Playing Shakespeare

In 1984, the director John Barton of the Royal Shakespeare Company led nine workshops for actors.  During the sessions, called Playing Shakespeare, the actors discuss how they interpret and perform Shakespeare: how they read the words, understand the rhythm of the poetry, contemplate motivation, etc.  Luckily for us, the workshops were all filmed--and they are available on Netflix.

The most incredible thing about the documentary is the range of actors who participate.  Seeing a young Ben Kingsley or David Suchet is only matched by watching Judi Dench or Patrick Stewart in other episodes.  What I love is that we get to see them not only act but think aloud about how they are acting, try out other styles, and see how the collaboration between great actor and great director can work.

One of my favorite scenes is in the first episode, when Ian McKellen tries out the beginning of The Merchant of Venice: "In sooth, I know not why I am so sad."  His very first performance of the line is wonderful--but then director asks him to try it in differing moods or emotions: sadly, humorously.  Then Barton asks the actor to consider the character's motivation. What does the character want the line to accomplish?  Barton suggests options: he wants to explain himself, he wants to avoid explaining himself, to make light of his sadness, to try to put an end to the conversation.  McKellen tries them all out.  By focusing on motivation rather than emotion per se, a great deal of depth began to come out.  This type of acting allows the actor to "make a connection between the mouth and the brain, and maybe the heart," as McKellen says.

The episodes are full of little insights into Shakespeare, big "ah ha!" moments into the whole world of early English drama, and a view of a world I could never have imagined: that which goes on in the weeks and months before the curtain rises.

Highly recommended--including for those of us who do not know a whole lot of literary history.  I've been watching the episodes with my partner David and our 12yo son--all of us fairly inexperienced in serious literary scholarship, to say the least--and all of us are loving it.

IS THAT A DAGGER I SEE BEFORE ME...

or are you just happy to see me?

Yep--yesterday was Sigmund Freud's birthday.  What a perfect time to discover an essay in Stephen Marche's How Shakespeare Changed Everything detailing how Shakespeare influenced Freud.  "From Shakespeare through Freud came the idea that a healthy sex life is an unrepressed sex life," writes Marche.  "Was there a more powerful, a more vital, a more influential idea in the whole of the twentieth century?"

Marche goes on to explain that the "humanistic, unembarrassed approach to desire" was ahead of his time--and perhaps ahead of our time--in his open ideas about sexuality.  The most successful part of the essay, I think, is Marche's discussion of the complications of gender identity in the bard's plays.  Because of the theatrical tradition of boy actors playing female characters, "transvestitism is always in the background" of the plays.  But Shakespeare plays around with that convention until we get dizzy.  "How can you play Twelfth Night, with a woman dressed as a man (who is really a man dressed as a woman) and a woman falling in love with a woman who is dressed as a man (who is really a man), without taking into account the charged effects of its role-bending sexuality?"

Or as I wrote about in the post TransShakespeare a while back (when talking about As You Like It), "you have a male actor playing a female character (Rosalind), playing a male (Ganymede), playing a female (mock-Rosalind).  And when Phoebe falls in love with Ganymede, it was actually a male actor showing love to a male actor, even though on stage it was a female character showing love to a female character."

Does this kind of twisting gender play lead to Freud, or just leave the staid psychoanalyst baffled?

What Marche is referring to most directly when he links Shakespeare and Freud is how the Oedipus story gets reworked in Hamlet.  According to Marche, the original Greek telling of Oedipus has the desire to kill one's father and sleep with one's mother expressed openly.  In Hamlet, Shakespeare has that desire "hidden, repressed."  Our repressed desires "return to haunt us like the Ghost that haunts Elsinore."  Hamlet, in short, "is the original neurotic."

My ideas about this book have not changed after reading these additional essays: The book isn't particularly scholarly and Marche absolutely overreaches in his arguments--and yet I have not had such good nerdy fun reading a book in a long time.  See if your library has a copy!

The Weird Sisters, by Eleanor Brown

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown tells the story of three adult sisters who return home to be with their parents while their mother undergoes treatment for breast cancer.  The three young women are in three radically different positions.  Rose, the eldest, feels responsible for her family and refuses to leave her aging parents to go visit her fiance in London.  Bean has come home from the big city after getting in trouble at work.  And Cordy's hippie ways have been interrupted by an unexpected pregnancy.  As they come together again after years on their own, the sisters heal their previous rifts and their confront their own personal demons.  Although they are already out of college and fully independent, all three of the sisters have a lot of growing up to do.

In many ways, the plot sounds like a fairly traditional example of "chick lit"--a label that many readers may see as an enormous condemnation.  Although I'm not a reader of chick lit (unless you count the novels of Austen, the Brontes, Woolf, and Welty), I don't condemn the genre.  Plenty of people who dismiss chick lit would howl at some of the trash I read to unwind.  (Just because I love reading the classics doesn't mean I'm turning in all the volumes on my mystery shelf.)

Still, for those of us who like to be a high-falutin' in our reading, it is worth noting that The Weird Sisters goes far beyond that genre of popular fiction aimed at women.  First of all, the emotional fallout of the plot is fairly sophisticated.  Brown's prose, with a few exceptions, is fluid and poetic. Perhaps most interestingly, she uses an unusual narrative technique--first person plural--which is surprisingly successful.  All in all, I enjoyed the book quite a bit.

Of course, my favorite part is the conceit of using Shakespeare references throughout the novel.   The sisters are the daughters of a Shakespeare scholar who spent so much of their youth quoting Shakespeare at them that they can't go through a minute without a line or reference to explain their circumstances.  Even their names are inspired by Shakespeare: "It's unlikely that our parents ever looked up any of our names in one of those baby name books.  The Riverside Shakespeare had obviously been the repository of choice."  Rose is named for Rosalind in As You Like It, Bean is Bianca--named for the character from The Taming of the Shrew, and Cordy is Cordelia from King Lear.  As children, their father would play sonnet round-robins where each would compose a line until the sonnet was finished.  As the author writes, "The game did...make us good at extemporaneous iambic pentameter, not that this is a skill that benefits one much in any world other than our father's."  Their father, of course, uses the magic he finds in his books to conjure a world apart from the craziness of modernity--much as Prospero does in The Tempest.  It is only when the storm of the mother's illness forces real life to the fore that all the members of the family come to a point that they can grow beyond their caricatures.

The book is very much not a retelling of any Shakespeare play or theme.  You won't leave this novel with a new lens into the bard's oeuvre.  Strangely enough, it is the intense seriousness of the Shakespeare allusions that bothers me most about this book.  The incredible humor and silliness that so many Shakespeare folks have--as seen by folks as diverse as the Reduced Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare Geek, and Bardfilm--is utterly missing in the sisters' dialogue.  I must say I missed the wit.

I definitely recommend Brown's The Weird Sisters--but don't go in thinking you're going to get something you are not.  Instead, appreciate the author's exploration of the meanings of both sisterhood and emotional growth.

Thanks to Amy Einhorn Books of the Penguin Group for sending me a copy of The Weird Sisters for review.

How Shakespeare Changed Everything

Stephen Marche's How Shakespeare Changed Everything hits the bookshelves next week.  I was lucky enough to receive a review copy from HarperCollins during the Bard's birthday week.  With all the festivities going on for my son's concomitant birthday (including a co-ed slumber party where the guests were giggling and playing sleeping bag tag at 3AM), I've spent most of the week staring into space unable to think, much less read.  But Marche's book has been filling the little reading time I have this week just perfectly.  It is light reading, funny, and fascinating all at the same time.

"William Shakespeare was the most influential person who ever lived," begins Marche.  I must admit I'm usually irritated by such hyperbole, but the author makes a good argument that the bard at least belongs high on the list.  Our view of humanity is shaped by the stories Shakespeare told and the characters he developed.  Our very language is saturated with Shakespeare's words.  And this seems as true today in our changing world as it did centuries ago.  As Marche writes, "The ground keeps falling out from under us.  Only Shakespeare keeps landing on his feet."  He concludes:

Shakespeare may reflect the dazzling beauty of the world and everything in it, of men corrupted by ambition or lust, wives triumphant and defeated, love of all shapes and all kinds and all degrees of force, death by surprise or by expectation, funny drunks, sexy middle-aged women, lovely falling leaves, guilty bloodstains, but he is himself is swallowed in the reflection, a dark origin to a vast illumination.  His art was to reflect the world as accurately as possible, and he achieved his goal by becoming as beautiful and surprising and mysterious and unfathomable as the world itself.

As a historian of the US South who writes about the racial politics of the Jim Crow system, I am especially intrigued by the first chapter of How Shakespeare Changed Everything.  The author makes clear that Othello uses racist stereotypes and storylines.  It also depends on its society's disgust at biracial marriage (as shown by many lines, including "an old black ram is tupping your white ewe").  And Othello's racial background is used to explain his downfall.  As Marche states, "Othello is a man whose inherent barbarism undies his civilization.... The inner truth of Othello is the unavoidable savagery of his blackness."

Nevertheless, as the author points out, "for most of its history, the problem with Othello was that it wasn't racist enough."  The relationship between Othello and Desdemona was an interracial romance played out for all to see.  And while white audiences could imagine the "black brute" raping and murdering innocent white women, they did not want to see or even imagine love crossing the color line.

Despite his downfall, Othello is a character of dignity--of nobility even--who commands our respect. Having a black character with both power and dignity created a huge challenge for racist audiences in Jim Crow America.  And the idea of having the role played by a black actor was an even bigger challenge in a world of segregated theaters and legal discrimination.  Into this position stepped Paul Robeson in 1930, "bringing the idea of a dignified black man and the possibility of racial love to the widest audience he could reach.  Robeson claimed that playing Othello set him free--and his role was, argues Marche, a major step towards the Civil Rights movement.

The fact that Shakespeare endowed his character with such deep humanity makes us identify with him, no matter what our sex, race, or religion.  "The fragility of civilization may have been an idea that Shakespeare saw as peculiarly relevant to a Moor living in Venice," says the author, "but it is equally relevant to everyone here and now.  We all have a barbarism we are trying to clamp down."  I would love to see Marche expand this argument beyond the paragraph it gets.  One of the elements of our own barbarism is the racism of our society.

Although I was fascinated by the history Marche presents and  by his larger argument of how Othello's meaning changes over time, I find the essay to be fundamentally flawed.  Marche draws a link between the Shakespeare play and the OJ Simpson story--which, while a stretch, he almost manages to pull off by cleverly comparing the handkerchief from Othello and the bloody glove of the OJ case.  Then he argues that Obama's campaign replayed the Othello story of the noble outsider who came to lead the Republic at a time of crisis.  Summarizes the author, "That's the 2008 election in a Hollywood pitch: Othello with a black wife."  I don't buy it, and Marche doesn't even really try to back up his argument.  It winds up seeming like pure ridiculousness.  But when Marche stretches just a little too far, it makes the book highly amusing and thought-provoking.

I'm very much looking forward to the chapter on place of The Merchant of Venice in Nazi Germany.  I'm also fascinated to find out "how Shakespeare changed our environment" via starlings in New York's Central Park.  I suspect this book will be on my nightstand for the next week or so as I read one or two short essays each evening.

The Birthday Boys

I mentioned yesterday that my son's birthday falls on the anniversary of Shakespeare's baptism. Luckily, my now-12yo boy loves the bard with all his heart and completely embraces their connection. This year, I arranged a few Shakespeare presents for him:


We discovered a VHS copy of The Reduced Shakespeare Company - The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) in our local library, many years ago. We checked it out over and over, eventually illegally copying the library's copy onto our own videotape. Well--we've come clean and now own our own DVD copy now.

My family loves the ridiculously nerdy slapstick of the RSC.  As the show starts, one of the actors tells us that the company is "proud to prevent the complete works of William Shakespeare"--and the laughs and groans get more intense as they work their way through the plays.  Othello is performed as a rap, Titus as Emeril's cooking show, and the histories as a football game.  The comedies are reduced to one medley of a play with a very long and very funny title.  Finally, the performance ends with Hamlet in several iterations--the last not only at lightening speed but backwards. 

If you haven't had the great pleasure of being introduced to the Reduced Shakespeare Company, go check them out right away. If you can't find the DVD in your library, you can check it out from Netflix.

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A couple of years ago, my son and I were thrilled to be able to attend the Folger Shakespeare Library's performance of Macbeth.  The Folger, a theater I've discussed before, is one of our favorite venues.  And their production of Macbeth was one of our favorite productions there. Directed by Aaron Posner and Teller (from that famous duo of magicians Penn and Teller), the production combined subtle illusion with astounding (and sometimes gory) imagery.

A new Folger edition of the Shakespeare text has been released which includes a DVD of the live show..  We are thrilled--partly because A. and I both want to see it again, and partly because we are eager to show it to David (who was unable to see the live play with us).  I have high hopes that the Folger will produce other DVD/text editions--including, perhaps, the incredible version of The Comedy of Errors staged earlier this year.

Right now my son is learning his lines for a children's performance of Macbeth at the Shakespeare Theater Company in DC.  We've been talking a lot recently about the Folger performance as he prepares for his part and are looking forward to a viewing of the DVD this weekend.

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One more bit of Shakespeare silliness: Shakespeare in a Box: Taming of the Shrew contains instructions to put on your own version of a Shakespeare play with friends and family at home. All the living room's a stage!  We haven't tried it out yet, but the kit has excellent reviews of Amazon.  We've already thought of a few friends who might find this right up their alley.

The kit comes with director and technical director cards which explain how to cast the play, direct it, stage it, and create basic sets and sound effects.  It also provides cards for each of the major parts along with a summary of the characters and ideas about how to play them.  It also comes with multiple copies of an abridged version of the script.  Finally, the Shakespeare in a Box kit comes with props: a cheap wig, a plastic flute, and Groucho glasses--all modeled here by my son:

(There is also a "Shakespeare in a Box" kit for Shakespeare in a Box: King Lear.)

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See his shirt in that picture?  I think he might have received it for his last birthday.  We found it in the Folger Library's small gift shop.  Don't you love the rebus?

The Prince’s Cry

Today is my son's 12th birthday. Inconceivable.

Photography by Doris Favale

A. is an amazing kid--a young man who has helped me grow as I watch him mature.  He is a reader, a fencer, a violinist.  He bounds up and down the stairs with the joy of a toddler, understands human motivation in a very mature way, loves to brag about his ability to eat spicy food, and keeps me laughing with terrible puns that remind me of my father's sense of humor.

Every year on this day, I think about his birth at home, which I wrote about several years ago on my old personal blog. This is a day of celebration for him but also for me.

A.is also a lover of all things Shakespeare--and all things Princess Bride. In honor of the anniversary of my son's birth and of Shakespeare's baptism, I want to share with you a sonnet my son wrote to celebrate:


The Prince's Cry


“Who’s there?!” The ghost of my father tonight appears
To me in the dark as I walk—perchance in dreams.
“Inconceivable!” you say, consumed with fears.
(Methinks that word means not what you think it means.)

You poisoned my father and stole his throne and his crown.
I tried to forget his death by taking a lover.
But in her pain, she fell in the river and drowned.
And you didn’t care: you married the queen, my mother.

I must avenge my father’s death most foul,
Oh my uncle, who hath torn this house in two.
I’ve learned to use my sword and duel with skill.
And I have planned what I now say to you:

“Hello, my name is Hamlet the Dane,” quoth I.
“You killed my father--so now prepare to die.”

Shakespeare Behind Bars

As I nurse my sore and purple toes, I've been reading haphazardly and watching films on Netflix.  One movie I especially want to share with you is the extremely moving Shakespeare Behind Bars.  This documentary tracks inmates of Kentucky's Luther Luckett maximum security prison as they prepare for a performance of Shakespeare's The Tempest.  It is a profoundly heart-wrenching and thought-provoking film which I highly recommend.

The inmates are brought together under a prison program run by an open-hearted teacher/facilitator who not only helps them understand Shakespeare's language and themes but explore their own identities and their own pasts.  The characters in The Tempest share a surprising amount with the prison inmates.  Like Prospero, many of the incarcerated men suffered from abuse or cruelty which led at least in part to the rage that allowed them to commit the crimes for which they were imprisoned. They too are isolated on an imprisoning island, removed from the outside world.  Just as Prospero must let go of his defense mechanisms in order to reintegrate into society. 

Many of the men involved in this production of The Tempest are facing parole hearings in their very new futures.  As they struggle to make sense of their anger and their guilt, as well as their ability to imagine themselves within the framework of humanity, they turn to the bard's words to help them grow.  What they eventually find through their work with the Shakespeare play is a script for redemption. 

As Prospero declares in his final lines,

As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

Thanks!

I've spent most of the last few days asleep--fighting off a minor illness and getting very little of anything accomplished. While I was down for the count, my to-be-read stack expanded by 3 books, all won in recent blog contests:

Go check out the puzzle competition over at Shakespeare Geek for the new book Pocket Posh Shakespeare Puzzles. Although winners have already been drawn, his cipher entry puzzle will definitely amuse you.  I can't wait to look through the book which promises to provide many evenings of fun for my Shakespeare-obsessed family.

If you love Shakespeare and really bad puns, you absolutely must follow Shakespeare Geek on Twitter.  He and Bardfilm keep me laughing everyday with hashtags such as the recent #JudyBlumeShakespeare, #ShakesPoe #ShakespeareProductRecall, and even #ShakespeareanPickupLines. (Unfortunately, these all seem to be past the date when Twitter keeps them available--but if you tune in yourself, you'll get to be part of all the fun.)  Follow them at @ShakespeareGeek and @bardfilm.

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Given that Little Women may have been the book that really started my career as a reader (depending on whether you count the entire Nancy Drew series or not), I must say how excited I am to be receiving the new novel The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott by Kelly O'Connor McNees, given away--and signed!--by the author.

I'm also looking forward to reading Harriet Reisen's well-received biography, Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women.  Perhaps an Alcott reading extravaganza is in order!

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I was thrilled to win Amanda's blogoversary contest over at The Zen Leaf a few weeks ago.  In her post, Amanda called special attention to some of the blog reviews she wrote in her first year and listed a few of her favorites. She offered the winner of her drawing any book from her 2008 list.

Immediately, I knew I would choose Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea.  Having been a Jane Eyre fan since I was a young girl, I can't believe I haven't read this extension of the story.  (It is the story of the m******* in the a****, as Amateur Reader would say.)

I think I'll reread Jane Eyre before reading WSS--and perhaps I'll look through Lucasta Miller's study, The Bronte Myth, too.  Ah, yes.  One book always leads to another...

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Thanks to all three of these bloggers for keeping my shelves--and all available floorspace in our house--brimming with possibilities.

Laughing with the Bard...the other Bard...

Today's prompt over at the Literary Blog Hop is "Can literature be funny? What is your favorite humorous literary book?"

One of the funniest bits of literature I know of is Shakespeare's hilarious play The Comedy of Errors.  It recounts the story of two sets of identical twins accidentally separated at birth when their ship encounters a destructive storm.  The twins look so alike that, as Shakespeare says, they can only be distinguished by name.  The complication here is that the identical twins actually can't be told apart by their names: they have the same names.  One set of twins have the name Antipholus while the other set have the name Dromio.  One Antipolus and one Dromio live together in Syracuse while the other Antipolus and Dromio live together in Ephesus.  At the beginning of the play, they all find themselves together in one place--not yet knowing their twins are even still alive.  This is the set-up for many hysterical instances of mistaken identity.  The dialogue--quite often rhyming--is quick and witty, riddled with wordplay and bad puns. 

The Antipholuses

The Dromios

I will revisit this play at a later date to discuss themes, language use, characterization, etc.--but today I want to tell you a bit about an absolutely stellar performance my 11yo son and I saw recently at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre, directed by Andy Posner.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Folger, it is a small, intimate theater with a tradition of putting on some of the most innovative and entertaining performances in the country.  Folger productions often draw from the same pool of talented actors used by DC's Shakespeare Theater Company.

My son and I saw a matinee performance set up for school students (including our small homeschool group).  When we were all seated, an actor--not yet in costume--came out and told us he wanted to share a few video scenes from an upcoming documentary about his English Shakespeare troupe, the Worcestershire Mask and Wig Society.  It soon became apparent to most of us that the film was in fact the first of many jokes we would see in the next two hours.  The mockumentary served to underline the themes of twinning and mistaken identification.

The "documentary" also allows playgoers to see how remarkably different the actors playing the twins look in real life.  The actors differ in height and weight, in coloring and age.  But by the magic of the stage--as well as the brilliant masks designed by Aaron Cromie and worn by all the male characters--we were utterly convinced they were identical.  The actors-especially those playing the Dromios--learned to mimic each other's movements so precisely that many of us in the audience had trouble keeping them apart.

I find it fascinating that none of the female characters wear masks or disguises in this production. (Female actors playing male characters do.) In some ways, this feels like a flip from Shakespeare's time. Then, all the female characters were played by male actors in disguise. Was this modern unmasking the undirector's idea of a double negative?

The Folger performance echoed Shakespeare's fast-moving dialogue by making the physical action seem just as whirlwind.  The stage, set almost to look like a colorful Edwardian circus, is filled with doorways which open and close as characters make their exits and their entrances again and again.  A musician-mime sits to the side of the stage, playing not only background music but interacting with the actors and playing sound effects.  This production is all about show, about masks on top of metaphorical masks--and ultimately about trying to figure out who we really are.



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For more literary laughs, check out my favorite Twitter hashtag yesterday: #SeussSpeare--a tribute to Dr. Seuss on his birthday from Shakespeare fans.

Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy

My intention over the last few months has been to read tons of contemporary fiction and literary non-fiction before starting my classics project in January.  During this period, I especially enjoyed A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book.  And I am especially looking forward to holiday reads of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and Edward Jones's The Known World.

I also found myself reading classic literature from the 19th century--knowing that it might be a while before I can get back to books from that era once I start my project.  The Classics Circuit inspired me to read Trollope (as you saw last week), and Christopher at the blog ProSe inspired me to read Thomas Hardy.  Although I planned to start with Far from the Madding Crowd at his recommendation, circumstances (which I will talk about next time) encouraged me to read his lesser known novel Under the Greenwood Tree.  Be sure to check out Chris's review of this novel.

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The novel establishes the the setting of many of Hardy's later novels: Wessex, his representation of rural southern England.  Under the Greenwood Tree tells the story of the social life of Mellstock, a small town in Wessex, though the lens of the community's musicians.  Joining the community as the story starts is Fancy Day, the attractive--and ambitious--new school mistress.   Although the Mellstock musicians have served as the parish choir (or "quire") for many years, the community's vicar decides to replace their traditional music with a harmonium played by Fancy.  Like Trollope's Rachel Ray (discussed last week), Under the Greenwood Tree--written less than ten years after Trollope's novel--gently explores the issues that arise as an isolated rural community goes through great social changes as it enters a more cosmopolitan world.

The novel begins with fiddlers and singers caroling throughout the village on Christmas Eve. When the musicians come to the schoolhouse, Dick sees Fancy for the first time and is entranced. But others in the town are charmed by the schoolmistress as well: a wealthy farmer as well as the parish vicar.  Eventually Fancy faces a choice: marriage to the man she loves of whom her father disapproves, marriage to someone who can give her status and luxuries, or marriage to a man who shares her modern worldview.

I loved the pastoral imagery of the novel as well the gentle loving portrayal of the wide variety of "rustic" characters.  When I was reading a bit of the novel aloud to my eleven year old son, he pointed out that as I was breaking into my native dialect and making them all sound like they were raised in the US South.

This is a charming novel, although I gather that it is quite different from Hardy's later (darker) style.  Although the novel is a very happy one in general, there is a small complication at the end to keep you thinking.  Hardy is also known for his insight into character--something not especially well developed in Under the Greenwood Tree.  If you know those limitations going in, you'll find this a perfect holiday read.

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Similar to what Trollope does in Rachel Ray, Hardy uses characters' names to reflect their personality.  Miss Fancy Day does, in fact, try to usher in new days of  what she sees as lavish and modern elegance.  As Tony points out, she is flighty and subject to the whims of fancy.  And Dick Dewy has the naive dewiness of first love.

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The title of Hardy's novel is taken from Shakespeare.  In the play As You Like It, characters gather in the forest of Arden--a place removed from the troubles of the rest of the world--to celebrate the possibilities of love.  The only troubles possible, says the song, are "winter and rough weather."  I wrote about the  fluidity of gender roles and sexuality in the forest of Arden in a post called "TransShakespeare" on my old blog--but Hardy really doesn't play with that kind of idea in Under the Greenwood Tree.  He does echo Shakespeare's idea that society removed from urban concern and rooted (so to speak) in the natural world of the seasons is the place for love to grow--and a place that is seemingly changeless and at the same time a place of profound change.

Shakespeare's work is also echoed in the similarity between the Mellstock Choir and the Rude Mechanicals of A Midsummer Night's Dream.  Like Shakespeare, Hardy draws his characters with a loving and gentle humor.  Sometimes the Bard is a bit broader, but both authors encourage us to think of their characters as deeply rooted in the land, full of both wisdom and naivete, and connected to each other in ways the modern world does not always allow.