"Shakespeare's First Folio: 1623-2023" is a public humanities project running through May 2024.
There will be much ado about Shakespeare this year at Portland State and around the city — and for good reason. This year marks the 400th anniversary of the 1623 publication of the playwright’s First Folio, a single but extraordinary book that changed history.
Portland State is partnering with local and regional arts organizations on a public humanities project titled “Shakespeare’s First Folio: 1623–2023” to commemorate the Bard’s enduring legacy. Programming includes an exhibition, a speaker series, a film festival and performances of Shakespearean drama, opera and music.
Portland Opera kicked off the project in September with an exciting mash-up of Charles Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette” and Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” and at least 30 other events are planned through May 2024.
“One reason why Shakespeare remains perpetually relevant is that his plays speak with power and eloquence to the controversies and debates that vex us the most,” says Prof. Jonathan Walker, the project’s principal organizer and professor of English at PSU. “They provoke audiences to wrestle with difficult questions, without providing definitive answers.”
The First Folio contains 36 of Shakespeare’s plays that were collected and printed by a group of his friends seven years after his death in 1616. Without the Folio, 18 plays which had not previously appeared in print would otherwise have been lost — among them, “Macbeth,” “Julius Caesar” and “Twelfth Night.” Folio plays are fixtures in high school and college classrooms, on the stage and screen worldwide.
Walker says Shakespeare’s plays resonate with our own contemporary public debates. For instance: Who gets a say in how government works? What kinds of gender roles do his characters perform? How did race and ethnicity shape identity? What can the challenges of bubonic plague in Shakespeare’s day teach us about public health crises such as COVID-19? Walker hopes the project’s diverse programming will be as entertaining and accessible as it is thought-provoking and topical.
The seed for the project was planted over 20 years ago when Walker was a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His advisor, Prof. Clark Hulse, curated an exhibition at Chicago’s Newberry Library, which commemorated Queen Elizabeth I’s reign on the 400th anniversary of her death — and he says being part of that project was a formative experience for him. When the timing didn’t pan out for a Folio project in 2016 — the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death — Walker set his sights on 2023. In a full-circle moment, Hulse will be giving a talk as part of the speaker series in March 2024.
After nearly four years of planning, Walker is excited for the project to get underway. Participating organizations include: Portland Opera, Oregon Symphony, Hollywood Theatre, Multnomah County Library, Oregon Renaissance Band, Play On Shakespeare and Los Angeles-based theatre dybbuk. The latter two were brought in by Prof. Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, a visiting scholar in English and theater at PSU, who’s also serving as the project’s performance scholar.
Highlights for “Shakespeare’s First Folio: 1623-2023” include:
- 11 free talks — some in-person and some online — on topics spanning visual arts, public health, race relations, sexuality, music and foodie culture;
- theatre dybbuk’s performance of “The Merchant of Venice (Annotated), or In Sooth I Know Not Why I Am So Sad,” which explores issues of marginalization, assimilation and power;
- Several programs of operatic selections inspired by Shakespeare’s plays;
- A film screening and discussion of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Prison,” a documentary that follows the production of the play at Two Rivers Correctional Institution in Umatilla, Oregon;
- A recital of Shakespeare’s Sonnets curated by PSU jazz professor Darrell Grant, featuring PSU faculty and student composers and performers; and
- PSU’s Theater program’s production of “Measure for Measure,” a collaboration with Play On Shakespeare.
For a full calendar of events, visit bit.ly/shakespeare-folio-portland. To sign up for updates, subscribe to the mailing list.