written by roger jerome edited & designed by kathleen...

Roger Jerome

Shakespearean AppearancesEducation/community RElations 650 Walnut st. cincinnati, oH 45202PHonE 513-977-4116Fax [email protected]

Study Guide

Written by Roger Jerome

Edited & Designed by Kathleen Riemenschneider

Artists on Tour

Classroom photo by Rich Sofranko

Cincinnati Arts Association � Shakespearean Appearances

In Shakespearean Appearances, Roger Jerome will perform from the following list of speeches:IAGO from Othello, Act 1 Sc. l, line 41: “O sir, content you...” to line 65RICHARD from Richard Ill, Act 1 Sc. �, line �15: “Was ever woman...” to line �50EDGAR from King Lear, Act � Sc. �, line 164: “I heard myself proclaimed...” to line 184BOTTOM from Midsummer...Dream, Act 4, Sc. l, line 198: “When my cue comes...” to line �15FRIAR LAURENCE from Romeo & Juliet, Act 4 Sc. l, line 89: “Hold then, go home...” to line 1�0MALVOLIO from Twelfth Night, Act � Sc. 5, line 80: “What employment have we...” to line 17�MACBETH. Act � Sc. l, line 31: “Go, bid thy mistress...” to line 64FIRST PLAYER from Hamlet, Act �, Sc. �, line 466 : “The hellish Pyrrhus...” to line 5�1HAMLET Act � Sc. �, line 55� : “O, what a rogue and peasant slave...” to line 607Attention will also be paid to the scene between EDGAR and GLOUCESTER in King Lear, Act 4 Sc.5, the first 40 lines

This teachers’ pack contains sections with comments on:Roger Jerome . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . pg 3Shakespeare, The Mystery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . pg 4Dramatic Irony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . pg 5Role-Play . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . pg 6Lying and Hypocrisy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . pg 7Disguise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . pg 8Trickery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . pg 9Dreams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . pg 10Hallucination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . pg 11Theater . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . pg 1�

[Discussion points are suggested on each page]

Cincinnati Arts Association 3 Shakespearean Appearances

RogeR JeRomeRoger Jerome is a member of both of the British Actors Equity and American Equity, the

professional actors’ trade unions on both sides of the Atlantic. He is British but now lives in the United States. His first Shakespearean acting experience was in Romeo and Juliet in 1954 and he recently played Capulet in the same play in May �001. He has been steeped in Shakespeare since high school and, apart from having seen all the 38 plays at least twice (Hamlet well over 30 times!), he has acted in 14 of them and directed 10 of the plays. He was a founder-member of the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1961. He has seen the plays performed in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Russian and Japanese. As a college lecturer for �� years, he has taught many of the plays.

Roger’s professional acting credits in the UK include the Edinburgh Festival, London’s West End, the BBC, Birmingham Repertory, the Bristol Old Vic and Nottingham Playhouse, as well as Stratford. His American credits include Monomoy Theater, Cape Cod, Pittsburgh Public Theater, Pittsburgh’s Irish and Classical Theater and numerous voiceovers and industrials. Having come to the USA in the early 90s and settled in Ohio, where he remarried in 1995, Roger has taught at a number of colleges, including Ohio University, the University of Delaware, Fairmont State College, West Virginia University and Shawnee State University. He also decided to devise some one-person shows that he could perform in colleges and libraries. He has shows about Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, King Arthur and folk tales but he really wanted to deal with Shakespeare.

Roger loves Shakespeare, thinks he’s the greatest writer ever and will willingly go and see a performance of any of the plays at any time if he thinks there’ll be an honest and intelligent, but not necessarily traditional, approach to the text. He is also intrigued by films and videos of the plays and has a personal collection of about 90 cassettes.

For this show, Roger decided on a narrated thematic presentation of extracts, interspersed with improvisations by students. The latter will probably hold, or reawaken, the audience’s interest, even if they get bored with the intellectual stuff!

So, we have an exploration of the theme of Appearance versus Reality.


ShakeSpeaRe, The mySTeRyThere is a strong mystery about William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616) and whether “he” wrote the

plays attributed to him so much so that many experts draw a distinction between “the man from Stratford” (who definitely lived) and the author of the plays. A comprehensive review of this controversy and the various claims to authorship is provided in Who Wrote Shakespeare? by John Michell (Thames and Hudson, 1996). It says, “The life of Wm. Shakespeare himself is the main reason why there is a Shakespeare authorship problem. A review of all the known, documented facts about his career gives a picture of a fairly successful businessman who dealt in land, property and rural commodities and arranged small loans upon security. He was also known on the London stage and speculated in the theater. His will mentioned no books, manuscripts or any sign of literacy. No one in Stratford ever acknowledged him as a writer. . .it is not at all consistent with his posthumous reputation as England’s finest, most highly cultured poet and playwright.”

Various claims to the authorship have been made for Francis Bacon, for the Earl of Oxford, for the Earl of Derby, for the Earl of Rutland, for Christopher Marlowe and even for Queen Elizabeth, among others, but it’s still a mystery. We are limited by the sketchiness of evidence and the historical gap between then and now.

It’s been suggested that there was a conspiracy to credit “the man from Stratford” with writing as a cover for another person who didn’t wish to be known as the writer. All this is set against the traditional view that “Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.” And even if “he” didn’t, we still have the plays and poems to admire.

Standing back from the whole picture, a notional observer who is omniscient and outside time might be having a huge laugh at all this speculation. What IS the reality of Shakespeare???????

DiScuSSion poinTS• From the writings that you know, what sort of person do you think Shakespeare was?• Why would any writer not want to be identified as the author of such brilliant work?• Does it make any difference to your enjoyment of literature if you know biographical details?


DRamaTic iRonyOne of the ways in which storytellers create tension is through dramatic irony. A Handbook to

Literature explains it thus:

“The words or acts of a character in a play may carry a meaning unperceived by himself but understood by the audience. Usually the character’s own interests are involved in a way he cannot understand. The irony resides in the contrast in the meaning intended by the speaker and the added significance seen by others. The term is occasionally applied to non-dramatic narrative, and is sometimes extended to include any situation (such as mistaken identity) in which some of the actors on the stage or some of the characters in a story are “blind” to facts known to the spectator or reader. So understood, dramatic irony is responsible for much of the interest in fiction or drama, because the reader or spectator enjoys being in on the secret.”

In other words, we (the audience) know more than they (the characters) know. When, in a Punch and Judy show, the audience is told, “There’s no crocodile here!,” and can SEE a crocodile in the background, it might yell, “Look behind you!” The character looks and, of course, the croc dodges out of sight, etc.. TV uses dramatic irony constantly – in comedy, learning from Abbott and Costello, and in serious programs, e.g. E.R., where a character will be unaware of a diagnosis which the audience has heard about earlier. Historical plays use our modern knowledge of what happened later, e.g. in The Diary of Anne Frank, where Anne doesn’t know about the Holocaust and her own fate.

So, plays often explore the relativity of reality.Disguise is a clear example of the use of dramatic irony and Shakespeare uses this device very

frequently.

DiScuSSion poinTS• How do fairy tales use dramatic irony? You could start with Cinderella trying on the slipper.• What recent political events show dramatic irony in retrospect?• Analyze how current TV comedy uses dramatic irony, e.g. The Simpsons.


Role-playThe program Shakespearean Appearances will feature students improvising unprepared situations

given to them. The fun the audience has from watching this, such as when we watch Whose Line Is It Anyway? on TV, derives from seeing how ingeniously the performers can make things up on the spot. We can be delighted when they make some unexpected move or come out with an effective piece of dialogue. This, of course, is what we do in real life. We face situations as they come to us, we respond to what people say to us. We’re all involved in what Ervin Goffman called “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.”

Our ability to deal with the unexpected is an important social skill and that’s why improvisation is very useful for everyone, used in job preparation courses, e.g., the army, management, and teaching. Again, Shakespeare was on to this and he frequently has his characters, as it were, practice for the real thing.

Rosalind, in As You Like It, practices love-making with Orlando (the irony being that she is the girl he yearns for), while in Henry IV, the Prince and Falstaff play roles exploring what the King thinks of their relationship. They take turns to sit on a pretend-throne and wear a pretend-crown. The scenes are hilarious and touching. Prince Hal is one of the best role-players of all because he says in an early soliloquy: “I know you all, and will awhile uphold the unyoked humor of your idleness” – that he will play the fool and be dissolute until he becomes king, so that people will admire him all the more for his apparent change of character.

In pretending a situation, playing at it, we can become better at dealing with the reality.

DiScuSSion poinTS• Have you ever improvised? Has the activity been useful to you?• What real-life situations have you encountered where someone is role-playing?• Apart from the Big Bad Wolf, what characters in fiction role-play to get what they want?


lying anD hypocRiSyKing Lear asks, “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” Sonnet 121 quotes the Book of Exodus, “I am

that I am,” but Iago says, "I am not what I am."The plays contain many characters who, to different extents, lie and are deceitful. Each play

contains strong examples. Some of them lie for convenience or to avoid embarrassment – much as we sometimes do ourselves. The concept of the “white lie” covers such responses as “Tell the person on the phone that I'm not in.” In Henry IV, we are told, “Lord, how this world is given to lying,” and in Measure for Measure we hear, “To have what we would have, we speak not what we mean.” Among the last lines – and therefore, presumably, a moral lesson – of King Lear is “The weight of this sad time we must obey, speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”

It is the wicked and self-seeking liars and hypocrites who are the most repellent yet memorable Shakespearean villains—those like Iago and Richard Ill, who will kill and kill again to get their way. There is a truly hideous quality as human life is sacrificed to their egotistical wishes. Iago is one who, like Aaron in Titus Andronicus, will never repent – and is pure evil. Shakespeare has these characters confide in and chuckle with the audience, thus drawing a measure of imaginative complicity. We are told what horrors they will commit and then we observe them being committed.

In real life, our understanding of the reality of a situation depends a great deal on what people tell us – hence our valuing whether they tell us the truth or not. There are countless times in the plays where someone is being misled by being given a wrong or partial version of the truth. Interestingly, the truth-teller, the character who is so frank that s/he will call a spade a spade whatever, is seen as a menace, as anti-social. Coriolanus and Timon (of Athens) both cause dismay and destruction all around them.

DiScuSSion poinTS• How can a character like Iago, who is so completely wicked, be seen as human?• Is some amount of deceit necessary to get on in life?• What examples of very truthful or very deceitful people do we see around us?


DiSguiSeOne of the well-known features of the British theater of Shakespeare's time was that female roles

were played by youths with unbroken voices. Thus, all the great women in the plays – Juliet, Cleopatra, Beatrice, Rosalind – were portrayed by males. The movie Shakespeare in Love had great fun with this fact, even turning it round for comic effect and having a girl pretend to be a boy – Gwynneth Paltrow as Romeo.

All actors are in disguise to the extent that they are costumed and made up to be a character in a play, but Shakespeare frequently creates multiple levels of dramatic irony by having his female characters – e.g. Rosalind, Viola, Portia, Imogen – dress up as men due to the exigencies of the story. Comedy is produced as we see them coping with hearty male company or being expected to fight with a sword. Further, the disguised woman will sometimes speak “as if” a woman, e.g. when Rosalind in As You Like It, in disguise as Ganymede, pretends to be Rosalind (!) so that Orlando can practice wooing her. The complication is compounded when twins are involved, as with Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night. Seeing two attractive “men,” Olivia exclaims “Most wonderful!” Both in real life and in stories, people can be confused about reality if someone pretends to be another person.

There are numerous times in Shakespeare when men are in disguise, to escape, to trick, etc., when “False face must hide what the false heart doth know” (Macbeth). Romeo and his friends wear masks to gatecrash the Capulets’ ball. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Ford assumes the character of Master Brook so that he can discover if Falstaff is having an affair with Ford’s own wife. Then Falstaff has to dress in drag as the Aunt of Brentford to escape from Ford when discovered in flagrante. The Gadshill robbery has the future King of England pretending to be a robber in order to embarrass Falstaff. Disguise also abounds in The Taming of the Shrew. And so on. In the program, Roger Jerome shows Edgar in King Lear turning himself into a beggar.

DiScuSSion poinTS• How believable is it when a Shakespearean character goes into disguise?• What examples of disguise in modern plays/TV/movies can you think of?• What's involved in pretending to be another person?


TRickeRy“Setting people up” is a time-worn activity. Practical jokes, April Fools' Day, the surprise birthday

party – there are many examples where a false reality is engineered.Shakespeare's plays are full of them, too. The story of Much Ado about Nothing depends on trickery.

Don John, in his malcontent, approves setting up the appearance of Hero flirting out of her window with his henchman. Both Beatrice and Benedick are fooled by engineered conversations into thinking the other is in love with them. “This can be no trick,” says Benedick confidently. Claudio does penance at a mock funeral for his bad behavior. As the song says, “Men were deceivers ever.”

One of the most moving scenes in the whole of Shakespeare is when, in A Winter’s Tale, the statue of Hermione, who is thought long dead by her now-repentant husband Leontes, slowly moves and is realized to be Hermione herself. Petruchio tells the audience he will brainwash Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew; the conspirators in Julius Caesar pretend to be concerned with business as they crowd around Caesar in the Senate to stab him; while Friar Laurence employs a powerful drug to convince everyone that Juliet is dead and should be laid out in the family vault. The “bed-trick” is employed twice by Shakespeare. This is a con where a woman is in bed with a man, and it isn’t the woman he thinks it is. This is an old device – at least in stories – and is how Uther Pendragon seduced King Arthur’s mother, Ygraine. It’s found in Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well.

Malvolio is punished by Maria and Sir Toby for his haughty bossiness. The forged letter he finds in the garden tells him Olivia loves him and this feeds on his secret feelings and ambition. The unwelcome smiling and yellow stockings are alI a result of the setup in the letter. The tormenting continues with the taunting of Malvolio in a cell by Feste, disguised as Sir Topas.

DiScuSSion poinTS• Have you ever been a victim of trickery? Why did you believe it?• Have you ever set somebody up? What details did you attend to?• What examples of trickery have you found in stories or the media?


DReamS“There once was a man who dreamed he was a butterfly. When he awoke, he wasn't sure if he was

a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who was now dreaming he was a man.” This is the Chinese poet Chang Tsu's paradox.

The power of dreams and the confusion they can cause, particularly when the dreams come true, is a very common experience. The importance of dreams, whether in the Ancient World, e.g. Joseph, King Arthur, or in the epoch following Freud and Jung, is well established.

Shakespeare knew this and his play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is a wonderful essay on the confusions and realizations of dreams. Even after waking from his deep sleep, Demetrius says, “It seems to me that yet we sleep, we dream.” Bottom chooses not to explore his own dream too deeply, an amazing dream in which his existential boundaries are exploded. A work of art, a play, is in a sense a dream that we share with the artist. At the conclusion of the play, Puck tells the audience to think

“That you have but slumbered here,While these visions did appear,And this weak and idle theme,No more yielding but a dream.”

Elsewhere, early in Richard Ill, Clarence’s dream presages his violent end on the orders of his brother, and at the end of the play, Richard is terrified by his victims reappearing in his dream and cursing him. In Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio sums up his own powerful speech about Queen Mab thus: “I talk of dreams, which are the children of an idle brain.” A key turning-point in Julius Caesar is the alternative reading of Portia’s dream which causes Caesar to go to the Capitol, to meet his death. Hamlet refers to Death thus: “To sleep, perchance to dream.” Caliban, in The Tempest, talks of his happy dreams, which contrast with his daily misery.

To write his plays, Shakespeare drew upon his own fantasies and dreams.

DiScuSSion poinTS• Do you dream? Have any been particularly powerful or unusual?• Is their a link between dreams and imagination? Between dreams and creativity?• What stories use dreams? You can start with Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz.


hallucinaTionOur senses can deceive us. We think we see a movement – it could be a floater in our eye. We have

all said things like: “I thought I heard something”; “I feel it’s getting colder”; “This tastes bitter to me”; “Can you smell a skunk around here?”

From Anthony and Cleopatra: “Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish, a vapor sometimes like a bear or lion.”

Shakespeare has some of his characters clearly mistake their perception of the reality around them. The strongest example of this is Macbeth, who does have visions and whose guilt works strongly on his imagination. Before he goes in to kill King Duncan, he imagines a dagger in front of him. It seems covered in blood and even points the way to Duncan’s bedchamber. We, in the audience, see the Witches who appear to Macbeth, we see the line of kings, we see Banquo’s ghost. But there’s a moment at the banquet when Macbeth sees the ghost and we don’t. His mind is deceived.

Ghosts are something we may or may not believe in but Shakespeare has ghosts appearing and talking to characters on stage. Hamlet’s father commands him to “Remember me!” and Caesar tells Brutus he will see him “At Philippi!” Richard III and Richmond are visited by a whole string of ghosts, who curse and bless them respectively, before the Battle of Bosworth.

A person who is insane is understood not to be able to distinguish reality from illusion. Hamlet may or may not be crazy; as Ophelia says, “Though this be madness, yet there’s method in it.”

It isn’t certain when or whether Hamlet actually loses his mind.In the midst of the mayhem in Comedy of Errors, the question is asked, “What error drives our eyes

and ears amiss?” The answer is that there are many reasons for such errors.

DiScuSSion poinTS• When have you been certain of something which you later found was a perception problem?• What key moments in plays/TV/movies have depended on deception of the senses?• How difficult is it to deal with someone who has lost their grip on reality?

Cincinnati Arts Association 1� Shakespearean Appearances

TheaTeROne of the undisputed facts about Shakespeare is that he was an actor and a shareholder in his

theater company. The plays are full of references to acting and one of the most famous quotations is from As You Like It – “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players (actors).” A complete survey of the dramaturgical references in the plays is to be found in Anne Righter’s book, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play.

A whole play, The Taming of the Shrew, is a play within a play. There’s an introduction, involving Christopher Sly, where doctors think “it good you hear a play and frame your mind to mirth and merriment.” The play that Mr. Sly sees is the one featuring Petruchio and Katherine. Two comedies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Love’s Labor’s Lost, end with a performance of a classical story, acted by incompetent amateurs. The fun is sublime and the details reveal to us many theatrical practices of the Shakespearean period. In Richard Ill, to hoodwink the London citizens into thinking that the city and country need a strong king, Buckingham and Richard playact dangerous situations, complete with props and sound effects.

The play that hinges on the use of theater and contains the ultimate questions — What is real? What is illusion? — is Hamlet. Here a group of players (actors) is employed by the Prince to act for a particular purpose: “The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” Hamlet gives the actors his famous advice – “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue” – and the audience observes the hammy First Player acting in a stagey way, grimacing, wailing, crying. Hamlet is perplexed that such a pretender can produce tears when he can’t himself, even though he’s in emotional turmoil. The later irony is that the pretence, the play, does make the King reveal his guilt in a way that he couldn’t be made by so-called “real” behavior.

DiScuSSion poinTS• Have you ever felt that a work of art (story/music/poem/visual art) is stronger than reality?• The Catholic Church used to present plays to teach people. Can you think of similar examples?• How would you define Reality?

written by roger jerome edited & designed by kathleen...

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