Graduation Address

"Convocation Address" (23 October 1988): 1-9. (UA Case 69, Box 2).

Chancellor, President and Vice-Chancellor,
Doctor Downey, members of the Senate and Board of Governors present, honored guests, prize winners, you who have attained your degrees, ladies and gentlemen:

I am profoundly honored to have been invited to deliver the convocation address this evening. I have pondered deeply about what insights I could share with you that could both reflect on your achievements and perhaps help to illuminate the labyrinthine dark passages you face in life's fascinating journey ahead.

The disciplines for which prizes and degrees have been awarded tonight seem at first to be unrelated to one another and yet, as I searched for my theme for this occasion and what it was I had in common with your differing aspirations and pathways, I realized how important they were to me as I encountered them over the years.

You will have heard from the generous introduction given me by Doctor Don Rowan how much Shakespeare has been woven into the pattern of my life, and having been armed with a good Concordance, I shall from time to time allude to the "wise saws and modern instances" on almost any subject which this unparalleled poet, dramatist and observer of mankind has commented upon in his collected works. For example, on literature, the arts and education he has this to say: "They are the books, the arts, the academes, that show, contain and nourish all the world." Nourish indeed. I'm sure we agree.

My personal journey began with the strong inculcation in me by my almost illiterate immigrant parents of the primary need for an education. It was the only means they saw of climbing out of the poverty trap in which they, my brother and I lived in the melting pot slums of Chicago.

My route was through the arts. The theatrical arts. A career fraught with insecurities and self-delusion. Unlike other arts, most young people entering the field of the theatre are motivated more by the adolescent attractions related to escapism, so-called glamour and the need to be the center of attention. A budding writer, producer, musician, painter or sculptor must at least demonstrate early manifestations of talent - not so the aspiring actor. Yet, who is to judge when so many talentless people seem continually to achieve a certain kind of success in this profession? Watch television.

While my parents were skeptical and apprehensive, it was only upon my first professional employment as an actor while still in my first year at Drama School that I began to think that I could actually make the stage my career. When that first weekly paycheck was more than my father's take-home pay my parents were awe-struck and their doubts silenced.

In spite of that early start, to this day I regret leaving university after one term to go to Drama school full time. All my life I've missed that period of concentrated study and intellectual challenge which could have enriched, informed and deepened my work from its early stages onward, both as an actor and a director. I've been playing "catch-up" on my education ever since.

Shakespeare said: "Learning is but an adjunct to ourself. And where we are, our learning likewise is." (Love's Labours Lost, IV, 3-314)

It was only as I matured, did I begin dimly to recognize that theatre was, indeed, an art form which evolved out of a deep need in man to understand the inscrutable mysteries of his existence and his relationship to the human race. I began to comprehend the interrelationship of all the various art forms since what they had in common was this search to express and reveal man to himself - "to hold the mirror up to nature" - "they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time." Says Mr. Shakespeare.

For me today all the art forms are an adventure in discovery, whether in performance: music, dance, theatre, or in the plastic and fine arts - and the arts are everywhere around us - nourishing, as Shakespeare says, our souls, uplifting us from the kitsch, demagoguery and commercialism with which our senses are battered from every direction.

For me, he encompassed it all, appealing to my senses, my heart, my soul and my intellect. He enabled me to better recognize and understand myself and my fellow man.

It may be that this was why I began the project, nearly 20 years ago, to reconstruct a faithful restoration of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre on whose stage he set all the world before us.

At first my motive was simply, perhaps naively, the desire to rectify a glaring omission - that there was NO significant commemoration of this, the most important theatre of western civilization -on or very near the actual site where it once stood almost 400 years ago. Yes, there was (and is) a theatre in Stratford-on-Avon dedicated to performing the works of Shakespeare but it is a modern proscenium arch theatre -now recognized to be unsuitable for the performance of these plays. In any case, Shakespeare lived and wrote the plays in London, many of the greatest of which were first performed on the Globe stage on Bankside.

From this seemingly fanciful idea there grew a conviction that such a faithful reconstruction was a necessity and could become a major international resource for the study, appreciation and performance of the greatest body of dramatic writing ever created.

From this concept arose the International Shakespeare Globe Centre, now in the early stages of construction. It will be a complex of buildings and facilities surrounding the restored Globe, which will include a permanent comprehensive exhibition on the evolution, development and operation of the Globe and its several contemporary playhouses of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, a second smaller theatre based on Shakespeare's contemporary, architect and artist Inigo Jones', plans for an indoor, private playhouse; there will also be a comprehensive audio-visual library, archive and cinema of Shakespeare in performance on film, videotape and sound track from the time these various media began; and most important, it will include a Shakespeare Education Centre with facilities for students, teachers, scholars and theatre practitioners from throughout the world.

The saga of this nearly 20 year effort has been fraught with frustrations, obstacles, passionate political opposition, economic collapse, derision and denigration, establishment hostility and lack of financial support. Yet, this lengthy struggle has enriched my life.

Here I am able to return to the theme with which I began: how these various disciplines which bring you here this evening have impinged on me personally and on our embattled efforts which I have likened to salmon powerfully swimming upstream to reach their pre-destined goal against all obstacles.

It was by virtue of the law and the courts that we were able to resolve the worst crisis we encountered when, as a result of a local council election, in which the project was exploited by political extremists, the site of the Globe, to which we had been given a free lease for 125 years, was brutally snatched away by the repudiation of a legal lease agreement. This resulted in a lawsuit finally resolved in the High Court after 3 long years of nailbiting anxiety. ("The law hath not been dead", Shakespeare commented, "though it hath slept.") With much relief we won back our site. I am now almost an expert on the complexities of the British legal system.

So much for the arts, education and the law.

As for the nursing profession, the Globe project and its traumas were instrumental, I'm told, in putting me into its trustworthy care on two occasions, for life-threatening medical experiences. This has given me a very personal insight into the extraordinary dedication, commitment and skill demanded by that noble calling.

Finally, the Sciences. Clearly, I am much indebted to the medical sciences for the advances and skills developed over the last fifty years, some of which had not been in place for the same illnesses as mine, which prematurely took my mother's life and could have extended my father's.

We are greatly aware of the massive contribution all the sciences have made towards improving the quality of our lives and expanding the knowledge of ourselves and the universe in which we live.

As one whose life has been spent in the world of the theatre and the arts, I have learned that to understand and reveal my fellow men to each Other in their common emotions, one must know them, live with them and interact with them in whatever vocation they serve and from whatever social strata or ethnic or cultural group they spring.

All the various forms of art transcend that which superficially separates us from one another and penetrates the core of what are our common passions of love, hate, jealousy, and pity, pain and ecstasy, as well as our superior intelligence and remarkable abilities.

I hope that you will strive to weave the arts into the fabric of your daily lives - it will reward you richly and transcend the artificial barriers keeping us apart.

Thus, my main theme finds its way back to that labyrinthine journey to which I earlier referred and what, for me at least, illuminated the path ahead. What has lighted my way has been the search for purpose and understanding, the readiness to explore, to try, to test things, ideas and tastes, to turn that lamp of inquiry and inquisitiveness into the dark corners along the way. You will cross paths of others moving in different directions and at a different pace but most everyone will help you illuminate your path with their light and you will theirs with yours. More important than all is the conviction that your goal, like the salmon's, is attainable and must not be deflected. Yes, you may have to take detours and leap over barriers, fall back into the shallows sometime to rest and renew your energies. But you must always return to the mainstream and move forward.

Had I not succeeded, after continuous struggle involving almost a third of my adult life, to attain the Globe reconstruction, I would, nonetheless, not have considered that I had failed or that those 20 years had been wasted. On the contrary, I would never have experienced the lawyers and the courts, the politicians and local government, the architects and engineers, the academics and the students, the nationals of many countries, the business tycoons and kings, queens and princes, the doctors and the nurses (well, I might have met them!), the artists and all the extraordinary people from so many walks of life I have encountered in my lengthy Globe journey, all of whom have deepened the texture and quality of my life.

I sincerely hope all you young people here tonight will know the profound pleasure and deep satisfaction I have experienced, in your own journey into the future. Shakespeare and I salute you and wish you God speed!

"Hourly joys be still upon you!
Juno sings her blessings on you."

"Be merry, you have cause,
So have we all, of joy."