Theatre
Hodges designed costumes and scenery for the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool (1928–30) and for the Mermaid Theatre and St. George's Hall, London in the 1950s. His love of theatre led to him becoming an authority on the construction of the Globe and other theatres of Shakespeare's time.
From 1935 to 1999 he both wrote and illustrated five books about theatre in that time. He had thirty years experience in theatre practice and scholarship before doing Shakespeare's Theatre for children, published by Oxford University Press in 1964. For that he won the annual Kate Greenaway Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book illustration by a British subject. Only one other Greenaway Medal in almost sixty years has been awarded for the illustration of nonfiction. According to one library catalogue summary, Shakespeare's Theatre "xamines how the pagan festivals and religious dramas performed throughout England evolved into the professional theaters, such as the Globe, in London." It also illustrates and describes "Shakespeare's famous and now rebuilt Globe Theatre".
Hodges argued in one of his books that "the theatre as an institution is the pre-eminent arrangement whereby human beings work out the models of their own conduct, their morality and aspiration, their ideas of good and evil, and in general those fantasies about themselves and their fellows which, if persisted in, tend to eventually become facts in real life. If this is so, and it would be hard to deny, then the theatre must be seen as a most powerful instrument in the social history of mankind, and its own history must therefore be allowed a corresponding importance."
Hodges's Shakespearean expertise led Wayne State University theatre department chair Leonard Leone to invite him to Detroit in the late 1970s and early 1980s to work on Leone's proposed reconstruction of the Globe Theatre on the Detroit River. The city suffered financially after the collapse of the U.S. auto industry and the project fell apart in 1982.
Read more about this topic: C. Walter Hodges
Famous quotes containing the word theatre:
“The theatre is supremely fitted to say: “Behold! These things are.” Yet most dramatists employ it to say: “This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.””
—Thornton Wilder (1897–1975)
“To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible. It is not drama that they play, but pieces for the theatre. We should return to the Greeks, play in the open air; the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest their dinner.”
—Eleonora Duse (1859–1924)
“People fall out of windows, trees tumble down,
Summer is changed to winter, the young grow old
The air is full of children, statues, roofs
And snow. The theatre is spinning round,
Colliding with deaf-mute churches and optical trains.
The most massive sopranos are singing songs of scales.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)