Speaking of Shakespeare Link

John Andrews
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 dozens of 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, History Teaches, and Country Over Party 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, 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 that oversaw several initiatives. For reporter Kyle Marksteiner's impressions of those who agreed to affiliate with that group, among them legendary promoter Michael Rosenberg, historian Dwight Pitcaithley, and entertainer Bill Brooks, 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.