By Robert St. Martin
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 6/3/23 – Lauren Gunderson’s “The Book of Will” has its closing weekend at A Noise Within Repertoire Theatre in Pasadena on Saturday and Sunday. Originally commissioned by the Denver Center Theatre and first staged in 2018, “The Book of Will” is a love letter to theatre itself and an homage to William Shakespeare and the genius of his writing. It tells the true and sometimes hilarious story of the actors and friends of William Shakespeare who undertook the Herculean effort to publish all of the Bard’s plays a few years after his death in 1616. This is Lauren Gunderson’s imagining of the tumultuous and arduous journey to publish the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, which secured the Bard’s body of work for generations to come. A Noise Within has staged a delightful production directed by Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and Geoff Elliott with a shimmering, candle-lit set by Frederica Nascimento and sumptuous costumes by Angela Balogh Calin.
At the opening of the play, a few years have passed since the death of William Shakespeare, and we find ourselves in a tavern with three actors of the King’s Men, the official theatre company under the patronage of King James. Actors Henry Condell, John Heminges, and Richard Burbage – all dear friends of Shakespeare – are drinking and lamenting the loss of their friend as well as the loss of his plays written in their true form. Apparently, Shakespeare never wrote his plays out in their entirety for fear of competitors stealing them. What remained after his death were bits and pieces, actor’s individual “sides,” scattered scripts, but no definitive published volumes of the full pieces.
Burbage is played with zest by Frederick Stuart. Leading the charge among these loyal friends is a stalwart Condell played by a passionate Jeremy Rabb along with the more hesitant but deeply loyal Heminge, played by the always dynamic Geoff Elliott. Burbage actually remembers, impressively, most of the plays verbatim and proceeds to regale the patrons with a mash-up soliloquy of several of them. But when Burbage dies unexpectedly that evening, the surviving men hatch a plan to publish a definitive book of the plays. Others have already begun performing unauthorized and decidedly incorrect, so-called Shakespeare plays, so the men with support from their wives (Deborah Strang & Trisha Miller) decide that it is vital to preserve the correct words of Shakespeare’s canon of plays.
Gunderson, who is still a young writer, has rapidly emerged as one of the most produced playwriters in the nation. “The Book of Will” actually is a superior piece of writing to that Disney movie-turned-play “Shakespeare in Love” because “Will” doesn’t get so trapped in anachronistic cleverness and the structurally adroit but focuses instead on earnest human emotion and historical weight. Gunderson takes a bit of arcane literary history and convinces us not only of its colossal importance to the humanities but of how the manifestation of love, drive and unselfishness can effect change and what actually happened to preserve the plays of William Shakespeare for us today.
The figure who is larger than life in this story is none other than playwright and poet laureate Ben Jonson (played in the night’s production by Alex Morris). Ben Jonson who was Shakespeare’s fellow playwright and friendly rival, who is eventually talked into writing the introductory dedicatory sonnet to the First Folio edition of the Bard’s collected plays. The heart of the show, though, is Nicole Javier, who plays Heminges’ dry-witted daughter and who serves to make the case that there were contemporaneous women who believed that Shakespeare understood them like no writer ever had before. And thus the plays must be saved, whatever the cost. Kasey Mahaffy, has a great time with the role of Ralph Crane, the scribe who was so earnest in writing down all of his favorite plays, he becomes a key player in reconstructing them and becomes their editor.
Condell and Heminge had a hard time with gathering the remaining versions of Shakespeare’s plays and an even harder time with finding a publisher. Various stolen and bowdlerized versions of such masterpieces as “Hamlet” and “Romeo and Juliet” were already knocking around. Yet other great dramas, such as “Antony and Cleopatra” and “As You Like It,” lacking quarto editions, had to be pieced together from prompt scripts, actors’ sides and unauthorized copies notated in the twilight by sycophantic but possibly inaccurate copyists. And they needed a press with a huge capacity.
Heminge and Condell had worked with Shakespeare for years and, like him, were actors and shareholders in the King’s Men. By the time of the First Folio, Heminge was the company’s business manager. Shakespeare left money to both men in his will to buy memorial rings, a sign that he considered them good friends. The book was published by a London syndicate headed by Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard. Isaac’s father William Jaggard printed it at his London printing shop, but he died before the book was completed. Isaac Jaggard took over the shop after his father’s death and in the play is the one who walked the publication of the First Folio through to completion.
The First Folio of Shakespeare, published in 1623, is an extraordinary book. About half of Shakespeare’s plays had never previously appeared in print, including “As You Like It,” “Julius Caesar,” “Macbeth,” “The Tempest,” and many more. Without the First Folio, 18 plays might have been lost forever. The First Folio was created in the years after Shakespeare’s death in 1616. His friends and former colleagues John Heminge and Henry Condell, who were also partners in the King’s Men acting company, brought together his plays.
26 actors are listed in the introduction, including Shakespeare himself. We can’t be sure of all the parts that each one played, but we know that Richard Burbage usually took the leading roles, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Richard III, and, according to at least one scholar, Romeo. It’s believed the well-known comic actor William Kemp probably portrayed Falstaff, Bottom, Dogberry, and other comedic roles. Since women did not appear on the stage, men and boys played all of the male and female parts.
“How did he know these things so young?” it is asked here of Shakespeare. Nobody ever has really answered that question, of course, but here is a play that points out that unless someone had saved what he knew, we’d all be even more ignorant about human nature than we currently seem. The play is great fun and thoroughly entertaining in this energetic production by A Noise Within.
