Stewart to Pay Poetic Tribute to the Bard

The first Shakespeare groupie may well have been a character named Gullio in a play called “The Return from Parnassus,” which dates from around 1599.

“I’le worshipp sweet Mr. Shakspeare,” Gullio declares, “and to honoure him will lay his Venus and Adonis under my pillowe.”

Nearly four centuries later, actor Benjamin Stewart feels pretty much the same way. Only he will honor the Bard on Thursday with a solo performance of “Venus and Adonis” (through July 23) at the Gem Theatre in Garden Grove at the Grove Shakespeare Festival.

Shakespeare has never lacked fans, of course. But he also has had his detractors. The university poets of his time looked upon him with the condescension they reserved for all playwrights. Theatrical writing in the Elizabethan Age was not considered literature, merely popular jotting.

Scholars have speculated that Shakespeare penned “Venus and Adonis,” an epic poem of 1,194 lines, to prove his literary worth. It tells the story of how Venus, the immortal goddess of love, falls for Adonis, the most beautiful of mortal youths. But he takes a rain check on the affair, believing he is too young for her.

“I first encountered the poem in my hometown of Houston,” says Stewart, 45. “An amateur group wanted to stage it. They asked me to narrate it. I was an FM radio announcer then.”

That was in 1969. Stewart moved to Los Angeles shortly afterward to pursue an acting career. For five seasons during the mid-1970s he worked at the Ahmanson Theatre. He also went to Broadway with the Ahmanson revival of Tennessee Williams’ “The Night of the Iguana” starring Richard Chamberlain.

But Stewart kept returning to Shakespeare, his first love, working at the Visalia Shakespeare Festival for two years before it folded in 1980 and at the Garden Grove festival, beginning in 1982.

“I always wanted to stage ‘Venus and Adonis’ on a double bill with something like Oscar Wilde’s ‘Salome,’ ” he says. “Nobody took me up on it. So I decided to design it as a solo performance.”

In 1984, the Mark Taper Forum presented Stewart’s version of “Venus and Adonis” at the Itchey Foot Ristorante in downtown Los Angeles for which he won a Drama-Logue Award. Later that year he also did it at the Gem for three performances.

Nobody knows precisely when Shakespeare wrote the poem. He may have had time to work on it during one of the seasons that the plague forced the London theaters to close. The Elizabethan scholar George Lyman Kittredge has concluded that the poem was written “probably in 1592.”

In any case, “Venus and Adonis” was printed in 1593 and dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s young but highly cultivated and widely admired patron. The work was so well received that nine more editions were printed by the time Shakespeare died in 1616.

“I don’t leave out a line,” Stewart says. His version runs 1 1/2 hours with an intermission. Several years ago, Irene Worth performed an edited version at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival in Ontario, Canada.

“She is one of the world’s great actresses,” says Stewart, “but I tend not to agree with her interpretation. She emphasized the role of Venus. I think the poem is a man’s piece. It has a masculine sensibility about it that crosses over to the feminine and not the other way around.”

Despite a fair amount of success in Los Angeles over the years--including the role of Dr. Watson in “Sherlock’s Last Case” at the New Mayfair--the veteran character actor moved in 1986 to Tucson, where he had been playing leading roles at the Arizona Repertory Company for almost a decade.

“I decided to turn my back on the whole TV and film thing,” he says. “I’ve taken a vow of poverty, as it were, to concentrate on the classical theater.”