For a brief biography of Mr. Andrews, click here.
For details about his multifaceted career as an educator, writer, editor,
event producer, and program host, click on the blue links in the paragraphs
that follow.
OUTREACH THROUGH POPULAR MEDIA
Among the many topics that Mr. Andrews has addressed as an author and speaker
is Shakespeare's impact on modern culture. In a 1989 program note for Washington's
WETA Magazine, for example,
he brought a whimsical approach to the playwright's extraordinary hold on
New World audiences. In 2011 he joined historian Dwight Pitcaithley as co-author
of a New York Times column
about America's Civil War, approaching it as a tragedy that recalled Shakespeare's
treatment of such Old World conflicts as the Wars of the Roses. That article
drew upon an October 1990 piece
in The
Atlantic, where Mr. Andrews had discussed the Lincoln assassination
as an event that echoed Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Macbeth.
Mr. Andrews had also explored this resonant topic in Humanities
magazine, as well as in remarks for audiences in such venues as the Smithsonian
Institution, the legendary QE2, the
University of Cambridge, the
Folger Shakespeare Library,
Johns Hopkins University, and Princeton University. He'd addressed it, too,
in interviews that aired on the Voice of America and on NPR's Sunday "Weekend
Edition," as well as in documentaries produced by NPR
and PBS.
In the spring of 2017 Mr. Andrews revisited the Ides of March with reporter
Ellen Berkowitz on Santa Fe's KSFR;
a few weeks later he responded to a Washington
Post column about a controversial staging of Julius Caesar
in Central Park.
For Mr. Andrews' observations about a January 2014 "NT Live" presentation
of Coriolanus, see James M. Keller's article in Pasatiempo.
And for a selection of Mr. Andrews' op-eds and letters to the editor, many
of which have drawn upon the playwright for perspectives on current affairs,
see his comments about Boring
Headlines, Contraspeak, and
Sarah Palin in the Washington Post,
and his remarks about such topics as Eliot
Spitzer, John McCain, Ransom
Note, Read My Hips, Hale
to Newt, Economic Contraction,
Empty Chair, Saving
Privatizer Ryan, Edward Snowden,
House Divided, Praise
for The New Mexican, A Focal
Point for the Railyard, Donald Trump,
Sean Spicer, Hypocritic
Oath, Tweety Bird, A
Salute to Journey Santa Fe, Promised
End, The Real Russian Hoax, The
Party of Trump, Trumpidemic, They
Came To Prey, Command,
Not Commandeer, Postal Shenanigans,
Coming Together, and History
Teaches in the Santa Fe New Mexican.
You might also wish to sample Mr. Andrews' reviews for The
Washington Post and The
American Scholar, and explore the coverage he's received in periodicals
like The Chronicle of Higher
Education (both before and after the BBC
series known as The Shakespeare Plays), Time,
The Christian Science Monitor,
The New York Times Magazine
(a witty column by Russell Baker that prompted a lively exchange about Mr.
Andrews' 1984 debate with Oxford historian A.L.
Rowse on PBS's "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour"), The
Washington Post, and U.S. News
and World Report.
In December of 1996 Mr. Andrews and several of his Guild colleagues participated
in A Stellar Shakespearean Weekend,
offering attendees a special preview screening of Kenneth Branagh’s epic
Hamlet film, and collaborating with the Smithsonian Institution
and the Folger Shakespeare Library on a symposium that included a Susan
Stamberg interview with the star and filmmaker (portions of which were later
broadcast over National Public Radio) and a panel that featured Sir Derek
Jacobi. Those festivities received front-page coverage in The Shakespeare
Newsletter.
A few years later, after the Guild launched SPEAKING
OF SHAKESPEARE at the National Press Club in Washington, Mr. Andrews
arranged a series of programs in the Windy City to help the Chicago
Shakespeare Theater open its new home on Navy Pier; during the early
months of 2000, he hosted wide-ranging dialogues with journalist Garry Wills
and actor Sir Derek Jacobi. In March of 2005 he presided over a memorable
discussion with critic Harold Bloom
and director Karin Coonrod that focused on her production of Coriolanus
for Theatre for a New Audience.
Between 2001 and 2007, while he was overseeing the Nation's Capital Branch
of the English-Speaking Union, Mr. Andrews worked closely with the British
Embassy and the British Council. One benefit of those relationships was
an opportunity to participate in the Council's prestigious Cambridge
Seminar. During that period Mr. Andrews also presided over more than
a dozen events that were recorded by C-SPAN
for the American cable network's weekend Book
TV series, among them a 2007 C-SPAN2 interview with author E. R.
Braithwaite, who gave us To
Sir, With Love. Meanwhile he assisted BBC Radio 4 with two Any
Questions? programs and two lectures in honor of Alistair
Cooke, the first in London in 2005 with Senator
John McCain as speaker, the second in Santa Barbara in 2008 with playwright
David
Mamet as speaker. In October of 2004, several months before the first
of these occasions, Mr. Andrews had attended a Westminster Abbey memorial
service for Mr. Cooke, and had played a significant role in a preceding
discussion of ways in which Mr. Cooke's many contributions
to Anglo-American relations might best be commemorated.
During the spring of 2008, shortly after Mr. Andrews and his wife moved
from DC to the capital of their native state, he took part in a festive
celebration of Shakespeare's birthday, not in Stratford-upon-Avon or London
but in the Egyptian city the dramatist helped immortalize with Antony
and Cleopatra. Founded by Alexander the Great, and renowned for the
most extensive and influential library of classical antiquity, Alexandria
now boasts a new Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and Mr. Andrews joined library
director Ismael Serageldin, scholar Sahar Hamouda, and a talented cast of
university students in a commemoration of "The
Infinite Variety of Shakespeare." Mr. Andrews' remarks focused on "Shakespeare's
Alexandrian Revels."
In 2011 Mr. Andrews collaborated with Santa Fe's majestic Lensic Performing
Arts Center on a special presentation of The Tempest that starred
Sir Derek as Prospero and his partner
Richard Clifford as Prospero. This
musical adaptation commemorated two significant anniversaries: a Whitehall
presentation of Shakespeare's play in 1611 and the founding of a "brave
New World" capital a few months earlier. In 2012 Mr. Andrews drew upon those
themes once again, joining forces with the NEW MEXICO MUSEUM OF ART in Santa
Fe for a series of "Centennial
Fridays" that commemorated a century of statehood for the Land of Enchantment.
Mr. Andrews made several appearances in William Safire's popular
"On Language" column for the New York Times Magazine,
beginning with a June 1992 contribution in which he compared
Ross Perot to Prospero. In April of 2009 he assisted the English-Speaking
Union with a festive tribute to Mr.
Safire at the British Embassy in Washington; sadly, Mr. Safire passed
away a few months after that gathering.
In 2016, to mark "Shakespeare 400," a global commemoration of the playwright's
life and legacy, Mr. Andrews arranged a number of programs in New York,
Santa Fe, and Washington. Many of them focused on the Folger Shakespeare
Library, which had generously sponsored a national tour of First Folios
from its incomparable holdings. For background on this special exhibition,
visit the website of Albuquerque station KUNM,
where you'll find several items of interest, among them a link to Spencer
Beckwith's conversation with Mr. Andrews and Mary Kershaw, director of the
New Mexico Museum of Art. To help promote the Folger initiative, Mr. Andrews
also took part in three other broadcasts, among them one on Albuquerque's
KKOB (with news director Pat Allen), and another on Mary Charlotte Domandi's
"Santa Fe Radio Cafe."
A January 2020 article in the New York Times called attention to
some uncanny parallels between what happens in King Charles III,
a brilliant 2014 script by playwright Mike Bartlett, and what we'd been
hearing about a minor crisis in Britain's royal family. Mr. Andrews had
been immensely impressed with Mr. Bartlett's "future history play" when
he and his wife attended a Broadway performance of it in November of 2015;
and so he learned, both in a post-show conversation and in a series of email
exchanges with the superb actor who
starred in the title role, was Tim
Pigott-Smith. Tim had played Angelo in the BBC-TV production of Measure
for Measure, and he was now depicting a very different kind of
ruler in theaters on both sides of the Atlantic. Shortly before his untimely
death in 2017, he revisited that fascinating role in Rupert Goold's riveting
adaptation of the drama for television.
EDITIONS AND OTHER PUBLICATIONS
In the years between 1989 and 1992, thousands of readers enjoyed The
Guild Shakespeare, a 19-volume set of the playwright's works that
Mr. Andrews produced, in collaboration with graphic artist Barry
Moser, for the Doubleday Book and Music Clubs. See Volume One,
with its eloquent forewords by Helen Hayes and F. Murray Abraham, and Volume
Six, with its memorable reflections
on two of Shakespeare's history plays by Patrick Stewart and Christopher
Plummer, for illustrations of the pleasures this edition provided its subscribers.
Similar treats greeted those who opened the introductory pages for Volumes
Two, with forewords by Julie
Harris and Brian Bedford, Three,
with a foreword by Ian Richardson, Four,
with forewords by Sir John Gielgud and Tony Randall, Five,
with a foreword by Jeremy Irons, Seven,
with forewords by Michael Kahn and Alec McCowen, Eight,
with forewords by Sir Derek Jacobi and Celeste Holm, Nine,
with a foreword by Jane Howell, Ten,
with a foreword by Claire Bloom, Eleven,
with a foreword by John Houseman, Twelve,
with a foreword by Kevin Kline, Thirteen,
with a foreword by Toby Robertson, Fourteen,
with forewords by James Earl Jones and Zoe Caldwell, Fifteen,
with forewords by Kelly McGillis and Michael Langham, Sixteen,
with a foreword by Sir Donald Sinden, and Seventeen,
with forewords by Hal Holbrook and Michael Learned. Because of its unusual
size, with three plays rather than two, volume Eighteen
contained no foreword. Nor did a concluding volume on Shakespeare's Sonnets
and Poems.
Between 1992 and 1995 Mr. Andrews revised and significantly augmented his
Guild editions of the sixteen plays that were to be featured in
a paperback collection known as The
Everyman Shakespeare. Like its forebear, it retained significant
aspects of the original 16th- and 17th-century printings, and featured insightful
commentary by a number of today's most prominent actors and directors. For
an illustration of what it offered, see the front matter for the Everyman
presentation of Antony
and Cleopatra, with its charming Foreword by Tony Randall. Other
volumes provided texts and facing-page notes for As
You Like It, with a foreword by Michael Kahn, Coriolanus,
with a foreword by Charles Dance, Hamlet,
with a foreword by Sir Derek Jacobi, Julius
Caesar, with a foreword by Sir John Gielgud, King
Lear, with a foreword by Hal Holbrook, Macbeth,
with a foreword by Zoe Caldwell, Measure
for Measure, with a foreword by Tim Pigott-Smith, The
Merchant of Venice, with a foreword by Kelly McGillis, A
Midsummer Night's Dream, with a foreword by F. Murray Abraham,
Much Ado About Nothing,
with a foreword by Kevin Kline, Othello,
with a foreword by James Earl Jones, Romeo
and Juliet, with a foreword by Julie Harris, The
Tempest, with a foreword by Sir John Gielgud, Twelfth
Night, with a foreword by Alec McCowen, and The
Winter's Tale, with a foreword by Adrian Noble.
A few years earlier, grateful readers had welcomed William
Shakespeare: His World, His Work, His Influence, Mr. Andrews' 3-volume
1985 Scribners reference set,
an extraordinary and enthusiastically-received
encyclopedia
with contributions by such luminaries
as Anthony Burgess, Sir
John Gielgud, Jonathan Miller, and
Sir Peter Ustinov, and its 2001 companion
trilogy, Shakespeare's World and
Work, an encyclopedia that was designed primarily for teachers
and students.
While Mr. Andrews was completing his 1985 Scribners set, he accepted an
invitation from the Dictionary of Literary Biography to compile
and comment on a wide range of reactions to "Shall
I Die?" -- a peculiar lyric that received front-page coverage in the
New York Times when Gary Taylor, believing it to be an early work
by Shakespeare, announced that it was to be included in a forthcoming Oxford
University Press edition of the playwright's complete works. By the time
a New Oxford Shakespeare collection came out in 2016, few of the
poem's skeptical detractors would have been shocked to learn that it had
been quietly removed from its provisional niche in the Bardic canon.
In 1987 Mr. Andrews contributed a lengthy overview of Shakespeare's life
and career (here reproduced in two segments, one
and two) to another DLB
collection, edited by eminent scholar Fredson
Bowers, that focused on Elizabethan Dramatists.
In 1993 he compiled, and contributed a comprehensive article to, ROMEO
AND JULIET: Critical Essays, a widely-used
Garland anthology that has now been reissued under the Routledge
imprint. A year later, in 1994, excerpts from Mr. Andrews' "Falling in Love:
The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet" were republished in Shakespeare's
Christian Dimension: An Anthology of Commentary by Roy Battenhouse.
For Mr. Andrews' views about the early printings of Shakespeare's poems
and plays, see "Site-Reading Shakespeare's
Dramatic Scores" and "Textual Deviancy
in The Merchant of Venice"; and read the pertinent pages in
The Shakespeare Wars
for Ron Rosenbaum's enthusiastic response to his contention that if our
experience of the author's poetic and dramatic works is limited to what
is to be found in editions that modernize his language, we're missing a
great deal of what is conveyed through the spelling, punctuation, grammar,
and other features of the texts that introduced these 16th- and 17th-century
masterpieces to their initial audiences and readers.
For Mr. Andrews' observations on thematic issues in the plays he considers
most resonant, see "Ethical and Theological
Questions in Shakespeare's Dramatic Works" and take a look at related
articles that focus on Romeo and
Juliet, Hamlet, and
Measure for Measure. And for
Mr. Andrews' advice to performers who aspire to convey all the magic to
be found in Shakespeare's rhetorical and metrical artistry (guidelines that
derive from his experience both as a dramaturg and, for several years, as
a mentor for the English-Speaking Union's annual
Shakespeare Competition), see Approaching
Shakespeare's Verse.
EARLY YEARS, AND WORK AT THE FOLGER
For a page that provides details about Mr. Andrews' youth in Carlsbad, New
Mexico (1942-61), his postsecondary education at Princeton (A.B., 1965),
Harvard (M.A.T., 1966), and Vanderbilt (Ph.D., 1971), his work as Assistant
Editor of Shakespeare Studies,
and his four years as a faculty member at Florida State (1970-74), click
here.
For an overview of Mr. Andrews' decade as Director of Academic Programs at the Folger
Shakespeare Library (1974-84), and for his eleven years (1974-85) as
Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly,
see the Library's annual reports for 1975,
1976, 1977,
1978, 1979,
1980, 1981,
1982, 1983,
1984, and 1986.
Mr. Andrews introduced significant changes, both in content and in design,
and substantially expanded a major journal's scope and influence, during
his editorship of SQ. For illustrations of his approach, and of the rich variety of new features and
material he introduced to the periodical, see the
front matter and examine selected content for the issues that appeared in
Summer 1974, Autumn
1974, Winter 1975, Spring
1975, Winter 1976, Summer
1976, Winter 1977, Spring 1977,
Summer
1977, Winter 1978, Spring
1978, Spring 1979, Spring
1980, Summer 1980, Autumn
1980, Summer 1981, Autumn
1981, Summer 1982, Autumn
1982, Spring 1984, Summer
1984, Autumn 1984, Winter
1984, "Teaching Shakespeare"
1984, Spring 1985, Summer
1985, Autumn 1985, Winter
1985, and "Reviewing
Shakespeare" 1985, a special issue that featured a cover article about
Anthony Sher's remarkable portrayal of the title character in an RSC production
of Richard III that had opened in 1984. Appropriately, "Reviewing
Shakespeare" was itself reviewed
in both the Washington Post and the Washington Times.
After his editorship of the Quarterly concluded in 1985, he remained
available to his successors, Barbara Mowat and Gail Kern Pastor, and he
contributed revews to the Winter 1988
and Spring 2017 issues of the
journal.
While he was overseeing the Quarterly, Mr. Andrews also presided
over the Library's book publications. Prior to his arrival, most of the
Folger's titles had borne the imprint of either Cornell University Press
or the University Press of Virginia. What turned out to be the concluding
volume from Virginia was John E. Booty's handsome edition of the 1559 Book
of Common Prayer, one of two titles that were scheduled to coincide
with a world congress devoted to Shakespeare
in America that the Library co-hosted in April 1976 with the International
Shakespeare Association, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and the Shakespeare
Association of America. The second title, Charles H. Shattuck's Shakespeare
on the American Stage, focusing on the period "From the Hallams
to Edwin Booth," commenced as a Virginia publication but was eventually
issued under a new imprint, Folger Books, owing to a tight deadline that
made it necessary for the Library to take emergency measures to ensure that
it was available for a high-profile reception that launched the festivities.
Both volumes were exceedingly well received, and Professor Shattuck's beautifully
illustrated narrative earned a prestigious award from the Theatre Library
Association. As a result the Folger commissioned a second
volume about Shakespeare on the American Stage, published in
1987 and focusing on the period "From Booth and Barrett to Sothern and Marlowe,"
and that book garnered two accolades, one from the Theatre Library Association
and another from the American Society for Theatre Research. Although he
was unable to attend Professor Shattuck's memorial service in 1992, Mr.
Andrews contributed a heartfelt tribute
to a commemorative keepsake in his honor.
An additional long-term publishing project that attracted significant attention
was the Folger Library Edition
of the Works of Richard Hooker, a multi-volume set under the gerenal
editorship of W. Speed Hill that was published under the prestigious Belknap
imprint of Harvard University Press. The Library celebrated it in 1977 with
a British Embassy reception, graciously hosted by Amabassador Sir Peter
Ramsbotham and his wife Frances, following a memorable lecture at Washington
National Cathedral by Oxford professor Hugh
Trevor-Roper, whose eloquent remarks were to be published a few weeks
later as part of a special issue of the New York Review of Books.
Meanwhile Mr. Andrews was chairing the Folger Institute, an interdisciplinary
center for Renaissance and 18th-Century Studies that had been founded by
Library Director O. B. Hardison, Jr., in 1969. Examples of its multifaceted
offerings can be found in brochures for the interdisciplinary seminars that
took place in 1975-76, 1976-77,
1977-78, 1978-79,
1979-80, 1980-81,
1981-82, 1982-83,
1983-84, and 1984-85.
So also for lectures presented under Institute auspices in 1976-77,
1977-78, 1978-79,
1980-81, 1982-83,
and 1983-84. In addition to
its seminars and lectures, the Institute also organized influential symposia
that focused on such topics as "Three
British Revolutions: 1640, 1688, 1776," "English
Theatre and the Sister Arts, 1660-1800," "Science
and the Arts in the Renaissance," "Hermeticism
in the Renaissance," "Calderon:
A Baroque Dreamer and Realist," and "Shakespeare
on Screen."
Several books resulted from Folger Institute symposia, among them a volume
about Three British Revolutions:
1641, 1688, 1776 that was published in 1980 by Princeton University
Press, a volume about Patronage in
the Renaissance that was published in 1981 by Princeton University
Press, a volume about British
Theatre and the Other Arts that was published in 1984 by Folger
Books in conjunction with Associated University Presses, and a volume about
Science and the Arts in the Renaissance
that was published in 1985 by Folger Books in conjunction with AUP.
So successful were these initiatives that Lawrence W. "Bill" Towner, Director
of the Newberry Library in Chicago, asked Mr. Andrews to team up with the
leaders of his academic staff -- Richard Brown, Mary Beth Rose, and John
Tedeschi -- to establish a consortium similar to the one that Mr. Andrews
was overseeing in Washington, a cooperative enterprise to serve academic
institutions in the mid-Atlantic region. Mr. Towner's initiative proved
to be an an inspired one, and before long a Newberry
Center for Renaissance Studies was thriving in the Midwest. By 1983
the Folger and the Newberry were collaborating on Summer
Institutes in the Archival Sciences. And new ventures were underway
that would eventually link those libraries, in what a joint proposal to
NEH in 1983 described as "a network of networks," with another pair of independent
research facilities in the humanities (the American Antiquarian Society
in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the Huntington Library in San Marino, California)
and more than four dozen of the nation's leading colleges and universities.
Several months before Mr. Andrews decided to leave the Folger for a position
in the Old Post Office Building as Deputy Director of the Division of Education
Programs at the National
Endowment for the Humanities, he and his Folger colleagues learned that
the NEH had approved a grant proposal the Library had submitted in support
of a "Folger Institute Center
for the History of British Political Thought," an endeavor to be guided
primarily by J.G.A. Pocock of Johns Hopkins University. That collaborative
effort, which soon proved to be a model of its kind, commenced operations
in 1984.
In addition to his other roles at the Folger, Mr. Andrews made numerous
presentations on behalf of the Library during his decade on Capitol Hill.
Examples include the remarks he delivered at Japan's Meisei
University in 1974 and at Indiana University
of Pennsylvania in 1976, as well as an article commissioned in 1982
by Werner Habicht, head of the West German Shakespeare Society and editor
of its prestigious Jahrbuch,
to mark the 50th anniversary of an institution that had long been an indispensable
resource for scholars, drama professionals, and writers from around the
globe.
THEATER, TELEVISION, AND EXHIBITIONS
During his time at the Library and for a short time thereafter, Mr. Andrews
supplied program notes for productions of the Folger Theatre Group and the
Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger, as the company was known after 1985,
when a new Library Director, Werner L. Gundersheimer, and the Trustees of
Amherst College decided that the operation needed to be reincorporated as
a separate fiscal entity (initiating a process that eventually led to what
is now the Shakespeare Theatre Company, an institution with no administrative
ties to the Folger). Mr. Andrews' introduction to Louis W. Scheeder's staging
of Richard III
was cited in favorable reviews of the production by Richard L. Coe of the
Washington Post and Peggy Eastman of the Fairfax Journal.
Also well received were Mr. Andrews' overviews about Michael Langham's production
of The Merchant of Venice,
Michael Kahn's productions of As
You Like It and Macbeth,
and Richard E.T. White's production of The
Tempest.
Mr. Andrews was also a key participant in the outreach activities that reinforced
The Shakespeare Plays, a monumental project that brought 37 BBC
productions of the dramatist's classics to American television between 1979
and 1985. As an educational consultant who served on, and eventually chaired,
a National Advisory Panel for this
endeavor, Mr. Andrews attended a February 1978 luncheon at The
Players that launched the initiative, and worked closely with WNET,
the Manhattan-based public television station that oversaw the American
side of a multifaceted BBC-PBS collaboration. A year later, to help launch
the series, he served as a consultant for an audio documentary, "William
Shakespeare: A Portrait in Sound," and hosted a "Friends of Thirteen" Lincoln
Center lecture series
in 1979 that was broadcast on National Public Radio as part of the network's
spring NPR Shakespeare
Festival. Meanwhile he contributed an article
on Henry VIII, one of the six plays in Season One, to a Study
Guide co-produced by the University of California, San Diego, and Coast
Community College District, and recorded his remarks for an audio package
produced by Cassette Curriculum.
From that point forward, he oversaw a succession of detailed manuals for
community-college teachers around the nation. Typical publications included
study guides for "The
Second Season" of course offerings, a "Special
Season Guide" that drew upon productions from the first two years of
the BBC schedule, and a guide to A Midsummer Night's Dream that
was compiled by Grant L. Voth for the Bay
Area Community College Television Consortium.
In due course Mr. Andrews found himself working with leaders of other postsecondary
consortia around the nation, among them an imaginative educator named Dee
Brock of the Dallas Community College District; Ms. Brock founded, and
for many years supervised, the famed Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, and during
a conversation with Mr. Andrews in 1984 she suggested that the most appealing
of the BBC productions might have more impact if they were repackaged in
ways that would make them more accessible, not only to teachers and students
at various levels, but to home viewers who often found it difficult to commit
an entire evening to even the most successfully-presented masterpieces.
This observation struck Mr. Andrews as exceedingly shrewd, and after exploring
it with his colleagues on the National Advisory Panel, he began working
with Stone-Hallinan Associates, with Bruce Roberts of Morgan Guaranty Trust
and the other corporate underwriters for "The Shakespeare Plays," and with
President John J. Iselin and his dedicated team at WNET/Thirteen. What eventually
resulted was a successful grant proproal, submitted to Morgan Guaranty Trust
and the National Endowment for the Humanities, under the auspices of Steve
Salyer and Marie Squerciati of the station's extraordinary Education Department,
to devise a new 15-week series -- featuring five plays and including "mini-documentaries"
on themes particular to each program segment -- that would be genially hosted
by Walter Matthau and would be billed as The
Shakespeare Hour. It aired in the spring of 1986, with a Signet
Classic paperback to introduce the five plays that had been selected to
exemplify the playwright's treatments of love, and one of the articles in
that volume was Mr. Andrews' glowing appraisal of the BBC production of
Measure for Measure, with Tim
Pigott-Smith in the role of Angelo. Among the dozens of accolades the
series received was a welcoming salute in the Washington Post from
drama critic Richard L. Coe. Because
most stations opted to air its fifteen installments on weekend afternoons,
however, it failed to garner the ratings required for PBS to proceed with
the seasons that had been planned for the next two years.
In 1991, Susan Willis of Auburn University published a comprehensive appraisal
of The BBC Shakespeare Plays:
Making the Televised Canon. Mr. Andrews was among the dozens of
participants in the project that she interviewed for her valuable history
of one of the most ambitious undertakings in television history. He'd met
Ms. Willis during the summer of 1981 when he'd made three visits to the
BBC television studio where Jonathan Miller was directing a brilliant production
of Troilus and Cressida, and in 2003, as part of his Foreword to
Shakespeare Plays The Classroom
(a volume that also included an eloquent message from "Mr. Rogers"), he
recalled how impressed he'd been by Miller's witty approach to a work he
viewed as analogous to M*A*S*H, an American TV series that had
been equally popular with British audiences.
In addition to his contributions to educational outreach for the BBC-PBS
series itself, Mr. Andrews also promoted The Shakesspeare Plays
in a variety of supplementary ways. In his capacity as Editor of Shakespeare
Quarterly, for example, he published interviews with producers Cedric
Messina and Jonathan Miller,
and with actors such as Sir Derek Jacobi
and Sir Ian McKellen, and commentary
by scholars such as Sir Stanley Wells.
In his role as Chairman of the Folger Institute, he arranged lectures, seminars,
symposia, and NEH-sponsored summer programs for college and university teachers.
Meanwhile he took part in conferences, lectured widely, and spoke with journalists
such as Clive Barnes of the
New York Times and Malcolm
Scully and Angus Paul
of the Chronicle of Higher Eduaction. And perhaps most important,
in his role as head of the Folger's book-publishing operation, he edited
Shakespeare: The Globe and the World,
a highly-praised book by Sam Schoenbaum
that served as the lavishly-illustrated companion volume for a touring exhibition
that delighted attendees and reviewers
in eight American cities.
This spectacular show had been proposed by Exxon executive Robert Kingsley,
but it required additional funding by the National Endowment for the Humanities
and other sources, and Mr. Andrews played a key role in securing support
for the undertaking not only from NEH but from several of the corporate
sponsors for The Shakespeare Plays. Once Shakespeare: The Globe
and the World was funded, Mr. Andrews coordinated not only with such
Library personnel as O.B. Hardison (Director), Philip A. Knachel (Associate
Director), James P. Elder (Director of Development), Margaret M. Welch (Exhibition
Coordinator), and Frank Mowery (Head of Conservation), but with Professor
Schoenbaum and with such prominent consultants as Stuart
Silver and Clifford LaFontaine of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and
content advisors such as book designer Irwin Glusker and fundraising guru
George
Trescher. Mr. Andrews also worked closely with Byron
Hollinshead, Director of Oxford University Press, and with such Press
personnel as Sheldon
Meyer and Jerry Sussman. He provided assistance to representatives of
the musuems that hosted the exhibition and helped organize ancillary activities,
many of them quite impressive and most of them supported by NEH grants.
He developed viewers' guides,
audiovisual materials, and other educational materials, helped with installations
as the exhibition opened in new venues, assisted with promotional efforts,
and helped arrange lectures, symposia, and other special events, many of
them with prominent performers (e.g., Ed
Ames and Arte
Johnson), directors (e.g., Gerald
Freedman and John
Houseman), and playwrights (e.g., Tom
Stoppard, who helped launch the New York exhibition with a lecture entitled
"Is It True What They Say About Shakespeare?").
REFLECTIONS ON AMERICAN EDUCATION
Several years later, while Mr. Andrews was launching The Shakespeare Guild
and serving as dramaturg for Summer 1992 productions of The Tempest,
Macbeth, and The Merry Wives of Windsor as part of a "Great
Shakes Alive" initiative at the Grove Shakespeare Festival in southern California,
he accepted a request from Carolynn
Reid-Wallace, Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education at the
United States Department of Education, to compile a policy analysis, Aiming
Higher, that would address current issues in American education. His
efforts, which drew on years of experience in a variety of pertinent settings,
elicited praise from a number of consultants and interim reviewers, among
them a prominent university president and leaders in several of the prestigious
national organizations that are headquartered at or near One Dupont Circle.
Mr. Andrews would have enjoyed disseminating his findings in print, and
working with the new Clinton administration on ways to assess and, where
pertinment, implement his recommendations. By January of 1993, however,
he was working with the London-based publishers of The
Everyman Shakespeare, a new paperback set that would build upon
the work he'd done for the Guild
edition he'd completed a few months earlier for Doubleday Book & Music Clubs.
Looking back, Mr. Andrews finds it sobering to observe how many of the concerns
that were being addressed in the 1990s remain pertinent today. For ease
of access his reflections are conveyed here in four segments: Aiming
Higher (Part One), Aiming Higher
(Part Two), Aiming Higher (Part
Three), and Aiming Higher (Part
Four).
RECOGNITION, HONORS, AND PUBLIC SERVICE
Mr. Andrews has been listed in Who's
Who in America and Who's Who in the World since 1984.
In July of 2000 he was inducted into the Most Excellent Order of the British
Empire as an honorary Officer, an OBE.
His hometown paper, the Carlsbad Current-Argus, marked the occasion
with a lengthy article about a local "son" who'd been singled out for a
special distinction. In 2016 the
Cavern City's Mayor, Dale Janway, asked Mr. Andrews to organize and chair
a Cultural
Development Council; for reporter Kyle Marksteiner's impressions of
those who agreed to affiliate with that group, see the Summer 2016 issue
of "Focus on Carlsbad." In July
2021 Mayor Janway welcomed Mr. Andrews and Sesame Street pioneer
Anna Jane Hays to the Carlsbad
Hall of Fame. For details about that induction ceremony, click
here.
In the years since his return to his native state in late 2007, Mr. Andrews
has served on the boards of such local and regional organizations as the
New Mexico Humanities Council, radio station KSFR, the New Mexico Performing
Arts Society, and the New Mexico Actors Lab. He has also served as a Trustee for the Museum
of New Mexico Foundation and as a board member of Theatre
Santa Fe, and joined forces with such institutions as the Lensic
Performing Arts Center, the New Mexico Museum of Art, Performance Santa
Fe, the Santa Fe Botanical Garden, and the Santa Fe Opera Guild.
For additional detail about Mr. Andrews, and for information about the cultural
leaders who serve on the Guild's Board of Directors and Advisory Council,
click here.
