Twelfth Night, or What You Will, and: The Winter's Tale, and: Othello, and: Unexpected Shaxpere (review)
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The cover illustration for the 2005 Colorado Shakespeare Festival program features a high-flying William Shakespeare in Elizabethan garb, but wearing sneakers, mounted on a skateboard against a background of blue sky interrupted here and there by fleecy white clouds. Also appearing in the background are two leaping Frisbee-catching dogs, a soccer ball, a baseball, and a dragonfly. In one upraised hand the Bard holds an ink bottle, while in the other he holds a quill pen, with a line of dialogue connecting the two writing implements. Since the viewing angle places observers below the ascendant figure, they can see the bottom of the skateboard, which features a union jack and the motto "born a poet," inscribed in quasi-Elizabethan lettering.
The purpose of such an illustration is not difficult to decipher, but if such help were needed, the festival's newspaper advertisement supplied it, inscribing an invitation to "Come picnic and play with us . . . " above the figure of Skateboarding Shakespeare. Needless to say, the bottom-line message of the illustration (also available in poster format at the festival's souvenir stand) was that Shakespeare is basically relaxing fun, the perfect complement to some of the other, perhaps more popular, leisure activities associated with summer in the Colorado Rockies. Indeed, the illustration seems to assume that writing was also enjoyable and relatively effortless for Shakespeare himself. But, the illustration obviously neglected the fact that two of the three plays chosen for the 2005 festival came from the tragicomic and tragic domains of Shakespeare's dramatic output. The festival's strategy, then, must have been based on hooking an audience with a broadly farcical Twelfth Night (supplemented, as I shall note below, with an equally uproarious improvised production called Unexpected Shaxpere) and hopes that audience members would return for the two more serious plays.
The festival fully delivered on its apparent premise with the Twelfth Night production. Director Robert Cohen insisted on including the play's alternate title in the program, asserting in his program note that What You Will...
