TAXONOMIES. YOU CAN't live with them and you can't write without them. When I was asked to join the Advisory Board of this series of books and then to write this book, I assumed that Recreational Shakespeare (RS) was about silly people like me who love Shakespeare so much that we devote part of our leisure time to him. I initially missed the main point of this series: recreating Shakespeare. Streamlined Shakespeare and the Columbia Shakespeare Cycle certainly recreated Shakespeare by presenting some of his plays in new formats on new media that reached new audiences in a different century, but were these series also recreational? The answer to that is not very clear.

Who would listen to these shows? Some listeners would certainly be educators, reviewers, broadcast professionals, and friends of those involved in producing them, but the bulk of listeners would be people giving some of their recreation time to Shakespeare. This leans toward RS, but with qualifications. The RS picture is murky.

Barrymore, Lewis, Conried, Morgan, and anybody else who made these programs on a weekly basis probably thought of these shows as work, not recreation. However, if Meredith, Robinson, Seldes, or Brennan listened for fun to episodes in which they did not appear, then it was recreation for them. More murk.

NBC invited educators to their Hamlet broadcast and made scripts available for school study. CBS also released their scripts for study and enlisted libraries around the nation to work with them to promote Shakespeare. Assuming some people studied Shakespeare because it was required and others did so because all the publicity stimulated interested, it is difficult to differentiate between the murkiness of educational Shakespeare and RS. There is no doubt that the Battle of the Bard was recreation for some listeners and work for others.

Is a Shakespearean performance ever a pure leisure time activity? I knew a young woman when I was in high school who told me that her family went to Ashland to see the Oregon Shakespeare Festival on their vacation every summer. I thought that was daft. I now live in Ashland, a three-minute drive from the Festival's theatres, and have the chore of finding a place to park when most spaces are taken by some of the 150,000 tourists that visit the Festival each year.