Scott Bellis, Actor & Artistic Associate

Scott Bellis is an actor and artistic associate at the Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival.

Interview Excerpts

CONNECTING WITH DIFFERENT AUDIENCES

SCOTT BELLIS: You often have in his plays characters of all different social status, from kings and queens down to, you know, the commoners. And they’re all written to appeal to the class in which they exist, in which those characters exist.

So, you know, the groundlings for the most part would—would relate more to the common characters but they would still want to see the story line of the king and queen and what’s happening with those characters. And similarly, those in the royalty who would come to see Shakespeare’s plays would relate to those characters who were at the top-most of the society in which they exist within the play.

And I think that if—if you go to see a Shakespeare and it appears too highbrow and—and like it’s—it’s existing way up in a stratosphere that you can’t reach, then it hasn’t been presented very well.

I think that the key to making Shakespeare come alive is to make it accessible, to find ways to have it connect with the audience.

LANGUAGE THEN AND NOW

SCOTT BELLIS: Well, I think that’s part of the brilliance of Shakespeare and why he’s lasted so long is that first of all, the plays are well crafted. They’re well written. The language, of course, is—is—is central to everything. I think part of the reason these plays live on century after century is—is because of the language, especially in our modern world.

You know, now we’re in the twenty first century and I—I think that the English language is constantly being broken down because we live in an age of information. We live in an age of technology. A lot of the language we employ on a day-to-day basis has to do with—with technology and with the idea of communicating information. It’s technical in nature.

The—the English language and it’s—and the people who speak it are—are, I think, a little losing the ability to express themselves in a creative form, especially in the spoken word. And I think that Shakespeare is one of those venues where we can hang on to that. I think people have a desire to hear that; they have a desire to hear beautiful words, expressive words, words that are evocative, words that can create a mental image that is wonderful.

They can listen to a character speak and understand that character through the words he says, through—through the language, through the rhythm, through the poetry. And it—it just takes you to a different place than we generally are in our day-to-day lives and—and, yes, I think that’s part of the reason that Shakespeare lives on.

[…]

We are constantly bombarded from—by—by different types of media, whether it’s the newspaper, television, movies, and the radio.

And these are not bad things by any stretch of the imagination but I think what they’ve done is they’ve kind of turned us inward a little more, as we take more time to absorb the information that is—that is thrown at us on a daily basis. Whereas back then, there was no media, much of the population didn’t even read. So their focus could be more on expressing their inner world. They had more practice at it. They had more practice with expressing themselves, using their language—their spoken language.

And I think as a result, became very adept at it. Whether it was the higher classes trying to use rhetoric in the court or whether it was the barmaid in the tavern, you know, trying to get a—a patron out of his bar stool and back out onto the street. [Slight laugh.] You know. I think you would have seen a great variety of language used and—and they just lived in a more spoken-word kind of world.