Joining on the live feed for making it possible for shakespeare fans to enjoy this special day. Shakespeares influence goes beyond the written word, your arrival was accompanied by the folger consort. If you are interested in their music you can find it on itunes and have a look at the wonder of will room that has been created by itunes. We collect shakespeare material for everyone who wants to celebrate. Today we are here to celebrate the legacy of the worlds greatest storyteller. What better way to do that than pay tribute with stories. I am willing to bet that every one of you has a story to tell about how they got to know this amazing writer. 400 years ago to this very day, april 23, 1616, William Shakespeare died. The world is much larger and connected today than it was in 1616 and a lot has happened. We are still talking to shakespeare. For many it feels like he is still in the room. If you look around he is still in the room. How is it that we still have more to say about this writer . Why is it that when we talk about our own lives we often seem to be having a conversation with him . One reason might be because shakespeare is unavoidable. He is the most produced playwright in north america. Over 90 of american schoolchildren encounter shakespeares works or plays, not to mention half of the secondary students on the planet. There are more shakespeare films made in hollywood than there are in the United States and the uk combined in terms of filmmaking. The characters and phrases from shakespeares writing now appear in dystopian novels, disney cartoons, broadway musicals, hiphop. If you do a Google Search today you will find shakespeare on the manner. Four centuries after his death people from around the world are still having a conversation with this glovers son from warwickshire. With shakespeare lightning seemed to strike many times in one place. He brought so many gifts to his job as a writer and a man of the theater, whether it was his handiness about Human Emotions or his dazzling use of language or the unerring ability to find a human pulse in just about every situation. It is important that all these gifts get expressed in stories because it is in stories that we learn to pass into the lives and experiences of others. Shakespeares stories and plays teach us to empathize with those who are unlike us and even more important they teach us about the communities we may someday become for better or for worse. Think about the familiar stories we find in shakespeares plays. Young love or the beginning of love in romeo juliet or much ado about nothing, sibling rivalry in as you like it, a loss of family in hamlet, forgiveness in the winters tail, selfdestruction in macbeth, standing up for what you believe in in king lear, or the experience of being treated as an outsider in othello or the merchant of venice. Shakespeare speaks to us in 2016 because we still struggle with politics, war, love and family and in the end this will always be a struggle to understand ourselves and each other. Markets and social media will only teach us so much about what drives us. To learn more we need the humanities and the arts to inspire them. What better way to celebrate the 400th anniversary of shakespeares death then bringing together people who can talk about the moment they discovered this amazing writer. And now it is time to hear their story. In early 2009 president obama appointed our first presenter as associate director of the White House Office of public engagement. However you might know him better from the film adaptation of the name steak, doctor Lawrence Cutler on house or maybe you know him as kumar. What you might not know is he shared a special connection to shakespeare from literally the first day he was born. Please join me in welcoming kal penn. [applause] thank you. If there is something everyone knows about actors we are impulsive and irrational. I am sure psychologists have a term for this but the most common phrase is actors are crazy. As every report card i ever had likes to deck out to my parents we are quick to speak before we think. I wanted to be an actor because i loved the power of storytelling from a very young age. In seventh and eighth grade i created characters in my bedroom and entered worlds i never could in real life. But shakespeare, despite my grandfathers love of shakespeare whenever i glanced at the pros i would think shakespeare, it is not even english, shakespeare is overblown and old. No one actually talks like that. Ninthgrade came around and three things happened. Number one i noticed in small font on the inside front cover of my english class copy of selected works of William Shakespeare that William Shakespeare was born on 23 april which also happens to be my birthday. I noticed that we share a birthday and the message was sent to the crazy part of my overdramatic inspiring actor mind that this was a sign that not only was i going to be an actor but i was going to be a working actor because i shared a birthday with this shakespeare fellow whoever he was. He was respected and relevant and people were still doing his plays all this time later. Number 2, i was only 14, when we read romeo and juliet we were allowed to watch in the classroom, you all know where this is going, the Franco Zeffirelli film adaptation which featured what . Nudity. How is this possible, i remember thinking to myself . Who is this shakespeare who allowed the teacher to show us nudity that is totally against the rules, nevermind that never really was a talented director, this shakespeare guy got away with letting ninth graders see someone estimating suit area in english class and was born in my birthday meant unconditionally i was going to be an actor and i was going to read shakespeare. Around this time, frankly a related, i actually did read and started to understand and fell in love with shakespeare. I started to understand the beauty of his words and symbolism and universality. I grew up in new jersey in the 90s and this capulet montague beef is the same as we see in the local news except new jersey local news talked about lots of families. Replace verona with hoboken and you have the opening to a mafia movie, two households both alike in dignity in fair hoboken where we lay our scene, even the prologue is rich. Shakespeare in many ways taught me my first lesson in making exceptions to rules and started to raise more plays. And i was totally in love with shakespeare. And we are holding the version of romeo and juliet, and we went for that . We loved it and it was so contemporary and heated and sexy and violent and it excited me even more as endless possibility of storytelling, white or rich or interpret any of this, the mtv interview began and they have their campus rolling and opened up about my feelings and in eighth grade i used to feel the words of shakespeare were not decipherable. I remember i thought to myself it is not even english but in 10th grade i came to understand and review shakespeare and i love this movie and i love shakespeare. The mtv special aired. I gathered around with friends in my dorm and my segment gets closer and i see my face and the interviewer comes on, we are asking inspiring actors what they think of shakespeare, kal penn, how do you feel about change your . I was so excited. I am going to be so eloquent. This is going to be my big break. How do you feel about shakespeare . Cut to my face. It is not even english and the camera cuts to someone else. And the first editing. Several more years go by, i am still struggling actor dissatisfied with typecasting and hollywood systemic refusal to cast colorblind gender blind roles and i hear a woman speak on a panel sponsored by the screen actors guild, she was in the only woman of color on a Major Network tv show and she said i decided long ago hollywood has reasons for not casting me. And race and gender had something to do with it. I was going to be classically trained. After classical training, not breakthrough barriers, and gatekeepers, and here we are. I have been working actor, and i am speaking at the 400th birthday i look back and appreciate the coincidences. One little remaining matter of how it all ends. When shakespeare actually died i did notice in ninth grade he was born in my birthday and i was born on his but i never process the idea of what it meant that shakespeare also died on his birthday. We actors are impulsive and irrational, we fear and review things that arent there. The fact that sharing a birthday with 60 are meant i was going to be an actor surely i can be selective in ignoring the fact it must also mean that im going to die on 23 april. In the meantime if i get through today i continue to vouch for the ability that he has for the universality of love and joy for another hundred years and if i lose this, let me be boiled to death in melancholy, thank you. [applause] not today, kal penn. Happy birthday, we are off to a great start. Our next presenter turned in early love of music into a career that has in turn, empowered people across the country to transform any curiosity about the arts and fullfledged careers and lifelong pursuit as the 11th chairman of the nea, awarded nearly 220 million and agency grants, please join me in welcoming jane ii. Who is there . Those of the first two word in shakespeares the tragedy of hamlet, the prince of bismarck, also the essential question great literature, who is there . And the world at large, the question of who is there continues to resonate across the ages from when hamlet was published in 1603 to today. When i read hamlet i was in high school and was slightly higher than the hamlet character but like a lot of adolescents i grappled with answering the question of who is there for myself and what really hit home to me reading hamlet, how his process coming to terms with his own grief as premature loss, mirrored the loss of my own father at the age of 9, there were a few things that were different from hamlet, i was fortunate in that unlike hamlet, my father was not murdered by my uncle, facing great loss at a young age hits home with me. To move on, to get over it, even hamlets own mother tells him to cast the color off, do not forever with your veiled lid seek for thy noble father in the dust, thou knowest is common, all that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity, a lot of conversation in my classroom was around how difficult it was for hamlet to make a decision but for me personally the play was about how grief if it is not properly processed in its own time can lead to greater challenges. Hamlet is not indecisive, he is not depressed, he is grieving. I always felt hamlet had been placed in a profoundly unfair position, here he is a young man at the age of barely being a man and the problems he has been handed by taking the responsibility of fixing those problems created by the grownups around him. I kept thinking if only the court had let hamlet take the time he needed to feel bad about his father maybe the play wouldnt have ended in such a tragic ending. When my father died when i was 9 i found a lot of solace in music, playing the piano through the lessons i was taking and pretty soon started to realize so many art forms give us powerful ways to express ourselves, ways that transcend the use of linear conversation and found a lot of comfort in hamlet because i recognize i was not alone. Shakespeare had written about the process of confronting ones own grief 400 years ago, i was not the only person to ever have these feelings and i surely would be okay. Shakespeare let hamlet pass forward, the message about the importance of grief through his dying words to his best friend and those words help us understand the power to say goodbye to our loved ones and keeping their stories alive in our hearts. If thou didst ever hold me in my heart, absent the from Felicity A Weiland in this harsh world drive i breath in pain to tell my story, thank you. Thank you. Shakespeares influence is not limited to the arts and humanities. You need look no farther than outerspace. With uranus moves moons named puck and ophelia our next guest will feel right at home. As nasas chief scientist studies the geology of venus, mars, saturns moon titan and the earth please join me in welcoming doctor ellen stove and stoef stoefen. Sweet moon, William Shakespeare wrote in a midSummer Nights dream, i think the for they sunny beams, i think the moon for shining now so bright. I wonder if shakespeare ever envisioned worlds with many moons such as the 27 moons of uranus which bear the names of shakespeares characters. Each of these moons its its own little world from the messy fractures of miranda pulled and twisted by uranus to the dark and ancient cratered surface of him real, umbriel but it is right to pay homage to shakespeare with these points of light in the night sky to a man who brought light to so many people as he has encapsulated the very nature of what it means to be human. In 2011, i sat in the theater in haymarket london having the amazing experience of watching ralph fines play prospero in the tempest. The program noted that the play was first performed for james i in london in 1611. The thought of that actually made me stop paying attention to the play for a few minutes. For 400 years in that very city in theaters people like me or maybe slightly more royal had sat in theaters hearing those same words laughing at those same lines. What is past is prologue. We are such stuff as dreams are made of and so on. I find as much relevance to my life and my modern era in his words as the people that watched it with james i found in theirs. The ability to bring life into art and make it last for centuries, that is the gift of shakespeare. I find in the timeless appeal and relevance of shakespeare the same thing i actually love about geology, the study of earth, our solar system, our universe. For billions of years, stars, planets, galaxies are born, they live, they die. We came from stardust and we return to it. For the study of astrophysics or astrobiology is just that. A wonderful, complex story with depth and drama. Just the kind that shakespeare told so well. I get frustrated sometimes with scientists who tell the public the facts and leave out the stories behind the science. Burying people in jargon and methods. I was an art history minor in college and i now promote science communication at nasa helping our scientists and engineers bring not just the detail but the why, but who cares, how did we get here, how does this affect my life and my place on this planet, and what is our future. Science not only informs us, it inspires us. The more we learn the more we crave knowledge and understanding. Science feeds our innate curiosity. We want to know more, we want to know what those points of light in the night sky are. When we plan at nasa to send humans to mars we do so to answer the fundamental question are we alone . Did life evolve beyond earth . What is the nature of that life . When we look at the thousands of planets we have identified around other stars we want to know are those planets not just potentially habitable but are they inhabited . That is why we need not just stem but the humanities, we need shakespeare, we need the arts, we need designed to understand our world and beyond. Shakespeare knew how to tell a story of the lives of people on this planet. In science we try to take apart what is behind the story piece by piece to understand how it works, where it is going, where we are going. We need to approach these difficult challenges using both sides of our brain, using our head and our hearts. Great science is about so much more than analyzing data. It is about dreaming big, creativity, inspiration and asking the right questions, perseverance and courage, it is about heroes, about shakespeares works. As we work to solve the most pressing questions about our origins and destiny we must come back to shakespeare to share the big story of science with everyone, thank you. [applause] fabulous. [applause] thank you, ellen. Even after 400 years, shakespeare remains ago to commentator in contemporary affairs. Still writes the headlines even if the events that are happening are not yet history. Clarence page, his keen insights, local and national affairs, recognized for his work with the pulitzer prize, and network commentator. Please welcome clarence page. [applause] i am a word man. When we celebrate shakespeare they celebrate the power of words, words often describe washington as downright shakespearean and why not . He wrote the script. The fellow who just introduced me said four years ago we discussed the 2012 president ial race. Almost all our political rhetoric comes from two books from the 16th and 17th centuries, the king james bible, shakespeares plays. Like me, whitmore was impressed by bill clintons speech, his comedic and sometimes adlibbed speech at the Democratic National convention. Even president obama sounded like he thought the former president did a better job selling the current president than the current president did. Obama said somebody emailed me after the speech and said appoint him to be the secretary of explaining stuff. I like that, said obama, and i did too. Later comedians felt seth myers observed on saturday night live we are ready have a job for that, it is called president. That is true. Explaining stuff is a big part of the job. Some leaders do it better than others do. The use of shakespearean simplicity and language is something president clinton, president obama and donald trump hold in common. We cannot get this far in the program without mentioning donald trump. At a Campaign Rally in december in hilton head the republican front runner explain the important of words while describing the state department, quote, i am telling you i used to use the word incompetent. Now i call them stupid. I went to an ivy league school, very highly educated, i know words, i know the best words but there is no better word than stupid, right . No wonder Michael Whitmore was intrigued by the language of politics. In fact michael took the text of bill clintons remarks and compared it to obamas found clinton relied almost exclusively on single syllables, action oriented words, words that come from germanic anglosaxon roots of english. Obama more often employed larger and more nuanced latin rooted words. The university of chicago exposure. Words the french brought to english with the Norman Conquest in 1066. Today whitmore said you could say all our political rhetoric comes from those two books. Indeed political speech comes to us in two speeds, i call them social economic tongues. It was latin and derivative of romance languages, french, spanish, italian, the king the english spoke and the law of bureaucracy and intelligentsia, short action oriented anglosaxon words with hard consonant