Shakespearean forum finds home at UCLA

Thursday, April 4, 1996

Recent film adaptations, performances are focus of yearly look
at RenaissanceBy Rodney Tanaka

Daily Bruin Senior Staff

This fall, scholars and thespians will converge on UCLA to
discuss murder most foul, a pound of flesh and make much ado about
nothing.

This meeting of the minds comes courtesy of the University of
California Shakespeare Forum, a research unit that promotes
Shakespeare scholarship. This year, the institutional home of the
forum moves from UC Berkeley, and the rotating schedule of UC
campuses lands on UCLA.

"UCLA is without a doubt the UC university with the greatest
depth and richness in Renaissance literature," says Patrick Geary,
director of UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. "We
have world class scholars who deal with Renaissance drama, and they
were very enthusiastic to help their colleagues at other
institutions."

UCLA professors and graduate students will meet with their
counterparts throughout the UC system to discuss Shakespeare’s
work. Activities include discussions, paper presentations and trips
to local theater productions of Shakespeare’s plays.

"Shakespeare was writing plays to be performed and this
performing aspect of his work is absolutely essential to understand
it," Geary says. "(When) these (plays) cease to be performatory and
are simply texts, this is denying a fundamental aspect of what they
are, and it’s also denying audiences, scholarly as well as popular,
one of the great joys of world civilization."

UCLA Professor Robert Watson, the new director of the forum,
says he wants the forum to address the often disjointed
perspectives of scholars and performers. Directors and actors
performing the work of the Bard will raise new voices in forum
discussions.

"We have increasingly become aware that the plays are organic
things that are written for production," Watson says. "They don’t
really have a stable meaning outside of the way they appear at any
historical moment in theater."

The increasing visibility of film adaptations of Shakespeare’s
plays, including recent versions of "Richard III" and "Othello,"
necessitate their involvement in the forum.

"What the forum has not done that we would like to see happen is
to emphasize not only the aspects of Shakespeare in theater, but
also Shakespeare in film and television," Geary says. "We will be
able to emphasize that, not to the exclusion of legitimate theater,
but in addition to that."

Shakespeare on film allows nuances unavailable on the written
page. A pivotal scene in a recent film adaptation of "Othello,"
directed by Oliver Parker, substitutes a gesture for a line of
Shakespeare’s dialogue. Othello is convinced that his wife,
Desdemona, has committed adultery. He suffocates her while in a
jealous rage.

"Just as she’s dying, instead of fighting him off, she just
stops and strokes his head tenderly, as if she knows he’ll be
sorry, and she forgives him ," Watson says. "It was a very powerful
and moving moment, and so I think you have to recognize that
cinema’s just going to do things differently from what you can hope
for from a stage production."

The forum’s move to UCLA signifies a new direction for the
event. Scholars and students will still present papers on
Shakespeare’s work, but the emphasis will be on discussion rather
than lecture. These discussions will address the importance and
relevance that Shakespeare’s ideas hold today.

"Shakespeare is in some ways a master multi-culturalist," Watson
says. "He is someone who has managed to create stories that have
spoken to people across an amazingly wide range of cultural
differences, and he’s also by my experience in classrooms, able to
make people feel a human connection to people who lived centuries
ago ­ to recognize the kinship. And I think when students
learn to recognize their kinship across that big a chronological
divide, they can also start reaching across some of the cultural
divide that makes life so complicated sometimes in L.A."

Students may find that something would be rotten in the state of
the world if discussions such as the forum were discontinued.

"I think that we would be at least at much greater risk of
losing our sense that human beings have important things in common
across the differences of cultures and times," Watson says. "You
don’t have to be a medieval prince visited by a ghost, like Hamlet,
in order to have conflicted feelings about your parents and a sense
that the world isn’t the ideal, perfect place that you thought it
was when you were young."

Laurence Fishburne stars in the film, "Othello," one of many
recent adaptations which the Shakespeare forum will discuss.