“One drawback, and not the least, of practicing any art is that it becomes very difficult to enjoy the works of one’s fellow artists, living or dead, simply for their own sakes.

“When a poet, for instance, reads a poem written by another, he is apt to be less concerned with what the latter actually accomplished by his poem than with the suggestions it throws out upon how he, the reader, may solve the poetic problems which confront him now. His judgments of poetry, therefore, are rarely purely aesthetic; he will often prefer an inferior poem from which he can learn something at the moment to a better poem from which he can learn nothing.”

W.H. Auden, “Yeats as an Example” (Kenyon Review, Spring 1948)

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I discuss the controversial departure of Emma Rice, the outgoing artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe. Here’s an excerpt.

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Shakespeare’s Globe is a reconstruction of an open-air playhouse at which Shakespeare performed, built on the site of the original theater, which was demolished around 1644. Ever since it opened in 1997, the Globe has presented low-tech daytime productions that endeavor to reproduce the conditions under which plays were performed in Shakespeare’s day: no lighting, no amplification. Some of the productions were mounted in the manner of Elizabethan theater, while others were contemporary in style, but all stuck faithfully to the same “shared-light” principle that is also used at the American Shakespeare Center’s Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Va., another noted Elizabethan-replica theater. In such theaters, the audience does not sit in darkness but is fully illuminated by the same light as the onstage actors.

Ms. Rice, who became the company’s first female artistic director earlier this year, is an avant-gardist who goes in for gender-bending casting and has confessed to not knowing all that much about Shakespeare and not liking much of what she knows. She therefore took it upon herself to install a temporary lighting and sound rig, which she used to enhance productions of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Cymbeline,” the latter directed by Matthew Dunster, whose texts were rewritten to suit her political preoccupations. (Mr. Dunster’s “Cymbeline,” for instance, was retitled “Imogen” and set in gangland Britain.) Both shows received mixed reviews but sold well, and it seems to have been generally thought that her first season was a success.

Then the blade dropped: The Globe announced in a news release that Ms. Rice would be departing, even though her work had “brought our theatre new and diverse audiences, won huge creative and critical acclaim, and achieved exceptionally strong box office results.” Why? The board decided to return to “‘shared light’ productions without designed sound and light rigging…this should continue to be the central tenet of our work.” A general meltdown followed, with Ms. Rice’s supporters in the press furiously declaring that the Globe had opted for anti-feminist stick-in-the-mud conservatism over radical innovation….

It seems plausible that the news release was nothing more than the truth: Ms. Rice sought to change the Globe’s production style in ways that were profoundly antithetical to its institutional mission. But her approach was already a well-known quantity when she was hired….

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Read the whole thing here.

A trailer for the Shakespeare’s Globe production of Imogen:

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• An American in Paris (musical, G, too complex for small children, closes Jan. 1, reviewed here)
• The Color Purple (musical, PG-13, some performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• The Encounter (one-man immersive drama, PG-13, many performances sold out last week, closes Jan. 8, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, closes Jan. 1, reviewed here)
• On Your Feet! (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Love, Love, Love (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Dec. 18, reviewed here)
• Plenty (drama, PG-13, closes Dec. 1, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• The Roads to Home (drama, G/PG-13, not suitable for children, closes Nov. 27, reviewed here)

“Does a man feel prouder of what he achieves himself or of the effect he has on the achievements of posterity? Which epitaph upon a poet’s grave would please him more: ‘I wrote some of the most beautiful poetry of my time’ or ‘I rescued English lyric from the dead hand of Campion and Tom Moore’? I suspect that more poets would prefer the second than their readers would ever guess, particularly when, like Yeats, they are comfortably aware that the first is also true.”

W.H. Auden, “Yeats as an Example” (Kenyon Review, Spring 1948)

Marvin Gaye sings “Got to Give It Up” on Soui Train in 1977:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Yeats, like us, was faced with the modern problem, i.e., of living in a society in which men are no longer supported by tradition without being aware of it, and in which, therefore, every individual who wishes to bring order and coherence into the stream of sensations, emotions, and ideas entering his consciousness, from without and within, is forced to do deliberately for himself what in previous ages had been done for him by family, custom, church, and state, namely the choice of the principles and presuppositions in terms of which he can make sense of his experience.”

W.H. Auden, “Yeats as an Example” (Kenyon Review, Spring 1948)

From 2006:

I “owned” dozens of books, some of them confiscated from my parents’ shelves and others bought with my allowance. A few can still be found on the shelves of my old bedroom, including a complete set of Reader’s Digest Best Loved Books for Young Readers, a long-forgotten series of volumes to which my parents wisely subscribed on my behalf. It was the Best Loved Books series that introduced me to Beat to Quarters, Call of the Wild, Jane Eyre, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and the Sherlock Holmes stories, among many other good things. They were, to be sure, abridged versions, but what did I know?…

Read the whole thing here.

“When two people today engage in an argument, each tends to spend half of his time and energy not in producing evidence to support his point of view but in looking for the hidden motives which are causing his opponent to hold his. If they lose their tempers, instead of saying, ‘You are a fool,’ they say, ‘You are a wicked man.’”

W.H. Auden, “Yeats as an Example” (Kenyon Review, Spring 1948)