The Taming of the Shrew

Let it be made known that henceforth at Rusticanda "Brother J" shall be referred to as Zacharias, in keeping with his personal preference and my command decision as the one who is blogging. Readers take note.

This summer, Zacharias and Giselle and I are directing a production of The Taming of the Shrew with our local CM co-op. Yes, gentle readers: we are putting on a Shakespeare play! Being inveterate Shakespeare lovers all three, I need hardly say that we are excited about the prospect.

The genesis of the project came during one of our homeschool co-op's book club meetings this spring. (I wasn't there myself, but I've heard reports.) The moms were trying to think of ways to keep the co-op active through the summer, and they started talking about drama. Zacharias was there and said something about Shakespeare, and then Giselle (who was also there) got excited about the idea, and the end of it was that Zacharias and Giselle were put in charge of putting on a Shakespeare play with the co-op during the summer. Then they told me about it and I got excited about it; so we are now working as three co-directors overseeing different parts of production (coaching, costumes, props, scheduling, etc).

Yesterday's Shrew meeting

Since then friends from co-op, church, ballet, and college have joined the production, and there is now a full cast of 21 people. We've had three meetings so far, the last one yesterday. In some ways yesterday's meeting felt like the real end of planning and the start of production. For the first time almost the whole cast was together, and we were able to read through the first half of the play. We heard some people read for the first time. We've already had some pleasant surprises with how well people read, and how excited they are to be in the play; but there's plenty of work to be done still. The current date for the performance is at the beginning of August. Until then we will be memorizing lines, getting into characters, making costumes, finding a place to hold the perfomance (*fingers crossed*), collecting props, and rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing.

So, yes. If you should hear us muttering things such as "Why sir, what am I, sir, that I should knock you here sir?" or "Let him that moved you hither remove you hence: I knew you at the first you were a moveable," you will understand that our minds are not deranged (not entirely, at any rate), but we are only remembering our Shakespeare. Now I must hence; and farewell to you all.

Imagination, Beauty, and Creativity

This is from an article by poet Luci Shaw; I'm just going to post the second paragraph.

I have come to believe that beauty is something inherent in creation (and by creation I mean the environment, the created universe in which we live). A sense of the beautiful is so integral, so deeply a part of who we are and what we enjoy as human beings, that we may easily take it for granted. Often flawed, or marred, or distorted as a result of human depravity and failure, beauty is still visible in the fingerprints of the Creator on the natural world, in the wilderness, and in human beings who reflect the Creator's beauty.

Only the individual twisted by wrong choices and destructive relationships into perversity and emptiness will create and worship ugliness. Beauty is perhaps one of the few things that constantly calls us back to God, that reminds us of a standard of goodness, vitality, and reality that embodies the beautiful. The Benedictines hold that beauty is "truth shining into being," a principle adopted by John Keats in his famous line "beauty is truth, truth beauty." In this sense beauty is redemptive and powerful. It can motivate us to turn a corner, to pursue a new objective. It awakens a new awareness in us because it is often surprising enough to startle, showing up in unexpected forms and places.

Tim and I are reading The Christian Imagination by Leland Ryken because it was assigned for our upcoming CM conference for a book discussion. The book is a collection of essays; we're just reading Part 2, "Imagination, Beauty, and Creativity," because the theme of this year's conference is beauty, and the essays in this section seemed to go along with that theme.

I suspect that Luci Shaw is getting at the exact point that will be emphasized at the conference, although she comes at it from a poet's perspective, so I felt like I had to wade through a bit of unsettling sentimental fluff to get to what she was saying. Luckily, what she was saying made the wading worth the effort. The gist of it was that beauty seems like an ornamental extra, but it's important enough for God to include in creation and even in decorative elements in the tabernacle, and it seems to be a vital need of humans created in His image.

We also read an essay entitled "The Christian Imagination" by Janine Langan, but that will take a second reading before I grasp enough to have anything to say about it.