Tina Packer, Shakespeare & Company's Founding Artistic Director, actor, writer -- and one of the country's foremost experts on Shakespeare -- launches her new book Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare's Plays April 7, 2015. Published by Knopf, Women of Will is a fierce and witty exploration -- part master class, part brilliant analysis -- of the women in Shakespeare's plays that illuminates Shakespeare's changing understanding of the feminine and reveals some of his deepest insights.
Packer has synthesized forty years of teaching, textual analysis, and stage experience into Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare's Plays, which charts Shakespeare's evolution and his increasingly empathetic and nuanced portrayal of his female characters. It follows Shakespeare's development from youth to enlightened maturity and explores the spiritual journey he undertook. Most importantly, Packer grapples not only with the language and the historical context of the plays but with them as they were and are actually performed. Packer posits that Shakespeare's imagination, mirrored and revealed in his female characters, develops and deepens until finally the women, his creative knowledge, and a sense of a larger spiritual good come together in the late plays, making clear that when women and men are equal in status and sexual passion, they can-and do-change the world.
"In many ways I've been working on this piece for the whole of my artistic life," says Packer. "I have to ask the question: why should a 21st century feminist spend her time with a dead white male? Well the answer is because I grow, expand, understand myself better with every play in the canon I immerse myself in, and have from the time I was a young actor to becoming a director and teacher. With each play, my awareness expands. He says things in such a way that allows me to understand the world-politically, psychologically, physically, poetically, philosophically-which change my personal and creative life."
Packer began working on Women of Will as a stand-alone theatre piece in the early '90's and over the years, through Guggenheim and Bunting Fellowships, developed it into a five-part production covering five different phases of Shakespeare's artistic life and the women who speak for him. With award-winning and long-time acting partner
Nigel Gore, who plays both men's and women's roles in the production, Packer débuted the epic five-part series, directed by
Eric Tucker (award-winning Bedlam Theatre Artistic Director) at
Shakespeare & Company in 2010. The play, Women of Will continues to perform across the country and around the globe, including a recent and critically-acclaimed Off-Broadway stint.
"Beginning with the early comedies Shakespeare wrote the women as shrews to be tamed or as obedient virgins with no definable independent thought," adds Packer. "The women of the histories are much more interesting. Joan of Arc, possibly the first woman character Shakespeare ever created, is wonderfully alive. Her independent resolution collapses within a few scenes, however, as Shakespeare himself suddenly turns against her. She then yields to the common caricature of his culture and becomes Joan the Enemy, the witch; a woman to be feared and destroyed."
Packer notes once Juliet has led the way, the plays are never the same again. "Shakespeare ceases to write about women as predictable caricatures," continues Packer. "He starts writing them from the inside, embodying their voices, his women become as dimensional, spirited, spiritual, active, and sexual as any of his male characters."
The indomitable Packer, mother of critically-acclaimed actor
Jason Asprey and married to
Dennis Krausnick (S&Co. Director of Training and co-founder), is not one for idleness-once Packer's book was completed she then recorded an audio version. She is currently on a promotional book tour all the while preparing for her role in the world premiere of Mother of the Maid by
Jane Anderson, which opens July 30th in Lenox.
Packer's book signing tour kicks off April 8th with the following itinerary:
April 8, 2015 - The Shakespeare Theatre, Washington, D.C.
April 20, 2015 - The Pearl Theatre, New York, NY (hosted by the Shakespeare Society)
April 25, 2015 -
Shakespeare & Company, Lenox, MA
May 19, 2015 - Modern Theater at Suffolk University, Boston, MA (hosted by the Actor's Shakespeare Project)
For a complete calendar of Packer's upcoming book-signing tour and special events visit
women-of-will.com. For information on
Shakespeare & Company's 38th Performance Season, go to
www.shakespeare.org.
BUY IT NOW:
http://www.randomhouse.com/book/212740/women-of-will-by-tina-packer#blurb_tabs.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR -
Tina Packer is the Founding Artistic Director of
Shakespeare & Company. She has directed most of Shakespeare's plays, acted in seven, and taught the entire canon at multiple colleges and universities, among them Harvard, MIT, and Columbia. Packer was an Associate Artist with the
Royal Shakespeare Company in England, and worked at the Royal Court and Aldwych theatres in London, Leicester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and other regional theatres, as well as for BBC and ITV television. She is the subject of the WGBH documentary Sex, Violence and Poetry: A Portrait of
Tina Packer, and Helen Epstein's biography The Companies She Keeps. She is the recipient of more than 30 awards, honors, and fellowships. In 1994-95 she received Guggenheim and Bunting Fellowships to create and perform Women of Will. Tina holds honorary doctorates of letters from Emerson College, Trinity College, the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and Salem State College to name a few. She was the 1999-2000 Arts Recipient of the Commonwealth Award, the state's highest honor for excellence in the arts. In 2004 she was given the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Travel & Tourism Leadership Award. In 2001 Tina's book, Power Plays: Shakespeare's Lessons in Leadership & Management, co-authored with Columbia Business School professor John O. Whitney, was published by Simon & Schuster, she is also the author of the award-winning Tales from Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Stories for Children, published in 2004 by Scholastic. The performance piece Women of Will has traveled across America as well as internationally. Tina is currently drafting two other books, one will document the aesthetic and teaching techniques of
Shakespeare & Company, and the second book delves into the playing of Cleopatra and Tina's life as an actress, director and 30 years as Artistic, Founder and President of
Shakespeare & Company. She lives with her husband
Dennis Krausnick in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
