TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface . 1 Art That Lives . 2 Bard’s Bio . 2 The First Folio . 3 Shakespeare’s England . 4 Barbara Gaines Criss Henderson The Renaissance Theater . 5 Artistic Director Executive Director Courtyard-style Theater . 6 Chicago Shakespeare Theater is Chicago’s professional theater dedi- Timelines . 8 cated to the works of William Shakespeare. Founded as Shakespeare Repertory in 1986, the company moved to its seven-story home on Navy ’ As You Like It Pier in 1999. In its Elizabethan-style courtyard theater, 500 seats on three Shakespeare s levels wrap around a deep thrust stage—with only nine rows separating Dramatis Personae & Relationship Chart. 10 the farthest seat from the stage. Chicago Shakespeare also features a The Story . 11 flexible 180-seat black box studio theater, a Teacher Resource Center, Act-by-Act Synopsis . 11 and a Shakespeare specialty bookstall. Something Borrowed, Something New. 13 In its first 23 seasons, the Theater has produced nearly the entire Shake- The Nature of Comedy . 14 speare canon: All’s Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, As An Education in Arden . 16 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, Lovers, Lasses, and Playing with Gender . 17 King Lear, Love’s Labor’s Lost, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, The Playing the Woman’s Part in Arden . 18 Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer What the Critics Say . 19 Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Pericles, Richard II, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, The Two Gentle- men of Verona, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and The Winter’s Tale. aAs playYou Like comesIt in Performance to life . 27 A Conversation with the Director . 30 Chicago Shakespeare Theater was the 2008 recipient of the Regional Theatre Tony Award. Chicago’s Jeff Awards year after year have honored the Theater, including repeated awards for Best Production and Best Di- rector, the two highest honors in Chicago theater. classroomActivity Index. activities. 33 Since Chicago Shakespeare’s founding, its programming for young audi- Theater Warm-Ups . 36 ences has been an essential element in the realization of its mission. Team Before You Read the Play . 40 Shakespeare supports education in our schools, where Shakespeare is As You Read the Play . 43 part of every required curriculum. As a theater within a multicultural city, After You’ve Read the Play . 52 we are committed to bringing Shakespeare to a young and ethnically di- verse audience of nearly 50,000 students each year. Team Shakespeare’s Preparing for the Performance . 55 programming includes free teacher workshops, student matinees of main- Back in the Classroom . 56 stage shows, post-performance discussions, comprehensive teacher Techno Shakespeare . 57 handbooks, and an abridged, original production each year of one of the “curriculum plays.” Team Shakespeare offers a region-wide forum for new Suggested Readings . 61 vision and enthusiasm for teaching Shakespeare in our schools. The 2010-2011 Season offers a student matinee series for Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s productions of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet ACKNOWLEDGMENTS in the fall and As You Like It in the winter, as well as Alan Bennett’s The This Teacher Handbook grew out of a team effort Madness of George III this spring. Also this winter, Chicago Shake- of teachers past and present, Chicago Shakespeare speare presents especially for students a 75-minute abridged adaptation Theater artists, interns, educators, and scholars, of Macbeth, at its theater on Navy Pier and on tour to schools and the- past and present. Chicago Shakespeare Theater aters across the region. gratefully acknowledges the work of Dr. Rex Gibson and the Cambridge School Shakespeare Series, We hope that you and your students will enjoy our work—and Shake- and The Folger Shakespeare Institute, whose con- speare’s creative genius brought to life on stage. C tributions to the field of teaching have helped shape our own ideas through the years. Marilyn J. Halperin Director of Education Erin Monahan Education Outreach ©2010, Chicago Shakespeare Theater Danielle Gennaoui Education Associate Lauren Eriks Education Intern WRITTEN BY William Shakespeare DIRECTED BY Gary Griffin Growing up is risky business for the young he- roes of As You Like It. Betrayed by the people O who are supposed to care for them, Rosalind, Celia, and Orlando pack their bags and hit the road in search of security, adventure—and their future. From the dangers of Duke Frederick’s court we plunge into the Forest of Arden, where a person may be safe from the threats of treason or murder, but no one is safe from the hazards of love. The person who travels here is grant- ed the chance to be someone else. Arden is a strange place, where you can make mistakes, where the only necessity is to practice and learn. Arden is a place of our imaginations and our desires. No one comes back from this forest’s depths quite the same. C Team Shakespeare arts-in-education activities for As You Like It are supported, in part, by Baxter international, with additional support from Sheila Penrose and Ernie Mahaffey. ART THAT LIVES rama, like no other art form, How can you help us give you is a living art. It is written to the best performance we can? D be performed live before a group of people who form an audi- C Please don’t talk during the performance. Talking dis- ence and together experience a play. tracts the actors as well as the people sitting nearby. Ancient cave paintings depict men disguised as animals. Since ancient C 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 man in his effort to express himself and to communi- but as a natural response to the story, and not in order cate. The drama of western civilization has its roots in the ancient to distract attention from the stage. Greeks’ religious rituals and observances. Until the Renaissance, C Please keep all “noisemakers”—food, gum, cell when Shakespeare wrote, drama was closely tied to religious be- phones, iPods, etc.—back at school or on the bus! In liefs and practice. a quiet theater, wrappers and munching are heard by Drama not only depicts human communication, it is human com- all, the actors included. munication. In theater, unlike television or film, there is a two-way C No photographs of any kind, please! Flashbulbs can communication that occurs between the actors and their audi- make the actors lose their focus and can be danger- ence. The audience hears and sees the actors, and the actors ous. Digital cameras, along with all other kinds of re- hear and see the audience. We are used to thinking about the cording devices, are prohibited, as is text-messaging. actors’ roles in a play, but may find it strange to imagine our- selves, the audience, playing an important role in this living art. Because the art lives, each production is guaranteed to be differ- ent, depending in part upon an audience’s response. Live drama is the sharing of human experience, intensely and immediately, in BARD’S BIO the theater, which momentarily becomes our universe. he exact date of William Shake- speare’s birth is not known, but A live theater production depends upon its audience. The best his baptism, traditionally three performances depend upon the best actors—and the best au- T days after a child’s birth, was record- diences. When the actors sense a responsive, interested au- ed on April 26, 1564. His father John dience, their work is at its best—full of animation and energy. Shakespeare was a tanner, glover, When the actors sense disinterest, they, too, are distracted, grain dealer and town official of the and the play they create is less interesting. thriving market town of Stratford-upon- One actor described the experience of live performance as a Avon. His mother Mary Arden was the story told by the actors and audience together. In this sense, daughter of a prosperous, educated farmer. Though the records you are also a storyteller in the experience of live theater. We are lost, Shakespeare undoubtedly attended Stratford’s grammar hope you’ll enjoy your role—and help us give you a dramatic school, where he would have acquired some knowledge of Latin experience that you’ll always remember. and Greek and the classical writers. There is no record that Shake- speare acquired a university education of any kind. [Theatrical performance] is essentially a sociable, communal af- fair. This is important. To resist this is, I think, to ruin one of the Some skeptical scholars have raised doubts about whether very important parts of the theatrical experience. Let the play Shakespeare, due to his relatively average level of education and let the fact that temporarily you are not your private self, but and humble origins, could have possibly written what has a member of a closely fused group, make it easy for the perfor- mance to ’take you out of yourself.’ This, I suggest, is the object long been considered the best verse drama composed in the of going to a play… to be taken out of yourself, out of your ordi- English language. But not until 1769, 150 years after Shake- nary life, away from the ordinary world of everyday. speare’s death, did these theories arise—and, to all appear- —Tyrone Guthrie, 1962 ances, Shakespeare’s contemporaries and immediate succes- sors never seemed to question whether William Shakespeare wrote the celebrated works attributed to him.