ARTicles vol. 6 i.4: Renaissance Scholar as Playwright

Sarah Ollove: What made you want to work with Chuck Mee on a play?

Stephen Greenblatt: I met Chuck at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy, and I admired his work greatly on that occasion.  Working on a play with Chuck was perfect for me because I am interested in cultural mobility.  That is, I am interested in what happens when materials get recycled – what happens when things are moved from one place to another, from one culture to another, or from one mind to another.  Chuck happens to be a genius at that kind of recycling.

SO: What about the idea of cultural mobility fascinates you?

SG: It interests me because of its strong links to my lifelong pursuits as a Shakespearean.  Shakespeare was perfectly capable of inventing stories.  He did it, for example, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and in The Tempest.  But most of the time he preferred to rip somebody else off.  Whether he was working from an ancient source or a contemporary source, he clearly loved moving texts into his own sphere and seeing what he could do with them.  I’m a scholar of the Renaissance, a word that means rebirth.  That’s another way of saying cultural mobility.

SO: Did anything surprise you in the playwriting process?

SG: I would say there were two things I found particularly striking, if not surprising. One was the delicious sense of freedom in writing plays that you don’t have in studying them.  You’re making it up.  And you can have it come out the way you want.  If the story that you’ve received has a miserably unhappy ending, as indeed the story from Cervantes that we borrowed does, you can give it a happy ending.  So one thing was the intense pleasure of agency in the act of making.  And the other is exactly the opposite – there are certain things you can’t make happen, even if you want to make them happen.  We tried at various moments to push the play in a slightly different direction from the one it was taking, but we found it resisted.  So as a playwright you’re free but not completely free.

SO: Has the creative process changed the way that you teach Shakespeare or the kinds of assignments that you give?

SG: This project changed my teaching before the play was actually written. When Chuck and I began talking about writing something together, I decided to teach an undergraduate course here at Harvard called Shakespearean Playwriting in which I tried to focus on Shakespeare’s work as a practicing playwright – to identify, for example, theatrical devices of which he was especially fond or track carefully the ways he handles entrances and exits.  I asked the students to write Shakespearean scenes, and Chuck and I began to play the game ourselves.

SO: What’s been your favorite part of this process so far?

SG: The sheer joy of knowing and working with my collaborator, Chuck, who is a remarkably interesting and engaging and joyous human being with an extraordinary set of talents.  It’s been a revelation and a huge pleasure for me to watch and join in the writing of this play with such a person.

Sarah Ollove is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T. Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.