This great stage

This program opens with a brief scene from Shakespeare's "Othello" performed in twentieth century dress and setting. Dr. Lawrence Ross, associate professor of English at the Johns Hopkins University, argues that such modern trappings distort Shakespeare's work and Elizabethan times. He explains that the Shakespeare stage was an open air platform with emphasis on the actors and their speech and symbolized the order of the universe with man in the center. The same scene is then performed on the Folger Shakespeare Library's stage in Washington, DC in period costume. Dr. Ross says that Shakespeare's dramatic poetry spoken on the symbolic stage represented the essence of life and that the meanings of Elizabethan words often differed from current ones. Shakespeare's characters are hybrid: part real, part symbol, such as Shylock exacting a pound of flesh in the dramatized scene from "The Merchant of Venice." Dr. Ross analyzes a portrait of Queen Elizabeth as an introduction to the Elizabethan order of natural authority: the king ruled over the state, God over the universe, the sun over the planets, the husband over the family, and reason over man. Actors from Johns Hopkins Play Shop perform five passages from "Macbeth" as Dr. Ross explains the violation of the social, political, and natural worlds, evident in the words and their rhythms, when Macbeth and his wife contemplate and carry out the death of King Duncan.