So here is the conversation, it was really fun he knows so much I couldn't believe the stuff he seemed to just pull from no where! Also this post corresponds with the post below which is the research I did to prepare for the call.
Fred: Fred Adams
Fred: Fred Adams
Cara: Hi Mr. Adams, this is Cara Call, sorry to call late there was a problem with the phone
Fred: Oh that is alright Cara dear I knew you would call when you could.
Cara: Is it alright if I record this conversation?
Fred: Oh of course!
Cara: Thank you, let me put you on speaker real quick, okay.
Fred: Okay the first one was from Sarah Jane is she there?
Cara: Um she couldn’t make it today
Fred: She talks mainly about the pre-performances the atmosphere created besides the actual productions. So costumes things like that she wondered if they were authentic from Shakespeare’s time were there other things going on? There were other things going on. Of course Shakespeare’s Globe Theater was located right by the bear pits so there was dog and bear fights going on. Moorish dancers often were surrounding the theater and dancing attracting a lot of attention with their bells and their ribbons, and then of course there were vendors so everyone singing out their wares and the various calls of the city. So we really kind of recreated that scene with our green show
Cara: I remember that that was very cool the people in the costumes going around
Fred: Yeah
Cara: Yeah it was a very nice atmosphere.
Fred: Well, we think it kind of helps prepare the audience for the language, when you first hear the language of Shakespeare’s plays you are taken back and you think oh dear I am not going to be able to understand that but all we have to do is just tune the ear a little bit, so we have the performers and the vendors using that dialect and language so that by the time the trumpet sounds and the gates open they are already in the mode and the language does not seem strange or foreign to them
Okay I have, I got a letter here from John?
Brian: Yeah I’m here
Fred: Hi John, can Shakespeare’s success both then and now be narrowed down to a few reasons and what would they be? Actually, one overriding reason and a couple of secondary ones. The overriding one is that Shakespeare was a success in his life time and four hundred and fifty years later is still a phenomenon, it was his personality. He, he understood the human condition and he recreated it so perfectly in his plays that a fourteen year old girl in America or in Nairobi today would have much the same thoughts and feelings as Juliet did in Verona four hundred and fifty years ago. That universality is the thing that draws people back to Shakespeare time after time because they recognize elements of themselves in it. We see elements of Macbeth in ourselves, or Richard III, we see elements of the the jealous elements, the indecisiveness of Othello, we see the desire to get rich quick schemes of Richard III, so we have elements within all of the characters that we discover in ourselves. Or not in ourselves, in those we know and associate with the bad ones we always see in someone else. (laughter from audience)
Brian: of course
Fred: Of course it’s been a success and it’s continued to be, the universality of it. The other would be his magnificent use of language. The poetry, the rich rich imagery, to describe, for example ah Romeo describes the sun rise, he says, look, love, what envious streaks do lace the severing clouds in yonder east night’s candles are burnt out and jocund day stands tip toe on the misty mountain tops, oh golly guys that’s gawgeous as they say in southern Utah. (Laughter) It’s beautiful. And those are probably the reasons for his success, the universality and his his ability to capture humanity in its most real state, the poetry invokes all of that with.
Brian: Awesome, well thank you very much.
Fred: Janelle and Joanna
Lianna: Hello
Fred: You ask about the socio-economic position, was Shakespeare is a position economically to play tennis? Ah we have so little knowledge of Shakespeare, we don’t know what he ate, we don’t even know where he lived in London? We don’t know ah, the people he knew, so little was kept because you have to remember to put yourself on paper was to court disaster, the regime change the law all of the sudden is pasted and they have proof from a diary you had kept, you could be beheaded, and this uncertainty, people didn’t keep diaries, Samuel Pepys will record the first diary written in England and of course that was just after the life time of William Shakespeare and he was so frightened that someone might read his diary that he wrote it in a special code, upside down mirror image,
Brian: wow
Lianna: no way
Fred: it took a three and a half centuries to translate Samuel Peeps diary, to break the code, if it’d been discovered in his own life time ah James I James II either one of them would have had him beheaded. So we don’t know a lot about very many people. We know quite a lot about Elizabeth not a thing about her personal life because even that was not considered . . .savvy. Ah his social economic position, Shakespeare was a very wealthy man, he could have played tennis, but we doubt if he did ah he uses tennis in several of his plays just as he uses other sports, we think he was an observer, but I don’t know, we have no record of course of his ever having played tennis. We know one of his favorite past times, one of his favorite past times apparently was drinking. (laughter) Sorry kids
Brian: Yeah well
Fred: We have, we have quite a bit of reference to his having, loved to spend time in the taverns and the ale house, but keep in mind that is where he heard his language, that is where he got his ideas for characters Falstaff himself, Nim ah Pistol all of these men all came out of actual people in the taverns in London and he’d sit there quietly in a corner, um obviously having an ale and recording their language which he then incorporated into his plays and gave him this wonderful sense of believability. That help a little?
Lianna: Yes thank you so much.
Fred: Carolyne or Caroline, Strong women characters . . . they were, all the women in Shakespeare’s early plays were very strong, Portia, Rosalind, ah of Twelfth Night, oh for heaven’s sakes, Twelth Night? Oh anyways, all of the women most of them were able to solve problems, women were in control, Um the Merry Wives of Windsor, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page were very very important great power house women but remember who he was writing his plays for, Queen Elizabeth, and so he made his women powerful and strong and she adored it, the minute Elizabeth dies and King James comes down from Scotland to reign as the king of England and he, by the way, becomes Shakespeare’s patron ah James did not like women and all of Shakespeare’s female characters from that point on get smothered with a pillow or drown themselves in a stream or get put upon by bandits or raped and have their tongues tied out in Titus, all of his women, suffer and suffer greatly cause he was pleasing the king , he was a political animal, Shakespeare wrote his plays to please the government
Lianna: I never noticed that connection
Fred: Doesn’t that break you heart?
Lianna: Well he did what he had to do I suppose
Fred: Well it it made him acceptable, it made him a favorite of the court and it made him wealthy and you guys have to remember he was writing these plays not for us today, not for fame or a place in history, he was writing his plays to sell at the theater that night and they had to sell and they had to make money . . . Ah Caroline asks again the women taught the children and took care of the house, they even did their husbands work if he was away fighting, but were they respected? In England probably more equal than many counties of the time, does that make since? . . . .and I think because of Elizabeth women were honored more in England’s history than in oh the history of say Spain even thought they had Isabella, a queen but women were more subservient, ah Muslim women were not given ah the power of the status that an English woman could have but even, even at that time you have to remember English women could not inherit, that, it was the oldest son, not the wife, so when Shakespeare dies all he could leave his wife is his second best bed because no one would challenge it, however ?? she was still alive and probably a vegetable in that bed, but to Cara, I just want to know what you would like to know on yours, I do speak to groups about the life of Shakespeare ah there is of course a legend and by the way it is only a legend, no now knows for sure but in Stratford if you were to go to Stratford and you were to ask How did William Shakespeare die cause remember he retired from London and went back to Stratford where he lived out the rest of his life with is daughters and his wife and his grand children but ah Shakespeare according to the villagers of Stratford, Shakespeare died choking on a vat of ale over a body joke, now weather he really did or not we don’t know, now we know he retired extremely wealthy he retired a lionite throughout all of England the name of William Shakespeare was a major household name and even after his retirement his home in Stratford became kind of a Mecca for people even while he was still alive people journeyed from London and Birmingham to Stratford just to see the home where the great William Shakespeare lived. So he was one would consider he definitely was a success in his life time, but we don’t know a lot about it and another reason we don’t know a lot about him is we more and more literary detectives are discovering that most likely WS was a closet catholic keep in mind he could be punished by being a catholic, and he protested, he let it be known that he was a protestant but we found in his home only a matter of decades ago a hidden up in the rafters and carved in a nitch they found a catholic pray book obviously owned by his father and then William, and his father it was discovered was truly a catholic, that’s how he lost his position as lord mayor of Stratford, because he was not keeping up the responsibility of the city fathers to destroy the catholic stain glass and the catholic images and the catholic alters, and it he every time they would go out to destroy them John Shakespeare would be sick at home and not go out with them and it wasn’t long before the village realized he was a Catholic just professing to be a protestant and it lost him his office, lost him his business, lost him his income and Shakespeare wasn’t about to let that happen to him so he never ne never declared.
Lianna: interesting . . .so I have another question for you that is kind of not on the paper, I know there has kind been a movement with some people saying that Shakespeare wasn’t actually an individual guy or he wasn’t really who he says he was it was somebody else’s work, what would you say to people who have that opinion of Shakespeare?
Fred: It all links into what is known today as the Shakespeare conspiracy it ah who wrote the plays of William Shakespeare, some say it was the earl of oxford, some say it was Bacon some say it was Marlow and there is a school of thought that Elizabeth the first was actually the author, um all of them have creditable reasoning behind it but no one has any proof, all we know Cara and I think this is important for you to remember all we know is that the boy known as William Shakespeare the boy from Stratford was considered during his entirely life time by his competitors as his contemporaries to be the author of plays of William Shakespeare, it was not until two hundred years after his death in 1830 that anyone decided that he could not have written them because he was not schooled because he not a university graduate, that is like saying Mozart could not have written that music because he did not belong to ASCAP? And Shakespeare could not have written those plays because he didn’t have a Ph.D. now that’s ridiculous you and I can realize such a thing as genius (Brian points to himself) and genius was at work here, did he write all of the plays? No, no we know there are elements in everyone of his plays that someone else has written and actors reciting Shakespeare’s plays would almost trip on certain lines because they would lose the flow lose the language and the concentration that he plays have someone else wrote those lines, perhaps it was an actor who thought he could do better than Shakespeare on his part so he rewrote his part, but the bulk of the plays as we know them are attributed to the lad William Shakespeare from Stratford and I, I kind of think it is true, there are many instances that these sophisticated people could not have written the plays, for example, I’ll just give you one quick one Marlow, Decker, Johnson and Bacon, all were international travelers, they went to France they went to Spain they went to Germany, so they sailed in boats, William Shakespeare never ever ever ever left the island of England, all of the shipping records and passenger lists you never find his name, we know he didn’t and when he Desdimona in the play Othello when he writes Desdimona arriving in Cyprus, a sea voyage, he has her arrive exactly like a stage coach was. Oh look she’s coming! Oh here she is! Off she gets! you only have to sail on a large ship once to know it takes hours for a ship to dock, Shakespeare didn’t know that, he’d never sailed, Marlow had, Decker had, Green had, and Johnson had, all of the people that they claim, they had sailed and how come they if they had written the play they never would have had Desdimona arrive three minutes after she’s sited. That’s just one little things but it gives you at least a glimpse that there are so many evidences that whoever wrote the plays of William Shakespeare had never been to Italy, he writes a lot about Italy but he writes about it from Italians on the streets of London, the merchants that he listened to in the taverns,
Lianna: okay thank you
Fred: Oh my pleasure, is there anything else?
Cara: Um you told a story where you told us about a hypothesis I guess that he had gone to anther town during the second set of unknown years and that he was a teacher?
Fred: Yes that’s become quite a positive theory now, Greenbomb and a group of detectives actually discovered that the theory and of course we can’t prove it but there is a lot of proof building up and with in your life time it could become a known fact that ah Shakespeare vanished from Stratford as a young married man, his wife has had a daughter and know she has had twins. He lives with his parents and three children and his wife and his mother and father and all of his brothers and sisters in that one little house and all of the sudden William Shakespeare vanishes. We don’t know anything about him for a couple of years and then all of the sudden we learn about him in London, but is several years after he vanishes, so ah interestingly detectives discovered that his school teachers in Stratford with whom he must have been very close, they were Catholic school teachers and when the Catholic reformation began these two teachers living in the village of Stratford vanished and we discovered they fled up to York, York was still a Catholic city and there they took up residents in York as school teachers and in one of the great houses of York we discover in the library there, just recently, that a young apprentice tutor teaching the lord of the manners children had apparently access to the library and in several of the books he has written notes as he was reading, a note on the side of the page, and the hand writing is the same as WS’S. And they now are figuring he must have gone with his teachers up to York where he apprenticed himself to as a young apprentice teacher to a family a wealthy family lived in the house and had access to the library and continued his studies while he taught the children and keep in mind he’d been in school seven years so he had Greek and Hebrew and Latin he spoke French he knew geography he knew history and so he would be a very credible tutor for children and if that is the case then that links perfectly with his appearance in London a few years later because the traveling company that we find him with in London played in York at the home of that Lord just a few months before Shakespeare appears in London he could have traveled southward to London with that company and joined a group of actors, so maybe the mystery will be solved.
Cara: um another question, you told a story about, you were in kindergarten you told a story and it has to do with Julius Caesar?
Fred: You are talking about my embarrassment in the first grade. In the first grade the teacher, we had just moved to a little community called Montpelier Idaho where my grandparents lived right across the street from the school and I was enrolled in the first grade and the teacher one day was talking about Goldy Locks and that three bears and she asked me what was the moral of the story, what was the story telling, I didn’t know cause I had never heard of it, I had never heard of Goldy Locks and the three bears and I told her and she thought I was lying, and I went home in tears my mother said well you go right back and you tell that teacher the story of Romeo and Juliet or Julius Caesar cause I knew them both my mother had taught me the stories of Shakespeare instead of fairy tales so I had to bone up on fairy tales for about a month.
(laughter)
Lianna: Sounds like you were a Shakespeare buff from a young age them
Fred: Of from an early age, both my mother and father were in the theater so I came by it kind of without hesitation; of it has been fun to talk to you kids I hope this helps a little,
All: Yes, thank you so much, thank you
Fred: Any other questions before I click off?
Lianna: No sir I think that was great, thank you for your time today.
Fred: Oh happy to do it and good luck to all of you I hope that you enjoy your classes, come down to the festival now and see us, introduce yourselves to me when you do.
ALL: yes sir, thank you, will do
Fred: okay bye bye!
All: Bye
I am going to try and electronically record the call and post it am not sure how yet but I will see what I a can figure out!
