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

O,o,o, that Shakespeherian tango!

Can't wait to see the choreography of MIDSUMMER. It's such a physical show, I can well imagine the transformation of what director Julia Whitworth calls "tedious" and "fun" blocking to elegant and funny movement by the time the rest of us see it. "Asshead" ballet? Get out!

An exciting heads up from this end. Stay tuned for TWO audio interviews with: one of the world's leading Shakespeare scholars STEPHEN GREENBLATT, who spoke with me from Harvard this week, and another with RICHARD BRUCHER, one of my favorite interpreters of Shakespeare from the University of Maine. They both have big thoughts about The Man, and about MIDSUMMER's take on marriage, sex and what happens in the wood...

Teaser: Who's the only person in the play "getting any" -- as one of the scholar's put it?