Terry Teachout on Shakespeare

The photo above is from the movie Shakespeare in Love (1998).

I have used it just to lure you cinephiles in. I have nothing to say about that movie at all. Or movies in general -- I'm thinking of live theatre this morning for some reason.

And I'll present without further comment the following, from a review by Terry Teachout in last Tuesday's Wall Street Journal.

"Broadway is one of the worst places in America to see Shakespeare done right -- not because nobody there knows how to mount his plays (though I sometimes have my doubts), but because virtually all of the theatres on the Great White Way are conventional proscenium-style houses in which the actors and audience are placed on opposite sides of a rectangular arch that frames the stage. Shakespeare's plays, by contrast, were written for a far more intimate kind of space, the closest contemporary counterpart of which is a thrust stage that allows the audience to sit on three sides of the actors."

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