A little of that worthy work, performed.
—Menenius Agrippa in Coriolanus, Act 2, Scene 2
A broad program of live performances by local and regional arts organizations. Performances include Shakespearean drama and opera as well as Renaissance songs, orchestral music, and contemporary compositions inspired by the Sonnets. A film festival will also highlight visionary adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays for the silver screen.
Play On Shakespeare and
Theater Arts at PSU
Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure is often classified as a “problem comedy” because it sets a conventional love plot in the midst of the corrupting influence of power and the uneven application of justice. The play features characters who are truly criminal; others who are neither virtuous nor vicious, but caught up in the merciless wheels of justice; and still others who gild their sin with impeccable reputations and religiosity.
Come witness Aditi Brennan Kapil’s translation of Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure, a collaborative production of Play On Shakespeare and Theater Arts at Portland State University.
Oregon Renaissance Band
Music in the English Renaissance encompassed both sacred and secular styles and it extended from the royal court to the common alehouse. Dozens of composers and thousands of professional and amateur musicians contributed to the rich and pervasive culture of Renaissance music. Many of Shakespeare’s plays utilize music to create atmosphere onstage, to punctuate transitions between scenes, and to add gravity or levity to the dramatic action.
Come hear Oregon Renaissance Band perform a selection of Shakespearean songs, played on historical instruments, including viola da braccio, violas da gamba, recorders, and various period double-reed instruments.
Portland Opera
Barely 10 years into Shakespeare’s career, Jacopo Peri composed Dafne (1598), the very first opera, and less than a century later Henry Purcell staged The Fairy-Queen (1692), the first opera based on a Shakespearean play. Since then, composers and librettists have created over 300 operas based on Shakespeare’s work. Brett Dean’s Hamlet in 2017 and John Adams’s Antony and Cleopatra in 2022 demonstrate that Shakespearean opera continues to flourish in the 21st century.
Come see and hear Portland Opera’s Enchanted Woods: Shakespeare & Song, a selection of 20th-century operatic songs and arias inspired by his plays. Portland Opera will also perform three additional Shakespearean programs in August and September 2023 and in April 2024.
Hollywood Theatre
Shakespeare’s 38 plays have given rise to over 400 feature-length film and television adaptations. From classic productions like Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948) and Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968) to radical departures such as Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) and Gil Junger’s Ten Things I Hate About You (1999), the modern screen has become a mirror for us to see ourselves cast into Shakespearean stories.
Come to Hollywood Theatre and watch six films that reimagine Shakespearean plays for the big screen and explore the questions that animate our own contemporary culture.
theatre dybbuk
Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice features traditional comic fare: young love, disguise, romantic rivalry, and the outwitting of an older generation. Yet it also depicts flagrant racism, egregious injustice carried out by a court of law, and the financial ruin and forced religious conversion of the Jewish merchant Shylock. It is a love story built on a foundation of hatred, tribalism, and greed.
Come experience theatre dybbuk’s The Merchant of Venice (Annotated), or In Sooth I Know Not Why I Am So Sad at Portland State University. Theatre dybbuk will also perform a companion piece, The Villainy You Teach, at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. (Photo by Taso Papadakis)
Oregon Symphony
Over the last four centuries, Shakespeare’s plays have stimulated composers to write extraordinary symphonic pieces, many of which center on emotionally charged dramatic characters and relationships. Orchestral programs throughout the world routinely perform these overtures, operatic pieces, incidental music, choral works, and tone poems, attesting to their enduring power.
Come listen as Oregon Symphony performs selections from Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, the overture from Antonin Dvořák’s Othello, and the complete incidental music from Felix Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
School of Music at PSU
Shakespeare’s Sonnets were first printed in 1609, about a decade after the vogue in sonnet writing had passed out of fashion. In 1598, however, Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia, Wit’s Treasury had lavished praise on Shakespeare’s “sugared sonnets among his private friends,” which indicates that at least some of the Sonnets had been circulating in manuscript during the 1590s. The 154 sonnets address conventional topics such as love, beauty, and loss, but they also meditate on Time’s relentless degradation of the living and the hope of escaping death through the endurance of the Sonnets into the future.
Come hear students and faculty from PSU’s School of Music perform “Love, Death, Ambition, Power, Fate, Free Will: Shakespearean Sonnets in Song.” Curated by Prof. Darrell Grant, this program of original compositions explores how 400-year-old poetry endures by resonating anew in contemporary ears.