Mon, 01 May 2023 04:40:17 -0700WeeblyTue, 27 Aug 2019 19:38:27 GMThttp://shakespeareinc.com/shakespeare-blog-and-contact-info/why-is-there-a-20th-season-of-instant-shakespeareStill haven't yet gotten into the regular blogging habit, but I will strive to do better.
The reason there is a 20th Season of Instant Shakespeare was because the First Season was so successful. The first season went under the name of the Applause Shakespeare Marathon at the old Applause bookstore on West 71st St. and it consisted of reading the 36 plays in the First Folio in 12 days, with 3 readings a day at noon, 3pm and 6pm. So we were aiming to get all of the plays done in 3 hours, for the last play we could go a little over since I was a part owner of the store at the time and could keep it open. As I wrote in my last post this was largely done as a test to see how useful doing readings from the First Folio text would be.

There are definitely challenges to reading the First Folio text, most especially if you look at a facsimile or an early printed edition online because there were different typesetting conventions. Lower case s was usually printed with a character that looks like and f. I and J were reversed in standard usage as were U and V at times. So for example the word "juice" would be spelled "iuyce". Now the Applause Folio Texts which were set up by Neil Freeman updated the type usage to modern type, while retaining the original spelling, capitalization and punctuation, so that "iuyce" was printed "juyce", which although it is challenging as it has an archaic spelling of juyce, it is much easier to figure out when the word starts with a j and not an i.

It soon became clear that there was a big benefit to using the First Folio when reading the text especially because the Capitalization showed you what words to emphasize and I found that it worked quite well when reading unfamiliar text and by putting emphasis on the capitalized words listeners could follow the argument more clearly and readers could discover the meaning while reading aloud without prior examination.

What quickly became apparent in reading the plays aloud, starting with the First Part of Henry the Sixt was that the text was easier to understand when spoken aloud then when read on the page. Some of the readings were quite successful and the one that I specially remember was the reading of Othello with Geoffrey Owens as Othello and David Palmer Brown as Iago.
]]>Thu, 04 Apr 2019 01:17:59 GMThttp://shakespeareinc.com/shakespeare-blog-and-contact-info/20th-season-of-instant-shakespeareHi, So I'm quite embarrassed that I started this website and then didn't post any blogs, so I'm going to start doing this. 
This year is the 20th Season of the Instant Shakespeare Company and we present readings of ALL of Shakespeare's plays annually. In our first season we read all 36 of the plays in the First Folio in 12 days at the Applause Theatre & Cinema Bookstore (which is now no longer in existence) from March 13-24th in 2000 under the name of Applause Shakespeare Folio Marathon. Now we do most of our readings at various branches of the New York Public Library from March to December.
There were several factors that contributed to doing the readings that year. One was that Applause had moved out its publishing operations and we had space in the store to have a stage built. However we knew that we would have to shrink the footprint of the store and lose part of the space which included the stage. Another thing that we were working on at the time was bringing out the Neil Freeman First Folio editions of all 36 of the plays in Shakespeare's First Folio. 
The work of Neil Freeman and Patrick Tucker contributed to the idea that the original settings of the plays in the folio contained clues for the actors that editors over the years had removed and that it could give clues to the actors. By doing readings of these plays without rehearsal would be a chance to see if those theories could be born out in actual practice. In my next blog post I'll discuss how successful I thought that was.
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]]>Thu, 12 Jul 2012 07:23:13 GMThttp://shakespeareinc.com/shakespeare-blog-and-contact-info/first-postHi, This will be a way that I can share my thoughts on Shakespeare and keep you updated on events.]]>