Bennett Brandriff and Josie Rourke

Bennett Brandriff is a barrister and a public speaking champion. Josie Rourke is the artistic director of the Bush Theatre in London and has also directed plays the Royal Shakespeare Company. The pair of them lead a workshop on rhetoric at the RSC.

Audio Excerpt

What makes a fool? In this excerpt, Brandriff and Rourke use a scene from Twelfth Night to demonstrate how someone thought to be a fool actually uses sharp rhetoric to win.

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Workshop Excerpt

BENNETT BRANDRIFF: The first thing that rhetoric is about is about understanding argument, about understanding the patterns of argument.  Recognizing logical fallacies, fighting them, and occasionally – rather wrongly – deploying them yourself.  That’s the first thing.

JOSIE ROURKE:  I’m sorry, what’s a logical fallacy?

BENNETT BRANDRIFF:  A logical fallacy is an erroneous argument.  You’re trying to prove a particular point, but in order to do so you deploy, perhaps, a suggestion that has nothing to do with it, but which the person listening fears to — to come back.  The Hilter gambit is a classic example.  Vegetarianism is a good thing; Hitler was a vegetarian – ooh, Hitler — bad thing, ergo vegetarianism, bad thing.  Ignoratio elenchi. There will be a lot of Latin so I’m hoping you’re going to keep up.  So that the first thing — understanding argument.

The second thing; what is the second thing that you have to address your mind to?  Rhetorical technique.  You’ve got to draw on two thousand years worth of rhetorical training to devise an argument that is clear, well-structured, concise, and which has emotional impact – emotional buy-in from your audience.  I’m going to give that to you today.  Emotional buy-in.  I can feel it, frisson, myself.  And some of you – yes, you madam in particular – I can see are also feeling that emotional frisson .  That is number two of what we’re going to do.

JOSIE ROURKE:  What’s number three, Bennett?

BENNETT BRANDRIFF:  Number three is performance.  Hypocrisis, as the Greeks called it; acting, as we understand it. So those are the three elements.

Moya O’Connell

Moya O'Connell

Moya O’Connell is an actor who has previously performed at the Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival in Vancouver, British Columbia. In this audio excerpt, she recites a speech from The Winter’s Tale.

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Tina Packer’s wonderful production “Women of Will”

Director, Actor and Scholar Tina Packer, former Artistic Director of “Shakespeare and Company” in Lenox, MA has written and is performing a new production entitled “Women of Will”.  Fabulous!

Tina Packer and Nigel Gore

The work looks at the way Shakespeare wrote his women characters, and how that writing evolved over his 20-year career as a writer.

It is all done with two actors only – Tina and a terrific scene partner named Nigel Gore.  They perform scenes, then talk about them, and then move on to the next.

Her piece is fascinating and beautifully organized. Her main premise is that Shakespeare’s view of women evolved over the course of career, starting out writing ‘about’ women, and then, starting with Juliet, writing from ‘inside’ women’s point of view – with deeper understanding of that point of view and creating much deeper, 3 dimensional characters.

Barry Kraft

Barry Kraft and Kevin Lynch

Barry Kraft has acted and served as a dramaturg at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as well as at other theatres across the country. In this audio excerpt, Barry Kraft and Kevin Lynch read from Julius Caesar.

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Charles Wu

Charles Wu

Charles Q. Wu is Professor Emeritus of Chinese and Humanities at Reed College, where he taught from 1988-2002. Dr. Wu was born in raised in Shanghai, China, and studied and taught at Beijing Foreign Languages Institute.  He left China in 1980 to pursue a Ph.D. at Columbia University in English literature with a specialty in romantic English poetry.  His dissertation explored a Taoist reading of William Wordsworth.

As an intellectual in Maoist China, Charles Wu was placed under solitary confinement. While there, Professor Wu wondered to himself, “Maybe it was people like us [Mao] had in mind to clean up all that was considered old and reactionary.” Those thoughts led Professor Wu to think of Shakespeare’s   Sonnet 29, which he transcribed in English in his diary. Here, Professor Wu reads Sonnet 29.

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Charles Wu

Charles Wu

Charles Q. Wu was born and raised in Shanghai, China, and studied and taught at Beijing Foreign Languages Institute.  He left China in 1980 to pursue a Ph.D. at Columbia University in English literature with a specialty in romantic English poetry.  His dissertation explored a Taoist reading of William Wordsworth.

Dr. Wu is Professor Emeritus of Chinese and Humanities at Reed College, where he taught from 1988-2002.  He has published a translation of a contemporary Chinese play in Reading the Right Text: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama (University of Hawaii Press, 2003) and a revised translation of the play Thunderstorm for another anthology of modern Chinese drama to be published by Columbia University Press in 2010. He also served as a cultural advisor on the board of the Portland Classical Chinese Garden. Dr. Wu currently lives with his wife Diane Ma in Vacaville, CA.

Audio Excerpt

As an intellectual in Maoist China, Charles Wu was placed under solitary confinement. While there, Professor Wu wondered to himself, “Maybe it was people like us [Mao] had in mind to clean up all that was considered old and reactionary.” Those thoughts led Professor Wu to think of Shakespeare’s   Sonnet 29, which he transcribed in English in his diary. Here, Professor Wu reads Sonnet 29.

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Read on for interview excerpts

Susan Patella

A student of Susan Patella's

Susan Patella is a 6th grade English teacher at University Prep in Seattle where puts on a Shakespeare play each year with her students through a program called “Shake Hands with Shakespeare.”

In this audio excerpt she discusses how she talks about metaphors with her students. Metaphors do for language, she says, what espresso does for coffee.

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You can also go behind the scenes of the students’ rehearsals. In this clip, the witches from Macbeth rehearse.

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This clip features Romeo and Juliet rehearsing the famous balcony scene.

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Dominic Dromgoole

Dominic Dromgoole /Photo: Sheila Burnet

Dominic Dromgoole is the Artistic Director of the Globe Theatre in London. Born into a theatrical family, he studied English at Cambridge University, began work as a part-time assistant director at London’s Bush Theatre, and rose to become artistic director there (1990–7). He directed new plays for Peter Hall’s company at the Old Vic and then took over at the Oxford Stage Company (1998–2005). In 2006 he succeeded Mark Rylance as artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe. His publications include The Full Room: An A-Z of Contemporary Playwriting (2001), and a memoir, Will and Me: How Shakespeare Took Over My Life (2006).

Read more: Dominic Dromgoolehttp://encyclopedia.stateuniversity.com/pages/6027/Dominic-Dromgoole.html#ixzz0sTqhdFJC

Shakespeare is known for his incredible writing, but sometimes one may come across some really awful patches. Dromgoole explains why those bad patches of writing are there, and how Shakespeare was able to move past them.

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Paul Edmondson

Paul Edmondson

Paul Edmondson is Head of Learning at The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, an Honorary Fellow of The Shakespeare Institute, and an Honorary Fellow of The Society for Teachers of Speech and Drama. His first degree is from the University of Durham. He did his post-graduate work at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, and produced a critical edition of The London Prodigal (1605) for his Ph. D.

King Lear ends with the title character grieving for his daughter. In this audio excerpt, Paul Edmondson explains how Shakespeare uses direct language to get an eternal question: Why do the innocent suffer?

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Christopher Gaze

Christopher Gaze is the Artistic Director of the Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival in Vancouver, British Columbia, which he founded in 1990. He has acted in his home country of England, as well as in Canada and the United States.

In this audio excerpt, Gaze talks about the power of Shakespeare to express the human condition.

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In this audio excerpt, Gaze recites the closing lines of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

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