Incorporated in the District of Columbia in 1987, The Shakespeare Guild
is a tax-exempt, not-for-profit organization whose purpose is to cultivate
wider and more informed audiences for the globe’s most influential writer.
Although most of its efforts since 1992 have been focused on programs in
Washington, New York, London, and Santa Fe (with occasional forays into Chicago, Orlando,
Santa Monica, and other settings), the GUILD remains open to new initiatives that will make additional opportunities
available to Shakespeare enthusiasts around the world.
Directing the Guild’s endeavors, and working with a distinguished Board
of Directors and Advisory Council, is President and Founder John
F. Andrews, a scholar who holds degrees from Princeton (A.B., 1965),
Harvard (M.A.T., 1966), and Vanderbilt (Ph.D., 1971), who has taught at
several universities (among them Florida State, Georgetown, and George Washington), and whose experience includes a decade as Director of Academic Programs at the Folger
Shakespeare Library, eleven years as Editor of Shakespeare
Quarterly, and six years as Chairman of a National
Advisory Panel to oversee educational applications for The
Shakespeare Plays (the BBC/Time-Life
series that brought the dramatic canon to American viewers over PBS
between 1979 and 1985).
In connection with "The Shakespeare Plays," Mr. Andrews hosted a Friends of Thirteen
lecture series ("Three Views on Shakespeare")
that took place at Lincoln Center
and was broadcast over NPR,
and helped produce Shakespeare: The Globe
and the World, a three-year touring exhibition of Folger treasures
that delighted museum visitors in eight of our nation's most prestigious
cultural institutions, among them the American Museum of Natural History in
Manhattan, where playwright Tom Stoppard
(pictured in the previous link in conversation with Mr. Andrews and Professor Bernard Beckerman,
an SQ board member who taught English and served as Dean of the Arts at Columbia University)
opened the festivities with a witty lecture about the genius who'd inspired such classics as
"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead."
Mr. Andrews also spearheaded a follow-up series, featuring
five plays and including "mini-documentaries" on themes particular to each
program segment -- that would be hosted by Walter Matthau and 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'
appraisal of the BBC production of Measure
for Measure, with Tim Pigott-Smith
in the role of Angelo. Among the accolades The Shakespeare Hour
received was a salute in the Washington Post from drama critic
Richard L. Coe.
After his decade at the Folger, Mr. Andrews enjoyed posts at the National
Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S.
Department of Education. He also served for six years as Executive Director
of the Nation’s Capital Branch of the English-Speaking
Union.
In addition to two annotated editions of Shakespeare’s poetic and dramatic
works, 19 volumes in cloth for the Doubleday
Book and Music Clubs and 16 volumes in paperback for The
Everyman Shakespeare (an imprint of Orion Books in London), Mr. Andrews
has also published two 3-volume Shakespeare reference sets for Scribners.
Meanwhile he has contributed articles and reviews to such periodicals as
The
American Scholar, The
Atlantic, The New York Times,
and The Washington Post.
Mr. Andrews has been listed in Who's
Who in America and Who's Who in the World since 1984.
In 2000 he was inducted into the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire
as an honorary Officer, an OBE,
and in July 2021 the Mayor of his hometown in New Mexico welcomed him and
Sesame Street pioneer Anna Jane Hays to the Carlsbad
Hall of Fame. For details about that induction ceremony, click here.
Click here for more detail
about Mr. Andrews and his wide-ranging career. Among other things, you'll
find links to fascinating remarks about Shakespeare by eminent actors, directors,
producers, playwrights, and journalists.
For highlights of Mr. Andrews' early life, his university education, and
his four years as a faculty member at Florida State, click here.
