January 12, 2023 • 39 mins
What happens when William Shakespeare walks into a Yom Kippur service? We take a deep dive into how Shakespeare informs contemporary religious practices and faith traditions, and explore one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays—host Barry Edelstein's favorite—The Winter's Tale. Its focus on the idea of wonder ties all of the Bard's plays, and this season of Where There’s a Will, together.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin, it is required you do awake your faith. You
know that line, right Am. Of course, the Winter's Tale
Polina at the end of the play. Such a great
line and a great character and a great play. It
(00:35):
really is the one Shakespeare I feel like I couldn't
live without. I mean, as much as I love Hamlet
and King Lear and Henry the Fifth, this one just
gives me something more. It touches on something spiritual. When
I'm around it, I feel Shakespeare looking beyond the play itself,
beyond the theater, beyond beyond. If I may quote him,
(00:58):
you may thank you. And that's beautiful. I love the
play too, And Polina requiring us to a week our faith,
it's just so stunning. M That's exactly what I want
to talk about this episode of where There's a Will,
the intersection between Shakespeare and faith. I can't help thinking
that The Winter's Tale and this huge idea about faith
in it is kind of the unified field theory that
(01:21):
ties together everything we've heard in our podcast. And I
guess that's not surprising because The Winter's Tale comes near
the end of Shakespeare's career, and it's one of the
plays that seems to sum up what his whole writing
life has been about. But the place a rare one.
It's not performed anywhere near as much as the famous
ones you just mentioned. Well, I'm doing my part. I've
directed it twice, and I buy a ticket whenever it's on.
(01:45):
If it's at the local high school, I'm there. I've
gotten on airplanes to see productions of it. I've seen
it in German and Italian and Swedish. Swedish Ingmar Bergmann's
production maybe the single greatest night of theater in my life. Wow,
I wish i'd seen it. But before we get into it,
maybe we should remind everyone what it's about. We absolutely should,
(02:05):
am and I've even asked some actor friends to lend
us a hand two minute mini production of the play
to get us going great. We're in the imaginary kingdom
of Cecilia, where King Leontes reigns Dear Siscilia. He's married
to Queen Hermione, who's very pregnant with their second child.
(02:26):
The queen rounds a pace Suddenly, out of the blue,
Leontes decides that the baby his wife is carrying is
not his own, but his best friends. He accuses them
and they deny it, but he gets violent, too hot,
too hot to mingle friendship far his mingling bloods. His
(02:47):
friend runs away. He throws his wife in jail, away
with her to prison, she gives birth to a daughter.
Leontes snatches the baby and banishes her from the country,
bear it to some remote a desert place. A loyal
courtier takes the baby away. He's the guy who later
has to exit pursued by a bear. But never mind.
(03:09):
Leontes puts Queen Hermione on trial for adultery, and she
insists she's not guilty. Innocence shall make false accusation blush.
Leontes begs the god Apollo to rule on the case,
and an oracle from Apollo's temple confirms the truth. Hermione
is chaste Leontes a jealous tyrant. Leontes refuses to believe it,
(03:33):
and the second he says so, word arrives that his
beloved young son, the Prince, has dropped dead. The Prince,
your son is gone. This terrible news makes the queen
collapse dead too. The Queen, the Queen, the sweetest, dearest
(03:57):
Creature's dead. Leontes has lost everything, his wife, his son,
his newborn daughter and his best friend. He sees the
terrible error of his ways, but it's too late, so
he vows a life of repentance, self denial, and despair.
Come and lead me to these sorrows. And that's just intermission.
(04:23):
The story jumps ahead sixteen years. Leonti's exiled baby daughter
is all grown up. Another incredibly complicated series of events
reunites everyone back into Cecilia. There, a wise and fierce
woman of Leonti's court, Paulina, has been presiding over Leonti's
sixteen years of darkness. Every day, Polina has reminded the
(04:45):
King of the damage is foolish. Jealousy has done the
King's grief and remorse have paralyzed the entire country. It's
just frozen in time for a generation. Polina brings Leonti's
and all the key figures still alive from that awful
moment sixteen years ago into a chapel. Inside there's an
impossibly lifelike statue of Queen Hermione. Leontes is overcome with emotion,
(05:12):
stunned by the image of his dead wife. The statue
is so perfect that he could swear the marble is breathing.
Polina offers to do something miraculous that will heal Leontes
and his country, redeem his tyranny, and restore what was lost,
but she tells him before she can do that, it
(05:33):
is required you do awake your faith. Polina summons mystical
music to play, and then, in a moment that to
me is one of the most beautiful in all of
Shakespeare and one of the most moving in world drama,
the statue of stone becomes flesh and Hermione, sixteen years dead,
(05:54):
comes back to life. Leonti's is healed, his loss is restored.
He gets a second chance. Faith that William Shakespeare tells
us is the way to redemption, the key to restoration.
(06:15):
I'm Barry Edelstein and I run the Old Globe, one
of the countries leading Shakespeare theaters, and this is where
there's a will finding Shakespeare from the Globe and Pushkin industries.
Our show discovers Shakespeare in all sorts of unexpected places
and asks what his presence means about him and about us.
My companion on this search for old William is a
(06:36):
friend and colleague with their own deep interest in Shakespeare.
The director and writer M Weinstein, it's really wonderful to
talk about the Winter's Tale. But as great as it is,
and as moved as I am by Polina's line about
how we have to awake our faith, it makes me
ask faith in what Shakespeare doesn't say, Maybe faith in God,
(06:57):
maybe in some other higher power, maybe in love, maybe
in ourselves, maybe in each other, maybe all of the above.
I think your question contains its answer am an openness
to what Shakespeare's doing in this line, a wide, inclusive,
subject to interpretation view of what faith can mean. And
(07:19):
this is regardless of whatever Shakespeare's own faith might have been,
whatever his own religious or spiritual beliefs were. Because I
hear something else in Paulina's words. I hear them as
a challenge to King Leonti's and also to us. What
will we choose to believe in? Where do we find miracles?
How can we turn the cold marble of an indifferent
(07:42):
world into the warm embrace of human beings caring for
each other? How do we awake our faith? We'll get
into the answer after a short break. The question of
what Shakespeare means when he talks about faith has been
(08:02):
alive in my own life for a long time am,
and for me, Shakespeare himself is a big part of
the answer. How do you mean? Well, I have a
very real kind of faith in him. I turned to
his works for wisdom and insight, for light, for solace.
At my most intense moments, I hear his lines. When
(08:24):
my daughter was born, I heard them, you Gods, look down,
and from your sacred vials, pour your graces upon my
daughter's head. When my father died, I heard them too,
As I talked about in our episode about Hamlet. When
I look at my ten year old son and I
see in him a strange mirror image of myself, I
(08:47):
hear another line from the Winter's Tale. I am like you,
they say. Whenever I feel like I'm near something that
reaches beyond the normal, I hear Shakespeare. I don't think
you're alone in that berry. A lot of people connect
with Shakespeare on a spiritual level and making where there's
a will. I've had the chance to speak with some
amazing ones, people who stand at the intersection of Shakespeare
(09:11):
and faith. Listen to this m that's Colney Dre the
(09:33):
prayer that starts the Jewish holiday Yom Kipur, right yep,
the day of Atonement the most somber day of the
Jewish year, and that's YUSSELA Rosenblatt in a recording from
the early nineteen hundreds. He was a famous canter in
the Jewish faith. That's the person who leads the congregation
in song during prayer. His colnidre was haunting and serious.
(09:55):
But m listen to this alliges marge blesses, long continuance
and increasing. I'll le us be still upon you. Junos
sings who blesses blessings on you. That sounds like Shakespeare less.
(10:22):
It is lines from the Tempest set to music. That's
how jung Kipoor was observed in twenty twenty two in
Orange County, California, with Shakespeare. You didn't know he was Jewish,
if only well he was that day. The service was
the brainchild of a really interesting and innovative rabbi. My
name is Marcia Tilchen. I am an ordained cantor and rabbi.
(10:46):
Through the conservative movement of Judaism, Rabbi Tilchen founded the
Jewish Collaborative of Orange County. It's a nonprofit that serves
the local Jewish community there, particularly marginalized Jewish populations. They
do all sorts of programming, including services for the major holidays.
Rabbi Tilton was a theater major in college and she
(11:06):
studied a lot of Shakespeare. She found that reading closely
and intensely, the way you do in an academic setting
really appealed to her, and then her life took a
different path. Years later. I had a sort of what
they call it teshuva, a return to my sort of
traditional Jewish roots, and I pursued a career as a
clergy person and discovered through my biblical analysis and my
(11:30):
joy in tech study that it reminded me of my
close reading of Shakespeare. My first exogetical exercises were in Shakespeare,
not Torah, and so I mean there's always been a
link for me. I love the idea that close reading
of a Shakespeare text and close reading of the Torah,
that five books of Moses are related. They're both old
(11:53):
canonical texts that wrestle with moral and ethical questions, and
they cry out for minute analysis, for interpretation, for explication.
That's the exogetical reading the rabbi was talking about. We
know what biblical exegesis is, Well, there's a Shakespeare exegesis too,
endless volumes of commentary by experts who argue with each
(12:15):
other and with what was argued before. It's a living
tradition of debate and dispute and justice. With scripture, there
are radical interpretations and conservative ones, traditional productions of Shakespeare
and avant garde productions. But back to Rabbi Tilchen. She
was doing some work with academic colleagues at a week
long seminar called Shakespeare and Sacred Text. They were exploring
(12:37):
the connections between these two types of literature and asking
how they both touched on questions of faith. It was
really remarkable, and I thought, I don't want this to
end here, so I'd like to invite a taste of
that into our high holiday services. So that's how the
idea came to include some pieces of Shakespeare's writing in
(12:58):
these high point moments in our jumpy, poor morning service.
I asked Rabbi Tilchen to share her perspective on that holiday. Yumpipoor,
first of all, is in some ways the most somber
and elevated day of the Jewish calendar year. It's called
(13:19):
Shabbat Shabbat tone It's the Sabbath of all Sabbaths. It's
the day that the Jewish people as a unified body,
where we reunite with God in our commitment to embrace
God as the sole sovereign of the universe, and we
(13:42):
do so with ideally pure hearts, pure souls, and also
really looking at our relationships with others, certainly with ourselves,
with the people most important to us, and ultimately our
relationship with God as we understand it. That's the work
we're supposed to be doing. So I'm Jewish, m me too,
(14:06):
And as moving as I find young poor, I also
find it well. I'll let the rabbi say it it's endless,
and but I say that it's you know, it's almost
as if the world stops for twenty six to twenty
seven hours. In my former congregation, we'd begin praying on
(14:27):
yumkipor at eight am. We'd be finished at about two thirty.
We'd take a little break. We'd start again at four
with the fourth service of the day, and when it
was finally dark and three stars came out, we would
hear the final show far Blast and we could eat.
And people often stay in synagogue all day. So, yeah,
that's what happens a lot of prayers, a lot of connection,
(14:51):
a lot of conversation, a lot of learning. It's amazing.
In my own experiences in synagogue am I've seen how
prayer books often bring secular material into the liturgy. Poetry, meditations,
writings related to the themes of the service. By Tilton
told me that for her, these things help close the
(15:12):
distance between our modern lives and the ancient traditional rituals.
They make prayer feel more immediate. This is why she
brings Shakespeare in writing, like his delivers a special jolt
of meaning. It touches people's souls. She told me. That's
what was behind her decision to include Shakespeare and her
(15:33):
Yom Kipur observance. That's so beautiful. So how does she
get Shakespeare in there? Well, she told me about one
example when she took a very famous speech from Macbeth
and linked it to one of the central prayers in
the Yom Kipur service. And then, of course, thinking about
that famous speech of Macbeth about what is the meaning
of life tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, we thought that
(15:56):
we would actually open the high point in the musof service,
which is a very special poetic passage called Unatana tokev,
and we would actually lead into that with mcbe speech,
which is very nobody would think that that would happen.
Many of the lines that we've heard today from the
(16:17):
Book of Psalms images of the transience of human life,
including a line from Psalm ninety which reads, we spend
our years as a tale that is told. And Shakespeare
renders this in a line that we have all I
(16:37):
hope heard. It is a tale told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury, signifying nothing that passage. The
Rabbi connected to Macbeth. The unatona tokev is central to
yum Kapoor. It translates roughly to let us proclaim holiness.
The prayer talks about how humans stand before the Almighty
(16:59):
and humility as we accept responsibility for our actions and
yearn for growth and change. The Rabbi read me a
little piece of it. We are like a fragile vessel,
like the grass that withers, the flower that fades, the
shadow that passes, the cloud that vanishes, the wind that blows,
(17:25):
the dust that floats, the dream that flies away. But you,
sovereign of all, are the living and everlasting God. I
listened to you read that passage from the Untanatokf, and
I hear Sonnet maybe at sixty like as the waves
(17:46):
make toward the pebbled shore, so do our minutes hasten
to their end. And it's exactly that vision of time
as a march toward the end of a sense of
incipient loss that resonates with me in exactly that same way.
I think about a great soliloquy in Hamlet where the
(18:07):
king kneels down to pray, in not just to pray,
but to repent for murdering his brother, and finds that
he can't. Right, try what repentance can? What can it not?
And yet what can it when one cannot repent? And
as I speak with you, Rabbi, I just hear this
sort of thirty years of Shakespeare that's been in my
life welling up with the same kind of ideas that
(18:31):
are being explored in the spiritual life of that day
on the Jewish calendar and Judaism broadly. It's an extraordinary parallel,
no kidding. And by the way, I don't know if
you want the good news or the bad news, but
I am so making you come to my services next year.
(18:52):
So I just want to say, book your ticket to
Orange County for High Holiday's fifty seven eighty four. We
should live poop poo poo. We should live and be well,
as we say. Brabbi Tilton's doing something really exciting. She's
connecting the secular and the sacred, and she's using Shakespeare
as the bridge between them. It's the same Shakespeare we
found building bridges to incarcerated populations or to an idea
(19:16):
of americanness. He's very good at forging these kind of bonds,
and he's a place where communities can come together and
discover something meaningful. Rabbi Tilton thinks about Shakespeare as a
way to enrich her own religious observance, and when she
shares that impulse with the community, she leads Shakespeare enriches
their faith too. He widens it, he deepens it. Thou
(19:43):
thousesigs to save ohrue, find the grain too. Weep. We'll
(20:04):
be back after a short break. The next time I
get a synagogue, I'm gonna be really bummed if there
isn't some Shakespeare there. I know, a guitar playing, rabbi
singing songs from twelfth Night not something you see every day.
(20:25):
Shakespeare really does start up in some surprising places, and
m I found him in another kind of spiritual context too.
I spoke with a wonderful thinker who has incorporated Shakespeare
into their mindfulness practice. My name is Lauren's you friend
Lauren uses they them pronouns like Rabbi Tilchen. They first
encountered Shakespeare in an academic setting, but even after their
(20:48):
studies ended, he stayed with them, and he moved into
another part of their life. Shakespeare is utterly magnetic, and
I couldn't figure out quite how to put him down.
My spiritual inquiry is already such such a part of
my life that you know, when you're holding two things
so regularly in your life, you naturally find ways, I think,
(21:10):
to start putting them. In conversation, Lauren has a rich
and deep meditation practice inflected by Buddhism. It shapes the
spiritual inquiry. They mentioned they found parallels between certain key
themes that preoccupy Shakespeare and certain key ideas in Buddhist thought.
The more time I have spent placing Shakespeare in the
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Buddhist side by side, you know, listening for their resonances.
For me, the connection that has become clear is that
one of them right, namely, Shakespeare, had the ability to
represent inwardness and suffering better than any writer of his
time right, and the other discerned how to liberate us
from that suffering. And none of this, of course, is
(21:52):
to say that Shakespeare was a Buddhist. People do a
lot of trying to put Shakespeare in a lot of categories,
and that's not my interest. But Lauren is interested in
Shakespeare's very specific relationship to mindfulness. Now am I know
a lot more about Beatrice and Benedict than I do
about the Buddha. But Lauren helped me understand how central
mindfulness is to Buddhism. It's a way of training the
(22:15):
mind to be intentional, to experience things with full alertness
and comprehension. It has an ethical dimension, too, as it
asks that humans be ever mindful of how we live
and behave in the world, as we seek to alleviate suffering.
In Lauren's mindfulness practice, Shakespeare's lines functions mantras. I don't
(22:36):
necessarily take these lines into my meditation practice with me,
but the Shakespeare as a mantra, those are the lines
accompanying me out into the world. I mean, there comes
a point in time in which you've been so deeply
steeped in Shakespeare that sometimes something happens in a day,
and for whatever reason, the first thought that comes to
mind isn't even yours. It's a line Shakespeare wrote. I mean,
(23:02):
I sound silly saying it, but that happens to me
more times than I'm maybe comfortable admitting. You get admitted
here Shark Confessional. Thank you. Yes, I appreciate that the
lines have a way of seeping into your unconscious and
they manifest in all kinds of crazy ways. You know,
like some old movie where a guy's walking down the
(23:24):
street and a piece of newspaper blows onto him, and
you know, he looks at the newspaper and it's the
secret to whatever it is he's been looking for. Back
in twenty eighteen, Lauren decided to offer to the wide
world the connections they were making between Buddhism and Shakespeare.
They started an Instagram page called Shakespeare and Mindfulness. Grab
your phone, m take a look. It's how I found
(23:46):
Lauren in the first place. Wait, I'm looking at it now. Oh.
They're these beautiful photos of pieces of paper with short
passages of Shakespeare on them. In like an old typewriter font.
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn,
good and ill together, and the paper is sitting in nature,
(24:06):
somewhere on a tree branch, or a flower, or on
some sand at the beach. It's beautiful with mirth and laughter.
Let old wrinkles come. And Lauren accompanies each photo with
a few paragraphs. They explain the original context of the line,
and then they interpret it through a Buddhist lens or
from the perspective of mindfulness. More generally, we know what
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we are, but know not what we may be. It's
so great, it's like going on a mini retreat right
in your hand. And then people chime in with associations
of their own. Every wink of an eye, some new
grace will be born, and this retreat turns into a
community event, and this kind of sweet and even vulnerable
(24:53):
discussion emerges about how Shakespeare is touching people's daily lives.
How long a time lies? In one little word? I
asked Lauren to share some of their favorite posts. The
second servant observes in Romeo and Juliet, he's as very simply,
but like so poignantly, we cannot be here and there too.
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It's a line. If I were not reading Shakespeare thinking
about spiritual inquiry, I would pass over in a heartbeat, right,
But suddenly that line is a mantra that, in the
course of a day is just calling me back to
each exquisite present moment. When Volumnia tells Coriolanus, you are
too absolute, like what stories and beliefs? Does that line
(25:39):
help me see that I am like tenaciously holding onto?
And then this one is my favorite. When Pericles reunites
with his long lost daughter, whom he can't quite recognize yet,
he says to her, thou lookst like one I loved. Indeed,
what changes if I arrive to each new encounter in
my day with that in line? Thou looks like one
(26:00):
I loved? Indeed? Remembering right To bring it back to Buddhism,
that everyone I encounter has been my mother, my liberator,
lover in some life right like you are You're someone
I've loved before. And so that line for me really
calls up like that Buddhist notion of rebirth or of
inter being. So these are just kind of some of
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the examples of what shows up on that feed. Oh
those are amazing. I spent a lot of time scrolling
through that feed, and it made me laugh, and it
moved me, and it made me think. It did start
to touch on something that felt spiritual to me. And
then am I found this line meantime, let wonder seem familiar?
(26:44):
And that took me somewhere else entirely, to someplace that
I know to be absolutely central to how Shakespeare sees
the world. You know, meantime, let wonder seem familiar just
delighted me. I think it's one of my favorite quotes.
You know about wonder about anything in Shakespeare. The line
is from Much Ado about Nothing, and the plot is
(27:05):
kind of similar to The Winter's Tale. A young couple
named Audio and Hero are about to be married, but
on their wedding day, Claudio dramatically accuses Hero of cheating
on him. The friar, who was supposed to marry them,
advises her to play dead to send out word that
she's died of a broken heart. This will buy some
time to clear her name. When everything is sorted out
(27:28):
and it's revealed that Hero is actually alive, Claudio is astonished,
just struck by wonder, and the friar tells him to
let wonder seem familiar. So he tells Claudio for the moment, right,
let wonder seem familiar, which which is to say, you know,
for now, I need you to accept these astonishing events
(27:52):
as ordinary matters. Right, But I love I so much,
Just love turning that line on its head a little bit,
because a familiar, right as a noun, was a close
friend or an intimate or someone you knew well. And
so you know that line is actually, with a little
bit of a twist, an invitation to become intimate with awe. Right,
(28:15):
let the familiar seem wonderful. Make astonishment an integral part
of your life, an invitation to become intimate with awe.
What a great turn of phrase. It gets at how
fundamental wonder is to Shakespeare and m Through all the
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years I've been working on his plays, I've come to
believe that wonder is what Shakespeare is about. It's the
big idea he was driving at his entire career. Wonder
is the unified field theory of Shakespeare. Which is so
interesting because wonder is a word that's lost a lot
of its juice since Shakespeare's day. In our language, you
(28:57):
just throw it away. I wonder what that's about, or
the sandwich is wonderful, or speaking of sandwich is wonder bread.
It's a lot more bland than what Shakespeare understood the
word to be, isn't it? Yes? For Sakespeare, it's an
emotional state that's excessive, shattering. For him, Wonder is what
we feel when we're faced with something completely overwhelming. It's
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what we feel when our minds are blown. It paralyzes us,
stops us dead in our tracks. And to Shakespeare, wonder
could be both a positive feeling and a negative one.
It can be prompted by things that are beautiful and
things that are terrible. A breathtaking sunset can be a wonder,
but an earthquake can be one. Two. Wonder has a
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doubleness in it. The monstrous and the glorious, loss and gain,
grief and ecstasy, they all strike us into wonder. It
makes so much sense that this idea would be what
brings Shakespeare into faith traditions and religious observance, because to
ponder God, to ponder a higher power of any kind,
(30:03):
to ask the biggest metaphysical questions about our lives. Even
to marvel at the night time sky or the Grand
Canyon or if you like the tiny fingers of a
newborn baby, or the flowers blooming in the spring, to
look at any of these, to consider miracles in any way,
it's necessary to have access to wonder. I like your
(30:26):
silence if the more shows off your wonder. That's Polina
again from the Winter's Tale, isn't it. She connects wonder
to silence. And that's so right in front of something
that inspires all we feel small, a little humble, a
little quiet. Am. That's how I often feel in front
(30:47):
of Shakespeare. And I think that in some way that
is what allows him to turn up, not just in
synagogues and personal meditations, but in all the places we
found him this season, a quiet sense of awe, his
power of evoking wonder, of embracing it, of giving it,
as he says in another play, a local habitation and
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a name. This is what touches men who've been incarcerated
for thirty years, what helps them find a kind of
emotional transcendence in these works. It's what gave Abraham Lincoln
some consolation in these plays when the Civil War was
at its bloodiest. It's what makes a five year old
autistic child able to express herself in some small way
through these four hundred year old lines. What makes teenagers
(31:32):
feel like they've discovered in Shakespeare the secret Dakota ring
to being alive. Yes, a touch of the marvelous in
all of these places and all of these people, A
touch of the marvelous, A touch of wonder made familiar
by Shakespeare. Over our eight episode expedition through Shakespeare in
(31:53):
the world, that's what I've discovered. His capacity for wonder,
his ability to describe it, to conjure it, his way
of making us experience it. These are powerful, magical even
There's something in effable about Shakespeare, something quietly spiritual. It's
(32:13):
what draws us toward him and him toward us, whoever
we are and wherever we are. That's really lovely, Berry,
And it gives me an idea. Do you think maybe
we could close our season finale by letting Shakespeare work
his magic for a moment. Nothing would make me happier.
(32:34):
Let's wrap up this season of Where There's a Will
with a scene from Shakespeare. M You and I narrated
the plot of the Winter Sale earlier. Yes, repenting for
sixteen years, Leonti's is taken by Paulina into a chapel
where there's a statue of his dead wife, a wife
he accused of adultery and whose death this accusation caused.
(32:54):
Now he sees an image of her carved in marble
and is awe struck at how lifelike she looks. Listen
as the words wonder, amazement, marvel ping through this scene.
Imagine you can hear them hanging through a prison, or
in the journal of a fifteen year old, or in
the oval office, or on an Instagram, or in your
(33:16):
own secret heart. Oh, grave and good Paulina, the great
comfort that I have had of thee what sovereign Sir?
I did not well, I meant well, but we came
to see the statue of our queen. Behold and say
tis well, I like your silence. If the more shows
(33:43):
off your wonder, Chide me, dear Stone, that I may say, indeed,
thou art hermione, or rather thou art she in thy
not chiding, for she was as tender as infancy and grace.
I am ashamed. Does not the stone rebuke me for
(34:05):
being more stone than it? O royal peace? There's magic
in thy majesty, Would you not deem it breathed. What
was he that did make it? My Lord's almost so
far transported that he'll think anon it lives still methinks
(34:26):
there is an air comes from her. What fine chisel
could ever yet cut breath? Let no man mock me,
for I will kiss her. Good my lord, forbear or
resolve you from more amazement. I'll make the statue move. Indeed,
(34:49):
arise and take you by the hand. What you can
make her do? I am content to look on, what
to speak, I am content to hear it is required.
You do awake your faith, then all stand still music,
(35:11):
awake her. Strike tis time, arise be stone, no more approach,
Strike all that look upon with marvel, Come away you perceive?
(35:38):
She stirs, Oh, start not her acts are holy? Do
not shun her, Nay, present your hand. She's warm. If
this be magic, let it be an art lawful as eating.
(36:04):
She embraces him. She hangs about his neck. Let wonder
seem familiar. Thanks for spending some time with us, and
thanks for listening to Where there's a Will. Where There's
(36:26):
a Will. Finding Shakespeare is written and hosted by me
Barry Edelstein. My co host is m Weinstein. Our show
was produced by Buffy Gorilla and Nisha Vencott, with assistant
producers Jennifer Sanchez and Salmon Ahad Khan. Our executive producers
are Katherine Girardo from Pushkin and Alex Lewis and John
Myers from Row Home Productions. Our editor is Audrey Dilling.
(36:48):
Our mix engineer is Justin Burger. Our theme is an
original composition by Hannis Browne. Samuel Buzid is our fact checker.
Vicki Merrick is our voice coach. Our show was recorded
at Bill Corquery Productions, Leopard Studio, and The Old Globe Special.
Thanks to Brittany Brown for help with this episode. Thanks
to our development department, Leetal Mulad and Justine Lang who
(37:11):
developed the pilot for this show. Thanks to Sam Dingman,
who produced the pilot and the scene from the Winter's
Tale we Just heard. Paulina was played by Opel Aladdin
and Leonti's by Ian Lasseter. Shakespeare in Mindfulness quotes read
by Camilla Leonard. Our executive team includes Jacob Weisberg, Malcolm Gladwell,
Heather Faine, John Schnars, Carrie Brodie, Carly mcgliori, Christina Sullivan,
(37:35):
Jason Gambrel, Letal Mulad, Greta Khne, and Mia Lobell. Our
marketing team includes Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Morgan Ratner, Nicole Morrano,
Mary Beth Smith, Jordan McMillan, Isabella Narvaiz and Sean Carney.
We couldn't make the show without operations and licensing support
from Nicole Optenbosch, Maya Kanig, Daniela Lakhan and Jake Flanagan.
(38:02):
Where There's a Will is a co production of Pushkin
Industries and The Old Clobe. Barry Edelstein. That's Me is
Erna Vincy Viturbi Artistic director and Timothy J. Shields is
audreyas Geisel, Managing Director of the Old Globe. For The
Globe thanks to sound director Paul Peterson and Assistant to
the Sound director Evan Eason, Director of Marketing and Communications
(38:22):
Dave Henson, Assistant to the artistic and managing directors Carolyn Budd,
The Theodore and Audrey Geiselfund provides leadership support for The
Old Globe's year round activities. To learn more about the
Tony Award winning The Old Globe one of America's leading
regional theater companies visit the Old Globe dot org. If
you love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering
(38:45):
bonus content and add free listening across our network for
four dollars and ninety nine cents a month. Find the
Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm.
To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts
Pushkin, it is required you do awake your faith. You
know that line, right Am. Of course, the Winter's Tale
Polina at the end of the play. Such a great
line and a great character and a great play. It
(00:35):
really is the one Shakespeare I feel like I couldn't
live without. I mean, as much as I love Hamlet
and King Lear and Henry the Fifth, this one just
gives me something more. It touches on something spiritual. When
I'm around it, I feel Shakespeare looking beyond the play itself,
beyond the theater, beyond beyond. If I may quote him,
(00:58):
you may thank you. And that's beautiful. I love the
play too, And Polina requiring us to a week our faith,
it's just so stunning. M That's exactly what I want
to talk about this episode of where There's a Will,
the intersection between Shakespeare and faith. I can't help thinking
that The Winter's Tale and this huge idea about faith
in it is kind of the unified field theory that
(01:21):
ties together everything we've heard in our podcast. And I
guess that's not surprising because The Winter's Tale comes near
the end of Shakespeare's career, and it's one of the
plays that seems to sum up what his whole writing
life has been about. But the place a rare one.
It's not performed anywhere near as much as the famous
ones you just mentioned. Well, I'm doing my part. I've
directed it twice, and I buy a ticket whenever it's on.
(01:45):
If it's at the local high school, I'm there. I've
gotten on airplanes to see productions of it. I've seen
it in German and Italian and Swedish. Swedish Ingmar Bergmann's
production maybe the single greatest night of theater in my life. Wow,
I wish i'd seen it. But before we get into it,
maybe we should remind everyone what it's about. We absolutely should,
(02:05):
am and I've even asked some actor friends to lend
us a hand two minute mini production of the play
to get us going great. We're in the imaginary kingdom
of Cecilia, where King Leontes reigns Dear Siscilia. He's married
to Queen Hermione, who's very pregnant with their second child.
(02:26):
The queen rounds a pace Suddenly, out of the blue,
Leontes decides that the baby his wife is carrying is
not his own, but his best friends. He accuses them
and they deny it, but he gets violent, too hot,
too hot to mingle friendship far his mingling bloods. His
(02:47):
friend runs away. He throws his wife in jail, away
with her to prison, she gives birth to a daughter.
Leontes snatches the baby and banishes her from the country,
bear it to some remote a desert place. A loyal
courtier takes the baby away. He's the guy who later
has to exit pursued by a bear. But never mind.
(03:09):
Leontes puts Queen Hermione on trial for adultery, and she
insists she's not guilty. Innocence shall make false accusation blush.
Leontes begs the god Apollo to rule on the case,
and an oracle from Apollo's temple confirms the truth. Hermione
is chaste Leontes a jealous tyrant. Leontes refuses to believe it,
(03:33):
and the second he says so, word arrives that his
beloved young son, the Prince, has dropped dead. The Prince,
your son is gone. This terrible news makes the queen
collapse dead too. The Queen, the Queen, the sweetest, dearest
(03:57):
Creature's dead. Leontes has lost everything, his wife, his son,
his newborn daughter and his best friend. He sees the
terrible error of his ways, but it's too late, so
he vows a life of repentance, self denial, and despair.
Come and lead me to these sorrows. And that's just intermission.
(04:23):
The story jumps ahead sixteen years. Leonti's exiled baby daughter
is all grown up. Another incredibly complicated series of events
reunites everyone back into Cecilia. There, a wise and fierce
woman of Leonti's court, Paulina, has been presiding over Leonti's
sixteen years of darkness. Every day, Polina has reminded the
(04:45):
King of the damage is foolish. Jealousy has done the
King's grief and remorse have paralyzed the entire country. It's
just frozen in time for a generation. Polina brings Leonti's
and all the key figures still alive from that awful
moment sixteen years ago into a chapel. Inside there's an
impossibly lifelike statue of Queen Hermione. Leontes is overcome with emotion,
(05:12):
stunned by the image of his dead wife. The statue
is so perfect that he could swear the marble is breathing.
Polina offers to do something miraculous that will heal Leontes
and his country, redeem his tyranny, and restore what was lost,
but she tells him before she can do that, it
(05:33):
is required you do awake your faith. Polina summons mystical
music to play, and then, in a moment that to
me is one of the most beautiful in all of
Shakespeare and one of the most moving in world drama,
the statue of stone becomes flesh and Hermione, sixteen years dead,
(05:54):
comes back to life. Leonti's is healed, his loss is restored.
He gets a second chance. Faith that William Shakespeare tells
us is the way to redemption, the key to restoration.
(06:15):
I'm Barry Edelstein and I run the Old Globe, one
of the countries leading Shakespeare theaters, and this is where
there's a will finding Shakespeare from the Globe and Pushkin industries.
Our show discovers Shakespeare in all sorts of unexpected places
and asks what his presence means about him and about us.
My companion on this search for old William is a
(06:36):
friend and colleague with their own deep interest in Shakespeare.
The director and writer M Weinstein, it's really wonderful to
talk about the Winter's Tale. But as great as it is,
and as moved as I am by Polina's line about
how we have to awake our faith, it makes me
ask faith in what Shakespeare doesn't say, Maybe faith in God,
(06:57):
maybe in some other higher power, maybe in love, maybe
in ourselves, maybe in each other, maybe all of the above.
I think your question contains its answer am an openness
to what Shakespeare's doing in this line, a wide, inclusive,
subject to interpretation view of what faith can mean. And
(07:19):
this is regardless of whatever Shakespeare's own faith might have been,
whatever his own religious or spiritual beliefs were. Because I
hear something else in Paulina's words. I hear them as
a challenge to King Leonti's and also to us. What
will we choose to believe in? Where do we find miracles?
How can we turn the cold marble of an indifferent
(07:42):
world into the warm embrace of human beings caring for
each other? How do we awake our faith? We'll get
into the answer after a short break. The question of
what Shakespeare means when he talks about faith has been
(08:02):
alive in my own life for a long time am,
and for me, Shakespeare himself is a big part of
the answer. How do you mean? Well, I have a
very real kind of faith in him. I turned to
his works for wisdom and insight, for light, for solace.
At my most intense moments, I hear his lines. When
(08:24):
my daughter was born, I heard them, you Gods, look down,
and from your sacred vials, pour your graces upon my
daughter's head. When my father died, I heard them too,
As I talked about in our episode about Hamlet. When
I look at my ten year old son and I
see in him a strange mirror image of myself, I
(08:47):
hear another line from the Winter's Tale. I am like you,
they say. Whenever I feel like I'm near something that
reaches beyond the normal, I hear Shakespeare. I don't think
you're alone in that berry. A lot of people connect
with Shakespeare on a spiritual level and making where there's
a will. I've had the chance to speak with some
amazing ones, people who stand at the intersection of Shakespeare
(09:11):
and faith. Listen to this m that's Colney Dre the
(09:33):
prayer that starts the Jewish holiday Yom Kipur, right yep,
the day of Atonement the most somber day of the
Jewish year, and that's YUSSELA Rosenblatt in a recording from
the early nineteen hundreds. He was a famous canter in
the Jewish faith. That's the person who leads the congregation
in song during prayer. His colnidre was haunting and serious.
(09:55):
But m listen to this alliges marge blesses, long continuance
and increasing. I'll le us be still upon you. Junos
sings who blesses blessings on you. That sounds like Shakespeare less.
(10:22):
It is lines from the Tempest set to music. That's
how jung Kipoor was observed in twenty twenty two in
Orange County, California, with Shakespeare. You didn't know he was Jewish,
if only well he was that day. The service was
the brainchild of a really interesting and innovative rabbi. My
name is Marcia Tilchen. I am an ordained cantor and rabbi.
(10:46):
Through the conservative movement of Judaism, Rabbi Tilchen founded the
Jewish Collaborative of Orange County. It's a nonprofit that serves
the local Jewish community there, particularly marginalized Jewish populations. They
do all sorts of programming, including services for the major holidays.
Rabbi Tilton was a theater major in college and she
(11:06):
studied a lot of Shakespeare. She found that reading closely
and intensely, the way you do in an academic setting
really appealed to her, and then her life took a
different path. Years later. I had a sort of what
they call it teshuva, a return to my sort of
traditional Jewish roots, and I pursued a career as a
clergy person and discovered through my biblical analysis and my
(11:30):
joy in tech study that it reminded me of my
close reading of Shakespeare. My first exogetical exercises were in Shakespeare,
not Torah, and so I mean there's always been a
link for me. I love the idea that close reading
of a Shakespeare text and close reading of the Torah,
that five books of Moses are related. They're both old
(11:53):
canonical texts that wrestle with moral and ethical questions, and
they cry out for minute analysis, for interpretation, for explication.
That's the exogetical reading the rabbi was talking about. We
know what biblical exegesis is, Well, there's a Shakespeare exegesis too,
endless volumes of commentary by experts who argue with each
(12:15):
other and with what was argued before. It's a living
tradition of debate and dispute and justice. With scripture, there
are radical interpretations and conservative ones, traditional productions of Shakespeare
and avant garde productions. But back to Rabbi Tilchen. She
was doing some work with academic colleagues at a week
long seminar called Shakespeare and Sacred Text. They were exploring
(12:37):
the connections between these two types of literature and asking
how they both touched on questions of faith. It was
really remarkable, and I thought, I don't want this to
end here, so I'd like to invite a taste of
that into our high holiday services. So that's how the
idea came to include some pieces of Shakespeare's writing in
(12:58):
these high point moments in our jumpy, poor morning service.
I asked Rabbi Tilchen to share her perspective on that holiday. Yumpipoor,
first of all, is in some ways the most somber
and elevated day of the Jewish calendar year. It's called
(13:19):
Shabbat Shabbat tone It's the Sabbath of all Sabbaths. It's
the day that the Jewish people as a unified body,
where we reunite with God in our commitment to embrace
God as the sole sovereign of the universe, and we
(13:42):
do so with ideally pure hearts, pure souls, and also
really looking at our relationships with others, certainly with ourselves,
with the people most important to us, and ultimately our
relationship with God as we understand it. That's the work
we're supposed to be doing. So I'm Jewish, m me too,
(14:06):
And as moving as I find young poor, I also
find it well. I'll let the rabbi say it it's endless,
and but I say that it's you know, it's almost
as if the world stops for twenty six to twenty
seven hours. In my former congregation, we'd begin praying on
(14:27):
yumkipor at eight am. We'd be finished at about two thirty.
We'd take a little break. We'd start again at four
with the fourth service of the day, and when it
was finally dark and three stars came out, we would
hear the final show far Blast and we could eat.
And people often stay in synagogue all day. So, yeah,
that's what happens a lot of prayers, a lot of connection,
(14:51):
a lot of conversation, a lot of learning. It's amazing.
In my own experiences in synagogue am I've seen how
prayer books often bring secular material into the liturgy. Poetry, meditations,
writings related to the themes of the service. By Tilton
told me that for her, these things help close the
(15:12):
distance between our modern lives and the ancient traditional rituals.
They make prayer feel more immediate. This is why she
brings Shakespeare in writing, like his delivers a special jolt
of meaning. It touches people's souls. She told me. That's
what was behind her decision to include Shakespeare and her
(15:33):
Yom Kipur observance. That's so beautiful. So how does she
get Shakespeare in there? Well, she told me about one
example when she took a very famous speech from Macbeth
and linked it to one of the central prayers in
the Yom Kipur service. And then, of course, thinking about
that famous speech of Macbeth about what is the meaning
of life tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, we thought that
(15:56):
we would actually open the high point in the musof service,
which is a very special poetic passage called Unatana tokev,
and we would actually lead into that with mcbe speech,
which is very nobody would think that that would happen.
Many of the lines that we've heard today from the
(16:17):
Book of Psalms images of the transience of human life,
including a line from Psalm ninety which reads, we spend
our years as a tale that is told. And Shakespeare
renders this in a line that we have all I
(16:37):
hope heard. It is a tale told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury, signifying nothing that passage. The
Rabbi connected to Macbeth. The unatona tokev is central to
yum Kapoor. It translates roughly to let us proclaim holiness.
The prayer talks about how humans stand before the Almighty
(16:59):
and humility as we accept responsibility for our actions and
yearn for growth and change. The Rabbi read me a
little piece of it. We are like a fragile vessel,
like the grass that withers, the flower that fades, the
shadow that passes, the cloud that vanishes, the wind that blows,
(17:25):
the dust that floats, the dream that flies away. But you,
sovereign of all, are the living and everlasting God. I
listened to you read that passage from the Untanatokf, and
I hear Sonnet maybe at sixty like as the waves
(17:46):
make toward the pebbled shore, so do our minutes hasten
to their end. And it's exactly that vision of time
as a march toward the end of a sense of
incipient loss that resonates with me in exactly that same way.
I think about a great soliloquy in Hamlet where the
(18:07):
king kneels down to pray, in not just to pray,
but to repent for murdering his brother, and finds that
he can't. Right, try what repentance can? What can it not?
And yet what can it when one cannot repent? And
as I speak with you, Rabbi, I just hear this
sort of thirty years of Shakespeare that's been in my
life welling up with the same kind of ideas that
(18:31):
are being explored in the spiritual life of that day
on the Jewish calendar and Judaism broadly. It's an extraordinary parallel,
no kidding. And by the way, I don't know if
you want the good news or the bad news, but
I am so making you come to my services next year.
(18:52):
So I just want to say, book your ticket to
Orange County for High Holiday's fifty seven eighty four. We
should live poop poo poo. We should live and be well,
as we say. Brabbi Tilton's doing something really exciting. She's
connecting the secular and the sacred, and she's using Shakespeare
as the bridge between them. It's the same Shakespeare we
found building bridges to incarcerated populations or to an idea
(19:16):
of americanness. He's very good at forging these kind of bonds,
and he's a place where communities can come together and
discover something meaningful. Rabbi Tilton thinks about Shakespeare as a
way to enrich her own religious observance, and when she
shares that impulse with the community, she leads Shakespeare enriches
their faith too. He widens it, he deepens it. Thou
(19:43):
thousesigs to save ohrue, find the grain too. Weep. We'll
(20:04):
be back after a short break. The next time I
get a synagogue, I'm gonna be really bummed if there
isn't some Shakespeare there. I know, a guitar playing, rabbi
singing songs from twelfth Night not something you see every day.
(20:25):
Shakespeare really does start up in some surprising places, and
m I found him in another kind of spiritual context too.
I spoke with a wonderful thinker who has incorporated Shakespeare
into their mindfulness practice. My name is Lauren's you friend
Lauren uses they them pronouns like Rabbi Tilchen. They first
encountered Shakespeare in an academic setting, but even after their
(20:48):
studies ended, he stayed with them, and he moved into
another part of their life. Shakespeare is utterly magnetic, and
I couldn't figure out quite how to put him down.
My spiritual inquiry is already such such a part of
my life that you know, when you're holding two things
so regularly in your life, you naturally find ways, I think,
(21:10):
to start putting them. In conversation, Lauren has a rich
and deep meditation practice inflected by Buddhism. It shapes the
spiritual inquiry. They mentioned they found parallels between certain key
themes that preoccupy Shakespeare and certain key ideas in Buddhist thought.
The more time I have spent placing Shakespeare in the
(21:32):
Buddhist side by side, you know, listening for their resonances.
For me, the connection that has become clear is that
one of them right, namely, Shakespeare, had the ability to
represent inwardness and suffering better than any writer of his
time right, and the other discerned how to liberate us
from that suffering. And none of this, of course, is
(21:52):
to say that Shakespeare was a Buddhist. People do a
lot of trying to put Shakespeare in a lot of categories,
and that's not my interest. But Lauren is interested in
Shakespeare's very specific relationship to mindfulness. Now am I know
a lot more about Beatrice and Benedict than I do
about the Buddha. But Lauren helped me understand how central
mindfulness is to Buddhism. It's a way of training the
(22:15):
mind to be intentional, to experience things with full alertness
and comprehension. It has an ethical dimension, too, as it
asks that humans be ever mindful of how we live
and behave in the world, as we seek to alleviate suffering.
In Lauren's mindfulness practice, Shakespeare's lines functions mantras. I don't
(22:36):
necessarily take these lines into my meditation practice with me,
but the Shakespeare as a mantra, those are the lines
accompanying me out into the world. I mean, there comes
a point in time in which you've been so deeply
steeped in Shakespeare that sometimes something happens in a day,
and for whatever reason, the first thought that comes to
mind isn't even yours. It's a line Shakespeare wrote. I mean,
(23:02):
I sound silly saying it, but that happens to me
more times than I'm maybe comfortable admitting. You get admitted
here Shark Confessional. Thank you. Yes, I appreciate that the
lines have a way of seeping into your unconscious and
they manifest in all kinds of crazy ways. You know,
like some old movie where a guy's walking down the
(23:24):
street and a piece of newspaper blows onto him, and
you know, he looks at the newspaper and it's the
secret to whatever it is he's been looking for. Back
in twenty eighteen, Lauren decided to offer to the wide
world the connections they were making between Buddhism and Shakespeare.
They started an Instagram page called Shakespeare and Mindfulness. Grab
your phone, m take a look. It's how I found
(23:46):
Lauren in the first place. Wait, I'm looking at it now. Oh.
They're these beautiful photos of pieces of paper with short
passages of Shakespeare on them. In like an old typewriter font.
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn,
good and ill together, and the paper is sitting in nature,
(24:06):
somewhere on a tree branch, or a flower, or on
some sand at the beach. It's beautiful with mirth and laughter.
Let old wrinkles come. And Lauren accompanies each photo with
a few paragraphs. They explain the original context of the line,
and then they interpret it through a Buddhist lens or
from the perspective of mindfulness. More generally, we know what
(24:29):
we are, but know not what we may be. It's
so great, it's like going on a mini retreat right
in your hand. And then people chime in with associations
of their own. Every wink of an eye, some new
grace will be born, and this retreat turns into a
community event, and this kind of sweet and even vulnerable
(24:53):
discussion emerges about how Shakespeare is touching people's daily lives.
How long a time lies? In one little word? I
asked Lauren to share some of their favorite posts. The
second servant observes in Romeo and Juliet, he's as very simply,
but like so poignantly, we cannot be here and there too.
(25:14):
It's a line. If I were not reading Shakespeare thinking
about spiritual inquiry, I would pass over in a heartbeat, right,
But suddenly that line is a mantra that, in the
course of a day is just calling me back to
each exquisite present moment. When Volumnia tells Coriolanus, you are
too absolute, like what stories and beliefs? Does that line
(25:39):
help me see that I am like tenaciously holding onto?
And then this one is my favorite. When Pericles reunites
with his long lost daughter, whom he can't quite recognize yet,
he says to her, thou lookst like one I loved. Indeed,
what changes if I arrive to each new encounter in
my day with that in line? Thou looks like one
(26:00):
I loved? Indeed? Remembering right To bring it back to Buddhism,
that everyone I encounter has been my mother, my liberator,
lover in some life right like you are You're someone
I've loved before. And so that line for me really
calls up like that Buddhist notion of rebirth or of
inter being. So these are just kind of some of
(26:21):
the examples of what shows up on that feed. Oh
those are amazing. I spent a lot of time scrolling
through that feed, and it made me laugh, and it
moved me, and it made me think. It did start
to touch on something that felt spiritual to me. And
then am I found this line meantime, let wonder seem familiar?
(26:44):
And that took me somewhere else entirely, to someplace that
I know to be absolutely central to how Shakespeare sees
the world. You know, meantime, let wonder seem familiar just
delighted me. I think it's one of my favorite quotes.
You know about wonder about anything in Shakespeare. The line
is from Much Ado about Nothing, and the plot is
(27:05):
kind of similar to The Winter's Tale. A young couple
named Audio and Hero are about to be married, but
on their wedding day, Claudio dramatically accuses Hero of cheating
on him. The friar, who was supposed to marry them,
advises her to play dead to send out word that
she's died of a broken heart. This will buy some
time to clear her name. When everything is sorted out
(27:28):
and it's revealed that Hero is actually alive, Claudio is astonished,
just struck by wonder, and the friar tells him to
let wonder seem familiar. So he tells Claudio for the moment, right,
let wonder seem familiar, which which is to say, you know,
for now, I need you to accept these astonishing events
(27:52):
as ordinary matters. Right, But I love I so much,
Just love turning that line on its head a little bit,
because a familiar, right as a noun, was a close
friend or an intimate or someone you knew well. And
so you know that line is actually, with a little
bit of a twist, an invitation to become intimate with awe. Right,
(28:15):
let the familiar seem wonderful. Make astonishment an integral part
of your life, an invitation to become intimate with awe.
What a great turn of phrase. It gets at how
fundamental wonder is to Shakespeare and m Through all the
(28:35):
years I've been working on his plays, I've come to
believe that wonder is what Shakespeare is about. It's the
big idea he was driving at his entire career. Wonder
is the unified field theory of Shakespeare. Which is so
interesting because wonder is a word that's lost a lot
of its juice since Shakespeare's day. In our language, you
(28:57):
just throw it away. I wonder what that's about, or
the sandwich is wonderful, or speaking of sandwich is wonder bread.
It's a lot more bland than what Shakespeare understood the
word to be, isn't it? Yes? For Sakespeare, it's an
emotional state that's excessive, shattering. For him, Wonder is what
we feel when we're faced with something completely overwhelming. It's
(29:20):
what we feel when our minds are blown. It paralyzes us,
stops us dead in our tracks. And to Shakespeare, wonder
could be both a positive feeling and a negative one.
It can be prompted by things that are beautiful and
things that are terrible. A breathtaking sunset can be a wonder,
but an earthquake can be one. Two. Wonder has a
(29:41):
doubleness in it. The monstrous and the glorious, loss and gain,
grief and ecstasy, they all strike us into wonder. It
makes so much sense that this idea would be what
brings Shakespeare into faith traditions and religious observance, because to
ponder God, to ponder a higher power of any kind,
(30:03):
to ask the biggest metaphysical questions about our lives. Even
to marvel at the night time sky or the Grand
Canyon or if you like the tiny fingers of a
newborn baby, or the flowers blooming in the spring, to
look at any of these, to consider miracles in any way,
it's necessary to have access to wonder. I like your
(30:26):
silence if the more shows off your wonder. That's Polina
again from the Winter's Tale, isn't it. She connects wonder
to silence. And that's so right in front of something
that inspires all we feel small, a little humble, a
little quiet. Am. That's how I often feel in front
(30:47):
of Shakespeare. And I think that in some way that
is what allows him to turn up, not just in
synagogues and personal meditations, but in all the places we
found him this season, a quiet sense of awe, his
power of evoking wonder, of embracing it, of giving it,
as he says in another play, a local habitation and
(31:08):
a name. This is what touches men who've been incarcerated
for thirty years, what helps them find a kind of
emotional transcendence in these works. It's what gave Abraham Lincoln
some consolation in these plays when the Civil War was
at its bloodiest. It's what makes a five year old
autistic child able to express herself in some small way
through these four hundred year old lines. What makes teenagers
(31:32):
feel like they've discovered in Shakespeare the secret Dakota ring
to being alive. Yes, a touch of the marvelous in
all of these places and all of these people, A
touch of the marvelous, A touch of wonder made familiar
by Shakespeare. Over our eight episode expedition through Shakespeare in
(31:53):
the world, that's what I've discovered. His capacity for wonder,
his ability to describe it, to conjure it, his way
of making us experience it. These are powerful, magical even
There's something in effable about Shakespeare, something quietly spiritual. It's
(32:13):
what draws us toward him and him toward us, whoever
we are and wherever we are. That's really lovely, Berry,
And it gives me an idea. Do you think maybe
we could close our season finale by letting Shakespeare work
his magic for a moment. Nothing would make me happier.
(32:34):
Let's wrap up this season of Where There's a Will
with a scene from Shakespeare. M You and I narrated
the plot of the Winter Sale earlier. Yes, repenting for
sixteen years, Leonti's is taken by Paulina into a chapel
where there's a statue of his dead wife, a wife
he accused of adultery and whose death this accusation caused.
(32:54):
Now he sees an image of her carved in marble
and is awe struck at how lifelike she looks. Listen
as the words wonder, amazement, marvel ping through this scene.
Imagine you can hear them hanging through a prison, or
in the journal of a fifteen year old, or in
the oval office, or on an Instagram, or in your
(33:16):
own secret heart. Oh, grave and good Paulina, the great
comfort that I have had of thee what sovereign Sir?
I did not well, I meant well, but we came
to see the statue of our queen. Behold and say
tis well, I like your silence. If the more shows
(33:43):
off your wonder, Chide me, dear Stone, that I may say, indeed,
thou art hermione, or rather thou art she in thy
not chiding, for she was as tender as infancy and grace.
I am ashamed. Does not the stone rebuke me for
(34:05):
being more stone than it? O royal peace? There's magic
in thy majesty, Would you not deem it breathed. What
was he that did make it? My Lord's almost so
far transported that he'll think anon it lives still methinks
(34:26):
there is an air comes from her. What fine chisel
could ever yet cut breath? Let no man mock me,
for I will kiss her. Good my lord, forbear or
resolve you from more amazement. I'll make the statue move. Indeed,
(34:49):
arise and take you by the hand. What you can
make her do? I am content to look on, what
to speak, I am content to hear it is required.
You do awake your faith, then all stand still music,
(35:11):
awake her. Strike tis time, arise be stone, no more approach,
Strike all that look upon with marvel, Come away you perceive?
(35:38):
She stirs, Oh, start not her acts are holy? Do
not shun her, Nay, present your hand. She's warm. If
this be magic, let it be an art lawful as eating.
(36:04):
She embraces him. She hangs about his neck. Let wonder
seem familiar. Thanks for spending some time with us, and
thanks for listening to Where there's a Will. Where There's
(36:26):
a Will. Finding Shakespeare is written and hosted by me
Barry Edelstein. My co host is m Weinstein. Our show
was produced by Buffy Gorilla and Nisha Vencott, with assistant
producers Jennifer Sanchez and Salmon Ahad Khan. Our executive producers
are Katherine Girardo from Pushkin and Alex Lewis and John
Myers from Row Home Productions. Our editor is Audrey Dilling.
(36:48):
Our mix engineer is Justin Burger. Our theme is an
original composition by Hannis Browne. Samuel Buzid is our fact checker.
Vicki Merrick is our voice coach. Our show was recorded
at Bill Corquery Productions, Leopard Studio, and The Old Globe Special.
Thanks to Brittany Brown for help with this episode. Thanks
to our development department, Leetal Mulad and Justine Lang who
(37:11):
developed the pilot for this show. Thanks to Sam Dingman,
who produced the pilot and the scene from the Winter's
Tale we Just heard. Paulina was played by Opel Aladdin
and Leonti's by Ian Lasseter. Shakespeare in Mindfulness quotes read
by Camilla Leonard. Our executive team includes Jacob Weisberg, Malcolm Gladwell,
Heather Faine, John Schnars, Carrie Brodie, Carly mcgliori, Christina Sullivan,
(37:35):
Jason Gambrel, Letal Mulad, Greta Khne, and Mia Lobell. Our
marketing team includes Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Morgan Ratner, Nicole Morrano,
Mary Beth Smith, Jordan McMillan, Isabella Narvaiz and Sean Carney.
We couldn't make the show without operations and licensing support
from Nicole Optenbosch, Maya Kanig, Daniela Lakhan and Jake Flanagan.
(38:02):
Where There's a Will is a co production of Pushkin
Industries and The Old Clobe. Barry Edelstein. That's Me is
Erna Vincy Viturbi Artistic director and Timothy J. Shields is
audreyas Geisel, Managing Director of the Old Globe. For The
Globe thanks to sound director Paul Peterson and Assistant to
the Sound director Evan Eason, Director of Marketing and Communications
(38:22):
Dave Henson, Assistant to the artistic and managing directors Carolyn Budd,
The Theodore and Audrey Geiselfund provides leadership support for The
Old Globe's year round activities. To learn more about the
Tony Award winning The Old Globe one of America's leading
regional theater companies visit the Old Globe dot org. If
you love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering
(38:45):
bonus content and add free listening across our network for
four dollars and ninety nine cents a month. Find the
Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm.
To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts
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