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2141 Wyoming Avenue NW, Suite 41 202-483-8646
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2141 Wyoming Avenue NW, Suite 41 202-483-8646
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| John Andrews is the founder and President of The Shakespeare Guild, a global nonprofit corporation which promotes the endeavors of a broad array of cultural institutions in the arts and the humanities. Under the auspices of the Guild, he created the Sir John Gielgud Award for Excellence in the Dramatic Arts, which has been given to actors such as Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Derek Jacobi. Through the years, he has worked with some of the greatest actor of our age: Julie Harris, Patrick Stewart, F. Murray Abraham, Helen Hayes, Jeremy Irons, James Earl Jones, and Sir Peter Ustinov, to name a few. In his career, he has worked closely with the Folger Shakespeare Library in D.C., BBC/Time-Life and PBS. Andrews has taught at several universities: Tennessee, Florida State, Catholic, George Washington, and Georgetown, as well as appearing on numerous radio and television programs. Along with the yearly Golden Quill Award Ceremony, the Shakespeare Guild celebrates and endeavors to cultivate a larger and more appreciative audience for Shakespeare, the dramatist who has been applauded in every culture as our most reliable guide to the mileposts of life. |
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frleft to right: Dame Judy Dench, John Andrews, Kenneth Branagh and Sir Derek Jacobi at the 2000 Golden Quill Awards |
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For more information on how to join
the Guild Click here
for additional information on benefits of Guild membership Click here for
7/30/01 Washington Post article and picture about the July 27, 2001 |
Shakespeare Still Resonates: John Andrews Relishes the Bardic Moment
John F. Andrews -- a Shakespeare scholar, impresario and educator -- moves in the most rarefied of dramatic circles. As
editor for the venerable Everyman Shakespeare series, he has enlisted an impressive cast of actors to write forewords; they
include F. Murray Abraham, John Gielgud, Hal Holbrook, James Earl Jones, Kevin Kline, Kelly McGillis, Tony Randall, and
Tim Pigott Smith. As creator of the annual Sir John Gielgud Award for Excellence in the Dramatic Arts, whose first three
winners were Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi, and (this spring) Zoe Caldwell, he mingles at the award galas with performers and
guests such as Kenneth Branagh, Marvin Hamlisch, George Plimpton, Lynn Redgrave, Diana Rigg, and Patrick Stewart.
For Andrews, who was born in Carlsbad, New Mexico, the turning point was a course on Renaissance literature during his
sophomore year, taught by then-professor Sherman Hawkins. "That was the experience that really made me decide to major in
English," recalls Andrews.
After a year studying teaching at Harvard, Andrews headed to Vanderbilt to earn a Ph.D. There he decided to specialize in
Shakespeare -- thanks to a chance assignment working for Shakespeare Studies, an academic journal. After four years
teaching at Florida State University, Andrews moved to Washington, D.C., to take a job with the renowned Folger
Shakespeare Library. There he was assigned to edit another journal, Shakespeare Quarterly, oversee the library's
book-publishing efforts, and head the Folger Institute, an educational consortium for Renaissance studies.
While at the Folger, Andrews made his first concerted efforts toward popularizing Shakespeare's works. Between 1979 and
1982, the Folger helped organize an exhibition and an accompanying book called "Shakespeare: The Globe and the World." In
addition to the usual centuries-old artifacts and costumes, Andrews included what he calls "a lot of junk" -- items that showed
how pop culture has long been fascinated with Shakespeare. The tour -- originally planned for six cities -- was so popular that
it was expanded to eight.
Andrews's outreach efforts reached an apogee in the early 1980s as PBS broadcast new productions of Shakespeare's plays
and distributed free teaching materials to schools across the country. A follow-up project was devised, in which plays were
broken up into easy-to-digest, one-hour, televised segments hosted by Walter Matthau. But poor scheduling doomed the
project after its first season, and Andrews moved to the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1984. When offered the
chance to edit books again, Andrews jumped at the chance, first with Doubleday and then with Everyman.
"I think my attraction is partly that compared to any other writer, you find a breadth of vision and understanding that is
incomparable," Andrews says. "The language continues to be amazing. Shakespeare's always ahead of us, no matter the latest
'-ism.' F. Murray Abraham said that when he played the role of Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, people would come
up to him after the performance to marvel that 400-year-old jokes were still so funny."
Aside from editing the Everyman series, Andrews, who lives in Washington, D.C., and is the father of Eric '93 and Lisa '95, is
writing a book on the role of Shakespeare in the Lincoln assassination. Andrews conceived the idea after stumbling upon a
copy of a program for a play whose cast included three Booth brothers, one of whom was future assassin John Wilkes
Booth. "I find it very interesting to imagine what must have been going through Booth's mind when he was waiting to go on," Andrews
says. "In the play, the conspirators bathe in Caesar's blood, and five months later he acted it out as a political act, an act of war,
committed 12 and a half feet above a real stage."
"There are always things in any Shakespeare play that echo contemporary events," he says. "Washington seems to be the
perfect place, partly because we're accustomed to this city being a stage where great issues are debated, which is something
characteristic of most Shakespearean plays. As Hamlet says, drama is an attempt to hold a mirror to nature. Here, we hold
Shakespeare as a mirror to human nature as we see it displayed in Washington. It can often be a very good reflector."
-- Louis Jacobson '92, from the
Princeton University Class Archives :
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