Clemson University Shakespeare Festival III

The Clemson Shakespeare Festival is an annual celebration of Shakespeare's enduring influence on our culture and our schools. We invite you to experience Shakespeare as never before through a unique blend of performance, lecture, film, and interaction between actors, experts and audiences. Enjoy fast-paced productions of the plays on stage and on film, meet the actors in informal workshop settings, and question the scholars on "everything you always wanted to know about Shakespeare but were afraid to ask!"

A Collaborative Effort between the Robert Howell Brooks Center for the Performing Arts, the Department of English, and the Department of Perfroming Arts, Clemson Shakespeare Festival III featured outstanding performances of six Shakespeare plays, five comedies and one tragedy. Each performance was prefaced by a free "informance," a brief introductory lecture-discussion of the play by a leading Shakespeare expert. The festival also included a series of film versions and adaptations of the plays, a lecture series by three prominent Shakespeare scholars, and dozens of workshop activities involving actors, scholars, and audience members of all ages.

For the inaugural year of the Brooks Center for the Performing Arts, the theme of the third Clemson Shakespeare Festival was "Leading Ladies: Gender and Genre Issues in the Plays of Shakespeare." This festival included productions by four companies, some in multiple performances:
Comedy of Errors, Taming of the Shrew, Othello, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Twelfth Night. In all these plays, Shakespeare's heroines seize the dramatic and social lead while educating and domesticating their sometimes confused, wayward males. The climax of the festival was a performance by Claire Bloom in Then Let Men Know: Portraits of Shakespeare's Women, her one-woman show based upon six of Shakespeare's female characters.