A Chat with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I

Shake Stonington editor Alicia Anstead caught up with Queen Elizabeth I in Stonington, Maine, where the Virgin Queen is in residence June 30-July 16 for performances of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing at the Stonington Opera House. When Shakespeare himself was just 5 -- according to scholar Stephen Greenblatt's imaginative biography Will in the World -- he may have seen the queen's "traveling playing companies" (much like the one that come to Stonington each summer) and may have been influenced by the performances and later by the "charismatic power of royalty." The following is the queen's view of life on an island much smaller than the one she calls home. She's a classy lady. And she brought some very cool clothes with her. Want to ask Her Majesty a question? Catch up with her on Facebook.

Welcome to Stonington, Queen Elizabeth. How's your stay going so far?
The people are very kind and very, very generous, indeed. They've offered their lodgings, wonderful food -- their baked goods are extraordinary. And their fish is terrific. We would like to have that kind of fish at court every day.

What do you miss most about your home in London?
My dance master and my hundreds of thousands of dresses. But that's small conpared to the hospitality I've experienced in the provinces.

What do you look forward to the most about your stay?
More than anything, I look forward to engaging with Mr. Shakespeare's acting company in the wonderful barn where they are styaing for the night.

Mr. Shakespeare? Tell me about him.
I've seen him over the years and have met him on several occasions. He's an enigma. One never really knows what he's thinking. He gives clues, but he never says the thing itself. That is both wonderfully exciting and terribly frustrating. He's very elusive -- to say the least. But brilliant. It's no surprise to me that he's an Englishman.

I hear he has a new play called Much Ado About Nothing.
He does! And I, in particular, love the character of Beatrice. Her sentiments seem to parallel mine at the moment: She wants to remain independent. There's a song in the play with the line: "Ladies, sigh no more." I like the tune but the sentiment is very exciting to me.

What will you be wearing the night you see the play?
Probably my white gown. The pearls in the gown were given to me by an admirer. I don't think I should say his name. But I have asked the court seamstress to affix them to the gown. It's a brocade.

Anything else, Your Majesty?
I do yearly progresses throughout the land, and I am so glad I chose this place this summer. The climate is fantastic. The food is amazing. And the people are so kind. The men in my court could learn a great deal from the citizens in Stonington.

The Measure of a Memory: Shakespeare (in Stonington) will always be with us

More than a month has passed since the lights went down on the Stonington Opera House production of "Measure for Measure," and each year I try to reflect on where the play goes once it has been passed from the stage and into our collective memory. Truth is, "Measure for Measure" is not my favorite Shakespeare work. (Don't think less of me for admitting that "Romeo and Juliet" -- perhaps as a symbol of my own longing for youth -- is still at the top of my list.) (Except when "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is at the top of the list; or when "Richard III" is swirling in my thoughts; or maybe when "Macbeth" sneaks into my thoughts; and certainly "The Tempest" is in the mix.)

In any case.

As much as I enjoyed diving into Shakespeare's text this summer, I suspected I'd be done with "Measure for Measure" when it closed. Not true. Although I never made sense of the love liaisons forced at the end of the story, I did come to think more deeply about justice, mercy and forgiveness.

And apparently, I'm not the only one who is seeing these themes echo through Shakespeare's lens at the moment. Our Shake Stonington friend and leading Bard scholar Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard University writes about this summer's Central Park production of "The Merchant of Venice" in The New York Review of Books (Sept. 30, 2010). Although many critics believe "Measure for Measure" is one of Shakespeare's so-called "problem plays," "Merchant" is sometimes also included in that group -- largely because, like "Measure," the comedy is so closely aligned to tragedy that a certain anxiety over form rattles our structural cage.

Greenblatt asserts that the comedic ending of "Merchant" has such "intolerable strains" put on it that it's almost impossible to bring it off successfully. The same is true for "Measure," and I grappled with my own sense of how to read the ending in a story for the Huffington Post -- even as Stonington director Jeffrey Frace accomplished a graceful and nicely ambiguous ending to "Measure" that depended on the nightly mood of actor Stephanie Dodd as Isabella. But Greenblatt's estimation of the NYC production's end echo in my thoughts: "disappointment, betrayal, and recrimination lurk just below the surface." Also true for "Measure." With one exception: the young lovers Claudio and Juliet, who offer some hope for the marriage bed as an equitable one.

In addition to the scholarly insight of Greenblatt's story, I found another resonance from reading his article. As Greenblatt points out, there's much to see about our contemporary life in Shakespeare's works. Namely: the treatment of "the other" -- whether a Jew, a Moor or a couple that gets pregnant out of wedlock.

I suspect the Vienna of "Measure for Measure," with its shifting definitions of justice and forgiveness, will continue to stimulate ideas, as it did again recently when I saw the ArtsEmerson production of "The Laramie Project" at the Cutler-Majestic Theater in Boston. "The other" will always be with us -- in Venice, in Vienna, in Wyoming, in Maine.

And each year Shakespeare in Stonington counters the more pervasive and pernicious sense of "other" by allowing us to come together as a community in the library, in the theater, in media, restaurants and homes to achieve fuller, richer understandings of our inheritance and our responsibilities. The encounter with Shakespeare also allows us to carry these stories in our thoughts and to look to them for guidance. "The quality of mercy is not strained." "Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall." These plays teach us what the Stonington Opera House already knows: "All the world's a stage."

Photo: Tommy Piper as Angelo in "Measure for Measure" at the Stonington Opera House. Credit: Linda Nelson/Opera House Arts

Pierre-Marc Diennet: "I'm here to live."

Abby Bray, a student at Stonington/Deer Isle High School, recently interviewed actor Pierre-Marc Diennet, who plays Lucio, a "fantastic," in "Measure for Measure" running through Aug. 29 at the Stonington Opera House. "Interviewing some of the cast of 'Measure for Measure' was the first time I'd done a formal interview," says Abby. "After some trial and error, it proved both fun and educational. I learned about the characters on a more personal level, and I also learned what attracts people to Stonington." Pierre is a veteran artist at the Opera House where he performed "Perdita," a show about his mother. In this interview, Abby asked Pierre -- as Lucio -- why we should care about his character. She also asked about working in Stonington compared to working in other locations. Give it a click. Then buy tickets! And check back on the Shake Stonington blog for more of Abby's interviews with actors. Coming soon!

Taking the "Measure" of Flannery O'Connor

Several years ago on a visit to Savannah, I came upon Flannery O'Connor's house on Lafayette Square. Her childhood home is now a museum, but that didn't stop me from walking straight up to it and hugging it. Or hugging a corner of it. I've done this with the houses of several writers whose art has deeply influenced the way I see the world. The first time I went to Paris, I walked directly to Gertrude Stein's house and hugged it, too.

But Flannery O'Connor has been in my thoughts these days as I've been reading "Measure for Measure," running Aug. 19-29 as this summer's annual production of Shakespeare at the Stonington Opera House. Director Jeffrey Frace, who played Oberon in last year's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in Stonington, has a literary crush on O'Connor and decided to run "Measure" through the filter of her Southern Gothic style and Catholic sensibility. The production reportedly is "dripping kudzu and Spanish moss," according to Linda Nelson, executive director at the Opera House.

Here's what Frace says about O'Connor:

She creates characters and situations that are as real as she can imagine, and then, as events transpire she learns more about them. Often she’s surprised at what transpires. But she is interested in flawed characters, characters suffering from spiritual blindness and in need of grace. Sometimes that moment of grace arrives in this lifetime: often it is accompanied by violence and death. Shakespeare, uncharacteristically, was more merciful on his characters in Measure for Measure. At least they all live. It is a comedy, after all. But there is spiritual blindness a-plenty, and real suffering along the way. And what is at stake is more than the love life of a sympathetic young person or two: it is the health and welfare of a whole community.

Now, for a brief primer on O'Connor:

• She was born Mary Flannery O'Connor in Savannah, GA in 1925.
  
• Her work includes novels, short stories and essays.


• She studied writing at the famous Iowa Writers' Workshop with the likes of Robert Penn Warren. In her 20s, she was diagnosed with lupus, an autoimmune disease from which her father died when she was a teen. She died at age 39.


• She was obsessed with birds.


• Her work can be very funny and very creepy.


• It's likely her most famous work is "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," a short story about an argumentative southern family that meets a serial killer. You can see the cutting approach to the human condition in this line about the annoying grandmother in the story: "She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."


• Her work is deeply concerned with redemption -- and the tension between the Christian mission and un-Christian people.

That last part makes O'Connor a perfect fit for "Measure for Measure," which shines a surreal light on the workings of justice -- in the state, the city and in love.

Theatergoers always ask me the best way to prepare for attending a production of Shakespeare, and I encourage them to read the original text. This time, I also invite readers to pick up a copy of Flannery O'Connor's short stories and explore her world, too. She and Shakespeare have much to say to each other.

How now?

Welcome to Shake Stonington! If you were in the audience Sunday July 5, please take a few moments to share your thoughts on the Stonington Opera House production of A Midsummer Night's Dream -- and to read earlier entries on this blog. (Scroll down the right side of the home page and look for June and July entries.)

Please also take a few moments to share the blog with friends. You can do this by email, Twitter, Facebook or knock on doors! When you do, please share info about upcoming performances 7 p.m. Thursday July 9 and Friday July 10, 5 p.m. Saturday July 11, and 2 p.m. Sunday July 12. And you can join critic-in-residence Alicia Anstead and guest scholar Esther Rauch, plus director Julia Whitworth and members of the creative team for a talk back after the performance 7 p.m. Friday July 10.

What fools these mortals be? Naw. We're only fools for Shakespeare.

Mawidge is what brings us together

Here's the love situation in Midsummer: Hipployta is a war bride for Theseus. Hermia has the choice to marry the guy her dad chooses, die or become a nun. Helena finds true love only if her man stays drugged -- an early version of taking lithium, I suppose. And Titania, Queen of the Fairies, is essentially drink-spiked (by her husband, no less) into a night with a guy who has a donkey head. (Not going to explicate that one here.) Except for pandering to Queen Elizabeth, who never married (or rather considered herself betrothed to England), why would Shakespeare make marriage so utterly unappealing?

For one thing, he's working within classical conventions of "lovers." Goes back pretty far -- Ovid's Metamorphoses, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and, big leap, movies such as Princess Bride. One of my favorite scenes from that flick is very Shakespearean actually -- and very much on point for our marriage theme. You can watch it here.

Another way to learn more about marriage Shakespeare style is to listen to an interview I did recently with Stephen Greenblatt, world-class Shakespeare scholar, Harvard professor and author of "Will in the World" and "Cardenio," a "lost" play attributed to the Shake man. (Here's the Greenblatt interview.) Greenblatt told me that "all of Shakespeare's comedies are a little strange -- in fact extremely strange." When I asked him why get married if you're a woman in Shakespeare, he said: "Alicia, if you ask that question too strenuously, no one would get married." People don't get married based on cost-benefit analysis or rationality, he explained. They get married because they are desperately in love.

Wish I'd thought of that.