ASC Education in 2013

As we wrap up another great year at the American Shakespeare Center, we're gearing up to offer even bigger and better programming in 2013 (and beyond). Here's a sneak peek at what we'll be bringing you over the next twelve months:

• The No Kidding Shakespeare Camp: London Edition: This adventure is something we've been wanting to do for several years now. Dr. Ralph Alan Cohen, drawing on his experience founding JMU's Studies Abroad program and leading overseas trips for many years. This program will focus on Shakespeare's London and the theatrical joys of the modern city. Highlights will include the Globe Theatre, the Museum of London, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Regent's Park, walking tours of important neighborhoods, a day trip to Oxford, and visits to some of London's finest pubs. Registration is now open, and we would love for you to join us next summer.
• From Class to Cast: 2013 Summer Teacher Seminar: With NKSC heading overseas, we're expanding our Summer Teacher Seminar to a three-day adventure in the mechanics of putting together a play in your classroom. From cutting, doubling, and casting to costume considerations to the language work that forms the basis of all of the ASC's productions, we will walk teachers through some techniques to get Shakespeare's plays up on their feet and into their students' bodies.
• The 7th Blackfriars Conference: Our biennial celebration of Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and the early modern theatrical world will take place 23-27 October 2013. The gathering will honor George Walton Williams IV and will include keynote addresses from Russ McDonald, Ann Thompson, and Peter Holland, among others. Registration and Abstract Submission are now open.
• Conferences: Members of ASC Education will make appearances at the Shakespeare Theatre Association conference and at Shakespeare Works When Shakespeare Plays at UC-Davis in January, at the Shakespeare Association of America conference in April.
• Even more new and improved ASC Study Guides: In 2013, our Lulu offerings will expand to include Othello and The Merry Wives of Windsor, with mini-guides on All's Well That Ends Well and Henry IV, Part 1. I'll also be updating As You Like It and Romeo and Juliet with some fresh new activities.
• More Education Artists -- meaning more programming for you: Sarah and I spent a week in December training and auditioning new Education Artists, and once they are settled in, they'll be helping us out with workshops, Little Academes, Educational Residencies, Leadership Programming, and much more. Together, we will welcome colleges from all over the country to the Blackfriars Playhouse, including old friends from James Madison University, the Federal Executive Institute, Grove City College, the University of South Dakota, Indiana Wesleyan, and International Paper. Remember, we also take this show on the road with Leadership Programming in Germany and more residencies on the books in 2013.
• A plethora of pre-show entertainment: Our Dr. Ralph Presents Lectures and Inside Plays Workshops will begin again in just a few weeks with insights into the plays of the Actors' Renaissance Season. Join us select Wednesdays and Thursdays throughout the year at 5:30pm to brush up your knowledge of old favorites or to get an introduction to unfamiliar works. Podcasts of these lectures and our Actor-Scholar Councils will also be available to further enhance your play-viewing pleasure.
• Slightly Skewed Shakespeare: The 2013-2014 Staged Reading series will feature works that are familiar yet off-kilter, almost-but-not-quite the Shakespearean plays you love and recognize. Join us for the First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet, the forgery Vortigern and Rowena, Nahum Tate's infamous adjustment of King Lear, and the anonymous history The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth.
• ASC Theatre Camp: This year's campers will explore Pericles, As You Like It, Richard II, The Taming of the Shrew, John Fletcher's The Wild Goose Chase, and Ben Jonson's Volpone. Registration is now open.
• Student Matinees: In 2013, we'll be offering nine titles: Julius Caesar and Henry VIII in the Actors' Renaissance Season, Twelfth Night and Love's Labour's Lost in the Spring Season, Romeo and Juliet, All's Well That Ends Well, and Troilus and Cressida in the Fall Season, and A Christmas Carol in the Holiday Season, with a special preview of Spring 2014's Othello.

A very happy New Year to you all -- we look forward to seeing you at the Blackfriars Playhouse in 2013!

No Kidding Shakespeare Camp Begins

This morning, ASC Education began our third year of the No Kidding Shakespeare Camp for adults. I had not, initially, intended to blog about the camp at the beginning of the week. I thought I would wait until the end, make a wrap-up post, include some pictures, and that would be that.

But then something struck me, just here in the first few hours. As the campers arrived, I realized how many of them I know already -- because they've come to the first two years of camp, or to Teacher Seminars, or to the Blackfriars Conference. Of the nearly-thirty campers, at least half are familiar faces. We started off with an informal brunch, to let everyone settle in and mingle a bit before diving into lectures. I saw people sitting together, chatting amiably like old friends, and I know that they met here. It really is like camp is when you're a kid -- you may only see these people once a year, but when you do see them, they're friends. And it happens so fast -- already today, our new campers are chatting with the group, laughing at shared jokes, and making new friends. We're really starting to build a community with this camp, as well as our other events, of people with shared experiences and shared joy. As a result, they're not just colleagues with a mutual interest anymore; they people who come here become real buddies. Watching that happen, and getting to be buddies right there with them, is a great experience.

When the introductions began, so many of the campers said things that made my heart swell. "This is my indulgence for the summer." "I begged my family to let me take this week." "This is my treat to myself every summer." Many of the first-time campers are here because of our shows, and at least two of them said, "I thought I hated Shakespeare until I saw it here." Another camper is here because our touring troupe had reached her. Another makes a six-hour trip several times a year so that she can see every show, and she jumped at the chance to spend a full week here.

I love that. Statements like those are the reason why we do the work that we do. Hearing one testimonial like that can make frustrating weeks completely worth it. Hearing a dozen of those testimonials in a row just about bowled me over. I love that this thing we've started, a Shakespeare camp for adults, has become a real vacation. These people are taking time off of their jobs and away from their families for a week because they really want to. It's an incredible validation of our mission, "to recover the joy of Shakespeare," to make it something that is a rollicking good time, rather than an academic tonic. I love that our shows are good enough to make people want more. Seeing a production, for some of our audience members, just isn't enough -- they want to dive in, get their hands on the text themselves, learn more about how our actors make their magic. Because of this draw, the camp achieved its optimal number of participants last year, in only its second summer of existence, and we've met that goal again this year. I'm so glad that we can provide this experience for all of these Shakespeare enthusiasts, and I can't wait to see how the program, and our friendships, will keep growing in the future.

ASC Education in 2012-2013

The announcement is officially out, the Facebook Jeopardy game is complete, and that means I can share ASC Education's plans for the upcoming year. If you've missed the information elsewhere, here's the American Shakespeare Center artistic line-up for 2012-2013:

Summer
The Merchant of Venice
The Lion in Winter, by James Goldman
The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Fall
Cymbeline
King John
The Merchant of Venice
The Lion in Winter, by James Goldman
The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Holiday
A Christmas Carol
Santaland Diaries, by David Sedaris
The 12 Dates of Christmas, by Ginna Hoben

Actors' Renaissance
Julius Caesar
The Country Wife, by William Wycherly
Henry VIII
The Custom of the Country, by Francis Beaumont & Philip Massinger
Two Noble Kinsmen

Spring/Tempt Me Further Tour
Twelfth Night
Love's Labour's Lost
The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster

What does this mean for Shakespeare Education at the ASC? For a start, throughout the year, we'll be offering Student Matinees of The Merchant of Venice, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Cymbeline, A Christmas Carol, Julius Caesar, Henry VIII, Twelfth Night, and Love's Labour's Lost. To complement these opportunities to bring your students to the Playhouse, I'll be preparing brand-new full-length Study Guides for The Merchant of Venice, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Twelfth Night, as well as revising (and, quite possibly, adding to) last year's Julius Caesar guide. I will also produce mini-guides for Cymbeline, Love's Labour's Lost, and Henry VIII.

We will, again, have four Teacher Seminars in the 2012-2013 season. On August 10th, we'll be looking at that perennial curriculum favorite, Romeo and Juliet (for which I will also be producing a full-length Study Guide), where both the construction of the language and the complex interplay of comedy and tragedy provide many opportunities for exploration. Our Fall Seminar, September 14th-16th, will focus on The Merchant of Venice and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. I'm excited to tackle the challenge of these two off-kilter comedies, from the racial tensions in Merchant to the troubled ending of Two Gents. Both plays are full of emotionally charged moments, opportunities for audience contact, and clever, fast-paced language, all of which make wonderful fodder for teachers. As we did in 2011 with The Comedy of Errors, we will be linking these non-curriculum plays with their more-frequently-assigned cousins, in order to provide teachers with the greatest opportunity to incorporate staging with study. We also champion these plays as ideal for teachers who are tired of always retreading the same material. The Merchant of Venice and The Two Gentlemen of Verona will provide intrepid educators with a new, invigorating approach to Shakespeare's word- and stagecraft.

Our Winter Seminar, February 2nd-3rd 2013, will focus on Julius Caesar, a play I can never get enough of and can't wait to return to. That play features so prominently two of my favorite things to talk about: rhetoric and audience contact. Those two elements define Caesar for me, more than anything else, and they provide wonderful avenues for making the play exciting for students. Our Spring Seminar, April 12th-14th 2013, will focus on Twelfth Night: frothy fun with some dark undercurrents. I look forward to reawakening some of the same topics I've looked at in As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, and Much Ado about Nothing -- twins, gender-bending, gulling, etc -- as well as exploring the role of music on the early modern stage.

Throughout the year, we'll continue to hold our lecture series, on select Wednesday and Thursday nights, prior to the evening shows. We've moved the timing of these events to 5:30pm, which will allow attendees enough time to go get a quick bite or a drink at one of downtown Staunton's fabulous eateries before the show begins. I'm pleased to announce that this year, we will have both a Dr. Ralph Presents lecture and an Inside Plays workshop for every play in the Fall, Actors' Renaissance, and Spring Seasons. We're especially pleased that this will allow us to offer audiences some more insight into the shows which are enjoying their Blackfriars Playhouse premieres in 2012 and 2013. See the schedule on our website for more information.

Our Staged Reading series also continues in 2012-2013, with four dynamic titles: the anonymous Edward Ironside (October 28th), an early English chronicle play full of patriotic glory, violent energy, and inventive language; George Chapman's An Humorous Day's Mirth (November 4th), where jealous husbands, absurd courtiers, lapsed Puritans, and lustful monarchs collide; Aphra Behn's Restoration hit The Rover (March 24th, 2013), a quick-witted and wickedly wanton comedy where a group of amorous English exiles revel their way through Naples; and The Insatiate Countess (April 28th, 2013), by John Marston and collaborators, a play of merry widows, virtuous wives, and subverted theatrical conventions. We're in the process of making some exciting changes to how the Staged Readings operate, and we'll have more information on that for you as the year progresses.

And, of course, summer 2012 will be full to the brim with camps for Shakespeare enthusiasts of all ages. ASCTC Session 1, June 17th-July 8th, tackles Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, and John Lyly's Gallathea, while Session 2, July 15th-August 5th, takes on Much Ado about Nothing, 1 Henry VI, and Francis Beaumont & John Fletcher's A King and No King. Our Midsummer Day Camp for ages 9-12, July 9th-13th, moves from the light-hearted comedies of the past few years to the high-octane thriller, Macbeth. Finally, the No Kidding Shakespeare Camp for adults, June 25th-29th, will explore Movement -- both the movement of the actor on stage and the movement of plays from one playhouse to another and out on the road.

It's almost hard to believe that here we are in January 2012, already planning for April 2013, but that's the way of it. The whole education team is looking forward to a full and fabulous year -- we hope you'll be joining us for these explorations into early modern staging.

2011 in Review

We're wrapping up another year in ASC Education, and 2011 has been full of excitement and surprises.

• Our biggest event of the year was the 6th Blackfriars Conference, held in late October. With over 150 presenters in both plenary and colloquy sessions; keynotes from George T. Wright, Scott Kaiser, Tiffany Stern, and honoree Stephen Booth; ASC productions and special late-night performances; banquets; parties; and after-parties, this year’s conference was a rousing success.
• Our summer camps were more successful than ever. At the American Shakespeare Center Theatre Camp, six troupes across two sessions performed in an hour-long version of early modern plays (in a “Greek to me Summer”, the plays were all set in Greece); participated in master classes including stage combat, dance, music, acrobatics, and maskwork; attended academic classes in theatre history, scansion/rhetoric, classics, and source study; and visited the Blackfriars Playhouse to watch the professional Resident and Touring Troupe actors rehearse and perform in our summer season of plays. This was the first summer we offered college credit for the camp. Our Midsummer Day Camp welcomed students ages 9-12 for an adventurous week of creative play, imagination, and fantasy, culminating in a final performance of Twelfth Night. Enthusiasts of all ages came to Staunton for the second year of the No Kidding Shakespeare Camp for Adults. We’re already looking forward to the 2012 camps; applications and registrations are now open: ASCTC; MSDC; NKSC.
• We introduced a new program in 2011: ASC Family. An ASC Family membership has many benefits, including discounted tickets, free Playhouse tours, and free admission to ASC Family events, where we bring the community into the Playhouse. In September, we welcomed musicians and artists; our next ASC Family event, “Taste of Staunton” is on January 21st and will feature local restaurateurs.
• The ASC also hosted recitation competitions for Poetry Out Loud and the English Speaking Union. At the ESU Nationals in New York in May, Ralph Alan Cohen served as a judge, and the ASC awarded a full ASCTC scholarship to second-place winner Claire Hilton.
• Our Study Guides, already improved in 2010, underwent another round of revisions. The new guides for Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Henry V, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, and Richard III feature an expanded Basics section, introducing teachers to methods of classroom performance and engagement with the text, including scansion, paraphrasing, acting interpretation, rhetoric, and audience interaction. I'm currently working on bringing the Basics from last year's guides up to those standards, and then I'll start work on the 2012-2013 guides.
• Those Study Guides form the basis for our Teacher Seminars. This year, we added a fourth seminar, a special one-day event in August. Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall, dozens of new attendees and old friends joined us to explore methods of performance-based learning. For the second year in a row, we’ve welcomed pre-service teachers from JMU to a mini-seminar in December, we look forward to seeing them return next year.
• We welcomed 15 Little Academes to the Playhouse over the course of the year: 2 in February, 6 in March, 2 in April, 3 in May, 1 in August, and 1 in September. That's up from 11 in 2010, and we hope that even more teachers will choose to bring their students to us for week-long intensives in 2012.
  
• If the students can’t come to us, we’ll come to them! In October, we held our first On-Site Educational Residency in Shaker Heights, Ohio. I traveled with former ASC actors Kelley McKinnon and Chad Bradford for a week with the amazing young women of the Hathaway Brown School. We presented in both English and theatre classes, and Kelley and Chad provided rehearsal coaching for the school’s production of Macbeth.
• Our educational opportunities aren’t just limited to students; this year, we expanded our professional training programs farther than ever. We continue our long relationship with the Federal Executive Institute, providing leadership seminars, and we’ve begun to develop programs focusing on law and finance as well.
• Apart from bringing scholars to visit us during the Blackfriars Conference, we also attended a number of other conferences in 2011. We presented to teachers and students at the Texas Educational Theatre Association in January, and that month, representatives from the Education, Marketing, and Managing departments of the ASC attended the Shakespeare Theatre Association conference in Boulder, Colorado. In February, Sarah and I presented on Shakespeare as a Primary Source at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies’s conference in Phoenix. And in April, Ralph traveled with ASC actors James Keegan, Rene Thornton Jr., and John Harrell to the Shakespeare Association of American conference in Seattle, where Ralph presented on Falstaff and our actors presented at a workshop on Playing Shakespeare. 2012 is shaping up to be just as full of travel for the whole team, with visits planned to Sacramento, Orlando, and Boston.
• We’re also expanding our relationships with friends across the world. Sarah and I visited the Folger Shakespeare Library in May to discuss how both companies are expanding our online resources for students and teachers. Ryan Nelson from Shakespeare’s Globe visited us to present for the MBC MLitt/MFA program and to talk about digital opportunities for education, and the conference in October further expanded that relationship with a presentation given by new Globe Managing Director Neil Constable, and Director of Research Farah Karim-Cooper on their upcoming Indoor Theatre.
• We moved the bulk of our archives to Washington and Lee University, where our materials can enjoy greater storage space and management than our facilities could offer (So for anyone who’s visited our archives in the past, that means no more cramming yourselves into that tiny, overstuffed closet). We retain the last five years’ worth of material in the offices, but we shipped everything about shows from 1987 to 2005 down to Lexington; more sections (from Education, Marketing, Development, the Board of Trustees, and on the building of the Blackfriars) will go down in Summer 2012.
• The MBC MLitt/MFA Shakespeare in Performance program also had a full year: an all-male production of Romeo and Juliet, dueling versions of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a spring thesis festival, and many other events and productions.
• We also work with the MBC Program for the Exceptionally Gifted and Honors program each fall semester. This year’s focus word was “wisdom”, and the students explored variations of that word’s meaning through scenes from As You Like It.
• We partnered with the Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind to bring workshops to their students, as well as arranging two sign-language interpreted nights of Macbeth in April -- one matinee, for their students, and one evening performance open to the public, thanks to the generosity of the interpreters, Kate O’Varanese and Laurie Shaffer, from UVA who gave us the gift of their services at no cost.
• We said goodbye to Christina Sayer Grey and welcomed Ben Ratkowski to the team. Christina didn't leave the ASC, but shuffled over into Marketing; if you follow the ASC on Facebook or Twitter, she's responsible for most of that content now, as well as numerous contributions to our other promotional materials. Ben took over her job as Group Sales and Academic Relations Manager, in addition to his responsibilities as ASC Family Coordinator.
• Education Interns always provide a bitter-sweet Hello and Goodbye. Good-bye to Natalie and Liz and David. Hello to Jane, Kyle, Brenna, Kimberly, Jennifer, Angelinne, and John. We’re so grateful for the time each of you can spend with us, and we wish you all the luck in 2012 and beyond.
  

You can see photos from these events on the ASC Facebook page. If you joined us in 2011, take a flip through and reawaken some memories. If you didn't make it to Staunton, then hopefully the pictures will inspire you to join us in 2012!

So what’s ahead for ASC Education in 2012? More access to more people. We hope to reach more students and educators than ever -- that means more classes coming to matinees, more young adults at ASCTC, more pre-teens at Midsummer Day Camp, more grown folks at No Kidding Shakespeare Camp, more attendees at our Teacher Seminars, more educators downloading Study Guides, more groups coming in for leadership seminars and other professional training opportunities, more podcasts featuring our actors and education artists -- more of you getting to do more with us.

I hope everyone has had a lovely and safe holiday season, and that we’ll be seeing you in the coming months. The Actors’ Renaissance Season ramps up in just a few days, providing a wonderful opportunity to witness firsthand the marriage of research and scholarship with theatrical practice -- so come see us soon!

No Kidding Shakespeare Camp (for Adults)--What a week....

It's only been a couple of days since we wrapped up our inaugural No Kidding Shakespeare Camp but I already miss our "campers" and the time we spent together studying Shakespeare's plays and the clues for reading the stage that they, and the historical culture surrounding their composition, contain. We had a FANTASTIC group of 19 fans, teachers, professors, and friends who listened to lectures, participated in workshops, dances, acted, clowned, played, and, ultimately performed--if I could spend every week this way, I absolutely would.

This one week is the result of many requests (from our other camper's parents, and from teachers) and previous successes with other programs. For instance, we were sad to hear, last year, that UVA would be changing up its Summer on the Lawn program, a program ASC had been delighted to partner with UVA on for several years. We were grateful to Jim Baker and UVA, though, for giving us permission to offer a program in their "slot." The UVA program was a well-oiled and well-run machine which offered participants the unique opportunity to lodge in the Lawn rooms at UVA--talk about history! Our architectural offering of the Blackfriars Playhouse sans Lawn Rooms was enough to attract some return campers from UVA--and they seemed to enjoy the options we provided at both Mary Baldwin College and local hotels, all walking distance from the playhouse. Other campers included teachers and parents who'd heard about ASC programming via our website and emails and teacher seminar weekends. The resulting group was a wonderful combination of people with a wide variety of interests and experiences. Couldn't have gotten a better group if we'd paid them to come (not that we wouldn't like to try that method of recruiting!).


The week was about much more than the right combination of architecture and people--although some might argue that Shakespeare's company, The Lord Chamberlain's Men and later the King's Men, was JUST THAT, a great combination of sharers, theatres, and (yes, it must be said) playwrights. What we were doing was investigating the clues provided in Shakespeare's plays and his playhouses to gain insights into appreciating them on the page and the stage. With our Director of Mission and the Gonder Professor of Renaissance Studies, Ralph Alan Cohen, we studied Rhetoric, Meter (see notes below from super intern David Techman on those topics), the history of directing and actor agency, and Audiences. With Bob Jones, ASC actor and Richmond Shakes director, we heard and saw the effect that simply acknowledging and engaging with Shakespeare's embedded stage directions can have on performance. Our own Associate Artistic Director, Jay McClure, shared his insights on casting, doubling, and every thing that goes into script and pre-production preparation (in the words of one participant "The Best"). We heard lectures from prominent scholars Carole Levin from the University of Nebraska and Paul Menzer from Mary Baldwin College on Backgrounds and Echoes in Othello and Taming of the Shrew and on textual variants, respectively. And then we observed rehearsals of ASC's next show to open in the Summer season (On Friday July 23) Wild Oats, played with cue scripts, entrances and exits, staging conditions, Elizabethan dance (Doreen Bechtol rocked), costume (the amazing Erin West), combat (thanks to Colleen Kelley), the history of Shakespeare's theatres, and too much more to mention--all in the span of 5 days. And I didn't even talk about the plays (participants, however, couldn't stop talking about the artistic quality--one said it was the best Othello she'd ever seen). The actors were so generous with their time at both the talkbacks and the cast party, and Sarah Fallon's and Ben Curn's visit to our last session on Friday was just inspiring.

I am out of time, but next time I will dwell on our field trips (to a vineyard) and social activities...all in all, a wonderful week that I can hardly wait to repeat. Hope you will agree and join us--if you will, what else would you like for us to cover?

A peek into a few of our classes, as observed by David Techman:
6/29/10
In the first afternoon lecture, Dr. Cohen discussed figures of speech. Every boy who went to grammar school (as Shakespeare did) would know rhetoric, including many figures of speech. The schools forced them to repeat the figures of speech until they were deeply engrained in the boys’ brains. The figures of speech that a character uses provides information about that character and even the surrounding action. That gave original actors, who only had sides, hints of how to portray them.
Dr. Cohen then gave a slideshow on Elizabethan and contemporary audiences. The anti-essentialists argue that we can’t know and can’t replicate the experience of original Globe, and even if we could, today’s audience would have a completely different reaction. Cohen doesn’t agree, and points out that lines intended to be funny then are still intended to be funny today. He cites Ben Johnson and the ancient Greeks as evidence that in some ways humanity essentially doesn’t change. Modern audiences figure out the conventions and how to react to audience interaction just like the original audiences did; some incidents when the Globe opened parallel anecdotes we have from Shakespeare’s day. A convention, such as asides not being heard by other characters, can be learned instantly and automatically. Audiences may be moved to interact by four factors: text, space, actors, and directors. Even if the anti-essentialists are right, it is still work to attempt to make an authentic atmosphere by interacting with the audience because it leads to wonderful theatrical moments and tells us things about present audiences regardless of whether or not that mirrors past ones.

6/30/10
The group sat in on a rehearsal of Wild Oats this morning, so Dr. Cohen discussed the rehearsal process. A director is there to “keep a lid on things.” If the director has an idea and an actor does something different that still works, the director usually shouldn’t take up rehearsal time to make the actor explore his idea too, for time is very valuable. In this company, most of the actors are veterans whom the director can trust. Actors should very seldom show any resistance to what a director says—it shouldn’t happen more than once a rehearsal. Being nice and collaborative is more important than acting skill and proves invaluable to actors finding work. Directors also shouldn’t micromanage actors’ readings of specific lines. Sarah revealed that, after we left, Mr. Warren started to give the actors more notes that he didn’t want the viewers to overhear. That rather surprised me and seems it could be a problem for the open rehearsal process. Next, Dr. Cohen and Sarah led a workshop on casting the audience. Sarah and Cass began by playing the scene listing the suitors in Merchant of Venice twice, once in a proscenium staging and once as a thrust staging indicating a viewer as each suitor. Needless to say, the second time was better. For most of the time, we focused on the St. Crispian’s Day speech from Henry V. It starts out talking to Westmoreland, but to be effective and rousing, parts of it must be delivered to the audience. We went through it line by line, deciding which ones should be said to onstage characters and which to audience members, then exploring how to best deliver the audience-directed ones. We don’t have historical anecdotes saying that actors addressed the audience like that, but Dr. Cohen provided enough textual examples to convince anyone. I didn’t know that actors could gauge whether or not to select a given person for contact, and this was the first time I learned the actual definition of an aside: an aside is heard by the audience and not the other characters, whereas most lines said to the audience are heard by both.