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James to speak on Shakespeare
"I had great pleasure in rereading the whole canon over and over and over," said James, chairman of the Department of Theatre Arts at Mount Holyoke College. "I thought if I could read these plays in a fairly short period of time, I could have an overall comparative vision of them; from that standpoint, it was wonderful." James is often asked if the "Bard of Avon" wrote the plays himself. "I'm for simplicity and I have yet to be persuaded that he did not write them," said James, who was born in London and came to the states in 1968 to work as a set designer for the Joseph Papp Theatre Company in New York City. She later worked in film and television as a designer of costumes and sets. "People often ask me how Shakespeare could have written the plays without having much of an education," she said. "His father was a major person in the town where he lived. Education was different then. People learned Latin. They learned to read and write in Latin. My guess is Shakespeare went to school. He wasn't the son of an itinerant. We don't question Einstein, who did not come from an aristocratic background. We don't question Michelangelo or Aristotle." James came to the long book format by accident, but it is now her signature and it seems to work. She had handwritten an earlier book, "The Genealogy of Greek Mythology," on a scroll. "This was before I had a computer and it took me 20 years to research and write it," she said. "The Shakespeare book did not take as long." When she went to her publisher's office (Gotham books) with the manuscript, she literally rolled it out across his office floor. It was 20-ft. long and 4 ft. wide. "He looked at me and said, 'Vanessa, we don't publish scrolls, we make books. We turn pages,'" said James. "Yet, he came up with a way to divide the manuscript in half horizontally and make the book like an accordion. You can read half the book on one side and flip it over and read half on the other." James fell in love with Greek mythology and Shakespeare at a young age. Her father read the tales of Greek gods and heroes to her at bedtime. "Instead of putting me to sleep, I'd be wide awake, until 4 a.m., thinking about the stories," she said. Later, when she was old enough to have slumber parties, James and her friend would read William Shakespeare out loud to each other. "We were only nine or 10, and I don't think we got much out of it, but it was fun or we would not have done it," James said. When it comes to naming her favorite Shakespeare play, James is reluctant to zero in on one. "Usually it is the play of the moment," she said. "Today it's 'Pericles.' If the Elizabethans had movies, it would have been the Elizabethan equivalent to 'Star Wars.' It's like a soap opera with twists and turns. Another favorite is 'The Tempest.' The play takes place in the time it takes to stage for the play itself. It's full of mystical beauty and imaginative things. It's not based on any other work of either fiction or fact. There is something about it that gets me going. My favorite history play is 'Anthony and Cleopatra.'" While James read and reread the canon of Shakespeare to write the genealogies of his 1,000 characters - some historical, some mythological and some fictitious - she has yet to trace her own family's genealogy. "I might do it for my mother. She's interested in that sort of thing. Shakespeare's genealogies are personal for me in another kind of a way," said James. I |
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