Royal Shakespeare Company myShakespeare Solves Shakespeare Mysteries

Los Angeles, CA, July 12, 2012 --(PR.com)-- The Royal Shakespeare Company’s myShakespeare project features writer David Schajer’s essay which answers the question how to interpret Shakespeare for the 21st Century, and solves many Shakespeare mysteries.

The myShakespeare project has been produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of the World Shakespeare Festival. It runs from the 17th of April to November 2012 and is a microsite linked to the World Shakespeare Festival website.

The purpose of the myShakespeare project is to measure the online digital heartbeat of Shakespeare, and ask the question “How do we interpret Shakespeare for the 21st century?” People from around the world, including artists and professionals, are invited to contribute various media including essays.

Writer David Schajer’s essay on myShakespeare answers this question with another question: “What if the most radical and innovative interpretation of Shakespeare for the 21st century would be setting the plays on Shakespeare’s stages in the 16th century?”

Mr. Schajer’s new adaptations of Hamlet, Richard III and The Merchant of Venice present the plays as if they are being staged for the very first time, and performed by Shakespeare himself and his fellow actors.

Instead of staging the plays in modern dress and periods to make them more contemporary and comprehensible, these new versions go right back to the beginning and show the plays as they were performed for the very first audiences, who understood the stories, the humor and what Shakespeare was really saying.

Presented in this way, Shakespeare’s audiences, of nobles, merchants and groundlings provides a translation of the plays for us, the modern audience. Shakespeare did not seem to care about printing his plays during his own lifetime, so it is clear that Shakespeare wrote his plays for his audience, and no one else.

The addition of Shakespeare’s audience, who react to the plays as they unfold, gives our modern audiences today an understanding of what the plays mean.

This translation affords us an understanding of some of the oldest mysteries surrounding the plays. Scholars do not know when these plays were first written and performed, they do not agree who may have inspired the character of Hamlet, and there is little to no agreement on what The Merchant of Venice means, and why Shakespeare wrote it, this most problematic of his “problem plays.”

By going backward, and by seeing the plays as they would have been performed in their original historical context, we have answers to these and many more mysteries -- for the first time in 400 years.