Christopher Gaze, Artistic Director & Founder
Christopher Gaze is the Artistic Director and Founder of the Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Audio Excerpts
Christopher Gaze talks about the power of Shakespeare to express the human condition.
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Christopher Gaze recites Puck’s lines at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
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Interview Excerpts
ON WHY SHAKESPEARE IS STILL IMPORTANT
CHRISTOPHER GAZE: It’s the stories, it’s the language, it’s the words. It’s all the things that the heartbeat of that language is—speaks: who we are and how we feel. He, in my view, shows us how we feel and shows other people how we feel. Very often it’s hard to describe how we feel about any particular thing, or the size of emotion that is actually—exactly does exist within us.
And when you start speaking Shakespeare and trying to express those things of warmth, of love, of hatred, of desire, of lust and so forth, it’s hard to find the words and we come up so chronically short. You quote Shakespeare and you don’t come short and you express the human condition brilliantly.
I always say to young people, if you’re ever short of things to say, in a nice card or a sad card or whatever it might be—expressing your condolences or expressing your joy or delight—and you need some good quotes, then open up your collected works of William Shakespeare and you will find the very, very best way to say it.
ON THE MAN OF THE MILLENIUM
CHRISTOPHER GAZE: I like to think of the fact that when we have five hundred and twenty young people, say, on a student matinee coming in, I will say to them before the show—and I talk to the audience generally before the show—I will say the wonderful thing—the communion that’s taking place today is that many of you are enjoying a Shakespeare play for the first time, but you are now part of a great tradition that hopefully your parents enjoyed, your grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on, until we get back down the line many generations and towards Shakespeare. It doesn’t take too many hops, actually, to get there.
And I think that that is something—it’s a—it—that links us back into Shakespeare, it links us back into storytelling. It—it’s—these are stories that our families and our bloodlines that go back in time have embraced—some more than others—over the centuries. And that links us to the past and I think that’s a beautiful thing, as it will link us now and into the future to our own children.
Because these are the stories of our lives. Harold Bloom has said—and it’s a great sort of opening comment, you know—there’s the Bible, there’s Shakespeare, then there’s everybody else. The invention of the human, how—in a sense he created how we—Shakespeare did; not Harold Bloom—how we—how we communicate, how we operate in the world; how we speak and so forth.
So the effect of Shakespeare on civilization is monumental, no matter—no surprise that he was the Man of the Millennium. That’s a pretty big deal, Man of the Millennium.
