Speaking of Shakespeare Link

Background on the Guild
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.