Mary Hartman, Education Consultant

Mary Hartman is an education consultant who has worked with the Bard on the Beach Festival in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Interview Excerpts

PUTTING SHAKESPEARE UP ON A PEDESTAL

MARY HARTMAN: I really can’t stand it when people say things like Shakespeare was the greatest writer in history and things like that. And—and there are two reasons I really don’t like that, and one is I don’t know whether or not that’s true. I—I haven’t read everything ever written and I’m not going to get a chance to in my short life. So I don’t like pronouncements like that for that reason.

And I also don’t like it because then suddenly Shakespeare is up on this pedestal, as if he’s sort of this demigod that had nothing to do with us mere mortals down below. And I think the absolute opposite is the case. Shakespeare has everything to do with the merest of us mortals down here.

And that’s why it’s so important that we all get a chance to do Shakespeare, to hold Shakespeare, to—to sort of have Shakespeare belong to us. Shakespeare is not for the elites; Shakespeare is not for the experts; Shakespeare is for everyone. That’s everything he—I think everything he did—well, at least everything we know about what he did in his lifetime—shows us that he was writing for everyone. He was writing for the common man; he wasn’t writing for the elite.

And—and I think the very best experiences that we have of Shakespeare are those that include everyone, that involve everyone, that welcome everyone into the experience.

PLAYS, NOT WORKS

MARY HARTMAN: You know, he wrote plays, and actually in the Elizabethan time acting wasn’t called acting, it was called playing. And so to play is to do Shakespeare. And I think so often we forget that when we have to sit in straight lines in straight rows in a stuffy room and be quiet and be still and study Shakespeare. Oh, my God, is it work?

And isn’t it interesting that they’re called the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, when that’s not what he called them? He never called them works. And he wasn’t writing works. And yet now we approach these plays with such a sense of work associated with it.

And it—not only is it—it makes it a drudgery, it makes it so much to harder to understand it, whereas play—obviously it’s a lot more fun but I think far more importantly, it—it makes it easy to understand the plays. In all of their richness, in all of their complexity, with all of the—the, you know, sort of epic seriousness as well as the delights that are in the play.

DRAMA AS A DEMOCRATIC MEDIUM

MARY HARTMAN: Drama is the most democratic art form I know of and there are a couple of reasons for this. Unlike in a novel where there is an authorial voice, be it first person narrative or third person whatever, there is an authorial voice and you’re getting everything that you read through that voice.

In drama, every character speaks for himself or herself and there is no grand arbiter telling you what to think about anyone else. It’s just each person speaking for him or herself.

Then when you go to a performance, you know—and when you go to a movie, film is a very dictatorial medium. You basically look where the director wants you to look. And you look at it for as long as the director wants you to look at it then there’s a cut and you look at something else.

But in the theater, you can sit there in the theater and you can listen to Hamlet or you can pay attention to that really good-looking second lord on the left; it’s up to you. And then also you can hear what Isabella and Angelo, etc., what they have to say, and you’re going to have your own experience of what they say; you’re going to come away with your own thoughts and your own feelings.

And so it’s a very democratic medium. And I think Shakespeare takes that to such a delightful extreme, in terms of really providing us with incredibly complex, well-rounded, multi-dimensional characters, multifaceted characters, so that they—it isn’t easy to sort of dismiss anybody as, you know, that person’s evil, that person’s a monster. Even like the really—people who do horrendous things are very human.