Joseph Papp and Elizabeth Kirkland. Shakespeare Alive! New York: Bantam, 1988. Print.

In New York City the name Joseph Papp is still nearly synonymous with William Shakespeare. Mr. Papp has produced many New York musicals and plays, but his lasting contribution has been the popular Shakespeare in the Park (Central Park, that is) which got its start in the 1950s and is still going strong. It seems worthwhile to see what this Shakespeare impresario had to say about his favorite topic.

This work is very different from The Meaning of Shakespeare, a work by a Shakespeare scholar. Which is better? It depends on what you are looking for. Character analysis and poetic detail? Take Goddard. But Shakespeare as theater? Take Papp and Kirkland.

The first half of Shakespeare Alive! is cultural background to Elizabethan and Jacobean England. While some things may be obvious or overstated, this can be very helpful for someone who is looking for the background. I think especially of American students who are not as familiar with British history or who may tend to see things from their own cultural perspective. It has different and probably more specifics than Marchette Chute’s Shakespeare of London. It includes many quotations from Elizabethan and Jacobean sources to give us an idea of what people were thinking and what was going on then.

I found the second half more helpful to me personally because I was somewhat familiar with a lot of the background. (Besides Chute, there is also Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture). Here the writers get into theater history and theater production in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. Papp and Kirkland do a nice overview of some of Shakespeare’s sources. I found their quotation from Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s “Life of Marcus Antonius” and what Shakespeare did with it especially illuminating. It illustrates what an artist and wordsmith the Bard was.

That quotation was also fun because a Latin version of Plutarch is quoted in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia and then “translated” by a tutor who claims to have been better than Byron in poetic expression. But the character is merely quoting those lines from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. You never know where Shakespeare will turn up. (The tutor’s pupil recognizes the lines and cries, “Cheat!”)

The book ends with an overview of modern Shakespeare productions from the 1920s until the time of publication. The authors bring up some famous and distinctive productions of Shakespeare plays. including some on film. I recall many years ago hearing that Sarah Bernhardt had played Hamlet. Papp says a 1920 silent film of that production exists. According to Wikipedia and YouTube, the film was made in 1900. If there is a carefully remastered version, that might be worth looking into. (There is a poor, short clip on YouTube, but it gives very little sense of the production.)

Yes, Shakespeare can come alive to those who read this book. For many, it may be even be a relief to read. Papp and Kirkland emphasize that Shakespeare was a playwright. His plays are not really meant to be read, they are meant to be performed and watched and enjoyed by people. That is when they really come alive.