The timeless genius of William Shakespeare
Stratford veterans Colm Feore and Seana McKenna describe what Shakespeare demands of his actors; how his characters embody the essential qualities of humanity, and why Shakespeare in the 21st century is more relevant than ever.
We may have little information about his life, but Shakespeare has arguably done more to inform human life than anyone else in the secular world. The literary critic Harold Bloom held that Shakespeare invented the human. The historian Simon Schama argued that Shakespeare invented England. Literary historian Stephen Greenblatt suggested that Shakespeare's greatest invention was himself … a dazzling genius that appears entirely self-created out of humble origins.
Shakespeare's peers aren't just Sophocles, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes and Joyce. They're Aristotle, Newton, Darwin, Freud and Einstein. All the more's the burden on his actors, the conduit between that genius and the audience. Which is all of the rest of us.
