Friday, August 01, 2008

Justly neglected

Summer in America, you may know, means Shakespeare! Amateur and professional and youth productions, many outdoors and free, take place in every city. And there's a good number of Shakespeare Festivals, too. One is the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, held at the University of Colorado in Boulder (45 minutes by bus from Denver). Here's their hip teeshirt; the tattoos refer to his plays, of course.

I went to Boulder today after the R&T preconference ended, took a brief hike, peeked into some Buddhist-inspired shops, and saw "Henry the Eighth," a play only Shakespeare Festivals perform, and only for the sake of completeness. CSF's is the only production of this play in the US this year, and they haven't done it since 1971. I'd say they can wait another 37 years before doing it again - some things are justly neglected! Even Homer nods, and this Shakespeare seems shapeless and dated. Now I suppose that someone's production might someday find a way of presenting this play which makes us revise our judgments, but today's wasn't that production. Nevertheless, it was nice to get a bit closer to the Rockies, and to get a taste, however fleeting, of Boulder, one of those sacred places where (white) people go to get in touch with themselves, with nature, with whatever else exists!