Clemson Shakespeare festival VI, 1997

The annual Clemson Shakespeare Festival roared into Clemson for its sixth year March 3-March 14, 1997. Our festival theme was "Shakespeare and the Traditions of Popular Culture." We investigated the roots of Shakespeare's theater in the popular entertainment of his time as we celebrated the Bard's curious but enduring popularity in our own day as witnessed, for instance, by the production of five new plays on film in just the last two years, including Romeo and Juliet and Othello. At the festival four plays illustrated our theme of Shakespeare as pop culture and icon and was in full production by the Warehouse Theater of Greenville and the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry IV, Part I and Love's Labour's Lost. The festival also featured an encore of the new romp written by the Reduced Shakespeare Company and performed by Greenville's Shakin' Up Shakespeare Company, The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (abridged) and a children's version of A Midsummer Night's Dream was performed by a "dream team" of fifth-graders from Greenville County. In addition to live performances and a popular series of festival plays in film adaptations, the festival included workshops with teams of actors, scholars, and directors, lectures by internationally known Shakespeare scholars, visual exhibits and computer demonstrations on "Shakespeare in Multimedia Format" and "The Globe Theatre in Virtual Reality" all dealt with that year's theme, "Shakespeare, the Bard of Pop."