Shakespeare

A Walk through the Renaissance

Anonymous — Fri, 11 Mar 2022 07:00:00 +0000

A Walk through the Renaissance Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 03/11/2022 - 00:00

Plants were important to Shakespeare. From love potions in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Ophelia’s symbolic bouquet of rosemary, pansies, fennel, rue and daisies in Hamlet, plants appear in the storylines of many of the Bard’s greatest works.

At ��񱦵�, the Colorado Shakespeare Gardens serve as a tranquil, historic lesson on plants prevalent in Shakespeare’s time. Founded by Marlene Cowdery in 1991 and now a donation-based program within the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, the gardens are maintained by nearly 20 members — including master gardeners, teachers and CU alumni. On Saturdays from spring to fall, members can be seen gardening in the courtyard between the Hellems Arts and Sciences Building and the Lucile Berkeley Buchanan Building.

Approximate number of plant species in the gardens

Types of trees in the gardens

Members of the gardens, with 5-6 regular maintenance volunteers

$2,000

Annual cost to maintain the gardens

450 hours

Volunteered approximately each year to maintain the gardens

Unusual plants

Samphire (King Lear) and pomegranate (All’s Well That Ends Well, Romeo and Juliet and Henry IV, Part 1)

June and September

Best months to visit the gardens

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Shakespeare play that mentions the most plants and flowers

The Plant-Lore & Garden-Craft of Shakespeare (1884)

Primary source of information for gardeners about featured plants

New members and volunteers are welcome. Anyone interested can email carolmellinger@gmail.com.

Take a virtual tour of the gardens.

Submit feedback to the editor

Photos courtesy Colorado Shakespeare Gardens

The Colorado Shakespeare Gardens located at ��񱦵� contain plants prevalent in Shakespeare’s time.

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Feedback Fall 2020

Anonymous — Wed, 11 Nov 2020 06:00:00 +0000

Feedback Fall 2020 Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 11/10/2020 - 23:00

Shakespeare at CU

Your summer issue arrived at a most welcome time for those of us older Buffs who have been mostly staying at home. I loved the nostalgic photos and was especially moved by Sarah Kuta’s article on the Shakespeare festival.

Shortly after my family moved to Boulder in 1957, we started attending those outdoor productions, and the accompanying 16mm film presentations in the Forum auditorium. Although my brothers and I didn’t at first appreciate all the dialogue, we liked the sword fights.

I would also like to say hi to Sam Sandoe (BioChem, Thtr’80). Your father Jim was a remarkable man, who besides his work on the festival was responsible for making the acquisitions at Norlin Library. His class in comedy, which I took my senior year, is one of the two or three educational experiences I had at CU that I think back on the most often.

Lawrence Chadbourne (Class’70)
Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Please pass along to Sam Sandoe (BioChem, Thtr’80) how much I treasured, and still treasure, my freshman year, five-day-a-week classes with his amazing father. Dressed in jeans and a jeans work shirt, he introduced us to a world outside the Hellems classroom. The buttoned-down world of high school was nothing like this. I can still remember some of the questions on his final exam, and the license his assignments gave us to see connections. He inspired us to travel through books — we read a lot of history — and planes. We saw many of the paintings we studied during our 11-week, “Europe-on-$5” adventure — the first of about 20 times to cross the Pond.

After my 32 years teaching English, my wife and I co-produced a PBS show on the Marshall Plan, and that took us to work for the State Department on the renovation of the Talleyrand in Paris. I’ve had many bracing experiences; James Sandoe’s classes were first.

Eric Christenson (Edu, Engl’60)
Southern Pines, North Carolina

Phi Kappa Tau, 1950s

In the summer issue of the Coloradan, I noticed a letter, “Spring of 1946,” written by Ruth Duffy Hirsch (A&S’49). I am a Phi Kappa Tau member, having gone active in March 1953. I lived in the fraternity house for over three years. The house mother in the article was my house mother as well, and this letter serves to make a slight correction. The house mother’s name is Mrs. Rose “Owens,” not Mrs. Rose, and she preferred to be called “Mother Owens.”

She was a wonderful woman with whom I was very close, and who, during her term as house mother, ran a very tight ship and was highly respected. She grew up in Leadville in the late 1800s during some violent times, saw many bloody occurrences and had no appreciation for firearms.

Thanks to Ms. Hirsch for the article.

James Berger (Mgmt’56)
Colorado Springs

Picture Perfect

I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed the cover art on the Summer 2020 issue. Two seconds after retrieving the issue from my mailbox, I was immediately transported back to my dorm room in Cockerell Hall. Cockerell Hall is located directly across the quad from Aden Hall, so the art depicted is exactly the view I feasted on for nearly two years from my dorm room.

Even today, 41 years after my graduation, this is the view in my mind’s eye when I think of the years I spent in Boulder. Great memories!

Chris Glasow (IntlAf’79)
Broadlands, Virginia

Oh how I appreciated the “Thinking of You” postcards in the Summer Coloradan. The postcard picturing the bridge over Varsity Lake is special to me. What decades of student experience the bridge could tell us.

The bridge was the route to Norlin Library study hours, dances in the Glenn Miller Ballroom, Saturday football at Folsom Field. It was the place of Greek pledge sneaks. The meetings of Hysperia, the Junior Women’s Honor Society. The clandestine passing of class notes and exam questions. The snow and slush walks to January final exams. And many a late-night romantic kiss.

Students crossed the bridge to the world of ideas, challenges of thinking and learning, the opening of young minds. From the chrysalis of learning, students crossed the bridge into adult life. Decades of grads took with them fond memories of the bridge and gratitude for a CU education.

Judith Hannemann (A&S’57)
Cape Elizabeth, Maine

My husband and I are both alumni and we always enjoy reading the Coloradan. We especially enjoyed this issue’s “Thinking of You,” when we noticed the picture of the Old Main postcard. Just a couple of years ago, we discovered this same postcard in some belongings of Ruth Platt, my husband’s paternal grandmother who resided in Wyoming and Boulder in the early 1900s. Ruth’s son Lester (A&S’53); her grandson, my husband Lester (EnvDes’83); and great-grandson Trevor (AeroEng’20) are all graduates of CU.

This year when our daughter Cori (Mktg’23) began her college career, we gave her this postcard as a reminder of her family’s connection to Boulder and CU and she displayed it on her desk in her dorm room.

Kim Willson (CivEngr’96)
Lakewood, Colorado

University Pride

Thank you for continuing to send the Coloradan. I read every one and have saved them as well. The photos and the articles are outstanding and make me proud to be an alum. I graduated in 1965, so I remember Paul Danish (Hist’65) well and always look for his column. Please keep the same format.

Sally Adams O’Connor (Edu’65)
East Hartland, Connecticut

The Connection

I was the game room manager and assistant director [of The Connection] from 1974 to 1980. I succeeded long-time manager Larry Burkett. I was hired by Jim Schafer, the student union director, immediately upon my graduation in 1974.

The Connection, then and now

Before I became assistant director, we modernized it along with having a naming contest. Therein is how The Connection got its name. “The Connection,” said it all — a place to connect with friends and family.

We had a lot of fun remodeling and modernizing the area. We brought in graphics, colors and lights, which brightened up the area with life. We were able to get permission to add 3.2 beer. Needless to say — that was a big hit — it drew in beer drinkers and added to the atmosphere of fun.

We also brought in nationally known pool trick shot artists as another way to promote the game room. It was a fun job, and a vital part of the student experience. We hosted the ACLU games on numerous occasions.

It appears from the Coloradan that The Connection has been taken to yet another level, all for the enjoyment of students and patrons.

Mike Nunnery (PolSci’74)
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

I was a member of the UMC Board during my time at CU. After dinner at the Alferd Packer Grill and our meetings on Tuesday evenings, the whole board would go bowing at The Connection. Both staff and student members participated. The prize for each member of the winning team was a 50-cent can of pop bought by the losing team members from a machine located on a landing of the main stairway. I live in Boulder and still bowl at The Connection sometimes!

Kate Carroll Schmid (Anth, Ger’92)
Boulder

Readers comment on the Shakespeare Festival, The Connetion bowling alley and nostalgic memories from their time at CU.

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Powerful Prose

Anonymous — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 14:05:00 +0000

Powerful Prose Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/01/2020 - 08:05

Sarah Kuta

Shakespeare’s enduring legacy is on display at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival.

The Bard’s turns of phrase, witty puns and beautiful verbiage still have a place in today’s emoji and TikTok-ruled society.

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival makes sure of it.

For more than 60 years, the festival has kept William Shakespeare’s language alive, sharing his famous (and not-so-famous) words with new generations of theater-goers on the ��񱦵� campus.

After a 2020 COVID-19 hiatus, the tradition plans to continue in 2021 with a spiced-up performance schedule and dynamic cast, which includes Sam Sandoe (BioChem, Thtr’80), who’s been performing with the festival for 50 years.

“Shakespeare’s language is some of the greatest ever written, and the importance of the ideas and the conflict and the human nature of it all translates century after century,” said Sandoe. “So this 400-year-old playwright is still valid and important to us now.”

For Sandoe, Shakespeare is a family affair. Though the festival was officially founded in 1958, its origins date back to 1944, when CU librarian and English instructor James Sandoe — Sam Sandoe’s father — directed Romeo and Juliet at the newly constructed, 1,000-seat Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre.

James Sandoe, who directed many performances at CU and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, passed along his love of the Bard and the university to his four children. He died in 1980, but Sam Sandoe says he still thinks of his father often during rehearsals.

After tagging along to performances with his family as a child, Sandoe began acting in the festival as a teenager in 1970 and fell in love with Shakespeare. Even while working full time for ��񱦵�’s University Communications team from 1996 to 2017, he rearranged his schedule to make time for rehearsal, often leaving his house at 5 a.m. and not returning again until midnight.

He’s acted in so many plays that he’s on track to complete the entire canon — meaning he’s performed in all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays, some more than once.

“For somebody who is not in theater full-time to manage to notch all of Shakespeare’s plays is an act of endurance — and it took me half a century,” Sandoe said. “I’m proud of that.”

Even after all these years, Sandoe, 65, still revels in the collaborative process of getting a show ready for opening night.

“You’re working with a bunch of creative people, trying to translate words on a page into something dynamic, and that’s a great deal of fun and a great challenge, but it’s very rewarding,” said Sandoe, who lives in Boulder.

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival is a professional theater company housed within the ��񱦵� College of Arts and Sciences. The festival — the second oldest Shakespeare Festival in the country — regularly collaborates with students, faculty and staff from CU’s English and theater and dance departments, and it offers a graduate certificate in applied Shakespeare.

“There’s a long, long history of Shakespeare scholarship here on this campus, and there is a great deal of passion and love for Shakespeare among our scholars,” said Tim Orr, Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s producing artistic director.

Professional actors temporarily relocate to Boulder from May to August when they land a part and work alongside local actors like Sandoe. Professional directors collaborate with festival staffers to determine an artistic vision for each production. Up to 23 cast members can be involved in one performance.

Celebrities like Val Kilmer and Annette Bening have performed in the festival, which still hosts many performances in the Mary Rippon amphitheater.

The lineup for the festival — which runs from June to mid-August and sees roughly 30,000 audience members a season — is determined two to three years in advance, to avoid repeating titles too often. Orr said he considers each season as a whole, taking care to offer a diverse array of shows so someone could reasonably attend all of them. That also means incorporating some non-Shakespeare plays into the lineup, such as Homer’s The Odyssey or Cyrano de Bergerac, and adding a modern twist to classic plays. “When it comes to the text, I don’t want to reinvent the wheel,” said Orr.

“When it comes to telling the story, I want to see something new. Every line of Shakespeare could be interpreted two or three different ways, so that gives you a nearly infinite number of interpretations of what he meant.”

If the festival resumes in 2021, for instance, actors will wear 1950s costumes and tromp around France for All’s Well That Ends Well, and there will be a 1980s glam punk rock vibe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“I’ve never produced or even seen a season of theater that was in pre-production for two years,” said Orr. “More time to dream. More time to imagine. It should be amazing.”

Even after 400 years, the themes and emotions depicted in Shakespeare’s work remain relevant — and they keep audiences coming back, year after year.

“Shakespeare didn’t feel anything that you or I don’t feel,” said Orr. “Like any great artist, he’s just a master at expressing it and conveying the experience so that you and I know that we’re not alone and that we’re not the first people to have experienced this.” And being in Boulder doesn’t hurt, either.

“You’re going to hear amazing language that has never gone out of production, and you’re going to see it in one of the most beautiful venues in America, under the stars, under the mountains,” said Orr. “It is not only seeing a Shakespeare play, it is the full experience of seeing it here.”

Photos by Zachary Andrews and Jennifer Koskinen

Shakespeare’s enduring legacy is on display at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival.

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The Book of Shakespeare

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Jun 2016 19:45:41 +0000

The Book of Shakespeare Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 06/01/2016 - 13:45

Eric Gershon

On April 23 literature lovers around the planet celebrated the 452^nd birthday of William Shakespeare. The date also happened to mark the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s 1616 death, an epic milestone that has prompted a riot of celebration that will continue all year.

A conference in Denmark unfolded in the real-life castle where Shakespeare set Hamlet. In Singapore, actors performed the play in Vietnamese. In London the playwright’s last will and testament is on public display, allowing visitors to eyeball the bequest to his wife of his “second-best bed.” Countless public readings, performances and exhibitions are yet to come.

In Colorado August will be an especially heady time for Bard enthusiasts: Early in the month, a 393-year-old copy of the first printed collection of Shakespeare's plays is expected to arrive at CU-Boulder for a three-week public exhibition.

On loan from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, the book, known as the First Folio, will be on view at the CU Art Museum Aug. 9-31, part of a 50-state tour called "First Folio: The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare.” A copy will also travel to Puerto Rico.

CU is the only Colorado stop on the circuit, which began in Oklahoma in January and ends in Tennessee in early 2017. Admission will be free with tickets available at the door.

“The important thing about old books is they’re not really museum objects alone; they’re a way of touching the past,” said Katherine Eggert, the CU-Boulder English professor who directs the university’s Center for British and Irish Studies. “So we have this marvelous book from 1623 and it was made by Shakespeare’s associates…It’s like shaking the hand of the guy who shook Shakespeare’s hand.”

Prepared in 1623 by two actors who worked with Shakespeare, the First Folio includes nearly all of his plays, 18 of which had never before been published in any form, including “Macbeth,” “Julius Caesar” and “The Tempest.” Without the First Folio, these plays might have been lost, giving the book an almost mystical status among Shakespeare aficionados.

“The survival of great literature,” Eggert said, “is a chancy and wondrous business.”

Worldwide there are 234 known copies of the First Folio; the most recent addition — a specimen in the library of a Scottish estate — was authenticated in April. The Folger owns 82 of them, by far the world’s largest collection. Individual copies have sold at auction for more than $5 million.

No institution or private collector in the Rocky Mountain region owns a First Folio, according to experts, making the campus exhibition a unique opportunity to behold one without traveling far. While the book is at CU, it will be the only First Folio touring the continental United States. (A copy will also be in Alaska then.)

A folio is a book with pages folded once, yielding two double-sided leaves, or four pages. Made up of many smaller folios, First Folio copies weigh about five pounds on average.

The idea that CU might host a Folger First Folio began circulating in 2012. The university submitted a formal bid in 2014 and learned in February it had been picked. Since then, a campus cast of dozens has been organizing the exhibition and a series of related activities.

Fiske Planetarium will host “Shakespeare and the Stars,” for example, in which actors and astronomers will explore Shakespeare’s celestial references with the planetarium dome as a backdrop. On Norlin Quadrangle, The Book Arts League will demonstrate the use of Elizabethan printing presses. In September CU hosts a day-long academic conference for September about Shakespeare and science. The annual Colorado Shakespeare Festival will have just lowered the curtain on its final performance at Mary Rippon Outdoor Theater.

Several CU-owned treasures will be on display with the First Folio, including a Fourth Folio of 1685, Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland from 1577 and John Gerarde’s The Herbal, or General Historie of Plantes from 1636, plus a Mercator Atlas from 1630 and an atlas of human anatomy on loan from CU-Anshutz.

The Folger’s folio will be hand-delivered by Folger personnel and displayed in a special glass case equipped to monitor interior temperature and relative humidity.

As at all other stops on the tour, the book will be open to Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy.”

Eggert happens to prefer Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech. But the choice of “To be or not to be” is hard to argue against, she said: “It’s hands down the most famous speech from Shakespeare.”

Illustration by Anita Kunz; photo courtesy Folger Shakespeare Library

Without the First Folio of 1623, the world might lack half of Shakespeare’s plays. A rare original copy comes to CU-Boulder in August, the only Colorado stop on a national tour.

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Q&A with the Chancellor: Philip P. DiStefano – Summer 2016

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Jun 2016 06:00:00 +0000

Q&A with the Chancellor: Philip P. DiStefano – Summer 2016 Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 06/01/2016 - 00:00

Art Is All Around Us

Astronauts, the Mars explorer and our top-ranked physics department instantly pop to mind when people think of CU-Boulder. Do the arts get lost?

No, CU-Boulder is a dynamic, multi-dimensional place, a major public comprehensive research university in which the arts play a powerful role. The Folger Shakespeare Library chose us as the only Colorado stop for its traveling exhibit, “First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare.” I consider this an international recognition of the significance of the arts on our campus.

The campus is complementing First Folio! with a summer-long program of 40 exhibitions and events called Shakespeare at CU, but you can’t pin a reputation for the arts on one major exhibit.

CU-Boulder is a cultural hub: home to three museums, six galleries and the Grammy-winning classical Takács Quartet. It’s a repository for cultural artifacts and a venue for innumerable performances and lectures. More than 380,000 citizens come to campus annually for arts and culture, and of course our students also greatly benefit.

What are some other cultural “big hits” on campus besides First Folio?

Here are just a few examples. The CU Museum of Natural History has a remarkable display of ancient tools used to butcher ice-age mammals 13,000 years ago in present-day Boulder. It will be there at least through the summer.

The Conference on World Affairs in April attracted 20,000 unique attendees and featured a student-sponsored keynote by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. The Colorado Shakespeare Festival is celebrating its 59th summer season on campus. It attracts 30,000 visitors, and its education programs reach tens of thousands of children.

The Artist Series has been bringing in world-class music and dance performers to campus for 80 years, including cellist Yo-Yo Ma next February. We also offer numerous free performances every year by our highly accomplished faculty and students.

How are students incorporated into this cultural hub?

This space doesn’t allow for an exhaustive list, but let me mention that students act alongside the professional theater company in the Shakespeare Festival and student art will be displayed throughout the University Memorial Center this summer. A trio of College of Music programs — Thompson Jazz Studies, Ritter Classical Guitar and Eklund Opera — introduce audiences to the musical leaders of tomorrow and bring worldclass artists to campus for concerts, classes and collaborations.

On a broader scale, why are the arts important?

We talk a lot about innovation. But innovation is not just technology. The arts promote innovation by allowing us to think creatively and get outside our own experience. Performing and visual arts are powerful teachers of different cultures, perspectives, historical interpretations and philosophical discourse. You can’t have a great public university without the arts.

Illustration by Melinda Josie

A look into the arts on campus.

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Shakespeare

A Walk through the Renaissance

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Shakespeare at CU

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Q&A with the Chancellor: Philip P. DiStefano – Summer 2016

Art Is All Around Us

Astronauts, the Mars explorer and our top-ranked physics department instantly pop to mind when people think of CU-Boulder. Do the arts get lost?

The campus is complementing First Folio! with a summer-long program of 40 exhibitions and events called Shakespeare at CU, but you can’t pin a reputation for the arts on one major exhibit.

What are some other cultural “big hits” on campus besides First Folio?

How are students incorporated into this cultural hub?

On a broader scale, why are the arts important?

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