from the ordinary world of everyday.