“He was not of an age, but for all time!”

Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson described his friend with this immortal line in the preface to the First Folio, the first complete works of Shakespeare, printed in 1623. It’s hard to think of a more influential statement about the English language’s greatest playwright. We regard Shakespeare’s timelessness as one of his most extraordinary characteristics: he seems to have understood human events centuries in advance, and his insights feel like they transcend history.

But in my decades of work on his plays, I’ve sometimes found it necessary to invert Jonson’s formula and suggest that Shakespeare was very much of his own age. Indeed, we can use Shakespeare’s plays as a way to measure just how much human society has changed since the 1590s when he first sat down to work.

In some ways, we’ve not changed at all: now as then, parents love their children. Now as then, the moon is beautiful in the night sky. Now as then, we feel a charge of new energy when the flowers bloom in spring. Shakespeare renders all of these in language that’s indelible and ineffable. And in some ways, we’ve changed massively over four centuries, and from our vantage point we can recognize in a handful of Shakespeare’s plays a set of ideas that feel outdated and even retrograde. Othello, for example, encodes a frequently benighted view of race from which we’ve progressed. The Merchant of Venice has a vein of anti-Semitic bigotry running through it that we’re relieved to have (mostly, thankfully) left behind. And tonight’s play, The Taming of the Shrew, centers on a construction of gender that, at this moment in particular, can feel very problematic in a culture striving to address and dismantle systemic misogyny.

These plays, the ones that reveal a Shakespeare very much rooted in the attitudes and beliefs of early-modern Europe, are both the most exciting and also the most challenging to revive in the contemporary theatre. They require directors with great ideas, trenchant interpretations, and deep theatrical skill sets and tool kits.

Shana Cooper is such a director. An artist I’ve long admired, and one I’ve tried for years to bring to the Globe, Shana directed a thrilling and incisive Shrew in 2018 for the wonderful Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival just north of New York City. I had the great good fortune to see that production, and I found it the best staging of this play I’d ever seen. The instant the lights blacked out on a breathtaking final moment, I asked Shana to restage the production here, in an expanded version (it had only six actors in New York, and minimal scenery). I’m so pleased she accepted my invitation.

Shana finds in this play’s DNA the imprint of the Italian folk theatre tradition of commedia dell’arte, and she runs with it. Shakespeare is very consciously riffing on this tradition in the play, embracing and extending its reliance on physical comedy, remixing its many archetypal characters, and celebrating its obsession with stereotypes and their implications. The play is deeply and fundamentally comedic in conception, and Shana’s insight is that this essential comic substructure is the key to decoding the plot’s complex gender formulations and upending its familiar “battle of the sexes” energy. Shana also finds deep love in the play, and conceives of Kate and Petruchio, the iconic couple at the center of the story, as outsiders who discover a unique bond that allows them to transcend and even escape the anxieties of the conventional and limiting society around them. Shana’s work on this production makes me understand the play in a new way, or, more precisely, this is a production whose director has shown me that a play I thought I knew is actually one I didn’t know at all. That’s what great Shakespeare directing is supposed to do.

Shana’s ace design team and fearless and endlessly inventive cast body forth her brilliant interpretation with verve and delight. Proudly among that cast is our current cohort of actors-in-training at The Old Globe and University of San Diego Shiley Graduate Theatre Program. They, and directors like Shana Cooper, are the future of Shakespeare in America, and it’s in their hands that Shakespeare will fulfill his Jonsonian destiny and be a writer “for all time.” I’m deeply grateful to them all.

Thanks for coming. Enjoy the show.