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ASU English Home > Special Features > The Bard's Birthday BashOn April 23, the Department of English hosted a celebration of William Shakespeare’s birthday. The daylong event brought together ASU students and faculty, community members, and area high school students and teachers to engage with Shakespeare’s works and life in a festive spirit. The day began at 8:00 am on Alumni Lawn, where a small stage had been set up in front of the water fountain. Passersby were invited to read a Shakespearean sonnet aloud. A crowd slowly grew as faculty and students read the sonnets in order from the 1st (“From fairest creatures we desire increase”) to 46th (“Mine eye and heart are at a mortal war”), with each volunteer reading between one and three sonnets at a time.
At 9:30, the sonnet readers cleared the stage to make way for a quiz-show style challenge between Shakespeareans and Chaucerians. Students from Bo Smith’s Shakespeare class (ENG 421) squared off against students from Rosalynn Voaden’s Chaucer class (ENG 416).
Quiz Master, Mark Lussier Mark Lussier served as the Quiz Master, asking the Chaucerians questions about Chaucer and the Shakespeareans questions about Shakespeare. Although both teams showed the range of their knowledge by answering questions on the texts, their sources, their historical contexts, and their modern legacies, the Chaucerians ultimately emerged as the champions of the quiz.
Team Shakespeare
Team Chaucer Following the quiz, members of the English Club took the stage from 10:30 to 11:30. Undergraduate students, coordinated by English major Mia Rodriguez, performed a series of scenes, monologues, poems, and parodies. After a break for lunch, festivities started back up with the arrival of classes from two area high schools to put on a “play-in-scenes” production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at 12:30.
New School for the Arts and Academics Students For weeks prior to the event, Dawn Oester (Fountain Hills High School) and Jeffrey Middleton (New School for the Arts and Academics) had been working with their students on individual scenes from the play.
New School for the Arts and Academics Students By the time they arrived, the students had analyzed their characters, memorized their lines, worked out their blocking, and finalized their choices of props and costumes.
Fountain Hills High School Students The students presented the scenes they had individually rehearsed back-to-back, watching from the audience when they were not onstage as the play unfolded.
Fountain Hills High School Students The daylong celebration ended with a multimedia program in the Lattie F. Coor Building from 5:00 to 7:00. Members of the original-practice group Bartholomew Faire (http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bartholomewfaire) kicked off the evening with a medley of Renaissance music. Next, Bo Smith (a member of the Actors’ Equity Association) played Shylock in a monologue and the trial scene from The Merchant of Venice, in which undergraduate Education major Marjorie Hazeltine played Portia, and English faculty (Mary Bjork, Ian Moulton, and T. P. Roche) and students (Lowell Duckert) played supporting roles. Finally, Ayanna Thompson gave an illustrated talk on Shakespeare on film. The evening ended with birthday cake and coffee on the Coor building patio. --Bradley Ryner |
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