Open your ears ...

Hello, and welcome!

This is Hearing Shakespeare: a place you can visit to listen to Shakespeare and read about how you might approach speaking it yourself. I believe wholeheartedly that Shakespeare should be heard not simply read silently, and I endeavor to give you that opportunity right in your own home, sitting at your own computer, without a huge time commitment.

The vernacular in Shakespeare’s day was to go and “hear” a play, not ‘see’ one. As we have become more and more visual, we’ve lost our sense of active listening, and Shakespeare embeds in his work some of the most evocative language ever written. I will create here for us a forum in which we can engage and return to our roots in the aural tradition.

You may or may not know that Shakespeare was an incredibly savvy businessman; a purveyor of popular entertainment that amassed a fortune by engaging with his audience in the most innovative ways. It’s no secret that Shakespeare drew upon many sources for his plays, but his versions stay with us because of the ways in which he stirred within his audiences (and in us today) a connection to the heart of the story: the universal needs with we continue to struggle.

I think that Shakespeare would have loved what is possible today with the use of technology. He wrote: “all the world’s a stage” and here I activate that idea directly. I will create for you, my listener/readers, a global ‘stage’, where the blogosphere serves as our ‘Globe Theatre’, both figuratively and literally.

Play on!