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The Offer and the Experience
Seeing thirty-seven Shakespeare plays in thirty-seven languages is probably something you do only once in a lifetime. The chance to do this in the space of six or seven weeks is rare. So the offer from Shakespeare's Globe Theatre-"If you're prepared to stand, you can see every play of Shakespeare's, each in a different language, for only £100"-was too good to miss.1 And now that I have stood through every production, here are some observations.
Of the wider experience, I will say almost nothing: nothing about London Bridge and the walk past Southwark Cathedral, the Golden Hind and the rose window of Winchester Palace. I will pass over what it is like to stand in the open-air theater; the smell of the wet wood after or during rain when you press your nose to the stage; and the feeling in the interval when you nip out and rest your leg muscles, sitting on Bankside wharf, marveling at the tidal range of the Thames, letting your eyes wander across the skyline to the dome of Saint Paul's. Nor will I mention my fellow theatergoers: the pro to-community of groundlings, eccentrics, and enthusiasts. All that is the baseless fabric of expe- rience and will melt into air, into thin air. The play's the thing.
What Is the Point of Watching King John in Armenian?
Unless you are a prodigious polyglot, then seeing thirty-seven plays in thirty- seven languages means that most of the time you don't understand the individual words, although you hope to follow the sense. It is like watching a foreign language movie without subtides, or listening to opera in an arcane dialect of Chinese. Or like being a child at an early stage of language acquisition, intuiting meanings by gesture, intonation, and an intelligent grasp of context and probability.
What is to stop the whole experience becoming boring? First-to be basic- most plays were abridged to fit "the two hours' traffic of our stage" (plus a quar- ter of an hour's interval).2 Second, the Globe Theatre helped out with two dig- ital screens discreetly positioned above and at the sides of the stage, so as not to interfere with the main sightline onto the stage. These screens summarized the...