Sponsors

~ In ways fit for the 21st century, presenting anew the shared heritage of Shakespeare’s spoken word ~

"Shakespeare is a kind of miracle", Tom Stoppard

OUR GRATITUDE

We are immensely grateful for the incredibly generous help of the following benefactors to ensure the project reached this successful prototype stage:

Patrons

Mrs Terence Delaney, USA

Mr Mirko Ilic, Mirko Ilic Inc., New York

Besides our hard-working office crew, we would like to thank Mr Erik Anthony Von Lim, a top Microsoft specialist in Asia, who has gone above and beyond the call of duty to help us overcome all manner of technical challenges to make this e-project feasible and create optimal formats for actors, teachers and directors.  Any shortcomings at this juncture are on the editorial side, for which the author of this page takes full responsibility as General Editor.

We are also grateful to Lord and Lady Feversham and Mr Philip Miles for their generous time in dispensing advice on I.T., business compliance and related matters.

Finally, our thanks to actors / teachers Mr Paul Holme and Miss Pinky Amador who allowed us to experiment on their students.  Multiple award-winner Miss Amador, a graduate of Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, was in the original cast of Miss Saigon under Sir Nicholas Hytner.

"I was thrilled.  Shakespeare is a tough call for Asian students, but they thoroughly enjoyed Versebuster's slide show presentation [Dec 2013] interspersed with lively and entertaining commentary.  The clever graphics and layout made it easy to see all the antitheses, repetitions, puns at a glance.  It was like watching a digital John Barton.

The students were captivated and wanted more.

This was an early prototype - I'm fascinated to see the advances since then. "

Pinky Amador

"In its bold conception and vast scope Versebuster promises to place at your fingertips arguably the most comprehensive guide on how to deliver Shakespeare that anyone has yet attempted, and this in a user-friendly, digital format ideally suited to modern students of the Bard.

So much thought has gone into the printable scripts that accompany the digital media they are, in themselves, works-of-art and a joy to use.

I eagerly await the completion of this Herculean endeavour."

Paul Holme

THE NEXT LEVEL

Now that we have proven in workshops that the Versebuster approach greatly accelerates the ability of actors to lift the words off the page in ways Shakespeare broadly intended, we are focusing on funding to bring the project to full fruition.  This will take 15-20 years to reach, but create, we hope, a lasting legacy that will benefit future generations of actors, directors and teachers.

WHAT IT COSTS

The typical Shakespeare play costs US$12,000 to break down into its Versebuster component parts (taking into account staffing and running costs).  These component parts comprise:

• the 600 page ePlay resource for each play, packed with line-by-line performance information that can be projected on walls in workshops and classrooms, or enjoyed on laptops, iPads, and iPhones

• a wide variety of printable theatre scripts that each serve a distinct and useful performance purpose

• the speeches of the play in audio, together, where applicable, with their cue-lines to point up all the performance clues embedded in the text (as shown in the ePlay and the more sophisticated scripts we produce)

If you share our patrons’ belief that the flame of good Shakespeare-speaking must be kept alive via learning formats that have greater appeal to the modern generation, why not consider adding your name, or your company’s name, to our roll of honour?

MORTAL THREATS TO SHAKESPEARE’S ART

As the 400^th anniversary commemoration of Shakespeare’s life and work draws to a close it would seem from all the publicity it engendered worldwide that his future at the heart of Western culture is secure and that it would be preposterous to suggest otherwise  However, a distinction needs to be made between literature and performance.  Shakespeare as literature on the shelves of the Bodleian Library or the Folger Institute is, of course, forever assured; but 50 to 100 years hence we are not so confident on the performance front.  Two seismic cultural forces are at work.  In relation to Shakespeare, neither is benign.

GATHERING STORM CLOUDS

Part 1

The first storm-front is gathering in academia and on campuses throughout the Anglosphere.  The dominant PC view now emerging is that a phenomenon such as Shakespeare is the oppressive and unfair product of historic white, male privilege.  Therefore, the argument runs, in the new global village where all cultures are equal, Shakespeare should be relegated in the public curriculum, or, better still, dropped altogether to give other cultures 'artistic breathing space'.  This was the argument advanced earlier in 2016 by Yale University students ¹ and at a school in California ² (links at end).  That this argument is gaining traction among young, non-Caucasians is certainly understandable - sixteenth Elizabethan / Jacobean England must seem very remote to those who are not its descendants.  Two things alarm us though.

First, the protest drew fairly wide support from members of the Yale faculty.  There seems here a failure to grasp that Shakespeare's voice is universal.  This is because he articulates the human condition, and the human condition is independent of colour, race, background, geography, sexuality or belief.  At various points throughout our lives we all feel anger, jealousy, envy, revengeful, scorned, spurned, in love, out of love, unwanted, unappreciated, abused, ambitious, greedy, and so forth.  Shakespeare's gift to mankind is that he wrote with dazzling psychological insight about imperfect people subjected to huge pressures in an imperfect world.  All other claims about him are, in comparison, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.

Second, the view that Shakespeare is merely the product of unfair privilege is aggressively promoted by social justice warriors across the Anglosphere, many of whom are themselves white, rich and privileged.  As Shakespeare was a rural grammar-school boy the irony cannot be missed!  The essential flaw of this argument, it seems to us, is to judge the realities of pre-16^th century England through the prism of contemporary preoccupations with diversity.  

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In 2001 the UK's Secretary of State for Education, David Blunkett, was forced to defend Shakespeare in schools ³ against those in his own party, the Labour Government of the day, who saw Shakespeare as ripe for eradication from Britain’s national curriculum as he no longer suited their prescription for modern, multicult Britain.  The debate then evolved into how Shakespeare should be taught.  In this respect we have some sympathy with those who argued, and continue to argue, that Shakespeare in schools is boring.  Where we part company is that we don’t believe this need be so.  What has been lacking all too often was, and still is, imagination in teaching it.

To cut the story short, a consensus quickly emerged that giving ‘kidz’ dumbed-down texts was the worst way, while getting children on their feet and speaking it was the best way.  In his 2006 book Beyond Words: How Language Reveals the Way We Live Now ⁴, British broadcaster John Humphries cites this example of the former:

which the alternative text translates as:

To this we can add our own depressing example seen in a textbook at an international school in Hong Kong:

To illustrate the more productive way, Dr Bethan Marshall, a lecturer in English education at King’s College London ⁵, has argued that it would be better to assess pupils’ Bardic knowledge ‘...through performance’.

This will not appease PC forces that believe Shakespeare is an irredeemable symbol of white male privilege regardless of how he is packaged or taught.  Their guns on this issue may have been temporarily silenced, but they have not gone away or given up; they are constantly regrouping, as the incident this year at Yale illustrates.

Part 2

The second storm-front takes a different form.  A recent report by the sociolinguistic department of the University of York ⁶ states that, with the great migration of peoples to America and Europe we see today, by 2066 the '[TH]' sound will be lost to London and other high migrant areas as so many immigrants cannot manage it.  Needless to say by the year 2100, or sooner, that would have a devastating, if not fatal, impact on Shakespeare-speaking.  In 1603, more or less the pinnacle of Shakespeare’s career, Sir Walter Raleigh was threatened by the Crown prosecutor with the words:

'I thou thee, thou traitor! '

Difficult though they are sometimes to interpret, the importance of switches between the formal ‘you’ and the informal ‘thou’ forms cannot be overstated in Shakespeare performance.  And yet there are opinion-formers on both sides of the Atlantic who feel that, if we must insist on Shakespeare, at the very least it should be re-written to exclude such archaic forms.  They are seemingly ignorant of the vital contribution the ‘thou’ form makes to the status games of a Shakespeare plot.  What is Shakespeare without such conscious manoeuvrings of status and the unconscious ones of Fortune’s fickle wheel?

According to the conclusions of the report, the best we could hope for by 2100 is 'I fou fee, fy traitor'.  It is an extraordinary thought that in 100 years perhaps the only counties where actors will still be able to enunciate Shakespeare will be in the barely-English speaking, low-inward-migration republics of India and the Philippines.  Of those two, however, only India has a Shakespeare pedigree.

A SHAKESPEARE APPROACH FIT FOR THE 22ND CENTURY

To push back against these tides of cultural erosion may appear as futile as the efforts of King Canute, but we should at least try.  Otherwise our grandchildren, and their children and grandchildren, may be deprived of one the greatest art-forms ever devised in the history of humanity.  And it is, of course, Shakespeare’s humanity that above all makes him fit for all mankind.  As his rival and friend Ben Jonson put it:

He was not of an age, but for all time!

One way to achieve this is to vigorously repackage Shakespeare performance technique in new and imaginative ways that appeal to the Facebook generation.  In the TEFL industry (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) the better schools use a range of colourful, interactive, multi-media means to help students speak the language and make it a more enjoyable process.  When people enjoy learning they learn faster.  Why not the same with the language of Shakespeare?  We have made a beginning, but it costs a lot of money.  With proper funding we can devise new and better tools.  Unfortunately the prospect of help from Arts Council England is poor and dwindling.  Its one billion pound annual budget is now only funding "ethnically diverse projects" ^{7 & 8}.

The diversity is not, however, as great as one would be led to believe.  Arts Council England funds the Muslim Festival of Cultures, but does not fund, say, a Christian Festival of Cultures, or a Jewish one ⁹.  

CONCLUSION

To avoid causing careless offence to any of the great variety of our readers, we make it abundantly clear that we have no problem at all with completely non-white, or female-only, or gay-only productions of Shakespeare.  Indeed, some of the Versebuster squad have been in gender-benders and the like themselves.

If we were casting our own production, our main criteria would be the ability of an actor to handle the verse and the antithetical prose, as well as the strength and clarity of their voice.  Gender, sexuality or colour would not come into it.  Nor would physical disability unless it placed impossible constraints on the part, or on the production as a whole.

However, we believe that is a decision for producers and directors only, and governments should not impose casting quotas to suit political agendas.  Let the theatre-going-public decide by voting their approval or disappointment through ticket-sales.  Or is it being suggested that never again can there be an all-white production of Shakespeare?  That way tyranny lies – exactly the kind of thing Shakespeare articulated against.

WHERE VERSEBUSTER STANDS NOW

After Richard III, due for release in March 2017, our next two plays are Romeo & Juliet and A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream.  We would dearly welcome sponsors to help with these two.  Accordingly we are developing the following sponsorship strategy.  It is at concept stage and we are aware it needs considerable refining to give sponsors the confidence to step forward.

In essence the strategy provides for different tiers of sponsorship to suit different budgets and different ways of helping.  Most sponsorship will be in the form of money, but some would be very welcome in the form of free professional help – accounts, legal matters, copyright, trademark and patents, editorial, etc., etc.  And some in ways we have not yet imagined.

Here are some examples of the concept (so things are clear, if you haven’t already, please click first on the big orange thingies on the Homepage to view the DEMOs):

ROLL OF HONOUR - PLATINUM

Sponsor a whole category of the canon – Comedies, Histories, Tragedies, or Romances >> US$100,000 for the first three; $50,000 for the smaller Romance category.  Your name, or your company’s name, will appear on all the dust jackets and related products, and on our website’s permanent Roll of Honour, and in all related marketing material.

ROLL OF HONOUR - DIAMOND

Sponsor your favourite play >> US$12,000.  Your name, or your company’s name, will appear on all the dust jacket for that play, on our website’s permanent Roll of Honour, and in all related marketing material.

ROLL OF HONOUR - GOLD

Sponsor the ePlays – ePlays are the engine of Versebuster and the most crucial component.  It is always our start and end point >> US$6,000.  Your name, or your company’s name, will appear on the ePlays dust jacket, on our website’s permanent Roll of Honour, and in all related marketing material.

ROLL OF HONOUR - SILVER

Sponsor the great variety of printable theatre scripts for performance and workshop purposes >> $US 2,000 for Comedy of Errors (2,000 lines) up to US$4,000 for Hamlet (4,000 lines).  Your name, or your company’s name, will appear on the theatre script dust jackets, on our website’s permanent Roll of Honour, and in all related marketing material.

ROLL OF HONOUR - BRONZE / SILVER

Sponsor the audio recordings of the play’s speeches >> US$1,500 up to US $4,000 for the most speech-intensive plays.  Your name, or your company’s name, will appear on the audio listings, on our website’s permanent Roll of Honour, and in all related marketing material.

OTHER WAYS TO HELP

• Platinum > Sponsor our website to help maintain and improve it and have your name, or your company’s name, in a prominent position on the Home and other pages.  Cost of a full-time web master based in our Far East satellite office is US$8,400 p.a. times ten years >> US$84,000.  Your name, or your company’s name, will appear on our website’s permanent Roll of Honour, and in all the publicity and related marketing material.

• Platinum > Sponsor out slide-show teaching materials and have your name, or your company’s name, on the cover of over eighty slide shows that will be used on personal computers, in classrooms, workshops and seminars all around the world.  Cost of a PowerPoint specialist in Asia would be US$8,400 p.a. times five to ten years = US$42,000 to US$84,000.  Your name, or your company’s name, will appear on our website’s permanent Roll of Honour, and in all the related marketing material.

• Platinum > Sponsor the Quick Reference Performance Library.  We are trying to find a retired person to do it on an expenses only basis initially, but who wouldn’t appreciate a little remuneration if it was on offer? $US6,000 p.a. times five years >> US$30,000.  Have your name, or your company’s name prominently displayed in that section, on our website’s permanent Roll of Honour, and in all related marketing material.

• Platinum, Diamond or Gold > Sponsor a private or public 50 minute Versebuster promo performance / lecture.  Main cost is the initial set-up of the production, devising the script, actors’ wages, rehearsals, etc.  Once done once, it can be honed and refined to be repeated as and when at suitable times and venues.  US$5,000 first performance + venue hire + publicity costs.  Falling to $1,500 for further performances + venue hire + publicity costs.  Your name, or your company’s name, will appear on our website’s permanent Roll of Honour, and in all the publicity and related marketing material.

• Diamond, Gold, Silver or Bronze > Sponsor a private or public workshop >> US$1,000 to US$2,000 + venue hire + publicity costs, OR a series of workshops in specific territories >> US$5,000 - $US10,000.  Have your name, or your company’s name, on our website’s permanent Roll of Honour, and in all related marketing material.

• Gold > Help us with the one-time of cost of Lock Lizard that prevents the copyright-theft of, or the tampering with, our product >> US$4,995.  Have your name, or your company’s name, on our website’s permanent Roll of Honour, and in all related marketing material.

• Gold or Silver > Sponsor YouTube and related promo videos >> US$3,000- US$5,000.  Have your name, or your company’s name, prominently displayed on the promos, on our website’s permanent Roll of Honour, and in all related marketing material.

• Gold or Silver > Help us with free legal advice concerning copyright protection, trademark registration and patents across various territories.  Help us prepare trademark registration and patent applications.  Have your name, or your company’s name, on our website’s permanent Roll of Honour, and in all related marketing material.

• Gold or Silver > Help us with free accounting and budget management.  Have your name, or your company’s name, on our website’s permanent Roll of Honour, and in all related marketing material.

• Gold, Silver or Bronze > Take an Ad on our site.  Have your name, or your company’s name, on our website’s permanent Roll of Honour, and in all related marketing material.

• Gold, Silver or Bronze > Help us in any other way that we have failed to list here! Have your name, or your company’s name, on our website’s permanent Roll of Honour, and in all related marketing material.

• Bronze > Tell fellow Shakespeare enthusiasts about us.  If they are at a loose end and money is not the most pressing issue for them, refer them to our Jobs page in the Main Menu to see if there is an opening for their skillset and talent.  In most cases the work particularly suits retired or semi-retired professionals who would like the idea of getting stuck into a project of great cultural importance and ultimately profit from their long experience and passion for Shakespeare.  If you hit the jackpot with one of your personal contacts consider your name added to the website’s permanent Roll of Honour!

John Nobody
General Editor

16^th October 2016

REFERENCES

Shakespeare – oppressive white male privilege / dead white poets

¹ Yale University

http://reason.com/blog/2016/06/01/yale-students-tell-english-profs-to-stop

http://lawnewz.com/high-profile/yale-students-seek-to-abolish-oppressive-courses-that-include-white-poets-like-shakespeare/

² California school

http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=6596

Eradication of Shakespeare from the British national curriculum proposed by government officials in 2001 and opposed by UK Secretary of State for Education, David Blunkett MP

³ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1321862/Shakespeare-must-stay-in-English-exam-says-Blunkett.html

British broadcaster John Humphries on ‘kidz’ Shakespeare (though the book only deals briefly with this aspect)

⁴ Beyond Words: How Language Reveals the Way We Live Now by John Humphries, Hodder & Stoughton, 2006

Dr Bethan Marshall, a lecturer in English education at King’s College London.  Article in the Sunday Telegraph, April 23 2006

⁵ Brush up your Shakespeare: for a pass you need to know…nothing.

Disappearance of 'TH' sound over next century

⁶ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/09/28/th-sound-to-vanish-from-english-language-by-2066-because-of-mult/

Arts Council England and the Sir Trevor Nunn 2015 casting controversy

⁷ http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/news/trevor-nunn-defends-all-white-shakespeare-histories-10457512.html

As a response to this, Simon Mellor, Head of the British Government’s Arts Council England which disperses £830m p.a. (US$1.2 billion) has stated:

"Only ethnically diverse projects will receive government funding."

⁸ http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/08/17/arts-union-blasts-shakespeare-production-for-having-white-actors-and-no-disabled-quota/

No further UK government funding of Christian culture

⁹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arts_Council_England