The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon
Why We Love Atlanta
SHAKESPEARE IN ATLANTA
A surprising choice for top of our list of things we love about Atlanta?
Not when you consider the richness of theatrical offerings in this city that includes not one but two venues where the lover of Shakespeare can always find a satisfying matinee or evening performance. Most cities do not have even one stage devoted to Shakespeare. And why should they?
Well, for starters, the plays of Shakespeare are at the heart of the Western canon of literature. Ask Harold Bloom, pre-eminent American literary critic who credits Shakespeare with inventing human nature as we know it. "Before Shakespeare, there was characterization; after Shakespeare, there were characters, men and women capable of change, with highly individual personalities." This assertion comes from his 745-page tome on the bard.
Or ask Julie Taymor, the highly regarded stage and film director who has devoted much of her career to Shakespeare (aside from The Lion King). In an interview for the December 2013 issue of Smithsonian magazine, she says, I love to do musicals and operas .... But for me, Shakespeare is the most challenging. He's the most far-out, the most wicked and spiritual, and demonic and philosophical. See her 1999 film Titus Andronicus starring Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange.
Consider also people lucky enough to have discovered early in their education (as I did, in the ninth grade, required to read Julius Caesar) that the biblical language filling our ears on Sundays came from the King James translation of the Bible, carried out during the time and in the place where Shakespeare was composing his secular but no less sacred writing, and so thee and thou did sound familiar and welcome to mine ear.
It wasn't until I moved to the big city, however, that I found the true wealth of the language and the close attendance to human nature that makes Shakespeare an indispensable mentor for anyone interested in exploring what it means to be fully human. My heart is full of gratitude to those Atlantans who dug deep into the ground of the developing city to plant the soulful roots of Shakespeare here and worked many years to bring their stages to maturity in Georgia Shakespeare and New American Shakespeare Tavern.
_______Barbara Knott
Words You Probably Didn't Know Were Invented by Shakespeare
Reference: Harold Bloom. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York (NY): Riverhead Books; 1998.
Copyright 2013, Barbara Knott. All Rights Reserved.