Twelfth Night

From An Hour's Recreation in Music, 1606. there is a garden in her face where roses and white lilies blow a heavenly paradise is that place wherein all pleasant fruits do grow there cherries grow that none may buy till cherry ripe themselves do cry those cherries fairly do enclose of orient pearl a double row which when her lovely laughter shows they look like rosebuds filled with snow yet them no peer nor prince may buy till cherry ripe themselves do cry her eyes like angels watch them still her brows like bended boughs do stand Threatening with piercing frowns to kill All that approach with eye or hand These sacred cherries do come nigh Till cherry ripe themselves do cry.

From Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 5, by William Shakespeare.

From The World's Best Poetry, Volume 2, Love, Part 1, read for libvox.org, by Lien.

Olivia Voila! Tis beauty truly bland, with red and white, nature's own sweet and cunning hand laid on.

End of poem.

This recording is in the public domain.

O Mistress Mine, from Twelfth Night, Act Two, Scene Three, by William Shakespeare.

From The World's Best Poetry, Volume Two, Love, Part One.

You'd hardly know it was Penrod!' The pride and admiration with which she pronounced this undeniable truth might have been thought tactless, but Penrod, not analytical, found his spirit somewhat elevated.' No mirror was in his range of vision, and though he had submitted to cursory measurements of his person a week earlier, he had no previous acquaintance with his costume.

He began to form a not unpleasing mental picture of his appearance, something somewhere between the portraits of George Washington and a vivid memory of Miss Julia Marlowe at a matinee of Twelfth Night.

he was additionally cheered by a sword which had been borrowed from a neighbor who was a knight of pythias finally there was a mantle an old golf cape of margaret's fluffy polka-dots of white cotton had been sewed to it generously also it was ornamented with a large cross of red flannel suggested by a picture of a crusader in a newspaper advertisement the mantle was fastened to penrod's shoulder that is to the shoulder of mrs schofield's ex bodice by means of large safety-pins and arranged to hang down behind him touching his heels but obscuring nowise the glory of his faade then at last he was allowed to step before a mirror It was a full-length glass, and the worst immediately happened.

It might have been a little less violent, perhaps, if Penrod's expectations had not been so richly and poetically idealized.

Yeah, thank you for having us.

I'm thrilled that you're here, and I'm even more thrilled to learn about this production of Romeo and Juliet that you two are putting on.

So let's start in the very beginning, which a wise woman once said is a very good place to start, and have you tell us a little bit about For anyone out there who doesn't know, what is Romeo and Juliet about? Laura, let's kick that question

to you.

I think just.

beautiful parts of theater, you know, people falling in love, sword fights, people hating each other, loving each other, all of the incredible things that we love to see a real microcosm of our world around us.

And we're excited to do a really interesting spin on this production where we will be kind of playing with how this love impacts the world around them.

So I'll maybe let Daniel talk a little bit more about the concept that we have for this.

The Great Bed of Ware, built around fifteen ninety and now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, measures roughly three point three meters, or nearly eleven feet, wide and was reputed to be able to hold multiple couples at once.

Shakespeare mentioned it in Twelfth Night, and it became something of a celebrity in its own time, with visitors carving their initials into its oak posts.

While the Great Bed of Ware was exceptional in its dimensions, large shared beds were not unusual in the houses of the wealthy, and even modest households rested communally out of necessity, economy, and custom.

Before central heating, bedrooms in northern European homes could drop to near-freezing temperatures on winter nights.

You know, we want to make more racially sensitive colorblind casting, color-conscious casting, productions, and yet we struggle to... make the audience resemble the actors on stage in terms of race and ethnicity and disability.

Shakespeare wrote plays called As You Like It or Twelfth Night or What You Will.

He's clearly conscious that you have to keep the crowds coming, but he's also clearly in those plays, especially gender-bending plays, sensitive to the need to challenge audiences instead of pandering to them.

And I'm just curious, over the course of your career here, how you've wrestled with that, to what degree you feel you've been successful or less successful.

For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org.

If music be the food of love, from Twelfth Night, Act I, Scene I, by William Shakespeare.

Recorded for LibriVox.org, by David

Fetterman.

It is not so sweet now as it was before.

O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou, that notwithstanding thy capacity, receiveth as the sea, naught enters there.

Of what validity, and pitch sower, but falls into abatement and low price, even in a minute, so full of shapes as fancy, that it alone is high fantastical, End of If Music Be the Food of Love From Twelfth Night Act I, Scene I This recording is in the public domain.

For more information or to volunteer, please visit libervox.org. All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.

I was 17.

I'm actually just so amazed that you had this exposure at a high school level because For me, at a high school level, I was only exposed to, like, Shakespeare, Romeo's and Juliet's Twelfth Night, you know.

And then maybe at a matric level, then we got to read Try the Beloved Country by Alan Payton.

And that's when we started to realize, oh, There's deeper stuff, but it was very contextual.