Reading Shakespeare - Two Gentlemen of Verona

I moved into our Drama section yesterday, and picked up a copy of Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona.

I have to admit that I have not read a play since highschool english class, so more than 25 years have passed. I am much more used to seeing plays in the theater. And since Boise has an excellent Shakespeare festival I have been treated to productions from Shakespear's plays every summer since Laura and I moved to Boise in 1990.

It was different reading Shakespeare rather than seeing the plays. I found that while I was reading I could hear the voies of the actors from the Shakespeare festival. Oddly, this helped. There is so much that I feel is lost going from the stage to the page that being able to close my eyes and see the players, to hear their voiecs speak the lines, to treat the reading of this play more as a performance than a dry read made it a fun read.

After I finished reading the play I took a look at "With Our Good Will", Doug Copsey's history of the Idaho Shakespeare festival. And it is interesting that the voiecs that I heard when reading, and the scenes that I drew in my mind while reading, did not match up to the actors or costuming from the last performance of this play, which I know that I attended. I can't explain this, it just is.

---Bruce